To all my fellow Veterans... have a great Memorial Day!
Monday, May 27, 2013
Friday, May 24, 2013
'A Sailor's Wife'
Every married man has one… some good, some bad, and some have an all-time great one by their side! Too… it’s been said there are two times a man doesn’t understand a woman… before marriage & after!! Now don’t let me put any misconceptions in your knucklehead nogg’ns… we’ve all got them too and every gauddamned one of them notions is different… just like your women!! I specifically remember a Chief once telling us…
"Boys & Genitals, we're gonna get underway for a while so you’d better get home… take care of your wives and girlfriends and all their needs while you're away… ‘cause if they end up at the neighbor’s doorstep look’n for some sugar and get six inches of dick instead… you’re gonna be all kinds of fucked up! And I ain’t having none of that on my watch!!"
Well I ended up married to a gal homegrown in Bremerton, Washington… a sailor’s legacy as most of the town can attest! She’s a pretty little thing and has a mind of her own… not sure why she stuck it out with a fella like me all these years but here we are and there it is!!
How we met wasn’t exactly fairytale story material… wish I could say it was as romantic as sitt’n beneath a coconut palm tree with a ukulele watch’n a beautiful sunset overlooking the basking waves of Pacifica… but it was nothing of the sort!!!
You see, in my younger years I was the kind of ‘Crackerjack’ that used to sit in the local beer joint with all my shipmates swill’n suds and infusing sea stories of who’d been where with what and how many & that & the other assorted wornout bullshit while pinch’n big tittied barmaids on the butt!! Yes my friends… I’m proud to say I was a perverted heathen!!!
I loved women… the chase, the thrill, the perfume smells… but eventually I’d realized if I didn’t stop going out everynight of the week I’d drink myself to death! So I got me a part time job at a beer joint while the ship was in the docks!! And there my friends is where I met my young bride to be on her Twenty-First Birthday!!!
She came walk’n in with her perky busted breastesses being the first pleasurable thing I noticed as she asked her cousin…
“Who’s that guy?”
“Oh… that’s ‘Dennis Slut’ you want to stay away from him!”
Now I’ve been called many a name by women who loved me & hated me… but never been called a slut before! At least not to my face… still don’t know if that was supposed to be a compliment or an insult… just another difference between us men and women!! A couple fellas off the ship were hedging their bets on who’d get to take that young gal home that night… only to get turned down at every turn… I’d figured my chances weren’t good so I didn’t make any efforts on that particular night!!!
But young Crystal, my future wife, just couldn’t keep away! After several weeks had gone by and our humble establishment became her favorite watering hole on Friday & Saturday nights, it was inevitable we’d soon get to talking and one thing would lead to another and my boyish charm soon won her over!!!
A month went by… I’d moved my Seabag and few belongings I had into her apartment and voila… on a four day trip to ‘Treasure Island’ for aviation firefighting school I get the phone call…
“Sob… Sob… Dennis I’ve got something important when you get back…Sob… Sob!”
“What’s wrong? Why can’t you just tell me over the phone?”
“I’m pregnant…”
It was faster than a ‘Westside Story’ knife fight in a streetside phone booth! Have you ever had one of them ‘Oh Shit’ moments when your whole life story changes in the flash of an eye?!? That was my moment…
You see I’d fully intended on leaving town in six months with the ship shifting colors to Alameda once it got out of the docks… but never intended on bringing a lil’ life into the mix, which brings up another saying I’d once heard…
‘A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband, while a man never worries about the future until he gets hitched…’
Now mind you we weren’t married yet, but were definitely on the way to making a family rather I was ready or not… and knowing… to do the right thing, I intended on making an honest woman of her… or her making an honest man outta me… truthfully!!!
So it was the beginning of a new way of life and the end of another! But I gotta say… I’d never in my wildest dreams realized the price of kids... my budget was like a fully compressed balloon fart’n its way out the window… and from there it became a matter of life and debt!! It was gett’n costly on meager Navy pay and she was shoot’n out kids like a ‘fast pitch’ machine at the batting cage… thought I was gonna have to break out the ol’ catcher’s mit!! And when you gotta litter the size I was handling with her nieces & nephews living at the house too… it was like herding cats!! We decided somewhere along the line to get married and that’s when all the mushy stuff stopped… with the honeymoon over life and marriage began to resemble the sitcom ‘Love & Marriage’!!!
The late George Carlin said…
“I am’ is the shortest sentence in the English language… Could it be ‘I do’ is the longest sentence?”
No one who’s been married for a significant amount of time can argue the rollercoaster of tribulations you go through in the sanctity of matrimony… for better or worse?!? ‘No Shit Sherlock’… sure rings a bell! Next thing you know it’s sleeping on the guest bed or the couch with fingers pointing… bitching and complaining… accusations of infidelity and the whole kit-n-caboodle that goes along with the maturity of marriage!! I’m an asshole and she’s a bitch and that’s become our mutual nicknames over the years… some of you have ‘my little poopsiekins’ & ‘sweety buns’… we were ‘AssHoLe’ & ‘BiTCH’… okay?!?
After long deployments you become strangers more than partners in wedlock! Civil at times… usually when the kids were around but other times at eachothers throats!! You know, they don’t have a gauddamned guidebook on how to be a good husband and wife team… especially when you’re in the Navy!!
Now that the statute of limitations has run out I gotta say there was a point I’d realized that arguing with my wife was like mud wrestl’n with a pig… after a while you gotta recognize she actually enjoys it! There’d be times she wouldn’t piss in my ass if my guts were on fire!! And she was sooo damned full of piss-n-vinegar…
“Why are you so late from work, and don’t blow smoke up my ass?!?”
“I had to work late!”
Then she’d find out I was out play’n football or softball with the boys… like the time I sprained my ankle and ended up at the hospital… that went over like a fart in church! And to this day she still won’t let that one go…
“You remember that time fifteen years ago when you got hurt playing football when you should’a been home with your family?!?”
I hate having to apologize for things I did that come with a fifteen year time delayed fuse attached to it… I guess them there are the recyclable types!! I gotta say I’d rather eat glass and try to shit a vase then have to deal with a pissed off wife… that shit ain’t no fun no how!!!
So moving right along with the hissy fits, tantrums… holler’n despicable comments back & forth at one another… and we tried to go to marriage counseling but…
“No counselor can tell us anything that I don’t already know! I’m right and your wrong… and even if I’m wrong… you’re still wrong!”
… you just can’t win an argument like that fellas!! And if you pissed your woman off too bad, I swear she could put you in a coma for so long your civvies would go outta style!! I saw a phrase the other day something of the effect…
‘There are many fish in the sea, but you’re the one I want to stuff & mount in the bedroom’
… well I don’t know about the bedroom but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind displaying my head on the wall, all taxidermied with a stupid smile on my face!’
Yeah… eventually as the years go by most of us have become tamed and your wife has got you saddle-broke, house trained or in laments terms ‘Pussy Whipped.’ You mellow out and stop giving a shit about the idiosyncrasies like not putt’n the toilet seat down… not putt’n the toilet paper on the paper rack… dirty dishes in the sink… or where you throw your coat and kick off your shoes when you come through the door!!!
The pucker factor becomes less of a factor and you just learn to get along… stop going in to the room with your pistol halfcocked!
Instead of gett’n mad at eachother over silly things, there are wonderful moments ahead filled with passive aggressiveness… like those ever precious moments of annoying that special someone for the rest of your life... fart’n under the covers…
“Let’r rip tater chip!”
“Keep that up and I’ll cancel your birth certificate!”
… and then she’ll go sit in her car for an hour and start singing! Oh my… that gal couldn’t hold a tune if she had a bucket with a lid on it!!
I especially love it when I come home from work late at night and she looks forward to a little body warmth sharing and snuggl’n under the covers…
“What’s that poking me?”
… in my best Sam Elliot impersonation…
“Tube snake smothered in underwear… It’s what’s for dinner!”
… to which I usually get a pillow to the head…
“Why did you stop rubbing my hair, are you asleep?”
“NO! I was just check’n for holes under my eyelids… YES! I’m try’n to sleep!”
Yes… despite our differences we’ve learned to show our love in many different ways after living the lessons of what truly counts in a marriage!
“Just because we’re talking friendly… don’t mistake it for me getting over you being an asshole!”
Her diarrhea of the mouth and my constipation of good ideas… yeah we make a pretty good couple! We now sit back and reflect on that ‘do you remember when’ kinda thing and hone in on the error of our ways as I realize she’s filed down my horns and made me a domesticated man… I love her yes I do… who else would take me knowing the stories of the bars… the girls… the monetary compensations for the horizontal mambo in foreign places… listen to my silly ol’ sea stories and still put up with my silly ass?!? It’s no bull shit love!! That woman has got to be at least half nutz to put up with a half shelled ol’ Salt such as me!! I don’t understand it but I’m glad she does!! She surely ain’t no saint… but I guess I ain’t no prized package either!!!
Yep… marriage ain’t easy… it’s a hell of a lot rougher than I’d ever imagined… but the plunders are a true treasure…
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
‘Drunken Sailor’
A Drunken Sailor was stumbling down the street with one foot on the curb and one in the gutter!
A cop pulled up and says…
"I've got to take you in, pal. You're obviously drunk!"
So the drunken Sailor asks…
"Officer, are ya absolutely sure I'm drunk?"
"Yeah, buddy, I'm sure!"
…said the copper…
"Let's go."
Breathing a sigh of relief, the Sailor says…
"Thank goodness… I thought I was crippled!"
Friday, May 17, 2013
‘Working Parties’
Ever wonder how all that sustenance & other crap we need out in the ‘Deep Blue’ while cutting holes through the waves ever got there? Five… Six… Seven Decks below, down & around steep ladder wells through passageways so extremely tight you could barely squeeze your butt cheeks through?!? I’ll tell you… ‘Working Parties!!’ ‘Working Parties’ or ‘Stores Onloads’ were the ol’ Canoe Club’s way to get the cargo we needed while surviving long epic journeys underway!! Usually a bottom feeder licensed dumbass at the anchor end of the social pecking order was the recipient of such work!!!
If you were a young ‘Crackerjack’ you got the shitty assignments… the smelly end of the stick! That’s just the way it was!! You were comparable to the domesticated jackass!! Your subservient duty as the shipboard subordinate doormat was to move stores from trucks on the pier or vertrep nets off the flight deck to the holds and refers down below among many other insufferable deeds!!!
“Okay shitbirds… we got some stores to move, and by ‘WE’… I mean ‘YOU!’
But I must admit… as a young dumb ‘Crackerjack’ on a floating tin can… I really didn’t mind jackass’n that stuff back and fro!! Rather it was a fifteen man or fifty man working party I loved that shit… toss’n cases of soda up the brow and down the hole… through the passageways…
“OOOPs… dropped one, GULP, GULP, GULP!”
Nothing like a little cumshaw when it came to store onloads… why the hell else do you think there was noth’n but stale Cornflakes, Total & Wheaties when it came to chow in the mornings… all the ‘Fruity Loops’, ‘Apple Jacks’, Sugar Smacks… and any other good stuff never reached the messdecks!! We had us some ‘Ali Baba and Forty Thieves’ activity going on!!!
Anything not hermetically sealed in a package or box was fair game!! Some ass clown hijacked a tub of premium Neapolitan ice cream headed for the wardroom pantry from a loose package and ate it down in the mess decks. He was a super hero for a minute… until the MAA got wind of it!!! But that's one of the fringe benefits of being on the ‘Working Party’!!!
Yep… nothing like shipmates side by side… sleeves rolled up toss’n boxes back-n-forth like some kind’a crazy ass assembly line evolution! When the truck arrived on the pier or the chopper arrived underway…
“Now muster the umpteen million man Working Party!”
… a little ragged around the edges, & always filled with major horseplay and plenty of grabass to see who could toss a bag of potatoes the farthest or box of dry goods the hardest… once caught the pointy end of a box right in the teeth. It cut my mouth all to hell and I looked uglier than a rabid warthog for days!! That’ll get the attention of a Chief faster than a preacher in a whorehouse…
“Turn off that gauddamned music and clear out… Who’s the pivot man in this here cluster fuck?!? Boy, you’re mouth looks like a baboon’s ass… that’s what happens when you horseplay… always leads to sickbay?”
And God forbid you try to escape one of them there working parties… there’d always be one of them dreaded Store Keeper Chiefs right around the corner… the kind that could chew nails and fart tacks…
“Hey Shipmate… get your gauddamned elbows off the bulkhead! It’s time to toe the line and stop fucking off!”
“But Chief, I think I strained to hard and busted a shit string…”
“Chief he ain’t hurt’n! He’s so lazy he wouldn’t pick his nose if it didn’t taste so good.”
“Shut your Cockholster… I’ll ask if I wanna hear you speak!”
“But Chief… there’s no more stores coming down the passageway… we’re done!”
“Bullshit! This Working Party ain’t over ‘til all this shit gets cleaned up! You can’t say you’re done taking a crap if there’s still shit hang’n from your ass… you need to wipe it up!”
“But it’s supposed to be Holiday Routine…”
“Tell you what… I’ll tell your Chief to give you a half day! 24 hours in a day 12 hours in a half day!”
“But Chief… that ain’t even fair! You think that’s even right?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?!?”
And that’s usually what made up a ‘Working Party’… a well-oiled, truly motivated ‘Working Party!!!’
Then there were the other times… when you just didn’t feel like showing up…
SH1 Dent was the ship’s barber and one of them smooth talk’n black men from somewhere down south! He was a cool kat… kind’a fella everyone liked!! One day during a stores onload he was in charge and it was quite obvious I was hungover… feel’n like I’d been eaten by a wolf and shit over a cliff …
“Hey Swing, what da fuck is wrong with you? You look’n all raggedy and shit!”
“Aaaah Hell… I just gotta case of the ‘Black Ass’ that’s all!”
“Whatta fuck did you say?!?”
You ever feel dumber than a bag full of hammers?!? You gotta realize as a kid I was a transplanted Midwestern boy in the swampy orange groves of central Florida! It took a couple rotten oranges upside the nogg’n and a few scuffles with some good ol’ boys just to figure out what ‘Hell Naaa’… ‘Shit Fire’… and whatever the hell ‘Bocephus’ on one of them redneck ballcaps was all about!!!
Yep… a few tussles and a couple fat lips later I’d learned not to ask too many damned questions… and I’d heard the term ‘case of the black ass’ on many an occasion! Can’t rightfully say if I was too naïve or too dumb to know the difference… but truth be told I never put two & two together!! Nonetheless, when SH1 raised his voice wound up tighter than a two dollar watch… I knew with outta doubt what it meant!! It took me a long while to calm that feller down before he permanently affixed my scrawny ass to the bulkhead… I think he realized after many a plea that I’d just suffered a case of ‘Dumb-Ass-Itis’!! I guess you could say I was a few fuses short of a full circuit!!!
For many years after that I’d been on birdfarms… auxiliary ships… and things float’n around in the ‘Big Blue’ big enough to carry several zipcodes!! Didn’t get called to do working parties no more! Once you’ve had that crow on for a while you don’t have to do that kind of menial stuff!! Then on my last bit-o-sea duty… showed up wear’n khaki on a small boy tin can!!!
Hell it don’t matter what color the uniform or how far up the pecking order you are on a small boy! There comes a time when everybody’s gotta pitch in and do there part! Never thought I’d have to reach down and get my hands dirty as a Chief warp’n my spine over loads of taters & cases of soda… but life is full of surprises and that was one of many!!!
An all hands working party to replenish stores via verteps, high line, or loading the pier… sometimes you just come full circle!! We worked hard and there ain’t nobody who can say we were slackers… we did our part!!
I’m proud to have played an insignificant part of it all… To have the honor to serve with shipmates I’ll never forget… I think that’s what we all think about when we look back at such a past!! I wouldn’t trade it for a million dollars!! Those were wonderful days of patriotic obligation…
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Warped Sense of Humor
Got this from the Drunken Sailor Facebook Page... Warped sense of humor I know!
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
Thursday, May 9, 2013
'Mail Call'
Every single rapscallion and scalawag alike who ever sailed the seven seas can hark back to times a blaring over the 1MC…
“Mail Call… all Mail Petty Officers to the Ship’s Post Office… now Mail Call!”
… As it was, on long cruises crashing through the waves, mail call was probably the most anticipated event underway!! Perfumed letters with lipstick sealed envelopes & crotch-cutouts from young Suzy’s panties… these were the kind’a things that kept us going on our long journeys to faraway places!!!
Yep… I absolutely loved them handwritten letters! Nothing was better than a letter from home… sometimes with glossy photos of scantily clad girlfriends and all…
"What in God’s Green Earth would a pretty young thing like that see in an ugly son-of-a-bitch like you?"
We’d see unclaimed parcels in the mailbag like Victoria Secret & Fredericks of Hollywood catalogs… Cherry Blossoms Mail Order Bride Magazines… Swiss Penis Pumps… 'How To' Books on finding a woman's 'G' Spot… Blow up Dolls with vibrating vaginas… Blow up Sheep with vibrating… WHAT the HELL!! Just when you thought you’d seen it all there was always something!!!
Naturally… everyone looked forward to the ol’ mail call! As soon as it arrived on deck it went straight to the Post Office to be distributed likewise boosting morale with a roar heard throughout the decks…
“Okay… front and center when your name is called!”
“Seaman Jones… You got a letter here from Texas… You from Texas?”
“Yeah… what of it?”
“You know what they say, only steers and queers come from Texas!”
“Hey, this one’s for Reed… Hey Reed, I didn’t know you were from Tennessee… What does a thirteen-year-old girl from Tennessee say after sex? …Git offa me, cuzzin Jed, you're a crush’n my cigarettes!”
“Hey, Santelli… why you laugh’n?!? If Jesus were born today he couldn’t be born in New York!”
“Why’s that?”
“Cause there’s no way to find three wise men… or a virgin in your whole gauddamn state… Yoooow!”
Hahahaha…
“Yo… damn Johnson! What’s up with the odiferous perfume panty incense in this letter… address says she lives on ‘Fanny Lane’… man, get that shit outta here?”
“Hey man… my girl just broke up with me!”
“Well look at it this way… Having guys buy her drinks at the EM Club won’t make her feel guilty any longer!”
“Hey man don’t feel bad… the last letter I got from my wife was addressed from Divorce Court!... That's all she wrote!"”
“Looks like Goff got twenty more mail order letters from the PI… how many wedding proposals does that make… twenty… thirty?!?”
And so it was 'til the final parcel was emptied from that ratty ol’ canvas bag and everyone got the welcoming scoop from back home that pegged their morale meters until the next mail call! Mail was the tether that kept us connected to the real world back home while living in a surreal vacuum of underway insanity!!!
And to those Navy Ships, the mail was always addressed to the Fleet Post Office (FPO) address USS Umpty Squat with the service member’s social security number right on the front of the envelope! But somewhere along the line, the ol’ Department of Defense realized what a ‘Kabuki Goat Fuck’ that turned out to be with the introduction of identity theft and canceled that part of the program!!
Some of the addressees were pretty gauddamned hilarious…
IC2 Balls
SN:555-55-5555
Ops Dept / OI DivFPO/AP 96698-2031
Ensign Moe Lester
SN:515-55-5151Weps Dept / OF Div
FPO/AP 96698-2031
Deck Dept / 1st Div
FPO/AP 96698-2031
Barry McCockiner … Mike Okhurtz… Jack Mehoff… Justin Syder… etc… etc…
You get the picture!!!
And then there were the care packages! When you’re feeling isolated and the monotony is gett’n rather challenging… sometimes a good ol’ gift wrapped care package just for you is the secret combination to the world that was left behind!!
But like always… the futures gotta put a wrench in the gears… a kink in the hose if you would! Some knucklehead came up with the idea of the twidgety widget of a computer thingamajig and voila… born was the instant e’mail!! Now this generation is into Xbox… I-umpty squats… & expounding endlessly on some mindless crap every fifteen minutes on the damned computer from ten thousand miles away like he’d never left home!!
That brings up a question… and the question is before the all-mighty e-mail took away our mail call what kept us from snail mail’n classified information to our loved ones… comsec type of stuff?!? Well, we used to have certain Chiefs & Officers who randomly went through our letters before we sent them out to prevent that kind’a thing… Sometimes we’d purposely delay sending out mail just to deny the enemy!! Now the computer looks for certain phrases or words… hell who knows maybe Comsec is being broken all the gauddamned time and we’re just to stupid to know better!!!
AAAH Hell… much of what we held dear is now all gone… along with our waistlines… hair… virility… just a few brain cells keep’n us going and reminding us of the things the younger generation could give two shits about!! But I’ll take my snail mail any day!! It meant so much more… no matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery!!!
Yep… mail was what kept us going… That’s my story and I’m stick’n to it!!!
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