Notes on religious indoctrination and the clinging to childhood beliefs

The Question of the existence of God and our immature beliefs that persist

These notes refer to my own upbringing as a Catholic. My experience is all I can write about and no one else’s.

As I matured my understanding of all things changed and still continues to change with education both formal and self actuated, with development of relationships and with experience in the world.

Can I safely say that most of what I learned as a child got proven wrong or turned topsy-turvy? I’m not sure. I know that many things have changed as a result of my maturation. Sometimes beliefs have grown even deeper and fuller with maturation. Other times fully rejected and replaced by other understanding. In the complete life of a human being, one who is thoughtful, who has imagination to absorb and process information and compare and contrast it to whatever was there before is able to synthesize it into a world view (weltanschauung). Pieces of previous views may fall away while others deepen as I’ve just said. However, the brain can’t maintain thoughts in the manner of say computerized transactional processing, where one can look at one transaction and see it replaced by another transaction and so on. If transaction records are kept properly then you can see transaction A, transaction B etc. And even if combined A & B will = C, you can still examine the first two and see the difference. Given this example the brain doesn’t do that. The brain can only comprehend and process Transaction C. It no longer cares about the two that preceded it.

But what happens if we don’t understand where Transaction C arises and evolves? This is where my critical notes regarding religion and belief of any kind actually comes about. As a child I was taught early about God. Religious training must begin early. I still recall being taught to bless myself by my Mother’s Mother who was Catholic. “In the name of the Father and of the Son (that’s me) and I’m afraid of the Holy Ghost.” I would say, kidding around with Grandmother who was always amused by my antics except when I pissed her off. She’d laugh and tell my Mother who did not think along the same lines.

What was happening to me at the age of three or four was an introduction to God as the Father (all seeing all powerful all knowing being as far as I was concerned in my dealings with my father who was male role model and final authority on everything). I was also being introduced to Jesus Christ, the son, who I identified with immediately because I was the son. And also I learned about the Holy Spirit or Ghost, that mysterious invisible force that I was frightened of especially when it was dark. I had an image of this white spooky presence that would intentionally scare me.

Of course what could be my understanding? Did I know what it meant? I don’t believe so. At the time I only thought I did. I can’t see transaction A. Because I was innocent of any kind of ideology it was clear to my innocent mind. Yet theologians can’t explain the three persons in God that Catholics believe in. They would fall upon the sword of mysticism if forced for an explanation. They would claim these are matters which can not be explained rationally only felt, only seen with the eye of religious fervor. And they would further claim God loves you. He would not trick you into some falsehood. Only Satan would trick you into believing something that wasn’t and manipulate you into a false thing to worship.

If one has a questioning mind, if one likes to take things apart to see how they work, if one only believes what one hears and sees this concept, three persons in God, creates a problem as the brain matures. Say we started out as fully formed adults with all concomitant experiences we would easily dismiss this doctrine as we do advertisement (in most cases). But they get us early. And they make it part of us. And we are frightened. The transactions which process into the final transactions can’t be seen. That early training worms its way in. We say our prayers as a child because we were told to. In that moment we discover comfort at first because God is listening to us (and 7 billion others in hundreds of languages I might add) We believe as children that all will be right. We are comfortable. We confess our sins with the same relief because we were told to. And these little bits like tiny atoms and molecules cling to other thoughts with maturation and we look for relief and comfort in what amounts to not prayer but a form of meditation. Yet this we don’t know unless of course we examine what we are doing. But minds that do not evolve with deeper thoughts still believe in those childhood prayers. It is a superior brainwashing system for children.

And once brainwashed we carry it into our adult way of thinking but that teaching when we were between ages of 3 and 8 doesn’t change. It can’t. It’s comfortable. It’s easy. It’s relief. That’s why we go there. But if we ever doubt we’ll still cling to it because it is part of our bodies . It’s a piece of our brain we can’t cut out because we don’t know where it is in the final transaction. It is an inherent part of our body, our existence our childhood, our love of the people who formed us. That is the life of a Catholic.

If I had been born a Jew this would all be different. Jews have a different kind of connection to religious belief. It is tied in with everything cultural and racial among Jews. It is the DNA of their being. There can be no such thing as a lapsed Jew only a secular Jew, but Jewish all the same. A Christian can lapse because it is not part of the DNA. But because it is not, it is a far more frightening a thing to lose. This sounds contradictory. But that is the crux. The belief in Catholic Orthodoxy is tenuous mainly because it is an intellectual pursuit, a psychological pursuit, a forced belief and if we lose it there is nothing. And “Nothing is greater than God.” (Read that any way you would like.)

Notes on abortion and the insanity of Religion

The religious man or woman, say of the Christian fundamentalist persuasion (Catholics too) is deathly opposed to abortion because he or she believes that permitting or sanctioning such a thing for any human female is detrimental to his or her eternal soul. The soul is eternal according to this Christian belief. It is eternal and can not be destroyed. It immutable, it is the constant in the life and afterlife of all humanity. Belief has nothing to do with its existence because whether there is belief or not the soul exists. Consider this constant the same as physicists since Max Planck have postulated that the speed of light is constant and can not be exceeded.

Christianity teaches, and whether this was put forth by Jesus Christ himself I could not say, perhaps through the teachings of Saul/St. Paul, the Roman police agent who was actually a pharisee responsible for arresting people and placing them in a situation where they could get the death penalty for heresy or apostasy. The world according to Saul/Paul, police agent, is chaotic, mutable (unlike the soul) pitiless and painful but the after life is a place to be counted upon to be the opposite of the world. Death is the gatekeeper to that better world but to fuck up that afterlife by sinning mortally in the earthly world eliminating your chances for a wonderful afterlife you have forfeited for all eternity your soul’s opportunity to be with God.

Murder is such a sin that will send your soul for eternity to a place that is even worse than your life on earth. It has been described as hell. Many authors have described this place. This sin of murder is very simple. It is ending the life of another human prematurely through violence of some kind. Christians believe abortion is a violent ending of a life prematurely.

Thus, anyone sanctioning this violent end, even if not present but declaring that such an end is allowed through legal means is considered the same mortal sin. And anyone assisting in said abortion is considered to having commited this mortal sin. Just voicing ascension of abortion is a mortal sin. Even acquiesing is the same as being guilty. Think accessory to the crime.

This is the insanity of religion.

The democratic slide into Totalitarianism

Democracies are joining all other societies in their slide towards totalitarianism. There are only democratic, authoritarian and dictatorship societies. Monarchical society is a vestigial leftover from the past, bound in some cases by tradition, and can have some form of power within those who are ruled or have complete control. Saudi Arabia is good example of a monarchical society as is the UK. But they are very different. The UK has a parliament that makes laws. Saudi Arabia has an advisory council but is an absolute monarchy. Most of the other societies declare that they are in fact democracies and the people are taught that they are and support their leaders. The United States and North Korea are examples of “democracy” and “dictatorship.” Yet the difference between the two are some variable degree. North Korea calls itself “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” Russia today is a good example of an “authoritarian” society though it too calls itself democratic. It claims to be the Russian Federation. The people who are not engaged in the government believe they have “freedom.” Governmental operatives know differently. Freedom is a very difficult word to define in terms of governments.

But what is meant by democracy? Our democratic societies are not ancient Athenian style democracy from which the concept is derived. It is believed that democracies today operate by the rules of law whether those laws are made by decree within representative government or through precedent in courts. The U.S. has laws from both. And in addition it is through the will of the people who are governed that these laws are agreed upon through election of representatives who will make those laws. Democracies are self-supporting and self-governing. Democracies require co-operation of all citizens. So much for the ideal. The reality is something else and the deck is stacked.

The ideal can not face what is reality. We are slowly developing a closed society. A few years back it was discovered that all citizens in the U.S. were being spied upon by it’s own government 24/7 in our technological utopia which it has become. Some rules were instituted to ameliorate this problem but there is no knowing how much of that has changed. It would be best to call the United States a technological utopia instead of a democracy because technology is believed to be the panacea that will move the U.S. forward and make it thrive.

Technology itself is not destructive. But utilized to allow some to have power over the many it destroys. There is a belief that each day brings a new “us’ a new “we the people.” But instead through technology we have become passive, regressive and reactive not proactive. Instead of a community of citizens willing to work together and assist each other where each individual can contribute something, we are becoming fractured, existing in our small ever shrinking withdrawn worlds. We are small groups in this technological utopian world where we only look for like-minded beings. Where we want to be liked for whatever we do. Where we want only agreement. Conflict of any kind is dealt with hostility. Rumors drive our belief system. History ends each night we go to sleep.

Thus fractured we look for the individual who will lead us from this morass we have fallen into. And when found that individual is given the power to tell us what to do, what to believe, what to think, which group is important who is on the outs. Those who are not recognized and are on the outs become scapegoats and are demonized. When they resist they are ostracized, imprisoned or killed. Our weak resistances these days are inspired and run by celebrity. And when the heat comes who do you think will disappear?

Think of the U.S. today. The U.S. has the kind of society where you are not constantly questioned for every move that is made. There are many things wrong with the United States but you still can exist without having to “show your papers” all of the time. (Though that might be limited by the browness of your skin). But for the most part, theoretically, if you decide to get into your car and drive to the store to buy some milk no matter what the hour of the day it is and the store is open no one is interested in knowing why. But U.S. society is becoming more fractured. And a fractured society needs a strong leader to pull the fractures together.

Why is this? We have no unified principle anymore. We used to be defined by class, values, family, religion, skills and strength of character. Class divisions of course are not a great way to exist but class divides could be broached. Today though we are defined by race, gender, celebrity, popularity, technology and perverted interpretations of religious belief and still in many ways, class. And so many of these things could lead to hostile conflict. Shame doesn’t matter anymore. Anger takes precedence over all. Patience is not a virtue. It is thought of being taken advantage of. Every belief is challenged by some opposing belief. This is particularly destructive in the realm of politics where even proven scientific fact seems to have some “alternative fact” that can challenge a fact. And above all it’s wealth not class that defines us specifically. The wealthier we are the more important we are no matter what kind of boorish individual we are. Only the wealthy make the rules that turn into laws that govern us. They control the levers of politics in this country. And those laws get subsumed as the new values that we believe we should have.

Values are usually thought of as family, spiritual and secular beliefs, education, growth, recreation and friends. These are still talked of in today’s technological utopia. Except the definitions of those words have changed to have meanings that support the technological utopia and our drift towards totalitarianism. Is there no way out of the morass we call the United States of America? It remains to be seen.

God and Religion

I am an atheist or at least I believe myself to be. But for certain I ascribe to no religion. And I put no stock in a deity to have anything to do with me. I was baptized a Roman catholic, was an altar boy, thought about becoming a priest and then reached the age of puberty and as George Carlin was known to say, “I was a Catholic until I reached the age of reason.” So that's who I am. Still this short essay is about God, the supreme deity that people of all faiths believe and I suppose I can even as an atheist make a defense for God. John Lennon said, “God is concept by which we measure our pain.” Perhaps. I believe that God is a manifestation of the imagination. But is that wrong? Must we cut away our imagination? Remove God and you stunt a portion of human imagination throughout the world because many people certainly the great majority are believers. You remove God and a whole realm of ideas, beliefs, aspirations and inspirations disappear.

Yes there is the question of morality that is derived within the structures set up within the various forms of God worship. But that is a question to be taken up at another time. What this belief is has to do with self-consciousness, an arisen consciousness an awareness of the self in relation to the other as well as the positing of the human in the universe and the belief that something perfect can exist borne out of imagination, a collective imagination if you will. The rules within religion, starting with the dictates of morality have somehow perverted this perfect entity of our imagination. The perversion is when religious dictums turn God into a voice, a creator, a giver of laws, an eternal justice definer, a damner. After all these matters are from the “imagination” of those who choose to take the power from the imagination of those who are not so devious and only wish to believe in the perfection beyond reality. These are the people who create a religion who demand that we follow their rules, their beliefs and serve in fact their needs while claiming they receive their beliefs from a higher power, God.

Should perfection be worshipped? Perhaps this is where we can find the crux of the problem of religion. One religion can never say the name of God. It is written g-d. Another religion claims three persons (three entities) exist in one God. Another requires a medium not to be worshipped but this medium's visage can never be shown, creating a need for one's imagination like the God he demonstrates he knows though this medium existed as a person. And then there are the laws written down by scribes and interpreted by anyone who aspires to do so, cutting off the head so to speak of each individual's imagination.

Religions are political forces designed to cause fractures in society for the benefit of some as if to prove that humans on their own with no designs of wanting to rule others and wanting to live and survive as nature intended are incapable of anything but destruction, error, falseness and deceit and only by worshiping a certain formula for accessing this imaginitve perfect being can their perceived enemies be defeated while the sins of the worshipper acting to defeat can be forgiven. What the appeal is can only be guessed at. Perhaps it is when engaging in destructive acts against others. Because guilt can be an unbearable force and it can not be expiated by any means other than lying to oneself or the lie in and of itself.

Because it all didn't begin last week

The year I turned 30 was 1974.This was a year when I was starting Graduate school. My political activities were winding down. Vietnam was clearly lost by then in any case. So in fact it was sort of a victory, right?  But my political cohorts and I were also wandering around (and lost) what do we do next? I chose graduate school. For my birthday one of my close friends, Bob, an English lecturer on the verge of getting his phD gave me a copy of the Iliad translated by Richard Lattimore. Bob wrote on the cover page. "Because it all didn't begin in the 20th century. Happy Birthday, Bob."

What did he mean by that? What he was reminding me was that with my penchant for Hemingway and Fitzgerald as well other early 20th century writers that there was far more to understanding the human race than a few American writers who defined the Lost Generation. Even if their political stances, I'll say Dos Passos and Steinbeck and some others who fit my own political thoughts.  When I thought about it he was right. Most of what I had taken in College, outside of a Shakespeare course and 17&18th Century English drama was focused on the 20th century, including philosophy classes which only examined Existentialism.  

What a barbarian I must have seemed? Or was I? At least I was looking at historic matters which affected the current situation. I was spanning at a minimum fifty years. 

But what about today? We have a generation growing up before our eyes who will be taking over the world pretty soon but whose attention span is ruled by video games, streaming services and their handheld devices. So many strike me as not stupid or dumb or even all that ignorant just not cognizant of that which may have happened before last week. So kids pay attention and just remember and repeat this as a mantra to yourself-- "Because it all didn't begin last week."         

Selma I don't know why I never wrote this up or posted it before but this is what happened the night of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, March 7th 1965

Listening to Congressman John Lewis on a repeat of the Colbert Report one June morning in 2012, reminded me of an incident that I participated in. Lewis has just written about the first march across the bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, AKA “Bloody Sunday.” ("Across that Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change"). I was home on weekend liberty from the Navy. I paid attention to the news and absorbed what had happened, but in those days I never knew how to argue anything or express myself very clearly. However, I had paid attention to the civil rights movement from the days of the freedom riders. Though I held the standard view among ignorant, white suburban teenagers at the time, I think there was an element of curiosity that I harbored and a sense of courage that I may have perceived but couldn’t give voice to, certainly never to my Irish friends and hardly to my family.

But first just a note about my family: Racial epithets were not something that was said very much at home. Maybe sometimes they were but there wasn’t a litany of racism. My parents had friends who were not all white and Catholic. My Mother in particular had a black friend from work and she brought her home for dinner once to our white, suburban neighborhood. That was in the mid 1950's. I was about 11 years old and very nervous about meeting her. No doubt she must have been nervous and probably worse scared. My father, who generally kept silent about such things, actually about most things, had Jewish band mates that he traveled and hung around with. His hero beyond sports heroes was Benny Goodman and he also had an uncle who eloped with a black woman. His best friend growing up was a Cuban who I was named after even though the first born son should be named after his grandfather. Both parents were FDR, Kennedy type democrats and members of unions. My grandmother, my Mother’s Mother, who I was very close to and lived with us tended to be the one who uttered the most racist comments though she spoke fluent Yiddish and was friends with the Jewish elderly woman next door and they played bingo together.

We lived in a fairly liberal school district even though it was a Republican run town and most teachers expressed what we would call today “liberal” views. As working class people, though, my parents didn't exactly fit the mold of Ozzie and Harriet, the Cleavers or any other TV family. As a child I was probably fearful of the "otherness" of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Asians, Jews but I don't recall having ill will or hatred towards any others because they were different from me. In the 1950’s there were a lot of public service announcements. I recall animated cartoons about race and religion and how we should treat everyone as equals. While sitting there watching TV and not really paying full attention it still sunk in. For example I still remember this ditty:

“Don’t be a schmo, Joe.
Be in the know, Joe.
Religion and race just don’t count in this place!
So don’t be a schmo, Joe.
Be in the know, Joe.
Remember that and you won’t fall on your face!”

Yet the first time I recall feeling simpatico for real (or some kind of human feeling of recognition) with a black person was when I was on a train trip returning from Hollywood, FL and going to NY in the summer of 1960. I encountered segregation the whole time we traveled south and back and especially I remember the segregated bathrooms and water fountains at a stopover in Jacksonville and recall feeling very odd about it at the time, that there was something really weird. That this was what I had seen on TV or had heard about in social studies, but here it was for real. I was 15. There were also all those small ramshackle buildings that I saw from the train as we passed. Barely fifteen feet or so from the passing train you could see dozens of small black children poorly dressed in rags playing or milling about in the dust though some would wave at the train. And there were the chain gangs just about everywhere working highways when my uncle drove us around south Florida. Most prisoners were black.

On one leg of the return trip from Florida, the only vacant seat that I could find for part of the trip was next to an elderly black woman. There didn't seem to be segregated seating areas on the train. I was extremely anxious about sitting next to a black person. Plus I was sure everyone else who was white was looking at me. My father just ushered me over to the seat. The lady looked very old, older than my Sicilian grandparents who were pretty old at the time. But for the first time I could see the face of a black person who reminded me of my Sicilian grandmother, only darker. She had a lined, crinkly face and tired eyes that were more golden than brown, short knotted gray hair and she looked up at me without a smile or any kind of acknowledgement and seemed to sigh and then looked away out of the window. She wore an old washed out printed house dress and some kind of worn out looking shoes, and she hugged a small satchel to her breast. She was very small as her feet hardly touched the floor of the train. I'm not the type to talk to strangers even to this day and so I sat there quietly trying to read a magazine that I had though I couldn't concentrate and I was fascinated by this tiny woman and I kept stealing glances at her the whole time she was on the train. It probably was from that time on that I realized that there was just one human race and that everyone deserved to be treated as such.

Today I marvel at the thought of that woman. Why was she on the train? Was she traveling alone? Where was she going? Obviously she had lived through the worst excesses of Jim Crow and was probably a descendant of a slave once removed. Did I frighten her as a white person, a hulking white pimply faced white teenager? If only I could have had a conversation with her, would I have been automatically enlightened? Still whatever the facts are of my life these days and how it evolved to the world view that I possess, it all probably started to change at that encounter when I recognized that "the other" was exactly the same as me and mine.

So back to that weekend in March-- That Sunday evening's news that I watched in a Blarney Stone (or maybe it was "Smiths") or one of those types of bars at the time across the street from Port Authority was filled with TV reports from Selma and showed clips of the fighting and the police brutality. And those clips were shown a few times. Every time they were shown the drunks at the bar, the white drunks would hoot and yell epithets not at the police but at the marchers. And since there were a couple of hours yet for me to get on the bus, I drank and drank by myself and I eventually got pretty drunk, but was still able to walk. I got on one of the buses that were reserved for servicemen, mainly sailors. I knew no one on the bus. Usually I traveled with sailors from my ship who lived in NY but this time I was solo. We left Port Authority and headed into the Lincoln tunnel. I guess the Selma story and what I saw on TV haunted me, and in my drunken state I got up and started making a speech.

What I said I don't really remember. Truth is I remember none of the events as they were told to me when I was finally sober, but it was purportedly a drunken rambling speech about how we are all brothers and whatnot. And as I looked around I saw a black sailor and I singled him out and cried to the heavens that he is just like us. The black sailor tried to shrink away, obviously not wanting the attention. There were shouts of anger at me but I didn't care. Right in the middle of the Lincoln tunnel, it was around midnight after all, the bus driver halted the bus, got out of his seat, grabbed hold of me and made the sailor sitting in the first seat get up and change seats with me. He told me to shut up and sleep it off which I guess I did. I awoke to daylight as we stopped at Little Creek, VA to let the bulk of us off. A sailor said to me as were getting off. "You know you almost caused a riot last night." And then he proceeded to tell me what I did and what transpired as I didn't recall any of it.

Today as I reflect on his words; "You know you almost caused a riot last night," I wish I had. 

The Summer of my discontent

When I was graduated from high school June of 1962, the next day my father insisted that I start looking for work.  It's not that I hadn't worked. Since I was 11 years old, the last six years of my life, I had a job of some kind. I delivered newspapers, I worked in a drug store as an abused helper, (that's another story) I caddied at the public golf course, I cut lawns in the summer and shoveled walks in winter for my neighbors for cash and there were the occasional truck unloading jobs and the times I worked for Mr. L and put the Sunday papers together for him every weekend. And one time I got a three day job with the Clyde Beatty Cole circus when it set up in town.  In between all that I had to mow my own lawn, shovel my own walks and clean the basement and take care of the dogs & feed the cats.  The work he wanted me to do though was to get a full time job and he wanted me to turn over half my wages for room and board.  I guess he was trying to teach me something. My own desire though was to just get drunk or high with my friends. And weekends I'd do that.

I did get a full time job that summer.  I worked for a diminutive man, named Helmut Hoffman, in a small shop in an East Farmingdale, L.I. industrial park, where he made industrial sized cameras to order.  My job was to assist Ray his assistant repairing the wooden film slides used by professional studio photographers. I guess I was an assistant's assistant.  The company "Hoffman Camera" was one of two firms that repaired them. His was the only one on the  East coast.  Mainly my job was to do the grunt work. I unloaded trucks, swept the shop, cleaned up the scraps of wood and metal, dump  the trash and anything Hoffman said I had to do.  Sometimes he had me doing repetitive work, drilling holes in the small pieces of wood that made up the frames of the slides and also cutting slots in them with a table saw. Even with the noise though I could hear Hoffman's radio blasting out some talk show. I can't remember who it was, but it must have been early talk radio.  My job paid $1.15/ hr. After taxes I got about $32.00 a week. Ray, the assistant, married with 2 kids and paying for a car made $1.50 an hour.

Hoffman was a very disagreeable individual.  His thick German accent was sometimes hard to understand.  And if you didn't respond fast enough he'd give you a kick in the shin or a slap in the back of the head. Usually it was more than a love tap. The hours were 9 to 5:30.  Lunch was a half hour but if you didn't bring lunch there was a truck that came around selling sandwiches and coffee.  But that was too expensive so I always brought lunch.  The only way I could get to work was by taxi. That cost a dollar a day in the morning. At night I'd walk home about 3 miles. But a dollar day meant 5 dollars a week.  I argued that if I turned over half my salary every week that would leave me with $11. Finally my father agreed to only take $10.00 which left me with about $17.00. Enough to get high on. 

So we got a half hour for lunch. And Hoffman allowed us 15 minutes each half a day to go to the toilet and to do nothing. I'd go outside and smoke cigarettes one after the other.  Ray did too and we'd talk about our dislike of the work. The toilet was incredibly filthy and I was glad I never had to sit on it plus there wasn't toilet paper. Hoffman went to the toilet whenever he liked and he took toilet paper with him. 

After I had been there about two weeks Hoffman took me aside outside and said in his German accent: --I see you take the full half hour for lunch every day. I would like you to end your lunch 5 minutes sooner so that you can  reacquaint yourself with the shop and your work.  He turned on his heel and told me to follow him inside.  As I crossed the thresh hold, I see a ball peen hammer sitting on top of a 55 gallon drum.  My fantasy has me picking up the hammer and driving it into the back of his skull.  Fortunately I knew better.

One day Hoffman has to drive to NYC and says he won't be back and gives Ray the keys to close up and gives us our checks.  It's already around 1 PM on a Friday.  So I go back to work on the table saw cutting grooves in the small pieces of wood. After a half hour or so.  Ray stops and signals me to turn off the machine.  He says, let's go into town and buy some wine. We buy a cheap bottle of Gallo red and some potato chips, go back to the shop and fuck off, smoke cigarettes, laugh and carry on and turn on Hoffman's radio to listen to rock n roll.  Both of us tipsy now or worse we decide to finish up our work as quitting time is at 5:30 and it should look like we did some work. I go back to the saw and start cutting grooves. I'm not being careful and as I push one of the pieces of wood through, it flies away and my right index and middle finger hit the blade. Deep cuts, blood flies everywhere. I yell to Ray.  He runs over with a dirty rag and covers my hand.  He drives me to the hospital on Hempstead Turnpike not far from my house.  And there I wait at emergency for awhile bleeding all over the floor.

I'm out of work two weeks. I'm out of money.  I return. It's impossible to use my right hand to do anything. It hurts even with the self-medication. Hoffman is not happy with me, but I make up a story claiming that because there was no guard, no way of using an implement to push through the wood on the saw's blade that it is his fault and that I now have  a workman's comp case. He gives me light duty. He expects me to just keep things cleaned up. By the end of the week I inform him that I am quitting. In my 2 week's hiatus I got another job but it wasn't going to start until after the summer.  This time the job is at Republic aviation at $2.16/hr. They made F-105's.  (And that's another story) Later that year before I go in the Navy I decide to not go through with the Workman's Comp case even though the lawyer my father got says I could get money. As much as I hated Hoffman, I didn't think that any of it was his fault but only mine and the fact that I had been drinking.