The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

marriage

An Ugly Divorce

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I have avoided writing about Jon and Kate Gosselin. I don’t find it to be particularly interesting and more importantly I feel badly for their children.

I haven’t any false ideas about marriage. I do not believe that every relationship is made to last and I am not of the opinion that people should stay married just for the children.

Anyhoo, I signed onto CNN and saw that Jon Gosselin says that he despises his wife and decided to give my two cents. I couldn’t tell you if she is the worst wife ever or the best. I don’t watch their show, but when I read that I got irritated.

Irritated because two adults decided to become reality television stars, decided to chronicle their lives on television. That is all fine and good, but now they are chronicling what appears to be a very ugly divorce on camera.

Now they are placing their children in a terrible position. They shouldn’t have to worry about strangers asking if their mom is a bitch or their dad is a jerk. They shouldn’t be able to have the end of their parent’s marriage immortalized on camera. It is wrong.

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Save The Last Dance For Me- 75 Years of Marriage

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Not so long ago I explained my belief in astrology. It is very simple. If I like my horoscope than I believe wholeheartedly in it and if I don’t I write it off as being nothing more than superstitious bunk. I do the same thing for most of the new agey stuff.

Don’t tell me that if I ask the universe to give me a gift it will come true. Because if that was true than back in high school good old Ann Stacey would have been really attentive to my needs. But I digress.

This afternoon I saw something that might have made me question my beliefs a bit. This afternoon I watched two 95 year-olds dance themselves back in time. And then I saw them kiss in a way that made me remember that Sarah was older than my grandmother when she gave birth to Isaac.

Great googly moogly, grandma and grandpa kissed each other like they really meant it. If nothing else they managed to make my son ask why grown ups like to kiss so much.

I told him not to worry about it and to watch them dance because he might not get to see it again to which he replied, “are they going to die?” I rolled my eyes in mock exasperation and said yes. For a moment he stared at me and they I told him that I didn’t expect it to happen today.

But the truth is that this might have been the last dance and that makes me a bit sad. My grandparents are one of the constants of my entire life. For forty years they have always been a part of it. I have seen them dance at untold numbers of family parties, weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs etc. They always spent time together out on the dance floor. It occurred to me that I am not sure when I last saw them dance.

I hadn’t realized until that moment that dancing is one of the images I have of them. But when I think about it is easy to envision them gliding around the floor. Confession time. I remember being about 15 and thinking that if I could dance as well as my grandfather it would make it a lot easier to find a girlfriend.

For a brief time I tried practicing in front of the mirrored closet doors in my parent’s bedroom, but that didn’t last long. As a 15 year old boy dancing wasn’t something that I was real comfortable with. I didn’t want to talk about it and wasn’t about to ask for lessons. Maybe I should of have.

Nah…

Anyhoo, it was all part of an anniversary party that we threw to celebrate their 75th year of marriage. The best part of it was seeing how much fun they had. Later on we went back to my parent’s house for dinner.

I got a kick out of watching them sit on the couch holding hands. It was very sweet and I couldn’t help but wonder what they were like 75 years ago. They got married twice. The first time was a secret wedding at the court house. So for a year they lived at home and pretended to be dating.

I’ll share more about them in part two of this story.

The Search For Happiness

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You can call this post The Search For Happiness. It is one of those posts in which I find myself thoroughly unsatisfied with the end result. I had 800 words or so written down but I decided that I just didn’t like it so I nuked it and started over. This is the result.

As a child I had a lot of different dreams about what I would be when I grew up. Many of them were the typical things that you might here. Professional athlete, Fireman, President, Lawyer, Doctor, Sports writer.

As time passed so did my interest in some of those dreams. I suppose that you could say that my interest in being a pro athlete never did pass, but my ability didn’t allow for that particular dream to continue. I’ll write more about this in a different post.

My interest in some of those other professions waxed and waned over the years for a variety of reasons. Some of it was due to practical reasons and some of it due to what you could call extenuating circumstances. It is fair to say that part of the personal challenge for myself and a number of my friends is the lack of burning desire to become a (fill in the blank). I’ll readily admit to feeling mild jealously to those few people I know who are doing exactly what they love.

I don’t want to live to work. I work to live. See I can rattle off all the little cliches. I don’t want a job, I want a career. But there is so much truth in those thoughts. Life is very short and I want to enjoy it with passion and with gusto. I want to wake up feeling like I am ready to attack the day. It still happens from time to time, but not with the frequency I want.

If you ask why I can give you a list of reasons and I can give you a rudimentary framework for how I am trying to change the areas that are deficient. But I would be remiss if I didn’t try and explore how I got to this place and why.

The simplest answer is that people change. I am just not who I was. Many of the things that used to be important to me are just not all that exciting or interesting to me. Many of the things that I thought that I wanted fall into the category of not necessary.

When the boys and I sit down and discuss this we all agree that life experiences are responsible for creating this change in us. It is a bit unsettling. I have always found big changes to be a bit tough. But I also know that I can’t continue along the path I am walking on without making some adjustments.

One of the guys told me that he fears that he won’t find a place where he feels truly happy and that right now all he wants is to focus upon being happy in the moment. I understand that. I have always been a bit restless and felt this sort of wanderlust. I have wondered if that is always going to prevent me from really enjoying life. But when I think about it I realize that I have a lot of really good memories and some of them are in the very recent past.

The very recent past. That gives me hope and strength. It is a reminder that I am not looking backwards and saying that the best is behind me. It means that there is no reason why the best is not yet to come.

This search for happiness is a very personal and intimate thing. For me at times it has been a struggle and I suspect that there are going to be some very tough moments ahead. But I have to do as I teach my children.

That means I need to identify the problem and try and determine what the solution is. And as I tell the children it means that before I ask for help I need to determine if I can solve it myself. Too bad it is not as simple as the challenges that they come to me with.

In the not so distant future the kids and I are going to have more discussions about how to deal with a challenge head on. I see too many of the parents of their friends creating future issues by always fixing things for their kids, but that is a separate issue altogether.

What I do know for certain is that if I want my children to succeed on their own quest for happiness I have to give them the tools to do so. One way to do so is to let them learn from their father’s experience.

And that is all I have to say about this for now.

If You Could See The Future Would You Want To

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In the midst of all of the current chaos I have heard a number of people say that they wish that they could see the future. It is kind of a nice dream. It sounds like the sort of thing that would be useful. It is a practical skill. See the future and you can be sure that you’ll always make the right decisions. At least that is the theory.

There was a time in my life that I used to be one of those people who wanted to know what was going to happen. I’d like to say that it was because I wanted to plan ahead. I’d like to say that it was because I wanted to stay a step ahead of the game. Those were certainly part of the reasons why I wanted that particular skill at that particular time.

But the rules of the blog dictate brutal honesty so I have to acknowledge that it was also because I was a 20 year-old kid who was heartbroken. A relationship had ended and I really wanted to know what was going to happen. Friends who tried to console me told me all sorts of good stories. I heard about their breakups and why they thought that splitting up had been a blessing in disguise.

The reasons varied. Sometimes it was because they led to new opportunities and sometimes it was because the couple had to have time apart so that they could grow and then come back together. But the common theme there was that splitting up was ultimately a good thing. There were one or two exceptions. I heard from a couple of people who said that breaking up had been the worst thing ever. I remember telling one of my friends that he should never consider being a therapist. I think that I said something to the effect of “you’d be the guy who handed the suicidal patient a gun.”

Anyhoo, I was like so many other people. I just wanted to know what was going to happen. Would the struggle be worth it. Was it going to lead to some incredible experience or relationship. Was the end really the beginning of something new. I remember looking up at the sky and saying that I was ready for the door to open. It was in reference to that line about one door closes and another opens.

If you ask me today if I’d like to be able to see the future I am not so sure that I would want to. I don’t really want to know when I am going to die. Sure you could make an argument that if we knew when we were going to die we’d live our lives differently. I already try to do that. I try not to make excuses to do certain things because you don’t know when the end is coming. Still, I don’t want to know the exact date. It is more interesting to me to wonder if I have another 200 years.

I am curious to see what sort of people my children are going to grow up to be. I wonder what sort of careers they’ll have and what they’ll be like. I wonder what my own life will look like in five years. What about ten or twenty or fifty years. What kinds of memories will I have. Will I have lived the life I wanted to live.

Foresight would be nice. It’d be useful to have some sense of things. I’d probably find it easier to relax. I wouldn’t worry about going bankrupt or dying of some dread disease because I’d already know about it and be prepared.

I am no different than anyone else. If I could change the past there are some things that I would have done differently. There are jobs that I wouldn’t have taken and relationships that never would have been. But I can’t help but wonder what I might have missed out upon. There are so many interconnected threads. If I don’t follow one path I’d never hit the fork in the road that led me to the other one that gave me that great whatever.

So I think that I am kind of glad that I can’t see the future. While I appreciate the thought of not suffering through some of the struggles in the same way I come back to the appreciation of surprises. I can’t and won’t say that they are all good, but there is something nice about not knowing. The uncertainty has its own rewards.

I suppose that it all helps to explain why sometimes I like to gamble and take a risk here and there.

What do you think?

Gay Marriage- Proposition 8

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This post will probably be relatively graphic in nature so if you’re easily offended this is your chance to skip it. If you want to know what I think without the gratuitous commentary you can find it here and here.

I have been wracking my brain trying to find a way to understand the thought process of those who oppose gay or same sex marriage. I have tried to understand their logic. One supporter of Prop. 8 told me that for thousands of years marriage has been understood to be between a man and a woman.

Ok. We could make the same argument about how it was understood that the Earth was flat, the moon was made out of cheese or that the sun revolves around the Earth. All of these were proven to be false, but for a considerable period of time these positions were understood to be true.

A guy at the gym tried to tell me that he was against it because it was unnatural. He was granted the gift of being told that he is an idiot to his face. A short time before this talk he told me that he and his wife love anal sex. So I told him that a lot of people think that shoving his friend up his wife’s ass is unnatural. Not to mention a number of the other things that the two of them enjoy doing together.

Someone else told me that they thought that gay marriage would promote promiscuity. Now it just so happens that I know that this guy shtupped his way through college. A graduate of YULA he was famous for his escapades with a number of different women. So I asked him how he could justify his position when we knew that he had been sticking John Thomas wherever and whenever he could.

He laughed and said that it was different. I asked him about a moment in his school days when the mother of a girlfriend walked in on them. He still remembers her saying “Oh, I see that you’re busy.” Managed to laugh at the memory and then tried to tell me again that it is different.

But the thing is that it is not different. Heterosexual and Homosexuals have sexual urges that we act or do not act upon. Heterosexuality is not a guarantee that a marriage will be successful. It is not a guarantee that they won’t divorce, cheat, or have the same domestic issues that all couples do.

So I find myself asking what the big deal is. I find myself asking what people are so scared of. Oh I know, someone told me that this would open marriage up to crazy things. Someone might marry their dog, their sheep or their motorcycle. Well, I think that I am ok with saying that if you choose to marry an animal you have a problem. Animals are not people and while they deserve respect there are limitations.

But that is how some people try to get around on this issue. They come up with a totally ridiculous example and say that it is representative of everything that falls under that category.

I just don’t get it. If two people love each other and want to make a loving commitment to each other why would we try to prevent it.

Repairing a Broken Heart- The Modern Man

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If you haven’t noticed or I haven’t told you I like music to accompany my writing. Sometimes it helps to set and maintain the tone of whatever it is I am working on. Sometimes the music is supposed to help you, the reader better understand and sometimes it doesn’t mean a freaking thing.

As a point of interest, whenever I link to a song on YouTube, unless otherwise noted the music is the most important piece.

Love Reign O’er Me– The Who
Somewhere Down The Road– Barry Manilow
Sweet Home Alabama – Lenigrad Cowboys & Russian Red Army Choir

In an earlier post I mentioned that I have several friends who are in the process of splitting up with their spouses. They are not the first friends of mine to get divorced, but they are the first to do so at this time of life.

For those who care, here is the distinction between the two. There were a few who got married in their early twenties and by the time they had hit their mid to late twenties their marriages were over. No children or property was involved either time.

Now it is different. Now there are kids and there are assets and there are complications that didn’t exist for those other friends. Not to belittle or marginalize them, but splitting up then was far less complicated.

And now the boys are dealing with their relationships and trying to process what it all means. The conversations feel a bit surreal. Are we really old enough to have these discussions. Can we really be in a place where we wonder about how we got to this place, where we ask how things got so crazy and mixed up. Can we really be old enough to talk about custody issues and to wonder if it is possible to fall in love more than once.

Are we really old enough to wonder if we have reached a place where you can never fix a broken heart. Because that is precisely what one of them asked me. He is confident that dissolution of the marriage is the way to go and that they cannot get past their differences. But he says that his heart is broken and that he can’t imagine ever feeling anything for anyone again.

I am tempted to show him the Pablo Neruda poem, or at least a quote from it:

“What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else’s. She will be someone else’s. As she once belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me, and this may be the last poem I write for her.”

But I think that I’ll hold off. I am not sure that it would help or that he would appreciate it. It is a funny thing to be a man today. Our fathers and grandfathers would deal with this sort of thing stoically, no doubt or weakness to be shown to others.

Now we modern men are told that it is ok to show feeling, that it is cool to cry. But at the same time we still receive the messages of old, that it is better to show strength. Better to laugh it off and say that there are lots of fish in the sea,

I feel for him, I really do. Because I wonder what sort of outlet he has. I have told him that he has my ear. I am happy to listen, to grab a beer or watch a movie. If he wants my advice I am glad to give it to him.

Advice, now that is a dicey proposition. Relationships are really complex creatures. I have learned to be quite careful in what I say. His soon to ex is in simple terms a major bitch. I don’t know a single friend of his who liked her. But I don’t want to say that. I don’t see how it is going to help and on the off chance that they somehow reconcile I don’t want to make things awkward.

When he asks me how to fix a broken heart and wonders what I would do I have to tell him that I think it is a really hard question to answer. It is not because I haven’t got an opinion or prefer to sit on the fence. I just think that it is different for everyone.

If someone were to break my heart now I am not quite sure exactly what I would do. I have my ideas. I have my thoughts and my sense is that I’d follow my gut. But again that is a personal thing. If you really are in love with someone I am not someone who just says goodbye. I go the distance. And yet again I have to say that this is a personal thing.

Repairing that broken heart is one of those chores in life that requires you to find your own way. You have to wander around and find your own path.

Special note to anonymous from this post, I included Barry Manilow again. Here is another just for you. 😉

Crossposted here.