Back to My Future: The Life and Times at Purdue University

Chapter 1: The Song and the Women Remain the Same
I might be the first guy ever to attend Purdue as a student in four different decades. I took a course at sixteen in Basic programming in 1988. Then, the campus held about 25,000 students, mostly dudes here for engineering a better mouse trap or the optimal keg flow mechanism for Fridays, Saturdays, and for final exams. I can remember my first roommate, Alfredo Portales, a pre-engineering student from Texas. We became fast friends, hung out a lot, played euchre, and tentatively hit on the 17 year-old girls that were nerdy enough (then) to attend a Purdue summer camp not specifically designed for cheerleaders as that was what we (or I) noticed everyday going by the Co-Rec to our 'basic' class.

Decade Two. After high school mercifully came to a close, I came back to the only place I felt at home in Indiana. I traveled back to Purdue painfully virginal, and with a crush still on a high school cheerleader, who I do not blame for not giving me the time of day, or millennium. She, even then, deserved a better engineering egghead. As rejection brought out the worst in me, college women (loosely 18 -22 years of age) did not bring about better at-bats. A tired baseball analogy: if you can’t hit the slider in the minors, then major league pitchers will throw you a steady diet of the same. Can you say, “caught looking,” yep, I thought you could, as my ass caught more splinters than Pinhead has acupuncture marks. I was ‘riding pine’ all right.

You probably get the feeling this is all there is to talk about: women. There were things called lectures I failed to attend on a better than 50% rate. I found drinking was right up the alley of a Scots-Irish-Cherokee family tree of lushes led by lead lush Sam Houston of Texas fame. The Co-Rec was a place to take on the best b-ballers, even a few name Robinson, Miller, Martin, Waddell, Painter, or Ms. Basketball Jennifer Jacoby, or ‘JJ’, when I played her frequently in the summer, or took her buzzed, two-in-the-morn order at Taco Bell for a spell. The ‘Brick Dick’ fell while I attended in the 1990s, as the ‘Clock Tower’ came to be an alternative way to find your way home while drunk – and suddenly too dumb to walk back to some shitty apartment, or jail cell-sized dorm room with a homemade loft made in a weekend move-in on a sticky August night. And a roommate with a nagging, big-boobed existentialist girlfriend, or just a bad case of beating himself blind. Yep, those are good times.

Decade Three. I took a class in 2000 in Indianapolis on Constitutional Law at IUPUI. “Ooh-wee-Poo-wee,” sounds like a babies’ sound upon letting you know they made caca or pooed themselves. This time I didn’t crap the course, getting the highest grade in the class, and a recommendation to attend law school. (From a lawyer!!! So you know that counts – ha!) I sat for the LSAT – got a 157 which sounds good until it is known it is out of 180, and you get 120 for signing your name. A woman would again trip me up (Bill Clinton syndrome, without any of the successful West Wing wet cigars) – same name as the cheerleader a decade before! – but then again, an entirely different scenario of life and loveless loquaciousness. I was still a rebel without a Rough Rider…and a head seriously clouded with alcohol, daddy issues, and all the crap I didn’t ooze out accordingly while still closer to diapers than adulthood.

Decade four. By now, you’d think going back to school was beyond the scope of this life’s course. Prerequisites and post-grads taken, interviews and epic fails done, and launchings and leavings a worn out path. In point of fact, this is the only time I am in it for the education. I actually read more economics now than industrial engineering ever. Now, I left once again for college with an unrequited love in the rear view. Different name (well…their middle names all happen to be Marie) and a penchant for ie(s) at the end of their first, like Industrial Engineering, IE. This time I make no declaration of love, or interest – she too happened to be a college cheerleader, is an elementary education teacher, and now, has had two DUIs, and is not even 25, yet. You might say why are you even interested? Or what did you do really different? What are you looking at, or for?

I am interested because when she isn’t trading in guys like a day trader on the NASDAQ, or doing three jobs (bar wench, teacher, cheer coaching) and drinking to boot, she is actually a really sharp egg. She is ‘damaged’ (flawed as we all are) – her brother told me she got pregnant a few years back, aborted the fetus (argue to yourself), and got a tattoo on her spine ‘TRUST’ – but all in a really psychologically, understandable way. (Ok...)

I can relate – but she puts up a WWI Western front I have yet to maneuver around. Plus, I am closer to 40 than she is 30, and financial security and coolness is likely her sort criterion for all men. Spend money on her, impress her flaky, fake-in-more-ways-than-one gal pals, and things happen, I suppose. But nothing that lasts. Thus, this soon-to-be college-poor guy that isn’t pulling down six figures will not get into that ballpark. I just get a ticket to watch BP, and see some flaws in the swings. (All those minor league cuts…now help.)

While I can write about my reality, talking is not so easy – when you actually are unable to cut through your crap and her crap, in unison. And “people always assume,” or presume you have no understanding of how you got from “there to here.” Even I presume with her...and for that, a hypocrite.

Doing different was easy: I just did not tell her I cared directly, nor did I make any overt play. She knows full well - but I stopped short. With the line of metro-sexual, quasi-biker troubadours playing a (VD) beat to her bedroom or bar door, I’d never get in that line anyways. I felt like the only thing I could do was give her a drinking lecture (yes, I do see the inside of bars – self-control and self-knowledge corrects that Kryptonic issue), but how would that help? She ain’t gonna listen – can’t name an alcoholic, or a woman, that has listen to any advice given by me in all of my years, sober or not. And goes backward to, “people always assume…”

So while I do actually have consideration (and attraction) for her, once again, I am not the man she desires presently, nor am I in the position to become that while she either: wrecks forward; or straightens out for someone much better than I. (The latter I hope does happen.) Instead, I just wished her good luck. She is indeed out of my league....
 
Decade Four and Beyond. The answer is two. Move on to my objective – create a ‘good bank’ of grades for admission to further education – and – creatively express myself in the mode you see here. There is no real point in pursuit of the ‘P word.’ Success has never followed; and I just get older, barely wiser, and generally poorer, due to inflation.

I have a ton of goals down to get at – and the female companionship was listed on that bucket list. But like all lists, you work on that which provides a window of opportunity quickest first. Short to long-term in sorting out a life – the day by day work put in. A 1,000 words a day, if possible. A friend a day, if God willing.

Looking at the future, I am trying for the idea of knowledge of a lot of things so I can always write about something. Maybe, make a lasting legacy. At least attempt that course. Like a hero, Ben Franklin, he did not get stuck on what he was doing for too long. He had probably 30 different titles and jobs in his life. And did about five or six, really, really well.

So while the song of women remained the same, this juke box hero needs a new joint to pump out to the clubs. 

Stephen Speaks: Out of My League.

Or: Jump Jump Dance Dance – 2.0.

Working Paper: The Real Color of Money

If vulgarity and vice are not your cup of tea, then reading on will not be a fruitful exercise. But if you drawn like a moth to the flame - time to burn!

At the end of the day, when all the work and play is done, you’ve either given a handjob or sucked someone off to a better end (you hope) to improve the next day of sucking and jerking the purple-headed yogurt slinger. Most do this act without a direction or decision to the party involved. You tell the boss, “yeah, I’m on it,” thus jerking him off. The creditor that calls – you give them the handy handjob excuse: “the checks in the mail.” Or you give a current boyfriend a hummer to keep him less suspicious of your backdoor dalliance with that rich old fart that you’ll give handjobs to, for now, in the dreams of the money honey flow. It goes around like this, males and females alike, taken to the task of pulling on someone’s frank in the fiction or perceived escape hatch that we don’t wind up like Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes quipped: “In the long run, we are all dead.”

Leaders of the world give blows to their fellow leaders. POTUS has called up Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe, or maybe Charles Taylor in some woe-is-always-me African nation in crisis, to say, “get it together or get the hell out.” But really, the Prez was just jacking them around or paying “international lip service” – because these dictatorial dudes have all existed for thirty years plus, and will suck on the large financial cock of aid long after the current POTUS leaves for a cushy retirement financed by their own handjob-providing American constituents. (Even as this handjob went seriously awry in the African Spring of 2011. Hey, the Arabs got tired of the blue balls...)

Financial power sucks and jerks Jimmy well too. When ponzi and handjob master Bernie Madoff supposedly sucked the New Yorks Mets owner Fred Wilpon dry of his wealth, the owner dutifully went to the local congressman, or in this case, a former NY governor, tugged on their Johnsons until more liquidity flowed than a thousand pornstars in a congressional circle jerk. Thus, the ‘cock’ ring was complete: a bunch of horny guys participating in a reminiscing frat house elephant walk with money, pussy, and drugs as the usual spank bank enablers. Yet, a lawyer (need I say more?) stepped in to add more sperm to this dish: a trustee for the victims of the ponzi scheme wants Wilpon to pony up some of his returns (about $700 million into the load cycle of this $60 billion plus spermicidal drama.)

The key for these last two groups: they get to pick the size of the pecker and load they will likely handle. It started early on – as general ass kissing – then evolved into well-directed schmoozing, reached mastery as professional lobbying (jerking loads of pertinent knowledge and bullshit and money onto someone-thinks-he’s-important desk or really is the HNIC), then culminated as massaging multiple peckers for multiple ends to get multiple massive loads. It’s a skill to master quickly – as it takes on an importance to the way the Earth revolves. Not enough jerking off going on – the Earth will stop.

Chaos will result.

It happened with Lehman Brothers. One leveraged-to-the-hilt bank failure caused money to freeze up like a frigid old bitty on an Antarctic sperm whaling trip without a dildo to be found for a thousand fucking miles. Why? The merry-go-round of credit cumshots (bankers throwing loads of money around the globe) stopped – no one wanted to pull on Jimmy anymore – afraid they’d be stuck with a steamy load all over their financially fucked faces.

Happen too in the 1920s. Those pesky war reparations were an international jerk off. Germans paid in Papiermarks to England and France. The Hundred Years’ War participants paid American bankers (in real gold, a major cumshot) who then, in jerking off unison, rolled this into greenback paper to shift back to our German cousins. But that ended (someone got wise to the handjob nature of it) – hyperinflation, Reichsmark issued as the new currency in 1924, and a guy name Hitler rose up to jerk three billion or so people off for a decade plus – and John Maynard Keynes was too right about all of it. (As he wrote presciently about the dangers after quitting the Treaty of Versailles conference. The Economic Consequence of the Peace (1919))

Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations dude, spoke of the “invisible hand” of the market. Wasn’t he just talking about the “invisible handjob?” One – that left to its own devices – will make us all wealthier, happier, and free?

But this all came from the mind of a guy that was ugly as original sin, perpetually buried in books, and made his last lot in life working for the Scottish government in customs – a jerkoff post if ever there was. No, our friend Adam, going back to the bible here, was just as oddly enchanted and slavishly hopeless with women as the next dude, and just never got off enough to make any offspring that we know of. Undoubtedly, Adam split his seed; but to no avail.

While the commoner jerkmaster too can blow hard to the four corners of the Earth, hoping to change his behavior or his stars, he’s sowing the proverbial seeds of his own kind and kin. With the expressed hope that by blowing someone right, he might too wind

up with more stuff to leverage and get more and better opportunities to handjob the right people for the right price, as his lot will surely increase many fold.

He or she will find religion – praise Jesus or Mohamed or Buddha – and keep failing at controlling his or her urges, thus violating his/her own belief system. We do it because someone else wants us to suck them off – give a favor – or jerk them – give them a lie to satiate their human needs for knowing the universe actually supports their little narcissistic plans. Then too we divide along some ideological lines to make this into another game of: “Jerkoff, I win – Jerkoff, you lose.”

Conservatives, for example, adore Mr. Smith – the invisible hand or the “creative destruction” principle – is likened to a sexual experience to them. And what is jerking off or blowing a guy off but creative destruction? (The split seed analogy.)

Not to be outdone, liberal/Commie Keynes likened the economic forces to the “animal spirits” being unleashed. The Great Depression was the abject taming of those spirits. Reminds me of a Bloodhound Gang song, The Bad Touch: “So lets do it like they do on the Discovery channel…”

Another misogynist (note: Keynes detested teaching women, yet engaged in homosexual relationships), Napoleon Hill noticed men of great power must garner such drive from having an intense, ever present, and urgent sexual appetite. The necessity to throw ones dick around to be handled regularly by women, by hook or by crook, is apart of the instincts to success, Mr. Hill supports in his classic tome: Think and Grow Rich (pg 184.)

And Wall Street is full of these swinging dicks. The military too has a swinging dick private, or general, or two. (Tailhook scandal, anyone?)

All ideologies stem from this pattern – someone has to be jerked or blown. It’s inevitable; even God himself is known for blowing hard to part seas or giving us 40 days of rain and flood. (A metaphor is to be had here – but I’ll leave it to you sick and saintly minds to come up with it.)

Our ancestors knew these things – partook of the vile and vulgar such as we do – and whatever principles were, indeed, damned. Nope, these behaviors will go on…and the jerking off story only gets better from here.

(Just don’t get caught on tape doing it. The visual is a visceral no-no if you want to achieve more than any sinful commoner.)

In Memoriam: Donna Mae Powers (1952-2011)

Her Life: Climbing Those Stairs…To Heaven

I started this draft shortly after discontinuing my mother’s treatment. The neurologist at Loyola University had informed me that minimal gains from intensive radiation were to be weighed against the more negative conditions my mother would endure in the days and months to come. He had suggested I up my mother’s steroids for the short-term, hoping she would gain responsiveness and climb back to a better baseline that had been lacking upon his consultation. She did not climb back.

Donna Clark was a simple woman; of simple tastes; but that simplicity does not belie her hidden complexity as a overwhelmingly generous, forthright, fighter for the underdogs in life. What she did was often unseen – as she never sought credit or the public eye. She made the choice to join the U.S. Marines in 1970 that would be important to her life in immeasurable ways. She met her only husband and gave birth to me while stationed at Quantico, Virginia. She maintained a marriage for a decade when many others would have called it quits in less than one year, enduring physical and emotional tirades the likes of which I have only seen in the most brazen Hollywood send-ups. Her painful marriage and divorce were very real. And she never dated again because of it.

A hint of her metal: We often did not have a car – or rather – her husband left her without one to do chores, like laundry. She and I would load up a little red wagon and walk two miles in oppressive heat to the laundry mat on Cowan Road in Winchester, Tennessee. Sometimes we had a dog, Lady or Runt, and they would come along too. She made sure she had quarters for me to play Ms. Pacman at the mat.

She later came north with her clothes and her strong shoulders to Lowell, Indiana, her hometown, seeking shelter and a rebuild of her life. She found work as a consignment shop employee, soon to be owner, where for twenty-three years she tag ten of thousands of clothes, carrying them all up and down stairs, greeted everyone with a smile, and never made much more than rent and food money. She was happiest in Neat Repeats because it was soon hers to put her best efforts into daily.

She raised me to respect the idea of an education. She attempted several times to complete college courses – coming up only 3 credits short of an associate’s accounting degree – but money or time or my failings stop her from that ultimate goal. She saw to it that I graduate from Purdue in 1996, which was very special to her, probably even more than to myself. We took a few pictures around Stewart Center, ate at pizza joint in the Levee, and toured campus as we had many times before. (It took place seventy years to the day of her father’s birth.)

I remember later moving out of a 4^th floor apartment with my mother assisting me. It was the first time I realized my mother was getting older as she collapsed from exhaustion of climbing stairs, a task she did so much in her life.

Her first battle with cancer came in 2004. She lost a kidney, and rebounded well physically, but would lose some of her drive as her shop closed for good in 2006. She still continued to walk and climb stairs though; she delivered papers for nearly fifteen years while maintaining her shop and also working part-time at the Lowell Library for seven years. She adult tutored, tried teaching volleyball to 4^th grade girls, played softball well (even on the Marine Corps traveling team), and adored her Chicago Cubs. She wrote very little – only when she was trying to solve a problem did she express herself the most – but she did send out Christmas Cards with letters religiously to those she made friendships with in all avenues of her life. She rarely got mad – or lacked understanding with me – and was there for me as I made some really ignorant choices in my post-college career.

Even in her last days, she walked and climbed the steps of our little apartment in Merrillville. She is destined to climb a set of stairs that will lead to a bustling shop, where she will be loved always, and the Cubs she loves will win every, single, game they play.

The Marines are climbers; Donna climbed further than most in this life.

God Bless You Mom!

Old Must Go!: Manifesting Astrological Constraints & Mysteries

I like astrology and tarot readings. They are an enjoyable piece of pseudo-science that make a day often more interesting than it really is. Sure, you can be slave to the hum-drum beat into you since childhood, or posit, "I will not waste my time on this frivolous reading," knowing your great ancestors (some not so great ones too) often rolled the bones, I-chinged and divined their futures based on the alignment of our celestial orbs.

So, what do we have today?

Uranus is opposing Saturn for the 4th time in a cycle of 5 occurences. From my very rudimentary understanding of astrology, Uranus is often the explosive, unorthodox, and liberating planet and Saturn is the basis of constraints, structure, morality, and learning from prior experiences. These two planets are like Mortal Combat opponents - much like the far Left and far Right in U.S. politics.

The last time these bodies opposed was in the mid-1960s. For those that were alive - the pot was good (sometimes), the politics were volcanic, and the Vietnam War divided a nation. Happy times by all: not so much.

But America survived.

In today's realm, these two were in exact opposition when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Should not have to say more about what he represents astrologically in America.

For my own part, today I did a tarot reading in which the cards of tarot are laid out on the wheel above.

Highlights: The Empress Card fell on the house of Mysteries. Denoting I should mother along my unknown or undiscovered desires in business, love, and the like.

The Ten of Pentacles fell in my Family Matters house. This reflects fortunate times, an 'all is well' attitude. Which should inspire me to be content. (I know otherwise, so far.)

The Nine of Swords landed in my body-mind section. This could mean disruption or avoidance of certain realities as if I am afraid. (Ding!)

The Emperor card arose in my Future Potential section. This could mean I am capable of reaching new heights, but I should be aware to credit others and put forth a consistent message.

All and all, I liked the reading - I did it all by myself, without the constraints of someone else's intepretation or moneyed desires.

More on Sat-Uranus opposition & Presidential outcomes here.

Movie Review: She's Out of My League

Normally, a chick flick/date movie is not my fare of choice. It is one to be tasted in small quantities, and avoided, if the protagonist is who you perceive yourself to be - in a Perceptionville of your own making.

That said, She's Out of My League is truly funny. Jay Baruchel (usually a character actor) plays Kirk, the 5 or 6 out of 10 lead part, as a TSA officer with friends you love, yet cringe at their analysis. Kirk meets up with Molly (Alice Eve) by work accident - getting her away from his awe struck co-workers. Through chance, he answers the call to a misplaced phone that Molly lost in those hated buss tubs in the airport.

From there, you get taken on a field experiment of an inexperienced-in-dating knockouts man trying to be normal while his perfection-is-not-my-goal lawyer (but not really) stunner tries the road less travelled, but bumpy no less, adventure.

Comedy ensues in the love game.

The now jealous 2-year ago ex, who dates a 6.5 at best, but brings him over to hang with Kirk's family regularly. Kirk's family - that has a no-edit button - is loud and proud of their middling life. The funny, and similarly rated, friends of Kirk that constantly analyze the chances and prospects of this Beauty and the Beast pairing. The ex-boyfriend of Molly - Foot Long - plays his integral part in setting a faux bar to measure up to for Kirk. Molly's top gal who is a perfect match for Kirk's top analyzer.

Ratings being the game, She's Out is a 8.5 out of 10. It has heart; it runs well on that - just a few flaws, here and there. But hey, it maybe out of your league.