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 June 2012

Let The Wild Rumpus Begin

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It is almost midnight here in Los Angeles and I am a bit beyond tired. That is because I started my day at 6:45 AM, Eastern Standard Time.

Yep, Sunday night I flew out to the East Coast so that I could hit a couple of meetings and then hopped back on a plane to come home. It wasn’t my first turnaround and probably won’t be my last, but it wore me out a bit.

This time around I decided not to bring the laptop. Figured that I could make use of the mobile phone and that if I really needed a ‘puter for the meetings I could borrow one. Fortunately I didn’t so I didn’t have to shlep one around.

Instead I got to shlep around a large Russian man. Ok, I didn’t really have to carry him but he sat next to me on the flight home. That is really my polite way of saying he mostly sat on me and seemed not to care.

It would be wrong of me to say that he disappeared into the bathroom for a good twenty minutes and brought back whatever it was he meant to leave there. That was about 3.5 hours into my flight and if there was a moment when I wondered what would happen if I stretched out my arms and accidentally slapped the side of his pumpkin size head.

It is one thing to sit on me, but biological warfare just isn’t cool.

I Opened Pandora’s Box

A long while back I opened Pandora’s Box and have been enjoying the benefits/consequences of that ever since. I have no regrets for having done so. I chalk much of it up to the lessons I referred to in this post.

But I could use a short break to catch my breath and look around to see what’s what. Life doesn’t work that way so I don’t expect things to slow down but I figure it never hurts to ask. The list of what I haven’t seen is long so it is possible that I might discover that which I have been searching for by simply mentioning it.

It reminds me of when I was a boy and my father and I would fix things around the house. Most of my memories consist of a moment where he reminded me that there was rarely an advantage to using my strength to force things to fit.

That is one of my favorite lessons and something that I still work on today. Call it finesse or diplomacy. Or just describe it as taking a moment to remember that sometimes the smart thing to do is stop, look and listen.

My son is very good at this. He is not the boy his father was. I always figured that if I jumped off the side of house I would land safely in the pool, learn to fly or come up with a solution on the way down.

Little Jack is smarter than I was/am. He looks at the challenges and takes a much more methodical approach to solving them. It makes me smile to see that.

My daughter isn’t always like that. Her soccer coaches tell me that they love how fearless she is on the field. I laugh and tell them they ought to see what happens if she is irritated with a player on the other team. She is a sweet girl, but she has a double dose of me, at least when it comes to sports.

When Possibilities Become Opportunities

One of the meetings I sat through evolved because I figured out how to turn possibilities into opportunities. There is a much longer story tied into this, one that discusses whether things are meant to be and whether the universe is involved in life, but this is not the place to discuss that in detail.

I mention it because it is connected and deserves consideration.

Anyhoo. when I left the second meeting I walked away feeling good but still went through the “I wish I had shared this” moment that we all have. The good news is that it wasn’t the one where you kick yourself because you think you did poorly.

I didn’t. I did well and I feel confident but that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish that I had mentioned a few more things. It is just how I am built.

It is tied into a million different things, this feeling. And it reminds me again of that boy I was, except I think about how sometimes I would tell my father that there was a time when muscle would be of benefit.

I think that time is now, except now I am not relying upon physical strength. Now I am using the mental toughness I developed over time and am seeing the beginning of some amazing results. And one day when my kids read through all these posts they will sift through the ones where I say that life has been hellish and come across this one and see that I was serious when I said it gets better.

Life isn’t perfect, but it is better and I expect that to continue in a big way.

What about you? How are things in your world? If you are a reader who doesn’t comment often now would be a good time, especially those who are locked in dirty hotel rooms out of state. 😉

Exhaustion has finally hit, sleep calls and I shall answer. See you in the AM.

This is part of Just Write #41.

Lessons For Being Human

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human

It is important for you to know that I borrowed that image from my friend Mitchell Brown, also known as Thoughtful Pop. You should also know that this post is being entered into the challenge grid at Yeah Write #63.

What is significant about that is out of the six or seven times I have entered I have only won once and have been flat out destroyed every other time. I mention this because one day my children may read this post and I want them to know that their dad can be ridiculously competitive but is also tenacious.

I don’t give up. I don’t quit. That’s because sometimes the win comes from showing up and battling. That is because if you aren’t blessed with ridiculous amounts of talent and the will to use it you don’t win.

Although my experience has taught me that persistence and tenacity are often enough to make it happen. When you are willing to push yourself and take one more step than the next guy you can win.

But I don’t want to get caught up solely in talking about winning and losing. I want to talk about what I want to teach my children. I want to talk about helping them become menschen.

Character/Integrity/Honor

A mensch is a person who has character, integrity and honor. Me? I am just your average Joe with oodles of this and buckets of that. It is a silly way of saying that I am a decent guy who has made a lot of good choices and a lot of bad choices.

But I also understand that this is part of being human as is learning from our mistakes. I am not the sum total of all that is good or all this bad. I am both. And as a father I am obligated to do the best I can to help my children not do the same stupid things that I did.

If we take a moment to look at exhibit A, also known as the fancy picture up above we see that there are no mistakes in life and that we keep repeating our lessons until we learn them.

Both of those resonate with me. Hell, the whole thing resonates with me which is part of why I posted it here. I take my role as a father very seriously which is part of why I keep writing these letters to my kids.

I want them to see that I am walking the walk and talking the talk. I want them to understand that there have been moments when I felt like Atlas and that I didn’t give up. I didn’t given up in large part because I was taught not to take the easy way out and because I want the kids to do the same.

I want them to understand that there is merit and value in work. I want them to see that sometimes walking through fire leads to something better, bigger and more beautiful.

It is a Journey

Life is a grand adventure and one hell of a journey. We often make it more complicated than it needs to be so here is my attempt to try to make it simpler for my children:

Live, love and laugh.

Do all three of these things as often as you can and without fear. The lack of fear part is hard. Someone is going to rip out your heart and I will probably want to kick their ass because when you hurt my kid you hurt me.

But the thing is that you never really understand how amazing love can be until you make yourself open and vulnerable to heartbreak. So unless you take a risk you miss opportunity for the great reward.

Live, love and laugh. Remember that you can do all those with a friend too. Make friends who are so dear you would consider taking a bullet for them and they for you. You don’t have to tons, a few good ones will often suffice.

There is more to say, do and discuss but for now I think we’ll make it simple.

Live, love and laugh.

Do those things and you will be happy.

On The Road Again

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The Traveling Jack Tour Bus is just about to leave for the airport so that we can go share joy, mirth and merriment across the country. Of course that means that Old Jack has to go sit inside a stuffed tin can for a few hours, but that is ok.

I have got a window seat, book and movies and music to accompany me. Not to mention snacks, can’t forget the snacks because if you do it will cost you $35.00 for a stale bagel with shmear on it.

Anyhoo, I make make the odd appearance around the blogosphere later today but I wouldn’t expect to see anything new from me until late tomorrow night or maybe Tuesday.

If you are dying for stuff to read beyond the recent post you can always try:

  1. Words Left Unwritten– That is the link to home page which contains some of the latest additions  to the story or you can try this link and get a sense of some of what I am trying to do with it.
  2. How To Write Funny Posts That No One Will Read
  3. Writers Write Right
  4. A Jealous Man
  5. The Many Layers of Hell
  6. What The Hell Happened to Courtesy

Be excellent and I will see you later. Got a plane to catch and I don’t run like the wind anymore.  😉

 

 

You Don’t Need A Niche To Be A Successful Blogger

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Whenever I blog about blogging I try to answer the questions and concerns that I have about blogging.  More often than not I find that my questions aren’t any different than those you have.

If you want the dime store explanation for why I blog the answer is because I am a writer. Blogging isn’t a choice for me, it is a part of me. I cannot conceive of a world without words.

What is funny to me about this is that I have always been a storyteller but I haven’t always called myself a writer. Read through the blog and you’ll find mention of how my preschool teachers told my mother that I had the most active imagination of any child in my class. Ask mom about it and she’ll tell you it is true and then shush me when I say that I went to a school with three kids and two of them were deaf and mute.

Somewhere around the time I was 12 or 13 our school teachers started requiring that we keep a journal. I hated it. I didn’t want to write about my feelings or what I did last summer. It didn’t stop me from joining the school newspaper in 7th grade or my continuing on all the way through college.

And then life happened.

I graduated and discovered that I couldn’t afford to become the next great sports writer or at least I didn’t think I could so I stopped writing and did other things. I sold advertising, worked in construction, spent time in marketing/PR and helped launch a few businesses.

Blogging was something that I fell into. Didn’t intend to become a blogger but in May 2004 I jumped into it on a whim and never stopped.

Take a look at the words above and you can’t help but notice the ones that stand out:

Continue, Want, Interested, Reading, Sharing Things, Know and Like.

My interpretation is simple. It is a message and a reminder that blogging  is about sharing things you know and like with others. It means that you should read other blogs as well as books, newspapers and magazines because they will help fuel your love.

That is what I have been doing. Read the old stuff here and some of it is absolutely horrible, but there are nuggets of gold too. You’ll see that I spent a lot of time writing about religion, politics and parenting.

Flip through and you will find my fiction and assorted odds and ends that caught my eye at one time or another.

Sometimes I look back and wonder what would have happened if I did nothing but write about one particular topic. What would have happened and where would I be today. It is a rhetorical question because I can’t go back in time to change things and I don’t know that I would.

What I know is that a few years ago I decided that I wanted to use my blog to do more. I wanted to take something I loved and monetize it. The short term goal was to do so in a manner that didn’t destroy what I had built. I wanted to maintain a certain level of purity.

Not really sure what that means other than I didn’t want to be the blogger that gained an audience solely by doing reviews and giveaways. But I wasn’t entirely against doing some of those because a man has to eat and I saw that as a potential path for creating a revenue stream here.

I think that somewhere around then was when I started calling myself a writer. It was when I began to recognize that the universe had been slapping me in the face with 1,938 messages saying that this is something I love and should focus upon.

Ever since then I have found myself chasing after a different set of dreams but with a sense of purpose and confidence. I don’t have any doubt that I am going to find the place I have been searching for. It is not a question of if, but of when.

So when I look at posts like Daddy/Daughter Day and The Tales We Tell I smile. To me they serve as evidence that I am well on my way.

It took a bit of time and effort for me to move all those rocks, but I did it.  So let’s circle back to our headline.

This post isn’t about establishing a mission statement or metrics that you can use to measure success. Both of those things are important and useful. If you want to figure out if you are getting the job done they can help you determine that.

I wrote this post as if you and I were walking on the beach, hiking in the mountains or sharing a cup of coffee. That is what I saw in my head, just two friends spending some time together.

When you asked me if I consider myself to be a successful blogger I said yes. It is not because blogging has helped me make a million dollars because that hasn’t happened yet but I have rediscovered what I love, who I am and what I want to do.

Nothing is more valuable than that.

Thank you again to all who have been a part of this journey. This fellowship continues to evolve but I remember all who have been a part, those who don’t visit any more and those who do.

You have all helped and I am grateful. I hope you will continue to walk with me or share that cup of coffee because this journey isn’t even close to being done.

I Don’t Sing Well, But I Sing Loud- Join Me!

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It is pushing midnight and I am listening to Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes sing Up Where We Belong. Got to confess that somewhere out there is a woman who remembers a night at karaoke where I once sang this with her.

I am guessing that she was drunk and or deaf because she smiled the entire time. Or maybe she just thinks that I do a great impression of Joe Cocker. It wasn’t quite like this:

Sadly there is no video footage of that particular night but I can assure you that there is plenty of other footage out there. Sadly you probably won’t see any here either. The whole idea of video footage is kind of funny to me.

Funny in the sense that sometimes what we think we are doing doesn’t always match up with what we see in our heads. We imagine that we look cool, sexy and suave yet in reality we fall short of the mark.

The question is, do we care? Does it matter? Are we so self conscious that we refuse to step out of our comfort zone and let it all hang out.

What About You Jack?

Thank you for asking.  The answer is I have two moments in my life where I remember embarrassing myself in such a way that it has stuck with me for years.  The moment from A Whiter Shade of Pale is one that I still remember quite well.

In fact you can say that it is because of it that I learned to sing loud. Call it over compensating or just screwing around but you rarely hear me sing in what you would consider a normal tone/range for me.

When I think about skills/talent I wish that I had singing is pretty high up on the list. I can’t decide if it is because of that moment or because I see it as another way to express myself.

The second incident that comes to mind is another that I have blogged about but I can’t remember when or where so you don’t get a link to the post. But that is ok because I am going to tell you about it.’

Freshman year of college and I am a pledge in a fraternity. Every year we hold a Chippendales party where the guys get up and dance. All of the brothers tell us that the party is filled with hot women and that dancing is a virtual guarantee that you will hook up with someone.

I am a dumb 18 year-old and I figure that there is no reason why any of the boys would stretch the truth. So I agree to do it. I get up on stage and dance my ass off. Mind you if there is a time in my life to do it, that was it.

I had the six pack that every man wants and I was cut all over. Who knew that all that time on the swim team would lend itself so well to something on land.

Long story longer, I am not a dancer. Slow dancing is something I have down. I know how to two step and I can hold my own but some of the other stuff…not so much. But I am young and dumb. Just before we go on stage we all hit the floor and start doing push ups. I look in the mirror and I can see that I look pumped.

Too bad it doesn’t show that in a few minutes I am going to try to shake my ass next to my pledge brother who is an actual dancer. Yep, I stood next to the guy who was in school in dance. It was a great comedy routine made better by the appearance of an ex girlfriend who isn’t interested in me but won’t leave my side either.

The Benefit & Beauty of Age

Twenty-five years later I can see myself walking onto the stage. I remember being incredibly self conscious and wishing that I had more than a couple shots of tequila. But I also look at that moment as well as the one from junior high as times when I took a chance.

I stepped out from the crowd and tried to capture a moment to make it my own. I want that for my children and frankly I want it for me too.

The benefit and beauty of age allows me to do some things that I might not have done when I was younger. It is what allows me to ignore the moments of being self conscious and say screw it.

If I want I can do dance on stage and strip or sing for a crowd. Don’t know that I will or that there is a reason to, but I could. And I could do it better than before with far fewer concerns.

But the point is not that I could do either one of those things. The point is that I have taken a very active role in making the changes I want to see in my life happen. They aren’t all happening at once and they aren’t moving as fast as I want them to, but they are happening.

I can’t speak for you, but there is something very reassuring about that.

What about you?

 

Twitter Is Dead & I Hate Headlines

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Twitter isn’t actually dead but it is down. By my unscientific estimation it has been comatose for almost two hours. Rumor has it that you can hear Mark Zuckerberg and and Larry Page laughing maniacally, but I can’t confirm that.

What I can confirm is that I don’t particularly like being disconnected unless it is my choice to do so. You see Twitter is just one of the tools that I have come to rely upon to connect me to my online community. That community has become a big part of my life.

It is important enough for me to dedicate an entire newsletter to it.

My online community is composed of friends and colleagues. It is a vast network of resources that I rely upon daily. If I have questions I know that I can reach out to my community and ask for help or opinions and be confident that I will always receive an answer.

For those of us who work from a remote office Twitter is one of our virtual water coolers. It is where I can talk about Game of Thrones, favorite music/movies and just relax.

A bunch of us have been kidding around on Facebook that productivity throughout the world has shot up dramatically and that the net result of Twitter being down will have a positive impact on the economy.

I Hate Headlines

I don’t really hate headlines but I dislike living in a world of instant gratification and short attention spans. I dislike the emphasis to always have to be clever so as to grab the attention of prospective readers.

This is the sort of complaint that I tell my children to ignore. That is because I can’t see an easy way to change this. All I see is an uphill battle and though I have never been afraid to fight against anyone or anything there are some battles that aren’t worth it.

What good will come out of my complaining about headlines. The answer to that question is painfully obvious to me but probably not to any of you.

I have some really good things going on in my life now. There are some really big opportunities that I am excited about but it will be several days before I find out whether they are going to materialize or not.

So I am feeling a bit crazed because it is close enough to see but too far away to touch. Consequently I am feeling a bit frustrated and somewhat stifled. This is it coming out.

It is also one of the reasons why I love blogging. I know that just writing about this will take some of the edge off and that I will feel better. My community will read this and I know that I will be supported.

Support is important for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are someone who is confident enough to go against the tide or someone who isn’t. The support of a community provides comfort in a variety of areas and that is invaluable.

What do you think?