Changing Diapers is the Easy Part

I just finished the first draft of my memoir and as soon as I got everything down on paper I began to think about how I can revise, revise, revise. Do I have enough details, do I have too many? I wanted to capture a day filled with joy in the midst of a very difficult time in my life. The opening provides a glimpse to this period in my life and the closing brings me back to the reality of it.

For this story of a day in my life I see myself as both the main character and as the narrator. As I reflect on this I wonder how it would have felt to attempt this story through a third person perspective or even the possibility of seeing it through the perspective of my son. My son is entering the Air Force in January and he just happened to stop by my house this evening. In reading this piece aloud to my son it caused me to think that I need to add much greater detail to the events of the day, the time I was with my son. The only problem is that we were not engaged in a lot of exciting activity. Truthfully, in many ways it was rather ordinary and mundane.

My son was only two after all. He said he did not remember anything about that day and that did not surprise me. I suppose in many ways, the story was really not about him but rather about how my love for him was something positive that I held onto through dark times. If there was anything that supported and fueled my desire for change, it was my love for my son. When I remembered the events of the day, it was easiest for me to think of them chronologically. It was really about a simple bus ride downtown for an ice cream cone and a stroll around campus. Perhaps the seeds of my returning to school were planted there.

The dialogue was difficult for me to remember and there really was no dialogue between my son and I. I am thinking that if I had a couple of photographs of the day, the event and places, it probably would have stirred more concrete images. I seem to remember more about feelings than about the details of the day.

Never mind, I just shoved it into a trash can, poured lighter fluid all over it, and lit a match. In doing so I also invented a new phrase...radical dramatization!

My Wife's Secret Lover

“I have nothing interesting to say” said the tired cynical man to himself.

“Why I find that rather interesting” he replied back with a hint of sarcasm.

“I wasn’t talking to you, asshole!”

And it went back and forth like this for nearly fifteen minutes, escalating in both tone and content until the door swung open and his wife shouted “Who the hell are you yelling at on the phone?!”

Talk about awkward pauses. As soon as she realized that he was in fact having an argument with himself, she did what she did best.

She joined in.

…and as usual, she won the argument.

Monopoly Money

Blessed are those that know what they want to be when they grow up.

Many stumble through life never quite finding their niche, some slip by sheer coincidence into an occupation that offers at least minimal satisfaction, but few are drawn with complete conviction into work that feeds their passion.

The daily ritual of earning a paycheck should not be one that brings anxiety and apprehension, yet so often it does.

Allow your inner management team to hire a consultant so that you will never have to collect self-imposed unemployment.

DAILY ROUTINE

Desiring an alteration

Indicates an admiration

For the better application

Of awareness on location.

Due to independent realization

And several accurate calculations

Let us build a new administration

And hire ourselves to take vacation.

p.s. I have a current passport, do you?

For the Love of Netflix

I am so amazed at my ability to turn on a pointless sitcom and forget for a moment everything and anything that separates me from the mediocrity of my mid-life crisis.

For instance, I have recently blazed through Dead Like Me. Not only do I now know what it’s like to be trapped among the living, but I can also relate to having lived a pointless life that was taken much too soon. Instead of live hard and die young, it was more like a case of die young without living. Fate and frogs and souls and soup, ya aint gotta get it, but you do gotta dig it. How precious and priceless and perfect life is… “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

Then there was Weeds. Not the kind you pull from the cracks but the kind they call the gateway to crack. I think I liked the catchy ticky-tacky song as much as I liked the notion of my naïve neighbor turning to harmless hemp to salvage the mortgage and the survival of her fatherless sons. As a suburban sellout for a moment or two, I could really relate to the illusion that everything, after all, is really just the same. Can’t we all just get along. A soccer mom with a bag of seeds, hey it could happen. Right?

So if it seems that my choices in entertainment were aimless and unwise, well I quite literally got Lost. Actually I never quite got Lost. By my brother Justin raved and rampaged about how great this show was, so I burned through the first four seasons hoping to understand the attraction. Then I finally got the joke. Lost was about all the time I would never get back.

So, needing yet another vacation, I am now sitting at the doorstep of Californication. Never mind the gratuitous nudity, which I hope continues throughout the series, I like the notion of a lovelorn lyrical genius getting in touch with his love for his daughter. A story about a writer, how original. Showtime Original, that is. I don’t know if I love it or hate it, but I sure am laughing a lot.

Mental Blip: David Duchovny stars in Californication; this blog contains information about my perception of Californication as well as the series Lost; I watched an episode of the series Lost with my wife; Halle Berry was David Duchovny's wife in a movie that contained the word lost; I also watched Things Lost in the Fire with my wife. This is where the recollection disintegrates. I distinctly remember turning to my wife during the movie and saying something to the effect, “if Halle Berry took me back, I would so leave you for her.”

Unfortunately I was thinking out loud. I don’t remember what happened next, but I do remember waking up in a puddle of my own blood.

I think I am still in love with Halle Berry. Don't tell my wife.

Random Memories

It is funny, but there was a period in my young adult life when I thought that all of my childhood memories did not exist. It was not that I had a horrible childhood; I just felt that for some reason I could not remember much of my childhood. My mother divorced my father when I was probably about four or five, but I really do not have any memories of my father when I was young.

I remember bits and pieces of childhood experiences. For example, my younger brother Jamie has a birthday four days from mine. We always celebrated our birthdays together, we would get the same gifts, and I really hated this. I wanted a day that was special just for me. One happy memory, though, was when we both got Big Wheels for our birthday, I remember riding them up and down the alley in the housing project that we lived in. The alley was made of concrete slabs, it was riddled with cracks and grass growing from these cracks, and cars parked on either side of the alley. For some reason we were allowed to ride up and down this alleyway, apparently since there were so many kids in this project, the alley was a safe place.

Other things that I remember from this time in my life are the cold, snowy winters. The building of snowmen in the front lawn and sledding down a hill that was probably less than three feet high. There was also a bush in our front yard and I used to stop at a Kmart after school with a friend that was a bad influence. We would always steal a toy and I would hide it in the bush in the front of the house, trying to convince my mom later that I had found it. She knew I was lying and brought me back to the store to confess my crime.

Later we lived in a house that was the top floor of a duplex owned by my grandparent’s. Memories from this time are also intermittent, but I remember spending time with my grandfather over the summer at a cottage in the woods. There were three different houses, two were on a river, and one was like a farm. I do not know if these memories occurred before or after the time we lived above my grandparents or if they occurred at the same time. The smell of butane lighters always reminds me of my grandfather, and my grandmother always had a few pieces of candy in her purse.

It is interesting, as I try to rekindle some of these memories, I can almost see and feel the summer’s spent on the river. For example, I remember the name Fox River, and the house on this river was right next to a forest. Although it was not really a forest, just a wooded area between two houses, it was easy to feel as if you were lost in this area. They must have stayed at this place for a couple of years, because I remember summer’s where the sound of frogs filled the air. Later summers some environmental damage must have been done because I remember feeling a great sense of sadness and loss that the frogs were no longer there. I even used to have dreams about this place, but in these dreams the fish and wildlife were all gone. It was very sad.

As I close my eyes and think of these childhood memories, the senses really do play a role in helping to remember. For instance, I am thinking of the smells of Christmas dinners in which all of the sisters (my grandparents had four daughters) and their children (my two cousins) would get together. It was always a time of joy, of playing, of laughter, and of good food. My grandfather used to make a dessert that was basically an angel food cake, shredded into pieces, with a can of fruit cocktail poured over it and stirred with a package of cool whip. For some reason I loved this dessert more than anything.

So the senses of smell, of place, of the seasons do have a powerful impact on helping me to remember. I am trying to think of any aural memories, sounds that were unique, that might help me remember things as well. I remember my mom playing vinyl records on a record player, and I remember the sounds of dogs barking, but for me the sense of sound does not seem to play as strong a role in helping me to remember things.

What helps you remember?

A Standing O

Without an audience, we seldom receive a standing ovation!

The stage upon which we perform our most entertaining dialogue is the one held deep within our own minds. If we are lucky, from time to time we will be able to laugh aloud at our innermost conversations.

In one of my most recent intrapersonal conversations I was attempting to solve a mystery from my youth. You see, in my mind a hippopotamus had somehow escaped from the Milwaukee Zoo and was living in the canal system. Perhaps this was a transmorphizamagination of the old flush a crocodile down the toilet and it grows up in the sewer system fixation. Who knows? I doubt it ever really happened, but just the same, I know it did.

And then the argument begins….

In a fight with oneself, no one really has a chance to win.

My favorite words are the ones I make up myself.

Now, imagine for a moment if any one of our given inner dialogues was played out on a large screen high definition television set with surround sound speakers in front of a group of our most intimate friends!

Would you hold your head up high, proud of your relative lack of sanity?

Or would you die inside?

Or…would you sit and laugh at yourself until your sides hurt?