Archives for February 2016

Three years later I am sitting in a place I never expected to be, living again where I never expected to live, doing what I had thought I had given up.

Is it coincidence or circumstance that has The Winner Takes It All playing on iTunes now or something in between.

I go back to Lessons Of The Blog Fathers and stare at the Dallas skyline and think about Superbowl Sunday 2013 and remember how I spent that day.

Instead of attending the traditional Superbowl party with family and friends I sat in my hotel room in Fort Worth and tried to plan out the next day and part of the next week.

That is because I had just spent three days driving through five states with two suitcases, a laptop, some pots, pans and a weight set so that I could start a new job.

I had two days to find a better hotel to stay at while I looked for an apartment and didn’t know a single person I could ask for help.

Confessions Of An Almost Ordinary Man

A few moments have passed between when I started writing this post and Abba has moved on to SOS.

In between then and now I came up with Confessions Of An Almost Ordinary Man as both headline and subhead.

Played around with trying to focus on something that would generate more clicks and more interest but settled on this one because my gut likes the feel of it.

Made a lot of decisions to or not do things in life based upon that gut and have come to accept it as being a decent measure of what I should or should not do.

But have also come to accept that sometimes fear clouded my judgment and I passed upon some things that I should not have passed upon.

Ask me to share my regrets and almost all of them are tied into something that fear made me pass up, but fortunately there really aren’t too many of those.

Unfortunately the few regrets I do have are pretty damn big.

*****

Sometimes I think about the whole ordinary man thing and wonder where I really want to hang my hat because I never want to settle for being just one of the many and yet sometimes that is exactly what I want or see.

I guess what that means is that if you ask me to describe myself I’ll usually say I am just an ordinary guy who has had the fortune to live through some extraordinary times and moments.

Better to be humble, or so I try to be but the reality is I know that is not entirely how I see myself and sometimes that ego pushes up hard enough for me to say I am an idiot to try and describe myself as being just another guy.

Because if you want certain things you have to market yourself as being more than the plain wrap version of a person.

More Comments & More Shares

Sometimes I think about it in context of trying to get more comments and more shares from you, whomever you are, ya know the readers of these posts.

Sometimes I think about it and say if I push a bit harder for those things and ask for more help in marketing myself and this joint I’ll get more opportunities.

*****

That is when I realize I am back in the do as I say not as I do phase that I sometimes fall into.

Steiner the minor is painfully shy and hates being the center of attention. That kid almost always knows the answer to any question the school teachers ask but will never raise his hand because he would prefer never to be called upon.

I push him to step outside of his comfort zone and tell him there are some benefits and opportunities he is missing out upon because of his refusal to do so and he tells me he is ok with that.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that even though I have never been afraid to be the center of attention or to speak in public his refusal isn’t really that different from some of the things I have refused to do.

He is me and I am him…except when we are not.

That is one of my favorite quotes and so is this one.

Why?

Because I have taken an active role in living my dreams and not dreaming my life.

Some people have described me as being single-minded of purpose and I would agree with them.

There are dreams I have chased after with purpose and intent. I have taken action because the only way to move from losing time thinking about what could be is to do something about it.

Dad Must Act

Three years ago I sat in that Marriott and mapped out my Monday.

Since Tuesday was going to be my first day at the new job I figured it made sense to drive into downtown Fort Worth and figure out where my office would be.

Didn’t care that I had a GPS in the car and one of my phone because sometimes technology fails and I wanted to make sure I knew where I was going so that I would be on time.

What I hadn’t accounted for was how much more traffic I had to contend with in LA so I breezed into downtown Fort Worth almost an hour faster than I had planned on.

Almost nothing was like I had planned, but in so many ways it worked out better than I could have imagined.

Dad had to act, had to shake things up and do things differently because what I had been doing before wasn’t working anymore.

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Three years later I am back in LA, trying to figure out if I took three steps forward and one step back.

Three years later I am uncertain about some of the choices I made because some things are dramatically better and others feel like I have done nothing but rejoined a treadmill I had jumped off of.

 

Want to know what I share in common with the lion in the picture above?

We’re both fathers and he is whispering in his kid’s ear, probably something like “you better knock it off now because if you don’t I will embarrass you in front of your friends and take you home.”

Don’t ask me to provide you with a list of all of the other things we share in common because this isn’t one of those obnoxious list posts like The 25 Most Annoying Bloggers & Why You Can’t Sleep With Them.

It is another post about Breaking The Rules of Blogging but this one is not being written for entertainment or educational purposes but because my heart hurts.

Similar But Different

My parents sold the house I grew up in and after 44 years my childhood home is no more.

It is sort of a bittersweet moment because it was the right move for them and if I was in their shoes I would have done it too, but when I stop being dad and let go of the adult world it changes a bit.

If you go back to The Story Of A House- The Final Days you might gain some sense of some of why but  unless you have been through similar things you won’t get the  depth of emotion and feeling that comes with it.

That kind of bothers me, not as a person but as a writer because my inclination is to try to figure out how to paint a picture that you can see.

Because if I can’t make you see and feel it, well then I am not doing my job, I am failing and though I have failed many times I don’t like the taste of it very much.

Still failure is no something I fear because there is no reward without risk and that is something I have tried very hard to pass along to my children.

Life is a risk and if you don’t take chances it isn’t a whole lot of fun, at least not from my perspective.

I sit here at the kitchen table and stare out at the darkness and realize that the days of writing from this vantage point are rapidly coming to an end. I sit here and stare out at the darkness and think about how August 2011 will be the month that I remember for burying my grandfather, my sister’s wedding, moving and one hell of a family vacation.

It is not easy to measure time or to figure out how to identify the marks and moments until after things have happened.

That is because the big moments aren’t limited to birthdays, weddings and funerals. They are bookended and earmarked by the ordinary, mundane activities that are indistinguishable from the next until you realize they shouldn’t be.

I remember having a conversation with my father about the future and how his commentary shocked me.

That is because in many ways my dad is the typical Virgo, he is ridiculously organized, has lists and labels for everything and in my mind has always been a planner.

One day we sat in the living room of my old house and he told me that you could never plan for the future with the degree of certainty we want to.

“Jack, you can plan a year or two out but you can’t really say what is going to happen in five years or ten. You don’t know where you will be, what you will be doing or what things will look like. You’ll try, you’ll do your best but you won’t be able to see with the sort of clarity you want.”

He was right.

I wrestled with how to write this post.

Wrestled with whether to insert that now famous Steve Jobs quote about how our time is limited or to break up the post with some cool pictures.

Struggled with how to write this in a way that would give it the weight and impact I wanted.

Struggled because part of me feels heartbroken and it seems silly to be that upset about four walls and a roof.

People are important, things are not. Things are just things.

But then again, things become important because of the memories we associate with them and those memories are tied into people.

I wanted to write this last night, but after the final walkthrough in my house I was exhausted.

In the past I would have forced myself to write, but this time I decided to let it sit and see what happened.

Perspective- There Are Bigger Challenges

I haven’t forgotten and am not ignoring that there are bigger problems in the world than having to say goodbye to a house.

Hell if you go back to the link about the final days of a house you’ll see one of the low moments of my life.

I was unemployed and forced to sell that house because I couldn’t see any way to avoid foreclosure.

I had sent out thousands of applications, applied to unload trucks and done everything I could to find work and had come up with nothing.

That is when failure and I got real close and intimate.

I had trouble trying to imagine a time when I would feel like a person, like a real man again.

Maybe that sounds goofy to some of you, but that was when I realized that even though I do my own thing socialization had taken ahold of me.

Men are raised to provide for our families and a man who can’t do that doesn’t feel like a man.

It was brutal. It hurt.

But I got through it all and I came out the other side.

Cue, He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.

Storm Walker and Fire Dancer

There is more than one reason why I call myself a storm walker and a fire dancer.

Life experience has proven that when I set my mind to it, I get where I am going. I may not do it the easy way but I make it happen.

That road not taken suits me just fine and though life doesn’t like I thought it would all those years ago in that bedroom I walked through I am certain all will work out.

Hell, this post hasn’t gone as I had thought or planned it would either but I feel better and that is a gift I won’t give back.

I am grateful my kids got to spend real time in the house I grew up in and that they got time with their grandparents and great-grandparents there.

They got to eat oranges from the tree we planted when I was five and played soccer at the same park I did growing up.

So many good memories and so little time.

Damn, I am going to miss my house.

That picture of Dallas at night got me thinking about driving through the desert and the things I saw on a five state journey that could have easily been described as the original long and winding road.

The man who left Los Angeles for Texas didn’t come back but then again the guy who left Texas for Los Angeles wasn’t really the same either.

That is the sort of convoluted and contradictory statement that only a few people could understand and even then it is questionable if they would really get it.

I suppose it begs the question of whether that serves or hurts me as a writer because if the goal is to connect with people and make them feel something, well simple is usually better.

Ask your readers to answer a question like Could You Be Steve Jobs or share a post like The Reason Your Blog Is a Failure and you’ll have a better shot at connecting with multiple and not just some people.

Of course that is only pertinent if it meets with your goal and if it doesn’t, well then just write baby.

What I Saw When The Clouds Lifted

If you want to know what made me decide to write this post you ought to go read Jericho because something made me think of it and that sent a bunch of thoughts pinballing through my head.

I thought about trying to share a fragment or two here to see if that would help illustrate it better for you and for I because sometimes I write to figure out what it is I am really thinking/feeling.

But I couldn’t decide what to share, so I might just drop a few lines in a moment knowing it is not painting the picture the way I want it to.

I met Jericho in a time and place that no longer exist. The people we were are long since gone. Now they drift through time and space in a place that I call memory or perhaps it is just my imagination. If you ask Jericho she’d probably push for imagination. She’d want to say that what I remember has been obscured by my own desire for the future. She’d tell you that it was never as good as I remember it.

What Do People See In Your Eyes?

Remember when I asked what do people see in your eyes?

Today someone told me they saw my eyes change and swore they could see laughter behind them morph into something else.

Sunday afternoon my mother told me to sit down so that she could look in them and told me that parenting goes too fast.

“I am not ready to have a son who is 50.”

“That is ok mom, I am not 50 and I won’t be for a while.”

“It feels strange to think that not long ago you had to look up at me and now, I have to look up at you. When did you get so tall. Don’t answer, it is not a question and I don’t want to hear some crack about my age.”

When I wrote Jericho I wasn’t familiar with The Wichita Lineman which is too bad because it would have been appropriate, it would have fit.

Hell, in many ways it still fits but like I said, it is hard to really say if the man that wrote that piece would have appreciated it as much as this one does.

That is because life experiences have made a significant dent upon me and my perspective. I am not who I used to be and in many ways exactly who I am supposed to be.

Wonder if by the time I am 50 how many of the changes that need to happen will still be waiting in the wings and how many will have already passed.

You Never Know What Is Coming

The kids and I have had multiple conversations about how we never know what is coming and the importance of rolling with things and taking advantage of opportunities.

Patsy Cline is singing Walking After Midnight now. She follows another Glen Campbell song called I am Not Gonna Miss You.

I like that one, but it is heartbreaking because if you listen to the lyrics and know the story behind it you know the man is…unraveling.

It is not by choice, it is just one of those things that sometimes happens.

Stuff like that is why I tell the kids we have to live hard and live now.

But I am more balanced when I talk about it with them. I don’t want to scare them because even though shit happens, it might not happen to us.

So there is this fine line in my head of doing what we can to plan and prepare for the future while recognizing we can’t put everything off to do on a different day.

Don’t talk to me about someday because someday might not ever come. Someday has to be today, expect when it can’t or it shouldn’t because if you blow all your cash today you might not have to retire tomorrow.

Cue Walt Whitman for me, will you, it is time for a final quote to end this post.

What did I see when the clouds lifted?

I saw happiness. I saw opportunity. I saw a bright future and a couple of big bumps that would have to be handled.

The prize isn’t just handed to you, you have to earn it. See you later, this old man needs to grab some shut eye so he can go battle again tomorrow.