vincentclark dot com

The countdown continues and there is no winner wet. I did get Jen to go to the art supply store, which I have been trying to do for a while. I know she is trying to get out of it, and playing every angle in that comlex overactive brain of hers. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to do the painting, but the fact that I am “forceing” her to do the painting per my directions.

This is why there are so many starving artists. It isn’t that they lack talent, they are the most talented people I know. What they lack is the ability to do what they are told. I am guessing a year was added to the painting of the sisteen chapel because Michale Angelo kept giving the Pope lip. I wonder if Angelo was the first, perhaps Rudolf was originally given the task, but he told the pope to go f- himself, “I am an artist, I don’t paint a church because the pope tells me too, I don’t care how much they pay.”

Sorry, Jen is home and wants attention. 5 1/2 hours to do.

Vince tries to get Jen to sell him a painting continues!

“Last night I was poised to make the announcement that I had one my little game with Jen last night, however, the universe used the Internet to intercede. 

I will give a full summery when the game is wrapped up. Fortunently since the internet went down last night I was unable to declare “mission accomplished” Jen pulled out a last minutes surprise that left me slack jawed. 

She then took the money and has been hanging out at the mall having a great day with her friends, which is what I wanted, however, I wanted a painting too. (I am pouting)

She is wearing me down. This is a plot of hers. I am going to be sucked into my game and she is going to have the upper hand and I will have to hear about her day and then my day, poof, gone, no where to be found, nobody asked, she didn’t, so I can do this right? Seriously, I want to play flight simulator, how can I get this to whine. ARG! Worse, I have good thought, want to finish, but I can’t even get that right now. Damn! she is good, sneaky bastard. 

shutting down my second monitor, I am going to do it, playing the game. She should be here right about …

 

Brought to you by, “will I win this argument?”

Jen will be home any minute now and I am going to stand up to her and see how long it takes for her to back down. She is going to want to talk about her day, and I know you are saying to yourself, but she has had a long day, be good to your wife, which I do, and you know exactly who you are. Lisa! 

So I am going to do, I have to hide the grin. I have a quarter of a bottle of wine, it tastes bad because it wasn’t finished the night before last. 

No, no category, no more spelling corrections, I mean it. I am going to play my game. 

10:46pm waiting for Jen

1. Ok shut down the second monitor. This is for modern art that is out of order. Ok, not installing the new mesh because I want a picture. That is all I want to do. Just take a picture inside my game. She will come I know it. 10:44 pm, my guess.
2. Will there be a trumpet, will I finish this with the words, apple 2 e basic? 

this was actually in the begining that right down there, but I wrote this almost last, I really want to play the game. I am not sure if I am going to have the energy. 

“Rocky Rocky!” Vinnie Vinnie, like that Victor?

Seriously, I am expecting her any minute and I want to play flight simulator. Shh, I am going to insist that she listen to me and get her to read something of mine and sell one of her paintings, which she talks about doing a lot. She will say, “I can sell one of my paintings.” For how much? I have $100.00 in my pocket and I am calling her out to paint me a painting so I can sell it. I will not split the money with her, it is mine, I have full rights she can’t say anything about it. I am a client and I am willing to giver her $100.00 for as little as 10 minutes of work. Cha, she won’t do something for 10 minutes for $100.00. But she feels that she deserves to be paid that wage. Exactly, this is what I am up against.

Challenge: Can Vincent Clark get Jennifer Clark to sell him a painting on a canvas for 15 minutes, that is $400.00 the going rate for seeing a psychiatrist at an HMO. 

Next week I will get Victor to admit that was wrong, only here at VincetClark.com (Still using text, but it isn’t text, but you don’t know the difference so shh. I am talking to you Jen. 

Ok, sleep, I still think I can do it, but really, Flight Simulator time. I want to see this working, finaly.

wait she is here. Damn, I will fire up the game and at least pretend.

I did this for her, ha, check.

10 print you smell

20 goto 10

Before the announcement there is a small plug I want to toss in here. Not sure if it is a good idea or not so I am going to put this out as a preface as well as.

Do you remember the early 90’s? I don’t think we do, I think we have all collectively block that time period out of our minds. Who says “90’s” and they talk about Kurt Kobain, and some actually say, “that is when the 90’s began.” What? I remember very clearly looking forward to 1990.

. Even the distractions are the distractions. Do you remember when people accused Clinton of bombing a way station in Iraq the night they voted him impleached? A way station? What? What the hell is that? Bush took over the whole country, so what? So what? If people thought blowing up someones gas station was a way to get out of getting head? Or, actually said that 

“Tell me three news events from the failed Y2K to the “failed Y2K I told you so.” But there weren’t too much of that.”

“No power grid went off, wow, we almost avoided a technical blunder like configuring a world wide web that had networked the entire planet and there was a fundamental flaw in the way that all electronics from the dawn of time was originally built. ”

“We built a unique world.”

“Right Here Right Now, the world woke up from History, 

“I’m Buddhist. i didn’t know that “Ave” means prayer to mother Mary.. Heheh!! Oh! i found it!! i’m finding dictionary..”

“Before chat rooms contacted the geeks the freaks were at the coffee shop and you were at the mall, so what, does it matter?”

“Disissions to make things to loose things to take before I cut it up, she says wait a minute I am going to add it up.”

So tell me something, do you remember life before .rtf, before bolding and power point? What was it like, the day before the Renaissance?

You don’t have to had been there, not for us, but for then, they still are there now, what is the point? Just acknowledge that it was there, and that these french words were hard to right, but I have Google now, I can ctrl-c click ctrl-v click ctrl-a click drag ctrl-v to get rid of a heading so I can get, wait, Renaissance, there, spelled correctly. You are welcome, and tell me that people would not pay to see that. Ha! 

There was a world before your bold and headers where it was being built. 

This is a story of that world

And that is just the begining. 

Or Ending

The ending of the begining of the end of the one that should have ended ok dragging on.

wait

I have a story to tell you

crtl-x click ctrl-v enter

it isn’t always right the first time. 

now don’t fuck it up.

“hello world”

most of my current writings fail to mention a pivotal person in my life. I know after writing to this I am going to have to explain myself to my wife. To say Katinka was a person whom I was in love with would not be correct, and if it were it would be an understatement. Katinka was much more than just a girl I met in college, and far more than someone that left and everlasting impression on me.

I would like to say Katinka was a road sign, but that would not do her role in my life justice. I would like to say that she was an angel that gave me a gift of hope, but that would not do her role in my life justice. To say that she was a beacon left by God to guide me, would not do her role in my life justice.

Katinka was Katinka, and until you were to spend a moment with her you would never understand what an amazing person she is.

knowing katinka is vital in the story of knowing vince.

^{inital draft}
Today was a bad day, a very bad day. I think that the doctors of my life have finally pushed me to the edge. I find myself with one of two choices.

The first, go over the edge. This show has to end sometime, ever act gets pulled. I have no doubt in my mind that I cannot live my life like this. This is not a pain that I want controlled by mind numbing pain killers.

After my last nerve injection my doctor extended my leave by a week, then told me that I should talk to the long term disability service and then doubled my pain medication. Nothing says, “I give up” quite like that.

I have put up with a lot of crap from doctors in my life. I wonder what I would have been like if the doctors did not mess up as they did. I first went to the medical clinic at Chico State with a lump in my testicle since mid August 1997. Despite not having sex for close to a year I was treated for Chlamydia for three and a half weeks. Two types of oral antibiotics and three injections of very powerful antibiotics, but this STD I knew I didn’t have didn’t go away. I think this is because it wasn’t an STD. Though the not having sex should have been the first sign, the second sign is the lump was near but not on the epididymis.

After weeks in pain, I was referred to a urologist. If the pain was not so severe there is no way I would have gone to one. Only a year prior during an examination by a urologist certain things occurred that prompted me to file a police report for sexual abuse against the doctor. The officer that took the report as well as several advocates wanted to see this guy fry. Unfortunately the detective didn’t even interview the doctor and told me that if you go to a urologist you have to expect things like that to happen. I know very clearly where the line is, and I know it was crossed.

After abandoning my speech scholarship, dropping out of school, and splitting up with my fiance I was finally getting my life back together. I knew that if it weren’t for the pain I would have rather died that go to see the urologist. It took me almost a month of scoping out a nurse practitioners and doctors to find one that I trusted enough to tell them about my testicular pain. I never really blamed the nurse practitioner for not uncovering the obvious tumor as much as I did the people that trained him and the complete lack of education about testicular cancer. Chico State had a full site on breast cancer. The in depth information on a cancer that would not affect the female population for another 20 - 40 years dwarfed the single page that dealt with the most common type of cancer among college males.

I thought about suing the school and was approached by a couple lawyers, but I knew where that money to pay me off would come from. Classes such as ballroom dance would be cut and the ability to have lectures such as She-mo Perez and Ice-Tea would be lost. I could not do that to my classmates, so I did the next best thing, I raised awareness. I openly talked about my experience. When I gave a presentation or speech I can tell that this was my way of correcting the injustice, not by taking money away from the school.

The doctor that discovered the cancer was a surgeon. I was 22 and things were happening very fast. I was 500 miles away from my family doctors and decisions had to be made quickly. The doctor advocated the second surgery and the option to have chemo was never entertained until the second tumor was found. I lost the ability to conceive a child naturally and eleven years later I am still feeling the after effects of an unskilled surgeon gutting my insides. I probably could have got a settlement from his malpractice insurance, but there was no way I was going to sue the man that save my life.

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^{from Vincent Clark’s newsletter archives}

^{originally published December 2nd, 2004}

It has been eight years since I finished my final round of chemotherapy. I was cured. Some days it seems like it was just yesterday, but most days it seems like a lifetime ago. It’s amazing how quickly life can change.

In September of ‘96, my life was heading in a different direction; it has been so long that I don’t quite remember what direction it was going in, but I sure as hell know this isn’t the path that I saw for myself. People would tell me that things happen for a reason. Two surgeries later, two rounds of chemotherapy, pneumonia, a degenerative disk from the chemo, nerve damage, the loss of being able to have children-I still wonder: what was the point of all that? Why did this need to happen? I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that I feel like an ass every time I ask myself that. I am thankful that it was me and not one of my friends or cousins.I don’t want that ever to happen to someone that I care about.

I know I should feel lucky, but most of the time I just feel guilty. I got a curable kind of cancer. Yes it sucked, still does suck, and I guess it always will always suck, but it isn’t going to kill me. We think of all the shitty things that we have to go through in our daily lives while most people my age will never know what it is like to tell their mother that they have cancer. Sometimes you will think about how shitty it must be to get out of bed and go to work. This sucks, because we should be glad that we have the ability to get out of bed. Yeah, things suck sometimes, and for some of us most of the time, but we can still get up. Tomorrow, we will be okay. My uncle once said, “You know, if you have a warm bed to sleep in, three square meals, and nobody is shooting at you, then things aren’t that bad.”

Some days we feel like throwing in the towel, saying “that’s it, I give up,” but deep down inside we know that we would never do that. I remember my cousin telling me that people would ask him if it was hard to grow up without his mother, who died when he was fifteen. He told me that he would tell them that he didn’t have a choice-he did what he had to do. He said that it was much like what I was going through. I didn’t have a choice; I did what I had to do. Shit happens, and sometimes we are stuck with it, but giving up is never an option.

One thing always stood out in my mind when I was getting chemo. I would be there for eight to ten hours, and I would see people come and go. Most of them were sixty or seventy years old, and I thought, I want that to be me when I get that age. Not that I wanted cancer; I just want to be that age and still be fighting hard for my life, even if only to extend it by a month or two. I think of this one girl, the only one my age there. She had melanoma on her lung. She asked me if I was going to be okay. I told her yes and asked her if she would be okay. She told me they didn’t know, that they needed to see if this round of chemo would shrink the tumor. She is dead now, and so are most of the people that were in the office the days that I was there. I was one of the few that survived this long and I will continue to survive as the years go on. I am not sure what that means, but I do know that it means something.

Your Friend, Vincent

45 second promo for a mocumentry I am developing.

The mocumentry, “the Cylon Menace” is about a rash of encounters commercial airliners have had with an unidentified flying object dubbed, “the cylon.” It is called “the cylon” because of its resemblance to a space craft featured in the legendary Television series, Battlestar Galactica.

The multipart series deals with learning about what this menace is as well as its technice of hunting aircrafts in the twilight. 

The overall purpose of this project is to test and build out project work flows. Though I will be doing a bulk of the work myself a work-flow is key when more than one piece of software is at play. 

In this edit I took a simple clip from Flight Simulator and ported it over to Adobe Premier where I trimmed it down and made several cuts. The focus of this was not on editing principles but how to incorporate an After Effects component. After Effects was used for the filters as well as the animated titles. You will see that the titles are not exactly what they should be. I was stuck in making a mask out of text. 

Building custom music with Garage Band has been a constant struggle for me. I take every opportunity I can to incorporate some original music into the clip. 

This is the the first clip in the promo 2 series. The three clips are separated by the After Effects filter being used. 

Adobe Premiere

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe After Effects

Adobe Audition 3

Soundbooth 2

Flash CS3

Google Sites

Flex 3.01

Microsoft Flight Simulator X

FRAPS

FSX BSG Cylon Raider - Rev 1.5

Garage Band

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When Fox first started to taken on the three main television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC they were largely seen as the network that aired the shows the real networks didn’t want anything to do with. This allowed for edgyer shows to survive with what many in the industry considered, substandard ratings. Since the spotlight was rarely on FOX they could simply, get away with more. This ability to get away with more than the average network show is a main factor in the success of the crass sitcom “Married with Children.”

Fox then took the initiative of thinking outside of the box and brought us complex shows speaking at times on complicated and controversial subjects. The network became the go to place for the shows with a niche market. Somewhere along the way FOX merged into the mainstream. The most spectacular part of this merge to the mainstream was the fact that the shows on FOX were not diluted in order to comply with the standards of Prime Time, however it was the standards of Prime Time changed.

If you are looking for an example of the boldness of FOX once it had entered as a true competitor to the previous three champs of Prime Time you only need to see the opening episodes for FOX’s 24. After an industry delayed start to Prime Time after the events of 911 and after movies such as Collateral Damage were postpone as well as video games being edited due to the sensitivity of the terror attacks Fox was set to launch a new promising franchise about terrorism 24.

24 was not just another telivison show about an governemnt agency thwarting attacks on the United States. 24 introduced a new format to the story, real time. The show would be 24 one hour episodes that would cover a complete 24 hour day. The format alone made the show a risk. Another risk of the network was putting the lead charter Jack Bauer into the hands of a gifted yet volatile star Kiefer Sutherland. The network was unsure if this formula would work, however they understood the base of the show, and after two subtle but ground breaking decisions, an audience was hooked. With one more thought from outside of traditional thinking, 24 is not entering its seventh season with several books and a video game added to the franchise.

Decision 1, should we or shouldn’t week?

There must have been decisions at the highest levels as to continue with the production of a show that centers around terrorism in the days following the largest terrorist attack on US soil.

During the opening episode of 24 on of the terrorist operatives blows up a plane in order to escape with a photographers badge. A decision was made to air the episode uncut less than two months from the date of the terror attacks. Blowing up a plane on a flagship television show on a network that had just earned its right into the mainstream could not have been easy. The scene could have been cut, the plot device was not a crucial element of the show. This all could have been done and nobody would have noticed, however the show would be less than what it was originally intended to be.

I am certain that the motivation of leaving this scene in was not to impress the potential die hard fans, but it did just that. Many of us remember the boldness of the shows producers when the plane was destroyed. The scene was not without emotion, I am sure almost everyone watching that thought of the attacks that occurred in the weeks prior. I was speechless, a part of me was angry that money trumped national traumatizing. It was then that I saw a point trying to be made. You cannot talk about terrorism without talking about all the components, even the components that make us sick to our stomachs. It was in that boldness that made me want to hear what this show had to say. FOX was on track to deliver us what we had come to expect from the show. A good story that is tough to swallow, but sparked debate within ourselves and at the water cooler.

thirteen eppisodes

Dispite the name 24 and 24 expected hours, the show only originally ordered 13, this is not uncommon for new shows. The problem with this approuch is the fact that the story was a serial show. This meant that we will have to wait until the end of the show before we know the whole story. 24 was a part of an emerging class of shows that broke from traditional telivison shows and formated itself more like a mini series than a network telivison show.

When starting a miniseries you are guaranteed at least some resolution within the show. An additional installment of the mini series or a full blow series was icing on the cake. Needless to say the new format of serial shows had the potential to upset a lot of fans if the series is pulled before completing.

Unsure if the season would be proved for the final 11 shows the producers wrapped up the show giving a sense of closure to its fans as well as leaving an opening for more. I cannot stress how brilliantly this was executed. The show was extended for the full season and the plot had thicken and twists were made and the efforts amoung the producers to statisfy their fans went largely unnoticed.

This effort among the decision makers behind FOX, including the writers, actors, producers, and executives not to abandon their fans loyalty went overlooked due to the success of the show and the fact that it had been extended. In the telivison world of 2007 and 2008 this concern for fan loyalty at the network level has all but vanished from the landscape. Those this descision did not earn new fans, strengthen current fans, or earned respect for the network, it was the right decision and was made with profit margins aside.

Beyond Telivison

In 2002 before the start of season two FOX found a whole new fan base for 24 within the DVD market. Though 24 was not the first TV show to come out to DVD, it proved to increase the fan base for the show and opened a new revenue stream. Though a show’s success still in 2008 is not based upon anything beyond sampling from Nilson, in 2002 the series was given royal treatment despite not posting the strongest ratings on the Network. The executives saw beyond the ad revenue and discovered the potential of TV series on DVD. This discovery has been largely missed within the industry.

I have no doubt that the concept of a world beyond ratings and a prime time slot was not floating around among the decision makers, and I am no doubt that the true concept of new media was drowned out by people that did not understand it. This is a failure within the industry, but not within the people that have maintained control of cutting edge shows such has 24.

As all great ideas by visionaries, the idea that made 24 24 would be lost as narrow minded individuals used their connections to get their hands into the mix of greatness others created, thus introducing a bacteria that will consume the life and legacy of the show. Unfortunately this is not an unusual occurrence, in fact, it is rarely not like this.

In television executive’s decisions (part 2, Universal) we will see the effect of well connected losers taking over the unconnected great ideas and how this treachery is on the verge of permanently crippling the industry.

^{brain leak
needs to be trimmed down, focused, however, will preserve original edit.}
A while back I set a standard for myself, and I admit it isn’t always achieved, but it is something that I try really hard at. That is taking responsibility for what I know I did wrong. My father always told me that he would back me 100% to the police, to my teachers, to anyone I might have got in trouble with. He then told me, “you will wish I hadn’t.” I knew that my father was a far worse person to cross than anyone. I am not quite sure the magnitude of what the fear was. I want to be clear, my father knocked me around a few times, sometimes I don’t think i deserved it, other times I know I did. There are some sore spots I have around my father  about this, but in the end, my father was fair.

I did not live in fear of what the police might do to me, but what my father would do to me. I had seen my father so rarely violent. I knew what he could do, but I never saw that could be unleashed on me, but on the person he was protecting me from. My father always made it clear to me that he would rain hell fire down on the person that hurt his boy. It wasn’t the fear of the harm my father could do to me that kept me in line and out of trouble, it was so much more than that.

(parable of the barrel)

When I was nine years old I was with my father hunting in Willows Ca. I was a crappy hunter, terrible shot, crapped my pants, and  the stories can go on and on about the worst hunter in the Clark family. My father was among the best. Aside from being notoriously bad shot I was also left handed. If you have ever used a shotgun that ejected the shells out of the side of the gun it was most likely coming from the right side. If you haven’t, imagine a place that is in a confined space lights gunpowder hot in off and quick enough to shoot scores of beebees out the barrell. Now you cannot just explode gunpowder in a tight sapce like that with just anything, you need something storng enough to hold the gunpower before it exploded. This is made from metal that doesn’t melt when it gets really hot really fast, it just absorbs it, making the metal really hot. Since the hot shells are ejecting from the right side of the gun, the burning hot metal shot away from the right handed shooter and the shells didn’t have to shoot over the other arm in order to stay clear from any part of a right handers body because the metal was really really hot.

This is an important part of the story. For the hunting story I am going to tell it from one of my grandfather’s hunting buddies, I think the one that used to hunt with Tito.

Now right handed guns are for right handed people, it is why so many right handers like hunting. However if you were like Tom’s boy who was a south paw, lefty, or as everyone else saw it, not right handed. Most the time Tom’s boy had a jacket on, so when the shells hit his arm he didn’t notice. Only a few times did the shells hit skin, the boy dropped the gun in the mud and Tommy spent the rest of the day cleaning it as the rest of his family went hunting.

Most the time it was just my Tom and his boy out there. The family would always split into groups of two, three or four. Almost all the time rest of the family came back with their limit, Tom would always have one bird, and the south paw would be the one carring it. Most of them saw Tom give the bird to his son right before they got to the trucks. That kid was always dirty, no kills, eyes swollen from the brush, he reminded me of a kid in movies, the scronny one with the inhaler. But this kid didn’t have an inhaler, instead he was holding a shot gun. Tom had it specially made for him. It only had one shot but the shell didn’t eject and burn his arm. The kid was already a bad shot, this gun didn’t help. He looked so proud holding it with the barrel up.

As he approuched the group he gently pointed the gun down, in the oppisite directon from everyone else. Pulled the trigger back to unlock it. Now this trigger was different than the others, and really, not as safe, but nobody seemed to give it as second thought. Tom’s boy never pointed the gun at anyone. He put the gun down, cocked back the trigger to unlock it, flipped the barrel open, held the gun steady with one hand, removed the lone shotgun shell, looked down the barrel of the gun to be sure that one didn’t sneak in when nobody was looking. I will never forget how he looked down the barrel, he knew exactly what steps to take to make a dagerous wepon in to a harmless paper weight. He didn’t exactly as he was tought, though some of it may seem silly to anyone outside of the group that was hunting. The family would boast over their kills but they were most proud that everyone made it back, as they always done before.

I think Tom’s boy shot two Pheseants in his life. One was a join kill with his cousin. Tom flushed the bird out, Tom’s nephew was around eleven years old. The bird flew up in front of Tom, inbetween Tom and two boys nine and eleven with loaded shotguns was the bird they were out to hunt.

This is a small foot note in Clark family stories. Most would think it would have been told more, that is if the story went something like,

“Tom’s boy and nephew, bird flies up and pow, both shot at the same time. What sane man would take to kids out with loaded wepons? Poor bastard.”

But that isn’t how the story is told. The bird flew up between the two boys and Tom. Tom could have swat the bird out of the air it was that close to him. The two boys were about 15 feet away, their barrels pointed at the ground. They were always told, you do not point at something you do not intend to shoot. Tom saw the bird, the boys didn’t, they saw Tom and were not about to point their guns at him. The two moved their guns along the path of the bird and the barrels pointed harmlessly to the ground. They followed that bird with thier barrels pointed to the ground until they turn almost 180 degrees and both of then fired their guns at the same time and the bird fell to the ground.

Tom told his brother in law what happend. Bill laughed patting Tom on the back and said, “if it were me, I would have hit ground.” One might think Tom merly froze in the face of two children with loaded wepons wanting nothing more than to shoot the very thing that is flying in front of him. I wondered if Tom’s life flashed before his eyes. But I know it didn’t, and if he though it was appropriate he would have been face down in the ground the moment the bird took off. Tom was confident that the boys knew what to do and if he wasn’t then he would have been there. With so much to be embarassed about Tom knew his boy knew what mattered and that is why he was so proud to bring him back to the group, even if they were empty handed.

I, Vince, did make a mistake once. I dropped my gun near the mud. One can never shoot a gun if there is mud in it and that was a day killer right there. I wasn’t sure if mud even got in there. I paniced and acted like a nine year old, the gun was not cocked, and the chances of it going off without devine intervention was none. The gun was still loaded and I put my face in front of it. I was not thinking. My father swiped the gun from me and I will never forget the stair. I cannot say what it said, anger, disappointment, failure, I could guess but it was a look I had never saw before and it terrified me. Then he said the most terrifing thing I have ever heard in my life. “What would your grandmother say if she saw you do that?” It was beyond comprhension. He gave me back my gun. I pointed it down, with one hand held the gun, with the other I removed the bullet. I put the bullet in my pocket and looked down the barrel, this time from the oppisite end. I did exactly what I was taught. There was a small piece of dirt. I knew not to put anything I do not intend to shoot in front of the barrel of the gun. I knew that I could not shoot the gun if there was dirt there. I could have easily removed it when my father wasn’t looking, but this was not allowed I had not intention of shooting my hand off so I was not going to put it in front of the unloaded gun.

So I did what any nine year old kid that wanted to walk around with guns, hunting with his father and cousin would do, I told my father what had happened. I knew the day was ruined, the gun was dirty, I had to stay back at the truck. My father took the gun, walked around the truck, came back and handed it back to me. I checked to see if it was loaded and the barrel was clear and it was. I pointed the gun down opened it, held it with one arm and put the bullent in. I closed the gun and kept the barrel down. That was a really fun day.

In the end, what does this have to do with how I feared my father. With so much unpredictibility he taught me that there were always constants. He taught me to do right and then taught me what right was. I did not fear a beating, I feared doing something wrong. Now that my father is dead and there is a complete absense of fear that he could ever harm me, but I still follow what he taught me, not for fear of him, but the fear of being wrong. I am not always right, and I mess up, I try to admit when I am to blame, but I do not accept it when it isn’t mind.

Things will always be tough, but I draw on the fact that I do do good, I am better than I think, and I can always do better. I have a far higher standerd to compare myself to than I can expect anyone to hold for me.

That is how I am Tom Clark’s son.