My Liberal Diary

Day 88, My Liberal Diary
I remember when getting undressed involved two people and was accompanied with moans of pleasure, now it seems that getting dressed usually requires two people, the moans are still there but they sound more painful rather than delighted. I remember looking forward to pay-day at work, the weekend here and some change in my pocket to have a few drinks with friends, play a little music, maybe go fishing or to the shooting range. Now, I'd rather work on the weekends so I can at least avoid the pleasure of the persistent calls from the mortgage company, power company, telephone company, and an assortment of medical offices. I wonder if that is the real reason for the free Obama phones? So creditors can annoy you and .gov can track you on the built-in gps? I don't have an Obama phone, they said I make too much money to qualify so I got to spend my own money so bill collectors can call me.
I am deaf to certain sound frequencies, I can still hear a pin drop but there are these narrow frequency bands that just aren't there. Unfortunately, most people speak through these frequency ranges and entire portions of what they are saying just isn't there. I've gotten pretty good at reading lips and body language but telephone conversations are not very reliable, especially when I have to guess at what the other person is saying. I generally like to think they are being pleasant and just calling to ask if I'd like to give them my bank account numbers for direct payment but they always follow up with a letter when I tell them my bank is named Nelly and is a yellow ceramic elephant. I named her Nelly after a song by the German rock group, Nektar. They did an album in the 70s called "Enter the Future" It amazes me just how prophetic rock circus music turned out to be. And I don't understand this tax thing at all. Take a dollar out of your pocket, if you got one but don't ask me to borrow one if you don't, look at it and guess how many times it has changed hands making a purchase? Does the government not understand that every time it changes hands making a purchase, it earns tax revenue? in Mobile, if it is spent ten times, it has earned the government another dollar without them doing a damned thing to collect it because the merchants have had to do this for them and send it in.You would think that with a powerful revenue generating scam like that, the government would want us to earn more money and spend it. If I buy a bottle of water for a dollar (something that used to be free) the merchant pays .10 to the government, pays their store employees a portion of it, puts the rest in their pocket until it ads up to another dollar that they have to pay a tax on and so on to infinity. As long as that dollar is circulating and being spent, it is continually generating revenue for the government; wake up and pay attention, you jack-booted thugs! If we have money to spend, you make money without doing a damned thing to earn it. If you'd just stop spending more than you earn on bullshit wars everywhere so that Halliburton and Boing can keep building planes, airports, hospitals, warehouses and shit treatment plants in third world countries to house our children that are getting blown up by goat farmers, just for a little while, and let us working Americans keep some of our money to spend and circulate, pretty soon your revenue would catch up with your spending and then we could have another grand war, already payed for in advance!

 

the 'Bank of Nelly'

 

The Bank of Nelly @Ganado

 

Day 89, My Liberal Diary
I played music with the Bay Area Songwriters Association in an outdoors stage tonight at the Old Hwy 27 Bar and Grill. It was cold, I referred to the evening as the Great Blizzard of 2017. We played a lot in Tennessee on nights this cool, but we always had a fire burning and we were, after all, acclimated to the cooler temperatures associated with Spring in Tennessee, it's been in the 80s all week here so a dip into the 50s is almost unbearably cold. I enjoy listening to songwriters perform a little piece of their soul, a painting in words and melody to share a brief emotion or tell a story, or maybe just something to make you want to dance. That's the wonderful thing about music, it doesn't have to say anything but it can read volumes or express a subtlety that will awaken you with the plot of a dream. Music has always been a catharsis for me, a way to excise demons, a means to express what words alone were inadequate for. I was discussing the sins of our children with a friend tonight and wondering how many of those sins were our own, when I remembered an old song that I had written years ago about starting a new life. I did start a new life and I have almost forgotten every thing prior to that. I do not nastalge nor lament anything prior to this new start, I just had to regroup and decide if I wanted to act or react? Life had gotten very complicated and I was feeling so lost and confused that I either had to restart or quit and I am not a quitter. I left everything I owned and hitch-hiked to somewhere else wit a guitar, a few clothes and a sleeping bag in a knapsack. I wasn't running from anything, I wasn't hiding from anyone, I just wanted to start over. I got a job in a sheet metal shop over in Memphis and a cheap place to stay while I worked. I made a new friend, Mark "Slider" Kitchens and we decided to perform music together and publish a magazine, Memphis Original Music Magazine. We had no money but Mid-South Christian College gave us free use of their printing facilities and recording studio but we had to work after hours so it wasn't unusual for us to play a show at Barristers until 2:00 then go work on the magazine until 8:30 in the morning, an hour before the school began their first class in printing of the day but we could generally work all weekend and usually did. We would record original songs for the featured writers and print the lyrics, along with an interview of where the song came from, what techniques were used in producing the recordings, etc. A cassette recording of the featured songs would be embossed to the cover of each month's magazine. We got support from some really cool folks, SunRecords, several of the best live music venues on Beale Street and Downtown, Neil Young, and Mid South Christian College. Neil helped because the entire proceeds beyond actual costs were donated to his "Star of Bethlehem" foundation. This is where and how I met my wife, the Republican.
Mark and I had taken a break from the magazine to get a pizza at a dive bar called the KnightCap. We were shooting pool while waiting on our pie to able and Jimi came in to pick up her mother, the bar-tender, at the end of her shift. She was dressed in a vey short black skirt and heels; those chase me, catch me, take me home shoes that make a woman's walk so hard to ignore but ignore her, I did. At least until she walked up to me as I was about to sink the 8-ball and whispered into my ear,"Mr. Those blue eyes are going to get you into some trouble".
I scratched.
"Oh? Just when is going to happen?' I asked and she made a date with me for the following evening. We were to meet there at the Knightcapp at 9:00 and go out on the town. I was there with bells on....she never showed up. A week or two later, I had an appointment with the General Manager of a chain of high-end venues to discuss an ad in our publication. When I arrived, I introduced myself to the bar-tender and explained I was there to meet the general manager and he said he'd fetch her. When Jimi came walking out of her office, she looked at me for a minute then said "I guess this means I'm going to buy an ad in your magazine." We had a lovely meeting, designed and contracted a full page ad in Memphis Original Magazine (MOM), and she had the DJ put one of Slider and my recordings on the house system. Everybody loved the music so she hired us to replace the band performing at her main club in two weeks. We played there and I went home with her that night and we have been together ever since, traveling the world over from one adventure to the next. This was no accident because everybody knows what you call a guitar player without a girlfriend: Homeless.
It's been 29 years now and we are still together, we have lived abroad, aboard ships, in a shanty-boat, lived in a tent one winter while I was on a SUR-D02 project in South Carolina, but we have never been homeless. I have always managed to have us a home and she has never complained one time. I love her in spite of her being a Republican. I was feeling romantic this evening and reminded her of how we met. She told me that even a blind hog finds and acorn once in a while.

 

I thought you were being poetical about Nelly! She's real. even better!

 

Day 90, My Liberal Diary,
It was such a beautifully pleasant day today, the weather was cool and breezy and skies amazingly blue and white. I love Spring weather, the warm days, the cool days, the storms. Most people now seem to look at weather as something we should be able to control. Nature has such a way with injecting reality where we'd rather have climate control. I have worked in salvage and marine crisis management for most of my life. Cleaning up in the aftermath of hurricanes, earth-quakes, oil spills, vessels sinking, enough to have an immense appreciation of just how little nature cares for our "feelings"'. I think we should all be entitled to fair weathers and a following sea, but unfortunately. tornadoes must be conservative because they really could care less.
Man is destructive by nature, but not nearly so much as nature is towards man. In fact, evolution came about because we were so ill-prepared to deal our environment, the weather, animals that would eat us for lunch and Republicans. Without these things threatening our existence, the "strongest survive" will become just a suggestion or maybe some kind of right-wing conspiracy. Just how damned important can such ill-conceived laws such as the "Laws of nature" be allowed to exist in this day and age? Surely mankind, since AL Gore invented the internet, can overcome the need to keep our species evolving. I realize that most folks are sort of the immediate gratification type, but some things take a while to contain with evolution. That's why we have things like "sun-screen", for example.
I am sure that we are immortal, or would be if the government provided free health care for everyone. I was one the unfortunate liberals that actually took Civics class while in school. It is a good thing that they have dropped this subject from our public educational programs because people actually knowing how our government is designed, structured, and operated can be quite a danger to our agenda. Obama tried so hard to 'Change" our nation and he succeeded! Now we are adversarial with a bunch of heavily armed people that believe in the Constitutional Law of our nation and they are tired of footing the bill for those of us that were subsidized to populate the urban regions and destroy the traditional family because it is sexist, racist, and homophobic. They out number us now, they are heavily armed and intend to stay that way, and they are dead-set against our demands for social equality! Every welfare baby in this country should be entitled to the same cosmetologist as Donald Trump!

 

Day 91, My Liberal Diary
It was my understanding that democrats are supposed to be Southern, since the North during the war of Northern Aggression, were Republicans? I understand that a good many Southerners moved north to Detroit during the 50s-60s to get jobs in the automobile manufacturing plants, back when Liberals still believed in working for a living, but most of you seem to have lost sight of your heritage. Taking down statues and denouncing Confederate battle flags as racist is just plain stupid because a good many of us liberal democrats still live in the South. I can certainly understand why there are not too many statues of Robert E. Lee in Chicago, but Memphis or New Orleans is in the South so why can't we just leave well enough alone and go after something important, like eliminating hunting and fishing licenses? Let me refresh your memory, George Wallace was a Democrat, so was James Earl Ray, Jimmy Carter, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan. OK, so I understand the idea that we were conquered as a nation by Republicans and it only seems fair that they pay us to be slow, lazy, and stupid. I am all in favor of getting as much free stuff as I can, especially if Yankee Republicans have to pay for it, but damn it, why do my taxes, medical costs, insurance costs, and costs of living keep going up but my paycheck doesn't?
Also, country ham is cured in salt to preserve it, it isn't like a smoked or baked ham and isn't meant to be. When you fry it, the skillet is deglazed with yesterday's coffee to create "Red-eye" gravy. Red-eye gravy is served over buttermilk biscuits, never those canned things, but you may use canned biscuits to fry into doughnuts or fried apple pies. Grits are ground dried hominy, boiled in water to reconstitute and seasoned with butter, salt and pepper, shrimps, cheese, or bacon drippings. Hominy is dried corn that has been soaked in lye until it expands like popcorn, then washed and boiled. Fish are meant to be rolled in cornmeal and deep fried, the fins and tails eaten like potato chips. Most foods can be fried, as this is the preferred way of preparing food here in the South. Frogs may be shot, gigged, grabbed, or snagged but never bought from a grocery store, who knows what they feed those farm raised frogs? Cornbread does not have sugar added. Bacon may be served as an entree with any meal or as desert, so may fried pork chops. Barbecue is slow smoked never over 205 degrees F and at least for an hour per pound of meat. Sauce is not added while smoking and a proper sauce does not contain mustard, it is mostly vinegar, red peppers, a bit of ketchup and spices. Coleslaw can be served on the side but some should be added to the pulled pork sandwich as a condiment. We serve our turkeys with cornbread dressing, not stuffing and if you've never had real Southern cornbread dressing, then it will not be possible to explain the difference. Colored folks are never called "niggers" it only pisses them off but they may be referred to as a nigger man or woman, no insult intended, when talking with others. This is a colloquial thing that Liberals have been trying to stamp out ever since someone shot George Wallace, by using "the N-word" as a way to be more politically correct. It destroyed the career of a wonderfully sweet woman in Charleston with a very successful cooking TV show, when someone publicized her talking about the nice nigger woman that taught her how to cook when she was a child. She wasn't being mean or racist, just Southern and you remember, the Republicans like us being slow and stupid. And it isn't like colored people don't have a number of less than flattering colloquialisms for white folks, but we don't ask them to call us the "c-word" or the W-word", just go ahead and call us whatever you want in the privacy of your cultural circles, we won't take offense. In fact, I'll invite you over for dinner and we can find out just what kind a person you really are over some fried catfish or shrimp grits.

 

Day 92, My Liberal Diary
I worked all day then came home and still had a few hours of daylight so I cut brush from the fence-line and made quite a pile of limbs and small trees that will dry in a few weeks so I can burn them. My wife, the Republican, brought me a glass of water and some B12 and said that I needed to stop or I might have a heart attack. I got to admit that heart attacks are something that really hadn't crossed my mind. I am sixty-one years old, still wear the same size jeans that I wore in my 20s and can still out-work any of the 20-somethings that we employ at Construction Solutions any day of the week. OK, so I am a little slow getting started in the mornings because of this arthritis thing but just give me a few minutes to limber up and I'll work those kids into the ground and shame them that an old man can do that. This heart attack thing, looking at comments on some of the more conservative sites, seems very unlikely; it seems that the consensus is that we Liberals are heartless, therefore should be immune to heart attacks. I'm cool with that.
I am starting to suspect that, heartless though we may be, we still are not immune to poison ivy. And I got this stye in my left eye that is swelled and very painful. My eye-sight is not quite what it used to be, unless there is plenty of light and I am pretty much deaf to the frequencies that most people speak through but most people just think I'm an asshole because I seem to ignore them though the simple truth is that I really can't hear them unless I am looking at them and even then, usually have to guess what they are saying. Jimi says that I tend to frighten people because I don't speak much and when I do, I usually say something off the wall. She often apologizes for me saying that I just can't help it, when something crosses my mind, it just comes right out of my mouth without the checks and balances that most people seem to have. I will admit to not being a big fan of political correctness or pretending that history didn't happen, which seems to be a notable Liberal characteristic, but I interact with Republicans and conservatives with the exact same directness and I probably own at least as many guns as most of them. I suppose I really wouldn't have decided to be a Liberal if some wing-nut on Survival Monkey.com hadn't taken offense at me defending the right of an Aussy sheep farmer and weaver of pussy hats, to make fun of Donald Trump and called me a Liberal. So now you guys are just stuck with my gun-toting, redneck, deaf, politically incorrect racist ass and that's that. I don't really mind being called a racist, just don't call me a Republican. I was quite happy being a Tea Party Radical but after a rally in D.C. that the Park Service estimate was 3.5-4,000,000 protesters gathered was reported by the Liberal controlled Main Stream Media as merely being tens of thousands of Tea Party Protesters, I realized that I was definitely on the wrong side because the Park Service estimated tens of thousands of people gathered for the Million Man March but the Main Stream Media still called it a Million Man March. I like being on the side that gets to write history, whether it happened or not!

 

lol you liberal, selective hearing

but it doesnt seem to affect your music right?

You are a very funny man with great writing skills

 

Hell Yeah!!! I like my grits, But you have to work with them!
My frog legs I prefer to 'Q' on the grill, Amazing!

 

Day 93, My Liberal Diary
I may have mentioned that I am a Southerner? So is my wife, the Republican, at least I think she is but there well may have been a Yankee in the wood-pile. We were both born in Jackson, Tennessee and delivered by Dr, Thomas K. Ballard, who was also the County Coroner, about seven months and 14 days apart, me having arrived first. I was not present for the birth of my wife, possibly due to my ever increasing fascination with breasts, mostly my mother's but my Aunt Mary had me reaching for her's when she walked by too. Jimi and I have been together now for most of the last three decades and I have been increasingly concerned that she might actually be a yankee, as well as a Republican. Dr. Ballard is more than likely dead by now or I would have read about him recently in the Guinness Book of World Records, so I can't call him to confirm that the signature on her birth certificate is actually his and her mother is as crazy as a shit-house rat so I don't believe anything she says. I wonder if Dr. Ballard delivered more babies or performed more autopsies? Anyway, not the least of the yankee-like things I have noticed about her is that she refuses to eat grits, even shrimp grits!
She is an excellent southern cook but now that I think about it, I am the one that taught her how to make cornbread, fried pork-chops, and mashed potatoes, in the true Southern fashion. And she never ate squirrels, rabbits, deer or frog-legs until after we met and were married! She definitely has an authentic Southern accent but I understand that there are schools that teach people how to speak Southern so that they can buy fresh Gulf Shrimps and crawfish. We grow a garden and several fruit trees. We have already been enjoying spring plums, blue-berries and dew berries and recently the cucumber plants have started bearing. When I picked the first two cucumbers of the year from our garden, by the time I finished my chores, she had eaten one of them and the next day at lunch, I mentioned that I would like a slice of fresh cucumber and she had eaten the second one as well. Southern girls do this once in a while, so this isn't conclusive. Southerners do not call anyone names other than terms of endearment or nick-names unless they want to start a fight. I call her "Bug" and she usually calls me "Precious". Nobody else can call me "Precious" and get away with it because it invokes the only other acceptable reason that a Southerner would call someone a name other than their own; If I call you a name and it isn't your nick-name or a term of endearment, then we are going to fight or you are going to run away to avoid a fight. Well, back to the garden; She has been watching and waiting expectantly for the first ripe tomato of the year. They are still pretty small and a couple of weeks away from being ripe but she checks them daily with anticipation. When I came home for work yesterday for lunch, I had bought a small tomato at the corner produce stand and put it in my pocket. She says to me "Lunch is ready, Precious" and I said just a minute, I want to check the garden. She watched me as I pretended to pull the small tomato from the vine and took a big bite out of it. She got very excited and started jabbering about tomatoes and I took a second bite and she started demanding that I not eat that whole tomato and give her a bite and I just kept eating, fully expecting her to call me by my full name, Darrell Wayne Wallace, like they do in the South when you are on their bad side but she didn't do that. She called me a "Lousy Rat"! Now that just ain't Southern.

 

Day 94, My Liberal Diary
Today, I want to mention a problem that is deeply threatening our Liberal agenda; Short-sightedness! If we get all the money that the right-wangers are spending on bombs and bullets, all the people that make their living and pay taxes to support our goals by manufacturing them will be out of a job and have to rely on the same entitlements that we are demanding for everyone! I recognize that this is unfair because someone has to earn the money that we are demanding but I looked into the war/military thing a little closer and saw that it was not just bombs and bullets that we pay for, did you know that every time we have a war, folks are paid to build airports to land the bombs and bullets , warehouses to store them in, temporary housing to shelter the folks that are shooting them at little turban-headed people and it doesn't even begin to stop there? We send them tooth-brushes, toilet paper, clothes that sort of hide them from the folks that are shooting back, aspirin, for when the noisy bombs give them a headache, we even make special shoes for them and goggles to let them see in the dark. In fact, we have people employed to make everything that we send somewhere else to kill people and meet the everyday needs of of our professional killers. If we stop having wars, then everyone that is employed manufacturing, transporting, and storing all the stuff needed to have a war will be unemployed (Read: not paying taxes on income that we need to support our agenda). It is with this thought in mind, that I have decided to create a new program to find a solution to this major obstacle. I have decided to call it The American Short-Sighted, Hope and Opportunity for Liberal Education!
While the Right-wangers think that we are naive and ignorant, our rights to the shared wealth of this nation should be fairly divided equally between the haves and have nots. The only thing standing between us and that agenda is that if nobody is spending money to buy the stuff needed to have a war, nobody has a job making the stuff to have a war and the ones that are making all the wealth that we want to share will run out of money for us to share and this will eventually cause even more problems like bounced checks . So please lend your support to this important new program, The Short-Sighted, Hope and Opportunity for Liberal Education and became a life member of ASSHOLE, show them that we Liberals have the answer!

 

LOL, Facebook wants me to put a button on this post to raise money for my nonprofit cause!

 

Day 95, My Liberal Diary
Let's face it, my liberal brothers and sisters, we just have not had much support in our agenda to destroy the second amendment to the Bill of Rights. I just thought of something related that I'll wager any amount that we can gain tremendous support for and in fact, can easily get passed through the ignorant Republican House and Senate! Let's start a movement to repeal the 1934 Gun Control Act and the 1968 Gun Control Act, then we can get the money saved by eliminating the BATFE, their budget is enough to fund abortions, and pay a sizable portion of the costs of free health care! Once we have achieved this tremendous political coup, the Republicans will be so surprised that I'll bet they'll be perfectly willing to share more of their wealth since it will create huge markets and profits when Americans are really allowed to not only Keep and Bear Arms that are now heavily taxed and regulated, but to buy them at Walmart, where we know are large number of Liberals do their daily provisioning.

 

Day 96, My Liberal Diary
Maggie, my Dobermon, is the terror of the feline community that resides at my crazy mother in law's house. The high point of her day is when I say "Who wants to go chase cats?" She does this dance until I open the door then she runs to the end of the drive and waits for me, apparently cat chasing has to have an observer. She always stays about 100 feet ahead of me then sneaks up very stealthily towards the cats and pounces with ferocious barking. The cats used to scatter in all directions, and Maggie would chase them until they ran under a building or climbed a tree. It makes her so happy, but the cats got used to her and now, however ferociously she barks, they just sit there and look at her like they are thinking, 'There's that stupid dog again," This doesn't deter Maggie from sneaking up on them and barking, sometimes there is a new cat that hasn't heard about her and it will run from her but mostly, they just sit there and ignore her.
Recently one of the cats had two kittens. This always has been the friendliest of the crazy woman's cat collection, but not any more. Today, when Maggie pounced and began barking, the mother cat charged her, puffed up like a halloween cat and literally chased her back to my side. I was laughing so hard, it hurt. She stood beside me and continued barking at the fierce cat until the weinerdog can running up to help and the cat turned tail and ran for a tree. The weinerdog may be short but he is a vicious killer of frogs, lizards, and would love to ad a large house cat to his trophy room. Maggie is sort of like a liberal, all that barking and pretending to be a bad-ass cat chaser but they have her number now and they give her about as much attention as Donald Trump gives to that Pelosi woman. Any one of those dozen or so cats is half again larger than the wienerdog but they recognize a real threat when they hear him running up sounding like a caterpillar in high-heels, the cats scramble in all directions and Maggie gets to chase them and reclaim her dignity.

 

Day 97, My Liberal Diary
I played a show tonight at the River Shack on Dog River, wonder what kind of dog it was that named that river? There were a lot of folks there, some liberal, some conservative, some moderates and a good many of them came by boat and were wearing bikinis. One of the song writers, Bruce, dedicated his song, Momma Don't Let your Babies Grow up to Be Liberals, to me and mentioned my Liberal Diary and suspected ownership of a pussy hat and I was pleasantly surprised to find so many total strangers that have been reading and following my Diary. I was amazed that I sold nearly $3.00 worth of music downloads last week! . That's at a penny a download on Reverbnation, if I ever get to $25.00, I am going to get a new guitar strap, a pink one disquised as a vagina to show my solidarity with that particular anatomical feature. I confess to a fondness for most things related to vaginas except for some of those really masculine looking women that look like professional wrestlers. I really don't have an opinion about their sexual proclivities but some of them do try to intimidate me just because I am a heterosexual male that really intends to stay that way and when I feel threatened, I am prone to sometimes less than tactful reactions, up to and including shooting someone, if necessary.
I had this girlfriend once, many years ago, that wanted to try Ladies boxing at the Underground, a club in Memphis. If you won your bout, you got a free bar tab, if you won the evening competition, you got a hundred dollars cash. Bebe was very athletic and very bi-sexual which could make for an interesting evening sometimes and I had agreed to coach her in boxing. She was a world-class tennis player, extremely coordinated, and had great upper and lower body strength. Her first bout, she floored her opponent, a petite little blond. Bebe was appalled. She reached with both gloves to help the girl up and the blond decked her and won the bout. We were sitting at our table as I explained that the purpose of a boxing match was to hit the other person as many times as possible and it wasn't generally a good idea to apologize for it, at least during the match, when a 250 lbs. Butch sits at our table, puts her arm around Bebe and tells me to beat it or she'd kick my ass. Well, I had no doubts that she would make a legitimate attempt at it but Bebe was my date, after all, so I explained that she was interrupting a private conversation and should go find her another pretty girl to hit on. This behemoth literally roared at me as she attacked me with a bottle of Amstel so I side-stepped her charge and kicked her in the nuts, or at least where her nuts should have been if she'd really been a man instead of a woman pretending to be a man.
Turns out, she was actually one of the bouncers at the Underground and she had friends. I had left my gun out in my automobile because at the time, it was illegal to carry a firearm into an establishment that served liquor. I would have gladly been peacefully escorted outside by her friends but they seemed determined to do me grievous injury for some unknown reason so I willfully beaned a second one with a picture of beer and a third with a chair leg that had gotten broken in the confusion. I did not escape without injury, it did require a trip to the emergency room to get a couple of stitches in my right hand where there was a piece of broken tooth protruding but they wouldn't give me a rabies shot and I had to answer several questions from some policemen but fortunately no complaints were filed on my behalf although it was made very apparent that I would not be welcome back at the underground. I learned a valuable lesson that night, don't fight women that think they are men, shoot them or they'll become stalkers.I sure wish I could hear their side of this story.

 

Day 98, My Liberal Diary
I was thinking about when I was working for a major world-wide Marine Salvage Company before they were major. We had undertaken to re-float an old dry-dock made from a WW ll Liberty Ship in the Ybor channel near Tampa, Florida. Now before I get into this tail, let me say that people that own dry-docks have more pumping power than can reasonably be expected from just about anyone else so if they can't pump up one of their dry-docks, it is a pretty sure bet that a little salvage company with giant expectations couldn't do much better. I arrived aboard our salvage vessel, the Lana Rose and was met by our chief naval architect. He asked my opinion and I said that we would be ahead of the game to start chopping the thing up right away. Of course, he had expectations of a successful re-float, repairs, and selling the dry-dock to someone down in Venezuela and said it would take two months to cut the thing up. Well, it was close to four months later that we decided to begin wrecking the dock. Great expectations can be very costly. Well before we started getting smarter, all the money had ran out and the owner couldn't even make payroll so management, myself included, went for a couple of months without a pay check. I was 40K out of pocket just keeping the crew fed and materials needed to continue working. The owner of the company had another naval architect fly in from Houston to see if he had any silver bullets, the guy took one look at the project and asked why we didn't just cut the damned thing up? Joe drove him back to the airport in my company truck and when he returned a couple of hours later called me over and was very angry. He demanded to know why I had let the fuel get so low in my truck? Said he ran out of fuel on the way to the airport and had to borrow $20.00 from the naval architect just to get back. I looked at him for a moment before replying that I didn't have anyone to borrow $20.00 from. That shut him up, damned republican.

 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>