I am sitting in the car in the parking lot outside the Moviehouse in Flower Mound.
Gordon Lightfoot is singing about a hard lovin woman making him feeling him mean and I am playing around with whether I feel like drinking a beer with my next flick.
The theater is close to home and a favorite because it has reclining seats, a bar and a decent meal.
I am thinking about the conversations I intend to have in a couple of weeks and wondering if they are going to give me the sort of insight and understanding I really want.
Probably not, but I’ll give it the old college try and see what happens.
The music moves on and If You Could Read My Mind takes me back to a rainy day memory from childhood.
Ripples & Echoes In Time
Fast forward to a different moment and I am staring out the window thinking about all that I have heard and seen.
Ideas and thoughts are bouncing around inside and I am wondering about the ripples and echoes in time that flash back and forth.
Can’t go back and in truth I can’t say that I would hop in the time machine even if I could.
Might be because of a bad case of fear of missing out on what is coming next and might be because I don’t know what going back would change.
It is the typical dilemma posed by every science fiction book or story about time travel, you don’t know what happens to the present if you touch the past.
Thing is when you are dealing with a man like me who isn’t afraid to take a risk but hates the idea of doing so you really don’t know what can happen until you are in that moment.
That is the big challenge of the current moment, the reality I am facing right now.
I know exactly what I want to do but I am uncertain about how to do it and whether pulling the trigger on some things will make them better or worse.
Can’t rely upon the little data I have now to make the sort of educated decision I want to make.
There aren’t any metrics or benchmarks I can use to feel 100 percent confident so I have to step carefully and or willingly jump into the void.
Chaps My Hide
I remember seeing the big kids in the neighborhood take their girlfriends for a ride on the handlebars of their bikes.
It never made sense to me because I always thought it looked uncomfortable, but when you are around ten almost everything boys did for girls looks ridiculous.
A thousand years later I have learned firsthand that some of those things are just as ridiculous as 10 year-old Josh thought and some…aren’t.
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In case you are wondering I never have tried to give any of the women in my life a ride on the handlebars of my bike, romantically involved or otherwise.
I never got past seeing it as being something uncomfortable for her and always figured it wasn’t worth the potential harm that could come from an accident.
Wouldn’t matter whose fault it was either, I just know that during the conversation I’d make a comment about her weight throwing the balance of the bike off and well, you know that it would probably go badly from there.
So I figure there are usually better options and unless I get stuck my record of never giving someone a ride on my handlebars will remain.
Easier to maintain my balance and keep moving forward.
Potholes & Bumps In The Road
It is not all that long since the bottom fell out on things and I bounced down the hill.
I am pretty sure I managed to scrape my entire body on every stick, cactus and or rocky outcropping on the way down.
Took a moment to catch my breath and then I climbed back up and out. Not going to lie and say I wasn’t mad as hell or that I wasn’t prepared to breathe fire and shoot lasers at anyone and everyone who got in my way either.
Nor will I say I haven’t been frustrated with some of the bumps and scrapes that have come since then because there have been been a couple of doozies.
Most of them were overcome and there are just a few left to deal with, but the main one is a serious monster.
That is what left me staring out the window of the car wondering whether the face-to-face conversation would yield the sort of answers I wanted.
Can’t say that it did, but I feel better about some of it because I feel like I have a better sense of things.
Still don’t know how to measure or define it, just have this belief it will be worked out. The only question is how long will it take and what sort of chaos will be created in the process.
Sometimes I still find myself looking back at the ripples and pot holes and wonder which led to this particular place.
When it happens I always tell myself it is because I hope to avoid repetition but there is a certain morbid curiosity too.
Mostly I don’t bother looking because it is impossible to get the sort of answer I want and you either forgive and move on or get stuck in a loop that serves no one.
Man, this parenting stuff isn’t easy sometimes but I wouldn’t give it up for anything either.
