Admin note: As always, guest bloggers are welcome here at Existensis.com. Just email me with what you have and I’ll happily share it. Today’s guest blogger is Marsha O’Brien, a fitness consultant, healer, and also my mother. You can find her blog at http://marshaobrien.wordpress.com/

Hysterical paroxysm

Have you heard of this? I was rather (to say the least), shocked by this. In the Victorian era women were thought to have a malady called “hysteria.” The signs of it were fainting, dizziness, weakness, a real plethora of complaints.

Most physicians were of the male gender in Victorian times. The treatment for hysteria?

“Oh my, hide the children!”

The physician gave women manual stimulation with vibrators, massage, or water…until orgasm. It was thought that is why women had all these symptoms.

Can you imagine the doctor? I bet he kept this little remedy rather closed mouth; didn’t want to share the “wealth”, if you know what I mean. Of course it became known ultimately the whole thing was ridiculous.

I know a few crabby women who are a bit hysterical because they are not with a kind, patient, and caring man who knows “just what to do”, but I think it can be worked out between them.

You know most doctors are still “practicing physicians” I bet the doctors worked long hours in those times - without a complaint!

“I think I’m feeling faint!” :)

First of all. I feel great. I’m happy. Life is good.

The bump was this: My Dad showed up in the workspace I’ve been bivouacing in for the past month and told me it was time to pack up my stuff and leave. He said that my attitude was intolerable and that it was too much stress for he and his wife to tolerate anymore. He gave me my final check and told me to get out.

I asked him for a couple of days to figure out where I was going and what I would do but he was intractable. After sitting and trying to talk with him for a while, his wife convinced him to give me another chance, but I’m not the kind of man that stays in a situation like that.

So I threw out about half the stuff I’ve accummulated to work and have a semblance of a life and packed up the rest. I told them goodbye and I got on my bike and rode down the mountain.

I’ve always wanted to do this ride. It’s a near 3000 foot descent to the high desert on windy turny roads with traffic whizzing by and not much of a shoulder in a lot of places.

I’d managed to make my old Schwinn 10 speed that only had one speed into a bike that had two and while the wheels wobbled dangerously, I made it down. It was exhilarating.

‘And so it goes’ as that old sage Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was fond of saying. At the moment I am sitting in the public library in Lucerne Valley and planning my next moves.

Frankly, I’m glad to be off the jobsite and glad that we managed to get the bulk of the heavy work done while I was still there…right now they are doing mostly finish work and I would have hated to have to live in a ’showroom’ while they try to find renters for the apartments.

The desert is hot as hell. It’s about 105 degrees fahrenheit in the shade.

Good Luck Dad! Glad to have been of some service. It’s too bad that my attitude is so bad.

I’m just glad that it wasn’t my work that caused my old man to can and evict me on such short notice.

Incidentally, it’s the first time I’ve ever been fired as an adult and the only time I’ve ever been evicted. You gotta love new experiences.

Damn, since he wasn’t on the poll, we’ll keep it open for another two weeks….they are dropping like flies….

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — Veteran actor Karl Malden, who won an Academy Award for his role in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” has died at age 97, his manager said Wednesday.
Karl Malden died in his sleep at his Los Angeles home, his manager says.

Malden died in his sleep about 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, said his manager, Bud Ross.

Malden appeared alongside Marlon Brando in two of director Elia Kazan’s classic films of the 1950s — “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront.” He won the best supporting actor Oscar for “Streetcar,” which was released in 1951, in 1952 and was nominated for his role as a priest crusading against crooked union bosses in “On the Waterfront.”

Ross said he did not know the cause of death.

“It could be a combination of things,” Ross said. “He was 97 years old.”

Born Mladen George Sekulovich in Gary, Indiana, the bulb-nosed actor made his New York stage debut in 1938 and first appeared in films in the 1940 melodrama “They Knew What They Wanted.” After serving in the Army Air Corps in World War II, he made his mark in the New York production of “Streetcar,” by Tennessee Williams. Video Watch Malden talk about why he got into acting »

Malden also did extensive work in television, starring with Michael Douglas in the police drama “The Streets of San Francisco” from 1972-77. He was nominated four times for Emmys for the show, and won a supporting-actor Emmy for his part in the miniseries adaptation of the true-crime bestseller “Fatal Vision” in 1985.

His other well-known screen roles include his performances in “Patton,” in which he played World War II Gen. Omar Bradley alongside George C. Scott’s title character; the steamy “Baby Doll,” another Elia Kazan-Tennessee Williams collaboration; and “Gypsy.”

Malden was also famous for a series of television ads for the American Express card, in which he advised viewers, “Don’t leave home without it.”Video Watch Malden talk why he took such diverse roles »

A memorial service is expected to be held within the next three to four weeks, Ross said.

Malden was the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1989 to 1992. The Academy is best known for its annual awards, the Oscars.

Malden’s “Streetcar” Oscar had its own mini-drama. In 1985, he sent it to the manufacturer in Chicago for replating. But he discovered the award sent back to him was a fake in 2006, when the original appeared for sale on Ebay. The Academy sued the sellers, Randy and Matt Mariani, who eventually returned the award.

In 2004, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.

Malden was born on March 22, 1912, and grew up in Gary. He broke his nose twice playing football in high school, where his athleticism won him a scholarship to Arkansas State Teacher’s College in Conway.

After being forbidden by his basketball coach to appear in a school play, Malden left college and began playing semi-pro basketball. He later worked in the steel mills of Gary to save money for drama school.
advertisement

When his acting career began, Malden took his grandfather’s first name and rearranged the spelling of his own first name to make his professional last name. He said he changed his name, “to fit theater marquees.”

One of Malden’s last acting roles was in 2000, according to IMDB.com. He played a priest in an episode of “The West Wing.”

Last time we posted, we the Scary Arab Clowns allowed our brother Hamham to type and we didn’t like the way he capitalized things (or didn’t) so we won’t be letting him type again. We write these things as a Scary Arab Clown Collective with each of us providing phrasing, stories, and commentary. Today, Ya-el will be typing.

You may think we have funny names, but at least none of us are named Blanket. Michael Jackson actually named one of his children after a bed covering? Wait until we tell our friend Duvet about this…

The deceased pop star left all his assets to the Michael Jackson Family Trust and has named his mother Katherine, 79, as guardian of his children – Prince, 12, Paris, 11, and Blanket, 7.

We think we know why Vago loves the King of Morocco, they are obviously brothers!

Here is the King!

Here is Vago!

We found a story yesterday in the New York Times that we thought was interesting. It seems that the conservative Bush Administration is still moving the United States to the right even under the Obama Presidency through Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

The court took mainly incremental steps in major cases concerning voting rights, employment discrimination, criminal procedure and campaign finance. But the chief justice’s fingerprints were on all of them, and he left clues that the court is only one decision away from fundamental change in many areas of the law.

The two newest justices, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both appointed by President George W. Bush, agreed 92 percent of time, the highest rate for any pair of justices. But Justice Alito often wrote concurring opinions to underscore or try to extend conservative rulings, especially in criminal cases. He may well now be the court’s most conservative member.

“Alito is staking out some room to the right of the chief justice,” said Pamela Harris, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, “and you would have thought there is no such room.”

We think the United States is still a more scary place to be than just about any other country in the world…
Today seven American teens were killed in Detroit, while four American soldiers died in Iraq. The moral? It’s safer to send your teens to Iraq than to Detroit.

Gunmen in a van opened fire on a group of teens waiting at a bus stop near Detroit’s Cody Ninth Grade Academy school on Tuesday, wounding at least seven, including two who were in critical condition. Two gunmen, possibly three, emerged from a green minivan and “asked for a person by name” before they “opened fire at the crowd,” Detroit Police spokesman Rod Liggons told WXYZ-TV.

Four soldiers were killed in Baghdad on the eve of the American withdrawal from Iraq’s cities as a “result of combat related injuries,” the military said.

And while the mainstream media has stopped talking about anything but Michael Jackson, we would like to remind you that Pakistan is still a nuclear country at risk of losing control:

A militant commander in northwest Pakistan tore up a peace deal with the Pakistani government Tuesday, dealing a major blow to the government’s campaign against Islamist insurgents in the extremist-controlled Waziristan region.

And we might add that North Korea is still psychotic an armed with nukes. Though we applaud the efforts of the U.S. at stopping them from trafficking weapons…

A North Korean ship tracked by the U.S. Navy on suspicion of carrying a banned arms cargo may be returning home, a U.S. official said, as Washington cracks down on companies helping Pyongyang export missile systems.

North Korea will find it increasingly difficult to trade arms due to U.S. moves and U.N. sanctions to punish it for a May nuclear test, but those measure will not end the weapons exports the destitute state relies on for foreign currency, experts said.

“Of course, it raises the costs of doing the arms and weapons of mass destruction business, but it won’t stop them from trying to circumvent the sanctions,” said Daniel Pinkston with the International Crisis Group in Seoul.

Now if someone would just stop the two biggest arms dealers in the world from selling weapons…those of course are the U.S. and Israel….

We think it is time to point out too, that space is more than just a fun place to do somersaults in the air…it is filled with dangerous things….like Uranium. The Japanese have found Uranium on the Moon.

Uranium exists on the moon, according to new data from a Japanese spacecraft.

The findings are the first conclusive evidence for the presence of the radioactive element in lunar dirt, the researchers said. They announced the discovery recently at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Conference and at the Proceedings of the International Workshop Advances in Cosmic Ray Science.

The revelation suggests that nuclear power plants could be built on the moon, or even that Earth’s satellite could serve as a mining source for uranium needed back home.

The Japanese Kaguya spacecraft, which was launched in 2007, detected uranium with a gamma-ray spectrometer. Scientists are using the instrument to create maps of the moon’s surface composition, showing the presence of thorium, potassium, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron.

“We’ve already gotten uranium results, which have never been reported before,” said Robert Reedy, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, and a member of the Kaguya science team. “We’re getting more new elements and refining and confirming results found on the old maps.”

The findings could help decide where to build future lunar colonies, since manned outposts will need energy, and could potentially derive it from nuclear power plants.

Furthermore, since uranium supplies on Earth are scarce, mining uranium on the moon to satisfy our energy needs at home could prove lucrative.

Kaguya, officially named SELENE (”Selenological and Engineering Explorer”), crashed into the lunar surface at the end of its mission on June 10.

We always used to laugh at the idea of curry being England’s national dish, but it turns out, that curry really is English…

Curry powder is a spice mix created by the British in an effort to replicate the flavor of the freshly ground spice blends they encountered in India. “Curry” comes from the Tamil word “kari,” which means spiced sauce, according to “The Oxford Companion to Food.” Commercially prepared mixtures were available to the British cook late in the 18th century. With time, the book notes, “what had been an Indian sauce to go with rice has become an English stew with little rice in it.”

Curry powder was one of the “exotic treasures” brought back by American sailors to their wives or mothers, wrote Avanelle Day and Lillie Stuckey in “The Spice Cookbook.” They note a “currey of chicken” was included in a 1792 cookbook published in Philadelphia.

Curry powder contains up to 20 spices, herbs and seeds, according to “The New Food Lover’s Companion.” Most commonly used are cardamom, chilies, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, fennel seed, fenugreek, mace, nutmeg, red and black pepper, poppy and sesame seeds, saffron, tamarind and turmeric.

We’ve always believed that curry makes your sex-drive higher. It turns out daily sex also makes our sperm stronger…

Having sex every day improves the quality of men’s sperm and is recommended for couples trying to conceive, according to new research.

Until now doctors have debated whether or not men should refrain from sex for a few days before attempting to conceive with their partner to improve the chance of pregnancy.

But a new study by Dr David Greening of Sydney IVF, an Australian center for infertility and in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, suggests abstinence is not the right approach.

He studied 118 men with above-average sperm DNA damage and found the quality of their sperm increased significantly after they were told to ejaculate daily for seven days.

We particularly like that this can be sex by one’s self as well. That will be good news for HamHam.

We are certain things are getting worse in the United States now…

Because the high-end booze has been taking a sales hit as consumers have increasingly turned to bargain-priced liquor. Distillers of the good stuff are chopping their prices to hang on to recession-weary customers.

What do American’s do when things get bad? They start drinking….

California, is about to fall apart…by the way, we erred when we said it was the 14th largest economy in the world…it’s actually the 8th largest.

And then we have the state with the largest people…

Mississippi’s still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers.

It’s time for the nation’s annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there’s little good news. Obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year and didn’t decline anywhere, says a new report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

And while the nation has long been bracing for a surge in Medicare as the boomers start turning 65, the new report makes clear that fat, not just age, will fuel much of those bills. In every state, the rate of obesity is higher among 55- to 64-year-olds — the oldest boomers — than among today’s 65-and-beyond.

That translates into a coming jump of obese Medicare patients that ranges from 5.2 percent in New York to a high of 16.3 percent in Alabama, the report concluded. In Alabama, nearly 39 percent of the oldest boomers are obese.

Health economists once made the harsh financial calculation that the obese would save money by dying sooner, notes Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group. But more recent research instead suggests they live nearly as long but are much sicker for longer, requiring such costly interventions as knee replacements and diabetes care and dialysis. Studies show Medicare spends anywhere from $1,400 to $6,000 more annually on health care for an obese senior than for the non-obese.

“There isn’t a magic bullet. We don’t have a pill for it,” said Levi, whose group is pushing for health reform legislation to include community-level programs that help people make healthier choices — like building sidewalks so people can walk their neighborhoods instead of drive, and providing healthier school lunches.

“It’s not going to be solved in the doctor’s office but in the community, where we change norms,” Levi said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long said that nearly a third of Americans are obese. The Trust report uses somewhat more conservative CDC surveys for a closer state-by-state look. Among the findings:

_Mississippi had the highest rate of adult obesity, 32.5 percent, for the fifth year in a row.

_Three additional states now have adult obesity rates above 30 percent, including Alabama, 31.2 percent; West Virginia, 31.1 percent; and Tennessee, 30.2 percent.

_Colorado had the lowest rate of obese adults, at 18.9 percent, followed by Massachusetts, 21.2 percent; and Connecticut, 21.3 percent.

_Mississippi also had the highest rate of overweight and obese children, at 44.4 percent. It’s followed by Arkansas, 37.5 percent; and Georgia, 37.3 percent.

_Following Alabama, Michigan ranks No. 2 with the most obese 55- to 64-year-olds, 36 percent. Colorado has the lowest rate, 21.8 percent.

This is a great article, I’m reprinting in full from the Washington Post. The King of Morocco is a great man, no doubt about it. I think Morocco is very fortunate to have him as the changes he is making are sweeping and progressive. I see a bright future for Morocco, and it’s nice to see that I’m not the only one who appreciates it.

In Morocco, an Alternative to Iran

By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

RABAT — If you want an antidote to the photographs of police officers beating demonstrators and girls dying on the streets of the Iranian capital, take a drive through the streets of the Moroccan capital. You might see demonstrators, but not under attack: On the day I visited, a group of people politely waving signs stood outside the parliament. You might see girls, but they will not be sniper targets, and they will not all look like their Iranian counterparts: Though there is clearly a fashion for long, flowing headscarves and blue jeans, many women would not look out of place in New York or Paris.

Welcome to the kingdom of Morocco, a place which, in the light of the past two week’s events in Iran, merits a few minutes of reflection. Unlike Turkey, Morocco is not a secular state: The king claims direct descent from the prophet Mohammed. Nor does Morocco aspire to be European: Though French is still the language of business and higher education, the country is linguistically and culturally part of the Arabic-speaking world. But unlike most of its Arab neighbors, the country has over the past decade undergone a slow but profound transformation from traditional monarchy to constitutional monarchy, acquiring along the way real political parties, a relatively free press, new political leaders — the mayor of Marrakesh is a 33-year-old woman — and a set of family laws that strive to be compatible both with sharia and international conventions on human rights.

The result is not what anyone would call a liberal democratic paradise. One human rights activist painted for me a byzantine portrait of electoral corruption, involving “mediators” who “organize” votes on behalf of candidates. Others point out that if the demonstrators I saw at the parliament had been Islamic radicals or Western Saharan guerrilla leaders, rather than trade unionists, the police might not have been quite so blasé. Though women have legal rights, cultural restraints remain. A tiny fraction of the population reads newspapers, even fewer have Internet access, and somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the country is illiterate; as a result, election turnout is very low. Political posters feature symbols, not words.

Yet in at least one sense, Morocco truly stands out: Alone in the region, the Moroccan government has admitted to carrying out political crimes, and it has set up a “Truth Commission” along South African and South American lines. Beginning in 2004, the commission investigated crimes, held televised hearings and paid compensation to some 23,000 victims and their families. The crimes in question — arbitrary arrests, “disappearances,” torture, executions — occurred during the reign of King Hassan II, who died in 1999. The Truth Commission is the creation of his son, King Mohammed VI. But although this acknowledgement of wrongdoing was made possible by a generational change, it did not require a regime change. There was no revolution, no violence. The king is still the king, and he still has his collection of antique cars.

The result of the Truth Commission’s work is a kind of social peace. Not everybody likes the monarchy, but even its opponents concede that the break with the past is real: If nothing else, people feel it’s safe to speak openly, safe to form civil rights groups, safe to criticize the electoral process, even safe to complain about the king. Saadia Belmir — a Moroccan judge and the first female Muslim member of the U.N. Committee on Torture — told me that despite obstacles, “we can now build the future on the basis of our good understanding of the past.” Controversially, perpetrators were allowed to fade into the background. But the crosscurrents of anger and revenge that might otherwise have marked the young king’s reign have subsided.

Is this a model for others? The Moroccans think so, and they have quietly “shared their experiences” with African and Middle Eastern neighbors. Belmir told me that an informal group had been working on setting up a Truth Commission in Togo; others hint at Jordan, though of course that’s unofficial. They all hasten to point out that their formula — slow transformation under the aegis of a (so far) popular king — doesn’t apply everywhere. One thinks wistfully of the shah of Iran and of what might have been.

Still, watching the extraordinary range of clothing and skin colors on the Moroccan streets, one takes away at least one thought: Transformation from authoritarianism to democracy is possible, even in an avowedly Islamic state, even with an ethnically mixed population, even with the presence of a jihadist fringe. More importantly: It is possible to acknowledge and discuss human rights violations in this culture, just as they can be discussed elsewhere. Just because much of the Arab world lacks the political will to change doesn’t mean that change is always and forever impossible.

applebaumletters@washpost.com

I love this contest. Someday, maybe I will win it, as it stands, I’m happy to not be the winner yet.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – A shambling sentence about screaming seafarers on the sturdy whaler Ellie May stood shoulders above the rest in an annual bad writing contest. David McKenzie, 55, of Federal Way, Wash., won the grand prize in San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

The contest, a parody of prose, invites entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. It is named after Victorian writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford,” with the much-quoted, “It was a dark and stormy night …”

Contest categories include purple prose and vile puns. Among other winners announced Monday were:

• “How best to pluck the exquisite Toothpick of Ramses from between a pair of acrimonious vipers before the demonic Guards of Nicobar returned should have held Indy’s full attention, but in the back of his mind he still wondered why all the others who had agreed to take part in his wife’s holiday scavenger hunt had been assigned to find stuff like a Phillips screwdriver or blue masking tape,” from Joe Wyatt of Amarillo, Texas, winner in the adventure category.

• “She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida the pink ones, not the white ones except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t,” from Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wis., winner in the detective category.

___

On the Net: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

We the Scary Arab Clowns have noted with great sadness the passing of many great entertainers in the past few days but there is one we think deserves more notice, we consider him one of our own.

Fred Travolina

Impressionist Fred Travalena, a headliner in Vegas showrooms and a regular on late-night talk shows with his takes on presidents, crooners and screen stars, has died in Los Angeles. He was 66.

We would have preferred it to be Pat Buchanon, though in the article we’ve linked to, we think he made a couple of good points. Bye bye lily white USA. Maybe it’s time to head up to the local porn shop and lock yourself in a room with a vibrator…according to a recent survey, half of American’s use them!

About half of American adults indicate using a vibrator, according to a new survey that sheds light on acts that take place beneath the covers and behind closed doors.

The survey was funded, however, by Church and Dwight Co. Inc., maker of Trojan brand sexual health products. It finds it’s not just women taking advantage of the battery-operated tickle toy. Forty-five percent of men said they’d employed a vibrator, with most heterosexual men doing so during foreplay or intercourse with a female partner. About 17 percent of men said they used a vibrator for solo masturbation.

One might think that Iraqis too are using them by the looks of ecstasy on Iraqis faces today:

U.S. troops pulled out of Baghdad on Monday, triggering jubilation among Iraqis hopeful that foreign military occupation is ending six years after the invasion to depose Saddam Hussein.

We hope it’s not a premature evacuation.

Israelis on the other hand prefer to cum inside and stay there, no withdrawl from them and no joy on their faces either:

Israel’s Defense Ministry said on Monday it had approved construction of 50 new homes at a West Bank settlement as part of a plan for 1,450 housing units, an expansion that defies a U.S. call for a settlement freeze.

Former vice president Dick Cheney looks like an Israeli but we think he secretly uses a George Bush Buttplug.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday said he is concerned about U.S. forces withdrawing from Iraqi cities within 24 hours.

But hey, it’s not the end of the world….or maybe it is…grasshopper plagues are hitting Utah:

Grasshoppers are regular summer visitors and a perennial crop-eating pest for farmers, but this year’s invasion in Tooele County west of Salt Lake City is worse than anyone can remember. Tooele County commissioners have been swamped with calls about grasshoppers, particularly by people living next to undeveloped land where grasshoppers hatch — sometimes up to 2,000 per square foot.

At least one man is maintaining his optimism though:

Friends and even family members of Kimberly Jacobs still ask her husband, Stan, if she’s returned yet, after disappearing 10 months ago from their Waikiki apartment.

We are with you Stan. She will be back.

And the economy will get better too:

A senior White House adviser said Sunday the economic stimulus package has not yet “broken the back of the recession” but set aside calls for a second massive spending bill. Republicans, meanwhile, called spending underway a failure. “We have confidence that the things we’re doing are going to help, but we’ve said repeatedly, it’s going to take time, and it will take time,” David Axelrod said. “It took years to get into the mess we’re in. It’s not going to take months to get out of it.”

We don’t know about it getting better in months though…maybe decades.

We’d love to tell you more about the state of the world but we have to go to a MJ memorial with Bubbles.

No one has posted any ideas about the domains…it’s really easy. All you have to do is post an idea about what you would like to do with it and I will give you this great domain….

(then you have to renew it for $7-9 after you set up a free godaddy account and you can set up a free wordpress blog on it, get email, etc.)

This is a great domain…no one wants it? Really????

(admin note: Guest bloggers are always welcome here at existensis and it doesn’t even have to be about me!)

The Meaning of Old Friends

I always wondered what it would be like to have an old friend. When I grew up I moved from place to place and went to a different school almost every year until 9th grade. Finally, I started to fit in and find my place during my 9th and 10th grades at Big Bear High.

When my best buddy moved from Fawnskin during the middle of 10th grade I knew I had lost a good friend. Things began to break down in my life and living in Big Bear sucked more than ever. I had no friends in that damn little town and felt like a prisoner. My mom and I both knew it was time for me to go and live with my father again. Like so many times before I was leaving that which I knew to go into the unknown.

I knew it would be hard to find a new best friend. Moving so much proved to take its toll on my social life. Going from Big Bear to Huntington Beach was too much. I fit in like a sore thumb. The surfer guy I thought I was when I moved to Big Bear was a now a surfer wannabe. A few years passed and I managed to find my way, but I knew that my chance to have life long friends was lost. I did not have the luxury of going to school with the same kids year in and year out and making friendships that would last a life time. I didn’tt even go to my high school graduation. When it came time for college I went but felt even more lost. I went, I learned, and I left.

I managed to hook back up with my old pal from Fawnskin one time, but we had gone different ways and lost touch just as quickly. The saving grace was that I managed to find the love of my life and twenty years later I still cherish her. I had found my dad to be a good friend but then in his sudden death I found myself lost again. I found myself searching. Through that search I got in touch with my lost uncle, a few old friends from Huntington Beach High and then, with the internet, I even found my long lost amigo from Fawnskin.

I finally talked to that old friend who you’ve probably figured out by now is Vago. The crazy thing was he was on his way to see the world. So just when I thought we might get in touch again, he was on his way out of the country. I found this blog and followed his amazing adventures. He was so far away and so busy I knew he had no time to keep in touch with an old friend he had last seen 17 years ago.

Life is always like that, just when you think that it is not possible, something happens. This ties so well with Vago and the concept of what a fool would do. That old friend takes a chance travels to the east and heads to the west. He suddenly finds himself needed by his father in So Cal and by the means of his thumb and a few dollars ends up in the very place where we first met some 23 years previous.

We got in touch and planned a meeting. I didn’t know what to expect. I left my family and headed to Big Bear all by myself. I felt so lost with out my family. I always go to Big Bear with them as I have for the last 15 years. Not this time though! I was going to see an old friend!

When I lost my father I found myself searching. I didn’t know what I was searching for or what I would find. I wasn’t sure if all that I had become was what I had hoped that I would become. Was being a married man with a wife and a child was what I had been looking for? I had so many questions about myself and about my life and about everything. Should I have searched and explored the world like Vago and learned more about what life has to offer? Was I living in a box that was leaving me uncertain with what life was all about? Had all that Vago had seen, felt and become left him with the meaning of life? With all that time that had passed would we even be able to reconnect? Would we even have much to say or would we be so far apart that what had made us friends was not there anymore?

What I found was that we were to people who went to different directions and found the same answer. No matter how hard you try to understand it all you cannot know. There is something in life that leaves us all searching. We don’t know what we are looking for and no matter how hard we look or do not look we still come to the same conclusion. We just don’t know. We can pursue the American dream, we can study all that man has known, we can travel the world. But when two old friends meet after many years apart what brought them together is still a common bond between them. That is what I learned.

We both went searching for the meaning of life and we did not find all the answers. We found some answers but not all. We could still give each other some insight but only a small glimpse. No matter how much we grow up or how wise we become we will always wonder about if we had taken different paths We will always think if only I had done x or what if I had done y? No matter if we did either we still would think about the other.

The beauty of having an old friend is that we can get some insight into just what it would be like if we had done things differently. We still never know what we are looking for. What I do know is that I have been given some insight and now I know that I am right where God intended me to be. Maybe we will never know the true meaning of life but old friends can give us some clarity when we are looking for it. Reconnecting with my old friend has given me some peace in an unforgiving world. That is why what I did not know then is what I still do not know now…and you know what? That is ok.

That is why I say now, thanks old friend.

The old Belleville Cabin in Holcomb Valley. Hard to believe this is all that is left of what was once the largest southern california gold rush town. Belleville was nearly 25,000 people and had more than it’s fair share of prostitutes, miners, and desperados. The town was named for Belle, the first baby born in the community.

Well, the work hasn’t stopped here at the apartments. We are building bathrooms, tiling, trimming, and more. I finally figured out that a part of the reason I was so exhausted at first was because of suddenly being above 7000 feet and working my tail off.

None the less, I did have the chance to meet with a couple more old friends this weekend and rediscover the friendships that we had in the past.

My friend Beki was up on the hill (as we say) to visit with another old friend Leigh Anne Drake. We all met up for coffee on Friday and caught up on their kids and all of our new loves and then on Saturday, Beki and I ventured out into beautiful Holcomb Valley.

I had bought a camera to send to Hanane and thought I would try it out to see what kind of pictures it took. Unfortunately, the pictures were total crap and then to top it off, I put the camera in my pocket and it erased all the pictures I had taken! Needless to say, I will be returning this piece of crap to Walgreens and getting another.

Rumor always had it that this old Juniper tree was the hangman’s tree where all those desperados I mentioned before were sent to meet their maker. The story when I was a kid was that they would hang a man and then cut the limb off, hence all the cut limbs. The Discovery Center now claims this tree was not the hangman’s tree, but I don’t believe it. I think they just want to protect the tree from souvenir hunters….

Very much a bummer since we had stopped by the Big Bear Discovery Center to throw tomahawks with old mountain men and saw some really incredible scenery through the day. Luckily, I had brought my usual camera and thought to snap a couple of photos with it too. Sadly, I didn’t get any shots of the scores of Mormons who were on their annual trek dragging carts through the mountains while dressed up as old time pioneers, nor the tomahawks, nor much of anything else. What you see here, is all I got.

And another gorgeous view of the Lake from the Gold Rush Trail. The drive on this road was treacherous and made more so by dozens of dirt bikes that would come roaring at us from the opposite direction. I thought Beki was going to kill me for taking her on this stressful road, but it turns out she let me live after all.

It was certainly nice though to see old friends after more than 20 years and have the chance to catch up and remember old times too. Now, I have to get back to work!