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 December 2013

How Do You Only Make Good Decisions?

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M*A*S*H Set in Malibu Creek State Park

The boys and I are sitting around a table under clear blue skies talking about life. It is one of those moments that never leaves my mind because we have done it a million times before and will do it again a million times more.

Except this time around we are in that funny place in between college and being eligible to apply for Social Security benefits. We still look at the girls who pass by except the conversations often include comments about hoping our daughters don’t dress like that because she still doesn’t know as much as she think she does and even though we won’t automatically classify boys as jerks we remember.

We are dads and though we worry about the unthinkable and unmentionable we worry more about the nice boy. He is not going to force her to do anything she doesn’t want to do, but when she does he is not going to call or he is going to say something she doesn’t like or date her friend.

It is going to happen along with a million other things. Some of those will break her heart and there is not a damn thing we can do to stop it.

Life Happens

The guy with the perfect marriage tells us that they are splitting up. Says that after twenty plus years they have had enough and he can’t take it anymore.

It is not any one thing for him. They have an active sex life, she is still in shape and is a great mom but something is broken and they can’t fix it.

The two guys who are divorced look at each other and then ask him if he knows what he is getting into. One tells him that he doesn’t recommend it because “the cost is higher than you know.”

Another asks if he has met someone else and says that the table is a safe place and that nothing will be revealed. Just as he finishes we all start laughing because it sounds ridiculous. We don’t mean to give him a hard time but it is just one of those moments. The group of us have been friends for more than 30 years so there is a certain level of comfort and understanding that exists among us all.

He tells us he hasn’t met anyone and repeats that his sex life is great. Wife does anything and everything in bed but they don’t talk because there is nothing left to be said.

Conversation moves on and we compare notes about our professional lives. Most of us have been through some major changes and all of us feel like our world is very different from the ones our fathers occupied.

One of the fellas says it is about making smart, educated decisions and then moving with it.

How Do You Only Make Good Decisions?

His comment irritates me because it is pat and simplistic. How do you only make good decisions when you have limited control is what I want to know.

There are so many variables and factors that come into play in every part of your life. I point across the table, “Mr. Perfect” is splitting up with his wife but if it was up to her they would stay married.

I got laid off from one job because they lost a contract and I wasn’t willing to take 40% pay cut. John had to stop playing softball because he was hit by a car.

He looks at me and says that he understands what I am saying but he disagrees.”Smart and educated decisions protect you.”

I roll my eyes at him and shake my head. “It is a good thing I have known you for 35 years because otherwise I would wonder if you were stupid.”

We laugh together, it is an old joke and then I tell him that sometimes it is ok to say you are wrong.

He gives me the finger and I tell him to bend over and grab his ankles.

Driving

Left the boys hours before to run some errands before I head off to the gym. It is the end of a lazy day and I am feeling pretty good about life in general.

Flip on the radio and am absent-mindedly listening to talk radio while driving into the sun. The glare is awful and I make a point to slow down because I can’t see if the streetlight is red or green.

Unfortunately guy driving the bus behind me thinks it is green so instead of slowing down he hits me and in the midst of getting thrown through the windshield I can’t help but think how this moment proves that I was right about how we are never in as much control of our lives as we think we are.

Where Are You…

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Inside 4151

It cost $100 bucks and change to transfer some old videos to DVD. A hundred bucks and change to see my grandparents smile and laugh again and for just a moment feel like they aren’t really gone but are just on vacation.

A hundred bucks and change to temporarily forget about the empty places at the table and to pretend time has stood still and my generation is not second in command.

Life has taken some funny turns since you all made your way to wherever it is we go after our time here is done and now we are getting ready for the third big family event without you all.

And though we talked about this day and prepared for it I find myself wishing you were here. I remember your words and your requests and I know what to say but I can’t ever say it as you did or tell the stories the same way and sometimes it bothers me that my children will never have that experience.

But this is the normal course of things and there is no surprise or shame because the outcome was not unexpected, even if not desired. You told me you would fight the clock and I said I would help. We did for as long as we could but I would have liked just a little more time.

Would have liked for you to see the people your great grandchildren are turning into but we won’t be able to share that this time around.

So I have given you these words and shared again those below so that if there is magic in the night that allows you to peel back the veil you can gain a glimpse of life as it is now and as it was.

And if nothing else you will know that even if your names are not said aloud you have not been forgotten.

It is Friday night of the weekend of my sister’s wedding and my parents are hosting Shabbos dinner for friends and family from out of town. Dessert has been served and the kids are running around with their cousins while the grownups drink coffee and talk. I am standing outside on the terrace staring at streaks of orange and red and thinking about my grandfather. It is only a week since he died and his absence is palpable.

The painted sky is simply beautiful and I can’t help but think about how this is one of those moments where all of my grandparents would have told me to try and burn all I see and feel into memory. It makes complete sense to me to do so. In so many ways memory is the most valuable possession that we own. Sometimes it is the most painful but I try to focus on the positive and think of it as being the most precious, most beautiful and most valuable.

Midway through my musings I have this bizarre thought that 25 miles north of me my grandfather lies in a box that is buried beneath a mound of dirt. He was claustrophobic and for a long time very unhappy about the idea of being placed inside the casket. Long ago I promised him that if he knocked on the casket I would stop everything and pull him out. I remember telling him that there were better ways to get attention than to be buried alive and he told me to stop being a smartass, but the smile on his face made it clear that he appreciated it.

The day of the funeral I made a point of bending over to whisper, “grandpa, this is it. Knock three times on the ceiling and I’ll get you out of there.”  If you haven’t noticed I have a dark sense of humor but he appreciated it and that is all that matters. He didn’t knock and so we carried him over to his body’s final destination and I watched as he was lowered into it. I suppose that it is important to clarify that I wasn’t the person who verified that he was inside- but  I have to believe that no errors were made.

However I can verify that the rabbi and I made sure that the entire casket was covered in dirt.  My sunglasses hid the look in my eyes as my shovel rained dirt down upon him. It is not the first time that I have helped to bury a loved one and it probably won’t be the last. Some people don’t like it but I take it seriously. It is one of the last courtesies that we can extend to those who wander off into whatever lies beyond the pale.

Saturday night there was another family function and I found myself standing in front of the home I grew up in with my kids, cousins, nieces and nephews. We tossed around a football and I watched boys who used to be babies turn into almost pre-teens before my eyes and thought about how much has happened. Close your eyes and life has a way of getting away from you.

It reminded me of people long gone and some just removed from my life who spoke about potential and living up to it. That is something that I sometimes find troubling…potential. Or maybe it is more appropriate to say that I find unfulfilled potential to be troubling. It sometimes eats away at me and I get lost in the land of what could have been and perhaps what could be. It is a line of thought that I try not to get caught up in as it is not real productive to dig at the wounds of what I wish could have been. I don’t have many regrets, but those that I do are…painful.

That is not the sort of possession that I am real fond of, but I suppose they help to make me who I am. From a different perspective we could say that they help to make me who I am going to be. Yep, I said going to be because who I am today is not who I am going to be tomorrow. That is not supposed to be some sort of goofy philosophical comment but acknowledgement that what is happening today is having a significant impact upon me now.

I wonder what sort of possessions this experience will leave me with.

Would Live Blogging The Mile High Club Be In Poor Taste?

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Airplane Flight Wing flying to Travel on Vacation

Don’t ask me how I came up with that headline or why I keep hearing someone say never bring knife to a gun fight. It is just one of those days or weeks where I shake my head, roll my eyes and wonder if it is ok to start drinking at  6 AM or better yet just not stop.

The clock shows 6:30 and I am laughing because I just heard the Wilhelm scream on the television again. Kind of funny to think about the different paths to immortality but I suppose a movie scream isn’t such a bad thing, certainly there is far worse.

The children and I talk often about the importance of taking responsibility for our actions and trying to do the the right thing all the time as opposed to just the right time.

It doesn’t always work out that way but life is filled with complexities that work both for and against us. All we can is our best or so they tell us. I still maintain that I just might be able to tell you how to raise the perfect daughter.

The Return of CommentLuv

I turned off the Comments Evolved plugin and turned on CommentLuv again and am curious to see if there is mad rush to the comments box but I am skeptical about that.

In part it is because there are a million distractions that prevent people from commenting and I am about to go on a writing tear or so I think.

Hard to say for certain because I am publishing content in so many different places but I am kind of enjoying the pace I have set and there is more joy in these words than you can imagine.

I don’t know if it will lead to 500 comments and I am ok with that because that it is a hell of a lot of work to respond to so many. I am more concerned with the quality of the content than with the number of comments I receive but at the same time I didn’t turn CommentLuv back on just for the hell of it.

How to focus on blogging when you just don’t have the time

Sometimes when I think about how to come up with more time to write I think about my friend Jens because not only is also a blogger, but he is blogging in two languages.

One of these days I want to head out to Norway but I think I’ll probably try to go during Summer because I don’t know about all that snow.

What I am certain of is that the pictures I have seen make me think Norge er kult. Hope Google Translate didn’t screw that up for me.

Reminds me of being in Israel at an ice cream shop. A guy came in and in broken Hebrew tried to order cheese.  He said:

אני רוצה קצת גבינה

When he should have asked for:

אני רוצה קצת גלידה

I know many of you are scratching your heads or moving on because you don’t read Hebrew so I’ll give you the triple A transliteration:

Gaveenah: Cheese

Gleedah: Ice cream

That transliteration may or may not make it easy to see how there is some similarity between the words. All I know is that the guy behind the counter gave the person who mistakenly ordered “cheese” a great WTF look.

Anyhoo, if Jens can find a way to write in two languages I can find a way to blog.

The Mirror Doesn’t Lie

I bought a new suit the other day and discovered the mirror hates me. At first I thought it was a fun house mirror and then I realized the damn thing hadn’t changed a thing and was giving me an honest reflection.

That mirror is an asshole.

I wasn’t as bothered by the extra flesh as much as I was by the hairline because it has become clear that I have been betrayed.

There is a mass exodus on top of my head and I don’t like it. It is time to get serious about getting serious about my fitness because my vanity only goes so far.

It means I can deal with having some extra weight and a full head of hair but I can’t deal with being bald and chunky. So we are making arrangements to cut out junk food and to start a hardcore lifting program.

And then I am going to go back and visit the mirror.

 

Sometimes People Disappoint You

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Seventh grade can be a really hard time. You are on the verge of puberty or maybe all the way in it. Doesn’t really matter because chances are you are surrounded by a ton of other kids who are.

It is hard because hormones are raging and there are more than a few moments where you can’t figure out why you are angry or happy and you are frustrated because you want to be a kid and you are desperate to be an adult.

Crap seems to be flying every which way and you feel like the perpetual outsider watching others glide through life easily and confused because you can’t figure out how to do what they are doing.

The older people in your life promise you it will be ok and swear that everyone survives and that some times you just have to take it day by day but you are not sold on that.

Not sold because you see that sometimes those bigger people are enmeshed in battles too and it makes you wonder.

Sometimes People Disappoint You

Your father says that sometimes people disappoint you and that you have learn how to roll with it. He says it is a part of life that never goes away and you wonder what sort of cruel joke that is because it seems illogical and unfair.

When you tell him this he smiles and nods his head. “Yep, it is not fair and that is the thing about life, it is often unfair. But you can depend on change because good and bad never last. So you have to learn how to roll with it and try not to get too high or too low.”

“I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything”
Hurt- NIN

I love the Johnny Cash cover of this song. It resonates with me and I relate to it.

Been thinking about the conversation with my 7th grader and how timely it is. He has hit a few bumps in middle school that are not unexpected or surprising to me at all.

I have been waiting for them, but he views them in a different light.

Funny thing is that right as he hit those bumps I hit a few of my own.

They weren’t little bumps either, they are big monster size mountains that left me puzzled and angry.

Been a long time since I felt this sort of anger directed at anyone who meant anything to me so I am sort of unsure what I want to do about it.

What Is The Right Thing?

It is one of those moments where I ask what is the right thing to do and no one can answer that. Can’t answer it because it is subjective and I am trying to figure out what outcome I can live with.

You see there is a difference between what you need, what you want and what you get.

I know what I want and what I need but I am fairly certain what I’ll get is different. So I need to decide if I am willing to deal with the consequences.

That is the difference between me of today and yesteryear.

Consequences bother me more and yet even less than ever. It is the big contradiction I live with but I am going to make a decision soon because walking around with the flame in my belly set to high is not healthy.

Hard to accept that the people who are disappointing me the most are among those who would normally be listed among those I trust the most.

And in the silence I hear

“If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way”

and think of possibilities.

Was 2010 The Year Of The Dadblogger?

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dadblogs

Don’t ask me to tell you about 2009 and why it was the year in which the universe decided it would be fun to see how much crap it could fling at me before I would break or why I consider it to be about the worst year of my life.

I don’t have much interest in revisiting much of it but I suppose the nature of blogging lends itself to sometimes revisiting the past.

Somewhere during the normal chaos of the weekend I stumbled back onto a post I wrote called If I Was a Professional Blogger and then revisited a guest post I wrote for my friend Ron called The Random Thoughts Of Jack Be Nimble.

And that led me to a post in which I announced I felt like I had failed.

How Much Life Have You Lived?

When I think back on those moments it is with mixed emotions because in many ways it feels like it happened to someone else and I realize that I am not who I was.

That is not necessarily a bad thing.

Life forces us to make choices and to change or be changed. You roll with the punches and figure out how to keep getting back up or you just lie down and take a beating.

I took a beating but I never did give up in large part because I went through a big portion of that with the real world friends and a bunch of dad bloggers.

We did our best to support each other and to encourage us to know our own worth and to fight to get it.

And now almost four years later I look back and mostly smile because that sad and angry man is mostly gone. He was replaced by a man who feels a lot like he has been to hell and back.

That sort of life experience has value because when you look at the scars you not only knew you lived but you gain confidence in your ability to weather other storms.

Was 2010 The Year Of The Dadblogger?

2010 was the year I really pushed hard to change how about I went blogging and made a concerted effort to try to help build a stronger and more cohesive dad blogger community.

I don’t know how effective I was at building a larger community, if at all but I felt like I finished the year with new friends and that was worth a lot to me.

Sometimes I laugh at myself when I think about how serious I was at trying to convince more people that dad bloggers were a force to be reckoned with and that it was a mistake for brands to have such a strong focus on mom bloggers.

Hell, I still think it is. I still think that many of the brands have a very poor understanding of how decision-making in married households work and that they don’t pay enough attention to single and stay-at-home-dads.

I still think that relatively few people understand metrics and that inertia and or laziness keeps them from digging as deep as they should.

It wouldn’t be hard to write more about engagement, reach, pageviews, unique users and a rant about how there is often no uniform metric for measurement but that is not what this post is about.

The Evolution of A Blogger

How To Make More Money and Have Better Sex Through Blogging  makes me smile because I can use it to gauge progress or more accurately I can see how much happier I was when I wrote it.

That is a good thing.

It is one of the things I love about blogging. I love how it can serve as a chronological history of what has happened. Ultimately that is a big part of why I write about my kids here.

I can go back and see snapshots in time that remind me that the kid who is about to have his Bar Mitzvah asked me not to die when he was 3.5 and I can see how I responded.

One day these rug rats of mine are going to appreciate being able to look at these moments.

But in the interim it will be me who enjoys looking back and seeing how a guy who started blogging on a whim used it to reinvent his life and career.

But What About My Friends…

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The Lead/Theme Float

I want to thank whomever decided to use a butter knife to try and carve out a section of my skull for being kind because clearly a scalpel and general anesthesia would have required far too much work.

Second place goes to whomever took a flame thrower to my stomach. Someone ought to remind them I have a dysfunctional digestive system so I know how to power through these GI issues like nobody’s business, whatever the hell that means.

Do The Right Thing

There is a kid here who calls me dad and is a couple weeks short of turning 13. We have lots of interesting conversations about life and if had to list what I missed about being in LA these talks would be in the top five.

I like hearing his thoughts about his day and life as well as his questions because they are a big part of how I learn things too.

You see when he asks me certain things I quickly ascertain what my feelings/beliefs are on those issues. Sometimes I know exactly how I feel and sometimes I realize it is not something I ever thought about.

Maybe it is because when I was a kid someone gave me answer that satisfied me and I never chose to look backwards. Or maybe it is because there is a significant difference between what I thought I would do in a particular situation and reality.

Texas is a great example of how reality and thought sometimes don’t intersect the way I want them to and how trying to do the right thing can be a challenge.

Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness

I moved to Texas because even though I enjoy freelance work it was time to return to a steady paycheck and a great opportunity opened up there,

Spent almost a year there and did my best to help prepare the kids for a big move. They didn’t like the idea and I got a lot of “what about my friends? Why do we have to go?”

I understood that and tried to explain how things are very different now because I was a kid when there wasn’t email, Skype/Facetime or Google Hangouts.

I was a kid when people shushed you because they were talking long distance and that was a really big deal.  Back then when people moved away they usually disappeared from your life.

It wasn’t because you and they weren’t important but because it took real work to stay in touch and life sometimes got in the way of your desire.

And since my siblings and I made friends easily it wasn’t hard to find new ones. Not  trying to say we replaced the old one, but…

Anyway Texas turned out to be much better than I had anticipated and I really came to enjoy living there and expected it would be even better with the family.

Except life happened and plans changed.

I found out I could work remotely from LA and wouldn’t have to make the family move. Even though it is more expensive to live in LA I moved back because I figured that money doesn’t buy happiness and it would be easier for the kids.

But Is It Better?

The burning question inside my head is whether the move makes as much sense now as it did when I came back.  Texas doesn’t have a state income tax so one of the first things I noticed was my paycheck was smaller.

Add the additional cost for gasoline and rent/buying homes and it becomes clear that from a financial perspective Texas is probably the better place to be.

I don’t have to work as hard to do certain things and that translates into some pretty big benefits. If there is a change in employment status you don’t have to work as hard to make ends meet, more money can be saved for vacations, retirement and emergency funds.

Truth is I can’t really say for certain whether it would be better without trying it out. Can’t know how easy or hard a transition it would be for the kids and that is a big part of why I didn’t insist on making the move.

The overwhelming majority of family is in LA and that is what kept us from moving 13 years ago.

Back then there were five great grandparents and four grandparents in LA, not to mentions lots of aunts, uncles and cousins.

But now there are only grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Not only can they travel, they do so the question is whether they would is moot.

So for the time being I’ll be here and see how it all goes but in spite of the uncertainty I am paying attention to life here and thinking hard about whether this was the right move or not.

Sometimes life is ever so peachy.