A Day in the Life of Chaos

  “So its for sure now, I will retire.”   I have been waiting 33 years of my life to say that.   The only ones that can relate are those that have experienced or will experience the same thing.   I am learning that the hard way.   I know my wife doesn’t understand.   She never had the experience of showing up for the same job for 33 years.   This was mostly by design as our transient life never allowed her the consistency of a career.   For 33 years I have had to be responsible to something other than myself and my family.  I have had to follow the government’s rules.  I have had to live my life around the demands of another.  For some people their career becomes their identity.  They are their job.  It is a function so intertwined with day to day existence that when the link is broke their life loses meaning.  I am not one of those people.  I am grateful for my career.  For the places it has taken me and the life it has given me.  I am also grateful to leave my desk and computer b

There is an agent in my office named Alex. He is young, approximately 29 or 30. He is about to have a child with his wife. A young little creature is expected to make his presence known in this world in a week or two. Alex is the same age I was when I went to Bolivia and had a child of my own. When I see him it reminds me of those days. Being young and trying to establish your place in the world. Becoming a father. At that time of life I had just met two close friends who I have stayed in touch with throughout my life. Both were significantly older than me. Alfredo was less, probably six years older than me. Ira was much more senior.   Our age difference was more like 24 years. By the time you hit your late 20’s and move into your 30’s you realize that age doesn’t mean so much anymore. When you are young it is everything and then its magnified. In your teens a friend more than a year or two from your age is almost inconceivable. A person more than 10 years older seems

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