Chapter 44 The Palau Connection...

Last chapter was written a long time ago. I had left off saying that my former employer had turned down an offer to scam the Canadian Government of funds by setting up a sham company, an office front really, in order to get funds from the Canadian Government for bringing in technology into Canada. Of course the intent was to foster new companies and jobs, but there are always people who can game the system to line their own pockets.

I was on my honeymoon in the Cayman Islands when I was approached by two men trolling the bars looking for businesses to invest in such a scheme. I took the info back to my employers and partners and gave them the facts and they turned it down.

Ah...imagine my surprise when about five years later that they had changed their minds.  By then our association had parted ways under rancorous circumstances. I was employed in Houston, was living with a woman who had just opened an upscale bar in West Houston and we were building the business up. I was working for Schlumberger full time and about 20 hours a weekend at the bar.

I was sitting at the bar when I happened to hear two patrons talking about a prospectus they had received from a company and yada, yada, yada, it was a geo-microbial technology survey in Palau, a place I had done something similar five years earlier. I butted into their conversation and after dropping a few pertinent phrases and facts had their complete attention.

They were indeed discussing an offer from my previous employer to carry out surveys for petroleum in the very same area I had done five years earlier and had written a scathing cover letter to accompany my final report detailing how the project from start to finish had been one big scam designed to fleece any company who was stupid enough to think there was oil there.

My former employer is based in Ochelata, Ok. and it appeared as though they did open a Canadian subsidiary to bilk the Canuke government out of money. The oil company the men represented shall remain nameless. The two guys were nice enough to let me see the reports which they had out in their car. I showed them the reference to my original work in the bibliography of one of the project reports they were citing. It seems they had done another survey there on a volcanic atoll and they were pointing to the methane they detected as an indicator of possible gas and or oil. This was patently horseshit since the gas was thermogenic not biogenic. Long story short I filled them in on all the nefarious practices that the company carried out with respect to the data that they presented to their clients. Many were non-scientific such as manipulating the data and then passing it off as "raw" data to the clients. Then manipulating it again to process it. They also used shoddy practices in so far as they did not throw out obviously spurious data points that were detected by the laboratory methods put in place specifically to detect such anomalous data points.  This was primarily due to Doofus, the son and president, not knowing elementary statistics or laboratory methods. So he included spurious data points that completely threw off the final processed data.

At one time I tried to introduce some new methods by developing a data drop curve. We were sampling live organisms that we removed from their habitat. It is expected that they would begin to die once so removed, and that any delay from sampling to arrival at the lab to be processed would result in changes in the expected norm. I wanted to generate a decline curve for days since sampling, which would have been a simple thing. The father and originator of the technique torpedoed my efforts by deliberately not continuing my work along my established calendar, when I had been sent out into the field, so all the work done up till then on the same samples had to be thrown out.

I left the company shortly there after to go to law school and could not longer travel.

Well my two new friends were more than interested in hearing my comments about the business practices and lack of scruples of the company. They were impressed by my knowledge of the techniques being offered until I told them that I had done a lot of the developmental work while at Phillips over a six year period in research and development. I was also the chief geologist of the company while I worked for them, doing sales, project management, implementation, data analysis and client reporting and relations.  I knew the stuff cold and told the two men that I felt my former employer was misrepresenting what the technique could do and told them so.

I also let them know what they should ask and what the correct answers were and what they would be told instead.  They both agreed it was not something they were going to recommend to their bosses that they get involved with.

In 2018 I do not know how the company is doing, I do know that the father has died, and possibly the mother, both of whom were the brains of the family. I wanted to lay the involvement with the Canadian con-men at the feet of Doofus  but his father Donald did not die until 2012. and his mother just a few years ago. So it may be that they all made the decision, or that Donald had essentially retired and left Doofus to make all the business decisions. In any event, it was fraud plain and simple.

I felt like I did a service by warning off my two new friends.  Today, the whole issue has been put to bed since all of Palau and its national waters have been declared a Marine and Shark Sanctuary and oil exploration as well as commercial fishing are strictly prohibited. Not too long ago, a couple of Vietnamese fishing trawlers were seized and then burnt by the Palauan Marine Patrol, which has the backing of the US Navy, since there is a defense treaty between the US and the new Republic of Palau.

Chapter 43 Working in Ochelata

I got caught in the layoffs of 1989 and misguidedly accepted a job proposal with a small startup company in Ochelata.  Yes, Ochelata, just south of Bartlesville at the turnoff  there by the diner and filling station.  I think there was a filling station there.

 

The company was biotech company used for petroleum exploration.   It was founded by one of the research scientists who had recently been forced into retirement.  As part of the package deal for him to go quietly, Phillips licensed a proprietary surface exploration method based on the microbes in the soil.

I had worked on the project for the last four years or so, and knew the scientist in question.   He had served as advisor to our applied research group as we applied his techniques in the field for the various exploration groups who wanted to use it.  This resulted in me running over great parts of eastern Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado parts of Texas and Saskatchewan, Canada.

I was promised a portion of  the company, which was just one of the many lies that the owners told over the next few years.

I liked the guy, can’t say the same for his son, who was the company president.  I was named Chief Geologist. I was the ONLY geologist.  The mother was the drafts person, the dad, Don was the Director of research and we had a microbiologist and his wife and a variety of local yokels who did lab and field work.

So the leadership of the company was mainly made up of ex-Phillips people and the lab and field people were locals.

 As I said I worked with the method that was called MOST at the Phillip’s research center for five years.  We put a lot of time and effort into developing it and working out statistical methods for processing the data.  We developed a “how to” cookbook so that anyone could train themselves on how to do it, equipment needed, the whole shebang.

My contribution was moving the technique from glass pipets, where we were sucking on glass pipets by mouth to using “Mr. Pipettes” a Japanese invented auto pipet. You see them on CSI now they look like big fancy syringes you use with your thumb.  You press on a disposable plastic tip, depress a plunger with your thumb, and it sucks up a preset amount of fluid.  You squirt it out, the eject the tip with another thumb actuated plunger and you are goo to go again.  Quick, easy and light weight, compared to the weight of glass pipets.  One box of 100 pipets weighted about 40lbs.  100 plastic tips weighted about 12 ounces, the bulk of that was the plastic rack they came in. It meant a lot less crap going to the landfill.

The technique was called MOST and  was patented.  It stood for Microbial Oil Survey Technique.  They gave a release to Don to use it as part of his retirement agreement. He was the inventor but that they gave up some valuable technology shows how badly the company wanted him gone.

Don’s obituary of 2012 says he retired in “the early 1980’s” which is incorrect.  He and I were still at Phillips in 1989 and they pushed him out the same time I got laid off.  The startup company was founded that same year.  He lived to be 85 which is a wonder to me.  The guy smoked like a chimney.  When smoking was still allowed in PPCo buildings he would come down to our offices in the Geology Building at R&D and stand in the hallway and smoke so as to not pollute our offices.  There would be a pile of butts and ashes outside our doors depending on which of us he came to converse.

Both he and his wife had that nicely creased nicotine prematurely aged but well preserved facial skin.

So I started to go to work in Ochelata, running surveys and attending conferences to do marketing and sales.

Through contacts I had with Phillips I arranged to get us some surveys down in Bolivia.  This was work I had actually started while still working at Phillips.  So I ended up going down as a contractor to finish the work.  This led to three different surveys, of increasing size and governmental involvement.

I went down by myself the first time, took three additional Gringos down with me the second and then went alone again by myself to supervise a survey carried out by local teams the third time.

I did get to go to Palau, in the Pacific but that was for an Arizona oil company.  I scuba dived to collect gas samples bubbling up from the sea floor.  That is a story unto itself and I will go into that more detail later.

While at PPCo the field surveys I did took me to a variety of places and opened the door to many of the escapades related in previous chapters.

Working at the smaller company was a bit more boring, as I had gotten married and was faithful to my beautiful new wife.

 I still tromped up hill and dale collecting samples and after a few years I realized that the company was not going to grow and so my stake in the company was not going to increase in value either.   I had taken a salary cut in order to go to work there, and I was rapidly realizing that the company was just a place the son, could play at going to work.

You see, the son was a trust fund baby, who had been endowed with a substantial sum of money by his maternal grandfather who I was told was a muckety muck in old Oklahoma oil.  The boy lived down off of Riverside drive in a somewhat exclusive neighborhood just north of Maple Park, the last big vacant area along the River before you hit down town and where the pedestrian bridge, dam and fountain are located.

The son was somewhat of a “doofus”.  He was the CEO but really didn’t have much of a grasp on anything.   He didn’t need to.  The company could have been a total failure, and he probably would have still benefited, by writing the losses off.   They bought up a good portion of down town Ochelata for some reason, and we were in a trailer and metal lab building on a street east of town.

I served as the marketing person, sales person, survey planning person, field supervisor, report writer and presenter.

One of the things in the way of the company growing was the father was afraid of “Asians” specifically the Japanese getting control of the methodology, and surrounding it with patents.  That is a technique whereby competitors patent all singularly variations of your technique preventing you from modifying or improving it without infringing on their patents.

Anyway, I was trying to get us involved in Asia with some companies and was told no.

I enrolled in law school at the University of Tulsa and began to study law a night.  My wife was expecting our first child and I decided that I could no longer travel abroad as the law school had pretty strict rules on attendance.

This did not seem to be much of an issue till things started to get tense.  I had been particularly put off by what I perceived as willful sabotage of an ongoing research project I had started to try to make our analytical results more meaningful.

Let me explain.

The technique we used was called, MOST standing for Microbial Oil Survey Technique.  It is based on taking soil samples in potentially oil producing areas and analyzing them for the presence of soil metabolizing(eating) bacteria or micro organisms.

You see in nature nothing goes to waste.  If something can be utilized as an energy or food source then nature and evolution provides something that will eat it.  Look at th Giraffe.  Short animals cannot reach the tall foliage on the trees so evolution resulted in an animal that could.  The current Giraffe’s ancestors included a few with long necks, they could eat off the tall branches and were therefore bigger and stronger than their shorter siblings who had to compete with the other more numerous shorties.  Soon the tall Giraffe was getting all the girls and passing his tall genes on to all the baby giraffes that he produced.  Soon the average neck length increased and this went on and on till we see the long necked thing we see today munching on the treetops that no one else can reach.

So bugs as in microbes evolved to eat hydrocarbons.

Numerous kinds exist and numerous kinds of hydrocarbons exist.

So we would sample the soil with the idea the theory that every oil reservoir leaks to some degree.  Rock is not impermeable and under the pressure of all he overlying rock squeezing down on it, some leaks to the surface in invisible micro seeps, usually as one of several forms of natural gas.

In some places in the work, natural gas seeps to the surface and ignites and has formed “eternal flames.”  The Zoroastrian religion of Persia the main religion before Islam conquered the place worshipped these flames and built their temples on top of them.  This was the kind of worship the Liberal Democrats evoked when they put the eternal flame on J. Kennedy’s gave in Arlington.

So you have these invisible seeps, and microbes feed on the associated hydrocarbons. So if you map the microbe concentrations you can map the seeps.

So we would collect samples, culture them in petri dishes (the same kind the culture your strep throat germs in) introduce a specific hydrocarbon and see what bacteria grow.  The technique was designed to be specific to one type that was most commonly related to oil.

Don, the dad advanced the method first invented by some Russian in the 1930’s and made it into a viable tool for use in the field.

There were only a few problems that had to do with time, weight, moisture and willful omission.

Since the technique dealt with living organisms the longer they are removed from their habitat it goes to reason that the total number of viable organisms decreases with time.  The time involved is the delay between sampling and removing them from the ground and getting them to the lab where they are cultured and provided with nourishment to continue to grow and replicate.

Another problem involved weight and moisture.  We weighed each sample and took 25 grams.  Well if the soil was damp, or outright wet the actual amount of soil you were sampling would be less due to the difference between the weight of water in a wet sample vs one in dry sample.  So your initial sample would be biased one way or the other.   This would introduce a lot of noise to the analytic results. 

For example a wet sample containing a lot of microbes would be weighted out and you would only get say 15 grams of soil and 10 grams of water.  A dry sample with few microbes would give you a full 25 grams of soil.  The results after plating, growth and colony counting might be the same or even higher for the sample with fewer actual microbes.  

The last problem was harder to prove and could be due to ignorance but I felt it was willful.  You be the judge.

We would count the microbe colonies in the petri dishes after a week of growth.  In the medium we place a nutrient solution that was toxic to any microbes other than the one we were interested in.  We did two plates of the same dilution and one that was one tenth of the first two.  This allowed us a check.  If one plate was out of sequence 1:1:x10 then would be discarded.  So if one plate had a count of 50 and anther had a count of 55, they were within tolerance.  If the third plate was 5 or one tenth that followed the dilution and everything was right with the world.

However it say one plate was 30 and the second plate was 120 then the 1/10 dilution should tell us which of the two first plates was the correct one.  If it was around 12 the second plate would be retained and the first discarded as an outlier.   The 1/10 plate would be multiplied by 10 giving two plates with counts of 120 for an average of 240 divided by two would give us 120 which would be the value assigned to that map data point.

What I found were obviously incorrect fliers or values that did not correspond to the sequence being included.  Using the second example let’s see the effect on the data.

120 +30+ 12x10) = 290

290 /3 (the number of plates)  =  96

So the end value would be 96 rather than the correct 120 a lower value by 20%.

I saw this going on time and time again.  Even by Don who should have known better and routinely by others including the son.

What this did was bias the data.

Another  thing we had a falling out over was how the data was presented.

A survey might last six weeks or sometime longer.  I looked at those samples taken over the same time period as a single population and evaluated those values with regard to mean values to derive a baseline to determine where anomalous exploration targets might occur.  That is after all what the clients were paying for.

I found that the owners were finding and identifying anomalous values on EVERY LINE of the survey instead of looking at the survey as one or as several discrete populations.

Let me explain.  If we ran a survey and the first two weeks was during a rainy period we were weighing out more water and less soil.  The second two weeks were dry, so the real measured amount of soil went up.  In the final part of the survey, the winter frost had hit and the ground was too hard to dig, except around certain plants (this happened in a survey in eastern Colorado so nearly every sample during that part of the survey was taken at or near ground cactus plants that had sufficiently dried out the soil that it did not freeze and we could dig in the frozen ground.

 Now each of those effects could cause the results to vary, but you could see that and adjust for it by normalizing the data using the standard deviation of the distribution of sample values collected during each period.  Simple and effective.

But no, I had to drag them kicking and screaming to do it.

The science project that was sabotaged was along these lines.  I wanted to take a population of samples from a number of samples and analyze them over time to see how the sample counts decreased over time from the same sample.  All it would take was to plate a few samples every few days to derive a “decline curve” or “death curve” that would define how much sample counts would decrease from the time it was collected to X days into the future.

This would be helpful since we commonly collected samples and they did not get sampled for up to a week after sampling if not longer. Others got sampled and analyzed the same day.

The curve would allow us after enough surveys were sampled this way, to derive a curve that would tell us how low a given sample would be 5 days after it was sampled vs if it had been analyzed the same day.

My efforts were scuttled by the old man when I was out on a project and he failed to count the plated samples he had been asked to count for me.  He could have had someone else do it and did not.  I have no doubt he did it deliberately.  It was something he did not want to address.

 

We never brought up all these intangibles to clients.

In fact the outright lied to clients about the data and what had or had not been done to it.  “Raw” data means unaltered, un-processed data.  The counts taken directly from the lab books was raw data.  But they sent out data that had been averaged and the clients never saw the three plate counts, nor the many spurious data counts included in the averages.

The addressed some of these issues after I left due to the fact that being in possession of their mailing list, I sent out a letter to some 100+ clients detailing all the “what you should know” points I am addressing here.

When I suggested normalizing the data both father and son were against it, since the said “they want us to give them anomalies!”   I had to point out that absence of results is just as useful and even more useful than a map covered with anomalies mapped from bogus data.  It allows you to know where you should NOT waste money drilling.   They felt giving them something even if it was wrong was better than saying “according to our results there isn’t anything there to indicate oil and gas is present.”

Eventually they adopted my methods.  I do not know if they still use them or not.

When I told them I could not travel overseas they tried to fire me with cause 6 months later but I in arbitration.  It was judged as a layoff entitling me to unemployment benefits.  I had to sell my share in the company and it turned out to be worthless, something they designed on purpose.  The company was a shell, all the assets were in their names.  I cashed out for $3000 since my wife was pregnant and they had tied up my unemployment benefits long enough to leave me cash strapped.

Years later I found out they found some other shills to act as their geology face.  One turned out to be a former colleague a section supervisor at PPCo.  He had moved on to  Unocal and had been the president of the Houston Geological Society.  Now retired, he hired on with them for something to do.   He probably brought in a number of additional clients who’s pockets they could then pick.  He authored a few articles touting the technique in the Oil and Gas Journal as well as other trade magazines.

They are still in operation and have moved on to do projects in SE Asia the same place I had proposed going two decades ago.

There are a few tie-ins to my trip to Palau which is covered in the next chapter.

When on my diving honeymoon to the Cayman Islands I met two Canadians looking for investors for a scam.

The scam had to do with a program in Canada similar to what we call CAPEX or capital expenditure.  It has to do with R&D monies being tax deductible.  The two gentlemen were presenting the Canadian program as an out and out scam.  Set up a company in Canada to do R&D, it can be a store front façade or shell company and you can make a fortune off the Canadian government who wants investors to pump R&D money in and create jobs.

I reported this to the company owners, to Don and his son, Doofus and they turned it down, as a nefarious scam. 

 

Ah, but avarice takes time to work, and it took them about 5 years before they succumbed to the jingling sirens call of the money that could be made and became involved in it.  I found out in a roundabout way that I will go into in the next chapter.

 

Chapter 42 The Maelstrom of a Woman’s Mind

This was not Bartlesville, but Tulsa and I was no longer working at Phillips Petroleum, but it is an interesting and bizarre story of that which women are capable.

I was working for a small company in Ochelata at the time…yeah  Ochelata…look that up on a map, it’s a virtual ghost town now, a few miles off of US 75 north or Ramona.

My wife was pregnant and we wanted to move into a less expensive rental house.  So we moved from up on 71^st at the top of the hill across from where Bennigan’s used to be, to a smaller place over near  49^th street on a cul de sac.  The house had just been vacated…rapidly as it turned out.  We were told we would get a free month’s rent if we cleaned the place out ourselves.  So I figured that it was an easy $500 bucks.

There was heaps of clothing in the garage and in the living room along with other sundry crap.  I just gathered it all up and trashed it.  Cleaning out the laundry room cabinet I found a diary. 

I kept it for a few years afterwards, but finally trashed it.

I am not superstitious but I believe that book was second only to the Necronomicon in the level of bad mojo it contained.  It was not bound in human skin, nor was it going to raise the Army of Darkness.  I do believe it was bad.   In fact reading it made you feel a little dirty.  It was like it had this aura of evil around it, and if you held it too long, or read too much of it in one sitting, some of the filth it contained clung to you.  It could be that whoever held it had a curse on having a lasting relationship. Lol.

I have never ever felt that way.  I mean you can read or watch porn, but you know that is fiction.  It is designed to push certain buttons, it’s almost in the realm of being a tool, fulfilling a function.

I kind of think reading from the diary was more like watching a snuff film.  It was disturbing because you know it was all true.  You could see where it was heading, and when I first found it, I was standing in the detritus of the book’s final chapter, only it had not been written down.

The book was a diary of some Cowgirl’s expedition to find a husband. 

She recorded each sexual encounter she had, what kind of penetration there was and so on.  It was pretty clear her intent was to have sex with a likely guy, get knocked up, then set the hook in him good.

Once she got pregnant the rest of the diary documented her efforts to narrow down which unfortunate schmuck’s spermatozoa did the egg penetration.

It was in narrative form, as if she was talking to herself or an imaginary friend as she tried to logically deduce which cocksman had done the deed.

If she had engaged in anal sex, the guy was obviously off the hook.

 

And so it went.  Encounter after encounter as she worked her way backward through a forest of stiff dicks.

Eventually she settled on a likely guy.  Not sure if the poor patsy was the actual father, or just the first of a few likely suspects that caved in and claimed paternity. 

Well, they got married and the quest finished, the Grail filled, the entries stopped.

Considering that the diary had been left behind and was in a pile of cloths on the floor, that the poor hoodwinked  guy stumbled onto this treasure trove of decadence and surmised he had been had. 

It might be that the kid actually WAS his, but the lurid details contained in the diary made it pretty obvious the owner was on a mission to find a husband so she would not have to work and her methodology was to have sex with every swinging dick in Tulsa till she snagged one. 

Now if the guy insisted on wearing a condom, she listed that too.  She hung in there for a while hoping I guess that she could hit an unprotected gusher and would be in then money.  

I cannot say, but the revelation of the diary may have led to the precipitous dissolution of the marriage. 

It’s a tragedy for the kid of course, as it always is.  I have always felt a little dirty when I think back to that diary.  Not due to the invasion of someone’s privacy, but due to the outright and unabashed attitude of the woman who kept it.  I am not quite sure what word to use to describe her.  Mercenary and calculating do not do it justice.  Maybe degenerate gold digger would do it, but that still does not explain why I feel dirty.  Maybe it is the callous disregard she had for not only the guy’s feelings, the cold way in which she set out to use some guy’s feelings of responsibility to “do the right thing” against him, and then there is the cold blooded way she brought a kid into the world simply to use as a pawn to seal what she hoped was a lucrative mercenary deal.

Chapter 41 My Brush with Date Rape

I moved back from Houston and decided to live in Tulsa.  I got a place at One Eton Square.

It was the first and only apartment that I ever lived in where the billing of “singles” living actually lived up to the hype.  There was a fun but odd group of people in my building.  I had gotten a ground floor one bedroom off the second pool back from the main pool.  There were a couple of guys across the breezeway, a divorcee, a few younger women in assorted jobs like sales and marketing.  We kind of hung out together for a short time before people moved or drifted away.

 I met a nice guy there that I still stay in touch with, he moved up to Minnesota and works for Johnson Controls.  I didn't meet him till I was dating my Future Ex #2 pretty steady.

The apartment managers were real friendly and we had parties one a month at the main pool.  I would use my dive equipment to check out things in the pool for them every once in a while and in exchange they left me alone.

I remember one gal who worked for the Green Sheet in advertisement sales who I knew casually, called me up and asked me to come over to...uh, service her.  It was pretty cut and dried.  Actually it was pretty nice.  No games everything right up front.

At a party I met a surgeon.  She was a short haired looking athletic sort.  She was working down in Marfa doing a stint of government service to pay off med school.  She had been a flight surgeon and had to work off some of the med school costs the feds had picked up.  Her specialty was male urology.  She installed implants for erectile dysfunction.    I had no idea there were so many types.  Of course, Viagra may have put a dent in her future business. 

But this was in the days before the blue pill.  She described the pump, a kind of the Michael Jordan Air pump, only the little pump pad isn't in the tongue of the shoe but in the guys scrotum.  I wonder how many pumps it would take to get the thing erect.    It would inflate a bladder inserted surgically in the penis.  She said the pumping could be worked into foreplay.

The second and most ridiculous was the tent pole extension.  Two telescoping metal or plastic tubes were inserted surgically.  They nested into one another.  To use the thing the guy, or girl if he had a helpful partner would pull the ends of the two tubes and then twist them to lock them in place, just like two tent poles, or walking sticks. 

One had a cam that would bind up to hold the two tubes in place when they were twisted.  Neat, but oh so not cool.  According to her this type was prone to rupture through the side of the penis.  Imagine having the equivalent to the tube that holds a role of toilet paper in your penis and hitting something not too yielding inside your partner and having that thing ram against your pelvis or worse something too yielding.  You could ram the thing out the back of your scrotum, which I guess happened once or twice.

In the event we went sailing together after I met her at a pool party.  Turns out she was divorced.  Her ex had been a body building narcissist and she had come home to find him in bed with, dare I say, one of his body building buddies.  Not of the feminine persuasion either. 

 I guess in the twisted world of self love; he loved looking at himself so much that he fell in love with someone that looked like him.  Nah!  He had just married her to have a beard.  He was gay and just could not face up to it.  Now you know how AIDS crossed the heterosexual boundary.  Sharing needles?  Some, but by far it was infecting of unsuspecting females by gay men or bisexual men.  To this day the gay community still won't own up to it.  They want to continue the fallacy of casting themselves as victims.

Anyway, that kind of startled me and we talked and she point blank said the first thing she did was go out and get tested, then filed for divorce.  But it was a big ego hit for her.  How do you compete with someone from the opposite sex?  I found myself on the end of that dilemma about 10 years later with Future Ex #3 the bi-polar, sexually confused wunderkind.

There was one very bizarre thing that came out of my acquaintances at One Eton.  One of the guys liked to regale us with stories of his encounters and one in particular piqued my interest.  He spoke of a young woman who liked to be tied up, you know into BDSM or a bondage queen.  At the time, this predated the Internet, I was pretty ignorant of the underground community to which these people gravitated.  Well being the resourceful guy I am, I found out her name and where she worked and called her up for a date.

Talk about cold calling. 

Anyway, I proposed she bring a friend for safety, I described myself and said what I would be wearing.  Since I didn't have a clue what she looked like other than a cursory description, hair, eyes etc, and that she was attractive.  I wouldn't be in a position to recognize her.  She could come to the designated restaurant of her choice, check me out and if she wasn't interested just leave and I'd never be the wiser.  If she wanted to meet me she could introduce her self.  Well it worked out great.  We met and decided to date.   I went an picked her up at her apartment late one evening in pretty foul weather if I recall correctly.  We went to Incahoot's or whatever it was being called then. 

I knew I might have a head case on my hands when she wanted champagne. I obliged her and she immediately got wasted.  So much so she couldn't find her way back to the table after visiting the women's room.

In hind sight I would have to say she might have been Bipolar.  She drank like she was on a mission from god to get wasted.

The BDSM thing is now a give-away.  In my personal experience, people into that in a big way, have psychological problems.  Wife #3 wanted to delve into it in a big way, and I gather now, that there are several elements at work.  One is self-loathing.  They engage in it to punish themselves.  Second is a touch of infantilism, by that I mean they emotionally never grew up, and they put themselves in the role of the child, the Dom is the parent.  They want to be taken care of, and in exchange, they allow themselves to be punished.  Third is objectification.  They see themselves as an object for sex, they cannot differentiate between sex and love.  They are one in the same to them.  Anyone who used them for sex, loves them, so to be loved they let themselves be used.

It sounds fucked up and it is.

 There could be a touch of masochism and desire to be degraded too, that plays into the self-loathing.  Even sex can become an act of contrition, or punishment.

It’s kind of like they carry this load of emotional baggage with them and they are constantly wanting to make amends for something they were not responsible for.   Ever hear of autism, where the sufferer is kind of cut off from the world and resorts to head banging to feel something?   There could be an element of sexual dysfunction that laps into that too.  My ex needed intense pain not being whipped but still intense stimulation I would call pain in order to climax.

I am not a psychologist although I had Psych 101 and 102  in college and had 7 years of on the job training.  My interaction with real shrinks makes me thing my diagnoses here have just as much validity as their half- baked arm waving does.

Okay, now that I established that there seems to be, in my opinion, a link between mental illness and BDSM, it tosses the whole premise of 50 Shades of Gray on its head.  Believe me, BDSM in not romantic.

Pause.  Stop. 

I need to write a whole entry on this.

Now that I have touched on it, let me continue.

The gal gets tanked, just like I later saw my wife #3 do all the time.  No reason, just a mission to get blotto.

I end the date early since she is nearly incoherent.   I think she might have popped something along with the Champagne.

I take her home.  I say by good byes but no, she wasn’t having it.  She barred the door, wanting me to stay.  I really did not want another Marilyn on my hands.

She then pulls off her top to show me her newly enhanced breasts, wanting my opinion.

Okay, so that did stop me from leaving.  I tell myself I put her in bed because I was afraid she would have followed me out and down the stairwell half naked.   She probably would have.

So I tuck her in bed.  She pulls me down on her and we start kissing and one thing led to the next and we had sex.

Okay, so I gave in.  I stayed until she was asleep and then I let myself out.

Again, I don’t call the next day.  How do you tell an attractive gal that you had a good time, but you really don’t want to go out with a hot mess drunk?  To this day, after wife #3 I cannot stand to even talk to a drunk when I am sober.  Drunks just make me want to throw up.

Well I finally get a call from her, and I guess as a face saving measure, insinuates I took advantage of her, when I am here to tell you, I did not.

I have been in the company of many drunk or passed out women and I never, not once did anything that was not by mutual consent by action if not word.

This was in the days when you did not have to get a signed consent form from the Dean of Student affairs or the District Attorney before two adults exchanged bodily fluid by sexual penetration.

Today it’s different.

At the time we exchanged words, I told her I think she was miffed because I hadn’t called her.  That pretty much tore it.

That is until I moved apartments.

I found this nice place called Green Briar on 61^st  near Lewis.  Quite, nice, a second floor apartment overlooking the pool.

As I am unloading my trailer with a buddy, and my future wife #2 imagine who I run into on the landing, of the same floor.

You guessed it.  All of a sudden the place is starting to look way familiar.  I had been there only at night.  I suddenly recall the little half moon turn out for the car around a tree at the base of the stairs.

As you can expect, the gal got her nose in a joint, thinking I was moving in because of her.  Our apartments back up against each other.  I was on the south side, she was on the north side, we shared a common wall.

As it turned out, I didn’t see her at all and she moved out not long after that. 

Small world.

Bill Cosby has now admitted to purchasing Quaaludes with the intent of using them on women to have sex with them.  If that is true, I guess they have to prove he did in fact use them.  If a woman takes drugs on her own, then drinks rendering herself incapacitated, I would not have sex with her.  It not only opens the guy to allegations after the fact, but what fun is it?  Pretty much like fucking a corpse only its warm.  In this case, the girl was quite active, but it was my bad for not taking my leave when I should have.  It was decidedly not date rape, far from it.  If I had recorded the session, it would have been quite clear she was an active participant, even if she could not recall it the next day, or chose not to.

In Cosby's defense some of the alleged instances took place at the Playboy Mansion, where I dare say that all the girls were there for the use of the many VIP guests that happened through.  If you care to read, "A Bunny's Tale" by Gloria Steinem (available on the web for free) written when she did an expose of the NYC Playboy club working as a Bunny for two weeks,.  You will learn that it was common for all the female employees to put out for VIPs both at the clubs and it follows, at the Mansions too.  Although it was "against the rules" to date customers, the girls were in fact pressured to do so by the managers.

2018 Update.  Considering the events of the last year and the formation of the Me Too! movement by militant feminists, I really do feel fortunate that my run in with "morning after regret" happened when it did. Men today have a mine field to walk when asking a woman out on a date. I truly feel sorry for them.

Chapter 40 A Midnight Horse Race at Place One

I lived for a short time at Place One in Tulsa, off Riverside Drive.  It was a nice two story apartment.  I had just gotten a Labrador puppy and knew it was a matter of time before I had to move because of the dog size restriction.

Well, I sailed catamarans and I had to park mine at the end of the covered parking by the end of my building.  I had a big blue tarp over it by the end of my building.  One evening we went up to the pool side pub and had a few drinks.  We were walking home, the distance was about 40 yards if that.   At my insistence we got adventurous. 

I pulled soon to be wife #2 under the tarp where it hung over the mast.  You could stand under it since the mast was in a cradle above the boat making a sort of tent.    The opening was held closed by a cord so we were in our own little enclosed space.   She braced herself against one of the trampoline cross members between the two hulls and I flipped her skirt up and we headed off to the races. 

Just after I left the gate and was at a full gallop sprinting down the track, some older gentleman out for his late evening walk just happened to be wander by.  Well the boat was a rocking and he should’t have come a knocking.

The boat and trailer were pretty light and our combined weight was making it move around a lot.    I had both the trailer and the boat rocking and the tarp flapping for good measure.  Lol.

Well the old guy must have thought there was someone out to mug him, or was trying to jack with him.  He got in quite a tizzy.  He started yelling wanting to know if someone was out there.  He wanted to know what we were doing.  Really getting himself worked up.  I slowed down to trot, and needless to say, we were both fighting to keep from laughing all the while trying to finish our business.  I guess the guy got himself unruffled enough because he kept on walking.

I gave it the spurs and increased my speed to a full gallop, but damn if my date didn’t get to the wire before me.  I guess it’s as it should be.  The mounts nose always gets to the finish line before the jockey does.

I still laugh my ass off when I remember the worried tone of the old guys his voice.  He was really panicked, little did he know that we were quite pre-occupied and if not for fear of having our privacy invaded, would not have given him a second thought.   The  whole thing was pretty hilarious.

Chapter 38 Nursing Stories

My girlfriend from college that came out to Bartlesville from back east was a nurse.  The trouble is that she didn't much like it from her experience with clinical in nursing school.  So on arriving in Bartlesville she went back to bar tending which put her through school.

We rented a house on Greystone just east of the Quarters at the top of the hill.  She went to work for Larry Lively and things were pretty hectic what with working for the guy and having to help his girl friend after he beat her up regularly.  But she stuck it out with him.  He stopped on the side of 75 on night coming back from Tulsa and pulled her from their car and beat her with a belt.  On another occasion he nailed her in a closet of their home where she was hiding from him.  Not her physically, just the door.

As the world turns.

Well my girlfriend and wife #1 did take her nursing boards at my urging and landed a job at Jane Phillips.

Now, I want to say here, that she deserved a lot better than she got from me.  She was a wonderful woman, smart, outgoing, headstrong, pretty, a real keeper.  I just met her too soon in my life it seems.

Well she took Jane Phillips by storm. The hospital had such a shortage of registered nurses that if you had a BS-RN you were immediately given a lot of responsibility.  In her case she was made charge nurse of a unit.  After a few weeks of wearing a dress, hat and the proper shoes, she started wearing white pants and tunic and ditched the hat.

The hospital administrators were not keen on that and it escalated to the board and she allied herself with some doctors who agreed with her that her choice of dress did not impact her nursing care if anything it made it better because she was not afraid of giving the staff a moon every time she had to get up on the bed to help roll one of their "large" patients.

She won.  I was proud of her, but would have not expected anything less.

She used to come home from work and regale me with stories.  She did some time in the ER and those storied were the best.

On weekends there was never a shortage of excitement.  The casualties and such poured in from Pawhuska.  Those Osage Indians really knew how to party.  I recall one episode she recounted to me.  Seems late one Saturday evening a middle aged lady came in with a problem.  Seems she had something lodged in her vagina.  As my Future Ex # 1 recounted it, the woman was drunk off her ass, and just kept laughing hysterically.  She laughed the whole time the doctor worked on her.  It appears she had a tampon lodged crossways in her vagina. To make matters worse, it was still in the dispenser tube. It appears that in her inebriated state she had failed to insert it correctly and remove the tube.  She had just shoved it in and forgot to remove the tube.  She then proceeded to engage in sex with several gentlemen and in their zeal they were not about to let something like a tampon get in their way.  So onward and upward they went, figuratively and literally.  They pounded the thing in pretty good and it lodged crossways high up in her vagina.  I guess she thought it was pretty funny since she was still laughing when she left.  I have to say I am very impressed with the rigidity of the tools of the men involved.  I think I would have given up if I had started pounding the end of my pecker into something as unyielding as a cardboard tampon tube.  But hey, maybe the quim of  a heifer cow or ewe feels that way.  You never know, right?

The next funny story was about someone being brought in with a heart attack and the doctors failed to revive him even after prolonged CPR and defilibration.  That was before her shift.  They pulled the screen around his bed and when my Ex came in told her that she had a patient.  She walked over and stepped behind the curtain to see the obviously dead patient.  Good fun, right?   She said he was in pretty poor shape, ribs broken from the CPR and what not. 

 

We were sitting on our front porch of a rental we lived in off Greystone behind the Quarters.  We were both laughing and having a glass of wine when our neighbors drove up and looked pretty devastated.  Being good neighbors we struck up a conversation and asked how their day was going.  "Not too good," they replied.  It seems the wife's father had died that very day from....yeah you guessed it: a fatal heart attack.  My Future Ex #1 just about choked on her wine.  It was pretty funny at the time.

This wasn't so much a funny story but a commentary to the abiding stupidity of man.  The hospital had a Garp ward, named aptly for the book, The World According to Garp.

It was peopled by head trauma injuries brought about by failure to wear motorcycle helmets.  They would jokingly refer to going up to feed and water the plants.  Referencing the fact that the unfortunate patients resembled members of the vegetable family and only needed to be turned and watered. (turned to prevent bed sores and have IV fluids changed.)

My current secretary just lost her Ex-husband and father to her two kids to the same oversight.  I can only imagine that it has to be a fundamental lack of gray matter or basic IQ to think that your head is harder than a concrete road bed when impacting it  in excess of 50 miles per hour.

If you think it is safe to ride a motorcycle without a helmet.  Get an egg and drop it from about 3 feet.  The terminal velocity (velocity at which falling rate equals drag) won't be large but what do you think will happen to the egg.  Now throw another egg at the ground at about 50 mile per hour.  You think you'll be walking away if it were your head?

 

If you want to feel the air going through your hair, get a convertible.

I think it is Darwin's Natural Selection at work.

Chapter 37 Conflict of Interest

I worked in the R&D division under John Mihm and had been there for five years.  Wanting to further my career, I personally requested a transfer to an operating group and got one to the Gulf Coast Exploration group in Houston.  A bunch of us were transferred to Houston in 1986.  I arrived in Houston New Years night 1987.

Earlier that year before I was officially notified I was getting a transfer by the company, I was walking through the Frank Phillips Building Tunnel connecting to the Phillips National, I mean First National Bank.  The greeter sitting at the desk, was some one with whom I had a passing acquaintance.  You can imagine my surprise when she, as I walked by said " Hi, I understand, you're going to be leaving us?"  I assured her that I wasn't going anywhere as far as I knew.   When she say I was mystified she suddenly got sheepishly quiet.

 

You see First National Bank held the mortgage on my house. 

As it turned out apparently the people at the bank knew before I did that I was getting a transfer.  It was either a reflection of the close working relationship the bank had with the company, or someone with inside information was leaking information on pending transfers of employees.  

 

I never found out if there was any kind of sweetheart deal going with realtors or something shady, but if the info was leaked to this realtor or that, it would give them a leg up on the competition.   

To me it stunk to high heaven.  I seem to recall there was some noise about Mr. Mihm giving his wife inside into, and that there was some fallout over it.   

You can imagine what would have happened to your average Joe employee if he’d done something so egregious.  Public flogging, drawing and quartering followed by hanging of the remains would not have been adequate enough I bet. 

But remember the Golden Rule: "They who have the gold, make the rules."

 

As it was the housing market was so flooded at the time, the company bought my house and held it off the market for about six months to keep the prices higher before it was finally sold.  A guy who was dating a gal I was also dating at the time (my future wife #2 as it turned out) and was showing off all the work I had done in the house, the kitchen remodel and floors.  It was funny because I had taken her over to the house on one lunch hour before it was put back on the market and gave her a grand tour.  I knew how to get into the house even though I did not have a key any longer.  I went by the house a few years ago, and the privacy fence I put up back in 1982 is still standing.  They did at some time replace the arched oak front door with a modern piece of shit.  The old siding was replaced and a new roof and A/C was put on it before the guy bought it, so he got a bargain.  It was a nice old house.  It is the red brick one with the brick front porch, with a very steep pitched roof, almost gingerbread looking, just two houses up from the Cherokee Street split north of the high school.  A few blocks south of the Frank Phillips Mansion.