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Yep, that's me alright! Bent over and crippled from a quarter century of construction in some of the most brutal conditions you could imagine. Add to that my youthful indiscretions, car crashes, getting myself in trouble and my love for things that go fast! Problem is, those things that go fast can have a tendency to stop really fast too, and that kind of puts one at a disadvantage in the laws of physics. But I wouldn't take back any of the skiing (water and snow) and flying through the air as far as I could on the slope, cutting through the wind like there was no tomorrow. I loved the illegal car races and my record for car flying - once going airborne over 75 feet in a 69 Nova and landing on all fours, plus the rolling over in dune buggies and flying around on quads. The years spent as a firefighter and water-rescue on the Northern Pacific ocean going over swells and breakers up to twenty-five feet high to save lives, being inside fires so hot it melted my equipment, lived through a flash-over that brought the roof down on us. (Hollywood calls it a "back-draft" - r i g h t . . . A "back-draft" is getting buggered by a heavy-breather!) The parties, the girls, the intense fun of
living on the edge, the adrenalin rush of seeing who will chicken out first. All
in fun, never hurting anyone. Now, stuff such as that, the Sure, I'm busted up today, but what is life for? To count the number of years one can expect to stay alive, or to live each day as if it were your last? To put in your time on a job, or to take the risk of doing it all on your own and reaping the reward of saying, "I designed and built that!" To show someone a structure that will remain standing long after I'm gone as a monument to my intellect and determination. Any self-made individual will point with pride to his creations, his work, his manifest. I'm not bitter, getting a bit fed up with the pain, but luckily I have the support of others to help me get through each day. That is why I can laugh at this cartoon - it's me in some ways, but it was I who made the decision to use my own body to build stuff, not some foreman standing on the ground belching out orders, it was my mind, my work ethic and my will that made me do things that most people would never try to accomplish. So when the time comes and I'm looking up at the daisies, pour a little beer on my headstone, I might be thirsty.
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