Stories: Endings
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__ OMG, I have a leaving-Timaru story.__
It's good to see you are getting over your sensitivity about being from there Russell, and are now able to talk about your origins.
Don't. Just don't.
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I got to sleep with his young wife
Ewww....that's the kind of thing best kept to oneself, as in too much information!
Forever tainted by Rai Hai...
Er ... not enough information perhaps Michael. I'm not above a little mischief (I was going to 'fess up sooner, but to do so after Sam's post seemed inappropriate).
Yes, I slept with Rainton's wife. As in: "zzzzzzzzz". We'd taken a gaggle of strippers on 'Tour' up North and I got the privilege of sharing a room with Tara (Rainton doesn't tour, and he was too cheap to give me or his own wife our own rooms). After giving Whangarei a taste of Las Vegas we retired to our rooms for some drinking. Finally it was time to bed. It was nerve-racking.
Tara was an attractive young women with a body fit from dancing. And I'd seen her naked from various angles. And she had been flirting with me. And now it was. Time. For. Bed.
Had she really propositioned me or was she just making mischief? How does one reject 'the gangsters moll'? Is it an affront to her? Is it an affront to her husband?
I decided she was just teasing and her husband might actually damage me significantly if I did anyway (and found out - and he would; probably from her). So I rolled over and. Fell. Asleep.
When Tara eventually left Rainton it was into the arms of one of his rivals. Being out of his employ by that time I have no idea how he reacted. My guess is he would have used it to his advantage. Someone might have been 'taxed'.
But I digress ... back to the topic folks.
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Leaving school
High school was mostly a war of attrition for me, but at least I made it to the end. On my last day I made a point of picking up a school leaving certificate. The office administrator was perplexed, wondering why (like most others in my class) I would want to go on the dole. It wasn't that. The leaving cert simply meant more to me than any of the qualifications I'd got along the way.
I had lost the company of several friends that year - due to a massive marijuana bust. In one hit, 25 students were suspended or expelled. The Deputy Principal had caught an initial two smokers in a barn on a farm adjacent to the school. Using interrogation tactics worthy of a spy master he gradually discovered more and more reefer maniacs. The wall of his office was like a giant spider web, with drawing pins and lengths of wool yarn illustrating the connections between the guilty and the complicit. He didn't need MySpace or Facebook. Kid "A" would be hauled into the office, reminded of the shame he was bringing upon his family, the fact the school could prevent him getting UE and ultimately, the fate of his immortal soul should he not divulge more names. Concurrently, teachers lectured their classes about the evil of sheltering the guilty. You might not smoke yourself, but if you were aware of others that did and did not inform on them, you were just as guilty. I remember feeling the eye of a teacher delivering this sermon linger on me. But if I had learned one useful life skill from school, it was not to snitch on people. Personally, I was an abstainer, protected by my nerdiness. At the same time I was a known friend of the damned due to our common interest in making music tapes and my various connections in sourcing food. My friend M in particular was a massive imbiber, but after having already opened my mind with music never even suggested I join him and his other friends on their "jogs" through the countryside. Nonetheless, the methods used on the poor bastards dragged to the DP's office were effective, and soon kids C, D and E were hauled into the office and things snowballed from there.
Being on the periphery of the above events, I didn't know which bits of wool yarn were being connected to who. But the fear got around that some very central figure must have been giving up names. And then all of a sudden, 25 people were gone. Shipped off home to different parts of the country. The population of my own dorm was reduced by 20% overnight. This was a big deal not only in the local community, but across the country.
After school I went hitching all around New Zealand and one day found myself in my old friend's home town. He had been incommunicado and I'd had to track him via his father's caravan park and his mother's church group. We met up and he related his version of events at school and asked given I was moving to Christchurch to study would I be looking up our other friends there. I said I guessed so. He asked if I believed his story about the events at school. I said yes, of course. I hit the highway south the next day. The last words I heard him say were, "Jase, you're a good friend." I never saw him again.
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'82/'83 I was at kirkwood Intermediate. Intermediate schools are an odd concept and for land & buildings alone are a waste of resources.
The Teachers wanted to get to know us and so started with that most boring of questions, "What do you do?" Except we were kids and so the question was "What does your Father do?" No pc here.
I dreaded it and feeling sick as the kids answered, mechanic, lawyer, undertaker, bank manager .... I knew there was one other kid whos Dad was unemployed, a new phenomenon in the '80s. He was not my mate and had a deprived childhood in more than one way. You could pick him out of the crowd and knew he never had a chance. All my mates were pretty normal & mostly middle class.
When asked what my Dad did I sunk into the floor, hope ebbing away . "He's unemployed" came my stunted response. We were supposed to give a little more than just a title. In a little shock the Teacher wouldn't leave it and wanted to know what Dad used to do. All the kids knew this and a few helpful ones answered for me. "He was that striker, at Firestone." By this stage I'ld stoped listening & just lowered my head.
In the days NZ thought an infrastructure was a good thing.
The Firestone Strike & '81 Tour swirled around like a double helix on talk back radio.Firestones longest strike was about conditions, specifically the absense of the companies contribution to their super fund. '81 Tour I'm sure you're all familliar with. The Left & Right of the debate fitted nicely into either camp. Anyway at the end of the strike the company paid up what they had previous agreed to & with fear of Reds under the Beds Dad got the sack over a load of bollocks.
A year or so after Dad got the boot he finally got employment and a manager who though himself a money whiz had lost the the whole company super fund and taken his own life.
That other kid whos Dad was unemployed shot himself with a shotgun in a stand off with police about '92.
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Shit this has to be one of my faves
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I am riveted.
What a great bunch of stories we have. -
I am riveted.
What a great bunch of stories we have.I heartily concur! Even though the subject lends itself to stories of a more downbeat manner, just the way that people are telling them is making for some really good reading. With every ending is a new beginning.
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I heartily concur!
Me Too. Y'all can write.
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I was thinking that yesterday, Russell. What wonderful stories people have told.
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Kudos to Russell and his posse for providing the venue - without the PAS and the seed sown we're just a bunch of disparate stories which may or may not have ever come to light.
He is the Rolling Stone Magazine to our Hunter S Thompsons...
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My most vivid ending began with a trip to the airport. I was lying on the floor in the back of the car, a blanket thrown over me. I remember the smell of dog and petrol on the blanket, and the sensation of speed.
I was not as frightened as I probably should have been, no doubt thrilled to the hear the barely contained fear in my mothers voice. She had caused my family much heartache recently, had been caught having an affair and talked of leaving us all.
But that's another story, the beginning of another ending. I was only 10 years old and had many endings to come.
"Keep your head down, keep your hair covered, everything's going to be ok".
Later I found out it was because I was blonde and, on that day, in that year, in that place, blonde was not a good thing to be.
We were racing through the streets of Iran's capital, Tehran, fleeing the Islamic Revolution.
There had been sporadic gunfire in the streets every night for the past week or so and my father, who had brought us here on a work exchange program with Kodak, had been ordered by his bosses (who, in turn, had been ordered to evacuate all Western staff by the US govt) to take his family to the Sheraton hotel near the airport.
When we arrived at the hotel I was feeling sick from the smell of the blanket and the rough ride in the car. US marines with machine guns (machine guns! wait till the kids at home hear this!) herded us to rooms on the tenth floor. I promptly made friends with an Old-English sheepdog called Basil, and we went exploring the corridors and empty rooms.
The grown-ups had a party and got drunk that night, and my parents fought viciously, but I was stoked because I got to order room service for the first time. I had either a cheese omelet or spaghetti bolognese - pretty much all I ate while we were there.
The US govt was trying to convince the Ayatollah to let us leave. Finally after four days (enough time to become wickedly expert at table tennis) we were given two hours notice and, under military escort, were taken to the airport and aboard a Pan Am 747. The stewardesses were really nice and let me go up to the cockpit and gave me half a dozen badges to give to my friends when I got home.
I still have one.
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You know, I used to think that I didn't like most human beings. I used to get the impression that most people aren't interested in looking outside their little boxes. And then you hear all these stories, and you think - everyone has a story, absolutely everyone. I have to say, this site is one of those things that has happened to me relatively recently that has made me take notice more, look at peoples' faces more, and wonder what their story is. I still don't like most people, I still think most people are idiots but I'm more willing to listen the older I get, I guess.
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Sorry, Michael, I meant to also say that your story is what triggered the above post.
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In regard to that sentiment Jackie, I've noticed how over the past decade or so it's become more and more fashionable to admit to misanthropic tendencies. I'm as guilty as anyone.
Which IMHO perhaps helps explain some of the social and class divides that have fractured communities and isolated individuals - particularly in Western and Westernised countries.
However it might pay to remember, and point out to others, that misanthropy is at heart an exercise in self-loathing.
Find a way to feel better about yourself and other people stop looking quite so ugly and stupid. Or put another way, accept your shortcomings and forgiving others theirs tends to follow.
Still, there's always culling.
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As I would have said on another thread, absolument!
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Today was my last day at work.
I had coffee with one of our managers, and we swapped stories about Caesar's conquest of Gaul, Josephus' account of the Jewish war against the Romans, and children's culture. I did some filing, and then I had coffee with my husband. I followed that by some more filing, and then lunch with a close work friend. I passed a major project over to a colleague, did yet more filing, cleared my inbox, and deleted all my old documents.
I walked across to the supermarket and picked up a couple of bottles of wine, and we cracked them around 4pm. I continued filing.... and passed my last project back to my manager.
And I finished up with the usual Friday night drinks.
Today was a good day.
I'm going shopping on Monday.
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