How We Survived Reagan

Dangerous Levels of Self Medication

This is my last shot to imagine film making. I was too slow to finish the mile swim, even…I was eleven. It was not that I could not swim the mile, it was that the Scout Master was bored with waiting for me to keep up. He got me out of the water by promising me another shot at it, so why not, I thought. That never happened, and I never got faster at anything.

I was not neat or thorough either. I was messy, slow, and doing as I was told, always, eventually. It took me a longer time than most to learn the Scout Oath and Law. I did my best to stay within the lines those masonic mind fuckers crafted for us public school kids. It was the Episcopalians that introduced that portion of our MIC community’s brethren to film making. I was not much older than eleven.

There was still photography gear in a closet of the office my father never used attached to the house. Recording gear as well. By the time I was eleven my father was broken, or fixed, depending on perspective. I was often unattended, so I spent hours playing with this stuff.

I got paid for a photography job before I turned fifteen. The MIC was on top of everything, and the smart kids were rebelling. I was just learning about self-medication, with the older kids stuck in Scouting in 1972, as a freshman.

By the time Reagan got in, nine years later, in 1981. I had seen and done things that most Americans will never hear about, let alone experience. I doubt I would have survived the first three years of high school even without the skills and self-medication methods I learned in scouting. I had failed two film making courses by then, but had stills published in the NYT in 1977.

Yes, I learned how to shoot in the Boy Scouts; as a professional I never shot more than stills, but during those Reagan years, I was drunk and short sleep. That was how I survived them; slow, hung over, and exhausted…too busy to make sense of anything. Such was the mushroom program for us also-rans.

I was in DC, at the Washinton Hilton, not long after they almost deselected Reagan. I was in optical instrumentation, selling the Topcon brand, for a masonic owned firm, buying the drinks for Land Surveyors all over New Jersey.

Yes, we put the con in contracting, but I could not convince Topcon to make instruction films for the Americans.

I did finish the mile more than once in Cowpet Bay, on the east end of Saint Thomas but I have not made a film yet. The Boy Scouts are gone, and the masonics on the run…The Anglo/American empire done. I am too old to go back in, at 67, but I still want be in that number…The one where we get the job done. Next time around? One never knows do one?

That there is my father’s Pentax…The sailing gloves are Harken, the knife is a Buck. The image is an old one.