An abbreviated synopsis of my life

Prolly gonna regret this but.... This was written awhile ago.

I graduated SUNY Potsdam with a BA in Geology, did a year of grad school with some teaching at Washington State University. Where I met a girl who derailed me (or should I say Let me derail myself?) from all my previous plans of spending my life happily ensconced in the rarified zones of academia, puttering around with rocks and going where few had deemed feasible to tread in the field of metamorphic petrology.

This twist of events led me to live in Idaho for a short while and eventually across the state to Bellevue, where I took a temp job for the large sum of $6/hour. The job turned into a permanent position and I hopped across Lake Washington to rent the downstairs of a house on 5th Avenue in the University District of Seattle. For anyone who says, Ohhh, Fifth Avenue, Dahhhling I say, Directly next to I-5 and about 16 lanes of traffic, meaning LOUD. But this place afforded me a garage in which to practice with my band and work on building furniture. (My apartment in Bellevue was furnished in contemporary pallet furniture made by myself out of the wood from pallets obtained from work.)
(That's me playing my guit-fiddle)

Life was going along swimmingly, or so it seemed to me. My mentor and good friend from college, Dr. Bob, had been in Seattle for the national meeting of the Geological Society of America and convinced me to return to grad school. I applied and was accepted to the University of New Hampshire for study under a person he assured me was good friend and brilliant metamorphic petrologist. I decided that it was time to bring my girlfriend back to the east coast and home for the holidays so that she and the people from the earlier portions of my life could meet.

Alas, into my sunny disposition came rather large cumulonimbus cloud named in the form of the nasty thing known as reality. My girlfriend was very firm in her opinions and beliefs. She also was outspoken. These are all very good traits to have.unless you are temperamental, neurotic, depressed and have a need to control aspects of your life about which you can have little to no control. In the incredibly short time that she spent among my friends and family, she managed to alienate every single one of them. And when my brother announced that he was getting married, her immediate response was, "Dont do it! You will regret it! The resounding consensus of all my friends, family and people who barely knew her or me was a great and deafening roar that can be approximated by the three letters, WTF????!!! (We goin to smack that boy upside the head with a 2x4 see if we cant drive some sense into im.)

Now, backtracking a little, we have arising on the horizon a new player, one of whom I had noticed little, but she had taken an interest in me. She actually noticed me at a birthday party I had for Susan. She was, at the time of our first meeting, with the person with whom she had shared the previous seven years, a person who was in the midway in transition from Bruce, the hyper-male with thick hair over 95% of his body, to Ara, the busty and still hairy (though less so) 44DD cup. Susan had met Ara one day on the bus and they hit it off right away. Go figure, two people on shaky mental foundations can go shopping for sweaters and go all girly, but I give out Susans phone number to a potential friend and musician and she just flips out, basically accusing me of wanting to find her broken body in some storm sewer. But I digress.

Well, to make a long story short, this other person, Mysty, had to beat me over the head and shout, Hey stupid! Look at me in order for me to finally wake to the fact that she was interested and was quite possibly more sane than Susan was. (It took re-application of the 2x4 mentioned above before things came clearly into focus.) Susan had the requisite screaming, throwing dishes, cutting the crotch out of all my pants, smashing the picture that I had drawn of her on top of my computer monitor, all the while screaming, Fucker. Get it. Fuck-HER, at the top of her ever so voluble lungs, parting from me. At least I escaped with my guitar, my computer and my sanity. There is much, much more to the story, but I am trying to be brief.

During the spring and summer that ensued, life was chaotic but pleasantly so, until I realized that I wouldnt be able to pay for graduate school, and I had not been offered assistance from UNH. I wrote to my future advisor and informed them that if they could not come up with some money, I could not attend. That was a hard letter to write. It was even harder not to hear back from them. (I later found out that she had tried to call me and let me know that she did have money for me, but like I said, it was chaotic. Another dream eats the big one. )

It wasnt all bad. Mysty and I were married in November, 1995 and we spent our cold, rainy and completely beautiful honeymoon on Whidbey Island, exploring the area around and about from our tent in Magnolia Campground. We both took up silver-smithing in addition to the work that we were already doing with lapidary and felt we could turn it into a livelihood. Towards this end we bought an old school bus and began to convert it to a space that could house living and working quarters. The intent was to take us on the road to the various craft fairs and festivals across the nation, thereby letting us make a living while still being able to go to the different regions of the country where the other important people in our lives were.

In the fall of 97 I left my job and returned to New York with two cats and as much as I could fit in a 1976 Chevy ton van in preparation for this grand plan. Unfortunately, Mysty got cold feet about the whole plan (there goes another one) and in March of 98 my two cats and I packed up my 76 Chevy ton van and headed back to Washington. Gee. That didnt work well at all.

I went to my old place of employment, but they werent hiring, so I went down to the temp agency and got a job (that day) at another electronics firm. (Oh, yeah. That $6/hr job in 93 had turned into a $12/hr assembly job by the time I left.) Just as I was going to get hired on full time at the second place, (I mean I was in the managers office filling out the paperwork), Mysty calls to tell me that my old employer , Baldor, is shutting down the plant and consolidating operations to Arkansas. I balk. I balk very hard.

Mysty is thrilled. It seems that Baldor is willing to pay a moving bonus of 5K to each of the employees that move to Arkansas (can somebody please shut off those dueling banjoes?) and the house prices are much lower in Arkansas (there is a reason they are much lower, like, no one wants to live there) and they will move all of our stuff at their expense (See?) and I have already lined up some houses to look at (I am not moving to Fort Smith, Arkansas! That is final. No way, no how, uhh-uhh All yall ken whuts a fixin ta happen? Especially after all this foreshadowing and Okie talk)

(This part spoken in my deep, sonerous and melodic voice over character) Welcome to lovely Greenwood, Arkansas, where you cant buy a beer to save your life, there are three churches for every person, with congregations that meet about every hour just to make sure that yall didnt fergit that 100% of life, the universe, what you had for breakfast and just why you pooped your pants when you ate that chilli is all a part of the greater designs of the creator, who, in a moment of extreme righteous goodness created every-thing 6000 and some- odd years ago because he is really just a swell dude. (I facetiously say, Yay.( :-P)

To be fair, we did have a nice house on 11 acres with two barns and a detached garage and it only cost $75K. The country was nice if you could get past the thousands of ticks dropping on you and the chiggers who you didnt know you had on you until they started to itch and tarantulas running around and the wide variety of poisonous critters running, crawling and slithering all around and the gas well that they put in 100 feet from your house but you get used to it. Or at least you manage to fool yourself into a sense of complacency. But I ramble.
(Here is Major Dog, our 16 year old yellow lab/golden retriever mix at our old house outside of Greenwood, AR. Mischief is coming to see what I am doing, also.)

Well, Mysty soon found out that Arkansas was all that I had told her it would be in terms of culture and mores, and she found out all on her own that even in America there are still some places that women are still thought of as being less than. So, in a short time she had been drummed out of her job in charge of the spare parts department and (after butting heads with the plant manager who wouldnt listen and who didnt really care about the way things were supposed to be done) placed in an entry level parts picker position in the interest of cross training. So she bailed. After a couple of years bouncing from temp job to temp job, started college to get a degree in order to make a better living (or at least not kill herself with physical labor).

Enter 2004. By this time, I have worked my way into the engineering department at Baldor as a PCB designer. They hired me back when they moved because they had no-one to build their larger drives, and from the manufacturing floor I moved into the Reliability Lab where I designed and built the larger test dynamometers. I worked my way from building test fixtures to designing printed circuit boards (PCBs) which allowed for me to get afull timeposition in the engineering department designing PCBs.

I had been attending college to get a degree in electrical engineering, but when work exceeded 70-90 hrs a week, that didnt leave much time to study. I was making good cash as salary-non-exempt, meaning that I got paid for my overtime, but I wasnt getting that much sleep.

In the same time frame that I was working long hours, Mysty was trying to expand her college career and get us out of Arkansas. This time, she would be the one moving first. So, in August , 2004 Mysty switched to Sage college in Albany, NY. By the End of November we were divorced. There is a lot that goes on between those two dates, but that is another conversation entirely.

So you may at this point be asking yourself how I came to be living in West Podunk, MO.

Well, Mysty, after having spent a semester at Sage College in Albany and a semester at the Cleveland Institute of Art, decided that she would have to go way to far in debt attending private colleges like those and came back from her adventures to finish her graphic design associates degree. I had put the house up for sale the previous fall (remember, we were both going to be moving to New York? Ha.) So we rented a place in Fort Smith and moved there so she could finish her degree in town, I could be closer to work, plus we could sell the house easier if it wasn't occupied.

When she did graduate, Spring 2006 (five yeasrs and two Associate degrees later), she was left with the quandary of how to pay off that mountain of debt when all she could seem to get were jobs that would pay $7.50/hr. at the highest. The ultimate answer came when we were visiting Seattle. Move. So in September of 2006 she moved to Seattle where she could get a better job and pay her student loans. Mystys moving left me alone, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, considering my options.

Remember I said that I didnt want to live in Fort Smith, Arkansas? That feeling still dominated me, compounded by the fact that I no longer owned a house or had anyone to share the incidentals and the consequetials with. By this time I was making $45k/Year at a pretty easy job. I liked what I did because it was like a big multi-layered puzzle I had to assemble with no finished picture to work from, just outlines and some fixed components and rules to work from. But I was flying a desk, the very thing that I said I never wanted to do. (That type of job, by the way, is the perfect job for me: take a cocktail napkin sketch or hand waving idea and turn it into something physical and real, something with substance.)

My ex-in-laws have a 40x30 metal, Quonset hut type of building that was supposed to be a woodshop. Now, Papa (Mystys father) had crammed this building full of crap in a fashion that I call Papa Stacking. Papa is always in a hurry. This comes with the essence of being Papa. As a consequence of his perpetual hurriedness, he will finish a project to a point where it is at least functional, then he will either just leave every thing lay where it is and start the next project or throw the stuff in a box, sack, plastic bag or whatever and say for either case, We dont have time to finish this right now, Ill pick it up/ get to it later. My friends, after living for almost 42 years on this planet, I can tell you that later never turns to now.

(This picture shows A mantle piece under construction in our shop.)

Papa had been collecting furniture grade lumber for a long time and had stacks and stacks of assorted hard and soft woods. A bunch of this was lumber that we had milled from trees that we had cut. Add the lumber to the woodshop, and then add the fact that Papa had been diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and needed help keeping up with the property and.

One day I came up with THE PLAN and here is what it was. I would move to MO, start an artisan furniture business, and contract with Baldor to do what I was doing for an hourly rate of $50 an hour. Since I would be self employed as an independent contractor they would not have to pay the taxes, health insurance and other costs of employment. I figured out, and showed them, how Baldor could save 40-60 thousand dollars a year, pay me at a rate that would allow for health insurance and other expenses, and still get the benefit of my experience and knowledge. The furniture business, after I cleaned out and organized the shop, would be a low overhead venture because we had all that rough cut lumber. I could then segue into the furniture business while still making money from Baldor to ease the transition. A winwin scenario. Perfect.

When I finally had every thing in line, all the contracts signed with Baldor and most of my stuff moved to MO, I thought that I was pretty much set. I gave my father a call because it was about time for him to go down to FL for the winter. After a conversation about how they were staying up in NY to do some things, the weather and how the family in NY was fairing, as I was about to hang up he told me what those mysterious things were. He had cancer and was taking hormone therapy for it.
Well, dip me in shit and slap me on a shingle: Wasnt someone going to call me? Maybe tell me that my dad had cancer? The irony of this whole thing is that I was going on about my plans and how I had finally gotten them all lined up and finalized. Luckily, he seemed to be responding well to the hormone treatments so I didnt have to scrap the whole shebang.

Now I have advanced further into my life by at least six or seven years... Guess it is time to hit the keyboard again.

(This picture was taken in Steamboat Springs and is contemporaneous with The Story. I just threw it in cause I like winter.)

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