The Most Important Thing (repost)

I was going to stay up tonight and write this great story about tonight… tons, tons of Allison-style stupid. But I got stopped listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Change”, and when I go there, I can’t – ironically- change. So I went through my archives looking for another story to take quotes from, but felt the need to repost this one. I’ve too many people ask me lately, “Allison, what ARE you looking for?”

And my answer is always short.

Vague, even.

“I don’t know.”

Hope, I think, because I have no lack for courage.

But I think the story I write tomorrow will answer that.  If I get to writing it…If I still feel the same way tomorrow.

The Most Important Thing                                                                                      2.14.09                                                                                   

I’m looking for something.

So lately I’ve been asking around a lot: “What is the most important thing?” I’m not surveying so much for frequency of answer as much as I am searching for the answer that fits me. When I ask myself this question, I routinely come up short. These common answers: love, happiness, security…. Yes, I agree they are important. But what above all? What is the one thing , that lens through which I can look at my life ahead of me, that thing which will not make all of my decisions for me so much as make the answers shaper to see?

One recent night I had the displeasure of listening to an acquaintance rant and rave about her ex boyfriend who cheated on her and then broke up with her.

“He moved in with her a WEEK after we broke up,” she huffed. “I mean COME ON! It’s (HIM)!” And the name replacing the (HIM) justifies the astonishment in her exclamation. (HIM) is a total tool.

“Then why do you care so much?” I asked, because since it’s not my problem and I don’t’ care, I can’t really see how anyone else would.

“Because he has a TWELVE INCH COCK!”

The last statement rushed from her mouth with the fervor of a game show contestant who had the million dollar answer. She stared at me unblinkingly wide-eyed, arms out, the gesture of complete disbelief that I somehow had not known this. And my only thought was: So? What the hell does that even count for? I mean, I have a ruler, and I just don’t think I’d need all that business in my business to have a pretty kick ass life. I’ve had sex before, it’s cool. But a twelve inch cock as the most important thing?

When I go to the hospital, I don’t demand the doctor with the foot-long. When I vote for congress, I don’t scrutinize trou. When I’m in a restaurant and the waiter says, “The special tonight is chicken…” I don’t butt in, “Well, only if it’s a twelve inch cock…”

I’m pretty sure when I’m looking for anyone to be anything I’m hoping they’re at best qualified for the position and, at least, not a total douche bag.
Hell, if you’re in love what about his charming wit, his dazzling personality, the way he says your name and how it sounds differently than from anyone else- like it is safe inside his mouth, the color of his eyes and how they’re hazel in the middle and fade to green on the outside like two tiny earths from space with no oceans, the way his hair feels through your fingers, or that tiny space between his teeth that makes you smile when he smiles, or the sound of his voice when he leans in close and whispers, “I love you” and the words drip into your ears and into your blood and through your entire body……

Or whatever other kind of saccharine bullshit people say when they’re in love. Wouldn’t one of those be a more important thing? Perhaps not for this brass-haired broad. Twelve inch cock was the end of her road, and I’d liked to have told her to hike back to her trailer or some NASCAR event, or go shoot cans, or for god’s sake find a trash can and throw yourself away.

I asked my son, “Aiden, what is the most important thing?” and without hesitation he replied, “You.”
I thought about this and- while yes I would completely agree with that on all counts being the amazing specimen of human being that you read before you- I realized that no one else would say that. No one did, and no one else would have any reason to. To my son I am all of those answers to my initial question: happiness, security, laughter, consideration, pride, kindness, compassion, and the most frequent answer above all: love. To my son, I am like the sun: when I shine, he sees the entire world. And he is that for me. And I think that is pretty damned important.

Maybe even, for me, the most important thing.

 

Rice Fabulous.

The name of my (imaginary) band is Sushi Ruse.

So, the other night my younger sister and I tried to go to (a certain location, not Sapporo) for sushi. It was around 8:30pm on a Sunday night, and I remember this quite distinctly because I had checked the time against the restaurant hours posted on the door, wondering if we’d have time to eat and (excessively) drink. So we walked in and the place was practically deserted. I tell the hostess we would like to sit at the sushi bar, as I noticed she was directing us to the hibachi grill.

She looks at me confused and asks, “You want sushi?”

And I’m like, “Dude, duh, that’s why I said I wanted to sit in the sushi bar.” (Except I used more polite and eloquent wording. I think.)

So she leads us into the sushi bar and this older lady walks out and gives us a nasty look. The hostess points to the (for lack of a proper term) guy who makes the sushi who wears the hat and says, “He has to do it.”

So the old lady looks at him, he looks at her with a death countenance, she looks back at the hostess with a death countenance like it’s a relay race of facial expression, and then the old lady turns to my sister and me and says:

“We are out of rice.”

Really.

Seriously.

You are an Asian restaurant. You serve Asian food, which in America (if I may be so bold as to purposefully stereotype for the benefit of my own story) means EVERYTHING COMES WITH RICE.  You are to rice what Elvis is to the blues: you didn‘t invent it but you get a lot of credit for it. You are seriously going to tell me that the one thing you serve most of you are out of? What, did the stock boy commit seppuku? Nobody saw this coming? You should have your own silo of this stuff out back!
It was clear that they did not expect any more patrons that night and were cleaning up to leave early. But I mean, really. No one could think up a better excuse? I could think of a million less questionable things to say, like: “We’re promoting Atkins.” or “We had a hydrochloric acid spill on the nori.” or “We don’t serve your kind, get out.”

I left fuming. And not because all the raw fish had caught on fire and accidentally got cooked. Which would have been a better excuse than I was given.

So, we decided to try a different sushi place and the whole time I’m driving I’m like totally pissed off. I thought about going to the Wal-Mart located less than a quarter mile away, buying a big ass bag of rice, and walking back into the restaurant exclaiming, “Heard you’re out of rice?!”

Then, I envisioned myself dumping the rice out all over the floor and screaming, “WHO’S OUT OF RICE NOW!!!!”

Really, if there is a rice shortage I’m buying all the inventory I can find. I’m going to do for rice what Neil Lane does for diamonds: make it deliciously expensive. I’m going rockstar on supply-and-demand, taking it world-wide for the bidding.

Watch out, China. I’m coming up Rice Fabulous.

 

 

Strike Three (repost)

The fleur-de-lis topiary box. Empty, of course. So me 😉

I originally wrote Strike Two on 6.29.09 after moving into the Lake Forest house I bought from my divorcing parents. I have lived in this house in one way or another since I was 15… so almost 15 years. Tonight is my last night in the house. Tomorrow, I will wake up and sign it over to my ex husband.

Hold on- my new roommate just called and I am now on the phone with her. I think that she is drunk. This is hilarious and also foreboding. I have NO idea what she is talking about.

“I just went to Utah,” she just said, “and I think I need way, way more wine in Utah. I think I may have drank a couple bottles of wine tonight. That might be what’s going on here.”

I am hanging my head in laughter. What have I gotten myself into….

Another Allison Adventure.

She has just hung up.

This house was a lot of fun. You remember that time you were here… sitting on the kitchen counters talking, laughing about that t shirt that’s always on my porch, running around the golf course late at night, watching Rome for the 40^th time, drinking beer by my lit fireplace in my “hearth room”, planning for a zombie apocalypse,  listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Change” over and over and over after, you telling me the truth, me loving you more for it….. We’ve lived.

I’m reposting this story because I think it was one of my most-responded to on my old blog. It reads hostile but was, as most of my rancorous rantings are, meant in jest. It’s riddled with the unabashed self-aggrandizing I am known for. Nothing tickles me more than people who are unapologetic assholes. Which is why I like you so much.

My friend E-rone and I spent the day going through my stuff to craigslist, and she asked me about the topiary box mentioned in this next story. It reminded me of writing this, and I declined listing it in the sale. I will keep it. It was, after all, something I loved. I’m going to take it with me. I never did put a plant in it, and it’s time to put roots somewhere.

Strike Two                                                                                                                 6.26.09

My son is spending this summer at his dad’s in Nashville and I am losing my grip on reality over it. Since we recently moved into a (brand new big ass Lake Forest) house, my husband hired me a decorator to assist me with what she calls a “home plan”. In my home, the plan seems to consist of her making suggestions while I rub my chin ponderously, saying, “I could do that…” dramatizing my false consideration. What I’m really thinking is, How stupid would that look! The problem is not necessarily that her suggestions are bad, but moreso that she is bad. She is an aging hippie with bad hair and bad clothes; not exactly a human reflection of any merchandise with which I would choose to furnish my home.

Diane (that’s her name) is the one person on that planet who can formulate every sentence using only the verb To Do. This annoyance is enhanced by her puny voice which is punctuated by a complete lack of enthusiasm. “You could DO your bed against this wall.” “You could DO this buffet chest downstairs.” “You could DO this topiary box in your hearth room.” It’s maddening.

And I don’t even know where my hearth room is.

So the other day she was throwing suggestions out for me to mentally shoot down and she asked, “Allison, what would you like your place settings to say about you?” Oh I don’t know, Diane, perhaps that I’m a boozy, self-interested suburban housewife with deep-rooted abandonment issues and an extraordinary sense of entitlement! Here’s what I learned: Crate and Barrel doesn’t carry that pattern. I almost asked if we could get my face silk-screened onto all of the dishes and napkins, but decided against it after envisioning my dinner guests finishing their plates only to uncover my likeness beaming at them through their scraps. I don’t look good under remnants.

Once I worked for a salon owner who had a giant canvas portrait of herself wearing a ball gown hanging in her dining room. It was the most admirable display of narcissism I have ever beheld. I aspire to that. My house, like my outlook on life, needs to celebrate me.

Not having a useful opinion on the place settings I just shrugged and offered a weak, “Um, that I’m…unique?” Unique is a word that means nothing to me. It implies a boldness in being set apart but offers no backup as to how. It’s filler. Nobody is unique, really. People are disappointing in that way. At the core, people are mechanical in their behaviors and predictable in their pleasures. I’m afraid, my friends, that we are all the same selfish skin-sacks of shit. All those things you think are ‘unique’ to you, all those strange things you do in secret, all those impulses you do or don’t act upon, everyone else has them too. And we all, in one way or another, do exactly the same things for which we negatively accost each other. If you think yourself otherwise, you’ve got yourself fooled.

Two days ago I took an early appointment and forgot about it. I was twenty minutes late yet not stressed when the owner called to say the lady was pissed off but still wanted the appointment. Walking in I was face-to-face with that superbitch I blogged about awhile ago. Same bitch. She was just all full of bitch and ready to go.

During her session she told me she was a hairdresser. “It’s a job that’s not as rewarding as it should be!” she huffed. I’m going to guess that she thinks nothing in her life is as rewarding as “it should be”. She should be adjusting her general attitude, that’s its own reward. Jesus, woman, life doesn’t pat you on the back because you get out of bed in the morning.

She continued to discuss her upcoming mission trip to Cuba during which she is going to teach kids how to play baseball. Baseball: that’s what a godless, communist third-world country is missing. While she droned about her mission I began to imagine what communist baseball is like. Do they keep score? That seems so very capitalist, so does everybody win? Or, like in a communist society, does nobody win? Is each player rationed an equal and sufficient number of swings? Are all the uniforms red? Do The Maos play The Castros?

“The things I try to do to make things right,” she said, releasing some of her savior-ing modesty with a sigh.

“Wow”, I responded with feigned interest. “That’s unique…”

To Get To The Other Side.

So, as I was driving home from Nashville on January 1^st, 2012, I saw a cow cross the road. Had it been a chicken, I could draw a more cliché conclusion, but as it was, I saw a cow moseying its milky udders across the interstate. A million questions entered my mind: Did it just wander out of the pasture? Did it dig its own tunnel under the fence? Did some drunk farmboy let it loose for some New Year’s prank? Was it escaping a future as a delicious steak? Was it headed for the big city, looking for a chance to make something of itself?

A stray dog, sure, but a stray cow is not something I see every day, and less than a quarter mile past this livery escapee I saw a policeman stopping the entire Southbound side of I-65. I knew- gigglingly- who the traffic culprit was.

I saw a  lone cow crossing the interstate, and I immediately knew that this is going to be the Best Year Ever.

At 10:30pm on the last day of 2011, I decided that this year is going to be totally different than last.  I am notoriously grandiose in my commitments and routinely flakey on the carry-out. I had planned to see one of my dearest friends in Nashville to ring in the New Year then cancelled at almost the last minute, feeling a sort of manageable guilt about the whole thing. Just enough guilt to weigh on my mind, but not enough for me to get on about it.

At 10:30pm on the last day of 2011, I sort of realized what I had done: I had chosen to forego time with someone who will be in my life forever for something else that I knew would be fleeting. I am such a douchebag about doing this, and I do this often. In fact, I spent almost the entire past year doing this: diverting my attention from things that are important to nurture things I know won’t end up meaning anything.  The universe doesn’t give out a whole lot of trophies for that.

My best friend Sbataf lives in England, and we talk via email every single day.  Both suffering this year through a string of bad-to-worse events, we decided (in the joking way we always use to comfort ourselves) that the theme for 2012 is Believe the Hype. Sbataf is my biggest fan, and I am his, and we hype each other constantly. It’s not fake or forced, as we are by far and away the greatest people we know. This year, however, we’ve decided to live it all out. Every morning we are to remind ourselves that we are superstars and then spend the entire acting upon it. Nothing is too big, nothing is out of reach, and no less will be settled for than only the most dramatic of gestures… superhero style, really, carried out by humans.

At 10:30pm I thought about Sbataf and how much my life has been influenced by him over the past 8 years. I thought about Sbataf and how he’s talked me down from tons of veritable ledges, how he’s saved my proverbial ass in some huge ways, how he’s made me laugh until I have tears in my eyes, and- most importantly- how many cool t-shirt ideas we have come up with.

I thought about what Sbataf would, slightly jokingly, tell me to do at that moment…. “Get on about it, Allison, that’s what I love about you”….  and how tickled he’d be if I went on and made the last-minute drive: 3 hours away with already a half hour cut in time.

At 10:30pm I decided to believe the hype: I said “fuck this” to my current state of things, put two hands on the steering wheel, and went with the wind. I made it to Nashville in 2.5 hours, arriving 5 minutes before midnight, unannounced. I was in just time enough to shock the bejeezus out of, and clink plastic champagne cups with, someone who is insanely important to me.

It was a pretty bad ass scene in my own life movie… in my expert reviewer’s opinion.

During the course of the night, the particular friend I went to see drunkenly explained to all-who-would-listen about how I’ve had the most influence over his own life’s philosophy. My immediate thought was: Oh no, life cues……… from ME?

I spend all my money on unwearable dress clothes and I once fell off the bar while dancing in a crowded club. A few weeks ago, I accidentally told a friend’s date (who looked like a stripper) that she looked like a stripper, and I thought I meant it kindly. I once took my Kitchen Aid mixer to a TV repair shop… to get it repaired. I went out with a guy once who had his own name tattooed on his arm (I liked to believe he was constantly afraid of getting murdered without his wallet).  I once gave a girl with a guitar $100 for playing my favorite Radiohead song.  I once threw up on the front steps of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence Italy on Easter Sunday of 1998, following a night of underground drinking, in front of a parade. I spend my copious free time sharing way too much information about myself by (irritatingly and over-wordily) documenting my daily grind.

And that, to me, is pretty fucked up.

But that’s me, I guess, and I get on about it. And I guess it’s pretty funny to see right in exactly one snap decision this sort of chain of events: where one unshakeable friendship begat my tending to another unshakeable friendship. And I think that’s good. Good enough to start the Best Year Ever satisfied.

Last year was a flush, and I could rehash every reason why, but I’ll do that later when I need misery material for some other points I’d like to illustrate, like how dating you and cutting my hair and eating all that cake were huge mistakes.

It’s 2012, and I woke up with one boot full of chess pieces, squeezed one of my dearest friends, spilled orange juice all over a Waffle House waitress, and saw a cow cross the road (possibly getting to the other side).

At the absurdity of it all, I giggled all 2012: Day 1 long. Fantastic, I think.

That’s how this year is gonna go 🙂

Out of habit, I call all my guy friends "brother" because I have seen the entire HBO series Rome a million times (They call each other that ten millions times in the show). I am so loving how some of them have started calling me "brother" back. This tickles me.

Who Got On My Peter Pan?

Aiden's turn, midday... What I've amassed is to his left.

So, yesterday was my son Aiden’s tenth birthday and we spent almost the entire day playing Monopoly. My older sister, Kristen, gave him a Disney-themed set for Christmas, and it is objectively AWESOME. Instead of real estate, the properties are various Disney movies and seem to be ordered by box-office grossings. Park Place is Hannah Montana, Boardwalk is High School Musical…which is odd because I find both detestable onscreen, yet found myself vying for during the game.

Aiden has begged me for years to play Monopoly with him, and I have made a parental policy of refusing. This is not because I don’t like board games, it’s because I have never really understood Monopoly and when I don’t understand something I usually just pretend I hate it. The last time I played Monopoly, I was in such a sore state of losing that I started an Anti-Trust argument and “accidentally” flipped over the entire board.

So, for years I have pretended to hate Monopoly, and found myself in a pickle when my son newly received one of the games on the brink of his birthday. Birthdays have some sort of slavish magic which the born-on person tries to wield one day per year, against any will. “You have to eat at Shoney’s, it’s my birthday!” “You have to go see Nickelback, it’s my birthday!” “You have to try meth, it’s my birthday!”

[I would like to clarify that I have never done any of those three things. Purely joking. And I wouldn’t even if it were your birthday.]

But, as it is, my son exclaimed: “You have to play Disney Monopoly, it’s my birthday!” And because I love my son and it’s his birthday, I relented.

My mom, Aiden, and I actually started our game the night before his birthday, and with a series of lucky rolls I began to find myself really, and I mean really, liking Disney Monopoly. I began planning endless possible steps ahead: allocating my money for investments I was likely to encounter, evaluating whether it was more efficient to put two cottages on The Incredibles or buy a castle for Lady and the Tramp. And my choices worked. I was getting awesomer by the dice-roll.

Disney Monopoly started to make me feel like I could be a real estate tycoon, and I became dizzy with Parker Brothers excitement. My self-confidence climbed a few Cinderella stairs with both glass slippers still determinedly on. I was buying, strategizing, building, watching my pewter Snow White game piece break free of her domestic obligation to those hapless dwarves and get on about building her own Hi-Ho. And I was loving it. I was putting more effort into the game than I did my last job.

Everyone around the table became an immediate obstacle to my happiness. Sure I owned a lot of respectable-earning films, but I had my eyes on the Blockbusters. It was fine to own A Bug’s Life, But Chronicles of Narnia – ALL the Chronicles!- were still up for grabs. Chronicles, combined with my Wall-E and coaxing mom out of her Cars… I could claim some high-stakes rent on the East board.

My selfishness gave rise to some serious thoughts to getting ahead, and with the game-pausing  agreement that is was bedtime, I found myself plotting. What if I get up in the night, I thought, Come downstairs, and add a few hundred dollars to my account? Maybe swipe that Chronicles, or a Peter Pan? No one would notice…  

When playing anything with me, the real game is: How Is Allison Going To Be A Competitive Asshole?

I can’t even believe the amount of cheating that went through my mind. Cheating. At Disney Monopoly.  Against my own mother and child. What kind of a woman am I?

The other day, Aiden and I were driving to my mom’s in North Carolina, and I made a pit stop for a Mega Millions ticket. I always do this on road trips, as I have a weird belief that only the shittiest and most remote gas stations possess the magic of winning lottery tickets. Being sure with every ticket purchase that I will hit the lucky numbers, I spend the remainder of my drive imagining what I will do with my winnings. The first purchase is always a house on the water, like my grandfather’s, and the second is replicas of all Disney princess gowns which will become my daily wear. [If you know me well, you will recognize that this is not made up for this story’s sake. I have stated this countless times, for years] This will not be ridiculous, as I will be so rich I can buy your approval of it.

“Why does that girl look like Belle from Beauty and the Beast?” an unwitting spectator will ask.

“Oh, that’s Allison Wonderland. She’s a mega-millionaire,” replies a second.

And both will want to join my table in hopes of depositing my wealth of friendship.

My daydream never gets past this point. I guess if I buy a houseboat and learn to sew gowns, I can, literally, fulfill my wildest dreams. Kinda low-bar when I think about it.

So, I didn’t cheat. Really, I know better, and I spent the entire game making sure that all rents on all properties were paid, though my mother had her own tactic of passive silence to avoid them and hustling on to the next turn… a good plan, if you ask me. In the heist of it, I presented myself as bubbling over with integrity… knowing purity is the best veil for corruption.

This morning, we resumed our game, and I continued my Magic Kingdom domination. I may not be the kind of mother that cheats, but I am the kind of mother who will railroad my son out of his two transportations (equivalent of regular-Monopoly railroads) as he’s about to go bankrupt on owing me castle rent. My mom was out by 6pm and I took it upon myself to force my son to play until the bitter end. We all knew I was going to win. I just like to watch myself achieve any form of glory.

This past year I haven’t been the shining beacon of domination I once was. I used to go to the gym and make a self-pact to be the very last one of us on the treadmill. I used to count quarters to have enough money to buy one more show-stopping Diane von Furstenberg dress. I used to tan and hair-highlight myself to a whorish end. I spent my entire 20’s as a miserable trophy wife, and in my poor ex-husband’s opinion, likely: a hell of a twisted concession prize.

And it worked. Those things worked. I was greater, it seemed, or something… or maybe I was just more aware of, and consistently concerned with, my “greatness”.

These days, I just don’t care. It’s not that I’ve given up on being great, it’s quite the opposite. I’ve come to believe that there are much more enjoyable things than being “the best”, and what is that good for anyway? So I can look better in Facebook photos? So I can date some ladies-man-style dirtbag? So I can spend hours and nights and months looking the part of a movie I have no real character to belong in? I still enjoy being me just as much with an extra 10lbs and almost see-through white skin and my hair so damn natural it could start a forest fire. Who cares?

I have had a totally wacked-out amazing life, I have seriously ridiculously amazing friends, and best of all: I have a seriously, ridiculously, amazingly, wacked-out brilliant son who is my for-real hero, whose BIRTHDAY it is. I didn’t have to cheat for those things. To realize my luck, all I have had to do is be unafraid to be honest.

I’m luckier than any Disney princess.

Without the gowns to prove it.

Jesus Slaves.

Me and my awesome Grandaddy. I love you. I'll hold out on my promise, you and dad are doing a great job delivering on yours :,)

So, last night my mom, sister, and I were eating Christmas dinner, and as usual the topic was making fun of other people. It’s not really so much making fun as it is my mom doing impressions of people, likely in a negative light, which makes her getting her insult across endearing and fun for the rest of us. My mom is an expert at this. I’ve tried to explain this to other people, but they don’t quite get it: My mother can insult someone in the kindest way possible. They won’t even see it until it zips past. It’s like a subliminal flicker, and the victim might double-take at it, but will ultimately leave pleased and with a new complex about whether their teeth are too yellow or their sweater is ill-fitting. It’s a true art my mother possesses.

Last night’s subject of impersonation was my newly-deceased grandfather’s wife; my step-grandmother. Her name is Mercy, and she has none when it comes to being evil. Mercy is a step-grandmother in every sense of Cinderella: conniving, money-hungry, diligently unpleasant and insulting with a sincere and deep hatred for her husband’s family. And, unfortunately, a deep hatred for her husband, my grandfather.

Last night my mother and sister were relaying to me that Mercy had actually HIT my grandfather on his deathbed. Like, literally hit him. She hit him. A 91-year-old-woman hit a 94-year-old-man IN THE NURSING HOME, ON HIS DEATH BED. This is not speculation, as the nursing home employee witness to the assault had to file a report. The conclusion, my mother said, was that Mercy was “embarrassed”.

“Not embarrassed that she did it,” my sister added, “just that she got caught.”

I could feel my blood reaching a boil.

I couldn’t add much to this conversation out of my own embarrassment, as I had missed the whole trip for his funeral. I couldn’t muster the energy or organization under the pressure of what I’m dealing with in my own life, and staying home was simply easier… albeit shameful. I am ashamed of this, but not nearly as ashamed as I am furious that I missed an opportunity to wish that ancient bitch a merry trip back to hell.

In my head, a movie began in which I creatively, impactfully, and wittily give Mercy a dose of her own bitter-tasting medicine. I say one or two sentences that bring her to her decrepit, make-up covered knees in horror of the years of anguish she put my grandfather through: the years of verbal abuse, the years of extorting money, the years of being a downright nit-picky bitch, and the years he refused to leave that blue-haired bag of bones even though we offered to care for him. In my daydream, my family backs me up, we all walk out on her, and the world is better because justice had been SERVED and we are now all stronger as a family unit, having stood up for our patriarch in the final hour.

But, in the great words of Sophocles: “There is a point at which even justice is unjust.”

My mother continued, “She is the meanest person. Even Grandaddy’s care-nurse said that she had never met anyone more miserable than Mercy. Even Mercy has said herself that she is too mean to die. [I’d like to insert here that I added: “Mom, she won’t, demons are immortal”] All she cares about is money and getting whatever she can get her hands on. I don’t know what would make a person so hateful.”

As I grew angrier and angrier, I could feel my face about to either catch fire or literally boil. But I stopped myself at my mother’s last sentence.

What would make a person so hateful?

The thing is: I don’t know. None of us know. And, if I could beg anyone for anything it would be to understand exactly that. Something makes people so hateful. Something makes people, on the flipside, great. Something drives people to wrastle’ gators or become high class hookers or bake shruken heads or finish college in their 40s or love their children insanely or drown their children insanely or pick up a stray dog or design ugly hats or think Nickelback is good music or study their ass off to be a dentist or spend their lives figuratively pulling teeth or be a ladies-man-style dirtbag or laugh or cry or lay in bed until 5pm or be a gunshot-wound of a second wife….

Or whatever else it is that people do. There is an impetus, or a set of them (I don’t know the plural of “impetus”), that drives everything. Be it nature or nurture, we simply don’t know.

We all spend so much time throwing our hands up in consternation at the negative aspects of other’s behavior. We are all so outraged and hateful at it, and many times rightfully so. Bad behavior should be punished and frowned upon. But I think somewhere, also, we have to be somewhere in it….. forgiving.

I tried to explain this to my family at the Christmas dinner table, and perhaps my aim was a little begging for forgiveness for myself, for my own trangressions. “But mom,” I tried to explain, “something drove her to be that way, something or some things we will never know about. Something we may never understand or maybe even shouldn’t have to. People don’t set out to be bad. We all get broken in some way.”

The table grew less hostile and heads hung a little in posit. I don’t believe the table was necessarily considering that Mercy didn’t deserve our anger, but maybe, I hope, rather considering our own faults and bad behavior for a second. Haven’t we all done terrible things? Don’t we all still consider ourselves good? Perhaps even right and just in what we do?

My point was not to throw out deserved punishments on the condition of forgiveness. My point was that if there is even one day to consider forgiveness in any capacity, if there’s one day to consider the complexity of another human being and to stop washing them in hate and anger, would any day be better than on Christmas? Isn’t there a whole religion founded upon this? Isn’t it called Christianity?

There is no excuse even I can find for what Mercy has done to my grandfather. My eyes well up and my heart-pace quickens even typing those words. There is no excuse. I would still tell Mercy off given the chance, and she would still deserve it. Forgiveness is not the same as clemency; bad behavior should and does rightfully get punished. But there is a reason behind it, some fucked up stupid reason that I don’t even know about. And I know she knows she is evil, I KNOW SHE KNOWS she has done wrong. But perhaps even she doesn’t know why. And that’s the real tragedy. You have to understand yourself which requires you to be, quite painfully, honest with yourself to ever begin to change your own behavior or attitude. And I know she does not have that luxury. Her denial and suppression is her own evil-spirited cage, and that’s not for me to rattle. That is not my burden. That is not my veritable cross to bear.

I can’t live my life in anger. And that’s where I need to apply forgiveness.

And, really, don’t millions of people believe there is a man who died for us to have this exact same privilege? Isn’t he the reason the mall stays open late all December and Cooper at Oxmoor Apple can’t visit his family and Harry and David is in business and jokes about fruitcake are tiresome and the awesome movie Elf exists and you gifted your mother that ill-fitting sweater?

Forgiveness.

And, really, even if you don’t believe in God or religion or magic or Star Wars or anything…

Don’t you just get tired of being mad?

I Don’t Care What You Call Me, Just Call Me.

My lost iPhone and me.... in happier times

It’s 3am on Christmas and I can’t sleep because my friend Veen has drank a little too much “Christmas joy” and is now lonely and brooding and won’t stop messaging me to textually announce it. I’d like to insert a sentence here about how I’m such a good friend and am staying up to “listen”, but I’m really just as bored and insomnious as he is miserable. So, there’s friends who stay up all night because they care for you and friends who happen to stay up all night checking their phones, neh?

So, the other night my phone was stolen because Iam careless and irresponsible and because I drink too much wine around riffraff. Stolen might be a strong word, as I may have simply lost it, but admitting that doesn’t exactly have the ring of victimization I would like. To lose my own possessions is merely a highlight of my unwary, perhaps even impetuous, qualities. To have my possessions stolen; that is something at which all people collectively wag their fingers.

Upon realizing that my electronic extension of my being without which I feel lost  iPhone was not to be recovered, I reacted the way I always do about everything critical: by freaking out, yelling, and making it the problem of everyone else I know. Normally I call my friends to do this, but without a phone with which to do this, I had to take it to the mean streets of Facebook. Which, in all reality, simply illustrated the general opinion that it “serves me right”.

I love my iPhone. I mean, like really love it. I doubt I’ve been more addicted to anything in my entire life. If I could find a man I was as interested in as my iPhone, I would behave, for him, like one of those subservient Chinese Mao-era wives. I’m on my phone CONSTANTLY. So badly that my friends constantly chastise me for this. I once, years back, checked my phone during sex, and that’s not like a Paris Hilton video rip off. I’ll give you the guy’s number to verify this. During the invective toss that usually solidifies a break-up, my last boyfriend brought up my phone attentiveness as my most annoying trait. I can think of TONS of other more annoying things: the fever pitch of my voice or the way I lick my fingernails or my penchant for picking my nose in the car. But, as it was, that didn’t hurt my feeling in the slightest. I liked my phone better than I liked him anyway.

So, after getting my virtual whine on, I headed to AT&T to buy a replacement. It being Christmas Eve-Eve, TONS of people where out buying gifts and being douchebags, and the AT&T store where I went was loaded with the total headache of other people with good intentions being more patient than I am.  This drives me nuts. I can behave, even laugh, if someone else in the room is being erratic or displaying jerkitude, but if a crowd of people are being docile and kindly waiting their turn, I can only feel it being my responsibility to open a can of crazy. Which I did by pacing and huffing and yelling at the girl who told me I was 16^th in line and it would likely be over an hour.

(I didn’t really yell at her, that’s not my style. I only yell at others in the confines of my own car and only at other idiots who have somehow acquired the privilege of a vehicle. It’s pretty heated. I’ve been told by several sources that my ranting is YouTube-worthy.  I have been told by several reliable sources that my ranting is “unnecessary”. )

Anyways, since I felt the need to yell and also was acting, grotesquely, like a flapping mother hen whose baby chick was taken, I stormed out to my car and drove to the mother suckle: the Apple store.

I wouldn’t say luck is my sidekick and fortune seems to have singled me out for special punishment, and as I walked into the veritable zoo that is the Oxmoor Apple Store, I realized that it was going to be a matter of waiting for hours or leaving empty-handed. The latter was simply not an option, and I suddenly felt sick over having left the last store due to impatience. Now here I am: tired, hot, and unshowered, stewing in my own mess, surrounded by a bunch of people gift-shopping. Suddenly, I realized that my intentions, my reasons for waiting in that insufferably long line, were purely selfish…. as I watched other people’s attitudes being seemingly in a gift-giving, jovial holiday spirit.

As I waited in line, I thought about this. I questioned whether I had even muttered a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays to one single person as of yet. I asked myself whether I put any thought into my Christmas shopping, or whether I’d even finished it. I realized then that I hadn’t bought anything for my younger sister, and chalked it up to knowing I can, literally, buy her off with cash and still feel settled. And I realized that lately, I’ve forewent some important things because I let my Self, my own problems, my own total bullshit self-created nonsense, become bigger than the bigger picture. I realized that, when it comes to my spirit for anything, I have really phoned it in this year.

To desire feeling connected is human, and perhaps I am mistaking disconnect for true linkage. Maybe, despite the countless ways to stay “in touch”- Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Viber, text…- maybe I’m not really reaching anything. The luxury to document my every most fleeting of ephemera, and to have the gratuitous- almost unsavory- ability to, at any given moment, find out what anyone I know is practically exactly thinking or doing…. Maybe that’s what I’m using to create my every interactive congruity. Maybe that’s what I’m mistaking for contact. Maybe the warm hands I might otherwise be grasping are also filled with the cold casings of iPhones.

Four hours later, and with the help of a young man who’s Apple store retail job (with its irritatingly deperate consumers like me) won’t allow him to see his family this Christmas, I got my new phone. I thanked the young man, whose name is Cooper, whose family lives just under an hour from where I am now visiting mine, and told him I hoped he had a Merry Christmas. He was the first person I verbally told that to this year. This Christmas Eve-Eve was the first time I had my head out of my phone’s ass long enough to know what is going on in the real world.

So I walked outside, phone in hand, satisfied in my “reconnection”.  I placed my new phone in my dash and periodically checked it… all that strain and all that strife…. Expecting the rush and flood of everyone’s relief that I am now finally back in touch, and I imagined my friends wailing: “FINALLY Allison is reachable!!!”

And I waited, and checked, and waited….

No one, for hours, calling.

Failing to Thrive.

So, last night I fell asleep on my friend Erin’s couch after much snacking, beering, and “how-can-we-get-rich”-ing. I stirred awake to the sound of the narrator from American Planet Earth- Deserts, who gently explained that, in the desert, “Toads are another night owl….”

I mean, I’m no zookeeper, but I don’t think so. You can’t say “Ford trucks are another kind of Boeing”. I expected more from Animal Planet, at least when it comes to animal metaphors.

Today, I sat at lunch with my good friend Jean-Pascal for what seemed like four hours but was probably merely a quarter of one. I love to watch my friends; they are like my own little characters in my own little gay squirrel cartoon. Jean-Pascal spent an intermittent 70% of our lunch hitting on the waitress, whose age we hedged bets at being between 24-26. She was enamored with him. I think she fell in love. She was also 21, rendering us both distastefully and age-inappropriately wrong.

“I wish I were a rich Italian man in the 1970’s”, Jean-Pascal threaded, in his vodka-fueled lunch quilt not atypical of being sewn this kind of a day.

I wish he were too, but I’ll settle for the short-pants version I get in 2011. I told Jean-Pascal that his pants were too short and he said, “No, these boots just have high heels.” God Save the Metros.

No harm in being boisterous and flirtatious, as I find myself routinely and overbearingly so. And I listened to Jean-Pascal go on, and then on, about marriage. We have both been such before, and have that commonality that only comes when your heart has blackened into something bitter yet hilarious.

“Back then men could have their hot wife and a new mistress every month. It wasn’t about dishonor and disloyalty and ‘finding out’, it was about not embarrassing who you’re with. Everyone did what they did, and kept it clean- Understood. Nowadays, people take these vows and expect each other to actually follow them. That’s why marriage fails. It’s not that marriage has changed, it’s just that now we are expected to actually DO IT.”

As he continued and as I laughed, I realized that this- perhaps not in such stark form- is fundamentally true. I don’t know what marriage, or what much, has mean to me, but I did always find it subjective and breakable while in it. After-words, I never felt different; I didn’t stop feeling attracted to other men, I didn’t stop desiring, I didn’t feel such loyalty as to suffer what I felt was the agony of loyalty. I felt the same. And I acted the same. And in the ruins of that, in the flames of it, was when I began to feel differently.

I spent all that time trying to find what would fulfill me, what would make me feel “loved”. Nothing did. It wasn’t as though I went out and found the man who spent the day from his birth preparing to meet me and make me feel goddamned special constantly forever. I spent some years in a pinball machine of miserable people, all bouncing out for the same goal. Socially, companionship-ally, there are no teams. Every man for himself, one or two button-hits to save. Few balls knock full-on compatibility.

The waitress continued her over-attentiveness to us, at the behest beckoned by Jean- Pascal’s charm, and Jean-Pascal and I smiled, knowingly, at each other. The world operates by tricks, and here we were: playing such a routine one.

He asked for our check, and upon bringing it the poor girl brought a spare receipt tape with her facebook contact information on it. I joked with her, kissed her cheek, and thanked her for being so sweet. And as she walked away, Jean-Pascal, all 39 years of him, waved the ticket in my face with a Victory at Actium smile and said:

“See…. I still got it.”

“People spend all this time,” he continued, unaffected immediately by the interest of a new girl, tossing the ticket aside, “this day and age, worrying about ‘what fulfills me, what makes me whole?’ I got news for people,” said Jean-Pascal, “Nothing. Nothing. Even if you are healing AIDS by laying on of hands in Africa, there is a major corporation behind it. Nothing is going to fulfill you alone.”

“You see us? People like you and me, we have the same lunch anyone with more money does. In the dark, we’re all having the same sex. We can drink top-shelf enough to feel the same as any millionaire…”

And he turned his head to me, pointed his electronic, ridiculously gay cigarette in my face and said, “Find something you can do and do well, and turn your brain off to thoughts of ‘What does it mean???’’

So I came home, wine lunch and all, after sleeping until 5pm for days, after Failing to Thrive (which has been newly vetoed as my new site name)… and wrote this.

This is what I can do, albeit shot-in-the-dark well.

From listening to my guy friends talk, I’ve learned that none can be trusted. From listening to my girlfriends talk, I’ve learned that few can be trusted. From listening to myself, I’ve realized that trust and me are fair-weather at best and enemies when drinking. But I do believe, and always have, that people are neither good nor bad. People operate under an amazingly, almost dazzlingly complex set of circumstances under which they either do what they should, what they want, or what they think is best at the time. People are people. To be content or feign it, that has to be good enough to understand.

And I guess sometimes I’ll have to wake up, listen to a bad Animal Planet metaphor, and get on about doing whatever I’m good at.

Without spending the life of it questioning what it means.

 

 

 

 

How’s My Driving?

I saw this on my drive: a truck bed carrying a truck bed pulling a truck bed carrying a truck bed. It was almost too much absurdity for me to handle. I was sure I was passing the ends of the earth.

So, last week I made plans to watch my son’s final cross country race in Knoxville, Tn.  My son is living with his dad this school year, while my life steadily declines in the hopes of some veritable phoenix rising from the ashes of it. But that is not yet the case. It seems as though, daily, things get wronger and wronger.

To be at the race with time to spare, I had to leave Louisville no later than noon.  I set my alarm for 6:30am, and promptly hit the snooze until after 10am. I have time, I thought.  Laziness is not a good platform for reason.

So before I left, I tried to tie up some loose ends to feel less overwhelmed. I went to pay my court costs for my DUI, only to find that since it was a BANK HOLIDAY I couldn’t move money from my savings to cover it. I don’t understand this. I was trying to make a fucking ELECTRONIC transfer. It’s not like there’s a mouse in the middle of this deal, spinning in a wheel to make my money physically move from one place where MY money is to another place where MY money is.  All an electronic transfer does is make numbers move. It’s not even real cash, it’s just numbers. But I guess numbers need a holiday too.

I did manage to drop my comforter off at the cleaners, which was good because I was starting to feel pretty filthy for sleeping next to a massive red wine stain. Which also served as a reminder that I feel fine with drinking wine in bed. Which served as a reminder that I am a complete and utter sloth.

While driving around all day, I did what I usually do which is drain my phone batteries by being feverishly addicted to all forms of media one can access from a phone.  Texting everyone to say nothing, calling people to whine and bitch about nothing, checking your facebook interminably because I’m obsessed with you…. These are the important things that make my battery go from fully charged to about 10% life within 2 hours.  But, No sweat, I thought to myself, that’s what car chargers are for.

My last task of the morning was to get a new car charger, as I had left mine in the car of a friend. So, I went to AT&T to buy a new one, not wanting to make the 20minute drive to pick mine up from my friend. I got into my car, plugged the thing in, and nothing. There was no juice in that Hi-C box. So, I went in and I started like heckling the guy like it’s his personal fault the charger is defective, he tested it, and said it was fine. I refused to believe this, because when I set my mind to something, I have a hard time giving up the dream.

So, I huffed off to find my friend at work to locate MY car charger. Because I’m  100% sure MY car charger will work and everything else is the store’s fault.

No.

I got my car charger from my friend, plugged it in, nothing again. So my friend explains: “You might have a fuse out.” Like I have time to deal with this. ANOTHER thing. ONE MORE fucking thing.

By this time it’s 12:15pm. I’m 15 minutes behind schedule, it taking 4 hours to get to Knoxville and the race being at 4:30pm. Still, though, I knew I could make it if I left no later than 1:00pm.

So, I searched for a solution the Allison way: by freaking out, calling everyone I know, and yelling.

Though I may appear to have it together, I assure you, I don’t. I was fiercely committed to the idea that I could not drive to Knoxville without a charged phone. A million worst-case scenarios ran through my mind: getting a flat tire 15 miles from the nearest service station, getting into a wreck and the other person passes out and I can’t call 911, getting somehow kidnapped by an angry gang of Mexicans who force me to traffic drugs, alien abduction…. I don’t know. But I was sure all of these things would happen if I didn’t have my phone.

One of my friends simply said, “Just go, Allison. You’ll figure it out. Just go and worry about it when you get there.” That answer seemed too easy and to make too much sense. In my mind, everything is arduous and anywhere I’m not familiar with is like the movie Labyrinth, with its impossible mazes, riddles, creepy puppets, and of course a super sexy David Bowie at the end.

The clock was then reading past 1:30pm. I called Aiden’s dad, almost cancelling. He, too, said, “Just come, meet me here, you’ll get here when you get here, even late.” So, against my internal sense of impending disaster, I got on the road… 8% battery to spare.

Before I left, I stopped back at AT&T to pick up my only phone-charging option: a solar-powered phone case. The sun was out, the phone charger boasts 8 hours of extra life, and so I threw $100 at the problem, snapped my phone into it, and set it on the dash.

I’ve never owned anything solar-powered, as I am not a hippie and have gotten on well with electricity for 29 years, but I’m beginning to think the sun is full of shit. This case did not charge, and in fact lost what little power it had within an hour, draining my phone of 3 extra precious percents of power. As I read the instructions, it stated that the solar-powered charger must first be wall-charged BEFORE it can be solar charged. So, wait, what? What’s the point? If you need power to solar-power, then what good is solar power? No good, I realized. That’s why the sun goes down at night. It has to be plugged in.

So, I’m on the road and I’m listening to Less Than Jake and I’m trying to be steady and stoic and not shrivel into a sniffling ball of bratitude.  As I headed down the on ramp to 64, I passed a hitchhiker who promptly gave me the  middle finger. Really? Could things possibly get any more totally fucked up? Even the hitchhiker was foreboding, and I was certain that I was heading towards disaster.

But the thing was, the thing that kept me all along the while, was thinking about how disappointed my son would be if I didn’t show up, even late. I had to disappoint him the weekend I got my DUI, missing an event I promised to make because of my own irresponsibility. And he didn’t ask me to come to his race, I made that commitment, I told him for weeks I would be there.  I just couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing him AGAIN, as I know I’ve been such a disappointment in so many ways over his 9 little years on this planet.

As soon as I arrived in Knoxville, my phone completely died. Though I had the wherewithal to hand-write directions to the race location, and though I thought I was thorough, I missed some specifics on the last part of which interstate to take.  At the crossroads, I held on tight and went with the wind, immediately being sure I had taken the wrong exit.  I began to sweat, becoming more and more desperate, no phone to check directions or even call for them, no idea how long I would drive until I could turn around.

4:26pm, the clock read. I’ve lost this battle.

Just as I had given up hope, I looked up to realize the next exit, the one at which I was going to turn around, was actually THE exit, my exit, the right exit. My heart swelled with a weird form of gratitude and my eyes welled with tears, and I just cried a little in the relief of it. That’s the thing about Me vs. The Universe: we are always butting heads. But somehow, when the Universe gives me all kinds of shit and I choose to move along with it, the cosmos give me a strange sort of pity-pardon at the eleventh hour and I end up coming out ok.

I looked at the clock: 4:29pm. One minute. The Universe gave me one minute.

I parked about a mile away from the race site, this particular race being attended by over a thousand people. So I got out of my car, and I ran. I ran in the rain with no umbrella, in a white top and my favorite Frye leather boots. I was soaked to a visible bra and ankle-deep in mud when I arrived at the meeting place, my attempt to look like a put-together mom trumped by the elements.  I looked everywhere, no sign of them, no sign of what race was going on, panic again setting in. I was sure they’d raced, and I was sure I’d missed it.

Just then, I heard, “Allison, Allison!!” It was my ex, running at me “They boys are about to start!” He wasn’t at the meeting place because my son was at the start line, running, literally within two minutes. I had just enough time to get to the start, hug my elated son, and watch him take off.

When I saw my son running towards the finish line, I could see the determination and pain in his face, his little body wittering with the empty-fuel shake of being pushed beyond its limit. I knew what he was doing: he was trying with everything in his little self to impress me.  Because he loves me so much. Because despite all my shortcomings as a mother, he wants my attention, my praise, and my love above everything.  Because he was so happy I was there to watch him.

I guess that’s the thing about unconditional love: You can be shitty six-ways-sideways and still be worthy of it.

He came in second for his school, timing a mile in 7 minutes and 12 second, over a full minute better than his best mile previous.  So there I was, in now-ruined boots and a see-through top, hugging my sweat-soaked son in the pouring, cold rain, and I doubt I’ve ever felt happier than I did in that moment.

As we were driving back to the hotel, I said to Aiden, “I can’t believe I made it.” I hadn’t stopped, I hadn’t peed all day or eaten or anything. If I had, if I had just been two minutes behind, I would have missed the whole thing. Two minutes. And I almost, almost…. I was two minutes away from never leaving Louisville.

“I knew you’d make it, Mom”, he said. “Whenever I would think about it, I knew, I had the feeling you’d make it.” And I wondered: If there is an all-driving force governing what I believe is chance and circumstance, was it his determination, his positivity, his unwavering belief in my making it that ultimately made it happen, when I was two minutes shy of almost giving up?

Whatever it was, we drove to our hotel, happily, hungrily and soaking wet to the bone. There we ordered a ton of room service, dried off, plugged in all our electronic devices, and fell asleep…

Everything recharging.

There’s “The Chase” and Then There’s Cutting To It

( I originally wrote this story on 9/19/2010, and am reposting it because it goes along with the post I’m making next 🙂

Aiden and I, after ordering all the desserts on the menu at the Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine this past summer. He said it was the best day of his life 🙂

My son has joined the Cross Country team at his elementary school and I couldn’t be more proud and by “proud” I mean “crazily promoting my kid as a future star athlete”. The school had their first meet this past Friday, and Aiden did amazing.  He came in fourth within his school group, and within the top 20 over about 200 kids.

Two hundred kids in one race… it’s almost militant, that kind of force running at you. They line these kids up in a row unending as the shoreline, with no real consideration for ability or likeliness to win, shoot the start gun, and let them flow forward at random and with varying degrees of effort. The most aggressive kids, of course, are leading the pack, followed by the kids who will never be more than average at anything followed by the kids who are busy looking at butterflies followed by the kids who will eventually shoot them all in high school. It’s like looking into a little character-development crystal ball.

My son ran his ass off. I have never seen my child work so hard at ANYTHING. I think that’s a shining moment as a parent: watching your child’s first desire to whoop it up on other kids.  As team parents, we congratulated each other and complimented each other’s child’s job. I walked around saying, “Oh Johnny did so awesome!” while thinking, “Johnny might do better without such butternuts for parents.” And “Oh Cole did sooo great!” while squinting my internal eyes and thinking “Oh Cole…you may have won this time….just you wait, you little….”

Because, while I may have never been accused of being “careful”, I have DEFINITELY been accused of being “unnecessarily competitive”.

I run drills with the kids during practice and I show no mercy. I don’t care how young you are or how delicate your self-esteem is, given the opportunity to whoop you, I’ll take it. When it comes to me, glory is gladly accepted in any form, even undeserved, and it is my staunch belief that you are never too young to learn your place in the food chain. 

Look, kids, there’s the chase and then there’s cutting to it.

Before many, many practices this year, Aiden has complained: “I don’t WANT to go!!! It’s harder than I thought it would be!!!!” But I’ve kept strapping him in, making him go, tailing him with a bull whip until the bitter end of practice.  The other day I got fed up and said, “Look, son, welcome to Life. Everything is hard work and that’s what you do and then you die, sometimes violently. Have those nature shows on Discovery taught you nothing? You don’t see antelope playing video games.  Antelope run their ass off. Get your shoes on before I turn lioness on you.”

I’m not cruel-hearted, it’s just that at my older age I’ve come to realize that everything I’ve done well, everything I’ve accomplished, has been as a result of choosing something and sticking it out. Everything good I’ve lost has been from behaving exactly opposite: quitting early.  This is not the result I want for my child. I want him, among other things, to develop fortitude.

Fortitude is something I see so lacking in people, almost epidemically.  I see so much starting-and-stopping, so much never-trying, so much co-dependence, and as a result, so much misery. Instead of BECOMING what they want to be, I see people simply hating each other for having what they want. It’s disheartening. Life is already hard, why throw so much effort after tripping up the runner next to us instead of quickening our own pace?  I have found that the quickest way to make someone hate you for no reason is to appear confident in your own performance. 

I got news for you, peeps: Life doesn’t give a shit about you, it doesn’t want to be your friend.  Life does not care if you’re having a bad day or you don’t like strawberry and there is only strawberry or if Phil doesn’t like you or if Carol is hotter than you or you wished on that Zoltar machine and you never grew big or your dad was cold-hearted or your mom’s nickname was Mussolini or you couldn’t sleep because you think your office is haunted because your printer keeps going off at 4am or because you’re too thin or because your boyfriend broke up with you to date a chick who’s fat enough to be silhouetted before a Hitchcock film or because you didn’t get enough to eat at Thanksgiving fucking dinner or any of the other things that people blame their shortcomings on.

So I got my kid up this morning and we ran in the park ALL day. Literally, all day. We jogged and sprinted and jogged and sprinted and drilled and drilled and talked race pace and course strategy. Currently, we both have all the flexibility one could expect from a NASCAR roll cage. I’m not trying to teach my son that winning is the goal; I’m trying to help him show himself something about himself, maybe something I haven’t even seen yet. Something worth all this effort. But I believe something good will happen. I guess that’s what faith kinda is.

And if it’s not being the winner every time or ever, there is definitely something self-proving about whole-heartedly putting one foot in front of the other…  until you either cross the finish line or pass out trying.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Edison