One of the things I look back on is when I was in my early to mid thirties.

Looking back on it there were a lot of people that were pretty envious of me. Unless a guy was in a solid, dynamic marriage and had a career they loved a lot of people out there would have gladly traded places with me.

I had the world pretty much by the ass.

I lived on a sailboat that cost me $250 a year in slip rent. My bills were about $12 a month for electricity and in the heating season about two bucks a week for heating oil. That's about it.

My electricity was paid for a year in advance. One day when I was flush I gave the power company $150 and told them to let me know when it ran out. I actually told them to leave word at the Anchor bar. (Things like this were far from unusual in Kodiak at the time)

I had what I'll call an 'income on demand'. This means I could work whenever I wanted to and make as much as I needed.

If I needed a couple of bucks to eat on I'd do an odd job of some sort. If I needed a bigger chunk of change for something expensive I'd hop on a boat and go fishing. If I didn't want to fish there were contractors I could work for that paid pretty well.

Many of the local restaurants and bars kept books on that they owed me for fixing stuff and otherwise helping out.

While some of my food came from the local supermarket, a lot of it came from the fat of the land. There were fish to catch and ducks and deer to shoot. If I caught or shot too much that was OK, too. I knew people that would let me use their freezers in return for a piece of the pie.

Single women and divorcees were plentiful and for a bar stool sniper it was a target rich enviornment. 

Beer was too easy to be had and I had to be careful I didn't drink myself goofy. I easily could have if I wanted to.

In short, life was incredibly good.

You could tell how another person's life was pretty much by the way they showed approval to your life style. Miserable people hated me. Truth is they would have changed places with me in a heartbeat. These were either people that found that their money didn't buy happiness or the guys that had married poorly and felt trapped.

Happy people and I got along well. We seemed to respect each other's happiness. I also got along very well with the Filipino community, which I attribute to Filipinos being basically happy to begin with. They are actually kind of like the Irish of the Pacific.

A lot of this I attribute to being pretty handy, not greedy and flexible. When I needed a spinnaker for my boat I didn't feel the need to have a world class racing 'chute built. I just needed something for light airs.

I could make my own if I had the materiel. A parachute would do.

One day I put the word out on the docks and in the bars that I was looking for a parachute and presto! A couple of days later someone came up to me and offered me ten bucks to move a tote of stuff for him a couple of miles. There would be a fork lift at either end to unload it. I could either tale the ten bucks or the parachute he had in his garage.

A parachute at the time on the surplus market ran about $40 so it was a no brainer. The job took me 20 minutes and I got the 'chute.

The next morning when the bar opened I took the chute and lofted the pattern on the dance floor which was not being used.  I whipped the sail up over the next day or two and was good to go.

The 'chute was multicolored, half orange, and the other half was split between white, brown and OD so as to provide camoflage for a downed aviator. The resulting sail looked like hell but actually worked pretty good when I tried it out.

It proved quite servicible and a few of the people that laughed at it later respected it when they thought about it a bit. It did the job it was supposed to. It caught wind in light airs and propelled me.

In a nutshell I was able to live like a king with very little effort and there were people that envied it.

When I re-entered the 'straight' world several years later I had skills of all sorts to fall back on and compliment my re-entry.

The biggest thing I brought with me was the ability not to sweat the small stuff coupled with the ability to see that about 99% of it IS small stuff.




To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY