I remember the days when I could say that and people would say:
“Oh yea, where?”
I’d say: “Nowhere, I just decided to walk.”

I miss those days a lot lately, but I was watching a movie about a young man who goes to Alaska and lives off of the land, and it reminded me of a walk I took in northern california in the late eighties.
Back then I lived in a high crime area, but I felt this urge to walk.
Dressed in a pair of sweats, three dollars and a hoodie, I walked out of my house. My first point of intrest was a small park by my house. It was a small little league T-Ball field, and a small swing set.
I remember seeing the swing sway from the light breeze that blew that day. I couldn’t resist, I walked to the swing and began to swing. I felt like a little kid, the wind blowing in my face as I’d swing foward, and the pull of the earth’s gravity as I went backwards. I’d kick my legs foward on my way up and pull them back on the way down, after swinging for a few minutes, the daredevil in me cheered for me to go faster and higher. I went as high as I could go and at the peak of height I jumped out of the swing, it threw me about yen or fifteen feet, I landed on the concrete path with a loud smack!
I turned around and saw the swing still moving, and remembered being little.
I also thought about my first college paper that was due by Friday, and I hadn’t even begun to write iit, and it was Tuesday.
I walked onward through the “Quiet” part of my neighborhood. It was quiet because it was across the street from the park, the police patrolled there at random intervals. If they had come by at that moment, they would have asked me what I was doing out walking at 2:30 in the morning.
I walked as fast as I could, but not to cause suspicion, my next stop would be the local seven eleven, which was about eight blocks away. I have to admit I was a little scared to go there, because once after I had went inside to say hello to my friend Ernie, it got robbed ten minutes after I lleft. If I had spoke to Ernie just a little longer, I would have been held up too.
I remember looking at the darkened houses and wondered if they felt at ease living so close to a high crime area, in the “Quiet” area, the houses were nicer than they were on my block, which was only four blocks North, it’s amazing how in just a short distance statistics could change. Low Crime to high crime, sad and amazing.
Once I got to seven eleven, Ernie wasn’t there, instead there was a young lady. I decided to go in, she greeted me when I walked in and I greeted back. I went to the freezer and pulled out a small pint of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. I walked to the counter, the young lady smiled, and rang up my
ice cream. Back then it was only a dollar ninety five.
I asked her for a wooden spoon and she gave me a hard plastic one, I walked out and headed down the main strip of the city, it was quiet and dark, no cars passing by, no one at all.
I walked and walked, and walked, I even passed by the police department, police passed me, but didn’t stop me, they just drove on by.
I miss taking those walks, because the one I described was one of many. I was either stupid or lucky.
Maybe the criminals who saw me thought I was some nut, but either way I learned a lot about who I was, but mostly where I was going in life.
Walks can do that for me, if you can take a long walk maybe it’ll take you somewhere you want to go.

Just make sure that it’s safe to go out, I took risks, and got lucky.

Be safe, take care.

JF

Rosie: “Is that a members only Jacket?”
Maurice: “Yes, Yes it is.”
Rosie: “So are like the last member?”

-Shallow Hal

It’s movie revue time, and some of you know I tend to watch odd movies. I am reluctant to talk about this movie, because is may sound a lot like my other post “Relationships and the Spotless Mind”

This Movie is called “Time”. An asian film about a women whose boyfriend, has “wandering eyes”, so to speak. In other words a women walks by and he looks at her. The main character a women named See-heh, finally gets fed up with her boyfrien Ji-woo, and goes to a plastic surgeon.
He warns her (The Surgeon, Ji Woo doesn’t know yet) over and over that it’s a bad idea, she agrees anyway and gets a whole new face.
She then moves out of her aprtment and just leaves Ji-woo.
He putters around town, goes on a few dates, and months later he meets a women, they hit it off, real well, but when the women asks him about See-heh, he says he still loves her. Turns out the new woman is See-Heh, and just renames her self See-Hee. She loses him, and he goes away.

Of course thats not the whole movie, just wanted to give you an idea of it, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m happy with the face I got, and if I weren’t(believe me I sometimes wish I had a different face) I wouldn’t change it. My parents gave me that face and I’m proud of it.
NO women outside of my family is worth me changing the way I look, it’s crazy, it’s insane to think
that someone would do that.

I’ve mentioned to family and friends that I would be happy to get a tattoo of my children’s names on me, but a women’s? HELL NO!

All in all the movie makes a good point, that sometimes what you want, and what you need are two entirely different things. If you get the chance and like subtittled movies(It’s english subtittle, but voice is in Korean) check it out, it’ll make you think twice about how much you really love how you look.

Thanks again.

JF

Picard: “Report”
Riker: “Shields are down, long range sensors are offline. ”
Data: “According to the astrometric readings we are in the mid twenty first century, from the radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere, I would estimate that we have arrived ten years after the Third world war.”
Riker: “Makes sense, most major cities destroyed, few world governments, six hundred million dead.”

-Star Trek- First Contact

No this is not a blog about Star Trek, though I could talk hours about the subject, thats not what I intend. I will admit, and many would agree, that if you look beyond the “Space Opera” of the show you see something more extrodinary than science fiction.
The premis of Star Trek is that a starship and it’s crew seek out new life and civilizations, they fly around at Warp speed and get to the destination solve the problem and move on.
Look closer and you see alien races co-habitating with humans, everyone happy and content, at least till the Dominion, the Romulan’s or even the Borg come and cause problems.

Our space program hopes to achieve the same purpose, except we don’t have Klingons roaming around the space shuttle.
Imagine what it would be like, all people on earth cooperating for a single purpose:
Increasing mankind’s knowledge of the galaxy.
There are Black’s, white’s Russian’s, American’s, Israeli’s, Arab’s, Filipinos,Latinos, chinese,japanese,
etcetera, etc. All of them cooperating, there are no wars on earth, only wars against earth and her allies. Granted war sucks, but at least star trek has a view that everyone on this planet of ours is co-operating, and I believe that our space program could do just that.

If we could all drop our predjudices imagine what we could do.

If every country laid down their arms and said:
We could save the world together, eliminate hungry, disease, poverty. I know, I know it’s too optimistic to say that we could do that, there are so many people out there who believe that they’re right about their cause, but think about what is at stake.
It’s not and ideal, a belief, a way of life, it’s life itself that we’re risking.
Again, imagine if the international space station had the cooperation of every country on the planet, it would become a space station, where the worlds most able and brilliant minds have come together to insure that MANKIND( I know I should say Humankind, but you get it right?) survives, because in case no one has noticed, we have one earth, and despite it being a little crowded, we all want to survive.
We cannot change the past, we all know that, then why destroy the future of humankind, because of the past?
I believe that the space program is our opportunity to invite all countries on the planet to participate, because on every country on the planet, there are brilliant minds who want to do more than make the world better, they want to make humankind better.
As optimistic as it sounds, lets drop our weapons, and cooperate in space to insure that mankind survives.

Oh…I forgot we can’t because we’re too stubborn, and beliefs can’t be changed.

That’s too bad, because I want your children to live and not know hate for others. I want your family to survive and make the world a better place.

How naive of me to want peace and cooperation on earth.

Thanks again for reading.

JF

Butch :”You looking at something friend?”
Vega: “I’m Not your friend Poluka”
Butch: “What did you say?”
Vega: “You heard me just fine punchie”

-Butch and Vincent

I just watched a movie called: “Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind”.
In it a man wants to erase the memories of his girlfriend, he goes to see her and she doesn’t recognize him at all. He finds out that she has erased memories of him. Once he finds out he too has his memories of her erased.

Now imagine if you will if that were possible.

I’ve been in a lot of relationships, and I will tell you many of them really needed to be erased!
Or do they. There are very few people who are as qualified as I am for knowing what a broken heart is. I know there are many levels of broken heart syndrome, I’ve had most of them.
I’ve had many relationships that have lasted longer than three years, and something tells me I’ll probably have many more, but imagine what it would be like if you could erase your memory of an ex.

I know the pain of waking up, relizing that your significant other is no longer by your side. I know what it feels like to be cast aside, as though you have no value, I know what it feels like to be left for another, and I definetly know what it feels like to wake up besides your significant other and relize that you no longer love her.

I see the pictures of me and my exes and remember a laugh we shared, a moment of joy, and the moment that it was over. I understand there are only a few things that I I’ve been grateful to not have experienced. Even in that case I’m not sure that a memory erasure would be warranted.
Life is so strange, one minute your as happy as you can be, or one minute your miserable and it doesn’t get any better. Time heals all wounds, they tell you, you’ll be fine, just take one day at a time.

Lets go back to erasing the memories of an ex, sounds pretty good doesn’t it? No more staring at a picture and seeing someone you once loved. No songs to remember them by, no places where the two of you used to go,it’s all gone.

Now think for a minute. What if everyone in the world did that, no one feeling sorrow of loss, no feelings of heartbreak. What a terrible world we would live in.

It is the experience of that relationship that teaches you, gives you the strength, molds you into the person you are today. And at the risk of sounding optimistic, I believe that all my failed relationships have taught me who I am, not how little I matter, not how worthless I am.
I love the person that I am, if I had those memories erased I would never remember the mistakes I made, and that lessens the chance of becoming better.

Our experiences shape us and make us the people we are, without them, we would never strive to be better, especially in intimate relationships.
I wish I never met(Fill in name here)!

I know I’ve said that in the past, now I say:
“We were together, but it’s over now, I’ve moved on.”
Heartache is a part of life, like taxes and death, it’s how we handle it that defines who we are.

Once again thanks for reading, take care.

JF

There he stood staring at the blank computer screen wondering if the muse would answer his call.
Glancing at the clock, he sees that he has spent more time than necessary writing nothing.

I really hate when that happens. I have been writing on and off for about ten years or so, and no nothing has ever been published, nothing at least worth noting.
I remember sitting in my room with a pen in my hand and an assignment for school looming over me like a shadow. Hours would pass and nothing would come of it.
Back then I lived in a neighborhood where violence was common, and like an idiot I would go outside in the middle of the night and just take a walk.
Once I walked out of my house at twelve am and walked, and walked, eventually I looked at my watch and it said four am. I looked around and saw that I had walked from my house to the downtown area of the city. Part of me misses that crime riddled neighborhood, and then again, part of me doesn’t.
Why are these BLOGs so hard for me to write?

If I could I would go outside and take a walk, as far as I could go, but thats just not possible.
Even when writing a story, I sometimes stop and look at the screen expecting the story to write itself, but in reality, my pen is dead, and I have writer’s block.

Writing to me is this idea that grabs me, and it keeps rolling and rolling till it over takes me, and then I sit down and begin to give the story life and liberty. I create fictional people based on some character that I met at the last party I was at, or give them a personality from one of the people I’ve known all my life, twisting their personality here and there to create a believable person.

But not today, and not yesterday.

I have to admit that I don’t hold my breath on someone publishing my stories, nor do I have delusions of grandeur, that someday I’ll be a great world wide author, I simply write to satisfy a craving in me. I love to write about anything.

Yet, I’m still left with a question that will always haunt me:

Why is my pen so silent, and why has my muse left me?

Thanks for listening,
Late
JF

“Adventure, excitement, a Jedi craves not these things”

-Yoda

I have pride, or at least the feeling that I do. For a long time I have survived by depending on my own abilities. I would be lying to say that I did not have a good support base from my family, and my friends. One could even accuse me of being over priviledged, and to be honest sometimes I do feel priviledged.

I have family that loves me, and friends that are loyal. I’ve felt the sting of being hungry, but always had a roof over my head. But don’t be fooled.

I have worked since I was thirteen to obtain the things that I have. I have endured it thru physical and emotional pain to take me to where I am today. I have worked fourteen hour days, and then worked twelve more the next day. I have worked like this for the last five years of my life and I am tired.

I have given what I could to those in need, feeling the sympathy of their plight, the pain of their hunger, because I’ve felt it before. There have been times that I was sure that I was at my ropes end, but somehow, I managed to pull thru.

I may have mentioned that I am “Trapped” in my own home becuase of my injury, the very things that I take for granted, walking, sitting, and running are painful reminders that I am injured, I am hurt. Part of me dispairs, and part of me rejoices.

For now I don’t have to worry about fourteen hour days, or work twelve in a row just to get two days off. I don’t have to worry about being called back into work after getting comfortable at home. My cellphone isn’t ringing non-stop, there are no clients or customers asking for my help. It’s just me, my dog, and this keyboard.

But I do need help, I am limited in my movements, and cannot drive. I’ve noticed that I have not lost my pride, or my drive to be better than I am today. I’ve just noticed that things need to be done.

Growing up I went camping alot with my family, there in the forests, my dad taught me and my brothers how to survive with very little. He showed us what was safe to eat, where to look for clean sources of water, and how to ensure that you have shelter. He showed us self reliance, and heart. He showed us how to survive when the odds were against us.

My whole life I’ve lived like that, and lately it seems that I depend on others more and more as my injuries heal, Hungry and in pain, I called someone for help, I was almost ashamed to do it, but talking to them, they assured me that it was okay, everything was going to be allright. Take one day at a time and know that there are people who are there to help me.

Like I’ve said in the forest I know how to survive, but the purpose of surviving in the forest is an eventual escape to a town, a village, or even a gas station, to ask for help.

I suppose this injury of mine is the forest, and I’ve come to the end of my survival techmiques, it was time to find the town and ask for help.

I struggled with it in my mind for a long time, and eventually relized that I did need help. It is my hope and wish that everyone who is in my situation or one similiar have a support base like I do . If your starving, or really hungry, your pride falls away, your prejudices begin to melt like butter, and all you can think about is the pain in your stomach.

So I asked for help, and got it, it’s one thing to be stubborn, or percevere, but’s it’s the wise person that knows when it’s time to ask for help.

May you never know my pain, and may you never let pride stop you from asking for help.

Until then, be safe, be cool, and:

Be there to help, or ask for help when you need it.

JF