Oil Rigs

Timeline 1981-1985. My age: 19-23. Locations: Louisiana bayou country including New Orleans, Texas coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

Typical oil platform like I was on

After my return to Arkansas from a short stint living in Monroe Louisiana, my friend Greg Ward and I got obsessed with the idea to work offshore on the oil rigs of the Gulf of Mexico. We didn't know much of anything about them and had no connections with anyone who did.

We headed out anyway. In my 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit. We drove the route across the 30 mile Lake Pontchartrain Bridge and  through New Orleans (my initial reactions to NOLA was love, it was a big coastal city, more exciting than any city I had spent any real time in), then on to Houma Louisiana where Offshore Catering Service was headquartered.

We had drove all night, crossed the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge in the morning and made it to Offshore Catering Service before they closed at 5. We applied to be galleyhands -which is a dish washer, and cleaner of ALL things in the living quarters on an oil rig. We got a hotel room and...just hoped. We were kids so cable TV, air conditioning and a six pack of beer...all while 500 miles from home...was a big deal.

We checked back in the morning. Success!! We were now dishwashers!!

We weren't assigned to the same rig. I went to a rig by the name of Penrod 69. It was an exploratory rig, specializing in finding oil. The type of rig that pumps oil once it is found are called a production platform.

When the weather permits, we flew in helicopters, but my first few times going out were in crew boats, the weather was too rough for helicopters to land on the oil rigs.

I remember my greenhorn self riding on that first crew boat ride. The men are smelly, the whole world down there has a smell of petroleum -its just a world of heavy industrial and humidity induced sweatiness. We got to the rig after 8 hours at sea. I was wondering how we would get on the rig, assuming there would just be some nice stairs from sea level up to the living quarters.

I walked out on the rear main work deck of the boat and looked up the oil rig. The central platform of the rig was about 60 feet above the water. There were no stairs or ladder that I could see. Then the crane starting to lower our "ride". To the right in the photograph you'll see a relatively small round thing that looks almost exactly like a mini-trampoline. That is what one stands on when hoisted from the sea up to the rig.

Personnel were slinging their luggage bags into the middle of that mini-trampoline and then stepping on the outer ring and holding onto the rope mesh as the crane brought them up to the rig.

I make this all sound dramatic, but it was nothing but fun to me, I have absolutely no fear of heights or speed. Once a crane operator hung me out over the ocean for an extended period of time before the boat got there for me to board, and I loved it.

These personnel lifts are dangerous. Keep in mind they are used more during rough weather, the copters are the main transport when the skies are calm. I heard stories of some who got spooked while being lifted in rough seas, fell and splattered on the boat.

I never saw such an accident, but once I did see death on the high seas. Literally. I was standing on a gangway outside and talking with another galleyhand. I said what is that blue-green thing out there? As it floated closer we saw it was a nude dead man. A workboat came, they lifted the body onto the deck and took it to shore to authorities.

Greg and I did that first gig on a rig, then met up back in Houma and drove back to Arkansas. We then waited for another assignment. It came and we were to be at a heliport in 48 hours. We started the trip the next morning. The trip was in my car, so I got Greg to his heliport first, then I drove towards my heliport.

I got extremely tired and pulled over for a nap. I woke and it was past my arrival time deadline. I assumed I had lost the job entirely, later I would find out the industry is not so fixated on my Germanic punctuality, I would have only been a little late, not a biggie. But in my mind at that time, this was the end of my world. I really was the ultimate uncool, ready to rule myself guilty when social norms would have let me slide.

So I thought I was fired and jobless at that moment. Driving along Louisiana Highway 1 I picked up a hitchhiker. He told me about a boat company that hired deckhands and needed people. I went there and got a job right then. I told them I needed to do something with my car, so my ride to the boat followed me to Houma and I parked my car at the A-Bear Hotel (map), which was our hotel of choice. See this review from the web on that wonderful place:

A-Bear is possibly the worst motel I've ever had the misfortune at staying at, and that's saying a lot. The room is dirt cheap, but there is a reason it is cheap, like most things. Upon arrival, the bed wasn't made, and the A/C unit seemed to be out of order so they put me in a different room..beforehand I asked them to change the bed while I watched. Most people who go here are the lowlifes of societies..prostitutes and drug dealers. That night I saw a giant roach in the bathroom and there apparently was someone getting busy in the room next to me because that's what I heard all night long. I don't think I've ever been more scared that the police would come pushing down my door in some sort of routine raid on the place. Don't go to A-Bear, unless you are used to and don't mind staying at places that are hazardous to your health.


I left a note on the dash for Greg saying "I've gotten a job on a boat. Left my car here so you can drive it back to Arkansas. I'll get back home on a bus. Check out the Van Halen cassette I got".  I put the car key on the tire and left it. Of course Greg found it and and drove back to Arkansas.

I got to the heliport, and the helicopter took me to a rig, and on that rig they let me down onto the Robert R.

The Robert R was  a tiny firewatch boat dedicated to one oil rig. It anchored a few hundred feet out from the oil rig, and we watched the rig for fires 24/7.

The boat had two deckhands (myself included) and a captain. We had five hour shifts of watching the rig, though the captain took on most of the watch during the daytime.

I was 19 at the time, had two 45 pound dumbbells I actually carried into the boat in my luggage bag. I did ten sets of ten reps of arm curls every day, and push ups. I was 165 pounds, 6'1" -a beanpole with biceps. I had no finesse or coordination.

I say all that about my age and physical profile to prepare the reader for The Fishing Hook Story.

The captain was this little old angry man. A specific kind of little old angry man that lives in Las Vegas, New Jersey or New Orleans. And by that I mean a man with enough money to enough bad taste to wear tacky heavy jewelry, ornate button-up shirts and other things that go with that kind of get-up.

He was the set of people in his generation that liked Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and not Elvis and the Beatles. He even told some story about a a "hippy" band that had to cancel a performance because the electricity was out, which proves (to him) they couldn't play their instruments.

The captain hated me with a hate larger than the oil rig we were charged with watching. Let me give the poor little man a break by saying I was so dorky, aloof and accident prone some contempt was a little justified.

One of my accidents had been breaking a pole with hook on the end we used for pulling in fish too big and heavy for our fishing rods. We fished all the time. Pulled in mostly little sharks and some other random fish. We'd mostly through them back in.

One day the captain was fishing and caught a big one. He yelled a series of cuss words mixed with ordinary words at me to get the pole. I said it was broken. He yelled more cuss words louder, and told me to get the other fishing pole. We switched poles, me holding the original pole that caught the fish, while he tried to get the second pole's hook on the fish, with the idea two poles would have the strength to lift the fish onboard. He got the second hook into the fish.

At some point in the next minute I yanked on the fish too hard (my bicep strength combined with no finesse), the hook came out of the fish with loads of force, and the hook (a big deep sea fishing hook)
came rocketing by me and then did a circular orbit, it was a projectile on the end of a fishing line, orbiting me, fishing line wrapping around me and the orbit of the projectile getting closer every millisecond.

The hook went into my arm, into it and through it, the pointy end sticking back out.

I thought the scene would change and I'd get some sympathy.

The captain saw the hook in my arm, said more cuss words and reached over and yanked the hook out of my arm, and told the other deckhand to climb over the railing of the boat and pulled the fish in with his hands.

The fish turned out to be one that goes by several names: cobia, ling and lemon fish. It weighed a little over 70 pounds, and made 29 steaks.

I spent 5 weeks on the Robert R firewatch boat.

Back in Arkansas all heck had broke loose. There had been a murder. Greg had killed me and stolen my car.

That's what my mom and dad thought. Greg had returned my Volkswagen Rabbit to their home and given them the keys and told them I had left a short note saying I had found a job.

My mom and dad invited Greg to have dinner at Denny's, their treat. He went. During the visit they questioned him over and over about the trip, then finally my dad said "Come on Greg, admit it, you killed Lance".

Before my gig on the boat was up my mom found out from my friends in Louisiana -the Pinkstons- knew where I was. She wrote a letter that got to me, saying how worried they had been and...well...I had screwed up and had better get home soon.

I got back to Arkansas. I would go through some more odd Lance-situations: worked as transmission tear-down specialist at the shop my dad managed (Budget Transmission in North Little Rock AR), met and dated my lifelong good friend Mona Kimbrough, met the members of local rock band The Patios (Benny Turner on bass, Chris Maxwell on guitar and voice...he's has since moved to NYC and done sessions with Yoko Ono and St Vincent besides contributing to Wu-Tang Clan, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and others),  met and befriended Janor Hypercleats on same night I met The Patios, and rented a room at Benny Turner's house.

During this time in Arkansas, Greg Ward and I were inseparable. We pretty were through our whole 20's when I was in Arkansas. We were hanging with, and being, the first punk rockers in Central Arkansas. Greg had worked some more oil rig gigs to save up for a new set of Tama drums. He got his first time in a band as drummer in The Yarbles (led by Doug Corzine) -a cover band of Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, Ramones and Gang of Four. Greg and I were obsessed with music, especially the Police.

It's worth mentioning Greg became a prolific multi-instrumentlist and gigging musician in Little Rock and the region. From drummer in The Caterwaulers with Jeff Dee Laux, Zombie Fish (Scott Mullins guitar, Greg Ward bass, Phil Manning drums), to his latest incarnation as country songwriter in a John Cougar Mellencamp kind of authenticity vibe. 

That was all an interlude that deserves its own entries, but for this oil rig thread I'll just say that after a year and a half I left Benny's house and went back to Houma Louisiana and got back on at Offshore Catering Service.

My first rig, out of all the dozens or hundreds out there? The same Penrod 69. It was winter, and an especially cold spell in the low 30's. I can take minus 30 in most places, but in the humidity of Louisiana and the Gulf the low 30's is miserable.

Eventually I began staying at a $15 a night place in the middle of downtown Houma -the La Acadian. It was a huge old hotel, easily 100 years old. It was ornate and grand in the classic southern antebellum style, except in rough shape with rough clientele. Well, actually no one there looked really hardcore mean. It was just a big flop house, perfect for those going out on the rigs for several weeks then coming back onshore and needing a place. It had air conditioning and free cable TV, which made it paradise for me.

Offshore I was doing good. I usually did gigs of 2 to 5 weeks, I couldn't seem to take any longer than 5 weeks out there. While out there I developed a daily schedule of 12 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep, 3 hours reading and 3 hours working out. I would spend way too much money while onshore in New Orleans at bookstores, and lug those books out to the rigs.

A word about food. Southern Louisiana has one thing over most of the world, the food is amazing. Same with offshore, the workers on the rigs demanded good cajun food, and thats what was served. Red beans and rice were always served, even breakfast. Once a week steaks were grilled outside and served with fried shrimp. All this was all-you-can-eat. I usually had two steaks and two plate fulls of fried shrimp. Once a cook took a count of how many plates of beans and rice I had on a 12 hour shift working in the kitchen, he said I had eaten 10 plate fulls, not counting my 3 regular meals. I weighed 165 pounds and my stomach muscles were visible.

What was work like? Most of time was in the kitchen cleaning pots and pans while the cook cooked, then dishes during and after main meals (every six hours), then the rest of the time was cleaning the living quarters. Yes, cleaning the living quarters meant cleaning the dorm rooms the men slept in. Making up beds, sweeping and mopping floors. Then of course the shower rooms.

It wasn't that hard on most oil rigs. I remember one cook that deliberately used too many pots and pans just to mess with the galleyhand, he was the exception, most of the cooks were really good people, and a few were especially smart .

I worked under one cook who was a former judge that got in some trouble via sex scandal , he was a black man, brilliant, really liked hearing his stories. Another was full blood Cherokee, and he studied Confucius' Analects  with a serious focus on it as his life practice. He was a big serious man, but not a hard man, he was nice to me. Finally, I had a cook I met on a rig named Mark, he was from someplace like Illinois, and we actually hung out together in Houma. He was maybe five years older than me. We talked about music and politics mostly. Mark was my only friend onshore and offshore. He once remarked with a laugh "Lance, you're such a true believer in that punk rock socialist stuff, you sit at the meal table and talk to these oil field worker about Joe Strummer, and as dumb as I think it is, they'll actually sit there and listen".

To get to an oil rig, workers first go to a port that has both helicopters and boats. The weather determines whether boats or helicopters are going to be used. These ports were always far from any kind of real city, with the exception of the port on Grand Isle. I didn't have a car, so getting to and from these ports was of some difficulty.

I had to go to Offshore Catering Service, wait for the grocery supply truck bound for the same port (groceries were sent out same time as personnel) and I would ride with the truck driver. I got to nearly every big and little Louisiana state highway through the swamps of southern Louisiana.

South of Interstate 10 in Louisiana is a world unlike the rest of North America, and I saw all of it. The land slowly descends into the sea, with almost 100 miles of shallow marsh before finally meeting the sea. Grand Isle has the only typical ocean front beach in Louisiana. It is land of water, trees and exotic intensity of bugs and reptiles. I saw nutria rats (24 inches long, 20 pounds) regularly in the marsh.

The culture of southern Louisiana is a mix of plantation south and French. Actually the language of the area is the only remaining example of Old French.

Law and folk ways are...not like the rest of the country. It is a step back in time. Disputes are settled in ways not practiced at Yale. Judges like it when a father marches into the courthouse and guns down the accused rapist of his daughter, which happened when I was living there. The father walked free and the rapist was sentenced to forever.

I learned to be a little wily and tough there. Maybe too much.

Back to how those of us without a car got to and from the heliports. I would ride the supply truck to the port. Getting back was another thing entirely. When come from an oil rig to land the supply truck was always long gone. So the only way back to wherever was hitching a ride with a coworker from the rig. In all my cases of getting a ride with a coworker they were never going all the way where I was going, so at some point they dropped me off on a highway and I hitchhiked the rest of the way.

Greg once got a ride from a heliport all the way to Houma. This was the time I went out on the Robert R as a deckhand. Greg rode with the night cook he had worked with. Along the way they picked up a hitchhiker, named Sol. They drove on to Houma, dropped Greg off, and headed on down the highway. A short ways later, Sol took a rattlesnake out of a bag and let it bite the driver. It was in national news. The driver lived.

Once I was hitching back to Houma with a cook named Larry. Stopped in Morgan City diner for food. Morgan City was staggeringly dangerous in those days, and this diner was a meaner place than a prison meal hall. We got a ride from someone there, gas money for a ride. That ride ended at a fork in the road, the driver was going northeast and we needed to go southeast to Houma. It was 10PM on a Thursday night, no one around, it was getting late and the alligators were going to start stalking us. Finally around midnight a Camaro pulls over. It was a scary dude from the diner back in Morgan City. Sun glasses on, ski cap on. Larry leans in and talks to him and offers gas money, turns back to me and says "he's got a gun right beside him, watch out"...and we get in. I sat in the back seat of this two door Camaro, trapped, but ready for anything. We made it just fine.

Eventually I work up to what was considered better work on a production platform. It was an Exxon operation, and being a production rig it got better food and living quarters. There was one engineer on it that fished on all his off time, he would bring maybe 100 pounds of frozen fish back on his trip back home every week. One time he got this brilliant idea to just catch them all at once. The fish, each weighing maybe 20-30 pounds, were always swimming in a school. He got a big net, had hold of a rope coming off one end of it,  threw some food waste in the water to get them all grouped tightly, and he threw the net over them.

They almost took him to the bottom of the sea. Luckily he released the rope before last contact with the platform.

I got to see a large hammerhead circling its prey, a school of manta rays, porpoises and countless sunsets on the water.

I was scheduled to fly out off what was to be my last oil rig gig, I had moved to New Orleans and enrolled in Delgado Community College. I got up that morning about 3AM, got some coffee and stepped outside. I noticed an especially large shipping vessel with five cranes trolling along fairly close.

We were on a very special, experimental oil rig. It was in a trench, a part of the Gulf that is downstream from the outlet of the Mississippi River, hundreds of feet deeper than the usual shallow Gulf. Our rig was standing on one giant stilt-like structure, and held in the air by suspension cables.

Most Gulf based oil rigs are not like that, they are in shallow water and much more stable.

Over the years I had been in weekly emergency drills. That morning at about 5AM an unscheduled alarm went off, everyone ran outside. And there was that giant ship heading straight towards our rig. It was without power and had no means of steering. It was about 150 feet away, floating at water current speed to us.

It was a Korean vessel. When it got extremely close, a Korean deckhand ran out in the middle of the boat and snapped a flash photo of our rig looming over him. We laughed.

The boat slammed into and did about $100,000 in damage, but nothing catastrophic or of danger to personnel.

That was my last morning on an oil rig. Good times.

The author of this blog also has two books available on Amazon. Athena Techne uses some of the autobiographical content of this blog and adds a philosophical perspective utilizing the ancient Greek god Athena.

Athena Techne :: Amazon.com Page

Autistic Crow Computer is a fiction set in Seattle, about an autistic boy and two crows. The book was written for young autistic readers, although reviews by non-autistics have been positive.

Autistic Crow Computer :: Amazon.com Page

The Benton Speedbowl in the 1970's and early 80's. Now known as the I-30 Speedway.

My dad, known in the local car racing world  by his nickname "Tommy T Miller", was a fixture at what we called the Benton Speedbowl, but is now called the I-30 Speedway (www.i-30speedway.com).

My first visit to it ever was when I was about 5 or 6, with my aunt Rosemary, which makes no sense because she wasn't into racing. Later I began to go to the track on a regular basis with my dad in 70's. Just like our thing with drag racing (story here), going to the dirt track races meant going with Murray Draper and maybe his brother Tom or someone else.

For all who don't know what dirt track racing is, here you go: it is a kind of car racing with the track being oval, and not paved...dirt. The dirt is even wetted down a little. If you are thinking a car might slide on this, well, you are beginning to understand dirt tracking racing. The sport is not crazy sliding around out of control, there is an art to it, and a beauty. The cars go around the curves in an extremely graceful move of semi-out-of-controllness. It is hard to convey the movement with words. But basically they deliberately spin the cars sideways, maybe 135 degrees if you want to get precise....and drift backwards at over 100 miles an hour until the driver applies just the right pedal and steer to shoot the car down the next straight stretch.

Honestly, a movie (or real life) about a Japanese Zen Monk applying his focus to dirt track racing is entirely plausible. It is a good sport, which means it has riddles and depths no finite single person can fully master.

The cars are very rough. It is a contact sport. Only the "sprint cars" have something going on like a Formula One car. All the rest of the car types are big, with big tires for the mud, and with body parts usually busted from contact in those crazy spins around the curves semi out of control.

I am trying to decide whether to say rednecks proliferated this place, I am trying to be nice and not denigrate the place with name calling. So I go to the reader for some parsing of this. If you do not believe there is any such thing as rednecks, then I am not claiming rednecks were at this place. On the other hand if you believe there are rednecks, I can tell you that I saw a very strong...amazingly strong...showing of that constituency at this race track.

And we had fun.

One night stands out. It was Murray Draper, my dad and me that rode there together in my dad's 1970 Pontiac Bonneville. We watched the usual races. Then the track did a special gimmick crowd pleasing thing: they staged a race anyone could enter, using their own personal street cars. The only rule was that you couldn't have raced on the track before. You couldn't be a real "race car driver".

Driving fast, competitively fast, on a mud race track, adrenaline and maybe testosterone spiking. Recipe for.... Yeah, bad idea.

They all raced, a bunch of random cars and one pickup truck. The pickup won. No crashes, nothing besides just a bunch of cars struggling to go fast on a surface they weren't meant to go fast on. That's maybe why the truck with larger diameter tires won.

It was all not very exciting till after the race and the track was handing out the prizes for first place. It turned out the winner of the race had raced at the track in the hobby class (hobby class cars that are not worth $100, seriously, a rule for that class was anyone could buy your car in the pits for $100, this kept that honest). So the car had raced. But let's be serious, he wasn't a "race car driver" in that special sense most people mean.

So the person the PA said something to the effect that he was a previous driver, and he was not getting the first place prize. The driver was not happy, and stood in the middle of the track yelling and cussing. Then the person on  PA said something like "you need to leave or we will remove you".

That is when the driver went ballistic and started screaming "Get me....get me m****f*cker....GET ME!!!".

A really fat, short, small town sheriff's deputy came up and used his finger in the international motion of "come here" and the driver put his head down and walked to him.

My dad and Murray erupted in a relentless "get me m*therf*cker...GET ME". Over and over...."get me m*therf*cker...GET ME". Through the whole ride home "get me m*therf*cker...GET ME". And for years a common phrase between Murray and my dad was "get me m*therf*cker...GET ME".


Great resource for photos and info on the era of racing at this specific race track at: facebook.com/pages/Arkansas-Dirt-Track-Racing-Legends-Blasts-From-The-Past

The author of this blog also has two books available on Amazon. Athena Techne uses some of the autobiographical content of this blog and adds a philosophical perspective utilizing the ancient Greek god Athena.

Athena Techne :: Amazon.com Page

Autistic Crow Computer is a fiction set in Seattle, about an autistic boy and two crows. The book was written for young autistic readers, although reviews by non-autistics have been positive.

Autistic Crow Computer :: Amazon.com Page

I was a runaway. Drove from Arkansas to Connecticut, lived in Waterbury

My route. Little Rock AR to Waterbury CT. 1496 miles.

In the Spring of 1979, during my 11th grade at Little Rock's Mills High School, I ran away to my aunt's home in Connecticut.

While living in Connecticut I attended Wilby High School and worked at the Chess King Men's Clothing Store at Brass Mill Center (Mall).

I met Rachel Hitchock at that mall, and we dated steady through the rest of the time I was there. I left in late summer, returning to my parents home in Little Rock.

I drove from 5916 Lyndell Drive, Little Rock, Arkansas (my parent's home) to 24 Stowe Road, Waterbury, Connecticut (my aunt's home).

That is a quick synopsis. What follows is a far more detailed telling.

The year leading up to my running away had been a period of intellectual discovery. Two books I had found in our school library had a great influence on me: The Naked Ape and Future Shock. The Naked Ape was a big influence, and the only influence at the time, towards believing in evolution.

Future Shock was equally influential. I had chosen it as my focus for a research paper assignment in English class, the writing project spanned most of the school year. Future Shock pointed to a hyper-modern world of disposable goods, information overload and tumultuous change.

I yearned for more of what these books introduced, I wanted more dialog among people comfortable with evolution, and I wanted to be actually in an information overloaded, quick changing, and hyper-modern society.

In essence, I wanted out of the South (and to be fair and even, I would have had more contempt for any tradition bound and backward society in the developing world).

Combine that with troubled relations with my father through all my teens, bullying and general malaise at my high school, and then one nagging procrastination....I was seriously behind on completing my writing project for English class.

Future Shock, I haven't thought of that book in decades. I realize now the seed of so much of my outlook on life -how I love hyper-modernity, information overload, ubiquitous disposable electronic technology, and the social disruptions and new ways introduced by the Internet. I wasn't just out of synch with local culture in Arkansas. Even in Seattle and college in Olympia I've been almost equally out of sync. In the Pacific Northwest its normal to praise every instance of raw nature, and deplore every encroachment of man-made environment. Information overload and hyper-busy-ness are considered things to take a break from. I've really disliked this Pacific Northwest norm, its been every bit as much of a wet blanket on my passions as norms of the Southern Bible Belt.

Getting prepared for my runaway out of Arkansas was fun. I've always loved looking at highway maps and planning. I would go to McDonald's, drink lots of coffee and plan. I wanted to see Washington DC and New York City, so I planned a longer route than the most direct and easiest route. I had a 1965 Chevrolet Chevelle. It was in excellent shape, and my running away was in it.

The morning of the getaway I used the subterfuge of going to school. I had put my bags in the car the night before, while no one was up. I said bye at the usual time to go to school, and drove to Interstate 40 and bolted for Memphis Tennessee. I knew I only had till the afternoon before my mom would suspect, so watched the clock and tried to make as many miles as possible in that time.

My parents figured out what I was doing pretty quick, and put out an APB for me in all the states along the route to Connecticut.

My mom really resented my lying to her, I think she asked me if I was going to run away and I said "no". Then of course there is the drama and emotion my parents went through when they didn't know where I was. I apologize to them now, even if this story seems to glory in the whole escapade.

My car had its original AM radio, with a single speaker in the middle of the dash. It was the 1970's, so AM radio stations were still great and had massively powerful signals (US later outlawed such powerful signals). I was a teenager, I would get very excited when a good song came on. Plus this three day trip was my first time ever to be alone for that long, which made the radio a much stronger tether to humanity.

Later in life I would become master of driving long distances on Interstates. But this first attempt at long distance driving was kind of slow -I took lots of exits and stops. Plus the speed limit was 55 mph. I never drove over 60.

I drove basically till I couldn't stay awake any longer, which is really pathetic since I was extremely tire by Cookeville Tennessee, just 428 miles into the trip. I must have not gotten much sleep the night before I left. I got a hotel room and some sleep.

Then I proceeded to Washington DC. I was unprepared for the local laws: hotels couldn't serve a minor unaccompanied by an adult. I drove around the famous Beltway of DC, deliriously and dangerously exhausted. I was nodding off while driving. Finally I got not-stupid and pulled off the Interstate into a parking lot and slept in my car.

Once I woke I started the rest of my trek on Interstate 95, through the most densely populated portions of the East Coast, going through Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.

During this stretch was the first time I saw unending suburbia, that was impressive. In the south I had seen plenty of large cities such as Memphis, Dallas and Houston. But the southern cities, even with all their sprawl, eventually end and farms and forests take over the view. Not I-95 in this region, the homes and shopping centers never ended.

I always had a special memory of seeing a bridge in Trenton New Jersey with a giant banner declaring "We Build It, The World Buys It". Years later, while a history geek in college, I learned the major industrial districts of the US/Canada were the only ones not bombed into dysfunction by the end of World War II. The late 40's and 50's were not just a period of baseless pride among America's manufacturing sector, they truly were the only game on the planet for making stuff such as cars and washing machines. I always used that memory of the Trenton town slogan to keep the lesson in mind.

A big goal for the route I chose was to see Manhattan. And I did. In the mode of a 17 year old Arkansan, in a car, not at all prepared for how to properly see NYC. By the time I got to the NYC area I was out of enough money for the tolls, which were as surprise to my plans. Plus I was a little lost and kept circling around the same area, so I was hitting the tolls several times. I went through two unmanned/automated tollbooths without paying.

Eventually I took an exit into the actual city, and wound up on some random street in NYC. I was surprised at how navigable and low traffic the streets were. It was a real neighborhood of condos, grocery stores and gas stations. I parked, walked around a little and asked a guy at a service station for directions to I-95 towards Connecticut. He gave easy directions and there were no more issues, I got myself to Connecticut with no more problems.

I rationed my little remaining money, used it all for gas, and didn't eat again.

I got to Waterbury, phoned my Aunt Rosemary and was at their house by around 9:30 that night (for some reason I remember the time). I was manic and happy to be there, telling them all kinds of things, just so happy to have made it into this new nicer world.

My uncle-in-law was John Blazek. He was of Czech heritage, born, raised and settled in Connecticut except for his stint in the military in Amarillo Texas and Little Rock Arkansas area. He drove a silver Volkswagen Beetle in immaculate shape. He kept everything in his home in great shape, did all repairs himself.

My Aunt Rosemary had worked for Bell Telephone her whole life, like all her sisters, and was a manager of the very first Bell Telephone Store (later to be popular in many malls across the country).

They had a son, John, who was seven and they gave him everything a kid could want.

John took me to a school district placement office and got me in high school with no problem.

I finished 11th grade at Wilby High School. It was a big new high school at the time. One of my teachers said the school theater had the equipment and design of a standard Broadway theater.

One very new thing was the racial heritage mix. Everyone was Italian. Even students that didn't look Italian were Italian. A big change from my former school with the standard southern reality of 50% blacks and 50% whites.

Everyone was nice to me. That's an understatement, rather, everyone liked to talk to me. I was popular.
Years later my Aunt Rosemary said she still heard from people all over her town that knew me or knew of me. It was truly extreme.

I got a job at the main men's clothing store at the biggest mall, the chain was called Chess King. Remember what guys wore in Saturday Night Fever? That's the kind of clothes we sold. I know, that makes my head hurt now.

Even at the mall I became popular, kind of part of a family of managers and people that worked there. I remember being liked because I was supportive of the assistant manager's gay lifestyle and cool with his boyfriend (or maybe just friend), a gay manager of another store.

Across the hall from Chess King was a kind of general merchandise store, with a short order restaurant counter. I went over there for lunch sometimes. I met my girlfriend there, she worked behind the counter. I didn't flirt with her in any big way. One time I went there and she made the food and served it and said "no charge".  I kind of knew something then.

We started dating. Her name was Rachel Hitchcock. Her parents, her and her older brother lived in an apartment. Her dad leased his cars. I watched the evening news with them every day at 5:30. I loved doing that. I first theorized about feed-forward media manipulation sitting on the couch with her watching NBC evening news.

Rachel's father was German and her mother was Hungarian.

One of our first dates was as a double date and we went to an actual disco. We weren't served alcohol, we were all dressed up and trying to act adult, for the big adult scene we knew from Saturday Night Fever.

I was happy beyond what most people can understand. I had had a previous several years of meanness and bullying at home with my dad and at school. I go to this new place and experience not just a lessening of pain, but a very strange extreme popularity. The popularity might be a little nice perk to a mature adult, but to most teens that is the ultimate gold of all gold.

I had escaped Auschwitz and entered a free stay with free food at Disneyland. There, that's exactly how happy I was.

I entered Connecticut liking music artists like ELO, Boston and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird. I left Connecticut crazy about The Cars, The Police, The B-52's and Cheap Trick. I also was into a band largely unknown now: Flash and the Pan. Their song "Walking in the Rain" was played on FM radio there (Connecticut, not in Arkansas) and I bought their debut album.

I mention the music stuff because it was a big deal to me at that age. Just like in the TV series "Freaks and Geeks" - my identity was expressed by what kind of music I liked.

I even remember one night driving back from Rachel's and "Walking in the Rain" was played on my AM radio (AM stations are usually more pop/conservative than FM). That meant a lot to me.


Eventually this all came to an end. My mom and dad wanted me back home, and to be honest my aunt and uncle shouldn't have been burdened with raising and feeding me.

There was some major argument between my Aunt Rosemary and my mom. Rosemary wanted me to leave my car and just fly back to home, and my mom wanted the car driven back so I'd have transportation when I got back. My mom and dad were doing the right thing, I definitely needed that car so I could work, and my mom was worried about me driving alone so she flew to Connecticut to help me drive back. My mom and Rosemary were so mad at each other they weren't speaking to each other. I was supposed to pick my mother up at the airport, and we'd drive in my car back to Arkansas.

I didn't like them not being on speaking terms. So I left all my packed bags at Rosemary's house when I went to pick up my mom. That way we had to go back to Rosemary's to pick them up. I had my mom and Rosemary talking and over their hostilities within hours.

My mom stayed at Rosemary's that night and the next day we set out for the big roadtrip back to Arkansas.

On the trip back, while my mom was taking a turn at driving, I acted like I was dozing once, and cried.

Sometime after getting back to Arkansas, Rachel Hitchcock flew to Arkansas to stay at our home for a week. She met a few of my friends, and we climbed Pinnacle Mountain. My uncle Michael commented she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was rather striking -blonde, petite, a model's face. For some reason I stopped writing her sometime after that visit. That was wrong, and I kind of loathe myself for doing that.

Something turned dark inside me after that. I hated being back in Arkansas. I came up with a rule I stuck with most of my adult life -never date someone born in the South (later to be amended with can they climb Pinnacle Mountain without a break). I also was done with "running away", I became extremely accommodating to adults around me (all except my dad). I joined the religion of my grandmother's -the Christadelphians- and when one Christadelphian family offered to let me move in with them in Monroe Louisiana I accepted.

...all while maintaining my oath to never date or marry a southern girl and having all my desires set on either New England cities or mountain climbing, two of the most opposite and impossible things one could want while living in Louisiana.

While some of you reading this may be insulted by my anti-south statements, please take it in the spirit of everyone has their preferences, their likes and dislikes, and their life goals.

I am guilty is of something more hideous than not liking the South. I was 17 as all this was beginning to emerge in my personality. The next year I was 18 and able to move and work anywhere I wanted. I didn't, and that is pathetically lame. I could have fought my way back to Connecticut and back to Rachel Hitchcock after graduating from high school. "Fighting my way back" is overly dramatic, I could have just saved up for a trip on a Greyhound bus and gotten myself there. It's not that complicated or hard.

I chose the small person's strategy, I stayed, I complied with ideas and goals far from what fit me, and I sabotaged myself for most of my 20's.

Postscript reflection: after writing this my friend Greg reminded me of our trips to southern Louisiana and working on oil rigs (that story here). This reminded me...Waterbury was really boring, and I wasn't doing anything special or cool there. Whereas working on the oil rigs and living in New Orleans definitely was an adventure that taught me lots of stuff and exposed me to the world. And by 1990 I didn't even like places like Connecticut -New York City being the only place on the East Coast I still really like a lot. Maybe I should turn the whining and self-loathing down a notch. Still sorry to Rachel for ceasing to correspond without giving any reason. 

The author of this blog also has two books available on Amazon. Athena Techne uses some of the autobiographical content of this blog and adds a philosophical perspective utilizing the ancient Greek god Athena.

Athena Techne :: Amazon.com Page

Autistic Crow Computer is a fiction set in Seattle, about an autistic boy and two crows. The book was written for young autistic readers, although reviews by non-autistics have been positive.

Autistic Crow Computer :: Amazon.com Page

Learning to Type -the crucial skill that decides ones opportunities and class

Timeline: 1975. My age: 14. 9th Grade. Location: Little Rock Arkansas.

In 8th or 9th grade my school -Pulaski East Junior High- offered an elective course for learning to type. I really wanted to take it.

My father said no.

Snap to the present. My father has been dead for over a year. I've refrained from dwelling on or writing about negative things he did out of respect, and also he became a different man in his last years, he was a lot nicer than the person who raised me.

Back in 1975 I was going through the roughest of times -the skinniest and possibly most bullied kid at my junior high (see this entry). At home my dad was equally hard on me. He routinely told me I was ugly and dumb. So when I brought up I wanted to learn to type, I can still recall the words he said verbatim: "Typing is for people that work in an office, you're never going to do that, you'll always work on a dock or some other manual labor".

I didn't have the imagination or will to overcome his verdict. Now I know I should have ignored what he thought and filled out the paperwork to get myself in (though maybe I needed my parents signature, not sure on that).

But I didn't fight his verdict on my abilities. I accepted it.

Me, the eternally bookish kid, clumsy in everything physical, the one that even as a teen loved to watch the national and world news every night and talk about every issue the news focused on. Me -the kid that read the whole Bible several times over, the Odyssey, Naked Ape and Future Shock. Me -the inherently text focused person. Banned from clerical work and careers by my dad's opinion.

Through my whole 20's I worked as a dishwasher on oil rigs (see this entry), finally finding meaningful work as caregiver and teacher aid at multi-handicapped institutions. But never in a clerical position.

Finally I broke through a mental barrier and got in college at 29 years old. I made good grades, even a 4.0 while taking a massive 21 hours of credit one winter semester. But one aspect was painful: I had to get others to type up my essays. Luckily I had people that would.

Snap to 35 years old and in Antarctica. I had a lot of free time, access to computers connected to the Internet. I spent my 15 months there learning to type via writing emails.

When I left Antarctica I moved to Seattle (October 1996), where I immediately got a Unix shell account with Speakeasy.org, and by 1998 got my first computer. Once I had my own personal computer I made a plan to seriously learn to type with speed and proficiency. I did by seeking and getting a job as a phone sales rep for Ticketmaster -a job that required taking calls and entering the data of a customer purchase. I know this is going to sound crazy and like an exaggeration, but I had a mandatory regimen I implemented on myself to spend 8 hours on my computer at home learning Linux command line programming and also making HTML web pages. My thought was 16 hours everyday typing would force me to get better at typing.

It did.

Looking back at me at the age of 15 to 30, I see now I could have been more resilient, more creative, more tenacious. I could have bought a type writer or word processor or Commodore 64 and learned to type. I could have overcome.

But I didn't. Yes, there is something to be said about the hurtful words coming from my dad, and how that was poison for my self-image. It's all a long time ago and the opportunities are lost, and I got to see other things, and live the life I did, which is something.

What we can gain today, right now with your reading this, is the object lesson of rise up, figure out how to get around such a hurdle, ignore the wrong and the hurtful, do the thing you need to as soon possible to get past whatever is causing perpetual misery....if you can. There are people to talk to, things you can buy, roads you can get on, planes you can get on, that can literally take you to a better place.

A final word. My son. North. I tell him when he is correct, I tell him when is right and I was wrong, I tell him he is smart. I am doing everything I can to make him the most literate and math capable person on this planet. I would die if it got him in MIT or Stanford. There is nothing I wouldn't do to get this kid smarter at 15 than I ever was. Love is an inadequate word, I give him my love, but more than that, I want to give him the world...and by that I mean I want him empowered to go anywhere in it...full of the healthiest self-esteem.

The author of this blog also has two books available on Amazon. Athena Techne uses some of the autobiographical content of this blog and adds a philosophical perspective utilizing the ancient Greek god Athena.

Athena Techne :: Amazon.com Page

Autistic Crow Computer is a fiction set in Seattle, about an autistic boy and two crows. The book was written for young autistic readers, although reviews by non-autistics have been positive.

Autistic Crow Computer :: Amazon.com Page

Pulaski East Junior High School and Bus 15

Timeline: 1974 to 1977. My age: 12 - 15. Location: southwest Little Rock, Arkansas, and our junior high school located in Sweet Home Arkansas (map).

On 7th grade I began going to Pulaski East Junior High School. Also new for me was riding a school bus. My new school was ten and a half miles away.

Immediately on the first bus ride things were weird. We were picked up around 7:15 AM, which was fairly early, school started sometime around 8:30 or 9:00AM. To my confusion, our bus driver drove us all the way downtown, to the Interstate 30 bridge along the Arkansas River. To anyone who knows the area will also know this was directly in the opposite direction to our destination school. The only thing I could figure out over the years was the bus driver was extremely early and didn't want to arrive at the school before a certain time. Whatever the reason, this gave a surrealistic introduction to...a three year nightmare.

Pulaski East Junior High School. First I need to say something in defense of the many teachers, school district officials and bus drivers associated with that school who were good people doing good things. There were many. I remember more than a few of those teachers, praise be to you all.

Pulaski East Junior High School smelled like cow manure because that was the heritage of the grounds upon which it was built. Its outdoor gathering fields for both sports and general mingling were adjacent to fields used for cows, and the cows regularly wondered onto the school grounds. Cow poop was a mainstay of the school's sensory experience.

I rode bus number 15, henceforth to called Bus 15, and I should use the kind of font used for old horror film posters, with red and running blood shaped letters. Hint: Bus 15 was scary, it was tough, and it was dangerous. So dangerous Chuck Norris soiled his pants and never came back after just one ride.

And Pulaski East Junior High School was also.

Beginning sometime in 7th grade black kids started taking my lunch money every day. This occurred through all of 7th and and 8th grade. It stopped in the later part of 9th grade because I had gotten a 120 lbs weight set for Christmas, and quickly got up to doing arm curls with 60 pounds. I asked one of the people who had bullied me, David Sanders, why the bullying had stopped. He fidgeted a little uncomfortably and said I had gotten bigger. The only place I had gotten bigger was my arms.

The bullies ran in two packs. The white kids were a pack of kids mostly from the Southern Oaks subdivision (map) with the exception of Ricky and Johnny Mullins that lived just off Butler Road on Allyson Circle (map), and Philip Easterly who lived on Lancaster Road (map). They bullied me on Bus 15 and in my neighborhood. The boys in Southern Oaks were led by David Sanders, and David would team up on me often with Ricky Mullins.

A short interlude: Johnny Mullins was one my neighborhood bullies. Early one evening he was riding his motocross motorcycle up our street and kicked our trash can over. My dad, who weighed 350 pounds of pure fat and massive muscles, ran outside in a rage. Our street was a dead end. Johnny had to turn around and come back our way. My dad picks up the garbage can lid laying in the street. Johnny slows down at the sight then revs back up trying to get by. My dad puts the garbage can lid sideways into Johnny's helmet, Johnny swerves but doesn't crash. My dad runs back in the house, gets his nickel plated Colt .45 automatic, jumps in his car and goes looking for Johnny. He comes back a little later never having found Johnny. This was over an empty garbage can. Neighborhood kids never did anything to our property again.

The bullies who were black kids, I can't recall all their names, but the worst was Bobby Trice. This pack of bullies I saw at school and lived far from me, near the school.  Please, this isn't defaming all the black kids there. My best friends in those years were black -Michael Martin, Alphonso Miles, and Helaine Palmer (who would become a muilti-decade columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette).

I'd put the negative effects like this: the black bullies kept me from having lunch for a few years and that caused my serious weight loss. The white bullies exacted psychological harm.

The bullies on Bus 15 would do this thing called a "dog pile" on me, and I think one other weak outlier. Now that I'm an adult I can see through the haze of teenage trauma, I was allowing fear to reign. These "dog piles" were humiliating, but not truly physically dangerous. The person I would become in my 20's, the me that lived in New Orleans, would have seen the dog pile as an opportunity to crush a lot of stuff in their pelvic area, or put out some eyes.

To any out there who are now being bullied, I recommend analyzing what is being done to you. When is it truly physically dangerous? When is it psychological? When is it social humiliation? They are not all the same, although they are all most certainly wrong.

Once, in 7th or 8th grade, the local white bullies were hanging out on the street in front of our house. Philip Easterly was with them. My sister and I were at home, and my mom and dad were gone. They kept trying to get me to come out on the street to fight Philip. Eventually Philip got the courage to kick our unlocked front door open and he stood in our living room in a martial arts pose telling me he was going to kick my _____.  That was the limit of his nerve, he left and the pack of boys eventually moved on. That wasn't at school, but fits with the gist of my junior high years.

Bus 15 had bigger problems than "dog piles". A cluster of the worst kids started placing nails in the bus tires. When the bus would come to a stop and we were getting on, one kid would place a nail under a tire in such a way that it was punctured when the bus started rolling again. We would have a flat on the way to school, and miss a major part of the first hour of classes. Also during this time the kids started tearing the cushions out of the seats.

At one point our vice principal Merle Breeding came on board the bus as we arrived at school. He gave us a strong talking to about the damage we were causing daily. We were doing over $1000 in damage per week. He said Bus 15 was by far the worst bus in the entire Pulaski County Special School District.

One flat tire incident was more action filled than the others. The kids had placed a nail in the usual manner, and we were all riding along wondering when the flat would happen (I'm sure the bus driver was too). We made it all the way past the drop offs of kids at Fuller Junior High and Mills Senior High. We were about to make the turn into Sweet Home when the blowout happened a lot faster than usual. We were on a curve, and the bus went off the road into a farm field and rolled over on its side. Being a big bus and the slow speed, it was less like a crash and more like a ride at a state fair. No one got hurt.

One might conclude all the buses were as bad. No, they weren't. I began to try and ride Bus 56, which serviced the neighborhood of Wakefield on east side of 65th Street. It was perfectly peaceful bus, right out of a perfectly peaceful movie. There was no difference in class, wealth or anything else between that neighborhood and mine (they were right next to each other, divided by one main thoroughfare). School district rules forbid kids switching buses ad hoc and riding one outside their service area. The bus driver for Bus 56 took pity on me a few times and let me ride, but for the most part I had to go back to Bus 15.

Looking back on how peaceful other buses were at the same school, and how peaceful things were at other schools that serviced southwest Little Rock, it seems to be just bad luck that got me on the worst bus in...possibly...the world.

School shootings. We were way ahead of our time on those.

One incident was on Bus 15. A black girl who lived on Butler Road, a friend of mine and we often sat together on the bus, was being harassed by the pack of white bullies led by Ricky Mullins. One day she packs a short barreled .38 caliber revolver and pulls it out on the boys, while we were on the bus. No bullets were fired. I can't recall the details of the outcome, she didn't get arrested, I think the situation was simply de-escalated somehow. All I remember was feeling happy while she was pointing the gun at them. I liked her, even more then. I know her name but omit it here out of protection for her reputation.

Another shooting incident had lots of bullets flying, but I missed it. It was at Pulaski East Junior High School, during the morning outdoor gathering before the first classes start. A boy I will call by his initials R.V. brought a pistol to school. A confrontation with vice principal Merle Breeding happened outside in front of all the students, R.V. shot at Mr Breedings feet, making him jump around. Then R.V. stole the school secretary's car and tried to flee the area, but was caught by deputies a few miles away.

Decades later, when I was near 50 years old, R.V. appears on our Facebook group. He had moved to another state and had a good life with career and family. He told us a few details I never knew. He had brought the gun to school out of fear of a set of bullies at the school.

So the two gun incidents I know of related to that time and that school were in response to bullies, an indication my memories of bullies isn't just imagination.

I loved academics all through school, including those years. Science classes were good, and I especially recall liking our English class reading A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens.

My one other great fear in those years: Physical Education class, PE. I loathed that class. I would try and get away with "forgetting" my gym shorts and shirt so I could sit out of the activities. To all the parents and educators who think PE is automatically something kids love and need, please read my account of how wrong you are.

I was weak, skinny, and uncoordinated in those years. PE wasn't a resource for getting healthier or more fit. The activities we did were sports such as volleyball, baseball and the thing I truly despised: the rope climb to the gym ceiling. These activities didn't develop jack sh_t. They were forums for the strongest and the most coordinated to win, and the physically less developed kids to lose.  I was not a lazy kid or one that entirely disliked all fitness.

Actually, I liked all real fitness we did in the class. By fitness I mean the few times we spent in the football player's weightlifting room, and other times doing 220, 440 and 880 yard sprints. At the time I knew these were the activities I needed several days a week, and was frustrated Coach Evans only let us do them a couple of times a school year.

Years later I would get my first weightlifting set and begin to change my life, eventually becoming a fitness/weightlifting instructor at the downtown YMCA, and at Gold's Gym. Once the ignorant and wrongheaded physical education was out of my life, I began to get stronger and healthier, thanks to geeky tendencies with reading and studying (strength training concepts) and the equally geeky or autistic tendency towards sticking with a regimen.

One last parting shot on physical education. Baseball, basketball and many other sports never ever got anyone in this world healthier. They develop social coordination. No one baseballs their way to healthier or stronger muscles or cardiovascular system. A strong/coordinated kid comes into baseball, they'll come out  strong/coordinated and the enhancement of social coordination, and likely a higher self-esteem. A weak or uncoordinated kid goes into baseball, they come out the same weak and uncoordinated kid, with injured self-esteem.

Baseball and basketball type sports forced on kids who do not like them is abuse, and institutions and individuals who revere those types of sports as something beneficial for everyone are fundamentally wrong and operating with flawed information or just plain ignorant.

In 9th grade I started hanging out with Jimmy Sullivant and Robbie Smith. Jimmy introduced me to marijuana, I smoked my first joint with him at his house. I quickly got to be a weekly smoker of the stuff. Robbie Smith lived on Southern Oaks Drive, and we became best friends, and part of that was smoking pot. We would tell our parents we were spending the night at the other one's house, then we would hang out at King Bee's on 65th Street, go to the hill in back and smoke pot, then went to the wooded area near our homes and sleep with some makeshift camping scenario.

King Bee's was southwest Little Rock's version of a hippy underground speakeasy. It's real business was pool hall, and a few pinball machines. They served soft drinks and snacks. It had the obligatory spacey surrealistic painting of volcanoes and plant-life all done in bright colors covering one wall.

I became a link in the pot world, through Jimmy Sullivant and Charles Smith I knew older and more pot invested people and would buy from them, and resell to my friends in junior high school. It was really small time, but I was more socially connected in all this, and having fun, which was a big change from the pure pain of the last two years.

One night I went with Jimmy and some much older car driving teen to a party in Wakefield. Charles Smith was there, and lots of older kids. Well not even kids really, they were 17-21 year olds, probably a lot of dropouts. They were listening to Yes, smoking pot ceaselessly and drinking. Charles had some moonshine, and offered to share the bottle with me. I didn't start drinking alcohol till years later, so I didn't know what to expect. I took several drinks. We were smoking pot before, during, and after the moonshine. I was sitting on the floor, and suddenly everything and everyone around me began to be like a giant canyon wall, Jimmy Sullivant, sitting in front of me in a chair, became a giant.

The moonshine was laced with LSD.

We got back to King Bee's and every facet of my perception was ...well... tripping out seems to be the only justifiable phrase to use. I remember sitting with a few kids my own age,  I remember Redonda McClellan being one of them. We talked about all these profound things I was seeing and feeling.

It was a school night, I was supposed to be home by 9:30 PM. My mom and dad would be up and waiting to see me.

I was 14 -it was against the rules for me to smoke pot, drink moonshine, and take LSD.

I left King Bee's with an idea for getting sober. I went up 65th Street to the Westgate Apartments, and I ran around the whole complex, several laps. It felt like I was on super-legs. I had endless stamina, it was all effortless. Maybe it woke me up in some way but my general state of mind stayed about the same as at King Bee's. So I walked home trying to at least make it before breaking my curfew deadline.

I walked in the door, past my mom and dad who were watching TV, they saw me and said "hi, good you're back", I said "yeah" and walked on by to my bedroom, making sure to not walk any faster or slower than usual. I went to sleep.

7th to 9th grade was all one bad dream.

Addendum: On the first day this blog entry was published I got four replies, all thanking me for writing about Pulaski East Junior High and said they too were bullied and their time at the school was full of dread and misery.

The author of this blog also has two books available on Amazon. Athena Techne uses some of the autobiographical content of this blog and adds a philosophical perspective utilizing the ancient Greek god Athena.

Athena Techne :: Amazon.com Page

Autistic Crow Computer is a fiction set in Seattle, about an autistic boy and two crows. The book was written for young autistic readers, although reviews by non-autistics have been positive.

Autistic Crow Computer :: Amazon.com Page

TTYLR : Teletype Little Rock

I didn't begin to use computers till the early 1990's. My first experiences where at UALR [wikipedia], using a VAX unix system and text only internet. In 1995-6, the World Wide Web exploded into wide use, and I was in a place with 24/7 access to a computer lab. My life, and the world, were changed forever.

From 1996 on, I began using a Unix command prompt for access to email, web pages, and a shell prompt [wikipedia]. I felt immediately at home on the command line. And let me add a qualifier: on an inter-networked command prompt. In the early 90's I had used DOS, and the concepts and ease of use did not flow so well. Once I got on Unix, and the shell prompt had an ubiquitous internet connected to it, then the operating system made sense. On the other hand, DOS, especially if one cannot get to the internet from the command prompt, was too useless to make sense.

I've attributed my ease of "grokking" Unix and the Internet to a very odd and rare experience as a child. In 1972 I was in fourth grade, enrolled at Wakefield Elementary School in Little Rock Arkansas [map]. I was very much into reading, I spent many summer days riding the bus downtown and hanging out at the main library. Our little elementary school library was a favorite place also. One day I noticed a book in the math section: Networked Computers. I had just seen 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theater, and knew computers could control a whole spaceship, talk with humans, plot to kill, et cetera, so I checked this cool looking book out to find out how they did it. The book turned out to be way over my head. It was not a simple howto book for children nor even an average college student. It was an honest to goodness technical manual on the inter-networking of computers.

What was bizarre about this book's existence is the date and location. By date I mean the internet was not invented till 1967, beginning as a DARPA project at five colleges in the western USA. By 1972 networking was certainly still only for government and business. So, what was a technical book on one of the most advanced technologies in the world doing at a children's library in the working class side of an Arkansas town?

I finally made a pretty good guess a few days ago, 36 years later, on that question. My answer (which is still just a guess) is the book was donated by someone who worked at the Teletype plant, which was about one mile away. I believe some eccentric engineer wanted to blow a young person's mind by the Gestalt method of teaching -basically by overwhelming the person with an intense exposure of a concept.

...and it worked, to this day I can remember one diagram in the book of computer terminals, a line depicting networking cable connection, and their numerical addresses printed underneath. Text on the page explained the routing. Below is my own re-creation of the graphic from memory:

The Teletype plant was not solely about technology for us kids, we played on the construction site on the weekends when no work was being done, and we called the woods between the plant and 65th Street the Teletype Woods.

Website for the Little Rock Teletype Plant.

Carlisle Dragstrip

Grog at Carlisle Dragstrip. A regular I saw many times.

Note: there is very little on the web about  Carlisle (Ark) Dragstrip. Sorry my recall lacks for a proper essay on the place. From the looks of it this may be the only online record of the place.

Carlisle Dragstrip was Central Arkansas's main or only official dragstrip. I'm not sure of its exact years of operation, but I know first hand it was open all through the 1960's and early 70's.

It was situated just outside of Carlisle Arkansas. It wasn't a full time raceway. It was actually an airport for the crop dusters that serviced the local farms. Only on weekends was it in use as a dragstrip. All the concession stands and other things needed for running a dragstrip were in portable trailers.

Even though it was not a full-fledged big deal dragstrip, it did feature every big name in drag racing at the time. I saw Don Garlits, Don Prudhomme and Tom McEwen "Snake and Mongoose" (movie: Snake and Mongoose), and I probably saw The Little Red Wagon a dozen times over the years. Don Garlits even gave me a spark plug used in his world famous dragster (its in a museum now) .

My dad, Tommy "T" Miller, raced his first few cars there. Yes, his cars he drove everyday. He didn't have average cars. He owned a series of GTO's with special edition motors (I believe with three four-barrel carburators) and purple paint.

My first visit to the dragstrip was after my dad's years racing there. It was maybe the summer of 1970, or 71 at the latest. My dad usually stood near the starting line. For me that was all fine...till the funny cars. For any who don't know, funny cars and dragsters are a breed above all other drag race cars. They burn a higher grade fuel, and have horsepower in the thousands. When their motor revs even a little bit, the earth shakes several hundred feet away.

So there I was, 9 years old and standing less than 30 feet away from two of these funny cars. I was dealing with it till the staging lights went green and they took off (they reach 60 miles per hour in one second). I panicked and ran from my dad back to our car. I never had bolted from either of my parents like that before, or since. My dad came looking for me and was totally understanding.

I know that sounds like drag racing wasn't going to be my thing...but the trauma of that first race didn't last. I loved drag racing after that, and stood at the starting line both at Carlisle and Memphis dragstrips.

A funny story about one Sunday at the Carlisle Dragstrip. It was my dad, Murray Draper (owner of The Gun Exchange), and me. We were in my dad's 1969 Pontiac Bonneville, which is pretty low riding long wheelbase car. My comment about low riding and long wheelbase is important in this story. My dad was a spendthrift....miser...cheap...anything to save a buck (and died with 60,000 in the bank and no debts). Him and Murray planned to get in the drag races for free, by taking backroads that eventually end at the back end of the drag strip near the pits.

These roads were dirt roads for farm tractors, they didn't have a single house or business on them, they were just paths between field crops for the farmers. The drag strip didn't manage these road entrances because no one without a giant farm tractor would drive down them.

One more thing to add to this story: a torrential rain storm had just waterlogged the region over the last week. Carlisle is situated in the southern delta, all flat land. Away from cities, in the delta farm country, rain has nowhere to go other than into the soil or sit as mud and giant puddles. When there's an especially long duration of rain, the soil is saturated, and then the delta becomes a mud bog.

When we got to Carlisle all was easy till my dad got the end of the blacktop and saw the backroads: they were nothing but mud. ....we went anyway.

Miles and miles of slowly trudging our big Pontiac through mud. Then we came to IT. It was a half mile stretch of water, under it somewhere was a muddy road, but all we could see was the surface of a huge pond of questionable shallow depth.

...we went anyway.

The story ends with us making it to the races without ever getting stuck. God only watches over Southerners, especially those not going to church and sneaking into drag races.

The last time I went to Carlisle Dragstrip had to have been no later than 1975. My dad got more interested in dirt track racing, and began going to the Benton Speedbowl on Interstate 30 south of Little Rock. The rest of his life he was a fanatic about dirt track and especially the World of Outlaws.

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The author of this blog also has two books available on Amazon. Athena Techne uses some of the autobiographical content of this blog and adds a philosophical perspective utilizing the ancient Greek god Athena.

Athena Techne :: Amazon.com Page

Autistic Crow Computer is a fiction set in Seattle, about an autistic boy and two crows. The book was written for young autistic readers, although reviews by non-autistics have been positive.

Autistic Crow Computer :: Amazon.com Page