a reflection on "The Dude On the Cereal Box"

As any of you who regularly follow this blog now know, I'm a regular follower and avid reader of Australian blogger/writer, Sam de Brito's All Men Are Liars blog. In the past his blog entries have provided inspiration or a jumping off point for some of my mental meanderings.

He had such an entry today.

And while my "wilder days" were considerably tamer than Mr. de Brito's, I found I could still relate on some level to that switch being flipped. You go through a certain chunk of your life where you're "in the now." You either don't consider the consequences of the things you choose to put in your body, or you don't care. You live your life on fast food, booze, and usually some form of "tobacco" (whether it be actual tobacco, or "wacky tobacky"). Most people go through that phase in some extreme or another.

At some point you notice others your age are drinking less, eating healthier, and/or exercising more. Deep down inside you feel a desire to "be like them." Their healthier lifestyles are more attractive to you than your gluttony, sloth, and whichever other of the 7 deadlies are present in your lifestyle repertoire. Initially you don't know how to get "there"-- to the happy healthy glow they give off. You make excuses for not doing it and realize you're still a hamster on a wheel-- going through the motions but not getting anywhere.

Many never get off the wheel, some need a little trigger (isn't that an Elvis Costello song?) to be pulled or a little switch to be flipped in their lives. My switch came in the form of a baby girl-- a daughter I want to see grow up, whose life I want to be there to witness. I want to be around long enough to be a strong compass for her-- to give her life direction... and when she's old enough, impart the wisdom of the aforementioned Sam's book No Tattoos Before You're 30:What I'll Tell My Children.

Fatherhood

They say there's nothing quite like it, that it's indescribable-- that first moment when you lay eyes on your first child, a life brought into the world by you and your wife-- a life you're suddenly responsible for. Whoever "they" are, they're right.

Everything I thought it could and would be-- completely blown out of the water by an intense maelstrom of pure joy and unconditional love.

Monday night, June 1st, 2009: 8:14 pm-- hidden behind a surgical curtain as doctors carefully make the necessary incisions, I was holding my wife's hand, providing words of comfort. Then I hear it, a baby's cry-- at this point I still don't know whether it's a baby boy or girl.

The doctor gives me permission to stand and look behind the surgical curtain, obstructing my view and for the first time I see my little girl... Right then and there, I'm a goner. The tears well up and start pouring out of me. She's absolutely beautiful and I'm already in big trouble because she already has Daddy wrapped around her little finger.

After cleaning her off, she's given to me so I can introduce her to her mother as she's being stitched back up. The nurses briefly take her back to take some blood and run some tests on her.

As they finish stitching up my wife, my daughter & I wait in recovery for Mom to join us. Her eyes are as open as my heart as I offer her soothing words of comfort and encouragement. I decide to try out a couple of possible names my wife had picked out on her.

"Olivia?" She screams at the top of her already very strong lungs. Apparently, she's not a fan.

"Samantha?" She quiets down and looks me in the eyes... Just to make sure it wasn't a fluke I try again.

"Olivia?" Again my eardrums are pierced by pitches I'm still getting used to.

"Samantha?" And again she goes quiet and looks me in the eyes. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a winner.

When my wife finally joins us in the recovery room, I tell her that I left the name completely up to our daughter and told her that our daughter was Samantha.

I continued holding Samantha as my wife recovered, feeling a little guilty that my wife had done all the hard work, but I was the first to enjoy the results of all that she had been through and was continuing to go through. At the same time I felt well and truly spoiled that I was getting this precious bonding time with my little girl so soon after her big debut.

Almost three weeks have passed and I'm enjoying every precious second I spend with my little girl whether my wife & I are watching her sleep, or she's wide awake at 3 am ready for a feeding and watching us trying to sleep. When she's awake she's alert, her eyes looking around and taking in all these new sights, sounds, and smells. When she's feeding her eyes lock on my wife or my eyes. When she's asleep her arms raise above her head in what we've come to call "the hockey pose" as it resembles a hockey player cheering after scoring a goal.

I've already started her "musical education" with a bit of Supertramp and Steely Dan. While I'd love to introduce her Dream Theater, I don't think she's quite "there" yet so that will have to wait a bit. In the mean time she'll learn about Chicago, Toto, Little River Band, Poco, Boz Scaggs, and Genesis (and if her Mommy gets her way U2 and The Rolling Stones as well).

Reincarnation?

The other day I was recalling a recurring dream I used to have when I was rather young. In the dream I was wearing a tuxedo. It was a nice one too, tailcoat, top hat, the whole 9 yards. And in it I was an adult dancing with a woman in a beautiful evening gown... The thing is the tux and evening gown were not of the present era (or the present era at the time I had the dream, the early eighties). I don't recall what music we were dancing to, but I do recall knowing that the clothes I'd been wearing in the dream were from the past. I was too young to have any concept of when in the past they were from. In hindsight, I believe they were reminiscent of the roaring twenties.

The odd thing is, I've always felt close ties to that era. Some of my favorite classic novels were written in the late teens through the twenties (Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and of course The Great Gatsby, and Ernest Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises). I'm also a fan of silent film-- the comedies of Buster Keaton & Charlie Chaplin, the swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks, the horror films of Lon Chaney, and even some of John Barrymore's and Rudolf Valentino's films.

When I read books or watch films of that era, there's a familiarity that's not necessarily there when I read books or watch older films of other eras that pre-date my life. I suppose there are other possible and likely more plausible explanations out there. But can the possibility that our souls get recycled really be outside the realm of possibility? Our bodies may become worm food or ash after our expiration dates, but are our bodies perhaps merely vessels our souls occupy on a much longer, perhaps even infinite journey of existence?

And if this isn't my first time around, how many times before have I held residence on this third orb from the sun? Who and when might I have been?

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Now playing: Richard Clapton - Get Back To The Shelter
via FoxyTunes

Happy Anniversay, My Love

Four years ago today, you made me the happiest man alive when you became my wife. In a few weeks you're going to top that by bringing our first child into the world. My love for you knows no limits.

In honor of our special day...



I am, I am, the luckiest. :)

Numb

Last night, after rating my top 5 heartbreak songs, I was transported to a time when those songs were my lifeline—when every time I heard them I felt as though they were about me specifically.

However now, with enough time and space between the present and that particular chapter of my past, I have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. And I got to thinking as bad as heartbreak is… what was worse (at least for me) was that numbness that comes after the pain finally wears off. It’s that point where the pain has worn off, but the memory of the pain is still fresh enough to keep you from putting yourself back out there.

It’s that stage where you feel as though you’re just going through the motions—not just in love, but in life. The pain is gone, but there’s no joy or happiness. It’s a nondescript numbness, like after you go swimming and you still have water stuck in your ears. The whole world just seems muted to you. The sounds are flatter, the colors are grayer, the smells and tastes are even a bit duller.

It only hurts when you’re still alive. It’s that lead weight on your heart feeling, the world muffled, you know that feeling where you’re just going through the motions? That’s where you were at.

Somehow you managed to get past the intense hurt where every love song on the radio sounded as if it were mocking you. You’ve done the hurt, the self-pity, and heck even the bitter pill of anger has worn off.

And as bad as all of that was, it would be a welcome respite from what comes after. This head underwater feeling you’re now stuck with—no pain, but no joy either. You’re stuck in the purgatory of the human heart. The wounds may not be fresh any more, but the memory of them is enough to keep you from putting yourself back out there. So, what do you do next? You start living your life on a treadmill.

If you're one of the lucky ones, when you stop trying, stop looking for it one day love finds you. It can be stubborn that way. No matter how much you close yourself off to it, no matter how big a shield you put up-- it can get through. But it also plays hard to get. If you try to hard, it'll be a no show.

For some though, the treadmill becomes more than just a way to live, it becomes a security blanket. You know you won't get hurt if the most you ever give the world is merely showing up. So there you are, just walking in place... and somehow time gets away from you, and you wake up one day and realize at some point you stopped living and spent most of your life merely existing.

I'll admit I was one of the lucky ones, and I count my blessings for that because I could just as easily have stayed on that treadmill, I could have continued going through the motions. But I left that door open and I didn't force it. Somewhere along the way, love snuck in the door-- a door I never fully closed... and the love that snuck in and snuck up on me has grown into something that exceeds even my wildest imagination.
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Now playing: Chicago - Remember The Feeling
via FoxyTunes

Late Bloomer

I was a late bloomer... didn't get my first snog until I was 19 years old. It wasn't really due to physical appearance, I'm not an ugly bloke... that being said I also realize I'm not God's gift to women either... It was more a lack of confidence thing.

At any rate, several years back-- when I was 19 there were 2 people who changed my life substantially. One was a passing acquaintance I merely knew online who gave me the advice which stuck with me all these years:

"Don't rely on your charm. You have none. Just relax and be yourself."

(incidentally he also went on to say something to the effect of, “It doesn’t matter how tight your jockeys are, the human tongue is at least 3” long.” And “Your best chance of a date on a Saturday night is your right hand.”)

The other was my first girlfriend who gave me the shot of confidence I’d been lacking prior to knowing her. She believed in me and in so doing got me to believe in myself again—for the first time in a long while. We parted amicably and even still keep in touch. Her influence on me has been a lasting gift even as our lives have gone in rather different directions.

There’s a type of bloke out there who thinks of picking up women as a “game” and fashions himself as being a “Pick-up Artist.” Their perception of themselves instills them with a confidence. And generally the "confidence" PUAs have (or appear to have) is false. It's held up based on a script these blokes expect the women to follow to a “t”. Once a woman goes "off-script" the confidence crumbles.

Either way it's all about having confidence-- not too much as that often comes across as arrogance or even as being superficial and/or fake—with pick-up artists, if the perception of confidence is strong enough it creates and perpetuates the reality. But that confidence is still held up by a perceived script that sometimes the prospective sheila follows and other times goes off script.

In the end it's pretty damn simple, you have to like who you are as a person, be confident with who you are... and just be yourself. If she's a good match, things will just click and if things don't click chances are it wouldn't have worked out anyway as the two of you may likely just have incompatible personalities. Life’s too short to dwell on it.

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Now playing: Jim Steinman - Surf's Up
via FoxyTunes

For Just a Moment

We laughed until we had to cry
And we loved right down to our last goodbye
We were the best, I think we’ll ever be
Just you and me
For just a moment

We chased that dream we never found
And sometimes we let one another down
But the love we made
Made everything alright
We shone so bright
For just a moment

Time goes on, People touch and they’re gone
And you and I will never love again
Like we did then

Someday when we both reminisce
We’ll both say there wasn’t too much we missed
And through the tears, We’ll smile when we recall
We had it all
For just a moment

Time rolls on, People touch and then they’re gone
But you and will never really end
We’ll never love again
Like we did then

We laughed until we had to cry
And we loved right down to our last goodbye
--For Just a Moment (Love Theme From 'St. Elmo's Fire')

There’s something magical about youth, an amplification of human emotion. It’s a time of first experiences and truth be told, the intensity of subsequent experiences rarely lives up to the intensity of our firsts. First kiss, first love, first broken heart.

And it’s because of that intensity and newness that, as adolescents, we tend to blow things a bit out of proportion. We can’t imagine how anyone else could have ever loved or been hurt like that before us. We’re still young enough to believe we can change the world, and not yet old enough to realize that chances are we won’t.

When you add to that the trappings of adult responsibility; the bills, mortgage payments, the 40 hour work week many of us eventually become slaves to; these haven’t yet invaded our lives. Our focus on that intensity of emotion grows so singular that it can’t possibly be matched in adulthood.

And then, as we grow older our adolescence often gets idealized. The sepia tones of memory often paint a much brighter picture of the highest highs of our past at the same time dulling the lowest lows. And with every re-painting of those memories those lowest lows grow duller until they eventually disappear leaving a bright vivid picture of only the best times of our lives.

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Now playing: Kids in the Kitchen - Current Stand
via FoxyTunes