Category Archives: Life

Warning signs…

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I should have known the kind of day it was going to be when the first two alarms failed to coax me from sleep’s comfortable embrace. The day started behind schedule and never recovered… late to lunch, then a two hour soul suck of a meeting that ran late, then another meeting that should have lasted 5 minutes ran over and promptly spawned another hour-long meeting later in the week, and by that point I was already late for end-of-tour. Blasting out emails for the next thirty minutes in order to make sure the later-in-the-week meeting actually took place then put the day further behind. Or more specifically it put the end of the day even further behind. And that, obviously, is where the real snarling started.

As perfectly willing as I am to admit that some things are unavoidable, I’ve always thought the total number of those unavoidable things is pretty small. Most things, with a bit of planning, are utterly an completely avoidable if you just pay a bit of attention. For instance you can count on one finger the number of times in any give year I show up at the office late. I build in what some would consider excess time in order to make sure I hit the mark as expected. It doesn’t feel at all unreasonable to expect a bit of consideration coming back the other way, though recent history leaves that in doubt.

I guess it’s my fault for not seeing the warning signs. I don’t want to have to make a scene to remind anyone that there’s a holy line of demarcation between “my time” and “your time,” but I absolutely will if that’s what needs doing. I’m in no way above making an ass of myself to make a point when it needs made.

A real pisser…

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Six or so years ago I found myself limping around the house, the office, the grocery store, basically everywhere. It wasn’t quite agony, but it wasn’t pleasant. A trip to my primary care doctor and a referral to a orthopedic specialist later, the diagnosis was plantar fasciitis. It’s a problem of the ligaments of the foot, which tends to cause intense pain after sleeping and long periods of sitting, both of which are activities I participate in on a daily basis. The basic fix was some over the counter anti-inflammatory, some icing, staying off the thing as much as possible, and a fancy set of orthotic inserts for my shoes. It’s all part of my look as the world’s youngest 70 year old man.

Mostly the inserts and an occasional handful of ibuprofen do the trick to stave off any further issues. About once a year though I unwittingly do something to aggravate the hell out of the little bundle of ligaments… at which point I’m right back to limping around from place to place and generally trying to keep off the damned thing as much as possible. It seems that this week is that magical time of year.

So if you see me gimping across the parking lot or I don’t stand up to greet you, a) I’m ok and b) don’t take it personally. I once heard it said that getting old ain’t for sissies. The older I get – and the more wear and tear I inflict on myself – the more I’ve come to appreciate that statement. For good or bad we’re all living in bodies that were designed by biology to last 35 or 40 years, seed the next generation, and then make way for them. We’ve pushed that frontier back through the audacity of our science… but the bits and pieces that wear out and break down along the way are a real pisser.

LinkedOut…

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In an ongoing effort to un-muddle my digital footprint, I deleted my LinkedIn account over the weekend. I talked about doing it a year or two ago but didn’t get around to it. A spate of emails from the service this week drug it back onto my list of things to do. I wanted to like LinkedIn – and maybe if I worked in a universe that traded on creating a massive professional network I would have. But for what I do, and the scope of people I need to interact with, it just wasn’t doing much for me other than sending a dozen emails a week to my inbox. I don’t need that kind of help.

I have to think LinkedIn is so popular because it creates a benefit for people in a sales environment, or those interested in building their professional network, or those who have any kind of professional ambition left. Since I don’t fall into any of those categories it was just one more extraneous feed of information I wasn’t using.

The simple fact is I don’t really identify, even “professionally,” with my 9-5 self. If someone wants me in their network it should be as a sometimes writer, a blogger, an opinionated blowhard, a reader, and hopefully, in some small way, as a thinker. That other stuff, how I whore myself out to pay the bills, is entirely secondary to what I consider the “real” me.

It’s just the most recent bit of transition from a guy who long ago thought what he did for a living defined who he was to a man who’s trying to define himself in some other – if far less tangible – way. What that definition is, what it will become, remains to be seen.

Whatever the definition, I know with certainty that future self doesn’t require an account with LinkedIn.

Blank space…

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Usually by the time I get home at the end of the day I’ve got half a dozen post its or a few hastily scribbled margin notes to remind myself about whatever blogworthy ideas I had during the course of the day. Yeah, I’ve long since given up the illusion that I can remember something that happened at 8AM when I sit down to write ten hours later.

It didn’t happen today. Not one single note anywhere. Plenty happened, of course, just nothing that I would consider even marginally entertaining… and certainly not something I’d want to relive for 30 or 45 minutes this evening. What I’m saying is that tonight I’ve got nothing. Just wide open blank space where a blog ought to be.

I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Even surrounded by the best topics, some nights it just doesn’t happen. Missouri is burning again. A card carrying socialist is drawing 25,000 people to his political rallies. China devalued its currency. The EPA just dumped millions of gallons of toxic waste water into a clear mountain river. The state of Alabama is the subject of a Go Fund Me campaign. There’s plenty enough going on that seems worth commenting on.

Any one of those issues would chew up 300 words without looking back and yet even while I sit here, just naming the jackassery in the air today makes me exhausted. It’s not so much that I don’t care as that I’m too annoyed by what passes for civilization to even be bothered to comment. All I really want to do is shut down, pull a cork, and settle in with a good book. It’s not one of my finer or more engaged moments, but it’s the fact of the matter.

Maybe tomorrow it will matter, but for tonight I just can’t be bothered enough to give a damn.

Mixed signals…

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I grew up in a part of Maryland where it’s possible to stand in one spot and see well into both Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Inter-state rivalries were common and a “mixed” relationship could easily mean one part of a couple was a WVU fan and one cheered for UMD. Most people are (reasonably) good natured about it.

Confederate_Rebel_FlagWhile I was home, though, I saw something I couldn’t bring myself to reconcile – Flying side by side from someone’s shed were the West Virginia state flag and the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (or what the internet is determined to call the “Confederate Flag”).

I don’t mind state pride (even though this individual was flying the WV flag over the sovereign soil of the great state of Maryland). Flying the battle flag doesn’t bother me (even thought, again, we happened to be standing in a part of the country that was never even tangentially represented by that flag). What annoyed me to no end, of course, was that the West Virginia flag and any flag representing forces of the Confederate Flag_of_West_VirginiaStates of America are, historically speaking, mutually exclusive. They’re so mutually exclusive that the entire state of West Virginia was created in order to make that fact absolutely clear to everyone who may have been confused.

The voice in my head who just wants everyone to have some semblance of logic supporting what they do urged me in the strongest possible way to pull over just to ask the guy in the driveway what, exactly, was the point he thought he was making. The other part of my brain, the one given over to self preservation and not wanting to get my ass kicked by a redneck yokel told me to just keep moving… so I did… but I’m dying to know what kind of tortured logic is banging around that guy’s head.

The sound of going home…

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There are some conversations I only hear when I make the trip home to Western Maryland. This weekend, one of those overheard conversations started innocently enough – the usual checking in on mutual friends that happens when two people who haven’t seen one another in a while show up at the same place. It very quickly became obvious that it was a conversation better not had… because it went something like this:

Person 1: Have you seen Bob lately?

Person 2: Bob’s dead.

Person 1: Oh damn. What about Frank?

Person 2: Dead.

Person 1: What was his wife’s name?

Person 2: Bonnie. She moved to Florida and died.

Person 1: Pete?

Person 2: Stroke.

Person 3: Maybe you could just list the people not dead?

OK, so I made up Person 3… mostly because that’s what I was sitting there thinking while this conversation happened. It went on for another ten minutes, with every answer being that someone was dead, almost dead, in a nursing home, in a nursing home and almost dead, or moved to Florida.

I hate to think that in 35 years that’s the kind of conversation I can look forward to. In fairness, I’ll probably be one of the ones who has dropped dead by then so I’ll at least get to miss out on the most awkward small talk ever… and that my friends is the sound of going home.

(Temporarily) Embracing my inner slacker…

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This is one of those days where I’m reminded just how limited a scope of interest I currently seem to have. I could regale you with another in the latest round of stories about why the office is a shitshow. I could rant about any number of celebrities, political figures, policy decisions, or current events. In a pinch I could even bang out another about the alleged joy of home ownership. What I can’t do at the moment is give you a fresh and interesting take on any of those things. They seem to have become the background hum of every day.

I’m not an escapist by nature, but I find myself spending more and more evenings cramming my nose into a book and trying hard to ignore all the other noise. I don’t want to think about work. I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs with politics. I don’t have it in me to further ponder the expensive mud pit I’m about to have commissioned in the back yard. So for the moment, maybe I’m being a little more escapist than usual. Even so, spending the evening with a decent drink and a good story doesn’t sound particularly awful.

Conveniently I don’t have an inner adrenalin junky to satisfy or I’d probably be off signing up for sky diving lessons, so that seems like what it’s going to be for the time being – or at least until the other bits and pieces settled down a bit and are, on the whole, a little less exhausting. I’m usually inclined to try doing it all at once, but this one time I think it best to let my inner slacker lead the way for a while.

A certain smell…

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There’s a certain smell to summer in proximity to the Chesapeake. It’s not the saltwater smell you find at the beach. It’s not the aggressive punch of decomposing plant matter in the wetlands right down along the water’s edge. It’s a smell I only know from a few miles inland. It’s salty and woody and vaguely marshy. It’s a good smell and a familiar one for me. For a few weeks during the hottest parts of the summer I’d catch it in St. Mary’s County when I lived down at the southern tip of the western shore. It’s here now, too, at the northern reaches of the Eastern.

My first memory of that smell, and where I remember it most distinctly, is an a little town in between those two points no one reading this would have ever heard of. It’s the smell of long ago summer visits to far away relatives, of horses, of learning to pick crabs and to shuck oysters, and swimming until the pool’s rough bottom had worn blisters on my toes. It’s s a smell of a simpler time, or at least one that seemed simpler by virtue of knowing so little about the world’s machinations. It’s the single smell I’ll (apparently) forever associate with one very specific place and time.

It’s not a smell I’ve ever encountered elsewhere in my travels – there’s no hint of it in Petersburg, or Honolulu, or Memphis. Oregon has its own particular smell of the old, deep woods and powerful running water, but it’s not at all the same. I picked up that fleeting scent a few nights ago. It’s that time of year. The instant recall and deeply fond memories of times and people long gone couldn’t possibly have been stronger. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being amazed at what small details the brain snatches for its own and hides away only to restore them with perfect clarity years and decades later.

My 18th century so-called life…

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One of the reasons I popped on Casa de Jeff 2.0 is the fact that it had a sun room that seems almost purpose built to be a home office. With the slope of the yard the room is just about eye level with the bottom of the forest canopy. The birds, squirrel, and occasional deer are a bit of a distraction, but otherwise I’ve found it ideal for reading and writing – although at this time of year, the room seems to be basically uninhabitable between the hours of 2:00-5:00 PM. I like that it’s a separate, self contained space, but not jammed in a corner at the far end of the house. When I’m not tinkering around on some other project, it’s usually where you’ll find me.

I only mention it now because I noticed for the first time as I sat down to write this that we’re already starting to lose daylight in the evening. We’re racing towards the end of July, with more of the summer behind us than in front of us. I like the long summer nights maybe more than I thought. Even though they’re still mostly here, I miss them already. That’s not to say that I’ve taken maximum advantage of them in any real way. There haven’t been any epic road trips – no vacation days to speak of that didn’t involve meeting a contractor to talk about some much needed repair or much desired alteration to the new homestead. In fact I’d wager I haven’t been more than 20 straight-line miles away from the house since I bought the place. Me and my 18th century so-called life.

It’s all been necessary, of course, but none of what I’ve been up to feels like what summer should be about. I’m not at all satisfied with that state of affairs, though I’ll grudgingly accept it as the current (and theoretically temporary) cost of doing business.

How it starts…

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I’ve often wondered how it is that old people lose touch with technology – whether that’s the eternal flashing 12:00 of a generation of VCRs to or the firm instance that GPS will never take the place of a glovebox full of paper maps.

Once upon a time, I could build my own computer. Sure, I bought the components off the shelf and wasn’t making my own chips or anything, but I knew the specs I wanted, knew where to order them, and was able to slap the whole bit together into a functioning PC. I haven’t tried (or really even been tempted) to do that since the late 1990s. It stopped being a cost effective use of time. Easier to buy the whole rig off the shelf and go to work.

This afternoon I finally accepted that maybe it was time to update my iPhone playlists – that I probably haven’t substantively changed since the days when I had a Memphis address. First things first, it almost feels like with the bevy of streaming services available now, the whole idea of having a self-curated playlist may be a little old fashioned. It’s like having a bookshelf full of CDs or 45s. Its existence is a throwback to an earlier time. That’s when the first light of recognition came on – the way I like my media delivered is on the verge of being utterly overcome by the march of progress. I like having my “own” copy of my music – even if it’s just a digital representation. I made it from cassette tapes to CDs to mp3s and Winamp skins, to iTunes, but after four format changes, it seems I’m beginning to resist the onrushing future.

I wonder if this is how it starts to go off the rails for me. Am I going to wake up some morning in 2045 and wonder why I can’t make my 20 year old Mac Mini work. Are printers going to someday be as rare as 8-track players? Is this where tech abandons me to the future as I grow more and more entrenched with only the technologies that I fully understand?

I don’t want to be that guy who thinks of every device as a damned infernal contraption. There’s some way to head that off, right? Some magic bullet that will let us stay attuned to what the kids these days are up to?

I’m not ready to live in a world where the best device I ever bought is one I have already.