Just saw an article....

which stated that there have 30 suicde attempts at Gitmo in the last couple of years. 12 of these attempts have been by the same man!

Now, I ask you, how can anybody who muffs 12 suicide attempts be taken seriously? He must realise he's damaged goods and not one virgin, let alone 72, would have anything to do with him. His career as a martyr is in the crapper.

Huge clouds on the horizon. My 5 sq. meters of lawn is wiggling with anticipation. Hope everything works out or it's the buckedt brigade for me.

Company coming for the weekend. Some from Tijuana, some from Mexico City. I will try to avoid the incessent chatter and dip in and out of the crowd to get some of the food. When visitors come the quantity and quality of the food service goes way up. Over the years my inlaws have come to know that I am unable to watch and talk about babies for hours on end. Nor can I participate in the endless recollections of great aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews, etc.,etc., ad nausium. I glad I cannot for if I could I would choose not to and that would make a bad guy. As it is now I'm known simply as the anti-social gringo.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"I want my people to be the most intolerant people in the world." - Jerry Falwell

MEXICO ( as I see it):

In Mexico, getting drunk is the only thing that works 100% of the time. Everything else is hit or miss.

AND

As a Mexican driver pulls away from his house in the morning he automatically makes the sign-of-the-cross. It's not clear whether he's asking for safe passage or if he's asking forgiveness for what he's about to do unto others.

THE SERIAL: Oxygenated Water

We left off:

Darrell was real candid . Darrell was real candid
with the old fella, he reared up on one elbow and said,
'What the fuck is this stuff and how do you know about
it?'

"The old bum answered Darrell like this: 'Listen,
lad, I was a soldier way back in the big one and I was
stuck in a small town over there.'

"I can't, for the life of me, recall where he said
the town was. It might have been Belgium or France
but, anyway, it was one of those pitiful little burgs
that the Germans and us were swapping back and forth."

'It was all tore up and the folks were scared to
death,' he went on, 'They was all living like cave men,
double timing everywhere they went and staying in the
shadows; too afraid to even stick their heads out of a
window for fear some bastard would punch their ticket.
The summer I was there the town happened to be ours.

'Well, lads, I met myself a woman.' The wino
paused long enough to take a nip from Darrell's
half-pint. 'She was fifty years old, never been married
and didn't even have any kids. Matter of fact, I don't
know if she were a virgin or what. Maybe she just
hadn't used her equipment in a long time.
'She was a real proper woman living by herself in
a little rooming house that had somehow not got hit by
nothing thrown by two armies. Normally speaking, a
woman like her would never even give the time of day to
a dumb-ass doughboy like myself. But, in war times,
with people knocked off stride and death and disaster
all around, I guess the warmth of another human body
values a lot more than in regular times.'

"So,the way we boys were getting his story was that this
woman had allowed herself to get close to this old bum,
who, at the time, was a young buck soldier. We waited
while he asked to take another look at Darrell's
bottle, then, on he went."

'Boy's I've never again seen anything like this
woman. She had the body on her of a woman thirty years
old instead of one fifty. Her thing was so tight that,
I swear, she must never have had a man. I could hardly
do any good. I tried to make love to that woman every
which way I could think of but each time she'd go to
squealing. I wanted to think that some of it was from
passion but I learned the most of it was from pure
pain, like a young girl gets when she's starting out.
'Anyway, this here one time', the wino said,'I
built up a real head of steam and I had to throw
caution to the wind. I just didn't know how to be
gentle anymore cause I had to get it. You know how it
is, boys.'

"Well, we didn't know 'how it is' in those days,
at least Mike and I didn't, but naturally, we nodded."

'Hand me that there whiskey stuff, will you kid?'
the old boy asked Darrell and went right on talking, 'I
was about to bust and I plowed straight on into that
woman and let fly. Well sir, she put out a yell like
she'd been snake bit, but I held her real tight and
talked to her nice and soft until she calmed down.

'The trouble was, when she got up to go to the
bathroom,' the wino's eyes got big, 'I saw this here
blood stain as big as a dinner plate right there on
the sheet! I looked at that thing and thought, Lordy,
Lord what have I gone and done to this poor woman?'
'When she came back to bed and saw the stain she
turned white and went to palpitating. She was deathly
afraid that the landlady would see that sheet come
laundry day. I guess, even in hard times, when
ruination lay within arm's reach, landladies are still
real fussy.

'Lads, I gotta tell you, that poor woman was
killing herself grieving over that bloody spot.
'This is awful,' she told me, 'terrible! If my
landlady sees this she'll throw me out in the street.
My village is devastated, there's no place for me to
go; I'll be lost!'

'Well, I couldn't stand to see her so upset over
something I'd done to her so I asks 'What you want me
to do?' The lady says to me without even hem-hawing, 'I
want you to get some oxygenated water.'
'What?' I blurts out.
'Oxygenated water,' she repeats, 'go get some.'
'Where in the hell am I going to get oxygenated
water at this time of night in a tore-up pueblo out
here in the middle of nowhere?'
'You must return to your unit and ask for it at
the medicine tent,' she says.
'The medicine tent!' I says, 'What are you talking
about?'
'The place where they dispense medicine to your
fallen comrades.'

Boys, I was just a kid from thesticks and I'd never heard anybody talk so refined as that lady.

'Oh, I get it,' I says, 'you want me to get some
oxygenated water from a medic back at my outfit.'
'Yes, yes, from your 'outfit', that's it, from
your outfit.'

"The old wino paused as if to take a little
breather, then he added to Darrell, 'Pass me that nose
paint again, will you son?' We boys were all hoping
that we didn't run out of whiskey before this old guy
ran out of story."

'Well', the wino went on, 'I gotta admit that I
felt a little responsible for the lady's dilemma.
After all, I'd had my way with her and I kind of loved
her just then so off I treks, into the night, back to
my outfit.

'When I got there I thought about forgetting the
whole deal; the hell with her sheet, you know what I
mean. But, I was real young and things still seemed
important so I hunted up an orderly who gave me a
small, brown, bottle of the stuff. It could have been
my ass, because they weren't giving up no passes to
soldiers at that time of night. I had to sneak past a
sentry to get out of the compound. By the time I gets
back to the boarding house it's almost four o'clock in
the morning and the lady was still wide awake; still
fretting over the bloody sheet.

'I'm telling you now boys, it was the damndest
thing I ever saw. The lady dumps the oxygenated water
directly on that big ole blood spot, the size of a
cow-pie, and, by God, she disappears the stain! I'm
talking about disappeared the blood!'

"I guess the old fool repeated himself to make
sure we boys understood how amazing the whole deal
was."
'And,' he says, 'that's exactly what we're going
to do for this young fella right here,'

continued...