more normal than not

It’s funny how often, when you talk to people and you’re able to really get down to brass tacks….go below the surface of what people are willing to show day-to-day, how they all seem to have a place where they wish they could be but for some reason “just can’t get there”.

It may be a place that they’ve read about or actually visited, driven through maybe…or took a hike there or stopped and had the best breakfast they’ve ever eaten.

Sometimes, it’s not even the place…it’s just the circumstances that aligned perfectly and the company they were keeping…it’s not the place, it’s the memories that somehow got attached to the place.

And memory is a strange and changeable thing.

We mold our memories to be what serves our purposes.

The place we “are” can feel like a prison…until we can’t be there anymore and it becomes a paradise…full of our nostalgia.

It’s a rare thing to talk to people who are consistently happy where they are.

It’s hard to be happy in the moment.

Often, it’s “where we are” or “what we have” or “where we’re going” or “I could get there if I…” or “who we’re with” or…or, a whole list of other sets of circumstances that might allow us to really…finally…be happy.

“No matter how good things are….things can always be better.”

That’s a rough way to live.

It’s hard to live up to a potential that you don’t even really understand.

It’s not good to expect things to be better when you can’t see how good things already are.

I used to think that I needed to live back out West…the elusive and mystical “West”.

The times I’ve been able to visit the “West”, I was always happy to get back home.

Maybe I just wanted to be somewhere “away”?

That’s been a pretty consistent thread, now that I think about it.

I think that for most of my life, I just wanted to be somewhere “away”.

Weird.

You can’t really be happy where you are if your boots are always parked by the front door.

Driving the mail around, there are places where I can feel the cool air coming off the streams in some of these little “hollers” that I drive through.

There is a certain smell and the air feels different and it makes me glad that I live where I live.

It’s beautiful here in the Spring.

I think that it’s probably beautiful everywhere in the Spring, though.

Even the worst of places is a little bit nicer when the Winter ends and things green up.

I love Idaho.

It’s really beautiful out there…and it feels good to be out on the old home place, walking around.

There’s some good family history out in Idaho.

But you know….my family history is right here so far. This is my family history that’s happening everyday.

Big or small…this is my life… where my family is.

Like the picture…everything else is a blur…

THE WELL IS DRY!! THE WELL IS DRY!!

I could drop a pebble down the well and hear it hit soft mud at the bottom.

Some mornings I wake up after a fitful nights sleep and think that I’ve hit the end….there’s nothing more to write about.

I might have had two good subjects and 600 posts…and now I’ve exhausted the supply of topics and that’s it….from here on out it’s going to have to be posts where the only thing I have to fall back on are funny Youtube videos of monkeys doing strange things.

It’s over…the world is sucked out into a creativity free black hole and there is nothing that interests me or catches my attention.

Of course, I think that way when I’m tired.

I’m tired because I’m on the periphery of the “new baby nighttime hijinks”.

I’m on the edge of all of that.

Jenny is in the middle of that storm.

She’s really tired.

In the big scheme, I’m not even that tired, really. I’m not exhausted. I don’t have my nose to any grindstone that I know of.

I have nothing to complain about…soft bed, soft life.

I’m blessed.

I know that.

Today is Memorial Day and I have the day off.

The post office gave us the day off so that we could do what we could to honor and remember our veterans.

Here’s a funny aside…funny strange…

I deliver out of the Saluda, NC post office now. They combined offices so Zirconia delivers out of Saluda.

In the town of Saluda, there was a big controversy because the town was denying this fellow’s right to put up this sign at the edge of town….

I guess that it wasn’t cool to put up a sign that wasn’t approved by the city first.

I’m not sure what the controversy was.

There’s plenty of goofy signs in Saluda….you’d think that it would be a no-brainer to allow someone to make mention that Saluda liked Veterans.

They’ve allowed him to put it up now…I’m glad.

You shouldn’t have to get a permit for patriotism.

You shouldn’t have to get permission to say how proud you are of the people who fought for your freedoms.

I’m glad that his sign is up now.

What’s that old saying about anything worth having is worth paying for?

(Maybe it’s “worth fighting for”? Same difference….)

“Worth paying for”….

I have all these freedoms that I didn’t earn.

I didn’t do anything to earn them….I never had to fight for them or even work hard to sustain them.

I take them for granted.

They’re a part of my everyday life that are invisible to me as I enjoy them.

I am so free that I don’t even have to be conscious of how much freedom I really do have in my life.

Somebody…at some time in history…paid for my freedoms.

Things are easy for me because of it.

That’s something worth celebrating…worth honoring.

Somebody paid for my freedoms.

Somebody fought for my right to walk around ….oblivious to how free I am.

Maybe I should write about that?

Maybe I should put up a sign, too?

I just finished watching this movie…online…and, mostly because, in this world of all possibilities, I couldn’t think of a blog post topic (!!)….I’m going to write for a while about this amazing film.

This movie was kind of a surprise for me.

I’d heard some critics talking about it on the radio….and they seemed to enjoy it…so when I saw that I could watch an HD quality print online….well…

I jumped at the chance.

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a movie completely like this one.

That’s a hard thing to say these days.

There isn’t a whole lot of originality in the world anymore. Plot lines are regurgitated…set in a different locale or with a different type of cast…maybe a western goes to space or the aliens come to the old west…maybe the girl gets the girl at the end of the movie now? It’s hard to say what’s going to happen anymore. For all the weird tweaks and attempts to make the old idea feel new again, it all feels strangely familiar sometimes.

So this movie was a pleasant surprise.

(Maybe “pleasant” is the wrong word…there isn’t a whole lot that’s “pleasant” about this movie…)

The plot of this film is that in the future, after failed efforts to combat the effects of global warming plunge the world into another ice-age, the remaining survivors take refuge in a nuclear powered train that circles the world forever.

It’s a closed ecosystem with its own caste system…the people at the back of the train being lower on the “social scale” than the privileged front riders.

According to the “engineer”, everyone has their place.

Everyone has their place….no matter how unfair it may seem.

Of course, the people in the back don’t like this…conditions are horrible at the back of the train….and they revolt.

The revolution is what this movie is about.

Chris Evans without his Captain America suit….Ed Harris…Tilda Swinton….John Hurt….good cast.

Read some reviews on IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes…and you can see that the reactions to this movie were kind of a mixed bag…some folks loved it, some folks hated it.

The ones who hated it have some valid points…it’s pretty far-fetched (but it is a fantasy…) and you really have to suspend your disbelief at times…let the plot holes and contradictions pass by without thinking about them too much…

The ones who loved it, really loved it.

Maybe that’s what makes good art….it provokes response?

Maybe this movie isn’t really art? I don’t really know.

But it was pretty cool….with all it’s shortcomings that I didn’t really pay attention to at 5 in the morning….it was pretty darn cool.

This movie has been out in Europe for a while….now  it’s coming to the states after a long delay on June 27th…..

It’s a movie worth checking out…in the theaters soon….

Or….

movie4k.to

….if you can’t wait.

Just saying.

We ate at a pretty fancy pizza place downtown last night to celebrate my daughter’s birthday.

It isn’t your “run of the mill” pizza place.

It’s fancier than that…wood-fired with a gourmet menu.

Zoe ordered a potato and walnut pizza…one that she’d had before and enjoyed.

I ordered a pizza for Jenny and I to share.

I decided that we should branch out and try something different this time.

So I ordered the salmon and goat cheese pizza.

Now I know what not to order next time we go to this pizza place.

It sounded kind of interesting on the menu…a diverse collection of ingredients accented by a drizzle of balsamic vinegar reduction, if my memory serves me well….

The “balsamic vinegar reduction” should have been the tip off….too fancy for me.

Let me see if I can find the description from their menu online….

Yeahhhh…..here we go:

Roasted Salmon Pizza – virgin olive oil brushed crust, roasted salmon, fresh spinach, marinated artichoke hearts, red onion & local goat cheese with balsamic reduction drizzle. – 14

I think it was the local goat cheese that did us in….I could tell that it was goaty goat cheese. It tasted goaty….

Goaty and fishy isn’t a good combination.

That pizza is a good example of what a survival mechanism “live and learn” is.

Jenny didn’t like it…she has discerning tastes…so I ended up eating this nasty pizza because I didn’t want to waste it….which says something about my survival mechanism, I suppose. I’m cheap enough that I’d rather eat something that none of us enjoyed than waste my money.

We had a good time…but I wouldn’t recommend the goaty fish pizza.

(If they’d described it as “goaty fish pizza”, I wouldn’t have ordered it.)

I was thinking this morning about how so much of what we do is a matter of degrees.

Tweaked a little, some of these experiences would be wonderful and completely memorable.

If the salmon had been smoked and “drier”….thinly sliced….and the cheese had been slightly less goaty…and the drizzle of balsamic reduction had been more subtle….and….

And…if that pizza had been a hand grenade we’d all be dead.

It’s a waste of time to get caught up in “what ifs”….

But there’s so much that almost makes the grade….so much in this world that is almost great, or even “almost acceptable”, that our standards eventually are lowered to the point where we’re pleasantly surprised by even “competency”.

It’s like that old physician’s saying about “first, do no harm…”

It’s as if we were satisfied if most of our experiences didn’t go any farther than that….”do no harm”…but don’t do anything beyond that, either……

If an experience wasn’t “bad”….well….it has to have been “good”, then, right?

Knowing that, we can work at meeting a lowered expectation… because mediocrity becomes the new norm…the “do no harm” fallback position…the place where “good enough” is all we ever get because it’s all we now know…

This was just a pizza…and the company and the memory of the “goaty fish pizza” more than make the experience pretty great.

I don’t know that I could live in a world where I wasn’t blown out of the water by “excellence”, anyway.

The surprise would probably kill me.

Man….I used to eat this stuff up when I was younger…back in the day….

How many little kids were running around in the 1970’s “snatching a pebble from my hand” and practicing their high kicks because of David Carradine?

I heard the song at the bottom of the post…the one by Curtis Mayfield…and all of a sudden I was thinking about David Carradine and Kwai Chang and Kung Fu and “the pebble” and Grasshopper.

The song didn’t have a whole lot to do with Kung Fu, it turned out….but it was a kickstarter for my memories…

That was quite a show.

“Be like the sun and what is within you will warm the earth”

Ahhhhhhhh!!! I ate that kind of stuff up, boyeeeeeeee!!!

What a great introduction to all that philosophy stuff…what TV show ever referenced some of this stuff?

How about this scene where he leaves the temple?

I could never look at a hibachi without wondering if that wasn’t a passage to the outer world….I could have been a 12-year-old, training-less “monk” with funky scars on his arms.

That would have been a bad move…for me…..it worked out great for Caine…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y5foQGKNeY

I don’t remember seeing another show like this….I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed this show until I watched a couple of clips for this blog.

This was a great show….”snatch the pebble”?

Cool…..

“Kung Fu” Curtis Mayfield