Why Does It Always End With A Bar Scene?

Why Does It Always End With A Bar Scene?

There is a crime, a plot that involves somebody really screwing up and people getting shot or hurt or generally fubar’d (fucked up beyond all recognition – from the movie Die Hard 1 or 5 or one of them).   Sometimes all of these.  Greed, revenge is a big one – always revenge, getting even.  “You killed my sister’s cousin’s girlfriend’s cute little dog.  Yer gonna pay for thet!  Shot him like a dog!  Wait he was a dog.  Okay, you shot him like a squirrel!  Nobody shoots my sister’s cousin’s girlfriend’s cute little dog like a squirrel and gits away with it!”

Sidenote: Can a squirrel shoot a dog?  Can you shoot a dog like a squirrel?  I don’t think the squirrel’s little arms are long enough …  Maybe that is supposed to be, “shoot a dog like the dog was a squirrel.”  That makes more sense.  End sidenote.

Something like that.  A 7/11 or bank or ATM machine robbery gone wrong.  Something like diamonds or highly secret government weapons, like a new 75 tool Swiss Army knife that includes a thumb drive AND a magnifying glass - and maybe a missal launcher.  Frequently it’s radioactive and is threatening downtown Cleveland Heights.

The hero is a cop, FBI Agent, NSA ninja. He’s a tall; we are led to believe he’s tall (he’s never short, that’s for sure), no-nonsense dark haired (seems like he’s always dark haired … and really nice hair (we are led to believe)) manly man. 

If he’s black, his head is always (and I mean always) shaved.  Dome like black chrome.  And if he’s black he always (nearly always) wears a moustache and goatee that is trimmed – trimmed like by a diamond cutter.  No living man can trim his own beard like that.  It’s just plain impossible.

And he’s nearly always broody.  Dark and broody.  He’s got crime on his mind and nothin’ else.  He hates crime with a passion.  The only thing he lives for is gettin’ the crimers (criminals) and puttin’ ‘em away.  To do hard time for their heinous crime.  If he’s married, he’s divorced.  Just can’t keep a relationship together.

Now if the hero is a heroine, she’s pretty much the same in all ways except there is more latitude with the hair color.  And even though she has feminine arms, like sticks sometimes, she is wa-a-ay strong with super-kung pow karate skills.  She can take apart any man no matter how huge he is.  She could take apart Robocop like he was dried pasta.  If her partner is a man and he can lift a car, she can lift a truck.  If he can lift a truck, she can lift a space station and throw it into orbit.

You don’t mess with that chick.

If she’s married, she’s divorced because she just can’t a relationship together.

Of course either way, the hero/heroine has a team.  Always a team.  Got yer screwed up Army/Navy/Marine (Marines are really popular) guy (almost always a guy).  He’s in AA or some kind of therapy and has a rage problem.  Generally there’s the nerd, who can hack into anything from the London Bank to space satellites.  Almost always a guy and he’s so nerdy he strikes you as a forty year old virgin type.  Then there’s the token black person, also usually a guy, but sometimes she’s a she and so damn beautiful traffic stops when she’s anywhere near a street.

Everybody always hittin’ on the black chick, from the all the other chicks on the cast to like lampposts and the K-9 corpse dogs.  But she’s just not interested, because she was married and she just can’t keep a relationship together. 

Throw in the bald supervisor, who’s always pissed about something – or everything, just never quite sure what – but he (or she, sometimes he’s a she, and if she’s a she, she is nearly always a black she – who is usually overweight) is pissed.  Every episode, or act (?), if it’s a movie, has to have a scene where the boss reams everybody out.    He (she) is going to take the hero/heroine’s badge and gun for screwing up again.  But does the hero/heroine stop the investigation?  Does a bear in the zoo, shit in his cage?  Hah!  NEVER!  (Well, of course the bear shits in his cage, but the hero/heroine never stops … not shitting in the cage (that’s the bear - never mind) …) (frequently the bear in the zoo, shits in his cage just when you are standing there with your five year old grand-daughter.  Now why is that?)

Every freakin’ time!

Okay … so we got our cast of psychologically messed up good guys.  Now we move on to our bad guys.  The crime doesn’t really matter.  ‘Cause whatever it is, it’s always really heinous.  Like super-di-duper bad.  “And he/they (sometimes she) just has to be stopped.”

Hair.  Used to be hats, white hats and black hats.  Now it’s hair.  Good guys have incredible hair, good women (sorry about the chicks thing, but “hey!” I’m just trying to stay “street”) have just plain amazing hair.  Venus would envy such hair.  In real life it would take at least three heads to grow that much hair.  And either the hero or heroine could have a gun fight in a running car wash with jets spewing axle grease and their hair would remain just amazing. 

Bad guys always have bad hair.  Or, they are kind of bald, never shaved heads, but kind of like homeless guy bald.  If the bad guy is a she, she stills has amazing hair.  For some reason women can be extremely villainous, but the hair quotient doesn’t apply to women.  I’ve spent a lot of viewing time trying to figure out the bad guy woman thing, but it eludes me.  They are almost never blonde though, that’s one thing.  And, the bad guy women generally wear like nine inch spiked heel shoes.   I mean shoes you could pick ice with, or kill somebody with (which is a plot twist that is even used occasionally).

I don’t know how any person could even walk in those shoes, let alone climb twenty feet of polished marble like they seem to be able to do when they have to get away; like early in the show.  Later in the show, in the same shoes, when they need to be caught, they can’t get over a folded newspaper.

The crime occurs; a plot is sort of suggested (a plot that my cat has figured out within the first ten minutes and is now licking his …) the hero (person) gets all wrapped up in getting the bad guy (persons).  The boss gets pissed and grabs the hero’s (person’s) badge and gun.  The hero (person) continues to go after the bad guy (persons).  And, of course, does get them and puts them away to do hard time.

And then everybody meets up in a bar for beers.  Including the Army/Navy/Marine Vet, who is AA (or whatever) (which is never fully explained).  Including a stop-by by the bald boss (or overweight black lady boss) who stoically congratulates the team and says he (she) never stopped believing they would get that bad guy (bad guy woman).  Even though the boss has to go into for hernia surgery soon for being pissed off all the damned time.

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Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014

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The Good Teacher: Part Three

The Good Teacher: Part Three

The good teacher enters his or her classroom with an open mind.  Above all, an open mind towards the students in that class, is imperative.

As a teacher of many years, I can attest that we are always given files, also called Learning Profiles, of each student.  We are supposed to read these and tailor lessons around these profiles, or learning styles.  In other words most of the kids have been pigeon holed, some of them for years, into these styles. 

I find it nearly impossible to look at young student and not feel kind of cornered into emotions surrounding that child, stemming from these reports.  “Ooh-oo, gotta have written instructions for this one, he can’t learn from spoken lessons.  Gotta really do a special one-on-one with this other one – she is really shy and won’t interact otherwise.”  And so on.  As the teacher I always feel such pressure and even, sometimes, resentment towards a kid that has been identified as one who needs kid gloves.

And yet I have also often found these reports were full of shit.  I find the vast majority of kids just need somebody to validate them as actual people.  Most of their lives they have had stuff just thrown at them and it has been expected to stick.  If it didn’t then some reason was invented as to why it didn’t, or generally doesn’t, stick. 

This is a practice that has become nearly doctrinal throughout all educational institutions today.  We keep testing and testing, hammering at the poor kid’s id until we break it into pieces that we, being the adult educators, can understand – can quantify and label. Often many of those, who have actually determined these learning differences, rarely ever enter a real classroom and observe the same students they have labeled. 

An educational classroom is a dynamic entity.  It almost seems to be a living, breathing organism.  And each different class is unique.  There is the teacher, who derives a satisfaction from teaching and interacting with young minds anxious to learn (usually) and the students, who, each in turn, interact with the teacher, each other and the class as a whole.  This entity moves, it spins, it consumes knowledge, it creates new thought, and sometimes it bogs down and needs a bit of recharging.  It can seem to rest, even sleep and then awake and start going at it all all over again.

I admit there many children who do have somewhat specific input, as it were, channels that seem to work better than others.  Hell, we all do – all our lives.  Everybody is unique in just about every way possible.  The short person can’t reach the highest shelf and so tends to ignore things that are way up high.  The very tall person is generally banging his or her head on door jams and so tends to be looking up a lot.  Or, things like that. 

I am a visual spatial learner.  What I see, I tend to remember.  And that’s a lot of what it’s all about, isn’t it?  What you remember.  What you can spit back on a test.  ??  Is that knowledge?  Is that wisdom?  Or is the whole objective to be able to do something?  To be able to actually perform some function that returns a value to your society and to your sense of a happy fulfilling life? 

If the second part of this thinking is the objective we are seeking, then sticking some label on a kid as soon as you can justify doing that, isn’t that rather counter-productive.  How can you truly know until enough educational experience has settled into the child’s brain?  Maybe the year the child was labeled as a visual learner was the year that child had a teacher with really strong accent or speech impediment, and the kid just couldn’t understand that teacher.

I have been teaching for over twenty-five years and I have yet to witness a Learning Specialist in my classroom.  So how, or why, should I spend a great deal of time on reports that are going to close my mind to any child and the potential that I might discover?  Is it not reasonable that I remain open minded as I begin a new class, a new school year, as I will in just a few weeks from now.  And let my lesson plans evolve as my own experience has served me, then I believe I have a better chance of tendering some actual learning in that class.

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If you enjoyed this blog, and/or found any value to you within it, please do subscribe.  I’d really appreciate it.  And feel free to write to me, or add a comment.

Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014

Please check out my new book Drawing Blind (Learn to draw without looking) at:

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The Planet Earth Is Just An Art Project … ?

The Planet Earth Is Just An Art Project … ?

Is it possible that this planet, maybe the whole universe as we know it, and this whole life experience as we know it, is just an Art Project.  It is all just a class assignment by some even greater creator than we can imagine, for his or her students.

All of this is just a class project, an experiment, and the whole thing is going to be graded.  The greater creator, the Art Teacher is merely a member of a larger faculty.  Over him or her is some other entity, an Administrator or Dean.  And on it goes up  and up, or maybe down and down.  In speaking of this concept, could there even be an up or down?

I find this idea is not so difficult to wrap my own brain around.  Being an artist myself, whether I am any good or not (who knows, really?), I can sort of just feel it sometimes.  This doesn’t mean I am completely on board with it as a faith, as it were.

But, why else do there seem to be so many loose ends hanging off this cardigan of life everybody is wearing.

And, why does one individual species appear to have the ability to screw the whole thing up?  It’s as though some kid is doing a painting and a bit of … say, ugly kind of yellow starts streaking into every brush stroke.  Just a bit, by accident, and as the kid tries to get rid of it, it gets worse and worse.  No matter how many times he or she cleans the brush and scrapes his or her palette, the damn ugly streak finds it’s way back.

Say this paining is a landscape.  Streaks of this yellow, and it’s not a nice yellow, more of a sickly brownish yellow, muddy up every stroke of the sky.  Even the clouds look diseased.  And so on throughout the whole effort – painting.  But let’s say this project is not a painting, it is a diorama.  This same yellow gets on everything and the little plastic figures of animals keep falling over because the glue is cheap and the cardboard base is all warped.

Or maybe, the project is a one act play and the somebody in the audience keeps heckling the actors.  And when the heckler shuts up, one of the actors seems to be having a digestive disorder and has a tendency to fart.

The project is just not a good one.

Now as to the universe and all scientific knowledge as it accepted as fact amongst those of us who are sentient enough to be self-aware is any, even a tiny bit of this, in fact fact?  How can this be known if none of us involved as little parts of this whole project know?

We can’t.

How does a dog know that it is a dog?  We all know, and have heard many times, that dog doesn’t know what it is.  All it knows is that it isn’t anything else.  For instance a dog knows that it isn’t a squirrel and it knows, if it is a wild dog, that a squirrel is food.  That’s about it.  As, what we believe are sentient self-aware beings, we humans honestly perceive that we know what we know. 

It is the experiment business that is really the BIG question here.  That and the Art part.  If the whole thing was a science project, I think more of it would be more successful as a self-sustaining on-going result.  But it obviously isn’t.  Seems to me it’s far more random and interpretive.  Despite all the intelligent design people, I get the impression that whoever, the big kid, that’s making it, is not all that bright.

Have you ever seen a manatee?  Or a giant spider crab?  What the hell is that?  Human beings wearing mullet hairdo’s?  Huh?  On a global scale, there are now ocean islands, miles across, of garbage. 

The student knows it, the teacher knows and everybody else in this great celestial School of Art can see it.  “The universe, as we perceive it and, in particular, the planet Earth art project is a dude.”  It’s not a total failure, but the best grade it is worthy of is maybe a “C”. 

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If you enjoyed this blog, and/or found any value to you within it, please do subscribe.  I’d really appreciate it.  And feel free to write to me, or add a comment.

Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014

Please check out my new book Drawing Blind (Learn to draw without looking) at:

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It’s free – all I ask is that you post a review.

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I Ride 300 Miles on a Bicycle in 24 Hours

I Ride 300 Miles on a Bicycle in 24 Hours

(I Meet Myself In Person)

When I was 32 years old … a long, long time ago … I was a member of a bicycle racing team.  Kind of a racing team, we did race (each other mostly) and we did have a team name (which I have forgotten – some French water bottling company).  I was the oldest guy on the team by about five years.

We had been racing (each other – did I say that already) for about two years and one of us got the bright idea to ride a triple century.  A Century Ride on a bicycle is a hundred miles, in one go, all at once, on the same day.  If you’re in good shape and experienced, this can take, give or take, six hours.  Depends on the terrain and wind, among other factors.

As a team we had already done a goodly dozen century rides (races).  So a hundred miles in the saddle at one go was not a big deal to us, at that time.  We were very young – we were passionate about bicycles and riding them.  What can I say.

This was when I was living in Arizona, right in the middle of the Phoenix Valley.  Now the Phoenix Valley is huge, maybe as large as the state of Rhode Island.  However, the valley is surrounded by mountains – really big mountains.  Some of them very steep mountains.  Grades of seven to ten per cent grades (which is actually very steep for a road) and they can go on for miles. 

Now on this day, on this triple century ride (300 miles) we gave ourselves 24 hours to complete it or we were getting into support van (known as the sag wagon – because when you are racing bicycles and you carp out … maybe, you sag?  Get all saggy??)  This ride included climbing uphill to the Kitt Peak National Observatory.  Which is located on the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation and just happens to be 8,675 feet above sea level.  And this is … oh, a good 7500 feet above the Phoenix Valley floor. 

This is all part of the Mojave Desert, which on the east side, appears to be flat – very flat – part of this natural wonder.  You wouldn’t think there would be this much of a huge difference in elevation as you stand anywhere within the hundreds of miles surrounding Kitt Peak.  Doesn’t look like any kind of a mountain, or Peak.  It looks flat as a table. 

As you leave Tucson going towards the observatory the climb begins.  Twenty-two miles of it.  A deadly slow, soul grinding climb that doesn’t even give the bicycle rider any sense of accomplishment.  I have ridden in Colorado and the steep mountains of New England.  On mountainy mountains, even though it really hurts, burns the thigh muscles and cramps your back into a horseshoe over the bike, you can see the grade.  You can see you are on a mountain climb and it gives you that sense of accomplishment, which keeps you pushing with all you have on the pedals.

Melt it all down and this is what is happening with this little jaunt on two wheels: you leave Phoenix and for about 200 miles you physically drain your body totally against a mountain you can’t see.  Lord help you if you also run into a head wind.  Then … and then when you crest the peak, you can’t even see that you are cresting the bloody thing!

One of my teammates encapsulated the experience, “You know you are grinding in your lowest gear when somebody is walking alongside you and they are passing you!”  Now that’s discouraging. 

We did make it, however, and began the descent.  What would seem to be enough of a daring feat, that is riding a bicycle for two hundred miles up a mountain, is not enough though, on this task.  This incredibly naïve challenge we had set for ourselves.  Oh NO! Now we had another 100 miles to ride after that climb. 

We had figured it be a 100 miles downhill though.  We hadn’t seen the mountain going up and now we couldn’t see anything vaguely resembling a downhill.  It looked just the f---ing same – flat!  A gain of 7500 feet in altitude and other than being really shortwinded – nothing!  WTF! 

And that was when we did run into a headwind!  So, this was a desert, in that there were no trees, nothing at all to break the wind, just wide open spaces of nothing.

Nothing that is, but a strong wind right in the face. 

Here is the cast of characters.  Me, short, skinny (at that time) and the oldest (as I said).  There was my best friend, let’s call him Mike, who was very tall and even skinnier than me and a full on type 1 diabetic.  Then there was Joe.  Joe had a definite beer belly because Joe definitely drank wa-a-ay too much beer. Even so he was an incredibly strong rider.  Then we had Benny, barrel chested with chicken legs.  Strange physique for a bike rider.  Those lungs gave Benny a huge edge on the mountain climbs even if his legs didn’t look like they could keep up. And there was Josh, the youngest, who was still in college and was a varsity gymnast.  Even shorter than me, Josh was … like … 100 per cent muscle.  Small, but possibly the strongest rider on the team.

And Officer John.  John was a cop (Police Officer) and even though not the strongest rider, it’s always handy to have a cop along on any kind of dumb thing like this.  Big Ken was the giant on the team.  A good six six and so strong he had actually broken the pedal cranks off bikes.  However, on a bicycle, being big tends to mean weight and the more weight you have to push against the wind and up-grades the mathematical math starts to reverse the advantage you might have in other sports – like the shot put.  But if you wanted to get out of a headwind for a few miles, Ken was the guy you wanted to get behind.

The only reason to know the team members is that once we did get to the top of Kitt Peak, the team began to break up into groups.  And you need to understand that after a 200 mile mountain climb it is the brain that makes the greatest difference.  We had stayed together on the climb.  We had set out in the late morning planning to be on the climb in the dark.  Figuring that riding at what we had hoped would be lightening speeds on the downhill, we wanted to have daylight.  Just safer that way, we had thought.

End of part ONE …

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And your video:

Painting the Lily

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If you enjoyed this blog, and/or found any value to you within it, please do subscribe.  I’d really appreciate it.  And feel free to write to me, or add a comment.

Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014

Please check out my new book Drawing Blind (Learn to draw without looking) at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/426600

It’s free – all I ask is that you post a review.

You can also get any of my books for Amazon Kindle at:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=dale+clarence+peterson

My website:

http://daleclarencepeterson.com