Take the Cannoli

This appeared as part of a short article about the Okinawa Hash House Harriers in the current issue of On On, the History Magazine of the Hash House Harriers, published by friend and fellow hashman Robert “Shakesprick” Pateman. With a writeup like this (click the image to enlarge), how can we not give On On a plug? You can subscribe, as well as view the catalog of back issues, here.

Will add to this little bio that while with the Okinawa HHH I was also elected grandmaster, and it was during that time I began to collect contact information for sister clubs in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand. I’d print off contacts to share with Okinawa hashers planning trips to those countries, because traveling hashers love to hash wherever they are. Keeping and updating hash club contacts led, a few years later, to the Half-Mind Catalog, the first international hashing website, still going strong under the stewardship of another old hashing friend, Ra.

Speaking of hashing and hashers, 8YS (for “Ate Yellow Snow”) and Blowup Doll dropped by for a visit this week. Please to ignore the selfie stick … I tried cropping it but like the original better.

Donna made us a beautiful lunch (cannoli for dessert yet!) and we spent the afternoon on the patio catching up with one another. Bruce and Tamara, to call them by their mortal names, live in the beautiful southwestern Colorado mountain town of Ouray. I’ve stayed over with them on motorcycle trips, and back in the day Donna and I hashed with them, once at a invitational meet in Winter Park, Colorado, and I think before they moved to Ouray in Long Beach, California.

The friends who visited a few weeks back, Gopher and Pigs in Spaaace, are also hashers, as are most of our friends these days, even though Donna and I haven’t hashed in years. We still have a few Air Force friends, but hashers outnumber them by a big margin.

Lately I’ve avoided addressing the elephant in our room, our live-in chronically unemployed manic-depressive alcoholic 48-year-old daughter. She lasted about a week at Walmart, then pretended to go to work for another, driving off in the morning and spending her days who knows where. We knew she’d lost or quit yet another job when she started bitching about co-workers and supervisors at home, always the tell with her.

Donna was to have dragged her to a state welfare agency today to see if there’s a mental counseling program she qualifies for (we’ve paid for counseling in the past but can no longer afford to), but she ran off yesterday and never came home, which we think is her way of saying no thanks. We’re worried, depressed, desperate … I know we’re not the only parents with a middle-aged child living at home, but sometimes it feels as if we are. Please excuse the whining. And the oversharing.

Also depressed — and furious — over what’s happening to a dear friend, 61 years old and sacked by the defense contractor she’s been with for for 23 years, almost certainly because they can pay a new hire less than someone with her seniority, not to mention skipping out on providing the retirement package she paid into all those years.

This is so common. We all know people who’ve been let go just short of retirement. At-will employment, they call it, meaning at the employer’s will, not the employee’s, one of the uglier aspects of capitalism. I think there should be some kind of enforcable law to prevent large companies from doing this, and failing that an expansion of Social Security to cover people involuntarily put in this situation. Who’s going to hire a 61-year-old, no matter her qualifications and experience? What is she supposed to do now?

Sometimes I’m tempted to start hashing again, just so I can get drunk and stop thinking, for a little while at least, about just who exactly is benefiting from what they keep telling us is a booming economy.

Stay fresh, cheese bags!