Sunday, January 28, 2007

scatterbrained, incoherent post

And now the fifty meter dash for thoughts with no sense of direction.
On your mark,
Get set,
bang.

  • i had a chance to toss the old lacrosse ball around with my eldest son yesterday. It was hard to concentrate because i was repeatedly getting creeped out by a Field of Dreams experience. As if, instead of flingin' and catchin' with my son, a teenage me had come out of the cornstalks. Which is doubly weird since up till he hit gawky pupa i would have said he looked like his mother.
  • hmm. Think i just called myself 'gawky.'
  • 'pupa?' ewww.
  • i have also reached the conclusion that Elwood Station, that's what i call this tumble-down pile of matches, our well ventilated wooden tent, our twin we share with a squirrel in the attic, the bane of my existence, the big, blue box o' belicosity, i have made it as official as such a thing need be that Elwood Station is cursed. Tools secret themselves, even when i buy duplicates. Despite seven years of pouring enough raw materials into this black hole of futility to rebuild a plague-riddled, war-ravaged fourth-world nation, i can still get halfway into a project and be missing the one nail that would have made it a productive day. Techniques that work just fine, nay! bring success and fortune in my professional life as a remodeler bring nothing but abysmal, beard-tearing, sackcloth wearing, self-flagellating, weeping and teeth gnashing failure here. Short of an exorcism on the scale of Operation Overlord i am considering a new name...Sisyphus Station.
  • Friday afternoon i set two goals for myself to accomplish this weekend: one-finish the purchase, packaging and shipping of my long-distance friend's Christmas gifts. (Yes, i am aware it is nearly February. i am somewhat less than punctual and consider it still on time if i get it to him before his birthday in March. Yes, i have often missed this deadline too.) Self-appointed milemarker of self-loathing number two-write next Sunday's worship service. So, here i am, two cups of coffee into Sunday morning, willfully, somewhat guiltily declining my Heavenly Father's invitation to brunch with the family and i have yet to make serious headway into either task. i suck.
  • Rascal, my youngest son, is a video game junkie. In an effort to meet him where he is i sat down to a little EA sports Nascar racing. Three restarts in practice mode later my virtual driver finally unhooked his seatbelt, abandoned his smoking ruin of a car, froggered the pixel crushing river of death of other racers flying past, scaled the outer wall and ran screaming into the stands to get away from me. Apparently my Atari-trained, five thumbed paws can't quite grasp the idea of a nuanced joystick. It ain't Indy 500, that's all i know.
  • Sign that the scruffy puppy is getting to be an old dog. i'm starting to like a nice, hot cup of tea at night before bed.
  • Other signs: my knees, my hands, my sciatic, my elbows, my jaw, my ability to stay awake past eight, scatterbrained, incoherent posts...
  • Since the Mynk has screamed out of pit road and back into the Rat-Race 500 as the manager of an H&R Block office, (all of a sudden i'm picturing a black car with a big, green square on the hood and a pit crew of tax professionals. Go Mynk, Go! ;) ever since then i have taken over the cooking duties here at Sisyphus Station. All hail the crockpot! Preparing a meal at five in the morning before work however has nixed two of my favorite parts of being the chef: Blasting the Blues from the kitchen radio and Shooting the booze. i generally cook with alcohal, some of which goes into the food.
  • Speaking of which, i gotta go get dinner prepped. Today's special: Black Bean soup with a dash of Buddy Guy and shot of Jose' Cuervo 1800. Mangia!

Monday, January 22, 2007

Travel advice

Like a snap shot from a muddy AK-47, today's post is just a quick proverb from the continent of Africa...

"If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together."

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Topic numero zwei

Time to get to that second topic i warned y'all about. Hmm, "y'all" may be presuming too much. On the outside possibility that there is A Reader to this little blog o' blarney, i should probably address it in the singular. How's this...?

Time to get to that second topic i warned you, mom, about. Aww who'm i kidding. Not even my mom would read this rather overripe tripe.

Hello, airwaves, dustmites and neutrinos, me again and while i know you can't read, my rather fragile psyche needs the illusion of being heard. So thank you for just being there.

No wonder no one reads this...it takes three paragraphs just to get to the featherpluckin' topic! Hah! i was going to start this topic with a line like..."it takes me a long time to reach a decision." But i think i've made that abundantly clear. A long time to reach a decision, a conclusion, or for the love of all the infelicitous spirits, a gutdump topic!

Fight or flight? Attack or escape? i've known my share of fighters. Envied no few of them. i, on the other paw, am an escapist. Any problem can be easily solved by never confronting the problem in the first place. And though it is not common knowledge, problems run kinda slow. So you can, when necessary, outrun 'em. Not forever mind you, they tend to be long distance types but over the short track you can leave 'em panting in your dust. i know, i usually have no small pack of the hounds on my trail at any particular moment. Persistant little buggers.

But what do you do when you finally reach the rather obvious brick wall that running away and ignoring your problems has become..a problem? How do you run away from running away? How do you avoid..avoidance? While turning around and fighting like the cornered rat i am may be the only option i have left myself, i'm really not that fond of being a rat.

Y'know, to read this you would think i have a sloppy amount of time to ponder my own inner workings.

How does one change decades of ingrained habit, instinctual tactics and hardwired strategy? Well the answer is obvious to anyone with the mental capacity of a lop eared bunny.

You can't.

Rats don't cease being rats cause they wanna be dogs. Cockroaches are cockroaches, put lipstick and a wig on them and you still got Paris Hilton. Leopards don't wear pinstripe and tiger's stripes go down to the skin. And the Artful Dodger still gets shivved in a dark alley when he's no longer able to out run that last problem. Literary critics will tell you to avoid the Deus ex Machina, the Act of God that saves the hero from his or her literary issues with no help from the hero. It's unfulfilling in a story, it cheats the reader out of their hopes for the main character. For me to just say that the only way for me to change who and what i am is for God to do it may sound like a cop out...

unless, unless i'm not the main character, or the hero, but instead...the problem.