Obit

Opened the paper today to find that a childhood playmate died.   We didn't play exactly;  every time we met we fought, and I, a confirmed sissy, mostly kept away from him.  

I remember one time I didn't want to play but stayed in the car, and when he was hitting at me playfully through the window I stuck out a fist and caught him on the side of the head and brought tears.   Later in his yard he caught me on the side of the jaw with a roundhouse kick and when he saw how hard he had hit me, invited me to go to the store on the corner with him for candy.  (Those days many Lubbock neighborhoods had houses converted to a little store in the front room, where kids could buy candy and cold drinks and ice cream; that was before the days of convenience stores.)  On the way to the store I started to black out and had to put my head between my legs.  

He was always trying out on me moves that he saw on TV wrestling, or at Lubbock's Fairpark Colliseum.   I remember getting into a hold he learned by watching the Sheik.  He sat astride my back as I lay in the dirt, put his hands on my forehead and pulled hard.

One triumph I had was when he threw a long pole about 3" thick and 8 ft.long at me while I cowered behind a car.   The pole struck the car roof and bounced up and I accidently caught it, causing him to run.  There was usually a wrecked car in their yard, because he had several brothers and they were always wrecking their cars.

One of the last times I saw him he came to my house and tried to string a bow the wrong way and split the wood.  So it went.  I never called him a friend, did I?   But neither do I think of him as an enemy, now. 

I think maybe the first time I met him was when I was taken to a revival meeting at an outdoor place south of 34th on Ave H.  His mother was quite religious.  I don't remember any preaching but do remember running around with other kids there.   That was about the only time I ever went to such a thing.

He was one of a large family living in a tar paper clad house in Arnett-Benson, that lived hard, loved promiscuously and died early.   Two brothers and one sister predeceased him.   They were always getting arrested for something.  Their mom must have kept the numbers of bailbondsmen by the phone. 

For a brief time we went to school together, when he had been kicked out of another school for saying something to a teacher.   Then I heard he had a pregnant girlfriend;  he would have been 16 or 17 then.

Curious, I googled his name today.   He died as an inmate in an area prison medical facility, serving out a 4-year sentence for DWI.  I saw he had been involved in a marijuana bust back about the same time as the DWI.  

He was only 59.   

I'm sure there was much more to him and to his life, but this is all I know.  If he were writing my obit, he'd say that I was a coward, a bore, who never had any fun and didn't know how to.   He would have been right.

I think on him with a combination of sympathy and envy.  He may not have had a happy life or a long one, but by golly he lived--or so it seems to me as I wear callouses on my rear end and strain my eyes on print and blog away as a substitute for talking to friends.

Mispronouncement, or Ressurection?

Well, well.   The reports of Talk Lubbock's death were mistaken.   http://www.talklubbock.com/index.php?sid=0c6b0ff7418ef144d155fe1c8f17590f  Either that or it underwent resurrection. 

That is one of my greatest fears, to be mistakenly pronounced dead.  

My worst nightmare is to be standing on a subway or train platform and to get pushed off with the train coming on.   (There are those who get their jollies that way, you know?   Stand behind someone on a crowded platform and give a little nudge at just the right time.)     Remember that TV episode where a man was trapped between train and platform, his lower body crushed to jelly, so he stays there conscious and saying his goodbyes before the train is moved and he bleeds out.   Awful!

Second worst is to be pronounced dead and wake up in a coffin, trying to breathe.    Which is not likely to happen these days, given our curious funerary practices.
  
If the pronouncement of death is wrong, draining the blood and injecting embalming fluids will do you in.   Death by embalming.  

(I have this vision of an undertaker finding to his dismay that he has a live client on the table.  A live client means the undertaker is out of a job and down a fee with respect to this particular client, y'know?  Economic considerations rule, and so the undertaker reaches for a hammer kept under the table for that very purpose, and conks the undeceased on the head and proceeds with his work, whistling.   Wonder how many times that occurs.)

New Discussion Forum part 2

Been posting some over at that new forum, Views n News or whatever it is.    I want it to be a success and to participate but don't want it to overwhelm it.   So I'm gonna keep clear and not frighten new members away.   At Talk Lubbock there were enough members from the outset to get the ball rolling.   Still, it took close to three years to achieve critical mass.  Most "members" were spammers.  Genuine members were far fewer and those actively posting fewer still.

Critical mass means enough members, comments, and views to get the site to snowball.   

You can recognize a dead discussion forum when all the posts are old. 

The forum I started, http://lbkactives.forummotion.com/, "West Texas Active Adults" has never gotten rolling as far as members go.  I hoped it would replace a fairly active site called the "Caprock Multi-Sport Forum" that got taken down along with West Texas Cycling.    A couple of those guys came over, but that's all.   Most cyclists and athletes are too busy doing stuff to worry much about talking about it.

Still, I don't consider "West Texas Active Adults" a failure because it does provide useful information to those looking for it.   For example, the thread on cycling links has over 1300 views.  The information about ride routes in Lubbock is likewise useful.   

I try to keep active links there, so my forum acts as a gateway to other Lubbock/West Texas sites pertaining to cycling, running, climbing, caving, etc.  

That site needs little maintenance so far.  Only one spammer discovered it.  So it's tempting to just neglect it.   But I do drop by once in a while to check for spam and broken links.

If I'd thought about it, I'd have called it something else.   "West Texas Active Adults"  sounds like a swingers website.  It isn't; just about G-rated types of exercise like walking,  running, cycling and weights.

Think I'll go back and start keeping a weblog of my exercise activity there. :)

New Talk Forum in Lubbock

I hear there's a new forum in town at http://lubbockvoices.proboards.com/index.cgi  .   Haven't signed up yet, but may do so.

Flying Saucer Departure

Remember that movie where benevolent aliens come to earth?  To find that humans are ,,, human:   at best suspicious, disagreeable, back-biting, sly; at worse, murderous and cruel;    that you feed humans at the risk of losing a finger, a hand, or the whole arm.   Finally, the aliens sigh at human foolishness, pack up their spaceship, and go back to where ever they came from.

From the time Talk Lubbock came into being, I suspected that it was run by aliens.   I looked at the sky last night and saw no mysterious lights or flying saucers, but what occurred bore the marks of alien visitation, here, then gone.

The Demise of Talk Lubbock

For three years most of my idle time on the internet has been used in a local forum called "Talk Lubbock,"   posting under the names Ironfoot McGurk and Inmate #24602.   It's been fun, both stimulating and irritating, by turns  and often at the same time.

To my regret, it looks like that forum is being discontinued.   It is also to my regret that I may have had a hand in precipitating the decision to discontinue it.

Free speech is that way, not really free.   Each gruff or aggressive word or conflict is remembered, at some level, and eventually comes back to cloud any continuing relationship.   Like others, I have not been shy about speaking my mind.   I've hurt and been hurt, but it may be that my skin is thicker than most.   To those I have offended unfairly, I apologize.

The folks who were kind enough to provide the forum for us and who did the work and bore the expense  growing the forum, weeding out spam and policing TOS violators, have on this day deleted their accounts and posts and gone home.   Sad.

My thanks to them for sticking with it while it lasted.   You did good, fellas.   I never meant to say that you didn't. 

The shame in the way it ended is that a certain ill-mannered blogger on a vendetta can claim a hand in ending it.    

Catch you on the flip.