There was a segment on NPR this morning. A man talking about his mother and how happy and caring she always was. And then it came time for her to die, and the man was sad and his mother looked him in the eye and asked him “Do you not know what a privilege it is to die?”
And those were the last words he heard her speak.
I buried my mom and dad all inside a year. It was a long time ago, and it still affects me in ways I’m probably not even aware of. But I am aware of what a beautiful year that was, and what a privilege it was to their son that year.
There was a lot of treasure there.
by Sandra Cisneros
This is my father.
See? He is young.
He looks like Errol Flynn.
He is wearing a hat
that tips over one eye,
a suit that fits him good,
and baggy pants.
He is also wearing
those awful shoes,
the two-toned ones
my mother hates.
Here is my mother.
She is not crying.
She cannot look into the lens
because the sun is bright.
The woman,
the one my father knows,
is not here.
She does not come till later.
My mother will get very mad.
Her face will turn red
and she will throw one shoe.
My father will say nothing.
After a while everyone
will forget it.
Years and years will pass.
My mother will stop mentioning it.
This is me she is carrying.
I am a baby.
She does not know
I will turn out bad.
Kristi after 40 provided the name of the poet, and I dug this one out of her collection.
"... never contradict anyone or seek to prove anything to anyone unless one gets paid for it in cold, hard coin."
george jean nathan
from thisisnthappiness
Coaches, man, they always talked so rough.
Deep-voiced and rough.
“Coach, I hurt my big toe. I can’t practice football today.”
“Bullshit. You need a doctors excuse to miss practice”
“Yes Coach, I got one right here.”
“When did you go to the doctor?”
“Yesterday when I got home. My toe hurt. Mom took me.”
Coach examines excuse for a minute.
“So your mommy took you to the doctor. Okay Phantom, get your sorry ass over there with the rest of the invalids”
‘Sorry coach”
“You are all about sorry, aren’t you?’
“Yessir, thank you sir”
Frick’n coaches man, they were brutal.
My nickname used to be "The Phantom".
FROM THE CONTINUING CHRONICLES OF FIGHTING JOE, v. 2.5
When he was 4 years old, Buck Boopman cried all the way to and from the all-girl tap dancing lessons his mother made him go to. But he did not cry during the classes. No, that would have been too humiliating. It was bad enough to have to wear that leotard and those shiny black shoes with the little ribbon as a shoelace without bawling like a big baby about the whole thing. The real reason Buck kept it together was simply out of respect for the little girls in that class, especially Teddy, the daughter of the Minister at the church he went to. Buck always looked forward to seeing Teddy there. Teddy was Buck's first love. Tap-dancing lessons may not have made him a dancer, but they taught him that sometimes love is just hoping to see someone, and keeping it together for them when you do.
A few years later, in the second Grade, Buck would walk home from school with Donna for lunch everyday. And everyday he would split the baby Snickers bar his mother had given him with Donna when they met on the corner for the walk back to school. One day when his mother gave him his usual Snickers bar, Buck asked if he might have TWO Snickers bars today.
"Why do you need two today?" his mother asked.
And Buck explained to his mother that everyday he split his candy bar with Donna, and that today he thought maybe Donna might like one of her own.
"Oh yes!" his mother beamed as she wiped her hands on her Watermelon Apron and reached into the pantry for another Snickers "You most certainly may!"
These two events would form Bucks attitude towards women that he kept for the rest of his life.
It was also why he felt a bit nervous and uneasy about the effect that his step-sister Betsye had on him, all the while hoping something might happen between the two of them.
You may recall that my 1975 Chevy truck burned to the ground last month.
I’ve been going to the Dallas Can Charity Auto Auction the last month looking for a new car. I’ve been going with my pal Jeff, who has bought several cars there, and had pretty good luck. The last car he bought was a 2000 Mustang. He bought it for my daughter.
See, in addition to being one of my High School pals, he is also stepfather to my daughter, by virtue of being the husband of the Ex-mrs Bulletholes.
But all that is a whole ‘nother story.
Jeff has bought several cars at the auction. You get them pretty cheap, but there is no way of knowing what all may be wrong with them until you drive them off the lot.
The first week, Jeff stopped me from bidding on a cute little British 1977 model MGB-GT. It ran, and it sold for only $800, but as cute as it was it would have been the wrong car for me. I barely fit in it.
The next week, there was a nice Accura, but the bidding took off, and it went for 3000. I don’t want to spend that much on a car, only to find I need to put another 1500 into it just to get it roadworthy, because like I said, you don’t really know what they may need until you drive them off the lot. And the assumption is that most will need something.
Last week, I bought a car. It is an Isuzu Rodeo, in good shape, and I thought it might go for 2000 or more, but the bidding got stuck at 1500, and I won!
But when I drove it off the lot, the transmission was slipping. So I had to take it to the shop. I had hoped that 1500 might get the transmission fixed, and that would seem to me to still be a pretty good deal, but these transmission are apparently harder to fix.
The price is 2500 for a rebuild on the transmission!
So I called the Ex Mrs Bulletholes and told her how much it was going to cost.
“Twenty –Five hundred dollars for A Joe Isuzu Japanese Transmission!” I told her.
She gasped, and asked “What are you going to do?”
"What am I going to do? I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to NOT GO GET ANY DOPE, that’s what I’m going to do!!!”
There was about 8 seconds of silence over the line, and then she says real softly, real relieved:
“I am so glad for that”
People not in the program probably don’t really know what that means, how positive an action it is to actively stay clean, and while she has watched me for all these years do what it is I do, I think for the first time she really understood what that meant.
The miracle is that it wasn’t long ago that every last thin dime I had went right up my nose.
The mathematics of it is I actually have the money to do this.
And its still not a bad deal for 4000. Not for Dallas Can Auction, not for me, and certainly not for the transmission guy.
I got my book published!
The premiere was last weekend down at Barnes and Noble.
The title, which I am still trying to figure out, was “A Room With A Freeway View”.
I sat at a table, surround by stacks of my book. A blonde haired woman with cat glasses and a huge pearl necklace in a low cut dress stood and handed out copies of “A Room With A Freeway View” as customers walked by.
But the book, it had a green and gold colored paper sleeve on it, it looked just like a Narcotics Anonymous book “The 12 Steps Stepworking Guide”, but instead of saying that on the cover, it said “A Room With A Freeway View”.
So I asked the lady handing out my books why.
“Why does my book have this green and gold cover and look like an NA book”
“Because it is an NA book” she says.
"No, no, no, my book IS NOT an NA book!”
She bent over a little, real close like, her pearl necklace dangling next to my neck and I could see her cleavage real nice from her low cut dress, and she whispered kind of matter-of-factly into my ear:
“Oh yes dear, it is definitely an NA book”
And I woke up. And I kind of realized that any book I might write would be an NA book of sorts and that everything I do the rest of my life will be grounded on the principles I try to apply to my daily life that I have learned about at NA. That without having come to NA, I would still be slugging in out in the unmanagability and insanity of my life, riding a bike everywhere I went, likely homeless and jobless and miserable.
And all I could think was one of the things we say at the group a lot;
“The only way to keep from returning to active addiction is not to take that first drug.”
follow the link above to see where I must have got the title for this "book"
We have a Salvadorian restaurant around the corner. I can't go in there. The food is good, but they have the place decorated with all sizes, shapes and colors of dead stuffed frogs. Some of them are playing guitars or driving '57 chevy's. There are two that appear to be getting married, with a little frog priest and everything.
Its very sad looking to me, and the little ones playing baseball just break my heart.
The album that inspired my 10th grade year. (see previous post)
I think sometime even after the 10th grade, I used to take the album to different people’s houses, and much to their chagrin, insist that they play it. I did the same thing with an Atomic Rooster album. Its a wonder I had any friends at all.
Oh wow. When I was in the ninth grade I had this album by a band called Bang, and they had a song on it called "Future Shock". I loved that album, and the next year a book appeared on a reading list at school called "Future Shock" by a guy named Alvin Toffler. So naturally I picked this book, and did my book report on it.
I think the song was about the book, because it warned of the nightmares that our technological progress was going to create.
My friend Nita did a post about this book, and she says she didn't finish reading it, and the thing is, I don't think I really read the book. I have no recollection of it, and I think maybe I did my book report on the song, not the book.
That sounds real right to me because there was another Bang song called "Our Home" on the same album, and I used it on my science project that same year. The project was that I got an aquarium, and put some fish in it, then poured oil in it to simulate an oil spill, and recorded the results; i.e. how long it took the fish to die.
I had a cardboard exhibit set up in the lunchroom, and the centerpiece was the lyrics to Our Home, with a cassette player that played the song, and in a small corner of my poster board backdrop, there were the results of the study:
That the fish had died painful deaths as a result of the simulated oil spill I had created.
But the teacher asked me why I had no pictures of the project, or the aquarium itself as part of the exhibit, and stuff like that and all I could do was point to the lyrics, and ask her if she wouldn't like to hear "Our Home " again..
Finally she said "You didn't really do all this, with the fish and aquarium, did you?"
and I bowed my head and said "No ma'am" and she still gave me a "D".
That's the kind of student I was in the 10th grade.
I know you guys are dying to hear a Bang song, just to see what scholarly music it was that I was listening to in the 10th grade. I'm really torn as to which one to play for you, they are both so great...haha.
Thanks Nita, for reminding me what a horrible student I truly was.
One of my favorite blogs to go to is Sous Girl. She is a Chef up in British Columbia. She's not an experienced Chef, and neither is she a Baby Chef. She is what I would call a Teenage Chef.
She has all the angst and sturm and drang of a teenager. She has also recently won a victory over cancer.
It is a very uncomfortable place on the learning curve, just like it is a very uncomfortable age to be.
This is probably why I like her blog so much, it really takes me back to read some of the things she is going through. She has inspired more than one Bulletholes story, and I am adding her to my sidebar today.
Recently she has posted about employees meals
Long time ago I had a major grudge against employees meals as well. I think most chefs do at some point. Things get busy as snot in the kitchen, and you tend to run on heat.
You run on heat big-time. You sweat paper chef hats right off your head.
That can make you a real asshole about your third hat for the day, and you don't realise how unnecessary it is at the time to be an asshole.
But I remember sending some real crap down to Cycles, a lot of real crap some days. “Cycles” was the given name for the employees dining room. Some bright bastard from Human Resources had thunk it up during some kind of meth induced psychosis I’m sure. I think it was short for “Recycle” but I don't think that’s what the author had had in mind. Me, I changed it up slightly and called it “Psychos”. Sounds like cycles, but total different meaning.
One day I sent some real crap down there, probably chicken bones and carrot peels, and the next thing I knew I was in the GM’s office, and he was explaining to me that it was the most important meal I would prepare that day.
I didn’t believe him one bit. But what I did come to understand was that if I wanted to win the respect of every manager in the hotel, and the undying love of all the employees, all I had to do was take good care of their free meal for the day. And do it as happily as if it was for a paying customer.
I would come to find out many years and tears later that it might be the only meal they got that day.
A few times a year I do posts about my good pal Buddy Whittington, who has never had any job his whole life but being a musician. He and I went through puberty, and High School together, and after 15 years of touring as John Mayall's lead guitarist, he spends most of his time back here in Fort Worth with his wife and kids. He plays gigs all around town and has a good following, and at any given show there will be up to 100 of us regular Fort Worth fans, most of us being friends to one degree or another.
But several times a year Buddy sets out to play for all the crowned heads of Europe, touring with Peter Green's old band, through Italy, and Luxembourg and Germany, steams his way to the pubs of England and Ireland, and then back to Holland again before coming back home with all his dirty laundry. Buddy says he loves the European blues fans, that there is a huge appreciation over there for blues beyond what you find here in the states.
It seems that Buddy has been nominated for a British Blues Award in the category of Best Overseas Artist. He faces some pretty good competition, with Joe Bonnamassa and Walter Trout also in his category.
I would ask all my Bulletholes peeps a favor, to maybe go to the site BRITISH BLUES AWARDS and vote for Buddy just because I said so.
Or you can go to YouTube and check him out, and the other nominees too, and make up your own mind.
Or you can take a look at some of my past posts about Buddy.
Or you can just sit there, whatever.
Here's one you shouldn't miss; Buddy and Mouse Mayes* doing an old Fleetwood Mac tune. I swear they do tear it up @ the 1:30 mark.
*Mouse Mayes is no slouch either. Thats him on the right. He plays every bit as well as Buddy, his notes seem to start down in his toes, like a Mike Tyson punch, and Mouse has the best Rock Star shirts you've ever seen. Mouse has done what he calls "three tours of duty" with Black Oak Arkansas.
My son asked Mouse if he had any advice for young guitarists.
"Stay in school" Mouse says.
Good advice
Some small towns are funny. The rest are just plain scary. I remember being in Batesville Arkansas once; they manufacture caskets there. As you pass by the town square, there are a dozen grizzled old men, retired casket-makers, that give you the hairy eyeball. There is a stop sign there, but its best just to roll right through it. I stopped off at the diner, where the owner needed more information about me than what I would have expected before he could serve me.
'Its not me, " he explained, "its the darn Chamber of Commerce. They don't want no tourists or college kids classin' up the place."
He told me that it was for that reason he couldn't get anything but frozen peas to serve with his Chicken Fried Steak.
"No fresh vegetables" they had told him, "Too delicious, people might come back"
None of it made any sense, even when he asked if I would like to buy his restaurant so he could get out of Batesvlle Arkansas.
It reminded me of a movie I saw long ago, "Outback" with Donald Pleasance. He played a schoolteacher who was stranded in a funny scary small town where they drank every night and everybody played a game with dice and no one could leave until they won the stupid game. Of course Pleasance never won, the movie ends with him sitting in the scorching sun, sucking on the barrel of a rifle and a single bullet in the chamber.
I just got back from passing through a town like this, where the cashiers at the grocery look at you funny and say "From out of town aren't you?" and its not a question at all. As you pass through the town square there are grizzled old men that don't bother to look up from playing domino's, they know you are there, they knew you were there since before you left the grocery store. You wave at the one who does look up, but he just stares right through you as you pass. Later at the lake there is an eerie quiet and there are no fish, or fisherman, its just you on the lake and you feel a million eyes watching you.
The lady at the grocery store said there had been gators in the lake, and they called in a gator hunter and he pulled 23 out of there and thinks he got them all, but none of the locals will go near it. You start to imagine that somewhere someone is building an altar of straw in the shape of and alligator, like the one in the movie "Hook" and you fight back the feeling you and that altar will have a lot in common around midnight.
It doesn't surprise you one bit when you find your car battery doesn't work, or when the local deputy shows up at dusk with a bottle of whiskey and a set of dice.
The next time you pass by a big 18 wheeler full of coffins, take a look at the tags.
I bet its from Batesville.
NOTE:
This story is inspired by my visit to Tommy and Tammy Rutledge's back about 6 weeks ago. It isn't at all what I intended to write, but every single part of it is 100% true. In fact it is so true that the only thing not true about it is that I took the unbelieveable parts out.
NOTE #2- this was originally posted a year ago under the name "Batesville Casket Company". I've added a bit to it after reposting @ FB.
I've also changed the title, inspired by Soubriquet comments.
.
These are the words I’ve learned to say that help me a great deal:
"OK."
"You’re right."
"I’m sorry."
"So what."
And I’m getting a lot of mileage out of something a Chef told me a long time ago:
“The more you explain now, the more you will have to explain later.”
And a friend of mine, he wrote a poem about clouds, and asked what do clouds hang on to, and he's going through some kind of shit, he has been going through it for a long time, and in all kindness I want to tell him, I did tell him, that only half of life is about hanging on, and the other half is letting go.
But he's gripping too tight to know what I'm talking about, and I didnt want to tell him that its ALL about letting go. Its all about surrender.
So I'll just say "OK."
TRAINING UPDATE
Things are going well down at the gym.
After 4 weeks, I have only missed 2 days! Instead of 12 days of training, that would be 10 days complete. That’s like an 85 out of 100. I’ll take it.
My first day there I stepped on the scale. It read 278.
Since then when I stepped on the scale, it just read ERROR.
But the goal has not been so much to lose weight, but to get in shape and FEEL better. To be able to dance more than a couple few times a night when I go out. To be able to come home in the afternoon and not jjust die in front of the TV, mouth open, fast asleep and drooling on myself. To have the energy to go sing Karoke with my daughter.
I’m pleased to report that I have met two milestones.
My first few workouts when I got on the treadmill to do 30 minutes of cardio, I couldn't make it more than 20 without getting really gassed, and having to step off. I told my trainer this on my way out one day.
“That’s no good. You have to stay on for 30 minutes. Are you slowing the speed down after you reach your Target Heart Rate?” he said.
“No, I didn’t know that was legal.” I said.
He looked at me like I was nuts.
“Of course it is. Just bump the speed down after you reach your target, and you’ll be fine. Can you do that? He said.
“I’ll try.”
He looked at me like I was completely incompetent.
When I went back in two days later and trained for 30 minutes on weights, and went to the treadmill, I was relieved to know I could lower the speed if I needed to. But you know what?
I did all 30 minutes at the original speed!
That’s progress.
A week or two later, I went back to the scale, and it registered “Error” again. It was frustrating a little, not being able to see my weight, but there was a cute trainer at the desk, and I went and asked her what was wrong with the scale.
‘Nothing.” She says “I just used it”
“Every time I get on it I get an ERROR” I said. “Maybe I’m about to break it or something”
She follows me to the scale and I get on it, and it shows error again.
“Try it again” she says “And this time, try not to wobble”
“Am I wobbling?” I ask.
“Yes. Don't wobble.”
I step on it again, and I try to stand there straight and not wobble, but I can tell now I have reached a shape that makes it impossible to stand and not wobble.
The scale says “ERROR”.
She looks at me, sorrily, and says “You wobble too much, Mr. Bulletholes”
“Yes Ma’am, I will have to work on that”
I don't know how you are supposed to work on that, it seems kind of stupid. doesnt every body wobble a little?
Maybe, maybe not , but I stepped up to the scale yesterday and you know what it said?
278!
Same as 4 weeks ago!
But I didn't wobble!
I call that a victory!
Weebels wobble but they don’t fall down!
I don't get over to The Throwaway Blog as often as I should, but I stopped by today and he has a post up, looking for your suggestions for Famous Fictional Trains and Sorry Ass Politicians. Throwaway, aka Dmarks., always does some interesting stuff with his topics, so go by and give him a visit.
Be sure to tell him I sent cha!
