Disclaimer

This blog is an expression of thoughts and words that crossed my mind at the moment I wrote them down.

This is highly sarcastic and cynical, and sometimes poignantly serious so it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes whether I’m being serious or pulling your leg.

Thanks for reading!

The Legend of VB Hocksworth

In the beginning, at the moment of conception, cells begin to divide.  This is life.  Creati, a new human soul so tiny and small, microscopic.  In the beginning there is life.  Cell division increases and the genetic fabric makes its mark on a new human being, creating a new life, in embryo.  A living being, just getting started in its mortal experience.

This is the very beginning of human life. Life does not begin solely when there is a heart beat.  That comes in a later stage of development.  Life has already begun, the growth and changing that a zygote goes through is much like the growth and changes that a toddler goes through.  There are many stages of growth and generation throughout the lifetime of every human being.  The creation of a mere zygote is the creation of human life

To kill a zygote is to end a human life, because once it begins, whoever the two people were creating it, they are now responsible for it.  I don’t know what to say in the case of rape.  All I can think of is that the child is innocent and does not deserve to be killed, even though the circumstances were brutal.  Because there’s a spirit that comes to that body from heaven and to abort its chance to have a mortal experience is something I could not judge.

We can not legislate nature.  Rules and laws made by mankind for convenience do not change eternal truths.  Life is life.  It begins at conception.  At any point in the journey that life is taken away, that is death, at whatever stage of development.  And the cause of death, by the hand of another, is murder by law.  But then there is intent, and the intention in someone’s heart at the time they stopped another’s life is between them and God.  Not for me to judge.  So abortion is so extremely stigmatized and one thing about abortion rights and the activists that I find confounding is that abortion rights are a litmus test to whether or not a political candidate is viable during an election.  This is not a political issue.  This is an issue of humanity, spirituality, religion and ethics.  

I don’t think the government should ever intervene in one’s progression of life and I disagree with the death penalty as well.  It is not for me to say who lives or dies.  But I could support imprisoning those people for life, without parole.  And I certainly wouldn’t want to cause them a lifetime of suffering.  Just take away their freedoms and rights and make them prisoners to society until they die.  Give them something they deserve, which is not much.  But think about the tragic experiences of their lives that led them to those consequences which put them in prison, and don’t treat them like they treated their victims.  Treat them like you love them.  Because the worst person you can think of needs love and is probably doing despicable things because they were never given the love they deserved in the first place.  So they believe the world is evil and that they are evil and worthless and so they only imitate the things they have experienced.  

Sometimes children are exposed to things so horrific that it changes their entire psyche and shifts them from a reasonable and compassionate youth to a diabolical adolescent.  It’s all environmental.  Even dark nefarious thoughts that creep up in a child’s mind are a product of their environment.  They got the idea somewhere.  Maybe they saw a snake get tortured by a group of youths who didn’t know what they were doing.  Or witnessed something arousing that they did not understand that caused them to have powerful rushes of emotion with a person of the same gender.  Then later in life they have powerful feelings of lust toward these sorts of things, and then they become pathological or homosexual.  

I just can not possibly believe that a person is born with gender disorientation.  

And I’m not saying where or who is at fault.  I’m just saying that it’s environmental, and the formative years of a child while they are pure innocent vessels from God, they stumble upon things that are supposed to be recognized much later in their development.

And it’s happening all too often in our open society, sexualizing children at such young and tender innocent ages.  It is deplorable to introduce the idea of sexuality to a child, and then in today’s totally screwed up standard morals educators believe that children should be taught about gender dysfunction even  before puberty.  That is the work of something dark, deep and evil that has been sewed into our society.

It probably started with pornography.  Young men and women become aroused naturally and they have to deal with those types of things growing up and families should be the outlet to speak about them.  

When we are born we are a clean slate. A blank, clean, innocent, know-nothing, assume nothing, expect nothing, understand nothing, no tendencies, only natural reflexes, slate.  The only things that baby has experienced are vibrations, which are sensations of noise and movement from mother’s activities.  And experience begins in the womb, depending on the baby’s surrounding environment during gestation.  So it is possible to traumatize a developing embryo if the mother’s environment is not calm and peaceful.  Loud and explosive percussion can potentially scare and traumatize the baby even before they enter the world on their own.  That is why it is so important for mothers-to-be to make necessary changes to their routines and create a calm and peaceful environment in which the baby can develop naturally and without unnecessary rigor.  Loud noises and unhealthy environments affect the baby even while protected in the womb.

All babies have the same inborn natural reflexes and are all completely, 100% clean and innocent of anything and they are male or female.  There are cases and exceptions where biological anomalies occur, but for the sake of this discussion there are no health issues, mutations or anomalies and the only difference between one new-born and another is gender.

And there is a reason gender is assigned during gestation and a reason the body forms the way it does. It’s because of the way genetic material lines up, unfolds, develops and evolves following the way the program is supposed to work according to the DNA blueprint encoded within the living cellular structure.  That is the miracle of life.  And we can not re-define it.  It is what it is.  Our RNA creates DNA and our DNA tells us everything physical about ourselves.  It determines how your fingerprints will look, how your fingers and toes will develop, what your nose will look like, and of course if you’re male or female.

So it is absolutely ludicrous to even have a discussion that a boy was born in a female body or that a child is born homosexual.

Sexuality happens after a child is born into this world and throughout their experiences and in their formative years, gender attraction is solidified one way or another and it’s environmental.  That’s why it’s important not to expose children to anything sexual.  Because they become aroused way too early for nature’s sake.  And then they form ideas and pleasurable thoughts about things that are far more mature than their years.

That’s why we used to not talk about certain things or view certain images while children were around.  But today, in our society we are saturated with sexual imagery and children are forced to make choices about sexuality when they don’t even understand what it means.

That is the devil’s work.  And those who promote it are doing the works of evil in society.  And you can see those who promote this stuff using the devil as comedy fodder.  It is not progress to be more open and all inclusive sexually.  It is reprehensible and highly immoral to entertain thoughts of sexuality to children in public schools and to teach them that homosexuality and gender disorders are to be glorified.

When you’re in college and being a little cavalier and talking about things that went against your morals when you were being raised by your parents, those types of things become entertaining.  They become the subjects of comedy sketches and situation comedies and are played off as silliness and just media hype.  But what comes through our media sources into our homes, penetrates the families and especially the young ones in their formative years.

Wholesome television programming is a thing of the past.  Now everything on television is salacious and shocking to some extreme.  And that erodes the innocence of children growing up with this stuff being pumped into their minds.

During experiences in life, the formative years, the new adventures, the things we learn by being immersed in our environment, we find ourselves in countless defining moments of development over which we have little or no control and are forced to immediately adapt to our surrounding experiences without even understanding what is happening.  All of this is new and overwhelming for a new-born.  And I think that’s why they cry for what we see as no reason. But to them, they are being assaulted by brand new, unknown stimuli constantly and so often during the day the baby will just lose control of all emotion and break out crying because they can not comprehend what is happening around them.

We need to remember that even though newborn babies do not know what is going on, they are still experiencing everything around them, just as you and I are.  However, we have a framework and fundamental understanding of what is happening around us.  They do not.  So they become overwhelmed easily and often. 

Although, being a blank slate, helpless and hitting the ground running, baby is given some tools when he comes to earth 

The first is free will, or choice.  Of course a newborn does not understand what choice means, however instinct takes over and choices are made early on with reflexive actions and reactions to their environment.  They have no control over their own responses and they simply respond to their feelings and emotions by expressions of laughter, crying, cooing, a  Everyone is born free, free to do anything, but their environment immediately begins molding and shaping their lives and telling them how things are, and they believe it, just like we all do.

The next is volition, the unconscious or subconscious thought process which is blank when they’re born because they haven’t had any of life’s experience yet.

Then there is their environment, and THAT is where everything comes from, comes AT them, begins immediately stimulating responses from the moment of birth, that little precious vessel of God just responds instinctively in any way he can to satisfy the demands of the stimulus that is being bulleted at him.

Nobody is born with a predisposition toward anything.  Habits, identity and all those things are developed as the child grows and experiences the things around them.  It is all environmental, 100% totally and completely from the moment that little zygote began responding to the stimulus in its environment in the womb.

We do have DNA genetic code and we do have triggers that unlock patterns that our ancestors before us have experienced and more often than not, that is what happens to a child.  They fall into that ‘natural’ environment and immediately begin conforming in every way and responding in every way the same way that their parents did and their parents’ parents did and so on and so forth.

Every newborn child is given the opportunity to break the cycle of dysfunction from their historically dysfunctional ancestry and make the world a better place.

Unfortunately they don’t know anything so babies become the representation of what we show them.  That’s what they do in their formative years.  That’s the only thing they can possibly do, mimic our behaviors and our actions. 

But with this understanding we can also help ourselves become, once and for all, the people we’ve always dreamed of becoming.  If you can merely understand how simple this Plan really is and how it applies to you as an individual, the limits are boundless.

And therein lies the key.  So how do you get the key to unlock the vault?

I’m still working on that and that’s why I keep typing.

Sometime in the year 2008 my then girlfriend was working for an advertising company who had a client by the name of Ruth Holmes.  Ruth had been diagnosed with cancer, among other things, and had discovered a new way to live; by changing the way she ate; because we are what we eat.  So she discovered the power of raw foods.

I don’t mean eating raw beef and uncooked potatoes, I mean eating what the earth provides for us to sustain us as the Human Family, the way it was intended from the beginning.  She cut out everything processed, and any food that came from any living being.

And she was blessed with an amazing gift to create an enormous menu of meals and dishes prepared all with raw, natural food items.

And this is what cured her cancer.  Yes, I said she cured her cancer.  A plant based diet is the way to begin to heal yourself, the way to begin to heal your body from the decay of what the propaganda menu has been feeding you for all these years.  The food pyramid…throw that thing out the freaking window.  USRDA, fugedaboudit.

It’s time to figure out how to save your own life.

I started eating this way to see what it would do for me.  I used to be able to set my calendar by my yearly bout with bronchitis.  But ever since I started eating this way, I haven’t had one single illness.  No colds, flus, sniffles, sinus anything, not even a headache.  I don’t even get cold sores or canker sores anymore.

I don’t adhere to this all the time, every day, but I try to as best I can.  Sometimes I have to have a big fat apple fritter or get myself a nasty pastrami burger from Apollo Burgers.  And sometimes I eat regular people food for a few months but I stay away from a lot of red meat and dairy.

Balance of mind, body and spirit.  And that takes sometimes a lifetime to figure out.  Sometimes people get it a lot earlier in life but it took me almost 50 years to figure it out.

And because I have, I feel a responsibility to share what I know.

So when we are born, we are a blank canvas upon which this dastardly world will attempt to paint your portion of its horrific masterpiece on your soul.  And while we are infants and toddlers and up through about six to eight years of age we are merely sponges soaking in every single little bit of experience and responding instinctively to every little bit of stimulus we receive from our surrounding environment.

So let’s give that some thought and think again about those inherent tools with which we come to this earth.

Everything we receive from our surrounding environment is processed by our five senses while we are newborns.  Any added sense of intuition has not been developed yet because that comes after the development of cognition and understanding who we are in relation to our surroundings.

As we begin to receive even the first new experiences in this world, which come by the sudden trauma of birth, our Conscience, Subconscious and Souls begin to develop.

And for the sake of our discussion, I’ll define my understanding of what the Soul is.  We have our body and we have our spirit.  Our body is a vessel within which our spirit is able to experience this mortal sojourn on earth and through which we are given a ‘veil’ of forgetfulness about our pre existing state in Heaven.

We are here on earth to be taught, to be tested and to grow our faith, because what comes next is greater than we can even imagine, and our Father in Heaven just wants to be able to have us look back on our lives and be able to comprehend in the best way possible for us what it is that He already knows that we need, and that is what we agreed upon in the first place before even coming here.

And now, back to the definition of the Soul.  The soul is the body and the spirit united.  As we are now on this earth, we are individual souls of mankind.  When we die our souls will be separated for a time, but then that’s why Christ was resurrected, so that our souls could be made complete, whole and perfected to move on to our next state in this eternal journey that we can barely comprehend while we’re here in earth Kindergarten.

And the keys to understanding who you are, are to truly understand what our Conscience, Subconscious and our Souls are, how they work together and what we can do to master them. Because that is our ultimate goal; to be our own masters and become truly free.

And that’s an individual thing, between you and Him and nobody else. So nobody else even has to understand it because it doesn’t matter how anyone else would interpret it because it’s yours to experience and understand the best way you understand. You only have to start by asking, and the rest He will take care of.  But you have to work for it.  I didn’t say He’d do it all for you, I just said He’d take care of it.  But you have to start by asking for it.

And when you finally get that relationship it’s like an infinite number of portals just opened for you to find whatever it is you want to discover.

And finding that is the pinnacle of peace.

We all understand what our Conscience is and most of us pretty much believe that the Subconscious is a non-cognitive, unrecognized by our conscious mind, program that interprets our experiences and tells us how to respond.

But where did our Conscience and our Subconscious come from if we were blank slates when we were born?

Everything we experience and everything we are told, the way we are taught by others by their actions and their examples, shows us how to respond to our stimulus as our free will begins to overcome our natural instincts from birth.

So in reality, we become a mishmash of the people with whom we associate from birth through those critical, early formative years up to about six to eight years old. That is pretty much our introduction to this world.  And everything we do after that depends on our understanding of the world during those first six to eight years.  That is why the true church of Christ baptizes children at the age of eight.  Because before that they are innocent vessels just doing what they see and are told.

And as a child is being reared throughout those first formative years, he takes in all of the experiences around him.  Everything that happens while he is present is part of the developing Subconscious and self-identity.  Even when the little babies are asleep in an environment that is a little bit too ‘adult’ for them, that stuff is traumatic to the soul of the little tender ones as they are just barely able to comprehend anything at all.

It is so tragic today that little babies are exposed, or brought along to environments that they could not possibly benefit from, the overload of sensory experience creates trauma within the Subconscious of the child and they feel safe because they are children, trusting in their parents that they will do no wrong and that whatever happens is supposed to happen the way it does.

But people make mistakes and pregnant women sometimes go to heavy metal concerts.  Baby is assaulted with this harsh music and it penetrates their tender growing mind.  Or mother sits by when dads set off fireworks and the percussion is traumatizing to the baby in mommy’s tummy.  I think that’s where my son Nathaniel got his anxiety from.  He was born early, just the day after the fourth of July and I had many illegal fireworks that were pretty much just bombs.  So that percussion surely upset my little guy, and I have to let him know that it is my fault that he has anxiety.  

They may not understand what is going on, sure but they are ingesting all of that into their precious little minds.  And they grow up looking back on those memories and when they find themselves in situations where they have choices to make, they recall garbage like that, use it as the standard and example of how to behave in society so they become completely out of control and the adults around them are left wondering how it ever happened and where they went wrong, and that’s why this new generation of children is so tragically bent for destruction.

And that’s where the gender identity thing comes into play.  It’s environmental.  I don’t know exactly how it works, but children are not created homosexual.  It happens because of life’s experience, and more than likely an experience during the formative years made them feel safe within their subconscious mind being sexually open with the same gender.  How messed up is that?

Children are exposed to things they should not be exposed to.  They are innocent babies from Heaven and they must be nurtured as such and those who are so irresponsible in their rearing of the innocent will have much to answer for, because children are not toys, nor are they playmates.  Children are vessels of God to come to earth, be taught correct principles and further His work and up build His kingdom on earth.  That’s how it works.

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 1

‘A man filled with the love of God is not content with blessing his family alone but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race‘  ~Joseph Smith

My rock and roll life starts early on in childhood. I was born in Portland, OR in 1965 during Viet Nam or rather, during the Viet Nam war. My dad was prime for the draft and freaking out that he was going to be sent to Viet Nam. He had a new wife and me, a little new son to take care of so he joined the National Guard to save his ass and keep himself out of the horrors of a fight that we had no dog in. But for some reason USA got mired into the Viet Nam war and it completely destroyed America as we knew it. That’s another story.

My dad joined the National Guard and was spared the Viet Nam experience, thank God. I seriously thank God that my awesome dad was not ruined by that horrific experience.

While he was in the National Guard he met a new friend, his bunk mate who he became best friends with. This young man’s name was Leigh Stephens and he was from San Francisco, the center of the hippie counter culture. Leigh was a musician in the scene in San Francisco and joined the National Guard rather than burn his draft card or be a draft dodger. He also had just become hugely famous for being the lead guitarist in a band called Blue Cheer, who had a hit called Summer Time Blues. Leigh’s band named their band after their favorite LSD, but Leigh was known as a musician in that scene who did not take those psychedelic drugs. He was just in it for the music but was around it a lot.

And I think that’s why he and my dad bonded. Because they loved the music but not the drugs. My dad was an elite athlete in high school and should have been a pro athlete but didn’t have anyone recruiting him like they do today with great high school athletes. He played football and basketball in high school with dudes who went into the NFL and the NBA so he was playing with some damned good athletes. And my dad was a great track star. He held the decathlon record at Franklin High School in Portland, OR in 1962 and it wasn’t broken until the 80s.

My grandfather, Glade Rasmussen was an all American fullback for the University of Utah and was drafted by the Detroit Lions to be an NFL running back. But he had a young family and could not afford to play football and support his family at this time. This was before the NFL was getting paid like they are today. Check out the movie, Leatherheads. That’s my grandpas experience in football.

And my uncle Wes Turner was an elite baseball player and was drafted out of High School to the NY Yankees when he was only 16 years old. But just before spring training he was helping a friend move his car and there was a car behind them and their car dropped the clutch and lurched forward and crushed his knees. So he was put up in the hospital and his legs have steel rods holding his bones together. It’s a miracle he ever walked again and that ended his baseball career.

So in the National Guard Leigh and my dad became good friends and I remember my dad would leave for weeks to go on training missions or whatever they did. And he and Leigh got really close. Then after they got out of the military Leigh had a bunch of new rock star money and bought a brand new Corvette. So he drove up from San Francisco to visit dad and he stayed at our house for the weekend. I remember him hanging out with dad and them going out at night partying. They drank a lot but didn’t do the psychedelics. I think they smoked some weed. My dad said he tried it but didn’t like it. I do know he had friends we hung out with that smoked pot because as a kid I remember seeing paraphernalia that I remember, now as an adult, was used for smoking weed.

So later in rock and roll history, Leigh’s band Blue Cheer came to be known as the godfathers of heavy metal music in America. They were heavy and the Seattle Grunge scene took after them a lot so they were known as the godfathers of grunge music also.

One time when Leigh came to visit he wanted to wash his car so me, dad and Leigh went out on the street old style with a bucket and hose and dishwashing soap to wash his new Corvette and used my cotton diapers to wash the car. This was in the 60s just before anything disposable was invented. No Pampers yet, just cloth diapers and plastic pants.

So we washed his car and Leigh left the diapers sitting on the rock wall along the sidewalk just along our front yard and they were wet and got moldy. Now, these diapers my folks had to pay for and there was a service to clean them or they washed them in the washer and dryer. So this was a household expense. And Leigh left those diapers outside and they stayed overnight and got moldy and my mom was so pissed. That’s how I learned that my dad’s friend was a rock star. I didn’t even know it until I was in my 30s when me and my mom were recalling the time when Leigh came to visit with his cool Corvette. That’s when she told me the story about the moldy diapers and then she told me he was in the band Blue Cheer.

But one thing that is ironic and hilarious and kind of weird is that Leigh Stephens was the godfather of heavy metal and grunge music but, he was also my for real godfather. Yup, dad told me one day that Leigh was going to be my godfather. So the godfather of heavy metal and grunge music is my actual godfather.

So Leigh and company got famous and Leigh left Blue Cheer and recorded some solo records with National General Records. Leigh was replaced and they got a new guitarist but he went on to record some solo records and played with a couple of other bands, Pilot and Silver Metre. He was a great musician and I had no idea that iconic influential musician was a part of my childhood.

He was also named in Rolling Stone magazine’s number 98 of the world’s top 100 best guitarists. That’s pretty cool but that’s Rolling Stone magazine so I don’t give two squirts what they think, but they had my friend Leigh up there in the top 100 and I like that.

But seriously, Rolling Stone magazine is one of the worst rags on the magazine shelf. The worst of the worst. They have no sense of reality. Please do not believe anything you read in that stinky fish-wrap. I can’t believe they still have a following. Everything they talk about is gossip and lies about stuff they dislike and stupid things they think are cool. I swear it’s being published by 13 year old girls. Rolling Stone magazine used to be cool and have new news about music culture but it’s a bunch of bullshit these days. Rolling Stone magazine sucks! And I want the world to know that they suck because they’re reporting is childish and it seems like their reporters get their knowledge of the music world from what makes them feel cool and what is not actually real.

So after that Rolling Stone rant, tangent I come back to 1970. Around that time Richard Nixon was coming to Portland to meet with Governor Tom McCall. The hippies and the counter culture there had plans to protest President Nixon and they were not being peaceful as they always claimed to be. That’s one of the reasons I think hippies are dipshits. Because they protest violently. They are angry and stupid and most of the time as individuals, do not even understand what they are protesting against, except for what it says on their bumper stickers and their signs. If you try to have an intellectual conversation with a hippie about morality or politics it turns to name calling and why they are pissed off at the world. Nothing to do with the subject at hand. They are monkey-wrenchers in our good society. The hippies screwed it up, that’s for sure.

This is one of my blog posts about hippies

The Hippies Ruined America (Pushed Us Over The Moral Cliff)

21122010

“One day the Viet Nam war was all over.

The soldiers began to come home and suddenly there was no more war movie on the news every night but there were some bad things going on when the vets came home. Our soldiers were portrayed as baby killers, rapists and murderers; when they were just kids sent to do a duty for their country.

These poor soldiers got thrown into this new war; a much different war than anything an American GI had ever known before. One out of four became addicted to heroin to ease the trauma and stress of this insane war. Many of these soldiers returned to the states with their heads completely scrambled.

These young men, who were the future of America, were traumatized and confused as to where they fit in, what their role was in society, what power they now had and how they had to tame the beast that was unleashed while they were fighting after they came back to the way life used to be. It didn’t work for them. It couldn’t work for them. It wasn’t like the other wars; where you would have your heroes and your treaties and your winners and losers.

The repercussions of this war were weaving their way through the fabric of our society and polarizing the nation. For the first time in our history, our soldiers came home from battle and were looked upon as the enemy by their own country. How could this have happened? Who spun this mess to destroy these young men’s lives like this?

It was the counter culture and their rebellion; the hippies.

They wanted to do something good, reform society; but what they did was carve a rift through this great nation and put youth against authority, government against academia and just like a cracked windshield, it spread out of control and in all directions, infecting people’s understanding of politics, ethics, and even religion.

By the time anyone was able to see what was happening, the damage had been done and this great country was beyond repair. The hippie counter culture cancer had begun to decay our nation. Their ideology was based on selfish principles, going against what has worked for so many years, causing strife and upheaval in people’s lives. They called it freedom. What it was in reality was bondage; bondage according to their dictates, their philosophies, influenced by mind altering drugs and so-called free love expression.

They brought us STDs and a sharp rise in illegitimate births under the umbrella of “free love”. They started the sexual revolution, which was nothing more than a proactive petition for irresponsible behavior free of consequences. The consequences were not immediate, but they came, and they have damaged our precious nation and its wholesome family values. Lost innocence was the result as these irresponsible youths pushed and clamored for attention from the media; and they got it. And when they got it they forced their opinions and ideas on the rest of us whether we wanted to partake in it or not. So we were fed their propaganda through any medium they could deliver to us.

They disguised their assault on America’s values as art and free speech. They did it with sensationalism, bumper stickers, sound bytes and protest chants. It was all about repetition and forcefully sinking their message into the minds of those who didn’t want to hear it. Symbols of their rebellious opposition to our former patriotism started showing up everywhere and become accepted as American culture. The hippies became fashionable. They used art as a way of spreading their doctrine. They assaulted the senses with photography, paintings, music, movies, magazines, signs, gatherings; anything they could do to get the masses to pay attention, just enough attention so that their poison could be introduced into the minds of the American people.

They wanted to convert everyone to their way of believing, but they were such hypocrites in their message of free thinking and individuality. These freaks created their own religion and worked just as hard as any cult to convert the masses to their way of thinking. And it continued to spread as the changing of the guard takes place from generation to generation, these unbound and revolutionary ideologues took over our curriculum, they homogenized things like, patriotism, failure and achievement and began to inject sexuality into every aspect of our culture and sex education into our schools in tandem with the sexual revolution.

This is what happened to America. They called it progressive, but what it really was, was taking the innocence from our children far too early in their lives and putting the focus of boy-girl relationships on sex rather than innocent puppy-love that used to be cute for kids to experience and awkward but safe to enjoy.

Academia has been infected by the ideologues as they inject small bits at a time of their dogma into the regular main stream. A little here, a little there, until school principals are handing out condoms, Christmas is a bad word and the mere mention of discipline could result in the expulsion of a teacher. All the while kids are being taught how to properly pleasure themselves with the introduction of safe sex education, free of responsibility and free of consequence.

No longer is it OK to teach children that they have to draw a line at some point to protect themselves. Now they’re taught to toe that line and experiment to see what comes of their exploration.

Thanks to the counter culture revolution we have a major increase in unwed pregnancies, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the breakdown of the traditional family. First the poison is introduced, then it is tolerated, then it is accepted, and eventually it is embraced as a regular part of life.

The women’s liberation movement was a big part of that counter culture revolution too; Gloria Steinem and her feminist sisterhood. She introduced us to the title of Ms. in addition to Mr. and Mrs. While well meaning, she didn’t have her eye on the right mark and she lacked the proper vision and wisdom to speak for women of America. But, her message was enticing to many and they embraced the tenets of the Women’s Liberation Movement and they worked hard to equal themselves to men.

Change may have been necessary, but when it came, it was loaded with pit falls. The Women’s Liberation Movement exacerbated the issue of women against men and began to draw lines and create new rules and issues by which these disenfranchised women could identify them selves. The result of all of this so-called enlightenment was a rapid increase in divorce, latch-key kids came from this movement and step families became an accepted norm.

Previous to this our country had been built on the solid foundation of the family bond. There is something indestructible about a family united with purpose. There is wisdom in the years of the elderly passed down to the younger generations, there is strength in the bond of a committed family, there is power to create, to heal, to build up and to fortify when families are bound together. United we stand. Divided we fall. It is so true. And the interjection of these counter culture values began to erode the core of what made America great; the family.

And once the family structure begins to unravel, society as a whole is in danger of collapse. It is so simple to see that the family is the critical element to holding this great nation together, but something has infected our society and it is so cancerous and destructive now that we find ourselves in the midst of redefining the marriage covenant being between a man and a woman to being genderless. How far have we slipped from our core? How far have we come as a society to go from the grit and strength of a solid, tried and true, safe family structure to men marrying men being a constitutional issue?

The hippies rebelled against rules and regulations that were designed not to confine or imprison, but to help balance and manage our freedoms, to elicit individual responsibility. They disregarded their responsibilities for pleasure and introduced the consequences of their actions into the mainstream of our lives, and as they cascaded into our homes through every media outlet we all became familiar and comfortable with them.

They turned everything upside down and then as these hippie rebels aged and matured, they carried their philosophies into our governments, our schools and institutions and now this nation is infected with that cancerous hippie ideology and people can’t even see where we once were and where we are headed.

And at this time in my life hippie counter culture was pretty much becoming pop culture. We had television shows like “Laugh In”, a take on the hippie’s “Love In”. It was very psychedelic and I loved it, my parents loved it, it was goofy and hilarious and made fun of things that were going on in society. So we watched that and got a lot of ideas for fashion from what they were doing.

A lot of famous people came out of Laugh In like Goldie Hawn, Gary Owens, Ruth Buzzie, Arte Johnson, Ellen Brennan, Flip Wilson, Jo Ann Woreley, Tiny Tim, Lilly Tomlin, Richard Dawson and many more, who went on to be in sit coms and game shows in the 70s.

That was the entertainment of the time in the early 70s. Game shows were fun to watch, they were new and the celebrities who were on the game shows entertained us. They had special guests from time to time like Paul Newman or Farrah Fawcett and that was something we looked forward to. There was no information super highway, now known as the Internet and the World Wide Web. The only network connections in the world were between Universities so they could share curriculum and that was done by phone lines and modems, very cutting edge technology at the time, but never a thought about it becoming something everyone in the world would soon enjoy.

But the game shows in the 70s were more outrageous than we imagined. Watching them now we realize these people were getting drunk on camera and having a ball with the contestants. And you could tell there was a lot of hanky panky going on behind the scenes. These were Hollywood big shots just having fun to goof off and get paid for it. So of course they were getting loaded and screwing around and once in a while they would make a major faux pas that would sneak past the censorship and that was hilarious. The worst of that was Match Game. The celebrities on that show were on the edge at the time and they were the most flamboyant in Hollywood. But they were highly entertaining and they knew how to put on a show.

There were dudes who were obviously gay but they were still in the closet and talked about their wives and girlfriends just to keep a lid on things. But the others knew what was going on and we at home were not stupid. I knew Paul Lind was as gay as a three dollar bill in the center square and Charles Nelson Reilly on Match Game was as flamboyant as Elton John but much more effeminate. But they were entertainers and they did entertain when we only had three channels of television to choose from. And there was nothing known as a re-run. You either saw it when it happened or had to be told about it at school the next day.

We actually had five channels of television viewing. NBC, CBS, ABC, the big networks, then the local channel, KUTV and PBS that showed educational stuff and introduced us to Sesame Street, the Electric Company and Zoom. the Electric Company is where I first saw Morgan Freeman. He played a character on the Electric Company called Easy Reader. He was a groovy negro from the Harlem area, dressed like the negroes of the 70s, very cool and stylish and he walked around reading words on signs because he was Easy Reader. The coolest cat that ever read anything on a sign. He’d walk past a delicatessen and the neon sign said “Deli” and he would stroll up all cool and funky like and go, “Deli”. Then keep on truckin’ to the next word. I thought Easy Reader was the baddest dude I ever saw. I wanted to be as cool as him when I was a kid.

Kids had their idols. At the time it was usually pro athletes, Hank Aaron, OJ Simpson (yea, he was pretty awesome before he became a murderer) or Dr J AKA Julius Erving. But I loved Easy Reader’s style and so I dressed like Easy when I was in the second and third grade. Seriously. I would go shopping for school clothes with my mom and while my friends were getting tough skins and jeans and t-shirts I was getting patch work bell bottom corduroy pants and shirts with all kinds of pictures of nature and psychedelia with big butterfly collars and my friends wore Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers but I wore patent leather platform shoes like a pimp that were multi colored and had diamond shapes in different colors on the upper.

I’m dead serious. I dressed this way when I was a youngster because I thought I looked kickass in my cool threads. My friends didn’t say anything about it because we were just kids and I was as cool as the next kid so they didn’t give me any shit about it. And my dad loved it because I was a spitting image of his stylishness. We would go out on the town mom, dad and me to restaurants and we would dress to the nines and have five course dinners at the best restaurants in town. I got treated like a freaking prince when I was a kid and it was totally awesome. I loved it. I had fun and I was very aware of the adult world but I was silent most of the time. I was a deft observer of my surroundings so I noticed every detail of everything that was going on and later on in life when I would be out with people and talking about things sometimes people would be a little off put by my noticing too much detail about things and commenting on it all the time. But that was entertainment for me as an only child. What else are you going to do? Stare at the walls? No, I had to figure everything out and make mental notes so I would be on top of things in the future.

In the second and third grade I went to Woodstock Elementary in SE Portland, OR. This was a pretty big elementary school that had from Kindergarten all the way up to the eighth grade. Back then it was elementary school up to grade eight and then high school. No middle school or Jr High in the Portland Public Schools. So when I moved to Vancouver in the late 70s that kind of threw me for a loop. That and it was the first time I ever rode a bus to school. Because in Portland we walked to school no matter how far away we lived. Yes, even in the snow, up hill, both ways. That’s just how it was and we didn’t know anything different. We were inner city kids but didn’t know it. We were just growing up and learning at the school of hard knocks. Looking back I can see that we were completely free to get in to any kind of trouble we wanted to because we were for the most part totally unsupervised. Just as long as we were home at a certain time our parents didn’t worry about what we were doing.

And for the most part, at least for me, I stayed within the guidelines of my parents’ expectations. Once in a while I’d do something I knew they would not approve of but they would never know and I wasn’t going to tell them about it. That’s just stuff me and my friends got away with all the time. And I guess that’s probably why, in my later years in life I felt like I could get away with stuff that most people worried about. Like walking in to a venue without paying or getting stamped, like I belonged there, when my friends would hold back and play by the rules. I would go to a show or a dance club and get a stamp on my wrist, then while it was still wet, put my wrist on my girlfriend’s wrist to copy the stamp and get her in free. We did this pretty much every time to save five or six bucks when we were in college. But they got hip to it and the stamps became words like “paid” and started looking inverted or backwards if we re-stamped my girlfriend’s wrist, and so we’d get busted. But when the stamp was just a yellow dot it worked well.

That stuff happened years later in my life but I’m still talking about childhood here. One time after school in the third grade at Woodstock, on the walk home on the west side of the park there were two huge groups of young boys on both sides of the street having a rock fight. Me and my friends were walking home from school and happened in to the middle of this furious rock fight so we joined in and started pitching rocks across the street at other dudes. I got hit in the leg and then a rock smacked me in the cheek. It didn’t really do any damage, just a glancing blow but I made a big deal of it when I got home. I told my parents that those boys at school were throwing rocks and threw one in my face. I don’t know why I even told them. Probably because my adrenaline was pumping and I had no filter.

They were not impressed and they didn’t have any mercy for me. Didn’t console me at all. That was weird. I was looking for some kind of safety from my parents after that but didn’t get it. So I felt pretty much alone with my angst and anxiety started to brew. As much as they loved me and treated me well, there was no love shown at home. I just had to be tough and cool and not rock the boat. When I was really young my parents took me everywhere and I saw all kinds of cool stuff. I was the only child in a huge extended family of adults.

When we lived in SE Portland in the late 60s, it was the summer of 1969, America and NASA were sending astronauts to the moon for the first time. I remember sitting with my mother watching on our black and white television set while Walter Cronkite did the play by play. And I got to witness on television the first moon landing. That was pretty cool. I do remember my mother telling me that this was a very important event in history and that she wanted me to remember it. And I do, and I’m grateful my mom took the time to do this for me.

I also remember being mesmerized as a kid that there were people walking on the moon. I would go outside and look at the moon in the sky, then go back in the house and watch the men walking on the moon and try to comprehend that. It pretty much blew my mind but it was awesome too.

After that huge event it was Watergate all the time. It seemed like the only thing on television for ever was the Watergate hearings. I didn’t understand what was going on but I do remember seeing the president say “I am not a crook” live on TV. It’s weird how the left likes to drag its opponents through the mud rather than just do good things for the country. Nixon got busted doing what all of them were doing.

My extended family treated me very well. At birthday time I would get huge sums of money from my grand parents and killer toys, everything I asked for. And at Christmas it was just me so all the aunts and uncles and grandparents went to town and I got overwhelmed with gifts. I always got what I asked for and then I got some more stuff that I never thought of. It was so wonderful and it made me feel great.

In the third grade I decided to start playing baseball. In the Portland district there was no tee ball. Even as little kids we were pitching. And I wasn’t very good at baseball but I could throw a pitch so I became the pitcher. And for a third grader, I was throwing heat. No curve balls, sliders or knuckleballs or anything like that. Just fast balls. And I had a wicked fast arm and struck out many batters. I was the best pitcher in the league actually. My team was undefeated and I was having fun. Once in a while when I was tired I would play catcher and the catcher would pitch. He was a good pitcher too and we smoked every team in the league. Except for this one team called The Big Red Machine. They had a pitcher as good as me and they were our only loss that season. They went undefeated. There’s always someone better, and I learned that lesson young. But I was still great.

One inning I threw nine strikes in a row and not a single batter swung. And one time, it was pretty sad but a little kid went to bat and he was scared of the ball so I smoked him and struck him out but I felt sorry for him. Another time one of my pitches got out of control and the batter ducked and the ball hit the bat and it was a bunt. The kid didn’t realize he just got a hit so I ran up and picked up the ball and tagged him out.

Kids didn’t understand the rules but for some reason I totally did. There was one play I was in a hot box between second and third base trying to steal third, and I was running toward third and the second baseman had the ball in his right hand, for some reason I saw that, but he tagged me with his glove, without the ball, so I knew this was not an out so I kept on running to third base and I got the steal. And I was called safe and the kid started crying. There’s no crying in baseball dude. I guess when you’re in the third grade and you just got you lunch eaten by Vaughn Brown there’s crying in baseball.

During this baseball season I was also going to school. I was in the third grade and I had a bad stomach ache and would come home from school at lunch time several times during the week. So after the third day I told my mom I should probably go see the doctor.

We went to Kaiser Permanente in Portland, Oregon and the doctor took a look at me and came back into the room and told me that I had appendicitis and that he would have to operate. I heard that word ‘operation’ and I freaked out and started crying because all I could imagine was the surgeon cutting me open and how much it would hurt. But they calmed me down and told me I would be asleep and wouldn’t even feel a thing.

Then they took me to the hospital and got me prepped and gave me a shot that made me feel super happy and I was cracking up the nurses by what I was saying. I do remember talking about going and eating a McDonald’s Big Mac after surgery was over and I invited them to come with me. Then I remember they put some slippery thing under my butt and I wondered what the heck that was and then the doctor started counting backwards from ten to zero and the next thing I knew I woke up in the recovery room and didn’t feel a thing.

So when I woke up I wanted to feel the incision so I touched my abdomen and notived that there was tape in a circle around my belly. And I thought, because I was a kid and had no frame of reference, that they had cut a huge piece of my torso out like a big hole in my gut to do the operation.

But then I soon learned that it was nothing more than a two inch incision just above my right hip. I stayed in the hospital for three days and watched a lot of TV ate a lot of popsicles and ice-cream. There was another kid in my room with me who had something wrong with his leg. He was into Star Trek but I wanted to watch sports so I thought that kid was a dork. I tried talking to him about Evel Kenevel, football and basketball and the kid had no idea what I was talking about. He was into Star Trek. What a geek. And the poor guy was in pain too. He was screaming in the night for pain waking me up. I had a lot of ice water with bendy straws so I would take clumps of ice and shoot them across the room at the other kids in the hospital. They didn’t know where it was coming from but that was my entertainment and I thought it was funny when they would get hit by a piece of ice. Then one kid in the room was kind of cool and we started shooting ice balls at each other and we started sort of picking on Star Trek leg dude and shooting ice balls at him a lot. I know that’s not cool but we did that and that’s what it was like back then.

Then Star Trek dude went away for a while and came back in traction so we quit picking on him because he was majorly damaged and totally ensconced in plaster.

This all happened during my excellent year of being the best pitcher in little league and it put an end to my pitching career. Retired at the age of nine.

While I was in the hospital my schoolmates all wrote me letters to help me get better. That was pretty cool. One day I got about thirty notes from all my friends telling me what’s going on in school and what was going on in the baseball league. One of my buddies, Tommy who was on my baseball team told me that we played against a team called Oregon Brass. Our team was sponsored by Nolan Rexall, the pharmacy. Pretty fitting for me and my life and my addiction. So Tommy wrote to me that we beat Oregon Brass but he didn’t spell Brass right and he said they played against Oregon Bras. So when I read that I started laughing so hard and the doctor told me I should not laugh because it would damage the stitches. But that was the best medicine, laughter.

Unfortunately after I recovered my coach didn’t let me play pitcher or catcher so he put me in right field so I wouldn’t get hurt. I thought that was bullshit and I was pissed about that. But we had a couple of other games and I played third base and I also got some hits and 4 RBIs. I was a great baseball player but my dad wasn’t into baseball so he didn’t nurture that into my sports experience. Football and Basketball and Track were the things he wanted me to play. I was good at everything but I was a year behind in school so for basketball and football I had to play in city leagues rather than on the school team. I was too small to play varsity sports in school.

My mom and dad were flipping houses in the 70s and that house in the Woodstock district of Portland was a fixer-upper and it was a junk yard when they bought it, but they turned it in to a pretty sweet and good looking home. I had some good times at this place and had some good friends in that neighborhood and I loved going to Woodstock Elementary School.

There were a lot of girls in the neighborhood so I had a lot of female friends as a child. And there were a couple of sisters across the street who were a bit older than me. They would babysit me when my folks went out together or in the summer time when they worked. But they were young and mischievous themselves. I remember them talking about having drank alcohol and having gotten drunk already. They were in the sixth and eighth grade. The older girl was early into puberty and had matured and the sixth grade girl was just blossoming.

And the older girl would always tell me how handsome I was and she would tell me that when I got older all the girls would be “on my side”. That’s how she said it. I didn’t know what she meant so I asked her and she told me that all the girls were going to love me when I got older. I thought that was yucky at the time. And she wanted me to be a good kisser when the time came so she taught me how to French kiss. So she told me to put my lips like so and she put her tongue in my mouth and told me that’s a French kiss and that all the girls would want to do that with me when I grew up. But at the time, I was just a kid and thought it was gross and wet and weird.

During the summer the parents were at work and these two sisters were pretty much babysitting me and the other kids in the neighborhood all at one neighbor’s house. One afternoon we were playing hide and seek and I hid in the closet by the front door and I noticed a puzzle of a naked woman. So I showed it to the girls (I was the only boy and there were probably four or five girls there). And then they dared me to take my clothes off and run through the room naked. So I did. And we were laughing and then those naughty girls took off all of their clothes and we pretty much spent the summer naked in that house with each other.

But there was never any touching or sexual experience, just being naked with a bunch of pubescent little girls while I was about 8 years old. That pretty much solidified my love of the female form. Even though we were young, I loved it.

Then one time our parents were visiting each other upstairs and the two sisters and one of the other girls in the neighborhood were playing downstairs, so I joined them. And they sat me down on the couch and played dress-up and put on dresses and stockings and got all dolled up. Then proceeded to strip for me, taking off one thing at a time, showing me everything and whoa! I was in ecstasy just as a little kid experiencing this stuff. Still no touching, just the show was blowing my mind. I have no idea why this happened or what it had to do with my life but it certainly made me love the sexuality of a woman.

But my family was LDS and so I pretty much forgot about that stuff and never let it get to me too much. Although, I did get into watching porno when I was a teenager, remembering that stuff as a child, it brought back memories. But I watched it with my buddies and didn’t get caught up into it. Never had any secret pornography episodes or anything like that thankfully. I know a lot of other young men get caught up in pornography and have to hide it so they live a double life. That’s tragic. And it’s a miracle that didn’t happen to me.

With those young girls one time we were walking to the local convenience store to buy some candies and we walked through a vacant lot that was full of tall grass and in that grass we noticed a bunch of magazines. So we checked them out and they were porno magazines. So me and those girls once again were being sexualized but we only looked. We didn’t do anything else but look and I’m grateful we didn’t. That would have messed me up big time. I got spared the sexual assault that many children went through. There’s a lot of evil in this world, looking to hurt children and sexualizing them at a young age is one of the enemy’s best tools.

When I was about nine years old mom and dad had my sister and I had a new companion to hang around with after she grew up a little. When she was a baby that was cool to have a baby sister. I loved her so much and I always wanted to hold her and feed her and take care of her. I felt love for another person that I had never felt before.

And when she grew up and started walking and talking and I would make her my subject of fun and it was the best when I could make her laugh. So I did all kinds of crazy stuff to make her crack up. But, of course when we got a little too rough and she started to cry I always got in trouble. So that sucked. We had so much fun until she cried and that was, party over!

Then I would hear my name hollered across the house. “Vaughn, you better quit that.” “Vaughn! I’m going to tell your father when he gets home.”

That would keep me on my toes for the rest of the day but if she told dad, and I’m sure she did, he never said anything to me. So it was a lot of empty threats and intimidation how my mother raised me. She was sweet and kind to my sister but she was hard core on my ass all the time. Everything was my fault when something went wrong between us kids. And mom would harangue my dad until he came and unloaded on me. My dad didn’t want to punish me or hurt me. He let me get away with everything. But mom had it in for me and she made my dad give it to me so she could come out the nice one and dad had to be the bad guy. This I figured out much later in life. But at the time I thought my dad was an asshole and that my mom was super nice. But I have learned that my mother was highly manipulative and controlling and dad did what she said because he didn’t want her wrath.

And she would pick at him until he got pissed and then they would argue all night and yell and slam doors and scream at each other. No physical violence thank heavens but it was gnarly man. As a kid I had much anxiety and walked on egg shells around the house. I thought dad was mean but he wasn’t. He was just doing mom’s bidding. He always, and I remember this happening all the time, he would come in my room and tell me, there’s a really funny movie on TV, and ask me to come and watch it with him. But I feared my dad because I thought he was mean, so I didn’t want to hang around him, but he was actually really cool to me looking back. He was never mean to me when we were relaxing. Only from the crap my mom got him in to so that drove a wedge between me and my father. That’s tragic because I know he loved me and wanted to share his life with me but he was always looking over his shoulder for what mom would bring down upon our relationship.

A lot of new music was coming in to my life at that time. My dad liked Elvis a lot and I also loved Elvis. Elvis was the shit. Nobody was cooler than Elvis Presley. So I listened to a lot of Elvis records. All of them. Even the sound tracks to the movies he made. I was all about Elvis when I was a kid. The King of Rock and Roll. That was my guy, Elvis Presley. Coolest dude ever. Cooler than Fonzie. My Aunt Carole saw Elvis in concert in Hawaii and I was so jealous. I would spin my Elvis records in my bedroom and with my mom’s hair brush as the microphone I would do Elvis in the mirror. Jumping up and down and doing his karate stylings. I had a huge imagination and it was fun for me because I was an only child and I had to entertain myself somehow.

There was other music besides Elvis that I listened to. Ricky Nelson was one that I liked a lot. He was pretty rock and roll, but this was fifties rock and roll. Not quite Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd yet. I was just cutting my rock and roll teeth at this time. I remember I had a Neil Diamond record but I didn’t really like much of his music for some reason. It didn’t speak to me like Elvis did.

I can’t stand today’s country music but years ago some country songs were pretty good and I liked them a lot. I had Glen Campbell’s album, Rhinestone Cowboy and as a kid I thought that was pretty cool. I had John Denver albums too. He was pretty mellow but he sang some pretty cool songs like Rocky Mountain High. I was in to that stuff until I got my first taste of serious rock and roll. And everything changed after that.

It was at the time that the movie Xanadu came out with Olivia Newton John and I saw it in the theater and was blown away with the music. But what really turned me on was the scene when they battled head to head, big band music vs rock and roll and the band that was the rock and roll band in that movie was The Tubes.

That was my first introduction into good serious hard core rock and roll. And by today’s standards, The Tubes are far from hard core, but they were out there at the time. They had naked people on stage, they sang about drugs and doing all kinds of craziness and that totally got my attention. When I heard those electric guitars something hit me right in the heart like I needed more of that.

So I bought the sound track to the movie Xanadu on vinyl and it had some mellow Olivia Newton John songs but I always played The Tubes songs because I was just starting to get in to rock and roll that was a bit more than Elvis and Ricky Nelson.

My mom bought in to the record of the month club with some TV Guide magazine or something like that and sometimes she would not send back the ‘no thanks’ mailer and a new record would show up in the mail that she did not order. So I would take those records and put them in my collection. I got the Cars first album that way. Never heard of them but they were pretty cool I thought.

I was introduced to a lot of good music that I had no idea was so great from garage sales. My parents had a lot of garage sales. It wasn’t their stuff, but they would host a huge garage sale and everyone in the neighborhood would bring their stuff into our driveway and garage to sell. That’s how I met a lot of the people in the neighborhood and I always sifted through the record collections that were for sale and just took the ones I liked by the album covers that I thought were the coolest.

This is how I discovered funk music from the Ohio Players album Honey. It had Rollercoaster of Love and Fopp on that album. I rocked out to those tunes, they were super groovy. A lot of their music I didn’t dig, it was more for getting down and love making music but those two songs I was totally in to. And later on in my rock and roll life the Red Hot Chili Peppers, my favorite band of all time, covered Rollercoaster of Love on the Beavis and Butthead movie and one of my other top five, maybe at the very top with Led Zeppelin, the Chili Peppers, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix is Soundgarden. On their second record release they covered the Ohio Players’ song Fopp. And I also saw the Chili Peppers live (many times) on their Californication tour they played Fopp too. That was the tour when the Foo Fighters opened for the Chili Peppers. Now they are the two biggest rock bands in the world. I saw them together. And the first time I saw Red Hot Chili Peppers, they opened for Oingo Boingo in Park West, Park City, Utah on the ski slopes. That was I think April of 1989, could have been 1990

I remember new technology, the very first of which came long before me was the invention of radio. Then television. When I was a little kid we only had black and white TV to watch and we didn’t have very good signals so the picture was really screwed up and you could barely see what was going on, but you had the audio and that made it a little bit better. But the picture sucked and we had antennas on top of our houses to bring a better television signal into our home and once in a while when we wanted to see something clearly we had to get on the roof of our house and turn the antenna to get a better signal. So dad would be on the roof and mom would watch the television and tell him when the signal was good, or better or bad. And then they’d say, “Hold it right there, I think we got it.” And dad would come back down off the roof and come into the living room again and we would have a much better picture to watch our favorite television programs.

My dad loved sports. Like I said, he was an elite athlete and I’m not exaggerating about that. He never went to college so he didn’t get recruited by any pro teams but if he had gone to college and played sports in college he would have been a professional athlete either in basketball or football. He played football against Mel Renfro, now NFL hall-of-famer and Steve Jones of the NBA, who won a championship in 1977 with the Portland Trailblazers. was on his basketball team in high school. So he was playing with some pretty good athletes.

When I was running track in high school I was trying everything. I wasn’t great at anything in track and field but I did the high jump pretty good for a guy my size. I ran the 440 relay but we were the loser team, just got out there and lost but had fun. I was the lead off man and when the gun shot for us to go I took off like a rabbit, so I thought. But then on my right side I could hear some dude huffing and puffing in the lane next to me and he blazed right past me and left me in the dust. So I ran my 100 yards and handed the baton to the next person and we got smoked but it was fun nevertheless. I was not very fast. I think my fastest 100 yard dash was like just under 12 seconds.

I asked my dad what was his best long jump. Dad told me his best long jump was 22 feet. I don’t know how that translates into the metric system but back then it was feet and not meters like it is today. So I do know that 22 feet was damned good. Because our best long jumper was jumping 18 feet in school.

Dad loved to watch football or basketball on television. That was his enjoyment for the weekends, watching sports. He loved it and he taught me all about football and basketball and I was a damned good athlete myself. Although I started school too young, a year earlier than my classmates. And when you’re young, at that age, one year made me much smaller and weaker than my peers, so I never excelled in school sports because of the age difference. If I had been put in school at the right age, starting Kindergarten at the age of 5 rather than 4 I would have been as great an athlete as my father was. But this became a disappointment for him because I wasn’t a great jock/athlete like he wanted me to be. The guys were too big and much stronger than me. One year in a young man’s life is a lot of time. One year in an old man’s life is nothing, but when you’re maturing in those formative years, one year of growth is a lot and I was one year behind everyone else physically.

This was way before cable television or picture in picture. My dad had to watch every game that was broadcast on TV and he couldn’t just change channels all the time. There was no remote control for television yet so if we had to change the channel we would have to walk up to the television and turn the dial to the channel we wanted to watch, then re-adjust the antenna to get a better picture. Because each channel had a different broadcast wave length and the antenna caught it just right in the right position for each channel. Now that’s some manual analogue television viewership. The word digital had never been spoken at that time.

So dad had to have every football game to watch at the same time. If there was one on NBC and CBS at the same time, he got two television sets and set them on top of each other on different channels so he could watch both games at the same time. My dad was creative and innovative. Not side by side, they were on top of each other for the best viewing. My dad ruled.

Then in the early 70s we saw something in the news paper that was totally cutting edge and something we had to have. It was the first in home video game called Pong. So me and dad went to the local super market called Disco Mart and bought the first ever home video game, Pong. And it was fun, there wasn’t much to it but it was much better than playing a board game. This was on the television so that was futuristic and super cool. I told my friends at school about it and they tripped out. And this was even before we had a color television. All black and white, and Pong was black and white so that fit right in.

Television played a huge roll in my upbringing. I remember waiting all week to see things like the Wide World of Sports when we could see Evel Knievel or the Harlem Globe Trotters. That was the best, when the Harlem Globe Trotters were playing on TV everything stopped and we just watched basketball Vaudeville. And then Evel Knievel jumped a line of busses and it was great when he landed the trick but it was even better when he ate shit and crashed and burned. Inside I always wanted to see him crash and burn because that was more spectacular than him just making the jump. And we saw Evel crash and burn many times, his body being tossed across the pavement like a rag doll and his bike crashing into the wall until he stopped sliding down the track and everyone and the ambulances hurried over to take him to the hospital. And he was majorly jacked up but as cool as a cucumber in the ambulance talking to America and telling everyone that he was alright. If he was conscious. Sometimes he would knock himself silly and couldn’t talk to the media so Jim McKay would have to talk us down and tell us to pray for Evel Knievel to have a “speedy recovery”.

Then the last time I saw Evel Knievel jump anything it was in his jet propelled rocket ship he made to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. And that failed big time. He didn’t even get half way across the canyon until his rocket ship shot out its parachute and he crashed and burned against the canyon wall. He was again totally messed up broken and bruised but conscious. And they got him on TV when they rescued him. He only broke his nose this time.

So I played LDS church basketball. And in Vancouver, WA where I grew up the LDS church basket ball league was just as intense and competitive as school sports. We were serious. Each LDS ward had a team just like each school had their own team. And we practiced, and had playbooks and had great players who were not on varsity squads in school, so they came to play church ball with us LDS dudes. And my dad was the coach and he recruited team members that were not members of our church but they loved the competition and the seriousness of the games, and we had a great team. We would practice and my dad taught us all the fundamentals of basketball and how to pass, dribble, shoot, defend properly, steal the ball, set up an offense, how to play a good zone defense, and work together as a team.

And there were about seven or eight teams full of good ball players in the Vancouver area at that time in the late 70s that didn’t play on their school teams. It would have been fun to play the high school teams. I bet we could have beaten them. We were pretty good. Once in a while someone on the high school team would get cut and my dad would recruit him for our team. We were the Vancouver Second Ward and we had the best basketball team. We went to the playoffs and won.

We had a full court professional sized basketball court, maple hardwood floor with glass back boards and break away rims right in the middle of our church building. So of course basketball was something we were brought up on. And it taught us the fundamentals of life. How to work together as a team, how to see what’s going on out there and make quick decisions and sometimes how to just take it on your shoulders and leave everyone else in the dust. It was a great foundation for life and my dad was an excellent coach. Everybody on the team loved him and feared him because he only wanted the best of our talents and he nurtured those things and I think his basketball coaching shaped a lot of those young men’s lives. Because many of them came from broken homes and when they got into our basketball program, my dad taught them the fundamentals of life, and I got that in the home all the time.

It was sometimes militant but he was making me into a man. He knew how harsh the world was and he was teaching me how to overcome the world and thrive and seed out the ridiculousness of society and garner the good things that life can bring.

Me and dad went through a lot of things together. One of the most intense experiences of my life was with dad when I was about four years old. When dad was in his early twenties he was an iron worker and worked at the shipyards on Swan Island in the middle of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. A pretty hard core job for a pretty hard core and tough individual. My mom worked at a company called Ford Industries. Ford Industries made answering machines, the first of their kind. They were used in businesses. Nobody had an answering machine at home and voice mail had not been invented yet.

And we had an answering machine at our house connected to our phone. We were way ahead of the curve as far as technology goes. We were the only people I ever knew who had an answering machine in their house in 1970. I didn’t know how cutting edge it was. Mom and dad drove a brand new Chevy Mustang. It had a V8, four on the floor and it was a convertible. I loved that car. Today it’s a classic. They bought that car after me and dad got in an accident and totaled our brand new Chevelle. Also a classic. I’ll tell you the story about that car accident.

It was 1969 sometime in the fall and dad was taking me to the babysitters house before going to work on Swan Island. It was early and the sun had not come up yet so it was still dark and it was a really foggy morning. Soup thick fog and we were driving along the east side of the Willamette river on the border of Portland and Milwaukie. We came around a curve going about 60 and all of a sudden we rear ended a flat bed pickup truck that had died in the lane we were driving in on the hi-way.

Now, this is 1969. There were no seatbelt laws. Some cars didn’t even come with seat belts. They were an option you had to pay extra for. And there were no child safety seat laws either. So I was standing on the bench seat of this Chevelle, leaning on my dad’s shoulder and seat surfing when we would go around corners. This was fun for me. So, I was standing on the front seat, dad had no seatbelt on and we piled right into the back of this flatbed pickup truck with no time to break.

Physics say I should have gone through the windshield and been on the evening news but I ended up on the floor of the passenger’s side of the car in the fetal position completely unharmed. There was a piece of glass in the corner of my eye and a small tear in my pants. No clue how that happened. Dad hit the steering wheel with his chest and broke it and smacked his forehead on the windshield but was unhurt. Had a sore chest but other than that no injuries.

No seat belts, no air bags. No injuries.

The only things I remember from this experience is seeing the car’s front end completely crushed like an accordion and the next thing I remember was sitting in my grandparent’s house on a barstool looking across the room.

What I saw in the room looking back at me has stuck with me all my life. It’s one of my first memories of childhood. The accident and then this. I was sitting on the barstool looking across the room and there was a man in white robes standing there looking after me. Inside his robes they were glowing with a golden hue like he was made of golden light. And I felt the most amazing peace and calm and safety and protection you could ever imagine. I have pondered this and prayed about it and it has been confirmed to me that this was Jesus Christ. I did not and still do not understand the magnitude of this experience but I do know that it was real and that I can not deny that it happened. It was not a dream. I remember as much as I remember anything, the feeling deep in my soul, in my bosom the burning fire of strength and total peace and comfort after such a chaotic event.

This type of peace only comes from the savior Jesus Christ. And for some reason He manifested Himself to me as a child. I believe I have a great work to do. I don’t know what it is, maybe I’m doing it and don’t even realize it. That’s probably the case. But I do not seek glory for myself. I only wish to glorify my Father in Heaven and do His work.

But He has blessed me with some of the most incredible life’s experiences and this is why I am writing this book. To share the spectacular events that have made up my life

I was a normal child, born in September 1965.  My parents got a little carried away with their hormones and if you do the math you can see that their wedding was six months prior to my birth so I guess you could say I was sort of an accident.  They were typical kids raised with the values of the 50s, their parents had been through the great depression and they were children of WWII, the baby boomers, and were fresh out of high school with adulthood before them, a baby on the way and no idea what the future held in store.

President Richard Nixon was scheduled to come to Portland for an American Legion convention to help promote the continuation of the Viet Nam war.  As a result of that scheduled visit the hippies were organizing mass protests under the umbrella of a coalition known as the People’s Army Jamboree.  They were planning a series of anti-war demonstrations and other protest activities.  To combat this and hopefully thwart the efforts of the hippies, and to keep the peace, Governor Tom McCall made an agreement with local anti-war factions to organize a sort of rock festival, ala Woodstock, at the state park in the city of Estacada.  The anticipation of this event and the rumors that Santana, The Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane would be performing, and being that this was a free-of-admission outdoor party where the police were encouraged to turn a blind eye to the nudity and drug abuse, the festival became an amazing spectacle that grew beyond expectation.  On the busiest day of this week long hippie love-in there was a line of cars that extended eighteen miles from the park gates into south east Portland.

President Nixon cancelled his visit to the American Legion convention, although nobody knows if it was a result of the protest activities, the hippies nevertheless thought their work was a success and felt quite proud as a result of this grand undertaking.

Where do I fit into this you ask?  Well, on the first day of the festival my mother’s friend, Connie, who worked as a Portland City Police officer, was dispatched to work undercover at the festival.  Not knowing what to expect and thinking that this would be a relatively harmless gathering of peace loving youth, Connie and my mother decided to show up a day before Connie was supposed to report for duty just to get a glimpse and find out what this thing was all about.  So, after attending our LDS Sacrament meeting services and having a nice and peaceful dose of spiritual enlightenment, Connie and mom drug me and Connie’s young son, Brad, who was one year older than me out to what has now become known as Vortex I.

This, like the car crash, is one of my first memories of childhood.  It was August of 1970 so I was four years old, going on five.  I was just about to enter Kindergarten the following month.  I was a little innocent boy who was growing up under his mother’s wing in a conservative home with a conservative nuclear family, and we were about to walk into this psychedelic extravaganza of nudity, rock-and-roll, pot smoking and free-loving LSD freaks.

Mom and Connie thought they were going to a state park for a big hippie picnic where there would be groups of young people holding signs and protesting the war.  Hippie love shit was relatively new in 1969 so ‘The Man’ hadn’t quite yet learned that whenever you put a bunch of unkempt, drug loving, jobless, college-aged wanderers together without supervision that it turns into a naked, drug-orgy from hell.

I’ll recall the events the best way my memory allows.  This was a mind bending experience for me, shocking to say the least, and it is something that I have never forgotten and has never faded.

We parked our car on this sunny Sunday afternoon and walked into Milo McIver State Park for a stroll, to walk down by the riverside for a quick and refreshing splash, to have a little bite to eat and give Connie a good look at what to expect for the next week.  When we walked in my senses were immediately assaulted by the sounds of rock-and-roll, visuals of naked bodies everywhere, people dancing and gyrating freely in crazy trances and all kinds of psychedelia painted on buses and cars, there were tents all over the place, booths set up, tie dyed fabrics everywhere, it was the pinnacle of what you would imagine a gathering of thousands of 60s war-protesting hippies could create.

I vividly recall seeing a large hairy man with dark hair and a dark beard walking past a big stage where there was a rock-and-roll band setting up.  Acid rock was blaring, he was buck naked and his ball-sac was bouncing back and forth, side to side off of his upper thighs as he walked.  I found this to be quite shocking but at the same time I found it so surreal that I was strangely amused by it and found myself staring and giggling.  I thought to myself, these are adults, these are people who live this way all the time…they must live this way all the time to be so comfortable like this in the open public, not caring what anyone sees or thinks about them.

My entire outlook on people changed at that moment and I suddenly was aware of the possibility, and probability that the world was full of things far stranger than I had witnessed or could imagine.  This set me up as sort of an explorer of sensationalism and strangeness.  I enjoyed being witness to things that normally shocked others and got a bit of a charge out of seeing people squirm uncomfortably while I would just observe and chuckle to myself about how oddly and extremely some people chose to lead their lives.  This is not to say that I ever agreed or had any desire to conform to these weird things, I just found them not so offensive as others did and understood that people were like this, and that they were just regular people doing irregular things.

As we continued walking we witnessed people toking weed out of various pipes, smoking joints, all the dancing, nude, semi-nude and otherwise, and then we approached a big hill that led down to the banks of the Clackamas River.  I thought I was going to be able to go swimming in the river and had my heart set on it all that afternoon.  That was the reason I was so excited to go.  This is a four year old mind, a mind that, once it gets fixed on something it is hard to dissuade from its intended goal.

We quickly saw that down at the river there was a large gathering of naked bodies all running around, splashing, tossing mud and having a good time.  That didn’t make me change my mind; I still believed I was on my way down there.  Mom put an abrupt halt to that idea and I threw a bit of a fit not being able to go swimming.  I was pretty upset and I remember standing up there looking at all those naked women and thinking, what’s the big deal?  I could still go down there and swim, they weren’t going to hurt me; they just didn’t have any clothes on.  Still, mom and Connie refused to let us go swimming, so we proceeded on walking around and looking at the tents, groups of stinky dirt-bag hippies, hearing blaring psychedelic rock music coming from all directions, there were vivid colors everywhere to enhance the psychedelic experience too.  This lasted about an hour until mom and Connie finally decided they had had enough and took us out of there and drove us home.

When we got home my father was livid!  He could not believe my mother would do such a thing as to expose me to this crazed, psychedelic Sodom and Gomorra.  Fortunately I don’t remember being witness to this fight but my mother recalls to me that dad was a little more than pissed off about it.

As my life went on I do remember bringing this up to her from time to time and her brushing me off acting like it was my imagination.  I questioned whether or not this experience was real or whether it was in my head because every time I mentioned it she would act like she didn’t know what I was talking about.  I’m positive she did this out of guilt for having exposed me to it.  After I was in my mid thirties I was on Google one day and decided once again to see if I could drudge up this memory and find any evidence of its history online.  I was able to find quite a bit and found out all I described above and also found out that an author by the name of Matt Love had written a book and made a movie based on Vortex I.  We ended up emailing each other back and forth and I shared with him everything I remembered from that day.  I haven’t seen the movie or read the book yet but I will and I’m anxious to see how much of what I remember lines up with the things told in his accounts.  Vortex 1 was the first Rainbow Gathering.  Deadheads know what I’m talking about.

I did approach my mother again, this time finally with some evidence, and told her that I did remember this thing and I had her tell me all she remembered about it too.  That is how I knew that her friend was an undercover cop and why we ended up going to this thing in the first place.  Imagine my confusion as I found out we actually did attend but that I had no idea the reason and was left to draw my own conclusions.

The next month after Vortex I, I started Kindergarten.  It was September of 1970 and I attended a private Baptist school in the city of Milwaukie called Wichita Kindergarten.  The babysitter mentioned in the car accident story had a son, Scott Ruby and we were the same age and so we attended the same Kindergarten.  We became best friends growing up.  One day, before we went to school, just before our ride picked us up we were playing with one of his Siamese cats.  Scott was holding it and for some reason he tossed it at my head.  The cat found itself suddenly flying through the air and engaged all of its claws and began frantically grasping through the air for anything to cling to.  The first thing he caught was the middle of my upper lip just under my nose.  The cat tore a big old scratch mark right down from the middle of my nostrils to the top of my lip and it was bleeding like crazy.  Pandemonium broke out at that moment and there was yelling, Scott was in trouble, I was crying, there was blood, the cat was pissed, everyone was running around and our ride had just pulled up to get us.  We got a wash cloth, cleaned me up and slapped a band-aid across my upper lip and I went to school.  To this day I still have that scar on my upper lip and you can see it in every picture of me.  It’s part of who I am.

Scott had an older brother named Jeff, who we tormented relentlessly, and who tormented us back when he could get away with it.  We were pretty good at playing the ‘little brother’ card so if Jeff ever gave us back in equal portions what we gave to him, he usually got in trouble.  We always had this little-kid fanciful sense of accomplishment when we would start trouble, and it would end with his mom or dad yelling, “Jeff, you leave those boys alone!”

Big brother vs. little brother was a game we played well.  But then again, it was two on one so it wasn’t all that fair.  We got really good at antagonizing the shit out of poor Jeff, teasing him, calling him names, drawing goofy pictures of him, I have no idea why we did it but we just did.  Scott got particular pleasure out of it and I went along for the kicks.  It was fun and honestly, Jeff took it pretty well too.  He was a really good natured kid and had his older friends he hung out with and he was always really nice to me despite the relentless taunting.

Scott had an older sister named Lynn who didn’t spend much time around that I remembered.   She was even older than Jeff so she was always away at school or doing things with her friends.  He had a little sister named Leslie too.  She was about three years younger than us.  Scott and I stayed very close until we were about 18 years old so Leslie took a lot of hell by virtue of her position and gender in the family.  Like Jeff, she was also a great kid.  Actually, so was Scott.  Those kids were all great.  His parents were great, especially his mom, Ruth.  She took care of me probably from age two to age five and she was just an incredibly sweet woman.  Her husband’s name was Clyde.  He worked for the telephone company.  I don’t remember a whole lot about him.  He came and went from work and when he was home I usually remember him doing projects around the house.  They had a huge back yard, like ¾ acre and grew a massive garden with corn rows we would hide in and raspberry bushes we would go through and eat fresh raspberries from.  They had a lot of fun toys outside too.  They were the first family I ever knew who had a trampoline in their yard.  That thing got its mileage from us; we used it for everything from where to eat our lunch to our boxing ring and to sleep on in the summer time.

The Ruby’s always had a lot of animals too.  They didn’t exactly have a farm but they had chicken coops and would gather up eggs in the morning for breakfast, there were ducks running around in the yard, always a lot of cats and dogs too.  They even named every animal they had, including the ducks and chickens.  I remember one of the dogs chased one of the ducks around the yard and ate its tail feathers off one time.  The duck survived but his ass was all bloody and missing lots of feathers and Ruth gave the dog a piece of her mind at full volume.  I recall a lot of yelling from her because of all the commotion from kids and animals.

I learned to ride a motorcycle in their yard too.  It was a Honda 90, a little thing.  They had a couple of them for the kids to run around the yard in.  It seemed like they always had the greatest toys to play with and I loved being over there.  At one point there was a severed head from some Bob’s Big Boy or something like that, rolling around in the yard.  I remember the big giant head and climbing inside of it to try and make the head speak.  That place was my second home.  Any time I had the chance I would go to Scott’s house for a sleepover I took it.  His house was the only place I felt completely comfortable away from home.  It was under their watch that I learned things like how to tie my shoes, how to ride a bike, how to zip up my coat, those kinds of things that little kids learn at the very beginning of their development.

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 10

The Rubys were Baptists.  My mom was raised Mormon, although I never knew her parents to ever attend church services.  My mother would take me with her to church often, but my dad wanted nothing to do with it, not until I was a little older, but I’ll save that for later.  Baptists don’t really look favorably on the Mormons but I don’t remember a single religious discussion ever coming up between me and Scott the whole time we knew one another and his parents never told me I was going to hell like a lot of other Baptists I’ve known through my life, so that was nice.  Even if they thought it, it was probably good they kept it to themselves.

As I got a little bit older my father began to dream a little bigger and started making some investments and taking some risks.  We moved from that apartment complex to a house on 45^th Ave in S.E. Portland in the Woodstock area of town.  I remember the house they bought was kind of old, it was dirty and run down and had a ¼ acre yard on the side.  They bought that house around the summer of 1971 for $17,000.  What a steal.  This is long before the term ‘flipping a house’ came into existence but that’s what they did.  They flipped that house quickly by gutting it, laying down new carpet, stripping the wallpaper, repainting, putting in a new kitchen and bathroom and cleaning up and repainting the exterior.  The house went from a complete wreck to a beautifully restored comfortable and cozy home.  I really like that house and I loved the neighborhood.  It was full of kids my age and I made some great memories in that place.

The side yard became the neighborhood football field.  It was absolutely perfect and we would play for hours.  It was empty, just a ¼ acre side yard with grass, and they kept it mowed and healthy.  I was a happy kid back then.  As far as I could tell I had a normal family.  My parents loved me, I had great friends, I had fun at school and I felt safe.  I thrived during these young years of my life.

But the safety and innocence didn’t last.  It was while we lived in this house that I began to realize that life was not all milk and honey and innocent safety.  I began to realize that my parents were not perfect.  This was a time when some bad things started to happen, where I began to witness things that dulled the edges of my conscious mind so that the sharpness of shock and dismay did not instinctively turn me away in disgust and horror as it may have other more innocent children.  In hindsight I see this as a blessing and a curse.  It prepared me to remain calm in a lot of situations where other people would panic or lose their cool or just be overwhelmed by what was going on around them that it would leave them traumatized, but it also prepared me to be a little more comfortable in situations where good LDS young men should not be spending their time and energy and it made me curious about things that I would be better off not knowing about.

I was exposed to sexual things at a very young age.  I was never molested, never taken advantage of, never abused, nothing like that, I just wound up being exposed to things that I shouldn’t have been exposed to at such a young age.

There were a lot of girls in my neighborhood and they were a little older than me, a little wiser, they were pretty sassy and they weren’t too bad looking either.  In hindsight I think that it is possible that there could have been some sexual inappropriateness going on in their homes where they were the targets.  This is based on things I remember them telling me, like their father sticking his tongue in their mouths when he kissed them and them being able to access liquor and get drunk at an early age.  I didn’t know what any of it meant so it just remained in my mind as I got older and realized what it was I was hearing.

I became close friends with these girls; we hung out a lot, played all the time, our parents hung out together and I was always quick witted, cute and funny enough to be the older girls’ friend.  One day we were walking down the street, it was me, Sharon, Betty and Joy.  Sharon was in the sixth grade and so was Betty.  They didn’t go to the same school because Sharon and her older sister, Patty, went to a Catholic girl’s school.  Sharon and Betty were just starting puberty and Joy was my age, about eight years old.  So there we were walking down the sidewalk and wouldn’t you know it, off to the side we see some magazine pages flapping around in the breeze.  We walked over and low and behold we had ourselves some porno mags.  Four kids standing there gazing at these beautiful bodies in all kinds of crazy poses looking at us with those bedroom eyes.  We browsed those pages in awe.  I have no idea what the girls were thinking but I had all kinds of crazy tingly warm sensations going through my body that I knew were probably grown-up feelings, but there I was with these cute young girls, getting a lusty look at some hot babes and I have to say that I enjoyed that experience quite a bit.  Even though I was a kid, I felt the stirrings of manhood, if you know what I’m saying.

Sharon’s parents both worked and so did Joy’s.  Sharon babysat at Joy’s house during the summer for her and her little brother and a little friend of theirs that was my age too.  One day we discovered a jigsaw puzzle that was up in the closet at Joy’s house.  It was a Playboy puzzle and we knew that if we put it together we could get another look at those naked bodies we had seen in the magazine recently.  So we got it out and played around with it, didn’t ever manage the patience to finish the puzzle but that did lead us to some activities that, if our parents found out about, would have gotten us into some serious trouble.  

This provocation of seeing the jigsaw puzzle got us to be a little more daring.  It was summer time and we were spending a lot of time in our bathing suits playing in the pool, sprinklers, etc. and the parents were away.  We were little kids, sure, but we had imaginations.  So, I changed out of my swimsuit and put on a towel and the girls dared me to drop my towel and run across the room naked.  Of course, being me I took that dare.  So I ran across the room in my birthday suit and it was quite liberating I have to tell you.  This prompted me to dare the girls to do the same and since Sharon was a budding young woman I knew it was my chance to get a look at something more than just the pages of a magazine.  I don’t remember how it all transpired because the feelings started rushing around in my head and I got caught up in the excitement of it all but next thing I knew there they were, naked girls.  I was an eight year old boy with this going on before my eyes.  Yeah, I thought this was pretty cool.  This went on day after day, no touching or anything but we were naked with each other all the time.  Disturbing on many levels, I know.

This only happened that one summer but it was the beginning of some pretty crazy feelings that were awakened inside of me and those experiences made me really dig on the female form and want more of it.  I can remember another time when I was visiting Sharon’s house with my parents and we were downstairs in their basement.  She was down there playing dress-up with a Betty.  I don’t know they saw this in a movie or what, but Sharon pushed me on the couch, made me sit there while her and her friend dressed up and then proceeded to perform a full on strip tease right in front of my gaping eyes.  I can’t describe the feelings this gave me as a young kid.  I felt like I was King Shit of Everything.  There these older girls were doing this crazy stuff for my entertainment and all I had to do was show up.

Not only that but Sharon’s older sister, who was in the eighth grade at the time, who had pretty much gone through puberty and had a nice rack of her own, came downstairs while this was going on and asked them what the hell was going on.  She didn’t scold them though, she seemed interested, almost like she wanted to participate too, but she didn’t, probably because her parents were just upstairs.  Her name was Patty.  She would always tell me how handsome I was and how when I got older all the girls would ‘be on my side’ as she put it.  When my parents went away for the evening sometimes she would come over and babysit me and we would sit up talking, laughing, making prank phone calls and having all kinds of fun.  She smoked cigarettes too.  I remember her telling me about things she had done with boys, things she was experimenting with and sharing these things with me like they were secrets just between us and they were new and wonderful experiences for her.  I remember getting butterflies in my stomach when she would tell me these things.

Rather than participate in the stripping she started taking my clothes off of me and looking me over.  I remember her saying something like, “let’s see what we have here” as she pulled my shirt up over my head.  I knew this was naughty but boy did I like it.  She only got as far as my shirt and my belt before it stopped but it was pretty fascinating to be a young boy and have these pretty older girls doing these things for me.  There was another time that we were playing hide and seek and Patty ran over and hid with me and taught me how to french kiss.  She told me she was preparing me for when I was older because I was going to be doing this a lot with girls when I grew up.  I remember it was very wet and I wasn’t quite ready for it but it was something I knew how to do when the time came in my teen years thanks to this pretty young thing.

There was another little girl who lived down the street a couple of houses named Mandy.  She was a cute little girl and we were the same age and in the same class at school so we walked together in the mornings.  I would often walk over to her house in the morning and knock on her door.  They lived in a run down house with a crappy yard and creaky old doors.  Her mother was single and she had a boyfriend who was around a lot.  He was a big scary guy who I think was mostly her drinking partner and was probably really abusive to Mandy.  Mandy never said much about him but would sometimes talk about how Earl would be coming over to stay the night so she had to be home with them and couldn’t play with the kids in the neighborhood that day.

There were always rumors in the neighborhood about Mandy’s alcoholic, abusive mother, how she would beat her children and how horrible it was in their home.  This is never something I ever witnessed but I would hear yelling coming from her home from time to time and her and her brother just seemed a little bit off center compared to normal kids.  Our parents would talk about it candidly and we always thought they were joking around, but at the same time we could tell that there were kernels of truth in the things they said.  Nobody called child protective services and nobody did anything about it.  This was a time when parents raised their children the way they chose and nobody put their nose in anyone else’s business.

Mandy also had an older brother named Brian.  He was friends with Patty and in the same grade, although they didn’t go to the same school because Patty was in Catholic girls’ school.  One day Patty was babysitting me at my house while my parents were at work when Brian knocked on the door.  Since he and Patty were friends she let him in and he sat in the living room with us talked for a while.  I could tell he liked her; she was a pretty girl with a great enthusiasm for life.  This day Brian had a fresh black eye and he came over to tell us about it.  When Patty asked him what had happened he told us that he got it for his birthday.  He said that his mother asked him what he wanted, and when he told her, she also said he deserved a black eye so she hauled off and clocked him in the face.

He got a black eye for his birthday and he laughed about it when he told the story like it was just a normal part of his every day life.  There was nothing odd about it and to me it just seemed like that was the way it was in their family so I didn’t really say much or think much of it other than being relieved my folks didn’t give me birthday gifts like that.

That was one of the last times I ever saw Brian.  I always felt bad for him and hoped that he was doing OK.  I don’t know if he left home, went to live with his dad, joined the Army or what, but I’m sure he got out of there the first chance he had.  I don’t know what ever became of Mandy either.  It wasn’t long after that that they moved away without really saying anything to anyone.  She was just kind of gone one day.

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 11

This neighborhood also had its share of young boys and I had some pretty good friends who were in my class too.  Kevin and Ricky were their names.  They lived about a block east and a block north of where we lived.  They loved playing football in the yard with me too.  There were also a group of boys across the street from me who we played with from time to time.  There was one who was my age, one who was a year older and then there was a mildly retarded older brother who we didn’t play with much but who we would see standing in the yard staring at the sun from time to time.  This family was a bit odd.  They were extremely enthusiastic about their Christian religion and they drove a red Volkswagen van.  Their mother was a short, fat loudmouth named Dorothy, who was always giving us, kids a piece of her mind for the things we were doing that she didn’t approve of.  It was usually me she targeted because I was usually the leader of the group and the one who caused most of the mayhem.  She would stand over me and drone on and on about how this was no way for a child to behave, how her children would never do these things and ask me how I would like it if she did that to my things, this and that, how I would like it if she told my parents, etc.  This wore on us and she became kind of a laughing stock with the kids in the neighborhood and it began to ostracize her boys from the rest of the kids in the neighborhood.  Still, from time to time, when we needed a couple extra bodies for baseball or football we would call on them to fill in.

These were the types of kids who took every opportunity to tattle and squeal on those of us who were trying to get away with just a little too much or press our advantage as kids would do, and we did it all the time.  These boys also used adult words and phrases when they would speak.  I’m not talking about profanity.  I’m talking about grown-up talk, like sophisticated people used.  They said things that were just not quite normal for young boys, like not ending their sentences in prepositions.  For example rather than saying something like, “the hill he stood on” they would say, “the hill upon which he stood”.  This got them their share of razzing and mocking so they kind of took on the role of the neighborhood adversaries.

One afternoon Sharon and Betty had set up badminton net across the street in Betty’s yard and were playing.  I wandered over there to watch and I started playing with them too.  The two boys from across the street walked over and I remember they were just being annoying as hell.  They were asking us if we wanted a drink of water and we thought it was something nice they were doing for us.  When they brought it over to us we drank it and it in the water was a bunch of salt and they started laughing at us after we drank.  They kept this up for a little while, just being as annoying as they could, being their typical adversarial selves, trying to instigate some trouble with us that would end with me getting a lecture from that battle axe, Dorothy.  Finally we started yelling at them and just telling them to go home and leave us alone.

They persisted and finally I had enough of it.  I marched over to John, the kid that was a year older than me, and began forcefully shoving him in the chest until he fell backwards onto the ground  Then I climbed on top of him and gave him the beating of his life.  I pounded his face in until his nose was flowing with blood and he was yelling for me to let him up.  I have no idea where this came from, I just snapped and I could hear the girls behind me cheering me on and telling him things like, “see, that’s what you get”.

While this was going on, John’s little brother ran home and got his mother and when I saw her coming I got off of John and he ran over to her and into the house.  I started walking the other way toward my house and this woman followed me on my heels lecturing me like she always did.  I would usually just stand there and take it because I was a kid and she was an adult, that’s just what you did.  You didn’t talk back or show disrespect to adults.  But this time was different.  I ignored her and just kept on walking with this fat ass biddy yapping in my ear.  Finally I turned around in the middle of the road and yelled into her face, “What?”  This startled her and she gave me another lecture.  I let it continue for a moment or two then realized that I had the power to just walk away, so I did.  I turned around and just walked into my house.

I told my parents what had happened and they were a bit startled, then soon there was a knock on the door and it was Sharon’s dad, Jack.  He came over to tell my parents that he had just witnessed this whole thing from out his living room window.  The parents were all laughing and I felt pretty kickass at this point, like I was the man, like nobody should screw with me or they would get what’s coming to them.

I took this attitude with me for the rest of my youth and it got me into a lot of trouble, although I never got my ass beat, except for one time when I mouthed off to the wrong kid who was about three years older than me and on the fast track to juvenile hall and a life in and out of jail.  We were in gym class and standing in a line in the gym.  This kid was named Gino.  He was Italian and he was a hard-ass.  He was held back a couple of grades so he was older and bigger and much tougher than the rest of us.  That didn’t stop me from giving him what was on my mind.  In fact, it made me give it to him even more because he was more intimidating than everyone else.  Until this one day, I just carried it too far and all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye I saw his fist coming and, WHAM!  Down I went.  He cracked me right in the mouth and I hit the gym floor.  I learned my lesson that day.  I didn’t learn to shut up but I did learn how far I could push it and I learned to keep my guard up at all times.  This punch in the mouth woke me up a bit because it bloodied the inside of my mouth and it was the first time I got a taste of punishment from the other side.  I was usually the one to hand out the beatings.  I went to the bathroom to wash up and we made up after that and he had a respect for me and I had a respect for him.  It was just another day in the life and that was how it was at my school.  We talked shit and we took it as well as we dished it out.  Nobody went to the principle’s office, no parents were called; we just took care of things right then and there.  That’s how it was, it was a different time, nobody had to be made to feel special and everyone knew that they had to stand up for themselves.

That spring I decided it was time to start playing organized baseball so I had my parents sign me up in the farm league.  We didn’t have tee ball back in those days.  We started the season with full uniforms, fast pitch, aggressive play, winners and losers, the way it is supposed to be.  None of this namby-pamby everyone’s a winner crap.  The teams were chosen with the best players from the neighborhoods and the coaches held try-outs so they could see who had talent and who didn’t.  I had been practicing throwing baseballs at targets at home in my spare time when there was nothing better to do so I could throw strike after strike right down the middle.

I was good because I remember figuring it out one day.  I thought to myself, if I could just throw the ball as hard as I can, and also hit my target, I could strike out any batter that stood up to me.  This wasn’t something my dad coached me on or that some gym teacher told me.  It was just something I figured out, so I started to practice doing it.  I drew a target on a cement wall that was in front of our house and stood in the street with my mitt and ball.  I would stare at the spot I wanted the ball to hit and I would wind up and throw it as hard as I could.  After doing this for a while I got very accurate and I could pretty much throw strikes in my sleep.  Then, when it came time to try out for baseball I had a smoking fast ball and it was right on target every time.  So they made me the pitcher and I would switch back and forth with the catcher when my arm wore out, then he would pitch and I would catch.  The team was sponsored by a local drug store called Nolan Rexall.  We had a great time at practice, we bonded, the coaches were great, they taught us how to play ball, we were a great team and we won every game we played…except when we played against the Big Red Machine.

These kids were good!  They were undefeated and we were undefeated.  They had a pitcher who could throw as good as I did, so they coasted through their games like we did, striking out batter after batter.  We were a great team.  We knew we were the best, but this team was our nemesis.  They were undefeated and when we played against them it felt like the World Series.  These guys were good, they had great uniforms, looked sharp; their pitcher was as good as me and when we went head to head it was an exhilarating experience.

It was a rival game but we were all really good about it, no bad mouthing or anything like that to the other team.  We did feel like we were going to win though.  We had a great game, I even pitched great.  I don’t remember all of the details but I do remember that during one of the innings I was pitching I threw nine strikes in a row and not a single batter swung.  I struck out three guys in a row with three perfect pitches each, just whiffed them with my fast ball as they stood there watching me throw fire down on them.  It felt pretty damn good to be me that day…but in the end we wound up losing the game.  It was a close one but those guys just had better defense than we did and they beat us by one run.

It was a good lesson in humility for me.  It taught me that there’s always someone bigger, better, faster, or stronger than me out there and that I’d better keep my eyes peeled and not get too full of myself or else I’d set myself up for a big fall.

Something special also happened that baseball season that taught me about perseverance and overcoming obstacles.  I was a cocky little kid, full of myself, I felt like I had the world by the tail and could swing it around any which way I wanted to.  But there was a practice game where I showed up and I was just off that day.  It was cold, we didn’t dress in our uniforms and it just felt weird and I didn’t have the same enthusiasm and drive as I did most other days.  I remember standing on the pitchers mound, cold, teeth chattering, throwing bad pitches, dropping the ball when the catcher threw the ball back to me and having a pretty off day.  This was the first time I ever got down on me.  To make things worse, when I went up to bat the pitcher let the ball get away from him and it hit me right in the kidney.  It was cold; I was in a bad mood and then bam!  This kid drilled me in the back with a bad pitch.  I shook off the tears and took my base and that night as I was going to bed I told my mom that I didn’t want to play baseball ever again.

She sat there with me and told me that things like that happened all the time to people and that just because I had a bad experience one day, that didn’t mean that all the other great things I had done and experienced had been wiped away.  She taught me that just because I had an off game and got hit by a pitch that it wasn’t any reason to quit.  She told me that I should take that and not be scared of it happening again, to stand up and try again, to remember all the good things I had done and to think about that one bad experience against all the other wonderful times I could remember.  It really helped me put things into perspective and see that just because I had a bad experience it didn’t mean that I should stop doing what I was doing or that I had suddenly lost my talent or skill.  She taught me that the best of the best have bad days and that it’s just part of life and that we need to pick ourselves up and keep moving forward.  So that’s what I did, and it brought me a lot of confidence and a very successful baseball season.

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 12

There was a kid who lived down the street from us, he was a big dumpy kid who was funny as hell and who had a mouth like a sailor.  I remember when I went to his house to play I would always hear something new, something that most families didn’t allow to be spoken in front of children.  Jeff was his name and he was pretty fun.  I knew that I shouldn’t consider him to close a friend because he just seemed to be on the verge of a meltdown all the time and was kind of edgy.  He entertained the hell out of me and I would always egg him on to say things that the other kids wouldn’t dare say and he would come up with strings of cuss words that were just hilarious and so out of control.  I couldn’t believe a kid had the guts to say such things.  I remember one day he let loose with a real doosey.  He looked at me and said, “You ready for this one?”  Then he turned his head and said “fuckershit!”  I was stunned.  This guy was a master vulgarian and I was beholding something that I knew my parents would never allow me to be exposed to.  Such language from a child!  Where did it come from?  He just laughed it off and thought it was funny that I found it so shocking.

There was a family who lived down the block from us, just across the street from Mandy on our side of the street.  The mom was a big fat woman and the dad was a skinny little man.  It was an odd looking couple and they had two girls that went to the same school as we did.  We were friendly with them but we weren’t necessarily friends like I was with the other kids in the neighborhood.  One day I was riding my mom’s bike around the block and I saw Jeff and picked him up.  He got on the handlebars and I rode him down the street past this family’s home.  Their mom was outside hanging laundry on the line and Jeff yelled out, “who wears those fat ass underwear?”  I ducked my head hoping not to be seen but we were in the middle of the street and I was busted.  This woman called my parents and let them know that I was hanging out with this horrible kid who had such a potty mouth and they made me go over and apologize for saying such horrible things.  It wasn’t me though!  I was just there, and Jeff let loose with his turrets or whatever.  I did laugh my ass off, and I’m sure he let it fly for my entertainment but these were the kinds of things I always found myself in the middle of, just trying to amuse myself at the expense of others and getting into trouble for it.

A lot of interesting things happened to me while I lived in that place.  I learned how to play basketball at my friend Kevin’s house and would spend hours shooting hoops by myself in his driveway.  His parents didn’t mind that I stayed at his house long after he went in for dinner or to do homework or whatever.  They liked me and just let me have a good old time shooting hoops in their yard by myself.  This is where I remember having the childhood fantasies of championship glory and playing it out over and over in my mind.  I would imagine making that last second, desperation shot at the buzzer to win the game and reap the glory.  I would throw the ball up to the hoop, pretending to be the opposing team missing a shot and I would begin the count down, seven, six, five, I would grab the ball as it rebounded off of the rim and dribble up to the foul line where I would turn and run in for a lay up, pretending to zig and zag through traffic, still counting, four, three, two, one, and I would shoot the ball just as I got to zero and the buzzer went off.  I could hear the crowd cheering as the ball went through the hoop and I scored the winning basket.  I would make cheering sounds myself and run around the driveway with my arms up in the air like I had just won the world championship.  I could almost feel the exhilaration of winning these games, as if they were real.  I had a seriously active imagination and I lived my life in my head because I was an only child who had to entertain himself most of the time.

Kevin had a dog named Hebo.  Yeah, weird name, I know.  His older brother called it Hedo, I have no idea why but I thought it was odd.  I didn’t know if he was stupid or if he just thought it was clever or what.  One day I was sitting on the dog like it was a horse and I grabbed his ears and started to twist them like they were motorcycle handle bars.  Hebo turned around and took a big bite out of my face to let me know that wasn’t cool with him.  I learned to be a little more careful with dogs that day and never quite trusted them after that.  I knew it was my own damn fault but after the Jocko attack and having Hebo snap at me, I learned that, as friendly and nice as dogs were, they could turn on you at any moment so you’d better keep your head on a swivel.

We only lived in that neighborhood for a couple of years before my parents sold that house for a pretty nice little profit and bought another fixer-upper a few miles away in a new neighborhood.  By this time I was going into the fourth grade and I would be going to my fourth school.  There was the private Kindergarten when we lived on 28^th St, then I attended Hosford Elementary in the first grade living in that same place, then we moved when I was going into the second grade to the house on 45^th and I attended Woodstock Elementary.

This time we moved a little farther north and I was enrolled in a school called Richmond Elementary.  This school was closer to the inner city and it didn’t have any grass surrounding it like the other schools I went to.  This one was all blacktop and the schoolyard was huge.  It was an old brick school with a large boiler room in the basement and was several floors high.  A lot of kids attended this school; it was Kindergarten through eighth grade, so there was a rich schoolyard culture at this place.  At times it was almost like a prison with the way the groups of kids managed themselves.  We would have to protect ourselves in groups of gangs.  We didn’t have organized gangs for the purpose of violence and selling drugs or anything like that, we just had to band together so the big kids couldn’t rule over us.  We knew how to take care of ourselves and it was a pretty fun place to be.  I had really good friends and we watched over each other pretty closely and took care of each other whenever there was a problem.

I was always pretty extroverted and confident and always jumped in to volunteer with any activity when I had the opportunity.  I was getting to be pretty agile and coordinated too and I could play sports pretty well for a kid.  I played with a lot of older kids and I could hold my own because of my tenacity and grit, I just never let up and I gave 110% at everything I did.

I always loved playing dodge ball during gym class.  This was before things were politically correct, when teachers could use corporal punishment in the classroom and use humiliation and intimidation to enforce their authority on the students.  So naturally, dodge ball was just another school activity.  I was a ferocious competitor and I can remember times when I would be the only one left on the team and we were about to lose and there were three or four other kids on the other side of the line staring me down, trying to get me in their sights for the final kill.  I loved these moments because they were the ones I could really step up to and become the hero, so I would stand there ready, with my head on a swivel prepared for combat.  Some kid would get up the nerve to try and take me out and rather than dodge the ball I would be aggressive and go catch the ball, bringing all of my team back to the court where we would then quickly pick off the opposing team one by one and win the game.  I loved this kind of thing and always tried to get myself in that position in games or sports.

During my fourth grade year there was a huge group of boys that played football together in the schoolyard every chance we got.  We couldn’t play tackle because there was no grass so we always played two-hand touch below the waist.  We would line up and choose teams, I was always one of the first chosen to be on any team and a lot of times I was chosen to be captain to pick the teams.  The kids who played were usually older than me, but they always let me play because I was a scrappy kid who could run fast and play hard.  We would have incredible competitions out on this school yard at recess, before school and after school.  We played for hours and hours, we couldn’t get enough of it.  I remember waking up in the morning before school trying to get out the door without breakfast so I could get to school an hour early for the football game.  My mom would always try to slow me down and have me eat something but I would rush through it and run to the school yard.

Once there at the school we would start the game.  There would be a big group, usually at least ten kids or more and we would split up into teams.  We would make up plays and strategies in our huddles, throw blocks, have all kinds of rushing rules, it was a blast.  I loved making that dash for the end zone and cutting away from my defender and seeing the football spiraling toward me as I would reach out at a full sprint and catch the ball to run in for a touchdown.  I would spike the ball and run around with my arms in the air jumping up and down and my team mates would come running down to join me.

Sometimes I would QB but most of the time I was a receiver.  It was fun to play defense too because catching interceptions or blocking throws was just as much fun as catching passes.  It was the greatest feeling to be playing those games and as the other kids began to come to school in the mornings they would gather around and watch us play.  We had an audience and it felt pretty cool to entertain them.  We were kids but we were pretty damn good and we had respect from a lot of the kids in the school.

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 13

There were no organized little league sports teams for kids in the part of Portland I lived in at that time.  No Pop Warner football, no city league basketball for kids, there was only little league baseball and that was it.  All other sports you didn’t get to play until you were in high school and you had to learn on your own while you were growing up to get good enough to make the teams.  So we did this with street football and basketball and as I grew up I got pretty good.  My father would coach me on how to throw the football, how to improve my jump shot, how to play good defense and things like that because he enjoyed watching me love sports.  He was a great teacher but at the same time, he was overly critical and very harsh with his instruction and very impatient if I didn’t do something right immediately.

I learned a lot from my dad by just observing the way he interacted with people, the way he reacted to situations and the way he handled strangers and conflicts.  He was always extremely confident, very aggressive but he wasn’t quick to fly off the handle and he was had a silver tongue when it came to talking with people so he always did well when making acquaintances and talking with people.  He was a road rager though.  He didn’t have a lot of patience for bad drivers.  If someone drove too slow in front of him or changed lanes the wrong way he would always drive up next to them and give them the stink eye and a head shake of disapproval.  I never did like that side of him, but I kind of took on that part of him because he was my role model.

My dad was also pretty tough and could take care of himself when he needed to.  He talked about it once in a while but I actually had the chance to see it a couple of times.  I didn’t necessarily like when this happened, I found it to be kind of traumatizing and unsettling to see my father in these kinds of conflicts, but it did help me learn how to take care of my self and stand up for myself.

The first time was at a public swimming pool in south east Portland.  My dad took me and a couple of my friends for a swim one afternoon and we were playing in the pool, just having a good time with the rest of the families that were there.  I noticed a commotion outside the fence that surrounded the pool and saw two young men running around the perimeter of the fence in a chase. They were running pretty slowly and breathing heavily, that is what caught my attention, their heavy footsteps and heavy breathing.  It was obvious that this chase had been going on for quite some time and the guy who was trying to get away was running out of options.

They had their shirts off and one was chasing the other and yelling at him to try and catch him.  It must have been pretty serious because the guy being chased jumped up on the cyclone fence, which was about eight feet high, and climbed over it into the swimming pool area to get away.  That didn’t stop the chase, the other guy soon scaled the fence and the pursuit was on inside the pool area and these guys were running around the deck yelling at each other.

The pool manager yelled at them to stop and they did for a moment but when they did they just squared off and started duking it out.  The manager stepped in between them and was promptly flattened on his ass by one of them as they continued fighting.  These guys were beating the shit out of each other too and we had no idea what it was all about.  Well, my dad had about enough of it so he got up out of the pool in and walked in between these two guys, grabbed a hold of both of them, one in each hand and with some sort of superhero strength just tossed them both back from each other, stood in the middle of them like he was ready to take them both down and yelled, “Break it up!”

I was stunned!  These guys weren’t paying attention to anything that was going on and they had creamed the pool manager but when dad got up there, somehow he was able to take control of the situation.  Then the guys did stop and I heard the manager say, “I’m calling the police.”

When the manager walked over to make the phone call, one of the guys went over and leaned against the brick wall to rest.  The other guy followed behind him, walked up to him and took him and cold cocked him with a right cross to the face, which sent the back of his head into the brick wall.  I watched this whole thing play out right before my eyes as I sat there in the swimming pool.  His head hit the wall with a loud thud and the guy was immediately unconscious and slid down the wall onto the ground like a rag doll.  That was the end of the fight.  I remember there were drops of blood in the pool too and by that time everyone was being escorted out of the pool and sent home.  The police showed up and we drove home.

I never found out what happened or why those guys were doing what they were doing, and the cops never came to the house to talk to my dad, but I gained some incredible admiration and respect for him that day, watching him take control of that chaotic situation in front of everyone at the pool.

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 14

It was getting harder for me as I got older to please my dad.  When I was a kid he saw me developing fast, blossoming into a bright young kid with all the enthusiasm and confidence in the world, but as I got a little older and my growth slowed a bit, and his life became more of a grind and a challenge with the worries of the world and the strife between he and my mother, we started to butt heads and he became very critical and scolding rather than encouraging and fun like he was when I was younger.

My parents were really good to me through these years but they really struggled with each other.  They just didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things and they argued incessantly about everything it seemed.  My mother would be doing something around the house and she would make a comment to my dad, he would comment back and it wouldn’t be exactly the way she wanted it so she would ask him what was wrong with him.  He would say, “Nothing, what’s wrong with you?”

This little tit for tat type of back and forth bickering was very abrasive and it wore me down by watching it day after day because with the question, “What’s wrong with you?”, would come back responses, or really reactions of petty little things they had to find to show that they were not the one with a problem.  So they would begin to point out one another’s faults to show who had a problem with this or that and these stupid little pissing matches would escalate into yelling, accusations, the subjects would move from finances to he-said, she-said, to something dad said he would do but didn’t follow through on or something my mom made for dinner that didn’t turn out very good and he would criticize her for that.

It just got to be a normal part of life to listen to this chaos day after day, the arguing, the accusations, the merciless needling of each other and I myself became very skillful in the art of argument and persuasion as a result of seeing how these two operated, always showing each other up, showing each other, “Yeah but you this, and you that”, in response to some attack put on them.

It was like learning the art of verbal guerilla warfare in my own home.  It was a sport of mental gymnastics and it became something that was just a part of life.  It was engrained in me to be abrasive, to be confrontational, to egg people on, to point out idiosyncrasies, to goad them into things they didn’t want to do and to just manipulate situations for my own means or entertainment, to poke and prod and just needle people to the point of getting a response out of them.

I’m not saying I was some kind of evil mind-fucker or anything like that, I just mean I learned how to take control of situations and be king of the hill.  When you’re a kid you have an unlimited supply of energy and I had to direct it somewhere.  So as I got older it started to get me into a lot of trouble.  When it came to verbal sparring, I was the best.  I don’t know if it was intentional, conscious or unconscious but I was a real mind-fucker and I loved to dominate.  I was really smart and could be really devious and maniacal if I wanted to be. 

The friends I had at this new school were decent kids but they were a little rough around the edges, like me and we were a pretty raucous bunch.  There was Mike Rangey, a tall blonde kid who was the group leader by default because of his good looks and his size.  He also had an older brother who helped Mike grow up a little quicker than he should have.  Mike and his brother lived with their mother.  His parents were divorced and there wasn’t a lot of supervision during the day because she worked.

There was also another scrappy and funny little kid we all loved named Tommy Truman.  He lived pretty close to me with his mom and dad and he had an older brother too who was about eighteen.  Tommy’s brother was into hot rods and was always working on loud muscle cars in his driveway when I went over to play with him.  There were a lot of other kids we hung out with quite a bit but these were the kids I stuck with the most.  We were three amigos and we were tight.  We watched out for each other, we shared everything with each other and any time any one of us had any kind of experience that we knew was supposed to wait until we were older, we were always eager to share the details with one another and try to relive the moment for each one of us to enjoy.

It was with this group of kids that I got my first taste of tobacco.  Mike had swiped some cigarettes from his mother’s purse and we went behind the school to smoke them.  I wasn’t really into it but they were.  They lit the cigarettes and smoked them just like adults did, puffing away, blowing smoke through their nostrils as we talked to each other, flicking ash to the side like a seasoned smoker.  I could tell these guys had watched their parents smoking and wanted to be just like them.  I always watched my dad smoke but I didn’t really want to be a smoker for some reason.  It was probably because my parents told me it was wrong to smoke and I figured I would get in trouble.  But, nevertheless, there I was with these guys so I had to give it a try.  I took one that was already lit and gave it a drag, inhaling a little bit like they did.  It burned my throat and lungs and I coughed a bit.  I only took one drag and that was it.  I told them I didn’t like it very much and they didn’t really bust my chops or anything, they just kept on smoking and I was the odd man out when it came to cigarettes.

I never witnessed it, but these guys also talked about smoking pot too.  It was Mike’s big brother who introduced them to it.  Luckily I was never exposed to it, I’m not sure if I would have partaken anyway, but I knew these guys had tried it, and they liked it.  And when they talked about it I wasn’t put off by it at all, in fact it sounded pretty dang fun and something I might want to try some day.  So, because of the conversations we had, I was pretty familiar with marijuana use and the terminology used in talking about it at a young age.

It was at Mike’s house one summer afternoon that I got my first glimpse of hard core pornography.  This was a bit disturbing and I really wish I hadn’t seen what I saw that day.  It was just a little too much for a young kid to behold.  Hell, I didn’t have a clue where babies came from or what an erection was good for, I just thought it was some annoying thing my ding dong did in the morning when I had to go to the bathroom.  But this day Mike’s brother and his friends were upstairs looking at dirty magazines.  Mike and I were downstairs hanging out and he said to me, “You want to see some dirty pictures?”

I was curious so I said OK and walked on upstairs to take a look.  I started thumbing through the magazines hoping for something like I saw in the Playboys found in the field by my house with the girls, but this was different.  I can remember me and Mike asking his brother, “Why is that guy peeing in her mouth?”

His brother responded, “That’s not pee, it’s semen.”

We asked again, “What’s semen?”

That’s when we got the old standby answer of, “wait until you’re older and you’ll understand”.  We were confused and frustrated by this experience because we didn’t understand what was going on and fortunately the guys didn’t explain it any further than that.

So we went downstairs again to make some lunch for ourselves.  I remember he cracked open a couple cans of Campbell’s clam chowder and heated it up on the stove.  When it was ready I started to eat it but my stomach was feeling really sick from the pictures I had just seen.  That was a pretty shocking experience.  I was a kid with a hollow leg and I could eat for days, but this time my appetite was gone.  It’s the first time I ever experienced the emotions of anxiety, guilt and shame.  I didn’t understand what I just witnessed, I had no clue what it was, and it wasn’t pretty and sexy like the other naked girls I had seen in the other magazines.  This was really extreme and it blew my mind.  I knew it was something way beyond what I should have been exposed to, and it stuck with me for a very long time.  I would try to get the images out of my head because they were so disturbing to me, I almost felt violated that day because those assholes let us innocent little kids look at hard core pornography.  If I could go back in time I would change that scene and beat those kids’ asses for what they showed to us.

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 15

My parents didn’t have many friends but they did have some pretty good friends from time to time.  This one couple they hung out with had a son about my age named Sam.  They were kind of hippie types and were pretty liberal but a lot of fun.  Sam and I had all kinds of fun together because he was just as adventurous and mischievous as I was and we never had any trouble finding things to keep us entertained and laughing.

When I visited Sam at his house I would see his parents’ Playboy magazines and of course, I would take the chance to thumb through them and get a load of the gorgeous females between the covers.  Most kids thought girls were yucky, but not me.  I though chicks were hot and I liked looking at them.  I would still have flashes of those hard core porno pictures come into my mind and they were disturbing, but I liked the softness of the female nude in Playboy.  I knew it was wrong for me to look, but I was fascinated by it.

There were a few times that I saw strange smoking devices laying around Sam’s house and he would tell me that his parents smoked pot with them.  There were glass pipes, bongs, bags of weed, etc.  One day Sam took me out into his dad’s truck and opened the glove box and pulled out a big bag of pot.  He said, “You know what this is?”

I said, “No, what is it?”

He told me, “It’s marijuana and your dad and my dad smoke it together.”

I didn’t believe him because my dad said he didn’t like that stuff.  But, Sam may have witnessed them doing it and I wonder if dad really did toke it up a time or two when hanging out with those friends.  I do know that his only confession of marijuana use was a time he said he tried it when he was drunk and it made him sick so he never tried it again.  Maybe it was with Sam’s dad that he did try it, or maybe he was just trying to protect me by saying he never got into it.  Either way, it didn’t really matter.  Dad did what he did and it was OK with me.

I always had this strange feeling though that my dad wasn’t always completely forthcoming about his personal activities.  I mean, if I was ever to ask him anything about his life the answer was always very cut and dried and his story was always right along the lines of having done the right thing or made the right choice, except when it came to kicking some ass.  He has a scar on his upper lip and when asked how he got it he says some guy at a bar hit him.  I asked him why and he told me it didn’t matter because it was the last thing the guy remembers doing; and I actually believe him because I’ve seen him in a couple of scraps and watched him go from dad to the incredible hulk in about three seconds – another reason I was always scared shitless of him.

I do know he worked at the ship yards as an iron worker.  I’ve seen him as drunk as a junk yard dog.  I’ve seen him blow his top more times than I can count and I’ve seen him bullshit his way through many situations to get what he needed.  I know for a fact that he hid a lot of what he did to keep himself looking nice and guiltless.  I wish I knew more about him only to shed more light on what the deal is with me.

I always remember having some sort of interest or fascination with drugs.  I was always interested in knowing what it was those drug crazed freaks called hippies were experiencing.  There were TV commercials I remember as a kid where some long haired youngster would hold up a crayon-drawn self portrait of himself on fire or in some state of freak-out and go on to tell us how this is a picture of himself while he was on LSD.  They never told us not to do the drugs; they would just describe to us in some nightmarish description what their experience was.  This was supposed to scare us away from being interested.  Well, as spooky and creepy as this was it piqued a curiosity in me.  I always figured out that they were back to normal but that these drugs put them in some temporary dream type state.

Most of the TV programming was a bit psychedelic.  Easy Reader from The Electric Company was one tripped out city slicker, grooving out to his kooky, funked out theme song.  I claim to remember seeing Jimi Hendrix on Sesame Street being interviewed by Grover.  I can’t find any evidence of that on YouTube or anywhere online so I may have imagined it.

When I was in the fifth or sixth grade we received an assignment to put captions to various pictures cut from magazines.  I got one of a small child about two years old holding his thumb and forefinger together up to his mouth so I captioned it something about needing a roach clip.  My parents saw this drug reference and were not at all pleased.  While I thought it was funny they thought it was something to be concerned about with a fifth grader familiar with drug terminology.  I didn’t even know what a roach clip was, let alone a roach.  I had just listened to a lot of Cheech and Chong records with my little buddy Joe Cox, who had an older brother, who had Cheech and Chong records.

So that got me in trouble of course.  It seems like I would always do dumb things like that, sort of innocently but then find myself being punished for it.  I knew right from wrong but I thought it was funny and OK to talk about it as long as I wasn’t partaking.  I guess it wasn’t so OK.

Life was starting to get very intense for me.  When we were in Portland I was usually very happy.  I made a lot of friends, I had a lot of fun and my cares were unknown.  We moved to Vancouver and everything started to change.  I don’t know exactly why but things were different.  For one thing I had to make all new friends and that can be a little hard.  I have always been very sociable and I have always made friends easily but I was never too discerning.  Children need to be taught that; all I ever got from my parents about choosing the right friends was stay away from strangers and I could tell they didn’t have much respect or esteem for black people.  They weren’t necessarily overtly racist and telling me not to hang out with black kids but my dad would use the term ‘chocolate drop’ when talking about them.  I remember coming home from school in about the third grade and he would say to me, “did you play with any chocolate drops today?”  

Mom would reply, “Milt, don’t say things like that!”

And he would say, “What, I was only kidding”

To be honest, it was seriously racist but kind of funny too.

I don’t remember if my mom or he explained it to me or what they said but I got that he meant black people.  They used to call Brazil Nuts, nigger-toes too.  That was just their upbringing but that bothered me.  I didn’t even know what the real name of those nuts was, and I knew I didn’t like them.  Sometimes when we were at my grandparent’s house I would dig through the nuts and take the opportunity to say nigger in front of my parents by talking about the nuts.  I felt like I was getting away with something; like reading the Bible and seeing words like damn and hell.

I wasn’t racist, I was just a kid and I loved everyone who just wanted to laugh and have a good time.  I didn’t care where they were from, what they looked like or what category they fit into; I just judged people by how comfortable I was in their presence.  I always liked kids that were a bit on the odd side of things, maybe it’s because they were always the best material for laughter, strangeness and not fitting the mold.  I have never been much of a conformist.  I always found those who ran in cliques to be arrogant and self-centered.

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 16

My parents’ volatility had taken its toll and after several separations, my mother finally packed me and our stuff up and we moved in with my cousins, the Turners in north east Portland.  This was my mother’s sister, Carole and her husband, Wes and their brood of children.  At this time they had six kids, but when it was all said and done they finished it off with a lot of nine.

They lived in a huge house with a gigantic stair case and a huge basement where we could play like wild animals and they had a killer back yard, but not only that, this was back in the early 70s in the northwest before the cancerous Urban Sprawl littered the landscape.  We had acres upon acres of old growth forest to make our domain and play to our wildest imaginations.

BMX bikes were a new thing and we were all converting our Schwinn Stingray bicycles into stunt bikes we could hit ramps with and catch some air.  We would replace the old banana seat and sissy bar with the BMX pear shaped seat and take the ape-hanger handle bars off and replace them with the BMX handle bars  with the cross bar, new grips and pads all around.

I had pads on my bike, on the bar that ran between my legs, on the gooseneck, on the crossbar of the handlebars, just in case I crashed and burned, the pads on the bike would soften the blow.  We didn’t have any time for helmets or knee pads.  We padded our bikes, not our bodies.

And I was the craziest mofickey of them all trying to build ramps to launch myself as high in the air as I could possibly get.  I never even stopped for a moment to think about danger or injury.  All I could think of was flight.

So one afternoon there was a nice dirt hill down the street at the dead end, and we had some spare boards so I built the steepest ramp on the tallest dirt hill so I could get the most air possible; never thinking about landing, only the exhilaration of flying through the air on my bike.

As I pedaled down the block toward this behemoth of a ramp, which we called a ‘jump’ I was only focused on going as fast as I could because I only understood the simplest of the laws of physics.  Go fast, come in contact with an opposing force, the faster I go, the greater the launch.  So I hit that jump pedaling for all I was worth and I launched myself sky high in the air and for a moment I felt like Icarus flying to the sun, but just like Icarus, something had to give, and I suddenly remembered that there was a landing coming immediately and I was stranded about eight feet in the air with my bike completely vertical at this point.  My mind processed all of this information in an instant and I knew I was going to eat shit in the hard dirt road below.  And I didn’t want the bike to land on top of me so in my youthful wisdom and my instinctive ability to survive I kicked the bike out from in front of me, clearing myself from impact with the bars and pads I had carefully maintained for just this sort of incident.

There I was in the air about eight feet up, flying free just like I wanted to be, but now rather than feeling complete exhilaration, it was total panic and I began to give in to the law of gravity.  Down I came and hard I fell.  Whammo!  I Landed hard on my right butt cheek and looking back it couldn’t have been any better than that, thinking about the other options of flailing around and landing with my hands down to break a wrist or try to roll and break my ribs.  I was definitely protected in that moment as well, and even though it hurt like hell, I just got up, jumped up and down a couple of times, shook my head clear of the concussive feeling of getting punched in the nose and grabbed my bike and rode back home in retirement.

That was the last of my extreme bike jumps.  I went as far as I could and I learned my limits.  And that day I started to learn that you have to think ahead a little bit.  You can dream big, but you have to deal with the consequences.  And if you’re not prepared for what might come then you’re just going to have to suck it up when it hits you between the eyes unexpectedly.  You can be as crazy as it gets, but sometime you’re going to get seriously injured.  Fortunately, that was not the day.

Most of my life my right leg has been a little bit shorter than my left leg.  I never noticed it until I was 18 years old and a chiropractor took some X-rays and showed me that my pelvis was a little bit out of kilter.  And not until I wrote these stories did I realize that my crash landing into the ground from way up high, flying free as I always wanted to is what caused that imbalance.

And there was another crash that got my spine all compressed and discombobulated that happened while I was fooling around on some gymnastics equipment at the local health club.  This was before Gold’s Gym was everywhere and everyone worked out.  Back in these days, it was rather expensive to be a member of a health club, and they were exclusive too.  There were several around town.  There was the one at the golf club called Green Meadows.  The Portland Trailblazers used to work out there.  Then there was the broke down ghetto workout club called Landover that sat nicely inside of the Landover subdivision.  And then there was Club Oxford.  That’s where me and dad worked out.  He had good taste and liked to feel like he was something special in society so he joined that club and it was awesome!  Dad really was a pretty cool dude, always.  He just ruled life, took it by the horns and rode it the way he wanted to.  And that’s what I learned from him.  I just did as my father did, and I became quite an ass for a time in my life. But I had fun doing it!

So we would go to Club Oxford feeling all uppity and righteous while our lesser important brethren would work out at Landover.  We felt pretty superior, and we were.  That club was great, and I was just a kid, eating this entire thing up.

Dad taught me how to play racquetball while I was pretty young.  And being the fierce competitor that he was, we of course, had to take it to the nth degree of competing against one another.  And I could never beat him, but I came close many times.  But that man taught me tenacity and grit and fortitude that wouldn’t quit.  He instilled in me a strength of character, a Constitution that is so solid, and that’s why I became what I am today and did all the things I did in life.

And when I went to college I ruled the racquetball courts.  People were astounded at how good I was and it was frustrating to them because nobody could beat me and I wouldn’t join in any tournaments.  It drove them nuts.  I understand today why I did what I did but while it was all happening I was a little confused and down on myself for not getting in there and dominating the racquetball tournament.  Thinking back, it was my fear of failure that plagued me so terribly throughout my life.  And that’s why I passed up many opportunities, because of my fear of failure.  I was never taught that it’s OK to fail in achievement.  That failure is part of the process of achievement and reaching one’s goals.  One must fail time and time again to understand who he truly is, to know himself through and through.  But failure in my household was a bad thing, and when I failed at something I was given the what for over and over again for my mistakes.  

My parents bless their hearts, they did the best they knew how with the knowledge they had at the time, but they were an angry couple.  I mentioned it previously, but it’s important to understand how profoundly that rancor and contention shaped my life.  Throughout my life, any achievement I would accomplish, the benefits, the good things, the growth that I might have experienced from them, were overlooked and the minutia of the flawed was focused upon.  I kid you not.  It was that bad all the time.  No matter how well I did with anything, the mistakes were presented afterward to me so I could learn from them I suppose.  But that gave me such an inferiority complex, and it created a serious rebellion in my soul.

My dad was also my basketball coach.  And in one playoff game against our rival team I schooled those boys, I was on fire!  I had like 6 steals, 24 points and 8 rebounds.  He let me play point guard and I loved it, and we had a team that the others feared.  

But after that game we were on the drive home and I said to my dad, “I did pretty good tonight, huh?”

And his response was nothing more than, “you did alright.”

That moment right there was the moment that I turned into a rebel against my father.  I busted my ass for him all my life and I kicked ass for him all my life in football, basketball, racquetball, golf, baseball, any sport he wanted me to play I did the best I could and all I ever got was, that was alright.  Never, ever did I hear accolades, praise, good job, you’re awesome!

Dig Me No Grave

Chapter 17

This is a story about me.  I’m Vaughn Brown.  Vaughn Hocksworth Brown to be sure.  I always thought my middle name sucked, but in my later years I’ve grown to like it.  I sign my art work as VB Hocksworth, which sounds kind of cool, it is somewhat of an alias but still my real name too.  And of course my friends call me Hocksworth when they learn my middle name.  My buddy Anthony calls me Hocks and my brother in law Brandon calls me Hocksworth.  Everyone else calls me Vaughn or just V.  A lot of people in the music industry call me V.  But my closest friends just call me Vaughn.

I was born in 1965 on September 21st.  For some reason that’s kind of a big deal.  I don’t follow astrology and all that mystical mysterious kind of stuff but I do know I was born when it has something to do with the age of Aquarius, also it’s the first day of fall, or in South America the first day of Spring.  Plus, Earth, Wind and Fire wrote a song about The 21st Day of September.  And on my 54th birthday I was standing on a street corner and heard that song blaring out of someone’s car and I looked to the heavens and said, “thank you heavenly father for saying happy birthday to me”.

I have a pretty good recall of most of my life and I’ve been re-remembering things in preparation for this project, and am finally putting things in print and getting them out of my head.  I’m trying really hard to remember back as far as I can but the only true memories I have, other than photographs of my toddlerhood, started about the age of three or four.

My earliest memories were of me and dad on Saturday morning.  He would be sitting in his favorite chair in front of the black and white television, I would be sitting on his lap and he would light a cigarette with a match (this was before the Bic lighter had been invented so you had matches or a zippo) and then he would blow out the match and I would watch the smoke rise up in the air and dance around until it dissipated into the air.  Then I would turn my focus on to the smoke rising from his cigarette as it sat between his fingers.  I would be mesmerized at the way the smoke rose up from the ashes in a uniform line and then start dancing around and dissolve into the air just like the match smoke.  For some reason I was fascinated by watching that.  And then he would crack open the beers.  This was beer cans with pull tabs.  He drank Blitz Wienhard, before it was Henry’s it was Blitz.  I always recall the smell of a freshly lit cigarette and a newly opened beer as being a bonding memory with my dad.  I would ask him if I could have a sip of his beer and he would tell me not to drink too much.  But I would take big gulps and I got a taste for it because it was me and dad watching football and having beers, even though I was like four years old.  But he only let me have sips, never anymore than that.  And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  I got more alcohol in my cough medicine than what I got from those sips of beer.  And holy crap, sometimes when mom didn’t have any cough medicine in the medicine cabinet and I was sick, it was whiskey, honey and lemon juice.  Nasty taste but it did the trick.  And I would get colds and flus every season so mom would stock up on the best cough medicine of the day.  Back then it was called Triamenic. And she would give me more than the recommended dosage.  I remember having really kooky dreams, very psychedelic when I was sick.  I thought it was because of the fever but as I grew up and started experimenting with mind altering substances I realized that those kooky dreams were brought on by overdoses of Dextromethorphan, the active ingredient in cough syrup.

I really had some big time hallucinations when I was a kid from that cough medicine.  And my parents wonder why, in my older years when I began to dabble in mind and mood altering substances did I gravitate toward the Dextromethorphan.  It was like LSD to the fourth power.  I loved some LSD in my twenties but that was nothing compared to a major overdose of Dextromethorphan.

When I was just a little kid, I mean like four or five years old, everything was psychedelic.  I was growing up in Portland, Oregon; hippie central in the late sixties.  I was wearing tie dyes when tie dies were new, not just a fad throwback like today.  I hope to get this story mostly in chronological order so I’ll start from my earliest memory.

And generally, old and lingering memories are from poignant moments or traumatic events.  And my earliest memory was both poignant and traumatic.

It was the fall of 1969 and my dad had just purchased a brand new Chevrolet Chevelle.  Yup, a classic today, but brand new to him that year.  He was very cool, always on the cutting edge of coolness, much cooler than even Arthur Fonzerelli in my book.  You had to know my dad back then to understand what I’m talking about.  This dude was like where the Fonz got his ideas.  He was an amazing athlete, strong as Atlas and fast as Mercury.  He played varsity football with dudes that went on to the NFL, varsity basketball with dudes that went to play in the NBA and held the decathlon record at Franklin High School in Portland from 1962 until someone finally broke it in 1985.

I started kindergarten at the age of four, a year too early.  I should have been held back one year so I would have caught up with my peers as they matured.  I was never able to make it after Jr High School on any team sports because I was a year behind everyone physically.  In our adult years, one year is nothing, but as an adolescent, one year means the difference between being able to play football or having to sit in the bleachers and just cheer for the team.  So even though I was a killer athlete, I could never keep up with the dudes in my class because I was a year younger than everyone.  I totally kicked ass with the kids one grade back from me, where I should have been, but my classmates were way bigger and stronger than me so I was toast.  I sure gave it my all though and once in a while on the playground or in gym class they would be surprised at my skills.  However, still too small to play varsity or even JV.

So I played football in a Pop Warner league in the 8th grade.  I hated practice and I never got any playing time until one day I just broke out of my shell.  I was a line backer and we started with hitting drills and the linebackers were going against each other, hit each other and tried        to muscle our way toward wherever the coach would tell us in that direction.  And like I said, something clicked that day and in our hitting drills I was going for it and one of the guys that sometimes picked on me was in front of me so I went for it and he took his helmet off and rubbed his forehead and said, don’t hit so hard dude.  So when we were doing our tackling drills.  I would be on my back with my elbows and heels on the ground.  The running back would be five yards away with the ball.  Coach would blow the whistle and I had to get up as fast as I could and tackle the running back.  And when we did that drill, I usually sucked at it but one day something clicked and I figured out how to stick those running backs right into the turf.  So the whistle would blow and I would flip over like a cat and drive my shoulders and helmet into the running back’s torso and slam him to the ground, every time.  And suddenly coach said, “Brown, you’re first string linebacker next game, keep playing that way.”

But low and behold it was the last game of the season.  We had lost every game that year but this last game, the one I shined and played starting linebacker, we won that game.   coach told me to come back next year but my parents forgot about it. 

In the third grade I started little league and this was in the Portland Public School District.  We never heard of tee-ball.  We wore full uniforms with the baseball pants and socks and shirts, full uniforms, dressed to the nines, and it made us feel spectacular.  And I had been practicing pitching at home before baseball tryouts.  My dad, being the Uber athlete that he was, taught me how to throw a pitch.  Because he said, I don’t really like baseball but if you’re going to play baseball you should be the pitcher.  That’s the most important position on the team.  It’s like being quarterback on the football team, and that sounded pretty kick-ass to me, to be the leader of the team, heck yea I want to be the pitcher!  So I had my sights set on being the best pitcher I could be, because of what my dad told me.  And it was always about making my dad proud by doing my best in front of an audience.  

So it came time for tryouts and I had been practicing at home.  Our house was raised up above the street so there was a concrete wall in front with stairs leading to the house.  So I took a piece of chalk and drew a catcher’s mitt on the concrete wall in front of the house and then drew a pitcher’s mound in the middle of the street.  I had a hard rubber baseball that would bounce back to me.  And my dad told me if I wanted to throw strikes to look at my target, keep my eye on my target, wind up and throw the ball as hard as I could right at the target and never take my eye off of it.  And at that age we weren’t throwing curves or knuckleballs or anything like that.  It was all fastballs at such a young age.  So I practiced relentlessly, making sure I was just as far away from that wall as the actual pitcher’s mound was from home plate and threw strike after strike after strike.

And when we played real games on Saturday morning I was ready to go as the pitcher.  And the other batters feared me because I threw heat and we were undefeated.  Mostly because I struck out most of the batters.  There was one inning I remember I threw nine strikes in a row, not a single batter swung and that was three and out for my kick-ass pitching.  And once in a while if I got tired I would switch it up with my catcher, who was also a dang good pitcher.  I would catch and he would pitch, just to change things up a bit.

But then at the end of the season I got real sick and went to the doctor and the doctor told my mom that I had appendicitis.  So I missed many games after that.  I was in the hospital for five days and got letters written to me by my friends to make me feel better.  It was awesome.  Everyone in my class wrote me a letter and custom made a greeting card for me.  I had like 30 custom greeting cards made by fourth graders.  And some of them were hilarious.  Not because they were trying to be funny but because of misspellings.  I was pretty smart even though I was young.  For example, my little buddy Tommy Truma wrote to me; we played baseball for Nolan Rexall , the pharmacist, and he told me that they played against Oregon Brass.  But he misspelled Brass and it read, Oregon Bras.  And me and my mom were laughing so hard, it hurt my incision.  I was not supposed to laugh like that but dude said Oregon Bras, how could I not crack up at that faux pax?  When I recovered we had one game left.  We won every game I played in.  When I was out our team lost every game without me.  So when I got back I told coach that I could pitch but he sent me to right field so I didn’t have much action.  So I took it out on the bats and scored a triple hit and a couple of singles.  When I pitched I didn’t hit.  But I was an outfielder that day so I used my energy to score runs and I got like 3 RBI’s that game and we won that game.  So, I’m not saying anything about myself but every game I played we won and every game I missed we lost.  I don’t know.

So I got majorly sidetracked from my 1968 Chevelle story.  And that’s how my mind operates.  I think of one thing and, start to hyper-focus on it and then follow and get completely lost on a tangent thought and forget about my original thought.  And that is what made me become a writer, because I can always go back and re-remember what I was thinking.  My mom tells me I have ADHD but I think I just have an overactive imagination.  Because I think of all kinds of kooky stuff that normal people leave to cartoons and books, so that’s why I became a writer.  It’s kind of in my blood to spin a yarn, if you will.

So back to 1968 and my earliest memories.  There are two and I do not know what came first but I will share both stories.  There was the moon landing of Apollo 11 and then there was the car crash on McGlophlin hi-way.

We’ll start with the car accident, because in just mentioning it, I’m sure you want the details.  This is from my best memory as a child.

My dad was driving me to the babysitter’s house early in the fall of 1968 in his brand new 1967 Chevelle, Mr. Cool Guy my dad.  And I was standing next to him on the bench seat, leaning on his shoulder as we rounded corners.  There were no seatbelt laws back then.  It was a foggy early morning in Portland, just on the South East side of town, a little town within Portland called Millwakie.  Ran up along the Willamette River along McGlophlin Blvd.  And that hi-way kind of snaked around the curves and it was a fun drive.  So this particular morning it was foggy and we were clipping along about 50 mph when all of a sudden everything just stopped.  There was a loud crash sound and then silence.  

There was an old man who had a flat bed truck and it broke down right in the lane we were driving in.  And with the fog and not being able to see more than ten feet ahead of us, we just kept on driving looking for red lights.  But, whammo!  We piled right into the back of that flat bed truck. 

I didn’t know what was going on but it was just a moment before impact and I was standing on the seat of dad’s new car looking out the windshield and suddenly I was on the passenger side floor curled up and completely unhurt and safe.  The only thing I could have possibly been injured by was a piece of glass from the shattered windshield nestled in the corner of my eye and a small tear in my pants.  So dad got the glass out of my eye and picked me up and we were both fine.

And like I said, I was standing on the bench seat leaning on my dad’s shoulder and he was driving with no seatbelt of course (nobody wore seat belts back then, some cars didn’t even have seat belts) and his chest broke the steering wheel and his head hit the windshield but he was unhurt.  Miracles that morning.  How was it possible for me to survive that experience and my dad too:?

I’ll tell you what happened next and this is the honest truth.  Rather than go to the babysitter’s house we went to my dad’s parent’s house which was near by,  And this is my earliest memory in life.  Right after the accident that we were miraculously saved from I was sitting on a bar stool at my grandparents house and looking toward the front door, and leading down the hallway there was a man standing of bright golden light, the most brilliant light I had ever seen.  Just standing there making me feel safe and secure.  And I remember the feeling of total protection, invincibility.

The next earliest memory is of Apollo 11 landing on the moon and watching those spacemen walk around and play golf on the moon.  My mom told me that this would be very important for me to remember so I focused on it and tried to make sure I would remember this event, and I did.  I remember the apartment complex we lived in back then.  I would look up at the moon and then run back inside and watch the men on TV and it was boggling my mind as a child, I could see the moon, but on TV there were guys walking around on it at the same time.

Then the Vortex happened.

in 1970 Richard Nixon was going to be coming to Portland for some political discourse about Viet Nam and the hippies of the day were promising violent protest.

So brilliant governor Tom McCall decided to give the hippies free reign of Milo McGiver State Park with no police.  And when you give hippies a state park for three days with no cops, they’re going to party. The hippies took the bait and rather than protesting with violence, they threw a huge psychedelic party for three days which wound up being known as Vortex 1.  They wanted 

to do it again but never did.  Vortex 1 became The Rainbow Gatherings.  And I’ve seen some Dead shows and the Jerry Garcia band, was in to the hippie vibe for the music.  I did not agree with their politics though, so I was ostracized in many hippie gatherings.  They say they are accepting of all cultures and beliefs but they are not accepting of mine, that’s for sure.  So my Deadhead friends ask me if I’ve ever been to the Rainbow Gatherings, I say yea, just one.  The first one ever when I was five.  They are very impressed with that experience. But hippies are pretty stupid if you ask me.  They have good intentions and love in their hearts but are way too liberal and do not understand America very well.  They are socialists and leftists and want to monkey-wrench big business.  They bring art and music and fun but are a fly in the ointment.

The first day of Vortex was Saturday and my mom had a friend who was a female cop and wanted to see what was going on in the park.  She had a son my age so we two buddies and moms went to the hippie park festival.  But low and behold, when you tell hippies that they can party with no rules, those human beings got naked and put up tie dyes all over the place.  There were rock bands playing on stage and there are two things that still stick out in my mind from that day.  I saw a full grown naked man walking around and his ball sack was flopping back and forth on his thighs.  The other thing that is still engrained in my mind is naked people down at the river’s edge rubbing mud all over themselves.  I told my mom that I wanted to go swimming and she said no, there are naked people down there.  I remember telling her, I don’t care, I just want to go swimming in the river.  But that’s all I remember about that day.  And yea, I would say I was a little bit traumatized.  When we got back home my dad was super pissed off that mom exposed me to that mayhem.  And  he was warranted in his anger this time.  My mom really never did too much good in our family.  She knew how to take care of the house and cook well but she was never affectionate with me like most mothers are with their little kids.  She always wanted me to leave her alone and when she got frustrated she would call me a little shit.  You little shit!  I heard that echo in my mind from toddlerhood.  And she had a quick temper too so I pissed her off a lot and always felt like I was in trouble.

So I spent most of my younger days by myself, playing with my plastic cowboys and indians with my Fort Apache.  I would be the indians and kill the cowboys and overtake the fort.  It was real in my imagination and I got lost in those battles.

I also had Lincoln Logs and built many giant fortresses to give shelter to the cowboys after being evicted from Fort Apache.

I was a happy child, having fun with my dad, he was my best friend until mom started arguing with him, then he would get mean.  Not at me, but he just didn’t seem happy when mom would give him crap.  He just wanted to have some fun after work.

I have to reflect back during the Viet Nam war.  The draft was going on and my dad could have been called up to go to Nam.  So rather than getting drafted, he joined the National Guard.  He hated the military but it kept him from going to Viet Nam.  And when he was in the National Guard his bunk mate was doing the same thing, trying not to get drafted.  He was from San Francisco and his name was Leigh Stevens.  Just before joining the National Guard, Leigh was in a band in San Francisco called Blue Cheer.  And Blue Cheer had just made it on the billboard charts with their song Summer Time Blues, which was covered by The Who.

So after all of that, Leigh got some money and bought a new Corvette and drove it up from the Bay area to Portland to visit my dad.  And I was like maybe four years old and I remember that dude visiting because he and dad went out and partied.  And when they came home I remember dad telling me how great I was and that I could do anything I put my mind to and that his pal Leigh Stevens was going to be my godfather.

I remember that vividly.  Blue Cheer was the name of the band after their favorite type of LSD.  The guys in Blue Cheer took a lot of LSD but Leigh was known to be the musician who did not partake of the psychedelia.  And that’s probably what bonded Leigh and my dad, the music but not the drugs.

And the band Blue Cheer is known as the godfathers of heavy metal music and also grunge music.  So the godfather of heavy metal and grunge is my actual godfather.  Whoa!!

So Leigh washed his car with my diapers, cloth diapers back then before Pampers or anything disposable. And he left those wet diapers out on the rocks and they got moldy.  That’s my mom’s story of his visit because that made her angry, irresponsible rock star show off leaving my diapers out to get moldy!  

My bedroom became my oasis, my escape from reality.  I had my toys, my art stuff, my music.  I would play records and dance around like I was Elvis Presley in his bedazzled karate suit.  I had my dad’s old records from the fifties.  Elvis, Ricky Nelson, The Kingston Trio, Vaughn Monroe (who I was named after).  So I spun those and when I was really young that was my background music.  That and the pop tunes on the radio, which was crappy 1970s soft rock post hippie pabulum.  Seals and Crofts, The Carpenters, Simon and Garfunkel. 

It wasn’t all bad but my mom would tell me that rock and roll was the devil’s music.  No kidding man, she actually said those words to me and so when I was really young I thought if I heard rock and roll music, like “hey kid, rock and roll, rock on’ that the devil was going to get me.  And I was freaked out.  I had a wild imagination and I didn’t have any brothers or sisters to share my thoughts with so it was just what my mom told me and my imagination.

Fortunately I had a voracious appetite for curiosity and learning abstract things like reading the dictionary just to learn words or studying the atlas to memorize all of the geography around the world.  I studied books about the solar system, dinosaurs, read all the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, The Narnia Chronicles, A Wrinkle in Time…I read all kinds of stuff when I was a kid that got my imagination running wild.  It expanded my horizons and helped a lot in school with creative writing which was one of my favorite things to do.  I always came up with crazy stories and would write on and on about things in my imagination.

In like 3rd grade or 4th I wrote a story and drew a picture of an alien that crashed into a tree in my neighborhood.  I drew him with a heart shaped head and said that all he could say was Kava Kava, like a bird. I helped him get out of the tree and we were friends after that.  But he could understand me when I talked to him. 

When I saw the movie ET it drew me back to childhood with Heart Head.  That is the truth and it kind of freaks me out that I was imagining ET before it was a movie.  Maybe a lot of kids had imaginations like mine and thought about an alien crashing in to his trees and becoming friends.  I don’t know.

My mom took a job at a place called Ford Industries that produced a product called Code a Phone.  She was the receptionist so I had to get a babysitter.  I remember this vividly.  We only had one car at this time, not like today when each person in the family has their own car.  It was a Ford Mustang with a rag top and a V8, the serious Mustang that is classic today.  My folks had style so we were cool.  Mom and dad would drop me off at the babysitters house and then dad would drive mom to work and then drive himself to his job.  Dad would pick me up first before we got mom and he would have the convertible top down and I loved that.  I thought my dad was so cool.  But when we picked up mom we put the top on because mom was wearing a wig and that would’t do well in the air.  She had good hair but in the 70s chicks wore wigs rather than do their hair.  She had several wigs and Styrofoam heads to put them on with pins.  

I used to play with the wigs and run around the house like I had long blonde hair and mom would tell me not to mess up the wig.  I liked it better when she just did her own hair.  I didn’t like the fakeness of wigs.  I suppose she got that from her mom.  My grandmother Rasmussen never showed her hair.  She always had a wig on.  It was weird, kind of some secret to keep that Grandma never wanted her real hair to be seen.  My Grandma was super cool to me.  She married Glade Rasmussen, the all star running back for the University of Utah.  He was drafted by the Detroit Lions to play in the NFL but this was back before there was money being made.  It was like the movie Leatherheads.  He could have played in the NFL but he had a family and they only paid a per diem, there was no salary back then, no contracts, no shaving commercials, no agents, just football players and a coach.  They didn’t even have face gear.  And their pads were just pads.  Nothing like the NFL of today, these guys were down and dirty in the mud.

So Grandpa stayed at home and raised his two daughters, Carole and Jill, my mother.  Aunt Carole was awesome.  I only knew her when she was married to my uncle Wes.  They had my best cousins, Chris and Sean.  Chris was one year younger than me and Sean was two years younger so we were pretty close.  When the three of us got together it was usually something sneaky or crazy.  They had a huge house up on the hills of NE Portland.  Wes was a successful salesman and always had a company car.  He worked for some big corporation that handled paychecks.  He always had the newest Cadillac.  The biggest car they had. 500 cc engine, gas guzzler but in the 70s gas was cheap.

When my great grandmother died Wes gave us his Cadillac to drive to Utah for the funeral.  I don’t remember much of the trip. The things I do remember were that the speed limit was 60mph.  It used to be 70.  It was me, mom and her parents driving all that way.  It was boring and when we got to Utah it was so different than Portland.  It was desert and mountains and no rain.

So we went to the wake and that was the first time I saw a dead body.  I was mesmerized by the thought of her dead body was just that close to me and I wanted to touch her face but my mom told me not to.  She looked really peaceful like she was just sleeping in that coffin.  

I don’t even remember the funeral.  Maybe we didn’t go, me and mom.  I would have remembered something like that as a child.

My grandpa was always doing something constructive so on this vacation we were staying at his sister’s house.  Grandpa took it upon himself to cut down the hedges and when he did, he cut them down a little too much.  But his sister was OK with it.  She really didn’t want that done.  

Then grandpa got up in the attic and he was doing something up their and all of a sudden his leg came crashing through the ceiling.  So he was up in the attic cussing up a storm and he had another project to do before we went home.  He fixed that ceiling and did a good job too.  I watched him repair it and I learned a lot that day about how to repair damaged walls or ceilings.

We headed home and all I knew was that it took a lot less time to get back home than it did to get there.  So I thought.  I had a huge bag of Fritos and munched on them most of the way home.  When we got back from Utah I had my big stomach ache that got me in to the hospital for appendicitis.  I wonder if all that crappy junk food and stress on me didn’t cause the appendicitis.  I’m glad they figured out what my problem was because I was seriously hurting and my mom just told me to go back to school.  But I told her, mom I think I should go to the doctor.

So she took me to the hospital and the doctor came back and told me that they had to operate on me right away.  I freaked out and started crying but the doctor and mom told me that I would not feel a thing or remember anything.  I would just wake up in bed and have to stay there and heal.  

When I came out of surgery I woke up in a hospital bed alone and I felt the tape on my belly and thought they cut a huge hole in my stomach.  But that was my imagination again.  The cut was like two inches wide and there wasn’t a big hole in my belly.

I stayed in the hospital for several days and when I had ice water and a bendy straw, of course I was going to use it as a weapon to shoot ice on the other kids in the room.  So I would aim my straw at the kid next to me and launch ice bombs on him because he dominated the TV and watched Star Trek.  I was 9 years old.  I didn’t want to watch no Star Trek man.  So he got his TV show and I douched him with ice.  I was laughing to myself because he had no idea where it was coming from.  The poor kid was in traction with two broken legs but I still assaulted him with ice pellets.

So that’s the rest of the story leading up to my baseball career in right field.

The next year for baseball tryouts we had moved to another district. I thought I would just show up and pitch for them.  But they made me field the ball and grab grounders to see who was the best  player.  So I sucked at that tryout and got put on a farm team when I should have been pitching in the minors.  That was the last time I played baseball.  I was a pitcher or catcher.  I didn’t have to try out.  But I got lost in the mix with the new district. 

I went from fast pitch to tee ball.  So I just sucked it up and looked at all the other players as pussies.  Finally half way through the season they started to pitch and I got my chance again.  Everyone who wanted to try out for pitcher got up and threw their best and I sat back and wanted to be last so that all those chumps could see what a real pitcher was about.  I got up last on the mound and started throwing strike after strike.  I hear coach say, I think we found our pitcher.  Man it was like being let out of chains to be able to pitch again and not have to suffer that tee ball shit.  I was embarrassed for myself having to hit a fucking tee ball.  I came from knowing how to hit a baseball when I was 7 years old, I didn’t need a fucking tee ball.

So that was the end of my baseball career.  I retired at the age of 9, hung up my shoes and started golfing more and playing basketball a lot.  My dad custom made me a set of golf clubs to fit my size.  I learned how to swing a 7 iron when I was 9 years old.  I remember practicing in that big lot next to our house in Woodstock.

I practiced a lot but had never played a game of golf yet.  I would go with dad and ride in the cart and do some chip shots but I never played a full game until I got older.  Me and dad were always trying to improve our golf game.  We would go to the driving range and he would help me get used to each different club and show me how they worked and how far you could hit the ball with certain clubs.   

I don’t remember my first nine holes but I did go to the range and practice a lot.  I was pretty good with a putter and my short game was not bad.  My problem was getting laid up in the fairway after a long drive and slicing into the ruff or water or a sand trap.  I had that pent up anger inside too so that didn’t help at all.  I must confess that I did break a golf club against a tree a time or two.   And I got so  pissed one time I threw my 9 iron in the air but it got loose and flew over the fence into the corn field.  I had to get a new one after that.  I learned to calm down as I got more mature.  

So I did my career time in Information Technology.  Much better for my interest in elixirs and brain experiments.  I always wanted to know how far I could go, what I could get away with and then I would do it.  Then I would think about who to share it with and those people became my best friends.  And in my older years I have sort of isolated myself because I have emotional pain so I escape from reality and society with DXM.

It’s no wonder I have the liking for the active ingredient in cough syrup.  It was my go-to comfort medicine throughout my life.  Any time I got sick,  dosing of cough syrup.  Cough syrup used to be liquid heroin, then they replaced it with morphine, but people were becoming addicted to the stuff so big Pharma came up with an alternative that was non-narcotic.  It was called Dextromethophan.  There are two ways of the delivery to the body from the pharmaceutical industry.  One is what you get in Robitussin, it’s called Dextromethorphan-Hydrobromide.  Hydrobromide is the delivery agent for the dextromethorphan.  But now they have a time released DXM called Dextromethorphan-Polystyrex.  There is a difference between the two.  I used to dose myself on the Robo DXM only in pleasant tasting syrup, that was never pleasant tasting and sometimes made me puke.  But after the puke, it was worth the high, so soothing to the bosom.  Non narcotic heroin.  But then big Pharma gave me something called Delsym.  Delsym is Dextromethorphan-Polystyrex, time released.  So that means it lasts way longer, doesn’t taste as horrible as Robo, it’s actually quite tasty, the orange elixir,  It’s like a gift from God to me to free my mind of society and the facade that it is, 

But my parents did not know what was going on.  Me and my sister used to Robo trip all the time and smoke weed, we dropped LSD together many times, had a great time and mom and dad knew nothing.  We took our dog, Baron, a Standard Poodle, weighed 100 pounds, huge black poodle, but super cool too.  I loved that dude, we got along great and of course I got him stoned all the time,  My sister, Shannon didn’t like me getting Baron stoned but he loved it, of course he loved it, so she mellowed on that eventually and we always got the dogs high and they would get the munchies of course and would be super playful.  Dogs are so great with people who are high. It’s like you can communicate on another level and understand one another,  But dogs are stupid, they really are, they just want food and play time, nothing more than that.  But that’s what makes them such good partners.  I have seen people abuse dogs for just doing what they do by instinct.  And it breaks my heart to see a master dominate a dog with rancor.  When I was younger and not so wise I would punish my dog for things I did not like.  But I did not understand at the time that it was just a dog doing dog things.

I had a girlfriend in my mid 20’s who had a dog named Aiko.  He was a Malamute, all white with golden eyes.  Super awesome dog.  One day me and my girlfriend went out on the town and left Aiko home alone but we left the downstairs slider open so he could go in and out of the house.  But we were gone way too long one time and he got pissed so he took our clothes out of our shelves and put them in the back yard as a statement telling us that he missed us while we were gone.  Because Aiko always had someone around him, he was never left alone.  He was communicating with us.

There was a time when my sister, Shannon was my best friend.  I loved my sister so much and I trusted her more than anyone.  Shannon was and is still so beautiful.  She was voted in high school, best eyes.  Because she is so beautiful and her eyes shine like the stars in the sky.  I think my sister is probably one of the best looking women on this planet.

She got married to one excellent person named Brandon Whiteley.  And if he could handle her and love her and calm her down, because she has my father’s temper with her kids.  I am so grateful for Brandon, in my eyes he is a saving angel for Shannon.  He keeps her cool when she might get upset, he is captain cool head, just rolls with what’s going on.  Plus, he likes to rock out and he plays lead singer in a cover band that  plays cover tunes that you would not expect.  Of course I gave him that idea long ago.  I think Brandon really looked up to me, and I treated him just like he was my best friend.  He was going to college studying to be a corrections officer.  But I told him that he would be in that environment all day and then bring it home with him.  Not such a good idea, it’s for other dudes, not for him. 

And I had my career going mighty fine making nearly six figures in Information Technology.  My title at the time was Network Administrator.  But when I was out with our CEO doing business, he told people that I was his IT Director.  And really, that’s what I was.  My boss, Tim Richards knew nothing about networks, LANS, WANS, he didn’t even understand Striping with Parity; that’s some networking 101.  So I have a boss who in normal America should be able to do my job because we had teams in this company,  We were the IT team and he was our leader, but he knew nothing about computer networking, he was just there to manage people.  A job not necessary.  He didn’t do much all day, socialized a lot, made himself look good on paper.  

I ran that place and I built that place.  And when my vision of a data center came to fruition after spending one million dollars on fail over, redundant Internet connections, fire suppression, and we got all of the data on SANS.  Redundant data that if one server failed or even two servers failed, there would be fail over.  And I gave that endeavor life, but when it came time for things actually getting installed, I was mostly checked out because of my divorce.  So they built the great data center and I didn’t even feel like it was mine any more. Because I hired some killer IT talent and basically I became a Tim Richards without the clout.  They were moving toward Linux and open code, php, java and I was a network guy, not a coder.  But I hired dudes that could manage my MS Exchange servers, my web servers, authoritative DNS servers, WINS servers, SQL servers.  I even owned a full class C network so I could host websites and networks and I took advantage of that because my boss had no clue about technology.  

So my IT vision for Datamark came to fruition and because of it, I was laid off.  I worked myself out of a job by getting the best talent in IT in Utah.

I found the best hardware the best software solutions for security and IT management, the best of anything I could find.  I did not worry about price, although I talked dudes down a lot and got killer deals on things other companies were paying full dollar for.  I would get things for cost because I was a schmoozer and the salesmen liked me a lot.  Sometimes they would call me up in the afternoon from Chicago just to shoot the breeze and talk about sports or music or what went down last weekend.  We had a friendship going on.  And because I was one of their best customers, not one of the most lucrative but my agent could see us growing and knew he had to keep me as a customer for the time when we built that data center and needed anything from him, drop shipped next day lowest prices.  Because we did volumes with him and that added up.

Dude’s name was Jason Stage.  He was so killer, very cool, a good friend to be honest, over the years we became friends, talked a lot about our relationships, children, when he got married.  And so he flew me out to Chicago to take a look at their warehouse and wined and dined me, but I did not drink alcohol at this point in my life, so they saw me as a cool dude, clean as a whistle that they could trust.  And they took me out for a night of fun, with a great dinner and a magic show for entertainment.

And when I would come home and tell Christi about what happened she would get jealous and tell me that I’m out there having all the fun while she is home working her tail to the bone raising children.  But she had no idea the pressure that was on my shoulders to keep the data up and running 24/7 and keeping an eye on it day and night.  I would sometimes have to log in from home and do work remotely.  This was way before the Internet is what it is today so remotely working was some VPN stuff that you had to know how to configure.  I had to memorize all kinds of subnets and IP addresses.  And I had all this knowledge in my head and Christi had no idea what stress and pressure I was under.  She only saw me having fun.  But we played hard and we worked our asses off.  Sometimes if things crashed, I would spend 36 hours working in a row over the weekend to restore data.  And Monday morning the workers never knew what happened.  But I saved their asses many times from their mistakes that created all kinds of IT troubleshooting labor.  In meetings we would tell the users, You have rights over this data, so be very careful and do not delete anything like it is your desktop because there is no recycle bin on the network.  And those dipshits would do it anyway, then expect me to go back and get the data from backup tapes.  And usually it was not the most recent data but it was close, and we did recover most of it.  But those assholes relied on my backup and failover for their mistakes.  And when some newbie got in there and deleted something I would be calm but super pissed and wonder who in the hell gave them rights to that data.  Why did that person have so much authority for deletion?  To edit, sure that is OK, but delete rights?  They said they needed that to be productive so we gave it to them and they fucked us over many times.  

They would come walking up to my desk like all cool and friendly and say, Um, Vaughn, I think I made a mistake man.  Can you help me out?  And those types I would be cool with.  But there were some that denied making the mistake and would not take accountability for what they had done.  Those were the ones that got made fun of on our IT white board.  If you saw your name on our IT white board you knew you had fucked up big time.

Those dudes had no idea how much we saw in every nook and cranny in the network.  I busted one dude for downloading a shit ton of porno.  I did not say a word to him, I just saw it on his PC and deleted it and never spoke a word about it.  So I figured he would take that as a hint.  But dude was stupid and had some nasty shit that I wish I could un-see.  I knew what it was by the titles of the files and clicked on it and whammo, visual assault that I did not want to see, so that pissed me off big time and rather than delete it, I went over Tim’s head, because dude was Tim’s best friend and I knew Tim would sweep it under the rug, so I went to our HR director and told him what was going on.  Dude got fired right away.  And Tim was pissed at me for doing what I did but I had to do the right thing.  Man, you can’t bring your porno addiction into work brother.  You have a major problem dude.  But I digress.  I wish the best for him and had no animosity toward him at all.  He was a friend of mine too.  And I saw him later and he was cool to me and I was cool to him.  It just was as it was.  And he was like Tim.  He managed the print shop but had his side kick Kris Ing do all the work.  So when he was fired, Kris got his position, but not the salary.  And that bothered me a bit but Kris was excellent at what he did.  He treated his employees fairly and worked just as hard as they did.  Not like Tom, sitting back at his desk watching Kris take care of his job.

So that kind of sucked in a couple of ways because Tom, the shop manager was my Tim Richards to Kris Ing.  We did all the work, they took all the glory.  But Kris loved working hard, and me and him became like best friends for a while.  We went golfing every Saturday morning at 6am, played 18 holes before noon and then went home and did the yard work.

And all that golfing got me and Kris on the USPS tournament at Stonebridge golf club.  A super links golf course with many sand traps and ruff areas.  Not many trees like the golf courses in the North West where I grew up golfing.  But this course was designed by Johnny Miller and it was super nice.  Really long par fives and few par threes.  A great open golf course near the airport so there was much interference from jet planes landing.  We would be setting up to hit our ball and a DC-10 would come screaming down above us.  So we stood there until it passed and then hit our balls.  But this morning was different from any other morning we played at Stonebridge.  Because we played that course all the time.  So we knew it well and I was expecting to get at least the long drive, because I had one killer long drive, but my buddy who was 6 ft. 8 beat my long drive by about ten yards.  Dangit!!  I thought I had the long drive in the bag but dude out drove me that day.  So I was going for closest to the hole on the par 3 and I got close but did not win that one.  I was super good at golf.  It was a foursome.  Me and Kris Ing, and Tim Richards and Tom Dearden.  So we were playing golf with the company brass and they chose us because they knew we were better golfers than they were.  They knew we were the best golfers in Datamark.  So those kind of perks were pretty cool to have.  And sure Christi was jealous of me getting to go golfing for work.  But I earned it man.

But the craziest thing on that day was not that we were playing in a golf tournament rather than working, but the day was September 11, 2001.  Yup, 9/11.  In the clubhouse before we teed off we saw an airplane crash in to the first tower and thought, what the hell is going on in New York?  Was that dude drunk at the cockpit?  Nobody knew yet what was going on.  And then as we were watching, suddenly the second plane crashed into to the second tower and I was immediately pissed and wanted to kill the Arabs.  I said, fuckin’ A man, this is terrorism.  What the hell is going on in New York, and we’re expected to play golf today?  Oh man, it was surreal.  Our CEO was in New York and he called me and told me that he was OK and asked me to do a couple of things for him.  He called on me and trusted me.  He brought me over to his house and had me fix up his wife’s network that she was doing business with, and I would do it just because I was that kind of guy.  I didn’t care if I got paid any more or over time or anything.  But he treated me like a son.  He was wealthy and a philanthropist.  A super likable Jew from New York, but he cheated on his wife, everyone knew that he was cheating on his wife.  And we knew but did not talk about it.  And I asked Tom Dearden what he thought about Arthur’s cheating and he said, I keep our relationship a work relationship.  And I could see that, what else could he do? I liked his wife, she was so nice and kind.  I would go fix her computers and get all the bugs out and have them running clean as a whistle and when I split Arthur would shake my hand with two hundred dollar bills.  And that did not suck at all.

So we were golfing that day and the skies were quiet, no airplanes making noises and after we got done with our 18 holes we were back at the club house receiving awards.  But I could only think about what was going on in New York and could not sit there receiving awards for golfing on that day.  So me and Kris split and went back to Datamark.  And I immediately got online and started looking for any news of what was going on in New York.  It was odd.  Life was on  hold pretty much for all of America that day. 

I would shop around for software and hardware solutions and do research and then pitch it to Tim, and he would say we don’t have the budget for that.  And I would tell him, yea but if Datamark is going to be successful in the future, we are going to have these things.  They are necessary.  So he said he would talk to our CEO, Tom Dearden.  And Tom had vision too.  But Tim kept all the ideas to himself and in their staff meetings with the Tom Dearden he would share what I told him, and took all the credit.  He seriously screwed me over.  And my life was tanking but I was trying to stay afloat.  The economy wasn’t doing too well in 2008 so lay offs were coming hard and fast and because I had just made that data center a reality, and got the best Linux techs and the best security tech, my team was excellent.  I should have been managing them while Tim found something he could understand.

Around this time I was newly divorced and I had no clue how to get into the dating scene.  So I reverted back to what I knew and that was 20 something hot women.  And I was in killer shape going to the gym, six pack abs, hardly any fat and sculpted muscles.  My friends at the gym would comment on me and say, dude, you are getting cut!  So, that helped a bit with the ladies.  And I met the most beautiful woman on the planet, Cydney Young.  22 years old to my 41, a huge age gap but I was very youthful and we fell in love fast.  But the tragic part about our relationship was that she could not tell any of her family that she had a 41 year old boyfriend because they would jump to conclusions and tell her that she was being used and to get out of there, etc., etc..  

But she was a great girlfriend and we were so in love.  I wanted to marry her but the family thing and the age gap prevented that from happening and I was frustrated but I understood so I counted my blessings having the most beautiful and coolest and most fun girlfriend ever.  She was super sexy and could kick it like one of the boys.  Tough as nails but super sensuous.

She did not like me smoking marijuana but she did enjoy drinking some beers so we did that a lot.  And I had started drinking and smoking pot and smoking cigarettes, and she was a smoker of the menthol flavor.  Nasty to me.  I was killing some emotional pain with the young Cydney and some alcohol and weed but Cyd, so voluptuous and beautiful, you have no idea, this woman.  Her eyes and that mouth, yowza!  But if I ever smoked weed, which I did a lot with my buddy Lance, she would get pissed if she ever knew, so I had to smoke, chew gum, drop the visine and act like I was not stoned out of my mind.

And many times me and Cyd would get a bottle of whatever liquor we were in to, get a hotel room and closed the door.

This next story is XXX rated but it has to be told.

Me and Cyd were having all kinds of fun together.  She was a broke college student and here I came, paid for everything, swept her off her feet.  The movie 40 year old virgin had just come out and we laughed at the parts when they said, You know how I know you’re gay?  So Cyd was talking to me about one of her friends that she said liked buttsex more than the regular thing.  And we were scratching our heads at this.  So Cyd told me, we should probably try it out.  So I said, seriously?  You want to go there?  She said, yea I just want to feel what it’s like.  I told her it would probably hurt the first time.  She was up for it however.  So we were messing around and got lubed up with baby oil and when I slipped it in she said to me, You know how I know you’re gay?

And I broke out laughing and said, I love you, for the first time.  We didn’t go farther than a little penetration because we were laughing our asses off.  She said it was not what she expected and we did not re-visit that again.

But one thing me and Cyd and Lance enjoyed together a lot was Dextromethorphan.  The active ingredient in cough syrup.  Back in the old times doctors would prescribe heroin as a cough suppressant, but of course, it was a highly addictive narcotic.  So they replaced it with Codeine, which was also an addictive narcotic but not as bad as heroin.  So the RH Robbins pharmaceutical company synthesized heroin by changing one molecule and they came up with a non-narcotic cough suppressant called Dextromethorphan.  And of course, if there was anything over the counter that could get young people high, we were on it.  So we did the research and learned the things that I just explained and knew what to look for.  So we would take this stuff and trip out together, listen to music, run around like children, get naked together, just me and Cyd.  Lance kept his clothing on full time, watch movies, go to amusement parks.  Just do anything that was fun and it was super fun on that stuff.  But later in life Cydney would become a pot head and we had tons of fun when she finally gave in to that stuff.  Funny thing is, I don’t get high anymore.  I kind of over did it and so it’s very boring dealing with the altered mind.  I’ve explored every arena in my mind so I keep it safe these days with maybe some caffeine.

I started working out early in the morning, going to the gym, I did the Body for Life thing.  So my eating habits changed and I got in killer shape.  So eventually Tim and my PC tech and my security administrator, Mike Kindt, good dude from Canada.  I loved that guy, it was great going to work because I worked with a couple of my best friends and we had all kinds of fun.  Usually started by me.  I had to keep us entertained.

We started going to the gym for an hour workout and then we would go for a 30 minute lunch.  We took a lot of time off but got our work done and we didn’t punch a time clock.  And the president of Datamark, Tim’s boss told us that as long as we got the work done, we could take long lunches and get a good workout in.  Tom Dearden lived a couple of blocks from my house in Kaysville.  His daughter and my Cassidy would have play days together when they were little kids, and that was awesome for me.  So me and Christi started going to the gym early in the morning doing the Body for Life regimen.  Tom Dearden had a huge belly, and was totally out of shape.  But he took my lead and started hitting the gym.  I told him we were doing Body for Life and he said he was doing Belly for Life.  He was super cool, as the president of the company, he was much like a peer.  I looked at him as a friend rather than a boss.  But Tim really screwed things up for me.  

Like I said, he took all the credit for my vision and of course, I put in all the work to make it happen.  He did nothing and did not even understand what was going on.  So when the work started of the building of the data center, I just let him have it all.  It was my vision, but he took all the credit by showing up and managing the project.  If it were not for me, Datamark would not have the excellent data center that they have today.  And they are not called Datamark anymore.  They got bought up by some big conglomerate from Denver with deep pockets and it is now called Helix.  And I flew out to Denver with Tom Dearden to meet with our new owners.  I’m not sure why he chose me but he did and I just thought it was regular work day.  And this sort of thing is what made Christi jealous.  She said I was flying around the country, eating at the best restaurants with my best friends and she was at home with the kids.  Well, Christi, I’ll tell you what.  If it were not for me flying around the country, eating at the best restaurants and sharing time with some of my best friends, you would not have the luxurious house and spectacular children that you get to be with every day.

I would give up all of that to stay at home with my children if I had that chance.  It’s all about perspective.  She had none.  And she was pissed off at me for having such a great life.  Why should I have to suffer just because I was kick-ass at life and that she sucked at life?  I told her that she needed to get a hobby.  She is a great artist actually, but she did not get in to doing art.  She was very self critical and anything, the very least of harshness or hardness would offend her.  It was like she lived life to be a victim of something.  Everything that was wrong with her was someone else’s fault.  Caused by someone else because she never made any mistakes.  Is this not the behavior of a sociopath?  

And what makes a good person in to a sociopath?  Abuse, lying to be told the truth?  Yes I would say that is a recipe for that.  And that is exactly what she was brought up on.  An abusive father and a mother that told the children to lie to her father so that he would not get mad about what they were doing.  She was the oldest of seven.  Four girls and three boys.  The youngest two were fraternal twins.  Christi was abused and her two youngest sisters got none of the abuse so they never saw it and wondered if Christi was lying about the abuse, because dad treated those girls like princesses. Two of her sisters never saw any of the abuse and they are doing very well at life with great husbands and great families.  It’s bizarre to see the dysfunction with most of the kids, but the two charmed daughters who could do no wrong saw nothing of the abuse that the other siblings endured.

Christi would tell me all about her father’s rage.  She would remember it as if it were just happening.  It was that engrained in her mind’s eye.  And the worst part was that she projected her father’s diabolical rage upon me in proxy for the abuse she expected, but did not receive from me.  It was twisted and weird.  I have it all figured out now and have forgiven her because she did not know what she was even doing.  But that put major trauma on every child in the family.  They have gone through anger and resentment, being pulled from household to household, moving all the time to escape abusive husbands.  I was the only solid one and she barely made me out to be an abuser.  I was so not abusive.  When we argued, we didn’t even swear.  It was calm and collected discussion if I could even get her to talk about anything.  But when she did, she would lecture me and repeat herself three times.  And if I said, You already said that, she would tell me I was being mean to her.  I couldn’t win for losing. 

I hosted many drum builder’s websites on my web servers and nobody had a clue I was doing that because nobody other than me knew anything about technology.  Except for our SQL programmer.  But he did not have admin access to the servers so he didn’t know what was going on.

I was getting in to playing the drums and back then there wasn’t much going on about social media.  There were a few AOL chat rooms but if you knew anything about the Internet you got on UseNet for social media that was split up in to specific topics.  This is where the dark web exists for all kinds of nefarious Internet action.  I was never in to anything like that but had to be aware of it, being a Systems Admin.  The group I was a part of, big time part of and a legend of sorts in that UseNet group was alt.rec.music.makers.percussion.  Or as we called it RMMP.  This was a discussion group for drum lovers around the world.  Not just drummers, but custom drum builders.  That’s what this group was.  Thousands of drum lovers who shared inside information about the custom drum building world

And there are some guys I made friends with that became life long friends out of that news feed.  One of them is named Eric Warman.  He is a 3-d graphic artist and back then worked in Spokane, WA at Cyan doing 3-d graphics for the game Myst that was bundled in every release of Windows 95.  He was one kick ass artist and taught me so much about art and Photoshop, then I became a photoshop master taking after him.  After Eric worked for Cyan he moved to Florida and worked on EA Sports Madden Football.  In its 2008 release his art work was on the cover of the game packaging.

Eric is known online as Edog, and he is a legend in the drum building industry just as I am, because we got it started together back in 2001.  We met each other on UseNet and we PM’d each other and he asked me about his ideas of doing art on drums.  Because I told him that I had bought some drum shells and wanted some artwork done on them before I made them in to playable snare drums.  And he was just getting in to wood burning so I sent my shells to him and he burned my, then company logo called Wasatch Percussion on the shells.  And he was new to wood burning so it looked like shit but it was the start.  And he practiced and got damn good at wood burning and did whole kits for C&C drums, who got started through me and Edog’s online newspaper called Ghostnote.net.  Back then there was no Facebook or even gmail yet, even before Google, so we were sort of cutting edge.

We got all of the resources we could together in one place and created an online newspaper about custom drum building with all of the resources for builders, where to get raw shells, hardware, hoops, lugs, custom lugs from machine shops started popping up all over the place.  New custom drum companies were coming out of the woodwork because of what we did with ghostnote.  There was a guy in England who owns Highwood Drums, Gareth Healy.  The biggest drum company in Europe now.  One day he asked me what a snare bed was.  Now that is some technical drum junkie information, so I explained it to him and several weeks later he told me he was thinking about putting his life savings in to opening up a custom drum shop and asked my advice and opinion.  So I told him that there is nobody doing what you have in mind so you are going to be successful if you do the right things for the right reasons.  Build custom stuff, sell hardware, bring in big shot drummers for clinics, make a name for yourself and always produce the best quality drums, far better than what Tama or Pearl is doing.  So he did that and as a response to that, Tama and Pearl started producing way high end high quality drum kits.  They started using maple and birch hardwood for shells rather than crappy mahogany and they started crafting custom lugs and hardware to be able to stay in the game with the new builders who were getting all the new business.

So Gareth went from not knowing anything, being interested in custom drum building, asked my opinion offline and from what advice I gave him, he has been super successful for almost 30 years now.

And Ghostnote now has a booth at the musicians trade shows in LA and Chicago.  We are world famous for turning drum building on its head.  Because back before the year 2000 drums were pretty plain and very expensive with very shitty and cheap materials.  But now when you see drum kits, they look like boutique furniture

My wife asked me for a trial separation and that was in 2004, April.  So I stayed with my aunt Carole for a couple of weeks and then moved in with my buddy Lance.  Those were some good times.  

The reason for the separation is beyond me.  We were LDS, temple worthy family, pretty much the example of what other people thought they should look up to (I was told this later by some of our neighbors).  Our neighbors viewed us as the rich family in the neighborhood but assumptions get exaggerated.  We did have a 3000 sq. ft. Cape Cod style  house on the corner of the block with a huge front yard, and a trampoline in the front yard, 2 car garage, 4 car driveway.  I took good care of my lawn and I was the coolest, and everyone sort of envied me.  

And I didn’t know it at the time because I was dealing with my wife in the home.  But to an outsider, yes I can see why they would think that of us.  We had three cars, a Mercury Mountaineer, I had my Mazda and my old Ford car too.  In the basement I always had at least one drum kit, sometimes two.  My daughters had guy friends who played guitar so I told those boys to bring their guitars and amps so we could have a jam session.  

We were talking about music that maybe we both knew and one of the guys said, do you know Nirvana?  So we chopped it up with Smells Like Teen Spirit, played some AC/DC riffs, smoke on the water of course, and then just jammed.  I taught those dudes how to noodle around on guitar and play what comes to their mind.  We were free-jamming in my basement and you know what?  My wife was upstairs in out bedroom pouting because of all the loudness.  But my kids loved it.  My son Spencer who was still in diapers would climb on my lap and take the sticks from me while I was playing, didn’t even ask, he just crawled up, took my sticks from me and began to play so naturally with perfect grip and using the rebound from the heads.  He couldn’t quite play a back beat and he was so small he certainly couldn’t play a down beat but he had natural chops and I was amused by his skills and let him play whenever he wanted to.  Today in the year 2020 Spencer plays drums for the Snow College jazz band.

In the year 2001 I bought a drum kit, a Tama Swingstar for $800.  Trap kit, crappy snare drum, total rip off.  I was playing guitar back then and I was good too.   I had an Aria Pro II, the body and neck were from the same piece of wood.  And it had a Floyd Rose tremolo, an innovation made popular by Eddie Van Halen, so I could bend notes like crazy.  And those Floyd Rose tremolos had fine tuning knobs down near the pick-ups and at the nut of the neck of the guitar, the top end, there was hardware to lock down the strings so they did not de-tune.  So when I needed to tune my guitar I just used those tiny knobs by the pick-ups on the guitar rather than turning the tuning knobs.   

And I had my small amp that I couldn’t turn up more than between 1 and 2 because it was so loud.  I never cranked my amp, but if I had it today I would push the limits.

When I was dating my wife I had my guitar and amp at her house and I would play guitar and she would enjoy my musical expression.  But after we were married, she would be at work and I would be at home doing work or college homework and the neighbor kids said that when Christi was gone, scary noises came from our house.  That was me cranking my guitar and riffing some Metallica or Corrosion of Conformity.  I learned COC’s entire album by ear and that got me in to  playing heavy metal riffs.  Because before that I was playing Led Zeppelin stuff, Jimmy Page was my guitar idol.  I never wanted to shred like Eddie Van Halen, that wasn’t for me.  I was more grunge and blues.

Around this time, before I got married I was going to college 

Back then I was in to the Grateful Dead big time.  Everything tie dyed, psychedelic, trippy visual however I was completely stone cold sober at that time.  And the Dead were on tour and my sister Shannon had never seen them but was totally into their vibe.  So I was not yet married but engaged and I took my sister up to Seattle to see the Dead.  And she got super stoned, ate ganja goo balls, pot brownies, she was super high and I was super sober, but loving her experience.  That’s how me and Shannon rolled.  She was my best friend for a time.  And I needed that.  Someone I could talk to, I couldn’t talk to my parents about my lifestyle but Shannon was always there for me.

But before that, I was living in Seattle and came down to Vancouver in 1992, she was still in high school and dating Jeremy Child.  So my mom asked me if I could pick Shannon up from school.  And she asked me if it was OK if her boyfriend got a ride home too.  I said hell yes it’s OK, get in the car.  And I had a sweet car back then.  It was a Pontiac Grand Prix.  But it was customized before I bought it.  It had low profile racing tires, killer chrome rims and the springs were cut down so it road low like a race car, because the back tires were larger than the front tires.  And it had no emblems or chrome on the outside.  Just high gloss black race car looking.  I can not believe I got that car.  When I would roll up for a night of Seattle band shows we would smoke out in my car and dudes would ask me, how did you get this car dude?  It had all the options too.  Back then, that was huge.  Today it’s pretty much par for the course.  Sun roof, Moon roof, electronic locking doors, and my speedometer was orange LCD and looked super cool.  I don’t know where that car came from but I do know one thing in hind sight.  God set that one up for me to be the coolest dude of ever.

I was rocking my long black thick locks, wearing my black leather biker jacket, any concert shirt, always a band t-shirt and my pants, only thing I ever wore, Levi’s 501’s.  And my shoes were spectacular of course.  Doc Martins or Creepers or some really expensive upper with embroidery stitching with a buckle and platform sole and pointed toe.  That was my style, t-shirts, Levi 501, biker jacket, killer shoes or boots.  The dudes envied me because they had shitty jobs and shitty cars and regular girl friends.  But they were the coolest and the best friends and totally fun to rock out with.

One time my buddy Bobby X Anderson (yes his middle name is the letter X) asked me, how do you get such fine good looking girlfriends?  I told him, you just have to be picky and when you see the most beautiful girl in the group, go make friends with her and make her laugh.  Do not hit on her, just be cool and laid back, not expecting anything and she will fall in love with you.  Treat a woman like a friend if you’re interested in, and allow her to express feelings.  Don’t come on too strong, that is very off putting for chicks.  Just be cool, help them out with things they have to do, that are easy for a dude, but somewhat complicated for a woman.  Be interested in what they like and share it together.  Ask her what she is in to and enjoy it with her.  That is bonding with women.  Then the trust comes, because women do not trust dudes.  You show them by your works that you are solid and honorable.  Then let nature take its course and allow her to respond to your awesomeness.

Awesomeness was not a word until I started using it and now it’s in spell check

It’s like with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  I got in to them in 1986, but I first heard that band name in 1984 from my bro Kevin Chambers who lived in LA and was into the punk scene.

And back then, in the late 80s nobody listened to my kind of music.  When my buddies and me were going somewhere and I was driving I would be listening to the Chili Peppers and my friends were in to the latest pop music, so the Chili Peppers were something new for them.  A little too hard core for their taste.  But the Peppers spoke to my heart, it was like I could hear my Father’s voice in their music.  That sounds odd, and I was totally sober at this time in life.  So the Chili Peppers were like a band made for me to get through life.  Because there is always a message in their music for me.  My life has always paralleled their albums and Anthony’s lyrics have always spoken to me like he was talking to me.  It’s been a wild and crazy trip with me and my Chili Peppers.  I think God made that band for me to soothe my soul because the Chili Peppers got me through some hard times and they also got me through some great times.

I turned my kids on to the Chili Peppers and we listened to Stadium Arcadium over and over again and they loved it.  They particularly liked the song Readymade for its funk and groove and some head banging in there too.   I’ve seen the Peppers live six times.  The first time I saw them they were an opening band for Oingo Boingo.  That was their Mother’s Milk tour.  John Frusciante was new to the band, 19 years old rocking out with the Chili Peppers on guitar.  What a treat it was to see him back then.

But you know what?  My girlfriend in the mid 80s was an identical twin, we were living in Provo, Utah, and her sister Michelle went to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Salt Lake City.  I did not know they were coming through town and I was bummed that I missed them because that was when Hillel was still alive.  Michelle Jacobs saw Hillel Slovak play with the Chili Peppers.  I asked her after the show, how was it?  She just said, it was good, they were shirtless the whole time.  I wonder if she knows how epic that show was for her.  She was way in to killer music so I’m sure she knew, in hind sight what an honor that was to see Hillel Slovak playing live with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

When I was in Paraguay I always jumped in and photo bombed anyone I could.  We were just having fun.  So one of my favorite missionaries, Terry Hilton was way in to music and snuck a plethora of cassette tapes of all kinds of killer underground and new wave music.  And he did not want to get busted for having music in the mission, so he gave me all kinds of killer tunes that I rocked out to only on p-day.  But I had my Walkman with my headphones rocking out to all the new music that I was missing at home.  That was the only thing I did to break the rules, listening to music.  

But man, how could I get by for 18 months with no tunes?  I remember hearing Tears for Fears for the first time.  Ice Sickle Works, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bauhaus, The Art of Noise.  The Art of Noise was the first industrial band.  They were good too.  I don’t like a lot of industrial music but I liked them.  Then out from left field came Nine Inch Nails and blew the roof off.  

I was kind of in to Ministry for some reason.  I think it was their heavy guitar riffs that I liked about them.  I did not like the way Al Jorgensen distorted his voice.  When the vocals get all growly I’m out.  I need a good lead vocalist who I can understand, that does not just present rage.

But back to Terry Hilton and the Jacobs twins.  While I was in Paraguay, we Elder missionaries would love to have pen pals (way before Internet or PCs, only mail) with cute chicks back home in the states.  So we would try to impress them by sending our coolest photographs and we would write stuff on the back of the photos and write a short letter to them.  Chicks we didn’t even know but they loved hearing from missionaries and we loved hearing from them.  So Elder Hilton has a friend back home who met these two blonde twins at Ricks College so Hilton started writing to them and they responded.  So I decided to send them a letter with some photographs of me looking cool.

So right after getting back from being in Paraguay for the last 16 months it was time to figure out what to do next.  I had some shitty minimum wage labor jobs that sucked and my parents were well off and asked me if I wanted to go to college.

They wanted me to get away from my girlfriend who I was in love with but who was cramping my style and breaking my heart right and left cheating on me.  So I thought that was a good idea too.  And my buddy Dayne Draper who I met in Paraguay was from Portland was going to Ricks college so I hitched a ride with him and enrolled in the fall of 1986.  That’s where I met my amazing girlfriend, Sherrie Jacobs.  Amazing but tragic.  She taught me a lot about life and I am grateful for the drama I endured being her boyfriend.  She was an identical twin from Milwaukee, WI.  I was a Sophomore and she was a Jr.  The twins stood out in the college, everybody knew the Jacobs twins just because they were some eye candy, so drop dead gorgeous.  Their parents bought them a brand new Firebird to drive while they were at school so imagine that.  Me kicking it with the two hottest females on campus driving around in that Firebird in 1986.  Yeah, dudes were jealous and so were the women I used to be friends with.  

But this is the crazy thing.  I mentioned that I would send letters and pictures to cute chicks in the states that I did not know that were friends of my buddies down there.  And when it was early in the year at Ricks I was hanging out with another foxy chick named Valerie, she liked me a lot but I only liked her as a friend.  I was picky.  She was totally hot too, but not my type.  And I had my girlfriend back home anyway, but we were doing the long distance relationship thing and it sucked.  Because I missed her, she was cute, kind of looked like Madonna.  She got pregnant while I was in Paraguay and so I gave up on her to focus on the mission.  But when I got back she got her hooks into me again and I fell for her lovely blue eyes and toe-head blonde hair.  But I wanted to have all kinds of fun being out of the house again and leaving my image and impression on everything and everyone.

So rather than getting married with a readymade family I was shipped off to school, good thing too.  So I was hanging out with Valerie, this chick I had met at the dance club.  She was cool and nice, we would hang out on Sunday afternoon and have lunch, listen to music, watch movies.  I would make her laugh.  Those were good times

One night she asked me if I knew the Jacobs twins.  I said no, but I knew who they were.  She said they were friends of hers from back home and asked me if I wanted to meet them.  I said that would be cool.  Heck yea I want to meet them.  So she said, they live in the same complex as me, so we walked over to their place and knocked on the door and Sherrie opened the door and we were introduced.  And Sherrie said, Oh my gosh, I have a picture of you on my bedroom wall.  My mind was blown, and I said WTF?  How in the world did that happen?

So she told me that one of her friends was a missionary, who was a friend with Terry Hilton and I had written to her and sent her photos of me.  And she liked them and put them on her wall.

So that happened.  Totally cool.  I started spending a lot of time with her and she knew I had a girlfriend back home and she was hitting on me big time and wanted me bad.  So we were sitting in her bedroom; and my hair was a big deal with the hair spray and doing it just right to my style. She gave me a scalp massage and I allowed her to totally mess my hair up.  She was a cosmetologist also so she knew how to make the scalp feel good.  So I said I had to go home now and I walked to the front door and she said, you know it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have a ring on your finger.  And she got me right there.  So I swooped in for a killer make-out session with that hot blondie who became my girlfriend pretty much from that moment on.

And I was a straight A student but when I started dating her, my grades went to shit because all I could focus on was my love life.  My social life got the best of me and my grades tanked.  I was put on academic probation.  Also, there were standards at this school.  Guys had to have short hair above the ears, certainly no piercings.  But I was always a rebel with my fashion and I had longish hair, all hair sprayed up in to a pompadour flat-top style with a gold stripe in front, and I wore an ear ring to one of the school dances.  So I was called in to what they called Student Life and given a lecture about the dress code and standards.  I also had the 5 o’clock shadow going on all the time and guys were supposed to be clean shaven too.  So they saw me in the pictures at the Homecoming dance with beardage and an ear ring and they could not abide that sort of thing.  So I told them I would conform and that I was just having some fun.  Of course I rocked my style anyway, just not when I went to class. 

I had a buddy we called Mohawk Mike.  He was from Long Island and one of the only dudes I could identify with, being from the city.  He had a true mohawk, a good one.  His hair was curly and the mohawk was just right, thin from forehead to the neck but he let his hair grow on the sides so he didn’t get busted by Student Life.  And he was the only other dude who dressed like me so of course we became fast friends.  He was always going through some romance heartbreak and writing poetry about it.  He was kind of gothic but we listened to cool tunes and he was totally misunderstood by his roommates.  I would go over to kick it with him and he was in to art and music, didn’t like sports at all.  But I was that new wave rock and roller with my weird style but totally in to sports.  So I would hang out at Mike’s pad and play touch football with his roommates.  And they liked me because I was for real.  I was kind of weird but I had hot girls and liked cool music and dudes like a rebel for a friend.  And I was cool to them.  Mike had some cool room mates.  But they didn’t get him and made a little fun of his gothic style.  I was there to buffer that and be cool with everyone.  Mike was in to women, he was always making out with this chick or that chick.  He would tell me after the weekend, Hey Vaughn, I made out with her Saturday night.

At Rick’s college there were rules.  No boys in the bedroom, and after hours females could not enter any male apartments and no men could enter any female apartments.  But I broke the rules.  I would sleep over night in bed with Sherrie and Michelle.  Fortunately there were no cameras back then so I could sneak out when nobody was looking.  Looking back on this, I was kind of charmed.  Who gets to sleep with two foxy twins?  And when I say sleep with, I mean we slept.  No sexy time for adult fantasy.  But me and Sherrie would get frisky and Michelle just slept right next to us as we got down on each other.  

And when I came back home in April 1986, just as the summer was getting over, my parents thought it would be a good idea to send me to Ricks College.  And I was all for that.  And I met all kinds of super foxy chicks.  They all loved me with my style and being so different from the norm.  Plus, when I was younger I was a fairly handsome dude.  People used to tell me I looked like John Travolta, before he became a fat scientology wierdo.  That didn’t suck at all, people thinking I looked like Vinny Barbarino.  So I stood out and dudes would comment on my style and my hair and how many pairs of shoes I had.  They were cool, they wanted to be my friend and they would compliment me on my style.  But there were the haters too, and those local cowboy dipshits thought they could mess with me and bully me. 

They had no idea where I came from. Through their lens, I was some uppity city jerk coming to their territory. My hair style and clothing pissed them off highly. So one of these corn fed hard ons saw me at the grocery store. I was with my beautiful blondie girlfriend, driving a brand new Trans Am, so we stood out like sore thumbs in hick town. That surely pissed off captain redneck. So he followed us into the grocery store and started harassing me so I flipped him the bird and he shoved me in the shoulders and I fell on my ass. But I got up and flipped him the bird again. And he said, “why is your hair all weird like that?” At that point me and Sherrie just laughed and walked away.

But that weekend there was only one movie theater playing one movie so everyone in town went to see it. It was Ghostbusters. We were in line and that redneck was there too and saw me and he walked past me and said, “what’s up dickless?” 

I blew it off and Sherrie was kind of pissed at that dude, like what’s his mental issue?

After the movie I was in the rest room and our friend Brian was with me, he said, “hey man, that dude is looking for you and he wants to fight you.”

So in my mind I prepared to perhaps lose the first fight of my life. This dude was huge and I was intimidated. But my uncle Frenchie was a goldsmith/jeweler and he had custom crafted a gold ring with my initials and three diamonds. I wore it on my left hand but in the restroom I put it on my right middle finger. Because I was about to tattoo VHB on that mother fucker’s face.

So I tried to avoid the guy at first but he came running after me and Sherrie got in his way and said, “why don’t you just leave him alone!”

Then he shoved her in the shoulders like he did to me at the grocery store and she fell flat on her ass in the middle of the street. So I saw that, my beloved flailing and falling to the asphalt, and I was about ten yards away from the dude at this point. And when I saw that, I went red and my right arm was throwing a hail Mary pass over the mountains right into that asshole’s face.

He didn’t even see it coming. So after that first punch that shattered his nose and face bones, I laid down a beating like his face was Mike Tyson’s punching bag. I beat the living dog shit out of this dude.

And what freaked me out is that he didn’t go down. But I stopped and looked at him and he was just standing there in shock, literally in shock from the face trauma I put upon his redneck ass. He was wobbly on his feet and I just remember his face was purple and distorted and his eyes were out of focus and I said, “OK, let’s shake on it”

And I put my hand out to be a gentleman and he attempted to throw a punch at me but seriously, dude was in shock, lights out, nobody home, face destroyed. And his fist raised up and touched my cheek and then his arm fell down like a rag doll.

So we just got in our car and went home and we didn’t say a word about what just happened. It was weird, like we never spoke of it. It was like it never happened.

And the rest of my year there I was always looking over my back to see if redneck dudes were coming for vengeance. But as time played out I realized that I probably put that dude in the hospital and he probably never tried anything like that again, let alone getting vengeance.

My college roommate, Jason Buchanan is one of my best friends to this day.  We were both studying psychology but he started taking pilot’s lessons and is today a Captain for Virgin America. 

And the dudes across the hall, I don’t remember their names but they were from Wyoming, kind of rednecks but they were there on baseball scholarships so they were fun.  And they loved what I was in to, all my kookiness and fun party times.  Van Halen had just joined up with Sammy Hagar and were on tour with their first Van Hagar album.  And I had seen Van Halen three times with David Lee Roth and Sammy twice as a solo artist.  So seeing these dudes together was going to be something else.  So I told all my roommates and the dudes across the hall that Van Halen was coming to Idaho State to perform and that we must all go see them together and that it would be a show that would blow their minds.

They agreed and we all got tickets and when it came time to go to the show we piled in to Jason’s sub compact Mazda hatchback and stuffed ourselves in to that car.  It was a five seater but we had eight people in that car.  Me, Jason, his girlfriend, John our roommate, the three dudes from across the hall and one of their girlfriends.  It was sort of like back in the fifties when dudes would try and stuff as many people in a phone booth as possible.  We were young and having fun sober going to rock out to some live Van Halen and we were stoked.

Jason wanted me to drive so he could cuddle with his girlfriend.  And I liked driving fast and his car was a speedy five speed little white Mazda.  We’re flying down the Interstate and I’m putting the pedal to the metal driving 120mph in the left lane on a two lane freeway with eight people in the car.  I know, completely irresponsible but everyone was laughing and screaming and we were loving it.  And just then, woosh, I drove past a state trooper.  I knew I was busted big time and I was freaking out.  But there was a convoy going on with a whole bunch of semis.  So I was smooth and sly and slowed way down and nestled that car right in between two of those big eighteen wheelers and watched the cops with their lights and sirens go whipping past me and a little bit down the road, the cops had pulled over a white MR2 that looked like our car.  Yup, we got away with that one.  But I drove the speed limit the rest of that trip.  And we were all laughing knowing how bad ass we were.  I still can’t believe that happened.

Then we rocked out to Bachman Turner Overdrive and Van Hagar for the next several hours and I banged my head and showed those dudes what it was like to party at a Van Halen concert.  They loved it and I loved giving them that experience.

And I saw Sammy again in Puyallup, WA but do not remember the show at all.  I was staying with my buddy Jay and he owned twenty acres of raw land and built his home on ten and then there was the other ten, just old growth forest.  And up in Washington mushrooms grow all over the place and especially in old growth areas.  So I was flying high on shrooms and his sister gave me two Xanax.  I am not in to pills but I was out of my mind on shrooms so I took the Xanax.  I remember walking into the venue.  I remember one bar of the song Heavy Metal and that’s it.  I told Jay I don’t remember a thing and he laughed and told me I was rocking out singing every lyric having a blast.  Wow!  Xanax is not a party drug that is for sure.  If you want to be retarded or just sleep, then I guess that’s what it’s good for.

That year of college was a blur.  I had too much fun and not enough studying.  The photography club was taking photos for the yearbook and they were doing a piece on the fashion of the day and they sought me out, my girlfriend, her sister and Mike and a couple other people who dressed like us and did a photo shoot.  We were spotlighted right there in the middle of the yearbook for being so cool.  And I wasn’t even dressed up in the pictures, I was just wearing my grubbies but I had Vans, big wool socks hanging around my ankles, pegged Levi 501s, some cool t-shirt and a white ski jacket with my hair all done up.  I looked like 90210 preppy dude.  That wasn’t the way I normally dressed, which is ironic but it was still fashionable, much more than the dull style that most of the students had.  Mike, Sherrie and Michelle just wore their every day regular styling clothes that looked killer and got attention.  I laugh now about that style I rocked back then.  Ricks College 1986/87 year.  And what was super awesome that year, even though it was a Jr College, our football team won the national championship that year.  Michelle, Sherrie’s twin sister was dating the quarterback of course.  They were stereotypical 80s chicks.  If they had their eye on some dude, they knew they could get any guy they wanted.  And I would hear them talking this shit out loud about how hot they knew they were while they stood in the mirror shooting Aqua-net into their platinum blond locks, and I would just sit there laughing enjoying my eye candy times two.  And they would get dressed in front of me, like I was just part of the family.

Later on I heard from Sherrie, when we first met they chose which one of them would get me after I left her apartment that day looking at those photographs with Val.  And they both decided I was for Sherrie.  And she did a good job seducing me, that’s for sure.  And how could I not give in to her hitting on me?  So fine, sexy, funny, loved alternative music, came from a messed up dysfunctional family just like me.  So we fell in love fast.  It was that first kiss, her seducing me.

There was a dance club in that town that all the college students went to and that’s where she started flirting with me big time.  She liked the way I danced and I loved watching her sexy body move to the music.

I was in good physical condition.  I played racquetball for a couple of hours every day and then went to the weight room to sculpt my young adult body to look good for the chicks.  There was a lot of competition out there so I had to be prepared to get in to the social scene.  And I was looking good back then.  Very athletic, very vain, very in to how I looked because I got a lot of attention so if I was going to get attention, I was going to give them something to remember.  Sherrie would embarrass me a bit, she was very particular about her boyfriends and she only liked athletic body types.  She was very commercial and vain and wanted to appear to others to be the beautiful people to make others jealous.  But she was so hot, and I was young so how could I not go for her at that age?  In my later years I would have blown her off and called her a stuck up bitch.

When I moved to Provo after the Seattle bust I had been in touch with Sherrie but she had a new boyfriend.  I called her on the way out and told her I was coming to town and asked if I could visit.  She was excited for me to come and visit and despite her having a boyfriend, we got naked in bed that night.  When I pulled up she walked out of her house and I was walking around my car to give her a hug and she just planted the greatest kiss on me and we stood there by my car making out for a good five minutes.  Man that was a good welcome home.

So we went in the house, got some food, watched a movie then went to bed together and it was so awesome.  But we were not in a relationship however we had all that history so it was like being with family again.  We should have gotten married but she was never faithful to her men.  I mean, look at this.  She was getting down with me and was in love with her boyfriend Tyler, last name will be unwritten.  Pinegar.  She loved that dude because he was athletic, had a body like Arnold but slimmer.  She was lusty and small, and liked to crawl over her man’s body and feel safe and loved it that way.  When we were in bed I would be laying face up and she would just curl up put her arms around me, and I would put my arms around her and she would lay me and sleep on top of me.

She was tiny, she weighed less than 100 lbs and she wasn’t anorexic, she was just a little tiny blonde bombshell.  She ate everything we ate but she and her sister were just little tiny hot blondies.

Michelle had to fly home for some reason and the closest airport was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  It was the middle of winter and Michelle had to catch a flight that night so she drove the Firebird and me and Sherrie and another roommate came along for the roadie.  Michelle drove that car like she stole it.  She was out of control.  She drove like she was in a Nascar race all the way to Jackson Hole.  And we were in the Tetons, it was snow and ice and she was one hell of a good driver because she put the pedal to the metal and skid around turns.  And as crazy as I was driving, she actually had me feeling a little anxiety like holy shit Michelle, you’re going to kill us.  I asked her to mellow out and she said, Shut the fuck up, Vaughn.  So I just kicked it in the back seat and enjoyed the ride.  They were laughing and going nuts so I just chilled out the best I could.  What the hell could I do with three crazy women thinking they were invincible?  

The funny thing is, that when we finally made it to the Jackson Hole Airport after driving like Speed Racer (seriously it was Speed Racer all the way there on snow and ice and cliffs if you got off the road, you were toast) we were driving down the street that lead to the airport and she slid on some ice and crashed the car in to a snow embankment.  Now how ironic was that?  After all of the Speed Racer dangerous driving, she crashes into a snow bank at the airport and had to get towed out because she got the car stuck.  I kept my mouth shut but wanted to tell her, that’s what you get thinking you can drive like that.  

The guys that worked at the airport got one of their trucks to pull us out of that snow bank and the guy hooked a chain between the two vehicles and when he gave it some gas, the chain snapped and slammed in to their pickup truck’s rear window and it shattered.  I was thinking, what in the hell is going on around here?  This is crazy!  So they got rope and that worked and we took Michelle to the airport and she flew home to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  But before she flew home we had to stay over night because the next flight was the next day.  So we pooled our resources together and I got my parents to give me their credit card number and we got a motel room with a king sized bed and all four of us slept on it that night.  We hit the hot tub and chilled out for a while then it got late and we all got in that bed together.  Me and Sherrie had some sexy time right there next to Michelle and their roommate.  I’m sure they knew what was going on but they just slept through it from what it looked like.

Sherrie was a little horn dog because we would be watching movies with a group of friends and she would be giving me a handjob, and nobody knew what was going on.  For vacation one time me and the twins rode an Amtrak train to Portland.  The train broke down so they put us on Greyhound buses and gave our money back.  Me and the twins sat in the back seat of the bus and Sherrie gave me hand jobs all the way home.

We went down in to the restroom together and she gave me a blow job and when we came out of the restroom together there were a group of older folks looking at us and wondering what was going on in there.

Like I said, she was a horny little thing.  One time we were at my apartment in Rexburg, Idaho where we attended Rick’s College together and she said, I am so horny, I have to give you a blow job right now.  So we locked ourselves in the bathroom and she went to work.  She took care of herself while taking care of me too.  She wasn’t a swallower but she tried one time and came up for air looking like she just got shot in the face with a gravy hose.

The year ended and I went back home and the twins moved out to DC for a job.  Me and Sherrie had a long distance relationship but she was cheating on me for sure.  I did not realize it at the time but I know now.  But that’s OK.  She had a libido and could get any man she wanted, so she did.  Yea, I would say she was a slut, but when she was 18 I got a whole lot of her and I wouldn’t trade it for the world because it was spectacular.

When it came time for loving I gave it to them like they never had before and never would again.  Every woman I had sex with more than once told me that I was the best they ever had.  And that sounds terrible to say a woman I had sex with more than once.  Yea, there were a few one night stands but that was not my norm.  It would happen once in a while when some drunk chick would see me and felt horny, I would check them out and if they looked good enough I would give it to them.  Hell, I was lonely and I never had to pay.  I’ve been propositioned by prostitutes many times but I always tell them, I don’t have to pay for sex.  If I want to get lucky all I have to do is buy the right woman some drinks and then seduce her.

This happened to me one time in Las Vegas.  I was living in Seattle around 2015 and 

 several years earlier me and my girlfriend and Dave Weisenbeck and  his wife went to Las Vegas for the Lost 80s Weekend and Mandalay Bay.  It was 10 or 12 bands from the eighties, they would get on stage and play their most famous hits.  And one of my best friends is the guitarist for Dramarama, Mark Englert, so we went to support him.  And at the show I was up dancing to the tunes, my girlfriend just sat on the grass and watched.  But I started dancing with these two chicks who were there because they loved these old bands.  And I told them I came to support Mark, because Dramarama had just gotten back together from VH1’s bands reunited.  And they said, You know Mark Englert?  I said yea, he’s one of my best friends.  They were impressed and one of them was the HR director for Flamingo Bay resorts so she told me that any time I came to town she would comp me a suite at Flamingo Bay.  I only had to pay the tax which was $40.  A Flamingo Bay suite for $40 bucks a night?

Like I said I was living in Seattle with Jay at the time, I was working on a huge project of the online sort and working as the web master in this entrepreneurship called Culture Tree, something that Amazon.com became and killed Culture Tree.  But I told them that there needed to be competition.  However, they were young and let that take the legs out of their venture.

I had a paypal account and I got an email one day telling me I had $600 in my paypal account.  I knew it was a mistake so I tried to find out where it came from but got no response.  I let the money sit there for a week and heard nothing from anyone so I took it.  Then I used it to fly to Las Vegas for a week of vacation at Flamingo Bay.

I got a killer suite off the strip.  It had a living room, dining room, patio, full kitchen, King bed and a hot tub in my bedroom with television everywhere.  So I just kicked it there for a whole seven days and got loaded and sat in the hot tub, ate good food.  I would walk to Freemont Street for the good entertainment but I’m not a gambler.  I just enjoyed the eye candy and the flair of Las Vegas. But I over did it and spent all my money so when it came time to leave I was broke so I had to walk to the airport with my luggage on my shoulder.  And I was laughing at myself thinking, this is going to make a good story.

My college roommate, Jason was flying me for free, as the captain of the flight, from Seattle to Vegas and I had to dress up for these complimentary flights so I put on a nice shirt and tie and slacks and nice shoes.  And the flight attendants came around with some Jack Daniels and I said, I don’t have any cash.  And they said, You know Jason, right?  I said, yeah he’s like a brother to me.  So she gave me a cup of ice and two tiny bottles of Jack.  And the dude sitting next to me laughed and said, I know Jason too.  So he got one too.  I was having the time of my life.

We flew in to Las Vegas and Jason had a layover for a couple of days so we got a room and went out on the town.  We were at one of the casinos, Jason was playing poker at a machine and I was having a beer.  In walks this smoking fine hot woman and sat right next to me and started talking to me.  She had a friend with her who was sitting a couple of seats down the bar.  Jason didn’t drink, he was squeaky clean honorable LDS father and a very good man, one of the best I’ve ever known.  But he liked to have fun and he was non-judgmental about my antics.  He just liked hanging out with me because whenever I was around there was something fun going on.  So this fine lady sat next to me and we started chatting and I said to Jason, how long you think it’s going to take before she gives me a price?  He laughed and said, I don’t know let’s see.  She started playing video poker and chatting me up, we had a couple of drinks together and then she said, you can have me and my girlfriend for $400 tonight.

I said, well you’re working right now but when you get a break I’ll take you up to your room and give you something you never get when you’re working.  And she said, I’m always on break.  And if Jason hadn’t been there I would have gotten a freebie from that hot prostitute.   But we sat there talking to each other, she started talking to me about her family and her faith in God and when she got up to leave she gave me a nice warm hug and thanked me for being sweet and kind.

Back then I was out of control with women.  I could get any woman I wanted and sometimes I felt like I was a predator.  And that is some evil shit.  But where my head was and being so fucked over by women, family and society, what else was a guy gonna do but keep himself occupied with the fairer sex.  And there was no question about my heterosexuality.  As far as I would take myself in experimentation, I would never and could never understand how a dude could find another dude attractive on a sexual level.  I have been offered threesomes many times and to be honest, I declined every time.  I like it one on one, I don’t need to live out some porno fantasy or do something I can talk about later.  

The first time was in Provo in 1992.  I met some dudes who liked to party where I worked and they were younger than me and their women friends were smoking hot from the ages of 17 to 19 so I had to be careful because they all wanted me and I wasn’t going down as a statutory rapist.  Hell no, not worth it.  I was 25 and there was this drop dead gorgeous blonde 17 year old chick at party central where I met these dudes who rented a house and partied all the time.  We got in to the same music, art, chicks, same drugs and just loved getting high and throwing parties.  I had my apartment but never went home.  It would be three weeks sometimes before I went back to my apartment because I was crashing out at party houses all the time.  And they loved me being there so it was like I was just kicking it with them for a full time party.

So, at one of the parties there was this blondie who was in to partying, I think she was rebelling against her parents and just doing bad things because she was pissed at them.  So we started making out and we were getting down and feeling each other up against my car, so I asked her if she wanted to go back to my place, I had no roommate at the time.  She said yea, for sure.  So I snuck her in and we got it on but I was freaking out because she was 17 years old.  But I could not deny myself of that beautiful little hot rebel chick, tan skin, long blonde hair down to her waist, gorgeous eyes.  It was like, where did you come from?  So I did not give her the full works because I was super nervous about her age.  We finished and went back to the party and it was about 4am, party was still going and I never talked to her again.  My buddy Patrick told me a couple of days later, hey Vaughn, you remember that blonde chick you scored with?  I got down with her too all last weekend.  I laughed and just thought how tragic it was for her to be living like that.  She was getting some hot dudes but she was giving it up for nothing.  No love in her family evidently, either that or she was abused.  I’ll throw this in, she wasn’t anything spectacular.  She just laid there like a cold fish letting it happen.  So yea, definitely a victim of sexual abuse in hindsight.  I did not see it then but I totally do now.  And what’s weird, I never felt guilty after a one night stand until her.  I felt bad for her.  She just wanted affection any way she could get it. 

This party house in Provo was big time epic.  It was on the corner of 900 east right near BYU.  Right behind that house was a huge water slide park, when water slide parks were a new thing.

Years earlier with that crazy chick Carrie. 

However I never joined or got a band started.  I’m not sure why I never did that because as good as I was at guitar and composing music and writing songs, I never saw myself under the spotlight so that’s probably why I didn’t make it big time.  Just a basement musician. I didn’t know anything about drums back then, but little did I know this was my baptism into custom drum building legend.

I got back in to playing the drums again and that was very good for me.  Then I went nuts and got an extra tom and bought the best cymbals I could find on Ebay.  I was totally in to Sabian cymbals because they were innovative and produced new and cool bronze.

I had like nine drums and a great cymbal lineup.  So I started taking drum lessons from a dude in Utah named Kendall White.  It was kind of funny because for the hour of teaching, we would usually get lost on some tangent talking about music or some experience we had in life and I would try to pay him and he would say no way man, we just talked and I didn’t teach you anything.  But I said, hey man, this is like therapy for me, getting out of the house for a beat to get some musical time in my craw.  Kendall was so cool, he taught me how to swing, taught me independence with my hands and feet and also taught me some African rhythms that really helped my independence and made me a way better drummer.  My right hand would be doing one thing, the left something totally off time from the right and my foot would just kick when it seemed necessary.  I came up with all kinds of unique chops with the hi-hates and the snare drum.  I was having fun and my wife hated it.  But my daughter, Ali was totally in to it so I took her to a drum clinic put on by Steve Smith from the band Journey.  Me and Ali had a lot of fun together.

However, that was not the case with my oldest daughter, Tayslie.  I would say that I abused her with my words.  I never laid a finger on them but the vocal abuse echoes for ever.  And I was angry and mean and took it out on Tayslie.  Seems like those kind of patterns happen in families.  So tragic.  Looking back, Tays says that she would try to make me mad.  I do not know why there was so much animosity between us because today we are friends.  I have cried a river of tears many times for the stupid actions of a young father.  And what is worse is that I can’t go back and make changes then,  that stuff happened in their formative years so it is engrained in their subconscious.  And even though I have repented of my anger and bitterness, my face might still trigger those old emotions.  I sure hope not but you never know.  I have asked for forgiveness from my daughters, Tayslie and Ali and they were pretty much brainwashed by their mother so they didn’t say anything when I apologized.

My wife told them that people do not change so if I was mean I will always be mean to them.  Well that is exactly the opposite of what we were teaching our children about the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Change is the key element in a relationship with Christ.  And she was so caught up in the Mormon culture that she missed the gospel message that the culture was supposed to teach.  She was taught, but she did not learn.  And she could teach too.  She was called upon many times to teach classes in church and she would go way overboard with her demonstration and preparation, like she was going to be judged by everyone in the room so she super prepared and was always a great teacher before an audience.  But she didn’t do it to help others learn, she did it because someone asked her to and she had to make sure that she made no mistakes.

Christi was very critical of everything.  When we were dating she told me that a small two bedroom house with a white picket fence would make her happy.  So I bought that 3000 sq ft Victorian house in Kaysville, Utah and she found all kinds of things she did not like about the house.  It had Oak hard wood floors in the dining room and kitchen and a huge Oak China cabinet.  The house was beautiful.  The bedrooms were massive, and I tore out the storage room and made another bedroom for our daughter Ali. Tayslie and Ali had their own rooms but because of the framework of the house there was an opening so it was like two huge bedrooms with no door.  But that allowed them to be very close as they always were.  Best friend sisters.  My kids all loved each other.  Nathan and Cassidy didn’t get along very well, but they do now.

So I had a stay at home mom, a great house, five kids and a killer job that I loved because every day I would go to work and hang out with some of my best friends.  And Christi was jealous of my life.  She even told me so.  She would tell me how arduous it was to take care of the children all day and I was having fun at work with my best friends.  She couldn’t even clean the god damned bathroom with all the time she had on her hands.  She said it grossed her out.  Well yea, cleaning the bathroom is gross when you have little boys that do not aim well.  But that is her job while I do my job to bring home the bacon.  All of the luxuries in life she couldn’t ask for more.  She could have done anything she wanted to.  I don’t understand how a stay at home mom can not clean the house.  And she didn’t know shit about a kitchen or how food works or flavors.  All she knew is that she hated cheese and creamy sauces.  How does one come about that kind of aversion to food?  She must have had a bad experience as a child with cheese.  Maybe she got sick after eating something and when she puked it was cheese.  But she said it was the texture, slimy that she didn’t like.  She was finicky like Morris the cat.  I’ve never known another person who was so averse to so many things in life.  I’m not sure how it would be possible to enjoy anything with such a negative outlook on everything.

And I mean everything.  Never satisfied, ever.  Never grateful for anything, ever.  Always expecting the worst to happen and then making it happen because that’s where she put her energy.  When I bought the perfect house for our family she said that it was missing some things but that she would get used to it.  WTF?

I think her dad had a lot to do with the way she did things.  She didn’t know anything, wouldn’t look up a recipe, could barely boil water.  All she could make for meals was chicken baked at 350 or maybe some spaghetti pasta and Prego sauce.  Nothing else, never tried to learn anything new.  It was like she had given up on life when life was just getting good.

I should probably talk about how me and my wife met.  If it were not true, it would seem like a fairy tale, but it’s all true and it actually happened.  So after high school I had my sights set on going on an LDS mission for my church.  To preach the gospel of Christ and enlighten peoples lives, nothing better to glorify God than that.  So when I turned 19 I got my affairs in order, sent in my papers and received a calling from the Lord to serve as a missionary in the country of Paraguay.  Now, if you want to talk about third world dankness, this is the place.  At first I was totally homesick, but I got some gnarly food in my digestive system, puked my guts out for three days and when it was over I was happy and healthy and felt right at home.  I guess I had to become assimilated, and I did big time.  So there I was in the middle of South America, just coming from the convenience and luxuries of the United States.  We were in the freaking jungle, man!  Dirt roads, all bumpy, red dirt that looked quite spectacular contrasted with the lush green foliage.  And I was as far away from home as I could get on this planet.  We saw different constellations in the sky at night; I saw the Southern Cross constellation.  But you know what was weird, I could also see the Big Dipper but could not see the Southern Cross in the Northern Hemisphere.

So I must have been in the right place.  And when it got dark out there, there were no street lights or headlights or houselights.  When the sun set, and there was no moon, you could see a bazillion stars out at night.  They say we are in the milky way galaxy and you could see it out there.  It was perfectly clean air and the clearest bright blue skies you could ever dream about.  I could see the formation of the galaxy if I sat and pondered enough.  Very spiritual and got me close to my Creator.  There is something about the night skies that will take you home to your first home, you can feel it if you look closely enough and think about where you came from and why you are a human being on this planet at this time in history.

It is said that Christ came to the earth at the pinnacle of time.  And that means that this world was created by the powers of God that we can not comprehend, yet mankind thinks he is smarter than that.  We are merely children in our sojourn in life.  As humankind living as mortals on planet earth we have evolved up to inventing modern conveniences and if Christ came at the pinnacle of time, which was four thousand years after the fall of Adam and Eve doesn’t it make sense that something has got to give?  To save humanity from their very selves?  Because as knowledgeable as we are, we know nothing.  We only know what God allows us to know.  And brighter minds who are set upon Him, are given greater knowledge.  These are prophets and disciples of Christ.  There are so many churches, religions out there proclaiming to have the answer.  I have been to Catholic Masses, and all sorts of Protestant religions and churches.  We all teach from the same Bible but why are there so many divisions?

For starters, I have no comprehension about how anything got started in the Universe.  I certainly do not give any water to the big bang theory.  What is a theory anyway?  A theory is a hypothesis based on an idea.  And what’s more tragic is that secondary educators, Doctors with phD’s teach this stuff as though it were truth.  And that is dangerous, to teach a theory as taken for granted truth.  So when this happens it leaves all sorts of open doors for untruths to be woven in to the fabric of our brightest young minds.  

And the other theory, Darwinism.  Evolution happens but not apes to humans.  That is ridiculous.  And the scientists say that the earth is billions of years old.  Well, they are correct because the matter that Christ used to create the planet earth has existed for eternity.  So the earth in its form like we have right now is not billions of years old, there are major changes going on.  The Great Flood that we read about in the Old Testament.  That actually happened.  And I think about what kind of crazy creatures were walking around at that time.  It does say in the Old Testament that God repented.  So that means He was experimenting with his creations.  In the beginning we do not have everything told to us, except revelations to the prophet Moses and what we have in the Old Testament.  But for God to repent does not mean He sinned.  He just changed His mind about how things would go down on the planet earth.  He made it more peaceful for the rest of humankind.  But before Noah there is a hint in the Bible that there were giants in the land.  And we have lore to tell stories about giants.  There were giant people and also small people.  Surely the giant people dominated the smaller people.  And of course, dinosaurs.  All kinds of gargantuan creatures.  But I think God experimented a bit and then wiped the earth clean with a baptism of cleanliness to start life anew, to wipe away anything that was not to be remembered.  Much like the atonement of Christ.  A clean slate once forgiven, however, one must go through the arduous process of repentance.  Much like the earth, cleansed from all iniquity, save eight souls, Noah and his family and two of every creature that was upon the earth to be taken into the ark.  I’m sure that’s where the dinosaurs died off, and all those huge and gnarly creatures that walked the earth and the bones that paleontologists dig up came from the results of the flooding of the earth.  Noah could not take every creature.  So some species surely died off.  I wonder if whales and dolphins and octopi and fish stayed under water and just rolled with it.  Probably.  No need to build aquariums in the ark.  Noah had enough going on.  Think about it.  He had apes, monkeys, and monkeys are little shits, they cause all kinds of trouble.  Giraffes, what??  I love Giraffes, they have blue tongues. and their coat is a really cool looking pattern.  Zebras too.  I like the African jungle wild life.  Very beautiful to behold.  That is God’s creation right there.  To make the world a more beautiful yet dangerous place.  There is teaching and learning in that.  God is wise, oh yes, and He only wants us to gain knowledge and glorify Him.  Trapped animals are tragic.  Zoos are not cool for those creatures.  They are put in prison basically for the rest of their lives.  What gives us the right to dominate animal kind like that?  I don’t know, maybe it’s no big deal because animals do not have the skills to solve problems like humans do, although, they do solve problems and some are smart.  However, as humans we are given free will of choice, to choose what is right or what is bad or wrong, to make mistakes and become stronger after going through the process of recovery.  That’s how we learn, by screwing things up and then fixing them.

That is the way God intended for us to behave and learn.  Someone said, “As man is, God once was.  As God is, man may become.”

And that makes perfect sense to me.  Why would the father of our spirits not want us to achieve the things that He has?  The Bible does not say much about the things I imagine but I have studied the best books and looked for knowledge in the right places, asking in prayer for guidance to learn things that most people would pass off as boring.  But those kernels of truth, when you seek, you shall find.  And I have been given many astounding experiences in my life.  All of them testify that God lives and Christ is our savior.  Now, I’m not going on like some television evangelist who says hell fire and brimstone.  From everything I’ve been taught by Christ, it’s all about  love and compassion.  Don’t worry about hell unless you’re an evil mother fucker.  Then you might deserve what we imagine as hell.  Pedophiles, rapists, murders, people that take lives for pleasure, yea they’ll burn in hell with Lucifer for eternity.  But I am not the judge and I do not know what was in their hearts and so I can not say that this mass murderer is going to hell or that this pedophile can not repent.  The judgement is not up to me.  The judgement is Christ’s.  And people think that the judgement is coming when He returns for the second time to rule and reign in righteousness, however that is not biblical at all.  And there is no rapture.  That is man made fantasy uppity better than you are so-called Christian’s fairy tales.  Someone made up the Rapture.  Probably because in the book of Revelation it says that people are taken up to meet the Savior when He comes again. 

So that’s where I’m coming from.  I was, in my earliest years just a kid who played sports and went to school and hung out with his best buddy, Scott Ruby.  My mom took a job when she was young and needed a babysitter so my grandmother knew a family called the Rubys who had a son my age.  Scott and I went to kindergarten together, and we became best friends immediately because we were interested in all the same things.  And we were both very creative and smart, too smart for our own good sometimes, and that’s when we got in to trouble, which we did a lot.  But his parents were so cool, they did not scold us.  They would make Scott go sit in his room and let me watch TV for an hour, then we would get back to our deviance and have our playtime.  We had huge imaginations and were both very artistic so we would come up with all kinds of scenarios and play them out.  We would dress in costumes, pretending to be other characters, we would draw pictures on huge drawing boards or a sketch pad.  They had so much artistic stuff, it was bliss for a child to grow and enlarge his mind with creativity and imagination.  I learned some piano, how to draw, how to paint, how to garden, get fruit off the vine, they had ducks running around their huge yard, dogs and cats that we would torment.  We would make them be characters in our plays and dress them up and give them names.  Scott had a great imagination and that was why I loved being at their house so much.  It was like an oasis for me, to get away from the rancor of my parents and have some peace.  Me and Scott went to Wichita Kindergarten.  I think it was a Baptist church kindergarten.  They didn’t talk about Jesus but I learned to draw in the lines and learned my ABCs.  Me and Scott stayed best friends all through high school.  I would go have a sleep over with them on various weekends and his parents liked me being there because they told me that I kept him occupied and out of trouble.  But we were always looking for trouble.  He had an older brother named Jeff.  Scott was relentless at teasing Jeff for some reason.  Jeff was really cool to me but I would laugh at their banter back and forth.  I remember we started play fighting on the trampoline, like boxing but slap fighting.  I never fought Scott because he was my best pal, but I fought the other kids in the neighborhood.  And one time Jeff came home and saw what we were doing and I challenged him to a fight and he kicked my ass.  I was usually the winner in all these fights but Jeff beat me ass that day.  It wasn’t anything brutal, just slap fighting but he was bigger and stronger than me of course he totally dominated me.  But I thought I was tough enough to take him, and I learned that day that I was not the greatest fighter in the neighborhood.

Portland Wrestling in the 1970s.  This was before big time wrestling or Randy Savage or any of those dudes.  Those guys came on the coat tails of Portland Wrestling.  And the best fighters came through town, promoted by Sandy Barr, who also ran a flea market during the week.  There were the good guy wrestlers and the bad guys too.  Jesse Ventura got started in Portland wrestling in the mid seventies.

My family had moved to a new house, new to us but very old.  My parents flipped houses in the 70s before it was a thing.  And we would move in to a better house, remodel it, sell it, make equity, get another bigger house, remodel, live in it for a while, sell it, then they settled down to a house that I grew up in in Vancouver, Washington.  And when we moved there, it totally took me out of my element.

But back to Portland Wrestling.  So I watched Portland Wrestling on TV every Friday night and I always wanted to see Bull Ramos and Jesse Ventura fight Dutch Savage and Jimmy Superfly Snuka.  Back then Jesse was huge, muscular and wily eyed.  He looked like a crazy person but he was a gentle giant I came to find out.  In our church we had one Sunday every month that the grown-ups would fast and donate the money not used for food to what we called, fast offerings.  It was a way to get the youth primed for knocking doors on their missions, and a way to get them to learn how to deal with all different types of people.  But it was also a way for people to donate to the church and use that money for humanitarian efforts around the world.  Tithing is what paid for the building of temples and churches.  So me and my Deacon buddies were out collecting fast offerings one Sunday afternoon and we knocked on Sharon Rhyer’s door.  Sharon’s husband was Jimmy Superfly Snuka, the famous Portland wrestler and body builder.  So we knocked on their door and Jimmy opened the door and it was, for me like seeing a big shot celebrity all of a sudden, not expected out of the blue.  And we told him we were collecting fast offerings and he hollered down the hall, Sharon, it’s the guys from the church.  And he looked like he was just going somewhere because he had a  huge tight black leather jacket on and a pooka shell necklace with his hair tied up in a  bun.  They were Samoan.  And dude was huge and intimidating and I was standing before one of my idols and did not soil my pants, although, if I had, I would not have blamed myself because what?  Jimmy Superfly Snuka in Vaughn Brown’s face right now?  How kick-ass is that?

So my other epic experience with a big shot wrestler was like a year or two before that.  My family had moved again to another house to flip so I changed schools and was attending Richmond Elementary in south east inner city of Portland.  A concrete jungle as they called it.  No grass in our playground.  We played football on the asphalt.  So I was in the fourth grade and I heard that Jesse Ventura worked out at Loprenzi’s Gym on television.  They threw the name of the gym out on TV and I had seen Loprenzi’s Gym.  It was right across the street from my Elementary School.  So I was crossing guard and me and my crossing guard buddy had an idea.  It was my idea and he was all in of course.  There was one post that was pretty far from school on 39th street and that was ours that day.  So I told my teacher, Mr Hamblin that we needed to leave early to get to 39th street on time for school to get out.  And he said, yeah, go for it.  So that worked and I had my idea to go to Loprenzi’s and see if Jesse Ventura was there.  Because what else, in a kid’s mind, would a big shot wrestler be doing other than working out and kicking ass.  Those dudes were invincible to me.  And Jesse was a bad guy wrestler back then, but I didn’t care.  He was famous and I knew I had to meet that dude.  So we took off early one day, went to the gym and asked the guy at the front desk, in our nine year old crossing guard uniforms and flags, Is Jesse Ventura here?

So the guy at the front desk was so cool and sweet to us little kids, and he yelled back to the locker room and said, Hey Jesse, you got a couple of fans out here!

So all of a sudden freaking Jesse Ventura walks out in his work out uniform, all huge and sweaty and we said, Can we have your autograph Jesse?  And he said, what are you doing in here, I’m the bad guy.  I bet you like Bull Ramos and Dutch Savage.  Of course we did, but right then I said, No way, I like you.  You’re way better than those guys.  And he laughed and signed our little pieces of paper and we went on our way and said, Thanks Jesse!  And he said, Be good kids!

That was very cool for me.  So I told all my buddies and my parents and my parents were cracking up that I had the audacity to do such a thing.

Me and my friends got a lot of autographs back then.  It was like a competition between us to see who could get the most famous autographs.  So when the Portland Trailblazers were the NBA champs with Bill Walton, my mom got his autograph for me and I got Lloyd Neal’s autograph somehow.  I think I saw him at a restaurant and of course for the children, they were very cool.  I got several NBA player’s autographs.  My dad had season tickets during the early years and their championship season in 1977 when they beat the Philadelphia 76ers with Dr J, Julius Erving and Chocolate Thunder Daryl Dawkins and Moses Malone.  But we had the tenacious Dave Twardzick, Bobby Gross, Bill Walton, Lloyd Neal and Larry Steele.  So any time I saw a famous person I grabbed pen and paper and shoved it in their face.  They were always cool because I was a kid and who doesn’t like to give autographs?  Unless you’re overwhelmed, but there was no celebrity that famous in those days.  Maybe in Hollywood but not in sports.

When I was nine years old my uncle Frenchie (he was from Paris so we called him Frenchie, his name was Claude but he did not like that name much) and his wife, aunt Sandy, my dad’s sister had no children and I was the only kid on that side of the family so I got treated like a prince whenever it was gift giving time.  They lavished me with anything I asked for, it did not suck at all.  I was spoiled rotten but remained humble for the most part.  My friends didn’t get it, where I got such cool stuff and I would tell them, my aunt and uncle are wealthy and they give me all kinds of cool stuff. 

Frenchie was a goldsmith and jeweler so he made a 14 karat gold ring with my initials on it.  What kid in the 1970s wears a gold ring on his finger?  Just me.  One time I was in the rest room taking a whizz.  I must have been in the third or fourth grade, and the bars on top of the stalls looked like something I could jump and grab.  So in my over enthusiasm I stood on the toilet and jumped up and grabbed that bar above the stall door.  But there were pointy triangular metal things to keep people like me from doing what I was doing.  And I didn’t care because I was invincible.  Not quite…I jumped and grabbed that bar and was hanging there for a minute and then I let go but my gold ring was caught on one of the spikes and I was freaking out hanging by my finger on my gold ring.  And it cut in to my finger and there was blood and I was freaking out.  So I grabbed the bar with my other hand and pulled myself up and got down off of that thing.  Then I went to the office and they put some bandages on me and sent me home.  Their first aid kind of sucked but when we went to my grandpa’s house, he put some antibiotic ointment on my finger and wrapped my hand up in sterile gauze pads.  And I healed up quickly after grandpa fixed me up.  My grandfather Glade Rasmussen played full back at the University of Utah in the 1930s.  Watch the movie, Leather Heads, and that’s what football was like back then.  Hard core, not much padding and you were just getting beaten like everyone else and it felt great.  So grand dad was big time national and got attention from the NFL.  But he had a family and a job with the railroad so he stayed with that.  The Detroit Lions were trying to draft him, but they did not pay like they do today.  They got a money for food and hotels but they did not have a salary.

 So my uncle Frenchie and aunt Sandy were going to vacation at Disneyland and wanted to take me with them for three days.  I was super stoked!  I got out of school for three days and got to go to Disneyland in 1976. I had the time of my life and didn’t want to go home.  It was the first time I flew on an airplane.  We stayed in the Disneyland Hotel, we got to see Disney on lights that was new, and the biggest ride back then was the Matterhorn, which is pretty lame by today’s standards, but it was killer back then.  And the Pirates of the Caribbean was killer.  I also liked the haunted house, that was super cool because it was like watching a horror movie on a roller coaster.  But for the most part it was just killer being a kid at Disneyland with nothing in the world to care about.

And when we were at LAX waiting for our flight back home I recognized some dudes also waiting for our flight.  It was the New York Nicks.  The Thursday before we went to Disneyland, me and dad went to the Trail Blazer game against the Nicks, and so evidently they were playing the Lakers that weekend.  And they flew first class.  No private jets or anything lavish because billionaires did not own teams back then.  And my uncle knew nothing about NBA basketball, but I knew everything.  I knew every team, every player and their numbers and their stats.  I kept up on NBA basketball as a kid, I could have had a radio show talking about NBA sports.  That would have been cool.  Anything about the NBA and I was full attention.  Corky Calhoun of the Trail Blazers came to our school and put on a clinic and I was there front and center.  Played two on two with him, jumped up to get the ball and totally fouled him on the arm.  But he was cool about it of course.  We were kids having fun.  So anyway, I saw those New York Knickerbockers at the LAX and recognized them of course from watching NBA on TV and having seen them lose to the Trail Blazers earlier in the week.  They didn’t look like they were having much fun but of course I was in full on autograph mode.  But I was a little shy so I asked my uncle if he could help me get their autographs.  So I handed them pen and paper and one dude wrote, Walt Frazier, and the other guy wrote Mel Davis and then I handed the pen and paper to Spencer Haywood and he said, I’m just traveling with the team.  I knew who he was, but as a nine year old I was not going to call him out.  I should have though.  You’re Spencer Haywood, I know you dude.  You think I’m some dumb kid?  But he was just being non chalant.  Then he got traded to the Seattle Super Sonics and won a championship with Jack Sickma from Oregon State.  Man I knew some NBA facts when I was a kid.  I saw Jack Sickma and I remember how tall he was and that he had really bad acne on his back.  Kind of gross but I do remember that.  He was young or on steroids or something.  They did not drug test back then so dudes in sports used steroids all the time to heal up quicker and bulk up for professional sports.  The big men in NBA basketball were like giants to me.

In 1976 there was something called the Freedom Train.  An Amtrak train that was made in to a museum.  And it rolled through Portland so we had to go see all that cool stuff.  And I saw all kinds of killer things from fame.  Like Dorothy’s dress from the Wizard of Oz, one of the best movies ever, next to the Big Lebowski.  And I saw a size 22 shoe from I think it was Moses Malone but I could be wrong about that.  I don’t exactly remember whose shoe it was but it was a Nike and it was frikking huge man.  You could water ski on that thing, seriously.

And I saw the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and all the founding father’s documents.  George Washington’s wooden teeth, Ben Franklin’s kite.  I did not realize at the time what I was beholding.  I was walking through history and I thought it was pretty cool but did not know how amazing that was, for some group to put together that much to share with the nation to remember our freedoms and liberties.  As an adult I surely appreciate the wonders that I beheld right before my very eyes.  Not too many people get to see the Smithsonian on a train in 1976.  The golden spike, the first television, the lunar lander that splashed down when the astronauts came back from Apollo 11.  So many cool things I got to see.  I wish I could remember them all.  Probably a good Google search for Freedom Train 1976 would do the trick and that’s what I’m doing right now.

George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, the original Louisiana Purchase, Judy Garland’s dress from The Wizard of OZ, Joe Frazier’s boxing trunks, Martin Luther King’s pulpit and robes, and even a rock from the moon.

This from freedomtrain.org

I remember all that stuff. It was cool looking at a rock from the Moon.

So back to the fighting, I wish I did not have so much violence in my history.  I do not enjoy horror movies or really don’t like watching MMA too much.  I’m pretty mellow these days, I wouldn’t even kill a fly unless he tried to party on my skin, then I would whack him to death.  But flies are quick, like rabbits, so you have to hunt them down and have fast hands to kill flies with the bare hand.  And of course while you are doing battle with the fly you must have your own sound track like making noises that coincide with the events happening upon your skin with flies dying.  And bloody mayhem for those flies that encumber my progress.  You will die if you party on my skin!  You flies can party around me but not on me.  If you party on me, I will kill you.  If you just fly around and be cool, I will let you live.

So I have to tell about my epic fight in college.  And this fight started weeks before any fisticuffs were thrown.  I was in Rexburg Idaho, completely out of my element.  And it was a couple of weeks before school started at Ricks College.  So I found an apartment away from campus because I knew I would be breaking rules.  For the first time in my life I did not have a car, but I did not need one because everybody else had a car and they let me use them if I needed to.  That year was a volume in itself.  But I’ll just stick with the fighting that season.  I was in to fashion and underground music so I dressed like I wanted to look different.  I wanted to be someone that people looked at and wondered how the hell did he become so cool.  That was my style back then, very arrogant, but I got the most beautiful chicks and hung out with the popular crowed.  Not that it really means anything to me today, because I was just doing societies work.  Being in a category by being called a New Waver or a Punk Rocker.  They were so freaking judgmental in Idaho.

So when I moved in to my first apartment I was on the bottom floor and there were dudes up on the second floor.  It was the afternoon and I was chilling out reading some book and in my ceiling it sounded like a herd of bison was walking around up there.  So remember, I came from intensity and confrontation and that was the only way I knew how to deal with things.  Confrontation, and that got me in to a lot of trouble.  Like this time, I should have been patient but I did not know what patience was.  That was for old people.  I had no time for patience because I had to have my way right now all the time.  Very spoiled.  But super kick-ass as well.

The rumbling in my ceiling was enough to drive Mother Teresa to violence.  So I, in my tough guy mode, went up there and knocked on the door and when they answered I said, hey, I don’t know if your sexual preference  is gay but could you guys tone it down a bit?  I was in asshole mode, not realizing that I was out of my element in Idaho.  

And they were nice and cool to me and we shook hands and that was that.  And I decided not to stay in those apartments so I talked to the land lord and they let me break my lease because it was still early in the year and they could fill it up with someone else.  So I moved to Harris Hall and my roommate was Jason Buchanon.  A hoser from  Canada and we were instant best friends.  We did everything together, until the girlfriends got in the way of our freedom.

So how does this lead up to my last fight?  Well, when school got in session me and my new girlfriend were going to class and one of the dudes from the apartment experience saw me in a parking lot and he flipped me off.  So I showed him the bird too.  My girlfriend asked me what that was about and I said, I don’t know, just some asshole flipped me off.  I did not want to tell the whole story.  But this thing lingered and she was by default, right in the middle of it.

So me and Sherrie were at the local grocery store and the dude that flipped me off was there with his buddy, some corn fed cowboy who was huge and way bigger than me so he took it upon himself to do the dirty work for his buddy.  And I was looking city slicker with my layered clothing and funky shoes and weird hair that they could not comprehend.  I wore my hair like a pompadour with a gold stripe across my head.

And cowboy dude saw me in the isle of the store and came up to me and said, why is your hair all freaked out like that?  So I just flipped him off and walked away. But he followed me and shoved me in the shoulders and I fell to the floor.  So I gave him the bird again and said to Sherrie, no fighting in the grocery store, cops will come.  So we split.  I didn’t think much of it after that.  I did think that his buddy was an all time pussy for letting his friend fight his battles 

It was 1986 and Ghost Busters was in the theater in that town so we went to watch the movie and anyone who wanted to go out, the only thing to do was see a movie, so basically the whole young adult crowd was there to see Ghost Busters.  And while we were standing in line that dip shit cowboy walked past me and called me dick less.  A reference to the movie.  So I just laughed, I thought it was funny.  I was not intimidated at all.  So after the movie I was in the restroom and my buddy Brian tells me that this guy is waiting outside for me and wants to fight.

So I got prepared for what I thought was going to maybe be my first beating.  And remember uncle Frenchie?  When I got older he crafted a new ring for me, which was much heavier, still my initials but this one had three diamonds in it too.  I had that on my left hand but I put it on my right hand to tattoo that dudes face with my initials.  I did not know what was going to happen but all of a sudden I was in fight mode.  So we walked out of the theater and dude was chasing me down, I didn’t want a fight, I just wanted him to go away.  So Sherrie got in his face and said, what’s your problem, why don’t you leave him alone?

And just like in the grocery store, when he shoved me down, he did the same thing to her and she fell into the street and when I saw that I saw red, and dude did not know what was coming from my fists of fury.  Diptard cowboy messing with the wrong dude from the city.  So the first thing I did was to jump step a bit closer like I was throwing a javelin to that guy and serve him up along side his face with my knuckle sandwich.  And he got VHB branded on his face that night because I came like I was throwing a hail Mary pass from the ground into his face.  And after that first blow I then I proceeded to box his face in like a punching bag.  I beat the living shit out of this dude and he was tough too.  He would not go down.  But I could tell I messed him up real bad because after I stopped with my hurricane fists in his face he stood in front of me and I saw like, lights on but nobody was home.  Dude was out on his feet, and he tried to throw one punch at me after all of that but his hand just barely touched my face and his arm dropped to his side like a rag doll.  So we split and I remember seeing his face.  I surely fucked him up bad.  Dude probably had to have cosmetic surgery because I know I broke his nose and I think I broke his cheek bone too with that first punch.  His face was purple and you could see that the poor mother fucker was in shock.  He couldn’t even react to the ass beating he just received. The next day both of my hands were sore from punching his face in.  And that never happened in any of my fights before.  For my knuckles to be sore after that, I must have really pounded on that dude.  Both of my hands hurt the next day so he got everything I had to give.  And fuckin A man, did he not deserve it?  Dude was asking for a wakeup call. 

After school got out, Sherrie came to visit me in Vancouver  and my mom asked her, why do you love him.  And she was a loud mouth chick from Milwaukee, Wisconsin but freaking beautiful, one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen.   5 foot 3 and healthy, not any fat on her body, blonde hair, gorgeous smile, beautiful blue eyes.  Man, what did I do to deserve this?  I once heard that the best missionaries get the hottest girls.  And I always had the hottest girlfriends, because I was picky.  But I was also a great missionary.  So in response to my mom’s question, she said, he has a hot body and he’s totally sexy.  I think my mom’s mind was blown right there.  I was somewhat embarrassed but totally amused that my girlfriend told my mom I was sexy and hot. 

And yes, I lost my virginity with her.  And man, Our love life was so good.  We were together like Forrest Gump and Jenny.  And the first time we had sex, she was not a virgin and that didn’t bother me because she was with me now, she asked me, how do you know how to do all the right things, you are like an expert lover she said.  I said, maybe instinct, but I already knew what was going on from years of Levi loving and making out with numberless chicks.  I knew about the things that got her started too from watching porno when I was a teen.  Me and my buddies would rent porno and we learned all kinds of sexual stuff that I wish I could un-see.

We went all night long, like nine times until the sun rose.  We were one in the flesh.  And I bought her an engagement ring that she wore.  We were fiances but never set a date to get married.  I thought that was up to her.  What sucked however is that she cheated on me.  I figured it out later.  She was a nymphomaniac but I wanted to be chaste and do what I was taught growing up.  I was a rebel, but not a rebel in every regard.  I took chastity seriously.  Today having sex is like drinking water, but back then it was a big deal.  Fornication is a bad sin but I fornicated a lot before I got married and after.

What got me going was a friend of Sherrie’s.  She will remain nameless because she has changed her life.  But she was a floozie in college.  And she was smoking hot too.  She called me up one day when I was living in Provo in 1988 and told me that she had some weed and did not know how to smoke it.  I laughed because I was a former stoner and she knew that about me.  So I went over to her apartment and made a pipe out of a toilet paper roll with some tin foil.  I did not partake at this time but I watched them get super stoned.  It was tempting and it smelled so good.  We were laughing, they got the munchies so we ordered pizza of course.  It was fun watching them munch out on pizza stoned with the munchies.  I was laughing and digging it.

Another time I was kicking it at her pad this dude from down stairs came up and he had weed and cocaine.  The chicks were drinking beer and smoking pot, and I had given in and started to party with them.  So he asked me if I wanted to try cocaine and I said, well I’ve never done it before but I heard it’s pretty good.  Then he chopped me up a line, a big fat one too.  This guy was generous.  I knew how to snort drugs because I snorted speed in high school, so I took his rolled up hundred dollar bill and sniffed half up one side and the other half up the other side.  Man o man, that made me feel ten feet tall and bullet proof and I started talking a lot.  He asked me how I liked it and I said, it feels good man.  So the chick I was hanging out with was getting very tipsy and laughing a lot.  I was totally attracted to her but we were just friends.  But with the cocaine I had all the confidence in the world so yup, sexy time happened that night.  And I stayed at her place for a while.  She told me I was her lover, we didn’t get in to a relationship but we had good clean sexy time.  She was so cool to me.  She even did my laundry. 

I did not have a job and I was not enrolled in school.  I did not have a car but I had a bank account that my parents gave me, and I would call them and tell them I needed some money and they would fill my bank account.  I was out of control, no responsibilities. I felt entitled, and I was getting everything I wanted and never having to work for it.  If I needed to go anywhere I would just ask one of my friends to drive me and I would give them gas money and buy lunch for them.  But there are two sides to every coin and opposition in all things.  So just as I was living the high life as a young adult, it came back and bit me in the ass after years of living like a prince.

She had a former lover named Robert Retallic that now lived in Salem, OR.  And she wanted some of him so she said, I’m going to visit Robert, do you want to ride with me to Portland and see your folks?  I said hell yes that would be excellent.

But I was frustrated with her teasing me, knowing she was going to have sexy time with Robert so I bitched her out for teasing me and holding out on me, so I called her all kinds of horrible names.  And she just sat there and took it and I got back in the car and she said, Do you feel better now?  She was so freaking cool.  Then I apologized and we were cool with each other again.  But I wanted her and she wasn’t giving it to me anymore.  

We drove to Salem and kicked it with Robert and his buddies, smoked out and then she gave me the keys to her car and told me to come pick her up in three days.  So I drove to my parents’ house and played the good clean boy for three days, ate well, caught up with mom and dad and Shannon.  It was a needed decompression from everything that had happened in my life, and everything that was just about to happen.

Unfortunately at this time I had taken up a bad habit of smoking cigarettes.  She told me not to smoke in her car but I was rebellious and didn’t care what she thought because I was still pissed that she left me hanging like a tease.  So I smoked in her car, but out the window so it smelled a little bit like smoke but it aired out quickly.  I was a chain smoker, but if I had to be somewhere without cigarettes I could deal with it and not have any nicotine fits.  It was odd, I should have been nicotine fitting while I was at my parents’ house but I didn’t even think about smokes while I was at home.  I mostly just smoked while I was driving so maybe that’s why I didn’t get addicted.

When I picked her up three days later she talked about what her and Robert did together.  They dropped acid, went to the beach, and she said it was fun.  He was cool, a real tripper too, an artist type like me.  I liked him however he was my nemesis because of her.  I had never dosed yet.  She told me I probably should not try it.  Those two were mellow, and I was wound up like a top.  So yeah, she was correct, I should not have done LSD at that time anyway.  But later on I took a lot of it and expanded my mind big time.

I got tired of Utah so I moved back home in 1988.  I still went to church but I was partying too much to be a worthy member.  I would go to church activities hammered drunk and my bishop told me he could smell the liquor.  But he was cool and he told me to drive safe.  Then I met Tammi Schuler.  She was super foxy smoking hot little tiny wonderful tight body.  That was about the time that me and David Hamm moved in to the Imperial Arms apartments in down town Portland.  It used to be a hotel built in 1918 but it was converted into apartment complexes for mostly young artist type of people.  There was a lot of partying going on and we threw some epic parties.

One Saturday night we told everyone that we were going to have a party at our pad with live music.  And it was elbows to elbows, there were so many people in our apartment it was like a traffic jam of people.  And everyone was getting beers and getting tipsy and then Dave and his bandmate started playing industrial dance music and we were all dancing and having a blast.

There was one dude who showed up, I just met him that night, he said he wanted to smoke pot and asked me if I knew where to get some.  I said hell yes I know where to score weed.  I asked him how much he wanted and he gave me $30 for an 1/8th ounce.  So I went down the hall to Green Buddha’s pad to score my weed.  She was always holding something and I knew I could get some weed from her.  But she was out of bud and all she had was shake.  So for $30 she gave me a small pillow sized bag of shake that we used to roll doobies.

When I showed back up to my pad and gave dude his weed he was cool with that.  He said he only wanted some for tonight and didn’t want to take any home with him.  So we all got super stoned and that dude told me when he left, that there were surprises all over my apartment.  I did not know what he meant but I soon found out what he was saying.

Because he had so much weed and did not want to take it with him, he took handfuls of this stuff and put it under our coffee cups in our cabinets, he put weed in our toilet paper rollers, he put weed in everything he could find a place to hide some.  I found it in my shoes, in my socks, in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, in drawers in the kitchen.

And I was not a super big time stoner yet so I flushed some of it and I was working at Budget Rent a Car at the time.  And one of my co-workers, Jason liked the marijuanas so I told him what happened and he said, Dude, give me all of that weed that you do not want.  So I gave him a huge bag of grass and that’s when I started becoming a major stoner.  Me and him would roll doobies and drink beers and philosophize about everything we could imagine.

He was loving it.  He was super smart and a big time pot head.  His parents let him smoke out in his bedroom because he got straight A’s in school and they said, if your grades are up, you can do whatever you want to.  And he partied hardy with me.

I had a girlfriend at the time but she lived in Vancouver, WA and was not 21 yet so we did not see each other all that often.  But I never cheated on her.  She would come down town when she had some time and always wanted to have sex.  One time we were done and she said she needed more and she grabbed me by the collar, threw my mattress on the floor and I got up and locked the door and put a sign on the outside that said, Dave, go away for a while I’m getting some action.  She threw me on the mattress, she was feisty and I gave her what she wanted and she got what she needed.

I had some really good pals that lived down the hall, Mike and Matt.  we loved all the same music, beers, weed, drugs, dressed kooky alike, went to the same shows together.  On Friday night and usually Saturday night too we would go to Safeway and buy a six pack of cheap beer each, come back to the apartment and shotgun some and drink the sixers as fast as we could.  Then we would take some bong hits and walk back to Safeway to buy a case of good beer that we would nurse throughout the night to keep the buzz going.

This was our regular routine for months.  It was so much fun until one night we left to go to the store and Mike locked himself out of his apartment.  He lived on the second story so I boosted him up on my shoulders and he was working the window to get in to the apartment but he lost his balance and fell over on his back onto the curb.  He said, ow, it hurts really bad, just get me to my bed and I’ll be OK.  But we called 911.  He shattered his kidney.  So Matt went to the hospital with him and when he was checked in he had  can of beer in his pants pocket.  The doctor took it out and said, I don’t think he’ll be needing this.  This is what Matt told us later.

Mike had surgery and that dude healed up quick because three weeks later we were playing full court basketball.  We were young and resilient.  We went to a lot of shows together, well not together but every show that came through town I would see Mike in the pit.  I moshed a lot and loved it but he was a crowd surfer.

I went to see the Jesus Lizard and there was Mike.  I drove down from Seattle with my girlfriend to see The Pixies, Primus and Jane’s Addiction at the University of Portland and there was Mike in the pit.  At that show we were front and center and I crowd surfed with Mike and the security dude let my girlfriend stand in front of the barricade right in front of the stage and watch the show nice and safe while we were in the pit.  And Mike told me, you’re going up buddy, so they grabbed me and I crowd surfed a bit.

I saw Primus again in Seattle the next year and in the lobby I saw Mike.  We laughed and told Jason that we see each other at every show but we never go together.  Tad opened for Primus and me and my buddy Jason for some reason drank a fifth of Jaegermeister before the show rather than doing what we would normally do, take acid or robo.  While Tad was playing the stage was all wobbly in my eyes, I was super hammered on that stuff but it was just perfect because we were in the pit and the mosh pits back then were not violent at all.  It was just a bunch of dudes all standing next to each other, wandering around in a huge pit of bodies and leaning into one another, high fiving, just having a blast with anyone you looked at.  I didn’t even have to know the guy next to me but in the pit we were brothers.  And if you saw some dude many times, we would say during the moshing, what’s your name dude?  And we would say, good to meet you bro, isn’t this pit kick-ass?  And he would say, yeah fuckin A man.  And the pit would move and we just said, Later dude, rock on brother”

  So I was crowd surfing during the Primus set and it was so fun, I was feeling no pain and I got tossed over the barricade into a security guard who wasn’t paying attention and when I landed on him he hit his head against the edge of the stage.  He got pissed and picked me up like carrying a baby, grabbed my crotch and arm under my shoulders and threw me back in the pit.  Lucky for me my pants were loose because I think this dude was trying to hurt my nutsac.  I said, sorry dude, I did not to that on purpose.

Primus put on such a great show.  Les is always hilarious and Larry shreds on guitar and Tim was like Neil Peart.  When they were done Les said, Thank you, we are Van Halen.

In the late 80s and early 90s rock and roll began to suck dead decaying gangrenous donkey balls from hell because of bullshit hairspray make-up faggot bands trying to be the New York Dolls like Motley Crue and Poison and all the others who fucked up heavy metal in the 80s and 90s.  The Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Minor Threat (a huge punk band from Portland), X, the Circle Jerks, anything Keith Morris did was heavy and punk rock, bands like that were doing it right keeping rock and roll alive although they were only playing live shows and if you wanted to listen to them in your record or cassette collection you had to score their bootleg recordings.  And this is how I got much of my punk rock music back then.  Because those bands didn’t tour all that much but when they did we would hit the punk rock venues and slam dance in our leather jackets and Doc Marten boots.  Those were good times, getting our rage out and doing it safely, although once in a while someone would take a header and get hurt.  I drew blood from time to time in the pit but that was part of the experience, usually in the eyebrow area.  I would not realize it but someone would tell me, dude, you’re bleeding.  And I would touch my head and see blood and remember getting elbowed or kicked in the head by a crowd surfer.  People weren’t trying to hurt each other but it got gnarly and you had to defend yourself so elbows were up while dudes were head banging and throwing elbows, not to hurt anyone but just as an expression of what was going on on stage.  And when you tripped and hit the floor, everyone played it cool, picked you up, asked if you were alright, then high fived and slammed into each other and kept it going.

When Slayer did their last tour before retiring Bobby X hit the gym six months prior to the show to get in shape for the Slayer pit because he was fifty years old at this time.  Bob was the ultimate crowd surfer pit monster.  When I went on Youtube to check out footage of the Lollapalooza I was at in 1991 in Seattle I checked out the opening set by the Rollins Band and low and behold, there’s Bobby X on camera crowd surfing the Rollins set.  Later that afternoon, while me and Jason were hanging out Bob came walking through the crowd to use the Honey Bucket and we talked for a bit and laughed at how bad ass Bob was.  He said he got kicked out because he fell over the barricade and the security guard tossed him out.  But the power of robo came to the rescue and someone asked Bob if he needed a ticket to get in to the show.  He said he didn’t have any money but they just gave it to him.  So that’s how things worked for us back then.  Everything ruled and was totally kick ass for the telling of stories of lore in the future.  We were charmed or something because we got away with everything.

I need to back up again and mention a couple of other shows.  I heard Jane’s Addiction on the radio from the song Jane Says.  I liked it but I was not terribly impressed.  That song certainly did not display what Jane’s Addiction was about.  My buddy Dave told me that Jane’s Addiction was coming to town and I should probably go see them.  This was in 1987 and Jane’s Addiction was new and playing smaller clubs of less than 1000 seats.  I payed $7 at the door at the Starry Night venue, and my friend Jay wasn’t interested so he took off to a bar to pick up on the ladies.  I went to the show by myself and it blew my mind.  

Perry was wearing football pants with cowboy boots and a hot pink shirt tied in a halter top and had red dread locks and a cowboy hat on.  The other band members were in tattered jeans, shirtless, long hair and sunglasses and they kicked ass.  Dave Navarro  had green hair.  Back then in the 80s that stuff was coming  only from Hollywood. 

Man that show blew me away, the drums and Dave Navarro’s guitar, Perry’s vocals, it was almost a spiritual experience to see that show.  They brought some energy.  When Perry needed to bang his head he would put his hand on top of the cowboy hat and head bang away so it did not come off.  It was hilarious.  Of course he did all that weird body movement contortion thing he did tripping everyone out.  He was such a good performer.  I saw Jane’s three times but that first show was definitely the best.

The next time I saw them was at Lollapalooza and Perry came out dressed like Hitler and told a horrible racist joke, then started singing, Don’t call me whitey nigger.  Then Ice T walked out on stage all pissed off dressed like a Crip and Perry started to tremble and Ice said, Don’t call me nigger whitey.  They went back and forth on that and then all hell broke loose, the band started rocking out, Perry was screaming Nigger Nigger Nigger and Ice T was screaming Whitey Whitey Whitey and then they came together and started doing the polka.  It was hilarious.  Jane’s Addiction only put out two albums but I saw them three times.  But they are back at it and I love everything that Perry does.  He is a genius artist.

There were so many epic shows I went to.  I saw Public Image Limited at the same small venue where Jane’s played.  Seeing Johnny Rotten was really cool, the original Punk Rocker rebel.  Then I saw them a second time on Halloween 1988 in Utah front row right in front of the bass player.

I saw so many bands, Van Halen 5 times, Sammy Hagar twice as a solo act, then again with Van Halen for 5150, and then Sammy again at the Washington State Fairgrounds, Rush, Foreigner, Blue Oyster Cult, The Tubes, Queensryche (thier first show as Queensryche, $1.00 to get in), Zebra, Red Hot Chili Peppers six times, The Grateful Dead twice, Jane’s Addiction three times, Primus three times, The Limbomaniacs, Fishbone many times, The Melvins 100 times, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, The Violent Femmes, Rollins Band, The Butthole Surfers, Ice T, Public Enemy, Anthrax, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Tad, Gruntruck, Pearl Jam (as Mookie Blaylock), NoMeansNo, Smashing Pumpkins,  ABC, The Thompson Twins, Men Without Hats, Animotion, Nu Shooz, Modern English, Wang Chung, Naked Eyes, The Cult, Lenny Kravitz, INXS, Flesh for LuLu, Dramarama, The Motels, Alphaville, A Flock of Seagulls, Jean loves Jezebelle, The Escape Club,  Mike Patton and Tomahawk, Ebn Ozn, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Terrence Trent D’arby, Machine Head, The Revolting Cocks, Soulfly, Motograter, OFF! Oingo Boingo, The Charlie Daniel’s Band, The Brubeck Brother’s many times, The Crazy 8’s so many times over 100 for sure, New Kids on the Block (brand new, performed at a festival in Portland before the Crazy 8’s)  When the Crazy 8’s came out Todd Duncan said, What did you think of Menudo?  That was perfect.  Neil Young, Carole King, Kenny Loggins, David Crosby, Foghat, The Edgar Winter Group, the original Jefferson Airplane, Eric Burden and the Animals, Santana many times, The Indigo Girls, Jefferson Starship, The Blue Man Group twice, Chuck Berry, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Quarterflash, The Jesus Lizard, Davie Bowie, Ratt, Ed Hall, Depesh Mode, Led Zeppelin twice, Foo Fighters, The Mars Volta, The Sky Cries Mary, Bachman Turner Overdrive, After the Fire, fIREHOSE, Foreigner, The Screaming Trees, Solomon Grundy (the screaming trees using an alias) and many I have forgotten. 

OK so this is going to take a very serious turn.  I was suicidal because nobody wanted me around and nobody could help me out.  I was flailing at life.  So I thought I would just end it and nobody would miss me because nobody  reached out to me.  So I was in Seattle and I was by the Interstate and thought I could walk in front of a semi truck and I would be done in a flash.  So there were two semi’s coming down the Interstate and I walked out in to the middle of the freeway to let myself go and low and behold, those trucks just passed me by and suddenly I was on the other side of the freeway safe and sound.

And I tried it another time and the same thing happened.  I am telling the god’s honest truth.  Just like when I was a kid and that angel saved me, he was there for me those times as well.

And I’m happy today that I failed at suicide.  Because I have a lot more work to get done before I go home.  I was having a pity party but God saw other reasons for me to keep on living.  I am so grateful for the love of a God that I know lives.  And Jesus too.  God used to be an authority figure for me but then I got to understand the gospel of Christ and He became my friend and Heavenly Father became my dad, to be there for me, to prepare my path before I walked it.  And Jesus is super cool, like a peer when He manifests himself to people.  You don’t know it’s him until He leaves and then you sit there with a warm comforting fire in you belly burning to tell you, that was Him.

I’ll share my experiences in Paraguay.  I was nineteen years old, just turned the month before, it was October 18, 1984 and I went to the missionary training center AKA the MTC.  I was there for two months learning how to preach the Gospel in Spanish.  And we had culture class to get us ready for the changes in culture and the new things we would experience.  It was some great training.  And one of the best parts about the MTC is that I just met some of my closest brothers in life.  When you go third world with a bunch of dudes from the States to do something like sharing the Plan of Happiness with jungle folk, you bond for life.  

After the MTC training we went to the airport in SLC and it was 15 degrees in a blizzard.  We were all bundled up in our suits and over coats but like six hours later we were in Miami in 80 degree weather, so we put our overcoats away.  We flew Delta and touched down in Atlanta just before Miami.   Then we got on Varig Airlines DC-10 and flew to Sao Palo Brazil.  That was like a nine hour flight.  And we were in coach but we were treated like first class.  We all got hot towel treatment before meals and we had steak for dinner, it was luxurious.  It sure felt like first class.  But after a while when I was bored and couldn’t sleep it was almost painful to sit there any longer.  I had never stayed seated for nine hours in my life.  I had too much energy for chilling out like that.  I needed stimulation or entertainment.  Then they finally put on a movie and that was cool.  We watched Cocoon.  That movie about old dudes getting the fountain of youth by hanging out with aliens in the swimming pool.  It was good entertainment and distracted me for a couple of hours.  So we eventually landed in Sao Palo and disembarked from our DC-10 comforts to waiting in the airport for another flight to Rio de Jeinero.   

We waited three hours for the next flight, we got on another DC-10 and were served hot towels with excellent meals.  That airline was awesome!!  But I could not understand what in the hell the stewards were saying.  It was just getting out of our element and in to South America a little bit.  When we took off in Sao Palo it was like I saw sky scrapers for ever.  That place is huge, just gigantic building after building for miles.  Talk about a concrete jungle, hello!  I even saw the Cristus statue that stands over the city.  So we landed in Rio, did not deplane, then we were off to Asuncion, Paraguay.  And when we got off the plane we were in summer time in South America.  Just hours before it was chilling winter weather, dry and cold and completely opposite down there in Paraguay.  Hot and humid and about 98 degrees. Me and my new best friends were completely out of our elements and it was totally awesome!  The air smelled different, everything was different but it was beautiful and I was anxious to know where I would end up.

We spent the night at our mission president’s house, had the last nice dinner for the next several months. And the next day we were off to our new areas.  I got on a bus with my new compadre, Elder Camphuysen and rode east for three hours to the middle of Paraguay to a town called Ca’aguazu.  In their native language, Guarani that meant Big Herb.  Ca’a meant herb, Guazu meant big.  So like those huge waterfalls between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina they are known as Foz do Ygua’zu. Meaning Falls of Large Water.  The letter Y is pronounced in a sound that English speakers do not make, and it means water.  So there you go, a little Guarani lesson for the day.

When we arrived to Ca’aguazu we got off the bus and had to schlep about a mile to our pension, or apartment.  What was kind of cool that I did not realize how much of a blessing in disguise it was for me, there was a full court basketball court in our back yard.  Nobody plays basketball in Paraguay.  How did that happen to me?  So during our siestas from noon to 3 pm as a newly acclimated American I was shooting hoops all afternoon, getting tan and sweating my ass off in 100 degree weather with 95 percent humidity.  I was getting acclimated for sure and was kind of having fun despite my homesickness.  But one weekend I got real sick.  I had eaten something bad and it was revolting.  I was down puking with fever for three days.  And after that was over it was like I totally assimilated to my new environment.  I could eat anything and drink anything and love it.  And we ate some nasty shit down there.  They had in every town, a woman walking with a mule and boxes on his back selling Churro.  Churro was all the leftovers from after having killed and butchered a cow.  And they sold everything for soup bones.  The neck bones for the marrow the kidneys, raw liver, tongue, every part that could be boiled for flavor.  Intestines, stomach, all of their organs, the heart meat.  It was craziness.  And the woman would saunter through the streets in the evening with her donkey yelling Churro, Churro, Churro!  Sometimes I would buy something just to gross out my companion, like intestines and swing them around like jump rope.  We had crazy imaginations and we were free, out of the nest in the freaking jungle man.  So we did our work and obeyed the rules but after obeying the rules, the only thing left to do was have fun.  So that was my attitude.  Obey the rules and have fun.  And it worked marvelously.  On Halloween I bought Churro and made a haunted house at the local church building.  There were pumpkins with intestines coming out of their head, and it was creative and gross but those Paraguayos loved it. 

So after one month in Ca’aguazu Camphuysen split for another area and I got a Uruguayo named Anibal Dandaluz.  And this dude was nothing like American missionaries.  He was the senior companion because I was new and called a greenie.  And the dynamic totally shifted when he got there.  He would sleep in late, he was lazy, he acted like he was better than everyone and he had a relationship with a girl in the city, which was a big time no-no.  We were there to be brothers and forget about women for a time.  We couldn’t forget about them but we were not involved with them romantically.  But Dandaluz had a girlfriend who he eventually married.  And I did not know that was going on.  But in hind sight I see it now, why he would be late for things or sleep in.  Dude would split in the middle of the night and kick it with his mamacita.  I never knew because I was out like a rock sleeping hard.  So we had some friction between us because I was all pumped to do the work and he was totally distracted.  I did not know why he sucked as a missionary but he was a shitty companion.  Fortunately I only had him for two months.  But in that time my Spanish got way better, I got used to the food and climate and was totally in the middle of the jungle in South America.  And I would look outside and ponder on the things I was blessed with.  I learned to walk in sand streets or once in a while cobble stone.  In Ca’aguazu there was only one restaurant and we went there every day for gasiosa AKA soda.  The drink you had to have down there was Guarana.  A soft drink that was somewhat like cream soda but it had way better flavor.  And the carbonation was tiny bubbles like beer, not like coke or pepsi.  And it looked just like beer, the caramel color and it had a foamy head.  

So one time in another area I had the bright idea to prank a new sister missionary.  There were two sister missionaries in that area, one was from Uruguay.  And her companion was from England so she spoke spanish with a very English accent.  There was a restaurant that fed us every afternoon and evening on a deal made with the mission presidency.  We would pay him every month for all the food and beverage we could intake.  And of course we over paid so dude let us have anything in the house.  His name was Ruben and he was bald on top.  It was totally inappropriate but we would slap the top of his head like Benny Hill did with that old man all the time.  I would take his hat off and slap his head.  He actually was cool with it.  We were friends and having fun but he told me he didn’t like that anymore, so I apologized and stopped.  That was learning as a young dude.  Making mistakes and becoming stronger in character for having gone through them.

So back to the Guarana beer thing.  A new sister missionary came to our area, Hermana Oaks, niece of Dallin H. Oaks of the quorum of the twelve apostles, an apostle of Jesus Christ.  That’s pretty cool in my book.  Her uncle was a freaking apostle of Jesus Christ.

So when she got there we had already planned this one out.  Ruben cleaned a beer bottle and filled it with Guarana then put the cap on top.  And so when we ordered and he asked what we wanted to drink we told him to bring us beer.  So he got that bottle and made a sound with his mouth like he was cracking open a bottle of beer.  And he poured us a glass and the British sister licked the head of her Guarana and said, bottoms up and proceeded to drink it down, so me and my companion followed suit and sister Oaks was in shock.  But we all started laughing and told her it was soda, not beer.  She said, I knew something was going on when he opened that beer bottle.  She got suspicious but we fooled her.  It was fun and now it’s a great story to tell.  Can you imagine that?  Coming newly from the states ready to serve the Lord and teach people that alcohol leads to all kinds of social problems, then being given beer at your first meal.  She must have had all kinds of crazy thoughts running through her mind for that moment.  Missionaries drinking beer.  We did all kinds of crazy stuff while we were in Paraguay.  Of course we obeyed the rules but then had fun.  

Another time, this of course was my idea too, there was a huge zone conference in the city, Asuncion and I had been a big fan of Bob and Doug McKenzie back then from SCTV.  They had just put out a comedy album called Welcome to the Great White North.  And one of the things they did was play a game called Beer Hunter, because the movie Deer Hunter had just won academy awards so they played off of that.

And the way Beer Hunter works, is like Russian Roulette, like they did in the movie, except you have a six pack instead of a six shooter.  Then one guy from the other team shakes up a beer (or in our case, a can of Guarana because we didn’t drink beer) and puts it back with the other five.  Then a guy on the other team selects a can from the six pack, holds it to his head and cracks it open.

If you got the loaded can you were out and of course, because you opened it, you had to chug it.  And if you got shot in the side of the head with a spray of Guarana you had a Wet Head and you had to Towel Off and were called a Hoser.  So we played this with about a case of Guarana and the patio floor was a swimming pool of Guarana and we were all soaked and sticky but laughing and hugging and having so much fun.

So we planned the second Beer Hunter and our mission president got wind of it and put the kibosh on those plans.  But I was always coming up with crazy ideas to kill the boredom of missionary lifestyle.

In one area we were out in the jungle and decided on one p-day (preparation day, or rather, our day off from proselytizing) to go exploring in the jungle Indiana Jones style.  So I came up with the idea of having our local taylor make us some khakis, jungle green, Indiana Jones style.  I had the shirt with long sleeves rolled up and buttoned on my shoulder, army style pants khaki, hiking boots and a big brimmed Panama hat.  Me and my companion showed up ready to go with our canteen of water and we even had a whip.  It was awesome, we had so much fun just goofing around.  

And then I had the bright idea of having our taylor make us custom bermuda shorts out of all kinds of crazy psychedelic fabric.  And me and Mike Peterson wore those to our zone conferences and other missionaries were like, hey where did you get those killer threads?  So we told them we just laid down some money and had a taylor custom make some shorts for us.  I had like 10 pairs of crazy bermuda shorts that I wore for years after I got home until they wore out or I got too big for them.  But I still have them in storage.

And Terry Hilton even had a custom tailored suit made for him with custom shoes, black shoes with white uppers.  So yea, I guess I sort of set some trends.

There was another time when this guy we knew had a Jeep, which was rare for anyone to have a motor vehicle.  But he owned a restaurant so he was well off as far as things go down there.  He was up in the Chaco, the jungle up north where it’s no man’s land.  No utilities, phone, running water, nothing.  Pure tropical rain forest jungle with gnarly spiders, monkeys, snakes, no gorillas though, those are African.  But flocks of Parrots flying around, Toucans.  I had a pet Toucan for a while.  He died though.  Take a bird of nature out of his element and put him in a cage and he’s not going to survive very long.  I felt bad for that dude.  We named him Monty.

So dude has his Jeep up in the Chaco and sees a massive Boa Constrictor crossing the road and puts the pedal to the metal and runs right over that snake.  Gets out of his truck and he had killed the Boa.  So he brought it back to town and told us about it.  And by trade he was a shoe maker so I asked him if he could make me some snake skin sandals.  He said, yes but it would be very expensive.  I laughed and said OK, whatever it costs is OK, just make me two pairs if you have enough skin.  So he did and he charged me 10,000 Guaranies per pair, which was like two times the monthly income of a Paraguayan but only like ten dollars to me.

So he was stoked to get that kind of business and I now had two custom pairs of Boa Skin sandals that I wore for years after that.

Then me and Mike decided we needed to work out and that we needed a weight set so one p-day afternoon we went to a sporting goods store, which was rare but we actually found one.  So we bought a weight set, dumbbells and brought them home.  And on the bus they were in our duffle bags and super heavy and when we dropped them on the floor it made quite a sound.  People would look at us Americans always suspiciously, they thought we were CIA always.  We would tell them we were missionaries and they didn’t believe us, the insisted that we were CIA undercover.  So seeing something like that got their suspicions aroused.  And we played it off for fun, knowing these people had conspiracies going through their minds.  But we told them we bought a weight set so we could work out.  And they didn’t get it.  Why would we spend our money on something like that?  We must be rich to be able to spend money on luxuries like work out equipment.  That’s what it was like back then, down there in the jungles of South America.  And I freaking loved it.

We used our weight sets and got in super good shape, did push-ups on chairs elevated from the floor so we could dip way down low.  Hundreds, then used the barbells to curl and work the triceps.  We didn’t work the legs because we were walking more than ten miles a day in the sand so that was good for the leg workout.  And we didn’t have mirrors so we couldn’t check ourselves out.  Well we had a tiny mirror the size of a post card hanging in the bathroom to shave and comb our hair.  But we couldn’t see the results of our working out so we took photographs.  And there wasn’t anything digital back then.  We had to send our rolls of film to get developed and wait like two weeks to a month to get our photos back.  So finally we had a zone conference and got to go downtown again and get our photos and see other missionaries from other areas who were Americans.  That was always a blast.  And they looked at me and said, dude, have you been working out?  I guess I had put on some muscle and was looking good.  Then I got my photos back and surprised myself.  My arms and chest were huge and I had a full on six pack.  I was looking good and I was amazed and impressed by myself.

So then other missionaries started working out with weights after they saw my results.  Because I was kind of scrawny when I got to Paraguay, then suddenly I was buffo like an athlete.  That made me feel pretty kick-ass, to be noticed like that.

And after the mission, and I was unaware, but I was somewhat of a legend down there.  The other returned missionaries say I was like the original cool missionary with the style and the cool ideas and would do things that others did not think of.  Like the dudes who I looked to as examples of coolness told me that they took after me.  I took after them.  Thats weird but it worked and so we were all cool and hip.

Then we were at the mission home for a zone conference and I met Hermana Dyer.  Most sister missionaries were not very attractive but she was foxy and all the Elders were checking her out.  After I got home I heard that Elder Powell from San Francisco came in and married Hermana Dyer.

But that was a disaster of a marriage.  They had two daughters and they got divorced.  He moved back to California and she stayed in Utah with the girls.  Her brother was accepted in to OHSU dental school in Portland so she split to live in Portland and be near her brother.

I was sort of dating this chick named Edith and when I got lonely she was there for me.  I called her up one afternoon and asked her what she was up to and if I could come and visit.  She told me that she was out with her girlfriends and that she would leave her door unlocked so I could go in and watch some basketball on TV until she got home.  And I was partying a lot back then.  I had a sixer with me in the car, drank three or four already and I smoked out before I went into her apartment.  I was going to bring the beer and weed into the house but for some reason I left it in my car.

So she comes home and she’s with like three other foxy chicks and they wanted to meet me.  She told them I had the best car and was the most handsome dude you’ll ever see.  She actually told them, because later I heard it from one of the chicks, who became my wife.  She would tell people that I was ‘movie star’ handsome.

They walked in and Edith says, this is my friend Vaughn.  And all of a sudden one of them said, Oh my gosh, you’re Elder Brown!  And I was like, And you’re Hermana Dyer.  What’s going on, I thought you were married to Powell.  She told me they were divorced but that her two daughters were in the car and asked me if I would like to meet them.  I said heck yes I would.  So that was the first time I saw my adopted daughters because it wasn’t long before me and Christi were married in the Portland LDS temple.

I had to find a career fast because I had just taken on a family and I was a dad all of a sudden.  So I dropped out of school and ditched the pharmacy thing and got in to sales.  A close friend of mine was in to multi level marketing and got me into selling his snake oil.  I had a partner I worked with, Derek Jentsch, and we would go to schools and pitch them this service called Lifetime Reminder Service.  This was just before the Internet gave us the World Wide Web.  It cost $39 and for a lifetime you would get reminders for things over the phone.  So we would go to high schools and help them with fund raising and pitch this to them and they would get all excited about selling these things door to door for us.  And we went from Portland down to Eugene and pitched it to all of the high school administrations we could and they all thought it was a great idea and we thought we were going to make a killing but nobody sold anything.  And that fizzled out.  

After that they got in to the cell phone business and called their company SmartLink Communications.  They made me manager of a team of salesmen.  My guys would get $40 – $60 for each sale and if I sold a phone and signed someone up with a new contract I would get $100 per sale.  I also got a piece of each sale of my team members.  I was the best salesman they ever had.  And we were humping it, it was not easy because it was door to door sales and one sale at a time.  I sold sixteen phones one week so that was a company record.  I got burned out quick, I had gone in to a Brinks Home Security shop and sold phones to their manager and secretary.  It was easy changing from AT&T to US West Cellular because they got a new phone and the rates were cheaper.  Easy sales if I could switch people or talk people in to getting a cell phone for the first time.

I got burned out on this as well because I was not making much money on every sale.  It was quantity sales that made money so it was hard work but I learned a lot about myself and life through this experience.

As a newly married family man I was supposed to bring home the bacon.  I didn’t want my wife to work and have the kids be brought up at day care.  I wanted to provide enough so that she could raise the kids at home and not have to do what most of America was doing.  I wanted to do the honorable thing and provide for my family so that the kids could go to school from home and come home from school to a mom who was ready to take care of them.

After I burned out on sales I took a job making low wages at SEH America.  I worked 12 hour shifts that rotated days, swing, graveyard and back and forth.  So it was hard on the family and hard on the marriage.  I was earning less than $10/hr but I got overtime, had a steady job in a factory and the benefits were out of this world.

It was a blessing in disguise because the way they worked in shifts gave me around five hours of break time each working day.  We were growing silicon ingots that were used in the IT business to make microchips.  Intel and Motorola were our biggest customers.  But it was a Japanese company that payed shit for wages.  So I took this break time, rather than playing cards all day, I bought a book called Networking Essentials and I devoured that book.  I read it like scripture, I marked things I knew I would have to recall.  I learned acronyms of information technology and learned to talk about things that I did not even understand.  I just knew by reading this book and memorizing its content that I could use this information to get a job in information technology.  

I had a computer with Windows 95.  I had messed around with Windows 3.1 when my folks had a computer.  I’m not sure why but they always had a computer to do spreadsheets and word processing.  My folks were always on the cutting edge of technology.  Getting in to the latest and greatest things..  So I didn’t hand in my papers from a type writer like all the other kids, my stuff came from a printer

In the mid seventies when pick up trucks were starting to come off of the assembly line as mini pickup trucks, my dad had the idea of turning those mini trucks, like Toyota and Datsun and Mazda into 4x4s.  There were big trucks like Chevy and Ford and GMC that were 4×4 but these mini pickup trucks were only two wheel drive.

My dad went in to business with a partner and they called the company, Pacific 4×4.  They did conversions on mini trucks and converted them to 4x4s.  He was the first one in the world to produce a mini pickup truck 4×4.  It cost around $3000 to do a conversion and they could get it done in about three hours so there was not a lot of waiting time.  And they were making bank and getting successful and showing mini pickup 4x4s at car shows and I was about 11 years old and loving this.  We always had the coolest looking trucks in our driveway and people thought I must have been pretty cool to have these vehicles in my yard all the time.  Different ones every week.  Dad would get a conversion job and drive it home then take it back the next day and deliver it to the customer.

I remember going to car shows and having so much business going and my parents were doing well, my dad was so happy now that he had such a successful business enterprise.  My mom was the secretary so they worked together and the arguments were kind of shitty but they were successful and I got anything and everything I wanted because they had money in the bank and could afford nice things.  It was nice, I was charmed and somewhat spoiled.

Then Mazda sent a truck to Pacific 4×4 to do a conversion and they said if they liked it they would send every after market truck to Pacific 4×4 for conversion if the customer wanted it, as part of the sale.  So they did a handshake deal and I remember driving to Spokane, WA to pick up the prototype Mazda and watched it be converted.  When we got it it was just a bare bones mini truck.  It didn’t even have a bed on the back.  So they got it in the shop, converted it to 4×4, put a nice step side bed on the back and some hefty Firestone All Terrain tires and delivered it to Mazda’s headquarters in San Jose.

Mazda took that truck and screwed my dad over and the next year they were the first mini truck manufacturer to have 4x4s coming off the assembly line.  They used my dad’s formula, took it from him, promised him deals and then took the money and ran.  Goes to show you need a contract.  Those Japanese fuckers ruined our livelihood and almost sent my family into bankruptcy.  But mom and dad were resilient and got back on their feet quickly by getting in to Uni-Strut and Multi-Strut.  

There was a lot of new construction going on at the time so they made a good amount of money on the ground floor with Uni-Strut, but then there was a parting of ways from the original Uni-Strut that became Multi-Strut so there was now competition.  Before Multi-Strut there was no competition so they were making money hand over fist.  My folks, during the fallout, went with the new guys and became Multi-Strut.  What Multi-Strut is, it’s metal bars with notches in them in a tube configuration shaped like a U.  This stuff was used in every construction site and it’s what replaced poles to hold up street signs.  So they were in business again and did pretty well.  But what was great about my folks’ success, they did not go out and spend all their money on luxuries.  They invested their money and lived a middle class lifestyle, but we were never gone without anything.  They always had a hefty bank account and whenever I needed or wanted something that cost a lot, they found a way to get it for me.  

At Christmas time I would get everything I asked for and then some from the relatives too.  I wanted a ten speed bike so I got one that Christmas.  I was ten years old and having a ten speed for a kid my age was like a 20 year old driving a Porsche Carrera.  I rode that thing all over town and it was so much faster than my other bikes.  It was orange too, a very cool color.  I could go from here to there in less time and I thought I was super great.  But one day I went to 7-11 and left my bike outside.  I was in there for like one minute and when I came out my bike was gone.  Man, that hurt me real bad and that got my anger boiling.  What could I do?  I was told to lock my bike if I ever left it anywhere.  But I thought I could go in and out of the 7-11 quickly, there were no other patrons so I did it fast but somebody saw that bike and took off with it.  That was some major bullshit in my life.  I was pissed off about that for a long time.  Who steals a dude’s bike?  Why?  Mother fucker, I was thinking I wanted to see who it was and kick his ass.  Little 10 year old with all the fury and anger going to kick some dude’s ass. 

So I walked home and told my folks what had happened.  They weren’t too comforting.  They didn’t go looking for it.  They just told me I should have locked it up.  You’ll know next time.  

My daughter’s bike was stolen when we lived in Portland.  And I was driving around town and I saw it in the back of some dude’s pickup truck with a whole bunch of other bikes.  I stopped him and told him to give me that bike or I would call the cops, then I said, you know what, I should just kick your ass.  So I called him all sorts of names and took the bike back and told him he was lucky that I had my family with me or he would have gotten his ass beat for stealing bicycles.  So I got his license plate and called the cops.

I can’t believe that actually happened.  We were so pissed about bikes being stolen.  I think Christi told Tayslie to say a prayer that she might get her bike back.  My son Spencer lost his football and was sad about that so I told him, let’s ask Heavenly Father to help us find it.  So we prayed together and we went back outside and found his football in the bushes.  I remember another time I lost my wallet and was freaking out because it had all my cash and credit cards and checks.  So I was in my back yard and I got on my knees in prayer and asked the Lord to help me find my wallet.  I stood up and it was sitting right next to me on the picnic table bench.  Now, that was no biggie but I couldn’t find it until I prayed.  So there is something to that.  Prayer has power if you do it right.

I have two more stories to tell about the power of the Melchizedek priesthood which is something we receive in the LDS church as worthy members to use to bless the lives of others.  It is not and never can be used on ones’ own self.  It is only to be used to serve another.  The priesthood is the power to act in the name of God if you are worthy and righteous.  Not self righteous, but living a clean and righteous lifestyle, in the world but not of the world.

It was winter time and we had a wood burning stove in the living room.  The front plate got super hot and was  too hot to touch.  Spencer was playing with Nate and running around the living room trying to catch each other and Spence put his hand on the wood stove to push off and get away from Nate.  When he did this the palm of his hand blistered up like a balloon.  He cried a little bit but he was pretty strong about it.  So I called another Elder from the neighborhood to give Spence a blessing of healing.  And how we do this in the LDS church, we have a vile of consecrated virgin olive oil, representing the pureness of Christ, we put a drop on the crown of the head and anoint him before the blessing.  So my friend did the anointing, and then I gave a blessing of healing and said that his hand would be good as new and not have any scarring or damage to deal with.

So we wrapped his hand up in Neosporin and gauze and the next day we took a look and his hand was completely healed like he never had those blisters or anything.  You can chalk it up to the Neosporin if you want to but I believe in miracles.  I kid you not, his hand looked like a balloon and the next day it was perfect again.  No residual skin or scabbing, just a healthy hand of skin.

Another time, Nate was riding his scooter down the driveway across the street and the newly asphalted street was his landing pad.  So he came booking down the driveway fast and hit the bump and face planted into the asphalt.  And it messed him up big time.  He had skin taken off of his upper lip and blood clots in his mouth and Christi called me and told me what happened.  We were separated at the time but I was still worthy.  So I drove 90 mph from West Valley to Kaysville.  I didn’t even park my car in the driveway, I parked in the street and jumped over our fence and ran in to the house and found Nate downstairs with a wash cloth on his face and Cassidy holding him and crying.  But the thing about Nate, he was happy as could be.  He didn’t care and he said it didn’t hurt.  But he is one handsome boy, like movie star handsome and I was freaking out that his face would have scar tissue all over his upper lip.

So I checked him out and he was a champ.  We were all crying but he was smiling and telling us not to cry.  Cassidy and Nate fought all the time but this night, Cassidy was holding him in her arms and trying to help him feel better.  So I got there and called my buddy Heath across the street to come and give a blessing to Nate for his healing.  Heath anointed Nathan’s crown with oil and then we both laid our hands on his head and I gave him a blessing of healing in the name of Jesus Christ out of faith and begged God to heal my son.

About three days later I was hanging out with Nate and I wanted to see what his wound looked like.  So we took off the gauze and there was a scab and it peeled off and his upper lip was brand new like he never had the crash.  He has no scarring and the funny thing is, he scraped his cheek on the ground and that took three weeks to heal.  

So I believe in the power of the priesthood because I saw it work.  It is a sacred thing, something we do not talk much about but are always grateful to the Lord for having it in our families.  And that is what the LDS missionaries are trying to share with people.  Stuff like that, a better way of life, not depending on the world for comfort but knowing from whence we came and the power that is given to a person who has the faith and belief to help others in a time of need.

My life has been a roller coaster ride because I was so rebellious against my parents and I broke most of the commandments and lived a cavalier lifestyle.  But when I was a father, I was rock solid and did not screw around.  I was there for my kids, even though we were separated for some stupid reason.  

The Spencer thing happened while we were still together but the Nathan thing happened while we were separated.  Then the papers came and the divorce was final.  And that just about killed me.  Because she had written the papers herself, having been a paralegal, she knew what she was doing.  In our divorce decree it stated that I would have unhindered electronic communication with the children.  And that I would also have joint custody with the children.  So I could come see them whenever I wanted to and I had them at my place every other weekend, which I thought was stupid.  And one night of every week I could have my time with them.  It was Utah law bullshit because that was my god damned family that Christi used to screw me over.  I did not give a shit about separating from my wife.  I’d been through breakups before and she was a shitty wife.  I was actually better off without having to deal with her bullshit anymore.  But the thing that killed me was not being able to live under the same roof as my children.

When the divorce was final it was July 2006 and we had been separated for two years.  She still lived in that Victorian 3000 sq ft house that she could not take care of.  So I told her, if you want to continue to live in the house you will have to pay the mortgage.  Because I told her, I paid the mortgage up until the divorce was final.  And now it is her responsibility to pay the mortgage.  She said she would and she started going to the gym and getting in to shape again, out on the hunt for another fox.  She got a job as a flight attendant with Delta airlines so she was gone a lot of the time and the two older sisters were raising the younger kids.  It was completely messed up.  I was so pissed off at her.  I was getting fucked in the ass for money too.  $1500/month in alimony (bullshit) AND $1470/month in child support which I had no problem wit that, although, I did have a problem with the way she would use the money on her self rather than to help the children.  

She got cosmetic surgery, hair extensions, got all fit and sexy for another dude to come in and swoop her off of her feet.  And the children suffered because of this behavior but I did not know what was going on.

I did not know any of this until years later.  If I had known what was going on I would have taken her to court and had her put up on neglect charges.  She let teenagers raise the family while she pranced around the country as a flight attendant.  Probably telling all kinds of bullshit stories to her co-workers.  I could have been there to take care of the family while she was gone but nope, she had it all under control.

And then she started dating.  She met Brett Ford, a cowboy welder with no education and probably an IQ of 95.  I was in Spokane on business and me and Brett were txting each other about Christi.  He told me that he would see to it that I would never see my children again.  So I laid down the cold hard truth about Christi’s lying and conniving and they broke up over that.  But they got back together because they were both as stupid as a rock.  But I told Brett that we were going to fight and I was going to kick his ass for telling me that I would never see my children again.  I called him while I was in Spokane and said, where do you want to meet up for the fight?

And he said something I do not remember then I said, dude, there’s not going to be a fight, I was just messing with you.  But if you ever lay a finger on my children you will wake up in the hospital and have to learn to speak english all over again, do you get me Cochise?  He did not reply and he never abused my children.  But he abused Christi and that is why she left him three times.

In the divorce decree it stated that we would divide the marital assets 50/50 and that she could not take the children out of the state of Utah without my permission and the permission of the courts.  So she said she would pay the mortgage but she never paid a dime toward the mortgage.  

I got a call from US Bank telling me that my house was going in to foreclosure.  I said what the hell?  Foreclosure why?  She said that the mortgage had not been paid in over four months.  So I politely said OK, I’ll take care of this, thank you.

I called Christi and asked her what in the hell she was doing about the mortgage.  She told me that she could not afford it so that I had to pay for it.  I said, that is not how it works you dumbshit.  What in the hell is wrong with you?  You told me that you would take care of the house and pay the mortgage and I let you live in it.  Now it’s in foreclosure and you have to  move out so I can sell it.

So she played the victim and told everyone that I kicked them out of the house so I could get the equity.  That lying bitch slandered my reputation and I did nothing but let her do it but it built up massive amounts of anger inside of me that had to get released somehow.

When it came time to sell the house, she had married Brett Ford and so they moved in to a rental in west Kaysville.  She told me that they were out of the house and that I could come and sell it now.  When I got there I opened the garage door and there was a pile of broken furniture in the middle of the garage and when I went down stairs, the carpet was gone, it was just concrete floor and those nail boards.

I said, what the fuck is going on here?  And then I realized that she took all of that crappy stuff and left me with the marital assets of broken furniture, not 50/50 like she put in the decree.  That makes her a liar and a hypocrite.  She told me later that they pulled up the carpet downstairs because the animals got shit and piss all over the place because they did not know how to take care of dogs and cats.  So she let my house get trashed.  I called in a cleaning service.  A team of six Mexican people and they cleaned the house spic and span and I had to replace the stove because she never cleaned it and it was ruined.  It cost me another $700 to get the house in order to sell it.

And the economy was not great so we had very little equity.  A couple of years earlier and I could have sold it with $100,000 in equity.  But things changed and it was around 2007 so I sold it and got merely $6000 in equity.  I had to split that with Christi and when I sent her a check for $3000 she told me that I was holding on to some money that she needed.  At this point I was not a nice person to her so I told her to go fuck herself and Brett can go fuck himself too.  You trashed the house you stupid bitch and then you expect me to give you more money?  Are you stupid or are you just a psychopath?  I told her that because of her negligence we only got $6000 in equity so the $3000 you got, and wanted more was something you did to me and yourself for not taking care of your house you stupid bitch.  

When we were dating she told me that to be happy in life all she needed was a small house with a white picket fence.  I gave her that and more and she trashed it and I know what was going on.  Because I know Christi.  She was laughing with her dad in the garage leaving me the marital assets.  And Grady Dyer is one dip-shit of a person because I know he told her, you don’t owe him anything.  So the next time I see that dude I will be respectful but I will ask him to meet me and have a conversation.  And I will break that mother fucker down and make him tell me the truth about his dip-shiterry with Christi against me.  And for what?  A little vengeance that she took out on me that should have been taken out on her dad and Brett.

But I digress…I can not live my life the way I am supposed to by feeling that way.  It is just a memory that I have forgiven, but it had to be drudged up for this narrative.

The tragedy in all of this is not what I lost, it is her lies and manipulation that my family, and children heard from her.  I was not doing well emotionally and I did not have anything to live for except for my children.

All I could do was go to work and try to live life as a single man.  I was 40 years old, in the best shape of my life.  But there is more to the story and you will realize why I wanted Brett Ford in the hospital.

Not only did he tell me that I would not see my kids ever again, but when they moved out of my house they rented one in west Kaysville that had an unfinished basement.  Ali was a Sr. in high school, an elite dancer and a cheer leader.  She went on to Snow College and got a full ride scholarship as a cheerleader.  So to the guys, she was very good looking.  To me, she’s my little Alibear.  Ali had a bedroom downstairs in that unfinished basement.  It was framed and there was insulation between every stud in the wall.  Christi saw Brett going downstairs while Ali was getting ready for school.  She is very stupid so she just figured he was doing something every morning downstairs.  But she finally followed him and watched him as he looked through the insulation watching Ali get ready for the day.  Your imagination can fill in the blanks.  So I heard about this and at this time, I had started partying and I was spending much time with a heavy metal band called Massacre at the Wake and they were working on new material and I was somewhat of a manger/producer unit in there because I was always at their practices and at every show, the guys in the band were some of my best friends and we rocked out many places and broke shit when we played.  We didn’t break things but shit got broken when these guys took the stage.  They were hard core like Bad Brains but super heavy and tight as a mosquitoes butthole.  The lead guitarist Josh Braum had a degree in jazz guitar from the U of U, the drummer Jason Thompson won first place in drum corps in college so his chops were out of this world and our rhythm guitarist Jason Cowell had played in many bands on the road over the 80s and 90s and our bass player Sid Bush played like Les from Primus.  He could just pick up on whatever the rest of the band was doing and get in the groove right on top.

It was beautiful making music with these dudes, writing songs, chopping it up, saying, do this here and that there three times, then stop for a beat, the go all out full force, then drop down and play like acoustic for a moment, then get all back in to the hard core heaviness.  We would compose these songs at downtown music, our practice pad, which was a super kick ass place for me to hang out.  It was probably the size of like a four car garage, couches, ambient lighting, coffee table, bongs and pipes, drum kit, amps, guitars, rock and roll posters, Hendrix of course and the place was red.  It was so bad ass kicking it there all night long.

So my heavy metal and biker buddies had my back.  There was a club in Salt Lake City called Club Vegas that hosted all kinds of heavy metal debauchery.  And after the divorce I got in to this scene with these hard core dudes.  I stood out like a sore thumb because of my unique style.  Everyone there was black leather and denim but I would roll up in my flashy yellow sweater and True Religion jeans and $120 shoes made in India.  I looked good and the owner of the place loved me.  His name was Dusty Ash.  His wife loved me and said I was her favorite customer because I would order and pay and not jerk around and tip big.  I would usually drink Newcastle Beers, or Jaegermeister shots.  That was it for me.  Maybe a Heineken but I was picky about what I drank.  I wasn’t getting all slobbery drunk drinking anything that came over the bar.  So I would have my beer in hand and walk around the joint talking to the ladies and the bands and they all gave me space and welcomed me into their groups.  It felt pretty good.  When I showed up there was a line out across the block and I would walk in to the joint and the people taking money and giving tickets told me to get in back of the line and I said, where’s Dusty?  And she would say, he’s in his office.  So I told her, tell him Vaughn is here.  And she was like, whatever dude.  So she called Dusty and said there’s a guy named Vaughn say’s he wants to get in.

She hung up the phone and Dusty came out of his office and gave me a hug and brought me right in and I got the stamp for free of course.  Everyone else in line was like, who the fuck is that dude?

Any time I wanted to see a show at club Vegas all I had to do was tell Dusty I was here and he came out and gave me the red carpet treatment.  He was huge, wrapped in leather, big dude with a beard, all heavy metal hard core but sweet as pie to be friends with.  Dusty would always be back stage watching the shows and only I could come back there with the bands and watch from back stage.  There is footage on Youtube when Massacre at the Wake was playing Club Vegas, you could see me back stage taking photos during their set.  I got carte blanche for most venues.  

One time I was on the edge of the stage taking pics and Sid, the bass player kicked me in the ass and I fell off the stage on to the floor and I was laughing my ass off because that’s how it was with these guys.  And a group of people came over and asked me if I was OK and I said, yeah it’s cool, that’s just Sid messing with me.  So I stood back up and started taking shots of him rocking out again.  

Dusty would do his business and then as the night drew to a close he would start partying with the bands and get up front with us.  I didn’t do the pit much and Club Vegas, I was usually up front just watching the bands play.  I liked to watch the musicians play their instruments, that’s why I was in front.  I learned a lot by doing that.

I saw the Revolting Cocks play there and the bass player had an afro the size of Jupiter.  It was so awesome.  The guitar player is Sin Quirin, who also is the guitarist for Ministry.  Al Jorgenson was front man in the studio but didn’t go out on the road unless it was LA, or Chicago or New York shows.  That’s what Sin told me.  I kicked it with Sin after their show and we talked a lot about old school industrial music and I didn’t know who he was really.  After the fact I was like, wait a second.  That’s the guitar riffer for Ministry.  What?

When Al didn’t come with the band they had another dude be front man and he was good.  He was like Mike Patton.  All crazy, wearing women’s lingerie and singing a song with a chorus that said, I’m not gay…I, I, I a a am not gay.  I’m not gay.  It was hilarious and they rocked the house.

Dusty and I were watching front row next to each other at that RevCo show.  When the local bands like Massacre or Separation of Self would be playing Dusty would be back stage head banging with the band and just me and him were allowed back there.  Unless I had a girl with me, she could check it out too.  It was nuts man and they treated me like family and I took out much of my angst in that heavy metal club.  I was going through a shit storm of emotions so I was using a lot.  I don’t want to go in to too much detail about my drug abuse but I was never sober ever when I was down there after I got dumped by Erica.

I held it together pretty well.  Nobody knew I was high as a kite all the time and that’s why I was so happy and positive about everything.  Because my reality sucked ass but my boys were there for me to get high and let me cut loose.  I needed that in hindsight.  I really did.  And it was like bear cubs getting all crazy with each other not knowing what was going on just flailing.  

One night at the club there was a dude named Steve, a biker who was a shitty tattoo artist at hard core tattoos.  He was hammered drunk and he was friends with Dusty and the bands because they got free ink.  I was walking out of the restroom and they were walking in and I was joking around with them and said something in response to what they had said.  So Steve hals off and punches me in the face with his rings on his fingers, like right in the forehead just above my eyebrow.  So his girlfriend apologized for him and told me he was drunk and I said it was cool, that was a powder puff punch anyway.  I didn’t even feel it.  And I told her he’s lucky I am in a good mood because I would have taken him outside and kicked his ass.  But I told Jason, the drummer for Massacre what happened and he told Dusty and Dusty grabbed Steve by the throat and was going to pummel his ass but they talked him down and dude came and apologized to me and I told him to go fuck his mother.  I told him, you don’t fuck with the wrong person dude, you’ll find yourself face down in the mud bitch.  I was trying to play it cool but I was feeling no pain and knew they had my back.

One of the local bands was called Separation of Self.  I knew the bass player from when he was 17 years old and I knew his dad too.  Ricky was his name and Russ was his dad.  They did the wiring for me at Datamark.  So any time they had a job to do for us, Ricky would come by my desk and shoot the breeze.  Jason Thompson was also working at Datamark as a designer and he was good friends with Ricky and Russ.  I remember Ricky being really young being in shitty bands playing bass but he got with these dudes and formed Separation of Self and they were good.  They sounded like Meshuggah.  The only weak link in the band was the vocalist.  He was a great performer, but he did not have the greatest vocals for that band.  But it sounded good.  I had no problem rocking out with them.

Ricky told me all the time to come and check them out and that is where I found out about Club Vegas.

Separation of Self went out on the road for their album tour  around the country and they played Spokane when me and my PC tech were in Spokane on business.  And we both knew Ricky from Datamark and we were on business from Datamark, and Ricky was on business with his band.  And these guys were driving around in a broke down van with a trailer full of gear staying in shitty motels.  Me and Mauchley (Matt Mauchley, my PC tech) were being put up in 4 star hotels on Datamark’s dime.  The economy was good at this time and we were put up in the best hotel in Spokane on a corporate deal and Matt and me had separate rooms.  These hotels were lavish with turn down service, chocolates on your bed, elegance everywhere, room service out the yin yang.

So me and Matt get done working and it’s Friday night and Separation of Self is playing a club in Spokane.  So me and Matt thought it might be cool and give those dudes one of our hotel rooms before the show.  Treat them like rock stars.  They were holed up in a $60/night motel six. We also had rented a jet black Chrysler 300 that we were rolling around town in.  So I called Ricky and asked him where they were staying.  We went over there and I said, get your money back dude, we’re going to put you up in a 4 star hotel tonight.  And of course we were cranking Separation of Self’s new release on the CD player.  They were flabbergasted and couldn’t believe it.  I said yea man, just get in the van and follow us and we’ll get you a nice room with all the goods.

So they followed us to our hotel and I grabbed my stuff and stashed it in Matt’s room and gave those dudes my room.  There were five of them and two of us.  They were used to being crammed in a van with five guys but tonight they had TV, a shower, killer bathroom with fresh towels and robes.  So I let them have my room key and I went back to Matt’s room and told them I’d be back in a while to see what’s going on.  This is a heavy metal band.  I knocked on the door and the drummer Chris and the guitarist Doug were sitting on the bed watching Reading Rainbow.  Their singer Kajol was sitting at the desk doing homework on some Adobe application that he was studying, Shredder Steve the other guitarist was in the bathroom with a straightening iron fixing his hair for the gig and Ricky was just sitting there loving the shit out of it.  I walked in and Doug and Chris jumped off the bed and said dude, you want your bed.  I said no man, this is your place tonight.  I’m over there, make yourselves at home.  Just do me a favor and rock our faces off tonight.

They were super stoked so I chilled with them a little bit, smoked a little weed, then I went back over to Matt’s room and watched Sport’s Center while those guys  were loving it.  And me and Matt were just laughing at ourselves because now we were legendary to these guys and wherever they played, we were part of the band now.  I used to go to Shredder’s house and watch them rehearse.  That’s how I got to know them so well, but this was so cool to be able to do that for them.

They played after the opening acts and the crowd was pretty lame so me and Matt got up when SoS took the stage and got a pit going and then things got gnarly and the place blew up.  After the show they were telling us, man you guys started the pit and it got off the hook fast, thanks for everything man.  What can we do to repay you?  I said, just keep on rocking in the free world brothers.

After the show we were back at the hotel and Steve’s wife was there with friends but staying in a crappy motel somewhere.  And Steve was in tears in the room and I said what’s up dude?  He told me that his wife was cheating on him and this is some hard core shit.  Steve was curled up in the fetal position sobbing and I laid down next to him and just was there for him as his brother to comfort him.  He thanked me so much and whenever he saw me anytime after that he just yelled my named and gave me a huge hug.

I even took Cassidy, Nate and Spencer over to his house one day to meet him and see his guitars and he played for them.  They liked that a lot.  So I opened my kids’ eyes a bit and was there for dudes like that.  I don’t know, it just felt like the right thing to do.

Erica hated me going to band practice but I had to.  I was part of the band.  I even took Cassidy, Nate and Spence to see the practice space.  Nate and Spencer loved it.  They were banging on the drums and cymbals making all kinds of noise but Cassidy was kind of creeped out so I took her under my arm and made her feel safe.  I apologized to her later but later in life she became that kind of person.  She is super responsible but she likes to party like dad.  She remembers that and she tells me today that it was super cool to get a glimpse of those sorts of things, being sheltered by mom.  Nathan and Spencer were loving it because they could go nuts in there and just act like animals, so that’s why I took them down there for a beat.  Just to see how they would respond to that environment that I lived in several times a week.

I started to share my music with the kids as we spent more time together before the big break-off that I will go in to later.  We had our every other weekend and one day in a week to be together.  But that did not make up for time lost in the family.  I thought it was bullshit but I loved and treasured every moment I had with them so I made the most of it.

Christi would tell me while we were still married that sometimes people get divorced and then the dad shows up only on his best behavior, not having to deal with the every day drama that a family brings; she called that a Santa Dad.  So you know what?  I gave that bitch a Santa Dad for my children and I was the best fucking Santa Dad you could ever imagine.  Christi also told me not to get a young hot blonde girlfriend and bring her to the boys baseball and football games.  So you know what happened.  Cydney Young and Erica.  I was there with my kids in the bleachers watching Nate play football with Erica by my side and Christi and Brett stayed in their car because they did not want to see me.  And that was good enough for me.  It was my time with the kids and I had my new hot girlfriend who took such good care of me and loved me like a wife should love a husband.  We were not married, we were going to get married but we had a house and bedrooms and chests of drawers for the kids clothes so they did not have to pack when they came over.  We had their clothes in our house for them while they stayed with us because it was their home.  And we made them feel at home too.  Erica was such a great step mom.  She loved my kids as  much as she loved me and she bonded with Cassidy and Nate big time but Spencer was really young and he was tender and cried sometimes but dude, he was only six years old and she did not understand how it worked.  So I would take care of Spence and pay special attention to him to make sure he felt safe while the other kids had their fun.  Erica had a daughter named Cali from her first marriage and Cali was the little sister to my kids and we had a family of  six and it was wonderful.

The only thing missing was Tayslie and Ali.  Tayslie and Ali were Christi’s daughters from her first marriage to Alan Powell.  I adopted them and raised them and their last name was Brown.  But they were older and in high school so they had their friends and they were left out of the parent time I had with the other three.  And it was tragic because as much as I loved them, I tried to talk to them and get close to them but they would never open up to me.  It was very awkward between me and the two older girls.  Christi drove a wedge between us, and then told me that I should never say that she drove a wedge between us.  That was manipulation 101 by a sociopath.

I remember at the end of the marriage I went in to Ali’s bedroom and Tays and Ali sat on Ali’s bed and I sat on the floor and just apologized to them for every wrong thing that I had ever done to them and that I was trying to repent and become a better man and I just begged them for forgiveness and those two precious angels were caught up in their mother’s narrative so they were totally closed off to me.  But I told them that I saw my mistakes and that I wish I could do it all over again and I took full responsibility for my own actions and I now had to pay the consequences.   They just sat there staring at me with folded arms and said nothing.  I was in tears trying to get inside them but they were so closed off, their body language told me to fuck off and that they did not want to hear my apologies.

So they were wrapped up in mom’s shit and I couldn’t do anything about it and it was fucking killing me inside.  So I left the house and drove down the street and punched the shit out of my steering wheel.  It had knuckle marks from me pounding on it.  And I was screaming at the top of my lungs, “WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK HEAVENLY FATHER, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS THAT SHIT ALL ABOUT, THAT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT DUDE, JESUS HELP ME OUT HERE DUDE THIS IS SOME FUCKED UP BULLSHIT THAT I HAVE TO LIVE THROUGH!”

I knew my Heavenly Father saw it more clearly than I did, because I did not have that perspective that He did.  And so I begged Him to show me some perspective that would give me comfort and I went home where I was then living at my mom’s house and I got on my knees in prayer and apologized for saying fuck to Jesus and asked Heavenly Father to teach me patience and faith and forgiveness.  Because I knew anger was not going to benefit me at all.  So I knew I had to humble myself and figure out who in the world I was and why I was put here to do this work.

Because I was spent man.  And I had been taken to the cleaners and taken for all I was worth by Christi and Erica.

Well, you know what happened?  Cydney Young and Erica Gandy is what happened.  Two of the most mouthwatering drop dead gorgeous women I have ever seen on this planet.  Cyd became my first girlfriend, I told you about her, and Erica became my next after the Cyd breakup.  There is a huge New York story to tell about me and Erica and I will do that right here.  This ten days could be a movie in and of itself.

Erica came from wealth.  She was taught how to be a lady, she went to charm school and knew how to act the part.  So in society she got along great.  But when you got to know Erica it was completely different.  She wasn’t so prim and proper in real life, although, she was one spectacular person that I adored and loved and still love.  But I fucked it all up and I will give you the dirty laundry on this one. 

We both worked at Datamark.  She was a copy writer and once in a while I would have to fix her computer.  My buddy Jason Thompson, drummer for Massacre at the Wake worked as a designer and coded web sites.  Jason and Erica were friends and in relationships that they wanted out of desperately.  Jason is one of the coolest dudes I ever knew.  He might be even cooler than me, but that will remain to be seen.  It’s not a competition but I love that dude like a brother.  Jason is a drummer and in college he won gold medals for drum corps.  So when he started working at Datamark, he knew through Ricky Brandes that I was a drum builder and he needed a full set of drums.  

So we worked it out and I was going through hell in my 

As I got older and needed to buy a car or rent an apartment I didn’t have the money for it but my folks would bank roll my needs.

In my early 20s I worked at Fleetwood Mobile Homes.  I did this as a summer job.  It paid minimum wage which back then was $3.35/hr.  Not very good wages but things cost a lot less back then.  One thing I could not comprehend is how the guys I worked with could raise a family on that crappy wage.  So I would have to get up at 5:30 every morning to be to work by 7am because it was a long drive also.  My buddy Bob would pick me up and I would sleep on the way to work.  We would hit the 7-11 for a soda and donuts but then I would fall asleep for the rest of the ride and Bob would listen to music.  It was hard work too.  It was an assembly line building these mobile homes.  In a giant warehouse it started with the framework, then the floor, then it came to my area which was the outside walls.  We used nail guns and laid out insulation on the outside walls.  I really dug that job even though it was hard work.  The guys I worked with were really cool and I would listen to their stories of debauchery from weekend parties and laugh.  I was clean as a whistle back then.  Fully active in church and temple worthy.  All I wanted to do was make out with my girlfriend and play basketball.  Truth be told, I was getting the best blow jobs on the planet earth from my girlfriend, Kim Downing.  She loved me.  She would watch me play basketball for two hours on Wednesday night and then come back to my house.  We would turn on the TV and I would watch late night TV while she gave me blow jobs all night long, one after another.  I don’t know what I did to deserve that but I had no complaints.

Then I got moved over to another department and started manufacturing the inside walls of the mobile homes.  This was a lot harder than outside walls.  We had to frame the inside of the mobile home and then nail wallpapered sheetrock on to these inside 1×2 boards.  It was thin and I understood why they were so cheap.  Mobile homes are not 2×4 construction like a regular house.  It’s 2×6 on the outside and 1×2 on the inside.  So you can see why tornadoes always fucked up a mobile home park.

The one thing that was great about that shitty job is that I got off work at 3:30 every day so that left a lot of the day open for having fun.  I was sober at this time in my life.  Like I said, all I wanted to do was play basketball and do naughty things with my girlfriend. 

I had a friend who moved to Vancouver from Idaho named Brian Nielsen.  He was super cool like me, we did not see eye to eye on music.  He thought the Chili Peppers were too weird for him but we could rock out to some Van Halen or Sammy Hagar or AC/DC together.  I would pick him up to go do whatever we were doing and I’d be listening to the Chili Peppers but then for his sake I would change it to some Van Halen.  As time went by however, I made him listen to the Chili Peppers.  He didn’t like them because they sounded too much like rap.  I remember making him listen to Mother’s Milk while we were driving from Clackamas, OR to Vancouver over the bridge.  He liked Jane’s Addiction though so we could rock out to that together.

Brian’s family was pretty wealthy and my dad and his dad got along really well so that was awesome for me because my dad didn’t have many friends.  Brian was athletic  just like me.  But Brian was shorter than me, he was like 5’ 9” and I am almost 6 feet tall.  5’11”1/2.  We played basketball together all the time.  One on one, pick up games, church ball.  Brian was super chill but dude won a gold medal in the Jr. olympics for weight lifting.  I used to tease him and call him a pussy, you couldn’t bench press the bar, you’re such a fag.  We had so much fun giving each other shit.  I think that’s why my dad and Ron got along so much.  Because all we wanted to do was laugh but to joke on each other, it was funny.  Never taken seriously.  And we would just laugh our asses off because we knew that we ruled.  Ron Nielsen was a dude who could understand my father and that was great for me. 

I think they bonded over their liking for cars.  Ron was an inspiration to my dad and I loved it when they got together because my dad would come out of his shell and be cool dad like I remembered from childhood.  My dad loves classic sports cars.  And Ron had in his garage, a Corvette Indy pace car with 37 miles on it.  Not only did they have the cars but they also had a boat and when you have a boat and you live in the Pacific Northwest you are going water skiing whenever you can.

So I would get off that shitty job building mobile homes at 3:30 and Brian would get off work doing construction early too.  In the summer time in the North West the sun stayed up close to 10:00pm.  So after work in the summer time we would hustle our asses home, get something to eat and drive to Brian’s house to go water skiing for the rest of the evening.  Because we lived on the banks of the Columbia River.  Best water skiing ever.  Calm waters, a little choppy but that’s the best water skiing.  Or we would go out to Lacamas Lake and water ski on the smoothest pond water surface, it was made for water skiing.  The great thing about the Columbia River is that is was so huge and wide that there were islands of sand in the middle.  

So we would set the boat in the river and park the truck then get in the boat and land on the island.  There we would build a bon fire and have a cook out, do some water skiing and just have all kinds of fun.  Of course we had super hot chicks with us all the time.  Brian was a kick ass water skier.  He could slalom and when he cut the wake he would put his elbow in the river, he got that low on one ski.  I was never that good but I could send up a roosters tail of water on my left but I couldn’t do it on my right.   I loved water skiing and crossing the wake and getting air, bending my knees as I go over the wake and get all gnarly, then let the ski drop back down on top of the water and wipe my face off so I could see again.  One thing I liked so much about water skiing was the whip.  When the boat makes a U turn you pick up speed and you’re usually doing about 15mph to 20mph.  But when the boat turns you have all kinds of momentum so I would just love it and go faster and faster as the boat turned around.

I just had to power through the fatigue and hold on to the rope so I was going from 20mph to 60mph in about three seconds.  It was exhilarating!   The cool thing about water skiing, if you don’t crash, you just go and go until you tire out and then you let go of the rope and drop down into the water, floating safely while the boat puts up the flag so that other boats will not  drive over you and give you a concussion.

We would do this all summer and to me it was regular lifestyle.  But for others when I would talk about it at work I called it partying.  And they knew I didn’t do drugs or alcohol but when I said I partied they knew I meant dancing, skiing, getting chicks, playing basketball, golfing.

My golf career was something else.  And it ended tragically from a broken bone in my lower leg.

I said before I was charmed.  When I was 8 years old I had my own set of golf clubs.  So I was golfing all of my life.  Brian and me would go golfing every week, sometimes twice.  My dad loves golf and he took me to a golf clinic put on by Byron Woods.  I learned how to drive the ball straight and not slice like I used to.  I never had a problem with a hook, but that was Brian’s nemesis.  I had a slice, he had a hook.  And Craig, just shot straight as an arrow.

Brian and me had a mentor named Craig Heesh who played the PGA but never won anything.  But he played the US Open and other golf tournaments.  But he never played the Masters.  That would have been killer.  He was very calm and collected and very wise.  He liked me and Brian so we three would go out golfing whenever we could and he would teach us how to get better and better.  And I would take the lessons to my dad and help his game too.  Craig opened up a golf shop at Pioneer Square in downtown Portland.  I would go visit him from time to time and talk for hours about anything.  He was such a good friend.  He would tell me about how he was teaching Clyde Drexler to be a better golfer.  I asked him what is Clyde like?  He said he’s a nice guy, just wants to play better golf.

Craig would be gone for weeks at a time and then just come back home and life went on.  He never told us what he did for a living.  But I thought, and I am sure today, I know for sure that dude was CIA.  That or FBI.  He would come back home and we would go golfing and we would ask him where he went.  He would tell us that he had to go to Brazil for two weeks.  He was always going to Brazil for weeks at a time.  But when he was home he was chill and we golfed and got great wisdom from that man.  He really treated me and Brian like sons.  We would bust his chops from time to time and tell him are you FBI or CIA.  He would tell us that he can not tell us what he does for work.  He would jokingly tell us that he was going to open a golf shop, then he did.  That was his cover.  We knew and he knew that we knew but we could not talk about anything.

I took her out on our first date and knew I was going to marry her.  And I got stoned before our date because I partied.  But after that date, I went cold turkey and cleaned my act up to become a stand up guy, husband and father.  I knew what was coming, and it did.

One of my companions from Chile came to visit me in Seattle when he was doing some business later on in life.  I was in my forties at the time and we talked about old times.  He was my greenie, a brand new missionary, his first area.  So he pretty much took after me in every way and kind of idolized me, being American, being cool and doing things that other missionaries didn’t do for fun.  Like when we would get frustrated with each other, rather than argue I would tell him, put your bag down.  He would ask why and I would say, because we are going to fight right now.  So he dropped his bag and I grabbed him and body slammed him to the ground and we wrestled around until we got it out of our systems and then got up feeling much better, laughing, hugging and went on our way to do the work.  And I heard later that he did this with other missionaries that didn’t really like it, they weren’t the physical type.  But for those of us who were, it worked pretty well to get our frustrations out without arguing or being contentious.

We were in an area called Itaugua that was like fifty miles east of the big city of Asuncion.  There was an odd number of missionaries for a couple of months so our mission president had me take a local who was a Priest in the Aaronic priesthood as a companion.  I am the only one he did this with.  He must have trusted me a lot to give me that responsibility.  And I had some good companions from the city who were young, getting ready to go on their missions and this was sort of a mini-mission for them for a week or two.

And when we did that, those young men looked up to me, idolized me so I made sure I set a good example of what a missionary should be.  We worked hard, taught well and played hard too.  We had some good spiritual experiences too, and I wouldn’t just dominate and show off, I would allow them to speak, guided by the spirit and those young men would testify of Christ and the truth of the plan of happiness and it was wonderful watching them grow and blossom in to men.

Then I finally got a new companion, that dude from Chile and he was so awesome.  We had so much fun, never any strife like with most companionships.  I had frustrations with most of my companions who were from Uruguay, but not with my American companions.  We were always cool with each other.  I only had a couple of American comps, and they are some of my best friends today.  Anthony Clark from San Jose, a full blooded Tlingit native american brother who I love like my very brother.  He taught me so much about myself and loved me like a brother.  And Mike Peterson, who taught me how to play tennis and we learned to play hacky sack together.  He was the one I had all the custom threads made with.  He was fun and up for adventures all the time.  Always doing something to kill the boredom.  But then back home the evil one got up in his head and got him all dark and depressed and he didn’t know how to deal with it and I told you before, dude took care of it with a shot gun in the shower.

Now, if you ask me about depression, me being a spiritual man and having dealt with bouts of depression and having come through them, finally figuring out the source of my depression anyway.  To me, this world is a battle between good and evil.  We have the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that most of us use as a guideline for living an ethical and wholesome lifestyle.  We get our ideas and common sense from scripture, the teachings of the Beatitudes, the ten commandments.  And even if we are not Christian, we abide by these teachings given to us through Christian historical learning.

I have always been taught that every good thing comes from God and every bad thing comes from the adversary.  And that makes sense.  God does not trick or fool you.  Deceit is Lucifer’s plan.  So pray, and ponder that you are a literal spirit child of a loving God, who is your real father and He will guide you to peace.  It will not come easily, because you have to ask first, because He only wants you to grow and increase in knowledge and strength. 

I share my faith because it is at the core of who I am, however I do not wear it on my sleeve.  I like to party and rock out and I have no regrets.  The Christian community is a little weird if you ask me.  Very intense and very much like high school.  A lot of cliques. Super judgmental when they say they are not the judge.  I could go on, but their hypocrisy does enough to make them look foolish.  

So I play by the rules that guide me to peace and don’t worry about the consequences because I believe I’m finally on the right course in life.  And life is starting to get fun again, because for the last fifteen years I have been in hell trying to reconcile my life with the things I was promised, that were taken away.  Taken away by greed and sociopathic women.

Our society is a farce.  It is a distraction from reality, bent on tricking you in to the newest, latest and greatest big thing in your life that your neighbors will envy and that you will put useless energy in to maintaining rather than bonding with your family and becoming closer as individuals within families.

Everyone needs to be impressive and show off to meet the expectations they have in their minds, to satisfy their sense of well being with glory from the world.  Whether it be a new car, a raise in salary or a fine meal at an exclusive restaurant.

I am a victim of these very things that I criticize.  These are the things I love in life.  But they are not the things that fill my soul with happiness.  I love music and art and being able to express myself with no regard to what anyone thinks about what I am doing.  But I know the boundaries of reason and taste and keep some forms of expression hidden.

We all do this, but we do not understand what we are even doing.  Society compartmentalizes us and tries to force us in to a mold that everyone else is doing.  If you look at a neighborhood; houses the same, same cars, same everything.

And there is safety in that.  There is community in that.  But when someone comes along and plays to the march of a different drummer, things get dicey in suburbia and people become ostracized.  It happened to me in Kaysville, Utah.

I was raised in the inner city of Portland, Oregon and moved to Vancouver, Washington when I was 11 years old.  So I knew some things about life that people in Utah could not understand.  I was exposed to some very adult things as a child, alcohol, sexuality, social combat.  And now I lived in a nice quiet and safe community north of Salt Lake City, Utah.  Everyone, including my own family was LDS and went to church on Sunday.  We just walked to church because the church was in the middle of the neighborhood.

So I lived next door to my bishop and we were friends, got along well and my youngest daughter Cassidy became friends with a non-mormon kid down the street, whose dad I became friends with.  And I liked that sometimes there were families that were not part of our church around.  Because sometimes that’s all you had in common was church.  And that gets boring.  So I searched for friends who had interests in other avenues.  There was a dude down the street who wasn’t LDS and I liked hanging out with him.  I love my LDS brethren but sometimes it’s nice to have a friend who isn’t always talking about church stuff.  It was bizarre, like dudes were so churchy that they didn’t separate church society from regular society.  And that was the safety bubble in Davis County, Utah.

In the LDS church bishops are inspired.  Some really are, and some just do their own will, but who am I to judge?  They are men flawed with weakness just like anyone so when they make mistakes, people freak out instead of realizing that he’s just a dude getting by in this world and was called to be the bishop.

So I lived next door to my bishop and I had drums.  And I played them at respectable hours, but they could be heard a few houses down, and definitely in bishop’s house.  Sometimes on weekends I would have jam sessions with my buddies that lasted into the wee hours of the night and maybe that bothered him.  And there is an order of presidency in the LDS church for the youth to have their goals and titles and honors and blessings that reaches into adulthood and High Priests and what not.  Nothing political, no power, nobody recognized anyone for being in any position in the priesthood unless it was a church matter.  In society we were just regular dudes. 

And the bishop calls members from the Ward to hold callings or positions of stewardship, like a Sunday School Teacher or a person who was a leader in the young women’s organization.  And these were voluntary efforts but taken very seriously.  So I was called to be a counselor in the Young Men’s presidency.  And I got to work with the Deacons, 12-14 year old males.  I was their spiritual adviser and mentor.  And I was good with those dudes and they had some struggles that we talked through, that they didn’t feel they could discuss with their parents.  But I didn’t judge them and they opened up to me and we were breaking new ground and progressing.  

But bishop all of a sudden out of the blue told me, “I don’t know if I was inspired or what but I need you to head up the neighborhood watch program.”  So I was released from my calling in the Young Men’s presidency and the bishop made me neighborhood watch supervisor.  Which was not even a real calling in the church.  It’s like he made this shit up and took me out of those young dude’s lives just when things were getting good.  When I would teach those Deacons the gospel I would testify about Christ and how important He is to our lives, and the other councilor in the Young Men’s presidency would tell me after the lesson, “I felt the spirit man.  That was awesome.”

They looked up to me and were  confiding in me about issues with their parents, that they didn’t feel comfortable talking with their parents about, and they were doing better in school because of the counsel I gave them, and they were learning to be nicer to kids they didn’t like.  And bishop Brent Craven took that from me and took me from them, because he did not understand that drums were not rock and roll tools of the devil.  Dude was seriously like trying to keep sin out of the neighborhood.  He talked about masturbation all the time like it was a plague for the youth.  What a dipshit. 

And there I go being judgmental on him, which is totally hypocritical.  So I didn’t rock the boat, I would just laugh under my breath at his little utopian society that he was in charge of.  It was bizarre, so I’m so glad we moved away from that place and got a much better house with better jam spaces and much better leadership in our new ward.  And hey, he was a super nice guy for real and he had a good sense of humor and was really good with the youth.  But he had something against me that is for sure.

Around that time my credit got better after going through a bankruptcy that I did not want, however it was a result of my using department store credit cards and a line of credit from US Bank to finance whatever it was I felt would appease my wife.  Financial mistakes in a young man’s early marriage.  I decided it was time to buy a house.  My credit wasn’t great but it was decent and it was the right time to buy a house because prices were at an all time low.

We shopped around a lot but finally settled on a house I freaking loved.  It was a 3000 sq. ft. victorian, three floors, huge bedrooms, I mean massive huge bedrooms upstairs.  three full bathrooms.  four bedrooms and a storage area downstairs.  Real oak hardwood floors in the kitchen and dining room, oak china cabinets.  Huge front yard with a cyclone fence, two car garage, four car driveway with a basketball hoop.  I remodeled the basement all by myself to make two bedrooms for my oldest daughters and that was great so we had five bedrooms and three bathrooms, big family room downstairs with entertainment center, couches, bean bag chairs, art center for the kids, drum kit for dad.  My daughter Ali got a huge walk in closet that she put her desk in to do homework in private.  My boys shared a room upstairs across from the master bedroom that was freaking huge.  We had a king sized bed, a big window overlooking the neighborhood from upstairs, in one corner there were two small love seats and a television with a throw rug and coffee table for the kids to hang out in our room and in the other corner was our office with the computer and file cabinets.  On the main floor was a living room with furniture and a piano that was only used when visitors came over.  Downstairs was where we had fun.  It was 1000 sq. ft. of open space, movie theater, drum kits, art room, two bedrooms and a full bathroom with storage under the stairs, wall to wall carpet.  I loved that place.

This house was the place to hang out for the high school kids.  My kids were somewhat popular in school and their friends would come over and hang out, watch movies.  They would come to our house to get ready for Prom and Homecoming, then the limos would pull up in our driveway.  My daughter Tayslie was a band nerd, she played the flute, musical of course.  Ali was a cheerleader and played the violin.  The boys played football and basketball.  Ali went to college at Southern Utah University on a full ride scholarship.  Cassidy is in Ireland studying business at the University of Dublin School of Business.  Spencer is in college, plays drums in the jazz band.  Nathan, he works but is not in school.  Has a beautiful girlfriend and is the nicest dude you’ll ever meet.  He’s super talented and figuring out who he is.  I give him slack because he’s been through hell in his youth.  He will figure it out and be spectacular one day.  He’s spectacular already in my eyes, he just doesn’t see it as I do.

All through high school Tayslie dated an actor in the LDS films that you see on Temple Square.  He played the 14 year old Joseph Smith in those films.  He was super talented and hilarious.  When he came to our house he would get out of the car, immediately jump on the trampoline, do a full out body flip with a twist and land on the grass, then flip his hair back and say, how’s it going?  He was super talented.  We went to his house and jammed on guitars a few times, that was fun.  Christi liked this sort of thing because it was church related.  And that’s all she could relate to, church stuff.  The world was too hard and harsh for her to take.  So I would entertain myself by going over to Tays’ boyfriend’s house and playing music with his brothers using his guitars.

It was always a good time free jamming.  I didn’t know much about music theory that I do today.  Back then it was all play by ear and feel.  Get in the groove.  I would play some cool rhythms and they would drop in from a blues scale or major scale noodling around and it sounded quite good I might add.

So we were pretty much the family that everyone in the neighborhood looked up to.  This I did not know until after the divorce and I came back to visit some old friends from the neighborhood.  They told me we were the rich family.  Well, we were not but evidently we presented ourselves well.  We did have nice cars, and my yard always looked great, had a huge pine tree in the corner of the yard and a peach tree in the back yard.  And hedges that I had to maintain but I had the electric clippers and would groom the hedges.  That was my Saturday in the spring and summer time.  Good workout and I would get tan from taking my shirt off.

My son Spencer, he must have been four years old, he got one of his sisters’ play toys that had wheels and he would bring it out into the lawn while I was mowing and mimic me, like he was mowing the grass.  Man, I miss those good times.  Spencer gave me so much joy in life.  He’s like the spectacular kid that everyone loves, a perfect example with anything he does. 

We had a trampoline in the front yard and there were always high school kids hanging out at our house.  The music too, we always had live music coming out of our house.  Oh, and on halloween we put on a killer spook alley with creepy sound tracks that I would compose on my computer, cool light show and killer halloween art that we made ourselves.

The kids from high school would come to our house after Prom or Homecoming and we would set up a nice spread of chips and dips for them, munchies for the after party and they would watch movies until five am.  Always supervised.  My wife would check in on them so the make-outs didn’t get out of control.  She was a little naive, but I knew what was going on down there in those bean bag chairs.  And I was cool with it.  I knew they were safe and sober and getting a little lovin’ from each other after the school dance.

I used to work at an Italian restaurant back in the early nineties, and during that time I have many stories to tell.  But while I worked there I was head waiter, and this was an exclusive Italian restaurant.  The owner was the chef and he used work as Sous Chef at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and worked at Doros too, under chef Paul Bermani.  If anyone is in to haute cuisine you know what I’m talking about.  This is some five star clout.  So he had a custom menu and made everything from scratch.  And after I would end my shift and count my tips out he would call me back in to the kitchen and say, Hey Vaughn, let me show you how to make a real good seafood fettuccine from scratch in the pan,  and he showed me and taught me how the chemistry of the ingredients work together with the right temperatures and the oils and creams how they would blend and not break, or break if over-heated and at what point you add this and start with this and that and it was a recipe and you had to do it just right with the right heat and right timing and get the bubbles and the color and thickness just right and there were ways of telling if it was right or need more time or needed a little more butter or more chicken stock.  Never water, always chicken stock.  Always butter, never margarine.  And to start you had to use clarified butter.  Never pads of hard butter for a true creamy white sauce.  And heavy cream.  40% fat heavy cream.  People do not understand about cooking.  They will make something and call it chicken Alfredo with garlic.  This is not Alfredo. Real Alfredo has several ingredients, nothing more.  Heavy cream, butter, parmesan cheese.  That’s it.  If you add anything to it, it’s not Alfredo sauce anymore.  It’s a white sauce.  It’s Alfredo-ish, but you can not call it Alfredo.  And yea, I’m a food snob so it bugs me when The Olive Garden does their whatever Alfredo just because it’s a white sauce.  A good white sauce has butter, heavy cream, dash of salt and white wine.  And just because someone put parmesan cheese in it, does not make it Alfredo sauce.  The white wine made it NOT Alfredo, however, that is a recipe for a good white sauce to put over some seafood and a bowl of fettuccine, scallions, ground black pepper, a little parmesan ground on top and some diced tomatoes.  

So it was  Prom time for my daughter, Tayslie and rather than have those dudes spend their hard earned money on crappy restaurant fare, I decided I would serve them up a good five course meal made from scratch the way Patrick Conner (chef at da Vinci’s) taught me.  We started with a salad, leafy greens, garlic bread, then they were served for the main course, chicken piccata with a side of spaghetti bolognese, made from scratch.  And at this point those poor kids were stuffed so they didn’t get to enjoy the Tiramisu I bought for them.  I didn’t make that, but it was a good dessert.

They could hardly finish the main course, but it was super good and they felt bad that they got so full.  I should have figured they were kids and maybe the boys could chow down but the girls probably not.  But that was a good night.  And then after the dance they came back and watched movies downstairs.  This was before big flat screen LCD plasma TVs and all that.  So what I did was borrow the projector from work that was used to give presentations during meetings and hooked it up to my laptop computer, put it up high on a shelf in the back of the room and built a frame out of two by fours with a big white sheet and made a huge movie screen and played the audio through my surround sound stereo.  So they had a movie theater in the basement after their dance.  How kick ass was I as a dad doing that for my kids and their friends?

And of course my wife would not tell me thank you for doing all that but the girls were grateful and that made them super happy.  Although, my wife made everything in my life shitty.  There had to be a reason to be offended about something and it was always projected on me.  Like life was so grand but she was a dark cloud that blamed me for her unhappiness.  How screwed up is that?  I got effed royally and did everything I could to make life great for her and the kids.  Sure I would raise my voice at the kids in laziness rather than sitting down with them and calmly working out their problems, but every parent does that a time or two.  Well, there are those parents who are spectacular and don’t do that, but most do.  But if I did it, it was documented by my wife, I kid you not.  She would write things down that she did not like of my behavior like Rain Man did to Charlie Babbot.

Oh and you know what?  The actual Rain Man that Dustin Hoffman used as his character is from Salt Lake City and would hang out at the public Library.  So I talked to him once in a while, asked him crazy math problems and he loved it.  His dad was with him all the time, letting him socialize and he was super nice.  His name was Kim Peek.  He talked really loud, very monotone, head cocked to the side like Hoffman did and held his hands like Hoffman did in the movie.  Kim died years ago and it was kind of an honor to know the dude.  He was a sweetheart.  Very kind, likable.  Loved to make people happy.  He loved giving people the answers to their questions.

When me and my wife would have arguments we didn’t even swear at each other.  We just tried to have discussions calmly.  But I would get super pissed and frustrated because she had some mental problems or something.  Seriously, I would try to have adult conversations with her, talking about my feelings about how she made me feel when she said this or that and ask her what she meant or was trying to do.  And she would clam up, not say a word, curl up in the fetal position and cower like she was being abused.  It was freaking bizarro world.  And I had this to deal with for a wife.  And when we talked to our psychologist, she told him that I was abusive toward her with my language.  Because in my frustration of her not acting like an adult and not being able to step up to the table and be a wife, I would tell her that she had mental problems and should seek out professional help.  And sometimes I would say, What is wrong with you?  Normal people don’t act this way.  How come you can’t have an adult conversation with your husband?  Are you mental?  What is wrong with you that you can’t talk?

And she would tell our therapist these things and he told me that I was an abuser.  Fuck that dude and her.  I was not an abuser.  I was being mistreated and had a mentally ill wife who pretended to be perfect on the outside but was nuts on the inside.  She was finally diagnosed as a Sociopath.  And when my psychologist told me that it made perfect sense.  The way she treated me, got so easily offended, she hoarded too.  Never threw anything away except for food trash.  Anything old was put in bins and stored in the garage to be re used or to be had for another day reflecting on the past.  And she lived in the past big time.  Always talking about the past.  She did a lot of genealogical research and found a lot of connections to our ancestors. And she also found on her European side links to Odin.  I thought Odin was fairy tale stuff.  And my mom has done a lot of research too.  Evidently I am directly blood related to Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas. Which makes sense.  I always saw my grandfather Brown as looking somewhat Native American.  Very dark traits, black hair and darkish skin.

And I have always been in to drums and percussion, music, art, those sorts of creative expression.  I love playing guitar too.  But drums are in my blood.  Not only in my blood but in my blood line.  Eli Brown was a drum maker and he made the snare drums that were played in the Revolutionary War.  Back then there was a drum line with snare drums and bass drums  in front of the armies that made it sound like there were more troops marching to put fear in to the enemy.  The oldest existing drum from the Eli Brown Drum Company is from 1833.  And before I knew anything about this, back in 2000 I bought a drum kit and took the wrap off of it and refinished it, then wanted to build myself my own custom snare drum.  So I did all the research I could online.  That was the advent of Ghostnote.net  Our goal was to raise the quality and lower prices and give drummers far more options than the big time retailers were offering.  And we did that, and we completely changed the drum building industry and drums became far more important than just a backbeat instrument to keep time.

And I became famous but did not realize it.  Like I was famous to big shot drummers who I idolized.  And evidently I am a legend in the drum building industry.  Because when I met Bob Rodriguez, a builder of custom drums and who does drum tune ups, when I first met him and shook his hand he said, It’s V the legend.  I said what do you mean legend.  And he said, you’re a ledge, bro.  You’re famous man.

So that kind of blew my mind.  And when I met Mario Calire, drummer for the Wallflowers, The Motels, and Ozmatali, an LA based studio drummer, fairly famous himself in the music industry, he shook my hand and said, So you’re THE Vaughn Brown.  And I was put off my feet.  He was the famous musician that I was meeting and he was honored to meet me.  Mind blown again.  So I have some influence that I did not recognize and looking back on life I see things differently and wish I had understood what was going on so I would have made different choices.  I was just in the right place at the right time so many times it boggles my mind how many cool events I witnessed, just stumbling upon epic things.  And starting trends, doing things people talked about but never did, then I would go do them and then people would see that, yea, that’s doable, and go do it too.

For example, the Bonneville Salt Flats.  A vast desert like expanse of nature’s beauty that one must behold before kicking the bucket.  There is nothing out there but grand flat salt plains 25 miles in any direction.  On a clear day with beautiful blue skies it looks like you’re on the moon.  White plains of salt, hard as asphalt that you can drive on as fast as you can, with no interference.  The only thing you can see is mountains, miles off in the distance.  Everything around you is flat and white, nothing growing, no wild life, just you out there on the salt of God’s  great earth.

When I was newly divorced, still doing OK at life, but just starting to party a little bit but not drinking alcohol or smoking weed, I was in incredible physical shape, I worked out and my body was sculpted like the statue of David…I put in a lot of hard work and discipline for that.  I had six pack abs and my arms and pecs were cut.  I wasn’t huge, that’s not what I wanted but I was 180 lbs of muscle and that worked out very well for my newly singled ass with the ladies.  I actually bench pressed 245 lbs, just one rep though and it was very slow getting it up. Things like that never last however, unless you’re Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

I was happy all the time hanging out with my best friend Lance, who had been through two horrible divorces as had I.  So we were bosom buddies who could finish each other’s sentences.  And we loved all the same movies, the same music, the same food.  And I kicked it with him when I was not in a relationship because I told him he was my hetero-non-gay life partner.  Like a brother, for sure but a dude I could have as a life companion and be cool with it.  Like the Odd Couple.  That we were for sure.  I was handsome, had beautiful women at my feet.  He was grizzly, a large man who over ate but had the best sense of humor and was kind and loving and up for fun times like I was.  You never knew two dudes who could get in to trouble like me and Lance.

So one Saturday morning about 8:30 am I woke up early after partying hardy the night before for my 41st birthday after seeing Separation of Self live at Club Vegas and being treated VIP style.  I met Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith’s wife at Club Vegas.  She was singer in a band called Wicked Wisdom and their drummer was Phillip Fisher from Fishbone, one of my all-time favorite bands.  And I kicked it with Angelo Moore, the front man for Fishbone for about 30 minutes when they were playing in Park City, and we talked about divorce and the same shit Christi was doing to me, his ex wife was doing to him.  And I said, but you’re a musician man, that’s how you put food on the table.  But she don’t understand, and we super bonded on that moment.  Me and Angelo.  So he gave me a big hug and we took some pics together.  That dude has made me happy many times in life and it was an honor to tell him that I think he is the best front man ever, better than David Lee Roth.  He stepped back, clapped his hands laughing.  And he said, I love you man, you’re making my day.  Talk about talent, when Fishbone played Angelo would be playing the sax and then he would switch to the trombone and the way they did it was by throwing the trombone from back stage out to Angelo and Angelo threw his sax back stage and it was so cool to watch them catch their instruments and then just keep on jamming. It was wild man, I saw Angelo throw his sax over the drum kit and then saw a trombone come flying out from behind the drum kit and he caught it and started rocking out.  That’s why Fishbone is one of my favorite bands of ever.  Who does that?  That’s some punk rock hard core heavy grooving right there.

Back to the story at Club Vegas, so that was somewhat of a supergroup for me.  I had never heard of them and I showed up late and missed the show.  But it was starting to rain hail so their roadie asked me and Lance if we would help him get their equipment out of the rain and into the trailer.  So we did, and then were give backstage entrance and did not have to pay $35 to see the show.  They were opening for Soulfly.  I was not in to heavy metal, but my friends were heavy metal musicians and very cool.  And those metal heads loved me for some reason so I was well taken care of any time I showed up.  Also, I built the drum kit for the house band so that helped a little.  

I met some celebrities coming through there.  I saw The Revolting Cocks, a side project of Ministry, hung out with the band.  Met the dudes from the band Prong when they were in a band called Motogrator.  That was cool.  I used to listen to Prong in college in my head banging days.  I met Jim Rose, the circus side show dude.  I first saw him in Seattle in the early 90s when they were first getting started.  Then they were on tour opening for heavy metal bands and I talked with Jim about the old days in Seattle and the old clubs that we used to hang out in.  He told me the owner of Rockandy was in prison for possession of weed, which is ironic, being in Seattle for that.  I saw Soundgarden for $6 at Rockandy, and fIREHOSE, I bought a fIREHOSE tshirt from Mike Watt himself, gave him a ten dollar bill, shook his hand and I said, You guys ripped.  And he said, Thanks man, thanks a lot. 

I met Al Hendrix, Jimi’s dad there, saw the Screaming Trees.  Rockandy was a great club.  They would have theme night, where a bunch of Seattle bands would come and play on the house drum kit and perform two songs from the band theme for the night.  They did KISS night, Queen night, Pink Floyd night, and we were at Jimi Hendrix theme night when I met Al Hendrix.  He showed up to honor Jimi that night.  So freaking cool.  

We were upstairs in the crow’s nest watching the shows.  There were couches all around, wall to wall carpet, ambient lighting, a bar up there too and me and my bros, we were super cool, we were passing the pipe around and sharing with everyone and the owner of the joint comes by and says, Hey if you see anyone wearing polyester, keep it low, they’re they guys from the liquor board.  So we were given free reign to smoke out in that venue, and that’s what it was like back then in Seattle in the early 90s.  And I was honored to be right inside of it.  Loving every minute of it.  And then the lead singer for the band The Sky Cries Mary, Rupert sat down in our circle and we smoked with him.

The Jim Rose Circus Side Show was new and they performed first at Lollapalooza, and that’s where I first saw them.  But they were based out of Seattle and performed weekly, a couple times a week like a bar band does.  There were posters for the Jim Rose Circus Side Show at The Off Ramp Inn, the OK Hotel, Rockandy just like any band promo.  So me and Jason and Thor decided to go see them at Rockandy one night.  And I had rented a video camera for some reason so we brought it along and they let us bring it in to the venue.  So we filmed that show and re-watched it at home.  Then those dudes got famous and were on the X-Files and toured with major bands.  They had one freak called the Enigma who would swallow things and regurgitate.  At first he did this wearing a tuxedo but as they got more famous he got tattooed head to toe in puzzle pieces and shaved his head and had horns implanted in his forehead.  I talked to him when he was in tuxedo at Rockandy, but he became a freak of nature and he made a living at it.

When I saw them at the last performance of the first Lollapalooza I had taken a tab of LSD so things were a bit wonky in my perception.  I remember the Violent Femmes were on stage and it was raining so me and my buddies went over to the art tent to keep out of the rain.  The rain didn’t bother me at all.  I came dressed for rain.  I was wearing two pairs of wool socks, army boots, Levi’s 501 jeans with long underwear, an undershirt, a t-shirt probably of some band, a Sr. Lopez hoodie and my black leather biker jacket with the Red Hot Chili Peppers star huge in white acrylic paint on the back, and big steel rings hanging from my shoulders.  It was a custom street job that made me stylish and cool.  So we were looking at all kinds of cool art that inspired my style of art from that day.  I got my style of art from that show actually.  I saw some seriously intricate artwork, meticulous workmanship, eye for detail and I was on LSD devouring this in my mind, memorizing all of it for some future purpose unbeknownst to me at the time.  So the Violent Femmes are playing live, I’m tripping balls on acid looking at some of the coolest art I’ve ever seen and then I hear this sound, a click-clack of metal pulling and letting go.  So I turned my head and what I saw was so surreal, my brain was tripped out to the max right then.  And this is what I came for, so I got my monies worth and then some.  What I saw from that weird metallic sound was two dudes having a tug of war but using metal hangers that were being held by their pierced nipples.  And that sound was when one of them gave and broke the hold and I saw their nipples all stretched out and I was freaking out but laughing at the same time.  And I told my buddies, check that shit out man.  WTF?

So that just happened. Just after being in the pit during the Butthole Surfers’ set right before the Violent Femmes took the stage, walking back in to the crowd.  I wanted to watch the bands play but I needed to be in the pit for the Butthole Surfers for sure.  So I took off my biker jacket, my t-shirts and my hoodie and went into the pit shirtless in the rain tripping on acid to the Butthole Surfers.  My buddies, Jason and his brother  hung back and waited for me, held on to my clothing.  I found my way back to them after the Butthole Surfers’ set.  And the LSD was setting in nicely.  And that’s when we saw that killer art.  And there was some disturbing yet hilarious art too.  A drawing of a family standing there, naked, dad with his pot belly, mom with her gut after having children, smoking cigarettes, mom holding a baby smoking a cigarette, dog taking a shit and the toddler eating it.  Mind blown again.  I could not fathom how someone would want to create that kind of art imagery.  But I saw it and it made me laugh but also kind of disgusted me too.  But hell, I was at Lollapalooza on acid with the Violent Femmes playing live, what did I expect?

And after we checked out the art we were walking back to our spot and I saw my ex-girlfriend, Kim Downing.  She was with her new boyfriend, the guitarist of Nero’s Rome, an alternative band from Portland in the 80s, kind of like Dramarama, very popular. 

She saw me first and called my name.  I was wet from the rain and sweaty from the Butthole Surfers pit and naked from the hips up.  And I knew I was looking good to her, so I went to give her a hug and she backed off, trying to stay all clean and dry, not enjoying the rain, not being prepared.  And  I told her, I took LSD.  And she said, What’s that?  I said, acid, I’m tripping.  No comment after that and her boyfriend, Todd Morrisy just sat there judging me in their expensive clothing that one would wear to a concert venue indoors.  But this was new, like Woodstock.  This was the first traveling festival concert.  You had to come prepared to be able to enjoy the bands, not just see them.  They were very uncomfortable, and I was laughing in my mind about how I introduced her to that environment, broke up with her for some unknown reason, I still do not understand why I broke up with her.  She was the best girlfriend ever.

When we dated she used her sister’s ID because she was 19 and they looked like twins, so I treated her to things she could only imagine.  Took her out to clubs and saw killer live bands that were good too.  Nero’s Rome eventually got on the billboard charts.  But the band the Crazy 8’s were not playing in to any of the music industry manipulation.  They were one of my favorites and they played out live like at least three times a week.  They were so killer.  A great party band and they were tight too.  And funky with brass.  They had two drummers like the Grateful Dead.  One for drums and one for percussion.  Man they sounded great live.

And the Crazy 8’s have kept it going through the years and are very psychedelic now.  Probably got in to some LSD at one point and changed a bit.  But that’s pretty much how Portland works.  Very psychedelic.

I have to tell you, I was young and stupid because I should have married Kimberly Downing.  She loved me and she was so good to me.  Just like when my mom asked Sherrie why she loved me, she asked Kim the same thing, and she said, He cracks me up.  So, I know if you make a woman laugh, you have her in the palm of your hand.  Because laughter is not only the best medicine, it is seductive as well.

When I first moved up to Seattle I lived near a killer record store called Bubble University AKA Bubble records.  So I would go in there all the time after I got a paycheck and every week spend about $50 on new music.  That was a lot back then.  CD’s were less than ten dollars.  I would usually sleep Friday night and then take many bong  hits and then go music shopping on Saturday morning.  Killer music was always playing at Bubble records and the dude who worked there, Jason we became fast friends.  Liked much of the same music and we also like to play some basketball.  Jason was tall and thin with long wavy hair down half way past his back.  Looked pretty cool if you asked me.  He looked like a 70s hippie but cooler.  He was very intelligent and liked to have deep stoned conversations like I did.  But we did not know this about one another quite yet.

Until one day he said, ‘Hey Vaughn, do you know where I could score any of that green bud?’  And I said, what do you mean man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.  He laughed and said, come on man, I can tell you’re totally stoned when ever you come in here.  So I dropped  my guard and we were best friends from that moment on.  He gave me some cash and I scored some herb and we got righteously stoned together for the first time that day.  There would be many stonings between Jason and I throughout the next couple of years.  Mixed with some LSD and perhaps exceeding the recommended dosage of cough suppressant.   Perhaps from time to time some Extasy or Cocaine.  We partied hardy but never let the hard drugs get their hooks into us.  If we ever had cocaine we would use it up and forget about it.  We never fiended for it.  We wouldn’t really chop up lines.  We were stoners man.  If we  had cocaine, we would put some of that powder on top of our green bud and smoke cocco puffs.  And that was one righteous high right there my brother.  Smoking cocaine and weed together…never felt better in my life.  But we never got out of control with it.  When the coke was gone we didn’t try to find more.  We just did it if it was around.  We knew better than to let ourselves get strung out on narcotics.  But sure, we would party with some if we had the chance.  But never a needle.  Now way brother, never ever a needle.

That was some dark nefarious stuff when you were shooting junk with a needle.  I have watched many friends fix up with needles as I helped them package up heroin balloons for sale but I would only smoke or snort heroin.  Never a needle. No way Jose.  And like that was some saving grace, because I was still using the stuff.  I would roll with my friend who was a heroin dealer and we would kick it in his mom’s basement, listen to some righteous tunes, balloon up the heroin black, smoke some herb, do some heroin and just fade away and love everything around us.  It was dark and dank but it felt so goddam good at the time.  My buddy would be on his bed trying to find a vein and I was online watching some music video tripping out.  And I would laugh as he would contort himself to just try and find a vein.  Then he would get it and relax and and come down and we would crack up together.  He gave me some Meth too, but I did not like that stuff at all.  It just made me feel like I had drank 100 cups of coffee without the stomach ache.  Nothing I liked about it at all. Just getting really focused on something that means nothing.  I do not understand Meth freaks and why they do that to themselves.  One thing I do know however about Meth is the production and the melting in the bubble then it turns to vapor and then you inhale and don’t hold on to it like weed but blow out huge amounts of white smoke.  Chasing the dragon.  I did smoke my share of Meth when it came around but I usually passed on it.  I just didn’t find it entertaining at all.  But once in a while if I was with a hot chick and she had a bubble I would partake, but not much.  One or two but man, I would not sit there and go for it over and over again like those freaks.  Like I said, Meth was like too much coffee to me and I didn’t like speed. I liked psychedelics.

It is sort of hard to recall these experiences because I have put them behind me.  And while I feel it necessary to tell the truth, I take myself back to those moments and re-feel some of it and do not enjoy that part of telling my memoirs.  But I am trying to tell the ‘hole truth and nothing butt’

One of my favorite party tricks to trip my friends out was to take LSD and then just when we were getting super high, turn on some Butthole Surfers.  That was enough to flip anyone’s lid if they had not heard it before.  And while on acid, you were in for a mind jobbing.  I was introduced to the Butthole Surfers in 1984.  I lived in Vancouver and was hanging out with Lance, late at night.  His mom managed a Dairy Queen so she worked late and Lance was supposed to do the dishes and clean up the house while she was at work.  I would come over and kick it with him as he cleaned up the house and we would crank tunes.  On Thursday night about 10 pm the indie radio station from Portland would have punk rock hour.  And we loved that because it was the only way to hear new music that we were never going to get from the record store.  That’s where I heard Minor Threat, Poison Idea, Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, The Weirdos, The Plimsouls, X, and the Butthole Surfers.  They had their first recording just released and the one song that was played was called ‘The Shaw sleeps in Lee Harvey’s grave’.  When we heard that craziness, I knew we were on to something spectacular.

When I was in Paraguay I wrote on the wall of my last apartment in 1986, ‘Butthole Surfers’ all over the place.  And of course I made the O in Butthole look like an anus.  I forgot about the Butthole Surfers until I was at a party in Bellingham, WA.  Everyone was tripping on cough syrup but me and my friends had taken several tabs of LSD instead, but we were working well together.  And I heard some of the corniest kookiest twisted music possible coming through the speakers.  I said, who is this and Bobby X said, it’s the Butthole Surfers.  I was floored.  Then I remembered them from back a few years ago.  This was 1990 but six years earlier I heard them for the first time.  So I told them that story and they said, no way, you heard them back then?  And I said yeah but I had no idea they would come up with this stuff.  They were just brand new back then.

For music, I was brought up on the fifties stuff but whenever I could find something at a garage sale, I would not have any idea about the music but I would see the jacket cover and pick the records by the art works.  That is how I found the Ohio Players Honey album with Love Roller Coaster and Fopp.  Some funky tunes for a kid of 12 years old.  A double album that opened up with a picture on the inside of a naked women getting honey poured on her naked body.  You could not see any of the naughty parts, they were hidden but you could see she was totally naked and dripping with honey.  Yea, that blew my mind and I listened to that funky ass music but never ever let my parents see the record cover.  No way, they would have taken it away from me.  And fortunately records were very thin and when you put them away all you could see was the back of the jacket cover, not the full display on the front.  Easily hidden within so many other records.

And I rocked the Earth Wind and Fire as well.  I liked my funky tunes better than Elvis, that’s for sure.  I would crank up EWF and boogie around the house because they sang a song about my birthday, the 21st day of September.

I got my first taste of good rock and roll when I saw the movie Xandadu.  There was a scene in there with a big band vs a rock and roll band and that rock and roll band was The Tubes.  And that song stood out for me, when the Tubes would chime in, I was all about that, it hit me right in the heart and I wanted way more of that stuff.

The Tubes were somewhat popular in the 70s but in the 80s they recorded a great album called The Completion Backward Principle.  So I got that and there was a hit on that album called She’s a Beauty.  And Sushi Girl also.  So I got in to the Tubes big time, bought all of their records from the beginning.  And they came to Portland in concert and me and Lance were definitely going to see that show.  It was at the Portland Civic Theater in the summer of 1983 and we rolled up in there and were amused at the Tubes showmanship.  I thought Van Halen put on a show but never did I imagine something like the Tubes.  They changed costumes for every song and played out theatrics like a stage play drama for every single song.  It was theater on rock and roll.  Nothing like that ever before or ever again, it was the Tubes man and I was honored to have seen them in their prime.  And they had dancing girls on stage like cheer leaders.  When they played ‘We’re white punks on dope’ Fee Waybill came out in huge 12 inch platform shoes with a silver suit and a giant pompadour.  

And they played the song and then the theatrics took place and Fee Waybill would fall down off of his platform shoes and destroy the instruments and ruin the whole set and then go off stage, but then come back with slings and casts like they were just released from the hospital and continue the song.  It was theater rock and roll and it was the greatest rock and roll performance I have ever seen to this day.

Another concert that was mind blowing, not at the time but years later was when this new trio from Canada came through called Zebra.  They were good, sort of like Rush or Triumph.  They played at the Paramount Theater in Portland in 1983 I went with my buddy Dan Moses to see them.  Zebra was great but the opening band was nothing I expected.  They were a little bit too serious about themselves and very gothic, but dudes shredded on guitar and the lead singer could sing like an opera star.  It was their very first show as the band Queensryche.  They went on to take over the world with album after album of platinum selling.  But that first show, I did not even like them and while they were performing me and Dan walked out to the foyer and chatted with our buddies who were there to see Zebra.  There were some chicks from Seattle who told us to watch Queensryche because their singer had such a good voice and the drummer’s cymbal stands were made of chains.  Theatrics did not impress me unless it was comical.  Gothicness never turned me on too much.  I’m not really in to darkness and depression and that’s what these dudes were all about.  We even flipped them off.  But then they sold platinum records and we flipped off the next big cheese.  I tried to like them but could not.  I’m not saying they were bad, heck no, those dudes were masters of their instruments and wrote great songs, just not for my taste.  Like I love most food and tastes but there is something about horse radish and those types of alkaline extremes that do not sit well with me.

So back to me waking Lance up at 8:30 Saturday morning. (sorry Gary, my brain is on fire dude) I kicked his bed and said, dude, I have an idea.  He just laid there and said, Give me a minute.  So I went and kicked it in the living room, probably watched Borat for the hundredth time while he put himself together from the last night of partying.  So he comes out of his bedroom and I said, let’s go to the Salt Flats dude.  And me and him had our minds working in parallel.  So it didn’t take any explanation as to why or what would we do out there, we just knew that was the best idea for that day at that time.  So we made food, and beverage, and ate a whole bunch of Dextromethorphan and as it kicked in Lance was driving west toward Wendover, Nevada but just before you get to Wendover you can take a right and find yourself on the Bonneville Salt Flats.  Where land speed records were broken and minds of Vaughn Brown and Lance Blas were about to be blown.

Lance was always good about being the driver because I just wanted to party and I could not party if I had to drive.  But Lance was an expert who could party and drive at the same time.  His skills were beyond mine of the partying type.  I took lessons on how to party from that dude from a very young age.  We met when we were 11 years old being in the same LDS ward in Vancouver, WA.  But he and I had mischief in our eyes and we saw it in each other.  So we became fast friends and enjoyed much of the same stuff of rebellion.  My dad did not like me hanging out with Lance.  He could see that bad influence, but I needed Lance to get my energy out in non-harmful ways.  Well, harmful maybe to myself but not to anyone else.  He kept me chill and I stopped fighting and mellowed out a lot hanging out with him.  But we saw eye to eye when it came to mischief.  And we got in to all kinds of it growing up.  

Once we were older and were able to get around by ourselves we would meet up whenever we could.  We went to different schools.  He lived in another school district, the Fort Vancouver district and I lived in the Evergreen district.  But we were in the same ward at church so our social life was great.  We saw each other every Sunday and also every Wednesday for our mid-week church outings.  It was good for us.  It taught us morality and how to be good citizens, but me and Lance were out there man.  We would push the envelope all the way when at Mutual, that’s was the weekly meeting was called.  MIA, Mutual Improvement Association.  It was something like scouts but Christ centered and it taught us service to others.  That was pretty great if you ask me, for rebels like me and Lance, to be there rather than out in the streets creating all kinds of havoc.  And as rebellious as we were, we learned about the gospel of Christ and actually took that part very seriously in our lives.  We were ordained as Priests in the Aaronic priesthood and were given gifts of service, and the ministering of angels, and the power to act in the name of God to do good works and to preach the gospel.  And as priests, we would bless the sacrament on Sunday and the Deacons would pass it to the congregation.  And I feel bad about being such a rebel because I would show up on Sunday morning with a hangover and bless the sacrament, totally unworthy.  But if I told on myself I would get totally busted so I talked to Heavenly Father about it and told him I was sorry for being so rebellious and please forgive me.  So I was tormented by my rebellion and thought that God was mad at me.  But I learned later in life that he does not get mad, he only loves.  So He was probably laughing with Jesus when I would get hammered drunk as a teen and try to walk upstairs coming home trying not to wake my parents.

So Lance came out of his bedroom and I said, Let’s go to the Salt Flats.  He said, yea, that sounds pretty cool.  So we took some psychedelic mind altering substances and proceeded to drive west to the Bonneville Salt Flats.  On the way there we had to stop at a rest area for a break and this is not the first time Lance and I had taken a roadie together, and not the first time he exited the freeway in to a rest area but forgot to slow down until he hit the parking space.  So we are flying through the rest area about 60mph out of control and he slams on the brakes and cranks it to the right, right in to a parking space.  And we were laughing super hard because of the drugs and opened the doors, fell out of the SUV, stood up and walked in to the restroom still laughing.  We did our business, checked the mirror and were being pretty obnoxious.  This old man, really old, walks in and I said, I have to apologize.  And he said, You have to express yourself.  Man, that was the correct response ol’ timer.  So now me and Lance say that to each other all the time when things are getting a little crazy.

We got back in his Honda SUV and continued west.  We saw the Salt Flats to our right but did not know how to get there.  Then we saw the signs and we were on the road.  It was a two lane road built up on a mound of dirt and rocks that ran about a mile long up to a parking lot.  And as usual, we were doing about 90 because there was nobody around.  

Then the road ended unexpededly and whammo, we were driving on the Salt Flats all of a sudden.  Jimi Hendrix was playing, Axis Bold as Love and Lance floored it.  Soon we were doing 120mph+ just flying across this vast white surreal expanse and I said, Just don’t turn man.  We drove balls out screaming fast tripping in our brains for about ten minutes, just flat and clear ground for 25 miles in every direction and no rules or speed limits to worry about.

Then he finally slowed down, cranked it to the left, did a cookie and came to a stop.  We opened the doors and didn’t say a word.  I took my shirt off, it was clear sunny skies on the Salt Flats and just then Jimi started saying, Well I stand up next to a mountain, chop it down with the edge of my hand.

And there was nothing but mountains in the distance and so we were air guitaring and rocking out and I saw those mountains and started chopping them down with the edge of my hand.  It was sublime, surreal, set up by God I swear to have that moment with my brother Lance and Jimi. 

The Bonneville Salt Flats became an oasis, a place for me to go and get away from the world for a while, to commune with nature and God.  I went there so many times after that.  I even did some photo shoots out there.  I even had sexy time with my girlfriend out on that vast white no man’s land with nobody around out in the great wide open, just to do something risky and scandalous. 

Lance and his girlfriend were driving around in his SUV and they took off, left us two out there alone and it was spectacular.  They were gone for about half an hour until they found us again.  He said he was lost out there and was having a hard time figuring out where we were.

Lance’s girlfriend was blind.  But she was cute, from Greece and she was fun and up for all of our antics.  So we thought it would be a good idea to let her drive.  His car was an automatic so it was pretty simple for her to figure it out and she got going about 60mph and me and Cyd were sitting on the roof of the SUV while she was driving.  It was out of control but fun as hell.  We just held on to the luggage racks as she turned and we stayed on top of the car, didn’t fall off. 

Then we drove out east a bit and suddenly we were driving on this two lane back road that it seemed like it was the victim of an earthquake because the road was little hill after little hill all bumpy but driveable.  So Lance, being the get some, go again type of guy that he is, proceeded to drive the entire length of this broken road.  It was like going 4×4 in the bumpiest terrain you can imagine and we were bouncing around inside the car, catching air, laughing our asses off.  He was driving as fast as he could and man, his car took a beating that day but it was hella-fun.  

And that reminds me of what we would do when we were teenagers.  I had a 1973 Ford Capri, a little sports car in 1982.  In our neighborhood the streets crossed like a grid pattern.  But to keep traffic slow, the cross streets were built up like a giant speed bump.  So what did I do?  I thought it would be a good idea to see what happened if I drove 60mph across those huge bumps.  I had a full car of friends, one in the passenger side and three in the back seat.  I remember Lance was there.  When I hit those cross roads, they were somewhat gradual so if you played it right you might get some air.  And I figured out how to get air flying across those mounds or road.  We were out of control in cars and it is a miracle that I never crashed or killed anyone.

I used to drive through neighborhoods and drive right through people’s yards tearing up their lawns.  In the north west there were no curbs in the yard because it was mostly old growth forest.  So I would take a good look, go screaming ass about 35mph over their drive way, through the front lawn and out the side, spinning my tires and throwing mud and grass everywhere, then just bolt on down the street so nobody could catch us.

I also had this maneuver where I would be driving down a curving hill road, crank my wheel to the left and pull my E brake, do a 180 and drive back up the street.  It had to be a rainy day so my car could slide, but I did that when there were cars parked in the street on both sides.  My friends were freaking out but I was laughing my ass off.  Never hit another car because I did not turn, I only spun around so I basically kept going in a straight line.  Maybe I should have been a race car driver.

I grew up LDS AKA Mormon, but we like to be called Latter day Saints because we’re not Mormons.  Mormon was an ancient prophet.  We are Christians, we don’t worship Mormon, we worship Christ.  But we got the nick name because of the book.

In the LDS church the high school kids go to seminary during the school week.  In places where there are high populations of LDS peoples there are seminary buildings and students would take seminary as one of their classes.

Before they started building seminary buildings we would have to get up before school and go to seminary at 6am.  My folks would let me drive before I had my license because it was a pain in the ass to get up so early just to drive me to seminary and then pick me up an hour later.  

Oh man, I was a horrible rebellious teenager.  I can’t believe I got away with some of the stuff I did.  I truly believed everything I was being taught in church and seminary, but I would do crazy shit like smoke a joint before going to seminary.  I’m sure I smelled of pot smoke and my eyes were red.  I sat in the front of the class usually but on the days I got stoned I would show up late and sit in the back.  Totally busted but nobody said anything, but everybody knew what I was up to.

Sometimes I would skip seminary and go visit my girlfriend, super foxy Katrina Crane.  We were so stinking young and all we ever did was make out.  But man she was so freaking hot and she got my motor running.  Her parents let her party and also her best friend’s parents let her party too.  Trina and her best friend were cheerleaders at our high school, and they were  THE two hottest chicks in the school.  So I had both of them with me in my car, I got a twelve pack of Schlitz Malt Liquor, I had a doobie to smoke under my car seat and several pills of speed.  I was a freaking pharmacy man.

I drove with those two hotties down to the east side of town in the valley where there was new construction going on and parked in an isolated cul de sac.  We were drinking beer and talking, laughing, just having a good time and I had drunk five beers so I was pretty toasty, but I handled it very well.  If I drank five Malt Liquors today I would pass out.  I was an expert partier even in my youth.  So we’re drinking, having fun and in the distance I see police lights.  Someone was getting pulled over for speeding on the main road that lead to our cul de sac.  And that dude just had to pull in to the dark and hidden cul de sac that we were in.  So I proceeded to drive away and the cop told me to stick around.  When he was done with the ticket he searched my car and saw the beers and asked me if I had been drinking and I told him I had one.  There were empties crushed outside and he saw those but could not hold them to us, but he knew.  He took his flash light and looked around the car and I thought I was totally busted because I saw that flashlight light up what was under my seat and dude either did not want to bother with it or he  just totally missed it.  I was about to soil my pants and he stood up and said he was going to give me an MIP and let me go but that he would call my parents.  So I had to go before the judge and the fine was only $35.  I guess that was a big penalty back then.  Man I got off easy.  I didn’t even get grounded for that one.  I got big time grounded for other things later in my high school career.

I had built up somewhat of a reputation of partying too much and my folks were starting to hear people gossip about it.  When I was a Jr. my dad harangued me and told me that Brynn Horrocks said I was doing cocaine.  Well, that was not even true, I had never done cocaine.  I was snorting a lot of speed to get my homework done and keep up with the fun but not cocaine so I did not even have to lie and told my folks I don’t know where she got that from but I promise, I swear on the Bible, I swear to Christ I have never done cocaine.  So they said OK, we believe you but just because she says that, you must have been doing something.  My parents were catching on and they started to see the signs.  I was busted.  Me and Lance, oh man this is so horrible…I’m so glad for repentance because we would burn in hell for what we did.  

It was Christmas time and all the youth in our LDS ward were having a hay ride, singing Christmas carols around the neighborhoods on a flatbed trailer being pulled by a pickup truck.  Just before we went out caroling me and Lance went into the Jr. Sunday School room and snorted lines of speed off of the sacrament table.  Yeah, going to hell was my next adventure for sure.  

We were good and hyper and I was yelling at the top of my lungs, pretending to sing in Chinese, jumping off of the trailer as it rolled down the street and then jumping back on.  Totally out of control.  So Brynn Horrocks was sitting next to Lance and she said to him, Is Vaughn on drugs?  He replied, Not any more than I am.  Truth right there and she was appeased.  Maybe that’s where she got her idea that I was on cocaine.  I would walk in to statistics class after snorting some speed and I had white powder in my nostrils.  Fortunately a couple of the more mature and wiser females who had been around the block knew what I was up to and told me, hey dumbass, you got dope in your nose.  So I went to the drinking fountain and cleaned it up by snorting some water and getting another bump.

Man, I really don’t want to remember these things but they were something I did.  I am highly embarrassed by my actions back then but I want to be truthful and open about my nutiness, and the vast change that can take place when a man centers his life on the Savior.

 My grades were slipping, I was only interested in rock and roll and theater and drama class.  Nothing else but psychology class interested me, let alone Trigonometry.  I aced geometry the previous year but my brain was clear so I was focused.  I sucked at algebra and did not understand the abstract quite yet.  Although, in college I missed out on an A in calculus by one freaking point and the prof would not give in.  I begged him to give me an A, extra credit, anything.  He said there was nothing he could do, the school year was over.  One freaking point from an A-!  So I got a B+ in calculus.  I finally caught on to the abstract.  Maybe it was all the psychedelics that helped me figure that abstract noise out.

My  parents had enough of my bullshit and they finally called me out and grounded me in the winter of 1982 for two months.  It started in December and would end at the end of January.  I was stuck at home having to be a good kid.  I would still rebel at school every chance I got.  I still hung out in the smoking section for the students and snuck a hit of weed whenever I could.

I started buying baking extract because it was 90% alcohol and I would make orange smoothies in the morning and take them to the bus stop and get a buzz on the way to school.  One morning I was doing my thing and my mom took a sip and told me it tasted weird.  I told her I think I dropped an orange peel in the blender.  I got away with that one barely.  I was basically taking two shots of everclear before school.  Not every day, just once in a while when I was super stressed.

My home life was highly stressful.  I did not realize how out of control I was until I started writing these memoirs.

One time I came home drunk as a skunk, I must have been 16 years old, and tried to walk up the stairs and was falling down.  My mom heard me and got up and let me go to bed.  She told me that she would tell dad and he would have to talk to me.  But nothing was ever said about that again.  I know she told him, but my dad was so cool, he just let it be.  Because he remembered his high school days and what did he expect me to do?  He was mean as a junk yard dog but at the same time, cool as a cucumber and super smart about life.  He would lecture me and in those lectures he taught me all kinds of stuff.  It was like being in boot camp but he toughened me up for life and I am super grateful for those times, that I hated back then, but like he told me back then, you will appreciate this when you’re older.  He was the perfect dad for me.  I needed him to keep me on an even keel.  We didn’t see eye to eye on much but I knew deep down that he loved me and he was trying to make me in to a good man that would reflect well upon him.  Because he came from the 50s where you had a reputation to protect. So he saw his reputation being played out by me and if I screwed up, he thought it would reflect poorly on him.

I was the first of the Generation X, born in 1965.  And our generation saw ourselves as individuals, not as a copy of mom or dad.  We let our freak flags fly and we were independent and creative.  And mom and dad could not handle something like that so they put me in a corner and clipped my wings before I could even fly.  I was super artistic and I loved good music.  I would draw pictures of disney characters and the Flintstones and my pictures were exactly like the cartoons.  And I could draw donald duck in like ten seconds, screaming his head off.  That was my go-to art piece when I had to do some art.  People would tell me all the time, Draw Donald Duck, Vaughn.  So I would super fast and they would say, how do you do that?  I said, just practice.

And I was way in to music as a kid.  My best friend, Scott Ruby turned me on to all kinds of new music.  I listened to Fleetwood Mac with him, and I don’t really like them but they were somewhat experimental at the time.  I remember hearing Blondie with Scott for the first time and I loved that music.  Blondie was great, hit me in the heart. And I do remember my female friends who lived across the street, Pam and Karen they were sisters, had bought Boston’s first album with the guitars that looked like space ships.  But you know what?  I only saw the album cover.  They never played the record when we were hanging out.  We never listened to music together.  That would probably been other worldly to get in to some psychedelic music with those hot young girls, older than me, showing me all kinds of things that my parents should have told me about.

At home I had only my dad’s record collection.  That was composed of mostly Elvis recordings.  So I listened to everything that Elvis ever did from his younger days wearing leather suits and singing Heartbreak Hotel, and even in to the seventies when he was the King of rock and roll, fat, over fed, mutton chop, bedazzled karate suit bell bottom wearing Elvis.  He was always the best performer, before Mic Jagger or Freddy Mercury or Diamond David Lee Roth.  Those dudes would not have been had it been for Elvis to pave the way for them to rock on and in to America.

I quit partying when I was 17 because I knew I was going to serve a mission, mid year through my senior year.  And fortunately for me, because I had all kinds of gnarly make out sessions with chicks who were more than ready to give it up to me, but I remained chaste because I knew I had to save it for the Lord and be honorable and clean to serve a mission.  But I knew what was going on.  I wasn’t born yesterday.  I had my times with chicks and pretty much did everything but the big one.  Man, the first time I got naked with chicks I was in the fourth grade.  Can you believe that?

My family lived in the Woodstock area of Portland.  And this was like 1974.  Across the street there were two sisters, Pam and Karen.  They were older than me and I think there was some inappropriateness going on in their household because they knew way too much about sex for that young age.  There was no Internet or HBO or Showtime, just four channels of TV.  NBC, CBS and ABC and one local channel.  So in the summer time our parents were gone to work, my mom was at home but I would go over to the neighborhood kids’ house and play with them.  Pam was older, like in the 8th grade, but Karen was in the sixth grade and just coming in to puberty.  I remember they were very Catholic school girls.(Just like the Chili Peppers song ‘Catholic School Girls Rule’).  You know what’s crazy?  My girlfriend Sherrie and her twin sister, even though they were LDS went to Catholic high school.  Catholic School Girls Rule for me.  Mind blown. 

I always said to myself that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a band that paralleled my life.  Every album talked about what was going on in my life at the time.  But I thought about it and thought, Catholic School Girls Rule?  How does that fit in to my life.  Now I see it.  Mind blown again.

She was curious and had a crush on me, young fourth grader.  But people told me I was handsome back then.  All the girls wanted me to be their boyfriend.  It was crazy, little girls coming up to me in line in class, they would whisper in my ear, I love you, and, You are my boyfriend now.  And I didn’t know what was going on so I figured I now had a girlfriend.  But we never did anything, she just proclaimed that she liked me.  Children are super honest with each other and when you have boys and girls together, nature takes its course even before puberty.

So back to Pam and Karen.  Karen babysat the neighborhood kids that lived next door to her and Pam was a little older and much on her own, but she was around a lot too.  She paid a lot of attention to me especially.  When we would play hide and seek we would hide together and she told me that when I got older all the girls would be on my side.  I didn’t really know what that meant but she told me how handsome I was and then she told me that I needed to know how to kiss a girl.  So she had boobies and was foxy but I was a 4th grade boy who was attracted to the visual of a female but could not quite abide the physical contact quite  yet.  But she was teaching me at an early age how to kiss.  So she showed me how to french kiss. And we hid out and kissed and tongues were wrestling with lips and saliva and when we stopped she said, what did you think of that? And I said, that was kind of gross and wet.  She laughed and told me, remember that because when you get older you’re going to do that with a lot of girls.  And I just blew it off like no biggie.  But holy cow man, she was super foxy and wanted to make out with me at nine years old?  WTF??

And then that summer we were hanging out at the house where Karen babysat and we were bored, looking around the house for things to entertain ourselves with and I went in the closet and found a puzzle of a naked Playboy woman.  So we got that out and tried to put it together but we just looked at the naked lady on the cover.  And that got me aroused being around foxy sixth grade Karen who was a dirty little girl.  So she dared me to take my clothes off and run through the living room naked.  So being me, I took that dare and went in the closet, stripped off all my clothes, I think I was just wearing a swimming suit and I ran around the living room naked and then put my swimming trunks back on.  So I dared her to do the same thing, and I wanted to see her naked because she was foxy and blossoming.  So she totally did it and not only did she not just run fast like I did, she pranced around the room like a stripper.  And holy cats man, I was taken to new heights of pleasure that day.  So we all took our clothes off and ran around the house naked.  And I was getting an eye full of older girls naked but what was funny, we didn’t touch each other.  We just looked.  So that is good, because if we started touching, that would have been some nasty gnarly traumatizing stuff.

So we did that every day for a while and one time we were downstairs and Karen and another girl from across the street put on their dress up clothes and they put me back on the couch and proceeded to strip right in front of me.  They took off layer after layer until they were naked and showing off for me.  I have no idea why that happened but it did.  I remember that other chick raising her skirt, and saying, there’s this, then she took off her panty hose, then there’s this and she took off her panties, and she said, then there’s this, and it was yeah…naked and ready to go.  But I had no clue what to do with a girl at that age.  But I was tripping out in my brain and actually loving every minute of it.  And then Pam came home and came downstairs and saw what we were doing and she said, you better not get caught.  Then she took my shirt off and started checking me out, but it went no further than that.  And I am glad we didn’t do anything more.  I’m not sure why she took my shirt off but she was something else.

So, that was a young man’s wet dream that I actually lived.  I did not ask for it, it just happened.  But I think I was traumatized by it or prepared for adult life by it, I’m not sure.  It did not feel gross, I liked it.  It was probably going to get a lot more serious but I said I needed to go home.  If I had stayed it would have been one weird sexualizing me at too young an age.  I count that prompting to go home to my gift of the Holy Ghost that I received after I was baptized.  

It certainly was not like that time I saw all that hard core porno that made me sick.  I’m glad I did not know what the hell I was doing because if I did, we would have gotten in to all kinds of nastiness. Now, if that happened to me as an adult with adult women, I might have changed the story, but alas, I was fairly innocent.  That is a damn shocking experience but somewhat comical to me.

I was always super picky when it came to girlfriends.  I was much like Jerry Sienfeld.  If there was one little quirk or oddity I was put off by it.  I was a snob, but hey, I picked and chose and I got the hottest girlfriends so it meant something.  I was not an asshole to them, no, we were friends still but I would be super friendly with them but just not come on to them.  And it was kind of a drag because I could tell that some of my female friends, who were super fine but not perfect in my eyes (I know, dude come on already) had major crushes on me and I could have just taken their face in my hands and given them the kiss of their life.  But I did not, and I did not even think about doing it, until I reflected back in my older years.  And what’s funny, some of them I re-met later in life and we instantly got it on.  It was crazy, like all this pent up sexual frustration from our youth was bursting.  So social media did that to me after my divorce.  It was comforting, but not in the proper ways.  I did not realize how many hot chicks had the hots for me until we were older, divorced and on social media.  It’s probably good I did not know because I would have gone nuts.  Some chicks in school were blatant about their crushes on me but most of them were 7’s so I could not abide that lowness.  OK, I’m mostly saying this tongue in cheek but yea, I was so damned picky.  I actually wish I had not been so picky because I would have gotten a lot more action.  But, on the other hand, it’s also good that I was because it kept me worthy to serve  a mission for the Lord.

When I was divorced and had my time with my kids we would go out to eat at good restaurants.  I treated them like they were royalty because they were to me so I gave them anything they wanted when we had our time together.  And Christi hated that.  She called me the Santa dad.  Lavish the children with anything they want, then give them back to mom to deal with.  That’s how she saw it, so tragic.  When we were at the California Pizza Kitchen my son Nathan said, Dad, every person you talk to you make them laugh.  That was a very poignant moment for me.  For my son to observe that.  And if I can make every person I talk to, laugh, I think I’m doing a good job at life.  And if that is the example I gave to my son then I’m glad he saw it that way.  Because he is one funny dude.  Very hilarious, loves to make people laugh.  A natural entertainer.  My children are all spectacular in their own rights.  They all have creativity and original thinking, they do what they like and don’t worry about what anyone else thinks of them.  That’s one thing I taught them when they were young.  Figure out what you like to do, then become the best at it by practicing, and you will be able to do anything you want to do.  Your imagination might become reality if you dream big enough and have faith and courage to succeed.  

And I surely see that playing out in Spencer’s life for sure.  He does anything he wants to do.  When the family moved from Austin TX to San Pete county Utah he was a sophomore and played drums in the marching band and the jazz band and was lead in every school play from his 10th grade year up until he was a senior.  His senior year he was lead in Little Shop of Horrors and Newsies.  He is super talented.  He can sing, dance, play the drums, plays guitar and ukelaly. I bet he will become famous.

He’s just getting started in life but he is one spectacular individual.  I love that guy so much, we had some really great times before Christi screwed up the family.

The divorce was a relief for Tayslie and Ali.  But they did not understand what was going on in the marriage.  Christi pretty much brainwashed Ali and she hated me, but she was very cool about it and did not show any hatred toward me.  In hind sight I can see why she, as she matured, would be very stand offish with me.  But I did teach her how to play the drums and we had fun doing that.  But Christi did not like any bonding between me and Tays and Ali.  She drove a wedge for sure and kept the fire burning.  She told me this recently, as we are now able to let everything out in the open for truth.  Ali is trying to put things together in her mind and I am helping her get there.  It is really comforting to be able to help her have closure on so many emotional experiences.

She said she hated me for a long time for what I did to her mom.  But I didn’t do anything to her mom.  Her mom made up some bullshit about me and telling her how mean I was to her and called her names.  Yea, really mean trying to get her to have a conversation and name calling I would say, are you crazy?  yeah, calling her names and being mean. The only things I can think of is that the since the names of which she speaks of are not spoken but assumed to be words like bitch.  But the truth about the name calling, I told her that she was crazy and should seek professional help.  I never called her names or verbally abused her.  She made up stuff for our psychologist and he told me that I was an abusive husband.

But as Ali matured and we have talked it has been good to let her know the truth.  She realizes now that her mom was being very manipulative.  Christi would play the victim, the drama queen in front of Ali just to show her what a bad man I was.  That is some serious sociopathy.  I would try to talk to her about why she was upset and she would lock her self in the bathroom and have panic attacks.  She was fucking mental man.  I can’t believe I had such a freak for a wife.  So my home life was pretty good for the most part, until she freaked out once in a while, maybe once a week.  But I was great with the children, except for Tays and Ali.  She would tell me what a great dad I was with Nathan, who nobody else could understand but me.  I was the only person that could get him to mellow out when he was upset.  That was the only thing she ever said to me that was positive.  And that meant a lot too.  Nate is much like me.  He lives inside his head and has a huge imagination.  He just wants to have fun and be entertained because he already gets it and is light years ahead of everyone with his intelligence.  I’m looking forward to what he produces later in life.  He just turned 21 so he’s full on adult now, but can’t rent a car yet.

So because of the things Christi told to Ali, they decided that divorce was the best option.  And she drove to Disney Land without me and the boys, just the girls trip. When she was in Las Vegas to visit her uncle she told him her story of an abusive husband bullshit, so he advised her to get a divorce.  And she even called Dr. Laura Schlesinger and got advice from her.  Of course Dr Laura knew nothing about our marriage, that Christi was embellishing to play the victim.  So Dr. Laura told her to have a trial separation for one year and see if I would change.  If I had the chance I would punch Dr. Laura in the face.  She would give advice to one side of the story and fuck up relationships.  Very evil if you ask me.  But the salaciousness sold and people tuned in on the radio for drive time to pass the traffic frustration.  Christi was taught growing up that when you had a difficult situation to deal with, you asked God in prayer for guidance.  But rather than do what she was taught, that works, she relied on a radio talk show host to give her the answer.

You know, a family is good and wholesome in America.  That is what we strive for.  Peace in the home and bread on the table.  But the media hype messes everything up with expectations and assumptions.  So Christi, in April 2004 asked me to move out of the house.  I was floored.

When we first got together she was living in a broke down house in SW Portland built in 1918.  And her car needed help.  And she let the lawn go, so I brought over my lawn mower in my dad’s truck and mowed her lawn and she appreciated that.  Then we went in to the attic and looked at all the stuff she had saved over the years and bonded on much of that.  So we became friends quickly and I would sleep at her house all the time but we were chaste.  We wanted to be worthy to get married in the Portland LDS temple, sealed together for time and all eternity.  

We kept our pants on but had some great make out sessions.  But what is odd, after we got married, she wasn’t all frisky like she was when we were dating.  She was in to make outs, but could not abide sex.  I don’t know why but for someone to respond like that to sexuality to her husband, she must have been seriously abused as a child.  She told me that her mom told her that sex was dirty and wrong and that she should not do it.  Well, her mother taught her these things as a single person.  But she didn’t go far enough and tell her it was good within matrimony.  And I was not a virgin when we got married and I could make a woman feel like they never felt before.  To me, sex was like art.  So once in a while I would get her motor running, maybe once every two months, and I would give her all the good stuff and make her feel really good.  And she had the audacity to tell me that she felt dirty for doing that, but that it also felt really good.  Yup, I was big time hurting in the bedroom.  But I was not in to porno and I did not masturbate.  I just dealt with it as a good LDS Elder should.  I was highly frustrated with her and I would try to talk about things but that’s when she said I was abusing her.  In society everything is is sexualized, but I kept my eyes on what was good and wholesome during our marriage.  

I was a stand up guy.  I never flirted with cute women, I never strayed on my business trips.  I just went to the hotel, watched ESPN and did my work. And I had carte blanche on the company dime.  I could stay at the best four star hotels, eat at the best restaurants, and my company credit card paid for it all.  I would meet with other co-workers in the company in St. Louis and Kansas City, and pay for everything and then get the work done.  I was IT director so sometimes I had to fly out to our satellite offices around the country.  

My actual title was Network Administrator, and Tim had the title of IT Director, which was comical because he knew nothing about networking.  The only thing of technology that he knew was how to code in Fox Pro, which was a dying language and is dead now.  He wrote a database for the sales team that Datamark used to keep up with clients in Fox Pro and because he was the only person in a small company at that time, by default he was given the management of IT operations.  We would be in meetings, talking about what we had going on for the week and I would be talking about networking this and that and what I had to do to keep the data safe and available to only the ones who needed it and to keep it running 24/7 if any disk or network card failed, what would we do?  And he would sit there as the manager of IT and look me in the eye and tell me that he did not understand how that worked, and he would laugh.  I would laugh too because I knew he needed me.

I had a vision for our data center for years and we finally had the budget.  So Tim pitched the idea to the executives and got all of my credit.  And we spent one  million dollars on this undertaking

I started getting in to politics from listening to radio shows like Rush Limbaugh and took an interest in what was going on with my America and the government.  People do not understand what Anarchy means.  Most people think that anarchy means mob rule and violence.  Anarchy actually means to self govern.  Our founding fathers were Anarchists.  (Johnny Rotten AKA John Lydon gave a stigma to that word when he was in the Sex Pistols).  The people required a government, so they came up with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

This sounds exactly like what took place in the Book of Mormon.  There was a time in the BoM when the people had peace, just after Christ visited them, the people wanted a king and judges.  The prophets just wanted to live in peace but the people demanded a government.  So they called the sons of the prophets to be the kings and judges and they denied the calls.

They said, once we have kings and empires there will be war.  Finally one man was chosen and made king over the land.  And he reigned in peace for many years until division came in and took its place.  Then wars began again after 400 years of peace.  400 years has to be some kind of record because there has never been peace for that long in history.  They should get an award for not having a war for over 400 years.  But they did not have mass communication back then so they just started another war instead.  And that was the biggest war of ever and they killed all the white people so only the dark skinned natives remained.

I think self government is the best government.  No rules or laws to be broken, just freedom to worship a god however that makes sense to anyone.  And the rules or laws would just be common sense. There’s no way Anarchy would work anywhere on this planet because someone will always want the power and authority to make rules and laws.

So let’s get off of my philosophy and  go back to real events to entertain.

I witnessed a lot of crazy things in my life for some reason.  I don’t know why but they helped me grow up fast and be able to handle traumatic situations without panic.  When I was about  10 years old my parents took me out for dinner.  They were in to haute cuisine, nice things in life, luxuries, things that most middle class folks did not get to enjoy.  They saved their money, made investments and had some good times and I was always there to be a part of those things.

And my parents were in to good food, going to the nicest restaurants and being friendly with the chef’s and hosts.  So one night I remember we went to the Monte Carlo in Portland for Chinese food.  You’d think the Monte Carlo would be Italian but it was kick ass Chinese.  And years later it was a place for me and my friends to go after waiting tables at da Vinci’s to drink Vodka on the rocks with a twist and do some dancing in to the wee hours of the night.  Good times in my twenties.

So this night probably in 1974 we were done dining, spent some time after dinner talking to the owner of the Monte Carlo, my parents had a few drinks and I had some more dessert.  It was raining pretty fiercely outside and there was a thunderstorm and we got up to leave, left a huge tip and got in the car with a freaking monsoon coming down.  There was a lot of traffic, I remember it was dawn about this time so it must have been summer time.  We were at an intersection and this dude was crossing the intersection and a Volkswagen Beetle was at the stop line as dude was crossing the street.  The car jutted forward just a bit and I watched the pedestrian crossing the street as this VW waited for him because he was in the right lane waiting to take a right turn.  And just as the pedestrian got in front of his car dude popped the clutch and fucking ran this guy down.  He hit the front of the car, slid up across the hood, smacked his melon on the windshield, cracking it and flew up in the air with his arms and legs flailing in the air and just landed smack face down in the middle of the intersection and one of his shoes came off.  He was just laying there out cold and I was in shock, started crying and all we could do was drive by.  And my mom said, Milt, please don’t drive by that.  But that’s all he could do and of course I looked and it freaked me out.  And every time there was a thunder storm after that I would panic up until I was a little older.  I remember I was staying at my friend Scott Ruby’s house and there was thunder and lightning one night and I felt safe at his house and that night I got over my fear of thunder storms.  Not sure why that did the trick but I always felt safe at his house.  His mom was my second mom and he was the best friend you could ever imagine.

I never talked to my mom or dad about my fear of the weather.  It was like that for a lot of my fears.  I just held them in and allowed them to fester in my bosom.  I suppose maybe this is why at the age of nine I got really sick.  I had many stomach ailments, brought on my stress and the things I internalized as a child emotionally.  Having witnessed, over hearing things that a child should not be witness to.  So I had no outlet for these things, no siblings and no adults that would try to understand where I was coming from.  If I ever started a conversation about things that concerned me I was told to keep it to myself and that it was none of my business because I could not understand it anyway.

So I had a big time inferiority complex.  But I knew the things I heard and saw but was told not to concern myself with.  Like, there were issues going on in the lives of my adults, who I confided in for my safety and protection but was told not to concern myself with.  So I felt like I could do or get away with anything and that it never had to be spoken of.  So I did and said many things that were completely out of order just because I felt entitled by the actions of the adults around me.  When I was in social situations at school or in public I was an acute observer of things other people were doing and tried to identify with them somehow the things that were going on in my life.  And I always felt like I had far more experience in life than these innocent kids did, being protected by their big brothers and sisters.  And I always wanted to push the envelope and expose things for kids to witness or partake of just for the shock value or purposes of entertainment and in so doing it always got me in to trouble, or at least got me in to situations I had to manage, that I suddenly realized I did not want to be responsible for.

And all of this kind of thing just for being holed up in my own mind with a creative imagination, watching television fantasy, reading books and imagining stories played out as I day dreamed.  I would try to control my dreams and do all kinds of crazy fanciful things that could only be done in cartoons or movies.  And it would work sometimes, sometimes not.  But once in a while I could control me dreams and become the master of my Universe.  Sometimes I would do all kinds of destructive maniacal shit or sometimes I would just fly or go kill monsters.  It was crazy, my mind and imagination got the best of me and I lived in my head a lot because I had nobody to talk to or relate to but myself, adults and television.

And I heard from my schoolmates about their older siblings doing adult type stuff and had those things in my imagination too.  Not necessarily wanting to partake of them but partaking of them by default when I would spend time at their houses when school was out.  Because back then we would get up in the morning and there were no cell phones or ways to check in with parents.  So I would just tell my mom I’m going over to see if Rick is home and play with him.  She would say, OK, just be home by 1 o’clock for lunch.

So I would go to Rick’s house and he might be there alone or with some other buddies and we would just get together and take off through the neighborhood trying to amuse ourselves with something to do.  We would go play in the fields, play army, wrestle, swipe a couple of bucks from our parents and go buy a plethora of candy.  We would ride our bikes through the trails and jumps in the forrest, play in the creeks catching little fish and salamanders.

He had big brothers doing things that were for adults, definitely not for children and I witnessed some of these things.  Did not partake but witnessed.  They swiped some of their parents’ cigarettes when we were in the fourth grade and I remember going out behind the portables by our elementary school near downtown Portland.  Richmond Elementary on the SE side of town and they would light up cigarettes and it was the same smell I remembered from my dad.  They passed it to me and I took a puff but coughed and said no thanks.  Then they found some weed somehow and I watched those fourth graders smoke pot.  That I did not partake of and did not want anything to do with.  But I thought it was entertaining watching them get retarded and laughing a lot.

Then we stumbled upon the pornography.  I won’t go in to detail but Rick’s big brother’s had some serious XXX hardcore porno mags that I thumbed through out of curiosity and after I witnessed that I asked some questions out of my naivete and they told me I would understand when I got older.  

So me and Rick went downstairs to have lunch and I remember my stomach was upset, like I had eaten something bad.  I did not realize it but I was traumatized by that pornography.  And I just kept that to myself all my life.  I did not know how to talk to an adult about those things.  For one things I thought I would get in trouble for sure and how could I even go about approaching the subject anyway?  I was not mature enough to start a conversation of that type with an adult.  So I kept that to myself all of my life.

There was another time when me and the girls, Karen and Pam were walking to 7-11 to buy candy and in the field we saw some magazine pages flipping back and forth in the wind.  We looked down and saw that they were porno mags.  So this was not the first time I had seen porno and these were just Playboys so we got an eye full of this stuff.  And it wasn’t traumatizing as those XXX images.  And I had already seen these girls naked too.

My parents got separated a time or two because my mom was a bitch and my dad could not handle her anymore.  I always was made to think my dad was the bad guy but he was totally kick ass and he had my mom’s control freak nature to deal with.  I swear she is a sociopath.  My dad was so cool, but to have to deal with her shit, no wonder he was always in a bad mood.

There was a time when we were living in the Woodstock area of Portland and they got separated.  Me and mom went to live with my cousins, the Turners.  That was actually a good time for me, not because I was away from dad, because I missed dad, but I got to spend time with some of my best friends, Chris and Sean, my best cousins ever.  We had such good times.  Chris had just as a devious mind as I did and we got in to all kinds of trouble growing up.  He had nine siblings and was the third oldest in the family.  And Sean was next to him and Chris was one year younger than me so it was just right for great friendships and family bonding.

When my mom and dad separated most of the time me and mom would go live with the Turner cousins because they had a huge house, my Uncle Wes was wealthy and had room for us and they took us in and treated us like we belonged there.  It was bliss, what a wonderful family they were.

And I got to hang out 24/7 with Chris and Sean so that did not suck at all.  But when I went to spend weekends with my dad it was pretty  boring.  He did not know how to entertain me but we hung out and watched sports and ate good food, but I just wanted to go back home and play with my cousins.  Not that I did not love my dad, but I just felt more comfortable in that big safe family environment.

But when I was away from my dad I would be sad because I thought about him being lonely without us and was kind of pissed at my mom for doing this to our family.  My dad was my strength and protection, my hero in life who taught me how to be a man, and mom took that from me for some reason.  

So I started to become angry and harbor some resentment inside me and began to take it out in various ways that I did not have control on.  I became somewhat of a dare devil, trying to find dangerous situations to get myself in to and seeing how tough I was and how I could impress others with my courageousness.

I would build big huge ramps and jump my bike as high as I could.  There were a lot of dirt trails all over the place back then, un developed old growth forrest areas in Portland where kids would congregate when school was out.  We built forts and ramps out of wood with hammers and nails and these were sturdy and gnarly and dangerous but we would test them and then when they were done we would test them, slowly getting a feel for the ramp and once we got a good feel for it we would get way back, get some high speed and hit those ramps at high speed, do cross ups in the air and land without wiping out and skid out on our back tires raising our fists in the air screaming in triumph!

There were older kids crazy enough that while they were up in the air they would cross up and spin their front tire around 180 before landing.  That was some fun times, just getting as crazy as we could out there with no supervision.  That was the only thing I could do back then for entertainment.  That and play basketball on the playground.  We didn’t have video games of VHS or DVDs or cable television so we spent our time playing outside.  And when it was all the boys in the neighborhood getting together, of course there was the alpha male and the positioning for bad assery.  And I didn’t play in to that too much, I wasn’t necessarily the leader but the leader of the pack always chose me as their right hand man because I was the guy who came up with all the good ideas and was the first to give it a try.  So they loved that about me.

And in school, once in a while I would get bullied by being the new kid on the block, moving around while my parents were going through their separations.  So bullies would give me shit and I always made friends with older bad ass kids who were in trouble, so I would not have to fight my battles with the bullies unless I wanted to.  I would be in the fifth grade about this time, going to Margaret Scott elementary, where Beverley Cleary got much of her inspiration writing about Bezus and Romana and Ribsy the dog.   I loved losing my mind in fantasy land reading those books about childhood experiences that I could identify with.  And it was cool to know that I was attending the same elementary school where she did and had those experiences.  She mentioned the same street names that I would ride my bike on and it made me feel at home in this fantasy world in NE Portland, OR.

So back to those bullies that I did not want to have to deal with, and I know I talked about fighting too much, not things people necessarily enjoy but a huge part of my upbringing.  Rather than deal with bullies who were older than me, I would be in the fifth grade and have sixth grade bullies but also have seventh grade friends because they knew my foxy female cousins and liked me for that reason.  So I would tell these dudes that I was being picked on by these dudes over there and at lunch time they would go have a conversation with them, and those guys never bothered me again.  But I was homesick and wanted to be back at my school, Richmond elementary.  I was probably better off at Margaret Scott but I felt out of my element.  Once again put in to a grade too advanced for my intellect so I was not comprehending math and science and social studies and for the first time in my life my grades began to slip. 

My parents would scold me but we did not realize that the trauma of being taken from school to school, from social environment to another unknown and new social environment took it’s toll on my psyche.   Then they reconciled and bought a new house in Vancouver, WA where I started school all over again in the fifth grade.  So I went to Richmond, Margaret Scott and Crestline elementary schools all in the same year.  My favorite school was Woodstock elementary in Portland, but we left that place when I was in the third grade.

So here I was in a completely new environment.  The class rooms were weird.  They were not like inner city schools with hall ways and wooden doors and desks that smelled old with a boiler room to keep the heating and cooling going and a smelly lunch room where all the kids ate at one time.

Now things were divided up and that was new for me.  And I was lonely, out of my element having been a big shot in my school environment in Portland but now was the odd man out and once again, got bullied for being the new kid.  But I did not want any trouble, and I knew that if it came down to it I could kick some ass but I did not want that kind of shit going on.  So I just went to school and for the first time in my life rode a bus.

And I sat in the back of the bus with the cool kids and we talked about all kinds of stuff that you do when you’re trying to be accepted in with the social groups in school.  And the girls would flirt with me, tell me about experiences they had with boys, tell me how cute I was.  And because I was a year younger and smaller the dudes in my class kind of dominated over me so I would have my sense of humor and my quick wit to keep me on track and in the game all the time.  I was able to hang out with the cool kids and witness a lot of things that they were not supposed to be doing, not partaking in them myself but getting experience nevertheless.

And I did not comprehend the flirting that was going on around me with these girls that I found highly attractive, however puberty for me was a couple of years away.  Although I had been sexualized at an early age through the viewing of pornography, I still did not have the hots for the cute chicks that they were telling me they were in love with me.  And because I was the new kid and all the girls loved me the guys kind of picked on me so I became friends with foxy chicks and hung out with them most of the time.  But there were some super smart ass intelligent kids who liked to stir up mischief like I did and I gravitated toward them.

After that horrible fourth and fifth grade year of trauma and moving around, losing my good friends and having to make new ones and then being the new kid I had a lot of angst inside, having dealt with my appendicitis I began to harbor much anger and would take it out in various ways.

When I was nine years old my parents had my sister Shannon.  And I loved her so much, she was my sister, my little sister who I could play with and protect and love and teach all kinds of cool stuff to.  So as she grew up and began to interact socially we were best friends and did everything together while mom and dad did their stuff.  But as I became an adolescent I would be out with my friends and we did not have a lot in common suddenly, once I hit puberty and was in to chicks and my buddies and causing trouble everywhere I could.  I would not share these things with her because I knew she would tell on me.  

But Shannon looked up to me, this I did not realize until I was older.  She idolized me and thought I was the coolest things since sliced bread.  If I had know this I would have made different choices, knowing that she would be following in my footsteps of rebellion and doing things that our parents would not approve of.  She saw me coming and going in and out of the house because I was grown up, nine years older than her, having lived in South America for a while, then coming home, having cool friends with cool cars come around, with many super foxy chicks in tow as friends or sometimes girlfriends.  She would just sit back in the family and admire my lifestyle being cool and getting anything I wanted.  And I worked for what I received.  I worked hard for my nice cars and my nice clothes and my music collection, my guitars, the concerts I would go to and start sharing my experiences with her.

We as a family would vacation on three day weekends or sometimes if my parents took vacation time, we would go for a week to Lincoln CIty, OR.  Like I said I was treated like a prince.  My uncle Frenchie owned a condo right on the beachfront in Lincoln City with a giant picture window over looking the ocean and beach up on the cliff.  It was so killer.  So me and my family would go out there for weekends, we would go fishing, digging razor clams at 5am, play in the  ocean, build sand castles, play frisbee, throw the football or play catch with a baseball just having so much fun in the open spaces.  Then we would get hungry and go to the finest restaurants around or maybe make clam chowder with the clams we caught that morning, and have fresh crab from the crab pots that the fishermen would drop as they were out in the ocean fishing.  I ate all kinds of fresh seafood growing up and my grandma and grandpa, aunt Sandy and uncle Frenchie and my parents knew how to cook.  Like good stuff, restaurant fare.  The studied cook books and made such good meals with the stuff we would catch fresh.  Like I said, treated like a prince.

And my sister was growing up and we were having all kinds of fun going to the coast for vacation.  That was the best.  I would be at home and it would be Thursday and my folks would tell me and Shannon that we were going to go to the coast for the weekend.  And we would get all excited and know we were in for some good times.  I always loved it if Sandy and Frenchie were there too, and Grandma and Grandpa Brown too.  Some times my uncle Tom, he did not like being called uncle Tom, but he was cool, lived in LA and would come up for vacation with his wife and step daughter who was super foxy and we would flirt but nothing went down like probably should have.

There was one time we were at the condo and my parents and grandparents were asleep and I was about 15 years old, I was bored and curious and there was much liquor in the cabinets.  So I stayed up late watching Benny Hill and just doing things a teen aged boy would do in that kind of environment.  So I had the bright idea to try and have myself some alcoholic beverages.  I had never had drinks of alcohol before except for those sips of beer or wine with my parents.  So I got in to the liquor and had no idea what I was in for.  At first it was super fun, but of course, I did not know what the hell I was doing so I just drank more because I thought if this made me feel this good then more would probably make me feel better.  And that lasted a couple of hours and I was stumbling drunk, pissing on the floor but fortunately I didn’t wake my parents.  I think my grandma knew what was going on because the next day I was hung over and we were having lunch and I said, man I am super thirsty today.  Not knowing about hangovers.  And my grandma said to me, it’s probably from all that beer and wine you drank last night.  And I kind of tripped out for a moment but she did not tell my parents and that was super cool.  I can’t believe I got away with that.  Grandma had me covered. I thought she was joking around ironically but I think she knew what I was up to.   

That was when I was about fifteen and just starting to get in to chicks and wanting to experiment with partying.  I had a friend, Mark Larsen who was an amazing artist.  We would go out in to the forrest and he would take pictures of nature, then get them developed and he had an art studio so he would paint these scenes of nature and put ducks flying around and wildlife and he had so many paintings that he had done, he was remarkable.  And today he has his art all over the world hotels and airports and just by watching him I learned a lot about art.  

His dad owned a condo at the coast and they were remodeling it and asked if I wanted to go for the weekend to help them work on the place.  I was totally up for it and this is when I got out of the house and got a little too out of control.  We went to their place and worked all day, I knew how to do construction because of my parents flipping houses, that’s why they brought me along.

Mark had a step side pickup truck that was a low rider with killer chrome rims and performance tires and a killer stereo system so we would kick it together in his truck being all cool, cooler than everybody else.  He was one year older than me but we were best friends.  I was in to everything he was doing and he liked that I was interested in what he was doing.  So we were at the coast, it was night time, probably Friday night and Mark looked older than he was so he could buy beer.  But this day, his dad bought us a twelve pack of Schlitz Malt Liquor and let us go out on the town.  So we cruised around town and picked up on some chicks and drank beer with them and cranked some tunes.  Partied all night and had a blast.  The next day we did some more work on the house and that night me and Mark went out looking for another party.  We found one too.  I think we were at a fast food joint and these chicks said they were having a party at their parents house because mom and dad were gone for the weekend.

Of course we were totally in to that noise.  So we followed them to their house and I remember thinking how cool it would be to live by the coast growing up.  We pulled in to the party and people were super cool to us but the alcohol began to flow and last night was the first time I ever got tipsy.  This night there was hard liquor and I started drinking like a fish.  I had no idea what I was in for.

I remember Mark was getting some sexy time with one of those chicks and I was outside making out with another one and she had a boyfriend who was at the party too, so those dudes were pissed at me but they did nothing to me because I was cool.  This was also the first time I tried to smoke a cigarette.  I tried it but I did not like it.  I just drank a bunch of alcohol drinks that these chicks made for me and then we went outside behind the house to sneak away from her boyfriend and had a serious make out session.  But what I did not realized about alcohol, that when you drink wine, beer and liquor, you are going to want to die as you puke your guts out in the porcelain goddess.  

And that next morning I wanted to die.  I never knew what a hangover was.  I heard about hangovers from people talking on TV or from adult conversation but whammo, I got my first hangover and it was a bitch.  So I had to play it cool and power through it because we had all kinds of work to do and I felt like I had been run over by a steam locomotive.  My head was aching and my stomach was churning.  All I wanted to do was die at that moment.  But I had to power through it and I talked to myself and said I would never drink again, until the next time of course.  

And I gained a tolerance and could hold my liquor unlike some other people of my age, when they got wasted they couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.  But there was something about me that kept me going and I can not believe that I did not get any DUIs or crash a car, because I drove drunk all the time in my high school years.  I partied more than most, and I pushed it too.  Because my favorite buzz was beer and weed together.  That got me going, and I was Mr Charlie happy go lucky everybody’s best friend, making plans for next Monday, getting phone numbers from chicks.

My parents went on vacation and Shannon stayed at a friend’s house and my folks let me have the house to myself over a three day weekend.  My mom told me, No parties, Vaughn.  So I said no way would I have a party here, you would totally bust me.  But what did I do?  I threw a big ass party at my house.  Everyone was drinking, getting wasted, there was weed all over the place.  I found a bag of weed in the living room under the curtains and was thankful that I spotted it because if my folks found it I would be busted big time.  

Everyone from high school came to my pad that night and partied until about 2 am and we were drinking beer, smoking pot, people stayed out of the bedrooms, just in the living room and family room and back yard.  

I cleaned the house spic and span and put the empty beer cans in a bag to take to the dumpster behind 7-11.  But I put that stuff in the trunk of my dad’s car and then forgot about it.  My parents came home the night before and things were cool until my dad, on Monday morning opened up the trunk of his car and saw a case of beer cans in a garbage bag.  

I was quick with a lie to my parents (something I learned that does not work ever).  I came home from early morning seminary, LDS gospel teaching to prepare one for manhood and to serving a mission to preach the gospel of Christ.  I had to get up at 5:30am to go to seminary before school started.  So my dad was putting his tools in the trunk of the car and he discovered the bag of empties and asked me what was this about?

I was quick to make up a story so I said, some people drove past our house and tossed all their beer cans in our side yard, so I didn’t want to get in trouble, I picked it up and put it in the trunk to take to the trash.  And my mom said, well how come there is our news paper in the bag too?  And I thought I was totally busted, but I had these words put into my head from the Ether.  

The only thing I got to do while they were gone was to have my pal Greg Palin over to sleepover.  So I said, we picked up all the beer cans and brought them in the house and there were some that had not been opened and Greg drank those, but I did not.

And my parents said, oh, OK.  We probably should not have Greg over again.  And I said, that’s a good idea.  And I walked Scott free but I was freaking out inside.

There were dudes at school who I would party with, that their parents allowed them to party.  So my buddy David Vail saunters up to my house one afternoon with a six pack of beer and tells me that we are going to party.  And I freaked out, pushed him out of the house and closed the door.  My parents saw what was going on and asked me what I was doing.  I told them that he’s a dude in my acting class that looks older than he is and he wants to be my friend but I don’t like him.

Man oh man I got away with that one too.  But what in the hell was Vail thinking coming to my house in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday with a sixer?  I was 16 years old man.  Maybe that’s why his brother got busted with a duffle bag full of weed on the bleachers behind Mt. View high school.

It was lunch time at Mt. View high and I was always running around with my best friend, Tim Raynor, who knew how to party like I did and also shredded on guitar and taught me how to play the drums.  His uncle would come over to their house and Tim would play the drums, I played bass and his uncle played guitar.  It was the first time I was walked through the blues scale and we just jammed on that blues scale and it was so sublime.

His uncle was the first dude who ever got me stoned.  It was Halloween and I was a Jr. in high school.  Me and Tim dressed up like AC/DC.  He was Angus and I just had a pair of drum sticks.  That was my costume, drum sticks.  Tim drove us over to his uncle’s house and we said ‘trick or treat’. got some candy and they let us in the house.  We were talking about music and concerts that we had been to when all of a sudden dude whips out a plate full of marijuana.  He rolled a doobie and lit it off and took a couple of hits, then Tim took some and then I took some for my first time.  I didn’t feel anything at first but then I was staring off in to space looking at the television and those dudes said, yea, I think Vaughn is stoned.  And I said, Am I?  At that moment it really set in and I liked it a lot.  

We smoked more, watched TV and I was super stoned and had drum sticks and was playing the drums on Tim’s back all night.  That was cool at the time but he told me the next day that his back was sore from me pummeling the sticks on him.  I apologized and we laughed and he said, it’s cool, you were high as a kite dude.

I became obsessed with marijuana.  I would dream about getting stoned, think about getting high all the time, look for any place to cop some weed.  It was kind of spooky, I just loved the stuff so much, it took me away from all the harshness of my home life and mellowed me out and made me so much more creative.  Unfortunately I could not do math and science when I was stoned so my grades began to slip.  Before I started smoking pot, I got A’s and B’s.  After I started smoking, I got D’s and F’s.  So what does that tell one about what weed can to do an adolescent mind?  Not a good thing to smoke pot while maturating because your brain gets all confused about reality and you have a hard time comprehending things that in reality are better for you.

However, I do know some people who pull it off well.  They could be mega-stoners and get straight A’s.  Those were just some hyper intelligent kids that I looked up to and loved to get high with.  Because when I got high with those intellectuals, I would ask questions about things they understood and that my teachers in school did not teach me very well, so I would ask these dudes about US History and politics and government and how it worked and I got a better education from them than I did from my public school system.  And it made sense as we brought our minds together.  Dude would be talking about government and I would be thinking things on the spiritual level so it was super enlightening for me.  

And Jason was always up for some deep discussion or debate.  We never debated each other but we certainly debated stupid uppity college know-it-alls.  And that was fun, as he taught me how to handle the knowledge of truth and slay the leftists’ ideology.

Unfortunately we took a piece of George Hegel’s, the art of argument and used it as a weapon of war to confound anyone who disagreed with me.  But that taught me how to debate and how to tell the truth and how to discern lies from truth.  When I get talking to someone about religion or politics and they start saying things I have never heard before, I call them out and tell them they are lying and making things up.

This sort of off the radar training gave me confidence when I got in to the work force.  My first job, outside of being the lawn boy in my teens, I got a job at Arby’s when I was 17 years old just graduated from high school barely.  I had to take a social studies class at the community college to get my grades up to par.  So I did.  I failed US History twice.  My teachers were lefties and I could not agree with their politics so I could not get good grades.  I could have if I wanted to combat their nonsense but I was not in to debate back then.  I just wanted to  have fun and all I knew was that my history teachers were full of shit.  They would be blatantly mocking conservatives and anyone who spoke up about being anywhere near the right was talked down and made to look bad.  Talk about indoctrination in the school systems.  So no wonder I got low grades in that class.  I should have been more stalwart but I was young and knew nothing about politics.  I did however smell bullshit when it came creeping out of my teacher’s mouth.

They talked about the Mormon pioneers and were disparaging them and I am LDS AKA Mormon so what was I going to do?  I was not yet trained as a missionary but I heard their bullshit and learned what I was up against and why they believed the lies that they did.  It did not get me any good grades but it helped me out in understanding where they were coming from.

So I’m working at Arby’s with my best friend Lance and whenever we worked together there was much chicanery to be had.  The only thing me and him knew how to do together was to get people’s attention and blow their minds.  We were somewhat like Abbot and Costello, but in real life.

One time when we were working together someone came in and asked us what we suggested for them.  There was a Wendy’s across the street so, just because we were so close friends we both said at the same time when he asked what we would suggest, we said, Wendy’s.  So dude left and went to Wendy’s.  I guess we were like Bevis and Butthead working at their burger joint.  It was pretty much like that.

Arby’s had Horsey sauce.  It was like horse radish and mayo, not quite as strong a a full on horse radish.  And Arby’s also had milk shakes.  One time when one of our co-workers was on break, she got a vanilla shake.  I was always coming up with crazy ideas of how to have fun, make myself and others laugh at someone’s expense.  So her milkshake was sitting on the break room table and the straw was staring at me, telling me to fuck with her somehow.  So I grabbed a bottle of horsey sauce and filled her straw with it.  Then we were in the back washing dishes, me and Lance and waiting for her to take a big sip of her horsey sauce milk shake.  And she did and it was hilarious.  She was pissed off at first but calmed down and said, yea that’s was pretty funny.

Another time there were two dipshit drunk dudes at the drive thru.  They ordered food and were being belligerent, while sitting outside the drive thru window they were tossing coins at the window and yelling at us to make it faster and get on it dude’s we’re killing time here.  They ordered a Beef and Cheddar and Lance made their sandwich.  Lance had just been slurping down some ice cold yellow lemonade and I knew his loggias would be nice and thick.  So I unwrapped that Beef and Cheddar and took the top bun off and said, Spit on that dude.  He didn’t even say a word or ask why, he just spat right on the cheese, and I put the top bun back on the sandwich and wished them a happy day.

I hope that Beef and Loggia was nice and tasty.  We made it special just for them.  Because we liked to take care of our customers.

We would get off work after closing time and have all kinds of extra food so we took our extra food and went knocking on the doors of the Mormon Missionaries and gave them our food.  They were starving and they loved us bringing them food late at night.  And we would stay up late talking about stuff and they helped us prepare to be kick ass missionaries when it was time for us to go.

And what was even better is that if you were LDS you had a full court basketball court inside your church with glass back boards and break away rims with score boards.  Real maple hard wood flooring too, and professional striping.  A serious basketball court and the missionaries would play b-ball on their p-day and we would show up and play with them.  It was awesome because I loved playing basketball more than anything else in life.  Any time I had a chance to get in on a pick up game of basketball I was there.

Like I said before, I was too small in my class to make it on the teams but LDS church had just as great a basketball league as any high school did.  So I had my chance to be point guard and my dad was the coach, and he was damn good too.  Our teams were always in the playoffs, always undefeated, we recruited dudes from within the borders of our ward who wanted to play on a competitive basketball team but like me, could not at school.  So we got some great talent and my dad scouted the kids in the neighborhood for his players and we would go up against the other wards’ basketball teams and totally dominate them.  We were the Vancouver Second Ward and you knew if it was basketball season that you had to look out for the Second ward.   We had Larry Cole, power forward would score like 35 points a game.  We had a center who dominated the inside and two shooting guards who could light up the skies.  I always had like 12 points and a couple of steals.  Nothing to write home about but it was fun times and I always started and played most of the game.  I don’t remember dude’s name but we got him from our high school and he was good too.  Black dude that could play some ball and we were dominating like the other teams knew it was going to be an ass kicking but they did their best.  There was one other ward who got some great players and gave us a challenge but we always beat them in the playoffs.  So we went to the semi finals and played teams from other cities and that’s when we really had some competition.  That was super fun and super competitive.  We never won the championship in the area, but we did win the Stake championship.  I remember we went up north to play some other teams from around other towns and we had our swagger and confidence and we were tough, not like we were supposed to be tough guys but if you were coached by my dad, you had to be a bad ass and take no shit and never give in.  

We were in the playoffs and it was a game on some Saturday afternoon.  The ball was loose and I dove for it and a dude on the other team dove for it too.  And I grabbed the ball like it was mine and he was trying to steal it from me and we stood up and squared off like we were going to fight.  So we settled down and what was funny is that later on in school, that dude and me became close friends eventually when we were going to the same high school.  And we talked about that game and laughed.

Later in the playoffs I had a really good game.  And our ward used to be the whole Heights of Vancouver, WA but there were more and more members of the church joining so they had to split the ward.  And so the same guys we used to play with were then on another team.  But we were still the Second Ward and they did not have my dad as coach anymore.  So at playoff time we went and played at the new Jr high school and went against all my friends from the other ward before it split.  And they knew they were good too, the best two teams in the region.  Head to head.  And I was out of my tree that day because I scored 26 points, had 8 rebounds and 6 steals.  They did keep stats just like high school ball.  We won of course and on the drive home I was sitting in the passenger seat next to my dad, our coach and I said, I did pretty good tonight huh?  I was very proud of my performance.  I was the freaking MVP man.  And all my dad could say was, ‘you did alright’.  Man, right then and there I learned that I could not trust my parents to support me in anything I wanted to do.  So I became a full time rebel.  I did alright.  WTF???  I fucking dominated and my dad couldn’t tell me I did any better than alright?  Was he jealous of me or something?  What the hell?  What parent does not praise their kid for kicking ass at the sport they most wanted them to excel at?  And my parents wonder why I became so angry.  It was like I just cured cancer and they said, that’s cool what else you got for me?

And I got that kind of shit from my relatives also.  When I was in my mid twenties I had just started to get back in to art.  I was at my grandmother’s house with my uncle Frenchie, Sandy and my parents and Shannon.  I had my drawing pad with me and my drawings were very intricate and surreal.  Very detailed and very psychedelic.  And I broke out my drawing pad and started drawing to kill the boredom and my uncle Frenchie, I don’t think he realized how much it hurt my feelings, it was some kind of off handed compliment or was he being sarcastic?  I think I misunderstood his comment.  I took it as he was telling me I wasn’t good enough to try and do something like that.  He said to me, ‘What, do you think you’re Salvador Dali?’

And for a moment I took that as sarcasm but in hindsight, if he compared my art to Dali, it was a complement.  And he was a great artist himself.  And his brother Paul was Ansel Adams’ framer.  My sister, for a wedding present got an original Ansel Adams photo framed by Paul Pickman.  It is beautiful and priceless and hangs in their home today.

A couple of years later he asked me if I would take over his goldsmith business.  So I had my jeweler’s bench in the back of the store and I was an apprentice goldsmith.  At first he paid for me to go to gold smithing college in Seattle but after a couple of weeks when I told him what we were doing he said, just come back home and start working with me, I will teach you to be the best.

So I moved back in with my parents and started my apprenticeship.  It was great from the start.  I learned super fast, way faster than I would have in college.  I got a goldsmith degree in like two weeks.  I was a sieve for learning new things.  I got a job working at da Vinci’s Ristorante Italiano to make some cash while I was doing the apprenticeship and became head waiter.  This was an exclusive Italian restaurant.  I mentioned earlier about da Vinci’s.  Man I miss that place.  I met some of my best friends there.  After we got off work, like waiters do, me and my co-workers would spend out tip money, go to downtown Portland and eat pizza, shoot pool and drink much alcohol after smoking the ganja.  We would meet chicks and go back to their place for a one night stand.  Horrible as it is, I did it and I am not proud of that cavalier behavior.  So I’m getting down with this chick I just met in her roommate’s bed, gay dude, and he comes walking in about 3am and says WTF?  So we went in to the living room and got it on, on the living room carpet.  And I was kicking it with my buddy Adam, also a waiter at da Vinci’s, one of my closest friends.  I busted him and my sister making out and I knew Adam and I said, Keep your damn hands off my sister dude.

Back at those chick’s apartment, Adam was going for it with the other girl and he took off her panty hose and panties and I heard him say, WTF?  Then I saw him grab a blanket and crash on the living room floor.  We woke up in the morning and walked to our cars and he said, look up at that tree.  Her underwear and panty hose were hanging in the tree right outside the window because when he was getting down with her, he soon realized that she was fat and she hid it well, and that pissed him off (Adam was movie star handsome like me so we only hit on the hottest women)  So he tossed her unmentionables out the window and there they were, hanging in the tree.

I had a wicked hangover that day and that evening I was one of the groomsmen at my friend’s wedding.  With the night before ringing in my mind I felt like I was in hell.  But I powered through it and tried to forget about yesterday’s debauchery.  What funny is that several weeks later, the chick that Adam was with, came in to da Vinci’s with some guy and I was their server.  I told Adam and we were laughing our asses off.  I’m positive she remembered me but I was professional and said nothing but just gave them a good dining experience.

As an apprentice goldsmith, (I was a goldsmith, not a jeweler, I worked with gold and silver, did nothing with gems, that was Frenchie’s thing, cutting fine rocks into jewelry) I was getting really good and Frenchie would give me some of his work to do and I did it well.  Until I screwed up royally trying to take a short cut.  I knew exactly what I did wrong.  I was re-sizing a gold ring that had a huge violet colored stone, and normally, unless it was a diamond, we would remove the gem before doing the work.  So like I said, I was trying to take short cuts and be super quick in my work but I fucked up big time.

When you’re working with gold rings you have a butane flame to heat the metal and make it malleable.  When re-sizing a ring I had to cut it open at the bottom, insert some new gold then before I fired the ring and got the new gold to adhere to the ring I was supposed to clean the ring and put a coating of flux on the metal.  Flux helped the gold, when it became liquid to stay in its place and not run.  So I made the mistake of not removing the gem from this ring and I heated that ring up enough to melt gold and whammo, the gem shattered from the heat.  That is why we remove the rocks before re-sizing the rings.  I was six months in to my apprenticeship and I was getting really good but when that happened, I got fired.  They told me I was too distracted to be a jeweler.  But I learned a lot about alloys and metal.

After that experience I decided it was time to go back to college so I enrolled in a pre-pharmacy program, I decided I wanted to be a pharmacist.  It’s a good thing that did not work out because I would have been abusing pharmaceuticals.  But in that venture I studied chemistry and continued to work at da Vincis.  One of the waiters who got hired after me had his degree in chemistry from Oregon State.  His grades were 4.0 but because of affirmative action, a negro got his scholarship.  So he was pissed at the system and I was too so we bonded big time on chemistry, smoking weed, music.  This dude was super cool and I crashed at his pad in Portland all the time because we partied way too much.  We were out of control.  He lived in a house with two other guys and one female roommate.  It was party central.  All we did was go to work, come home to Chris’s house and get loaded and listen to music.

One evening I was hammered drunk and did not want to drive so I let Chris drive my Grand Prix and I don’t remember exactly what happened but I think he hit some ice, he ran in to a big curb and completely tworked my front driver’s side wheel.  It was all bent up and I was laughing and he was freaking out.  I told him that is what insurance is for dude.  But I didn’t have insurance for that.  So, Chris, being the stand up guy that he is, paid to get my car fixed.  It cost him almost $1000.  He had to borrow it from his roommate but he payed her back.  He was so apologetic and I just said, don’t worry about it man, shit happens and it will get fixed.  I’ve been through worse things than this and things always worked out.

I remember it was going on 1994, new year’s eve.  Me, Adam and Chris had just closed down da Vinci’s and were heading to party central downtown.  We all went to the same bar, it had a huge dance floor, a stage, a big bar and in the back were pool tables, booths and another bar.  So all of the roommates were there and one of the females had some hash and I was jonesing for that stuff.  We started drinking Goldschlager  and proceeded to get immediately drunk.  Tip money was taking care of us.  So we all wandered to the back bar where the pool tables were and I was asking this chick if she would smoke some hash with me.  She was totally cool about it and said, where can we go?  I said, let’s just smoke it right here.  Nobody will say anything, it’s new year’s eve in Portland.  So she said, yea, you’re right and so we just sat in the booth seats passing the hash pipe.  Soon we stood up and passed that pipe around the entire back bar to anyone who wanted any.  Nobody said shit about us smoking hash in that bar and the bartenders were slinging drinks to us, we were big tippers too, so we basically took over the place and made it our party.  That’s kind of how we rolled back then.  We were all beautiful young adults with style and cash in hand and a lust for life so the six of us would wander around and stop somewhere and make parties happen on the spot.

Midnight came and we were all hammered, feeling no pain, everyone was everyone’s best friend and suddenly I couldn’t find Adam anywhere.  Come to find out, he was puking his guts out in the restroom.  He said he even heard me and Chris come in and take a piss while he was puking but didn’t say anything because he was embarrassed that he got sick.  We couldn’t find him and I was in no condition to drive so when the bar closed I wobbled over to my friends’ pad and spent the night with them.

Later on Adam told me he was the only one left and he was so sick.  The bartender drove him home.  That was very cool.  We raged.

So I went to my friends’ apartment and they were sitting around smoking out and I was super hammered and got more stoned and had several more beers.  These chicks loved me because I was fun, into the good music, stylish and I did not hit on them, although I could have had major sexy time with both of them if I wanted to.  But I was playing it cool and just being their friends.  They were hot too, but I played it cool.  So I slept over that night in bed with one of them and the next morning we got up, had coffee and breakfast and watched a movie, smoked out, got more beer and spent another night together.  It was freaking awesome.  They loved me being there and I loved being there.  We were such great friends, very close, talked about intimate stuff but didn’t get on each other.  There was some sexual tension, we could feel it but we didn’t give in.  It would have ruined the friendship.

When I was engaged to be married I had been basically living with my fiance and I gave those chicks the phone number to her house so they could get a hold of me.  No cell phones yet, not social media or Internets.

I had cleaned up cold turkey when I met my wife.  I just knew we were going to get married.  So I did the honorable and right thing and put my past behind me.  I didn’t really miss it because I was prepared for this new adventure.  But those chicks called my fiance’s phone and I picked up and they were cussing and laughing and wanted to party but I said I was done and was getting married.  They were super cool and congratulated me.  They gave me closure to my partying ways in some strange way.  I love women as friends but once I get in to a relationship things change.

daVinci’s was closed on Monday but the fire department in Oregon City wanted to have a meeting at daVinci’s on Monday afternoon so Patrick did it for them and the wait staff he chose was me, Adam and Chris because we were the best.  We knew how to have fun, and Patrick loved that about us, but we also knew how to bust ass when things got hot so he loved us for that as well.  He knew he could count on us to serve them an excellent meal.

We poured carafes of red wine and white house wine because they got to choose spaghetti and meatballs or chicken piccatta as their main course.  However, they were working so they did not drink any of the wine.  When we were breaking down after they left, Patrick told us to pour the wine back in to the Jugs.  It was house wine, not horrible but it was cheap Burgundy.  A little sharper than a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Pinot, but it did not suck. And as white wines go, it was a much sweeter than a Pinot Grig or Savignon Blanc.  It was kind of odd for and LDS Elder to know his wines so well.  I could talk about wine like the growers knew after I was done at daVinci’s.  Patrick taught me so much about the world that I did not learn from my parents.  My parents knew this stuff but had changed their lives and become clean LDS Saints so there was no talk of good wines in our house.  But when we were out with the relatives, the wine flowed like the Salmon of Capistrano.

I had cleaned my life up and was now engaged to be married

There was a play at our high school and our church group was going to see it for the activity of that week.  Me and Lance were together with a couple of other dudes in my Capri before the play started.  We were driving around the neighborhood and noticed it was garbage day.  So I drove up next to a garbage can, these were the small tin ones, not the huge ones with wheels, and Lance grabbed the can by the handle, I hit the gas and we got up to about 60mph and I said, OK, let go.  So he let got of the garbage can so it would catch an edge and it was flipping like a pin wheel throwing trash all over the street and we sped off laughing our asses off.  Then we turned around and drove all non-chalant back by the mayhem where now there were people outside checking out the chaos that just hit their queit neighborhood and we were laughing.  Nobody saw us coming or going.

The fee to get in to the play was a can of food so we all had a can of food we swiped from our parent’s cabinet.  Lance had a can of minestrone  soup and I said, let me see your can dude. He handed it to me and I tossed it out the window.  He said, hey man that was my ticket into the play.  I was laughing and I said, OK I’ll go back and get it.  So instead of just getting it out of the street I ran over it and it was flat and crushed but I picked it up and said, there you go.  And he was cool with that.  When we went to enter the theater he just dropped that smashed can into the bucket and got in.

There wasn’t a lot of entertainment like there is today so we spent a lot of time at the video game store called Cosmo’s, playing pinball, Galaga, The Vortex, Frogger, Centipeede and stuff like that.  

We lived in a place called The Heights because it was just about a mile from the Columbia River but about a mile up on the top of a huge plain.  I suppose that is why Evergreen High school has a Plainsman as their mascot.  The Evergreen Plainsmen.  I wonder if Barack Obama made them change it to the Evergreen Plainspeople.

The city sat up on the hill and the rich folks lived down the hill closer to the river.  Our pinball shop was right on the edge of the hill so you walked a block down the street and suddenly you’re going down a 15% grade for half a mile.  There was a dumpster behind the video game store and me and Lance had the bright idea of rolling it down the hill.  Not a good idea.  Hilarious, but a terrible idea.  There were cars parked on the hill on the street too so I know we caused some major damage.  I don’t even want to think about it.  Yea we rolled that dumpster down the hill and took off running so we didn’t see the destruction in its wake.  But we heard a lot of loud crashing sounds.  That one kind of freaked us out because that was kind of huge.  But we did it.

There was a construction site at the crossroads of McGlophlin and Leyser with an outhouse sitting there for the workers.  Whenever I went to Lances house I had to drive past that thing and I usually had Jay with me because whenever I needed to be entertained I would just go pick up Jay and it got gnarly.  He was as crazy as me and Lance.  But he turned out to be the most stable of us three as we got older.  So we’re always driving past this outhouse and my mind was thinking, that’s an outhouse, there has to be something I have to do to cause trouble for those workers.  It was right at a four way stop so every time we drove past it we had to stop.  That was a great opportunity for rebellion.  We would switch it out, sometimes I would stop the car and do it and sometimes Jay would just run over and do it.  We would run up to the outhouse and slam in to it like a football stick and it would tip over.  Shit everywhere for sure.  Then the next day the thing was vertical and we did it again.  Any time there was nobody around that thing got knocked over.  I can’t believe we did that kind of irresponsible and destructive shit.

When I was going to early morning seminary I would go pick up Wayne first and then we would go pick up Lance and we were supposed to pick up Donny Shawcross too, he lived next door to Lance so that was convenient.  But Donny was one weird dude.  We weren’t quite sure what was his problem but he was super creepy.  But, he was fun sometimes and liked to rock out, get hammered and do crazy shit too.  But we knew he was demented, we just didn’t know in what way.  I would drive in to Lance’s driveway, he would run out of the house and jump in the car and Donny would be walking to get in the car and we were assholes.  I would act like I didn’t see him and just take off without him.  This went on over and over again.  I can’t believe dude didn’t give up but morning after morning Lance would hurry and get in the car and we would see Donny running to get a ride and we would just drive off and leave his sorry ass.

After we graduated high school me and Lance and Donny got along pretty well because of our mutual interest in music and getting loaded.  Donny’s mom got married to some old dude who had money and she gave him a debit card to live on while she was away with her new husband.  Donny and his older brother had the house to themselves and no jobs and an unlimited bank account.  So of course we took advantage of that.

One time me and Donny went to downtown Portland for some hijinks and Journey was in concert at the Coliseum that night.  So I parked somewhere near the Coliseum and we didn’t have tickets but we figured maybe we would go hang out back stage and something might happen.  We were talking to the roadies and all of a sudden I saw my car on the back of a tow truck going up and over the Broadway bridge.  My dumb ass had parked in a tow away zone.  I didn’t see the sign or I would not have parked there.  So I was freaking out because for one thing, I was supposed to be hanging out in the neighborhood at Donny’s pad in Vancouver, not going across the river to Portland.  So we went back to where I parked and found out which towing company had my car then we walked across the Broadway bridge to the towing yard.  The impound fee was $40.  This was 1983 so all things relative, that was a lot of money and I certainly did not have forty dollars but Donny said, hey I have my mom’s card.  We can go to the bank and withdraw $40 and get your car back.  But we had to go back to Vancouver for the transaction.  This was before the convenience of ATM sharing.  If you wanted to withdraw money from your bank with a card you had to go to you bank to do it.  So we told the guy we would go get the money if we could have the car to do it.  And he said, you’ll have to leave me some collateral.  My dad was a contractor who was installing a lot of raised floors because computer networks were new on the LAN and raised floors were necessary to keep all those wires below floor level but still be accessible.  One of the instruments he used to keep a level across the walls as they installed this flooring was a laser.  It was a low powered laser light that shot a red line perfectly level across the walls.  And it was in the trunk of my car, because it was dad’s car.  So we left that laser as collateral and dude let us go get the money.

We came back, paid the man, got the laser back and proceeded to seek out alcohol and party on Waterfront Park.  There was always somewhere to party in Portland.  You just had to show up and look for it and it would find you.  Donny looked older than he was and if we went to the asian convenience stores to get booze he could get away with it without being carded.  So we got a fifth of Jack and got hammered drunk that night.  We got so wasted we didn’t even remember the rest of the night.

The next morning I woke up on Donny’s bed, he woke me up and had passed out in the front yard all night.  I got up and looked out the window and saw my car parked along side the curb at an angle.  Obviously I was in no condition to drive.  But somehow I managed to never crash or get a DUI in my youth.  I remember one time I was driving so drunk I was seeing double and a cop was behind me.  I was freaking out but I just knew to keep that needle on the right speed and drive next to the yellow line.  And the cop turned the other way and I had to change my pants.

We eventually figured out about Donny Shawcross.  It was the summer of 1983 and I spent a lot of time at Lance’s house.  His mom worked swing shift at the Dairy Queen.  So me and Lance were kicking it at his house and tuned in to the punk rock hour, he did the dishes while his brother cleaned up the front room to make it look nice and presentable for when mom came home.  It was chaos until the last minute and then everything was cleaned up and put away.  Music was cranked always and me and Lance would go to his bedroom and smoke out trying to hide it from his little brothers.

At this time in our lives we went to dances on Friday night or Saturday night.  Me and Donny, Lance and Nick Wies would put on the records for the dance.  We had all the albums we needed back then and ginourmus speakers to fill the room with danceable music.  So we were the people behind the curtain choosing the music.  Once in a while I would do something crazy like play Carry On My Wayward Son.

.  I had a ride and they did not so my dad and their folks trusted us because what were we doing?  Just going to church before school, right?  What could happen?  Well, I picked up Jay first because I wanted him to witness the mayhem.  I always had to have a witness so Jay was up to his own stuff and he was my best friend and Lance was my best friend but Lance and Jay weren’t friends at all.  I mean, they were cool to each other but the only time they saw each other was because of me or church.  So  it was me, Lance Blas, Ralph Willey, and Jim Lackey and we went down to the old Evergreen highway that ran along the Columbia River.  I was driving a 1977 Cheverolet Impala that had like a 350 V8 engine with a four barrel carb.  I put the pedal to the metal and buried the speedometer needle at 120 plus and kept going.  We were probably doing 140 flying down that highway.  I was a bit nervous about a car coming in to the lane but we got away with it.  I remember Jim and Wayne were freaking out  pushing their hands up to the roof of the car in panic but the rest of us were just balls out crazy laughing and loving it.  So then we went to seminary after getting our hearts pumping for the morning.

I was supposed to pick up Lance and his next door neighbor, Donny Shawcross to go to seminary

Sometimes when I was really pissed off at my parents I would get super stoned before seminary and roll in late with my eyes all red.  There were people in class who knew what was up and other who were oblivious.  I knew the teacher knew one time but he was cool about it.

We used to have church dances and there were a lot of LDS youth in Vancouver.  And in LDS church houses there  is always a basket ball court.  In the larger churches it’s full court maple floors and glass backboards.  We would have the dances in there, we called it the cultural hall.  It was my basketball court.  So when these dances went on of course I had to party before going even though it was church stuff.  Usually we smoked weed but sometimes we got drunk.  So we had to chew gum to hide the smell and  I remember the females telling me that my breath smelled like mouthwash.  I said, yea I just did a bunch of mouthwash to keep my breath fresh.

At one of the dances I had some pot and it was me and Paul Parker and this black dude from school who we had on our basketball team, he was fun and really cool but Paul would call him a nigger and tell him not to nigger lip the joint and I was cracking up, they were like best friends so he just rolled with it.  We got super stoned before the dance and it was a good time.  There was this one chick whose name I do not remember but I remember her for sure.  She had a crush on me and she was pretty hot, good athletic body and huge boobs.  She had been drinking and I was stoned and there was another dance across town so we decided to check it out.  I drove and she came on to me big time, she was trying to make out with me as I was driving and I had my hand around her shoulder feeling up her spectacular tits.  So we got to the dance and just sat in the car and made out all night but finally went in and boogied down all conservative and what not.  I got to play with her rack so that was cool.  

It was kind of like being jewish.  We wanted chicks, they wanted us but we were celibate until marriage.  But we fooled around a lot and LDS girls were brought up healthy and clean so they were the most foxy chicks around.  And dudes were jealous of me because I was friends with all of these hot chicks that they wanted and I did not play on their teams because of my age.

Remember in high school I had a girlfriend named Katrina Crane who was absolutely THE finest chick in school.  I do not even remember how we got together but chicks liked me and once in a while I would let them in.  One day I was with her at her locker and one of the football players who was all tough and though he was cooler than me saw me through a window and he knocked on the window outside, I turned and looked and he was flipping me off.  Yeah I had their hottest cheerleader girlfriend…(dude, this is a little bit like Grease haha! that’s for you Gary)  

So those assholes started talking to her and she did something that pissed me off and I broke up with her.  It did not end up like Grease but it was going in that direction.  If my parents had been cooler it totally would have paralleled that screen play but I broke up with her and she would not get back together with me when I asked.  So I screwed that relationship up but I would probably had a bunch of enemies from the football team.

I was broken hearted because I was in love with her, it was puppy love but dude, how does a guy like me get the hottest chick in school and then lose her forever?  That was the first of many heartbreaks in my life.  I never got good at dealing with them because those experiences are like car accidents.  All of a sudden shit just gets messed up and you’re sitting in the middle of the intersection with the headlight spinning around wondering how in the hell did it come to this?

But what do you do?  Pick up the pieces and plod on.  I saw her with her new football player boyfriend who she married.  I bet those assholes told her how to break up with me or get me to break up with her because like two weeks later she was with Dana Folz and they are married to this day.  She friended me on Facebook however.  I should ask her about that.  They look happy but he is a big fat ass with a mustache and I am Vaughn Brown so she lost in that one.  I don’t hold it against her.  She was young and impressionable   as we all were.  I didn’t have anything to offer her anyway.  She got all the attention she needed from those jock assholes.

But I knew I was way cooler than them and that my life would kick ass as they settled in to their  home life and got fat watching TV and eating processed food things.  

I had another girlfriend for a short time who I took to my Sr. year homecoming.  She was not the most beautiful, still super cute and best friends with my best friends’ girlfriend.  But me and Larry’s girlfriend hated each other.  Because she had a huge crush on me that I would not give in to.  She was super hot but there was something off-putting about her.  So I introduced Larry to her and they hit it off and she stopped hounding me.  And when we were making out I would be in one room with my girlfriend and Larry would be in the other room with her and across the house while we were making out, she and I would pick fights with each other and argue during the make-out sessions.  Because as we did not become lovers, we became enemies.  I don’t know why it worked that way but it did.  It sucked having my best friend in love with a total bitch to me.

And that happened more than once.  Jay got married to Sandy, his high school girlfriend.  She was the love of his life but made his life hell.  She did not like me because when I came around Jay would change a bit, and get all reasonable and she couldn’t control him as well as when I was not in his life.  She was controlling and so was he so it was fire on fire and they could not see eye to eye but they were attracted to each other because they were so good looking, and they did look good together.  In the beginning she was nice to me but later on me and Kevin would go see Jay and she would open the door, let Kevin in and grab me by the shoulders and shove me out of the house.

They got separated and so me and Jay moved in together in south Seattle and did our work at Emergency Networks.  Sandy lived up north in Ballard, which was funny because Jay’s last name is Ballard.  So Sandy Ballard moved to Ballard and me and Jay lived in Kent.  Sometimes when Jay wasn’t around and she was crazy pissed off she would get scissors and cut up his clothes like a psycho bitch from hell.  And Jay would apologize to me because she cut up my clothes as well.  

When me and Kevin would come to pick up Jay to go out for a night on the town we would knock on his door, Sandy would answer and let Kevin in but she took me by the shoulders, turned me around and shoved me out the front door.  So I stood out there laughing, smoked a cigarette but just to irritate her I would ring the door bell and knock on the door.  And yell things like, It’s the paper boy, or Did you guys order Chinese food?  I always had to have fun even when bitches tried to screw up a good time.

Jay did not have any fashion sense but when we went out on the town together, which was far and few between, once in a while Jay would cut loose and party with Vaughn.  So because we were going out on the town I made him dress up a bit and he perused my closet and got dressed up like I did with the fashion of the day so we could score chicks.  We would go dancing and drinking in downtown Seattle and we met two hot German chicks who were here as nannies.  I hit it off with Marie and Jay was not the ladies man that I was because he was going through a separation but still married so he was tormented about going out on the town with the guys.  So those two did not hit it off but me and Marie sure did.  We were in to each other big time.  She was so hot, blonde foxy from Germany.  She was cool with me and beer but she did not like me smoking.  And at this time in my life I smoked cigarettes and pot like it was food.  

I would try to hide it from her but she could tell and she would say with her accent, You smoked.

But I never smoked around her and she was cool with that.  Man, she was so mouthwatering, I could not get enough of her.  And we really didn’t have anything in common but beer and sex but at the age of 25 that’s about all I needed in a girlfriend.  I left her place one morning and did not call her for two weeks and it was pretty much over at that point so I apologized if I hurt her, but I thanked her for being so good to me and making me feel good about myself.  It was a good break-up.  

The reason I moved to Seattle in the first place was for a job as an alarm tech for a company called Emergency Networks.  This job was so kick-ass.  When I made it as lead tech I was getting paid piece rate so we worked fast and did quality work and made more money per hour that way.  I made at least $150 a day and sometimes $300 if I did two installs by myself and they were limited access.  I was the best tech so I got the best jobs.  Next to Jay, he was the best and he trained me.

I worked with a dude name Rick Rhoderman  who was super cool, about five years older than me but we loved much of the same things in life and would tell stories and laugh and have lunch together and work fast and make good money.  So we got to know each other and I was new but I mentioned I would go home and drink a beer and have a smoke.  He said what kind of smoke.  So I laughed and said the green kind if I had it.  He asked me if I had any and I said I didn’t know where to get any.  He told me his wife was a pot dealer.  Bingo!  So I would hang out at his place, buy my weed and just smoke theirs all night.  We had a blast together.  I did that for a couple of years, several times a week.

Then his brother in law moved up from northern California.  He had just been honorably discharged from the army.  He was an airborne Ranger, made it through the first time.  Most fail the first time because the course is so hard.  He jumped in to Honduras, Panama and Grenada and fought Reagan’s wars against communism.  He got a bronze star for heroism and after his service he boxed golden gloves for the army.  He was a tough  mofo and one of my best friends soon after we met.  He started working at EmNet too and he was my side tech.  He was  military disciplined and I was basically raised that way too so we could slam out a difficult installation in less time that any of the other teams.  We saw the challenges as obstacles to conquer.  So we worked really well together and after work we partied our asses off together.

Kevin could keep up with me.  Most of my friends could not.  We like psychedelics a lot too.  One day we got done super early and I had a bunch of LSD in my freezer so I told Kevin, he do you want to drop acid this afternoon.  And he said, Does the pope wear a funny hat?  It was about 3pm so we took a couple tabs each and it started kicking in.  We were in no condition to drive but we were walking around the town, going to the convenience stores, buying candy, laughing at anything, just having a blast and then I got an idea.

I roomed with Jay.  Jay was the assistant manager at EmNet and we knew he would be coming home around 5pm.  That’s when the LSD was kicking in good and strong.  So my idea was to try and blow Jay’s mind.  What we did was lock the front door but open the slider, turn on all the lights in the place, turn on the TV to static and turn the volume up all the way and do the same with every radio in the house.  Turned on every appliance, opened the oven and had it on broil, every burner was on high.  The microwave was going with nothing inside, the hair dryer was blowing but nobody was using it, the shower was running but nobody was in there and we saw Jay drive in to the parking lot so we set the pad up like that and then I laid down on the couch and Kevin laid down on my futon and we acted like we were sleeping.  

We positioned ourselves to be able and see his reaction, because that was what it was all for.  He came walking up the stairs and unlocked the door and just when he saw what was going on with everything in high gear and us asleep, I saw his head twitch to the side just a little bit because I know it freaked him out for a second.  But then he realized it was me and Kevin and he knew we were up to something.  So later he told us, yea, I figured it was you two doing your acid thing.  We had a good laugh and he was a good sport.  He didn’t party like we did because he saw his parents mess their lives up with booze and drugs.  He did every once in a while but he was clean as a whistle.  A straight up great friend who I could trust and for some reason he put up with me.  I think he found me entertaining.  We did have a lot of fun together when we were younger and that kept us bonded.

Another time me and Kevin were paroozing around downtown Seattle late at night we were around Pike Place and there was a maze of stair cases that intermingled throughout the shops and condos out of doors and there were elevators for if one did not want to take the stairs.

These stairs and elevators were somewhat of a genius undertaking of a construction project  that made it super convenient to get up and down those crazy hills in Seattle.  Because downtown Seattle is way wonkier that San Francisco and the hills are steep.  If you live down there and must walk those hills you don’t have to go running for excersize, 

  I had the pipe in my hand and was standing on one side of a corner, Kevin was on the other side.  Suddenly the cops come out of nowhere.  I didn’t see them because I was on the other side of the wall.  I saw a look in Kevin’s eye and I knew what he was looking at so I turned and split the other direction while he talked with the cops.  Fortunately I had the weed so he was clean.  They talked with him for a moment and then I walked down the stairs across the street just as he was walking down the stairs right in front of me after leaving the police.  We met up again and didn’t even say a word and took off sprinting down Seneca street.  We were both athletic and fast and we were out running each other on  high adrenaline.  He would get ahead of me so I would pour it on and get ahead of him, back and forth until we saw the big staircase up to the parking lot where my car was and we bolted up those stairs like we were running a race.  We got to my car and he said, yea, it was cops.  We were laughing so hard and catching our breath.  We had adventures like this and it was good bonding times.  I still had the pipe in my hand so we finished it off and drove home.

Kevin and I decided to rent an apartment together because we spent all our time together anyway.  So we got one right on top of East Hill in Kent Washington.  The day we were moving in we had to throw a party of course so everyone was invited, the party was just getting started and everybody pooled their money and I drove to my dealer’s house to score a half ounce of killer bud.  I got there and Janie wasn’t there but some other people were and they were selling for her.  I thought it was her cousins.  They weighed out a half ounce on the scale which I though was odd because she always had it in bags ready to go.  I got up to leave and they said are you forgetting something?  I laughed and said, oh yea, I do this all the time.  I forgot to pay.  So I reached in my pocket, gave them $160 and turned to leave and a dude was blocking the door way and had a pair of hand cuffs dangling from his index finger.  He said put your hands behind your back, you’re under arrest.  So I thought he was joking and I laughed, patted him on the back and tried to walk out the door and suddenly cops came out from every door, closet, bedroom, bathroom, hallway with guns drawn and cuffed me and put me in the car.  They arrested two more dudes and took us to the Maple Valley jail, let me sit in a cell for about 45 minutes and then let me call Jason to come and pick me up.

They were waiting and waiting for me to get home and when I finally called he told me he had a feeling I got busted.  Several days earlier I had bought from Janie and I saw helicopters flying over her house.  I thought that was weird.  They were kind of hovering.  She lived in the east of Kent up on a hill out near farm land so she was isolated.  A dark road, no traffic except for her business dealings.  I figure the neighbors got wise and called the cops.  That was such a drag because she was always home whenever I called, always holding, always generous and often times like I told the cops I would forget to pay because I was friends with her too.  We would sit at her dining room table smoking cigarettes and chatting friendly and smoke a few bowls then I would grab my weed and leave.  She would call me later and say, Hey Vaughn did you forget something?  I would laugh and say oh man I’m so sorry.  She said that’s cool just bring it next time.  I was there at least every three days.  One time I was so backed up I wrote her a check for $360 for weed.  She took it and it cleared of course.  I wrote a check for weed.  That cracks me up.  Who buys dope with a check?

After the bust she started dealing again a couple of weeks later and it was business as usual.  But not for me necessarily.  The night of the bust me and Kevin had moved in to the new apartment so I was driving a company truck for the move.  It got impounded during the bust and because of that I got fired.  We had a no drug policy at work but my boss told me that he would not have fired me if it had not been for the police having contacted the national sales center in Dallas about the impoundment.  If they had just kept it local I would have been able to keep working.  I was that good that they would have let that slide.  But because corporate got wind of it, they had to let me go.

What’s funny is before Jay was manager we had a manager named Frank.  He used to be an installer but got promoted and he managed us pretty well, liked me and that’s why I got all the good jobs.  One Friday afternoon when everyone was gone from the office but me and Frank he called me in to his office and told me to take a seat.  I was wondering what was up, and got a little bit nervous.  He said, see that paper bag next to your chair?  Hand it to me.  So I did.  I was a tokemaster bong, about four feet long and he loaded it up and we got super stoned in his office.  Hahaa!  He told me not to tell any one and I only told Kevin.  Then I told Rick, Kevin’s brother in law and we kept it between us so there was a silent understanding in the company where to get weed, who smoked and who not to tell.  It was 1990 and we were young and single.  Every Friday all the techs would be back at the shop and there were cases of beer flowing, we were talking about what bars we were going to be at that night, then we would go home, get cleaned up and see each other out on the night for drinks and some pool and darts and hijinks.  Those were some good days and I got the kibosh after I got busted.  The money wasn’t rolling in anymore and I had to take a far lower wage job and eventually moved back to Vancouver.  That was a total drag.  I kind of left Kevin hanging with the apartment but I didn’t have the income and couldn’t keep living my lifestyle and surviving like I was so I had to take off and move home for a time.  That was around the time I started my goldsmith apprenticeship and moved back up to Seattle for a short time again.  I spent a lot of time with Kevin but was rooming with Jay and attending Highline College in a goldsmithing program.  I was also spending a lot of time with my ex girlfriend Rocky AKA Raquel Sagarese.  She was a drop dead gorgeous italian bombshell from New York who loved to rock out as hard as me.  We went to so many shows together.  She was the best rock and roll girlfriend ever.  We were all about music and art and making love and wearing our leather jackets and dressing grunge, going to all the shows and moshing.  

One night in the middle of the week there was a show in Portland that we had to see.  I had to work the next morning but I was not going to miss this show.  So me and Rocky had tickets and we took off about 3:00 that afternoon from Seattle and drove to Portland after work to get to the show on time.  It was at the University of Portland in 1990 and it was The Pixies, Primus and Jane’s Addiction.  

Of course I saw my buddy Mike in the pit.  Rocky had the pleasure of standing in front of the barricade and watched the show safely as I moshed and crowd surfed.  I already told this story.  But what was arduous was the drive home, three hours back to Seattle after those three killer sets and we got home about 3am and I got up at 6am to go to work.  I was dog tired but fortunately had not partied that night.  I actually went to that concert sober.  I don’t know what in the hell I was thinking but I think it was the only sober concert I saw in those years.  It was because of work and my diligence in being a good employee but I knew I had my obligation to rock and roll too so I burned the candle at both ends.

Rocky was great and her parents were great too.  I crashed at her place and went to work the next day.  Rocky had a huge family of nine brothers and sisters.  A massive Italian family from New York who were loud and who loved each other so much.  It was wonderful to be a part of that family while we were together.  Her parents, Joey and Theresa loved me and all her brothers and sisters did too.  Before MMA Joey and Theresa were cage fighters and black belts in several disciplines.  Rocky was a fighter too, a total drop dead sexy leather clad dark curly haired green eyed italian bad ass.  She rocked my world and I loved it.  She had the most beautiful naturally curly long black hair and penetrating green eyes with a gorgeous smile and mouthwatering dimples in her cheeks when she smiled.  I was smitten and she loved me too.  I was 7 years older than her and she was all over me.  I would be at home doing something, trying to concentrate and she would be frisking me, kissing me on the neck and chest, fondling me and I was trying to concentrate on what I was doing and kind gave her the cold shoulder a few times.  She was frisky but when I had her attention it was awesome.  She loved watching me crank tunes and sing at the top of my lungs Jane’s Addiction and RHCP just acting like I was a rock star.  She was mesmerized and we were in love and having fun.  I had a poster from Jane’s Addiction’s first album on my bedroom wall.  It was of naked siamese twins and I told Rocky that her boobs looked like the ones on the poster, so she pulled up her shirt and was comparing them.  I was enjoying that eye candy.

But I had to move away again and that romance fizzled.  She is still a dear friend to this day but married and lives in New York again.  Her parents say she should have married me but she was much younger than me and had some life to live.  And she did, but those stories are for her memoirs.

After Rocky I dated Rene for a while.  She was one of the best girlfriend’s ever.  Like I said we never had a contentious moment.  We were best friends, laughed all the time, loved everything we did together and loved getting romantic.  She was a hot strawberry blonde with green eyes and she looked a lot like Marisa Tomei.  My buddies were digging her being around but she did not stray fortunately.  My friends wouldn’t have done that to me as much as they all wanted her too.  She could keep up with the boys when it came to partying too and that was a major bonus.  She loved taking acid and smoking weed, getting drunk and letting our freak flags fly but being responsible during the week.  But on the weekends it was just assumed that we were going to scoop out a party and have fun to the nth degree.  We started Friday evening and didn’t slow down until Sunday morning.  Then we would settle down, get some rest and get ready for the next work week, build the bank account for the next weekend’s raging.

Rene was the secretary at Emergency Networks and we talked a lot but it was a long time before we ever became involved. We were just friends. I would talk to her about her divorce and we started talking about going to a party together some time.  We had a look spic and span because we were installing security systems so we had to be clean shaven.   But I being the guy who always found a way around the rules and still got away with things being trustworthy, (you certainly can not judge a book by its cover and when you saw me, you had a first impression, then when you got to know me it was completely different from what was expected).  I had long hair and ear rings but I took my ear rings out and put my up in my EmNet hat.  And everyone at work saw me this way and the boss knew but he did not say anything because I played it off like I was all clean cut.

One Friday after work, I was chatting with Rene and we started to flirt a bit and I could feel it and she could too but we did not want to screw things up at work so nothing happened until this one Friday afternoon.

I usually parked my car in the back behind the shop but for some reason I must have come in late when the front doors were opened.  The front doors did not open until we left for our jobs for the day and then the sales people all showed up.  My car was out front this day and I said good bye to Rene and walked to my car.  And it was the chick magnet car, I did not get it for that reason but I bought it mostly because of how stylish it looked.  That car was one of a kind, just like me.  I walked out in to the parking lot and took off my hat and took my hair down and my long hair dropped past my shoulders and she said right then and there she was smitten with me.  Because even though I wore the EmNet outfit of blue police safety salesmanship I still was able to rock my black leather biker jacket with that huge RHCP star emblazoned on the back, also with chains hanging from the shoulders and metal rings to look hard core.  Because I knew how to play it cool for society and I knew the true Vaughn Brown on the inside, or I was just getting to know him.

She told me that one time as we partied together, dropped acid and made out.  I spent most of the summer of 1991 in her condo, working, treating her like a queen, getting high and making love.  I didn’t even think about it but later on after it was all said and done, the dudes told me how jealous they were of my lifestyle with Rene.  Because like I said, she could hold her own as one of the boys when it came time to party and she loved dropping acid of doing Robo and she was so mouthwatering hot I don’t know how come I was so blessed with that.  I felt like a god damed rock star man, but I did not have a band.  Actually, I had all of those Seattle bands to rock out for me all the time.  It was surreal, super sublime and I took it all in.  I know I am repeating myself but when I realize what kind of lifestyle I lived up there, it kind of freaked me out.

One night I was tripping on acid and my roomies went to Taco Bell and I was home alone with the television on and I think it was like NBC news or something serious like that.  And I saw my scriptures sitting on the floor, I opened them up once in a while but they were not my tools at that time in my life.  I was doing it on my own.  However, I was doing it basically how I was taught to behave in the scriptures, except for the rebellious part that I knew I could repent of later.  And that is some messed up entitled bullshit, I know.  But that is how I lived back then.  And that is why I have been so humbled in my later years.  Because I still prayed all the time even though I knew I was not worthy to be a member of the church, that testimony of Christ burned inside me like a fire bright, gleaming and leading me on my way, even in rebellion I felt His love.  So maybe I was chosen for this path, to experience all of it and show the world that repentance is real and that it works if you allow it to.

Back that night when my friends went to Taco Bell and I was alone, frying balls on acid and having taken many bong hits was in deep oblivion that I liked to be in on weekends, but not usually alone.  For some reason that night I said, naw, I’m good, don’t need any Taco Bell right now.  So they were gone for about twenty minutes and during that time I heard the daily news, my life flashed before my eyes and I fell on my knees in prayer begging God to help me out of this crazy net that I had been caught up in.  I said, Heavenly Father, I love this shit but I know it’s wrong.  Please take me out of it and help me be a better man.  That was right before I got busted at my dealer’s house.

The Lord works in mysterious ways to bring to pass His will for Mankind.  And when I got busted, I remembered that prayer that day and it reminded me once again that no matter what I was in to, God knew me and he loved me and he answered the desires of my heart to help me become a better man.  And I knew that the road would not be a road I would have chosen but I knew it was the road my Father in Heaven paved before me to walk.

And I have to throw this in just for fun, because we all like to bash on uppity Christian holier than thou types.  Even though I am LDS, I still believe that the Holy Spirit is poured out upon those who worship Christ sincerely in their hearts.  But those holy rollers tell us, the LDS Saints that our inspiration comes from the devil and that we are deceived and that it is all a lie.

But they also preach that by their fruits you shall know them and it also says in the Bible that every good thing comes from God and every bad thing comes from the devil.  So we honored their testimonies in Christ, and had fun with them as they tried to tell us we were going to hell for worshiping a false Messiah.  I do not understand how so-called Christians can be taught the principles of Christ from the Bible but not learn them.  Because all they did was use them as weapons of war to call out sinners.  Christ did not operate that way and that is why LDS people do not operate that way.  We love every person as an individual, however we shun groups that go against our morals and values.  But uppity Christian fucktards don’t see it that way so whenever I have a chance to meet one of those loudmouths on the street I calmly talk them back to reality and put a little bit of common sense in to their understanding of Christ.  Because they use Christ as a weapon.  He is not a weapon, he is everything that is good, compassionate and healing.

Alright, enough of my yacking about Jebus.  

Back to Seattle and my girlfriend, Rene. We started hanging out just as friends and one thing lead to another and we were solid for a good seven months until her divorce was final and she felt released and decided she had to not only be divorced but be single for a while so she dumped me cold.  I already mentioned it but that’s why it happened.  And like I said, that one hurt real bad.  She broke up with me at my birthday dinner.  My 25th freaking birthday.  Can you believe that?  Right as we were getting drinks, I drank my tequila sunrise, chased it with a Henry’s and then we got on the dance floor for a romantic slow dance but my heart was breaking and she was trying to console me.  And she expected me to enjoy the rest of the night.  I got drunk and stoned and was sad and forlorn.  She was very sweet to me but I was holding back tears.  

I turned to my friends for comfort and started partying even more.  Just killing the pain, getting more intense and doing crazier shit than ever.  I put off women for a time after Rocky and Rene.  Those two roller-coastered my heart into oblivion.

It was party time and time to go to a lot of shows.  So that’s what I did for the next year.  Partied way too much and went to as many shows as I could.  I actually skipped several shows I should have gone to.  Soundgarden was getting ready to tour for their Badmotorfinger tour and were doing shows around town under assumed names.  Jason had the inside scoop and knew every show they were playing.  He went to every show but I stayed home for most of them because they were in the middle of the week and had to get up in the morning for work.

But one weekend night the Jackofficers (a side project by two members of the Butthole Surfers that did EDM, real psychedelic EDM that did not suck like dub step did).  So the opening bands played and it was the Screaming Trees and a metal band called Panic.  So we were stoked for the Jackofficers because it was Gibby and Pinkus from the Butthole Surfers and we knew we were in for a psychedelic mind job.  But after the last opening band got done there was a super long break for an hour and a half and it lasted until about 1am and everyone stuck around for the hype because we knew that as the night got later, the show was going to be even more gnarly.  The show was at Rockandy and that place had a reputation for breaking the rules and pushing the envelope so we knew we were in for a treat.

When the band finally came out it was not the Jackofficers, it was fucking Soundgarden.  And they played their entire new album Badmotorfinger as rehearsal for their tour with Metallica.  Man, that was a surprise treat that even Jason was not privy to.  And that was the last time I saw Soundgarden until I saw Chis Cornell on his solo tour where he played everything.  He played Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine and his solo stuff.  It was like seeing three bands fronted by Chris Cornell in one show.  And that dude did not off himself.  Hell no.  I have done research and just before he died he was trying to expose a pedophile ring within the music industry that went in to Hollywood, just Like Corey Haim was trying to do.  Then Chris’s best friend, Chester Bennington was going to finish the work, he was found dead by the same means.  They called it suicide but rock stars do not commit suicide.  They go out in a blaze of glory.

I could have seen Soundgarden any time I wanted to but I wish I would have gone to those shows because that was right before they blew up and Nirvana got famous and we couldn’t see them anymore.  

But we didn’t know that was going to happen.  We were talking about what if and how cool it would be if our bands made it huge and we were thinking and talking, Me and Jason and Bob about that and me and Jason were thinking that Badmotorfinger was going to put Seattle on the map, but Bob said, no man, Smells Like Teen Spirit is going to be the one.  Listen to it dudes.  It has punk sensibility, pop sensibility, it has a catchy hook and it’s radio friendly.  So we agreed on that and he was right about that one.  He called it.  Bobby X Anderson, the grunge rock prophet.  That was exactly the same time that Metallica’s black album hit the charts and The Red Hot Chili Peppers’, Blood Sugar Sex Magik took over the world.  That all happened in October 1991.  I thought rock and roll was on it’s death bed but this lineup came around and saved it.  Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Tad, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, they saved rock and roll.  Even Gruntruck was a great band that got none of the Seattle love.  There were too many at that point but Gruntruck was killer and I wish they had done better.  They had a seven record recording contract with some label but drugs got in the way of their success.  Man they were so fucking good, heavy and so tight.  They played the chunka chunkas better than even Metallica.  Gruntruck was something else but the stinking drugs screwed it up for them.

I saw them play at Tad’s record release party in 1992 at the Crocodile Cafe.  Me and Jason had passes from his employment at Bubble Records so we did not have to stand in the line  that was around the entire block and down the street, we just walked right in, no nonsese.  Gruntruck was kind of a cross between Alice in Chains and Soundgarden.  Yea, they should be known because they fucking rocked.

Gruntruck was playing and me and Jason got a couple of drinks and then sparked up a bowl of weed right in front of the entry way and the company brass kicked us out, so we just walked on to the sidewalk  corner of the street where the line was and passed the pipe around to the people in line, then when it was ash we just showed our passes and got back in.  People were looking at us like who in the fuck were those guys and how did that just happen?  We were laughing about how we just blew all those people’s minds.  We were Death McSkate so we had carte blanche bitches.

Nirvana played all the time around town but the one show that was amazing was the one at the Paramount theater on October 31, 1991.  It’s the first live Nirvana performance on DVD and me, Jason, Thor and Kevin were in the pit for that one.  Mudhoney opened that night, as they often did for any big show in Seattle.  It seems like Mudhoney was the go to opening band for a big show.   I even saw Mudhoney open for the Bare Naked Ladies in 1993 at Bumbershoot, before the Bare Naked Ladies got popular.  They put on one seriously entertaining show and totally mocked boy bands.  That was highly entertaining.  Live they were kind of like a jam band but they had hit singles so that screwed them in the recording industry.  They would just play on like the Grateful Dead and trade off solos like jazz musicians do.  They were super talented and those dudes could sing too.  Very good entertainers.  They were definitely a touring band more than a studio band, like I said, much like the Dead was.  They got into it with the crowd and made it a spectacle and a super fun time to remember.  Like the Flaming Lips did but not quite as much fan fare.

Primus, Tad’s record release, the big Nirvana show right before they got huge.  It was Mudhoney’s biggest venue ever at the Seattle Center Arena where the Sonics played.  Smells Like Teen Spirit wasn’t even a national hit yet but it blew up like the next week after the Halloween 1991 show so it was a turning point in their career.  It was cool to have been at that show, knowing it was on film.  I watch it once in a while and remember all the antics they pulled on stage.  I tried to see myself, should have been able to, but the camera’s were too quick to focus, haha.

We were floating in outer space having drunk massive quantities of cough syrup before the show.  That was the best drug for a mosh pit because you got the euphoria of being drunk without being stupid and stumbling and you got the psychedelic mind trip without freaking out on acid.  It was the nectar of the gods in our eyes and we took it as a sacrament before Melvins shows and wore the robo rings that came around the bottle caps.  Those were our connections to one another.  When we were in the pit and couldn’t talk to each other but we saw each other once in a while we would hold the thumbs up with the robo ring on and knew we were still connected.  We had a tight music and drug fueled brotherhood those years.

We produced a magazine called Death McSkate every few months too.  It was a free zine and we had a mailing list and passed them out at shows.  It was all hand made and copied, cut and stapled together at Kinkos on construction paper.  The releases were about the size of a TV guide and were chock full of oddball commentary, strange images, really cool music reviews and strange art.  Lots of really cool indie poetry and prose were written by various contributors.  To be accepted in a release of Death McSkate it had to be pretty cutting edge.  I had a lot of art published.  Death McSkate was even in High Times magazine’s hemp 100 in one of their releases.  So that was nostalgic.  We would send letters with questions to Seattle bands as interviews because we could not contact them by phone and they would, every single one of them, answer our questions and send them back for publishing.  We got Nirvana, The Mentors, The Melvins and some I have forgotten.  Nirvana did not answer our questions but responded to each question with something they wanted us to know about that had nothing to do with the question.  And some of their responses were questions about things in their lives that we had no idea about, they were dropping names of friends and saying all kinds of silly shit.  It was awesome the way the Nirvana would do things.  And that is why we loved them so much.  We all knew it was a big psychedelic mind job and having fun with each other was the best thing you could do.  Their sense of humor and irony ran right up there with Death McSkate’s.  Not many people got it but those who did, loved it even more when it happened.

After the sting operation and my bust I took another lower paying job installing security systems for a rinky dink operation out of some dude’s garage.  He paid me piece rate under the table and I slammed out two of his toughest installs every day.  Right off the bat I was his best installer.  He was amazed at how good I was so he gave me solo jobs and real good ones with a lot of extras that paid well.  One day I only had one job and it was out on one of the Islands in the Puget Sound.  So I went out there in my own car because I had a long drive and wanted my killer car to drive rather than that lame truck.  I had some acid that I wanted to take so I took it with me and after the install I took two tabs and drove home through the forest and the Narrows bridge across the Sound through Tacoma and up through south Seattle and the LSD was starting to kick in about the time I got home.  That was a fun day.  I had a killer trip by myself, I watched Sesame Street and Mr Roger’s Neighborhood.  It was so awesome to just watch those shows again as an adult on acid.  I totally fell in love with the innocence of childhood watching those shows on acid.  It was mind altering and in a very good way.  I became much more compassionate toward children that day, although I still had no clue how to be a dad.  I did like little children after that, because before that experience, kids bugged the hell out of me.

Then I got a roll of tin foil, spread it out on my living room floor, covered it in Zippo fluid and lit a fire in the middle of my living room and danced around the house listening to Jimi Hendrix.  It got really hot so I opened all the doors and windows and just tripped out to the music, kept lighting fires and watching it dance in the middle of the room.  I know it was dangerous but I wasn’t completely out of my mind.  I had it under control and understood the chemistry and knew the foil would not get hot but the heat would rise.  I kept it in somewhat of a bowl so I was playing with fire but not going to burn the house down.  It was a cool blue flame dancing in my mind with Jimi’s psychedelic rhythms.  I had a box of baking soda ready in case something went haywire.  I knew it was risky but I was not about to be the idiot on the news who dropped acid and watched his house burn down.  It was cool, nothing got out of control except for me.

Another time I got a half sheet of acid and was dosing regularly for a good month.  That month was a blur.  I was out of control, dosing after work, staying up all night, then working all day and coming home to crash at 4pm until the next morning.  I did this until I ran out of the stuff but I was pushing it.  I took 22 hits one day and tripped out for like three days.  It was pushing the limits but I was not losing my mind.  I was losing sleep and my friends were concerned but I had to see how far I could push it. 

I started mixing drug cocktails to see what or where it would take my mind in the experience.  I was careful at first but then after taking robo and acid at the same time I mixed shrooms in there, and of course, it goes without saying I was always smoking pot.  One evening I had taken the trifecta and took a huge bong hit, sitting next to Kevin on the futon watching NBA playoffs and I started seeing colors flowing off of every image on the TV, the posters hanging on the walls, it was like video feedback and it was tripping me out and I let out a burst of breath and said, whoa!  And Kevin laughed and said, “you tweaker”.  He was so cool with my psychedelic mayhem.  I was a lot like Jim Morrison but without the alcohol.  I was not in to alcohol that much.  I started out smoking pot and drinking a lot of good northwest micro brews and I drank a lot of Jaegermeister,  and Rumplemanz, a European peppermint schnapps that was 100 proof.  It went down smooth like a real Russian Standard vodka.  I remember when Rocky broke up with me for the last time, because she said she had a boyfriend in Hollywood named Frank and she felt like she was cheating on him, it was Saturday and I hit the liquor store and bought a fifth of Rumplemanz, drove around town to all my buddy’s houses taking shots to kill the pain, smoking bowls at every stop.  I went to Jay’s place, went and saw Kevin, and Rick (this was before me and Kevin roomed together), Shooter, and I think I stayed at Rick’s place and just talked about my heartache and bitches and they were so cool about everything.  So I got hammered drunk and stoned and blew that one off the best I could.

I started hanging out with these dudes I met in our new apartment complex playing basketball.  We played a lot of cut-throat with three guys playing against each other.  I was actually a really damn good basketball player and scrapped with the best of them at the playgrounds and rec centers.  I loved a good game of pick-up one on one with someone who gave me a challenge.  I even played some guys who had their small moment in the NBA and held my own.  Did not get dominated, stole the ball, I got beat but I held my own.  They complimented me too after we got done because when I asked them to play I heard them laugh under their breath.  I heard that and took it as a challenge.  I got respect but I had to earn it.  I was not a big shot on the ball court.  I had to show my skills.  I was not looked at as a threat so I was not always chosen but when I played I kicked ass and got props.  I just didn’t look like a baller but I was.  When I was 25 I could actually dunk if I was unopposed.  And I could hit a jumper and I was quick under the basket and played killer defense.  My friends told me I should have played college ball but I was too distracted and undisciplined for that.  It would have been good for me though.  I remember playing some pick up games at rec centers sometimes and they would pick out the teams and I wasn’t trying to stand out or anything.  I didn’t know anyone, I just showed up so I got to play but I wasn’t in the crowd.  But when we got to playing the guys I played with would compliment me on my skills and say, you know how to play some basketball.  Because a lot of guys at the gym just knew how to showboat and sucked at defense and ball hogged and didn’t set picks or play right.  The guys who did know the game saw that I understood it and they would often say things to me.  I chalk that up to my dad’s teaching.

So anyway, back to these dudes that lived at the same apartment complex as me, they played a lot of one on one basketball like me and Kevin did so we challenged them to some two on two and they were good but we kicked their asses.  Kevin had a good jump shot and he was quick and could drive the lane but he was only five foot eight so he relied on his quickness and ball handling skills.  And he was a major stoner but he knew how to play some basketball and that was so good for me because I always loved some good one on one with my best friends.  And he was there for me to get that out of my system.  We would play at our complex or go to the local elementary school and play some pickup games with the ballers in town or go to the  Rec center.

Me and Kevin challenged each other at a lot of things and one time at the basketball court at the local elementary school where we played most of our one on one or two on two games, I challenged Kevin and told him I could beat him 11 to 0.  That’s how we scored.  1 point for an inside shot and two points outside the three point line.  Kevin would beat me sometimes because he was damn good and I had a height advantage over him but he played his ass off and it was fun.  So he said, Really? 11 to 0.  What are we betting on?  I said, a pitcher of beer and he said, if I score one point I win?  I said yup, and I am going to win this one mother fucker.  And we laughed and it was on, and it was intense.  There was rage going on but not hatred.  We were playing our asses off and I actually did it but after I hit that last shot I was spent physically and I dropped to the ground trying to catch my breath and Kevin stood over me flipping me the double bird and said Mother Fucker.  I Fucking hate you man.  I laughed, because as bad ass as Kevin was, he could not stand being dominated in any way and I did that to him.  It fucked with his head a little bit.

There were times when we would be drunk at a bar and some big dude would try to  pick a fight with Kevin.  I told Kevin, I know you’ll kick his ass dude, but you’ll wake up in jail bro so go talk shit in his face and walk away.  Tell him how you will beat his ass and then walk away.  So he went up to that dude and said, you’re lucky my bro Vaughn is here because I could snap your neck mother fucker, you don’t know who you’re fucking with.  And I came and put my arm on Kevin’s shoulder and told the guy, you are one lucky mother fucker right now, you really do not know who you’re were just about to get fucked up by.  And he got in the car and chilled out.  Kevin wanted it so bad but I loved him so much like my brother, I didn’t want him to go to jail and have to deal with all of that so I saved his ass that night.

Another night he called me from jail to bail him out.  He said he punched a cab driver’s face and broke his nose and was in jail.  I asked him how much the bail was but I did not have that much in my account.  I would have bailed him out but I could not afford it.  

All kinds of weird stuff went on when we partied.  This one time we were at a local watering hole and we met this dude and his girlfriend.  Couples always liked hanging out with us because they got some sense of adventure from us or something.  So it was closing time and this dude’s girlfriend was hot and she was coming on to me, they were going through a breakup and I think the dude was OK with me hooking up with her.  So we went back to our pad (me and Kevin were rooming at this time) to smoke some weed to end the night.  And the guys were in the kitchen taking bong hits and me and dude’s girlfriend were sitting on the couch flirting, but I did not make a move.  My imagination was getting carried away with me.  All I could imagine was taking her in to my bedroom and this dude coming in trying to fight me while I was naked so I didn’t even go there.  But I should have told her that she was going to stay the night with me and I would drive her home in the morning.

While I was dating Rene and working at EmNet there was another secretary there named Simone Garcia.  She had a kick-ass cool boyfriend named Bill and we hit it off big time.  Liked to drop acid together, smoke out.  Me and Bill would go hang out without the females, he was one of my new best friends.  We all went camping together on long weekends, it was sex, drugs and 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000rock and roll.  They were up for it and so was Rene and of course that was my theme for the day, every day that I could.  Bill called Simone Simmy, Simmy G. So I started calling her Simmy G too.  It was around the fourth of July 1991 and we had a long weekend so me, Rene, Bill and Simmy went camping east of Seattle around the Grand Coulee Dam.  On the fourth of July they would open the spillways and do a laser light show on the water falls.

So we dropped acid for this event and watched a laser show on the Grand Coulee Dam with fireworks going off in the distance.  It was a visual trip.  I was running around the parking lot like I was riding a horse, my hair was long and black, I didn’t have a shirt on but I had my leather biker jacket on with beaded necklaces and I had a goutee without the mustache and Simmy G started tripping out and Rene asked me if I would calm down because Simmy said I reminded her of the devil.  I could see that narrative playing out in a young girl’s mind watching a dude like me rage and party full force.  I freaked people out sometimes but I was all about getting gnarly and tripping balls and pushing the mind to degrees unthinkable.  Because I knew it was a drug and as unfamiliar as it got sometimes, I knew it was a new experience for knowledge and that it would wear off.  Other people would forget these facts and allow the drug to take them on a bad scary trip that they thought they would never come back from.  I have talked many people down from a bad trip just letting them know they are loved and that all those weird thoughts were only thoughts and that they were not real, just imagination.  And told them to think about the people they love and the good things they have in life.

And the reason I could do this is because I have tripped on LSD hundreds of times and had several bad trips myself, that I had to work my way out of.  I took a lot of LSD in Seattle during the early 90s and took way too much sometimes but never had a bad trip.  Until after I got busted in that sting operation with my pot dealer.  I decided it would be a good idea to move to Provo, Utah and maybe try to connect with my LDS roots and find a clean lifestyle.  So I moved out there and on my way to Utah I drove up to Seattle to visit those two dudes who I used to drop acid with on the weekends.  I scored some acid and a bag of weed for the drive so I dropped two hits of strong blotter acid and smoked an eighth of good Seattle bud to kill the boredom of driving through the plains and mountains of eastern Washington and Idaho.

I spent the night in Seattle and took off about 8am the next morning.  I took the acid about thirty minutes in to the drive and let it kick in.  I had a huge music collection but for some reason I was really getting in to Metallica’s black album so I listened to that over and over again.  Of course I would slip in some Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Negativland, Melvins but I was getting in to Metallica big time.  I had And Justice For All and the Black album.  And I let my mind wander and ponder and trip out on all kinds of weirdness as I drove through the northwest, watching mountain ranges rise and then I would be in the middle of them 5000 feet above sea level, then come down the mountain and listen to Jane’s Addiction’s, Coming Down the Mountain. at full volume.

Just coming off of my Seattle experience and not quite yet realizing how big the music scene was around the rest of the country, when I landed in Provo I was completely Seattle.  The hair, bandanas, leather jacket, boots, jeans worn out, longl,lll,l,l,,,, u   nderwear under cutoff jeans with boots and big heavy socks, rock band t-shirts.  Dudes in Provo were preppy so I kind of stood out but I didn’t mean to.  I had just come from the latest and greatest to the most wholesome small college town in America.

I signed a contract at the King Henry apartments and made fast friends with my roommates.  Two of them were going to BYU and were teachers at the Missionary Training Center, so they were squeaky clean.  My roommate was named Bill.  He just lived there because it was cheap rent and he worked construction but was LDS.  He didn’t talk much, wasn’t very sociable.  He got up at 5:30am and went to work, came home about 4pm, got some food then took off and came home and went to sleep.  The rest of us were super sociable and having tons of fun.  There were four of us in this pad, the other two were both named Dave and were from Portland.  One of the Daves had a Yamaha 750 that he let me take out on dates with hot chicks, because chicks loved a motorcycle ride.  We played a lot of basketball and listened to a lot of music.  CDs were new so we had a lot of CDs to choose from.  I was not enrolled in college and I did not have a job.  I was being supported by my parents and living life, out of control.  Just starting to push it.  At this time I was pretty innocent but

Basketball was huge back then and we all knew how to play some pick-up ball.  At the Rec centers we would always find dudes who were as good or better than us so we had to up our game a bit and it was good to do that from time to time because we got schooled from guys who were better than us and I liked learning from those experiences to make me better.  And I would talk to them after we played, tell them my thoughts and just try to get better and we would make friends and come back and play again.  But usually we were crashing an already good thing.  Sometimes it worked and we became part of that Thursday at 7pm for two hours of full court basketball and sometimes it was just that night and we did not come back because we did not feel welcome.  And when we did not feel welcome we poured on the gas and showed those assholes who they were dealing with.  Me and Kevin both understood how the military worked so we would have a plan to fuck them up because it was   pick up ball so they played slack defense.  But because they were being dicks to us we brought our A game and shut those fuckers down by stealing the ball, setting picks and blocking shots, driving the lane and calling our own fouls but making the bucket…not all the time but we were good.  Pick up basketball was relaxing and not intense but when these guys treated us like that we showed them up a bit.  I remember when I was playing pick up ball with my dad’s buddies, one dude said, hey man don’t play such hard defense.  I was thinking, where in the hell did you learn to play basketball chump?  Don’t play such hard defense?  Is that how you think you’re going to win, by getting us to slack on defense?  Basketball is not all about offense.  Defense is part of the fun too and I was damn good at it.  What a pussy.  Don’t play such hard defense.  Hey Charlie, I can see your tampon is leaking,  you might want to go to the locker room and check that out.

This is my last basketball story maybe.  Kevin and our buddy who we worked with was hanging out one evening and we were playing cutthroat in our complex basketball court.  The sun was setting and we were getting tired and this smoking hot young female with short hair came walking but with some animal around her neck.

So Kevin and Dan were checking her out and I said, Go break the ice dudes and then I’ll get her phone number.  So they walked out and started talking to her.  She had a pet rat.  I stayed back playing it cool shooting around by myself but keeping an eye on them.  So when they split I grabbed the ball and called out to her and asked her what she had there.  And so I already had something to talk to her about, so I talked to her about what my buddies were saying and they were cool and I told her they were a couple of co workers but that Kevin was like my best friend and that Dan was cool as ice too.  So we chatted for a bit and I asked where she lived.  She said just up around the corner in that building over there.  So I got her phone number and told her I would give her a call that night so we could get to know each other.  And she was totally game for that.  So it worked.  They broke the ice and and I got her number.

We talked on the phone and I asked if I could come over and visit her and she said sure, she was just doing the dishes and watching a movie.  I walked over there and her apartment was pretty much like ours.  No furniture in the front room but bedrooms were decorated like shrines.  I guess they just kicked it in their bedrooms and did not hang out together much.

We talked a while and she said something kind of odd but she thought maybe I would not like but she did not know Vaughn Brown was cool with weirdness.  So she said, you may not like this and when I tell you you might want to leave but I have to tell you I am in to men but I also like women too.  And I said, are you joking?  You just went up two points on my scale baby-doll.  She finished the dishes and asked me if I wanted to have sex with her.  I never knew anyone this forward.  I found out later she was a call girl and had business but she liked me on the side.  She was only seventeen years old too so I was treading on some dangerous territory but a chick like that, how could I say no.  We put on some music and she stripped for me and we got it on that night all night long and then I went home in the wee hours of the morning.

Then I called her up on a Saturday morning and asked her what was going on and she said, ‘Do you want to have sex with me?’  I said that’s not why I was calling but yes, I sure do.  Want to come to my place?  My room mate is kicking it with Dan watching sports on TV so we had the bedroom all to ourselves.  And we got it on for a couple of hours and were listening to music but when the music ended I asked her if she wanted to go out in the living room and choose something else so we could keep going.  So she got up stark naked and just about walked out there in front of those dudes naked to get some music but just as she grabbed the door knob I grabbed her hand and said, wait a second, these dudes are jealous already, I don’t want to rub it in their faces because I truly love those dudes like brothers and that would kill them if you did that.  So we laughed and agreed and I got some CDs and while I was going through them Kevin was like, so what are you and Winter doing in the bedroom Vaughn?  I said, we’re just listening to music and talking.  He said, why is your shirt off and your hair all messed dude.  And we both burst out laughing and I said, dude, she was about to come out naked and grab some CDs but I couldn’t do that to you so I said no, don’t tease them.  And they flipped me off and called me a mother fucker and I went back in my room laughing.

Then the last time we got it on it started just after I sprained my ankle playing ball.  I drank some cough syrup to kill the pain and was listening to Blood Sugar Sex Magik in the living room, took some bong hits and was fading away when I thought about Winter so I called her up and told her what happened and she asked if she could come over and have sex.  I said yeah, now, right now?  She said, I’ll be right over.

I answered the door and was limping around the living room and I had changed the light bulbs in our apartment from incandescent to Red and Green so there was a party atmosphere in our pad with amplifiers, guitars, rock and roll posters, much psychedelia.  So the Chili Peppers were pumping and she came in, we embraced and she pushed me back on to the couch and proceeded to dance for me to Blood Sugar Sex Magik while stripping her clothes off.  Then she took my clothes off and took me by the hand and when I stood up she held my dong and walked me to the bedroom.

We laid down on my futon and put on music and got it on until the sun came up, all night long and she was a screamer too.  Kevin was in the next bedroom but I knew he could handle it.  I knew he was laughing his ass off because I heard the same thing coming from his room before.  In the morning when we decided that it was probably time to come up for air I put on my pants and she got dressed and Kevin was watching sports on Sunday morning.  We embraced and kissed and said goodbye and Kevin said, good by Winter, have a good day.  He was so cool.  But then he started laughing and he said, dude, she got you man.  I said, did we keep you up all night, I’m sorry about that dude but I had her going like a machine.  And I said dude, you know what she told me?  She said, Vaughn, you’re the only white boy who ever made me cum.

And he laughed again and said yea I can see why dude, she totally got you.  And I said what do you mean?  He said look at your back in the mirror dude.  So I did and wowza, it was eight perfect fingernail scratches starting at my shoulder blades and ending just above my waist.  It was symmetrical and as freaky as it was, it was kind of cool and that morning it was just red marks but she got me good and it scabbed over and took a couple of weeks to heal.  I did remember her scratching my back but it did not hurt.  I only felt the passion.  I was pretty high and this was some marathon sex and we were almost hallucinating just getting lost in each other.

But that was the last time I saw her.  She moved back in with her mom in Tacoma.  One thing I forgot to mention was the first night I met her she finished the dishes and walked me back in to her roommates bedroom where there was some girl on girl porn going on.  We sat there and looked at it for a minute, got all aroused before hitting her bedroom but one thing that struck me was all these photographs of her roommate with Sir Mix A Lot.  I said, is she obsessed with Sir Mix A Lot?  She said, no, that’s Anthony, her boyfriend.  So I was humping Sir Mix A Lot’s girlfriend’s roommate.  And then I remembered seeing those Lambo Testarossa’s driving through our apartment complex parking lot all the time, then realized that was Mix coming to see his woman.

I had lost my place at EmNet, I was broken hearted and working for chump change and could have done much better with my life so I packed it up and moved back home to Vancouver.  And that really sucked because I left Kevin in a lurch to find a new roommate and my friends said I was being a dick, but me and Kevin had talked about it and saw eye to eye and told me I had to do it and get my shit together and that he could take care of himself.  I knew that.  And I came back to Seattle to visit from time to time but it wasn’t the same.  After I was gone the party ended and everyone got jobs and girlfriends and just kept on plodding along at life.

I went back to Vancouver for a very short time and then decided to move to Utah where some of my good LDS friends were living.  I figured I could be in a better environment and pick my life up that way.  Things don’t always work out as you plan or imagine them but they do work out in the right ways in the end.  And this was the right thing to do for me.

So I packed up my Grand Prix with all of my worldly belongings and got on the road to Utah.  But before I went to Utah I took a detour up to Seattle to say goodbye to all my pals up there.  I stayed the weekend up there and hung out with some dudes I had met previously who enjoyed several LSD trips with me.  These to best friends lived in the same complex as me and Kevin and we played some basketball together and started talking about smoking out so I went back to their place and we smoked out.  They were cool, had good music and were into all the same stuff I was.  Before I left Seattle, I was hanging out with these guys and we had dropped acid a couple of times together.  The did it every weekend together.  It was on their schedule and I thought that was cool.  Their girlfriends would go to the bars and these to best friends would sit at home tripping on acid all night.  They were my kind of people so we started hanging out a lot.  One time I had a half sheet of acid that had images of ants on each tab.  So earlier in the week I told them I score a half sheet so we were up for Friday night.  I went over to their place and they were playing Nintendo fishing.  And this blew my mind because I grew up fishing but never imagined a video game going fishing.  So I was tripping out watching dudes go fishing on their couch.

And I said, I have some killer blotter, do you guys want some?  The one guy did but the other dude said his stomach wasn’t feeling all that well and he didn’t know if he should drop with a bad stomach.  But I had an idea and I said, dude, I have exactly what you need bro.  I pulled out that sheet of acid and I said look, Ant Acid.  So we were like WTF just happened, really, did that just happen and we laughed and said, man, that has to be a sign so we all dosed together that night.  And that trip was amazing because dude broke out his coffee table books of Salvador Dali, MC Escher, Ansel Adams and HR Geiger.  And while hallucinating on LSD those images took on new life and we tripped out talking about spirituality and things of nature.

And the next morning one of them said, man last night you could not tell me that there was a god and this morning you can not tell me that there is no god.  I tripped out on that and thought wow, that was super kick-ass if he got that from our trip together.  And if you tell me that an LSD trip got a dude to believe in god then I can not explain that it is always a bad thing.  It was a good catalyst that night and a good environment too.  Maybe it was me being there.  I usually got very spiritual on LSD, except with Thor and Jason, then we just rocked out.

After that night I remember the next morning when he told us about his belief in god he said, I’m not dosing for a long time.  This was huge and I have to figure shit out.  I said, is that a good thing man?  He said, yea it’s a great thing.  I have to figure out what to make of myself and what to do with my life now.  What he actually said, his literal words because he talked like a California surfer dude, he actually said, Dude, I’m not dropping for mass.  Which in translation means, I am not going to drop acid for a  massive long time.

I was blown away and just shook my head and thought about all the people who said LSD was evil but I always believed that it could be used as a good tool in good environments to get people to see truth without fear and recognize who they really were to themselves.

But those arguments were already made and summed up and closed down in the fifties and sixties when the government experimented with LSD on real people.  In 1993 I read a book called Acid Dreams that was all about how LSD was first discovered by accident and then misused as a weapon of mind control by the US government.  It taught me a lot about why the government is so punitive when it comes to LSD issues and what a tragedy it is that LSD can not be used in extreme mental health issues.  In my experiences and experiments with LSD on myself and others I have seen it work as a tool of therapy and healing.  Most of my LSD trips were just for fun however, there were many trips when me and a friend would allow ourselves to go deep inside our selves, tap in to hidden recesses of the psyche and recall things and work through issues of a psychological nature.  I had studied in college a lot about psychology and had done my own research and work to come to understand psychology and I could probably put my knowledge of human psychology together and get a phD for my deep understanding and experience of the human condition.  I have ideas and theories that I have written about but not submitted to universities.  Perhaps I will do so in my later years and get my honorary doctorate in psychology.  I deserve one, that’s for sure after all I’ve done and been through.  Most doctors are book smart but I know shit that they can only read about.  I should have phDs in sociology and psychology.  Maybe I will pursue them if I get some funding and break some new ground in research of Parkinson’s disease, of which I have vast experience with in the real world, and mental illness, also Alzheimer’s disease I understand very well because the side effects of abusing Detromethorphan manifest themselves as symptoms of Alzheimer’s.  Dimentia, forgetting familiar things, not being able to function on a cognitive level.  Although temporary side effects to drug abuse that I can sleep off, I have stayed awake and experienced what patients of Alzheimer’s disease experience and live.

So I when I decided to move to Utah in 1992 I drove up to Seattle to hang out with those guys one more time and we said goodbye.  I also went up there to score some acid and some weed for my travels.  I dropped two hits just before hitting the road and had a good hefty eighth of killer Seattle green bud to keep me happy while driving through the most boring parts of the north west United States.  For some reason I had just started getting in to Metallica’s black album so I mostly listened to that while driving for 12  hours from Seattle to Salt Lake City.  

That was quite a trip and when I got to Salt Lake City finally I drove to Lance’s house and said hello to him, told him how killer Metallica was and that he should probably listen to them.  Because we blew off Metallica as stoner burn out music that must have sucked like hair metal.  But we were wrong.

How I came to appreciate Metallica is the same way my buddy Steve came to appreciate Jimi Hendrix.  Steve always thought Hendrix sounded like crap because of his voice.  But Steve played guitar and I thought, if you’re a guitar played who does not appreciate Hendrix then you must be stupid of just have not given Hendrix a chance.  This blew my mind so I had an idea that would convert him in to becoming a Jimi fan.

This is something I did when someone needed to be introduced to a recording that had to be listened to with no distractions from beginning to end.  The first time I did it was when The Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik album came out.  I had been waiting for this and was almost freaking out that I was about to get a new Chili Peppers album.  The album was released on October 19th if I remember correctly and I went to Bubble Records at closing time on Oct, 18th and told Jason, I know you have copies of the Chili Peppers new album, dude, give me a copy and we’ll listen to it tonight and then I’ll come in and pay for it tomorrow.

So he was cool and down with that.  I was like a kid in a candy store excited jumping up and down almost hyperventilating.  We went back to my pad and I said, let’s put this CD on and turn off all the lights and lay on the floor and just listen to it from start to finish and not say a word, even between songs.  ********************

I had a half sheet of acid that had the image of the Egyptian eye on each tab.  Steve had taken acid like once before but said he wanted to go for it like I did.  So he took four hits and I took six.  Then 

Then I drove on to Provo 

As a newly married family man I was supposed to bring home the bacon.  I didn’t want my wife to work and have the kids be brought up at day care.  I wanted to provide enough so that she could raise the kids at home and not have to do what most of America was doing.  I wanted to do the honorable thing and provide for my family so that the kids could go to school from home and come home from school to a mom who was ready to take care of them.

After I burned out on sales I took a job making low wages at SEH America.  I worked 12 hour shifts that rotated days, swing, graveyard and back and forth.  So it was hard on the family and hard on the marriage.  I was earning less than $10/hr but I got overtime, had a steady job in a factory and the benefits were out of this world.

It was a blessing in disguise because the way they worked in shifts gave me around five hours of break time each working day.  We were growing silicon ingots that were used in the IT business to make microchips.  Intel and Motorola were our biggest customers.  But it was a Japanese company that payed shit for wages.  So I took this break time, rather than playing cards all day, I bought a book called Networking Essentials and I devoured that book.  I read it like scripture, I marked things I knew I would have to recall.  I learned acronyms of information technology and learned to talk about things that I did not even understand.  I just knew by reading this book and memorizing its content that I could use this information to get a job in information technology.  

I had a computer with Windows 95.  I had messed around with Windows 3.1 when my folks had a computer.  I’m not sure why but they always had a computer to do spreadsheets and word processing.  My folks were always on the cutting edge of technology.  Getting in to the latest and greatest things..  So I didn’t hand in my papers from a type writer like all the other kids, my stuff came from a printer.  I did not realize at the time how cool that was, always different when abiding the rules.

In the mid seventies when pick up trucks were starting to come off of the assembly line as mini pickup trucks, my dad had the idea of turning those mini trucks, like Toyota and Datsun and Mazda into 4x4s.  There were big trucks like Chevy and Ford and GMC that were 4×4 but these mini pickup trucks were only two wheel drive.

My dad went in to business with a partner and they called the company, Pacific 4×4.  They did conversions on mini trucks and converted them to 4x4s.  He was the first one in the world to produce a mini pickup truck 4×4.  It cost around $3000 to do a conversion and they could get it done in about three hours so there was not a lot of waiting time.  And they were making bank and getting successful and showing mini pickup 4x4s at car shows and I was about 11 years old and loving this.  We always had the coolest looking trucks in our driveway and people thought I must have been pretty cool to have these vehicles in my yard all the time.  Different ones every week.  Dad would get a conversion job and drive it home then take it back the next day and deliver it to the customer.

I remember going to car shows and having so much business going and my parents were doing well, my dad was so happy now that he had such a successful business enterprise.  My mom was the secretary so they worked together and the arguments were kind of shitty but they were successful and I got anything and everything I wanted because they had money in the bank and could afford nice things.  It was nice, I was charmed and somewhat spoiled.

Then Mazda sent a truck to Pacific 4×4 to do a conversion and they said if they liked it they would send every after market truck to Pacific 4×4 for conversion if the customer wanted it, as part of the sale.  So they did a handshake deal and I remember driving to Spokane, WA to pick up the prototype Mazda and watched it be converted.  When we got it it was just a bare bones mini truck.  It didn’t even have a bed on the back.  So they got it in the shop, converted it to 4×4, put a nice step side bed on the back and some hefty Firestone All Terrain tires and delivered it to Mazda’s headquarters in San Jose.

Mazda took that truck and screwed my dad over and the next year they were the first mini truck manufacturer to have 4x4s coming off the assembly line.  They used my dad’s formula, took it from him, promised him deals and then took the money and ran.  Goes to show you need a contract.  Those Japanese fuckers ruined our livelihood and almost sent my family into bankruptcy.  But mom and dad were resilient and got back on their feet quickly by getting in to Uni-Strut and Multi-Strut.  

There was a lot of new construction going on at the time so they made a good amount of money on the ground floor with Uni-Strut, but then there was a parting of ways from the original Uni-Strut that became Multi-Strut so there was now competition.  Before Multi-Strut there was no competition so they were making money hand over fist.  My folks, during the fallout, went with the new guys and became Multi-Strut.  What Multi-Strut is, it’s metal bars with notches in them in a tube configuration shaped like a U.  This stuff was used in every construction site and it’s what replaced poles to hold up street signs.  So they were in business again and did pretty well and I was charmed and got anything I asked for.  But what was great about my folks’ success, they did not go out and spend all their money on luxuries.  They invested their money and lived a middle class lifestyle, but we never gone without anything.  They always had a hefty bank account and whenever I needed or wanted something that cost a lot, they found a way to get it for me.  

As I got older and needed to buy a car or rent an apartment I didn’t have the money for it but my folks would bank roll my needs.

In my early 20s I worked at Fleetwood Mobile Homes.  I did this as a summer job.  It paid minimum wage which back then was $3.35/hr.  Not very good wages but things cost a lot less back then.  One thing I could not comprehend is how the guys I worked with could raise a family on that crappy wage.  So I would have to get up at 5:30 every morning to be to work by 7am because it was a long drive also.  My buddy Bob would pick me up and I would sleep on the way to work.  We would hit the 7-11 for a soda and donuts but then I would fall asleep for the rest of the ride and Bob would listen to music.  It was hard work too.  It was an assembly line building these mobile homes.  In a giant warehouse it started with the framework, then the floor, then it came to my area which was the outside walls.  We used nail guns and laid out insulation on the outside walls.  I really dug that job even though it was hard work.  The guys I worked with were really cool and I would listen to their stories of debauchery from weekend parties and laugh.  I was clean as a whistle back then.  Fully active in church and temple worthy.  All I wanted to do was make out with my girlfriend and play basketball.  Truth be told, I was getting the best blow jobs on the planet earth from my girlfriend, Kim Downing.  She loved me.  She would watch me play basketball for two hours on Wednesday night and then come back to my house.  We would turn on the TV and I would watch late night TV while she gave me blow jobs all night long, one after another.  I don’t know what I did to deserve that but I had no complaints.

Then I got moved over to another department and started manufacturing the inside walls of the mobile homes.  This was a lot harder than outside walls.  We had to frame the inside of the mobile home and then nail wallpapered sheetrock on to these inside 1×2 boards.  It was thin and I understood why they were so cheap.  Mobile homes are not 2×4 construction like a regular house.  It’s 2×6 on the outside and 1×2 on the inside.  So you can see why tornadoes always fucked up a mobile home park.

The one thing that was great about that shitty job is that I got off work at 3:30 every day so that left a lot of the day open for having fun.  I was sober at this time in my life.  Like I said, all I wanted to do was play basketball and do naughty things with my girlfriend. 

I had a friend who moved to Vancouver from Idaho named Brian Nielsen.  He was super cool like me, we did not see eye to eye on music.  He thought the Chili Peppers were too weird for him but we could rock out to some Van Halen or Sammy Hagar or AC/DC together.  I would pick him up to go do whatever we were doing and I’d be listening to the Chili Peppers but then for his sake I would change it to some Van Halen.  As time went by however, I made him listen to the Chili Peppers.  He didn’t like them because they sounded too much like rap.  I remember making him listen to Mother’s Milk while we were driving from Clackamas, OR to Vancouver over the bridge.  He liked Jane’s Addiction though so we could rock out to that together.

Brian’s family was pretty wealthy and my dad and his dad got along really well so that was awesome for me because my dad didn’t have many friends.  Ron Nielsen was a dude who could understand my father and that was great for me. 

I think they bonded over their liking for cars.  Because my dad loves classic sports cars.  And Ron had in his garage, a Corvette Indy pace car with 37 miles on it.  Not only did they have the cars but they also had a boat and when you have a boat and you live in the Pacific Northwest you are going water skiing whenever you can.

So I would get off that shitty job building mobile homes at 3:30 and Brian would get off work doing construction early too.  In the summer time in the North West the sun stayed up close to 10:00pm.  So after work in the summer time we would hustle our asses home, get something to eat and drive to Brian’s house to go water skiing for the rest of the evening.  Because we lived on the banks of the Columbia River.  Best water skiing ever.  Calm waters, a little choppy but that’s the best water skiing.  Or we would go out to Lacamas Lake and water ski on the smoothest pond water surface, it was made for water skiing.  The great thing about the Columbia River is that is was so huge and wide that there were islands of sand in the middle.  So we would set the boat in the river and park the truck then get in the boat and land on the island of sand.  There we would build a bon fire and have a cook out, do some water skiing and just have all kinds of fun.  Of course we had super hot chicks with us all the time.  Brian was a kick ass water skier.  He could slalom and when he cut the wake he would put his elbow in the river, he got that low on one ski.  I was never that good but I could send up a roosters tail of water on my left but I couldn’t do it on my right.   I loved water skiing and crossing the wake and getting air, bending my knees as I go over the wake and get all gnarly, then let the ski drop back down on top of the water and wipe my face off so I could see again.  One thing I liked so much about water skiing was the whip.  When the boat makes a U turn you pick up speed and you’re usually doing about 15mph to 20mph.  But when the boat turns you have all kinds of momentum so I would just love it and go faster and faster as the boat turned around.

I just had to power through the fatigue and hold on to the rope so I was going from 20mph to 60mph in about three seconds.  It was exhilarating!   The cool thing about water skiing, if you don’t crash, you just go and go until you tire out and then you let go of the rope and drop down into the water, floating safely while the boat puts up the flag so that other boats will not  drive over you and give you a concussion.

We would do this all summer and to me it was regular lifestyle.  But for others when I would talk about it at work I called it partying

That helped me in college big time because I could write papers and save them for editing later.  I no longer had to write my papers on a typewriter.  And I had spell check now, so that was awesome.

Poetry 08/27/2023

I have a shoe down on my feet
It takes me down town on the street
Sometimes it trips when I’m not looking
Suppose in time then I’ll start cooking
In the way or way the hay may
Silence spoken to the most woke
A spiral fallen to the next spoke
Don’t matta what and it don’t matta where
As long as you’re wearing clean underwear
You can crash your car or fall off a cliff
As long as your mother doesn’t know of this riff
Come as you are and wish upon a star
Remember those stories and how you got those scars

Child Trafficking and Homosexuality promotion behind closed doors is Satan’s oath and covenant

47 And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah: Hear my voice, ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech; for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.

48 If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech shall be ^aseventy and seven fold;

49 For ^aLamech having entered into a covenant with Satan, after the manner of Cain, wherein he became Master Mahan, master of that great secret which was administered unto Cain by Satan; and Irad, the son of Enoch, having known their secret, began to reveal it unto the sons of Adam;

50 Wherefore Lamech, being angry, slew him, not like unto Cain, his brother Abel, for the sake of getting gain, but he slew him for the ^aoath’s sake.

51 For, from the days of Cain, there was a secret ^acombination, and their works were in the dark, and they knew every man his brother.*** <Hello!! They knew every man his brother. Secret combinations happening in Hollywood for glory and fame, homosexual acts and child sexualization is the secret oath and combination they have over each other.)

52 Wherefore the Lord ^acursed Lamech, and his house, and all them that had covenanted with Satan; for they kept not the commandments of God, and it displeased God, and he ministered not unto them, and their works were abominations, and began to spread among all the ^bsons of men. And it was among the sons of men.

53 And among the daughters of men these things were not spoken, because that Lamech had spoken the secret unto his wives, and they rebelled against him, and declared these things abroad, and had not compassion;

54 Wherefore Lamech was despised, and cast out, and came not among the sons of men, lest he should die.

55 And thus the works of ^adarkness began to prevail among all the sons of men.

56 And God ^acursed the earth with a sore curse, and was angry with the wicked, with all the sons of men whom he had made;

57 For they would not ^ahearken unto his voice, nor believe on his Only Begotten Son, even him whom he declared should ^bcome in the meridian of time, who was ^cprepared from before the foundation of the world.

#oprahchildtrafficking #DrPhilPedophile #Billionaresgetbillionsbychildtrafficking #BillGatesChildTrafficker

Infinite Eternal Eternity Infinitely

Light is the source of Truth. God’s power is governed by light. Meaning that His power is Truth, the word is truth, the truth is His power and it commands the elements to act and react according to His word, His truth, His purposes and His eternal perspective.

We are a part of that on a mortal scale right now, but we are eternal beings being taught the things in mortality that we need to progress to our next estate in existence through the eternities. There are things Eternal and things Infinite.

Infinity is mathematical. There are zeroes and negatives. But Infinity goes on both ways for ever. Eternity is without beginning nor end. Incomprehensible, but real. As mortals we can not possibly comprehend the idea of no beginning because, where did anything start, and where did that spring from, and what was the source of the beginning of that, and what came before that to create what brought us to what we are now?

God’s work is one Eternal round. It doesn’t mean it repeats, but it is eternal and it continues The end is connected to the beginning but it expands in all directions on all planes for eternity. That is eternal progression. That is godhood. An understanding we can not comprehend but a gift God wants us to receive if we will give in to His will on our mortal sojourn on earth. That is the key.

We must give our will to Him if we desire to progress to our next estate, which is His desire for us; the very reason we were created. The world brings us opposition to teach us to be strong and distract us from reality but we find ourselves replacing reality with sensationalism and things that stimulate the flesh. Those things are given attention and the spiritual things are forgotten.

It’s critical to our progression that we recognize and perceive correctly our true beginnings and the trials we face here, as a distraction from the eternal, but we are given this distraction to prove where our hearts lay, and the intents that fill our hearts we will be judged by and given eternal progression with and for.

We are gods in embryo. He is nurturing us to grow us to be His sons and daughters to become creators as He is throughout the eternities. Much like a gardener does for his creations, God treats us with the things we need to become the best for His holy purposes. We do not understand everything because we are growing. And it is time for us to learn and grow, not to comprehend all thins. But being given eternal perspective allows us to grow further toward our ultimate goal, and that is to become, from a seed, to a fully blossomed tree, bearing fruit, from childhood in embryo of godhood, to fruition through trials of mortality, progressing on toward our eternal rewards.

This is the work of godhood. This is truth. This is holy. This is not understood by the finite minds of petty mankind. Eternal perspective is the only thing that can comprehend this. It is truth. It means everything to me and it is what give me strength and builds my physical constitution and backbone. It is what gives me breath and what I live by. The source is the power and grace of Jesus Christ, the power and truth and light that is eternal and brings forth creation and everything that is and that ever was and that ever will be.

If you find this uplifting or insightful, please share it. I think it will help bring people together in love and a peaceful perspective of the future.

Recent Poetryings

As flowers bloom and seasons turn
From nature’s light I feel the burn
Truth, the source which governs all
The eternal round makes me so small

Before we came we were a part
Divinely called to make a start
Beginning life with a godly spark
And soon it dims as we embark

On unknown paths and roads we travel
The mysteries come and do unravel
And we come upon the crossroads
Our shoulders yoked with heavy loads

To choose the right way we must look
Into the past and the time it took
To prepare us wise as those who came
Before we walked, they did the same

The Atonement of Jesus Christ

I have pondered the atonement deeply all my life trying to understand it fully and in the last couple of days I’ve had some thoughts that I realize about Christ in his darkest hour

He was with the twelve and went to pray in the garden of Gethsemane, and before that, Judas told the Romans how to find him so they could kill him and took 30 pieces of silver for it. And when they fell asleep, Jesus prayed to His Father, was visited by an angel to uplift Him so He could continue his course. Then in solemn prayer, laying prostrate on the ground, took upon himself all the sins of mankind, which caused him to bleed from every pore. What powerful darkness He had to endure now having the sins of mankind upon his soul

Then Peter denied him three times and realized it when he heard the roosters crow. That’s two apostles failing and falling away from support.

Then he is brought before Pontius Pilate and is proven in a court of law that he has broken no laws,, then given to the people because it was a Democracy, he was scourged and beaten and spit upon, and because of the mob rule, he was given a cross to bear having taken all the sins of human kind upon himself in the garden of Gethsemane, and his mortal body failed him, and he could not carry the cross.

Then he was nailed to the cross in the palms of his hands, his wrists and ankles and suffered on the cross for nine hours.

And during that time he asked the Father to forgive the men who were killing him because they did not understand what they were doing.

After all of that in the ninth hour, with the Father being in him to uphold and bear his cross with him, the Father withdrew His spirit and Christ was forsaken, alone, borne with all the sins of mankind and for a moment believed that he was doomed to eternal damnation to complete the atonement, and he cried out Father, why hast thou forsaken me? Christ believed that he was given up to eternal damnation by his loving Father in Heaven for a moment, Then the Father returned and Christ’s atonement was finished and he gave up the ghost and he returned to his Father in Heaven.

New Post in a Long Time, Yes it’s about Time!!

There are so many things happening right now. The Depp-Turd, errr…Depp-Heard trial has taken most of my time recently. It is fascinating to me only because I have been Johnny Depp in relationships and experienced all of the bullsnort and what have you that he describes to the jury from women who find themselves entitled and deserving of a man’s peace of mind. The constant gnawing at the mind, the insults, the clawing at the psyche to invoke an argument to scratch an itch that only their daddy could satisfy.

I’ll show you where I identify with Johnny Depp by recalling incidents of domestic violence and abuse. Not by my hands but by the hands of psychotic women who were catalysts in the full on and catastrophic demise of my prosperous life. Now, I have been told since these things ever began or transpired to keep them under wraps and that I had much to apologize for so I did that, and apologized. And as Mr. Depp experienced, and as I have, my name had been slandered and my reputation had been destroyed by a couple of incidents leading me to make poor choices, having been brought on by the abusive and mistreatment of a man who merely sought to find peace within a loving relationship. But the issues from their past sprung to the forefront and I was the only element present with which to display and project past traumas and dramas upon. And they got played out on my funky ass over and over again.

There are those close to me who could only guess who the individuals in these narratives could possibly be. I will not name names or dates but those who wish to guess can do so. I will keep this as anonymous as possible. But for me, it is important to air this dirty laundry in light of our celebrity scandal of the day. Because Johnny is not the only man to have endured this sort of scenario. He’s just fortunate enough to have a bank account that helps him vindicate himself before the world after being slandered by a psycho woman who has no control over her emotions and hormones coursing through her body. Diluted with alcohol and psychedelic drugs, I can only imagine what horrors he endured that we are not privy to.

I am not going to give specific details or even tell stories about craziness and lunacy that I experienced in my marriage. I promised my children I would never again make their mother cry by sharing experiences that scarred my psyche and which were played out in front of one of our daughters where I was physically assaulted in her presence by my wife. Oops, I let it slip. So maybe just that…so just saying, I’ve been on the end of the ugly stick a time or two unjustly and unprovoked. But I didn’t press charges. She would have been charged with felony abuse if I had called the police. But I would never. If I had been the abuser, surely I would be behind bars and never be able to see my kids again. But that’s the way it goes for pacifistic men in abusive relationships from sociopathic partners.

And they tell me to let it go. That it’s water under the bridge. Well, for them it is. I was taken for all I was worth and pushed aside while they had all of their say in the beginning, to sum everything up to their satisfaction while I had absolutely no voice in the matter, just to be the scapegoat for their dramatic pleasures.

OK, on from marriage, enough with that. I could write volumes about that but I am torn because of the feelings of my children. But dammit, I need a voice and someone to validate me because I’ve been ruined by all of the crap that has been piled upon me by myself, sure but in the beginning, by them. I didn’t do anything to deserve what I got. However, as a result of being screwed over I made some seriously poor choices that I am wholly and completely responsible for. But, I would never have made those poor choices had I not been screwed over, so therein lies the rub where ‘they’ believe I blame them for my choices. I do not blame them for my choices. But, I would never have been given those choices to make had ‘they’ not screwed me over in their selfish ploys to come out from crap circumstances, smelling like roses, due to the work and sacrifice put in by me to bring them to the relief and good circumstances they were able to enjoy, escaping detriment and an impoverished existence.

And when it came time for them to be there for me in a time of weakness, of course the women, who shall not be named, made no effort whatsoever to pacify nor ease my burdens and help strengthen my weakness as I had done for them.

You Can’t Kill Rock & Roll…(but it’s on life support)

They say you can’t kill rock & roll but it’s in the ICU right now, life flighted from some festival show where PCP or something called “molly” and electronica came to kill it. The children today wear t-shirts of fashion with the godfathers of true rock & roll emblazoned on them, but they say “my parents listened to this”, as they crank their latest EDM offering from some clickety pop turntable…not even a turntable anymore. Just electronic creations from computerized synthesis on keyboards played, not even understanding music theory on a piano keyboard.

And the music of yesteryear used to com at us with a message. A message in the music itself with a crescendo to make the hair on the back your neck stand up, to peak, them culminate in chorus and dissipate with musical instrument solos into the ether leaving us wanting more of the same good stuff from the roots of creation.

But today all we get is quickly recipied electronic samplified pop clicks and over…way over the top bass beats and a back beat that is so weak it sounds like a brush being slapped on a rolled up wet fish wrap.

Where are the guitar virtuosos, the backline bass players, the stand out drummers? God bless people like Jack White, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Pearl Jam for keeping rock & roll alive, albeit on life support for the love of popular music.

There has to be something more coming to the forefront of music popularity to save pop music from the vile and dank evilness it has been usurped by the evil and greedy hands of nothing more than making money.

The moguls in the music industry today are as vile as the bile puked up from the recesses of hell’s dark belly. Wanting nothing more than glory upon themselves, selling talent for money in exchange for material items in the form of flashy cars, lavish lifestyles and sexual debauchery in their Los Angeles swimming pools and hot tubs.

Where are the true living souls from the backbone of rock & roll, from the streets of New York City and London anymore? I know they’re out there, in the alternative scene. It’s a tragedy that these brilliant artists are not at the forefront of popular music. I think people are far more intelligent than the tripe we are fed over the airwaves of commercial and corporate music.

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

First of all, I have done and chosen what I have for various reasons, known only to me and God. And that is what I have been taught by feasting on the Scriptures.

Some of you have been taught the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Some of you have learned about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and you have taught the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But are you living the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

And my observation of humanity today; everyone on their electronic device, divided individuals, not socializing but doing social media which is completely impersonal and with no emotions or charisma, only words and digital images, perhaps video, but still very disconnected.

Nothing organic anymore. People walking around with a screen in their face, not interacting with their environment but living in a virtual environment.

And what does the word virtual mean?

The dictionary says, “being such in power, force, or effect, though not actually or expressly such:”

So what it says is that it has power or force, but it is not real. And this is what occupies the energy and minds of most people today. A power or force that is not even real. And there are those who don’t believe in God but let these things manage their lives. That is confounding to me.

The convenience herein is the ability to make changes that we can not with paper and ink. In virtual reality, change is easy, hiding is easy, but if you live in reality things are real and unchangeable.

And why is virtual reality so popular?

The quickness of satisfaction, the immediate gratification, the instant delivery.

How long ago was it that we were being told by our superiors that to wait gives more meaning to the outcome?

Is that principle lost on technology today?

We give away things with immediate satisfaction.

Tom Petty said it when he said, “The waiting is the hardest part. You take it on faith, you take it to the heart”

But with time to wait, rather than becoming impatient, there is time to ponder, to be thankful. Do not be impatient, learn from our negativity and transform those things into strengths and things you can learn from. Humble yourselves and give in to the truth that you have been hiding from for what ever reason, and usually the reason is fear of change, or habit. Habits are good and bad, they are just the way we do things, but we can do something different if we feel stuck in a place in life.

It does not matter what it is you choose, as long as you make a good choice, something healthy and uplifting to the spirit and body. Find something new, create something from your imagination. Make the world a better place. Everyone has something spectacular within themselves. The tragedy is that sometimes an environment will squelch the inborn creativity.

We are all creators because we are children of a great Creator, and being children in embryo of a great Creator means that we have hidden talents that we must seek out and explore. That is our purpose, to find these hidden treasures by living life correctly and not living up to the expectations of other people’s assumptions, that are clearly misunderstood because nobody can read another’s mind.

So do what you love and don’t worry about the judgments of others. Because great things come from those who understand the rules, then do things differently for good reason, not for selfish reasons or to glorify one’s self.

Because what does it mean to thrive in life?

It is defined by the things that society tells us it is. But, perhaps that is not the only way to live life. Perhaps this is something someone started, that looked good, so everyone else followed along. And who is really doing anything new and creative?

Usually most people live up to the expectations of others. And the tragedy therein is that most of the time, nobody truly knows what others expect of them. People assume much, then make choices based on incorrect assumptions.

We tell ourselves that we are a free thinking society, however, most of what we do is predicated upon what others will think or believe or conclude about what we have been doing. Are we truly individuals or are we sheep?

The problem here is fear and anger response. When someone does something different from the societal norm, there are reactions and responses that usually stem from jealousy, fear and anger.

Something new and different in society is usually, immediately rejected. Then sometimes it is given a second chance perhaps to see if it would “grow legs” or come to fruition and be understood or accepted.

And why is that? The immediate rejection of something not understood? It is to protect ourselves from the unknown. But aren’t we always looking for something new and unknown, discovering new things and expanding our intellect?