stream of consciousness, truth, lies, no videotape

A friend of mine just mentioned how hard the job his friend, a NYC police officer, has, and how improbable he'll live to see his pension....got me thinkin...

My mother-in-law was the teacher's union president for either her city or for the state where she lived in Mexico. She knew EVERY politician. At my wedding in Mexico, a Minister of the Mexican Secretary of Interior was a guest, "Senor Juarez". Mstr Juarez wanted to hire me to infiltrate the drug gangs (this was in 1979!). (I thought about it, for about a nano-second, and declined the honor!)

A CHP moved into an apartment below ours in San Diego once. Wow, that was a close call as far as the possible bust was concerned. Jesus! (as in HEY ZEUS). Met him years later at lunch at San Diego State. He was still a trooper and I was a grad student...we talked about how tense it was with him living in the building. No one wanted him there, not the pot-heads nor the drunks.

I'm dating a woman with a 7 year old daughter who HATES MY GUTS only more so.

There was a guy who shared my first and middle names. We were born on the exact same date! He was found, drawn and quartered, in plastic bags, in the trunk of an abandoned vehicle somewhere in NYC. I'm still around.

Was with a group of boys once who abandoned a very large cadillac at the top of a hill without it's brakes...

Someone approached me once with a syringe and asked if I would shoot up to see if it was good or not.

My first scuba dive (without lessons) was to 110 feet, down the La Jolla Canyon, to see squids mating. They had already mated, but their egg sacks were anchored like flowers on the bottom, waving in a tidal breeze.

My second scuba dive, at Moonlight Beach, was almost my last. We went out in a rip-tide (hungover and stoned), 3-6 foot surf breaking on the reef, quite overcast and 65 degrees outside, dressed in a full wetsuit and 2 bottles of air for 45 minutes before marching into the surf, illegal abalone diving with my "buddy" Jeff, I couldn't dive under the surf fast enough to catch my breath, so I put the regulator in my mouth, and the mask on, and literally crawled my way back up to the beach, taking advantage of every inflow of a wave, and holding onto rocks and seaweed to keep the rip tide from dragging me back out, crawling up a river of wet and moving sand, getting knocked down every time I got up, even when the flow of water was ankle height, the steep beach kept me from getting vertical, until finally I was hauled out by the lifeguards.

The snorkel had been ripped from my mask, as had the dittybag from my weight belt. Jeff, my "buddy", dove without me, the lifeguards freaked all over him when he came back on shore, since I could easily have died. Of course Jeff his own self yelled at me later for not keeping up with him (as he had a ditty bag full of abs that he had had to abandon when he saw the lifeguards and me on the beach).

Pizza was the nickname of one of the smallest campers that summer. He was 10 but was as small as the 7 year olds. I was a "jr. counselor", and helped out on the rifle range. Pizza's gun misfired. I told him to put it down, which he did, and I laid down next to him, and he pulled the trigger and the gun went off about 6 inches from my right ear, with the bullet entering the mattress just below my right cheek. I promptly said something crude, picked Pizza up and hung him on a nail, high up a post, so he was dangling there too surprised (and shocked at how close he had come to killing me) to speak for quite a while...