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I can't wait until December 21, 2012, when everyone's last-minute Christmas shopping at 11 AM (Central Time) and we're all still alive and in-tact, making this "2012" thing a bigger joke than Y2K.Oscar, I almost forgot about that sillyness., had a conversation not too long ago about the sheer amount of wasted money spent on that nonsense. Y2K had to be one of the biggest jokes ever played.
I can't believe we began THIS SAME DECADE with Y2K!!!
It seemed like 20 years ago that happened.
We began the decade with Y2K, and we close the decade with thoughts of December 21, 2012!
hah.
Personal reflections on the last decade.
For the good.
I have been working for a company that has the best benefits that I have ever recieved on the job. And, in spite of being the oldest millwright, with not that much seriority, I lost no time to the recession.
The wife and I have become closer, with more agreement on what we want to do with the next decades of our lives.
For the bad.
My best friend and first cousin, whom I have literally known since we were babies, died of cancer, a cancer related to asbestos.
My Father died at 89. Not unexpected, but do I miss him.
I watched my two grown children make mistakes that will take years to undo.
Humorous.
The Air Force sent me a personlized letter inviting me to re-up. So I filled it out, and sent it back. Never heard back from them, do you suppose the birth year of 1943 put them off? Wonder who is in charge of doing these things?
The company that I work for was sold to a Russian company. So now I work for a Russian company, often rolling armor plate for Isreal. For someone that was on base in uniform when we stopped those Soviet ships off of Cuba, this is wonderful irony.
So, as this decade comes to a close, I am looking forward to the next decade. Life continues to be interesting and wonderful.
Personal reflections on the last decade.
For the good.
I have been working for a company that has the best benefits that I have ever recieved on the job. And, in spite of being the oldest millwright, with not that much seriority, I lost no time to the recession.
The wife and I have become closer, with more agreement on what we want to do with the next decades of our lives.
For the bad.
My best friend and first cousin, whom I have literally known since we were babies, died of cancer, a cancer related to asbestos.
My Father died at 89. Not unexpected, but do I miss him.
I watched my two grown children make mistakes that will take years to undo.
Humorous.
The Air Force sent me a personlized letter inviting me to re-up. So I filled it out, and sent it back. Never heard back from them, do you suppose the birth year of 1943 put them off? Wonder who is in charge of doing these things?
The company that I work for was sold to a Russian company. So now I work for a Russian company, often rolling armor plate for Isreal. For someone that was on base in uniform when we stopped those Soviet ships off of Cuba, this is wonderful irony.
So, as this decade comes to a close, I am looking forward to the next decade. Life continues to be interesting and wonderful.
Personal reflections on the last decade.
For the good.
I have been working for a company that has the best benefits that I have ever recieved on the job. And, in spite of being the oldest millwright, with not that much seriority, I lost no time to the recession.
The wife and I have become closer, with more agreement on what we want to do with the next decades of our lives.
For the bad.
My best friend and first cousin, whom I have literally known since we were babies, died of cancer, a cancer related to asbestos.
My Father died at 89. Not unexpected, but do I miss him.
I watched my two grown children make mistakes that will take years to undo.
Humorous.
The Air Force sent me a personlized letter inviting me to re-up. So I filled it out, and sent it back. Never heard back from them, do you suppose the birth year of 1943 put them off? Wonder who is in charge of doing these things?
The company that I work for was sold to a Russian company. So now I work for a Russian company, often rolling armor plate for Isreal. For someone that was on base in uniform when we stopped those Soviet ships off of Cuba, this is wonderful irony.
So, as this decade comes to a close, I am looking forward to the next decade. Life continues to be interesting and wonderful.
Lief is always full of Irony, and speaking of humor, my daughter and I recently went to San Diego on Vacation and while downtown, we were walking out of a seafood place and she pointed to this Aircraft Carrier and said "hey dad thats the Midway, you were on that right? and she said let's go look it's a museum now!!", Then as we got onboard and the memories came back, and got on the flightdeck, she pointed to an A-6 and said " wow dad they even have your airplane here" Thats when I realized I most likely would not be getting any of those letters you were talking about. laughs*
God Damn The Naughts
We watched the sun drop on the last day of the 1990s and the Second Millennium; myself, a Boston Herald photog and assorted others, looking west from among the old Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives. A choir of Carmelite nuns emerged by the gates of Gethsemane to sing sweetly at the sunset, which was silhouetting Muslims walking atop the Temple Mount, toward the domed mosque of Al Aqsa, from which we could hear the mezzuin calling them in. It was like the past was being put to bed, even as everything continued on in this ancient place one more day at a time...
...This is a very bad situation, I shouted to Andre, a Russian photog pal who was being carried along about 10 feet away, his blond shock of hair sticking up like a beacon.
It is important not to panic! advised Andre. He had survived a bad crowd scene when AC/DC played Moscow, plus horrific beatings as a Red Army conscript, and knew what he was talking about.
Its always good advice in dire circumstances, as the Naughts would reminds us again and again, and I minded it that night. Shortly afterward, miraculously maybe, but through no effort of our own, the crowd spat us out like watermelon seeds into a centuries-old alley, all three of us within a few minutes next to each other. We tumbled down the hill, found our car and got the heck out of Bethlehem.
The Holy Land is in the business of producing omens, and the inability of Palestinian cops to coordinate with another species on peace symbolism wasnt the only portent it offered up at the end of the last millennium. A few days earlier, the Herald photog and I had raced down from the Golan where we had been doing a mood piece on the anticipated Israeli-Syrian peace talks. We made Tel Megiddo at sunset, and the watchman liked our press cards enough to let us in.
Up on the ancient mound of Armageddon, we could see Nazareth to the east, Mount Tabor, and the pass down to the Mediterranean. We were surrounded by, in fact atop the scene of many ancient and terrible battles. It wasnt for nothing John of Patmos in his cave settled on Armageddon as the place where the world would end. It had been doing that on a regular basis there for centuries.
The sky was afire, blood red and terrible overhead. It looked great, very apocalyptic. But Garo needed someone to shoot amid the ancient wreckage of 16 cities, and I needed someone to quote. I caught a flash of black in the corner of my eye, a caped figure bounding across the old fallen stones at some distance.
Look, its the Angel of Death, I said. Lets go get him. ...
...Here are some of the things we all shared.
The USS Cole bombing in Aden in October of 2000 was trouble pounding at our door. On Sept. 11, 2001, it burst in. My memory is of the planes emptying out of the sky, one by one, each of them having a menacing quality as they flew through the same airspace over Boston through which two of the hijacked plans had departed a couple of hours earlier that morning. On the TV monitors at work, we watched the Twin Towers fall. A Boston Herald photo editor commented that a colleagues father was in there. The 2,973 innocent victims were the first of the many dead we would come to know.
God damn the Naughts...
...God damn the Naughts.
It was odd, how people turned to the kind of naivete that got us into all of that in the first place. Maybe they expected a cheap kind of messianic deliverance. Thats not so odd. In dire times, people have always wanted the easy out. I remember as well the unexpected feeling of relief when they had their way. They wanted it, let them have it, as one friend said. That feeling wouldnt last long.
We were now facing an economic collapse, the sudden onset of which stunned both our political and financial leaders, yet another obvious threat out in plain sight that no one had quite noticed, and each side immediately blamed on the other. After years of war and deepening political divisions, hundreds of thousands of us faced the prospect of losing homes and jobs. Another fundamental fear we were supposed to have transcended decades ago had resurfaced, and it isnt clear yet that it is ready to subside. That was just one of a series of blows to my own business, the newspaper business, which would in this decade be laid low by this marvelous tool of the devil, the Internet. It revived popular literacy and caused an explosion of information, and threatened to destroy all of the fundamental infrastructure of both. It gave the people a voice, new avenues of power, and means of exacting accountability, and showed just how base, vile and petty people could be.
Damn the Naughts.
A great moment in our nations history, the election of the first black president, was mired in vile accusations of racism that were debunked by the facts of repeated elections, but still opposition to his political proposals were dismissed as bigotry. Ironically, one of the most straightforward tutors in modern race relations ultimately was not the president himself, but a white cop who was wrongly denounced, and bore it with grace...
They are topping it now, with 'global warming.'Oscar, I almost forgot about that sillyness., had a conversation not too long ago about the sheer amount of wasted money spent on that nonsense. Y2K had to be one of the biggest jokes ever played.
They are topping it now, with 'global warming.'Oscar, I almost forgot about that sillyness., had a conversation not too long ago about the sheer amount of wasted money spent on that nonsense. Y2K had to be one of the biggest jokes ever played.
) and am now ready to slowly, but surely, face life.
