It’s mid-October so I’ll get the island to myself. After all its hurricane season and bookings tend to be light. They can always lure a poor bloke like myself with their category five discounts so I’m outta here and headed south.

When the cab pulls into the hotel entrance you get that sick feeling in your stomach that you made a big mistake and just blew a week off. The façade is run down and looks more like a circa 1970’s middle school in Buffalo than an exotic Caribbean resort. You’re almost embarrassed to walk into the lobby and admit you actually booked a room for a week in a place like this.

However, when you walk out through the other side of the lobby, you see that the grounds are attractive enough and the hotel buildings don’t look so bad. Once in my room, I’m stricken by the ocean view and the vast sandy beach dotted with palm trees. This is as close to paradise as a peasant like me is likely to get and although a peasant’s paradise is more pedestrian than Paris Hilton’s, it still is nevertheless a paradise.

I wonder if it’s the same way in heaven.  Will Paris Hilton get a five star cloud to harp away on while I’m rowing and bailing out some leaking cumulus piece of carp that’s ready for the cloud junk yard? You are what you are after all even in the hereafter.  If you can’t make it here on earth what makes you think there will be some kind of role reversal in eternity?

But I digress. I could care less about the condition of the hotel buildings or the lousy food they serve, I came here for the beach and especially the calm warm ocean water. The ocean is calm here and that’s something I’ve had trouble with at other resorts.

I’m sick of resorts where the ocean waves are over my head and when I try to get into the water I’m knocked on my ass by a series of building size waves.  When you finally get into the water you feel like you’re in an episode of The Deadliest Catch with only even odds of making back to shore.  But here on Fortuna Beach there are no waves and I can swim and snorkel off and on during the day more like a trip to Typhoon Lagoon than being a cast member in The Perfect Storm.

I worship Caribbean beaches and I love swimming in the warm salt water. I come from the Northeast, and live less than a mile from the Atlantic, but you can’t go in the water without getting hypothermia. The bone chilling water is like diving into a vat of liquid nitrogen and so I have to take a thousand mile plane ride to go for a swim.

This place has a lot of young European couples. That’s a good thing because Europeans won’t talk to Americans. They consider us too uncouth probably because we show up for dinner wearing an Arkansas Razorback muscle shirt and a pair of flip flops. That and Americans drink like fishes and every other word out of their mouth is an F Bomb. Anyway the fewer people who talk to me the more privacy I have.

I’m sitting on my deck staring out over the tranquil turquoise ocean and my soul is at peace. My problems are a thousand miles away; they didn’t make the trip with me. Everything is ok with the world now and I am reconciled to my existence.

Funny how taking a break from the greatest country in the world can make a person feel brand new and bring the joy in my heart back from the dead. I’m only half way through my vacation and I can’t wait to come back.

The main character, Jenny Sylvester, (I love the name Jenny) walks alone on the beach every night.  This is the perfect setting for a story like this, a forlorn Jenny dreaming of her missing lover with only the tranquility of a pacified ocean and the muted twilight sunset to console her. She dreams and I get lost in her dream as I read.

This is a story of a missing lover and another man who seeks to steal away Jenny’s heart. Jenny is torn between the need for a miracle and the need to move on.

If you like romance novels then this is as good a story as you’ll find.  So I recommend that you buy it and read it when you’re in the mood for a dreamy tale of romance. You can order through Amazon right here on my web site. See the link on the side panel.

I thought it would be cool loading and unloading luggage on the planes, or guiding a just arriving plane into the gate. They even let you de-ice the wings during the winter time. Sounds like fun to me. I’m going to go check it out. So I applied for the baggage handler’s job and got called in for an interview.

Well I arrived at the US Airways office and was directed to take a seat in the conference room and given some paperwork to fill out. Turns out there were a lot of other people there who applied for the same job I did. They must be fascinated by airplanes just like me. If you can’t fly one at least you can do the next best thing and load them up. Even baggage handlers get a uniform and an official US Airways badge. Maybe I’ll at least get to meet a real pilot captain and talk with him like a fellow employee. “How was the flight Capt’n, no ditch’n in the Hudson today heh?”

It was lunchtime, and we all have been waiting for quite some time for someone to come in and get this show on the road. I wonder why they couldn’t be bothered to put out some donuts or something seems like that would have been the courteous thing to do.

The big guy from Charlotte headquarters finally came in and put on a picture show meant to show the wonders of being a baggage handler. There was also a lot of talk for the need for safety on the job. I’m thinking ok big shot, let’s cut to the chase here, what’s the pay and the benefits. Well hearing what the job paid brought my heart up into my throat and gave me a bought of air sickness of the kind ya get when you run into some unexpected turbulence and the plane your on makes a sudden five thousand foot drop without warning. The fellow across the table looked incredulously at me and then whispered to me “did he say $9.89 an hour? How are you supposed to live on that?”

The people at US Airways know that no one would work for that kind of money, so the next speaker, a longtime employee gives the punch line: it’s not the pay it’s the benefits that got him to sign on. He’s right, I know you’re not going to pay me; I’m here for the health insurance. For many Americans it’s not about pay anymore, it’s about insurance.

Well they did give us all the courtesy of a one on one interview. When my turn came I was asked why I would want to work for them since they gave me every reason not to: low pay and miniscule annual raises of 25 cents an hour. I gave him the answer he undoubtedly gets from everyone, “I need the health insurance”.
But the show is over now because he has sized me up and seeing that I’m over forty, (a little too old to be lifting heavy bags all day without getting injured) he knows I’m just a worker’s comp. claim so he tells me he won’t hire me as a baggage handler, maybe a ticket guy but not a baggage handler.

Well the bastard read my mind exactly since I had a disc injury in my lower back and a torn rotor cuff so I was expecting to have to file that claim before I finished my first week of employment. Foiled again I’m afraid. My dream job came to a screeching halt. It all ended with him telling me to go online and reapply for a ticket punching job and he would personally give me a recommendation. Sure pal, whatever you say.

Bottom line is that they are recruiting only young minority guys; the only ones desperate enough to sign on for a $9.89 an hour career with no future. But it was a pleasant sunny day and I do love the feel and sights of an airport. The whole experience was kind of fun any very enlightening. I learned US Airways will pay their CEO tens of millions of dollars but there is nothing left over for the guy on the tarmac.

Trickle down my ass, the only thing trickling down is the piss from the penthouse commode. That ain’t rain your feel’n buddy, but you might want to take out your umbrella just the same.

Talk about stupid, I went up to the pharmacy counter to pick up my prescription and was told that of the two a day 60 pills a month my doctor prescribed, my health insurance company would only pay for 51 of the pills. Seems they overruled my doctor’s diagnosis and came up with one they liked better. On top of them forcing me accept the lower dosage, I had to pay them a $50 co-payment. This, of course, is stupid.

Not long ago I dropped off a prescription at the pharmacy and when I came back to pick it up, I was told they could not fill the order because my insurer needed my doctors approval. Since my doctor made the diagnosis and prescribed the medication, it didn’t make sense that he had to now also approve it. I did not even know how to respond to that news because my brain could not process the circular reference. This, of course, was stupid.

For me, it’s like when you’re being asked to do stupid things that something is WRONG!!! I am a reasonable person who operates in the realm of reason. I fail to function properly in the realm of foolishness and stupidity. When put in that realm I react with furious anger.

I expect within the next year that I’ll walk up to the pharmacy counter for a pick up, and they will tell me they have my prescription ready, but first they will need me to stand on one leg, bend over and kiss their ass. Upon completing that I’ll then be required to reach into my wallet and give them $50 bucks. I’ll then be told no more prescriptions will be filled unless my doctor jump though a series of fiery hoops like a trained poodle in a circus sideshow.

When this happens I will of course say: yes massah, yes massah, anything else I can do for you massah. Unfortunately, I need the medication for myself and for my family so I’ll do whatever they need me to. Even though it is stupid.

O f course we don’t need health insurance reform. That is a stupid idea that the socialist democrats keep pushing every time they manage to get a president elected. I’m just a peasant in this country but I know that when you get to the point when you’re doing stupid things you stop doing what you’re doing and get serious.