Mail Call....Just When You Think You've Seen It All!!!

I'm pretty sure that all of us have, either accidentally or slightly or purpose, entered our email address on a website that felt the need to sell our information to another website. The amount of spam, though not nearly as bad as it used to be, was ridiculous and somewhere along the line someone decided that we wanted to see certain body parts of certain people, in various postions....well you get the idea.

Well today things took a turn in another direction and when I went to the mailbox there was an unassuming looking letter there addressed to me, at an address from a couple years ago. In the fine print on the back of the envelope, right where you would miss it, unless it just happens to catch your eye, were the words...."Adult material enclosed". So I'm thinking, this should be interesting and I can't seem to get the important mail to find me, but I'll be dammed if bills and this envelope had no problem tracking me down. Now of course my first thought was to just throw it away, but of course curiosity got the best of me. Being the kind and generous person that I try to be I felt the need to share this with those who may come across this. Everything below is actually from the brochure that was inside and .... well....enjoy!!!

"Performance-Fusion: THE Supercharged Erection Gum. Pop it in your mouth....And get ready to watch your penis swell bigger by the second".

"I was sitting in the living room waiting for my wife to finish cooking dinner... Suddenly, I felt a long-forgotten warmth in my groin... More surprising yet, it seemed as though my penis had started to swell up!
I told myself that this was impossible, that I must be having an allergic reaction to the gum... Then I got up and headed to the bathroom to see what was going on, and realized that my penis was fully erect - and then some... I touched it and I had such a huge erection that I thought my penis was going to explode!"

All I could do was laugh and laugh and laugh. Of all the things that I've heard this is one for the books. In case you're interested in this, a thirty day supply of gum costs $75. So go ahead and chew like hell and plan on skipping dinner.

Mind Over Emotion Over My Mind & My Emotion

For anyone that knows me, even just a little bit, they know that my life has been ruled by emotion and completely illogical, random, spontaneous and, at times, destructive decisions. At 37 years old I would have thought that things would be a lot different, yet I find that I can compare it to an 18 year old who does not seem to have a clue. The difference being I have a long list of mistakes, that I should have learned from over the years, and perhaps I have, though I would be hard pressed to actually put my finger on anything too specific. Growing up in a military family had many advantages as well as disadvantages. The constant moving around, for myself at least, pushed me further and further into a shell that still to this day haunts me. Over the years that shell proved to be my only friend that I knew that I would never be forced to say goodbye to, unfortunately it has also proven to be an obstacle in trying to relate to the world outside of that shell. For many years as a child and teenager my emotion took the form of anger and basically showing my ass. After I graduated from high school I began working with children at the Youth Center on NAS Keflavik and started to see a lot of myself in many of the kids that I was working with. Although I had no actual training to work kids, what I did have proved to be more help than any training could have given me. I had already grown up as a military brat and knew what they were feeling and the things that they were going through. I found myself gravitating to the kids that seemed to have behaviour problems, discipline problems, those that seemed to just be kinda lost. I became very close with a handful of these kids and their families and acted like a big brother of sorts for many of them, while still being able to be their friend. I worked there for a little over a year before my dad was stationed back in the states and I had to leave. On my last day of work at the Youth Center one for the boys that seemed to always be in my office in trouble came up to me and said he wanted to talk to me. In my mind I was thinking that this was it, this kid was going to let it all out and tell me exactly what he thought of me. As much as I tried to be a friend, I was still the assistant director and more often than sometimes, I was forced to be that bad guy at work. I was ready to let this kid say or do whatever he wanted, if for no other reason than to let him get it out of his system. We sat down in the main room of the center and what happened next completely caught me off guard and changed me in a huge way on an emotional level. This sixth grade boy, that spent more time in my office than most of the other kids told me that he was sorry for all the trouble that he had caused me. He told me that although he would get mad at me for various reasons, he knew that everything that I had done was only to try and help him. He told me that he was going to really miss me and he thanked me for everything that I had done for him and then he just started to bawl his eyes out and put his arms around me. At that point another of the kids was walking through the main room on their way to the bathroom and saw what was going on and also started to cry at the thought of me leaving. It was not too long before about half of the 100+ kids ended up coming out to see what the noise was all about and it was just one big emotional moment. At that time I learned that, although I grew up thinking that boys do not cry, they hold their emotions inside, that crying was ok and letting your emotion out was a good thing. I tell this story because it changed my life in a big way and I believe that it changed the lives of many kids that day that perhaps had grown up thinking the same way I had. I do hope that these kids learned a much better way to balance that emotion with logical thinking than I have over the years. Looking back I find that I have apologized many times for my emotional outbursts only to find that instead of apologizing for anything of the sort, I only need to find that balance. There are times I wish I could be nothing more than just a bitter old queen because it seems, at that particular moment, that it would be easier to not have the emotion that may be consuming me. Of course those moments of bitter envy rarely last more than 24 hours if that long and I find myself grateful for the emotion because it reminds me that I care.
Emotion and caring in and of itself is not so much of a problem, but add to it, over analyzing a situation to the point that it brings to mind things that may not even be there and all hell can break loose. The utter turmoil between that which is logical and that which is emotional, again I can only speak for myself, needs a constant mediator to manage the particular situation. In the past when this turmoil has proven to be too much to handle I have turned to various destructive ways of handling it, and in the past all I have been able to gain from taking those routes is nothing more than temporary numbness. Last night I once again thought along those same lines as I got pretty drunk, though nothing compared to my drunken days of the past. Last nights venture only served to guarantee that I woke up with a massive headache and the guilt of not handling my emotion in a logical way. Instead though of spending today getting down on myself for being dumb about last night, I have decided to figure what I may have learned from it. I chose to use my mind over my emotion.
The shell that I have lived in for so long really has no place in my life anymore. I have spent all these years in this shell, never reaching out in a positive way, meaning that I have refused to admit the need for closeness from people around me. Sitting in the bar last night all alone was quite depressing while I watched various groups of friends interacting with each other. I really have no desire to get into the bar scene again, yet I know that I need to reach out in some way to meet people and make new friends. There are support groups out there for everything on the face of the earth, but what could be more supportive than a group of friends just hanging out and

spending time together. I have realized that I can not so it all by myself, despite many years of trying to do so. I can not be with the one I love right now, though we are both working towards that goal. I am realizing that it is ok for him to have people close to him and that I need to have people close to me. This battle of My Mind over My Emotion is not going to end anytime soon, I do hope however that I will continue to learn how to balance out the two of them in a way that will strengthen me versus bring me down. Despite the occasional desire to be an uncaring bitch, I am grateful for the lesson that I learned so many years ago from those kids. There are times that I have thought that I didn't have emotion anymore, I have realized that there are simply things in life that I don't know how to process, or maybe I am scared to process. We all need therapy of some sort, whether it is professional, talking to your friends or neighbor, or, as in my case for now, this blog. Keeping things bottled up only gives cause to an explosion of some sort in the future, I know this in my mind and try to remember that every day even if it doesn't always work. I recently took a silly quiz on facebook that is supposed to show which side of your brain you use the most, my result was both side equally.....which really explains why I tend to be such a mess I guess!! I just can't make up my mind sometimes and my emotion does it for me. Hell who want to be logical all the time, that would be boring!

A.T. Mahan High School - Keflavik, Iceland

How many people were in your graduating class? 500? 1000? 1500?

Well here is a picture of my graduating class in Keflavik, Iceland in 1991. All seventeen of us, although one did not make it, making it a class of 16 people who graduated. Thanks to facebook I have been lucky enough to get in touch with most of them in the past two months after almost twenty years.

There is no way to fully share this experience with anyone who has not lived it sadly. I will however do my best to give it some life because it was simply the most amazing time of my life and in a category all by itself.

Recently I was chatting with another friend from the days of Iceland we both agree there is nothing in life that will compare or even come close to a related experience. As I have said before I had no intentions of going to Iceland in the first place and so my whole attitude was negative in the beginning. It did not take long to realize that these people were going to be my only friends whether I liked it or not. I met my best-friend on the first day of school. See that little Filipino guy in the front? That's Eddie Parker, later and forever known to me and a few others as Mr. Ed. I remember how I met him as if it were yesterday and though the story itself is pretty lame it somehow remains a so vivid in my mind. First day of school, first class of the day he was cool as he informed that i had missed a belt loop in my pants. So that's it, nothing dramatic, but for whatever reason that is all it took for us to become instant friends.

It's pretty interesting how living a small plot of land on a small little island in middle of the ocean suddenly changes your life in ways that you would never have imagined. It did not matter who was popular and who wasn't in the good ole USA because everyone knew each other and popularity simply had to be left at the door. As did many other things, ie: Fashion, Current Events, Popular TV Shows and countless other things. You didn't have to worry about being someone because nobody was anything and everybody was everything. You learned to get over things fast, you had to when you simply can't get away from someone because they are everywhere. Arguments and fights couldn't last because then you wouldn't have anyone to help you get through the day. There was no black or white, rich or poor, or 'I'm better than you are '. The island and school was too small for that and there was not any room for all that.

As seniors we were very lucky to have a little room that we could all congregate into and get away from the other 182 students(grades 7-11). The Senior Lounge was our special place to go and relax, unwind, and it was all ours. No under class men were allowed to enter and no teachers dared invade our space. This room held for us secretes, freedom, our own reality and gave us the space to be alone, which was very hard to do anywhere else on base. There are so many memories that come rushing in just as I type this, yet I seem to remember one of the best things about the lounge is was it was like Vegas. What happened there, stayed in there and is still in there.

With all the things that people think we missed out on by being in such an isolated place, we had the opportunity to experience things that those people never will. Did you have a Senior Field Trip? If so did it include seeing one the greatest waterfalls in the world? How about sitting in a natural hot spring, surrounded by snow? Those are just two of the amazing things we were able to be a part of together and as friends. I wonder how many people in the world can say they knew everyone they graduated with?

I often refer to my time in Iceland as a total and complete break from reality. In some ways it be seen as primitive compared to what the high school kids at the time were doing in the United Sates. In many ways our options were limited which gave us reasons to become creative in what we did and how we spent our time. Silly as it may sound today, our days and nights were spent bowling, playing pool, playing cards, watching movies 4-5 times a week and many, many trips to the Air Terminal for no other reason than to get hot chocolate and get out of the house. We were able to have some of the same rights of passage as high school kids in the states: House Parties(ok so it was really a rented community center), Drinking and trying to hide it from our parents, and Prom. Our prom lasted for close to twenty four hours and included dinner at the Officers Club, A Movie, Bowling, Breakfast, and a few other things that I don't remember for one reason or another.

So what happens when the school year ending gets closer and closer? You begin to realize that these people that you have spent so much time with, more time than any other high school class would spend together in the world, have in many ways become your family. Perhaps the worst thing about being a military brat is always moving from place to place, I know it brought me to a point where I didn't really care about making friends. It was just easier to be a loner. However, in Iceland the rules changed. Not only did I make friends, my whole life, as well as theirs, revolved around each other. There was point where if you saw me, you saw Mr. Ed, David Hillers and David Mayes, almost as if the four of us were one person. In hind sight it was probably kinda freaky...or would have been if we were in the states.

Amongst all the things we had shared and were still sharing it starts to settle in that someones father or mother could get orders at any moment taking them away from what had become our life. For some it came as a blow almost too much to take, why had we been forced to come this island and meet these people and become so close with them only to have them ripped out of our lives...yet again. As much as we were adults we were still kids and it wasn't easy. Why did someone who you had spent pretty much every single day with in the past nine months suddenly shut down in despair over how to handle doing something that we had all done so many times, move on? We were about to graduate high school, finally after so many years, yet so many times we cried, we were sad and at a loss for words. Saying goodbye is never easy, but it is twice as hard when you have to do it over and over and over in just a couple months time.

The great thing about going to A.T. Mahan High School in Keflavik, Iceland is that you were allowed to be a person, a real person. We were allowed to cry and show feelings and emotions, even if we thought we could control them and no one faulted us for it. We were allowed to share a bond that no one else in the world could have access to. We were able to all be friends without all the bullshit that still plaques high school kids today, we all belonged....to each other.

Pulic Display Of ....

There is no doubt that every single one of us, at one time or another, has done something in public that we should not have done, or at the very least did not mean to do. I think we have seen someone digging for gold in their car, thinking somehow that the within the comfort zone of their four doors that no one can see what they are doing, despite the fact that half the vehicle is completely see through.

There is a line to be drawn though when in public though and that line is, without a doubt, crossed when your search for gold follows you on the train! Just as wanna be valley girls seem to infest the Red Line, I had the unfortunate experience on the Blue Line a few nights ago to sit next to a man who, though his efforts were great, could not seem to find what he was looking for up his nose. He did seem to find a great many things that were not to his liking though, as he carefully examined each treasure closely. When his careful, almost scientific, analysis proved to be in vain he took it to yet another level of public distaste by rolling each find in between his thumb and index finger until he formed a ball and placed these disappointments under the seat in front of him, perhaps for a closer second look at another time.

If you have actually read this far you must be wondering how I can describe this man in such detail. As I write this I wonder myself. The whole experience can be compared to watching a horror movie through your fingers because your hands are covering your face. Or trying not to stare at the really large person walking down the street, yet you keep peaking, despite your efforts not to. I recall my utter amazement at this man so much so that although I did not want to keep watching him in his quest for this fools gold that seemed so important to him, I could not stop. The only thing that I can think of that kept me from yelling, "What the hell are you doing!", again was what I am defining as social shock.

This whole thing has caused me to reflect on the various moments in life that seemed to happen with no warning as well as the things that everyone only seems to realize are happening half way through the moment...

"Yaaawwwwnnnnn"....opps I wasn't covering my mouth, I'm sure that looked cute!

'Whew it was only a silent one'....OH NOOOOOO I HAD EGGS FOR BREAKFAST!!!!!

"Hey guys listen to this one rip!"....Oh Shit!! (that literally happened to a friend of mine in New Orleans and he was forced to take a cab home and change...he had to sit down to ride in the cab!)

I guess the point of this whole thing is that as perfect as we want to believe we are...we are still human....no wait that's not the point....

DO NOT DIG FOR GOLD IN PUBLIC, DO IT AT HOME!!!

Going To Iceland

"I Love Lucy", "The Andy Griffith Show", "Bewithced", "The Brady Bunch", "The Cosby Show". What do all these shows have in common? They represent various points in time when life was a lot more simple than it is in this day and age. As adults most of us long for the days when things were less intense and our worries were more about where to go and what to do over the weekend. We have all also been forced to learn that with each passing year there seems to be more and more than we have to think about, worry about, more to face and deal with, while we wish we could go back to a place in time when it was just easier. For myself, and I'm sure many of my former classmates, that was our time spent at A.T. Mahan High School in Keflavik, Iceland.

Now I realize that for a vast majority of people high school was an awkward adventure that went far beyond trying to figure how the hell we were going to use algebra on a day to day basis, or why did we really need to know the history of the world, or what is the point of understanding Hamlet. In the midst of all this academic turmoil, social anxiety and plotting schemes to have fun without getting caught, you come home from school one day and find out that one, or both, of your parents just got orders that, when translated in your own mind state the following terms: "Pack your shit-again, say goodbye to your friends-again, get ready for a new school-again...this time your going to Iceland!"

Now for someone like myself, whose claim to fame at this point had been typing every single word that had been printed in the previous school years yearbook. I say that pointing out the difference between "typing the words" versus "writing the articles". I was not popular in high school, was not into sports, clubs or any other extra-curricular activities. I was not preparing for college, I did have a job though and I was 18, which meant that I didn't have to go to Iceland if I didn't want to....and i didn't want to, nor did I go...well not at first.

It took all of about two months "on my own" before I called my dad and said I really screwed up and needed to come home. By this point "home" now meant going to a big old piece of lava rock where there was 23 hours of darkness in the winter and 23 hours of sunlight in the summer. A rock where the temperature rarely creeped up above sixty degrees in July and where the ground was pretty much hidden under the snow for six months out of the year. I already have a pretty bad attitude and anger management problem and the situation I was about to get into only served to make it worse...in the beginning that is.

I remember trying to tell myself that things wouldn't be as bad I thought they were going to be. My dad made arrangements to have my things shipped, I sold my car, made a trip to visit my granny and prepared myself mentally as best as I knew how at the time. I had a friend drive me to the base where I had to catch the plane for the eight hour flight from Norfolk, Virginia.

As they began calling everyone into order at the air terminal to walk us out to the flight-line to board the plane I forced myself to summon up a sense of excitement as we walked out the door into the sunlight and in one quick second my heart sank. I was about to board a flight from sunny Virginia Beach to desolate Iceland....on what??

Hawaiian Airlines!?!

WTF?

The Red Line

Perhaps their is no place more interesting or annoying than the Red Line here in Chicago. From what I've been able to gather so far in my few short months of living here, it is the busiest of the CTA trains running south to north in Chicagoland. As with any form of public transportation what makes it interesting and annoying as hell at the same time, are the people who ride.

There never seems to be a lack of three screaming kids running back and forth, apparently with no parental guidance. That is until you look at the end of the train car you are in and notice mom sitting in that little alcove with one seat, somewhat separated from the rest of the car, with an empty stroller and a cell phone glued to her ear. Now i can deal with the kids being a little crazy, after all they are just kids. I remember when I was but a wee little lad myself, my mother had the horrid task of riding cross country on a Greyhound bus with me and my little sister. The difference being that my mom gave a damn and would not have let us run around like a banshee.

Spending the past few months getting in touch with people from high school after almost twenty years and being bum rushed with all the photo's that I personally have not seen in almost as many years from our high school days has been overwhelming at times. I mention this as I wonder if the three high school kids who I had no choice but to sit next to today will realize in twenty years just how stupid they were on this day.

I take comfort in the fact that seeing as how my senior year was spent on a little island in the middle of the ocean, there were limits to our choices in fashion, hair styles and let's face it the 80's lingered on for several years into the 90's as much as we might have wished they didn't. The kids on the train today had no such excuses for anything they were doing in fashion, hair or speech. I honestly felt that I was sitting next to a more politically correct 90210, and I am not referring to the new show, but the original.

Remember that Valley Girl that had the most annoying voice you have ever heard, who also did not seem to understand the difference between actually speaking and singing? "Oh my goddd, can you believe him, he was sooooo groooossss. I was like....and theeennn he wennnt....and this one time at band caammmpppp....".

This girl that I was sitting next to the whole time never shut up throughout the trip and although she departed the train by herself, the conversation apparently continued in her head. I learned many things today about this young woman, and I use the term loosely because from her conversation today loose is the operative word. She loves people knowing her name so that she can walk through the hallways at school and people will acknowledge her, though I'm skeptical as to why. Her life's goal is to be able to whistle, which she was able to do when she was younger by blowing through the gap in her front teeth, which no longer exists. She also is not sure if she wants to do the nasty with a boy, a girl, or a just by herself. Any of the three of these options were up in the air for her. It wasn't until I finally saw her, for I was afraid to even acknowledge her presence lest I should be sucked into her conversation somehow, that I realized that she would be doing the nasty all by herself for quite some time to come in the future.

Now do you remember also that white girl in school that thought she was black, or vice-versa the black girl that thought she was white? Well she made up one third of this little group today and had she not been so obvious in her endeavor to be something she wasn't, I may not have even noticed her. Now everyone is totally entitled to act and behave in whatever way they feel is being true to themselves. The problem I see is when people try to be someone they know nothing about and stick their noses up and look down on people, for no other reason than total and utter ignorance.

I honestly felt sorry for the guy in this threesome. This poor dude was stuck with two girls who were so annoying, to point that I almost turned to them and asked them please shut up or get off the train before I went bi-polar on them. The formally gap toothed valley girl had such an obvious crush on this guy, and this guy wanted to smack the shit out of her, you could just feel it in the air. Who ever he was texting back and forth along the way would have made much better company for him than two chicks stuck in whatever world they were in.

I often think that it would be so much easier to be a teenager in this day and age compared to twenty years ago. Although I'm confident that I could have come out to my friends in high school and not been afraid of anything, I had the advantage of really being in another world. After today perhaps I am wrong about it being easier to be a teenager, because I ran into a group of them who were searching for who they were in this world and their journey is far from over. As annoyed as I was with these kids today, I envied them as well. Wouldn't it be great if the only thing that we were worried about was learning how to whistle again, since you no longer had that gap between your teeth!

A synopsis of life

The main point of setting up this blog is to share with the people that I went to high school with in Keflavik, Iceland the answer to the question that we have all seemed to ask each other recently, "So what have you been up to?" After 18 years of not being in touch with so many people of these people myself, that can be a very loaded question.

For those of you that may come across this blog and decide to read it, it will still be an interesting read for sure. Of course there are friends in my life that ask me what it was like to live in Iceland and I intend on starting from that point. Along the journey I want to also comment on the countless, pointless, sometimes insane, sometimes not thoughts, feelings, and basic random crap that runs through my head.

One of my best friends from high school recently told me that I probably have more stories than anyone else that we graduated with. The more I thought about those words, the more I realized that my life has been nothing short of an adventure. Not necessarily one that anybody in their right mind would want to embark on, nevertheless one that continues to go on day by day.

You will not find anything spectacular here, I haven't gone to the African Jungles, climbed Mt. Everest or even walked up the Washington Monument. What I have done is survive a life that has dealt me all sorts of challenges and taught me to be strong, never to regret, learn from the mistakes and above all else remind me everyday that I am not invincible, but I am loved and I am human....just like you.

Everything that I will post will be honest, true(to the best of my somewhat not so clear recollections), and hopefully a little funny at times. There are a lot of things that have happened just in the past few years that, if it had not happened to me personally, I wouldn't believe it. Trust me though, I have no reason to make things up because life has been way too interesting. I mean come on, how many people do you know who are bleached blond southern boys, living in Chicago, with a boyfriend in California, has gone through three hurricanes and above all else.....has my name?!

Welcome to The Life & Times Of The All-American....Trotzky