Things About Jack

Playing it Safe

June 3, 2009 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

You can blame a lot of things on a man turning 40. There are all of the traditional and stereotypical things going on here. The desire for a sports car, the need to feel young and vibrant etc.

I admit to feeling all of those things. But I also can say that I truly don’t feel old. Ok, so that is a contradiction to some of what I have said. I do feel the pressure of time. I do feel like there are more responsibilities and fewer chances to take a risk. All that is true.

But it doesn’t change the overall feeling inside that I really am not old. I may not look like I did at twenty. I may have some mystery aches and pains that didn’t exist, but mentally I don’t feel like an old guy.

Ask my children and they’ll tell you that their dad is a big kid. I chase them around the house ans wrestle with them. Little Jack and play handball. I challenge and win races against he and his friends all the time.

Ok, not that impressive to beat a bunch kids. But give me a break. In ten years they’ll be on the verge of entering their peak and I’ll be fifty. Got to take advantage of the opportunity to win while I can. And believe me, I am not conceding anything when I am fifty.

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Spent several hours at a school event last night. It was a dinner for the kindergarten class of 2009-10. The dark haired beauty was in rare form. Not long before we left she told me that she is a big girl and it won’t be long before she is married and has a baby in her tummy. She emphasized the tummy part by sticking her belly out at me.

I smiled and told her that she has plenty of time to learn and grow before she becomes a mommy. She told me that she is ready. So I leaned over and told her that I am ready to speak to any boy that wants to help her become a mommy. She looked at me and told me that I wasn’t going to speak to them, I am going to punch them in the nose.

Good to see that she understands the score. Truth is that little girl is going to take some little boy and turn him inside out. But just in case, I will be there. Good to know that she knows that.

Anyway, at the dinner I made a point of playing with the kids and then moseyed off to hang out with some of the fathers. We made the usual small talk about life. Batted around the idea of retirement and how if we pulled our kids out of private school we could retire earlier.

I laughed. Some of those guys are making so much money it is hard to believe that retirement is an issue that they worry about. Some of them played it safe, doctors and attorneys who moved into the family practice. I don’t fault them for it.

At times I have wondered if I didn’t make a mistake by playing it safe. There are easier paths to walk than the one that I have chosen. There are fewer bumps and bruises to be had by hiking the trail that has already been blazed. But that is not me. I like trying to Shoot the Moon. I like the razor’s edge.

The trick is be aware of where you are at. I don’t want to become the next Icarus. If it works. If I find that way to make it all happen then all is good. And if it doesn’t, well, I have a fall back plan. The hard part is that falling back could end up being a literal experience and that is where my age comes into play.

It is not that you can’t get back up, but the bruises and aches have a way of hanging on a bit longer than they did in the past. I guess that we’ll see what happens.

What The Doctor Said

May 25, 2009 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

Every so often I read about the legendary physical exploits of the Tarahumara Indians. They are an indigenous people in Mexico who are known for being able to run long distances. One of the stories that is told about them involves the Olympics.

Two of the tribesmen were entered into the Olympic marathon and were thought to be among the favorites to win the race. As it worked out they were among the last to finish the event. However it wasn’t because they were tired or out of shape, but because no one had told them how long the race was. They had assumed it was going to be much longer and complained that the race was too short.

To me that is impressive. When you look at 26 miles and consider it to be a warm up you know that you are in excellent shape.

I have been thinking about running. When I turned 37 I went for a physical and was told by the doctor that my knees are arthritic and that I shouldn’t do exercises that provide undue stress on them. According to him ignoring that advice would lead to a knee replacement somewhere around the time I turn 50.

He also told me that overall my health was good, but that I needed to lose some weight. According to him that would provide some immediate benefits as well as long term. Good preventative maintenance.

I ignored his advice about playing basketball and running. I love to play ball. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is one of the simple pleasures in life. I never get tired of playing and when I don’t I get cranky.

Add to the mix that when I play regularly it increases my ability to lose weight and you can see why I didn’t like what he had to say. Oh, and did I mention that my knees don’t hurt. I don’t feel any sort of regular pain in them. Occasionally it happens, but that is usually tied into walking six or seven flights of stairs.

Anyway, I can accept that aging forces some changes upon us. I know that physically there are some things that are harder to do, but that doesn’t mean that I am incapacitated nor does it mean that the doc’s opinion is completely accurate.

Part of what made me think about all of this stems from a race I had with my son and some friends of his.

I won.

Sad, isn’t it that a 40 year-old man is gloating about beating a bunch of kids in a sprint. But I needed that. I needed to push myself. I needed to hear the wind rushing in my ears. It has been a while since I made the body move like that. It felt good.

We raced a few more times and I won again and again. Tried to convince some of the other fathers to join in but they didn’t.

I need to find someone who will. I need to find someone faster than I am. Not so fast that it is impossible to beat them, but fast enough that I know that I have to try.

Those Indians run and run and run their entire lives. They prove that some of our thoughts/beliefs about when our bodies begin to fail are not entirely accurate. They prove that there are things that can be done to stave off time.

And that is what I am doing. I don’t care about the wrinkles or lines that are gradually appearing. Don’t care too much about the hair and its migration. Just give me the ability to keep playing, to keep moving and I’ll do the rest.

It is not too much to ask for.

Facing My Fear

May 22, 2009 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

In the early days of the blog when it was new and fresh I had complete anonymity. It provided a cloak that I could hide behind so that I could give voice to the things that troubled me. I spent a lot of time looking in the dark corners of my mind so that I could ferret out the demons and give names to the things that troubled me.

Anonymity provided the freedom to lay out those fears and to bare my soul in a way that I had been unwilling to do. But it was a crutch that helped to mask another fear, the fear of exposure. The fear that presenting myself as a thinking and feeling human with a real name would somehow harm me.

There is merit in that fear because there are those out there who prey upon our weaknesses and try to use them to wound us. Time has taught me the bitter lesson of the truth of those words. I bear the scars of the attempts that have been made to hurt me.

At times I look in the mirror and I see the impact of the past staring back at me. Moments that once haunted me occasionally are dislodged by the present and dredged to the surface. Cloaked in bravado I have roared in anger and shame and fought to stuff them back down. Bitter tears of anger and frustration spent on people and things that didn’t deserve the attention, didn’t merit that power.

The advantage of age and life experience has helped to make it easier to face them. And in many cases they have lost all power, any hold that they once had is gone. That has made it all easier and has served as a positive reminder that the practices I espouse and the values that I hold dear are worthwhile and effective.

But still there are those demons that never go away. Their voices are never completely silenced. Sometimes the whispers increase in volume and the silence of my life is pierced by murmurs that grow into loud shrieks and I am forced to confront it all.

And so I find myself immersed in a struggle, really many struggles. The battles never quite end because the war is never won. If you choose to stand you have to face the reality that some will always try to pull you back down into the mud.

The blog helps. It is of tremendous value. It provides a framework and a structure that I can use to build the foundation of support. It is the tool that I use to dig myself out from under the muck, to clear the wreckage. And from within that I find the things that I need.

Still, the title of this post is called Facing My Fear and I am just now getting to the place in which I am prepared to do that. It has taken time for me to be ready to confront a few things. And so the grand dance is beginning.

If you think in graphic images as I do then perhaps you understand a bit about why I choose to describe things as I do. Perhaps you understand why I write about riding off into battle, talk about the blood lust and the primal scream. I seek that which I fear because I fear anticipation of what could happen more.

Better to hear the clink and clanking of battle than to sit and wait for it. Dance so that you avoid the fire or take the risk of the house burning down around you.

Game on.

Bloggers Are Arrogant- The Genesis of a Blog

May 15, 2009 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

Somewhere on my bookshelf is a book that contains a collection of Peanuts comic strips. I have had it for a good thirty years or so.

Every so often I’ll pull it out and flip through it. I never get tired of watching Snoopy fight the Red Baron or following his exploits as an author. How many dogs sit on top of their doghouse and use a Smith-Corona typewriter to compose the Great American Novel.

One of my favorite strips is one in which Snoopy struggles to come up with a good opening for his book. The major problem is that all of his opening paragraphs are either cliches or duplicates of famous works. It makes me smile, because I often feel his pain.

So you’ll forgive me when I say that when I began this blog in the Spring of 2004, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. There was so much going on in my life that I thought that blogging might serve as a great release.

Very early on I intended to let a number of friends and family know about this place. I think that I even sent out an email or two about it, but there wasn’t much of a response. And then at a party I listened to a group of people rant about how arrogant bloggers were. The comment was something along the lines of “you have to have a major ego to believe that people want to read your words.”

And while I wasn’t fazed by their criticism, I decided that for a while I’d enjoy the anonymity and see what happened. By that point in time I had already begun writing more personal posts in which I shared some pretty raw feelings. So it was actually easier to be anonymous than to have to engage in discussions about some of those thoughts.

If I had to do it over again I probably would do some of it differently. I probably wouldn’t be anonymous, but you can’t go back in time so this is how it is.

As blogging has become more prevalent and more mainstream I have been involved in more conversations about it and answered more questions about what it is and why people do it. From time to time I still hear the “bloggers are arrogant” comment and I still have the same response. No one is forcing you to read their blogs, so why do you care.

I have yet to hear a good response to that, maybe it is because I am arrogant. Or maybe it is because it is another one of those throwaway remarks that people make without thinking. I don’t know.

What do you think?

If I Started Blogging Today

May 13, 2009 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

In a couple of weeks I’ll celebrate my fifth blogiversary and is my custom I start celebrating well in advance of the day. Typically I try to use these sorts of posts as a moment during which I reminisce about the past, speak of the present and consider the future.

This has been one hell of an experience and I find it inconceivable to imagine my life without the blog. I was never one for journaling. If you search through the boxes in my garage you won’t find notebooks filled with my hopes and dreams. I didn’t like it, journaling that is and I didn’t do it. The few exceptions being those school assignments in which I was forced to keep one.

But this has been a tremendous experience that has brought me much joy and pleasure as well as some real aggravation. Inside these cyberwalls lie the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a relatively ordinary man.

If you really know me then you know that some of those posts are raw emotion. I have my moments of doubt and times in which I wonder if I am destined to be a tortured soul who is unable to rest. But there are also a lot of good moments that have been chronicled here.

Believe it or not, I am someone who easily shares my thoughts and feelings. Oh, the superficial stuff is easy. Not afraid to discuss politics or religion and tell you what I think. I can do all that easily.

It is the deeper stuff that is hard for me. Anonymity made that easy. I could say anything and not worry about it. Slowly over time that anonymity has been compromised. Some of it is/was my own doing and some was not.

But I think that if I had to start over that there are two things that I can say I would do differently. I would have come up with a better name. I am a creative guy and could easily have come up with something better than random thoughts.

The other thing that I would have done is said the hell with the anonymity. I would have used my real name and solved or avoided a number of problems. At least that is what I think I would have done.

It is not so easy to say. Who I am at 40 is a bit different than who I was at 35. The past five years has been filled with an awful lot of challenging situations. It is fair to say that in some ways it has been the most challenging period of my life.

Death came to visit. I lost two grandparents and said goodbye to the parents of some friends. My father had a major heart attack and almost died. For a while he and my mother were forced to live across the country and I became responsible for taking care of three grandparents, another household and more.

The dark haired beauty came into my life and turned things upside down. My career underwent a few changes. Friends got married. Friends got divorced. I was in a car accident in which my car was totaled. I was lucky to walk away with a few bruises.

All of that is a partial list of some of the things that happened. Compared to some it was nothing and compared to others it was the most incredible upheaval they’d ever see.

In short we call it life.

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I do my best to try and live a life without regrets, but I have a few. There is a very significant one that weighs upon me. I won’t say more than that. But I’ll admit to wondering if I made a mistake by not taking that fork in the road.

On the other hand I can’t help but wonder if there is a major benefit in having not taken that path. Did I gain some valuable life experience that I can apply to my life. Not to mention that it is very possible and quite likely that the path I didn’t take will intersect again in the not so distant future.

Since I can’t actually see the future all I can do is try to influence it so that the outcome favors me. I suspect that in five years I’ll be able to come back to the blog and take a look at this and get a sense of whether I hit the mark.

Oh, one more thing about starting over, at least as it pertains to blogging. If I started blogging today I’d probably make this a niche blog that focused on a couple of topics and I wouldn’t post more than once or twice a day.

Oh who am I kidding, it is May and I already have written more than 400 posts this year.

I am 40, Now What.

May 11, 2009 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

A few minutes before midnight I sat down in a dark room and thought about the events of the past day. The last vestiges of my birthday were slipping away. It wasn’t just any birthday, it was my fortieth.

Forty years of wandering the earth trying to figure out what the hell am I doing here had led to this very moment. As a responsible blogger I thought that it was incumbent upon me to share the distilled wisdom of the ages with my readers, present and future.

So I ambled over to the computer and began to write a rambling and garbled post that never quite got its legs beneath it. It took all of thirty seconds to decide that I didn’t want to run it and I deleted it.

I had intended to take another shot at it last night, but after the Mother’s Day marathon I just didn’t have it in me. Wife, mother, mother-in-law, sisters who are mothers and a mother of day sucked the life out of me.

But you my lucky reader had nothing to worry about because here I am writing this post now. It is better, tastier and contains all sorts of healthy nutrients that will make you grow up to be big and strong.

Forty doesn’t feel all that much different to me, age is a number. I won’t lie and say that I am in better shape now than I was at twenty.

At twenty I was a beast. That is not hyperbole. My body fat was somewhere around 9%. I could curl 150, bench press over 300 and I could run for as long as I needed to without fear of how my back or knees would feel later.

Back then I had the benefit of not being responsible for anyone or anything besides myself. I rarely missed a day at the gym and when I was there it was for several hours at a time. On a side note I would have loved being able to use my iPod. It is so much more convenient than that huge walkman I had strapped to my arm.

Ok, so we have established that physically I am not in the shape that I was then. That is not great, but it is not the end of the world either. Mentally/emotionally I am a million times tougher than I was then and that is worth a lot. Life doesn’t always work out the way that you think it will and you need to have some steel in your guts to help you through the rough moments.

A dear friend called to wish me a happy birthday as well as to tease me about my advanced age, in a month I’ll return the favor. During our conversation he told me that he thinks that I know more people who have died young than anyone else he knows.

He is probably right, but I wish that he wasn’t. I can run off a list of around 16 names of friends and people that I knew in passing that died from cancer, drunk driving, bike accident and two suicides.

It is only logical to assume that the older we get the more likely it is that we’ll have these stories to share. But I am not part of the clergy and not in a profession where I have more exposure to this part of life so I suspect that I probably do know more than most.

It has had an impact upon me and lately I am feeling the effects more than in the past. I am far more focused on trying to spend time with the people who are important to me and to do those things that I have always wanted to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t any reason to believe that I am dying now or that I will do so for many years to come. My paternal grandfather lived to be 92 and I am grateful to still have my maternal grandparents, 95 and counting. In fact to quote my paternal grandfather, I intend to defenestrate death.

In more colorful terms, when death comes I am going to kick him in the balls, poke him in the eyes and then throw his bony ass out the window headfirst. I have got far too much to do.

Anyway, as I sat there in the dark I smiled and thought about all the good things in my life because there is a lot. But it was a bit of a bittersweet smile, because even though I have much to be thankful for there are challenges.

Challenges that make me shake my head and question whether I have accomplished enough for someone my age because sometimes I wonder.

That twenty year old I referred to would have laughed at the old man. It would have started as a deep rumble in his chest and erupted into gales of laughter. And then the old man would have used him to mop the floor. I may not be in the same shape, but I am a hell of a lot meaner and far more cunning.

On a serious note, at twenty I had no clue about so many things. Life was simpler then and that has its benefits. On a Saturday night my girlfriend and I would have kept busy until just before dawn, or I would have been out with the boys, until just before dawn.

I am still a nightowl, but given the presence of little people in the house I pay more attention to my hours. I am sure that my fellow parents appreciate that. The kids love to be up early, regardless of how much or how little sleep I have had.

So here I am, the forty year-old man at the computer, now what. Stay tuned and maybe I’ll answer that question.