Archives for November 2014

There are moments where I hear my heartbeat and swear it is like the a giant clock, tick-tocking the days of my life away.

A pair of noise cancelling headphones rest upon my ears to help me focus upon the important tasks and not upon the screams of children or leaf blowers that roar outside my door and window.

The Who is asking me to Join Together With the Band but I am thinking about days long gone when the guys and I would sit poolside singing this and other songs while drinking beers as we watched girls in bikinis look for the best places to tan.

Those were heady days of college when it really felt like summer was endless and the opportunities life provided didn’t come with the same challenges and restrictions a father more than twenty years out of school stares at.

The kid I was could wander onto a packed floor at the fraternity house and pretend to have enough rhythm to move with whatever music was playing. If he wasn’t in class or sitting with the guys you might have found him studying, a pair of headphones on his ears, walkman at his side.

He didn’t have the luxury of loading 10,000 songs on his phone or his MP3 player so he did his best to fill two sides of a cassette tape with songs that were appropriate for whatever situation he found himself in.

Today we smile and laugh at the memories and talk about the present as it leads into the future.

The recently married on their way to being divorced men talk about how they never had to worry about accidentally butt dialing a girl or wondering if the text they sent was stupid.

I look at them and ask if they think it was easier to date then or now and a wave of contradictory responses fly my way.

Is Technology Your Master?

The kids are sitting on the couch trying not to look like I am boring them. I tell them the answer to the question should be no, always no but they push back and ask me to defend my habits.

I have two laptops, a cellphone, a tablet, some iPods and two digital cameras plus an assortment of other odds and ends. I gave the old laptop to the children and I use the other for my stuff.

So even though that picture isn’t of my gear I could probably produce something similar. But what I have has been acquired over time and because I take care of my stuff it mostly lasts, mostly being the operative word.

Planned obsolescence, shoddy construction and the occasional accident have helped to motivate new purchases as has personal desire. But if push comes to shove you’d find very little was purchased before the need was great because the cash flow was small.

But there are huge differences between the childhood my children are experiencing and that I had. Mine was analog while they are in the midst of a digital age.

They don’t know what a busy signal is and I don’t know if they recognize the call waiting beep. Dial tones, cords and cables are things they don’t think of just as it doesn’t occur to them that from first grade until I graduated high school I walked to school. Ok, correction, my senior year I got a car and started driving then, but you get the point.

We grew up during the days of mothers kicking us out and forbidding entry until darkness fell and roamed anywhere and everywhere our feet or bikes could take us.

Now I tell them it is time to turn off the Kindle, the phone the Wii or whatever device they are using because sunshine is best felt on our backs and not through windows or pictures.

My Face Is Up/Down Here

We walk into the pub and grab a table. The girls have thrown on a pair of shorts and tops and are joining us for a pitcher of beer.

A game is on the television and we are trying to talk and watch. In the midst of distraction some of us are told by the women where our eyes should be focused.

Sheepish grins roll across our faces and we make eye contact. This is a pivotal moment for some of the people at the table. In a few hours they’ll find time for each other and no one else.

Morning will come and they’ll walk out of an apartment and head back to theirs and two people will wonder when they should call. One of the guys will be screamed at because she doesn’t know her roommate is on the phone for hours and that the guy tried to call but was unable to get through.

Decades later they laugh about it and we hear her tell the story again about how angry she was that he didn’t have the decency  to walk her home nor call her.

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The Temptations are singing (I Know) I’m Losing You and I am thinking about how much has changed in all of our worlds. Certain experiences for the children are no different than they were for us and yet some are downright foreign to me.

iTunes moves to I’m A Man by The Spencer Davis Group and I am back in my Camaro. It is a ’77 with steel bumpers and wheels made to exceed the speed limit.

This was on a couple of the cassettes and any time it started to play my foot grew heavier.

I close my eyes and wonder if I can turn back time if I put the pedal all the way down on our Honda Odyssey. The thought makes me smile but the truth is I don’t miss much from those days.

Somewhere inside my head there is a 21 year-old kid screaming at me to wake up and remember endless summers and opportunities that stretched out farther than the eye could see.

He thinks I am blind and old but what he doesn’t know is that I can see clearly that some of those exits on the endless roads didn’t lead where he thought they would. I see the pot holes and wrecks of other vehicles.

But that doesn’t mean I am unwilling to take those roads now, I am just more careful than I once was. Got too many responsibilities and the recovery time isn’t what it was when I was 21.

I love tech, but it is not my master. I much prefer to experience things in person than through digital means.

What about you?

Flip through the pages here and I am sure you’ll find something about the rules for life and something about how the lesson is repeated until you get it.

When and if you find it don’t tell me or try to explain how I am missing the point or give any sort of explanation for current circumstances that suggest I am responsible for all that is going on now because you’ll wake up in a hospital bed and I won’t feel like I did anything wrong.

That is ‘cuz I feel like I have a good handle for what is going on and how I got here. Hell, I know I bear some responsibility for this moment in time but the majority of the moments that led here weren’t because of me, they were in spite of me.

You don’t know how long it took for me to be able to say that and to not focus on trying to figure out what I did wrong. That is because it is part of the learning process and journey I set out upon some ten or more years ago.

I didn’t know it or recognize it then but I can see it now.

Dude I Am Getting Divorced

I wrote about that moment over here but it took place before then. Mark told me they were through and I chose not to write about it for a long while because it didn’t need to be shared.

But the moment came and it fit in a post about how life can be different than what you expected and how sometimes you find yourself up against it and wonder how you’ll get through.

I remember when he told me he was done with marriage and through with women. He said he had enough and that he was done dealing with crazy. I told him that I understood why and that I wouldn’t be surprised if one day he decided he was willing to give it a shot.

Some months late he told me he felt like a kid in a candy shop. “Brother, there are a lot of very nice single moms out there who understand my situation and have no interest in a relationship. But unlike our school days they don’t hide their interest in sex. You find out pretty quickly you are or you aren’t going to get ‘lucky’ and you enjoy the time.”

Eventually, the kid in the candy store discovered he had favorites and the man who wasn’t going to ever get married got a girlfriend again and then another and another.

“I don’t know that I’ll ever get married again but I like dating one person. I am not a fan of dating several women at the same time, it is too hard and you never feel like you get to know any of them.”

I smiled.

“I think this one is going to be around for a very long time. You’d be an idiot to let her go.”

He laughed and said yes. It is almost two years since they started dating and he cracks me up because his energy is so light he is floating.

The Words Fall As They May

I flip through the pages and see what post capture my eye. Sometimes when I revisit the past I am pleasantly surprised by what I read and sometimes I am disappointed because it feels like I haven’t made enough progress.

Disappointment is better than being embarrassed and that happens sometimes too. Posts that have no rhythm or flow with awkward phrasing and words that are inappropriately placed make me wonder if I should delete what I see.

Clean up the messes and clear out the clutter echoes in my mind but part of me wonders if I am smarter to keep them around because it offers insight into where I once was and serves as a benchmark I can use to measure the progress I have made as a writer.

• The Universe Taps You On The Shoulder
• The Universe Taps You On The Shoulder…Again
• You Can’t Ignore The Power Of Pictures
• The Blogging Jedi Trick That Might Work

Not embarrassed by these but not sure how I feel about them. Parts and pieces make me smile and I see a thread I can use to do more and make more of what is there.

I think about the life lessons I have learned so far and wonder about those to come. I have a pretty good idea about some of them, expectations that stuff that has been waiting in the wings isn’t going to wait much longer.

Most of the time I take it all as it comes but every now and then I grow extra frustrated and wonder if there is a more effective way to handle all that is going on now.

Things could be a lot better and they could be a lot  worse.

A dear friend says he is worried about me and I say I am too, I might lose all of my hair. He tells me I am serious and I say don’t worry because if I jumped off of a cliff wings would sprout on the way down.

There is no easy way out nor am I truly interested in on. I have come too far not to go the distance.

He tells me to hang on and to remember time is a bitch.

I thank him for his concern and he asks if there is anything he can do to help.

I tell him I want three things:

1. Fifteen million dollars.
2. To never write a bad post again.

He asks what number three is and I say it is just for me. I don’t mention I have someone in mind I would share it with but that is only under certain conditions,

He tells me he can’t help with one or two and I say not to worry, time is a bitch but I can handle her/him/it.

It is part of why I focus on being A Man Of Faith and remember I may be slow but I usually figure it all out.

I am listening to Leonard Bernstein conduct Rodeo (Four Dance Episodes): Hoe-Down. Allegro with my eyes closed and my head tilted back. Won’t be long before Bernstein and company move into Fanfare For The Common Man and I let the music drive my thoughts.

Sometimes the best way for me to write is to shut off active thought and let the feelings that come with these moments wash over me and then take quill and pen to place them upon the page.

Today we are focused upon becoming a Man of Faith.

That is not a religious reference nor am I inclined to dedicate any space today to that line of thought. Maybe it is because I am mentally exhausted and emotionally drained or maybe it is just because I don’t see anything that interests me there…today.

Instead I am focused on reminding myself that sometimes I need to be a bigger believer in myself. It is sort of funny because those who know me are unlikely to describe me as anything less than confident and some might even say arrogant.

But we all have moments where we feel like we have fallen short of the mark we have set for ourselves.

A Man Of Faith

That picture above reminds me of days past when I was on the swim team and felt like I could swim forever. Hours of training combined with a desire to prove myself to me pushed me to test my limits.

There were days when I would hit the beach and swim through the waves straight out into the sea and not stop until the land looked far away.

Moments in the gym when I would look at stacks of weight and wonder if today was the day when I would curl and bench my weight. Wonder if today was the day when I could lift the side of the building up and create my own exit.

The silly thing is I always believed I could, all I needed was to find an appropriate grip for my hands.

But it wasn’t just the physical world that I looked at. I looked at school projects, class assignments and philosophy and believed there was nothing beyond my ability.

All I needed was time to focus upon whatever it was and I would figure it out.

Somewhere along the line life, circumstances and experiences took some of the fire out of my belly. Somewhere along the way I began to question whether I was overreaching and thought perhaps youthful naivete made me think more was possible than reality could provide.

Friends and family died from terminal illnesses. People divorced. Hearts were broken more than once and a harder edge than had ever existed became a part of me.

The Shiva Call

Last night I made a Shiva call. I went to visit a friend who buried his father last week and after the service was done we sat down and talked about life.

He and I had been very close in college but life intervened and he moved far away and so we lost touch. But last night as we sat there talking we shared memories and laughed.

I listened as he told me stories about his father and when he asked what was going on in my life I gave him an abridged but very honest answer. I told him about the challenges of middle school and said I wondered if I was giving my son good advice.

When I said it was easier when we were kids he laughed and said it was because we didn’t fear making mistakes the way parents do and something clicked inside my head.

Suddenly the forges inside my belly fired back up and I started thinking about who I was, who I am and who I intend on becoming.

I felt a mix of gratitude and embarrassment because in the midst of his grief he gave me a bigger gift than he knew. Maybe it was intentional, maybe it was coincidence but it gave me a momentary lift and that was enough.

Enough to remind me that sometimes we need to be people of faith in ourselves and our abilities.

I have a perfect record of overcoming every bad day I have had and while I can’t say I have never failed or fallen I have always gotten back up.

Look hard at the picture and you’ll see me swimming in the distance. Might even see me wrestling with a squid or fighting a great white shark. Feel sorry for those creatures, because Old Jack Steiner doesn’t ever quit.