Six-Thirty Report by Beamish

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Six-Thirty Report by Beamish Follow our blog at:

Storyteller / Artist / Photographer / Writer

Retired Former Director of Strategic Communications for JPO F35 and Pentagon Spokesperson

Soldier Heart is a research writing and art effort mostly about World War II.

Good news. Starbucks over next to the auto parts store just east of Nevada and west of King Soopers near where I live no...
25/06/2026

Good news. Starbucks over next to the auto parts store just east of Nevada and west of King Soopers near where I live now opens its doors before I wake up. They have a new dark roast. 1971. New to me anyhow. I mean, after all, what’s the purpose of life if you can’t think back to the grittiness of life in 1971 with the unique taste of a few specially roasted coffee beans? For me, the summer of that year meant the way i remembered the Beatles dressed as I watched them years earlier as a six year old in fuzzy black-and-white during their three famous appearances on the Ed Sullivan show in the mid sixties were fresh on my mind as I picked my wardrobe for the eighth grade from the shelves of Payless just off of First Street in my hometown.

Did you happen to see the video of that lady who dumped out all the garbage that was in one-of-ten New York Knicks theme colored garbage cans onto the sidewalk at the team’s big celebration parade? I mean, this lady was brazen—in an iconic sort of way that says something about the world we live in in this day and age. It wasn’t a few piece of trash she removed from the can. This was a three-foot tall garbage can filled to the brim with garbage. Her defiant display left onlookers pretty much stunned as she strode away hugging the empty can that was now her prized trophy.

How in the hell did we as a nation get from the Beatles in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination and in the midst of the damned war in Vietnam—plus hippies smoking w**d sitting on the grass of the high school football field listening to rock and roll music on cranked up transistor radios—to this fifty years later? The good news, of course, is that technology made the lady famous and We The People having a vote in the swift outcome for a person who turned out to be an executive in corporate America. The bad news belligerent behavior on the national level has entered our daily lives.

What makes this so iconic to our current state of affairs and the reason I am writing about it, is it illustrates the only safety net you and I have to save our collective sense of right and wrong . I’m serious. In my view, the danger today in overall politics, governance, business practices is the leveraging of personal views drips from a national platform into the daily lives of you and me living in some local place far away from Washington DC. To my eyes, I saw this in the videos of the garbage can incident in New York.

Listen to the outrage. City sanitation got the can back, held the lady accountable and even her company appears to have done the right thing. Let me remind you that my 1971 coffee blend tastes just fine. I have never smoked w**d in my life, but I did accidentally inhale once when my roommate in the Army barracks in Germany was smoking hash in 1979. My point of these five graphs is that there is hope in the world that comes in yesterday’s fall of mankind.

We The People can right the ship.

—Beamish

It’s Memorial Day Weekend. Home of the sounds of roaring engines in the Indy 500 coming from a cheap plastic brand new t...
23/05/2026

It’s Memorial Day Weekend. Home of the sounds of roaring engines in the Indy 500 coming from a cheap plastic brand new transistor radio I bought at the old Five Corners Market up on Queen Avenue. I had known the lady who owned the place since I was eight when my dad bought the old fixer-upper of a dilapidated house down on fifteenth street about a block away. She had red hair, and I think it was just her and her son and mother who lived upstairs above the Mom and Pop neighborhood store. The first time I met the lady, I learned she was kind and wise to little boys. She taught me not to steal. I thought I had covered up my crime well enough with my littles hands in my bulging coat pocket clutching more than greedy handfuls of the penny candy. I remember her patient face as she asked me to empty the pockets onto the wooden counter.

She added up the total for my haul and said that’ll be a quarter. “I do not have a quarter,” I said. Then how you gonna pay? “I dunno,” I said. Do your parents give you an allowance? My eyes lit up with the revelation, then I said, “Yes, my dad gives me a dollar every Friday night when he comes home from work. I have to give a dime of it in the offering on Sunday at church and then I give the preacher’s wife fifty cents to save up for church camp in the summer.” She smiled as she moved the pile of candy I was stealing to the side on the counter, leaving a nickel’s worth in front of me. “How ‘bout you take these now and you come back next Saturday with a nickel to pay for it?” Relieved she wasn’t gonna tell my dad, I agreed.

That was the beginning of the merchant-buyer relationship we had over the next few years which eventually led to her helping me buy the radio on display in the front window. I was twelve that year and my money earning ability had grown to income from mowing lawns, so I struck a deal to buy the radio for twenty bucks at a dollar a week. Anyhow, Memorial Day became seared into my soul in 1971 when Al Unser won the Indianapolis 500 for the second time in a row in some far off land from Oregon that I knew nothing about in a race that jolted my senses awake as I sat on my porch at that rundown house with gray skies overhead listening to my first race. The radio from the lady was the beginning of my escape and my journey in life, really.

You see, this post is really about my father on this Memorial Day. Which gets me finally to my artwork. Of course this holiday is to remember those who died in service of this country. Over the years, I suppose, the holiday has sort of morphed into a day off, picnics and barbecues, remembering friends and loved ones in our lives who’ve died. But for me, still today, my thoughts go back to the Indy 500 race, my dad, and that transistor radio that a stranger lady helped me buy and provided an escape from the realities of the aftermath of war to a little boy. Dad did not die in combat, but I know a part of him did. I have spent my lifetime—sixty-five [EDIT: FIFTY-FIVE] years since that Memorial Day in 1971–trying to understand intellectually the complexity of a loving father who suffered from untreated PTSD in World War II.

I painted the three paintings below. Perhaps the most important thing I have been able to do in my life has been to somehow make a tribute to my father’s Army service. Hidden Wounds of War, is a triptych, oil on canvas, telling the odd story of a boy and his relationship with a combat veteran father who suffers severely from untreated PTSD. The autobiography in the three 36"X30" images are the foundation for the work in this thesis exhibition. With a total dimension 104"X36," the 2021 paintings are on permanent display in Washington DC as part of the Pentagon's Patriotic Art Program.

The story—his, not mine—is profound. I will attempt to tell a part of it in the next two days. I will explain the meaning of the painting and symbolism.

In the meantime, what is your Memorial Day story?

The Nuggets lost again. Storm clouds greet my Sunday. There’s a wild rabbit hopping just now in my shared backyard just ...
26/04/2026

The Nuggets lost again. Storm clouds greet my Sunday. There’s a wild rabbit hopping just now in my shared backyard just below the big black charred scar of burnt grass from the grass fire that thankfully did not get up into the scrub oak trees and was doused a hundred feet away from my home just two nights ago. Oh, and now a deer walks where once embers and flames pierced our sense of comfort and safety and naivety. Now I hear the birds as they chirp.

Might as well write. Or paint. The images I made in the wake of the fear have nothing to do, really—visually—with a fire or folk in their backyards with garden hoses just after midnight in the dark of night desperately prepared to fight the flames. Fire trucks arrived almost instantaneously and, I suppose, had everything under control in a matter of minutes. They stayed through the night to watch for any flare ups. This fire of less than just a thousand square feet was simply that real to those of us who know.

There was a hero I’m told, a man nobody knows his name. A guy driving by on the main road over there who saw the flames in the field. He called nine-one-one to report what he saw. Then he did something more. Before the fire trucks as the fire spread, he turned his car into our neighborhood on one of the side streets, got out and ran from door to door, banging and shouting to wake us up from our sleep and warn us of the approaching fire. Nobody took notice of who he was or what he wore, just that he warned of danger.

I wonder if Joker and the Nuggets can come back down three one. Of course the game last night was marred by more important news. A shooter in a room full of journalists where the President and his wife and a bunch of his people were present for a time honored dinner. The Nuggets were ahead in control in the second when a news anchor interrupted the broadcast to give us the news, then back to the game. It was midway with Denver still in the lead in the third quarter that they broke away again for a lengthy Presidential press conference.

When we came back to game, there was two minutes left and Denver was done. The Joker erupted with his anger and got kicked out with about a second on the clock. I suppose images I made after the fire scare are a hodgepodge of how I feel this morning: A simple face, church and a car from when I was a boy growing up.

—Beamish

Like any artist, I decided to paint a picture tonight when history is at the crux of a pretty significant crossroad. Dur...
07/04/2026

Like any artist, I decided to paint a picture tonight when history is at the crux of a pretty significant crossroad. During primetime viewing, our military will be ordered to eliminate a civilization from the face of the earth during a four-hour window tonight if they do not agree to our demands before six o’clock mountain time where I live. If what the entire world has been told over the last few days holds true, our lethal military might, strength, and power will come down full force on their country in a four-hour window if Iran doesn’t freely let oil through the strait tonight.

As a longtime military man—a basic, simple soldier at heart—this kind of talk creates emotions in me that are difficult to explain. So I drew a sketch on my iPad this morning of the painting I want to paint. If it turns out, it will be the lead image for my very first chapter where I talk about me wanting to be an unknown hobbit who paints in obscurity in his old age. The image is of me when I was just eighteen years old living in the town that smelled of dead fish about forty miles from the ocean in Oregon.

I am wearing the clothes required of box boys working at Roth’s IGA on the corner of Hill and Nineteenth Streets, not far from the Boy’s Club where I spent my time as a young boy. We had to have our hair cut short and wear blue jeans with a white short sleeved shirt and a clip on green bowtie. The railroad tracks were not far from the store. So when I worked on the weekends, I would go down to the tracks where an old hobo lived in a tent during my lunch hour. I’d bring him a can of Campbell’s soup to warm up over a little fire next to his tent.

I’d sit and read a book while he fussed with his belongings while mumbling about his adventures riding the freight cars as a homeless creature. I was always attracted to the rail yard, even since I first lived near them when I was six. I would dream of just running away by jumping on one of those cars with him to a destination unknown. I guess that is why I liked in there with the smell of old grease and oil soaked into the rocks. It was a door to an escape that I chose to never take, at least in that war. I felt the comfort, though, to sit there in the atmosphere of danger, risk, and fear.

I don’t know why talk of basically obliterating a country today makes me think of this image of me down by the railroad tracks reading a book while wearing a green bowtie. Yet it does. It makes me feel safe.

—Beamish

As you know, this space is for my potentially daily experimental writings and selective artwork reflecting on the mating...
17/03/2026

As you know, this space is for my potentially daily experimental writings and selective artwork reflecting on the mating rituals of wild animals I have observed in my life of fun and adventure traveling around the world, and that these pieces may or may not end up as starters for bigger things in that door stopper book that I am writing on the theory of art—My Art Thesis. I always thought the world would fight its next big war for something like everlasting peace—once and for all!—throughout the entire world. That it would be a war declaring the failure and end of all war to end our little differences amongst nations.

Yet here we are three weeks in a war fighting over nukes and oil.

I never told you that in my classification of wild animals regarding their mating rituals, I include human beings. My favorite story in the Bible, and I don’t really know why, is the one in the Old Testament where one of the tribes or groups of God’s People were living in a city of Heathens. Guess what? The Heathen men r***d the women and young virgins among God’s People. So the men in God’s People decided the best way to avenge this cruelty was to become friends with the Heathens and convince them to become men of God by getting circumcised.

Yes, it took years for God’s People to infiltrate the Heathens in that city and to earn their trust, but the menfolk of the one group whose mothers and sisters were r***d convinced the menfolk of the other group who did the ra**ng to cut off skin from their very own s*x organs! And they did it. The rapists did it. Perhaps the most profound and telling part of this story, though, is God’s People waited a few days until the men among Heathens were weakened with the excruciating pain in their groin areas, and God’s People attacked them and killed them all and did it at their weakest point.

I guess the world was a complicated place to live in, even back then, given this whole concept of power s*x mixed with the ends-justifies-the-end mentality in religion. Of course, today the problem of our big war over in Iran has far different implications. We are shooting down cheap drones costing up to fifty thousand dollars each with four million dollar missiles. We’ll probably put boots on the ground so that we can get their weapons-graded uranium and they will strangle hold the world’s access to oil.

At the end of the our first world war, men like Picaso and Hemingway and Steinbeck—and many others—had aversions to war. There was serious belief that mankind could end war through the arts. If we could just somehow communicate to each other through visual imagery in paintings, sound in music, and other human senses through the arts in general the excruciating pain of human suffering caused by war, we could end war. We are now more than a hundred years of experimenting with that idea and here we are.

—Beamish

17/03/2026

Can Art Change Man?

Jackpot! Been trying to win a sweepstakes all my life and finally did. My mom got me hooked on entering these contests w...
16/03/2026

Jackpot! Been trying to win a sweepstakes all my life and finally did. My mom got me hooked on entering these contests when we were dirt poor living over near the railroad tracks in a town in Oregon that usually smelled of dead fish where I was born. We’d walk to Piggly Wiggly that was just down the street and next to the Linger Longer Tavern where men would get drunk. I learned that was a good place to look for loose change and dropped five dollar bills all lost as the drunk men searched through their pockets for their car keys and, then, when found, would drive, well, drunk.

My dad, who fought in the big second world war, was one of those drunks who loved the Linger Longer place that to a young boy sort of stank. He wrecked a lot of cars driving in those days. My mom was usually optimistic that we’d win one of these drawings at the corner grocery store and, if we didn’t, she was certain we’d find some money on the sidewalk if we just looked down as we walked. My drill sergeant later told me there was no need to look down as that was my habit when I marched because there wasn’t any discharge papers on the ground.

I never told him, but I didn’t want out of the Army. I was looking for the prize (that I finally found fifty years later in the Power of 9’s t-shirt give away)!Anyhow, one day when we walked to the Piggly Wiggly store, she told me that she dreamed she could win enough money to buy me the brand new stingray bicycle that I saw in the magazine that came in the mail. Well, when we got to the store with these big arches over the entry door, there was this big box next to the bulletin board.

The sign said to fill out the slip of paper with your name, phone number and address, then put it in the little slit at the top of the box and you’d have the big chance to win the big prize. I don’t really remember right now what the big prize was on this particular day, just that when I looked in my mom’s eyes I saw the glimmer of hope that this would be her day. I just knew that she wanted a way to give something special to her boy and that there really was no other way other than winning in a sweepstakes.

Of course, my life went on beyond that of a six-year-old and my dad stopped drinking and we all found our own somewhat dysfunctional ways. For me it was the Army and that was all it took to get where I am now in a place to type these stories onto a keypad. But through the years, and now with social media, I always enter online enter-here-to-win-season-tickets-to-Denver-Broncos-football-games give aways thinking of my mother and her elusive dream. But, like her, I never have the winning number.

Finally, I have won the sweepstakes. It came from a bunch of senior enlisted boys and girls from our nation’s military who call themselves the Power of 9’s in their social media group. By the way, the apostrophe is a singular possessive. I told them if I won the t-shirt, I’d wear it down at the coffee shop that is next to the sushi place where I go to write these little stories in the mornings on regular days.

—Beamish

15/03/2026

Just curious. There are seventeen hundred followers to this page. How many of you awake? Do you wanna hear a bedtime story?

Snow is falling down here in the “purple mountains majesty” as we near Spring—and more of the world’s boys and girls are...
15/03/2026

Snow is falling down here in the “purple mountains majesty” as we near Spring—and more of the world’s boys and girls are dead in war—so I might as well bang out a few more words on the keyboard. I think that is the big problem with the precision and speed that Artificial Intelligence and all that technology brings us today. Just consider the bombing of the school in Iran that killed all those kids. We sure didn’t intend it, but AI and technology is only as good as the data going in …

… if it is wrong or not current, the precise consequence sure can be deadly even for the wrong people in an unintended target. In other news, Winds are stiff and cold this morning, blowing snow swirls as if in a harsh winter blizzard. No sun or blue skies to be seen for us today in my little hamlet as our Kings and Queens attempt to rule with their narrow version of an iron fist of justice. I hope we all survive. I think that you know I will not be silenced, even with their latest edict they intend to deafen the ears of the peasants.

Yesterday I saw a pregnant lady within days of her due date and who I know from Fort Carson over at the corner coffee shop. She was reading the paperback version of the seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Yes, that means this book was first published nearly ninety years ago as World War II was brewing two years before Germany invaded Poland and well before we had smart bombs. We spoke politely as I was getting to go and she sat comfortably on the leather couch.

I told her—please get the nuance here of me an older man nearing the end of life telling her these things as she sat there nearing the birth of her child reading a book about a character created before a great war who had naturally lived his life in isolation and then went out for adventure to help fight good and bad—I have decided that now I want to be the Hobbit before the adventure. I told her of the hobo and how I gave him a can of Campbell’s soup that he exchanged for my first copy of the book.

I hope you can read through my ramble of stormy weather, Kings and Queens, death and destruction of civilization, with war and characters in a book to see the truth I am trying to get through. Anyhow, I told her of the scene down by the railroad tracks that smelled of oil and kerosene with a little campfire warming a can of soup and a hobo as I read the book for the first time when I was a senior in high school. It was there that I decided to go out for my adventure and it is here that I have found my retreat.

—Beamish

A friend of mine not in this clique posted this little snippet in his social media feed this morning. He was a soldier w...
14/03/2026

A friend of mine not in this clique posted this little snippet in his social media feed this morning. He was a soldier with me long ago when the uniforms that we wore had no patterns and we had to starch. Drab olive green and sometimes khaki. Our boots and shoes were spit shined—well, mostly so—and our hair was really short. Pretty much buzzed. He was the Soldier of the Quarter for the entire post. I got it next. It was a big one in Oklahoma, that Army post. Maybe you heard of it, Fort Sill, where the artillerymen go.

What? How could you win that title of the best amongst the artillery and infantry and fighters when you were just writers when you were young? You see, we weren’t just writers and we didn’t just take pictures when we were young soldiers. We lived on those guns with those soldiers and we ate the huge Meers Hamburgers with them outside the back gate where there were buffalo standing in the road when we got back from weeks in the field. One time an artillery soldier crashed into a big one driving an artillery tank—self-propelled howitzer, still tank sounds better—on our way back in the rain.

I still remember the baby grand piano in that dilapidated place eating that savory hamburger bigger than the twelve-inch plate. Our appetites that big. So why the long story instead of short? Because we learned to suffer with those soldiers as they trudged in the mud and lived in the rain and figured out how to get the steel onto the target in order to make our stories ring true for the mothers and the fathers and the brothers and the sisters and all the others reading the words. It was the greatest lesson from a first sergeant, not a writer, who taught us in those days.

Yes, we were soldiers once younger and please don’t forget it because we have not changed. We learned to pull the lanyard and to load the heavy shells into the tube because we wanted to feel how it feels when there was the mind-numbing shudder and loud bang that shook the bones in our frames and caused a sort of blackness in our heads that we’ll never forget. It was the greatest lesson for us as writers when we were just privates and young specialists of lowly rank among some giant men and women who did the dirty hard work of soldiers for this great land.

It sounds patriotic, but it really is not. So I was reminded this morning and told him: “Tell me how long your hair was and the tint at the ends. I wanna know about the cracks in the road and how one of them rose higher than the rest as you walked along on your lonely quest. Help me feel the cold on your neck as the wind howled in the dark, rustling the rest. Tell me about the skunk unseen who left the scent in the air. Stir my senses as I hear the words of your adventure on this earth. Oh yes, don’t spare the words. Do—please do—make your story long so that I can join you in your song.”

Thanks my friend for the post: “Forget the ‘long story short.’ I’m shifting to ‘short story long’ and giving you bonus scenes, extra details, and director commentary.” Those words prompted my sentences written in response. It was fun.

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