[GaryO]

Well, that was messy... like I mentioned in the off topic thread I wasn't sure if we were going to be together long and I guess I was right. Came to a head today when we had an argument. Gotta' say that technology is pretty useless considering it was over text messages and we couldn't understand what each other was really saying.

Such a shame really, after a year and a bit of what was rather explicit happiness ended over text messaging. I'm all for the advent of technology, I genuinely believe in most respects that it's beneficial to us as a whole. However, it sort of feels... tacky and a little pathetic on her account, she refused to meet up or even let me call her so we could speak so there we go.

I'm feeling incredibly fortunate for being young at the moment.... plenty of time to find another lady friend and enjoy myself!

Jammy, you must be a bit shook up. It’s not like you to misspell such a pedestrian word as 'hole'…….

‘She is beneficial to me as a hole’…………oh, wait, you were taking about technology……….

OK, serious…….you’re free, man!!!!
You’re in yer teens, don’t waste yerself on any commitment.

Go outside….play.

[Schultz1]

Like play some good ol' rugby!

[5butjam]

Two more weeks of exams and then I have a week in Turkey on a lads holiday... Plenty of tine to go outside and play there!

[GaryO]

IKE

The Eisner’s place was at the bottom of the hill.
Ike was the runt of our little mob. Thus he did some suffering….nature’s process of natural selection.
The Eisners were a tidy bunch. Mrs Eisner kept Ike in new clothes. He always looked like he’d just stepped outta the Wards catalogue.
There was no man around the house.
Mrs Eisner was quite fetching, a bit thin, but quite fetching indeed. She kept herself up, and I gotta hand it to her, maintained things pretty darn well. Remarkably, those were the days before mandated child support.
However, they all seemed to be missing a screw to their well oiled machine.
Ike’s sisters were prime examples.
Seems like they were about 13 and 15 and had been around, having the minds of 47 year old hookers.
Ike was their experimentation lab.
Andy was practice.
I was a curiosity.
Bart was their personal ‘Lennie’
Eddie stayed home.
Brad damn near lived at the Eisner’s place…Brad liked to narrate…I took notes.

Ike was pretty much our gofer.
One summer day we were just sittin’ behind Andy’s place, considering tossing Ike down the hill again, when Andy developed the brilliant idea of gathering up some junk and setting it all on the blind corner of the paved road below.
A broken bat, a rusted wagon, some leaf springs, and other junk, in a wash tub, set smack dab in the road, by Ike.
‘Ike won’t get in trouble as much as we will, since they already know us (the fire cracker incident, the beehive fiasco, and a few other things that enabled us to see the inside of the police station).

First car.
The guy just stopped, took the wagon, and kicked the tub off the road.
Ike set it back out.

Second car.
An ol’ gal got out, looked up the hill, right into the brush we were hiding in and yammered in her high pitched ol’ lady voice ‘I see you boys. I’m going to turn you in. Get down here right now and clean this up.’
Then she sped off, leaving the tub in the middle of the road.

It began to dawn on us that maybe this wasn’t one of our brightest of ideas when car number three, an ol’ pickup, came whippin’ by. Only he didn’t stop. Not right away anyway. Seems the handle of the wash tub hooked onto the undercarriage of his truck, and made quite a gawdawful racket for about a hundred yards, just clangin’ and bangin’ down the road.
I think the ol’ guy thought he’d lost his differential. Cause he seemed quite relieved to find that ol’ tub…as he unhooked it, threw it into the truck and sped off.
Another inventive event for us to laugh our asses off, and celebrate by tossing Ike down the hill.

One rainy fall day, Bart and I were goofing around with the mud bank at the end of the road.
Andy came out and suggested we build a dam, and make a lake. Eddie, Ike, and Brad appeared.
Soon we had six shovels and two wheel barrows employed.
We learned about the do’s and don’ts of dam building in short order.
A sheet of ply would be our water gate.
The lake got to be about three and a half feet deep once we built the side gates for overflow.
The red clay bank developed a huge gap in it.
Next, the dazzling idea of flooding the road when cars came.

CAR!!!

Andy and Bart lifted the sheet of ply. There was a rush of muddy water. Something of the dimension of a middle sized dog went whooshing onto the road.
It was Ike!!
The car came close, r-e-a-l close to Ike’s head.
The driver didn’t see a thing, just kept goin’.
Andy and I picked up little Ike, squeezed out his shirt and cap, and commenced to shake him, scolding him for being on the wrong side of the dam at such a critical moment.
He loved the attention, smiling his happy dog Ike smile, then giggling his little Ike ass off.



In spite of everything we, and his sisters, put him through, he maintained a pretty happy heart, and kept a kind of innocence about him.
He was beyond likable.
None of us would say it, but we all loved the little guy.
And even though he was our projectile alotta times, if anyone out or our realm gave him grief, we'd all take turns beatin' the s*** outta that person.....no matter how big she was.

Years later, I heard he’d become a structural engineer.
I’d like to think we had an influence on him that rainy fall day.

[Schultz1]

Is he building a dam right now?

[GaryO]

Last I heard, he was in Honduras, improving some villages in the outback, rerouting waters of floodplains, and teaching building techniques, but that was long ago now.
His frustration was the unions wouldn’t let him get his hands dirty with anything more than a pencil.
The lad had a remarkable resilience about him in mind and spirit. I’d like to think he’s doin’ well……hell, I may search him out on face book or something, since a lot of folk have died off, and the web is so damn handy these days….’course then I’d have to join face book….last time I did that, I learned I had more than 10,000 friends I didn’t even know. ‘sides, I’m not sure of his first name….but then, right now I’m not sure of my own first name…..


Naw, I’d rather just think my thoughts. Getting’ tired of learnin’ how folks are ending up….but then learning of yer enemies taking a dirt nap is rather uplifting at times.

Think I’ll celebrate right now.

Cheers

[GaryO]

Brad

Brad lived down the paved road about a mile, so when he appeared he made it count.
He was closer to Andy’s age, so they’d pal around quite a bit.
He was bigger than me, and always challenged me, right up to the time I lost it and beat the daylights outta him with a baseball bat.
I remember his incredulous look of terror and surprise. He never really stopped challenging me, but his taunts had lost a ton of sincerity after that.
Andy always got a kick out of it all, and looked on with great interest as to how things would play out between me and Brad, or me and Eddie, or me and Bart…never stepping in, but quite interested….guess alpha members of a pack like to keep score for future reference….

Brad’s mom was a nervous sort, not hard to look at, but nuthin’ memorable either, just his mom.
She too was divorced, but kept a tidy place.
Thinking about it, all the single moms in that area kept a damn tight ship. Maybe they channeled all that pent up nervousness toward dusting and mopping.
Thinking about it some more, all the households that had neat, well maintained places either was kept up by a single mom, or kept up by a married mom that might as well have been single….
On the flip side, there was the Hansens.
Seems they would get it on as regular as breakfast lunch and dinner, not counting the afternooner, and the night cap, and the morning paper……..
Bart’s mom must have been well tapped too, as she wasn’t the neatest of housekeepers…but always had a smile on her face and always hummed a happy little song.
Our place was kept up, but not as fastidious as those single moms, so I guess things were OK with mom and dad.

When Brad came around, things happened. Not the best things, but really fun things.

He’d joined our BB gun wars a few times, but he was one to always want something more.
One afternoon we were contemplating what we could do with Ike when Brad thought shooting at the passing cars on the road below would perk things up.

It did.

Our marksmanship was lacking, as most our shots just pinged off fenders and bumpers and the back of an occasional window, but this one time Andy’s shot rang true. Right at the back of this passenger’s gigantic ear.
It was an amazing spectacle to watch take place.
Pap
Whap!
AAAAAAH, MY EAR! A BEE STUNG MY GODDAMN EAR!
He commenced fanning is skunk cabbage sized ear like it was on fire, and I gotta say it wasn’t that great of a shot, ‘cause that gentleman’s humongous ear was a huge target, flappin’ in the wind at 40 mph.

The car came to a screeching halt and he hopped out, dancin’ around batting at the side of his head.

Well, one of his gargantuan ears musta picked up on our rolling on the ground laughter, as he looked right in our direction and started cussing us up and down.
We just flipped him off and invited him up for a chat.

Within 30-40 minutes the town cruiser came barreling up the road.
We started passing the football around in Andy’s yard, and when they pulled up, we became sincerely helpful as to ‘keep a lookout for those hooligans for sure, officer.’

Brad was a rather intense fellow.
If he wanted something, it consumed him.
He wanted a model car of mine.
Andy watched with great interest as Brad hauled out prized possession after prized possession to trade, riding his bike back and forth from his house, a mile away.
I feigned interest, then backed off.
The lad was beside himself.
Finally I ended up with three of his model cars, two model planes and three tubes of BBs.
It taught me an early lesson in supply and demand.

The thing I remember most about Brad was he was the one that explained things to me about the opposite sex, in great graphic detail.
So, at the ripe ol’ age of 11, I had all the mechanics down, to a tee.
A couple years later in health class, I’d be the first to raise my hand and answer any question, and even offered other facts for extras credit.
I was rather proud of that.

Funny, nobody really cared for Brad.
He could come or go, it didn’t matter.

He wasn’t dislikable, just a bit over the top.

He died in Nam.

[Schultz1]

Died from what in Vietnam? Death pits, bullets, torture, hunger?

[GaryO]

Died from what in Vietnam? Death pits, bullets, torture, hunger?

Don’t know.
Just heard about it, third or fourth hand.
Can’t even remember who told me.
Maybe a war whore gave him a flesh eating disease.
That seems as likely as anything.

He was one’a those guys that was always in yer face.
Rather intense, demanding fellow.
It was like when he mentioned he was going home, nobody said ‘Stay’.

I only visited his place once.
His mom was a bit distraught, as she was cleaning up the glass of her huge picture window.
A hunter’s large caliber round had found it’s way smack dab square in the middle. A misdirected shot from the hills in back of their place…..just a huge arc lobbed onto their living room carpet. Not the most uncommon occurrence during hunting season.

Kinda sad really.
What was his life for?
He did have a penchant for cussing and swearing, and came up with some great ones, ones I still use today.
So maybe that was a part of his legacy.

Kinda like one'a my legacies that came about when I was at a factory in Guangzhou.

There was a half dozen folk from Taiwan, cadre that ran the rather large golf bag factory in main land China, and me, and my broker.
We were in a critical part of negotiation, whether or not they would even manufacture my boss’s uniquely designed bag.
Thru my broker’s interpretation, ‘We can make 1000 normal bags in the time it takes to make 20 of yours’.
Three hours and 40 cigarettes handed to me later (damn, those guys could smoke), we were all in full agreement that they would proceed.
Actually, the decision was quite sudden.
The honcho stood up and barked one short, harshly sounding sentence.
It was all quiet.
I thought, damn, I gotta tuck my tail between my diarrhea smeared ass cheeks and drag it back home…..and find a new job.
My broker leaned over, smacked me on the back and told me, ‘He says they’ll make the bag!’
More cigarettes were handed out, and warm lemon water was poured.
Tensions relaxed, and even though my broker didn’t interpret the jokes, I knew they were about me.
They were all laughing in unison and glancing at me.
I imagined they were saying things like.
‘I tell you what, we’ll play with round eye’s mind and build the bag half way, then demand a higher price….haw haw haw haw’, more cigarettes……

So I flipped ‘em all off, told ‘em all to get phucked, and commenced sipping my tepid lemon water.

The honcho looked at me, then looked at my broker.
Smiles faded.
Once my broker put his face back together, he told me they didn’t understand the gesture.
Really? Really? I thought that was universal.
I told him to explain.
My Broker, with lowered head, told them.
It was quiet.
Then the honcho busted out laughing and flipped me off.
A round of raucious laughter.

As we strolled thru the campus to the private car, and to a sumptuous dinner, everyone practiced telling each other to get phucked, laughing and flipping.
Turns out the maître d' didn’t know that form of sign language either, much to their delight.

So, yeah, even coarse language can be some sorta legacy, I s’pose.

[Schultz1]

Uhhhhh huh. I see.