Category: Orphans

DoD photo by Dennis Rogers, Air Force

I always get a kick out of these pictures. This one is particularly magnificent as the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds fly over while newly commissioned second lieutenants throw their hats into the air after graduating at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. How do they get those hats to fly so high? They must have jet propulsion. Having been an enlisted man and non-commissioned officer — in the Navy of course — I also have to ask: Who picks up all those hats and make sure they get back to the right person? I bet it is some lowly E-2 or E-3, probably restricted to base and pulling extra duty compliments of an Article 16. Oh well, live and learn lad.

With access to so much literature good and bad no doubt the Internet must be the hypochondriac’s best friend.

It is actually a good thing that your doctor goes to school for all those years, has all those grueling hours as a resident and can generally tell the difference between a bacteria and a virus. Looking at Web sites such as wrongdiagnosis can be either a frustrating or a mind-blowing experience depending upon how one is wired.

I just happened to be looking at wrongdiagnosis to glean some possible causes for a condition I have been experiencing for perhaps a year or more that is more aggravating than it is worrisome. I speak of aural hallucinations which rouse me out of a sound slumber. Perhaps I should write down every time it happens but needless to say it happens more frequently than I’d like.

This morning I had “the invisible alarm clock.” One blast from this alarm — which sounds nothing like my present alarm but nevertheless wakes me up — inevitably rouses me followed by my spewing at least a couple of my favorite profanities. I have had dreams which were either influenced by nearby sound which involved some type of alarm rousing me from sleep. Although what I have been experiencing isn’t the same. The weirdest dream I can remember like that was just plain spooky. This tale may reside somewhere else on the blog, but if so forgive me, it’s just too weird.

At one point in time when I worked as a firefighter we still had direct-line “fire phones” on which we could communicate with the dispatcher at the central station from out “substation.” Some bells and a buzzer — the old, annoying and loud telephone kind — went off when someone downtown picked up our fire phone. A little lamp came on by the phone, which was handy in that you didn’t have to stumble to find the phone.

Since I slept closest to the phone, I always answered it. One night the bells went off, I picked it up and my friend Karen, the C-shift dispatcher informed me that someone reported an elementary school a couple blocks away was on fire. She said the caller indicated “fire was coming out of the windows” of the school.

What I failed to mention was the bells interrupted a dream I had in which I had called in a false alarm. Karen happened to be on the other end of the phone and I was trying desperately to make her to understand it was only a joke. When we arrived — in real life — on the scene the school had no fire anywhere. It was a false alarm. The other strange thing was that I worked on B-shift and, while Karen was a close friend, she wasn’t our dispatcher rather she worked on the oncoming shift. Creepy enough?

It wasn’t until this morning’s false alarm that I began considering another annoying wake-up I have had for more than a year, could be some kind of auditory hallucination. This involves a quick knock on the door while I am sleeping.

The knock always takes place sometime between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. It’s like a light “knock-knock” most of the time. I have jumped out of bed a number of times only to find no one is there.

What has made me think someone was there and has been annoying me before making a quick getaway is that we have some pretty marginal, oh hell I’ll just say it, we’ve got some real nutjobs living here. Conceivably, there are places one could quickly hide between the time someone knocked on my door and I got out of bed, then went to the door to investigate. Now I have never complained about the mysterious knocking because I am sure my manager would say there is little he can do about someone knocking on my door whom I don’t know is actually doing it.

Not until today, when the alarm buzzed somewhere in my brain and I heard it, did I ever think that the knocking is actually some kind of hallucination. I guess dream would be a better word for it. Actually, I have heard the knocking in the sleep state I sometime am in which I really can’t tell whether or not I am asleep. I figure that if I am thinking of something that is just totally absurd, I must be asleep. But then, one never knows.

Oh well, everyone has there little bumps in the night. Some have nightmares. I have been told that I act during sleep sometimes as if I am having nightmares, complete with screaming. My night-screaming used to freak out my co-workers at the fire station so that they used to joke that I was possessed. But I never remember the nightmares. I guess that’s good, I don’t know.

The closest I can remember any dream being a nightmare was last week. I dreamed about this animal coming out from under the ground. It just emerged and kept on getting bigger and bigger until it was out and was the size of a hippopotamus if not larger. It could also fly. Fortunately, it was chasing around this crazy dude who looked like a tall, thin Mormon missionary who likewise could become airborne. The Mormon just laughed and laughed as he merrily led the flying hippo on a chase.

Thankfully, my real life isn’t nearly as exciting.

If the level of rhetoric which has passed for far-right-wing discourse in recent times is any indicator then we should all gear up for some kind of truly stupid wingnut comments about Sonia Sotomayor’s busted ankle.

The 54-year-old federal circuit court judge and Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee fractured her ankle after tripping this morning at LaGuardia Airport in New York on her way to Washington.

“No doubt the woman who would be the first Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court spent too much of her time over the weekend knocking back the margaritas, probably while wearing one of those hideous, large sombreros,” I can just hear Rush Limbaugh say.

“Do you want a Supreme Court justice who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time?” Perhaps Ann Coulter would ask, adding, “Too bad the fall didn’t kill her.”

Of course, the presumed justice-to-be’s fall and cracked ankle will be fodder for late night — Dave and Conan (Jeez, I still can’t believe Conan in the seat where Jack Paar and Johnny Carson sat) — may be funny when they ridicule her. But I would count on those sour little right-wing political propagandists saying something they think is funny but is only mean.

That’s part of what separates human beings from extreme wingnuts like Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Beck, Coulter, Malkin, Hannity and all the lesser-known wannabes.

During Memorial Day weekend I watched the last half of the HBO series “Band of Brothers” — the story of Easy Co. of the 101st Airborne Division during and after D-Day — which first aired in 2001. For whatever reason I didn’t watch the series when it first aired. I would like now to have seen the first half.

Although the invasion of Europe by the Allies on June 6, 1944, is rightly a much-heralded day of remembrance the Allied forces had much more heavy lifting to do before their ultimate victory over Germany some 11 months later.

Young people see World War II as ancient history, much as I viewed World War I as a child, but perhaps what makes both conflicts stand out so very much more than other wars before and after is the word “World.” The world at war is a pretty heavy concept. Although coalitions existed in most of the wars the U.S. fought since World War II — some such as in Korea and Vietnam more than others (Iraq) — we’ve not had a global war since WWII. I hope like everything we never see one again.