more normal than not

I think about perspective a lot.

Sometimes I write about it as if puzzling it through by remembering the order of a bunch of letters will help me come to a stronger conclusion.

I desperately want to figure it all out.

It’s the key.

Having a good perspective on things is going to get me through this world.

We just finished what is called a “mail count” at work. A mail count is where we (and you probably guessed what is going on before I tell you) count all the mail…every letter and flat (magazine/catalog), every move we make, every package…and then the results are applied to something called the MATRIX and the folks who know assign a number and a letter to the route that determines how much we are paid…and more importantly to me, at least…how many days a week we have to work.

We finished our count and the results said that I was now an “H”.

That meant that instead of getting a day off every other week, that I was back to working 6 days a week.

Gaaaaaaawwwwwwwwfuuuuushhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh……

I was HOT. It got warm in the office when I heard that news.

It was bad news.

So….it was a test of my perspective.

When I got home….it was like it should be. My little boy was happy to see me and wanted to show me his latest Lego creation.

My family greeted me warmly.

But in my head, the news I’d gotten was taking center stage.

What was wrong with me? Things at home were still great. But this news was too bad to ignore.

I was an “H”. How could this have happened to me? I was an H .

Do you know how it feels to be an “H”? Do you know how hard that is to suddenly be an “H”?

Do you know how sad it makes me that being assigned a letter for my contribution to the working part of my life is something that’s even on my radar?

So my perspective failed me. I was upset.

I have a great and loving family and I was upset about this “work news”.

What do the French say? I think it’s something like, “Le Pissed Offe”.

About the time I’d pulled it back to the “simmering volcano” level, my Postmaster called and told me some good news…

I was a “J” again.

I hadn’t gained anything because of the count…but I hadn’t lost anything either. I still had one day off every two weeks!

It seems that I should have been given credit for the extra work I was doing that before was being considered a freebie…so when they factored the real number for my contribution, the results were more favorable.

They’d determined that I should be given credit for the work I was doing!

And….Baddabingbam…I was a “J” again!

Imagine what that did for my perspective. My universe aligned and all was cool…just because the stupid letters were more to my favor.

Now, I could be depressed if I start thinking about this whole MATRIX thing and the letters and the rigidity of the Postal System.

I could be depressed if I started thinking about the Matrix… there’s something dark at work there, I think.

I’ve seen the movies…I know there are strange things behind the curtain.

But I’ll take what I can get if a letter means that I can get away from it every other week for a day.

At least that’s my perspective.

I’ll take what I can get.

And besides…there’s a Lego castle that I need to pay closer attention to all the time…..

I woke up at 5:47 this morning instead of the usual 5:00.

I looked at the clock we keep by our bed…the one we can set to make a loud sound when we want to wake up…the one we use to time ourselves….to give us the time…to tell us “when”….and thought, “Gahhhhhh…I’m late! How will I ever get my blog written this morning before I have to get on the highway at exactly 7:30 to go to work?”

I’m like some kind of freaking punctual robot.

I’m a “Time Nazi”.

That’s a funny term my wife’s family uses…now it’s a funny term my family uses.

I’m a part of the family, you see.

How did all this happen? I wear a wristwatch. We have clocks all over the house. There’s a clock on my car radio…and if there wasn’t, the announcers would keep me up to date on what time it was.

I can’t stop running into clocks everywhere I look.

And then people talk about how time might be running out…how we’re all getting older…how we’re burning the candle and running out of time and using up what we have and how it might not be enough.

So we set up and reinforce this awareness that time is fleeting…and then we spend all day monitoring it with all these timepieces.

I have a better chance of watching a cloud float by than I do of seeing time pass.

Where is all this “time” that people keep talking about?

I can see the hand on my watch move around the dial…and I guess that I understand time. If the hands are moving, time must be passing.

If someone tells me “it is”…well, I guess it all must be a fact.

That’s a law of nature…it’s a measurable fact.

And just so that the planes land on time, all over the world, it darn well better be a consistent “measurable fact”.

That’s something to shoot for….consistent measurable results. Where would we be without a clock to measure with? What would we do without “time” on our hands?

So I woke up “late” this morning.

Going on the trusted measurement that rules my life, I woke up exactly 47 minutes late this morning.

Less than an hour of time on the universal measurement, and I felt like I’d made a mistake somehow.

I felt like I’d messed up.

My timing was off.

I guess that what I’m meandering towards is the thought that it’s kind of strange that we let some kind of mechanical/digital/organic measurement affect how we feel about the day.

That’s pretty weird, that when someone says, “You want to go play?” that we might find ourselves responding that we just “don’t have the time right now”.

If we don’t own our time, then who does? What the heck? How’d that happen that we owe somebody any of our time?

How did we get to the point that we’re willing to trade time for some money so we can go to Fatz restaurant and eat some crappy fish?

Or trade it so that we can get Health Insurance because at some time in the future, we might get sick.

It’s good to have some kind of system, I suppose…but how’d this whole “time thing” ever get to this point? How’d TIME get to be so powerful? It’s like we were all sleeping…and then woke up one day and thought, “THE TIME!!! LOOK AT THE TIME!!!”

I need to stop wearing shoes, make myself some weird hemp jewelry, get a suntan, and stop wearing a watch….do more artwork and learn how to play again.

Someday, I may just do that.

But right now, I can’t.

I’m late.

I washed my “leavings” down the drain this morning and thought about something for the first time.

Actually, I think about things all the time….so I misspoke if I say that it was the first time that I thought about something.

I think about things quite often.

By “leavings”, I mean what ever it’s called that’s left in the sink after I shave a days worth of whiskers off.

Maybe “ex-whiskers” or “potentiabeard” would be more accurate descriptions?

I think I’ll call it “potentiabeard”. That sounds pretty cool. I like that new word.

Anyway, I shaved and then rinsed all these little black stubby, stubby hairs down the drain…all that “potentiabeard” that a day produced…and I thought, “I wonder how many potential “full vikings” I’ve washed down all the different drains I’ve known in my life?”

That’s kind of a funny thought…nothing to obsess over or anything…I don’t need to do a “drain genealogy” ….but it’s a funny thought to think about the beards that could have been.

I’m not going to retrace my steps in detail just so I can catalog something that I might see as a loss now, though.

If I didn’t make these tiny hairs go down the sink on a consistent basis, I would not be a very popular person at my house.  It’s kind of gross to have a bunch of whiskers in the sink. I couldn’t get away with keeping my memories around very long.

I couldn’t get away with that.

That beard was on a ship that sailed. It’s gone.

Sometimes, I obsess over things that I’ve lost like any of it matters.

Like it matters.

Now, the people I’ve lost mattered. To lose a loved one is a tragedy that never really stops being a tragedy. That will always matter.

But sometimes I misplace a brick…a single brick…and then moan about the house that could have been.

I trouble myself over some mysteriously “better” circumstance that eluded me…some twist in the road that might have brought me to a different conclusion.

“Might have been” can be sort of seductive. “Could have been” pulls you into it’s orbit with minimal gravitational suck.

Now, I’m in a good place…I couldn’t design something better if someone said, “here…anything you want…ANYTHING!!! How’s that sound? Right…anything. Anything you want…any life, any people around you…name it, it’s yours…all you have to do is look around and decide.”

I wouldn’t change my life.

Wow…that’s a good early morning revelation….. “I like my life”.

That’s goooooooood. That’s a good thing.

And I really don’t miss my “potentiabeard” to the point of incapacitation.

Smooth or hairy, it’s “all good”.

I did ponder that swirling hairy water for a moment this morning and think about what might have been if I’d just left it alone and let it do what “potentiabeards” do.

If I’d just let it grow, I’d have a beard by the end of the month.

But smooth is good.

It’s crazy to miss something that never was.

Be here now.

That’s not a picture of me.

 

I don’t know if it’s “cool” to like this as much as I do.

Maybe if I pretend that I like it from an “ironic” viewpoint…maybe if I pretend that I come at it from a cynical angle…tongue in cheek, laughing at this “old stuff”…maybe I could get away with liking it and no one will ever have to know that I’m sincere in my appreciation.

Andy Williams recorded this version around 1962, so I would have been pretty little when it was first aired.

I doubt that I saw it then…although my parents might have seen it…and I might have been in the room with them when they were watching it.

So…I guess that I might have seen it then.

Maybe.

The fact that my parents might have watched it is enough reason to have an interest in it.

Check out what this guy does.

He stands there on stage and sings a beautiful song really well and completely grabs my attention.

No pyrotechnics or “meat suit” costumes…no twerking…no bad attitudes.

It’s just a normal looking guy entertaining the viewer.

And he does it with both style and a really smooth approach.

Really smooth.

This is some of the coolest stuff I think that I’ll hear anywhere.

We don’t think about Andy Williams much anymore.

He’s not in the news.

He’s not with us anymore.

He’s not here.

This music is so great, though.

Check this one out….and I’ll close. I’ve got to go anyway.

We can be moved by simple things…simple sets, music that sounds familiar….sincerity of approach, real talent that isn’t pushy or inappropriate or vulgar.

I know that it can be done…watch this guy do it.

My postmaster told us yesterday that they were giving a 20% pay increase to attract postal drivers to move to North Dakota.

In the “Fracking Fields”, that would put us among the lowest paid people in the area. I don’t know if you could even afford to find a house in that frigid region on those wages.

Now, I’m far from complaining. I have nothing to complain about. Postal wages are good. We can be comfortable down in the Carolinas where it’s warm…we have things pretty “dialed in” down here.

It’s a good life.

But, to move to the Dakotas where it’s impossible to find a cheap place to live anymore, would be a goofy decision….and 20% really isn’t a good incentive.

The days of being able to find a great house for thirty thousand dollars….just because it’s in the “Dakotas” (who would want to live there?)….went away when they started drilling sideways for gas.

That ship has sailed…and it sounds like it left without filling up with enough mail delivery workers first.

Oh well.

I wrote a post a couple of days ago about a really maudlin song.

My friend Joel commented on the post and mentioned that I’d put it on a mixtape that I’d made for a road trip that we’d taken together back in the 80’s.

I guess that if you put anything into the context of listening to it while you looked up at the Wind River Range for the first time….well, shoot…it kind of turns a maudlin song into something different.

And because it’s something different now, if you think about it, from then on the “maudlin song” becomes something more important than it probably deserves to be.

It becomes another “trigger” for remembering a really good and important time in your life.

Here’s another “trigger”…and I’ll set the scene a little before you play it.

Imagine two “late stage” adolescents, cruising down the highway in an early 1970’s Dodge Dart, laughing and pointing out all the new and strange…to them…sights they were seeing.

I am on a road trip with my friend, Joel.

That’s a good and hilarious place to be.

I’m in my early 20’s…that’s why I say “late stage” when I mention adolescence.

Big vistas and wide open road ahead of us and behind us more of the same.

Road construction…so we’re slowing down…gives us a chance to add some more highly philosophical musings on the cassettes we’re recording as we meander across the country.

And then this song comes on…

By the time the chorus had made its way around again, we’re singing the lyrics like we’d known the song all our lives.

“Just look at them beans, doooodoooodoooo, and look at that corn….dooodooodooo…and I bet that watermelon must be three feet long….dooodooodooo”

Where did that song come from? It’s not a radio staple anywhere I’ve ever lived…that’s the one time I’ve ever heard it on the airwaves.

It came out of nowhere…out of the ether…from Johnny Cash’s mouth to the grooves of an old record…then to a disc jockey’s hands in Nebraska? Wyoming?….then to the cheap Jensen speakers in an old blue car….and from there, almost instantaneously, to the ears of two young wandering souls.

Bam….instant trigger for the rest of my life.

That is a funny little miracle.