Gregg who?

 

Who is this nut guy? 

 

The crucial question.  Why does anyone read anybody else’s blog except for the fact that they hope they might find something interesting in the quirky way the other person’s mind works?  But if you don’t know the person then why should you care?  The more you know about people, the more interesting they become…well, to be sure, there’s a tipping point, which is why they have divorce courts.  This autobiographical sketch may tell you more than you really want to know…but, hey, it isn’t mandatory reading, either.  The only thing I can guarantee you is that it is absolutely true and unbiased.

 

Half a dozen years ago, as Carol and I were getting close to actually moving to Costa Rica, I happened to reencounter an old girl friend from circa 1956…a girl I had actually known since we were neighbors in the 1940s, I didn’t find out until much later how much my mother wished we had gotten married.  Might have worked, too, but in 1956, the last time we dated, I was headed back to college after 3 years in the Marine Corps and she was still much too young, living with her family, of course, and her father was friendly but just the same I could see how he looked at me…only over my dead body, I translated.

 

Anyhow, I digress…which you will find is a common fault, although I always try to get back to the subject eventually.  This girl got in touch with me again around 1999, about the time we were finalizing things for our move to Costa Rica.  I told her where we planned to live, at the foot of the very active volcano, Arenal, in La Fortuna.

 

Well, Gregg, she said to my total shock, “you always did like to live on the edge.”

 

I don’t know when anyone has ever said anything to me more confounding.  I certainly never considered myself in that light.  Sure, I don’t wear both suspenders and a belt, but I do wear a belt.  And underwear.  I used to work for Standard Oil and wore a white shirt and tie every day.  In the Marine Corps I was, I think, very responsive to orders and the chain of command…well, within reason, at least, because I never got in any serious trouble…well, not that I couldn’t get out of.

 

Anyhow, I never, ever thought of myself as liking to live on the edge.  It was astounding to me that someone I had known so well, even if long ago, could say it so casually.  What did she know about me that I didn’t? 

 

My name is William Gregg Calkins, born 11/4/34 in Los Angeles in the French Hospital (erk!) a stone’s throw from City Hall, which in those days was easily visible and also the tallest building around them there parts.  My father worked in those days soldering radios together for a living, for which he was paid 7¢ each.  Almost by luck he heard of a job opening with the CAA (Civil Aeronautics Administration) about that time, later to be called the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority), and he made his life a huge success by applying for and getting it!  It was a great government job but it also involved many transfers.  I can remember living in both San Diego, where I had a bad experience with a surf board that I never forgot, and in Mt Shasta, where I fell into an icy stream I remember as much from family tradition as from real memory…we were standing on a narrow bridge when my mother bent over to fill the wash tub and her big behind pushed me off of the bridge and into the small but fast-moving creek.  My father had just dressed in his good clothes to go to work, so mother got rescue duty…which, after all, was only fair.  I remember being pushed off, but I don’t remember being cold or afraid.  We also lived briefly in Winslow and Kingman, Arizona, where my major accomplishment consisted of burning down a board fence.  I got caught because when the fire trucks arrived I was safely back at home, immersed in reading a comic book and showing no interest in fire trucks and burning fences, which my mother thought a bit strange.  She was always too suspicious for my taste.  I didn’t intend to burn down the fence, of course, things just sort of got out of hand…I’m sure you know how that happens.

 

Much of my young life we were stationed out east of Barstow, California, (not only east of Eden but even east of Daggett, which had been an important stop back in the days of the 20-mule teams hauling borax, immortalized by Ronald Reagan in “Death Valley Days”) back in the years when commercial airliners were not much more than low-flying aluminum tubes with fans attached to the wings, this was the period 1940-48, and airplanes still flew their courses from beacon to beacon, hoping for good weather so they could see them. 

 

The CAA station had residential quarters; two detached homes, one of which was ours because my dad was Chief by that time; one home attached to the radio station in the middle, with bachelor quarters on the other side for the unmarried operators.  The little complex was situated right adjacent to the two runways where they intersected…and I do mean close!...with the beacon just outside our little complex.  Our residential area was surrounded by a snake-fence but one would occasionally get inside, anyhow, and I remember some very sick dogs and an occasional cat recovering from a bite.

 

I spent WWII living there, for the most part pretty scared because whenever I overheard the grownups talking, quietly and unaware that I was listening, they weren’t all that certain we were going to win that war.  I also heard the news on the radio, which for a long time wasn’t good at all, and every movie in those days had a “News Of The Day” newsreel, often grim.  Our windows were painted black, covered with heavy curtains, and cars—when they were allowed to be driven at night—had their headlights half painted over.  It made an impression.

 

The CAA airfield had become involved in the war effort, of course.  Douglas Aircraft moved in and built hangars and constructed P-38s, which were test-flown prior to delivery.  The Mojave Desert boasts some very strong winds, up to hurricane speed at certain times of the year, and as a kid I watched lots of hairy take-offs, landings, and crashes, some fatal.  One memorable crash I actually watched a man die.  He landed an A-20 that was on fire, but although he got it down okay the fire burned out the hydraulic lines and the landing gear collapsed before he rolled all the way to a stop.  He got out of the cockpit but snagged on something, and couldn’t escape the fire. 

 

I saw others die in the crashes of P-38s and also one time a B-24 which barely missed the Boulder Dam-Los Angeles power lines which went by us 2 miles away.  The pilot passed over the airport and told the crew to bail out, some did but others did not, and while he was turning to make a crash landing approach he crashed within feet of the towers..  Live ammunition cooked off in that fire for some time, hampering rescue efforts, which were futile in any event.

 

I came close to being killed, myself, as part of the P-38 testing.  They used to fly target practice around the field, with a target towed by a B-26 at the end of a long cable.  The planes fired bullets with painted tips and after the exercise the B-26 would fly over the field and disconnect the target, which would then fall to the ground, so the scores could be recorded.  The disconnect mechanism weighed about 5-7 pounds and dangled at the end of the loose cable after the target had been dropped, and while the crew was reeling the cable in the device occasionally whipped around enough to break free from the cable.  Since they were flying over the station, occasionally these landed in our yard.  One day we children were assembling to go to school when we heard this eerie whistling sound, just like in the old war movies, followed by a THUNK as the metal chunk buried itself in the yard about five feet from our group of kids.  My dad, who had complained about this danger before, went ballistic over this event and they finally paid attention and made sure they didn’t fly over our complex any more.  It was close, though.

 

My grandmother lived with us during the war years and taught me to read at a very early age…family legend says I could read the funny papers by four.  My first school was a one-room school out in the boondocks, complete with outhouses, with the only other students a family of Mexican track-workers on the nearby AT&SF line, named Arajo.  I sincerely regret not learning Spanish from them, but it never occurred to me at the time because they were busy learning English.  It would have been so easy, too, darn it!  Anyhow, I was WAY ahead of those kids but fortunately the teacher—who later became a life-long friend of the family and we were there when she died of old age, my young Miss Brown—let me go at my own pace.  As a result I was never bored, read every book the school had, and was promoted to 3^rd grade the next year.  For decades afterwards I used to go back and report my life’s progress to Miss Brown!

 

Then we went to the ‘big’ school in Daggett itself (indoor plumbing!)…another one-room school holding 4^th through 8^th grades, which is where I graduated.  Once again I had an enlightened teacher who was happy to let me work ahead, again reading everything in sight.  I spend the 9^th grade in Barstow at a real school, where we were separated by grades for all classes, and I hated it.  I had to ride the school bus to school, and in those days that bus ride was—and may still be—the longest in the nation, beginning at Ludlow, California, although the ride for me was only 8 miles or so.

 

In 1948 we moved to southern Utah, to Bryce Canyon airport.  From there I remember watching our atomic bomb tests lighting up the skies some nights, listening to the rumbles…and my sister later died an untimely death of leukemia as a result.  Our government admitted responsibility, but our timing was wrong…we weren’t living there at quite the right times, they said.  Many of my sister’s and my own classmates also died untimely deaths from leukemia, however, over the years.  My brother and I, however, were unaffected.

 

My high school was a step up from the one-room school houses of my elementary days in California’s Mojave Desert.  Tropic was a big city of around 500 people, many of them immediate heirs from the pioneers who made the great trek west in the 1800s, some were polygamists and in general it was a subject best not brought up.  Our school building had 2 floors and several rooms.  Heat was from a pot-bellied wood stove, helped by coal (a local product), and air conditioning not only was not necessary but had not been invented yet, I don’t think.  Dad’s “radio range” was all vacuum tubes in those days, the transistor had not been invented, and it had to be ventilated with huge fans in order to prevent it from overheating.  None of the roads other than the main state highway were paved.

 

We lived in government housing located out in the middle of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, a nowhere stretch of sagebrush with no redeeming qualities except that it made for a good place to grade runways for an airport.  The spectacular Pink Cliffs in the distance gave the only hint that the rim of the plateau, only a couple of miles away, was the fabulous Bryce Canyon National Park.  It was a lonely life for a young high school boy my age, 13-16, and I spent virtually all of my spare time reading—anything would serve—and hunting rabbits with my .22 and my dog, Blackie.  I still have the .22 rifle.

 

I spent the 10^th through 12^th grades going to school in Tropic, Utah, riding a school bus another 8 miles every day, only this time it was from our home up on the “rim” of the canyon that a few miles to the south became Bryce Canyon National Park, elevation around 7200 feet, down to the relative warmth of “tropic” several thousand feet below.  In 1948 the snow was so heavy that the highway was closed and the guys living in the government quarters, this time located about a mile from the CAA station on the runway, had to snowshoe to work.  The shift change at midnight was too dangerous for anyone to do alone, since a sprained ankle might mean death from exposure, so the guys always went in pairs.  One night there was no one readily available, for whatever reason, so I got the duty.  It was just past 40-below-zero that night, I’ve never felt air like that.  You had to breathe through a muffler, and even at that take shallow breaths, deep ones actually hurt.  My dog thought it was a wonderful outing, though, and he raced hither and yon, sending up gigantic puffs of steam with apparently no discomfort.  I’ve always been amazed at that.

 

In 1951, at age 16, I went to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.  I had a scholarship for my tuition…as I recall, it was around $100, big money in those times.  My rural southern Utah school was backwards, to say the least, and I hadn’t really learned anything new since my 9^th grade in California, before we left.  About all I learned during those years was what I read at home, which was a lot.  I had little else to do, there were no kids at the station anywhere near my age.  My daily routine was to get off of the school bus, meet my eagerly-waiting dog, grab my .22 rifle, and take off on our rabbit-hunting routine, weather permitting.  We’d hunt until dark.  The object was not really killing rabbits, although they were a pest the farmers detested, but the chase.  My dog loved chasing rabbits and he was very fast.  We had a favorite hunting spot, a small knoll just behind the CAA station, and I’d go up on the side of it a little ways so I could look out over the valley floor and spot the rabbits he couldn’t see sneaking away through the bushes.  My dog ranged the valley floor, watching me for instructions and going wherever I pointed.  My goal was to make the longest-possible successful shot…without hitting Blackie in the process.  Since I was firing .22 long rifles when I was flush, .22 regular when funds were tighter, and .22 shorts when I was really broke, some of the long shots were really a challenge.  But close counted for me, and I became a pretty good shot as a result.  During the appropriate season we hunted deer, these for the table, but that was different.  I killed a couple of deer, but the last one swore me off of hunting for the rest of my life.  I looked her in the eyes and watched her die and said I didn’t need to do that any more.  Fish were my limit, after that, although I did kill one duck one time.  One of the older guys at the CAA station took me duck hunting with him (it wasn’t safe to be out alone in that climate) and loaned me his .410 to use.  I got off one shot, got our only duck, which he hadn’t even seen and refused to believe until I showed him where it had fallen, so I figured why mess up that record by ever going again?  Anyhow, after it got too dark to hunt (in the winter that wasn’t long after the bus dropped me off) I’d go home and read.  No tv in those days, of course.

 

So I was struggling academically when I got to college, as you might imagine.  Especially in English…they put me in what we called “bonehead English” that first quarter and I learned enough to pass the class and escape but I still don’t know jack-shit about the technicalities of my own language, which has not helped when I tried to learn foreign languages.  I attempted French a couple of times, was told I had a passably-good accent, but couldn’t figure out the equivalent English parts of speech to translate them into French, which I still don’t know.  I checked with Carol the other day, wanting to verify my recollection that a ‘complete sentence’ required a subject, object, and predicate, and she looked at me pityingly. 

 

My summer job was fighting forest fires.  Mostly these involved brush fires in the hills surrounding Salt Lake City, but occasionally a fairly good-sized fire in really big trees came along.  As is the case with all fire crews, a lot of time is spend around the fire station waiting for the fire phone to ring.  Our Forest Service boss kept us busy 6 days a week building the trail signs you see everywhere, wooden outhouses for the campgrounds, picnic tables, you name it.  I learned what woodworking stills I have from those times…in high school I nearly flunked our mandatory shop class, escaping only because the practice time for the school operetta conflicted and I had a good-sized role in that…it was politically incorrect to flunk me for incompetence, as a result, but I think I did get a D, just the same.  Mr. Barker didn’t particularly like me, anyhow, for some reason.

 

When in college I found my first real girlfriend, that person being defined in those quaint old days as the special girl who would allow only you to touch her in forbidden places.  I went berserk over the idea and soon found myself ready to flunk out of college for not paying attention to anything else but, well, you know.

 

Thus in 1953 I joined the Marine Corps due to a very complicated set of personal responsibilities and problems, mainly my desire to save the world for civilization…or, as some uncharitably thought, my own ass.  I had fallen in love, or at least in heat, and I no longer attended college classes with anything like the frequency they expected.  I was flunking out, and the Korean draft awaited me when I did.  And oh how we worried about being drafted!

 

So I showed them: I joined the Marine Corps before the draft notice could arrive.

 

Actually, I wasn’t as dumb as that.  No, really.  Come on, now, no giggling.  No, my Dad was an old Navy man who ran away from his Illinois farm before he was quite old enough to join legally and subsequently wound up down here in Nicaragua helping the nationals attempt to capture Pancho Villa.  He later tried to put in for a service medal for his time here and was told that the entire affair had taken place off of the books…officially it never happened.  And you think times have changed, don’t you.  He was on the USS Texas, a ship that was never here officially at that time.

 

So I decided to join the Navy.  With typical foresight, I had no idea how to do this.  But the Navy Building was in downtown Salt Lake city, in those days a 4-story skyscraper the lower floor of which was the post office, so that’s where I went.  I was, uh, well, okay, somewhat nervous.  So I entered the office very casually, super cool, I thought, braced the young swab-jockey at the desk, immaculate in his white uniform, and when he asked what I needed I told him I wanted a job.  He looked at me in bewilderment…we don’t HIRE people here, he said.  No, I explained pityingly, I want to enlist.  Oh.  Oh…those offices are up at Ft Douglas on the University of Utah campus.  Where I just came from.  Duh.

 

So back I went, same routine, only this time the perfectly turned-out uniformed clerk finally figured out what ‘wanting a job’ meant, although once again it had to be explained to him.  Well, he said, I’ll put you on the waiting list…six months.

 

Six months?  I was going to be dead in less than six days, because if I did not withdraw “passing” from my classes by Friday, the last day one could do that, they were going to flunk me out on Monday.  I figured the chances of my mother killing me, when she found out, were greater than those of the North Koreans doing it.  My mother was not a person you wanted to cross.

 

I left the Navy office in deep dismay.  As I staggered down the steps of the Quonset hut, considering suicide methods and techniques, I looked across at the neighboring hut…the Marine Corps recruiting station.  Gosh and gee whiz heck Billy Bob, I said, the new thought brightening my mental horizons, I always wanted to be a Marine, anyhow. 

 

So I walked up those steps and into the office.  There I encountered a Marine in dusty dungarees, down on his hands and knees underneath his desk, fighting with his typewriter stand.  He was not in a good humor.  “Yeah,” he said, popping his head up, “what the HELL do YOU want?” 

 

Now I’d been around the block by this time, if perhaps not yet to a hog-calling contest and two county fairs but still older and wiser, so I decided to test him.  “I want a job”, I said.

 

“Sit your ass down,” he told me, “I’ll be with you as soon as I can make this f---ing thing work.”  So I sat.  Finally he emerged.  “So,” he said, you want to join the Marine Corps.”  Uh huh, I told him, but by now I’d also learned the potential problem I faced.  I want to leave RIGHT AWAY, I told him, no more of this waiting 6 months stuff.

 

He looked at the clock on the wall.  It was about ten a.m.  He said there was a train at 1430 hours and I could be on that.  Gulp. 

 

I hadn’t even told my folks about what I was considering.  Hell, before that morning’s test results I hadn’t even considered it, myself.  As far as they knew I would be getting a good report card for the spring quarter, not flunking out.  I thought that maybe they deserved at least some explanation, although I dreaded going home to give it.   I signed up, though, on the spot.  Our only bone of contention was whether I should sign for 3, 4, or 6 years.  The draft was for 2, so I figured 3 would be enough.  I have to tell you, that sucker was really persuasive and I almost, almost went for 6.  At the very last moment I held out and said if I liked it that much I could always ship over, couldn’t I?  Well, he had to surrender that one, but he came damn close to winning.  And if I had signed up for 6 the first time then I know I would have stayed in for at least 20, maybe 30, maybe even 40.  On what little things do life’s decisions hinge.

 

My Dad was quite surprised when I told them, although controlled, but my poor Mother really took it badly.  The war was still raging and Marines were dying, after all.  In the end, though, I left two days later.  And withdrew ‘passing’ from the University before I did!

 

Well, anyhow, I spent most of 3 years at Camp Pendleton as the chief clerk of Headquarters Battalion, keeping the world safe from North Korea.  Then I went back to college in Salt Lake City.

 

I got out of the Marine Corps a couple of months early and returned to college to make up the quarter I had missed.  I was a frat man (Sigma Pi) and decided I had lost three years of life to the military service so I should get married right away and have children.  Life in a fraternity is very romantic, and marriage is one of their major subjects, with an apparent goal to be suitably married by graduation, ready to embark on life’s career.  My wife, a wonderful girl, was a legacy Delta Gamma and my father-in-law was a Sigma Pi in synch with the whole thing, so we started playing our version of “It’s A Wonderful Life” while I finished my college career.  I went on for an MS in Geophysics while she graduated and started teaching school to support us after my GI Bill ran out…the classic story of young married college life.

 

Except she wanted children before I graduated and got a job, and I thought that was irresponsible, so, in another classic Hollywood ending we divorced and she married my best friend, a Catholic who gave her two children barely within the biological speed limit, at which point I moved on to Standard Oil in La Habra, California, and began my geophysical career.

 

In one of life’s truest ironies, she had been a Mormon girl who decided her church was too confining and tried to drop out.  Well, I’m very fond of the Mormons, personally, but I have to tell you that one of the things they don’t really allow is dropping out, so the missionaries used to harass us regularly in an effort to reconvert her plus add me.

 

My best buddy was a Catholic from New York City, a very bright and well-educated guy who always impressed me with what he knew and he attributed it all to the “good nuns” he said beat it into them.  You can see what is coming, can’t you?  In order for them to marry in the church, she couldn’t be divorced.  In order for that to work out, I had to agree to tell the bishop or pontiff or whoever it was who called me that no, we had gotten married under a misapprehension or misunderstanding or misalliance or something and it turned out that we had never really had a meeting of minds, only of flesh, therefore we never really were married, not in the Catholic sense, and so it was annulled.  I had no problem with this, the guy had been my best buddy for years and I did love my wife even if apparently not enough to make her happy, so what the hell.  The church guy phoned me, I gave the right answers, our marriage was annulled.  She moved to New York, they got married in the Catholic Church and had two kids, bang bang.

 

The last I heard of her they had divorced (!) and she had returned to Utah.  I cannot tell you how unhappy this news made me, it made things all seem so futile.  We all seemed to lose, each and every one of us, there were no winners.

 

Anyhow, I graduated with an MS in geophysics and went to work for Standard Oil in La Habra, California.  I played a significant role in the discovery of an oil field (actually I discovered it, but my best friend to this day was a geologist working with me who thinks he helped, so what am I going to do?) and also spent time working in Seattle, offshore Oregon, Bakersfield, San Francisco, Houston, and New Orleans.

 

Eleven years later, after another marriage in which I acquired two boys (to make up for the lost years, once again) and we subsequently produced a boy and girl of my own, we had bounced between all of the above.  My final permanent transfer to New Orleans was too much to bear…I didn’t want to live there, period.

 

But the technical part of the geophysical business, in those days, was centered between Houston and New Orleans…if I didn’t quit, or even if I did and went to work for another oil company, sooner or later I’d wind up in the Gulf.  So I quit the business.  If Houston is the armpit of the United States, then New Orleans is the…   New Orleans has only one saving grace, it’s called the French Quarter.  Houston thinks The Galleria is the equivalent.  They’re wrong.  The French Quarter is a great place and I could easily live there as a starving alcoholic artist, given the opportunity.  People didn’t even leave their French Quarter bar stools during Hurricane Katrina.

 

I quit the oil business and went into real estate in order to bring up my kids in Walnut Creek, but the final result turned out to be yet another divorce, after which the tides of life then moved me to the California foothills to continue my real estate career in Jackson, California. 

 

Along the way I got married and divorced again, long stories involved except that I was always the jerk in the play, no doubt about that part, eventually things came up with Carol and Costa Rica and so I took my Sociable Security at 62 and retired here as soon after as I could get the business and the house handled.  We drove out of Jackson forever on February 29^th, an auspicious day, of the first year of the new millennium, 2000…unless you are one of those kooks who counts differently.

 

Not long after that happened my mother died.  I went back to California to settle family affairs and wound up bringing my father back to Costa Rica to live with us.  He died a month or so ago in the middle of a construction project on our house which he was financing.  Well, no, we’re further along than in the middle, it’s livable if not complete.  I miss him terribly and everything I look at reminds me that I failed to finish the job in time for him to enjoy it.  It is a bitter pill.

 

All of those happenings, mixed together, have made me who I am.

 

I’m 71 years old, in pretty decent physical shape, not too grossly overweight at a current 185 and 5’10”.

 

I spent nearly 3 years in the Marine Corps, between ages 18-21, and they probably did more to make me who I am than anything else has.  I’m a grunt Marine, expert rifleman 3 years running, ended as a sergeant E4 after less than three years while running Headquarters Battalion MCB Camp Pendleton almost all of my Marine Corps career…it was the only job I ever had in the Marine Corps.  I was an office pogue but I’ve dug my foxholes and climbed my hills, just the same.  And I can shoot very well.

 

I have a graduate degree in geophysics and 8 years of college, but I’ve spent a lot of years in the trenches getting my face dirty.  I’ve fought brush fires and forest fires, both as a grunt and also in charge, astonishingly enough in the latter case.

 

My grandmother used to tell me that after we died and went to heaven that all of our questions would be answered.  Great, because I sure want to know how that damn lieutenant, or whatever he was, picked me out of the middle of the ranks and told me to take the platoon up the hill and put out the fire.  How did he know that I was probably the only guy there with the experience to know how to do it?  That will be my first question at the pearly gates.

 

I’ve been the president and corporate broker for a couple of corporations, both of them my own together with a different ‘partner’ in either case, after working the requisite two years for a couple of other real estate companies, both as a rookie salesman and later as an office manager.  I’ve been the worst salesman in the office and also salesman of the month.  I’ve been a fairly-good office manager and also a near-disaster as one.  Okay, maybe closer than near.

 

I’ve spent a fair amount of my life as some kind of boss or another, but I have also personally done just about every one of the distasteful or dangerous jobs anyone has ever been asked to do along the way.  I know what the idiot-end of a shovel feels like as well as the fact that the worst tool ever devised for a human being was the post-hole digger.

 

I’m not bragging, it’s just who I am.  I ain’t no virgin.  Dizzy Dean, one of my heroes, says it ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.  I say it ain’t braggin’ if it’s been done to you, either, and you survived.  One of life’s greatest sensations is getting out of Marine Corps boot camp and being awarded your first stripe.  We all looked at one another in disbelief…you mean we actually made it?

 

Between us, Carol and I have had six children, now all grown with families of their own.  She has a boy by one husband, a girl by another.  When I married the second time I acquired two young boys, 4 and 2 at the time.  The older of them was killed in a motorcycle accident just before he graduated from high school, a real tragedy.  John was a super boy, a special kid, a credit to us all.  With their mother, though, I fathered a boy and girl of my own, biologically-speaking.

 

Now, at age 72, Carol and I have adopted a 2-year-old Costa Rican boy, who turned 3 last April.  Yes, I know…our Costa Rican name is “Los Gringos Locos”.

 

If you had told me, when I was 16, that I would act as father to five children, only two of whom were actually mine by birth, I would have told you that you were loco, too.

 

All of this is by way of explanation.  Whenever you are reading some opinion of mine on whatever subject, wondering who the hell this idiot is and how he got that way, maybe this will help.

 

I’m not sure, either.