MIXBAG OF MUSINGS

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...