First Time Sex

Okay, right up front I have to explain that I was raised Irish-Catholic and was a kid in the 1950s, so a lot of what's talked about today on computers and television didn't get talked about back then. What I'm getting at is, for example, that while I walked around with a perpetually hard male member from ages 14-19, no one explained what masturbation was to me and so I never masturbated until I'd had sex. I had sex at the end of my 18th year, and masturbated about a week later, just after my 19th birthday, when I realized there was a connection.....More than you needed, right? Okay, but I'm just setting the time frame.
So here I was, a freshman in college, still living at home, and this absolutely stunning blond, Darryl, takes a liking to me in a sociology class. We start to hang around and then make a date. I borrowed my mom's old Dodge Dart, picked up Darryl and found a place to park and talk. It was snowing in Queens, New York that night. So we talked with the windows up for a while, the motor running to keep the heat on, then started making out. And it occurred to me that I might actually get some,...well, have sex in the car. Which is what we were moving toward, with me in heaven, when suddenly someone was tapping at Darryl's window. I nearly jumped through the roof. In a moment the knocking came again, this time followed by "Open the window. This is the police."
Well, it took a few moments to get reasonably dressed, then she rolled down the window. "Are you alright, mam?" the officer said? She told him yes, everything was fine.
The second cop in the car came to my window and did the license and registration thing with me, while the first cop got from Darryl that we were just kissing a little and nobody was the worse for it. So they let us go.
I took her home, but we left each other with a pretty passionate embrace that continued my five year streak of always having a hard-on. And which made me determined to find a place to get Darryl alone.
It didn't take long to find one. My friend Naomi, who also went to Hunter College, said we could use her place over on 91st and Amsterdam Ave. She was going out on Friday night and would leave a key in her mailbox in the foyer, which she'd leave open. Excellent. Next was to talk to my friend Bruno Valle, who took from his wallet a Trojan and handed it to me, saying, "That was going to be for me, but you're going to need it," in a solemn sort of way.
I was, shall we say, good to go.
Friday night came and I picked Darryl up after her last class at about a 7 PM. We took a cab to the West Side, picked up some Chinese food and walked the block or two to Naomi's. Only problem? There was no key.
I wasn't going to give up that easily, so we hung around until someone else going into the building came by and went in with them. We made our way up to Naomi's apartment and I looked under the welcome mat. No key. I felt around the door. No key. A couple of neighbors poked their heads out when they heard us talking in the hallway but we looked the right age to be Naomi's friends, so no one said anything or told us to leave.
I was getting pretty desperate. If I could just get to the other side of that door all the treasure of the Arabian Nights would be mine. And the damned door was locked.
Suddenly, my brain sprung into action: Above those old doors in New York City apartments were transoms, little windows that spun on pins on either side, so that people could open them to get a little more air. I had Darryl boost me up and I pushed the thing open, then slithered through and crashed to the ground on the inside. Who cared? I was in! I opened the door and then so was Darryl.
She played coy, asking for Chinese food and so I served her. But it didn't take long to get to a bedroom and down to things. Problem was, I was no good. I didn't even know how to put the condom on. Not unexpected, as I'd never seen one out of its package, but still slightly awkward. And then I knew I should get involved with some oral sex, but I didn't really know what that was, so did my best but I didn't hear Darryl screaming with delight or anything.
And then the ACT. Well, if I didn't know about condoms or oral sex, I sure as hell didn't know exactly where to put that thing and so probably stabbed her a dozen times before she took control. And once there I had no idea how I was supposed to move. I was simply wretched.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I told her I was sorry I sucked but that I was a virgin and so.....
I never got to finish that sentence. "You're a virgin? Really? Oh my god! I've been dying to fuck a virgin since I was 14! My god, I can't believe it!!!"
And with that we went from her allowing me to have a little sex to her deciding she was a bucking bronco and I was going to have to hang on for dear life! She bucked, she moaned, she sighed, she nearly bit my ears off. She drew blood tearing into my back with her fingernails; she wrapped her long legs around me and squeezed until I nearly feinted. All of it was good. All of it was very very good.
And then I finished. And man did I scream! Wow!!!!!!!! For the first time in my virgin life, I finished when I wasn't sleeping. Wow!!! So that's what people are talking about when they talk about jerking off, I thought!!! Why hadn't I thought of that???
Shortly after my bliss we got up and went to the bathroom. I knew I wanted some more of that so I took the condom off, washed it out and put it on the sink.
Just then there was a loud bashing at the door. "Police! Open up!"
Darryl and I raced for our clothes, dressed and opened the door. Two huge cops and one 19-year-old girl I'd never seen stepped into the room. "Who are you?" I asked the girl. "I live here. Who are you?"
Naomi hadn't mentioned anything about a roommate, and in the next couple of minutes we learned that she hadn't mentioned anything about promising me I could use the place on Friday night, either. The cops--who had been called when the roommate heard us in the apartment, probably my screaming in delight and amazement--wanted proof that we weren't thieves, considering that we'd somehow broken in. I explained the transom entry and pointed to the Chinese food. I explained why we were there but they weren't necessarily buying it. And then, out of the blue, tearing out of the bathroom came the house cat, condom between her teeth. She raced across the living room and I swear she dropped it right on one of the officers' shoes.
"What the hell is....Oh my god, get that thing off me!" he shouted. I did, but noticed that the damned thing had teeth holes in it, so I wouldn't be getting another chance to use it.
The condom convinced them we were telling the truth, but they still insisted on us leaving with them. On the way out one of the officers leaned over to me and sort of whispered: "You don't reuse them. You just bring more than one."
And then we were out into the winter night.
I spent about a month trying to get Darryl to do a repeat performance but evidently she wasn't impressed enough to go for it. Now that I wasn't a virgin but would still be a lousy lover was a combo that didn't turn her on. She let me neck with her a few times but then even that Peter'd out.
A couple of weeks later, just after I turned 19, I decided to experiment with that masturbation thing...and damn if it didn't work. I was amazed. And I decided that I liked it and had about 5-years of catching up to do.
40-years-later, I'm nearly there.

That Gorman Guy

Alright, enough already. That Gorman guy gets in these moods sometimes where he thinks people ought to kiss his butt a little. So he writes these plaintiff little messages asking for recognition from blog readers. Let's go kick his butt, not kiss it. Who does he think he is, saying he might not write anymore if people don't respond, when the whole damned blog is actually his therapy? Of course he'll keep writing. What else has he got to do?
I think we should all get together and boycott the damned blog. Don't give him any feedback at all. HA! That would put him in a stitch, I'll bet....
Just kidding. Thanks all.

Anybody Out There???

Listen, folks. I have no counter and have been kicked off Yahoo@ adds. So Here I am writing frighteningly secret stuff and I got to know if anyone is reading/listening. If no one cares, I'll stop writing. If there are 10 of you, I need to know. I'm about to write the story of my first sex. Very personal, very vulnerable, very funny. But it no one is reading, why spend a few hours writing it?
So I don't need a cascade of names but I do need to know that at least 10 of you are finding my posts worth reading, otherwise I'm just masturbating---and if that's what I'm doing I'd rather do it in private, thank you.
So give me a hollar and let me know I'm not writing into the wind. And if you do I'll give you a pretty good story about my first sex--which has less to to with sex than it does the NY police...which is why it's a good story.
SO WHERE ARE YOU??????
IF YOU ARE HERE, LET ME KNOW IT!!!! I DON"T HAVE A COUNTER SO AS FAR AS I KNOW I'M THE ONLY ONE INTERESTED!!!!
SAY IT Ain't so, okay?
Peter G

Swim Team 101

In high school I wasn't a great athlete. I was born an okay athlete, but then spent several months in a hospital at 5 1/2-till 6 with rheumatoid arthritis and was a trial patient on cortizone. Which apparently worked but left me weighing 162 pounds as a very fat 6-year-old. I was schooled by Ms. Harper who came to the house twice a week, I think, for about three or four hours. She was a public school teacher who taught kids like me who couldn't be in regular school, and she got me up to half-way through the fourth grade by the time I was old enough to enter second grade at St. Luke's school in Whitestone. I've written about St. Luke's, I think, where classes ranged from 79 to 108 kids with one nun. No wonder they needed the ruler. 108 2nd graders would be too much for anyone to handle, particularly sex-starved virgins--which they were at that time.
In any event, when I went back to school as a cigarette smoking 7-year old (and didn't I get my knuckles rapped for that pretty much daily!!!) who'd gotten a social security card at 6 and was working and earning money as a soda jerk at Louie's candy store on 24th Avenue 8 hours a week, the other kids used to run backwards and beat me in races, particularly my pal Tommy Farrell.
But my father and brother Mike loved sports and wanted me to be an athlete and so me and Mike (Mike and I, for you, Ms. KAOS) practiced football and baseball mercilessly. Or rather, Mike drove me mercilessly to become a regular non-sick kid by being brutal to me. He'd make me run 8 or 9 street football routes daily, 15 times each to the left and right. That was something like 240 passes daily, including the suicidal: "Baldy, 10 steps, cut to the left and dive over the curve. I'll hit you falling onto the sidewalk," play.
But it worked.
I got good at baseball with my brother making me make 50 throws from catcher to second base daily for a couple of years. I'm nearly 60 but still have one hell of an arm. As a kid I became an all star catcher in little league, and later made the high school baseball team, though Tartaglia and Johnson were better catchers--and waya bigger and stronger than me--and so I didn't play a lot.
But there was this thing that President Kennedy made people do. It was a 10 or so event physical test. Some of you will remember it: We had to climb a 25 foot rope, climb a peg board, do pushups for 2 minutes, do sit-ups for two minutes, broad jump, standing, run 100 yard dash, and some other things. When I got to high school, a pushup and sit-up fanatic by that time, I wound up something like number 1137 out of 1240 people as a freshman.
By senior year I was number one in the whole school until the basketball team came back from an away game, at which point I dropped to number 8 or 12. Still, not bad for a kid other kids had beaten running backward just 6 years earlier.
During high school I won a lot of awards for writing so decided I'd be a writer. But I also was good at theatre and was in all the plays, generally in the second role to Bob Herbert, who was very good. I also joined the gymnastics team and the swim team. The gymnastics team was not good. I practiced (as 14th man on something like a 12 man squad) for a week, then went to a tourney. Someone got hurt and I was asked to do a routine on the side-horse. I'd never even gotten up on a side horse so needless to say, I didn't do well.
Swimming was worse. I joined because I wanted to learn to swim. I'd missed that chance when I got sick as a kid and wanted to learn. Coach Hoffman let me join even though I couldn't swim because he was proud of how much I worked at doing pushups and sit-ups (66 old-fashioned situps in two minutes; more than 50 pushups in the same time) and how good I was at the rope and peg-board. He was never impressed with my best time in the 100 yard dash, which was 12.5 if I remember correctly). IN any event he encouraged the swim coach to take me. Which he did.
Now, I couldn't swim. I joined to be taught how to swim. And we had a couple of guys on the team, Billy Warner and another guy, who could fly. They would be in the race for county championships. Wonderful to watch. But not me. I just wanted to stay above water and catch up on what I missed when I was sick and fat.
Then we went to a meet. It was a four-school meet. All catholic schools. Bishop Reilly (my school), against St. John's prep and two other schools. I forget their names because they didn't do anything striking. But St. John's did: They didn't wear swim trunks. They were freaking naked with their balls shaved. Twelve or so St. John's Prep kids walking around this indoor pool with their shlongs hanging out, badmouthing us for wearing trunks. Worse: I didn't have a speed-o. I had regular trunks that I borrowed from my brother Mike, who was 22 to my sophmore 15. Nice plaid trunks that fell to my knees. Didn't matter. I wasn't going to swim. I was last man on the team, second or third away from first 12 and only 8 or so were going to compete.
Until a couple of people came up hurt. And suddenly my name was called. I looked to coach, who waved me to the pool edge. I asked what the heck I was supposed to do. He said just swim two lengths of the 50 meter pool and that was that.
So I climbed to the edge: Everyone else had these wonderful poses. They looked like birds of prey, toes wrapped around pool edge, knees bent, arms forward, backs straight, slightly bent toward the pool. I, on the other hand, stood straight, a couple of inches away from the frighteningly deep pool, my hands together in a position that probably looked more "alter boy praying" than "swim meet ready". Worse, the guys on either side of me were naked and they kept pulling their dicks to make them look bigger. And they had no hair! I'd waited 14-15 years to get hair and these hairless guys were just stretching their dicks! To say I was lost was an understatement.
At some point during my completely-lost-why-are-they-naked reverie, a gun went off and everyone dove into the water. They didn't dive, they dove: some of them looked like they sprung off boards, leaping 10-12 feet straight out into the air and then touching the water and coming up 5 yards ahead of where they touched down. I watched in amazement and then realized I was losing time. So I dove. And I went straight down, as my posture indicated I would. And then, coming up about 2-feet from where I left the pool edge, I realized my swim suit had come off. It was down around my ankles! I was not about to surface without a swim suit, so I reached down and got it and got it back on and by the time I did I realized that everyone had already made the 50 meter turn and was coming back toward me! I was lost. I was beyond redemption even if I was wearing clothes!
So I doggie paddled about 10 yards, till everyone in the meet passed me, then decided I'd better feign drowning and did and made my way to the side of the pool and clambored out, fake huffing the whole way.
Eddie Monaghan, a prick, nailed me.
"Why didn't you finish, Gorman? Chicken? Pussy?" he said, chesting me back toward the pool.
"I was choking. Took water..." I said.
"Bullshit. You fucked this team....I'll kill you."
Enough was enough and I stood my ground. Lying, I said, "I took water. You don't like it go fuck yourself."
Eddie was a tough guy who'd been in the golden gloves. Nobody talked to him like that. Especially quitters like me. So he was stunned.
"You're a punk. I could kill you."
"Do it. Do it."
"You're going back into that pool..."
"No, I'm not. I took water..." I lied.
Somehow, he seemed to believe me or thought I was really ready to fight him and he didn't like that idea. Probably I was just scared and embarrassed enough to have been at the end of my rope. And he knew I'd already backed down in the race and was not going to back down again.
"You suck, Gorman," he said, turning and walking away.
Later that day I discovered that we needed one point to win the match against all the teams, and that win would have put us ahead of St. John's Prep in the city championships and we could have gone on to playoff victory. That point would have been achieved if I had simply finished, no matter whether I'd taken a week to do it. By quitting, I'd lost that point and just tied St. John's Prep, but since they'd beaten us in an earlier meet we didn't get to go to the playoff/championships.
I have hated myself for being a quitter since I found that out. I wish someone would have taken 4 minutes to explain it to me, or explained it to me as I was feigning drowning but before I got out of the pool. No one did. I didn't know how to swim. My fault but I've forgiven myself.
I still never went back to the swim team.
And I have never quit anything again, despite wanting to on a number of occasions.

A Hitchhiking Story

I used to hitch a lot when I was a kid. I think I've got about 50,000 miles under my belt. Just today a friend who hitched told me about the hardest working he ever did when he got picked up by a crazy lady who made him catch chickens all day and never paid him. I responded with the story of the most memorable hitch I ever got: From just outside Chicago to Los Angeles in 23 hours. Here's the story.
My hardest hitch, and also the most memorable--and there were a lot--came just outside of Chitown. I was headed to the coast to go swim in the Pacific and pick up summer work and this Ford LTD came screaming by at about 100 mph just after dusk. He stopped 500 yards ahead of where I was and peeled backwards at an insane pace on the shoulder. I determined I wouldn't ride with him. But when he stopped I saw a gun in one of the hugest hands belonging to one of the hugest drunk men I'd ever seen. "Get in. I'm headed to the coast." "No thanks...." "I said get in the car..." At the wheel was a smallish longhair, a bit older than me. "Better get in, man."
I got in the back and we took off. The man was drinking whiskey from a fifth-bottle. The hippie explained that he'd been coerced into the car the same way. The man, who held the gun on the driver and threatened to shoot him every time he dropped below 100, explained he was going home to LA and had been chased by the cops for speeding in every state since he left Florida. Why he was on the northern route I had no idea, and he wouldn't explain.
When we stopped he ordered us out of the car. I'd have to think it through but maybe it was Des Moines. He walked behind us into a bar, this 6'7" giant, stood in the doorway and demanded to know: "Who's the meanest, toughest son of a bitch in this place?"
Most of the men looked pretty tough to me and one finally stood. "I guess I am. Who the fuck wants to know?"
Our guy didn't break a sweat. "Well I am now and I want to drink. And if you don't think I am, then you are going to have to go through my friends here. And if you can make it through them, then you and I will decide who is the toughest son of a bitch here."
The man looked at us and dismissed us by looking through us and measuring the giant. He forced a little laugh and sat down.
"I knew it. You're all chickenshits. These hippie scumbags have you scared."
And then he had three or four doubles, paid and left, nudging us out in front of him. He sent the other hippie to a package store to buy another bottle of whiskey--I think he was drinking Old Grand Dad--had the tank filled and off we went, me at the wheel, the gun pointed easily at my stomach. "You're down to 90! I'll kill you if you don't keep that at 100 or more."
I'd never hit 80 in my life, so 100 felt like I had no control whatsoever. But the car was huge and heavy and smooth, even at that speed. The man explained that it had, I think, a 456 engine, which he said was the largest engine ever put into an assembly line car in the US. And he was proud of it. The 100 mark was to keep us from police notice. That sounds silly, I know, but he explained that at that speed we were through counties and into new police jurisdictions before the county cops realized we were there. And that being about 1971 or 72, there were no computers and most county cops didn't talk with cops from another county on their radios. So we'd be chased for a few miles but we'd hit the county line and the cops would stop. Thirty minutes later we'd see lights behind us and outrun them to the next county line and we did that all night. We only stopped for more liquor and drinks and gas and at each stop the giant did the same thing he'd done at the first. "Who's the meanest, toughest son of a bitch in here?" And at most places nobody even stood up. At the places where they did, they always sat after he told them they'd have to go through me and the other hippie before he'd even both to fight. He was just that big and that drunk that he wasn't worth it to anybody.
We clocked 100-plus on route 80 all the way, through Lincoln, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, and then started south to LA on 15. By about 4 AM the guy finally fell asleep. I was in the back seat by then and he'd put the gun under the seat. I reached for it and removed the shells. It was a regular six-shooter, a huge thing that weighed about three pounds it seemed to me. I put the gun back in place, glad we were no longer in immediate danger of getting killed. At the same time that danger existed, of course, there was also a certain thrill in the whole thing. It was just so insane and dangerous that it was hard to resist enjoying it at least a little.
We were somewhere on the edge of the salt flats when the guy woke and ordered the other hippie to stop the car. "No worry about cops here; there's no fucking speed limit." And then he dozed off. So did we.
We woke a couple of hours later and the guy said he'd sobered up enough to take the wheel. And take the wheel he did: he had that car's speed guage a half-an-inch past the 140 mph mark. It seemed like the car was off the ground for a few seconds, touched down and then lifted off again. I'm not saying that happened, but that's what it felt like. What a rush. The only hitch was that there were two police cars blocking the road at the end of the desert crossing. "Sons of bitches. I'm way to close to home for this shit," he snarled, then slowed to about 80 as he approached, looking as if he was going to actually stop. And then, about 200 meters before the cop car barricade he simply swerved onto the desert floor--even with the highway, drove around them and gunned it up again. I looked back at the cops and they weren't even considering going after us. I guess we were out of their jurisdiction.
We hit Los Angeles 23 hours after leaving from maybe 100 miles west of Chicago. 1,900 miles or so in 23 hours, including a three hour nap. It was evening when we arrived, same time of day it had been when I first got picked up. The house he stopped at was fairly simple; in the front yard a heavy set woman was digging in the flowers in front of the place.
The guy got out and shouted "Mama! I'm home and I have guests for dinner! Get your ass in there and make us some food!"
The woman didn't even bother to turn. "If that's my husband, he'd better apologize this minute or I'm going to kick his ass. Who do you think you are ordering me to do anything?"
The giant slumped. He knew who the meanest, toughest son of a bitch in this place was, and it wasn't him. "I'm sorry baby. I'm just excited to be home."
"Well then why didn't you say that you stupid man?"
Then she got up and he walked over and they hugged like they were teenaged lovers.
She fed us, showed us a huge garage full of chinchilas and other small animals they raised for the fur industry, and then asked where we wanted to be taken. I told him just get me to the Pacific. So he did. And I stripped to my undies and jumped into the cool water before dressing and crashing for the night on the beach. The other hippie was being dropped off last so I've no idea where he went.
I've never seen or heard of either the hippie or the giant again. But for one day, we shared a hell of a ride.

Cooking up a Storm

Well, it's dinner time and I'm just ready to start a nice spaghetti with meat sauce. Or rather, I'm ready to finish the sauce: good garlic and onions, fresh tomatoes, chopped meat cooked separately and strained of most fat, fresh basil, oregano and parsley, good parmesan cooked into the sauce, lots of coarse ground black pepper, a little red wine to keep it loose enough, and then topped with fresh shaved parmesan. Coming with a good mixed greens salad and fresh garlic bread.
I've been home about two weeks and when I got here the kids said they missed my cooking. And with my ankle preventing me from doing much--it's getting better, thanks--my normal cooking had to be ratcheted up a notch. Not like we do fancy stuff here as this is not a NYC restaurant and those dishes often take a basic brown sauce just to start--and that takes 100 pounds of beef bones and 15-20 hours all told--but we still try to keep it interesting.
For breakfast the kids have eaten fried eggs, scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs with cheese, omlettes stuffed with all sorts of good things, eggs in a nest, French toast, a vegetable souffle. That's come with rice, baked potatoes mashed and fried in a bit of bacon grease, home fries, plantains, tacacho (plantains mashed with bacon grease and bacon bits) and bacon, sliced steak, fried ham wrapped around cheese and so forth.
For dinner we've had steaks, roasted chicken with rosemary or done Peruvian style, chicken thighs with vegetarian tomato sauce on fusilli, shrimp sauteed in olive oil and garlic with red peppers, scallions and fresh parsley; mussels posillipo and mussels in white wine; homemade Chinese stir-fry with chicken, chicken burritos with homemade beans, sour cream and rice; bar-be-que with hot links, sweet sausage and chicken; vegetarian lasagna with eggplant, spinach, garlic and three cheeses; lemon chicken (breasts dredged in flour, egg and breadcrumbs with lots of parmesan, then sauteed and covered with the juice of several great limes), fat hot roast beef sandwiches on good Italian bread with roast red peppers and pepperjack cheese, and a few things I'm forgetting.
Starches have included regular rice, basmati rice, yellow rice, plantains, boiled potatoes with saurkraut, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes with gravy, potato and egg salad, potatoes au gratin,potato latkas with sour cream, spaghetti squash with red pepper, garlic and sweet onions, homemade macaroni and cheese.
Veggies have included steamed broccoli--almost nightly--broccoli, cauliflower and baby carrot melange with a sprinkling of fresh parsley or cilantro; sauteed spinach with garlic and balsamic vinegar, grilled asparagus, sauteed tomatoes sliced thickly and covered in parmesan cheese, homemade coleslaw, roasted red peppers, stuffed mushrooms, and so forth.
Man, I'm getting hungry. This is good food. About 1/4 of it organic.
And don't forget the breakfast juice: In a blender put a banana, half-a-pint of fresh strawberries, 2% fat milk, good water, orange juice and a bit of sugar in a blender. Add cantaulope as you wish. That will wake you up for sure.
Just passing it on. Keep the food good, simple, clean and your kids and you will stay healthy.
If they were just a little older I could do the rack of lamb en croute parsillade with sauce madiera on a wooden platter surrounded by flaming whiskey mashed potatoes but they're not, so that will have to wait.
Whatever you're eating tonight, I hope it's wonderful, makes you healthy and keeps you happy.

Teeth

When I was a kid I had wonderful teeth. A lot of cavities but they were still beautiful and gave me a great smile. Then, at about 27, I went to Europe with Clare and on the night of our return, drunk, I was in our loftbed, sleeping. I must have sat up to go to the john at some point, but forgetting I was in our loftbed rather than a bed in Europe--Portugal was our last stop--I stepped off the bed and fell to the floor. My head would have been about 9 feet from the bare hardwood as the platform was at 6'. I don't remember the fall but I do remember Clare handing me several teeth in the taxi that took us to Mt. Saini Hospital's emergency room. Turned out I'd fractured my jaw, my cheekbones, broken my nose, but the worst of it was that I'd lost allo the bone along the front upper portion of my mouth: The bone the teeth sit in. The best part was that for some odd reason there was an orthodontist at Mt. Saini when I arrived and she spent several hours reimplanting my teeth and wiring my mouth shut. To keep things in place she made a sort of cement football-player's mouthpiece that I couldn't remove for 6 weeks.
During those 6 weeks Clare was an angel, putting all my food into a blender as I couldn't chew. And after the six weeks were up, all but one of the five teeth that had been knocked out had grown new and deeper roots. So I went and had a Maryland Bridge made for that one (a new and very expensive proceedure at the time, and one that was so exotic that several years later, when I was not living with anyone or dating anyone, a dental hygienist treated me to wonderful intimacy simply on the strength of having that Maryland Bridge).
Unfortunately, during those six weeks of not being able to brush teeth, several otherwise healthy teeth rotted and I wound up needing half-a-dozen crowns. Fortunately, I was making great money as a chef at the time and so was able to pay the $5,000+ bill for it all.
But my teeth were no longer something I thought were good looking and my smile was no longer beautiful. Because of the lack of bone, I had sort of dinasaur teeth that went way up higher into the missing bone area than they had earlier. And then two of them, on the right and left sides of the bridged front tooth, began to discolor. In short, over 10 years time I was smiling while showing very little teeth.
And during the past five years or so I've become so embarrassed about my teeth that I stopped doing television interviews and even disliked having my picture taken.
Worse, a couple of years ago I was sitting in Iquitos, having a piece of wild boar when I felt a splintering sound as I took a bite and instantly knew something was wrong when I began to spit out pieces of teeth. The chef had forgotten to remove the shotgun pellets and in one bite I shattered four crowns, three on the bottom right, and one, very visible one on the upper left.
I truly felt like a freak. No photos with mouth even a little open.
And since I'm not a wealthy man, there was no way to fix it.
Until last month. Last month I was so disgusted with myself that I went to the best orthodontist in Iquitos, Peru and began a $3,000 US dollar repair job. I had the dark teeth bonded a lovely shade of off-white to match the one fake tooth in my mouth, then began work on the crowns. First crown was the upper left. And there was all sorts of other work to do as well: In that first week I spent 20 hours in the chair. In the second week I spent another 10 before saying we'll finish the rest of the crowns when I return to Iquitos in June.
I cannot tell you how different I feel. I can smile again. I've got middle aged man's teeth, and my dimples won't ever be what they were when I was 17, but I can smile again. I can let people take photos. I can laugh out loud, though I'm out of practice. I can beam for Madeleina and not have her ask me if I'm ever going to get my teeth fixed. It's just fantastic. I'm human again!
And because I look in the mirror more often I noticed how freaking fat I'd gotten and have started losing weight. Not enough, but at least the 34 pants are fitting (not perfectly but it beats the hell out of 36s) well enough to close the button. And the extra large shirts are starting to be baggy enough that I've taken to wearing the larges instead.
Why am I sharing this? Not sure. Just wanted to celebrate something cool with you all. And maybe wanted to let a few of you know that if you can't afford the $15,000 for teeth work here in the states, there are some wonderful orthodontists down in Peru where the work will run you $3000. With airfare and hotels and dining at good restaurants you can get it all done for 1/3 the cost of what it would take here. So don't let it stop you. I spent too many years hating my teeth and shunning smiling pointlessly. And I'm glad that those days are gone.

Blue Sunday Night

It's Sunday night. Chepa and the kids, including Madeleina, just left. Italo and Sarah are here, as is Marco, but they're involved with school and video games in their rooms so I'm alone. Which makes this something of a Blue Sunday.
I'd go to bed but the dogs aren't ready to sleep;
I'd lay with the chickens, but they don't need me....
So I'm thinking Tom Waits. What a hero he's been to me. My age, so not the right age for hero worship, but boy, not only can that man sing, he can write up a storm.
Tonight I'm thinking about his duet with Bette Midler: Perfect Strangers.
Midler: "It always takes one, to know one, stranger,
Who asked you to annoy me with your sad, sad repartie...
Waits: "You must be reading my mail, you're bitter since he left you
That's why you're sitting in this bar....
Midler and Waits: "But only suckers fall in love...
with perfect strangers...."

Or the song made famous by Bruce Springsteen:
"Got no time for the corner boys,
Out in the street making all that noise,
Don't want no whores on 8th Avenue,
Tonight I just want to be with you....
Tonight I want to take that ride,
Across the river to the other side,
Take my baby to the carnival,
And I'll put her on all the rides...
Sha-na-na-na, na na na,
Sha-na-na-na, na na na,
Sha na na, na na na, na-na
Sha na na I'm in Love with a Jersey Girl,
Sha na na na na, na na...

Or: "I woke up, in a Mexican whore house,
Across the street from a catholic church,
Well I wiped off my bandana
And tucked in my over-sized shirt...
The refrain of which goes something like:
You got to tell me, Mr. Seigel,
Why the devil is so strong,
Why the angels go to sleep
While the devil leaves his porch light on...."

Or, perhaps the most famous, best line ever written for a song:
"The piano has been drinking,
Not me....."
So I've been singing these and three dozen other Wait's bits and my kids are thinking dad's gone nuts again...and while I haven't they know the blues are on me when I start singing Waits' material:
"She took all my money
And she didn't leave me any....
Life was never this goooooouuuuddddddd
Life was never this bad..."
So here I am, making a racket and thank god the neighbors are not in earshot.
And I'm not even sure why I'm blue. Maybe I just wanted to salute Tom Waits. But I doubt it. My guests in the Amazon quickly learn that when I'm melancholy I tend to revert to song. And I sing loug and clear, even if slightly off-tune. And that's what I'm doing tonight. Singing Waits', loud and clear, and making up the lyrics when I forget the real ones.
And I hope you're all either enjoying this melancholy evening or helping someone through it. It might be the moon, it might be a long February winter night, but whatever it is, sing long and loud and deep and clean those cobwebs out. Because, if we're lucky enough to wake tomorrow morning, it will be time for a new set of songs, a set of work songs, a set of Thank's that I'm alive! songs....
So enjoy Waits while you can. He's brilliant.
And tomorrow will have more light than you can deal with.
Betcha

Boots is Okay, Everything Else is Up in the Air

So Boots survived surgery. I was warned by his doctor, and then by a friend, that just taking his balls off would not mean he won't bite people. Darn, I though that would do it. So I'm crossing my fingers. Otherwise, he's a dead dog and I don't want that for him. He's a great guard dog and pal but I cannot have him chasing people into traffic anymore.
That said, everything else is up in the air. My sister R is mad at me, my son Marco was mad at me for demanding help for Chepa last night when she was cooking for her sisters here at the house and the babies were threatening to pour hot oil on their heads--Marco asked: Is this how you show love to me???? Is this how you love the babies? By demanding I take care of them?"
My answer was a simple, "yes."
Italo was just as angry: "I don't approve of mom of having these two babies, so I'm not going to take care of them."
Man, I was livid. "They are your sisters and they are going to get hurt here and I can't deal with it and cook at the same time. So Get your fucking asses out here and take these babies to your rooms and keep them out of the kitchen."
Which didn't go over very well.
Oh, well.
It was my sister Peg's birthday yesterday and so Happy Birthday, Peg.
And today I was interviewed by someone on video for three hours. Next year it will show up on PBS or Cable. Good for me. I have hesitated or denied this for years because of what my teeth look like. Now that my teeth have been worked on, I was willing and I did great. Welcome to the world, Mr. Gorman.
Thanks for listening to this short, personal rant.
P

Boots the Wonderdog

Well, today's the day. Today's the day that Boots, the blind wonderdog is going in to get fixed. And he knows it and hasn't been seen since 4 AM when he chased an early rising bicyclist down the street, terrifying him.
Boots was rescued from the local pound about two or three years ago. He's got a thick tan coat and white legs from the knee down, hence his name. He's a big, bold, handsome dog, all muscle and playfulness. About 90 pounds of muscle and playfulness. And he's a great great guard dog, something you need in rural Texas, what with lawn mowers and chainsaws in the garage, and recently repaired bicycles on the front porch. Thieves don't generally come and steal a television here, like they did in New York. Here they wait till there are no cars in the driveway and then bring in a truck and take the whole darned house. (Probably why so many people have at least one or two extra cars, often non-functional, in their drives.) So Boots is essential and fantastic.
He wasn't always. We got him at the same time we got another pup, Blue. Blue was a sort of weird midget doberman who got sick early and then got mange, then an awful flea infestation, then got his head bitten by a junkyard dog who used to hand around looking for scraps in our trash. The head bite left Blue unable to walk properly: his head bobbed up and down constantly, like a bobble-headed dog and when he'd put his right forepaw out to take a step it would stand straight out at a right angle to the ground for a few seconds, then it would bob up and down in time with his head for another few seconds and then he'd finally get it onto the ground and take that step. Then it would all be repeated again a couple of seconds later. He looked like some sort of strange military dog, always tipping his cap and saluting as he walked.
Blue and Boots were pals, with Boots always cleaning him, till he too began to get whatever horrid thing Blue had. And then one day Boots decided to see what the street in front of the house looked like from a position in the middle of it and got walloped by a passing car traveling 60 or so mph. I found him on the side of the road, his hips broken badly. So I carried him to the porch, put a blanket out for him and imagined he'd just die. I had no money for a vet for that sort of thing, and wasn't willing to put him down--I've never put an animal down--so I was just sort of waiting for him to die. So was Blue, who curled up next to him, bobbing his head and pointing his right foreleg at the space in front of him.
But Boots didn't die. And in a couple of days, when I realized I had to do something, I looked at him, prayed, then reset his hips. And I got lucky and they went back into place. One was still crushed pretty badly but I figured time would heal that. Months passed and Boots got a little better by the week while Blue got worse. And then just about the time Blue crawled under the house to die, Boots stood and instead of dragging his hind quarters, actually walked.
That was a wonderful sight. He even walked to the back of the yard behind the chicken coop where the pig now lives to watch us bury his pal Blue.
And then, several months later, he was all better one day. Just started running around like a 6-month old pup and hasn't stopped. And he also became this wonderful guard dog--though he's fairly blind from some infection he and Blue shared, and the Vet doesn't know what to do about it. I mean he went from this broken-hipped 50 pound dog to this 90-pound wonderdog overnight. And in the process decided to defend this place of ours with a gigantic heart and a ferocious attitude. Not toward us: To us he's like this big teddy bear who loves to have his nose kissed. But not to others.
We first found out about his guard dog tendencies when Italo got a frantic call one night. We were in my truck running an errand and Italo's friend Martin called to say that Boots was trying to attack him. Now Martin had been to the house 100 times and Boots knew him but still, Boots had become the Wonderdog overnight and we were not home and Martin was not getting into our house and that was that.
Then about a week later, maybe a year ago, Boots chased his first bicycle with a speed I couldn't have guessed he had in him even if he hadn't suffered broken hips. We tried to calm him down a little and explained who to go after and whom to leave alone but it didn't really sink in. And then last Summer he bit a teenager--I've written about that--and did a week in doggie jail/quarantine while awaiting the results of rabies tests. The teen deserved it for trespassing near midnight with two friends onto our property, but them's the rules: The dog is guilty here in Texas even if you were trespassing at midnight.
But lately it's gotten out of hand. In November he knocked a man off his bicycle and had him pinned to the ground under his bike until I came out (in about three seconds) and called him off. Then he bit the plumber who came to fix the pipes at about the same time. Then he nailed a DHL lady and the FedEx man and the neighbor and who knows how many others. Not big bites, just reminders that the next step you take will be very painful. Heck, he doesn't break skin in most cases, just tears jeans or leaves scratches.
But then while I was in Peru I had to pray to whatever God I believe in to make sure Boots didn't run someone into oncoming traffic while I was gone. And I swore I'd have him fixed as soon as I came home if he didn't.
And I came home to find Boots had behaved wonderfully while I was gone. And so I didn't immediately get him fixed: Somehow that fell down the list a few notches. Until yesterday when he bit the FedEx man for the second time. I wasn't home but I'm told he did and so that's that. Me and Italo are going to go round him up if we can and take him over to get him fixed. Not that he's broken, but he has to get that testosterone level cut back.
I told Madeleina on the way to school this morning and she hates me. "Now he's going to be a wimpy bum, not a guard dog, dad! How would you like it if someone cut your things off?"
"Don't even talk about that, baby. Men don't like to think about that."
"Well, I'm talking about it because that's what you're doing to our beautiful dog!"
That went on till she stepped out of the car. Whew!
But that's what we're doing. I hope he'll still be Boots the Wonderdog when it's done, but it's got to be done.
Assuming we can find him.

The Way Things Are Sometimes

So yesterday was my birthday and I turned 58. It wasn't so bad because until last week when I did the math I thought I was already 58. So this is a re-do year, though how I made that mistake is something of a mystery. Same thing happened when I was turning 30. I had spent the day in Central Park, alone, just thinking, and it occurred to me in going over things that I simply couldn't recall age 29. For some reason it seemed to be a blank. Not that I couldn't recall what I'd done that year, I just couldn't recall ever saying I was 29, and yet there I was, turning 30 the next day. And I finally went home and spoke with Clare, with whom I was living and let her know how darned frustrating it all was. She listened attentively, and when I finished, calmly noted:
"You're out of your mind, you know? You're turning 29 tomorrow, not 30."
So I did the math and sure enough, I was turning 29, not 30. And so this year I kept thinking I was turning 59 and thinking that I was missing something...and of course, I was.
Now being my birthday, that meant I was to do shopping, cleaning, cooking. Not counting the regular stuff. So I put in a wash, put my trip stuff away and got to collecting towels, as there were none to use if I took a shower.
How my boys and Sarah manage to stuff 19 used and damp towels into bookcases, under mattresses and so forth I will never quite understand, but knowing where to look I found them all in less than two hours. Moldy, stinky and wet and into the washer they went.
Italo, however, had snuck in a wash after my initial wash, and so when the towels were ready for the dryer I realized I had a huge load of his clothes--he'd snuck off somewhere to avoid the job, I'm sure--to fold. Which I did. Now aside from the usual brazzieres and thongs (Sarah's) and Italo's sports clothes and sox, what was unusual was how many of his underwear I kept coming on. And on. And on. Thirty-seven underpants of his in that one load. 37? What the hell is he doing with 37-underwear? And why did they all need washing at once? Heck, I don't own 37 pieces of clothing, much less 37 underwear. And all regular. Nothing to suggest a fetish or anything. Just 3 dozen underpants. I'm still gonna have to ask him about that.
Birthday dinner was great: Couple of nephews with their girls came over, couple of other friends of Italo and Marco's new girl as well as Chep and the babies. I made Peruvian chicken, hot links, sweet sausage, steak, hot potato and egg salad, asparagus, broccoli and beans. Everything was going great until it was cake time.
It was a huge cake covered in thick brightly-colored sugary junk and I blew out the candles and went to get a knife to cut it when Bam! Something hit me squarely on the back of the head. I turned to get another something right in my face. It was cake. And then all hell broke loose: Cake began flying everywhere. I mean 10 pounds of creamy junk started crossing the room in three ounce blobs. The fight was on. Sierra got nailed on her chin; Alexa took a glob to her stomach and began eating it contentedly. But Renzo and Marco and Chepa and Italo were down and dirty, lambasting each other mercilessly at very close range. Someone reached for the potato/egg salad and caught me on the neck; someone else got me with a piece of chicken. Beans made the kitchen floor slippery as ice....the fight went on until nobody could find any more cooked food and the canned stuff seemed too dangerous...
When it was all done but the laughter, I naturally picked up what I could salvage and stashed it in the stove, then served it to Marco and Italo for breakfast...the kitchen floor isn't such a dirty place, after all.
But times like that, times when that kind of spontaneous insanity breaks out makes me think it's a great great family to be part of. Nutty, not quite typical, totally broken but so freaking joyeous it's fantastic.
Heck of a birthday party.

Ta-Da!

Hello, all you guys. I'm back. Been gone better than six weeks and I missed you more than you missed me. But I have a very hard time splitting myself in two and when I'm with guests in the Amazon I find it impossibly difficult to just run to the computer and write a blog piece. Heck, I can't even run to the computer or phone to call my Madeleina. So forgive me. I am where I am generally 100 percent and to become the other part of me--an equally important and vital part but a very different part--is just too darned hard.
Which doesn't mean I didn't think about you. I don't even know who you are but I know I sent thoughts out many times telling you all what we were doing, how the trips were going and all that jazz. I just couldn't face going into the internet cafes and being squeezed into a seat next to a stranger reading 50 emails a day from parents whose children are in prison unjustifiably and who want help when I know I can rarely help them from Texas but certainly not from Iquitos, Peru, the heart of the Amazon. And that's how many people need help daily. Just the way it is.
Nuff of feeling sorry for myself. The trips were fantastic. Fantastic. Everything that you want to have happen: Boas and electric eels, magic medicine, monkeys, frogs bearing wonderful medicine, magic mushrooms, surprises galore, swimming with dolphins and all the rest happened as if on cue. Things that might take people 10 visits to see altogether my two groups saw in 12 days each. WOW!!! I mean, I spent hours thanking the spirits, the guardians and finally the White Light or God or whatever you want to name the big power for the gifts we were given. Could not have gone better, I don't believe.
Except for the slightly broken and very dislocated ankle. That hurt and still hurts and happened on day 11 of the first trip, which means I had to walk a couple of miles daily on an ankle/foot that had 13 bones dislocated--three hueseros, bone doctors, reset them viciously, ignoring my screaming--and one small bone crushed and one other broken. Still hurts. Man that hurt. But you know what? Because of the pain, I decided to stay sober and didn't even take any pain killers more than ibuprofin--and that sobriety helped make the trips great. I didn't indulge like I have so often, making a legend and fool of myself at the same time. And that allowed more trust between me and the guests and that worked in both of our favors. Hooray! Lesson appreciated and hopefully learned. Except that the thing still freaking hurts unbearably to walk on and the docs say it's too late to do anything but wait till it fixes itself. Oh well, there's always something in the Amazon. I pray that whatever it is comes to me and not the guests and it generally does, whether poisonous snake bite, murderous spider bite, broken head, exploded intestine or slightly fractured ankle.....give it to me Powers that Be, not to the guests.
Gonna stop praying, I guess.
And then a 30 hour flight home and instead of Italo, Chepa, the wife/ex-wife, picked me up with my Madeleina and her Sierra and Alexa and what a time we had. The little girls acted up a ton, then got to my house and I painted them in Indian paint, fresh achote, and Madeleina dressed up in leaf skirt and anklets and Sierra--who now calls me P Gorman! instead of Dad, at her birth father's insistance--was running around the house touching everything and screaming: "This is P gormans house! This is P gorman's desk! This is P Gorman's dog! This is P gorman's cigarettes...where's mine, P gorman? Where's my cigarette?"
And so on till despite being terribly stretched out and exhausted and sick and ankle hurt I was laughing till my eyes hurt. Oh, how I love kids! Amd little Alexa, just a year or so, was just spinning and spinning till she was drunk with it and Madeleina was trying to be a mother hen till she too broke down and spun till she got so drunk and dizzy she couldn't stand.
And of course the house was/is a mess: No toilet paper, paper towels, food, dog food, pig food, cat food, bird food, garbage bags, milk, soda, eggs....Italo! Marco! Sarah! How on earth did this happen???????
"I don know, dad....must be somebody's fault...not mine..."
That came from all three of the culprits...
So I limped to the car, drove to Walmart and bought $250 worth of basic staples and made them dinner and gave them hugs and let them know how much I missed them all.
And now it's the next day and I've a lot to say but have said enough, eh? So welcome back, everyone. Thanks for visiting. Life is freaking grand, eh? Couldn't be better.

Out The Door

Dear All: I'm leaving for the airport in about five minutes. I'm headed back to Peru where I've got two small groups lined up for trips into the deep green. I don't really know how to access this blog--in terms of writing on it--while I'm there, but if I can figure it out I'll put something down now and then when I'm not in the woods. Otherwise, I'll see you in some weeks and hope that your New Year starts off fantastically. And then gets better. Make a wish, have a dream, then work at making it happen.
For the groups, I hope I give them the chance to do the deep work the medicine will offer them. I hope to put them in the right place to let it happen. I would like for them all to have a wonderful experience, or a million wonderful experiences.
And now I'm gone.
See you later.
P

Merry Christmas to All...

I hope you all have had a wonderful Christmas morning! I hope Santa came and brought you each something special, and that your friends and family made you laugh and that there's something delicious in the oven getting ready to serve. I also hope that each and every one of you have the best New Year you've ever had. And I hope that everyone with anger in their hearts learns to let in a little love; that every person enmeshed in a war--any kind of war--comes out unscathed and that somehow, some miracle happens that allows people to put down weapons and pick up plowshares. With a little work we could even irrigate the Sahara and turn it into the breadbasket of Africa and beyond. That work would require the strength of every person now carrying weapons, but we could do it and I would love to be a part of that. If we did then every starving child could have enough to eat, every desperate mom could find a smile instead of uncertainty for her young. If men could stop, just for a second, just for a nano second and see what there is in this world, that there is enough for everyone if no one needs to have enough for a thousand or a million to themselves, then we could fix it all and start to work together as one big tribe rather than ten thousand small ones each protecting something they'll never own anyway.
And I hope that you all sleep well tonight, with full bellies and your hearts full of joy.
Merry Christmas/Happy Chanukah/Happy Kwanza/Happy any good goddamned thing you want, just so it's happy. And then, a wonderful, joyful, surpriseful and fantastic New Year too.
Thanks for being part of this world, and thanks for letting me take up a little space as well.

Warming Up

Well, that high school sweet heart of mine came to visit this weekend. There were a rough couple of days prior to her arrival because she asked me point blank if I was actually divorced and I answere 'no.' I explained that I couldn't because Chepa would have gotten the kids--all of them when the boys were younger, but even now she would get Madeleina and then fly off to her boyfriend with them and I just wouldn't have my family anymore. I already have experience from New York when I filed the custody papers on Madeleina in court there--after Chepa flew off with her to be with a boyfriend, who is long gone--that the papers don't mean much. Nobody seems to want to go after a woman who refuses to honor custody. And when I refiled those papers here in Texas after our move, well, just after they took the money and then took more for the actual delivery of them I was told they wouldn't be delivered. I said: "What? I just filed them and paid for their delivery..."
"Well, we don't deliver papers on a mother here in Texas. That's just not something we do. Kids belong with their mothers and unless you can show proof of physical abuse, we'll never deliver nor enforce those papers. That's how it is here."
Anyway, that's why I never pulled the trigger on the divorce.
And I let everyone know I'm divorced. And I feel divorced. But I'm not actually divorced. And it's never come up before. No one has ever asked me. Here I write "my wife/ex-wife" and feel that's good enough.
But I should have been clear with that prom queen. I just wasn't and she got very upset at being led on. And though she understood/stands the circumstances, she was very angry and up until she actually got on the plane to come visit I thought she'd throw me over.
And when I met her at the airport she was not real real receptive. I mean she was cold.
And that didn't get a lot better when I brought her to my house and she was forced to meet my kids and then I offered her a glass of wine from a bottle called Sweet Bitch. That didn't really go over as the ice-breaker I thought it might be.
But then I think she saw that I really don't have a wife lurking in the closet. That I obviously don't have any females helping out around the house (though Italo's Sarah helps sometimes) which is clear by the house condition and unmatched plates and silverware and probably 100 other things.
But what really began to warm her up was meeting the kids. They are just so nice, so warm and slightly crazy that she just melted for them--and they for her--and so we had a great weekend. Went to restaurants, did the Human Maze in the Ft. Worth Stockyards, made dinner one night. Just perfect.
She even got to get even with me when she and Madeleina picked out two bottles of wine for me: Old Geezer and Fat Bastard. Okay, I probably deserved that.
And then sometime early on Sunday evening, Madeleina, out of the blue, says: "Hey dad, should I go get the garbage bag and the machetes?"
And I ask "For what?"
And without batting an eye, Madeleina answered: "You know, for chopping her up and getting rid of the body."
Well, you can imagine the slightly stunned silence that followed. I knew it was a joke but my high school sweetheart, probably still thinking I need to get even with her for breaking my heart 40-years ago, went white. Not for long. But long enough.
And I didn't know what to say to that. I mean, I'm sure I stammered out something like "Madeleina, what the heck are you talking about? You don't put those kinds of thoughts into people's heads." And I'm sure Madeleina laughed and then my sweetheart laughed, but every now and then for the next day or so, when we were driving on a country road, she'd say: "Is this the part where you chop me to pieces?"
What a thing to put out there, eh? Yikes! I'm going to have to teach Madeleina to edit herself a bit I suspect. She's already got some of
the teachers at her school reading this blog, and I'm nervous enough about that, and then she brags to everyone that I used to be the editor at High Times and I'm definitely slightly nervous about that because of where I live and the stories I've written about local corruption and such...and now it's plastic bags and machetes....My, oh, my...
So that's what happened here the last couple of days. Fantastic, disturbing, wonderful and frightening.
Hope your days are as packed with excitement. And hope you're ahead of me in the prep for Christmas.
And hope you all get the chance to visit with someone you loved but haven't seen in a long time. It's a bit nervewracking but then that disappears and it's all good.

Divine Nutcracker

Okay, I'm gonna write a Ft. Worth centric piece here, but you've all got two weeks before Christmas to make it your own with your kids, loved ones, parents, dogs, whatever. And it doesn't have to be the Nutcracker, it could be the same with the Rockefeller Center tree, or a local Christmas Parade or whatever. Just do something you don't think you'll like and see what happens...
Okay, that said, I’m going to start this off with telling you that I’m not the best dad in the world. I know that because I never enrolled my kids in ballet. But my youngest, Madeleina, now 11, has been in soccer and cheerleading and band (with a flute) and choir for a few years. And she’s beginning to get music, in that she can transpose flute music to the piano. Good for her.
But two weeks ago she asked me to take her--me being a single dad--to the Texas Ballet Theater’s The Nutcracker. Well, being from New York, I’m not inclined to ballet. But having been raised on Broadway--where my dad made his living and raised six of us--I couldn’t say no. But still, I’m telling you, I had reservations. I even tried to get one of my quasi-daughter-in-laws (lived here with my son for years) to take my daughter. No luck.
So I shaved, put on long pants and a clean shirt and headed to Bass Hall on Thursday, Dec. 11. And you know what? The show was fantastic! Absolutely uplifting to the point of forgetting my own troubles and name for a few hours. What a treat. Canned music--the Texas Ballet is in financial straits--apart (but boy, it was GOOD canned music), this is something that everybody in Fort Worth ought to go see. No fooling. Just a great time. My daughter must have punched me 30 times during the show, which means she had 30 epiphanies. That’s how she shows them. Whack! Whack! Whack!
Is this the best ballet company in the world? No. But are they capable of making you laugh, roar, jump up and cheer? Absolutely. And the next time they’re near out of funds, Fort Worth ought to do whatever it can to make certain they stay afloat. This was a simply wonderful show. And it’s playing for several more days. And though I’m rarely a shill, I have no issue with saying: Take your wife, husband, kids, girlfriend, boyfriend...get gussied up, feel like a real cosmopolitan and get your butts over to The Nutcracker. You’ll have a freaking blast, as we might say in New York. Just a freakin’ blast.

Freezing and Getting Warm

Well, it's sort of freezing in the Gorman house today. I mean the thermostat reads 60 and I've put the heat up to 80 and turned on the stove but the number's not climbing. Everything seems to be working but my fingers are moving slow on the keyboard. I'm still wearing shorts but I do have a jacket on. Need something to keep me warm.
And a little of that might come soon: My high school sweetheart is come to visit Texas in a couple of days. Ain't that grand? Just in time with this cold front. I'm nervous, of course, and thinking about getting liposuction in the next 15 minutes or minimally buying a black wardrobe. Then there are the hair extensions and the colorant for my beard...so much to do and I'll still never be 17 again. Ah, but she's already seen me like I am. And didn't think I was all that bad. Problem is, that was first impression. This time I'm thinking she might scrutinize and notice the flaws. So I'm thinking wine for her, lots of it, and then maybe she won't see so clearly.
Ah well, I am what I am. And I'm freezing. But I'm sort of getting warmish at the same time. Cool. It's all pretty cool I guess.

The Repeal of Alcohol Prohibition

Well, 75-years ago today, the 21st amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, ending alcohol prohibition in the United States. That prohibition had been in place for less than 15 years before even a lot of the folks who hated alcohol came to realize that the cost of prohibition--the rise of alcohol cartels, the criminalizing of a huge portion of the population, turf wars, overcrowded prisons, people dying of adulterated booze, the loss of tax revenue--was too high. And it also wasn’t working: from what my folks and grandfolks told me, anyone who wanted alcohol could get any time of day or night in any city in the US.
Sound familiar?
I just got an email from an old friend of mine, Todd McCormick. He’s a guy who had cancer nine times before he was 10-years-old, a guy who has five vertebra fused, making it difficult to move without pain. He is also an outspoken proponent for legal medical marijuana--which he uses to relieve pain rather than prescription opioids--and helped get California’s medical pot bill passed in 1996. He was also the first person busted after that ballot measure became law in a famous case where he was found to be growing pot in a very ugly mansion in Bel Air, California.
Well, Todd did five years federal for that, got out a couple of years ago and for some reason looked me up today. It was good to hear he’s okay--the cancer has not returned. That’s always good news. And he managed to do his 5-year bit without coming out bitter.
On December 5, 1933, reasonable people everywhere agreed--for different reasons--that the prohibition of alcohol was a disastrous social experiment. Pot prohibition is the same. And the prohibition of medical pot, and the incarceration of medical pot users like Todd McCormick, is well past that.
For 75-years people have been having a legal beer after work. Legal beer has produced a lot of grief but less than what was being produced during its prohibition.
Me? I’m going to celebrate with a Jim Beam later today, and toast those who realized that the greater harm was prohibition, not booze.

Sister Somayah Kambui Has Passed

Sister Somayah Kambui has passed. Just about Thanksgiving time. Most of you never heard of her, I'm sure. But just as everyone else has a story of value, so did she. She was an extraordinarily courageous woman and the person who brought awareness of marijuana's medical help for sickle-cell to the world.
I'm sure most of you know that I used to work at High Times magazine. The bulk of my work there dealt with the hard news of the drug war--medical marijuana, mandatory sentencing, forfeiture, dirty cops/government agents, that sort of thing. There were also some fun travel stories, fascinating Peyote stories and so forth, but my real job was to work the hard news with a great team. It was Steve Hager, the visionary editor over there who put me on those things and let me run with them.
Well, you work troubled corners you run into troubled people. I'd get collect calls day and night from prisoners begging for intervention in their cases. I'd get crank calls from an occasional law enforcement officer who'd been found dirty and somehow blamed it on us. And then I had a series of calls with someone I later learned was Sister Somayah Kambui.
She first got in touch with me in the middle of the night nearly 20 years ago. The phone rang, I answered, and someone was screaming at me. I hung up.
Two weeks later or so it happened again.
And again.
I kept trying to find out who the person was and what they wanted, but all I got were names hurled at me. I had no idea what I'd done or to whom I'd done it. But someone was sure angry with me.
It probably took six months before I could get her to slow down and take a breath and tell me what as wrong, and why she had to keep waking me at 3 AM and 4 AM just to curse me until I hung up.
She said she called when the pain from her sickle-cell anemia got unbearable. If she was going to suffer, others were too. And as I was white and sickle-cell only affects African Americans, and also because I wrote for High Times on medical-marijuana, she took my not writing about sickle-cell as a racist thing. Therefore I had to pay with her tirades.
I told her I knew nothing about sickle-cell--didn't even know what it was, and so surely didn't know marijuana could help.
Then she schooled me. She had me look up articles, call hospitals to see how it was treated, that sort of thing. I forget most of what I learned, but the gist of it is that sickle-cell is a condition in which normally round or oblong red blood cells take on the shape of a sickle, and hook on to each other. When enough hook on they can clog up around the places where limbs meet, causing unbearable pain. The standard treatment most hospitals give is morphine three times a week. Or at least it was back then. People like Sister Somayah would go to her local hospital, get a small cup of morphine and drink it, then be told to come back in two days for another. And people like Sister Somayah, a military veteran who had spent I think 9 years in the army, became government junkies. "I couldn't do anything on the morph," she told me. "And neither can a million other people. That's why you see so many middle aged and older black folk sitting on stoops looking like junkies. They are junkies. They're US government junkies."
And that wasn't good enough for her. So she took her campaign to my stoop and despite being thick about it, I was able to investigate and discovered that she was right about the morphine at city hospitals. Of course, it didn't have to be that way. What was needed, aside from a cure, was a simple vasodilator. Like marijuana. Something that would simply open up the blood vessels and allow the hooked together cells to move on down the line. And so we began to print stories on that issue. And we discovered there were a lot of African Americans who'd already discovered that marijuana eased the symptoms and allowed them to hold jobs, and that that was much better than being a government junkie hooked on morphine.
And I hope some docs got it and that one day the Feds will get it too. If they do it's because of the work of Sister Somayah.
And that's the part of her story that I knew. I'm sure there was more, but it wasn't my business.
I'm guessing she's arguing with St. Pete right about now. And I'm going to bet she gets in as well. Good for you Sister. Good for you Sister Somayah Kambui.

Ah, Madeleina

Sunday morning and almost time for football. Madeleina was learning about the Giant-Redskin rivalry, and the Jets-Patriots rivalry and she got it to the point where she said "It's like the Yankees and Boston; you want to beat everybody but it's a little more delicious when you beat Boston.
"But what about the Giants and the Jets? Oh, yeah, you said they only play each other about once every 3-years or something."
"Yeah," I responded. "But that's why this year could be special. Everybody from New York is hoping that they can both make it to the Superbowl and then have a subway Superbowl."
"That could happen?" she squealed. "But that would be terrible...who would you root for? We love them both..."
"That's why it would be so terribly delicious..."
"I mean, it would be like you're screaming: 'Kill him! Take him down!' and then at the same time you're saying: 'Don't hurt him. We love him...' Oh god, dad...that's so fantastic! It's like you: We love you but we want to strangle you. We need you but we need to kill you too," she said, putting her hands around my neck and shaking my head vigorously.
"Because you're dad. Sorry, but that's the way it is."
"I understand, baby..." I managed to croak when she allowed me a little air.
"Whooeeee! Go Giants! Go Jets! Superbowl torture coming right up!"

Glorious Day, Animal Update, Time to Work

Well, good afternoon, everyone. This is me reporting from bucolic Joshua--pronounced locally as Joshuaa, with that hard "a" at the end--on a 50 degree sunny day after a week of thick grey glum skies. Bad glum. But not today. Today is so spectacular I found myself outside finishing the raking I started a week ago. And while I was doing that a delivery truck came carrying a fantastic piece of art that someone made for me that related to something I'd written about my late teacher Julio. Which was great, until Boots, the blind wonderdog, bit him. Not hard, just hard playing. But darn, that's the third bite this week--he got the DHL lady and Marco as well. Last week he got Madeleina and Bo while he was visiting. So I guess it's either time to get him neutered of buy him a pair of thick glasses.
Then there's the pig, who very cleverly has dug an 8-inch trough around the outside of the pen where the fence is buried, unburying the fence. And if she gets out I don't think we'll catch her that easily. Bribe her back in, maybe, but not catch her. When Marco initially caught her on the road she weighed maybe 20 lbs. Ten weeks later we're thinking she weighs 80 or better.
Then there's the new cat, a short-haired gray beauty brought in as my replacement at rat-catcher. Mostly because I'm not good at catching rats. Gonna be a great little rat catcher soon. Better yet, general rodent deterrent, the equivalent to my little nuclear weapon: You trespass here, boys, this little beauty will take you the f... out.
It's such a beautiful day that Italo's girl Sarah decided to spend a couple of hours on the pig's pen: Fresh water, more hay, a new feed bowl, the works. And while she did that Marco came home from his grocery store with maybe 50 pounds of vegetables they were tossing that will supplement the pig's food this week. I was going through it casually and had copped maybe six kiwis, a dozen good limes, some grapes and an excellent watermelon half when he busted me. "No dad. No. Don't even think about it. It's garbage, okay? Garbage. You're no feeding us that."
"Been a while since you've been hungry, eh? I must be babying you all..."
"Whatever, but you're still holding something inside your shirt...Give it up, old man..."
I reluctantly pulled out the bag of slightly soft kiwis.
"Oh, yeah! Busted my own dad, the trash diver! How could you do it?"
Easy, I thought, remembering times when going through the garbage behind restaurants on the road was the only way I was going to get something to eat. Or remembering eating handfuls of live termites with Pablo in the jungle. Or cooking a vulture with my brother-in-law Steve when we got lost out there in the deep green for four days with no food. I didn't bother to school my son on it. In his world there's always fish and rice no matter what. I hope, besides feeding him well all these years, he's ready for the lean times that always seem to come. Heck, I thought, again keeping it to myself, it was only 4-years ago that I was working the day labor center trying to get enough for smokes and a chicken to cook for us all. I think the lean times are okay, really. After they're done.
But on this beautiful day, none of that was enough for me. Exuberantly I went into the garage, the recent target of the rat invasion, where I had 15 or so boxes of books and magazines and old 33's. Marco first discovered the infestation about two weeks ago and we worked on it some, but today was the day to throw myself into the corners, scrub that shit down and get them gone. Fortunately, while Boots appears as afraid of rats as me, or at least equally creeped out by their very sudden and quick movements, Italo joined me. Now that was a messy job. And the sons of bitches had bitten into the sleeve of The Doors' Soft Parade. That really got me going. Heck, there were two boxes of tax returns going back maybe 15 years. Did they go after them? Not a chance. Not a single dropping in those boxes. But the extra silk scarves I brought back from India a while ago? Shredded. We cleaned, transferred it all to plastic boxes that ought to keep the rats out for a little while anyway, got rid of 5 old computer monitors and maybe 10 keyboards, tossed the pile of moving boxes we arrive in Texas with--we were merciless. Which means, of course, that the disgruntled rats will simply move into the cushions of the three couches we have out there for parties...Oh well...Pretty good day so far, I think.

Drug War Story

A featured news story in today's (Nov. 26,2008) New York Daily News has NY Giant kicker Lawrence Tynes asking George Bush to pardon his brother. His brother, locked up since 2004 in a Federal Pen in Arkansas, is doing 27-years as kingpin of a marijuana moving operation that was found to have moved 3,600 pounds of pot from Texas to Florida over an unspecified period of time.
He'd normally have gotten a max of 10-years, but had a prior drug felony. Then he refused to cooperate (snitch) and allegedly was involved in witness intimidation.
So he wound up with the 27-years.
And the comments from the readers of the Daily News on line--always a boisterous crowd--were chilling. "The drug dealer deserved more time," shouted one; "Do the crime, do the time," shouted another and others were equally cold.
And maybe the idea that he had a prior and the witness intimidation actually was what got the people riled up.
But looking at it from the outside--and I did not study this case, but hundreds of cases like this, here's how it goes.
Tynes and friends move a little Mexican brickweed and make a few bucks. It was being moved from Texas, which means Mexican brick. That sells for $200 a pound, tops, on the Mexican side of the border, $300 a pound on the US side. In Florida it would bring maybe $500 a pound wholesale. So 3,600 pounds represents a gross earnings for the 5 people in the conspiracy of Three quarters of a million to a million bucks, absolutely tops. Before expenses, which would have been fairly substantial over time. So maybe the five earned $175 g's over several years--$30,000 to $40,000 a year. Nice, but pocket change, not the stuff of drug kingpins.
They get busted and all are asked to talk. Tynes won't give up his 4 pals and he won't give up his Mexico connect. Absolutely stand up for his pals; absolutely life saving where the Mex connect is concerned, as the game these days has been taken over down there by people raging wars. And they do find families and so forth. So giving them up would have been suicide/murder: Suicide for himself and murder of his family.
The 4 guys he also stood up for, however, all turned on him and walked away scott free. The intimidation would have come from 1) anger that the people he protected ratted on him; or 2) the Mex connection. Tynes might very well have had nothing to do with it.
So this mid-level pot dealer running a little dope a couple/few times a year winds up this drug kingpin doing a mandatory 27-years.
Personally, I say drugs should be legal and if you go to hell in a handbasket for abusing them, so what? But even if I thought differently, I'd smell a small-time assistant DA out to make his/her mark with a case like this. Kingpin my ass.
That's what I'm thinking, anyway.

Twas the Day Before Thanksgiving

Going to take a moment here to say Thanks, Universe! I appreciate it all.
Right now, behind me on the couch, Marco, his girl Brook and Madeleina are sll sitting under my blanket watching Sponge Bob. They know I'm doing phone interviews this morning so have it on low. But just having them close is fantastic. And Italo's about to get up--he'll smell the bacon on the stove any second, and though he doesn't eat bacon ("That's just like drinking a cup of grease, dad") he'll know that smell means I've also made juice. And juice he likes: Fresh strawberries, banana, oranges, a little water a little milk, some sugar. Voila! Wonderful smoothie to start the day. His girl Sarah just left for work not long ago. I do miss Sierra and Alexa, still off with Chepa to the hinterlands and boyfriend, but they're probably where they best belong, so I'll say thanks for that as well.
And today we're going after cats. We've been to the pound twice this week already and today's the day to pull the trigger. I'm thinking two; Madeleina is thinking two and another dog; Marco wants six. Italo hasn't weighed in yet. Whatever we do, it's time to take a stand against the rats and that will do the trick. They've not yet breached the house, but next week, when everyone is gone and I'm alone for hours at a time here, I'll be thinking they have and investigating every little sound this old place makes.So we're preempting it. And I'm thanking the universe that the little rodents haven't come in yet too.
And I'm thanking the Universe that I've got work and two trips coming up in January, and that the bills are somehow getting paid and that everybody's healthy and that my sisters and bro are doing pretty good--at our age that means we survive surgeries--and that I'm still digging on that first girlfriend of mine and think she's thinking about me as well.
And I'm hoping that all of you are feeling as warm today. I hope you're just thinking that today is a wonderful day to be alive.
And if anybody knows where I live and is passing by tomorrow, stop by for some of the feast. You're welcome here.
Thanks, Universe!

The Delete Button

Good morning everyone: It's about 4 AM here in Joshua and I got up thinking about a piece I put up on the blog last night. It was about being busted by my son Marco for peeing in a cup because the plumber was working and there was no water. I just thought maybe it sucked. So I looked at it and sure enough, it wasn't funny and it wasn't insightful and so forth, so I took it off.
And then, interestingly, I opened my email and there was a letter from a friend who'd read the piece and questioned why I would need to put that out there in public. The answer, of course, is that when I wrote it I thought it was something many of us have done at one time or another and so I thought it would strike a chord, and more than that, I thought it was written very cleverly and would make you laugh.
Well, that's the problem with blogs. At least this blog. I have no editor. I just have to go to sleep and see how I feel about a piece in the morning. Thank god for the delete button.
In the past couple of months I've probably taken off half-a-dozen pieces--or been smart enough not to post them when written. There have been a couple written in anger that would have exposed that side of me to you--which is fine and honest--but would also have left you all splooched with my anger--which you don't deserve--even though it wasn't directed at you all. There was one long piece about my having helped build a NYC strip joint when I was about 23--good story told so badly it came off like pointless idiotic showing off. Delete.
And a couple of others that I can't remember exactly but do remember waking up in cold sweats thinking: Oh my goodness! Did I actually write that????? as I raced to the computer to delete them.
Point of this piece, I guess, is to let you know that if you've read something one day and it's gone the next, you're not crazy. They just got dumped.
Writers have editors for a reason. They catch us when we fall and polish us when we're good.
Bloggers have nobody. And that means that it's not always the cream that rises to the top.
Have a great great day. And thanks for reading.
Peter G

My Madeleina

Well, I've had my Madeleina for maybe three uninterrupted weeks now. Fantastic. She wakes up cursing me having been born--because she takes the wake up call as an insult to her soul--and then curses me again when it's time to got to Walmart/Two Bucks/Ft. Worth nearly daily to run errands. She doesn't get that daddy has to work for the first 9 hours he is awake, from 5:30 Am till 2:30 AM and that the time still doesn't allow him--me--to drive the two hours daily that need to be done to get veggies, buy a few minis of Jim Beam (we don't keep alcohol in the house because of my weakness for it), and then on into the city to take care of newspaper business.
So when I won a Katie award for best Investigative Reporter of the year for the Dallas Press Club on Saturday and said I wanted to pick up the trophy and download a contract with a business magazine for about $2 grand freelance work, Madeleina's response was: "Dad: Let's be honest. You won 13 awards in the last four years.You've been an important part in two national awards your paper won....Has it ever occurred to you that the various press clubs in the Southwest US simply had too many trophies made so they had to give them to someone, and that's why you got one? I mean, realistically, what are the chances of you winning these 15 awards in 4 years or less. None. Zero. So face it: You're a lucky hack. That's all there is to it.
She may be right. Still, today, when I picked up my Katie and she saw it in the car, she kissed it and kept yeling out The old Ranger's windows: "This is a trophy! We won! Ask us anything!!! We're the winners!!
And she was crazy but right and I was proud for her and proud that she was proud of my work.
Maudlin, ain't I?
Thanks for listening...
Peter G

Time to Bite the Bullet

Okay, we've been having a good time and a run of good luck around here. Madeleina played flute with the school band in front of a school assembly for the first time last week, and though she didn't invite me--"Oh, dad, you hate assemblys"--she came home very proud. Then she had a sleepover with a friend on the weekend and they had a great time jumping on the trampoline, feeding the pig and playing the 20 variations of ping-pong that she and Bo came up with last week--things like flipping a card each time you hit the ball, or having to catch the ball in a cup--which forced her to concentrate on the extra job and let her reflexes take care of the actually ping-pong. It improved her game phenomenally. Thanks, Bo.
Then Marco came home with another raise and nearly 100 pounds of vegetables his store was tossing, which were for the pig and which now are taking up most of the room in the fridge. He had to toss a lot of food to make that room, but as he noted: "Who eats horseradish and jalepenos anyway? And this mayonaise isn't good for anything but making you fat." And on down the list of everything I love. Somehow, his treats all managed to find a nook.
Then Italo came home for the weekend from school and said he expects to get all A's this semester, or at least close, and that a semi-pro team has asked him to join them for the indoor soccer season this winter, now that the college season is over.
Then I managed to snag a Katie Award from the Dallas Press Club for best investigative reporting (in mid-and-small paper category)in Texas this year.
And a new person joined each of the January trips to the jungle.
So you know with all that nice stuff some flit was going to hit the fan, didn't you?
And it did. The plumbing in this house is just out of hand. We've repaired, replaced, clamped, and taped nearly every plastic pipe under this house in the last year and the only one we didn't need to fix was a toilet pipe and that went yesterday, so I am giving up and gonna let a pro do it. In other words, I bit the bullet and just called a plumber. I'm tired of the drips that provide water to the rodents I hate. I want it dry under my house so my house stops breaking apart as it slowly sinks supinely in the mud. And that's what I'm gonna get. I hope.
And then we can get back on that winning streak, eh?
GOOD MORNING EVERYBODY!

Nice Visit

Well, Doc Bo Keely just left. I took him to the airport this morning. Nice visit. About a week long. We caught that one train early on, and then by Thursday, when we had Madeleina with us we thought we'd hop another with her, but it was late at the yard and we missed one that stopped for three minutes for a crew change--we were 100 yards off when the thing pulled out of the station--and another came through, slowed, but didn't stop. Bo could have caught it but no way I was going to let by baby hop a moving freight, even if it was moving very slowly. After that an hour went by without another so we called it a hobo day.
Which didn't prevent hijinks in the form of taking an old sign off the side of a building--nothing glamorous and nothing that's being used anymore as the building is undergoing renovation and the sign will go any day. Still, important for Madeleina to be involved in a caper, even if she kept saying "People go to jail for this sort of thing, dad. Why do we need the sign anyway?"
We didn't, of course, we were just being silly middle-aged men showing Madeleina how to be a cut up without hurting anyone/anything. Better she learns from us than from somebody in high school a couple of years down the road.
Actually, it was a great week and it's just not coming through in this piece. I guess I'm just exhausted and will need to recharge--and probably should have before sitting down to write. Sorry. I'll work at something better tomorrow.
Thanks for the visit, Bo. Great hopping a train with you.

Jumping a Train

Well, nice day today. Dropped Madeleina off at school, then came home to put the finishing touches on a 6,000 word story for a mag about how the US has completely co-opted Mexico and has them in near civil war over the drug trade, all to the benefit of us, the US. Everybody beware: It's freaking nasty and our government controls every single aspect of it, from training the killers to supplying the guns to setting the prices.
That finished, it was time to edit a couple of pieces for the local famous Weekly I am lucky enough to work for, and then time to spend time with my friend Doc Bo, who' been here several days. Bo's a veteranarian who's a five-time national paddle ball champ here in the US, a veteran of over 350 hobo train jumps and who now runs bokeelytours.com, a site devoted to alternative tourism for executives who have been missing something earthy in their rarified lives. He's good. We jumped a train today in Fort Worth and could have traveled to New York City if I didn't have my Madeleina to feed and my dog and pig and the birds that Italo and Marco would just as soon let starve. So we hopped off, made our way through a tough part of Fort Worth back to my grand old blue green Ford Ranger--which, for those keeping count now has more than 281,000 miles on it's original engine, nearly as much as I've got on my freaking 57-year-old heart--and drove back home to find Marco the brilliant had bought greasy pizza for us for dinner.
Not finished yet, Doc Bo, who really is a veteranarian (one who's also written several books on paddle ball, one of which sole 130,000 copies and who has been on Jonny Carson and in Sports Illustrated), insisted that I find some hay for the pig, who's currently living in the chicken coop and chicken house. So I took my trusty truck into the street and stole two bales of hay from a fresh load the roadbuilders have been laying down on the muddy bank in front of my house. Karma has it that I got stuck, of course, and had to pay some guy with a decent truck, unlike mine, to pull me out. Which cost about 4 times what the hay would have cost. Lesson learned: Next time simply steal the truck of the good Samaritan.
Along the way Bo and me put 10 coins under train tracks, took a couple of train spikes for protection from wild dogs, got some good pics, and basically had a good time.
Now, it's 10 PM and Bo and I are going to hop another train tomorrow. And we're thinking of taking Madeleina with us--a day off of school to try the life of a hobo would be a fair exchange as long as we put her on a non-moving train, unlike today when we hopped a moving train. And then we're going to eat lunch at the mission to find out how many guys are living hobo life here in Ft. Worth.
So all is good. And all Madeleina can think of to say is: Hey Dad! If the police catch you hopping a train they'll be happy because they'll put you in jail for five years and then they won't have to read what you write about them. So at least somebody will be happy."
That's my girl.
Thanks for listening.
P

The President-Elect

Well, the astounding happened last night. In our lifetimes. Barak Obama was elected to be our 44th president. You all know that by now. But to be here, to feel a full measure of change in the air, is a wonderful thing. Senator McCain is a good man. I've liked his courage in several areas in the political arena. But we the people are in a very deep hole. The country, in totality, has gorged itself on the Third World and on our own poor for a long time. Fixing the financial problems the way we're trying can only be done by more gorging on the Third World. What we need is a fresh wind. What we need are not good fixes but entirely new ideas. We need fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of invention again. There are dozens of wonderful ideas and inventions that will serve our energy needs but without the encouragement to develop them on a commercial scale, those seeds will wither. We need new eyes to see things in ways we've not been seeing. We need to see the world as something other than our lunch box.
We need something completely different and we may have gotten that in a man who hasn't been around long enough to owe too many favors. I hope Obama is up to the task. I hope his rhetoric is backed by genuine vision. Not a specific vision for how to fix this or that area of our society--let's hope he surrounds himself with good people who can tend to those things. What we need from Obama is a vision of how the world might look 100 years from now, and we need that vision backed with the courage to take the first steps down that road toward a 100-year tomorrow.
I believe that many people feel that way, though they might articulate it differently. But I believe a larger purpose is needed now, a bigger picture of the world and our place in it, beyond our selves, beyond our house and car payments and our personal needs and wants. We need someone to draw back the curtain and say: "Look outside! Look at it all the way it could be if we had the courage to dream for others the way we dream for ourselves. Look at your unborn great great grandchildren and imagine them here in this world when we are long gone. This is the world we can give them."
Certainly, President-elect Obama is going to face monumental challenges when he takes office. There really are a number messes that are going to take a great deal of work and creativity to clean up.
But I think if he can inspire us, if he can get us off of our collective fannies and working at what needs fixing, then the work will happen and the fixing will get done. And if he can also articulate what kind of future we might choose for those unborn great great grandkids, then he will have awoken the fantastic beast that is the United States. And then we can collectively stride into the future.

Ah, Them Kids, Them Kids

Okay, so it's Monday night and Chepa went with the boyfriend to wherever it is they go for a month yesterday and so today I picked Madeleina up from school and told her we had to go to the store before we came home. Well, I was going to tell her that, actually, but she beat me to the punch and came into the car with: "If you tell me we have to go to the store I'm going to kill you." And I had to say, "well, it's worse than that. After the store we have to drive into Fort Worth to pick up my paycheck."
She looked at me blankly: "Dad, let's be honest. That check is so small we might as well just save the gas money and earn a couple of bucks..."
Touche, girl.
Stll, she was stuck with going and I treated her parakeets to a 5-pound box of deluxe parakeet food, which took the edge of her humor a bit. And I gave in and said we'd go for the check tomorrow.
So we get back home and in short order I toss on a chicken--fresh garlic, salt, pep on a bed of celery and onion with some beer for juice--nice rice with roasted garlic in olive oil as a base, broccoli and cauliflower to steam--later to be tossed with garlic, diced tomatoes and asparagus then dressed in balsamic vinager, and some kidney beans with black-eyed peas.
"So dad, I sort of recognize most of this but what's up with those beans? Are you being serious or is this an early April Fool's joke?"
"Just kidney beans with black eyed peas darling. Couple of strips of bacon to start, a little garlic and tomatoes for flavor, then let them simmer an hour while I do my email."
"Well, aren't you a little freaky-deaky?"
She actually used that term.
"Yes, you are," she continued, as if talking to her baby sister Alexa. "You're a little freaky-deaky, aren't you? Just a little freaky-deaky, deaky..."
I guess things have gotten unbelieveable out here because I could not believe she was using that term. I've never used it and she sounded so familiar with it that it was spooky. Does she walk around using it when I'm not listening? I wondered?
And I'll still wonder, because she's now swearing she doesn't even know the term. But then she's drinking 16 ounces of cold coffee with milk and seltzer and beginning to bounce off the walls so I don't know that I'll be able to speak to the real Madeleina for several hours.
And she's not the only one infected with insanity here. Marco found two mice in a drawer in his bureau the other day--we got em--and wondered why they were there. The only logical explanation was that the bureau was the only clean place in his room. Everything else is covered in clothes or fast food wrappers. And this morning I took a glass of something from his desk and found three separate types of mold growing in it: One green, one a spectacular sunburst yellow and red, and one just brown stuff. Still, enough primordial goop to start an earth, if not a universe.
When questioned about it his answer was that he was trying to duplicate a science experiment he'd seen on tv.
I'm not buying that.
I'm not using that glass again either.
And Madeleina just came in while I'm typing this and asked me if I could introduce her to some effeminate men. "They sound so cool. You know...like if I could meet them I'd know how to try to sound if I was a grown woman or something..."
Oy, vey. Another day at the Gormans.
I'm very glad I'm allowed to be part of it all.