Fuzzy Parts 2

He was twelve years older, and gone most of the time.
Shelley was five years older, and well, she was a girl.

Other stuff from those days I remember are things like n 8 mm film of my Dad letting a billy goat butt him through a chain link fence at a decrepet El Centro Zoo, which is hilarious to watch.

The only pool in town was at the multi-storied hotel called the Barbara Worth which I remember burnt to the ground. The water in the pool made my sister's hair turn green.

That's about it for El Centro, the next thing I remember was living in North Park San Diego, near the Zoo, and the Balboa Park, and how nice and green everything was.

I loved San Diego, and still do.
I have said and still say, even with the crappy management of California, and how it is impossible for me to live there now, I would love to go back.
My Mom had it right. She saw the promised land and managed to get her family to it, but we have all dispersed due to reasons that will become clear if you come back to read these rantings.

Odd Fun Life-The Fuzzy Parts

I have often thought of writing the wierd and wonderful stuff that I have experienced in my days on this earth.

Since I have been handed a pink slip by the industry which I devoted most of my time and effort to, I suppose I have the time to do so now.

As I hope is the case with most, my recollection of really early years are based on extraordinary events, anicdotal conveyences, and 8 mm film footage taken by parents and such, allowing us to grasp things that happened before our brains were capable of commiting them to memory.

I was born in Brawley California, and was raised until the age of six in El Centro which at the time was a Sun baked stinking Hell hole. Things may have changed, I haven't been back, but if you put a window air conditioner in Hell, unless you get to stand in front of the window unit, Hell is still really hot.

Somewhere between Michigan and Brawley, my parents had my brother ,Kirk in Illinois, and my sister Shelley, in San Diego California.

My Mom, June, from Joplin Missouri, and my Dad, Haldon, (a compound name made up of the names Hal and Don), from Detroit, eventually met in Michigan then married into a life of un-ending bliss. Haldon, while in the Navy was stationed in San Diego and June, bless her, decided that San Diego was where she wanted to raise her family.

At an early stage of Kirk's life, like just when he learned to talk, he called my parents June and Hal. Never Mom and Dad..., June and Hal.

But I digress. In El Centro we were poor. I didn't notice.

In those days, this coming from the recollection of a five year old boy, the only industry was farming, and well, there was the telephone company for whom my father worked. Ha ha, my Dad was responsible for air conditioning the phone system in that furnace located between Los Angeles and the rest of the country. Nobody but the phone circuits got to stand in front of the window unit in Hell.

What I remember about El Centro was dirt and bugs. Lots and lots of both. El Centro means "The Center" in Spanish, and it was "the center" of un-Godly heat, dirt, and bugs.

A thing I remember, not from film or story, was the blanket of stinking dead crickets that covered the streets and the parking lot of the crappy little market we shopped at. Some sad parking lot attendant, with nowhere else to turn, had swept a particullarly large pile of decaying crickets behind the dime slot pony ride that I wanted my Dad to invest a sizable portion of the family's grocery budget in so i could gallop through the fetid stench of bug bodies.

Hal said no.

I don't remember much about Kirk