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 2012

What Father’s Do

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There is a man talking far too loudly on his cellphone and none of us are interested in listening to his conversation. He is ignoring the three kids at the table and his wife. guffawing loudly about jokes we can’t hear and gesturing for effect.

My family looks at me and my daughter asks why he is so rude. I make eye contact with the woman but she ignores me, doesn’t pretend to be uncomfortable. It is more important to her to let her boorish pal brag.

The waiter refuses to say anything, he is afraid because the man looks to be like some kind of hothead. I raise my voice and say “I am not interested in your conversation,” but it is a half hearted effort. My voice carries effortlessly but the question of whether this is the kind  of effort I want to apply it to weighs upon me.

I check him out and see I am bigger than he is. Am clearly taller and outweigh him, probably have plenty of muscle to rip the phone of out of his hands and force it down his throat. Let’s see how he feels when someone doesn’t care what he thinks, but I don’t.

My son wants to know if I am going to say something  because he heard grandpa make a comment about how obnoxious this guy is. I shake my head and say he is not worth it.

But the truth is that I won’t because my family is there and I think this man will want to make a big deal, it will escalate and I don’t want my kids to see that. I have no fear of this man and I know it, but my job as dad is to protect my family.

I won’t let them see the ugliness that I am sure will come. They don’t need to be exposed and there is a teaching moment here about picking and choosing battles.

He sees me glaring and glares back at me, still talking.

I stand up but don’t move other than to adjust my shorts. It is part of the silly game men play, I want him to get a good look at me and understand if necessary I will place him in the trunk of his car.

The manager is nowhere to be seen. I sit down and think this will make at least 5 different blog posts. It makes me smile, Jack isn’t just a dad, he is a writer who doesn’t know why he is talking about himself in the third person.

A photo of the jerk is taken and uploaded to Twitter. They leave and their absence is palpable, it is quiet. The meal is finished and my kids are smiling.

Mission accomplished.

A Man Crashes The Party

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A man crashes the party is a good description of how I feel some days. I am a father who has a remote office and that means it is not unusual for me to take the kids to school and to pick them up.

I show up at school events during the day and sometimes I am the only dad. It doesn’t happen real often, but I am often out numbered by the moms.

Sometimes they are friendly and warm, but there are moments where I am the outsider. I am the stranger. I wasn’t pregnant. I don’t have pregnancy tales to tell.

Mine are different. Mine are about fears of being stuck on the freeway when my wife went into labor or other tales that fathers tell and that is ok.

Today I went to a Halloween carnival at my daughter’s school and smiled as I watched her run towards me. There were lots of fathers there, but not nearly as many moms. We try hard to be involved and to be different from our dads, that is not to say they were bad.

Our dads had different times to deal with and now is our time.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if my dad could have been to more of my stuff. He was always around and he hit the bigger things, but I never saw him in the classroom like I get to go.

One day I may be at a different job and not able to do this anymore. I’ll miss it.

This is was part of 5 Minutes Friday. Details found here.

Quality Of Life

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She said that vegetarians live almost six years longer than non-vegetarians and recited more statistics about the health benefits of a “plant lifestyle” and I just smiled.

That is because you aren’t going to sell me on changing my habits without discussing quality of life. If I were her sales manager I would have politely found a way to adjust the conversation to reflect that and have made a point to ask some probing questions to gather more information about what I consider to be tied into “quality of life.”

Except it wasn’t a traditional sales call, it was just a friend and I talking about life. Quality of life is important to everyone but I have been focused on it for a “good long while.”

There are a million different reasons why that is so, but I’ll attribute most of it to conversations with doctors about my grandparents and discussions with other parents about whether we want/need DNRs.

Things Can and Do Happen

I think about life and how fast it can change. That is because I have seen it happen and know people who were put in positions they never expected to be in.

If life goes as expected and there are no major changes I expect to live to be 130, or at least 108. That is not tongue-in-cheek.

Three of my grandparents lived into their nineties as did three of my great-grandparents and I had other relatives make it past the century mark, so I expect I will too.

But the thing is I am not willing to just live without any consideration for what could happen. My goal is to live today and to enjoy the best quality of life I can.

It is not always easy. There are challenges that come at us each day and moments where you feel like you are just grinding it out, living moment to moment.

The Cabinet

The cabinet in the picture belonged to my grandmother. She had it for more than 40 years and when she died we decided it would be a good edition to our home.

It lived inside our house for a brief while and then when we redid the kitchen and bathroom it moved to the garage. It never did make it back inside the house as it became enamored of its place inside the garage and chose to live outside.

Now I don’t know where it is or who it lives with anymore. When we sold the house last year we chose to sell it at a garage sale.

It was harder than I expected to let it go. It wasn’t my taste but it held sentimental value. And now when I look at the picture I shake my head.

That house was home for ten years. It was for a good long while the only home my daughter knew and the only one my son remembered.

But quality of life demanded that we sell the house. Even though it was a great home it would have taken far too much cash to fix it so that it would work for us long term and the schools simply weren’t good enough.

I won’t tell you how disgusted I am by the poor state of public education nor will I express my displeasure with the inordinate amount of cash I put out for healthcare that isn’t as good as it should be.

My Responsibilities To Myself And My Family

So here I am at the computer thinking about how to make more changes to improve my quality of life. I have a responsibility to my family and myself to do this.

It makes me think of Drunk Blogging For Amateurs and Timing & Time Management.

That is because the blog speaks to me and some posts jump out at me, begging for attention. Our Season of Mistrust, The Almost Warrior and I Once Had a Girl are intermixed with When your Favorite Blog Suddenly Goes Bad.

Words on the screen are blurred against the words in my head and I see nothing but layers.

Quality of life calls to me. I can’t wait for life to improve or to get better. I have to push harder to make it happen now.

And that is part of why you see me supporting so many different blogs and writing so many different kinds of posts.

It is about stepping up my game so that I can secure better writing gigs and earn more moolah for the work I do. More moolah equals less stress and more time with my family.

And that is part of what leads to an improved quality of life.

I won’t settle and neither should you.

4 Minutes of Pleasure or Pain- You Make The Call

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listen to ‘4 Minutes of Pleasure or Pain- You Make The Call’ on Audioboo

But wait, there is more. If you can’t get enough Jack, and we know you can’t you need to check out these posts:

Bloggers Are Insecure

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My Thoughts Are Over The Hills and Far away.
My Thoughts Are Over The Hills and Far away.

Most of you aren’t aware that I maintain about five different blogs, truth is there might be one or two more that I am not thinking about.

There are only a few that I talk about here. Random Thoughts and Words Left Unwritten get some play and occasionally I’ll point out the second Random Thoughts too.

The first Random Thoughts is where this all began. It is special to me because it is my first cyber home and I haven’t let go of it because it has sentimental value and because sometimes I go back there because it offers a place to do different sorts of writing than here.

Words Left Unwritten is where I focus on my fiction and I love that place too because it is where I have worked on turning possibility into opportunity. Many of the stories I write there have received quite a bit of attention and it is where I work on pushing myself to reach that next rung on the ladder.

The second Random Thoughts was my second serious attempt to move from Blogger to WordPress. It wasn’t self hosted, but it was where I began to figure out how WP works and where I mulled over whether it made sense to make the move.

“I believe we have two lives: the one we learn with, and the one we live with after that.” Iris Gaines From The Natural

The headline should be changed to sometimes Bloggers Are Insecure because that is more accurate. It reflects the truth or maybe it reflects my truth.

Sometimes when I don’t receive many shares or comments I suffer from Blog Envy and Tweet Esteem issues. Most of the time I don’t care because I love what I am doing too much not to do it.

This place you are visiting, it is my refuge and my salvation. There is so much joy in the journey I can’t properly express what it means to me.

I can tell you about how I became a writer, stopped and then started again. I can tell you about how blogging has helped put me back on track to what I am supposed to do with my life.

I am a writer.

This is what I am supposed to do. These words you read are magic and are taking me too places I only imagined.

Thirty years ago I wanted nothing more than to be an outfielder for the Dodgers. I was good. I led the league in home runs. No one had a better arm than I did. I threw out a boy at home plate.

I still remember scooping up the ball in center field and firing it home. It was perfect. He slid right into the tag.

Eighteen years ago I stood under a moonlit sky in the middle of Jerusalem and made my decision to leave the states and move. I walked with a group of twenty somethings like myself and talked about what life would be.

I flirted with girls from South Africa, England and Scotland. Israeli girls teased me about my accent and I laughed.

My dreams of playing centerfield were long since gone and I had other thoughts on my mind. I knew that I was on the verge of something big, something amazing and I wanted it.

Life happened and I went a different direction. Sometimes I have wondered whether the choices I made were right, smart and or proper.

I have wondered if I could do anything would I step back in time and try the road not taken. Most of the time I don’t think about that anymore. I don’t ask if things happen for a reason because it doesn’t really matter.

Life Is Challenging, But Good

It doesn’t matter because what is done is done and I have that fierce grizzly bear love that parents have for children. My children are simply awesome and I am grateful to have them in my life.

There is no doubt that life has presented its share of challenges and that there have been many moments where I have wondered what would happen next.

Frustration and uncertainty have reared their heads and I have asked if I am the source of challenges, but this is where blogging steps back in.

Blogging has provided a simple venue in which I have been able to ask and answer these questions. It is where I have wandered down aisles and pathways that have made it clear to me that this is special.

I don’t have all of the answers I have been looking for, but I have found more than a few. I feel a bit like Indiana Jones and though I am sitting at a keyboard it doesn’t mean I don’t wear the hell out of a fedora or am any less capable of using this bull whip.

Can’t tell you what chapter I am on, but I know there is a lot left in this story and I hope you continue to share it with me.