At 8 years old, step mom pulls up my corn plants that are
looking like they’re going to start giving corn any day. Of course, I was a little kid, so it might
have been a while, but that’s not the point, the point is that she pulled up my
corn plants that I worked hard and diligently on for months – and she did it
for no apparent reason.
At 11 years old, my second year of Little League
baseball, where the year before, I was one of two of the best pitchers in the
league. I sit on the bench for 3 whole
games that second year, while the coaches’ kids – who couldn’t throw a ball to
save their lives – played every game, all game; not to mention, the kid they
put on 3rd base who couldn’t even reach first base on the rare
occasion that he actually fielded a ball.
At 17, I’m on the varsity basketball team. The referee association has a problem with my
dad, so they decide to take it out on me – my dad’s 17 year old kid. In spite of that, and in spite of Rodney Loo
making damn sure that I don’t get the ball on offense, and in spite of having a
coach who was so dim that he let all this go on. In spite of all this, I still manage to
maintain a 17.5 scoring average (after scoring 29, 33, and 35 points per game
in the first pre-season tournament), 2nd leading rebounder, and
easily one of the top 5 players in the whole state. But, Jim Hackleman – the sports editor of the
main newspaper (the Honolulu Star Bulletin) flies into a rage at something my
dad does, and yanks me off the All Star team – as revenge against my dad. How many kids do you think something like
this would have happened to?
In the 80s, I had a very successful country band in
Hawaii, we played all the military clubs, and the two main civilian dance halls
there – this was after spending the first year taking a beating from Jim
Mitchell – the only booking agent there who handled the country circuit. We all thought that if we didn’t book through
him, that we wouldn’t work at all. I did
well after getting away from him, but boy did I ever take a beating at first. Anyway, after spending 5 years playing the
circuit, I finally get out of Hawaii to go after bigger and better things –
with my wife at the time fighting me on that tooth and nail. Funny, it’s common knowledge that the A &
R people (formerly known as “talent scouts”) hear things – well, if they heard
of me, they certainly made damn sure that nobody acknowledged me. My abilities and appeal – being subjective, I
can’t realistically say that they purposely locked me out, but if I had to
guess…
You can see me here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Ikaika1955
, and decide for yourself.
For the next 4 years it was nothing but problems. Too many to go into detail.
Sometime in the mid 90s, ex half brother goes into a rage
and makes sure I can never have anything played on the “Local” radio stations
there by contacting every person he knew (and he knew everybody in that town),
and said god knows what. I sent a CD to
the radio stations, and to a couple of local music/record companies, which
nobody ever even took the time to listen to. As if that's not enough, the program director at the radio station that played Hawaiian music dodged me for more than three months - while I called just about every day, and even went to the station to wait for him, only for him to have succeeded in dodging me the whole time.
In 1999, I move to England, where I lived for 3-1/2
years. I cannot begin to count how many
times I would lose a long email – by some bizarre occurrence where my computer
would make a clicking noise, followed by my email disappearing – BTW, this is
normally not possible. Never once did
any email vanish after the first few minutes, it would ALWAYS be after I spent
an hour or two, just as I was about to sign off and send it. I also had more computer problems, and saw
more error messages, than I can begin to count.
About the computer itself, we ordered one from the States, and it was
defective – the CD reader did not work.
So, we send it back, wait a month, 2 months, 3 months, calling to no
avail, finally order another one. The very
next day the first one arrives. I order
a keyboard from an online music outlet, but before I do that, I call to make
sure I’m getting one that does what I want it to – the guy on the phone assures
me that every detail I asked about was what that keyboard could do. It arrives, and it does nothing that I want
it to – it only makes a bunch of wild noises – no recognizable sounds. I send it back, I wait a month, 2 months, 3
months, then I go to a local store there and buy another one. Believe it or not, the very next day, the
first one arrives – and I am SO not kidding – the VERY NEXT DAY twice in a
row. Anybody know what the odds against
that happening are? Astronomical.
Moving to San Diego and living there, also for 3-1/2
years, strange little things started to happen.
I’m a bit OCD, I always have a place for my stuff, and I set it in a
certain order, and in a certain placement in relation to other things – it’s a
sub conscious thing with me. On more than one occasion, I would go to pick
up my wallet, keys, and watch, to find that all three had been moved just
enough for me to notice. I once found a
yellow baseball cap behind a chair in the apartment. My wife at the time swears that she never
touched my stuff, nor did she have any idea about the baseball cap – and I
wholeheartedly believe her – she was not the type to do things like that. I used to listen to (gasp) conservative talk
radio during the day. After a few
months, suddenly my radio station was being jammed by some bizarre quacking
noise. I suspected it was my ultra
liberal landlord, who I though may have heard my radio – being that the windows
were open most of the time. Thinking
back, though, I suspect it was not the landlord.
The Navy girl I was married to at the time, Lisa, she was
financially fairly well off – had spent her whole adult life in the Navy, no
kids, and had never been married before she met me. BTW, she came at me, not the other way
around, AND, I had no idea what her financial situation was until we’d been
married a couple of years. It wasn’t a
good marriage, and, shortly after marrying her, I started noticing that I was
fighting with severe mental depression – not that I think one had anything to
do with the other, it just happened that way.
We were, as they say, “Friends with
benefits”, roommates. Around 2005,
leaving out all the gory details, I’d had a nice amount of money coming to me
as a result of a life insurance policy. Keep
in mind, I had never had any good fortune of picking a girl/woman who was good
for me, or who I was good for. Out of
nowhere, Gala appears – she is in Peru – born and raised there. She finds me on the internet at a music
message board. At the perfect time –
while I was about to have enough money to pay off the house, and retire on, she
spends 5 months pushing me, seeming to know all my vulnerabilities, weaknesses,
and desperations, and being able to skillfully play on all of it. BTW, it was a matter of a few months before I would
have gotten that insurance policy. I
also let down a friend. Somehow, she
talked me into leaving all that – the house, the insurance money, and most of
my belongings – that I worked my whole life for – all behind to move to Peru to
be with her. She seemed to have
everything I wanted in a woman (BTW, I hate that word, but well…). Also keep in mind, the people in Peru are
beyond ignorant, they are horribly uneducated, they are lazy, most use drugs
all day, every day – the stuff is cheap and easy to come by in that
country. So, Gala, again, who was born
and raised in Peru, just happens to be highly educated and/or informed on Philosophy, History, and
world events. She was also very knowledgeable
on Poetry and non-fiction literature.
She was knowledgeable on physics and astronomy. She also happened to like all the same kinds
of music that I did – and hated all the same music that I did. Funny that all of these things are things
that I always loved talking about and learning about, but could never find
anybody who knew the first thing about any of it, not to mention, I’d never
been with any girl who had the same musical tastes as I did. Besides all that, she was funny, charming, pretty,
and seemingly fearless when it came to confrontational situations – something I
kinda liked at the time, but that I hate now.
So, after a whole lifetime of not finding any compatible woman to be
with, suddenly she appears – at the precise time in order to get me away from
finally being in control of my own life – not to mention having let Lisa
down. Funny also that she just happened
to be in a foreign country, because if she’d been here in the States, I could
have been there for Lisa, and not had to give everything away. Gala didn’t seem to care about wanting my
money or belongings, she only seemed interested in separating me from the
house, the money, and my belongings.
Looking back, I’m not convinced that she wasn’t sent to me to keep me
from finally being in control of my life – by being financially stable. BTW, Lisa died of cancer in 2005 – with all
of her family near her.
BTW, during my time in Peru was when I was fairly active
on the internet – I was very much anti-conservative by this time. When I would get into a debate at YouTube,
there were countless times where I would be burying somebody (figuratively of
course), having posted maybe 2 or 3 posts, when all of a sudden, somebody would
be manually blocking my posts. There
would be no reason, and no message telling me my post didn’t go, it would just
turn dark and sit there. If I would post
something unrelated to the debate, the post would go through, but if I tried to
post something relevant – something that would be effective in the debate, it
would manually be blocked – and this happened countless times, over a period of
a couple years or more.
I finally moved back to the States in 2009, after
spending, strangely enough, 3-1/2 miserable years in Peru. Since getting back, I have run into one
ridiculous situation after another, being mostly unemployed, staying with
people who pretended to want to help me, while really only wanting something
for themselves, and needing somebody to beat up on when they felt like it. There was Austin, San
Francisco, San Diego, Tucson (where I ended up homeless for about a month and a
half), San Antonio, Austin again, Portland, and now Reno – all situations where
I have no control over my own life, and being mostly unemployed - and bullied. Things seemed to de-escalate to the point
where I was prevented from working – by the time I got to Portland and Reno, by
sneaky, cowardly people who were determined to destroy me.
I have to mention this – still another bizarre occurence: My banjo case has an ID tag attached to the
handle, where I have one of my business cards in. By default, the thing faces down – the card
side facing the floor when I set the case on the floor on its side. I was staying with a guy who actually did
help me with good intentions, but his psychotic, vindictive wife was determined
to cause me as much grief as humanly possible.
In the bedroom I was in, I would set my banjo case down at the foot of
the bed – because it was easy to get to from there. As always, the ID tag, with my business card
inside always face down. One day I look
down at it, and the tag/card is facing up – which would never happen by itself –
somebody would have had to actually grab it and turn it face up, and hold it
there for a few seconds so it wouldn’t turn back over. This was only one of the many bizarre things
that happened while I was staying there.
The strange things continue to this day. There’s the fact that while I used to be able
to play my banjo with little or no effort, I have devolved to the point where I
cannot even consider me a banjo player – my fingers doing everything except
what I tell them - and this is after hundreds and hundreds of hours of practice
over the past 5 years. There is a video
of me playing banjo – that I made about 4 years ago – where I wasn’t as good as
I was back in the 80s, but it was passable and decent – I cannot play even
close to the way I did in that video – again – after hundreds and hundreds of
hours of practice. I’ve been bashing my
arms, knees, hands, and head, on furniture, towel racks, and whatever else –
and let me tell you, I was never a clumsy guy.
When I grab for something, I will
grab for it 4, 5, even 10 times before I’ll get it – seemingly having something
hanging it up somehow, and even seeming to have something yank it out of my hand
after I thought I had a grip on it. You
should see me trying to get a napkin out of a napkin holder. I don’t have any stiffness, arthritis, bad
vision, or anything that would cause this, but it happens very often.
There’s more, that I can’t think of at the moment, and my
logical mind cannot comprehend that so many things such as what I described –
can happen, especially when you think about the astronomical odds against even
ONE of them happening – much less having it be a regular, consistent thing. I’ve been hearing that this is not an
uncommon occurrence, that thousands of Americans are experiencing similar
strangeness – there’s even a name for it – “Gang Stalking”. I’ve read that there are even devices (HAARP
and others) that, among other things, can cause a person to have involuntary
body movements, and even thoughts. Another
strange thing – if somebody would have told me 15 years ago that I would be
fighting with mental depression at any time in my life, I would have laughed
and told them they were out of their mind; but, here I am. If this is really what is happening to me, I
can’t think of any reason why. I never
saw me as any threat to anybody – much less anybody who has any real power –
nor would I want to be any threat to
anybody. I’ve thought about my dad being
a talk radio host back in the early 80s – where he was trying to expose a lot
of the wrongdoings and injustices committed by powerful people and
organizations – that maybe the Powers That Be think I might follow suit. Intellectually, I can’t imagine I would do
such a thing – for a couple of reasons.
First, I really don’t care about what happens to people who do nothing
but beep at me, sneer at me, steal from me, and show horrible aggression
towards me in public places – even in my own living quarters, and who have
tried to destroy me. Yes, I hate
injustice in general, but I’m pretty sure I don’t care enough to be some kind
of activist – should I ever stumble across a bigger platform to speak
from. Then again, maybe these people
know me better than I do. I really don’t
know, all I do know is that there have just been way too damn many bizarre
things happen to me for this to simply be the natural order of things, to be random, or to be
some big accident. It’s been said that
things don’t just happen, they are made to happen, and, that there no coincidences. I don’t have a final or absolute assessment,
and I damn sure don’t have any answers.
So, I continue to live my life wondering what the hell is going on, and
wondering if my hard work and abilities will every pay off. I will also say that if something is going on,
where some organization is actually trying to stifle me for whatever reasons, I
find it no less than cowardly to do this to a person, and I would sure like to
come face to face with whoever it is – not that I could do anything, as I’m
sure they would have weapons to hide behind.
I’d still like to know, though, but something tells me that will never
happen, and something tells me I will go to my grave not knowing, and never
having had my hard work and abilities work for me.
Over and out.
I'm Right Here, Cowards
