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 July 2013

Sometimes You Have To Forgive Yourself

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leftovers

Sometimes I forget when and where I met Mike. I don’t know if it really matters because Mike is the best and truest friend I got. He is the only one who never leaves me and the only one who listens to all I got to say.

And believe me, I got a lot.

There used to be others. There used to be them that got my best interest in mind and those that claimed they did. I don’t remember all of their names because when you live the hard scrabble life you start to unlearn that which you once knew.

You can’t carry all them hopes and dreams you once had because they aren’t real. The streets are real, oh yeah, they are real. If you ain’t real you don’t make it for very long on the streets.

That is part of why I like Mike and why I need him. He keeps me focused. He doesn’t let me feel bad about what happened because it wasn’t my fault.

We were walking down Michigan Avenue. It was bright and sunny. She was holding my hand and she never let go. Even after that car jumped the curb and pinned her against the building she never stopped holding my hand.

I tried to pull it off of her. Tried to push it. Did everything that I could do but it didn’t matter, cuz she died anyway.

I couldn’t save her. Couldn’t hold her and make her feel better or stop the pain. Don’t know why it hit her and not me. I was so much bigger. Why didn’t it hit me. Why did they have to take her. Why not me. She was better than I was and so much better than I am now.

She told me to stop screaming. Said that I should calm down, even as the life was running out of her and heading somewhere else she was taking care of me.

I should have protected her better. I should have seen it coming. I should have heard it. Could have done something more, I know I could have.

*****

Mike tells me that I should finish letting go and just forget. He says that there ain’t no point in thinking about her or remembering cuz it only hurts us.

Mike says that it is good that I hit the driver cuz he was drunk and it is his fault that we are what we are today. He says that I should be proud that it took so many people to pull me off of that guy. He says that it is good that I crippled that guy because I am crippled now.

But sometimes I don’t like it when he says it because she wouldn’t have wanted it. She would have told me it was an accident and that I should let go. But that is the thing, I did let go. That accident forced me to let go.

I ain’t who I was and haven’t been for years. Now I am just a shadow who walks the streets. Mostly I keep to myself, but sometimes people mess with me. usually I growl at them and they run away but sometimes the stupid and mean ones do more.

That is ok with me. I like stupid and mean because when I am angry I fight. And when I fight I forget about being so damn lonely.

They say that a fighter who learns to like the pain is one fight away from death or worse. I don’t fear either because I am already dead and I know what hell looks like.

Mike says that this is why I should fight because when you just don’t give a damn is when you are the deadliest. I tell Mike that it don’t matter much because we ain’t fighting for money. He laughs at me and says that it don’t matter whether we fight for money or for pride because all we has to do is win.

He says that man was born for this and that we are one step away from being animals so we might as well be who nature intended us to be.

*****

Sometimes she visits me in my dreams. She ain’t broken then and neither am I. We’re at Charlie Trotters and I can’t be happier because the prettiest girl in the world is mine. I don’t know why she picked me but I know that when she smiles at me I can be anything she wants me to be.

In my dreams she holds my hand and tells me that I got to stop fighting. She tells me that she forgives me and that I should forgive myself. Sometimes I wake up crying, but I make sure to stop that right quick because out here that is the kind of thing you can’t do.

Beside Mike won’t tolerate that. I already told you that he says that I should have done more to punish that guy. He thinks that we need to find him and finish what he started. I told Mike that don’t make no sense to me because he didn’t start nothing, but Mike just tells me to shut up.

He says that if he hadn’t started it we wouldn’t be sleeping in this alley. I says to Mike that without that I wouldn’t have met my best and truest friend, but Mike tells me to shut up. He says that I can’t forget and I can’t forgive.

*****

But she doesn’t believe that. When we dreamwalk she tells me that she still loves me and asks me to promise to take better care of myself. She says that if I stop drinking I’ll be able to think more clearly and that things will make more sense.

I always do my best to do whatever she asks because she is my girl and she deserves better than I can give. Most of the time I manage to clean up for a while. I go back to my place, shower and put on clean clothes.

It is hard though. We got a big settlement on account of that accident so I don’t have to work. She tells me that I need to say goodbye to Mike, that he is bad news.

One time I told Mike what she said and he cursed her and told me to tell the dead bitch to fuck off.  I don’t think he expected me to get as angry as I did. No one is allowed to talk that way about her. I refused to talk to him for a week, probably would have gone longer but she didn’t dreamwalk with me and I started to get a little bit rougher around the edges.

I started to think that maybe she didn’t forgive me for not saving her. I started to think that maybe she finally realized that it was my fault for not pushing her out of the way of that car. I begged her to come back, swore that if she would forgive me I would do anything.

But she didn’t come.

So I finally gave in and told Mike I was sorry. And like every best and truest friend he forgave me. That is why I love Mike because he never left me and everyone else I loved did.

*****

Sometimes she tells me that other people still love me and that if I let them, they would come back. She says it wasn’t my fault and it is ok to forgive myself for not doing something that no one could have done, but I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

She tells me that she remembers when I used to smile and have conversations with people. She says I was charming and that I had a way of making people feel comfortable but I tell her that she is confused because it was always her who did that.

It makes her angry when I say it and she tells me she has had it with my bad attitude and insists that I think about a party we had at out place.

I see her talking to the caterer, but when she hears me approach she turns to face me.

She is wearing a long black gown and I am wearing tails. She says it is a bit over the top and I laugh and tell her that if I am forced to dress up than I am going to do it my way.

Her lips cover mine and her hand caresses my cheek.

I hear a man’s voice thank the caterer. It must be mine, but it sounds wrong. It is deep and resonant with a different tone and cadence than now, but why should I be surprised.

That man died with her.

She is yelling at me again, telling me I don’t have to live this life, screaming at me that I am supposed to look at that guy and remember what it was like to be happy.

Her words are starting to have an impact and I am starting to think that maybe she is right. But just as I am about to ask her a question I wake up and remember she is not here, but Mike is.

*****

Mike is pissed off with me. He says I don’t listen good and that she don’t love me. He says she just wants me to be dead like her and that I got to let that dead bitch lie in her dirt box.

I want to tell him that he can’t talk about her that way. I want to say he didn’t know  her and it ain’t fair to be like that, but I don’t.

Mike is my best friend and the only one who didn’t leave me.  He is the one who looks out for me now and makes sure that no one takes advantage of us. I got to be stand up with him and not let her get in the way.

But that don’t mean I have to stop loving her or say goodbye. I just can’t tell him.

What Is A Person Worth Part II

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Old Barn

Sometimes I like going to see or look at pictures of old barns. There is something about them that I find intriguing and interesting.

Maybe it is because every one of them makes my imagination start working overtime, maybe it is because I look at them and wonder who lives there and what their story is.

Maybe it is because I associate them with people who work with their hands and those are often people whose worth is misunderstood by those who don’t use their hands in the same fashion.

Social Media and People

Spent a few minutes today thinking about social media and what happens within it. Social media is about people but we have this habit of not treating them as well as we should. Instead of looking at people as people we talk about followers, fans and subscribers.

Instead of engaging with them we are collecting them like trophies.
What Is A Person Worth

It is well past 1 AM here in Texas and I am chastising myself for committing one of the biggest mistakes a writer can make, sleep deprivation.

Morning will come far too soon and I will nuke myself into a wakeful state with a barrel full of coffee and 198 pounds of eggs. Got a couple of days before Traveling Jack takes to the skies to head back to LA.

And here in the quiet of the night when the silence brings more clarity I wonder again about the direction of the blog and what I want out of social media.

I am not engaging and interacting the way I once was and I wonder if I really care. Does it bother me that I spent so much time trying to build things here and that now I am not giving it the same emphasis as I once did.

Have I stopped looking at followers and readers as people. Am I just looking at them as numbers and relying upon a ton of posts and links to consistently bring traffic to the blog.

Or is this just one of those momentary blips, a hiccup if you will.

Musical Intermission

Here are seven songs that have accompanied me this evening.

  1. The Man Who Couldn’t Cry- Johnny Cash
  2. God’s Gonna Cut You Down- Johnny Cash
  3. (Ghost) Riders In The Sky- Johnny Cash
  4. It Ain’t Me, Babe- Johnny Cash with June Carter Cash
  5. Going to California- London Philharmonic Orchestra & Peter Scholes
  6. Hero Of The Day-Metallica
  7. Adagio for Strings-New Zealand Symphony Orchestra & Andrew Schenck

Sort of an eclectic mix, but it fits my mood and the moment and that is good enough for me. Haven’t seen my kids since Memorial Day on anything but Skype and I am ready to burst with excitement.

Sometimes the kids and I talk about those old barn pictures I mentioned above and we share our thoughts about who lives there and what their lives are like.

And I talk to the kids about why their education is so very important and tell them I want them to focus hard on it so that they don’t have to work with their hands for a living, unless they want to.

Those last four words stick with me a lot, unless they want to.

Sometimes I wonder if my role as a father includes pushing them to try and find careers based upon want or what will provide them with financial security.

Most of the time I come back to the same place where I push them to focus on their education so that they can gain more choices and opportunity because sometimes you have to work for a while before you figure out what you really want.

What Is a Person Worth

Almost 2 am, I have stopped writing twice to stare out  at the sky and to clear my head. My mind is racing about a million different things.

Received notifications about some new subscribers and notifications about unsubscribers too.

Don’t know why they left but they did. Maybe they didn’t feel valued or maybe they grew bored. Maybe they just didn’t see value in the content anymore, I don’t know.

Thought about trying to include some of my favorite posts here but I am finally tired so I have to wrap this up. What I am certain of is that the posts I like best are those that include some passion and personality. I like the ones where we share pieces of our lives because it helps build connections and keeps us from collecting people like trophies.

People power social media.

Sometimes Music is Life Changing

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Shot by Sharon Mollerus Pure Moonlight
Shot by Sharon Mollerus
Pure Moonlight

One of the biggest surprises of my life was growing up and discovering that life was very different than I expected it to be. I didn’t become a professional athlete or find a job that I loved.

Fact is that out of college I went through a bunch of jobs before I started to figure out what it was that I wanted to do with my life. Hell, it probably took until I was around forty or so before I really started to get it figured out and even then it wasn’t completely clear to me how or what I needed to be doing.

A Click

One night a few years ago I was listening to a conversation Bruce Springsteen had with the audience right before he started singing The River and something clicked for me.

It wasn’t the first time I had heard that cut or listened to the album.  It easily could have been the hundredth time I heard it, but it was the first time I recognized that I thought of the “speech” he gave as a conversation and it made me think.

Because the reality was that a conversation usually involves more than one party speaking and that didn’t happen there, it was just one person.

But that is not how I responded nor is it how lots of people responded. It is one of those gifts certain people and performers have. They can stand in front of a room and hold the entire place captive.

Possibility

And that night I started thinking about how I hadn’t really thought of myself as the kind of writer who could make money from telling stories. I hadn’t thought seriously about how maybe I could do that too.

I thought about my favorite books and about how sometimes it felt like I knew the characters or wanted to know them.

And I wondered how Bruce did it and if there was anything that I could take/learn from him. But mostly I thought about working on my writing skills so that one day I could hold a room captive the same way he did.

Not because my ego needs to be stroked in that manner but because I figured if I could do that I could profoundly change my life in a way that I think would be quite fulfilling.

Sometimes Music Is Life Changing

I want to tell you about how I did it and how that night led to the publication of my best selling novel and that I made so much money from it I was able to do everything I dreamed of, but I can’t…yet.

The only thing stopping me from saying it is doing it and that is my challenge to over come.

But the point isn’t whether I have or haven’t done it. The point is the opportunity is there and it is up to me to go for it.

You never know what kinds of surprises, challenges and gifts life will throw at you, but you do have some say in how you respond.

You’ll find a copy of the conversation I referred to and a link to a video just below this sentence.

Hiya doin’ out there tonight? That’s good, that’s good.

This is ah… When I was growing up, me and my dad used to go at it all the time over almost anything. But, ah, I used to have really long hair, way down past my shoulders. I was 17 or 18, oh man, he used to hate it.

And we got to where we’d fight so much that I’d, that I’d spent a lot of time out of the house; and in the summertime it wasn’t so bad, ‘cause it was warm, and my friends were out, but in the winter, I remember standing downtown where it’d get so cold and, when the wind would blow, I had this phone booth I used to stand in.

And I used to call my girl, like, for hours at a time, just talking to her all night long. And finally I’d get my nerve up to go home. I’d stand there in the driveway and he’d be waiting for me in the kitchen and I’d tuck my hair down on my collar and I’d walk in and he’d call me back to sit down with him. And the first thing he’d always ask me was what did I think I was doing with myself. And the worst part of it was that I could never explain to him.

I remember I got in a motorcycle accident once and I was laid up in bed and he had a barber come in and cut my hair and, man, I can remember telling him that I hated him and that I would never ever forget it.

And he used to tell me: “Man, I can’t wait till the army gets you. When the army gets you they’re gonna make a man out of you. They’re gonna cut all that hair off and they’ll make a man out of you.”

And this was, I guess, ’68 when there was a lot of guys from the neighborhood going to Vietnam.

I remember the drummer in my first band coming over to my house with his marine uniform on, saying that he was going and that he didn’t know where it was.

And a lot of guys went, and a lot of guys didn’t come back. And a lot that came back weren’t the same anymore.

I remember the day I got my draft notice. I hid it from my folks and three days before my physical me and my friends went out and we stayed up all night and we got on the bus to go that morning and man we were all so scared…

And I went, and I failed. I came home [audience cheers], it’s nothing to applaud about…

I remember coming home after I’d been gone for three days and walking in the kitchen and my mother and father were sitting there and my dad said: “Where you been?” and I said, uh, “I went to take my physical.” He said “What happened?” I said “They didn’t take me.”

And he said: “That’s good.”
A transcription of Bruce Springsteen’s conversation with the audience on the live version of The River on the Live 1975-1985 box set.  My thanks to Cathal Garvey for his unknowing help with this.

Drowning In Email

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Machane Yehuda

I should be reviewing the 1,983 emails that sit in my inboxes. I should be clearing and cleaning those suckers out, instead I am drowning in email and losing myself in memory.

******

Sometimes my son starts dancing to A Beautiful Day by U2 and I wonder what he is thinking and what sort of feelings that song sets off in his head.

That is because it is one of those albums that he heard a lot In Utero and I wonder what sort of affect it had. Did it do more than any of the classical music he heard then too?

I love listening to The Planets by Holst, especially Mars, The Bringer of War. Hell, I love music in general and it is always playing so who knows if any of that had any sort of impact then.

What I know is that it does now and sometimes focusing on the present is the smartest thing we can do. That is not to say that we shouldn’t pay attention to the future but you have to balance it all or you can get lost.

Writing to Blog Or Blogging To Write

Some day soon I’ll have to write/blog about that. I blog because I love to write more than I write because I need to blog. Don’t know if that makes any sense to anyone or if it matters if it does.

I know that I care about the blog and that when I experience technical difficulties it makes me a bit crazy. The folks at Livefyre tell me they are working on some issues that are causing some hiccups here.

Part of me was ready to deactivate it again and part of me said let’s see how long it takes to fix it. There are two issues that I am aware:

  1. Old comments need to be imported.
  2. Some older posts won’t allow anyone to comment.

It is frustrating, but I am not going to allow the instant gratification society that we live in make me hop before it is absolutely necessary. I turned it on to see if it will help spur more comments and build community. Let’s give it time and see if that happens.

Time is important in blogging and social media. This isn’t a sprint, it  is a marathon.

What Is Your Favorite Post?

Someone recently asked me again if I could tell them what my favorite post is and I am not sure what to say. It is like asking How Do I Choose A Favorite Child?

When I read that post again I listened to the Moshav Band sing Come Back and I couldn’t help but think again about walking those streets in Jerusalem and buses to Rehovot to see family.

Remembered a million other minutes and moments, some of which are recorded here and some which will never be shared anywhere except in my memory.

And now I am back semi-focused on the present and thinking about blogging and why I don’t like to limit myself to a particular niche. I am thinking about how I don’t want to spend all my time focusing on how to provide solutions to every problem people have.

Sometimes I want to write something like Stupid Blog Tricks- The Difference Between The Best & Most Popular for no other reason than just because.

The Joy Of Writing/Drowning In Email

Ultimately I come back to the same places, I write for the joy of writing. Sometimes I look at the places I have guest blogged and am sad to discover they have closed up shop.

I suppose it might be a bit obnoxious to say I miss the back links and the help at promoting here, but I do. That is because the ultimate goal would be to earn enough cash to do this for a living.

Is it likely or probable?

Probably not at the level I would want it to be, but it is not impossible and that is enough for me.

Sometimes I write  because I read posts like The Radical Honesty of a Life I Don’t Love and I smile because so much progress has been made. Or I read Preserve Your Memories and smile for other reasons.

But mostly I just smile because even though I am drowning in email these words sometimes work as one cool life preserver.

Blogs and Bloggers Evolve

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listen to ‘Blogs and Bloggers Evolve ’ on Audioboo

and by popular request here is a widget with links to more audio blogs, I think it probably deserves its own page.

Three Stories You Might Not Know

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“Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby”

Sometimes music really speaks to me and right now this is the song that I am singing.  I have a dream that is being translated into reality and there have been some hiccups and hurdles that have made it more challenging.

Last week I was blindsided and tripped up, it didn’t feel real. I wondered if I really was awake.

“Golden slumbers fill your eyes
Smiles awake you when you rise
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby”

Writing feels to me a bit like a dream. I am not bound by the rules of science or confined by things that might otherwise restrict my movements. When the words flow freely it is a magical moment.

This book that I am writing now is a sort of amalgamation of a variety of things. At the moment there are approximately three different story lines- all of them connected but capable of standing alone.

“Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby”

I think that part of it is based upon the main character’s journey to find a place where he “rediscovers” peace of mind.  There was a time when life made sense to him and he understood what he wanted to do and what he was trying to do but he lost that somewhere.

Is this the kind of journey that proves that heroes are made and not born? I don’t know yet but I expect that we will find out. What I know is that at this moment struggle is the critical element. The struggle to find that place is part of what defines him as a person but not the sole thing.

“Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time
Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time”

My struggle and my task lies in trying to find a way to integrate these stories into a tapestry of sights and sounds that you can see. If I do a proper job of painting that picture, well who knows what can happen.

“Oh yeah, all right
Are you gonna be in my dreams tonight

Love you, love you
love you, love you…

And in the end, the love you take
is equal to the love you make
Ah”

Life is a series of moments that  we sometimes share with others intermixed with those that we experience alone. The best of those are always those that we share with those who mean the most to us.

Oh, come live with me
And be my love
Let our dreams combine

Be great to me
Be fate to me
Be mine

Plenty of Time

I could hear the echo of my father’s voice inside my head, “Boys don’t ever hit girls.”

He ignored my protests and told me he didn’t care what my sister had done. It didn’t matter if she hit me first or what she used. I was a boy. We weren’t allowed to fight back that way.

I told him again it wasn’t fair and he shrugged his shoulders at me. “We are bigger and stronger. Use your words to settle things. They will.”

He was right and so was I. Thirty-seven years ago they didn’t fight fair and they still don’t now.

I suppose the big difference between then and now is that it was much easier as a young boy to look at them as “annoying people” whose sole purpose was to bother boys.

Puberty changed all that. Those “annoying people” cast a magic spell on me and suddenly I went from not noticing any of them to having trouble focusing in school.

Hormonal overdrive and young love kept me from recognizing the kind of trouble that lack of focus could get you into.

But I found out.

Her name was Tammy. She was a tall blonde with bright green eyes and an electric smile. At 14 she was two or three inches taller than I was and quick to lord it over me.

She spent our freshman year of high school doing her best to tease and torment me. I tried to give it back to her and almost got my head taken off.

I don’t remember exactly what I said but I remember she was angry. When I told her she was acting like my sister she lost it. She stopped talking to me. When we passed each other in the halls she just looked through me, it was like I didn’t exist.

You would think that I would have appreciated the respite from the teasing and the incessant comments about my height, but I didn’t.

We didn’t speak again until November of the following year and to this day I can’t tell you if she even noticed, but I did.

Her refusal to speak made me so angry that I walked over to her. “You aren’t as special as you think you are!”

She just laughed, “look who finally grew.”

Until she mentioned it I hadn’t noticed that I was finally taller than she was.

I wanted to yell at her again but that laughter and the smile that accompanied it took the fight right out of me.

We went on our first date two weeks later and three months after that we lost our virginity in her aunt’s pool house.

It was young love and a healthy dose of young lust.

Her father almost put the fear of god into us. He came home early one day and surprised us.

We heard him and I tried to jump out of bed, but Tammy was fearless. She told me to relax and said there was plenty of time.

That became our line and our little joke. Life was filled with plenty of time and much laughter.

When it came time to go to college we ended up attending different universities. Neither one of us was worried about our relationship. We thought it was strong enough to survive anything, but we were wrong.

I don’t know when she slept with him or how many times she did but I know it happened. I wasn’t blameless either.

The girl I hooked up with was just as tall as Tammy and had those long legs that I loved, except she was a brunette with dark eyes. The moment I kissed her I knew that things had to go farther and that something else was dying, but hormones don’t care about relationships.

Within six months or so we had both acknowledged that it was time to go our separate ways.

It was painful but also somewhat exhilarating. Tammy and I had done almost everything a couple could do together and I was excited to be with other women.

That 18 year-old boy felt like a kid in a candy shop and for a while I really enjoyed it, but I noticed very quickly that these girls didn’t respond like Tammy did.

She would do anything and they wouldn’t. Hindsight makes it easy to recognize that love was the difference but that kid didn’t know it.

By that time Tammy and I rarely spoke and if we did we usually found ourselves fighting but it wasn’t like those days in high school.

Eventually we just stopped talking.

Five years passed and then I ran into her at a New Year’s Eve party. At midnight we kissed and it was like no time had passed.

Thirty-five minutes later we walked into my apartment and stayed there for three days.

Two days later she left for a two year Peace Corps assignment in Africa. When she kissed me goodbye she said she loved me, laughed and told me not to worry because there was plenty of time.

She never wrote me.

Twenty-five years passed and the silence continued. We were just a memory.

Last week there was a knock at the door and I saw a beautiful blonde standing on my porch. It was like being transported in time, there was my Tammy, except it wasn’t.

She said her name was Heather and asked to come inside.

“My mom said if something happened to her I should find you. Her name was Tammy and I think you might be my dad.”

“What do you mean her name was Tammy?”

Her eyes filled with tears and so did mine. I guess we never did have plenty of time.