So…there’s been a lot of weird news articles showing up lately. Well, first off…thank goodness for Chip Waggoner and his helicopter crew after their helicopter crash yesterday morning, all three of them were able to walk away from that. Now a good tone and piece of news after what happened in Phoenix last week.

Now, I thought I was one of the last people to ever have seen this video, but I showed (and commented) this video to Christine about a week or two ago. I guess it’s making a big hit, those of you who haven’t seen the inmates in the Philippines do their little music video are encouraged to watch it…at the bottom of this page.

Then, Russia’s got some creepy youth program going on…I guess I don’t have much to say about that. Sorry, how about being a capitalist, Russia…I mean you can even get a Sanrio credit card!

Probably the most disturbing, for me anyways, was last week when I heard that “24″ is going green. Okay, before you start telling me how I hate the planet and all…I’m not going to go crazy yet…I’m all for helping the environment, though if you were like me about two years ago and tried to get into the whole compact flourescent lightbulb craze, okay…get more truth out of them…pluck them out and just wait for the far better LED bulbs to come out.

Also, they say they’ll put more personal, smaller storylines. Excuse me, I think you were already doing it this last season…and I don’t think it worked out too well. The problem with last season, for me, was there was so much stuff going on and moving around. While it SEEMS to be a good idea, there was a big problem…I was able to predict just about everything that was supposed to be a surprise last season. There was no out-of-nowheres that I saw, look back to the first three seasons and keep that model. Season four was good too, season five was okay…but the first three were really good. Keep it there. If you’re gonna do the small, multiple storylines, you’d better find away to keep the surprises from “leaking” out and don’t make us that disoriented.

If the “24″ set wants to reduce their carbon footprint, as long as “24″ doesn’t become pay-per-view, that’s fine. Keifer Sutherland wants to give penguins a back massage, DURING COMMERCIAL BREAKS, that is fine. Do NOT make the main villain someone who was a villain on the TV show “Captain Planet.” I DO NOT want to see Jack Bauer doing a car chase in a Toyota Prius or running after a villain that flew off in a plane, because two planes would turn the sky greenish brown. I DON’T want Jack Bauer to drop his gun because the bad guys will knock a fishbowl with fish to the floor. I DON’T want to see Jack Bauer kill 80 terrorists in the room, only to take off his backpack and replace the bulbs in the room with compact fluorescents. I DON’T want Jack to tell Chloe to shut off her computer if she’s not really using it right now. I DON’T want the explosions on “24″ to be replaced with a mixture of baking soda and vinegar because regular pyrotechnics make molecules in the neighborhood block jiggle a little more. I DON’T want a terrorist to have 400 bread toasters connected to a power strip which he will turn on, heat the air, and 300 years later the weather will be different from…this year.

And I ESPECIALLY DON’T want to see Jack Bauer, inches away from dying, bad guy laughing, then all these multi-racial teenagers come out of nowhere and shove their fists in the air screaming, “EARTH!” “FIRE!” “WIND!” “WATER!” (then Jack Bauer raises his fist in the air and yells…) “HEART!” then some silver David Copperfield looking guy appears and says, “By your powers combined, I’m Captain Planet!”

That, and don’t replace your ticking timer before and after commercials with a sun dial…besides, they don’t work to well during the 24-hour portions when the sun’s down.

Despite all the unusual days beforehand, the weekend wrapped up nicely…closing a rather unusual week. On Friday, I met up with Chip and Dylan and ended up watching the Simpsons Movie. That turned out to be pretty good. First off, it was pretty funny…most bits brought out a smile from me, though there were some parts that had me laughing good. Further redeeming itself, those that know me (and Charles, Chip and Christine…) know we have an unusual sense of humor and there are things that are seemingly ordinary that would trigger us into a laughing heap. We are not unique in this regards, most everyone has a big list of “inside jokes” within. Coincidentally, the movie served up a decent amount of it and Chip and I found ourselves laughing at some points that normally aren’t funny to most (I know, as nobody else was). The movie experience was…far less stellar. I was reminded once again why I am not big on going to the theaters…though I have had good luck lately, but we decided to watch in more unfavorable conditions (opening Friday evening)…but there are some movies I want to see coming out soon, so I might as well watch it before the next set of sob story movies roll out.

Saturday was a great time. For several months now I had found out that friend and former Cole crewmember, Maribel, had gotten out of the Navy and was back in Dallas. Despite a few bumps here and there, she and her daughter, Jasmine, were back home and she was working…of course our schedules didn’t work out and it wouldn’t be until this past Saturday that we saw each other for the first time in about three years. Couldn’t think of a place to eat but tried Pazzo! again. Unfortunately, as I found out a few months ago, the Pazzo! restaurant that Chip, Codi and I went to was closed (and Brenda Vaughn vanished…remember what I said about jokes above?) and all they had was their Flower Mound location. I think that may have been a little bit of a stretch for Maribel, and while that is a heck of a drive for me I was gonna hit Grapevine Mills anyways, so it’d work out.

It was, for the most part uneventful…the “getting there” part, though Maribel did get a little lost finding the area (which I wasn’t of much use since this was my first time into Flower Mound as well), but she eventually got it and we caught up. While waiting for her, I did my normal advance team surveillance (well, I had time to kill so there!) routine. This location was different from the Dallas location. The Dallas location seemed a little more casual and we took ourselves to amusement by getting crayons and drawing strange pictures on the paper laid out over the table. They later hung that picture on the wall. Nothing like that here…in a matter of fact, if I just walked in here and didn’t know the restaurant then I wouldn’t have recognized it until I ordered the food. There were kids around as well, but nobody had crayons or anything. It kind of reminded me of that movie “Titanic” where you see the little girl laying the napkin on her lap. Welcome to Flower Mound!

Well, they arrived and I got to meet little Jasmine. Discussions were abound, with a few interruptions by Jasmine. I was hoping that the lunch wouldn’t turn into the afternoon to evening ordeal when I went to Houston to see Jason, Kim and Monica. Despite a different atmosphere, the food was still excellent as usual. I thought it was amusing to see Jasmine reaching out to grab the salad on her Mom’s fork. I know some parents that would do anything for their kids to eat salads, vegetables, etc. Afterwards, I got two tiramisu dishes for Maribel and myself. Despite going on the same deployment, turns out she never had tiramisu before…oh how she’s missing out! At first, Jasmine didn’t want any but when she finally ate a small piece she literally got up from her baby chair, spoon in hand and attacked the tiramisu in a renewed hunger frenzy. You know what was really sad? My brain lapsed and I totally forgot that I had my camera sitting in the opposite chair. That done, Maribel followed me (just to make sure she didn’t get lost) and headed over to Grapevine Mills on her own with Jasmine to probably get a few more clothes for her (Jasmine made a mess of herself!) while I proceeded to my area of Grapevine and just went about at the bookstore, Virgin store and Gamestop before finally heading in to play. All the while I’m glad to be able to say I do a fairly good job with keeping in touch with friends despite the times.
Sunday was pretty good as well. After church, I went down to visit George for a little shooting. As usual, that was enjoyable as I did some mover shooting and was satisfied that my intermediate engagement accuracy was still fairly good (indoor shooting ranges just don’t have the space for something like that). Despite it all, I was still soaked in sweat from being outside. Texas weather is slowly moving towards full fledged summer, but it’s not hot yet (Maribel was telling me how hot it was, but she was still in the Navy last year…she doesn’t know how it was last year). After a few hours and several hundred rounds later I headed back, newly exhausted.

After picking myself up from the ground I decided to go to the gun show. Christine wanted to go too so we headed out and lucked out. A guy was leaving as we were walking through the parking lot, talking about the Mesquite Police Dodge Charger parked in front (we amuse ourselves over random things). He called out to us and asked if we were going in, to which I said yes. He handed me a piece of paper and said there was no point paying if we were going in before they were closing and I thanked him as I saw he had bought a two day pass and handed it to me. I walked in and showed the pass to the ticket person who nodded to me, looked at Christine and decided she was under 12 and let us through. Inside, Christine looked and handled various pistols a little more carefully. Her birthday’s getting closer and closer. Though the highlight for her in the gun show was when we rounded a corner and there in the middle of the aisle in a stroller was a baby looking up at me and crying. For me, the highlight of the show was trying to walk past a crowd of people that were gathering around two people with some very young puppies. I knew that when Christine laid her eyes on the puppies she’d go crazy, if we were in anime land she would have eyes that looked like sandwich bags filled with water while squealing “Kawaii!” Me…I was just like, “Cool…puppies the size of hand grenades!”

And where was Tony? Well, Tony was UA…missing out at a gun show…in Texas! That’s grounds for being exiled from the state! No, he was making a macaroni dish in his apartment…making an excuse like, “I’m not gonna buy anything anyway” as an excuse for not going to a gun show. But we bugged him anyways, as Christine showed her tactical usefulness by evading Tony’s radar when we walked into his apartment…and Tony shuts the door on her face! While in there, Tony showed me the scope covers he got with his rifle’s scope, which he saved a little money and got the permanent tactical signal mirror (which is those scope covers that have a clear window so you don’t have to open the cover…you can just look through. I made the motion (don’t ask me what started it, like I remember) of grabbing a cricket and tossing it inside the objective lens and closing the lid while peering at it through the clear scope cover…doesn’t sound funny, but that’s because you weren’t there for the full experience…it was hilarious enough that this blog (on my website) gets the category of “Seanisms!” So after much goofing off, it was time to get ready for work and head back. Oh…another week. Normal, please?

Will this week return back to normal?  What timing…and a golden opportunity.  A few weeks ago, I made mention of Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of the tragedy surrounding Operation Redwing, was on Glenn’s show and is the author of the book “Lone Survivor”.  Well, just last week…if I recall right…he actually made it in person to Glenn’s studios in NYC and chatted with him for a bit more.  Apparently, he’s been going on a book tour.  Whoever knew that he would actually visit the Dallas area?  Even crazier, of all the bookstores in Dallas area, whoever knew he would visit the Border’s bookstore in Mesquite?

Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a rush and took pictures…or I thought I did.  Turns out, I forgot to change the settings on the camera that I used yesterday to photograph the big downtown explosion.  The inside of the bookstore is far dimmer than the sunny outdoors, and well…the pics I took were a mess.  But I got a book and had it signed, I got to chat a little and that’s really already more than I could ask for.

On the way out, I noticed something as I was pulling away and looked outside and blinked several times, partway out of my parking space and still in reverse.  After convincing my brain…I reached for the camera…made a slight adjustment for the sun setting on a near overcast day and took a picture…

Two slabs of beef laying on the pavement…raw.  I looked around…other than Borders, there is Bed, Bath and Beyond and then Best Buy.  Well, Borders has an actual cafe…maybe they have a meat market within amongst all their coffee.  So there you go…no picture of Marcus, but you get two random raw slabs of beef.

Once again, I do recommend you buy and read his book.  I found out he’s going to be in San Diego this upcoming weekend.  Though I think the weekend appearances will be at the Navy Exchanges since he was talking about Miramar and the north island (?).  I figured he’s probably stop at one civilian location, and yes he is…July 30 at 7PM, the Barnes and Noble and Mira Mesa in San Diego.  That’s in the Mira Mesa Marketcenter on Westview Parkway…store number 858-684-3166.  That’s all I can say, it’s been years since I’ve been in San Diego and I was only there for about a month…really just back and forth from the base to the mall that you take the train north…plus a few Tijuana stops.

Normal day tomorrow please…normal day tomorrow…  I’m thankful for getting to see Marcus…I just hope things start getting back to normal, it’s been an odd week!

As well…I’ve blogged quite a bit this week, huh?

Okay, this week just keeps getting weird. So I come in yesterday and one of my coworker’s kind of jokingly (because they weren’t sure) wondered if I was suicidal. I puzzlingly looked at him and he looked down at me. I followed his gaze and eventually spotted his concern. A single, yet kind of fat, trail of blood from the inside of my forearm. I lifted my arm up to look a little closer. I’ve been shooting since 1999 when I picked up an M9 pistol in the Navy for the first time. It’s slowly becoming a decade of shooting, thousands of rounds fired. Firing a semiautomatic weapon, even a fully automatic at times, will give you the risk of having the hot shells ejecting from the gun and landing on you and you get a brief pain of getting burnt. Okay…maybe not as bad as running away from a hot missile deck when an SM-2 is firing…but you get the idea. Well for the first time ever, when Christine fired several hundred rounds as a part of her pistol selection testing, a puny 9mm shell came at me and hit my arm. I pulled my arm back in an effort to make the shell roll off my arm, but it instead stayed there for about a second. I guess the skin broke yesterday morning and it started to bleed. I’m okay, really.

Then…I heard it. Didn’t think too much of it, looked around outside and didn’t really see anything too important. A few minutes later I get the breaking report that a building probably two miles away from me had an chain explosion event going on. I stepped outside to see the “mushroom cloud” begin blocking out the sun. Interesting. Snapped a pic and logged on to a local news station here and got a tower came footage of the mayhem. It was pretty crazy. All throughout the day, my phone was going off from people all over wondering what was going on. Being the sensationalist whores that they are, the media beyond D/FW began breaking news with retarded titles that only force you to sit down and watch their channel. I was able to go to some well known news sites here and shook my head about “Massive Explosions Rock Downtown Dallas” and “Dallas Shaking With Endless Smoke and Fire”…you’ve got to be kidding me. One even speculated about the explosion and the beginning of the trials of the Holy Land Foundation the day before. More reason that you are doing yourself a complete disservice if you think you know what’s going on in the world if you turn on your cable to the endless talking heads and their BS tickers in the bottom. How many heard about the S. Korean hostage getting killed yesterday? Any of you even know that S. Koreans were taken hostage? Okay, who heard about that Lohan girl yesterday? Ah…

So I’m okay, it wasn’t that big a deal…unless, I suppose, you were there when it happened. However, it shut down two of our highways and that was somewhat of a traffic mess. I still believe as far as disaster preparedness that Dallas still has a long way to go…especially since the shut down directly affected my route and many alternate routes to home. Thankfully, I like more or less the road system that Dallas has. It’s old and often archaic, but other than initially getting out of my work since one of the highways is just a block away, I had smooth sailing and took back ghetto routes and went around the entire thing and popped onto the highway on the east side of downtown. But man…checked the traffic updates online. Probably will be a while before it lights up red like this again.

So here’s to a strange yesterday. And more proof that there is no real point in watching the news. See it to see that an event occurred, don’t believe anything else after that. Do your own homework, or whatever entailing reaction that’s appropriate. Here’s my cool pic from yesterday. Enjoy!

Oh boy…once again, I am faced with a bit of a dilemma in that I didn’t post fast enough and now I have so many things in so many directions in my mind. Where should I begin? Politics…the necessary evil, and something I do have to pay attention to but try to keep it off of conversations, and do fairly well in doing so. All I have to say is, maybe I’m for a “Presidential Idol” or “Election Survivor” or “Senate Apprentice” reality show. Maybe if each person had about the same equal “playing field” and had to take action on various proposed tasks that were formulated in a way to help answer many people’s questions…with viewers actually watching each candidate, versus candidates that show up to smile and wave for the camera, but leave us to their websites, favored interviewers and talking points as our way to judge them. Not to mention the attacks from the opposition. Put up or shut up, show me on this reality based show what you’re made of. You accuse an opponent? Show me you’re better. You say you’ll do this…let’s find out. You say it can’t be done…how we are the masters of sensationalism, that’s how reality shows have lasted as long as they have. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. Yes, I’ve rolled my eyes on this concept overall…but hey, I can’t argue with some of its merits.

So my mind has been a flurry lately. Please read previous posts if you don’t fully know what’s going on. A lot of things have been going on, and there’s really no point in mentioning it here. If you are that curious, you are free to ask me and depending on who you are I will give you the appropriate response. Yes, I may be up to something.

Anyhow, I came across a box a few weeks ago. Haven’t been in it before (since I’ve got out of the Navy), I opened it up and peered in and through. It was mostly high school stuff, notes to and from many people who I have never forgotten but the whereabouts are currently a mystery. Letters, pictures and so forth. It was these letters and notes that I opened and unfolded. Things I wrote to and/or about a person, things written back to me. Various topics, some motivational…I even had a letter I made for a member of my bus loading crew for a band trip.

“How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?”

That quote introduced to me by Glenn, mentioning Bill Thomas mentioning his father…it coupled with what I read for that hour or so of various things in that box. I was brought back once again to my core. Nearby that box, previously looked through many months ago, was another box with contents similar…except I was already in the Navy, just not on the Cole yet. Printed e-mails and such to and from myself, a new Sailor and encouraged by opportunity and such. The e-mails to and from family and friends, the setting and stories were different…but the message was surprisingly the same.

Things changed after the Cole, mainly from Pascagoula and onwards. Where a different environment fostered a much darker Me. A lot of good came out of this Me, but it was a side that to this day I debate with myself back and forth and sometimes think was best a door never opened. In order to survive this new and, at many instances, hostile environment…I had to live as this Dark Me. It wasn’t long, but it was long enough…and it had to be that way for me to achieve the personal desires and the commitment that I had to my ship. In doing so, the lighter Me of before was obviously violently flung to the side a lot and in many ways forgotten.

When I was rang of the USS Cole as my final moment as a part of the crew, it was a near tearful moment because I didn’t want to hear “Permission granted” when I requested permission to go ashore. I did not want to leave. But it was a decision that I knew was best for myself, the ship and any future shipmates that I may have to encounter if I stayed in. I did what I could and when it came to furthering myself, it was almost always empty promises, blank stares and bobbing nods. With that, a giant change in life…I was so caught up with my time on the ship even though it ended about as perfect as I could have asked for and went on to pursue life as a civilian.

Those boxes made me go back to more recent messages…mainly e-mails. E-mails that I can usually call up in seconds as I type this. Going back to the beginning just made my jiggling world stop and hold still for just a moment. I realized I was an example to a whole lot of people. I’m not just talking about being made an example in the general sense. I’ve known a lot of people that come to a major wall in their life, from high school to today. A lot have used me as some sort of guide or motivation to tackle and usually overcome that wall. Once you get over that wall, other walls can get easier.

I remember the OS I met at the airport coming back from convalescent leave and how he hugged me and told me that all through boot camp how the bravery and determination of the USS Cole crew in Yemen helped pushed him on. Not a personal sense, but still it was there.

From tackling moments in high school, inspiration to serve the country or keep on with college or a job, to making things happen in the Navy to successfully transitioning out of service…several have looked my direction.

Am I still that example?

This past weekend, I got to try my hand at some tactical rappelling and I figured it was a small gut check in me. I realized how my mind and heart were still going, but I physically wasn’t. Things that didn’t faze me several years ago, they made me pause…if just for a moment. But for someone who had “no mind” in tactical matters, even a fraction of a second pause hit me like standing in an empty concert hall, doors slamming. I found it hard to scream down a wall or prep to assault through a window and keep my firing hand ready to bear at any moment. I’ll be ready next time, but in real life that just meant I was probably dead. For those of you that knew me on the ship and thought I was some Super Whatever…this is typical of me, I was only competent onboard because I was brutal with myself and I don’t like it if I screw up things like this. I had concerns and I talked to the officer about this and other concerns I had. He welcomed me to some SWAT training in the later future if I’d like…I really need to keep that edge.

My satisfaction/gratification is different from some. I keep up to speed on technology and weapons/tactics. But I am not trying to dress myself up like pictures in a Blackhawk catalog or waiting in line for an iPhone.

Speaking of, a few weeks ago I was in the Apple store because they had an external hard drive I wanted to get but wanted to poke on with my own eyes and hands. There was a crowd around the iPhone table, with maybe about five people checking out every one iPhone. Finished looking at the hard drive I made my way out. As I neared the table, this guy looked at me and with a face that 10 years ago translated to him winning a 10 million dollar lottery, he gleamed and thrusted an iPhone to my face while saying gleefully, “Isn’t this is greatest thing ever?!?”

After realizing that his actions didn’t warrant deadly force (I’m joking people!), I just reached over and swiped across the glassy iPhone screen with one finger letting the address book fluidly scroll up I said flatly, “Yep…it is…” and I walked past the disbeliefed person. Are we so shallow now?

More and more articles are being written about how unhappy we are getting and the topic of overindulgence and self-centeredness. One weekend, I spent most of my time to myself on an experiment. I went to five various locations throughout the Metroplex where I could unobtrusively monitor conversation. The articles are right about unhappiness…from getting the wrong nail polish color, to not having enough time to download a song on iTunes, the Starbucks drink is too cold, the sun is too hot, people are dying in the Middle East (being said while playing Halo 2 on a demo X-Box), gripes about boyfriends and girlfriends, and so on. No really, think about it. Remember that stupid Emo Epidemic I’ve mentioned in the past…just not really called it an Emo Epidemic. Oh, it’s alive and well…well growing. The sob stories and feelings-based lifestyles are obnoxious, they are. Just, in a slightly different way, my military buddies and I are more convinced that there really is a big difference between our never-served counterparts, some dangerously taking their reality and blanketing it over the world. Sorry, reality’s a little different and if you want to sob in the corner, get out of my way. Those that want to stand, however, I will hold out my hand to help you.

Which is my Self-Assessment, one of then-Commander Grady’s points as he commanded the USS Cole some years ago. I have been slowly balancing the Yin-Yang of Me these past couple of days. I do not know where it’s going to take me, or what’s going to be affected. We’ll see as time goes by.

After a bit of a last moment idea, Christine and I headed over to the range this past Sunday where she decided to test out some ideas. Testing a range of pistols of various calibers, she at least knows of a direction that she needs to go. One test complete, several ideas solved and on to more considerations. Besides, she has plenty of time to think. It was really sad for me…I spent more time loading mags and getting burnt by flying brass then actual shooting, how does that work?!? Oh well, Christine doesn’t have to be finicky in the details as I am…and I don’t want to either…but the Dark Me had to be that way when I was on the Cole. Oh well…

A final bit, one day Chip and I had a collaboration. Bambi Chili. We got ourselves some ground deer meat and I don’t know, we just started dumping ingredients everywhere…which is usually not a good thing for me, improv is usually bad. All things that I’ve usually made are successful because I break out the precise Swiss measuring tools (j/k) and follow recipes step by step. In the end, it turned out VERY good. I was surprised…I need to jot down the “recipe” before I forget and nuke the next one!