Morning writing thoughts about Mom and Dad… Guys, I can give y’all examples throughout this life where Mom and Dad continued (against all odds on my part) to believe in me, right out to the very end for both of them…their faith in me allowed me to take a two month long Bus Trip around the country at age 14, their faith in me earlier in my life prepared me for taking these leaps of faith, their faith in me meant I could fail spectacularly and Mom and Dad would still be there for me, before, during and after…
when we lived in Manhattan Dad and I were members of the New York Athletic Club (NYAC)…this meant that I could go play chess with a bunch of old men after school while I waited for swim practice to start with Coach Gay, who was to me an incredible Coach…he worked us hard but fairly and we trusted him as we performed lap after lap in the 25 yard pool…the thing I want to tell y’all is that every year at Madison Square Garden the NYAC would host the Indoor Track and Field Games and Dad and I would always go to these events…just another random memory from my childhood
it has been suggested to me that I make an audio recording on this Log Book and post it so y’all can hear me yak…there are some folks out there that suggest that y’all being able to hear me yak while still breathing might be a good thang…Johnny and I did that once up in the North Georgia Mountains in an area associated with the Town of Suches…John tells me that he has the tape, has run it once all the way through and preserved it somewhere…if that recording has value, I would strongly urge you to make physical copy of that recording so it can be read and played back by an analog device..
the foregoing was written back in March, 2024, sometime…it is now April 12, 2024…one additional note to the above, Mr. Mocat recorded that interview in October of 2022, just for the record…originally, I was going to use the March entry in to the Log Book above as springboards to Furthur (not a typo) write about them…not to be obtuse or What’s the Secret, Dad? I use that spelling to pay homage to the original Bus Name of the bus that Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters used to get to the World’s Fair in 1964 (previously mentioned in one of the earlier posts here) if you are reading this Log Book out of sequence…as I write this, Mr. Mocat and Britt are in Colombia for three weeks and Drew is clicking along in Denver, doing his thing…all is well here…next week, I will meet for lunch with one of my all-time greatest bosses, a guy named Mike Szomjassy…this guy and I had so much fun together while we were working all the while performing the hard work, as well…we made some tough decisions together and in one instance, I refused to budge on a principle and he and I butted heads, figuratively speaking, one day in the office…I prevailed and did not get fired that day which was a blessing
Anywhoo, back to the original intent here…which is what did Mom and Dad do by osmosis which allowed me to do some incredible truly free-range schtuff while growing up..I still have not told y’all the tales of me working the farms of my relatives back in Iowa for couple of Summers preceding the Summer of the Bus Trip in 1964…and the other thang Mom and Dad created for me was an atmosphere of trust where I operated, as a kid, and this atmosphere also, led me to in later life an appetite for change…now, I did not always embrace change when it approached, at first but usually, always I ended up enjoying the changes as they occurred, from day-day to month-to-month and year-to-year
as I used to say on the job site, any job site I was on:
“The only constant in the Universe is change.”
I have no idea who first said it but whoever did say it was enough to deeply affect all of my life, to date..I have been writing lately in other forums around the Intertubes on Gleason’s Law which is stated, thusly:
”No matter how paranoid you are, they are always doing more than you think they are.”
words to live by, Gents!…if I can find or remember where i posted that wil copy and paste it here…found it this AM, so here it is…so the question was posed in this forum: “When did you become “awake?” as in when did you realize that the “ reality” being presented to us was NOT what was really going on but a fabrication of lies put out by the gubmint and others…a prime example of this was back in the early 70s, when the Vietnam War was going on, we knew as as it turns out that in spite of what our President (Richard Nixon) categorically stated that we did NOT invade Cambodia but as we suspected and as it turned out, Nixon did in fact order the invasion of Cambodia to try an stop the North Vietnamese Army from getting their supplies through Cambodia and then onto Vietnam…so the gubmint lied to us much in the same way President Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident with North Vietnam to:
Gulf of Tonkin incident, complex naval event in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Vietnam, that occurred from August 2 to August 4, 1964, during the Vietnam War. It was described to the U.S. Congress on August 5, 1964, as two unprovoked attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy. The Gulf of Tonkin incident led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed President Lyndon B. Johnson to greatly escalate U.S. military involvement in the war.
but as it turns out, this was another manufactured lie by the Johnson Administration to fire up the American populace to support more war…so two big whoppers or lies by two different Administrations used to manipulate us to support more war…so here is the post I posted on another forum:
“If the question is when and how did you become “awake”, my answer is the early 1970s when I was in my early 20s. Ralph L. Gleason was a music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and a jazz music writer for many years on the East Coast. He subsequently went on to co-found Rolling Stone magazine with Jann Wenner. Anywhoo, he published a column in the SF Chronicle where he articulated Gleason’s Law which states that:
“No matter how paranoid you are, they are always doing more than you think they are.”
This articulation of his Law had the immediate effect of lifting a great weight off of my shoulders and it affected me so deeply that I wrote him a letter (in care of the SF Chronicle) expressing my gratitude to him for Gleason’s Law. He wrote me back thanking me for my letter.
So I have been “awake” since that pivotal moment.”
sounds like a good stopping point so I will.
with love for you both..
am proud of you both for how you have chosen to live your lives and the choices y’all have made in life…
Fajsha
April 23rd, 2024