Archives for December 2015

Confession: Sometimes I use this joint as my own form of therapy. Can’t say it is better or more effective than seeing a shrink but it costs a lot less and there is no time lost in traffic or waiting rooms.

Consider that fair warning that this post might not be what you expect so now is the time to commit to going the distance or pointing and clicking your way to safety.

If you take that first step into the wild and walk with me you have my solemn pledge to do my best to protect you as best as I can, but remember as Tolkien wrote in The Hobbit:

“There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go.”

I made the decision long ago to do as I do and to go as I go, often choosing the road less taken as the best path to find my way knowing it would often be harder and lonelier.

It wasn’t always because I wanted to be different or to rebel but because it was the only way I knew how to live and the only path I could see.

Consider that a long-winded way of saying hindsight is 20-20 and there are moments where the biggest impediment to my success is/was me.

But they are bookended by the long list of successful ventures that would not have come about had I chosen to play it safe or to be conservative in my choices.

Is it obnoxious to turn one of your quotes into a graphic element and hope that people will use it and that their use will lead to more traffic/readers which in turn will generate more opportunity for you?

Doesn’t really matter if your answer is yes because I did it for the reasons I illustrated above and because I know that if you don’t ask, you often don’t get.

I think about this on a personal and professional level as both a person, writer and a father.

That is because experience has taught me that sometimes we have to be the proverbial squeaky wheel or we end up being overlooked and or missing out on opportunities.

And if you know me, you know that unfulfilled potential drives me crazy. If there is something that will push me to turn my face southwards so that I can see evidence of what I missed that is often it.

The thing about that is sometimes you can go back to do what you missed out upon and sometimes you can’t.

But the great contradiction of that last sentence is that you won’t always know whether it is possible to do so until you get there.

So going backwards might be the thing that propels you forwards or it might be the thing that holds you back from moving on and you can’t know which it is until you experience it.

I remind myself and try to teach my children to remember that mistakes can be great experiences to learn from and that who we are today doesn’t have to be who we are forever because you better believe I am not who I used to be.

And if I didn’t know to think of this my pal Elvis reminds me of this every time I listen to If I can Dream.

Love that song, especially these words:

“But as long as a man
Has the strength to dream
He can redeem his soul and fly”

I am that dreamer and I am the guy who will push to live my dreams.

The 17 Worst Ways To Avoid Dying

I used to blog without fail 7 days a week.

I did it for years and often updated most if not all of my blog as I went about it believing that the focus on writing would  be of benefit to me as a writer.

But a while back I noticed that I was feeling physically and mentally run down and decided to try to figure out the cause so that I could correct it.

I didn’t pinpoint a single cause but began to wonder if it was a combination of some physical issue and something else and decided to try to test it out.

At the time I couldn’t afford health coverage for myself so I didn’t see a doctor figuring I could and would fight through it until things changed and I could go in.

Since it coincided with a period of time that I saw as being among the hardest I have ever been through I figured some of it had to be connected and decided I needed to disconnect and spend more time away from the computer.

That provided some significant relief which is why I don’t blog as often on the weekends as I once did.

How does this all tie into the 17 worst ways to avoid dying?

The central theme of that is I don’t want to look back upon my life and see that fear kept me in jobs or things that sucked the life out of my soul.

I don’t want to wake up and discover I wasted time just passing time because I thought something better would tap me on the shoulder and say “it is time to change.”

It doesn’t mean there haven’t been moments where I felt some sick sensation in my gut or some sort of lightness of being that made me stop and think because there have been.

Doesn’t matter whether you believe in fate or destiny or free will, we have a tendency to look at that sick feeling as being related to the burrito we ate or the lightness as coming from the beer we just drank.

I want to be the conductor of my life, not the passenger.

A Final Comment

That sick feeling showed up on Friday afternoon, a sense that something isn’t right with certain things.

I hate the anticipation that comes with it and the sense of foreboding.  Sometimes I am the most patient person you met and sometimes I am not.

Got the feeling I better sharpen my sword because the battle is coming and I intend to win this one.

And there you have it another blog post in the books, you just never know whether you will read about blowjobs or The Difference Between Bloggers & Writers now do ya.

If I told you Gladiator is one of my favorite movies you might assume it is because it fits the stereotypical action flick that many people, especially men enjoy.

There is truth to that, but it doesn’t explain all of what I love about it and neither will this post because it is not going to be a school essay about why Jack Steiner thinks Gladiator is cool.

Instead we’ll say I like it for the action, the love story, the imagery and Maximus, the protagonist. If you really need more and you know me well enough to reach by telephone you can inquire if you must.

But before you reach out and try to touch me let’s take a moment to think/consider some advice that some writers provide to other writers.

They say when you are writing fiction and are developing your characters you should consider writing the ending first and working backwards.

Figure out where you want your character(s) to end up, place them there and then work backwards on developing and describing how it all happens.

And that my friends makes me think of the line below from the opening battle of Gladiator:

There is a certain elegance and simplicity involved in that.

Focus on doing your job well and don’t be distracted. Ride hard, be death incarnate on the battle field and in a short time you can go back to being a farmer.

Hell, isn’t that what we all want for our lives. Isn’t that what we are asking our politicians to provide.

“If you work hard and do a good job then you are guaranteed a house with a two car garage, a family vacation each year and the ability to retire at a young enough age to enjoy it.

You Know How The Story Ends

If you ask me if I know how the story ends in my fiction I’ll tell you I always have a rough idea about where the folks will end up but I don’t really know how they got there so this is the kind of  idea that works for me.

In part it is because I like letting my characters write their storylines and show me how it all happens. It makes for a nice surprise.

But if you ask me as a father, friend and man to address it, well I’ll tell you that we all have hopes and dreams but most of us don’t have a fucking clue as to how it will all play out with the kind of certainty a writer can provide a fictional character.

Hell, if I didn’t learn that from the shit I referred to in this post than I would be blind, deaf, dumb and stupid, which I might add is a nicer description of me than was expressed by a guy at the store earlier this week.

I can tell why he was upset with me.

He thinks I stole his parking space and that I don’t understand the rules of the parking lot which in his world mean you park your car at one end of an aisle and wait to see if someone exits the lot.

Maybe if he had used a turn signal to indicate he was waiting for a space it might have ended differently, but he didn’t so when I came down the aisle I drove around his car and headed down a solid 60 feet or so and stumbled upon a space.

When he accosted me about the aforementioned space I told him I was sorry and kept walking. When he kept yapping at me I told him I knew how this story would end and said it was very unpleasant for him.

So maybe I do know more about how things go in real life.

My Own Soundtrack

If I was king of the world and not just a regular dad blogger I might have an orchestra follow me around so that I could have my own theme or soundtrack play during moments like the one I just shared.

I could have pretended to Force choke the guy to the Imperial march or used the music from Gladiator and said something like:

My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the TRUE emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.

Hell, if that didn’t get his attention and make him run away I am not sure what would.

It Makes For Great Blog Fodder

The beauty of ordinary life is that it makes for great blog fodder.

The simple moments often provide the fabric and foundation of stories worth memorializing on these pages and posts.

That is not snark or sarcasm, it is my real belief.

That’s because there is more beauty in the simple moments than we sometimes recognize and it is only later that we see how it was the simple things that made up the moments we treasure and miss.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t bookended or intermixed with those in which the ordinary became extraordinary because they are, but sometimes we spend too much time looking too far ahead and not enough on the present.

Maybe it is because we forget that when you know how the story ends it doesn’t preclude the importance of living out the time that leads to that moment.

You have to do the work if you want to get there.

Those aren’t just words to me, they are gospel.

I know how the story ends, now I just have to work it all out.

Five years ago I wrote a letter to my children about having to say goodbye to their great-grandfather, my grandfather.

We went to see him a day or two before he died, knowing full well that his light was dimming and about to go out…forever.

He was like  A Flickering Candle, a week or so before my son and I had taken him with us to the tux shop to be fitted for my sister’s wedding.

When my son tried on his tux, grandpa grabbed my hand and squeezed it, he smiled at me and told me how proud I should be.

We both smiled and then when my son complained about the tie, grandpa and I laughed together and that was when I knew he would never make it to the wedding.

I didn’t know for certain that he was going to die, but when he told me again that grandma should be there with us I knew his strength and will were fading.

What I didn’t Know Then

The list of what I didn’t know then but know now could fill two libraries, assuming I figured out how to articulate it and say what I have learned in a way that people could understand.

But I don’t think I could do so, even if I wanted to and I don’t want to.

Not because it is filled with some very painful moments but because I don’t think I would ever be satisfied with the quality of my explanation and that would bother me.

In part because the reality is the boy and the man that my grandfather knew is gone. The fires I walked and danced my way through changed me and though I see and hear echoes of that other guy, they are just memories.

Now the echoes I pay attention to are sonar like pings of the future I am walking into.

But if I had to try to tell you something about that time I would say I had no idea that it would take as long as it did for me to feel like I knew what direction I was heading in.

I’d tell you that the chaos really started around the day of my other grandfather’s funeral, back in 2006.

If you flip back through the pages here you’d find a post that talked about how my boss fired me that day.

Yeah, he fired me the day of my grandfather’s funeral knowing full well what day it was and that set our world on fire, but I didn’t have a clue as to how severe it would be.

Truth is by the time of my other grandfather’s funeral I thought I had figured things out…more or less.

But I hadn’t.

A Different Chanukah Celebration

This year is the first Chanukah in a number of years that I feel relaxed and good about celebrating it.

It is the first in forever where I feel like a real person again and like we are celebrating on terms that don’t upset or embarrass me.

Chanukah 2014 was tough because I wasn’t employed.

I had been, I had a great job and was earning real money but the contract expired and wasn’t renewed.

By the time Chanukah 2014 rolled around I hadn’t been out of work very long at all but unexpected bills rolled through and life happened all around me so I had virtually nothing.

If my kids didn’t have generous grandparents and family they would have gotten the equivalent of underwear and socks.

Every day was a fight and a struggle just to pay normal bills and find a way to get through, so gifts weren’t a priority and don’t talk to me about smiles and cheer.

But we made it through and a year later things are a thousand percent better.

A thousand percent better and I gave them a gift I had promised to come up with three years ago.

To be clear it wasn’t something I failed to follow through on three years ago, it was something I said would come when Steiner the minor hit high school.

It was important to me to deliver, not so much because I had told him three years ago that I would but because last year it felt impossible.

It wasn’t.

Perspective

Maybe those moments I shared and other experiences from life are part of why I smile now when I see the words below.

Maybe they are part of why I nod my head when I read these words too.

Steiner the minor asks me how I can be so damned stubborn and relentless about things.

His question is in reference to how I can walk into his room and instantly spot whatever he hasn’t done that I have asked him to do.

I tell him he comes from a long line of men that have all had that gift and explain it is something my dad and grandfathers did too.

He asks me if it is useful to be able to spot a pair of dirty socks or an empty water bottle on the floor.

I smile and tell him life is filled with parts and pieces and that big victories are built upon small.

He shakes his head at me and I share some specific examples about group projects and how the successful ones worked because one or two of us were willing to do the dirty work.

“Dad, how does this relate to my socks?”

Successful people don’t cry about picking up their socks or spend time moaning about what is fair. They just pick them up and keep going.”

He shakes his head and looks at me again, but he picks up his socks and takes them to the hamper.

I can still feel grandpa squeezing my hand and here him telling me how proud he was. I can see his smile and hear him say he talks to grandma every night and he’ll tell her about this.

“You are going to be ok Jack, you just keep walking forward and you are going to be ok.”

“I did and I am grandpa, I keep going. It is what I learned and what I do.”