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 October 2011

Babble Doesn’t Know About My Blog

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Babble doesn’t know about my blog or at least I don’t think that they do. Because if they did surely I would have been includedon their fabulous list of the Top 50 Dad Blogs.

I am told that it will sound bitter if I say that I don’t recognize a bunch of the boys they have listed and that I shouldn’t mention that I have been blogging longer than most. I am told that if I paid more attention to writing great headlines and SEO I might not have this problem of flying under the radar.

All those things might be true or they might not be. Because the fine boys/girls at Babble might have wandered through this joint and decided that it is not up to snuff. They might have decided that this blog is not Babbleworthy which in the grand scheme of things is not as bad as not being spongeworthy.

I really shouldn’t say “Bite Me Babble” because I am not bitter. But I can’t help myself because “Bite Me Babble” just has this ring to it. Certainly more fun than saying “Blow Me Babble” and I am good with that.

Why not talk about healthcare

Why not talk about healthcare. That is not really a question for me because it is something that I think about each month. My health insurance covers myself and two healthy children. Did I mention that the monthly cost is second only to that which I pay to keep a roof over my head.

But there is a significant distinction here. We sleep under that roof every night. We use the house daily whereas healthcare is used on an as needed basis.  Provided that we all stay healthy that means we hit the doc around a half dozen times a year. I don’t even want to tell you how much that averages out to be.

And I don’t dare change plans because if things go to hell the already expensive medical costs will hit the “holy fuck we can’t pay this but don’t have a choice because we don’t want to die or be permanently crippled” level. Did I mention that a trip to the dentist for two kid just sucked $240 out of my wallet.

I think that the toothmeister and I are going to have a conversation about what the real costs are and then I am going to start looking for a new doc for the kids.

The Top 50 Get What

Now if only I was one of those Top 50 dad bloggers the dentist would quake in fear, refund my money and offer to pay for my children’s college education. It is only fair because I know the dental work I had done last year paid for their new kitchen and a vacation in Tuscany. Instead I am shilling for my blog and looking for excuses to include  include Why Your Post Sucks and Everyone Hates Your Blog, A Father’s Burden and The Hypocrisy of Charitable Giving During the Holiday Season.

Really it is hard not to be irate about these things. I don’t begrudge paying for quality healthcare any more than I do for a quality education but this is unreal and unreasonable.  BTW, do yourself a favor and don’t tell me about how the Republicans/Democrats want to destroy the country because I am not interested in hearing it. Don’t want you to tell me why Liberals/Conservatives are the devil because I don’t want to hear that either.

Nor do I want to know about how the fine folks at Occupy Wall Street. All I care about is action. Tell me what you want to change, why you want to do so and how you intend to make said changes. And please for the love of all that is good and holy don’t send me a PowerPoint presentation that is so poorly done Crystal Meth addicts fall asleep while watching it.

This reminds me that it is probably time to revisit Dad Balances Fear Versus Reality because as you said in that post you have a goal:

The goal is the same as it has always been. Raise good children, smart children. Raise children who are self sufficient and productive members of society.

And the bottom line is that goal is more important than all of this other nonsense.

Blogging Is Not An Obligation Part 2

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Last week I got into a small pissing contest with a so called major blogger about content, quality and how we should be blogging. If you are among the 17 long time readers you have seen me wade into these silly melees with reckless abandon.

Some of those were worth the price of admission and some were nothing more than three or four men trying to prove whose dick was bigger than the others. Not really something to be proud or nor something that I teach my children to do but sometimes we fathers like to advise the kids to do as we say and not as we do.

Anyway, I am not impressed by how many followers you get, how many comments you  receive or most of the standard metrics people use to gauge their self worth. Nor am I bothered by the efforts of lackeys, groupies and minions to chastise me for disagreeing with their hero. Sorry fellas, if you stick it in my mouth I simply won’t swallow and most likely I’ll chew.

I am funny like that.

If you haven’t noticed I am in a droll sort of mood. You can blame it upon my candy corn addiction (please don’t send me anymore I can’t stop eating them) or you can just say that Jack is a grumpy Taurus. It might all be true.

What is also true is that I don’t see blogging as being an obligation. I am not obligated to provide you with scintillating content that stimulates you mentally, emotionally and or sexually. I write for me first and then for you. It is part of why you’ll find posts where I complain about bloggers who insist on posting about their cats and kittens. Not interested. When I see that crap I point, click and surf elsewhere.

You Can Do It Too

You can do the same. If you don’t like reading my words than don’t read. If you don’t like reading someone else, don’t read it. If you refuse to click away than you deserve to be irritated and should be punished for your stupidity.

You can do it too is a line that I keep reading in some email newsletters I receive. It makes me shake my head because I don’t believe that the author means it. I don’t think that they want that at all and I am sure that they hope that it doesn’t happen.

Why? Well their newsletter is designed to teach others how to become a competitor of the author and I don’t think that they really want that, at least not on a large scale. Maybe I am wrong, but I just don’t think so.

Feed The Beast

If you are going to be a blogger than you need to feed the beast. You have to update your blog on a regular basis not because of the readers but because you have an obligation to yourself to try to become better. You have an obligation to work on your skills as a writer and the only way that you can do so is by writing.

I’ll share more about this in an upcoming post. In in the interim, tell me what you think in the comments.

Music Tells A Story

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I am preparing for Nanowrimo 2011, also known as National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to produce 50,000 words in a month. According to the fine folks at the Nanowrimo headquarters that is about 175 pages, or a chapter of War and Peace.

Since I haven’t quite decided what I wanted to write about yet I figured it is time to start warming up my chops and chose to use music to do so. So what you have here is a very small selection of videos and song excerpts.  There is a rhyme and reason why I selected these particular “ditties” but I may choose to go a different direction entirely.

This really is just a warm up. It is a chance for me to start jingle jangling the melon to see if I can come up with something that works for me.

She put him out like the burnin’ end of a midnight cigarette
She broke his heart he spent his whole life tryin’ to forget
We watched him drink his pain away a little at a time
But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind
Until the night

1st Chorus
He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away her memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength he had to get up off his knees
We found him with his face down in the pillow
With a note that said I’ll love her till I die
And when we buried him beneath the willow
The angels sang a whiskey lullaby”


‘Believe me”
You really don’t have to worry
I only want to make you happy
And if you say,
hey, go away, I will
But I think better still
I ought to stay around and love you
Do you think I have a case?
Let me ask you to your face:
Do you think you love me?
I think I love you!”

“See the stone set in your eyes
See the thorn twist in your side
I wait for you

Sleight of hand and twist of fate
On a bed of nails she makes me wait
And I wait without you

With or without you
With or without you

Through the storm we reach the shore
You give it all but I want more
And I’m waiting for you

With or without you
With or without you
I can’t live
With or without you”

Hello, how are you?
Have you been alright, through all those lonely
Lonely lonely lonely lonely nights?
That’s what I’d say, I’d tell you everything
If you’d pick up that telephone, yeah yeah yeah

Hey, how you feelin’?
Are you still the same?
Don’t you realize the things we did, we did
Were all for real, not a dream?
I just can’t believe they’ve all faded out of view
Yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah

I fell in to a burning ring of fire
I went down,down,down
and the flames went higher.
And it burns,burns,burns
the ring of fire
the ring of fire.

Tell me, tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died
Give me, give me one more chance
To keep you satisfied, satisfied

Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time
You were always on my mind
You are always on my mind
You are always on my mind

I have about seven days to make a decision what direction to go in but I am going to start pushing hard to figure it out earlier than that. I suppose the big question is whether I use any of the existing pieces of Fragments of Fiction and or the pieces from The Red Dress Club.

I don’t know why, but I am a little bit nervous about this. I suppose it is because I want to do something special. I want to create something significant and meaningful. That is not a bad goal to have. If you are going to do it you might as well try to do it write. Bad joke there, but sometimes you have work with what you have.

This is part of the Just Write Project.

How To Build and Design A Blog- What I Learned

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Dr. Seuss Should Have Been a Dad Blogger
Oh The Places You'll Go

I never realized that rebuilding a car would provide valuable lessons in how to build and design a blog.

My first car was a 1969 Dodge Dart Swinger. It was a hunk of metal placed around a simple Slant 6 engine. I bought it in the Fall of 1986 for $300.00 and then spent hours fixing it up. More than a few moments of my time was spent cruising through old junk yards looking for things like transmissions, deck lid, headlights and other parts that I couldn’t afford to purchase new.

Those hours in the yard and in the garage helped me build a skill set that I applied to the building and redesign of this blog. That was when I learned about the value in creating a list of things to be done and the need to create a sketch of what I wanted the final product to look like.

It is also where I learned that sometimes you could blow off steam by using a hammer or crow bar to beat the hell out of some junker that was already semi destroyed. Unfortunately you can’t do that in blogging. It is considered juvenile, unprofessional and foolish to use a hammer on your laptop. Nor are you allowed to defenestrate it.

Ok, let me take a step back and share some reality with you. I really did all those things I mentioned above but I didn’t do them with the redesign of this blog. That was a mistake.

What I Should Have Done

What I should have done is taken few minutes to write down a paragraph or two about what I wanted the new blog to look like and the kind of functions I wanted to have. What I should have done is drawn a simple sketch or created some sort of mockup of what I wanted it to look like.

Then I could have conducted a simple search to see if there are any blogs out there that had design elements I wanted to replicate or modify. After that it would have been a simple process to find out what sort of work was necessary to make those things happen.

But I didn’t do those things.

What I Did

What I did is wing it. What I did was build and design by Braille. I purchased a new theme and blew everything up here. Then I took the fragments and slowly pieced them together to see what sort of creation I could build. Never did get my Doc. Frankenstein moment of shouting “IT IS ALIVE” but I did use some other colorful words.

The end product and I use that term loosely is better than what I had when I started. There are still changes to be made and some adjustments here and there but overall I am pleased with what I see.

So now I can return to making content the primary focus and design will move back to the number two position.

If you have any comments, criticism or thoughts in general please feel free to leave them in the comments.

The Evolution Of A Blogger

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Some tell me that I need to spend more time working on my headlines. They say it is a big mistake not to pay attention to them and that I’ll lose readers if I don’t. Others tell me that I am not working hard enough on my S.E.O. and that could compensate for my not focusing on headlines.

They may both be right and maybe I am working harder than I need to. Or maybe I am not. Maybe I am doing exactly what needs to be done to turn this blog into the vehicle that drives me to my next destination.

I try to remind myself that much of the joy lies in the journey and not just the destination. That helps me look at this as fun and not work.

Where I Have Been

This journey is something that I started 7.5 years ago. I didn’t know anything about blogs or blogging. Ok, that is not entirely accurate I knew that some people used a Weblog to write stuff in. But old Jack is the guy who used to hate being forced to keep a journal in school so I sure wasn’t going to do this voluntarily.

Yet, I did it. On a lazy day in May I went to Blogspot and set up a Blogger account. Sat down and wrote some posts that are truly awful. Some  of them are so bad that I dread seeing them but I keep them there. I don’t delete them because they help provide a guide to where I was and sometimes that is good to know.

I can tell you the same thing that a million bloggers say: I didn’t know this would be fun. I didn’t know that my love for writing had gotten lost or that blogging would restore it to me. I didn’t know that I would make friends, find work or capture moments in time here.

But I did and I do.

And because of that I decided to become more serious about some things. I moved to a self-hosted blog on WordPress. I spent time working on it. Took time to read and educate myself about things that would help and then did the best that I could to apply that knowledge here.

Where I Am Going

If you are among the 17 long time readers you have watched the transitions and growth. You have seen me work on new themes and witnessed my breaking my blog. You have hiked alongside and seen me sweat through some of the repairs. You may not have seen my face but if the words worked you read my smile.

You, the long time readers recognize my fiction. You know that anything that is labeled Fragments of Fiction is just that. You know that I didn’t really get arrested for that salami incident because it never happened.

Those little bites of fiction are part of how I try to keep my writing/storytelling skills sharp. They’re important to me because it is time for me to push harder to write and publish a book.

It is time for me to push harder to make the blog look nicer. I don’t want something that looks overly slick because they become sterile but I don’t want something that looks like it was created by a child either. So I am going to keep pushing, reading and practicing.

Some of that may happen behind the scenes but some of it will happen out in the open. There is a lot more to come and a lot more to say but I need to save something for later.

Questions for you

Do you have goals for your blog and what are you doing to make them happen?

A Father’s Guilt for his Daddy’s Girl

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She knows I love her but she really doesn’t understand the depth of my love. She doesn’t know that I would take the bullet for her or step in front of the bus.

I wouldn’t think twice about it or hesitate. She doesn’t remember the time at the mall I took out a man who was about to run her over.

He was too busy talking on his cell phone and she was too busy looking for something in her purse. I was fast enough to wrap her up in my arms but not graceful enough to avoid the collision with him.

The man went down hard and she laughed. “Daddy, you are so silly.”

She was four at the time.

Now she is seven going on thirty and I am hopelessly in love with the girl that I call the dark-haired beauty.

You can find the rest of this post over here.