Archives for June 2012
Don’t Be Such A Serious Blogger
Not long ago I received an email from someone who said that I shouldn’t be such a serious blogger. I thanked them profusely for their advice and then asked them if they were a Nigerian prince who just happened to be interested in sharing their fortune with me.
Sadly they were not…interested in sharing their fortune with me. I haven’t any clue as to whether they really were a Nigerian prince and or wealthy. That is because they didn’t respond to my email. It hurt my feelings and I decided to send them a letter letting them know this.
That is because I have been taught that men shouldn’t hold our feelings in. It is bad for our hearts or so I was told.
So I wrote him a letter that looked something like this.
“Dear Mr. Foosengoosen,
I am quite upset with your lack of response regarding my inquiry into your lineage and personal wealth. If you are indeed a Nigerian prince you should let me know immediately and should also consider sharing your fortune with me.
There are many reasons why you should do this not the least of which is because I said please…twice. Hell, if you were my employer and I were a millenial you would be able to expect to receive a strongly worded letter and a telephone call from my parents about your rude behavior.
That lack of response might have sent me over the edge because I grew up in a world in which unicorns were plentiful, rainbows colorful and everyone received a trophy for being able to breathe.
Sadly this is not the world I grew up in. I come from the seventies a time of bad fashion and silly television shows. We were harder and meaner than the kids today. I would have gone sweathog on your and told you to shove a hose up your nose or some such thing.
And it is entirely possible that I might have even dipped into the eighties and pulled Miyagi out to train me to kick your ass. We aren’t talking about the nice guy from Happy Days either. No, you won’t be saved by Mr. C. The Fonz can’t protect you nor will Ritchie, Potsie or Ralph Malph.
And let’s not forget what happened to Ritchie’s older brother Chuck. The dude disappeared. I could make that happen to you too.
Why So Serious
Great Googly Moogly Foosengoosen, you have the weirdest name of any Nigerian Prince I have ever known. Not that I have known any in real life or online. Don’t ask me if I knew any in the biblical sense of the word either. The last thing I need to do is say that I support Gay Marriage wholeheartedly but think that kisisng a man is repulsive.
That is because the last time I had that conversation here I got flamed by some loser who wanted to know if I was worried about the Gay agenda which according to him consists of having sex with lots of partners. Now my dear Foosengoosen I have to confess that there was a time when I wanted to have sex with lots of partners, just not at the same time or with men.
Am not bothered by men wanting to sleep with men provided I don’t have to do it or see it. But I don’t really want to watch a man or a woman have sex either. Besides if I did I would have to pretend to be Howard Cosell doing play -by-play .
Now that could have been special. Just imagine what that would have sounded like:
“This is Howard Cosell. Tonight we are seeing something momentous, a boy is about to become a man. I once talked to a young Cassius Clay about such a thing and thanks to my advice he remembered to pump slowly so that…”
Screeching Halt
Sorry Foosengoosen this is family blog so I can’t go into more details.
But what I can tell you is that because you are a selfish bastard I am not inviting you to join me on the great Ikea adventure. That is going to be big and amazing. The great Ikea adventure is the day where I go switch all of the signs at Ikea with fake ones that I have made.
It could be one of the all time greatest pranks and you aren’t going to be a part of it. You won’t be there when I switch the Hoskenflosked with a Skeezendozenker or the Gartleskin with a Crapyouneedenskin.
Sorry, about that, but you brought this punishment down upon yourself. And don’t try to weasel out of it by offering me a couple of chickens and a water buffalo either. I am not bought that easily.
Really, a man of my distinction needs more than that. Give me a black lion and a Bengal tiger and we can start talking.
Don’t Blog For Traffic
When I am at my best I dance without worrying about what I look like and write without concern for what I read or sound like. I know that I do things differently from most people. I know that I have spent most of my life standing on the outside looking in.
Guess what? So have most of you.
It took me a while to catch on and realize that the cool kids didn’t know a damn thing more about life and living than I did or do. I am proud to say that I never spent much time trying to be like them. Some of that was because I didn’t care and some because I couldn’t.
We didn’t have the money for me to wear the same clothes or go on the same trips so I couldn’t talk about some things without sounding like a silly poseur. Maybe that is when I started to become more cynical and grew a bit harder or maybe it happened after I had my heart broken a few times. Not really sure and I don’t know that it matters.
What matters to me is simple- family and friends.
What matters to me is doing things that feed my heart and fuel my soul. That is where my focus is and what I spend energy on.
I Know Who I Am
I know who I am. I know that there is a fire that burns inside my belly at a temperature that thermometers can’t measure. I know that I used to think of myself as being the easiest going person around and that one day I realized I am not quite who I thought.
I am intense. I come on like a freight train. When I play contact sports some people complain because I hit…hard. It is not because I am trying to prove how masculine or tough I am. It is because I have a body built for demolition and not for grace.
When I am going three quarters to full speed it takes a bit of doing to turn and or stop. Sometimes that means that I bump into people. When you outweigh someone by 80 pounds they tend to get the worst of it.
It sucks to get hit by the bigger truck. I know because it has happened to me a lot. When I play ball I usually get stuck guarding the bigger guys on the other side. All we can do is try our best not to hurt and get hurt.
But you can’t play the game without taking a chance. You can’t carry the ball up the middle and expect not to be hit. You can’t live life locked inside a box and expect to get all that you desire.
Take a Chance
I am excited and a bit nervous. I keep hinting at some of the potential changes going on around here. I keep dancing around the topic because until some things are certain I don’t want to speak more about them. Call it superstition.
I call it opportunity. I call it a chance to start a new chapter in my life and an opportunity to begin writing a new story. I call it crazy making because it is so close I can almost touch it and so far away that I can’t quite reach it.
Forgive me for the continued sports analogies, but it reminds me a bit of my last basketball game. I missed the shot I took and grabbed the rebound and missed it again…three more times.
Let me sum it up for you. In less than a minute I missed a shot from corner three point line, got the ball back and missed three under the basket. Got fouled three times and didn’t manage to put it in.
That irks me- but I didn’t quit. I just passed the damn ball and my team scored.
The lesson there is that when the door is locked you don’t have to break your hand or foot trying to break it down. There are alternatives.
Don’t Write For Traffic
I don’t blog for traffic or for accolades. I write because I have to. I write because I want to become a better writer. I blog because it offers a way to improve my writing and because there are business opportunities tied into it.
But mostly I do it because it brings me joy and when I am on my game it makes more than my soul sing. It brings me peace of mind and that is priceless.
Useful Information Used Usefully
- Welcome To The Jungle– Guns N’ Roses
- Shoot To Thrill– AC/DC
- Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door– Bob Dylan
- Since I Have Been Loving You– Led Zeppelin
- With Or Without You– U2
Some things make me so angry I want to kick the dog and drown the cat. I want to drive down the sidewalk and run over all of the pedestrians and then for good measure do something far more heinous than all of those put together.
I would share that in more detail but the guys in legal are having a fit now and I am required to tell you that I don’t really want to do any of those things. I have taken literary license and created a fake facade that is designed for the sole purpose of capturing the attention of my readers.
Hmm…I wonder if the guys in legal have a problem with me saying I want to give them all a colonoscopy without the benefit of anesthesia. Of course the guys in legal aren’t all male and at least two of the women gave birth naturally so they aren’t afraid of the aforementioned colonoscopy. Well, I am not impressed by them because everyone knows that our great grandmothers would give birth and then be back in the fields an hour later.
They make those women in legal look so damn lazy.
Useful Information Used Usefully
Today I was overwhelmed by the noise in the blogosphere. I must have read 2,983,839 posts about the same topics:
- How to blog
- Why To blog
- How To Deal With Writer’s Block
- How to make every post useful
- 872 Things You Must Need To Know
Dammit, none of them were smart enough to use a headline like How To Have Better Sex Through Blogging. It is not all that hard to write, hell let’s give it a quick try.
Blogging is a fantastic way to help you and your partner supercharge your sex life. The best and most obvious way is to use your blog as a tool to improve communication between you and your husband/wife/partner/lover.
Better communication leads to increased feelings of comfort and a deeper sense of love and affection. Not to mention it is sometimes easier to tell your honey that they aren’t quite hitting the spot during daylight hours as opposed to during intimacy.
Two minutes is all it took me to write that. I wouldn’t call it stellar but it is better than many. Of course I once wrote a post called The Secret To Better Sex. It was quite successful.
It didn’t generate oodles of comments but it receives regular traffic and the readers tend to click through the links there, none of which deal with tips about how to have sex. There are links to posts about writing and posts about relationships, but nothing that tells you how to touch…
That post also has links to two other posts that are important and useful. One is a post that contains a list of vocabulary words. I love that one because I love words. Here is a short selection:
- Raconteur-One who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit.
- Callipygian–adj.Having beautifully proportioned buttocks.
- Lachrymose–adj.Weeping or inclined to weep; tearful. Causing or tending to cause tears.
- Perspicacious–adj. Having or showing penetrating mental discernment; clear-sighted.
- Flibbertigibbet–n. A silly, scatterbrained, or garrulous person.
The second one talks about the death of my grandfather last year and contains stories about my grandparents in general. Been thinking about them quite a bit lately and wondering what they might say about some of the things that are going on.
One day I hope to build the sort of relationship with my grandchildren that I had with my grandparents. When I think about the things I am doing now and the plans I am making I see their fingerprints and feel their presence.
These plans are mine and none of them could have predicted any of this but that is ok. Where I see the connections are the work I am doing to take care of my family. They would understand and appreciate it.
Still it would have been fun to watch their faces while I tried to explain whether there is a difference between a dad blogger and a regular blogger.
Ask For What You Want & What You Need
Sometimes life provides you with the opportunity to get more than what you need and you can ask for what you want. If you want to be happy you need to figure out what you need. When you understand this and have identified what brings you joy you can develop a plan to obtain these things.
One of the useful pieces of information that blogging provided for me were the answers to many of these questions.
This is part of Just Write #40.
I Have My Spoon
Some things are harder to get used to than others. There are family dinners where old familiar faces no longer appear. Their absence is palpable and the silence is deafening.
But there is no way around that. There are no pills, spells or machines that enable us to cheat death. Sooner or later we all walk across the field and disappear into whatever lies on the other side of those cornfields.
It is not a bad thing. It is a natural thing, but that doesn’t always take the sting away of knowing that you can’t ask one more question, hear that story one more time or play fetch again with that furry friend.
Father’s Day 2012 made me think of all that and more. It was a very good day but it was also the first Father’s Day without any of my grandfathers to celebrate with. I went from being the third generation of fathers, the kid, to second generation. I don’t know if you call that a promotion or not. I didn’t get a new title, a bigger office or even an increase in salary.
Nor did I get to ask my grandfathers the traditional question of why they didn’t make my father rich so that I could be rich. They would laugh and blame their fathers for that.
I would laugh and say that I suspected this blame game went up the ladder quite a bit. Always good to know that I was a link in a chain of men who refused to be accountable.
They would laugh too and we would talk about life as men do. That last sentence is more significant than you might realize. We would talk about life as men do- I was the son and the grandson, but I was also a father. I had gained entrance to the club.
A Walk Down Wacker
I remember leaving my hotel to walk around the city. I walked down Wacker looked at buildings I hadn’t seen before and some that I had. I wandered in between the people and wondered what life had been like there in the twenties and thirties.
Lost in thought I eventually made my way to Michigan and and pulled out my cellphone to call my grandparents. Chicago was where they had all grown up and the place where my half my family still lived.
But I for various reasons I hadn’t been there more than a few times and almost always on a short trip where I had no time to see things or visit.
It was a surreal experience. Los Angeles was home but I have always felt like I have roots in Chicago. I know a million stories about people and places in the city and it is fair to say that I have wondered on more than one occasion if I might end up living there one day. Couldn’t tell you if it would be for a moment or a minute…
Chicago was a legend to my sisters and I. It was city covered in magic fairy dust and somewhere very far away and yet close enough to touch.
Father’s Day 2012- Los Angeles
Last year the children brought me breakfast in bed, but they decided that this year they had to do something more memorable. So instead of bringing me a hot cup of coffee and some eggs they brought me a hot argument…between the two of them.
And let me tell you that you haven’t lived until you have woken up because your children are standing at the side of your bed screaming at each other about something silly. Good times.
Of course I am not a new father so I opened my eyes just wide enough for lightning bolts to shoot out of them and the room grew silent. I won’t lie and say that I can pull that off every time, but damn I love when I can stop them in their tracks with just a look.
They recovered quickly and we had a very fine day which included more laughter than screaming and a lot of love. One of the highlights ( and there many) came from a card that my daughter made for me.
She told me that I am the greatest dad ever and drew a very cool picture inside of me and her. Next to my mouth she drew a little bubble in which I said, “Let’s go for ice cream.”
The dialogue continued in a bubble she drew by her mouth which said, “I have my spoon!”
It really is too bad that my grandfathers weren’t there for that because this would have made them roar with laughter and beam with pride.
Not to mention they would have loved the long discussion my dad and I had with my son about Rodney King and our experiences in the LA Riots. During our discussion I remembered that during the riots they burned down an ice cream shop I used to visit occasionally.
Later on I thought about the shop and the card my daughter made for me and wondered if twenty some years ago some kid said, “dad I have my spoon” and was told that they couldn’t go because the ice cream store had melted to the ground.
It has been almost ten years since I was in Chicago. Think it is time for me to grab my spoon and go back.
The Silly Versus The Sublime
Thirty-five years ago there was no doubt in my mind that I could be Evel Knievel and play centerfield for The Los Angeles Dodgers.
It is one of the blessings bestowed upon you by childhood- knowledge that anything is possible. With a little imagination you could see yourself doing things that should have been impossible but weren’t because you just know that you could.
That knowledge and certainty is a big part of what got me into trouble a million different times but it is also what kept me from getting seriously injured. Every time my friends and I tried some kind of stunt we did so with the knowledge that if we weren’t scared nothing bad could happen to us.
Nik Wallenda brought a lot of that back to me. I watched him stroll across a rope stretched over Niagara Falls and remembered discussions with the guys about whether we would be willing to ride a barrel over the falls.
I remember thinking that if I packed a couple of pillows properly it wouldn’t hurt when the barrel hit the water. Fear was something that I didn’t associate with waterfalls. I wasn’t a big fan of the dark and that bigfoot robot character on The Six Million Dollar Man scared me, but not the falls.
The falls would be easy. Evel Knievel crashed a million times and he never stopped getting back on the bike so I figured it couldn’t be that hard. Fall down and get back up. Keep walking and keep climbing.
Thirty-five years ago it never occurred to me that I would have mysterious aches and pains or that my body wouldn’t respond immediately to any and all requests. I never thought that one day I would look at pictures of myself in horror or look at the mirror and be irritated with what I saw. Vanity, thy name is Jack.
But I will add that I hold myself accountable for the current situation. I am not in the shape I want to be in because I like to eat more than I like to stop. I still exercise. I still move. I am in far better shape than many and worse than others.
It is up to me to fix the few issues and accept the things that I can’t change. Some of these mystery aches are from those days long ago and the ones that follow. You can’t put your body through all the pounding that I did and still do without receiving some sort of angry response.
Father’s Day
Three of the people I care most about are going to celebrate their first Father’s Day without their fathers. I am sorry for their losses and well aware of how lucky I am to still have my dad. I am also quite conscious of my responsibility to my own children.
When they ask me why I insist on trying to exercise and play ball as often as I do I tell them that it is because I love them and me. I don’t want to be the guy who is old before his time. God willing I am going to die with of my faculties and without having lost the ability to take care of myself.
Of course that is one more reason why I need to stop burning the midnight oil every night. Four hours of sleep just isn’t enough anymore and given the coming changes it is time to start learning how to get to bed by midnight or earlier again.
Do Daddy Bloggers Get Paid?
My daughter wants to know if daddy bloggers get paid and says that if we do then the mommy bloggers should get paid too. When she tells me this I choke back a giggle. This is serious stuff to her and I can see she will be upset if she thinks I am not responding in kind.
I don’t know where she got this idea or what made her think about it but it is funny to me. I am guessing she heard one of a series of conversations I have had recently about how bloggers can generate income.
She tells me that a girl could walk across Niagara Falls just as easily as a boy could. I tell her she is right and she asks me if I will listen to her sing the new love song she wrote.
This love song business is new. She says that she isn’t writing them for boys and explains that she just likes writing. I nod my head. I understand the joy that writing brings.
And then she tells me that when she grows up she is going to be a singer, a mommy, a teacher and maybe a professional athlete. I ask her how she knows and she rolls her eyes.
“Dad, I can do anything I want to do.”
I smile and tell her she is absolutely right, except for one thing. She asks me what and I tell her that she can’t put out a campfire by peeing on it. Her eyes get wide and I can see her formulating an appropriate response, “boys are just ridiculous.”
“Yes, we are honey. But sometimes we have to mix in some fun with the serious.”
And now I have to say Happy Father’s Day. This father needs to go to sleep so that he can dream about jumping over 30 trucks or flying over the Snake River.
This is part of Yeah Write #62.
