Interest or not

Category: A story to tell

  • Memories from when I was a young boy

  • The world is large

    Very large. When I was a young boy I looked at maps and globes and learned where I was. I hadn’t traveled very far and didn’t know then how large the world is. One of my first memories of traveling far from home was when I flew from Denver with my sisters to visit my Grandparents in Fort Lauderdale Florida. I remember being in the airplane sitting beside the window and looking down to the ocean very far below.

    We were between the mainland and Florida over the Gulf of Mexico recently renamed as the Gulf of America. Eventually I saw land below and that was Florida. When we arrived in Fort Lauderdale my Grandparents picked us up at the Airport. One of the first things I noticed was the humidity. I could feel dampness in the warm air. It was thick and I loved it. I remember on the drive to their home looking out of the car window and noticing how different the trees looked from the trees back in the dry arid climate of Colorado.

    When we arrived at their condo a gate opened, and we drove under the building into a large parking garage. We got out of the car and put our luggage on a dolly with four wheels and a handle just like in a hotel. We rolled our luggage to an elevator and rode in the elevator many floors up to their floor very high in the building. Their floor looked very different from the lobby area of the condo where we stopped briefly. Their floor had several doors on it. We rolled our luggage to my Grandparents door where there were fancy decorations and entered there home.

    Their home was very fancy. It was clean and bright, and everything looked good to me. I noticed a large wall at one end of their home that was almost all window. With my Grandpa I walked out onto the patio. The patio was long with a solid gate built around it. The patio was the whole length of the building and looked out over the beach and shore and Atlantic Ocean below. That was the first time I saw the ocean.

    Later that day we put on our bathing suits and went down to the beach. I loved it. I recommend you visit a beach if you haven’t been to one. There is no beach in Colorado. We all had fun playing on the beach and I went swimming not far into the waves and ocean. The salt water and sand felt so good. The water was warm and the waves were powerful. We collected sea shells in a bag and enjoyed being together on the beach. I have many good memories from that summer vacation.

    Back at home in Colorado I looked at maps of America and the world and globes with a new perspective. I could see where Florida is on a map in relation to Colorado and looked at the dot on the map of Boulder in Colorado the city where I’m from and the dot on the map of Fort Lauderdale in Florida where my Grandparents lived. I saw the distance between the cities and looked farther. I’ve been looking farther since.

  • I unfortunately have done numerous crazy things in my past. Fortunately I’m making rational decisions these days followed by rational actions and have learned not to react to something I don’t like when there is no reason.

    One crazy thing I did was look online for love. I’ve heard of success stories about couples who found each other through dating websites, something I’ve had minimal luck doing. I decided I wanted to get married and convinced myself that I needed to look internationally online for a woman who was looking to get married. This was about 13 years ago. At the time I didn’t feel confident approaching women in person about dating.

    I was making other crazy decisions and actions back then but for this post I’m going to focus on the specific crazy decision I took upon myself to look for love internationally. I’m not saying looking for love internationally is crazy. People do it all the time and create loving relationships that last. I wasn’t confident enough to approach women in person about dating and resorted to reaching out through the internet hoping to find a lover.

    Have you heard the song American Woman by Lennie Kravitz. That song summed up my opinion about American women which left me looking outside of United States for love. I spent hundreds of dollars on contacting women in foreign countries through websites that offer the service of connecting couples looking for marriage. Not much came of it.

    I wrote a letter expressing my interest in finding love and marriage to no one in particular and posted it on to Craigslist “man for woman” long term relationship in San Jose Costa Rica. I received numerous replies to my post and after vetting the replies one specific reply stood out to me. A young woman who was a college student studying to be a Doctor and living with her sister’s family in San Jose replied to my post.

    I liked what she wrote to me. We started writing back and forth and eventually had a Skype meeting where we got to see each other and listen to each others voice on a live video meeting. I got my hopes up. I was falling for her. Five months later I boarded an airplane with my buddy in Denver Colorado and we flew to Miami and then from Miami flew to San Jose, Costa Rica.

    Long story short, it didn’t work out. We arrived in San Jose and the next morning when I met the woman in person I was hung over from cocaine I took the night before. The impression I made on her was lacking. I did my best to give a good impression. I was on time and brought her a fresh bouquet of flowers and when we sat at a table in a restaurant for lunch I knew within me then and there I was not ready for marriage. Our meeting went well although not as planned and the spark I thought we shared did not show itself.

    I went back to the hotel where I was staying and proceeded to do more cocaine. Would have a spark between us have lasted if I would have stayed sober and arrived chipper to our meeting I do not know. Other than doing illegal drugs I was making other irrational decisions in my life back then.

    I’m going to stay on task and continue the story. For the rest of the trip I hired a tour guide who brought me to historical landmarks in San Jose one day. The next day I hired the same tour guide to take me to a beachside Resort outside of San Jose.

    A cab driver drove us to a small town on the coast where I hired a small boat and captain who brought us over the open water to the other side of the peninsula. When we docked I hired another cab driver to drive us through the jungle to the Resort. I rented a room with two beds at the Resort and spent the afternoon on the beach and drinking alcohol at the tiki bar beside the pool.

    A guest arrived at the resort paragliding into the ocean and swam to the shore. The tour guide I hired connected with the guest who paraglided in. She was a Canadian and on vacation from working at a Spa. The next morning I left early to make it to my flight to Miami on time. I left my tour guide at the Resort and hired a cab to drive me through the jungle to the pier where I bought a ticket on a large boat with many passengers that floated us to the small town on the other side of the peninsula.

    Back on land I hired a cab driver who drove me directly to the Airport in San Jose. I arrived at the Airport early and eventually my buddy showed up. We flew back to Miami Florida and then to Denver Colorado. From the airport in Denver I drove my car home. The next day I returned the gifts I had brought with me for the woman I went to Costa Rica to meet at the store where I bought them and went back to work.

    Not long after that I got a call from her one evening while I was eating dinner at a restaurant and told her that I was hung over and had taken cocaine the night before our meeting. That was the last time I heard from her.

    The moral of the story is don’t do illegal drugs. Like I said there was other irrational decisions I was making back then and was not ready for marriage.

  • My mom taught me how to cook food when I was a young boy. We cooked countless meals together. Later when I learned how to cook food for myself I learned to prepare meals for myself. I like to share food with others. Food is a blessing of life. I am blessed to have enough food to eat. I enjoy eating meals with other people. One of my favorite foods my mom taught me how to cook was chocolate chip cookies. I have many memories of preparing the batter on the kitchen counter by needing the dough and adding chocolate chips, eggs, baking powder, flower, sugar, vanilla and water into a mixing bowl and then onto the kitchen counter and dividing the dough into round balls and placing them with space in between each ball of cookie dough onto a greased metal baking tray. Then I’d press down on each ball making them flat and round. The next step in preparing the cookies was to preheat the oven until it was hot enough to bake the cookies on the baking tray. Cooking is a pleasure of mine and as a young boy I waited patiently while the chocolate chip cookies baked in the oven at home. The smell of sweet chocolate chip cookies was potent. The taste of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies I enjoy to this day. I prefer cookies when they are fresh out of the oven and have cooled down a little and still soft.

    People love to eat dessert. Sweet foods are often prepared as dessert to enjoy after a meal. The meal is the main course and most filling. The dessert is usually a smaller portion of food and usually sweetened with sugar or fruit juice.

    By the mid nineties I was used to cooking most meals for myself. At home I lived with my dad and he had hired a nanny who looked after me to some extent and prepared meals for us. My dad hired five nannies over the years to help look after me and prepare meals for us. I was 17 in 1995 and there was no longer a need for me to have a nanny. I knew how to cook for myself and was used to it. When I was 18 I enrolled in community college at FRCC. I had a job working in the kitchen mostly as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant. I quit my job and focused on college. My dad gave me a car because I was a college student. It was a Mazda 626 LX sedan. In college I was preparing to study for an Associates Degree. I enrolled in prerequisite courses for a full year with a full time schedule of classes. There was a computer room in the Campus in Heatherwood where I created a Hotmail.com account for my email address. The internet was new to me. I had experience using computers at home as a young boy and in the computer room in elementary school. When I was going to college the internet was marketed as the next big thing. There was a lot of hype around it. At some point my dad gave me a computer. I remember some of the first times I logged on to the internet at home in my room. Realplayer was a big deal back then. Realplayer was a program on the internet where visitors to the internet could stream live video to their computer. I used a dial up modem connected to my computer to connect to the internet. The speed of the amount of data that could be sent to and from my computer was much slower than what it is today in 2025. Most of the videos I watched with Realplayer were prerecorded videos. Watching a live stream technology did not exist back then. The only live stream video was usually on television on occasional news reports.

    My memories of what the internet was back then was a big deal. I had already been introduced to pornography in magazines and by the time I visited porn on the internet I knew that it has a powerful effect on the visitor. Outside of college and homework I was having a difficult time socially. I didn’t know what I wanted to major in for a career and after one year of college classes I stopped going to college. My dad took back the car because I was no longer a college student. I told myself and others I was a student of life. I went to work full time. I remember working at a Baja Cali Mexican restaurant where I learned how to cook on a line. It was not fast food and it was not a fancy restaurant where a waiter took customers orders at their table and served their meals at their table. At the restaurant people would line up and place their orders with us cooks from a menu on the wall and pay for their food that was made to order at the cashier who was running the cash register. The restaurant had similarities to the Chipotle restaurant chain. Hand held cellphones were barely on the market and technology for pay to tap and google pay did not exist. Customers paid for their food with cash dollars or their credit card.

    Technology has changed so much since I was 18 and registered with Microsoft for my Hotmail.com email address account. In my late teens the internet was very interesting to me so much that I wanted to become a website designer. My dad supported me and bought me educational software and text books for Adobe Golive, an HTML editor. I studied on my own mostly and learned many basic website design skills. I learned how to create web pages and ad text and graphics to them and how to lay out web pages so the visible information to the visitor was in order. I signed up for a web hosting account and registered a domain name and uploaded my first of many web pages with FTP to the host computer. From there I navigated with Internet Explorer web browser to my website domain name on the internet where I got to visit the first website I designed. It was a big deal to me. I was better at WYSIWYG what you see is what you get technology. Software engineering and coding was very difficult and I relied heavily on plug and play programs. I learned some HTML coding. I learned how to download premade widgets that would keep track of the amount of visitors my website received and add them to my web pages.

    Cookies the technology was a big deal. I learned that cookies were back end code that collect data when a visitor visits a website. Technology cookies are used to collect many kinds of data about visitors at websites. I was able to install some premade cookies on the websites I designed that detailed what kind of web browser and computer the visitor to my websites was visiting from. Unlike chocolate chip cookies from an oven, I didn’t learn how to code my own technology cookies.

    In food a cookie is a treat, a snack, sweet food, not the main course. The main course is the meal which is usually not sweet. Most of the energy in a meal is in the main course. For breakfast the main course meal is what sustains a person and gives them enough energy and nutrients for their mind and body to last them until their next meal which is often lunch. Dessert such as a cookie usually leaves a sweet taste in a persons mouth. It can cleanse the pallet from a savory meal. A glass of water does the same and leaves no aftertaste.

    Much of how I learn is visual. I am blessed with eyesight. There are two kinds of cookies. The cookie you can see with your eyes and smell with your nose and touch with your hands and bring to your lips and taste on your tongue in your mouth and there are cookies that function in the background of websites that are not visible to website visitors on the internet. They are very different. There is nothing wrong with a cookie and be careful when choosing the source for a cookie.

  • Desire

    I want a woman to share my life with who is a mate and a lover and my best friend.

     Most of my relationships with women are polite and basic. I rarely am in a relationship with a woman. I am very attracted to women sexually and would like to have a woman as a lover.

    When it comes to meeting a woman, I do my best to be polite and appropriate. I believe there is a woman who wants to be my friend and lover and mate and partner. It’s up to me to meet her. I’m 47. I have never been married and have no children. Depending on the woman I meet these are considered my attributes. I have more time to dedicate to a woman than I would if I had children.

     I feel that when I meet a woman if she has children, I will do my best to be a good man in their lives. Honestly if I meet a woman I’m attracted to and she has children, the thought is scary. I don’t have experience raising children. If I meet a woman who has children, and her children are already living on their own I would be relieved. Many a single parent raises their children on their own and need a good fiance or fiancee in their lives. I will do my best if I meet a woman with children to be a good man to each of them.

    Last night I got up in the middle of the night and poured out the rest of the bottles of beer in the sink. It felt good knowing I don’t have anything intoxicating at home. I don’t get drunk these days. I stopped getting drunk over 12 years ago. The most I drink in one sitting is 5 beers. Usually if I drink, it’s two beers and I stop. I don’t go to bars often and want to stop going to bars. I’m better off when I don’t drink a drop of alcohol. I don’t do drugs. I’ve been clean from drugs for over 12 years. My sobriety is very important to me. It’s very important to me that people in my life are not getting drunk and not using drugs. Healthy relationships are very important to me.

     Relationships are a two-way path. In a relationship it’s important to be on the same path. It’s important to acknowledge people on the path they are on and when our paths meet to respect each other on the path. Friendships build this way. I think everyone is on a path. Some paths have many people on them. Other paths have few people on them. Some paths appear to be straight. Other paths zigzag. Meeting people where they are on a shared path is how to live in society. Some paths are wide with room to walk around others on it. Some paths are narrow with just enough room to walk around another person on it. Paths go in many directions and to many destinations. At 47 the paths I travel are more predictable than 12 years ago. There are good people I meet every day on shared paths. The world is a safe place overall and there are good people everywhere.

  • Evening in Medford Oregon

    I went to the bar just before dusk.

    A couple were seated at one end

    I traveled there alone and sat down on a corner stool.

    A big woman with long straight dark hair asked me quietly, “what are you having”?

    Do you have Heineken in a bottle? I asked. “Yes”, she brought me the beer and asked, do you want to leave the tab open?

    “I’ll leave it open”. I replied. Several people were seated along a wall gambling on big machines where the players pull levers down or press a button and hope for a winning score.

    A small group of younger men were gathered near a pool table focused on the balls at play.

    The bar has good food. Last time I ate there I got a plate of quesadillas with grilled chicken. I sipped the Heineken and ordered another.

    On television the Sandiego Padres were playing a team I did not recognize. Their opponents black Jerzy had a capitol A on the breast pocket area, white and silver. The television stats kept the opponents team a mystery to me. Padre’s were up 4-3.

    The couple at the end of the bar noticed the baseball game on television for a moment and seemed to be enjoying themselves. They are a Hispanic man and women in their mid-thirty’s. Several other couples were seated around the room at tables. An Oriental man appeared to have more than enough drinks to possibly walk home.

    It’s a quiet neighborhood bar in a small shopping center with a Domino’s Pizza and a drive through coffee shop. Joes, Bar and Grill. Is it a franchise or one of a kind? I don’t know, I enjoyed the beer and social environment.

    The waitress brought me a second beer and spoke up, I’m glad. It was good to hear her voice above the voices of patrons. I settled my tab then drove home.

    It’s early in the evening, Thursday in the all American town. Tonight will cool off some from the summer heat.

  • Human relations

    I’m trying to get the word nigger out of my thoughts. The n word doesn’t occupy my mind often, but when it does it’s deliberate. I don’t consider myself racist. I speak to people with respect appropriately that depends on the individual. When I was a teenage boy I repeatedly got in trouble, some of that trouble was with other black boys of similar age as me.

     In current news media the n word is shunned for good reasons. Most of my friends were white growing up. Sometimes we’d joke around and call each other dog or the n word in a friendly manner. I understand from learning US history the n word emotionally hurt many people and is very divisive. I remember using the n word once yelling at a black man who didn’t pay me for driving him in a taxi cab to the destination he asked me to.

     There are less black people in the community I live in, in comparison to Los Angeles where I met and befriended many people from a variety of cultures. I learned a lot about people living in L.A. It’s my opportunity to not label a black person in my thoughts as anything else than human. A living breathing person who has feelings and feels encouragement and respect when those thoughts are present.

     Thoughts are things. I left my teenage years over 28 years ago. I’ve learned how to relate better to people since. I don’t feel guilty or ashamed for having thought the n word when coming in contact with a black person. I’m glad I don’t use it. The n word is a heavy thought. It’s my old psychological baggage I let go of. We are a free country, free to live and love and prosper.

    I’m making the world a better place letting go of old psychological baggage and wishing readers health and happiness. This post is meant to encourage continued good relations with people of all colors.

  • I went by my x girlfriends house last week. I had deleted her number from my phone and showed up and knocked on her door. She answered the door and was quick to smile. We talked for a few moments and she invited me in. Her apartment hasn’t changed much, it’s not a big mess like it was in the past. There are still way to many things in her apartment. She’s a hoarder. That was a major reason why I left her. I learned that people who hoard things can get very clingy, very attached to things, she was very attached to me and it was uncomfortable. In all honesty I was horny when I went to see her. We didn’t have sex. I didn’t go upstairs to her room so I don’t know if her room is a complete mess. I like to think that it’s not overflowing with things and clothes and it is not my business.

    I took her out for ice cream downtown. We sat on chairs in the mall and enjoyed conversation and eating ice cream. Then we went to a clothing store where she bought a new shirt. Then I drove her to my home and helped her order an instruction manual for her sewing machine. We hung out and talked for a while then I drove her to her apartment.

    It was good to see her and visit with her and it’s good to have my space.

  • A chance encounter

    I met a woman today at work. I arrived before she did at the yard where we get ready to go out in the field, more specifically to a road and control traffic as Flaggers in constructions zones. I checked in with the supervisor at 6:30am and we waited for instructions from the power company. Instructions never came. We waited on call at the meetup location for 7 hours before it was called off. The woman arrived not long after I did. I forget her name. I introduced myself and held out my hand to shake hers. She shook my hand. She had a story to tell. She didn’t tell me her story, just her name. She had tattoos on the side of her head, a puzzle piece.

     She was a similar age as me. She had shoulder length straight blond hair and pale white skin. We all waited in our cars for the instructions that did not come. In my car the thoughts in my mind about her were “don’t speak unless spoken to” That statement I’ve never used. I won’t teach my kids to behave that way if I have kids. The women I met for a moment surely had many things to say. I noticed her reading a book in her car. I thought maybe she ate fried eggs for breakfast. She’s beautiful. Later she joined the supervisor in the supervisors truck with her book. Maybe they are friends. I would like to speak to her, the opportunity didn’t present itself. I’m new as a Flagger. I can speak to her at another shift.

     Sometimes words come to me when I meet people, the statement, don’t talk unless you’re spoken to was clear in my mind when I met her. I’m glad she introduced herself after I reached out to shake her hand and introduced myself. I shook her hand for a moment. It was a human connection. I’m glad I reached out to her. Overcoming barriers is important. I did ask her if she liked the work and she said yes.

    I noticed she had a big smile when she joined our supervisor in her truck. The seven hours went fairly fast. I turned music on and air conditioning and dozed off. I ate lunch. And dozed off again. At 7 hours another supervisor from the power company drove over and gave us papers with our 7 hours for the day. Getting paid to sit in my car for seven hours was my luck I suppose. I like to stay busy, I’d rather get paid to work than to sit in my car. That doesn’t happen very often.

  • Fighting illegal online content

    The specific porn content a person is addicted to matters. That is a loaded statement. It’s loaded by the addict’s habit of looking at and watching porn. It’s loaded in the sense that the addict’s computer repeatedly over a long amount of time visits the addictive content. Computer’s create memories every time a visitor visits a website.

    Cookies keep track of the visits. Cookies keep track of specific information that includes what website pages you visited and for how long in seconds minutes and hours. Marketers use information in the cookies to advertise their products and services to the visitor of their content. Even if you are not paying money for a subscription to pornographic content your visits to the content makes you invested.

     You pay for internet service and while it’s billed as unlimited use on a monthly basis, the time you spend visiting porn content is a fraction of your total use of your internet service. The fraction translates to the amount of money you spend for your internet service visiting porn content. You’re investing in porn every time you visit a porn website even if you don’t pay money directly to the company that shows you the content.

     Your computer invests in porn every time you visit porn content. If you quit watching and looking at porn your computer remembers you visited porn content. The cookies that advertise porn to you are sensitive and know for example that you haven’t visited their content. Overtime the porn cookies stop advertising porn to you because you stopped visiting porn content. It doesn’t change the past, it changes the present.

    While there are studies that consuming some porn can have a positive effect on a person, studies also show consuming porn has negative consequences on people. Porn that shows underage people who are naked and having sex and porn that shows violence are very bad for everyone involved. They are bad for the victems being photographed and being recorded on video. They are bad for the people documenting illegal activity. They are bad for the computer website server that publishes illegal content.

    The only innocent people are the victims who are underage and who are experiencing violence. The people taking photographs and recording videos of illegal activity are perpetrators to the crime. The website server that hosts illegal content are perpetrators to the crime. Persons who visit porn content online are complicit in the sense that if they do not report a crime they are aiding and abetting.

    If you see a crime happen out in the world wherever you are, you are a witness to the crime. If you look the other way and leave it doesn’t make you part of the crime. If you go back to the same spot and witness crime again you have to ask yourself why you’re there. Hopefully you report the crime to the authorities.

    I knew about this on the periphery of my conscious mind and learned recently where I read about “content management” is a real job online where people report illegal content and work to remove illegal content from the web.

    People work in teams in the same office with the same goal of removing illegal content from the web and bringing criminals to justice. This is an opportunity to help make my community and United States and the world a safer place to live and raise a family. I am interested in doing this work.