This was a video I had posted before I started the blog, but had put in "Unlisted" mode because I thought I was going to write a more detailed version. I never got around to it.
Because I could only record about 30 seconds of audio on the phone I had at the time, I had to do an abbreviated version to post on YouTube. In essence, here is the fuller story:
It happened on more than one occasion that Mom and Dad would leave us alone in the car while they took care of some unspecified business in Downtown Artesia. They would tell us they would be back in just a few minutes and under no circumstances were we to leave the car. That few minutes turned into a full hour. During that time, Loyd and I would get in the front seat and start going through the glove compartment. Once, I started playing with the levers and buttons on the steering wheel and turned on the emergency flashers. But the button got stuck and I couldn't pull it out. I tried, but it wouldn't budge. I quickly got out the owner's manual and it said that to stop the lights from flashing, I had to step on the brake. I did that and the lights did stop flashing. However, they were stopped in the "on" position. No matter how I timed it, I couldn't get the lights to stop when they were "off." (I didn't know this at the time, but the brake lights were going to stay on no matter what when I stepped on the brake.)
Like I said, this was in Downtown Artesia, where there's a lot of foot traffic. Loyd and I were afraid people would see the flashing lights and wonder what was going on. I know that the son of a teacher walked by at one point and we didn't want him to see us. He actually didn't. I'm surprised that no one seemed to notice that something unusual was going on.
Finally, Mom and Dad came back to the car. My foot had been on that brake for about 15 minutes. We told Dad we couldn't turn off the emergency flashers. He reached in and was able to pull the button out and turn them off. Mom and Dad got really mad at us for not staying in the back seat.
In recent years, Mom has apologized for leaving us in the car like that and that they should have come out to check on us once it was apparent that the business they were conducting was not going to take five minutes. She says that today, parents wouldn't do something like that. But also today, kids have video games, cell phones and tablets to keep them entertained and out of trouble. We didn't even have any comic books to read. However, an hour is definitely too long to leave a couple of kids in a car all by themselves.
But this is what gets me: To this day, I have no idea what it was they were doing. (Mom and Dad don't remember, either.) Whatever it was, it was so important that it required both of them to be there, children were not allowed, and once they were inside, neither parent was permitted to leave.
Maybe they were looking into a timeshare.
Friday, June 24, 2016
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
One time I should have kept my mouth shut
I don't know what prompted this, but for some reason, when I was eight years old, I announced that I was never going to get married. That turned out to be one of the stupidest things I could have ever said.
At the time, I did not know that there were men who would become romantically involved with other men. The existence of the gay sub-culture was just beginning to become more well-known at the time and I guess my parents were aware of it. When I said I wasn't going to get married, it probably made them ultra-sensitive to the possibility that I was going to grow up gay and not provide them with any grandchildren.
I know all boys sort of go through a phase in which they don't want to have anything to do with girls, and vice versa. Parents need to expect this. I have a friend on Facebook who says he was aware that his son was possibly gay when he was eight years old. This friend of mine grew up in a culture in which he became familiar with gay people and was able to adapt with a progressive mindset. My parents did not know anyone who was gay and in the part of the country in which I lived, there was a major stigma attached to being gay that pretty much meant rejection by society at large.
At the time, I didn't consider that I would eventually become attracted to girls and want to marry one of them. I just didn't see the necessity of abiding by society's rules that require you to get married. I know that my uncle Ord was not married at this point and I decided to follow his example. (He was only 20 years old when I made the announcement, but in that era, if you weren't married by then, you were considered a confirmed bachelor. He would get married two years later.)
My father did not really try to "straighten" me out. I suppose he already considered that I had a host of other problems that he was not prepared to deal with and decided to just let things play out. My mother, on the other hand, took every opportunity to make sure I was interested in girls. AND she enlisted the help of Grandma Bend and Aunt Cind. They were constantly asking me if I had a girlfriend or making comments that I needed to get married. Yes, they even did this when I was eight years old. And it continued way into my adulthood, even beyond the point that it was obvious that I was not gay.
All that pressure made me want to get married even less. Even worse were the girls my mother wanted me to go out with when I was a teenager. Regardless of whether I would be interested, I knew there was no way I wanted to have anything to do with any girl hand-picked by my mother. I mean, what guy wants to give his mother credit for getting him laid?
Mom would always say, "There's nothing wrong with her" when telling me about these girls she thought I should be dating. I wish I knew enough to say, "Yes, Mom, but that also means there's nothing special about her, so let me figure out who I want to be with and if it's the wrong person, it will become very apparent sooner or later." There would be plenty of wrong persons showing up in my life through my years of dating.
Knowing that I was being expected to get married early into my adulthood put a strain on all my relationships. I was constantly afraid that I could wind up marrying any woman I started dating and this made for a lot of awkwardness. It would have been nice to just enjoy hanging out with someone without thinking that it was going to lead to a walk down the aisle and a run to the hospital.
So, yes, I believe if I had just kept my mouth shut this one time, I could have saved myself a lifetime of aggravation. But as a kid, I had no idea of the consequences or that they would be so hard to deal with.
At the time, I did not know that there were men who would become romantically involved with other men. The existence of the gay sub-culture was just beginning to become more well-known at the time and I guess my parents were aware of it. When I said I wasn't going to get married, it probably made them ultra-sensitive to the possibility that I was going to grow up gay and not provide them with any grandchildren.
I know all boys sort of go through a phase in which they don't want to have anything to do with girls, and vice versa. Parents need to expect this. I have a friend on Facebook who says he was aware that his son was possibly gay when he was eight years old. This friend of mine grew up in a culture in which he became familiar with gay people and was able to adapt with a progressive mindset. My parents did not know anyone who was gay and in the part of the country in which I lived, there was a major stigma attached to being gay that pretty much meant rejection by society at large.
At the time, I didn't consider that I would eventually become attracted to girls and want to marry one of them. I just didn't see the necessity of abiding by society's rules that require you to get married. I know that my uncle Ord was not married at this point and I decided to follow his example. (He was only 20 years old when I made the announcement, but in that era, if you weren't married by then, you were considered a confirmed bachelor. He would get married two years later.)
My father did not really try to "straighten" me out. I suppose he already considered that I had a host of other problems that he was not prepared to deal with and decided to just let things play out. My mother, on the other hand, took every opportunity to make sure I was interested in girls. AND she enlisted the help of Grandma Bend and Aunt Cind. They were constantly asking me if I had a girlfriend or making comments that I needed to get married. Yes, they even did this when I was eight years old. And it continued way into my adulthood, even beyond the point that it was obvious that I was not gay.
All that pressure made me want to get married even less. Even worse were the girls my mother wanted me to go out with when I was a teenager. Regardless of whether I would be interested, I knew there was no way I wanted to have anything to do with any girl hand-picked by my mother. I mean, what guy wants to give his mother credit for getting him laid?
Mom would always say, "There's nothing wrong with her" when telling me about these girls she thought I should be dating. I wish I knew enough to say, "Yes, Mom, but that also means there's nothing special about her, so let me figure out who I want to be with and if it's the wrong person, it will become very apparent sooner or later." There would be plenty of wrong persons showing up in my life through my years of dating.
Knowing that I was being expected to get married early into my adulthood put a strain on all my relationships. I was constantly afraid that I could wind up marrying any woman I started dating and this made for a lot of awkwardness. It would have been nice to just enjoy hanging out with someone without thinking that it was going to lead to a walk down the aisle and a run to the hospital.
So, yes, I believe if I had just kept my mouth shut this one time, I could have saved myself a lifetime of aggravation. But as a kid, I had no idea of the consequences or that they would be so hard to deal with.
Friday, June 17, 2016
How much air do we need?
This is an old video (as you can tell by the video quality), but I've never shared it on my blog before. The content holds true even for today.
As I mentioned in another video, we didn't have a lot of sugary items around the house when I was a kid, so I just ate whatever was sweet. Sometimes, that also included children's aspirin. Another time, I ate half a jar of Flintstone Vitamins because they had a sweet taste to them. My Mom freaked when she noticed that half the vitamins were gone. She thought I was going to die.
Nowadays, I notice that they have gummy versions of children's vitamins. I think that is just taking it too far. How many parents go through what my Mom did?
As I mentioned in another video, we didn't have a lot of sugary items around the house when I was a kid, so I just ate whatever was sweet. Sometimes, that also included children's aspirin. Another time, I ate half a jar of Flintstone Vitamins because they had a sweet taste to them. My Mom freaked when she noticed that half the vitamins were gone. She thought I was going to die.
Nowadays, I notice that they have gummy versions of children's vitamins. I think that is just taking it too far. How many parents go through what my Mom did?
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Election Day
Today, many are going to the polls to finalize the Republican and Democrat races for President. But I won't be one of them.
Doing my voting early makes me feel like I arrived and left a party before the real fun begins.
Doing my voting early makes me feel like I arrived and left a party before the real fun begins.
Thursday, June 2, 2016
The broken blog post
It seems like just as I've built up a full head of steam in writing my articles, something comes along to douse the flame that keeps it going. I was really hoping I could hit another two more months before taking my next break, but as usual, I have something in my personal life that needs attending to more than this project.
I'm hoping that new articles can return next month. In the meantime, I may post some embedded YouTube videos and provide links to my older, better articles on Facebook and Twitter that some of you may not have read yet.
This is really hard as I hit a record number of views for the month of May. I really was hoping to top that for June.
Just stand by and wait for better stuff ahead.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Follow up on Mr. N
Let's get this out of the way: The "N" does NOT stand for "Nice."
Mr. N was about 35 years old when I first met him while working for News Monitoring Services. I didn't realize he was the owner until after I had worked a few shifts there. He had started up the business with his wife, who had become his ex-wife within the previous few years.
Mr. N's attitude toward the workplace was similar to the man John Cleese says inspired the character of Basil Fawlty (paraphrasing): "I would be able to run this hotel if it weren't for the guests." Mr. N's take on it was that he would be making a lot of money if he didn't have to pay his employees. Every time he gave us our paychecks, he would say to everyone, "You're supposed to buy my lunch," but I don't really think he was joking that much. He would get really upset if we made some sort of mistake that resulted in the company not making a sale and this would result in one of his tirades of verbal abuse.
He complained that when he first started the business, it was easy to do as a two-person operation because there was only 4 1/2 hours of local news content in San Diego at the time. The two people would monitor all the news and then get on the phone and sell the video clips. As the local stations increased their news programming, it had become 10 hours' worth a day when I first started at News Monitoring Services and increased to more than 24 hours by the time I left. No one or two people could monitor that much news AND have time to sell the clips. It became very necessary to have employees to do all that work.
One thing Mr. N had fantasized about was having a physical relationship with one of his female employees. This would have been the ultimate: Him paying the woman to have sex with him and it would be completely legal. And he actually accomplished this, but it ended very badly.
It was Mr. N's ex-wife who had the most impact on his attitude toward everyone at work and those he did business with. She was from England. They married and had a little boy. Then they got divorced and started battling for custody over their son. In the middle of the court hearings, she took their son and went to England. She was there for several years. In the meantime, Mr. N hired an investigator to track them down. When she was found, Mr. N found out that she'd given birth to a girl, who was their child. He had them extradited to the United States, where she was forced to remain and allow him visitation.
At one point after she'd returned, she told the police he had molested his kids and he was arrested. While he was in holding, a couple of other inmates believed him and were able to protect him from being assaulted by the others. At his arraignment, the judge could tell that the charges were pretty much fabricated by his ex and he released him. However, they lost his clothes, so he had to wear the holding facility jumpsuit back home.
I only ever saw his ex-wife once when she came to the office. She was pleasant at first, but when Mr. N wanted to show her the TV studio he had built, she turned real nasty real quick and got mad at him for trying to waste her time when she was there to pick up the children.
Once, I was doing some work on the weekend. This was during a period of time in which I didn't have a car and had to rely on public transport. I needed to be at the office at a certain time to load the next set of videotapes for recording. There was going to be a two-hour gap between the time that I left and the time the tapes needed to roll. Since I didn't want to take the bus home, wait for an hour and then take the bus back, I figured on taking a nap on the lobby furniture. However, Mr. N had come by with his kids to take care of something. And before I left, he had decided that the three of them were going to take a nap on the lobby furniture. Since I didn't want to spend free time there while he was around, I just took the bus home and came back. I was pretty irritated about that.
But not as irritated as his ex-wife was. When I came in to work the next day, she had sent a fax stating she had found out he had the kids sleeping on the lobby furniture. (I assume the kids told her where they slept.) She was threatening to have him charged with child abuse over that. But I don't think anything came out of that.
So, it looked like all of the money he earned from the company was going to pay his attorney. This kind of explained why he would go berserk when something happened that caused him to not earn money from the clips. But it certainly didn't excuse him constantly berating his employees.
He later went through this series of AOL relationships. He would chat up women on AOL, convince them to move to San Diego with him, and then treat them like crud until they decided to leave. Sometimes, it was hard for them to do this because they had spent everything they had to come be with him. At one point, he tried to get me to train one of them to do a part of my job, which was preparing and labeling the tapes for recording. I told him I preferred doing it myself. From my prior conversations with this woman, it was clear she was too stupid to stick labels on videotape. I knew that she would screw this simple task up and he'd just wind up yelling at me for it.
But this woman appeared to have a moment of clarity. We used to record radio on videotape by using the lobby surveillance camera as a control track. At about 3pm one day, they came into the lobby. The video showed him talking very sternly to her and pointing his finger. He came into the office and she stayed in the lobby. I could tell she was crying and figuring out that she couldn't do this anymore. I was listening for a particular radio news story and saw this scene play out over and over as I monitored each individual station. I never saw that woman again after that.
He did the same thing to another woman, who appeared to have some actual intelligence. But when she decided to leave, he wouldn't let her have her refrigerator back. They wound up on a TV courtroom show. Most episodes of this particular show feature two cases per half-hour, but this took the WHOLE half hour. At one point, the judge ordered a friend of the woman to leave the courtroom, which was something that almost never happens. In the end, Mr. N was ordered to give back the refrigerator. Those of us at work had no idea he was going to be on this show, and we wouldn't have seen it, except that the station that carried the show did a news story about the guy who got kicked out. We watched the program at work, but pretty soon after that, every copy we had of that broadcast disappeared.
So, where is Mr. N now? He later got into real estate and tries to make films on the side. He lives in Murietta, CA. His son has become a skateboarder and lives in Los Angeles, but I don't know what happened to his daughter and ex-wife.
I guess he's able to make money now that he doesn't have to mess with lawyers anymore.
Mr. N was about 35 years old when I first met him while working for News Monitoring Services. I didn't realize he was the owner until after I had worked a few shifts there. He had started up the business with his wife, who had become his ex-wife within the previous few years.
Mr. N's attitude toward the workplace was similar to the man John Cleese says inspired the character of Basil Fawlty (paraphrasing): "I would be able to run this hotel if it weren't for the guests." Mr. N's take on it was that he would be making a lot of money if he didn't have to pay his employees. Every time he gave us our paychecks, he would say to everyone, "You're supposed to buy my lunch," but I don't really think he was joking that much. He would get really upset if we made some sort of mistake that resulted in the company not making a sale and this would result in one of his tirades of verbal abuse.
He complained that when he first started the business, it was easy to do as a two-person operation because there was only 4 1/2 hours of local news content in San Diego at the time. The two people would monitor all the news and then get on the phone and sell the video clips. As the local stations increased their news programming, it had become 10 hours' worth a day when I first started at News Monitoring Services and increased to more than 24 hours by the time I left. No one or two people could monitor that much news AND have time to sell the clips. It became very necessary to have employees to do all that work.
One thing Mr. N had fantasized about was having a physical relationship with one of his female employees. This would have been the ultimate: Him paying the woman to have sex with him and it would be completely legal. And he actually accomplished this, but it ended very badly.
It was Mr. N's ex-wife who had the most impact on his attitude toward everyone at work and those he did business with. She was from England. They married and had a little boy. Then they got divorced and started battling for custody over their son. In the middle of the court hearings, she took their son and went to England. She was there for several years. In the meantime, Mr. N hired an investigator to track them down. When she was found, Mr. N found out that she'd given birth to a girl, who was their child. He had them extradited to the United States, where she was forced to remain and allow him visitation.
At one point after she'd returned, she told the police he had molested his kids and he was arrested. While he was in holding, a couple of other inmates believed him and were able to protect him from being assaulted by the others. At his arraignment, the judge could tell that the charges were pretty much fabricated by his ex and he released him. However, they lost his clothes, so he had to wear the holding facility jumpsuit back home.
I only ever saw his ex-wife once when she came to the office. She was pleasant at first, but when Mr. N wanted to show her the TV studio he had built, she turned real nasty real quick and got mad at him for trying to waste her time when she was there to pick up the children.
Once, I was doing some work on the weekend. This was during a period of time in which I didn't have a car and had to rely on public transport. I needed to be at the office at a certain time to load the next set of videotapes for recording. There was going to be a two-hour gap between the time that I left and the time the tapes needed to roll. Since I didn't want to take the bus home, wait for an hour and then take the bus back, I figured on taking a nap on the lobby furniture. However, Mr. N had come by with his kids to take care of something. And before I left, he had decided that the three of them were going to take a nap on the lobby furniture. Since I didn't want to spend free time there while he was around, I just took the bus home and came back. I was pretty irritated about that.
But not as irritated as his ex-wife was. When I came in to work the next day, she had sent a fax stating she had found out he had the kids sleeping on the lobby furniture. (I assume the kids told her where they slept.) She was threatening to have him charged with child abuse over that. But I don't think anything came out of that.
So, it looked like all of the money he earned from the company was going to pay his attorney. This kind of explained why he would go berserk when something happened that caused him to not earn money from the clips. But it certainly didn't excuse him constantly berating his employees.
He later went through this series of AOL relationships. He would chat up women on AOL, convince them to move to San Diego with him, and then treat them like crud until they decided to leave. Sometimes, it was hard for them to do this because they had spent everything they had to come be with him. At one point, he tried to get me to train one of them to do a part of my job, which was preparing and labeling the tapes for recording. I told him I preferred doing it myself. From my prior conversations with this woman, it was clear she was too stupid to stick labels on videotape. I knew that she would screw this simple task up and he'd just wind up yelling at me for it.
But this woman appeared to have a moment of clarity. We used to record radio on videotape by using the lobby surveillance camera as a control track. At about 3pm one day, they came into the lobby. The video showed him talking very sternly to her and pointing his finger. He came into the office and she stayed in the lobby. I could tell she was crying and figuring out that she couldn't do this anymore. I was listening for a particular radio news story and saw this scene play out over and over as I monitored each individual station. I never saw that woman again after that.
He did the same thing to another woman, who appeared to have some actual intelligence. But when she decided to leave, he wouldn't let her have her refrigerator back. They wound up on a TV courtroom show. Most episodes of this particular show feature two cases per half-hour, but this took the WHOLE half hour. At one point, the judge ordered a friend of the woman to leave the courtroom, which was something that almost never happens. In the end, Mr. N was ordered to give back the refrigerator. Those of us at work had no idea he was going to be on this show, and we wouldn't have seen it, except that the station that carried the show did a news story about the guy who got kicked out. We watched the program at work, but pretty soon after that, every copy we had of that broadcast disappeared.
So, where is Mr. N now? He later got into real estate and tries to make films on the side. He lives in Murietta, CA. His son has become a skateboarder and lives in Los Angeles, but I don't know what happened to his daughter and ex-wife.
I guess he's able to make money now that he doesn't have to mess with lawyers anymore.