MIXBAG OF MUSINGS

When I lived in L.A. a biker friend of mine from the north would occasionally invite me to go shooting out in the oilfields. It was fun. He had a regular arsenal: a couple of 45 calibers, a 9 mil, a .357, and some 22's, both rifles and handguns. He also packed a couple of 10 gauge shotguns. Much too much firepower for shooting tin cans, but you've got to use them for something. We'd drive outside the city limits, down the oilfield trails and off the road a little ways. Shooting off rounds out there wasn't really legal, but it was common practice. As long as you weren't doing any hunting without a license the local law enforcement didn't much care. We would practice every conceivable scenario. From drawing holstered weapons on quickshot targets, to sniperlike shooting from a distance of a dotsized target, to tight patterns on shotgun spreads, shooting imaginary moving beasts. It was an easy way to waste a few bucks on ammo. Afterwards, we'd spend the eveni...

The disturbing menagerie of crooked branches crowded in around us, as we quickly shuffled through the leafy path. It was late autumn, and the ground was covered by dry leaves and small animal droppings. The wind howled around us, through us, enveloping us in its bone-chilling harshness. As we approached the brook, I took hold of Maggie's arm and slowed her down to a near halt in boarding the crossing. It was only twenty feet long, but its rickety boards didn't inspire much confidence. Maggie clutched hard at our child beneath her coat and blankets, hammocked in her mother's arms. The wind seemed to grow to a fever pitch as we crossed, aggressively trying to knock us over into the turbulent waters below. The others were so far ahead I could no longer see them. We'd fallen too far behind. It became clear to me that we were now on our own. Nobody would be waiting for us. The clouds were moving in, blocking the remnants of daylight left. Darkness was draping over the va...

What a sweet sensation Christmas brings! There is a feeling, scent and sound that surrounds you in the city during the holidays. Not during work hours necessarily, but afterwards, at night. As you make your way through overly trafficked streets, finding people's driving even more aggravating than usual, there's a particular feeling of Christmas. I can't quite explain it, this feeling. It's not the smell of cinnamon in the air or the sound of Christmas carols. It's more akin to the briskness in our moves as we make our way through crowded shopping malls trying to find thoughtful gifts in the blink of an eye, and in the subconscious sensation that an impending source of joy awaits us. When we were children it was so cut and dry. We'd count the days until Christmas. The holidays meant new toys and clothes, and time away from school. The joy the Christmas holiday brings to us as we get older is much more subdued. As a rule, the head of household tends to view ...

How do you project that spot on the calendar when all of a sudden it's not somebody else's home you're journeying to for the holidays, but it's your home everybody else is coming to? It's not like my daughter has left us and comes home for the holidays (she's not quite 4 years old yet), but my house has turned out to be the gathering point for several disparate branches of loosely fragmented particles of a family brought together by circumstance. Most of the connections between us are frail at best, with some notable exceptions, and we get together almost exclusively on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I've tried to come to terms with this whole "getting together for the holidays" thing, and I believe I understand the phenomenon a little better now. The truth is, days off from work are rare for me. It's hard to find any free time to do things around the house. On top of that, there are usually great games scheduled on those days, so dealing wi...

I spoke with an old friend yesterday. He called me on my cell phone out of the blue. I was walking around the mall with my Dad, killing time as we waited for my wife to show up for lunch (she's never on time!). My friend Alvin says he's coming to Florida this week. His company is sending him to Orlando for some safety training, sponsored by his Union. He'll be there all week. It's about a three and a half hour drive from where I live. Not exactly around the corner, but certainly a lot closer than the continental divide we've had between us since I moved away from California 7 years ago. We both vowed that we'd make an earnest effort to see each other on this trip, whatever it takes. Back in the day when Alvin and I first became friends, we were very different people from who we are now. Not only younger, but also driven by other motivations. Alvin grew up in a small oilfield town in south-central California. One of the younger brothers in a large family of m...

As the sun sets again, another day fades away. The clock ticks with ever increasing speed as I grow older; gaining momentum with each passing second. It's hard to be carefree when you feel the pressure of goals not achieved, and the finish line seems to approach you with the force of a freight train. I gaze upon my daily accomplishments at night sometimes, trying to find worthwhile achievements in my monotonous lifestyle. It's important to award yourself points just for doing the things that a working society requires, such as keeping a job, obeying the laws, investing in the economy, paying your taxes, etc. Mundane though they be these are not effortless tasks, and they form the backbone of our way of life. It's for the good of all that a majority of the population perform in this fashion. But I feel lazy and repressed, inhibited by petty fears of losing my comfort zone. Otherwise I would venture further into the world and try to live up to my self imposed expectations. S...

The colors of fall don't hit South Florida in the same spectrum-blasting way they do in the northern part of the country. There's gloom in the air and a sort of grayness dominates the scenery, and the leaves don't grasp for powerful tones before they wilt and die. They simply grow dull. Some people equate the change of season with the natural progression of events that mark the passing of a year. For instance, Christmas with winter, 4th of July with summer, and so on. In that same way, they balance their moods and spirits for that particular time. Despite the tireless efforts by the ubiquitious members of the advertising world that splash every holiday into our subconsciousness with thoughts of commercial expenditures, a sense of what certain holidays should feel like still persists in our minds, albeit sometimes only in bursts of nostalgia and naiveté. Either way, it's highly probable that the events that created those childhood memories that we cherish, were probably...

Hard to imagine what follows. I've long since stopped believing in gods and the religions that come with them. Yet the physics question of energy always transforming itself into something else makes it difficult to imagine that it all ends when we die. Thus the common belief in a soul - the essence of what we are, at least energywise. If our soul survives our physical death, what does it do next? Haunt the graveyards? Stick around to inspire the loved ones we left behind? Truly this last one is a romantic fantasy...that our spirit can look out for our children after we're gone...that we somehow still get to witness their development, the victories and failures in their lives. I don't know. I stopped looking for answers to questions that can't be answered a long time ago. Yet every now and then I can't help but wonder.

I don't wish to become sour. I'm bitter enough already. Things don't look too pleasant from this side of the 40 year mark. I'm staring at an ugly midlife crisis dead in the eye, and I'm quite sure I'll be the first to blink. I had high hopes for myself many years ago, when 40 was far enough away so as to not merit much concern. Suddenly it's but a couple of speedy years away. Time not only flies when you're having fun, it soars when it's in scarce availability. Where did it all go? The dreams we cradled, the expectations so carefully carved out in our youth...Summarily brushed aside by the passing of time and the loss of enthusiasm brought on by our daily survival. The urgent takes precedence over the important. Our needs supersede our wants and before we know it, we're waist deep in conformity. Happy to simply get by. Looking around at what I have accomplished thus far (unfortunately, even in self-analysis, I tend to opt for the social pract...

The stories were gory. They told of many a soldier who met his maker while patrolling the Czech border with West Germany. The same border I found myself guarding for a month at a time, every three months, back in '85. Today's children grow up unaware of the Cold war, but back then it was something that affected everybody in the western hemisphere. We spent our border tours gated in a few miles away from the line. We rotated on weekly "Reaction Force" shifts. Reaction Force members had to be on alert 24 hours a day. From the moment the camp alarm went off we had 15 minutes to be fully dressed in field gear with chemical suits on; our weapons clean, loaded and operational, and our tanks rolling out the main gate. We had so little time to do this that we could never afford to be out of our chemical suits. We kept our boots on at all times. Hell, we weren't even supposed to shower! We would spend all our time studying classified border terminology, proper interna...

I first met her when she was about four months old. The son of a friend of mine had received her as a gift from a neighbor, but his mother didn't want to keep her. I was living as a bachelor in L.A. then, and she was just what I was looking for to keep me company. I offered to take her. She was a chihuahua mix. Small, dark, and cute as hell. With barely any of the shaky nervousness that make chihuahuas so aggravating. She would jump up on my chest when I walked in from work (or when I returned from stepping out a minute, for that matter) and from day one she would snuggle up to me in bed. I would toss her inside my jacket and we would go for long rides on my hog. I called her Broad. When asked why, I would tell people that I always wanted to have a female in my life that wouldn't mind being called a broad. When friends would call me over to watch a game or have a beer, I would say "I'm bringing the Broad," and more than once guys would be pleasantly surprised to...

And then I was there; free to pursue a musical career in the midst I had anticipated for so long. The weight of my self imposed expectations weighed heavily on me. It's easy to plan for something while it's still far away. Once you find yourself there, the pressure to provide results takes away from the envisioned scenario. Regardless of the stories I'd heard and common sense itself, I halfway expected Los Angeles to be a bohemian breeding ground, or at the very least, a gathering place for artists. I could not have been more wrong. The air in L.A. is laden with bullshit and trendy eastern philosophies thinly disguised behind the masks of so-called New Age thought. The people are clay, eager to follow the next health-happy idea. It's a world ruled by the intrepid and the daring, but certainly not by the wise. But my hope rested in the music scene, not in the city itself. I pictured talented, music loving kids joining in a blend of cultural folklore; striving to disc...

The storm whistled through the night. We were warmly tucked into our beds, with our teeth brushed and our bellies tight. The flickering light from the corner lamppost slivered past the opening in our drapes and cut across our legs, safely hidden beneath the covers. As a child there were no sounds from the television at night. The only television in the house was upstairs in the family room and it was turned off when we got sent to bed at 9 o'clock each night. Every sound was tremendously amplified by the sheer silence we were accustomed to. Late at night my brother's heavy breathing would be a source of comfort to me, as I would discover years later when I no longer had it, but in the early evening hours after our lights went out and my eyes turned to the darkness around me, my imagination surged. As the rainfall intensified, the rain and wind combined to create a smattering action against our windows. It sounded like a perpetual throwing of pebbles, as one might do to call...

There's a creek that runs alongside the mountain, adjacent to the southernmost fields of my family's farm. You might call it a brook, it's so small, if you were to address it properly. But since I was a kid the locals refered to it as a creek. It drapes down from west to east; altitude declining unperceived as it falls. The water cascading ever so gently; you can barely see it break against the polished rocks on its downward journey. It is a sunken stream; buried below ground level by centuries of motion. You walk down into it if you wish to view it. The tangled rows of dividivis shelter it from above; a thorny ceiling of wild, overgrown and twisted wooden flesh; they weepingly hang over the sides. Sprouts from an old leather dye plantation gone wild; allowed to extend past the parameters of their intended home to takeover the mountain and valley below it. The creek is walled on both sides by stone fences. Each stone painstakingly placed over the other. Their purpose...

Whew! Sometimes you start building up momentum and get wound up so tight...that any good news gives you relief! Today I'm breathing a huge sigh of relief for some health problems in a loved one that have all but seemed to vanish. We'll find out for sure a week from Thursday. I'm still holding my breath for a million other things. Some problems that I can't even imagine ever getting resolved. But the truth is, most things usually seem quite futile to me and still they have a way of working themselves out. Besides, you have to put your problems in perspective. From the world's point of view, just how important is your selfishly small and silly personal problem in the whole scheme of things. We must balance our convictions apriopriately, scale back our dillemas to their proper size, and try to view matters from an objective angle. Not observe it from below, as we're being crushed by the weight of its menacing possiblities. This removes our ability to judge wit...

The dusty trail behind the last row of houses on the south side of T-town, wound narrowly past the arid desert land. Swerving round past the tumbleweeds and leafless skeleton trees; the bushes of thorny green weeds that somehow manage to grow in the Kern ridge oilfields. Nothing much else does, besides the rabbits and kit foxes. Rocks abound, at every glance filling your view. Covered in moss and bird shit. The path began as if out of nowhere. Behind the houses where everybody parked their broken down vehicles: boats, RVs, cars, etc. Open wasteland lay ahead, spotted with the occasional pumping unit. The trail inclines steadily yet almost unnoticeably, as you forge your way up the hill. Not very far, maybe just three or four hundred feet out there, you come upon a fenced in area. About an acre in size, dirty and abandoned, you can see row after row of tombstones in that old forgotten cemetery. They are uniformly built...lamentably ordinary and plain. Some have fallen over or tilte...

There was a time when I believed that the mark of a true hero was when in the face of certain death, he still chooses to do the right thing. This was illustrated in an event very close to me a few years ago. One of the outbound airplanes of a cargo airline I was working for at the time, had a sudden shift in its weight and balance upon takeoff - the locks which hold the large metal pallets where the cargo is secured came undone, allowing the carefully distributed weight to run helter skelter across three empty pallet positions - and lost its lift, crashing down less than half a mile away from the landing strip. The crash took place in a highly trafficked area, where there were not only congested streets packed with lunch hour drivers, but also warehouses, restaurants and other assorted small businesses. The potential for a tragedy of biblical proportions was quite real. Instead, the pilot and his crew used their final seconds on this earth to steer the plane clear from the crowds and...

I had an old friend over for dinner last night. We've known each other for many years. Grew up together. It was another place and another time, and I certainly never thought we'd end up so closely linked in this far away land after all these years. Now the funny thing is that our situations are very similar. Not our personal lives - I've opted for a family, house and pets, while he's doing the bachelor thing with a cool car, condo by the beach, and no attachments - but our professional lives. Though our fields of expertise differ and the work we do is of a dissimilar nature, we both find ourselves having the owner of the company himself as our boss. This type of situation is not to be compared to that of much smaller business enterprises, such as a small corner grocery store, where it's basically the owner, his wife and a hired clerk. No, though the two companies I speak of clearly belong in the realm of "small business," they each employ somewhere aroun...

The entrance to hell lay beyond a short white picket fence, through a broken gate that was barely hanging on a single hinge. It wasn't the type of fence you envision in your 'American Dream' landscapes. It was a rickety, old, cheap looking and splintered, nasty set of paint chipped boards that were loosely arrayed together in a crooked line. They divided the dirt sidewalk that almost seamlessly joined the street from a front yard that was splattered with color. There were odd things laying about, randomly calling to your attention or begging you to look away. Broken toys and rusted car parts...a broken window frame...blue plastic tarps, stuffed behind a leafless bush...a baby stroller with a tire rim inside. A small potted plant stood in the pathway to the front door, but the plant had withered away to a twig. There was no grass. Whatever ground you could see was dirt, layered with trash and the droppings left about by the house bitch's latest litter. The smell permeat...

It was a crappy job, but still...it got me through nearly four years of college. Playing rent-a-cop at an abandoned brewery in L.A. Yet I let it go just to keep my long hair. It wasn't really the long hair that mattered so much (or so I told myself), it was "the principle of the thing." I didn't believe anybody should be able to control me to such a point that they could tell me I needed a haircut whenever they felt like it, regardless of my job performance or my overall personal grooming, or how it affected my work related tasks. I'd already spent three years in the Army being told what I could or couldn't do. When I got out I promised myself I'd never be pushed into a position like that again. So, I quit. As it was, I'd been suspended without pay until I gave in, so I wasn't getting anywhere. Besides, quitting seemed to give me the moral upperhand somehow. Now I found myself wihout any source of income, no immediate family within 5000 miles, a...