001 Figuring out Earth -or- How do you get off this planet?

by Mike Carpenter  mcarp@mcarp.org http://mcarp.earthstorm.com/

Chapter 001

Having wondered for years why I havent ever written a book, I now start this harrowing procedure in WordPad.  Should be something more important, like MS Word or Wordperfect, with perhaps even more important content.  But it is as it is in the form that it is.  Perhaps these first few sentences will be all that there ever will be.  It is 8:18am, Saturday July 15, 2006.  I'm still prefacing years with 19 and I've been up all night reading the adventures of some 39 foot clipper sailed by an eligant couple who seem to have made their dollars and moved from the rat race to living life full on...something I desparately wish I could do starting this instant having no cash, no boat, no hot little companion to run around the world with and no likelihood of near future income.  I've spent the last 25ish years either staring at a piece of glass or wishing I was, occasionally living the good life off a few dollars from here and there.  I was a castaway in high school, excelling only in those areas that I really liked and trying best effort to ignore the bullies, the chastizers, the achievers, the teachers I clashed with, the homework and of course girls.  I loved girls intensely for some reason but they were deathly scary.  Both reasons eluded me for some time but I took haven in this little flat piece of glass that was attached to a piece of sillicon machinery that seemed poised to bring me the promise of worlds abundant, of fantasies unimaginable, of facinations heretofore unrealized... I had only to prop the hood open to reveal all.  Pushed along gently by my high school electronics teacher Mr Maner., I eagerly explored the world of technology that I hadnt really known existed.  Oh yes I had some here and there samples of what might exist but it was this first year in electronics that I truly found out what was already a plethora of Pandora's Boxes just dying to be opened in the fantasy land of technology.

That is how my long career of seeking began.  For a while I mostly forgot that for some reason I wanted an intense passionate lover that held dear all my inner ideals.  I forgot that I was a misfit among the Joneses, that I dressed funny, that almost nobody played chess, nobody knew what Go was and that most of my friends were going to be mass comm and biz majors in 4 years.  I had come from a childhood that was comfortable in many ways with wonderful parents and 3 pretty good syblings despite my loner attitude.  I knew I was a misfit.  I just didnt realize how  many people I knew were also misfits.  It seems in retrospect that maybe we were all misfits just trying to find our niche as we painfully grew up trying to find ourselves.  Maybe, maybe not, but I didnt have that insight in 1979 or any other previous year of my childhood before starting high school.

Spelling still eludes me often and I find that I do not care...much anway.  In fact sometimes I insist on spelling it my way just because well...English is such a messed up hodgepodge.  Sometimes I find even that its messed up-ness is what makes English a language of ultimate useability.  You can piece any old thing together and have it communicate the idea you just came up with.  Who coined the word computer?  I''m not entirely sure, but I may have read the answer to that question several times.  I've discharged that from memory rather casually if true.  But thats a point I'd like to make right now.  However eligant or important French is or any other spoken/written language is for that matter, I see English as that amazing language that although terribly fallible works no matter how broken it is.  How many ways are there to screw up in Spanish or French just by a simple inflection?  Many neighborhood wars may have been started over this precise fault.  Perhaps the same can be said of English but I do not perceive that it is true.  Hence, I accept that English with all its faults and my misuse of it to be superior.  Not that I have a choice currently.  I know no other spoken or written human languages but I DO know 4 computer languages.  8088 assembly, BASIC, C, DOS batch.   Many of my friends have said that DOS batch is not a language.  Tell that to my earlier computers that had scores of complicated batch files keeping me entertained and moving along all the time.  But I digress...  Whoever spellchecks and edits this book after I have finished with it will be insulted to find that I feel they are bastardizing the work.  Take that as you will Mr Editor.  I cant be arsed to do it.  And who will agree with me, except maybe some coders and obsessed internet buddies that periods CAN go outside of quote marks??  What is my intension? Will you edit this fully understanding what I'm saying to you?  It's like the statement at the end of Revelations that whosoever changes this text will go to hell.  Years from now when I look back at this and find all my typos, degraded IRC influenced typing style, stupid grammar, plain out I cant speel at all and some made up words you might figure out on the fly or later....

Well who knows?  Do I have to finish a thought like that?

Chapter 002

The snow pounded Atlanta...well ok what WE thought was pounding...what New England or Chicago might have called a bunch of pansies in a flurry but work with me here...  The snow pounded Atlanta.  Our driveway was impassibly steap.  We had a tiny old Renalt, which everybody in my family always pronounced ree-NAWLT (thats ow as in cow) to my chagrin after finding the proper pronunciation some time im my life.  It was an eroded baby blue.  Our abode was a basement apartment behind some more well to do house owners but we were happy to be home.  I dont remember if Dad got the car up the drive ever but as I recall the story told time and again that Mom carried me up the hill with Dad's assistance into the warmth of home.  That was January 13, 1965.  I had just been thrust into the world, first born to a happy loving couple on  journy of wonders.  It was after the glory age of the automobile, some still clinging to it, my Dad always being one of those some.  Mom and Dad both said they wanted to have 6 children.  I couldnt believe it myself.  Having 2 seemed daunting enough, 4 in 5 years pleny good and 6 in any time frame way too many in my opinion.  None the less I was 1 of 4 of a series of untameable creators and dreamers, makers and shakers, all crying to be the leader.  My first sybling, Beth proved to be the winner in this arena more times than not.  But we all tried hard to capture the role.  But as yet I hadnt had my first at home rocking chair time with Mom and all that lay ahead of me was unknown, inconceiveable.  Nor did it matter.  I couldnt have known that first day how wonderful Jim and Gerry would be for the next nurturing 3 decades.  I couldnt have known how much Mom and Dad loved each other, how they were the most amazing model of lovers, friends, spouses, roll models, community pillars, so much...I'm tearing up to imagine it now.  This of course wont be the last time I tear up in front of the keyboard, so bear with me.   Anyway, Dad was working at Penny's or Rich's, dont remember which.  Mom was a constant be there mom taking care of both us men lovingly and diligently.  If I could bring up the memories of those months of Atlanta living in the 60s I'm sure they would be good ones.

I'm pretty sure the only real visually concrete memory I have from those about 2 years living in Atlanta was this:  Dad was in his chair in the living room.  Mom was in the kitchen preparing food.  She was facing the living room through the typical opening between a the hanging cabinet resourcefully placed over the counter.  I was on the floor clinging to Mom's leg and I dunno doing what.  Cant remember if I was quiet or noisy.  Mom was pouring.  This preparation had been going on for a few moments.  Business as usual.  Maybe there was a TV, maybe there wasnt.  There was only Mom in my world at the moment.  But then it happened.... "Jiiiiiiiiiiiim!" followed by probably some wailing away with tears and murmering crying noises..."I just spilled the last glass of milk!!!"   I knew Mom was upset and I'm sure Dad quickly consoled her as he was good at doing.  I always made do and I would rarely want for anything.  Even at that moment I dont recall feeling the need of anything.  I had my Mom.  I had my Dad.  All of probably 30 seconds passed in total.  The memory of it seems like maybe 5 seconds.  I knew the cabinets were brown and the living room smacked of green decore, the kitchen was dimly lit from the living room windows which streamed mightily a bright dayglow.  It might have been that first apartment.  I could have been pre-toddler.   That apartment was somewhere off Buford Highway somewhere close to Clairmont.  It was a hilly residential area.  I dont remember that, but Mom and Dad had driven us kids by there at least once or twice on day trips to Atlanta after we were living in Carrollton.  I also dont remember the house on North Avenue or even what part of North Avenue.  Again we drove by there at least once on a day trip.

Many day trips passed the years as Dad worked at Penny's in Greenbriar Mall.  I cant remember how many times we ate at Picadilly with the whole family plus Grandma and Aunt Floy.  We visited Dad at work seemingly every weekened and had a grand old time exploring the then extravegant mall with it's huge round tower bird cage of black iron and swooping dinosaur slide made of concrete painted pine green, a little carosell no bigger than perhaps 5 feet across nestled in a shop space, warbley shiimmering bamboo looking poles of a fountain splashing and burbling that you could walk into if it werent for grandma holding yer hand like a vise.  She struggled to hold on to Beth and I as she withdrew her tiny grey coin purse that snapped with a "snap!!" when she closed it and handed us a penny to toss into the fountain.  These were simple pleasures that seemed all the world like the universe on a platter... all that you ever wanted to do, all that you ever wanted to eat, all the friendly and loving people everywhere you wanted to meet.  It was all the excitement our blazing little eyeballs could engulf.  We never wanted for anything.  We invented it or made it up if we thought there was something and things always worked out.  We were sheltered I guess from the cruel world outside that we didnt even ever stop to ask if it was possible to exist.  I never knew that world, the poor, the sick, the angry, the criminal, the unloved.

I remember several scenes from those early years before I was 5.  Most people tell me that they dont remember things from that early on.  A few say they do, a few are amazed when I recant times passed at only months old, at 2, 3 and on, vividly like a movie played on the backs of closed eyelids.  Sometimes as clear as reality, sometimes fuzzy, sometimes silent, almost always in good color.  Dad was a hardware nut moving from Rich's to JC Penny and back again in a sequence I'm unsure of, but I DO remember Santa Claus in the great Atlanta downtown building that had a the flying pig ride on top of the building and escalators galore which I loved because they were my salvation against the scary elevators.  I remember it was like a spaceport up there.  Flying around the gigantic Rich's Christmas tree in a train of happy pig cars, having snarfed ice cream and no telling what else, dibbling it everywhere we went...  The lights were magical out of the would be black night on top of the world in Atlanta.  The constant throb of electric motors and fans heaving into the night working tirelessly, the ever present voices of humanity in glee over an ever more crowded commercial Christmas that seemed like a paradise to us yung'uns.  Thinking back on that time seems like every day was Christmas.  It was always Mom, Aunt Floy and Grandma and us kids, sometimes Dad, sometimes Cousin Phyllis.  Our Christmas shopping trips were like journeys of amazement, of magic, excitement.  It was surely as good as the present openings that would come afterward.  I guess I was around 4 or 5.  At that time I remember we always went to Aunt Floy's house for Christmas Eve.  The whole extended family gathered there.  Even Uncle Tracy and Aunt Ruth would be there to eat, to open, to talk, to make merry....  We kids competed in making up the latest game of running around the house, the men in the TV room worshiping whatever football folley was on this year, the women in the living room or dining room chattering.  All was warm and fancy colored and musical.  We hasted our grownups to start the present opening not even realizing we hadnt yet had dinner, to which all the big people oddly rellished in achingly long persistant toiling.  That was why of course we HAD to run around making havoc; it was our JOB you know.

I vividly recall one trip home from Floy's in the darkness.  We cackled our goodbys down the steap driveway avoiding the ditches, wound our way over the tiny blacktop subdivision road brushing pine needle limbs and dropping our stomachs around curves and dropoffs, pausing briefly to turn right and North onto Hwy 27.  We had no bypass at that time, it was a straight shot to the Y split in front of Southwire, vearying left with 27 as we rolled past the entrance to Dixie St.  Normally we'd vear right onto Dixie and that would take us closer to home.  I imagine Mom wanted to see the town Christmas lights yet again before tucking us kids in bed.  But that gave us a chance to notice a bright flashing red beacon above our heads going into town. IT MUST BE SAINT NICK!  Yes of course Dad said, it had to be.  He told the most wonderful stories even when they were simple one liners and we always believed him...even if just for a moment or two, we knew it had to be Saint Nick pulled by Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer and Dasher and Donner and....well you know...  It just happened to be the old radio tower in the rail yard just the other side of South Street bridge, our only "exit" in Carrollton, proundly passing over the vast 4-lane!  Cornerstoned in the 50s, I'm sure some large grinning city officials beamed eagerly at its opening, but us kids knew it as routine to right exit then turn right onto South Street in one smooth stop sign abandoning motion, our galant leader briefly pivoting his head to the left to ensure our safety, then careen around the hard left curve in front of the old hardware store and the big white mansion on the right with the little toy house then brumble brumble over the rough railroad tracks past the old decrepit train depot, turning right immediately thereafter going past the weathered triangle building with that spoooooky welder guy burning the midnight lamps...  We arrived at our Mara Street house, discharging Grandma to her little mill house adjoining our property.  We jumped and jumped and jumped hoping to see Santa prancing on the roof in vain but knowing we'd be listening after we bedded down.  Too excited to sleep we reluctantly had our bedtime fantasty tales from Dad, lots of hugs and kisses and last minute drinks of water and....another kiss! after getting out of bed one too many times, told Santa might be scared away if we didnt stay in bed!  That was that.  We couldnt belay any longer pulling over the covers and wiggling ourselves to sleep with glee, finally letting go to the sandman....just in the back of our minds we knew the lights were still on SOMEwheres and what was going on we wondered...  Mom and Dad and their trickery no doubt!

Chapter 003

We had no sooner parked the car in the drive than I remember running up to the house between the overgrown shrubs around the near hidden front entrance.  Locked it was... we checked every door.  The back. Nope.  The side door under the overly tall carport on wooden posts built of 4 1x6s in a square on a piece of 2x bedistal on brick posts.  They were hollow of course but you wouldnt know it till they started rotting at the base years later.  3 of them, standing tall enough to drive a tower under we thought.  There was a basement door too, under the carport.  It too....was locked.  One of the grownups discovered the window next to the front door was insecure.  I was appointed quickly to be boosted over the sill and into the empty old house on Mara Street.  Already it didnt seem like a strange place.  Grandma had lived in the mill house next door to it for ages, giving birth to Mom her last yung'un and raising her 3.  We had walked to Grandma's house from West Avenue a bazillion times, up the hill to the stop sign, crossing over, then turning left down Hill Street, crossing Austin to North Garret and crossing Harmon Avenue into the field of tall grass and lacey white flowery grain like things we used to pick.  The field seemed huge but it was barely deap enough for a single row of government funded housing to be placed there in later years, but now an empty set of lots.  Maybe 5 or 6 of them. But up on the hill to the left was a misterious old brown mill house burried behind a few scragly trees and undergrowth.  Some keep to themselves folks lived up there.  Grandma called them names I wouldnt use, didnt even feel right about it back then, but Duey was born in 1903, back when...that was just so...We learned over the many years of wisdom she gave us almost passivly that hear true heart was not of those racial times.  She demonstrated time and again how she'd give all she had for anyone of any origin.  She was giving like that.   She was a faithful servant to Grandpa, making those regular chitlins I found many years to smell very aweful, keeping her house spotless and always smelling of fresh biscuits, apple pies and jellies...  I never knew about the chitlins *eww!*...  We crossed the field every trip picking weeds that were flowers to us and climbed the gental hill past the brown scary millhouse, through the bushes and trees and emerged into her backyard.  It was a comfortable place.  It had an old spindly pear tree, a towering cherry tree, 2 apple trees, a thriving old grapevine and monstrously big around pecan trees, 2 of them.  All lovingly cared for by my grandparents.  Grandpa fertilized and kept them, Grandma harvested them.  We'd stroll past the old Southwire wire real table past the old steel lawn rockers that bent to rock rather than having rockers.   A stick of Wriggly's gum at the back door step and into the tiny add on back borch that housed the washing machine and sitting area.  Into the cramped kitchen that was floored with pine green and white streaked linoleum "tile".  She always had an endless supply of homemade jelly and preserves and jams, a constant vigil of tending steaming pots clink clink clinking near overflowing lids.  She'd pull out the white porcellain table top from her old bakers table and we'd sit in in little kid sized old brown varnished webbed chair or the litttle white stool with the curious little bob between its 4 rough turned legs suspending the strut wires that held it together.  Our noses barely above that old pullout table surface we'd have a jelly biscuit or pear perserves right out of the canning jar, freshly opened with a *pop* as she'd twist open the old school lid.  And the carmel cake!!!  Oh my god...but thats a whole chapter, you'll have to wait.

I plopped to the floor of what would become our new residence next to Grandma's house.  Dad was hollering open the door!! as i wondered the spacious living room with its forboding fireplace and scratchy hardwood floors. I quickly found the door dad was banging on adjacent the window he'd just boosted me into.  I managed to open the door and everyone streamed in...  Mom had a pursed lip look on her face.  "Hmmmm....."  She ambled around the great room past the tiny entry cove we'd just come through with its little window on the other side of the door, not the one i'd come through, but on a tiny little wall just big enough for that window and a small vase table maybe....  There always seemed to be one there in later years.  Mom had a funny little rising 3 toned laugh she'd use when she meant to convey tollerance dominated acceptance. it went like this hm HM *HMP!* in 3 short octaves.  We knew this tone of skepticism well, but she gave it time as we walked all around the center supported roof wth all the rooms connecting in a circlet you could run around with great feeverish abandon! From the living room we were in, left acroos the floor grated furnace into the big dining room with its corner china cabinet built in, right! through the swinging service door accellerating into the long but narrow kitchen with gracious cabinet volume, right! sliding across the tattered but still smooth linoleum past a mysterious basement door on the home stretch! through the master bedroom and straight into the little 5 sided hall way with its floor also grated with a furnace then hard right! back into the living rooom was a statisfying lap 1!!  Beth and I were non-subtly stopped somewhere in lap 2.  We had of course missed 3 rooms in the 5 sided hallway.  The only bathroom, a tiny little space you could only take 2 steps in even at my age of 3.  And 2 goodly sized bedrooms, slightly smaller than the master.  These were the only 3 rooms not in the big loop so of course we missed them straight away.  However much we desired to complete lap 2, we were abruptly captured by the glass doornobs addorning the open bedroom doors. Rickety old things, they never worked right but they WERE pretty.  The fair sized  closets shared the space between the 2 bedrooms almost taking up as much deapth as the 5 sided hall.  It seemed a good place for a secret passageway which I only ever fantasized about building.  It could conceivably dump a honest and well meaning traveler into the triangle space over the carport that was right outside one of 2 bedrooms.  Maybe a mad scientist lab lurked there!  Ready just to be chiselled out of the empty dark raftered space.

Our 4 person crew, soon to be 5 with Carrie my second sister and then by the time I was 5 my brother David, would be served will by this faithful home.  Its cratchety old creaking roof and real plaster walls would be our palace til I was 20.  Mom and dad worked hard to put 124 Mara Street into working condition, leaving old style burning bug bombs in several places just a few days after we'd checkd it out.  It was an "in the family" building. Only a formality to pass the paper and set up the mortgage.  They would scrape and paint, scrape and paint, hammer and saw, mow and trim and make a bazillion trips back to West Avenue, 4 streets and as many turns over if you went the legal car driving way.  That was an unacceptable distance if you were used to the red waggon and Grandma leading the trail through the bushes.  But Mom's old Fairlane and my Dad's parent's old Ford truck-bed van would aptly ferry our things into place before we'd know it was over.  I cant remember who said it, either Mom or Aunt Floy during that initial inspection of the house, but apparently one of them new there had been a monkey as a pet from the last residents.  It has made little burrowing smudges in all the corners of 2 smaller bedrooms.  That room had been painted a pastel pink and the dirty smudges were glaringly apparent.  How it had made those smudges 4 feet off the floor I couldnt fathom, but monkeys were mysterious creatures not to be trusted and practiced witchery moves accompanied by Tarzan inspired whooping and cawing choruses of a language known only to jungle men.  This was the first thought I'd had that a monkey pet might be less than spic 'n span squeaky.  Certainly a monkey would be a boys best friend wouldnt he?  Jane certainly approved.  Beth and I both helped to paint all over including the dreaded monkey spots and soon all was covered and shining.  The alter to the TV god was in place, the old furnaces roared with life and the kitchen lofted its heavenly glaze of scented riches we knew were Mom's and Grandma's best cooking.  New beds were comfy and we had nearly an acre of lot space between ours and Grandma's to explore and liter to our heart's content with plastic assundries we'd gotten over Christmas.

We'd settled in well and I hardly remembered our year spent at the tiny West Avenue house I'd chased my sister in so many times.  I remember a few things from that place though.  Alt Hwy 27 / Hwy 16 ran just a couple houses away in the night.  Since the bypass would not be built for several years, all the big trucks came barrelling through town at night seamingly just beyond the bed sheats.  I remember being unable to sleep one night.  Dad must have known it.  He came to bolster me in my hour of need.  "Daddy! Its a monster making that noise!!!"  "Naa...just the trucks, we're safe!"  He'd tell me another bedtime story and cuddle me til all the monsters faded away into the well of darkness.  He always told us our stories from his head.  Sure we had bedtime story books, but his were always better, more adventuresome, more real than any old book.  It seemed like my bedroom was just a little nook beside the back door.  I dont know where Beth slept.  I'm sure she had a crib at first and was tended close to Mom and Dad's room.  I only really remember one bedroom in that house.  it was behind the living room which was the entire front of the house.  The kitchen was little more than a hallway with appliances, the bathroom was snugged into the corner by the back door.  We rarely used the front door, we parked around back, which seemed like the side really.  The house faced West Avenue at a 45 angle and on a corner of a black dirt alleyway that was a constant source of nastiness we kids got into.  So the right side was source of the "back door" and the tiny leftover spot we callled the back yard.  The lot was hardly big enough for the house and 2 cars to park.  I guess thats why we had to play in the alley and the black dirt.  Grandma regularly chastized us for having gotten dirty and tracked it into the house which of course she vigilently made emaculate shortly thereafter.

Granda too had a relationship with this black dirt and us kids but from a different perspective.  His issue was a preventative one and it was known he ment that to be unforced. "Git outta that road!" he'd bark.  I remember very little about Grandpa Gentry.  Gerald Eugene I would later know only after I had become a curious adolecent.  Grandpay was just fine for a 2 year old and i remember his shoe and panted leg up to the knee intimately.  I knew his rough narly strong grip of safety and I a felt that he was a friendly man.  He was on our side even if we didnt see him often.  I suspect he toiled laborously endless hours in Atlanta holding a long time Trolley job in the early years and dont remember what he'd been doing by the time I was born, but it seemed he must work in a far away place.  He played a banjo, a sax and was quite the character I understand.  Grandma was very fond of him and in years to come she would tell us of all their travels and experiences and grand detail.  Mr Gentry died when I was 3 and I missed the chance to really know him.  What I missed from my mother's father I would get a chance to reclaim from my father's step father.

Chapter 004

Grandma Gentry was our fully fledged "Gradma" in name and service, and Grandpa Gentry had died early on us.  Of course we had 2 other faithful grandparents on our father's side.  They lived a days sojourne in a Country we called Yellow Dirt.  This was bottom land of the finest quality, at least we thought so.  Surely it only took about 15 minutes to drive down there but it seemed to us to take the whole day.  We often lived with them, Beth and I over weekends so Mom and Dad could have personal outtings.  Travelling to Grandma and Grandpa Lee's house took us South down US 27 past a big tan boulder rock covered with moss, past a free standing old chimney, vearing left on Lowel Road, past chicken houses, cows, fields, and many little dirt roads and falling down old shacks grey with rustid tin panels on top, barbed wire crooked posted fences and *eww* the smell!  Fresh manure was never one of my favorite aromas.  We'd cross GA 5 keep on going forever till we'd turn right onto Staples Dairy road past the big Staples Dairy of course with its huge silos and a renewed putridity of fertil nauseum that definitely looked prettier than it smelled.  It was the classic picture of farmdom of a schoolboy's textbook.  After another seemingly endless strip of gravel paved track under our 1965 Ford Country Squire the pavement abruptly ended in harsh red dirt.  The trees thickened surely as we sped on, the able big block and glassy suspension unabated and unnoticing.  Our ownly indication we'd reached "the country" was a light G-force dive off the end and a camel caravan quantity of dust volume swirling around the sliding back glass me and Beth religiously peered through.  Grandma Lee always said it was just as intersting to see where you'd been as it was to see where you were going, and apparently just as important.  The horizontal facing folding rear seats of the station wagon gave both of us our own little couch and a clear wide view of where we'd come from.  It was from this faithful watch position that we tended our course and yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!ed in our arrival to "the country".  From here on our the ditches on either side of the dirt surface would deapen to canyons.  Pines and hardwoods spired infinitely into the sky showing only a narrow river of passage above if we careened our necks way over next to the closed sliding glass panel around the tail of luggage rack.  Rapidly the sky disappeared and our decent sharpenned and curved around and around snaking into the old rusty steel bridge with brobble brobble sounding boards wide enough for tire tracks.  We'd slow just in time to turn right before crossing it and dip down onto the 10 acres that was the Lees' homestead.

This Richard's Home, prerabbed to dryin and placed atop lofty bank over Yellow Dirt Creek with cinder blocks and much seeming jury rigging was a grad estate. Grandpa Lee had filled in the underside with rooms.  It was nearly level with the ground at the back, but a full story off the ground in front.  He'd geniously made use of the space under the house so that you'd never know it wasnt part of an origionally architected form.  It was just as it should be we thought.  I only learned it was a Richard's Homes prefab late in life while my father told me old tales in my 30s.  The would be front door was in the high above the ground position and once again here was another house where the side door became the used entrance.  It opened into the kitchen.  I approve of such entrances.  The front porch had been closed over at the same time the underpinning of the house was closed in.  Behind that was the used to be front door and the living room which seemed to be way overly sized for he house.  It  dwarfed the 2 small bedrooms, one of which was Grandma Lee's sewing room.  The kitchen was smallish probably only because a really big dining table turned this room into to 2 separate areas.  The part with the stove the sink and the food, and the part with the TV and Grandpa Lee's personal parking space:  a low to the ground fluffy yet sturdy leather chair and ottoman.   He loved Walter Conkrite and Paul Harvey and we learned what real newsmen were like in the 60s.  Just the news thankyou.  Oh sure maybe it had its own bias of the time, but it seemed glorious and crisp and exciting.  I wasnt expertly trained in recognizing political agenea at the time and oggled at the tech-ness.  Grandpa Lee was a fixer and maker of all things mechanical and electrical and seemlingly anything else imaginable with a physical basis in existance.  Some people think they know everything.  Mr. Lee never carried this shortcoming for indeed, he DID know everything from what I could tell and had excellent taste.  He worked many years as a Southwire electrician on 3rd shift and as we were up early Saturday mornings to watch HR Puffinstuff and other kiddie pastimes he always thought of us on the way home.  Each Saturday morning he unfailingly bestowed upon us the covetted big green seadless grapes we breathed in instantly after having fully accosted him and his big toolbox.  Sometimes other equally appealing little packages he supplied us, all with ceaseless chuckling grin from the spindly wire spectals.  I dont know how many overalls he owned but he always wore them.  Perhaps a similar number to the hairs on his head.

Charles R Lee, who we suspect may have had some ties to American history based on his recognizeable name, had one of those Perfect Heads that I found out about in my teens.  I learned of this human feature through a minister at Tabernacle Baptist in Carrollton.  The Reverand said, "God made only a few perfect heads, the rest he put hair on."  I was sure it wasnt original from by any standard, but I had none-the-less failed to hear it previously.  I learned in my 3rd decade that union electricians were rabid in there pursuit of overalls for comfort and utility.  Yes sir! here was a no BS man and if anyone truly knew it all, it HAD to be Charlie.

His wife always called him that.  Elba Beatrice Underwood was her maiden and I felt it appropriate that a typewriter of that namesake was proudly positioned in the great room.  She was of full American Indian decent.  Last I had memory someone mentioned either Cherokee or Siminole.  One thing I can be sure of is that I dont know if EITHER of those is her correct tribe.  She and Dad turned the darkest shade possible in Summer suns and both had jet black hair of the purest and most beautiful form.  Bea as she was called kept her long hair as long as I remember her. She was Charlie's equal in intellect if not moreso and capable of making all things cloth and craft in volumes only surpassed by mass production but only equalled in quality by Egyption kings' engineers.  It was she who engineered a solution to sauna hot water supply when they later moved to Florida.  They had long loops of black pvc all over the roof and tied into the pump system in addtion to the usual supply.  The usual supply consisted of a dual switched city water and well she'd had drilled near the sauna in the itty bitty back yard that is so typical of Florida bungalows.  Near dark, the bath was SO HOT you'd swear it came out a commercial dish washer.  Admittidly this isnt daunting technology but at 10 11 years old I was plenty impressed.

Mr Lee died in my teens but I had gotten to know him exponentionally better than Grandpa Gentry and he'd lived a healthy number of years and had a great many expert careers reaping a happy income.  After he passed, Grandma Lee managed to continue his work to tinker and prod at this and that having learned many a trick from the old man.  She'd become as deft with a hammer and screwdriver as she had with her crafts and had a deap respect for handtools.  I had gone to visit her in Melborne Florida many times over weekends while I was stationed at Orlando NTC.  Before I was to leave the last time and travel back to Georgia, she gave me an ancient Estwing 20 once electricians hammer, the ones with the flatter claws we use instead of the more bent carpenter's claws.  I felt like I had a piece of the genius man in my hands.  Boy! I cherished that hammer.  How can a simple thing like an old beat up hammer do that?  Prepare the sump pumps, I feel my eyes draning again...

Mrs Lee lived on many more years and Dad was to visit her many more times before she left us while I was in my 20s.  I was too see her one more time in late 1993 before then though when my brother and I drove 18 wheelers and managed to get by there one time.  I came to have a great deal more understanding and respect for her during those weekends staying over from Orlando and learned much about where I was going in life, who I was and what this big blue ball was about from her amazingly blunt but philisophical mind.  We spent many afternoons at the local McDonald's hashing over a 1000 topics of science, spirituality and crazy wild head to head competitions that one can only enter into with a an equal or superior argumentative force.  I hadnt realized that she could whip my Dad soundly in any argument invented.   It would still be years away that I would know my Dad in a fully intellectual way.  Up to some age you think your parents are dummies and as a teen and 20somethinger I has no exception.  By the time I learned that my dad was truly my superior, his mother had passed away and I looked back realizing I had gone up against a force orders of magnetude above my intellectual level which was Bea Lee.  Her musings at my attempts to thwart her talking points must have been astronomical in size but she kept many more of them than I realized wisdomaticly inside her self.  But I'll always remember her as saying, "Where ever you go, there you are!"  I didnt know anyone else who said that at the time.  Its such a cliche now, but I think she got much more out of it than the averave casual speaker.

Chapter 005

There was one other thing I remember about Charlie Lee that I will tell now even though I have bypassed a great segue into another entire segment...BUT! I'll come back to that later in some inventive fassion. My family made vacation trips to Melborne Florida many times after the Lees moved to Florida.  I think I was around 9 or 10 this trip.  One of my sisters has a silly picture of all us kids posing after a beach run beside the Lees's house wearing hooded pullovers that Grandma Lee made for us.  All of different colors and all fitting perfectly as several of my relatives were amazingly able to do.  The morning before that great beach trip we had this breakfast of these exquisite super thing pancakes Grandma Lee made.  Those alone could cover a chapter but it is Grandpa Lee's treatment of such a stack of cakes that requires my attention at the moment.  Grandma Lee prepped us for the event.  She hyped it as if it were the first launch of man into space which I had seen in 1969 in front of our 25" b/w.  She said that Grandpa had a peculiar way of eating pancakes and he did so with unabashed compulsion even without our presence.  She insisted that Charlie did this on his own with no one looking, with her looking, with an audiance of any type.

We couldnt imagine what this could be.  We pined away at an answer not knowing the will at which besought to tear assunder.

It seemed like this hype went on deaper and longer than I can now imagine in my 5th decade.  I even fear at this very moment that I am over hyping it for you.  In fact it wasnt so much the act he performed as her amazing ability to hype the event and the casual way that he went along with it.  I'll never know now whether he really did it alone or if it was just a show for us that they cooked up.  I asked dad late in his life if his step dad really DID practice such a scheme at every sitting with a stack of pancakes.  I badged Dad sharply longer than required.  His first few replies insisted he knew nothing, uttering a well practiced "uh........i dunno...."  Finally transitioning into maybe and lastly ending in a "Naaaaaa, musta been just for show...you guys really got hooked."  I still dont know the truth on that one.  Never the less, they were an amazingly entertaining couple in a dry sneaky way.

The Lees had many elderly Florida friends and just as they had many friends in Georgia.  My favorite was a man we thought of as an uncle at times.  Ray brown lived around the corner and one house down.  The Lees' backyard corner intersected with Ray's own backyard corner and there was a shared never locked gate between them.  Only one house, the corner house separated these lots.  Ray owned the corner house too, and rented it.  He was a seasonal resident spending half the year in the North and half the year in the South, always seeking the moderate weather.  I was fortunate enough to meet Ray many times during my growing years and found him to be a sound friend as I became a habitual visitor to my widowed Grandma Lee during Orlando NTC.  By the by, in some non-sequiter conversation, he offered that he had a small sailboat and invited me to sail with him.  I dont remember her name but she was a comfy 4 person sailing dingy, cutter rigged and well equiped with cloth.  Ray conservatively felt that he would never mount the main and the genny together and vehemently put down the idea of mounting the nicely rainbow colored spinaker.  Many trips later, we'd spent plenty of days with a full jib and main.  On the pickup truck jaunt back to the house, sailbag between us, he casually left me a standing order to take her out at any time I liked.  Ray had taught me well with his conservative approach.  I was able to handle her well single handed on a full genny and main.  I'd come up with some of my own rigging tricks for single handedness and was quite comfortable with 2 sheets in easy reach and a foot operated tiller.  I realized I had to really get out on the rail for real without Mr Brown as balast AND a 125, the wind fully on the beam.but I couldnt get away from that tiller!  I finally fenagled a few spare lines into a harness i could use through a couple unused blocks at the stays.  It seemed a bit unwieldy at first but I managed the balancing act to an art and found myself standing on the weather side dagger pretty much every trip.  The wind in the intercoastal waterway seemed infinite South of the Eau Gallie Causeway and usually from the East.

I took 2 dips to find I had learned enough to be a danger to my own health.  I once managed to dip the startboard gunnels enough to scoop up a good 25 or 50 gallons of water.  Luckily I let all sheets fly and managed with the handpump to bring things fairly back to normal in half an hour or so. Having had enough that day, I ducked back into the bay and took my birth.  A few weekends later I found out the very hard way that I had learned my lesson about paying attention to sudden gusts.  The now double sky reaching Eau Gallie Causeway bridges just didnt exist back then and I often waited for something bigger that I was to coax the bridge tender into opening the then single pivoting span.  The structure was wide enough for freighters but dagnabbit! just barely too low to get my lttle mast under.  Traffic was pretty regular around this bridge so I rarely had to wait long b4 I could sqeeze through behind some large yacht.  They probably figgured I was a complete buffoon and righty so.

I never had the non-lazy moment to actually cart the trolling motor to dockside, opting for the lighter weight single paddle I prefered for for docking and the occasional utter calm in the bay.  It was a well protected little bay but even in a mear breath I could tollerate the long slow flutter of the main, sometimes taking over 30 minutes just to reach my tiny slip near the US 1 bridge.  Exiting the bay was sometimes quite another manner sometimes taking an hour or more without rowing.  Those guys at the marina probably REALLY thought I was a lame-o tacking many times against a bare breath of wind to exit that little bay.  But even if I had to paddle a bit get limp past the bouys, I always made it out.

But, I did find one important piece of heart-throbbing danger.  There is no wind under that bridge, duh!  Ah but for a tiny little electric trolling motor I lamented!  Never the less I double time paddled my way barely through narrow now CLOSING opening hoping my mast wasnt going to be ripped out of the step.  Subsequently, I found paddling past that bridge upstream wasnt too bad MOST of the time and with a good running start I could make it when I wanted to.  Such was my usual procedure after I found I could transit the Eau Gallie and it became quite a habbit.  I even dreamed of sailing all the way to Daytona and even devised an elaborate tale that I had INDEED DONE IT.  It involved an all night/day trip that placed me at the 4th of July fireworks over an unknown bridge in next to a little marina and restaurant.  It could've worked too!  In reality I ended up in my buick with a fellow sailor in the front passenger seat and a begrudged young ride hitching but pocket filled young couple, also USNaval servants indiscretely taking up the back seat.  We had the 4th free and we DROVE to Daytona, almost got kicked out of a hotel room, well me and  my buddy DID, the couple had only paid for a double and the Indian Indian owner had noticed all 4 of us attempting to grab some zzz's.  We spent the night in the wide Buick seats a bit chillier and muggier than we liked whilest the couple were.....well I dunno....you take it from there.  The morning DID bring the 4th and we drove around aimlessly finding that Mr Money Bags had less cash that he'd promised, we DIDNT get into the Daytona 500 of course, all we got was hearing a few wound up motors.  Just before dark we parked near the afformentioned unknown bridge in my little fantasy in a public park and sauntered across the bridge where by dark myriad fishermen were holding lamps and traps religiously to claim a few prey for dinner.  I couldnt believe how many there were.  I watched the dingy run to and fro to many sail and motor cruisers near the restaurant, some crews ordering a late repast from the locals.  I made up my tall tale later after that fantasy of how it COULDA been that weekend with just me and my little 16footer all alone.  But the fireworks WERE spactactular and we made it back to Orlando in the wee hours in time for a nap and Monday muster :)

So back to my second experience I needed to teach me to pay attention!  This particular fine afternoon near Eau Gallie Causeway, I began my regular circling, weighting for passage behind some as yet unknowning yacht  I could slip in behind.  The wind was especially whippy around the South of the bridge that day.  I probably should have known I had too much wind and too much sail.  When a prospective North going yacht came along, I just happened to be on the lee of my circle and darnit I reached hard all the way to the opening to find it closing just as I was in position.  That darned bridge tender! Didnt he know I didnt have a VHF or even a toot horn? LOL  So I resolved myself for another half hour of circling and another attempt.  I still had too much wind and too much sail, having put all my mental energies into cursing myself for missing that last opening.  Already flustered I was clammering with some gear that was slipping away in the unpumped bilges I had been putting off pumping while having one foot on the windward dagger and one on the tiller, the handpump swathing about over the teak cockpit boards from stem to stern every few seconds.  I thought I could just grab it when I realized fast coming up to starboard was a HUGE ASS guy pylon that led to something obscure up on the bridge house.  I knew I couldnt compete with this unyielding government installation so I solved the problem aptly by steering hard a port.

Now is the time one should sit down.  Reconstitute.  Regroup.  Consider more options more astutely. Actually LEARN something from this.  Unfortunately I wasnt in slip gathering bags post mortem.  I happened to be an heavy winds and full sail, steering by foot, still cursing an elusive hand pump and dummer than dirt.  It so happened I had just turned fully abeam to a good 25 or 30 knotter and the ensuing spill was one I will never forget. Fully 2 hours later Ray reminded me harshly of all the options before me had I only paid attention.  That I COULD have packed it in and headed to birth well before even the FIRST attempt at Eau Gallie.  That I COULD have taken down the jib and pulled the main down a reef.  That I COULD have at least paid attention if I were going to be daring.

That big  wind on my beam pushed me and the starboad gunnels right into the drink.  The main stay snapped...  I lost any control I had over my heading for a moment.

Miraculously my bow now came into the wind and I stopped taking on water  Still in what seemed like hurricane force winds at the time and a goodly Southern current pushing me toward shallows and the wind now mostly meaningless with all my rig laying on the fo'c'sl......I bailed. and bailed. and bailed.  I was thinking as I hand bailed and bucket bailed and sloshed water overboard that positive bouyancy was a GOOD thing.  I didnt know what it would have taken to sink her, but I had mega water in that little boat.  How were the gunnels still above water now?  It was truly amazing.  I'd lost a new pair of deck shoes, the pump, my covetted lunch, my hat.  I managed to wring  out my saturated overshirt and produce only a moist face rather than a drenched one.  I ended up with only 20 gallons of water or so in cockpit.  Thankfully my paddle was smartly tied to something and I paddled into bay finding Mr Brown on the lee shore tapping his foot next to Mrs Brown who wanted a couple of circles in the bay for on hour or so.  That was now shot to hell.  I had piled everything in as securely as I could before paddling into bay.  I was defeated.  I hadnt even cared that I had lost the main stay during my washout.  There was no way I could hoist the mast in this.  I and the boat were both above the bottom of the intercoastal waterway.  Ray and I finished bailing her out and I paddled us back to the slip, my duty alone I figured.  Mrs Brown met us back at the slip on the other side of the bay next to US 1.  I handed up the occasional tool as Ray reassembled the standing rigging.  I'd noticed on previous trips that the steel cable was frazzled pretty badly at that single eye on the bow that Ray had clamped it to using a double channeled double bolt cable clamp.  This I reminded myself looked much like Rays trailer welding.  Perhaps all that was holding that trailer together was the welding.  I couldnt see very much visible metal in some spots.  It appeared almost entirely composed of spot weldeding and salt.  Very little of actual frame could be believed to remain.  The salt had done very little for it and eveything against it.

Would I have faired better with a solid main stay?  I should have added that to my stuff I shoulda paid attention to before going out in 25-30 knot winds.  I coulda blamed Ray for shoddy maintenance.  But wasnt I ultimately responsible while at the helm?  Certainly.  Anyway.  We got her back to sailing shape and after stowing the sailbag back at Ray's screened bungalow porch, which encompassed his entire back yard, not hard since his back  yard is about porch sized, he lamented over the much beloved pvc hand pump with wood plunger and leather flap.  Then he talked about building it, talked about sailing in much the way of "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenace"  I heard years later that a boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.  Thankfully none of the repairs cost any actual money and Ray was out only one 10$ for parts hand pump.  He finally said, Michael, just be careful and hasted me to sail again soon.  I was behooved and awed by this patient man who had taught me to sail.

Chapter 006

It would be a few years later before I sailed again.  1983 had come and gone.  I had graduated from high school, found my second love and regretably gone into the navy having to leave her loveliness and playfulness which I had scared myself out of in high school.  I had already presigned.  Nothing could stop it.  1984 saw me exit the navy and ironicly learn to sail under a wise civilian.  I never made it to a US Navy boat and even missed a recommended free visit to USS Georgia (SSBN729), a nuclear sub laying over at the near by naval docks.  I had married 1986 and by 1989 become sour of marriage.  But I had found a boat!  An 11 foot dingy with a tiny lateen rig.  150$ and a trip on the roof of my 72 Electra and it was mine!  We spent 2 goodly summers together and even hauled my brother a couple times.  At 400 pound capacity we were really pushing it.  I was over 200lbs and David was near that at the time.  To call this sailing was a stretch and we were not wanting of ballast.  If we sat still enough we could make it to the far shore.  We did.  more than once.  Why? it was there.  I dont have gigantic regrets and using that phrase, but maybe a few small ones.  A 200lb man could skip along quite happily with that seemingly undersized sail.  But anything more cloth on the whimsy hollow aluminum  mast and you'd have a sail board.  I watched a green sailboarder attempt that art once near a rental shop at Eau Gallie.  He was working HARD and doing poorly.  I played that memory several times this summer of 1989 on Carroll lake in my little dingy that weighed a hefty 50ish pounds.  Yes, she was OK.  a 5 minute tiedown to the Buick and a 5 minute launch, A 5 or maybe 10 minute haul in and tie down to the long wide roof of the Buick again.  I proudly sported my bow and stern tiedown cotton ropes on the bumpers.  The long swaths of double door open windows on the Electra were nearly as good as a convertable and I could rest my fingertips on the hull, reassured all was tight topside.  Many times I lazily drove my boat on a boat around Carrollton.  I knew I'd go back out tomorrow anyway.  I dont know how many people stared at that contrivance  but it seemed appropriate for that big old land boat I was driving.  Sadly I sold the poor dingy not much worse for wear for 50$.  I even wish I had her now.  I live in the county now though and Lake Carroll's out of towner fees are over 100$ per season.  Damned if that aint nearly what I paid for the red bottomed slice of foam filled fiberglass.  Her mast was now a 3/4" piece of EMT, I had lost it in a capsize....oh oops!  I failed to mention that eh?

Yes, I had gained back my prowess and daring shortly after paying the then 7$ or so lake fee in 1989, I'd gotten downright dangerous.  But I was wearing contacts at the time, I wasnt wary of losing a 300$ pair of glasses,  I had long since given up shoes on these outings.  Maybe I carried a sandwich.  I had learned to tie everything down by now anyway.  I took nothing of value aboard even leaving the car keys under the mat, the wallet in the glove.  Yes it was only me, shorts and tee, a hadful of cotton ropes a wooden tiller a piece of pipe and a single triangle of cloth to catch mother nature.  I had nothing to lose unless I banged my head badly and went under.  Oh yes I had the required floatation device tied to the mast partner.  Even the daggar board tied to something.  Well, just because you tie everything down doesnt mean you cant stupidly UNTIE them.  I got into a gust and went toppling over for my first full capsizing.  I was majorly annoyed remember that I had learned my lesson! in Florida!  I didnt mind getting wet, I really didnt.  You barely have 10 inches of boat and a mear 18 inches of draft only because you happen to have a little daggar, easly near 0 inches for that coast into the bank at days end.

I could easily have capsized that little boat anywhere in big enough wind.  But sadly enough  I went over because once again I had failed to pay attention.  As I cluched the majorly positive bouyancy hull, I idly caught my breath and tried to decide what to do  The hull itself would be easy to right, but that little sail would pick up a hundred gallons of water, as hard as I stood on the daggar, it was not coming up! No way.  Here is where I made my 3rd mistake.  I felt under the shallow hull I was clinging to found the cleated halyard.  What was I thinking?!  I watched my aluminum mast sink swiftly into the clear top water and disappear into the murky glass ridden can ridden stup ridden bottom water I knew I wouldnt go guessing at deapth here.  Had to be at least 20 feet.  My 1st mistake had happened pre launch. I had failed to tie the mast to anything!  Held only in place by the taught single halyard with not even a knot in the end I saw the cotton rope slip agilely through the mast head's eyelet!  No net!  The mast had earlier possessed a little pully block at its head but that was long lost.  An ordinary threaded eyelet with a nut on the other end replaced it.  The lateen spar was easily hoisted to the eyelet which was also the spar's stopping point.  Oh well, I'd buy another one.  A 10 foot stick of electrical conduit ran about 5$ and I was back on the water next weekend.  Amazingly I never replaced a single cotton rope.  I never repaced a single screw or nut.  I'd lost my rudder cotter pin but who cares.  I lived without it.  The new buyer got a deal he was happy with.  I told him about the mast, the cotter pin, the worn cotton ropes I'd had for 3 years and countless and unknown all day flights about Lake Carroll.  Only one bad dip in all that time and I was both mornful and happy to be getting rid of it.  Retrospect is....unkind.  I loved my little dingy.  Why had I forsaken it?

Just a couple months ago  was the first time I've sailed since.  The funds have gone elsewhere, the time has raced ahead and away, Ive pursued other hobbies....Where is my little dingy now?   I enjoyed time with 2 good friends Alan Kuykendall and Kent Smith on Kent's Helms 25 named Fiddler's Green.  I am terribly out of shape and spent most of my time at the tiller and snugging a sheet now and then, pulling the genny over crowded fore deck on a now and then tack or jibe.  I had 2 great days of sailing, swimming, tall tale telling and solving the world's problems without reporting our solutions to authorities and drinking ourself into a stupor that one anchorage night.  Yes I long now for a real good boat and open waters and a good friend.

I've been at this single text file for 9 and 2/3 hours only stopping to coffee up and see the bathroom for a moment.  Already the time is passing quickly on this I hope will accidently on purpose turn into a book.  My first cool million looms ahead in shiney ching ching!'s and fantasies of turning another obsession into a riches.

Chapter 007

What is a chapter you say?  Well I dont really know.  I'm up to 7 now and I fear these "chapters" are of inordinately short length.  All of this has switched about rather whimsicly connected in ways only my dark and contored conciousness knows.  I'm typing this in 12 point Times New Roman in Wordpad.  I have no idea how long these pages will actually format to.  How many pages these "chapters" will really be or virtually anything else about the text.  Its a 1280x1024 resolution and the type is tiny.  I prefer not to worry about those things as I've prefered not to worry about most minor details of daily inhaling and exhaling while carrying on a "life".  I think I'll keep it this way just to confound my afformentioned potential editors.  Afterall, the government prints "this page intentionally left blanks" pages.  Who sets these rules?  I generally left out a lot of stuff from my birth to my adulthood, all of which I hope to capture in shining detail.  Four decades is a lot of ground to cover and after all Ive just been inspired by those 2 sail cruiser writers last the last couple of days and boy do they cover a lot of ground in a short text.  Maybe would could get back to some earlier childhood memories or something like that.  I never know how any of my projects will really turn out.  I've built a bunch of computers in the last couple decades.  I've coded near countless unfinished assembly language programs and dabbled in those other languages.   I've got more than 2 years now worth of 3D modeling behind me of late and I'd hoped that'd be my latest chance for a million$ carreer.  Oh well.  I admit its getting tedious now.  I've modeled "moody yawl" a near 50 footer with a somewhat ketch rig.  I fantasize sailing it about the Bahamas and Carribean  following after my newly formed heros.   Douglas has made me laugh my ass off.  Bernadette has made me bawl in tears of her heartfelt sagas and passionate friendships.  The seem the perfect couple with the perfect jobs.  To sail, to write, to consume wonderful food and collect precious experiences.  They are beatiful people.  Douglas is in his 60s and Bernadette seems a good decade younger but I havent gotten a clue on her age yet from the logs.  Perhaps I will.  Even in his 60s Douglass looks fit and agile, a far cry from my couch potato stance and 2 pack a day tobacco habit.  Maybe I'd be willing to work it off over a nice little skinny tailed ketch accompanied by a gorgeous adventuresome doll of a philosopher gal....maybe I'd just huff and puff my way through it and keep the Gentry build *shrug*  Maybe I could just lease a 30 footer for a few weeks and see if I could take it. Oh...yes given that rolling supply of cash with which to gather the winds.

I'd love to own an airplane as well.  I've spent a few years flying RC planes and they're great fun.  This however can not compare to sitting in a Piper Cub butterflying over Carrollton on a gusty fall afternoon with a 15$ ticket and a pilot you HOPE is a good one and 2 other passengers you just met and hope to part company happily in another 10 minutes or so.  I watched a scantily clad ultralight of the looks like an airplane shaped kite type.  It seemed like a giant rainbow striped albatross taking slowly but surely to some Northerly destination against a strong head wind.  At times it seemed to be almost losing ground, hovering over the ground barely moving across the air show audience that had mostly left the airport by now.  West Georgia Regional Airport "OV Gray Field", KCTJ as I've fondly come to know it in MS Flight 2004.  It barely looks like the real thing in the sim, the surrounding "terrain" is NOT Carroll County, its a sadly lacking picture from above compared to Google Earth, yet oddly satisfying in lieu of a real aircraft.  I grip my new joystick with hapiness, having found I can no longer use my old gravis joystick, a midi-game port cable'd model.  We now bow to the feet of the standards gods who have declared USB the great bible of periferal connectivity.  So my rudder pot is nudged around my the other parts of the joystick making it non-precise and difficult to get any real good use out of.  I decide the auto rudder suffices and I'm happy with my performance in a Piper J3 Cub and a Cessna 172.  I havent gotten even useful skills at IFR, not even quite understanding the seemingly illogical nav systems.  I can use a VOR ok, I like my simulated Garmin GPS and I can find and align several runways of choice for final.  I can work fair with the simulated ATC guys and gals.  I worry that they dont chastize me for my mistakes.  How would I know for sure if I'm following the rules if they dont offer up the sky police?  Well, I dunno, but I try to offer up some kind of reply to those airspace crossing warnings and they seem to reply with acceptance so it at least FEELS FUN.  I'd love to get my feet wet with a real VFR general aviator that I cant hope to afford to hire but there yet again is the fallacy of needeing money to collect only experiences.

My ultimate goal at every turn is to collect experiences.  I dont really collect "stuff" per se.  Yes I have to have a computer to do this writing.  Yes I'd need a Cessna to fly in.  or a yacht to sail.  Simple needs, only a few 100,000$ right?  Sometimes these little examples make me feel like I DO collect stuff and that is rather dauntingly against what I say my goals are.  But I think of all stuff as expendable.  Yes sometimes I lament over a lost item like my little dinky or my Realstic LAB 1500 linear tracking turntable I once had and sold in some Western desert state for what....20$? If I was lucky?  Maybe it was 10$.   It has little real value, but lots of sentimental value and had produced for me a joyous sound for several years without complaint.  It was the musicl experience I'd wanted to collect but with that came the baggage of 1000's of $s in vinyl records and 100s in what for me was fine audio equipment.   I'm sure a Scott amplifier owner would pishaw on my 50 watt Onkyo seven band digitally mixed amplifier on sale for 99$.   I prised it.  It sounded clean and true through a pair of Realistic Optimis 1000s I got again on sale for 100$ a piece.  I had a dolby/metal Technics cassette deck  with mic inputs, independent level controls in/out jacks with monitoring enabled.  A Marantz am/fm tuner that was bigger than all my other companents together and one little flat pc board inside the huge case.  Judd Hughey gave it to me when his was replaced by an integrated receiver by his parents.  Lastly nearly a no name early generation CD player from Lennox.

Lennox was one of those nearly generic ultra low priced brands like SoundDesign and some others that were cheap and breakable.   Oddly I found Lennox to be on the upper swing of things for cheap brands.   I had handheld CD player from them with 5 second anti-skip.  It played horribly abused discs and kept going when slamming the firewall in hard breaking.   It never skipped a beat and a robust little devile for 29$.  It sounded great through a tape deack adapter and power out good and clear in my wife's Nissan Sentra cockpit with its Clarion receiver.   I had borrowed her car for a while for the daily commute to Atlanta while mine was horribly wrecked for a couple years.  I would get the Camry back eventually fixed and shining anew.  I put in a new speaker system and CD receiver of wally world begots and finally put in an 8 inch sub also of wally world begots.  i spent a good 500$ on this junk.  Faithfully the cavernous interiour of my 88 Camry Wagon Delux swallowed every bass tone at highway speeds and I found my 6x9s and sub in the back cargo hold utterly useless.  Hearing mostly the shattered dash 4"ers for ambiance it was truly earthshatteringly disappointing.  I moved the sub to the driver's side rear floor,  impeeding any hope of legspace in that seat, but it sounded a LOT better.  I also turned off my sub amp's crossover so the sub recanted full range spectrum to the best of its limited abilities.  This did manage to cover the big hole in the spectrum around 200-400Hz my swallowed 6x9s couldnt give me.   The 6x9s made ok mids with the receiver tuned to neutral bass and the sub amp fully bass boosted.  The high mounted rear tweaters above the hatchback opening look like paper cones but supply ear splitting highs reaching around 12-14KHz.  There is some action above that spectrum but a bit lacking in ambiance.  I'm not terribly disappointed tho.  I live with it for quite some time.  The wally world CD player I spent 10 times as much for skips like hell tho and the CD preamp has shitty outpout compared to the am/fm ones.  It doesnt make it back to the store b4 the warrentee is out. I vainly say repetitively, "It'll get better.  Its surely not as bad as I think.  It needs more tuning.... Years later I still have it and it has changed not at all.  It still sux ass as always.  I've been in my wife's Nissan many times and it's strong factory installed Clarion system assails any hopes I have for ever caring about my wally world system.  Alas the little portable Lennox CD player has been given away.

I sit here now with my some wally world some radio shack some Big K combination stereo hodgepodge hooked to my 4 channel AC97 codec outputs in my current AMD Sempron 2200 powered computer.  It seems to play CD's and mp3's fairly well.  It mostly fills the spetrum with fair output and I could be doing worse.  One sub is the old 8"er wally world one from the Camry which I gave up trying to make sound good.  It's not bad in house powered by its ancient radio shack floppy drive power supply.  It subs for the Realistic 10 watt amp hooked to the no name boom box speakers that detached from its boom box with little sliders.  The boom box has long been collecting in the junk pile.  This is an adequate front speaker system for every day usage.  Not high fi by any means but not bad at moderate volume for an old man.the rears system is an amp/sub box looking like it contains a 6" sub and so called 100 watts of output.  Every electronics buff knows how badly cheap gadget companys cheat by adding up all the inner stage power consumptions so they can call a 10 watt amp a 25 watt amp.   Well I doubt my 100 watt Regents  IS 100 watts.  Anyway it exactly like the same wally world offering of Lennox, still going in their cheap wanna be name brand gadget business for the mediocre shopping masses. Both came in 50$ boxes and for some reason I picked the Regents.  It has 2 real audio inputs and 5 satellite speakers intended to look like fronts, reares and a center, and be placed in those positions.  It doesnt sound bad at all.  It has crisp highs and decent sub.  There is no hole in mid bass as could be expected as long as its coupled to a decent equalizer which the AC97 thankfully IS.   This particular AC97 revision has a 10 bander that far surpasses M$'s nearly deitized Windows Media Player.   WMP's eq is slow, noisy, and for some reason failes to work on some inputs.  I've long since turned off ALL of WMP's software DSP fx and use my AC97 to taylor all output from my machine.  I would gladly replace all this with a  quad Scott amp and eq pushing a bank of Cyrwin Vegas.  Alas this is not possible so as I say.  I could be hearing worse.

My old stereo system I bought piece by piece over a handful of years was really better stuff than I had hoped for at the time.  I have no retrospective views of that equipment other than I thought it did a good job.  My brother dubbed that system the ever exaulted "Bass without Bass".  I'm sure a much more costly system could have produced more worshipful qualities, but yea verily I long for the old stuff I had in the late 80s.  At that point I had never had a sub and I dreamed of a Cyrwin Vega dual coil to replace my dodgy old coffee table.  I heard some astonishingly clean and satisfying solid CV's at a questionable club in sound east Atlanta.  I dont know what I was doing there...ok yes I do but  I managed to leave there without incident.  My most impressive memories are the sound in that club.  They played some good old boogie tunes from the old days some heavy sub busting 90s dance tunes of that year whatever it was precisely I dont have nailed down at the time but it was good feeling music.  Alas and many sighs....That was the most perfect audio system I have ever in my life set my ears on.   Its operator was smooth and blythe.  It was tuned to peak performance for my ears.  Every high was crisp and clear, not painful.  Every mid was solidly unyielding to any aborations.  The mid bass was solid and not muddy.  Its subs were an absolute beauty to hear and feel.   A beer bottle of less than half full would last a very short time on its top.  There were conveniently placed at the elevated dance floor rim and made great beer tables.  Inspite of the 1" rim around the would be table surface.  The shear power of these tight CVs would knock a half drank beer off its top in soon to be shagrin of its purchaser if not watched carefully.   Yet you could never hear the rattle of the bottle unless you were right up to it.  Said bottle was quickly dispatched at any rate.  Among all the fixtures and accoutriments in the building I could hear not a single rattle, not a single out of place accoustical value.  The ceilings were draped perfectly in cloths and baffles the walls richly addorned tacky novelties that weere either accousticly invisible or well hung.  If that room had been my listening chamber for life I gladly would have kept it as it was forever because of the pure audio reproduction precisely rendered as the sources had offered them.  The preamps were silent.  Feedbacks from mics did not exist.  It was loud but comfortable.  I endured no ear clipping that evening.  I had come at a low traffic night and there was little human scenery save for a few occasional morsals, none with seeming availability.  So I had just a couple beers over several hours and just listened, undisturbed.  I savered the silence I had enforced upon my Camry's poor audio slave child and listened only to the strong Toyota 16valver humming into the night.  The tuned resonator in this car's factory exaust, now replaced by Midas offers a firm gutteral support to my 2 liter 4 banger.  The exaust system has performe pricisely as Midas advertised that it would.  I have had 11 trouble free years of service from it and it still sounds exactly as it did when Toyota installed it 1988.  It is 252,000 miles warn and pushed hard every time I drive it.  It's showing its age but stll comfy as an old sock always gets me to home port.  With that feeling somewhere in the 90s  I drove home with pleasant audio memories from a doubtless dangerous club with a one perfect moment in musical time.  On the exit ramp I dropped 1and coasted, then 2 more,  then to 2nd gear as I cleanly turned left onto home stretch. No one was seen on the winding 113 to the house.  The yuppy wagon, key off, brake set,  faded to silence without a stutter.  I slept like a baby.

Chapter 008

See? I dont collect stuff!  The Camry has been my sojourning sole mate.  I could've had a Modena 360 but well ok thats way too much stuff collecting.  I'd gladly give it away to some needy billionaire eventually.  If I could just borrow one for a while I'd gladly and thankfully return it to the responsibility of its owner.  I once saw a Ferrari video of various speed runs.  One was at a track full of amateurs.  The owner had proudly, I'd hoped, brought his red Testarosa to the track to run it around the asphalt.  At the ready, his flag dropped and he gunned it.  Never getting a hold on pavement, or a chance to throttle back, paddle to 2nd gear,  or consider the brake, he turned a floating 90 to the left and smaked the inner wall with all abandon available to him.  He walked away unharmed.  I paid little other attention to his demeanor.  I hope he cursed himself not the car.  This was a simply example of abuse.  He had the perfect car, the chance for one of life's precious memories of thrill.  He'd paid his fees, or someone had.  Then he killed it.   I've never come even close to owning one of these grand machines, but I can truly feel the hearts of Ferrari owners world wide and especially at that track, that second.  I know their hearts exploded with tears and shock.  One of their babies had been killed in blatent abuse no man can accept.  I died that moment with them knowing their deaths were exponentionally more wrenching as intimate caretakes of these fabulous artworks.  Somebody should shoot the guy.

The sounds made by Ferrari engines is nothing short of demonic.  I know of few other ways to discribe it.  Perhaps as music of a kind.  But I find "demonic" to be the most accurate.  In a much needed contrasting memory I recall watching another Ferrari racing video in which a seemingly medium aged dusty red Ferrari raced a handful of others.  He had a good camera and an even better mic. The video commentator told of what was to come.  Soon a more aged, dustier, slightly different model of his car would be coming up behind him, would wait a short time for just the right moment and throttle effortlessly around his finely turned machine.  The camera driver had apparently easily beaten all his other competitors, yet the as yet trailing victor would overtake him with unbridled mastery and superior machinery.  That this could be possible seemed something of a mind numbing and belittling idea.  This car the camera was in had carried us gingerly and precisely to a #1 position in a way sure to make all its team members proud fathers and its creators gods having completed their job more than satisfactorily.  Yet there it was in the mirror, shifting, waning, waxing, screaming an unknowable song of ultimate power and insatiable hunger for pavement.   The commentator shut up entirely after his introduction of the hearty contender.  We had only a few moments to see its fine aged nose and listen to its song as it made its little moves behind us, plotting its inevitable destiny.  The sound was that of 12 tiny little pistons at perfect harmony with the universe, screaming out its undeniable furvor to escape its prison.

Suddenly without provocation or warning he made his path true and lept past into the #1 spot as if all life had meant for this moment unabashedly to take place.  I sat awed and scared as I watched that burning mechanism wane into the distance.  The look of it alone was enough to cause weeping in even the deadest souls.  But more shattering was the victory cry as it whipped by never touching its transmission whining higher, higher, unbelievably higher, 10,000 rpm a mear pittance to its current song.  It pulled away only as brielfy as cross country tracks allow and we soon snout to tail with this beast.  Many turns passed, they changed grooves many times, they played in and out like cosmic yoyos.  Every nuance of that engine you could hear clearly inescapably over our drivers own machine, even far into the distance as we slollomed the great track.  There was a good 6 or 7 minutes of this play time, then alas we lost him as he growled and screached a final flinging sting into the distance, an oportunity to leave the entire field behind.

Personally, I've never heard the equal of that engine, though I've heard many a 2nd and 3rd.

Many men have aspired to their own greatness in sometimes quiet, sometimes open unsubtle madness.  To me that engine was as sweet sounding as Mozart, as JS Bach, as Jean-luc Ponty.  Some arts are unappeciated by most, worshipped by the few, mastered by still fewer.  That moment in time was equal to that other frozen memory in that night club in Atlanta.  Every time I think I've experienced the greatest works of men, comes yet a contender, a superior.  How is it that every record of man is continually broken?  Every high jump jumped higher?  Every weight lift bested by stronger?  Every work of art exceded by sometimes unexpected and unhailed artists.  Will we cast off the wars? the economy? the thievery? The ever intensifying rat race to put down the competition instead of heralding it, embracing it, besting it with quality not trickory?  Humans of all race, tribe, sex, orientation, belief, and class have proved their abilities to excell all manor of works.  Our couriosity in all things never satiates.

Aside:  I hesitate to speak the  g. o. d  word.  Many times I have stopped reading an artical when its author stepped over the edge and started preaching his religion.  I will not preach religion here.  But it is a central theme, one that keeps us apart as a total species.  So I ask of you to press on with me through these next 2 paragraphs.

Cant we huggle this quality and cooperate into the 21st century and lay down all our weapons to tackle the advancement we so belatedly need to entangle ourselves in?  Surely all sentient beings understand harming another bring them unhappiness.  It is only our failure to look inside outselves and see the harm we are causing with our dogma, our mob mentalities, our fanciful ancient mythical kill God's enemies! teaching that keeps us killing and maiming each other.  Take away the smallest of us and we are all deminished.  Let us work together and answer our hard wired calling to populate the world.  This task we have accomplished.  Let us now sead the uninhabited parts of our galaxy that we can peacefully aquire.  Let us meet our celestial neighbors that surely abound if we could be find them.  It is the nature of all particulate matter to gather as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, uranium, nickel, all the elements we know and see throughout the light spectrum we've observed at every point of the known and charted universe.  Clumping together as protiens, acids, and long chains of chains of molecules is no more escapable to the elements as than we are from breathing.  It is just such physical properties as these that make our inevitable contact to our stellar neighbors as likely electrons clinging to their nuclei laden with protons.

I have much more to say in this topic but here are a few starters.  If there is a God, then he must have set all this into motion and there can be no conflict between religions.  None of us are "God's enemies".  We must come to grips with our inadequate religious documents and accept them as OK.  There are many religions and belief systems on Earth today.  Many of us accept this willingly, embracing our ability to be different, to disagree, yet still able to live in harmony.  We must learn to escape from our chains and allow believers and non-believers, practicers and non-practicers to live together, to intellectualize, to strengthen each other.  We've all shown we can be great competitors.  Competition does not require destruction, yet we often succumb to this temptation.  Why not tap our ability to admire our competitors as fellow artisans?  Some of us are able to do this.  Unfortunately not all are.  Once an :"enemy" is conquored, we kill them, removing them from our competitive field.  Does this better our skill? Our ability to best our competetor?  No. It does not!  It simply reduces the field for us so that we can best yet a weaker competitor, a non-challenge at best.  Could we not be proud of our victory and embrace our defeated competitors?  Could we not admire them, tell them how well they fought, how brave they were?  How we almost didnt win?  Couldnt we then show each others weaknesses and improve all of us for the future battle?  We could!

I now return to strictly physical.  In order to take part in this vast universe we've seen nearly entirely through telescopes only and a hand full of clever robots, we must join together as a species.  Out there... we will find many new things, many new species, many new experiences.  I can not hear a fine engine, or song, or see a great visual art or read a heart warming story of friendship without asking all of these questions.  Many of we humans dont ask these questions at all, ever.  We simply accept with obeyance from our leaders unquestioned and never advance.  As our economies show us, without advancement, they faulter and break, sometimes dying completely. Even so, as a species we must advance to remain strong.  We always seek new things, new challenges, new entertainments.  We wish for someone to do the hard work while never thinking how we could improve the hardwork into better more fulfilling work.  Only a few short years ago we scrubbed our fingers on washboards and carried our purchases on our backs.  Some of our less fortunate people still do so.  We conquered those problems.  We now have washing machines and motorized vehicles.  Those who are the have nots are imprisoned by governments who do not wish to fix their economies, their heirarchal systems.  Instead their rulers wallow in laziness letting the other governments do it, or letting their people fall into stagnation or even stepping back into the stone age.  We all know who these are. We all know how hard it might be to fix these problems.  But we cant tackle them until we stop pointing the fingers at each other.  It's not a matter of who's to blame, its about how can we FIX it. We've all made mistakes.  Its about our inability to forgive those mistakes and the unwillingness of those who've made them to let go and cooperate.  Dont those guys want their blood pressure to drop a little and rest a bit better at night?  Sure we are proud! Sometimes we are too proud to give in.  Sometimes we are too pround to admit we threaten each other because of fear.  We cant let anyone see our fears can we?  Oh but we can.  We must face our fears, admit them! To EACH OTHER, yes our dreaded enemies, our competitors!  What happens when we find we all have the same fears no matter our position in the pecking order?  Does the man on top not fear falling off?  Does the man below not fear being trampled?  Suuuure!   All we have to do is openly say to each  other, "I fear you will trample me if I let you know I am afraid, that I will lose my respect."  This is the same fear from a third world nation or a poweful nation.  Those on top must recognize their big feat and be careful not to step on the little guys.  The little guy next to you could be the best curry or raiman or fried chicken cook on the planet!  You fail to let him in your door because you disagree on religion?  Because his gun is bigger? Because he even HAS one?

You may have just missed an oportunity to collect an experience never again attainable!