Category Archives: Life

33: The Year in Review…

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The last 365 days won’t go down as my best year, but it’ll be up there near the top of the list. In case you haven’t been reading along for the last year, here’s the retrospective in 60 words or less: Escaped the inmate running the asylum, Moved back to Maryland, Fought with landlord, Had his Explorer towed, Started a new job, Shopped tax free in Delaware, Ate more steamed crabs in one year than in the last six, Wrecked the truck (twice), Rediscovered Atlantic City, Reconnected with old friends, Got serious about writing, Got a year older and more curmudgeonly.

So as my “early thirties” slide quietly under the stern, I’m comfortable officially designating it not a bad year. Forecast for year 34: More of the same, but with more awesome.

Pack leader…

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I am the pack leader. I set the rules, provide the food, and make sure we are sheltered from the weather every night. When they get snippy with each other, I restore order and tranquility. So riddle me this, if I’m the pack leader, what makes it ok to poke me in the forehead with your cold wet nose? I know I’m definitely not the one who decided it was ok to wake up and hit the ground running at 6AM on a Saturday morning… but still, here I sit thirty minuets later clicking away at the keyboard while the rest of my pack has curled up on their beds and gone back to sleep. Anyone who ever said that leadership was glamorous clearly never had a dog.

It’s a good think I like mornings… and an even better thing that I like standing on the porch with a cup of coffee steaming in my hand watching the night give way to morning, listening to the horses across the road waking up, and enjoying an hour or two of peace before the rest of the world catches up with me. Maybe the dogs did me a favor this morning after all.

Seriously…

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As a rule, I think people take themselves and the value of what they do too seriously. Heart surgery? Sure, that’s serious business. Making sure prisoners don’t escape from jail, yep, I’ll sign off on that one too. Airline pilot? You guessed it, another example of serious work requiring people to be serious. Sitting in a nice cushy office tweaking version twelve of a PowerPoint presentation somehow fails to rise to the level of seriousness that justifies having an inflated sense of self importance. Lord knows you couldn’t tell that from looking around at a room full average bureaucrats, though.

To me, the only really serious issues are the once that involve life and death. Almost everything else falls into the category of nice to have/do. Some of the other stuff is important enough, I guess, but is it really “serious as a heart attack?” If you have to stop and think about it, the answer is almost certainly no… And that’s ok, because when everything is a priority, nothing ends up being a priority.

What I’m saying is I’m going to need everyone to take an operational pause, suck in a deep breath, and just relax for a minute. I promise that no matter how important you think that PowerPoint slide is, 200 years from now it’s not going to be under glass at the National Archives laying alongside the Charters of Freedom in the rotunda. It’s not even going to be stored in the Library of Congress with your Twitter feed, so take a minute, collect your thoughts, and remember that history isn’t going to give a rat’s ass who we are or what we happened to be doing on a random Friday in May.

Most people seem to find that thought a little disturbing. It disturbed me for a long time until I realized what a gift it was. Once you embrace it, being an anonymous face in the crowd gives you a remarkable sense of freedom.

Fast food, but not really…

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There was a time in my life before I found myself fully entrenched in the middle of the organizational quagmire that is the federal bureaucracy. During that time, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, one of the many jobs I had was flipping burgers at the local McDonald’s. There’s a better than average chance I worked there with some of the people reading this post. Since I spent the better part of four years doing every job in the place from fry cook to cashier, I’m going to go out on a limb and say I can speak from experience, if not with authority on the issue.

If I remember my cheesy video training correctly, it’s considered bad form for a “guest” to wait in line for 35 minutes to place his order and get his food handed across the counter. Sure, if a couple of buses show up, it’s no unheard of, but for your standard lunchtime rush, it’s pretty much frowned upon. Especially when there are only seven people in the line in front of you. This isn’t rocket science after all. We’re putting pre-pattied portions of cooked meat on buns and deep frying potatoes until the buzzer rings for us to take them out and add salt. I’m pretty sure if I took of my tie and dug up my old apron, I could still show you how everything is done.

I’m sure there were extenuating circumstances. There almost always are. Even so, there’s never a really good reason for a burger joint to take more than half an hour to produce a regular menu item… especially when my only option for getting out of line at the point is elbowing my way through to the end or climbing over or under the stanchions. That’s just bad business and the only reason I’ll need to take my business next door whenever I feel the need for a greaseball cheeseburger.

Monday…

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It’s Monday. That means I should write something even if all I want to do is ignore this whole writing thing and vege out in front of the television. It occurs to me that writing is a lot like exercise that way. No matter how much you know you should do it, you head concocts all sorts of new and interesting reasons why you should really put it off until tomorrow. After all, tomorrow you’ll be sure to have plenty of motivation and time and energy to spare, right? You see that’s the catch. It’s always easy to start something, but seeing it through the nowhere land between the beginning and the end is something else entirely. Still, writing is way more interesting than peddling away on that damnable stationary bike I have sitting in the basement. It’s possible that I may have stumbled upon a way to keep myself motivated on these many nights I don’t feel like I can churn out another word. All I have to do is remember that my other option is spending quality time spinning my wheel and going nowhere. Maybe it’s not the most healthy kind of motivation, but on Monday night, I’ll take what I can get.

Deliverance…

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May 4th isn’t a day particularly noted in the annals of world history. To me, though, May 4, 2011 resounds with just as much meaning as July 4, 1776 or October 14, 1066. May 4th, you might remember, is the anniversary of my deliverance. It’s the day I got the long sought after call to end my long, unhappy exile in Memphis and return forthwith to my right and proper home in the great State of Maryland. I may have spent happier days, but I’m sure I can’t remember when.

It’s been a turbulent, chaotic, and altogether expensive year setting things right after they went so badly wrong, but I don’t begrudge it an instant of the aggravation or expense. It would have been a deal at ten times the cost as far as I’m concerned.

A year’s distance has softened the worst of the hard edges that surrounded my departure. In fact, some parts of my time in Memphis I can even look back on fondly now. Knowing that 90% of my problems there were attributable by a single individual is still a bitter pill to swallow. Then again, if it hadn’t been for that narcissistic prima donna I might be in Memphis still, rather than having fought my way back to the shores of the Chesapeake.

Every time I’ve gone away I’ve always managed to find my way home again. This time I’ve landed where I belong and it’s going to take a pry bar, a court order, and high explosive ordinance to get me to budge.

Off…

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You know the day has gone off the rails when you sit down to write a blog post about how off you’re feeling and just can’t quite muster the right words to deliver the message. It’s not been a particularly bad day, a busy one, but not bad in the grand scheme of how bad days can get. I think I just need a few hours of uninterrupted quiet. Even as I’m sitting here writing this, the drone of the air conditioner in the next room is starting to get annoying. A more introspective person might wonder why that is. For now I’m more firmly in the camp of those who say “meh” and head to the kitchen to find a cold beer. I usually like to watch television programs that teach me something, but tonight I think I’ll be more than pleased to find something that lets me be perfectly mindless. Have you seen television lately? Yeah. I don’t think that will be a problem.

Doing God’s work…

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Sometimes I leave the office at the end of the day feel like I’m doing God’s own work. Other times I feel like I’ve spent the day beating myself bloody against a great stone wall. Nothing uncommon about that, I guess. The problem isn’t that there’s too much or too little to do, as much as it is there’s no moderating influence. Monday might be silent as a tomb and the next day you run with your hair on fire from the time you set foot in the building. That’s not a complaint (seriously), just a statement of fact. Still, it would be awfully nice if there was some way to smooth out the peaks and valleys on the demand side of the equation. When I figure that out, I’ll get busy writing my best selling leadership and management book and retire with a nice royalty check. Until then, I’ll just keep my head down until the winds shift.

Since I’m always the optimist, it’s worth noting that I still smile when I drive across the Susquehanna at 4:25 every afternoon. It’s worth remembering that no matter how strange the day has been, my days were always stranger in West Tennessee than this place could ever hope to be. The benefit of having been on the bottom looking up is that by comparison, everything else looks like ice cream and lollipops.

Morning…

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I try to block off weekend mornings to sit down and really focus on writing. It’s pretty much the only time of the week when I can get three or four hours uninterrupted to focus on a section that’s complicated or requires a lot of detail. Usually I can manage a couple of thousand words a day on Saturday and Sunday. Through the week, I’m lucky if I can squeeze in 500 somewhere between getting home from work, making dinner, and getting to bed at something like a reasonable hour. So yeah, I put a premium on my weekends not because I’m running off to some exciting locale, but because it’s when I feel like I’m doing my best work. In college, I did my best work in the dead of night. That’s when the words flowed best. Now that I’ve conditioned myself into a morning person, I guess the sweet spot has shifted too. That’s really not the point, though.

Today is Saturday and what I really want to be doing is sitting here taking a stab at the next chapter. Unfortunately, what I’m really doing is sitting here paying bills, cleaning up the balls of dirt, dust, and dog hair that are large enough to qualify as a third dog, and installing a new toilet seat (don’t ask). Today is pretty much catching up on all the stuff a normal person would have kept up with during the week. Me, not so much. I’m determined to pretend that I have a second full time career as a writer… and time slips away accordingly. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the basement and rummage around for a crescent wrench. Either this bolt’s coming off or the whole damned thing will shatter. Maybe I should go ahead and turn the water off while I’m down there.

If I don’t flood the house in the next hour and I can manage to get the grass cut in a reasonable amount of time, maybe, just maybe, I can salvage some quality time to write this afternoon… Just in time to get interrupted by dinner. Lord, no wonder people never finish writing their great American novel.

On notice…

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To the asshat who decided playing mailbox baseball with my mailbox was a good idea this morning, please consider yourself on notice. There’s a better than average chance that I’m older than you are. That translates into me being smarter, sneakier, and far, far more vindictive than you could possibly imagine. The first one was a freebie. Everything’s reattached, no harm, no foul. If I have to put it up a second time, I’ll be suspending my mail delivery and filling the box with concrete so that you’ll get that nice tingling feeling when you make contact. If I get lucky you’ll snap your wrist on it. If you think I won’t spend all night outside in the cold lurking in the shadows to find out who you are, well, then you’ve seriously underestimated your opponent. You shouldn’t be surprised if your car accidentally ends up sitting on the street somewhere in Camden, NJ.

Regards,

Jeff