A Day in the Life of Chaos

This year, 2023, is my thirty second year of federal employment.  I am standing on the precipice.  It is the year I become eligible to retire.  Life is essentially filled with a number of dramatic checkpoints.  First and foremost there is birth, how can you argue that it is not important?  With its occurrence we literally win the lottery of life.  Facing the competition of between 200 and 500 million sperm one got through and made us.  Holy shit, what are the odds?  It has got to be up there with winning the Power Ball.  Of course like winning the Power Ball there is no guarantee it will end well and often it does not . Senator Roscoe Conkling, NY The next big moment comes when you enter life and assume responsibility for your self and existence.  This often follows being kicked out of your parents house.  Sometimes removal is more gradual and evolutionary as you work your way through college and then find a career.  This is usually a period marked by severe economic dependency.    Pos

Life is filled with a long list of people who cross our paths like firefly’s dancing in the night.   Some stay longer than others.   Some mark us in positive ways and some, not so much.   There is a precious list of those we love, a vastly larger list of those we know, perhaps admire and a hopefully shorter list of those we detest.   Bad feelings can stick to us like fungus yet a skill I have been working on for 56 years is how to let those feelings go.   Sometimes it can be terribly difficult.   Like the scorn I feel for a guy named Barry Wilson who back stabbed me in a previous office interfering with a chance for me to move back and resume a former job after an overseas assignment.   His actions caused me to sell my house and relocate my life.   Life can at times feel like a catalog of miserable interactions as they tend to stand out much more promi nently than the positive ones.  One particular memory reared its head this week when I learned that a previous boss of mine had passed

As you grow older it seems like events increasingly mark age.   They are like a highlighter illuminating a moment of our existence.   Today I opened an article that explained to me that on this day in 1967 the Beatles released Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.   I would have been 20 days old.   If you tried to explain this album to young people today it would be as mythical as the Iliad and the Odyssey.   Hell even people of my generation are often disconnected, post Beatle remnants.   Technology is the most vulnerable to rapid change and a lack of understanding from one generation to the next.  Often words can become meaningless or non-sensical in just twenty years time.  I often make a joke when I hear a phone ringing that increasingly no one understands.  The ring sounds and I yell “I’ll get it.”  In the era of cellular telephones attached to everyone of this who understands.  When I was young we had a single telephone in the house we all shared.  When a phone call came in some

As life progresses I am progressively certain that much of our life is determined in the early years of our own lives.  We live with our parents voices always over our shoulder long after they are gone.   Perhaps it is their everlasting gift or, equally possibly, their ever present revenge.  One way or another they tend to always be there in life and in death.   I wonder how one day my voice will echo in the mind of my son.  Hopefully positively or at the very least, elicit a quiet smile.  It will probably resound mostly in my sarcasm or the stupid jokes that I make annoying and perhaps comforting in the same sentence. My mother’s voice often echos in my mind.  It happens at so many different levels.  Could it be that mother’s nag us more and that is why they stay with us?  Everyday at work when the cleaning women makes her way through the office she stops to clean the restrooms.  It always seems to happen at the moment I need to pee and I think she spends an excessive amount of insi

I grew up during the middle and end of what could be considered the Golden Age of television.  It was an era when there were three channels.  Almost inconceivable today in an era of endless variety.  When I turn on my 150 channel cable package I search through pages of networks I have never heard of.  I find my televisions on services like Hulu, Netflix, Apple and Amazon that don’t even broadcast a signal.  Long gone are the broken signals of NBC, ABC and CBS that we pulled in with a split antenna extending out from the television set.  The sitcoms we watched were more like theater productions often filmed before live audiences, almost always with canned laughter. They were made on studio sets and the actors seldom changed locations.  The other day I was sitting at my desk in my corner of an office filled with modern half walled desks.  There is a bit more privacy these days than the open squad room of eras past yet everyone still essentially works within sight and voice of each othe

As you age it becomes increasingly difficult to segregate moments of time.   Our memories can recall events yet trying to reconcile the event with age can be problematic at best.   I find that if I start with an event I can build a recollection however, if I was to start with an age, say what happened to me when I was 8 years old, it is nearly impossible to construct.   There are times when I attempt to torture my mind by trying to rebuild a picture of not only an instant but everything that was around me.   Often times our only recollections are programmed around photographs that remind us and often reconstruct moments long forgotten.   When does this happen in life?  How old are we when our minds transition to a point of fogginess with incidental clarity?  I have recently taken interest in period television that reconstructs the past.  My past.  I drift away from the story to analyze the environments and try to recall if it was the same as I remembered.  Sometimes when I watch a pe

Living in Portland Oregon makes me think a lot about mental health.  Not just mine but those around me.  You see I work in the heart of downtown Portland and spend my lunch hours walking up and down the Willamette River through a city park.  Traveling through a public park is a lot like visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles.  It is basically a conglomeration of everyone.  For me the saddest part of the experience is viewing the vandalism and destruction left by people that don’t enjoy the park for the reasons it exists as a public gathering point.  Portland has so much to be proud of yet unfortunately there is a small destructive element that that doesn’t share common values. Walking through the park is like walking through a healing wound.  The scab can be ugly but it is a part of us and we can only hope when the wound heals and the scab falls away, what lies beneath will be better than what covered it.  Portland is filled with homeless people.  Their lives and what it does to the