The JackB

I am still here but yet I am gone but not like Glen Campbell sings here.

Still haven’t figured out what I want to do with this place. Most of the regular crowd has moved onto other places and I can’t tell you if it’s because they got busy with life, the content slowed down or if it wasn’t of any interest any more.

Though I can tell you some people actively chose to remove me from their lives so from that perspective I know exactly what happened.

But I am not prepared to shutter the shop nor say there is not more to do so this will stick around. Maybe it is grief, maybe it is a change of priorities, maybe it is a whole list of things.

Doesn’t matter because for now this is how it will be. Some days you might not find any updates and sometimes you might find multiple.

Give it time and the answers will come for all of us.

The wise men of life said long ago there is a time for all things and I can’t disagree with their words for I have seen it proven multiple times.

Maybe it is because I have reached a time for grieving and find myself staring at the moon, not knowing whether it is time to run with it or simply howl. Not knowing which will assuage my grief but mostly certain that time will help me heal.

Can’t decide if I want to put pen to paper and see if that will help release what lies beneath the surface or let it run its course in other ways.

So we look at music and find our buddy Bruce singing Cautious Man and recognize something that touches the soul.

Billy felt a coldness rise up inside him that he couldn’t name
Just as the words tattooed ‘cross his knuckles he knew would always remain

Can’t help but move on to Emmylou again singing Goodbye while the memories take me on a journey and I think about things past and present.

Was I just off somewhere
Or maybe just too high?
But I can’t remember
If we said goodbye

Reminds me of the time I ran into someone I used to run with along with a guy I automatically disliked and named “placeholder.”

Wasn’t sure if the universe was playing some kind of sick joke or if it was just dumb luck but I knew I needed to create some distance. Cuz I  I knew that if I was face-to-face with him there was a chance I would manhandle him in the kind of way no man ever wants to be handled.

He would be a rag doll and I would be the bear.

Won’t lie and say I didn’t want to ignore my better angels and to let myself slip back into a man I had once been but who I had given up being.

Maturity has its gifts and sometimes they include recognizing a time for grieving.

So maybe this is the moment where I rediscover a new purpose for this place.

Revisiting The Past

So I am continuing to tear this joint apart while I update, adjust and pivot. Don’t know where it will take me or what it will look like yet but I think I’ll find out.

In the interim here are more links to old work that will probably stick around for a while but may end up getting deleted, hard to say.

• She Saved My Heart
• Things Bloggers Write About
• The Kitchen
• Self Reliance
• Emptying My Head

Someone wrote that 2025 is as close to 1980 as 1980 was to 1935 which is to say there is a 45 year time gap between them.

I was born in the late sixties so by the time 1980 rolled around I had long since learned how to write in cursive and like most GenX kids had long been walking myself to and from school.

Had endless summer days in which my friends and I rode our bikes everywhere or took city buses all over the place.

1935 caught my eye because my folks were born in the early forties and so it sounds old.  Though if my grandparents had become parents as soon as most of their contemporaries the folks would absolutely have shown up somewhere between ’35 and ’38.

In concept that could have meant that instead of being mid fifties I’d be in my sixties now and that sort of throws me a bit because life could have been so different.

Maybe I’d be retired now and not a decade away.

My baby is going to be 21 this year and doesn’t intend to get married or pregnant for a long chunk of time to go which is ok with me.

I have told my kids there is no rush and to remember who you end up marrying has a big impact upon the rest of your life so take a minute to figure out who you are before you hook up.

Anyhoo, I don’t have time for a long post tonight but figured this joint needed an update and that time gap caught my eye. Hell, I go back to work tomorrow after having taken some time off and I am sure the new kid will ask me again if I feel old because I was a 20th century baby.

I took him into the gym a while back and curled his body weight which cut down on some of the old man talk.  Might have to bring him back because I can lat pull more than he weighs now too.

The kids say I have old man strength but I tell them it is just 40 plus years of lifting and good genes.

Happy New Year.