A Veteran’s Perspective

My Valentine’s Desires are TRX, a speed bag, and lots of Tiger Balm

Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

Acceptable Responses Of a Smart Husband  

  • When your wife starts a “Bootcamp” workout, waking at 4:30 AM:

    • YOU are awesome, honey!
    • You are really looking good.
    • I’ll get up with you…  just let me rest my eyes for a minute

  • When she offers to make you a ‘kale-berry-kefir-peanut butter’ smoothie:

    • Just a little one, my stomach is upset this morning
    • I will have it after I walk the dogs 
    • Actually, I had the leftover Quinoa in the fridge
  • When she asks you to set up a TRX / workout bag in the spare bedroom: 

      • I just ordered it on Amazon
      • I had nothing planned on Saturday, so I put it together
      • My buddy Greg is coming over tonight to bolt it to the floor
      • When she says “Let’s stay home” on Valentine’s Day; you can barbecue some steaks”  
        • You are the best wife in the world!
        • You have cooked amazing this week, I would love to
        • It would be crazy to go out tonight anyway

      Parrots in search of a Pirate

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      Seven years ago this month I performed my last Drill Weekend with the Navy Reserve.  I was retiring after almost 26 years of Active and Reserve service.  Several of my peers where I work today, Navy veterans all, greet me with “Chief” or “Senior Chief”, One of my favorite people is a formerly active (NEVER call them former)  Marine who participates all year long in Pirate-themed public events.  At other times and places,  love to engage in sea stories with with among others, a friend who served in the Navy fifty years ago.

      So the Navy was good to me.

      These days I supplement my working hours, church meetings and some political engaging on Facebook, with the dubious and infrequent bit of wisdom I can impart to family and the public at large through blogging.

      Some of my best ideas germinate from twice daily walks with my dogs Dexter and Comet.  This week, I wrote about such topics as dealing with weeds, weather,  dog behavior and so on.  But it was a bird, or rather a flock of birds  that got my thinking cap on.

      The annual ‘migration’  of parrots to my neighborhood (they actually live in San Diego year round) noisily began this week.   These are descended from escapees from a pet store many ago; over the years I have seen them in various communities of east San Diego County.  On this particular occasion, Monday, all the squawking and fluttering of wings began about 6:30 in the morning; it grabbed the attention of one of my dogs (the other was “focused” on his morning constitutional).   If it were not for my need to get my work commute started,  Dexter would have just stood there watching the tumult for quite some time.

      So, today at lunch,  I was reading from one of my favorite military humor websites,  The Sitrep,  when I happened to read an article and watch the video of a little parrot that wanted to join the Navy.
      Looney Tunes.

      With adult eyes and the experience of a few decades, I can understand why these cartoons may have disappeared.  The themes were as much ‘adult’ as they were to entertain kids.    Twenty-five years ago prior to an entire generation being raised on Family Guy, the cartoon had been rather tame.  But entertainment today is an endless supply of melodrama and human caricatures on cable television.
      However, it does an old Sea Dog ‘s heart good to chuckle with a cartoon.   Perhaps the pirating life has not dimmed entirely for me.

      Picasso’s remedy for dust

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      Art washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life

       -Pablo Picasso

      Lascaux caves, France

      Some twenty thousand years ago, in the caves near present-day Lascaux, France  our Homo Sapien ancestors rendered images of their world on the walls.

      We know from the fossil record that life was very difficult for the hunter-gather.  While there is evidence that these dwellers and their ancestors may have had some rudimentary cultural and religious practices, and required some level of sophistication to organize hunting, we cannot imagine that they had much time to devote to things that were not involved in survival.

      Babylonian Empire

      Perhaps six thousand years ago, the first signs of civilization, when people started to settle by water sources, and started to develop farming and animal herding seemed to also develop politics, divine authority, and warfare.  From the ancient records, we know that art seemed to be dedicated to glorifying battles, conquests and religious ceremonial centers.   Then the Greeks and the Romans later refined war, as well as art , politics and literature

      Henry VIII
      In the Renaissance period,  Europe, twelve hundred years after the last gasps of the Roman Empire,  art rediscovered perspective,  the natural world and portraiture.  Still, most art were renderings of Christian religious significance. Curiously, every subject in paintings of Jesus, His disciples and those who followed Him were all clothed in the garb of the artist’s day. And they were all white, Western European-looking folk.
      Picasso

      In the first half of the Twentieth Century,  post-modernism, and unconventional representations of the world around us were popular,   War as an art was practiced and nearly perfected.  That civilization could simultaneously express such a dissonance in culture, in art, in science, in technology,with positive benefits to humanity;  and on the other side, War, genocide, and political disunity and civil war should have alarmed more people. But basic necessities, even survival in many parts of the world was always an afterthought to the more sophisticated world.  Strangely, the only institution having a positive impact on the inhumanity of man for man, the Christian church, also became the focus of hatred and symbolism that were fundamental in world history began to be replaced with a multi-culturalism and loathing of the American democratic experiment of 200 years.

      David Choe

      Since 2000,  Terrorism based on warped ideology and Western hypersensitivity to ideas has pervaded the culture of half of the world.  Truth has no foundation in fact. Emotions are manipulated in short staccato bursts of Twitter and Facebook.  People are indoctrinated to live according to principles that have no room for any discussion.  Enemies who were once friends don’t even study what they disagree on.  With the tumult, disunity, and even chaos, in a Post-Truth world,  there is even greater need for art to wash the filth of the world away on a daily basis.

      Lessons of a military life

      Eric Saretsky1 Comment

      Lesson #1: You’ve got two rights in this world

      My early blog post is being retitled and reposted to first in a series of memories that shaped my adult life.  This story is forty years old as of 2018.   

      Thirty years ago, a Navy Senior Chief, his name forgotten to history, made a lasting impression on an 18-year old Sailor.  In what was then the Correctional Custody Unit (CCU) at Naval Training Center San Diego, I was a Petty Officer assigned to escort the nearly-bad-but-salvageable characters who were not sent to the brig for various offenses.  On the Monday of the beginning of every other month, a group of malcontent, mostly 18 to 20 year old,  “bootcamps” or fresh recruits and apprentices were lined up at 0700 in the courtyard of a nondescript half-century old building with bars on the windows and a locked front gate.  This was CCU and the Senior Chief, the LCPO.

      The Senior Chief was a burly man with a crooked grin, intense eyes and was all-business. He had spent ten years as a combat Marine and then switched services to the Navy as a Gunners Mate.  His deputies were equally salty, the soon-retiring Snipe Chief with weathered skin, alcoholic eyes, missing front teeth — he was busted in the face decades before in a drunken brawl with Shore Patrol in some liberty port.  The  incoming deputy was a hefty Boatwains Mate First Class (“Boats”) who shared the same passion for the Navy and making Sailors out of these men in their charge.

      “You’ve got two rights in this world, shipmates”  the Senior Chief bellowed, “One, to live; the other, to die.   And when you F*** up, I’m going to take one away from you!!”   At this, he usually got a snicker from some fool who also had his hands in his pockets.   After an hour of push-ups and eight-count body-builders, while we all enjoyed our coffee, the jokers were then quieter, sweating heavily and not inclined to disrespect their wardens.

       

      only the future holds promise

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      The dust of history has settled on the year 2011.  Thank goodness, many will agree.  In the next 362 days, new discoveries in science and medicine, art, literature, and the natural world will mark 2012 as their genesis.  The world will welcome millions of new babies, among them future Einsteins or Yitzak Perlman’s,  as well as good, honest, and hard-working future farmers, miners, fishermen and laborers.  In the next year, we will say farewell to many others.  The next 12 months are a cup half-full of promise.

      Over the past year, people who engage in politics, economics, and military -backed diplomacy have proved that there will always be tyrants and incompetents,  powerful and the power-seekers, and dreamers and fools.  Middle-Eastern countries we liberated at terrible cost are returned to despotism and chaos; some empires need to be obliterated and not tolerated by a civil society.  After two centuries of upward mobility and American blood spilled to engender an ideal around the world, the American identity is now a weakened vox populi, a bankrupt economy and a powerful State.  Sovietism in America?

      In 2012,  new leaders and new visions need to stand up; overcome the noise of the Occupy rabble, the sycophant news media, and the well-connected, and hold the Government to account.   Or the next 51 weeks  may be a cup half-empty.

      Flying trucks, drive-thru homes, and miracles

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      Bang, Screech, and BANG!  Two A.M on Saturday morning, out of a dead sleep Sheri and I leaped out of bed to see what the commotion was.  (Must be the druggies partying down the street). A few minutes go by. Sheri and I stepped out front,  looked down toward the main road and saw nothing,  only a couple people coming out to the street.  I went inside and then back out as the fire trucks pulled up the street a few moments later.  One of our neighbors joined us. A minute later I saw a couple people from the other direction coming down the street, saying that a truck has driven INTO the house at the top of the street. 
      After several minutes we walked up the street to see a truck buried in the corner of a house.  There’s several neighbors gathered, the police and the firemen were moving about.
      Our neighbors were first responders. Robert pulled a teenager from the rubble of his bedroom, and Brian shut the power off.   Brian grabbed the passenger who was trying to get away.  By the time we walked up to the house, the sheriff has both occcupants of the truck under arrest.  The twenty-ish woman driver was incoherent as she was escorted to the car past me.  She and the man military-looking seemed to be without a scratch.  An ambulance passed by, taking the teenager who was in the house, to the hospital.   His brother was unhurt simply because he fell asleep in the living room and not in his bedroom which was completely demolished.
      A few moments later we found out that these two drunks had smashed into a small trailer, then bashed into a car in the driveway of the house next door, backed up and went forward in the driveway again, smashing it again, pushing a pickup truck behind the first car THROUGH the garage door, then backed up and careened through the victims’ brick mailbox post.  They missed all the cars and trucks parked along the street, and, six houses where the street tees,  launched up a  driveway, over a cement wall and into the bedroom of the other home.  When the F150 was hauled off by the wrecker, it didn’t seem to have suffered that much damage.  (Wonder if Ford would advertise that as “Ford Tough”. )  It was miraculous that no one was killed and that no other cars were smashed on the way.  Oh, and the idiot kids –  the son and his buddies weren’t responsible. The mom, whose two cars and garage was plowed into, kicked them out of the house recently.  Our neighborhood, once insulated, is becoming more crime statistically average.  And to think, all I used to worry about was the probability of an airplane coming down, living in the runway approach to the Gillespie Field airport.

      My Ant Can Kick Your Weathercenter Uncle’s Butt any Day!

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      Ants are a heck of a lot more accurate than weathermen on TV.   Monitoring these ants diligently preparing their nest and moving material and food to and fro, I have received confirmation that they know environmental changes before we do.
      In April 1900, an article in the New York Times appeared to confirm the practice – in the age of science / dawn of a new century – noting the behavior of insects including bees and ants, to predict weather fairly reliably.  A hundred ten years later, and we might still find our superior technology at a disadvantage.  This past week, in a particularly cloudless day, these Arizona ants were busy preparing for a downpour, (corroborated by similar observation over a number of years) which by the following day proved to be accurate.   And despite the weatherman on TV stating that there was a minimal chance of precipitation in the following 24 hours,  the ants proved to be the ones prepared.
      If technology and wizardry can be outdone by an insect, it doesn’t say much about our Global Warming paranoid- environmentalism, now does it?     I may listen to the TV News, but in a cloudless sky, my money is on the ants predicting whether or not to bring my GoreTex with me tomorrow.

      Art Historian? No, but I slept in a Holiday Inn Express….

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      If I had the money to jump on a plane and jet across the country this week for the heck of it, there’s a lecture series I want to attend.  Of course, I have no particular training as an art historian or artist, but I know the subject of this lecturer’s presentation, Edwin H. Blashfield , muralist.  I doubt there is a single one of my peers who hasa clue who he was or what a muralist does.   Forty years ago, I lived a few years on Cape Cod in a mid-18th Century home which at the turn of the 20th Century was the home and studio of this artist.   What began as a curious find of a large book full of his work in pictures and lithograph prints at the house became a small collection of prints and books he wrote today.   In several state buildings, courthouses and libraries from the MidWest to Washington, DC and New England, his work is prominently featured.    Here’s the editor’s new book on Blashfield  edited by Mina Rieur Weiner

      Changing your own oil

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      Spending quality minutes with your children older than eighteen is an exercise in creativity.   Take this morning for example.   Getting up before they woke and started to scatter, allowed me to get the honey-do’s done.  Well, it is probably more accurate to say that I needed clean underwear and clean sheets since my sweetheart gone almost all week, was due back from her writing conference later this morning.  At least I wouldn’t have that added to my list of to-dos when the Missus got home.  (And might earn some points for me.)
      Matt and I had talked last week about changing the oil in the Honda, and this morning he approached with a window of opportunity for some bonding time.  Of all the discussion and the lessons on the costs and benefits of clean oil, I’m sure the one take-away from this morning was how cool the hand-cleaner was in removing the dirty oil from our hands.   There might have been another lesson on getting the oil filter off too.  And until some other dad or garage mechanic shows him the oil wrench one uses to remove stubbornly-tight filters, my hammer and screwdriver lever action will be a sharp trick employed by creative ol’ dad.

      The job’s not finished till the paperwork is done.

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      My mother had outpatient cataract surgery on Thursday.  It’s amazing the possible upgrades, replacements, enhancements and other medical procedures which can be done these days – even into our old age.   But, assuming that healthcare is going universal in the US sometime soon,  I can only imagine the complexity of the bureaucracy which will be introduced.   From the number and variety of questions that the eye clinic’s intake specialist pleasantly fired off at my mother, I would have thought it was her first visit to that clinic, that she had not paid sums in addition to her insurance, and that computers histories were not instantly available on each patient.  If this encounter was any clue,  we may hope for longer lifespans, if only to complete the forms and actually be treated by a doctor.   Until such time as the system gets hopelessly bogged down, my mother will be able to read and understand, if not be as  enthusiastic in filling out forms and questionaires – as long as the administrators realize that she may require their attention by critiquing and circling the questionaires omnipresent grammatical and spelling errors.

      There’s no Chinchilla in my Sesame Street world!

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment


      Four-thirty! Four thirty in the A.M, and I am waking, to the sound of scurrying feet, human, feline, and rodent. The chinchilla, for all my desire to see it other than a big squirrel, is somehow under our bed – bracketed in by curious cats and Sheri at the opposite side. Five minutes after I join the commotion, the chinchilla is backed into Sheri’s arms and plopped back in the cage.
      Good morning! If you have ever read “David Copperfield” you would instantly recognize that I live in his home. Where once I was in an irritated, agitated, and unhappy political and social conservative, calling fumigators and cheering cats ability to catch rodents, I now tolerate them as pets and have cats not on duty, but on the bedspread. What next is to happen in my social fabric unraveling? Oh Lord, please do not let me start reading the touchy-feely animal -rights blather! I need a good dose of Sean Hannity or perhaps some Rush Limbaugh , before I rush headlong into my mid-life crisis, a red corvette and a timeshare in the desert!

      Thankful for family, food, and good cigars

      Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

      Pleasant family memories at Thanksgiving gatherings in America are part of lore – native Americans sitting down with Pilgrims, settlers who first worked the world’s breadbasket, astronauts toasting America with freeze-dried turkey packets from orbit, and servicemen and women protecting freedom in dusty remote lands while enjoying turkey and cranberries. On the other end of the spectrum, some relatives can make some at a family Thanksgiving seek a corner, a couch, car keys. After fifty Thanksgivings, some family gatherings are part of my fondest memories, others I missed for military service and some I would rather forget, but none have been newsworthy nor subject for television.

      This time had all the makings of a good time: food, drink and good cigars.Sports: NFL and a few contests of pool.Conflict: apparently the husband of one of my inebriated (and feisty) sister-in-law’s nieces had her in some headlock as an outcome of a drinking contest.Reunion: seeing everybody I’ve missed in the past year. Time spent reminiscing around the fire pit late at night.

      Still, I would like to have had the younger members of always expected to have parents and children together at holidays. But I have come to expect this as the exception rather than the rule. I even rented a Ford the household accompany Sheri and me to the in-laws in Arizona this year. It’s Expedition to drive there – since I learned we would have my sister-in-law and kids along too. This was a far cry from the days driving to Arizona in a Jeep with the young boys constantly fighting right behind my ear – to the point I wanted to expel them into the desert. Now there are lessons to be had when driving for a length of time with family. Not even the cockpit luxury of riding in an Expedition can long suppress the expulsion urge I get with family – but I was very lighthearted this time in spite of some who chattered incessantly for 180 miles about her. There is not much lore that is made from the self-indulgent and self-absorbed. Lessons for next time: rent the Expedition again; bring a change of clothes, and perhaps a gag or more snacks to medicate the feisty chattering one – or myself.