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Experiences : 17 items
| 1986 Just a burger
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I don't know why I am sharing this, but I invited a friend to go for a burger, then had to clarify it meant "just a burger". He was OK with that, but a little perplexed at the added clarification. What else would it mean? So I told my story...
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| 1987 Skydiving
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Yes, I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. Twice. To me, it was no big deal. I just wanted to experience freefall, and enjoyed flying. I didn't think of it as very dare-devilish, though some others do. I had statistics on my side, but gravity and physics was working for the opposition. Then I met a Hustler Honey, and wanted to jump again.
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| The Towers Fell
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On 9/11/2001, I went into work like normal. I worked at a Newspaper, improving their Internet presence. My office was in the Press building. When a friend came in and said, "A plane has hit the Twin Towers". And I thought, "another silly pilot flew into it while in fog or something, like happened to the Empire State Building in 1945."... but I went down to the Newsroom to see the hubbub and read/watch what was coming across the wire. This is what happened to me that day.
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| 9/11
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On 9/11/2001, I went into work like normal. I worked at a Newspaper, improving their Internet presence. My office was in the Press building. When a friend came in and said, "A plane has hit the Twin Towers". And I thought, "another silly pilot flew into it while in fog or something, like happened to the Empire State Building in 1945."... but I went down to the Newsroom to see the hubbub and read/watch what was coming across the wire. This is about my experiences, how the FakeNews has distorted history, and used a tragedy to divide and polarize us.
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| Air Rifles
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There's this common myth that Air Rifles ("BB Guns" or "Pellet Guns") are toys, however, while they don't have quite the velocity of our top of the line modern rifles, they easily exceed black powder rifles that brought down buffalo and won the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. People hunt Buffalo and Elk with them, and they have no problem going through humans. Fortunately, since the gun-ignorant don't understand their threat, they aren't highly regulated (one last bastion of liberty, for now), and mass shootings and crimes are usually committed with gunpowder-based weapons. Which makes them especially popular in countries/place with hoplophobia.
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| Airline Attendant
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My wife, the airline attendant, and some stories of what it's like: from training, to a crazy cat person, to getting groped by TSA.
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| Getting my CCW
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The other day, I went and got my CCW (License To Carry a Concealed Weapon). Well, technically, I took the class to get my CCW, and have filled out my forms (it'll be a couple months before I get them back). And since I'm in the People's Republic of California, I only took the classes for the other ≈40 or so states (in Free America) that respect the Constitution and 2nd Amendment (called shall issue states): those silly rules don't apply in California, unless we get national reciprocity, then they'll secede. Still, it was an experience that I figured I'd share.
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| Housing and Urban Development
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HUD (Housing and urban development) has various programs that are meant to help low income and first time buyers into their own homes. Sounds great, right? Too many people can’t afford a house, so a little wealth redistribution ought to help them out? Yet, in many cases the opposite has happened. Here's my story about some of the negative and unintended consequences of HUD.
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| How I spent Christmas Vacation (1997)
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Family, Fun, and driving circa 1997. What an atypically typical Christmas vacation looks like for us. We visit my family on Christmas Eve, and visit my wife's family on Christmas Day. There can be no two more different families on the face of the planet.
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| Jury Duty 1998
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A jury is made up of 12 people too dumb to lie? I had not been called for Jury Duty, ever before… then my luck ran out; I received "the summons". I must admit my curiosity at doing my civic duty, was tempered with the thrill of driving to downtown San Diego (in rush hour), dealing with my fellow man (which I don't always think too highly of), and sitting through a torturously long bureaucratic process -- all for $5/day (when parking cost me $7). Lets just say my cynical nature was not disappointed.
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| Jury Duty 2013
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Jury Duty: after 4 days of picking Jurors, they finally asked me questions and decided I wasn't one of the droid they were looking for, and they let me go. Primarily, it got to questions about why I taught Martial Arts, and saying, "because I really don't like bullies" was all it took for the preemptory challenges to let me go free, with a fist bump from another juror.
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| Pulling a gun
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These are the stories of my experiences pulling a gun to stop crimes, and how it differs from the stereotypes. In my life, I have personally used a gun to end an altercation three times. A rape, an armed car robbery, and a drug dealer or pederast trying to pedal something on a not so helpless young lad.
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| Speed Traps 2002
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Sadly, I became another victim of a government scam. The oldest racket in the book. The mafia calls it the "protection" racket - where you are extorted to pay them for protection, while you are forced to ignore that they are only protecting you from themselves.
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| Suicide is Painless
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Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes... at least according to the song. Obviously, I didn't commit suicide, or that would make this article a lot more interesting. These are just a few stories I tell are about me finding bodies, or seeing it happen. I don't know if I'm just "lucky", but things happen around me.
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| Thinking outside the box
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People will tell you to "think outside the Box". I learned early on, they don't mean it. Or more often they mean "not too much outside the box".
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| Tired of suppressing my whiteness
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Salon ran a stupid race-baiting article by Priscilla Ward, but I know, I repeat myself: it was Salon. Still, her racist polarizing diatribe, made me want to retaliate in kind, re-living a mostly true tales of woe and racism in my past, in a parody of her article. Just to point out there's a whole lot of backstory in others lives that we may not know.
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| What’s shooting like?
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This is a story of what shooting is like for me, and how it differs from the stereotypes. Now the plural of anecdote is not data -- but lies of omission, are lies. The media loves to bombard us with selective anecdotes about how guns ruined lives, but almost never about the many, many millions of times a year more, where they are just used for hobby or sport. This is just some of those.
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