Not so vast ...

2011-01-28T07:49:00.000-08:00

First new post in two years.

Don't know that I'm back. But I wanted to make a small note somewhere out in the world about two people who I mentioned in this post years ago:

http://notsovast.blogspot.com/2006_03_26_archive.html

Gary and David.

David - the jumpsuit guy - is still there, surviving homelessness, sitting on a bench everyday. I first wrote about him almost 5 years ago and he'd been there for a while back then.

Gary - the security guard - came more and more out of his shell. He became a regular visitor to our office and others, ostensibly for the purpose of getting coffee, but more I think for human contact. He'd chit chat for a while and then make his way back to the lobby. One day last year, he was suddenly struggling with walking. He was afraid he'd had a stroke or something. He went to the VA to get checked out and they told him he had cancer. A tumor in his brain was causing the stroke like symptoms. The cancer had already spread throughout his body. They tried some treatments, but told him from the beginning there was little they could do. We saw him in the building for a few more weeks, then he was hospitalized, then in hospice and then he was gone. Within about 3 months he went from not knowing anything was wrong to death.

We miss him.

2009-01-20T08:41:00.000-08:00

For Such A Time As This...

Too many coincidences. I'd swear someone wrote this in a script. Not a classical novelist, equipped with subtle brilliance, but a screenwriter for a made-for-tv movie.

The first African-American president gets sworn into office the day after MLK Day which celebrated what would have been the 80th birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. The Democratic Convention when Obama received the nomination falls on the 45th anniversary of the "I have a dream" speech. You couldn't have orchestrated all this if you tried. Kind of makes you believe some force out there is pulling all the strings.

I stood in the kitchen cleaning up dishes yesterday (my dear wife confirms this in her beautifully written blog here and listening to NPR commentary and interviews about MLK's historic speech. I heard news accounts of Obama's day of service and of all these people and organizations performing community service. I wish I were among them. I've been making too many excuses.

I found myself emotional. Nearly moved to tears at one moment, not in response to a speech or a recording or anything particular, but because of something that by it's nature does not yet exist.

Hope.

This thing welling up seemed a little desperate, not a little fearful and definitely profound. It's a bad time. This seems to be one of those pivotal moments in history. We may be at the beginning of THE END, or the beginning of THE CHANGE. People are hurting. Here and abroad. The worst is still to come. I feel somewhat guilty that our little family is pretty much untouched by the difficulties around us. I saw the malls relatively empty at Christmas. I've seen the stores close. I've been in restaurants and markets and seen significant numbers of people wanting job applications rather than menus. I know people who have lost jobs or who go to work each day wondering when they might lose their job. I know people who have lost their health insurance. I know people struggling with debt. I have friends and family members who have served in the wars we are fighting. And although I haven't lost a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan, I know those who have.

I'm amazed that in this country of jaded cynics, people seem to be desperately leaping to embrace this man who offers a message of hope. I would like to join them, but I'm wary.

Don't get me wrong. I supported Obama from early on although I live in a part of the country that did not and my extended families do not. Lisa and I are something of black sheeps. We made contributions. We had a sign in our yard. But I don't consider myself a part of the Obama-worshippers. I want a transformative leader for president, but I think I'm pretty healthily cynical about politics. That's the realm where both my career and education have been focused. My expectations of wrong have been exceeded far more times than my expectations for good. But like many others, I want someone to believe in. I want someone who really will lead.

I don't doubt him. I doubt us. I wonder if we have the strength within us to really change as a people. I remember sitting on the living room sofa watching tv shortly after 9/11. If you remember, for a long time there were no commercials on during much of the coverage. We were watching a memorial for fallen firefighters and after a poignant moment, the coverage broke away to commercial. The tv shifted from a scene of strong brave men weeping for a fallen comrade to "WANT TO LOSE THAT UNWANTED FLAB WITHOUT DIET AND EXERCISE??!!!" I turned to Lisa and said "we're doomed."

I don't have much faith in my fellow Americans and especially not in my fellow Tennesseans. We seem to lead the way in obesity, waste, irresponsibility, bankruptcy, divorce... you name it. If it's bad, we're excelling at it. I'd like to be able to say I believe these people will rise up and transform themselves, transform our communities, our nation and our world.

Unlike the last 8 years, I don't doubt whether our leaders can lead, I doubt whether we can follow. And I really mean "we." I've been disappointed in myself a lot lately. I haven't done what I could in so many areas of my life. I wish I failed in bigger ways. It might move me more to change. Instead, I fail regularly by falling well short of where I could have been, by habitually settling for less.

So somewhere, I need to find faith in myself and then in you, whoever you are. We've been given someone willing to lead. Are we willing to follow?

2008-12-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

Quote of the Day

(courtesy of the Laverytory http://thelaverytory.blogspot.com/2008/12/quote-of-day-121608.html)

"Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone."

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

2008-12-11T21:01:00.001-08:00

Jumpsuit Guy

Nearly three years ago, and shortly after I started this blog, I wrote this entry about a homeless man named David who was sitting out on a bench just outside the building where I work.

http://notsovast.blogspot.com/2006_03_26_archive.html

He's still there. And has been pretty much everyday, rain or shine, scorching heat or freezing cold. They demolished and reconfigured a small park down the end of the block because too many homeless were congregating there and he remained. They've started programs to discourage panhandling and he remains. They've opened expensive high-rise urban condos a couple of blocks away and he remains.

Three years.

2008-12-11T20:43:00.000-08:00

A Few Degrees of Separation

The temperature hovered around 37 degrees. A drenching chilling rain slumped through the sky. It smelled like snow, the air was pregnant with potential, but it didn't come. It was as if the climate walked a knife's edge. With all the moisture in the air, if the temperature dropped just a bit, the world would be transformed.

Mixed in with the large raindrops were the occasional rogue snowflakes. They somehow managed the transformation their brothers couldn't. They were so big and dense you almost felt them individually when they hit your coat.

Standing at an intersection waiting for a light to change, I could see two worlds. The one where I stood now, damp, chilling, dreary and loud with shushing traffic and drizzling water and another. One blanketed in white, silenced, purified, covered. In one world, everyone kept their heads down, even under umbrellas, trying to keep the rain out of their faces and their feet out of puddles. In the other, the faces turn upwards, open to the sky, seeking contact with the manna from above.

2008-12-05T08:39:00.000-08:00

The Hugability of Monsters

Playing with our nearly 4 year boy the other day up in the kid's bedroom. For now, they still share it although the day will likely soon come when older sister and younger brother will need their own space. I'll be saddened when this era is over. Their bedroom is an upstairs room in our house with the fun of angled ceilings and dormers and a small door that goes to attic space which I converted to a toy closet. It was our bedroom when we first moved into the house as it is the largest room outside of the living room. It's carpeted now and painted 6 different colors. Yes, I said "six" and that doesn't count white for the trim.

Our first attempt on painting the room was a blend of pale yellow on the multi-faceted ceiling and a pastel purle on two facing walls. Later, we found this little rug our daughter picked out that had rainbow stripes of bold colors. Green, orange, blue, red, purple and yellow. And there you go. The North faciling wall (which has a big dormer in it) is a lime green with the sides of the dormer painted bright orange. The wall you enter the room (west) is bright blue. The South wall is red. The East wall, formerly pale purple had to be upgraded with a more vibrant purple after the other colors overpowered it. The ceiling and various associated slants remain the original yellow. The old ceiling fan had it's blades removed and each of the four painted to match one of the colors of the room. And despite predictions, it doesn't just look like an ugly brown when it is spinning.

Currently, the room is draped with sheets tied together and bungied to various door-knobs, furniture and hooks. Mattresses have been cast on the floor and the kids have been sleeping this way for a week. I started the whole thing a week ago. Of course now with an achy back I'm the one who has the hardest time getting in and out of their space to get clothes out of drawers or read books before bedtime or feed the gecko that now shares the room with them.

So I was up there playing with Ben and he was imagining and drawing on a Magna-Doodle. I'm mostly lying around on a mattress trying to play in the least mobile way possible. He draws an adorable "nice monster" on the doodle. The next thing you know, the monster has arrived at the door of the bedroom. I feign fear and scramble to hide in the tent. Ben assures me "It's okay, he's a nice monster" and runs to the door to hug the invisible arrival. As he wanders back across the room after this friendly greeting he adds casually "You can hug him. He's not gooey."

And so I do.

2008-12-04T19:54:00.000-08:00

Flexibility and Pain

The cold is here again. No fun. My right hip joint is becoming an ever more vocal constant companion. Sometimes it enlists my lower back to assist in its campaign. There are days when it feels like the area from my knees to the bottom of my rib cage is slowly hardening like a tree trunk, becoming more fibrous and less flexible with each passing season.

The pain itself isn’t intense, just fairly constant and most definitely tiresome. Kind of like a toothache or if something kept putting pressure on a bad bruise. Muscles tense up to protect the deteriorating joint, and the unbalanced tension puts pressure on my back. It takes conscious effort to bend and twist without messing something up.

I used to do yoga, but truthfully, it seemed that the increased range of motion I was gaining was actually allowing me to move my leg in ways that would trigger greater pain. But now everything seems to be locking up and I know that yoga would probably help if I could do it without injuring myself. I think I realize better now that yoga is dangerous when performed with a Western competitive goal oriented mindset. Maybe I could practice it more appropriately.

So my body is losing flexibility due to pain. Conversely, my spirit seems to be experiencing discomfort as a result of greater mental flexibility. The status quo is safe if nothing else. When you try to cut yourself loose from the constraints of your personal traditions, you discover a few things. Number one – you discover how deeply the roots of that thought system are engrained. It’s hard to move out of the comfort of the way you’ve always thought, even if you considered yourself an open minded person. But sometimes change happens like a subtle erosion and one day you realize that sand has washed out from under your feet while you stood there watching the waves.

2008-12-04T15:31:00.000-08:00

“I don’t know where to begin” he said.

“Try” she advised him. “There is no right way to explain things.”

“There’s just so much background that leads up to what’s going on now.”

“Then say something – one sentence. Tell a little piece of the story and maybe the rest will start to flow out.”

He sat and breathed a few times, thinking. “I’ve left where I’ve been, but I don’t know yet where I’m going” he said, looking frustrated.

“Sounds like an adventure” she replied, smiling. “I think that’s the way most of them start.”

“I have no security anymore in anything. Anything I think or feel or believe.”

“Do any of us?”

“What is this crap with you, are you trying to play arm-chair therapist?”

“Fine. Don’t tell me anything. Or tell me everything. I’ll listen if you want to talk and keep quiet. Or we can just forget about it.”

He sat silent for a moment. “Okay. Over a series of years, little bits and pieces of what I believed about life and truth and faith have eroded away. Or been chipped away. At first, you think it’s just a refining process of stripping away some excess and incidental spiritual baggage. Then at some point you realize the whole foundation has been compromised and you’re afraid the floor is going to collapse out from underneath you.”

He said this all while staring down at his hands. It came out in a rush. He paused and looked up into her eyes. She simply returned his gaze.

“I can’t imagine going back to the way I used to think. Life was simpler that way, but I think it would turn my stomach to go back to living in that world.”

He looked at her again and still received no response but a patient stare.

“I fought this for a while, lived in denial, kept my mind busy, ignored the changes going on. But now I can’t. Something seems to be prodding me in a new direction. I think the message I’m hearing now is that I need to be centered, not grounded.”

She finally spoke. “Interesting distinction. And one that is much more significant than it initially sounds like.”

“Yeah. It is. Kind of a whole different approach really.” He looked off into the distance. “But there is no blueprint I know of for this kind of spirituality. I don’t know where to get guidance.”

“But I think you do. You’re just scared to follow it.”

“I don’t know. I gotta think about that.”

2008-10-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Uses of Not

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,
but the empty space between them
is the essence of the wheel.
Pots are formed from clay,
but the empty space between it
is the essence of the pot.
Walls with windows and doors form the house,
but the empty space within it
is the essence of the house.

Lao Tse

Roots and Foundations

2008-10-17T14:55:00.001-07:00

Or…

Pastel-colored cookies

A work errand required me to go today to a part of town I don't usually have much reason to travel through. It's near the area where I grew up. There's this one main thoroughfare that has small commercial shops along both sides of the road. In a few places there are modern structures that have replaced what was there in my childhood with bigger parking lots and landscaped islands. For instance, the Osborne's Bi-Rite/Food Town Grocery that was operated by the father of the kid who lived across the street from me growing up is now gone and replaced with a Walgreens Pharmacy. It's a corporation that seems to have a penchant for demolishing the past and throwing up uniform brick structures. But on the whole, many of the old store fronts are still there but perhaps with different uses. The store I had to go to (a trophy shop where I was picking up a plaque to present at an upcoming conference) is just down the road from what used to be my pediatrician's office. It's now a veterinary clinic which I find terribly amusing though I'm not sure why. It is a strange 1960s or 1970s single story modern (?) structure of interlocking circles with examination rooms that surrounded a central nursing station. I guess there isn't much else you can do with a building like that.

Something that remains intact among all these store fronts that may have changed hands a dozen times in 30 plus years is Becker's Bakery. It's where my mom always went at Christmas time to buy a coconut cake and a plum cake, perfect rectangles that came in little boxes with clear cellophane in the lids. When I went there with her as a child on her errands, probably a lot like when Lisa now takes 3 year old Ben tooling around with her in our station wagon, I usually got a couple of these particular type of cookies they make there. They were a simple cookie. They came in pink, green or yellow. Not really that sweet. No chocolate chips or nuts or sprinkles. They all tasted the same regardless of color. All in the exact same form, basically circular, but with spiraling ridges. I've never seen them anywhere except Becker's. There are several Becker's locations around Nashville, but they're strictly a local business. Old-time Nashvillians all have heard of the establishment.

I saw the bakery today and was glad it was still there. I'm going through a period where I feel groundless and rudderless and un-anchored to belabor a point and stretch the bounds of linguistic decency. There was comfort in this place that hadn't changed. After picking up what I needed down the street, I had driven past the bakery on my way back to the office before I realized how much I wanted to go in there. I pulled into a parking lot, turned around and drove back to park right in front of the picture windows across the front of the store.

Entering the store apprehensively, I was pleased to find that nothing appeared to have changed in over 30 years. And thankfully, I saw a small tray of the same cookies in the first display case to the left of the entrance. A dozen cost me $4.10.

Where else can you purchase a moment of your childhood that cheaply?

2008-07-07T06:58:00.000-07:00

Peace and Love

or...

Life and How you Live it

or...

The Birthday Post

If you haven't heard, Ringo Starr declared for today, his 68th birthday, that he wanted everyone to stop at noon and say "peace and love."

He didn't consult me.

This is my birthday as well. Only my 40th, so I don't have as many years under my belt as Ringo, but still, the 40th seems more eventful than the 68th, so you think I'd get dibs on this one.

Last year was 7/7/07, which has a nice heavenly numerological ring to it and would have been appropriate for a big "perfect number" celebration. I heard at one point it was also scheduled for the release of the 7th and final installment of the Harry Potter series, but that release was pushed back to the 21st. (Two weeks?! You miss the marketing coup of the millenium by two weeks. Somebody in printing and distribution needed to be fired over that one.) Anyway, for some reason I can't remember, we didn't do anything major (at least nothing I can remember).

I believe it was the year before in '06 that Lisa was shooting a wedding for a friend on my birthday in which Olivia was also asked to be the flower girl. Or maybe the rehearsal dinner the night before was on my birthday.

In 2005 terrorists bombed the London Subway on my birthday.

In 2004, we spent my birthday driving back from a disasterous attempted vacation in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. We had a cabin rented up there with friends of mine from college. The cabin was much smaller than expected (too small for 2 families), the weather was cold and rainy, Lisa's morning sickness from her pregnancy with Ben kicked in with a vengeance and Olivia (who was really a trooper for a three year old) was terribly homesick. So mid-week, I made the call to pack up and leave three days early for the long drive home on the 7th.

Needless to say, my expectations for my birthday have diminished over the years. The day itself is one of 365 (or 366 in leap years). I may, like today, take the day off from work. But the day comes and goes with little fanfare which is really how I prefer it.

This year however, the 40 thing has been kicking my butt.

Thirty I celebrated. It seemed like a delayed rite of passage. You finally escape the striving of the 20s and feel more established. At thirty, I'd been recently married. I still felt relatively healthy and active. It was before the birth of our children who bring immeasurable joy into my life, but whose arrival signaled the banishment of a good night's sleep. It was before the acquisition of our now 80 year old house which I equate with back injuries, aches and pains and the gradual decline of my fitness levels as I spent too much time working to shore up an aging structure.

Now at 40, I feel like an aging structure myself which makes me wonder how bad 50 will be.

The 30s were a time when I gained much: most notably 2 wonderful children. Also, a deepening relationship with my wife which is more work than either of us naively expected, but which seems to be on an upward trajectory after some "challenging" years of growth and adjustment. The thirties marked some degree of professional success.

But they were also a time of deterioration. I discovered, with a doctor's assistance, that the cartlidge in my hips has degenerated prematurely and that I'm a candidate for "early" hip replacement, whatever that means. That has narrowed my scope of physical activity and diminished my expectations of my quality of life. Combined with a shoulder injury a couple of years ago, from which I seem to have healed after a long recovery, the hip problem helped me realize that I can't take running, swimming, biking, hiking, throwing a ball or playing on a playground with the kids for granted. I was never athletic, but now I know the time for throwing myself recklessly into any activity (yes, including that one) is over.

I realize the 30s, most regrettfully, also were a time when I let relationships deteriorate. Already introverted by nature, I too easily fell into the trap of using parenthood as an excuse to stay home. I lost touch with people. I didn't get out there. The demands of energy that went to wife and kids seemed to deplete my reserves, so when the chance for "me" time came around, I chose solitary activities rather than keeping friendships going or building new ones. I have friends at work, but they fall into the realm of people-you-go-to-lunch-with, not people-you-go-to-dinner-with, which is a significant distinction. And for whatever reason, that seems a difficult boundary to cross. Unlike the hips, for which there are surgical remedies, this relationship area is something I can do something about without too much blood, although it will take some sweat and likely tears. But it's worth it and it's toward the top of my to do list for the next decade.

At forty now, I realize something I should have long ago. Namely that you can't wait for the right circumstances to fall into place to do what you want with your life. The stars don't ever align. Nothing falls into your lap, except maybe food off a kid's plate. If I want to be fit and healthy, that is still achievable, but it will take a lot of work. If I want to move toward old age with deepening friendships, that will take time and commitment. If I want to write a novel (which I do), that will take a great deal of time and work and commitment. And the scary truth is, there may not be enough of those resources to acheive all those goals this decade and spend quality time with my kids, and read a lot of good books and (ah-ha!) lay on the couch late in the evening and watch tv.

So this morning, I decided I wanted to cook omlets, which I've become quite good at, and sit out on our deck for breakfast. One of those work friends, a truly wonderful woman in her 50s, gave me a bottle of champagne, so I decided to be decadent and open it for a sip even though it seemed wasteful to open the bottle without a group of adults with whom to share it. It was a nice symbolic gesture, but one that reminded me I don't really care for champagne all that much. By 8:00 the deck was already getting hot and humid here in July in Nashville. So we moved our party inside and began cleaning up and getting on with the day.

The half drunk glass of champagne was sitting on the counter and I picked it up for a sip when I noticed something in it. "What's this?" I asked and extracted a gnat with my finger. "Oh, a bug."

"Happy Birthday!" shouted my hilarious daughter who inherited her gift of sarcasm from me.

We all laughed, I took a last sip anyway and life moved on.

Oh, by the way....

Peace and Love.

2008-05-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

Let Him Eat Cake

The bouncy place had no air conditioning. It was only late April, but the converted warehouses in the metal building were bordering on being oppressively hot. Big fans were set up around the place, adding to the roar of blowers keeping the slides and towers and obstacle courses and other assorted play things inflated.

Play time was now over. We were all, adults and children alike, herded into a small nondescript room mostly taken up with a long table and folding chairs for serving cake and ice cream. I found an unoccupied chair and pulled it over so that I could sit and watch Ben and Olivia at a distance where I had settled them at the other end of the table. It was fascinating to watch Ben in particular. This party was for his 4 year old cousin. Apart from her older sister and his own older sister, Ben didn’t know the kids there and he would know few of the adults. He had been a reluctant participant in the afternoon’s events, taking some coaxing to climb into or on some of the more challenging devices. He was seldom far from my side. Now here he sat, looking about at the bustle and business all around. His sister was beside him. She, ever the social butterfly, was fully engaged with as many of the other kids as possible all at the same time. He just watched. Plates came by, then plastic utensils, then paper napkins, juice boxes, then cake, and little cups of ice cream – the kind that used to come with their own flat wooden spoon. He took this progression in stride.

His hair was slightly dampened from his exertions, his cheeks reddened. He was entering that late afternoon tired phase that arrives when he gets no nap. I don’t know that he said a word. When the cake was placed before him, he began to eat it. He did the same with the ice cream. It occurred to me as I sat there that he will most likely never recall this day. Or it will fade into an indistinguishable one of many. But despite how non-eventful the day was, I think I will remember it. It became a frozen moment in the slip stream of time.

I don’t know yet who he will be. I don’t know what will happen to him. He was there, and he played and he ate cake and ice cream and took in the world around him with wonder and curiosity. He’d later fall asleep in the car on the way home, wearing the orange cap from Ruby Falls that we recovered which had been left at his aunt’s house the last time he was there.

2008-04-27T17:46:00.001-07:00

Middle Man

I’ve been a son. And I’ve been a father. But lately I’ve been troubled coming to terms with being both. My son Ben is three. Somewhere out there (well, actually there is nothing mysterious about this, I’m sure it’s cataloged, boxed up and filed away in a closet of my parent’s home) is a collection of 16 mm home movies that I remember seeing long ago. In one of these films, my older brother and sister and I are dressed in bad polyester pajamas opening presents on Christmas in the wood paneled den of my childhood home. In another, we play with the family dachshund before we had to give it away because of my brother’s and my allergies. I don’t remember the films having any sound. What I can remember is an image of my young self that is virtually identical to Ben.

My parents regularly confirm this. "It’s like having you around all over again" my mom will say. The resemblance is probably more projected than actual, but it’s hard not to see patterns repeating. He’s a tender child. Warm, affectionate, humorous, adorable. Naturally thankful and gracious. Developing. Young. "Good as gold" as my Mom would say, likely repeating something my grandmother used to say about me. He’s bright, inquisitive, and funny, but small and fragile as a young child should be. This is something new.

We didn’t really experience this phase with our daughter. Olivia seemed to emerge from the womb fully matured and already insisting upon her way - "Can’t someone clean this stuff off me? Hey, watch it! That instrument is waaaay too cold! That wasn’t 7 pounds 8 ounces, it was 7 pounds, 8.2 ounces." It’s hard to remember moments of tenderness shared with her.

My job lately has required more time and there have been fewer moments period. Some Sundays I have to go into the office for a few hours to get prepared for all that Monday through Friday will demand. Some days require me to arrive early and/or stay late. I often can’t drive her to school in the morning because of another commitment. There are meetings or conferences in the evening or overnight that keep me away. More insidiously, there is the time I’m home, but not, because the demands and stress of work keep me from being fully present. I’ve worked hard against this last one, but I know I haven’t fully succeeded.

Friday I had lunch with my dad. There were some papers they needed my to sign so that, as executor of my parents’ wills I’d be listed as an authorized signer on their bank accounts. We were also going to try and clear up some things on my own bank accounts which actually go all the way back to when I was a child and my dad set them up in my name. The bank has changed names 3 times, but I haven’t switched and his name is still on the accounts. Can’t say why. Inertia I guess.

I see how precious the times with my kids are, yet I see them already slipping away. Last weekend I hoped to spend lots of quality time with them both, but my daughter who’s 7 had a schedule filled with playdates, birthday parties and general activity with her friends. I can still monopolize Ben’s time if I want and play on the floor with him for hours until my stamina gives out. This period is so short. Not far away will be adolescence when time with parents is merely tolerated at best. I was already talking in the car on the way to school the other day with Olivia answering questions about college and whether or not she will move away when the time comes. It will be here in a blink and I don’t feel prepared, emotionally or financially.

In the meantime, my dad tries to speak to me about news, my job, politics, religion, home repair, whatever. And 9 times out of 10 we are on different wavelengths. I don’t want it to be this way, but I can’t help finding myself irritated with him. I don’t know if it’s really him, or frustration at the void between us. I don’t think, vote, believe or emote like he does. We don’t read the same things, watch the same things or do the same things. I see him play on the floor with my kids. I can’t remember him ever doing that with me. He was a figure of mystery, authority, and probably some undeserved fear in my childhood. In my adult years, he’s been a help and a rescuer so many times. He’s fixed cars and plumbing, offered money and advice. Helped my wife, watched my kids, given rides to the airport or a car repair shop, helped move furniture and spent hours helping me meet some commitment I made and found myself unable to fulfill alone.

More often than not I’m less than gracious in these moments and I take him for granted. I regret this deeply and wish it were not so. Then I am with him again trying to have the simplest conversation and finding no common ground.

Some nights I try to read books to my son, but mom is still the preferred parent. She goes to exercise early in the mornings and if he wakes, I try to comfort him and get him back to sleep. More often than not, after I convince him Mommy is not available, he says "I want to sleep by myself" and I’m banished back to the world of showering, shaving and getting dressed while he puts himself back to sleep.

How long till find ourselves sitting in a cramped booth in a Subway restaurant, one of us eating tuna, the other salami? One of us wheat bread, the other white. One of us Democrat, the other Republican. One of us Southern Baptist, the other something else. One giving advice, the other refusing it. Planning for death, avoiding the subject and finding at last common ground in sharing the joys and the beauty of his child and my grandchild.

2008-04-22T12:27:00.000-07:00

Breaking radio silence...

Life gets in the way of life sometimes. The last 4 months have been the busiest and most challenging professionally in my career. At one point back in March, within the span of about 15 minutes, I got the news that an important ally in my work was leaving her position the end of April and I dropped my laptop, scrambling my hard drive and leaving me computerless and unable to access many files. It was the worst possible time to deal with either piece of news. I tried to get the laptop fixed as quickly as possible by going to a local store and as a result, stretched the whole process out 3 weeks until I finally had to box the whole thing up and send it back to the manufacturer. In the mean time, I felt like someone had cut off one of my limbs or turned off a hemisphere of my brain.

Somewhere in this period, my stress level kept ratcheting up and up until my stomach felt like it was digesting itself, my chest felt constantly restricted and my sleep was fairly well decimated. I felt like I was out in the midst of a great ocean and the only thing I had to cling to was a giant slippery rubber ball about 5 feet in diameter. It kept me from drowning, but was constantly spinning out from under me, dunking me in the water and keeping me continuously off balance.

Turning on the TV one evening looking for a welcome distraction, I saw part of a program on PBS about the impact of stress on our bodies (as if I didn't need something else to worry about). The program showed footage of a group of monkeys (is that called a herd?) and talked about the stress in the lives of all but the most dominant monkey. They checked out the arteries of these critters and found that the stress of being someone other than the chief banana was restricting the blood vessels of the lesser monkeys and shortening their life span. I identified with them.

But as I heard a high school teacher say once, "normality will return..." I don't know if that is actually true in one sense, but no matter how dramatically your circumstances change, I have learned that your new reality will become your new normal. Thankfully, things began to settle down. I got my computer back. I was able to prepare for and get through a key conference. Several big ticket items on my "to do" list were checked off. Looking back, I realize the biggest issue in all this was more about my response to all this stuff than it was about the stuff itself. That was where I found the formation of my own character was more important than any skills I could develop. I tried to discipline my mind, I'd read a novel to get sleepy enough to drift off, I tried to fit some exercise into my too busy schedule. Ultimately, life became a crucible that changed me, maybe just a little. Others around me may not see dramatic changes, but I feel I've grown more this last year than I have in a while. And it's because of the challenges.

Back to the monkey documentary, they said stress hormones up to a certain level improve your immune system, prepare you for dealing with threats, etc. If it get's to a chronic level, then it damages your immune system and your health. I was wondering why, in a new job, under a lot of stress, in a household with small children (affectionately known as little petri dishes), in a work environment where I am constantly in crowded situations, I didn't get sick this winter. Maybe I was getting the right amount of stress hormones. I don't want to live continuously the way I felt back in March clinging to that giant rubber ball in rough seas. On the other hand, I don't want to live a life of no challenges.

2007-12-26T17:59:00.001-08:00

A Different Kind of Nativity.

She somehow found the energy to draw a smiley face after she wrote her name "Mary" on the back of the meal ticket. It totaled up to $23.40.

When we first arrived, I had misgivings even though this was my idea. The day after Christmas, burnt out on left-over ham and suffering from a mild case of cabin fever, I suggested we take the kids over to the nearest Waffle House for dinner. The poster in the front window said "Open 24 hours, Christmas and New Years Day." There were three other customers in there when we arrived, but they paid and left soon thereafter. The four of us claimed stools at the counter. The short-order cook had a three day beard and 8-inch mullet. The only waitress on duty moved very slowly as she laid down a paper napkin in front of each of us and deliberately put down a fork, spoon and knife. I don't always check for health department scores at restaurants, but I looked this time. 88. Not as bad as I expected.

While we looked over the laminated menus, I heard the waitress asking the cook how he managed to get the day off on Christmas. The phone rang a time or two causing me to wonder who calls a Waffle House. Was it the manager checking in or friends and family of the staff? We ordered 3 of the 20,092,096 variations on the menu. We all got breakfast - plus we ordered some sides for Ben then shared with him whatever we could get him to eat. Olivia is still a modified vegetarian, but she will eat eggs, so I ordered her some and gave her the waffle that came with my All Star Special.

The Jute Box played 6 songs for a dollar, a bargain I could hardly resist. As I entered the first of my selections, Olivia came over to pick out a couple of songs. She wanted to play an Elvis song. I'd already had my eye on one. The thing still played 45's and it was well stocked with Holiday Themed music, so somebody keeps it up at least semi-regulalry. I pointed out the mechanism to Olivia and found myself saying "These are records. They're what everyone listed to long before CDs." (What a dad thing to say.) Ben clamored off his stool at one point and wandered over to the jute box. He leaned forward and put his head against the glass and watched the turntable spin. Like a mirror reflecting upon itself, I remembered looking out through eyes that were about the age of his at the jute box near the door of Marcetti's Italian restaurant while the rest of my family sat at a booth on one side and waited for our pizza. My dad probably kept an eye on me then just like I'm watching him now.

While our food cooked and we were still the only ones there, Mary the waitress and the cook (I didn't get his name) chatted with us a bit. I noticed her rubbing her pregnant belly which showed, but not so obviously, through her navy-blue apron. She stretched and pressed her palms into the small of her back in the way millions of tired expectant mothers have done for centuries. This was her fourth. She had a 7, 6 and 5-year old. She was taking that birth control shot, but obviously it wasn't 100% effective.

The fry cook first said he had four kids of his own. Later we'd find out that his girlfriend was pregnant again. He had two by his first "old lady" who he hasn't seen for 7 years. The woman, not the kids. He was raising them. Now he had two by his current "fiancee" - 17 months, 7 months and another on the way. He said "They say God don't give you more kids than you can handle. They're wrong. I don't think I could handle the first two." But there was a tone in his voice that made you think he wasn't entirely serious. This is the second of 2 jobs he works so his woman can stay home with the 4 kids.

About the time our food arrived the place began to fill up. A group of five people took a corner booth. From their accents I'd guess they were on the road on their way back up north. One couple in the group had an obviously adopted asian daughter with them. A couple of tables of your common SouthEastern red necks arrived. Then a group of three Hispanics. A large black man came in just to buy a Coke to go. A cross section of American humanity that you could probably find in a thousand other diners in a thousand other towns on a thousand other days. For a moment, I lost myself in time and space and was just a part of a timeless American demographic.

I made sure the waitress noticed when I left our money with the bill so she wouldn't think we'd skipped out. I left a large tip, at least percentage wise. Still didn't amount to much. On the drive home I wondered if we'd spent more on Christmas this year than those two make in a month. I wondered what kind of opportunities life was going to offer to the 5th kid of a fry cook. I wondered what it was like for a pregnant waitress to leave her three kids on Christmas day to sling hash to whomever wanders into a Waffle House on December 25th.

Mary's fourth was on the way. Could anything good come from Nazarath?

2007-12-06T16:38:00.000-08:00

The shape hung suspended in mid-air and turned slowly beneath the big orange crane. It's blue-grey hue perfectly matched the early morning cloud-covered sky behind it. If it weren't moving and didn't have crisply defined edges, it would be virtually invisible. I don't know if it was a panel or a support or some part of an HVAC system. It was going on the roof of that big new development at 5th and Main. High-priced condos with a view of housing projects. Only in East Nashville. I sat in traffic, waiting for the light to change and watched it slowly turn, changing back and forth from a two- to a three-dimensional object. I keep waiting for some giant kid's arm to reach down out of the sky and start re-arranging buildings like so many Lego blocks or knocking them all down with his toy lizard.

It doesn't happen.

On the in-dash CD player, Todd Snider is singing about the neighborhood in affectionate tones with profane lyrics. It's December, but the most festive thing I can see is the neon of the liquor store. It's cool to live over here now. Not cool in the homecoming queen and high school quarterback sense, but cool in the dis-affected outsider sense. Cool like the kid who always wore black t-shirts and knew the chords to every Clapton song and wouldn't be caught dead at prom unless his band was hired to play the gig.

We were here before it was cool. It just ended up that way. I can trace my East Nashville roots back to birth. But my parents moved us away when I was one and it would take 21 years to make it back. Lisa and I came here in 99 'cause we liked the houses and we could afford to buy one on a single state government employee salary. It was still a little risky then. We're technically Inglewood, not East Nashville, so that's kind of like the cool kid's cousin from out of town who shows up a few times a year and gets to hang out with the hip crowd.

The East Side is weird melting pot. A gumbo of artists and government types. The last mayor lived over here, side by side with musicians, consultants, lawyers and homosexuals. But I guess we're more of the soup stock, not so much the spice. Our artists friends used to invite us over when their parents were in town, probably to make them look more respectable to mom and dad. Married couple. With kids. State government lawyer. Stable. Respectable. Bland.

Some of that's changed. Now I'm a lobbyist. I've got a new car, a Blackberry, some cool new gadgets, a few new suits, a better haircut, some trendier glasses, a lot more responsibility and no one looking over my shoulder. I get to suck up to politicians, try to make policy and get criticized in the press. It don't feel East Side anymore. But maybe it is. Heck, anything can go in the mix.

The light has changed. I inch closer to one of the bridges into downtown with all the other commuters packed into their shiny metal boxes. It takes about as long to drive from the house to the river as it does to cross the river and drive a few blocks in downtown to the parking garage where I now have a reserved space. I didn't take the girl to school today on the way in, but I usually do. Most days her presence probably saves me from melancholy music and too much early-morning introspection. Some day I'm sure I'll look back and wish I made better use of those ten minute drives with her 5 days a week. There were mornings of hilarious serial made-up stories with a new chapter each day, but man, that took energy. But for every one of those, there were also mornings of trying to shut her incessant chattering out so I could listen to something on the radio.

I take a left on 5th so I can cross on the bridge by the stadium where the traffic doesn't back up quite as much. I'd like to have time to write something creative, paint-a-picture with a literary pallet, when I first get behind my desk. But that's not what they pay me for. I've got a nine-o-clock meeting with a bureaucrat and it's already almost 8. I didn't get breakfast at home and that first cup of coffee won't sit well on an empty stomach. Short story or sausage bisquit?

Sausage bisquit wins.

2007-08-25T22:44:00.001-07:00

(Sigh)

Where to begin. Where to begin. Let's start with a truism. Dads who are running at less than 80% of their parental operating efficiency should not be allowed to take kids into Target alone. I did that today. About $160 and 90 minutes later, I escaped. I guess I got out cheaper and sooner than if I'd been arrested by corrupt Mexican police who had planted drugs on me, but the feeling was the same. Lisa is shooting a wedding tonight, so she needed the morning to run some errands and get ready. We hadn't made a lazy Saturday run to the donut shop in a while, so I thought I could pry the kids away from morning cartoons by heading there for breakfast (and coffee I direly needed). Once we were out, I figured we could run some errands. I went to Target to get basically three things: some shirts for my daughter, a new home phone and a toy for a birthday party my daughter was invited to attend later today. It was that last item that complicated the logistics.

Trying to figure out what to buy for somebody else's kid whom you've never met is a challenging task. On the one hand, you don't know the kid, so you have no idea what toys she likes or what toys she has. On the other hand, you don't know the kid, so you're not that concerned if she likes the gift. The odds are against you actually getting something desirable that doesn't end up being snuck out of the toy box and later donated to goodwill along with a bunch of happy meal toys in an opaque black plastic bag that the kids can't see through and that's hidden in the back of the station wagon under a blanket and some beach towels. (Ummmm…. Not that we've ever done that.) At these group class birthday parties, whether staged at Chuck E Cheese, a "bouncy" place, a water park, or any one of the other levels of hell from Dante's inferno, the kids are always giggling and vibrating around like a bunch of players on the metal playing field of an electric football game from the 1960s. They'll never remember what happened or where the gifts came from. Any sense of excitement or disappointment is sure to be washed away in the Jacuzzi bath of adrenaline and sugar that's boiling through their cerebellum and cooking their brain stem.

So anyway… somebody asked somebody what this girl liked and the reply was "Oh, I'm sure she'd like whatever (my daughter) likes." So we eventually ended up basking in the neon pink glow of the Barbie aisle. I'm ashamed to say that as parents of a 6 year old girl, we have now fully embraced Barbie. When she was younger (our daughter, not Barbie), we had these grand aspirations of being parents who didn't perpetuate stereotyped gender roles and didn't acquiesce to our culture's vile body image messages foisted upon young girls. Five or six years later, we now realize that in comparison to the plastic tramps, sluts and whores that populate a good portion of the shelf space in toy stores these days, a standard Barbie looks downright wholesome. Whether it's a Bratz doll, My Scene or the "bling, bling" version of Barbie created as a part of the whole nuclear proliferation of sluttiness that started when Bratz began to push Barbie out of her own dominant market share, the portrayal of the feminine form in these dolls is appalling. Fishnet stockings, leather, chains, ridiculous pouty lips, and layers upon layers of makeup on already exaggerated eyes. And that's just on the baby doll Bratz.

A few Christmas seasons ago, we had a laugh at my dad because he'd been in the mall and was highly offended by something he thought was labeled a "call girl" Barbie. We looked in an ad circular and realized what he had mistakenly identified was a "Cali Girl" Barbie. Little did we know his erroneous vision was prophetic of upcoming marketing trends. With the ethnically diverse and suggestively clad Bratz dolls, what comes instantly to mind is the staff of some kind of under-aged and full service Bordello. Or more likely, a pack of street walkers from the worst parts of town. Okay, maybe it's my mind that's in the gutter, but I'm pretty sure that's the image the dolls are intended to conjure up. I'm not attracted to this ridiculous hyperbole of femininity, I'm repulsed by it. Polly Pocket on the other hand does something for me. I fear I might have a fetish for latex clothing, but that's the subject of another post. Or not.

Where I was headed with all this was a consideration of how this creeping cultural shift infects us all. In ten years, will Bratz dolls look tame? Will we be buying "free health clinic" playsets and domestic abuse Barbies? Instead of fade away tans will the dolls come with fade away bruises? I don't believe this is a vast liberal conspiracy to corrupt all the children of America away from their family values. I think it's a fairly obvious corporate capitalist effort to herd consumers like cattle by appealing to their basest and sometimes most powerful urges. I think they've just decided to start programming them even earlier.

Which brings me back around to my weakness with the kids. We hit the toy aisle first. I still had to select a phone amongst the myriad options and get some standard school attire shirts for Olivia. I had been thinking this school uniform thing wasn't bad. Although it did require us to purchase some new clothes, there are actually a broad range of options you can get and Lisa hit the thrift stores early and had us well stocked. She even bought a lot of standard school attire clothing of various sizes when she saw it available cheap and donated it to schools to make available to low income families (she's so altruistic). So shifting to uniforms was no problem until the crayon incident. The first time we run a laundry load of standard school attire there happens to be a red crayon in amongst all the khaki. Oops. And not a nice new washable crayon, but an old nasty one. So now we're back at square one trying to get school uniforms after every store in town has been picked over.

I'm tired (my caffeine hasn't kicked in yet) and distracted and trying to get things done. So of course wheeling two young kids up and down toy aisles is a great way of staying on course. They're both clamoring for different toys and I'm wondering how I'm going to be able to sort through the features on phones with whiny kids unless I can find a distraction. They can smell fear and/or a crumbling resolve and keep pushing till I hear myself saying "Well, I guess maybe you guys can pick out something small." I was thinking $5 or less. It would have worked okay, maybe, except for what my 2 and a half year old son wanted to get. Olivia was easy to please. She wanted a relatively cheap Barbie and it seemed when we were buying something nicer for her friend that I could pick up something inexpensive for her. I know. I know. It was the friend's birthday and she has way too many toys as it is. My mistake. But when Ben also wanted Barbie, I found myself in a dilemma. Despite my best efforts, he had no interest in Ken dolls. He wanted the Barbie baby photographer (a rip off on Anne Geddes). There was a lovely Barbie and three babies with different obnoxiously cute outfits to dress them in for taking pictures. Also a camera, tri-pod and backdrops. I tried to interest him in balls, stuffed animals, something. Then I started bargaining with Olivia to see if she'd want to put back her single Barbie and go in with Ben on this larger purchase which they could share. No dice. She smelled blood in the water. I get Ben distracted with some cheap stuffed elephants which enables me to get the other purchases I needed. All the while though, I'm wondering if I'm hung up on this gender role thing.

It bothers me that he wants to play with Barbies. Then it bothers me that it bothers me. He has a very sweet nature. He loves babies. He's warm and generally kindhearted. He's empathetic and sensitive and affectionate. He likes to put on his sister's dress up clothes. He watches her play with this kind of stuff all the time, right, so it's natural for him to be interested in it. It doesn't mean anything about his gender identity, right? And what if it does? I'm a more progressive and intelligent dad and shouldn't be bothered by this. But I am.

I'm second-guessing myself and also wondering why on earth I'm buying stuffed animals when they already have a zoo full of them and I'm wondering why I don't just put my foot down and say "No. We're here to buy a present for the party, not to get you guys toys" but I'm facing the prospect of watching them both mostly all day and if I start off at 9:30 AM with meltdowns in Target somebody's will have reported me to the Department of Children's Services by the time bedtime finally arrives. We get to the check out line and I decide to call my wife to discuss if I'm out of line by not buying my son the Barbie doll he wants. She was a huge help. After stating she wouldn't have agree to buy them anything at all she doesn't offer any insight about the whole Barbie dilemma.

This whole thing is way out of proportion now. But I can't figure out if it's worse to let him play with girl's toys then to fail to accept him for who he is. The funny thing is, I wouldn't have hesitated a moment if my daughter had wanted something Spiderman or a hot wheels car or some other kind of "boy" toy. What does that say about this supposedly enlightened parent? After a few minutes of indecision I take us back to the toy aisle one more time and get him the Barbie. In the check out line, I'm waited on by a large middle aged black man. As he's scanning my purchases, Ben's saying "I want mine. I want miiiinnnneee." Trying to cover I say "Here Ben, you can hold this sack." Ben says "I want my Barbie." Well, there goes my cover.

After we get in the car and I've handed my two spoiled children their individual Barbie boxes, my daughter says "Uh-oh. This is made in China." As if that matters at this point. Lisa's been trying to avoid buying Chinese products for socio-economic reasons long before the recent safety recall scares. But you just try and find a molded plastic toy that isn't made in China. I tell her it's okay. I look over the other products once we're home. The telephone I picked had the features we wanted and I liked the fact that it had a label that said it was made using sustainable practices. Still, it's a product of China. Barbies are of course made in China. The knit shirts were made in Vietnam. Of all the things I bought (and I of course got more than I went in the store for), the only thing made in the U.S. was a box of tall kitchen garbage bags. I think that's what they call "Ironic" with a capital "I".

Whether it is true or simply an urban legend, I've heard a frog will sit in boiling water till it cooks so long as you raise the temperature slowly enough. Has our consumer culture reached the boiling point yet? The pressure keeps going up and up and I think about all the good little American consumption machines that never give their lifestyle a second thought. Frog leg stew baby. I think my problem is that I keep jumping in and out of the hot water. I know a lot of what I'm doing isn't the best for me, my family, or the global economy, but I still do it 'cause it's convenient. And then I've got guilt and angst. Donuts, shopping malls, cheaply manufactured products, impulse buys, compromises, vehicles that burn fossil fuels. Where does it end? I guess it ends up with my kids suffering from juvenile diabetes, asthma, confused gender roles, poor body image, credit card debt and an inability to find a decent paying job. Despite my best intentions.

2007-08-24T12:18:00.001-07:00

I apologize for the lack of new content here. Life is moving in many directions at once these days. I'm about 6 weeks into the new job. The school year has started back. That probably meant for stress for my wife and I than for our daughter. Her response to hearing there would be 22 kids in her first grade class: "Wow! I'll have 21 new friends!" The comment shows not only her indomitable spirit and her extroverted personality, but also certain cognitive skills (i.e. she remembered not to count herself). It appears she has a wonderfully energetic and creative teacher this year.

Something I can show off and share is a creation that I was able to complete this summer with the help of my dad, my wife and an artist friend of hers. It's a circulation desk for our school library. This was one of those things where I got myself in over my head and had to tread water till help could arrive. But in the end, I was really pleased with the final product and it's a fun addition to the school library.

The librarian who is a wonderful asset to the school (hmmm… is it correct to refer to a person as an asset?), spent last year struggling behind a small cramped desk where she tried to keep her computer, check books in and out, and have a place for volunteers to work. Hopefully wormy, pictured below, will make a difference.

2007-06-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

Abandon all hope ye who enter in...

or

Biological warfare

If here you have arrived through some metaphysic search to delve upon elucidations regarding things martial or Machiavellian, you have mistread. For lo I speak to you of a horror much deeper, more primordial, more inhuman. If you have a heart well acquainted and endowed with bravery, steel yourself and read on.

I speak to you of an ordeal I was so foolish to dain volunteer earlier this fornight. Twas Moon's day when upon arrival at the homestead I discovered a state of illness had befallen upon my family. My young son, heir to the family name had been striken with intestinal distress various times and from diverse orifices. Twice these maladies had found him that day whilst he rode secured in his seat in our transport -- our wagon for commuting between stations.

To prevent a foul and malodorous (or more malodorous) condition from permanently settling within the confines of this wagon I set about to remove the afflicted compartment and clean it fastidiously.

Where brave men fear to tread, fools rush in.

I didst proceed to sop what I could and found the task not that daunting till I removed the apholstery from his chariot and experienced the nightmare within.

There, down in the depths, festering in the modled and metal compartments, intermingled with bindings of canvas, there lay horrors unknown and as yet unidentified. It was as if a darkened creature painted with a hideous rainbow pallet from hades had relieved itself within the hidden chambers of this seat.

I swear I saw it stir.

Though I conducted my task in the bright sun of late afternoon I still felt a cold shadow pass across my heart. I shrank back, then steeled myself and pressed on with what feeble tools I had at hand to disinfect and deodorize.

Like Dante's inferno there were layers upon layers of besmirchment. Some crusty, some dampened, some brackish and grey and certain others that defy description and should not be spoken of. I realized this was not the result of the recent malady that had struck the lad. Nay, that had merely inspired this discovery of an ancient monstrosity. But I should not speak in the singular, for when I asked somewhat profanely "My God! What is this?!", the response came back, not singular, but as a cacophony of voices that spoke as one.

"wE ARe LeGiON..."

I sat in silence.

Some time passed. A cloud o'er covered the sun but like the grace of God it's warmth returned undaunted and I prepared myself to be at least partially as steadfast.

My labor endured. I shall not regail you with the gruesome details. But bit by bit, I found that the true nature of the seat remained and that this loathsome putrescence could be set upon its heels and exorcized.

I found old devices now rusted and coroded. I found silver and copper. I found trappings for adorning the hair and baubles and treasures and trinkets plastic and otherwise. I did not allow these earthly treasures to tempt me for I knew they had all been soiled far beyond redemption and were tainted. So they were all exiled to the rubbish bin along with the foul substances that engulfed them.

At last when my task was done, and I had searched the contraption again and yet again to ensure no more demonic besmirchment remained, I sat and rested.

I looked down upon my hands and wished that some merciful soul wouldst tear from my digits the very nails that crowned them for I knew they would never be pure again and that I would carry some remnants of my struggle beneath those nails for the rest of my days. There are some stains that no lye nor brush nor hot bath can remove.

And so, I returned into the bright oasis of my home for a moment to put the darkness of my ordeal behind me, though I knew then I would carry it with me always. Within I found my sweet companion and our child and she said unto me: "Here, take him. I've got to change, he's thrown up all over my clothes."

At that moment I remembered that she has many times previously and thoroughly cleaned out our kid's car seats.

2007-05-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

Advice from the Seven Dwarves

or...

Keeping your Nose to the Grindstone.

"Healthy 2...healthy 1....healthy 2....healthy 2"

Victoria the hygienist spoke her mantra into the microphone of her voice recognition system. I wondered to myself what the alternative was to "healthy" when suddenly she answered my unspoken question.

"Recession....recession...healthy 1... healthy 2..."

Uh-oh. A blip on the radar screen. A chink in the armor. A fly in the ointment.

This isn’t some strange new genre of dental sci-fi. This is real life. I go to a very hi-tech dentist. Now I do anyway. I switched after going to see the same family dentist from my early teen years well on into adulthood. Everything stayed exactly the same there. No changes to the cleaning methods, the X-rays, the flouride treatment. The same machinery, the same staff. But I finally got tired of going there, in part because they never changed a thing about their practice in 20 years (you’d have thought there were some advances in dentistry in that time - which I soon discovered there were), in part because they were expensive, but to a large degree the straw that broke the camel’s back was the obnoxious right-wing talk radio that had begun to spew forth bile replacing the elevator music that had oozed its way out of the office speaker system for years.

So a couple of years ago I started going to a urban dentist a few blocks away from my office. It was a brave new world of panoramic X-rays, soft tissue screening, zoom whitening, bacterial analysis, aroma therapy, a coffee bar, posh interiors, flat panel TVs, and progressive music. I’m not sure how this place can offer all it does for roughly the same price as my old stone age dentist, but they do.

The hygienist wears a headset microphone behind her clear plastic face screen and talks to her computer as she does an initial exam. Tooth by tooth, she ranks your gums in terms of whether they are healthy or, as I discovered Monday, receding.

I’ve taken pride for years in the health of my teeth. I don’t have a beautiful smile. There’s a gap between my top front teeth, the bottom teeth are crowded and a little crooked, and they’re all slightly yellow. But... I have virtually no decay and (until recently) very healthy gums. I was well into my 30s before I had my first cavity filled in a permanent tooth. When I was in kindergarten, I had one in a baby tooth. It happened during national dental health week. We saw an old filmstrip cartoon about plaque monsters and cavity creeps or some sort of thing and I believe it scarred me for life. I brush the crap out of my teeth. I go through toothbrushes like they’re tissue paper. But as a result, I didn’t have another cavity for 3 decades. I’ve had too very small ones now. Not bad for being nearly 40.

But this receding gum thing is something new. It’s related to grinding, something they’d warned me about before. I even have this retainer type of thing they got me to buy a couple of years ago to prevent wear and tear from grinding my teeth in my sleep. I’ve worn the points off my bicuspids. I guess my canines are bovines now. I didn’t take it that seriously before. The retainer thing was uncomfortable and made it hard to get to sleep. I didn’t get used to it in a few weeks, so I quit wearing it. But now I’ve worn through the enamel in one spot, I’m causing my gums to recede in the area where I’m grinding and there is even evidence of thickening of the bone below the teeth in these same areas which is some sort of biological response to the stress on the framework.

And that’s really the culprit. Stress. It’s got to come out somewhere. My blood pressure is low, but my teeth are paying the price. So where’s this all coming from? Life in general. As Cake once sang on their album Prolonging the Magic... "The minute you’re born you start dying..."

I’m about halfway through a ten week transition from one job to another. A board of directors voted to name me to be the successor for the retiring director of an organization that has basically one employee - the director. So in this case there has been more than the usual 2-3 weeks notice involved with leaving a job. I thought having that long of a time frame would make this change easier. Truth is, it’s prolonging the agony. I’m still doing my old job, and this is the busiest time of the year for my old position. But I’m also having to handle all the logistics of the transition, respond to requests from my new employers, plan a retirement reception, gift and other recognitions for the guy I’m replacing, help develop the budget I’ll be operating under for next year, help recruit and find a replacement for myself in my old job, and work to close out all the existing projects I’ve got going there while also passing on as much knowledge as I can to the rest of the staff.

Then there is the broken clothes dryer at home, the leaky faucet, the flat tire, the unfinished closet addition, the busted cell phone, the speeding ticket, the children needing attention, the stressed out and worn out wife, the grocery list, the dog’s barking for a walk... I should go ahead and get some titanium dentures. You know, go for the Jaws look from the James Bond movie Moonraker.

Let’s not get carried away. There may be other options. The second half of that Cake lyric is actually helpful. "The minute you’re born you start dying... so you might as well have a good time." Hmmm.... Could it be that simple. Find a way to enjoy what you’re doing. Radical concept. Whistle while you work. To quote Cheryl Crow, "It’s not getting what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got." To elevate these sentiments a bit, Martin Luther put it this way: "Love God and do as you please." Or as Frederick Buechner said it, "True vocation joins self and service in the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need." Eh, that’s a little too lofty.

I consider myself very blessed in that I think I’m on the verge of getting to a place like that. A real vocation. I just need to make sure I don’t forget to enjoy it while I’m there. It’s a subtle conflict. I can tell my motor is revving a little too high right now. Some days I arrive at work with ten things to do and by the time I leave I have twenty. My back aches. My digestion is off. I sleep poorly. I’m impatient with the kids. Distant from the wife. Distracted. Pre-occupied. But this period will pass. And even before it passes, I can tell that the most important factor in determining whether I have a good day or a bad one is my own attitude.

Once in a while I catch myself getting all worked up and then I think "Wait a minute. You asked for this. This is something you want to do. This is going where you want it to. Enjoy the ride." And that little moment of reflection is like blowing into a pot of pasta that’s boiling over. It cools things down, settles the surface, stops all the splattering and hissing and all the mess. For a moment anyway. It comes back eventually. But that’s okay.

I’ve watched people burn out. I’ve seen co-workers with substance abuse problems. I’ve seen people hang on in misery just to get to retirement only to die within a couple of years from a heart attack or cancer. I don’t want to go out that way.

And when I go, I want to still have some teeth left.

2007-05-05T20:06:00.001-07:00

The house is quiet. I sit here accompanied by the clicking of the keyboard and the white noise of the monitor which tells me all is okay upstairs. Mixed in with the static is the rhythmic and unending ticking of a clock, so I know the device is not just repeating chaos over and over. Once in a while I hear a foot shifting under a blanket or a hint of a snore.

The boy fell asleep early as I read to him from Harold and the Purple Crayon in a voice intentionally monotone. The girl is now sleeping in bed after some dinner, some games, a book, six songs and a prayer.

The wife is down the street at a birthday party for someone she doesn’t even know that well. But you have to realize that the sorority of stay-at-home-mothers needs little excuse to gather and behave like grown-ups.

Things are changing. And always will. I’m moving in a new direction career wise. And it is a change that I can tell will stretch me – will change who I am. Not in some radical way, but in the sense that it will bring growth. In some ways it feels like a path that has been fore-ordained for me to walk down. But at the same time, I feel like I choose to make this path happen. There was a way that I could see that I could go, but like an overgrown track in the woods, I needed a machete to clear the route. And I feel responsible. I could have stayed where I was, but I didn’t and that has created opportunity and more than a little hardship (mostly for other people).

I’m not sure free will is entirely a genuine concept. I think instead life, or God, or karma tricks us into volunteering before we are drafted. Maybe what we do and who we become is largely out of our hands, but we are involved enough that we can be convicted of the crime and serve as a scapegoat while fate remains the unindicted co-conspirator.

2007-02-27T21:14:00.000-08:00

Common uncommonness

Tonight there was a basketball game I wanted to catch that was on ESPN. Since we have little kids in the house and we want to watch less television anyway, we subscribe to cable, but only to the lowest level. We’re talking sub-basic cable. For something like $11 a month you can get just the local stations plus a few others. I think we get a dozen channels in all, including a couple of local access, C-span, a religious channel, PBS, the local affiliates and not much else. ESPN actually does come in, but it’s in black and white and the sound is full of static. In most communities, this probably puts us in the bottom 3% of the population unless you’re talking rural Montana or sub-Saharan Africa.

So, I decide to cruise down to a local bar where I figure the game would be on and I could grab a pint of draft beer and chill out before heading to bed. Lisa had been at a meeting of an education organization for most of the evening and I got the kids to bed, picked up the kitchen and hung out till she got home. She wanted to work on the computer a while – I figured I could duck out for an hour. There I am, in a trendy east Nashville bar on Woodland Street in tennis shoes, a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt fading into the background when in walks an entourage of the hip and trendy. Lots of tall skinny people dressed mostly in black with funky glasses and hats, tight-fitting jeans, long coats, different hair. Then I realize one couple amidst the group are the parents of one of Olivia’s kindergarten classmates. I knew the dad was in a band. The mom has multi-colored hair. But their house is one of the few places Olivia has felt comfortable enough to spend the night with no trouble at all. They seem to be wonderful parents and genuinely kind and decent people. I can guarantee if we had gone to the same high school, we’d have run in different crowds.

For a while earlier in our marriage it seemed Lisa and I were in demand as the "normal" couple in our friends’ lives. We were the people invited over when somebody’s parents were in town or when a friend wanted to make a good impression on someone. "See mom, not all my friends are weirdos!" Of course, we got to feel a little bit cool by association knowing these artists and musicians and outsiders and assorted mini-celebrities. In our families, we’re the black sheep because we aren’t sticking with the party line and playing the role of traditional southern Baptist, Republican, social conservative, suburbanite white people. Amongst our friends (at least for a time) we were dreadfully mundane.

The thing is, we’re all still people. The cool crowd aren’t from a different species (homo trendicus?). The normal people aren’t missing a chromosome. Speaking for us normal types, I think we can be just as unusual as some of you others, we’re just nervous about showing it. I'll probably see either the mom or dad tomorrow morning when we're dropping off the kids at school. And here I am sitting writing this and I either smell of smoke like I've been out at a bar or I like the woman who watches the kids in the nursery at church.

2007-02-21T22:09:00.000-08:00

Hello again...

Well. 2007 appears to be the year when everything goes wrong. Lisa's back went out, the kids have been sick (both of them on the day of their birthday or planned birthday party), the truck doesn't want to start many mornings, our phone line inside our house is messed up and the phone company won't do anything about it, our computer fried, our gas grill started leaking propane (yikes!), our cassette deck on our stereo died, the hamster escaped (and unfortunately hasn't returned), the dogs escaped (and unfortunately did return), my right shoulder is messed up, Lisa's thyroid isn't acting properly, Ben isn't gaining weight properly and I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting.

The end result is our tax refund is spent before we've even got it back, we've met our deductable on our health insurance in record time and neither of us have been blogging lately.

We still have much to be thankful for. We've got a truck that occasionally acts up. We've got beautiful darling children who keep us up at night. We've got nagging aches and pains, but generally good health. We have a home. I've got a job that pays well enough that we can recover pretty easily from minor financial setbacks.

So now, this evening I've been trying to get our new Dell up and going and I've decided Windows Vista is kinda like a cheerleader girlfriend - pretty to look at but annoying in the long run. There aren't drivers yet for either of our printers and it took me about an hour to get our internet connection working. But we are connected again.

Maybe you'll hear more again soon.

I'm not so much into blogging these days, but I at least need to explain what I am doing with my writing energies.

p.s. Don't go see the Ghost Rider movie. It sucks big time.

2007-01-17T21:06:00.000-08:00

Women of the World - UNITE

or...

The truth in Combos advertising

"Do you work?" asked the chiropractor.

Before she could answer, I interrupted "Oh yeah she works. At home!" and I pointed to the almost two year old adorable child squirming in my lap as I tried somewhat unsuccessfully to entertain him in the examining room with hastily drawn sketches on his magna doodle of every variety of animal I can think of.

"I guess I should change that question to ‘Do you have a paying job?" he corrected.

Even before our current crisis, I have been careful not to say "my wife doesn’t work." But I don’t think I’ll ever come close to making that mistake again. As much as I intellectually understood the rigors of the stay-at-home mom, I did not have the experiential understanding of mom-hood. Until now. Somewhat.

Lisa’s back went out early Sunday morning (and no, it wasn’t going to church). Ever since about 8:00 am Central time on January 14th, I’ve been 100% dad and about 90% of mom, plus the male nurse for an invalid and the sole caretaker for our two dogs and George, the hamster – the newest edition to our family. He arrived for our daughter’s sixth birthday earlier this month, promptly bit her, was disappointingly consistent with his species’ nocturnal tendencies and pooped a lot. With some patient inter-species diplomatic relations, Lisa and I had him warming up to human contact, but with the state of emergency around here the last couple of days, he’s probably regressed. And I digress.

I know you’ll all be concerned, so I’ll answer the question first - she’s doing better. The doctor thinks it’s a bulging disk, but nothing ruptured. It was most likely a combination of the rigors of mom-hood and an ill-advised yoga move followed by an early morning session of playing blocks sitting on the hardwood floors. It’s been more than 72 hours and she can now walk unassisted for short stretches and get to the bathroom by herself (that wasn’t always the case).

I’ve been through the back thing myself. I’ve had I think 3 episodes where it’s "gone out." The last and worst was almost 2 years ago on Lisa’s birthday when I basically abandoned her with a 4 year old and a 4 month old while I lived on the floor for a few days and got to find all the things that were lost under our furniture. (And she didn’t divorce me. Imagine that.) Now Lisa has a greater appreciation for what I went through. I feel like less of a wimp since this woman who gave birth twice without an epidural says that a major back problem is pretty dang miserable.

So she understands my pain better and I’m understanding hers. Not only is her job tougher and more emotionally and physically exhausting than mine, the hours suck. It’s about a quarter to ten. I’ve averaged starting the demands of my day a little after 6 a.m. after a night of interrupted sleep and then wrapped things up around nine. That’s about the time I can finish getting our kids to bed, picking up the leftover dinner dishes, bringing her an ice pack, making a grocery run, etc. and then collapsing in a chair somewhere to watch a little tv or read a book if I can make my eye’s focus.

It’s not that I’ve never watched the kids by myself or that she’s never been sick before in the 6 years we’ve been parents. I’ve had the kids to myself for a day here and there and had Ben alone overnight a few months ago when Lisa and Olivia went on a camping trip. He was still nursing at the time, desperately missing Lisa and was inconsolable at regular intervals. I thought that was work.

I realize I still don’t qualify for honorary mom status. Four days isn’t even the equivalent of one work week. I’ve been out of town on business trips for 3 or 4 days at a time and left Lisa alone with the kids. I’ve felt guilty about those times, but now when they come I’ll feel worse.

Since Sunday, I’ve gone extended periods without a shower. I’ve worn the same clothes for more than a day. I’ve missed meals ‘cause I was just too damn busy to get to eat anything myself. I realize why mom’s are concerned about their kid’s diets. It’s seems likes 75% of what I ingested this week was the scraps off my kid’s plates (or even the kitchen floor). I was doing well cooking and making lunches and trying not to take the easy way out, but this evening Lisa wanted a milk shake and she said "why don’t you pick something up at Sonic for the kids’ dinners." We actually had a 3rd child around as a mom of one of Olivia’s friends called and caught me on the way out the door to ask if I could pick up her daughter too because her youngest was still sleeping and her oldest was home sick. I was flattered - I think that was something like an initiation. I guess moms do this favor thing all the time. It’s probably the key to survival.

So after the food run I stagger in the door with Ben on my hip and bags of sandwiches and fries and my daughter races to the door shouting "Daddy’s Home!" and I feel energized and appreciated for a brief moment before she asks "Where’s the food?" and snatches her bag and scampers off cramming french fries in her mouth.

Let’s see. What else have I experienced? Ben’s a drooler and I’ve gotten up a couple of times from rocking him to sleep for his nap with slobber stains on my shirt that make it look like I’m lactating. I’ve escaped unscathed from a Ben Snowstorm which occurred in the kitchen while I was trying to do dishes. That’s when he says "It’s snowing!" and begins grabbing handfuls of whatever he can find (in this case, refrigerator magnets - some of them rather substantial) and flinging them all into the air. I’ve brokered numerous inter-sibling conflict resolutions. I’ve cooked delicious meals and only managed to eat a couple of bites off my plate before it went cold because I kept having to shuttle back and forth between the youngsters and someone who needed an escort to get from the couch to the toilet. I thought I multi-tasked at work.

I’ve looked at the clock at 9:00 a.m. and thought "I’m already exhausted." And unlike the way it is most days for Lisa, I knew nobody was coming through the door at 5:30 to help shoulder the load. I remember some Clint Eastwood movie where he was a marine drill Sargent and kept emphasizing "You’re marines! You adapt, you improvise, you overcome." They’ve got nothing on moms. Ben wandered in the kitchen at some point demanding attention while I had my hands full with cooking dishes and I was trying to keep him away from the hot stove with one foot. He was carrying his stuffed Elmo and the belt from Lisa’s terry cloth robe. I grabbed Elmo, tied him up with the belt and slung him around the kitchen a few times before I sent Ben off to scamper through the house at high speed squealing and dragging Elmo behind him. It occupied him long enough for me to get stuff off the stove and out of the oven without burning anything.

I did a car seat exchange that would impress a Nascar pit crew. I was sitting in the station wagon in the line with all the other mom’s waiting to pick up my daughter and her friend at school when I realized I needed to swap Ben’s car seat for the extra booster we keep in the back for those occasions when we are driving around someone else’s precious cargo. Lisa was feeling good enough, so I was thankfully able to pop in a video for Ben to occupy him in the living room with her on the couch while I took 30 minutes to run to the school. So when the line of cars moved up and stopped again for a break I cut the engine, popped the back hatch, unlocked the doors, zipped around the car, grabbed the booster, unhooked the latches on the car seat, threw it in the back, slammed down the booster and jumped back in the driver’s seat before the cars edged forward again. I didn’t want to look incompetent around a bunch of mom’s. That’s the one thing they don’t tolerate.

Then I tell the teacher with the megaphone that I need to pick up someone else’s kid too and give her the name and I’m hoping that with my unkempt hair, bloodshot eyes, shellshocked brain and unfocused stare I can still pass for someone who’s not a weirdo pedophile trying to kipnap my daughter’s schoolmate. She calls out my daughter’s friend’s name without a blink and I think "Hey, I must be doing okay."

Oh yeah. The Combos thing. I’m trying to be a good dad, but I think no matter what, no matter how enlightened and sensitive a parent I may try to be, I’m not pulling off the mom thing. There’s an ad out now for Combo’s stuffed pretzel snack things where there’s this big middle-aged overweight guy in a wig and a housecoat lying in bed snoring. A teenage son walks in and says "Mom. I don’t feel so good. I think I’ve got a fever" The "Mom" rolls over, slaps a big meaty hand to the kid’s forehead and says "Nah. You’re not sick. You’re probably hungry. Here" and he/she slings him a bag of Combos. As the kid wanders off, the "Mom" yells "Hey! Love ya!" and rolls over to go back to sleep. The tag line is "Combos – What your mom would give you to eat if your mom was a man." It’s hilarious. And I think it’s mostly true.

I don’t have the instincts a mother does. I thought I was a diligent and safe parent and after four days I find myself thinking things like "It’s not that cold out" as I shoot out the door with Ben in socks and no shoes 'cause I don’t know where they are, I’m running late and I don’t want to go back upstairs for the 100th time today to look for them. I gave him back some piece of food he’d dropped on the kitchen floor and was crying about and then had to pull from his mouth the hair that was attached to it. I secretly think I should have bought Olivia two hamsters that looked alike and kept one of them hidden in the basement as a backup in case we kill this first one. This is not the way a mom thinks and acts. Guys (not necessarily all men, but the sub-class of "guys") are task-oriented. We just want to get it done and think we were successful if nothing happened along the way that left anybody with a scar. I’m not Al Bundy, mind you. But I sure as hell ain’t June Cleaver either.

In conclusion, I have new appreciation for what my wife has gone through now for years. I’ve very happy she’s getting better, but I realize I’m screwed the next time one of those "what about my needs?" arguments happens. The good thing is, I can probably coast through the rest of the playoffs and Superbowl Sunday on some of the credit I’ve earned going above and beyond this week. By the time football season starts up again next fall, hopefully Ben will be potty trained and the kids can fend for themselves for a while if dad needs to be a couch potato for a few hours on the weekend. I’m sure not ever telling Lisa that "I need some time off" again.

2007-01-03T19:34:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I’m on clear liquids. Then Friday I have a colonoscopy. Nothing is wrong. I have no symptoms, and I’m rather young for this, but my doctor thought it advisable to have one now since my mom had her run in with colon cancer last year.

There’s a little apprehension. Mostly I see it as an initiation. In a culture curiously devoid of rites of passage, this seems to be one of the few experiences that clearly qualifies you for adulthood. There also appears to be a fraternity or club of folks out there who have experienced this particularly unpleasant test. Everyone without exception who has had a colonoscopy has remarked to me some version of "it’s not the test, it the day before." I suppose I shall be the same.

I see tomorrow as something of a challenge, drinking these four liters of disgusting stuff that will clear out my system. I’m ready for that. However, in the last few days it has finally struck me that this test will have results. And that is what seems different.

I have no reason to think anything is wrong, but then again, neither did my mom.

2007-01-03T16:53:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to you all!

I have hope for 2007. Not hope in the sense that everything will be easy and comfortable, but hope in the sense that I will turn off the cruise control, exit the Interstate and drive through backwater towns and villages that won't always make for easy traveling, but will make for interesting vistas.

I can't say that I made resolutions this year, but I have chosen two mottos. They may sound like they conflict with one another, but I think in reality most of life is about balancing equal and unreconcilable principals. So for 2007 I am following the concept that "less is more" in some areas of my life and the mantra of "just do it" (no credit to Nike) in other areas and trying to simultaneously pursue both ideas in some portions of my life.

I have had an idea sneak up and find me recently and that may mean my writing energies are directed to places and projects other than this blog. I'll keep you posted.

In the mean time, may you find peace on earth, whatever parts of it you travel.

2006-12-21T16:35:00.000-08:00

Doh!

Okay people. I had inadvertantly activated "comment moderation" not knowing that meant I had to approve comments before they were published. So several of you had attempted to post comments to posts only to find they never appeared. And here I was thinking I had offended everyone with political statements or that no one was reading anymore. I was logging into the beta version of blogger instead of the new version or something, so I didn't get any notice that comments needed moderating. Oh well. I never claimed to be a techo-guru.

So...

I believe things are rectified now. Your comments have been freed from cyber-purgatory and should now appear on the website and I shall go read them for the first time. (Cringe...)

2006-12-15T09:49:00.000-08:00

It's a small world after all.

or....

Okay, that's not funny.

If you search on yahoo! for "notsovast" you now get links to all sorts of colon cleansing products. This has to relate to a previous post entitled "process of elimination" from back on November 20. But that's pretty scary that something out there has been reading through all the blogs in the world trying to find potential connections with marketable products then creating tags on websites that will direct people searching for me to places where they can buy herbal laxatives instead. Out of 18 results, you have to scroll all the way down to #15 to find anything that actually relates to this blog. Most of the results numbered 1-14 are poop related.

Talk about your vast conspiracy. (What's going to happen to me now that I've mentioned Karl Rove in my last post.) The other odd connection that pops up is a link to pages about gay travel. Somehow I don't think they mean "happy trips."

Google is better, with the first two results actually directing you here. Then there's something about fantasy football, something about clogs, a message board at the "blackpool conspiracy center" which looks interesting, the unexplainable "gay travel" references again, and down the list a ways there is a link to "Variations on a Theme," the blog of my lovely wife. But no colonics that I noticed.

Before google got so popular as a search engine, I was already in the habit of using yahoo! I never bothered to switch brands.

I think now that I shall.

2006-12-12T21:30:00.000-08:00

Who’s side are you on?

Or.....

Nobody expects the inquisition!

Once when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, "Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?" He replied, "Neither; but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come." And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped, and he said to him, "What do you command your servant, my lord?" The commander of the army of the LORD said to Joshua, "Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy." And Joshua did so.

Joshua 5:13-15 New Revised Standard Version

Somebody once said the two things you should never talk about in polite company are religion and politics. Well then, today I shall not be polite.

On the way home from work I was listening to NPR and feeling once again the deep and abiding sadness of war. A war of our choosing. A war, in my mind, wholly unnecessary. Even with the shift of parties in Congress and Rumsfeld leaving and reams of evidence of failure and errors there’s still little more happening in Washington than posturing and posing and hollow justifications and a resolute determination to ignore facts and plunge on full speed ahead armed with trite phrases, diversionary tactics and denials.

My opposition to this whole morass pre-dates the war. Before it began, my wife and I were at candlelight prayer vigils and demonstrations hoping against hope that people would turn down the volume on their podcasts of fear and listen to the quiet complicated whispers of truth. Now that polls are showing that the radical minority I was in three years ago has become the majority, that most Americans believe this war was a mistake, that it has made us less safe... Now, so many billions of dollars and thousands of lives later, I take little consolation from the fact that many more people agree with what I thought 3 and a half years ago.

I forget the exact date, but I believe it was in February of 2003, on a car trip one cold winter’s night, I listened to Mr. Bush’s speech that was supposed to lay the groundwork for why this war was necessary, why Hussein was such an intolerable threat to ourselves and our allies. This was the famous "yellow cake" speech later shown to be full of inaccuracies and half-truths. Alone there in the night, on the interstate with the glow of the radio and the monotonous passage of the asphalt river flowing beneath me I thought it was a pitifully weak and clearly transparent attempt at manipulating public sentiment. I listened and felt hope rise. The charges offered to justify the war and link Iraq to 9/11 seemed so far-fetched I thought surely everyone would see through this charade. I thought this country still believed war was an act of last resort. I thought public support would withdraw. I was wrong.

The ebb of the tides of vengeance was slow and though support has eroded over time, to this day, many well meaning people are still convinced we did the right thing. I can’t tell if that’s simply because they can’t face the alternative that we are tragically and criminally at fault or that they are that stubborn. Most astonishingly to me, some of the strongest supporters of this war and this president are people who find themselves in this position because they call themselves "Pro-Life." And they don’t see the irony.

When it comes to religion and politics, I’m all for separation of church and state. Unlike some proponents of that principle, it’s not primarily because I don’t want religion in government, but because I don’t want government in religion. Just prior to the most recent national election, I saw this guy interviewed a couple of times on different news stations who was a former Christian activist associated with the Bush administration who has now become disillusioned with the White House. Being ever-cynical, my guess is his little media tour was bankrolled by the Democrats who were trying to depress the turnout of the conservative evangelical Christian voting block. This guy was once a true believer who expected the Bush administration to be the most wonderful thing since pre-sliced communion wafers for the Christian church in America.
One word: naive.

I’ve worked with hard core politicians up close. They’ll use any commodity they can to generate votes and never lose a moment’s sleep over what they’ve done. They only worry about ethical issues if they think they’ll generate bad press. They wear their principles like a chameleon wears its scales. So when this guy came out saying "Oh my stars and garters! They’re more interested in their political agenda than in true Christian values!" I wanted to say "Wake up and smell the Starbucks, Ophelia. This is the real world." Okay, that would sound pretty silly, but you get the drift.

In certain circles of my family and evangelical Christianity it’s been a foregone conclusion since the Reagan era that all good Christians will of course vote Republican because they are the pro-life, anti-gay party. I’ve argued with these conservative members of my family for years that the Republicans will never truly deliver what they are hoping for on abortion and gay rights because once they do, a lot of those voters will have no reason to vote for them anymore. I’m not saying I want the Republicans to fulfill the wishes of conservative Christians, I’m merely trying to make the point that these people are trading their votes for some bead necklaces and cheap, but shiny trinkets. Republicans have delivered on little of substance regarding conservative Christian planks of the party’s agenda. For instance, Tennessee recently overwhelmingly (80% - 20%) passed a constitutional referendum to prohibit gay marriage. Okay. So gay marriage is.... still illegal in this state as it has been for over 200 years. What an accomplishment.

I wish these voters would consider a broader spectrum of issues, but my viewpoint is consistently disregarded. These folks have been brainwashed into thinking there are only 1 or 2 issues in American politics and that the sum total of the Christian life is comprised of a handful of regulations about sexual behavior. As long as they continue to think this way, they are easy targets for the professional manipulators.

In the interest of fairness, I should say that I’ve also seen liberals whip their constituents into a frenzy with exaggerated messages that make it sound like you better vote Democratic or women will be returned to the status of enslaved, disenfranchised barefoot pregnant cattle. But we’re talking religion and politics here, not gender and politics, and I have to say that recent American history and voting trends would present ample evidence that the GOP is the one currently guilty of using religion for political gain. Perhaps now the pendulum has swung. This election, a significant percentage of self-proclaimed evangelical Christians didn’t vote Republican. This is perhaps due to the inevitable scandals and hypocrisy from some of the Republican "family values" types. You also began to see the rise of overtly religious and occasionally pro-life Democratic candidates. Still, bi-partisan abuse of religion is not the ultimate goal.

In late November there was a news report that the president-elect of the Christian Coalition of America declined the position and stepped down, saying the organization wouldn't let him expand its agenda. I applaud his decision. The Rev. Joel Hunter, who was scheduled to become president this January, made the mistake of expressing an interest in more than opposing abortion and gay marriage. Of all things, he wanted to focus on poverty (Oh! The horror!) and the environment (the tree hugging liberal wacko.) He was quoted in a November 28th Yahoo! News article saying "These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about." (Jesus? What do His views have to do with anything?). A release from the Christian Coalition quoted in the same article stated that Hunter left because of "differences in philosophy and vision." Yeah, let’s see. He made the silly mistake of thinking the Christian Coalition would be interested in following the direction of Christ over Karl Rove.

This post may sound a bit mean-spirited, but it really galls me to watch sincere (if perhaps misguided) spiritual beliefs warped and manipulated for political and economic gain. I’m not the first to feel this way. Anyone recall a little episode with some money-changers? So I have a hard time conjuring up a lot of mercy for the manipulators of the masses. As for those masses of Christian voters, many of them are frustrated and frightened with the changes they see occurring in this country. Their town doesn’t look like Mayberry anymore. Norman Rockwell and body piercings just don’t mesh. Life is complicated. Government is complicated. It’s easier to pick out one or two hot topics that become the simple litmus tests for how to vote. Is the candidate pro-life and anti-gay rights? If the answers are yes and yes, we’re done. Turn the brain off. Resume watching American Idol. Those voters don’t have to wrestle with complex issues of international diplomacy, economic policy, equity in taxation, education administration, the national debt, social security reform, health care, the environment, corporate welfare, human welfare, blah, blah, blah. And they can sleep well, warm and comfortable in their belief that they have done what they could to protect their children and grandchildren from secular humanists and the vast gay conspiracy. Oh, and those Islamic terrorists too. Darn straight!

I understand why they do what they do. It’s easier, and it appears to have the Good Churchkeeping stamp of approval. So, despite the Protestant work ethic, you don’t even have to feel guilty for taking the easy way out on this one. This might be fine and dandy if it weren’t for the messy little matter of scripture. If you bother to actually read the Good Book - the whole thing, not just the popular parts or the verses used to justify your personal social and political preferences – you’ll find it is NOT chock full of verse after verse about abortion, gay rights and fighting terrorism, although you get that impression based on the messages put out by certain segments of the church in America. Yes, there are passages that speak of respecting God’s creation. And there are passages that direct believers to sexual purity and condemn a laundry list of unacceptable sexual practices. But these include things like not having sex with a women on her period. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sermon on that one. And other "abominations" listed in various portions of the Bible include the consumption of shellfish and gossiping. Read the sermon on the mount and you realize pretty quickly that life and religion and holiness can’t be summarized in ten commandments or 100 or 1000 for that matter.

Contrary to the priorities of the Christian Coalition and in conflict with many Republican economic policies, caring for the impoverished and avoiding materialism are discussed far more often in scripture than sexual morality. Jesus comforted the woman caught in adultery and advised her to sin no more. When he found guys trying to make a buck off of religious practitioners, he kicked their asses (and I don’t mean their donkeys). He ate dinner with prostitutes and outcasts. He saved his most vehement diatribes for religious hypocrites. His message and his lifestyle were consistently scandalous to the political and religious establishment of his day.

But lest I make the same mistake as Joshua up there in the verses at the start of this post, I don’t want to claim God is on my side in this argument. The point of that story of the sword-bearing stranger is that God is not Republican or Democrat or Hebrew or Gentile or pro-life or pro-choice. As I interpret the moral of that story, we puny humans should be concerned about lining up behind God rather than recruiting God to back up our causes. Too bad the Commander of the Army of the Lord doesn’t make guest appearances on Crossfire, although I'm not sure even he could quiet the tongues of Tucker Carlson or Bill O-Reilly.

Skipping ahead a few centuries and flipping over a few pages from Joshua to Isaiah, you find passages where the prophet condemns Israel for seeking protection in political alliances with Egypt instead of relying on God for its protection and salvation. Hmmm... So if the church in America wants to see God’s will done on earth, it should rely on God, not the Republican party. Or the Democratic party for that matter. Radical concept.

I hope the influence of conservative Christianity on American politics is waning. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hoping that the influence of Christ is diminished in America. There is a difference. Simultaneously, I hope the Republican party is losing its strangle hold on hearts and minds of evangelical Christians in this country. If that’s not the case, history would teach us we have frightening days ahead. But then again..., "NOBODY expects the inquisition."

2006-12-07T15:17:00.000-08:00

Roll Call...

I've switched over to the beta version of blogger and in the process, it looks like some commentators identities were changed to "anonymous." It wasn't my doing. Please take no offense.

Speaking of visitors, I'm going to request your indulgence. If you don't mind, make a comment to this post and just say "hey" or give your initials or identity or favorite ice cream flavor or something. I see the counter creeping up (this latest big jump I know came from some tinkering I was doing which resulted in numerous visits) and wonder who's dropped by or if some of these hits are from the kind of adbot software that showed up and left a link to a webpage on the post dated 11/11.

I guess I'm still amazed there are humans out there finding and reading this stuff. But I have to wonder just how many of you there really are.

Later humanoids.

2006-12-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

Half-baked

or...

Poetic license

Last night I got an urge to pull out some old files and look through them. I didn’t feel like writing, but I thought I might look at some poems I wrote about a decade ago. They were in a box in a file drawer up in the attic. I think there are over a 100 in all, plus assorted notes, scribblings, and first drafts of things written as an exercise when my wife and I used to host a writing group (this is something we are toying with starting back up). I believe that’s where the previous post about the dream came from.

There was one poem in particular I was looking for so of course I couldn’t find a copy of it. It may be lost for good. Most of the others are probably deserving of the recycle bin. I flipped through them while the tv was on, skimming the text at most. I found myself not really wanting to read them. It felt like when you bump into someone unexpectedly at a social event who you either feel guilty or embarrassed to see. It’s awkward and you have difficulty maintaining eye contact.

Most of these poems I wrote during a year long depressed period. They were a lifeline and a survival mechanism back then. And I loved them all like children. Now they strike me as juvenile, self-centered and amateurish. They are more obvious than clever. More sophomoric than wise. More spoiled than passionate.

Over the years I’ve written and probably forgotten a few short stories and also tinkered with 3 or 4 ideas for novels. In one case, I got as far as outlining and researching portions of the book and even writing a few chapters.

I saw some of these novel-related files mixed in with the poems and other stuff. I didn’t open the folders. I might be disappointed if I had. As it is, I think the stuff is probably half-baked. Which is not so bad I think.

Something that’s half-baked at least has all the right ingredients. They are prepared and mixed in the proper proportions. The dish is simply missing two things: heat and time.

Somebody stick a toothpick in me and tell me if I’m done.

2006-12-06T21:42:00.000-08:00

[I discovered this in a file of some old writings. It was scrawled in pen on a few sheets of a small spiral notebook that had been torn out and stapled together. It was in my handwriting, but I have no recollection of writing it or of the dream it details. I'm guessing it was written about 8 years ago.]

I dreamed last night. And in the dream I woke to strange noises in the house or if not strange noises, I woke up knowing someone was there. Whatever sixth sense it is that lets you know when someone is staring at you was going off the charts and startled me from sleep.

She was either oblivious or unwakeable – I don’t know if I remembered trying to wake her. But alone I rose to search the apartment. Perhaps she was even awake and talking to me, but like a siren call, I was drawn by something, some presence.

I moved through rooms without out my feet touching the floor and drifted into the living room where the something was. A dark figure moved strangely and soundlessly from spot to spot stealing bits of everything. It took a curio, a picture, a cd, a handful of the wall, a piece of the air. It didn’t carry a sack, but each stolen item simply vanished into its grasp.

I moved toward it and it merely shifted directions, consciously ignoring me. Neither of us made a sound as I approached it in the darkness. I tried to travel the whole distance between us, but seemed to scarcely make any progress toward it.

I reached it in the kitchen and suddenly (yet in the dream world, the change was unnoticeable as often happens) it went from some weird flitting shadow thing to a person, in jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt. This strange stalking dance of ours ended and it went from ignoring me to a furious, yet still silent, response as I grabbed the arm of the sweatshirt.

We spun into each other’s grasp and struggled, standing and stumbling, crashing and spinning through the house. This feral vicious thing slung me around with a strength that matched my own.

Still she didn’t wake.

Through the living room and into the bathroom we crashed. In that small place we did great destruction, ripping the shower curtain from its rings, knocking shelves off the wall and scattering their contents, crushing bottles and boxes underfoot.

I was slammed back against the medicine cabinet and felt its mirrored face shatter. Pinned against the wall, off balance over the toilet, I felt my arm moving of its own accord along the wall, my hands frantically searching for the light switch as my enemy pressed his forearm into my face and my face into the wall.

My fingers found the switch and flipped it and with the sudden burst of light the situation also instantly changed and we two adversaries stood still facing each other in the center of the room, a bigger bathroom now with walls receding from us, walls covered in mirrors reflecting both our images. In the dream, I watched from outside myself in the third person as I, standing in boxers and a t-shirt stared into the face of the night visitor in the sweatshirt who was also me.

This feral beastly burglar version of my self stared right back and said two emotionless words in explanation.

"I’m hungry."

Then I awoke.

2006-12-03T21:35:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: Unlike most of the content here, this is a work of fiction.

Shoe Leather

He leaned over the sink to wash the shaving lotion from his neck. He had nicked himself in there somewhere with the new razor blade. If he wiped the blood away, a half-inch long thin line of red would appear magically in the same spot, the blood eventually mingling with drops of water and white lotion and trickling down his neck in a watery pink rivulet. It didn’t hurt. He straightened up and felt something pop and tighten in his back. He grimaced and stretched. Then sighed.

"At 16, it’s like shoe leather!" the aging orthopedic specialist said with enthusiasm. "Tough, thick, couldn’t saw through it with a knife. But by the time you’re 75 your rotator cuff is like wet cardboard." He pointed again with his pen to the x-ray image. "The structure in your shoulder is perfect. Nothing wrong there. The soft tissues of course aren’t going to show up on an X-ray so we wouldn’t see any problems on this." he said, tapping his pen rapidly on the image. He glanced at the chart again. "You’re too young to be having rotator cuff problems. But then again, you’ve got all the symptoms. We can give you a cortisone shot today if you want. If it’s not better after a few weeks, come back and see me."

"Too young." That’s what he always heard. "The doctor has my info on the chart, so he ought to realize I’m nearly 40." he thought to himself as he pulled off his t-shirt and sat on the examination table to wait for the injection. "Maybe that is too young."

He was cursed or blessed with a face that made him look at least ten years younger than he was. He was getting some flecks of grey in his hair, especially at the temples, but he still had a thick head of hair. It was a sandy brown color that hid the grey strands until they lay across his lap on the barber shop shroud. There they would lie like casualties mixed in with the brown and blond strands, stark white and stilled and suddenly evident against the black backdrop.

It had been a while since the last time he was carded buying alcohol, but not that long. He’d reached his 35th birthday the last time it happened. Still, all this youthful external appearance seemed only to exacerbate the internal effects of what he felt to be his rapidly aging body. Back. Hip. Knee. Now shoulder. Ulcers. Colon. Sinuses. Circulation. Digestion. He was never athletic in his youth and was now coming to terms with the fact that his window had closed. Permanently.

Arching his back by the sink, trying to work the early morning kinks out, it was his 8th and 9th vertebrae that were acting up this day. I know that not because I’m a doctor, but because I’m a narrator.

Do you know what narrators are? I don’t mean the type of answer you’d give in freshman English 101 or even a graduate level literary theory class. I mean in reality. We’re the deceased souls of characters, endowed at the instant of our deaths with photographic memories. We’re frozen in time and stuck in limbo tell we get someone to tell our stories. We don’t age anymore, because we’re ancient. We don’t die because we’re already dead. We’re two dimensional and always stand at right angles to reality, so we’re too thin to be seen, but you can hear our whisperings if you learn how to listen.

You want proof? Go to a library. You don’t think you humans are creative enough to do all that on your own do you?

2006-11-30T22:09:00.000-08:00

Dead pan alley

or...

The introvert’s curse.

My bio over there mentions something about karaoke. It’s not a joke. It’s something I may only do once every couple of years, but when I get up behind that mike, buckle your seat belts. If I’m not just up in front of a crowd of strangers and there are people in the audience who actually know me, the best I can tell is that they experience some form of social whiplash. The singing may not be that impressive (or then again, maybe it is), but it’s so totally not what they expected that it makes their heads spin.

At a recent out of town conference the entertainment one night was a DJ and karaoke. Keep in mind the client group was a crowd of mostly mid-50s local government officials enjoying a night out of town and access to free alcohol. And keep in mind they usually see me as a young attorney and instructor pontificating on such fascinating topics as records management, court costs or ethics reform laws. It’s what I get paid to do. A few of the people there had heard rumors that I could sing, but I don’t think any of them expected to hear me belt out a bluesy rendition of Marc Cohn’s Walkin’ in Memphis and later follow that up with a soulful version of the Eagles Desperado. I’m just too white.

One official later came up and said something along the lines of "I shoulda known. You can’t ever trust the deadpan types." Um.... thanks. I think. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been described that way. I remember a high school English teacher who was directing the school play talk about how I was correctly cast in my part as a fastidious psychologist because I was so "deadpan."
I don’t know if deadpan necessarily goes along with introversion or if in my case it somehow amplifies it. But, like it or not, apparently it is my reality. Throughout my life, I couldn’t count the number of times people have thought I was angry or upset or depressed or disgruntled or sick or tired because there was apparently this blank mask on my face. (If you can be disgruntled, is there an opposite state of being "gruntled"? Just asking.) At the time I may have been thoroughly content or amused or peaceful. Still, they for some reason sense pain or anger or animosity coming from me. I have this theory that my face is some kind of blank canvas and other people project their own inner feelings or insecurities onto it. Who knows? Maybe with this clean slate of mine I’ve been missing out on all sorts of opportunities in the field of high stakes gambling.

I enjoy the privacy all this affords me, but it has its down side as well. There are times I’m really hurting or down or depressed and I wish I had sleeves on which to wear my emotions. I’d love for others to be able to sense the storm inside and offer comfort when I’m in too much turmoil to be able to ask for help. And there are times I need to kick up my heels or blow off steam or let out a primal scream and it just doesn’t happen.

However, there’s something about speaking in groups or singing on a stage that serves as an outlet. As an introvert, I’m bottled up or withdrawn so much of the time, I think these public opportunities serve as a pressure regulator. I have a role to play as instructor or speaker or lounge singer and I can put myself into that role and blame whatever happens on the moment. I’ve got an excuse to lay it all on the table. When I teach classes, I’m sharp, witty and down right charming. Not so much if you approach me for small talk at a reception. And if you were in the pew in front of me in church, you would not necessarily be impressed with my voice. I think it’s a bit like a high performance sports car that doesn’t run so smoothly at highway speeds. But crank the RPMs up to the red line and I can growl out a Joe Cocker tune, rock out to American Woman, scream out some heavy metal classic or belt out some emotionally charged ballad that brings the house down.

An Aside: Feeling emotionally restless a month or so ago I tried going out to a karaoke bar here in town by myself one night after the kids were in bed and Lisa was busy with some project. I unfortunately picked this cheesy country joint in Printer’s Alley. I think most of the people there had 20 years on me. When I walked in this big black guy was doing an impressive rendition of Ray Charle’s Georgia. Then I think he kicked into Charlie Pride. I was flipping through the song list trying to decide between Billy Joel or Billy Idol when this woman got up and asked "Do y’all wanna hear a slow Tanya Tucker song or a fast Tanya Tucker song?" as if those were the only two forms of music to have originated during the 5,000 years of recorded human history. Realizing how far from water this fish had gotten I packed it up at that point and went back home still restless and unsatisfied, but now with side helpings of foolishness and futility.

I wonder if someday this inner passionate self will ever manage to live closer to the surface and interact with the people in my life on a regular basis. Maybe it’s not meant to be. A dozen or so years ago now, I went through a depressive episode for about a year. It was caused by a bad confluence of circumstances and went undiagnosed and untreated. Eventually, circumstances began to improve one by one and I crawled back out of the hole I’d sunk into. During that period, I wrote poetry continuously. I think most of it was probably pretty bad. I should dig some up sometime and see. But there was something about that period that felt like a birth. Whether I was a bit nuts at the time or going through a personal transformation, I really felt like there was this person inside (the poet), who’d been chained up for years and controlled by a domineering highly-functional intellectual. Mr. Poet was finally loose and going on a rampage and kicking brainiac’s butt.

I think I’m a good bit more integrated now. Less compartmentalized and combative with the various sides of my personality. Either Mr. Poet’s wild ride came to an end or he got locked back in his closet or he got old or domesticated or peaceful. I believe I can access that emotionality now but without all the angst. Still pretty dang introverted though. So it’s nice to have opportunities to cut loose in a controlled environment. I guess that’s part of what karaoke does for me. And public speaking. And this blog.

I’ve found a weird phenomena this thing has created in my life. I saw some out of town friends recently and realized most of the things I started to share as news they had already heard by reading my blog. Then at church, another reader came up and asked about something going on in my life that I’d mentioned on here in a post. We ran into some friends at a park a few weeks ago who commented on reading my blog and another friend once commented that he found it fascinating to read my thoughts and my wife's thoughts and see the differences and dynamics of our relationship. So my life and thoughts and concerns are seeping out into the real world from this place. It kind of catches you off guard for a minute when it happens and you're thinking "Crap. What have I written recently?" I guess there's nothing wrong with that. As far as I know, no one is being held hostage with a gun to their head and forced to read this stuff. Nobody has to comment or ask a question unless they want to. It's like sitting in a karaoke bar. If you've walked in there, you've got to expect to hear some baaaaaaaad singing. That's part of the deal.

I have this horrible reluctance to "impose" on people, so I rarely approach a friend and say "Something’s really troubling me. Can I talk to you?" At dinner parties or other social gatherings, I probably let my wife – the natural extrovert, take the lead. If I do try to throw myself into conversation, I probably can’t keep up the pace for long. I’ve become practiced at the art of slipping into the background and deflecting attention. It’s hard now to drop my shields. So maybe the way poetry helped me get in touch with a part of me years ago, blogging may help me get in touch with others in a deeper more meaningful way. Ain’t technology grand.

I'm considering where to go with this thing. Do I stick with posts about my personal life and family or branch out into social, political or spiritual commentary? The world I work in is a political place and too much honesty could be a liability. Likewise, I wouldn't want my parents or in-laws reading a lot of these ramblings. I don't want someone to be able to type my name in Google or Yahoo and find all this stuff. There is freedom in anonymity. But paradoxically, there is also freedom and safety in being open and vulnerable and not trying to protect yourself.

2006-11-30T19:44:00.000-08:00

The weather is pouring in tonight. It was in the 70's here today with a gusty wind and a humid atmosphere. It's nearly 10:00 at night now and it's still in the mid-60's with a heavy rain. One state over to the west in Arkasas it's in the 30's with a wind chill in the 20's. They're predicting snow showers here by morning. Crazy.

This is the kind of weather that ought to make animals skittish and people a little nutty. Change is in the air.

For the sake of the kids, I hope we do get some nice snows this winter.

Soon to come I need to get a post up about the similarities between karaoke and blogging. I started drafting it a couple of weeks ago then set it aside. After that one you may note a shift in directions here, something along the lines of a prismatic splintering. I've been more reflective and inwardly focused till now. This place may get a little fictional. Maybe poetic. Maybe political. Let me know what you do or don't like. You, whoever you are out there, are at least as important to this process as I am.

2006-11-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

Trying to catch a falling leaf

or...

Learning how not to get the bends.

I get Thursday and Friday off from work on Thanksgiving week, so it turns into a 4-day weekend. The problem is, our family is usually required to cram in at least 3 different holiday events during that period and I end up feeling like I have less time of my own than in a weekend of the typical two-day variety. Although all my grandparents have been dead for over ten years, my extended families are still trying to maintain a tradition of gathering on Thanksgiving. So we usually have to get together at Lisa’s parents’ house, my parents’ house, my mom’s extended family and sometimes my dad’s extended family as well. It’s a bit much.

All these events are in and around the Nashville area, so we avoid excessively long car trips or overnight stays. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not more of a curse than a blessing. If our relatives were more dispersed, we might not be expected to make it to all these competing events. Trying to avoid scheduling conflicts is always a pain. One year Lisa and I had to eat a late Thanksgiving lunch with my family and an early dinner with hers on the same day. I think I nearly over-dosed on tryptophan that year.

There never seems to be much quality time. It’s too much running around, way too much food, a bunch of male relatives passed out on couches in front of big screen TV sets watching football games they aren’t interested in and, for couples like us, a lot of time chasing youngsters around making sure they don’t break anything in somebody else’s home. Naps get messed up. Bed times are thrown off. There are too many tempting sweets and there are always conversational minefields to navigate. One year it’s politics. Another it’s religion. Or maybe someone was overheard complaining about somebody else’s kid. We had the worst case scenario a couple of years ago when there was a rumor that one of the gay cousins might bring a partner to Thanksgiving dinner and there were nearly wholesale successions from my family. By the time it’s all over with I end up feeling frazzled and worn out and looking forward to returning to the safe shelter of my office.

In the midst of this entirely unnecessary but not uncommon traditional holiday stress, there were a couple of peaceful moments. The church we are attending has a tradition of gathering early on Thanksgiving for a breakfast. Everyone brings fruit to make fruit baskets for shut-ins and canned goods to donate to a food pantry for the less fortunate. There’s a brief worship service and a devotional. It was nice to have a few moments of gratitude and perspective before the wholesale festival of American excess officially kicked off.

Then on Saturday – the only event-free day of the weekend – we went hiking as a family. Just Lisa and I and the kids. The entire weekend was filled with glorious weather for late November, but we only got occasional opportunities to take advantage of it during all these family gatherings where everyone seemed more interested in talking about what nice weather we were having rather than actually experiencing it.

It was as if God broke out the good china for the Thanksgiving weekend. More often than not, it seems that’s the case in Nashville. Sure, sometimes it’s bitterly cold and rainy or even spitting snow, but I can recall many years when the November curtain parts over the Thanksgiving weekend and the in the midst of late autumn’s barrenness we get a reminder of spring days to come.

So Saturday we went to Beaman Park. It was the first time we’d been there. I messed up the directions which cost us an extra half hour or more in the car. I was sure the website had them wrong, but that wasn’t the case. I got to learn once again the subtle difference between admitting you were mistaken and admitting you were wrong.

The park is 1500 acres of undeveloped land that was formerly owned by a group of doctors as a private hunting preserve until they sold it to the city recently. The park is basically just a couple of hiking trails through some beautiful unspoiled land. We chose the two mile loop for our walk. It started out meandering by a stream then wound up and down a forested ridge. It was lovely as it was, but it made you wonder how breathtaking it would have been a few weeks ago when the turning leaves were still mostly on the trees.

When out hiking, I have a bad reputation for always rushing ahead. I don’t really consider myself a type A personality, but when it comes to hikes, I have a hard time not pushing on to the destination. Even in cases like this one where the end of the trail was just going to get us back to the place we started, I always want to see what’s around the next bend, over the next ridge. It’s like a continuous To-Do list. And I’ve been known to write down things I’ve already accomplished just so that I can check them off as finished.

This day we had the kids with us and I could feel the hills in my bad hip. It wasn’t as hard as usual to keep to a slow pace. Maybe that's a benefit of arthritis. Ben rode most of the way in a backpack carrier. He liked saying "Hi" to the trees. I tried to teach Olivia about trail markings. We stopped periodically and listened to the language of the brook or the message of the wind passing through those few dry leaves autumn had spared. At one point, I happened to be in front when we stopped. I turned around and looked back down the trail towards my little family which was scattered over a stretch of 30 or 40 feet of trail.

Ben was stunning. There he stood, stilled and full of wonderment. His two year old wispy blond hair wavy and tousled by the wind. He was clad in a little pair of hiking boots, jeans, a blue shirt and a black and red plaid coat with a suede collar. I swear he looked like the cover shot of Lands End for Toddlers. Lisa is the consummate bargain hunter when it comes to kids clothes and has this strange knack for remembering which yard sale or thrift shop was the source of every article and exactly how much she paid for it. This beautiful coat is an exception. She can’t recall where it came from or even if it’s a hand-me-down or a purchase. But he looks perfect in it.

She’s standing by him, holding his hand. She’s wearing jeans and a simple brown sweater, having succumbed to her innate brownness after experimenting with a more colorful phase. Likewise, her hair is pulled back in a headband, exposing the streak of grey in front that she is learning to wear as a badge of honor. She looks peaceful and unbothered for a change.

Olivia was closest to me. She stood there in the vulnerably slender form of a five year old. Her hair was crinkled from intentionally sleeping with braids in the night before. Her face and stance both show her unconscious defiance to the gravity of the world and the arrogance that comes from being very bright, very young and yet to experience the burden of failure.

Looking back at this sweeping vista of my family I thought "This is my life." These are the people who will affect me more than any other human beings on this planet. It wasn’t quite an epiphany, but it was a moment of thankfulness and timelessness as I could sense my future compressed into the finite years to come.

A short distance ahead there was an intersection of trails and some benches to rest upon. Waiting around there, I noticed an occasional stream of leaves falling from a nearby oak. Most every other tree had already shed its leaves but this one clung to a few remnants. I’d recently seen an episode of the kid’s cartoon Caillou where Caillou (a four year old boy) and his father and grandfather went on an autumn walk and tried to catch falling leaves before they hit the ground. I began darting about, making the occasional lunge for a leaf. It’s harder than you might think. Some spiral quickly to the ground giving you scarcely a chance to grab at them. Others soar like paper airplanes forcing you to chase them across distances trying to avoid smashing into tree trunks or tripping over a rock or root while you keep one eye on the leaf and the other on the ground. Olivia and Lisa wondered what on earth I was doing till I explained, then they all joined in for a few minutes of attempted leaf catch. I finally got one. I don’t think anyone else did. I expected Olivia to get frustrated and whiny when she didn’t succeed (Caillou sure did), but she didn’t make the first complaint. She’s changing, almost before our eyes.

We moved on and finished our hike, loaded up and drove back home. When we got there, all of us were reluctant even to go in the house. We spent most of the afternoon outdoors, running around in the yard, playing games or gathering sticks. I built a fire in the chiminea and we ate our dinner on the deck. It was one of those days you hated to see end. At the same time, you knew you would do it a disservice by striving to cling to it.

There are so many days in my life that I can’t recall anything about. Olivia asks me from time to time to tell her a story about when I was her age. I can only remember a few events from that time. I probably remember a handful of days out of each elementary school grade. If I tried I might be able to list half of the classes I took in college. Just a few birthdays stand out. There are girls I dated whose names I can’t even remember and I didn’t date that many women. That’s okay. I don’t spend much time living in the past. That doesn’t worry me. But sometimes I feel like I don’t spend that much time living in the present either. I’m too often looking ahead to the weekend, or a holiday, a new job, the completion of a project or the time when the kids sleep through the night and are out of diapers. It’s the next bend in the road, the next turn in the path.

I think for some people it’s easier to live in the moment. For me, there are just a few things in life that hold me to the present and serve as a magnetic force grounding me to my current reality. One is holding a peacefully sleeping child. I believe another is the practice of writing. I might be reflecting on memories or considering what the future holds, but I am doing it in this present moment. It’s akin to catching a falling leaf that only soars for a instant between withering on the tree and resting on the ground.

2006-11-22T19:43:00.000-08:00

Cheetos and Jeopardy

or...

The simple pleasures in life.

One time, long ago and far away in a land and time called college, I remember having an argument with a girl/friend who never really was a girlfriend about relationships. I made a comment something along the lines of "... You know you have a good relationship when you can just sit on the couch together and eat cheetos and watch Jeopardy."

She found this appalling. I still think I'm right.

Nearly 20 years later, I realize this is what I have. Of course the 2007 version is a little different. It involves sipping organic egg nog and munching on sesame crisps from the health food store while we watch re-runs of Scrubs after we've gotten the kids to bed. My wife says this has become her favorite time of the day. That makes me very glad. I think she needs to get out more, but it still makes me happy that she enjoys this time.

For cheetos and old friends. For memories and present days. For kids that are sleeping sweetly in their beds (at least for the moment). For restful moments and laughter. For organic egg nog (with a dash of rum!). And most of all for someone to share all these glorious riches with, I am thankful.

2006-11-20T08:09:00.000-08:00

Process of elimination

or...

Scat singing.

I’m writing this during a week day, but I'm off from work, so no harm, no foul. I have a job interview today which I wouldn't particularly want my co-workers knowing about. I already had a dentist appointment scheduled for early this morning so I was able to vaguely mention (Uh-oh, split infinitive) that I had another appointment I needed to get scheduled and managed to take the whole day off without having to say "I need time off to interview for a job that would take me away from all you people."

Aside: Is it just me or does the term "split infinitive" sound more like it has something to do with a rift in the time-space continuum and less like a grammatical error?

The dentist appointment was early, so I had time to kill before the interview. I grabbed breakfast at the café in our downtown library then hopped on a computer to... well, to do this. Of course now I'm editing and finishing this post at home and looking at things in the past tense. Feh. It does feel a bit like a time warp and a grammatical error rolled up into one. (Darn that split infinitive!)

So I was supposed to be off from work, but here I am/was running around town in a good suit trying to park and get something from my office, get to the dentist 2 blocks away and slip in and out of local haunts for breakfast and coffee and restroom and to my interview in the building directly across the street from my office without running into someone from work who would say "You're all dressed up. Wait. Didn't you take today off?"

This secrecy probably isn't necessary. I certainly wouldn't be in trouble if found out. It's more simply the fact that I don't want certain people panicking about the possibility of my leaving. Really just one person. My direct supervisor is retiring in April and would probably be freaked out if someone else on the staff managed to get out the door before he did. His impending "Retirement" (with a capital "R") has been in the works for what seems like two years. At this point, I think his exodus has become a bigger undertaking than the original one out of Egypt. The job I'm applying for needs to be filled immediately, so if I get an offer, the logistics of my exit would more closely resemble the Biblical one - dashing off in the middle of the night with my bread still unleavened. The others left behind will have to clean up the left over frogs and locusts and other detritus from the various plagues that precipitated my exit.

I visited the bathroom in the library café twice while I was there in the interest of making sure I encountered no unwelcome urges during the course of my interview. This was probably due to 1) the multiple cups of coffee I’ve had today and 2) the herbal concoction I’ve been taking at the urging of my wife. She was concerned I may have toxins in my system so she bought this stuff called First Cleanse at our local health food store. I think she actually is concerned that she has toxins in her own system, but since she’s still breast feeding, she can’t take this stuff and I get to play herbal guinea pig. The box contained two bottles of capsules which are apparently made of roots, berries, barks, leaves and extracts from every plant in the forest. You take one set of pills in the morning and another in the evening. They contain 39 different kinds of herbs and are supposed to cleanse all 7 channels of elimination. Now I never took advanced biology, but I can only think of 3 or 4 channels of elimination and that includes breathing and sweating so this whole process makes me a little nervous.

[Sung to the tune of the Johnny Cash song I’ve Been Everywhere...]

I’ve ingested ...
Slippery elm, nettle leaf, rhubarb root, marshmallow
milk thistle, blessed thistle, wormwood, hawthorn berry,
coriander, cayenne pepper, black pepper, horsetail,
garlic bulb, kelp weed, oatstraw and red clover.

I’ve taken everything man.
I’ve taken everything man.
Gather my dinner with a rake man.
Pick it right up off the dirt... and
Pop it right in your mouth man.
It all comes out together down south man.

(Hmm... Needs work.)

After 2 weeks of this First Cleanse stuff and nearly finishing the bottles, I can’t really tell that it’s done anything. I’m going a bit more often and with a bit more urgency than I used to. But whether or not my channels of elimination have been cleansed.... eh, I couldn’t say and I’m not sure I want to know. Speaking of my channels of elimination, I checked my messages at work while in the café and had a message from a gastroenterologist wanting to schedule me for a colonoscopy. Happy, happy, joy, joy. (By the way, shouldn’t it be a gastro-exit-ologist? Just wondering.) Last week I made the mistake/wise-and-responsible-step of telling my doctor about my mom’s narrow escape from colon cancer so he immediately referred me to get my plumbing checked out. I feel like I’m being initiated prematurely into some sort of club of elders. This may be as close as we get anymore to a rite of passage in our culture.

Sitting in the café bathroom waiting for the herbs and thistles to finish their daily commute, I can hear a distant and persistent scratching. As I’ve not read any Edgar Allen Poe in a while, my thoughts didn’t leap to the idea of the Telltale Poop or anything of a frightful nature. This café is undergoing renovations, so I make the logical assumption workers are on the other side of the wall sanding drywall or doing some mundane something of that sort. But here at a crossroads in life I also wonder if it isn’t the sound of my own future trying to claw through it’s eggshell and hatch. It’s faint and faraway, but if a sound can be ripe, this one is ripe with newness and potential.

Professionally, after a long season of toiling in relative anonymity, I’ve suddenly got options simmering over different degrees of heat on the stove: my current job on low heat, this one I’m interviewing for on rapid boil, and at least one and possibly two or three other options on medium heat that should be done cooking and come available in 2007. Out of a sense of responsibility, I’ve been trying to go through the exercise of weighing pros and cons against one another, but I think I know what I need to do. I’ll go forward with the interview today, but I know deep down that’s not the right path. I think what’s most appealing about this option is that it is available immediately. The opportunity that looks the best is something I’ll have to wait for, and I’m getting tired of waiting. Sitting there in that location mulling over these thoughts I realize the double entendre of the "process of elimination."

I hope this post does not seem too juvenile and sophomoric. [Zombies last time, poop this time. I’m probably losing most of my readers, but I could be killing with the males age 15-25 demographic.] I don’t think I’m scatologically obsessed. Having young children simply means poop is a regular topic of conversation. But I’ve never been particularly interested in what’s happening in those regions. I tend to agree with Jesus on this one:

"Don't you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’"
Matthew 15:17-18.

Now if he were preaching to our vastly overweight and/or obese culture, he might have thought twice about that statement. Nevertheless, he’s on record not really giving a crap about crap. There were other, more important things on his mind. Wouldn’t life be simpler if there were spiritual, emotional or psychological laxatives. You know, something in a tablet form, preferably chocolate-coated that you could swallow twice a day and it helped you eliminate fear, prejudice, hatred, sloth, greed and the like from your system. Maybe that’s what these other mystery channels of elimination are supposed to be dealing with. (Now I’ve done it. Used a split infinitive and ended a sentence with a preposition in the same post.).

I guess we do have non-biological laxatives as it were. Maybe you’d find meditation, confession, therapy, worship, prayer, and catharsis in this psycho-spiritual pharmacy. Sounds like mostly over the counter stuff although Catholics may need a prescription. I think I’m pretty well stocked when it comes to biological elimination, especially after the last two weeks. May not have been doing so well on other fronts. Hmmm... catharsis. (kuh-thahr-sis) 1. The purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art. Is that what this stuff is about? And by "stuff" I mean this blog.

Aside: While trying to wrap up this post my dogs have been barking at nothing non-stop for about 20 minutes. I may have to go get cathartic on their asses.

Some days writing feels like an itch that needs to be scratched (or some other un-named urge that needs to be taken care of). If that’s the case, why do this in public. Back in law school I used to journal extensively. It became some sort of unhealthy reflective whirlpool that fed upon itself and stirred, rather than stilled emotions. After graduation I entered a season of depression and difficulty and found myself writing volumes of angst-ridden poetry. This feels different. I don’t know if the presence or potential of an audience, no matter how small, makes the difference. I believe it was Wittgenstein who hypothesized that there is no such thing as private language. Perhaps he was right. Words need an audience. Books need a reader.

If you write a blog but no one reads it, does it make a sound?

2006-11-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

The Living Dead

or...

The inevitable unforseen consequences of setting your watch forward.

[An aside: Are the double titles lame or interesting? I like them, AND IN THIS REALM I AM OMNIPOTENT (he proclaimed) so I guess they shall continue.]

Confession: One of my guilty pleasures is the occasional viewing of a zombie movie. I'm not a fan of blood and gore. I'm not an adrenaline junky. I am a connoisseur of le cinema zombee as it were. We're talking the George Romero movies or 28 Days Later (which is not technically a zombie movie, but a reinterpretation of the genre).

Stop laughing. I'm serious here. (At least moderately).

At their best, zombie movies are social commentary. My understanding of them is that they are basically cautionary fables that highlight those trends within our fellow human beings that could spread and thereby lead to the destruction of us all. Romero's movies have targeted racism (Night of the Living Dead) and consumerism (Dawn of the Dead), lampooned the military (Day of the Dead) and even parodied the concept of the ultimate gated community (Land of the Dead). At its core, a good zombie movie should have an important message, even though you have to wipe off a thick coating of blood, brains and other assorted gore to be able to read it. Mind you, I'm not recommending anyone go out and rent any of these movies. They all include disgusting, violent, revolting and horrifying scenes which are designed to offend the sensibilities and flood the mind with terrifying images that will haunt you forever. For my wife, they fall into the "million dollar" movie category, as in:

Wife: "Offer me a million dollars to watch that movie."

Husband: "I'd give you a million dollars to watch that movie."

Wife: "No thank you. Keep your money."

When I saw Land of the Dead last year at the movie theater, I was left with the heebie jeebies for a few hours afterwards. I define "heebie jeebies" (which surprisingly doesn’t pass muster with spell check) as the irrational state of being where you keep expecting some hideous creature to leap out of every closed door and throttle you and devour your brains. Despite the best efforts of my rational, highly educated and hopefully unappetizing brain, on the way home from the theater I couldn't keep myself from checking the rear view mirror regularly and turning around to look over the back of the seat every time I stopped at an intersection to make certain I wasn't driving the Ford Focus SE Station Wagon of the Living Dead.

[NOTE TO SELF: Take the truck the next time you go see a zombie movie – no back seat! Hmmm...of course it would be easier to shake re-animated corpses off the roof of the car then shed them if they leapt into the bed of the truck. I digress.]

Why do I bring this up? Oh yes. Stranger than Fiction had a similar, although milder heebie-jeebie-like effect. Vastly milder, but similar.

Without spoiling anything, the film deals with the fragility of life as its theme. We watch the central character propelled down a path that may lead to his inevitable death as a direct (well, somewhat direct) result of setting his watch forward a few minutes. What I have said here shows up in the most basic promos of the movie and occurs fairly early in the story-line so it shouldn't affect anyone's enjoyment of the movie. I should also note that the movie is utterly devoid of disembowelments, decapitations and cannibalism. So it sounds innocuous, but, as I said, the film did infect me with something remotely resembling the aforementioned heebie-jeebies.

Leaving the theater, I didn't expect to be greeted by a horde of carnivorous zombies waiting by my station wagon, but I did wonder if a drunk driver might plow into us as we pulled out of the parking lot or if I might choke on a chunk of food at dinner or if the route I chose for heading home after picking up the kids would carry my little family directly into the path of imminent destruction. It wasn't really a fearful or cautious feeling. It wasn't about being afraid to step behind the wheel of a car or take a bite of food. It was more a sense of realizing my naked vulnerability to the forces of fate. It wasn't looking over my shoulder for monstrosities, but wondering which seemingly innocent object or activity might contain within it the seeds of my own demise.

Rule: No matter what you do, you are going to die. Period.

Exception: You may be exempt from the foregoing rule if:

a) You ascribe to some sort of fundamentalist end times theory and expect to be raptured up into the sky next Thursday at 2:15 p.m. eastern standard time just after they serve the pumpkin pie and just before Armageddon begins, or

b) You've already purchased space in that facility where baseball hall-of-famer Ted Williams has his head frozen for future revival when there have been sufficient medical advances to cure what ails you, or

c) You've already been implanted with a device in your cortical stem which is recording all memories, thoughts and sensations for future transfer to a cloned version of your own body.

So there you have it. Happy, happy, joy, joy, we’re all going to die. Sooner or later. The things you do in this life (eating habits, exercise, smoking, drinking, sky-diving, bungee-jumping) may determine whether it’s sooner or later and you could ask an actuary for advice with regard to those matters. But some things are totally out of our control and whether it comes in our sleep at a ripe old age or announces itself with a more sudden and violent entrance, death will come for the archbishop and all the rest of us as well. That’s part of the message of the movie and that’s what has been weighing on my mind for the last couple of days. Add in there my mom’s recent encounter with cancer and the fact that my wife mentioned today that she found the attorney she wants us to see for drafting our wills and there is more than enough mortality going around for everyone to share.

So Sunday afternoon I’m in my daughter’s bedroom for a stuffed animal convention. (Give me a minute. This is not a non sequitur.) It was some sort of a combination slumber party/tea party/sing-a-long/build-a-bear family reunion. The kids share a room. Once little brother got mobile, we re-arranged the furniture to segregate the room with a wall of dressers and bookcases. To get to Olivia’s side, you have to climb over her bed. So I’m on her side and need to get out. The herd of stuffed animals are taking up most of the bed and I’ve been clearly instructed not to disturb them. I step up gingerly and attempt to climb over the bed without crushing any bunnies, bears or monkeys. I’m managing as well as my arthritic and inflexible hips will allow and haven’t squashed anyone when I go for my dismount. Stepping down off the other side of the bed, I rest one hand on her armoire to steady myself. Brief aside: Our house is old and in old houses, the floors sometimes slope down away from certain walls. You can see this phenomenon mostly clearly when you push a tall piece of furniture all the way against the wall at the baseboards yet still find it leaning an inch or two away from a presumably straight wall at the top. So as I step down and transfer a little of my weight to top of the armoire, it starts tipping over with me which accelerates my eviction from the Teddy Bear’s Picnic. I end up standing with one foot on the floor and the other tangled up in the bed trying to balance with one hand and hold up the leaning tower of clothing with the other as the armoire’s doors swing open and drawers spill out their contents.

I shout out something that resembles "Arlague!" I can’t tell you what that means, but I’m thankful that in my moment of distress I didn’t utter a string of profanities and contribute to the delinquency of a Care Bear. As I am bellowing out my distress, time itself slowed down and I could project out the various potential outcomes of my dilemma. It didn’t take much imagination to see myself stumbling to the floor and ending up with a moderately sized piece of furniture on top of me. Could this be the end, dear reader? Slain by the combined efforts of a stuffed animal assembly and a chest full of predominantly pink clothing? Has anyone ever suffered such an
ignominious yet cute demise? My thoughts leap forward and I see my poor daughter who would be witness to the whole horrible scene having to endure years of expensive therapy sessions and suffering from an unnatural phobia of plush toys.

Back to the present, my wife hears my repeated primal exclamations of "Arlague!" and rushes to the rescue. She helps me right the armoire yet falls slightly short of restoring my dignity. I wrenched a couple of fingers and pulled my shoulder a bit during this escapade, but escaped from this fluffy, frilly horror relatively unscathed. This autumn, my mom passed safely through the valley of the shadow of cancer and I survived my encounter with a large wooden structure and such nefarious characters as Kitty-Kitty, Sparkle Pony and Hap the Bear. (Hap is quite cool by the way and I hold none of this against him. The other’s I’m keeping my eye on.)

The moral of the story: No matter how obsessed you may be with lurking dangers and potential horrors in your life, realize that grim beast known as irony may have something entirely more ridiculous in store for you. It’s quite liberating.

2006-11-11T19:08:00.000-08:00

Just a brief endorsement tonight. Lisa and I managed two dates this week. Wednesday night - the actual anniversary, some friends in the neighborhood who had kids roughly the same age as ours babysat so we could go out to eat. This evening, my mom and dad watched the kids and we were able to see a movie and have dinner out. Wow! It resembled a real date. We saw Stranger Than Fiction which we would both wholeheartedly recommend ...especially for anyone who also has literary interests. It stars Will Ferrell, but trust me, this is not like his other movies. It's not as if Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson played supporting roles in Talladega Nights - The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

2006-11-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Anniversary day

or...

Nine years on a playground.

If you're reading this, it's most likely you know my better half in person or through her online presence. If by some strange series of events you found this blog without coming through hers, you should follow the link to "My Wife's Blog" on this page and enjoy a glimpse of what a lovable person she is.

Nine years ago today we got married in a little church in Murfreesboro in a cheap dress and a rented tux (she was in the dress; I was in the tux) with friends and family in attendance. There were no bride’s maids or groomsmen and no ring bearer, but there was a whole platoon of flower girls. There were flowers from walmart and chocolate covered pretzels we’d made ourselves. The guy running the music messed up one of the tracts that was supposed to play and don’t even ask about the wedding video shot by a now ex-brother-in-law (it was so painful I think we only managed to watch it once).

We'd met less than 6 months earlier in the middle of strawberry patch. We went hiking with friends the following weekend and had our first two dates the weekend after that. I remember where we ate and where we danced, what we did and where we went, the movie we watched, the music we listened to and where we kissed. I don’t know if it was hormones or madness or fate or a moment of transcendent clarity but by the end of that weekend we both knew we'd be married and we were humbled that we were witness to something bigger than us at work.
We had wanted to have an outdoor ceremony in a park somewhere. Just a simple picnic with friends and family and frisbees and dogs and at some point we'd stop, get everyone's attention and speak our vows. But pressures from family and other people's expectations meant things didn't go exactly as planned.

You can't depend on the weather in Tennessee in November, but as I remember, it was a beautiful day and the ceremony would have been perfect in a park. Kind of like tomorrow is supposed to be. Pleasantly warm with a crisp clear sky and bathed in brilliant color and light. My mom was worried about the weather. I think she really just wanted her youngest son married in a church, but the weather was the excuse she gave for nagging us about changing our plans. I think Lisa and I just Knew (with a capital "K") that the weather would be fine the way we Knew "it" was meant to be. "We" were meant to be. Had the day been cold and rainy we could have huddled together under an umbrella with a candle’s flickering light dancing on our faces and we would have been warm and fine.

It was a time when music could steal the breath from your lungs and films would move you to tears. The world was magic and we couldn’t figure out why we hadn’t noticed that before.

I was nearly 30. Lisa was in her mid-20s and had been engaged to be married once before. So we weren’t kids, but we were.

On some other, higher plain of existence we were children on a playground. I think one of us was lost and a little bit frightened and one of us was alone and more than a little sad, but we’d found each other. We had a balloon to share, and maybe an ice cream cone. But most importantly now we each had a hand to hold to tightly.

This probably sounds foolish and strange to a soul that doesn’t live in that realm. But this is my haunting vision and it moves me to tears to remember it and how I was blessed and given the gift of a friend to spend my life with. Between jobs and sleepless nights and sick kids and mortgage payments and broken plumbing my eyes get clouded over. I’ve lost sight too many times of the slides and the swings and the merry-go-round. I’ve taken for granted my constant companion who has been the source of nearly every good thing in my life for the last decade.

Nine years is a lifetime and nine years is an eye blink. I hope with all my being it is only a prelude for what is to come.

I don’t think we’ve even explored the sandbox yet.

2006-10-20T19:31:00.000-07:00

What a difference a week makes.

or...

Skeletons in the shower.

I started last Friday with my mom in the hospital. She had safely undergone a colon resection on Wednesday, but was in a great deal of pain. She and the rest of our family were struggling with not so great news from the surgeon. While performing the surgery, the doctor removed some lymph nodes that had shown up on a scan as "suspicious." After surgery, the doctor, who came highly recommended and had 20 years experience with cancer patients, gave us an initial prognosis that these lymph nodes appeared to be lymphoma. We were left once again waiting for pathology reports and test results. What must it be like to work in a lab all day examining tissues and biopsies and knowing people's lives and hopes and dreams were hanging on your report? Lymphoma would either mean intensive chemo or a lifetime of management and monitoring depending on the type of cancer it turned out to be.

Then Friday the word came back. There was no cancer! Ones and zeros. Plusses and minuses. Positives and negatives. Live or die. In this case a negative result was the ultimate positive. We needed that. We don't know what they were exactly, but the lymph nodes weren't cancer. There you go. I didn't know whether to strangle the surgeon or embrace him.

The weekend to come was hard for my mom. Sleepless nights due to pain. A difficulty getting medicine regulated. I spent significant time both Saturday and Sunday sitting at her bedside relieving my dad so he could go home and get rest. This meant stepping into a role where I found myself doing the most basic things for the woman who brought me into the world and raised me. She was by no means helpless, but she was dependent. I know this is most likely a foreshadowing of days to come. She's only 65, which seems younger with each passing year. But with each turn of the calendar page I get further from being a child. Okay. That's obvious.

Life's progression was moving toward a new stage. We're born. We're cared for. We struggle for independence. We join with another. We have kids that are totally dependent on us. You find yourself responsible for another person's life and safety. But then it's different when your parents start to become the dependent ones. And I guess life is even more changed when they move on and our kids move off and we find ourselves at the top of the list waiting to graduate on to the hereafter. We don't do rites of passage in this country, at least not formal ones. So it seems you wake up one morning and your role has changed. Your the grown-up, whether or not you feel like it.

It's a week later. My mom is home trying to get back to full strength and back to her routines. We don't have the big bad c-word to deal with right now, but I probably have quite a few colonoscopies to look forward to in the future now that there's a genetic predisposition. Winter is coming and my son once again has an ear infection. (Don't believe all the hype about ear tubes.) My daughter is convinced there are skeletons or aliens waiting behind the bathroom shower curtains. (Curse you Buster Bunny! Why did you have to visit Roswell, New Mexico?) I remember being afraid to be in rooms by myself when I was around her age. For me it was aliens or vampires. Didn't worry about skeletons. Despite these memories, I find myself impatient with her neediness. My wife seems depressed and moody quite often lately. From my perspective, she went through something similar when our daughter was about this age and she started the weaning process. Work is demanding and calls for more of my time. Our dogs bark to be walked. There is always something to be done around the house. The car breaks down.

I wish I had something profound to say. I don't. This close call with cancer in the family is minor compared to what so many face daily. I have incredible blessings in my life to be thankful for. My difficulties or hardships are relatively minor, but they are mine. I cut the grass and change the oil and unlcog the drain and kill the roaches and wipe the noses and check on the insurance. And if there ever does turn out to be a boogy man in the shower, I guess he's mine to deal with too.

2006-10-07T19:46:00.000-07:00

I'm Baaaaack.

Or...

Finding something you didn't really lose.

Hmmm..... I guess blogspot isn’t a demanding taskmaster. Saw some friends today who commented that they had read my blog. I’m thinking "Blog? What Blog? Oh yeah, that thing I haven’t written anything for in months (four to be exact)." So why is that the case? It’s not that things haven’t been happening.

My 20th high school reunion came and went without my presence there. Then, I get an e-mail from one of the most unlikely members of that class telling of the event and how everyone is doing and laying bare his soul. He had links to numerous websites of other class members and I experienced that strange something you get when you realize time passes for everyone. Those people aren’t 18 anymore. Some of them have become amazing adults very different from who they were. Maybe if I’m lucky I have as well. I wish I still had a locker next to some of these guys and stood in a cafeteria line with them 5 times a week.

What else? I had a birthday. Turned 38. So I guess I need to edit my profile.

I was diagnosed with arthritis in both hips. That was fun. Some kind of congential defect where the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, just not in the right way. So the joint has worn itself out. I thought maybe there was some scar tissue or something in the joint flaring up that could be cleaned out, but no. One of the foremost hip specialists in the country (who happens to work here in Nashville) took a look at some x-rays and said "Well, you’re a candidate for early hip replacement surgery when the pain starts to get problematic." Oh. Thanks. Be sure to tell whoever helped you develop your bedside manner that they did a bang-up job. (That’s sarcasm by the way in case you couldn’t tell). I was at a playground with the kids today trying to chase them around with sore hips, a stiff lower back and a messed up shoulder that I woke up with one morning a week to ten days ago that won’t go away. I watched other kids and moms and dads clambering around like monkeys and hated the fact that I felt more like the tin man at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz.

My wife took an upholstery class this summer, so we're now the proud owners of 4 or 5 pieces of stray furniture in various states of repair that are in need of a good homes. (Sorry honey, I had to throw something in there about that).

Public service announcement. Fade in from black over sounds of ripping fabric. "Upholstery." Sounds of staple guns firing in rapid succession. "It's not a hobby. It's an addiction."

My daughter started kindergarten. That’s a short story in itself rather than a blog entry. Maybe a novel.

My wife now has a daughter that started kindergarten, that’s an epic poem.

My son slept through the night. Or at least came close a couple of times. We’ve put him down around 8:00 and he slept till 5:00 am. If we knew that was going to happen, I think we’d have climbed in bed about 8:30, but we were expecting the typical up 2 or 3 times a night thing, so we didn’t get to really take advantage. Neither one of our kids has slept well. They are both amazing and delightful people, they just won’t @#$#ing sleep. There’s a guy I work with who was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. Wears some mask now at night and says it’s made him a different person. Energetic, feels good, more sex drive, happier, more optimistic, blah, blah, blah. So let’s see.... Out of the last 6 years, my wife and I have probably spent 4 of those years with chronically bad sleep. What’s that doing to us? Waking up 2 to 3 times every night to the cardiovascular stress test of having a little person scream and cry and in your ear. Hmmm.... Restful nights? For those of you with kids that sleep, keep it to yourself.

Most seriously and recently, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Colon cancer. It appears to be in very early stages and very treatable. She’s having surgery this Wednesday. We’ll know more after that. But there’s something about the c-word that changes everything. I guess now and for the rest of her life, she’ll be a cancer survivor until she's not. She lost her mom to a protracted and very ugly battle with cancer back in the mid-80s, so her memory banks have a built-in personal slide-show of horrors that probably plays her to sleep every night. We are all hoping and praying it won’t be the same for her. The issues here seem to many and too personal for a forum like this.

So a lot has been going on. Tonight, while my wife got out of the house for a while, I got the kids to bed solo. Pretty easy go of it. I was able to divide and conquer. But during the process of rocking my son to sleep, he dropped my watch into the bowels of the recliner we were sitting in. He calls it a "tick-tock" and likes to hold onto it sometimes when I rock him. The practice is cute and sweet and sometimes helps him to sit still. So it slips out of his hand and falls down beside the cushion. I get him to sleep and into the crib and start looking for it. It’s not under the cushion. I tip the chair over to see if it slid all the way through to the floor. No dice. But in jostling the chair I hear it clink around in the guts somewhere. I try everything. I pull off the cushions. I’m reaching under some of the batting trying to feel around. I tip the chair over. I recline it. I extend the footrest. All the time I’m working in the dark and trying to make as little noise as possible so as not to wake one of the kids.

I try to reach up under the sides. I stretch the springs of the seat to one side and scrape up my forearms trying to reach around in the guts of the chair. I’d leave this timepiece there till morning, but I’m afraid I’d forget where I lost it and search for it for days. During the course of this nocturnal expedition I of course discover a couple of small board books, a train car, some change, some unidentified objects I decided were better left where they were and miscellaneous dried out food stuffs that I’m probably glad I can’t see and which I'm certainly not looking for. Finally, I'm lying face down on the carpet in the dark room with the chair reclined and me contorted under the footrest and reaching an arm up into the frame hunting blindly and getting grease and dirt and the aforementioned ancients food bits ground under my nails when my fingers brush the smooth cool metal links of the watch band and I’m able to retrieve my measure of time that my son had lost.

And that, I guess, is why I haven’t written for four months.

2006-05-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

From Day to Z

or...

Loving an ungrateful child

It was one of those days. My wife had her turn yesterday (and probably the day before and the day before and the day before...) and I had my turn today. This three day weekend is coming, as it often does for me, at the end of a hectic and draining period at work. Things at the end of May are always a little crazy and I usually have less energy and effort to give to home life during this season of the year. But that busy period has now passed and with the Memorial Day weekend here I’ve been trying to make up for some lost Daddy time as well as tending to an overgrown lawn and a house where Newton’s law regarding entropy is in full evidence.

Yesterday, my wife offered (to my daughter) to take her swimming at the YMCA when her brother went down for a nap. They returned two hours later, my daughter’s hair still damp and my wife’s spirit dampened. In fact, she seemed royally pissed that, at that point, the baby had napped for almost 3 straight hours giving me time to clean up the kitchen and get several things accomplished while having a little time to myself. In 15 months, he’s probably taken fewer than a dozen naps of that endurance and here, she had let one be wasted on me. My wife on the other hand had spent the last couple of hours bludgeoned by the demands of a very precocious, very strong willed and very five, five year old girl. Sometimes it seems with our daughter that if you make a special effort to shower her with attention, she’ll complain about the water pressure.

After the swimming, I had a share of time with her yesterday myself which was mostly free of the complaining and ungratefulness. Maybe because I catered to her too much out of a sense of guilt. My solo time yesterday with the kids was pleasant and relatively easy till it was punctuated by a moment of horror as I found myself in a bookstore still in possession of my 15 month old son, but without my 5 year old daughter. Thankfully, my wife had trained her well what to do in those circumstances and we were reunited after only a brief lifetime of terror - maybe 2 minutes all together. I’ll write about that one in more detail sometime, but it’s too fresh right now. Suffice it to say that moments like that one make you realize that parenting is sometimes like spending 8 straight hours juggling a Faberge egg, the Hope diamond and a large vial of nitroglycerin. It’s monotonous, but also requires constant vigilance and skill to ensure you don’t damage something delicate, lose something priceless or blow us all to kingdom come.

So... today. I woke with a nagging sinus headache. I had wanted to visit that other church because I feel a restlessness and hunger within. The church we’ve been attending for the last few years has great kids’ programs and Olivia likes it, it’s theologically tolerant enough for my wife to feel mostly comfortable there in her openly doubting state of mind, yet unapologetically still Christian, which in my experience is not always the norm in more moderate or liberal congregations. But the services are soooooo dry.

I can deal with the strict order of worship. There was a time in my life where I was rebelling against my earlier and most Methodist roots and I didn’t want anything to do with a church that knew far enough in advance to notify the printer on Thursday what scriptures would be read and hymns would be sung come the 11:00 hour on Sunday. Where’s the spontaneity in that? Where is the Charisma - in the Biblical sense? I digress. Anyway. So I can deal with the order of worship. But the hymns in a high church Presbyterian congregation just don’t stir the cockles of this southern boy’s heart. If I had my choice, I’d probably prefer what a friend of mine from college once referred to as the earnest-bearded-guys-with-guitars form of worship, but if it has to come from a hymnal, let it at least be The Old Rugged Cross, Blessed be the Tie that Binds or Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. I don’t know where they found the hymnal we use, but I swear I don’t think they’ve ever sung a song I heard elsewhere. They all have the feel of something like "Glorious God who didst diagram the sentences of creation and conjugate the present pluperfect tense of our faith, grant us thy grammatical mercies and instill us with thy ever-present state of the demonstrative."

In addition to the mind-numbing hymns, there are the sermons. I like both pastors and enjoy having a conversation with either of them. But I DON"T WANT SOMEONE READING TO ME. Yikes. If you can’t just speak from the heart, or talk off an outline or something, what’s the point? E-mail the text of your sermon to me and save us both the time. I’ll skim it while I’m doing a system scan for viruses or downloading an acrobat reader upgrade or something. Sheesh. I think my dislike of someone reading a prepared text makes it hard for me to get much out of messages which are probably okay content-wise.

We came home, had lunch and then O and I decided to go to the movies. We’ve only done that once before and it was something we had planned on doing sometime this weekend. With summer’s heat (and more notably, humidity) finally arriving in Nashville like a belated horde of huns, the idea of sitting in air conditioned darkness itself appealed to me. Having a movie to watch at the same time was gravy. So we went to "Over the Hedge" which I have to say I enjoyed. I’m not recommending it mind you, I don’t recommend kid’s movies one way or the other. What’s okay in one household is highly objectionable in another. You can’t win when recommending "family" movies (at least not consistently enough to make worth experiencing the losses) so I don’t do it. One family will object if a bug gets squashed. Another will tolerate all levels of violence in kid’s movies but will freak out if "poop" is mentioned just once. There. It’s about time "poop" made it’s way into my blog.

So the movie was fun. She liked it. I actually laughed out loud a few times. I even sprang for popcorn and a sprite to share which cost nearly as much as the tickets, but that’s pretty cliche to complain about. Afterwards, we did some other things she wanted to do. I could feel the tension slowly building as I said "no" to more food after the movie or spending much more on overpriced trifles. When we got back to the truck to head for home, the meltdown occurred. I opened her door and let her climb in herself while I went around to my side. I left her door open (she likes to close it herself). She was straining and trying to pull it closed, but the truck doors are kinda tough to pull closed so I grabbed her free arm to help give her some leverage. "You’re grabbing me!" she says. "I’m trying to help you pull and stay in your seat. I don’t want you falling out your door." I tug with her and the door slams shut. That was the trigger. She’s screaming, in near tears of fury "That’s not how I wanted to do it!" "Ahhhhhhrrrg!" I try to say something corrective to her, but she screams back, interrupting me in mid-sentence. I eventually cut her off and forcefully say "This is why your mom and I get so frustrated. You got to go to the movies. You had popcorn and Sprite. You got to walk around the mall and see things you wanted to see. And then the door on the truck doesn’t close exactly the way you want and you started yelling about it! It makes us feel like you don’t appreciate anything and all you want it your way, all the time, everyday."

Okay.

So where’s the surprise? Extra! Extra! Five year old wants her way all the time. Film at eleven.

And I’m yelling about it. Making her feel guilty. Everybody wants his way all the time. Olivia is just forceful and confident and honest and young enough to tell everybody about it. I want my way all the time. But my wants are more complicated and... eh, it’s sounds too lofty to say sophisticated. Sometimes those ways involve wanting my children to have fun so I let them watch a video on a Sunday afternoon and I listen to the Titan’s game on the radio instead of watching it. Oooh. Big sacrifice. I want my wife to get some adult-interaction, so I agree to watch the kids in the evening so she can go to book club even though sometimes I’m worn out at the end of the day and don’t have the energy to put the kids to bed. Wow. What a marytr. If I’m honest, deep down, I can be as selfish as Olivia appears at times.

I wanted to go to that other church and had probably been sulking about it most of the morning. I wish the cassette player in the car hadn’t gotten screwed up because some else’s toddler was in the front seat unsupervised for a moment and put quarters into it. I wish the house wasn’t cluttered so much of the time. At least I wish it wasn’t cluttered with stuff other than my own. I wish my wife would quit color-correcting her photos on the computer so I could get on there and play solitaire or write a blog entry. I can be petty. Trust me.

I’ve been intermittently reading bits of a book called "Let your life speak" by Parker Palmer. He writes and lectures and speaks about vocation and calling. One of the essays mentions hearing Dorothy Day, the catholic social justice activist. She scandalized Palmer by referring to the "ungrateful poor" in her lecture. He’s shocked by this till he realizes what she means is don’t give to the poor expecting gratitude. Give only if you have something you must give. Give if the giving is its own reward. Okay. So take "give" out of those sentences and replace them with the verb "to parent." Read them again. Hmmm... But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? Of course you love as a parent not out of the expectation of getting the love back. Otherwise, I guess every parent would retire at the teen years. I hope, as I’ve heard it said before, that no one really is changing all those diapers and wiping those chins because he’s afraid that there will be no one there when he’s old to change his diapers and wipe his chin. God’s little cycle of irony.

But being a parent involves teaching your child gratitude, right? It means helping them not to have a complaining attitude, it means traversing the narrow and treacherous mountain path between loving them and spoiling them. Sure it does.

When I was yelling at her in the truck for yelling at me in the truck for the door not closing the way she wanted, I was not in the place of detached yet loving instruction in virtue and character. I was pissed at this ungrateful little girl who’s throwing a tantrum over something I didn’t understand after doting on her all afternoon. No matter how loud she was yelling, I wasn’t hearing what she was saying. And she probably wasn’t hearing the message from me I wanted to convey. Or at least the message I wished I wanted to convey.

Looking up some Dorothy Day stuff on the Internet (ah, the joys of instant research - how did I ever get through college term papers without it?), I found an article that referred to her love of Dostoevsky’s the Brother’s Karamazov. I liked that one as well. Although I must admit when I read it, I don’t think it was out of a love for the book itself, but out of a desire to have the accomplishment and prestige of having read the great book. The article referred to an exchange early in the book between a woman and Father Zosima. Again, I must admit I didn’t remember the passage discussed in the article. Mostly what I remember about Zosima is the crisis of faith for Alyosha when the old priest dies and his body starts to stink. This exchange Zosima has is with a woman who professes a desire to do great works for the poor and needy but who doesn’t ever embark upon these works because she doesn’t think she could bear it if one of these poor souls complained or was ungrateful.

Zosima tells her of a doctor who told him similar things. "...‘I love mankind,’ he said, ‘but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love individual people.’..." Zosima continues "A true act of love, unlike imaginary love, is hard and forbidding. Imaginary love yearns for an immediate heroic act that is achieved quickly and seen by everyone. ... A true act of love, on the other hand, requires hard work and patience, and, for some, it is a whole way of life." Sounds a bit like a quote from Catcher in Rye I mention in an earlier blot. Hmmm... A theme.

So I’m trying to teach my kid gratitude and thankfulness, and I can’t worship because the hymns are too wordy? I’m trying to convey unconditional love and I wonder how much of the time am I really motivated by trying to get a sense of personal satisfaction from fulfilling my roles (father, husband, neighbor) well? I misplace my daughter for a few moments in a store and mixed in with the horror that someone may have taken her who will do unspeakable things, I find myself in the midst of my panic thinking that "my wife will never forgive me."

I fear every good work is tainted with selfishness if we dissect it long enough. Maybe it’s inherent in our species. So can I expect my daughter to learn true gratitude? Or am I simply using parental guilt to teach her to mimic gratefulness well enough to be socially appropriate?
Help us out Father Z. Is there any hope? "...But I predict that at the very moment when you see despairingly that, despite all your efforts, you have not only failed to come closer to your goal but, indeed, seem even farther from it than ever–at that very moment, you will have achieved your goal and will recognize the miraculous power of our Lord, who has always loved you and has secretly guided you all along."

A whiff of comfort. I guess it’s all God’s fault. Maybe while He’s busy working on us all, I can get him to punch up the lyrics on those hymns as well.

2006-05-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

Tongue-twister.

Yucky weekend. Ben and I have colds of some sort -- his much nastier than mine. Olivia seems slightly sick. At least she's using it as an excuse for extra tv. Lisa is frustrated that her mom immunities are protecting her once again and she can't be whiny like the rest of us.

Maybe the fever is getting to me. Aw, I can't blame that. I actually made this up a few days ago.

Tongue-twister of the month:

If you're about to get a very personal citrus-scented colonic from a cnidarian competitor, then...

That's an intimate imminent anemone enemy lemon enema.

Try saying that one time fast, much less three.

p.s.

If you're wondering about the cnidarian thing, thanks to wikipedia, I discovered that is the appropriate phylum for anemones. Okay, if I can't blame it on the fever, I can blame it on cold medication.

2006-05-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

Reflections
This internet research on job applicants (see previous entry) led me to do something I hadn't done in a while: searching the Internet for myself. Not much shows up. There are some much more interesting people out there in foreign countries that share my name. The few hits that actually were related to me certainly weren't incriminating, but they weren't that interesting either.

Then I came across this blast from the past. This lovely group portrait up above depicts the Mock Trial Team from my senior year in college. I'm the guy just to the left of center (hmmm... is that prophetic?) in the light colored double-brested suit. If you look close, you'll detect shades of Miami Vice fashion, but I assure you, I was wearing socks. You will also note a serious mullet. If only we all had a good friend with a talent for honesty and a eye toward the long range significance of fashion trends.

I had no business with long hair. I was shooting for Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, but ended up with Richard Marx. Alas. At least it wasn't the 70s.

In the 90s I tried reversing the style and going from short on top, long in the back to short in the back, long in the front. Coupled with a closely-cropped and thinly-populated beard, I had unfortunately at that point transformed myself into a reasonable facsimile of Bud Bundy from Married with Children. Again, not a good look.

Next I think, I tried the George Clooney Caesar hair cut. Another one that doesn't work for me. Then I end up married. With children myself. Or at least one on the way. About that time, I requested a little too much off the top at one haircut and ended up buzzed. My darling, and ever thrifty wife at that point saw a pair of clippers at a yard sale and bought them, offering to start taking care of my tonsorial needs at home. After the 2nd or 3rd cut, I realized upon closer inspection that these were actually dog clippers. In a few short years, I had gone from being a young professional groomed by an appropriately alternative-lifestyled hairstylist with his own studio to getting my head shaved by my wife on the back porch with a pair of used dog clippers while the baby took a nap. Talk about domesticated. I even sat perfectly still for my shearing. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Ozymandius has missed his cue.

Why this barber shop confessional? I'm not sure. I didn't change my hairstyle every other month, but I was looking for something. Or someone. Namely someone different to stare back at me out of the mirror. If you glance back up there, keep in mind I was 21 in that first picture but would probably have been lucky to be taken for 16. To say I was boyish, was an understatement. If you've been by Lisa's blog lately, you have probably seen her mention of my late-bloomer status. Unfortunately, that stigma of looking young haunted me most of my teen and adult life.

Now that I'm on the back half of my 30s, I'm finally reaping some benefits of a youthful appearance, but I'm probably over-estimating that youthfulness. And I wonder how much of my psyche is touched by either the pains caused by being small, nerdy and physically immature as a teen and young adult or warped by efforts to overcompensate. More than I probably need to think about.

We got a pair of actual new human hair clippers a few months into the hair-cut-at-home experiment and I stuck with those for a few years. Finally I realized the buzz cut wasn't a good look for me either. I returned to visiting a professional barber, albeit a relatively inexpensive one at the local mall. I'm 37 now and thankful I'm turning grey. I'm not trying to look like anybody in particular except a slightly more fit version of myself. My father-in-law did tell me recently that I looked like Keifer Sutherland on 24. I'd heard that before, but it'd been a few years. And I'm reasonable sure the last time I heard it I was single and it wasn't from a guy in his 50's.

2006-05-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Perils of Blogging (or, Ratting Out A Kindred Spirit)

I’m involved in a hiring committee evaluating candidates for a new position at my office. I’m the youngest member of the committee, but still significantly older than many applicants. There was one that looked particularly promising and for whom we had received positive recommendations. She was scraping by to get the requisite minimum job experience, but looked great academically and generally on paper. She showed a great deal of interest, frequently e-mailing the woman who is in charge of the recruiting.

Being a bright and accomplished student who suffered through a difficult start to a professional career myself, and also being someone who doesn’t fit the traditional mindset of an upwardly mobile young professional, I have a soft spot for these type of candidates. Whether they lack the family connections, the personal appearance or the exuberant self-promoting persona of a car salesman, sometimes there are gifted and capable applicants that just don’t get snapped up and seem to struggle to land that first job where they can then display their abilities.

A couple of us on the search committee had targeted this woman early on as a potential hire. When we were narrowing things down, trying to put together a list of those candidates we wanted to interview, I started doing Internet searches on some of the prospective candidates. Most of them kicked up little other than what you’d usually expect. A mention on a committee of a professional association, an entry as a child or grandchild in an obituary of a family member, maybe a reference in a published item somewhere or a listing related to some non-profit activity. When I searched this particular woman’s name, I kept getting weird references on music related sites. I tried both Yahoo and Google and got the same type of results on each. So I started exploring the links. It was some kind of on-line music forum/make-your-own-radio-station kind of website. I found her name in there. We actually share some of the same musical interests, at least when I’m in a bad mood. Whatever it may be, I think everybody has some kind of music that they turn on when they’re really feeling sour. It may be Patsy Cline. It may be Nine Inch Nails. This girl listened to that kind of stuff all the time.

Well. That’s okay. I tend to be a bit melancholy myself. That if anything made me more sympathetic toward this applicant. Then I found a link to her blog from one of these sites.
Blog isn’t the right world. More like on-line cocoon. In comparison, this blog is a stick-figure drawing and hers is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Not in terms of content mind you, but in terms of complexity. I try to steal an hour or so here and there to post a few entries a month and don’t worry about format. Hers is packed full of custom-created icons, images, avatars, streaming news, links and members. It’s hard for me to remember how to edit the links on my homepage. Half the time, I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at on hers. You could tell, she’d been living there.

Well, that’s okay too. A generational difference perhaps. She was in high school when the Internet explosion began. I was already out in the work world. She had years in college and grad school to get acclimated to all this technology. With the onset of parenting, I’ve fallen behind the curve. We only got a DVD player a year or so ago. All in all, this left me with the impression that our generation gaps are dramatically wider than they used to be. I am 11 years younger than the woman heading up the search committee, 11 years older than this applicant. My co-worker seems like a big sister. This chick seems like an alien.

And then we get to the content of the blog. Yikes. She’s pissed at the world. And not occasionally, but apparently 24/7. The blog was chock full of sniping and griping (actually, she calls it "snarking") about the current temporary job she has, her co-workers, her neighbors, people who interrupted her at a restaurant, her mom, ex-bosses, anyone and everyone. It was elitist, boorish, petty and just plain nasty. It’s pretty telling. She lets it all hang out. This isn’t a collection of thoughtful literary snippets of a slightly-disgruntled young women waiting to be discovered as Generation Y’s Emily Dickinson. It’s closer in content to the kind of nasty little notes a middle school science teacher confiscates from the girls in the back row of his class.

And... much of the content is posted during work hours from office computers. Not wanting to be the hypocrite, I’ll certainly confess to personal use of the Internet during work hours. I’d be actually more worried about someone who can honestly claim they never checked a sports score or browsed Amazon.com between the hours of 9-5. But this girl was living on line during work hours and spending much of that existence slamming co-workers and complaining about her job.
I had to pass this info along to the search committee. Well, actually, I passed it on to the next youngest (and likely to be more understanding member) and she passed it on from there. Those of us interested in this applicant tried to talk ourselves into still liking her. We argued that maybe this is just how she vents. Maybe this is just her dark side. But ultimately, we had to pass. This girl’s dark side may not be any darker than some of the rest of us, but hers was a google search and one hyperlink away from 6 billion people. She had no discretion, apparently little respect for other people, not much respect for her job, and a heckuva bad attitude.

I was (and am) tempted to e-mail and let her know how she’s hurting herself (professionally). She could at least limit access or use a pseudonym or something. But there are deeper issues than that going on here and it doesn’t seem right to flip the lid off that pandora’s box, then walk away. And to be honest, I felt more than a little like a peeping Tom reading through her on-line journal and dissecting her soul.

You tell me. If you take a second look at an exhibitionist, can you be called a voyeur?

2006-05-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

Challenges of raising a linguistically-advanced 5 year old (or playing the thesaurus game)

Standing in the pantry at lunch today, I noticed something I hadn't seen in there before up high on a shelf. I didn't know if it was a recent purchase or something that had been bought in a moment of weakness or given to us and my wife was now trying to keep our daughter from remembering it and hoping it would dissolve into the limbo of the upper pantry shelves. Our girl was in the kitchen with us, and I thought spelling it out would only increase her curiosity. So I found myself asking my wife in a halting query

"So, when did we get the Greetings-Feline, Explode-Strumpets?"

After a brief moment of translation this had my wife on the floor in laughter (not rolling on the floor mind you, so just OFL) which ceased only when it frightened our 15 month old son and started him crying.

Oh, the lengths we go. Maybe it was unnecessary, but when we're trying to get our daughter, who is generally an excellent eater, but with intermittant finicky spells, to eat a substantial, non-sugar-coated lunch, I didn't want to spell out H-E-L-L-O K-I-T-T-Y P-O-P T-A-R-T-S.

2006-05-03T18:59:00.000-07:00

Inspiration is a tricky thing

The other night, I had a handful of topics I wanted to write about and I could feel the words bubling around inside just waiting to pour out in artistically crafted waves across the page (screen, whatever).

Now I've got time. The kids are in bed. The wife is out walking the dogs. But I don't feel I can do things the justice they deserve and I'm having a hard time thinking of what some of the topics were that I felt so inspired to write about. I was up off and on all night with one or both of the kids. When they weren't waking me up, my thoughts wouldn't stop running around in the gerbil wheel and they kept sleep at bay. My brain and my eyeballs feel fuzzy and like they've been rubbed upon by too course of a grit of sandpaper.

2006-04-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

My 20 year high school reunion is this fall.

It’s something of a momentous occasion I guess.

When word came, I discovered I was cast adrift in the first stage of alumni limbo (maybe the Sargasso Sea is a more apt metaphor). A friend of mine from high school, a more social, more popular person than myself, put them on my trail by passing on my e-mail address. I’d flown under the radar for a time, but now I’m found. They’re still searching for some of our classmates. So I wasn’t among the abjectly lost or deeply hidden, but I wasn’t among the readily discoverable either.

The curious thing is I’m still working the same job that I had at our ten year reunion. I’ve married and moved residences since then, but I’m in the phone book, and my house (where I’ve lived for almost 7 years now) is less than 4 miles from the campus of our school. All that makes me wonder how hard anyone was looking.

Don’t get me wrong. I never expected to be on the planning committee. Not my style. I attended the ten year reunion and enjoyed it. I tend to like myself better as an adult than as a teenager. And there’s the added benefit of no wedgies. High school wasn’t miserable for me, but, thank God, I didn’t peak at age 17. I don’t live and die by reunions. I plan to go to this one out of curiosity more than anything else and would be disappointed if I couldn’t make it. On the other hand, I don’t have any strong connection anymore to the school or my friends from that stage in my life. Sorry.

My senior year, someone went around our English classes and interviewed each of us (probably less than 20 seconds a piece) about where we’d be in ten years. I’m in the profession I predicted, but in a less orthodox version of the job. I was voted most intellectual in my high school class and as a result, I think everyone expects I must be some version of a mini-Bill Gates type. They’re going to be disappointed.

I’m not wealthy, or close to it. I’m not famous or powerful or influential. I do think I’m balanced. My fiscal net worth isn’t going to impress anybody, but I’d put by blood pressure and cholesterol readings up against anyone. And I’ve still got as much hair as I did in high school. Actually, I’ve got more since it’s started cropping up in all sorts of new bodily neighborhoods. Oops. Too much information, right?

Somewhere on the near horizon there is the potential for a career move. Considering I’ve only held two jobs since graduation 13 years ago, job changes are significant events for me. This one seems to make perfect sense, like the next step in a natural progression. And it might be what I do for the next 20 years. But I don’t know what’s around the next bend. I don’t believe in 5 year plans. “Networking” is the n-word in my vocabulary.

I came out of law school, stressed-out, wired and overly earnest. And overly religious. I appreciate that my values didn’t lead me down the rabbit hole of a corporate big law firm high profile law practice. My bank account might be healthier if I did, but my soul would not be. I graduated with an informal association with a small “Christian” law firm. That path was the result of hours of prayerful consideration and few other options. I think it shows in interviews when the description of the job you’re interviewing for makes your skin crawl. Thankfully God spared me from the path I thought He had set me upon when the senior partner of the firm informed me they couldn’t financially afford a junior associate and the attorney I knew best at the firm informed me the week before I took the bar that he was leaving the firm. It was one element of a series of unfortunate events that left me emotionally, medically, professionally and socially shipwrecked and clinically depressed for at least a year. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a crucible of sorts.

As time went by, I found out the firm that at one time looked like an oasis in a bankrupt profession had major financial problems because the aforementioned senior partner had used his religious objections to certain federal policies as an excuse not to pay income taxes for quite a few years. Said partner also shows up with regular frequency in the state bar association’s reports of disciplinary actions for such things as inappropriately co-mingling client’s funds and a non-attorney coworker of mine who knew him from college claims he was one of the biggest druggies on campus in his day. Hmmm.... hypocrisy, thy name is lawyer.

Sometimes you learn to be thankful for life’s little catastrophies.

After that disastrous charge out of the professional gate, I learned not to plan too far ahead. In the realm of the best laid plans of mice and men, I was clearly a rodent and not a homo sapiens. A friend of my parents who worked in state government cast me a life preserver of a temporary job offer somewhere around a year after I began treading water. I made a place for myself, did a good job, swallowed a lot of pride, recharged the batteries of my self-esteem and in about 18 months, was hired away to the job I now hold and have held for ten years. Before I took this job, I’m not sure I said the first prayer about the decision. It felt right. And I was still gunshy with the whole prayer mumbo jumbo.

Since that time, I’ve had other job offers, have considered leaving several times, and declined to even pursue certain other opportunities. They haven’t felt right. Maybe they weren’t, or maybe I’m lacking in ambition. Or maybe I’m afraid.

Anyway… this next option out there on the horizon has the initial feel of the “next right move,” but it’s not in my control. In this case however, I have created my own opportunity, tentative as it may be. Ten years ago, that wasn’t the case. My dad saw the ad in the classifieds and recommended it to me. A co-worker gave a glowing and entirely unsolicited recommendation to someone she knew who was involved in hiring. But there it was. Fate, or God or random chance had placed me in my first job, which set me up to get my second. Ten years of work, learning and development in that position has, I think, ideally suited me for where I may go next which looks like a heck of a nice oportunity. But at times, my life seems much like a river with a strong current. I can make minor course adjustments and perhaps avoid rapids or hazards here and there, but ultimately it’s taking me to a pre-determined destination.

Maybe that belief is reflective of other changes in my life over the last ten years. In 1993, I was moving out of a briefly charismatic phase in my spiritual development which probably contributed to my quasi-superstitious manner of directing my life.

Now, I’m a Presbyterian.

2006-04-17T20:40:00.000-07:00

Tornados, disasters and tv...Oh My!

It’s April in Nashville, which means it’s tornado season. Many days this month, caffeine and adrenalin-infused weather forecasters will take the network tv broadcasts hostage as they break in with one alert and storm warning after another. We’ll be inundated with a deluge of names of little unincorporated communities no one has ever heard of linked to a train schedule of estimated arrivals of thunderstorms, straight-line winds, radar-identified vortexes and the ever-present "golf-ball-sized hail." Which raises the conundrum, "why must hail be compared to sporting goods?" You always hear the inevitable analogy to golf balls, ping-pong balls, baseballs, softballs, marbles... occasionally you get quarter- or half-dollar-sized. What I’m waiting for is some Australian crocodile hunter type of weather maniac coming on the local broadcast and shouting "Cracky! We got hail coming down out there the size of me left testicle!!"

This time of year, the weather men and women change from mildly charming and slightly nerdy junior varsity members of news teams to highly competent and professional flight attendants smiling their way through floatation device instructions on a one-way, non-stop commuter flight to hell. Every local station touts the supremacy of it’s radar and computer simulation systems. One’s got 3-D imaging. Another has higher resolution. Others show frequency of lightning strikes. They all seem equipped with an annoying capability for the user to point and click with a mouse and have the computer clutter up the screen identifying streets and highways that lie most directly in the path of impending doom. I’ve been in a major tornado. Here’s a hint: If you’re still sitting in front of your big screen plasma tv trying to determine whether the storm is going to hit the 700 or 800 block of the street where you live and the power goes out - your ass is grass as the saying goes.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the efforts of this cadre of weather warriors. If nothing else, they are so fastidious in telling you it’s time to run to the basement or an "interior room of your house" that you know if they haven’t put your neighborhood on high alert, you’re high and dry and can rest easy.

But it’s confession time. When the weather nerds break in like some kind of underground pirate radio station and interrupt American-celebrity-home-makeover-dance-a-thon-on-ice, there’s a part of me that hopes disaster has me in its crosshairs. Logically, I know that’s stupid. The husband and dad in me sure doesn’t want my wife and kids in harm’s way. I was in the middle of the big tornado that trashed downtown Nashville in April 1998 and went on to rapid-fire redevelop East Nashville on its way out of town. I know what can happen. I have a co-worker who’s house was right in the middle of that mess. Last week my parents had a near miss in their neighborhood by a small but potent twister that swept through the suburbs to the North of the greater Nashville area. I saw pictures in e-mails today from an old college friend who lives in Iowa City that had an even closer shave a few days ago.

Still, deep down, I find myself excited at the prospect that disaster will strike.

I don’t think I’m the only one.

I’ve tried to figure out where this comes from. Best I can tell, some dark shadow that dwells below my surface gets bored with the mundane 8-5 world of a desk job and a house with 2 kids, 2 dogs and a station wagon. Something in there wants the wildness of staring mother nature in the eye and calling her a bitch under my breath. I’m not an adrenalin junky or an habitual risk taker. I have as much life insurance as I can get through my employer. I don’t smoke or ride motorcycles or go skydiving or frequent casinos. I don’t have tattoos and I don’t even roller blade. I never "do the dew." So why does some part of me wish a big honkin’ storm front would sweep through the world and teach us all a little bit about survival.

In J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, there’s a quote that’s stuck with me which Mr. Antolini, the English teacher, shares with Holden. "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is he wants to live humbly for one." I think that’s a part of what's going on. It would be far more exciting to do battle with the elements than the dinner dishes. There’s more challenge in trying to bring order back to a life cast into chaos by an act of God than in trying to get the last two month’s Management Information System entries entered into the network computer.

I think all this helps stoke the fires of my latest obsession. I kept expressing regret to my wife that I never watched Lost when the show started. I’d caught the last few minutes of a handful of episodes -- just enough to peak my curiosity. So a couple of weeks ago she picked up the DVD of the first few shows at Blockbuster. We got hooked. She has now kicked the habit (because she hates spending the evening in front of the tv) and simply reads the recaps of the episodes on the ABC website. I, on the other hand, bought the boxed set of the DVDs on-line and have worked my way through 3/4s of season one. Thanks honey.

I was pleasantly surprised to find good writing and interesting characters on an entertaining and highly-rated tv show that actually doesn’t deal with lawyers, hospitals or criminal investigations. A tv show where issues of faith and belief, mysticism and science and social issues get all mixed together. Being a fan of sci-fi, I can suspend disbelief at a moment’s notice, so the attacking polar bears, mysterious monsters, strange hatches and the elusive "others" haven’t put me off. At least not yet. Generally speaking, I’ve got to say most of the shows I’ve enjoyed and watched regularly over the years usually outlived my interest as the show’s declined. I'd end up tuning out long before they were cancelled. There were some notable exceptions: Angel, Northern Exposure, Millenium, Strange Luck (bet you haven’t heard of that one). So who is to say whether Lost can sustain the quality of writing over multiple seasons. And maybe it actually sucks. I used to be a snob about such things. Now I can’t say for sure if it’s really good tv or if, as a parent of young kids, I’m just so thankful to be watching something other than the Big Comfy Couch or Barbie Farietopia (I don’t mind watching Arthur) that I have deluded myself into thinking it’s intellectually stimulating.

Watching Lost, of course I can’t help wondering what I would do in that situation. Stranded on a desert isle, trying to survive on my wits and other people's detritus scavenged from the wreakage. I’m afraid I have a bit of Mr. Locke in me. I think I’d like the island. I’d get some degree of satisfaction from seeing human beings surgically separated from their mocha lattes, SUVs and Walmarts and forced to confront a more intense reality and find out who they are.

So am I the one who is warped and twisted because I secretly desire to see the ordered facade of civilization stripped away? Or is it our culture that is a perversion of the way human beings were meant to live?

2006-04-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

Not trying to make homelessness a theme of this blog, but....

I was out this evening making a run to drop off some movies at Blockbuster and pick up a few things at the grocery store. Our house is about 2 blocks off a major road (Gallatin Road for you locals) and from there, just about everything is within a few blocks, so I hadn't driven far. We can easily walk to the grocery store, drug stores, take out places, etc., if we want.

On the return trip, there is a swarm of blue lights. I counted no less than 13 police cars, plus an ambulance and a fire truck. The road is blocked off in both directions. I pull into the parking lot of the strip mall where the Blockbuster is located and drop off my movies. Down the street, I see a crowd of spectators gathered in the parking lot. While I'm doing the obligatory return-the-DVD loop through the in and out doors of the Blockbuster (What's the deal with that anyway? Do they really think I'm such an impulse buyer that I can't make that loop through the store without renting something else?), I ask the teenager behind the counter what happened outside.

"Homeless guy got hit by an SUV."

Whoa. That seems to sum it up. You can guess who wins that contest.

I walked across the parking lot and got the news confirmed from some of the people milling around out there. There were cops everywhere. Apart from parking their cars to block off the road, I don't see many of them doing anything but standing around like the rest of us. One cop has a spray can and is walking around all the scattered detritus and spraying circles around where it all ended up. There must have been a crumpled grocery cart somewhere because there is just so much stuff spread all over somebody couldn't have been carrying it all.

I don't know if the pedestrian was killed or not. He must have been carted off already. It's hard to imagine anyone walking away from that unscathed. I call him a pedestrian'cause I feel guilty summing it up that way: Homeless guy vs. SUV. But on my way back across the parking lot to my car, two or three drivers who have pulled into the lot to turn around and try to find a way around the road block ask me what happened and like the teenager I say "homeless guy got hit by an SUV."

What else can you say?

2006-04-04T20:33:00.000-07:00

Jumpsuit guy's name is David (see the post entitled "Sitting" for an explanation of who he is). That's my name (not that I have a monopoly on it). Kinda weird.

My wife met me for lunch today and parked the car at a meter on the street right by jumpsuit guy's usual bench. He said "Hello" and was waving to our son (daughter was at pre-school). Moments earlier, before we'd gotten out of the car, he'd been having a rambling conversation with someone who wasn't there. My wife of course strikes up a brief conversation with him. I'd managed "good morning" after all the times I'd walked past him on the way into the building, but nothing more than that. She can effortlessly interact with anyone. After I'd left, she found out he had grandkids. You don't think about homeless people having family.

I remember reading in an art book once that you haven't really seen something until you've drawn it. Likewise, perhaps you haven't really noticed someone until you've written about him.

2006-04-03T19:26:00.000-07:00

Introversion. Or Why I'm Amazed Anyone is Reading This.

This blogging is a curious thing. I'm writing stuff about deep personal beliefs, thoughts or experiences in a forum literally available to a billion people. But since I haven't told a soul about this blog, it's not much different from my own private journal. It’s perfectly safe - just better formatted that a journal. Except for my wife. She knows of it. Bum Bom BAAAAAAANNNNHHHH (In case you can't tell, those are foreboding chords of doom).

That's the funny thing. She started this whole blogging business and I only created one so I could post comments on hers. (See one of my first entries on here for more about that - Or not. It wasn't very good). I tell no one about mine. She e-mails a link to her blog to the neighborhood mom's group, her writing group friends, tells our neighbors and her sisters about her blog. And then links to mine (yipes!). That was cause for a few freak out moments and I thought about telling her to drop the link. So then I would have a blog that no one except my wife knew about with no links to it. My publicist wouldn’t approve.

My options are therefore to write in total obscurity or remain linked to her social stardom and run the risk of who knows who reading this stuff. I decided to forge on naked and exposed to the world. Her blog still links to mine, but doesn't call it "her husband's blog" anymore. I guess that's out of a sensitivity for my privacy. But I'm still connected to her blog which everyone in our life knows about. So once again she is my missing link to humanity.

I've been amazed on occasion to open up my blog and find, Heavens to Murgatroid??!!!, comments! Comments I say! Universally they come from people who read her wonderful musings about motherhood and life (see the link on my site to her blog - what am I saying? you just came here from there) and I guess out of a well-placed appreciation for her point of view and interests decided to follow her links to other blogs.

That's such a perfect metaphor for our life. Most of the people in my life are there because of her. Or now because of our daughter. (We have yet to see whether the 13 month old son will also be a social magnet.) For my charming daughter's 4th birthday party, she and my wife consulted on the guest list and came up with 27 kids to invite. I think 26 came. Gee. Who do you think she takes after socially? I don't know if I've had 26 friends in my entire life. My wife? We can't go to JifffyLube without running into someone she knows. She has friends that she began a relationship with simply because she kept seeing them in some of the same thrift stores or coffee shops she frequented. Saturday we stopped at a yard sale and she had this long conversation with a woman she was sure she knew. Best they could tell, a couple of years ago my wife took our kids to a playground where this woman (who was nannying at the time) took the kids she was watching.

Me? I can stand at a bus stop every morning next to the same guy for 6 months before I find out what his name is. I can work in the same building and ride the elevator with someone for years and never have a conversation with them. She’s bosom buddies with the guy from the drive through at McDonald’s.

In case you haven’t figured it out. She’s an extrovert. I’m an introvert. One of the multitude of ways we are total opposites. See her recent blog entry from a couple of days ago for more about this.

And for more about introverts and why we’re so saintly for putting up with the rest of you, read this fun little piece.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch

I do think the author isn’t serious. Most of the time. If I were him I wouldn’t be. Most of the time.

I don’t dislike people. I’m not afraid to speak in public. I don’t think I’m visibly awkward in social settings (at least not so much anymore). Much of the time, I just can’t imagine why on earth I’d want to talk to this person I don’t know. Which is a convenient way of not getting to know many people. Usual dinner parties at our house involve my wife and daughter chatting about every incredible topic you can imagine with whomever is visiting while I set the table. At some point, if she has to go upstairs to put the baby to sleep, I might manage to ask them a few questions and possibly discuss a common interest before she returns and the maelstrom of communications whirls off leaving me flattened, dusty and bewildered in its wake.

I really do not intend for this to be a criticism of her or to sound bitter. Honestly. We are just so different. After 4 hours of intense conversation, she’s empowered, energized and bubbling and has a hard time going to sleep. I’ve probably enjoyed myself, but I’m longing for an isolation tank to hide in for a week or so before I have to speak to anyone else again.

Marriage and parenthood are interesting experiences for the introvert. I love my wife and children and find when I do have an evening without them at the home, I often feel lost and empty. But that doesn’t mean the incessant present-ness of a highly precocious 5 year old, the physical invasion of an active 13 month old and the social explosion of communication that can be my highly extroverted wife don’t feel at times like an amphibious assault on every shore of my being.

I wish I had more energy for people. To forge many deep and abiding friendships. To be fully engaged with my kids every moment I’m at home. To throw myself unreservedly into connection with my wife during the last final hours and minutes of the day before sleep. But more often than not I seek refuge in the pages of a book before bedtime or some decompression in front of the tv.

And I wonder how skilled my wonderful wife has become at finding ways for that not to seem hurtful and offending.

2006-03-31T21:20:00.000-08:00

Sitting and ...

The office where I work is just down the block from the main library in our city. There is also a small little park on this block. It’s comprised of a fountain, a few scattered benches, some intersecting sidewalks and some raised planters. It’s a pleasant enough little oasis from the pavement and parking lots. Due primarily to its proximity to the library, it’s a central hub for the homeless in our town. Everyday, regardless of the weather, there is a scattered conglomeration of humanity to be found there with their sleeping bags, backpacks, grocery carts, cardboard boxes and other tools of the trade.

The park has odd origins. There were buildings on the site that probably dated back to the 1800s. They were mostly vacant when I first started working in downtown. One winter there was a fire. Rumor was it was started by a homeless person trying to stay warm in the abandoned building and it got out of control. The buildings were severely damaged. They were demolished; the site paved over and made into a pay parking lot. A short time later, the city bought the lot and converted it into a park. Everything was excavated out to a depth of six feet or so, then truck after truck of dirt was brought in.

So...where the homeless used to hide out in vacant buildings, they now camp out in the open. During the winter months, you see them in the morning, congregating, smoking a cigarette, stamping their feet or simply sitting in the sun trying to thaw out while they wait for the library to open at 9. For that season, they hold absolute sway. Over the coming months, the park will witness a battle of demographics as the pleasant weather will encourage professional downtown workers to grab a sandwich or box lunch and try to find a spot to enjoy their lunch. But the homeless presence will never go away entirely.

There’s one guy in particular there I see everyday Monday to Friday. He’s a black guy. Age indeterminate. He wears a tan insulated jumpsuit and has a black backpack. Sometimes he’ll be standing or wandering around. He talks to himself. If it’s raining, he may find an overhang or awning of a nearby building for a brief refuge. Sometimes he shouts or makes strange noises. From what I can tell, he doesn’t go in the library. I’ve never seen him panhandle. He mostly just sits. Facing south. Catching the sun’s rays. He’s been a fixture there for months now.
Years before him, there was another guy doing the same thing. I passed him everyday for months on my walk from the parking garage to the building. In my head, I’d nicknamed him the Buffalo Soldier. He had a distinct Rastafarian look - dreads, long beard, bright colored clothing. He was there, everyday, just sitting in the sun, till one day he wasn’t. I don’t know what happened. Did he die? Was he arrested? Did he move on? To a shelter? Another location? A job? Another city? Who knows. A year from now, jumpsuit guy probably won’t be there either.

Their lifestyle confounds me. How do you do that? I can imagine surviving the elements - living outdoors. I can imagine getting by on your wits, seeing what you can scavenge up. Some days, there is a temptation to think that you can walk away from work, from a job and spend your days reading in a library, sitting in a park and doing whatever you want. I know a guy who did that. I could imagine being homeless and wandering from city to city. But how on earth do you not go insane sitting there, doing nothing day after day for months at a time?

In the lobby of my building, there’s a security guard named Gary. He also sits there day after day for months at a time. The building management company first hired him during the holidays a couple of years ago. My building is a small 8-story office building with mostly government or government related offices. There were problems with street people or criminals wandering into the building, sometimes just to use the restrooms, but also sometimes snatching purses and even stealing laptops or other small office items if they found an empty office late in the day or during lunch. There were security cameras, but nobody was ever caught from what I could tell. So one day, the security guard shows up sitting near the elevators in an old swiveling desk chair behind a folding table. He sat there. Maybe he read the paper. Once in a while he’d step outside to smoke a cigarette. He’d speak a little to the patrons and tenants of the building as folks came and went. Most people don’t come in our building unless they know where they’re going. So there weren’t a lot of questions to answer. There were no rounds to make. Just sit there from 8 to 5 and be a deterrent.

We thought it was just for the holidays, but the building management company kept him around. It’s been a couple of years now. He’s got a more established built in counter to sit behind that came out of some office during a remodel. He chats with the maintenance guy. He may come up to our office for a cup of coffee in the morning. He reads the papers everyday. Does the crossword. I’ve never seen him read a book. He works half a block down the street from the library and I’ve never seen him reading a book. He smokes the occasional cigarette. He’s ex-military. I don’t’ know if he was ever in law enforcement.

Once again, I am dumbfounded at what sort of personality it takes to allow you to go to the same place every morning and sit down and do nothing but stare at the wall or read a paper all day for 8 hours, then go home and come back the next day and do it again. From one perspective, there’s not that much difference in what he does during a day and what jumpsuit guy does. But one of them is paid for it and the other despised.

There’s a elderly lady who is a security guard down the block at the library. Other than validating parking passes, I can’t tell that she does much of anything other than watch people come and go. There are attendants in the parking garages down the block who sit in little booths about the size of a closet all day long taking money and giving change. I’m not trying to judge or criticize these people. I just can’t comprehend them.

A guy I work with talks about a job he had in college where he worked on an assembly line and put three screws in the bottom of water heaters all day. He talks about how some days it’s tempting to go back to that if he could make ends meet on the salary. I really think I’d be dead or institutionalized after a couple of months of that kind of work. Maybe these people - the security guard, the assembly line worker, the homeless guy - maybe they have nothing more in common than each having a daily routine that is befuddling to me. But I have to wonder if they either have some capacity – patience, stamina, longsuffering-ness – that allows them to do it or if they are lacking some quality – ambition, curiosity, creativity – that allows them to endure days and days of tedium.

Is it me or is it them? Or is it our culture? We have a prejudice for busyness. Not business, busyness. In the decade I’ve worked on this block, I’ve seen major redevelopment all around the area. Some good (in my opinion) like restoring or reclaiming old buildings. Some not so good, like demolishing historic structures to put in parking. Sure, they look like they are accomplishing a lot. But from the perspective of eternity, is there that much difference between the architects, engineers, foremen and construction workers razing and raising huge buildings and structures and the homeless guys that sit on benches or the security guards behind desks? In 300 years’ time will there be any more evidence left of one of their lives than another? For that matter, am I deluding myself that the bustle and activity of my day of work (mostly spent sitting behind a desk) actually matters anymore than the activity (or lack thereof) of the homeless down the street.

Psalm 46:10 Be still and know that I am God. Not a very American spiritual sentiment. In Nepal there was a 15-year old who was gaining international renown because he’d been sitting for months on end meditating under a tree. Magazines over here run articles about the dangers because our kids are too wired and get sensory input from multiple sources at once. They probably can’t meditate for ten minutes, much less ten months. And we wonder where ADD is coming from. This kid – Ram Bahadur Banjan – had allegedly been sitting from May 17, 2005, to March 11, 2006, not moving, not partaking of food or water, only meditating. Some believed he was the reincarnation of the Buddha. He had attracted followers and worshipers because he can sit for months on end and meditate and do nothing. March 11th he got up and wandered off. I haven’t read a news report about him turning up again. Maybe the Krystal Kraving finally caught up with him.

How do I know jumpsuit guy isn’t working his way toward Nirvana? Maybe the Buffalo Solider was spending his hours in prayer for the souls of all those around him? Maybe one of those guys on the benches down the street is actually a brilliant writer immersing himself in the world of the homeless for a book he’s researching.

Does the busyness of my life simply provide me with an illusion of worth and value to my days? Or does it just distract me from noticing the lack of value in my life? Of what I do every day, how much will matter in a year, in ten, in 100, in 500? Anything? I was discussing this with my wife the other night. I have to say how I treat my kids and my wife during the common moments of the day probably has longer lasting significance than anything I do during a day at work. How far into the future do the repercussions from a parent’s love or failure to love well reach? Certainly to the next generation, but for how many more. This lead me to the conclusion that my wife’s role as stay at home mom has much greater significance from an eternal perspective than my job as a local government consultant. Mine is just better compensated. She does more to shape our children’s perspective about who they are and how they treat people. What she does all day each day (and what I do for a few hours here and there) will shape the mates they choose and how they treat their children and what they can achieve and whether they’ll realize their talents and potential. That will carry over from generation to generation as our descendants thrive and grow from the start we gave them or struggle to overcome the obstacles we created in their lives.

What else of the things I do during my days has that significance? I guess writing could. These words get tossed out into the stream of information like a message in a bottle and somebody might read them and be affected. Some writers create a legacy through their literary brilliance that grants them a form of immortality. Still you have to wonder if any positive influence they have across generations from their writing would outweigh the damage they do if they happen also to be assholes to their kids. But our influence on our kids is an obvious one. I may be excusing too many other interactions with people just because the relationship isn’t as significant as the parent/child bond. Maybe how I simply treat everyone I come into contact with makes much more difference than the productivity of my work or anything I could ever write.

I started working on this entry a few days ago. After I began, I couldn’t help but see jumpsuit guy and the others in that park a little differently. Walking up the sidewalk one morning I looked at jumpsuit guy as I passed him. Looked at him instead of avoiding eye contact as he sat there on his bench. And he looked at me. And he said, in a surprisingly bright, warm, gentle and pleasant voice "good mornin’"... And it was.

2006-03-06T19:03:00.000-08:00

Ear Tubes and the Human Condition

Saw an article on-line tonight about Czech doctors who have developed a vaccine for ear infections. Initial studies showed it reduced the instance of ear infections in children by 30%. I had some ear infections myself as a kid. Painful things. Pain you can’t get to. Paid you can’t get away from. A couple of times the fluid and pressure behind my ear were so heavy it ruptured the ear drum. My dad’s dad had significant hearing loss because he had a lot of untreated ear infections and as a teenager took to pressing behind his ear somehow to force his eardrum to rupture to allow the fluid to drain out and get some relief. Graphic, I know. This was maybe the 1920's? Modern medical science really is fairly modern, even in this country.

Anyway... I’m not sure you comprehend the trouble with ear infections till you’re a parent of an infant who keeps getting them. Our first child is now five and still hasn’t had one which makes her an extremely rare specimen. Her younger brother - now 13 months - has had around 8 in his short life. Sometimes in one ear, sometimes in both. They came so frequently, you couldn’t always tell if one had gone partially away then recurred or if he’d contracted a new one within a couple of weeks of the last one. You can’t really comfort a baby with an ear infection. They don’t sleep well, and neither do you.

After a year of sleep deprivation and battling constant illness, he had ear tubes put in. You hear of other parents discuss such things and unless your kid is prone to ear infections, you don’t think much about it. A little curious, but not so much. It took a couple of months to get an appointment with an ENT surgeon. By the time we did the consultation and he was working on infection number 6 or 7 and his stomach was yet again trashed from oral antibiotics and he had chronic diarrhea we would have agreed to most anything to get him (and us) some relief. At one point I figured he’d spent roughly a 4th of his young life on antibiotics. The sticky, nasty stuff you get in droppers and try to squirt in their mouths, hoping they swallow at least half while the rest is getting all over you, them, their clothes, your clothes...

Then there you are early one Monday morning in a waiting room of a children’s hospital trying to entertain your toddler and not think too hard about what’s going to happen in a half hour. When your kid is born, you somehow never picture yourself in the waiting room of a children’s hospital. It’s both a cheerful and somber place all at the same time. The room was packed with kids waiting to have all manner of procedures done. I’m sure there were a lot of parents in that room who would have traded places in a moment with us. They would have much rather been there with a kid waiting for a routine 20 minute procedure instead of major surgery or chemo or cat scans or any number of things that haunt the dreams of parents.

It all went fine, and seems to have made a significant impact on our son’s well-being and disposition. It wasn’t the instant cure-all some parents seemed to promise, but it’s helped. Still, as assured as we were that this was a simple thing, as confident as we were in the doctor and the facility, and as desperate as we were for something to break the repeating cycle of ear infections/antibiotics/stomach upset... Still, there was a time we had to hand our young son who we’ve barely had a chance to get to know, over to someone else who would take him away, put him briefly to sleep and perform surgery (however minor) on him. There may be a one in a million chance that something will go wrong, but you know that will be no comfort if that something does go wrong. What if he doesn’t wake up the same? What if he never wakes up?
You sit there and make small talk and try not to think about how dramatically different your life could be in a few minutes time. You pray. You hope. And you know you’d do just about anything if there was actually anything you could do to ensure no harm will befall your child.

I felt pretty wimpy, but that’s where I was. I know people whose children have chronic health issues. I know people who’ve lost late term pregnancies. I know people whose children have developmental disabilities, or whose children have been paralyzed or seriously burned in accidents. I’ve met people who’ve lost children. And I’m stressed out about ear tubes. But that’s the threat I had to worry about. And it was more than enough to put a shadow on my heart that morning.

I have to wonder. What would the world be like if the concern I felt for my son that day I felt for everybody else’s children? How would I live differently? Could I even survive with that kind of weight? Probably not.

Last night I woke from a strange dream. I was going on some sort of road trip with my daughter. Don't know if we were driving or walking. I only remember a few brief moments from the dream. We were outside some kind of roadside market, taking a break and enjoying the weather. Our two dogs were with us. My daughter and the two dogs were lying in the grass, maybe 30 feet from the highway and spread out a few feet from each other. I watched them from the parking lot. Suddenly a couple of four wheel drive pickups come roaring out of some woods down the hill and cutting over the grass toward the highway. I watch helpless as the first truck drives right past where my daughter and the dogs are lounging. They don't move an inch. The second truck comes careening through the same path, this one looking like it's going to hit a dog with one of its rear wheels. The track of the wheel keeps drifting and I watch powerless as it rolls right up the length of my daughter's body then across her face and skull. I run to her terrified and drop to my knees in shock. After a horrible span of 3 or 4 seconds, she sort of scrunches up and wiggles her nose like you might if you'd just pulled a tight sweater on over your head, blinks a time or two and sits up. She says "Hi Daddy" in an oblivious manner.

The next thing I remember from the dream, I am again standing outside the door of the roadside market watching my daughter in the parking lot this time. There's a noise and commotion and I see her start running, without looking, directly toward the road and its traffic. Yelling, I charge after her trying to catch her, but she’s not stopping. Then, right behind me, a tractor trailer plows off the road, smashing through the cars in the parking lot and utterly destroying the market and it's front entrance where I was standing seconds before. My daughter is again totally untouched. Her apparent foolishness and oblivion have protected her, and this time, saved me from eminent peril. I woke up then, heart pounding and breathless. I didn’t know what to make of the dream and still don’t.

When my daughter was first born, I remember (and I’m sure I’ll never forget) going to an early check-up with my wife when our girl got her first vaccinations. My wife didn’t want to watch, so I signed and initialed the waiver form saying I realize there are statistically acceptable possibilities that awful things could happen, then I helped hold my baby daughter on the examination table as the nurse put one, then two, then three needles that seemed to be almost as long as her thighs were thick, into my baby girl’s legs. There’s a look of shock on her tiny face after the first one. Seconds later, she’s screaming and staring into my eyes while her still blue eyes fill with tears and fear. After an interminable minute, it’s finally done and my wife takes her to nurse and comfort her and gets to play the good cop. In a few moments it’s all over for my daughter, but I know it’s just starting for me. I think I had been operating under some delusion that I could save my kid from all harm. I was smart enough, or fast enough or diligent enough that I could prevent anything. Then you realize you can’t. And even if you could, you shouldn’t. I knew I’d fail her. Worse, I knew I would have to make decisions that would cause her pain. It’s unavoidable.

I think the worst injury she’s ever had I was sitting three feet away from her. We were at my mom’s house at the kitchen table. (What’s safer than Nanna’s kitchen?) She was kneeling in a chair. Our usual rule was "knees or bottom" so that was even operating in the allowable territory. She leans over or turns around or something and in an instant she’s lost her balance and falling sideways, driving the bridge of her nose into the hard wooden edge of the chair next to her. Her legs are tangled in the rungs of the chair she was sitting on and she’s suspended between the two, crying in pain. I sweep her up and see instantly a huge dark welt and knot the size of an egg swelling up in the space between her eyes. We take her to the emergency room and are freaked out as she keeps trying to drift off to sleep. We get checked in and ask the attendant if the drowsiness is a sign of a serious problem and he says "No. It’s okay if she falls asleep as long as you can wake her up."

????!!!

OKAY GENIUS. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT. HOW WILL WE KNOW IF SHE’LL WAKE UP BEFORE WE LET HER FALL ASLEEP?

Take a deep breath. Count to ten.

She was fine. She is fine. More than fine. Wonderful. She still had black eyes and a bad bruise in the first pictures after her little brother was born a couple of weeks later. There’s a small scar left there on the bridge of her nose that is more visible when she cries and she snores terribly. But she might have just inherited that from her mom. The point is, there was nothing I could do. I have in my care the most precious things I can imagine and there’s not much I can really do to protect them. That's my cross to bear. I can’t save them. But after last night, I’m wondering if the point of the dream and all this is that I’m not meant to save them. They’re the ones who are going to save me.

2006-02-28T19:26:00.000-08:00

Losing and finding yourself in a good book.

I finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime on the bus on the way home today. The protagonist and narrator of the story is an autistic teenager. The prose is hypnotically written so that you find yourself falling through the looking glass into his world of counting cars by their color, reciting prime numbers, rocking and moaning and trying to shut out the overwhelming sensory stimulus bombarding you from every direction you look. I was kinda glad nobody else was home yet when I walked in the door. It gave me a chance to decompress from work and convince myself that I really wasn't mildly autistic.

It's not the first time I've found myself so caught up in a book that I felt I was taking on characteristics of characters. I remember in junior high reading Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlen and feeling freaked out for a while. Even wrote a book report on it. Probably got the book removed from the library of my conservative Church of Christ affiliated private school. There's some fairly blasphemous stuff in the book (especially if you're easily offended), not to mention a healthy dose of sexuality. I remember one weird sequence where a character dies then remanifests and makes a soup out of part of his own body for his mourning friends to eat. Can't remember much more, but then, it's been over 20 years since I read the book.

Murakami transforms me as well. Reading his prose with it's simple structure and rhythm feels like meditation. Your breathing slows, your body and mind are depressed -- in the sense of taking a depressant, not in the sense of suffering from a deep sorrow. But there is a soothing form of melancholy to his writing. It reminds me of winter days in college when I went down to the riverfront park in Memphis and stood on the edge of the bluff staring out over the whitecapped currents of the broad Mississippi, feeling a cold wet wind blowing hard in my face. I went there to leave things behind. Things I wanted to forget. Things about myself I wanted to exorcise. I can't say that it worked. Not sure that there ever was anything I tried to cast out of my heart and soul that drowned in the muddy Mississippi. Demons are damn good swimmers. But I was successful in setting up an Ebenezer of formative angst. Ebenezer in the Biblical sense - a stone memorial set up by the children of Israel in locations where God did something miraculous in the life of the tribe. Interesting concept: find some great honking chunk of rock and stand it up where it doesn't belong so you inspire future generations to ask "what in the hell is that there for?" And then you tell them. Oral tradition. A precursor to blogging?

I guess we all want to tell our stories and at least pretend that somebody out there might read them. Somebody out there might be transformed, moved, altered by the words we express. We hope language really is a virus. We share our thoughts, hoping to infect another with our literary disease and pass ourselves on. You'd think having children would satiate this desire to recreate ourselves, but maybe it makes the desire more earnest.

Our mind recognizes traces of our physical self passed on to another and that causes it to long to find itself reflected somewhere, in an audience, a reader, a disciple. Or in the least, a comment to a post. ;)

2006-02-28T16:12:00.000-08:00

The following is something I wrote a few months ago based on an interaction I had with a man on the bus.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Marvin just got out yesterday. He said he was riding to Madison. That’s where he’s "stayin" these days. He started this conversation with Vietnam, but now he’s worked his way around to the halfway house. Each stop on the route seems to reveal a new layer of the onion. He was in 'Nam from the time I was born till I was three. I was oblivious. I remember being surprised when I was a teenager to realize we were at war when I was a kid. Now I find myself trying to make sure my 5 year old daughter knows as little as possible about Iraq. We don’t watch the TV news much. Guess my parents didn’t either. Before I had kids I remember a co-worker saying he’d let his kids watch just about everything except the evening news - gave ‘em nightmares. Nice reality we’re living in.

Marvin wasn’t much more than a kid when he was in 'Nam. Three months from finishing his tour of duty - 20 years old - when he was shot to pieces. Spent 4 months recovering in Saigon and the rest of his life trying to forget. Overcast rainy days like this one the shrapnel wakes him up at 4 or 5 in the morning, so he watches TV. Old Harrison Ford flick was on. The one where he hides out with the Amish to protect the little kid who witnessed a murder. That’s the first R-rated movie I saw at a theater. Snuck in with John W. and two girls who’s names I can’t even remember on a double date. John asked out Jamie something or other who I’d rather been with If I ever had the nerve to ask a girl out, but instead I was fixed up with her friend (Melissa?). Sitting there awkward and nervous and scared to death of the opposite sex as J & J made out in one seat next to us and I tried to figure out whether it was more embarrassing to watch them or Kelly McGillis sponging off topless on screen - the world’s first Amish pinup.

Marvin dealt dope for years, but now he’s got God. God, a criminal record and a metal plate in his head. That and a buck ten some lady gave him got him on the number 26 bus back to the halfway house from downtown. And maybe that’s enough. He’s clean and sober, 57 years old and moved in the early morning arthritic dawn by the simplicity and peacefulness of the Amish way of life. He wonders why Harrison didn’t stay there on the farm and help that woman take care of that kid.

He’s put babies in the hospital. Knows he’s sold dope to pregnant girls. Done things he'll never be able to forget. He’s seen a lot more. On the streets and in Nam. I see him.

Marvin’s lecturing now on babies having babies and how kids these days are getting old too damn fast. Across the aisle SnowBunny’s half of her cell phone conversation won’t keep to itself. "Where you at bitch?" She’s a fat white chick in a halter top with tattoos (that’s how I know she’s "SnowBunny") and pawn shop bling. Shitty gold sunglasses with rhinestones and -no lie- gold caps on all her front teeth. Once upon a time she’d be called a "wigger" but I don’t know if that’s even the term for it anymore. It’s certainly not politically correct, but hey, the bus aint’ PC.

Speaking of politics, I think that’s the one thing Marvin and I have in common. He may be missing one of his ribs, most of his teeth, all of his right knee and part of his scull, but he’s got enough brains to see we’re doing Vietnam all over again in the desert. He calls it legalized theft. "We stole this country to begin with. What’s gonna stop ‘em from stealin’ what they want." A 57 year old, black ex-con Vietnam vet and a privileged middle class white boy, liberal environmentalist government employee, but we got something in common. We know politicians lie.

The bus stops to let snowbunny and her half-hispanic girfriend waddle off. Marvin doesn’t slow down. He’s probably got a lot of catching up to do on casual conversation. There’s pain oozing out of the well-oiled cracks in his face and pooling in the milky vein streaked whites of his eyes.
Another guy I’ve seen before sits toward the front of the bus looking back at our animated conversation. Looks like an ex-hippie. Greyish blond ponytail, wire-rimmed glasses and wispy long beard. He’s skinny and delicate of build with a face that looks like he descended from Gnomes. He’s been balancing on his lap a shrink-wrapped package of some kind of wooden thing that obviously came with some assembly required. He looks good natured. I wonder where he was when Marvin was doing his tour of duty in Vietnam. Was he in Canada? Kent State? or slogging through the rice paddies himself?

Marvin is talking about advice his old man gave him years ago as a younger black guy sits down across from us. He’s wearing baggy denim shorts and a t-shirt that shows off a lot of amateur tattoos and a WWJD bracelet. He seems uninterested in Marvin’s ramblings but he gives me that look you get when you know you’re part of an odd couple.

The back of the bus is the place to be in the morning. It’s quiet unless those kids from the magnet school who argue and insult each other every morning are back there. In the morning the crazies ride up front. They jabber at the driver or the elderly passengers and scribble in their spiral bound notebooks. There’s the old white guy with the bowl haircut who wants to give you tracts explaining why his church is the only one that will get you to Heaven. This comes after he explains he’s divorced and he used to work for the state too until he had to go on disability for his narcolepsy. That’s why they won’t let him drive. A lot of people in the front rows in the morning talk about "they" and "them." It goes with the territory.

In the afternoon, the dynamics flip and the front of the bus is the safer place to be. Just a bunch of tired people heading home to get dinner. In the back in the afternoon I’ve seen drug deals, and drunks, hustlers trying to get laid, and one dumb Rastafarian actually get kicked off for lighting up a joint right there on the bus. You can’t even smoke, much less get high. But it takes all types.

I wish Marvin good luck and get off at my stop. He’s got farther on to go to get to where he’s stayin. The smell of diesel fumes spirals around me as the #26 roars off. Always takes me back to the days of the high school marching band. Inhaling straight exhaust from the buses while you unload and assemble your instruments and sit on empty cases trying not to scuff the white, highly-polished shoes. Woolen uniforms that drenched you in sweat in late summer and early fall and were too thread bare from previous wearers to keep your ass from freezing to metal bleacher benches after half-time once winter arrived. Fall Fridays were football games - Saturdays were band contests. A bunch of middle class white kids trying not to get out of step while they attempted to infuse a bad arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with passion and excitement. This poor Russian composer in the 1870s writes a piano composition to memorialize an exhibition of his late friend’s artwork. How was he to know it would end up blasted out in a three minute 45 second mostly-in-tune rendition by testosterone-charged trumpet players who try too hard for the high notes just before the start of the third quarter. I still remember the time the players ran through the flag line as we marched off field and the entire band seethed with righteous indignance at the obvious slap in the face. It's crazy, but every time I hear Don McLean sing American Pie I get chills at the part where "the marching band refused to yield" the day the music died.

I pick up the mail and head up the driveway, trying to shake the cobwebs and memories from my brain in order to take in Zoom on the couch with my daughter and give my wife a respite from holding the baby. Later I look up Pictures at an Exhibition on line and find out a German heavy metal band named Mekong Delta also did an arrangement of the composition. So maybe the B.C. Goodpasture High School Marching Band version wasn’t the worst.

I wonder if the Mekong Delta is where Marvin left bits of himself behind.

2006-02-23T16:17:00.000-08:00

Whatever makes you feel good

"Whatever makes you feel good. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?" She asked to an office full of nods and secular equivalents of "amen" or "hell, yeah!"A friend of mine is struggling to work through a tragic loss. The wounds are still ridiculously fresh and deep. Two weeks in she’s being sustained by her anger, best I can tell. Another friend brought her gifts of new music and a statute of a Hindu goddess. Some other less new-agey, but probably still non-religious co-workers in the room seemed to look at it a little funny, so the giver seemed compelled to explain awkwardly. "Well, I’ve got one in my upstairs room where I do yoga. She just makes me feel good." To which the friend in grief said, somewhat sarcastically, "well that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? Whatever makes you feel good."

I’m thinking "no." Actually, I’m thinking "NOOOOOO!" But I keep it to myself. It’s not the time or the place. I know she’s right, at least for a lot of people. Their religion is whatever makes them feel good. It might take the form of wearing crystals and burning incense, fanatic allegiance to the state university football powerhouse, acquiring that 3,500 square foot home in the gated subdivision, early retirement, political power, personal assurance of salvation, reality tv, a strictly vegetarian diet combined with regular yoga practice, evangelical fervor, a well cared for home and family, a string of sexual conquests or nightly confessions with a Grey Goose vodka martini. If you define religion as one’s utmost concern, then a lot of people in this county who claim to be practicing Christians, (or Jews, or Buddists, or Moslems or Hindus) just ain’t.

In my book, when it comes down to "whatever makes you feel good" that sounds like a better argument for a heroin addiction than a disciplined spiritual practice (with a nod to Mr. Marx). My religion, or my spirituality isn’t what makes me feel good. As millions of others in this country and the vast percentage of people in this city, the crown jewel in the buckle of the Bible belt, I claim Christianity as my profession of faith. But not the version you see on tv. I’ve never voted for a Republican president, I plan to send my kids to public school, I’m concerned about the environment, I’m not offended by gay marriage, I’m anti-war and I’m probably more concerned about all the "born" people on the planet dying unnecessarily of disease, starvation and violence than the "unborn" who are victimized by a medical professional before they get the chance to come into the world and experience the real thing first hand. Not wanting to be a hypocrite, I have to confess I don’t know that I have much success working these ideals out in my everyday life. Still, I don’t practice Christianity to feel good. I was disillusioned of that version of religion over a decade ago. Now, I hope I adhere to the tenets of my faith to the extent that I believe them to be true.

I remember a conversation once with an atheist girl I dated briefly. She couldn’t get my "faith." Ultimately, the best answer I knew to give her was that even though I neglected or rejected my spirituality at different times in my life, I couldn’t shake it. I didn’t always want to believe, but at some level I didn’t seem to have a choice anymore. It was there. A part of who I am. Something given to me more than something I achieved or earned. Something I didn’t always want, but something I’m not sure I could truly live without.My experience includes a heck of a lot of doubt, questioning and struggling as to which parts of those things which have traditionally become a part of the practice of Christianity are valid and which are the unfortunate by-product of human involvement in the divine interaction. It’s not a crowded booth at the spirituality job fair. Assurance of salvation, absolution of guilt, and initiation into the "chosen people" are much more popular options. Our religious beliefs in this country are undeniably, in my opinion, influenced by our economic system. There’s a consumer motif and credit card mentality to too much of our spirituality. And a jingoistic nationalism. And an elitist class ethic. And I need to stop this before I start sounding too much like an angst-ridden second semester Junior year philosophy essay.

My friend needs something to help her feel a little comfort right now. Today, I can’t say that what she needs is "Truth". But someday soon she will. And the truth is there are a lot of terrible things in this world. But also a lot of beauty. Religion shouldn’t be just about making one feel good, or safe, or justified in her beliefs or prejudices, or giving someone something to cling to when she wakes up in the middle of the night wondering what happens after she dies. It should give hope, which seems like such a small word. In the midst of tragedy and suffering and violence and hatred and perversion, you have to do something to cope. You can distract yourself, anesthetize yourself, delude yourself or quit giving a damn. You can’t stare at all the horror in the world honestly and openly and survive for long. Unless you have hope. Hope isn’t an answer to life’s questions, but more an ellipsis...

2006-02-21T21:13:00.000-08:00

Currently Reading:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon
We Can Build You, Phillip K. Dick (I've been nostalgic for him lately)

Recently Read:
Harry Potter books 1-6, J.K. Rowland (see below)
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Norweigan Wood, Haruki Murakami

On Harry:
My wife and I are both somewhat snobbish when it comes to literature. Neither of us had read any Harry Potter till December of last year (2 months ago). She was looking for something light to read and checked the first one out from the library. She read and enjoyed it, although she kept wanting me or one of our more literate friends to read and approve of it as well so that she didn't feel like she was "slumming" in the book world. Both of us for years had assumed that anything that popular with the masses just couldn't be good literature (i.e. Stephen King, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, etc.). So for Christmas I bought her the 5 volume set of the Potter trade paperbacks. By far this was my most succesful gift purchase for her in more than 8 years of marriage. She devoured them all and borrowed the 6th from the library, finishing the entire series in less than two months. Somewhere along the way I followed her lead and began the books, was also sucked into the charm and sheer pleasure of reading dear Harry's adventures and recently finished the 6th one myself. Now we have to wait for ages for the conclusion to come out. We're too cheap to buy 2 copies, so we may have to fight over it, or I guess more romantically we could take turns reading it to each other. We were so immersed in the world of Harry, Ron and Hermione that we find ourselves feeling as if they were house guests who recently left us after a long and enjoyable visit and we're not sure what to do with ourselves.

2006-02-21T19:45:00.000-08:00

Vast? VALIS? What’s the deal, eh?

Fair enough. What is the deal. I knew I would have to do this eventually, so let’s get this behind us.

VALIS is a few things. Primarily the title of a 1981 book by Phillip K. Dick (PKD). Within the book itself, it is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System - an extraterrestrial intelligence that may or may not be God. I read the book for the first time in the mid-1990s. Around the same time I started using the internet. It seemed a clever ruse to use the acronym as a user name (back then, more often than not it was available) on websites when floating about on this vast active evolving communication system known as the Internet. Ghost in the machine, that kind of deal. Of course a lot of people have that idea now and I couldn’t even use VALIS as a user name on blogspot without adding in some numbers. Humbling.

Up until a few years ago, the best way to explain who PKD was to the uninitiated was to ask if they’d seen or heard of the movie Bladerunner. It came out in 1982, the year coincidentally that Dick died (1928-1982, almost a palindrome for his tombstone). Bladerunner, an excellent film in its own right by Ridley Scott, is loosely based on a PKD novel entitled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Check out Wikipedia sometime and you can find more on all of this than you’d ever want to know. For someone who only lived 54 years, PKD produced a phenomenal amount of published work. Somewhere around 40 novels of his were published (some posthumously) and enough short stories to fill a five volume set. How did he do it you ask? Amphetamines helped a bit (more on that below). He started in the early years (the 1950s) when sci-fi writers were relegated to pulp magazines. In the 60s his novel The Man in the High Tower won him awards. After Bladerunner, he became sort of a pet author for Hollywood. The Schwartzeneggar film Total Recall is based on a short story of his. Two or three other PKD works were the basis for minor films before Spielburg and Cruise collaborated for Minority Report in 2002, closely, but not entirely based on a short story of the same name. The John Woo film Paycheck came out the next year to much less critical acclaim. Upcoming is a Keanu Reaves/Winona Rider film A Scanner Darkly based on one of my favorite PKD novels of the same name. The movie is scheduled for release July 7 this year - coincidentally my 38th birthday. [Also coincidentally, I hear that Harry Potter 7 may be released on 7/7/2007 or 777 - my 39th birthday and a mighty nice stroke of luck as a marketing ploy. I digress. (Boy, do I?) But these pleasant occurrences are much nicer than what happened on 7/7/05 - the London subway bombings. My b-day seems to have become something of an eventful date in recent years and that has me a bit concerned.]

I’ve heard that the Matrix films were influenced by PKD and I can see that, but maybe it’s just become trendy to claim that connection. Personally, if Dick wrote the screenplays, I think the second Matrix would have started with Neo waking up in a psyche ward back in the reality he thought was the matrix being told he had a psychotic break with reality and that trinity, morpheus and all those guys weren’t real. And then you’d spend the next two films jumping back and forth confused, along with Neo, about whether he’s insane or the world is. That’s a bit more Dickish in my book and would have made a much better sequel IMHO instead of turning Matrix 2 and 3 into special effects vehicles with interminably long fight sequences.

Again, I digress. Where was I? Ah, yes. Mr. PKD. Well, VALIS is a mind-bender. One of his last works and part of a trilogy of religiously oriented stories. VALIS is somewhat autobiographical (exactly how much we don’t know). The main character is Horselover Fat (Phillip is from the greek for Horselover, "dick" in German is "fat"). Trust me, it gets weirder from there. This guy has an epiphany when he gets hit in the eye with a pink laser beam and freaks out, hallucinating strange images then spending some time living a divided existence, partially living in modern-day California while simultaneously living as a first-century Christian. Horselover and his friends end up on a religious quest and discover the existence of a satellite of alien origin circling the planet and sending messages to Horselover and others from VALIS, a powerful extra-terrestrial intelligence that might be God or might be what inspired the concept of God in ancient humans. Have I lost you yet? Now you see why I wish we still had PKD around to work on punching up the screenplays for Matrix sequels.

If you found that brief plot synopsis freaky, don’t forget I said this book was something of an autobiographical work. Dick allegedly had some similar hallucinatory experiences. That may not surprise you if you know he spent a lot of time in Berkely in the 60s and experimented with taking massive doses of vitamins and other pharmaceuticals and sustained much of his writing career by abusing amphetamines. During at least one of his hallucinatory experiences he was provided with detailed information about a medical condition one of his kids had. He got it checked out and doctors confirmed the condition existed even though Dick had no discernable means of knowing it was present. Hmmmm.... Whenever you feel yourself a bit too well tethered to this earth, pick up some PKD and give him a read. (Or better yet, try out his autobiography.)

So this little ole place of mine here is named in tribute to Mr. Phillip K Dick and in homage to the concept that we really don’t grasp as much about this thing called reality as we think we do. That’s significant to me given my personality type. Under Myers-Briggs, I’m an INTJ (again, you could look it up on Wikipedia). For folks like me (and we’re fairly rare), ideas and concepts are as important, if not more so, than sensory experience. To quote from one source "[INTJs] are the supreme pragmatists, who see reality as something which is quite arbitrary and made up. Thus it can be used as a tool – or ignored. Reality is quite malleable and can be changed, conquered, or brought to heel. Reality is a crucible for the refining of ideas, and in this sense, INTJs are the most theoretical of all the types." (See Please Understand Me, by Kiersey and Bates – an interesting book with a really lame title.) Phillip Dick, or what was left of his brain after he fried it for years on miscellaneous pharmaceuticals, had to have been an INTJ.
So you’re all invited to drop by for a visit now and then if you want your envelop stretched. We all need to step out of our comfort zones every once in a while and try out an idea we just can’t imagine is true. Expand your mental horizons. Get a little paranoid. Get a little mystical. Actually, I can’t guarantee that I can blow your mind on a regular basis. I guess my humility (and lack of a history of drug abuse) is why I named this "Not So Vast..." instead of sticking strictly to the VALIS nomenclature. But I do hope this can be a place of original thoughts and unique perspectives. Try and do your part and remember that there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio... or Horselover... or whatever your name is.

2006-02-15T18:48:00.000-08:00

HI. Beggining transmission. Beware of pink laser beams. Beware of concepts and ideas. Language is a virus.

My wife created a blog. Only two of us were given the link. She was hoping for comments. So to do the supportive, husbandly thing, I had to register as a blogger to post to her site. She could probably change a setting and let anyone -- bloggers, non-bloggers, wizards, muggles, aliens, hybrids, spirits, principalities and powers -- all post to her blog thing. But she hadn't. So I registered. And now (gulp), I've become a blogger (yuck).

A writer I hope I have been. At least intermittently. A blogger? Feh. Who cares. The title seems like a badge of honor for those non-conformist types who all dress alike.

Though by no means a technofile, I've had enough experience in on-line communications to know that most of them end badly. Too many souless users sit out there behind the twin shields of a key board and anonymity and look for victims upon which to spew the voluminous pools of bile produced by their diseased inner organs (particularly that really nasty one lodged inside of their cranium). So please abide by momma's old rule and "if you can't think of anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." I'm not looking for an argument. An audience I'll take if I can get one. And if it's well-behaved. No hecklers please.

Thought for the day: Civilization is a mirage. It's nothing but a thin veneer propped up by the desperate wishes and feverish hopes of hordes of self-deluded and willfully blind people who just want law and order to hold together long enough for them to be able to buy that new lexus and find out who wins the next season of American Idol. If you squint your eyes tight enough, spin around three times before a mirror in a dark room and click on the light, for an instant you'll see how close we are to descending into chaos. In case you haven't noticed, I'm a pessimist. Particularly lately. Tomorrow it will be two weeks since the husband of a friend - a man who spent 30 years crusading for social and political causes and loving a wife and daughter and stepson - suddenly got the urge to find the highest bridge in a 50 mile vicinity of his physical location and find out what would happen when he stepped of it. C'est la vie.

Thought for the night: If you sit quietly in a peaceful room with early morning sunlight streaming in and hold a sleeping child in your lap, if you breath just the right way and you've been eating right and treating your fellow planet dwellers with decency and grace, you can get a glimpse of how close we are to something beautiful. Not civilization, but something that doesn't concern itself with regulations and boundaries and property rights and IRAs and the dow jones and polling results, but something much, much better.

So in theory, humans are capable of incredible goodness (by the grace of God). In practice, I have my doubts.