Walkabout Thoughts #54

My thoughts, Stream of consciousness, rough and ready, while walking off long Covid and listening to podcasts… July 17, 2023, Monday

Weather for the day… 63 degrees starting out,

Podcast Marc Maron with Felicia Michaels

I Instagram for the day, this just seemed appropriate with comics on the podcast... Also.

OK... I’m walking on my 1st mile for the day. I spent the entire day yesterday editing my true crime biopic “The Teenage Bodyguard“. Big history with that, and all the work I’ve done on it, including with producer/actor Michael Douglas' producer Robert Mitas on some films (one of my favorite being, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, so fun talking to him on the phone about it from time to time), and who I worked with on this project. Really nice guy to work with. He helped me rewrite it into a shorter, tighter, screenplay format. But it's just not the original which is the actual story. Likely more sellable. I’ve sent it to screenplay festivals over the years and the ones where I got notes back on it, I fine tuned it, ignoring the notes as you do, where appropriate. Usually when they don't get something and are wrong on something, you still need to do SOMETHING. Because if they don't get it, something wasn't clear. Clarify it! I entered one festival recently and got some good notes back. So yesterday I did all the obvious fixes on mistakes and a tiny bit of re-ordering of scenes, which I admit are better now. I thought, hey those were good notes, maybe I should send them the Mitas version? But the festival is now in waiver only status. So I took a shot and emailed them and explained the situation. Couple of days of no response and then, sure enough, yesterday they sent me a waiver to directly email them the screenplay and then pay $40 on PayPal which is like 56 Canadian. So they're in Canada apparently. I wasn’t gonna bother with update using their notes, until I thought about sending it to some other festival that I came across this weekend. So thought might as well give it a shot and first few notes were good so I kept going and updated it all and submitted yesterday to the new festival. Along with my "Pvt. Ravel‘s Bolero" film. Since I’m in a situation where I have other things going on, it’s hard right now for me to produce a new film. So I thought I have all these screenplays sitting around, I might as well send some off. 

I then went and looked at my "International Screenwriters Association" profile at ISA.org and it needed updating. So I added my horror/comedy screenplay, “Gray and Lover The Hearth Tales Incident“ and this updated Teenage Bodyguard screenplay. My "Gumdrop", a short horror film was already up there, so I added "Pvt. Ravel‘s Bolero" film. Oddly enough, for anyone to see my screenplays I have to pay for a monthly or annual subscription. At this stage of things I might do that. See as a rule, since the 1980s, I had decided back then, as things like AOL we’re around making difficult Internet access...difficult, that I refused to pay for the Internet, partly because that I was broke in the 80s, until I got my first IT job. I tried to do everything cheaply, "on the sly" (According to Etymonline, the word sly has been used since the year 1200 in Middle English as sley. This comes from the Old Norse sloegr or Old Norse slœgr meaning cunning or crafty). So while I could’ve thrown thousands and thousands of dollars down the drain over the decades, I really spent very little, but probably learned a lot more than I would have otherwise. Because I had to do it with brute force and in the hard way. I had to study, I read a lot of books, I researched and... here I am. It's ironic because when my wife and I split up, part of the complaint was I wasn't making any money, much money. Not a big complaint, but it was there, mostly put upon her by her parents. Before we split when she said they'd mentioned it, I pointed out I was working all the time. I worked on a mainframe at nights at the University of Washington Medical Center for their Radiology and Pathology (and the regional trauma Harborview Med. Ctr, affectionately nicknamed, "Harborzoo" by many) and that I was studying manuals and books on PC design and IT issues, and learning all the software (sans manuals) I could get my hands on. Which all paid off years later. I ended up making a good deal of money and had she stuck around...while she never really did and built a much more difficult life for herself and by association, our son. Which I didn't know about until he became a young adult.

Anyway, I got a lot done yesterday. Probably more than I’ve done in a long time on any one day. I got all these blogs up-to-date and edited in the last one to get out this morning. Now I’m creating another damn one, here. But I got that entire screenplay updated, except for some of their more serious structural notes. They hate my SUPERS. Which I do keep hearing from everybody, but this is that kind of film where you need to be oriented in the moment, because it jumps around in the timeline. Yes I could do a linear format as this guy noted, but…the thing is, part of the reason everyone hates SUPERs now a days (text on screen in a movie, also called, "cards") is two fold. I do like how you have to guess you made a jump in time forward or back in a film and it's notable by elements within the frame. But it also has to do with people watching movies on their pads and phones. You'll notice some series and movies now have GIANT writing on the screen indicating location, mostly. Well? It's easier to read on a cell phone.

I’ve always liked Marc Maron, and I’ve been dabbling in his podcast lately more and more. Especially the ones where he has on a comic from back when he started out and what they were doing then and today and reminiscing. Too fun.

Listening to Marc’s podcast with his old friend, who started out in comedy before him Felicia Michaels. He got me thinking. She kind of started out as a stripper, and you have to hear her story to appreciate that. The type of person I'd always avoided. Maybe that was a mistake. I mean a lot of them were not having their shit together to be sure. you know? Maybe I needed the stripper who had her shit together a little and was just doing this to "get her degree" or something. But I always seem to end up with more conventional women. Not when viewed back then in the moment, but when you look back on it. Yeah. My oldest son‘s mother was the least conservative in being an artist and a partier. Weird relationship in a way. I kept trying to get away from her and kept not being able to. We started working at Tower Video in Seattle, Mercer Street store. I was a supervisor and she got hired one day. But that’s another story. Apparently she was a blossominkg alcoholic not until after we got divorced. Then she moved to Portland while I remained in the Seattle area. So I didn’t know what was going on in her household for years. I mean, knowing her for who she had been, from her upper middle class family, a woman who could just sit at a piano and rip off a classical piece of music. While I came from a lower middle class that grew into maybe middle, then I heard from my son, how things were there with beer bottles all over the house all the time… Oh, my. Well, she ended up only having him from age 4 for 18 months because their family had money and threatened me with lawyers (she did not them but I assumed they put her up to it) and I figured as I was a dad in 1992 little chance I'd get the kid. But I tried until I had to give him up after she left (I tossed her out for kind of reasonable reasons). But then she gave hi up and I brought him into my new marriage with a young child I adopted a year or so later at age 2 (as birth dad was an alcoholic). When I had married that very sweet woman, a horse trainer, who turned out to be seemingly building into some kind of mental issues which led to a rather abusive nuclear family situation for I guess. all four of us. I know that woman’s entire family doesn’t like her much now because apparently she’s cut them all out of the parent's will and took everything after the they recently died. But in mental illness, narcissism and megalomania, I’m sure she has a completely rational and normal view on all that. That was oddly enough, ironically enough, the story of my siblings and our mother who needed mental help, but exhibited an appearance of sanity just enough to where you couldn't do anything about it to help her (or us). So I started off life serious about that never happening to any of my children should I ever have any (that was up for question for years until my oldest's mother just took that choice away from me) and then, it all came to be as if I had planned it or something. But then, when you’re attracted to mental illness because you’ve lived with some form of it all your life and don’t know that yet, until you’re blindsided, until it's too late, well... I'd thought I had a sort of intellectual armor since I’ve got a university degree in psychology. I was at the top of my class, according to my professor. But there's a joke that was around the psych department that was pretty standard across all psych departments most likely, that psychologists make the worst parents. You could probably synthesize that into other associated issues. But when you know a discipline like that and help others, you have a kind of blindness to it at home.
Anyway, did my kids turn out OK? Well? Better than me, and worse than me, in different ways. Which sounds like childrearing in general I guess. Basically, I’d say they’re both happy people.

I was going to skip over, since Marc’s podcast ended. to another one of his, but Felicia mentioned her podcast. She’s on, "The Liars Club", they mentioned it several times, so if I check it out, though I was going to another Maron podcast, anyway, in going to Marc's podcast, up popped The Liars Club podcast and I saw one with Bill Burr. I like him, friend of theirs, they talked about him on the last podcast, so I thought, well, check out some of this and see how it goes…

So, The Liars Club podcast starts and Felicia starts talking and they introduce themselves and she says what they do there is, they invite one of their friends on, another comedian, who has to tell two stories, one true, one a lie, and then they try to figure out which one's a lie. Well, that sounds entertaining.

Fascinating. I"m editing this later in the day today and had to go downstairs to get my sheets out of the dryer. Ever wonder what my basement/house looks like, it's detailed pretty clearly (most of it) in my film, "Gumdrop", a short horror. I got into the basement sometimes and look around and remember "killing" people down there (for in the film). Anyway, I put on Marc's new podcast with an Irish actor I've been enjoying on screen for years, Cilian Murphy, and they're talking and said they both had the Sears Silvertone guitar with the amp built into the case. Cillian says he only has the guitar. I had both, given to me by my older brother who had a band and at some point in the late 60s pulled my sister into it. I can't count the number of times I took that amp out of its case and put it up on my ... ok, yes, true...gun rack on my wall in my bedroom growing up. I had a .303 British and a breaking single shot 20 gauge shotgun, and shells. My brother got that when he was 16. He gave it to me when I was 16 (he should have kept it for his son someday). So I gave it to my son when he was 16. One time I was putting that amp into the case again and I accidentally forgot to unplug it from the wall. I had been plugging it in and unplugging it multiple times in trying to figure something out and got confused. So I put my hand on the wires to crimp them down flat and the power shot into my hand and up my arm feeling like an iron rod going up my arm. I couldn't open my hand. I just stood there being electrocuted and began to fear for my life. I couldn't figure how how to stop it until I realized the freezing effect hadn't gone to my knees (yet?). So I relaxed my knees so I was fall from a standing position and it pulled my hand off the amp, ending the shocking event. Guess what? Never made that mistake ever again. I was the one in my early teens who changed out the house electrical on/off toggle switches and I never turned off the power. It just wasn't necessary. Only go shocked once doing that, very briefly. But after this experience with the amp (I told my brother and he explained amps to me in a more comprehensive way), I never did that again. Naw, I'm lying, I still don't tend to turn off the power today in swapping out a switch.

I was really liking the noise cancellation function on these AirPods, because I never had that before and I’ve always been curious. Yesterday I started being disappointed because so much sound was coming through. I thought maybe they’re not in my ears correctly or something? So I just checked on the Settings on my phone just now and it was turned off. I turned it back on. And now it’s weird silent again, except for what I’m listening to, obviously. Especially cool because there’s some landscapers who are trimming a giant hedge and it's so much quieter now. So that’s cool…

About talking about these AirPods… If you back up in my blogs to when I got them the other day, I was calling them "air buds". Nope. Then I started calling them by their correct name only lowercase and separated, "air pods". Now I find if I say it correctly, they transcribe correctly… "Air pods". I tell ya, AI maybe scary and it maybe gonna destroy us, but so far it’s actually pretty cool.

So far, my only complaint with these… AirPods… is they keep rotating out a place and you have to slightly twist them back in, moving the bottom forward towards your chin and that’s really fucking annoying. But as I had discussed, some of that probably has to do with sweating. So having some way to hold them correctly in place at all times would definitely be a bonus. Maybe they should ask the AI how to fix it?

Speaking again of AI… as I said, before, my oldest son has my book “Suffering Long Covid“ in his brick and mortar health food store in another city that he manages. But it’s sitting there by the door and although people will pick it up, it’s not yet been selling. Why? Probably because you have to have long Covid. Which isn’t everybody. And you need some advertising material to sell it. So I thought I might take a second today and produce a one sheet to put by the books. If I hadn’t grown up when I did, the cool thing about this now is I can do it quickly. I don’t have to design it, draw it up, cut and paste it together and make a copy of it, then mail it to him. I can whip it all together in a few minutes and just email it, or stick it on Google Drive so my son can grab it and print it out at work [which is what happened today over the course of a couple of hours rather than a couple of days]. Which is where I keep a pitchdeck/lookbook for my "Teenage Bodyguard" screenplay (on Google Drive) which was made up professionally, cost me a couple grand and it’s so big in file size, that I can’t email it to anyone. But they can easily just go to a link and download it if they want. Or I can upload it to a website where it says to upload your pitchdeck here, or something.

On another topic, I just sent this to my son, and I’ll share with you:

So I was thinking of paying for a year of "International Screenwriters Association" account again. Which I haven't done in years, just to have my screenplays up there and then it suddenly occurred to me. While we are having problems here in America today, and we have a writers and actors strike going on right now,  that the industry says could kill them. Because tech companies like Apple and Amazon have gotten into making movies and they're killing it and have way more money than Hollywood… But by putting my screenplays into where an international audience of producers and investors around the world still have a group of money out there! It's a bigger audience for one, Some of those people out there are so rich they just aren't so concerned about small amounts of money to make a film. So maybe it's worth the $100 to make my profile fully live again. Am I dreaming? Isn't that what filmmaking is all about?

I usually start this walk with a light short sleeved shirt because it’s cool and then gets hotter before the end of the walk and as I said yesterday, I took off my shirt leaving just my kind of soaked T-shirt and life was better. So today I’m starting my 3rd mile and taking it off now before I get all worked up and hot, and it feels good to have the air hit my T-shirt and dry out what little needs drying out, and knowing I'll avoid that getting overheated thing. Yeah, I know this ain't rocket science but it is what it is.

I bunch of people tied talking me into doing a podcast or video podcast, a Vpod, but I don’t know, I don’t much like getting on camera. So I’ve got my blog here and a friend, Kelly Hughes, who has his own video "Rising Star-Music That Matters" podcast, and doing rather well and he has had some incredible guests, I’ve got to say. But it just occurred to me, I wonder if there’s an AI to turn my text log into an audio podcast? I mean, I suppose I could just read the damn thing as an audio podcast, and maybe I could try that?

OK I just walked back past those landscapers with a big long hedge trimmer which is really noisy, even though it’s electric, and it’s much quieter now with the sound cancellation. Though I can still hear it too much with these AirPods, it is much nicer now.

OK The Liars Club podcast with Bill Burr and his first story starts, One time I was an altar boy…
OK then Bill. I was an altar boy myself. We had a tiny Slovak church in Tacoma, called "St. Joe’s" how we called it (Saint Joseph's Catholic Church). Says right on the building it’s a Slovak church. My mom was Czech, Grandpa came over on a boat at a young age, Grandma was born in America. Then my dad‘s family‘s Irish. In eighth grade, I went to Holy Rosary Catholic Church and school (closed as of 2019 due to a need for $17million in repairs), with the big cathedral you can see from many places in downtown Tacoma if you look south. There’s the church, the school, a rectory for the priests and a convent for the nuns, and and a big playground area. South of it is the I-5 freeway and up above that on the hill is our little St. Joe’s church. My little brother went to Holy Rosary all the way through school until he died. Decades later I heard that everyone knew our family because of what he and we were going through back in the mid 70s as the priest would say prayers during mass for him. Didn’t work, but it was a nice try. I thoughtful effort. I'd had some trouble in seventh grade at Stewart Junior High (only 3 blocks from my parent's house) and wanted out. So I got finagled into eighth grade at Holy Rosary. No, I didn’t realize, although I knew eighth grade was the last grade there, and then you go, probably to Bellarmine prep, an all boys school then, which eventually became co-Ed. In fact, my girlfriend after I got out of the Service graduated from there. Which weirded me out because I didn’t know it turned into a boys and girls school. I turned down going there after eighth grade because I didn’t wanna go to a school with no girls. Which kind of shows you my orientation back then. But in going to only eighth grade in a Catholic school, I'd not realized it I was stepping into the morass of being the new kid in the last year at a school where these kids had been together for eight fucking years! I got along really well with the outsiders in the class, who are either really poor Catholic kids, or not even Catholic but their parents wanted them to get a good education. Well, the nuns smacked you around, so yeah, you paid attention, for safety's sake. And we had the oldest Nun, the principle, Sister Rogers. Good God, was she a piece of work! We had several rich kids in there who were really annoying. But not so bad once I forced my way in and got to know them. The girls anyway. The guys were mostly just all assholes until several year later, those who got out of the Catholic school system and had entered public life. I had the most fights in my K-12 years of any grade level, in that school, over that single year, with... the altar boys. Apparently, stepping into the last year of a school is a bad idea. Unless you bond with the kids and make friends. So they were nice at first when they asked me, Do you want to be an altar boy? I was very proud of the fact I was an altar boy at the little church up the hill and I saw this giant cathedral as say the corporate version Church over our mom and pop version. St. Joe's was a great experience. Small church, small community. I mean, going into Holy Rosary a cathedral, was literally awe inspiring. There was one day I was asked to serve Mass because all the altar boys had gone on an outing and I wasn't invited because I wasn't an altar boy..at their church. You know, one might think I'd get a complimentary invite to show some affection for the church up the hill, as I WAS going to their school, but no. Nada and it was explained to me very clearly. I just always thought it an odd situation. The Church is based in Rome, so it's international. But they can't show some love for an altar boy ONE church, ONE block away? OOOkay.
Anyway, after being asked to join the gaggle of Holy Rosary (affectionately nicknamed, "Holly Roller" BY the altar boys, by the way..), altar boys, I’m afraid I may have expressed my indignity in saying no thanks. They kept pushing at that meeting, cajoling me into joining, which was a mistake. For all of us. Until finally, I said, Look, I’m head altar boy at St. Joe’s and I’ve gone there all my life. I don’t want to be altar boy at two different churches as it takes up a lot of time at two. And I don’t want to quit being head there to just be ordinary here. But they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want this esteemed privilege. I think at that point I might’ve gotten a little irascible. Anyway, that was the exact opposite of a bonding experience for them. Or me. And so they harassed me mentally and physically that entire year and I’ve written about this elsewhere…worst day/experience? They got in a big ring around me and kept hitting me in the head with a basketball until my head hurt so bad I just walked off "campus" and went home. They may have given me a slight concussion. Nice guys. I remember some girls in that ring around me that moved as I moved. It was bizarre.

My point in bringing all this up getting and back to Bill Barr and I don’t know what his story is about to be, but it continued with... they would take the altar boys on a field trip… It was when I became an adult and started hearing about pedophiles in the Catholic Church ad I was shocked. I went to Camp Don Bosco, a two week summer camp, run by priests, and those studying to be priests and I couldn’t of had a better experience. Amazing people. And no, I’m not suppressing memories. But other than the obvious problems in the Catholic Church, being the dogma, and how I was a very analytical child, and wasn’t buying into the Bible overall, I had a pretty good experience being raised Catholic. It was pretty strict. And there were downsides and yes it took me into my 30s in actively studying and researching, and looking into other religions and such, before I could wash my mind of all the Catholicism. Which granted, will still be there in my roots until I die, but hopefully not there afterward. My Buddhist orientation now, where I don’t buy into reincarnation, and by the way I didn’t see any of that in the original Buddha's teachings, and while my oldest and I continue to talk about physics, and how there may BE something after we die, though I doubt it, as existing in a discreet unit of existence, as we do now, that is, we may more realistically end up being dispersed into the energy of the universe and what the hell good is that as an individual? I know, I know, you’re getting to be in the presence of “God”. But that doesn’t do me any good if I don’t know I’m existing.

Funny, if this is the true story Bill Bar is telling, oh damn, I have to say Bill Burr, not Bill Barr. Burr had a similar experience with the altar boys. He got the shit beat out of him too. Well to be fair, I didn’t get the shit beat out of me. Public school, I did a few times. But the thing was, those altar boys didn’t know, because we were in eighth grade, that I started fighting tournaments around the Pacific Northwest in Karate in fifth grade. So I did pretty good anyone fight in particular and ended up beating the shit out of this one kid who took a swing at me first and then when the fight was over and I was walking away, tried to jump me from behind. I had fine tuned awareness from fighting tournaments so I threw a back kick and dropped him like a rock. A kid told me years later in high school, who didn’t go on to Bellarmine prep, that after I got in the car with my mom and little brother and we drove off home, which is what started this whole fight as somebody had thrown a snowball in my mom‘s car. Abuse me, fine. Abuse, my family? Fuck you pal! So this kid had noticed the kid Mark, from the fight was missing just after as the kids were milling about talking. I think this was Johnny White telling me this one day, as we were walking to Lincoln high school one morning years later. He went and looked for Mark and found him on the other side of the church, huddled up in a fetal position and told or threatened him that, You better not tell anybody you saw this. So I guess I won that day. Catholic school is supposed to smarten and toughen you up for life, but I don’t think that was the best way to do it, to throw you into a lion's den with a bunch a little spoiled fuckers. Anyway, back to Bill Burr story…

It’s funny how I keep hearing mostly well-known people talking on TV or Podcasts or wherever, even in movies and I guess on TV, hearing this commentary about how "back when I was a kid it wasn’t like it is now, it was more dangerous "back then". I've heard that succeeding, if you want to call them “classes“ or generations after me through each decade, in looking back how it has a more dangerous group when you were young, then you see today. So by extrapolation I would have to say that when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, OUT scary kids must have been carrying around handheld nuclear bombs or something.

Bill’s second story on the podcast is about his being involved when he was young, stealing alcohol from a package store. He didn’t do it. He was waiting in the car, if this is the true story. But it got me to thinking… I don’t remember ever stealing alcohol, and I certainly drank it in high school. It’s one of the reasons why, by the time I got in the Service at 20 (after kicking around America a bit) I really wasn’t into drinking any more and much preferred getting stoned on weed. For Christmas one year my sister gave me this long thing pocketbook telling you all about wine. It was designed to talk with you to buy wine. And so I got into wine. In the late 70s I would always have like six bottles of $40 wine at the ready One of my friends who worked in the shop, up front of the parachute shop, in the fabric and rubbergear shop, came over one day and I turned him on wine, taught him about it. He’s from California so decades later he sent me six bottles of California wine out of appreciation. Last time I heard from him he was very into Jesus, so...another lost to the ethereal. At some point in my late teens, early 20s when I got that wine book I read it and got into it and that led to my lifelong appreciation. Years later, when I got to Western Washington University, Prof Rees, told our class that he was gonna teach us how to think. Give me a subject, he said. People called things out until I said, almost jokingly, BEER. He stopped, pointed at me and said, Good, OK, good. Beer. And he started drawing on the chalkboard and spent the hour explaining to us why you can drink beer as you would wine, for taste. You don’t have to drink it just to get fucked up. I didn’t know that about beer back then. And it enhanced my respect for beer. It's interesting. When you drink for quality, you can lose the desire for inebriation.

I love "stand ups". So it’s ironic that I’ve only been to one comedy club in my life. It was some comedy club on Roosevelt Street in the U District in Seattle. Called Laughs Comedy Club now, might have been back then when I lived a few blocks away. Typically we went to the Monkey Bar (Monkey Pub now) until it was sold, and the clientele changed to bunch of assholes. Next to the comedy club or nearby so was a college bar called Dantes, which always had attractive girls in it but also had a bunch of drunk asshole frat boys. So I was in there a few times, but mostly steered away from it.

Good grief, I just saw how long this blog is today… Sigh…sorry?

So I started doing the elliptical and dead lifts on my off days when I’m not walking I’m feeling pretty good from it. The more exercise I get the more motivation I seem to have to do things.

Bill, now talking about the fights he had when he was younger weren’t as many as it sounds like, but in his family, there was like a fist fight every day. And that his dad would threaten to "put them through the wall", which sounds like my stepdad who was from Crisfield, Maryland. He had more education having graduated from high school then my mom, who made it through ninth grade, but my mom was a hell of a lot smarter and knew it. My stepdad liked to terrorize me once in a while and was a grouch overall on a daily basis. He treated my sister though like a princess. Who wasn’t his kid either. But if my screenplay "The Teenage Bodyguard" ever gets made into a movie, there’s a scene in there where you’ll get the idea what it was like growing up around him.

Bill Bill is talking about going to a college party where he didn’t go to that school and in hitting on girls from another school they could figure out pretty quick like that, You don’t go here, do you? That reminded me when I was in USAF tech school in Illinois, and a couple guys and me went to a bar in Champaign/Urbana up north, I think? I was dancing with some girl and she asked me what I did. She was in college. I said I was at the tech school at the airbase. And she just turned around and walked off the dance floor. That  happened one other time, after my divorce (okay A divorce, one of them), when my son was like four years old, I was at a bar in Pioneer Square, Seattle dancing with some girl and I’m not really a dancer. But if I like you enough, well… anyway. I was always very (too) upfront about my situation. I always have been. I’ve blown many dates that way. After the Air Force, I was in debt for a while (we divorced, I took all the bills) and I would share that with a woman and needless to say, I didn’t get the date. So I told this girl I have a four-year-old although he lives with his mom and...she just turned around and walked off the dance floor. That was the end of that. So when I met my next wife to be, who had asked to use my darts to play darts with me and with her girlfriend, at the Pioneer Square Saloon one night, she offered that she had an infant. And I lit up. I said, Well I have a little kid too, but he lives with his mom. And that bonded us. Because in talking about it a long time later after we were married, we both realized that having a young kid pretty much made no one want to date you. But I thought she was so cute that she could’ve had a baby elephant I wouldn’t have cared. But that infant was amazing and I ended up adopting and saw their first step and the first word was "Dad" and we’ve always had a great relationship. Not so much with the mom anymore, which is pretty much how her entire family feels about her now, so… there is that.

Now the podcast is talking about drinking when they were younger, and one of the women says, Yeah, they drank a lot in the military. Which reminded me when I was in college  at Western, Washington University, Playboy that year came out with a rating of all the universities around the country about drinking. They made the comment. I think they chose the UDub, University of Washington, as the drinking school in Washington, because they didn’t consider Wazoo, Washington State University, in Pullman Washington for consideration because they considered them a professional drinking school. Fair, partly because just over the Idaho border the drinking age was lower and in fact, that girlfriend of mine from Bellarmine Prep went there for a year, got in trouble on that stretch of well monitored road, twice and joined me for our next three years of college/university. I was at a party at Western and we were talking about that Playboy piece. Everybody was pretty offended and somebody asked me if I wasn’t offended as I didn't seem so. I said no, not really, remember. I am a STRATA student (STudent Returning After Time Away, or something like that, it means I had time between graduating high school and college, mostly military types), someone who’s been away from school for a while and returned. I had been through the military in between. And as they had said about Wazzu, I’ve already been at a professional partying organization, in the military.

Cheers! Sláinte!