Did you know?

pattonDid you know?

Did you know that humans (anatomically accurate and modern like you and me today) have been on earth dating back to the middle Paleolithic age? That’s about 200,000 years ago. Thats not Neanderthal man, or bi-pedal apes and evolution. Humans as you and I see each other with the same essential brain capacity for learning have been on this planet for about 200,000 years and thats simple fossil evidence backing that fact up. Good piece of time huh? Color TV, internet porn, canned Spam, the iPhone, thong panties, and self parallel parking cars. Not bad for 200,000 years. We sure have come a long way.

Did you know that from when the Wright brothers flew in the air under power for the very first time in human history, 65 years 7 months and 3 days later man stepped foot on the moon? Think about that for a minute.

We’ve been roaming this earth in our current form for a little more then 200,000 years. It took us less then seventy years from the very fist time we learned to fly, until we set foot on something other then earth 250K miles away in space.

In the grand scheme of things sixty-five or seventy years is but a blip a fraction of time in 200,000 years of human exisitence. One day we said “shit we can fly” and from that moment on a short sixty-five and a half years later we walked on the moon.

Imagine in human existence we made fire, the wheel, hunted animals, made communities, countries, governments, gun powder, war, electricity, cars, and in all that learning, living, and conquering in about a fraction of a bit of time taught ourselves to fly and then left the planet.

What have we done since the moon? Where has our human spirit of creation, learning, exploring and understanding taken us? I suggest and it is my opinion, FUCK ALL. We have done squat in 40 years.

Sure, some may argue we created cell phones, internet, satellite TV, shitty AOL and Amazon customer service phone centers in India and Pakistan. What is all that in the big picture? Its nothing. Its lazy, and greedy. I like lazy and greedy too, but really what have we done? In fundamentally five minutes of human history we learned to move through the air and then walk on another celestial body. Since that time, we have spent about half of what it took to learn to get to the moon and back, figuring out a way to get pizza delivered in thirty minutes or less and to send pictures of our cocks to hot women on the internet!

In 200,000 years of modern human history, I have to watch a family member in the prime of her life battle cancer!?

The smartest minds on this planet in sixty-five years found a way to lift a man off the ground and send him to the moon and back. Yet in 200,000 years those same smart minds have to look a mother and father in the eyes and say we don’t know what to do our how to cure your child of cancer. The same cancer those minds have known since about 300 BC. Thats about 2300 years for all you keeping score at home on your Gregorian calendar bingo punch cards.

There is something seriously the matter with this picture. You will notice I have left out religion and politics in any of this for reasons or blame. Blame rests solely on all of our shoulders. We have become lazy, and greedy. Lazy in that we have lost our desire to learn and conquer. Lazy to create. Lazy to elect representative government who fails to drive us to greatness with human interest at stake rather then their own.

Greedy because its more profitable in the therapeutic maintenance of terminal disease rather then its simple eradication. Greedy because hard on and erectile dysfunction pills are quicker to make, market and get FDA approval then say curing diabetes, congenital heart disease, and cancer.

We did this to ourselves. We all have to shoulder this blame. The only positive thing in all of this is, and its especially true for me and my fellow americans, is that we can at any time stand up and say, “WTF stop this madness.” We can demand accountability from our elected representatives or remove them from office. We can stop ignorance and the dumbing down of the general population by the mainstream media. We can take the money or raise the money and demand our brightest brains to cure disease. We can stop taking from one another and giving to others for someone else’s profit. We can empower industry to create what we want and need. We can learn, we can create we can cure. We are still free.

In California a 16 year old high school girl on a whim because she is pissed about her cell phone battery always draining, puts her head to work. She creates a super capacitor that can potentially charge a cellphone in 20 seconds.

How much money and computing power does our government spend in an hour, day, week, month, year dealing with taxes and the IRS?

How long would it take the scientists with all that IRS operating budget and computer power to say map all the human genetic code to cure disease?

Its not hard. All we have to do is demand it. Want it and we can make it so. When do we stand up? When do we say stop? Our governments and societies want this to look impossible. They are in business to stifle our will. Its not hard to change this. All we have to do is want it. We’re still free. We’re still the greatest and smartest generation. My only worry is for how long?

Let ‘er rip, tater chips.

Eyeballs! Snap Sir!

Today is Memorial Day. While most enjoy the long weekend, sales, family, BBQ I too enjoy those things, but I also think back to my time as a US Marine in service to the country. I often wonder about where some of my old military buddies are now in life and those that never came home.

You see when I was deployed in the early nineties during the first Gulf War and some other small tactical operations around the world protecting American assets in Liberia or Israel most of the men around me physically came home. Its just in some cases that their minds never did.

I had a buddy named Benjamin Antaran. Big Filipino and Samoan from San Francisco. Good guy good sense of humor. We both got out about the same time in 1993. We’d catch up on the phone every few months. His dad was a cop. Ben became a cop and worked in the courthouse. From time to time when talking to Ben on the phone he would ask me about things we saw “over there” and as Marines we’d talk about those things we saw or did which in general we never really could explain or open up to civilians. At the time I wouldn’t classify Ben as being troubled about what happened but the more I talked to him I knew he was going through his own battles reconciling things in his mind. At the time pretty normal I thought.

We all settle and come to terms with extreme things whether its scenes of combat, hurt buddies, highway car accident trauma in our own ways. My father was a Marine in Vietnam. I grew up periodically being woken up in the middle of the night by my father moaning or yelling in his sleep and my mother waking him from nightmares. The only time I ever knew what my father did in Vietnam was when I was a late teen when his buddy and best man at his wedding who he was in the Marines with him came to visit and they rehashed some old times. No one talked about combat stress, PTSD, etc. Shell-shock was just a grainy old picture of WWI soldiers with thousand mile stare eyes.

I lost touch with Ben. He stopped calling. A year turned to three. I finally decided to try and track him down. I knew he worked for the San Francisco Sheriffs department. I knew he was married. I started searching the internet. Shit.

He blew his brains out with his pistol in front of his wife and father in-law. Accusations of infidelity, shoved his wife to get away from her during an argument, she calls cops, boom. It’s not the worst.

RochefordMeet my priest. Father Dennis Rocheford. LCMDR USN

I first met Father Rocheford sometime around 1990 when I was with 3rd Battalion 8th Marine Regiment attached to the 26th MEU. He was the battalion chaplain. In order to become a chaplain in the USMC you have to be a naval officer. You see Father Rocheford back in the day was a Marine. He was with the 1st Marines during TET in 1968. Fought in Hue City, Hill 881 at Khe sanh, was a radio operator for the famous MajGen Ray “e-tool” Smith. Of one hundred men in Father Rocheford’s company in Vietnam he was one of six that survived. Father Rocheford during Vietnam promised God if he survived he would not waste his life. He made it home, joined the seminary and became a priest. Went back into the service around 1987 and for the most part preached the Catholic faith to Marines who need it the most.

Father Rocheford was a hell of a Marine. Even though he was actually a Navy LtCMDR as far as any Marine I ever knew that knew him he was a Marine. Whenever we needed to get dressed up and put on Alpha’s with ribbons and awards there wasn’t anyone the Battalion Commander included who had more awards or prouder then Father Rocheford. Numerous purple hearts, bronze stars, combat action, unit citations. I think he had a ziplock bag of the ones he couldn’t fit on the uniform in his pocket, so that at least he had them on his person as to not be considered out of uniform. Chesty Puller himself would have given Father Rocheford a pass.

I can barely tell you what I had for dinner Friday night. I can tell you however before going ashore around a rather hostile embassy in civil war torn Liberia, in a mass with Father Rockeford a quote in the homily was “Greater love hath no man than this, than a man that lays down his life for his friends”. That stays with me and will for the rest of my life.

Father Rocheford went with the Marines as a chaplain to Iraq in 2007 during some pretty fierce fighting around Ramadi. I can’t tell you how many Marines this guy may have brought comfort to during those times.

Unfortunately in 2009, it was too much for Father Rocheford. For the Marine priest who prayed for and gave comfort to thousands of Marines heading into combat for over 20 years, whom only he himself knew what real combat looked like, took his own life by jumping off a bridge in Rhode Island. Who would pray and give comfort for he who gave the rest of us peace?

I have stopped looking up old buddies I served with. I can’t take playing the what if and why games in my head for months at a time when I find out they couldn’t deal with life afterward.

I don’t recount these men, or tell you these stories to somehow illustrate that we should be doing something special for them on Memorial Day, or Veterans day. Pretty much everyone I went in to the service with would agree, we do and or did it so others we love could stay home in freedom and do the good things in life without seeing the “shit” of war. Partly that and boys of a certain age and immortal sense of romantic adventure choose it. I say enjoy your long weekends on these holidays with loved ones but know someone gave the ultimate price. Some mother or father paid the highest price with a son or daughter.

Those that make it home but suffer in private about what they saw or did, are just paying rent on the ultimate price. You’re not going to fix them and in most cases you’re not going to help them. More times then not they don’t ask for your pity or help, but you can respect them. A simple wave, handshake, a nod. Mostly enjoy your weekend with your family and loved ones. Eat, drink, be merry. Shop and get a good deal on a TV. Do it all. As long as you know in the back of your head what was given and someone went forward and didn’t come back, and now more then ever someone went forward, came back, but they may not really be back.

People may thank me or people like me for my service. I generally keep my mouth shut and attempt to be gracious. It aint me. I aint no fortunate son. Much bigger and much better men need to be thanked, but they’re not here now.

2CEB

2CEB 2 MARDIV Somewhere in Turkey about 1992 Antaran 2nd from right kneeling

I’m in this picture can you guess where? Ben Antaran is too. This was how we rolled as Combat Engineers back in the day.

So enjoy the rest of your long holiday weekend. I know I will.

Let ‘er rip tater chips.
Semper Fidelis.

Cops. Come and try to snatch my crops!

EVTime Who you tryin’ to get crazy with ese? Don’t you know I’m loco?

Well it looks like Mr. Peabody has turned the way-back machine dials to 1993 this morning.

War was over
I was home from the Marines
Pearl Jam gave us Vs
Nirvana gave us In Utero and then suicide the following April
Cypress Hill broke us off some with Black Sunday

I catch myself in conversation and sometimes others catch me when referring to someone as old being like forty-five or fifty years of age. Then I, or someone else will go, “Old? Um, you realize we’re forty-something?” Opps! Then I immediately revise my statements to “Oh I mean old like really old, not our kind of old” in a pitiful attempt to not be old myself. Only walking away thinking to myself “Jesus, they’re right I am getting old too…..SHIT.”

Getting old isn’t so bad. Its just a number. You’re only as old as you feel you are. (insert any number of failing to make oneself feel better cliche type sayings here) I feel good. My health is good. My mind is good yeah well my mind is still there.

However sometimes I sit and think to myself. Is this where I am supposed to be? Was this all part of the plans I envisioned for myself? The only problem is, I can’t say with certainty what “the plan” really was for me. You have all the normal life’s goals of course. Do good, be happy, make money, support yourself, but past all that what was “my” plan?

I am at the old or young age of forty-two still unsure what my plan for life really is. Can I invent something that will save the world, or destroy it? Sure I could, but what is it? Can I paint or create the next artistic master piece? Sure I could, but what is it? Can I inspire millions of people, or just one person? Sure I could, but who?

There are so many variables that plot out and or influence either directly or indirectly in our lives to figure out ones place in the world. What do you believe in? What do you have faith in? Do you chase the plan down, does it come to you like a vision while scratching your ass in line at the grocery store? Do you just carry on believing it will find you? I have no clue. I guess I am still in the camp of not knowing what I want to be when I grow up. I am still waiting to see.

I am waiting to see. I have my eyes open. That wasn’t always the case though and at times I still need to remind myself to slow down and look around. Society pushes us in directions which we mistakenly think is normal and “the way we should go”. I used to believe and subscribe to this idea. Go to school, get a job, make lots of money, get married, have lots of kids, go in debt, curse the kids, curse the wife, lose the job, die. I used to believe all this too. Now, not so much. I watched my peers, family, friends do these things and I even did some of these things.

No, now I plot and follow a much simpler course. Do good, be happy, be me and wait and see. Oh, and of course second guess myself at every turn on this wait and see path wondering what it is I am supposed to see. If there is one thing worse then living by simple and sound advice its hoping the shit was right and it all works out. I am ready, willing and able for life, and I know theres more for me, but what? I am in no rush honestly although my age tells a voice in my head “well what the fuck lets get this thing on”.

In the end I cant complain. I am already rich and I am happy. I’m rich simply based on the friends and family I have and the work I do. I am happy with me. I got here honestly and while the road here took many turns, hills and valleys in the end I know I wound up here on my own and with clarity. I know I missed some opportunities on this path, and at times regretted them, but I know now, what I thought I wanted or needed really wasn’t for me. My eyes were closed in those times. Now my eyes are open and I wait and see.

Let ‘er rip, tater chip!

Well, I’m glad that’s over.

Max Overdrive Has the whole world gone mad? What the hell is going on out there? It’s like the earth has been caught up in a nearby passing comet’s trail and all the machines humans have gone bat-shit crazy. Only difference is there is no cool AC/DC soundtrack and Emilio Esteves isn’t a short order cook at a truck stop gas station.

Cris Kyle, Navy Seal, and the greatest sniper to come out of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars was killed this weekend by another broken veteran on a gun range in Texas. I can’t help but notice how Obama’s liberal media machine is all over anything to do with gun violence. Its a shame really the media can’t report unbiased and news worthy facts. The facts are simple. Every single day, TWENTY-TWO war veterans commit suicide. Let that sink in and read it again. I’ll help you. Every single day, TWENTY-TWO war veterans commit suicide. The same exact veterans that are getting there medical and healthcare benefits reduced more and more by the very President sitting in the oval office right now.

I wish I had spoke to someone after I got back from the first Gulf War. Instead I just kept my mouth shut, didnt talk much about what I saw, and kept on and carried on. After all hearing my father moan and groan in bed with nightmares from Vietnam as a kid was normal. As I look and think back now, aside from pissing them off with snoring, I have probably scared the shit out of every woman I have ever slept in the same bed with since 1993 with occasional nightmares and waking up in cold sweats. Sorry ladies, where ever you may be now.

Last week this wackjob (another fucked up veteran) jumps on a school bus, blasts the driver and takes a kid hostage into an underground bunker for a week. Thankfully today that all ended with the child safe and the veteran dead.

What could go so bad in your head to make one do that? I can’t say I know or understand, but I will say what some see in battle is some horrendous shit. In my case bad, but not bad in as much as my buddies getting hurt next to me. But in the subsequent Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Beirut, Vietnam, that high intensity close in combat seeing your friends get hurt/killed or injured yourself doesn’t leave your mind. It hasn’t for me and comparatively speaking what I did and saw was a cakewalk.

It’s sad, but more infuriating that mental health aid isn’t more available to veterans. When it is the stigma attached to it is like you’re some kind of pussy is a real issue. The ironic thing is and you can mark my words now, in the near future all kinds of mental health assets and federal funds are going to be made available all over this country to make sure someone who wants to buy a hand gun is suitable to own one. There will be so much bureaucratic bullshit involved with mental health and gun ownership all while the veterans who need the help will not get it and continue on in pain and hell between their ears. Only thing is they probably wont get a gun to kill themselves with, so its back to the pills. booze, highway overpasses.

The Super Bowl was weird this year. The game was great in the second half. Beyonce was good. The commercials? Eh. Was I the only one thinking in my head when they pulled out the Newtown or whatever elementary school choir and thought to myself, WTF? Is it now pretty much accepted that every single national tragedy we go through we must rally up the survivors and somehow make a spectacle of them at championship sporting events? First its Captain Sully. Now the kids who didn’t get blown away. Whats next? Little Ethan who was saved from the bunker in Alabama today, gets to wave the green flag at the Indy 500?

I watched the brand new Netflix series House of Cards this weekend. Thirteen episodes of season one. Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright. About a congressman from South Carolina. It was the best thing I have watched since Sopranos, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, and Walking Dead. Do yourself a favor sign up for Netflix for thirty days free and watch this series. If you like politics, you will love this series. Its brand new, on Netflix only and its absolutely awesome. There is a second season coming out with another thirteen episodes probably towards the end of the year. I can not wait. David Fincher produces and directs some episodes. Its well done. Two thumbs up, five stars, highly recommend. Here is the best part. Netflix put out all the episodes of the entire season at one time. I binged the entire season Friday night and Saturday morning.

I’ll close this for now and hope that all the crazy in the world calms down a little.

Let ‘er rip, tater chip!