Archives for November 2014

This post was supposed to be one where I repurposed the content in Sex, Lies & Blogging- The Post That Went Viral but I changed my mind.

Something about the responses to What Happens When People Don’t Comment On Our Blogs? and She Saved My Heart made me decide to go a different direction.

I am not entirely sure why or what turned my head and made me see something different. Might be because I wanted to write another story about Remorse Brown or because Sometimes Bad Headlines Don’t Matter but most of it is probably because I am on fire right now.

It is hard not to be angry when I see pictures of people handing out candy after a terrorist attack. Hard not to be angry when I don’t see outrage when men walk into a synagogue with knives and guns and start slaughtering people and the headlines and article offer some sort of moral equivalency explanation for the unforgivable.

Authentic and Raw

Life has been a bit more challenging as of late. The work has been slower and the cash flow hasn’t been anywhere close to what it needs to be. An acquaintance described it as bad luck and bad timing but that is not how I see it.

When you are up against it, you are up against it.

There is a difference between feeling a little pressure and a lot.

But I was built to last.

I was made to dance in the fire and march through the storms and I do what is required so that I get to the other side. In a few moments I’ll go take a shower, get dressed and visit my mother.

She had surgery today. It is supposed to be relatively minor and if all went well she’ll be in the hospital for a few days.

That is my expectation but she is old enough now that I pay more attention to standard medical procedures. Mom would be pissed if she heard me say that, she’d say she is not old enough for me to think like that.

She’d tell you no one believes all of her kids are over forty and she’d smile.

When I tell her some of the guys and I have started talking about whether we want to do something big for our 50th birthdays she shakes her head and tells me that I still have more than a few years before it happens.

But sometimes she looks at me and asks if it is really five years.

I get it because sometimes I look at my kids and wonder how they reached this place. I suppose all parents do it.

****

The authentic and raw hold my attention in ways that others don’t. That is because sometimes I think my best writing comes from my being able to tear into the painful places inside my head.

I used to worry and wonder about it because I was worried about whether I could call upon the gods of writing if I was happy and content. But then I thought about it and found posts that showed I could do it and had done it.

Don’t Take Blogging Too Seriously

It might sound like a contradiction but I really don’t take this business all that seriously. You can read posts like Do You Miss Old Fashioned Blogging? and send me emails saying I contradict myself but I’ll tell you that you don’t get it.

You don’t understand where I am coming from.

I had to make a course correction not because life was a motherfucker but because I was dying.

It wasn’t literal but it didn’t change that what I was doing was killing me from the inside out. I had to go this route, had to follow my heart.

That was a lot to swallow and a big change but I accepted it because I knew it would make me feel better and it did. Did because I started the journey to live a life that would fill my heart and soul with joy.

Doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps in the road or bandits to deal with. Doesn’t mean that sometimes the desperados will find a way steal my horse and or sabotage my car because that crap comes with it all.

The only question lies in how I choose to respond and to reply.

****

When you don’t take blogging seriously you come up with goofy headlines like:

• Why Do Clowns Make Better Lovers Than Mimes?
• I Am The Bruce Lee Of Dad Bloggers
• What Do Broken Condoms Have To Do With Blogging
• 500 Ways To Have Better Sex & Earn Money From Blogging

It means you just write and you don’t worry about how many people will share, tweet, comment or pin your posts.

You don’t worry about whether you ever appear on Huffpo or anywhere else. You just write and you don’t have to worry about gaming the system.

I Hear Music

Some people will find these tales and moments to be of interest and will join us on the journey and others won’t. Some might walk with us for a ways and some for the whole distance, I don’t know.

All I know is that I hear music inside my head and know there are stories waiting to be told.

So I am going to wander upon the trails that have already been marked and blaze some that haven’t in search of the song.

Some days you burn the bridges so that you can’t go backwards and can only go ahead. Today I am carrying a torch and lighting following a fire in the sky that I can see day or night.

What about you?

If you are of a certain age Breakfast In America might make you think of Supertramp and I can’t blame you, because if often does for me, mostly because Take The Long Way Home has become one of my personal anthems.

But most of the time when I think about breakfast in America it is tied into food and into travel.

****

When I was a kid my folks used to load my 86 sisters and I into our station wagon and we’d head out onto the road for family vacations.

I’d spend most of those trips in the seat right behind my father looking out of the window or reading a book. Many of those moments are burned into my memory, endless hours of staring at train tracks, looking at farmland, the ocean or rolling fields of crops all the while listening to whatever song mom played on the radio or cassette player.

Eventually we’d stop at some restaurant along the road and my sisters and I would go play with the cigarette machines they had in the lobby, you know the ones that had those Foosball like handles you’d pull on or we’d go see if someone forgot to take the change from the payphones and nag our parents about why it was taking so long to be seated.

Sometimes my sisters would fall asleep in the booth and it would be just my parents and I awake at the table. In the background I’d hear them play some of the easy listening music of the time and I’d feel like a big shot because I was the only kid who was still awake at the table.

Decades later those songs still take me back while others bring along the early memories and ones that came later on.

It is an interesting mix of memories because you have the boy, the teenager, the twenty something, husband and father all wrapped up in those songs.

And then you have someone else, old Jack the guy who has driven and or flown thousands of miles by himself for work. That guy is an amalgamation of all who came before and yet he is his own individual.

Don’t know if that makes sense to you but I get it and sometimes that is all that is important.

What I know for certain is there have been moments during those individual trips where I saw/experienced things that I wished I could have shared with another.

Moments where I smiled and thought about how to record that minute in time so I could share it later and then laughed because I knew there was no way to show you what I saw.

All I could do was hope to have a chance to create new moments and memories down the road at a different place and time.

Travel By Car Versus Air

My children don’t know the road trip with the same sort of intimacy as I do. They have been a part of some road trips but most of them include plane travel and though that is special too sometimes I think they have missed out on some things.

Because when you are not trapped inside a giant metal tube you can stop any time you want. When you see some little joint with a wagon wheel on the roof you can pull over and check it out.

You can stop at Pea Soup Andersen’s in Buellton for Pea Soup and clean bathrooms or hit family restaurants in Santa Barbara that are supposedly haunted. You can visit ghost towns that were big in the gold rush or go see where Wyatt Earp and company took on their enemies.

These moments are harder to come by in part because of finances and time constraints. My dad had a very healthy vacation plan so we could go away for weeks at a time.

But unlike me my kids didn’t have to wait until they were 16 to start flying from state to state and place to place.

They don’t have the memories of hitting a Motel 6 and hearing mom tell dad to turn up the television because the people in the room next door were too loud or still tease their sisters about the time they got car sick and threw up on each other

But that doesn’t mean they don’t have some very good memories or that they won’t get the opportunity to create some more because they will.

One of the many reasons why I am working on changing our situation is to put us in a position where we can create more more of those moments and spend less time trying to chase enough change to pay daily expenses.

Life is meant to be lived, not endured.

Breakfast In America

Breakfast is one of my favorite meals, especially those moments where we are able to really indulge ourselves and enjoy fine food, great coffee and the sort of company that makes you pleased to be a person and not a plant.

And believe me, I have met some people I wish were plants because then they would have an excuse for their amazing personalities.

But I suppose it is both fair and important to add that if I have learned anything in my travels it is that a very fine meal is never the same when you eat it alone than when you have company.

Last week I went on an interview in which I sat at the top of a large building and looked down upon BJs. It is hard not to smile because it is a place where I have had some wonderful experiences, some of which truly blew me away.

Moments where you share a meal with someone who understands you and in turn is understood by you. Moments where you don’t have to fill the silence with words because you can communicate just as effectively with a glance or a smile as you can with sound.

******

When my son tells me about how the girls at school won’t stop messing with him I tell him that I am sure at least one of them likes him. He tells me it is ridiculous and that someone that likes you would never mistreat you and I laugh.

I tell him sometimes the people we care about are the ones who make us act the goofiest and that girls are very good at making us feel foolish. He shakes his head at me and tells me he’ll never have a girlfriend and yells at me when I laugh.

“Dad, why can’t you take me seriously?”

“Because I know you and I know me. I know enough to know that some girl will catch your eye and one day you’ll find one that you will want to spend time with more than anyone.”

“You aren’t me and you can’t know that. You have sisters, so you have to know how irritating they are.”

“I do and I can promise you no one will make you crazier. Some day there will be a girl who holds your heart and you will be furious that she makes you feel so damn stupid. And just when you can’t figure out if you are an idiot for giving her this power she’ll do something and you’ll wonder how you ever could have been angry with her.”

He shakes his head at me and tells me if he becomes a father it is because he is going to adopt a child.

“One day you and I are going to have a very serious conversation about safe sex because you are going to discover there is a world here you know nothing about. One of my great hopes for you is that you find the right person to have breakfast with and that they are the person you want to have breakfast in America with.”

Gerry Rafferty is singing about Baker Street and I am thinking about the life I once dreamed of and the one I lead now. Thinking about how very different it is and how today it reminds me of a bad meal.

From the outside looking in all looks to be as it should be.

The table is set with beautiful plates and silverware, nice centerpiece and all of the expected accouterments except the steak isn’t cooked the way I like it, the mashed potatoes look like they can from an ancient can and taste like they were scooped out of a rotten skull and the vegetables are just nasty.

If it weren’t for the rolls there would be nothing here that tasted right but that doesn’t fix the disappointment or cure the hunger in my belly.

It is not the first time my meal fell short of expectations nor will it be the last. Sometimes this is just how it goes.

Life Has Killed The Dream I Dreamed

The music moves on and George Jones is singing He Stopped Loving Her Today.

My eyes are closed while my fingers work the keyboard. Got one kid wandering around the house while the other softly snores her way into the night.

My son the wanderer is frustrated with me because I don’t understand his position and told him I don’t have to. When you are my age it is a minor disagreement that will have no lasting consequence but the middle schooler believes otherwise.

He tells me he is getting really angry and I tell him to take it out on his pillow. Dad doesn’t always have to explain himself nor does life have to make sense.

Some things just are and I need him to go to bed because I need him to go to bed.

Midnight isn’t that far off and we both need things from this time. He needs the sleep and I need the quiet of the house to myself.  I like every age and love how we can have deep and sophisticated discussions.

But sometimes we bang heads, just as I did with my father. I remember those moments with more clarity than my son knows and I understand more than he realizes but this is one of those times where I have to be selfish.

Have to be selfish because we are ensconced in a particularly challenging moment and I am struggling to get through it. Doesn’t matter how confident I am about my ability to figure it out because we all hit those moments where we find the knot at the end of the rope and just hang on.

Life killed the dream I dreamed and now I am figuring out where it leaves me.

The Carousel Horse

The carousel horse I am riding is on the far side of the sun on the bottom part of the dark side of the moon. Experience tells me it is going to go back up and it probably will soon but when the waves knock your ass below the surface you don’t open your mouth until you feel air upon your cheek.

The dog and I wander through a few rooms. He watches me throw some ice into a glass and pour some Scotch, wags his tail at me and smiles when I tell him it won’t be much longer.

We head upstairs and step inside my daughter’s room.

Don’t know why she decided to sleep on the floor tonight but she has a blanket, iPod and pillow with her. Dark curls cover one eye exposing a button nose and a bunch of freckles and I stop to watch her sleep.

There is a lot I can say about dads and daughters and it would never tell you enough about her or the guilt I sometimes feel because I haven’t given her as much as her brother got.

He went to private school through fifth grade and she only got to go through second because I just couldn’t make it happen another year. Sometimes she asks me to send her back for sixth grade but I won’t do it primarily because it really doesn’t make sense for her to go back for just one year.

I think it would be much harder for her to step back into that world for just one year, especially since it would mean not starting middle school at the same time with the other kids.

But when you are ten going on thirty you don’t always agree with or understand why mom and dad make other choices so sometimes there are hard moments.

Rainy Days

Sinatra is singing It Was a Very Good Year and it is hard not smile. Some of it is because of the memories it brings with it and some because I dream about writing a song like this.

We are in living during the time of rainy days and cloudy skies. During the time when you look out your window and wonder what it is you are looking at because the drops sliding down the glass obscure and distort your view.

That dream I dreamed floats behind my eyes and I wave goodbye to it. It is not the first time I have done that and it might not be the last time.

I am doing all I can to just roll with the changes and to remember that some of those dreams stopped being interesting to me long before I let go of them.

Some had their moments in the sun longer than they deserved because inertia made it easier to maintain than move but those days are mostly gone.

Now I am pretty good at rolling with it and just going along with the current but there are those moments where the old habits rear their head and the challenges are harder than they should be.

But most of the time when I remember that I know things and look at the accomplishments of the recent past I smile because this moment in time won’t last much longer.