Funs Between Works

Thirteen years spent as a common laborer with limited skill sets, taking college coursework as time and budget allowed during that span of years before beginning a professional career which would carry on for thirty years, twelve of which would entail operating my own company, the path was long but not as arduous as expected. Along the way there were always lots of fun times experienced between stretches of work, and even most of those were a joy to have lived through, though some were dangerous and so risky to life and limb.

WORKS First job earning money from strangers involved the odd art of monoculturing in a humid subtropical land, officially known as USDA Hardiness Zone 9a, where tropicals and subtropicals grow long and lush unattended. And yet humans strive to keep their yards well carpeted with a single species of mown grass at all cost to budgets, environment, and sanity.

There's nothing like the racket of engines on each and every single, calm Sunday morning.

FUNS after works that summer involved heavy rubberbands, snake tongs and pillowcases. The rubberbands stunned agile little lizards, the tongs, agile cottonmouths swimming in inky waters. They all ended up in pillowcases if we were agile enough to nab them on the run. We weighed and measured all of them and pickled some of them in formaldehyde for science.

Daydreams extended that fun with visions of becoming a bayou dweller with our dog Tanji.

WORKS The lawn mowing continued after moving to a harsh, dry, barren land where the water was bad and was inhabited by a mischievous gang of hippie kids, The Pickwick Players.

FUNS We spotted them as we arrived in town and were having first look at our new neighborhood. Dad said "Look at all the hippies." and we all laughed over his insightfulness.

On my first day at school, those hippies kidnapped me and took me to their theatre where I was encourage to play my guitar and improvise on stage in front of them all. The director, Mr. Graczyk, liked the way I played House Of The Rising Sun and Classical Gas on twelve string guitar, but wasn't impressed by my acting abilities. Still he agreed to let me join the group for a tuition fee. I told him I had no money and my parents would not spring for it. He thought about it for all of five seconds then generously granted me a scholarship to join up.

After seeing the Monahans Sandhills, premonitionary visions of roaming over dunes ensued.

WORKS The stint performing with The Pickwick Players was fun, but by the next summer work on a pig farm in Illinois beckoned. Its stench was pervasive but Rob Roy Creek was cool.

FUNS Ice skating on Rob Roy was cool, too. Rob Roy is where The Fox–aka Rey–would conduct secretive meetings with Royco of the Chicago Daily News to tell all about his most recent nonviolent acts of environmental vigilantism, like the times he plugged smoke stacks with giant stoppers and dumped barrels of polluted sludge on the floor of U.S. Steel's lobby.

WORKS Aside from giving private guitar lessons to a few kids living in the next harsh, arid land, getting around a city of four million people was sketchy work for a teen who could not speak any Farsi. Soon, though, it became apparent that carrying a guitar made it a lot easier.

FUNS That task had a fun side, too, when opportunity arose for venturing beyond city limits into surrounding verge of desert land seeking adventure. Having read the first of Frank Herbert's trilogy, and with unenviable prospect of dying in a foreign jungle nation called Vietnam while fighting a futile, unwinnable war of attrition, it was fun entertaining ideas of gaining means of transport across vast expanses of wild sand to become a desert creature.

Our choir teacher talked us into performing Peace Train and Horse With No Name on stage at the University. The audience was appreciative, and as we played, TV cameras rolled onto stage to record. We found out later it was to be broadcast over the national TV network.

WORKS Returning to the States, after eagerly consuming every American dish and entertainment craved while living abroad, a job at a gas station helped me learn how to lube vehicles and pump gas into them all day long. Not enjoying that work much at fifty cents per hour, a search for more interesting work began in earnest. Soon I had dropped out to tune in as a jug band member working days at a lumber yard on the shores of a high mountain lake.

FUNS The audition with the jug band went well and we agreed to keep at it, but living and working at high altitude as winter snows began to fall, my mistake soon became obvious. Thanks for the opportunity, Duffy. I sometimes regretted not following that dream to fruition.

WORKS Deciding to return and finish highschool, and after Nixon had stopped sending troops to Vietnam, I took a job as a convenience store clerk and considered enlisting in the Air Force. The recruiter informed me that myopia and strabismus would keep me out of any kind of cockpit. Another quick misadventure to OKC convinced me not to enlist in the Army.

Taking on a rough nightshift job at a truck stop fixing semi truck tires, the swarm of flying bugs I had to strive hard not to allow to fly into my mouth as I yawned more each moment sunrise approached, a conviction not to do that kind of work my entire life settled in quickly.

FUNS Times I wasn't too pooped to play after a week of shifts on that job were spent roaming The Breaks where I could find solace in silence and solitude of that beautiful place.

WORKS Then I had completed serving time in the public school system and could set out to become an adult working hard as an adult should. Walking up to the rig, I saw that all of its pipe and collars were standing in the derick, indicating I would be tripping on that first day working as a roughneck on a wildcatter rig punching holes into gas pockets ready to blow.

That was interesting, more challenging work, but when it was time to promote me to chainman, I balked at the thought of throwing the chain and losing fingers in the process. So I skipped having fun that summer and moved back to a familiar place, taking on a job making and delivering crushed ice. It was a decent job and I liked the boss, but college beckoned. So after passing the ACT and being admitted, the book learning recommenced. After knocking out required base credits it was time to embark on a higher level of learning.

After completing the first year of college coursework, a year working at a gas transmission facility and a summer job driving trucks delivering bulk cement to petroleum drilling sites, followed by a short period of roustabouting provided impetus to return to school studying what I really wanted to be studying. So I started composing and practicing for the audition.

FUNS An audition in a renowned music school for a renowned jazz guitarist somehow resulted in being admitted into the performance guitar program. And then I was in paradise.

These studies progressed well and I was learning to perform complex, demanding pieces of music under pressure. After acing my junior year jury, my guitar instructor invited me to go to Spain to study under Segovia. But I was broke by then and had to return to the workforce.

WORKS At two years in the school of music, classmates who were superb musicians much more talented than I was returned from east and west coasts starved and unemployed. This convinced me to abandon goals seeking fame and fortune as a working musician to pursue a degree in science or engineering. Working as a weldor building boat docks on Possum Kingdom Lake, I also began boning up on algebra and trigonometry. That job was as much fun as it was hard labor, well worth the time spent on it even though the pay wasn't so great.

FUNS The job working on the lake was where the fun was that year. I camped some in various places but really enjoyed being out on the lake working for the barge company a lot.

WORKS A year later I was admitted to a good engineering school and began hitting the books hard in that intense field of study, and in more advanced mathematics. Civil engineer was the goal, and I enjoyed learning the subject matter, but then I took a course in computer programming using the FORTRAN language. That's when I finally found professional calling.

FUNS From the moment I was admitted to pursue a bachelor of science degree in computer science and mathematics, it was all fun through to graduation day, having finally found my niche. The dean of the department, Dr. Carpenter, interviewed me for consideration to be admitted into the program and agreed I was a good fit with high probablity of success considering my extensive arts and sciences study trajectory to date. He handed me a degree plan, I immediately enrolled and knocked out coursework at pace through to my graduation.

I enjoyed the course work and really enjoyed the labwork, soon acquiring a PC and compilers to do the work for all my labs at home where it was quiet and comfortable. I could see potential doing such work remotely someday as CEO/CIO/CFO/... of my own company.

And that if I couldn't immediately set up in a home/studio environment to run my company then it would be easy to do so from any city anywhere in the nation, or in the world, desired.

Imagining the ultimate situation and setup for such outcomes kept me striving to achieve it.

A brief cartography job performed for a regional water management entity building a new reservoir in Texas convinced me beyond any remaining doubt that I was on the right track.

WORKS After coding for a couple of startups which weren't much heading anywhere I wanted to follow, a global corporation doing telemetry log analysis software development needed skilled software engineers, so I applied, interviewed and was immediately hired.

FUNS Although I loved the work I was doing and thought it was too enjoyable to be earning so much to be doing it, I began expanding my horizons to have fun outside of work, too. Fun like canoeing during meteor showers; surf kayaking as seas grew high and rough or on calm bays where I could paddle right up to a warf and buy fresh seafood; open canoeing in alligator waters; observing Hale-Bopp comet from the caprock; mountain biking, snow skiing and running class II whitewater in an open canoe in the Rockies; overlanding in various places across the southwest; kayaking among Orca in Johnstone Strait at the northern end of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada; even intentionally jumping out of an airplane.

While traveling across the southwest, I began planning my escape from The Hard Gray Edge.

WORKS Seeking new skills and related employment where those skills could be leveraged toward success in a career which was rocking along much better than I ever expected it would, a pair of new jobs were landed in the realm of financial management software solutions. These jobs were city-bound but they allowed me to attain skill sets and experience which encouraged me to chase the dot com bubble and acquire web applications development work out west on the Front Range, a life-long goal was now well within sights.

FUNS That job was more fun than toil and having mountains within short driving distance in every direction except east, I was living a dream long sought, one of the most fun aspects of which was being able to bike along a beautiful stream all the way from my home at the edge of a regional park to the office building where hot coffee and bagels were waiting to be had.

WORKS Then the dot com bubble I had chased to the Front Range burst and I was laid off by the B2B startup I had so eagerly sought employment with eight months before. Fortunately, winter had passed and I was able to spend spring and part of summer along the front range and into the deeper reaches of the Rockies as an indie singer/songwriter performing my orginial songs and tunes for five glorious months of the freest time of my life. This work eventually led to winning third place in the Silverton Jubilee songwriter's contest in 2002 where I was invited to perform that song and another on stage beneath the big tent.

Five months and four or five interviews later I was offered several positions in a City Dysfunctional including a job in software engineering working for a state government not too far from the homestead property I had purchased only a few years earlier. Eager to begin construction on that property to create an off-grid home/studio thoroughly embedded in wilderness where its natural beauty and quiet solitude would allow creation of wonderfully-crafted solutions for clients of still unknown kind or cloth could commence sooner than later.

FUNS During time spent as a government employee I learned a lot of what I wanted to know and what I didn't care to know about bureaucracies and the people running them. But that did not dampen desire to get out and seek fun in an enchanting land chock full of fun stuff.

WORKS Six years later that dream was achieved in spades and I found myself living year round at the home/studio no matter how severe the weather or how deep the snow drifts.

FUNS Being self-employed is a wild, wonderful trip, in and of itself. Additionally, being ensconced in wilderness while working for myself, I could stroll outside to have fun on site, from relaxing breaks strolling along aspen-glow lanes, hooking a trout for lunch, or just kicking back to chill whenever, wherever and however was most appropriate for the situation.

Riding this wave of professional fun to conclusion at retirement age, it then only intensified as leisurely activities broadened and freedom from schedules allowed for extended sojourns. Adventure trekking dominated retirement lifestyle and life was as perfect as I could imagine. With my mind cleared of the pressing concerns of clients, every moment was full of reflection on every already-experienced works and funs while languidly soaking up still more funs. But as the saying goes, all good things must end, and so did this stretch of funs when the U.S. Forest Service came trespassing into my life with full force of incompetence and negligence.

WORKS They were on a tight schedule and the bosses wanted the burn to begin right away. Nevermind the seasonal, unpredictably high wind events. Nevermind the USFS weather stations in disrepair. Nevermind that all tiers of emergency backup firefighting crew were either sitting on their asses in a town an hour distance from the fire or were in training sessions at a place two hours away. Nevermind such details. It was time to Burn Baby Burn!

So they did and then they all freaked out when historically seasonal high winds kicked up and they had no contingency crews to come help them, allowing the prescribed burn to run wild. It soon would come to be known as the Hermit's Peak Fire. But this was only the first act for these bungling buttheads. Unbeknownst to them another piece of their negligent handiwork was smoldering inside a disregarded burn pile which they hadn't monitored, even though pile burns were notorious for smoldering and reigniting. Another reason to freakout.

Spotting the smoke rising from that reignited burn pile, they rushed over to put it out. After flailing about and stomping on sparks they deemed it a done deal and left the site. Ah, but it wasn't extinguished at all and reignited. Then the high winds kicked up to scatter its sparks.

Then lo and behold, these two wholly preventable fires merged to become one hugely ravenous inferno which would burn on for four solid months while USFS ranks swelled so that a multitude of fire fighters pretended to be busily battling the conflagration, knowing all too well that they were powerless to have any positive effect, just too much for them to handle.

Back at USFS district headquarters, news of the SNAFU had the manager so totally stressed.

And when news of it reached the U.S. Secretary of Interior, whoooooeeeeee was she pissed!

Well, not really. She just called around town asking for massive amounts of taxpayer funds to remediate, and eventually the POTUS made a promise to fire victims which wouldn't be kept.

In a stroke of genius, FEMA was assigned the task of distributing compensations to victims in a manner they quickly deemed would be Simple, Fast, and Fair. A lie. It was no such thing.

In the famous words of Jay Leno: FIX EVERYTHING MY ASS!

The USFS had suckerpunched victims to the ground. Then FEMA ruthlessly commenced to kicking them while they were down. Cruelty For Profit became the theme of their sick game.

Winters have come and gone since April 6, 2022, while victims face each knowing it will only bring continuing suffering as FEMA bureaucrats play their little games to draw such rich pay.

Knowing victims' hands are tied because the U.S. Government is a powerful juggernaut so blind to any mere citizen's plight, even if they brought ruination raining down upon them all.

Without options and ignored by FEMA, victims try to rebuild upon a desolate land of waste. Some victims able to dig and find answers no one else wants to hear try to warn of their folly.

To no good end, no matter how fervently alarms are raised. Then nature responds, full force.

While representatives shrug and ask "What more can we do?", bereft of any iota of empathy.

Then they feign deep concern, offering more words meaning nothing in sufferings scheme.

And wrap it all up with theatrically expressive prayers for victims in times of greatest need...

...before rushing off to secure best seats at the festive feast for celebrating their good deeds.

FUNS Stuffing themselves with delicacies in an opulent dining room, they all laugh it up over how they have again so skillfully served up to their constituents a very merry poke in the eye.

WORKS So, thanks to the bungling buttheads at the USFS and cruel machinations of FEMA bureaucrats cruelly turning their screws while reluctantly determining compensations for victims of the Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, works again became a necessary activity in life as the battle to be made whole again ensued. This phase of works has been going on for several years now without achieving satisfactory degree of recovery. But sitting around waiting on FEMA goons to do the right thing just isn't an activity worth engaging in. I've done all I can to state my case in extreme detail and submitted every damned form demanded by FEMA and have now commenced works to recover and get back to being happily retired while they all pretend to be so busily considering my claim in their infamously failed Simple, Fast and Fair manner. Fortunately, this phase of works has provided plenty of funs between recovery sprints, apparently due to a genetic propensity to remain positive in all of life endeavors no matter how arduous or distasteful. Funs which easily distract from vile vibes bureaucrats emanate as a matter of course. Funs which have been unexpectedly fine, from re-equiping with the latest, greatest studio gear to seeking out a parcel to re-homstead on, finding it, and then designing and building its amenities, systems, structures and accroutraments to a finer degree of detail for a perfect balance of practicality and comfort.

FUNS Upon a beautiful new parcel in a region stradling hardiness zones 8a and 8b having a seven to eight month growing season, with plenty of rich, arable land and groundwater, as well as a burgeoning array of natural flora and fauna within its verdant biome, life goes on better than ever. Its features an aura, sooth and reassure with potential to enrich and endure.