9:42 pm October 12, 1987
the Thunder is Clattering in the distance and echoing off the buildings. I can see stars from my porch and some fog.
The air is real still and it will probably rain.
undated, but probably early 2009
A Lightening Bolt of Love, here, then gone in an instant!
U told me I've always had strength. I'm finding it now because I need it.
I need to be strong to ride on top of my feelings, our feeling come......
Writing has almost always been a release. Writing, journaling has always allowed me to be buoyant and rise about the process and release my apprehensions I might feel. Right now, this moment in time, this small pin head of time that folds and stretches out for us but is not even a speck of dust in the big picture is very uncomfortable.
It is uncomfortable because the feelings we shared, the distance is in real time. I know something of the way I'm feeling. You have told me many words, ideas validated my feelings telling me you feel similarly and to have struggled with how you feel. Now Creator and some time has allowed our feelings to seek their own level of strength, find a niche to live in. They are still here in us, but not all on the surface like they were for 30 days. We know they are there, they feel apart of us.
Lover, together we have walked through doorways that previously have been closed. I find an incredible challenge dealing with.....
You may feel a larger bunch of feelings that are overwhelming. You have opened a door to me and told me about the courage you believe I have. You have encouraged me to express to you all that I am feeling. Sometimes words are not accurate. I mean you no harm, or disrespect. You have revealed more of yourself to me and I am grateful that you have. You told me all the feelings we have expressed are real. I am glad of that because I am feeling a little confused by our downturn of communication. I know that you don't have the technology available to you and I do. I suspect you may have reached a point where you are over loaded with your emotional and physical pain, have had to take a step back. I have done this to hoping to let time percolate feelings the way it does.
We can go beyond what our past barriers were. What we think as our limitations will fall to the side. I can feel that now. I will be patient, you have told me I am and I know I am with others more than myself.
Life is easier when I have a structure, a foundation that I have been building that I can rely on. The trick of life is not to lose sight of the big picture. We each face different challenges. We have what we have got. What has brought us to where we are. For me it is that connection I feel with a source of the greater good, that powerful energy that connects all life on this planet and perhaps beyond.
Miscellaneous Chaos {part of the deception}
01-30-2006
{11 months before I leave for Portland. I don't think I know I am leaving yet because I have left work, to take a test at SBC for work. If I get the work, not going to leave. Hind sights..}
Waiting in the SBC staffing center to take the test. I should have left work earlier. Here 15 minutes early, but we are waiting. I paid $8 for parking up Webster @ Douglas Parking Lot. $8 a day, $40 a week or $160 a month. They must get some kind of break for signing up for a month at a time.
12:21 and no one but test participants in sight. I wish I had eaten lunch, it may have helped quell my nervousness. It was easy to get in, don't sweat it another first. Chris says he didn't pass the first time. All I can do is the best I can. Would make a nice Birthday gift though. I am attempting to stay calm, gazing at my P&W hat with the 2 UAL pins, Otis pin and no nuke pin on it. I'm 56 tomorrow and attempting to get a new career started with a company that I may have a chance to become a permanent employee. They are letting us in at 12:45. I suspect it was on of the test participants opening the door for the late person. To many details that don't concern me.
A person came to look at ID's and I wasn't on the list, but neither were some others. I'm not particularly surprised.
I was reading an article about Jerry Brown Mayor of Oakland in Sunday's Chronicle. It was saying how in 7 years he had not accomplished all he had hoped for. A citizen was talking about crime in the flats and how more police are needed. Jerry is now running for State Attorney General. Oh boy!
It is now 1:10 pm and people are wandering in. I find this to be disturbing because other testings I have been to, they lock the doors and if you aren't on time, you don't get in and it was requested when I called about taking the test that I show up 15 minutes early.
It is now 1:15 and the test has still not begun yet. I expected more organization, but surprises never cease. 1:25pm they are now calling people who filled out the applications incorrectly or incompletely. Now they are giving instructions about parking which I was told about on the phone. Now the facilitator is explaining the jobs they are trying to fill. The test crew is short handed today and it is now 1:45pm. She is going to review our TMT sheets questions. It is frustrating because she is doing this one participant at a time. It is now 1:55 pm. She is putting my TMT to the side. She is trying to determine which is us needs to take the test.
I don't have any recollection of having taken this test and don't know what the results may have been. I am now in Portland Oregon which tells me I took the test and what, failed. I don't know. I probably got distracted, as I know I did. Got a hold of someone from my past and everything else became less important. I made plans to move somewhere around July of 2006.
As late as Aug. 2006 I was still looking for work in SF Bay Area, but running into schemers etc.
December 18, 2006
The feelings I am getting are overwhelming and depressing. Just scraping the surface of what needs to happen as far as maintenance and Little Willies talents are being exploited by the landlord, the crazy man, the boss. Actually, he has to suppress most of his talent in order to work for this character! Sometimes my life seems so illusive, hard to get a grip on.
Sometime in early 2004
I'm aging. I am getting older inside. As strange a statement this might seem from a man going into his 54 year on the planet, it is true for me.
I've just taken a sip of my morning coffee and it is excellent. That is a feat since my last French press took a spinning dive from my stove top, first hitting the handle of one of my two cast iron fry pans, sometimes known as skillets. I knocked the handle with my elbow, setting it to spin and hitting the skillet. Although I heard the resounding clang of the pan and essentially felt I knew what was coming, I continued to to walk away, letting the freshly pressed contents spill down the face of the 1940's or 1950's Wedgewood Range and oven and then crash as the glass pitcher of the coffee maker; and continued to bounce it's way down the face of the stove. A stove that has seen untold kitchen tragedies over its long tenure as an appliance in servitude of us human beings. It has even seen time in a cave of a warehouse waiting for someone like me who had a nostalgic streak in them for a stove that had some character and closely matched his fathers middle name. The spelling is different, my pops being Wedgwood. the difference is the stoves are one and the Fine china is Wedgwood. Something to do with past relatives.
My father was an interesting character. Apparently, many of us Clyde's are interesting characters! I have found this to be true of myself too. Back to my pops, I didn't know much about him though for various reason and only learned about him, that he was a human being only when he had a stroke in the mid 1970's. I learned lots about him as a person from his clients at a bar in Santa Cruz, CA. It was called the Seaside Cavern and was much like it's name, a cave. It was dark and smelled of stale air, stale alcohol. It was painted green outside, maybe to emulate its place in nature, to make one think of walking into a secret hideaway. On the inside it was dark like a cave. It had dark stained wood, much of the stain coming from the smoke of countless cigarettes, cigars and pipes that were being smoked by patrons and the owner alike. Sometimes the smoke was so thick in there it was hard to see across the room. When looking out the entry door one evening I thought the fog had come in, but discovered it was clear as crystal outside. I drove by it as recently as 2012 and it is a Little Cesar's Pizza shop. The Seaside belonged to a dying group of bars in Santa Cruz. There was the Eastside over on Soquel Ave. The Asti over on Pacific Ave. and the Seaside Cavern. These were all bars that were dying and after having some success in previous decades.
When my father bought the Seaside in the early 1970's it was owned by a couple of semi retired guys, one a truck driver and the other a commercial fisherman. The fisherman's name was Bobby Fazio. Bobby always wore a maroon jump suit with short sleeves. He had dark brown wavy hair and was about 50 back then. Bobby was a wheeler dealer, always had some guy coming by the bar when he was working to show him something, sell him a fish etc. People would come to the side door to the left of the bar down a driveway where he parked his pickup truck. He was the only one who parked there. That was made very clear to me right from the get go by Jim. Bobby had a problem with alcohol and new much more about his problem than I was yet to find out about mine. The other guy was Jim was probably about 65 or so and I don't recollect his last name but can describe him. He was big, over 6 feet, had a big barrel chest, a stern face like he didn't approve, but mostly kept his opinions to himself. He almost always wore plaid short sleeve cotton shirts, was married, drove a big Buick Electra and seemed to view me as the spoiled kid I was. He taught me the bar business pretty well. He brought his wife in occasionally an aging blond and they were making the circuit of bars including the Asti, the Eastside and the Seaside and Pasatiempo Inn among others. They were almost certainly Republicans, although we didn't talk about politics. Those guys were a couple of characters and my dad fit right in with them. Kept them on after he bought the bar from them. My dad had expressed to me in the past he wanted a bar for a long time. He had looked at others over a period of time but the sellers often lied about their books and their income. My dad was a statistician and really smart with numbers and could look at the businesses books and work the figures in his head and tell you what he didn't like about the figures posted that the money didn't add up. It must have had some attraction to buy that old tired place. He never shared his thoughts about that place or if he did, I was not in my body at the time.
Joseph Wedgwood Clyde was a genius. My aunt Ralda thinks that the two Clyde brothers were of equal intelligence. My Uncle Joseph John Clyde Jr. My uncle told me before he passed that when the family lived in Oakland and were attending high school he and my dad would walk home from school, stop at the library on the way home and check out a book and then stop by the grocery store and each get a beer. I guess the person in the grocery would sell to them because that is just the way it was and they were only getting one. Then they would walk the rest of the way home, take off their shirts, sit in the back yard in the sun and drink their beers and read their book. The books were finished about the time the beer was all finished. They read a book a day. Both of them had problems with alcohol up into their 50's or so, my dad past then. My uncle went to AA for a good stretch and thought he had a handle on it. {My sisters know more than I. }
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