Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm sixty (4,5,6,7)?

I really don't want to write about turning 65, and all the hoopla that sometimes attends it.  The physical stuff (you know, hair, peeing, ED, and all); the emotional stuff (O, God, I'm old); and the bucket list stuff (I really love that movie and it has more significance for me since I do have cancer).


I think, instead, I will briefly chronicle what has become my new normal since my jumping off in Rochelle, Illinois at 6-something in the morning of October 4, 1950.  I do this selfishly, so that when I actually want to look back at turning 65, I have some kind of baseline from which to judge myself on the scale of cantankerous-old-man-ness.  Here goes:

1. I HAD cancer and I've beaten it, for good as far as I'm concerned.
2. I'm reasonably sure that I was a real asshole for much of my adult life to a lot of people - Mrs. Silberhorn told me that somewhere around 1988 on the field at Beyer Stadium when I sent her son off the field for not paying dues. 
3. I was very lucky to grow up in a small town, although it did delay my social consciousness.
4. I think I've finally learned not to fight it when I wake up at nothing in the morning.  

I am completing this first part of this epiphany at 30,000 feet, on New Years Day.

I will have additional resolutions, but here is the first.  It has religious overtones but should be taken at face value:

I have spent approximately 43 years wondering when and how a particular life event was going to happen for/to/with/in spite of me.  I give up.  If it does, hurrah.  Que sera sera. 

TO BE CONTINUED......

Phantom Regiment - Amazing Grace

You Can't Make Me Do It, but you can sure as Hell make me wish I had....

In digging through my personal library (euphemism for collections of stuff), I came across a 2 page manuscript with the same title as this post.  I recognized it immediately as the beginning of a book I promised myself I would write after I left my 12-year stint as a Probation Officer. 


It was printed on a dot-matrix printer, and as I recall had been created in a now long-defunct computer program called something like GeoWorks.  I no doubt saved it on some sort of floppy disk, but have no clue where, and am sure Microsoft doesn't make a translator for such a program.


No problem!  I have what amounts to the Introduction, as well as my preliminary list of chapters.


Here's a teaser from the intro:


"A lot of people will probably do with this book what I did with the one about black militancy back in the 60's when I left my all white school, went off to college, and realized that there really were things I preferred not to know about or think about."


Darn it....now I gotta write the darn thing

And Just What HAVE you done with your life?

So much to write about, so little time.  Been waxing nostalgic lately, what with catching up with long-lost relatives, finding new ones (via Ancestry.com by the by) and thinking a lot about times past.  To that end, I want to start capturing bits of memory that I fear will be lost, like the list of all the cars I've ever owned. 




For now, I'm starting with making a list (hopefully exhaustive) of all the jobs I've had. I have not had to prepare a resume for over 30 years, so here goes (and it will no doubt be edited over time):

• Ice cream entrepreneur - running the one and only street treat cart in Mt. Morris, Illinois
• Soda jerk at local drive in, Mt. Morris, Illinois
• Retail sales, Men's Clothing - either Ackers or Bordners (down the street from the bank)
• Grocery boy - M&M Super Market, Mt. Morris, IL
• Paper boy - Mt. Morris, IL
• Janitor at the high school while attending
• Sewer cleaner, Village of Mt. Morris, IL
• Police Radio Dispatcher and Animal Control Officer, Decorah Police Dept., Decorah, IA
• Quality Control Flunkie, Kable Printing Company, for one summer - [this will be a great story for a later blog]
• Jailer/Dispatcher, Filmore County Sheriff's Office, Preston, MN
• Bartender, American Legion, Mt. Morris, IL
• Radio Operator, Ogle County Sheriff's Dept., Oregon, IL
• Deputy Sheriff/Youth Officer, Ogle County, IL
• Part-owner/operator, Valley Kartway Go Kart Track, Miniature Golf, Snowmobile Sales and Service, Artic Cat Dealership, and Small Engine Repair
• Police Officer and Director of Ambulance Service, Byron, IL
• Truck Driver/Labor (erecting grain bins, delivering feed), Farmer's Coop, Byron, IL
• Security Guard, Barnum and Bailey Circus, Carbondale, IL
• Graduate Assistant, SIU, Carbondale, IL
• Visiting Instructor, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL
• Part time grill cook, Golden Bear Restaurant, Carbondale, IL
• EMT/Paramedic, AIDS Ambulance, Rockford, IL
• Bar Manager, Leombruni's Italian Villages, Byron and Rockford, IL
• Senior Probation Officer, Winnebago County Juvenile Court Service
• Assistant Director, Tour Director, Percussion Instructor, Bus Driver, Phantom Regiment Drum and Bugle Corps (circa 1984-1997)
• Founder and Executive Director, Midwest Correctional Services, aka Comprehensive Community Solutions, Rockford, IL
• Percussionist, Rockford Symphony Orchestra

WHEW!  Let's leave it at that for tonight, while I review the list and try to figure out if there is a common thread here??? 

Readers and friends - feel free to weigh in if you remember one I forgot. 

Emoji-UI

Coming in future blogs - Emoji and Aui (the Language of Space).  New tools for police community relations.  Here is your primer to get you started.




aUI - I actually studied with Dr. Weilgart, and did my college senior paper on this language:






Probably the most bizarre artificial "universal" language of recent times is aUI (pronounced "a-OO-ee"), the "Language of Space." aUI, meaning "space-spirit-sound" or "space-language," and advertised as the "Pentecostal Logos of Love and Peace," was launched on Planet Earth in the 1960's by John W. Weilgart, an Austrian-born Iowa psychiatrist who claimed to have learned the language as a young boy from a little green elf-like humanoid from outer space. The little green spaceman told Weilgart that aUI was the literally universal language used by intelligent beings on all planets throughout the Cosmos. aUI, according to Weilgart, is a perfectly logical and rational language, and learning aUI can actually cure a person of irrational thinking patterns.


In aUI, each sound of the language--each vowel and each consonant--is a "basic element" signifying one basic concept, and the meaning of every word can be analyzed into the "elements" of which it is built up. Essentially, this means that every letter stands for one particular basic idea, and always stands for that idea. The aUI alphabet and sound-system consists of the short vowels (lower-case) a,e,i,o,u,y,q, the long vowels (upper-case) A, E,I,O,U, the nasalized vowels (long and short) a*,e*,i*,o*,u*,y*,A*,E*,I*,O*,U*, Y*, and the consonants r, L, m, n, w, v, f., h, j, c, s, z, g, k, t, d, p, b. The long and short vowels aeiouAEIOU are pronounced as in Spanish, Italian, and German; y is pronounced like German ü in Brücke, fünf or French u in lutte, duc; Y* corresponds to the German ü, üh in über, kühl or the French u, û in pur, mur, dur, Vaucluse, s'amuse, sûr; q has the sound of German ö or French eu; c is like English sh in ship, shoe, fish; j has the zh sound of s in pleasure, z in azure; x has the sound of German ch in Buch, Nacht, machen, sprach, doch; g is always "hard" or velar as in English go, get; the b,d,f,h,k,L,m,n,p,r,s,t,v,w,z have their usual English values. The short nasal vowels a*,e*,i*,u*,o* stand for respectively the numbers 1,2,3,4,5, while the long nasal vowels A*,E*,I*,U*,O* represent respectively the numbers 6,7,8,9,10; zero is indicated by Y*, the nasalized version of the sound of Germanü in über, Führer or French u.in dur, mur, s'amuse, Vaucluse. The short vowels a,e,i,u,o,y,q stand respectively for "space/place (a), movement (e), light (i), man/human/person (u), life (o), no/not (y), Condition(al)/if (q)."


As to Emoji:


Emoji (絵文字（えもじ）^?, Japanese pronunciation: [emodʑi]) are the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and Web pages, the use of which is spreading outside Japan. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji literally means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji). The characters are used much like ASCII emoticons or kaomoji, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets. Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing businessman, a face wearing a face mask, a white flower used to denote "brilliant homework," or a group of emoji representing popular foods: ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, Japanese curry, and sushi.


Hmmm... make sentences out of pictures

• 
  

Face with Stuck-Out Tongue and Winking Eye

Cara sacando la lengua y guiñando

• kidding, not serious


More later. 

The Bobbies know best

While I do not intend this blog to be some kind of running commentary on current events, the goings-on in Baltimore, NYC and elsewhere (and yes, including the effort here in Rockford to unseat the police chief) leave me no choice.


Nearly 38 years ago, after deciding I wanted to do more than jockey a squad car around, I entered grad school in Administration of Justice at SIU-Carbondale.  As a grad assistant to Dr. Fred Klyman, one of my first assignments was being handed the textbook for a course in Police Community Relations and being told to basically run the class.  Actually, I had fun with this class, which starts out in Chapter 1 talking about Peel's Principles of Law Enforcement--sort of one of the underpinnings of modern law enforcement.  [remind me later to tell you about meeting Sir Geoffrey Dear of the LMP].


Principle 6 of Sir Robert Peel reads, in relevant part, as follows:  "The police should use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient to achieve police objectives". Peel asserted that "the police are the public and the public are the police". 


A little short of 200 years later, and following countless wars, conflicts (large and small), battles, skirmishes, conflagrations, and mild pissing contests, we still seem to be plagued with a fundamental need to cast the world in "us vs. them" rather than acknowledging that it is and always will be JUST US!


I'm as guilty as the next of this human frailty, but I'm learning every day how to correct that.  In the final analysis, folks, policing is a mano-a-mano kind of deal.  Decisions and the exercise of discretion by our men and women in blue boil down to zillions of individual human interactions each and every day.  This is where we need to focus our attention. Sorry, but not sure that body cams will cure this one.  Remind me also to tell you one of my personal stories of persuasion that worked and violence avoided.  Thanks, Sir Robert.

Blog the 1st

Years back, I wanted to start a book.....never got traction beyond I believe a chapter outline and maybe a stab at the first page. If I had a nickel for every time I've said "that's going to be a chapter in my book".  Well, back then there weren't blogs.  Brace thyself....here comes mine.

First a word about the address of the blog - humpy3rd.  Don't read it that way!  "Humpy" was the nickname of both my grandfather and my dad, and thus, I am Humpy the 3rd.  I have never told many people of this and the story of it will be the subject of later posts, I'm sure.

Secondly, the title - "I'm not finished yet".  My dad wrote a column for my hometown newspaper, the Mt. Morris Times, titled "At the Finish Line", a sports column.  He really had an incredible way with words.  I thought about calling this "On the Starting Line" in honor of my years with drum corps, but at age almost-65 it didn't seem right.  Since I'm not "at the finish line" by any means, couldn't use that. My chosen title is meant to say that I feel as if I have a LOT more to do in this cosmos, and recent events and people have made me even more determined to do so. 

I have just, in the last 4 days, gone from feeling like I should go home after work, crash on the couch and slog my way back through it tomorrow, to actually today wondering out loud why there weren't enough hours in the day to do ALL the things I want to do.  To say all the things I want to say. To spend time with all the people I want to spend time with but maybe never will.  Guess that's a good set of opportunities to pursue.

Welcome to my blog.  Believe me, I have lots of stories, insights and tidbits to share.  I hope you'll join me from time to time.