mp170.6

Thanks to this stupid thread, I went to a taco truck yesterday and doused my burrito with some super hot sauce.  The Mexicans running the food truck tried to stop me, then cringed and laughed as I proceeded to eat the burrito.
I had tears running down my face, and my nose ran for another couple hours. 
Today, my colon is on fire.  I'm having to take a dump every hour or so...my body is working overtime to expel whatever the hell was in that sauce. 

I am hero and deserve!
 
NSFW

The majority of sports fans in this country are white affluent men = conservative

My dad and I almost died one summer out between Niland and Glamis. 
 
We were driving to Arizona and decided to take the more scenic route via the Salton Sea.  My dad always carried a DeLorme Topographic Atlas on trips -- for those not familiar, they're the paper equivalent of Google Maps in Terrain View. 
 
Anyways, my dad always studied these maps with a fine tooth comb in advance.  He found a road that DeLorme listed as a paved road that would take us back to a highway going toward Interstate 8.  We picked it up after Niland and had no problem maintaining 40-50 MPH.  A few minutes later we passed a sign that read "END COUNTY MAINTAINED ROAD".  I verbalized this to him to make sure he noticed it.  He did.  We discussed it briefly and one of us said the road beyond the sign was in better shape than the road leading up to it.   Signs like these are not uncommon, and sometimes the government agency responsible for the road forgets to remove signage after upgrades are made. 
 
Another few minutes passed.  My dad was doing about 60 MPH when all of a sudden the road turned to pure sand.  We got thrown around pretty badly as his 2WD truck bogged down and he struggled to steer through it.  My dad kept his foot on the gas thinking the sand was temporary.  We came to a stop about 1000 feet later.  Not only were we in deep sand up to the frame, we were in deep shit.  This was before the days of cell phones, and the area was very remote.  Absolutely nothing nearby.  It quickly became obvious that nobody, not even 4x4's, had driven this portion of the road in days or weeks.  Nobody was going to find us alive.
 
We sat there for a couple minutes wondering what to do.  One of the ideas was walk back to Niland, but my dad's spare water was in military grade 5-gallon canteens.  Neither one of us liked the idea of lugging one of then 10 or 15 miles back to Niland, on foot, in 110° heat.  Five gallons of water weighs over 40 pounds.  We eventually decided to dig ourselves out, or at least try.  Plan B, if that failed, was to hike toward the railroad (closer than Niland) and flag down a train crew.  I spent about an hour collecting trash, wood, rocks, anything, to gain traction.  Using the tire jack positioned on rocks, we raised the back wheels one by one and placed all the crap I scavenged underneath the tires and in the path behind them.  Then we would floor the truck in reverse and back up as far as possible, without sinking too deep again.  We made progress about 50 feet at a time before needing to repeat the process.
 
The physical exertion was extremely taxing in the summer heat.  Really bad.  We took turns -- one of us sitting in the truck drinking water with the A/C blasting, while the other worked.  It wasn't enough.  Both of us were fighting off fainting when we went back to work.  I don't think we completely blacked out, but caught ourselves just in time to retreat back to the truck and rest.  This is where things got ugly. 

I finished another round of digging and motioned for my dad to back up again.  He wasn't doing anything, just sitting there confused and incoherent when I opened the door.  I figured it was heatstroke so I had him get outside while I poured ice water all over him.  A few minutes later, he was almost back to normal.  What I didn't know at the time was his symptoms more closely resembled water intoxication from drinking too much water.  Thinking he was in grave danger, I went back to work, alone.  There wasn't much digging left to do, but I was in pretty bad shape myself beginning to hallucinate.  We caught a break in the final stretch and managed to reverse the final couple hundred feet all at once.  The whole process took several hours. 
 
My dad still speaks of that incident as a father/son bonding experience, something we can laugh about now, type of event.  I poured most of our remaining water on him thinking he was about to die.  Because of that, our supply of drinking water would have run out by day's end.  Due to whatever episode that was, he has ZERO recollection of me pouring the water or how confused he was.  He doesn't grasp how close we were to collapsing and dying out there.  I reminded him of these details in the months after and he angrily said to me, "STOP LYING.  THAT NEVER HAPPENED!" 

I haven't brought that part up since.  And I never told my mother the full details either.  I figure it's best she believe my dad's version of events.

How many of you have unanswered questions about your dad? Topics that are implied off-limits, avoided, etc.

My dad worked for a few aerospace companies on DoD projects. He would be gone for weeks or months at a time, with the usual "destination" being some country in the Middle East. This was during the 70's, 80's, early 90's by the way. The nature of his work has never been discussed. Not then, not now.

I was cleaning at my parents' house one time and discovered some postcards that had been mailed during his trips. One of the postcards had been postmarked in a different country that couldn't be made out. My dad had an "Oh $%#%&" look on his face when I asked him about it. He mumbled something about mailing it from the airport when he changed planes. But not long after, the postcards, all of them, went poof. All gone. In my parents' house is a huge dining room rug from Pakistan(?) that my dad supposedly purchased on a business trip. If true, I'm at a loss for how he brought the rug home. Way too big and heavy to fit inside a suitcase -- it's like a small roll of carpeting when rolled up. Another time, on a trip to "Guam" he spent weeks "teaching a class" which was totally out of character for his skill set and the position he supposedly held at the time.

A number of years ago I was at a backyard BBQ. Off to one side was two elderly men talking. They were both hard of hearing and had to speak really loud. Turns out, they worked for the same aerospace company, same division, same location, same buildings, same years, as my dad. Lots of reminiscing about old bosses, coworkers, and, at one point, mentioned my dad's name just briefly. They were totally oblivious as to who I was, or that several of us could eavesdrop rather easily.

Besides the boring banter, they got to discussing cover stories, which really piqued my interest. The company had employees whose entire job was to facilitate a phony cover to fool family members, friends, foreign spies, or anybody, really, about the true whereabouts of employees while on classified trips. Some of this I knew. One tactic when flying commercial is a convoluted series of flights using multiple intermediate stops to create the appearance of a fake origin/destination. In other words, you start at point A, change planes at B, tell your family you're going to C, but board another flight at point C to reach your true destination at D.
These guys were bitching about how the company failed to provide enough time at the fake destination to purchase gifts for family/friends, mail letters, make phone calls, so their families wouldn't be suspicious. One of the guys was really bitter about a trip that "nearly ruined his life". His sequence of flights was changed at the last minute causing him to bypass the fake destination. He had promised to buy specific gifts for his family there. His cover man back in the USA assured him everything would be taken care of. The trip lasted a long time, and during that period, the cover man was promoted, quit, fired, whatever, and his replacement never got the message. The gifts for his family were not waiting on his desk when he returned to California. He said he panicked and grabbed one of the secretaries and the two went shopping hoping to find gifts that would pass as being ethnic enough replacements. He and this younger hot secretary were in a store waiting to check out when he noticed one of his wife's close friends, clearly pissed off, staring him down in disgust. I'm not sure how the story ended because they were interrupted. Either his marriage survived, or the woman at the BBQ was a wife from a different marriage.

I don't know whether any portion of that story, or anything similar, ever applied to my dad. My gut feeling definitely says yes.

My dad has situational behaviors that mimic PTSD in various ways. He can be very anxious when traveling and that boils over to anger when something goes wrong. That used to piss me off as a child because I didn't do anything wrong, yet he'd come completely unglued and cause a scene. He's very controlling or phobic in some settings, while laid back in others.

The whole thing is weird because those older gentleman at the BBQ gave me valuable perspective (via my eavesdropping) that may or may not apply to my dad. Nevertheless, it's provided me more patience and empathy for my dad, all of which was sorely needed on my part.

Taylor, my neighbor is a senior pastor at a medium sized church in Orange County.  I'm almost positive he is an introvert too.  While they have church functions at their home every week or two, he pretty much keeps to himself the rest of the time.  To be honest, we don't even know him that well. 
 
I've stopped trying to assess whether a person is an introvert or extrovert because it doesn't reveal anything useful.  There's a guy that likes to go walking near my house.  I thought for years he was really shy because he never says anything when people say "hello".  Turns out he is deaf.  That explains everything.

In fairness to millennials, I think the skills are missing because the opportunities no longer exist.  The lack of manufacturing jobs is only part of the problem. 
 
Gone are the days when cars were so unreliable that kids, because they had no cash, had to learn to fix cars on their own.  It was in these crisis situations that I developed a lot of my mechanical skills.
Nowadays, you can buy a Toyota or Honda and drive it 300,000 miles without ever breaking down. 

My dad and I almost died one summer out between Niland and Glamis. 
 
We were driving to Arizona and decided to take the more scenic route via the Salton Sea.  My dad always carried a DeLorme Topographic Atlas on trips -- for those not familiar, they're the paper equivalent of Google Maps in Terrain View. 
 
Anyways, my dad always studied these maps with a fine tooth comb in advance.  He found a road that DeLorme listed as a paved road that would take us back to a highway going toward Interstate 8.  We picked it up after Niland and had no problem maintaining 40-50 MPH.  A few minutes later we passed a sign that read "END COUNTY MAINTAINED ROAD".  I verbalized this to him to make sure he noticed it.  He did.  We discussed it briefly and one of us said the road beyond the sign was in better shape than the road leading up to it.   Signs like these are not uncommon, and sometimes the government agency responsible for the road forgets to remove signage after upgrades are made. 
 
Another few minutes passed.  My dad was doing about 60 MPH when all of a sudden the road turned to pure sand.  We got thrown around pretty badly as his 2WD truck bogged down and he struggled to steer through it.  My dad kept his foot on the gas thinking the sand was temporary.  We came to a stop about 1000 feet later.  Not only were we in deep sand up to the frame, we were in deep shit.  This was before the days of cell phones, and the area was very remote.  Absolutely nothing nearby.  It quickly became obvious that nobody, not even 4x4's, had driven this portion of the road in days or weeks.  Nobody was going to find us alive.
 
We sat there for a couple minutes wondering what to do.  One of the ideas was walk back to Niland, but my dad's spare water was in military grade 5-gallon canteens.  Neither one of us liked the idea of lugging one of then 10 or 15 miles back to Niland, on foot, in 110° heat.  Five gallons of water weighs over 40 pounds.  We eventually decided to dig ourselves out, or at least try.  Plan B, if that failed, was to hike toward the railroad (closer than Niland) and flag down a train crew.  I spent about an hour collecting trash, wood, rocks, anything, to gain traction.  Using the tire jack positioned on rocks, we raised the back wheels one by one and placed all the crap I scavenged underneath the tires and in the path behind them.  Then we would floor the truck in reverse and back up as far as possible, without sinking too deep again.  We made progress about 50 feet at a time before needing to repeat the process.
 
The physical exertion was extremely taxing in the summer heat.  Really bad.  We took turns -- one of us sitting in the truck drinking water with the A/C blasting, while the other worked.  It wasn't enough.  Both of us were fighting off fainting when we went back to work.  I don't think we completely blacked out, but caught ourselves just in time to retreat back to the truck and rest.  This is where things got ugly. 

I finished another round of digging and motioned for my dad to back up again.  He wasn't doing anything, just sitting there confused and incoherent when I opened the door.  I figured it was heatstroke so I had him get outside while I poured ice water all over him.  A few minutes later, he was almost back to normal.  What I didn't know at the time was his symptoms more closely resembled water intoxication from drinking too much water.  Thinking he was in grave danger, I went back to work, alone.  There wasn't much digging left to do, but I was in pretty bad shape myself beginning to hallucinate.  We caught a break in the final stretch and managed to reverse the final couple hundred feet all at once.  The whole process took several hours. 
 
My dad still speaks of that incident as a father/son bonding experience, something we can laugh about now, type of event.  I poured most of our remaining water on him thinking he was about to die.  Because of that, our supply of drinking water would have run out by day's end.  Due to whatever episode that was, he has ZERO recollection of me pouring the water or how confused he was.  He doesn't grasp how close we were to collapsing and dying out there.  I reminded him of these details in the months after and he angrily said to me, "STOP LYING.  THAT NEVER HAPPENED!" 

I haven't brought that part up since.  And I never told my mother the full details either.  I figure it's best she believe my dad's version of events.

My dad and I almost died one summer out between Niland and Glamis. 
 
We were driving to Arizona and decided to take the more scenic route via the Salton Sea.  My dad always carried a DeLorme Topographic Atlas on trips -- for those not familiar, they're the paper equivalent of Google Maps in Terrain View. 
 
Anyways, my dad always studied these maps with a fine tooth comb in advance.  He found a road that DeLorme listed as a paved road that would take us back to a highway going toward Interstate 8.  We picked it up after Niland and had no problem maintaining 40-50 MPH.  A few minutes later we passed a sign that read "END COUNTY MAINTAINED ROAD".  I verbalized this to him to make sure he noticed it.  He did.  We discussed it briefly and one of us said the road beyond the sign was in better shape than the road leading up to it.   Signs like these are not uncommon, and sometimes the government agency responsible for the road forgets to remove signage after upgrades are made. 
 
Another few minutes passed.  My dad was doing about 60 MPH when all of a sudden the road turned to pure sand.  We got thrown around pretty badly as his 2WD truck bogged down and he struggled to steer through it.  My dad kept his foot on the gas thinking the sand was temporary.  We came to a stop about 1000 feet later.  Not only were we in deep sand up to the frame, we were in deep shit.  This was before the days of cell phones, and the area was very remote.  Absolutely nothing nearby.  It quickly became obvious that nobody, not even 4x4's, had driven this portion of the road in days or weeks.  Nobody was going to find us alive.
 
We sat there for a couple minutes wondering what to do.  One of the ideas was walk back to Niland, but my dad's spare water was in military grade 5-gallon canteens.  Neither one of us liked the idea of lugging one of then 10 or 15 miles back to Niland, on foot, in 110° heat.  Five gallons of water weighs over 40 pounds.  We eventually decided to dig ourselves out, or at least try.  Plan B, if that failed, was to hike toward the railroad (closer than Niland) and flag down a train crew.  I spent about an hour collecting trash, wood, rocks, anything, to gain traction.  Using the tire jack positioned on rocks, we raised the back wheels one by one and placed all the crap I scavenged underneath the tires and in the path behind them.  Then we would floor the truck in reverse and back up as far as possible, without sinking too deep again.  We made progress about 50 feet at a time before needing to repeat the process.
 
The physical exertion was extremely taxing in the summer heat.  Really bad.  We took turns -- one of us sitting in the truck drinking water with the A/C blasting, while the other worked.  It wasn't enough.  Both of us were fighting off fainting when we went back to work.  I don't think we completely blacked out, but caught ourselves just in time to retreat back to the truck and rest.  This is where things got ugly. 

I finished another round of digging and motioned for my dad to back up again.  He wasn't doing anything, just sitting there confused and incoherent when I opened the door.  I figured it was heatstroke so I had him get outside while I poured ice water all over him.  A few minutes later, he was almost back to normal.  What I didn't know at the time was his symptoms more closely resembled water intoxication from drinking too much water.  Thinking he was in grave danger, I went back to work, alone.  There wasn't much digging left to do, but I was in pretty bad shape myself beginning to hallucinate.  We caught a break in the final stretch and managed to reverse the final couple hundred feet all at once.  The whole process took several hours. 
 
My dad still speaks of that incident as a father/son bonding experience, something we can laugh about now, type of event.  I poured most of our remaining water on him thinking he was about to die.  Because of that, our supply of drinking water would have run out by day's end.  Due to whatever episode that was, he has ZERO recollection of me pouring the water or how confused he was.  He doesn't grasp how close we were to collapsing and dying out there.  I reminded him of these details in the months after and he angrily said to me, "STOP LYING.  THAT NEVER HAPPENED!" 

I haven't brought that part up since.  And I never told my mother the full details either.  I figure it's best she believe my dad's version of events.

How many of you have unanswered questions about your dad? Topics that are implied off-limits, avoided, etc.

My dad worked for a few aerospace companies on DoD projects. He would be gone for weeks or months at a time, with the usual "destination" being some country in the Middle East. This was during the 70's, 80's, early 90's by the way. The nature of his work has never been discussed. Not then, not now.

I was cleaning at my parents' house one time and discovered some postcards that had been mailed during his trips. One of the postcards had been postmarked in a different country that couldn't be made out. My dad had an "Oh $%#%&" look on his face when I asked him about it. He mumbled something about mailing it from the airport when he changed planes. But not long after, the postcards, all of them, went poof. All gone. In my parents' house is a huge dining room rug from Pakistan(?) that my dad supposedly purchased on a business trip. If true, I'm at a loss for how he brought the rug home. Way too big and heavy to fit inside a suitcase -- it's like a small roll of carpeting when rolled up. Another time, on a trip to "Guam" he spent weeks "teaching a class" which was totally out of character for his skill set and the position he supposedly held at the time.

A number of years ago I was at a backyard BBQ. Off to one side was two elderly men talking. They were both hard of hearing and had to speak really loud. Turns out, they worked for the same aerospace company, same division, same location, same buildings, same years, as my dad. Lots of reminiscing about old bosses, coworkers, and, at one point, mentioned my dad's name just briefly. They were totally oblivious as to who I was, or that several of us could eavesdrop rather easily.

Besides the boring banter, they got to discussing cover stories, which really piqued my interest. The company had employees whose entire job was to facilitate a phony cover to fool family members, friends, foreign spies, or anybody, really, about the true whereabouts of employees while on classified trips. Some of this I knew. One tactic when flying commercial is a convoluted series of flights using multiple intermediate stops to create the appearance of a fake origin/destination. In other words, you start at point A, change planes at B, tell your family you're going to C, but board another flight at point C to reach your true destination at D.
These guys were bitching about how the company failed to provide enough time at the fake destination to purchase gifts for family/friends, mail letters, make phone calls, so their families wouldn't be suspicious. One of the guys was really bitter about a trip that "nearly ruined his life". His sequence of flights was changed at the last minute causing him to bypass the fake destination. He had promised to buy specific gifts for his family there. His cover man back in the USA assured him everything would be taken care of. The trip lasted a long time, and during that period, the cover man was promoted, quit, fired, whatever, and his replacement never got the message. The gifts for his family were not waiting on his desk when he returned to California. He said he panicked and grabbed one of the secretaries and the two went shopping hoping to find gifts that would pass as being ethnic enough replacements. He and this younger hot secretary were in a store waiting to check out when he noticed one of his wife's close friends, clearly pissed off, staring him down in disgust. I'm not sure how the story ended because they were interrupted. Either his marriage survived, or the woman at the BBQ was a wife from a different marriage.

I don't know whether any portion of that story, or anything similar, ever applied to my dad. My gut feeling definitely says yes.

My dad has situational behaviors that mimic PTSD in various ways. He can be very anxious when traveling and that boils over to anger when something goes wrong. That used to piss me off as a child because I didn't do anything wrong, yet he'd come completely unglued and cause a scene. He's very controlling or phobic in some settings, while laid back in others.

The whole thing is weird because those older gentleman at the BBQ gave me valuable perspective (via my eavesdropping) that may or may not apply to my dad. Nevertheless, it's provided me more patience and empathy for my dad, all of which was sorely needed on my part.

My dad and I almost died one summer out between Niland and Glamis. 
 
We were driving to Arizona and decided to take the more scenic route via the Salton Sea.  My dad always carried a DeLorme Topographic Atlas on trips -- for those not familiar, they're the paper equivalent of Google Maps in Terrain View. 
 
Anyways, my dad always studied these maps with a fine tooth comb in advance.  He found a road that DeLorme listed as a paved road that would take us back to a highway going toward Interstate 8.  We picked it up after Niland and had no problem maintaining 40-50 MPH.  A few minutes later we passed a sign that read "END COUNTY MAINTAINED ROAD".  I verbalized this to him to make sure he noticed it.  He did.  We discussed it briefly and one of us said the road beyond the sign was in better shape than the road leading up to it.   Signs like these are not uncommon, and sometimes the government agency responsible for the road forgets to remove signage after upgrades are made. 
 
Another few minutes passed.  My dad was doing about 60 MPH when all of a sudden the road turned to pure sand.  We got thrown around pretty badly as his 2WD truck bogged down and he struggled to steer through it.  My dad kept his foot on the gas thinking the sand was temporary.  We came to a stop about 1000 feet later.  Not only were we in deep sand up to the frame, we were in deep shit.  This was before the days of cell phones, and the area was very remote.  Absolutely nothing nearby.  It quickly became obvious that nobody, not even 4x4's, had driven this portion of the road in days or weeks.  Nobody was going to find us alive.
 
We sat there for a couple minutes wondering what to do.  One of the ideas was walk back to Niland, but my dad's spare water was in military grade 5-gallon canteens.  Neither one of us liked the idea of lugging one of then 10 or 15 miles back to Niland, on foot, in 110° heat.  Five gallons of water weighs over 40 pounds.  We eventually decided to dig ourselves out, or at least try.  Plan B, if that failed, was to hike toward the railroad (closer than Niland) and flag down a train crew.  I spent about an hour collecting trash, wood, rocks, anything, to gain traction.  Using the tire jack positioned on rocks, we raised the back wheels one by one and placed all the crap I scavenged underneath the tires and in the path behind them.  Then we would floor the truck in reverse and back up as far as possible, without sinking too deep again.  We made progress about 50 feet at a time before needing to repeat the process.
 
The physical exertion was extremely taxing in the summer heat.  Really bad.  We took turns -- one of us sitting in the truck drinking water with the A/C blasting, while the other worked.  It wasn't enough.  Both of us were fighting off fainting when we went back to work.  I don't think we completely blacked out, but caught ourselves just in time to retreat back to the truck and rest.  This is where things got ugly. 

I finished another round of digging and motioned for my dad to back up again.  He wasn't doing anything, just sitting there confused and incoherent when I opened the door.  I figured it was heatstroke so I had him get outside while I poured ice water all over him.  A few minutes later, he was almost back to normal.  What I didn't know at the time was his symptoms more closely resembled water intoxication from drinking too much water.  Thinking he was in grave danger, I went back to work, alone.  There wasn't much digging left to do, but I was in pretty bad shape myself beginning to hallucinate.  We caught a break in the final stretch and managed to reverse the final couple hundred feet all at once.  The whole process took several hours. 
 
My dad still speaks of that incident as a father/son bonding experience, something we can laugh about now, type of event.  I poured most of our remaining water on him thinking he was about to die.  Because of that, our supply of drinking water would have run out by day's end.  Due to whatever episode that was, he has ZERO recollection of me pouring the water or how confused he was.  He doesn't grasp how close we were to collapsing and dying out there.  I reminded him of these details in the months after and he angrily said to me, "STOP LYING.  THAT NEVER HAPPENED!" 

I haven't brought that part up since.  And I never told my mother the full details either.  I figure it's best she believe my dad's version of events.

How many of you have unanswered questions about your dad? Topics that are implied off-limits, avoided, etc.

My dad worked for a few aerospace companies on DoD projects. He would be gone for weeks or months at a time, with the usual "destination" being some country in the Middle East. This was during the 70's, 80's, early 90's by the way. The nature of his work has never been discussed. Not then, not now.

I was cleaning at my parents' house one time and discovered some postcards that had been mailed during his trips. One of the postcards had been postmarked in a different country that couldn't be made out. My dad had an "Oh $%#%&" look on his face when I asked him about it. He mumbled something about mailing it from the airport when he changed planes. But not long after, the postcards, all of them, went poof. All gone. In my parents' house is a huge dining room rug from Pakistan(?) that my dad supposedly purchased on a business trip. If true, I'm at a loss for how he brought the rug home. Way too big and heavy to fit inside a suitcase -- it's like a small roll of carpeting when rolled up. Another time, on a trip to "Guam" he spent weeks "teaching a class" which was totally out of character for his skill set and the position he supposedly held at the time.

A number of years ago I was at a backyard BBQ. Off to one side was two elderly men talking. They were both hard of hearing and had to speak really loud. Turns out, they worked for the same aerospace company, same division, same location, same buildings, same years, as my dad. Lots of reminiscing about old bosses, coworkers, and, at one point, mentioned my dad's name just briefly. They were totally oblivious as to who I was, or that several of us could eavesdrop rather easily.

Besides the boring banter, they got to discussing cover stories, which really piqued my interest. The company had employees whose entire job was to facilitate a phony cover to fool family members, friends, foreign spies, or anybody, really, about the true whereabouts of employees while on classified trips. Some of this I knew. One tactic when flying commercial is a convoluted series of flights using multiple intermediate stops to create the appearance of a fake origin/destination. In other words, you start at point A, change planes at B, tell your family you're going to C, but board another flight at point C to reach your true destination at D.
These guys were bitching about how the company failed to provide enough time at the fake destination to purchase gifts for family/friends, mail letters, make phone calls, so their families wouldn't be suspicious. One of the guys was really bitter about a trip that "nearly ruined his life". His sequence of flights was changed at the last minute causing him to bypass the fake destination. He had promised to buy specific gifts for his family there. His cover man back in the USA assured him everything would be taken care of. The trip lasted a long time, and during that period, the cover man was promoted, quit, fired, whatever, and his replacement never got the message. The gifts for his family were not waiting on his desk when he returned to California. He said he panicked and grabbed one of the secretaries and the two went shopping hoping to find gifts that would pass as being ethnic enough replacements. He and this younger hot secretary were in a store waiting to check out when he noticed one of his wife's close friends, clearly pissed off, staring him down in disgust. I'm not sure how the story ended because they were interrupted. Either his marriage survived, or the woman at the BBQ was a wife from a different marriage.

I don't know whether any portion of that story, or anything similar, ever applied to my dad. My gut feeling definitely says yes.

My dad has situational behaviors that mimic PTSD in various ways. He can be very anxious when traveling and that boils over to anger when something goes wrong. That used to piss me off as a child because I didn't do anything wrong, yet he'd come completely unglued and cause a scene. He's very controlling or phobic in some settings, while laid back in others.

The whole thing is weird because those older gentleman at the BBQ gave me valuable perspective (via my eavesdropping) that may or may not apply to my dad. Nevertheless, it's provided me more patience and empathy for my dad, all of which was sorely needed on my part.

They are heroes and deserve dead breasts.

And every fake-ass "entrepreneur" and "producer" in SoCal will have one on a 15% loan.

If Ozzie Guillen is seriously being considered,I think that’d be a sign that Arte has officially lost all of his marbles.

This never gets old. 
All over Steven Shell. lol