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

Just Write

Let The Wild Rumpus Begin

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It is almost midnight here in Los Angeles and I am a bit beyond tired. That is because I started my day at 6:45 AM, Eastern Standard Time.

Yep, Sunday night I flew out to the East Coast so that I could hit a couple of meetings and then hopped back on a plane to come home. It wasn’t my first turnaround and probably won’t be my last, but it wore me out a bit.

This time around I decided not to bring the laptop. Figured that I could make use of the mobile phone and that if I really needed a ‘puter for the meetings I could borrow one. Fortunately I didn’t so I didn’t have to shlep one around.

Instead I got to shlep around a large Russian man. Ok, I didn’t really have to carry him but he sat next to me on the flight home. That is really my polite way of saying he mostly sat on me and seemed not to care.

It would be wrong of me to say that he disappeared into the bathroom for a good twenty minutes and brought back whatever it was he meant to leave there. That was about 3.5 hours into my flight and if there was a moment when I wondered what would happen if I stretched out my arms and accidentally slapped the side of his pumpkin size head.

It is one thing to sit on me, but biological warfare just isn’t cool.

I Opened Pandora’s Box

A long while back I opened Pandora’s Box and have been enjoying the benefits/consequences of that ever since. I have no regrets for having done so. I chalk much of it up to the lessons I referred to in this post.

But I could use a short break to catch my breath and look around to see what’s what. Life doesn’t work that way so I don’t expect things to slow down but I figure it never hurts to ask. The list of what I haven’t seen is long so it is possible that I might discover that which I have been searching for by simply mentioning it.

It reminds me of when I was a boy and my father and I would fix things around the house. Most of my memories consist of a moment where he reminded me that there was rarely an advantage to using my strength to force things to fit.

That is one of my favorite lessons and something that I still work on today. Call it finesse or diplomacy. Or just describe it as taking a moment to remember that sometimes the smart thing to do is stop, look and listen.

My son is very good at this. He is not the boy his father was. I always figured that if I jumped off the side of house I would land safely in the pool, learn to fly or come up with a solution on the way down.

Little Jack is smarter than I was/am. He looks at the challenges and takes a much more methodical approach to solving them. It makes me smile to see that.

My daughter isn’t always like that. Her soccer coaches tell me that they love how fearless she is on the field. I laugh and tell them they ought to see what happens if she is irritated with a player on the other team. She is a sweet girl, but she has a double dose of me, at least when it comes to sports.

When Possibilities Become Opportunities

One of the meetings I sat through evolved because I figured out how to turn possibilities into opportunities. There is a much longer story tied into this, one that discusses whether things are meant to be and whether the universe is involved in life, but this is not the place to discuss that in detail.

I mention it because it is connected and deserves consideration.

Anyhoo. when I left the second meeting I walked away feeling good but still went through the “I wish I had shared this” moment that we all have. The good news is that it wasn’t the one where you kick yourself because you think you did poorly.

I didn’t. I did well and I feel confident but that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish that I had mentioned a few more things. It is just how I am built.

It is tied into a million different things, this feeling. And it reminds me again of that boy I was, except I think about how sometimes I would tell my father that there was a time when muscle would be of benefit.

I think that time is now, except now I am not relying upon physical strength. Now I am using the mental toughness I developed over time and am seeing the beginning of some amazing results. And one day when my kids read through all these posts they will sift through the ones where I say that life has been hellish and come across this one and see that I was serious when I said it gets better.

Life isn’t perfect, but it is better and I expect that to continue in a big way.

What about you? How are things in your world? If you are a reader who doesn’t comment often now would be a good time, especially those who are locked in dirty hotel rooms out of state. 😉

Exhaustion has finally hit, sleep calls and I shall answer. See you in the AM.

This is part of Just Write #41.

Useful Information Used Usefully

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Sleeping

  1. Welcome To The Jungle– Guns N’ Roses
  2. Shoot To Thrill– AC/DC
  3. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door– Bob Dylan
  4. Since I Have Been Loving You– Led Zeppelin
  5. With Or Without You– U2

Some things make me so angry I want to kick the dog and drown the cat. I want to drive down the sidewalk and run over all of the pedestrians and then for good measure do something far more heinous than all of those put together.

I would share that in more detail but the guys in legal are having a fit now and I am required to tell you that I don’t really want to do any of those things. I have taken literary license and created a fake facade that is designed for the sole purpose of capturing the attention of my readers.

Hmm…I wonder if the guys in legal have a problem with me saying I want to give them all a colonoscopy without the benefit of anesthesia. Of course the guys in legal aren’t all male and at least two of the women gave birth naturally so they aren’t afraid of the aforementioned colonoscopy. Well,  I am not impressed by them because everyone knows that our great grandmothers would give birth and then be back in the fields an hour later.

They make those women in legal look so damn lazy.

Useful Information Used Usefully

Today I was overwhelmed by the noise in the blogosphere. I must have read 2,983,839 posts about the same  topics:

  • How to blog
  • Why To blog
  • How To Deal With Writer’s Block
  • How to make every post useful
  • 872 Things You Must Need To Know

Dammit, none of them were smart enough to use a headline like How To Have Better Sex Through Blogging. It is not all that hard to write, hell let’s give it a quick try.

Blogging is a fantastic way to help you and your partner supercharge your sex life. The best and most obvious way is to use your blog as a tool to improve communication between you and your husband/wife/partner/lover.

Better communication leads to increased feelings of comfort and a deeper sense of love and affection. Not to mention it is sometimes easier to tell your honey that they aren’t quite hitting the spot during daylight hours as opposed to during intimacy.

Two minutes is all it took me to write that. I wouldn’t call it stellar but it is better than many. Of course I once wrote a post called The Secret To Better Sex. It was quite successful.

It didn’t generate oodles of comments but it receives regular traffic and the readers tend to click through the links there, none of which deal with tips about how to have sex. There are links to posts about writing and posts about relationships, but nothing that tells you how to touch…

That post also has links to two other posts that are important and useful. One is a post that contains a list of vocabulary words. I love that one because I love words. Here is a short selection:

  • Raconteur-One who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit.
  • Callipygian–adj.Having beautifully proportioned buttocks.
  • Lachrymose–adj.Weeping or inclined to weep; tearful. Causing or tending to cause tears.
  • Perspicacious–adj. Having or showing penetrating mental discernment; clear-sighted.
  • Flibbertigibbet–n. A silly, scatterbrained, or garrulous person.

The second one talks about the death of my grandfather last year and contains stories about my grandparents in general. Been thinking about them quite a bit lately and wondering what they might say about some of the things that are going on.

One day I hope to build the sort of relationship with my grandchildren that I had with my grandparents. When I think about the things I am doing now and the plans I am making I see their fingerprints and feel their presence.

These plans are mine and none of them could have predicted any of this but that is ok. Where I see the connections are the work I am doing to take care of my family. They would understand and appreciate it.

Still it would have been fun to watch their faces while I tried to explain whether there is a difference between a dad blogger and a regular blogger.

Ask For What You Want & What You Need

Sometimes life provides you with the opportunity to get more than what you need and you can ask for what you want. If you want to be happy you need to figure out what you need. When you understand this and have identified what brings you joy you can develop a plan to obtain these things.

One of the useful pieces of information that blogging provided for me were the answers to many of these questions.

This is part of Just Write #40.

Those Three Words

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Field of Dreams

Men in their twenties don’t say I love you to male friends or at least we didn’t when I was in my twenties. It was a mistake but I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know it because when you are in your twenties you are invincible and you don’t worry about dying.

You don’t ever expect that one day you will stand under endless blue skies holding a shovel because you have to bury a friend who was more like a brother. It is not supposed to be like that and you never could have imagined that 14 years later you would remember it all so vividly.

It never occurs to you that you’ll wonder what happens after we die and ask yourself if he is watching over the six year-old boy who is buried near by. I didn’t know about that little boy until after ‘D’s funeral. I was lost that day and I didn’t pay attention to any of the graves, but I saw him later.

One day after my oldest was born I decided to go visit ‘D’ and tell him that I had become a father. I walked by the little guy’s grave and had to sit down. It was always tragic to me but I hadn’t ever thought about it as a father. This time it was different. This time I remembered the looks of horror on the faces of ‘D’s parent and the magnitude of it all hit me in a different way because I understood the responsibility parents feel regarding their children’s welfare.

Those Three Words

I don’t have many regrets but I wish that I had told ‘D’ that I loved him. I wish that he hadn’t hid the severity of his illness and that he would have let me help carry some of the load. I would have done it. He would have done it for me.

All these years later I don’t doubt that he knew it but there is something different about saying the words. I have thought about it quite a bit and I haven’t ever figured out why I didn’t say it other than I don’t share my feelings easily.

That might sound shocking to you, but if you are an old friend you’ll know that I am close lipped about many things.

My Uncle Jimmy died in ’94. Technically he died from pneumonia but it was AIDS that got him. I didn’t find out he was gay until I was a senior in high school. Funny thing is that it never was a secret, I was just oblivious. It didn’t change my feelings about him. He was my uncle and I loved him, but I didn’t say it to him either.

Hell, my father almost died eight years ago and we didn’t exchange those three words. We did when I was little but somewhere along the way it stopped and I am not sure why.

But if I have learned anything from these experiences it is that you shouldn’t wait to tell the people you love that you care about them. I have gotten better about it but I need to do more.

Eight years later I am carrying around some guilt because I don’t think dad is taking care of himself the way he should because he is worried about my sisters and I. I wasn’t going to say anything to him about it because I didn’t think he would change.

But I can’t do this any longer. I can’t not say anything. I am in a transitional phase but I am not worried about coming through it. I always get through and I will this time. I am concerned about my kids, but that is because it is what parents do. They will get through this time too and they will probably do better than all of us.

This time I am going to say something. I am going to pull out those three words. I should have told ‘D’ and I should have said it to Uncle Jimmy but I won’t miss the opportunity to say I love you to my father.

This post is part of Just Write #39 and Yeah Write #61.

More tales of a 40 year old Someone

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I did it for the children. Those are words that I wrote 18 months ago. By themselves they are virtually meaningless but when read in the conjunction with the rest of the post there is so much more there.

You see I am reading that post and shaking my head because I saw what was coming and did my best to plan for it but it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter because there was no way to stop some things from happening. No way to prevent circumstance, happenstance and shit house luck from coming together in a perfect storm. I described it then like this:

I cannot win. There is a minuscule chance that things will go my way, but I am not real hopeful. This experience has been dreadful. It has been damaging, harmful and hurtful in ways that are still yet to be felt.

That is an awful way to describe a situation. It sounds so dire and hopeless. I am not that guy. I am not the man who gives up and I hate sounding like I did because I didn’t. I haven’t.

All that I have done is my best to take a bad situation and turn it around. Ultimately I think that time will show that I did it. Things got really bad and I think they have improved but there is a price to pay. I mentioned it above and I think I am paying it.

What Have I Accomplished?

Sometimes I find myself compiling a list of my accomplishments. It is a good list but it falls far short of where I want it to be. When I try to determine if I am being too hard on myself I try to imagine what I would tell my children if they came to me with this.

I picture the year 2032 and stare at kids who are in their twenties and thirties. They want dad to tell them it is going to be alright. They want dad to say that they made good choices and that all will work out.

My response is simple. I tell them they did some amazing things and remind them we can’t control life we can only manage it. I tell them that our attitude impacts everything and that they have choices to wallow or to push through.

Yes some things are hard and unfair but that is how life is. When you push through to the other side it will feel good and you will feel like you really accomplished something because not everyone keeps going when things get tough. I’ll tell them that I don’t know how I did it all because I don’t.

I made a lot of mistakes and got lucky too. But more than anything else the reason I made it was that I just kept going and did my best to make the best out of everything.

Damn, that sounds pretty good. Hell, maybe they ought to give me Father of the Year for the Father’s Day. It would make a great gift.

Where Is Your Focus?

Damn blog crashed while I was writing this so the tone might feel a bit different than before but the message is still pretty close to the same.  The question of focus is tied into accomplishment. It is me asking what is important. It is me saying that if you don’t know how to feed your soul and help fill your heart you will feel empty regardless of what you have.

Some years ago I would have called it new age bullshit but I have come to believe it. Experience has taught me that there is a truth there that I cannot ignore. So when I look at this period of time and think about how awful it has been I also smile because it has helped me figure out some really important things.

What hurts me is knowing that my kids have gone through some rough spots because of me. Not to mention that my ego is bruised and I hate knowing that some bad people have made a lot of money because of what I did. I don’t think about it often because I won’t give them free rent in my head.

But I won’t lie and say that I don’t wish for them to lose everything either.

Dancing Children

My children love music.I take some responsibility for that. We never go a day without listening to something together. I make a point to expose them to many different types. I tell them to read anything and everything and to listen to…everything.

Sometimes I find them just dancing with reckless abandon and I smile. How can you not. They are joy incarnate. The dark haired beauty tells me she is going to write a love song just because she wants to and not because she has a crush on some boy.

Her older brother tells me she is lying. She screams at him, he laughs. Later she will share his secret and laugh while he screams. They are typical siblings but they like each other and if I have my way they always will.

I guess I must have done something right, but dammit, there has to be an easier way to get there than this. This is part of Just Write #38.

Just write

 

567 Ways To Tell A Better Story

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English: The church of St Martha-on-the-Hill i...
English: The church of St Martha-on-the-Hill in Surrey, England. The church is dated to the 12th century and is dedicated to Saint Martha (sister of Mary & Lazarus.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most people consider it bad form to slap a priest or pull a rabbi’s beard. They aren’t real keen on your telling Sister Mary that she has a rack that was made for sin and or suggesting that you can help her see god.

In theory these should be things that would get you in a lot of trouble but some of us have a silver tongue and manage to find ways to convince people that what we have done really wasn’t all that bad. The thing is that some of us find it impossible to accept that we got away with something so we keep pushing the envelope because we can’t help but wonder where that line in the sand is going to be drawn.

Well let me help you with that. You can’t kick the rabbi’s dog nor can you take Sister Mary’s cat and throw it in a swimming pool…without consequences that is. Sure, you can try. You can claim that the little rat dog tried to bite you and maybe get away with that, but you can’t convince Sister Mary that you were trying to give Whiskers a bath.

That is because no one bathes a cat by stuffing it into a sack and then throwing it into a swimming pool. It just isn’t done, but then again most people can’t say that they slept with Sister Mary either. But I am not most people and I know Sister Mary in the biblical sense of the word.

So you see I am not lying when I say that I can make Sister Mary see God because I have done it…many times and in lots of different places. My favorite place was always in church. You might think that church would have a negative impact upon Sister Mary and her ability to perform, but the exact opposite was true.

The last time we did it Father Pete almost walked in us. I told Sister Mary that would have made one hell of a confession. She laughed and then demanded that we do it in a synagogue. I am a good Jewish boy so I made a point to help her feel like I was an equal opportunity fornicator. Didn’t matter to me whether it was in church or synagogue- either place was good for me.

567 Ways To Tell A Better Story

I suppose that you have figured out that those words above do not contain 567 ways to tell a better story.  Truth is that when I started writing I had no idea where I was going or what I intended to do with the tale I was telling.

I just knew that I wanted to participate in Just Write #36  and Yeah Write #58.  So I figured that I would open up the old melon and see what came spilling out. I thought about using 7 Things You Never Say To Mean Moms as my Yeah Write entry. I figured that most of the participants would be familiar with mean girls, but I couldn’t do that this time.

Nor did I want to run with A Letter To My Children-2012 because it was too serious. What Is The Value of A Comment? didn’t work because it was a good post that stood on its own. I almost used I Wish Some Of You Would Just Shut Up because I think many people can relate but then I decided I wanted to just write and see what happens.

And here we are.

A Better Story

I kind of like the story I started this post with and I hope that you do too. I hope you do because it provides validation that I am on the write track, but I am pretty confident. A good story doesn’t have to be original. People keep saying that they really like this tale and there is nothing unusual about it. It is just a story about a boy who loved a girl and the girl who once loved him back.

People like those stories. They want to know if the single mom and single dad can find love again. More importantly they want to know if lightning strikes twice.

The reason that story works is because they identify with the characters. They know what it means to suffer heartbreak and to love so deeply it hurts. The moms and dads who read this like the comfort it provides because there is something nice about knowing that maybe there is a chance that the one who got away might come back again.

But the motor that moves this monster isn’t love or the idea of being in love. It is the ability to relate to the characters as a whole. When Jack says he aches and he burns for Ann people get it and even if they don’t they wish they did.

To be fair not everyone likes those stories. Some of them hate it, but even those who do can follow the story. They can relate to some portion and or piece of it because it is a human experience and that is what people are looking for.

People love the Lord of the Rings because there is a world of magic and mystery. They like to imagine what it would be like to be with the elves in Rivendell but the real thing that captures their attention are the characters and the relationship between them.

If you want your readers to love your stories find a way to build those connections and to show the relationships between your characters. Set a scene that provides enough detail for their imagination to picture it and then get out of the way.

What do you think?

 

The Rules Of The Game

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Self Reliance

My daughter looks at me and asks what is wrong. I don’t tell her what I really think or what I really feel. I just say that I had a bad day because I did. She smiles and she throws her arms around me.

This girl of mine, she wants to rescue daddy. That is what she says. I smile and I tell her that she doesn’t need to feel that way because I don’t need rescuing.

That is not entirely true. I do. I need to find a ship that will take me aboard. I need to stop treading water. My body is tired but that is not the hardest part. The hardest part is that my spirit feels weak. I feel battered and bruised.

And Now A Word From Our Sponsors

Tonight I am writing for Just Write and Yeah Write. They are two different writing programs that I have come to love. Every week I look forward to being a part of them. Every week I find new blogs to read through them and every week new readers find me.

This post you are reading is hard for me to write. It is hard because there are a million things going on and I am guarded. I share much but I don’t share everything. This post you are reading is hard because I am trying to connect with you and I keep telling myself to stop.

Instead of just writing and letting the words flow I am thinking carefully about what I say. That is because I want you to become so enamored you can’t help but become a fan of my Facebook Page. I want you to read these words and want to be a part of this community. I want you to read these words and want to read everything I have ever written.

Part of me is digusted by that. Part of me wants to say that it is terrible to beg and debase myself. Part of me says that I need to stop thinking and just write because that is where my best writing comes from.

There is truth to that. When I ignore self doubt and turn off the editor inside my head good things happen. But there is another voice inside that says that I have to change the rules of the game.

That voice says that I have spent too much time doing things one way and it can’t hurt to change it up. So I wonder if my hesitation is fear. I wonder if I fear being successful as much as I fear failure.

Fear And Blogging

Fear is a big part of blogging or should I say my blogging. I try to write about my fear. I do it because I hope that by doing so I will understand it better and because it is easier to control. I don’t walk around in fear, but I am normal. There are things that scare me.

Somewhere there is a list of them. I usually share it around Halloween.

At the moment my two biggest fears are simple. I fear failing my children and I fear not having the courage to try. I really prefer to try and fail than fail to try. Most of the time I think I do a good job of not succumbing to that, but sometimes I fall short.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and see my biggest enemy. Sometimes I think of the person that used to be my biggest cheerleader and wonder if I really need them to succeed.

I probably don’t. Not sure why I qualified that. It is times like now that I miss my grandparents. They definitely were among my biggest cheerleaders. I have blogged about them many times. I probably should link to those posts or at least some of them. You can read about my paternal grandfather here. You can read a post called Echoes Of The Pople We Miss and learn a bit more about my grandparents.

It touches upon how one of my grandfathers died of a broken heart. Sure he was 97 and sooner or later age would have caught up to him, but it was grandma’s death that killed him. He loved my grandma so very much.

A while back I had a dream about them. I was standing in front of my house and I saw grandma driving down the street. I couldn’t figure out how she was driving because in my dream I knew that she was dead, but dreams are funny that way.

So I ran next door to the neighbor’s house to get grandpa. I watched him run to her. They hugged each other and waved to me. They were about 2o feet away but I couldn’t get to them.

They smiled at me and I wondered why I couldn’t just walk over and say hi. It was surreal. I knew that I was an adult. I knew that I was a father, but I felt like a kid. Why couldn’t I just go hug my grandparents.

You Can’t Go Back- You Can Only Go Through

I wonder how many people will read this post. I wonder who will be interested in checking out the other links. There is one called Life is A Tale Told By An Idiot that has been calling out to me.

Several sections of it keep popping up. I keep hearing/seeing these words

“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

There are others that call out to me, other posts that is. I can’t provide excerpts to all of them but I can provide links and hope that some will follow:

  • New Year’s Eve– Sometimes they are magical and sometimes they aren’t.
  • The Final Goodbye– The Big Lug was more than just a pet, he was my best friend. Don’t know why the comments repeat there, but..
  • I Hear Music– There is no explanation. This simply is.
  • The Flying Clown– A drunk clown at a child’s birthday part is a recipe for…something.

I am chasing my dreams. Change is in the air. It is a bit exciting and disconcerting. We’re going to be moving again. Not quite sure when, but some time this year. Don’t know where we’ll move to yet. Might stay in the city or might leave the state.

Lots of possibilities.

I am chasing my dreams. If I can’t figure out the rules of the game then I might as well make them up as I go along.