Call Me Captn Gutz
The year was 1969. Our fearless leaders seemed bent on bombing a stone age country back into the stone age and equally determined to kill all of its own first born sons. Also in that auspicious Yin-Yang summer of '69, Captain Gutz first appeared in Yellow Dog Comix. Guts' alter ego was a wimpy uber-conservative WASP who transformed into a hippy bashing super hero whenever he drank a beer.

I was a young marine, stationed in San Diego.
One balmy night that summer, I somehow found myself caught up in an adventure involving the Naughty Nudies all night theater, a pint of Jim Beam, and six M.P.s.
The next morning, after a reaming out by my First Sergeant that still, after 35 years, makes my ass pucker, I straggled back to the barracks. I was beat to hell, so hung over you could take my pulse from ten feet away, and condemned to thirty days of scrubbing pots and pans in the mess hall.
It is the nature of Marines, in all times, to thoroughly enjoy rich irony and see the humor inherent is such things as car wrecks, colon cancer, and explosive decapitations. Hence, my good buddies, on hearing my account of the evening, broke into hysterical, sustained, can't-catch-your-breath laughter. With manly tears wetting their faces, they christened me with the sobriquet I was to bear from that point forward to the end of time.........I became Captn Gutz!



The Man
My name is Cecil Boze. I was born March 30, 1950 at 3:23am in Peoria, Illinois.
My mother grew up dirt poor in an area of Southern Indiana that wasn't electrified until 1966. She had a bright smile, a sunny disposition, and a lovely, lullaby voice. She was a reader of books. This, coupled with the fact that we didn't own a T.V. until I was five years old, combined to make me the voracious reader I am today.
My father was a veteran of World War II. He landed on Leyte Island, in the Phillipines, when he was twenty years old. By the time he turned twenty one, he had stacked enough bodies, crawled through enough human gore, and seen enough horror to make another five or six Freddy Krueger sequels. He was a rabid, fire-breathing, foaming-at-the-mouth union man. He believed in solidarity even if it meant taking a telephone book to a co-worker to make him more "solid". God may have created the heavens and the earth, but, by god, Walter Reuther created the U.A.W...........and you'd best not let that distinction escape you in his presence.










My childhood was part Tom Sawyer and part Buck Rogers. What time I didn't consume playing in a nearby woods or sneaking down to the river, I spent perched near the top of a favorite "reading tree" with Moby Dick, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.............and countless others. Mom made sure we had good books to read..............Dad grumbled at the expense.
The future we envisioned at that dawn of the age of computers and space travel was fantastical...........and pales by comparison to the reality of the future we live in. "Oh, Brave New World..........."









Since graduating from High School, I've been a Marine, a student, a railroader, a husband, a father, a grand-father and a Mason.
I've spent half my life in some sort of serial monogamy, worked twenty eight years as a conductor/engineer for the Santa Fe railroad and raised two great kids. I now have two beautiful grand-daughters.
I am single, and the future I envisioned for myself has been rather fucked into a cocked hat by divorce and a work-related injury............and in a strange way, it is exciting to not know what is to come next.
I sometimes envy young bloggers the ability to sum up their lives and character, their likes and dislikes in one or two witty paragraphs.........and at the same time derive some amusement in the knowledge that in ten years they'll wonder who those people were.
I had a good friend while stationed in Okinawa, his name was Don Trupiano. He was from Detroit. Don and I spent hours talking about everything, mostly while under the influence of that remarkable combination of weed, speed, and Akadama wine that makes you as clever as God at a hundred miles an hour. We parted ways and lost track of each other, as service friends do, and then, one night in 1974, he called me on the phone.........just out of the blue.
We reminisced for a while, and played catch up. He had married and had a son. I was soon to be married. He reminded me of something I had said in our Okinawa days............I can't for the life of me now remember what it was......and went on to say that he had essentially founded his life and philosophy on whatever it was I had spewed out of my addled brain on some wasted night so long ago. I was appalled...........all I could think of was that I no longer believed that way. The experiences of the intervening years had completely changed my outlook. I wanted to shout at him............NO!!!! Instead, I hemmed and hawed a bit, and changed the subject. Trup died in a motorcycle accident two years later, but I never have forgotten the lesson I learned that night. Sometimes, whether you like it or not, people are going to take the things you do and say, and go places with them that you never intended them to go...........and there really is not a whole hell of lot you can do about it.



I know that I love to read and cook and travel. I love history and poetry and children. I love Ireland and all things Irish. I love sweaty, manly work and the outdoors. I like strong coffee, dark chocolate, full bodied beer, robust red wine, peaty Scotch Whisky, the flesh of animals, hearty soups and crusty bread.
I love leather and wood and wool and flesh. I think pregnant women are sexy. I loved making love to my pregnant wives. I have big appetites.......for food, and drink and sex. I haven't noticed a drop in my enthusiasm or energy or desire for sex. I love to fuck and if I were God, I'd let the french into heaven just for inventing oral sex.

I'm honest, partly out of a sense of honor and partly out of laziness and fear. The liar has to work too hard.........and is always more a prisoner of his own deceit than his intended victim.
I am passionate about the things and people I care about. I am loyal.
I am even tempered and slow to anger. I am thoughtful and tolerant and generous. I can work out almost any difficulty with anyone who is willing to be reasonable.
I cherish friendships and see love and trust as something too sacred to be risked over the insignificant or the expedient.
I've never cheated on a wife or a girlfriend.
I love children and would raise a new crop if I were to meet a woman of child-bearing years who wasn't self-destructive or neurotic.
I loved being married. I would marry again if I were to meet a woman who wouldn't rather climb up a tree to tell a lie than to stand on the ground and tell the truth......... and if I could meet a woman who could match my enthusiasm and energy and curiosity and versatility in things physical.
Eight women have told me that they love me.............Mom was the only one who meant it.
I have told eight women that I loved them.................and I meant it with all my heart.
I have no desire to control, or any use for a woman who needs to be controlled...............need, power, control, all preclude love.
I will not be controlled.
I am not a jealous person. A jealous person is weak and needy. A jealous person cannot love.
I want to love.

So, I've written too much and I've written too little. It's partly right and partly not quite right and I'll spend the year coming back to add something or change something.
I'm still evolving.

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