Bruce A. Borders: July 2013

Monday, July 29, 2013

All Locked Up - Or Not

I’ve always had a knack for getting into places I shouldn’t. Places I didn’t belong. Places that were locked up. When I was younger, I figured there was only one purpose for locks - to see if I could get them open. Usually, I could. Locks are meant to be opened after all! Of course, I was no Harry Houdini, but I did possess a little proficiency at it.

Also when I was younger, I seemed to have an inherent desire to explore. And since all the world had already been discovered, my exploration was confined to buildings and the inside of anything fenced off. This, mixed with the ability to defeat locks, was not a good combination for a young teenage boy.

While some of the places I’ve been able to get into would be quite impressive, I think I’ll resist the urge to name any of them - for security reasons - mine! Not that I ever stole anything - for me the thrill was getting in. But, I know better than to admit to anything, even all these years later. Someone, somewhere, would decide I was guilty of something and there would be a big mess. So, let’s just say that I know several major stadiums have an elaborate system of tunnels and secret passages, most commercial buildings have multiple hidden rooms, and at least two of the towns I have lived in are built over an entire network of tunnels. All great conditions for an explorer!

Out of all of my “expeditions,” I was only caught once. I think I was twelve at the time. A security guard ushered me down through a complex series of tunnels and hallways to his office, which to a kid more closely resembled a jail. Asking me a few questions that I refused to answer, he made the mistake of telling me to sit tight while he went to call his boss. He left me locked in the interrogation room, as I referred to it, but didn’t bother to actually keep an eye on me.

Remember I said I had a knack for defeating locks and getting into places? Yeah, funny thing is, my talent worked just as well to get me out of places too!

Bruce A. Borders is the author of more than a dozen books. Over My Dead Body, The Journey, and Miscarriage Of Justice, and other titles, are available as ebooks on Apple I-Pad®, Amazon Kindle®, Barnes & Noble Nook® and Sony Reader®, Kobo, Diesel Books, and Smashwords. His books are also available in print at most online retailers or at www.bruceabordersbooks.weebly.com. The popular Wynn Garrett Series Books are now available on Barnes And Noble® at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/?series_id=867526 See Bruce’s Smashwords Profile at www.smashwords.com/profile/view/BruceABorders #MiscarriageOfJustice #BruceABorders

Monday, July 22, 2013

Borders Detective Agency

I once got this grand idea that I would be a detective. A private detective, since I didn’t want to waste time going to school. At the time I didn’t have a job and was convinced I could make money as a private eye. After all, how hard could it be? I’d read that most private detectives spend most of their time locating missing persons or simply following people around and figured I could handle that. So, I set up shop. I hung up a sign, Borders Detective Agency, and was open for business.

And nobody came. No one. I didn’t get a single person to hire me. Of course, it may have had something to do with the fact that I was eleven years old. However, at the time I didn’t think that was a good enough reason for people not taking me seriously. Didn’t they realize I was qualified and could do the job? I mean, I’d taken a correspondence course and received a license, and I’d ordered an “official” badge from a magazine. Everything was set. But after a month of waiting, still nothing. Out of all the people in my neighborhood who knew me, not one of them had a case for me to solve.

So, I gave up. I took down my sign and started selling a weekly newspaper called Grit. This turned out to be fairly profitable for an eleven-year-old and soon I had quite a few customers in the area - just under a hundred!

One day, one of my customers, an elderly lady, mentioned that she’d seen my Detective Agency sign a few months before. “How did that go?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said, not wanting to admit I’d had no cases.

“Great! Do you think you could find some stolen property for me?”

“I can try,” I hedged, not at all confident anymore, now that I might have to actually prove myself.

The stolen property, I soon learned, was her grandson’s bicycle. She gave me a good description and off I went searching for the bike. And found it too! A few houses down the street, there it was leaning against a shed in the back.

I gave myself access to the back yard and then helped myself to the bike. A few minutes later, I returned it to my “client” who paid me quite well for my successful investigation. I was pretty proud.

It was a few weeks later that I discovered the house where I’d found the bike was vacant. And, it had been empty for quite some time. Asking around at a few of the neighbors, I further learned the elderly lady who had hired me didn’t have a grandson. Even at eleven years of age, I could figure it out - I’d been set up. It was rather disappointing. And embarrassing. I thought surely everyone was laughing at how gullible I was.

But then, with the help of another of my customers, I looked at it from a different perspective. Evidently, the lady had felt bad that no one had hired me and had created a case for me to solve. She was trying to do a good thing, to bolster my confidence and pride. I didn’t feel quite so bad then.

In a way, since I did figure out the whole thing was staged; I guess it was still my first “case.” And my last case too, because that’s also when I figured out that being a private detective wasn’t such a grand idea after all.

Monday, July 15, 2013

What Speed Limit?

Speed limit 20. At least that’s what the sign said. At that speed, you could supposedly make it all the way through town without ever hitting a red light. I’m not really sure since my friend and I were both hitting 65mph when we saw the cop.

I suppose I should start at the beginning of this story. It all began with a simple question. One day at school, our teacher asked whose car was faster, my Chevrolet Impala, or my friend’s Mercury Montego - and we didn’t know. Neither car was exactly a hotrod, but with a 4-barrel carburetor, an 8-cylinder engine, and a lead foot, both cars would move -and fast! We’d had the cars for quite a while, but had never raced them. Sure, we’d driven down a few deserted country roads and knew the cars were pretty evenly matched but there had been no actual race to see who was the fastest. Until that day. Odd for teenagers, I know. The teacher was surprised as well.

Why we picked the downtown section of road for our race, I don’t know. Maybe because at sixteen it sounded like a good idea? We did have a freeway we could have used but I guess that would have made too much sense. So, instead we chose Main Street - in the middle of the day.

Starting at one end of town, there we sat, side by side, at the light. When the light changed to green, we both floored the gas pedal, leaving two nice sets of rubber tracks in the road. (And announcing to the world, or at least the people of the small town, what we were up to). We’d covered less than five short blocks when we saw the cop turn onto the street, coming toward us.

I think the police officer was more surprised to see us than we were him. It took him several seconds to make a u-turn and come after us. Those several seconds were about three seconds longer than it took us to disappear. Literally. At the light, where the cop had suddenly appeared, my friend turned right and I made a left. And then we were gone. We never saw which way the cop turned but it didn’t matter. By the time he got back to the intersection, we’d both made several more turns and then headed for a dirt road outside of town. And just in case anyone is wondering, one of the most satisfying feelings in the world for a sixteen-year-old is to successfully outrun a cop!

The only problem was, we never did find out whose car was fastest, not that day or any other. But the race wasn’t a total waste. I’ve always tried to learn something from my experiences, even if it’s not what I expected to learn. This day was no exception: That bit about driving 20 mph and hitting all green lights? Well, it works at 65 too!

Monday, July 8, 2013

Medical Emergency

I learned something new this past week. Amazing, I know. Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks. (Not that I’m getting old or anything). What I learned is, if you are experiencing chest pain DO NOT go to the hospital. I realize this runs contrary to the general wisdom regarding such pain, but I’ll explain.

When I arrived at the emergency room, surprisingly, I got right in. Evidently, the mere mention of the words “chest pain” allows a guy to skip the customary two or three hour waiting period normally associated with a visit to the ER. So far, so good.

Then started the melee. Almost a circus, really. Numerous doctors and nurses swarming all around, each one introducing themselves. (Like I was concerned with their names - or would even remember). Within minutes, they had me hooked up to several machines, diodes and wires attached to various points on my upper torso - nineteen of them, I later found. Monitors beeped in concert as if they were playing a well-orchestrated symphony of my body’s vital signs. Drugged up on a private cocktail of meds, and even sporting my very own nitro patch, I lay there quietly listening to my song. “The drugs, particularly the nitro, might give you a little headache,” one doctor said. That was a drastic understatement!

Meanwhile, the medical personal seemed to have a peculiar fetish with needles. In rather short order, they had opened a portal into my circulatory system. This established a viable means of delivering and extracting multiple fluids, including a sizeable blood donation by yours truly. Of course, the ready-made spigot, that some call an IV, wasn’t good enough. I guess they needed more blood than one of my arms could provide, because it took only a few ticks of the clock for them to start poking the other arm. Perhaps they just liked perforating my skin. It’s probably easier to remove that way - in case they decide further torture is in order.

And then began the game of 120 questions. If you’ve never heard of that game, it’s sort of akin to the more popular 20 questions, except the questions are repeated every 10 minutes by a new interrogator. I think they could tell I was becoming annoyed with the game when my answers were all, “The same thing I told you the last four times you asked that.”

They ran every test in the book, and then invented some new ones, I think. Blood pressure, ekg, breathing test, blood tests, etc. And then the story gets worse. They decided to admit me for “observation,” like I’m a rare specimen of human. What they actually wanted, I discovered, was not to “observe” me, but to “interact” with me; to poke, prod, measure, take my temperature, blood pressure, check my pulse, listen to me breath, and more things that I can’t remember. Honestly, every five minutes, it was something new. And like clockwork, someone showed up every hour to steal more of my blood. “The pet vampires we keep in the basement are hungry,” a nurse explained.

For two days they kept this up, advising me to just get some rest. Exactly how was I supposed to rest? They had deprived me of sleep, caffeine, food, and given me a massive headache, while periodically sticking me with needles, taking a few gallons of blood - all in preparation for a stress test. Really? I can’t think of any reason why I would be stressed at that point! I had come in with chest pain and a few hours later everything hurt, I was tired, hungry, and very irritable. I should have just put up with the chest pain!

Okay, the bottom line is, they found absolutely nothing wrong with me, all tests were normal. I’d had no heart attack, no heart problems of any kind. Two days of playing the part of a human test subject - all for nothing. The hospital had succeeded only in creating more pain and discomfort. In my opinion, this is by design. I’m convinced it’s all a ploy - so you forget about the original pain and think they cured you.

My “medical emergency” was neither medical nor an emergency. They never did discover why I’d had the chest pain; so apparently, my hospital stay was a colossal waste of time, and money. Eventually, I was discharged, but not without a strong warning: “If you feel any more chest pain, be sure to come back for more tests.” Yeah, not going to happen. I learned my lesson the first time; show up in the ER without a heart attack, they’ll do their best to give you one.

Monday, July 1, 2013

Freedom

With Independence Day coming up this week, I thought I’d write a serious blog for a change. Shock! I know.

July 4, 1776, a new nation is born - America! At least that was the official start, though the process began long before that date, hundreds of years, in fact. But, I’m sure everyone is well aware of the history of the United States of America, so that’s not what this blog is about. Instead, it’s about the idea that spawned the birth of this nation. That idea or concept was freedom: religious, as well as political freedom, and a yearning for that freedom. But what exactly does that mean? What is freedom?

Freedom is more than a list of enumerated rights, such as free speech, the right to assembly, the right of a free press, or the right to keep and bear arms. Freedom is more than the ability to choose where we live, where we work, and to lead the life we decide. That’s what I was taught in school, but the meaning of freedom goes much deeper. Those things are a result of freedom, not the definition.

One of the most basic definitions of freedom is the condition that exists when the people are in control. Freedom is when the people tell the government what is allowed, not the other way around. Freedom is when the citizens do not live in fear of what a corrupt government can do. Freedom means not being subjected to a tyrannical and oppressive form of government. It means our lives are not ruled by thousands of regulations aimed at creating criminals out of ordinary citizens.

Freedom also means we have the reasonable expectation that our government will not spy on us, that it will not invade our privacy, and that it will not conduct unwarranted search and seizures. It is the ability to live life unworried. Freedom means the right to be left alone!

In recent years, it seems the American government has lost sight of the meaning freedom. But that doesn’t mean our freedom has gone away. We still have the right to voice our opinion, elect our leaders, to change our leaders or our whole governmental system if necessary. Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes, but is worth fighting for.

That’s what freedom means to me. No, I’m not a big political figure. I’m not a guy with any influence at all. I’m just a flag-waving, patriotic nephew of my Uncle Sam. And I’m Proud to be an American! Happy Fourth of July! (Independence Day for those of you who are sensitive to that sort of thing).