Archives for 2014

They ask me “do you have secrets” and I just smile. I let them stew for a moment in the silence while I think about one of my favorite quotes.

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” Robert Frost

Yeah, I have secrets. Not just one, two or three but somewhere close to a hundred. Not sure how or why it happened, but I know that it did.

Some of it is just because of how I was raised and some of it is just how it works, life that is.

People have secrets, even those who say they don’t really do. They might not realize it but if you ask the right questions you’ll stumble upon them.

Most of my secrets aren’t really important. You wouldn’t call them important but for the request of another. They are secrets I share.

Perhaps the reason they aren’t important to me is because they aren’t mine. Maybe it is a mischaracterization to lay claim to them. Maybe it is more accurate to provide a different answer.

I don’t really know and I don’t think it matters. I keep them because they are important to the people who asked me to put them in my vault. Those requests come from people I love and hold close to my heart so I treat their secrets like my own.

But the few secrets I call my own are big. They are huge and at times they have made me wonder what I got myself into.

There is one that sits in the middle of the ring that Frost wrote about. It stares at me with eyes that cut through the poker face I try to maintain.

It demands my attention and asks for a declaration of intention. This is not something I can just ignore or forget. It requires more because to pretend it didn’t exist is to dishonor it and that I cannot do.

For a long while I have ignored my gut and the knowledge that one day the secret would break free of the shackles I placed upon it and force me to face it.

I don’t want to say I am afraid of it because fear is a weakness and men don’t like to be weak.

Yet the only way to figure out why it bothers me is to look at it during the daylight hours. The day is coming when I’ll do that and then we’ll find out if what I sense is real and discover if I am going to end up where I always suspected I would be.

Secrets & Questions

Sometimes secrets come with questions, ok most of the time they do but the nature of those questions is contingent upon who is asking them.

Give me an impossible situation and I will tell you how I am going to beat it. I have a plan. What, you say you want to see me fight a Great White Shark? Ok, no problem. First step is to agree that he/she has to fight me on land. It is a small step in equalizing the playing field, but not as large as you might think.

What, you say that it is not fair- sharks can’t breathe on land. Fine, I can’t breathe underwater. Ok, let’s pick a different animal. I’ll fight a gorilla, lion, bear or tiger on land. Snakes, crocodiles, alligators and water buffaloes are eligible for the famous Jack beat down as well.

Blame it on an over developed ego or an imagination that views the world in technicolor- but I just believe that in the end I will win. And that my friends is how I overcome adversity.- The Qualm Before The Storm

The pieces of this giant puzzle we call life are moving and I am doing my best to help push them into the appropriate places.

I suppose the biggest challenge I face is trying to figure out where to push the pieces because in some cases it is harder to tell what direction or move to make.

Unlike a plane or movie theater the aisles in life aren’t lit with a lined of row of glowing white lights pointing the right way to go and the secrets aren’t offering any suggestions either.

Confession: some of this uncertainty makes me a bit uneasy and a little antsy. I’d almost say it scares me but fear isn’t really what I am feeling either.

At the moment I am staring at one of my secrets with the kind of intensity that makes people uncomfortable. Staring hard because I am lost in thought about what to do.

Can’t do nothing and won’t spend much more time thinking because I am not going to let myself suffer from paralysis of analysis. Decisions will be made, action will be taken and then I’ll just roll with whatever comes because that is how it is done.

Ask me what I see now and I’ll tell you it might be influenced by the music I am listening to. It is the Wedding Celebration and Bottle Dance song from the Fiddler On The Roof Soundtrack.

I see people dancing with joy and reckless abandon and I see one of many potential paths.

When the music moves to The Breaking of The Fellowship from Lord Of The Rings the parade of images changes in my mind. Now I see the end of one path and the beginning of another.

It is a long, hard journey that can only be walked with or by a few. Can’t say if that is because only a few are needed or if because not all are capable of walking alongside us.

But when I think about I’m Not Gonna Miss You and the video that goes with it I feel a mix of sadness and resolve. Those clips of moments in his life and the knowledge they are going to be stripped from him pushes me to go collect as many of my own as I can make.

That is why I won’t be paralyzed by indecision.

Do You Have Secrets?

Yeah, I have a few and those that I keep are massive but they are mine and I am ok with that. Life is lived best by those who actively chase their dreams.

I may be a dreamer but I am not the one who just watches day turn into night and night turn into day.

Editor’s Note:  I took an old post from a few years ago and expanded it. Haven’t decided if I am happy with how it turned out yet, we shall see.

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.”