The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for March 2012

How To Be A Dad Blogger Part 9,872

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“When I grow up to be a man
Will I dig the same things that turn me on as a kid?
Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn’t done what I did?
Will I joke around and still dig those sounds
(Will I still joke around and still dig those sounds?)
When I grow up to be a man?”
When I grow up to be a man– The Beach Boys

Every parent has a couple of stories that they like to tell about their children. My parents have two about me that they never tire of telling. They don’t have a particular order that they tell them in nor do they always share them, but these two have never managed to fade into obscurity.

They like to share the tale of what happened when they brought my youngest sisters home from the hospital. I was a few weeks short of turning five and desperate to finally have a brother. Instead they brought home twin girls and I burst into tears.

The other tale they sometimes like to tell takes place when I was about five years-old. I got into trouble for something and my father sent me to my room. A short time later I came out and challenged my father to a fight. The reason being that my five year-old self thought that if I beat him I would no longer be in trouble and consequently could do as I pleased.

So you see I have been like this my entire life. I haven’t ever seen anyone or anything as being too big, too tough, too strong or capable of beating me. They might be able to slow me down, win an occasional battle, but never the war. Call me delusional if you will, but I am consistent.

The kitchen that once was looked like this.

I stumbled across pictures of our old kitchen from the old house. It brought back a ton of memories.

Too many things stuffed into too little space

So we decided to gut it and start over.

After the demolition it looked sad and deserted.

Slowly it evolved into something different.

Slowly it began to take shape.

And from nothing came something.

Blue Pearl Granite, Travertine and more…

This is where my children learned to walk. Every Friday night it was where I blessed them:

In English the words are as follows:

For a son:

“May G-d make you like Efraim and Menashe.

For a daughter:

May G-d make you like Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah.

For both:
May G-d bless you and protect you. May G-d cause His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May G-d raise His face to you and establish peace for you.”

Who Am I/Who I was/Who I Will Be

Two conversations today gave me pause and left me thinking about a million different things. Two different friends, one older and one younger made me think about how interesting life can be.

The older one was a tank commander who visited Lebanon encased in a steel beast. It was the early ’80s and he was scared but determined to do what had to be done. The second man is younger than I am by about a decade. He was a paratrooper who has his own share of tales and stories of doing what had to be done.

I could have been one or both of them. Had I turned left or gone right I could have been him or him.

But that kitchen that once was wouldn’t have been. And these children I still bless wouldn’t be and me, well I don’t know who I would be.

Sometimes I get lost in let’s remember and I walk with the ghosts and the shadows of what was. Sometimes I get lost in think of what might have been and I wander among the fantasies, elves and sprites.

But I always come back to where I am now. I never forget about what it is I am doing now and why. Some decisions have been smart, some have been dumb and others have yet to be measured.

That soldier boy I could have been is gone and so is the baseball player. I won’t ever be 19 again nor will I be 25 but 45 hasn’t quite hit and 5o isn’t quite here yet either.

What it means is that I have options and I have time. I can make choices to be who I want. Some of the decisions I have made may not be smart and some may be brilliant but I don’t have to let any of them define me any more than I ever did.

All I can do is all I have ever done and that is try to make the best decisions possible based upon the choices I had and the information I had on hand. I still laugh more than I cry and sing more than I shout.

I don’t know how to get where I am going but I know where I want to get to and remain confident that I am going to get there. It just might take me take a bit longer but the joy of the journey makes the mundane into the majestic. All it takes is patience and the willingness to seek out the magic of the moments.

Don’t believe me? Slip your hand into mine, walk with me and watch.

Dark Doesn’t Mean Bad or Scary

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Can’t stop listening to Johnny sing this song. Those lyrics stab me in the heart and remind me of things from the past. I hear the ghosts in my head rattling their chains and I wonder if I need to climb into the attic to confront them or if I need to just let them run their course.

Thing is that either way the echoes remain and for a time they occupy deep and dark places.

Dark doesn’t mean bad or scary, at least not in this instance. This time it just refers to something that I have pushed away and buried because I couldn’t or wouldn’t give it away. So it lurks upon the edges of my mind and I go about my daily affairs.

In between the moments I write quick blurbs and share fragments of them with whomever it is that reads these words.

I know what my heart says, but my head says don’t be a fool. Don’t write these things down because you sound crazy. Don’t open the door and don’t look back.

But you don’t become a writer unless you know how to dream. And the very best dreams come from the heart- source of passion, power and magic.

Much of my writing comes from the music I hear. Some of it are songs I hear in my head and some of them are songs that you can hear too. I have learned how to delve deep within my mind and how to rekindle the flames that once burned.

I know how to build a fire that roars and sometimes I dance around it. It is my own expression and one that I retain solely for my own use. I suppose that I would try to show and share it with you but I don’t know if you would get it so I just don’t.

Just stumbled onto that and am smiling broadly. Johnny and Joe are both gone but they both made music that moved me, so did Bob Marley. I wonder if one day my children will be as moved by them and others as I am.

Today we had parent/teacher conferences for the kids. I always expect them to go well. I always expect to hear good things because I have good kids but I also practice realistic parenting.

My children are amazing but they aren’t perfect. They fight and they get into trouble. I don’t discount the possibility that one day I might hear a report of problems in school and I refuse to be one of those parents who is in denial.

It is even more important to keep my eyes open now because there is more going on. I know that the current confusion won’t last and some of the craziness will subside soon but my perception of time is far different than theirs.

Are You On Pinterest?

Are you on Pinterest? I am and I use it daily. I am still shocked to say that I am there but I keep finding little things that stimulate thoughts and ideas.  I posted one picture of our old kitchen:


I was surprised by the feeling of loss I felt when I saw the picture. Maybe it is because I remember how hard we worked to build that sucker. Maybe it is because I did some of that work myself and now I don’t have it any more.

It was a great kitchen for us, but it won’t be the last. There will come a time when there will be another. Truth is that I want a bigger space with an island and maybe a breakfast nook.

Kitchens are important because they are the heart of the house but the spark of life that makes that heart pump is the people. Later on today I might have to blog about that experience again.

For now I am busy thinking about what I want from my writing and how to finish the monster project I have hanging over my head. I am thinking about what to do with my children and whether I can find time to take a nap.

Because that is part of my life sometimes it is Just Write.

More Life Lessons Learned On The Soccer Fields

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listen to ‘More Life Lessons Learned On The Soccer Fields’ on Audioboo

There are posts you should read. There are words that I have written that I am linking to here because I am engaged in self promotion.

I do it because we all have to be our own advocates. We all have to push sometimes to get people to follow us on Twitter and or become fans of our Facebook pages. We all have to work at turning our dreams into our lives and not dreaming our lives away.

That is part of why I have the links below because I know that some of you won’t like what you see but you might like something else. So I push and pick and prod and hope that it works out the way I want it too.

There you have it- a sample of dad blogging, life blogging, social media blogging and and authentic hogwash. Read, rinse and repeat.

Thank You Paul Simon

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Sunset at Huntington Beach, California.
Image via Wikipedia

“And a song I was writing is left undone
I don’t know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can’t believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme.”
Kathy’s Song– Simon & Garfunkel

“I wandered empty streets down
past the shop displays
I heard cathedral bells
dripping down the alley ways
as I walked on”
For Emily Whenever I May Find Her – Simon & Garfunkel

It is early March which means it is winter around most of the US and almost Summer in Los Angeles or so the almost 90 degree weather would have us think.

I am out with a few of the boys for a working lunch. We very well might talk shop but more than likely we are going to set aside work to lean on each other a bit and enjoy life.  There is a guarantee that we’ll spend some time talking about our children and what they are doing but on a day like this there are more than a few distractions.

Girls on roller blades roll by and it is hard not to admire hard bodies that have been pushed hard at the gym. Some of them linger near by and we see faces that belong to women who are clearly more than a few years younger than we are and we laugh.

We laugh because yesterday we would have spent time trying to figure out if we could approach them. Would we try to be funny or would we be serious. She looks like she likes to hike, maybe we’ll talk about the hills around Malibu. Except the thing is that we all recognize that there is a chance that we could be old enough to be their fathers.

It is a bit disconcerting and not something we want to acknowledge because we all picture ourselves as being twenty somethings but we aren’t and haven’t been. More importantly we all have daughters and are very aware that our thoughts about these women are things that men might one day think about our girls.

We may kid around about not wanting to talk to women but the truth is that even if a relationship isn’t wanted everyone wants a woman who is old enough to have a conversation. Besides the boys all remember the craziness that sometimes comes with a younger woman who hasn’t quite figured it out. More importantly, if she isn’t a mother she won’t understand some fundamental pieces and parts of us.

That is a game changer. We might laugh and smile. It might even be enjoyable to think about what could have been but that is not where we want to go or be. The past is done and we can’t get back to it. Not that any of us really want to, ok maybe it would be fun to revisit the summer of ’85 or ’88 but I am not convinced.

Go The Distance

I tell the boys a little bit about my 100 year-old penny and share with them two quotes from my post “Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost“- J.R.R. Tolkien and “The only way to find what you are looking for is to go looking for it.”

It is tied into now and a reminder of The Lost Boys summer of ’88. Mostly it is me telling them that I am drawing a line in the sand. Been through too much nonsense and dealt with too much bullshit. There has to be another way through, around, over or under.

“He is going to get into trouble, he has that look on his face.”

“Tommy, I am right here. You can look at me when you are talking.

“I don’t want to get sick, I just finished eating.”

“Bite me.

“I just told you I don’t want to get sick.”

The banter quickly deteriorates and even if we aren’t in our twenties we feel like we are. There are no wives, ex-wives, or children around so no one feels a need to watch their tongues. This is good for us. We are all blowing off steam. Life is more complicated and more complex than any of us ever expected it to be.

“Jack, why are you smiling like that. It makes me nervous.”

I laugh. We all went to high school together and some of us have known each other since before that. They recognize that look in my eyes and know that when my lip curls at the corner I am about to cause trouble. Sometimes when we play poker I flash that smile because I have a hand full of nothing, but they don’t know that.

What they know is that I have that crazy side and that it could be a flush or nothing more than my trying to cause confusion.

“We have parent/teacher conferences tomorrow. No school for my kids for the next two days.”

They ask me if I am concerned about how the kids are doing in school and one of them asks if a dad blogger will write about conferences.

“I am not concerned about their grades and I am going to write about all of this.”

One of the guys says that I better not use his name so I promise to write about a beer goggling incident he had in college. I have done that now so we can move on.

I tell the guys that my kids are smarter than I am and better students than I was. I pay attention to what they are learning and push them to live up to their potential, but I don’t really worry.

“What I wonder about is what will happen when they are my age. Will it take them as long to figure out what they want to do with their lives or will they get their faster than I did.”

Everyone nods their head. “I want them to live their dreams and not dream their lives.”

The waitress drops the check off and as she walks away one of the guys says “I’d like to live that dream.” Apparently he still hasn’t figured out what it means to use his “indoor voice.”

She turns around and walks back to our table and issues a reply that leaves us roaring with laughter. I couldn’t possibly repeat it verbatim but suffice it to say that she managed to slam all of us, something about needing to share Viagra prescriptions and a chiropractor.

Later on as I am walking to my car I hear Kathy’s Song playing in my mind and wonder if 2012 is the year when everything changes.

Life is A Tale Told By An Idiot

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desperation“If I could read your mind, love,
What a tale your thoughts could tell.
Just like a paperback novel,
The kind the drugstores sell.
Then you reached the part where the heartaches come,
The hero would be me.
But heroes often fail,
And you won’t read that book again
Because the ending’s just too hard to take!”
If You Could Read My Mind- Gordon Lightfoot

I am in a funny and unfamiliar place now that I am not quite sure how to describe. It feels a bit like I have stepped into one of those carnival fun houses and I am staring at myself through a variety of crazy mirrors.

The floor keeps tilting and the lights keep flashing.  Every time I take a few steps forward I find someone or something has placed some sort of hurdle in my way.  Don’t know whether to laugh or cry so I choose laughter.

Each time I try to move it is a step forwards, always forwards. Sure, I may have to turn right or left but my eyes are always on the trail ahead. Doesn’t matter if I have to zig or zag because forward is where I am focused upon.

Some of these situations require finesse but that is not my forte. I don’t want to to tip toe through the forest. My inclination is to bull my way through and let the chips fall where they may. But time has taught me to temper that so I try. I slow down and take a hard look.

Damn fun house didn’t have any lights so I have gone and stumbled into some swamp. Now I am working twice as hard as before to navigate the mud and the muck. It is waist deep and I am exhausted, but I am still moving forwards.

Finally I am so tired I can’t take another step. I collapse against a tree and as I fall asleep I hear a man’s voice whispering in the woods….

The Heart Wants What The Heart Wants

Someone once told me that the heart wants what the heart wants. I don’t know if that is a line from a book or a movie, it could be. Then again it might be one of those pithy statements that people come up with. I’d ask the person who told me but I can quite remember who said it. Hell, it might have even been
me.

The heart wants what the heart wants. You know what that means? It is a statement made by people who can’t explain why they are in love with person xyz. It is what you say when there is no logical explanation for your actions. It is a catchphrase, a tagline, a slogan and a motto.

The heart wants what the heart wants. It reminds me of Shakespeare, “Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Somewhere my high school English teacher Mrs. McDonnell is smiling. Little Jimmy actually remembered a line from Macbeth. See ma’am, I told you that I could hear just as well in sunglasses as without..

The heart wants what the heart wants. It is the kind of thing you hear people say when they are trying to explain why they are hung up on someone from their past. Or maybe it is what you say when you stop denying the love that is in front of you.

If love were rational, if it were based upon logic life would be easier. When I think about some of the things I have done because of love I want to scream. When I consider the self-inflicted misery I have endured I want to cry because it seems so very foolish. How could I waste so much energy on such a silly thing as a woman, a single woman. The world is filled with millions of women. It should be easy to replace her. It should be as simple as changing shoes, but it is not. It is not, it is not.

The heart wants what the heart wants. It does and mine has chosen someone that is far more special to me than all of the others. My lips remember hers. I can still feel her touch. The pillowcase has never been washed because I have this fantasy that I can still pull it close and smell her.

Sometimes I think that reincarnation must be real and that in a past life I must have stolen fire from the gods or committed some other heinous crime. Because there is no logical reason why I would be punished in this manner. I found the woman that completes me. I found the person that makes me whole and I let her go.

She would have stayed. She would have held my hand. She would have helped save my soul but I couldn’t say the words. I couldn’t make myself do it. Even though I knew it to be a simple thing. A brief plea for help and she wouldn’t have left me. I wouldn’t have been left to live in shadow and night. I could have been whole. Her love was enough to let me believe that I could have been something more.

But like I said, in that past life I did something. I earned the wrath of those who sit in judgment. Or maybe it is nothing like that. Maybe there is no reason why. Maybe this is all there is and happiness is based upon some sort of random something or other.

The heart wants what it wants and mine has betrayed me. In a different life it lay in a green garden beneath bright blue skies and now it is filled with weeds and fields of shattered stone and black night skies.

Once I might have hoped for salvation. Once I believed that I deserved better than this but now I understand that not to be so. Hades has issued his decree. I stand next to Sisyphus. Tantalus is my brother. Happiness is something that I can see but can’t reach.

The heart wants what the heart wants.

Dear Universe- Straight Answers Please

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>There is a challenge that comes alongside of the audioblogs and that is what happens when the blogger doesn’t host the audioblog on their server. If the service you use goes under you end up losing your file. Think of it as being similar to trying to read an article in a newspaper in which someone has cut out all of the coupons.

It creates giant holes and does a fine job of killing your ability to read the story. Well, TheJackB loves danger and lives footloose and fancy free. In other words at the moment I will take my chances.

The point and purpose of this post is to obliquely share thoughts/criticism about a few things. I have a couple of projects that I am having a terrible time completing. It is not because I am unwilling or incapable but because every time I work on them I get interrupted. If I were more superstitious I would say that someone doesn’t want me to do it.

And that my friends is why I ask for a straight answer. Tell me what you want/need for me to do and I just might do it. If you don’t tell me we go through this crazy race around the Mulberry Bush in which I try to figure it out.

Now I do like to take the long way home and I enjoy wandering with purpose but I hate having work hanging over my head. I can’t relax until I finish these things and I can’t get them done because I keep getting interrupted. What is up with that.

In a moment I am going to ‘sneak back’ into work mode and see if that helps. Before I go I want leave you with some random links from the blog, a few comments and maybe a thought.

Some of the old posts here make me cringe a bit but they also make me smile. The blog shows a history of what was and perhaps glimpses of what could be. It also shows a lot of dust which is why I air out some of these things. I intend to write more posts and update WUL ASAP- provided I can free up some time.