When I was a young lad, fresh out of high school and college, I had a crush of Deborah Harry, from Blondie. I still enjoy listening to her voice from time to time.

It's quite possible that after years of trying, my wife and I may actually "get our house back".

I'm not going to go into details, but Zachary has moved out and won't be moving back in. He'll probably still be coming for the occasional visit and all, and he's welcome to do that. Hopefully he'll take this time to figure out what he needs to do to make his own life happier and act on it.

This morning, Nikki applied for an apartment in Kent, near where she works. She was accepted! She can start moving in later next week. I'm sure that she's going to be really happy having a place she can call her own. We'll help her get established, but this one's a victory for her!

Think good thoughts for them both!

These <insert racial designator here> Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever <insert racial designator here>s are gathered.  They consist of the following concepts:

1. Commitment to God.  “The God of our weary years” will give us the strength to give up prayerful passivism and become <insert racial designator here> Christian Activists, soldiers for <insert racial designator here> freedom and the dignity of all humankind.
2. Commitment to the <insert racial designator here> Community.  The highest level of achievement for any <insert racial designator here> person must be a contribution of strength and continuity of the <insert racial designator here> Community.
3. Commitment to the <insert racial designator here> Family.  The <insert racial designator here> family circle must generate strength, stability and love, despite the uncertainty of externals, because these characteristics are required if the developing person is to withstand warping by our racist competitive society.
   Those <insert racial designator here>s who are blessed with membership in a strong family unit must reach out and expand that blessing to the less fortunate.
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education.  We must forswear anti-intellectualism.  Continued survival demands that each <insert racial designator here> person be developed to the utmost of his/her mental potential despite the inadequacies of the formal education process.  “Real education” fosters understanding of ourselves as well as every aspect of our environment.  Also, it develops within us the ability to fashion concepts and tools for better utilization of our resources, and more effective solutions to our problems.  Since the majority of <insert racial designator here>s have been denied such learning, <insert racial designator here> Education must include elements that produce high school graduates with marketable skills, a trade or qualifications for apprenticeships, or proper preparation for college.
   Basic education for all <insert racial designator here>s should include Mathematics, Science, Logic, General Semantics, Participative Politics, Economics and Finance, and the Care and Nurture of Black minds.
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence. To the extent that we individually reach for, even strain for excellence, we increase, geometrically, the value and resourcefulness of the <insert racial designator here> Community.  We must recognize the relativity of one’s best; this year’s best can be bettered next year.  Such is the language of growth and development.  We must seek to excel in every endeavor.
6. Adherence to the <insert racial designator here> Work Ethic.  “It is becoming harder to find qualified people to work in <insert urban area heavily populated by members of the race here>.”  Whether this is true or not, it represents one of the many reasons given by businesses and industries for deserting the <insert urban area heavily populated by members of the race here> area.  We must realize that a location with good facilities, adequate transportation and a reputation for producing skilled workers will attract industry.  We are in competition with other cities, states and nations for jobs.  High productivity must be a goal of the <insert racial designator here> workforce.
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect.  To accomplish anything worthwhile requires self-discipline.  We must be a community of self-disciplined persons if we are to actualize and utilize our own human resources, instead of perpetually submitting to exploitation by others.  Self-discipline, coupled with a respect for self, will enable each of us to be an instrument of <insert racial designator here> Progress and a model for <insert racial designator here> Youth.
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness.”  Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.
   Those so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:
   1. Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another.
   2. Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.
   3. Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us.”
   4. So, while it is permissible to chase “middleclassness” with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method – the psychological entrapment of <insert racial designator here> “middleclassness.”  If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our “voluntary” contributions to methods A and B.  And more importantly, <insert racial designator here> people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons.
9. Pledge to Make the Fruits of All Developing and Acquired Skills Available to the <insert racial designator here> Community.
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting <insert racial designator here> Institutions.
11. Pledge Allegiance to All <insert racial designator here> Leadership Who Espouse and Embrace the <insert racial designator here> Value System.
12. Personal Commitment to Embracement of the <insert racial designator here> Value System.  To measure the worth and validity of all activity in terms of positive contributions to the general welfare of the <insert racial designator here> Community and the Advancement of <insert racial designator here> People towards freedom.

Pick a race. Any race. Make the substitution. Tell me such a "value" system isn't racist.

The problem is, how do you define the first "children" in that title? The second one is easy.

We consider animals adults when they can reproduce, but are people nothing more than animals?

Just because a person is old enough to reproduce does not make them emotionally or mentally an adult. Chronological age doesn't make one an adult either, although legally it does.

God has been exceptionally kind to the humans he created. He allows emotionally crippled and immature people to have children. Often it matures them quickly.

I pity the children when it doesn't.

My sister-in-law sent me this video. I think the title just about says all we need to know… if you watch to the end.

Lake Kachess.

The beach at Lake Kachess.

Photos copyright ©2007 by Perri Nelson. All rights reserved.

There's an odd article in the Seattle Times today. When I read it, I immediately thought of my older son. This morning, as I was getting ready for a parent-teacher telephone conference for my younger son, I overheard his older brother cursing at his daughter - my granddaughter. Anyway...

A Scranton woman who allegedly shouted profanities at her overflowing toilet within earshot of a neighbor was cited for disorderly conduct, authorities said.

Dawn Herb could face up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $300.

... 

Her next-door neighbor, a city police officer who was off-duty, asked her to keep it down, police said. When she continued, the officer called police.

Read the whole article.

Bad decisions can come back to haunt you at the strangest times.

We all make mistakes in our lives. Oftentimes those mistakes have consequences that affect us immediately, but they can also affect us later in life. I've just witnessed that in my own life.

When I was a teenager I "experimented" with recreational pharmaceuticals. It began with tobacco.

A friend of mine named Bob and I decided we wanted to smoke tobacco when I was around 13. I remember hanging out with him at the entrance to the PX and the Commissary on base and picking up the cigarette butts that people discarded in the ash cans. When we had collected quite a few we peeled them and gathered up the loose tobacco into a plastic bag. Later we took paper towels and rolled our own cigarettes with them. They were horrible.

Not long after that I started stealing cigarettes from my dad. I remember he smoked Pall Mall golds. I'd take them to camp with me and me and my buddies would smoke them there. We really didn't know what we were doing, and we tried swallowing the smoke instead of just inhaling it. It made us dizzy, but we thought we were getting high. Later we got sick.

One time I decided to try to make brandy from scratch with Bob. We'd stolen some of his dad's brandy and thought it was cool. So we tried to figure out how we were going to make some of our own.

We knew we needed a still. At first we thought about using a gas can. I remember taking one and trying to "burn off" the gasoline in it to make it clean enough to use as the main boiler for the still. I can attest to the fact that it really, really hurts to burn yourself when the gasoline fumes flare up.

We decided that wasn't a great plan, so instead we got a five-gallon glass jug of water and emptied a good amount of the water. We filled it with grape juice and added a few packets of yeast to ferment it.

A few weeks later we took the fermented grape juice it to camp and set up our still in a tent. The glass jug couldn't take the heat and shattered, filling the floor of the tent with our sour grape juice. Another failed experiment.

A couple of years later I decided I wanted to try marijuana. Another friend of mine named Clay told me he could get some for me. He showed up at my house late one night and I went out front to see what he had. It looked like ordinary pipe tobacco instead of marijuana, so I didn't waste my money on it.

I actually knew where I could get some. Another couple of friends, Jay and John introduced me to marijuana on another campout. Then they showed me where they were growing it. Less than ten years later, that property had been sold and a mobile home park was built on the spot.

When I was in high school, all the "cool" kids hung out across the street from the school in the mornings before school, smoking cigarettes. If you stepped into the woods behind the crowd, there were a few trails you could follow. There was almost always a crowd of kids smoking marijuana there. Big circles of kids passing joints around. There would be ten or fifteen kids passing around three or four of them at a time. I was there quite often, before my American History class.

Somehow, despite all of this, I managed to do fairly well in school. There were a few classes I didn't do so well in, but I did well enough that I ended up with several college scholarships, including an appointment to West Point and one to Annapolis. I ended up going to Michigan State University.

It was there that my experimentation really started getting serious. Amphetamines. Cocaine. Finally LSD.

I've had a few really "good" trips on LSD. I've also had a couple of really really bad ones. The first bad one nearly scared me to death, but it didn't stop me.

Ultimately, and actually very shortly, my abuse of drugs and alcohol caught up with me. I spent more time partying than I did studying and within two semesters I was through with Michigan State. I had lost my scholarships due to very poor grades and had to return home in shame and disgrace.

You would think that that would have been enough for me to learn my lesson, but the fact is, I really enjoyed getting stoned. I had to be straight for a while, long enough to actually get through college and get a real job. For a while things were working out. Then my boss decided to party with me.

I was back at it again. I was smoking marijuana and popping pills again. I was also getting drunk a lot more than I should have been. Eventually, it had to come to an end. I think that the beginning of the end came when my boss died of a heart attack at the age of 26.

He was supposed to go out with a woman from work named Nancy one night and never showed up. Two days later he didn't show up at work. A couple of people from work decided to go check on him and found him dead in his home. It was devastating.

I don't know to this day whether he had a heart condition that I didn't know about or if drugs, specifically cocaine, might have had something to do with it. I do know that he was a friend of mine and now he was dead. He and I had traveled to the Florida Keys for a vacation once and he had talked about how he wanted to own and live on a boat and sail in the Caribbean. Now it wasn't going to happen.

I still miss him.

For a while, thanks to the help of some Christian friends I cleaned up. I ended up going through the motions at work though and kept chafing under the "straight" life. Eventually I started going to a strip club just about every night and blowing hundreds of dollars a night there.

Then I came to Washington for a visit. "Inspired" I quit my job in Florida and moved to Washington. Sadly, part of the reason I did that was to have an opportunity to get away from everything in Florida, except for the drugs. Marijuana was once again a major part of my life.

I've taken up smoking, drinking and drugs several times in my life. I've quit them all several times too. Once I quit smoking cigarettes for nearly a year, then I lost control of my girlfriends car one morning and nearly got us both killed. My immediate reaction was to start smoking again. It took a few more years before I finally managed to quit them for good, a few years after I had married my girlfriend.

It took a few more years after that for me to finally be able to quit smoking marijuana. It also took quite a few attempts. I had gotten to the point where I was going through an ounce of marijuana a week and didn't have money for anything else. I knew I had to quit, but I couldn't do it.

When I did manage to finally quit it was really difficult. I had become dependent on the stuff to the point that when I didn't have it, my personality changed drastically. I fell into a clinical depression and had to take prozac for six months. I nearly lost my wife during that time, but eventually she and I managed to work through it. I've been clean now for more than seven years.

Still, consequences can strike at the weirdest times. Tonight I watched as a young person I had told some of this tale to went to his home stoned out of his mind. He had gotten drunk and eaten some psychedelic mushrooms and was totally wasted. He had thrown up all over himself and his friends car. He seemed proud of himself. He also said that I was probably the only person he knew that could understand it.

Because of my bad example, someone that really has enough problems is following in my footsteps.

I pray to God that he doesn't take as long as I did to realize the consequences of this foolish behavior. I pray that he learns from this bad experience and stops abusing drugs and alcohol now, before it ruins another life.

And, I wish I had stopped long before I did. Before I ruined his.