If you want to make a teenage girl slap her head let her catch you dancing in your chair to Janet Jackson singing Rhythm Nation.
She’ll be horrified but what you’ll wonder is how you ended listening to Rhythm Nation because it is not what you typically use to inspire your writing.
Apple Music is to blame or the answer, however you choose to play it because when you have access to their entire catalog you end up wandering among the aisles, though you’d much rather be wandering the isles.
Perhaps the wordplay between aisles and isles is what helped me come up with the headline Friday The Virgo Came Late or maybe it is the headline about Julia Roberts and her holes.
I probably should provide a link to the story about that editing debacle so that if we read this in the future it makes sense, but I won’t.
I am not in the mood, especially since someone told me to grieve silently. They d0n’t know that telling me not to do something is like telling the Big O how to drive from the back seat.
We may listen or we may just do whatever the fuck we feel like doing.
Given my current state of care about opinions from others you can expect me to speak my mind without concern or filter.
New music is driving this particular stream of thought and I find myself mulling over how heavy to make this because I hear those fucking bells that I allude to and suspect that if I write what I hear and see it will make you think.
But I am not pushing that to bait or encourage anything, I am just sharing what I hear and see. Just going with my gut which will eventually lead me to the promised land.
Guess we’ll see if I get to be like Moshe and look down upon it or enter.
Anyhoo, I stumbled upon the piece below the other day and it resonated with me so I’ll share it with you.
Sixty Years
Can you imagine carrying that sort of load for sixty years?
I can’t.
I have very few regrets but those I do are significant.
A while back I made a promise to myself to take action to ensure that I don’t fill my days with looking backwards and wondering about what could have been.
There are things I have done to make sure that doesn’t happen, can’t say that it will remove all future regret or failures because that is impossible.
Hell, we make mistakes all the time because we are fallible, breakable and infinitely human.
I tried to take the frame off my Facebook profile picture and accidentally posted a picture of dad and I. Same one I have been using as my profile photo, but I didn’t want to post it again.
I just wanted to take the damn frame off and screwed up.
That is a minor screw up, but it is a solid example of how stuff just happens sometimes.
****
After dad died I took his hand in mine and held it one last time. It was a little swollen and discolored but it was still clearly his.
And since I had gotten to hospice within 15 minutes of his going his hand was still warm. In strange coincidence I was able to do something similar with my paternal grandfather’s hand too.
But there was a fundamental difference to me.
Grandpa outlived my dad by 18 years and had smaller hands than dad and I.
That is part of what I remember that final early morning, the giant hand was no longer giant because for decades mine have been just as big.
Yet for that last moment it was like the adult me was phasing in and out as the 10 year-old boy came back. My hand would shrink and dad’s hand would seem huge and then my man hand would come back.
I keep hearing echoes of the past and echoes of the future.
Keep thinking about where I have been, where I am and where I am going. Is life really that different how I imagined it or is it exactly as it should be?
I’d say it is different but evolving and moving towards what I have imagined with some wiggle room left to adjust expectations.
You might say that is taking liberties and I might nod my head and smile. Why should I limit myself when the need doesn’t exist.
Why not color outside of the lines, tear down the walls and step outside of the box.
I can say give me your hand. I can say please give me your hand. I can just reach out and take it or go any number of other ways.
Too much of life is predicated upon limits we set upon ourselves and not enough time is spent on seeing what is possible. It doesn’t mean you should be reckless or get to be crazy but there is a place before the pines that avoids the extreme.
You’ll find me there.
