June 30, 1998 is the most important day in my entire life. Ten years ago, I bid farewell to all that was familiar to me. I said goodbye to my Dad, my sister, my nieces and a very close-knit group of friends that meant the world to me, packed up all my belongings and hit the road to travel 1,500 miles from Pittsburgh to Houston, Texas to start my teaching career.

Ten years, as Bob Seger once sang about another number, "Where'd they go?" Ten years, one quarter of my life has passed since that time, and here I am, sitting at my computer, a fine glass of my best Bourbon at my side, at a computer (a machine I never thought I would own when I left )and reflecting on the past decade.

Please travel with me a bit.

I graduated high school in 1983 and went to a very good eastern liberal arts school. Unlike a lot of 18 year olds I didn't have a "bleeping" idea about what I wanted to do with my life. I told my parents I would study business just to keep them off my back, but I totally hated it and did not do well. I finally decided to major in history (and having to deal with the "What the Hell are you going to do with that" talk from my Dad when I told him) in order to go to law school. I made that decision too late and ended up "having" to transfer, after having wasted two years and a lot of my time and my folk's money in this futile effort.

But that was a good thing. I went to Community College for a year and built up my transfer credits to go to Duquesne. I paid my own way there and, while working full time, I gave my Dad money to help pay for my return to college.

I earned my BA in history from Duquesne, but had lost my desire to go to law school. I (half-heartedly joke that all it took me was one summer of "working for lawyers to change my mind about that and that was partially true. I just did not like the adversarial nature of the law that I discovered in my summer of law clerking/paralegaling for a small family law firm, of which I was good friends with one of the partners. I did that in the summer of '88 and finished Duquesne in May '89.

I turned in my senior thesis the day before my Mother was diagnosed with the malignant brain tumor that would eventually kill a few years later. My life was in total flux. I had this "useless" liberal arts degree and had to deal with Mom's condition as well. '89 - '92 were a blur for me, as we bounced from one doctor to another, one oncologist to another, as Mom was shuttled here and there and from one treatment to another. I did finally decide to move out of the house in 1990, and got an apartment with my best friend, Tim. At least I was on my own.

I began working restaurants in 1988 as a server. I worked at Abate's in Pittsburgh until I was (unjustly!!!!!) fired in spring 91. I moved next door to Damon's, the barbecue/sports bar that I worked until I left Pittsburgh in 1998. I bartended there, and was the sports director in the sports bar (that was a rough gig, getting paid to run satellite dishes, watch sports, give scores, make announcements etc. etc. etc. ).

Tim and I went our separate ways in 1992 and I moved in with my cousin John, with whom I have had a close relationship over the years, but as Shelby Foote observed in the Civil War, the ugliest fights are between brothers, and our closeness often got in our way. I spent about four years since I had moved out, just marking time, treading water, working at Damon's and paying the bills, but with no future, no real permanence.

But what about teaching??????? Yeah, what about teaching???? I had always thought about it, kept it burning on low flame in a back burner of my mind, since I was in junior high. My sister was a teacher, as was my brother in law. I loved history and thought that I could spread that love on to the next generation of students.

I wrote to Duquesne and got information on the graduate education program in December, 1994. I even called Dad (Mom had died in '92) and asked him to meet with me at my cousin's tavern. I told him my plans and he was very touched. He did not say much but he told me that I had to come back to the house with him. He would not tell me anything more, but I followed him home to the place where I had grown up.

Dad sat me down at the kitchen table and showed me a letter written in Mom's handwriting. She wrote this note SIX MONTHS before she was even diagnosed with the brain tumor, and she knew that there was something wrong with her, that she dying. She left my Dad instructions on what to do with her IRA in the case of her death. She left money for me for "law school or whatever Robert finally chooses to do." Dad and I had a pretty good cry over that one.

I began graduate school in the summer of 1994, while still working full time. I had also met Julie in May. Julie and I had met at Damon's and it was love at first sight. We were dating seriously the whole time I was in grad school, and we got engaged in the fall of '94. She was very instrumental in helping me get over the obstacles and self-doubts that kept popping up during that time, to test my mettle. Julie and I had set a wedding date for the late spring of '96, but that was not to be. For various reasons, that I will not dwell on here, it did not work and we parted. We still cared deeply for each other, but marriage (as we both admit now) would have been a bad move for both of us.

I finished my student teaching in the spring of '96 and then entered the nether-world of Pennsylvania teaching graduates as they find themselves fighting and clawing to find a permanent position. Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania is a great place to live, but unfortunately the job market isn't growing fast enough. It's not dying like it was when the steel mills were shutting down, but it's not growing fast enough. I spent two years subbing and trying to look for any inroad that would lead to an interview, but to no avail. During this time I was working at Damon's and on weekends at a black tie country inn type restaurant near Pittsburgh, where I bartended.

I was frustrated after two years of this. Finally I went to a job fair in March 1998 at a convention center near Pittsburgh. There were over 100 districts there from all over and I looked everywhere. Hey, I was 32, my lease was up in June and I was single. I even talked to Anchorage-FREAKING-Alaska! I needed real experience on my resume and I made up my mind to leave Pittsburgh if I had to. This was a big decision for me, setting out on my own like this.

I literally bumped into a Texas district by accident. I looked down at their banner, looked up at the recruiter (the fact that she was amazingly hot had nothing to do with that ) and said, "Where's Richmond/Rosenberg Texas?" She told me and then I said, "Texas huh? I don't speak Spanish." To which she replied, "That's good neither do I."

She was also from Pennsylvania and she told me that she was just like me a few years before. She had graduated from Penn State and did not want to move any further than North Carolina (she nailed me to a tee there, I was looking out of state no further than a day's drive from home). She said she did not want to come back from Texas now.

Well that was my foot in the door and I had a phone interview within a week and was hired. Interestingly enough I accepted a position in the same school as "Carrie" (the recruiter) and was even placed on her team, so at least I knew someone when I went down there.

Funny story, I had acquired a bottle of very good Irish Whiskey at some point and a friend of mine had told me to save that bottle and have a drink with them when I got my first teaching job. Well, when I got hired, I made the rounds of all my family and friends who had been instrumental in helping me and who had believed in me during my trials; My sister, John, Tim etc. It was now two years after Julie and I had split, but we had stayed in contact. I showed up at her doorstep with the bottle in my hand. She answered the door and saw me beaming and the bottle and she knew what it meant. She threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly and congratulated me as the tears flowed from both of us.

That was April of '98. I had two months to put my affairs in order and prepare for my new life. I had a tight group of friends at that point. There was Tim and his girlfriend Mindy, my good friend from trivia Jim (more commonly referred to here as his trivia name MENTAT or simply TAT), his girlfriend Lisa and my post-Julie girl-friend Jody. I had met Jody at a Pirates game, shortly after Julie and I had broken up. We began dating, even though there was a great deal of difference in our ages. (I was 31 and she was 20, and yes, the "cradle robbing" jokes were endless )

After I had made my decision the rest of the few months remaining was marking time. I put my affairs in order, acquired an apartment in Texas and kept i contact with Carrie and my new principal. I did not want any fuss. My sister held a small get together with only immediate family and my family/friends did pull a little surprise party for me at the black tie place where I worked, which was pretty fun.

I was getting ready to leave! To uproot my entire life and head off to what? I did not know, I just knew that I "had" to go. There was nothing for me in PIttsburgh, career wise anyway. I didn't want to become one of those pathetic college grads in Pennsylvania, still bartending or waiting tables well into their thirities, hoping to get a big break. No, I was going to be proactive, despite the fact that that would mean leaving my Father, my siser, my nieces, a close-knit group of friends and a loving girlfriend. No, I had to do this.

And where was I going? Why it was obvious. I was heading to Texas! I was going West! What could be more American than that. I kept hearing that final line from the great American novel ringing through my head, constantly during those few months. That last line. I was going to Texas! As a boy I loved Texas and stories of Texas. The Alamo was one of my favorite films; I inherited a love of westerns and John Wayne movies from my maternal grandfather, and I even had a card game called "Game of the States" in which you had to match cards on a bingo like card with images of the states on it, and I always wanted the one with Texas on it. Yeah, it had to be Texas, and the west.

I had to take my air conditioned Pontiac and follow in the footsteps of all those canal boats, and steamboats, and Connestoga wagons and folks on horseback and I had to head west.

That last line of that great American novel. It kept running through my head and finally I found myself quoting it to people when they asked my plans. It rolled off my tongue as easily as it rolled from the pen of Mark Twain.

Reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest...

June 30, 1998, the day I lit out for the territory. The day my life changed.........

End of Part I

Sorry friends, I sat down at the computer and just started writing a few hours ago. I had no idea which direction it would take me. I still have lots to say and I want to get to it, but I have to sub tomorrow for summer school and I need to get to bed. I hope you enjoyed Part I, I will be back with Part II tomorrow.

The SCOTUS handed down some important decisions this term and they have batted .333 in the major ones.

1. When I was in Italy, one of the few major American news stories I was able to get was the high court's idiotic decision to allow terror suspects, usually captured on a "battlefield" in a military action, habeus corpus rights and the right to an attorney in the US court system.

This decision was the culmination of a string of terror detainee decisions that began a few years ago with a bad precedent, where the court ruled that terror suspects were entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. Apparently the majority never even read those accords, which covers the conduct during war time of uniformed soldiers, operating in service of a nation state, under an operating chain of command, subject to military discipline.

How the high court applies this to armed pyschopaths, who strap bombs to pregnant women, cut people's heads off, live and operate in the shadows, wear no uniform (in fact trying to blend into innocent civilians as much as possible) and are answerable to no legitimate chain of command nor any ultimate civilian government staggers the imagination.

So now we are back to those charming days of the 1990s when we treated terrorism as a law-enforcement problem, instead of the military/national security issue that it is. I really don't think the SCOTUS has any idea of what they have unleashed here.

So do we have to give terrorist suspects the right to "confront" their accusers? Are we going to have to fly back the soliders who captured the guy in order to testify against him? Are US prosecuters going to have to reveal classifed information on on-going clandestine operations so as not to infringe on the rights of these international criminals?

The stupidity of these decisions is amazing.

2. Yesterday in Kennedy v. Louisiana the High Court ruled that a state may not write a law that punishes the rape of a child with the death penalty, as apparently that violates, both the 8th Amendment and some amorphous ideas about "an evolving standard" and a "national consensus" that the death penalty is not an appropriate punishment for that crime. This, despite the fact that duely elected legislators in various states have debated bills of this sort and passed these ideas into law, yet it violates what the majority of the court appears to support. Judicial activism at its worst.

Justice Alito gives a blistering dissent in which he quite correctly argues, that the decision in this case ignores, among other things,

(1) This holding is not supported by the original meaning of theEighth Amendment; (2) neither Coker nor any other prior precedent commands this result; (3) there are no reliable"objective indicia" of a "national consensus" in support ofthe Court's position; (4) sustaining the constitutionality ofthe state law before us would not "extend" or "expand" the death penalty; (5) this Court has previously rejected the proposition that the Eighth Amendment is a one-way ratchet that prohibits legislatures from adopting new capital punishment statutes to meet new problems; (6) theworst child rapists exhibit the epitome of moral depravity; and (7) child rape inflicts grievous injury on victims andon society in general."

For the record I have moderated my view on the death penalty over the years. When I was younger I used to a "fry 'em all" kind of guy, but I have really changed that opinion. Given the length of time and the financial cost involved to society, where it is cheaper to feed and house the guy for the term of his natural life rather than fight through the endless appeals, then it really should be used sparingly.

Also I look at what it means to take someone's "life." I look at it this way, if you put a 20 year old in prison for 30 years you have essentially "taken his life." He has spent the flower of his or her adulthood incarcerated; they have lost their youth, their prime years of health, their best reproductive years etc. I keep seeing that image of Morgan Freeman's character, Red, in The Shawshank Redemption out of prison and bagging groceries at 65, still asking permission to use the restroom.

Now, with that in mind, I think child rape is one of those crimes that deserves death (and for the record, I am not going to write about the specifics of this crime in this case, as it was ghastly, as this animal repeatedly sodomized his step-daughter, but you can look them up on your own). How the court found that society can't inject a clean lethal-injection needle into this waste of a human life, while that poor little girl has to live the next 70 years or so with the soul-shattering trauma that he inflicted on her, well I can't follow that reasoning at all.

3. Well today they finally got one right. In a 5-4 decision, the High Cout struck down Washington DC's thirty-two year old hand gun ban and they asserted for the first time, since ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791, that American citizens have constitutionally protected privelage to own fire arms for hunting and self-defense, and not only for participation in a "well-regulated milita." YAY!

Personally I have always felt that individual ownership of fire arms was implied in the various militia acts that were passed by the Federal and state governments over the years from 1791 through the time of the Civil War. It was implied that men would bring their "own" weapons to drill and target shoot with. This was no great stretch of Constitutional logic for me ever.

(And BTW for you new readers to my blog you may want to check out my July 4 post of last year which outlines my views on gun ownership in this country: http://www.tv.com/users/PikeBishop/profile.php?action=show_blog&entry=m-100-25058528)

And, as I stated in that blog, I am no Second Amendment absolutist, and this case says nothing about striking down various "limits" on gun rights, such as background checks, prohibition in school zones, prohibition of felons and the mentally ill possesing guns etc. etc. and I am glad to see that. I am just happy that the basic fundamental right to keep and bear arms, for law abiding citizens is protected.

Perhaps the (hopefully unintended) funniest comment came in Justice Breyer's dissent. He wrote: "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas."

Gee Justice Breyer, I live in a crime ridden neighborhood. I wonder if guns are one of the things making it crime ridden? You know all those illegal guns in my crime-ridden neighborhood that is in the middle of DC, home of this very restrictive gun law that has worked wonders over thirty two years at keeping the streets safe. So I can't protect myself in my crime-ridden neighborhood, while the criminals have no fear of this gun law in making my neighborhood unsafe. Gee Thanks Judge.

Well at least they got one right. That terrorist decision boggles the imagination. The idea that we have to give terrorists a day in a US court is abhorrent to me. The fact that five justices, who don't like the death penalty but can't really get rid of it outright feel free to make up their own law and dictate to the US Congress, state legislatures and ultimately we the people also flys in the face of my idea of what this country is about. But, ultimately they got the big one right. I have always maintained that there is a reason the founding fathers put that one SECOND! Right after speech, press, religion and assembly, the right to keep and bear arms.

I think I may take the Mossberg out of my closet and take her to the range today!

Hey Everyone:

I just got back last week from Italy and can't wait to blog about my adventures, but in all the running around and walking and plane travel (I was up 27 hours on the day of our home flight) I have come down with a serious summer cold. I am too weak to post. Be back in a few days. Missed you all.

PIKE

Rest in Peace to an American comedy legend. As a young boy growing up in the 1970' Saturday was the only night I was allowed to stay up past ten and that was to watch Carol and Vicky and Tim and Harvey. I got hours of belly laughs from those great comedians.

Who can forget Harvey as the loyal Butler Max in the Sunset Boulevard sketches or his reaction to Carol's descent in the drapes in "Went with the Wind." Harvey also showed some dramatic chops as well, as the Eunice sketches became darker and less bubbly as the show wore on.

And who can forget his breaking up at the hands of Tim Conway all those times. Interesting note about that was posted on this site by Korman's own son, that Harvey eventually grew tired of all of Tim's cracks about his (Harvey's) lack of professionalism and performing ability.

Harvey was also great in movies such as History of the World and, of course, Blazing Saddles (That's HEDLEY )

Rest in peace Harvey.

I was so glad we had this time together, just to have a laugh or sing a song.....

Thoughts and prayers to the Korman family.

As many of you know Sen. Edward Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain tumor today. A vicious, ugly death sentence, that, according to initial reports is the exact same type that took my own Mother's life over sixteen years ago.

For the record I despise Kennedy and most of what he stands for. A spoiled, fat, drunk, playboy for most of his life, he has argued for higher taxes on most of us, while he made sure the Kennedy forturne paid only about 1% of the inheritance tax that is ruining family farms and ranches throughout this country. He got away, at the very least, voluntary manslaughter in the waters of Chapaquidick and only escaped punishment because of his familiy's owning of all the local politicians. He led a morally reprehensible personal life and was granted a special immunity because of his last name.

With that in mind, I feel sorry for him and his family. I watched my Mother suffer with this and would not wish it on my worst enemy.

And I was quite pleased with what I saw from the right side of the blogosphere today. Michelle Malkin, one of the most widely read conservative bloggers and a huge vocal critic of Kennedy and his policies merely said the following:

Kennedy diagnosed with brain tumor

By Michelle Malkin • May 20, 2008 02:12 PM

Put aside your political differences and join me in keeping Sen. Ted Kennedy and his family in your prayers as they grapple with the news of his malignant brain tumor diagnosis.

With that simple and touching statement she showed an immense amount of dignity and grace. And I was pleased to see that over 90% of the comments that followed that post were supportive and offered best wishes, thoughts and prayers to Senatror Kennedy and his family.

I thought that was very touching.

And I could not help but think about the reaction of the lefty blogs, such as Daily Kos, Huffington Post and DU if it had been President Bush who had been stricken with such a terrible tragedy.

Regrettably I think the positive messages would be few and far between and we would be subject to some of the most vicious bile, poison and hatred imaginable as so many of the arrested adolescents on those sites celebrated the President's misery.

AS Dennis Miller is fond of saying, "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong."