Mike Hardwick Rest in Peace

 

Blog out of commision

Don't blog much these days. 

Great Escapes

 ***GREAT ESCAPES***

PROLOGUE

They thought I would forget.

They thought I would just lie down, satisfied with clean sheets, and forget all they told me. No matter that it was the truth, but they knew I would never catch on. They had serums in syringes especially formulated to make a man forget. Comfortable, clean rooms I was supposed to be happy to sleep in, even if only for a few months before being tossed out and left to the unenlightened. Unenlightened myself, as they would have it. That's what the needles were supposed to do, anyway. Yes, friends, they thought I would be just fine because you can't miss what you don't think you ever had. The truth is malleable, right? They merely implanted it in my head to see how I would respond. In those illumined months the truth was charted with meticulous care, as filtered through my own personal experiences, opinions, dreams, ambitions, hopes, desires...and nightmares. If only they had surgically removed it after that first bad dream I would probably not bear such a grudge as I do. I wouldn't give a rat's ass about the truth. When it was given or how it was taken away. But they waited.

It is a single nightmare that drives me towards the lost truth. The truth I lost. Truth I never would have had and likely would never know again. Not in it's totality. Maybe not at all. It is a long nightmare...6 months in the space of a single night's slumber. I've heard it said, and likely it's true, that the dream state lasts only a few seconds. Not even half a moment and yet the suspension of corporeal time allows the experience of moments, hours, days, weeks, months, years, who knows but we could experience entire lifetimes between one second and the next. 

So 6 months, really, is nothing. Right? Nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. That's what it all comes down to. Just expendable dream time. No matter that the world turned hateful towards me, it was only for a second or two. Imprisoned in an air conditioned, nuclear-powered incubator, convinced that I'd done something deserving a life sentence. 

They knew better. 

Only 6 months. 

Only 13 seconds. 

Ah, to know the things I was told, settling even for those 13 seconds alone. Wondrous, glorious prophecies, eons easily condensed into 6 months. It should have been enough. More than most people will ever see, feel, taste, touch, smell, understand, comprehend, know with the absolute certainty even reality does not offer. Seconds & months, I should have realized that this knowledge could not be hosted for the duration of a lifetime. There's only room in this universe for one God.

So they tell me it was a dream, and like all dreams it can (and will) be forgotten. I know this is true, at least the part about how they are forgotten. Only makes sense...it's easy to recall a special moment in the past, triggered, perhaps, by a song or a smell or the way a woman walks. But who can recall a single second? Not enough time for the embers of emotion to be fanned into deja vu. Add up all the seconds spent dreaming and you still won't have enough time to catch and codify the collective memories. Maybe a handful will make a lasting impression. Yet even they feel tenuous, as if they could slip through the cracks into forgetfulness at any time. No matter...you'll reach out and grab them, and you'll hold on to them like a character in an old black and white serial. The anti-hero who grasps his enemy's hand, with inconceivable strength, to keep him from falling off a high cliff and spiraling down to a rocky death below. Spin and twist to your will, they remain. The atoms of time are little more than stragglers still convinced, despite the apathy of others, that they are capable of something lasting. 

Maybe it actually was a dream. 

One of theirs. 

The only difference being that they had the luxury of waking.  

CHAPTER ONE

"Great Escapes Dream Implant Manufacturing Company". 

The sign is rather nondescript considering the implications of all it represents. The building, relatively small and unremarkable. Nothing at all like what you'd expect from a firm specializing in the manufacture and sale of dreams. But it isn't even a consideration for the proprietors. There is logic in low overhead. It doesn't take a lot of room to store a million tiny micro chips, even if the information coded in them contains millenia & galaxies. For all we knew there are more lives represented in a single bowl of chipped quartz than have ever actually been lived out in the real world. The "real" world...ha! Now that's a concept that's fast becoming antiquated. 

There aren't a lot of people who work in the manufacturing wing. The technology has become so advanced, practically perfected, that there's really no reason to keep engineers or technicians on the staff. Just a handful of coders to tweak what already exists in the archives. A few minor details. Nevertheless, details that will make a world of difference in the customer's experience. The tone of a lover's voice. The level of hatred towards an enemy. Just a touch of melancholy when a lucid moment  suggests it's not real. Slight variations of the implanted dream's perceived reality as specified by the customer cannot be tolerated. These things are important because the customer could actually retain the "dream" long enough to recall possible defects after waking. There's nothing worse than signing up for a trip to the Bahamas and winding up in some backwoods town in Arkansas. Oh, well, perhaps there is something worse. Not a few cases, kept "hush hush" by the corporation, have resulted in the necessity of ice pick lobotomies for customers who have not paid for, and did not want, the special "Halloween" temp-paradigm (which, I assure you, is every bit as terrifying as you'd expect from an implant based on the holiday). 

So what though, eh? You're gonna wake up anyway, right? That's all fine and good and seems like the logical point-of-view, but you forget that you're in an implanted dream. Until, maybe, the last few dream moments. It's only natural that such a situation would be cause for disgruntlement. With a full money-back guarantee the coders had to be very careful not to let such intrusions occur. 

Then again, very few people had ever succeeded in getting the best of the Great Escapes money-back guarantee. Litigation was usually thwarted by the tried-and-true "Dream-Within-a-Dream" defense.

The plant was located on the east side of mile marker 200 on Interstate 49, where, for the most part, it existed unseen to passing motorists. It was situated in this desolate region for a reasonable reason. You see, dream implanting had become such an inseparable part of everyone's lifestyles...much as the Internet was in the early 21st century...that it's materials, technological secrets, and everything about it, right down to the junior coders, were as closely guarded as even the massive storehouses of nuclear weapons that littered the land like a sea of push pins stuck in a map. It's brain trusts, time warping machines, indigenous templates and even the massive holograph integrator, all were as safely defensible as was humanly possible. Fortified by a shield dome capable of withstanding any and all atomic explosions, the Great Escapes Dream Implant Manufacturing Company was the safest fortress on the planet. No one knew this, of course, other than the chief CEO, a few senior officers from each branch of the military and the President of the United States. 

So, how did I get here?

There were a few among the Great Escapes ranks who thought it would be unethical to ride out a nuclear attack knowing they would come out on the other side unscathed. Very few citizens had even heard of a shield dome and fewer still had the ways and means to purchase and maintain one. "How can we live with ourselves," said these dissenters, "knowing that 99.99999% of mankind will be annihilated while we sit here talking about the meaning of life, heaven and hell, the nature of reality?" These qualms were quickly discarded when the truth set in...human beings, the entire race, were either dreaming or thinking they must be dreaming. There is comfort in believing you are asleep even if you're wide awake.

**************

I'm going to die. 

I can almost hear the warning sirens in the distance. The lights are flashing on and off. A strobe effect that would knock an epileptic to his knees. I know the camera is pointed towards me. I'm pretty sure that the postmortem assemblers have enough footage of my body so that I don't have to worry about abnormalities. Pretty sure. My mind races to confirm. I mentally scan my entire body, checking off each inch until I'm certain they've got it all in the memory banks. Inch by inch. Limb by limb. 10 fingers & 10 toes. Eyes and mouth and turned up nose. Satisfied for the most part, still something nags at me. Something very small, yet important enough that it distracts me from the seconds that are left before the bomb lands, point blank, on top of the cell...In the frenzy it hits me...

I turn around, bend over, pull down my pants and stretch wide my ass cheeks, hoping that the camera will squeeze off a shot before it's too late. I stand there, bent, for too long, not long enough, until the man with the stick and gun opens the door and says, "Pull your pants up".

I do just as he says, choosing to believe that his authoritative tone was not a command but a confirmation that now, thank the Holy god in heaven, I am complete. The assemblers have everything they need to put me back together before I wake up. 

I close my eyes.

I say a most sincere prayer of repentance, then the required mantra: 

"Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If my soul the Lord should take

I pray He finds me when I wake."

After the first "Amen" I take a peek to see where I am, hoping to see you by my side. 

Four grey walls. 

In my fear I wonder...are you still there, waiting for me to arise? Will you be there when I open my eyes? Will you be in the other room waiting for me to rouse myself, grumpy as usual in the morning? Will I wake up to an empty house as you've gone out to get us some coffee and donuts? Or will your absence be permanent? Through death? Disregard? Disagreement? Will I feel the soft brush of your breath on my shoulder or the vacuum left behind by spent rage? 

Were you ever there at all? 

I chant the supplemental mantra:

"Now the Lord my soul doth keep

In Him I find the dreamless sleep

Within His love I wish not wake

Though offered back, I will not take.

Amen."

**************************

This was the first defective dream implant I received from Great Escapes.

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 8)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 8)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 27, 2021

(This is the final page of the handwritten original manuscript)

She's been gone a long, long time and I can't even imagine if things would have been better or worse had she stayed. Different, probably. I know I'll regret the time not spent with her when she passes away (god forbid that happen soon). I've had dreams of her dying and me getting upset for not being closer to her. The guilty feelings and the dreams still don't push me to make amends, though. I don't understand because the love between the mother and her child is supposed to be something transcendent, special, the most important love one should cultivate while still living. I think I'm ready for that level but I don't even know if she's capable of that. To be honest I have let things get so bad that I don't even really know if she's still alive. (this sentence is from the revision, written in August 2021)

I lived with her in Oklahoma City on two different occasions. Both were disastrous. Her old man and I were of a different species and I'm sorry too say but I hated that man, not just for what he represented (whatever that means). 

It was a rare occasion when I saw her after the last eviction from his house. I remember that one well. I had spent the whole day walking around the streets of Southwest Oklahoma City, ostensibly looking for a job. No one was hiring though during this time, nothing like it is now where you can find employment everywhere you look around. Furthermore I was still reeling from my experience with the Navy. I haven't written about that particular Naval Experience in this autobiography because the memories are still too intense. (a lengthy piece about that span of time can be found on one of my blogs, though you may have to do some hunting to find it, I don't see myself posting it on Facebook soon. - JAC) I would sometimes stop at libraries and stay there until I felt comfortable going home. One day I guess my mom's second husband must have followed me to one of the library branches close to "our" house and he walked right in dressed in work clothes covered with paint and laid it on the line. He wanted me out of the house and he didn't care the means I had or didn't have to make it happen. I wound up asking my brother if he would keep my stuff while I tried to make it happen, and he let me stay at his house for a few days. I have this weird memory of watching Trinity Broadcasting Network (the wacko 24 hour a day religious channel that thrived on money donated to ministries who in turn would buy airtime to appear daily on their own shows or as guests in the flagship Praise the Lord program...not to be convinced with Jim Bakker's similar Praise The Lord program on HIS satellite channel (he was from the cable TV generation while his doppelganger Paul Crouch tapped into satellite networks to do basically the same thing). Anyway this particular evening when I was once again homeless, living on a few days of charity, there was a program that featured some dude who did actual exorcisms. It looked real to a person who had seen The Exorcist in a drive-in theater as a teenager having snuck  past any age restrictions and no previous knowledge of the Catholic Church. That movie had been the equivalent to The Passion of the Christ in terms of how much "buzz" was generated by people who had already seen it. 

So I'm watching this wacky tv preacher (they're all wacky) and he's knocking people down by touching them with a bible...he's casting out Satan in the name of the Lord Jesus. He's doing the same thing that Bob Larson is currently doing only he's not trying to look like a priest like Larson does with his silly collar. I don't think this was Larson doing it back on that day when I saw this unknown preacher casting out demons "in the name of the Lord Jesus". I knew it was pure crap constructed and probably rehearsed but I think I may have been vulnerable because of my new homeless stature and knowing I couldn't just up and expect my brother and his wife to let me move right in... I was primed to be a bit worried and scared of the future, my subconscious probably screaming "Let Me Out!"

I moved on. There was no way I was going to go back to her husband's charity and it would have been a fool move because his charity had run dry for me laying in the bedroom doing nothing but reading and listening to music "all day" (Jim Ed Brown's "Pop a Top", the Psychedelic Furs "Heartbreak Beat", Public Image Ltd.'s Album and of course R.E.M.s new masterpiece Fables of the Reconstruction. Such a work of genius right down to the album cover and the back side which completely changed the name of the record to Reconstruction of the Fables. I played that album at least as often as I'd played Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols in my younger, more rebellious years. The R.E.M. album had become a symbol of me making it through what little career I had in the Navy and of how I was embarking upon a journey of life without my ex-wife Barbara. This getting over her became the next thorn in my side. The pain lasted a long, long time but I eventually did get over it, with the help of nature and the love of another woman who was willing to take me with all my damage and love me through it. A woman who knew how hard it hit me to have gone through a divorce, a woman who even after I told her I had bipolar disorder was willing to "pick up her cross" to do the hard work of getting me back to a place in my world that is more like the real world, I had started to slip away and even now, with all the stress of 2020-2021, can still make me smile and think of holding on, if I ever had in my life thougnt that I was serious about taking my own life, I would, by the grace of God, not do it because I know how it would it would affect her. Of course I'm not going to join Swingin' Ian with the World's Famous Auto Asphyxiation Club in his honor, I have something and someone to live for and this person thinks I post weird shit on the Internet and this person refuses to budge on her stand that marijuana, even medical marijuana, is detrimental to my mindset (although we both agree that it may well work for other people)...I'm not going anywhere without her. She doesn't even like most of the music I like (she actively dislikes the Christian music that I find a lot of comfort in but hey, so what? In the long run I understand it's JUST music). 

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

[I've drifted from the original manuscript, but there is very little left of it so I'll try not to drift far away so I can "put this to bed", as they say in newspaper journalism)

The way I understand it my mom's second husband learned that he had a brain tumor or some untreatable malaise and when he found out he only had like a couple more months to live he went berserk and walked to a neighbor's house (I think it was a neighbor, it could have been someone else and for all I know he had his own gun) and procured a gun...he'd told my mother if he had to die then so should she and their young daughter. 

She may have been a dummy for getting involved with this loser (IMO) but this wizened her up quite a bit and immediately. She grabbed her daughter, hurried to the car and got the hell out of Dodge and moved back in with her sister, my aunt Wanda where I assume she hid out until news arrived of her second husband's demise. The doctors were apparently correct because it was only a month or two before he passed away...on the other hand I have that on second hand nature, he may have killed himself. One thing seemed for sure: the old fucker left this world alone, contrary to his psychotic notion of taking his whole family with him. My mother dodged a bullet, I suppose it could be said. Her daughther, who I have always had an aversion to calling a "stepsister" because of my disdain for her father, has grown to be married and now works in a bank where she's been for several years. I've been hesitant to get in touch with her because I have so much guilt for not paying attention to OUR mother, she's been there to take care of her all of these years and I have gone off to do my own thing... but I hope she knows that I still love my mother despite what I percieve her as being, the mother who walked away. I wish I could see her for more but it's a two way street and my mother, if she's still alive, has done zilch to get back in touch with me and my family. The onus has been on me all this time and maybe she's made my brother feel the same way...

That's basically how it feels but I have it on good authority that she is still with us. I went to the Library book sale the other day and bought at least 20 of the Harlequin Romance novels she reads, I'd love to be the one to give them to her because you gotta know I forgave her a long time ago for any and everything that I've written about here. I've, as they say in the south, "put it in the hands of Jesus". 

Where it belongs. 

-30-

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 7)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 7)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 25, 2021

She walked away from home, from her family, when I was 17 years old. It took me by surprise. Sure, things had been bad with lots of arguing but that had been going on for so long maybe I'd become immune to it. I can't say how well Charles took it but I do know that we both fared MUCH better than my old man. He was devastated. I t was like the only thing in the world that mattered to him was gone. In my time I've fallen on many black days but that one was probably the absolute worst, most likely a contributing factor to dark days to come. 

It was bad enough I had to watch my father cry like a baby. I didn't feel sorry for him at the time. I'd become used to it and it made me angry. He was convinced that my mother would only listen to me - if I'd only speak to her I could convince her she should come home (a lot like dragging me into an argument, don't you think?) What he couldn't/didn't want to see was that it was a useless hope thata they could ever live together again. Their love had died years ago, maybe it wasn't all my fault or my brother's fault after all... Who knows but that their love had been dead ever since the time we were babies? Does that happen? Of course it does. I never heard either one of them say "I love you" to one another. Hell, I don't think I heard my dad say them to ME more than 10 times in his life but what are they but words, right? Three stupid little words that don't seem to add up to much unless you put them in the proper order. By the time he'd come around to saying them to me it was difficult to hear them. They just didn't seem natural coming from his lips (or my mom for that matter because she wasn't one to say them much either, if at all). 

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

To this day I know so little about my parents... one of the reasons I've been writing this bio is so that my daughter Aubrey Lynn and my son Bryan James might know me better than I knew my own dad. 

My father insists that my mother was unfaithful to him. This is very possible because she certainly wasn't satisfied by him. She denies this and I have to believe her but what then? Why would my dad make up a story about catching another man in the closet? That's exactly what he told me, that he'd found this "other man" in their bedroom. When I last saw my mother (it's been years ago) I confronted her with this accusation and she laughed like I was telling a joke on the Carol Burnett show. WTF, right? 

So she denies the accusation...is she being honest or does she not want me to know the Truth? I can understand that, I suppose, but it's hard not knowing my pa wasn't delusional, now that he's been gone for so long and I can't talk about these things. God knows I would have talked to him about it whenever he'd let me, but then again I'm sure he wouldn't want me to dredge it up so often as I might. I'm ashamed to say that we got into a few arguments not too long before he died and I'm even more concerned because they seemed like old times, like we were doing what we were supposed to be doing. Only these arguments were different because I'd already proven that I could be a decent father to my own son having been given the opportunity, the blessing, the responsibility, having it thrust upon me. Knowing what love feels like once again, Love, capital L. 

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

(I've veered from the original manuscript somewhat, now I will return to 1995, so some dates may be off)

Does it even matter? It's been over a year since I last saw my mother. I know where she lives and it's not far from my where I live now - so why don't I go visit? I'm not mad at her. Her second husband, who never liked me and the feeling was mutual, the man she left my circle for is dead now so I can't use him for an excuse for not at least checking on her. 

I suppose some part of me is still pissed off at her for walking away. For putting me in the position I wound up in. Surely she had no idea that my dad would carry on like he did. Surely she didn't expect me to carry such an enormous burden... She says I could have come and stayed with her had I wanted, at least that's how I remember some kind of choice being offered back in 1977. I don't think of it as a choice these days but I guess it was and I also have to consider that I made that choice to stay with my father and that there was no turning back for any of us. 

I was too naive to realize that she'd already put the divorce in motion. I remember thinking she was starting a new life and had nothing, not even a place of her own, which was only half true, I just wasn't privy to the "where" of this domicile, at least not at first. She gave me the address and let me drive to OKC to visit her anytime I wanted, she gave me stuff just like my dad gave me stuff to go fetch her for him. She gave me a cool new suit that made me look like a new romantic with my long hair finally straightening out. I was looking pretty damn good in those days but I couldn't see it because I wasn't looking at through the right "lens". My mother saw it. My first girlfriend/wife Barbara McLaughlin saw it. We drag the pictures out nowadays and my beloved wife Stacie sees it. What's most important though is that *I* see it now. When I was free, when I was given the freedom to make myself whatever I wanted to be I was happy in the midst of all the chaos that was going on around me. I pretended I was in a band when I was a kid and I never stopped pretending and look what I got. A talent for drumming, singing, playing soprano, alto, baritone saxophones, keyboards (though I never learned to play with music), and now a new suit my mom bought for me at one of the malls in Oklahoma City... I remember getting a Clash button from Friends Records when they were only located in Norman, OK and wearing it on the lapel of my suit jacket, skinny tie and all. [Those "tacky" badges were really cool, you could show your respect for your favorite band by wearing them in your coat, shirt, wherever a sharp pin wouldn't jab you...the import copy of Joy Division's double album Still had one of these pins included and it was my pride and joy in 1980, the design on the pin was the cover art for the band's first proper LP Unknown Pleasures... I went on to be the biggest Joy Division fan in Oklahoma.]

As for my mother...she never asked for custody and therefore she didn't have to fight for it. That's the black and white of it. That's the stuff I didn't understand at 15 years of age. I knew what divorce was... I had seen Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in "Kramer vs. Kramer" at the Ritz theater in Shawnee (or it may have been the Penthouse theater a couple of blocks away) so I had at least some kind of experience with the concept of the ravages of divorce, even if it was only a movie... it was a great movie and I recommend it to anyone whose children (and grown up children) might have a hard time understanding the pain of the "big D".

(I only have one more page of the original manuscript for this autobioraphy so I'll probably dig deeper into my hand written archives for future facebook and blogger posts. Just so you know, they aren't all in this biography form but there is much there to laugh and cry at. If you've been keeping up with these posts I can only say thank you. It makes me feel better knowing that I'm not the only one who understands or who might wish to understand. And I'm not. 

Peace OUT!

Head...Oklahoma's first truly original alternative band

HEAD, left to right
Gregg Dobbs - guitars, backing vocals
Jimmy Casey - Vocals, bass guitar, acoustic guitar
Charles Casey - Drums, vocals, cowbell

Head was an alternative rock band which consisted of Singer-bassist Jimmy Casey, Guitarist/E-Bow master Gregg Dobbs and drummer Charles Casey, who also sang backing vocals with the group. Though there was much confusion as to their band name, Jimmy told Genius, "It was lifted from an old Man Ray piece entitled 'Head Found Underneath a Bed'. There was something I found singularly absurd about the title and I wanted to infuse the sound of the band with it." Apparently they were successful, as many took it to mean everything from an actual head to a myriad other possibilities.

"We were serious about it," Casey continued. "Dead serious."

Indeed they were, for within a matter of less than a year they found themselves playing in dive bars, at weddings and even opening for national acts The Call, and soon to be local 90s legends, The Nixons ("Sister"). Lesser known local Oklahoma band The Wake also shared the stage with Head on at least one occasion.

Gregg Dobbs

Gregg Dobbs' mesmerizing mix of rhythm and lead guitars, often sounding like space wars waging in the distant night, also bore the distinct distractions of Peter Buck and Angus Young influences.

Charles Casey played the drums like John Bonham ina jazz club, with finesse and power. Though his role was almost always confined to the traps he was also quite a versatile background singer. Known to friends simply as "Chuck" he was a personable comrade and fans loved him.

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 6)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 6)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 23, 2021

My brother and I got used to being alone together. My mom had to take a job at the Sooner Cafe and she would have us stay in the car for a couple of hours until her shift ended. This was NOT fun, for one reason our car was a tiny Ford Maverick. We needed more of our own space but there was nothing to help matters. It was the family car and it got great gas mileage and I eventually learned to drive in it. I thoght of it as my car for a long time even though it still belonged to dad and Charles drove it at times as well (I think). 

Sometimes we were allowed to come into the Cafe if it wasn't too busy and we stayed out of trouble. That's where I saw one of the first jukeboxes I ever saw and heard. I definitely remember playing Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Run Through the Jungle" and The Doors "Love Her Madly" which didn't seem much to me even then as dining music but they were in the nationwide top 20 so their popularity got them through the door and into the jukebox service guys box of stocked 45s. Sometimes when a record "ran it's run", as it were, falling off the charts or whatever reason, the juke box guy would sell them for a pittance. This was circa 69-70 and most of the records were crap pop music we were growing out of. The Osmonds was a band you grew out of. The Jackson 5 was a group you grew out of. No matter how many more hits they made there was a point in time when they, to coin an outdated Internet term, "jumped the shark" and became completely irrelavent to us, consigned now to the nostalgia factor, resurrected now by Google on YouTube if you really want to make yourself feel old because you actually find something in those jubilant young faces, still too young and innocent to know that the world has in store for the aging musician. 

I seem to remember we were out in the car, and expected to stay there, much more often than when we were welcomed into the Sooner, out of the way. Oh well.

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

[the following portion of the original manuscript has been touched upon in this revision but I will copy it here faithfully because it is of such importance]

My mom and dad fought a lot. I never saw violence but they sure did wear thin on each other's nerves. My dad would often try to drag Charles and myself into these fights and this, my mother has told me, was the main reason she left him. In retrospect that reason, even when she told me at the time, was pretty lame. My mom is still alive, praise the Lord, but she's locked herself out of my life as I see it as well as the life of my wife, my son, and for all I know my brother and his extended family. That's a lot to lose out on...but on the other hand I have not felt right reconnecting with her either. As I get older I try to understand her better and I think I do to a very good extent (although obviously not enough to go pay a visit). She is probably where I get my love of reading from, God knows she wanted me to be a doctor or a scholar and let me know it from a very young age. She likes to read Harlequin romance books and she reads them voraciously. She will sit on the floor on a blanket and smoke pack after pack of nasty cigarettes (the gross kind made with tobacco har har har). I don't judge her for that, I actually kind of admire the ability to enjoy something as simple as a cheap subscription romance novel that she buys in garage sales and I'm sure at the library sales here in town. I was thinking of her the other day when to the library and out of the blue I got the urge to buy her as many romance novels I could fit into a large paper bag at our library sale. Our sale is ridiculous, any book for 5 cents and 50 cents for a huge paper sack filled with your choice of what they have to offer. I'm not sure how often they rotate and add new books but lately I've been going more often and I'm finding more that interests me. The only down side to the library sale is that I don't have room for all I would eventually buy if given the oppurtunity (and at those prices it is easy to buy stuff I know I'll never read just to have them in my collection. Like an entire World Book encyclopedia for instance which I can't even read because the print is too small...did I tell you I have a voracious "quest for knowledge", as it were? I've found Wisdom in God, now I want to understand his works through schooling. Which is my way of saying I want to go back to college and pick up where I left off when my first wife left me...that's a story I'm not looking forward to telling and probably won't in this Autobography, at least not for a long time. Divorce is one of the most painful emotional responses one can live through on both sides...but it's water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned).

She walked away from home, from her most immediate family, in December 1977. I was 17 and you can quote any statistic you can find from anywnere and by anyone, doctors and psychologists, counselors and gurus, if any one of them tells you 17 is old enough to deal with a parents' divorce I will call you a fool. Is there an age when divorce is going to be just a-okay by everyone involved? Maybe. For me 17 was the age when my world was turned upside down.

Sure, things had been bad with lots of arguing leading up to her leaving but I suppose I'd become immune to it because it didn't take me by surprise and I feel like maybe it should have been discussed by all of us together...but no, the last I saw of my mother while she still considered herself a CASEY was before I left to vent in the truck. 

She left and I took it fairly well at the start. I broke down and cried that night during choir practice at the First Baptist Church where I'd been attending at the behest of a friend (I'm pretty sure it was my best bud David McCurley). The music director was also the youth director, a tall skinny dude named Alan Tinsley. He pulled me through that first wave of pain and though I've fallen from grace with him I have to confess that I appreciate what he did all those years ago. Thing is I don't remember what it was that HE did. Nowadays I give glory to God for using Alan as a vessel to bring some healing to me and I know it was the Holy Ghost (aka Holy Spirit) that brought me to the other side of those bad times filled with pain and sorrow, insecurity and fear, so deeply hurtful that they would cause me to tell the pillow that I hated him and I may have said those words but if I did I've blocked it out because what I now realize I felt was summed up in one word: PITY. 

No one should feel pity for their own father. No one should be put in that place where it feels like pity. That's where I was though. And my pity turned to revenge and I started listening to music that bled pity and revenge, aimed at no one necessarilly so it was easy to assign it to my dad since I suppose I blamed for the whole mess. I still love those old punk records I had currently streaming on Spotify of course but Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Psychedelic Furs had come to replace the Be Bop Deluxe, Cheap Trick and a good chunk of everything else. Nowadays I listen to black metal to cleanse my soul but I wouldn't do that if I didn't know that I have the Holy Spirit in me to protect me from the negative vibes that are part and parcel of most black metal. 

Black metal...can believe that? Just another aspect of my morbid soul. 

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 5)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 5)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 21, 2021

(When I last left off it was about 1977-1977 and my mom and dad were trying to rekindle their romance by weekly visits to the BJ Corall then I got a little side-tracked. Now we return to the original manuscript...)

Charles and i were left alone on these Saturday nights. That didn't bother us, however and we actually began to look forward to having the run of the house at such young ages (I was 16, I think, and my brother one year behind). They would buy us Fox DeLuxe and Tony's pizzas to fix for our dinner(perhaps this is why I have such well-documented love for pizza even today)...cooked 'em straight from the freezer and into the stove, no mamby pamby microwave for us country boys who hated country music. We also got a six-pack EACH of Coca Cola so we learned quickly how to process caffeine and use it in the service of staying up as late as we possibly could. There was nothing stopping us from staying up until mom and dad came home but I don't remember them coming back and in retrospect they probably left us to fall asleep on our own until the bars closed down at 2:00. I may have been young but I knew even then that this place was no more than a glorified bar out just side of the county line. The law concerning alcohol was known as B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Bottle) but the news kept talking about a new law that essential would supplant pseudo-dry counties: Liquor By The Drink. I don't remember the essentials of that mandate, it just meant that the Oklahoma was catching up with the Coasts and Las Vegas concerning alcohol consumption. Pretty sure it had a lot to do with taxing the hooch much like we now tax "medical" marijuana in Oklahoma and let the more "pious" of us call it a "sin tax". Tobacco has always been a huge player in collecting Oklahoma's sin tax and it looks like ganja could well surpass it in sheer dollars and cents within a short period of time...hell, I haven't looked at the numbers, our marijuana taxes may already have surpassed tobacco. I wouldn't be surprised what with dispensaries popping up in every crevice of every small town and blossoming like the wild west in the bigger cities. Oklahoma City and Tulsa, for instance, have countless dispensaries already in full operation. 

What will be the future of marijuana in Oklahoma? In the long run we'll just have to find out.

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Back to the autobiography...

So...here's me and my brother all alone in the house, I suppose some would say these days that we were being "neglected" but that would be plain silly. It's not as if we lived in Chicago. Remember, the town I grew up in was small. Somehow it's been classified as a "city" as of not many years ago but make no mistake, it's a small town, always was and always will be. Small town gossips, small town churches (except for the beautiful Catholic Church which hosts the supposedly infamous Shrine of the Infant Jesus), small town schools, small town shutting the doors down at 10 PM and except on special occassions everyone was expected to be at home with his/her family. And we were, most of us. There were some names that were infamous for being outlaws...Fawcett, MacAnally, Griffith...I grew up with a sense of fear for this lot...except for Justin Fawcett, who, along with his sidekick Russell Drury became my first "partner in crime". 

Justin and I had a wooden box with a lock on it. I suppose I should say it was Justin's, he had the key to the lock, but he let me see what was in it...just more of the "adult books" that I'd been developing a taste for. We would take magic markers and write coded messages all over that box so there was no mistaking who it belonged to. Like a club. I also remember a small metal box where someone had cut out individual pictures of nude women from Playboy and Penthouse and me receiving these on the cusp of my pubescence makes the memory of that box strong even though I was the one who threw it away. Why did I throw it away? I suppose I didn't want my mom and dad to catch me with it, I don't think I ever even showed it to Charles, this was my own secret box.

Time marches on. I was not damaged by my appreciation, as a pre-teen, of what the prudes called "porn". It wasn't until several years later that I saw what I would consider actual "porn" and it was a different ball game indeed. 

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Back to those Saturday nights, slightly less outlandish. We'd stay up as late as we wanted to watch Mazeppa's Uncanny Film Festival (featuring Gaylord Sartain as Mazeppa and his many skit characters, and a young, less frazzled healthy Gary Busey whose main role was as a Tulsa Oklahoma version of a greaser named Teddy Jack Eddy. This stuff should still be on YouTube, I think you'd be amused to point your Google Antenna towards those keywords and see what you find in those waters).

This was also the era of the first few seasons of NBC's Saturday Night...as any true fan of the original show knows it wasn't called Saturday Night Live during at least the first one. No lazy initials of SNL and Chevy Chase were only on that first run before I assume he became too obnoxious and coke-addled to be relied upon (or even liked). It didn't matter because Charles and I only started watching it when the second season began, the one where Bill Murray joined the cast and the music guests began to get more eclectic (DEVO, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello & the Attractions to name a scant few of dozens of awesome, original music guests. Nothing like it is today, although I don't doubt that plenty of people who aren't really deep into music might think there's something there that just wasn't there before, I am here to tell you there was. Kanye West, face it, is his own biggest fan. Much of what passes for music on SNL these days is a pale imitation of honest working man's music or punk rock or progressive rock or anything that was happening in the 70s and most of the 80s (I'll give you a few from the 90s as well but Kurt Cobain killed alternative music when he shot his stupid ass self in the head having succumbed to every musicians' nightmare, the Siren of all artistic integrity and the killer, HEROIN. 

I have never done heroin in my lifetime and it is with a great degree of confidence that I will tell you that I'll never do it for the rest of my life. I can't say that I won't one day fall off the weed wagon (though I don't see it happening anytime in the future). But I swear with my hand on the Bible and the Rosetta Stone that I'll NEVER smoke crystal meth or crank or speed and even though I'd been open to it for a long time I don't want to trip on LSD or even mushrooms. Life on this planet is too bizarre on it's own terms for me to want to mess around with reality. 

Hugs not drugs. Sounds lame. Trust me, it's not. There comes a time when it catches up with you. You start to think you have the answer. You start to think of yourself as Buddha himself dispensing wisdom hither and yon. You start thinking that everything you see on the TV and in the movies is either real or intended to mess with your mind. Have you ever seen The Truman Show? I got to see it in the theater with a few of my friends from my stoner days. I was so brazen at the time that I took a wood pipe and a quarter sack in an Altoids box everywhere I went and once I even took a hit in the empty men's room of this particular theater. I don't think it was The Truman Show when I did this, but no matter, I was on Cloud 9 with my ganja gang and something about Truman's predicament as the unwitting star of a whole television show he knew nothing about made me feel paranoid. Looking back I'm surprised that it didn't push me into a psychotic episode, now that I understand better what a psychotic episode is like...and I have marijuana to thank for that. 

My story...I'll never be able to see it in a linear fashion. It will always be memories that trigger something within me that I recognize as my SELF. Is it starting to get weird? Trust me, it gets weirder and I'm not barely half through with the original manuscript I began transcribing a few days ago. This is not an invitation to pry into my private life. It is only a sharing, secure in the knowledge that NONE of you, not a single one of you is better or worse than I am and hence I am no better or worse than any of you. The great equalizer. So it is. Down to choices. 

I really need to listen to some music today! What will it be? Choices!

Choices! What should I listen to? I think I'm going to get out the old HP Computer that I put on the shelf when Microsoft killed Windows 7 (idiots...Windows 10 sucks big time next to Windows 7 Home Premium and that old computer will prove it. Now I'm happy to use a Lenovo with a slow Dell back up). There are a ton of videos I made of myself during various stages of learning to play guitar and singing, none of which would probably make the grade on a silly Tik Tok video, but they were recorded so long ago that I'd forgotten them. I think I'll spend most of my Saturday with headphones on my head a computer on my lap, laying on my back so it doesn't start hurting again...there's something I should figure out and chech with my doctor about, my back just kills me. He'll just say exercise more and he'd be right. He just doesn't know how much I can't stand the sun sometimes. 

Choices!

(Damn, I have a fine wife. A good wife. Thank you Jesus for sending her to me...I don't think I'd still be tethered to the mortal coil without her)

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 4)

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 4)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 20, 2021

Backing up a little - my next door neighbor (and also the nicest person I know) Randy Blemmel showed me some magazines which would prove to become favorites.  They were published by Warren Magazines and each one dealt with the macabre and the bizarre. Eerie and Creepy were black and white graphic pulp magazines that took the horror genre into realms that DC books never dared to go. Vampirella was similar although it was a serial title and focused on one main character, an out-of-this-world sexy female vampire named Vampirella. 

The best Warren magazine, in my opinion now and especially then was Famous Monsters of Filmland, which was primarilly filled with still photos from classic (and not-so-classic) horror films of the time. Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. and Christopher Lee were the big boys here and the gorier the photograph the better I liked it. Perhaps this is strange but I was only like 10 years old and had a lot of curiosity to waste on these trivial things. (In 1995, when I originally wrote this, there were still monster magazines being published but nothing as good as Forest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland...there could never be because modern horror, influenced by slasher films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street have little more to offer than blood and gore. That's not so much the case now, in 2021 as they have turned into a cliche)

The eternal vampire has been replaced by the psychotic knife weilding serial killer. Back then, in the late 60s and early 70s we were afraid of the monsters/villains for what they were (vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, on and on), not simply what they did (and could do) to their victims, though that was definately a part of it as well. Dracula was my childhood favorite because the idea of a living corpse feeding off of human blood seemed almost believable. (2021 update: I now see a lot of reasons to be afraid of such a creature not the least of which being summed up in the old saying "Who wants to live forever?" which is a flip-sided question of it's own)

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I started out writing about my mother and I've wound up with comics, magazines and Dracula. I guess that's because my mother and I were never really close (that can be said of my dad and me as well, I'm afraid). In these formidable comic book collecting years my mom and dad seemed to have been trying to recapture the lost romance of the years, I assume, before my brother and I were born. They'd begun visiting, every Saturday night, a country music "dance hall" (let's call it what it was, a honky tonk bar located a few miles out of town that obviously needed an outlet for adults at the time, worried about the war, having diffiulty bringing themselves to the point where they could see through the black and white). This place was called the BJ Corrall. Named after the owners Betty and Joe Sargent (I think that was thier last name, pretty sure about the first). It was apparently the "place to be" in Prague on the weekends. At least they had a live band, though I was not old enough to ever find out, I can only imagine it as a lame country and western cover group trying to churn out Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings you get the idea. 

Actually I feel kind of foolish suggesting any reason for why they went there. What did I know? And what do I know now? I just knew that they fought a lot still and I can speak for my brother and myself that we were too young to have to listen to that stuff so often. There were periods when they would argue days at a time although I never saw my dad lift a fist to hit her and I honestly don't think he had ever done that. I think he pushed himself to a line where he refused to cross with her and later with me when I was the one on the other end of his nightly arguing. It seemed as if he actually enjoyed fighting with me as I reached and crossed the line of puberty. Especially after my mom got tired of being on the recieving end of his rage and left us to fend for ourselves and take care of him on our own. It was a little too much, though. My brother and I had to figure out what was going on in front of us and it wasn't pretty. He was having a nervous breakdown but we had no idea, I don't think I even knew what a nervous breakdown was at that time or at least that I would recognize one as such. But he would go on about how his nerves "were shot". He was in agony, you could tell he was ashamed to be crying in front of you, he'd beg me to go after her, once he even hit the wall hard enough to put his fist through it. But never did he threaten us, that wasn't something he would have done. 

After he realized she wasn't coming back and that he'd given me a hundred dollar bill to drive to Oklahoma City and do this supposed magic spell he must have thought I had in bringing him back and in retrospect you're damn right I feel guilty for taking that money and not saying a thing to mom about coming home when I went there. I admit it, I didn't want her to come home. I didn't want her to face him again and argue like it was a part time job piled up on top of the full time job she left behind. Dad was desperate when he did that and I recognize it as such. I sometimes wonder if he ever "wised up" and realized that I'd stopped having anything to do with her...that wasn't my fault either, what I inherited were the arguments. Virulent and hateful we would stand at the end of the hall and hurl abuse towards each other. It's a blessing that I don't remember all the things that were said on my side as well as his. He made a lot of threats and so did I, it must have been comical to an educated outsider that we didn't just have at it and wrestle it all out, get it out of our systems physically but he was my dad and I'd never lay a hand on him as long as either of us lived and I kind of knew he would be the same. To be perfectly honest I think we did take each other down once but again, I've mentally blocked it if I did. 

It's strange, looking back (in 2021) but it's almost as if I subliminally learned to enjoy an argument now and then from him but trust me, that's not a place I need to be or ever want to be. My wife has taught me what a fool I am to want to argue about anything or everything. Lately I've been about keeping the Cynic at bay and this morning I feel pretty damned good even though I hated reliving this sad portion of my history, it's over, it's in the past, my father passed away in 1999 and the only thing I can think of is how happy I am that he never had to witness the World Trade Center attack. He had a soft heart and so much tragedy at one time would surely have put him over the edge. I don't know if I'll ever see him again, but I know there's a huge part of him in me, both the good and the bad. And what with all the hate we taught each other I think that IF we somehow wound up together on the other side of my life we would forgive each other as we have been forgiven on this side by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Then we can see each other as He sees us. Made perfect by His sacrifice.

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 3)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 3)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 19, 2021

I mentioned in the last segment that our new house was located directly behind the cement plant and Panell's Lumber Yard...in the lot east of those buildings was the first convenience store ever built in Prague. It was also the first "self service" gas station and it was called Mom's Minit Mart. This monumental structure was completed in the late 70s and as far as I know the whole c-store idea was a new thing across the country. Mom's was typical with it's gas pumps, microwave oven and sandwiches to microwave in it...microwave cooking had only recently arrived in our little town, it was amazing to see food cooked so hot in under a minute. 

Mom's had a walk-in refrigeration unit for cold beer, soda pop and other food items that might come in handy for the happy traveller who stopped in regularly or the truckers using Hwy 62 on the way to 99 and on to I-40. As a service to their customers they kept a stock of periodicals. Any magazine you could think of and a few, hidden on the shelf above the bottom row that you won't see these days with it's politically correct view of erotic magazines (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and a few other titles I called "dirties"). They wouldn't sell these to minors, ostensibly, although they did lose a lot of them to shrinkage (people stole them). I once obtained a huge bag of these treasures by stocking the walk-in for an older friend who happened to work there and didn't feel like going into the walk-in and freezing his ass off stocking cans and bottles of various drink and lunch meat and whatever else that was there to refill. 

My favorite thing in that store was a wire carousel comic book rack, well-stocked with new stuff arriving at least once a week, or so it seemed. Comics only cost a quarter (they'd raised the price by a nickle at the same time we moved into our new house) and it was a very short walk across the lumber yard to buy them at "the Minit Mart". Dad always had a spare quarter he would give me so I could amass a truly remarkable collection of these educational and entertaining books. 

I preferred DC comics. I liked the Justice League of America congregation and would buy lots of Batman and Superman titles but my true interests lie in much darker fare. House of Mystery was always a great cover-to-cover chill inducer. There were also specialty titles like Weird War Stories and Weird Sports which I would pick up with the rest. Marvel comics just didn't do it for me at the time and EC was badly drawn and written (though I must say I've read people proclaim EC as the veritable king of horror comics, I never saw it).

I had 'em all though.

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I always figured that all kids enjoy MAD magazine. I don't think they even publish it anymore so the youth may have moved on to something else but then again MAD wasn't just for the young 'uns. As a pubescent punk-rocker-to-be I identified with MAD's satirical style, poking fun at current movies and television shows as well as deflating cultural mores, etc. Much of my dark, cynical sense of humor was born in the pages of MAD.

I was also a regular reader of Cracked, another black and white large size comic magazine that never pretended to be anything more than a witty, slightly less virulent version of MAD. MAD had it's mascot, the toothless dork Alfred "What Me Worry?" Newman and Cracked had Sylvester P. Smythe. I think there's still a website based on Cracked though I don't imagine it has a whole lot more in common with the magazine than the font of the masthead. 

When I got a little older, an aging 15 or so, I switched from the cartoon style humor of MAD and Cracked to the slightly more literate National Lampoon, which I read faithfully for several years before growing out of it. The Lampoon had something that interested me at the time - photographs of naked women and the shop owners didn't seem to understand how much "adult content" was in the so they would sell them to pre-teens. 

Before long the few naked breasts in National Lampoon's Foto Funnies just weren't enough and I moved on to seriously reading Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, High Society, every title that would get me in trouble with the state of feminine women today...but in my own defense I have to say that my time spent learning to enjoy reading was done with the Playboy Interview, their Advisor, their Forum (which indoctrinated me for better or worse with the "Playboy Philosophy" that Hugh Hefner dreamed of) all the cartoons and party jokes...of course I looked at the women...I was a teenage heterosexual, it was in my veins...but that photography was art and the models were each and every one a Venus de Milo, I felt no guilt as my collection of what puritans would call "pornography" began to rival in size my box of pulp comics. I was learning a lot of valuable lessons in those magazines.

But enough of that, in Part 4 I will introduce my good friend Randy Blemmel as he introduces me to the Warren magazines Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and the big daddy of them all, FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND.