If you now me personally , this little story will be no big surprise but will maybe shed a little light onto the kind of person I am and why .

When my parents moved to Bonita from skyline in the late 60's , it was a case of " white flight " from a once beautiful young neighborhood in Spring Valley that was suffering the fancy new fangled plague called " urban gang activity and turf war " We had lived in Skyline for about 4 years and had just adopted my sister before it started to eat shit and become a life sized shooting gallery . My mom & dad decided it wasn't a going to be such a great place to raise their newly aquired young family .

We moved to a bigger house in a new neighborhood called Bonita . It wasn't too far from Spring Valley , but it was light years away from all the trouble and violence going on there . It was near a park and was new and clean and not engrossed in drug and gang troubles so it seemed like a good new start to a brand new life as a family man .

He was the first one to buy a lot and as soon as the word got out all of his newly retired Navy buddies all jumped the line and bought new houses on the same street . It was awesome . We had a family in every house on the block and new everyone in every direction . It was pretty much urban utopia .

One of the great parts about this new living situation was the constant roaming house parties . Being a bunch of retired salty dogs , these men liked to tear back on the cocktails and have a good time every once in a while . All the wives would lounge around on the patios with Mai Tais or Blue Hawaiians , smoking like smoke stacks while the dads would be huddled around a little a.m. radio listening to the ball game next to the pool drinking beers and getting sun burns and whooping it up like a bunch of drunk sailors .

To this end my dad decided to take it to the next level . We had a 4 bedroom house , and my dad knocked out one of the windows and made it into a sliding glass door , that led to a swimming pool . On the other side of that door he built the ultimate man cave ( at least that's what they call it now-a-days ) , complete with a sunken bar ( where the closet would have been ) a working sink ( plumbed into the bathroom sink on the other side of the back wall ) , hidden Hi-Fi speaker system and a keg cooler . All this sweat and work , to have a classy drink with his pals . . . who's that sound like .

I've tried to tell my friends who've never been to that house what the room looked like and how it hasn't changed in the better part of 35 years . I swear it has bottles of booze that have been there for that long .

Anyhow , here it is for the first time ever , photographic proof of the crazy story I always tell about my dad's bar-room . This is a large part of why I am the man I am today , because I spent a large portion of my youth hanging out in this room with the dudes , talking dude shit and making drinks for the old guys .

And this is the ceiling . . . black spray on popcorn texture , with sliver flake in it . Yes , my dad has a metalflake ceiling , in his bar , that he built by himself , in his house . I was fucked from the holeshot .