10 Random Facts

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Postby barracuda » Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:28 am

Is it just me, or does Peregrine sound majorly hot? Nicely done, lady.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Postby Nordic » Mon Nov 09, 2009 1:29 pm

annie aronburg wrote:
Nordic wrote:8. I was once shooting out of a helicopter (with a motion picture camera) when we ran into a telephone line going about 100 knots. It's the one time in my life when I was convinced I was about to die. It was sheer luck that I didn't. Describing the event to more than one pilot afterward, they would get this look on their face and say to me "you're the walking dead".


You didn't happen to be filming a rubber band ball that was dropped from a B-52 over the Mojave?


No. It was a commercial in the midwest.
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Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Mon Nov 09, 2009 1:50 pm

barracuda wrote:Is it just me, or does Peregrine sound majorly hot? Nicely done, lady


Yup, almost ALL of you sound majorly hot, because you are a bunch of smart weird people. The hotness doesn't get hotter.

This is hands-down my very favorite thread on RI. At least, in the lounge. And I keep thinking it is titled "10 Random Secrets" because it is kind of a confessional to strangers, and I can never find it when I search that thread because it is in fact, "10 Random Facts". Thanks everyone for sharing...
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Postby Peregrine » Mon Nov 09, 2009 4:04 pm

aw, blush... thanks barracuda, was a rather long night & my tooth was aching & not feeling much like sleeping, so what better way to introduce yourself on a forum? Not to mention hopped up on T3's for the pain... I was feeling rather 'chatty' :)

Nordic:

I was once shooting out of a helicopter (with a motion picture camera) when we ran into a telephone line going about 100 knots. It's the one time in my life when I was convinced I was about to die. It was sheer luck that I didn't. Describing the event to more than one pilot afterward, they would get this look on their face and say to me "you're the walking dead".


That's totally cool. Not the almost dying part, but you came out of such a freak accident. Was everyone else involved ok?

Wow, ten already? I could just keep going ....


Ya, was on a roll myself :D

sunny wrote:Thanks Nordic, and feel free to add more. Everyone should if they want.


Ok! The little exhibitionist in me feels compelled... ;)

- I've been in love only once. It was very short lived & ended in quite a painful ordeal for me, of all days, on Valentines day this year. It was one of the most painful, yet enlightening experiences of my life. I learned a hell of a lot about myself. I just tell myself the more distance time puts between me & him, the more I will view it as a positive learning experience. Right now, my ego tends to rear it's ugly head once in a while thinking him an asshole, but really, no one did anything wrong. Just wasn't meant to be. Meh, I shall not ramble on that one any more...

- I attend a fetish club called Sin City at least once a month & dance 'til my feet hurt. It's also one of the few places I venture on my own.

- I've got a funny little internet crush on Alice the Curious. I just love the way she presents herself on here :oops: ... I keep picturing her with killer brown eyes & a head of dark, flowing ringlets. And if that's the case, methinks she should have a pic in the "hot dissidents" thread..! Also OP ED. The stripped fingerless gloves pic did it for me. Very hot, sir!
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Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Nov 09, 2009 6:48 pm

Can’t believe it took me so long to discover this thread. I am amazed by all of you without exception.


1. On a memorable night in the mid-70s, I was on the verge of losing my virginity, but I spoiled my chances by suddenly and very copiously vomiting on the girl's beautiful fur coat. It had been lent to her for the evening, very reluctantly, by her domineering mother.

Sometimes even the sincerest apology just isn't good enough to repair the damage done. I can still remember the way the lumps and droplets hung there in the hairs. It didn't smell very good, either.

2. On a summer's day in the 1930s, my grandfather saw a leprechaun in the countryside just outside Dublin. He had taken my mother and her sister out on an early-morning mushroom-hunt. The two girls had drifted off on their own for a couple of minutes, gathering flowers & fungi, and came back to find him standing on the road rooted to the spot and staring into the middle distance. This was unusual enough, and went on long enough, for the kids to grow worried. Eventually he cleared his throat and said: "Did yez see that? Did yez see the little fella? He was there and then he was gone. Just gone. I was watching him the whole time." My granda was not a superstitious man. He recovered his poise quickly and he refused all subsequent requests to talk about what he had seen. (But he wouldn't deny it either.)

3. When I was 22 I nearly drowned in the Mediterranean after swimming too far out under the influence of some ludicrously potent Columbian grass.

4. I was past 40 before I ever jumped off the high board in the swimming pool, and I only did it then because my eight-year-old kid accompanied me all the way to the top (and the bottom), having foolishly presumed that I had already performed that heroic feat several times beforehand, as she had. Since then, I have jumped off the high board approximately one million times, even without holding her hand. There's a lesson for us all there somewhere.

5. As a very small child, I was convinced that my dreams were real, and I didn’t tell my parents about them because I feared it would make the dreams disappear. One night, I woke up screaming from a terrible nightmare about The Child of Prague (there was a cheap chalk figure of it on the tallboy opposite my bed) and I wouldn’t believe them when they told me it was “just a dream”. I spent the night in their bed and they had to ditch the statue next day, after getting a priest to de-bless it. If they hadn’t got rid of it, it would have eaten me. Either that or I would have spent my entire life in their bed. (No wonder they hurried.)

6. Moths frighten me, especially those big fat hairy dusty ones. They seem to be both alive and not-alive.

7. Having just eaten a plastic chicken, I once belched extremely loudly and quite deliberately on the stage of one of the biggest, oldest and most famously beautiful theatres in Europe. The response was spontaneous applause from about one-third of the packed premiere audience and loud boos from all the others. Some people actually walked out. That belch was something I had worked hard at and took a craftsman's honest pride in, and it had gone down well everywhere else. So I was not pleased.

(This reminds me of Billy Connolly’s remark onstage at the Royal Command Performance: “Those of you in the cheap seats, feel free to applaud. The rest of you can just rattle your jewellery.”)

8. During a period of sleeplessness and manic intensity and very productive work, I once entered a weirdly lucid state in which I was quasi-telepathic and prone to premonitions. It lasted about a month. On one particular day, I was on my way to rehearsal on the subway, feeling very good and optimistic (I was in love at the time too), when I suddenly felt a very strong and peculiar sense of dread. It was so intense and so abrupt that I actually very hastily made the sign of the cross, something I hadn’t done since my early adolescence. There were only about six people in the whole carriage. The guy diagonally opposite glanced at me and raised an eybrow slightly. At that moment, the train emerged from the darkness onto an overground part of the line. Seconds later, there was a very loud bang and the window behind the guy went totally white. He was showered in tiny fragments of safety-glass like fine gravel, but the window was intact apart from a small round hole about the diameter of a finger and about a foot to the left of his head. There was no hole in the window opposite. When the train drew into the station, various guards came looking to see what had happened. They suspected someone had fired a gun from the flats opposite, but no bullet could be found anywhere in the carriage.

9. Jeff wrote:
On the last day of school, in I think grade 3, my class exchanged gifts. I got a little Popeye toy. He was on a base; you pressed the bottom and his limbs and joints moved. On the way home I lost it. It still upsets me.


What is it with those things? When I was five, my four-year-old brother was in hospital to have his tonsils out. Among the presents he got was one of those toys, but with a dog (a Pluto?) instead of a Popeye. I was deeply envious and I have never forgotten it, not least because he had lost it by the time he got home. No doubt it was stolen from him by some other entranced infant.

10. When I was a schoolkid we always had to address female teachers as “Miss” and male teachers as “Sir”. Towards the end of my first year at university, I almost collided with my philosophy tutor while rushing up the stairs to a lecture. Breathless and flustered, I spontaneously said “Sorry, Sir.” He (a hairy young anarcho-syndicalist) burst out laughing and said “Let’s not exaggerate.” I was mortified.

10 ½. (Youse are right: once you get started it’s very hard to stop. Not unlike jumping off the high board at the swimming pool.) Continuing on the rewarding topic of embarrassments on staircases, I once knocked myself out cold by leaping the last six steps in a state of euphoria and banging my head hard on the sloping ceiling above me. You might say I felt mortified (again). Or you might say I felt like a right tit. I certainly looked like one, or so I was reliably told.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Postby Project Willow » Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:55 pm

I feel like this is slightly unnecessary given the amount of material I've already shared about myself for no particular good reason.

(On the other hand, I've had a very interesting life and if any of you script or fiction writers steal any of this material, you'll be in serious trouble! It's all going in my memoir when I write it. So this is copyright L.S., got it?)

1. When I was a very young child, and influenced by Saturday morning cartoons, I invented a superhero character called Super Turtle. Super Turtle had to eat bananas in order to gain enough strength to fight crime. Then he would don his red cape and rescue little girls in distress.

2. When I was 6 years old, in 1969, my very boisterous, alcoholic, atheist/satanist, yankee family up and moved from Detroit to the heart of the Deep South, Birmingham, Al. It wasn't until I was in college that I finally understood why it was so difficult to make friends the first few years. They did indeed call us damn yankees.

3. In my high school English class I was given the assignment of painting a poster to Illustrate the characters of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. I avoided it to the last minute and then the night before it was due, I found I did not have enough white paint. I finished it anyway. The next day when I turned it in, I was immediately sent to the principal's office. My english teacher was a very large African American woman, teaching in a 98% white suburban school, who proudly pronounced her 'r's with two syllables. She thought my poster was a racist production designed to humiliate her. I was absolutely stunned, and got a better education out of the incident than reading a number of books. (Shortly afterward I found out the boy I had dated the previous summer was a member of the KKK.)

4. I went to 3 high schools. Eventually my family was forced out of Alabama. The story goes like this: My father ended up owning a strip coal mine in the Northern part of the state. To maximize profits, he tried to keep his workers from organizing. Then one day someone from the KKK decided it was time to intervene. They either found him or took him to a remote job shack on the property, held a gun to his head and told him he better the get the fuck out of Alabama. Well, my father was always good at tall tales, nonetheless, we went back to Detroit. Then we moved to Chicago, just in time for my senior year. I was one of those unknowns in the yearbook photos.

5. I've always been slightly reckless with money, but rarely have I regretted it. My best friend from high school went to our state's main university (illinois). I went to my birth state's university (Michigan). One winter I was lonely and I wanted to see my friend. I saw advertised a seat on a private flight to the school for a weekend trip. I took all the money I had, and paid for the seat. It turned out to be the only time (in normative life) I've been in a 4 seater prop plane. We took off in a blizzard, with 40 mile an hour head winds. At one point the plane was rocking so much the pilot became silent and red-faced. We obviously made it and I had a great time with my friend.

6. For 17 years I lived with a man I thought I loved (and probably did at the time.) Nothing happened.

7. Just kidding, really. After college I moved to Atlanta, GA. Why, I still do not know, so I assume it was an order from the program/network. Well, there's Lockheed Martin, Bell Labs, all kinds of shit down there. In normative life I had my one and only corporate job there as Junior Store Designer for Macy's South, Inc. I was completely shocked to learn how company PO's worked, that they could buy furniture and other items for the homes of the top executives. After a time, I refused to sign them anymore and began keeping records of those that got processed through our little design office. When I quit I tried to do the whistle blower thing. It worked to a degree, as my former department head resigned not long afterward, though my involvement was never made explicit. Get this, my department was run by conservative (Republican) gay men, an odd sort of being I hope not encounter to again if I can help it. My boss's name was Cesar. He was known for having to rush to the bathroom at times due to the malfunction of his (do I really have to explain?)

8. In the late 80's and early nineties I started focusing on my abuse issues. I did my first "survivor" art show in 1990 in Atlanta. It was called "No More Secrets". I could not prevent my mother and father from attending the opening. I could feel their distress as they tried to play proud parents of the incest survivor. My father came to me and said, "I like your work, just make sure you tell them it wasn't me." Indeed, it was he. Hey dad! It was you (along with a lot of other people) but yeah, asshole, it was you!

9. In 1991, I applied to and was accepted to be part of a 6 person group show about CSA in Seattle at the yearly arts festival called Bumbershoot. My then partner and I travelled from Atlanta to attend the show. Some 20,000 people saw the exhibit. Our little group was offered further showings all over the country and the world. Two months later my partner and I moved here, and I joined the group to organize our further showings. I ended up being interviewed on tv about it, however, not long into it there was infighting. Then there was the FMSF backlash and everything fell apart. We did a couple more shows in the NW and it all ended in 1993.

10. In 1994-95 the symptoms of my past came on full blown and knocked me out, completely. I then spent a decade on disability, isolated, in absolute pain and terror, and without adequate resources or treatment, and worse, with the growing awareness that my past was far more complicated than just incest. I fought like hell and eventually in 2004 I left my ex and ventured out to make a new life for myself, and to commit to complete deprogramming and freedom. I landed in a great new arts community where I have not only been accepted, but have been able to fulfill some leadership roles and build a reputation with other artists.

Lots of you know the rest.
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Postby lightningBugout » Tue Nov 10, 2009 12:53 am

1. I am extremely double jointed in my arms. If I put my hands on my hips I can touch my elbows together. Its a decent party trick.

2. Three years ago, while camping I had a profound paranormal experience. My companion and I showed up to our campsite in upstate New York after dark. It had been raining and was autumn. All the kindling was damp. We built a fire and proceeded to burn the paper from an entire Sunday NY Times as well as a large road atlas in my car. I'm fairly adept at all things outdoors but we simply could not get the fire to light. In mock frustration, I poured some Scotch on the forest floor and not-so-seriously asked that any forest spirits nearby help us to light the fire. Without missing a beat, the damp and impossible pile of wood shot up into huge flames. In retrospect it seems like an almost mundane encounter with some spirit or another.

3. When I was growing up my friends and I were terribly interested in playing with fire. One in particular and I used to sneak out in the middle of the night and throw rolls of toilet paper 60 feet up in old maple trees, then set it on fire. If kids did this today and got busted, I think they'd be sent to prison. We were 12 yo.

4. I was 16 when I first fell in love. It was a summer romance in a beach town. At the end of August, after camping out in the basement of a vacation rental during a major hurricane, we parted ways. She to NYC and me to DC. As is normal for young lovers, things became morose and dramatic. Feeling afraid the relationship would end I concocted a plan to skip school the next day, catch a train to NYC then the subway to her private school in Queens. I pulled it off without getting busted, though the relationship soon faded. I ended up ratting myself out to my high school guidance teacher. News spread among the faculty. They stared at me a lot and had no idea what to do with me after that. But one middle-aged gentleman, an instructor of Asian languages, pulled me aside and privately told me he thought my quixotic love mission had been a terribly romantic thing to do.

5. I have moved at least 25 times in the past 15 years.

6. I was 19 when I first realized that the book "I'm Ok, You're Ok" was so titled. I had, no joke, misread it as "Imok, you're Ok." And leapt to the conclusion that it was a culturally sensitive account of one Inuit boy coming to greater self-acceptance.

7. I have smoked pot with a well-known black actor who was featured in Apocalypse Now and Boyz in the Hood.

8. I look several years younger than my age and last year had no less than three people remark on how much I look like the photo of Aleister Crowley which adorns a bio of his that I own. I ascribe no meaning to this but it amuses me wildly. Other figure I have been compared to? It's a strange list that includes Donovan (the singer) and Samuel L. Jackson. I like the idea that Wallace Shawn might play me in a film someday but he's obviously too old.

9. The only time in my life I have been to a strip club happened in the late 1990s in SF (oh wait, I went one other time too but only for a moment). My friend and I were walking by and feeling sort of exuberant. We strode in and I sat in a booth where a quarter gave me visual access to this strange plastic room full of nude strippers. One of them came over and looked me in the eye and put on a show for me. It was strange and a bit disorienting, not so much my thing. The following week I was at a very chic and very fun speakeasy party in SF. Somewhere around 4 in the morning, this girl walked by and did a triple take. It was one of the most intense eye-exchanges I have ever experienced. I lost her in the crowd and the next week, I told another friend of mine about it. He knew who the girl was - the stripper. Reflection on that experience still gives me chills. Serving as it does as some sort of very contemporary and curious parable about class and sexuality. I'm 99% sure that she did not recognize me.

10. I am very spiritual. In word and deed. I never thought I would be saying this, but there have been moments in which, though I will never be a Christian, I have felt connected to various Christian spirits and saints. And drawn tremendous comfort from that connection.

ps. ever since I mis-read "Belligerent Savant" as "Belligerent Swan," I have wanted to start a band called "Belligerent Swans."
Last edited by lightningBugout on Tue Nov 10, 2009 4:47 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Postby Peregrine » Tue Nov 10, 2009 1:10 am

Project Willow wrote: I could not prevent my mother and father from attending the opening. I could feel their distress as they tried to play proud parents of the incest survivor. My father came to me and said, "I like your work, just make sure you tell them it wasn't me." Indeed, it was he. Hey dad! It was you (along with a lot of other people) but yeah, asshole, it was you!


Holy shat have I been in a similar predicament, but with an abusive uncle. Having them view something so personal, such as your artwork, or writing, is violating in a way. This really resonated with me, my heart aches at this. I really hope he felt dissgusted scrutiny of others at this opening. Vile creature.

I fought like hell and eventually in 2004 I left my ex and ventured out to make a new life for myself, and to commit to complete deprogramming and freedom. I landed in a great new arts community where I have not only been accepted, but have been able to fulfill some leadership roles and build a reputation with other artists.

Lots of you know the rest.


Kudos to you, gal. I dunno a whole heck of a lot, but seems like you've literally come through a war zone, so to speak, & are a stronger person for it. Thank you for sharing this.
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Postby Peregrine » Tue Nov 10, 2009 1:24 am

lightningBugout wrote:6. I was 19 when I first realized that the book "I'm Ok, You're Ok" was so titled. I had, no joke, misread it as "Imok, you're Ok." And leapt to the conclusion that it was a culturally sensitive account of one Inuit boy coming to greater self-acceptance.


:lol:

7. I have smoked pot with Larry Fishburne.


Lucky ducky!

...Reflection on that experience still gives me chills. Serving as it does as some sort of very contemporary and curious parable about class and sexuality. I'm 99% sure that she did not recognize me.


You sure about that? There might have been something about you that just really turned her crank & she spotted you & thought, "there's that hot dude I put a show on for last week. Mebeh if I give him the intense triple-stare, he'll follow me & I'll get his digits..." :D

Heh, I think I quite like this thread meself, you folks are definitely a neat bunch...
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Re: 10 Random Facts

Postby Jeff » Fri Jan 06, 2012 11:48 pm

I don't have anything new to contribute - not right now, anyway - but I wanted to kick one of my favourite lounge threads for any who may.
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Re:

Postby Hammer of Los » Sat Jan 07, 2012 12:57 am

...

barracuda wrote:Is it just me, or does Peregrine sound majorly hot? Nicely done, lady.


It's not just you, fishface.


:lovehearts: :angelwings: :lovehearts:

...
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Re: 10 Random Facts

Postby Harvey » Sun Jan 08, 2012 4:51 pm

1) I suppose this is of interest to RI folk.

I had a childhood dream age between 6 and 9, (can't pin it down further) that I saw a silver man walk out of my cupboard mirror and across my bedroom in the night.

Around the same time, my father who had left when I was three years old was a work colleague of Ken Edwards. While driving past the university reactor in Risley one night, Ken saw a 'silver man' as he described it, walk through a fence and shine some kind of beam at him. He suffered what might have been radiation burns. He was interviewed by UFO researchers Peter Hough and Jenny Randles and died a year later from multiple cancers. My family later moved to Risley, within 200 hundred yards of that spot, and nearly equal distance from an old road called Silver Lane.

It was another twenty or so years before I learned that my dad had known Ken. Meanwhile I met Peter Hough by chance and went on to illustrate a few of his books with Jenny. I didn't even know the full story of the silver man at that point. I also became friends with a Canadian Radiologist who worked at the reactor. It was only many years later that I came to know about the whole story of Ken Edwards and my various connections to it.

2) I was beaten unconscious at age four. I fell off my bike and apparently hit my head on a curb around eight. I fell through the ice on a frozen pond age nine. I was run over head on by a car age eleven and flung over the top of it with minor injuries (a month or two on cruches.) I've had a number of other scrapes since. The interesting thing with losing consciousness at such times is the way it alters perceptions and memories. It sometimes feels like you fell sideways in time. I believe I remember world events which never happened.

3) I swam out too far all the time as a child when we went on holidays. There was the time when I was coming up from the ocean floor for air and there were thousands of jelly fish as far as I could see above me. Id been stung plenty of times before and naturally I wanted to avoid it but this was ridiculous. I can't even remember exactly how I got out of that one but not without welts as I recall.

4) I bullied a lad from my school once for some negligible slight real or imagined. I knocked him to the snow. His mother brought him round to my house later that day and I saw his bruised face. My mother grabbed me by my hair and knocked me to ground in the snow, on our own door step. Years later I absolutely loved her for doing that.

5) During a train journey I once saw an apparently schizophrenic man seated on the opposite side of the coach having a conversation with an invisible other standing in front of him. The only thing is, the man was deaf and signing into mid air. First thought, how is he experiencing the other side of the conversation? Is it verbal? And if so how is he hearing it? Is he actually seeing someone signing back at him? Second thought was to keep an open mind about what schizophrenia is and how it works

5) I spent a while living in Redruth in a guesthouse where most of the other guests were former inmates of Trengweath Mental Hospital. I noticed the occasional intensification of arguments, unusual activity and general strangeness. There were certain peaks of activity. Another guest pointed out that it was an entirely regular occurrence and it was every full moon it happened. It did. I've heard this relationship be downplayed by experts, but I've seen it all my life since. It's a full moon over the next few days, look around and see.

:)

7) My alcoholic, drug addict brother turned up out of the blue, destitute and yet drunk and abusive. He'd come to see my daughter who was less than a year old at the time. I sent him away. I haven't seen him since. I had already learned what he'd been going through from late teenage years onward but I’ve lived all of his later afflictions for myself and exceeded them to some degree. I wish I could change things. I can’t.

My brother was raped once when we were on holiday in Spain and he’d gone for a walk in the night. He was also sexually abused by an older friend of his when he was very young. My mother was also abused as a girl by a friend of the family. He was a policeman asked to baby sit while her mother went out now and then but he took advantage. (She’d been told her father died in the war – untrue, she tracked him down many years later and discovered she had two half brothers and three half sisters) In later life my mother found out who he was and confronted the bastard. He died not long afterward, perhaps out of shame. Interestingly, while she was in the middle of all of this as a child, she told me that the contents of most of the kitchen cupboards once rose into the air and fell in a heap in the centre of the kitchen while she and her mother were making dinner.

8 ) A number of times over the last few years, night and day, alone or in company, I've observed stationary lights in the sky with a noticeable disc, not points of light, not stars or planets, they persist anywhere from ten seconds up to 20 minutes before fading or vanishing. The best one I saw was with my daughter for the full twenty minutes, aircraft flew apparently nearby but in front of cloud banks which then subsequently covered over the object in question.

9) I was living in Dundee winter of 2010/11on the 4th floor of an old brown stone terrace. In early November the snow was already a few feet deep. More snow storms swept in. One night I watched them, watched fire engines skid off the roads and become mired as lightning struck continuously all night through the flurries of snow. it was the first time I've ever seen lightning in a snow storm. There were several foxes dashing around in the streets below me and flocks of geese flying North and South through it all. You could hear them squealing in terror each time the lighting flared or the thunder came. Because such a huge swathe of sky was visible from up there I could see the long arcing skirts of successive blizzards long before each deluge of snow arrived. Blizzard after blizzard. It was bright enough that between snowfalls the storm clouds were clearly visible in all their majesty. It was a night I'll never forget, a John Martin painting come to life.

One evening a week later it broke my heart to hear my daughters trembling voice on the phone, calling to tell me her mother had died an hour earlier. I was packed and waiting for a taxi to the train station before five in the morning, praying that the taxi would arrive at all, then that the trains would be running. Somehow I got back by late afternoon, having caught one of the last train connections south for the next week or two amid cancellations across the boards. It was another day I'll never forget, the saddest of mine and her life.


10) My little girl is doing well despite everything she's been through and I couldn't be more proud of her. I guess I've broken just about everything else that was ever beautiful in my life and I've sabotaged just about every single opportunity I was ever given, one way or another. The rest seem as if they were destined to fail in retrospect. I know there's a reason for it all, just don't know what it is. May she continue to be well.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: 10 Random Facts

Postby Alaya » Sun Jan 08, 2012 9:50 pm

Jeeze, Harvey :hug1:
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Re: Re:

Postby Peregrine » Tue Jan 17, 2012 4:51 pm

Harvey, your post had me in tears last night. Thank you for sharing this.




Hammer of Los wrote:...

barracuda wrote:Is it just me, or does Peregrine sound majorly hot? Nicely done, lady.


It's not just you, fishface.


:lovehearts: :angelwings: :lovehearts:

...


Oh goodness... :oops:

I must admit that I feel like a very different person than the one who posted all that info. Change & all. Good change. heh. Thanks though!
~don't let your mouth write a cheque your ass can't cash~
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Peregrine
 
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Re: 10 Random Facts

Postby wordspeak2 » Fri Jan 20, 2012 12:35 pm

I've thoroughly enjoyed every page of this thread, and, sunny, you're a rock star for starting it.

1. When I was two years old I had six and a half hours of ear surgery to remove a tumor that could have killed me if it had been allow to keep groing into my brain. The occurrence of this specific type of tumor in an ear was so rare that the case was written up in a national medical journal. The operation left me mostly deaf in that ear, and, bizarrely, many years later I found that, due to some internal re-wiring from the surgery, if I hum at a low pitch it actually comes out my ear. Weird humming sound coming from my ear. So that's my party trick or ice-breaker in summer camp-like new group situations (like this virtual one).

2. I had a very long sexual relationship with my male childhood best friend, even through college. It was kind of an open secret sort of thing- if you weren't really homophobic and you had your eyes open you could figure out what was going on, but since most people are homophobic and don't pay much attention, very few had any clue about it. To be honest it was the only gay fling of my life- not that I haven't wanted to other times, and I'm immersed in queer culture.

3. I dropped out of college, hit up the Seattle WTO protest of '99- that changed my life- then I followed my heart and went to work for a drug legalization organization for three years. A multi-racial couple in their sixties- now in their seventies- effectively adopted me into their home, family, and crusade to legalize pot. I would speak on the radio, at colleges, etc., very regularly. Once I even gave a talk to a white-male business association group (Rotary Club) about medical marijuana. I was a punk kid who didn't know how to tie a tie, but I guess I pulled it off by cracking some jokes and just acting like I belonged.

4. Shortly after 9/11 I got really involved in the activist end of the 9/11 truth movement, and for a stint I was actually paid to be a 9/11 truth organizer/educator around the Republican Party convention protests. I can't claim any real accomplishments, though I did connect up the various producers of the film "9/ 11: Press For Truth." I contributed zero to the actual production of the film, but it wouldn't have happened without my networking! If you call that an accomplishment... I also organized the first two public screenings of the film.

5. I've had very distinct drug phases in my life. The darkest was a several-year intense addiction to coffee/espresso. At times it was completely debilitating. One winter I pretty much stayed in my room constantly, completely freaked out, unable to see anyone, unable to stop myself from drinking several cups of coffee a day. At other points during this phase I would drive around between coffee shops all day and live out of convenient stores, sometimes downing multiple pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream in a single day. I'm still in some trauma from this self-imposed tweeker phase.

6. Eventually I moved out to the country to try to get myself together and get over this pathetic embarrassment to the human species. I decided to try psychedelic therapy, and started taking copious amounts of LSD and MDMA. This actually worked for quitting coffee, or at least played a major role, but I got very psychologically dependent on candy-flipping (taking acid and ecstasy at the same time), and literally candy-flipped pretty much straight for two or three years. Moderation was never part of my vocab. I'd say the ecstasy was not a problem, really, but too much acid eventually catches up to you. I didn't stop until a year ago, and I find myself permanently tripping on acid very hard to this day. Most people think I mean that metaphorically or in some vague, "The trip is already in me, man" kind of thing, but, no, I mean- I'm permanently tripping. Very literal. Visuals and all, especially at night. That is some strong shit... My current management strategy is lots and lots of weed and kava kava. And hide out in my room reading RI and old Alex Constantine books and what not.

7. On a more positive psychedelic note, there was a phase in there when I actually mostly put down the acid because I had a constant supply of DMT, so I thought I'd explore hyperspace (DMT land). I smoked DMT just about every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, for about a year. This I generally have no regrets about, and I'm the deepest believer in that stuff as a tool for human evolution, though I haven't yet had the privilege of taking it in ayahuasca form. Anyway, I'm currently on a break from all psychedelics, holding the intention that the next time I do DMT or mushrooms I'm going to break through to a level I've never hit before. This is really what I plan on dedicating my life to, just as soon as I get over nursing my wounds.

8. I've also had very distinct dietary phases. I was a raw foodist for many years, and for a few months (while taking acid constantly) I was even a "fruitarian," living completely, 100%, off of fruit. I can tell you that this extreme diet is *completely idiotic* and makes you very spacey and lacking in energy. You need some actual protein and fat. However... to this day I'm obsessed with tropical fruit, and it's probably about half my diet atm. I estimated that I've gone through about 70 pounds of persimmons over the past two months. I spend exorbitant amounts of money buying exotic tropical fruits from online distributors, and, needless to say, have become pretty knowledgeable about this topic, and get deliriously excited to talk about it with anyone even remotely interested. I give away fruit to friends all the time, always trying to win converts to passion about tropical fruit. My favorite at the moment is sapodillas, a delightfully sweet Cuban wonder-fruit. I also order 15-pound boxes of fresh dates from California, which I give out at meetings at protests.

9. I've never in my life been drunk nor smoked a cigarette. I've had a drink or two on a few occasions, but I always had a gut reaction against alcohol. Cigarette abstention I can credit to my mother, one of those stereotypical anti-cigarette liberal crusaders whom Bill Hicks used to rightly make fun of.

10. Despite being an innocent little white boy from the suburbs I've had guns pointed at my head three times. One was a random mugging in Oakland, and the other two were related to drug dealings. It's scary as fuck when two masked guys with guns storm into your bedroom at 3 in the morning with a big silver pistol pointed right at your head, just because they want your happy little pills so they can re-sell them and support their coke addictions.

Bonus. I've only been in love once (not the guy), and I'm not quite sure what to make of that fact, and I seem remarkably uninterested in the sexual or romantic, almost to the point where I wonder if something's wrong with me here. But I have the greatest friends and am madly in love with my trangendered little brother, who is currently in acupuncture school... which I think counts for something. Love the life you live, live the life you love, I guess, however it rolls....
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