click it.......when you look at the cartoon, use your "back" button to return here.

Yep, In my younger days life on the island was a thing of beauty.
Someone said here take this, it's mescaline, take it.
Who was I to argue? I took it!
Since it was night time, I quite naturally thought I'd party all night
but soon I fell asleep. Four hours later and about an hour before sunrise I realized I wasn't sleeping at all.
"Hey", I called out to the room flickering in candle light, "are you guys sleeping".
Gradually I heard responses, "Nope not me!" and "I don't think so" and Just a laugh from someone.
Wow, we were all awake and hadn't spoken a word for hours.
"Lets go take the skiff out", somebody said.
Before we knew it, we were all climbing through the early morning darkness into the Skiff that had a ten horse power outboard on it.
There was enough moon light for us to see the channel markers as we made our way past the stone jetty to the bell buoy outside the harbor entrance where we tied up and waited for the show to begin.
Slowly the sky began to light up with a liquid neon blue and it seemed, in the next instant, liquid yellow gold rolled in from the horizon as the Sun began to take it's place in the morning's sky and the bell buey began to ring at each wave as it came by!
"WOOOOOOOOW....OH MY GOD", some one said, "KOOL" another said, but I remained quietly speechless. We all had liquid gold on our faces and our arms and the bell buoy was covered with it.
Even the skiff was full of it....just warm, beautiful, liquid gold.
It was a morning never forgotten.
I'm sure glad I didn't say no to drugs that night.
I did say no the next time because I knew it couldn't get better than that!Hey, thats the way it is and it was years ago and beside who else can say they were covered in the beauty of liquid gold spewing from the sky?
I am happy to have it in my hip pocket to remind me that life is about experiences of all types when flying a flag of moderation

Regards

You ask, what is life in the Getto like?

Well, It'd hard to describe but to give you the feel for it, I'll convey a little story.

There was a drive by shooting one day. Three guys dead. The Bodies chalked, investigation complete. All that's left are the chalked outlines of the three bodies when the neighborhood gets back to normal. The kids returned to the street and began playing hop scotch from one outline to another.
One kid was holding a "Freezie cup".

I have Snippets of memory like everyone else and here are some of mine.

1.I'm standing on deck of the 65' oyster scrape boat at 5am waiting for the eastern horizon to light up in blue as the Capitan lowers the scrape into the dark waters. One hand of mine is holding to a guy wire from the mast and the other is waiting on the knob handle of a hydraulic control.

2.I am pulling a dolly filled with 500 hot tin cans full of green beans from the in floor pressure cooker, through a steam filled room, To a machine to do the boxing. drat

3.I am standing at the end of a conveyor belt where the peaches are spilling off into a five gallon container which, when full, I remove and replace it with another. Than I take the full container and dump
it into a cement mixer type thingy followed by 4 cups of sugar and a cup of citric acid. At the end of the day my clothing would stand up on their own and my shoes appeared to be covered with a layer of cracked ice.

4.I am peering down from the third story window at the rear of an old house in the Ghettos of west Baltimore waiting for the Gas and electric guys to leave so I can jump into action installing "Ghetto electric" so I can see to paint that night.

5.I'm about to do a back flip from the diving board at the country club when I spot my dad and his buddies down on the tee at one. They wave, I wave, than flip!

6.I am taking my cloths off on the back patio because of the skunk piss and I learned that a good shower with soap worked just fine to rid myself of the smell but I threw the clothing away.

7.I was designing a partial denture one day when the finishing room guy came over and said some gold was lost in the casting machine so I went and wet my finger and picked up a bunch of flakes and put em in a little vial with the others that I eventually melted down and mounted the "nugget" in a vitallium ring that I gave to a friend who lost it.

8.I have my gas mask on and I can still smell the chlorine as I try to get the air line back on the valve so it will close. I remember thinking paper making stinks!

9.I was playing in the barn and jumping from the hay bails onto a pile of hay on the barn floor below. After the jump,I look down and see a piece of hey going into my calf and projecting a bit out the other side. I remember thinking, "I didn't know hay could do that!"

to be continued

As a youngster, I got my first "Ham Radio License" at the age of ten.
The local radio club members guides me through my first experience of building a radio transmitter. It used a single tube that was both a crystal oscillator and a power amplifier and put a whopping 2watts of power(thats power enough for a couple of flashlight bulbs) to a piece of copper wire running from my upstairs second floor rear window to a telephone pole at the end of the yard in Pennsylvania.

My receiver was a a single tube also and is called a supreregrenative type. It worked on the "squeeze the cat she'll holler" principle where it just set there about ready to regenerate when It received a small signal from the antenna.

I was ready and excited. I used Morse code to called CQ THIS IS W3DMI OVER (-.-. --.- - .... .. .-- ...-- -.. -- .. -.-) and I waited for the "Cat to Squeal".
Than, there it was, ever so faintly, not a squeal as much as a fading in and out whimper.
I heard my call sign being sent back to me ad my heart began to pound
wondering what my 2watts have stirred up.
Oregon....It was Oregon.....Yipppeeeeeeee!
An now, here I am typing to who knows who who knows where and I have that wonderful experience to remind me of the marvel of it all. Yippppeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!