Concerning my most recent article entitled "Young People Don't Care - And That's a Good Thing" (http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/mike-in-tokyo-rogers/young-people-dont-care/) about how today's Japanese, Korean and Chinese youth seem to not hate each other like past generations did... That they don't care about nationalism like their predecessors...
I received several mails from people (older generations) who seem to misunderstand what I wrote. Perhaps I did write it poorly (I do think or people want to read into it what they want).
I never said the Japanese, Korean or Chinese kids didn't study history - International test results show they certainly do MUCH better scholastically than America kids do (but who couldn't study more?) My entire point was that today's Japanese youth (and Chinese and Korean youth) don't hate each other like past generations did. When viewing each other, they don't care about what happened in their grandparents generation.
That they don't hate each other like the generations of the past did should pretty much speak for itself, no? Prejudice is a learned behavior, isn't it? These Japanese, Korean and Chinese kids don't hate each other like they did a generation ago... Or all the generations that came before that...
Why do people have a problem with this? Isn't this good news?
The super healthy breakfast. This is what my son eats everyday! You should too! You'll lose weight, feel great and look years younger. I started eating raw over six years ago and I am never going back the the standard sick diet that everyone eats. I recommend the raw food diet for everyone. It’s also good for all sorts of ailments.
Right: Home made raw juice. Ingredients: Cabbage, broccoli and alfalfa sprouts, ginger root, asparagus, carrot, broccoli, Goya, pineapple, oranges, banana, milk.
Not pictured: One half English muffin and two slices bacon.
Note: I usually just have the juice - about one liter and one banana for breakfast. I do not eat the toast and bacon. I am slowly weaning my son off the cooked food. He is now about a 70% raw food eater. I am 95%.
OK, well, my hair is a disaster (as usual) but I'm 6 months short of 55-years-old in this photo. I know if I stay on the raw food, I can keep this for the next ten years. (Photo taken at 11:40 am Saturday Feb. 11, 2012)
Seriously, I recommend this for everyone. I used to have gout and high blood pressure. But I don't anymore. I wrote about that in Gout Sufferers of the World, Unite!
"... a raw food diet can cure and help alleviate the problems and pains of many diseases and ailments. So, I ordered the book, The Live Food Factor, and tried it. I went 70% raw for the first two months. I also got great tips from the Beating Gout web page.
I've stopped drinking alcohol and I now eat raw foods at least two meals a day. I also try to drink at least three quarts of fresh water every day. I found the advice in the book The Live Food Factor wonderful and I recommend it to you.
Even though I eat raw at least twice a day, I can tell you that I do feel great. I take no gout medicines and my cholesterol levels are completely normal too. I have also cut my blood pressure medicine dosage by two-thirds and plan on quitting altogether when I get the courage up to eat three raw meals a day.
It has been now seven months and I have had three blood tests that show that my uric acid is well within safe levels and I haven't had any trouble with gout at all. On top of that, I've lost 22 pounds in six months and feel great!"
Annette Larkins at 69 years old.
That was one and one-half years ago. Now I take no medicines and my blood pressure is an extremely healthy 120 / 74! I will never go back to the poison and junk like processed foods that so many people eat today.
And get this: Eating raw food costs nothing extra! There are no catches! It isn't a fancy diet! Raw Food? Eat all you want when you want!
Here's a TON of testimonials from those who have thrown away our modern Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) and gotten back to natural foods:
"I was wise enough to see that one can't experience one's grandfather's revolution. Rip it up!" ~ Jp Valentine
There are a very many things that we need to be thankful for and I wanted to share just one of mine with you and hope that, after this, you'll take a few moment's time to close your eyes, relax and reflect on yours too.
The one I want to tell you something that I have discovered the importance of nearly 35 years after it happened! All until this time, I was thankful that I was there and got to see it, but I never fully grasped how I was able to be a part of a bigger picture; a bigger "scene." Now that I have, I realize that God (Vishnu, Siva, Buddha, the Great Electrode, Bob, what-have-you) gave me such a wonderful present that I shall always cherish.
Usually, when you read these sorts of posts and articles about what we should be thankful for, you are given a litany of the usual things and those are things to be thankful for today: Family, a home, food, health... Of course, those are things to be greatly thankful for and to never forget. But, may I ask that you indulge yourself and take a time trip and be thankful for something you probably don't really think about all that much? And, perhaps, feel a little guilty about today if you stop, reflect and say, "Thank you for that wonderful time!"
I'm talking about being thankful for the past. The past that's never coming again. I'm talking about being thankful for the treasures of youth we received. And, I'm talking about giving up gracefully those treasures of youth so that we do not cling to to them like a drowning man clings to straw, but that we surrender them to the next generation with class befitting our age and experience.
I'm talking about our youth. Those wonderful dates, places you visited, things you experienced that only young people can do. I want you to take this morning and reflect for a few moments on your favorite of those experiences; experiences that probably you, and only you, of all those around you know about.
This morning, when I woke up, I thought about my life and how lucky I am; how lucky I was. I enjoyed things that few people could have and, I'm sure, that you can say the same thing about yourself. Everyone has enjoyed something special in their time in this cosmos that has happened especially for them that no one else can, or will, ever experience again.
For me, there are so many. But, like I said, I'd like for you today to think about and focus on one.
Here's my "one" that I stumbled upon that I rediscovered yesterday and it was something that happened about 35 years ago! While I enjoyed it at the time, I didn't realize that it was so unique. Let me reminisce and tell you about it.
I wrote yesterday about a producer friend I have who lives in Hollywood. His name is Jp Valentine. Jp and I have become good friends, I like to think, yet we have never even met. We have corresponded greatly and he sent me a gift the other day that really has stopped me and made me pause and think.
The present he sent me was a book entitled, "Riot on Sunset Strip - Rock'n'Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood." It is a wonderful book filled with photos and accounts of the Golden Time between 1965 and 1966 for Rock'n'Roll music and the Sunset Strip that occurred for a few shorts months.
Here's a VERY short synopsis of the book:
For a brief period between 1965 and 1966, Rock’n’Roll music, heavily influenced by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as well as American acts such as the Byrds, the Doors, Love, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas & the Papas and more, displaced cinema as the center of action in Hollywood. The scene appeared out of nowhere, lasted a few exiting and incredible few months and then just vanished just as suddenly as it appeared. The mix of London and Los Angeles gave rise to an eruption of local music and culture at that time. From this cultural explosion, Rock’n’Roll combined and quickly permeated television, animation, cinema and popular culture around the western world.
Here is a snippet of a review of the book that I took from Amazon:
I loved this book because of the way it put me right on the Sunset Strip in the mid 60s, making me feel like I was sitting at Canter's Deli with Gene Clark and then dancing to The Byrds at Ciro's later that same evening. I also love the argument it makes about San Francisco's elitist attitude about its own 60s bands, versus those of L.A. Ask me to choose between The Grateful Dead and Love, between Moby Grape and The Byrds, between any SF garage band and The Seeds or The Music Machine, and I'm going with the Hollywood "cream puff" act every time. The book also makes you feel the tragedy of the collapse of the Sunset Strip nightclub scene, after the police effectively shut it down because some influential people in town didn't like the idea of the Strip being a place for teenagers to hang out and dance to groovy music. You get to know what a magical time and place the Strip was in 65-66, and it makes you want to be there.
Wow! That sounds like a cool place! I love that sort of thing. Jp tells me these sorts of cultural booms happened in London, Paris, Berlin and America in the 1920s, as well as a few other places and times that I was too dumb to take note of. He also tells me that, besides 1965 ~ 1966 on the Sunset Strip, that it happened again, albeit very briefly, on that very same Sunset Strip in 1977.
The weird thing is that I was there in 1977 and saw it and was a part of it! I never realized that that time had its roots in a sixties rock movement in Hollywood.
I knew it was fun and have always been thankful for being there and seeing it and being a part of it, while it was going on, but never realized how it fit in with the evolution of pop music culture in America until I read page 25 of "Riot on Sunset Strip - Rock'n'Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood." On page 25, it talks about the sudden disappearance of the Hollywood Rock music scene in 1966. It says,
"Not even the smallest portion of the (Sunset) Strip would seem vital again until the emergence of the punk rock scene in the late 1970s..."
That really astounds me. I never realized how the seventies punk boom fit into the overall history of Hollywood and Los Angeles. The seventies punk boom in Los Angeles, also, seems to me was there one day and then gone the next.
The Deadboys were one of the best live acts I have ever seen
I wrote to Jp:
"In my youth, I lived all over the USA moving almost yearly and changing elementary and Jr. high schools annually. It always made me a sort of outcast with few friends. I stayed in Calif. through high school but still was considered sort of "backwards" by my peers (even the slang and lingo and how kids talked was different from the Mid West - where I just came from - to California)."
"When the punk boom happened, I used to drive my car, by myself, to Los Angeles and go see punk bands. I saw the Deadboys play, I think it was 5 nights in a row and Sham 69 play 7 nights in a row at (I think it was the Whiskey - can't remember). I liked it so much that I drove all the way from Venture to Los Angeles (about 1.5 hours) every night to see these shows! I loved it. I loved Hollywood. Guess what? I thought that the night club scene was the way it always was and always has been... Now I read that part in the book, "Riot on Sunset Strip..." and it really surprises me that it is not. I got lucky... I stepped into a Time Warp! I honestly didn't know. I thought it was business as as usual... Thank you, Jp. for allowing me to know this and thank you God for allowing me to be there."
Wow! That was a wonderful time. That was my time....
But now, we're back to today... I'm back to this blog post. It's a Saturday morning here in Japan and my family is sleeping and I am sitting here reminiscing about the past, a past they know nothing about.
It is a guilty pleasure of mine to enjoy those memories that only I know about and only I can recall...
Thanks for listening to mine. Now, it's your turn. Whether you want to write it down or not, why don't you take some time today or in the morning tomorrow to sit down and think back? Think way back to something you haven't thought of in years... Maybe it was that time with friends? Or that time with mom and dad when you were a child? Or maybe it was that time on that date with that someone you'll never forget?
Think back. Remember it. It is a present. Enjoy it.
Enjoy the wonderful memories and, while still cherishing them, gracefully give up the treasures of youth...
Be thankful for them. Enjoy them. You have many more wonderful memories coming.
I'd like to talk to you all about why people take things of beauty and destroy them by putting them in cages.
When I was a 7 or 8 year old boy, a second-grader, and living in the country in Minnesota, my school class gave us the assignment to capture butterflies and bring them to school for some sort of Science class experiment.
One of the neighborhood girls, and a classmate of mine, Paula Nelson, and I went out to capture butterflies together. Paula was a nice girl but I didn't have a crush on her like I did with some of the other girls in class.
While chasing butterflies together, we spied a large yellow beauty fluttering about the roof of my house. The butterfly lit upon the rain drainage pipes. I gathered a ladder and started to climb up in order to capture the butterfly with my net.
As I climbed, Paula started chanting, "Mike! You can do it! You can do it!" I began to swell with pride and because of this cheering began to to develop a real liking for Paula...
Everyone wants to feel important and Paula did that for me at the time. I will never forget how I felt at that moment. Someone was truly cheering for me! I was so happy! Even though I was but a small boy, I will never forget Paula for making me feel so good about myself. I have thought about her many times over the years. I hope she found a true soul-mate and is truly happy! Thank you Paula!
In a way, capturing a butterfly and making it "mine" is also a way for children to increase their personal worth and add to their lives "treasures."
But I digress...
I neared the butterfly slowly and took up my net. Paula continued chanting. I swatted my net down upon the beautiful butterfly and... It escaped and fluttered away.
I felt defeated for a moment and felt that I had let Paula down.
A few days later, back at school, I viewed all the captured butterflies the other children brought into the classroom laying dead, side by side, in a row. Some kids had very many of them. I had failed to catch even one. As I viewed the butterflies, it dawned on me that dead butterflies were not beautiful but were actually trash.
All those wings of grace and color and dreams lying there were like a pile of old and dirty crayons: cold, lifeless and used up. Of no use to anyone or anything.
Simply garbage.
The butterflies flying in the blue skies are actually a miracle of grace and give us, children and adults, dreams... Dreams of flying over the mountains and clouds. Dreams of being who we've always wanted to be!
The butterflies laying still and lifeless in a cage give us death and dispair.
For the first time in my life, I was glad that I didn't catch any of those poor butterflies. I wished I had had a time machine and could help all those dead butterflies go back in time where I could have prevented their capture and set them free.
I will never forget that experience.
When my lovely second daughter, Sheena, was a small girl of seven and a second-grader, she and her friends had some nets and were out catching butterflies in the neighborhood near Yokohama. To my great surprise they caught a very many of them and put them in a plastic, see-through clear box that had holes in the top. Even though the box was designed for insects, the holes were so small the butterflies suffocated and died....
The children had so merry a time a capturing these creatures... They were so happy that they brought the butterflies to me for my approval. But I didn't approve. The memories of my time as a child and seeing all those dead butterflies came racing back to me.
I foolishly got angry at the small children.
"These poor butterflies are beautiful and a gift from God when they are flying free. But now that you've captured them, they have died a terrible death in a box. Dead and lifeless they are not beautiful to anyone anymore. They are merely trash to be thrown away. Please, dear children, don't take these beautiful creatures and capture them. They are only beautful if they are flying free."
I learned that lesson as a small child. I was hoping that these small children would learn it too...
I was reminded again of that lesson again last night.
A beautiful girl, with dreams and visions all her own, marries... Then the husband takes her away and puts her in a cage where she suffocates.
In the cage she suffers, cannot breathe, begins to lose herself and is, of course, extremely unhappy.
The husband thinks he loves her and so he captures her and puts her away... He puts her into a cage where she languishes and eventually will become resentful and will whither and die...
Is that what the husband really wants? Does he think that this situation is really what's best for his happiness too?
When you stop to think about it, if he truly loved her, he'd make her happy and set her free. Everyone desperately desires freedom.
Why do so many men never grow out of their childhood phase?
True love between two people will come from a sympathy for each other and putting the other's feelings first... How could putting one in a cage possibly do anything but create a feeling of resentment and start tearing down the dream that was the intention at the start?
When my daughter was a small girl, she refused to come and sit with her grandfather. "Why won't she sit on my lap?" The grandfather complained to me!
I told him, "Because, when she wants to get up and go play, you won't allow her too. You hold her down so she can't leave. Let her come and go freely as she pleases and wishes to do and then, and only then, will she sit willingly on your lap."
He followed my advice and she willingly began sitting on his lap again.
Men! Do not destroy that what you love! Do not strangle that which you want to grow. Do not destroy, hold, capture and cage!
Women! Life is short! The cage once closed is rarely opened again. If it does crack open, for even a bit, dash and make yourselves free while you can! For the chance to do so disappears as your youth and energy dissipates! Do not allow yourselves to be captured and caged! If you are caged, then set yourselves free!
Men and women! Be free. You can be free and still share the love! Share the love every moment of everyday even when you are apart! Always understand and feel sympathy for each other. Life is short, we all have much suffering to go through. Let us not be the cause of more suffering for each other.
Life is bad enough without have those who supposedly love us being the source of our misery. Life is bad enough without those, who supposedly love us and want to care for us, putting us in a cage.
Share. Respect. Set free! In this way, and this way only, can you build the one and only true love.
Please don't be offended at the title of this post. Do old people smell dusty? Do old people smell bad or funny?
Like I said, please do not get angry at me about this comment, direct your anger to my ex-friend Tom.
Let me explain... Tom insulted me the other day. He said I smelled like an "old guy." I thought we were friends.... Guess not.
GIORGIO ARMANI - AQUA DI GIO - WOMEN
I don't know, but this stuff looks like it smells like the ocean or maybe fish...
Or, even fish bait. And what's the deal with that jet airplane and the boat? Airplane fuel? Diesel? Fishes? Yeah! That's it. Smells like shark bait! "Oh baby! I love that salty smell!"
Remember when you were a little kid and your grandparents or some older family friends would come over to visit you? It would be someone like aunt Emma and uncle Fred from Philadelphia who your parents hadn't seen in ten years but they loved them so dearly. Remember?
In return, aunt Emma and uncle Fred loved you so much too. So much so that they sent you Christmas presents and birthday presents every year. You kind of knew who they were (in pictures with you when you were a very little baby) but you didn't remember them well.
Now they have come to visit. Remember? You were 10-years-old and they arrived at your house. You smile and are a bit shy. They insist on kissing you... Especially aunt Emma...
Uncle Fred doesn't kiss.... He just shakes your hand and smells like old pipe tobacco or some old musky after-shave that you think he bought before the great war... No, I'm not talking about Vietnam... I'm talking about The Great War as in 1914.
Aunt Emma likes to kiss and hug you... Way too much. The hugging is bad enough because she smells like dusty lilacs or stale lavender and her teeth have lipstick spots on them... But the worst part of the kissing you all the time isn't that. It's the fact that when she kisses you she always slobbers on you too. And she slobbers a lot... Her slobber smells bad too... It kind of smells like boiled cabbage or corned beef hash.
Of course, the family dog slobbers on you too, and that disgusting enough, but at least the dog is afraid of your wrath and will stay away when you push him away... Aunt Emma? Afraid of you? Ha! She pounces on you every chance she gets like a desperately hungry Bengal tiger goes for a baby lamb with a gammy leg. Like devouring you whole, she hugs and kisses and slobbers on you every chance she gets. Oh! That sickening wet pond-scummy kiss! Yuck!
Anyway, the point I am getting at is that, besides your aunt always slobbering on you, I think older people smell, well,.... different. Don't you think so?
Maybe, in the old days, smelling like a dusty barn or a moldy garage was sexy. I don't know. I wasn't there. But nowadays I think you have to smell like a famous movie star or something that smells like pheromones or whatever those smell like!
Don't get me wrong. I've always liked old people. They have the best stories to tell and they always have lots of great wisdom to pass on... I've learned a lot from old people.
But darned if I didn't meet lots of them who smelled, well, they smelled "dusty."
Not that long ago, why it seems like it was just a few weeks ago, that I was 17-years-old... Heck, it was just the other day that I was in my twenties and thirties.... My current wife told me that she "loved my smell."
I think I smelled like a wild stallion out at a stud farm... Hee, hee... Memories...
But, darn, now I'm 54... My wife is 41... I wonder if, to young people today, we have started smelling like dusty barns? No. It can't be! We were born after the Industrial Revolution so maybe our generation smells like old oily rags, broken down cars or burnt out transistor radios.
You know, that burnt smell that worn out transistors made? Yeah. That must be it!
I still think that young girls probably smell nice. But I don't get the chance to smell them too often as doing that could be construed as a crime.... And, I don't appreciate it when people are sneaking glances at me while dialing 9-11 (in Japan it is 110 for police emergencies).
As I write this, my ex-friend, Tom, sits next to me. Let me ask him exactly "What do old people smell like?"
Tom says that, "People over 50 smell like old Japanese dusty pillows."
See? I told you he was a jerk. Right after he insults 75% of the entire population of the planet earth, Tom realizes his error and begins to try to kiss my a*s and says, "But I like the smell of old stinky pillows."
Yeah. Sure, you do, Tom. Sure. Stinky pillows? Wow! Can you imagine what that does for the self-esteem of us senior citizens?
Well, what's the point of all of this? I guess it is just another sign of growing old; younger people start to think you smell funny. Well, that might be true... But I am proud of my stinkiness. It is a badge of honor.
They say that one of the ways to grow old with class is to gracefully give up the treasures of youth. I didn't think that not smelling like a boys locker room was a treasure of youth, but I guess it is... And I have to give it up... Like my old socks...
I don't want to smell nice anyway... It just means that I'd have to take a shower everyday and brush my teeth...
I didn't get married because I wanted to shower and brush my teeth everyday... I mean, what's the point of getting married if you still are expected to shave, shower and smell good?
I thought you did that because you wanted to get a girlfriend... Not because you already had one!
Tomorrow, in part two of this report, I will investigate why older, married couples never have sex... Stay tuned!
I think most people have recurring dreams. If most people don't, then maybe I am just weird because I have had the same five recurring dreams over and over for these last 27 years. Do you have recurring dreams?
Since moving to Japan, I have had basically five recurring dreams. But, now that I think about it, one of these dreams, the dreams of me flying like a bird or a jet plane, stopped a few years ago.
I wonder why my dreams of flight have disappeared? Maybe because I turned 50 and stopped dreaming like a 17-year-old? No, I don't think it is that because I still feel like a 17-year-old many times (just won't be doing the crazy things I used to do).
The first of the five recurring dreams I've had was flying in the skies. They started when I was a small boy. In my dreams could fly like Icarus. Can you fly in your dreams? Those are fun dreams... Sometimes, I guess when my condition wasn't so great, I'd have a hard time achieving lift-off in my dream. I'd have to run and flap my arms as hard as I could until I took off. Sometimes it was a great effort and I had to try over and over. Other times, I was just like a graceful bird; a tiny step and jump and I was off soaring like an eagle in the clouds.
Then, when I got to about 30 or so, I could fly like a jet plane. In fact, many times I knew I was dreaming and that I was flying. I figured it was some sort of alternate universe and so I rode it like a snow-boarder rides the snow or a surfer rides the waves. I knew I was dreaming but didn't care. When could really fly and fly like a rocket, doing a thousand miles and hour, I would consider flying over the Pacific Ocean and going to the United States to fly over my parents house.
Weird thing is that I would fly out a few hundred miles from the coast of Japan, look over the water, and turn around because I'd start getting scared. Scared that I would wake up and be flying over the cold ocean, fall into it, and have to swim back. I used to be a good swimmer, but not that good. Being so high over such deep water freaked me out so I'd turn back. Even though I knew it was just a dream.
The other problem with flying to the USA like a 747 in my dreams was that, at such high speeds, I had a difficult time turning and would often continue on a straight line when I wanted to make a hard left turn.
Sounds ridiculous because it was all a dream and I knew it, but I also felt that, somewhere in my heart, dreams were and alternate universe and a reflection on reality. I guess I still do.
Another dream that often occurred was fishing. I love fishing. Before I moved to japan, I went fishing every week. Sometimes two or three times a week. Fishing is heaven. Fishing is spiritual and fishing is close to God.
There is a saying about fishing. It goes like this: "Do you know what the difference is between a religious man and a spiritual man? A religious man goes to church and thinks about fishing. A spiritual man goes fishing and thinks about god."
I am a spiritual man. I'd go fishing everyday of the week if I could.
I used to dream about fishing at least once a week when I first came to Japan. Sometimes I dreamt about it every night for days in a row. That's because it is difficult to go fishing in Japan and I had been an avid fisherman since I was a small boy living in Minnesota. Minnesota is known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes" so fishing is a lifestyle there.
Fishing in Japan, Tokyo especially, though, is a chore. Japan is a crowded place and the good areas for fishing on the coastline are usually taken by the local fishing collective so they don't take too kindly to your fishing in their good spots... In fact, they might give you the boot up the ass if they catch you fishing in their prime areas. Going fishing in Japan is not like the USA where you can just grab a rod and reel and head off to the lake or shoreline. In Japan, fishing is an all-day expedition like 18 holes of golf: You need a plan and it costs lots of money.
My other two recurring dreams, or maybe I should say nightmares, are related to work. Whenever work is going poorly or I worry about bankruptcy or the economy going down the tubes (an understandable and common recent worry since 2008) I have bad dreams of returning to the USA and going back to my old jobs.
The worse job is returning to Prudential to the same old office and working with those dishonest people that I wrote about yesterday in Working With Thieves, Liars and Crooks. The weird part of the dream is that I am always scheming about returning to Japan and, even after one year, haven't sold one single contract yet they do not fire me in my dream.
Talk about being able to live off one's laurels!
The other work-related dream is that I go back to working at a Sears, Roebuck and Company in Ventura, California (it was in Oxnard when I worked there, but has since moved causing the city of Oxnard to sue the city of Ventura, but that's another story about the insanity of the USA).
When I was 17 I started working at Sears in the catalogue ordering department and then transferred to commission sales in the Photo & Office Equipment department. As a commission salesman, I made a heck of a lot of money in the late 1970's.
In my dreams, for some bizarre reason, I go back there and have to work in the sewing machine and vacuum cleaner department selling poorly made and badly designed Sears equipment. The nightmarish part of the entire thing, besides selling this poorly designed and quite unstylish junk, the same management is there at the company running around doing their weird hijinks.
There is the store manager, whose name escapes me, but he was a very short, yet handsome man. He dumped his beautiful wife and four beautiful daughters (whom he often brought to the store) to marry another woman (who he soon also brought to the store). I always noticed the daughter because they were very beautiful girls. He got his lightening strike from god when, soon after the divorce and marriage, he was diagnosed with some sort of brain cancer. No kidding. I think he soon died after that.
Then there was a guy named Walter who was a section chief who was married but he ran around unable to control his libido and was trying to take every woman working at the store to bed. I guess his wife got fed up with it one day and dumped him and got another boyfriend.
Walt, being like the immature little boy he was, then decided that he wanted his "toy" back (the wife he disrespected and treated like sh*t) and, from what I understand, went screaming drunk to the boyfriend's house while she was there and started banging on the door and breaking it down.
The boyfriend shot him and killed him.
Later, after the funeral that I didn't attend, many Sears employees were complaining that the wife was wearing black but didn't seem sad. I heard them complaining about that and said nothing. It did nothing for me but confuse me as to what was really important to these people and what they were thinking about.
There were lots of really weird things going on at Sears at that time. I found the same types of problems when I got myself transferred to the Sears in San Fernando Valley and found that store, too, was full of some very twisted people whose priorities were not success of the business and success of their personnel and staff but protection of their position and attempting to continue their lives acting like high school students with their idiotic politics and clicks.
But, I digress....
These are the recurring dreams I often have. Even in the case of Sears or my old jobs, it is nice to be able to see my old friends and to remember them in their beautiful youth. Even when I have nightmares, I am able to realize that they are nightmares and am able to view them like a movie so they rarely scare me.
I went to see my sick old dad a few weeks ago. He wasn't the same person that I will always remember. In my dreams, he is a young and handsome 30+ some year old Marine wrestling with us kids in the yard. For the sick, aged and ill, dreams are an escape. Back to better times and the treasures of youth.
Surely, dreams are one of the best things about living that there could possibly be. I look forward to sleeping every night and I look forward to the dreams of my youth.
How about your dreams? I think if you wake up and think, "Today is going to be great" and you keep track and write down your goals, you can control your dreams and make sure they are positive. Try it. For more on that, read, One Easy Step to Becoming a Better Parent and More Successful at Life.
