The Touch of a Button

Strangely, my first move after sitting in front of this screen lately has been to go to HGTV.com.

Incongruous, no?

No.

HGTV is giving away a "smart home". This is a high tech place, as high tech as it gets in 2015. Everything is connected and digitized and sanitized and smart this and smart that.

Everything can be done with the touch of a button.

So you can live in luxury and get fatter.

I don't care about the gadgetry.

The house is located in Austin, Texas. That is what I care about.

Austin is a dream location for me. I must get there. I would have been happy with a visit or two, but living there would supremely tasty.

In a brand new home and driving a brand new 2015 Mercedes-Benz C-Class, which is part of the prize package.

In fact the entire package includes this 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom, 2300 square foot modern Austin farmhouse, tech savvy appliances, beautiful furnishings and custom artwork, $100,000 in cash, and the 2015 Mercedes-Benz C-Class automobile.

Pretty goddamn droolable.

But Austin is the draw for me. I would be an instant celebrity in every downtown bar. "Hey, here comes the dude who won that house."

And believe me, in Austin I would do committed bar research until I narrowed my haunts to a few places with the best atmosphere and the consistently best music.

In reality, with even a limited knowledge of Austin, I believe "a few" would be impossible to achieve.

Anyway........................whenever I visit the website, I enter four times. Twice under our E-mail address, twice under my E-mail address.

I have submitted a large number of entries.

Got two more days left to enter.

See you in Austin, baby.

Breathless

My visits here have become a tad erratic.

This is a situation that must be remedied.

I may include that commitment in the June Manifesto I am considering going public with.

I kicked the living crap out of May. Kind of.

Walked and walked and walked. Ate yogurt for breakfast and lunch many times during the month on work days.

I'll be summing it all up tomorrow. As I thought about and re-considered May it occurred to me that if I really want change I may have to REALLY kick it up.

Go nutsos crazy in a lot of different ways, in a lot of different directions.

Why not push it, not just a little further, but a lot further? What have I got to lose?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I am experiencing inspiration right now. Motivation. Because my body is directly tied to climate.

Winter kills, summer inspires.

Interpreted, this means I am dead for a minimum of eight months out of the year. With only four months of life to work with, change can not be incremental.

It must be monumental.

I am considering laying out specific things that must change or specific things I must do in the month of June.

Always a dangerous undertaking because if I fail miserably you will be there to pound my head with a ball peen hammer.

I do not want my skull attacked with a ball peen hammer.

I'll mull it over for the rest of today which, mercifully, I have off. A slow moving, overcast and humid Sunday to enjoy life and peace with Carol and the cats.

Tomorrow I walk straight ahead into hell once again. Gonna be a miserable week; sale changeover week.

It always sucks. Very physical as displays are taken down and new ones erected in their place. Booze distributor reps whining and complaining as they jockey for bigger commissions. My boss standing in my way instead of working with me.


Tomorrow will be a great test of my bumped up commitment. I will either stagger home and consume 4 -  1.75 bottles of Crown Royal Whisky or I will buckle down in the face of adversity and commit to making June bigger than May.

Much bigger.

Bet you are breathless in anticipation of the outcome.

What The Weekend Was

We had Saturday and Monday to ourselves.

Slow moving, peace filled days. Doing things together, doing things separately, digging on the cats, the screened in porch, the garden, the fountain, the weather and the overwhelming sense of how it feels to be human when you are away from work.

Sunday we cruised on up to Old Orchard Beach Maine for Cori and Sarge's annual barbecue.

Beautiful day, easy ride. Lounging in Cori and John's back yard with our Maine friends.

Friends who were introduced to us through Cori and Sarge.

I have a theory that quality people attract quality people. This crew is proof positive.

Cori and Sarge knew a whole hell of a lot of people. We met a lot of them.

Not all of them are people I would want to spend a lot of time with.

Then again a lot of them are.

These people are our friends no different than any other friends we are close to. Except they are a hundred miles away.

Can't pop over for a drink, can't go out to dinner on the spur of the moment. But whenever we do get together there is warmth and conversation and trust and laughter.

Kind of like bullpen friends.The guys who come in out of nowhere and keep our world rolling.

That analogy did not go the way I wanted it to but I still like it.

Robin and another dude did the barbecuing so I was off the hook. No pressure. Just eating  and drinking and socializing.

Sarge and Kevin were not there. They will never be there again.

It was a huge void and one that hung there unavoidably. I doubt there was one person there who did not think about them.

It was a good and a laid back day.

We were the last to leave.

As we were preparing to motor on south Cori said she had stuff for us.

She gave me one of Sarge's racing jackets. A very nice jacket. Nicer still because it was Sarge's.

I checked it out, draped it over my arm and let the tears roll out from under my glasses.

Bigger still. Cori gave Carol an afghan. An afghan Carol had crocheted for Sarge shortly after he graduated high school.

Shortly after Sarge graduated high school he took off for Wilmington, Vermont to write yet another wild chapter in his life.

Pancho's Wreck. There was a restaurant in Wilmington called Pancho's Wreck. Somehow Sarge and a lot of his friends ended up there as cooks and, probably, all around roustabouts.

Initially Sarge was living in a room above the restaurant which was not heated well or maybe not heated at all.

Carol and Sarge have always been especially close. In one of their conversations he told her how cold his room was.

Carol crocheted this afghan for him.

That afghan stayed with him for all these years, from Wilmington, to New York and to Maine.

Now it has come full circle.

That was Carol's turn to cry.

We spent that day in the presence of friends and in the absence of Sarge and Kevin.

We came home with a jacket and an afghan. We came home with reminders and memories and feelings too deep to express adequately.

It was a glorious day in celebration of so many things meaningful.

I came home feeling a love for my wife that is impossible to put words to.

On one level I though how similar she and Sarge were. Always giving to others. Always considering exactly what they need and then delivering. Sometimes giving things to people they didn't even know they needed or wanted.

I considered how hard it must have been for her to receive that afghan and how good it must have made her feel to know that Sarge treasured it enough to keep it around for his entire adult life.

Sunday was a very good day.

A Summer Moment

Driving home tonight from The Asylum.

86 degrees. Humid. All four windows down on The Big Ride. Radio on.

My kind of night. My night.

As I got close to home Layla came across the radio. The original version. Not the slow one, which I also love.

So I'm cruising faster than I should be cruising and my whole body smiles. My whole psyche, my whole being, my whole past and my whole future.

Layla is memories. It is association. It is good feelings and good music and good guitar and a long step back to a simpler time in my life.

It goes deeper than that for me. If you are an Allman Brothers fan you know that Duane Allman played on that track with Clapton.

You know that bird sound, that very cool bird sound at the end of the song? That was Duane.

And he contributed a whole lot more than that musically. Clapton and Duane dueled back and forth on that song, two guitar Gods duking it out with mutual respect.

Such a great story. At the time, Duane and Eric were circling each other like gunslingers. Each was in awe of the other. They had not played together before.

The Allman Brothers were in Miami where Clapton and crew were recording Layla. Duane asked if he could sit in.

Clapton knew who he was dealing with. They created history.

So I am driving home from HELL but digging on the weather, my weather and the way it makes my mind feel and Layla comes on.

The perfect moment.

A moment when I can lay my head back on the headrest and just smile.

My short hair blowing in the wind.

Tonight is summer.

A taste. A promise. A feel. An emotion.

The music.

I am still smiling.

1,000 and Counting

After reading peacefully this morning, I placed my bookmark at page 1,000 of "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand.

That's like reading three typical books.

And I still have 168 pages to go.

Thing is, this book is overwhelming in thought stimulation. It is a work of fiction Ayn Rand used to espouse her theory of how life should be lived.

Over and over again, I read long passages that are really Rand's philosophy in the words of characters, and I know as I am reading this that I need to pay attention, that I am being exposed to something radical and interesting and potentially life changing.

This is heavy duty stuff thinly disguised in a work of fiction excellently written.

You don't get that every day.

My commitment to this book has been unwavering. I have been plowing through it for some time now, interrupted by annoying distractions like work and sleep.

I love it. It stimulates me.

It has stimulated this nagging thought that if I change the way I look at myself and at life I can radically change my existence.

This plays right into my hands right now, considering where my head is at relative to the shock and pain I and my family have endured.

The types of things that make you want to change your life and make it your own and learn to enjoy and appreciate it.

Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Do You Think This is What Pink Floyd Meant?

"He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly - yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think."

"Atlas Shrugged",   Ayn Rand



"We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom, teachers leave them kids alone."

"Another Brick in the Wall",   Pink Floyd

Goddamn, This Stuff Hurts

A passage from "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, describing how the typical working stiff struggles through his life and how those in control manipulate him.

"And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don't know what has hit them or why, who crawl as bet they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence - and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk."