Tuesday, October 31, 2006

venting

We all get mad, we all get angry, but this really pisses me off!!!

Read this.

And this

And this


My own story to come.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Lost

My wife and I went out this evening. We met up with our friend Dean and his boy about 1930 I guess for wings. After eating and picking on Zak, we split up, meeting again at a bar called the 101 to listen to this band that was supposed to be good. I’m not sure exactly when it was, but at some point, between the bands rendition of Billy Joel or Robert Palmer, it hit me. I SUCK! I feel like a waist of space, inhaling precious oxygen that was intended for a better person. I just suck, period.

It’s going to be a long winter…

Monday, October 23, 2006

We are who we are...

If you search the Internet or watch TV you are sure to find someone talking about change. Politicians speak of change for the good. People write about the left and the right or down the isle, supposedly in between the two. Blogs abound are filled with writings about how we need to change our government to make things better. How we need to get this party or that party in control. How this person being in congress will change things for the better, improving things like crime control and prevention; how this or that person is best fit for Mayor of your city, or Governor of your State. Well, I hate to break everyone’s bubble here, but this is what I choose to believe. Everyone who listens, worse yet acts on these beliefs about how these politicians are going to make all these awesome changes are in a huge state of denial. Exactly how are we to expect the government, whether it be Local, State or otherwise to change things without making new laws, restricting our already smothering civil liberty and freedom?

The very term politics, when boiled down to its origin, implies one thing, people. This is where the real, so called, meat and potatoes lies. We cannot wait or even rely on the government to change our Community, our own City, our own Lives; we are ultimately responsible for the outcome of our own Lives, our own Families, our own Community, if not our own Nation, PERIOD! The changes that this Country is begging for needs to begin with the people! Then, and only then, will the people will drive the government to support its peoples public outcry. We need to stop living our lives thinking someone else will fill in the blanks. WE are the ones that need to make things better, to make a real change for the good!

During the summer, one can watch many parents drop off their kids at any of three public playgrounds within the City where I live. Adults, mostly City paid College kids, man two of these playgrounds during the summer, the other is left unattended and completely public throughout the year. For the two that are manned, and fenced off I might add, these kids are left to the responsibility of just a handful of teenagers, getting paid just over minimum wage. If anything would happen to these kids, and it has happened in the past, the City is, and has been sued for negligence. Nice! This is what I’m talking about people, taking responsibility for your dumb ass actions! If you see someone dropping their 6-year-old daughter, or their 7-year-old son, stop them. Scream in their face if you have to. It’s parenting 101!!!

I ask you, if not beg you to start asking for change within your community. Start making a difference as best you can. If you know, or better yet see someone mistreating a child, call the police. Don’t wait for someone else to do it; don’t assume someone else will find out, take charge and do it yourself. Personally, I’d walk my ass over there and take care of it myself, but that’s just me.

We, as a people, need to take charge and make things better, for our kids, for our future! WE need to do it, the politicians will follow suit! There truly is no other way.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Did you know???

A bullet fired from a .22 Caliper Rifle, one of the smallest Caliper Rifles made in the U.S., at 100 yards is traveling approx. 2042 feet per second. 2042 fps is 1392.27273 miles per hour or 1.8 times faster then the speed of sound.

A 125 Grain bullet fired from a .30-30 Caliper rifle, at 100 yards is traveling approx. 2100 fps, or 1431.81818 miles per hour, or almost 1.9 times the speed of sound. The is the equivalent of 1210 ft-lb of energy.

A 165 Grain bullet fired from a .30-06 caliper rifle, at 100 yards is traveling approx. 2900 fps, or 1977.27273 miles per hour, or over 2.5 times the speed of sound and will hit with over 2400 ft-lb of energy.

I just thought your local neighborhood terrorist would like to know.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

The longest damn post I have every put on the net...

Life, if nothing else, is a roller coaster: One long track of ups and downs and pains and loves and smiles and tears. While I can honestly say that when I was maybe 15 or so, if I had a chance to guess where I would be in life today, it would be nothing like it is now, not even close. But, there has always been one thing I have noticed. If you look around hard enough, you can always find someone else’s life that is far worse than yours. It seems that now matter how bad things get for me, someone around me or close to be is worse off. Sometimes people are so messed up from their situation that it leaves them so warped, so disconnected, so just pain messed up that even they don’t know how bad their won life is. Case and point:

There’s this guy, let’s call him Mike. To even get close to fully understand his situation, we need rewind a few years of his life. He enlisted into the Navy just a few years after High School. He met his wife in California, a California-Mexican, average education, kind of mellow and down to earth. She would soon find God and become a deeply religious person. Although Mike was a bit wild, a partier at heart, he obviously felt something for her. They got married and had two children. The first, a girl we’ll call Daughter, ended up with the same sense of humor, attitude and a little bit of looks as her father. The second, let’s call him Son, ended up not even seeing his father until he was almost a year old. Duty had kept Mike away from his family during and after his son’s birth. Through the years, Daughter was always closer to her father than Son was. Living a long life of partying and fun loving freedom, while his wife cared for the kids, Daughter seen her father’s point of view, through her own eyes, while Son turned to his mother. Son looked at his father as a drunk, a person who he could never relate to.

Mike retires from the Navy, moves his family back to his own roots here on the east coast and gets a job doing what he was trained as in the military. By this time, Mike owns a Harley, belongs to a motorcycle club as Vice-President, often attends functions with at the club and stays overnight without calling home and just lives his life for himself, hardly every making it home in time to eat dinner with his family. It’s fairly obvious to the people around him that he just doesn’t want to be a home. His wife, on the other hand, still has no job, takes care of the kids alone, hands her husband beer on demand and does everything she can to make her family be happy and healthy, including her now sometimes violent husband. As time progresses, Mike has had more than one affair with mostly biker chicks. His wife assumes this fact enough to actually tell him during one conversation “I don’t care what you do Mike, just please don’t get anyone pregnant.”

As time passes on, Mike becomes close to another woman and starts sleeping over at her house, only coming home about once every 3 days of so. Plus, his newly found girlfriend also lives with her mom. His wife tries to talk to him but he avoids any conversation with her as best he can. This goes on for weeks until days of encouragement from friends and family sends Mike back home to basically tell his wife that he no longer loves her and he is leaving. About a week later, Mike gets a call at work from his Daughter who is at the airport. She tells him of her mother shipping her out to her Aunt’s house in Florida because she cannot control her. Daughter literally left within moments of ending the phone call. It was painfully obvious that Mike was hit hard by the phone call, going around the rest of the day saying “why would a Christian women do such a thing, send my daughter away from me without even telling me?” The very next day, Mike had put it behind him and said nothing about it again for weeks, although he did comment daily about his girlfriend and how much she drinks. She also is known for her instability. Roger’s son has not talked to his father since he stopped coming home daily. By now, the two have not even looked into each other’s eyes for weeks, if not months. When asked about it, Mike simply says, “he hates me but he’ll get over it someday hopefully”. Just to recap, Mike and his wife are still married; his wife send Daughter to her sisters in Florida; Son is still living with his mom attending high school; Mike and his wife still share banking accounts; his check is still directly deposited into the same account that it has been for 10 years; Mike still continue to help his wife where he can, for example, buying wood for the house, cutting it up and stacking it in the yard for the upcoming winter; yet he is living at his girlfriends house, with her mother, who by the way, apparently holds absolutely no love for Mike at all.

Several weeks ago, Daughter shows up at her dads work looking for him. She flew up with her cousin to help her mother that is going to have some type of surgery. Apparently Daughter never told her father what the surgery was for, but she did try her best to patch things up between Son an Mike. Son wanted nothing to do with it and said he hated his father and didn’t care if he ever seen him again in his life. Mike, although is somewhat bothered by this fact, tries no personal attempt to patch things up with Son and still sleeps well because the world still had bars.

This week, Mike got a phone call from his wife at work, like he does almost daily. After all, Mike does not believe in cell phones, or anything technology that was born after the 70’s, and his wife still has no other way of getting in contact with him. This phone call was a bit different. Although the premise for her call was to bug him about getting wood for the winter, she also dropped a bomb on him. She has Colon Cancer and that was the reason for her surgery. I asked him how what stage it was in and what condition she was in but he said he didn’t know. I have asked the same thing for three days now, and he still doesn’t know!!! I gave him a long speech about how he needs to make things right, for his family and everything that goes with it. I told him that if his wife dies, his teenage kid would be in his hands. I thought I opened his eyes so wide you could drive a truck through them, I thought…

Today, his main topic of conversation was about how his girlfriend likes to dress up for Halloween and how they are both going to the club for the party. I just gave up. Sometimes people are so far out there, so lost, so disconnected from reality, that they themselves have no idea how bad their own situation is.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Picket fence post bastard....

This week, while working on an issue with a purchased $4,000 heat exchanger, I met a salesman with the company who also just came back from Iraq only 4 days prior to our meeting. If that fact doesn’t catch your interest, get this; he is a Lieutenant General, a 23-year veteran, now with the Army Reserve. Although our conversation was mostly work-at-hand related, we spoke…, big time.

Later, my boss said the following about him. “Yea he was a bit strange, I’m not sure how to take him”. I cannot publish what I though of saying to my boss….

Friday, October 13, 2006

Friday The 13TH... Live and in Color...

Ah yes it’s Friday, the end ‘O’ the week, and Thank God! This week has been the worse I have endured for many years. It seems as though everything, I mean everything that could have gone wrong, went well past wrong. Everything I touched turned to crap, everything I said sounded stupid and everything I did went horribly insane. When I woke up this morning I didn’t even take notice to it being Friday the 13Th, it never even crossed my mind. That was, until about 9 AM when a coworker, a project manager and close friend came up to me and interrupted a conversation I was having with someone on the shop floor. He said “I will no longer be…” and I broke his conversation by saying “so disruptive?” He said “that’s right, effective immediately, I have to go”. Not fully understanding what he was getting at, I simply said, “ya, later”, assuming he meant he had to run to the other office for a meeting or something. About 10 minutes later, our President informed me that she “had to let Clark go”. “It was a tough decision”, she said. I had my game face on with her, but little did she know my heart fell to my feet. I couldn’t believe it. She just waltz right in, canned him and then left. I think it’s time to start looking a bit more seriously for a new job.

At least the week from hell is now over. TGIF BABY!!!

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Good old G.W.............

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Will YOUR head explode?

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

An update on the Amish Slayer…

New light has been shed on this asshole that shot 10 kids within a one-room Amish Schoolhouse. "Neighbors say they had no clue Charles Carl Roberts IV had demons lurking inside, neither did his family."

DEMONS, HU? Well, lets look at the latest and greatest on this guy.
· "The truck driver rang his wife minutes before the shootings, admitting to molesting young family members 20 years ago and dreamed of doing it again. The 32-year-old said there was something else that happened 20 years ago, which he would not reveal. He was also traumatized by the death of his baby daughter, who died 20 minutes after she was born nine years ago."
· "Despite his talk of molestation, though, and the discovery that he had sexual lubricant and flex-ties with him, police have no evidence that any of the victims were sexually abused, State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said."
· "Authorities Tuesday discussed Roberts' tormented existence, a reality that included anguish over the loss of a child, as well as talk of child molestation."
· A quote, apparently in the shooter's note to his wife "We had so many good memories together as well as the tragedy with Elise. It changed my life forever I haven't been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself hate towards God and unimaginable emptyness it seems like everytime we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn't here to share it with us and I go right back to anger."

· October 2, 2006 - Shooting Timeline

3:00 Arrives home from work
7:30 Gets children ready for school with wife
8:45 Walks children to bus stop
9:00 Wife leaves house for prayer group
9:14 Buys eye bolts, zip ties and hardware from store
10:00 Arrives at West Nickel Mines Amish School
10:30 Teacher calls authorities
10:50 Calls wife, stated "I am not coming home. The police are here"

Ok, so this guy molested a young family member, or members when he was 12 years old. He apparently was having dreams and thoughts about molesting children and felt the need to do it again. Personally, I cannot fathom what it feels like to have this so called "feeling" or "need", I never could understand how someone can stomach even the thought of hurting a child in this way, or in any way for that matter. He also lost a daughter that was born premature. Although this holds a bit more merit for being, for lack of a better word, disturbed, he still had three perfectly healthy children.

Evidently, in the same letter to his wife, he was quoted as saying "I don't know how you put up with me all those years. I am not worthy of you, you are the perfect wife you deserve so much better." To be brutally honest here, I couldn't agree more. In my humble opinion, this guy was a selfish and spineless bastard. Selfish for what he has done the schoolgirls, selfish for what has done to the family's effected, selfish for the long lasting effects left on the rest of the class, selfish for not asking for prefessional help, selfish for what this has done to the community and mostly selfish for what this will do to his own surviving children. Yet, most of all, he was spineless for taking his own life. A weakminded, egotistical and gutless pedophile want-to-be.

As for those among us that think things would have been differient if guns were illegal... I truly believe that people in this state of mind would find anything to commit their crimes. If not guns, then a knife, or a razorblade/box cutter. Hell, even a few screwdrivers used in the correct way could have done the same damage in nearly the same amout of time. I know this is now a coined phrase, and I hate to use it, but it fits perfectly. Guns do not kill people, people kill people. Removing guns from the equation will not eliminate opportunity, period!

Monday, October 02, 2006

I hate copycats

At approximately 10:30 this morning a horrible crime was committed. Three innocent children died at the hands of a man who, for no apparent reason other than watching a news story, snapped.

Ok, let’s look at this from another point of view. A seemingly normal man, a milk truck driver, a father of three children of his own, a person quoted as ‘average’ and ‘just normal’, allegedly watched a news story about another school shooting, let a childhood prank or picking from a little girl twenty years ago, drive him into a unspeakable train of thought. According to the current reports, this guy got off of work at 3 a.m., borrowed a friends pick-up, went to the local lumber yard for 2x4’s and 4x4’s, then drove to his friendly neighborhood one room Amish, one-room school house. He then allegedly used to wood to barricade the doors, took the first three little girls he found and bound them up and lined all the girls against the chalkboard.

After receiving at least one phone call from his wife on his cell phone concerning his notes he had left at home, "along the lines of suicide notes" that were "rambling" and "didn't make much sense", someone made a call to the local 911 center from the same cell phone. The police were advised of the number and tried to call just moments before he began to shoot the girls execution style.

What the hell? Why did this guy go off, and more importantly, why did he forget his family, only to fulfill a 20 year old, preteen vengeance towards girls? Why did the guy drop his kids off safely at the school bus stop, then methodically, premeditatedly kill other kids?

There is something to be said about the mindset of the locals, the average Americans living within the Amish communality. In our everyday, busy, fast paced, competitive, shallow lives, the Amish are a people who are seem disposable, a people who just get in the way of normal, daily life. I, admittedly, cannot totally disagree. That being said, these were just kids. Kids that, although have been brainwashed by people within their culture, not unlike how our government brainwashes the average, television watching, retired person. Yet, these kids have yet to do any harm, make their own choices, or even get a chance feel love with another outside their own family.

I’m lost for words other than this; I would have taken any of those lives in trade for my own. Kids, just kids, forgetting anything else, just kids!!!!!!!

It’s too bad this guy took his own life. I’d love to take it for him.

I should rename this blog "The Stupid Stuff I Have Done".