How do you like these old ladies that wait twenty years until somebody runs for president, then complain he felt their thigh? Sounds suspiciously like they are really bragging. I see the logic, I mean, who’s going to listen if you complain about a nobody so it never happened until he got famous. Such women get no respect from my direction. I mean what guy didn’t make passes at easy women when he was young?St. Augustine is still in the picture. I believe I’ll chance the trip on the scooter. My barber wants to make the drive, but he’s got a motorcycle and won’t be happy doing 45 all the way. He wants to just go there and back, I want to stay a few days and see the town. This trip is a paradox in that technically, I should not be able to even consider it. But it is a measure of my skill at organization. True, I have no money, but that isn’t the same as being broke. I know exactly how to manage my affairs. Poor people don’t own silver, drive new scooters, and go on holidays up the coast.
This is the same situation as when I was the phone company. I made a third the money of my supervisors, but I drove a nicer car, dated nicer women, and took nicer trips overseas. It is a matter of good fiscal management. The last six years hasn’t been spectacular, but I’m back on my feet and golly, do I know an awful lot about how to retire the right way. To the onlooker, the house looks shaky until you kick the foundation.
You know that little Ibanez practice amp with the built in chorus? I’m going to donate it to Jag. It’s brand new but it’s been sitting behind my armchair for three months. The bad news is the ground hum from my bass turns out to be the one implement I can’t fix myself. My expensive Ampeg bass amp. I’ll try but face it, quality control has gone for a dump over my lifetime. The amp is solid state and sits in my living room. What’s to go wrong?
How’s my own guitar playing coming? I was able to play two full hours tonight without my wrist acting up. I’m learning a lighter touch and which of the few chord inversions I can play sound better on which tunes. It is still a struggle with that C and D I can’t make sound right yet, it sounds so weak compared to other chords. I had no choice but to learn a Bm which kills my fingers. I need a ton of practice but I’d place myself at about the level of an insecure coffee house first-timer. All of this represents progress.
The book on Bin Laden is tough reading. Chunks of it won’t make sense unless you know a lot of the prerequisites. I skim over anything too political or too religious, particularly since those passages complicate rather than simplify. Does the world really care if a terrorist is a Sunni or a Shiite? I did not know that Bin Laden was originally sent to Afghanistan to keep his fundamentalist ideas out of Saudi Arabia. It is not common knowledge that the Saudis keep their true population a state secret. They are afraid if their neighbors knew how few people really lived there, they’d get invaded.
This was demonstrated by Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. At that time Bin Laden was back in Saudi and wanted to use his trained Afghans to rescue Kuwait. But this would mean allowing a large guerilla force into Saudi soil under the command of an extremely popular leader, so the Saudi princes invited in the USA instead. This infuriated Bin Laden who had just defeated one superpower and who wasn’t afraid of another. The book is informative but not good reading.
Let me tell you what happened when I was 21. I appeared maybe 15 and looked like a hippie. There was a hotel up in the Rockies that hired a lot of my friends to work there as staff in the summer holidays, but I could not stand food service. I worked in a lumber mill for $5.85 per hour, big money. So I went to visit my friends at the hotel, which housed them in a large hostel connected by underground service corridors. I was making time with one of the gals when shift time came around.
Everybody disappeared down one of the tunnels. Being the naturally inquiring sort, I followed them and at the far end stepped into a large kitchen. They were as surprised as I was, and a big chef about three times my size with a big butcher knife started bellowing about how I got in there. I ran as fast as I could back down the tunnel and left town. A week later I heard the hotel had established security gates on the tunnels. Yeah, that was me. Oops, sorry.
