A Very Military Halloween

After leaving college I ended up joining the Army for almost eight years and seeing the world, at least a good part of it. I can only remember two times in that period dressing up in a costume for Halloween and one of them doesn't really count. Both were while I was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The one that didn't count was at work, we were allowed to dress in costume and a friend and I went as movers which was our part time job. All we did was put on the company shirt and wear our jeans so really we cheated, but hey, still counts.

The other time was completely unplanned. My friend Adam and the girl that he wanted to be his girlfriend and I were hanging out. It's been over fifteen years and sadly I no longer remember her name so for the sake of the story we'll call her Lisa. Our other friends had gone out of town and we were hanging out at Lisa's apartment but were bored. They came upon the idea of going down to Georgetown and hitting a few bars but wanted to do it in costume. Personally I would have been just as happy going home and watching a movie but I gave in to them and their adventurous plans. It had to be more fun than sitting at home by myself, right? Adam was able to put together a sort of swashbuckler/pirate costume with a red shirt, black pants and a sash. It worked. Lisa already had a costume that she had worn before and it was basically a warrior but the best way to describe it is as a female Conan The Barbarian.

That left me and I had nothing, including the desire to dress up. I had long ago outgrown the police officer costume from my college days so we were left grasping at straws as to what I could be. Just when I thought I wouldn't have to dress in one Adam had a brilliant idea. We drove into the post and since Adam worked as an operating room tech he snuck in and grabbed a pair of scrubs for me. When we got back to her apartment Lisa broke out the red paint and we covered the front of the scrubs in it. My costume was now set, I was to be a not very good doctor.

We made the drive to Georgetown and found a less expensive parking place and started our pub crawl.If you've never been there before let me tell you it was a sight to behold. Almost every adult was in a costume and most of them were quite bizarre. The one that stands out for me to this day was the guy dressed in an adult diaper with a bonnet and a giant baby bottle and nothing more. I don't know how he could stand it in the cold weather but I guess he was well lubricated by the end of the night. The rest of our night consisted of me being the third wheel as Adam and Lisa groped, kissed and flirted with each other. As I said before Adam wanted her to be his girlfriend but while Lisa was fine with occasionally being intimate with him, she also didn't want to be constricted by a relationship. This drove Adam crazy.

He should have realized that it wasn't meant to be and moved on but the heart wants what it wants, no matter how wrong it is for you. Needless to say their situation didn't hold up well and Adam finally understood that it wasn't very healthy for him so he moved on. I left the Army on terminal leave about six months later and only got to see him once more. That was when I came back after I was officially out, to get my final check from the Army. Adam was on a different path then and like most people in the military, once you move on you rarely ever see them again. After this I only recall dressing up for Halloween once more but I don't know if I'll tell that story yet. Now I get to take my son out trick or treating and let him experience it all for himself. I just hope that he doesn't lose the joy of it for a long time.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

And You Shall Know Them By Their Fruits....

October 21st passed by rather quietly. You may ask what the significance of that date is. I only ask that you please indulge me and it will all be clear. Harold Camping is a preacher who predicted that on May 21st of this year the rapture would occur and that on October 21st, after five months of plagues, fire, disease and war that the end of the world would come about. Camping had previously made the same prediction about the rapture in 1988 and 1994 but after the world continued as usual he went back to the drawing board and claimed that he had made a mathematical error when he determined the date. This time he swore that no such error could occur. His numbers were solid and there was absolutely zero chance that he was wrong.

Over the years despite his incorrect predictions Camping had attracted a large following and had even established Family Radio, a radio station that broadcasted to over one hundred and fifty markets. This of course was very prosperous for him. Many of his followers quit their jobs, sold their possessions and went abroad to spread the word of the coming end of the world. Only it didn't happen. Again. Some had even donated their money to the church although why it would need it if the world was ending soon was a question left unanswered. Camping was puzzled as to why the rapture had not occurred so he decided to study some more. When asked if the church would give back the donated money or help those who had gotten rid of everything he said "We're not at the end. Why would we return it?"

Two days later Camping announced that after reinterpreting his prophecy that a "spiritual" judgment had happened and that the physical rapture would now occur on October 21st simultaneously as the world would be destroyed. There was no definition of what the "spiritual" judgment had been and indeed nothing appeared to have changed. Since this had been at least three times he had made this prophecy and every time it did not come about Camping lost many of his followers. He had retired from his post at Family Radio five days before his next predicted date of October 21st but true to form, it also passed without notice. He has remained in seclusion ever since.

The thing that puzzles me is that his followers professed to be Christians. Yet even when he claimed to know the date of the end of humanity, which goes against what the scriptures say (no man shall know the time), they continued to believe him and what he said. Time after time. Indeed, until this last debacle his ministry kept growing. Many have called Camping a fraud, a charlatan or just a plain fake but I have a different name to consider for him. False Prophet, that is a person who makes claims not backed up the scriptures and lures others to his side. One that opens up Christians to mockery and ridicule (something they seem to be able to do quite well on their own) and makes a nice chunk of change doing it. Someone who claims to know what no man knows. Sounds like a false prophet to me.

Perhaps it's simply because people want to believe so badly that they are willing to let little things like details slip aside in favor of their desires. Or perhaps Camping was a clever, silver tongued speaker who was able to deceive them and separate them from their finances. Clearly there are a lot of problems in the world that many would like to escape from to a more loving and peaceful place where there won't be any pain and suffering. There have been false prophets before (anyone remember David Koresh?) and more shall come before it's all over. That is of course if you believe in God in some fashion or another. If you don't then you have probably been laughing derisively at this whole thing content and secure in your knowledge. Belief is a funny thing though.

Perhaps it's a good idea to actually read the source material so that when a false prophet does start preaching you can identify him or her for what they are. Then we could eliminate all of the messy problems that they bring forth. But then again, they wouldn't be worth their salt at the old False Prophet Club if they couldn't get a few people to believe them, could they? It's their job, it's what they do. And we just keep on believing what we believe, for better or worse.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

It's Been A Good Month For Song Lyrics

It's been quite a month for me as far as writing song lyrics. This one came to me last week and to be honest I haven't had time to go back and look at it to make changes. Still, why should this stop me from putting it up here? As usual most of my lyrics don't mean what they appear to mean, so what does this say about me? And in case you are wondering, no this isn't about my wife and our relationship, that's fine thank you.

Let Me Go

The tie around my neck
Doesn’t hold me to you
Like you wanted it to
It only ends up irritating me
Constantly at the back
Of my mind someplace
Always tugging at it
My heart can’t take this

The restless shake of my arm
Twitches me out of a dream
About me and you it seems
The end of time has come
Even separated by space
You find a way to invade me
I’m not sure what’s going on
Anymore or any less

If we wait for the perfect day
Some might look the other way
Do you believe it will ever come
One thing leads to another
Never finishing what we tried
To start over again and again
Better to stay inside and
Shake this feeling from my heart

Chorus:
Living with you day to day
Tell me there’s no other way
Keeping this pain inside me
Comes at too high a cost
It’s time to let me go
Let me go, let me go
It’s time to let me go


Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

Frat Life 101: A Very Different Costume Party

In the summer of 1986 I attended Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training for the Oklahoma National Guard which was not exactly my idea of the perfect way to spend a summer. There's something about spending the majority of your time outside marching, doing pushups and so forth that kind of ruins the day. Still, it was required in order for me to get my bonus check and I thought it would be best to get all of the training out of the way at once. I came back in the beginning of October and at the end of the month decided to go down to NSU and see all of my friends in Sig Tau right on time for a Halloween costume party. Once I got to Tahlequah I hung out with some friends and we started planning on what kind of costume I could cobble together on short notice.

The key was to use what was on hand, buying things to use for a one time occasion wasn't really an option. What we came up with was very simple, I hadn't shaved so we put on my black military trench coat and my military glasses that I had tinted black and decided I would be a terrorist. Our only research material on the subject was having seen action movies and their stereotypical versions of what terrorists looked and acted like. Still, it wasn't enough, something more was needed so we took some penny rolls and filled them with something (don't remember what) and then taped them together. That was my explosives. An old stereo microphone was added as my detonator and the costume was finished.

Well I walked in to the party and loudly informed everybody that I was seizing it until my demands were met and was immediately taken down and "disarmed" by a few of my friends. This was the first they had seen of me for about five months and most of them didn't know that I was even coming to the party so they were happy to see me. Most of them anyway. The rest of the night was a celebration of friendship for me but it also was the beginning of the end. I chose not to go back to college and in a few short months I moved back home to Ohio and then ended up joining the active Army because I really couldn't see any future for myself back there or anywhere else for that matter. I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life (some would say I still don't know) and the Army was a job, something that I could do for at least four years without thinking much about the future. My world was never the same.

This was twenty-five years ago and it shows how much our world has changed. Back then terrorism had not made it's way to our shores, it was an abstract concept to us. Sure it existed all over the world but it wasn't real to us because we had never experienced it, it had never touched our lives or anyone that we knew. For us it wasn't a big deal to dress as a terrorist, it was even considered funny, but a lot has changed over the years since then. We've had homegrown and foreign terrorist operations on our soil to deal with. The world wide web has shown us vividly how bad the rest of the world has had it. Now the very thought of wearing such a costume would be considered to be in bad taste. But back then it was a simpler time for us. There was no thought of how others would react to something that was only meant to be a joke, where no harm was ever intended. With the world we live in now I often long for those simpler days when my eyes had not been shown what we humans are capable of.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

Dealing With An Angry Son

My son was angry with me yesterday which is not unusual since he is four years old and most children at that age do not have a good grasp on controlling their emotions. Normally he forgets about those kinds of feelings as soon as his attention in turned somewhere else. In other words, if you distract him from what made him mad he forgets about it immediately. In this case however it was for something that I said to him and he held onto that feeling for quite a long piece of time.

As we were pulling out of our driveway my windows were down and we heard some people talking who were walking in the street. It's quite normal for our neighborhood as there are no sidewalks there. My son yelled out something to them, he feels that he is the people police and when he thinks something is wrong he is not afraid to voice his opinion. At such a young age it's hard for him to understand that not everybody will take what he says kindly, some people get angry and others might even take a more violent reaction. Plus it's just plain rude to say things when something doesn't concern you.

So in that moment, where I knew I wouldn't like it if some unknown person yelled out at me, I turned to him quickly and told him to shut up, following it up with saying that what they were doing was none of his business. That was the first time that I can remember ever saying that phrase to him. I try not to say it to anybody ever, something that was instilled in me from the time that I worked at a Boys & Girls Club. Yes, I know that there are some extremely rare times that you may need to say it but this was not one of those times.

Several minutes passed by and then I said something to him but I could tell he was not happy with me so I asked him if he was angry. He said he was and when I asked why he told me it was because I told him to shut up. I confessed that I should not have said it but also reminded him that he needed to watch what he said to other people. He wouldn't look at me and in a moment of anger I told him he needed to learn about these things and that I wasn't happy with him and that I was done talking. It was childish of me but I was frustrated and in a moment of weakness I let it out.

At the babysitters house he wouldn't look at me or say goodbye and on the drive to work it really bothered me. Yes he shouldn't have yelled anything but I shouldn't have said things the way I did either, After all, I am the adult here, the one who is supposed to have learned some things in life. When my wife called me later she said that he had told her what I had said and she said that I shouldn't let it bother me so much, that I was the one who was trying to teach him these lessons and sometimes he would get his feelings hurt. Like me, he is very sensitive.

After getting home my wife woke up and told me that he was still angry and had told her that he wanted her to sleep with him, not me, even though he knew he would be asleep long before I got home. She agreed with me that he would be over it by the next day. True to form, the next morning all was well between us even though he made it clear that he remembered what I had said. I just tried to let him know that he couldn't go around yelling things at strangers. In this world we have today you never can tell how someone will react and I just want him to be safe. Nobody ever said it would be easy to raise a child and it isn't. He's a good kid, very intelligent and very inquisitive and he loves to help. I just hope I can arm him with enough life lessons and common sense that he'll be prepared.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

Frat Life 101: The Costume Party

As Halloween fast approaches I am reminded of the handful of times that I have worn a costume on that day as an adult. This is the tale of one of those days. One thing to remember is that I am a person who has never felt comfortable in social settings, especially with large amounts of people, even more so when those people are consuming alcoholic beverages. I've never been one for celebrating holidays very much and also don't care for attending birthday parties or weddings and don't even get me started on funerals. To me they are all basically just another day and I feel they are only important because society has deemed that they are and now we are pressured to conform. Then I feel pressure to interact with people when I'd rather not. But I digress.

During my first semester in college as I was pledging Sigma Tau Gamma a female who was friends with a member of the fraternity invited that member and all other Sig Taus to a Halloween party that she was having. Even though it meant that I had to go to a party where I would not know the majority of the people (a terrifying thought to me) I agreed to go with some of my pledge brothers. Once that was decided the only issue was what costume to wear. Since I was a poor college student with little to no money my choices were limited and I needed to use some originality in devising what to wear.

Luckily for me while working my summer job before starting college I had "acquired" a few items from my employer that were not being used at that time. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, besides, I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired. Still, just to be safe I'm not naming where this job occurred. You see, the summer job was for a police department and among the items was a uniform or two and a few ticket books. Please remember that this was a different era and if someone tried to do something like this now they would be treated in a very different and more serious manner if caught. In my time however, it was still looked upon in a mostly innocent way. No serious harm was ever intended. It was just a young person having fun and being stupid all at the same time.

Originally I thought I would wear a pillow under my shirt and go as a fat, country police officer however that idea changed because I really didn't want to wear the pillow all night. Instead I just went as a police officer. I had a belt and nightstick that were loaned to me but did not have a badge or a gun, not even a toy one. To me it was clear that I was only wearing a costume, especially since in my mind's eye I looked nothing like what I thought a real police officer looked like. As I left my dorm room I saw another guy leaving his room from across the quad and as it happened we were going in the same direction. Later we became friends and he told me that he and his roommate had been smoking pot in their room and when he saw me he thought that someone had smelled the smoke and called the police and that he believed he was going to get arrested. That thought was cemented as fact in his paranoid brain as I followed him to the stairwell and down to the ground floor.

Once there however he slipped away to certain freedom and I stepped out the front door and stood there for a few moments taking in the night air. Several people were gathered there and most of them drifted away immediately and to those few that remained I nodded and said something like "What's up man?" They nodded back but were acting strange towards me, almost as if they were nervous. That's when it hit me, they thought that I really was a cop! Never mind the fact that the patch on the arm of the shirt was for a different city or that I really didn't look like a cop, they totally believed it. Armed with this knowledge I went over to my friends dorm room and gathered with the rest of the pledges who were going to the party.

When we arrived at the party I walked in the door and immediately saw multiple dirty looks being cast in my direction. You could almost see the thoughts that were forming, they were angry that a police officer had dared to come into the party surely only to hassle them and ruin their good time. That is until I stepped up to the keg and poured myself a beer. Then it was if a light went off for all of them and they thought "Oh right. It's Halloween. This is a costume party and that's his costume." After that all was well and the night was fairly uneventful until right before my friends and I left. We went outside and decided to start writing fake tickets and put them on all of the vehicles parked in the yard and on the street only instead of giving them real violations we made them all up. The violations that we came up with were for things like parking like an idiot or behaving like a moron.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) we were not there to see the looks on peoples faces as they stumbled out to their cars and went from believing that somehow they had been given a ticket to the uncertainty as they read what it was for. That would have been hilarious. Instead it was back to the dorms for us to sleep off whatever we had imbibed and to start a new day. We did these kinds of things as a joke back then but I can't help thinking what would happen today if someone in that position were caught how much trouble they would be in. More than likely they would be in front of a judge pretty fast for impersonating an officer, theft and whatever else they could be charged with. It makes me pretty glad I lived in that era where the motto seemed to be no harm, no foul. That's really what the intent was. It's strange to think of it as a more innocent time considering what we did.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

Frat Life 101: Care To Watch A Scary Movie Anyone?

It's that time of the year to think of scary things and a few nights ago at work somehow a few of us started talking about zombie movies which then led to further discussion on vampires and even werewolves. Although I do like a good zombie or vampire movie I've never really been a fan of horror movies per se. There is a distinction between the two. To me a horror movie is pretty much the same as a scary movie, the overall intended effect is to scare or terrify you. The same cannot be said of all zombie, vampire or werewolf movies though. Some can be funny, dramatic, intense, action packed or just so well made I don't mind if they're a little scary. Now if it's just a plain old slasher flick well, that's where I have to draw the line. I have seen some but really it's not my idea of a good time.

One of those times that I willingly watched a scary movie was in college. A favorite pastime in the fraternity was to gather in our run down, ramshackle house and watch, or should I say interact, with movies. We were doing Mystery Science Theater 3000 before we'd even heard of it. It was one our favorite activities, to sit around a room full of friends with all of the lights out bagging on whatever movie was on HBO that night. On one particular night the movie turned out to be A Nightmare On Elm Street. For it's time it was a very scary movie and right up to the end of it I thought I understood what it was about, it almost seemed to make sense in it's own way, until the very end that is. I was baffled and I will admit a bit scared.

Afterwards at around 2 a.m. a group of us were walking back to the dorms when I noticed something unusual. At that age men (or boys or whatever you wish to call us) have this macho attitude about not showing fear, especially to our friends. As we walked it became clear to me that as the group approached a corner almost everybody started to slow down just a little bit so that they were not the first one to come around the corner, myself included. Even in a large group (there were at least seven or eight of us) that little bit of fear that was preying on our individual minds manifested itself on the entire group, at least on a subconscious level. I would have laughed out loud if it weren't for the fact that I was busy concentrating on the shadows in an effort to make sure that nobody (or thing for that matter) was going to jump and kill all of us.

When something gets into your head like that it doesn't matter how hard you try to rationalize it, the truth doesn't matter. All you can do is wait for it do go away and for me that takes a lot of time which is why I don't like to watch movies like that in the first place. It's also why I have never and will never watch The Exorcist. The previews for it alone when I was young were so terrifying to me that to this day if I see it on a channel I will immediately close my eyes and change it to something, anything else. Well, we all reached our dorms and our rooms safely, with not a one of us lost in the effort and the next day we found ourselves at the house watching movies again, although I'm quite sure that most of us were more than happy to watch something different, like a nice safe comedy. Nobody ever got killed walking home from watching a comedy right?

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.