The Beatles, Princess Bride & Blogging

I could start this with a comment directed to Princess Buttercup to remember The Man In Black also known as the Dread Pirate Roberts braved the Cliffs of Insanity and overcame multiple other challenges so that he could find his way back to her..sort of.

Or I could quote Frost and talk about The Road Not Taken. It is one of my favorite poems primarily because I identify so strongly with it.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both

This I know. This I have experienced and this is what has driven me crazy because there have been moments where I was so very certain that I needed to be on both paths and that I needed to find a way to straddle them. Needed to figure out how to somehow hang on to both for just a little while longer but I never did master that trick.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

That sigh isn’t indicative of despair, dilemma or derision. It comes from the place inside where you exhale with pleasure because you recognize you have been on the great adventure and come through it.

I Don’t Like Girls

Little Jack is in 7th grade now and has told me more than once he is sick of his friends talking about girls. He doesn’t like them and has no real interest in learning any more about them.

I tell him that one day he might feel otherwise and he shakes his head at me. Don’t know why, but I gently pop him in the head and say “Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon his head.”

He makes a face and tells me not to do that again because he just brushed his hair and I laugh. Not long ago the little man hated brushing his hair so this is real progress.

“Dad, tell me one thing that girls do that is fun and don’t say kissing. I hate that.”

I smile and ask him what girls he has kissed and he names his mother, grandmothers and sister.

“Relatives don’t really count. If you do a proper job of kissing a girl you’ll be rewarded in all sorts of interesting ways.”

He grimaces as if the words hurt him and tells me he didn’t want to hear about kissing which is precisely why I said things as I did. Dad is notorious for teasing.

The Stories We Share/Tell

The best bloggers know how to tell a good story and a good story has layers. Been thinking about that quite a bit lately, it is part of what attracts me to Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and a bunch of other shows/movies/books.

Truth is stranger than fiction and I watch these shows and think about the story I could tell. Tempted to put a link into Take The Long Way Home by Supertramp but The Beatles make more sense.

Came across a YouTube video that isolated the audio tracks from Abbey Road and had a great time listening to it.

Why?

Because I like the layers.

1982

It is July of 1982. I am 13 years-old and am at an overnight camp  in Ojai, California. Every night one of the guys puts on Simon & Garfunkel or Abbey Road and that is how I fall asleep, listening to the boys sing”1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 — ALL GOOD CHILDREN Go to Heaven” or some other cut.

Three years later many of the same guys will spend the summer in Israel with me and I’ll borrow that Boom Box and sit under the  stars in Jerusalem talking with some girl from the Midwest about what it would have been like to have seen The Beatles in concert.

She’ll tell me she is thinking about kissing me but usually doesn’t kiss boys who are younger and doesn’t like knowing I am going back to California when she is going elsewhere.

I tell her not to think so much and to take advantage of the moment. I tell her to take the Road not Taken and silently thank my English teacher for making sure we learned that poem.

The 21st Century

Life in the 21st century is far different than I could have predicted or thought. I’ll write about being a Bitter Dad Blogger quote the Princess Bride and cover a million other topics.

And though I am far from the real end, I’ll know from experience that the love you take is equal to the love you make.

The road not taken has been pretty damn good to me.

P.S. Here is the video I mentioned earlier.