If I told you I listened to Never My Love By The Association, Everything I Own By Bread and Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash while writing this you might narrow your eyes and ask what is on my mind.
Maybe I’d tell you I was inspired by a Time-Life commercial or something by K-Tel or perhaps I’d say you know me well, but maybe not as well as you think.
That is the kind of teaser line that generates emails and telephone calls asking who I am talking to or about.
If I wanted to tell you it is someone I know biblically or it refers to several women it wouldn’t matter because it wouldn’t answer the question anyway.
It would just aggravate some of you…maybe.
But hell if you have lived through a day that lasted a year you might not wonder or worry. Maybe you’d understand or maybe you’d ask what I mean when I say I have danced in the fire.
Those are questions you’re unlikely to have answered.
Disillusioned
It is not easy parenting teenagers.
Not easy trying to help them figure it all out when crazy town envelops the entire country and you decide your decision to become an Independent almost a decade earlier is proving to be smart and you want it to be wrong.
It wasn’t particularly insightful or profound. One didn’t have to be a genius to look at the back and forth and wonder when partisan politics overtook altruism.
Maybe it was always like that and it was a naive belief that a large portion of the government was in it to help people.
Truthfully I haven’t ever believed government is always unwieldy, incapable and or corrupt. I haven’t ever believed it is all swamp and still don’t.
It is not.
But things are broken now and the system is being abused in multiple ways and that is wreaking havoc because the fringes on either side have too much influence.
The moderates need to take control again.
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I tell the kids to be willing to take the unpopular position but only if they have thought it through. Don’t just take it to be oppositional. Don’t fight just ‘cuz you can or because your father does that.
Take a position that you can support and recognize sometimes the best way to get things done isn’t by adopting unreasonable positions and refusing to compromise.
Sometimes that center position offers more than you realize, if nothing else it enables you to compromise and work with others.
That is what we are missing…the ability to work with others.
I don’t want to stack the courts with conservatives or liberals. I want a mix. I want an opportunity for people to step out of the echo chamber and consider a different path.
But hell, life keeps teaching me that what I want doesn’t always matter.
Tick Tock
There is a grandfather clock roaring inside my head and I can’t ignore it. Can’t push it aside and say it is just one of those things that come with a certain age.
I am not satisfied with some things and I will not let them go forever.
Can’t.
Won’t.
There are so many questions.
Does It Have To Be Literal?
Does this Brother Pablo have to be taken literally?
Maybe yes and maybe not.
Some might argue that if you have been lucky you understand what it is like to be comforted by the presence and breathing of another.
Sometimes all it takes is spending time with them and that is enough. There doesn’t always have to be words shared for there to be conversation.
Silence fills spaces and places in multiple ways.
Much can be learned from who you can sit with in silence and be comfortable and who you can’t.
If a day feels like a year you might never want to be with them again or if a day feels like a year that went by in a moment perhaps all you want to do is find more time to be together.
There are sorts of aches in life.
Some come from falling down or being struck and some come from doing things that expand mind and body.
The pain that comes from running distance hurts just as the pain that comes from being scratched by a thorn, but one we try to avoid and the other we try to obtain for the gains we think it offers.
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