@done

@done 26 October 2022

What your are witnessing as we roll into this election season is a group who repeat the lies over and over... ... learning that the lies are lies.

@done 11 March 2022

From the Garden to the Woods We left off talking about playing in the front yard and driveway so far. Let me tell you about the back yard today so you have a picture of the house and surroundings where I grew up. We could easily go into the house and out the back door to get to the back yard, but I have a memory of something that occurred right near the house on the side yard. **No workie, no eatie** Half way up the front stairs, you could turn left on a sidewalk that lead around the house. Bushes were between the sidewalk and the house. A as we walk around the house, we see a flat dirt area along the side of the house. The dirt is held back by railroad ties. If they were not there, the dirt would fall onto the side walk. To your left as you walk, there is a large side yard with a big elm tree to shade the side yard. My father Bought a rotor-tiller and ran it over the section between the brick house and the sidewalk and his plan was to plant a vegetable garden there. He chose me as his helper. We were pulling weeds and planting seeds there. I was young and bored within minutes but my dad wanted me to help him finish planting the garden. Every time I looked up while working, I saw my siblings talking and snacking and playing in the kitchen. There was a picture window that allowed a great view of the side yard, the dead end road we lived on, the highway that ran past the neighborhood and an arboretum just past that. I remember asking my dad why the other kids do not have to work. He said, "Don't worry, if they don't work, then they cant eat what grows here." So, I taunted them about that. In the end, that became a saying, "No workie, no eatie." That summer, I learned that you should put two seeds in one spot in case one does not grow. Not a bad strategy. I *did* use it when I planted things after that. Now, I test the seeds before planting. The ones that sink in water are the ones you want to use. I also germinate them in a foil packet with moist paper towels inside. When they sprout, I plant them. But every time I plant a seed, I **do** think of my father and what he taught me. Later, he set up a sprinkler in the garden. I was told to open the tap where the hose was connected to it and run around the house two times. Then shut it off. Great way to have a kid use a timer and burn up some of that extra energy too! The problem was that my brother and sisters would sometimes take the sprinkler out of the garden and put it in the yard. We did not have a pool and hot days were spent trying to cool off. I have clear memories of running and jumping over the water that was spraying upward in all directions. But after we were done, I would have to take the sprinkler back to the garden where it belonged. The back yard. Once you get past the house, you are in the back yard. All the houses on my street had similar back yards. If you step out the back door and walk straight ahead, you are on flat terrain for about fifty feet. Turn right and it would gradually go up hill, left was down hill. The back yard was not quite as big as half a football field. Under the flat part was a septic tank and the the grass was always thicker and more lush above it. The rest of the yard sloped downward into the forest, affectionately called ***the woods***. Past the woods was a corn field. At such a young age, I was only allowed out with my sisters who were older. We played in the forest behind our house and knew it very well. we would later build an entire neighborhood in those trees, but I am getting ahead of myself. At the edge of the forest was a section of metal lattice where we had grape vines growing on the side that faced the house. Raspberries grew on the same lattice but on the side facing the forest. At the base of those, there was always rhubarb to harvest at will and it was a favorite snack for us as kids. We cut it and brought it indoors, washed it and then dumped sugar in a bowl. We dipped the end of a rhubarb stalk in the sugar and bit the end off. Rubarb would become less sour and more leafy tasting as you worked your way up to the leafy ends. That is how you knew when grab a new one. As you walk around the east side of the house, we had another side yard but it was tiny. Our neighbors to that side, the Schmidts, had an equally tiny side yard and our houses were only about twenty feet apart. Split that and you have the width of each tiny side yard. Our house was brick and there were more grape vines planted all around the east side and they grew and climbed the brick walls all the way up to and under the eves of the house. Fall was a delicious time for us and my mother would later make grape jam. https://pxhere.com/en/photo/933042 Ground level of the side yard was eight feet higher than ground level of the driveway and the two met abruptly at the southeast corner of the house. There was a flagstone staircase that lead down to the driveway and flagstone wall about knee high that ran the length of the drive. It held the hill from pouring into the driveway. This is is what a flagstone stairway looks like. Ours was twice as high. To the left would be our two car garage and to the right would be a 'retaining wall' running the length of the driveway. The problem with flagstones is that when it rains, the dirt runs out through the cracks and all over your driveway, soon you have a pit (where the left side plant is) with no dirt inside. The flagstones fall in the process over time, you find yourself climbing a dirt hill instead of stairs. The flagstones used when our house was built were not as even as the ones in this picture. Remember when I talked about bikes and how we rode them into the garage and skidded on the smooth cement floor? Well, there was another way we could earn the belt.. Between the corner of the house and the flagstone stairway was dirt with a few flagstones toward the bottom. There is no graceful way to descend eight feet right at the corner of the house. Someone had the idea that planting vines would hold the dirt back, but when kids slide down the dirt, it makes a butt shaped natural slide that was fun to ride but plants on that dirt slide did not do well. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c1/81/ae/c181ae7b0ce405ae890e430b8ff8426c.jpg We could not lift the flagstones but we would kick them out of the way so we could slide better. Oops. Whatever dirt the rain did not wash into the drive, we brought down with our little behinds. Later those same behinds would be striped. If you have read all of my articles up until now, then you will have a pretty good idea of where all the events take place from here on out. We have worked our way around the house from the hill we lived on, the garage, the west side where the garden is, our huge elm tree named Elmily, the back yard and all the mysteries that will be discovered in the woods. You know completed one lap around the house with me and we can turn the water off after the second one! Most of my story will take place at this residence. **That's it for today**. It will take some time to get to *how I got where I am*. These articles are documenting the good, the funny, the hard knocks, love, heartbreaks, and successes of someone who thinks outside-the-box. Have a look at some of https://read.cash/r/done. You can also find me on Noise.Cash & memo.cash  https://memo.cash/profile/12ErLNdXWZh6pNB8ySjRiaeebBKQYDVNWc **Thank you!**

@done 8 March 2022

The Good, the Bad, and the Special A bit more background on my parents. My dad had a pretty short fuse, an ex-military man who worked on aviation hydraulics in the Air Force at the end of WWII. He struggled with alcoholism but had beaten it in the early years of my parents' marriage. My mom was a nurse and she fell in love with my dad when they were dating. Mom was the youngest of three sisters with over ten years age difference to her closest sibling. I never met my grandparents on Mom's side. Dad had a younger sister and a much younger brother who are both still alive today, though elderly. What little I know about my father comes from stories I had heard from my uncle. For now, I am writing about what I do remember. Mom was a teacher and was very loving. Dad seemed to be in charge of discipline and other things that made my mother yell at him. I remember my five year old self being rewarded for being a good boy, via my mother's report at the end of the day. My father would take me in his room and pull down a fishbowl of sorts that held his loose change and small bills. I was allowed to reach my little hand in there and close my fingers around as much money as I could grab. I never had an occasion to spend money until much later, but I was able to get these little metal disks and crunchy paper out of his spare change bowl. My brother and sisters were able to do the same. Bad reports would usually result in the belt coming off. Talk about being scared. That was a very stressful time in life. I remember trying to run and being told to come back. I do not remember being hit, but I do remember one incident where I had stopped to point at my father. His head was bleeding. I guess he had swung accidentally hit the top of his bald head. That ended the spanking. I also remember my mother saying things like, "Wait till your father gets home." I also remember bargaining with her not to tell him about the goofy childish thing we did on that particular day. As you might imagine, my children have never been hurt like that by me. We saw Dad in the evenings and he would do a lot of tricks for us. He pulled a string through his neck for us, he had coin tricks that he could do and then there was his harmonica. He could play a lot of songs that we did not know, until we did know them from his playing. Special dates. He liked to spend time with us kids. He took all four of us out sometimes. Mom needed a break I guess. But then there were special dates. My older sisters got them one on one most times. My brother and I were a different matter. Nine times out of ten, we were a team for special dates. The name was made up by my mom I think. She went on dates with Dad way before we did. We had heard about their dates and when Dad took us out, they became ***special dates***. Whenever my dad was working on something, and he was always working on something, he would need screws, wood or supplies. My sisters hated going to the hardware store, so when he had those kinds of errands, he would grab the boys. It was time for a special date and off to the hardware store we went! I loved seeing all the men there. I asked what each and every tool was for until Dad lost patience. Then I would try not to ask. He had a limit. Most times, we had ice cream or a visit to the candy store en route. If the special date did not include cool stuff like hardware, saws, hammers an the like, he would offer up *the drive* as the cool part of the date. I remember one of our dates was a grocery run. Boring! We were returning home, me and my brother in the back seat of my dad's Saab with paper bags of groceries. There was an S curve on the way about two blocks shy of our arrival home. https://pinxcars.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/saab-1386173523kn48g.jpg He took that S curve at blinding speeds. My brother and I would be thrown from one side to the other and then back again. Super fun! We would talk about it all day every time he did that. The car would lean so much, we swore it had gone up on two wheels. Speeding around those two turns became a tradition from then on. I remember we would anticipate the turns and start throwing ourselves from one side to the other. I tried imitating that same thrill on **the same S curve** when I became a father. No fun with car seats. Besides, my child flew with me in airplanes starting as soon as he could walk. The S curve did not seem to thrill him at all after experiencing steep turns and two-G dives. When we pulled in the driveway, my dad had to play "find the boys" under all the bags of groceries that had spilled over on us. No pain or injuries. Just a lot of fun. It later became a tradition to hide ourselves under all the groceries so my dad could not find us - as usual. We were surprised one time when the S curve was driven at normal speeds. There we were under all the groceries with a mock mess that never occurred. We were kids. We did not know about bread and eggs and things that you should not lay on or dive under. I think there was a spanking in my stack of stories related to special dates. That's it for today. It will take some time to get to how I got where I am. These articles are documenting the good, the funny, the hard knocks, love, heartbreaks, and successes of someone who thinks outside-the-box via trial and error. Have a look at some of my other articles. https://read.cash/r/done You can also find me on Noise.Cash & memo.cash  https://noise.cash/u/undone https://memo.cash/profile/12ErLNdXWZh6pNB8ySjRiaeebBKQYDVNWc **Thank you!**

@done 4 March 2022

Not the same after 'Tar Wars' It has been a while since my last article. We left off when my family had moved to a different house in the suburbs, but had been bothered by the introduction I had made for my mother. I asked my sister what she knew about my mother and father meeting. So, I will interject the new information here. New information As I had said, my mother had been studying to be a catholic nun but I did not know the details on how she had become my mother. She was in the convent and already had her teaching degree. When she approached the authorities (the diocese?) about studying to become a nurse, they had denied her request. She would just have to be a teacher. When my mother decided that she was going to leave the convent in order to pursue her passion, they had shoved her out the door at two o'clock in the morning. She was stuck on the streets with just the clothes on her back. My uncle had to pick her up. I think these circumstances are important because Mom never gave up her faith. Later on, when she had almost finished obtaining her nursing license, she met my father. Two of her fellow nurses had met him because alcoholics anonymous meetings were held at the hospital where they all worked. They thought he was a nice man and set my mother up with him. The rest is history as they say. One of those women ended up being my godmother as it turns out. My father did relapse back into drinking for a time, but I had nor recollection of that from our previous house. I did remember that he had had a broken jaw at one point. I did not know how that occurred. Some say it was a bar fight. Either way, it was at a time when he was drinking and the only memory that I have of that time is me, looking at a picture of him and asking why his jaw was wired shut. To this day, I am severely irked whenever I must deal with an alcoholic. They cannot be dealt with using reason or logic in any sort of productive manner. Back to experiences The driveway led into the garage which was under the rest of the house. The driveway was made of coarse white gravel. I am not sure if our house was new or not, but I later saw this same gravel as a first functional medium for cars and trucks to park outside a new home that was being built. I remember it because playing anywhere near it caused my clothes to be covered in white dust. I may as well have been playing in a pile of chalk sticks like those used in schools, at the time. I am not sure when I learned to ride my first bike, but I do remember my younger brother and I coasting down the hill, making the right turn into the driveway, and if successfully able to stay upright through the chalk-gravel, we hit the smooth floor of the garage and hit our brakes to see who could make the longest skid! When my father got home, we were very surprised to see that he somehow knew what we had been doing all day. "This is not a @#%#@$ skidway!" and my mother would perk up and come to see what our fate might be. To this day, I have never heard anyone else in God's green earth call anything a skidway. To the side of the drive was a part flagstone, part cement stairway leading up to the front door. Gravel was what defined the driveway which matched the street, though the street used smaller rocks and a good deal of black tar to bind the little white stones from moving too far. https://pxhere.com/en/photo/32569 We used to play in the street quite a bit. It was fun to pop the tar bubbles on hot days. Our army platoons never looked quite the same after their first ***epic battle of the street***. "Tar Wars" changed the troops from green to black, and stuck together of course. The only traffic that might have put us in danger would be Mr. Stevens coming home from work, but we were usually at the dinner table when his car came down the hill. The Stevens' house was the only one to the west, or down the hill, from our house. He also had a gravel driveway but instead skidding bikes, Mr. Steven's was annoyed by people who would turn around in his driveway after finding out that the street was a dead end. You could hear them accelerating, after backing out of his drive, gravel spewing from the rear tires as they left. There was Mr. Stevens shaking his fist in the air from his front stairs. The article you are reading gives you a fair picture of the surroundings when playing in the front yard as a child. I am feverishly looking for any pictures I might have from that time in my distant past. My sister said she may have some pictures of the house when we were little. For now, I am searching for similar photos on the interweb. All photos used from other free sites are sourced with links in the text near each photo. ***That's in for this one.*** Have a look at some of my other articles. https://read.cash/r/done You can also find me on Noise.Cash & memo.cash https://noise.cash/u/undone https://memo.cash/profile/12ErLNdXWZh6pNB8ySjRiaeebBKQYDVNWc Thank you!

@done 28 February 2022

4 X 4 Childhood Home The first couple places we lived gave me very few clear memories because of my age. Knowing where I lived and at what age we moved actually did help me place memories and how old I was when they occurred. We pick up our story at a new house, twenty miles outside of a major U.S. city, located several municipalities south of the other two that we have traversed. This one has a front yard with a hill rolling down toward the street and a grass covered ditch of sorts where the water moves from one culvert to the next. https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.lkhVp0_EQAbBFHqHuufmUwHaJ2 We also lived on a good size hill. Our street led down to a dead end due to an interstate that ran by our neighborhood. But none of that mattered much to me as a four year old kid. My younger brother and I just wanted to play in the yard and we constantly made believe that the ditch was a war zone, rocks were the bombs that fell, and each explosion was a hand full of dirt thrown directly in the direction of up. G.I. Joe games were only the first of many. We also had a back yard that had a fair size forest in it. The property line was somewhere midway through the forest which gave way to farmland if you walked far enough. With farm fields, comes mice. Some of my first memories involve our black and white cat named "Friskie" because he acted that way. Every time frisky went out, he was free to come and go as he pleased, he returned bearing gifts. The mice would be alive most times. I guess he figured that we would also be entertained by how they played dead when you step on them. My mother was not liking that game at all. https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FIp05AlQFYx4%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1 Friskie was purchased for practical reasons. His job was to keep the mice at bay. He only asked to go out when the house was mouse free. My father called Friskie "**that infernal cat**" because Friskie seemed to taunt him. One day, he had his belt off and was trying to get Friskie out from behind his chair. My dad was in his chair, a lazy-boy, and Friskie had climbed up the back and tapped the top of my Dad's head. There was very little hair up top there and this scenario had played out quite often. Instead of getting up and chasing Friskie, he started to swing his belt so that it wrapped around the back of the chair in an effort to teach "**that infernal cat**" a lesson. Friskie ended up under the couch and I was elected to get him out from under there. When I nudged him a few times, he came out and bit me on the leg, my inner thigh to be exact. There were two perfect puncture marks that were welling up with blood every time I would wipe them off. The other kids went to school that day. I went with my mother to the doctor for a tetanus shot. I am not sure if I was four years old when I was bitten, but I was younger than seven for sure. This same house will be my home and the set for many other stories from the time ***I was four*** until ***my son turns four*** which covers thirty years. Is that a 4 X 4 generation or what? **That's it for today.** It will take some time to get to how I got where I am. These articles are documenting the good, the funny, the hard knocks, love, heartbreaks, and successes of someone who thinks outside-the-box via trial and error. Have a look at some of my other articles. Thank you! https://read.cash/r/done

@done 25 February 2022

Infantile awakening Still early in life My only memories of the house where my parents brought me after I was born were presented in the last article. If there are any others lurking in my grey matter somewhere, I cannot pull them up right now. Paper records and the dates therein state that we had moved when I was one. One to Four The next house was in a different village and it was located in town, which means you could walk a block or so and run into a news stand or store. The house was not far from the street and it had a sidewalk parallel to the street about thirty feet from the front steps. It was a brick house, dark ones with cement caps as railings going up the five or six steps. I think we had a porch. I only found it one time while driving in that neighborhood after I became an adult. My memories from childhood and the ones from passing by the house give me the ammunition needed for this article. Not much about my toddler years flashes in my mind. We lived in this house only until I was four years old. During those three years, I attained knowledge about how people pay for their house every month. We had a landlord and there were frequent arguments with him because they lived next door and our back doors were separated only by a pair of driveways, theirs and ours. The Eshelmans If you want to have a house to live in, you have to pay Mr. Eshelman for it. I wondered if other kids had houses with Eshelman people living next door that yelled at them. My mother tried to become friends with Mrs. Eshelman but she was not allowed to fraternize with the tenants. I found out that she was bald but every time I saw her I could not tell. She had a scarf or something on her head. I was still trying to come to grips with people's looks and how they could change them with hats and different clothing. I was three! Of course, my mother would talk on the phone. I heard the gossip and tried to incorporate what I could in the way of vocabulary. That is a kid's main struggle aside from learning to tie shoes and how to tell if a shirt is inside out. I remember asking questions about words I did not understand. Sometimes I had to wait for the answer. Maybe she did not even know. One day, my mother was visibly upset. I heard her talking to my aunt. It was something about Mrs. Eshelman and how she had used some money to buy a wig. I learned what a wig was that day. I was amazed that people would want to fake their hair. Well, Mr. Eshelman had come home late the previous night and he was yelling - I remember waking up to it. I cannot remember the result of that fiasco and my mother is not here to help me with the missing pieces. I do know that there was always yelling next door. Pat The only other memory that I can think of from this house is playing in the front yard. I had a tractor or some sort of riding toy. It could have been a tricycle. We had one of those too - it had a place to step up on along the rear axle. You could kick like a skateboard and steer with the handlebars. It got my ankles a few times while learning that skill. I was riding one day and when I looked at the sidewalk, I saw a person walking left to right. I remember a green sweater, jeans, curly hair puffed out like a dandy lion in its seed phase. If you have ever seen a snot-nose kid staring at you dead silent, that was me. Pat glanced at me but did not say anything. I was thinking about Pat in my head but could not come up with a *he* or *she* to attach to my thoughts. Up until then, I had not had any trouble finding a pronoun for any of my mother's friends, my sisters, my brother or any other child I met and played with. This was strange to me. One of my clearest early memories and it was cleared up by the mammaries which I eluded to in my last post. I was looking at this person for clues. No girl hair, no dress, no cigar, cannot see the muscles, no makeup, no lipstick, no high heels, no purse, no briefcase, no hat, no visible jewelry. I was stumped until I saw the bumps under the sweater. My mom has those! I bet she is a girl. I should have more memories up until this point in my life. Maybe of a candy store or shopping with my mother. But I do not. Just the Eshelmans and Pat. Speaking of Pat, I just made my xxth twitter account and called myself **Pat Slone** this time. I have put up a profile pic and passed a couple human tests so far. I do not tend to last long on algo-social platforms. If it is still up, I want to use it to 'tweet' out posts from read.cash as another way to be a sponsor. It should be up top with the others. https://twitter.com/SlonePat That's it for today. It will take some time to get to how I got where I am. These articles are documenting the good, the funny, the hard knocks, love, heartbreaks, and successes of someone who thinks outside-the-box via trial and error. Have a look at some of my other articles. Thank you! https://read.cash/r/done

@done 22 February 2022

Your Sponsor's Introduction I am a self made man who retired a half a decade ago, or so. I am disgusted by governments world-wide who feel that they have the right to collect information about us, then use it against us, up to and including our opinions. I have no problem laying out every detail of my existence on the internet. It does them no good unless they have the name of the person writing said details. My hope is that read.cash will be a safe place for this man's life story and when done, my yet unborn grandchildren will know me. Heading back in time I want to start with some of the earliest mammaries. I do not remember which one was my favorite but I relied on them until I was big enough to eat solid food. But really, the earliest thing I can recall was scooting on a wooden floor investigating a folding partition door that separated the front hallway from the living room. This is what it looked like. I know which of my childhood homes this was because I was in diapers and we only lived in Saint Charles until I was one year old. I remember soiling my diaper and not being happy about that. I remember thinking about how that seems to happen over and over. no concept of days, weeks of even that would likely sleep later. Life just happened to me. I cried, got more unhappy, then cried louder. That is the end of this memory clip. The other memory I have from that same house was more related to my first million. I was less than a year old and I was playing in the driveway. It was mid afternoon and I remember a large wooden wrench on a string and my toy wooden car was in pieces. The part about this occurring in the afternoon was from my mother's memory of that event. You see, she had seen the truck all in pieces and when my father returned from work, she asked him to go put it back together. He pointed out the window and said that I was riding it when he pulled up. I had only begun to walk and I had already begun to modify my cars. Apparently they still sell these kinds of toys - image found here. https://giveagift.co.uk/wooden-toys/8-personalised-wooden-tool-truck.html That's it for today. It will take some time to get to how I got where I am. These articles are documenting the good, the funny, the hard knocks, love, heartbreaks, and successes of someone who thinks outside-the-box via trial and error. Have a look at some of my other articles as they emerge. Thank you!