Harold Budd – Wikipedia

Functional America

This is you. Today you woke up when you didn’t want to, left with or without having something for breakfast, said “I’ll be late today” over hunched shoulders, and went on to make another Monday work. This time with one less hour of your life because of some shit called “Day light savings” with a long forgotten purpose.

You want to but you don’t like Trump or Bernie, or any other sick ambitious clown stuffing their mugs in your life every second, riding clouds trying to look positive into the future in either direction. You are real America – you get things done so you stay alive. You don’t believe in much any more but you keep going. Maybe you still manage to uphold some kind of lofty ideals as a base of why you do what you do every day. Maybe for a long time now you just go through the motions without thinking. You are a tiny part of America’s fleeting identity, its extreme weariness, its silent conformity to everything and everybody because of an endless list of personal reasons.

If you ever come to dinner and I’m sitting there in my shorts and hanging belly you know it’s tradition.
Nothing personal. Not even the accordion.

Me chat.
Me nice.

This here is about heroes too. But not in the usual way.

Two days ago I worked on a house being built for a disabled veteran. It is a lofty type of thing – you will see it in the TV news next Saturday. A big time home builder gathered contractors to donate all materials and labor to produce a very nice house which will be officially handed over to the new owner on Saturday. Yes, wide corridors for the wheelchair included.

You could call all the people involved in this work “angels”. But these people do not look like angels. These angels where weary Mexican laborers that in 8 hours stopped only for a 30 min. lunch, a war veteran that came to help in an old truck with all his belongings and his pregnant fiance because they have no place to live, the small start-up business owner who after 5 days on his day job spend his Saturday working on his knees and the next day hurt all over, the hectic and stressed managers of the project, a guy from Eastern Europe that had 4 hours of sleep the day before, the quiet guys that did last moment handyman work and had little to say because for $10/hr you do not have much to say.

These were the angels some of which you will see dressed up and smiling on TV next Saturday.

This is how a miracle happens – with small, ordinary people without wings that you can see. Dirty clothes, noisy equipment, mud, sweat, torn shoes and shirts, all kinds of dust.

To me all that had little to do with war, right, or wrong. It had to do with love.

* Update: About 3 years later the sergeant’s demons got to him.  He took his own life.

I wrote this some years back. It is a play of sad and funny – just like real life is. It is entirely made up. I like it very much now. See if you like it too:
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At the age of one and a half years, standing 2 feet and 4 inches tall, I was put to work. Not field work, no, but lighter, housework. It was lighter work indeed but when my thoughts take me back to those innocent childhood days it does seem that the housework was rather hard for an infant.

Wearing my pajamas – looking more like a loose woman’s dress that used to be white – I had to wash a single roasting pan. Since we were a big family the pan had a matching size. It was 3 feet and 2 inches, not counting the handle. My duties were to climb on a specially made wooden platform positioned in front of an old sink. The sink had gargantuan dimensions – it suffices to say it was used as a bathtub in warm summer days. The pan was then placed in the sink approximately at the level of my chest. Water was run through a garden hose attached with a rusty coat hanger wire to the side of the sink. The water was icy cold and the pan had a thick layer of lard on it. There was no soap.

My tears fell in the lard while I scrubbed the lardy pan with my tiny hands that still had baby dimples. At times I’d use some sand that I had collected outside of the house earlier in the day and hid in the folds of my pajamas as well as in my hair. I’d cry and scrub and the water made my hands hurt. I’d put them under my armpits but quickly the fabric in that area was soaked with water and lard and provided no protection from the cold water.

At the end of this humbling activity I climbed down the platform. My pajamas were soggy and lardy in the area were I was leaning on the sink. I had no means to dry myself and I resorted to the only available option. I hugged the housedog for a few minutes. Some of the water as well as some of the lard soaked in his fur, which the dog later gratefully licked off. I on the other hand was left with somewhat dry pajamas, but with a lot of dog hair on my chest and the cheek that was touching the animal. I also recall the unmistakable smell of wet dog in my nostrils me while I drifted away in my sleep.

I made no effort to remove the dog hair off my face. There was a hole on the wall by my bed and the cold winter wind blew through it night and day. I had tried to plug the hole with a fish tail that I found one day but that seemed to add more fish smell than protection from the wind. The dog hair stuck to one of my cheeks seemed to protect me from the wind as long as I spend the night sleeping on the cheek that had no dog hair on it.

About that time I adopted a rat. It was probably the combination of the smell of lard and fish that attracted the rat to the house. I woke up one day and here he was – laying on his back, cheek to cheek with me, tiny paws in the air. He was snoring lightly. It was very amusing for me, still a little kid, to see his tiny nose move while he slept.

He was my pet and I took good care of him. We played together – I’d hide some crumbs around the house and he’d look and find them. I’d tickle his tummy and on days when he had found plenty to eat he farted gently from satisfaction. He also licked some of the lard off my pajamas.

Those were days full of memorable moments. As any child of that age I was not really thinking of how horrible the world around me was. I took it for what it is and always found new and exciting things in it.

What you are about to read is extreme.

This is a real story of obsession, the importance of support, and living your dreams by proxy too. There are many negative things in this story. But the message is beyond positive – it is about the foundation of one’s existence.

The attached video is too much for most people. You are looking at a man that is only 20 years old. No, he does not look his age. Yes, he is full of steroids and other drugs you have never heard of and will never hear about. If your judgement tells you that this is the end of the story and to stop reading right here, click away right now. You are not going to understand the things written below.

This man is deadlifing 904 lbs. This is a weight you will never even see loaded on a barbell in your lifetime. You probably can’t even roll the bar with that weight pushing it with your foot. The man has achieved something so extreme that it is not understood by most people. Just look at the sparse audience – many of these people do not understand what they just witnessed happening.

Such extreme achievements happen if two things are in place – dedication that is a full blown obsession and a 24/7 support by someone in the background. Did you really think that fat guy here just trains his fat ass off and has managed to achieve the unreal feat that you can’t even process well? Watch the portion of the video after the lift – you can see a short fat man hugging the lifter. That man has made what you just watched a reality. This is the lifter’s father. There is hardly a video that shows the son and father separate. That is what support is.

With support from others you can lift 904 lbs and that will not be your best lift either. With support from others you can get your dream job and actually find happiness in your work. With support from others you can think of anything and it will happen.

Without support you will look for many ways to escape failure. Without support you will find many reasons to justify your failure. Without support you will dream, think, work for two, three, four, or more people. Because you are your own support. You are a one-legged table. You will be stable as a table with one leg.

Look at the people around you. Who is your support standing on the stage behind you. Away from the camera view but always watching your back. Who are these people? Who is this person? Do you have someone like that? A family member, a friend, another race, old, young, unlikely hero or a shining star?

Are you a true support for someone else?

I hope that you can answer those questions quickly and without hesitation. I really hope you do.

Here’s a double sided story you are not going to like:

The man on the picture has been in prison for 27 years. For a crime he did not commit. The picture shows the moment when the was declared innocent. The court gave him $40,000 for each year he was in prison. A little more than $1 million.

I personally think, he should be given more than that. His entire life had a $1M price tag hung on it. Really? Screw that. You are not going to sell 27 years of your life for $1M, would you?

Ok, that was the better part of the story. Here is the one you really don’t want to read:
After working your life away you have some savings, investments, whatever. Your health is most likely going away. Do you have $1M in savings? I know a person that worked 46 years for the same company and has $700K saved. Most Americans do not have anything even close to that. Moreover – official statistics say that 45% of Americans are on mood altering drugs. Basically every 2-nd person you know.

I don’t know which story is worse. Maybe the first one is better – hopefully the guy that was in prison for 27 years does not need prescription drugs for his mental problems.

Have a great day now.

1970.
One of the greatest composers of our time – Vangelis Papathanssoiou.

After this psychedelic phase he went on to write electronic/symphonic compositions we all know:  Chariots of Fire, Bladerunner, 1492, and many more before them.

Meanwhile in Bulgaristan… Outdoor beer and rakia drinking by the lake
Camping is such fun!

Here’s a story, a real one:

I work in apartment complexes – meaning a bunch of apartments piled up in one place. Often they are very bad ones – where blacks, poor people, students, and all kinds of immigrants live. The stink and the scum are one thing on hand. But the saddest thing is to enter an apartment and see the signs of a hasty exit complete with leaving behind photographs and personal belongings. Often a heavy marijuana stench or scattered syringe needles are left behind too. It gets even worse when you see kid’s toys laying around and drawings on the wall by the abandoned soiled matress left laying crooked on the stained carpet.

One day I enter an apartment. I see a few personal items. Obviously some Mexicans lived here – one can tell by the kind of items. In such level apartments in every case they are illegal immigrants – the ones we both hate and can’t live without because we just love to have everything to be done cheap for us.

And so I see a pink bracelet just like the one on the picture below. I pick it up, read the name, the date. Crap. From everything that those people grabbed in the last moment running out from the apartment then forgot the most important one. I imagined how this pink bracelet floated from the delivery room to the slum apartment and how the people were happy for at least a little while. And then – day after day they made a resemblance of a live, the baby grew and cried and made cooing sounds and overall the first years of his life flew by. Then one day – we ran out in a hurry to go somewhere else.

That joy and that running away describes all of us more or less, I think. We all have times of joy, times when we keep pushing to survive, moments when we run away from ourselves, from something we’ve carried inside for a long time. And we forget the small and most important things. No matter if they are tangible or not.