third day pain

Posted on by August 22, 2013

What a dramatic title.

Makes what I do sound so much more mythic and “trial” like.

Actually, it’s more like “third day discomfort” than any real pain.

I try and pay attention to my body a little more than I did when I was 20.  I’d stop if anything really started to hurt in a bad way.

But it made me wonder why the third day is harder somehow.  Maybe it’s just that the previous two days “aches” have had a chance to catch up to me…it’s hard to say what’s going on.

So…I’ve been running a little over a mile the last three days.  Trying to ease back into it.  I thought I’d spend about a year easing and then bump up the mileage to a good 1.75 miles.

Kidding.  A mile isn’t too impressive.

It’s a start, though.

Looking for running videos this morning, I came across this one.

It’s a long documentary but it helps to have something else to compare my tiny amount of discomfort to.

I run in the morning when it’s cool.  In the mountains of WNC, it’s usually a little cooler than most places in the South.

This morning the moon was full and there was a lot of light and it was a really pleasant temperature.

Look where these guys choose to race.

Holy Smokes….it’s smoking hot in the desert.

I’m not hurting nearly as bad as I thought I was.

There are a few ultramarathoners who might be known by name…Dean Karnazes is the only one I can think of right now…but for the most part these guys seem to do it because they love the activity.

In these days of A-Rod and watching sports turning more and more into some weird diseased business, it’s pretty refreshing to see a bunch of people who do it for the love of the sport.

Sadly, that’s getting more unusual.

It’s exciting to feel my small amount of discomfort again.  I love running.  It’s good to start to slowly get back into it again.

I know from the past what discomfort leads to.

It’s a good thing to work through.

the full-on original freak out

Posted on by August 21, 2013

Blond Boy Crying

My youngest son went with my wife and older son to the library the other day.

They go and pick out the week’s worth of books and just kind of hang out for a while.

It’s a fun trip.

When they went to Wal-Mart after the library, Nate decided that he’d take Teddy in with him when they did their shopping.

“Where’s Teddy?”

“Where is Teddy?!”

“WHERE’S TEDDY?!!! WHERE’S TEDDY?!!  I WANT TEDDDDDDDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!”

So after a frantic look through the minivan, the “big people” realized that Teddy was back at the library.

“Teddy’s at the library…we’ll have to get him on the way home.”

“NOOOOOOOO….SOME OTHER KID WILL TAKE HIM!!!! SOME OTHER LITTLE KID WILL TAKE TEDDY!!!”

It was a full-on freak out.  Big time.  You don’t stop a tornado when it starts spinning, you don’t push lightning back into the cloud….”you don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with…” Nate.

A freak out session definitely alters an adult’s ability to enjoy any task.

It changes our reality.

Anyway, after a truncated trip into town, they got back to the library and got Teddy.  He was safe at the library.

No little kid had taken him home.  No one had stolen Teddy.

What a freaking relief.  I felt bad that I have to work 6 days a week and had missed all the fun.

In Nate’s defense, I started thinking about freak out sessions and how it’s not really something that’s only a little guy’s territory.

We cloak our own freak outs in adult trappings.  We have the vocabulary to describe it more poetically.  We can go to a therapist, or smoke a lot, or develop a big drinking problem, or wreck our cars or get in bar fights…there’s lots of things an “adult” does to express freaking out….but a freak out is a freak out is a freak out.

Maybe it’s not about something like a stuffed bear, but it’s still a freak out.

A friend has a song with a line in it that mentions “children in disguise”.

I guess that’s what we all are, really.  We don’t ever get very far away from whatever we were as children.

We just learn to blend in with all the other children pulling off the same deception.

And it creates a lot of tension sometimes to keep the freak out potential at bay.  It’s hard to either get all your ducks in a row…or to allow yourself to become so delusional that you think it’s all under control.

I guess that’s why we have laws.  I guess that’s why we have “social norms”.

Freak outs could be a problem if everyone was screaming in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

“Where’s my Teddy?!!!”

“WHERE’S MY TEDDY?!!!”

” Oh, wait…I’m an adult.  I don’t have childish concerns like a Teddy…”

“WHERE’S MY PROMOTION?!!!!  WHERE’S MY BIG NEW HOUSE?!!!  WHY CAN’T I CATCH A BREAK EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE?!!!”

“Now….ummmm…enough with the figurative musings….that’s crazy. I’m an adult. Calm down.”

but…..

“WHERE’S MY CAR KEYS?!!!  SOME LITTLE KID IS GOING TO STEAL MY CAR KEYS!!!”

 

normal

Posted on by August 20, 2013

sky runner

I went for my first run in a couple of years this morning.

It took me a while to realize that it had been a couple of years since I last ran, but it had.

That’s a pretty long time.

Of course, I have read a couple of running magazines and watched a few races and films about running on TV…but I don’t think that it had much improvement on my body fat percentage and VO2 max to watch someone else exercise.

So this morning I ran. This morning I jogged. This morning I did something that was a little faster than walking.

It’s a grunt to get started again.

I ran up to the church and back…about a mile or so.

It felt kind of hard after being fairly sedentary and mostly just driving the mail around 6 days a week.

Except for mowing the lawn and occasionally chopping some wood, I don’t get a whole lot of exercise.

That’s normal, though…I guess.

I started thinking about “normal” on my run.

You hit a certain age and you put a little weight on…or redistribute the weight you already have….and people say, “Oh, that’s normal.”  Usually they follow that pretty quickly with, “….at your age”.

It’s like you’ve hit the point of starting the downhill part of the roller coaster and you’re just supposed to throw your hands up and say, “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” on the fast ride down.

I guess that’s normal.

Meandering back into running, I wonder if normal and status quo are things to settle for?

I’m not a runner again yet…but I start to get aware that “normal” may not be such a healthy thing.

I heard someone say, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”  That’s not normal to say something like that.

I think that normal would be more like counting every single day you’re alive…do the math…make the comparisons, run the numbers, consult the actuarial tables…and arrive at the conclusion that in order to keep the boat from rocking, it might be best to accept the fact that older dudes have some belly fat and borderline cholesterol readings.

Now that’s normal!

I don’t want botox.  I don’t want someone to lipo me or pull my lip over my head or smooth this or sculpt that.  I don’t need pec implants…no, I said that wrong….I don’t want pec implants.

I’m not freaked out about getting older…I’m just freaked out about acting my age.

How immature.

I make fun of the people who have become desperate about dodging the reaper and who take silly measures to do it. That’s kind of hilarious. It’s funny to see what a lot of money and a little desperation create when they collide.

There are some goofy looking people as a result of dissatisfaction.

But normal?  I doubt that the bulk of people…the majority of “bulky” people…have access to surgically enhanced living.

Unless they find a way to finance it.  You can always have augmentation if someone will help you set up an easy payment plan…or give you a really good amount on your title pawn.

I don’t think this fitness/aging thing is really a battle.  But it is a gentle and constant reminder that “normal” may not be the best way to go.

Like the Isley Brothers used to say….

Fight the Power!!!

07 – The Isley Brothers – Fight The Power Part 1

 

rain and the postman

Posted on by August 19, 2013

harvest moon box

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My kids enjoy playing a game called Harvest Moon.

It’s a game, from the little I’ve seen of it, where you set up a community and plant your crops and enjoy life in a rural setting.

It’s a pretty nice game…very peaceful.

The other day my daughter told me that when it rains in the game….when it really pours in the game…all the characters move to shelter.

No one goes outside to work or play in the downpour.

The only character who goes outside to do anything in the heavy rain is…

the mailman.

The mailman.  That’s me.

I wouldn’t even be able to catch a break in a video game.

What the heck?!  That’s kind of disappointing.

It is pouring here right now as I type this.  Soon, I’ll be out on the road, trying to keep the mail from getting completely waterlogged as it makes the short journey from my Jeep to the mailbox.

You wouldn’t think mail could get so wet traveling a couple of feet.

That’s what I do, though.  I work in all kinds of weather.

The old adage about “rain or sleet or..” ( I think there’s another part but I don’t really remember it…was it scorpions?)…that old adage wasn’t even coined by the USPS.

It’s not the official motto of the USPS.  We don’t even have an official motto.

Somebody else set us up for that long before email was invented.

I guess the saying is, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

That’s me in a nutshell…unless the “gloom of night” part threatened to put me into overtime…then they’d shut that down pretty quickly.

If it wasn’t a “money thing”, they’d keep me out all night if it suited their needs.

That’s just a feeling I have.  It may not be true.

Here’s a Wikipedia link about the saying…kind of interesting to read about it.

When you really get down to it, the weather was never a thing that risked shutting the post office down.

We can deal with something that’s a force of nature.

Now, the fact that we have to pre fund our retiree health benefits to the tune of billions of mandated dollars a year (5.5 billion dollars a year is the figure I could find) is a different issue. It’s a little harder to handle than a vicious downpour or a blizzard.

5.5 billion dollars is a big chunk out of a company’s potential profits.

When you are required by law to do that…no matter how a business is doing…it can make a bad situation look even more dismal.

We may go to a 5 day delivery schedule.  That would save about 2 billion a year, apparently.

I’d love a Saturday off every week.  I’d love that.

I would not know what to do with a normal weekend.

But, that’s 2 billion dollars out of a reported loss of 20 billion a year.

That’s not a big percentage.

I wonder what it would have been like to be a mailman when we were perceived as “weather warriors” who were unstoppable in the face of violent weather?

That’s a lot more appealing than the perception of us being overpaid Union tools working for a company in dire financial trouble.

It’s better than the misconception that “the USPS is wasting our taxpayer dollars”.

I’m going to go saddle up my horse, get my leather pack bags, and set off in the blizzard to find out.

postman horseback

Right now.  I gots to know.

Right.

I’ll be all right as long as I can spur that horse on to avoiding overtime.

security light

Posted on by August 18, 2013

speciality-projects

We have a new neighbor.

He’s developing a piece of land across the street from us.

One of the first things he did was put up a big fence around the perimeter of his property.

One of the things that he did shortly after that was put up a security light.

It’s a big light on a big pole that turns itself on when the sun starts to go down.

We live out in the country. There aren’t any street lights on our road.  When it was dark, when it was night time….it was really dark.  You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.  You walked in faith when you went anywhere without a flashlight.

The only time you could really see was when the moon was full.

Then your walking figure threw a shadow on the trail ahead.

Now you have a shadow at night no matter what time of month it is.

Night is different now.

I don’t really understand what the benefit is of having a light like that fellow put up.  He comes up from South Carolina every so often…but usually it’s during the day, so he really doesn’t need the light then.

I guess it’s just a comfort factor for him.  It must give him a sense of peace to know that his recent possession is never covered up with darkness. It must make him feel safe to know that the place he visits weekly is all lit up when he’s not there.

But for me, it changes my world in a dramatic way.

There is something good about knowing that night-time is dark.

When the sun goes down, it’s supposed to be dark.

Unless someone has a security light, it is dark.

Our other neighbor had a security light that he let burn all night, too.  We had our bedroom on the side of the house facing his light, and it was a real trick to keep his light from shining in our window and keeping us awake.

I think that his bedroom was on the other side of his house…so the light wasn’t that kind of issue for him.

It’s hard to figure people out.  Everyone has a different idea of what’s going to make their lives better.

Put the bed up, put the bed down, light up the night so you don’t have to worry about the darkness…do whatever it takes, and if it intrudes on someone else’s space…well, it’s just collateral damage.

Like our favorite character on a weird reality show about kids surviving in a fake frontier town used to say, “Deal with it”.…seems to be the attitude that a lot of people approach their lives with.

Like some dog marking his turf, ringing his personal space with dog pee so that the other dogs know what the score is…soiling his home so he can feel the comfort of a claim well staked, until there is no mistaking that this smelly pile of s… is unmistakably his.

That kind of attitude really stinks.

03 – Parliament – Flash Light

Here’s an old funk song to take it to the bridge.

Let the darkness be dark.

 

action kills worry

Posted on by August 17, 2013

Action-Quotes

I wake up early a lot these days.

I don’t know if it’s genetics…or just getting a little older…or any of the reasons people can’t sleep in the morning…but I seem to wake up early.

The other morning, I was laying in bed thinking about every single thing that I needed to get done, all the changes that were happening in our lives, everything I’d already done and had convinced myself I’d done wrong, all the things I’d never get a chance to even start…much less get done, etc., etc., etc.

It didn’t feel like a really constructive way to spend my time.

So…I’m laying there mulling all this stuff over at 3:45 in the morning….and I came to a conclusion.

Action is a worry killer.

I got up.  I had my orange juice and vitamins. I put some water for the coffee on to boil.  I packed my lunch for the day.  I came back up stairs and sat down at the computer to write my blog. The water got hot and the kettle started to whistle.  I walked creeped back through the darkened living room and then ran down the stairs when I was sure I wasn’t going to step on a piece of Lego…quieted the whistling tea kettle and made my coffee, came back upstairs and sat down to write.

It wasn’t anything that was any different from any other morning.  Maybe a little earlier, but other than that no different.

But my thought that if I just got moving…if I just did something…anything…if I just took, to quote Anthony Robbins, if I just “TOOK ACTION!!”…if I just did that simple thing, I’d forget to worry….that thought was a good and empowering conclusion.

I needed to work on what is…not worry about what could be.

Maybe someone…somewhere…is thinking, “rigghhhttttttt…what’s so profound about that?”.

Well…nothing, really.

I don’t want to be some kind of big bug in a little box, scurrying around, bumping into every corner.

I can’t just move solely for the sake of moving around.  Willy-nilly is second nature to me…but it’s not really beneficial.

I guess there has to be some kind of method behind the mania…it can’t just be movement.

It has to be some relatively constructive action for it to kill the worry.

Otherwise, I’d start worrying about not getting anything done.  I’d worry about why I couldn’t get anything done even if it felt like I was constantly moving.

I’d start worrying about why I worry so much.

That I’m going to worry about stuff is kind of a given.  I ponder things, live inside my head a lot, wonder how the future is going to play out a lot more than I need to.

It seems to be something I’m pretty good at.

I was in sort of a foul mood the last couple of days.

I wasn’t mean, really…I just wasn’t feeling really “positive” about things.  There was a slant to my perspective that seemed to want to take me down.

I started thinking about events and choices and realized that, out of boredom on the mail route, I’d been listening to conservative talk radio for the last couple of days.

Problem solved.

Solution:  Stop listening to all these people talk about everything that’s going wrong and why we can’t trust anyone on the “other side”…and try and get back on the “good foot”.

Listening to someone else’s problems is as damaging as pondering my own.

Napoleon Hill is better for me to listen to than Rush Limbaugh.

Action kills worry.  Right Action builds good lives.

That’s not such a mystery…but where was that thought hiding for a while?

 

 

another big day

Posted on by August 16, 2013

freedom

In this life, people have big days all the time.

Someone is coming, someone is going…somewhere one of us is getting ready to have some kind of big day.

It’s the only real consistency in our lives…something is probably going to happen….all the time.

There is always someone having a big day.

Today is one of our big days.

Today our first-born child leaves for college.

She chose a college that’s about 45 minutes up the road from us.  Physically, it’s pretty convenient.  In a geographical sense, she didn’t make it hard for us to get to her.

Far enough…but not too far.

But it’s a marker of something else…like a leaf turning up before it rains, or geese flying south for the winter…and the “something else” that’s coming is understood by parents everywhere.

Being a part of life that’s “understood” doesn’t make it any easier.

I remember her first day of kindergarten.  I remember how it felt to see her little face while I said goodbye for that first time apart from both Mommy and Daddy.

And now I know how it feels to see her go off to college.

(I almost said “let her go off to college”.  What a slip of the brain.  I might help facilitate … but “let”? It shouldn’t be a situation where I’m “allowing her” to do this…that would be kind of sad. It’s not a matter of me “unclipping the leash”.)

When I started college, I made myself sick with worry.

I don’t think that I really wanted to be there.  I had visions of framing houses and learning carpentry…but I think my mother’s vision was a different one for me…and I ended up going to college.

I remember sometime in the first couple of days of being really sick with dread that I ate a bunch of beets because it was the only thing I thought I could stomach.

When the beets finished making their way around my digestive circuit, I was sure that I was bleeding internally.

The college nurse helped me remember that beets would give that appearance, too.

I don’t have any big advice for my daughter on her first day of “college life”…except maybe to just chill out a little…and to stay away from beets the first couple of days.

Getting back to the topic at hand…this is one of our big days.  This is a milestone in all of our lives.  There are parts of this journey that we all share with Zoe.

But when you really get down to it, this is, for the most part, her big day.

This is her walk that she’s continuing today.

This isn’t about how I feel watching her go. This isn’t about any demands or wishes to control her future that I might have.  This isn’t about my needs.

This is her walk … and I’m confident that she’ll handle it with class and grace.

I am proud of my children.

I am proud of my daughter.

Walk Tall, Zoe.

 

 

eyeballing

Posted on by August 15, 2013

crooked_house_1901

I’m working on a bathroom project these days.

It should have been something simple.

It’s not a full remodel…it’s just tearing out a short wall, rebuilding the wall, sheetrocking and taping and finishing the new wall, replacing the door with a sliding barn style door (that I’ll build), and generally cleaning up the mess and making it all look pretty again.

What a pain in the rear.

The railing has to be level for the door to slide correctly.  The railing needs to be level to look right against the doorway that has to be level to look right in relation to the railing. The railing mounts have to be up high enough over the door frame that the door I’m going to build covers up the whole door opening.

The ceiling isn’t level.

This whole old mushroom house must be sinking down into the earth or something because nothing in it is really level.

To top it off, the ceiling isn’t only “not level”, it’s also not straight.  It curves down into the corner.

You don’t see many ceilings that curve down into the corner.

I’m glad that I don’t see that very often.

Anyway, I’ve got to figure out how to scribe a 2×10 so that it sits flush with the ceiling, comes all the way out to the precise “very edge” of the wall so that it covers up a small hole in the ceiling drywall, and then cut it down on the bottom of the 2×10 so that it sits (level) at the top of the door frame and acts as the top piece of trim on the door because we don’t have enough head room to put the railing up like the instructions specify.

I should just tear out the old ceiling, shim the rafters to make it all level, put up new sheetrock, tape and finish the new level ceiling, and start fresh.

But I don’t want all the rock wool that I know is up there to fall into my eyes.

I want to avoid making the simple job more and more painful.

Gnnnnhhhhhhhhhhahhhhhh.  FNNNNNNIIIIKKKKKKKKK.

When I put the trim up on the interior part of the door, the railing wasn’t a concern.  That part goes on the outside of the door.

The top of the door is level but the ceiling isn’t level.

So everything looks crooked even if some of it’s level.

When Jenny saw that, she said, “The pros say to just eyeball it and make corrections as needed for it to look right.”

Cool.  Solutions.

“The pros”.  Where are they when I need them?

I was going to write this blog about compromise and appearances and “going along to get along” and reading each and every situation we come into contact with…and adjusting accordingly for the most harmonious outcome possible.

But then I started to think that the more obvious and pressing lesson this whole shebang was teaching me is that sometimes even if you try to do the right thing…even if you try to “level up”…if you don’t have something good to start with, the whole thing is bound to look a little bit “wonky”.

No mattter how much eyeballing you do, it’s never going to be right.

And let’s say you get it close to right.

Let’s say you get it so right that everyone else who looks at it can’t see the defect.

You are always going to see that one side is a little lower.  You’re always going to remember that shim you put in so it didn’t creak quite as badly. You’re always going to remember what you did to cover up the defect.

You are the author of this debacle, and you see every hidden compromise that you made to try to get “almost right” to look correct in a reality that’s a little crooked.

There is a victory supreme in taking something weird and making it workable.

That’s a good feeling.

I think my wife would agree that with hard work and optimism, you can take something weird and make it workable.

(Look how she puts up with me.)

But good grief.  Why couldn’t that ceiling have been a little higher and more level?

And I sure could have done without those weird dips.

Detroit…again

Posted on by August 14, 2013

detroit houses

It’s hard to stop returning to thinking about Detroit.

That’s a good and powerfully convoluted way of saying that Detroit and all those vacant buildings have captured my imagination.

Detroit!

What’s up with that?

I was driving around (one of the central themes of my life and job) yesterday, and I started thinking about homesteading…and the history of homesteading in this country…and some of the hardships the homesteaders faced…and how it must have felt to carve a niche for yourself out of a hostile land…and…

I started thinking about Detroit again.

Now, it’s kind of naïve and presumptuous and obnoxious to suppose that anybody busting a move up in Detroit like, “Look!  Here we are!  We’re going to SAVE THIS CITY! YOUR PROBLEMS ARE OVER NOW THAT WE’VE ARRIVED!! NOW…GIVE US SOME FREE LAND/HOMES!” would be received with open arms.

That would be pretty irritating to the long time residents.  It would get me mad if I’d been trying to make it in an area that was really going downhill and some over educated dude showed up to stake his claim in the middle of blight town.

But look at all those vacant houses.  Blocks and blocks of vacant houses.  That’s crazy.

Blocks and blocks of vacant land and houses…left to the occasional gang and the roving packs of feral pit bulls.

Who wouldn’t see the opportunity in a situation like that?

You think about the homesteading of Detroit and it seems like it could be a win/win situation for both the city and the homesteaders.

You get a bunch of naïve people with enough money to pay the taxes and refurbish some of these derelict properties.  They pay the taxes, fix up the area, revitalize some…stick around for a period of years…and then they get the land…and then they own the houses.

Simple.

No Sweat.

I don’t really know how bad it is up there.

In all the old Cowboy and Indian movies, the settlers had a heck of a time.  Those Indians gave them fits when the settlers blew through to steal their land.

The Indians didn’t like that.

But the settlers were the heroes in all those old movies.  They were the ones who came off looking good when they blew an Indian off his horse with a well placed bullet from their lever-action Winchesters.

Maybe that’s what we need up in Detroit?  A bunch of WHITE GUYS with lever-action Winchesters?!

KIDDING, KIDDING, KIDDING…I’M JUST KIDDING.

That wasn’t funny.

Too many guns in the hands of too many people.  You don’t use a gun to rebuild a city…unless it’s a Paslode…or a Senco.

I think that most of the folks up in Detroit are good people who just want their city back.  Nobody wants to live somewhere where things are falling in around them.

Life should be nicer than that.

So…homestead the heck out of Detroit.  Give these houses away…give those blocks away…plant some gardens, fix some houses, convert some factories into studios and housing and youth centers and….

Who knows?

When you’ve stopped caring about these places…and the city’s bankrupt…and everything is just going to pot…why not just give it away in return for revitalizing some of the bad situations?

What do you have to lose?

You can’t subtract nothing from nothing.

It’s cheaper than having the bulldozers come back around, right?

missing

Posted on by August 13, 2013

compass-musicians

When someone goes missing in the woods, they send out a search party.  They don’t let another evening pass when they discover that a person isn’t where they need to be.

But what if a person’s “never left the building” and they’ve been missing for years?

How do you search for someone who seems to be in the room?

I love books.  I love buying books.  I read a lot of the books that I buy.

(Maybe I should read my own “hungry ghost” post again….)

I used to buy all the “60’s manifestos” I ran across.  By “60’s manifestos”, I mean all the hippy writings about living an authentic life, sticking it to the man, living without material possessions, living in a van down by the river, living…

Just generally “living”….there’s always going to be someone to tell you how to live.  Why not let some old hippy tell you what’s going on? There may still be a commune somewhere you can join, after all.

Coming from a slightly more adult perspective, it looks pretty selfish and unproductive…but when you’re young, the life of freedom and adventure sounds pretty appealing.

But really, it’s just joining the stream of young people through the centuries who convinced themselves that their parents don’t know how to really live …nothing all that new here.

It’s the same old story with some new and desperate youthful energy behind the telling…a frantic “I’m going to do it better! I’m going to bust out of these chains of impending adulthood before I’m bound up like my parents!!”.

“Hididdlededee, an actor’s life for me” we keep singing as we skip off to Pleasure Island.

But what if the problem was more subtle?  What if we really have dropped the ball somewhere? What if we’ve failed to live the genuine big life we were capable of living?

What if no one else in the world could see the lack but us?

We’d be so full of angst all the time.  It’s hard enough when it’s something physical that we can quantify…weight, income, material possessions,etc….but when it gets into the spiritual, or “youthful promise”, or artistic integrity, or anything that’s hard to measure…then it sets us up for a lifetime of feeling like we’ve shortchanged ourselves.

We don’t really know anyone else’s hearts.  We don’t know that they all had dreams that they’ve put on a back burner or given up on completely.

We each carry a hidden secret.  We all have dreams and aspirations that don’t show their faces.

There is always going to be some kind of invisible bar that seems out of reach.

(Someone else would say, “What bar? What are you talking about? Bar?!”.  It’s hard to see someone else’s aspirations.)

So…someone goes missing in the physical world and we send out a search party.

Someone goes missing in the spiritual world and it’s harder to see.

It’s the old story of the monk in the business suit, making his way through his own personal vigil. He can be full of life and understanding and not give his “hidden secret” away.

On the other hand, there may be someone who’s built up such a wall of apparent success that they can hide behind it.  They can be a shell without a middle…dead inside but hard to read, like if they kept scurrying to the next camouflaged deceit fast enough no one would notice that they’re not really alive.

Who am I to know, though?  I can’t even take care of myself sometimes.

I guess the real lesson is that Kerouac isn’t really a good role model…even if his exhortations to burn through life…”live, baby…live”… seem pretty appealing to someone just figuring things out.