BUBDADDY'S SECRET PLACE

Archives

09.03   10.03   11.03   12.03   01.04   02.04   03.04   04.04   05.04  

Next time I'm in PB (Pacific Beach), I'll try AGAIN to have a Big Ass Burger!

When I see a sign like the one above, I feel that it provides warmth to my soul, to my psyche. The person who conceived this sign is a linear thinker. No marketing degrees here. No Harvard affectations here. No Oxonian here. Just the simple proclamation that the observer is a mere 65 feet from a "BIG ASS BURGER". What more could a hamburger eater want than one of those??

No golden arches, or youth dressed in baggy pants, spinning on their heads in the street. No slutty looking girls with almost no clothes on. No vacuum headed 20-something youth with their tongues hanging out chanting empty-headed rubbish. Just a "BIG ASS BURGER", only a few feet away. I knew that I liked the guy who painted this sign, and I knew that I was going to invest 65 steps to find the masters of this bit of information, and meet the purveyors of "BIG ASS BURGERS". I stood in the street to get this photo, and then walked around the corner, in the direction of the fluorescent green arrow.

Several things happened almost simultaneously after I rounded the corner. A bright red fire truck parked in front of Fred's Mexican Grill and several firemen got out and entered it. Two San Diego police cars pulled up behind the fire truck, and the cops stood in front of the restaurant. Two cops went inside, and two waited outside. No lights were flashing and no sirens were howling. I assumed it was a lunch break, and continued walking, having only about 20 steps left to go. A young man, in baggy shorts, shirtless, well tanned, with ratty blond hair came rocketing down the sidewalk on his skate board, which had red wheels and flames and skulls painted on it. He screamed something as he shot past the door to the home of the "BIG ASS BURGER", and kept accelerating as he zoomed away.

There were moments of silence, nanoseconds probably, and then all kinds of hell unique to Southern California erupted. Two Mexican kids on tiny bicycles rounded the same corner by the fluorescent green arrow at breakneck speed and one them slammed into a policeman, who was knocked into the street. The kid fell off of his bike and took off running. I never saw him again. The other bicycle kid, looking at the collision his friend just had with the cop, ran into a parking meter, and was thrown into the street. The driver of a huge black Ford pickup truck tried to avoid running over either person in the street and ran into a parked car instead. The two cops who had been inside of the restaurant ran out of its dark interior and into the intensely bright mid day Californian sun, and were temporarily blind, which gave the Mexican kid in the street time to get up and run across the street, into an alley, and into oblivion. The other cop, the one who had not been hit by the bicycle, was on his police radio, ordering backup units, and possibly, helicopter gunships from the Marine Base at Camp Pendleton.

I'm sure that the cop on the radio had NO idea of what was happening. I had seen it all, and was totally overwhelmed by the complete chaos created by the union of several unrelated events. My mind was searching for a pattern to this madness, telling itself to look closer, while telling my body to take cover, even though the only available cover was 20 feet away, the home of "BIG ASS BURGERS". The other two cops could now see, and were out in the street, dodging cars, trying to control them.

An ambulance arrived, followed by another, and then four more police cars, and two more ambulances arrived. All arrived with lights flashing and sirens shrieking. Traffic was diverted, and more police cars arrived. The two firemen who had been the first to enter, came out laughing, and seemed amused with the show going on in the street and on the sidewalk. I raised my camera to photograph them, and a cop put his hand on my shoulder and told me to "get movin". I protested, but was told to leave, or be escorted from the scene.

I left


diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Wednesday, January 07, 2004 107352436889078406 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107352436889078406 1.6.2004 "Siehst du mein DAUGHTER???"

Please email:

2seaward@san.rr.com diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Tuesday, January 06, 2004 107341853009376436 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107341853009376436
THIS man is an idiot!

Steve Irwin, the blond Australian with the thick, elastic accent and khaki shorts is a blessing for America, Australia, and the rest of the world. If you remember, Steve Irwin decided to teach his one month old son how to feed dangerous 13 foot long crocodiles so that he would know how to defend himself from the crocs which purportedly abound in the Irwin home and property in Queensland, Australia. (Why not move to the suburbs, Mr. Irwin?)

Young master Irwin hasn't yet mastered the art of not pooping in his own attire. He is incapable of walking, and is probably not strong enought to hold a piece of flesh as heavy as the one his dad fed to the croc in front of a crowd of horrified, onlookers who had PAID to observe the senior Irwin's crocodile antics. Young master Irwin lacks the ability to recognize the danger he would place himself in if he were to crawl over to a crocodile with a bloody morsel of meat, in emulation of his apparently foolish, irresponsible father.

From the clips I observed on TV, young master Irwin was being held away from the crocodile, and presumably, could not observe his father's croc feeding technique, and therefore, could not learn from it. His father also waddled him towards a pond like a helpless rubber doll, his feet apparently never touching the ground, but Steve Irwin ensured that crowd and the camera were able to see him place the child in mortal peril. They were little feet.....the kind that might have just been a tasty little munch for an opportunistic predator, such as Mr. Irwin says that crocs are.

Why did Mr. Irwin choose to "teach" his son those valuable survival techniques in front of people who had bought tickets with MONEY, and in front of a film crew which was filming the spectacle for his show, which earns him MONEY???

In the beginning, I said that this has been a good experience for the world...............it shows us all that the United States does not have all of the idiots. Australia has at least one WORLD CLASS IDIOT itself. The rest of you countries have your own share of Irwinesque idiots too, and one by one, they will carve a place for themselve in the world press, and you will be embarassed and ashamed too.

Mr. Irwin said in paraphrase, that he was "sickened and disgusted at being compared to Michael Jackson. Most of us would be too, but most of us have cared for and nurtured our children, and didn't use them as props for media stunts, to boost our ratings.

Shame on you Mr. Irwin. I never liked your fatuous, self-serving show before......it's worse than "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo"., which I always thought was the worst TV show ever. (Ever see the episode where Skippy flew a helicopter?) Your mistreatment of your child, and your subsequent mealy-mouthed, transparent lies have ensured that I will NOT EVER watch any of your rubbish again.

As for the comparison to Michael Jackson.......which do YOU think is worse? Sleeping with 12 year old boys, or subjecting an 11 month old baby to dangerous predator which by its own instinct, will be compelled to kill the infant by drowning it and then eating it??

diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Tuesday, January 06, 2004 107340832742354970 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107340832742354970 1.5.2004 Good morning Amy,

I'm writing this now, so that it will seem "new" to you tomorrow morning.....if you can even read this.
Today is a big day for you.
No matter which way it turns out..........I will always love you.

Love,

Bub diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Monday, January 05, 2004 107336802015235739 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107336802015235739 Good evening Amy/Aime. I don't know which spelling is current, but either means "you"
I love you.

Stay warm....it looks like it's going to be below zero tonight. Next time you see national weather, look to the left, a little above the Mexican border........it usually 74 and sunny in San Diego

Love,

Bub diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Monday, January 05, 2004 107335371817428943 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107335371817428943

NOTICE THE FULL-BODY WETSUIT!!

Laura and I had a lazy weekend.........putting away all of the Christmas decorations and picking pine needles out of the carpet. I put the Christmas tree on top of the Jeep, and we drove up to the Mt. Soledad Christmas tree recycling center. It smelled like a heavenly pine forest instead of a place where used and unloved Christmas trees are dumped and later ground into sawdust.

I confess that as I prepared to heave our tree on the stack, I thanked it for its beauty, and for the pleasure it had brought into our lives. Then I laid it gently on the stack of its hapless brethren, rather than heaving it. I think that The Great Spirit is infusing me!!

The view from Mt. Soledad is spectacular! A 360 degree view of San Diego, the Pacific ocean, the valley in which Miramar Air Base is located(Top Gun was filmed there), the coastline to the North and South, and the mountains to the East. Hot air balloons drifted down the coast in groups of 3, and parasailers and hang gliders were drifting over Torrey Pines.

It was also damned cold!!! A steady 15-20 knot wind had been cooled by its passage over the cold Pacific, and made it uncomfortable to stay outside for very long. After a year, I'm starting to show signs of having learned that California gets COLD in the winter, and that all of the Beach Boys songs, and all of the Annette Funicello beach movies, were talking about a narrow window of beach comfort which only exists during the SUMMER!. The songs and the movies gave the impression that it was warm and sunny and "surfy" all year long.

People from the Midwest, and from Eastern states believe that myth too. On Saturday, Laura and I took a walk along the cliffs above the ocean. I spotted a car from IL, and looked around to see if I could guess which people had driven out here to escape the brutal cold of their chilly state. It didn't take long to pick them out of the many people who were on the cliff. Everyone, including us, was dressed in sweaters, jackets, long pants, and some even had gloves and wool caps. Everyone except them. They were dressed for a Beach Boys song!

Alone, as if in quarantine, the family of five sat huddled, shivering on the lawn at the very edge of a cliff. They were having a wonderful picnic in th esun, by the ocean, in one of the most beautiful spots in the world. That must have been what they thought when they began their trip that day.

In reality, it was a family of five, all wearing shorts, short sleeve button-up-the-front Hawaiian shirts, and sandals. They were huddled together, shivering, trying to have fun. One of the children, a little girl of about 10, had wrapped some very ugly pea-green thing around her legs, and a boy about 8 had wrapped his legs with a few pages of a discarded newspaper. The father, a graying, nearly bald guy was trying to keep the family's spirits high as they shuddered in the cold and ate their foil-wrapped sandwiches. Even the seagulls, the California version of ants at a picnic, left them alone. It was too windy and too cold even for the seagulls, who, on any ordinary bad day, would fight a tiger for a piece of a potato chip. Laura and I watched them from our seat on a nearby bench.

"Why would they come here dressed like that?" she asked. "Because", I replied, "because they're from Illinois, and they thought it would be warm here." "If we were to ask them, they probably have their swimming suits in the car". She chuckled. "Do people back there REALLY think that the water in California is that warm in the Winter??" Ruefully, remembering my own SHOCK the first time I entered the ocean in La Jolla, I said "Yes, a lot of them do". The difference was that I had made my entrance into the water in the dead of Summer, when it was "warm". It was not even nearly warm. Not since Pleistocene days, or before, has the water off the shores of California been warm.

I used to hate swimming in Lake Michigan in the Summer because I thought that it was so cold that only polar bears and ice fishermen could be happy in it. My fingers would turn blue, and I would begin to shake and shiver........preludes to hypothermia. I loved the Gulf of Mexico, and all of the Caribbean, because the water is so pleasant to swim in. Swimming in Lake Michigan, I thought, was another curse of life in the freezing, mosquito-infested Northern Flatlands. When I was driving to California, I had visions of me running recklessly into the warm surf, like those teenagers always did in the beach movies of the sixties.

I only ran recklessly into the surf one time after I got here. The effect of that icy water was to jolt my entire system of homeostasis into profound shock, and I'm sure that my body thought it had just died.

Since then, we've gone swimming, and every time I do, I silently denounce as liars and charlatans, the Beach Boys, Annette Funicello, Jan and Dean, Frankie Avalon, and all of the other people who contributed to the myth that California beaches are warm and sunny all year. Even as I made my first "Hollywood run" into the surf, I had known and had observed that ALL of the surfers wore wetsuits. Since I believed the Beach Boys so completely.........I assumed that wearing a wetsuit was some new California youth fad that I was unaware of, sort of the modern version of Huarache sandals.. The effect of that first instant of contact with the icy Pacific was the same or worse than when you take a shower and someone turns on the hot water in all of the rooms with sinks, and all of the toilets in the house are flushed at the same time. You are left standing naked in a cold stream of water from which you can not get away fast enough! In an instant, you formulate a plan to save yourself..........usually to turn the shower head away from you and smash yourself into a corner of the shower where the water can't hit you directly, but the damage has been done!

It must be like childbirth for an Eskimo baby in the days of old............happy, content, and surrounded by pleasantly warm water one moment, and then violently pushed into a freezing cold environment from which there seems no escape. For the nascent Eskimo, there is no escape. For you, racing to evade the icy stream, the only recourse you have is to loudly berate the bastards who did this to you....the ones who took your hot water away. In my case, as soon as I hit the water, I tried levitation, and tried to fight all of Newton's laws as I sought to instantly reverse my forward motion into the freezing brine and rise above it, back to the warmth of a towel and my clothes. In that same millisecond, I also cursed the above-mentioned celebrities who had lied to me through their songs and their movies.

Getting back to the folks from Illinois, the father's milky white legs were turning blue, and his balding pate no longer had its rosy glow......it had turned gray. They were trying bravely to have a "Beach Party" picnic, without the surfboards, the tan boys and girls, the exciting surfing music, and most importantly, without their goosedown jackets and gloves. These poor people had driven 2,000 to live in a myth. They were shivering, shuddering, and shaking. They finished their food and left so quickly that we didn't see them leave..........we only saw that they were gone.
diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Monday, January 05, 2004 107333917009244821 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107333917009244821 1.4.2004
La Jolla from the balcony next door........ diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Sunday, January 04, 2004 10732748085410675 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#10732748085410675
This little guy had the best manners of any seagull I've ever seen!!! (more pics of him to come)


The letter from your mother's lawyer says that the idea to change your name...........is yours, and that you've wanted to do that since the divorce. I do not believe that. I trust you, I trust your judgement, and I trust the strength of the relationship we had (and I'm optimistic that we still have a relationship despite the problems your mother and I have had).


Love,


Bub
diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Sunday, January 04, 2004 107325867040275521 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107325867040275521
Taken yesterday while on a walk...........


Hi Amester,

I wanted you to see what it's like in La Jolla in early January. Don't be fooled by the notion that we Midwesterners have about the "Warm California sun" (and water). The water you see in this picture is about 56 degrees.............it's like Lake MIchigan except that it's salty, has waves, and has sharks. Laura thinks it's funny that I REALLY expected the water to be warm!

have to go now and drop of the Christmas tree for recycling.

I love you


Bub diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Sunday, January 04, 2004 107324811601217303 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107324811601217303 1.3.2004

Dear daughter,

Because I don't ever hear from you, I never know what you're thinking about. I don't know what your mother has been doing to you mentally, psychologically, emotionally...........(are all of those the same thing?). I know that she hates me, and that she used to resent you, and was scornful of you unless you won "First Place" at something. She has made it impossible for us to communicate, but as you can tell from this blog, I've never stopped trying to tell you that I love you.

I'll write a little more later. I'm going to the ocean to watch the big waves....there's another storm coming in from the Pacific.

I Love you


Bub diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Saturday, January 03, 2004 107314839658724622 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107314839658724622 1.2.2004 *
*
*
*
*
*

Don't know who you're talking to. I know that I love you

*
*
*
*
*
* diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Friday, January 02, 2004 107309380470083813 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107309380470083813 Dear Any,


This was on the little Christmas tree you gave me about 3 years ago.

You caught hell from your mother for caring about me then................you gave me the tree, and a little white Kodak "beanie baby". It was all you could afford, and those things, and the tag, are still items I treasure. I treasure the love that you had for me then. Have you remembered who read stories and books to you each night, and who saved your grade school artwork?? I still have quite a bit of it, but when she "cleaned me out of the house", she threw a lot of your things away.

I'm still trying to survive.....I don't need to impress anyone, and the only dream I have is to be happily reunited with you. I just want to be your father.

That's all for now.....I'm going to take a long walk on the beach. I want this to be about my love for you, and not anything negative.


I love you Amy!

Bub diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Friday, January 02, 2004 107308639391783874 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107308639391783874 1.1.2004





Happy New Year Sweet daughter!
(There should NEVER be a "U" or a "K" in Amy Elizabeth Ward)

Love,

Bub




diego santiago diego 2seaward@san.rr.com Thursday, January 01, 2004 107294129446635760 2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html http://bubdaddy.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_01_bubdaddy_archive.html#107294129446635760 Buy GhostSurf Pro Buy GhostSurf Pro