Please pardon this rant. I was recently reminded of a challenge to my personal definition of how certain family members should be titled via a popular social networking medium. Put in plain English, I stated in a public electronic forum that certain blood relations were of a closer specified relation than blood would allow.
Why did I do this? Why
would I do this?
Answered simply;
1. I did it because
it was right to do.
2. I did it because
I meant it.
Shall I be even more specific? Ok... I said on Facebook that my nieces were my sisters and I stand by the fact that... they are.
Being a brother, sister etc is a privilege. Not a right. Blood means that someone shared parentage, but does not ensure, engender or guarantee loyalty. This is not a hypothesis. This is not a Theory. This is a fact.
How do I know? Empirical evidence my friend. It has been proven. By action on the part of some and lack of action of others time and time again.
Family, loyalty and love are not a game. Score is not kept, tallies are not settled. Family, loyalty and love are silent wars of attrition where only those who's mettle is true and love is real survive. It is not a popularity contest.
Therefore today I step off the high road. This is not to say that I will bow to ruder tactics or nasty double entendre to seek out revenge upon those who disagree... no, I merely disavow myself of the argument.
You see, I live a professional life where thousands of men and women are my brothers and sisters. We call each other such to each others faces on a daily basis. We have bonded so via common experience, shared code and moral value. It is a
choice we have made.
What I share with the young ladies in question; My
sisters, is something even greater. Not only did blood, relation and circumstance push us toward another, diversity, distance and strife could not and will not keep us apart...
This is the part in the conversation where I sigh, look down at the ground and give it just one last try...
I love my sisters, these three amazing young women. I am blessed to be their brother. I dont give a good god damn what someone who doesn't understand those words thinks.
I care about
My Family, a family which includes many people, blood and not... and which when examined honestly is a strong and enviable clan.
You see, Family is a
privilege... not a right.
It is something you fight
for, not rail
against.
In the end it is not something you are born to, it is something that must be earned... and if you treat it badly and with contempt... it can be lost.
Tonight as I sat down before the keyboard intent on writing, I hit that spot I sometimes do when my want of writing is greater than my need for writing. It's times like this that I often lose momentum on a project and end up relegating it the “Visit Later” folder on the hard drive. More often than not those stories and essays languish in the lonesome dregs of the virtual desktop never to be visited again regardless of the title of the folder, almost as if they were a freshly dumped girlfriend whom I just told “Let's be friends”.
Many times when I need to write it is because I have recognized a problem and want to logic out solutions by riffing on the page. I used to write a great deal of poetry. Horrible, overly emotional self indulgent fluff (okay, it wasn't all that bad) but that stopped for the most part when I met my beautiful wife. Oh, I have had resurgences of the poetic muse, but they were when I explored technique and nearly always involved... drinking.
Why? Why did I all but give up poetry as I gave up music and song writing? Easy; because I was no longer sad, no longer wallowing in self pity. Dumb as it may sound, sometimes I'm sad that I'm not sad anymore. I've never had the ego to say that I was good, but god damnit I was prolific! Sometimes I just miss the way the words flowed from my fingers.
So tonight, as I sat here wondering what to write, I thought, well, what's on my mind?
(In no order of importance, Ladies and gentlemen your top ten!)
- The Time's Square Bombing (but I get enough of that via the inside-track at work).
- Arizona and the immigration issue (but I get enough of that on talk radio and around the water cooler at work as well)
- Turns out stem cells work different in space according to recent research (that actually has me pretty intrigued as far as meaning and potential goes)
- Voyager 2 stopped transmitting it's usual telemetry and began sending back unintelligible signals which has “The Scientists” scratching their heads. (hey, I like weird stuff)
- My Wife is awesome. (Just a fact)
- Family's coming to visit soon (Yeah!)
- I'm anxious to find out if I got promoted, but the results are going to be late due to the floods in Tennessee. (then again, if the answer is 'no', I can wait)
- I'm really digging on the debut album by “Them Crooked Vultures”. ( I mean how does one go about getting John Paul Jones of Led Zep to be your bass player?)
- I really enjoyed the grilled Portabellas, squash and Polenta I made for dinner.
- My kids are awesome. And a pain in the ass. Sometimes an awesome pain in the ass. And I love them for it.
What's that you say? Really? Number ten? You think so? Hmmmm.... Yeah. I guess besides number five (which doesn't surprise anyone who knows her) it's the only one relevant to this blog. The title of the blog after all is “A Husband and Father” and not “Bored Dude Drinking Wine and spelling Dog backwards”.
So I guess I'll write about their awesomeness and pain in the ass-ness.
The Oldest.... Hmmm... we need new nick-names... We'll call her 'Rosie'. Well, Rosie hit an even 10.0 on the PITA (Pain In The Ass) Scale yesterday. It was just an out and out lousy day behavior wise. Wednesdays are always hard and we may have figured out why. Rosie has (we are finally admitting) some attention issues to go along with her stunning memory, intellect, creativity and ability to just well... figure shit out. Put simply she is a loud wiggle worm. Wednesdays are rough (we figured out) because;
(A) Mom picks her up early from “after school care” to take her to the sitters so she can see her friend. This means that she misses out on that extra recess that let's her get her ya-ya's out.
(B) She goes to Ballet which, though she wants to be a dancer, she just doesn't have the patience for. Add to that that her Ballet Teacher thinks that she is at
Julliard and the next recital will be at the
Bolshoi, well... Rosie doesn't take well to that level of seriousness... she's six years old damnit.
So the fact is, by the time she gets into our loving-just worked eight hours and am dog tired-arms she has lot's of ya-ya's... Mucho Ya-Ya's... EPIC fricken ya-ya's to get out.
So yesterday she had the privilege to go get frozen yogurt with her friends (Mom Chaperoned) after dance. Let's just say that it did not go well. Ya-yas won over. She had her first ever “Go to your room until bedtime” night. Yes, she was paroled for dinner, but it was a bare bones “eat and don't you dare laugh dinner”. There was crying, there was discussing, there was more crying... and generally, there was crying.
Today, Mom figured out the Ya-Ya connection.
So today (as we often do anyway) we had a family bike ride after work. The route is about four miles round trip over residential, city and then waterfront bike path. It doesn't take too long, today just an hour. Rosie rides her own bike (and today was especially proficient, even experimented with Standing Up and Trying to Pedal) Mom and Dad ride theirs and The Youngest... Hmm... Nick Name... 'Itty Bitty' well... she usually sits in the child seat behing Mom. She's 4 and she is (as her nick name would indicate) little. We are just a about to upgrade Rosie to a larger bike and will re-attach the training wheels and re-gift her old bike to Itty Bitty. In the meantime we have considered getting a “tag along” (the 'half bike' things that connects to the back of a big bike that the kids can peddle but not really control). I digress.
Itty Bitty should be able to get her own ya-ya's out right? Well Dad said (jokingly) that she could chase him by running after him. So, we gave it a try. Now understand something... this kid is little. We can barely force MAYBE a thousand calories into her on a good day... Getting Itty Bitty to eat anything other than cheese, chocolate, yogurt or Pediasure is neither a science nor art... it's a crap shoot.
This little girl ran. She RAN man... She must have run the equivalent of a 5k for her size. Even when she was tired she still wanted to walk and pick flowers. I took a movie of part of it. She was amazing. Just Kept Running. She even had her own little 'kick' (shout out to present or former runners).
It wasn't a perfect night. Dinner and manners and then baths etc were not perfect. But that time on the bikes (and for Itty Bitty; the open road) was awesome. All of those awesome moments, validated by knowing glances between my wife and I, those moments where we acknowledge that “We made these independent miracles before us”, they are what life is... they are why I am happy that I cannot write poetry... The muse can go to hell.
(The author would like to thank his wife, Justin Vineyards, Them Crooked Vultures, The Smiths, Incubus and Outkast for proofreading and the patience to actually link all the things he meant to when he first put fingers to keys)
Still here?
Enjoy the Music
Years ago while on the way back to my wife's hometown in Michigan following a mini second honeymoon in Chicago we stopped for fast food. While eating my curly fries I assumed the persona of an overweight-financially and educationally challenged white rural female. I remarked how the fat the fries were cooked in was the nectar of the gods and how all that "health food mumbo-jumbo" had no bearing on my free-bird flag loving lifestyle. I continued the thick voiced soliloquy with a diatribe on the majority of America and it's pretentious ways. It is a memory of some very serious laughter. We were headed east on I-94; probably somewhere around Kalamazoo or Battle Creek, it was raining and I was smoking in the car with the window cracked. We laughed so hard; especially when someone resembling my assumed persona drove right by. Good times. [Late Entry: My Wife just reminded me of the portion of the act where I explained that salad was just a "Delivery Device for the manna that was Ranch Dressing..."]
That is the memory that stuck in my head when I thought of the title for this post. I thought of titling this post "Fat Entitled and American" but that would have put too much political emphasis on the article. This post is the initial response to a Doctor's Visit two weeks ago. [Background: I quite smoking cigarettes and tobacco products of any kind about three months ago. I put on twenty pounds quick as a bunny.]
It turned out that I was a little late on my scheduled physical. So I went in, showed that I was able to hear, see and that blood still pumped well enough in my veins to provide the requisite sample. I knew I put on a couple pounds but given my rank (I'm in the military) no one would really have the stones to look me in the eye and call me on it... Then the labs came back.
Them: "Chief, your cholesterol is very high and you have hypertension..."
Me: Excuse me?
Them: (My translation) "Chief, With respect, you're a lazy fat f@#k who doesn't exercise enough, you eat too much salt, red meat, fast food by god you drink too much. And if you ask me you are an angry pr!ck."
Well. What do you say? You don't . You pack your gear and go home for the day. And you quietly freak the f@#k out. I did the right thing after about five minutes of some serious internal monologue. I called my wife. I told her exactly what was on the table. She was surprisingly calm and supportive
(at least from the perspective of a man who assumed his first heart attack would come... well, now.) She pledged her uber-support of my professed immediate life change and all in all made me smile. I even made a smart decision. Instead of turning left and having one more Carl's Junior Five Dollar Jalapeno Burger I turned right and got a foot long turkey and ham at Subway (No chips and a Diet Coke).
See, before that day I was a red meat eating, cigarette smoking (in spirit) whiskey swilling American bad ass... or so I thought...
Fact is, I realized that I was an idiot. I was killing myself. For a guy whose parents passed before he could graduate high school
(granted they had seven children before me and were 47 and 50 at the time of my birth) I realized I sure had been living a free wheeling f@#k all lifestyle. I realized that through position, rank and stature I had worked myself into an entitled self destructive bacchanal of a 40 something heart attack and early life insurance payoff culminating in fatherless children and a widowed wife.
For about ten days I have counted ever calorie. I have measure every single moment. I
(and my wonderful supportive wife) have begun to run every morning. I have even started working out again. As I am the cook in the family we are all paying a little more attention to "
serving size" and daily intake. My water intake now far exceeds my coffee or whiskey intake and little else save green tea enters my newly ribbon cut temple.
I will soon be a lean mean sexy mofo... Okay, no. Not really. And even if that were true, I don't give a damn about that. What I do care about is dancing with my daughters at their weddings
(and having a heart strong enough to endure the bar bill). I want to meet my grandchildren. I want to meet my great-grandchildren. I want to be an old curmudgery pain in the ass to to my wife...
Forever!
And I will. I am no longer
Too lazy too live. After just a week I am proud to say that my blood pressure is low-normal. Cholesterol we'll check next month. But that doesn't matter. I feel good. I'm not headed back to sloth. I plan to live long enough to annoy the hell out of my old curmudgery children!
