The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

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A Time For Grieving

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The wise men of life said long ago there is a time for all things and I can’t disagree with their words for I have seen it proven multiple times.

Maybe it is because I have reached a time for grieving and find myself staring at the moon, not knowing whether it is time to run with it or simply howl. Not knowing which will assuage my grief but mostly certain that time will help me heal.

Can’t decide if I want to put pen to paper and see if that will help release what lies beneath the surface or let it run its course in other ways.

So we look at music and find our buddy Bruce singing Cautious Man and recognize something that touches the soul.

Billy felt a coldness rise up inside him that he couldn’t name
Just as the words tattooed ‘cross his knuckles he knew would always remain

Can’t help but move on to Emmylou again singing Goodbye while the memories take me on a journey and I think about things past and present.

Was I just off somewhere
Or maybe just too high?
But I can’t remember
If we said goodbye

Reminds me of the time I ran into someone I used to run with along with a guy I automatically disliked and named “placeholder.”

Wasn’t sure if the universe was playing some kind of sick joke or if it was just dumb luck but I knew I needed to create some distance. Cuz I  I knew that if I was face-to-face with him there was a chance I would manhandle him in the kind of way no man ever wants to be handled.

He would be a rag doll and I would be the bear.

Won’t lie and say I didn’t want to ignore my better angels and to let myself slip back into a man I had once been but who I had given up being.

Maturity has its gifts and sometimes they include recognizing a time for grieving.

So maybe this is the moment where I rediscover a new purpose for this place.

Revisiting The Past

So I am continuing to tear this joint apart while I update, adjust and pivot. Don’t know where it will take me or what it will look like yet but I think I’ll find out.

In the interim here are more links to old work that will probably stick around for a while but may end up getting deleted, hard to say.

Time Marches On

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Time marches on whether we want it to or not. SQ is off doing her thing, maybe with a placeholder or maybe without.

I have been doing mine, wandering through time and space on a journey I never expected to be on but sometimes feel I should have anticipated.

Sometimes I think about whether it is time to reach out and touch someone with a handwritten letter or if I ought to just pack it all up and let sleeping dogs lie.

Everyone and everything has a life span and sometimes the best you can do is just let go or so people tell me. Some of them have accused me of not being able to do so but they seem to ignore the long list of those left behind.

I may take a minute to let go but when I do it is usually the end…forever.

2025 Is How Far Away From 1980…

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Someone wrote that 2025 is as close to 1980 as 1980 was to 1935 which is to say there is a 45 year time gap between them.

I was born in the late sixties so by the time 1980 rolled around I had long since learned how to write in cursive and like most GenX kids had long been walking myself to and from school.

Had endless summer days in which my friends and I rode our bikes everywhere or took city buses all over the place.

1935 caught my eye because my folks were born in the early forties and so it sounds old.  Though if my grandparents had become parents as soon as most of their contemporaries the folks would absolutely have shown up somewhere between ’35 and ’38.

In concept that could have meant that instead of being mid fifties I’d be in my sixties now and that sort of throws me a bit because life could have been so different.

Maybe I’d be retired now and not a decade away.

My baby is going to be 21 this year and doesn’t intend to get married or pregnant for a long chunk of time to go which is ok with me.

I have told my kids there is no rush and to remember who you end up marrying has a big impact upon the rest of your life so take a minute to figure out who you are before you hook up.

Anyhoo, I don’t have time for a long post tonight but figured this joint needed an update and that time gap caught my eye. Hell, I go back to work tomorrow after having taken some time off and I am sure the new kid will ask me again if I feel old because I was a 20th century baby.

I took him into the gym a while back and curled his body weight which cut down on some of the old man talk.  Might have to bring him back because I can lat pull more than he weighs now too.

The kids say I have old man strength but I tell them it is just 40 plus years of lifting and good genes.

Happy New Year.

Emptying My Head

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“Still every night I burnEvery night I scream your nameEvery night I burnEvery night the dream’s the sameEvery night I burnWaiting for my only friendEvery night I burnWaiting for the world to end”

Burn– The Cure

I feel like one of those ghosts that take you back in time has grabbed me and pulled me into something I left more than a decade ago and asked me to revisit it.

Read My Stairway to Heaven and knew I would have to go read the other links included in that post. Can feel shackles around my hands and feet and echoes of the future and the past.

Got something that resembles rage beginning to fire up inside my belly as I work on deciphering what I see, feel and hear.

It is not clear yet whether it will actually materialize as such or if I will find myself shaking my head because I’ll recognize I misunderstood something. or not.

****

Flipping through old pieces from Fragments of fiction like the two below I try to reconcile what was and what is

1) And now years later he discovered to his chagrin that some flames are never completely extinguished. The real question was whether to try and quench the flames or follow the path that his heart was constructing for him.

and this

2) I had a dream. I dreamt of a place that I had never been to but always wanted to live in. You were there and your arms welcomed me to a place that until then had always lived inside me. You unlocked the passion and the fire that burns inside me.

You helped me to remember that love is meant to sting, that to be apart is to feel an ache that no drug can touch and to be together is to know the meaning of union.

You are my drug of choice, an addiction that I cannot give up. My air and my blood, the wind that fills my sails and were I to lose you I would be forced to revisit that dark place that I used to live in. I would be hollow inside, an empty shell and who knows what might choose to occupy that place.

I knew the day that we kissed that life was going to be different. Few people understand because so few have had the experience and even then few walk that path. When you walk through fire you risk being burned but you also open yourself up to untold rewards.

When just holding hands brings incredible pleasure, when whispers and caresses offer the height of joy and passion there is something special.

When I kissed you I felt your legs go weak and I held you tightly but I was not concerned because my arms were made for holding you tight and feeling your heart beat against mine gives me all the strength that I require.

I had a dream that became reality.

It is a peculiar feeling looking back and remembering where one was and what things once looked like. So I now I ask myself what to do and make of all this, do I trash or hold onto it.

Is it still meaningful, useful and or significant. Is there any importance in it. Given the large changes that are taking place now it might make more sense not to make any decisions for a bit.

Can You Spell Divorce?

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Got EmmyLou singing Goodbye while I tap upon the keyboard and think about how it feels like the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Twenty years ago I blogged about a Benny Morris interview and today I read the piece again and shook my head.

A few things jumped out at me:

 

Morris told me that he was not a “determinist,” and believed that “a mindset can change over a generation or two.” The problem with the Arabs was cultural, not racial, he believed. But this did not make him any more optimistic. And it was his historical research for Righteous Victims that forms the basis of his pessimism. “I spent time looking at the whole thing, from its origins in the 1880s until the present day? and the thrust of Palestinian history from the beginning of the Palestinian movement in the 1920s? was rejectionist. It opposed the idea of Jews coming here, it opposed the idea of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. ‘Not one inch’ – that was basically the slogan, and unfortunately, my study of the last 100 years shows me that they’ve been uniform, monolithic, linear about this.” He then recounted all the opportunities for the Palestinians to accept a compromise – in 1937 (when a British commission called for partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, and population ex-changes between them, with the former getting some 70 per cent and the latter 20 per cent), and 1947, and 1978, and, finally, four years ago. And each time “they reject a peace offer and a compromise based on two states, they lose territory. The Jewish population grows, Jewish greed grows, and Jews take over more and more territory. And then there’s less territory available for Arabs, and they’re offered less.”

and

Similarly, two thirds of Israelis told pollsters in June that they supported Sharon’s plan for unilateral Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza, and 68 per cent said they would be behind a plan to dismantle most of the settlements there and in the West Bank in the context of a peace deal. If there is no partner, then Israel has no alternative but to act unilaterally. Hence the broad support not only for the Gaza pullout, but also for the construction of the security barrier.

Morris is all for a withdrawal from Gaza: “I don’t think we should have 20 or 25 per cent of the Gaza strip’s land for 7,000 settlers when you have 1.5m really impoverished people there.”

Twenty years ago I was beginning to lose some of the optimism over Oslo. I hope the disengagement would lead to a better future but it is hard to see things that way, especially after 10/7.

****

And now we shift into a different world and focus below:

That is about a year or so old now but I figured I’d share it because some of you seem to have an interest in old material. Might offer a single comment that who I was isn’t necessarily who I am any more.