Poet, Pirate, Priest, Patriarch

WHISKEY FOR THE BEAR……

The slumbering bear, recently awakened by a lovely nymph, satiated, soothed and brought back to the world of the living. Rejuvenated,  primal urges echo again, Confidence regained by the realization of his desirousness, only to be absolutely crushed by the rejection of the very creature who awakened him.  He had forgotten about that part, the heart. Fuck! Dazed, confused, he wanders out into the storm, not seeing, or thinking, clearly…. Whiskey……Yeah……

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knew it was gonna happen, wasn’t sposed to last, but still….. pulled out of hibernation for a couple of weeks, only to be told to go back to sleeping alone……

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…… I don’t know, guess I’m kinda at a crossroads here………… I know my appeal as “an itch to be scratched”, I know, dark, mysterious, outsider, I get it….. I’m just waitin for the woman to come along for whom a just a scratch aint gonna do….. someone who actually sees the depths of the sea … See Morethat is my soul and wants to dive in, not shrink away in trepidation….. or will I simply continue to be a scratchin post….. mmmm whiskey, yeah, whiskey knows the answers

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…………………………..Oh, whiskey was a metaphor for needing some company, some affirmational whiskey as it were…… I got no offers, so I just went to bed….

VERRRY FORMATIVE QUOTE FROM POPS….

We may never have money son, may not be able to afford to go to all the places you want to, but we can read all about them, know all about them. We’ll be rich in knowledge son, we’ll be rich in knowledge…….

Max Wayne Madden(?)

sometime in the early 70′s

HELLO….GOODBYE

Hello, nice to meet you, since absence makes the heart grow fonder, and familiarity breeds contempt, excuse me while I disappear so you can commence to falling in love with me….

NOT LISTENING…..

Of course I’m not listening to you……. I’m thinking about shit much more interesting than you, have you heard me talk out loud? Imagine how much better then, it must be inside my head where the uncensored version is……. So….shut….up……

Trust is for strangers, I trust no one that I know….

This Blog Thing

So this whole blog thing has been a long time coming to hear some talk over the years, but now I have to get people to read it…… I don’t know why really, that I was so reticent to start one, part of it was sporadic internet service, but that has been stable for  a couple years now……. Again, maybe I blame the dogs here, being responsible for them has me up and moving, or at least supervising, no more layin in bed all morning/day…….. with the extra time to putter and such that not malingerin’ gives ya, I have gotten a number of little things undone or unfinished completed, or at least advanced, a blog being one of them

I think the spark was the reactions I was getting to article links I was posting on facebook. I cruise the news pretty voraciously when I do it, though perhaps not the news you see on TV. I also have an interest/obsession with genealogy, history and anthropology and subscribe to a couple of digests that put hundreds of juicy articles in front of me every week. I spun through those digests, and if I found anything interesting/funny, or one of my friends on facebook would find it funny, I would post it. People were telling to me start a web page, a blog, newsletter something. Not just in cyberspace either, but people walked up to me at the good ol’ brick and mortar workplace. Granted, they were coworkers that were friends on facebook, but still, something about someone thanking you face to face for turning them on to information, and howlin for more……. It was time…. and with my new adventures in Pitbull Wrangling with the ubiquitous cute as hell puppy pictures, I have material to help me have a little meat on the blogs bones as I launched it.

But now, How do I go about getting strangers to check it out? I submitted it to google today, we’ll see how that goes…..

Also, I am a little dissappointed thus far,most likely in myself for not figuring it out, in my inability to get my links to show up as posts, or to show up chronologically, somehow, so far they only show up alphabetically…. I would like people to be able to see the latest posts at the top, ya know, a list showing time relevance, maybe I’ll try monkeyig with the blog roll settings when I finish this huntin and peckin session…….

So back to why I am here blogging, again, this is in addition to the Pitbull Sanctuary aspect, is my interest in History, in social justice, my eye for irony when it comes to world events and social behavior, and my passion for genealogy and the dna research and analysis that making exciting breakthroughs….. indeed, think about it….. Genealogy calculated by dna can change what we know of history, our own personal histories, our National histories(Sally Hemmings-Thomas Jefferson), indeed, even world history, DNA has proved Anastasia DID NOT escape, that  the entire Romanov family that was taken into that basement that day, died shortly thereafter. All bones have been found and accounted for, but this was only proved in 2008! Before that, our contemporary view of history had to leave the possibilty of her escape, two bodies weren’t in that basement……. turns out two Romanov children were so hard to kill it appears they burned the bodies to keep them from coming back to life…… stories purport it was the amount of jewelry and valuables sewn into their clothing that allowed them to survive the first few attempts on their lives, remember, they were prepared to flee the country. Now there still are Romanov’s, out there, multiple lines and dna can help them finish DUKE-ing it out over who the REAL Romanov’s are, but we know that particular line of the ruling family is gone, no more footnote required.

And of course, my own family Patriarchal mystery, or would that be Grand-Patriarchal?

HMMMMmmm……

So back to task…

getting this shit out there for other people to see,

trying to find out if they find it as interesting as me………

Earliest Knowledge Of My Mortality

I woke up early that day, it was a first really, I think I was in the first grade. I had gotten up, gotten myself breakfast, got dressed, even made my lunch. Mom hadn’t had to get up, of course, I had woken early, more than an hour early, they didn’t expect me up. Both Mom and Dad were working, and my sisters, twins, were infants I think.
They were dead tired, and I was pretty proud of myself for saving them the trouble of getting me ready for school. I wanted to tell them they didn’t have to get up, but I didn’t want to wake them, like I said, I knew they were tired, and it was still before 6 am. So I kept going down the hall toward their bedroom, then changing my mind and turning around.
Now this shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but for one thing, my brand new cowboy boots…. I was pretty damn proud of those boots. A six/seven year old boy in brand new cowboy boots, yep, ya might say I had a bit of a strut, heal, toe, like I was moseying down an old west wooden walkway. Well, apparently on pass 3 or 4, Mom woke up.
Now I was taking breaks between passes down the hall, sitting in the front room, or looking at my BOSS boots in the hall mirror, so mom wasn’t sure what she heard, and rolled over to go back to sleep. Not so on the next pass, she was wide awake, and trying to wake dad. Now initially dad wasn’t having it, told her it was nothin, to go back to bed. That was until my next pass, he heard it, and was getting up…
Now I was clueless as to them waking, in fact, I had checked the clock, and to my estimation, it was O.K. to wake them now. So I sauntered back down the hall, full of the pride of being a big boy. I reached toward the door, when WHOOSH!! the door swung inward and open, and I was staring at the business end of a gun, a gun that in my 6 year old eyes was so big I couldn’t see my father crouched behind it, all I saw was blue grey metallic, glinting in the semi darkness of an unlit hallway…..
Dad almost shit his pants when he realized it was me. They thought they had a prowler in the house. Needless to say, the house, which I had been trying to keep so quiet so Mom and dad could sleep, errupted. There was crying, laughing, hugging and what not for quite a while. At one point Dad told me I was lucky it was him that got up and not mom. He said she would have shot first …..and then opened the door……..

I didn’t have to go to school that day…..

Reunion And Reconciliation Via Social Networking

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 11:24pm

How does one reconcile their perception of the past, the actual past, the past other individuals perceive, reality(based on the general perception of the past)in the present, your perceived present, and the perceived present of other individuals with whom you are in contact, and thus affect your perceptions, of self, of reality and of others…. hell of a run-on sentence, huh?

FaceBook has led me to this dilemma …… I suppose I thought about this same dilemma back during the lead up to both my 10 and 20 year high school reunions, though only briefly. Perhaps had I attended either of them, I wouldn’t be writing this now.
Though I am not sure if I would have attended, as I was a pretty angry specimen at the time, my 10 year reunion had I been invited, the fact that I wasn’t invited pretty much sealed the deal on my not going. I don’t know, maybe I’m weird, I have no problem crashing parties I got no business going to, places where I wouldn’t even know how to meet someone who might get invited…Shit, no prob, grab the keys, lets make a couple a stops, we are in… Audacity has it’s moments…. And failure means you tried…. But to not be an invitee, to possibly have to explain my right to be there, I had had enough of failure at that time in my life….. I didn’t want to share it with people that didn’t invite me…. but enough, that aint the point..

Unfortunately when the 20 year came around(I was invited this time) I had only just, and I mean, only just, moved out of state, and wasn’t in a financial position to take time off from work. Hell I had only just got a job, after having sold what I could and giving away that which wouldn’t fit in a motorhome or under my mothers deck, and taking off for the Arizona desert. (I was on a bit of a quest you might say, still am…) Whole ‘nuther” story….

So that leads me to now, and to social networking….. It really is amazing, imagine if our great-grandparents had been able to correspond in real time with old friends, or distant cousins whom they had never physically met, from the Old Country. Had they been able to have that connection, how different would we be now? that’s how different our great grandchildren will be….

But I’m getting tangental….

What I’m getting at here are perceptions, mostly mine, the only ones I know much about. You see, as with most of us, the teen age years were an awkward and difficult time for me. I didn’t really fit in anywhere at my high school, though I did find a group of like minded individuals, from all different high schools, many of whom have stayed lifelong friends. We knew and cared about each other because we wanted to, not because we lived in the same neighborhood, or were on the same team. I had some friends from my high school, but the majority of my friends were from elsewhere…

I am pleasantly surprised and grateful for the re connections with many old friends, what has surprised me has been the number of people that have contacted me that seemed, again from my perspective, to simply tolerate me back then, or indeed had an active dislike for me…..I know some of it was/is my own self-loathing and I know we all grow up, but it has been rather surprising, even un-nerving to hear from a couple of these people. I wonder if anyone has had the same reaction to contact from me? Is there someone out there that was surprised or shocked to hear from me? Did I make someone I’ve gotten in touch with as uncomfortable as some people made me back then without knowing it? Or have I simply forgotten how I made them feel? I don’t know……

Has anyone else come across this phenomena, through myspace or facebook or any of the other social networking sites? Just curious……….

NOTES FROM THE PODIUM

With almost 30 years of experience in the hospitality and entertainment Industries, as well as being an ordained minister, This column will feel free to pontificate on any number of subjects. However, the emphasis will ordinarily revolve around entertainment, entertainers and those being entertained.
That having been said, this first column will focus on etiquette, specifically nightclub etiquette, and more pointedly, the entrance of the entertained/patron. That’s right, how to treat the doorman/doordame. Most people seldom think of the door person as much more than a barrier to get by, an inconvenience at best. That however, is SOO far from the truth, and downright rude if you truly think about it.
Most door personnel can attest to the disdain and downright rudeness with which they are treated on a nightly basis. They are cussed, cajoled and accused of all kinds of motives for their actions, when in truth, they are simply trying to protect the establishment, themselves, and most of all you, the patron.
Believe it or not, the worst offenders are those that think of themselves as “regular” customers. A regular customer rarely has to identify themselves as such, the staff come to know them. Contrary to popular belief, regular attendance at an establishment does not automatically qualify one as a regular. To be considered a regular customer, you must be a GOOD customer. Not just good to your server, good to all of the personnel at the establishment. That doesn’t mean you have to hand out cash to all, like a human ATM, though tipping does help. A big tipper with a foul mouth and rotten attitude is not a regular. An average tipper who truly has kindness in their heart for all of those that serve them, is.
Back to the doorstaff. These people truly are gatekeepers, but not in the way most people think. They are not there to keep you out, regardless of what the excessively drunk asshole is howling about when they are denied entrance for being way to belligerent to do anything but ruin the good time of others. No, the door-staff are there to make sure the establishment stays in compliance with the law, and avoids getting closed down. A great nightspot will cease to be a great nightspot if it gets it’s liquor license pulled. Likewise, if the police are continually called to deal with the belligerents continually acting in a way as to ruin the good time of others, the constabulary WILL put an end to it being a great nightspot. Trust me, they have their ways, and many of them.
Another thing to remember, these people are professionals, and have alot on their plates. They are generally underpaid, considering what they have to put up with, and are doing this job not for the stellar pay, but because they truly love the scene, and enjoy working with people. Many are doing this as a second job, just for the opportunity to stay in the scene. As I said, they have a full plate, they are checking I.D.’s, charging cover, keeping a head count and determining if someone is too impaired to enter, or perhaps would be a detriment to the good time for all that the rest of the staff is trying to provide.
Later, they are cleaning up(puke, excrement, spilled drinks, etc.} as well as trying to protect the majority of the patrons from injury when someone’s inner knucklehead/ pindejo comes flying out into the open. Good door-staff stop fights before they start, better ones stop fighters from even getting in the door. Again, this is for your protection. even if you aren’t involved or injured in the fracas these people get into, it still takes away from the good time you came for and your drink could get spilled, or worse yet a drink could be spilled on you!!
Back to the door before I close. Name dropping…… Not a good thing. You are basically telling the doorman/dame that they aren’t important enough for you to know, that because you know someone inside, you have no reason to treat them as a human being, they are simply an inconvenience to you, a nuisance. How about getting to know the person, talk to them(preferably before you are too drunk to hold an intelligent conversation), learn their name and make sure they remember yours. Again, tips aren’t required, but I’d be lying if I didn’ t say they help.
Consistently trying to get out of paying cover charge only makes you look cheap and cheap people never become regulars by the aforementioned rules. Pay the cover, be respectful, treat the staff like you would want to be treated and your preferential treatment will come soon enough. If you have a friend that works there, call ahead and ask to be put on the guest list. Don’t assume you are always their guest, call ahead. Most bartenders/servers have more friends and great tipping customers than their guest list on any given night, so give them a little warning. Trust me, a little respect goes a long way.

I hope this has been informative, and helps you enjoy your leisure time to the fullest. If not, PISS OFF, we didn’t want you in the joint anyway……..

BARBARY AL