The Lost Decade, Part I

If I thought the 80's were bad, they were nothing compared to the decade of the 90's for me, both personally and financially. It seems like the bad start I got in the 80's just kept its momentum going through the entire decade of the 90's, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop it. Whatever I tried just seemed to make everything worse, like I had been cursed by a band of gypsies. By the end of the 90's, I would be in debt over six figures, lose my long-time fiancee', lived in eight different places, and have less than $2,500 to my name.

Starting in the fall of 1990, and lasting through about early 1994, I managed to barely scrape by. It was the period of the  recession of 1990. I had finally quit the family business, for reasons that remain murky, but it was mostly money; I think my last year there was my highest paid year-around $16,000 or so, which was a fortune compared to my salary from 1983 through 1989. Plus, despite putting in 7 years with the company, I just was not getting any respect. I mean, low pay is okay, if you like your job, but if you have consistently low pay, without so much as an "atta' boy" once in a while, and the job is completely monotonous, you can only last so long. Regardless, I said "see ya' later", and was on my merry way, just before this latest recession hit, if I recall correctly. As usual, my timing was perfectly horrendous.

Looking back on it, I would bet that my Dad hired me just to keep my Mom happy. She could be a nightmare to live with if she was unhappy over something and, despite her contempt for my childless and wifeless ways, she did seem to care about my welfare. That's what a paycheck from dad felt like too, welfare, because it certainly wasn't because he thought I was worth anything, that's fer' damned sure.

This was their game though. Make things impossible for me, impossible for me to achieve any semblance of normalcy. Isolated farm, low pay, control freak parents with a huge chip on their shoulder for whatever reason-I still don't know. Then, when I became middle-aged and unmarried with nothing to show for my life, blame it on me. "Oh, Kurt's a confirmed bachelor. He's just a party boy", my mom would tell people to cover up the results of their half-ass dysfunctional child-raising techniques. I would just get the urge to strangle her at that point.

I think it goes a lot deeper than what I realized at that time. I would be willing to bet that my Dad came along and "adopted" us, my Mom-divorced with a young child at the time he entered the picture, in order to sell more insurance, in the big picture, to be more successful, in portraying the family man image that was so important back in those days in business, the 1960's in America. * That sure would explain a lot of things. In fact, I would bet a million dollars on it.

With us, he had an instant family. It was purely a business move, nothing more, nothing less. Sociopaths will get wealthy, because it takes a sociopath to do such things, to fake a family. I say this because when my mom passed away years later, in 2011, he almost immediately took down every picture of her and threw out all her possessions-emptied the house of her entire presence.

Anyways, there I was in mid-1990 somewhere, driving around in my piece of junk car, well, at least I had a car-things could always be worse, right? But in comparison to my peers, I was doing badly. It really came down to family support. Where I had a hostile, wealthy Dad that was dying to see me fail miserably, friends and acquaintances had an incredible amount of family support, to put it bluntly. Resume's were everything in those days too, before the advent of the internet, and I didn't have anything notable on my resume, except for some vague office-work gopher job.

Plus, there were a lot of new faces around. I remember sitting in traffic, during my job search in the Philly suburbs thinking, "where did all these people come from?" What we didn't know at the time was that we had a wide open border with Mexico, and cheap labor had been flooding into the States since the 80's or even earlier than that. Eventually this massive influx would begin to be felt, in lowered standards of living, increased medical care costs, more-crowded highways, ever-increasing crime rates, and general change in appearance and culture of the population. Now, it merely made the job-search a little harder than when I had graduated from college in the 80's.

Point: If your country is getting really crowded and shitty, and crime is out the ass, chances are the corporations are importing cheap labor, sending existing high-paying jobs overseas, greasing the politicians, and pocketing the profits.

Still it was a golden era, compared to the America that awaited us about 10 and 20 years down the road. I would go back to the America of 1990 (or earlier) in a heartbeat.

After a few months of this. my parents didn't really give me much feedback on the whole situation. I don't think they cared much at that point, what I did. They were set up pretty well, and they had their adopted kid to worry about. I think he was just getting out of high school, or had a year left. Unfortunately, I had never been really close to my "brother". He had always hated me, even though I was there first.

Can you imagine showing up at some guy's house, and resenting him, when he was there 13 years already before you?  I really think it was the money that made it so weird. Plus, when he got older he took on the same disdainful attitude towards me that my Dad harbored also. So now I was stuck with double-asshole Dads. I tell you I got terrible luck. It's not like I had any access to Dad's money either, which is all the new kid cared about. They kept me poor as hell. Don't let your parents adopt, trust me.

But, the fact that they had adopted another child and then treated me like crap and the new kid like gold was a sure sign that I should just leave home and never come back, but you're blind to these things when you're younger. I was in denial. "It's just a temporary thing, right?".

Having nowhere really to actually go, I stayed on my friend's couch for a while-he had a little house down by the Susquehanna River, and eventually he rented a room to me for a few months. His wealthy Dad was a friend of my wealthy Dad, but his Dad actually liked him and had given him a house after graduation! Don't get me wrong. I didn't want everything handed to me, but at least take an interest in seeing all your kids get a good start, not just the new guy, if you've got the means and you are a Father! "Fish" was having his own problems though, as the recession was taking a heavy toll on his father's steel company, which had been around since about 1964 or so.

This also got weird, because his parents were good friends with my parents, and I'm sure they were getting a full report on their 30 year-old runaway's status. I can hear it now, "Yep, he's still sleeping on the couch. Should I have him call you? No, don't bother. He's learning a good lesson from all this, that he's only good for yard work."

The Fishers were a real nice family though and huge! I always wondered, what's it like to be related to half the county? I wouldn't know because I've had to move ten or twenty times, but I would think it would be a great advantage in business. Everywhere I have moved, in trying to start a business, everyone is like, who in the fuck are you? Then I go broke and end up leaving town in the middle of the night, only to repeat the cycle somewhere else.

It still breaks my heart that the Fisher family had to be witnesses to the dysfunctional relationship I had with my family at that time. We had already moved to the neighborhood back in 1966 for six months before my new Dad moved us away for seventeen years, probably the best six months of my childhood. Then my parents moved back to the area and of course, everybody was a stranger to me by then. The senior Fisher was an ex-Amishman with an eighth-grade education, who had built a steel fabrication service out of a garage on a country road into a 14 million dollar company in under 15 years or so, an amazing story, really. I don't think there were any problems until he brought the kids into the business, who all had gone through high school and some college. It just goes to show you what a scam formal education is in this country.

My first job search here eventually brought me to a local radio station, where I got a job in advertising sales. I got the idea for this venture from a friend of mine in Philadelphia who had been hugely successful in advertising sales. The only detail left out was the other guy had started right out of college, unlike my 8 years-late entry into the work force. Unfortunately, I sucked at it immediately, and I went nowhere.

Did I look too good? Was it the physical fitness? Jeez, I should have just opened up a gym. "But there are too many of those". Why did I listen to the naysayers? Back to the job interviews, problem is, if you show up anywhere for a job interview and you're in any kind of physical shape, people tend to think you just got out of prison. Plus the male bosses in corporate America of that era were very often screwing half the female staff under them, so to speak. I'm sure this is still true in modern day America, in the few corporations that are still here.

Who knows. I think a lot of the problem with my inability to find a good job or get any business, had to do with the fact that men just didn't want to hire me, or if they did hire me they just made sure that I did very poorly, like the experience with dear old Dad's company. If women had been in charge anywhere, I am convinced I would have scared up a few more opportunities in the job market, even though it was the shitty early 1990's.

In fact, I believe the perfect career for me would have been to skip college-saving four years of wasted time there, and become a hairdresser. It would have been great. I like women, they like me. I'm artistic and have an eye for beauty. A straight hairdresser. Are you kidding me? It would have been a genius move. I guarantee I would have made a fortune.

I believe I made one sale the entire time I was at the radio station (3 months). I think the problem was that it was a really small town, and most of the decent accounts were already locked up by the manager (male, asshole) at the same station, so I was competing with my boss-not a very good arrangement. I did manage to sign up a restaurant just before I quit, and they reported one of their most successful weekends, ever. I had been pestering these guys for months to try radio advertising. Advertising doesn't cost, it pays! That was one of the little taglines in the radio advertising business.

Then I was unemployed again, and still trying to figure out where to go and what to do. I finally got desperate enough to check out my old lifeguard job at the beach (Avalon, NJ), because the Captain (Murray Wolf) was still there from my stint back in 1983 after college graduation (see "The 80's"). I called him, and he said "sure, come back". He was a man of very few words.

I would have to take the lifeguard test again, and it was about six weeks away, so all I did was hang out at my buddy's little house, watch TV, and go swim laps at the local college pool up in Millersville to get in shape. Luckily, I got away with this because they didn't bother to ask for my college ID until the last week before I left to take the test. Try getting away with that these days. Anyways, I got a week off before taking the test, enough time to peak physically, without losing what I had gained in the pool. I passed the test with flying colors on a rough water day.

1983 had been an incredible summer at the beach, because I had roomed with a bunch of buddies of mine from college (Elizabethtown College), and two of them had been hired by the Beach Patrol with me.

This time, things worked out only okay, not great, because it was 1991 now, I was older, and there were no familiar faces around. Unfortunately, I thought 31 was old at that time, but it really is not. Also, 1983 had been such an incomparable experience, that coming back was naturally a big letdown. I don't remember getting laid even once in the summer of 1991, which certainly had not been the case years earlier. It didn't help that, in my mind, I was just an "over-the-hill loser" now, with an uncertain future, instead of a fresh college grad with a supposedly great future. Given a chance to defeat myself, I usually will.

I also remember that the economy was bad in 1991, so bad that Captain Murray was firing lifeguards for the slightest infractions. The inside story was that the town was going broke, and there was pressure to reduce the size of the borough workforce. It's really kind of a miracle I didn't get fired this time, because I had been away for so long and I do remember making a few stupid mistakes.

Plus, we froze on the beach that summer, due to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the South Pacific. Yes, the eruption had been so huge that it affected the entire planet. So the summer consisted of sitting on the cloudy beach in our jackets while a cold wind battered us most days. The sun was a rarity that summer.

By late August all the college boys had left for school, leaving a skeleton crew, including myself, on the beach. This group consisted mostly of older guys and screw-ups like myself who had nowhere to go. It was kind of nice though, because there were very few tourists or kids around anymore, and the volcanic ash had finally cleared up in that part of the world, so we had clear, sunny days in the 80's with low humidity.

The rules were relaxed for the post-season, so we did not have to keep bathers right in front of us, as long as we watched them wherever they swam,  Just the same, I did save two children from drowning one morning, while I was setting up my beach stand. It happened so fast, while their mother sat on her blanket some distance away on the empty beach, reading a book.

I was alone, vaguely conscious of two kids, a boy and a girl, about 8 to 10 years old, swimming around, about 20 feet from the beach. Glancing over at them, I suddenly realized to my horror that they had been pulled out by a riptide, and were tiring quickly, starting to sink under the murky water, as the waves rolled over their barely visible heads. They hadn't even made a sound. Dropping my fresh cup of coffee into the soft sand, I grabbed the big orange life preserver, and frantically headed into the surf.

By the time I got there, they were both in dire straits. I swam behind the girl, lifting her head up out of the water, and slipped the preserver in front of her face while she grabbed it as she coughed and choked, and I pulled the boy onto my back, while he wrapped his arms around my neck in a death grip, and that's how I swam back to the beach, holding onto these two kids.

Naturally, the mother was most grateful, and the staff had showed up, alerted by radio by someone, and had recorded it as an official rescue. Pretty cool day at the beach.

On most other days during that September, I spent most of the time working out, and rowing the boat in the warm summer sun, picking up an even golden tan. For pushups, I would hook my feet over one of the crossbars of the lifeguard stand, and do them at different angles. My goal was 1,000 push-ups a day. For dips, I would place the oars under the wooden seat, so the handles would stick out, horizontally. I would do 250 of these. Then, I would row the lifeguard boat back and forth along my designated beach.

At night, I would drop by the local pub on my bike, down a few beers, and then pass out back at the house, with the cool night breeze coming through the screen windows, smelling of salt-air. All my roommates had gone, so I finally had my little bachelor pad, if only for a few weeks. Then, I would wake up in the morning to the sound of seagulls, and head back to the beach for another day. I was in heaven.

Live "O", Part 4

If another thing did make our forgotten generation stand out, it was the effect of divorce. Many of us were scarred in new ways. Never before had so many parents casually quit the family unit. Maybe they watched too many Elvis movies in the 50's. The hip-shake was too much for 'em. We didn't die in a war, but part of us died when our parents split up.

After seeing Elvis on TV our young Father's tried to bang anything in a skirt.....

These events actually happened. The names have been shortened to protect the guilty:

High School: I hated school, for the most part. I think it must have been the constant weight loss for wrestling, because in the brief time at the end of each wrestling season, 7th through 12th grade, when I could eat normally, I actually enjoyed school and improved my grades, as I remember it.

Phoenixville High: Great wrestling coach, Lonny Moore. A+ Role model! Not only was he a solid coach, but a master motivator, causing the entire wrestling team to diet like Ethiopians during a drought. It got to the point where if you weren't constantly hungry, missing meals with no body fat, you were looked upon as a traitor. From the archives.....

Lonny Moore coached Phoenixville's wrestlers to five consecutive Ches-Mont League championships during a 16-year tenure. He compiled an overall record of 160 victories and 51 losses for a winning percentage of .758.

We were blessed with a lot of talent though, that's for sure. I distinctly remember Steve McGovern, who went to the state finals on two basic wrestling moves. Here's a guy who wasn't the strongest guy you'll ever meet, but he concentrated on hitting these two wrestling moves from anywhere, mainly the Fireman's Carry for the take-down and the Head Lever-where you pull the bottom wrestler's arm back by the wrist and put your head into the guy's armpit. Then you slip your head under the arm and lift him over for the pin.

So the guy would eventually be dead tired after fighting off the head-lever the whole time he was on the bottom after getting taken down by the Fireman's Carry. Steve beat just about all comers with this strategy, despite being a big pot-head party animal. It was pure genius, really. Exercise was a rare occurrence for Steve, although he did show up for every practice. Here's a newspaper blurb from the archives on Steve's career:

McGovern finished undefeated (43-0) in dual meets and 82-8 in his career before graduating from Phoenixville in 1978. He won two sectional, three districts, and two regional titles and became a two-time state medalist. His career at the University of Maryland was curtailed by injury.

Amazing, but the weed-smoking and aversion to exercise seems to have caught up with Steve in college, wrestling against bigger and stronger athletes. If someone could have persuaded him to train aerobically and hit the weight room, he would have been unstoppable.

This exposes a little-known secret of success in sports, mainly that you don't have to be the best at everything to be a winner, just be the best at three or four basic moves that you practice day and night until nobody can stop them.

Then there was Mark Cagle, one of the best pure athletes I've ever seen, at least in high school. He was a grown man it seemed, and we were still kids. He was another natural. He didn't seem to have any special exercise routine going on. He was just naturally strong and fast. I'm not sure how he didn't win the state tournament....he was the only one of us that went on to do anything meaningful at the college level. From the archives; Cagle, a 1977 graduate, captured four postseason titles and went on to become an All-American at West Virginia University.

It seems that we were tough at every weight class and we were because we won the conference all three years I was there. Luckily I fit in and made varsity all three years, although I missed most of my junior season due to a knee injury early on.

We were ranked top ten in the state in my senior year. Lonny knew how to get results. I don't know if he could deal with today's kids. The discipline we had was not to be valued in later years like it was at that time. They stopped spanking the kids, stopped pushing them, even stopped yelling at them. Now the prisons are full.

My own performance sucked for the most part, after my sophomore year, at least compared to my potential. In fact, my sophomore year was my best year, as the next year I injured my knee early on and missed the season, and my senior year I finally reached my former excellence by, maybe the last few matches, and won the Sectional Championship, despite being insultingly ranked third by the local "experts." Rank me third? Good move if you were trying to totally piss me off. Thank you for the motivation.

Unfortunately, by this time, my body was trying to grow and I had grown tired of starving myself to make weight by the post-season and took a dive at the District tournament, stupidly lost on purpose. I honestly don't remember what I was thinking at the time, to do such a thing. This is probably the most dishonorable thing that I have done in sports, that I can recall.

Regardless, I will never truly know how far I could have gone in that final season of wrestling, which still stings to this very day. My sophomore year was my best year, probably because I didn't have to cut much weight to make the team. The timing of my knee injury early in the next season effectively ended any real mark I could have made in local high school wrestling and the Sectional title at the end of my career was like a fart in a hurricane.

My wrestling career was basically over, at that point. It's just that nobody bothered to inform me of such. Looking back, I wasted a lot of time on some huge ventures that were essentially over; they had reached their peak. Then I would blow another decade or so, trying to "force it" down my own throat, like wrestling another four years in high school and college, a huge waste of time, especially since I was doing it mostly, for my parent's approval.

What I did not realize was that, after my parents adopted a boy when I was thirteen, it did not matter what I did. It was all about the "new kid." It was essentially over right then, between my parents and I. From that point on, I was an afterthought, really. As much as I tried to be, "the good son", the new member of the family could do no wrong and I could do nothing right. My own mother, to her dying day, worshiped this interloper and his every move, ignoring my relatively meaningless existence.

Back to high school wrestling; I'm always talking about do-overs and regrets, what I would have done and could have done and should have done. If indeed I could have started over again from that point, right after that knee injury my junior year, I think my best move would have been to drop wrestling altogether and concentrate on getting my grades up and growing my local lawn business and maybe coming up with some kind of career plan. There's always a better way to spend your time. Unfortunately, I never could recognize when it was time to change my path. I could only look back and agonizingly see it way later.

As it were (was?), I did nobody any good hanging around the wrestling room the rest of the season with a cast on my leg while watching everyone else reap the rewards of a great and winning season, only to get depressed that I wasn't a part of it. There's about eighty nine better ways I could have been spending my precious time. Instead, I never did fully recover from the injury before graduation, even though I eked out an average senior wrestling season at best, only to piss away three more precious years wrestling for free in college, no scholarship. Finally, by some miracle, I scored a one year scholarship at West Virginia University by my senior year in college, after transferring and working my ass off in the wrestling room at my new school, only to finally graduate, still with no concrete career plan and no job prospects. So I basically wasted another five years screwing around with the wrestling with still no career plan, not particularly enjoying the experience and gained next to nothing and everything is forgotten by anyone that matters anyway. Pure idiocy.

Teachers, good, but mean spirited. Eagles fans, you know? A lot of bullies. Real tough, picking on kids. I hope you're real proud of yourself. Maybe they were already jaded by the dope-smokin', hippie baby boomer generations before us, who were no angels themselves. That's how it was for our generation though. We always showed up to pay the price for the hell-raisers that came before us. By the time we showed up, the teachers had hair-trigger tempers. Plus, they were typically miserable, working in that school district, for some reason, and took it out on the students. There was this English teacher, Mr. Blahut, who routinely handed back papers with 25 to 50 F's marked on them. Jeez what a bunch of dicks.

Not all teachers were bad. Favorite teacher, Mr. Aurand, Biology. He got my stupid humor, which actually takes intelligence, I have learned.

Socially, I was inept, to put it lightly. Awkward is a good word. Shy-boy. Probably a result of getting my ass beat regularly by my stepfather in the 60's, who was quite the disciplinarian, but it felt like an ass-beating to me. I got to know the sting of the belt. It got to the point where I would almost piss myself if he looked at me sideways. I mean, to me, he was a giant. A pissed off, giant maniac that was chasing me with a belt. The worst was when he would yank my pants down to my ankles and slap my bare ass in public restaurants, in front of a room full of strangers. Not the best way to grow a confident young man. It always struck me as odd, that a father would humiliate a young boy in such a way, and still baffles me to this very day....

Luckily I got some decent mentoring later on in high school, from Coach Lonny Moore, among others, in school sports. By college, I was almost "normal", but I was still frustratingly plagued by panic attacks until my mid-30's or so, especially during any kind of attempt at public speaking.

In fact, I got a taste of this, probably one of my most embarrassing moments, at least in high school, my ill-timed, first attempt at stand-up comedy, in front of my entire 9th grade English class. We had a writing assignment, "describe how to do something step by step", which we had been required to subsequently read out loud. I wrote a little masterpiece I called, "suicide bit." Problem was, it wasn't supposed to be funny.

I read my little "comedy" piece in front of the class and then, dead-silence. My first lesson in public speaking. I enjoy making people laugh, but this was a disaster. What never occurred to me, at my young age is, suicide is a very common problem. I think, if I had more encouragement, I would have stuck with stand-up comedy. I love going to comedy clubs, but I still can't do public speaking now, without sweating and stuttering like an idiot. I am sure this could been remedied, with some more practice with more tactful material.

Highlight-Homecoming Court w/K.Scott. She was ridiculously cute, and I said about 5 words all night. Eventually, I would probably gladly have made this girl my wife, but her family moved away soon after. My young life shows a persistent history of uncannily being "cock-blocked" by one random thing or another. It's pretty amazing, how unlucky I was. The experience usually went something like this: great opportunity - majorly screwing up of great opportunity - lesson learned - opportunity never occurs again well into old age.....

Enjoyed innocent "dating" with Kathy H., Betsy B., and Sherri M. Clueless about girls, lucky for them. What a sin that the girls were so gorgeous, and I didn't really understand how small this window of opportunity would be. Plus, I had a confidence problem, which is never a good thing.

Linda P., Summer of '77 is ours in eternity. I remember making out with Linda on the living room floor of her parent's beautiful contemporary-style house, tucked into a very private corner near the edge of the Park on Valley Forge Mountain, while Fleetwood Mac's new "Rumors" album played on the stereo. Or sometimes we would walk down the trail behind her house, which led through the woods to an open field overlooking the edge of Valley Forge Park. We would lay in the tall grass, hidden from the world, the warm sun playing upon our young bodies, while the summer breeze would gently toss locks of her long brown hair across her pretty face.There were no cellphones or electronic distractions at that time. They weren't invented yet. I had her undivided attention.

Linda was the type of girl in high school I thought I could never get, remember that esteem problem? She seemed more sophisticated, mature and quite unattainable in my young mind at the time. We all create our own limitations. Regardless, my hormones got the better of me, and one day in the summer, while hanging around the Sun Bowl on Valley Forge Mountain, I boldly asked her out and she said, "Sure, we can go out. Where do you want to go?"

I was completely thrilled. She seemed older than her 17, I guess because she smoked, and she had kind of a raspy, sexy voice-the type of thing that would probably not seem so sexy twenty years down the road-but it was now that mattered. Plus, she had a really cool red Firebird. I felt like I was dating a 25 year old woman, which is a dream come true for any teen-aged boy. This was my first real girlfriend, in that we made out a lot, and more, and hung around together. Linda was hot. She looked like an under-developed Jacqueline Bisset, an actress I also liked a lot. We used to have a game where if we saw a car at night with one headlight out, we would kiss. The summer of '77 with Linda was one of my best summers ever.

Linda Pemberton and I, 1977 - easily my best part of the 1970's.

I know that my destiny was to marry this girl, but my parents so sabotaged my relationship with her that it did not come to pass. They would repeat this nasty little habit a few more times, until I was out of young wifely prospects. They were true cock-blockers 'til the end. Never listen to your parents when it comes to girls. They really don't know anything and long after they're gone you gotta' live with the effects of their meddling. Even if it ultimately had turned out to have been a mistake, I think it would have been my favorite one.

Unfortunately, my parents were totally against the relationship, and eventually banned Linda from the house. I still managed to see her for another year, and even took her to her senior prom at a neighboring high school. My mother was so desperate to stop me from seeing this girl, that she made up some very unflattering rumors about Linda, that she supposedly heard from a neighbor, which caused me to break up with her before I went off to college. Linda took it pretty hard, to my total surprise. I had no idea how fond she had grown of our thing together. Later I found these rumors to be untrue, but by then it was too late. I've always felt bad about how this ended, to put it mildly. You never forget your first girl, that's for sure. Dedicated to Linda:



1978: Sectional Wrestling Champion-I should have done better than this, but my talents were badly managed, and I had a poor attitude. Plus, I lived too far from the high school practice room. Unfortunately, the emphasis was on making weight, more than the technical aspects of wrestling. Still, I had two scholarship offers, from Drexel, and Southern Connecticut State. Sick of losing weight for wrestling in high school, I turned down both offers.

For you young wrestlers with some natural ability in the sport, here are some recommended books, thoroughly reviewed by yours truly. In fact, going through these books makes me want to get back in the game, but my utter lack of health insurance prevents me from such a reckless endeavor. I wish I'd had these books back then. I am sure I could have gone from being merely good to great.


Senior Prom, drank too much. I don't know what I was thinking about here, but I got so wasted, I could hardly speak. The football players had smuggled in some Southern Comfort-some serious whiskey. Sorry Monica B! She had to drive. She was a nice girl, originally from Argentina. Some of the stupid things I did, I have to cringe.

High School ends, thank God. Grad party, 2 beers, made out with class valedictorian. There was only one in those days. It was kind of cool, because she was a scholar, and I was an incredibly dumb jock. I think it was easier to hook up at that moment, because the women knew they wouldn't have to deal with the consequences later at school. That was it though. I tried to call her a few times and continue, but she was not open to anything more. At the very least, she helped me discover the magic of moderate alcohol consumption. I was actually invited to three different proms at three different high schools, and went to two. Looking back, I should have gone to all three. These things don't happen every day, you know.

Part 5

The Greediest Generation

Part III

Revised 04/10/09: My actual story, strange but true.......

Kurt Anderson - The ? Generation:

I remember when I was a kid, old people were so nice. This group was mostly the World War II generation-the parents, or more accurately, the grandparents of the Baby Boom generation, but I think the Baby Boomers were more like the Luckiest Generation, in that they escaped the remnants of poverty that plagued earlier waves of Americans. WWII survivors had a lot of opportunity when they shipped back to the states, but it took them a lifetime to take advantage of it. They achieved prosperity just in time to spoil their kids and grandkids, the Baby Boomers and the later boomers, whose parents were of the Depression-era generation. I can't just pick on the Baby Boom generation, of which I am technically a late member. Regardless, they all benefited from the WWII generation's resultant wave of prosperity after the war. Whoever had survived WWII had their pick of jobs, property, and women. This was indeed a rare and opportune moment in world history, and the "Boomers" would be in the best position in human history to profit from such good fortune.

So the WWII generation would lead to the birth of the largest and wealthiest generation in history, the Baby Boomers, and later become notorious as the Greediest Generation. Where the WWII people were relatively kind, hard-working, religious and honest, the Baby Boomers would be relatively atheistic, dishonest, and greedy.

The "Boomers" ahead of us would soak up all the jobs and cash, and set the tone, well before we showed up. This would be our lifelong curse. These jokers would be one step ahead of our generation every step of the way. They were too cool, and yet, by the year 2009, their presence would be evidenced by the general and mass decline of Western civilization. Originally 78 million-strong, every day, they're dropping like flies now, finally. It's actually quite fascinating to witness, because I think this group truly thought they would live forever.

Where the WWII generation fought and died for their country, the Boomers would betray their country and be proud of that. How did the Boomers eventually screw later generations and their own country? Here are the six main areas that my exhaustive research has borne out:

As of 2014:

*1) Voted for Spending with Almost no Fundamental Return on Investment, like wars, and instead of paying for it added it to the national debt. Now we have huge debt payments due to their recklessness.

2) To support their lifestyle they voted for tax cuts, allowed funding for colleges to be cut as well as poorly negotiated trade agreements that made short term financial sense but undermined many industries that supported the economy. This fueled the growth of China and India, two countries that now consume the resources we used to have a near monopoly on.

3) They rode the real estate bubble hard. They turned their backs on the corruption of the lending industry because property values were doubling every 5-10 years. They saw their $30,000 starter home go up to $250,000 and thought "free money", not realizing it also meant their kids were all paying for those "tax free gains".

4) They voted massive benefits for themselves with no thought on how to pay for it. Like allowing the social security age to stay at 65 without raising their taxes until much later. Most were contributing at half the rate their kids have to contribute. Over 50% of our health care expenses go for the last parts of a persons life, meanwhile a young person who has an injury can be financially ruined.

5) Valued social issues over long term economic growth. They fought "culture wars" instead of investing for the future.

6) They didn't guard the country for the next generation. They allowed the institutions that supported the young people, like college loans and health care, to run rampant over a bunch of 18 year olds.

Really this is just a starting point and not an inclusive list. I will keep adding to it as long as I am able.

*Source: Reddit.com, MLBAccount 2014

Back to my experience: Starting around 2003 or so, the gray-hairs started to get meaner and meaner, not all of them of course, but a whole lot more than when I was a kid through the teen-age years-the sixties and seventies. I never saw geezers flip the bird when I was younger, that's for sure. Luckily they abused their bodies so badly from drugs and partying, they're not living that long, so we're getting rid of them pretty rapidly, at an increasing rate every day.

This generation always seemed intent on giving the country away to outsiders under the guise of affirmative action, wide open borders, and the liberal agenda. Later on, when they finally realized what they had done, and the country really did start to slip away, they tried to take it back through the Tea Party movement, but it was too little, too late. The damage had been done.

I see that currently, economically, the Baby Boomers are finally getting their due. Maybe there will be justice after all: Tom Brokaw reported in 2009: "(They became) the richest and the greatest consumers, for good, bad or indifferent," Brokaw reported from Vancouver. "And now they're in a stage in their lives — coming into their late 50s and early 60s — during this economic downturn, when a lot of the assumptions that they grew up with, that they assumed would be there forever, have not just been challenged, but have been turned on their head. It's forcing Boomers to re-evaluate their lives and their expectations", Brokaw said. "Boomers thought they'd continue working if they wanted to, but they can't because many are being pushed out. On the opposite side", Brokaw said. "A lot of Boomers who had hoped to be able to cut back on working can't afford to. The economy worked for them, and now it's turning against them".

Tom Brokaw-March 1, 2010, USA Today

Our generation's appearance on the other hand, Generation X, seemed to be hardly noticed. We just kind of quietly showed up.

There would be nothing to mark our generation, no age of prosperity, like the early baby boomers, no great war, like our grandparents. We wouldn't get the chance to be heroes, to walk around with our chest sticking out after saving humanity from some evil empire.

There would be no Vietnam or Woodstock, Charlie Manson, or campus protest for us. We were the wide-eyed innocent children of the sixties.....hypnotized by idealistic TV shows like Gilligan's Island, Bewitched, and I Dream of Genie, too young to comprehend the rebellion all around us. Some people refer to our time as that of Generation X. Actually, we arrived just after the Baby Boomers and before Generation X. We never had a name. We can best be described as members of a forgotten generation. We got to college too early to benefit from computers and the internet, and too late to enjoy the massive generational party that was the Baby Boomer Generation.

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war…our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off. -Fight Club

As far as wars go, we were involved in a more subtle kind of war, one with no body bags. The corporate culture was being born, especially that of the "pharmaceutical drug cartel". All in the name of profits, this one dimensional marketing machine would end up dwarfing the sins of the Nazis in regards to the body-count resulting from pushing prescription drugs in the name of health.

For example, take the huge marketing campaign push of the original birth control pill. Corporate had finally perfected "the pill", building on the unfortunate Thalidomide morning-sickness pill disaster of 1958 to 1961 (updated article, 2010). Their mantra was that the "World is over-populated. Save the world, blah, blah, blah.....", and we fell for it. The Woodstock generation screwed like rabbits, with no apparent consequences. If you're white and you were born in the 60's, consider yourself lucky to even be here.

The 40 million-person vacancy left in the U.S. population by the Pill's popularity would open the door eventually, years later, to a massive influx of illegal immigrants to take their place. Every effect has a cause. This one thing would drastically change the face of America forever, and set the precedent for the huge profits of the drug industry for the foreseeable future. The emphasis went from health care to health care profits.

The world was empty then, compared to now. If we wouldn't reproduce, the Third World certainly made up for it in later years.

Life's Goals:

In my 30's-to start a successful business and buy a house
In my 40's-to do something right.......

I accomplished none of these goals. In fact, the harder I tried, the further away it seems, I got from achieving even a semblance of any of these basic goals in life. The reasons for this were mostly my fault, mainly due to poor decisions, bad advice, sabotage, the era, and just plain bad luck.

"I've dated guys with a little bad luck, but I've never met anyone with bad luck like you have it."
Ex-girlfriend number 3

I suppose I will die an unsung man, but it won't be for lack of effort.

Now that I'm older, here is what my goals should have been:

In my teens-find a competent career counselor, plan my career path, date a lot of girls...
In my twenties-establish my career and reputation, marry my girl, buy a house...
In my thirties-bank the cash, raise the kiddies....
In my forties-enjoy the fruits of good planning....

Well, this is how our parents did it anyway. It seemed the country was changing, unfortunately for me and my aspirations to accomplish anything meaningful....

Unfortunately, I was raised to be super-fair and honest, which is no way to get ahead in the world as it is, but my mother was very naive in her teachings, and my stepfather was non-existent as a mentor, as he was always away chasing the dollar, except for Friday nights, when he would come home in a rage over his work-week, and I would go hide under the bed. Selling insurance must suck as a job, because he was always pissed off. (1966-70, King of Prussia).

As far as planning, there really was no plan, except to survive college, which I was ill-suited for, except for the wrestling thing. I think, specifically, to begin with, I really regret even going off to college. It's not like I was some academic prodigy, in which case I could understand the push to go to college. My going to college was akin to sending Stephen Hawking to wrestling camp.

When I left for college my parents just got wealthier and devoted all their energies to helping my much younger adopted brother achieve his dreams. He also got a lot of slack because he had been diagnosed with dyslexia. I guess that severe color-blindness condition that I was born with didn't count for much....

So while I was away at college learning drinking 101 and wrestling 102, it gave my brother a chance to look like a hero by helping out on the new 40 acre farm, which soon became an 80 acre farm. He subsequently got a job just working on the farm doing the same thing I was doing before I got sent off to college, except he got to just keep doing it the rest of his life, while I was chasing around the country after graduation paying overpriced rent and expenses and working jobs that I usually hated and that didn't pay much above survival wages.

I would have gotten much further merely by staying in my parent's basement and continuing my lawn business, and keeping my moped and bike rental business at the beach, instead of going off to some far-away college and pissing away the next five years, with nothing to show for it at the conclusion. More importantly, I lost the connections I had nurtured during my 8 years living in a fairly wealthy area, because, as I know now, connections are everything. In fact, I never did recover from college, never bought a home, got married, or sampled anything else meaningful that life has to offer.

Even if I had stayed in that basement, I don't think my Dad would have let me be successful anyway. In fact he spent a fair amount of his energies ensuring I would not be successful, at anything I got involved in. Unfortunately I did not realize this until too late.

Better yet, I should have attended a trade school, plumbing, or carpentry, along with sticking with my two businesses and moved to a tiny house to start, in a decent area. I know a cabinet-maker who lived like a king, up until the latest economic meltdown of 2008 or so. The trades really have been gold through the 80's and 90's, and well into the 21st century. Things have only recently slowed down for the skilled trades people (2009), relatively speaking. I lost count of how many times I was jobless and broke, for months on end, while my plumber or construction buddies had all the work they could handle.

Plus, there's the fortune in living expenses you blow while attending college. I see now why the community colleges are packed. At the very least, you should attempt to buy a house in the town where you attend college, rent some rooms to other students to pay the mortgage, then sell when you graduate. Ah, but experience is something you get.........just after you need it.

That would have been a better plan, but they say we have no real control. Destiny is destiny.

Next: Part IV

Live "O", On Women:

As far as women were concerned, I was always pretty lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. Since about age 17, I never lacked a girlfriend for long, even through to the current day. I don't know if this will ever change. Put me in any town in America, or even overseas for that matter, and I will acquire a not-bad looking girlfriend in under two weeks. It's not due to low standards either. I've tested this out, numerous times, because I've lived almost everywhere in my quest for constant employment. Sometimes there is just no work where you are, so you gotta' move. I'm sure if I had landed a decent career after college and stayed in one spot and built a business, I would have had 10 children, easily.

Some of my past girlfriends stuck around for so long,waiting for me to marry them, that unfortunately, we both ended up wasting huge chunks of time, waiting for the right time for me to make that magical marriage proposal, when we both could have been dating more successful people. Unfortunately, I was so ill-prepared to earn a living after college graduation, that I never could quite feel right about taking the plunge, as I was perennially poor as a church-mouse. Whenever I did happen upon a good business idea, my parents were sure to sabotage the whole thing, although I did not realize this was going on at the time. That's why it was so frustrating.

Whenever I would bring a decent girl home to meet the parents, my father would make it a point to somehow humiliate me in front of her eventually. The more gorgeous the girl, the worse it would be. I don't know if he was secretly gay, or what, the way he acted.

This went for my mother too, although she wasn't the control freak my dad was. She would just be rude and mean to the girl, not immediately, but would do it in a subtle way, especially if I made the mistake of leaving the poor girl alone with my mother.

I remember I brought this lovely blonde home that I had dated at college before I graduated and my Dad suddenly got the urge to assign me loads of yard work the entire weekend we were there. So, instead of a fun time hanging with the parents and watching football on a chilly Fall weekend, my girlfriend got to sit in a pickup truck and listen to the radio, while I spread mulch all weekend. I didn't bring her around much after that and we eventually broke up anyway, thanks to my crazy parents.

I think what made it worse was that by having such a wealthy father, most of these girls probably assumed he would help me along eventually, but that help never materialized. He usually gave me just enough rope to hang myself and he was usually the one that yanked away the stool, figuratively speaking. Then he would run and tell everyone what a loser I was. But let my adopted brother screw anything up and my "dad" would fall all over himself making one excuse after another for this little prick. Bro would always get a free pass.

My father was truly a step-dad, in that his stuff was his, and he wasn't about to hand anything over to some little bastard kid he happened to hijack to give the appearance of a normal family, just so he could build his insurance empire. This was untrue of course, for the newer adopted child.

Best girlfriend: Las Vegas, 1998-the Older Woman

Worst Girlfriend: West Virginia University, Gorgeous and young but too career oriented, but this was college, so my fault. I made the mistake of assuming that the women were there to find a husband. Some were, but most were not, at least the ones I pursued. If you're looking for a wife, college is about the worst place to look, in my experience.

My advice now: Use college to work on your career. When you're ready to find a wife, the best prospects will be found in a third world country, or temporarily join a religious sect, such as the Mormons, or the Amish, and date as young as legally possible. You want to find the smartest, least-educated woman you can find, who has healthy parents, both physically and mentally. Take a good look at her mother. That's her in 20-30 years. Best strategy: Date and have fun 'till you're about 29 or 30, then go third world. Hopefully you have saved a little money by then, and can travel.

On the other hand, if you want a life of agony, marry a career woman, with lots of education. You will be so screwed! Trust me.

Surprisingly, it really seemed to piss-off my parents when I brought women home to meet them, back in my younger days, when all the women were of prime baby-making age. In fact, looking back on it, the unlucky women I managed to bring home to meet the parents, both in high school and later on through early adulthood in the eighties, were usually looked upon with resentment, but not in an obvious way. I remember getting a feeling about it at the time. The thing was, the better looking the girl was, it seemed the madder my parents got. I am still unsure as to why this was happening. It will always be a mystery to me. I guess it has something to do with the stepfather thing.......I don't know.

I remember, the last really great girl I brought home to meet the parents, it was 1999. By now, at age 39, I had finally figured this thing out-what they were doing. This girl was 30 with a kid- all the good ones are knocked up by then-at least once, right? I had a brief history with this girl, from years before, when we were kids. She was now a statuesque brunette, slightly taller than I, not a rare thing as I was a short man. She was just a real knockout, and personality plus, from Chicago. I was pretty thrilled.

She was very cool, so I asked her, as a favor, to do a test for me, because I suspected that my parents had been sabotaging me with all these girls through the years. She said "okay", so I introduced her to my mother, who was very cordial and polite, "pleased to see you again after so long", etc. So I left them together in the kitchen there, for an hour. I said I had to go to the store or something like that. Sure enough, when I checked back in later, my little girlfriend sat there in the kitchen with the strangest look on her face.

"Well, what happened?", I asked. "Your Mom, she really doesn't want you to have a girlfriend." "What do you mean?", I said. Turns out, Mom had told her all kinds of stories designed to basically get rid of her. This girl was like, "Let's get out of here, and don't ever leave me alone with your mother again, please!"

Years later, after Mom passed away unexpectedly in 2011, I was going through her old photo albums and I found this picture of my-then fiancee' and I from some time in the '80's, except that someone had scratched my face out of the picture, probably my Mother's doing, since she was in charge of the photo albums. So my gut feeling had been right all along. Mom had some deep-seated psychological problems.

Kurt and Y, 1985

So it was true, my mother had been sabotaging my relationships, probably for years. No wonder everything had gone great until they met my parents. If I had paid attention to my intuition on this, I probably would have done things differently. Most parents want their sons to have girlfriends, who eventually turn into wives, so it still took me by surprise. I guess the sons pay for the sins of the father, being that I was the product of a former marriage. That could be it. I really don't know. It could be any stupid reason. Unfortunately, the damage had been done, as I was near 40 years old by the time I figured this out, with really no time left to start again.

Part III