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 November 2009

Thanksgiving- A Working Holiday

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Thanksgiving is a working holiday, but the nature of the work varies from person to person. If you are hosting a Thanksgiving dinner you may be working on preparing the house and the meal. Or you might be one of those people who have to work on Thanksgiving at a job that helps to pay the bills.

You might be the chef or hostess at a restaurant. You could be a bus driver, bag boy, cashier or guy behind the counter at 7-11. Many of us enjoy the holiday because it offers a time during which we stop working. It is a vacation from our normal lives. And that is great, as Martha would say it is a good thing.

I have several Thanksgiving traditions. One of them is a football game. It is not a game I watch, but one I play in. Every year my fraternity plays on Thanksgiving day. I started playing in 1987 and with the exception of the Thanksgiving I spent in Georgetown in 1990 haven’t missed one since.

Today I lined up against a boy who told me that he was born the year I graduated from college. So I did what every guy my age would do, I kicked his ass, rubbed his nose in the mud and told him to go home and play with his Lincoln Logs. It is a man’s game and we’re very manly people.

Of course I don’t ever want to see video footage of the game. Allow me to think that I look like a gazelle running and not some awkward, herky-jerky marionette. I glide through the line and sack the quarterback. When necessary I smash a hole in the middle and stomp the ground with all who oppose me. Please allow me to retain this simple fiction.

The game was great fun, but this year was a bit different. It was different because it was a working Thanksgiving for me. I didn’t play the entire game because my partners and I took time to work on our business. It was important. It is important and I am glad that we did it.

Part of the reason that I am writing about this is because we are chronicling our journey.If fortune smiles upon us one day we will look back upon this time and talk about it. It will be a fond recollection that we will share as well as a lesson that we pass along to our children.

Success and opportunity are there for those who know how to acquire them. We happen to believe that part of the process is hard work. And we hope that there is a payoff to this hard work.

Although this is a working Thanksgiving for me I am well aware that it is not the sort of work that others are doing. In a few moments I will stop typing and head off to a much needed shower. For a few moments I’ll sit inside and watch the mud caked on my arms flow towards the drain. And then I’ll dry off, change clothes and head off to dinner.

I am thankful for the opportunity. I am grateful that I have a place to go. And now if you’ll excuse me I really must move as the dark haired beauty has told me that I must give her two hugs and three kisses before I am allowed to eat dinner.

Five years-old and that girl is already barking orders at me like some kind of drill sergeant. It is a good thing that she is so damn cute because I don’t take orders or instructions very well.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Book Meme

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Stole this just because…

Where do you fall in the list? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here.

Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. If you want to, tag other book nerds.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible x
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X

Total: 9

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 1/2 X read quite a bit
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (saw the movie)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

Total: 3.5
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X

Total: 6

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles DickensX
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (sitting on my shelf, unread)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X

Total: 3

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan (also sitting on the shelf)

Total: 3

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (sequel to lust and malaria)

Total: 4

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (read some of it)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X
Total: 3

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt

Total: 3

 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

Total: 5

 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

Total: 3

Grand Total: 42.5

Damn Brits, trying to make me feel like I am illiterate and uneducated.

Thanks for Giving

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iTunes just pushed through Captain Jack and You’re My Home and I find myself thinking about life and the things that are happening to me, around me and the world. Life is moving at lightspeed and at times it feels like I can barely keep up.

One of my fraternity brothers recently lost his wife. She was only 40, a mother taken far too early. I lost another friend about six weeks ago and another this past May. Three people who were all my age. Won’t claim to have been close or best friends with any of them. But I spent large chunks of time with all of them and more than a a laugh or two.

One day they were here and the next they were gone.

It is not as unusual as we might hope it to be. Things happen to people. It doesn’t matter whether they are good or bad, life happens. It is hard sometimes to reconcile why people like Charles Manson are granted long lives in relatively good health and others have so many challenges to overcome.

Out in the dark there are people that I love and care about who are fighting their own battles. Some are doing the best that they can to help sick parents. It is hard to watch our heroes fail. It is hard to watch the people we think of as being invulnerable break down and know that our own ability to help them is so limited.

************

Destiny. I have been thinking about it quite a bit. Been thinking about what I really believe and whether some things are preordained. There are moments where I want to believe that some things are meant to be. Moments when I demand that G-d, karma, the universe, something give me an answer that makes sense. And there are moments where I doubt it all.

Here is what I know for certain….nothing, or relatively little. But I can tell you that I am doing all that I can to take control of my destiny. I have to. Lately life has felt a bit like I am riding a stagecoach that has no driver. Well, I climbed out the door, over the top and jumped into the saddle. I am busy trying to take the reigns so that I can gain some control of it.

And I am thankful for that. I am grateful that I can try to make a difference there. I am grateful for my health and the health of my family. I am grateful for having some amazing friends. I am grateful for having had a good life and am well aware that sometimes it can all change suddenly.

I have seen those changes and because I have I am unwilling to watch life pass me by. I am unwilling to let the horses take me over the cliff or to just stare out the window watching the scenery pass me by.

I cannot be other than I am and I am grateful for the chance to be me. Have a happy Thanksgiving.

Scenes From A Car

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I am a person who loves to watch people. Yep, that is me, a peoplewatcher. I just find it interesting to sit back and watch what people do. In restaurants I find it especially interesting to watch couples who are clearly on a date and see what happens.

Sometimes it can be a lot of fun to create dialogue for them, to offer a running commentary. OTOH, sometimes my creative juices are nonexistent and I can’t think of anything funny to say.

Another aspect of peoplewatching is the fun that you can have while driving. If you spend enough time on the road you see so many different things. Here is an incomplete list of things that I have seen at one time or another:

  • Woman applying makeup- Always makes me feel good to know that if they rear-end me they will end up with the mascara brush in the eye or pushed so far up their left nostril it is likely to become a permanent fixture.
  • Men Shaving- Actually I once saw a guy using a blade and no shaving cream. Ouch! What are you thinking.
  • The ubiquitous nosepicker- Both men and women. You may be alone in your car but you are most definitely not alone on the road.
  • The ubiquitous cellphone talker- They are everywhere and there is not enough to be said about them that hasn’t already been said.
  • Oral Sex- Yep, I have seen more than one man with a large smile on his face and one hand on the wheel. Again this is one of those situations where I smile when I think about what will happen if the jerkoff (wrong word to use) smacks into my car.
  • Fast Food Fanatic- I don’t know if fanatic is the right word, but I like the alliteration. This is the guy or girl who cannot stop stuffing that leaky taco or drippy burger into their mouth.
  • The Entertainer- Thus named for those people who sing and dance to the radio. It can be especially fun to watch them bebop around blissfully unaware that someone is filming them so that they can be uploaded onto the net.

Ok, this list could be more interesting and there are most definitely some screwy things that I haven’t listed but this is primetime and there are children reading this blog.