A Day in the Life of Chaos

Over the holidays as my father and I worked diligently to rewire a number of things in my son's 1973 Karmann Ghia and during the process I became intimately acquainted with the most disturbing example of wiring I have yet to witness.  Wires that go nowhere and some that vanish into hollow cavities like snakes disappearing into the black of night left me with nightmares of smoke and acrid burnt electrical smell.  Fuses popped with disturbing regularity as I followed each wire like a prospector seeking a vein of gold.  Somewhere within the tangled jumble of dubious connections and occasional curse words I started to assume a philosophical approach and wonder if in fact the tangled mess before me was in reality a metaphor for life. I love the metaphor.  It is an art most cultures of the world understand but in our own it is sorely misunderstood and sadly underutilized.  I think I came to appreciate the metaphor the most when I was a college student and engaged in the study of Easte

As a modern Renaissance man I like to equate my life to the Renaissance.   My forties are not just growing older, they are a re-awakening.  An attempt to accomplish things I failed at earlier in life.  This can include languages like Spanish, French and German.  A certifiable attempt to discover artistic ability of which I have little.  Yet each of these is intellectually cerebral.  I also count among my failings mechanical ability.  Mechanical ability is much more than just dirty hands, it is the ability to problem solve. The other day my son watched me repair something and he told me he was afraid.  "Why are you afraid?"  I asked.  I half expected him to recount some occurrence involving a bully or a deeply introspective fear. "How will I know how to do these things?"  He asked, perplexed. I smiled and explained that as we grow into life we have two options.  The first is to pay people to do things for us.  That reality will either leave us bankrupt or at

There are times when I can remember being a child.  I close my eyes and a vivid vision comes to play dancing across the neurotransmitters that record the memories of life.  It can be in the form of a sense, a smell or a touch.  They are good visions, not sad ones.  Recollections of moments of happiness.  The kinds of memories that I dare not contemplate before I sleep because if I do, sleep will never find me. As Christmas rolls around once again I remember the days as if they were yesterday.  My father is unquestionably one of the most talented people I have ever known.  Christmas always seemed like an opportunity for him to put his talents to the test.  There were nights when I would lay in bed waiting for sleep to take me on Christmas Eve and I would hear strange sounds in the house.  I wasn't allowed to investigate so my mind and imagination would just capture my sensibilities. I can remember one Christmas so vividly.  I must have been six, seven or maybe eight years

When I was in college trying to graduate on time I had a problem.  Somehow in four years of study I had managed to amass credit hours from four different institutions all in the pursuit of a Bachelors of Arts degree in History and Political Science.  Anyone who has submitted transcripts to an admissions office knows what an arduous task it is to gain credit acceptance for the most esoteric subjects that just don't seem to fit in a different curriculum.  When the vast collection of transcripts mailed from distant colleges arrive on the admission's officer desk, they sit like Caesar in a gladiator arena and judge everything you have done.  One by one they give thumbs up or thumbs down to the hours of course work you have dedicated a large portion of your life to and enormous sums of money. In my case I was fortunate to attend an expensive private university that while leaving me with mountains of debt proved to be quite accommodating.  My accumulated transcripts from Anchora

I had originally intended to write this as a forum for the discussion of stress and anxiety yet life often takes many twists and turns and the genesis of this blog is certainly no exception.  In the weeks that it has been fomenting in my mind the anxious demons of a young man have evolved into an indictment of our educational system and one pissed off father. My son is exceptional.  I know every parent feels that way but for me he is a treasure.  When he was a newborn I held him to the sky and then I looked into his eyes and I told him it didn't matter what he became in life, just be an honest, good and kind man.  I placed him in his crib and like a fertilized plant with lots of rain watched him grow.  Before my eyes he changed and became a young man.  His brain blossomed in the colors of creativity.  Every day he proved himself to be becoming everything I wished for when I held his new born body in my arms.  More than I wished for.  Every day I am with him and every moment wh

"Same Dice!"  Is the call that goes up when a craps table is hot.  It is a yell of hope, a cry of superstition.  It happens when a shooter is hot and no one dares break the rhythm. Every one standing around the table becomes nervous and each maintains a stare out of the corner of their eye.  They are fixated on the chips they have laid out on various bets and hoping that nothing has been jinxed, that the rolling will continue. My most recent Las Vegas Excursion led me on a craps-a-palooza.   It is an eternal quest to find the cheapest craps tables in town.  Cheap craps means a low minimum bet and for my good buddy Dave and me, it can be extrapolated into the following:  Low risk and hours of dice rolling accompanied by free booze.  It also means some of the best player odds in Las Vegas when you do one simple thing; make the same boring bet with odds over and over again. The house edge for a simple pass line bet is 1.41%. Compare this to say Keno where the house edge is

Las Vegas is forever evolving.  I imagine the place as a kind of organism that is alive and constantly metastasizing into different forms.   It is not just metastasizing it is in a constant state of metamorphosis.  I almost think a new word should be invented to describe the condition, perhaps "metastasorphosis."   It is precisely this change that intrigues me so much.  I have often said that if I could change my way in life I would have been an urban planner.  There is something about the re-invention of design and function that fascinates me.  Very few urban planners begin with a blank slate, a canvas with which to completely adorn with their own image of perfection.  While this might seem idyllic, in truth I think it is a recipe for disaster.  Cities created with such an open canvas tend to be Stalinistic monolithic nightmares or organized chaos.  Brasilia was carved out of the jungle as a model capital and is instead an urban horror of concrete steel and glass that is

Every so often something happens that reminds us what a thin line we balance on between life and death. As you age these reminders become more apparent as declining health speaks like an owl in the night reminding you that your body is fragile.  That life is only for a short time and that eventually it will all come to an end. The call can come at any moment.  I dread hearing the telephone ring in the middle of the night, it can never be good.  When I answer it I know something has happened and in a half dream like state I confront the news.  Recently the call came but it wasn't the middle of the night.  It happened during a simple moment when I was out with my son practicing driving.  I left my phone at home as the battery was dying.  It was only going to be a few minutes away from home anyway.   We passed by the grocery and picked up a sandwich  for dinner.  As we pulled my son's Karmann Ghia into the garage my wife was there to great us.  I thought she just wanted to he