Eight Feet Deep

Do you see the lit­tle graphic to the left? It is what the National Weather Ser­vice uses to illus­trate the fore­cast for tomor­row in Arling­ton, Texas. There are also more of these sym­bols. One  is for this after­noon, another for Sun­day and still another for Monday.

It means that the temp is going to be hot­ter ‘n hell. Hot­ter than a $2 pis­tol. Hot enough to fry a con­struc­tion worker on the side­walk hold­ing an egg in one hand and Jimmy Dean Pure Pork Sausage in the other.

I men­tion this for Arling­ton is where I am going this week­end. Why? Is it not hot enough where I live 45 miles north of Sabine Pass, Texas? Well, it will be hot in Beau­mont. This is, after all, mid-July. But there will be a slight chance of thun­der­storms and not nearly as hot as in North Cen­tral Texas.

My mind usu­ally equates North Cen­tral Texas with heat and big thun­der­storms and hail. I once saw a storm rain down baseball-sized hail and left the ground in April look as if a bliz­zard had come through. Oh, the win­ters are cold there too. I’ve lived in sev­eral places in Cen­tral and North Cen­tral Texas for var­i­ous peri­ods of time and found the weather is most dis­agree­able with me.

But I am going to visit some old col­lege friends. These friends were edu­cated, as I  was at the “School of Steve” or “Steve  U.” a.k.a. Stephen F. Austin State Uni­ver­sity in Nacog­doches, By God, Texas. So I know my friends are smart enough to have plenty of air con­di­tion­ing. Thank good­ness. Because it’s going to get hot I tell you.

See! I told you so. I told you that White House Press Sec­re­tary Robert “I’m A Loser” Gibbs was mak­ing a ter­ri­ble mis­take when he said it looked as if the Democ­rats would lose the House dur­ing the Novem­ber mid-term elec­tions. It was a gaffe! Just as I told you so. Actu­ally, that is not what I told you at all.

Just as one shouldn’t write under the influ­ence of alco­hol or drugs, although Edgar Allen Poe sure gave it the old Bal­ti­more try, one shouldn’t write under the influ­ence of pain. Unfor­tu­nately, I do that some­time. What is even worse, I write under the influ­ence of pain, mostly with­out telling any­one. All kinds pro­fun­di­ties appear and why would that happen?

There are times that I may write some­thing  such as “much to my cha­grin” and I write it just because it is eas­ier to write a cliche than it is to think and explain what one is actu­ally try­ing to say. I have no idea what “much to my cha­grin” means. It don’t mean much to me, but it means much to my cha­grin. My lit­tle pet cha­grin that I keep in a cage with its tiny lit­tle wheel.

No. I am lying. I know what “much to my cha­grin” means. I was just try­ing to fool the reader into think­ing I was com­ing clean after years of writ­ing like I know what I am doing. But I really know what I am doing. I just don’t want the reader to know that all the time so I can lure that per­son into my web of com­fort. To let them feel, for just one moment, like they are much more supe­rior to this per­son writ­ing this garbage. Why would I do that? I haven’t the clue.Well, yes, I actu­ally do. You see, I am a habit­ual liar. No I’m not. I just lied about being a liar so I could con­fuse the reader. And why in the world would I want to con­fuse the reader, the per­son who reads my words?

Beats me. Much to my chagrin.

“Ouch, damn back.”

I say stronger words than those when I com­plain of a back pain, so why not have a for­mal con­ver­sa­tion with my back?

Uh, per­haps because it can­not talk back. My back don’t give me no back talk. That sounds as if it could have been a great 50s R & B song. Which is a per­fect segue because I was think­ing about some­thing from almost that long ago related to my aching back.

If there was one thing my broth­ers and I could agree upon, it was our devo­tion for “The Three Stooges” and their mem­o­rable bits. Now even 50 years later if one of my broth­ers men­tions a back­ache — other than heart prob­lems back dis­or­ders are leg­endary among the five of us broth­ers — it imme­di­ately turns into a Stooges’ bit.

“Oh, you got a weak back?”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you had it?”

“Oh, about a week back.”

When your back gives you loads of mis­ery it seems humor is a good potion to try when you don’t have some­thing stronger on hand, like Val­ium or Mor­phine. How­ever, a good “adjust­ment” some­times helps too.

I don’t get my back adjusted any­more because I am afraid my spine would snap like a drought-stricken corn stalk. But when I was younger and would get mus­cle spasms in my back, a trip to my doc­tor or the old retired chi­ro­prac­tor would seem pretty helpful.

Even in my mid-20s I would get back spasms. Some prob­a­bly had to do with my line of work as a fire­fighter. Or per­haps they came from other activ­i­ties — like well, going to ice cream socials, right. My doc­tor was an osteopath, which is a doc­tor trained in med­i­cine but takes a more holis­tic approach to treat­ment. One such approach is giv­ing adjust­ments like chi­ro­prac­tors do. These adjust­ments were quite help­ful. I kept get­ting them for quite awhile until my doc­tor started hav­ing his own back prob­lems. Too bad the physi­cian couldn’t heal himself.

I also used to go see the old retired chi­ro­prac­tor who lived just up the street from me. He wouldn’t prac­tice unless some­one would come by and ask, and then he only charged a $10 bill for his service.

This is one of these days I have an aching back. From what, I don’t know. I have just had these back spasms since I was a young adult. Maybe these spasms orig­i­nated 30 years ago we loaded ammu­ni­tion on our ship for our 3-inch can­nons. The ammo weighed about 50 pounds apiece. Once, when we were leav­ing dry­dock we stopped at Seal Beach and picked up all of our ammo. I was part of a human chain load­ing those suck­ers all after­noon and into the night. Another time we loaded from a “Vert-rep,” for “ver­ti­cal replen­ish­ment.” This meant unload­ing shells from a huge heli­copter and stow­ing them about three decks below. I don’t know if either load­ing caused any per­ma­nent dam­age. I doubt it did. It sure made me respect the hell out of hav­ing smaller weapons to fire, if you get my drift.

I guess I will try treat­ing myself the old-fashioned way — with an Old Fash­ioned! No, just kid­ding. I will take my med­i­cine as pre­scribed and then jump in bed and pull the cov­ers over my head if that doesn’t work. I will also try to laugh by think­ing of the Three Stooges and their ridicu­lous bits. At least Doc­tors Curly, Larry and Moe don’t charge you out­ra­geous rates and send you back for test after test after test, with seem­ingly no result in sight. Of course, they have no mal­prac­tice insur­ance either. Nyuck, Nyuck, Nyuck.

Heat­wave blan­kets much of the U.S., Threat­ens Grids, reads the head­line of a CBS News.com story.

Never let it be said that I lack empa­thy. But one has to sti­fle a chuckle — the kind of when you whis­per a funny about the deceased dur­ing a funeral — when you see the rest of the U.S. is hot­ter than Hell. After all, it is the snow-mobile-ridin,’ ice-fishing, 50-below-swimmin’ Polar Bear Club-types who flick off a com­ment when they hear of Dal­las being par­a­lyzed dur­ing a snow or ice storm. Or they hear of schools shut­ting down.

“That ain’t noth­ing,” says Thor of the Frozen North.

Well, 102 or 103 in New York or Philly is hot. And 91 in Mon­treal, something’s out of whack, eh?

The fact is we, speak­ing of the peo­ple down in these parts (South­east Texas) live with such tem­per­a­tures pretty often. Oh, it doesn’t go over 100 degrees here every day. Some sum­mers it doesn’t even get to 100. But oth­ers do. And the humid­ity. It’s killer, dude. It gets so humid that there are times when you either don’t depend on one shower or bath to last you dur­ing the day, or you just say “the hell with it.”

There are old and old and poor folks up in the North­east that have a hard time deal­ing with the heat. I hope they get fans and access to some places to cool down. For those who mouth about how their cold win­ters “ain’t noth­ing,” well, you are right. That’s why, at least I, live where I do.

Ah, the paid fed­eral hol­i­day. Who loves you, baby? I do. Even if I am only a part-time worker, I get full time pay for sit­ting here and doing what I do, or don’t do.

One ter­rific ben­e­fit of the day off is the sleep-in. Sleep­ing in has increas­ingly become a trea­sured part of life lately. I am sure a thor­ough exam­i­na­tion of my mind — fright­en­ing as it is to imag­ine — might yield the cen­tral rea­son or rea­sons why only in a mat­ter of years I have become so fond of late sleep­ing. What­ever the rea­sons, I find dream­ing to be much richer dur­ing these series of morn­ing naps.

This morn­ing I drove to Indone­sia. Yes, it’s a neat trick if you don’t live in Indone­sia what with all the water sur­round­ing the 17,500-something islands that make up the South­east Asian-Oceanic nation. What’s more, I drove (actu­ally I rode with my friends War­ren and Stacy), then drove back and was get­ting ready for a return drive to Indone­sia when my dream ran out of tracks.

Dreams can be like a great, or a really bad, or ter­ri­fy­ing, movie. Of course, they are very short films which make “Let’s Go Out to the Lobby” seem like “Dances With Wolves.”

I don’t know why I dreamed of Indone­sia, much less dri­ving there from Whereverville. It’s strange to think how the mind gets around to the peo­ple you know and the places you’ve been. I can under­stand dream­ing of War­ren and Stacy. They are two of my clos­est friends. I think I intro­duced them 20-something years ago and it wasn’t long before they were together as a cou­ple and later mar­ried. Indone­sia is a bit more complicated.

If my mem­ory serves me. If my mem­ory serves me. What did I order any­way? As I was say­ing, if my mem­ory serves me I vis­ited Jakarta in Jan­u­ary 1978. My ship, well, the Navy’s ship, or the tax­pay­ers’ ship, spent about three or four days there on a port visit just after two months of dif­fer­ent port calls in New Zealand and Aus­tralia. Those “down under” coun­tries were some­what of a shock in that they were beau­ti­ful and had some of the nicest and friend­liest peo­ple one might see out­side Texas. Indone­sia was a whole dif­fer­ent load of cargo.

Of the places I vis­ited that year on my deploy­ment, which also included Fiji, Tai­wan, Guam and our “port away from home­port” Subic Bay, the Philip­pines, Jakarta was the most for­eign. In fact, Indone­sia was the most for­eign coun­try I have ever visited.

Per­haps I should only men­tion one of the odd expe­ri­ences I had in Indone­sia. This hap­pened on the very first day in port.

My ship­mates and I were loaded on a bus, pur­port­edly, on our way to a com­pound at the Amer­i­can Embassy. There was a fairly major prob­lem, how­ever. Our dri­ver spoke no Eng­lish and no one in our crew spoke what­ever his lan­guage might have been. While some of my fel­low squids tried to use sign lan­guage or Cha­rades to deter­mine just where the hell we were going, I heard a “thump” which was fol­lowed by a very disturbed-sounding mur­mur by some of my mates.

The street on which we were rid­ing had an out­side bike lane and appar­ently our run­away bus dri­ver pulled into this lane and struck a bicy­clist, then just kept going. I couldn’t see it because I was on the other side of the bus and there were guys stand­ing in the aisle. Those who did see the spec­ta­cle said it wasn’t pretty. About six or seven of us finally had enough as we were dri­ving through what appeared to be a cen­tral busi­ness dis­trict, what with sky­scrap­ers seem­ingly as far as the eye could see. (Jakarta is quite a large city which had a pop­u­la­tion then of about 5–6 mil­lion peo­ple. Today it has nearly 9 mil­lion.) Those of us who got off the bus went into the lounge of a Sher­a­ton and finally found an Eng­lish speak­ing man with an old car who agreed to be our com­bi­na­tion “taxi driver-tour guide” that day for what was a very rea­son­able sum. The rest I shall not divulge other than to say it was an adven­ture of “sailors being sailors.”

I actu­ally had kind of a cul­tural over­load dur­ing my time in Jakarta. I saw some unbe­liev­ably majes­tic struc­tures which, I can only sup­pose, had some­thing to do with Indone­sia hav­ing the largest Islamic pop­u­la­tion in the world. I also saw some of the most abject poverty I had ever wit­nessed includ­ing sights you’d only see in “National Geo­graphic.” On a pedes­trian over­pass cross­ing a major high­way sat an arm­less and leg­less woman on a cart, with a can next to her for dona­tions. Then, of course, I men­tioned the hit-an-run by our bus dri­ver. In more recent times, these mem­o­ries have kind of made me won­der if Pres­i­dent Obama viewed such scenes when he lived in Indonesia?

For­tu­nately, I rarely have bad or even dis­turb­ing dreams thank­fully. So my foray into Indone­sia in slum­ber was more detailed with con­cerns about time or other engage­ments, those things we deal with in rou­tine. All in all though, some of those things which go on in your brain dur­ing down­time can yield some pretty fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. Writ­ten on the bath­room wall of our thoughts: “For a good time call 1–800-THE-MIND.”