Life of Nobody

[P3nT4gR4m]

Innit great how the safety measures are introduced after something totally fucked happens? With the BP oceanic remodelling project in the news this shit is just as relevant now as it was then.

[Adios]

The loading dock had called and let me know some electric motors had came in for me. I was able to get there a couple of hours later, but no one was on the dock.

I found my motors but there was a pallet of paper for the copy room in the way. I grabbed a hand jack and went to move it. It was very heavy. Finally I turned my back to the pallet and put my arms behind me and jerked hard on the pallet and got it rolling enough to be out of the way.

I thought something in my back had popped but nothing hurt. When I got the pallet of paper where I wanted it I stopped and relaxed. I hit the floor and screamed.

The pain was incredible. I couldn't get a decent breath and I certainly couldn't move. This time the nurse wasn't having my nonsense about an ambulance and I was ready for drugs if Bill wanted to get one back on me. So flight for life showed up and I got a ride. Bill was at the other end of the building and it was a quarter of a mile long so he missed out. Didn't matter though, I was begging for drugs.

So in the hospital they ran some tests and admitted me right there. I had torn the muscle that runs across the lower back in half. A neurologist was called in. They ran all kinds of tests and the result was it was inoperable. Damn.

So They kept me for a couple of weeks until they figured out what drugs were going to work best and for massage therapy. I wasn't allowed to move at all.

They sent me home and set up ongoing physical therapy and the next 30 days of my life are forever lost in a haze of demerol and muscle relaxers. I was taken in after 30 days to see this specialist. supposedly one of the top neurologists in the Denver area.

As we talked I was asking about getting out of the wheelchair and he told me I would never get out of it. My mind went blank. The impact of his statement was crushing. We must have sat there for over 5 minutes without a word said.

The physical pain was almost blinding but the emotional pain was twice as bad. I made a decision without realizing it. I stood up and walked out of his office. I pushed my own wheelchair out of his office. It hurt like pure hell, but I did it.

I drove them crazy in PT, insisting that we work harder. They kept trying to hold me back and we kept butting heads over it. I would get wheeled in the hospital for steroid injections into my spine, 4 injections every trip, once a month.

After the injections I would push my own chair out of the hospital. That damn chair had become my personal Satan. I would not give up. No matter what. It was 6 months before I was able to go back to work. But I did.

I spent the next year in PT making them push me for the entire time. After PT the company had a fitness center so I started working out 5 days a week. I was addicted to Soma for the next 12 years but I beat that wheelchair.

There have been a lot of very rough times over the years but I refused to give in. Today I am pain free in my lower back almost all of the time. Once in a while I get muscle spasms and some pain.

I am not in a wheelchair. The pallet of paper I had moved weighed 2000 pounds I found later. 1 ton.

[Adios]

Innit great how the safety measures are introduced after something totally fucked happens? With the BP oceanic remodelling project in the news this shit is just as relevant now as it was then.

Yep. It was just never even considered that this would happen. There wasn't even an air evacuation system in place.

[Adios]

The company I worked for was Johns Manville. At least twice a week we would get a bomb threat. JM was involved in the asbestos litigation and some people hated the company.

I was part of the bomb search team. We received regular training on what to look for and what to do if we found one. There were several of us because the building was a quarter of a mile long and spread over several floors.

The call came in, another bomb threat. We all met in the engineers office where they organized us and were passing out 2 way radios. I remember driving past road construction sites in the mountains and there were signs telling you to turn off all radios and phones because they were blasting.

I thought this was worth mentioning since we were looking for explosives. As they were collecting the 2 way radios from us we decided to use the emergency phone system. I thought it was a much better idea.

So we began the search. Up and down one stairway after another. Looking in cubbyholes on every floor. They always evacuated the building and all the other employees stood out in the parking lot while this was happening.

When the company had been in downtown Denver a bomb had actually gone off. Now we were in the foothills in Deer Creek Canyon. It was 20 miles to Denver.

Now the only time the police bomb squad would show up was if we found something. We never did find a bomb and I was good with that. I didn't want to find one. We never caught anyone who was making the bomb threats either.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Hard-f'kin-core dude! Some people make the most of the hand they're dealt. Others use their middle finger to demand more cards and they keep that finger skyward till they get a hand they like. Sometimes that's just the only way to get shit done!

[Adios]

Hard-f'kin-core dude! Some people make the most of the hand they're dealt. Others use their middle finger to demand more cards and they keep that finger skyward till they get a hand they like. Sometimes that's just the only way to get shit done!

I wish I could take credit for it. Something in my head took over.

[Adios]

It was a beautiful summer day in the foothills. We were working outside on a Saturday repainting the lines on the parking spaces.

The front reflecting pool had been treated the day before so it was a very pretty blue and the sun was reflecting the building off of it perfectly.

A magpie landed on the ledge of the pool and squawked at us for a while. We took a break and were watching the bird. Every once in a while it would take a drink from the pool. We went back to work.

An hour or so later we took another little break and the magpie was still there. I wasn't walking so good either. We watched it literally stagger. Then it would stop and take another drink. Now we were caught up in watching the bird. If you've never seen a bird stagger when it walks, it is a very funny thing.

After a while the bird kind of walked off the ledge. It was a very ungraceful landing. The bird took a few more steps and then it fell over. We went to check on the bird and it was awake looking at us. When we would reach down to pick it up it would peck and hiss at us so we didn't try to help it.

After about an hour the bird made it back to it's feet and made 3 unsuccessful attempts to fly off. It did manage then to take wing and fly away. All we could figure out was the bird got drunk on the chemical in the pool. None of us ever saw anything like that again.

[Adios]

I was afraid of heights. On a 6 foot ladder it was both hands for the company. Up to 14 feet it was one hand for the company and one hand for me. Over 14 feet and it was both hands for me and to hell with the company.

I was mad about being afraid of heights. It was a weakness and sometimes it affected my job.

I had a plan. I was going to go bungi jumping to cure my fear. I mean it's only logical, right? Man up, face your fear head on and grab it around the throat. Choke it to death!

So I paid my money and up we went. There was a huge airbag on the ground in case things went bad. All the equipment looked good and I was hooked onto the platform.

Then we got to the top. That huge airbag looked like a damn couch pillow. The wind was howling and pushing us around. I couldn't swallow. Hell, I could hardly breathe. I started to doubt the equipment. I started to doubt my sanity. I was sweating and shaking.

The jump master told me he was going to count backwards and when he got to 1 i was supposed to fall off backwards. About this time I failed to see any logic in falling off of a perfectly good platform so I screamed at the jump master to shut the hell up.

Now I was standing with just my toes on a tiny lip on this platform with my back to what felt like a black abyss. I closed my eyes and somehow managed to calm myself down. Without opening my eyes I told the jump master I was ready. He counted me down and I fell.

I kept my eyes closed waiting for the feel of bouncing back up. I will tell you there isn't any feeling of that, it just happens. I couldn't stand it anymore so I opened my eyes. Bad move. I was already back near the top again.

Now I was too terrified to close my eyes. The air bag still looked like a couch pillow and the air was screaming past my ears. I was going back down. My chest was hurting and I was bouncing around on that rubber band like a cat toy.

I was NOT happy.

Finally they lowered me to the air bag which once again had regained it's full size and as they lowered me I rolled off of it. I had done it. I had bungi jumped. As I stood up my knees failed me. My entire family was laughing at me. Apparently I had screamed like a woman for the whole ride.


But I had done it. Know something really crazy? I wasn't afraid of heights after that.

In Denver there is Elitches Garden or 6 Flags or whatever they call it now. They have a swing that is a huge arch. They pull you up to a nearby tower and you have to pull a ripcord to start the swing.

In the background there are the towers. There is a microscopic speck on the right hand one that is my stepson Mike and myself.

[Adios]

I had an idea. What the hell, it ad been a while since I had gotten hurt so it was due.



Yes, I bought a boat. I wanted to water ski. So I learned how to handle the boat, all the rules of the water and off we went.

The wind was blowing on this day but I wanted to ski anyway, I had learned to ski in rough water after all. So everything was going on pretty good. The boat driver saw some smooth water by the dam so off we went. The instant my skis hit the smooth water I crashed.

I mean face first at 40 MPH. There I was face down in the water out cold. Now we had several people in the boat, both men and women. After they managed to drag me into the boat they went back and got my swim trunks. I guess the water had ripped them right off of me.

So I woke up back at the beach naked as a jaybird. And the water was cold. So I fumbled around getting my trunks back on while the laughter continued. It took a while to live that one down, but it wasn't the last time it happened either.

Finally I gave up on trunks and started wearing cut off jeans. That seemed to solve the problem. I still got knocked out once in a while, but at least i wasn't naked.

[BadBeast]

It was a beautiful summer day in the foothills. We were working outside on a Saturday repainting the lines on the parking spaces.

The front reflecting pool had been treated the day before so it was a very pretty blue and the sun was reflecting the building off of it perfectly.

A magpie landed on the ledge of the pool and squawked at us for a while. We took a break and were watching the bird. Every once in a while it would take a drink from the pool. We went back to work.

An hour or so later we took another little break and the magpie was still there. I wasn't walking so good either. We watched it literally stagger. Then it would stop and take another drink. Now we were caught up in watching the bird. If you've never seen a bird stagger when it walks, it is a very funny thing.

After a while the bird kind of walked off the ledge. It was a very ungraceful landing. The bird took a few more steps and then it fell over. We went to check on the bird and it was awake looking at us. When we would reach down to pick it up it would peck and hiss at us so we didn't try to help it.

After about an hour the bird made it back to it's feet and made 3 unsuccessful attempts to fly off. It did manage then to take wing and fly away. All we could figure out was the bird got drunk on the chemical in the pool. None of us ever saw anything like that again.

We used to have an Orchard, and in the Autumn, the Badgers would come around at night, and scarf down all the windfall apples. By 3 in the morning, they would all be drunk on the alcohol in the half rotten apples, and spend the rest of the night acting like drunken humans, singing Badger songs, and  chasing each other around, and fighting over Badger chicks, before staggering back to their Sett at dawn. 

[Adios]

We always took a weeks vacation with another couple and went to the lake and camped and skiied. He had a nice jet boat that would haul.

One day we were sitting there drinking some cold ones and I asked Tom just how fast his boat would go. He said he thought it topped out at 70 MPH. The legal speed on lakes in Colorado was 45 MPH.

But like I said we had been drinking a little. I had a plan. Yeah, I know but what the hell, right?

We put my big tube behind his boat to see just how fast a guy could ride and stay on. Of course I was the guy on the tube. Tom hadn't had that much to drink.

Now I didn't know how fast we were going but the tube was only hitting the water about every 15 feet. It was just kind of skipping and I was having a blast. So far so good.

Tom was running out of lake so he had to turn. If you've ever ridden one of those tubes you know that when the boat turns the tube will slip out and kind of catch up to the boat. Well, I was almost passing the boat. It was getting harder and harder to stay on the tube.

I was trying to tuck my elbow in the center of the tube but couldn't quite get it. So I glanced down at the tube. It was flat. It was as flat as a pancake. There was no place to tuck my elbow.

While I was processing this information I came off of the tube. As I was flying through the air my last thought was to roll into a ball to minimize whatever damage I had gotten myself into.

When I woke up back at the beach I learned a couple of things. Tom had been going 70 MPH. The inner seams on the tube had disintegrated. The fine print on the tube said 40 MPH max speed. I was in  pain.

I also learned despite telling myself to curl into a ball I had cartwheeled about 50 feet across the water before my magnificent crash. Tom said my arms and legs were all spread and it looked really cool.

We decided the next time we would reinforce the seams on the new tube I bought.

[Adios]

The eastern plains in Colorado are very unpredictable when it comes to weather. A storm could come out of nowhere at any time.

I had made some poles that were about 5 feet long for Tom and myself so we could drive them in the lake bed and tie our boats nose out. We would leave enough slack in the rope to allow the boats to dance on incoming waves and we tied the stern to the shore so the boats couldn't run up on the stakes.

He and I were always watching the horizon because you could see a storm coming from a long way off if it was daylight. Which ever one of us spotted a storm first we would always let the other know. We would get back to camp and get the boats tied down and the storm covers on them.

We would also make sure the campsite was ready for a storm after we got through with the boats. The only things left would be our chairs and we could pick those up and put them in the campers when the storm hit.

While we were doing all of this it never failed some campers would laugh at us. That was just fine.

We were at Bonnie Lake which was almost to the Kansas state line when a real nasty storm hit. Tom and I had gotten everything ready so we just went in the campers. A lot of people were still out in the water and the waves were at about 4 feet from the wind.

One guy had been wind surfing and he had to be rescued by the rangers. Others had to struggle to get back to shore without swamping their boats.

The storm lasted most of the night and the next morning everything was a mess. Many boats were sunk in shallow water by the beach, a couple were on their sides. Our boats were just fine and all of out camp gear was right where we put it.

Tom and I just sat and enjoyed our morning coffee. I didn't hear anymore laughter. Well, except for Tom and myself. Pretty soon the kids and everybody was awake and we decided to get some skiing in. It was real nice, no other boats to have to look out for, and the water wasn't all chopped up from too many boats running around.

Later that evening a lot of people walked by to check out how we tied our boats up every day. Even in clear weather we put on the storm covers and always tied them the same way.

[Adios]

This story is about why Tom and I changed the way we tied our boats up.

It had been a nice day and we had worn ourselves out playing. So we tied our boats like we usually did, bow to the beach and the stern to a tree.

I guess it was about midnight when I woke up. The wind was howling and the camper was rocking hard. First I made sure we weren't in any danger of it blowing and then I checked on the boats.

Holy cow! There were 5 foot high waves crashing on the shore and Toms boat had broke loose and was in danger of banging itself on a tree. I took off and jumped between his boat and the tree doing my best to save it. There was lightening everywhere and the waves were bashing into me all the way up to my head.

I was yelling at the top of my voice for help and I couldn't even hear me. Finally my wife opened the camper door and I started yelling for help. The wind took a seconds pause and she said "No, I don't need help", I started cussing and about that time Tom came out of his camper at full speed.

It took us about 20 minutes to get his boat secure again. The next day we had to bail both boats out even with using bilge pumps. And that was the last time we ever tied our boats out that way.

We were lucky because a lot of boats were sunk and a couple were even washed up on the beach.

[Adios]

I learned early in my boating phase that if you put a 14 foot cabover camper in your truck and a boat on behind the truck that you can't see the boat when you are trying to back it up when you want to launch it. This is bad because you have to get the boat lined out straight and keep it that way.

I went down to a nearby lake to watch other people launch their boats so I could get some ideas. And to laugh. You could always spot a new boat owner. They would back up and get their boats out of line and have to pull forward again, over and over.

When you are backing a trailer everything is backwards from what you would expect. So this was some pretty good free entertainment.

Well, back to the story. I didn't get any good ideas so I went home and thought it over. Then I took my truck to the welding shop and had them weld a hitch to the front of my truck. I would pull into the marina and unhitch my boat, then turn the truck around and hitch the boat to the front. Problem solved. I could see the trailer easily and never had any more trouble launching.

I always got a lot of strange looks and the next year several front bumper hitches started showing up. What the heck, it worked. Boat owners and campers are always fooling around with equipment to try to make it better.

My camper was 14 feet long and the truck bed was only 8 feet. It worked pretty good but there was no step to get into the camper. After several failed ideas I went back to the welding shop and had an extended bumper put on. I never got tailgated when the camper was off of the truck because I had 4 feet of heavy angle iron welded to the back of my truck. It looked intimidating.

Of course parking was something else. I always had to park way out so I could take 2 spaces.

[Adios]

In 1965 I lived in Alabama. That year I learned to hate the south. I remember separate drinking fountains and just about everything else. I can still see in my minds eye signs on stores that said Whites Only. I remember the hate that went both ways.

I was just a snot nosed kid and didn't pay a lot of attention until one day that burned itself into my mind to remain there forever. I was walking down the sidewalk and coming the other way was an elderly black man. When we got close to each other he stepped off of the sidewalk and into the street and kept his eyes down as I walked by. Even I knew there was something very wrong with this. It troubled me and I asked my Papa about it. He muttered something about "niggers knowing their place".

I had just learned my family, people I loved and respected were haters too. I guess I always knew, I just never paid any attention to it. It was just a part of life. After this I started watching closer. This was going on everywhere. I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut about it, a couple of backhands go a long way.

I was out in the country and in those days we all had wells with buckets that were lowered down for water. I stopped at a farm where a black man was hauling up a bucket of water. He had a dipper and took a long drink. I asked him if I could have a drink and he told me he didn't have another dipper. I asked if I just couldn't use his. He stared at me a while and then turned and went in his house and closed the door. He took his dipper with him.

There was a black man on television in those days saying a lot of things that made the white people mad. To me he was just a calm man saying that black people deserved equal rights. Except in those they said colored people. But he sure made the whites mad and I thought a little scared.

They wanted to walk from Selma to Montgomery but the police beat them up pretty bad on a bridge before they got too far. I heard they went to the law to get permission to make their walk. Some judge said they sure could and there was a lot of cussing about "nigger lovers."

Well they made their march. White people all along the road had sandbags stacked in front of their doors and had shotguns too. Near as I could tell they didn't hurt anybody, just walked and sang a lot. Sure was a lot of people walking with them. I think more joined them every day. The more that walked the more scared the whites got too.

I watched on television later as Dr. King made a speech in Washington. I found myself agreeing with everything he said. There were lots of folks there listening to him as well. Well some time later he got shot to death. A lot of people I knew were real happy and laughing about it but I was pretty sad. I thought maybe we had lost a very special person. But then again I was just a kid.

I heard on the television how things were changing all over for the black people but I didn't see any of it. It seemed like nothing had changed at all. Well, that isn't true either. There were a lot more KKK meetings and a lot more black people were getting hurt and killed.

I'm grown now and there is still a great deal of hate because of skin color. I don't think much has changed. I don't know if it ever will either.