insearchofbud

December 13, 2021

I’ve been fixing up Christmas gifts for seven grandchildren. Wait. Let me go back.  

I’m 72 years old, and the burgeoning population explosion of offspring weighs on my soul, especially at Christmas, but also birthdays. Daunting! I’m a slacker!

I’ve also been hoarding stuff since I was 24, back in the 70s when I bought a bunch of newly-minted coins on the advice of a co-worker.  (A good investment, said Bill Moody. Always worth face value, but acquire value as collectables.)

I went to the bank and bought pennies, mostly, but all the other denominations in much smaller quantities.  Therefore, I’ve had a whole lot of 1976-dated coins stashed away all those years.   I rented a safe deposit box at First Bank Billings.  More recently I kept the coins on a shelf in our room, in an 8×10 photographic developing tray.  I also gave a granddaughter some actual collections of pennies and nickels.

Therefore, like I said, I’ve been fixing up Christmas gifts.  Coins for grandchildren.  Also favorite books, also a stamp collection I got from my late brother.  

Expense:  mostly it’s been purchasing postage from an affable Post Office man with a name badge, Dean, the man behind the counter at the Pioneer Post Office in our neighborhood.

Mailing rolls and rolls of pennies isn’t cheap.  Some of the packages weigh 15 pounds, perhaps more. Seems worth it to rid myself of the coins, while enriching my grandkids. Hell, if they want to spend them on video games it’s fine with me!

Oh, we helped one grandchild purchase a new couch for her bedroom.  She is a fashion-forward 14-year-old who got a job at McDonald’s to help us buy it.

And we sent some of our books to our other grandsons who live in Duluth.  Books we love that will help them make sense of our dumb world.

Point is, we’ve been spending minimal amounts (except for postage).  Big bucks there.

That’s how we continue to survive this Christmas, retaining much of the fun and frivolity, joy and happiness.  Without going crazy at stores or on-line.

December 12, 2021

Excited to be mid-December.  Legal marijuana in Billings Montana is but a couple weeks away!  A dear friend asked me why I spent six months in jail in my youth, back in 1969.  Drugs?  No.  I hit my commanding officer in the jaw.  Another friend thought that would suit my character.  Okay.  The appeals court said I should not have been punished.

Trouble with pot:  kicks the bricks out of my ability to keep up a conversation (a strength of mine).  My personality is my greatest strength, even if it is superficial.

Trouble with wine:  habit forming.  Kicks me into bed after a few glasses.  Destroys my ability to be anything but BORING after a few glasses.

I’m hoping to cope with a combination of pot and wine.  Not too much of any one drug.

The drug I like best is acetaminophen (Tylenol) because it has minimal side effects and helps my pain and my ability to sleep.  I’m thinking the CBD might be a nice alternative to the activating THC in pot.  Stay tuned.  I think the mellowing effect is good, but subtle.

Drug use for those such as me is ingrained.  Also, I’m a retired pharmacist, so I have an attitude toward acceptance when it comes to drugs.  Opiates?  Good for post-op pain or terminal cancer.  Otherwise, I’m not wanting any.  A dead-end.  Plus it has mild addictive properties.  

Speed?  Don’t get me started.  Speed kills.  I think that’s enough information about that.

Nicotine?  I think that’s a drug to be shunned.  If one is already addicted, one needs to try to taper off.  I did, and it took me a year.  I still have nightmares.

Straight talk about drugs?  Good luck.  Your own experience might be the best counsel.

November 4, 2021

I no longer believe I am capable of plumbing.  Leaky faucet?  No.  Running toilet? Nyet.  Broken toilet seat?  Not really.

Eighteen years ago I set out to make sense of the plumbing in our house.  Copper pipes ran hither and yon across the basement ceiling to the kitchen sink on the other side.  Then there were drain pipes and other pipes to vent the stinky air and allow the drains to drain.  Clogged toilet?  Slow-draining sink?  I can do some good with this last one.  

My paramour has long hair.  I used to use Drain-O, a plunger, a six-foot sewer snake.  Had filth, trouble, loose connections, leakage.  Then I discovered the seven-inch length of coat hanger that I fashioned into a crochet hook.  I poked it into the drain (without removing any parts of the sink or drain apparatus) and managed to withdraw great masses of hair to be wrapped in toilet paper and placed into the waste basket.  Worked like a charm on our bathroom sinks.  

I worked in Lame Deer five days/week, so I’d drive 1.5 hours to work, then put in about 8 hours, then drive 1.5 hours home.  This left a remainder of thirteen hours of every day to be wasted in sleeping or fixing the plumbing.

As I mentioned, I set out to make sense of the copper plumbing.  Using a pencil and paper, I sketched the location of the various sinks and bathtub and faucets upstairs and downstairs.

In the end I had an interesting jumble of angles and cross pieces. At two a.m. i turned on the water.

It leaked heartily. So I pulled a 40-gal garbage can to catch the water.

As I watched the water splash gaily, causing bits of paper and trash to dance happily on the choppy surface of the water, I abandoned my post.  I sprinted up the stairs to wake my spouse.

“I fucked up the plumbing,” I said.

Back in the basement I turned off the house water at the entry valve.

Then I ascended the stairs, undressed, put on my pajamas, and went to bed.

Next day I re-soldered the many joints, ruining a perfectly good piece of sheet metal I used to mimic the steel in the galley trays when I made page proofs.  That piece of sheet metal is permanently warped from the heat of the propane torch.  I used the metal sheet to protect the house from catching fire when soldering joints in the basement.

Basement.  My life from the days when I first learned to toddle has been obsessed with visiting the basement to play with the tools and paint therein.  I didn’t play with plumbing early on because it scared me.  I should have been afraid of electrical wires, but electrical wires don’t threaten to flood the house.  Once, in the bathroom, I cranked both hot and cold water faucets on but for some goddamn reason I couldn’t turn the water off.  This was the first of three times I screamed.

I soon had the water turned off because I had no choice but to keep trying.  You can run away from electricity but you can’t run away out of the bathroom if the faucets won’t turn off.  You scream, but you keep ranking and pulling and twisting the faucets.  Nobody else was home.

The second time I screamed I got stuck in the elevator in the university library between floors.  Nobody heard me then either and I got my wits gathered enough to keep trying the switches and playing with the elevator doors that opened on the south and north sides of the elevator, but at different floors.

Third time I screamed was as a principle actor in an opera because I couldn’t sing my solo loud enough to suit Hall Diteman, the director of “Bastien and Bastienne.”

I’ve not screamed successfully since, although I’ve groaned, yelled, hollered.

And yet people ask me to help with their plumbing.  And lead to confusion and delay.

October 26, 2021

Started writing several times, but it was no good.  I am ridden with contentment these days, despite the divisive politics and large calamities I read about.  

Opera Pagliacci came and went.  Trip to Hillsboro was most enjoyable with Guy Davis singing some of his modern blues/hip hop/social commentaries. We visited the Hoyt Arboretum and dug dozens of species of maples.

October 6, 2021

P. and I delivered Meals on Wheels yesterday morning.  Went well and the people we delivered the meals to were pleasant in most cases, and in other cases they were mildly grateful.  Sometimes they are so grateful they thank me repeatedly.  I assure them the pleasure is ours and, of course wish them a great . . ..

Today I was up at 6:30, back in bed by 9 to nap, then up at noon.  Drinking my third cup of coffee today.

September 16, 2021

Is this the best of all possible worlds?  How would we know?  Seems like we’re programmed in a secret way and things go well for us if we yield to the inner program and follow the way, no matter how mundane, no matter how scary.  The I Ching admonishes us to not present false appearances to God, as there is no use.  

September 2, 2021

Feeling the sting of not writing in more than a week.  I wondered what would happen.  Not much.  Frightening?

Olivia just came in;  She finished her fourth day of school at 3 pm, and is eating snacks to get ready for an hour 45 minutes of swimming at the Y.  A high school kid’s athletic schedule.  Billings Senior High School has no swimming pool.

(Reminds me of a dilemma I had in 1969 in Marine basic:  Each of us recruits was issued a “cover block,” consisting of a 24” by 6” piece of 1/8” plastic with a screw and wing nut to fasten it into a hat-size cylinder.  This device came flat, so we had to bend it into shape to hold our hats so we could brush on much starch.  A starched cover looked much sharper than the flaccid cotton we started with.

My cover block had a screw without threads.  No.  The wing nut had no interior threads, but the screw was fine.  No matter how I tried I couldn’t block my cover to starch it.  I needed a replacement wing nut-screw assembly.

That evening I walked to the hut where our instructors had their office.

I reported correctly to my senior drill instructor in his office.  “Sir the private requests permission to speak, sir!

“Go ahead.”

“Sir the private’s wing nut ain’t got no threads, sir.”

I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination for what happened next.  I mean, I knew it would provoke derision from the instructors.  I wasn’t worried, and I can honestly say it wasn’t terribly painful, but I got no satisfaction, hardware product-wise.  

In the end, I think I rigged up a clothes pin to starch my cover.)

Those are not my fondest memories.

Yesterday:  I heard back from someone in my distant past:  Gerry Berry, retired person living in Florida.

In 1971 Penny and I had Todd, newborn, and we lived in military housing, some old strip houses across Red Hill Road from MCAS(H) Santa Ana, California, 92710.

Our modes of transportation were a baby buggy and a bicycle.  I’m sure many can identify with that.  We lived in the orange orchards surrounding Santa Ana in Orange County.  I worked part time cleaning a Xerox facility.  It was the Regional office.  One of the things I liked best was cleaning the offices of the various vice presidents on up to the president of the Region himself.  Here’s what I noticed:  The pipe tobacco was Balkan Sobranie in the president’s office.  No.  It was Black Malorie.  I remember Peter Koch telling me back in 1969 about Black Malorie.  Finest tobacco anywhere, he said.  It was not attainable.

Black Malorie was the tobacco in the office of the president.  Balkan Sobranie was in the vice’s.

Amenities tended upward in the chain of command.  President had his own shower and dressing room.  Vice president had a large waiting room, but none of the other stuff.

As we worked down the hallway from the apex, a curious phenomenon:  Number of staples in the rug increased exponentially. We picked them out with needle-nose pliers.

In those days (1970s) computer work meant cutting 80-col key cards.  For some reason staples held the cards together, sometimes.

I tried to find work in Anchorage, Alaska, back in 1969.  Most of the secretarial-clerical (stuff I hoped I could find a job doing) work had to do with those keypunch cards.  In fact the word “keypunch” seemed to be everywhere.  Typing would have been a good enough skill to do “keypunch.”

August 16, 2021

On this day in 1988 Lame Deer had a snowy blanket of ashes from forest fires.  I crawled out of my sleeping bag in a government three bedroom house, vacant, my home for the week until the government provided me with other living quarters.

That night the streetlight on the cul-de-sac illuminated the ash fall that I walked through the next morning to work at the Lame Deer IHS Clinic pharmacy.  I would be the second of two pharmacists on duty at the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation.  This was a new position; all the pharmacist action used to be performed by one pharmacist.  Turns out they had hired additional doctors so they needed additional nurses and another pharmacist.  Me.  

I was apprehensive.  Fires burned out of control in the nearby wooded areas around the edge of town.  Two locals were on death row at Deer Lodge for killing a caucasian man.  I saw a pile of four dead horses yesterday morning near the Little Bighorn Battlefield while I drove to work.  Old cars rusted on the lawns of houses along the highway between Busby and Lame Deer. All my fears were gone in 24 hours.

#break#

We’re having Bob and his family over shortly.  Gotta go.

I’m back.  Things are humming here in Billings.  We have a lot of union people, social democrats, moderate republicans, moderate democrats.  I get an inkling when I speak with Bob.

I think fishing will be restricted the remainder of the Summer because high temperatures stress some of the fish, especially the various species of trout.  This is a river-by-river deal.  I think I’d google Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks for current information regarding a river of importance to you.

We are hoping for cooler weather this Wednesday.

Did I mention I am reading Don Quixote?  I’m about a third through it, getting more and more involved in one of the ancillary tales that reside in the book.  Amazing work is this book.  What is he saying?  To whom is the humor directed?  

Published in 1604, in Spanish.  Translated numerous times into a modern American vernacular by many, and by someone named “Grossman.”  I don’t own the Grossman translation, but I’ll get it pretty soon via the internet.

Parts are funny enough to make me laugh out loud.  It should be read and enjoyed by most everyone, especially if high school age or older.

August 10, 2021

Today was odd.  I had some kind of military dream that I was enduring basic training in the Marines again.  It was “ho hum” the second time. Just couldn’t get shook by the crazy drill instructors.

I’m going to write for thirty minutes.  Believe me when I tell you!  I’ll never tell you no lie.  No, no no.

That was Samuel Clemens’ declaration at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn.  I would hold with his disclaimer.  Mostly.

I cannot afford to be sanguine.  Much injustice prevails, albeit temporarily.  Necessarily temporarily, in my opinion.  I believe that ultimately justice, truth, and reality are so powerful and indestructible that they will prevail.  They are everywhere and lies and deceptions are only momentary.  Friendship mind is the law of the land!

How can this be so? 

I stumbled out of our bedroom to greet P. and Taylyn, our 10-year-old friend.  P. was planning to visit her sister Dolly this morning, then to lead us in a walk around Lake Elmo, in the Billings Heights.

(I check my blood pressure.  123/71.)

Don Quixote, translated by Ormsby, sits at my right elbow.  Two copies of the book, actually, because I ordered a second copy when the first one was disintegrating in my hands.  Next, I need the newest, the Grossman, translation.  A kind of ultimate, I believe.

August 11, 2021

Went to a list of places:  NOVA to work on the main stage; Rocket Burrito to return a growler that once held cream soda; B&B Tire to purchase four new ones for our car;  Sportsclips where the marvelous Mai wasn’t there, so I got a geeky haircut.  The library to return a book.  P. got her eyes examined for cataract surgery; Taco Bell to feed our inner selves.

I am a geek.

August 7, 2021

Last night for the first time in months P. and I and Gunther had the whole house to ourselves.  The rest of the time we’ve had our children and our grandchildren vacationing with us.  And us with them, when we went camping.  And for us, camping usually means going in our Hymer RV.  It’s really just a repurposed Dodge Promaster van and we can eat, sleep, shower, bicker, and play Scrabble right in our car. It’s about ideal for P. and me.

We bought the Hymer a couple years ago in Alaska. Now we’ve put on 30K miles between Minnesota, California, and Montana.  So far, we’ve replaced the coach batteries, front tires, and radiator, but otherwise the driving has been relatively trouble free.

Tuesday Todd and his family and P. and I set out from Billings to climb Cloud Peak in the Big Horns of Wyoming. 

P. and I were the support crew.  We headed south on the west side of the Big Horns.

About 8 pm we stopped at a bar in Ten Sleep to eat supper.  Todd shared his rocky mountain oysters, breaded and deep fat fried.  Some smooth eating. The bar was packed, but the patio was nearly empty. We resumed driving into the evening, headed up the pass.

On to a road that took off from Highway 16.

I followed Todd on a nasty Forest Service washboard road that chattered everything and caused our new radiator hose to fail. Well, it hadn’t been installed correctly and would have failed anyhow.

You can’t drive without coolant in the engine, so we didn’t. We figured things would work out if we chilled out that night. We had no cell service. We were on what seemed like a deserted road.

P. and I slept in the Hymer on the place on the road where the engine coolant puddled. Todd and his family camped at the East Ten Sleep Lake campgorund, only about 150 yards from our disabled vehicle.

Next day a Forest Service man named Jeff radioed to have our Hymer transported to Buffalo, WY for repair.  (Turns out a hose had been improperly installed last month and it jiggled loose on the washboard road. ) 

Todd and his family headed toward Cloud Peak Wednesday while we worked on restoring the Hymer to health. After the mechanic had reattached the hose, we spent the night at Circle Park campground.

P. and I and Gunther goofed off Wednesday, hiking to Willow Lake and back. 

Thursday we walked up the trail to Cloud Peak, as we expected Todd and his group back.  We spoke with other hikers, asking those returning if they saw a family of four: Todd, Susanna, Cyrus, Roland?  None of them had, and we admonished hikers heading out to tell a family of four that we would be waiting for them. They made the connection. However, I didn’t know the hikers would refer to us as being “an elderly couple.”

Our message was transposed and garbled by the time the four arrived back at the parking lot.  [Joyous reunion.]

Thursday, we moved the camp from East Ten Sleep Lake to another campground:  Circle Park. 

First we six went in to Buffalo to eat at a great Mexican restaurant.  Then Sus bought two bottles of merlot at Crazy Woman Liquor.  Then back at the camp we sat around and talked while Todd took a shower in the Hymer.

Yesterday we hiked up a limestone canyon a little more than a mile, to admire the amazing natural sculptures.  We ate at the same restaurant, a little place close to the Buffalo exit from the interstate highway.

July 31, 2021

Do you know about octopuses?  I say that because I believe “octopi” to be a bogus pluralization.

We went with my nephew Chris Angel on his boat at Ketchikan, Alaska, to haul up some shrimp pots he placed on the bottom of the bay a couple days previously.  Most of them had lots of shrimp, in addition to some star fish, hermit crabs, and in one case, an octopus.

We had eaten shrimp a couple days earlier.  You twist off all but the tail, then you boil them. Finally, you pull and peel off the chitinous exoskeleton to get the yummy meat within.  All of this is a crude way to get the goody; consider the octopus we pulled up that had gotten into one of the traps. 

No live shrimp with the octopus, but some perfect cellophane-looking exoskeletons.  The octopus did an amazing job of cleaning the meat out of the shrimp.

This octopus was holding onto a rather large (maybe a foot diameter) starfish.  We managed to get him and his starfish out of the shrimp pot and into the bottom of the boat before one of us picked him up (perhaps 10-20 lbs, probably three feet from one tentacle tip to another.  I touched him and his skin was soft.  We put him overboard and, although I didn’t see it, he squirted ink as he jetted away.

I learned that octopuses live relatively short lives, usually just a couple years, especially the males who die soon after impregnating the females, who also die soon after giving birth to the youngsters.

Octopuses are reputed to be damned intelligent. Learning a maze, using tools, that sort of thing.

July 6, 2021

Swept the garage, vacuumed the basement, rearranged my grandson’s video game apparatus so I might walk through the big room.  Oh yes.  Gunther’s sleeping on the couch.  Can’t tell if he’s bored or tired.  Or both.  It’s over 90 degrees today, again.  Good idea to hunker down and wait for cooler air to slide down from the Beartooth Mountains.

There’s that word “vacuum.”  I know of only two double u words:  equus and vacuum.  Must be more than that.  How does one pronounce vacuum?  vac- you’- um?  Or as my mother used to say, vac’-yoom.  

Never mind.  Working on banjo playing.  I can play “Worried Man Blues,” after a fashion, but “Cripple Creek” is coming painfully slowly.  I’m sure it sounds that way, too.  I practice most days, but for short periods.  Once or twice a day.  Nothing is really pushing me, but I want to learn to play with the three finger style.  I’ve tried claw hammer, but can’t get any traction.

When I sat down to write I think I had an idea, but I’ve forgotten.  I think it had to do with my Marine Corps experience in mid-1970.

I joined November 23, 1969.  That was Penny’s birthday, a sad occasion, because I said “goodbye forever.”  I was off to Vietnam, of course.  Everyone knew that’s what happened if you joined the Marines in those days.  Didn’t they?  I had my faith.  I had been reading a bunch of Eastern religion stuff:  Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism.  All of them extolled mortifying the flesh and entering reality.  The Vietnam war was my reality, naive as I was about the particulars.  I knew I was a hippie, but I also knew I couldn’t stick my head in the sand or be a coward.  Real hippies were brave and true.  Or so I thought.  I was also under the influence.  Of Don Quixote.

I’m re-reading Don Quixote as I write.  In 1969 I read the Putnam translation, but now I’m reading the Ormsby translation.  Mr. Ormsby used Putnam in his scholarly re-writing in English.  Nonetheless, it was written by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra.

Under the influence of Sr. Cervantes Saavedra, even joining the Marine Corps during Vietnam makes perfect sense.

I had friends shout at me!  

Whereas people on the street had enjoined me to “get a haircut!” My hip friends urged me to become a “happy hippie.”  Life has its serious aspects.  I knew I had to face front.  I had to face the reality that seemed most real to me.

One monday morning I strode into the Marine Corps recruiter’s office on West Broadway in Missoula.  “I want to join the Marines,” I mumbled.

A gunnery sergeant looked up from his desk with mild interest.  “What are you running from?”

“Nothing.”

“Ever been arrested?”

“Drunk and disorderly,” I replied (omitting the part about indecent exposure). (I pissed on the window of Skeet’s Cafe after a racist cook threw me out because I threw a rag at him.)

“Come back tomorrow,” said the sergeant.

The gunny was smiles and welcomed me when I returned.  He had me take a test and answer a bunch of questions.  What I remember about the test:

• I had to identify parts of a car motor, including ignition coil.  Since I didn’t know the parts of a motor then, I don’t know if I got that one right.
• there were lots of other questions.  I’m pretty good at taking tests, so I believe I answered most of them correctly.
• I had to answer if I’d been a member of a list of organizations, none of which I’d ever heard of before.  I think the gist was “young communist league,” and “communist party of America.”  I’m making these up, but that’s the impression I got.  I wasn’t able to say I was a member of any of them.
• I had to list all of my addresses.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the basis of my gaining a Secret security clearance through some outfit called ENT NAC.  I listed all my addresses.  I was too naive to know if any of them were incriminating.  Anyway, my address tended to change every week in those days.  Depended upon the whim and generosity of friends like Bill Reynolds and Peter Koch and my brother Tom.

My Marine Corps experience was particularly foul.  I disliked the drill instructor because he was sadistic to the degree of being creepy.  I did enjoy the company of the other recruits, however, at least most of them.

Later, I was bullied by a little shit when we got to infantry training.  Turns out ignoring him didn’t work.  I learned to confront bullies until I was bullied by my commanding officer in training group at Millington Tennessee.

I punched out the commanding officer, went to jail for five months, and was subsequently forgiven by the upper echelons of the Navy Board of Military Appeals.

The cosmos, the stars were beginning to line up again after I was transferred to a helicopter squadron on a small base near Los Angeles. This was MCAS(H) Santa Ana, CA 92709.

At last.

Here’s my story:  I was starting my second year as a private E-1, having never gotten promoted because of my altercation with the Marine major.  Just because you get forgiven for punching one of them doesn’t mean you’ll get a promotion any time soon.

In Southern California, I lived in a big concrete barracks with the rest of squadron HMM-265. This was decommissioned shortly afterward, and our squadron was redesigned as HMM-161.  Many of the members of my squadron had recently returned from Vietnam, from Phu Bai.  One of these saw a fellow named Sergeant Sergeant.

The guy with this unfortunate name was officious, punctual, neat, and personable.  

Nobody could stand him.

“He’s a real dipshit,” explained my friend, Sergeant Bobby Haines.

He was on duty at the barracks the day one of my fellow squadron members, a kind of sleazy guy named Jerry, offered me some marijuana. 

I eagerly accepted his offer.  Because I was paying a forfeiture of pay for my previous crimes I couldn’t afford the $0.25/pack of store bought smokes, so I rolled my own with Prince Albert and Top papers.  I mixed some pot in with the tobacco for a mellow smoke and a welcome high.

After I lit up and took a couple of hits off my cigarette, into my cubicle marched Sergeant Sergeant!

“Private STRUCKMAN!” he yelled.  “Report to the quarter deck!”  His desk was at one end of the squad bay and was technically known as the “quarter deck.”

I figured I’d be busted and kicked out of the Marines. This would have been a disaster because I was negotiating with Penny to get married the following year.

Nothing to lose, I hollered at him, “Sergeant Asshole!  You are one dumb motherfucker!!  I’m smoking a tobacco cigarette, SEE STUPID?  (I held up the can of Prince Albert.)  It’s nothing but PA!  IN A CAN, STUPID!

Poor Sergeant Sergeant got apologetic, mumbled something, and slouched away.

In retrospect, I think he was glad not to bust me, a guy who’d been busted already for punching a major. Whatever the reason, I was glad to escape prosecution!

I, of course, took the evidence to the toilet and flushed it!   

Moral of the story:  tobacco will not mask the smell of weed.