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

Random Thoughts

My Brain is Stuck In Neutral

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It is approaching that time people refer to as late morning and my brain is stuck in neutral. Yes, you read that correctly the pea sized object that resides in the great melon that rests upon my shoulders is on, but operating in the neutral setting.

It is a silly way of saying that I am conscious of the giant list of things that must get done yet remain undone. The great lies before me. On a yellow writing pad that is placed in front of the computer monitor I see line item after line item of things that I have to work upon.

In fact as I stare at the pad a pen magically stands up and adds 5,987,087 more things to be done to the list. Somewhere in the distance I think that I can hear a little girl whispering “they’re back!“

Ok, none of that really happened but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. The giant list is daunting in its size, overwhelming. Yea, overwhelming is the right word. That is why I am busy staring at it and not working. It is not like I haven’t been up and chipping away at it all for hours because I have. But I just don’t feel like I am making the sort of progress I want to achieve.

It reminds me a bit of the few times that I have gone cliff diving. When I walked up and just jumped I was fine. But if I made the mistake of looking down first I always found myself frozen in place, my mind racing with all sorts of thoughts.

“Hey stupid, this is an all stations alert from the legs. We have no interest in being broken into tiny little pieces. Someone slap some sense into the brain.”

“Yo legs, it is the hands. We have got your back. Take a look at this we are about to smack the brain silly.”

“Dear Legs and Hands, this is your brain. I command this ship and I order you to immediately cease and desist.”

If you haven’t had the pleasure of engaging in your own civil war let me encourage to try and avoid this. Aside from serving as potential blog fodder it is not the least bit interesting. And did I mention that it can be quite embarrassing.

In the age of YouTube you really don’t want to be the person that ends up on ten million blogs. Or maybe you do. Maybe there is a way to monetize it. If you can live with the humiliation you just might be able to turn it into something positive.

Say, did you notice how for the last two minutes I haven’t mentioned a word about the brain being stuck in neutral. That is one the finest plays in Jack’s playbook. It is a tried and true standard that is good for gaining yardage and eating up the clock. It is a give and go that I use to step beyond the thing that is holding me up.

In just a moment I’ll take a deep breath and look at the list again and try to identify three line items that I can take care of…quickly. Just need to feel like I am making a bit of progress. Just need to feel like I am not walking in quicksand. Small steps that lead to a giant victory.

Aww…Who am I fooling. Someone get me a giant cup of coffee and get out of the way. As my pal Ben Grimm would say, “It is clobbering time!”

Forty Is Not Old- No Really It Is Not

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Portrait of a sleeping cub

It is heading towards midmorning and outside the ever present blue skies are teasing me with thoughts of non work related activities. I try not to look out the window because I don’t want to be any more distracted than I already am.

Granted I am seated in a coffee shop where I am in the middle of a business meeting. Just across the table a man is trying to sell me on an idea that he says is going to make all of us very wealthy. All he needs is the opportunity to make it happen and it just so happens that he thinks that we can provide it to him.

I frequent these coffee shops on a regular basis but it is usually with one of the boys. We all have non traditional jobs, or should I say jobs that don’t have traditional hours. It is not unusual to find us here during the middle of the day during the work week. We are never alone. These places always have a steady stream of customers. Even during hard times people still need their caffiene fix.

The man is still talking but I am just barely listening. I already know what he has to say and where he is going with it. I came up with the concept. I get distracted again by a pair of legs in a black skirt passing by and I start wondering if it is like this elsewhere.

I am that rare native of L.A. and though I have traveled all over I can’t recall whether other cities had the same feel of people out and about during the middle of the work week. Does it really matter? Probably not, but this is how my brain works.

Two days later I am going to be back in the same seat but this time I’ll be hanging out with Max. Max and I have been friends since we were 13. We went to high school and college together and have spent more than a few hours hanging out. I am less than a month older than he is but with the dreaded fortieth birthday approaching those distinctions aremore important than normal.

We agree that age is just a number and that neither of us feel as old as the number sounds to us. I am not kidding when I say that my mental image of myself is of me at nineteen or twenty. Hard body, stomach carved and muscles rippling. Oh, and I can’t forget the full head of hair.

I wore it in a flat top or as some people called it a brush cut. If I wore the right color green t-shirt and jeans I was sometimes mistaken for being in the service. It happened a lot during the days prior to the first Gulf War.

Now I look at myself in the mirror and I see a different image. Still have a fair amount of hair, but it is a bit thinner in the front. If I flex I can see the cuts in my stomach, but there is no hiding the spare tire that has taken up residence there. The rest of the body more or less passes muster.

Brutal honesty says that physically I am not who I was, but in some ways I am not so far off. Some days I don’t care about it and some days I do. I miss the metabolism that let me eat anything and the ability to watch nicks, bruises and aches fade away ten minutes after they showed up.

But not unlike so many others who came before me I appreciate the wisdom and strength that life experience has brought to me. I know so much more about who I am and what I am capable of than I did then.

That is all part and parcel of why Max and I smile wistfully and agree that we are on the verge of conquering the world or falling off the edge of the cliff into the abyss. It is a bit ridiculous to be so melodramatic about it all but that is how it feels. The biggest difference between now and then is not the physical component but the responsibility.

In those days that we remember so fondly it didn’t matter whether we made a dollar or a million. Didn’t matter about so many other things because all we had to worry about was ourselves. There weren’t any children. No worries about where they were going to go to school. No worries about where we would live because even if we spent a week on a couch here or there it just didn’t matter. Sooner or later we’d have our own place and life would be fine.

But it is not the late eighties or the nineties anymore. Those moments of incredible freedom are gone. They feel like a different lifetime. We hardly remember who we were. Now we have who we are and it is ok. It is ok because we have no choice other than to make it ok.

Old Max and I are in agreement that every transition resembles a roller coaster. There are ups and downs. There are moments where you feel the car pulling you up a steep incline and you know that soon you are going to go hurtling down the other side of the hill you just climbed. Question is whether you’ll scream because you are happy or because you are terrified.

Nah, forty isn’t really that old, but I think that I am ready to get it over with. It is the anticipation that makes me crazy. It is the waiting for things to happen that makes me grind my teeth and furrow my brow. Those lines in my forehead were earned, but I don’t need to help make them any deeper.

A small yelp of pain/surprise comes from across the table. That guy is still talking and in the midst of making a point has managed to spill a cup of coffee on his lap. Something tells me that the meeting is going to be cut short. Maybe I will take advantage of this sunshine and do something active.

If nothing else those endless blue skies tell their own story and I think that it just might be time to try and find out what that story is.

Do The Right Thing

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Most of us grow up in environments in which we are told to do the right thing. It is something that I remember hearing quite frequently. It stood alongside all sorts of phrases such as “you can’t screw an old head on young shoulders” and “leave the table.”

If you ask my middle sister she’ll tell you that I spent more dinners in my room than I did with the family. That is not how I remember it, but little sisters love to try and stick it to their older siblings.
Anyway the beauty of being an adult is that you find out that life can be very complicated and that doing the right thing is not always readily apparent. Sure, there are plenty of situations in which you can argue that there are only two choices, right and wrong. But the reality is that much of your everyday life falls into categories in which doing the right thing is better classified as taking an educated guess.
I suppose that I should mention that the genesis of this post stems from a conversation I had with a friend who is in the early stages of getting divorced. We have spent a lot of time talking about how it all happened. Went through the whole falling in love “I can’t spend enough time with you” to I don’t love you anymore “what was I thinking” bits.
Midway through he looked at me and asked me what I thought about all of it. He wanted to know if I had seen any signs that he was doing the wrong thing. I told him that I hadn’t seen anything that made me wonder about her. However I refrained from telling him that the boys and I agree that after they got married she changed. No point in adding that.
Anyway as we went back and forth about it all I told him that I don’t advise beating yourself up over the past.  It is really easy to look back and see the mistakes we made and hard to look forward and anticipate all of those that we will make.
When I look at my own life I see lots of crossroads and I’ll readily admit that I am not always good about taking my own advice. I won’t say that I cringe over all of my decisions, but there are a few that I really wonder about. Every now and then I ask myself what would have happened if I had taken that other turn. What if I had refused to do XYZ or had decided to move out of state.
Would my life be different? Yes, it certainly would be. But would it be better? Well that is a much harder answer to give.
And now that I find myself looking at another big birthday I do wonder about some things. I do ask myself if I should make some big moves now to shake things up a bit. I believe in second chances. I believe that it is never really too late to start over.
I believe those things because I have to. I can’t accept a life that doesn’t offer that. When I look at what is happening in the world and the impact of the economy on my life I wonder if now isn’t the perfect time to take a leap into the great unknown. It is really hard to say what will happen. One decision has so much influence on so many other things.
But it could make life so much better. It could be the difference between being satisfied and fulfilled or just kind of getting through the day. Or maybe not.
The point is that it is not all that clear cut. But whatever happens I’ll try hard to do the right thing.

Stop Breaking My Sprinklers

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I am relatively certain that my gardener is not reading my blog, but on the off chance that he is I’d like to ask him to stop breaking my sprinklers. Not only does it cost me money to buy replacement speakers it costs time.

And that my friends irritates the hell out of me. My time is far too valuable to have to spend on repairing and replacing sprinkler heads each week. If he keeps this up I may break down and buy a lawnmower and he’ll be out of a job.

A World Without Chocolate?

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Oops, sounds like someone is trying to kill The Shmata Queen. ABC reports:

It’s hard to imagine Valentine’s Day without chocolate, but some scientists say that it’s possible that chocolate could one day be in short supply.

What would the world be like without this decadent, delectable and divine dessert?

If you read the rest of the article it suggests that there is a potential sustainability issue for cacao. I am not an expert on any of this, but what I read sounds plausible. Perhaps now would be a good time to change professions and dedicate myself to becoming a “Green” Willie Wonka.