A giant case me “meh” is what I’ve had all day for some reason. No motivation to do a damned thing. Don’t want to write, or read, or talk, or watch TV, or cook, or clean, or really do anything that my seemingly addled mind could come up with. So here I’ve sat, pinging from thing to thing without 
taking an interest in any of it. For the record, it’s not going to make my list of recommended things to do on a Saturday. Eventually, even though I still don’t really want to write, I turned up here because in the end that’s always what I do. I write, I rage, I rant, and hopefully when I finish my brain is clear of whatever cloud has descended on it. If that doesn’t work, there’s always cold Red Stripe in the fridge. That doesn’t so much clear the cloud cover as make me less apt to care about it being there in the first place. Sometimes, that’s every bit as good as finding an actual solution. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pillage the fridge. Hooray Beer!
Category Archives: Life
Open wide…
Life is full of ironies. When I was a young careerist just starting out you, I barely had two hours of vacation time to rub together. What I did have were almost limitless invitations to go places, do things, and generally raise hell while I was young and stupid. Since I never seemed to have the vacation time, I took a pass on most of those opportunities and hoped against hope that I wouldn’t get sick and need to burn off any of my limited reserve of days off.
Now, after a a decade or so of experience, I’m sitting on a pretty respectable war chest of paid time off. What I seem to be lacking are the invitations to raise hell and be stupid. While that’s probably for the best, there’s something disheartening about taking the vast majority of days off over the course of the year to do things like having bloodwork done and going to the dentist. I’m sure this is not how 25-year-old-Jeff planned to spend his days off when he was 35, but there you have it.
Sure, it’s a four day weekend, but I’ll be spending a big part of the first day with my mouth hanging wide open letting complete strangers poke, prod, drill, and fill. If I can manage not to spend the afternoon drooling all over myself, I’ll consider it a victory.
Faith and good works…
I went to work for my Uncle Sam almost 11 years ago. I knew that the job was never a path to riches, but it was good, honest work in support of the republic. I had the idealist’s faith that I was doing good works 
and in exchange I’d be afforded a decent salary and benefits commensurate with my professionalism. Maybe that was true once… or maybe that’s a past world that only ever existed in my imagination.
This is going to sound strange coming from a cynic, but I still feel like I’m doing good works – that what I’m doing does, or at least should matter. What I’ve lost, though, is the faith that I’m doing the right thing for me and that my time and talents wouldn’t be better spent taking on some other challenge. That’s a startling realization after you’ve spent most of your professional life following what you thought was “the one true the way.”
After three long years of hiring and pay freezes, furloughs, impending shutdowns, an apathetic administration, and serving as the legislative branch’s favored whipping boy, it’s really a marvel of human endurance and fortitude that more people aren’t just walking away from the whole damned mess. I’m not on the cusp yet of having my “mad as hell and not taking it anymore” moment, but I’m sorely tempted on an almost daily basis.
I may have lost my faith, but like everyone else on the planet I have bills to pay and promises to keep… and that’s likely enough to keep me on the straight and narrow even when the thrill is gone.
Too dead to care…
Writing a will is one of those things I know I’m supposed to do as a responsible adult. I’ve pondered it off and on a few times in the past, but the Navy Yard shooting last week got me thinking that perhaps I’m not actually invulnerable and that it was time to actually sit down and put pen to paper.
On the advice of counsel, I’ve started conducting an item by item inventory and deciding if there’s anything of significance I want to account for specifically. What I’ve discovered during this process is that while I have a house full of random crap that I’ve accumulated over the last 35 years, there’s not much in it that would mean a thing to anyone else. For the most part the house is full of objects that are sentimental to me personally, but don’t necessarily have much real world value. There are a few items that have a very specific final destination when I’m finished with them – a few trinkets and shiny baubles, a bit of furniture hand built by a grandfather I never met, and other odds and ends that should find their way to a good home eventually. Those bits were easy enough to tick off and allocate in what seemed like an appropriately fair way.
What I’ve actually spent the most time considering is the disposition of whatever animals I might have when I shuffle off the stage for the last time. While I’m certainly planning on outliving both Maggie and Winston, it seems reasonable to assume at this point that there will always be dogs in my household. There’s also the issue of a Russian tortoise named George who could very easily be around a few decades after I’ve begun my career as a daisy pusher. I don’t think I’m going to cash out and leave everything to the critters, but it’s safe to say that there’s going to be a provision that accounts for their health and wellbeing in my absence.
Your own mortality is a ponderous thing to spend any serious amount of time considering. I know it’s the right thing to do, but so far the effort has left me with more questions than answers… and everyone can guess how I feel about such ill-defined murkiness. It seems that the best one can manage under the circumstances is stating their druthers and then hoping someone actually follows through with them. Of course the up side is that by the time any of this is particularly important, I’ll simply be too dead to care what happens anyway.
I suppose it sounds a touch morbid, but I have to admit I find it strangely comforting to know the circus will go on even if I’m no longer part of the big show.
Rat’s ass…
I have occasionally been known as a pot stirrer, a rouser of rabble, a trouble maker, and a malcontent. Maybe I am those things, but generally I only do it in the service of a greater cause – to force a conversation onto hard territory that needs covered or to make sure that the dissenting side of the argument gets heard. I don’t generally do it because I want to hear my own voice. You can safely assume that if I had my druthers, I’d pass most days in writing and quiet contemplation with the television news channels providing the low-volume background vocals.
More often than not, I’m being a contrarian because there’s a point that needs to be made, not because I particularly enjoy being the odd man out. I could save myself one hell of a lot of headaches by sitting down, shutting up, and just letting things happen. Unfortunately that’s never been my approach… though some days, I really do wonder if giving a rat’s ass about anything is really worth the trouble that comes with it.
First line of defense…
There’s no good or diplomatic way to talk about what happened in Washington this morning. Good men and women, faithful servants of the republic, and their families are hurting tonight because of the brazen acts of cowardly few. The discussion will be made political soon enough, but that part of the discussion won’t start here. Not tonight.
Tonight’s post is my simple reminder that no matter how secure we think we are, there’s no substitute for vigilance when it comes to keeping yourself and those around you safe.
– Be aware of your surroundings and remember if something doesn’t look right, it’s not right. Trust your self-preservation instincts.
– Whether you’re in a restaurant, your office, or a driving down a street in your neighborhood, know more than one way out of wherever you are. You never know when Plan B will need to become Plan A.
– Find concealment or cover when it’s called for; Run when it’s called for; Stand and fight when it’s called for. You should know which situation you’re facing and act accordingly.
The world is the world and bad things happen to good people every day. That means it’s up to each one if us to be aware of our surroundings, learn to recognize and react to what looks or feels out of place, and acknowledge that we’re all our own first line of defense when it comes to our health, welfare, and safety.
One good thing…
I don’t know anyone who is really a fan of Monday. I suppose there is always the odd shift worker whose weekend starts on Monday, but they are clearly the exception. For most other working stiffs, Monday is mostly just the week’s great reminder that our time really isn’t our own.
The day does have one redeeming quality that I’ve found. This singular quality would be that Monday is so significantly different from the two days preceding it that in most cases the morning just seems to fly by once it gets going. Maybe it’s a minor issue of perception, but being the optimist that I am, I thought it worth pointing out. After lunch, of course, the perceived passage of time slows to its standard weekday snail’s pace. At least one this one day of the week it’s nice to look up from whatever I’m doing and be pleasantly surprised that it’s time for lunch rather than looking up and wondering why it’s not even passed 9AM yet.
Perception is a tricky mistress like that. She gives with one hand and punches you in the junk with the other. My advice: Try enjoying the good moments while you’re waiting for the other hand to drop you like a ton of bricks.
For the cure…
It’s Saturday. I was finishing up the mad dash around southern Cecil County that included trying to get get gas, get to the bank, stop at the vet for bulldog meds, get what’s probably the last of the summer fruit from the roadside stand, stop at Petco for dog food, hit Walmart for people food, and then get back to the house before noon. I’m a man with a plan… and a schedule. Usually that schedule runs like a well built Swiss watch and it would have today, too, if the picture postcard town of North East hadn’t been overrun by people wandering in and out of traffic on the one street in and out of town. With every minute that these asswagons plod around, I have frozen stuff turning into thawed stuff… and that doesn’t make me a particularly happy traveler.
With every car length I inched down Main Street, my usually sunny disposition degenerated further into a seething rage. I mean here I am trying to be productive and get shit done and there’s a town full of people wandering around like they don’t have a single thing to do or a care in the world. People like that make me crazy, or maybe I should say they make me more crazy than the run of the mill people you can’t avoid on a daily basis.
After ten minutes of swearing a blue streak at everyone who had the audacity to cut between me and the car whose bumper I was riding, I felt vaguely bad about driving past the Race for the Cure “finish line” set up at the far end of town. I’m sure all of these people are perfectly nice and they’re trying to do a good thing, but it seems to me that they could have managed to plan a route somewhere that didn’t tie up traffic coming into and out of town in every possible direction. Today I got to see a whole lot of people with a whole lot of heart, but there’s not a jack one of them that knows a damned thing about logistics or route planning. Clearly, I’ve gotten past the part of the day where I felt bad yelling at them.
The lost day…
Today kind of feels like the day that wasn’t. Between getting a latter than usual start, the usual Saturday errands, cutting the grass and a laundry list of other minutia around the house I sat down a few minutes ago and realized it was almost 8:30 and I hadn’t gotten a blog post in for the day. In fairness, that might be mostly because there wasn’t a thing that happened today that was worth mentioning. As much as I would like to opine about the current fiasco in Syria again all that really makes me want to do is throw my hands up, quit civilization, and go find a couple of hundred acres of the mountain west to call my own, build an off the grid cabin and the proceed to ignore the rest of the world as much as possible. I don’t know how you go from being the world’s only superpower to begging the French for help in less than a generation, but it seems like we’ve managed to pull it off. Of course that’s not the point of this post.
Then again, this post doesn’t really have a point that I’ve been able to identity other than the fact that it’s slowly creeping towards 9PM and I can’t really give you an accounting of where they day went. Fortunately there are two days left this weekend. Hopefully I can manage not to lose them too.
Holding my tongue…
I suck at holding my tongue. It runs counter to my natural inclination to get loud and rowdy when points of personal pride are involved. I can only hope that my silence is never mistaken for assent. I have a long memory, particularly when it comes to keeping tabs on those who think I’ll stand idle while they malign my integrity. If I 
don’t react it’s because I’ve opted to respond in a time and a place of my own choosing rather than based on someone else’s timeline.
My very first instinct when something stupid happens is to think about it as a “blogable” moment. Occasionally, despite how pitch perfect the post would be, a cooler head eventually prevails and I realize that now is not the time to shift my career dissipation light into overdrive. Instead, I bite my tongue, and file the original post away for future reference or for inclusion in Jeff’s Great Big Book of Asshattery, currently scheduled for publication in Fall 2036.
I may be keeping my own counsel. For now. But I urge you not to make the unfortunate mistake of thinking that I’ll ever allow myself to be backed into a corner – Especially by someone whose quiver is only filled with tersely-worded emails.
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