Life is an adventure

By Dan Barber

Life in the Navy was an adventure… during my career it seemed that time just moved so slowly, but after 20 years it didn’t seem that bad, but what has really whizzed by since then has been the last 26 years since I retired from the Navy.

I think that everybody complains about some of the duty stations they’ve been assigned to and then can’t wait to get orders to another assignment. But, when the transfer is completed, they wind up missing the duty station that they just left. I found out that regardless of the duty station, whether it’s a great place or crappy one, when you leave it you’re going to miss it.

What I discovered when I returned to a crappy place that I thought I missed… it was still a crappy place, and it wasn’t the place that I missed, it was the people that I knew at that duty station that I missed. I discovered that a place does not make a community, people make up the community.

I spent 20 years pretty much being homesick for the community of Rowland Heights, California where I grew up. When I retired and moved back to that community I discovered that I had very little in common with anyone in the old neighborhood. My childhood friends moved on in their lives with family and new interests, just as I had.  I then realized that I became homesick for the Navy.

Fortunately, I was able to get a good job back in a military town, Twentynine Palms, California. When I moved here it felt like I had come back home. My neighbors were either retired military like myself, or they were active duty, or they worked at the base. There is nothing like the camaraderie you have with your co-workers and in a military town your neighbors.

I see young people coming out here to the desert for duty, and if they don’t have a family or a car there isn’t much for them to do except hike in the desert… which they probably do as part of their training at the base. Many of them try to stay fit so they run, play sports and run some more. If they have a young spouse, they might get involved with other young couples. One night my wife and I went to the drive-in to see a movie here in our town, which is probably only one of a very few drive-ins left in the United States.  We saw young couples and young families arriving before dark to get set up for the movie. They had brought their pot-luck dinners to share with each other and later to enjoy the movie together… as a community. 

That took me back to when my family and I would get together with our friends at those crappy duty stations… we might have a potluck dinner then play board games or cards because the duty station didn’t have English language TV. Or we might all get together to go camping somewhere.  One time we even caravanned up through Italy and camped on the side of the road at night. We got to share a great adventure by visiting Taormina, at the Messina Straight, Pompeii, Naples and Rome all during a four day road trip.

Out here in Twentynine Palms you can pretty much tell where a retired Marine lives… if they don’t have the National Flag and the Marine Corps Flag flying on a pole in their yard, you just have to look at their garage… if the door is open you tell that they were a Marine… a place for everything ship-shaped and squared away. On the other hand, if your children followed you out to the desert to live near Mom and Dad, then they need someplace to store all of their stuff… so in my garage, there isn’t any space to put anything else… For a long time, I had to carry my golf clubs around in my vehicle because they wouldn’t fit in my garage.  My wife and I are now way too old to try and ride a bicycle… yet up until recently we had half a dozen of them stored in our garage. After a period of about 15 years I was recently able to move the children’s things into their own garages so now I have a 1969 VW bug parked in the middle of my garage waiting for rebuilding…when I get up the energy to take on that project.

My Grandfather was a Marine for maybe two years, but the discipline he obtained in the Marine Corps stayed with him for his entire life. His garage was always squared away. Oil was not allowed to drip from any car that dared park in his driveway.  Weeds were not allowed to grow in his lawn or around his prize roses.

When grandpa was still working before retirement, his shoes were always spit shined and his suits neatly pressed and his tie tied with a double Windsor. Come to think about it, after he retired his gardening clothes had to also be pressed, and his work shoes shined.

Life in the Navy can be measured in duty stations… during this time we were here… then this other time we were over there.  We think that we missed the disco 70’s all together because we spent most of that time overseas somewhere or moving to or from a military base in the states.

There were movies and TV shows that came and went that I am just now discovering online or in the discount video bins at my local super duper discount stores.  Some of the fashions that were around in the 70 have also seemed to come from the clown acts of the circus… Big shoes, Neon suits and Big Hats…  We did witness a streaker at a ball game on a Navy base in Sicily in the early 70’s… the guy didn’t run very far until he was apprehended by the base security officers.

Our two sons had no idea what TV was until they were nearly 3 and 4 years old. We arrived at my parent’s house after being picked up from the airport following a trip half way around the globe. The TV was tuned to some program about cavemen fighting dinosaurs. Our oldest son became very upset that those cavemen were going to hurt the dinosaurs.

Back in California I was stationed at Naval Air Station Miramar… now Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.  We were close enough to be able to drive up to Rowland Heights on the weekends to visit family there.  We found a great house in Poway, not too far from work at the air station.  Then the news came that Diane was expecting our third child… on Friday the 13th of August 1975 our daughter Kimberly was born at a civilian hospital in Escondido, California. Now we could mark our duty stations by where our children were born… Brian at Oak Harbor, Washington; Christopher at Naples Italy and now Kimberly in San Diego.

The Navy wasn’t satisfied by just leaving me alone to work at Miramar; they decided that I should go to North Island Naval Air Station.  Not too far from Miramar, but a mess to have to drive through during rush hour traffic in San Diego.  We decided to move down to Coronado to be closer to work.  We found a relatively cheap house to rent while waiting for Navy housing.  I saved money by riding my bicycle back and forth to work at North Island, and when we were finally assigned base housing in San Diego I learned how to use the public transportation system so I wouldn’t have to drive in traffic and to save money on gas.

With almost ten years of active duty behind me, I decided to enlist in the Navy Reserves and go to school full-time on my GI Bill and Weekend drill pay.  I quickly learned that I needed to make a bit more money, because we no longer had health insurance, which was badly needed when our daughter broke her collar bone when she fell off a swing and then a short time later she came down with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized.  

I got a job at Beckman Instruments in La Habra, California. A short time later my old scout master and brother-in-law’s uncle introduced us to the union so we could get a job on the back lot of Disneyland.  Tim went to work on the cars of autopia and I went to work checking the air pressure on the tires of the Monorail train... of course I had other duties, like trimming the tree branches away from the monorail track and cleaning stuff off the track that patrons tossed there during the day.  I made good money doing this, and really enjoyed working in an environment very similar to the military.  At the time, Disney had a dress and grooming code for employees…I had no problem adapting to those rules with my ten years of military service.  My children really liked the fact that Dad worked at the coolest place in the world, especially when I would drop them and their Mom off in the morning before I would report to work… after I got off in the afternoon, I would scoop up some very tired kids from a bench by the Small World attraction and load them in the car at the employees parking lot.

My shop and the parking lot was just behind the Small World attraction… the only drawback about working in such a location was the “It’s a Small World” tune… many years later it is still embedded in my brain!... I think that I should get disability compensation for such an injury.  Now that I’m old the “Happiest Place on Earth can really PISS me off!  You have to pay a huge admission fee to stand in line for two hours for a two-minute ride.  But of course, you can make a reservation for that ride and report later in the day.  If I wanted to take all of my grandkids to Disneyland I would have to get a second mortgage on my house to buy the tickets.

Thank goodness that my wife made me reenlist in the Navy so we could retire with a pension and inexpensive medical coverage. We are happy with our life… we have our children raised and we get to see our grandchildren quite often… I don’t think that we will ever move again, we have found paradise and the grass isn’t greener here on the other side of the hill that I have to mow, because we don’t have any grass here in this beautiful desert.  The air is clean, we are in small town America where it isn’t over-crowded and everyone knows everyone else and it’s not possible to have traffic jams in town unless the Marines schedule one at the Main Gate to the base… which they do most every morning now that we have terrorist threats to worry about.  We also have a couple of Little League fields where I can sit with my neighbors, friends and family and watch my grandchildren play ball.  

My wife, Diane, and I can literally walk out to our back yard and explore the vast Joshua Tree National Park’s hiking trails and sites… life can hardly get any better.

Deep in thought

By Dan Barber

Another Friday night and I sit in front of my computer and try to think up something clever to write about. But, alas the only thing leaking out of my brain is this drivel about nothing.

Last week I wrote about living life in my imagination… Perhaps everyone does that. When I was young I would sit in my math class in school and instead of paying attention to how division or algebra worked my mind would wander off and I would day-dream about exploring the distant hills I could see outside my classroom window. That is the reason to this day I can only divide using a calculator that was invented by some kid from my generation who actually paid attention in math class.

The reason I believe that everyone day-dreamed in math is because of the popularity and abundance of calculators now available everywhere, including calculator apps (applications) on smartphones and any computer. I remember when these magical devices were very expensive, but now they can be bought for just a couple of bucks in any convenience store. When I was a kid a wrist-watch calculator would have come in handy for math tests.

Today, if kids are caught day-dreaming in class they might be labeled as suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).  However, they may have laser-focus on any subject that is of interest to them. All of my grandsons are expert video game players and all of my granddaughters can type with just their thumbs faster on their smartphones than I can type with all ten of my fingers…but they are all smart because I believe they inherited their ADD from me, or they could just be human.

One time when my son was in high school he asked me for help with his Algebra homework I started to panic until he explained the purpose of the Algebraic formula the teacher tasked him with… to find the number of newspaper pages that were needed in a tabloid sized publication to meet a 40 percent news copy to 60 percent advertising ratio!  At that point  in my career, that was the first thing I did on Monday mornings after my newspaper’s advertising manager gave me the week’s run sheet for ad copy! I thought, “Crap, I’ve been doing Algebra for years and didn’t know it!” The lesson here is to pay attention enough in math class so when you use your smartphone's calculator later in life you will know what you are really doing.

The best classes I had at John A. Rowland High School where I had laser focus were Remedial English (because the regular English teachers thought I was too stupid for their regular English classes), Drama, and one year of typing. 

Perhaps I’m still too stupid for regular English classes, but that’s why editors were invented and excelled in regular English classes. Drama gave me the confidence to “act” like I knew what I was doing in life which allowed me to perform in a successful and award-winning career as a professional journalist/writer/day-dreamer. Typing gave me the tools which allowed the information or day-dreams to leak from my brain to the empty page.

The lesson from this blog to parents is…If your child’s school counselors tell you that your son or daughter is suffering from ADD, immediately request they be enrolled in Remedial English, Drama and Typing (today they call it “keyboarding” because another smart kid paid attention in math class and invented the computer with spell & grammar check for all of us slow learners to use in our careers).

In the Human Race which team are you on?

By Dan Barber

My daughter and I had a conversation the other day about whether we were poor or not. I advised her that economic advantage is always on a sliding scale. Meaning that residents in any community are divided up in the haves, have-nots, wish-we-had-more and maybe even those who wish-to-have-less.

Our community here in the Mojave Desert is the same. Many people are comfortable in what they have and can be viewed as being content. We have those who are in a rush to earn more. Then there are those who are just barely scratching out their survival and are viewed as being homeless or on the verge of being homeless. There are people who are too ill or handicapped to be able to take care of themselves. We also have those who are too lazy to earn their own living so they rely on others to provide it for them.

That conversation sparked a thought in my head that is now searching for a safe place to land among all of the cobwebs. The thought is what team do I run for in the Human Race? Can I make the roster using custom and convention through birthright; or through earned or natural talent or through the perception of others?

I think of myself as being energetically lazy. Now that I’m retired I think that I prefer to run the course of the human race mostly in the quiet solitude of my head. I’m not too concerned about material things anymore; I have my family close by, my health is OK and I have food to eat. I much prefer the silence of the desert than to the noise of large population centers. Others would disagree they need the close-by bright and noisy attractions. All I need is a shady spot to sit where I can use my own imagination for entertainment or where I can participate in another favorite pastime of watching nature such as a lizard do pushups on a hot rock…if I’m successful someone will actually check my pulse to see if I’m OK (which actually happened).

Where do I place myself in the Human Race? I consider myself as winning as others are racing past me at top speed to achieve their own goals…is that confusing to you?

Which team are you on in this Human Race? The rich, middle, or poor team; blue collar, white collar, intellectual elitist or high school dropout; what is your sexual preference; which ethnic team do you identify with? How do other Human Race team members view you? How do you want others to see you…As a man, woman or either? I want to be viewed as an American with a bunch of ethnic heritages thrown in. In a previous blog I mentioned that I had a very talented nephew who viewed himself as an American with Mexican heritage...he told his Dad that he was born here in the U.S. so he wasn't a Mexican American... he was an American first.

Then we all have other options within those team “requirements” to deal with…which are divided up by religious and political ideology and geographic locations broken down by country, state, city neighborhood, street and even directions of Northside, Southside, Eastside, Westside. Don’t forget to consider the decade we all belong to, baby boomer, millennial, etc.

If Freud were alive today he would probably opt for a different career choice, rather than trying to figure out the collective mind of the evolving human.

May you be successful in your Human Race…

The Evolving Digital Human

By Dan Barber

As we age our ears and noses continue to grow…have you ever noticed that? Perhaps it is to allow old people to counter the effects of losing the ability to hear or to smell.

Other stuff also appears to evolve for humans as we grow older. Young folks can mistakenly blame old people of being crabby, out of touch and a bit, or a lot senile.  In fact, old people just lose the patience to deal with young people’s bull stool. We used to be young people ourselves and know more about life now than we let on.  There is not enough time in the world for old people to explain the really important stuff to young people so they would understand.  What’s there to understand you might ask? I would suggest that you check out the “memes” posted by old people on social media sites about the “good old days.”

Young people today are being “digitized” into expecting instant gratification. The human brain is being rewired with the over-abundance of electronic media and video games that replace reality for many children today. Back in the “good old days” people had to rely on their imagination to escape their reality. However, imagination can be very dangerous if it’s made into reality! For example, it created the “happiest place on earth” where people can pay more than $100 to stand in line for 2 hours for the excitement of a 2-minute thrill ride. My imagination caused some dangerous situations in my life… I imagined that I could ride my bike down a very steep hill which resulted in some really serious lacerations and a bruised reality. There were other incidents that are too many to mention here.

 Imagination created the video games of today which allow a very dangerous contagion to latch onto a young brain to cause reprogramming to take place. I witnessed medical researchers trying to use that technology in an attempt to reprogram the brains of military personnel, to help relieve the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), i.e., altering or blocking the reality a human being actually experienced. I predict that in the future someone will be able to figure out how to make a bowl of oatmeal think just by sticking a couple of wires into it that are hooked up to a laptop computer. 

In a busy world today people can multi-task by listening to a book being read to them while commuting in rush hour traffic. Or they can tackle a big deal on an international conference call on their hands-free smartphone while driving… I would still worry about distracted driving because hands are still connected to the brain, and disconnecting the brain from the task at hand is a dangerous thing. But people mistakenly think that taking away all of the modern electronic devices would only create a very disadvantaged human and place them on the verge of madness.

 The trouble of having all of this wisdom in old age is the fact that we are now too old to do anything with the important stuff our elders tried to teach us in our youth!  If we were to try and explain the important stuff to young people they would just ignore the advice.

It’s time for me to ask my computer to check my nonsense here for spelling and grammar errors, silence my smartphone and turn off my large flat-screen low energy TV with a couple hundred channels to choose from and take a nap where I can dream about the “good old days” when I would complain about not having anything to do.

Something is still rattling around

By Dan Barber

I have stuff rattling around in my head constantly… I can be easily distracted which causes me to sometimes take a little longer in accomplishing assigned tasks, so I apologize to my four or five followers of my Saturday Morning Post blog for being late, or sporadic with my posting. And please forgive me if I am repeating myself, or becoming abstract in my thoughts… I am starting to do that more and more these days.

I think the older we get, the more we start thinking about the “after-life” or the hope for one. I do believe that we have an after-life, or a “forever-life”. A few years ago my father was being kept alive with medical devices. My mother, along with my siblings knew that he didn’t want to continue living like that so we decided to have the hospital turn off the equipment and let our father pass.

For a few weeks after that action, I worried about my part in the decision until I dreamt that I was having a conversation with my Dad and I asked him, “If we can bring you back to life, do you want to live again?” He said no, he added “I am able to relive the joyous moments of my life all over again as if it were the first time.”  After that, I was able to find peace in the knowledge that my Dad was having the“Times of his life” in his Heaven.

Many years ago I thought it would be a good idea to write a science fiction story about some ancient alien beings that created a device to gather all knowledge that would never be lost and these alien beings would be immortal if only in memory, or “knowledge”. The title I thought about was the Gathering of Data… or the acronym G.O.D. I thought that a good way this device could use to collect the data would be to implant a soul into every living thing or being. So upon death, the information could then travel back to the creators to be downloaded into the Gathering of Data… told you I had weird stuff rattling around in my head… Now whenever I watch the “Discovery” or “History” channel on TV, some of the stuff aired rekindles some of my ideas that I once had about my story idea. One physicist, Stephen Hawking, claimed on one of these TV programs that nothing can escape a black hole, not even knowledge… I thought well there you go, the Gathering of Data!

The more I wrote my science fiction story the more I thought about the need for a conflict. I decided that to create a conflict, the Gathering of Data would download the information from the recently arrived soul and then send out the recycled and hopefully blank soul to other living beings to gather more information. Here is where the conflict starts… some of these souls weren’t blank, they retained some memories from their previous lives or even the memory of being with the Gathering of Data… GOD!

I also had another dream. This dream involved my grandmother who passed right after my daughter was born. I remember the day my grandmother died. Earlier in the day she sat in a lawn chair holding my infant daughter while watching me work on my car. Later that night I got a call from my Mom telling me that my Grandma had died.

In my dream, I was viewing my Grandmother in her death bed with a person holding a baby next to the bed. It was like viewing a painting through thin gauze, but my Grandmother was moving and the person holding the baby was comforting her by telling her that this was the resurrection of life.

So you see I know that we have an after-life or a life forever… enjoy your today-life, and please forgive me if you believe I am being blasphemous… I do believe!

Heaven is Here and Now...

But can only last if we follow the commandments of God.

By Dan Barber

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

It seems to be agreed upon that there is only one thing that created everything. Scientists are still trying to figure out what caused the spark of creation resulting in the “Big Bang.” Some string theory advocates believe that we even have multiple universes existing all at the same time, which would explain how God would be able to be everywhere at once…past, present and future and even at the beginning of  “our” universe.

Science knows and has proven that our universe is several billion years old and some people have glommed onto people of faith who take the story of creation literally and believe our existence is only about 6,000 years old. That belief makes sense in a certain way because the art of writing was created just about 6,000 years ago which started the ability to record our history. Many writers then and now use the art of the metaphor to simplify their ideas. Those people who disbelieve and make fun of people of faith risk damnation metaphorically speaking.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 

According to the Bible, we were created in the image of God so there is no need to create a weird interpretation of the image of God because all we have to do to see the face of God is to see all human beings as we view ourselves. If we can do that without regard to race or appearance then we will always be with God.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain

This means that we should not demean God by acting on his behalf for selfish reasons or to do harm to His creation. When a person kills in the name of God that is a serious sin, just as an utterance of asking God to damn someone or thing just because you might be angry. No human is perfect and according to the Bible God recognized this fault in his creation so he sent his son Jesus to earth in an attempt to teach humans how to ask for forgiveness even in the face of grave circumstances…Jesus had to die on the cross just to emphasize that idea. He also rose from death to show us that God will forgive us if we just ask.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy

We should take the time off from our labor to relax and view God’s work as a gift, and while we’re at it maybe we should thank the Lord for what He has provided to us.

Honor thy father and thy mother

Perhaps we should extend out this Commandment to mean that we should honor all of our ancestors, because of them we exist today.

Thou shalt not kill

To kill is to destroy God’s creation. What if every living thing has a soul within. Many Christians believe that life is created at conception. Suppose that a human is aborted that may have been destined to benefit humankind in some way, granted no one but God can tell what is to come, what I don’t understand is how someone can be so selfish as to deny all of humankind the opportunity that child may have offered.

Thou shalt not commit adultery

Perhaps our partner in our life has been planned out by our Creator for some reason we do not yet understand. I feel that we do not own our own lives; the people who love us and know us provide a great comfort to our wellbeing as well as a true purpose in our life. Love is actually magical if you pay attention. Sometimes love grows stronger when challenged by hardships or sickness or tragedy.

Thou shalt not steal; Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor; Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.

People who work hard for their possessions should not lose them to thievery or those who are capable of working but chose not to.

The last three Commandments are tied together to mean that we should be happy with what we have been given or earned. We should also celebrate the successes of our fellow humans rather than envy them for their accomplishments through their own hard work.

I don’t mean to sound so presumptuous to know anything about theology or what God thinks or what his plans are, these are just my ramblings or philosophy for living the best life I can.