Jammed for time and hoping to produce some new content. In the interim take a look at these posts from the past week.
Friday Morning Music
Horror Movies- No Sound Equals No Fear
My Love/Hate Relationship With Technology
How Do You Become a Father
Jericho
Pieces of My Heart & Mind- Collection of Fiction
Where Were You When The Death Star Blew Up
Extreme diets: Life on 800 calories a day
Are men smarter than women? Gender Issues
They Call Me Dad
A Few Things You Might Not Know
Just Out Of Reach
It Burns
Archives for December 2009
Friday Morning Music
We Gotta Get Out Of This Place – The Animals
Backstreets – Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
Houses Of The Holy – Led Zeppelin
Kite – U2
Everybody Wants To Rule The World – Tears For Fears
Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long – Barry White
Atomic Dog – George Clinton
Annie’s Song – John Denver
All I Want is You- U2
History Repeating – Propellerheads & Miss Shirley Bassey
FanFare for The Common Man – Aaron Copland
Horror Movies- No Sound Equals No Fear
Typically I am ambivalent about watching horror movies. I don’t find them all that exciting or interesting.
Oftentimes the acting is poor and many rely upon blood, guts and gore to make them fly. I can take them or leave them.
Truth be told the only time I really remember paying attention to them was during my single years. I found them to be a useful tool as they did a good job of encouraging handholding and the like. There, that is my big confession of the evening.
Here is one more. Silence of the Lambs did wonders for my dating life, I’ll save the full story for a different night. And now on to the meat of the post.
If you are the kind of person who watches horror movies from between the fingers you use to cover your eyes you might want to consider turning off the sound. Ok, turning off the sound would make it awfully dull, but it would work. There is something else that can be done. Get rid of the soundtrack. Strip it from the movie and leave the dialogue.
Ok, I don’t know how you would or could do this, but without the scary soundtrack the movie loses some of its edge. The monsters aren’t quite so scary and the anticipation is dramatically reduced.
Think about it.
My Love/Hate Relationship With Technology
How Do You Become a Father?
How do you become a father? It sounds like a ridiculous question. Way back in prehistoric times when Jack was a wee lad the question was asked by the older brother of a friend. He answered with a cackle, “stick it in and bounce up and down.”
I think I was about seven or eight. Can’t say that I remember for certain. But I know that I didn’t have a clue what to stick where or how you were supposed to bounce while doing that. I didn’t ask either. Funny to think of it, but by then I already knew that sometimes you nodded your head and pretended that you understood whatever was being discussed.
Flash forward a few decades. I am 30 years old and in the process of trying to get the wife pregnant. For years this has been verboten. Much effort has been expended in trying to practice the bouncing up and down and a few prayers have been uttered in the hope that the miracle of life doesn’t happen this time.
It is a strange feeling, this trying to get pregnant thing. I have heard stories from friends who are unable to get to pregnant that I need to relax. One of them tells me that he hates having sex. I look at him with wide eyes and ask why. He tells me that they have been trying forever and the wife is losing her mind.
She has implemented a regimented schedule for sex and is having trouble sleeping because that thing that we didn’t want to happen in college won’t happen now. I look at him and ask if he is serious. He tells me that when they first started trying it was like manna from heaven. He couldn’t provide enough servicing and that somehow heaven has turned into hell.
I hear other stories that are similar and a bunch in which I am told that all he had to do was look at her and nine months later a baby would pop out.
It is all a bit disconcerting, but I am excited about it. I figure that everyone is different and I will just have to see what happens. As it works out it doesn’t take all that long. In fact, we get the news one day before we leave on a trip.
The airport makes me think that I am starring in a movie. Kids are screaming and parents are scrambling. Wives are yelling at their husbands to help or get something out some bag. I am not scared. Grew up in a house full of kids with parents who seemed to know what they were doing.
Still, I am wound up. I know that this time I have jumped off the cliff for real and am trying to learn how to fly before I hit the bottom.
Days later I am standing in the middle of Manhattan holding my oldest nephew. He is little, just an infant. I hold him in front of me and stare at him. He stares back.I ask him to tell me a story and he burps. I ask him if that is the best that he’s got and he gurgles.
I put him in his stroller and we cross the street. A car comes perilously close and I yell at the driver. My sister screams at me about being in New York and that people are crazy. I stare at her and ask when L.A. turned into podunk.
I am streetwise. I am 5’10 two hundred something pounds and I will not let anyone hurt my nephew. At that moment it occurs to me that if I feel this strongly about protecting my nephew it is only going to get more interesting when my kid arrives.
On a side note I look at my sister and tell her to push the damn stroller. They don’t build them with men in mind, at least not normal sized men. Later on I find out that my friend who is 6’2 has an extension put on his stroller so that it is more comfortable to push around.
Flash forward a bit and my son has arrived. He is small enough to fit in my arms like a football. The two of us are alone in the condo we live in. I am telling him stories about anything and everything. I ask him how long I have to wait for him to talk so that I understand what he wants, tell him that it is true that the world can be his.
He takes a nap in my arms and I think about how crazy this is. Not so long before one of his great grandfathers tells me that you never stop worrying about your children. I say something like “really” and he starts laughing, tells me that even though my father is in his fifties he worries about him.
My son and I sit on the couch, or should I say that I sit on the couch and listen to him snore in my ear. I stare off into space and wonder what the future is going to be like. Who will he grow up to be and how will I help him get there.
It feels like a lifetime since those days and yet he is still young and there is so much left to do and to learn. And that is the underlying lesson and message of this post, I am a father. I am a good father, but I am still learning how to do it.
Jericho
I met Jericho in a time and place that no longer exist. The people we were are long since gone. Now they drift through time and space in a place that I call memory or perhaps it is just my imagination. If you ask Jericho she’d probably push for imagination. She’d want to say that what I remember has been obscured by my own desire for the future. She’d tell you that it was never as good as I remember it.
But if you took her aside and caught her in one of those moments she’d admit that it was exactly the way I remember. She’d admit that as the queen of low expectations it is easier to think of things that way. She’d tell you that to really remember is too painful, too tragic. So old Jericho set up those walls, long and tall, deep and wide.
She lies in wait behind those walls waiting for the future to come. She lies behind those walls and watches the days pass in front of her. There are some really happy times, some good moments that make her think that she can do this for a while. Good things come and she smiles and thinks that life might not be exactly what she wants it to be, but for now this will work.
And me, well I stand outside and stare at the wall. I stand and look and wonder how they grew to be so tall. Too stubborn or too dumb to give up I continue my assault upon them. Every day I look for a way to breach them. Every day I search for a nook or cranny that I can use to start weakening more sections.
Sometimes I see Jericho looking out at me. Sometimes I see her staring at me, a wistful smile on her face. Sometimes I catch her shaking her head. She wonders if I am going to continue to live in denial about the circumstances that placed us here. But I think that she knows that I am not the sort to give up. I…keep….moving…forward….
I have a mental diary of the tactics I have used to try and breach Jericho’s walls. There was a frontal assault that was used to try and gauge the strength of the defenses. Some progress was made by eventually the defense asserted itself and we withdrew. There were flanking movements that had minor success, but still didn’t amount to much. An attempt to climb over failed as did the tunnel beneath.
In between the attempts I have continued to pepper Jericho with reminders of what could be and paintings of the dream. It has been slow going, but I am ultimately a patient man. Those walls will come down, of that I am certain. What I had to remind myself was that Jericho erected those walls for a reason. I may disagree with the reason, but the smart move is to bide my time.
A well planned siege can work. There is no need to plan my own D-Day.
So I remind myself that the current situation is just a moment in time. A moment in time that can become nothing more than a memory or it can become reality. With this in mind I have made a point of mixing up my tactics. Sometimes I withdraw all of my forces and take some R&R. Inevitably Jericho’s natural curiosity drives her out of the tower and she engages in her own reconnaisance. She always finds me.
Life may be a series of random acts but some things seem to be more than coincidence. It is a discussion that Jericho and I have had more than once. One day I suppose I’ll have the chance to look back upon this life and determine whether I was right or wrong about that belief.
In the meantime you can find me at my post watching and waiting. One day, one way or another those walls are going to come tumbling down.