Day 76: Steak & Potatoes

Where food is concerned, I'm a pretty simple man. I like my food simple. I like my choices to be simple. I like simple, straight ahead, no nonsense food that's edible, that won't confuse my taste buds, that won't upset the delicate balance I've worked so hard to build.

I don't particularly like to experiment with food. I know plenty of people who do and who are entirely happy doing so. They dabble in this. They dabble in that. The order of the menu. They walk down aisles of the grocery store I don't even know exist. They eat things I can't pronounce. No judgement here. What's fine for you is fine for you. But it's not my thing.

I'm sure not living a little more dangerously where food is concerned is to my own detriment, but I more or less have grown accustomed to the fact that where trying new dishes or dipping my chip in a new concoction is related, I'd rather not, thank you. Give me the basics. That's all I ask. I'll stick with what has gotten my this far: humdrum choices I know aren't going to let me down.

Here's the thing, I like to set myself up for success. I like to devote just one portion of my day to knowing that I'm going to make myself happy. Today, that involved supper. Yes, any day, like today, that my last meal consists of steak and potatoes, that, my friend, was a good day. Nothing fancy. Nothing that took hours to prepare and make. Five ingredients. That's all. Steak, potatoes, salt, pepper, and butter. Ta da. We have a winner, folks.

That's positive, brother. 

Day 75: “Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! The circus is in town!”

One of the absolute best aspects of having children and being a parent is the opportunities it presents to view expressions of joy, wonderment, excitement, anticipation, surprise, and delight on their faces. Compared to supplying myself with self-gratification, it’s not even a close race.

If you’re a parent and you expend more energy and time making sure you’re content and happy than you do doing the same for your children, you’re failing at your job--miserably. If you think by just providing a home to sleep in and food to eat that you’ve done your duty, you haven’t. Your responsibility is showing your children life is a treasure and there is gold to be discovered everywhere. If you’re not helping them unearth happiness and delight, you’re also missing out on one of life’s truest gifts. You’re missing out on the endless satisfaction that is bringing joy to another without expecting anything in return.

Tonight, my wife and I are taking our four-year-old to the circus. More than watching the clowns demean each other or the lions roaring or the monkeys riding horses or the tigers flashing foot-long teeth or the women and men flying through the air or the elephants stacking themselves on each other’s back, I’m looking forward to watching the endless stream of expressions on my daughter’s face as she experiences all the grandeur occurring before her eyes. I’m looking forward to her shoveling popcorn in her mouth, tearing cotton candy off the stick, and taking nibbles off my sno-cone as we turn our attention to the center ring and revel in the parade of clowns, animals, and performers making their entrance under the big top. I can’t wait to see her fidget in her chair, anxious to find out what’s coming next. I can’t wait to hear her squeal in delight. I can’t wait to see her curiosity quenched.

The years we have as parents to experience newness and discovery with our children are far too few. They fly by in the blink of an eye. The opportunities we’re given to present them with entirely magical worlds are criminally limited. When such opportunities come along, I firmly believe you have to take advantage of them. So I’ll get one less round of golf in my retirement by shelling out for good seats to the circus. So flippin’ what? So I’ll have to put off buying this or that for a while longer. Big deal. The circus, zoo, ballgames, amusement parks, swimming parks, vacations . . .  these are why I work hard.

I’m by no means the world’s greatest dad. My kids put up their share of crap where I’m concerned, trust me. I don’t know if they’ll remember moments like the circus decades from now, but it does my heart to experience these moments with them in the present.

Now pass the peanuts already. 

Day 74: The Ties That Bind (e.g. "The Hunger Games")

I don't read nearly as many books as I used to or as I would like to. I literally read all day, 8 to 5 p.m., five days a week. When I get home at night, the last thing that I want to do is stick a bunch of words right in front of my nose and concentrate on what they mean. The stuff I read every day is technical and often, it’s very much so, to the point it regularly does flybys over my head, and I have to re-read to make sense of it. Come 5:01 p.m., I hate words. 

That's a shame because reading has historically been one of my favorite and most passionate pastimes. Straight out of college, I didn't have a TV for roughly two years. When I did finally break down and begrudgingly part with some of meager wages for a whopping 13-inch set, I only had terrestrial channels to entertain me, and those were only on the air until about midnight on weekdays and maybe 1 a.m. on weekends. Thus, I spent the majority of my downtime in the bar drinking, at someone’s house drinking, or at my own apartment drinking and reading books. A good journalist I dedicated myself to become.

For the next decade, I read and read and read. Once you start to engage in reading on the regular, it becomes an addiction. Although I concentrated mostly on the classics the first year or so, I'd read pretty much anything thereafter. Graphic novels. Biographies. Philosophy. History. Photography books. Anything I could buy cheap from a local used book store or get from the library.

Those years served me well and gave me a pretty solid foundation. Today, most reading I do has something to do with music or sports--lightweight stuff that doesn't require too much of an attention span. I almost never read fiction, although I'm not entirely sure why. I made an exception several months back, though, after my daughter asked if I'd read "The Hunger Games."

“Um, no,” I said. “I haven’t even heard of it. Should I have?” It seems pop culture has passed me right by. She told me that yes indeed I should read it. That I’d enjoy it. That it wouldn’t take me long, but it was worth my time. After reading the plotline on the sleeve, I hemmed and hawed, coming up with one excuse or another as to why I’d consider it, but maybe now wasn’t the best time. Deep down, I didn't have a lot of faith that I'd be spending my time all that wisely. I was wrong

I should have trusted my daughter upfront. In hindsight, I'm thankful that I did. True, the book wasn't the best work of fiction I've even dived into. Still, I got sucked into Katniss' world soon enough, and I found myself ending up turning pages about as quickly as my eyes could take each sentence in. Before long, I was developing theories as to who was going to meet his or her demise next and if Katniss would ultimately endure. Simply put, reading "The Hunger Games" was damn fun, and damn if it didn't take my mind off of this given responsibility or the other, if even only temporarily. 

More important than anything, though, reading the book gave my daughter and I something to talk about at the dinner table. It gave us a chance to exchange our thoughts and wishes and expectations about something other than grades and chores and getting a job and all the other nuisances life throws our way. It gave us common ground. It gave us a tie that binds. That's so vital.

I live in a house with four females. That presents challenges, including not always knowing the right thing to say or how to say it. I don’t always understand why something I consider trivial they consider imperative and vice versa. That’s why I’m thankful to have shared “The Hunger Games” with my daughter, and I'm actually excited to see the movie, hopefully with my daughter, after it opens this weekend.

Thank you, Mikah, and thank you, Katniss. 

* For a great review of "The Hunger Games" as written from a 10-year-old girl, check out the great blog Book Monkeys from my longtime friend Clark and his daughter.

Day 73: Encyclopedia Britannica, parting is such sweet sorrow

As Encyclopedia Britannica so aptly stated on its blog yesterday, for 244 years its “thick volumes” have “stood on the shelves of homes, libraries, and businesses everywhere, a source of enlightenment, as well as comfort, to their owners and users around the world.”

Think about that for a second. For more than two centuries, Encyclopedia Britannica has been providing men, women, and children something on printed pages that’s both incredibly invaluable and incredibly useful: knowledge.

That’s now ended, though, as the company has announced it will no longer provide a print form of its glorious 32 volumes of encyclopedia beauty. Once the current inventory is sapped, that’s it, no more new printed pages of facts, biographies, and historical events for flipping through at your own leisure. No more earmarking pages of interest. No more sinking away entire rainy afternoons or snowy mornings pouring over recounting of the Roman Empire or the demise of dinosaurs or how baseball was invented or the significance of the Industrial Revolution—at least not on the printed page.

Encyclopedia Britannica might characterize the discontinuing of its printed volumes as “just another historical data point in the evolution of human knowledge” and try to console me by stating the “encyclopedia will love on—in bigger, more numerous, and more vibrant digital forms,” but I don’t sum up the situation as such, and I don’t feel comforted knowing I can log into a Web site or pop in a DVD and get a digital fix of info.

What I feel is the sadness of knowing another piece of my personal past has evaporated in an instant. I feel as if another piece of my existence has been altered and twisted and reshaped in ways I feel are unfortunate. I feel the same way I do when thinking too long about the slow death of albums or print media. I feel just a bit more lost in an ever-altering world, a world that already had me reeling and feeling out of place on any given day.

Look, I’m no old-timer who scorns anything that advances civilization. Far from it. I adore certain aspects of technology, both for the convenience they enable and the absolute close proximity they put vast amounts of wildly varying information, entertainment, and more to me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel sullen about another staple of my youth dying a slow death and is being left behind by evolution.

Why so torn up about a bunch of books, anyway? Because the encyclopedia set my parents so wisely purchased and made available in our home while I was growing up provided me endless hours of escape and learning and friendship. That set, bound in white covers with black print and appropriately categorized in alphabetical order in an old wooden bookshelf, was an island to where I could travel at any time I desired and feel absolutely at piece. Long before there was cable television or the Internet or video games to occupy children’s minds and energy, I would spend entire weekend afternoons perusing whatever would come my way in the S-T volume or verify what my teacher had just taught about Abraham Lincoln in the L-M pages. That encyclopedia set supplied entertainment, higher learning, discovery, amazement, horror, wonderment, disbelief, exuberance, and far more. The volumes were a teacher, mentor, guru, tour guide, and window to a far more vast and fantastic world than I could have ever conceived without their presence.

Upon reading the Encyclopedia Britannica news, my friend Steve, an instructor, may have summed up my feelings better than I can by saying: “Remember reading stuff and you were like, “Oh man, I am going there or I am going to do that or . . .? I also liked it when I read something my dad did not know or tried to BS his way through not knowing. I still laugh to this day when some kid starts a report or cites "According to the Encyclopedia Britannica . . ."

Better, Steve is right on point by saying, “The biggest thing about encyclopedias-in my opinion--is that they gave you just enough info to either satisfy your need OR hopefully make you then go the to the next step and get more info and really think and construct your thoughts. Nowadays--all the info is there, and most time people cut and paste and miss the thinking part or the constructing part.”

“Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact,” Springsteen sang in “Atlantic City.” That’s a shame. 

Still, despite my kids and most likely 99% of their peers not blinking an eye to changes such as this, I do feel blessed and fortunate to not only have been able to partake in something that gave me so much pleasure and that enriched my life so many immeasurable ways but to also be able to recognize the long-lasting importance of those gifts.   

Day 72: Mother Nature, You Beautiful Broad You

If I’m alone and not trucking a child to her or there or fulfilling a responsibility or en route to a particular destination as ordained by a particular schedule, it doesn’t take much in the way of Mother Nature demonstrating her considerable power and influence to cause me to pull my car over to the curb and just sit and witness her majestic beauty.

You only must devote your attention, if even temporarily, to Mother Nature to recognize when the good Mother is beckoning your attention, to spot that she wants to single you out among the many and gift you her grace. You only have to turn the radio off, stop obsessing about the cup of coffee you have downed yet, or worrying about all the deadlines sitting heavily on top of your head to know that Mother Nature wants to be your guide. She wants to be your confidante. She wants to open her door and expose you to all her surprises and gifts. You only have to pay attention.

This morning, fortunately, I did just that. I pulled the car to the side of the road. I let those anxiously following me pass on by. I rolled the window down. I sat in silence. My reward was witnessing in the flesh Mother Nature pushing with her might the most orange-flavored sun upward over the horizon. Ever so slowly she exposed his heat beauty to my eyes. As the golden ball slowly inched it way on top of the world, it shot massive beams in uncountable throngs over a whitish-gray blanket of fog that appeared so thick and sturdy to me, I swear I could have tiptoed on top of it if I’d tried.

The entire scene put me in another place and time, somehow transporting my mind and thoughts to locations only Mother Nature can escort them. I wanted to get out the car and run as quickly as my old legs could take to the sun. I had a urge to grab it in a huge bear hug and squeeze all it’s warm so that it drenched me. I wanted to swim in that fog, do backstrokes across its waves, and let it float me wherever time and chance deemed appropriate.

Sometimes, Mother Nature taunts me with her power and mystery. She teases me, knowing full well I can never truly understand her endless capabilities or intentions. She invites me to participate in her teachings and wisdom but only up to a certain point before she snatches them away. It’s as if she is testing my commitment, as if she wants to measure the extent of my desire to fully engage in what’s she’s offering. She’s not just going to hand over all of her bounty and treasure outright. That would be irresponsible. She’s only going to expose her soul piece by piece. Sometimes, Mother Nature blesses me while haunting me in the same instant, giving while refraining. I’ve felt these taunts often but accept them as reality.

This morning, though, there was no taunting. No teasing. No suggestive glances or flirtation. This morning, Mother Nature kissed me full on the lips and shot undeniable passion straight up my spine. She caressed, engulfed, and inebriated every last sense. I haven’t stopped thinking about her since. I haven’t stopped thanking her, either. 

Day 71: Violent Femmes, I Can No Longer Be Your Friend

A friend of mine mentioned the other day that he had seen a TV ad featuring music and lyrics from The Violent Femmes. Upon hearing the news, my heart instantly heart fell a little, much in the same way it fell not that long ago when I heard The Pogues “If I Should Fall From The Grace Of God” prominently playing during a car commercial.

It’s always painful when something you once considered left-of-the-dial and rabble-rousing and shocking to the senses suddenly becomes lightweight, inconsequential fodder for so-called soccer moms driving kids to soccer practice and the ice cream shop afterward. There’s something knife-in-the-belly painful about when the weapons in your own personal anti-establishment gun rack suddenly get transformed into dull tools used in the name of commerce. It happens all the time (Zeppelin, Clapton, Elvis, etc.), but it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier to swallow as the years go by.

I remember vividly the glee I secretly felt from witnessing the horrified look on my mother’s face all those years ago when, while home from college, I popped in a Femmes’ cassette and “Blister In The Sun” proceeded to play in all its awkward, clumsy glory. If I recall correctly, she said, “What the hell are you listening to?” and seconds later demanded I turn it off. I didn’t protest much. I was respectful of her space. It was her house, and I understood that this was my music and not hers. And while I thought she might have been more open-minded, I can’t say I was too surprised of her reaction when such lyrics as “Why can’t I get just one f*ck?/Guess it’s got something to do with luck” came rolling out the speakers. This wasn’t exactly Simon & Garfunkel, after all.

Hell, I remember the look on my friend Susan’s face the day she climbed the steps to my college apartment and heard Shane MacGowan drunkenly garbling “Let them go, boys/Let them go, boys/Let them go down in the mud/Where the rivers all run dry” over whiskey-fueled, punk-tinged Irish whistles, drums, and guitars. If I recall correctly, her words were very similar to mom’s: “What the hell is that?” And this was coming from someone who had dabbled in The Dead Milkman, Circle Jerks, and the like. In other words, she didn’t exactly have virgin ears where hearing jolting, strange noises was concerned.

I accepted long ago that to find the types of music I seemed to gravitate to and that appealed to me most, I was going to have to search it out. Sometimes, that search was a long and difficult one. Sometimes, that search took me to unconventional places where the scenery wasn’t always so pretty and the people not always so nice. But the search, more often than not, was worth it. That’s why I think it’s so difficult when success comes beating at the door for bands I once adored mostly in semi-obscurity and now I have to share them with far more sets of ears that belong to people I don’t necessarily share a whole lot with otherwise.

This occurrence has happened for me over and over. One day, Black Flag was only for the hardest of hard. The next day, everybody and his sister was sporting black bars on their arms. One day REM is playing The Drumstrick; the next year they’re playing The Civic Auditorium. One day The Ramones are the baddest-ass punkers in the U.S. The next day eight-year-olds are learning “Blitzkrieg Bop” from their guitar instructors.

The struggle for me has always been weighing “There’s a reason I liked this song or band to begin with” against “should that change because a lot more people like them too now?” In other words, am I true fan who says he likes a band for its music or am I just a poser who wants to be seen as having off-the-beaten-path tastes and edgy cool and doesn’t want to be part of the collective? Do I really respect the bands on an artistic level, even if they decide to make a buck from their art?

Part of me believes that if you write lyrics like “It’s a beach party Vietnam, surfing with the Viet Cong/cooking hot dogs with napalm, a beach party Vietnam,” you’re not supposed to be commercial. Part of me believes “who am I to dictate what others should like and what is popular?”

As of today, I choose to stick to my guns and look down my long, superior nose at The Violent Femmes and The Pogues and turn my elitist back. I’m guessing my smugness will last right up until that day when I somehow create something that’s accepted on a commercial level and the offers start rolling in.

At least I recognize the hypocrite in myself. 

Day 70: Keep On Swimming

People are going to let you down now and again. That's a fact. The question is what are you to do about it? The positive thing is not to be affected by it. Take the hit, absorb it, and breathe it out. The hits are going to keep coming, and some will be worse than others. So what. Start swinging back, but with the intent not to damage but to be unaffected. Stay on the path. Don't deter.

I've limited time here. I don't want to waste it fighting battles that are neither important or worth my time. I want to fight the battles that improve me. Better me. Leave me stronger and more able. People will bring you down, but that doesn't mean you have to stay there.