Category: Orphans

“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.”

Meet one of my hometown folks. Well, it seems like a have a lot of hometown folks because, in addition to my hometown, I have a secondary and tertiary hometown. I plan on writing about my secondary one later this week. Or that’s the plan. Beaumont, Texas, is my tertiary hometown. Anyway, this hometown folk I introduce today (I don’t know him but wouldn’t mind) has the improbable name of Brent Coon.

Coon, who plays in a rock band and hangs around with knockout women, and (he also has a music company and a whole flock of bikini-clad “coonpups”) is a big dog in tort law right now. This is because in the court room he cleaned BP’s — yes, that BP — clock over the Texas City refinery explosion in 2005 that killed 15 and injured 170.

The head Coondog has a revealing, “as told to,” story about BP that can be found right here on Esquire‘s Web site. Yes, that Esquire. One of my favorite magazines in the whole wide world.

Now you can dismiss Coon totally or partially, if you want, because he is a plaintiff’s lawyer from one of the most plaintiff-friendly towns on Earth — that is if you believe the anti-plaintiff U.S. Chamber of Commerce (not the guys and gals who welcome you to town and has all the great maps and brochures but the chamber that owns one of the newspapers they publish nationally to try and scare potential plaintiffs’ juries.) But, to pardon the bad and poor tasting pun, where there is smoke there’s fire — and oil in BP’s case. That is what some friends and relatives, one with a Ph.D. in geology who works in deep drilling, tell me about BP’s reputation in the oil and gas industry. These people say, basically, “BP sucks” when it comes to safety.

So say what you want about Coondog, but this guy has got it going on when it comes to BP. And apparently to living la vida!