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

Archives for August 2008

A Gold Medal Couple

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I thought that this was kind of interesting:

A few weeks ago, FPM’s Pat Imig told us about Katerina and Matt Emmons, a pair of Olympic shooters who met during the Summer Games in Athens four years ago and were married in June, 2007. Shooting for the Czech Republic, Katerina captured the first gold medal of the Beijing games when she won the 10 meter air rifle. She followed that with a silver in the 50 meter three positions rifle.

Matt, an American who lost his chance at two golds when he shot the wrong target in Athens, took silver yesterday in the men’s 50 meter rifle prone position. He has a chance to equal his wife’s record tomorrow in the 50 meter three positions competition. For the sake of marital harmony, I know I’m cheering for him. (“Matt, honey, could you polish the medals, please? Both of mine are getting a little dusty.”) To be fair, Matt won gold and Katerina bronze in Athens, so exactly what the score is depends on whether you are counting golds or total medals.

Meanwhile the Emmons have become media darlings, the TomKat and Brangelina of the Olympic Village (MattKat? Matterina? Help me out here.) Olympic shooters usually manage to dodge the
swarming paparazzi, but the “Rifle Romance” has climbed to Spunky Gymnast levels on the adorable scale (just one step below Puppies and Cooing Baby).

After all, when you are first introduced in Athens and your second date is in Bangkok, that’s not
just meet cute, it’s meet jet set. Not bad for a guy from Jersey and a girl from Plzen.

Sudden Death and Aging

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If you asked me to describe the most frustrating aspect of blogging it would not be the struggle to come up with content or the fight to develop of a community of readers who comment. For me those things are mild irritants.

What really bothers me is when I have trouble writing the actual post. Sometimes the words just flow from fingertip to keyboard and sometimes they come in drips and drabs. I picture it as water flowing through a pipe with various kinks and obstructions in it.

Or maybe it is because some of these topics are harder to write about. Maybe it is because they’re more personal and my ability to share some of those things has been compromised. That could be it, I don’t know and I am not sure if I really care. Does it matter.

In the end there is just the keyboard and my struggle to try and give life to the story because some of these tales deserve more than they get. This is one of those, or at least my attempt.

Death is something that sometimes preoccupies me. I have been to a lot of funerals for people who have died what would be described as untimely deaths. It seems to me that I know or should I say have known more people who have died young than most people my age.

At least that used to be how I looked at it. Now that my friends and I are in that late thirties to mid forties bracket things have changed. More of our parents have gotten some sort of terminal illness and or died from it.

There are more stories about the mother/father who was sixty-something who didn’t wake up. More stories about how a sudden heart attack or aneurysm ended their life and the questions this leaves for their children.

In the pre-marriage, pre-children days these were still looked upon as tragedies, but they were different. Now my friends look at me with fear in their eyes and ask what will happen to their children if they die. Who will watch them. Who will make take care of them. Who will love them forever without question.

During the past year I have sat with friends of my father, widowers, and been given a window into their grief. As a kid I wanted to be able to do adult things, I wanted to have the freedom that grownups have. Now I have it and sometimes I don’t want it.

I have watched and listened as men who knew me as a young boy shared their feelings of loss and devastation. Twenty years ago I thought of people who were sixty as being really old, but now I see things differently. Look, I am 39, I don’t expect to become a member of AARP any time soon, but it is different. It is different because I see that there is no reason why I can’t have decades of life to live.

To live, not to endure, but to live. In theory those years and beyond will be a time where I get to do things that I can’t do now.

But I watch and listen and wonder. In their grief I see the tears that roll down their cheeks and do my best not to shame them by making a big deal of things. I hear them talk about never falling in love again and having to live out their lives a shell of a man and I wonder.

One of my father’s friends and I had a long discussion about it and I see that life really has changed a bit. Some years ago he listened and offered advice on life and now here we are, our positions reversed.

It is a little more than a year since his wife died. He is only 64, but he feels like he’ll never feel real joy and happiness again. I don’t accept his premise that he can never fall in love again.

Fortunately I have never been in his position, I am not a widower so I can’t comment on that. Can’t say that I totally understand some of the challenges of being 64, but I do know what it is like to be heart broken. That is something that I can relate to and can provide some advice about.

Different day, different scene. One of my friends calls to let me know that his father has cancer. It is in a relatively advanced stage, but they think that there is a good chance that they can treat it. I listen as he speaks, worries about what will happen to his father, whispers about the worst and wonders if he should ask his mother to live with him.

Flash to a different day again and there is a group of us talking about our parents overall health. Who has long term care, who has good healthcare, questions/comments about how many of us are going to end up having to take care of our parents.

More talk about wills, retirement and our own health. This person says that and that person says this. For a moment it feels like I am at a tennis match. I have said it more than once, these discussions used to be a lot more fun in our twenties.

But I get it. Too many heavy things have come down and we haven’t even discussed the state of our own grandparents. I think that I’ll save that talk for a different time, this post has gone on long enough.

Some Links That Caught My Eye

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Miriam Shaviv’s blog- Miriam’s old blog Bloghead was one of the first blogs I discovered and one of my favorites. So I was pleased to see that she has a new blog. You can find it here.

One of the liberators of Buchenwald has died. Thank you James Hoyt.

Hoyt had rarely spoken about that day in 1945, but he recently opened up to
a journalist.

“There were thousands of bodies piled high. I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments,” Hoyt told author Stephen Bloom in a soon-to-be-published book called

“The Oxford Project.”

“They said a wife of one of the SS officers — they called her the Bitch of Buchenwald — saw a tattoo she liked on the arm of a prisoner, and had the skin made into a lampshade. I saw that.”

Goodbye Sandy Allen

It is TU B’Av– Let the loving begin.

What is a JBlogger?

They call it Smart. I call it a Death Wish.

A Japanese Fiddler On The Roof– Still cracks me up. Sushi and Gefilte fish, a match made in heaven.

Who wants to play Pac Man.

Excuse me, I have to go buy some bread.

Heart Breaker or Heart Broken

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She told me that there are two kinds of people in the world, the heart breakers and the heart broken. I remember asking her if that wasn’t a little bit too black and white of a description of dating.

Her response was that it was exactly how life worked. Some people were very lucky and others were not. You were a Sneetch with a star or you were a poor shlub who didn’t have one. And for the most part once you fell into one category you were pigeonholed there for life.

I never could accept that as being a legitimate description of how life worked. In large part it came from my own personal experiences. I had been through some bad breakups in which women had done their best to destroy my sense of self worth and trampled upon that black thing that pumps the blood through my veins.

Yet, I also knew that there were women whose memories of me might not be so sunny. A few might have far more colorful descriptions of what they thought about me.

The experiences on both sides of the fence always helped to balance things out for me. Once I got beyond that first big heartbreak I figured that this was just how life would be. There would be moments of intense joy and moments of intense pain and that much of what I needed to focus upon would be what happened in between.

But I have to say that in some ways I was exceptionally naive. I suppose that I didn’t give any real thought to it, but for some reason I always picture life post marriage as being easy. Maybe I watched too much television, read too many books or saw too many movies. I don’t really know.

What I do know is that in my head I never saw any of the trials that people go through in their adult lives. I am not even talking about the challenges spouses undergo in trying to navigate the normal relationship issues. It is the other stuff outside of that, those are the things that catch my eye.

It is the fear and anxiety that being a parent is. There is a reason why so many parents blog and read other parent blogs. Intellectually you know that all children face challenges growing up and that the overwhelming majority overcome those challenges.

But emotionally it takes a toll on you. You never stop worrying about them. You never stop wondering about the decisions you make. There is always a little voice in the back of your head, nagging at you, criticizing and second guessing you.

To be clear, not every decision is earth shattering. There are those that you make without a second thought, but there are those others.

I guess what I am saying is that sometimes I miss those days of being nothing more than the heart breaker or the heart broken. When all I had to do was worry about myself, well life was easy.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that my life is bad. I don’t think that my concerns are all that unusual either. I just know that sometimes I wake up and wish that I was back in college so that I could skip class and hit the beach or Vegas.

Not all that much to ask for, is it, the chance to hop in a time machine and revisit being 19.

Thanks For Nothing NBC

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I don’t know about you but I enjoy following The Olympics, always have. I like watching the various events and learning little bits and pieces about the athletes. You can depend upon the networks to do a couple of profiles that are really interesting.

And you can also depend upon the networks to do something really dumb. In their infinite wisdom they’ll hit a bulls eye in the boneheaded move category.

This year NBC has repeated some of the mistakes of the past. There is one in particular that chaps my hide. The suits have this nasty habit of showing events hours after the results have been posted on the Net. Look, I understand that Bejing is 15 hours ahead and that they are trying to do the best they can to help sell advertising by trying to push games into primetime.

That was fine when you hadn’t any access to the Net. When the best you could do was a string a couple of tomato cans together no one knew what was going on across the world and you could get away with tape delay.

But those monkeys don’t seem to care that there are millions of people who enjoy watching the events live. I want to savor the excitement of watching Michael Phelps race without knowing in advance that he is going to crush the competition. I want to wonder what is going to happen in gymnastics and ponder the possibilities.

Too bad for Old Jack. NBC doesn’t give a rat’s ass about that. They’ll show us Wednesday’s events on Thursday and then follow up by showing Thursday on Friday. A perverse Groundhog Day cycle.

Thanks for nothing NBC.

I Want To Die

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It was more than a little shocking to hear those words spoken aloud.

“I want to die.”

The pregnant pause afterwards confirmed that they were completely flabbergasted. No one had expected to hear that and the lack of protestation confirmed that they didn’t believe in the speaker’s sincerity.

Because you know that if they had taken it seriously there would have been an immediate response, they would have followed up on it, tried to ascertain what the problem was and how they could help.

At least that seems to be the obvious expectation, friends don’t sit there while you declare your readiness to end your corporeal existance. And if they do, well either you are a drama queen or you need to get new friends.

A cry for help is a cry for help. Silence is not the answer, but then again maybe it is. Afterall they say that people who are truly intent on committing suicide don’t really spell it out, they do it. They act upon their desires.

And the desire to kill oneself can be far more powerful than anyone cares to admit or believe. When you don’t have a concrete reason to believe that there is anything after this it makes it much easier to see death as being a respite from the pain, a well earned vacation.

“I want to die.”

It is one thing to think it, but once you verbalize it, actually speak the words it takes on new meaning. It becomes more real and you find yourself considering the various methods you can use to commit the deed.

Having a morbid sense of humor it is easy to see what the police would call it:

Homocide against yourself

C’mon now, you know that it is worth a chuckle. Ok, maybe not, but life is lacking, you’re not exactly burning up the fun meter. Sadness, depression, frustration and anger are different, you own those feelings, you just know that somewhere there is a dictionary with your picture in it.

For a time there are the thoughts about what your loss would do to the family and the world. Suicide may not be as painless as advertised. You think about how the wife and kids will fare and wonder if your parents will feel responsible. It is almost enough to keep you from trying to pull the trigger. It is almost enough to prevent you from making that first cut, but the blistering pain and the empty, hollow feeling push those thoughts out of your head.

Now all you really want to do is find an escape from the madness. It doesn’t matter whether you are truly mentally ill or something else. The pain and misery make you spend much of the day doubled over, wishing you were comatose.

The light of the sun isn’t a pleasure, it is torture. Laughter and smiles from others torture your soul further. Your anger is fueled by seeing how others are happy and knowing that you can’t share in their happiness.

So the moment comes when you start to entertain the idea of letting go. You play around with ways and means, consider what your note will say, if anything. You can’t really explain it, so you don’t bother to do much.

A simple note that says “Elvis has left the building” will suffice. Or maybe it should read “will the last person to leave remember to turn out the lights.”

End of story, fade to black and utter silence.