Yeah Write

One cigar and two shots later I am back at the computer trying to come up with a polite way to remind people that when the majority of your output is negative you kill my interest in spending time with you.

All that negativity is sucking the life out of me and I am not interested in spending time with energy vampires.

I understand how life can get rough and that you are upset. It is important to vent and share your feelings so that you don’t explode but there is a balance to these things and it is affected by your relationship with others.

Negative Energy Can Be Unhealthy

My willingness to help you deal with your negative energy is impacted by our relationship and my understanding of your willingness to take steps to improve your situation.

A former friend of mine never had a good thing to say about anyone or anything. If you asked him about his job all he would do was complain and tell you the boss was an asshole.

His wife was a bitch and her parents were worse. The car sucked, kids whined and life in general was just bad and unlikely to get better. And if you dared to shine a light on good things you were told you were a naive fool.

I got tired of listening to his whining, especially because he never did a thing to change his situation. If your marriage is horrible and all you do is fight go to counseling or get divorced, stop yapping about it.

Don’t like your job? Find another one or do something else to improve the situation.

I am no saint and I understand nothing happens overnight but I can’t accept not trying to change things. That sort of negative energy is unhealthy.

Online And In Person

Overdosing on negativity can be just as harmful and tedious in the online world as in person. You can only absorb so much before it starts to weigh you down.

It is funny to me that I am writing this because a while back I would have called this new age bullshit and told people there was nothing to it, but experience has taught me otherwise.

I have learned that when you are immersed in this kind of energy it sucks you dry and leaves you feeling spent in the kind of way that makes you want to bang your head against the wall.

Attitude really does go a long way which is part of why I try harder than I used to remind myself about how I can impact my life and those who hang out with me.

And I can look back at some moments and have a greater appreciation for some special people who never let go when almost all I had to give was negative.

Gratitude is what try to have more of and focus upon and those people make it easy for me.

One of the biggest surprises of my life was growing up and discovering that life was very different than I expected it to be. I didn’t become a professional athlete or find a job that I loved.

Fact is that out of college I went through a bunch of jobs before I started to figure out what it was that I wanted to do with my life. Hell, it probably took until I was around forty or so before I really started to get it figured out and even then it wasn’t completely clear to me how or what I needed to be doing.

A Click

One night a few years ago I was listening to a conversation Bruce Springsteen had with the audience right before he started singing The River and something clicked for me.

It wasn’t the first time I had heard that cut or listened to the album.  It easily could have been the hundredth time I heard it, but it was the first time I recognized that I thought of the “speech” he gave as a conversation and it made me think.

Because the reality was that a conversation usually involves more than one party speaking and that didn’t happen there, it was just one person.

But that is not how I responded nor is it how lots of people responded. It is one of those gifts certain people and performers have. They can stand in front of a room and hold the entire place captive.

Possibility

And that night I started thinking about how I hadn’t really thought of myself as the kind of writer who could make money from telling stories. I hadn’t thought seriously about how maybe I could do that too.

I thought about my favorite books and about how sometimes it felt like I knew the characters or wanted to know them.

And I wondered how Bruce did it and if there was anything that I could take/learn from him. But mostly I thought about working on my writing skills so that one day I could hold a room captive the same way he did.

Not because my ego needs to be stroked in that manner but because I figured if I could do that I could profoundly change my life in a way that I think would be quite fulfilling.

Sometimes Music Is Life Changing

I want to tell you about how I did it and how that night led to the publication of my best selling novel and that I made so much money from it I was able to do everything I dreamed of, but I can’t…yet.

The only thing stopping me from saying it is doing it and that is my challenge to over come.

But the point isn’t whether I have or haven’t done it. The point is the opportunity is there and it is up to me to go for it.

You never know what kinds of surprises, challenges and gifts life will throw at you, but you do have some say in how you respond.

You’ll find a copy of the conversation I referred to and a link to a video just below this sentence.

Hiya doin’ out there tonight? That’s good, that’s good.

This is ah… When I was growing up, me and my dad used to go at it all the time over almost anything. But, ah, I used to have really long hair, way down past my shoulders. I was 17 or 18, oh man, he used to hate it.

And we got to where we’d fight so much that I’d, that I’d spent a lot of time out of the house; and in the summertime it wasn’t so bad, ‘cause it was warm, and my friends were out, but in the winter, I remember standing downtown where it’d get so cold and, when the wind would blow, I had this phone booth I used to stand in.

And I used to call my girl, like, for hours at a time, just talking to her all night long. And finally I’d get my nerve up to go home. I’d stand there in the driveway and he’d be waiting for me in the kitchen and I’d tuck my hair down on my collar and I’d walk in and he’d call me back to sit down with him. And the first thing he’d always ask me was what did I think I was doing with myself. And the worst part of it was that I could never explain to him.

I remember I got in a motorcycle accident once and I was laid up in bed and he had a barber come in and cut my hair and, man, I can remember telling him that I hated him and that I would never ever forget it.

And he used to tell me: “Man, I can’t wait till the army gets you. When the army gets you they’re gonna make a man out of you. They’re gonna cut all that hair off and they’ll make a man out of you.”

And this was, I guess, ’68 when there was a lot of guys from the neighborhood going to Vietnam.

I remember the drummer in my first band coming over to my house with his marine uniform on, saying that he was going and that he didn’t know where it was.

And a lot of guys went, and a lot of guys didn’t come back. And a lot that came back weren’t the same anymore.

I remember the day I got my draft notice. I hid it from my folks and three days before my physical me and my friends went out and we stayed up all night and we got on the bus to go that morning and man we were all so scared…

And I went, and I failed. I came home [audience cheers], it’s nothing to applaud about…

I remember coming home after I’d been gone for three days and walking in the kitchen and my mother and father were sitting there and my dad said: “Where you been?” and I said, uh, “I went to take my physical.” He said “What happened?” I said “They didn’t take me.”

And he said: “That’s good.”
A transcription of Bruce Springsteen’s conversation with the audience on the live version of The River on the Live 1975-1985 box set.  My thanks to Cathal Garvey for his unknowing help with this.

“My  wife said you you made them cry. When I grow up I want to be like you.”

It was meant to be a c0mpliment but I didn’t take it as one. I am not here to be a bully. I am not interested in building a reputation for making the mean moms cry, even if they deserve it.

I know How To Deal With Mean Girls & Mean Moms. I am not impressed by their money or the degrees earned but not used. But there is nothing special in being willing to tell someone they are acting like an entitled pig and that you won’t stand for it.

There is nothing laudatory about driving home the point because ultimately it was done in a manner I didn’t like. But at the time it seemed like the right thing to do.

Protecting Our Children

When the kids switched schools the majority of the mean moms and I lost the occasion to speak or interact. There was no need to talk about whether the room moms were being fair or nice. No need to wonder or worry about any of their behavior. They were there and we were elsewhere.

Except not entirely.

There was some crossover because of softball. There was a coach who tried to defend his mean mom wife by messing with my daughter. He did it when I was far away. He did it when I wasn’t close enough to call him on it in person.

It made me angry…very…angry.

I thought about flying home specifically to meet with him to discuss things but opted for an email instead.

It was strongly worded and it never received a response.  I didn’t threaten him physically or otherwise. I just picked apart an email he had sent earlier and pointed out his hypocrisy. I don’t know if he ignored what I read, if took it to heart or if it made him feel bad.

Face-To-Face

And then the same night I flew back in I ran into him, saw him face-to-face and for a moment I debated making an issue of things. It is one thing to mess with me but when you mess with my family it is different.

It is even worse when you involve my kids because my instinct is to twist your head until it pops off of your neck and I can feed it to feral pigs.

But I didn’t do anything, didn’t say a word.

When he said hi to me I gave him the thousand mile stare and walked by him.

My daughter seems to have forgotten about the problems he created so it seemed silly to bring anything up. I am bigger than he is. It would have been easy to have walked him over to the wall and spit out a series of invectives about his lack of common sense and the need for an attitude adjustment but I didn’t.

I didn’t want to have to answer the question of what happens when you are the bully but I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to slap him. Yeah, there is all sorts of testosterone flowing here and yeah I said slap because men slap men they don’t respect.

And more importantly my kids didn’t see behavior they and I might have been embarrassed by.

Musical Prologue

• I Will Wait For You- Mumford and Sons
• All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight- Hank Williams, Jr.
• Misty Mountains-The Hobbit
• Hard Hearted Hannah- Ray Charles

Change is all around us. This post was going to be about what happens when bloggers bully. It was going to refer to some recent incidents that set off some subsets of the blogosphere.

I was going to write about the hysteria and lack of common sense. I was going to share how much traffic I generated from using a headline about “Spitting and Swallowing” that had nothing to do with sex but something sent me in a different direction.

Don’t know what it was, but I heard something that made me think of An Uncertain Certainty and decided a different direction was important. When changes occur you have to roll with them, do your best to adapt and adjust and move.

That reminded me again about the post I was going to write and how I wanted to talk about the blog as a bully pulpit and how often it is meaningless but decided that at 1:45 AM it makes no sense to write about such narishkeit.

So here I am sharing a post I wrote a few years back about dreams and the pride I feel because I have already managed to do some of the things on that list and am actively working on others.

And now my friends I wonder if you are dreaming your life away or living your dreams.

See you in the comments.

What I Dream About

My mother tells me that my preschool teachers used to tell her that they were certain that I would grow up to be a writer. They said that I had a very active imagination. They were right, I did and still do have a very active imagination.