Lessons learned
It’s hard to post cogent, coherent and concise entries each day for a month!
I certainly didn’t do it (well, aside from the daily posting), and I bow to anyone who did.
On the other hand, it did lead me to raid my voluminous archives for some old stuff, which has been rewarding for me if not for you, the gentle readers.
I’ve also found myself a little less likely to blithely let each day’s mundanities go by with no consideration – if only to examine each event as blog fodder.
Okay, I’m gonna take a little break now and drown my sorrows about the damned Packers.
Back in a day or two, okay?
R.I.P., Evel Knievel
Iconic daredevil Evel Knievel dies at 69
I don’t think I’ve ever specifically discussed it with any of my pals, but I refuse to believe that I’m the only one who wheedled his dad to take him to see Evel jump some busses at the local arena.
Weirdly, I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.
Thanks, dad.
This kills me
Zac Hanson? Who knew?
| http://www.myheritage.com/collage |
(kudos to Michelle for hipping me to this)
another cop out? the beginning of a long ago story.
My name’s Juan, and I’m a gravedigger.
No. My name’s Juan and I dig graves.
No, that’s not it either, makes me sound like I like graves. I mean, I like graves, or I wouldn’t be practicing digging them all the time so I can be the regular gravedigger when old Gus finally gets to try out the results of his own craft. But what I’m looking for is the right way to say it. My daddy always said that if you’re gonna spend as much time doing something besides sleeping, you better fucking-a like it as much as sleeping. I figure that starts with the pride you take in your job – how you can say it to others, what you do.
I’m Juan and I’m a gravedigger.
When I started digging practice graves on the land Daddy left me, I sure didn’t figure that old Gus would last this long. Gus is not a thin man, and his red old face only gets redder after the two cans of Bud with lunch. The wheezing sound he makes with each thrust of the shovel gets a little louder. The nap he takes around three each day lasts a little longer every day.
I know these things about Gus because I used to spend a lot of time at the cemetery, watching Gus and talking to him, noting his every move. That was when I first decided what to do with the rest of my life. After a while, I could see I was making him nervous, so I bought a pair of binoculars and stood in the woods at the edge of the cemetery and watched him secretly.
Gus has been digging graves forever. He made the final resting place for my Daddy and maybe his Daddy before that. Old Gus has made room in this earth for two wives, a son and, when he was a young farmer and gravedigging was only a side job, he dug a dirt bed for one of his cows who had fallen over dead one day for no apparent reason.
It was the summer that his second wife and all of his cows died that Gus gave up on farming. His wife fell to some bug that they had to send her to the city for, only it was too late. They didn’t want to send her back in anything but a hearse, but Gus sat silently in the hospital’s morgue until they relented and helped him load her body into a pine box and onto the back of his truck.
No one’s sure about what cut up all his cows so bad, but the thing what was sure was that they were all dead, the whole herd of twenty scattered on the southern side of the forty. Some people thought it was the hippies who lived around here then, but nobody could ever prove anything. After a while the hippies left and the matter was forgotten by everyone except Gus.
Gus never did anything much after that. Enough people died around here so that he could live on the money he made by digging their graves and he lived quietly. We never saw him much at the Five Star or in town, unless he was buying groceries or something.
The mouse extends a middle finger to the swooping eagle
I walk across a busy street every morning on my way to the office. I mostly cross with the light, but sometimes even then, I have to skitter when the ‘Walk’ changes to a flashing ‘Do Not Walk’ when I’m about three-quarters of the way across (it’s a wiiide street).
I walk with a cane now, mostly so I don’t appear drunk when I’m walking, but I confess that when I’m being rushed by oncoming cars, I lean a bit more heavily on it. I’d like to go faster but I can’t so I just focus on what I’m doing and hope that the drivers possess an equal focus on the task at hand.
It reminds me a lot of time back in my college years, when a pair of ladies and a male friend and myself hatched a plan over a few drinks one Friday night to drive to the state capitol the next day to participate in HarvestFest – a decidedly counterculture event celebrating another successful season of growing hooch, maryjane, weed, dope, wacky tobacky - call it what you will.
It was a good plan but the men – me and my pal – decided to have a few more drinks. And then a few more, too.
The next morning, HarvestFest seemed like a lot less entrancing of an idea than it had the night before, but we were stuck.
We got there and went to the park where the festivities were to be held but my friend and I quickly decided that continuing to stand upright in an area where all of the ground sloped gently upward to the capitol dome was going to be far too challenging, so we decamped for some rehydrating soft drinks and a longish walk on the (thankfully) level city streets.
It was while we were crossing a desolate city street that we saw the man, clutching the white cane, start across the street on the other side of the street. Given that he was blind, there’s no doubt that we saw the car zooming toward him before he did. I don’t think he knew it was there until the driver, having seen him at last, locked his wheels up in a valiant attempt to stop before striking the pedestrian.
I’ll never forget the pedestrian’s body language at that moment when the tires screamed in frictioned agony because I’ve seen it in mice cornered by cats, too. They stop all movement and try to make themselves smaller and less noticable by shrinking their entire being and hoping trouble will pass them by.
It usually doesn’t work out so well for the mice, but the blind pedestrian was luckier. The speeding car stopped about two feet from his knees.
That acceptance, while totally understandable, has always bugged me.
I prefer to think about a sprint car driver from one of my boy’s DVDs, a compendium of racing crashes. We see his car launching itself over the edge of the track, improbably turning upside down as it does. Moments before the inevitable impact, the red glow of the brake lights is seen, as the driver tries just one more thing to fix this sorry bucket of syrup he’s found himself in.
I prefer to think of that image being more emblematic of my own reaction to pressure, like my uncle the bus driver who finally died peacefully and in his sleep.
Not crying and screaming like the passengers on his bus.
Throbbing overripe grapefruit
Remember how I was blathering on about how sometimes things eventually turn out better than you expected?
Yeah. Well. All bets are off now. My little cold of a few days ago has gently turned into some sort of evil sinussy beast that is making my head pound, not with an acute pain, but a much more subtle one. Although the pain hurts, I’m not really constantly aware that something is hurting, there’s just a constant discontent which, if I stop to examine it, turns out to be this golf-ball sized bit of throbbing pain directly behind the bridge of my nose.
So now I’m looking forward to another couple-three days of this joy, too sick to be 100% productive, not sick enough to stay home and in bed.
And even if it miraculously vanishes during my restless sleep tonight, it will already have been as bad as I feared because, unlike my Thanksgiving, I had no time or reason to fear catching a cold.
So the lesson to learn? It makes me uncomfortable to say it, but I think this means we should spend more time worrying and fretting about the unknown so that nothing bad surprises us – unless it’s not as bad as we had feared.
Make sense? Not really to me, either. More NyQuil!
It made me laugh
Cheers&Jeers at the noted hate site Daily Kos:
I don’t have any experience to go on, but it seems to me that it must be more difficult to write while sober.
Another Self-help Entry
Sunday without the Packers was a lot less dreadful then I would have guessed.
After a half-week, I finally got a shower in, much to the joy of those around me, and then I sort of puttered around the house until Lynn finished her errands and absolved me of toddler-wranglin’ responsibilities, which left me with the afternoon free…
…so I skated away to an undisclosed location and REALLY got my teeth into a freelance project that’s been poking its head up occasionally in the Whac-A-Mole game that is my life (I assume everyone else envisions all of the things they need to get done as varmints in a game like this, right?) Being able to devote my afternoon to this made me feel like a world-beater, like going to the gym does on some days, or finding a $20 bill forgotten in the pocket of your winter coat during the last days of the previous spring.
Like the gym, I’ve really got to try to do more of that sort of thing.
Jiggety jig (gettin’ jiggy wit’ it)
I’ve returned, psyche largely intact. Even the notably black-sheep stepbrother, who I always figure I’m about neck-and-neck with in the parental dis-approval sweepstakes, didn’t fall in for much abuse this year (though I was pointedly not around all of the time). I guess the fact that so many grandchildren were around probably kept everyone’s minds on the newest generation – the ones who have not yet made as astoundingly bad decisions as my sibling-peers and I have.
Or maybe it’s just that we’re all another year older.