(yes, the Shelley poem is whence my name, read it when I was very young and it made a lasting impression)
Where was I? Oh yeah...
So, out the door I went, in the middle of my senior year. (yeah, John Lee and George all over that one)
End up at my (maternal) grandparents’ house in Buena Park, CA, which was kind of an interesting place. She was short, skinny, incredibly stubborn and very smart Polish woman, he had retired from the OSS before spending another 20 years as a welfare fraud investigator for the state of CA. Was hard as hell to get away with anything in that house, but I managed to do it anyway.
Finished HS, though not with the kind of grades I’d had earlier—I’d had to repeat two classes, as I’d ditched them often enough to not even manage an F the first time I took them.
That summer I caught The Song Remains the Same at the midnight movies, and thus found the inspiration to actually learn how to play my guitar.
Then I got the bright idea that I was going to go to a local communicy college (Cypress), taking nothing but music-oriented courses--music theory, songwriting, guitar, percussion, and piano for music majors, with water polo thrown in for good measure. I say "bright idea" sarcastically because I was under the illusion that I could pull off a full course load
and work full time. Bwahahahaha.... Yeah, that didn't turn out all that well, somehow it turned into quitting both.
A friend from HS showed up soon after, and talked me into enrolling at Control Data Institute with him, we're gonna be programmers! I actually still have a box of Hollerith cards somewhere.
Anyway, that didn't work out either, people get funny when you don't pay them the tuition you agreed to (at this point I still had not learned the lesson about school and working full time).
Bam! Busted, after hours, in the park, with an underage girl and very nearly an ounce in my possession. What now? (approaching the summer of '82)
Hey, I know! I'll join....................the Navy!
Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time, I'd probably stay out of trouble, and pick up a marketable job skill for when I got out.
Boot camp--skate city! Even got a meritorious promotion in the process. "A" School (avionics tech, aka AT)--took to that very well, finished well ahead of the programmed schedule. From there, just a short four years of reserve duty, and in the meantime, I can get a decent job with my new skills, right?
Ack, wrong again. Went back on active duty out of desperation for an income, but not before getting married to the girl I'd been dating the last two years. Did that for the wrong reason--I'd thought at the time that if I let her go, I'd be kicking myself over "what ifs." Bah. I'm a very slow learner sometimes.
Didn't help much that the best job I applied for rejected me on the grounds that it would be unfair to their other employess for me to have one weekend a month off to serve my reserve obligation (I hate Sears to this day).
So, I end up assigned to a squadron assigned to a carrier, but I'm in LA, and the carrier is off the coast of South America. So, I fly to the Philippines to, you guessed it, wait for my ship to come in.
The cruise was...eventful. One guy got blown off the flight deck by jet exhaust, they never even found his body. Less than a week out of the Philippines, another succumbs to some tropical illness they think he got from a bug bite. On the way to the Gulf (Iran was threatening to blockade it at the time, stopping iol shipments), we had a major fire in the #2 MMR--it burned for 8 hours. At one point, they were evacuating people to the flight deck in preparation for getting them off this ship. At another point, I was several decks below the waterline on a hose team. Six people died of smoke inhalation, trapped in a berthing compartment. Lost a friend a while after that, when he fall off a ladder on the hangar deck.
I managed to get in trouble anyway. Post cruise, I'm back on reserve duty, and knocking around low-paying jobs in Hanford, CA. "Honey, I'm pregnant." That and 21 consecutive days of 110+ temps convince he to head back to LA to look for a real job.
(end of part 2)
Oh yeah,this one's for you, Hyper, had one of these on the walls in every house I lived in growing up (which I somehow managed to not really think about when I enlisted):
-----signature-----
Ozymandias
President, Republik of Ozymandia
http://barrettblank.homestead.com/files/acsigs/Ozymandias.jpg
We just rape and pillage and go home.--Sharon Osbourne
ou are never going to be able to vote for the revolution. Get that hope out of your mind" -Jerry Rubin