Life

Sometimes things happen and you find yourself somewhere between the familiar landscape of heartbreak and hope.

You look out the window of the train and pray it stops on the right side of the tracks but hold your breath because you know you can’t do a damn thing to impact it.

All you can do is hold on and see what happens.

It makes me think of sucker punches and suckers.

 

Of Fury & Rage

Hit some pretty big bumps in the road and found myself involved in an unexpected and unnecessary struggle.

Took a deep breath and told myself to do as I tell the kids to do, “breathe, think, breathe and work it out.”

And then I discovered the cause of the struggle could be traced back to an intentional act by someone else.

That brought out my inner Taurus and the horns were lowered and I had to work hard to not go out on a mission of seek-and-destroy.

In the midst of it all music rescues the moment.

How?

Sophie B. Hawkins singing Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover.

Suddenly it is 1992 and I am all of 23 and hanging out in a bar in Santa Monica with some of the boys. The song comes on and a group of girls start dancing and singing along.

A couple of them are staring at us and we work extra hard to try and look cool while simultaneously debating whether they’re serious or not.

“That blond wants me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she is staring hard.”

“You’re an idiot, she is staring at me.”

I listen the guys go back and forth and occasionally add my own comments. I am not convinced they have any interest in us and am not sure I want to be the guy to walk over to the group and get shot down.

“Jack, I’ll bet $20 dollars you can’t get a phone number.”

I smile and tell him I’ll take his money.

I walk over to the group and tell them I need their help.

“My friend bet me $20 I can’t get one of your telephone numbers. He is a cocky pain in my ass. If you give me a number that I can bring back I’ll take his money and give you the $20.”

One of the girls smiles kisses my cheek and then writes down a number and sends me back across the bar.

I take the $20, turn and deliver it.

Mission accomplished.

Some hours later I try the number and get an answering machine upon which I leave a message. The call is never returned.

Sucker Punches & Suckers

I don’t know that I agree with Freud but I have told the kids there is a benefit to struggling.

You learn how to appreciate what you have and the work it to took to gain/acquire and or obtain it.

Most of the time I believe it to be true and feel like I ought to be open to one day looking back upon the beauty of the struggle.

But the thing is I am killing myself right now to make the things work and worrying about a million different things,

I am busting my ass to not get knocked upon it by another sucker punch or punches and wondering if maybe I am the sucker.

I woke up before my alarm wondering if the tornado sirens were going off unsure of where I was and wondering if the screaming I heard was coming from my own lips.

Took a deep breath, opened my eyes and found myself lying on top of the comforter with a desperate need to empty my bladder.

Sat up and stretched and silently demanded all parts of my body behave.

There will be no mystery aches or brains and no discovery of bruises whose unknown origin irk me.

The only response I got was from my bladder saying it didn’t care where it was emptied and that I had a short time to figure it out.

Rolled out of bed and figured I should be grateful because I drank about 32 ounces of water after 10. Some of the boys tell me doing that guarantees a middle of the night bathroom visit.

Took care of the first part of the morning routine and asked why I feel like I am panicking.

It’s Just A Blog

I have two main blogs and a handful of others that I still support but I don’t know how long that will continue.

Time and energy are huge factors in why I wrestle with condensing what I have in to just a couple of places.

Limited resources are best used in ways in which we get the most out of what we have, or so I muttered to myself.

You may ask yourself why I am not more decisive and says it is just a blog.

Since you can’t see inside my head you haven’t any understanding about how proud I am of some of the work I have produced and how valuable writing is for me.

In the five minutes that have passed since I started writing this post I have noticed a distinct release in tension and pressure.

That sense of panic and dread is fading because putting pen to paper triggered something inside my head, clarifying what caused the upset.

Now that I understand what set me off I can say there is a reason for the discomfort and concern. It is there because there is a situation that I have limited control over and it could get ugly.

But knowing why I feel as I do is usually good enough for me. It takes some conscious effort to push aside and push through, but I can do it.

It doesn’t quite explain why I hear Banarama singing Cruel Summer but it does remind me of ’84, the beach and girls in bikinis.

That was a good summer.

I Want Candy

My reverie is interrupted by a Snapchat from my daughter as she walks into middle school and her 7th-grade commentary sends me back a few more years.

It is the spring of ’82 and I am at Magic Mountain in Valencia. This band called Bow Wow Wow is going hold a concert there and the park with filled with punkers.

There are people with mohawk haircuts, leather jackets and a ton of earrings and piercings. Might not look as shocking today as it did then, but back then they made a statement.

As I wander through the park with friends The Waitresses song I know What Boys Like starts playing on the overhead speakers.

Doesn’t take long for some of the girls around the park to start dancing and singing along to it. The guys and I look at each other, thinking about times we have been teased.

Girls are the great mystery to us. One moment they’re holding our hand and or doing more and the next they ignore us.

We can’t figure out what the hell they are thinking and aren’t convinced they know either.

Fast forward 35 years and some of the conversations with my single friends still sound the same. I imagine women probably say the same about us.

Don’t Stop Believin’

Someone tell Chuck I am doing it and that I am encouraging my kids to do it too.

Can’t just pass through life, got to live and live hard. Make your mark and whenever you reach that finish line you’ll feel better.

That is what I tell myself and the moments when it feels like the bull I am riding is about to throw me are the best and the worst.

So I go back to my eighties music and pull out Journey.

Saw them in concert in August of 2015 and was a part of a crowd of people singing Don’t Stop Believin’.

Man, I am legitimately nervous about some stuff, but it only takes a couple of hits from these arrows to give me a little swagger.

Enough to be almost cocky, but not quite.

Paying anything to roll the dice just one more time or something like that. 😉

I want to say yes to the question I posed in the title and I suppose if I wanted to I could make a case for how it can.

We would talk about how you could use older posts to track how certain things went and use that information to make some informed predictions.

Could be kind of fun to do that but the areas I most want information on aren’t the sort that are easily speculated upon.

That is because we are talking about people and there is often no rhyme or reason to why or how we make the decisions we do.

We like to say there is but if you dig into a lot of those decisions you find you are buying Honda because your father always bought Honda and that has relieved you of the need to really check them out.

Maybe you analyze prices and review dealerships, but the hard research might already be done just because that is what dad bought.

That is not a value judgment or me saying it is bad, it is just acknowledging there isn’t as much logic and reason done for decision making as we sometimes like to believe.

Situations & Circumstances

I am working on finding a solution or solutions to a situation that I have been dealing with for almost a year now.

That is in addition to a couple of other things that have been ping ponging around for a decade or longer.

It is frustrating because it feels like my ability to act as I wish is limited by situations and circumstances that are beyond my control.

Sometimes I am very good with handling those things because if I can’t do any more than I have done I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

But there are things like the aforementioned but not described situation where I feel frustrated because I am certain we are close to a workable and practical solution.

Certain that if I can just get the parties involved to open their eyes they’ll see the door and walk out of the rooms they have locked themselves in.

Convinced the only reason they haven’t is because I haven’t done a proper job of illuminating the idea and lighting the path.

So when I don’t see things going the way I want it makes me crazy and then I think about what I say to my kids about banging our heads against a wall.

I take a deep breath and ask myself if I am really going about it in the right way.

There Is a Cat

There is a cat and if I were like our new president I wouldn’t ask for permission to just reach out and grab it.

But I am not him and so I have to ask not that it matters because the room is so dark I am sure where I ought to try grabbing first.

Of course if I could use the blog to see the future I would be more relaxed about all this because I would know what was going to happen and could plan accordingly.

I can’t so I sit here thinking about a variety of things and hearing a couple of phrases echo in my head:

“You are only as happy as your happiest kid.”

and

“Little kids, little problems, big kids, big problems.”

Manage Life

Right now I am doing my best to manage life and all that comes with it as best I can.

Got one hell of a stomach-ache and a whisper inside my head says maybe this won’t pass, maybe this is the one that sticks around for life, like luggage.

But I also have my Taurus determination and willingness to dig in and go through, over, under or around the wall.

There very well may be a solid solution that I haven’t thought or come across and that optimism pushes me to go forward.

You miss every pitch you don’t take a swing at, so I am swinging.