» Racist grandparents

And now for something completely different.
My mum killed a young black girl.
We were driving down a dirt road in Africa, not particularly fast on a clear, sunny day in the late 70's. My mum was straight, sane & sober. I was in the car, mum driving but I was a wee sprog and can't really remember much else. A young girl - probably about my age (7-8 from memory) stepped out from the overgrown bushes on the side of the road. My mum had no time, she put on the skids but it was no good. After a sickening thud we had slid to a halt.
Mum flew out of the car, the girl was on her own lying on the road - I remember her head was bleeding. Mum got her in the back of the car. We had shouted help as loud as we could, mum beeped the horn & I went into the bush to see if anyone else was about. She had been alone.
Mum fucking hammered it to get to a hospital - she got pulled over once we got to a main road & then we had a police escort. At the hospital they worked on her, but she had died either on the way or after arriving. The cops eventually found out who her family was - mum insisted on being there when they were told. The little girls name was Margaret, she was a year older than me at the time.
My mum was eventually charged with what I guess was the equivalent of accidental vehicular manslaughter. AFIK she didn't lose her licence, she didn't do time or anything. I think the court took into account her clean record, the fact that she had done all she could to save the little girls life & her clear sorrow, remorse and regret. Bear in mind this was a pretty much a completely 'black" judicial system, she was a white lady who had accidentally killed a young black girl. There was no need for them to be lenient if they had chosen not to be. I don't know exactly what punishment my mum received but I'm pretty sure it paled in comparison to the feeling of having taken a young child's life.
My mum got to know Margaret's family. They probably hated her but as her only way of appeasement she clothed and put thru school all 3 of Margaret's sisters. Even up to her death about 5 years ago when Margaret's youngest sister had finished uni in South Africa.
My daughter was about 2 when her grandmother died - so at least there is a grandparent in this tale. That and the fact that there is nothing casual about racism.
And no apologies for believing that. Ever.
(Tue 1st Nov 2011, 23:10, More)

» Utterly Drunk

Some of my thoughts
at the risk of triple T'ing and the howls of derision from the usual couple of wanker-trolls with superiority complexes.

A disease is when a pathogen/virus/bacteria enters your body without your knowledge or conscious effort thru any number of avenues.

An addiction is when you body or mind craves a substance so much so that you will forgo all other things, places or people in order to get that substance and then ingest it. Physiological addictions tend to be far harder to overcome than psychological addictions. Having said that I'm in no way negating the fact that using you will-power to battle your brain over your body is any less of a serious battle.
But that's it to me - addiction is ultimately overcoming your overwhelming desire to take a drug with your will-power. You may need all sorts of assistance to beat that desire but at the end of the day you make a conscious decision to either lift the bottle to you lips or not. Addiction is not a disease.

Now I know I'm going against a lot of modern medical doctrine here. I don't have an argument really other than - as I've said you chose to do the things you do. Sex addicts penises don't accidentally fall into vaginas. Heroin doesn't invade 1 junkies bloodstream from another's and start to multiply. HIV and most of the Heps still do tho - shoot safe and don't share, kiddies!
Personally I feel that as soon as they managed to find a way to call any addiction a "disease" was when every person who didn't have any will-power got a free ride to say "Don't you judge me!". As far as I'm concerned a psychologist telling you that alcoholism is a disease is akin to a microbiologist telling you that the bacteria you ingested attacked your immune system because you were weak willed.

I don't like AA. A higher power never took me to a meeting. I drove my straight, sober self. I have the Blue Book - not really relevant anymore. But Bill did a lot of good shit at the time. If you want to scare your self sober by reading try "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey (which I know was bullshit but hair-raising non-the-less), "I'm Black and I'm Sober" by Chaney Allen or even "Scar Tissue" by Anthony Kiedis. (Google them you lazy bastards!)
The other thing I don't like about AA is the negative emphasis. EDIT: And the constant focus on staying dry. Spending all your time obsessed with not drinking isn't healthy - all you end up doing is thinking about drinking. All the time. I'm a great believer in pro-activity and silver linings.Spending your life focusing on how you've managed not to have a drink each day seems like a wasted effort. Go out, have fun, do shit that you enjoy doing. Then quietly reflect at the end of the day that you couldn't have done a lot of it if you'd spent your day drinking. I love taking my daughter fishing at the end of a busy day.

Finally - lower the bar. Don't hold others to your expectations.
A mate of mine hopped on the wagon a couple of years ago. His missus kept drinking most days and smoked a shitload of pot all day, every day.
She had offered to go "dry" with him but he told her that was her choice (as he should have) but she flatly refused to stop smoking. That was where he had issues. He could see her addiction and expected her to "give up" as much as he had (she clearly didn't have a problem with her drinking and was easily able to give it up). Yet his expectations were that she would be as "dry" as him.
I know it caused them a lot of problems - at the end of the day, he was going it alone and he needed to focus on that rather than worry about whether his missus was straight and sober.

To anybody who's dry or trying - talk to people you love openly about it. If they judge you then it's not *really* the end of the world (no matter who they are). If you drink bottle(s) of "hard" stuff a day go to a doctor when you quit because going dry without medical supervision can be far more dangerous than going cold turkey from smack.

My 2 cents.
(Sat 16th Feb 2013, 6:51, More)

» Winging It

My mum.
Was a flying instructor.
She used to build up her flying hours and get a free fly (no hiring the plane or paying for fuel) by giving instruction at the local flying club. As she was a single mum and I an only child that basically meant I spent a good portion of my weekends sitting in the back seat/luggage compartment of a single prop Cessna feeling queasy whilst watching my mum put some novice pilot thu their paces.

My mum as an educator (she ended up getting a doctorate based in education) was a great believer in "hands on learning". As an instructor this meant putting the student pilots in real situations to make sure that they knew what to do if certain things eventuated. She had flown everything from DC-10's to gliders and ultralights in all sorts of circumstances. To her, experience was the greatest teacher.
This meant that many of the scenarios other instructors might gloss over, she made the hapless students experience 1st hand.

Forced stalls - mostly done with forced landings maybe less than a hundred feet off the deck. Mum made them do it at several thousand feet. Your plane isn't always going to stall on the level, with flaps on full at stall speed is it now? So when you start to drop out of the sky and lose altitude rapidly it kinda makes finding a solution to the problem somewhat more of a sweat-breaker than it does when you have the runway in front of you and you were coasting in for a landing anyway.

CAT or clear air turbulence. Until you've experienced it you have no idea what it's like.
You're flying along happily when all of a sudden your plane drops up to a couple of hundred feet in a few seconds, leaving your stomach and anything you haven't evacuated out of it stuck to the roof of the aeroplane.
This was a fave of mums. In Mt. Isa, Queensland the wet season usually has daily thunderstorms in the afternoon. Fly thru 1 of those thunderheads and there's a good chance you'll get a taste of an air pocket. Scary as fuck but there's a good chance that sometime a pilot will get caught in bad weather (no amount of planning can cover that) so my mum would make the student pilots face the situation head-on by finding a thunderstorm and flying thu it.
At best we'd go through some rough and choppy air and get bounced around the cabin a bit, at worst we'd do the CAT dance and at least one of us would lose our lunches. Usually me.

As you might conclude from this tale I have a healthy aversion to getting my feet too far off the ground unless I absolutely have to.
Christ knows how many airsickness bags I chucked my nuts up into during the 70's and 80's but I reckon the highest points of distribution would've been where-ever my mum was training.

In the spirit of Juan Quar's post - my mum wasn't winging it so much as she didn't mind not being totally in control and certainly knew how to enjoy herself when the shit did hit the fan...

tl;dr - My mother tortured me and many student pilots by putting us in very serious predicaments whilst flying an airplane in the name of teaching the students how to deal with something first-hand.

EDIT: Despite the fact that my mum and grandfather both got their pilot's licenses at Biggin Hill (albeit 40 odd years apart - I think my grand-dad did it out of shame and competitiveness against his daughter) I have no desire whatsoever to learn how to fly.
(Sun 31st Mar 2013, 6:06, More)

» Inflated Self-Importance

This one
did it for me.

Making being charitable into a competition whilst getting all angry and indignant. I could visualise him pushing his sleeves up and everything.
(Wed 30th Jan 2013, 21:44, More)

» Inflated Self-Importance

Parking Inspector.
Yeah I know they're an easy target but...

This happened many years ago. At the time I was working with another bloke making hand-made candles. It was a business I had bought into after the other bloke (I'll call him Dick) had bought the business, its' clients (mostly stall-holders at all of the local markets) and the old Holden 1 tonner HQ off his brother-in-law.
But that's another story for another day.

Anyhoo - every Easter we supplied many of the local churches (including the big churches in the city) with the huge candles that they burn during the whole Easter week. There was no discrimination between faiths - to some we sold these candles at a huge profit (considering it was basically pouring a candle into a large poly pipe), to others we donated them as it was usually at the behest of a local charity.
These candles were usually 1500mm x 120 mm, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, sometimes with crosses for different denominations "coloured" into them. We used a slow burning wick as a normal candle can burn as much as an inch an hour. At that size they usually weighed a good 30-40kgs each & as you might imagine are fairly fragile - you're too rough and you end up with a couple of big chunks of wax, a wick in the middle and no candle. We tried 1 year getting a courier to deliver - after many of the churches received broken candles we decided we'd do it ourselves.

So. There we were the last week of March delivering these big candles in the back of our ute to the churches in the city.
We had parked in a "Loading Zone" almost directly in front of St. Georges Cathedral on St. Georges Tce. We wandered inside to find someone to sign for it and tell us where to put it. We found the archbishop. Lovely bloke - he actually baptised me & did my 1st communion.
We headed outside.
To find a parking inspector. Writing a ticket. For our ute.

I tried to head him off - "We're here delivering candles to the church for Easter."
"Once the ticket is written it's done." says he.
Fair call, but..
"This is a registered commercial vehicle that can carry over 1 tonne (so it can legally park in a Loading Zone) & we are on business." says I.
"Too bad, Ive already written out the ticket." says he.
The Anglican Archbishop of Perth then steps in - "These guys are delivering something that the church needs over the next week or so, they appear to have parked legally. I ask you to reconsider..."
"Sorry sir but as I said, I've written the ticket." The priest gets on the blower. And then talks quietly & hurriedly to someone for about 2 min.
"No worries" said my partner during this - we'd just invoice the city for it and write off the ticket.
Literally before the priest has gotten off his phone the Parking guys phone rings.

He answered, "Ahh-hummed" a few times then whipped the ticket out from under the wiper-blade and said to us "There is no problem with you parking here. I'm sorry to have taken you away from your task, my apologies."

tl;dr?
If you're a parking inspector, don't fuck with the church.
(Sun 27th Jan 2013, 7:41, More)