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 May 2014

It’s No Fun Getting Arrested

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black eye

Make no mistake about it, I never enjoy getting hit. I am not one of those guys who wishes that I could be an MMA fighter. I don’t need to prove my masculinity by stepping inside the ring to see who is the last man standing.

That is not because I am a pacifist or have any moral issues with hurting another human being. I don’t. Never have. Don”t go out of my way looking for trouble but if it finds me I am not always good about turning away.

I should be. It would be the smarter move to walk away. It would have saved me a lot of trouble but I am not that guy. I don’t play consciously think about it. I just do it and when I do it is without concern for consequences.

Last Saturday night I went out for a drink. Didn’t have a particular destination in mind or a need to be with friends. I just wanted to have a beer and watch whatever ballgame might be on the television.

It wasn’t a night for small talk nor was I an angry or upset. I just felt like being among people but not with people.

I chose local college bar. It fit the bill of what I wanted and was close enough to my place to not worry about how to get their and back. All I needed were my own two feet. That suited me just fine. Human powered transportation. Environmentally friendly, reliable, steady and safe, mostly.

Most nights it would have gone down exactly as I expected it to. I would have walked over, ordered my beer and burger and eaten my meal in quiet. This time I pulled the Joker out of the deck.

And I knew it.

Hadn’t been there more than five minutes when one of the kids bumped into me and gave me a glassy eyed stare that told me he was too drunk to recognize that there are some people you just don’t mess with.

I didn’t say excuse me. He had bumped into me and frankly I wasn’t in the mood to kiss his twenty-something ass. I saw his two buddies and the girls they were speaking to. I knew that he was going to act like an asshole. I knew that an apology would have defused the entire situation, but when trouble comes looking for me I don’t flinch.

So when he called me an asshole I punched him in the face and watched him crumble. If this would have been a movie I would have been worried about his little friends who most certainly would have joined in, but it wasn’t and they didn’t.

I finished my beer and I walked out of the place. Not because I was asked to leave or was afraid of getting arrested but because the little prick soured me on the place.

Two blocks south of the joint a man stepped out from between two cars and pointed a gun at my head. He didn’t look like the speed freaks you sometimes see roaming around the edges of society. Didn’t look like any of the junkies I have seen at all. His eyes were clear and his hands were steady.

“Give me your wallet.”

His voice was flat and there was no intonation in it.

“I don’t have a wallet.”

For a moment there was a flicker of something in his eyes and then it was gone. He walked up to me, put the gun against my head and repeated “Give me your wallet.”

Make a note, don’t ever point a gun at me unless you intend to use it. I don’t take kindly to it and I don’t appreciate being threatened. I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of being crippled by some jerk off who can’t shoot straight.

And when I get scared I tend to get angry.

So I reached up and wrapped my hand around his wrist and pulled the gun away from my head. When he didn’t shoot I realized what had just happened and I really got angry. One quick twist and a small step to my left and that gun wasn’t in his hand anymore.

Smarter men would have taken the gun and run away. Smarter men would have gotten out of there, but I proved not to be that smart.

Instead of running I took the butt of the gun and hit the guy in the head with it twice. “Don’t ever put a gun against my head unless you are going to pull the trigger. I hope that hurts motherfucker.”

And then I dropped the gun next to where he lay in the street and resumed walking home. Probably would have gotten there without incident, but he shot me. Clipped me on the  left side and put me on my ass.

Maybe I should taken the gun with me or fixed things so that he couldn’t use his hands, but I didn’t. Remember when I said that I pulled the Joker from the deck that night, well I think getting shot qualifies as one hell of a reminder.

Hello Officer

I don’t know what happened to the guy who shot me. Can’t tell you if he felt vindicated by popping me from behind or if he got scared about what happened. What I’d like to tell you is that I jumped up, pulled his right arm off of his body and beat him to death with it.

It would have made me feel better and probably made for a better story but that is not how things went down. When I got clipped I went down and then stayed down, primarily because my head smacked into a light pole and then for good measure cracked the curb.

Probably knocked me out for a moment or two, maybe three or four, I really don’t know. When I first came to I was mildly disoriented which is my fragile egos way of saying I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing on the ground. That sort of thing hasn’t happened very often to me.

Nature gave me a hard head…literally. Three different men have had the good fortune to have broken their fists upon my skull. That is not really a badge of honor but I suppose if you have to get hit it is something to be proud about, sort of. I remember telling my grandfather about it once and he suggested I learn how to duck or step to the side.

He said it with love but the look in his eyes made it clear it wasn’t a joke. Frankly I didn’t take it that way either, I don’t particularly enjoy getting hit, not even when I can say I came out better than the other guy.

Eventually I realized I had left the land of the vertical for a spot kissing the concrete and I decided it would be better to stand up. As I pulled myself up I saw a pair of black boots approaching rapidly and that made me nervous.

It never occurred to me to figure out who those boots belonged before I tried to help their owner embrace the concrete the way I had been doing. It would have saved me a lot of trouble but you know which card I pulled that evening so instead of things going easy they went hard.

Cops don’t like being touched by people they don’t know and they don’t react kindly to seeing their partner get taken down.

Later on in the courtroom my attorney would argue that I shouldn’t be held accountable for the overly aggressive actions of a rookie cop. He’d argue that I had just been shot and was in survival mode and the judge would offer some leniency for that, but that didn’t change the beat down those guys gave me.

By the time I got to the hospital I couldn’t see the silver bracelets I was wearing or the men who gave them to me. Maybe if I had been luckier I would have passed out, but I didn’t so I have a full memory of the festivities from that evening.

I have got to tell you, it is no fun getting arrested.

Sometimes Father Doesn’t Know Best

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Father and Son

It is the culmination of a very long week, 6 PM on a Saturday night and I am home alone. Ray Charles is singing  Come Live with Me and the dog just brought me his leash.

We’ll go for a walk, I’ll bang out another couple sets of push ups, take a shower and then make myself some dinner. A little later I’ll crack open The Balvenie Caribbean Cask and pour myself a drink and sit outside and think.

Sometimes Father Doesn’t Know Best

Five years ago I screamed in my sleep and my screaming woke up my daughter. I don’t remember the dream, if I had I probably would have blogged about it but I don’t and I didn’t.

What I know is that my dreams are often graphic but they rarely put me in a state where you find me shouting in my sleep. My biggest fear is not being able to protect my kids from something truly awful.

It is that scene from a movie where you can see that awful event unfold in front of you and you take off at a dead sprint but you don’t get there in time.

During daylight and even the darkest night I rarely think or worry about that. I am pretty good about focusing my attention on things that are statistically possible and probable.

++++

Yesterday my son came back from a three day school trip. I picked him up and watched as he staggered to the car. My little man was dead on his feet and I thought about how there was a time I would have scooped him up and carried him but that wasn’t going to happen here.

He is a teen, not a toddler and I wasn’t about to embarrass him in front of the other kids. Kids can be cruel and there is no reason to give them any ammunition.

When he got in he told me he went on the zip line and I told him how proud I was because when he left he told me he would never do such a thing. I told him that if you never step outside of your comfort zone, if you never challenge yourself you will never learn what you are truly capable of.

He smiled and told me he liked the zip line and told me a bit about his trip. There was much that he enjoyed but there is a bunch that he didn’t and he won’t tell me much about what that it was.

I know he wasn’t physically bullied or hurt. He told me that I shouldn’t worry about that and said he won’t tolerate that. We went back and forth a bit but he talked in circles and when I tried to find out more he told me he needed to talk to his friends.

I told him I respect that and that sometimes father doesn’t know best.

What Should I Do

When he was in 5th grade he had to do a genealogy project for school. During a classroom discussion his teacher told him that a family story wasn’t true and ridiculed him for “misunderstanding what he had heard.”

I went after the teacher. I tore her apart in an email and made an appearance at the school and demanded she provide an accounting for her behavior. I wanted to know why she thought she knew better about a family story that wasn’t a historical event.

What infuriated me was how she abused her position and made him feel ashamed. Last night I saw the look he had after that moment with her come back and it brought the anger back.

We can’t protect our children from everything. I don’t believe we should or that they need to be enclosed in bubble wrap. I am an advocate for teaching them coping skills so that they learn how to deal with life.

Though I am truly confident in his abilities to figure things out I am aggravated because I hate seeing that look on his face. I think he is trying to figure out crap that you can’t figure out.

People do stupid shit in middle school. Kids just act and say things without any thought or regard for consequences. I don’t believe he is going to find any logic but he is searching for it and it is hard to watch.

Five More Years

Five more years and he’ll be on his way to college. Five years ago college was so very far away and now…not so much.

I am proud of him, so very proud. I love that he is pushing me away and wants to do it all on his own. That means I did something right here but dammit, I hope he understands there is a time when asking dad to help is a sign of strength and not weakness.

An Ambient Video

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You can use

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“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”Ansel Adams

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The Most Staggering Adrenaline Rush…Ever

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Sometimes you have to find your wings on the way down.
Sometimes you have to find your wings on the way down.

There are no coincidences because what you see, hear and do are part of something greater than us. It is tied into something larger that can be described as both mystical and magical.

Don’t ask me to explain this because I can’t tell you how or why. All I can say is that I know because I have experienced it. I have seen it. I have lived it. I have been there and that is all the proof that I can provide.

It won’t be enough for some of you. It won’t be the kind of thing that you can accept because you can’t buy, touch or taste it. Actually that is not true, you can but only if you open your mind and let your soul seek its match.

I know this because for the longest time I didn’t do it. I spent years not buying into it or believing that it could be real. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to because I did. I desperately wanted to believe that this thing was something tangible. Because I just knew that if I could feel it in my hands and see it with my eyes it would prove that there was something to this dream I had once lived.

You see I fell in love with a girl and I loved her fiercely. I loved her madly. I loved her passionately. I loved her in every way that the poets wrote of, spoke of and dreamed of.

I loved her with all of my heart and all of my soul. I loved her desperately and somewhere in that madness I lost her.

Some of you can’t feel what I am saying. These words have no meaning to you. They are figments of imagination that you can’t feel, see or taste. So they never grab you. Your heart, your eyes and your mind are closed to them.

I can’t fault or blame you because I used to be like you. I used to look at this sort of writing and roll my eyes because I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen. I hadn’t felt it.

But that was long ago. That was in the time before I became who I am now. That was before I understood that love is a drug that can make you soar to the highest heights and or drop your ass into a pit so dark and dank you can’t remember what it felt like to see sunshine.

Some of you are nodding your head. You don’t even realize that you are doing it. You aren’t even aware that your pulse has quickened and you can’t see anything other than these words and even those are growing faint.

That is because we are running with the moon you and I. We are partners on a journey and you want to know more about my story because you hope that maybe it holds some sort of key insight to your story.

You want to know about the girl I loved and what happened to her. You want to know if there is hope for us because if there is hope for us there might be some for you.

The thing that is ever so interesting about this is that I haven’t given you much in the way of detail. You haven’t heard about how we met in the most unusual way or how crazy it all was. You don’t know how it is we fell in love. You wonder if I am exaggerating or maybe you don’t.

Maybe you know what it is like to have that kind of passion where you can’t stand not having that person in your life because there is a gaping void that aches and burns without respite.  Maybe you too were surprised to discover that the kind of crazy love you experienced the first time you ever fell in love could come back. Maybe you were shocked by the passion and overwhelmed by the loss of the friendship that you had.

Because that friendship threw you for a loop. It wasn’t just about love or lust. You liked them as a person. They filled the gaps and made you believe that you could be more than you were. They made you believe that all that hokey stuff you read in cheap paperbacks or saw on television might be based in reality. You understood that you could be naked in every possible way with them and be confident that they would caress your soul and cradle your heart.

It doesn’t have to be a dream. You don’t have to keep running with the moon. You don’t have to feel that enormous sense of loss or wonder whether you can ever love and be loved like that again because if it happened once it can happen again.

There are no coincidences. You can live your dream. You can find a way back. All you need to do is let go, submit to the reality of the possibility and accept that there will be opportunity.

It is not poetry or fiction. It is reality. It can’t happen on its own but if you ask and if you believe you will find the answer. You don’t need the old gypsy woman to sell you Love Potion number 9.

There are no coincidences.

The Most Staggering Adrenaline Rush…Ever

We stood on the balcony wrapped in each other’s arms and got lost in a minute that turned into an endless moment. When she asked me to tell her why things felt like they did I called it The Most Staggering Adrenaline Rush…Ever and then watched her eyes narrow and widen again.

Saw her try to figure out if I was feeding her a line and then relax when she realized I wasn’t. Felt her melt against me, nuzzled her neck and heard her promise to be mine forever. The soft whisper of insecurity and wondering whether it was true crept up inside, asked me if I could let go and believe.

Asked me if I could let go of the earth and allow us to float into the twilight sky and do so without fear of falling because that fear was and is the anchor that prevented things from following the natural course.

I closed my eyes and allowed myself to see with my heart and felt possibility flow into opportunity and this time when the jester threatened to rain down on our parade I smiled at him and watched him gnash his teeth. Watched him shake his fist and promise to turn joy into ash.

Once that would have worried me. Once I would have wondered if we had bitten off more than we could chew but not anymore because now I had seen fantasy manifest as reality and felt the joy that comes when free fall turns into soaring through the evening sky.

Now I could say I know things with the sort of confidence that only comes from experience because sometimes there are no coincidences.

There Is A Difference Between A Father & A Man

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The most important part of the castle is who shares it with you.
The most important part of the castle is who shares it with you.

There is a difference between being a father and being a man. It is a conversation my teenage son and I have had many times.

Right now I am doing my best to teach him how to become a man and hoping that if one day he should become a father he picks up a little something along the way.

Hoping that I give him something he can use and don’t fill his head full of crap he doesn’t want or need.

Don’t Measure Yourself Against Me

I am sitting on the floor in the big kid’s room and talking to him about his day. I tell him it is late and suggest he try and grab more than fifty winks and he asks me to stay in there a bit longer.

Disembodied voices carry through dark as we share some more words about the rhythm of life and I surprise myself by telling him, “don’t measure yourself against me.”

“Dad, what does that mean?”

“It means I don’t want you to use me as a way to measure your own success. I don’t want you to feel you need to match me in any way or put more pressure on yourself by trying to do better. Be whomever it is you are going to be.”

“Why are you saying that? You are a good dad.”

I had to smile when he said that, but I had to tell him that for years I made myself crazy by trying to measure up to my father. It wasn’t because of anything he said or anyone else.

It was something I did on my own. Don’t know what made me start but for there was a long stretch of time where I felt like I had come up short because I didn’t do some of the things he did.

“Don’t misunderstand me, I am proud of much of what I have done. I have my list of accomplishments and a variety of goals that I am striving for but I spent too much time comparing myself to him.”

What Do You Want?

He asks me to tell him what I want and I talk about a castle, various cars and places I want to see. I tell him about some of the books I want to write but I stress there is a critical takeaway.

“The most important part of all this is that you share it with someone you care for. Not everyone needs a companion but most of us do. The hard part is figuring out who that person should be. The trick is trying to find the balance between not settling and not establishing unreal expectations.

There Is A Difference Between Being A Father & A Man

There is a difference between being a father and a man. Give yourself some time to be a man first and you’ll find that if you decide to become a father your life will be much easier.

“Dad, how do I avoid making mistakes.I don’t want to screw it up.”

I laugh and tell him to accept that he is going to make some mistakes along the way because it is how we learn. “But how do I avoid making the really big ones?”

“I can’t tell you that. There is no silver bullet or magic that I can give you. All I can tell you is to try and use your head and when things go south just roll with it. You’ll figure it out.”

Soft snores drift through the darkness and for a moment I close my eyes and remember the baby this teenager of mine used to be. The kid is so damn big now, all I can do is hope that some of what I have said sinks in and trust that he will figure it out.

I am pretty confident about it all but sometimes I think about the stupid things I did and be grateful that things turned out as well as they did.

Now all I can do is hope his common sense prevails and that when it doesn’t luck is on his side. Sometimes the hardest part of being a father is the uncertainty, but it has been worth it. I’d do it all again.

Can You Hear The Quiet Of Your Own Heart?

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Dad can cook, clean and parent.
What do you see when you close your eyes?

Reelin’ In the Years is playing in the background and I am staring at the picture of the Stockyards. Took that shot a week or two after I moved to Texas.

Stood there among the tourists and thoughts about how different yet similar I was to them. It was my first time there except the family from England was talking about how long the plane ride home would be and I was thinking about whether I would cook dinner for myself or grab a sandwich.

It was new to me but I wasn’t a tourist because Texas was home and it will be again. Feels strange saying that, surreal, different and weird because it is just one of those things that has to happen.

Texas has been in my heart for longer than I can remember and it holds its place with LA and Jerusalem. It took a piece of me and when I left I had to temporarily let go of that piece. Wasn’t easy to do, but it had to be done.

Children and Transitions

Had to do it because there was unfinished business in Los Angeles and I had to go back to take care of it. Had to listen to the quiet of my own heart and accept that everything had been turned upside down and inside out. Part of me fought that because I am not always good with change but when I closed my eyes and turned off the background noise I knew.

What I saw, what I heard and what I felt inside made it clear that there wouldn’t be any peace inside, no refuge, no calm unless I stepped through the door and I did it.

I did it because when I first left for Texas I promised myself that I would take possibility and turn it into opportunity. I had to find a new way and a new place because what had once been was no longer. Los Angeles is and was home, but it was a place where I had taken one hell of a beating.

Old man Steiner isn’t built for grace but endurance. I can sustain my effort for far longer than most and I can do so under horrific conditions and I did. But it wasn’t until I left that I gained the perspective to see how silly that was. There was no honor in taking that beating any longer than I had to but I couldn’t see it.

Once I left and saw how I could live elsewhere I understood things differently. That is part of what led to Life Is Meant To Be Traveled Along The Field Of Dreams.

Why Did You Do It?

My son was so upset when I first left he refused to talk to me. For two days he wouldn’t say a word. When I called home they would put the call on speakerphone and he would listen but he wouldn’t respond. I told him I had to leave and that I was doing it to build a better future.

His silence hurt but I told him I wasn’t going to turn around just because he didn’t like it or couldn’t see what I saw. I told him it would make more sense one day.

Last week he admitted that Texas has some things that attract him too but said even if he moved LA would always be home. I laughed and told him I feel the same way.

“Can you hear the quiet of your own heart?”

He nodded his head and I smiled. “That is where this comes from for me. That is the sound I am following.”

I don’t know if he really understands but I feel confident that I have to follow it.  Too many people let fear prevent them from taking a chance to really live, but not me.

Sometimes the only way to do that is step into the unknown and set aside your fears about looking foolish.

What If You Are Wrong?

A friend asked me what happens if I am wrong about the sound. What happens if this gut feeling is nothing more than gas pain. This isn’t about right and wrong but even if it was I would do it because sometimes you never know what can happen unless you try.

If you don’t open the door you will never see what lies on the other side and if you don’t walk through it you will never know what kind of opportunity you are passing up.

Sometimes you have to step off the cliff and learn how to fly on the way down and that is what I am doing.

It is why when my son said he didn’t want to go on the school trip he is on I said he needed to go. Sometimes you have to step outside your comfort zone.

Life is about living.