Category: general

And this is just how the weeks go… one week I’ll go all five days and the next I’ll hit less than 50%.  It’s still a habit and I don’t think I could ever abandon it, but some days are more conducive than others.

This morning I was getting ready to go to work.  As I’ve been out of both my gym-going habit and my eating-better habit, I’ve put back on a shameful percentage of what I once lost and I was looking sadly at my overhanging gut in the after-pants-before-shirt phase of dressing.

I walked into the living room and gave my belly a halfhearted two-handed lift for emphasis as I said aloud to Sharaun, “Man, I’m fat.”  Keaton jumped on that, replying strongly, “Dad, you are definitely not fat.”  I loved the sincerity in her voice; such affirmation!  I told her, “Thanks babe, that’s a nice thing to say.”

“You just have a really mooshy belly,” she finished.

Good to know.  Not fat – check; really mooshy belly – check.

Time to get back to the gym.

Something’s happened to me lately. After spending all of my adult life as a person who never ate breakfast, I’m all the sudden hungry in the early morning.

This is new to me. Breakfast has never been part of my morning routine. At least, not in any substantial way. A few years ago, when the sawmill started giving away fruit, I began eating a banana or apple with my morning coffee. I did this more for fruit-intake reasons than any three-squares-a-day thing. Maybe this small expected intake worked to change my metabolism to some degree, training me, as it were, to desire food in the morning. I don’t know, but there’s no denying that I’m now looking for a (more substantial than fruit) meal to start my day.

So far, I’ve handled this poorly. I’ve been purchasing this meal at work and eating it at the desk as I read my morning news. That costs money and likely means I’m eating something in which tater tots have been integrated, not the healthiest options (Father in Heaven, please help me overcome this penchant for tots). To adapt, however, I need to change my whole morning.

In fact, I’ve always thought it might be nice to do the kind of 1950s sitcom breakfast table thing. You know, coffee and paper while I eat half a grapefruit and smoke my pipe or something. OK I hate grapefruit and even though I do enjoy smoking a pipe Sharaun surely won’t let me do so inside. I’d settle, however, for my laptop, coffee, and some toast and jam or an egg or two over easy. If the family is up during this time, which they most often are, it would even be some bonus time with them beyond the typical morning kiss goodbyes.

I have a friend who tells me he does this. Has a morning breakfast sit-down at the table with an old-fashioned analog newspaper and something his wife makes. I don’t expect whatever routine I land on to be quite that anachronistic, but whatever it ends up being it will feel old fashioned to me. I mean, who still takes the physical paper? Tree-haters, Amish, papier-mâcheurs, perhaps. Oh great now I’ve romanticized it, turned it into a mental “quaint” happening like the breakfasts Sharaun and I enjoyed outdoors on Martha’s Vineyard where we honeymooned. It won’t be like that, though. It’ll be a rushed bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and a bagel with the Today Show on in the other room. It’s cool y’all… it’s still breakfast at home.

Now to set my alarm clock twenty minutes earlier than usual. Wonder if it’ll be worth it? Goodnight.

The other day Sharaun texted me at work to ask if I would stop by the grocery store on the way home and pick up a fresh loaf of bread for dinner.

I used to hate these sort of requests, and it was rather unfair of me (I never voiced my dislike, but instead just went about the task in a huff… I’m sure it was totally discrete).  It’s just that I’m very much a creature of expectations, and by that I mean that once I’ve set my mind on a series of events playing out in a certain way it frustrates me when something causes those plans to change.

There is no logic to this, for the things I have mapped-out in my brain are almost always of no importance at all, and executing them out of order or not according to some arbitrary plan almost always brings with it zero consequences.  Still, when I have to go get gas and stop at Home Depot before work, my OCD brain creates an instant order-of-operations “plan” to achieve these things.  No sooner than this plan is formed does my brain christen it gospel and accept it almost as fact; I now have an expected sequence of happenings and I react negatively to any deviation.

I’ve found this trait to be the genesis of much of my impatience, random frustration, and, oddly enough, the reason I so value spontaneity.  I’m always perceiving the little non-occurrences of life as somehow “getting in the way” of my “plan.”    So you can see then, that when I’ve been sitting at my desk at work all day thinking about how I’m going to leave and go directly home after 5pm, that I’ve built up about eight hours of ludicrous expectation things will actually happen in the way I’ve been planning they will.  The out-of-plan bread interrupt, then, throws a seemingly frustrating wrench in the works.  Silly, right?

Yeah, silly.  And some years ago when I realized I have this brain-curse I strove to overcome it.  I am constantly internally asking myself, “Does this matter?  How does this change anything?” and then reminding myself, “Why worry or bother over it then; just let it happen.”  I want my plans to be ultimately malleable, changeable, adaptable – I feel like if they aren’t I might miss out on something truly random and unintentional.  When we go on vacations, when we travel, when we’re at Disneyland… in all these places I have to take a breath before I let my brain react with, “No!  This isn’t how I envisioned this!”  People call it “going with the flow,” for me I just have to surrender to the flow.  I think I’m better at it for acknowledging it.

But this isn’t what I came here to write about.

The other day Sharaun texted me at work to ask if I would stop by the grocery store on the way home and pick up a fresh loaf of bread for dinner.

Since I’m a better man and this kind of tasking no longer irks me, I replied with a simple, “Sure.”  As luck would have it I was able to leave work about fifteen minutes early that day, and thus found myself alone at the grocery store with some perceived time to kill (a notion which also owes its existence to my forever mental scheduling).  In no particular hurry, I found myself ambling about the aisles a bit.  Suddenly, a thought came to me: “I’m here, alone.  In the grocery store alone.  With all the buying power my Capital One Venture card endows me.  I am the decision-maker!  I can buy anything I desire!”  For the non-husbands in my audience, this translates roughly into something like, “Sharaun cannot tell me that this is too expensive, or too bad for me, or that I’m the only one who likes it so why buy it?”  In other words, I was free to do my own shopping.

I relished the moment.  I strode the aisles with a sense of power and domination, evaluating everything I saw by my standards alone.  Some $9 Hoisin sauce?, might be interesting.  A jackfruit?, sure, why not?  Bread made from potatoes?, dear God yes someone finally invented it!!  Now where’s the pasta made from the potato bread?  It would be like the Godhead of a foodstuff!  In the end, I didn’t go quite as crazy as I thought I might have, but I did manage to score some very “me” purchases.  Here’s what I came home with:

• A hunk of exotic veined cheese & “water crackers” to eat it on (probably the most luxurious purchase, in terms of dollars)
• 90 pack of “combination” flavor Pizza Rolls
• One of each flavor Ramen, and three each of the super-spicy seafood ones that are all in Korean
• Grape Nuts (Sharaun refuses to get them for me)
• A bag of barbecue kettle chips, the ones that looked the hardest and crunchiest
• Butter & vegetable oil (what?, we needed them)

And yes when I got home Sharaun looked on my spoils with skepticism, tsking the chips and cheese.  Perhaps it was my subconscious playing passive-aggressive; we’ll see if I get asked to pick up bread again anytime soon.

Gotta run, the Pizza Rolls are ready.  Goodnight.

I always giggle a little when I hear someone say that they donated money “to the rainforest.” Really? The rainforest?

It’s like there’s only one. A single rainforest. A needy one, at that. People don’t wonder what the rainforest is going to do with their money? How do we know we can even trust the rainforest? What if the rainforest uses the money to buy a plane ticket to the western seaboard and have a slut-up with some giant redwoods? What if the rainforest is into self-harm and spends the money on new chainsaws to cut herself down? What if the rainforest pisses away your money on booze and pills?

How to you even donate to a forest anyway? Yes I’m asking sarcastically. I imagine a little Cesna flying over some dense canopy, dropping tightly bound packages of cash and checks to be forever lost in the thick tangle. That’ll do a lot of good, that money you gave “to the rainforest.”

Think people might be a little too eager to dump their money into a charity-du-jour? I still believe that humans, Muslim or not, are overwhelmingly well-meaning. I mean, Earth as a unit pledged some $5.3 billion dollars to Haiti when they got earthquaked. Folks that is a ton of money. And a good portion of that came from private donors, I bet even one or two Muslims. I haven’t done extensive research, but a couple sources online content that most of that money, up to 90% in fact, still hasn’t made it to Haiti and that the 10% that has is mostly made up of nation-to-nation cancelled debt – which does little to get people fed and watered and out of shantytowns. Instead of diminishing, the number of refugees living in tents has instead risen, and now comprises over a million displaced souls.

I wonder how much money will eventually make it?  Goodnight.

Good Thursday to you.

Been stuck in some fast-forward mindset for weeks, keep thinking it’s a day ahead of what it really is.  Today was Thursday in my mind all day long, until I sat down to write what I figured was the capping entry of a bad week for writing (sometimes it happens, the writing-fail thing).  I kept checking my Friday calendar in anticipation of my schedule tomorrow, kept thinking I somehow missed trash day.  Strange.  Last thing I need to do is live any faster. This thing goes by too quickly as is.

Two nights ago I woke up in the dead-still of the 3am hour.  3am is one of those odd times; most night-owls and party-goers have finally turned-in and the early-rise commuters and gym-goers aren’t yet awake.  It’s truly a time for insomniacs, graveyard-shifters and the random waker.  That was me, the latter.  I lay still for a moment, listening through the window to just how quiet things were outside.  No cars, no dogs, not even a breeze to rustle leaves or chime the neighbors windchimes.  I tossed aside the comforter and, after using the bathroom an finding myself quite awake and free of the usual nighttime-pee drowsiness, decided to wander around the house a bit.

I love the house at night.  All cast in pale greens and blues from the digital clocks and standby lights.  Silent and shadowed and the emptiness of it makes it feel bigger.  Honestly, I walked around with my arms outstretched all INRI style just admiring how spacious things feel when you’re all alone and it’s the middle of the night.  Poured myself a glass of water, plopped in some ice, and stood there in the center of it all, in my boxer shorts with my belly hanging out, admiring my domain.

I have a lot to be thankful for.

Goodnight.

I was fifteen and I lived in a house of sticks for a week.  Danced around a fire most evenings.

Fell in love with a girl of immeasurable beauty, she came from a different continent, smelled strong of cinnamon.  We made filthy love on the dirt, churning the floor to clay in our passion.  Each day we made the burnt offering to buy continued redemption for our open sin, but the weight of it still weighed heavy.  Eventually it became too much for her fragile constitution, the sin-infused clay clogging her pores and starving her of oxygen.  In her weakest state I bargained with the devil for her corporal form, canted spells over her sagging skin.  To no avail.  On the sixth day God took her from me and I cursed Him for the agony of it.

In my grief I wandered.  I chased cars and spat at sunsets and tore down mountains in my madness.  I kept some of her bones; ate a broth of tears flavored with their long-dry marrow.  My legs stretched with longing, as tall as redwoods, and I stepped across oceans and seas and traversed the globe high above those toiling below me.  Head amongst stars, breathing the metallic air of outer space as I peered down to the world below.  Transformed as I was the people feared me.  Bravado swelled in my breast and my ribs ached to keep back the pride.  On the twelfth day God pierced me like a balloon.  Water and blood mingled flowed.

The Godless found me, drove me back to the sticks in a wagon, their women nursed me to health.  In their kindness I saw my folly laid bare and repented.  I took my leave of them, thanking them for my very breath.

I tore down the house of sticks; scattered the ashes of our fire to the four corners; rid myself of the bones of ghosts.  I regained my senses.

It was the fifteenth day.