Let my skull be a home for the mice

Given that it is the season for the macabre and the gruesome it seems appropriate to talk about the things that aren’t oft spoken about in polite company. I have always been a fan of the darker side of things, found beauty where others only see ugliness and I know I’m not unique in this sort of thing. There are whole industries built up on those things which avoid convention and embrace the darker side. Not sure how much truth there is to the saying, if you stare too long into the darkness it begins to stare back into you. So to celebrate the time of year and my love of the less than conventional dinner conversation in the query as to what becomes of the physical me once I’m gone. Well to honor my love of learning I really would like to donate my body to science. Which I did not know until recently that there are all sorts of restriction and such to that or at least donating your body to some things. I also think it would be fun to get entertaining tattoos so med students could read them and laugh or find inspiration. To borrow from “Breaking Bad” I have considered getting, “Yeah, science bitch!” tattooed across my chest. I think that would a bit uplifting to see that staring back at you, especially on a bad day. Other things: the bio hazard emblem, “Enjoy today it has to be better than mine” and on and on. Make anatomy a bit of fun. Someone suggested getting the body parts tattooed but that might be a disqualifier for a classroom cadaver. Once my work was done in the classroom as a cadaver, I’ve always wanted to have my skull cleaned and then bronzed. You know to be used as a book end or paper weight. Something to pass on down to the kids and grandkids. I mean show and tell would be awesome for the great grandkids, who else would have the actual skull of an ancestor to bring in for that, no body …bahahahahaha get it no body just the head. But seriously, this is my great granddad or great great granddad…winner. How about tagging along to a party long after you’ve shuffled off the mortal coil. Guess what is in the bag? A human skull. That would be the best Halloween party decoration ever. I’ve also wanted to start building the family “spice” rack or moveable cemetery. Cremation is one day going to be a requirement and cemeteries will be outlawed and a thing of legend or storytelling and no longer a place to go hide because most people are too afraid to go into the cemetery at night. So having the whole family in little labeled jars makes for a very interactive family tree discussion. This here is your great aunt so and so and she did whatever it was that she was famous for like robbing banks or something. Recently though science has come up with anything carbon can be made into diamonds thing, which has gotten me to thinking that jewelry which is actually family members would be totally awesome too. Having a family charm bracelet made of actual family members compressed into diamonds. I mean seriously how cool is that. If you are a guy having the gems put into a watch face as the numbers. It’s half past Uncle Billy or a quarter till granddad. Then what about the rest of the bones or tattoos. I mean skinning people has been done for ages and made into book covers, lampshades, museum pieces and lots of other products have been made out of human skin. Not exactly a gift for everyone, and that may not be a thing that most people want as a present or even to have around. But I like my tattoos and it would be a shame for them to just rot away or burn to dust. Then there are all sorts of things that can be made from bones; tools, art, and functional décor to name but a few. People have always kept bones around until recently. Stored them up in catacombs or ossuaries. The Sedlac Ossuary in the Czech Republic has the bones of perhaps 70,000 people as adornments and functional pieces. Rome and Paris had catacombs so large they have no idea how many peoples remains are stored under the cities. I’m not sure why we have strayed away from the practice to be honest but we have. Hopefully my bones will be dice or table legs or perhaps the eyeless face staring back from a bookshelf watching future generations of my line celebrate living. Who knows maybe I can even get the part of Yorick in Hamlet, “Alas poor Yorick I knew him well …” Would you get billing in the playbill as the skull who played Yorick. Happy Halloween Well, that’s all for now, other stuff to follow most likely Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday Today’s title: Lyrics from Tom Waits “ Satisfied” Thank you for reading, please subscribe, Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood. Ciao, Invisible Don PS 3 / PS4 Gamer Tag: invisible don Invisible Don PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015 Send me Post Cards … I love Post Cards

6 degrees

There was a saying that between you and anyone else there are only 6 degrees of separation, the saying came from a theory and the theory spurred a film that hardly anybody saw and a game that people used to play called, Back to Bacon. The idea of the game is the same as the theory name an actor and in six films or less you can find a link to Kevin Bacon. I don’t hear this said any more or play the game any longer either but I have pondered the 6 degrees thing and it works. You would be surprised how quickly you can get to most anyone. Some of it is conjecture and you guess where paths might lead and at least in theory it would seem to work. I’ve not ever called in any of my guess work to cash in on meeting anyone in particular by my mere six steps away from meeting someone famous or infamous. Say you only get to do this one time in your life, how do you pick who you would want to meet? Do you just on a whim pick whomever strikes your fancy that particular day or do you try to sort out someone meaningful and fulfilling. The problem is the fulfilling person is statistically more likely to disappoint you than impress your pants off, the crush is going to be a real person with their own thoughts and not your super imposed ones. The point is that your fantasy meeting quickly spiral out of your hands and into reality. Which if you are lucky slightly resembles your idea of the perfect evening, tryst, or conversation I’m not certain if I would aim for the lofty or the bawdy if I dared to take the six steps to meeting anyone. A lot of the people I would like to meet are dead, and that has its own set of drawbacks. However, keeping with the living. The theory only puts you in the room with the person nothing else. So anything happening beyond perhaps embarrassing yourself or the other person is not terribly likely. Take for example when the other one and I met Ryan Reynolds. We are in Vancouver waiting in the smoking lounge and the then not so famous actor asks to bum a cigarette. I glance at him, the other one does too and we trade looks and say we know this person. The other one say, you look familiar. Mr. Reynolds goes into explain how he is on this program and I so eloquently blurt out as loud as possible for everyone to hear, YOU’RE THE PRODUCT TESTING GUY. Yes I became the beaming excited dolt who scared off Ryan Reynolds to hide in some corner with his borrowed cigarette. You are welcome for the cigarette by the way, Mr. Reynolds. Sorry I was an idiot. That said he never tested any more products on that show as part of his character, you’re welcome for that too. Probably saved your career. However any six way step you take to meeting anyone is likely to play out just as well as my random encounters with known people. No matter how you envision it, it is not likely to play out the way you hope. Then you are left wonder why you even bothered in the first place. Disillusioned and perhaps sad about the fall from the pedestal you put the person on. They haven’t really changed only how you see them with less separating you from them. Them from you for that matter. Fans are scary up close, unrealistic and loud. Still who would you try to meet if you could? What would you want to do? Why that person for that reason? I have crass answers, lewd answers, philosophical answers, across the board to meet some desire or another simply too many to pick just one. Well, that’s all for now, other stuff to follow most likely Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday Thank you for reading, please subscribe, Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood. Ciao, Invisible Don PS 3 / PS4 Gamer Tag: invisible don Invisible Don PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015 Send me Post Cards … I love Post Cards

You may not want to read this if you are a fan of WVU... fair warning

There was much debate over writing or not writing my thoughts about today’s topic. However, I finally landed on not voicing disgust and outrage is really what has led to the recent events in Morgantown so I decided popular or not I would go ahead and dive into the topic. As I begin I will say I am not alumni to WVU, but I am a West Virginia native, I realize that this was not the entire student body and not all students. WVU is not the first school to do this type of stupid thing but it also is not the first time that WVU / Morgantown has done this same kind of stupid thing. In case you live under a rock or just don’t care about anything West Virginia, following the win in Saturday’s football game, the grand ol’ tradition of “sofa burnin’” commenced. Most people including myself are not sure how this sacrifice to the gods of upholstery even became a thing there but it has and it had gone on for damn near 40 years. So while it was mainly young people out in the streets this past Saturday, the college presidents past and present, and every leader in Morgantown elected or appointed from the mayor to the chief of police for the past 40 years hold a certain amount of accountability for the antics and out of control behavior that isn’t just Saturdays around football season, it is all the time. Morgantown isn’t any worse than any other town in West Virginia, which unfortunately in the last decade isn’t saying much. I hate to see that West Virginia is becoming abused by businesses coming in and taking advantage of a crumbling economy, that many of the best and brightest of West Virginia have to leave the state to find a sustainable wages because there just are not enough good jobs to go around. Drugs, gambling, alcohol, and other crimes and vices are becoming more and more common place in the state but especially in the towns with a college. You may be saying what the hell does any of this have to do with anything that went on in Morgantown on Saturday. Well it lends to the general tone of how people think of things, if you let your town become a crappy little village where slum lords gouge students to the tune of 400 to 500 dollars a month for a bedroom in a shitty little house that has 5 to 6 bedrooms, that was built in the 1930’s which probably has lead paint, no drive way, wiring that would not pass code anywhere else, has carpeting from the 1970’s or 80’s and most likely is not on a bus route because the buses can’t make it up the streets because they are too narrow. A university that crams as many students into a classroom as possible without regard if they graduate or not but only concern themselves with making sure tuition is paid in full, then for the most part ignores the deviance and criminality of the student body. Such as, batteries and bottles thrown at visiting teams, drunken block parties, and the list goes on and on and it has for 40 years. WVU is a bad joke to most of the rest of the country, sadder still the joke extends to the rest of the state. I know that every student who goes to the school isn’t a trouble maker, isn’t a drunk, that there are actual classes taught there and people do graduate with knowledge. I know people who live there and they are good people. However, the students and citizens who participated in the events on Saturday should be ashamed and embarrassed that they have just added more ammunition to the loaded gun and more people not taking the school and the state seriously. Long before this Saturday’s antics I advise against any student wasting their money and time at this college not because of the school but because the leaders of the college and the town don’t care, they all the bad to go on, slum lords, crime, burning things in the street and looked the other way. They have allowed this behavior to become tradition. I lost count of how many times I read the phrase, “It is a tradition” as this somehow defends the criminal acts, a lot of things were traditions until people stopped doing them because they were stupid. The truly sad thing about this is, that nothing is going to change until one of these stupid couch burnings, gets out of control and burns down several blocks in the town and a few people die. It is only a matter of time; beat up old houses which need to be condemned, drunks, and burning sofas is just asking for problems. As someone who is from West Virginia, I’m mad as hell that one stupid town paints the whole state to look like a drunken bunch of hillbillies with no manners and no sense. Students of WVU and the leaders of Morgantown, it is time to grow up and act like you have a major college in your town, take some pride in the state and not just the fucking football team, and stop acting like the cast of a Jackass movie. Well, that’s all for now, other stuff to follow most likely Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday Thank you for reading, please subscribe, Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood. Ciao, Invisible Don http://invisibledon.diaryland.com/images/burningname.gif PS 3 / PS4 Gamer Tag: invisible don Invisible Don PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015 Send me Post Cards … I love Post Cards

Remembering my dad on his birthday

My father and me, me and my father. The parental unit, alpha unit, dad, daddy, pop, papa other moniker which indicates a male parent. I generally referred to my father as dad. He signed his cards dad, letters too were all signed dad. Well unless they were to someone else then he signed his name or dad if it was to one of my siblings. Dad, has been gone now for 11 years, it seems so much longer. The empty place that is created by losing a parent is always there. Nothing fills it back up. Memories are just that, memories. I can’t call him up and talk about something that is bothering me or to tell him what the kids are doing. I still remember his voice and the rough feel of beard stubble and the smell of coffee when he would hug me. He always had a firm hand shake and although he was small in build was stronger than he looked. I remember him telling me stories of his growing up in various places because his father was in the Navy. How one time he had convinced his older brother John to piss on a car battery behind a garage and the resulting shock his brother got and having to run home with his brother chasing him. Living in Florida and Michigan and how one was different than the other. What it is was like being a child diabetic. I remember him telling me how his high school girlfriend, not my mother, got mad at him and threw his class ring into an open field and he had searched for hours until he found it. There was one about wrecking a car and it rolling over a bunch of times on some back road, and how his mother’s favorite punishment for him and his brother was to hit them with a shoe. His story about meeting my mom, and how she almost didn’t go out with him. He wore a beard most of time when I was a kid, until it was too grey for his taste and then he never wore one again. In fairness he did go pretty grey in his late 30’s so I can see not wanting to have that much grey hair before you were in your 40’s. There are a lot of memories of my father, various things good and bad. The morning he called from the Cleveland Clinic to say they found a donor match for a heart transplant and he would be going into surgery soon. I remember talking to him about nothing really important just stuff, a normal conversation, but in the back of my mind I was thinking this could be the very last time I talk with him we should be saying something important. Ironically the last conversation my father and I had was just a normal conversation about getting ready to buy the house where I live now and how the kids were doing. Nothing earth shattering, not so very important, just a normal conversation. Our last words were good ones, typical last words in a phone conversation; Love you, talk to you soon. Sort of the automatic things you say when you talk with family. I didn’t know it then but that just regular conversation was the last one we would have. The thing I associate most with my father is coffee. He drank the hell out of some coffee. Those who know me and think I drink a lot of coffee, have no idea what it is to drink a lot of coffee. I rarely saw my father without a cup of coffee ever. Even when he had an orange juice he had coffee too. What I learned from my father is you never give up and that life only kicks your ass when you stop trying even though I may not always remember that lesson. When I think about what my father was like as a person it isn’t that he was perfect or the greatest it was that he always kept trying to make the lives of those he loved just a little bit better not with a grand gesture or a big prize just little regular everyday things. Well, that’s all for now, other stuff to follow most likely Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday Thank you for reading, please subscribe, Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood. Ciao, Invisible Don PS 3 / PS4 Gamer Tag: invisible don Invisible Don PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015 Send me Post Cards … I love Post Cards

My Family

This past weekend I went back to the home town area to celebrate the wedding of a cousin. One of the things I have always enjoyed about my family is the inclusion over so many years and the accidental similarities which have occurred over the years. This is mainly my father’s family, his siblings and their children but my mother’s family has always been included. When a lot of the gatherings began my paternal grandmother and great grandmother were both still living. For those not familiar my father had three siblings; a brother and two sisters. Those four children had 12 children, oddly 6 boys and 6 girls. I’m one of the 6 boys and myself and my other 11 family members have added 20 something children to the family. Now, those children are marrying and having children. This wedding isn’t the first of those to occur and surely won’t be the last. As our family has grown we have grown apart by physical distance and also sadly the number of occasion in which we gather has also started to dwindle. Things change, but I don’t really want to see this change. I remember very large family gatherings from when I was a child. One where our great grandmother who would have been in her 70’s straddling a Harley with a cigarette in her mouth and a beer in her hand. I know the cigarette was hers but the beer may have been a prop for the photo. My father, uncle and aunts continued this tradition for years over the all the teen angst of their children. People have come and gone in the group as one person marries, and another divorced, special friends who have become just like family, exchange students from all over the globe have become part of our family, and those included in the group continue to grow. We all haven’t always gotten along and there have been times when there have been sore feelings a time or two. What family doesn’t have those ups and downs? We have always come back together and been a family, laughed and cried together and celebrated all the accomplishment and step toward the next generation of this family. I extend this out to my 11 fellow family members, to remember all the good that came from our parents bringing us together all those times and how it has brought our children together to celebrate and to know they are loved. We have traveled from ocean to ocean together and a lot of the spaces in between. While we may not be able to have the Thanksgiving dinners that grew so large that no one person’s house could hold it any longer every year or the Christmas white elephant exchanges for other reasons. We grew up and knew each other and our children have come to know one another because of effort our father’s and mother’s put into making this happen. Let’s continue this tradition our parents started so our grandchildren and great grandchildren will know and love each other and hear us tell the stories about our mother’s and father’s and our grandparents and great grandparents and to make friend with cousins they would otherwise not even know. I really believe our lives were better for our parents bringing us all together and that our children’s lives are so much richer because they know their history and can see that from very humble beginnings in the hills of West Virginia, that we have roots all across this nation now. We have all laughed together, cried together, hugged and loved one another for so, so, many years. We are the ones now, that must carry this forward for the next generation and the next after that one. I am glad our parents started this tradition of gathering to celebrate our lives and I hope we will continue to celebrate our lives, our accomplishments great and small, and the events of our lives happy and sad for many generations to come. Without family you have nothing and we have a great family Well, that’s all for now, other stuff to follow most likely Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday Thank you for reading, please subscribe, Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood. Ciao, http://invisibledon.diaryland.com/images/burningname.gif PS 3 / PS4 Gamer Tag: invisible don Invisible Don PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015 Send me Post Cards … I love Post Cards