Bram
I'm here because I don't see a better option to be honest. You can't possibly understand what it is to be in your 70s if you're even in your 40s or 50s let alone 20s or 30s. Obviously everything depends on so many factors. In some ways I'm stronger than I was when I was 20. I don't how many chinups I could do then but not as many as a couple days ago (I did 10 after not sleeping for probably 45 hours and some deadlifts.) Nobody I knew was doing chin-ups from elementary school through high school. If I was training for chin-ups as an 18 year old, I’m sure I would have been better.
About 6 years ago, I thought of moving to Costa Rica. The head of the surf club here said “Don’t. Stay here.” He was right. I went to Costa Rica 8 years ago. A successful surf teacher in his 30s told me that he had to rent an apartment in the capital San Jose for a month when his wife got pregnant. To get to Santa Teresa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Teresa,_Costa_Rica in an emergency might take longer than a day. There were no decent hospitals any closer than the 93 miles to the capital. Driving directly then seemed impossible through swamps. I doubt they built a good road. Why. The local government of Santa Teresa and I assume all of Costa Rica is so corrupt it is impossible to fathom when you are from the USA which has a legal system although from what I read it’s more and more corrupt. How do you get there. I paid 50 bucks for a 45 minute cab ride (forget about the bus which almost never runs if you want to catch your plane) over absolutely dreadful roads to get to a tiny airport and get into a small plane that held maybe 9 people where we were stuffed like sardines to fly 45 minutes to the capital to take a cab to a dumpy hotel near the airport. There are places in the capital where you get killed really fast so you better know where you are. I didn’t have time for sight seeing so I stayed overnight at the airport.
Unless you go to Costa Rica you can’t believe what it’s like. Food in Santa Teresa is very expensive. I spent 28 dollars a day, never ate out, never bought meat, lived on canned tuna, yogurt, fruits and vegetables. The town had the worst narrow asphalt roads I have ever seen that were paved. I had a knee injury and there were no sidewalks just sloped dirt with rocks. I could walk but not very well. To describe how crazy it seemed is impossible right now. All terrain vehicles (ATVs) with surfboards sticking out the sides could take up almost the whole road. Drivers were terrible and I didn’t want to get run over so I had to limp along. I’m laughing now but I never surfed (I got injured after my flight to the USA and assumed I would get better but didn’t. Eventually I had meniscus surgery on that knee which healed pretty well.) I did boogie board a couple of times. Once there was absolutely no one in the water. About 2 minutes later guys on surfboards are aiming for me and I left. It’s all very funny now and was sometimes then but I could never live there at my age. I might need to get to a hospital in an emergency and I was probably 30 years older than everybody. I didn’t go to the one night club. The only way to possibly make a comparison you could understand is Would you go to a high school dance now with teenagers at your current age? It would probably seem absurd. That was my reality.
I was told a 3 hour bus ride up the coast, to a retirement place for people my age with sidewalks etc. was called Tamarindo. The Costa Ricans called it Tamagringo. I said fuck it. I’ll stay here. Even if my knee doesn’t heal, I like talking to people a lot younger than me (they aren’t friends) than most people my age who I consider fossils, especially retirees looking for a nice lifestyle that I rebelled against about 50 years ago. Think of who you were as a teenager compared to who you are now and you might get a better comparison of what I’m talking about.
The jungle canopy over that road in Santa Teresa, the surf town, had been cut down some years before, and I was lucky I came at the end of the tourist season because there are terrible dust storms for months because of its destruction. I would have had terrible allergy attacks. One guy, probably from Australia, said he had been there for 26 years with 8 of them with no electricity, and he missed those days. I don’t use air conditioning here where I live not far from the beach. It gets into the high 80s and unfortunately this summer in the 90s some days with absolutely dreadful air quality that made it impossible for me to breathe. In Costa Rica I had to use air conditioning because of the heat and the humidity as it was probably May. I assume if I was about 25 I wouldn’t have needed a/c but I don’t know for sure because I wasn’t there then.
I talked to a lot of people there. Very unfortunately rich foreigners buy up property increasing the prices so that eventually the locals won’t be able to live there. I told one young really nice Costa Rican surfer (the only one in the water that day because it was over 8 feet and most surfers are too afraid apparently to go) that you shouldn’t even let me be there. I was joking around, but there should be a limit on foreign home and property ownership for the benefit of the locals.
The young Costa Ricans I met in that town are beautiful people. I would stop them and have conversations in English for a few minutes because I don’t know Spanish. They opened their hearts to me, frankly because I’m not like most other tourists there. I was so much older I probably seemed like a complete freak. It’s such a different culture than what I know America to be. Santa Teresa is crazy. Yoga studios, health food stores, organic restaurants, and God knows what else, all for relatively rich foreigners aged 20-40 I would guess. The Costa Rican locals were making so little money it actually hurts me to think about it. Life is unfair but why is the road so rotten when the taxes on food etc. is so high. A really nice Italian couple who owned an apartment hotel I stayed in said the local government officials steal almost all the tax money so the road never even gets repaved and is made with the worst asphalt to start with.
To be blunt I don’t like what the USA has become at least in 2015 the last time I was there. It’s a stupid statement because I was only in the midwest for about 2 weeks in the city I grew up in and Miami Beach. I hate to say this but what I saw is that money is the most important value for way too many people. Bram, I’m not talking about you or anybody here, but in general.
Here’s a crazy example. Before traveling internationally I had to call my 2 credit card companies to give them my exact itinerary. I was supposed to fly from here to New Jersey to Utah for a few days to Palo Alto for a week to LA and then to Costa Rica. I really fucked up and didn’t realize that I was injuring my knee before the flight and did a bunch of stupid shit before (not exercise related) and did something really dumb in the Newark airport that I won’t describe and my right knee was in agony by the time I got my luggage. It became almost impossible for me to walk for about five hours with one shoe off. I’m trying to remember how badly I was hobbling around. About 5 hours later I realized there was no way I was flying anywhere so I got a motel room near the airport.
I had to call the credit card companies to notify them I had changed my itinerary. One company said fine. The other said we have to know someone with your last name. I have a bunch of relatives by that name that don’t know me who I last saw in 1955. Obviously they couldn’t vouch for me. The credit card company reps basically said fuck you. You can’t use the card.
But the motherfuckers charge usurious interest if you pay even a day late and from what I know if you go bankrupt the credit card companies never let you go. Pay Pay Pay forever as the interest just keeps piling up.
I tried to pay about a week later and believe it or not the reps wouldn’t let me. I thought they were joking but they weren’t and I said “I’m going to a very dangerous part of Central America where there’s guerrilla warfare and I could get killed.” They basically said fuck you. We won’t accept your payment and we can’t even verify where you’re calling from. This actually happened believe it or not. I was in complete disbelief. I called my bank in that midwestern city and the rep said the credit card reps had to be lying because he could verify where I was calling from. About a week later I called the same bastard company in the middle of the night and talked to a really nice lady from Kansas City and told her the story. She actually accepted my payment and said the story didn’t shock her at all.
I have so many other crazy other disturbing stories about my time in the USA then. I couldn’t drive a car because of my knee for a number of weeks and took cabs. The nicest drivers by far were foreigners. I feel like crying because a lot of America seems so fuckin selfish, and one African guy told me he flew to LA and the cab driver who took him from the airport from that same African country who he didn’t know said to him, “You’re not going to a hotel. You’re staying with me.”
Another African guy let me use his phone in the Newark airport because I didn’t realize I had to get an international plan from Israel. My old phone could switch from the Israeli system to the American one (they have different frequencies) and the new one didn’t. He told me I have family living in my house for five years in that African country who pay me nothing. He wasn’t upset. He told me, If we’re not in the world to help each other, what are we here for?” I didn’t experience that at all in America. Maybe you do Bram and the other guys here also, but here is an example that still blows my mind.
I thought I needed knee surgery and could somehow at least rent a room in an apartment complex of one cousin who I known since childhood who had allowed me to do so numerous times before. I flew to my hometown and everything with me is a super long story. I’ll spare you all the details except to say I couldn’t buy a cheap phone in the airport to use in the USA and took a cab to a place I’d never been. Went to the Walmart and got a tracfone only to find out I couldn’t set it up there. What happened. I got a shopping cart and put my duffle bag and whatever I had in it and looked like a homeless person as I shuffled to a restaurant a few hundred yards away where I was told would have wifi. It was really cold out and I was sitting outside on a bench freezing my ass off. I very nicely asked a few people if I could use their phone for a minute to call one of my relatives. I didn’t look like a bum but they looked at me like I was from the moon and walked away. Eventually the restaurant opened and a very nice young black waitress actually helped me to get on the wifi where I was able to set up the tracfone so that it worked. What I understood then was that an awful lot of people would be unable to do so unless they had enough experience with the internet and a lot of people my age are just fuckin clueless. I was lucky that I knew enough about computers and the internet (I had been a programmer) to do so. This waitress wanted to go to med school and I gave her some helpful advice.
I needed to get a cab to get my knee checked out at the hospital. I call the cab company and the dispatcher says do you want a text message sent to you. I’m in utter disbelief. I told him I’d be waiting on the bench outside the restaurant and he needed to know the exact address which I thought was weird. It was in a major shopping plaza. I hadn’t taken a cab in my hometown maybe ever. There were no numbers on the restaurant so I went back inside the restaurant and got the physical number address and the dispatcher said again do you want a text message. I still couldn’t believe it. I said “I’m sitting on the bench outside the restaurant. How could the cab driver not see me? Why do you even need to know the numbers?” Idiot lenny thought the shopping complex was so large any cab driver from my hometown would know it. Anyhow the cab driver never showed up and the whole scenario starts over and I learn the dispatcher isn’t from my town but from Utah. I tell him “You know what’ll happen next year. You’ll be replaced by a dispatcher from India who will be replaced by a computer.” I got a cab and got to the hospital, paid some money with a traveller’s check and Thank God not with a credit card because they’d have hounded me forever. I no longer have those credit cards anyhow.
Dig this once I pay. I get to a metal detector with a fat 50 something woman in a uniform with a gun in her holster and I’m in another culture shock. I ask “Do people bring guns in here?” She answers in the affirmative and I’m think why don’t they get a tough 20 something ex-marine. I’m so fuckin stupid that such ex-marine is more expensive than fat 50 something who’d get her brains blown out in a second and a half at most by any punk with a pistol who’d already have killed the people I paid and whatever security I didn’t see when I walked in.
I ask once I finally reach the place where my knee is to get checked out about cost. Idiot lenny thinks he’ll get an orthopedic doctor but no - it’s a physician’s assistant (guess why - he’s a fuck of a lot cheaper and maybe even a fuck of a lot smarter than some idiot orthopedic doctors. How do I know? Some absolute dumb fucks from my high school are doctors.) I ask how much will this cost because I had traveller’s health insurance. Person at desk calls the accounting department or whoever handles the bills and I learn nobody fuckin knows. That’s nice. I call Israel to find out how much traveller’s insurance will cover and nobody fuckin knows. I decided fuck it. Let the guy do some tests which I later learn are the total wrong tests to determine if I have a meniscus tear. You guys think this is a total fabrication but it’s true. So what does that say about the American medical system and this is supposedly one of the best hospitals in the world for cardiac arrests.
Anyhow I somehow manage to get another cab to a house of the sister of my oldest friend from high school (the guy who fell on his head a few months ago) where he is going to be that evening. Cab driver tells me that the cost of a college education in some crappy local city college and probably worse law school is 350,000 dollars. I start thinking am I in the Twilight Zone or have I gone completely mad. He reiterates that’s the price. In the good ole days when I was in high school, tuition at that college was probably a few hundred bucks a quarter and most people lived at home so let’s say it was 4,000 dollars for four years. Maybe the law school was twice as much. I’m not adjusting for inflation which might up it to maybe 25,000 bucks.
A couple days later a college aged guy in a health food store says higher education is just an ATM machine and you can guess who is paying and who is taking the money for what I call brainwash education. Don’t rebel kids like I did. You just might not get a house in the suburbs with your beautiful wife and Life Underwater by the Talking Heads.
I tell said young guy, “You are all on Facebook. You don’t have to go out in the streets and protest like we did in the 60s and get your heads busted and tear gassed. Get one parent to represent you for the House of Representatives on one issue. Lower the fuckin tuition. Young guy looks at me as if I’m from the moon.” Later a friend who is now dying of some rare blood cancer says, “It probably costs that much for college and law school at those jerkwater so called schools of higher education. He goes on to say, “The kids who were then millennials don’t rebel.” I still think this is absolutely fuckin stupid. How much time would it take to get maybe 30 parents elected to the House of Representatives on that one issue and probably tuition gets lowered. I talk to a few young people about going on Facebook and I get the exact same result. I’m from the moon. Finally a young guy in Miami Beach who is maybe from some Spanish speaking country actually understands what the fuck I’m talking about.
I could go on forever with these crazy stories. It turns out that I can’t stay with any of my numerous relatives who I have known for 60 years and can not even rent the room in the apartment complex so I stay on the floor of my oldest friend. Because I did a lot of strength training and knew enough Feldenkrais I could get up from said floor without much difficulty on one leg and two hands and swing my self up to standing. I have forgotten how but could probably do it if I had to.
One thing I’ll never forget is a conversation I have with my friend who is on disability and lives in assisted living on 900 or so bucks a month. He has been into so called spiritual groups forever and has worked as a telemarketer, baker, cab driver and God knows what else and has never saved a cent. He has a BA in political science and without his sister he’d have died long ago. He tells me it cost 9,000 bucks to get disability and he used his cousins law firm who made him pay the full cost. Again idiot lenny wonders what world he is and says, “Why didn’t they do it for free?” Friend blows up at me. How dare I make such a suggestion after he has basically given his life away for a bunch of leeches who he has taught meditation and spiritual walks to for nothin’ and admits they screw him every day until he is too old to go on and the group he really helped for decades won’t even pay for him to go to the teacher’s camp one summer when he is living out of his car. He told me I didn’t realize I needed a home and he’s never done acid and doesn’t smoke dope. Who is the crazy one. Who is the dope? Him or Idiot lenny?
My one relative who actually returns my numerous calls including to one who stayed with me in Jerusalem where I teach him how to squat properly with some light weight which he probably never does again. He’s in his 40s and jogs so he’s not in such bad shape never fuckin returns any of my numerous calls until weeks later when I’m no longer in my hometown with a brief email, “How was your knee surgery (Motherfucker - my addition).
The one cousin who does call and lives in a huge house with just him and his wife who apparently he is enslaved to and says, “Stay in a motel not far from me where my brother stays when he’s in town.” Again I can’t believe what the fuck world is this? Why should his brother have to pay for a motel when these fuckers have not exactly a mansion but about five bedrooms, 3 floors, a billiard table in the basement, a small pond in the back. I’m almost choking on laughter. Said cousin invites me for lunch a couple days later. I’m at a store buying the friend I stayed with a flat screen TV. I feel like I should get him something for letting me stay there. Cousin calls and says you’re disinvited. He can’t give me lunch. I’m roaring in laughter as I write this. I don’t glorify 3rd world people but the ones I meet have some values that are a lot more human and will keep the human race a fuck of a lot longer that what I see in the USA.
To top it off I’m in a health food store some days later and see a young beautiful woman all covered in white obviously from some Middle Eastern country with her very aged father in the check out line behind me. I turn around and say “I live in Israel and you can’t believe how badly we want peace.” She looks at me in total sincerity and says, “God Bless you.” Outside the store I see one of my co-religionists all dressed in black so he’s obviously an orthodox Jew. It’s a major Jewish holiday and I wish him something in Hebrew that he should enjoy it. Honestly it’s a little bit flippant but I mean it. I’m not dressed in black and he doesn’t even reply. What am I supposed to believe about the USA I see.?I don’t want to go back.
It’s impossible for you to know what it's like to be from a generation that had so much idealism like mine when we were closing campuses. All of France went on strike in the spring of 1968 when we closed the Columbia University campus over a number of issues - the Vietnam war being a main reason.
I really believed we'd change the world for the better. I was very anti-war then and still see it as a last resort but if we don’t kill every Hamas terrorist we are all dead because they will just get new ones in Gaza and we will probably all die anyhow the way we’re going. Most of my generation long ago sold out all their ideals. I get it that people need a home, food, health care clothes, but what I read about a lot of Americans my generation who want to cut all social spending except for their own health care and social security sickens me. Think about the young. When we were young we were taken care of by our elders. You motherfuckers don’t give a shit about the young generation. It’s not everybody but it’s way too fuckin many.
As far as flattening cities being evil I agree and disagree. It depends. Dropping the atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima ended the war really fast. Would it have been worth the death of an estimated 30-50,000 American soldiers to invade and bomb cities and probably killing as many as those who died in those cities that got nuked. The Japanese knew what was potentially coming. They could have surrendered. America was conducting above ground nuclear bombing tests in the Pacific. The Japanese knew. They thought dumb Americans would be willing to lose a lot more soldiers. President Truman said fuck you to the Japanese who the Chinese still hate for raping their women during the war. Very very unfortunately a lot of people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima died but they didn’t have to. The Japanese culture was changed by America after the war. I read about it a book called Made In Japan
by the former head of Sony where he details a lot of changes in Japanese culture among them a very minuscule military, a constitution, the emperor being a figurehead, labor laws etc.. Japan could no longer be a threat to the world militarily.
Bram if you had a son who would be sent to fight in some foreign war like World War II that had gone on for 4 years in which hundreds of thousands of young Americans who had died and the options were - lose another 30-50,000 Americans and possibly your son to do an enormous amount of destruction or flatten a city that would probably kill as many people as an invasion what would you choose? America purposely stayed out of the war until Japan chose to attack Pearl Harbor thinking Americans wouldn’t fight back. President Roosevelt was willing to let Germany take over all of Europe and Great Britain until then.
As far as Israel I’d rather flatten all of Gaza than let my krav maga teacher and a lot of young guys die fighting. Watch this video and tell me what you think.
The fuckin Palestinians reject every chance they have to make peace including taking 99.9 percent of what they claim to want. They want us all dead period. I’m not saying all of them but there is no Palestinian peace movement. So watch this and tell me what you think.
If you can’t watch the whole 4:20 then start at 2:33
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty5GFIo ... sAustralia
Also watch this about moderate Moslems and their peace movement. It's 5 years old but there aint one here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z_RAbOJ ... l=Indicrat
Tell me what you think. I may not be on here for weeks so take your time.
I’m not putting you down. I hate the idea of war but like I said it’s a last resort. Hamas killed a lot of people brutally, burnt babies alive, raped women etc.. They’re monsters. If I could waive a magic wand and bring peace and end war I would. I learned the hard way. If you want something work your ass off for it. My generation in America didn't or couldn't or wouldn't do it. I left America for Israel 45 years ago, thought about moving back numerous times and finally gave up one weekend about seven years ago. I don't regret it. I had an uncle who said about my ailing father. "Life is tough all over.
Everybody has to die." Like Jim Morrison of the Doors said No one here gets out alive. I don't know how long I have left but i sure had a good time writing all this.
As far as getting over my virus idiot lenny did a completely fuckin stupid workout for a lot of reasons I won’t begin to describe and now has the flu. It’s probably for the best. I gotta stop workouts for probably 5 days and hope to recover finally after a few months of self inflicted viruses.
Goodbye originally meant God be with Ye so over and out from your friend
Mr Idiot lenny
