A Day in the Life of Chaos

Every year about this time when you are an adult you find yourself reflecting on the past.  Christmas is like a bookmark in our lives and while one might blend into the next there are often moments or traditions that hold a specific significance.  Sometimes, they are remarkable for their simplicity. When I was a young man my parents took me to Europe.   It was my second time across the Atlantic.  When I was younger we spent a summer driving around to genealogical sites and visiting the English Country Side.  It was a magical introduction yet  this trip however was different.  This time it would be a trip that would span London to Vienna and Rome.  In three short weeks I would visit or cross five countries and enter the greatest capitals created in the history of the world.  It was also Christmas time and with a plane fare too low to resist, we boarded a nearly empty DC10 and left the eternal darkness of Alaska for Europe.  I was fortunate, as an only child my parents could make the

There is nothing I despise more then conflict.  Some sick people thrive on it, I detest it.  This doesn't include debate.  I enjoy a spirited, structured exchange of opinions if they are well founded and perhaps may make both people think.  No I am speaking of the conflict that arises between two people over an issue perhaps professional, perhaps not.  I hate it.  It burns in me but I can't keep my mouth shut.  I refuse to be a victim but I hate the repercussions of not being one. Yesterday I was walking out to my car at lunch to drop off a few things and I noticed an older man who works in my office as a contractor doing something strange.  It was only upon closer examination that I discovered he was standing between two open doors on his Ford Explorer changing into a suit.  In my profession this is not odd, often people will do this when we have to go to court.  This avoids wearing a suit all day long.  Anyway, I noticed his door touching my fender.  When he closed it I

I used to admire the elderly.  Oh in many ways I still do.  I value their insight and their perspective.  I marvel at the world they have known in their lives and how it has changed.  How they survived the hard times and prospered.  How some just survived. Politics however has given me a different perspective.  It is a much uglier perspective and not one easily spoken of. The truly elderly are the most remarkable in my mind.  Those that have retained their minds in a late state of age.  My father recently regaled me with a tale of my grandmother's first political contribution.  She was shy to give, 10 dollars was all she could afford and she was afraid it would mean nothing.  A visiting campaign worker canvassing for a local city council candidate was present and my father interceded.  "Would ten dollars help?"  he asked. "Oh yes!" she replied.  "It takes six dollars to buy a t-shirt."  "Six dollars!" my 93 year old grandmother excla

There is something warm and furry in my house. It has a pink nose and demonic red eyes that provide a counter balance to it's seemingly cute and cuddly nature. It runs in the night like a ghost passing through walls and it searches the dark recesses of it's lair for buried treasure. It has freakish hands that grip like mine as it opens pockets of treasure and reveals the morsel tuck within. As often happens to a parent despite my best effort at strength I is was undermined by a vast array of elements poised against me.   These include the begging eyes of a child and the sympathetic support of a grandfather.  It is enough to make the strongest mountain cave in upon itself.  Grandfather's are in the unique position to support any desires of their beloved grand child while being able to walk away to the tranquility of their own home.  Ahh... what a luxury.  At the same time be careful of what you reap my mind reminds, as the very same child is filling himself with diabolica

Growing older is a stage in life.  It doesn't matter if you are young or old, the constant is always the progression of age.  Coupled with this, is the feeling of being left behind. It happens to us usually when we are associated with a group.  We seldom hearken back to a moment in time, rather a period of life when our minds and emotions were satisfied.  When we shared a commonality with others in an experience.  Youth provides fertile ground for this.  It is a unique stage of life when we are surrounded by a group experiencing exactly the same thing.  We see them day to day and often feel the same frustrations, the same pain.  It is a time when others share our age and we gaze out through the window of life from the same perspective.  I think for this reason when we age we often look back at our youthful years with nostalgia like none others.  They were a time of innocence when our lives were still largely unwritten.   Life presented few constraints over possibility. For this

Recently former and possibly future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, a minster from Arkansas and darling of the conservative Christian community gave a speech about health care.  As a minister I anticipated words filled with compassion for the sick and care for the poor.  This was after all the message of Jesus.  Throw out the money changers in the temple and care for the down trodden.  Had I lived prior to 100 A.D. Jesus would have likely found me to be a great sympathizer.   Well Minister Huckabee spoke concerning the issue of the new health care reform, specifically the new law that now forbids insurance companies from not insuring a person with a preexisting condition.  No longer can an infant born with a condition be denied.  No more can a person with a medical problem be denied coverage and sentenced to either death or poverty in the face of medical bills they can't afford.  While I would think Minister Huckabee's Christian leanings would have caused him to laud

There is a time in every parents life when they wonder if the punishment fit the crime.  When their child does something they shouldn't do, how do you respond?  Even worse, how do you respond when the crime is serious in the eyes of another and quite ridiculous in your own? I have attempted to look back to my own past for guidance yet have come up dry.  Perhaps it was because I was vastly more culpable of serious infraction than my child.  On the other hand, it might have something to do with the fact that on one occasion when my mother attempted to seriously punish me the entire affair ended in disaster.  I remember it as clear as day.  In my family there is this spoon.  Legend has it, it was given by a Russian Czarina to my Great Grandmother after she performed a piano concert for her accompanied by the legendary Polish pianist Paderewski.  In truth my grandmother was the family equivalent of a solitary bass fisherman who claims to have hooked a small whale in a local lake. 

Incoming Message: August 29, 2010 4:41pm 810-941-XXXX >>Hey boo its desmine (Creepy crawlyy Who was this this desmine in Michigan and why was he sending me a text on my phone?  I scanned my brain, Creepy crawlyy, Creepy crawlyy... With so many messages flying around the world it is only natural some deviate from their intended course.  I guess it is the modern equivalent of a letter miss-sent.  The kind that shows up in your mail box and you are immediately consumed with guilt.  Should you: return to sender, try to find the right person or trash it?  It seems somehow computer communication has intensified the problem.  Now the single miss-key of a digit or a letter can make all the difference. I remember once sitting in the office in a base camp in Trinidad, Bolivia.  I was stationed with an agent and earlier in the day another agent had sent me a highly critical email concerning him.  I can't remember why I copied it but I did and pasted it in another location.  A

In life there are sign posts everywhere.  They lead us in so many directions that explain the paths and courses our lives have taken yet often, we never see them.  They are like mile markers on a highway, nearly invisible unless you actually decide to open your eyes.  Freud would make you look into the subconscious to understand the conscious but I don't believe you need to look that far.  I think you need only look at the way we live our lives. There is no path into our own lives as descriptive as the one exposed when you have a child.   How we raise our child and the attitudes we take are shaped by our parents in so many ways.  Even when we try to correct the mistakes our parents made in our own lives, we find that those mistakes inadvertently have a direct bearing on our children.  Human beings seemingly by nature are prone to the negative.  I am not sure why this is but it most certainly is.  When we reflect upon our own lives, for some reason the negative always seems to ste

Outside my office building there is a tree root that that has enveloped an irrigation pipe.  The pipe is lifted and is slowly buckling as the root grows over and under its captive.   The pressure on the plastic pipe must be enormous and in a matter of time the pipe will inevitably break.  Water will spill and maintenance will fix the leak.  Everything will seem the same but in truth it won't be.  Nature will again have proven that in man's never ending march toward progress it will always ultimately define the outcome. It seems as I grow older I find myself seeking to find my place in the world.  It is a world filled with change, constantly adjusting, never quite the same.  I  feel like the pipe, twisting and turning and some day I will break.  When you are young there is no limit to time yet some day you will wake up and realize that time is changing all that is around us including ourselves. When you live in a modern country like America we gain little sense of the past.

Oh my homosexuals can get married.  Suddenly I wake up in the morning and my conventional marriage means nothing.  The temptations are so great, I am seriously thinking about becoming gay.  Think of the advantages, a sense of design, a spouse I can fight with.  Someone beside me snoring in the bed.  Maybe he will cook for me!  It is everything I dreamed of.  I have always wanted to be gay and damn it, now I can do it.  Wait...  hold the presses... I just realized something.  My life is no different than it was yesterday.  In truth, my marriage is not threatened, I am not any gayer than I was on Wednesday.  I still get that better tax bracket and I do believe, I still have health insurance.  Hmmm... what happened? What happened?  A big group of people finally got their version of civil rights, at least momentarily.  The majority was told that they can't pass laws impacting the rights of minorities.  That they have to respect the Constitution.  Was that so bad?  It was kind of

My father always seemed old.  Okay, maybe older is a better word.  He never seemed ancient and he certainly has never been like "old guy."  Old guy is a guy in my office that is slightly 10 years older than me but has seemed old since probably the day he was born.  I swear to God his mother gave birth to him and he came out in a tie gripping about those nasty kids.  He drives a Cadillac, need I say more? My father never even seemed older in the way that young people view those 10 years their senior.  Like they some how came from a world alien in from their own.  A world with completely different culture, values and rituals when it comes to growing up. No, my father just seemed like a father.  He mostly stood in an adult world but still had or toe or two in the world of a child. As I cross through the midpoint of my life I often look at myself in terms of my father.  I consider my age and the stage in life of my son.  I think about how when I was at that point, my father s

At some point in my life I crossed the line.  When it was, how it happened, I don't know.  The line was as blurry as my memory of breakfast last month.   Every generation has experienced this feeling because music is effectively a time stamp on our minds.  For whatever reason the teenage years are the most susceptible to this impression. I don't think there is a human alive that can't close their eyes and think of a song that was once playing on the radio or archived on an LP or a cassette tape.  Of course both of these terms alone are a generational divide.  Even before our very eyes the CD is giving way to the .mp3. Perhaps it is a result of a fundamental resistance to change but each successive generation has also despised some new music just as the one before it did.  From Duke Ellington to swing.  From swing to Elvis and the Beatles overtaken by the psychedelic and rock.  The latent violence and sexuality of rap and the screaming beat of punk each seemed to reach

As time passes I have always chosen to look over my shoulder.  I like to know who is still following, who is still there.  Some people blaze a trail into the future and chose to let the moments of their life they built it upon to fade into the mist.   You should never look back they say, never dwell in the past.  While we can't live in the past, forgetting is is like forgetting the foundation a building was constructed on.  Memories can be kind, beautiful or as sharp as a knife.   They can rip at our psyche like the teeth of a jagged saw yet they make us what we are.  To forget them entirely is to forget a piece of yourself. While I may never see them again, there is something wonderfully cathartic about knowing the figure I harbor in a memory still exists.  Occasionally, lives might cross again.  The most magical of these crossings allows for apologies for the mistakes of the past and redemption through the knowledge of a moment in life once shared together.  It transitions the

Years ago the immortal Monty Python, a name that means everything to anyone born before 1970 and almost nothing to those born after, created a film called The Meaning of Life.  It was vintage Python, filled with exploding men and Catholics singing Every Sperm is Sacred.  In a Python way it laughed at our own preoccupations, our own uniquely human thoughts. The film began with a song: Why are we here, what's life all about? Is God really real, or is there some doubt? Well tonight we're going to sort it all out, For tonight it's the Meaning of Life. What's the point of all this hoax? Is it the chicken and the egg time, are we just yolks? Or perhaps we're just one of God's little jokes, Well ça c'est the Meaning of Life. Is life just a game where we make up the rules, While we're searching for something to say, Or are we just simply spiraling coils, Of self-replicating DNA. In this life, what is out fate? Is there Heaven and Hell? Do we re

When I was a child I had a mentor.  Well not really, mentor is a word that conjurers up an image of an apprentice working with a powerful wizard.  In reality it was more like a person that feels special to you for an unknown reason.  There was just something about that person that seemed to sit right.  Maybe they listened, maybe they didn't.  Maybe it was just a person that even though I never asked anything from them, they made me feel secure.  They made me feel important or valued in some way.  In my case they were friends of my parents who in some way through my contact with them made me feel important in their eyes. Ken Piper Nearly as far back as I can remember I knew a wonderful man.  He seemed seven feet tall and had a body four feet wide.  His head was bald and he had a smile and a laugh as deep as a geyser billowing steam.  He used to give me books or records when I was small and as I grew older he would take me to school.  He lived with us for awhile while his life w

It is not easy being a liberal. Once I listened to an episode of the Prairie Home Companion, I know, a distinctly liberal thing to do, and Garrison Keillor had an interesting thought.  He announced at the beginning of the show he was going to become a Republican.  After doing so, he commented how easy life was.  His emotional guilt was gone.  He didn't have to worry about the environment or about charity.  He didn't have to consider other people, only worry about himself.  Yes sir, for Garrison Keillor, life was sweet.  There are times I wonder what it would be like to follow in his path.  I think I would sleep so well at night, my mind would be clear and my focus would be my own. It is funny how when we cross paths with a homeless person in our own world we are often oblivious.  If they are an everyday sight, they become invisible and often a nuisance.  When at work I often leave through a back door to avoid the out stretched hands.  I have never given to them choosing