the boy that cried wolf

So it’s a little after 11 PM.  I stayed on the treadmill for over 2.5 hours watching Expendables 3 and talking on Facebook Messenger.  When the movie was over I looked at the goals on my fitbit and noticed i only had 6 flights of stairs for the day and my goal is 10.  I knew i could go get the mail at the end of our driveway at the bottom of the hill and walking back up gives me 2 flights of stairs or 20 feet of elevation.  Two trips down the drive way and back would give me the 40 feet of elevation to get my 100 feet elevation for the day.  As I was walking down the driveway in the cold night air nicely lit by the moonlight i kept looking back over my shoulder with the flash light for anything that may be attempting to ambush me.  You know the usual suspects, panthers, coy’otes (like the old prespector on SNL would say), and wolves.

The idea of wolves reminded me of an ongoing joke I had with a former coworker and a bizarre incident.  Years ago I made some walking trails on the wooded property here and often walked on them alone at night.  It was creepy sometimes and I tried to imagine what I might encounter here in the Florida woods at night.  I playfully came up with the idea of encountering one or more wolves and started kind of playing with the hypothetical idea trying to think of how i could best protect myself.  Some type of club, a baseball bat, a machete, a morning star, a ninja sword, or a gun of some kind maybe.  Oddly enough I do have all those items although the morning star isn’t for real use according to where i bought it.  I’m not sure what that means since i think they were originally used for attacking someone in metal armor like a medieval knight.  LOL.

Before my former coworker got another job, i used to run wild and crazy ideas by him.  Ideas like what would be the best defense against a wolf or pack wolves if i was attacked at night while going for a stress-free walk on my trails.  We had several interesting discussions on it and I think he finally said a baseball bat and go for their back legs which are kind of weak.  Some weeks later on a windy Saturday afternoon, I was picking up fallen tree branches and various debris in the front part of the property when I saw a very large dog that looked exactly like a wolf.  He kept running and didn’t stop thankfully.  Later, I went inside the house and mentioned it to my wife.  I told her it looked like a wolf but that should be impossible.  She wasn’t at all shocked like I was expecting and she said, oh it’s probably an escapee from the wolf preserve down the road.  After a moment of being shocked at the idea I then thought how cool is that, we live near a wolf preserve. LOL.  And don’t worry, I’m not going to attack them with any items from my thought experiment and they are quite used to being around people and are hopefully just as harmless to me as i am to them.

One last funny morsel related to this topic.  Much later than the stories above, my daughter, who was 8 or 9 at the time walked into my home office while I was working at my desk and where I have the decorative weapons such as the morning star and ninja sword.  She asked me if I still used the ninja sword and I stopped for a moment and said oh no, all this stuff is just for decoration.  Then I thought about it and my daughter doesn’t usually ask random questions very often so I asked her why she asked.  She said well she remembers I used to walk on the trails at night for exercise and sometimes I would take the ninja sword.  I kind of laughed at the thought and told her she was right, I did used to take the sword with me at night and use it for a defensive weapon and luckily I never had to use against any wild vicious animals.

the cat’s meow

I got up this morning and went outside to repeat the same routine I’ve been doing for years.  I fed five chickens and five dogs.  There wasn’t much light but I stopped and looked around at the sky to see if I could see the morning sun peaking out from behind the waving tree tops.  Nope, wasn’t late enough to see the sun and I needed to finish getting ready for work.  I started walking towards the back door and paused again because I felt like i was forgetting something.  I looked around once more in the cool morning air but couldn’t for the life of me remember what I was forgetting.  I went inside and picked up an apple and apple corer to prepare my lunch and heard from outside a loud and quite annoyed “MEOW.”   Shoot, of course, it was our black cat, Midnight (I know I know how original).  His timing was impeccable.  He rarely meows because somehow I think he knows how much it annoys me but he had every right to remind me this morning.  How I can forget a part of my routine that I’ve been doing for so long perplexes me.  Merriam-Webster defines the cat’s meow as a highly desirable person or thing.  I guess from Midnight’s perspective that highly desirable thing was his breakfast.

 

You Can’t Choose the Important Things In this World, Because They Choose You

You can’t choose your destiny.  You can’t choose your fate.  You can’t choose the important things in this world because they choose you.  All you can do is choose to be there to be present when it’s your turn.  To be there for someone who needs you even when that someone’s time here is just forty-five minutes.  You can think of what could have been or you can think of what was.  Even if what was came and went before you could blink and know it was real.  Life is what we make it.  We can choose whether we make it happy or sad but sometimes that takes a lot of time, practice and patience.  I love and miss you, my precious son.

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I googled my son’s name (whom we lost to anencephaley some years ago) and a website came up that shows pictures of cemeteries and even obit information for some.   It appears to be driven by volunteers.  If you google someone’s name you lost and follow it with grave often you can find a photo of the gravestone.  I tried it with my dad’s name and grandparents and they all came up.   I don’t normally write sad posts but part of my goal with this blog is to share information and this seemed useful.

 

 

letting go of criticism

OK.  So I admit it.  I’ve read several books on meditation and listened to some lectures on religions like Buddhism and Jainism.  That feat alone required me letting go of my inner-self’s close-mindedness and infatuation with criticizing just about everything I came in contact with – even if I did so mostly with just my own internal monologue.  I carefully chose those religions because let’s face it, not many of the common religion’s members would sweep bugs out of the way to keep from stepping on them.    But in this blog post, I’m only using them as an example of how far some will go to be truly respectful of others and of life itself.  Now that I’ve said that, I’ll admit that I haven’t reached that level yet and probably never will but I have been on a journey to be more open minded and respectful of other people’s beliefs even when I don’t share their beliefs.

What made me think of this topic tonight is while reading other people’s blogs sites and their posts to other sites is I realized I wasn’t viewing them with my normal critical lens.  Apparently, I had after all made some progress on the journey of letting go of criticism.  So I stopped to reflect for a moment and realized I was seeing things in the posts that I hadn’t noticed before.  It’s almost like i could see them more clearly and analyze them with a much clearer lens.  I saw people trying to fit in anyway they knew how.  I saw people taking chances with their writing.  I no longer saw the figurative blemishes with their ideas and writing the same way.  I wasn’t blind to the blemishes but I was indifferent to them and somehow I saw new meaning in their writing and understanding who they may be and what they were trying to accomplish.  Although, that may in itself sound like criticism, I feel that internally something truly changed and like I had a newfound power to better understand others writing and motives.

 

Trust or Hide

I couldn’t think of the right two words to replace Fight or Flight but sometimes you have to be a satificer rather than a maximizer or if you’re a maximizer and you know it check out the book, Paradox of Choice, oh and clap your hands while you’re at it. And don’t confuse satificing with sassifying and whatever you do don’t look up Clarence Carter’s song Strokin’ unless you’re at peace with the obscene world that is our reality. But I digress…

Let me attempt to reel you back in for the serious discussion I had in mind when I picked out the title. A false dichotomy is when you oversimplify something down to just just two choices when in reality there are more so I’ll start off by apologizing for that. Life can be depressing and it can make us want to hide or find a large rock to crawl under or out of convenience or laziness for most of that really means a soft blanket, maybe with a faded tiger on it or a pattern that you probably saw on an episode of Three’s Company.

What got me to thinking about this topic wasn’t just how nice it must be sometimes to think about escaping reality whether that means hiding under a blanket, or getting lost in a good book, or just having a ((Insert favorite tv show or movie series here)) marathon but with how many parallels the idea has. Some people choose “hiding” when it comes to playing music, writing, socializing, playing games, or with just living life itself. Sure it’s easy to read or hear that one needs to stop and smell the roses but actually following through with that is another thing entirely.

I’m not going to pretend to know what the ultimate answer is which I figure is different for nearly everyone but sometimes just knowing how to frame the problem is a step towards solving it.

So if you are hiding from what you enjoy such as socializing, playing music, or writing figure out if it’s because you are afraid of being let down, criticized or afraid that you’re not good enough. After convincing your inner-self to be nice and accepting the outcome no matter what is the way to go, then understand that you can’t control others but just be happy that when you got the opportunity to dance that you danced and you don’t have to look back with regrets.

And finally what I think is really important is being true to yourself which in this case means don’t kid yourself about whether your are hiding or trusting. Trust in this case means trust yourself and if you have a problem with hiding from things you love then admit it. And spend every day and opportunity to better understand and trust yourself so that hopefully one day you can stop hiding and live your life to the fullest and in the process enrich other people’s lives and make the world a better place. A tall order no doubt but totally worth it. 🙂

The shoulder injury that could.

So I’ve played a lot of sports (informal not professional in anyway – although if coach would have only put me in the game in the finals, I could have went pro, lol, just kidding we didn’t actually have bench warmers due to always having just enough players to make a team) over the years and did a lot of dumb things so I know a thing or two about injury.   So about four months ago, I’ll label it as a sports injury since I was moving a sleeper sofa by myself to an extra bedroom in the middle of the house, when behold I felt a slight discomfort in my left shoulder.  I’ll call it a sports injury since the extra bedroom is becoming a music/game room and me and my daughter will likely play sports games on PS2 (and the 27″ CRT) at some point.  And since anyone that knows me and my body type knows I’m not playing a lot of real sports lately.  But as the legendary Chris Farley and hopefurry my new Blue FitBit Blaze would say, I’m working on it!  Anyway, back to our story, so the shoulder discomfort quickly morphed into something more analogous to a writhing pain like i envisioned would happen if a happy-go-lucky boa swallowed a nice big plump unsuspecting porcupine (and if you’re thinking to yourself wait self, I’ve heard that boa/porcupine story before then you and yourself would be right but hopefully you didn’t click the click-bait link where you saw it or if you did stop reading now and run a system scan.)  So for four months, it’s been this mild pain followed by occasional writhing sick boa.  So I finally told me doctor about it and he ordered an x-ray which obviously came back normal because modern medicine sucks.  No just kidding modern medicine is ok mostly especially since it’s saved my life more than once, it’s really just my luck that sucks.  Anyway, so he said since the x-ray was ok then obviously the pain is merely a figment of my imagination and I need some prozac or to take up alcohol.  Just kidding again, for the record I don’t think he believes in Prozac or it’s happy friends or he’d have probably put me on one of them a long time ago.  What he really said is he was going to give me a steroid shot and I quickly reminded him for the umpteenth time, that I’ve been allergic to steroids for many years and they will either kill me or make me blind or both because of something called CSCR which no one has ever heard of.  So then he said well that complicates things and gives me an RX for Etodolac which I thought was cool because maybe it was named after a mountain range called the Etodolacs or was it Adirondacks.   So after reading the 500 page warning pamphlet that came with it and which outlined the 10,000 maniac ways it can either kill you or make you wish you were dead because it’s 400 MG of NSAID afterall,  I was back to wishing he had just gave me Prozac instead.  But alas, I took just one yesterday morning (after a self-imposed and prescribed 5000 calorie meal to make sure it doesn’t cause stomach bleeding or upset) instead of the two pills he asked me to take each day.  So last night unlike every other night, the past four months, my shoulder hurt a lot less.  So thanks to my doctor and modern medicine, I may be on the road to recovery from shoulder pain and hopefully I can avoid the road of 10,000 deaths although I know it’s way too early to say yet.  And if you’re thinking (as my English professor in college would) did I really use that many words to describe something I could have said in 2 or 3 sentences then oh yes, yes I did.  🙂