2025: Perhaps the Worst Affluent Year of My Life

 What do I mean by the title? I'm one of those guys who never figured out WTF I was supposed to be doing with my life. That line by Rodger Hodgson in his last album with Supertramp always sticks in my mind:

"I never knew what a man was supposed to be.

"I never wanted the responsibility."

Spent high school being told that I'd aced every aptitude test ever devised by man, and that I could be anything I wanted from a chemist to a journalist to a musician. Big help that, as I was confused enough as it was. In the end, I think I was just an absolute genius at taking multiple choice tests and nothing else. I went to a trade school the year after graduation, and was all thumbs. I could stand over people and tell them exactly how to repair something, but couldn't get my own hands to do what I knew needed to be done. I got infuriated with rusted bolts, grease-caked worn out parts, and in general things that didn't work the way they should after I'd followed every procedure to the letter.

I joined the army just before turning 20, and was basically a smart guy in a dumb job. I did clerical and data processing work in Washington DC during two tours, with three years in a corps headquarters in Germany in between. Didn't want to make the army a career, as just about everything about it seemed mindbogglingly wasteful, inefficient, and stupid... but I worried about WTF to do after I got out.

Much as I was sick of abstract thinking and traditional academic study by the end of high school, I'm one of those people who actually BELONGED in college and was really rather out of place trying to do things that didn't require a degree. I started taking evening classes in DC, and by the time I got out of the army in January 1981 I had my bachelor's degree  and had pretty much aced the GMAT exam for graduate study,

Long story short, I ended up with a master's degree in linguistics, a rather esoteric field that left me--again--wondering how in fuck's name I was supposed to make a living in this world. I ended up teaching English abroad, first in Peru, then Japan, then Mexico, then in Japan again. The last job abroad paid pretty well, and I I saved enough to spend the rest of my career teaching part time in community colleges in the U.S. while investing in real estate in California before prices went from insane to head-smashing bonkers.

The Big Picture here is that I spent the first thirty years of my life poor. My folks always lived paycheck to paycheck, and I HATED the way they  were always fretting about money while I was growing up in the sixties. I was very frugal, could always make what I earned go a long way, and saved substantially enough that I owned some nice stuff... but there was always that nagging question of what's next, how I was going to actually get anywhere in the long term.

From about 30 on, I had some breathing room but still wondered how I was going to make a long-term living and WTF I wanted to be when I grew up... if at that point I ever would. There were a couple of girlfriends--both over four years older than myself--in Peru and Japan who very much wanted to get married to me, but I worried about how the heck I could support them and thrive at the same time. One eventually married a guy older than herself, and the other I kept advising to do so, though I really don't know what became of her.

From mid-thirties to just after 40, I stayed at the same job in Japan and came back to the U.S. once a year, saving a lot of money and gradually buying up property. From about 1990 on, when I was 35, I'd say I was into my "affluent years." I was no longer worried too much about money or making a living, and knew I'd make it as long as I didn't do something stupid like get married and have kids with the wrong woman.

The years since then have had their ups and downs, but lack the drama and existential angst of youth. Besides that, I acquired a lot of hired help that I've kept around for decades. I have a regular insurance agent, tax preparer, mechanic, handyman, and several property management companies for the places in California and Arizona.

These folks absorb a lot of the headaches I used to deal with myself when my affairs weren't as complicated. Last year, in 2025, I absolutely would have lost my mind if I had to deal with the otherwise unbearable shit-slides that rolled my way seemingly endlessly and one after another. That's what the title of this entry means.

It all began around mid-2024, actually. I began waking up with weird round marks on my face and other parts of my body, or sometimes scratch marks that looked as if I'd been mauled by a bobcat. I'd break out in hives at unpredictable times, my upper or lower lip would swell up for an hour or so, and I'd sneeze uncontrollably sometimes two dozen times straight. After awhile, my bed sheets and pillow were covered in drops of blood.

After a month at my place in Prescott, I returned to San Diego in late October 2024 and lay down on clean sheets, exhausted from the long drive. I woke up in the wee hours to find my futon bed crawling with bugs, which I quickly concluded were bedbugs. In a way it was a relief to finally know what had been causing all these weird symptoms over the past half year or so. At least now I had a specific problem to address.

After a month of washing, spraying, vacuuming, and laying out diatomatious earth (however that useless recommendation is spelled), I finally decided to hire a pest control company, For about $800, they came out and sprayed four times while I spent most of December back in Prescott. Meanwhile, I found that I had the same problem at my place there too!

Well, on Christmas Eve I returned to San Diego and immediately saw a bedbug crawling up my living room wall. I went to bed that night and got eaten alive. I might as well have flushed $800 down the toilet, and now I had them in Prescott too as well as San Diego.

The day before New Year's, I headed out to my place in Miami Beach for a month, only to find them THERE as well! More washing, spraying, vacuuming, hoping, praying, cursing, crying.

Once back in San Diego, I tried another company for heat treatment, this time for $1,000 to treat both my small condo and my vehicle. Within a week, it was obvious that I still had bedbugs. I called the company back, actually a guy and his wife with a few other employees, and he told me that my concrete floor topped with jute rugs made for a perfect bedbug environment. The concrete couldn't heat up enough with the rugs on top, and the loose-weave rugs were bedbug Nirvana. I asked him why in hell he didn't advise of that in the first place.

ANOTHER month of following everyone's useless advice and trying to deal with this infuriating problem myself. I threw away basically everything I owned: the jute rugs, old clothes I seldom wore, decades old journals I knew I'd never refer too, pillows, cushions, curtains... you name it. More spraying, vacuuming, washing... and still bedbugs!

Another trip to Prescott for a month, where I hired a company to do a canine inspection of the house. The goddamned dog couldn't detect any bedbugs... So WHY do I have bites all over my fucking face, I asked the guy. No good answer. After more of the same, the problem seemed to go away... but by now I was far far beyond feeling reassured by temporary respites.

Now it's the beginning of May. The heat treatment guy and his wife come out a second time to do a second treatment with a small discount. I wake up the next morning to a bedbug crawling in my bathroom sink...

This is really just the backdrop to my dealings with The Tenant from Hell at my folks old house, which I'd bought from the estate when my dad passed away in 2011. In 2020--shortly before the tenant moved in and immediately got exemption from paying rent due to the pandemic--it had required almost $30,000 of repairs when the sewer line rusted and the master bathroom became unserviceable. I hired a well-known shit-for-brains company to remodel the bathroom, and a contractor through the management company to dig up and replace the sewer line.

By 2024, the fiberglass floor of the new bath was cracking due to improper installation. The management company and I have since spent countless hours on correspondence, trying to get the company to make good on its warranty. Meanwhile, I had to hire someone else to replace the bathroom and keep the unit from being uninhabitable. Every time I see an advertisement for that fucking company, I want to kick the TV screen in.

By 2025, the OTHER bathroom floor had collapsed due to a leak that the tenant failed to report to us. At one point, neither bathroom was usable, and the tenant stopped paying rent. By midyear, I had to pay for two bathroom replacements plus legal fees to evict this tenant, who couldn't afford the rent anyway and had found these problems a wonderful excuse to spend a year living in the house free. By the time it was done, I was out another $25,000+.

The tenant was finally evicted, and two months of renovations and repairs followed. I spent a lot of time there, and did some of the work myself. Since June, there have been new tenants who pay on time and apparently are very happy with the place.

No sooner did that misadventure get resolved than my other rental unit in San Diego, a duplex in the same SDSU area, started having problems with drainage backup of its own. It tended to happen on weekends, with the tenants calling in emergency plumbers who charged upwards of $900 each the multiple times they had to come out  and clear the pipe.

In the fall, I finally plopped down another outrageous amount to have the front yard dug up and re-piped after clearing the roots that had been causing the problem.

 All of this while battling bedbugs in three of my own residences in three different states. Friends and relatives sympathized with my occasional rantings in despair and impotent rage, but none of them, of course, wanted me anywhere near their places or to be anywhere near mine. There are still occasional mysterious marks on my skin when I stay in Prescott or Miami Beach, and an irregular stream of them in San Diego. Perhaps the worst is over, or perhaps I'm just thinking wishfully to keep from jumping off the La Jolla cliffs in utter aggravation, but I know at this point that I'll never be completely rid of this cursed problem. I feel at times that it's the reason I never married or had kids, as I can't imagine dealing with this with other people in my household and/or trying raise a family.

In a macabre twist perhaps, I chose last year to finally make arrangements for internment in a national cemetery. Dumb as my years of military service were, I earned the privilege... and as with everything that ever had to do with it, dealing with the VA over this turned out to be an endless horsefuck. Finally, months after submitting all of the required paperwork with no response, a helpful employee at Miramar National Cemetery transcribed the information from my copy of the paper application onto an online form. A week or two later, I had my letter of eligibility for internment there.

This year  has started with an enormous headache over the insurance on all of my rental properties having to be terminated and reinitiated with an affiliate due to reorganization of the company. This resulted in cancellation of one California Earthquake Authority policy, and inability to pay the premium on the other due to computer glitches. I followed up and followed up and nagged and pestered over problems caused by other people and matters that had until then been on autopay and out of sight / out of mind.

So you see, I would have gone completely insane by now were I not a big boy with plenty of hired help to turn to in dealing with these aggravating adult-sized problems. It's really just an extrapolation of what I've been going through since I was about 8, with the old familiar refrain from acquaintances and observers: No wonder you prefer to be alone! How do you keep from losing your mind and going absolutely berserk on someone?

If 2026 doesn't provide some relief, I'll likely end up in that national cemetery sooner rather than later!

End of year 2024 

Early 2025

                                 

Preflight Trip

Haven't had much to say for the past couple of years... not on here anyway. Will vent from time to time on facebook groups and pages, but it's nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion on social media. So many there feel free to be as rude as they like from behind a screen. I'm 71 now, probably look it, and will get snarky comments about wearing a toupee or such whenever someone disagrees with my point of view. I keep forgetting that people are often on there because they have absolutely nothing else to do, underemployed thirty-something bald-headed pricks or those types that wear a shower cap all the time because they know their hair is as ugly as everything else about them.

I digress. Am still reveling in the fact that I'm retired, even six years after the fact. I love the monotony of my current lifestyle, waking up and going to sleep whenever I want to, and doing pretty much the same things (nothing much) whether hangin' on 7.5 acres in rural Prescott, at my modest waterfront condo in Miami Beach, or at my equally cozy SDSU area condo in San Diego. I work with the HOA in San Diego, and can do so pretty easily even while out of town. When in town, I'm active with the local community council, and occasionally get invited to events at SDSU by virtue of being a lifetime alum and a legacy donor. I take an active interest in my rental properties, and often work on them myself.

There are huge swaths of downtime, but it sounds impressive and keeps me busy enough.

This little slice of life entry is about January 29th, the day I left on a redeye flight for Miami after spending the time since Thanksgiving week in San Diego, and the month before that in Prescott. Was going to do a deep cleaning of the San Diego condo on getting back in town, but put it off until the day before leaving for Miami. This is because it's a 575 square foot place with a lot of stuff, being my home of record and, by default, primary residence. It's a pain in the ass to clean, as you have to move everything to another place in order to clear out a space to clean. The whole process takes about five hours, and I hate every minute of it.

Therefore, I did a quick tidying up and set up the Christmas decorations for a little less than two weeks, then took them down on the 29th while finishing up the deep cleaning. Meanwhile, I'd gone in for a doctor's appointment on the 9th because my doctor never sees me and was curious to see how I was doing. Well, my pulse and blood pressure are like a teenager's, but my bloodwork was basically toxic waste. She told me, in essence, that I had to stop drinking or I was going to die soon.

This wasn't really a surprise, and once again I convinced a primary care physician to give me three months to lose weight and get things into a more normal state. It isn't that hard to quit drinking, as I don't really miss it when I abstain. Diet Dr Pepper and soda water in my fancy glassware works fine, and here in Miami Beach I've been pretty content to restrict my diet to black coffee or tea, fruit, granola bars, soup with a little extra meat and vegetables added, and whole wheat bread. Maybe I'll splurge on a real meal once a week. Am making some pretty dramatic progress, and will continue to do so.

As for the 29th, I got up reasonably early and spent much of the day getting the condo spic and span. Then I showered and shaved, put on the sweat pants and shirt that I always wear to fly, and set out for the airport via public transportation. There are several ways to do this. Often I'll walk a couple of miles to the Alvarado trolley station--which I think is now named for UCSD Medical Center East--and then catch the free shuttle from Old Town right to Terminal 2 at the airport. This time, though, I decided to walk a half mile down to College and University to catch the 7 bus to Balboa Park. The plan was to take a look at the Christmas displays, then walk down Laurel Street to catch a shuttle at the rental car center by the end of the runway.

There was all the time in the world to do this, luckily. I stopped at the Taco Bell at College and University, which I almost never frequent. When I was a little kid in the early sixties, there was a man who used to walk his dog up and down the drainage ditch behind our house on College Avenue. One day he told my dad that his house had been taken by eminent domain. The Mobil station with its Flying Red Horse was razed, and the Taco Bell went up. The man's house was knocked down to put up a parking lot for the Taco Bell. It seemed pretty stupid then, even to an eight year old kid, and my dad was so infuriated by it that he refused to go to that Taco Bell for decades.

Being over sixty years ago, I decided to let bygones be bygones and have one of the combination meals I'm familiar with from going to other Taco Bells. Trouble is, this one had one of those self-service kiosks that I can NEVER figure out how to use. After a half dozen aggravating experiences, I finally figured out how to get the one at the local Burger King to work... as long as I'm ordering something familiar. Otherwise, I avoid self-checkout; someone always has to assist me anyway and ends up almost as aggravated as I am by the time it's done.

Well, I tried three times to order my combination meal. The third time, I thought I'd got it; it took my name and gave me an order number. There's always a half dozen employees scurrying around in the back, and I managed to flag one down to ask if I could have my drink cup while I wait. She said the order didn't go through... I'm not one for screaming at minimum wage workers or acting out in public places, but I did turn on my heel and walk out the door with an emphatic "Aw, fuck this place!"

Then the bus comes, and I manage to get on the wrong one, ending up on the north end of Colina Park instead of along Park Blvd where I planned to take my long walk among the decorations. The driver actually tried to be helpful, but I was already pissed off over my latest misadventure with self-service kiosks. I told him, more abruptly than I probably should have, that I knew my way around this neighborhood where I'd grown up, and just needed to get to the airport without a lot of complications.

Well, after walking down 54th Street to University, it was easy to catch a 7 bus and get off by the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. Here, this mundane and mildly aggravating day became memorable and even precious. There was Santa with his nine reindeer along the grassy path to the organ pavilion, looking just as they did when I first saw them in December 1957, shortly after I'd turned three and with my brother all of two weeks old. Then the booths with the dioramas of Jesus' birth and life, reassuringly familiar. I lingered a bit, a cynical adult with a mild case of the ass over the day's annoyances, yet misty eyed with nostalgia and sweet sadness.

From there, it was a brisk walk down Laurel Street, which goes down an abnormally steep hill to the I-5, and then on to Harbor Drive and the airport entrance. From there by the end of the runway, near where the original terminal once stood, it was an uneventful shuttle ride to Terminal 2. I sat for a short wait and recalled how we used to take my paternal grandmother, Mimi, to that little terminal for her return flight to Indiana after she'd spent the holiday season with us every other year throughout the sixties.

The airport is rather festive with its holiday decorations, and Phil's Barbecue within the security area provided me with a satisfying meal and none of that self-service kiosk stupidity. The flight was delayed an hour, but I was back to a reasonably good mood and counted my blessings that it wasn't cancelled altogether with all the weather delays. Though I had a nice window seat on the flight, I didn't sleep at all that I can recall. We got in to the familiar Miami International Airport around 7AM.

Then the airport express bus to Miami Beach, and a second bus to within a couple of blocks of my condo in the northernmost part of the city, just a five minute walk from where that complex in Surfside fell down in June 2021. Didn't see any of my neighbors for the first couple of days there, and spent most of the 30th asleep anyway.

That's a life highlight nowadays, traveling to the other side of the country so that I can hang in another beach town and spend most of the time doing nothing. Gotta love it!

Balboa Park, much as it's always been at holiday time

 

Day before Xmas 2024 in Borrego Springs
(yeah, a year ago)

Sonny Liston, A Man (and an Era)

A Prelude

Approaching age 68, my desire either to express myself creatively or to try to change the world has diminished considerably. A motorcycle accident during a routine ride around town in March left me with serious injuries that will limit my physical capabilities for the rest of my days, and the state of the world over the past couple of years just keeps me in a state of borderline despair usually manifested as apathy. I move between San Diego, my acreage in Prescott, and my small condo in Miami Beach, doing pretty much the same thing in each place.

In Prescott recently for five weeks, I followed a series on the NBC Phoenix outlet about the ongoing drought in the Southwest. Lake Powell is drying up, and Lake Meade, fed by it, is at such a low level that there is danger of it no longer being able to generate hydroelectricity. Builders continue building, investors keep on investing, people keep going about their wasteful ways perhaps because the catastrophic reality of this situation is too grim to contemplate. "Conservatives," for lack of a better label, continue to insist that there isn't enough evidence to warrant drastic action, even though they seem to think it's a fine idea whenever the U.S. invades another country and kills several tens of thousands of noncombatants because they think the country maybe, possibly was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Doing anything proactive about climate change though--just in case--is the stuff of wacky muddleheadedness.

When it all goes dry and life is no longer sustainable, these same A-holes will screw up their faces and claim there was no way of knowing this would eventually happen. They'll call the forward-thinkers a bunch of screwball liberals, fume that there's no point in placing blame about the past now, and look about for someone else to invade so that we can acquire the resources necessary to "preserve our way of life." This time, however, with the climate no longer cooperating, one wonders if there will be any way of life left to preserve.

A Prequel

I was a kid of the 1960s, more an observer than an active participant, and barely 15 years old when the 1970s started. I turned 8 in December of 1962, was just learning to read with any amount of comprehension any sort of publications like San Diego's Evening Tribune, Life Magazine, or Readers Digest, all of which my parents subscribed to. I couldn't have identified many celebrities other than Johnny Downs, the former Our Gang member who hosted the after school cartoon program in San Diego, and perhaps Walter Cronkite, who always made me uneasy because he was on TV every damned night talking about natural disasters and various crummy things that had happened in the world that day.

It's fun now, as a much older adult, to review some of the news stories of the time that I was too young to truly understand, and to read about the history of places that were just vague names in the news then, but places I've visited and come to know since.

Sitting back in Prescott by myself in the evenings, hearing and reading about Lake Meade, I began looking up little factoids about Las Vegas. Coincidentally, I've been getting a lot of recommendations about boxing history sites sent my way on the newsfeed of my social media. In that way did I get to thinking about a celebrity from my childhood, the world heavyweight boxing champion from 1962 to early 1964, Sonny Liston.

A Man

Liston is interred in a cemetery along the flight path of what was until very recently known as McCarren International Airport in Las Vegas, with the simple inscription on his headstone of "A Man." The site has occasional visitors who seek out his final resting place, but fewer and fewer as time passes. His life is a bit of an enigma, not least because no one is really sure of either the date and year of his birth, or the exact date and cause of his death in his Las Vegas home during the holiday season of 1970.

He was, in a sense, the champion nobody wanted. Born poor to a sharecropper family in Arkansas, put to work in the fields at an early age, and beaten incessantly by his father, in his early teenage years he shook the fruit from a tree, sold it, and made his way 300 miles north to St. Louis to find his mother, who had relocated there to seek factory work. Big and exceptionally strong for his age, he tried going to school but was ridiculed for his complete lack of literacy or prior education. He tried to make an honest living, but the only employment available was unskilled and low paying.

The young man turned to petty crime, leading a small gang in muggings and armed robberies, becoming well-known to local police. In time, he was arrested and sent to Missouri State Penitentiary. Liston never complained about prison life, finding it the only place he'd known where he was guaranteed three meals a day. A Catholic priest in charge of the prison's athletic program suggested that he take up boxing. With his exceptionally long reach, large fists, and natural talent, he soon excelled to the point that he obtained an early release on the condition that he have a sponsor for an amateur career.

Prison officials were not happy with the sponsors who came forward, with their connections to organized crime, but thought it a better solution than keeping Liston in prison. Thus did Liston's future lifelong connections with the mob begin. While boxing as an amateur, he did additional odd jobs for them as an enforcer and debt collector. Inevitably, he became known as a "usual suspect" among the St. Louis police, and this marked also the beginning of his lifelong negative encounters with law enforcement.

He moved later to Philadelphia, but fared no better.  Perhaps tired of being harassed, he at one point beat an officer unconscious and took his gun, for which he earned more jail time. By now he was earning a fair amount as a professional boxer, and had little need to commit petty crime. It is difficult to know to what extent these problems were of his own making, and to what extent he was unfairly profiled and targeted. There was the stigma of his mob connections, but there was also the context of the pre-civil rights era that he came of age in. Targeting a black male unfairly, particularly one who was becoming reasonably successful in his profession, did not arouse the widespread sympathy or indignation of the public that it would today.

None of the alleged infractions for which he was targeted were particularly egregious, but they gave him the reputation of a troublemaker as he moved up the professional ranks. By the time he reached first rank status and talk of taking on Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight championship became serious, the NAACP and eventually President John Kennedy himself were urging Patterson not to accept the challenge. Cus D'Amato, Patterson's trainer and much later in life the mentor and father figure to Mike Tyson, personally opposed the match due to Liston's troublesome connections. The fight was finally arranged, however, and Liston walloped Patterson in the first round to become the heavyweight champion of the world.

The champion's crown was always an awkward fit for Liston, and for the entire nation. He was seen as a poor role model, unworthy of the prestigious title. He vowed to do his best to be worthy, but was deeply disappointed when he returned to Philadelphia and found virtually no one at the airport to welcome him. Nonetheless, tutored by his wife, he learned to sign autographs with simple messages, and to read everyday signage and advertisements. Advised by Joe Louis, a close companion, he mastered the basics of being a public relations-conscious celebrity. By nature, he had a rapport with children and the elderly, perhaps because he felt they were the only people who had no designs on him and wanted nothing more than to meet him and shake his massive hand.

It has been argued that Liston, rather than Muhammed Ali, was the first civil rights era heavyweight champion. Ironically perhaps, through his mob connections he was accustomed to dealing with white people in a matter-of-fact, businesslike way. He was nonpolitical and noncommittal about the movement, participating only in a single demonstration with civil rights leaders against a church arson. After living briefly in Denver, the mob helped him purchase a house in an all white neighborhood on a golf course in Las Vegas. Despite the initial concerns of neighbors, he proved to be an affable family man, and remained there for the rest of his life. He made goodwill trips as champion, posing in a kilt and attempting to play the bagpipes in Scotland. He was persuaded to pose for a famous December 1962 magazine cover while wearing a Santa cap.

By the time he was challenged by Cassius Clay--later Muhammed Ali--in February 1964, he had gained at least tolerance by the public. Although Clay trained regularly at the 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach, he was not permitted to stay overnight during the buildup to their fight there. Hampton House, a well-known stopping place for black celebrities across the causeway near Liberty City, provided his accommodations. Liston, meanwhile, was a guest at the Casablanca in the north part of the city, as an apparent exception to Jim Crow laws in the final months before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Beatles were in town, taping their second Ed Sullivan Show appearance at the nearby Deauville, and Liston was in the studio audience with Joe Louis. Neither expressed any great interest to meet them, but the Beatles would later visit the 5th Street Gym and have a famous photo op with the man who would soon dethrone Liston.

The rest of the story is a bit sad. Liston did not train diligently for his first fight with Clay, and was TKO'ed in seven rounds, perhaps disabled by an injured shoulder. He trained even less for their second meeting the next year, being felled by the famous "phantom punch" in the first round. It is widely believed that he threw the fight, and there is much speculation as to why. Pressured by the mob, threatened by the Black Muslims who favored the man now known as Muhammed Ali, never truly comfortable as the champ, perhaps he just figured he'd had enough. He had a nice house and a comfortable life. Perhaps, as in Rocky III, he'd become complacent and Ali served as his Clubber Lang, though unlike Rocky, he exhibited no great determination to redeem himself.

As a kid, I recall reading that he'd been arrested not long afterward in Vegas for a concealed weapon violation. My sense was that his life was going downhill. His wife Geraldine would say later that every negative encounter he had with the police in the time she had known him began with a round of drinking, which he apparently liked to do often. Still, he lived a relatively quiet life for his final five years. Like too many boxers past their prime, he attempted a comeback in the late 1960s with some success, but was also beaten a time or two. By 1970, he was almost forty years old, perhaps more, and neither enthusiastic nor agile as a fighter.

Geraldine returned from a holiday visit to St. Louis in early 1971 to find Sonny dead. The cause has always been something of a mystery, and the exact date of his death, like that of his birth, will never be known with certainty. He'd won the last bout of his comeback a few weeks before, and it has been speculate4d that he'd been told to take a fall. Perhaps it was a final act of defiance, an assertion of his independence, that led him to be murdered. Perhaps he'd actually suffered a heart attack at home alone, and was unable to seek help.

An Era

Liston's passing was not widely noted by the media in early 1971, just a couple of months before Muhammed Ali would challenge Joe Frazier the first time for the championship. Ali would lose that one, but as we know it was far from the end of his career, which had been detoured for three years after he refused induction into the armed forces at the height of the Vietnam War. He would regain the heavyweight championship more than any other, and become a living legend. His first loss to Ken Norton in 1973 was widely believed to be the end for him, but he apparently saw it as comparable to his 1964 defeat of Liston, where his opponent had not taken him very seriously and showed up to fight in less than his best condition. Never again would Ali enter the ring less than thoroughly trained.

Later in life, Ali would express sympathy for his old nemesis. He felt that there was a dark moodiness about Liston, a sense of a man who'd had it rough, seldom seemed to catch a lucky break, and dealt with life's setbacks in his stoic way. He was not the only one to feel that, in retrospect, Liston was a more complicated and intriguing character than the man portrayed by the media.

Comparisons to other boxers, or other eras, have limited usefulness. Liston was in some ways a transitional figure in the transitional era of the early 1960s. By circumstance, he was concerned primarily with his own wellbeing rather than with the social change going on around him. He was independent minded, yet beholden to powerful others who always loomed large in his consciousness. The tone of his life and times has more the feel--the brooding darkness--of the Godfather movies than the good-guys-always-win aura of the Rocky series. The public expected much from the heavyweight champion of the world in those days, and never more than in the nascent civil rights era. Liston made some efforts to live up to those expectations, with encouragement and advice from Joe Louis. In the end, however, his unsavory connections and run-ins with the law limited his ability to polish his public image.

Mike Tyson, who admired him greatly and was sometimes compared to him, provides an interesting study in contrasts. Liston was about a decade older when he reached the top, more seasoned by life, and less overwhelmed by sudden fame and fortune. His mentors had been mobsters, who saw him more as a useful commodity than as a talent to be nurtured, He never had a true caring mentor, a Cus D'Amato of his own, Though many admired him quietly, he also never had a true fan base as a celebrity... nor did he seem to seek one. By the time he became champion, he had been married for a time and had a stable home life quite incongruous with his public image. The limited literacy Liston attained was through the efforts of his wife, as government in the era he grew up and in remote rural areas especially, had little interest in providing its citizens with a basic education,

Given the relatively benevolent option of reform school in his youth, it is hard to know how Liston might have developed. He was, by all accounts, a bright and perceptive individual. Like Tyson, and like all people of exceptional attainments, he had that special intelligence that enabled him to direct his talents toward greatness. One has to admire, even wonder, at the tenacity of a boy barely thirteen years old making his way to St. Louis, illiterate, with no sense of geography, little understanding of money, and no experiences outside the rural environment where he was born.  Never seeming to catch a break, perhaps the luckiest twist in his life was going to prison and discovering boxing.

McCarran International Airport, named for a former Nevada politician with notoriously unenlightened views on certain ethnic groups, was renamed for Senator Harry Reid around the time of the latter's passing. Planes still pass over the otherwise peaceful cemetery on a regular basis. The gravesite is not well known, but has occasional visitors. One has to wonder, hearing the roar of jet engines, considering the work and effort it takes to keep a fleet of airliners moving toward their destinations, and thinking of all the people aboard those planes--coming and going for various purposes--whether a small part of all that energy and life force might periodically mingle with the desert sunlight and through some cosmic mix produce a positive vibe over the final resting place of Charles "Sonny" Liston, A Man.

Never truly loved or esteemed even as the
champ, Liston nonetheless was not without
a sense of public relations and good nature..

In publicity photos, to my young mind he
appeared more impassive and intense than
angry and menacing.

The famous December 1962 magazine cover

During changing times, Liston's opponent for the February 1964 title fight met the Beatles 
at the 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach.

 

This essay is not carefully fact checked, though I'm consolidating my impressions on reading several articles and reviewing several documentaries as conscientiously as I can. Corrections or other comments are welcomed.

A Weirdly OK Year

 It's cliched to say that 2020 sucked. In a global sense, sure, but for me it really wasn't that much of an Anus Horribilius or whatever the fancy term is. I retired in December 2019, a couple of days after turning 65, headed out to Miami Beach for a few weeks, then took a cruise back to San Diego through the Panama Canal. About a month later, the whole world shut down while I was on a planned week-or-so trip to Prescott with little more than a change of clothes. I was there until early May, then back in San Diego in time to see downtown La Mesa burn just after Memorial Day. At the end of June, some tweaker-of-color tried to break into my condo at 3:30 AM, and I have very little doubt that his addled brain was emboldened by the zeitgeist. I would be back out to Prescott two more times, and Miami Beach again for the first time since the beginning of the year for a few weeks in mid-September/early-October.

Before you knew it, the year was at an end again, and here I am back in Miami Beach for a month. It's been pretty phenomenally lazy, a year into retirement and now accustomed to not really having to do much of anything I don't feel like doing. Social life for most people has come to a standstill, but it doesn't bother me that much because my social life was always more or less at a standstill. I listen to discussions on TV about teenage pregnancy, abusive relationships, and such problems, and can't comprehend such things really. It's been eons since any female gave me the smallest opportunity to get her pregnant or abuse her, even if I wanted to. It seems the whole world, in the first year of my retirement, has been modified to reflect the lifestyle of yours truly.

Financially, it's been a challenge. I was planning on depending largely on my rental income in retirement, then the virus started affecting tenants' ability to pay rent. On top of that, there were two extremely expensive tenant turnovers, one coming right after I thought I was recovering from the other, and totaling $45,000 in repairs and expenses by fall. My smaller, simpler place in Yuma also had almost monthly nagging expenses, appliances going out and such. I spent most of August in San Diego working on one of the places myself, but it still was draining my savings at an alarming rate.

On top of all this, I'd put a metal roof on the Prescott place in December and replaced the oak crown moldings inside that the painters had F'ed up and painted over before the final tenancy, only to find I had a pack rat infestation under the house on coming out to see it. I battled it myself with little help from a basically useless pest control company. Then in March, my neighbor to the east finally put his vacant lot up for sale. Clobbered and reeling from expenses, I nonetheless realized that the chance would never come again and managed to cobble together the money to buy it from him by cashing in part of my Roth IRA and dipping for the first time into my equity line of credit.

Each time I think I'm getting some breathing space, another calamity comes up, so I'm not going to say I'm out of the woods yet. Buying the neighbor's lot, though, was the culmination of a 20+ year old dream; it was just crappy timing is all. Thus, I'll say that as of early January 2021, life is all right.

Prescott, Spring 2020. The news on
the single antenna station I got there
was relentlessly bad, but breakfast was
always a peaceful if lonely ritual.

Early in the March thru May stay,
looking east toward my newly acquired
acreage and dreaming of better days.

With plenty of time for such things,
my stone lantern got an uplift after
tenants had spent over 20 years
shooting at it and such.

Back in San Diego in late summer, taking
a break from endless work on the back
unit of my duplex, a mid-year unexpected
mega-expense.

Early October, on return from 3 weeks
in Miami Beach. Kinda the epitome of
what it is to be retired and just not give
much of a shit.

During the fall return to Miami Beach.
Same pose; different location.

Home-cooked pork with black beans and a nice
Cuba Libre in Miami Beach, September 2020.

Make America Sane Again

After retiring in December, I headed off to Miami Beach for three weeks, then caught Holland America's Rotterdam back to San Diego from Fort Lauderdale. It was my first ever cruise, and though it was pleasant I'm by no means addicted to the lifestyle. Sixteen days on a boat is about enough, and as usual, I'm finding that no matter how old I get, I always seem to be surrounded by people a decade or so older. The bald heads, beer guts, and uncontrolled flatulence got to be a bit much after awhile.

Maybe I'll write more about the cruise itself sometime, but right now the salient thought in my head is how the whole cruise thing is open to criticism by those of a certain political persuasion. It's a bit odd to think of the fuel and resources pissed away on hauling a bunch of over-the-hill retirees pointlessly over the high seas for weeks on end, but the primary criticism would probably be about the labor practices. Holland America hires primarily Filipinos for food service jobs, and Indonesians for stewards and housekeeping. Apparently there are large training centers in both countries. It seems strange to be on a ship for over two weeks with a bunch of old white people being served almost exclusively by non-affluent young Asians. For someone like myself who has lived all over the world and also had to work fairly hard to get anywhere in life, I feel funny about having the same person serve me three meals a day and sweep up around the hot tub while I soak in it.

I was friendly with one lady on the crew, and told her as much. If ever she has time off in San Diego, she can relax while I do the work. Being about forty years younger than I am, I doubt she'll follow up, but I gave her my contact info anyway. There's nothing in particular going on in my head; I'd just enjoy letting one of the crew members actually see some of the places the ship docks in for a change.

For whatever reason, I seem to bond well with the older people I always find myself surrounded by no matter how old I myself get. There were several retired army-types who had been in the same places as myself at slightly different times, and any number of folks who lived in places I'd passed through or spent time in. My cross-country motorcycle trip from summer 2017 provided many a point of departure for conversation. Toward the end of the cruise, I got to talking with one of the entertainers during an elevator ride, and found that he was the nephew of a childhood friend!

One upside of a cruise is that just about everyone is in a good mood, and have their life together enough to be able to afford to go on a cruise. Though the entire Trump impeachment trial took place while I was at sea, there wasn't much discussion of it. The only consistent satellite channels available in most places were Fox News and MSNBC, so it was fun to switch from one to the other and marvel at how people can view the same event and have such a different perspective on it. During the Iraq War and the whole George W. era, I hated Fox and cheered on MSNBC. Now it's pretty much the opposite, with just about anyone with a brain willing to admit that invading Iraq was about the stupidest thing that ever happened.

Love the troops; hate the war... Remember that? Well, decompressing from the cruise and getting back to Realityville while retired and with lots of time on my hands, I find myself reverting to my default piss-and-vinegar world view. As Michael Savage once put it, in and of itself what's so great about somebody who wears a uniform? Firefighters save lives, but they also spend most of their time sitting around playing cards in the station and contemplating the unaffordable pensions they anticipate drawing on retirement.

Actually, since spending six years in the army myself, I've always thought this faux patriotism by people who wouldn't know which end of a rifle to clean was a buncha hooey. I served two tours in the Military District of Washington, the first in the immediate post-Vietnam era and the second during the Iran Hostage Crisis. I went from people flipping me off along M Street in Georgetown as I rode my motorcycle back to Fort Myer to having them come up and thank me for my service. In both cases, my basic feeling toward their behavior was a great big fuck-you.

It always seemed to me that, no matter how manly or macho the work might seem, firefighters, law enforcement types, and military personnel are all basically public sector weenies. Unlike the average Joe Schmo, they don't have to get up every morning and figure out all over again how to make a living. They don't have to hire a tax preparer to figure out how to keep from losing their shirt or having their pants pulled down as the government reams them. They just go off and play with big toys like a bunch of overgrown children. Occasionally it's dangerous, but most of the time that's just exactly what they do for a living, with no worries about healthcare or job security.

What's so High-Falutin' Great American about it? It sounds like the great socialist dream to me. Is it really so different from living in a communist country in the old days, sitting around on your ass without a worry in the world other than not upsetting the higher-ups?  Having spent so much time in the military, it would be hard to label me anti-military or some other sort of anti-American nonsense. I just don't see any particular reason to look up to somebody just because he wears a uniform any more than to someone who navigates the idiocy of everyday life in an advanced society while living by his wits.

In this stream-of-consciousness tirade against all that pisses me off about American society, allow me to now turn to the whole business of making a living and the so-called social contract. My dad was a pretty average and typical American, and like most typical Americans he wasn't that interested in being clever. He didn't want to start and run a business, or to spend most of his waking hours trying to out-maneuver and/or cut the balls off the competition. Herein lies a great irony that causes endless misunderstanding: It doesn't take that many ambitious or even intelligent people to run a society. What it takes is obedient people with a sense of faith in the system... believers in the social contract if you will. All you really have to do to keep a society going is avoid alienating them so completely and screwing them so blatantly that they cease to give a shit.

Republican politicians tend to be ambitious, and intelligent in a running-a-business way that, in my youth, I used to refer to as "butt brains." They don't seem to understand that most people just want to put in an honest day's work without worrying about being laid off on a half hour's notice. They'd also prefer not to have to worry about the job once they've punched out for the day. Democratic politicians, on the other hand, are generally either guilt-tripping inheritors of great wealth or public sector weenies, though strictly of the chairborne variety; soldiers and cops almost always fancy themselves conservatives despite being wards of the state. Many more Democrats than Republicans are professional politicians, and as Thomas E. Dewey once put it, no man should seek a job in the public sector if he can't make more money in the private sector. This, however, is a foreign concept to most "progressive" types. With some important exceptions, Democrats generally know about as much about economics or the dynamics of generating wealth as I did when I got my first job at Jack-in-the-Box. The political views of both sides derive from their own world views, and neither side seems to recognize that not everybody thinks like they do.

First out of necessity, then because I genuinely liked the life I'd made for myself. I became quite clever at investing and keeping my cash flow positive. My only conventional job for the past 22 years was as a part-time community college instructor. It's another great irony that tenured professors are almost unfailingly knee-jerk liberal public sector weenies of the worst sort themselves, yet they tend to look down on their part-time colleagues (adjunct instructors, or simply "aaaaadjuncts") as inferiors who couldn't quite cut the mustard, even as they claim to champion our rights in the name of social justice. College administrators, the ultimate superfluous public sector dead weight--and seemingly possessed of an en masse Walter Mitty complex--treat us with ruthless expediency, even as they come out with position papers about the rights of "Dreamers" or some other whining assholes.

It certainly doesn't help that I've been on the wrong end of affirmative action since the day I entered the workforce. There aren't that many Males-Who-Look-Like-Me in my field, and a surprising number I met during my career had done exactly as I did. We took care of ourselves because we knew we couldn't expect The System to take care of us. We succeeded, and must have been something of an enigma to the full-timers--who apparently presume that all adjuncts are jealous of them--but there's always a certain resentment in the back of my mind that I had to devote so much mental energy to something as chickenshit as making a living without being stomped out by some quirk of the system beyond my control. As it was, I lost my healthcare for a few months--during that period when you were fined for not having any--through the sheer incompetence of some classified employee in HR. She actually giggled over the phone when I tried to discuss it with her. I'd have complained, but why bother? Nothing would happen to her, and I'd be regarded as just another grievance-mongering aaaaadjunct troublemaker.

This brings me to yet another sore spot in my One-Man War against societal insanity: Societies in general, and this one in a grotesquely exaggerated manner, don't reward those who follow the rules. This wouldn't really be a problem if everyone followed the rules, but it's precisely the scofflaws, incompetents, shrug-your-shoulders-and-fart ignoramuses, and all around irresponsible assholes that the system actually does reward. Go to work, pay your taxes and bills, and know the authorities will be on you like a jackal if you don't cross a t or dot an i. Thumb your nose at the system, tell the authorities to shut up and give you your free stuff,  or--if you lack the balls to do that--simply claim you are a victim, and a whole world of government "programs," private charities, special services, and fight-for-your-rights advocactes are there for the picking.

You can clog up the hospital emergency room and stiff the bill. You can claim that you couldn't understand the instructions for whatever bureaucratic procedure you failed to comply with. You can screw up on the job until the cows come home. You can enter the country illegally and get free legal services and other forms of human rights infused bullshit that no one would ever consider extending to a native-born citizen. Meanwhile, every knee-jerk liberal within shouting distance will holler about your "rights." You can defy teachers and police, unlawfully assemble... pretty much do whatever you want, then claim--successfully--that you were somehow treated unfairly when proper authority does its job.

The result is that we basically live in a society full of chickenshits. Everyone's scared to death of being sued, shamed, fired, or physically assaulted if they dare to apply common sense to a situation. Government and private business alike seem to specialize in warning people about the obvious, using ridiculous amounts of hem-and-haw verbiage in a country where half the people can't really even understand English very well. We're told that coffee cups are hot, that people with heart conditions shouldn't ride on roller coasters, that national parks might have wildlife. If the admonitions are oral, they are given inevitably over a poor quality PA system with every kind of background noise going on, usually by a bored functionary mumbling at a thousand words per minute. The point isn't really to communicate, but to ass-cover. The national motto ought to be "You Can't Say We Didn't Tell You."

Then, at the end of the day, this nation of scared-shitless people comes home to relax, and what do you think they favor as TV fare? Programs about cops and lawyers! Yep, turn on a TV and channel surf randomly. At least half the programs will feature police stations and courtrooms. Meanwhile, the rest of the world marvels at this nation's truly stupefying levels of violent crime and idiotic litigation. Me, I just have an antenna and don't watch that much TV anyway. Who needs to pay for 100+ channels of garbage when I can get half a dozen free? When it all got to be too much, I used to take late evening walks around the neighborhood, but too many people I didn't know would take to heart that When in Doubt Call the Cops mentality that is really just a reflection of the national paranoia. I got tired of explaining that I lived in the neighborhood and was just walking down the street at an admittedly odd time of day. When it happens to me, it's just life in the good old USA. When it happens to Someone Who Doesn't Look Like Me, I believe they call it profiling.

Bullshit is the glue that holds societies together, and when a society's sense of self comes to completely lack any semblance of verisimilitude--and no one is afraid to point it out anymore--it implodes with surprising quickness and lack of fanfare. The Soviet Union was a recent example. The Japanese have the concept of "honne" vs. "tatemae," meaning the unadorned truth vs. the company line, the just-tangential-enough-to-the-truth bullshit that everyone knows is bullshit but no one dares to point out as such. It was one of various aspects of that society that annoyed me endlessly when I lived there, yet it seems to have taken root in politically correct America... and it's all the more annoying because Americans love to go on about how straight-talking they are. Of course, straight talking isn't always a good idea when everybody is going around with a gun and/or a lawyer on retainer, and tends to take offense at everything they see and hear. It's a toxic mix, and the situation is desperate; we are running out of bullshit!

King Apathy III

A few days after my 65th birthday last month, I gave final exams for the final time, had a fine send-off from my department, and slipped away into retirement. It was all rather nice and neat, finishing up a semester, applying for Medicare and CalSTRS, and celebrating my birthday all within a few days of each other.

After a week or so of tying up loose ends, I headed out to the Prescott place. The management company still keeps an eye on it--supposedly--since it reverted to my personal use over the summer. It seems to suck a lot of money through the management fee, heating it minimally with propane during this cold winter, and replacing the roof with a metal one even though the original 1996 asphalt shingle roof still seemed to have some life left in it. The unpleasant surprise was under the house, where I discovered a water line leak due to rats gnawing at it, and a nightly cacphony of the hated rodents trying to get into the house through the heating vents and drain pipes.

Though hardly happy with the management company, I'm kinda stuck with them unless I want to battle the problems myself. I seem to have scared the critters--which included a skunk--out from under the place, and so sealed up the holes they'd been getting in through toward the end of my ten-day stay. I caught a huge fat rat, probably pregnant, and the others laid low, apparently abandoning the place altogether. The management company sent out a subcontractor to repair the water leak, and promised to check under the house from now on during its monthly inspections... Yeah, do that!

All told, I now have three part-time residences. San Diego will remain the primary one, the address of record and mailing of official stuff, but I'm going to have to spend time in Prescott lest the animals return to take up residence again. Miami Beach, where I am now, remains a fun little hideaway on the opposite coast, and apparently free of rats since a small invasion of the complex three years ago alerted us to seal up any possible entrance ways. The neighbors' cats like me, and I encourage them to come inside, take a look around, and leave their scent. The San Diego condo, since flooding due to a ruptured water heater during a stay in Miami Beach three years ago, has remained trouble-free. I now shut off the water main before leaving on any trip of more than a few days.

The folks' old house in San Diego, now a rental, has been a money-sucker during the recent turnover of tenants, Then, a week or so after the new ones had moved in, the house next door to it caught fire. I'm sorry for the neighbors, but awfully glad the damage was limited to their own property.

The other San Diego rental, a duplex, of course chose this moment to provide me with a low-level headache, as the tenants can't get the oven door to close and there are no replacement parts for such an old model. More $$$ pissed away on expenses expenses EXPENSES!!! Don't ever think that owning rental properties is just a matter of living off of other people's earnings. There are time periods where I don't make a dime off of them. This is turning into one of those extended periods.

I'd stopped in Yuma on the way home from Prescott to take a look at the place there. To persuade the tenants to stay, I'd agreed to put a cover over the patio and to replace the flooring. This was my first time seeing it since the work was done several months ago. Then, this morning, I get an email from the management company there telling me that they are applying for a loan and apparently getting ready to move. Oh joy, just what I need right now...

Despite this bombardment of aggravations as I start out my retirement, the problems at the Prescott place galvanized me. I'm getting older, but can still rise to the occasion and work day and night to deal with a crisis. The thing is, left to my own devices I don't want to. Retirement is just exactly what I thought it would be ever since I was a kid and the concept reached me that I'd have to spend a large part of my life doing things that I really didn't want to do while on someone else's schedule. For all the talk about the love of teaching, I found a good number of students obnoxious twits, and am proud to say that I can't even remember their names a month later. The evenings in Miami Beach have consisted of cooking up a nice meal, and enjoying it at the picnic table on the boat dock with plenty of sangria or Scotch and soda.

The cats enjoy lounging around, and don't even seem to expect me to give them anything from my plate. Two of them look quite well-fed by their owner anyway. The third one is a black and white "tuxedo cat," virtually identical to the one my folks had from the early '80s to mid-'90s. It doesn't really like to be picked up and cuddled, but will put up with it for a minute or so with some half-hearted squirming around and vocal complaints. When I let her go, she just hangs around as if she wants more.

Will I grow tired of this, and wish I had new challenges, mountains to climb, annoying people to deal with? Not likely. I was always rather oddly apathetic, content to entertain myself with simple things and enjoy whatever is going on around me with a sort of amazed grin on my face. In the back of my mind, the only worry is whether the rodents in Prescott will stay scared away long enough for me to return and freshly terrorize them. Other than that, I wish only for a minimum of complications as I prepare to head out next Thursday on a cruise through the Panama Canal and back to San Diego.

Prescott

San Diego

Miami Beach

Nearing Retirement and Getting Crankier

I was born on Pearl Harbor Day 1954. This means that I'm less than two months from 65 years old. It's sobering to go through all the applications for CalSTRS, Medicare, and Social Security, and to notify the college that I'll be retiring at the end of the semester, a few days after my birthday. I've booked a cruise from Fort Lauderdale to San Diego through the Panama Canal in late January/early February, after planning to hang out for a month at the Miami Beach condo. This is really happening!

Then today, some woman in her eighties with a walker tried hitting on me after I'd bought a bottle of booze at the Rite-Aid. She was driving me crazy, taking forever to shuffle her way through the exit, but I managed a smile when she turned and apologized... and that set her off. Once finally in the parking lot, I straddled my motorcycle, and she expressed amazement that someone so old could still ride one. She asked how old I was, and I hesitated just long enough to show mild irritation before telling her.

I've been on some stupid dating site for the past several years, and have NEVER not once met ANYONE on it, or even had anyone under retirement age look at my profile. Was all set to meet a lady a few years ago in Miami, but when I sent her a selfie with a neighbor's cat a couple of hours before, she went on about how she was allergic to cats and therefore had to do the usual female cancel-out. Can you see how fine it makes me feel to be hit on by an old lady with a walker? I have enough negativity about anything hinting of romance as it is, and don't really need that to make my day.

Since the year I got out of high school, people have been telling me that I look 10-15 years older than I am. I don't really give a shit, but why must they keep telling me? My best childhood friend is limping around with a cane, and takes about 25 different kinds of pills every day. Nobody tells HIM that he looks old everywhere he goes. What is up with that?

At some point today, I'll have to get around to deep-cleaning my little bitty condo. I love it when it's clean, hate cleaning it, but don't trust anyone else to get it the way I want it. Like the motorcycle, it looks like something a much younger man would have. It is, I suppose, the late adulthood equivalent of a child's tricycle and playpen.

The simple fact is that I've never been that keen on adulthood. I've never wanted to be married, and never cared for any of that other grown-up crap. Kids annoy me as it is, so why would I want any of my own?! Women never seem able to express a 10-word thought in less than 500 words. Visitors leave peanut shells, potato chip crumbs, and fingerprint-smudged glassware all over my nice clean condo. Dealing with people gets on my nerves.  Thinking gives me a headache. In fact, I've never really enjoyed working; I just managed to find something I could do for a living that didn't drive me crazy or bore me to death.

Soon enough, the whole world can kiss my ass. Ever since I was five years old and had to go to kindergarten, I've always wanted just to be able to lie around in bed or on the sofa any time I wanted to without anybody hassling me, and to tell my mom or my teacher or my drill sergeant or whoever was on my case, "PPPHHHFFFRRRTTT!!!" to you! It looks like--finally--I've achieved my life goal.

SDSU Donor Wall, with the oldest man in the world

Teachers' conference in Sacramento early this year.
Oldest man in the world back and center.

Hangout of the oldest man in the world