I put in my last performance as a kabuki wanna-be at today’s Japan Day, the annual cultural festival on Misawa Air Base. (You can see photos of our performance on the Kabuki Page, only at o-broze.net!) I had a pretty minor part in today’s show, but it was as much fun as ever. After the show, the whole troupe went bowling and everybody had a great time.
Today’s issue of the Stars & Stripes included an Associated Press review of the book Star Wars: Labyrinth of Evil. Wow. Somebody’s taking the trouble to review these books? What kind of special hell must a job like that be? Here’s an excerpt: “Light sabers humming, droids chirping and the vivid complexity of alien worlds far, far away – finding subtle prose to execute the story line of the “Star Wars” films ... underscores [author] Luceno’s ability to make strange beings and habitats seem lifelike.” I’m thinking that what Luceno’s got is more like a prize-winning formula for churning out boilerplate space operas, but snarky opinions like that are a big reason I’m not a book reviewer for Associated Press.
And right next to the book review was the list of USA Today’s top 50 best-selling books. At No. 26: Blood Brother: 33 Reasons My Brother Scott Peterson Is Guilty. Not only is that the hands-down winner in the category of Most Ruthless Book Title/Most Ruthless Sibling, it’s also another reason I’m glad the federal government is now ripping the guts out of privacy laws so they can track the sales of books. That way, everybody who plunked down twenty bucks for this piece of crap and others like it can be rounded up when Phase One of the National Eugenics Program is implemented. (Throwing the book away won’t do any good; if you bought it, or even put it on your wish list at Amazon.com, you’re name’s on the list, pal.)
Irony in Real Life: Concerned Parents complained to an AFN radio call-in host last week that the hip-hop and rap stuff (I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to call it “music”) they broadcast in the afternoons featured offensive words and objectionable concepts that they shouldn’t play when children could hear it.
I used to run hot and cold on this argument, but my attitude these days has pretty much solidified. Radio is a technically complex piece of electronic machinery, but most people can master the on-off switch in a few easy lessons. That’s how I’ve saved myself and my family countless times from the ravaging effects of hip-hop, rap, country, techno, and, in their own special category, the Bee Gees. Failing that, unplug it and lock it up if you need that much control over what’s on the air.
Following the call-in show, the disc jockey played two classic blues tunes recorded in the early 80’s by ZZ Top. The first song’s title alone, “Tush,” buried the needle on the Ironic-o-tron, and it’s refrain goes in part: “Lord, take me downtown / I’m just looking for some tush.” The second song, “I Thank You,” features the intro, “You didn’t have to hold it like you did, but you did, and I thank you / You didn’t have to squeeze it like you did, but you did, and I thank you.”
No word yet from Concerned Parents on how they felt about those lyrics.
Retirement Update: Today is the last day in my life I will run a mile and a half for money. At least I hope it is.
I had to complete my yearly physical fitness test this morning, I suppose because I’m not retired yet and the military could still send me to a place where running a mile in under ten minutes would be very useful to keeping all your fingers and toes, and I’m happy to report that I still possess that skill, although I hurt in a few more places each year I try to do it. This year, my knees and ankles are especially creaky, and instead of strength and endurance training, I made sure I took regular doses of Aleve to control inflammation and relieve that unpleasant tight feeling in my joints. Isn’t this interesting? Soon I’ll be writing to share my hints for relief from painful hemorrhoid itch.
Retirement Update: One of my friends in the orderly room called me right after I got to work this morning. “I’ve got some bad news, Dave,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked. “Pee in a cup? Deployed to Iraq?” I shouldn’t say things like that, even when joking.
“Your retirement’s been cancelled.”
I laughed. “Right. What is it, really?”
“The message says you applied more than a year out from your retirement date.”
He was serious. “I’ll be right there.”
And that’s how I found out that the Air Force can cancel your retirement. Just cancel it. You can’t get out now, you’re going to stay a while longer.
I couldn’t have a simple, boring end to my career. No. The Air Force had to find a way to make it memorable. Here’s what happened: In August last year, I went to the personnel office and asked the helpful airmen there what I had to do to retire on August 31st, 2005. They gave me all the paperwork I had to fill out, which they transmitted to the Air Force Personnel Center some time after September 2 — BUT — when I signed my application, I made the mistake of dating my signature “25 Aug 04,” a year and seven days before the date I wanted to retire. We can’t apply for retirement more than one year in advance of the day we want to get out. It took the Air Force Personnel Center until today to spot that mistake. They couldn’t just white-out the date and fix it, they had to deny my application and suggest that I generate more paperwork. Typical.
Speaking of addictions, here’s what I don’t get about gambling your life away: You don’t get anything from it. You don’t get more money, you don’t get a happy feeling, you don’t get anything but poorer. There’s no up side. If you’re addicted to drugs, you feel good. It’s an illusion, and it doesn’t last, but for a short time, at least, you get something. If you’re addicted to sex, you get sex. Actually, I don’t see the down side to that, but experts agree it can be addictive. But with gambling, you have to go out of your way to gamble, you have to throw all your money in the kitty, and eventually you have to sell your car to a loan shark, your house gets repossessed, and your wife & kids move to another state. There must be a reason people get addicted to that, but it’s beyond me.
Retirement Update: I turned in more paperwork to re-apply for retirement. The airman who took my paperwork assured me that my application would be given “top priority.” The expression on my face said, “I’ll believe it when I’m standing on my patio with a cold beer in my hand, grilling bratwurst,” but my mouth said, “Thanks.”
The power went out at about six thirty last night in the middle of a hellacious thunderstorm, leaving the house as black as the inside of a cow, so, to pass the time, Tim & I lit candles and sat at the kitchen table reading magazines until about seven, when all the lights snapped back on, and we went back to rotting our minds in front of the television. I get so nervous when the electricity goes out that I inevitably write in sentences of seventy-five words or more.
Retirement Update: By way of the wonderfully helpful people at the personnel center, I learned that my reapplication for retirement had been received, that I wouldn’t have any problem getting the retirement date I originally asked for, and that I should have orders in hand within 72 hours (in other words, check back on Monday).
Iron-gray clouds hang over Misawa Air Base this morning, and rain occasionally spits down out of the sky, as if to remind you that it’s not really worth your trouble to go outside today. It’s been like this for the past four days, Misawa’s way of saying, “Welcome to Spring!”
Tim said to me yesterday, “I really like it here.” Oh, sure, crush me with feelings of guilt for wanting to get the heck outta Dodge. He said, though, that what likes is the peace and quiet, the small-town vibe – I wonder if maybe living in Wisconsin isn’t just the thing for him. There are plenty of tiny little bergs all over the state just like Misawa air base, towns with one gas station and a fashionable restaurant called EAT, a place where you get one station on the radio and the DJ was the AV nerd at high school. We could buy a frame house built by the guy to used to drive the town’s wrecking truck, and Tim could pull an old couch and his video games into the rafters over the garage and veg up there.
Retirement Update: There is no retirement update. It’s Saturday. There are some people in the military who work on Saturday, but those people do not work in the personnel office.
I’ve got a stupid pop tune stuck in my head, Rupert Holmes’ The Piña Collada Song. Holmes should spend the rest of his life cleaning sticky bar glasses as punishment for foisting this song on us, not that we didn’t lap it up so eagerly that it went to the top of the chart. And how did that happen, anyway? That song sucks, no two ways about it, so who was buying it, and why?
I may have got this song stuck in my head because I was watching Napoleon Dynamite last night. If there was a whole town full of nerds like there was in that movie, it would easily account for the popularity of The Piña Collada Song and other 80’s pop tunes like it that are still otherwise inexplicably popular (I hear it about once a month on American Forces Radio, hard to believe as that might seem).
Maybe Napoleon Dynamite is one of those movies either you get, or you don’t. If so, I’m definitely in the “didn’t get” category. I managed to watch it all the way through, and thought it had a few laughs, but for the most part I didn’t see why I should be watching this nerd for two hours. I’m kind of a nerd myself, but I couldn’t identify or even care about him or anybody else. Tim, who brays with laughter at nearly every scene, thinks this is one of those “so stupid it’s funny” films, but Napoleon and everybody else in it (are there really whole towns populated with nerds?) aren’t stupid, they’re just very nerdy.
I was pulling my trousers on this fine Monday morning, thinking to myself, “I’ll have to dress for work in these goofy duck-hunting clothes for only six more weeks.” WHOA! I’ve been counting the days for about three months, but that kind of hit me in the gut. Six more weeks on the Hill. Blink, and it’ll be over.
*blink*
*blink*
Crap. Still here. Okay, maybe more than a few blinks, but not very long before we’re all starting over again.
The weather today was clear and warm enough to run for PT. When you run for exercise and your ankles and knees hurt with every pounding step, isn’t that your body telling you, “Hey! Dummy! Quit running!”?
Rhetorical question; of course it is, don’t worry about answering. I was wrong earlier when I said I wouldn’t have to do this for money any longer. I’ll have to do it eleven more times, but I’ll never have to do a timed run again. The next time I run for anybody, he’ll have to be threatening me with a knife, or a baseball bat; maybe even harsh language would do it. I’m kind of easy to intimidate.
FIGMO, Baby! Finally, I Got My Orders!
There’s a lot more to the story, of course. There’s no way I can just walk into the personnel office, get my orders, and walk out. That would be too easy. Can’t have that.
I have fifty-nine days of leave on the books, and when I retire, I’m entitled to take them as “terminal leave,” which means that I go on leave and I never return to active duty. Pretty cool.
When I began planning for my terminal leave, the good people at the personnel office told me that I was also entitled to thirty days of “permissive TDY” – the simplest way I can explain that is like this: I get time off to look for a job.
“Cool,” I said, “Can I take it in conjunction with my terminal leave?”
Yes, they said I could.
“Cool,” I said. “I’d like to start my PTDY on 4 June, fly out of Misawa on 27 June, and begin my terminal leave on 4 July. Can I do that?”
Although they weren’t sure at first, they decided, in the end, that I could.
“Cool,” I said.
There was a hiatus while I waited for my retirement to be approved, then cancelled, then re-approved, and then I went to the personnel office this morning after they asked me to pick up my orders.
Very cool.
The airman who processed my orders asked me if I’d like to apply for a port call date while I was there. “Port call date” is the day I leave Misawa. I was all for that, so I hung around while he started filling out paperwork. To figure out when I should fly out, he wanted to count back from when he would give me my final out-brief, which he normally does before people go back to the States, so he asked me when my permissive TDY started.
“4 June,” I told him. And he counted back three days, to schedule my final out-brief on 30 May, so that I could fly out on 1 June.
“Ah, no,” I pointed out, “we’d like to fly out on 27 June.”
I believe his response to that was, “Hmmmmm.” And then he said something like, “I don’t think you can do that.” And after he talked it over with his boss, they both were pretty sure I couldn’t do it that way.
Not cool.
I know these guys have an awful lot to do, and not enough personnel to do it, and probably they were only listening to every other word I said when I asked them not once, but two or three times before whether or not I could do it that way, and they answered, “Yes.” I’m sure they only meant to give me their most honest answer always. But, really, when they all agreed today that I probably couldn’t do it that way, I could’ve literally exploded. I don’t know how I didn’t, but somehow I kept my tiny little molecules from flying off energetically in all directions, then got the boss of the retirements office to explain to me how I could manage to get out of here on the 27th of June, because, really, at this point that’s all I want to hear. How will it all turn out? Tune in again tomorrow, same bat-time, same bat-channel!
Barb’s working the late shift tonight, so her boys are on their own, trying to out-gross each other. Tim thinks he can be grosser than I can, but I have always proved him wrong. After all, he’s only fourteen, and I spent almost every one of my teenaged years trying to out-gross all of my high school buddies. I was pretty good at it, although my buddy Roy knew some songs that were masterpieces of revolting language.
Tim will always surpass me when it comes to being annoying, however, and I think anybody who knows him will agree with me on this one. One of the rather minor ways he annoys me is when he sneaks into the room where I’m sitting and manages to get close enough to poke me in the ribs. He used to suck at this, attempting to cloud my mind using his Moktahr Stealth Haze while he clomped into the room with all the sneakiness of a herd of bull elephants, but sometime just a week or two ago he figured out that he would be way more annoying if he focused on being quiet and keeping low to the ground. He did it again while I was typing this, and now I’ll have to take my revenge.
Why he starts this kind of fight is beyond me, because a poke in the ribs only annoys me, but he’s so ticklish that, when I dig my thumbs into his ribs, the energy released could light up every neon sign in Times Square. He hasn’t figured out a way to keep me from tickling him senseless ... yet.
I have no retirement update today. I left the people in the retirements office alone, but I’m going to go back to bothering them full-time, starting first thing tomorrow morning.
Two years ago, America invaded Iraq in order to stop Saddam from unleashing weapons of mass destruction on the world, and this week a lab in the States sent deadly flu virus through the mail to labs all over the world. The gagging sound you hear is me choking on the irony.
How about the international cat-shooting scandal? The most interesting news always comes out of Wisconsin, doesn’t it? What I loved about this story was that, when American news media covered it, they used a photo of a cute, fluffy house cat with great big eyes, and when BBC ran the story, they used a photo of about a dozen actual feral cats feasting on the corpse of a woodland creature they’d slaughtered.
It’s Friday! You know what that means, don’t you? It means that I’ve survived another week. It means that I’ve crossed five more working days off my calendar, and I’m that much closer to walking out the door for the last time. It means that, for two whole days, I don’t have to go back to that place where the Air Force employs my services. The best thing a guy can do at a time like this is: Drink beer. Luckily, the shopette has plenty of Guiness stout on hand.
Here’s one of the few things I can tell you about the place I work: Did you know it’s painted entirely in beige, just like all the rest of the buildings on this base? I don’t know if the monochromatic paint scheme is supposed to confuse would-be saboteurs, or if the guys who made the decorating decisions were all art school dropouts. It’s a wretched sight, especially here in Japan. On base, row after row of barf-brown buildings. Off base, houses scattered so randomly and colored so brightly that they look like heaps of jelly beans.
Brittany Spears is pregnant. On one side of the globe, militant fanatics are bombing women and children to ensure that men don’t shave and women don’t show their faces, while on the other side, people like Spears and Michael Jackson are not only allowed to procreate, but their sex lives are celebrated in great detail, round the clock, by everybody. My own mother asked me if I’d heard about Brittany. (Not the whole truth; she was making fun of the news reports, but she did ask.) Some day somebody will probably make sense of it, but I often wonder if I’ll live that long.
I got flu shots every week when I was a kid, or at least that’s how I remember it. Barb, too. Seems like they were always herding long lines of us into the gym, where grinning nurses in white lab coats waited with trays piled high with syringes ... GREAT BIG SYRINGES! HUGE SYRINGES WITH NEEDLES AS LONG AS YARDSTICKS! At the sight of those syringes, half the kids in the line – that would include me – would break down into hysterical, pathetic cries, bawling for mommy, or help, or just bawling until their faces were glazed in tears and snot, and teachers, forearmed with bales of Kleenex, worked their way up and down the line, trying against all hope to calm them. The teachers, no matter how kind or sympathetic or determined, had no chance. About one in every three kids in the gym screamed bloody murder when he got jabbed, and the blood-curdling sound of that scream not only pierced everyone’s ears and made the hairs on the backs of their necks stand up, I swear it sent tremors through the floor that those waiting in line picked up with their feet. Try to counteract an all-encompassing effect like that by softly cooing, “there, there.”
It wasn’t always flu shots, of course. I have no idea what it was. They could have been inoculating us against anthrax for all I know. And I never will know, because I have no idea where they kept records of that stuff. There’s probably a huge underground vault somewhere in the Utah desert lined with filing cabinets filled with the vaccination records, DNA samples and microchip frequencies of millions of America’s children. What an X-Files moment it would be to stumble across that.
This was all part of the 1960’s optimism that medical science could someday wipe all disease off the face of the earth. The teachers used to show us newsreels, a primitive form of video made by shining light through crude images carved in stone, of doctors inoculating children in far-flung countries, but that was long before the system we have today, when laboratories send carefully-cultured lethal flu viruses all over the globe via FedEx. Talk about a whole different world.
My very first job application reveals that, not only am I an utter newbie when it comes to looking for a job, but I’m a total nincompoop, as well. Barb found a copy of it yesterday while cleaning up the office, read it, and asked me, “Dear, do you even know how much money you make?” When she starts out saying “dear” in italics, I know I’ve been a big dummy, so it’s no use trying to duck the question. No, I have no idea. So long as somebody’s paying me something, I don’t give it any thought.
And besides, I’m in the military, so I figured a future employer wouldn’t even blink when I gave my base pay as my salary. My base pay, though, was less than half my usual paycheck. I guess that’s why they call it “base.” So I underestimated my salary big time, but I’m going to re-figure everything, make a crib sheet, and use that to fill out the many, many job applications in my future.
I cleaned off my bike and had a short ride on it yesterday, first time this season. Hell, first time in forever; I can’t remember the last time I was out on a bike. I sponged the ugly green layer of dust off it, dribbled 3-in-1 oil all up and down the chain, checked that the brakes still held tight, then banged all the spiders out of my helmet and strapped it on before jumping on the bike and heading for the street. I headed up the hill first, but that was against the wind, so I turned around and sailed past the house again toward the library. We live on a long, curving street, so that I was eventually going into the wind again, but I toughed it out until I could make the turn at the youth center. That street curves, too. I was against the wind coming back from the post office, and against the wind yet again going past billeting. In the home stretch, I was finally ... CRAP! The wind shifted!
Studying history used to put me to sleep. I must be harboring some guilty feelings about that, because I’ve been reading books about early American history, a subject that never interested me before, and every book I open reveals some surprise that I swear none of my teachers ever even hinted at, unless they mentioned it after they bored me to sleep. For instance, nobody ever, ever told me that the Constitution made it illegal for Congress to outlaw slavery for twenty years after ratification, or that another article gave slave states more representation in Congress, and more electoral votes, by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person. I picked up these tidbits in Arguing About Slavery. I was actually at the library looking for a book about the Amistad rebellion after I watched the movie the other day – first time for me; outstandingly good movie – and picked up this book instead.
Tim came in while I was reading it yesterday, looked right at the cover, and asked, “What’s it about?” Well, it’s about slavery, and how the American people argued over it. Does it all make sense now?
I’m allowed one hair oops per year. I’m hoping this is it, so I don’t have to wait for the other shoe to drop.
Man, she really buzzed me. Not only did she give me whitewalls – what we call the white space around the ears – up to my forehead, but she did it so that I didn’t notice until this evening. Subtle hair sabotage. Very clever.
Did my nose get longer? Or just pointier?
There’s an electronic toy in the museum at work that reminds me of my dad. It looks like an ordinary computer keyboard, but when I tap on the keys, the Morse code equivalent of whatever letter I just tapped comes beeping out the back.
Dad taught me the little Morse code I know, two words that would have made my Mom roll her eyes if she’d heard him teaching me how to spell them in dits and dahs. He used to be a radar operator during the short time he was in the Navy, and his scope was in the same room where the radio operator monitored Morse communications, so he picked up just enough Morse to know how to transmit four-letter words into the ether. I wonder if the radio operator took a similar interest in radar?
One day while we were taking a break from working in the yard, Dad passed along his hard-won knowledge to me, so that I can now spell ‘kit’ and ‘stuck’ and, let’s see, ‘tut’ – and a couple other words. I only know two vowels, so my vocabulary’s a bit limited.
When I leave work at night, I sometimes take the long way down the hall where they piled a bunch of obsolete equipment and called it a museum, and I stop for a minute to tap out a couple familiar words on the keyboard. It’s a cheap laugh, but it brings back memories.
Why do most jobs have to begin so damned early? Nobody should have to get up at six, or even earlier, to get ready for their jobs, unless of course they just love their jobs all to pieces and can’t wait to go, and then more power to them. But if a guy can get up at, oh, say, eight-thirty, get into work by ten, and finish up all the work he has to do by five or six, what’s so bad about that? The world keeps turning.
Maybe I just need to drink more coffee.
I’m probably going to annoy the hell out of you by reminding you that I’m just 65 days away from the day I fly out of Misawa, and there are just 131 days left until I’m promoted to Mister. And that’s why I look so darned happy.
Get out your crayons and draw a beard on this picture to see what I’ll look like by my birthday. I wonder if it’ll grow out gray? These photos are rather flattering (hard as that may be for me to believe); my hair’s pretty salty these days, but I have no idea what my beard looks like, not having seen it in more than twenty years. If it comes out gray, I may just have to grow it to Santa-Claus length.
My eyes look a little whacky in this photo, don’t they? Like the one on the left – your left, not mine – isn’t it maybe a little too low? And sort of glancing away from the camera? I hadn’t finished even one beer by the time this photo was taken, so I can’t be potted enough for my eyes to start wandering away from me. Maybe it’s the glasses refracting the light, or some other kind of horse hockey explanation.
The day started way too early. I mean, this is Saturday. There’s no reason to get up any earlier than ten o’clock, unless your sleep is pretty much ruled by a colon that makes sure you’re awake by seven as it welcomes the new day with a growl. On a really active day like today, the morning after a couple beers and a big dinner at the club, it’ll even vent noxious fumes like a newly-awakened volcano. In case you wanted to know.
But that’s not what got me up today. Barb had to work the morning shift at the café, so I got up to make her coffee while she was in the shower, because I’m a swell guy, but also because I can’t go back to sleep while she’s showering and getting dressed, so why not get up and share a jolt of java with her? It gets the weekend off to a running start.
Tim, on the other hand, seems to be determined to prove all by himself the scientifically-reported idea that teenagers need much more sleep than children or adults, as much as twelve hours. He didn’t get up until eleven o’clock this morning, although I believe he planted his butt on the sofa and channel-surfed until past midnight last night. As usual, he slept with a fan in his room, so that its soft hum covered his ears in a protective blanket of white noise. When Barb and I began to tramp around the house at six in the morning, he scarcely had to roll over to find his way back to sleep, even though he refused as always to close the door to his room when he went to bed at night.
Lucky dog. I have a dim memory of being able to sleep like that, but ever since I hit 40, I wake up after about six or seven hours and after that, I just lie there, wide awake. Boring.
Movie Time: We watched Spanglish last night. What was this movie about? I really couldn’t tell. It started off as a story about a daughter’s relationship with her mother, but the daughter didn’t really appear until halfway through the movie, and even then the director didn’t do much with her. If he was taking that long to build up to the mother-daughter relationship, the buildup seemed to whither when the relationship didn’t flower.
Until the daughter showed up, the movie was also sort of about a yuppie family who hired the daughter’s mother to work as a maid. The family is so wildly dysfunctional that their relationship left me constantly asking, Why? Why would the husband, a humble professional chef, stay with the self-centered, materialistic, manipulative, crybaby of a wife? He didn’t seem all that interested in saving their marriage when he muttered, “Running out of excuses for the wife.” He wasn’t staying with her for the benefit of their children, because he could clearly see she wasn’t beneficial to them; quite the opposite, actually.
The movie flip-flopped between trying to be a serious study of these relationships and a screwball comedy, and flips followed flops so quickly that the two styles sent a crazily-mixed message. A scene in which the father, drunk as a Lord, came within inches of sloppily kissing the maid, made him seem scary, even malevolent, instead of romantically drawn to her.
In the final reel, the movie tried to re-focus on the mother-daughter relationship, but there was no time to develop it in any kind of detail. The crazy antics of the dysfunctional family overpowered them until they were lost in the script as a minor plot device. Can’t recommend it.
Movie Time: American Forces Network showed Beavis and Butt-head yesterday afternoon. I have to ask: What’s the point? I’ve never seen the movie, but wouldn’t have to cut about three-quarters of it to avoid a blizzard of complaints?
By the way, AFN claims that it doesn’t alter the content of any of the programming, but even the youngest kids – perhaps especially the youngest kids – can tell that action heroes don’t cuss out their arch-nemeses by growling, “You gosh-darned mugging fluffer!” And when David Letterman announces, “We’ll be right back with tonight’s Top Ten list!” it’s about even odds whether or not you’ll get to see it.
If you want to know the wonder of the internet, I invite you to visit a creative little web site:
I got a pie-hole on the front of my head
It talks on the telephone and snores in my bed
It won’t go away ‘cause it’s stuck on my face
My friends, they don’t like it, it’s a big disgrace
My pie-hole
I like my pie-hole, it can sing and yell
It make a fart sound without all the smell
It burps and it coughs, it sneezes, too
I love my pie-hole, so why don’t you
My pie-hole
When I looked in the mirror this morning, I saw a huge, white zit staring back at me from the inside corner of my right cheek. Where do these overnight zits come from? It wasn’t there yesterday, but this morning, it was. Could there be some kind of zit pixie going from window to window on a mission of mischief?
Whenever my Mother caught sight of one of my overnight white-headed zits, her response was almost reflexive, and a little bit frightening: she would back me into a corner by digging the edges of her thumbnails into the skin of my face on each side of the zit, and s q u e e z e until the ooze popped forth. Satisfied that her work was done, she would back off, dusting her hands, and I would spend the next hour or so trying to unscrew my expression, which was locked in a deeply-contorted grimace.
I’m not sure how my Mom will like knowing that bulging, white zits remind me of her, but what can I do about it? Every Mom’s good for at least one story like that, don’t you think?
I can't get to sleep because I've got a nucular case of indigestion. Yeh, I give up. It's "nucular."
I confused the hell out of the cats by getting up in the middle of the night. They thought it was breakfast time, I guess, because they followed me when I went down to the kitchen in search of Alka-Seltzer, and stood outside the closed door, crying pathetically. You would not believe the disgusted looks they gave me when I came out and wasn't carrying a speck of cat food for them to greedily gobble down. Not that it made much of an impression on me. When indigestion keeps me awake, there isn't an ounce of compassion anywhere in my body, for cats or anybody on earth. I would happily drown kittens to get rid of a really bad case of indigestion. Okay, maybe not kittens. Ashton Kutcher, say.
It's Friday, and that means I have just three more weeks left before I quit working for the Air Force forever. You'll never meet a guy more eager to become unemployed. Oh, sure, every short-timer talks that way, but I really mean it. I chatted with an airman today who was separating from the Air Force shortly. "Congratulations," I told her, and she thought I was kidding at first, then smiled and said, "Thank you!" When I told her that I was getting out, too, she asked me what I was going to do after retirement. "I really don't know. Just sit on the corner with a sign and a tin cup, I guess." She thought I was kidding then, too. It's not that I have low expectations for myself, it's just that I want to be pleasantly surprised when I get a good job, a nice house, and live happily ever after.
The retirement process starts off so deceptively easy: Fill out a form, get your commander to sign it – BOOM! you've got a retirement date. Everything that follow after that, however, is subject to the usual red tape. The last thing I did was apply for a "port call," which is the date I want to leave Misawa. A quick check of past drivel reveals that I did this first on April 12th, and again a couple days later. I called the retirements office on Wednesday. "Hi, Dave Okonski here, just touching base with you regarding my port call. Any news to report?" No. No news. My file was on her desk and she would get to it that afternoon. No call-back that afternoon, so I called again the next day. The airman said he "just needed one or two more bits of information ... now, what was the date you wanted to leave?" After I answered a couple more questions that I answered two weeks ago, he said he would fax the application right away and I could call in an hour to receive confirmation. I called. Not in the system. Call back Friday. Well, it's Friday now, and I called, and they said, "Heck yes, with a retirement, you get whatever day you ask for. But you're asking for June 27th, which is two months from now, and I've got a big stack of retirements on my desk – if you could just give me a week..." It's a hurry up and wait process, with strong emphasis on the "wait."
Right after I made my decision to leave the Air Force, I kept the news mostly to myself, but when I did start to tell people, I got a funny response: "Me, too!" For a while, it seemed as though every Air Force guy I ran into with at least twenty years of service had decided to retire. There must've be a half-dozen who told me they were leaving this summer, and three or four more in the fall. It was as if the signal from the Mother Ship calling us all home had finally reached Earth after travelling across trillions of miles of deep space. If we all end up in Madison, Wisconsin, that really will be creepy.
I ran what I fervently hope will be my last readiness run this morning. It's called a "readiness run," but the general pointed out this morning that the readiness run wasn't really a fitness exercise, it was more like an exercise in morale-building. Every group on base formed up on the parade ground in front of the flag pole, and we were supposed to run down to the flight line and back, staying together, in formation. I guess we were getting ready to fight the redcoats.
Right after we formed up, and just before the general's pep talk, an Air Force chaplain stepped up to the microphone to pronounce the benediction. We pray before every official function; make a note of that when you get to the civil liberties quiz at the bottom of this page. This chaplain looked to be about nineteen, twenty years old, and I would hazard a guess that this was his first benediction ever. It started off with the usual: "Oh Lord, we thank you for this fine summer day, for the clear skies and the warm breeze, and we thank you for our strong bodies – " I would've suggested he use "good health" there, but nevermind. " – and we thank you for energy drinks – " Wait a minute. Did he just thank the divine being for Gatorade? " – and for lightweight running shoes that carry us along ... " I guess there's a prayer for everything, but this was the first time I'd ever heard a chaplain offer thanks for athletic gear.
Turning now to the weather, freak winds kicked up today that were so strong, they threatened to turn Misawa into a replay of Oklahoma during the dust bowl days. Just blinking my eyes was painful because the grit got under my lids and turned them into sandpaper that scoured my corneas. (Corneii?) And I've suddenly run out of things to say about wind. Dammit, that was a short paragraph. Time to head for bed, maybe.
... and then, after I got a few hours of sleep, a hot shower, and a cup of coffee into my system, I felt almost human again. Whenever I've been forced to suffer through a sleepless night by a stomach that doesn't want to hold still, there's just one thing to do: Go to one of the local festivals, where I can be sure to find plenty of food-on-a-stick and buckets of beer! Truth be told, we weren't looking for a festival or a lot of festival food, it just sort of worked out that way. We were looking for a sumo match in Towada today, and the taxi driver who took us downtown pointed out that there was a cherry blossoms festival going on. We just couldn't fight karma as good as that, so we settled down to enjoy it a bit.
Not only did karma bring us to a city full of cherry blossoms, good food, and beer, it also brought us face to face with two of our kabuki buddies. We ran into Yamada-san, who was on his way to work, but stopped to say hello. Then, while we were strolling along the main road under the cherry blossoms, we ran into Uedo-san, who was coming into town to perform at the festival. He introduced us to the rest of the actors in his troupe, and they offer us the most wonderful hospitality, in the form of beer and some delicious squid and snails. Y'know, I've eaten whole oysters, and shrimp, and scallops are yummy just about ever way I've ever had them, and I love squid and even octopus, especially when I've had a bit to drink ... but snails have a certain je ne sais quoi that makes them just about impossible for me to want to pop them into my mouth. Must be a defense mechanism they've cleverly evolved.
We stayed in Towada into the evening to have dinner with a friend, then hopped the train back to Misawa. One of the things I'm going to miss about Japan is the singing announcements. Everywhere you go in Japan that has a public address system, and that's just about everywhere you go in Japan, you'll hear a girl's voice making announcements in a singsong voice. There may be some subtle variations, but it's almost as if all the women have gone to announcement school to learn to sing the same song. I have to admit that I like it. If I knew the words, I'd probably be good and sick of it by now, but since I don't, I listen to the local Japanese radio station just to hear the announcements in the morning, and I still think it's a special treat to get change at the grocery store because the cashier's got quite an amazing song to sing about that.
All in all, it's been a full day. I'm off to bed, but if my stomach can't behave, you may hear from me in a few hours, so I'll just say: Ta-ta for now.