The best writing of my life is documented within this latest book.
From the book-
An Electrician’s Guide To Our Galaxy: Living Life On The Widest Frequencies
I was an electrician for a career choice.
I became a spiritual seeker as a life choice.
I found a Truth, a Truth that changed my life.
We find what we look for.
By insight into that which is looking,
We find something much more interesting, and unlimited.
My father prepared me well for my “writing career”. He always led with a great insult when acknowledging me.
I don’t write expecting positive feedback from anybody, so all is good!
Well worth your read, if you have a curious mind, and are open to this kind of material.
If you don’t like this type of material, or even if you do, how about leading with a good insult?
Gosh, I miss my dad!
How I Become An Electrician
In December of 1964, I was nine years of age. We lived near the Willamette River, which had a great flood near Christmas time. Our family lived along the river, just at the highest reaches of the flood, and the raging, destructive flood waters came within one inch of flooding our living room floor. The furnace and water heater, located in the garage at two feet below living room floor level were not so fortunate.
My father became concerned about the potential for future flooding, and decided it was time to move the family to higher ground. He located some property on a high bluff across the river from our home, and got Jim Stobaugh, the builder of his existing home in West Linn, under contract to build the next home.
We inspected the new home several times while it was under construction. One time we visited, the roof and exterior walls were present, but the interior sheet rock had not been started. The builder was there, and told dad that the sheet rock would be installed after the electrician had completed most of his tasks. It just so happened that the electrician was working in the basement, and Jim asked me if I would like to go downstairs and watch him work.
I remember walking down the stairs and seeing him pull romex cable through the wooden studs to the junction boxes he had already roughed in. I was fascinated by the work. It almost seemed like magic that a house could be wired in such a way that we could control lights and power from just toggle switches and outlets. I asked the electrician several questions, and he was very pleasant, and answered me in a friendly manner.
I was very impressed with the electrician, and I had an immediate respect for him and his work. The thoughts of bringing power and light to families had an appeal to me. I began to wonder if becoming an electrician might be a good thing to do when I became an adult, but there were a lot of other things I was interested in, too, like becoming a jet pilot and an astronaut..
We moved into our new neighborhood, and over a short period of time I met and befriended many boys my age. One of the boys was my neighbor Craig Salter, a brilliant young man who, by aged eleven years, seemed to possess a creative and mechanical skills package far in excess of my own. He struggled a bit in school because it was pretty boring stuff, and his IQ was far in excess of the average student. We spent a lot of time together climbing trees, building tree forts, and then progressed to building a secret underground bunker on an outlier section of his family’s large piece of property. We needed lights in our bunker, and so we secured a coil of electrical cable called Romex, and dug a trench from our fort to an outside receptacle of his house. Craig wired a plug on the line side, and I connected a small light on the load side, and, voila, we had lights when Craig took the plug from its hidden buried place and plugged it in.
One summer evening, very late I might add, when we were supposedly sleeping outside in an outbuilding his father had constructed, we entered our secret bunker, to continue digging further back into the hillside, to make more room. There was only enough room for us to lay down, as the ceiling was only about three feet tall, yet the chamber progressed to be about eight feet across, after about a month of excavation. We only excavated at night, knowing his father would immediately shut us down for safety reasons if he became aware of our bunker building operation. We had just the one light, which functioned well for our purposes, but the electrician on the job, me, failed to adequately insulate the hot lead on the fixture. I discovered my mistake when my bare elbow made contact with that energized connection, and my body became the new ground, or replacement light fixture, if you will. My eyes lit up and I shook uncontrollably for an unknown period of time until I shook free of the connection. Had the electricity passed through my heart, it would have probably killed me. I was not “saved by ZERO”, or ground potential, but only by good fortune, in this case. But boy did I learn a powerful lesson about safe wiring practices, and respecting earth, or ground potential.
My junior year in high school, I took several classes at our local Owen Sabin Occupational Skills Center. I was already committed to going to college, and getting a degree in electrical engineering, because I had excelled scholastically, had a high proficiency in math and science, and hoped to parlay that education into an opportunity to join the Air force, and qualify to become a pilot. I was then going to parlay the fighter jet pilot status into an opportunity to train to become an astronaut
Albert Critzer was a local 48 electrician turned instructor at the Skills Center. He was an intelligent man who also had a great love and enthusiasm for the industry. His energy was absolutely infectious, his energy rubbed off on me, and I knew that, somehow, someday, I must also become an electrician.
I took a long and circuitous route through college and university levels of electrical, electronic, and computer engineering. I also briefly was in the Air Force ROTC, where I could not quite find what I was looking for. The Air Force no longer needed pilots, as they had an excess trained from the Vietnam War, thus they wanted me to be a ground-based electrical engineer for them. I said
NO THANK YOU,
eschewing a full-ride scholarship with them to find my own unique path to reach heavenly realms. Umm, after a few years of bouncing around doing less than happy, fulfilling things, I applied to and was accepted into a local electrical union’s apprenticeship program. I have never regretted the decision.
I was an electrician for a career choice.
I became a spiritual seeker as a life choice.
I found a Truth, a Truth that changed my life.
We find what we look for.
By insight into that which is looking,
We find something much more interesting, and unlimited.
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