Thursday, March 20, 2025
LIVE MUSIC IS HARD | SPECTATIN' and SPECULATIN' 4
CONNECT-THE-DOTS | SPECTATIN' and SPECULATIN' 3
RUNOFF FROM THE WELL | SPECTATIN' and SPECULATIN' 2
THE WALKING DEAD F*ceBook ACCOUNT | SPECTATIN' and SPECULATIN' 1
THE WALKING DEAD F*ceBook ACCOUNT | SPECTATIN' and SPECULATIN' 1
bret harold hart
VIDEO LINK: https://youtu.be/5m-3P_I-wl8
Why?, Whuffo?, and Howcum? are better community puzzles to solve in Life than Whodunnit?....circuitously detailing my effort to exit a fraught and often ineffective 15yr social networking learning-curve, while sitting in an old cemetery.
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all right well good afternoon this is Bret
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again uh spectating and speculating and
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uh doing my best to keep out of the way of what ought to be going
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on I'd rather let it happen and what I want to talk about
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right now is the whole incredible experience I've had mostly not
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enjoyable um in trying to First deactivate and later
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delete a Facebook account that I'd had for about I don't
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know I think maybe 2 three years into Facebook
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finally caved and saw that it was maybe a viable way to be in touch with people that
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are too impatient to talk to you on the phone uh or too
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busy and uh because that's just the way things have gone in my 66 years is that
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you know I was raised by people that weren't just readers but who enjoyed it
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were kind of acious about it you know many magazine subscriptions and uh you
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know grocery store Encyclopedia set in the living room and uh you know boxes of
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National Geographic Magazines in the basement on a shelf and uh that's the
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kind of people that I was raised by and around and I'm still a
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reader but Lord knows I barely ever hold printed media
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that I'd have any interest in Reading
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anymore and um you know over the years here up in
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New England middle Massachusetts
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uh hell all the way back to the high school newsletter and art
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magazines we had back in the 70s mid
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70s I was a writer and I guess you could call all of that journalism and I I
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suppose you could call what I'm doing today journalism and I'm just kind of like that Silver Surfer you
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know I'm just kind of riding whatever most
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recent uh tool for Comm
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communication um that comes along and some of them are
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very brief fattish kind of things that vanish real fast you know like the laser
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disc and um and the eight track tape for sure and
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then we got I don't know now there seems to be a
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return to analog recording as though people have run they're feeling
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nostalgic and uh wanting to sound like the old days when things sounded like
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the stuff that the digital Music Revolution thought it was solving the problems
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of Journalism well anyway so I tried to leave I tried to deactivate myself from
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Facebook and delete myself from Facebook when um I don't know I I really hate to
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name names because sometimes you name a name and it's like a frecking mental force field flies up and and and F some
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folks can't even listen to the next syllable they're already formulating a a
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way to enact Justice on you for what you just said even though it was an incomplete thought and um yeah you know
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so forget about names you know forget about names
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labels names stuff like that uh but I made a decision after many
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years of really having a lot of failed relationships begin and end um and I
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don't mean uh you know you know what I mean professional relationships music art uh and when I was a teacher at one
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point there was even a sort of a local encouragement to use social media to
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connect with the parents of your students if you wish and of course we were for bidden to um communicate with
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the kids we taught online that was just a hard and fast Rule and I agree with it
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um but there was a period of time and I suppose it persists uh when parents use
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social media rather than phone calls or direct emails um to express stuff you know to
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teachers and back and forth I remember that that was not fun
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um and I would say that the first time that I very nearly left Facebook was during the time when I was still
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teaching at the middle school level uh in the Arts and we were at the Apex like the
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baby boom of that kind of thing going on with Facebook being the main conduit you
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know and for reasons that I won't speculate about um because I'm just
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going to take her at a word my wife really was beginning to have a problem um with a number of the uh mothers of
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several of the kids I taught and I was you know I've been here long enough that
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I taught the children of kids I taught okay so I've taught entire generations
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of children you know I could name a lot of families that I taught all three of
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the children all three of the daughters both of the sons you know that
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kind of thing and I've I've even worked with my ex- students and stuff as you know in
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education it was pretty cool interesting I got a deep look you know teaching
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thousands of kids and dealing with where they came from you
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know but um my wife was beginning to have issues with
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uh I suppose the frequency and really lack of urgency from her
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perspective with which some of these women um
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were wanting to be in communication with me and I really couldn't argue with her
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um because I get a lot of I'd say that eight out of 10
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texts or emails or even Facebook comments or notifications that I ever
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got eight out of 10 there was no point in them ever having been sent they communicated nothing
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usually they communicated well they didn't communicate nothing they communicated vanity um or narcissism and I started to
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actually get caught up in that you know who was it I think Kurt vonet said we are if somebody wants to know what a
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person is like look at the five people they spend the most time with and kind
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of do an average of those five people and you'll get the sixth one and
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um you know Kurt vonet was the kind of author that would make you think about
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something for the rest of your life and uh that's one lens through which I look at people and families and stuff like
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that but anyways uh to get back on point I digress I'm sorry
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um she one day had
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a uh completely in hindsight I'm saying this I don't think I handled it very
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well at the time um no I didn't handle it very well at the time I got defensive
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about uh my uh right to since there wasn't any weird [ __ ] going on uh oops
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I'm have to delete that too and she knows this we both know this in hindsight there wasn't any weirdness
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going on but as women do really if they're
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right-minded um they're going to guard their relationship with the person they
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married and I'm glad my wife does I don't know if I like her methods um but
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I'm really glad that she uh is capable of
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um she claims what is her right and her right is The Vow that I made when I
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married her and I'm not going to argue with that it in fact it's never failed us
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her getting her getting her throwing up a fence right quick um is always a good
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idea and she said at at that time this is a long time ago my God this is like
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12 years ago maybe I want you to delete every single female friend you got on Facebook that I
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don't know [Music] personally and I asked her how come and
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she said because if they if they want to be friends with you they well better be ready to want to be friends with me
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too okay we're like kind of a a a set here you
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know and uh so I did
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that and um I don't believe I even accompanied the act of doing it with any
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kind of explanatory post I think I just went in there in order to
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avoid um
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what could come and just did a mass bye-bye kind of
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thing and you know a whole lot of it was with people that to be honest with you I maybe had only had a back and forth with
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for over the course of the N9 months or less that I taught their child and then
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we never had another communication after that like they might have at one point reached out to me via Facebook because
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they had a question or something and we ended up um you know friend request
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exchange kind of thing going on like that but I went and did in one Fell Swoop and I think I knocked
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about maybe 125 ladies um right out of the right out
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of the right out of the tool as it were and
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um a couple of them got really pissed about it which she found very
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interesting and and in hindsight I find interesting in also that some other
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person might bring their opinion about um how a man and a woman
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agree um to respect one another uh as though their Viewpoint could make that
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change um but anyway so there's there was an early like okay it's time it's
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time to make a boundary happen here in in this in this so-called networking social networking
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stuff and and uh so then you know time goes by uh I pass in and out of several
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recording groups um one of which was led by a woman uh well at least she was the
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uh The Lyricist and singer in the group and um myself and a u a man who is um
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very accomplished on uh keyboards and and woodwind instruments primarily and
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when I say woodwind instrument I mean from uh baritone Sachs to harmonica okay
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um and during those professional musical
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business um the durations of those um
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Adventures um some women ended up back in Facebook
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as friends as well as I'm I'm not going to ex I'm not going I'm going to be very
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conservative as well as possibly maybe 200 people who I frankly never got to know
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in any way shape or form that mattered to me very much except that they
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purchased an album uh that I played on for which I might have
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made a dollar but anyways I'm you know I'm appreciative I always thank people for
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these things and stuff but you know when somebody's buying something that's not something on which to base a lifelong
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relationship that's kind of stupid um so I ended up with what I will call a whole bunch of barnacles sort of
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business Barnacles uh on my in my Facebook uh friends and
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when I don't know when when one of those musical Adventures one of those groups
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fell apart well basically I I exited the band and
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it was a trio so you know 33% gone I exited it for reasons that I felt
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were righteous and it there was Carnage that immediately followed it was like an
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earthquake occurred within this sort of extremely underground but pretty large
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realm in music that I was operating in at that time many ways still
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do and I just realized that I need to give that ship a good scraping um because of all of these
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various names that connect my memory and my thoughts to something that I'd really
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rather not think about anymore and so once again I went in and did another one of these great
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unfriending H I'll call it what it is because we W well I don't know we weren't friends we were they were
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customers and in some cases they were musicians who um might use another
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person as a ladder in order to get someone that they'd like to work with in
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music I felt a lot of the The Souls of a lot of weird boots going right up my
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back um between myself and someone that
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uh I don't know seemed kind of like overly willing
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to um well they were engaging in a lot of flattery and stuff like that and I I
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don't like that stuff that it bounces off of me there there's a difference between constructive feedback and and
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and and uh flattery When someone tells me like
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everything you're doing is fabulous I really immediately don't trust them because I know it isn't um it could not
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be uh part of how I roll is that I don't hide flaws in the
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process um you know this goes across every kind of art that I'm involved in it's it's it's AR it's immediate it's
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finite it's undecorated it doesn't have a lot of
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makeup on it um it's a immediate grabbing of the moment in
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which the thing is being made and I try to make things I'm not the kind of guy that
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works on a painting for years I'm the kind of guy that spends an entire week
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of 10hour days working on one and getting it done
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um so anyways I scraped the Barnacles off of the uh progressive rock uh realm
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uh that had infiltrated I allowed him to I opened
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the window and the vampire came in you know know but anyways uh let's see where
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we getting with our time here I sure hope this thing's still recording it is we're good um but anyways uh so then I
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did another big old scraping and then last year and I've
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been playing music live locally not doing recording projects or
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getting in bands or anything like that for probably about the last I don't know five years or so
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and that's the way I like it I probably only get out and play four times a month that's plenty I'm playing with people I
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enjoy being around and um you know at a place that I like being in
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uh but last Autumn uh I think it was in November possibly
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December I know it was after Halloween anyways the anniversary of Noah Noah's
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Arc begin beginning and the the flood kicking off that's Halloween for those that like to look stuff up that other
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people have said it is Halloween is weird memorializes
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catastrophe I decided that I didn't want to be on Facebook anymore and the reason why was because having been in the Navy
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for as long as I was doing spook work I'm kind of uh I have a healthy
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paranoia when there is a real reason to be paranoid about something yeah you know um a lot a lot of things that are
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bad are hidden Right In Plain Sight and sometimes you see it and um it makes you
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wonder and and I'm not someone who jumps to conclusions quickly but when I feel a
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lot of dots are being connected around a a certain theme uh I put that theme in a folder in my head and uh just you
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know remember that I have that folder in case something else another dot appears
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as it were and um I made a decision that um from almost a personal you know you
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hear about National Security right and I started to think about it might be a good idea for me not only to uh use it
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less which I've gone through phases of um but to
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just stop and and and just you know I've
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created the you know people have their personal Facebook page but artists and
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musicians and business and stuff you know they set up these adjacent Pages uh
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in order to promote something right and and I was quite vigorous about that I had at least two different
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pages um which sold my paintings and art and stuff and you know a person could go
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there and look at these pictures and so forth in fact two days ago a local woman
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contacted me because she'd seen some of my work and she tried to contact me
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through Facebook and I didn't receive the notification but anyways um but a friend
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saw her comment and called me up and told me and we've connected and so it's kind of cool that uh I might possibly
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make a sale uh she wants me to do a painting of her home I can do that I've done it before I decided to get off
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Facebook the first thing I did was I deactivated it according to the procedure that says this is how you do
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that that and I will say right now that Facebook doesn't make it easy for you to
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get out it really does not okay and then shortly thereafter um I
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upped it to the delete after I had given myself time to be mindful about the
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consequences of deleting my Facebook account okay and if
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I delete my Facebook account that means I can no longer laun in and moderate uh
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other Pages I'll call them commercial Pages um that I had out there for music
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and art and stuff and uh events and so forth like it's almost as though you've
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you know you're being towed Along by a ship in your own little boat and you are
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cutting the rope that connects you to that ship the bigger one that you built but
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you kind of willing to let that just kind of sail away uh like a lot of the stuff that you find you know if you know
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about archive.org if you use their way back machine you can find stuff that
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that that was once on domains that no longer exist and I'm kind of willing to
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let some of my stuff go off into that ether um not really trusting that it
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will be preserved but that it might be and I don't care I'm a res I can
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untether from those things I don't even have those things to sell anymore who cares right bye I also knew that I was
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going to probably have to um find a new way to
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communicate to replace the Facebook messenger chat box which I think most
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people find them useful locally for some reason I don't know and I I had found it
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I just find Facebook to be a generally crappy way to communicate anything that
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you want to get feedback about or attendance to unless you are
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already a celebrity of sorts or independently um economically
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independent you know what I'm saying and not caught up in
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uh monetary dependencies that involve other people uh and I made the hard decision
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that yes I'm going to let go of that and I know that this is going to disconnect me from photographs that I no longer
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have I no longer have and then I remembered that I
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actually did a dump uh of my Facebook
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media just a couple years ago and that I actually do have most of the photographs
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I've taken since then and that was the thing that made me say okay fine I'm
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going to actually delete this account and let it go away make it vanish when somebody looks for it it ain't there and
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that was at the end of November around the beginning of December all right so what happened
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right after that was I started getting these funny messages that I hadn't gotten before that were saying hey did
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you Lo someone logged into Facebook using your account in such such a
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location you know and it might have been in Charlotte North
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Carolina right or uh Boone North Carolina now these people are too far
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away to be hacking my my Wi-Fi right and
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the first couple of times that happened I'm like what's up with that
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like you do and like I did I don't anymore but
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anyway so I I I went for the bait on the
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hook that was dangling right there that someone's messing with you know your communication
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tools and guess what happened as soon as I clicked on that
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thing up came a thing that said that to proceed to The Next Step you'll need to
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log in I don't think of myself as a stupid person
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okay I'm ignorant about a lot of stuff but I'm not stupid I clicked that damn
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button to go find out if somebody was in my stuff okay they weren't they weren't
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I never found a explanation for why that occurred okay cuz I wasn't driving out of network or anything like that when
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that was going on so I don't get it so what I'm guessing is it it's part of the
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game right so then what I did was create a filter to make those kind kind of
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messages not get to my inbox just poof go away all
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right months pass I know that if I go to in order to
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check whether or not my Facebook account isn't
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there I have to have a I'll have to log in to find out and I
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know what happened before so several months go by here we are on the middle of March and I don't log into Facebook
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never a couple more of those did you log in I they sneak through they get past
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the filter I I spam them and get them right out of there okay so just a couple days ago this is
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the funny part for me our older daughter's over at the house and we're hanging out on the porch right drinking
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coffee and uh smoking cigarettes I say do me a
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favor anyway no I don't go in there and see if
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you can get to my Facebook account because as far as I know it shouldn't be there and I don't
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want to be the one to look okay you got a Facebook account and of course we've been Facebook friends go see if my
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account's still there and so she picks up her phone 5 seconds later she goes yeah it's
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still there she holds it up and shows to me and I'm like damn it and I just do
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not get it okay I just don't get
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[Laughter] it so on me
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right this is called the devil's tennis so anyways I'm smoking these
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inexpensive crowns Menthol Lights they're all we can afford down here in
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this tobacco State anyways
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um that's another video all together so I am just racking my
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mind and tin and I are watching a movie last night this apocalyptic thing called
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How It Ends from about six years
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ago with ad so during one of the ads I push the mute
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button and I say hey h h how do you I haven't used
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Facebook at all for months I just don't get it I say this to my
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wife and she goes well I use it sometimes and I
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go what do you mean and she says that our
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friend who um is a great teacher and just a lovely lady and and she's um she's really fond
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of Tina's crocheting work and and has actually found all kinds of great ways
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that Tina can can crochet things and and uh you know them get the people that would enjoy them and stuff you know so
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anyways she says well you know like when Shen sends me something that you know like I should check out you know like a
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pattern or something and I said yeah but and this is when the light bulb came on
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I said you've never had a Facebook account you flat out refused for years
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to have a Facebook account I said you don't even have an email address I
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said don't you understand what you what you what's happened
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here so funny to me I said you kept me
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in Facebook each time you looked at something that
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somebody said hey look at this and it was on Facebook you know on some
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crocheting group page or something you use my email to log into
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my Facebook page in order to have access to viewing that thing and she's
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goes oh oh and then her light bulb came on
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I'm really proud of her for never getting caught up in this junk I'm telling you you know like this is the kind of this is ignorance is bliss you
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know she's never been on any of that Facebook stuff and whenever she uh someone else sends her there to look at
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something it generally causes aggravation and I wouldn't have it any other way so anyways so the mystery of
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the the you know The Walking Dead Facebook account why won't it just die
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um has been solved and she went in and did a for stop on uh the uh app in her
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phone right so that she uh won't be tempted ever again and I asked her also
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if she would be so kind as to communicate to Shannon that please don't send me any Facebook links but anyways
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so I'm I'm saying that here you know my good friends know even the even the ones
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who never like or comment on my videos I see how many views there are I know what's going on out
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there but anyways uh you know that you know Facebook wasn't fun either um it
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did sell a bunch of records though so that's cool so pretty soon I think I'm
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going to be able to actually shoot the head off of The Walking Dead Facebook account you know it'll stay down
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right so you know I hope I don't have to make another video about uh on this
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subject and this video is all oh Lord this recordings all the way up to 33118 so I better give it a stop
Saturday, October 10, 2020
It's been a decade since I last blogged ... MOON MEN - amusingly serious progressive music
Monday, August 9, 2010
Before I Can No Longer Remember: The Great American Testimony, 1982-1985
Upon graduating from 'Madstop' - S.U.N.Y. Potsdam in the Spring of 1982, with a B.A. in English/Art, I found myself saddled with about $10,000 in college loans. New York State was experiencing high unemployment and the best my college degree was able to parlay for me in its economy was a 40-hour, 11PM-7AM, short-order cook position at Mario's Little Gem Diner in Syracuse. The job had its enjoyments and I learned to cook efficiently for groups. However, it paid poorly, I was living with my parents and driving a beater of a car, and the future looked like a big, meaningless void. And along came the payback cycle of the loans, which left me in a fix.
My childhood friend, Jim Irwin, had just enlisted in the Army and would be going to helicopter repair school after boot camp. He told me about the benefits and pay; far better than what I was making. I began speaking to recruiters to see what was out there for a college grad with my degree.
The Navy appealed to me most, to a great extent because I'd heard my dad's Korean War Navy stories for years, seen photographs and some funny 8mm footage from his travels, and had always admired the medals he kept in a cigar box on his dresser.
I won't go too deeply into the baloney (gotta get that quota to be promoted) a North Syracuse recruiter fed me about "the modern Navy" and it's "need for technical degrees" and how my education had little use to the Officer Corps. Suffice it to say that I signed up for a four year tour as an enlisted man, found out three years later that I had been the victim of recruitment fraud, and that "it would be dealt with"; this by the Navy Captain who I found myself, entirely by chance, eating lunch and chatting with one Saturday afternoon at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. He just happened to be 2nd in command of naval recruitment in these United States. I'd hate to have been that Senior Chief when he got called onto the carpet.
In April of '83, I got on a plane for the Recruit Training Center in San Diego, California. I was assigned to a "drill company", which meant that our company of 80+ guys would learn all of the gun twirling and flag marching stuff that would happen during the eventual graduation ceremony. This made things a bit more fun, as the time we spent doing this training circumvented doing something worse. Boot camp was about physical fitness, learning about the US Navy and its regulations and principles, learning how to accept and follow directions, cleanliness, developing personal responsibility, and putting a sharp point on one's coping skills. We ran, swam, marched, sang, stood at attention or 'parade rest' for what felt like hours, ate mediocre food, got yelled at, washed clothes, studied for tests, and were shepherded through a process that, in effect, built character and erased social distinction. I would recommend these lessons for anyone. They sure shaped some of what endures in me as useful. We graduated and were officially sailors, ready for "A-School', where we would obtain the foundations of our chosen job fields.
Next, off to the The Presidio of Monterey, located in Monterey, California, an active US Army installation that is the home of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLI-FLC). I lived and mustered with about 200 other sailors, men and women, studying several languages through speaking, listening, and writing. We ate, discussed, worked out, and partied together. Intellect, youthful energy, and fun were in the air. Some of the best cookouts and pick-up basketball games ever took place in the shade of our barracks. Olympic amounts of imported beer were downed. Guitars were plugged in and noise was made. The Presidio is built high on a coastal hill, with the stunningly beautiful Monterey Bay below and pine trees and deer above. Idyllic. John Steinbeck wrote many of his manuscripts in a cathouse called Kalisa's down on Cannery Row. No longer a whorehouse, Kalisa's was now a great Greek restaurant with live music and poetry readings in the evening; with Kalisa herself still hostess of the establishment! I bought my first 4-track recording deck at a Monterey music shop and built my first homemade instrument in the Army wood shop on-post.
When I arrived, I didn't even know the real nature of the job I'd be doing for the government with the language, as it was classified and we didn't yet have "the need to know". Having tested with a high score on the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB), I was given the choice of any offered course of language study. What language should I choose? I took an opportunity to talk with the Command Master Chief, a 25+ year Russian linguist and asked him, if he could do it all over again and was in my position, what language would he have chosen and why?
He said, "If I were in your shoes, I'd choose Korean. It is the only language you can study here that sends you to a place where you can actually speak it with people. Russian, Chinese, and Arabic linguists never get sent to those countries to do the job we do."
So I chose to become a Korean Linguist, in typical military obfuscation, titled 'Cryptologic Technician - Interpretive' in publications. I spent the next 60 weeks studying Korean language, culture, and grammar, 8 hours a day, five days a week. It was tough. The two Korean alphabets are either pictographic (Chinese - used in newspapers) or employ strange phonetic sound-symbols that are assembled on the page like complex fractions, rather than linearly as is English. INTENSE. Eight in our class graduated of the forty we started with. Waiting for the next Korean class to also graduate so a group could be sent to the next school, I was imported into a 'level two' Korean class for 16 weeks before shipping out for technological training in Texas.
Goodfellow Air Force Base is located in the western part of the state, just outside of a dust town called San Angelo. There, I was taught how to use a host of high-tech gear essential to the job and how to type 60wpm. We were in the DESERT. I saw snakes and jack rabbits out there while running the base perimeter that were monstrous. Living life near cities had always obscured the night's stars and I had never seen a sky so giant and clear. The food was dreadful and I will never be able to shake the memory of the huge keg of a breakfast cook in the mess hall who would, daily, shower the eggs and bacon she was flipping with a rain of sweat from her forehead. A Chinese linguist, Pete Nickless, turned me on to the music of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band during my six months there. What an epiphany! Every form of indigenous American music thrown into a blender and made into...what? Great stuff and really influential on my own slide guitar playing. I developed a burrito addiction, plowing through tens of them every week. There was a shallow river crawling through San Angelo that you could always see snakes in. The place was brown and dry; very like a scene from a cowboy movie. Towns-people and many of us from on-base would get together at a huge concrete sluice/dam that was nearby, just out of town. I had some extreme good times out there. Aerosmith and Zeppelin from boomboxes would bounce and echo like crazy in that place, and there was a long, smooth incline to the cool and calm water below. It reminded me of something from Clockwork Orange, minus the violence. Eventually, when our trainers deemed us capable of using the expensive equipment and not breaking it, we graduated from tech school.
Aircrew Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida's Naval Air Station came next. My Navy life was a slow and often arduous succession of trainings and schools. I opted for becoming an Aircrewman, it is voluntary, because the pay was better and the travel opportunities opened considerably. You'll notice that I'm not getting into any detail about my job. That is because I may not do so. Period. Until I die. That's just how it works. Our intelligence work was conducted from many platforms, military aircraft being one. There are things to know and be able to do when your job is on an airplane that could crash of be shot down. Swimming. Running. Not getting electrocuted during a rescue or drowned by your own parachute. Properly exiting an aircraft that is underwater (I almost drowned during this test, for the harness had a faulty buckle that got stuck and had to be cut by a scuba diver after I'd been under for over a minute and a half. Thank God for all the swimming I'd done at the Bayberry Pool as a kid!). We swam and we ran. We ran in dry sand, less traction. We ran timed trials through a tough obstacle course that involved climbing, crawling, balancing, dodging, and avoiding things. We studied necessary texts. And we slept like logs at night. Things like that. My mind was becoming completely able to not expect much enjoyment from work, but rather "to get through this and on to that, and then off-base tonight for some clams and beers." My parents had taught me "to cope", but the Navy was like a graduate course. Eight weeks later, we graduated and got to wear the winged uniform patch and embroidered ballcap representing induction to aircrew status. These things mattered and matter. My medals, ribbons, and letters of commendation signify accomplishment and having paid my dues to earn something. They remind me that I have been an adult and met a difficult criteria, not always possible.
The last phase of becoming an airman is completing P.O.W. Training in the California mountains. In three words: Incredibly Not Fun. SERE is a United States military acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, a program that provides military personnel, Department of Defense civilians and private military contractors with training in evading capture, survival skills and the military code of conduct. A "what if?" scenario, we were given tattered uniforms to wear, a knife and compass, and set down in the mountains. We were told that we were to avoid being caught, but not to get ourselves killed if we were "captured by the enemy". We were also told that being caught was inevitable. Humvees and other armed vehicles, firing blanks, we later found out, prowled everywhere, and the enemy (camouflaged Navy SEALS dressed as Russian soldiers) knew the lay of the land. We were given an initial clue to a second location, which would have a clue to a third and so on. Any of us (about 50) who located the "safe house" would be fed and sheltered for a spell. Two other guys and I made it to the safe house and had, maybe, three minutes to eat from a pot of cooked vegetables before the house was overrun and we, too, were caught. Without going into too much of it, the next few days were a test of each man's will to keep a secret, and to be taken to the place where you had to choose between injury and survival. One jarhead invited extra torment by getting his back up and sassing a guy they called "Bruiser" (Two days before while we were 'evading' in the mountains, the same Marine caught, cooked, and shared a rabbit he'd snared with some of us. Then, he put his hand up inside the skin, head still attached, and did a "puppet show" that had us rolling on the ground laughing.) One man tried to escape and ended up breaking his leg. I'll never forget the rice with way too much salt they made us eat. I spent the better part of an afternoon in a (working and ventilated) refrigerator, and another being thrown against a wall. It sucked, but we made it through the ordeal, and it was an ordeal.
Before 'shipping out', I had three days of "R & R" in San Diego during 1985. Besides the usual walking around between beers one does in a strange town, in the evenings I wrote this long, surreal narrative poem about my life and the changes I'd taken myself through.
==================================================
THE GREAT AMERICAN TESTIMONY
I. On Improvisational Living
I have thrown it with all my strength
it arcs around the planet in silent acceleration
over oasis and plant life
blowing hats and turbans from heads
then it reappears in my trouser pocket
the one with the hole in it
'Hello' is repeated over and over
while the other digits dance through
at a rate and intervals governed by temperature
something big and creamy is still knocking at the door
cold smoke anthems puff freely
beneath chairs and tables
an aluminum can keeps falling to the floor
with a luminous thud
between love and lust lies like,
but what lies between like and want?
more trips to the public urinal in the club
with those cigarette frigates and oysters
that won't go down
my feet fall apart slowly, like mica
and pack small windows into my shoes
in a place where wind erodes a bit of red sandstone
until it is the shape of a rose
and dinosaur fragments litter the site
of a faulty flashlight pool
now I'm in a favorite place
up there
on the very top of New York State
where a friendly princess in a rocking chair
smiles
asks how I've been
and sells me a book.
it's like apple and oranges
there are no truly red oranges
there are no truly orange apples
all red apples are apples
all orange oranges are oranges
apples are not oranges
and vice-versa
apples and oranges have this in common
we put them in our mouths
here's a seedless orange for you
do you have a wormless apple for me?
I am an American
I am an artist
I am an American artist
I am, therefore, at an advantage
you see, bad man only had one idea
some drone got himself a new attitude
and then got mad about it
"This cube is such a hell!"
at the hospital, a sign said
"Problems are 90% attitude
and 10% external occurrence."
the ears enjoy whales
the hole is tobacco-stained
foreign shapes come out of it
affection is inverted, heart-holes out
producing beautiful patterns on warped tablet
Mr. Lobster is getting pretty accustomed
to taking drugs which
never really brace him for that bathtub
men with birds on their shoulders
sit at an adjacent table
and let cigar smoke pour from their face-holes
some noble creature with buttocks
sticking out of its collar
is struggling with a necktie
as his bedecked wife paints
navy-blue eyeliner under her one brown eye
my skin is stretched and spread
over color zones
and feeds noisily
with all of its holes
snappin' and gnashin'
a blue pen goes dry
bringing to mind an easy metaphor
and her hair in candlelight
carp mimic salmon and dash their brains out
in currents of ill-positioned ego
and a very false sense of
"What the people want from their Art"
tears flow from rusty spigots
in their foreheads
"WHY HIM?!", she convulsed under his table
and said, "DON'T!"
too drugged to pause, he filleted the salmon
and drew from its ovary
a string of tiny human hands
connected thumb-to-pinky
the snack was re-hydrated and filled
with crunchy goodness
as I looked from a window in tears
a cork-board laden with notes
and photos
and clippings
rustles with the sound of a passing marsupial
a little pink beanbaby leans forward
and out come pink bubbles
to be carried away by doves
the Long Wait is a map
leading to an orchard
with friendly beasts baying in stereo
This is the Great American Testimony
No purple mountains majesty to speak of here
only farts and fools and futures
and countless false starts
You are proud of it
==================================
On a Sunday, I got carried my dufflebag onto a C-130 for duty in the Pacific.
Oh boy.
My childhood friend, Jim Irwin, had just enlisted in the Army and would be going to helicopter repair school after boot camp. He told me about the benefits and pay; far better than what I was making. I began speaking to recruiters to see what was out there for a college grad with my degree.
The Navy appealed to me most, to a great extent because I'd heard my dad's Korean War Navy stories for years, seen photographs and some funny 8mm footage from his travels, and had always admired the medals he kept in a cigar box on his dresser.
I won't go too deeply into the baloney (gotta get that quota to be promoted) a North Syracuse recruiter fed me about "the modern Navy" and it's "need for technical degrees" and how my education had little use to the Officer Corps. Suffice it to say that I signed up for a four year tour as an enlisted man, found out three years later that I had been the victim of recruitment fraud, and that "it would be dealt with"; this by the Navy Captain who I found myself, entirely by chance, eating lunch and chatting with one Saturday afternoon at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. He just happened to be 2nd in command of naval recruitment in these United States. I'd hate to have been that Senior Chief when he got called onto the carpet.
In April of '83, I got on a plane for the Recruit Training Center in San Diego, California. I was assigned to a "drill company", which meant that our company of 80+ guys would learn all of the gun twirling and flag marching stuff that would happen during the eventual graduation ceremony. This made things a bit more fun, as the time we spent doing this training circumvented doing something worse. Boot camp was about physical fitness, learning about the US Navy and its regulations and principles, learning how to accept and follow directions, cleanliness, developing personal responsibility, and putting a sharp point on one's coping skills. We ran, swam, marched, sang, stood at attention or 'parade rest' for what felt like hours, ate mediocre food, got yelled at, washed clothes, studied for tests, and were shepherded through a process that, in effect, built character and erased social distinction. I would recommend these lessons for anyone. They sure shaped some of what endures in me as useful. We graduated and were officially sailors, ready for "A-School', where we would obtain the foundations of our chosen job fields.
Next, off to the The Presidio of Monterey, located in Monterey, California, an active US Army installation that is the home of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLI-FLC). I lived and mustered with about 200 other sailors, men and women, studying several languages through speaking, listening, and writing. We ate, discussed, worked out, and partied together. Intellect, youthful energy, and fun were in the air. Some of the best cookouts and pick-up basketball games ever took place in the shade of our barracks. Olympic amounts of imported beer were downed. Guitars were plugged in and noise was made. The Presidio is built high on a coastal hill, with the stunningly beautiful Monterey Bay below and pine trees and deer above. Idyllic. John Steinbeck wrote many of his manuscripts in a cathouse called Kalisa's down on Cannery Row. No longer a whorehouse, Kalisa's was now a great Greek restaurant with live music and poetry readings in the evening; with Kalisa herself still hostess of the establishment! I bought my first 4-track recording deck at a Monterey music shop and built my first homemade instrument in the Army wood shop on-post.
When I arrived, I didn't even know the real nature of the job I'd be doing for the government with the language, as it was classified and we didn't yet have "the need to know". Having tested with a high score on the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB), I was given the choice of any offered course of language study. What language should I choose? I took an opportunity to talk with the Command Master Chief, a 25+ year Russian linguist and asked him, if he could do it all over again and was in my position, what language would he have chosen and why?
He said, "If I were in your shoes, I'd choose Korean. It is the only language you can study here that sends you to a place where you can actually speak it with people. Russian, Chinese, and Arabic linguists never get sent to those countries to do the job we do."
So I chose to become a Korean Linguist, in typical military obfuscation, titled 'Cryptologic Technician - Interpretive' in publications. I spent the next 60 weeks studying Korean language, culture, and grammar, 8 hours a day, five days a week. It was tough. The two Korean alphabets are either pictographic (Chinese - used in newspapers) or employ strange phonetic sound-symbols that are assembled on the page like complex fractions, rather than linearly as is English. INTENSE. Eight in our class graduated of the forty we started with. Waiting for the next Korean class to also graduate so a group could be sent to the next school, I was imported into a 'level two' Korean class for 16 weeks before shipping out for technological training in Texas.
Goodfellow Air Force Base is located in the western part of the state, just outside of a dust town called San Angelo. There, I was taught how to use a host of high-tech gear essential to the job and how to type 60wpm. We were in the DESERT. I saw snakes and jack rabbits out there while running the base perimeter that were monstrous. Living life near cities had always obscured the night's stars and I had never seen a sky so giant and clear. The food was dreadful and I will never be able to shake the memory of the huge keg of a breakfast cook in the mess hall who would, daily, shower the eggs and bacon she was flipping with a rain of sweat from her forehead. A Chinese linguist, Pete Nickless, turned me on to the music of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band during my six months there. What an epiphany! Every form of indigenous American music thrown into a blender and made into...what? Great stuff and really influential on my own slide guitar playing. I developed a burrito addiction, plowing through tens of them every week. There was a shallow river crawling through San Angelo that you could always see snakes in. The place was brown and dry; very like a scene from a cowboy movie. Towns-people and many of us from on-base would get together at a huge concrete sluice/dam that was nearby, just out of town. I had some extreme good times out there. Aerosmith and Zeppelin from boomboxes would bounce and echo like crazy in that place, and there was a long, smooth incline to the cool and calm water below. It reminded me of something from Clockwork Orange, minus the violence. Eventually, when our trainers deemed us capable of using the expensive equipment and not breaking it, we graduated from tech school.
Aircrew Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida's Naval Air Station came next. My Navy life was a slow and often arduous succession of trainings and schools. I opted for becoming an Aircrewman, it is voluntary, because the pay was better and the travel opportunities opened considerably. You'll notice that I'm not getting into any detail about my job. That is because I may not do so. Period. Until I die. That's just how it works. Our intelligence work was conducted from many platforms, military aircraft being one. There are things to know and be able to do when your job is on an airplane that could crash of be shot down. Swimming. Running. Not getting electrocuted during a rescue or drowned by your own parachute. Properly exiting an aircraft that is underwater (I almost drowned during this test, for the harness had a faulty buckle that got stuck and had to be cut by a scuba diver after I'd been under for over a minute and a half. Thank God for all the swimming I'd done at the Bayberry Pool as a kid!). We swam and we ran. We ran in dry sand, less traction. We ran timed trials through a tough obstacle course that involved climbing, crawling, balancing, dodging, and avoiding things. We studied necessary texts. And we slept like logs at night. Things like that. My mind was becoming completely able to not expect much enjoyment from work, but rather "to get through this and on to that, and then off-base tonight for some clams and beers." My parents had taught me "to cope", but the Navy was like a graduate course. Eight weeks later, we graduated and got to wear the winged uniform patch and embroidered ballcap representing induction to aircrew status. These things mattered and matter. My medals, ribbons, and letters of commendation signify accomplishment and having paid my dues to earn something. They remind me that I have been an adult and met a difficult criteria, not always possible.
The last phase of becoming an airman is completing P.O.W. Training in the California mountains. In three words: Incredibly Not Fun. SERE is a United States military acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, a program that provides military personnel, Department of Defense civilians and private military contractors with training in evading capture, survival skills and the military code of conduct. A "what if?" scenario, we were given tattered uniforms to wear, a knife and compass, and set down in the mountains. We were told that we were to avoid being caught, but not to get ourselves killed if we were "captured by the enemy". We were also told that being caught was inevitable. Humvees and other armed vehicles, firing blanks, we later found out, prowled everywhere, and the enemy (camouflaged Navy SEALS dressed as Russian soldiers) knew the lay of the land. We were given an initial clue to a second location, which would have a clue to a third and so on. Any of us (about 50) who located the "safe house" would be fed and sheltered for a spell. Two other guys and I made it to the safe house and had, maybe, three minutes to eat from a pot of cooked vegetables before the house was overrun and we, too, were caught. Without going into too much of it, the next few days were a test of each man's will to keep a secret, and to be taken to the place where you had to choose between injury and survival. One jarhead invited extra torment by getting his back up and sassing a guy they called "Bruiser" (Two days before while we were 'evading' in the mountains, the same Marine caught, cooked, and shared a rabbit he'd snared with some of us. Then, he put his hand up inside the skin, head still attached, and did a "puppet show" that had us rolling on the ground laughing.) One man tried to escape and ended up breaking his leg. I'll never forget the rice with way too much salt they made us eat. I spent the better part of an afternoon in a (working and ventilated) refrigerator, and another being thrown against a wall. It sucked, but we made it through the ordeal, and it was an ordeal.
Before 'shipping out', I had three days of "R & R" in San Diego during 1985. Besides the usual walking around between beers one does in a strange town, in the evenings I wrote this long, surreal narrative poem about my life and the changes I'd taken myself through.
==================================================
THE GREAT AMERICAN TESTIMONY
I. On Improvisational Living
I have thrown it with all my strength
it arcs around the planet in silent acceleration
over oasis and plant life
blowing hats and turbans from heads
then it reappears in my trouser pocket
the one with the hole in it
'Hello' is repeated over and over
while the other digits dance through
at a rate and intervals governed by temperature
something big and creamy is still knocking at the door
cold smoke anthems puff freely
beneath chairs and tables
an aluminum can keeps falling to the floor
with a luminous thud
between love and lust lies like,
but what lies between like and want?
more trips to the public urinal in the club
with those cigarette frigates and oysters
that won't go down
my feet fall apart slowly, like mica
and pack small windows into my shoes
in a place where wind erodes a bit of red sandstone
until it is the shape of a rose
and dinosaur fragments litter the site
of a faulty flashlight pool
now I'm in a favorite place
up there
on the very top of New York State
where a friendly princess in a rocking chair
smiles
asks how I've been
and sells me a book.
it's like apple and oranges
there are no truly red oranges
there are no truly orange apples
all red apples are apples
all orange oranges are oranges
apples are not oranges
and vice-versa
apples and oranges have this in common
we put them in our mouths
here's a seedless orange for you
do you have a wormless apple for me?
I am an American
I am an artist
I am an American artist
I am, therefore, at an advantage
you see, bad man only had one idea
some drone got himself a new attitude
and then got mad about it
"This cube is such a hell!"
at the hospital, a sign said
"Problems are 90% attitude
and 10% external occurrence."
the ears enjoy whales
the hole is tobacco-stained
foreign shapes come out of it
affection is inverted, heart-holes out
producing beautiful patterns on warped tablet
Mr. Lobster is getting pretty accustomed
to taking drugs which
never really brace him for that bathtub
men with birds on their shoulders
sit at an adjacent table
and let cigar smoke pour from their face-holes
some noble creature with buttocks
sticking out of its collar
is struggling with a necktie
as his bedecked wife paints
navy-blue eyeliner under her one brown eye
my skin is stretched and spread
over color zones
and feeds noisily
with all of its holes
snappin' and gnashin'
a blue pen goes dry
bringing to mind an easy metaphor
and her hair in candlelight
carp mimic salmon and dash their brains out
in currents of ill-positioned ego
and a very false sense of
"What the people want from their Art"
tears flow from rusty spigots
in their foreheads
"WHY HIM?!", she convulsed under his table
and said, "DON'T!"
too drugged to pause, he filleted the salmon
and drew from its ovary
a string of tiny human hands
connected thumb-to-pinky
the snack was re-hydrated and filled
with crunchy goodness
as I looked from a window in tears
a cork-board laden with notes
and photos
and clippings
rustles with the sound of a passing marsupial
a little pink beanbaby leans forward
and out come pink bubbles
to be carried away by doves
the Long Wait is a map
leading to an orchard
with friendly beasts baying in stereo
This is the Great American Testimony
No purple mountains majesty to speak of here
only farts and fools and futures
and countless false starts
You are proud of it
==================================
On a Sunday, I got carried my dufflebag onto a C-130 for duty in the Pacific.
Oh boy.
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