In this dangerous world, our nation’s defense is Priority One.
Or at least it should be.
What do you do when you want to attract the best recruits possible to join our naval forces?
Lower the standards, of course.
The business sector has been doing it forever to attract workers who just don’t want to work anymore.
It used to offend me that American countries would outsource to foreign countries, utilizing their workers and resources to fatten up the bottom line.
Now, I can’t blame them.
The term American worker has morphed into a punchline and is seen as an oxymoron.
I just saw a blurb about how Ohio is considering paying students fifty dollars to go to classes.
I can just see how that would have gone over with my mom if I demanded money to get out of bed and make an effort to improve my life and afford me more opportunities.
The end product might look very much like an ass-whipping.
A well-deserved ass-whipping.
I never had a problem getting motivated for going to school. We travelled so much that I was constantly enrolling and then withdrawing to go to another country and of course, another school.
School was where the girls were.
That fact alone almost guaranteed my perfect attendance record.
People talk about the past and a “kinder, gentler America.”
It reminds me of yet another Las Vegas experience circa 1979.
I was Executive Chef for a major casino, just erected in the downtown area.
We put on a splashy banquet for some law enforcement personnel and I knocked them out with a dessert that I had sculpted out of baked meringue and passion fruit that looked like a pair of hands that were handcuffed. They sat in a pool of “blood” which was a blood orange and red currant sauce I had just invented.
It looked so badass, and maybe a little politically incorrect with the “blood” which appeared to be coming from the tight handcuffs.
I got a standing O for me and my staff when they wheeled it out to the crowd of two hundred.”
One officer walked up to me and shook my hand, saying, “I wish I could afford to take you home to be our personal chef. My wife would go bomb-shit-crap-crazy!”
I had never heard that expression before or since. I looked at him and thought what a crazy bastard. Hope I never run into him on the other side of the law.
I ended up leaving that job and subsiding as a “kept” boyfriend of Sheila, a beautiful rich girl who was using me to piss her parents off.
I was fine with the arrangement, even after she told me.
Why wouldn’t I be?
For a year, she paid for everything, and when I finally told her that I thought I might go back to work as a chef, she delayed my decision by giving me a thousand dollar weekly allowance.
I was home.
I could have stayed as her designated Mexican boy toy forever, but all good things…
Sheila either tired of me, or of my habit of trying to pollenate as many cocktail waitresses as I could get my hands on, so then, I got to see the real disparity between us.
At a cocktail lounge we got in a shouting match and before I knew what was happening, I was sitting in the back of a police mini-bus with several other shady characters.
It did not smell very good.
The lounge owner had called the cops and the practice was, when you were on this bus, it had no destination, other than to pick up more “like-minded” individuals who had consumed too much alcohol. Instead of taking us right over to Las Vegas Metro and the Clark County Jail, they drove around a few hours and then let us go.
As I tumbled out of the bus somewhere around the California Club, the driver shouted, “Keep out of trouble, and don’t go bomb-shit-crap-crazy!”
Stay well.
