Circling

I’ve decided to become like the rock above, immovable.  Let whatever heads my direction simply cascade around my perimeter and continue on its own course.  I will represent the stiffest manifestation of inflexibility one can imagine.  This all in the name of personal will.  Although that rock’s age may defy its youthful appearance, I admire its childlike, self-serving demeanor.  Yes, the rock has demeanor.   Just look at its unyielding, current altering, “I ain’t going anywhere” personification.  Steady and strong, like a rock.  Bob Seger’s lyrics transcend all space and time.  Thank you, Robert.

Who doesn’t want to have things their way?  You get to eat what you want, on your schedule, in whatever quantity you so wish.  I suppose it says something about me when speaking of unchecked personal inclinations, my first thought jumps to food.  Oh well Sigmund, I guess you were wrong.  Unless this is masking some deep sexual repression that’s outwardly exhibited through oral indulgences.  Even so, there are worse things to insert into that cavity other than food.  I was thinking cigarettes.  What were you thinking?  Grow up, why don’t ya?

I am happy to eat well and embrace rotundity or eat well and hit the gym.  Either way will work, at least for a while.  Have you ever watched Biggest Loser and thought to yourself, “how the heck do you get that fat.”  I’m not trying act mean, but you can only blame genetics so much.  Although Jules in Pulp Fiction replies to Vincent’s comment about Tony Rocky Horror being fat by saying, “the brother’s got a weight problem.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call him fat.  He is Samoan.”  But whether Samoan, Tongan, Sumo wrestler, or however you want to get classified, four and a half bills is a bit much.

And they didn’t get that way by eating fruit, vegetables, and tofu.  No sir, they gorged themselves on whatever was in the refrigerator.  I understand that drive, though.  No, I’m not going to eat anything, I just want to look inside.  You know, kind of like take a quick inventory.  Besides I find that refrigerator bulb so intoxicating and warm.  It’s almost as if it’s a bug light and I’m a gnat.  A hungry, lying gnat that desperately wants to do more than merely see these stationary contents, immovable without human touch.  Ah, we’re back to immovable.

As before with Bob Seger, we find ourselves celebrating another singer/song writer as we contemplate the circle of life.  Although I don’t consider Elton John regal in any way, he does have certain feline qualities.  They could have dubbed it the Lion Queen.  Nah, it wouldn’t have flowed.  Not like that mountain stream splashing and rolling its way down hillsides into an open meadow.  So I’ve succeeded in my immobility by retracing my meandering thoughts and ending at the start line with my immovable rock.  I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I think I like it better that way.  Security never seems complete in the places we assign it.  Strange how trust often lies away from the only place it matters.  Consider yourself lucky if you know what I’m talking about.  Peace out.

What’s Mine is Who’s?

The Great Sand Dunes in Colorado represent a distinct contrast between two environments.  Although, Colorado is basically high mountain desert, it’s not like the Sahara.  You can hike along a mountain trail, walk through cold alpine streams, navigate around waterfalls and pine tress, all within view of this enormous expanse of sand dunes that cover approximately 85,000 acres.  It looks like a picture perfect image of when two worlds collide.  One area providing everything you need for survival and fairly easy to travel across, the other realm void of any natural assistance, coupled by each step partially negated in the shifting, sliding sand.

But let’s forget about contrast.  Doesn’t everybody really want everything equal and fair, any sense of contrast and competition tossed into a societal abyss, never to be seen or heard from again?  As a matter of fact I’m going to rush home right now and toss out all of our cookie cutters, barring one.  Why not?  It’s changing into a cookie cutter, check the box world.  Let’s take the bull by the horns and really do this thing right.  Who doesn’t want the exact same size, same flavor, same texture, same smelling, same ole same ole cookie?  Never again will we clutter our lives with such detestable things like diversity.  Soon the use of the word eclectic will become illegal, or certainly subject to fines.  Uniformity shall reign as our almighty king.  Now that I think of it, I probably only want one cookie sheet.  That way I can rest assured that we’ll maintain equal cookie amounts.  I can’t believe I ever existed with such insanity.  Is it any wonder we are not all locked up in the loony bin?

Next, we must quickly address the sports world.  The responsible parties will immediately adopt our popular catch phrase and redistribute the wealth.  Talent must get spread equally among all teams, across all sports, and transcend all age levels.  This will make the Olympics so much more enjoyable.  Especially after we eliminate the medal ceremonies.  The thought of watching that poor schmuck or unfortunate soul sullenly walk off with their head bowed in shame, knowing that there’s no prize for fourth place.  At the end of competition all the country’s athletes can stand together, hold hands, and take turns singing each other’s national anthems.  As a matter of fact, why even compete at all.  Let’s just have a great big kumbaya and call it good.  Television rating will sky-rocket.

Now I’ve got it.  Let’s not ever keep score, like we do in many youth sports programs.  No parent really cares how well their children perform.  No child ever yearns for any qualitative measurements to grade their performance or gauge themselves against their competition (yuck, naughty word), thereby encouraging future improvements.  That might make somebody feel bad about themselves.  So many fewer tears and less trees chopped down for tissues.  And we know from children if you don’t keep score they don’t run tallies in their heads.  Of course not!  Those little cherubs never want to know that meaningless information.  Furthermore, let’s take the next step and apply that thinking to academics.  Why assess grades or determine basic competency?  What damage we’ve administered on those poor unsuspecting minds!  Thank goodness we’ve finally come to our senses.

Let’s all immediately go home and inventory our stuff, share notes with our neighbors, and redistribute our possessions so there’s no contrast between households.  Share will become the new earn.  So let me take a peek at what you’ve got, because there’s no sense in all of us working.  We’ll take turns, but you go first.

Voices

Every living thing that can produce sound has a voice.  And when I say voice, I’m not referring to translated words shared among us humans.  It exists within animal species, plants, trees, you name it.  We might even consider that machinery echoes a voice, too.  Why not?  Humans created those moving, mechanical parts so it’s not a far stretch to personify our inventions.  Anybody who works in and around lots of machinery will surely agree.  Sound is everywhere and we find its absence unsettling.  Unless you’re deaf, but that’s a different ball of wax.  However, if that ball of wax is crammed into your ear canal preventing sound transmissions from reaching your eardrum then we’re dealing with an entirely different situation.  Tangents are so weird.

As I gently hammer (is that possible?) the computer keyboard and search for what to say next, my voice begins to emerge.  When I look back at what I wrote in the first few days, it seems that my writing style somewhat changed.  My voice does not manifest as serious a tone as the original blogs did.  Except, of course, for today.  So with that out of the way, let’s resume a more light hearted approach to discovering voices and what the hell those birds have to do with anything.

I suppose to find your voice, you must first have something to say.  If that were true, though, I never would have started this blog.  So perhaps you discover your voice along the way, kind of like “it’s a journey not a destination.”  That seems to make more sense.  And speaking of Journey, Steve Perry certainly had quite a voice, didn’t he?  Not that I ever heard him say anything of significance, but he sure could hit the high notes.  Hopefully he never injured himself reaching those peaks.  Not many ER docs probably have stories about crooning traumas.  But if they exist, I’m sure we could find episodes on Discovery Health or The Learning Channel about some poor fellas inability to sit for prolonged periods on cold hard surfaces after vocally reaching for the stars.  Yeah, tangents are still weird, but sort of interesting.

And what about those freaking birds?  I got their photo as they posed for me one spring day.  Not shortly after that day I checked on their status, only to find absolutely no sign of them.  No mama bird, no baby birds, and not even the nest.  The neighbor’s dog did intently watch me as I crept in close for that shot.  He seemed rather intrigued by them.  I’ve seen plenty of cats go after birds and their nests, but never a dog.  That dog was a puppy then, but he’s a big breed, larger than most full grown dogs.  I once saw another neighbor’s dog woof down a couple of baby rabbits in all of about three swallows.  Now that was disturbing.  Nothing like watching a live baby animal screech out its last sound as it get basically eaten whole.  I wouldn’t want to man the pooper scooper on that next dog walk.  Nature’s voice can come across as a whisper or a wail.  Hey, the birds had something to do with this!  I know you must feel better.  Don’t mention it.  Actually, please don’t.  It’s rather gross.

As interesting as it is to me, my voice seems to ramble through a series of non sequiturs and eventually land somewhere in outer space.  For you this is probably like being around a drunk person when you’re stone sober.  If that’s the case, I apologize.  Episodes of intoxication are generally only funny to those people embedded in the alcohol induced merriment.  Maybe I should put a disclaimer on this blog to only attempt after an appropriate number of cocktails.  I’m not advocating alcohol consumption, but you can refer to day 2 if you choose.  Not to get lost running down rabbit holes, but my writing voice needs a quick splash of coffee.  Remember you too have a voice, whether anyone wants to hear it or not.  Or does it end up like that tree falling in a forest without anyone there to hear it?  Screw that, you still have a voice.

Paradise

If a paramedic can administer medical interventions, but is not really a doctor and a para-legal can work in a courtroom, but is not really a lawyer, what does that make paradise?  Since “dise” is not a word, we’re left wondering if it has a true meaning.  I found an acronym for “dise”, which is “doing it so easy”.  So if we use that definition, paradise can appear as unfettered, but it’s not really a simple process to create.

Paradise conjures up biblical images, as we reflect on the Garden of Eden.  A perfect place, a perfect existence, and a relationship with a perfect creator.  But humans had to go off and screw the whole thing up and do the one thing God told them not to do.  Please do anything else, but whatever you do, do not eat from the tree of knowledge.  Everything else is O.K. by me, but this is your one restriction.  We’re so flawed that when you tell somebody what not to do, that’s exactly what they do!  We might have stood a better chance if Adam and Eve had a list of all the things they could eat, instead of the one thing they could not consume. But hey, I’m not God and it’s His show.  Besides, if you read ahead in His book, it all works out in the end (as long as you’re prepared for it).

So, since that fruit munching couple took away the chance to “do it so easy”, let’s agree that our specially self-defined paradises should at least be a place to “take it so easy”.  Should we rename it “paratise”?  That looks a little like we misspelled parasite.  Perhaps somewhat fitting, as we have a history of chewing up and spitting out heavenly locales once we declare them as paradises here on earth.

Webster defines paradise is an ideal or idyllic place or state.  For me, that kind of digs describes a stress-free environment.  Stress from the elements, stress from finances, stress from relationships, stress from jobs, and above all, stress from stress.  That’s the killer.  The chicken has become the egg, or is vice versa?  Who cares.  Either way you’re in a chicken coop, stepping in bird crap, looking to snatch a dose of artery clogging cholesterol.

If you enjoy 17th century, epic English poems (who doesn’t?), you can check out John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  It’s his twist on the first few books of Genesis.  It concludes with what we’re kind of looking at now.  Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden and told to find “a paradise within thee, happier far.”  What this boils down to is pretty simplistic and ego-based.  What paradise looks, smells, feels, tastes, and sounds like is purely self-discretionary.  For us gravity bound mortals, this is where we stand, whether you believe in God or not.  See, we do have something in common.

Some people call Hawaii paradise, but I’m not so sure it fits the bill.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool place to visit.  I just don’t think I could stay on an island that takes about 1 hour to drive around without going a little stir crazy after awhile.  Paradise for me needs a more expansive nature, although I’ll take the beaches.  They can keep the tourists.  But I’m just another “howlie” looking to get mine.  I hope you get yours, too.

The Gentleman Dandelion Farmer

I’m seriously considering the pros and cons of becoming a dandelion farmer.  Why try to grow a crop of something that requires nurturing and care?  Dandelions are a weed that sneak into our lawns, seemingly overnight, much to our chagrin.  Dandelions lose their appeal because they show up in areas where they are generally unwanted.  And, given the chance, those pesky plants will take a foothold in your lawn and quickly spread across your well-groomed fescue and eventually invade your neighbor’s beautiful bluegrass.  This occurs without any help from us.

But is a dandelion a particularly ugly plant?  I know it’s a weed and we hate this unwelcome gift from mother nature.  Still, I can remember loving these plants (sorry, weeds) as a child.  Bright yellow petals, scattered among green grass blades, morphed our yard into a tribute to the Green Bay Packers right in the heart of Virginia.  Plus, they made a great spot to capture unsuspecting bees searching for nectar.  We stored those bees in an empty glass aquarium that sat on our back patio.  After a few weeks we’d stare through the glass walls, perplexed why almost every single bee in our entomological zoo died.  We set the last surviving bee free, rationalizing he’d earned the right to live in the wild once again.  He was probably, though, just the last bee we had captured.  Just another experiment showing that living specimens don’t do well when forced into an over-populated, unnatural environment.  Budding environmentalists or evil scientists, I’m not sure which best described us…….then or now.

But the true magic happened when those lovely yellow spectacles of God’s creativity (sorry, weeds) evolved into the wispy, white particles that begged us to pick them from the ground and disperse them about the neighborhood with nothing more than the power of our breath and the breeze.  It ranked right up there with blowing bubbles.  The more dandelions securely entrenched in the soil, the better.  Besides, these mystical, fuzzy, white globes harnessed the ability to grant wishes to whomever took the time to ask before emptying their lungs on the prophetic plants (sorry, weeds).  Of course, the more generic the wish, the greater the likelihood the plant possessed the power to grant our desires.  Funny how we never made that correlation.  Sometimes you just know the truth about Santa Claus, but you’re not willing to ask and receive a final confirmation.

So, I’m going to create a dandelion farm, similar to a sod farm, so children can enjoy these wonders of nature (sorry, weeds) unencumbered by grass, lawn mowers, fertilizers, pesticides, or other adult interventions.  If one likes, they can harvest some dandelion sod and plant it on their own property.  After all, maybe we dislike them so much because it grows so easily without our care and attention.  We sometimes have an overwhelming desire to be needed and, lets face it, dandelions simply do not need us.  But as far as weeds go, this one definitely sits atop my all-time favorite list of grounds keeper’s concerns.  It offers bright, clean, natural color and changes into a simple, delicate, plain toy anybody can enjoy.  I consider it the first transformer ever created.

Well, the next time you experience something that overwhelming populates an area or societal norms define it as unwanted, stop and ponder this question.  Is it because of its self-reliance or is it truly an undesirable creation?  There’s little, if really anything, we can accomplish without direct or implied help.  But my friend the dandelion makes it on its own whether we’re there to lend a helping hand or not.  Is it ugly and unwanted or are we jealous?  Good luck with that question and try not to get “stuck in the weeds”.

The Blind

Is that a sailor’s hat you’re sporting on that balding head

The navy was years ago or haven’t you heard

The circus just left town with all those elephants in tow

Childhood caught the red-eye or at least that’s the word

It still seems like a short time back

With you and me trying to hack

All those things nobody ever explained

Remember how we’d chase your sister

Brand new shoes tearing up our blisters

Running like we’d lost our minds

Lifting rocks, looking for some answers

Never had moves like all the dancers

We were spying through the blind

We never saw no trains rolling down old abandoned tracks

That canoe never could hold back the creek water

Your momma said she’d be the best thing you ever found

But instead of kissing,  you went off and fought her

Now you’re thinking of what you’d change

Mixed thoughts and feelings rearranged

But we’re several chapters down the line

Remember how we’d chase your sister

Brand new shoes tearing up our blisters

Running like we’d lost our minds

Lifting rocks, looking for some answers

Never had moves like all the dancers

I still can’t see through the blind

Is that you standing out there

Drifting through the cold night air

Not caring what it mattered

Nightgown torn into tatters

You’re still guessing what to write down for the next verse

Hanging onto the bad and hoping for the worse

Remember how we’d chase your sister

Brand new shoes tearing up our blisters

Running like we’d lost our minds

Lifting rocks, looking for some answers

Never had moves like all the dancers

Why can’t I see through the blind

Blue Up, Sunny Down

I’ve been driving straight toward the dark night

Without any headlights on

I’m not watching where I’m steering this bus

Reckless and fighting off yawns

I mastered control and held on to all the power

As lightning crashed down in a mighty rain shower

Just to let me know I never had hold of the wheel

Am I gazing at a sunrise or yesterday’s sunset

We’re just riding this train, so don’t get upset

Are you gonna join this trip or will you let

that ticket blow straight out of town

The dealer says pony up right away

So now are you gonna raise, fold, or stay

Looks like it’s all coming down to today

Somewhere it’s blue up, sunny down

I’ve been dragging my feet just to take a look back

But we’re sliding on black ice

Roll down the tinted windows and let out a scream

Beause I’m rolling the dice

We can’t stay here so baby hold on tight

Where we’re headin’ gets decided tonight

Together or however it has got to be

Am I gazing at a sunrise or yesterday’s sunset

We’re just riding this train, so don’t get upset

Are you gonna join this trip or will you let

that ticket blow straight out of town

The dealer says pony up right away

So now are you gonna raise, fold, or stay

Looks like it’s all coming down to today

Up ahead it’s blue up, sunny down

They say life comes down to just a few big choices

But I’m not sure what they are

It seems we’re always giving up on our big dreams

And chasing after false stars

Just when its feels like the plan’s good and set

We loose our interest or simply forget

When we should have laid it on the table

Am I gazing at a sunrise or yesterday’s sunset

We’re just riding this train, so don’t get upset

Are you gonna join this trip or will you let

that ticket blow straight out of town

The dealer says pony up right away

So now are you gonna raise, fold, or stay

Looks like it’s all coming down to today

Where I sit,  it’s blue up, sunny down