"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx
If you haven’t been around in a few days you might have missed some of the more recent posts. Catch up by clicking on the headline to this post:
And is our custom, a walk down memory lane:
The difference between sick and tragic is sadly much easier to discern than people realize. Tragic is what happened in Japan. I am a native Angeleno and have lived through many earthquakes. The Northridge earthquake was no slouch, it was quite large but what happened in Japan….massive. Read about the Richter scale and you’ll see that the difference between the 7.1 for Northridge and the 8.9 for Japan is enormous. And then the tsunami that followed….well it is the perfect storm. My thoughts and prayers continue to go out to those in Japan. That was tragic.
Sick is different. Sick is what happens when terrorists break into a home and slaughter a family. The pictures of this poor family illustrate it better than I can say. WARNING, these pictures are graphic and disturbing.
Read this
The Fogel family was killed Friday night when a terrorist broke into their home in the West Bank settlement of Itamar and stabbed them all to death.
According to police, the suspect broke into the house armed with a knife and stabbed parents Udi and Ruth, along with three of their children, Yoav, Elad, and Hadas Fogel. Magen David Adom rescue services arrived at the scene and found them all dead.
The family’s 12-year-old daughter, who was at a youth group activity, returned to her home at approximately midnight and her calls for the door to be opened for her went unanswered. With the help of a neighbor, they managed to open the door and came upon the horrible murder scene.
It is inexcusable. There are no words, no justification for such action. What happened in Japan is tragic, but what happened in Itamar is sick.
This is a work of fiction based upon a prompt from the Studio Thirty Crew. I am posting it here and there. The prompt is based upon the word Serendipity
Serendipity – Luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for.
There is a very large bruise on my left arm. It is not camouflaged with makeup or masked by my shirt but open and available for viewing by all who stumble upon it. I mention this because it is kind of psychedelic looking and when I think of serendipity I think of the sixties.
I am almost a child of the sixties but not quite. Born just prior to the moon landing and Woodstock I am able to say that I saw the very last part of that decade but truth is that I don’t remember it from life experience but from pictures.
The seventies are a different story. I remember them quite well. The movies, the music, sights and sounds all are encased in that cavernous hall between my ears. Echoes of the past and hints of the future swirl back and forth in a timeless dance.
But even though I remember those days well the memories are those of a child. I remember wanting to be The Fonz and wondering if being in high school meant having to be a Sweathog. It was cool to tell my friends “up your nose with a rubber hose†or to say that they looked like Horshack.
It was a bit weird to see Vinnie Barbarino dancing in Saturday Night Fever but then again we still ran around yelling “Dy-No-Mite†like J.J. Walker so what did we know.
VANS were cool to wear but I never did own a pair. They didn’t make them in sizes that I could fit into. The pizza joints we used to hit all had sawdust on the floor and many had Pong. Pong was great as was Space Invaders.
In between and intermixed with this are memories of the Bicentennial, America turned 200 years old. We talked about it a lot during school and boy did we get excited when we got one of those Bicentennial quarters- they were cool.
It was a different world, a different time and a different place. I loved it when daylight savings time began. Never worried about a lost hour of sleep because I was too busy celebrating the extra hours of daylight that my friends and I had for playing after school. It just meant more time to ride our bikes or play baseball.
I never thought for one moment somewhere in the middle of the country there was a little girl with long dark hair, sparkling eyes and an electric smile. You can blame it on my being too young to be interested in girls or my being lost in my own world. You can blame it on either of those things or none of them. The reason why doesn’t really matter. What matters is what happened later on. What matters is what came later.
I suppose that it would be nice to pepper this post with pictures and music. It would add color and depth to it. But sometimes the silence and the intent to include imagination do more for a story. Sometimes the words that tell you about the smiling girl who loved numbers and the boy who loved words set a scene on their own.
Sometimes the silence sends its own smile and that is enough. What I know for certain is that I never expected to meet my best friend on a message board. I never expected to find her reading about GI problems.
It is not as romantic as stumbling into each other in a snowstorm or on a beach. It doesn’t hold the same excitement as my stopping a mugger from stealing a big black purse.  To be fair she might be more excited by my solving the Goldbach Conjecture or by providing Proof that 10 is a solitary number.
And that is ok with me because the connection that was created that day way back when started with our minds. All we had were words. There were no pictures to look at. We didn’t spot each other across a crowded room; meet in a bar or anything like that.
We didn’t have to worry about bad hair or bad outfits. Our words created a world and built a foundation that was far deeper and much stronger.
Sounds like Serendipity to me.
Some of the songs of the night. Click on the headline of this post to be taken to the links. Got some new posts coming soon.
This Time– John Legend
Sweet Child Of Mine– Guns N’ Roses
Barton Hollow– The Civil Wars
Beautiful– Moby
Born To Hand Jive– Grease (Sha Na Na)
Calypso– John Denver
Can’t Get It Out of My Head– ELO
In My Life– Ozzy Osbourne with Slash
Another Way To Die– Jack White and Alicia Keys
Double Dutch– Frankie Smith
Into The Mystic– Van Morrison
These are the words that I began to write but did not finish. Â These are words that belong to me about a time and place that might never have been and people that I never knew. These are words about things I have done, places I have seen and people I knew. These are words that belong to another who might have been me had life been different. These are words that are sometimes sad and words that are sometimes glad. Â These are nothing more than words/
“She put him out like the burnin’ end of a midnight cigarette
She broke his heart he spent his whole life tryin’ to forget
We watched him drink his pain away a little at a time
But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind
Until the night
He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away her memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength he had to get up off his knees
We found him with his face down in the pillow
With a note that said I’ll love her till I die
And when we buried him beneath the willow
The angels sang a whiskey lullaby”
Two tours of duty are an inadequate description for days that felt like months and nights that never ended but I am not the man who wrote that dictionary. I am just an ordinary Joe who threw his own fool hardy nature found himself wandering through mountainous terrain in search of ghosts.
In a different life we sat glued to our television sets and watched the towers burn and crumble to the ground. Amidst the images of those who jumped and the ashes of a million tons of office supplies we swore vengeance upon those who orchestrated that day.
When you are young, dumb and full of cum you are ruled by your passions and I was no different. She begged me not to serve, told me she feared what would happen and cried on my shoulder. I held her tight and told her that the bullet that would end my life hadn’t been invented, said that no man living or dead could kill me.
She cursed my stubborn nature and desire to prove my masculinity, told me that I was a fool and she couldn’t support such stupidity. I wasn’t cowed by her words or swayed by reason. In my anger I accused her of at worse being crazy and at best ruled by the visit of her monthly friend.
Instead of tears or screams my words were met with silence. For a brief moment an icy glare met the laser beams in my eyes and then they were both gone. She walked by me without a word and passed through the front door into the night air.
Youthful arrogance and anger prevented me from trying to contact her. No letters were sent from Camp Pendleton nor Germany or any of other places Uncle Sam sent me. I was determined to show her how tough I was.
A smarter man would have learned from the experience, especially after the things I saw. If you knew what sort of things happen to a body that has had the good fortune to be on the wrong end of various types of weaponry you would understand. It is a fancy way of trying to avoid writing I.E.D.
Wires, batteries, cellphone and explosives intermix to build a device that devastates hearts, minds and bodies. One moment we’re listening to music or should I say feeling the music. There is a beat that has us nodding our heads. We are a team of boys turned men who can act as angels of mercy or be as vicious as the hounds of hell. Ask for our help and we will greet you with a smile and an outstretched arm. Poke, punch or kick us and we will come at you with something far worse than a bad attitude. We aren’t locked and loaded.
We are death incarnate and our sole purpose is to wreak havoc and sow the sort of devastation that the Roman legions couldn’t possibly have dreamed of. When they took down Hannibal and destroyed Carthage they made history but that was only because there were survivors who were left to write of their passing. That is not our style nor our desire. If you gain that sort of attention from us we will wipe the earth clean of your memory and end your line as if it had never begun.
That is not hyperbole or melodrama. It is what we said and what we believed. We weren’t a bunch of ignorant fools who signed up to be all we could be. We were patriots. We were educated men, students of history who believed that if war is hell than we should be Satan’s Messengers.
What no one told us was that we were sowing the seeds of our destruction. No one told us that we were raping our minds and ravaging our souls, at least not in ways that we could understand. That is the great irony of warfare. You can’t really understand it unless you have been there and once you have you can’t come back as you were. Once you cross the line you pay Charon to ferry your ass across that river and then you run like hell so that you can find shelter that doesn’t allow you to sleep as you wish. Not that it matters because when you come home you can’t sleep either.
Drink a fifth of whiskey and maybe you start to take the edge off. Think about calling your girl to tell her that you are back but hang up the phone because you don’t know what to say. Take up running because you think that maybe you can find a way to run to a place where your mind can’t follow. The miles pass and the day turns to night and you keep on running.
You apologize to the guy at the gas station. It is not really your fault that you punched him. He should know better than to stand behind a man in uniform. Ok, maybe it is not entirely his fault. He can’t know that he you spent all that time watching the back of your brothers as they watched yours. He can’t know that loud noises sometimes make you hit the deck or that when you aren’t with the guys you turn around with your fist extended. Â And during the few hours you see the things that you try to forget. Sometimes you wake up and find your mother standing over you, trying so very hard to reassure you.
But mommy can’t save you. She can’t reach you because she hasn’t been where you have been. She doesn’t know that you heard her telling someone about how sometimes you scream in your sleep or  that you heard her crying about not being able to help.
And then one day when you are out at the mall you see that girl and she sees you. Months have passed and you haven’t called her, even though she called you. You see her and she still makes your heart pound but you don’t know what to say. There aren’t any words to share. Still, when she runs into your arms and cries on your shoulder you let her be. She looks up at you through tear stained eyes and you don’t recognize the face that is reflected in her eyes.
Life has changed. You used to use words like ‘I’ to describe it but now ‘I’ has become ‘you’ because that you don’t feel like a participant anymore. Now you just float through the days and nights wondering if you’ll ever feel whole again. Â You live in a world of shadows and she lives in sunshine. Â And because you remember once loving her you break the embrace and start to walk away, destination unknown.
The clown was drunk, surly and horny. Or should I say that he was in dire need of shagging Tinkerbell. Ok, her name wasn’t really Tinkerbell but the performers at a kids birthday party don’t introduce themselves by their real names so you’ll forgive me if I can’t tell you whether she was Karen, Kathy, Tracey, Lacey or Stacey.
All I know is that the clown who smelled like he had taken a bath at the local liquor store told me that he wanted to play hide the salami with her. I suppose that between the stench and his words I should have told my sister to fire him immediately but I was too busy laughing at the name I had given him, The Fairy Fucker.
Little sister wouldn’t have been happy about that. She wouldn’t have smiled, chuckled, giggled or guffawed about The Fairy Fucker. No grin would have been seen on her chin, not even if I tried to tell her that the local Pro-Gay defamation league would be pissed with me for calling him The Fairy Fucker.
She was far too engrossed in being the hostess with the mostess. It was my niece’s 9th birthday party and the house was filled with ten thousand screaming kids, a very nice assortment of food, Tinkerbell, music and my new friend, The Fairy Fucker.
Just thinking about it makes me giggle and maybe that explains why I didn’t kick his ass out myself. I like being an uncle. No scratch that, I love being an uncle. Maybe it is because I am 240 pounds of five year-old trapped in a man’s body. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, cuz I am really good at it and the kids love me.
So while little sister is flying around the house and yard trying to make sure that everything is just so, I am pulling out every trick in the Uncle’s Handbook. It doesn’t take long for me to be like the Pied Piper of the party. I have most of the ten thousand children kids at the party following me around, imitating everything I say and do.
I know from experience that this is not a good thing. Even though I like playing Peter Pan I know that having the lost boys trailing me is a recipe for disaster. Inside my head I start to hear Robbie the Robot start saying “Danger Will Robinson, Danger Will Robinson.” But I am in my element and I sort of ignore the robot and the red alert noise that Captain Kirk used to set off on the Enterprise.
Mere moments from now I’ll find myself face to face with little sister except she is not 12 and screaming at me because I have unplugged the phone and she can’t call our parents to tell them how evil I am.
Nope, she is pushing 40 (a fact that I repeat frequently) and she has slipped out of the hostess with the mostess mode and into I am going to kick my big brother’s ass. Well, I don’t know about you but I don’t like having my ass kicked and even though little sister may have a point that pump isn’t going anywhere near my crack.
Angry words are exchanged and we’re transported back to 1982. Just like old times our mother comes over and lays into both of us. Fun time is over and now I am angry. We go back and forth and then the argument is broken up by a scream.
Poor Tinkerbell has discovered that the balloon animal The Fairy Fucker is holding isn’t really a balloon or an animal. Little sister and I exchange a look and a millisecond later I drag the clown out the door and throw him headfirst off of the porch.
I turn and look at little sister and say too bad she didn’t teach him to fly. In between giant gales of laughter little sister gives me a big hug and the party resumes.
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