... Unless You’re My Wife or One of My Daughters and You’ve Had to Listen to These Stories for Years.

Continuing the meme.

1.) My college aptitude tests told me I was best suited to be either a printer or a mercenary.   I’ve pumped gas.  I’ve painted vending machines.  I’ve delivered furniture (it always seemed to be a damn hide-a-bed and had to go upstairs).  I’ve baled hay (for one day, and got sea-sick on dry land).  I’ve operated machines that stuff junk mail envelopes.  I’ve flipped burgers and worked with Colonel Sanders’ eleven secret herbs and spices.  I’ve been a bean walker, a detasseler, a deroguer, a lard puller, a belly wrapper, and a kidney popper.  I’ve been a brickyard worker, a ram press operator, a spot welder, a jackhammer operator (for one day, it was as bad as hay-baling), a circuit card assembler, a NASA-certified solder inspector, an expeditor, a coordinator, a production control supervisor, an assistant project administrator, a manufacturing specialist, and a business analyst.  Subsistence level drug dealing friends once tried to recruit me to be a collector for them (their “muscle”) but I was too shy and didn’t like confrontation.  I’ve been a garbage man and urinated in the back of garbage trucks.  I’ve worked in slipform construction and urinated in the walls of grain elevators while the cement was still curing.  Think about that the next time you have corn flakes.  Your corn flakes probably didn’t come from the elevators I built, you say?  Well, I wasn’t the only one doing it.  I’ve never been either a printer or a mercenary.  Now I’m a computer programmer.

2.) In 1966 my high school guidance counselor told me I’d never be a computer programmer because I didn’t have an aptitude for math.

3.) I once got in trouble for trying to derail a train.  It didn’t get on my permanent record because I was four years old at the time.  The police came to my house and gave my parents a Stern Lecture, however.  A year or so later, my parents reported me missing because I wasn’t home from school when they got home from work.  I’d gone to visit my grandmother, but she wasn’t home.  A friend and I were playing on a pile of mud at a construction site when the police found us and escorted us home.  This was my last run-in with the police until 1974 when I found myself staring down the barrel of a .38 caliber Police Special.  Once again I found myself being escorted by the police, this time back to a party I’d escaped from by crawling out the second story bathroom window and taking a stroll on the roof of the drugstore next door.  I don’t drink tequila to excess any more.

4.) I was a TAR (Teen Age Republican) and campaigned for Tricky Dick in 1968.  Why, you ask?  Because I couldn’t tolerate the thought of having a president named “Hubert.”  Fortunately I was too young to vote for Nixon, so at least I don’t have that on my conscience.  Four years later I was carrying banners that said “Don’t change Dicks in the middle of a screw, vote for Nixon in ’72!” and “Fuck for peace!”

5.) In the summer of ’73 I used to hang occasionally with Hells Angels, the Iowa branch, so they were relatively polite.  Things to remember when dealing with the potentially volatile; don’t ever show fear, exude confidence at all times, make sure your eye contact is firm but non-confrontational.

6.) If I need to know where “O” is relative to “R” in the alphabet, I still need to recite the whole thing from the beginning.  If I ever have to recite the alphabet backwards to stay out of the drunk tank, I’m doomed.

7.) Science Fiction turned me into an atheist when I was a kid.  Organized religion ensures that I remain an atheist now that I’m an adult.

8.0.) I’m still keeping secrets involving cemeteries and sloe gin.  8.1.) I believe I know the meaning of life.  It’s not 42.  I didn’t find it in either cemeteries or sloe gin.  I found it while reading Tolstoy, not in his words, but from the state if mind he put me in while I was reading him.  You may not learn details of any of this until after my death (if then, bwah ha ha ha ha).

- Poppa