Monthly Archives: March 2011

In my random leaps around the internet, I will on rare occasions find myself  staring at greatness.

Such was the day I found the Books of Adam. Adam Ellis writes stupid stories about his life and creates hilarious drawings to go along with them. He lives in Portland and never eats tomatoes, ever. He also has a fantastic sense of humor. I recommend to any and all that you stop by his site and read a few of his stories. If your anything like me you will continue reading until you have reached the end. Then you will pine away waiting for the next story to brighten your dark and dreary existence.

We live among ghosts. They’ve always been here, but as I get older they become more apparent. Dotted along the side of the roads are shrines, everywhere, echoing tragedy and loss. Even the simple ones posted by the state reminding us of the cost of drinking and driving, stand as markers where loved ones fell. They were the sons and daughters of someone, possibly the brothers, sisters, husbands and wives of someone left behind.

When I was a young man, I drank and when I became a Marine I drank and drove. It wasn’t smart, it wasn’t responsible, but I was immortal – bullet proof even. In my barracks alone no less then 16 of my fellow Marines had been injured in alcohol related car accidents in a single year. There were broken backs, broken necks, punctured lungs and other vital organs. Still, we drank, and we drove. That we survived our youth is a testament to the grace such young fools live under.

Still, not all of us do survive. A family up the block from my home buried there son last month. Not even 19, he and his best friend in the world died on the same spot one cold dark Saturday morning. The fire that engulfed their car after it slammed into a reinforced power pole left so little of them behind, it took two days before they were officially identified. They were my sons friends too and I thank whatever angels watch over him that he was not there that morning as well.

Our time on this plane is short, of those planes that lay beyond I can not know with any certainty. I believe there is someplace beyond the brief existence of the flesh, somewhere that the soul is free. Those that have fallen along the way still exist, they walk among us and call out to us in our memories.

We live among ghosts, remember that as you drive by that marker along the side of the road. Someone fell there, lost for a time to those who loved them and miss them dearly. They will bury three more young men this week, in a town not too far from here. No lessons learned, immortal and bullet proof the game goes on.

Never leave what should be said for later. Our chance to tell the ones we love how we feel is so very brief and though no one is ever truly gone, the chance will never come again.

My son is an Internet Gypsy, that is to say he wanders from friends house to friends house every night looking for an on-line fix. He hasn’t slept at home in weeks. It would not be too far a stretch to claim he actually lives on the internet and visits our world during downtime. Like many of the once called ‘middle-class’, I have felt the crush of the second great depression. Through manning reductions and cuts in pay, my family has lost an entire mortgage payment in monthly income. Due to this we have had to cut all non essentials, so no more Xbox-Live, no more Netflix, Cable, land line phones or internet. For a kid that is used to playing two MMO’s at the same time, while laying down suppressive fire in a live FPS and all the while keeping a running dialog on several open chat windows it’s tantamount to the zombie apocalypse.

My earliest memories of Joshua’s computer wanderings go far back to his early years, perhaps at as early an age as four (for those uber geeks who may have caught it, yes indeed Joshua was named after the computer in WarGames). Joshua loved wandering through my computers hard drive using Norton Commander, which I had setup with some hotkeys to allow the kids to play edutainment games. Joshua especially liked Reader Rabbit, but was never content to limit his explorations to those offered by the menus. Josh loved to get the women of the house to freak out by opening Daddy’s porn. So after several hysterical calls (All beginning with the phrase, “Do you know what your son just did!”) I would relocate the offensive images to less accessible places. That never seemed to slow Joshua down, almost as fast as I moved them he would track them down and display them for the world to see. Thinking I was smarter then this child whose sole experience with modern computing was chasing letters with an EGA rabbit, I used the zip commands of good ole Norton Commander to archive the files (we used Gif’s back then) into abstractly named lumps. Did that stop Joshua? Not in the slightest. Needless to say, Dads porn collection went offline after that.

So, wherever you are tonight Joshua. We miss you! Be safe, and watch out for campers.