Leonard’s Dope
I know a guy by the name of Leonard Dohr. I’ve know him a real long time actually, over a couple of decades. The first ten years or so that I knew him, it was just casual, a mutual friend. I didn’t know him well. About nine or so years ago, that mutual friend died. I ran into Leonard at the memorial, we smoked a reefer, exchanged numbers, and have kept in touch since.
Nowadays I know Leonard very well. He is a swell guy. Leonard would give the shirt off his back to a total stranger, as long as that stranger met his approval. I know that seems odd but Leonard has his own charities. I know that he takes in many strays at his home. If you know Leonard, if Leonard were your friend, you’ll never have to sleep outside, no matter what you did to get there.
Leonard’s parents have been deceased many years. Leonard was bequeathed a small fortune and was living a life with few struggles. I am not saying that Leonard is rich, he certainly is not. It is just that Leonard doesn’t need to work. Does not seem to concern himself with the little things in life that drive us all nuts, like paying bills, or creating a budget. I kid with Leonard, I tell him that he leads a life of leisure, the American dream. I tell him that if I had his choices, my own life would be considerably easier. That is not, in any way, suggesting I would live Leonard’s life. Hell no!
Leonard is fucking nuts.
Leonard has an unusual philosophy about life. If you didn’t really know him, it would be easy to dismiss his quirks as perhaps a form of dementia, or maybe you’d feel sorry for Leonard.
I know Leonard and I don’t really see it that way.
Leonard is about my age, maybe fifty or so. Like myself, he grew up in the decades following the Manson thing, after the Zodiac, right about the time when young folks started to take their drug experimentation a lot more seriously. Leonard did lots of acid. Leonard would ingest nearly anything that carried the promise of an eternal sense of happiness. I think he neglected to find exactly that, but he continues to try.
I have spent a bit more time lately with Leonard than is usual and I’m reminded how fucking crazy this cat can be. We’ve sat together lately several times, smoking grass and exchanging ideas on how to save humanity or some such thing. Sometimes it was just he and I, sometimes we were joined by others in our little peer group. I absolutely love to sit with other adults and exchange ideas and information, Leonard says it is the key to the evolution of man. Now that I know what he meant, I know he was right.
Leonard’s conversations are often centered around Leonard. I don’t think he’s especially narcissistic, I believe he’s only just discovering himself and is frequently amazed, or frightened, by what he finds. About the time I ran into Leonard at the memorial. He had just gotten his first computer and was planning to look into getting an internet provider and exploring this new technology.
The very next time I ran into Leonard, he was high as a kite and really excited about all the cool stuff he was finding through the magic of the world wide web.
See, Leonard is a strange kind of cat. Leonard is convinced that his drug use, yes street drugs, is not only, not killing him, it’s giving him a better, a more fulfilling life.
Granted, his financial situation is unique, perhaps enviable, and that does make a difference in his perception of the damage.
Anyway, now he kind of stays loaded, busy studying the new world he has found online, and he seems genuinely happy. He does not break the law in any other way. He pays his bills, eats good and shares his bounty with anyone in need. He is a great human being really.
I only find it odd that his choices would certainly raise eyebrows pretty much anywhere, any time, but his life seems quite manageable. In fact, he asked me point blank, the other day while we were discussing it, “Lloyd,” he says, “what would get better if I quit?” “What would be improved so much that I would be better off?”
I really had no clear honest answer.
Uncomfortable Atheism
I am an atheist. I guess that is a simple way of describing my present belief system. I am still available to have my mind changed. I wish that someone, anyone could show me some new information. Something that will make me realize that I have been wrong. I have read thousands of documents. I have searched and investigated. I have spoken with people. I have written letters to inquire about this subject. So far, there have been no epiphanies, no new information that would make obvious the existence of an external God. I will continue to look but there seems to be no evidence.
I believe that we, as a species, underestimated just how huge this entity would need to be. Every God that I have ever had described to me was in fact, to small “time” to worship. I think when we were imagining what God was; we had a real bad idea of how big the universe is. We then made him very small. Do you know that if we had a scale model of our known universe, even if this scale model was as large as the entire United States of America, Earth would still be too small to see? That is because the universe is so large as to be incomprehensible. We cannot really wrap our minds around how large it is. It is truly beyond our experience. I believe then that we created God’s that were entirely too small to be Gods. I continue to hope that I will stumble upon a piece of information that will change my understanding. At the time of this writing, it does not look promising.
Therefore, I have a dream.
No really, I have this dream once in awhile.
This often occurs after spending a frustrating period of time arguing or debating the question of whether or not God exists. I get so frustrated sometimes, really pissed. Just like a preacher myself. Pointing at the Good Book and hollering about fire and brimstone.
Instead of that, I get real arrogant and defensive; I point all the many scientific reasons that counter any theist idea. I am horrible and I always regret these tirades.
Seems really, if I have no belief in magic or whatever, I really am not the one to convince anyone who may well be quite comfortable taking an enormous leap of faith.
If I am very honest, I am hoping that someone stops me and proves me wrong! Could you imagine? Clear irrefutable evidence that there is any afterlife. Does not matter which afterlife, any will do.
Nevertheless, nobody has, not yet.
Anyway, I have this dream. I am 89 years old and I die in my sleep. Comfortably, of course, it is a dream. Within seconds, I am standing next to a giant harp-shaped Pearly Gate.
St. Peter is standing there with the little clouds all around his feet. He has this clipboard in his hand and a quill pen. He has a cynical look on his face and he is shaking his head just slightly. To tell the truth, he looks a lot like George Carlin. The George Carlin that I knew when I was young, from like 1976 or so, with the ponytail and all. Anyway he looks at me with a doubtful smile and says, “Look, we decided to let you in, even though you doubted, even though you successfully convinced others we weren’t here, we decided to take a chance.”
I grinned and exhaled.
“Wait,” Peter says, “Don’t let out all that hot air yet, there are some ground rules. This is not a playground, nor a prison. You are not here to recruit people for your own causes. Stay very low-key and avoid controversies. We like peace. As long as you do these things, I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”
I am thrilled, and promise Pete that I will be a real angel. (Oops) I do get a little curious before walking through the gate. I say to Pete, “hey, why would I need to recruit anybody?” I was thinking that even I should be content here.
Pete looked at me with ages of wisdom, patience, and maybe some annoyance.
I get the idea that maybe I will just look and listen until I get the hang of it.
Before we parted, he told me one more thing.
“We never run out of iced tea.” he says
Hey, it‘s a dream, just a dream..
Socially , Speaking
I guess it was about six years ago, I was driving my truck on the freeway. I had an awful lot on my mind. I had been to see a medical doctor that day and he had given some real tough stuff to think about. The test weren’t back but it appeared as though I may have some awful, deadly, frightening, condition to fight. I was taken by surprise and, found myself to be introspective, even thoughtful.
I had never, at that time, really considered my own death. I always had a kind of devil-may-care attitude about it and kept it quite far from my conscious thoughts.
That day was different. I wondered if there really was a god? I wondered, if there were, did that mean that my death is only the beginning then? I started really thinking about that. While still driving I kind of came to the conclusion that most likely, that would not be the case. I just started thinking about how very, very wrong we, as human beings, always are. Remember, “the world is flat”, “The sun goes around the earth,” “the moon is made of cheese,” etc, etc.. Seems to me that our guesses about things, well, are usually so far off that it’s silly to think that we could be right about something that is so hidden, so mysterious. This thought led me to another.
I started thinking about cause and effect. I started thinking about believing something to be right is the most dangerous thing. If wrong, everything after is twisted. I used to install cabinets. If at one corner of a kitchen, you allow yourself just an eighth inch mistake, by the end of that project, it’s way, way, off. Therefore, if our ancestors made a mistake, early in human development, then went on to base their other life decisions on this erroneous thought or belief, by now, we’d could be really, really far away from where we should, or could be as a species.
This idea intrigued me. Fascinated me really. I started to actively create scenarios in my head that could result from that. Frightening indeed.
I then started to wonder, where did we come up with the idea that we needed one of us to lead? I mean, where did we decide that we needed a leader? I started to think about that. I thought of a caveman type guy. His family, his clan. Hunting in packs. Living in groups. Everybody for everybody else. The group would hunt and gather for the group. Language was primitive. Let us imagine a group of hunter-gatherers living together in a cave. We grunt and make sounds to express ourselves. Picture that in your mind. My question became, “What happened to turn that collective into a need to follow?”
We are hunting, we have a way of bringing down giant animals, much larger than ourselves. We are cunning and skillful. We make weapons based on an idea that one of us had and it works. Why then, did we go from there, to making one guy better? Why did need a king? What made the King idea attractive to us? Why go from, “we are all valuable, with different, but equal responsibilities, and it’s not working.’ We need somebody to be in charge.
I’m sure that there was somebody in the group who was a bit stronger than the rest of us. I’m sure that individual was a master of the hunt. Perhaps He will lead us. Maybe there is an individual with incomparable fighting skills. That person would more likely be able to insure that we keep our meat once we killed it. Is that then our leader? Perhaps an uncanny ability to assign tasks, or to provide warmth. These things must surely be what we need in a leader.
Actually, I figured it was probably indeed a combination of these types of things. Whatever brought about the smoothest road for the survival of the species. That had to be how we first came to pick and follow a leader. The group member most able to insure the survival of the group itself.
Remember, I’m still in my truck, a bit melancholy, a bit scared, coming up with this stuff in my own mind. So this was the only conclusion I could imagine at that time. I am not an educated person. I am not studied on the history of our culture.
I am a curious bastard. I decide right then, I would use this internet thing to look it up. Find out what happened between cave dwelling and Kingdom Come.
I had actually been familiar with computers at that time for about seven years. I can build them, I can tell you what is wrong and fix them better than anybody I know, I had developed that skill. I had yet though to become familiar with the internet. Oh I had it. I had high speed internet before it was popular. I used it to play games, commit crimes, look at pornography, that sort of thing. I did not yet know it’s value.
I was really interested though. I had a feeling, it seems a little bit childish and ignorant now, that we are part of a big experiment and we fucked it up a long time ago. I started to look for “Social Evolution” I came up with that on my own. Sounded reasonable, right? What I’ve found, and continue to find, is nowhere near where I thought I would find and the search has become my whole life. I have done little else in the years since. I still read everything I find that in any way relates to the human condition. Social evolution is still my main interest.
“There is a deep gulf between what a man is and what he represents, between what he is as an individual and what he is as a collective being. His function is developed at the expense of the individuality. Should he excel, he is merely identical with his collective function; but should he not, then, though he may be highly esteemed as a function in society, his individuality is wholly on the level of his inferior, undeveloped functions, and he is simply a barbarian, while in the former case he has happily deceived himself as to his actual barbarism.”
The important thing about this story is how this idea has changed my entire life.
I went looking to find an answer to what I believed was a simple question. Turns out, of course, that the question is not very simple at all. First of all, we hunter-gatherers, as we began to leave our caves, leave our clans, our groups, we weren’t keeping good records. Some pitifully hard to understand pictures on the walls.
Some half broken tools.
We were still ages and ages from the idea of recording our lives for future generations. The motivation then, is speculative. We can put some ideas together about what we think made the cave boy look outward. Farming, growing our own food and fuel is an educated guess that is commonly cited. We began to think about settling into one dwelling, one settlement, for all seasons, instead of constantly following the better weather. We began to think about ways to make our environment adjust to us, rather than the contrary. These things, as well as other accepted ideas of how our ancestors were changing, has led me to some conclusions of my own. We’ll get to that later……
What I found first, when I first one finger-picked the words “Social Evolution” into the search engine was a website called ‘Cosmic Evolution’. The site is huge. Links followed by links, with glossy graphs and pictures. Tons, volumes of first class scientific knowledge and information that is up to date and as far as I could tell, complete. The site takes you on a written as well as a pictorial journey, beginning at the Big Bang and well into the projected future of our Galaxy. From there I went on to read the Origin Of Species. I continued to study wherever the links and my own childlike sense of wonder took me.
Folks, that was six years ago. I have not been employed outside of my home since then. I have the uncommon and fortunate opportunity to study uninterrupted for most every single day of the last six years. Every single day, with very few, but some, exceptions, I have read and discussed, online, a constant flow of data. I have learned more in this six years, than all of the rest of my life. That is not an exaggeration. Once I became aware of what it really was that I was finding, I got excited about it. Then I got a little frightened. Then, maybe a couple years ago, I was able to identify, myself, what it was I had found. Start putting an A next to a B then before you know it, everything becomes rather clear.
During this time, I realized that the GODS that we have been praying to and counting on all these years, lifetimes, whatever, is utterly and obviously bullshit. I have spent many, many hours looking at actual data, no faith, no hope, just factual information, relating to this subject.
I am very happy to have found that truth. If you misunderstand me here, or think I’m nuts, do some reading. Look for the information yourself. When you begin to see the immense amount of real science relating to the cosmos and where we come from, hopefully, it will do for you what it has done for me. I am a better, more valuable human being today because I live a better, more valuable life today. I do not have to imagine my bliss by looking forward to an afterlife, or a second chance, or some reward system that has been put in place. I get to live each and everyday to its fullest potential. I and I alone am responsible for my success and contentment in this life. It is up to me to make tomorrow an exciting time that I look forward to. There is nothing external that I can lay this on. I find myself much more appreciative of life, of others, of things that I see and do, because I did them, or saw them. I love my children more because I remember being a child and wanting to understand the world.
I remember asking questions as a child or a young person. Questions that meant a whole lot to me at the time because I was curious about our world, our lives. Seems like though that I was never satisfied with the sound of the responses that were given. Indeed, I heard Richard Dawkins say on one of his interviews I’ve seen that every time you answer a question with something like “God made it” or “Trust in God’s way and all will be well” or any variance; you have really explained nothing at all. There is no evidence of those answers being factual, therefore, that answer, that explanation, is simply not good enough for the questions.
My search has taken me to many, many, branches of information. I am sure you can imagine, if you’ve ever tried to study anything on the internet, how far and fast these sciences reach. I continue, even today to read all I can in the time that I put aside for this. I believe I will always do it.
I’ve rad about just how far Medical Science has come in recent years. Even more exciting is how far Medical Science is looking, quite confidently, to go in the near future. Unbelievable.
At some point in the last couple of years, I have had the opportunity to listen to Professor Stephan Hawking. He had so many incredible observations but one really struck me. I can’t quote exactly but he said that because of his condition, his illness, he has had an opportunity that most people don’t have. That is the opportunity to spend all his time and energy on a quest for knowledge. He said he had been lucky that way. From his bent up little fragile body, sitting permanently in a chair on wheels, He stated “ I have been Luckier than Most” What a guy.
I take that a step further. The next time you hear a creationist or a fanatic ask “What then, is life all about, atheist, without god, why are we here?”
I have the answer. There could be an infinite number of answers, depending on perspective and honesty, but I know the answer.
In a nutshell, we are like the leaders that first brought us out of the caves. It is our responsibility to do all that we can to further the existence of our species. We must always be improving, growing, becoming, evolving. For cave boy, that may have been hugely survival, physically. To us, to me, it is knowledge. The more we know, the better our offspring will be. The quest for knowledge that Professor Hawking spoke of, is our reason for life. It is what it is all about. I am alive to prepare the world, as best I can, for mankind. I am here to leave the world just a bit better, easier, brighter, for those that will come after me. I am one man, but I represent mankind, I can do a little. I can read, study, build a better mousetrap, teach my children how to make and understand that mousetrap. It will then be there job to improve or retire that mousetrap so that others can be built. I am a link a piece, a tiny cog. I love life. I love knowing that I get this one random, life, this truly awesome, miraculous life. I will do my best to honor it by enjoying it, respecting it, and living everyday like it was the only one.
Duane’s Song
I was raised in a rural area outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were dirt poor from the early sixties up until 1972 when my mother was the victim of a violent, drunken abuser. She wound up dead way before her time and way before us kids had a chance to grow up.
I was eleven then. My closest brother was Duane. This is Duane’s story .He was born only a matter of several months after I was. We had the same father. By the time Duane was actually born, our father was doing a life sentence in state prison for murder.
Duane was born gay, I don’t care what any crackpot will tell you, there was never a decision for him to make about his sexuality. While the rest of us played baseball and rode horses, and learned to hunt and fish, Duane would secretly steal my youngest sister’s Barbie dolls, Keep them in an unknown location and privately live in a world only he knew. Well, we knew, but we loved him and knew he was different and he was one of us.
When Duane was twelve years old, I was actually incarcerated for one of the first times in my life and missed him terribly. I was given the privilege of a phone call home at a point maybe halfway through the fourteen months I spent in the boy’s camp. During that conversation he said he had something very important to tell me. I was very intrigued.
I got on the phone with him and he says to me, “I’m queer, Lloyd, I’m a homosexual.” I told him that we had all know that his whole life. I had, in fact, beaten up several kids over our short years for calling him “Faggot” or “queer bait” and I still remember the pain in his face when that would happen. Although he and I were very different growing up, I truly loved him.
As many young men do, we chased our own brand of hell, after both our parents were gone and all us kids ended up in different temporary homes, foster care, or well-meaning relatives and other short –lived remedies. I was not to see Duane again for about four years. By that time he was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had found a group of young gay men to associate his life with. He seemed ridiculously happy considering, (at least from my view) he was still a very lost little boy. I went to save him
Duane needed a lot of things from me I guess, but not to save him. I found him genuinely content in his peer group. He had a fake birth certificate and was doing extraordinary at a local cosmetology school.
He had also, fallen in love.
Marvin was native to New Mexico; He was a waiter in one of those fancy, high dollar Santa Fe places. He was recently split from his wife and children. That’s Right folks, after eight years of matrimonial bliss; He actually brought Duane home to his family and spelled the whole thing out to them. I wasn’t quite around then, but the more I heard the story from everyone who was within earshot or eyeball range, the more I knew I would have paid quite a sum to have witnessed that little dose of reality. Marvin packed what little he had, kissed his children and grandparents, said goodbye to the woman he’d married and walked out of his life holding tight to my brother’s arms. I’m quite sure that this typical Chicano Family has never had that kind of idea about there boy and stood watching them go with mouths agape.
The relationship had some pitfalls, as you can imagine, and I’d hear about them from my safe settings in California or Washington. I had often made bad jokes and innuendoes directed at this alternative lifestyle. I meant it in good fun, I really did. Duane however thought and continued to think for sometime that I hated him for his homosexuality. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I admired his accomplishments, He became such a sought after hairdresser and beauty advisor to the well-to-do women in New Mexico that he had become quite comfortable over a very short time. Not only was he good, he was well-mannered, handsome, non-threatening, he had the whole package.
I got the call in 1992 that he and Marvin had contacted aides. It affected me so deeply that I pooled together literally every penny I could muster so that I may go to Santa Fe, and to nurse him, to wash his ass, to shower him, to do anything in my power to make his life more livable. As you can see, I, as well as many others was quite ignorant of Aides and its terrible track.
I found them both in fair health. I found them both completely devoted to each other and staying alive. They had a beautiful Adobe home on the right side of town. They were very popular and loved by everyone they knew. They were doing Magic Johnson Before he was. Jim Nabors was a friend of theirs and he too was quite sick with the same virus. It was a scary time for those of us, uneducated in the dilemma.
Remember, Duane had been born in 1962. I arrived on my mission of mercy in 1992. Duane and Marvin had been in a continuous loving relationship since Duane was 16 years old. So from 1978 to 1992, so far, they had loved through thick and thin.
The following summer their best friend Steve died and that was when I really saw it hit Duane’s eyes. A sadness there that I hadn’t seen since grade school.
Bottom Line, as they got weaker, I was finally able to help. I did become an ass wiper, as well as the bather and the keeper of the medication and so-forth.
Duane died in 1998 in his bed at home, with his cats and his makeup just perfect. I still mourn for him because I still love and respect him.
The Party
Seems like all my life I’ve been the biggest. I was the biggest in elementary school, I was the biggest in all my schools, counting those in my same age group. Then as I got older, eventually I got into a little trouble and had to do some long time in jail. I was scared to death, of course, but, I was still the toughest kid in my class. I do remember a situation where I was not the biggest, and I hated it, really. I was in the ninth grade and I had somehow been brought along with somebody at a senior party. I Thought I was cool. I Was! I smoked a lot of pot and drank several beers. This was not something I was used to doing and I got real loaded. Real Loaded. I passed out in a chair, trying to appear cool. I went so deep into this sleep, while sitting in this chair that I ended up with my head hanging backwards, my mouth wide open. Keep in mind that I was considerably younger than these other kids and the person I had come with had long since vacated this ugly, waterloo of a party. So there I was, The youngest kid at the party. Everybody wasted, nobody on my team. Dead asleep with my mouth wide open and head tilted straight back like I was preparing for the guillotine. What rotten, drunken senior could resist that? Three years later I probably could not have. However, this story isn’t about me being a little bastard, I’ve got lots of those stories. This was about me, the victim. I was suddenly awaken with the last dozen or so kids at the party all standing around me laughing out loud, pointing and gesturing. As I was just being awaken, with a hangover and a total lack of recall, it took several seconds for me to realize that I had three hot dogs, wieners, as the story was told, shoved in my mouth to the hilt. I was enraged, I was homicidal, I was shaking with anger and frustration. I was also alone and the youngest, and as the realization of my humiliation became more and more clear, I knew there wasn’t even a girl in the room that I could whip in an out and out brawl. I was defeated before the fight began and I walked away, beaten, teary eyed, and determined to kill each and every one of them. ‘Still feel like it now and then…..(I don’t have any real feelings of hatred for those other kids, hell, I don’t even know who they were, but I still feel the burn when I really think about it.) Thirty five years this year, since the ninth grade. I still get pissed.
Poetry…Sort of
I mentioned, in an earlier post that I first wrote poetry. Not that I was any kind of poet, I’m really not. It was actually the only avenue that I knew to sort of test the waters, if you will. I had written a few things way back in high school, some of which I will add to this post. I just wanted to see if people would truly read what I put out there and how they would critique it. I mentioned that the response I got was so encouraging that I have not stopped writing for an audience since. I have to include a bit of an explanation so that it doesn’t seem quite so abstract as to not make any sense.
My own mother was tragically and horribly taken from me when I was quite young. That is really the better part of the story. During her life, she struggled, she rarely had any real good things happen to her. She was born dirt poor, in Enid, Oklahoma. She was maybe, third of seven children. In a hillbilly family in the forties and fifties, that hardly even warrants new shoes. She married my father, quite young. He left her with two children and another on the way. Then, it got bad. A series of losers, abusers, and drunks, all promising to be the next daddy as another several children arrived, one a year, for several years. Needless to say, it never did get any easier.
Her name was Shirley Jean, she died in 1972. She was only thirty four years old.
SHIRLEY JEAN
a houseful of children
waiting to eat
no way to live
a charmed life
a bushel of beans
a bag of rice
government subsidies
served cold from a can
another day coming
another one gone
babies crying’
more hunger pains
she needs to work
cant get out the door
she’s waiting to die
at thirty-four.
a cold piece of work
a lover a friend
beaten and dragged
through a living hell
left for a bottle
a game of 8-ball
holding her chin
as high as it might
the all night shifts
that made her feet roar
she’s waiting to die
at thirty-four.
she lived and loved
never seeing what for
she waited and died
at thirty-four
____________________________________________________________
The following poem, I wrote back during the time that I simply could not stay out of prison. Eventually, unsurprisingly, my lovely wife decided she was through believing it would ever change. I think that I no longer believed it would ever be different either.
Teardrops and Time
We were two of a kind girl
you and I,
it was easy.
We used to laugh and sing,
and raise some hell,
it was pleasing’.
While the world was turning’ ’round and ’round.
our world just turned
upside down.
Teardrops and time
Tears and time.
Then I went away girl,
I left you lonely.
Another came along and stole
your heart.
Left me lonely.
While the world was turning’ ’round and ’round,
my world just turned
upside down.
Teardrops and time.
Tears and time.
Now I find myself alone,
Memories are hazy.
I think about us though, and wonder
How I got so crazy.
All the world keeps turning’ ’round and ’round,
my world just stays
upside down.
Teardrops and time
Tears and time
Teardrops and time
Tears and time.
___________________________________________________________
The following poem, I wrote originally when I was seventeen and confined to a children and adolescent psychiatric ward. That is another story but it was about then that I first began to dream that someday I could write, be read, and appreciated for that. As I’m sure you can imagine, I was a kind of mixed up kid who made some horrible decisions and was not yet adept at living with the consequences. There was actually a bit more to this but it seems I can hardly read it without changing something. Also, I at first thought of this and the last one as a song. So the rhyming seems a bit juvenile but I still feel it, ya know.
Streets !
Living on the street was never where it’s at,
Sharing a backseat with an old whiny cat.
But pain gets as comfortable as an old pair of shoes,
It’s just my reality, never sang the blues.
I’ve out with no home for so many seasons,
I could suicide now, for all the right reasons.
They say these streets are like a time in hell.
No showers or television, no dinner bell.
Hiding in corners just so I wont be seen.
The less is more, when kind is mean.
I could stay outside through every season.
Or I could suicide right for all the wrong reasons.
____________________________________________________________
I got a bunch more but I don’t want to have a bunch of silly poetry right at the beginning of the page, I’ll spread them out a bit.
Tony Freis (A dilemma)
I want to tell a story about a guy I knew named Tony Freis. Tony was a guy I met at about thirteen years old. I met him in juvenile hall to be honest about it and I continued to know him in high school and just around the neighborhood.
The reason this part sounds vague is because Tony and I were not exactly friends.
He was one of those guys of which nobody much was very fond.
He was a thief, he was a liar, he was loud, obnoxious and generally a real jerk nearly all of the time.
I guess I always sort of drew those types in. The assholes, the unpopular, the strays. I guess I always felt at home there. We are all flawed.
Tony was a tough case, even for me. My girlfriend,(later, my wife)hated him. Wouldn’t come out of her room if he was around.
I had fought him on several occasions. That was part of the problem, I guess. He always wanted to beat people up. He was hard for me to whip and I was twice his size. Because I could whip him, I guess that was our bond, I don’t think anyone else in the neighborhood could.
The incident happened at a neighborhood party that I happened to have attended. Tony showed up about halfway through the evening, uninvited and rowdy, of course. Nobody was real happy about it and some people actually chose to leave. I didn’t care much, it was the home of someone not real close to me and I just wanted to smoke some pot and party.
Soon enough though, Tony had started a quarrel with some of the people there and it looked like it was gonna continue into the night. Most people had left as soon as he arrived, more exited after the fighting broke out. My girl and I were still there, as well as a good friend and a drummer guy that had shown up. There was also a black kid that I had never seen before and one or two others. Tony had started pushing around the black kid and what was his buddy, I thought at the time. (I later learned that they had only met that evening.) Suddenly, without any clue of what was about to transpire. One of the guys there pulled out a kitchen knife and stabbed Tony. He stabbed him one time, right in the center of his gut. Tony hit the ground like a sack of rocks. Blood ran from somewhere near his sternum, as well as his mouth and nose. Tony was dead, unbelievably, suddenly, frighteningly, dead. We were just youngsters, trying to be grown up but not quite there. The bullying, the pushing, the whole tough guy thing had just went too terribly far. Tony Freis, whom I had now known for about seven years, was lying on the floor with his life soaking into the cheesy linoleum, dead. His eyes were still opened, a look of horrible surprise stuck on his face, forever.
Needless to say, everyone that was able to think, ran. The kid who lived there, stayed. He was there when the police showed up, there to see what part I didn’t
Apparently, after I and my girlfriend left, somebody contacted the police pretty quick. I don’t know who it was but when they arrived, nobody was there that had actually seen anything until they saw Tony fall. The police combed the immediate neighborhood and picked up a couple of people that had been at the party. One of the people they picked up was the black kid. Unfortunately for him, he was said to have been seen going through Tony’s pockets after the stabbing. Someone else said that it could have been the black kid that did the stabbing. I happen to know it wasn’t, but I never spoke to the police.
The thing is, that black kid was arrested, tried and convicted of that stabbing. The last I heard, (maybe a year after the incident) he was still filing appeals.
Within a few months after it happened, I was in my own mess and had successfully managed to avoid ever being questioned.
See my dilemma?
I don’t know if me coming forward some time later would have righted the situation, but, I don’t know that it wouldn’t have. I think that by the time I even cared, twenty years had passed.
I don’t even know his name.
Hillbilly Hero’s (Buck Owens)
When I was a kid in Oklahoma, back about the middle sixties I guess, every Saturday afternoon ’bout five you’d find me in front of the old black and white TV set. I mean I couldn’t wait for the show to begin. It was Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. Yeah, I loved them. I knew every word to every corny song. I could sound out every twang from that red, white, and blue guitar. I loved it. “Sam’s Place” and “Tiger by the Tail” were my favorites, but I loved ‘them all. So long as Buck was singing and acting silly, I was happy. Then in 1969 “Heehaw” started and for a few years we had back to back Buck every Saturday. I loved old’ Buck.
I continued to love country music all my life. I love it still. And although Buck was never popular with the other country music fans I knew, he was my sentimental favorite forever. As my life progressed and I moved on and into a tumultuous way of living that took me places I never wanted to go, I continued to love Buck’s music and all it meant. Everyone who has ever known me for any length of time, knows this about me
A few years ago, I was in jail for some trumped up charge having to do with writing more checks than I had given the bank money for, I met a guy from Bakersfield, California and I told him about my love for that area of the country and especially about my hero, Buck Owens. He told me that as soon as I was out of jail and any given weekend, I could come down to Bakersfield, hang with him, and see Buck, up close. Buck owned a big, very popular nightclub in Bakersfield and played every weekend himself, right there in town.
As my eternal good fortune would have it, I happened to meet someone a short time after the jail stay that also liked this hillbilly music, but had the resources to insure us a trip or two to Bakersfield.
Through the miracle that I have since decided to call the internet, she was actually able to set us up a face to face meeting with the man. She had contacted his manager after our first trip and explained that I had been a fan since the sixties; I was probably a bit loopy but still a huge fan of the man and his music. I’ll shorten this story a bit. I met the guy, I conversed with him for well over an hour at our first meet, was invited to return, was then invited to his 74th birthday celebration, attended nearly every weekend for just about a year and a half. Got to know, got to see, got to love and admire this larger than life legend that was Buck Owens.
Buck became so familiar a player in my life that he knew me by first name and knew I’d be somewhere in the room most Fridays that year.
Buck was an old fashion stay-put kind of person. We never mentioned topics like religion or politics much except maybe a passing comment. I had the impression that he was raised in a bible belt home, and probably, at least hoped for a reward.
That doesn’t matter much to me. He loved his music, he loved to entertain and to be appreciated in such a way as to almost seem naive, or child like. He was truly, as much as I could see, and I looked hard, a true innocent. A man with a creativity that was right for its time.
He died just a few months into his 77th year. He had been plagued with bad health for most of the last couple years of his life. He always played, if he could stand, he’d be singing’
I was invited to attend the private funeral, I didn’t go, I don’t do funerals at all, I spent the day, listening to his music, remembering and honoring his life my own way.
This I share because there are many things in my life that show just how cool my life has gotten to be. My daughter Amanda said it best, she told me “Dad, Wow, you know how many people get to know the hero they grew up listening to and admiring on television?”
I replied that I had no idea. She said “nobody dad, nobody, just you.”
Uncle Vern (A truly brave man)
I have an uncle that lives his life in a place called Cole, Mississippi. Lee Vernon Harris is his name and he is the local Pastor there in Cole.
He has held that position for almost thirty years.
He’s buried the dead, built or rebuilt the local Church a time or two, raised his own family and remained fairly content there in a town of about sixteen thousand people.
He was a Southern Baptist. Hellfire and brimstone has been a common theme many a humid Sunday there to an exuberant crowd.
Out of the population of sixteen thousand, about forty-five hundred are actually members of this church. Out of those, probably twenty-five hundred or so attend regularly. Now, that is huge. Keep in mind this is southern Mississippi, folks are mostly poor, mostly black, and very God-fearing.
Reverend Harris is very well respected and loved in this community. That has been the case for a very long time. He knows damn near every body in town by first name, knows the birth dates of their children and has sat at the dinner table a time or two with just damn near everyone in town.
Uncle Vern, as we call him, is a very, very, sharp guy. I mean that he is more intelligent than you might first expect. He has always read everything he could get his hands on and has continued to educate himself on the ways of the world all his life. He and I are pretty close. We have always kept in touch and exchanged news and ideas because, well frankly, we respect each other’s smarts. About eight years ago, I had talked him into getting himself a personal computer for his home and hooking himself into the world wide web. He was hooked almost from the start. He could not believe the amount of information that is right at your fingertips, right in the privacy of his own little home in Cole, Mississippi. We have been able to communicate almost daily ever since. He has always enjoyed sharing with me some little tidbit of knowledge that he would pick up and I would always do the same.
About three and a half years ago, I got a strange message from him. He had found a website dedicated to the Science of Evolution. Although, of course he was familiar with the “theory of evolution,” he had never read in depth about all the scientific facts surrounding it. I remember him saying just in passing that it was so compelling that he almost questioned his own faith. That was three and a half years ago and I thought little of it after that. he didn’t speak of it again and I never asked. That is, until just last February.
Uncle Vern invited me down to Cole for a visit. I am one who loves to up and run and he knows it, so away I went. Seems Uncle Vern never stopped studying Darwin’s Theory, He went on to study Cosmic Evolution, the Big Bang Theory, and many other related sciences. He had called me down to Mississippi to tell me that he no longer believed in GOD! Here he is, a lifelong servant of the word. A preacher in a small bible belt town. His faith had left him, completely. He had continued to do his job as long as his heart would allow him. He perform marriages and funerals. He still read the sermons all the way up until he was sure. When I arrived in Cole, his assistants had been performing these tasks for just about three weeks. He wanted to tell me, then make an announcement to his congregation.
(must stop here and finish later today, stay with this story, it’s amazing)
There he stood, right up at the pulpit looking out with a kind of nervous smile. The music stopped and uncle Vern spoke into the microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, today I stand before you for what will have to be the last time. I have been fortunate enough to have obtained some information that will prevent me from continuing to deliver the Sunday sermon.” He paused. Many of the people watching him looked confused, perhaps concerned. They were in no way prepared for the his next words. I was a bit frightened, but also having a difficult time suppressing a laugh. “I have found out, my fellow citizens of this fine community, that there is no God! I have been wrong, horribly wrong, and I must be moving on.” He then walked down from the pulpit, exchanged a few glances, and left the building.
I sat kinda stunned for a minute, watching people react. Nobody got really overexcited, they just kinda whispered to each other. I believe I saw and heard a few folks send up some prayers for my uncle. I will never be that brave, I thought, then I too, left the building.
