Friday, September 30, 2011

Some of the Realities of Life

I wonder if there is a time in each of our lives we have a grand epiphany where we realize our own mortality and look forward and see much less future existence than we do when looking back.  I don't think so.  I think it is just a gradual thing we come to see over the years and each of us arrives at the same conclusion at a different pace.

I guess I had a different path to these realizations as I firmly believed I would be dead before my twenty second birthday.  A total explanation of this belief would require much more space and time than I choose to devote to it now.  I'm sure I'll address it more fully at a later date.  Suffice to say New Years of 1978 was a big day for me.  A very traumatic kind of big day.  It meant something I had believed completely was not true.  Those kind of realizations are live changing and mine was.  But probably not for the better looking back on it.

There are a couple of almost irresistible forces at work here.  The first is my complete disillusionment with what I had, at my core, accepted at truth, though I had never followed it.  The second is the fact the human male has a dramatic physiological change between the age of eighteen and twenty-five.  This was a very nasty combination for me.  And, unfortunately, I was not the only one caught up in this.  Again, too complex to be addressed now and, again, there are things that happened during this period that will accompany me to the grave.  They are nobody else's business but, damn, they were fun. 

Due to my complete belief I would die in the fall of 1975 I made some very bad decisions.  Due to my disillusionment in being alive on January 1, 1978 I made some even worse decisions and those decisions mostly just kept on going.  Add in to this squirming mass of mental worms was the growing impact of the insanity I inherited from my mother.  Then there was the stress of having graduated from technical school and spending some months sitting all day with my sister in the hospital just waiting for  her to die while her husband took the night shift.    It was kind of stressful.  I had a very compliant doctor at that time and I was getting a thirty day prescription for Valium about once a week.  I was making a regular trip to Kermit, WV (the nearest legal liquor store) and buying a half gallon of Canadian Mist.  When I'd come home from the hospital in the late evening there was no way for me to sleep so I'd sit at the kitchen table drinking Canadian Mist and popping Valium until I felt I could go to bed and not just lie there thinking.  That would have been in the late '70s.  My sister died in 1978 and we moved to Florida where my brother lived.  Lived there until early 1980.  It is an absolute wonder I survived that eighteen or so months.  I'd like to say those eighteen months were the low point for my life but it was not.  It was just the wildest point.  Again, the details of this are mine to deal with and take with me when I go.

In the early '80s I was finally diagnosed with Grave's Disease (a highly over active thyroid) and the Eastern Kentucky Rehabilitation Center agreed to pay for my treatment and send me back to technical school for Computer Programming where I am now.  Those were relatively good years.  Relatively.  Then I spent the next year "coming in second" for all the jobs I applied for.  I took the Kentucky State test for Computer Operator and scored second in the state.  After  over a year I had heard nothing.  So I was going broke quickly and crazy maybe more quickly. 

Then a girl I was in Computer school with called me and asked me to join the Army with her.  Said she needed just one more to go in as a PFC.  I thought I was too old (32 at the time) but the recruiter called me and told me I could enlist up to 35.  So, being quite a bit on the desperate side, I went to talk to him.  Really, at that time I was out of options, so I agreed to take the ASVAB test. 

Lord I remember that test.  I HATED it.  I don't know how many sections there were but they gave you like forty-five minutes on each section.  after twenty minutes I had completed it, checked my answers three times and just hated sitting there waiting for all the idiots to finish.  Not the best day.

The recruiter picked me up late in the afternoon after the preliminary results were in.  Riding back from Prestonburg to Paintsville I asked him how I did.  He gave me one of those bs answers, "How do you think you did?".  I told him I did not know but I would bet I had not embarrassed myself.  He sat there for a while and then said, "You made a 93.  I have never seen anyone make a 93 before.".  Oh, arrogance, how great thou art!

So, I ended up in Beckley, WV at the regional station to sign up for a MOS (Military Occupational Speciality).  From my ASVAB score they asked me would I be interested in a Military Intelligence MOS.  Sure.  They offered an $8,000.00 enlistment bonus.  So I took the test and apparently impressed them as they seemed pretty excited for me.

Now comes the start of issues.  Like I have implied my past was not lilly white.  But, I was honest with them and they contacted Nashville and got a waiver for me to take that MOS.  I  thought all was well with the world.  As the Waylon Jennings song says, "Wrong".

I may or may  not go into things that happened after that or not.  Suffice it to say I ran into the girl who had talked me into this mess in the Hospital at Fort Jackson.  She was on crutches and they were sending her home because of her feet.  I've never seen or heard from her since.  She spent all of about two weeks in the Army and went home.  While I had some health issues they were not enough to be sent home and I was too damned stubborn to ever admit that at thirty two I could not hang with a bunch of seventeen and eighteen year old kids in basic combat training. 

I made it out.  But there are two days I would never agree to live again.  Perhaps I'll go into those two days at some later date.  That and a few other somewhat interesting (to me) things that happened other than those two days.

Somewhat later in my life I developed the phrase, "Life's a bitch then you die".  Later to find it was not original but for years whenever anyone asked me how I was that is how I answered them.  I may not do it anymore but I have certainly not changed my opinion.

1 comment:

  1. I always finished my tests early. Rechecked. Sat, Waited. The last time I remember doing that, I was the first to turn in my paper, despite having sat there half an hour waiting one someone else to be first. My American Lit professor took my test and said, "Are you completely sure you are ready to turn this in?" I assured him I was and left.

    I made a 100 on that test.

    I am pretty sure I know why you thought you would be dead that year. I knew Grandma Stella believed that. Somehow, I never knew you did too. Doesn't fit the picture of you in my head.

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