Category: Blog Post

What is it with the things we save, the oddball items we somehow treasure?

1970. Miami Central High School. My senior year. My favorite teacher was my English teacher, Mrs. Barbara Jean Turner. She was a brand new teacher, one of the best, and actually only about five or six years older than I was then! Yes, she was hot. Unfortunately, that was back in the day when teachers didn’t have sex with students. I missed out on that.

Anyway, my secret student organization, KELOP, tried our best to tease certain teachers. We once carried her desk out into the hallway one morning before class. She walked in that morning calm and cool and without even looking up told me and my friends to drag her desk back inside. Very cool.

I was responsible for counterfeit library passes. Mrs. Turner caught me with one, and proceeded to write a note on the back. As was my plan! I knew she would do that, and sign it too, so I would have an excellent signature to copy! Unfortunately, she was very sharp, and did not sign her name, just wrote “me”. LOL

Yeah, this is the fake library pass.

My senior year was one of the happiest of my life. I was a senior! I was driving a 1960 green Plymouth Valiant. Stick shift. Slant Six engine. Roll down windows. Regular gas was .31 cents a gallon. I had a part time job so was earning my own spending money.

I found this fake library pass in a shoe box of other miscellaneous memories.  Photographs, ribbons we would wear to support the high school football team, other notes and things. I’m not even sure where my high school diploma is, but I know where that counterfeit library pass is!

Mrs. Turner is now in her mid seventies. But in my mind’s eye, she is still 24 and gorgeous. Always will be.

I received an “A” in the class, by the way.

 

-Dart

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What if your automobile mechanic operated like medical care? Hmm…I am imagining several possible situations….

Mechanic: Sir, your battery is weak. So we duct taped a second battery to the outside of your front fender and ran wires to your engine.

Customer: What? Can’t you fix the battery?

Mechanic: No, this is our best option.

Mechanic: Sir, your radiator is leaking coolant. We have jury rigged a second radiator to capture the leaking coolant. You will have to drive with your hood half way open from now on.

Customer: Wait, can’t you patch the leaking radiator? Seal the leak?

Mechanic: No, not possible.

Mechanic: Sir, your left front tire has a tiny hole that is leaking air. We’ve attached a device to receive the air from the tire and then recycle it back to the same tire in order to maintain proper air pressure.

Customer: Can’t you patch that tiny hole in the tire?

Mechanic: No, not possible, sorry.

 

But this is what happens in the medical profession more times than I can list. The industry seems intent on treatment, not cures. Remember the March of Dimes? A non-profit organization dedicated to stopping polio. They were successful and almost vanished. They eventually found a different cause, preventing birth defects. But all the other gigantic non-profit health care organizations learned their lesson. Treatment. No cures.

Doctor: Your pancreas is not producing sufficient insulin, so you have diabetes. You need to inject sharp pointed needles with artificial insulin into your body several times a day to prevent eventual death.

Patient: What? Can’t you figure out why the pancreas isn’t producing enough insulin and fix it?

Doctor: Why the hell  would we do that? Do you know how gigantic the diabetes treatment market is? We wouldn’t make any money if we did something stupid like that

Doctor: You have high blood pressure. You need to take these three prescriptions the rest of your life. Be careful of the side effects, especially if you notice a third arm growing out of your side.

Patient: Doc, can you discover what is causing the high blood pressure and cure that?

Doctor: We don’t like using the word “cure”. We prefer the word “Treatment”.

 

Thankfully, my automobile mechanic successfully cures my automobile problems. I wish our medical system did!

Dart

 

 

 

 

 

Who are we? What is our personality? What is our core identity?

I’ve been thinking again. Always a risk with me. For whatever reason, I am always striving to decrease my faults and increase my better qualities. I grew up poor with loving but alcoholic parents, with my father dying when I was eight. I had speech issues, stuttering and stammering along with many other issues. So, improving was always on my mind. In my senior years I have learned that so many of the characteristics I possess, both good and bad, are not of my own choosing. Of course, no one, to my knowledge, asked me before I got here what characteristics I wanted to have during this brief journey on Planet Earth. In a way, that made me feel a little better, knowing most of my faults are not my doing. The more I thought about the many factors that influence who I am today, the more I realized that the real me, my pure mind or soul or what have you, the core piece of energy that is pure me, is very, very small. Almost everything, every characteristics from my anxiety to my humor, to my fears to my loves, everything is influence by a host of factors I had no choice in, I wonder if I may be entitled to compensation? Is there a lawyer in the house?

I have composed a list of influences. I want to emphasize that there are things that influence who we are. Not necessarily  determine who we are. I believe that our souls do possess free will, so we can choose to change our characteristics. We can choose to reduce certain qualities and enhance better ones. We can overcome fears caused by our childhood, prejudices caused by our culture or time period we are born into. We can decide who we want to be. But, when you see the list below, you will realize we have a huge task.

Anyway, this is all speculation on my part. Yes, there are good websites about what influences our core identity.  This is my list, which is just speculation on my part and probably not even complete.

• Animal Body: Let’s be real. Whatever life force we are, we are walking this earth inside raw animal bodies. We are not animals, but our bodies are. Our animal bodies are hard coded with programming to encourage us to survive, no matter what. To eat, sleep, procreate, defend ourselves or our territory. Fight or flight. This is one of the biggest influences over our core identity.
• ERA: The era you are born in. Differences between 875 AD, 300 BC or 2023 AD, etc. One cannot help but to be influenced by the science, religion, civilization, and culture of the era of time you are born in.
• Generation: The generation you are a part of. The Silent Generation:Born 1928-1945, Baby Boomers: Born 1946-1964, Gen X: Born 1965-1980, Millennials: Born 1981-1996, Gen Z: Born 1997-2012, Gen Alpha: Born early 2010s-2025. In America especially, society and culture was different during each of these periods. Technology was different, religion was different, culture and society is different in different generational periods. These influence us to a certain degree.
• Country: The country you are born and raised in and it’s society and culture.
• Religion: Whether or not you are raised in a religion or not.
• Gender: Your gender, Male or Female, has a strong influence on who you are.
• Genetics and DNA: Some characteristics are inherited.
• Race: Race influences you to certain degree.
• Physical Health: Dealing with a disease, disability, being physically strong versus not, size, height, weight, these things can influence who you are.
• Mental Health: Everything from mental illness, learning disorders, raw intelligence (IQ) to numerous other minor mental issues.
• Parents: The parental situation you were raised in. Two parents, one, adopted, abused, etc. How you were raised.
• Family: Siblings, extended family, etc.
• Economics: The financial situation you are raised in. Poverty, hunger, wealth, etc.

Again, remember the key word, influence, not determine. We do have free will and we should be striving to be true to our core self. Once you find it.

Dart

For twenty-five years I drove the same route to and from work, a 12.4 mile distance that often took about 45 minutes but at times could take over two hours.  The route included surface streets, turnpikes and interstates and traveled through several different neighborhoods.  The neighborhood driving patterns varied depending upon the people and culture of the neighborhood. South Florida is a pocket community, with different groups of people collecting into their own little pockets. I traveled through a senior citizen neighborhood, as well as Cuban, Haitian, Jewish, African American and many more. Each driving pattern in the area was different based on the culture of the area.

Learning to adjust my driving pattern as I entered a specific neighborhood was entertaining at first. But after awhile, I became very bored.  I have always enjoyed photography, so I started carrying a small digital camera. It would fit in the palm of my hand and had a decent optical zoom. So, on the way to work and on the way home, I would photograph things along the way that captured my eye. Often it would be human faces amidst the chrome, glass and metal of the traffic snaking its way slowly down the highway. Sometimes it was interesting debris.

Below is just a very small sample of what I captured over the years.  I am working on collecting all of my photographs into a large project. Not sure if it will be a giant canvas with all the images, or a large photo book, or something else.

 

And to answer all of my work colleague’s question, no, I never got into an accident while photographing things out my window. Usually because in most cases I was in standing still traffic!

I even wrote a poem about this:

Traffic faces
By Dart Humeston

traffic faces keep me
in the races
keeps me driving to work
every day
I-95 and other highways
same old same old
day after day

but snippets of faces caught
amiss the chrome, steel and rubber
sparkle my drive, lighten the miles

traffic faces 
keeps me going

 

Dart

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