Thursday, December 6, 2007

Looking for the temporal post office

Colonel Colonel tagged me with the meme, created by Malach ,to write a letter to myself when I was 13. My response is very late and for that I apologize. Work has been a major pain along with my son and a few friends playing his "Guitar Hero" video game tonight while I try to write. Sweet Jesus I can't believe I actually listened to the crap coming from his Wii. For that reason I'm also going to skip tagging five others for the meme. If I don't go downstairs and get away from one more rendition of "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols I will not be responsible for my actions.

Yo, Beach Bum you just turned 13 and your older self from the funky doodle year of 2007 found a great way-back machine on eBay (I’ll explain later) and due to an awesome meme floating around on the blogosphere (Yeah, I’ll explain that one as well) decided to drop you a little heads up on the coming events in your life as the 20th century closes out and the 21st century comes marching in.
First off, you are now living with your grandparents permanently after a really bad incident with your mom’s nut job of a boyfriend. You are pretty far behind in school and will need to really buckle down to catch up. But you will, your English teacher, Mrs. Rogerson will take a real interest in you next year and just go with the flow. You will try and buck the system but she will turn out to be one tough cookie. And you will actually come to like Dickens, Steinbeck, and Twain. Really! And no poetry and you will never get along just accept that your brain ain’t wired for it. Ogden Nash is about the best you will understand.
If you find yourself alone with one of the cute blond girls in your seventh grade class go ahead and try to kiss her. She will tell you in high school that she had a huge crush on you but couldn’t get your attention even though you are just really shy. She ends up married to a judge many years later but don’t blow away the chance for a little fun.
High school will be kind of weird for you. Out of all the groups floating around like the surfers, jocks, nerds, and rednecks you will hang out with all but never really fit in. With one of your uncle’s longboard you will learn how to surf but the other guys will be riding short boards and have some sort of attitude about it. You will play basketball during the freshman and sophomore years but not really enjoy it. While you have the height the other guys run circles around you. You will have caught on in school by this time and fine out that you ain’t that dumb. The nerds will try and draw you into dungeons and dragons but the rule book will be larger than the Georgetown telephone book and take away time from the beach. So when they come with all the D and D stuff and a strange gleam in their eyes, run fast. The rednecks will be the most curious of groups. Most of the people you know in school will be rednecks and you will cut class a few times while smoking some reefer with them but you will turn away because they will be severely raciest and that will just bug the utter shit out of you. Just continue to be the laid back dude and sit next to the first girl you see in your biology 2 class, it will be worth it.
In your senior year you will join the National Guard and do basic training and the Advanced Individual Training at Fort Bliss, Texas. DO NOT go to Juarez, just stay in the barracks or hook up with some of the other guys and go see Red Dawn again. Don’t ask just stay away but you do not want to spend the night in a dumpster as several Mexicans look for you.
After you return home from your training you will spend two years floating around working a job that you will come to hate. At this point while you make up your mind to go active duty in the army the best thing for you to do besides running up and down the road to Myrtle Beach would be for you to at least take some classes at the community college. But do take the lifesaving job at the water park, the chicks there will be awesome.
When you finally decided to go active duty don’t pick Fort Carson, Colorado. You will have the option to go to West Germany, do it. First, you will make it to Colorado in July but by December will have seen enough snow for the rest of your life. And except for precipitating in a REFORGER to Europe for five months and a much shorter trip to Honduras a couple of years later you will stay there your entire active time there. But your youngest brother, Joe Cool, will fly out to ride back home with you. He and you will make a side trip to New Orleans and have one of the best times of your lives. Stay an extra couple of days, the city gets blasted by a hurricane in 2005 and will not be the same.
You finally get to college, at least the local community college, and will earn an Associate Degree in electronics. Grandpop will have passed recently, one of the reasons you left the service, and you will live with Granny as you go to school and work a part-time job. Take some time with her, she is really lonely and needs someone to talk with. You will take her to the beach one time, having a good lounge chair for her to sit in while you surf. She will freak over it because she enjoyed it so much. Do it more than once bonehead.
I’ll go ahead and tell you that in 2007 you have two fantastic kids from a lady you will meet at a Buffett concert. You will not want to do anything that might screw up the timeline and cause them not to be in your life. But in 1991 you will meet a special lady at the movies and think seriously about making a permanent relationship with her. What will change your mind will be a less than mature attitude from her that worries you about how strong her feeling really are about her and you. If you want to change events think hard, she is fun, cute and laid back. The lady you marry is smart, witty, and so intelligent she at first blows you away. After you are married though as soon as you say “I do” it all changes and gets really bad in later years with her being obsessed with ever small detail in life and controlling it.
After jumping from a few too many jobs you will find a job as an electronic technician at a plant making fiber optic cable. You will love what you do, how they treat their employees, and will be told due to projections that see a never ending demand of fiber optic cable will have a chance to move up quickly. Well around 2001 the bottom falls out of the industry and while you will hold on to early 2002 you will get laid off. But here’s the rub, after getting laid off again just three months after you find another job you will fall into the best luck of your life and find a job as an X-ray repair technician. It will not pay anywhere near what you were making but if you have patience and can ward off your wife’s fits over that fact it will pay off in the end. One word of warning when the fiber optic plant calls you back hang up the damn phone. The company you loved changed greatly over the time you were away and you will realize just one week after you return that you made a mistake. And one month later when you call the X-ray repair company you were working for to try and get your job back it will already be filled. If you do go back for the money you better be ready to cowboy up because it will be a miserable time working by yourself during third shift. The saving grace though will be another hospital job that will open in 2005, but the equipment you work on will be different.
In the big year of 2000 the biggest doofus in the world will be “elected” president essentially by five fat guys on the Supreme Court. Grab a good hold on your knickers and be ready for a nightmare of a ride because that bastard will do his best to piss away all the goodwill anyone else in the world feels for the USA. The Texas Doofus, a Jabba the Hut political manager, an ass sucking little weasel of an Attorney General, and a pompous heart diseased, draft dodging, hypocrite from Wyoming will also do their best to take advantage of an attack on the US and sow as much fear and discord in America to gather as much power and privileges they can. The pisser of it all is that Doofus and his team have more or less gotten away with it for now.
All in all in 2007 from where I’m sitting you will feel many things are not perfect with your life. Many of the decisions you made along the way were about as outright stupid as they come. But the best thing you can do is keep close to your family. Do your best to overlook what you see as their faults. Because dude you will have a butt load of your own. Take care of your kids and do your best not to sabotage the tour bus your wife and her fellow attorneys use to attend the annual shyster convention in Myrtle Beach, no matter how much you might be celebrated as a hero.
Oh yeah, eBay and the internet. Screw it, read a book and find out about it on your own.

20 comments:

Vigilante said...

Ohhhhhhh, Gawddddddddddddddd.....

So, tell us the truth, Beach:

Just how many times, exactly, have you watched that laughable and pathetic movie, RED DAWN? Watched it through,?

This is the one thing I don't get about you. The one thing.

You're still cool! But, I mean, realllllly!

Anonymous said...

Another well written letter!

I sure am learning a lot about my blog buddies.

Why don't you go play a tune on that Wii guitar?

lime said...

dang, that was really good. i shudder to think about mine. as i ponder it an awful lot of initial thougths boil down to, 'girl, stick to your guns. don't let em convince you otherwise.'

Commander Zaius said...

Vigil: Honestly, over the years about fifty times I think. But in consolation I have also watched the movie version of Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale" many times as well. For those unfamiliar with it the story concerns a future America ran by real theocracy. Simply put it is very scary. My attraction to Red Dawn come s mainly from the first time I saw it at Fort Bliss. I saw it with a bunch of guys from my basic training unit and being as gung-ho as we were at the time we ate that shit up.

PrePon: I've tried my son's Guitar Hero and he about had a stroke laughing so hard. I got even by sending him to bed at 8:00pm. I don't think I will be able to do that much longer, he is getting really big.

Lime: This was kind of difficult to write. I wanted to try and make it funny but a great deal of memories got in the way. I wanted to mention far more things but the post would have ended up 20 or 30 pages.

Mike said...

Great letter Beach, and for the record, Guitar Hero is driving me nuts around here too.

Whatever happened to the good old days when we sat around playing Grand Theft Auto as a family?

Forrest Proper said...

That's a great letter! The responses to this meme have been outstanding and interesting.

FreeOscar said...

Don't screw the internet. You have to have this blogs!

Nice letter... real nice.

Pammy said...

Great letter, BB. And a great idea for a meme. I think I'll swipe it. hehe

Commander Zaius said...

Mike: I did listen to many of the songs that are included on Guitar Hero when they came out on the radio but I never tried to anything constructive while they were on. Writing anything while my son and his friends play the game is impossible. Grand Theft Auto might be an improvement.

Colonel: Thanks, wanted to include more but it would gotten too long and too deep. Don't want to delve too deep in the science fiction aspect but if possible I'm unsure whether I would change anything good or bad. We all bounce around life affecting each other in ways no one really can understand. Changing a few thing could upset the balance and place a person and those around him/her in a worse position. In other words, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

C.Rag and Pammy: Thanks, I had a good time writing it. The weird thing is I read a sci-fi short story in a magazine called Analog back in the late 70's that the author described the internet exactly. The knowledge, commercial, and x-rated aspects were all included in the story and that is generally what I meant about telling my 13 year-old self to read a book. Pammy, If you take the meme up I will enjoy reading it.

Jessica said...

beach bum, that was some truly inspired stuff. Thanks for sharing. I'm going to think about writing one myself, but not sure if i'm up for it just yet. I'm going through some holiday doldrums so it might get a bit downer-ish. Soon though. :)

Casdok said...

Brill letter!

Commander Zaius said...

Jessica: I seem to be saying this a lot lately but I can relate with the holiday doldrums. I'm a summer person and I don't get into the commercialism of everything from Halloween to Valentines day. About the second week of January a huge weight will seem to lift off my chest as most of the craziness will be over. I will then be looking forward to spring and summer activities.

Casdok: Thanks and please drop in anytime. One word of warning I tend to rant about our glorious and intelligent leader in Washington. Glorious and intelligent that is if his mission was to destroy about every principle this country was founded on.

Unknown said...

we wouldn't be the people we are if we didn't live our lives as we did.

it's not always nice though. one just has to concentrate on the GOOD

The Zombieslayer said...

You met your wife at a Jimmy Buffet concert? She's a Parrothead too? Wow! A match made in Heaven. :)

And I'm sick and tired of hearing that Sex Pistols song. That's the only song by the Sex Pistols anyone ever plays. :(

The Zombieslayer said...

Oh, longboards in Santa Barbara, CA never really went out of fashion. Just letting your 13-year-old self know.

Keshi said...

**But the best thing you can do is keep close to your family. Do your best to overlook what you see as their faults. Because dude you will have a butt load of your own

so true! U r absolutely right there BB.


Keshi.

Commander Zaius said...

Rose: Absolutely, won't have my two kids if a couple of events had been a little different.

ZombieSlayer; Yeah, My wife and I met as a Buffett concert. The crazy thing is she hates Buffett. She had just finished a couple of bad years with the breakup of her first marriage and jumping ship from the accounting firm is was doing tax law for. She left Washington DC and went down to Hilton Head, her mom and dad had moved there, where a childhood friend living then in Charlotte, NC took her to the concert. We sat beside each other and started talking.
As for the Sex Pistols I'm almost ready to toss Guitar Hero out the door.
The younger hot shots living on the coast of SC like to play with their shortboards but the waves at my local hangout, Pawleys Island, have never been really right for them. Only the longboards give a decent ride longer than a few seconds. When I started back after getting out the army I did have several guys from my high school years remark how cool it was when they saw me doing "soul surfing" with the longboard. One of my biggest regrets was getting rid of my longboard after my son was born. I couldn't get to the coast much and I had no real room to keep it stored. I'm trying to get around to getting another one but I'll have to wait till Miss Wiggles gets old enough to learn. My son just isn't interested. Miss Wiggles on the other hand will watch the "Endless Summer" movies with me.

Keshi: That is a pure example of hindsight. My family has a bad habit of letting little shit get in the way.

Kentucky Rain said...

So BB, everything else aside, you know, Sex Pistols and such, did you take Miss Wiggles to see The Golden Compass? I saw it yesterday and found it on a par with Lord of the Rings, but I don't recommend it for children under 10.

P.S. I was also at Fort Bliss.

Commander Zaius said...

MadMike: No, all plans fell apart last weekend with Miss Wiggles and me going to the zoo instead. Heard a few things about Golden Compass, nothing involving religion, and may wait till it hits DVD. ZombieSlayer gave a review that it was a little choppy and left too much in the air even given that sequels are very possible. Another reason was that Dragonwife reminded me that Miss Wiggles probably couldn't sit through the movie because she is just too young. Plus I really want to see the Will Smith flick involving undead-like mutants in New York.

Anonymous said...

Brillint writing...
thanks for sharing....


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