Odd Jobs and Then Some! You Load 16 Tons, What Do You Get? Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt 3 June 2022 Robert C. Steele, Sr. The title is from the lyrics of a song by Merle Travis that became a hit in 1955 by country music singer Tennessee Ernie Ford. It seemed an … Continue reading Load 16 tons and what do you get. Another day older and deeper in debt.
Odd Jobs and Then Some!
Plastic Blow Mold Operator The topic du jour is about my pre-professional career. I held a slew of odd jobs in my teens and early twenties. For a short while, I was a grunt construction laborer, shoveling out foundations, loading bricks into a wheelbarrow and delivering them to mason, and site/trash cleanup. I got fired … Continue reading Odd Jobs and Then Some!
A Not So Brief Moment in Time – Retrospective Humor
Sharing details about bowel problems is generally considered to be crude or at the least, TMI. However, I want to share it as it is funny in retrospect. I was having indigestion troubles back in my thirties and was sent for X-rays of my upper and lower Gastrointestinal (GI) tracts. I had them done … Continue reading A Not So Brief Moment in Time – Retrospective Humor
Sleepless Toil
Written: 7/30/2012 I awake suddenly, startlingly, with an all too familiar sense of dread and the lingering fragments of a bad dream. It’s 2:38 AM. As best I can figure, I have slept for 12 minutes – at tops. My mind racing, my emotions swirling, I labor exhaustingly, trying to force unconsciousness back to the … Continue reading Sleepless Toil
Battling Sociopathic Genocide
NOTE: This piece was written in free-flow, stream of consciousness mode while thinking about social alienation. It should be viewed as prose. On reflection, I'm not sure there's any meat with the potatoes. Isolation and hopelessness are the seeds of social discontent and desperation. Left unattended, they transform into anger and resentment. When fertilized by … Continue reading Battling Sociopathic Genocide
A Special Christmas Greeting
Our youngest child, Rachel (now a mom of two), was a very active and curious five-year-old. At the time, we were living in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. In the weeks before Christmas, our neighborhood boasted many beautifully decorated homes. Although we were Jewish and did not put up any lighting or decorations, … Continue reading A Special Christmas Greeting
A Youthful Matter of Life or Death
Growing up with a cocktail mix of neurological disorders (in my case ADHD, major depression, auditory learning disability, latent frontal lobe development, and general anxiety) is a catalyst for academic failure, low self-esteem, and an elevated suicide rate. Doing so undiagnosed in the 50's and 60's with no educational accommodations was brutal. By the 6th … Continue reading A Youthful Matter of Life or Death
A Bugle Call to Write
The desire/need to write rises from a myriad of personal reasons. It isn’t ubiquitous, some never hear the siren’s call. For me, it was quite literally a bugle call in the Fall of 1969. The Call to Quarters had sounded and scant time was left before the forlorn sounding of Taps, the call for lights … Continue reading A Bugle Call to Write
The “Borrowed” Mercedes
It started out as a typical early September Saturday in Durham, NC back in ’66, bright and sunny, still more like summer than fall. By all rights, it should have been an uneventful day, not worth remembering at all. But as luck and a non-medicated, prototypical ADHD 15-year-old mind would have it, it became one … Continue reading The “Borrowed” Mercedes
Bob Steele's Musings 