About Before the Internet Age: Gratitude for Cell Phones and Ditch the Hitch-hiking.

My internet connection crashed yesterday afternoon, and I felt molested to the upmost degree about that. My partner and I were in the middle of what is to us doing important work---building a website to market art resources and supplies at Art Easels for the Artist. By the way I ask readers to do us a favor and check out our website and leave a comment---this will encourage the traffic that leads to higher ranking in the search engines.  
 

My partner Osnelly and I at Mall del Rio in Cuenca, Ecuador

Anyway, it´s late morning now and my web connection is still down, but a trusted and experienced internet systems engineer at damonbreeden@gmail.com  is going to come over at 3 pm to re-establish the connection. I am fully confident he will succeed.

Obviously my tranquility is associated with a reliable and fast moving internet connection. I am tied to the net. It is a part of me and I am a part of it. But I am old enough to well remember the days when no internet existed, and I have a story about what that was like. My six brothers and sisters and I were children, in the family station wagon, and dad was driving and mom was with dad in the front seat. We were traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles and were about to ascend the mountains surrounding the approach to greater Los Angeles. That´s when our vehicle broke down due to mechanical mishap. Dad exited, stuck out his thumb, and started asking for a ride. He started hitch-hiking. He needed a tow to a gas station and he complained---for over an hour no one was stopping while it was plain to see he was a family man. This was circa 1964, well before the invention of cell phones. These problems and similar problems no longer exist because we have mobile phones.

Who would argue this advancement is not to our advantage?

 

The Osborne 1 computer (1981)

But I have a point to make that´s an offshoot angle or perspective about this. I myself did not grow up with the internet, computers and cellphones around in daily life. As a result their technology is always going to be somewhat foreign to me regardless of how many courses or studies of computers I may take. It´s like language. If someone´s native tongue is English he or she will never quite be able to speak an acquired, second language learned in adulthood with the same fluency as English.

The second language never gets ingrained like the mother tongue did. So it is with computer fluency for those who grew up before computers were part and parcel of daily life. They will never be as comfortable with the technology as are their sons and daughters, not to mention their grandchildren.

Something about it is a fascination to me. The internet has changed people´s capabilities---young people adapting to the world the way it is and becoming capable of guiding earth into a future which we would never have had absent the expansion of computer and internet expertise.
I live in what some term a third world country---Ecuador. But yesterday I noticed an Ecuadorian boy about five years old playing a digital game on his hand phone. He was moving his fingers around that keypad with ease---born of skill developed at a tender age. Be that as it may about Ecuador, it makes little difference. That boy will be painting the internet of the future with colors native to Ecuador.

What type of single guy are you?

This is a guest post written by Paul Yhip. Paul owns a landscaping construction and design business in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also writes songs and short stories at Pablito´s Corner.
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I went to dinner with my wife Anna the other day, along with our best friends Tom and Judy. We tend to be open with each other and talk and debate on a lot of different subjects. Judy opened the conversation and said ¨ I dated a few guys before I met Tom.¨

Interrupting, Tom said ¨A few? That´s like saying Hitler only killed a few people!¨  Anna and I looked at each other with forced smiles, and Judy, glaring at her husband of fourteen years said ¨What do you mean Tom? I was a slut!?¨

¨No, no let me correct myself,¨ replied Tom, his expression turning apologetic, ¨I meant not so much the quantity but the quality. I suppose every man you met was a different type of guy.¨

Anna and I looked at them as if we were spectators at a performance.

¨Of course I had guys who were sweet and gentlemanly,¨ said Judy, ¨and others were the all hands type.¨

Image courtesy of radnatt at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Looking at both of them, I said ¨Like everyone men come in different forms and with dating it´s no exception.¨

I´m not a psychology major but that didn´t keep me from sharing my thoughts. The conversation got all of us involved. After dinner we went our separate ways, and when later at home with Anna--- we continued to further discuss the subject.

I have come up with three types of men, presented below in terms of achieving their goals, especially when it comes to women.

The Bold: He is the type who takes what he sees. He´s a skilled talker and appears interesting. He sells the impossible but makes it seem believable. Women become convinced he is the hero for whom they have been waiting.

The Mastermind: He is cool and thinks calculated thoughts, slowly guiding women into his world because they feel so at ease with him. Women are turned on more by what he displays of his insides rather than physical appearance. He massages the mind and soul of the woman so eloquently that she feels he is the one.

The Cobra: His meekness is his strength. He appears so non-threatening. As if he is a little boy, women begin to adore his cute qualities. He knows he is gaining ground when the woman begins to show interest. As time goes on she finds he has another side which strikes with deadly accuracy for the capture. For some reason this is the one time the woman enjoys her defeat.

Like with everything there are exceptions and mixtures. Men can have aspects of all three types. One guy can start out being bold, then later become more like the mastermind. Another can start out like the little boy later becoming more akin to the bold.

How complex we are as humans.  

        

 

A Question about Halloween Answered.

At Zona Refrescante restaurant in Cuenca, Ecuador, every afternoon on Thursday, Ecuadorians meet with native English speakers to practice speaking English. It´s fun, and it´s a way for people from both cultures to inquire about strange customs they don´t understand.
 

This bright middle school age student had a question for me this past Thursday about Halloween. I pause to interject. This girl of about 14 years never lived in any English speaking country. She learned what she knows not only because eight hours of English per week is a requirement at her school, but also because as she explained, English is her favorite subject! She speaks it well and has decently good pronunciation, and she impressed me.  
But all that above about her is beside the point.

This girl, an obviously curious expression on her face, was asking me to explain Halloween. I tried but felt flabbergasted. I didn´t have an answer satisfactory to me.

Halloween as it´s known in North America doesn´t exist in Ecuador. The custom most akin to Halloween in Ecuador is called the day of the dead, I´d say, but this tradition is so different from Halloween that in fact the connection is most imprecise. Ecuadorians visit the remains of lost loved ones at their tombs in graveyards on the day of the dead. They place flowers and cards with messages on the tombstones, and eat food and drink a special drink called colada morada. It´s a time to pray for the dead and a time to communicate with the dead.

 

 

This to me is its, granted, unsteady similarity to Halloween. But take a look at one of the most popular Halloween costumes---the costume of a skeleton. Somehow in some way Halloween has something to do with death. And death is scary. Look at the costumes kids wear on Halloween--- ghosts, goblins, monsters, witches, pirates and devils---all scary, all evocative of frightening manifestations that would scare you to death if not make believe. So what IS the point of Halloween? Is it just to have fun going around to houses in the neighborhood carrying a bag to collect candy?  Get real--- that´s the biggest part of the point. But I think Halloween has a deeper meaning, which I wouldn´t be thinking about if it hadn´t been for that Ecuadorian girl´s question.  

   

In my mind the Halloween costume represents the dark side of human nature. It´s the side we ordinarily hide but that we bring out into the open in pantomime on Halloween. We proclaim there is this evil side to us that is like a monster or a demon. We say yes on Halloween, yes we are part bad and yes this part of us exists.

The beauty about Halloween as every kid in North America will attest is the collection of big bags of candy. Maybe this is symbolic as well. Is this a representation that evil spirits can be bought off?  After all, the ghosts and goblins leave the house once their bags get filled with candy.

  

White Flag Defeat and the Power of Surrender

To surrender? What does that mean?  It means you know you´ve been defeated and you accept it. You´ve been knocked out. You don´t have it in you to fight anymore and you give up. You fly a white flag.

Addicts in recovery have surrendered. The heroin addict who cannot stop injecting heroin realizes he has been defeated when he surrenders to the reality of his addiction. He needs the drug. He will suffer almost unbearable pangs of withdrawal unless he gets it into his blood stream. By a surrender to this fact of the matter, the addict makes possible a shift to the entirety of his position in the world.   

 

 

This thread of talk refers to what is personal and private. Heroin addiction never stopped some notable musicians from performing their music. Alcoholics have been famous figures in the literary world. The talent and energy that drives this success is immaterial to addiction. Addiction is monstrous, yes. It is almost all-powerful, yes. But it does not necessarily prevent people from achieving success. People are made of durable material and even those of us with broken wings can fly far.

But what addiction does do is render people, no matter how talented or famous, enslaved to their addictions.

I have an example of the power of surrender I want to share from my personal life, although it´s not about addiction.

The Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay, September, 1945

It´s about a condition that developed over a ten year period when I worked graveyard shifts as a security guard. My body acclimated itself to being awake at night. It became accustomed to sleeping during the day. Ten years after having stopped working in security, still, I get tired and sleep during the day. I perk up ready to greet the world during the dark hours of the night. My sleep and wake hours were completely turned upside down by the decade of years I worked security at night.

I fought the condition with ferocity for a long time. I did everything I could to reverse it so I could sleep at night. Nothing worked--- except the effective sleeping medication called trazadone, not available where I now live---Ecuador. My nights turned into anger fueled and frustrating episodes of insomnia punctuated by bouts of intense binge eating.      

I surrendered to the reality of my insomnia about a month ago. I accepted that I have a condition I can´t change. I elected to go with the flow. I gave up worrying about when to sleep and instructed myself to sleep when I´m sleepy and tired---ordinarily about five o´clock in the morning. I go about my pursuits calmly and without rancor or agitation at night. The capitulation to my insomnia erased the emotions which had been driving me to binge eat at night.

A connection exists between the troubles I had with insomnia and the troubles of addiction. Nothing about either of these two maladjustments can or could be remedied unless first a surrender occurs---the hoisting of a white flag indicating the profound realization change needs to enter into the picture.

 

Five Duties that a Man Owes to Himself

1. The duty to hold himself on a level equal to others.

This is an essential duty, because a man who holds himself equal to others is being realistic. He comprehends that in every category of characteristic, knowledge and ability, some will do better than he while others do worse. He understands the playing field of life provides advantages to some and disadvantages to others. He realizes these circumstances occur in a manner completely outside of his control, so for these he takes no credit nor assumes any blame. He asserts his equality to himself and in his mind will have it no other way. As well he feels the force in natural law which indicates that indeed all men are inescapably created equal.

2. The duty to be honest with himself.

This duty is of vital importance because a man who is not honest with himself is pretending to himself. Pretense isn´t grounded in reality. Pretense is a lie and a man who lies to himself distorts the incomparable validity to his unique individuality. It is a crime against the self of major magnitude. Fear is the father of this crime. It is being afraid of oneself that fosters the lie of the pretense. The duty of a man to be honest with himself  often  requires courage, which itself is a critical part of the definition of what it means to be a man.

3. The duty to master his emotions.

Emotions are powerful. Without the steadying hands of thought and determination, they are inordinitely powerful. Without the constraint imposed by the power of reason, emotions become high risk factors that can lead to major regret. A man owes to himself this duty even if it is never entirely accomplished to his satisfaction. Reason is what separates us from animals; not to utilize its capacity to choose behavior and to regulate conduct is akin to high treason against the self.

4. The duty to do the difficult.

Self-respect is earned by accomplishing the difficult, and self-respect is a key ingredient to man´s spirit. This is why this duty exists. What´s difficult and why are personal and unique to every individual who accepts the challenges of the difficult, but all difficulties engender patience and perserverence. Nothing worth much has ever been gained by doing what´s easy. Practice comes to mind as an essential component in the accomplishment of the difficult, and the repetitions of practice are not easy.  However, nobody ever achieved any measurable level of competence by infrequent or sporadic application of the will.

5. The duty to enjoy.

Forms of enjoyment are many and varied, but every man by the workings of nature is tailor made to enjoy hobbies and interests which have personal appeal. These interests are part of the make up of the individual;  it´s a duty to cultivate these interests by enjoying the pleasures they afford.  Life is altogether too priceless  to discard into the trash bin those enjoyments only living can offer. If a man must dedícate himself to making time for enjoyable activities, this dedication is only fitting.  To do otherwise amounts to nothing less than rude and ungrateful behavior towards the spirits of life.

 

     

 

 

Did Tears Fall for the Children of Palo Alto?

The night storm had vanished and I looked at broken black clouds over the city of Palo Alto. Rain had plummeted day after day, pelting the ground in a concert of constant deluge until at last dawn hours stirred. I viewed a wet street empty save for solitary cars directed east or west across a Caltrain railroad track. It was 2011.  
 

A stretch of Caltrain track in Palo Alto

 

One after another students from Palo Alto´s highly accredited high schools were awaiting death on the track in the path of oncoming trains. This epidemic of suicide had alerted the media. ABC and NBC news reporters appeared with cameramen to interview local officials.  

I guarded the tracks as a security officer. I witnessed how these calamities wounded the heart of this town in California´s wealthy Silicon Valley.

Downtown Palo Alto

This blond, slender 40-something woman always wearing blue jeans walked daily, across the track on the opposite side of the street. She´d pause, look both ways, then sprint over to hand to me a cold can of coke. Not once or twice mind you---she always did it. And every time she did she expressed in that action love for the lives of the children of Palo Alto.  

Late, late at night a car stops, the teen-age driver exits; he opens the trunk, grabs a beer and sets it down in the middle of the street, then without word said he drives away.

The Hispanic gardener in the truck with its lawnmower and rakes and ladder in the back---the driver waits for a train to pass. It´s scorching hot and the gardener hands over to me a cold bottle of water.  

Many times, indeed so many it was not uncommon, people would stop their cars on chilly nights or balmy days to exit and deliver to me a cup of coffee and donuts or cookies.
 

On one grey drizzly night a pretty Philippine woman arrives at my guard post and what she does is she chats with me. She keeps me company for almost an hour. I´m a 61 year old fat man with balding hair. I know the gift of her pleasant companionship was given less out of concern for me and more for love of Palo Alto´s youngsters.

A middle-aged man in a short sleeved white shirt would come during the day once a week to stand beside the tracks. He carried a bible and would read scriptural passages, then raising an arm skyward he´d pray. I saw this happen and I knew the reason. The man loved the young people of Palo Alto. Not infrequently I saw women make the sign of the cross as they drove over the tracks.

At the many intersections of street and track, volunteers with walky-talky radios and beaming searchlights would patrol the region at night until the last train run at 1 a.m.  A report might signal a teenager had been spotted hanging about the tracks at such and such a location, and it looked scary. A call to police would transpire and I knew these volunteers loved the children of their community. I know it now.

A Caltrain train

Blinking red lights and clanging bells warn of an approaching train about every twenty minutes, either on the track north to San Francisco or south to San Jose. Mechanical arms adjust down automatically to block passage across the tracks. The light on the face of the locomotive shines in the distance and I watch, and wait until the tracks clear, until the train speeds past with steel thunder and whooshing air. I did this job for a year.

 

 

    

 

How I Will So Love My Concubine

It´s me. I know it´s me crippled that derails my solicitudes to find a woman. I see 85 percent of the guys walking around here with wives or girlfriends but not me?  I see 14 year old kids with their girls but not me. What the flinging suck is it about me that keeps me single? It must be that I cannot walk with the gait of a normal man because believe me I have been looking for my girl.

The woman is there on the other side attracting me. I´m on this side--- being attracted---and apparently attracting her. I start walking towards her to get to her side and kaboom! I step on a landmine and brother I´m blasted out of the picture. I´m gone. Nada mas Mike. I didn´t see it you understand. I didn´t know it was there and I wasn´t probing the terrain in front of me with a mine detector.  You know how I feel about them?  About those landmines?  I hate them because they get me every single time. Those defensive weapons women employ to weed out the losers from their winners just blast me to God´s kingdom come so regularly I expect it to happen by now. It´s ordinary. It´s no big thing. It is my fate I am to remain single for the rest of my life.  That´s my conclusion.

I´m not going to kick my foot against the rock stone of my fate any longer. I quit. I´m done with it. Evidently I am a vast disappointment to the good women of this world. The time has come for me to accept this. I do so now.

Do you want to know something?  I really don´t trust the good women of this world---the unattached ones looking to mate. Too many of them don´t do what they say they are going to do. I get lied to again. Bam! Too bad---my hopes were high on her. Why do these women not stick around long enough to discover I´m a great guy? I just don´t get it.

But no matter. I know the women out there I can generally more often trust. I know the women out there who don´t play games or confuse your head---women more likely honest, fun loving and forthright.

They don´t hide landmines that blow you to pieces. They just want to make you feel happy for a few dollars more in this too often bastard of a world. Treat them with kindness and respect not expected and you will see for yourself, pal, what they give to you in return is not so far away from what is genuine after all.

I make my declaration. I´m outa here---To the guys who know how to avoid the landmines and get laid and married---go for it.

I´m going to find a concubine---she´s going to be a friend I help support---a friend to whom I am dedicated. I will care about her and most probably too deeply because I´m a great guy.  She will help me survive in return by treating my particular conditions of loneliness and lack of intimacy.

You know what else? I will be damned if I stop going to church.

My Most Personal Story: About Mom

My mom was an adept conversationalist, proper in dress and demeanor, and well read. In New Orleans where she grew up, she had been a high school radio announcer and member of the debate team. She knew me well enough to realize I had an irreversible condition even before I did, and she told me it was the only part about me that had ever really worried her. My mom had actually worried about me.

I’m going to tell this history in a non-judgmental way---as much as I can, I won’t allow emotion to muddy or cloud the telling of it. No matter how my mom had treated me in these particulars, I acknowledge the ways in which she operated against me were actuated by conflicts from which she herself suffered. They contorted her and attended to me via her in a vicious manner throughout the majority of my minor years.

The deepest root of the matter was that sensual and sexual feelings in me were enigma to my mom. They antagonized her. The innate desires that attracted me to girls horrified her and so as a child much of the time I was on high alert.

My parents when I was six and seven years old often monitored me in my bed at night for any slight, muffled signal that I was “touching myself.” Whether I was or wasn’t---if they thought I was--- I risked a spanking. I felt dread and associated pleasure with pain. I hid. I lied to escape bitter consequences of forthrightness.

I have always been enamored of women---as a kid I was--- and I am now as an adult. The feelings beg for satisfaction and expression. I always wanted to have fun with girls. I always wanted to hold hands with a girl I really liked. I wanted always to walk with a sweetheart in a park or on a beach.

But mom laid down rules. I was forbidden to deliberately walk with a girl home from school, i.e. seek out the girl to walk with her; walking home from school with a girl was permitted only if it should occur by chance.

Another rule forbade the entrance of girls I knew into the family home.

This next requires explanation. Every summer my parents sent me to San Francisco for a two or three week vacation at the house of my maternal grandmother. Before going one year, when I was eleven or twelve, mom issued an order forbidding me to enter the house of any girl while in San Francisco. I did anyway. This was reported to her by a sibling after the vacation, and Mom grounded me for the rest of the summer.
In 6^th grade a boys' and girls' party was held for members of the class. After the party separate slumber parties were planned for the girls and the boys. Mom refused permission to attend the mixed party but granted permission to go to the boys' slumber party.

At my grammar school in 7^th grade a sock hop was held in one of the classrooms and I attended contrary to the wishes of mom. A sibling reported the disobedience and I was reprimanded.

Mom forbade me to see the film “Westside Story.”

One afternoon--- a group of mothers who lived in the neighborhood and who had children, friends of mine, attending the grammar school I attended came to visit mom. They knocked on the door and mom let them into the house. I was watching and listened while perched up the staircase out of view. The women were asking mom to allow more freedom to me in regard to going to dances and mixing with girls in general. In short order mom curtly showed them to the door.

When I was 13 years old, our family went on a Catholic Church retreat to the desert. I met the most beautiful girl there I had ever seen, by far, and we clicked instantly. It was love at first sight and for two weeks I was living in heaven on earth laughing and enjoying companionship with this girl. Her eyes just sparkled. At the end of the retreat, we exchanged mailing addresses. A few weeks later, my folks called me into the living room. Mom was holding an open envelope and she had extracted and read the letter inside. She tore it to pieces in front of me and I realized then it had been a letter to me by that girl in the desert. On the inside I seethed at the insult and disregard to my privacy but didn't say a word.

When I was a junior in high school, I was on the phone with a cute blond and mom came with arms akimbo and stern face and stood inches away from me, making it impossible to have a private conversation.

These were all invasions against the heterosexual masculinity in me in a long standing war waged by mom.

When I reached 17 years of age I decided I had had enough. I began to devote myself to dissipation. I got high on drugs and stayed high on drugs as much as possible---I trashed the work ethic. My parents couldn't take it and kicked me out of the house and I joined the army. I took a discharge 16 months later and for the next nine years I lived on welfare in various northern California locations.

One day many years later, in another era, after I recovered and was leading a self-sustaining life, I was visiting my parents at their home in Los Angeles. Mom and I were sitting in the living room with other family across from one another. Our eyes met and mom’s body jerked erect. She stiffened. She didn't do the jerk; the jerk had been done to her. Then I saw a curl of what looked similar to black smoke rise above her, and felt that the demon---that tormenter---was revealing itself.

Last week, I was preparing to do the Essential Somatic Movements contained in the CD by Somatic Educator Martha Peterson.

I watched and listened to this gentle and caring woman explain how the movements eliminate pain. She encapsulated everything about the embodiment of the female gender that's especially wonderful. Innate wisdom, compassion, sincerity. And I couldn’t help myself. I started to cry--- deep sobs of tears because this Martha Peterson was in no way at all someone evil. She was good and kind and gentle and my mom for all those years had remonstrated against my feelings in favor of girls altogether as special and good. I cried for some minutes; until I didn’t have any more water. In my 65 years this was the first I felt not bitter or angry about the abuse but just hurt at the enormity of the crime done against me--- and my mom.

 

 

 

 

A Man without a Country

Alan by no means appears the strapping type who would cross continents and traverse oceans in an eight year drive to meet the peoples of the world. He approaches instead the diminutive. We sit across from one another in couch chairs one afternoon last week talking under the bamboo roof of the guest commons at Hostal Rosario del Villa in Cuenca. He laughs easily and looks about 42 years old, wears a worn baseball cap and appears altogether nondescript, perhaps even somewhat undernourished.


Istanbul, Turkey

Alan’s assured cadence and deep voice tell a different story. Those reflect a personal need molded onto a framework of intense curiosity which for almost a decade has stopped at nothing to find universal commonality no matter country or culture.


Cusco, Peru

So is Alan a traveler? “I can’t really characterize myself as anything,” he says. “I can just say that I travel because that’s part of my life.”

A part of his life that’s more consequence than choice he says.
Alan had been working with computer software and hardware in the Silicon Valley high tech era, and started part time, taking personal growth courses and studies. It generated full scale change but not until Alan rammed into a dead end wall years later.


Koh Phangan, Thailand

He has always enjoyed helping people, he explains, helping people discover their hidden aspects, helping people to resolve differences, helping people to better understand their motivations.

Time after time people encouraged him. You’re so good at doing counseling, they said, you ought to practice full time. So he got out of the high tech field and without a psychology degree that is in fact what Alan did for about the next six years.

“I thought about (getting a degree) for many years” he says, “and every time I went to go something stopped me. The main thing is they weren’t actually seeing people, they were seeing statistics in general and I wanted to see people in specifics.”  

He says he did it until he got really good at it. He could figure out their focus of attention, see the things inside themselves that they wanted to change. But Alan says almost everyone wanted to change superficially, for instance, how to change to make more money or how to develop a more likeable personality.

“Is that all people really want?” thought Alan. “They were satisfied with what to me was just a beginning. It was just bread crumbs. And people were delighted with it. And I wasn’t. I needed a path, I needed to go somewhere.”

He felt frustrated doing life coaching because to use Ecuador as a metaphor, people wanted to hear about the country but only one percent ever traveled to it. No one wanted to actually go. People didn’t want a change that turns things inside out or the change that pulls the root of the self out for brave examination.

It was like people “watching the travel channel but then turning off the TV," says Alan.

Buenos Aries, Argentina

This was the dead end experience that birthed the consequence of Alan’s travels across the globe. He visited Asia, South America, the Middle East and Europe. He lived in Buenos Aries, Santiago, Spain, Istanbul and Cusco, Peru. He went to India. He began searching for a commonality among people that unites despite habits of language and culture or country and belief. He “ticked” to find what made other people tick under the clothing of their heritage and cultural upbringing.

This tick is what Alan describes as “intent.” It’s a third aspect that forms a triangle of being along with the nature and nurture aspects, our genetic and environmental aspects. No two intents can be exactly alike Alan is saying, not a one can match exactly that of another. Alan argues these intents are the stuff that make us tick.

While traveling for these many years, Alan has lost contact with his country of origin and to the extent his English has been expunged of American slang. He speaks a neutral English which German or French people can understand.  

Santiago, Spain

“I’m an American in the official sense," he says, "but I don’t see the world through the eyes of an American.”

I don’t know how Alan’s awakening took place. I don’t know if it was like the rise of a morning sun over the horizon, or whether it came as a thunder clap that dismembered the lone tree on an empty tract of land. But according to Alan it was a discovery that contradicted his almost canonical belief that inside everyone exists something which unites them to others of the same species.

…”that came as a big blow to me” he says, “…we were really not…. everybody has something that makes them tick but that’s the only thing they have in common.”

When the interview progresses to this point I’m beginning to wonder if in truth the design of an individual’s being is so unique it cannot ever unite in fundamental fashion with the being of another.

Alan’s finding overturned and undermined the very purpose of his world travels and led him to go on to write a book published last February, available on Amazon in print and digital forms entitled, “The Story between Us, Living and Relating from Being.”

Alan required anonymity to tell his story, and as the author of his book, he’s known simply as Alan S. 

 

 

 

 

 

Family History and Legend of Courtesy Lost

He said he would do it--- and he did. He plunged his short sword into Emperor Calígula. He rid the Mediterranean world of a tyrant. He executed the assassination and shed the blood of a beast till death. Cassius Chaerea. His name appears in my book two thousand years after the event. And there is no one around entirely like me to honor the one who was entirely the man Cassius Chaerea.


Caligula

My family originated in America from Louisiana territory, vast French property sold by Napoleon for $3 million to the just formed USA.  In the few years before Pearl Harbor, the whole lot moved to California. They moved across an entire continent. Fathers and mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles and great-grandparents. Families with surnames DeCuir, Bell and Porche transplanted themselves anew. They left New Orleans’ parishes for cities named Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco.They succeeded. Aunts and mothers raised families and taught in schools and sold stock. Fathers played music, built houses and sold insurance. 
So my blood is inherited south---French, English, Scottish, black African---Indian and Jewish. I call it gumbo and praline. That’s cornbread and grits when Grandma talks French to Aunt Sue in the kitchen.   

Alexis and Cornelia Porche on their wedding day.

Papa my Jewish maternal great grandfather had been a cotton broker and raised two families. He’d laugh uproariously while tossing dish candy out the window to his daughter’s grandchildren darting about in the yard below. I’d count Papa’s change and buy his white owl cigars.

Papa

That world in which I used to live---when most people went to church on Sunday or didn't necessarily lock their front doors---it's vanished.
In those days fifty years ago the sun lit bright the parks and lakes of California. White clouds in blue sky were swept by wind over landscapes of brown and green. A young woman walked alone unafraid at night on Market Street in down town San Francisco.
It's not as bright these days and I take a look from a particular angle.  

Catholic University of America students at Mass
 

See, in the old days my family prayed at Catholic church. We kneeled and prayed the rosary in our home with other Catholic families in the neighborhood. Protestants let us do our thing without comment. They didn’t deprecate Catholics. Protestant and Catholic people became friends and didn’t fight about religión.
But during Jesus movement days twenty years later, together with evangelicals, I looked inside a cathedral packed with Catholics singing with arms upraised and my Protestant companions scoffed at the sight. Why?
I believe it’s an example of disregard which dwindling courtesy enables. I know it's an impossible stretch, but maybe the start of this loss of courtesy in some mysterious way began the day Emperor Caligula announced he was a god---that somehow being the hidden seed to today's school shootings and rampant drug abuse---that evil spirit keeping people afraid out of fear.
 

 

 

 

My Recovery Story

This narrative of what it's been like to have a virtually unchecked propensity to abuse drugs, to suffer bi-polar and schizoaffective disorders---this is my story.

I start at the beginnings. In the 5th grade, after class, I left the room by clamboring out an open window. A classmate reported this to the teacher and I was reprimanded. In the sixth grade, I trod bare-footed through a dirt field laden with sharp prickles which induced me to jump and skip. I did it deliberately and yelled in pain while traversing the whole lot. While sitting in a pew in a Catholic Church with other grammar school kids, I punched my jaw hard, repeatedly. Why did I act these ways? I don't know. All I know for certain is I was acting weird. Still, my grades in school were excellent and I was arguably the best little league pitcher in town. I published an issue of a class newspaper, and I was generally favored. I had friends and I was allowed by the nuns and priests to work at the coveted job of washing pots and pans on week-ends at the nearby monastery.

My brother Paul on the left, in San Francisco, on summer
 vacation at Grandma Porche's house, pretending to fight for the camera.

I graduated in 1964 from St. Rita's Grammar School in Sierra Madre, CA.---and entered La Salle High School, at that time an all male college preparatory school in Pasadena, run by the Order of Christian Brothers. In the second semester, junior year, I smoked a marijuana cigarette for the first time. I couldn't get enough. My grade point average plunged from near 3.0 to failing. Call it inherent character weakness, misguided epicureanism, youth rebellion. I had absolutely no defense against the appeal of pot, which liberated me from inhibition and opened the door to hilarity--- but which also demoted my aspirations to little more than the aspiration to smoke another joint. I couldn't proceed to the senior year because I had failed to pass almost all the junior year courses.

In time, my dad discovered a joint hidden in my bedroom---that was the last straw---bam!---my parents ordered me to vacate the house. I understand. I can see how I might easily have required the same if I were in their position. I honor the memories of my deceased parents. Still, I did feel driven to rebel. My mom and dad were much too strict, not only in my estimation but in the estimation of most of my friends. I feel my folks unwittingly helped to foment in me the very rebellion they decried.

I joined the Army in summer 1967, at age 17, while 500,000 U.S. troops were waging war in South Vietnam.

Graduation day: Basic Training, Ft. Ord, CA.
I'm second row down from the top, second from the right. 

I was a bad fit. I didn't care about being a soldier and it didn't take the Army long to find out. While I was stationed in Germany, Master Sergeant strode into the bunk quarters and told me to roll up my shirt sleeves. I did and he saw the bloody mess I'd made of both arms by slicing them up and down with razor blades.

The Army sent me to a mental hospital in Frankfurt, then across the Atlantic Ocean, across the United States to the Presidio in San Francisco, where on September 16, 1968, I was honorably discharged with a 10 percent service connected disability rating.

A veteran buddy and I rented an apartment on Waller Street, a block up from Haight Street in San Francisco. One afternoon I came home to find the apartment crowded with hippies who had moved in and bedded down with sleeping bags and blankets.

Top Floor Apt. on Waller St.
 which became a homeless shelter.

Without consulting me, my old Army friend had notified all of Haight Ashbury that our apartment was open to shelter the homeless.  It was chaos, but out of it a communal family of close friends was born that lasted seven years. Sheila, Ron, Larry and Bill and I rented an old Victorian on Sutter Street near Fillmore, then leased and operated a coffee house next door named "The Sign of the Fool." My job was to buy the eggs, cream cheese and bagels, apple juice and bananas. Larry cooked the omelettes.

But we were in more than the restaurant business. Plainclothes police with guns drawn barged onto our premises and arrested us one night on charges related to selling LSD. After our stints in jail, after we either bailed or were released, we piled into a 1957 purple jalopy and headed to Ohio.
I'm attempting to recount my story in linear fashion, but the memories jumble and overlap. I know the effects of drugs and mental illness often hold hands. I know for instance I had a supply of thorazine prescribed to treat me for an LSD induced nervous breakdown.
With hindsight, I see I was overwhelmed, or crushed, be it because of the turbulent times, my bad choices, the drugs everywhere so easily available, or because of a personal predisposition to mental illness, or, because of an amalgamation of these factors, but, around this time, I stopped talking. I didn't stop voluntarily. I stopped because I could no longer talk, and I couldn't talk for about a year.

When I did first speak again, our commune family was living in Port Costa, in the East Bay. I spoke to Sheila when we were in the kitchen. I'll never forget how happy she became, calling out to everybody in the house that "Michael talked!".
As I say, my memories don't permit me to assure you my story is narrated in proper, step by historical step order. But our commune fell apart after we returned to the San Francisco Bay Area from Ohio. Not that we didn't visit and see one another from time to  time, because we did.

I got on General Assistance and rented a room not much larger than a big closet in the Golden Eagle Hotel in San Francisco's gaudy North Beach district. While there I took a tab of acid and flipped out. I went psychotic. I couldn't handle the bad trip I was having due to an awakening awareness of my bi-sexual dispositions. I wandered the corridors and the stairwells in that hotel for two days. Probably the hotel manager called an ambulance, but when I saw those men dressed in white coming towards me, I fled up an extra flight of stairs and threw myself out the 4th story window. No way was I going to spend the rest of my life locked in a rubber room.

It was like I had never been born--- until I woke and saw and heard doctors at San Francisco General Hospital asking me if I could feel the needles they were poking into my legs, which I could. For the next six months I wore a white plaster body caste---from a hospital bed I watched the first man on the moon take his famous steps. And every week, my old hippie family friends came to stand by my bed and visit, even though much of what I said to them was absolute gibberish.

Eventually, after having been moved to Laguna Honda Hospital, a technician sawed off my caste,  and after physical therapy, I relocated to Hilarity Heights Apartments in Tiburon, in Marin County. A year later, in 1971, I bought a 25 foot wooden cabin cruiser and anchored it out in the waters of the Sausalito houseboat community.

Gate 5 Sausalito, where I often anchored my boat.

Much of this time I was sane and lucid. I was still plagued however with recurring nervous breakdowns. Not only during the two years I lived in my boat out on the water, but also when I moved onto land and into dirt-bag hotels in downtown San Rafael.

I began shooting heroin on a regular basis. If I didn't inject the dark stuff in time to keep from getting sick, I'd shiver and sweat.  I injected lots of speed and cocaine. I contracted Hepatitis C.

I was also during these times a well known client of the Marin County Mental Health System. I'd get into the locked looney bin at Marin General Hospital, Ward A, get released for three or four months, then return the next time I caved into the mania of a psychotic break.  I saw a vision out a window of Fidel Castro walking down the gang plank of a space ship. I was taught by pretty women witches how to walk past doors unseen. I never did learn how to talk to the dead on a telephone, but these witches tried to teach me. I met a fish wizard. I was put into the rubber room for God in Heaven knows what offense, but the touch under the door of the fingers of the woman patient with whom I had danced connected my life to her heart, and my isolation disappeared.

Those years were like a merry-go-round of disfigured horses. My friends were mostly mentally ill types, who went in and out of Ward A, and when out, went as I did five days a week to the Marin Psychiatric Day Care Center on Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael. Jumbo would look in a mirror and talk to Bob Dylan.  Bubba would slowly walk in circles in the day room for hours at a time. Once a week I bared my ass in the privacy of the Day Care office so a nurse could inject prolixin into me. We smoked bags of pot and drank cases of beer and then watched basketball games in the afternoon on TV.

Maybe...maybe round about this time it was the first time I ever prayed to Jesus Christ with some authentic measure of sincerity.

I remember this time to this day. It was raining. I was on the ground laying face down in mud under the Richardson Bay Bridge in Mill Valley. I felt an immense weight of flat rock on my back, and it was pressing me to the ground so much so I couldn't get up. I knew it was an imaginary rock, but still, because of it,  I couldn't get up and that part was for real. So I prayed to the Christ and the weight of the rock was lifted. Right then and there. I've never forgotten that experience.

Sometime in 1973, once again, I was on Ward A at Marin General Hospital.
Locked up once again at age 23 for mental illness issues, once again overwhelmed, mowed down once more by this disease that had already been knocking me to the ground for years.

I was in the day room on Ward A, and I collapsed. I utterly and entirely abandoned myself, so to speak, and leapt off a cliff hoping against all hope that the hands of Jesus Christ, if He were real, would stay my fall. I didn't care by then. If He were not real, I wouldn't care to go on living anyway.

Then I felt Him inside, holding me up. I felt Him alive, and experienced for the first time that He is a resurrected Lord. His love welled inside me from deepest, innermost cell to outermost bodily member. I shuddered and convulsed with tears that wracked me with sorrow because I realized I wasn't deserving of the crucifixion He had suffered for me. I laughed. I laughed and mixed the crying and laughing with a liberty, freedom and joy I had never before felt, not up to that time, nor after.  He was alive after all!

St. Emydius Catholic Church, where in 1978 on Sundays I used to
read selections from the epistles to the congregation. 

There was nothing else to do but laugh with joy and light without equal. Every distant and obscure rumour about the resurrection  of this God made man was proven true to me in an instant of transformation. I became a Christian, and despite  all later sin, all later misgiving and doubt, my faith in Him can never be taken away, not forever, not completely, not even by the demons I harbor inside myself.

I got off welfare---went to study at the College of Marin. I joined the Church of the Open Door in San Rafael, lived in an ecumenical community of Christians, and did work as a landscaper and carpenter. I later found work as a furniture finisher and refinisher for Furniture by Gatti in San Francisco. I worked this trade for 15 years, 3.5 years while in business for myself. I earned a B.A. in Journalism and worked as a newspaper reporter for three years.

My former wife and greatest support, Claudia Audelo,
after lunch, 2014, in San Mateo, CA. 

I married a wonderful woman and stayed married to her for nine years. I worked nine years as a security guard.

Office of the St. John Valley Times in
Madawaska, Maine, where I worked as a reporter.

I still have mental health issues. I will always need to fight for my sanity. I had a serious nervous collapse years after my conversion to Christianity, while I studied at San Francisco State University. There is no such thing as a magic bullet. I struggle still...with urges to do drugs. I had a major drug relapse just last March, and smoked bowl after bowl of crystal meth daily for a month. I abandoned my apartment and all of my property because the junkies and meth freaks living in my place wouldn't leave. I'm living now in a residential treatment house in San Francisco for veterans in recovery. I struggle, still---with doubt, with issues concerning faith and belief. I learn and I refuse to learn. But all in all, I believe I progress. I'm contented, even happy in a wonderful, confounding way.

Table and set of chairs I finished for a client while in
business for myself.

I'm interested. I want to live fully, more than ever. Yet still I have this part of me that seems to cling, to remain open to the temptation to deny, that wants to obfuscate, that fears complete honesty because of a pride within that balks at the truth that I'm not always humble, that sometimes I am arrogant and need to get with the program, need to hand the defects of my character to my Lord, my Higher Power, for healing that will work in God's time to shape me into the way He most would have me be while alive on this earth. I welcome the challenge this entails.