Don’t be Afraid (Or do, I don’t know your life)

How about this? "Always be happy, never be satisfied."

That's not my line, I got that from my middle school band director, Mr. Davids, which is absolutely not a made-up name since I always give you people's real names. We gave Mr. Davids a lot of shit, because we were kids and he was a man that was trying to teach middle schoolers music theory and manage a weight problem, of which he did at least one of those effectively. Mr. Davids was trying to do a lot with our young and mostly apathetic minds. He was teaching music and technique and discipline, sure, but he was also trying to instill passion. He wanted to inspire a certain level of work ethic and standard of practice, and all this other crap that was very ambitious knowing the kind of kids I went to school with. Some of us were in fact very talented, and even a few of us did care about rising to the level that he hoped we would. But c'mon, it was middle school, how many things do you know of that went according to the plan in middle school? We gave this man absolute hell, and I'm saying that as one of his better students in that day.

But I never forgot that idea he planted, about being happy but not satisfied. About continuing to build on what you've accomplished while always also looking forward to what else could still be done. Like a beautiful painting but the canvas would expand further once you finished painting the area that you'd been working on. One person would look at that and think, "this is bullshit, I'll never be done". Another person could look at the same thing and think, "I never have to stop." That's the way we tend to look at a lot of things in our lives, whether we realize it or not. We have all these things in our daily or regular life that we either look at as, "I can't wait to do this" vs. "I can't wait to be done with this".

I think about myself and the things I have thrown my focus into recently. This past summer has been an interesting one, seeing as I RUPTURED MY GOD DAMN ACHILLES TENDON. In case you couldn't tell, I was yelling that into the keyboard just now. Yeah, I did that this summer. So fun, having surgery and learning to walk all over again. I'll spare you the story of how I ruptured it. Basically because there's not even a cool story where I ran down some purse snatcher, leapt from a burning building, or scored a last second touchdown and was carried off the court by a bunch of adoring fans. 

Nah, I was playing basketball by myself and blew the damn tendon during my process of warming up. As in, I was about to take a layup, and instead laid down flat on my face, thinking maybe I'd been shot. But I wasn't, and I had to limp to the car and drive back to our apartment using both feet (not recommended).

Recovery has gone as expected the past few months, but you have to understand that it has been maddening for me to sit still this long. I don't consider myself someone who is bouncing off the walls with energy at all times, but I very much like to change scenery when possible. So, spending the majority of the summer in our 2-room apartment, mostly in bed, has been a challenge. I tried to keep positive where I could, but one of the main things I used to do to get into a different mindset was just go for a run, or a drive, or go shoot some hoops. Even getting up and going up into the loft to play video games was largely unavailable until about August. It was not always so easy to accept new limitations, but it is always not easy to just get over surgery just because you feel like it.

So, what do you do? Well, if you're me, you obviously can watch a ton of tv and movies. We have the streaming services that make it impossible to feel like you've watched everything that you should have seen by now, so that worked for a while. And we had had plenty of people stop by our apartment to visit us (gawk at how my leg looked). And my wife did a wonderful job of trying to keep my spirits up after her full days of work. Also, there was wine. Wine helps get through blowing your Achilles tendon. I know it doesn't help the literal healing process, but still. Don't ever let them tell you that wine doesn't help.

Even with the wine, there was a lot of time in between that had to be filled. And I've had a lot of time to sit and reflect, which is probably healthy but over time feels maddening. So I've done my best to keep mentally occupied if I can't be physically anywhere else.

One thing we did, we finally digitized our DVD collection. Which, I had an idea of how many dvds we had but still, holy crap, we had a lot of places that we had just slotted and crammed dvds that we hadn't watched in a while. And it's not like there were ones we didn't care about, because we'd already done purges in the past. These were all the ones that at least one of us had been adamant of not parting with.

We started watching Grey's Anatomy from the start. (It's January now and we JUST got caught all the way up to present day. Oh, you didn't know that they were still making this show and hadn't covered every single thing that could happen to the body? Same here.)

I started reading more. I finished a book on Norse Mythology, which seems like a really strange decision in retrospect, and another one with a lot of interviews with jazz musicians, and the autobiography of Viola Davis, "Finding Me", and have now started the biography of Frederick Douglass. Viola Davis's book alone gave a ton of perspective, because her childhood had some absolute horror stories that I don't think I could ever compare any of my own experiences to. But it's also uplifting because she still finds all of these beautiful moments to bring focus to within the chaos and pain and humiliation that she and her family lived through. And while you're reading it, you can't really feel too much suspense because clearly, she makes it out of her upbringing and becomes the star that she is today. But it was still a vivid picture in a lot of the early chapters.

Also, I dove into this gigantic book about machine learning. And I gotta tell you, I thought I had at least kind of a handle on how intense machine learning and artificial neural networks could get, and I didn't know shit. I'm about halfway through the book and I just started to feel like I can actually think through how I would set up some of these ideas for myself. But I also feel ridiculous trying to explain it to anyone, let alone people that have a good handle of coding in Python or people that have advanced understanding of mathematics. I attempted both with family members and could feel the stares growing with every layer of the explanation that wasn't, which made me feel like I need to just go back to the start and rebuild my understanding of all of it. But hey, diving into something new and very different feels...great? And scary? And humbling?

Yeah, I said scary. It's kind of scary diving into something like Machine learning. For those of you unaware, what I mean when I say machine learning is that I want to be able to write a program that takes a large data source and reads into it to find patterns within the data that humans likely wouldn't be able to on their own. I have already read two books on the subject and I am nowhere close to feeling like I know what the hell I'm doing. It's one of those situations where I thought I was in the middle of a forest 2 square miles, and as I learn more, I keep realizing that the forest I'm in is growing exponentially. I knew there was an insane amount of stuff to get through, but for some reason, studying has not only lessened those fears, it has given those fears steroids. And not even for reasons that make a ton of sense to me.

One thing that blows my mind, the more I think about it, is the sheer amount of data being collected on us, by us, for us, against us, and several other 'us's all at once. The internet continues to be a terrifying place, full of a whole realm that isn't even being readily advertised called the dark web. Not that the 'light' web is particularly friendly either. And it's just constantly expanding, more people using more content at a faster rate with more gadgets and greater impunity, to the point that we ran out of places to put stuff on the internet the way it used to be addressed before. If you weren't aware, ip addresses used to be enough so that there were 4,294,967,294 possible IP addresses in use. It doesn't so much scare me that they had to change with the times and expand the possibility of something, because that happens all the time. It scares me because we're now to the point that we have 7.5 billion people on the earth, so there are a lot of really stupid people out there that probably have multiple websites by now. I know a lot of smart people, and I feel like not very many of them have websites. So that's even more websites that may have been started by complete idiots.

It's probably a symptom of getting old, but more things are starting to scare me. I'll tell you another thing that scares me now. This damn Viola Davis book, it's a wonderful book and I flew through it, but it felt like it brought out a lot of older ambitions and desires in me and I don't know what to do with a lot of them. I had kind of lost touch with my creative side for a little while over the past few years. Not completely, I still write every so often, but I feel like a lot of it was more labored and was being done to make a specific point. I really wanted to write something during the pandemic about the current climate of racial strife surrounding the killings of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor and Ahmad Arbery. I had a specific set of events in mind and I had a distinct picture of where I wanted it to go, even though things always seem to shift slightly once I start writing. And there's nothing wrong with that except that I never used to write like that, per say.

I mean, I used to just need to write. I used to feel like I was going to explode if I didn't write. If I didn't sit down and just let some of the most top-o-the-head instincts spill out onto the page or through my fingers and onto the screen. That's the difference. I now occasionally feel like I want to write. I used to know, KNOW that I didn't just want to write, I HAD TO. I wasn't going to be productive in anything else unless I got at least some of my energy out in this specific way, a way that I could come back later and try to make sense of whatever I had been brewing at that point.

Now, part of me wants to believe that it's still there, and I just have better control of it. But part of me also wonders if I have the same need to get things out of my head the same way as I used to. So it's only kind of scary if I start to need to write again. What if I dig in for something, and nothing comes out? What if I have nothing substantial to say?

But then again, shit, what if I had never really said anything before? Is it possible I have put my previous writing on some illustrious pedestal that it didn't deserve in the first place? Or better yet, who even gives a shit if it was or is good writing? If I recall, the whole point of this blog was that I wanted to write and I wanted a place to put said writing. I never promised anyone, not even myself, that it was going to be good. So what exactly is my hope of proving here? Do I have anything to be afraid of? Or, do I have everything to be afraid of, but it's the fear that I actually need to lean into a bit more?

...where the hell was I going with this?

Not sure that I have some profound lesson to draw out of this one, if I'm being honest. More a question I pose to myself, and therefore you, the one that chose to keep reading this. What is it that has driven this whole entry? Is it fear, or nervous energy, or excitement to basically be back mobile again, or boredom, or mania? Or is it just another spot on the same road I've always been on in the first place?

As for what to do with fear, use it, don't use it, I have no idea at this point. I feel like I would have told people in the past to not be afraid to fail, to try new stuff and grow, blah blah blah, maybe being afraid isn't so bad. Maybe fear is right for you some of the time, maybe it's wrong other times. In the unlikely event that you have been using this blog for actual advice, don't do that here. Go out into your life and use fear the appropriate amount of the time for what you are facing, and then throw the rest of that shit away. Maybe Gustavo Fring had it wrong when he said "I don't find fear to be an effective motivator." Fear, when used effectively, can give a man wings. Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Gives you a pen? Pick it up and write something. Life gives you fear, and you channel that fear into getting your ass up out of there! (wherever 'there' is)

Yep, that's what we're going with. I'm happy with that thought. Happy...but not satisfied...?

Robitussin vs. Dimetapp

Well hi there.

I haven't written in a long time, and I have no real excuse other than, I haven't posted the things that I have been thinking about and kicking around. It's been a year that has felt like a decade, and everyone's tired and everyone's anxious to get out and do stuff again but it's getting cold as shit again, yeah, everyone feels it. I know. 

I would love to tell you that things will start to feel normal again soon. I would love to tell you that everyone is going to come together and be happy and healthy and cooperative and everything good starting this next week, forever and ever. And I'd love to tell you that I'm completely out of embarrassing and down-trodden stories for you, and everything else will be optimistic and uplifting and heartfelt going forward from this blog whenever you read it, and that I will be sure to write much more often. But, as you likely already know, I can assure you of not a single one of those things. They could happen, to be sure. They very likely won't. 

And I get it, you don't give a shit if I write anymore in this blog or not (I'm a bit hurt you feel that way, but I'll manage) but the larger point, about still not feeling like things are normal, I wish I had a way of helping you feel that. The thing is, sometimes there are things that we need to hear, despite what we want to hear. As in, even when we know bad news is coming, sometimes we want to hear it in a good way so it won't feel as bad. I feel like there's a number of different versions of this throughout pop culture, but I already know the version of it I want to use for this point.

The late great comedian, Patrice O’Neal, said something that I enjoyed once about truth and how people like to take it. He likened it to two different types of medicine: Robitussin and Dimetapp. I'll do my best to break down how he compared the two.

The Robitussin version of truth is nasty. It’s uncomfortable, it’s thick and makes you gag and make a nasty face, and it’s strong so you get drowsy and sleepy from using it. But it’s also effective, or at least more effective, as it knocks you out and you can get some rest and get over what you’re dealing with faster because of it. On the other hand, Dimetapp is much more pleasant, and it’s got a good taste, and it’s not too thick and not very heavy so if you need to do something else after taking it you can probably do that. But it’s often less effective for most, and you’ll probably have to take it over several days before you get better. But more people, according to Patrice, will take the good tasting version over the more-effective version. They’ll prefer to be comforted more than getting direct and definitive treatment that’s less pleasant. And I couldn’t agree more. 

(I think Patrice used Buckley's instead of Robitussin, but I never had that as a kid so I can't compare it the same)

(Also, please don't use this as a reason to alter any medical advice you've been given anywhere else, as I have no factual basis for saying any of this anecdotal shit)

They say the truth hurts. I’m not sure it always does, but the phrase doesn’t sound as good when you say, “The truth sometimes hurts and sometimes is awesome.” You can’t do anything with that saying. But when you got truth that hurts, not everybody wants you to just spit it out and get to the point. A lot of people do want to be let down slow, or they want to get a silver lining of something so they get to feel better about what went down. And many times, this leads to not dealing with the issue at hand and stringing things out further than needed.

And I should know, because I’ve had people tell me things in the polite way when they should have told me things directly. Many times, in fact. There are a few good ones to choose from, but I’ll use one example that I am still technically dealing with today.

I had a lot of really nice dentists over the course of my life. I wish that I hadn’t.

It’s not that I didn’t care about the condition of my teeth. It’s just that I never really thought it was going to screw me over in any real scenarios. Back in high school, I had braces for a few years, and I did a decent job of brushing. Flossing, not so much. Frankly, it’s a huge pain in the ass to floss when you have braces on, and who has time for that? (Literally everyone has time for that, by the way) Anyway, the braces come off, and there’s some slight issues here and there, but my teeth look fine and my dentists and hygienists that I went to are always really nice about suggesting ways to improve.

And in college, they were just as polite, even when I went to get cleanings a bit less often, usually on holidays or summer, and with the occasional cavity here and there, but again, everyone’s really nice and trying to be soft in handling it, not out to make me feel bad.

And then after college, when I wasn’t working a real big boy job yet and was off of my family dental plan and kind of needed to take charge of this (I definitely didn’t), I was still under the impression that how I was going about it was still basically okay (it wasn’t) and that no real consequences were just about to come up (I’m getting to that part now).

The thing is, even if the dental professionals were not being direct about how things were going in my mouth, others were starting to drop stronger hints than I initially realized. Like the time I got home and my dad made it about ten seconds into me getting off the plane before asking if I’d brushed my teeth that week. Like a stranger on a bus ride that offered me a free piece of gum twice within a span of 30 seconds and then essentially gave up her seat to no one. Like a girl I met at a bar one summer who literally looked back in horror at me and described it as “nothing” only after downing a shot of Rumplemintz with me. I’m not saying Rumplemintz was what I ordered or wanted to drink, but I was offered it a few more times than I care to bring up, and the state of my teeth/gums/mouth area could very easily have been the cause.

Where did all of this come to a head, you ask? Well, finally after one visit, I had to get a root canal on one of my front teeth. For those of you that don’t know, that’s where they have to go down into the root of a tooth and clean out a probable infection. So much fun, by the way. If you get a chance, watch a YouTube video of someone getting one, because it will ensure that you NEVER LET IT HAPPEN TO YOURSELF. I remember the doc that performed the root canal, an endodontist. Another very nice guy, very funny. He even went as far as to make the procedure feel almost normal and expected, which I appreciated at the time.

No. Bad endodontist.

I got the procedure done, and then I scheduled another visit to get a crown put on the tooth that they operated on. Low and behold, I scheduled it as the same day as a wedding I was going to of a friend from college. I figure, no big deal, I’d rather go to the ceremony than get this taken care of. What’s the rush, it’s not like I use my teeth all day every day and should get this taken care of as soon as possible. I’ll just reschedule getting the crown on so that I can more fully enjoy this wedding.

Two days after the wedding, on Sunday morning, I’m eating a bagel sandwich at my kitchen table and my tooth breaks. In half. I go to bite down like the oblivious doof I was/am/will probably always be, and I just feel it crack. I knew right away what I’d done. What I didn’t expect was that it didn’t hurt, because I had not realized what they’d had to do to get down into my gums through my tooth to clean out... whatever you call the infectious shit that was going on down there. I’m not a dentist, stop judging me. What I also did not realize yet was a problem was WHERE it had broken off. 

You see, when they go to put a crown on a tooth, they need to have a certain amount of the tooth remaining so that they can anchor it properly, and so that they can shape and polish the base of the tooth accordingly. My tooth had broken basically right next to the gum line. It could not just be glued back in place, and the dentist could not just fit me into another time slot to make up our earlier appointment. I now needed a periodontist.

I needed a gum doctor. 

To this day I don't know what makes someone decide they want to devote their lives to be one, but a periodontist is the one that specializes in the diagnosis, treatment, and hopefully prevention of periodontal (gums and the bone supporting teeth) disease. They are responsible for, among other things, shaping and reforming gums when necessary, which my particular break had now made necessary. Lucky me. I learned later that periodontists also deal a lot with dental implants, and this makes me somewhat fear ever letting myself get to the point that I find out I need them and have to visit another perio at their place of work.

So I schedule the time with the perio and get my tooth temporarily fixed. And it breaks a few days later that week and I have to go back. And then it breaks again, at another wedding no less, a few days after that, before the appointment. So that part wasn't even the least bit embarrassing. Totally hilarious for everyone involved, especially me. Except it was awful, and everyone that saw it felt really bad for me. One friend of mine in particular was so worried she was going to laugh at it, she essentially avoided me for the majority of a day that everyone was over at her house celebrating. I'll spare her the mention in case she would prefer I don't bring her up by name, but you know who you are.

Finally, mercifully, I make it to the appointment. I'll spare you the exact details of the experience, and suffice it to say three things about the visit that tell you what you need to know about it. 

    1. To reiterate, they trimmed my gums back far enough to get to the remaining piece of tooth. This took a considerable amount of anesthetic and I was on a large amount of aspirin for a week afterwards in lieu of painkillers.

    2. At one point, I felt the periodontist make a cut that sprayed my own blood forcefully against the roof of my mouth. I wasn't in actual pain when this happened, but was very aware that this occurred. I also was aware that even he and his assistant got wide-eyed for almost a minute straight before calming down and continuing.

    3. I lost concept of time while he was working, but had the distinct feeling that I was going to die in that chair. I got a strong vibe of a scene from A Clockwork Orange. And I'm not saying that periodontists must be sadistic by nature to do that job, but given what I sat through, how can I rule it out? So as I left, I made the joke-but-not-really comment that he said he hears all the time, "I hope to god that I never see you again."

But again, pretty nice guy when we're just sitting and talking. Tried really hard to be encouraging, and was very open to me calling for follow up questions.

(I got a question, how many people have you kidnapped from a European hostel and murdered psychotically?)

In any case, I got through this appointment and could go back to my dentist to get the true crown put on. After this occurred, I got the final bill for what all had been done and I gotta say, I wasn't amused. As expensive as it is to have good teeth, it's crazy how much more it can cost to have bad ones. It actually made the most lasting impression in this case, because I had to work out a payment plan for the remaining balance after my insurance bowed out. It wasn't insurmountable, of course, but it wasn't the kind of bill I had in my side pocket to handle like that. 

And again, basically this entire time, every professional in the dental industry that meets with me gives me a very sympathetic, soft spoken reception, trying to very politely and respectfully give me pointers to make gradual improvements so that my feelings aren't hurt and I'll give them a favorable review on whatever god damn referral service they use. Every one of them took the Dimetapp approach. Not one of them said something along the lines of what I probably needed to hear:

    -    Vic, your teeth look like shit. You need to get regular cleanings. You need to brush and floss regularly. You need to stop eating these sugary, acidic foods that are bad for several other parts of your body.

    -    Your insurance is garbage, so even for the things that weren't totally your own doing, you were always going to be screwed. Saving the 12-17 extra bucks a month that you blow on chicken wings will be better used at ensuring that you have a larger cushion to take care of this shit, so stop being a fucking idiot about this.

    -    If you don't want to be fitted for dentures by age 45, you'll make some changes right the hell now. It doesn't matter to us, because we get paid more to fix this train wreck than we do to give you advice that you kind of already knew. This is your responsibility, no one else should have to tell you this. Remove your head out of your ass a-s-a-f-p.

Now, I'm not hear to tell you that every problem out there requires the hard, unfiltered, almost-kinda-assholish version. But some situations very much do call for it. There are times that it should be apparent that someone in your life (maybe even yourself) is not getting the message about something in the medium or intensity that it is being sent to them. In those situations, I ask you, is it really worth it to continue trying in a way that has proven ineffective? Maybe you need to up the dosage, or maybe you should try a different prescription. When the Dimetapp isn't doing the trick, consider the Robitussin.

And also keep in mind, both Dimetapp and Robitussin may be the wrong treatment. Chris Rock knows.

Later.

FREEZE

...

Dear Lord,

I humbly pray

Which is interesting, as I'm not exactly the religious type

In fact, I haven't spoken to you in years

Does that surprise you, or does it surprise me

That I only speak to you on my worst days

Through these tears?

Lord, if I'm speaking to you like this

I must really be up against the odds

I must really have done something worth regret

Or yet,

I must have truly angered the other gods

See me wear down

As I bear down

As I share now

From my chair, down

Like I care now

Are we square now?

I tried so hard to give you what you asked for

I tried to humble myself

And bring honor and devotion to something greater than myself

I asked not what I would be given

But what I could give

I asked not to be exempt from the tired, miserable, broken and tattered

As long as I could live...

As long as I mattered.

But nonetheless, I find myself here on my knees

My hands up towards the trees

Hoping you noticed I obliged when you yelled

FREEZE...

Please God, please,

Please Lord, please,

Please don't judge a book just because of it's cover

Please don't assume crook just because of his brother

Please take at least one look before labeling another

And don't ask me why I'm crying, hiding under covers

I cover my eyes so that I might not see

What comes next, what I expect, what I will be

What judges my time

What judges my virtues, my dues

My shades, contrasts, hues

My views

And my crimes

Lord, I'm a product of my environment

And you supplied my environment, with respect

So what did you expect

Except, to accept

The majority of the subjects

To suspect their title of suspect

Every time they turned up

In one or another respect as upset?

Lord, I never claimed to be a perfect man

I just hoped I could be seen as more than my worst offense

I know I've been low on your list

And I've done my best to convince you

That I can serve recompense ever since

Surely a sinner can do better

Can elevate, get some credit

Write a letter to the editor

To keep from seeing his name in the paper

See him labeled as an oppressor

Lord, I'm just asking you

Pretty please

Please

It's not often I ask others to pray for a "suspect"

Or derelict

Or threat

Or whatever they called me on the ledger

I won't grovel for your mercy, and I'm still not a beggar

But that's the clothing I wear now

See me wear down

In the stare down

As I bear down

For the prayer now

Where's my air now?

Is it fair now?

That the first legitimate question that you ask me is,

"Why are you scared now?"

[  )

[  )

[  )

These are the things that went through my mind

In the year that stood between the moment when I knelt, blind

Confined and collapsed and trapped

And without my mind able to understand the time that elapsed

As I felt encapsulated and sedated by the officer that escalated

The situation that took place when I felt a trace

Of the possibility I would be caught with disgrace

And the moment I escaped

Lord, I pray

To something I cannot hear, and cannot see

That I believe in even when it does not believe in me

To something to which I continually aspire

Even at this moment, when I may expire

Even as I face the squad that wields the fire

And I uncover my eyes and raise them to the skies

I'm trying to go higher

I really want to do better than my first

I swear I'm so much better than my worst

And I can outlive and defeat my cyclic curse

But first

You have to answer this last critical prayer

You have to show that beneath this skin

That you have burnt and dirtied and pinned

Lies a deeper layer

...

If you can identify with this character I've explored

Then it really shouldn't matter who he was

The worst decisions of his life

Should not have left him to be something abhorred

If you find yourself

Justifying the reprimand,

The force over the man,

I find myself asking you:

For what, exactly, do you think you stand?

Surprise Car Karaoke

Hey there.

I remember this one time back in college I caught this store clerk talking to herself.

She was restocking cereal at this grocery store on campus and thought no one was in earshot, and she was going back and forth about how she was going to argue with her boss that she deserved the weekend off. I won’t say that I remember her arguments for it or what she anticipated as the rebuttal, but I remember standing there, on the other side of the pallet, for an extra moment or so, out of sheer curiosity. Then at some point, either I coughed or she glanced up and startled back, and I had to apologize and assure her that I wasn’t a creep, which sounds like something a creep would say. So we both started laughing at the other and at ourselves at the same time.

But then she asked me, quite honestly, “Do you ever catch yourself talking to...yourself?” As if it was this foreign thing that I could never relate to. I came clean with her though.

“I’ve had complete arguments with myself. Which are always awful, because you know everything the other guy’s gonna say and you STILL never win!”

She thought that was funny. Or she realized I had outcrazied her and laughed so that I’d leave her alone. Either way.

Do you ever get caught being yourself?

I don’t mean the professional, at-work version,  and I don’t mean the properly groomed and date-night appropriate one either. I don’t even mean the drunken, louder than necessary, shameless and arrogant how long you can ride this bicycle on the freeway without getting arrested version. Or maybe I do mean that one, if that’s the version of you that feels most natural when no one else is around. Hopefully it’s not quite so chaotic or detrimental to your health and legal problems. But even if it is. Does anyone ever get caught in one of those moments, where you’re sure no one’s watching, and someone definitely is? And there’s no point explaining, because it’s painfully obvious what you’re doing, but you have to fight back the urge to explain anyway?

I ask because I had one of those moments just today. Don’t worry, it was perfectly legal.

I have recently taken on a new job. I started working for the State of Wisconsin’s Employee Trust Funds. Woot woot, by the way. It’s going well thus far, but one annoying thing about it is that the first check comes in the mail before direct deposit kicks in from here on out. No big deal, I can just drive over and deposit it myself. So after work, I hop in the car and take the 5ish minute drive to the bank.

One thing about me, I love driving in the car alone. It means I get to blast music and sing/rap/harmonize/head bang to my heart’s content and no one gets to judge me for it. I could be in the car for literally 30 seconds and I usually am trying to find a tune that fits the mood of the task I’m setting out to accomplish. It turns out, by the way, that grocery shopping goes very well with materialistic 90’s hip hop. Because Money Ain’t a Thang. Because I’m the #1 Stunnah. Because Cash Rules Everything Around Me, CREAM, get the money, dollar dollar bill y’all.

Anyway, it’s still COVID going on, so I decide to use the drive-up deposit, and it’s the second or third time in my life that I’ve done so. Apparently, right now, they aren’t requiring deposit slips at my bank, so you just give them the check and your ID and they sort it out for you. I even clarify this by pressing a button to get the teller’s help. He comes up on this screen next to the console, we chat for a moment, and the confirms what I need to do, so cool. I get the capsule, put in my check and my ID, send it off, and wait a few minutes.

And while waiting, I do in fact turn the music back on and resume jamming out and doing way too much harmonizing to a song I don’t even know all the correct lyrics to. And I’m doing this for a minute or so, and I happen to look over and see the teller again, who at this point is laughing at me. I don’t know if he’s been sitting there for five seconds or the full minute. After pausing the music and apologizing, I confirm that he should make the deposit into my joint checking account and thank him for his time. He stops giggling at me long enough to tell me to have a nice day.

Now, I could have been embarrassed by that incidence of surprise car karaoke. I could have turned the music off and rode home in silence. Or I could have done what I did, which was blast the rest of that song and the next one with the windows down, imploring pedestrians and other cars to join in.

Unsuccessfully, I might add. Turns out, life is not a Nissan commercial.

All I want to say here is that, hopefully, you have a chance a few times a day to let out the more restrained parts of yourself. And it might not be some outgoing, random thing like mine was, but hopefully it is cathartic, and it is doable and safe (and legal). I mean, it’s not easy to feel like your normal self all the time anymore. So just do it anyway, especially if you’re in a mask while you’re caught in the act.

Later.

Going For A Run (The 5 Stages)

I’ve said it before and it still is the case
I’d lose my mind if I kept it in one place

I don’t really know what to say anymore
So I choose to say so little, it seems
It feels like I should have a mouthful to let forth
Amidst whispers to whimpers, laughs into screams
From thoughts and prayers back to jokes and dreams
Puffs of smoke that float and choke back the steams
Burst at the seams
Steep and brew up into something much more
Altogether screwed up
Swallowed, gnashed and chewed up
The most nasty stuff that can’t get through
The hole in my head that was arrogantly
Nailed, glued, and screwed shut
And for what?

Try to understand
I felt pride for this land for the first few hands
That the tide and the rip and the cascade
We would withstand
And not just out of chaos, but with seance
Bringing back the chorus to play us
One more sweet tune of joyous noise
“We shall overcome...”
I thought even if we came of different tempers
Scattered shades and various assemblies
We could assemble and send up the remedy
We could grow stronger and make this the end of
Our bitterest energies as we cued to
The beginning to endless fond memories
We could enter subliminal synergy
We could...

Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought was going to happen
Because it didn’t
It turns out there was a lot that I thought was going to happen

I thought we were going to be better together, even though we were already great
And I thought we were all in this for each other, and we were all pulling for the same fate
And I truly believed that those who had the chance to would own the mistakes on their plate
But I see what’s at stake, and what’s to come, and that’s what makes my heart break

I think I’ve been inside for too long
Suppose I’ll go for a run down the boulevard
Never knowing which direction along
Which I may be hoisted by my own petard
Left scarred from an action meant to bring my sanity
And my energy
Hell, my very health
Back to the proper yard
Don’t disregard my ready guard
As just an errant mental shard
Just watch, for the next time you regard
An unsuspecting suspect at large
Whose only fear is the waning moments left
Before the “warning” discharge
I hate to play this card
I hate to say that I have to look twice as hard
As I wander
Keep a second mind by design to not squander
The blessings I’ve been given
As I come across an interloper
Hoping I’m from not here
But somewhere back over yonder
Not necessarily the hood, or the ghetto, or the slums
Just not this neighborhood, not this community of chums
No one bumping down their street to the heavy bass and blaring drums
Singing, “WE SHALL OVERCOME...”
But please understand

Please understand that for every twinge of hint of xenophobic rage
So many others have set the table, opened the door, cleared the stage
Turned the page
How badly I want to say that we’ve not only freed the inhabitants
But have broken the cage
Pushed past the level of mere toleration
But busted the lever, and broken the gauge
I see all those that have become enraged
I see all those that demand change
Not because those engaged share the same semblance as them
But because they understand freedom and justice are always at play
And turning away means it could be another group
Left in dismay on any other day
And yet way
Way
Wayyyyyyy
Too many people left still don’t want to take a step back
And display the exact impulse stuck in their cracked array
That instead of empathize with a black man that lays flat
Just say back, “Maybe those people shouldn’t act that way.”

I mean, that’s the next act to this play, is it not
The darkening of the victim in slot
The explanation that he was deserving of what he got
Be it broken or battered, or poisoned, or shot
The noose was long due for the one that it caught?
Just saying, that’s the antics
To come off as pedantic but change the dynamics
To calm down and mute the upset and the frantic
Let me mute my surprise that there’s more in disguise
Behind the horror witnessed by eyes upon eyes

It’s coming, regardless
And it’s hard to know to what everyone can even agree anymore
Hard to get down pat who or what even matters
Facts certainly don’t
If the truth is what we all agree on
And we can’t agree on anything?
What’s the use in valuing truth?
Really, what’s your excuse?
You dig and you press and you prod and you fight nail and tooth
So the next comes along, pulls up Google and is just as much a sleuth?
I’m tired of arguing and jumping through hoops
Just to bend one opinion that can rally the troops
And call me a sheep for my source of the proof
While having nothing behind their own points to prove?
You can stay woke, dude
I’ll stay aloof

No, no, no
I can’t go outside anymore
Can’t breathe the same air
Can’t feel joy from prayer
Can’t meet with those whose pain we now share
Can’t bring myself to break my stare
Can’t leave the couch or comfy chair
There are moments I can’t bring myself to care
That it’s all going on out... there
It’s hard enough to take care of my normal affairs
And now I’m bottled up in this whole entirely full of shit
Pit of despair just because I let myself forget it has always been there

You see
This is what happens sometimes when you go for a run
You venture in a direction and once you’ve begun
It’s not where you expected to find yourself flung
And you have to finish what can’t be undone
And you’re face to face with something that you’re not too sure that
“We shall overcome...”

But in another time, when our songs are all sung
And smaller naive souls need wisdom to grow
Maybe it’s us that can show just how far we’ve come
To put in perspective how far we can go

I told you before, because it still is the case
I’d lose my mind if I kept it in one place

The Return of the Nigerian Prince

Well hey there.

How many of you know about the Nigerian Prince scam? You know, the one where you get an email from a Nigerian prince who is trapped somewhere and can't move his money, and needs your help to get out of danger, for which he will share a percentage of his wealth with you for your help. And all he needs is your bank account number to begin the process. For those of you still waiting to hear back from Prince Chetachukwu, I would advise you to make a call to the credit bureaus when you get a chance. 

    <-------- this guy did not email you.

For everyone else, there is apparently an updated version of this for the current events going on. Apparently, a new scam involves using the same idea but in the scope of relief funds to be redistributed, or a small business that needs to make financial maneuvers in order to avoid a crippling bankruptcy, that kind of thing. If you want to read anymore about it, here's a link.

I, like many of you, have been forced to stay indoors and not work, and it has pushed my perspective and focus onto subjects it might not have been previously. Under normal circumstances, I would be engrossed in sports right now, because we would have just finished an NCAA tournament and the NBA playoffs would be fast approaching. The NFL draft would loom larger than it already does, since they are going out of their way to ensure that it can still occur in some form. Still, it is tough to focus on things like sports the same way, even with the early release of a 10-part documentary about the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, called the Last Dance. If you haven't seen the first two episodes yet, stop reading this and go watch those right now. Seriously, this is not as important as that, you need to see it. It's awesome. And I need all the episodes to drop so I can watch the whole thing back to back in one sitting.

But alas, here I am, trying to stay busy, and for the most part doing alright. I've been reading more, I've been working out every day, brushing up on a few types of coding, I've been drinking...less than before. Also, been playing a larger amount of video games online, can't deny that. Oh, and I finally have time to tinker with some more tech-related things I used to study. For example, I was playing around with a virtual machine version of Kali Linux, and I started trying out different exploitation tools on our home wireless network to see what kind of vulnerabilities we've left open on our devices. This one program, Spartan, lets you scan all IP addresses on a network within a certain range and then will give you a rundown of all the different ports that may be vulnerable for each IP address. Another, Wireshark, is a well known packet analyzer that can break down the traffic of every single bit that passes through, detailing where it came from, its destination, what protocol it deals with, which computer port, and what was being delivered. Am I saying I'm becoming paranoid or willing to use these tools for more nefarious motivations?

Anyway, I've been reading and listening to podcasts about cyber security. It's interesting to get perspective, from people that used to exploit for bad or questionable reasons to those who spend all day defending against that first group, people that work in HR of these groups, people that do ethical hacking, all sorts of groups. There's also a ton of stuff on YouTube that either discusses what you're interested in, or actually demonstrates it for those of us that want to become familiar. And they all seem to hit on one idea in one way or another: the most important part of starting a career in this field is persistence. 

Regardless of background, age, initial aptitude, ect., there's a ton of information. And the ones that every group seemed to want to work with were the individuals who never got discouraged, who kept churning and kept trying to learn and would not give up on whatever task they were working on. I suppose there are a lot of fields where a formal education is just as important, but obviously persistence will win out against educated and informed but lazy. At least sometimes. Maybe. Eventually.

I know all about needing to stick with something to get real traction with it, and trying and trying and getting basically nowhere and trying again, and still not getting anywhere, and then getting better, but then still not getting to enjoy it because everyone else around you got better than you. I know all about that. You see, I used to play basketball. Used to.

Well, the honest truth is, I used to be a scrub at basketball.

Picture a goofy, 5'3 kid with long arms and not much coordination trying to run back and forth, dribbling and shooting terribly, usually forgetting whatever plays were called, that had hills and valleys of confidence in what he was doing. All through elementary and middle school, I tried and tried to get better as a skill player who could shoot from all over and could handle the ball well enough to shred defenses and get to the basket at will. I tried to watch enough basketball so I could understand the game and be able to see things happening while the games were happening in real time. I tried to will myself to grow so I wasn't so disproportionate to everyone I had to guard against. 

Didn't work so well.

I was never a very good shooter, for one. It didn't seem to matter how many shots I would take at practice, in the park, or at home on our own hoop. Sometimes it would be consistently close, other times it wasn't. Which is why I think it was always a matter of confidence, which I struggled with all through middle and high school. I used to go to all of these summer camps for basketball and I would work on shooting and ball handling drills , and eventually I became better, not great, at ball handling. But I was always one of the smaller kids on the court anytime I was playing in those days. And in basketball, being tall comes in handy. And, worst of all, no matter how much I worked at it, I always found myself getting too caught up in the moment when the games came down to the wire. I could never slow down and remember what the plan was. Every damn time I was in at the last moments of a game, I found myself watching instead of keeping focused on what needed to be done.

The only real reason I kept making the teams were because of the kind of shape I was in. I could run up and down the court with the other kids and have a lot more energy than they did most of the time. I could defend most kids that were bigger and more developed than me, I could jump with a lot of the taller kids and still come away with rebounds, and I always fed off of the other team's players when they got frustrated. So if I could make a play or two, and it made a difference, then I would get motivated and try to feed off of that.

So, somewhere in between 7th and 8th grade, I was playing a game in the gym and a guy on the other team stole the ball from me. We were right near half court, and I tried to fake him out or something, and he picked the ball right away and was going for a breakaway. So out of frustration, I run after him, and I figured I was too far back to do anything, he was going to get the layup easily, so I was thinking I would just jump up and try to touch the backboard, just kind of to see if I could even get up that high. And the next thing I know, my hand hits something large and I lose my balance as I push against it, and have to kind of twist around to land on my feet. And I realize that the ball is in my hand somehow. 

I later found out that I didn't technically goaltend the other kid's shot, because I touched it before it touched the backboard, so technically it was a legal block. But the thing that stood out in my mind was not that I had made a good basketball move. I was surprised I could get up that high. I had never really focused on it before, but one of our coaches mentioned that I should come out to track and field that spring when basketball was over that year. So I did. I tried long and high jump and ran sprints, eventually doing triple jump too. And you know what? I was a scrub at that too for a while. Among the kids who really knew what they were doing, I was nothing special when I first started.

But I liked it, it was fun to be faster or a better jumper than other kids. So I kept working at it, learned some technique, and kept going, and I grew a little, and got stronger, and eventually I got really good at a few events in track. And so that's what I focused on after my freshman year of high school and ultimately college. I played basketball for two more years because I have always enjoyed basketball, between playing it and watching it. That's ultimately why any of this happened in the first place. I found something I liked doing and wanted to do it better. And I was willing to keep trying to get better even when I clearly wasn't getting better and was embarrassing myself over and over. Maybe that's the best reason that any of us do anything.

Persistence really does matter, even if it doesn't work out for the reason you think it will. Keep pushing yourself, and adjust your approach when necessary. The evolution of the Nigerian Prince scam can attest to that. They say, "find something you love to do and you'll never work a day in your life." My version goes, "find something that you'll keep doing while you suck at it."

See ya later.

Trust Me?

I had this neighbor who moved into the apartment below ours in Madison some years ago, and I got really pissed off at him when he decided to (technically) break into our house one night. Twice. On the same night.

I know, I know, there's way more serious things going on right now. There's a global pandemic that is pushing its way into every part of our lives. Concerts are cancelled, sports seasons are postponed, travel is restricted. Schools are closed, workers are getting laid off, stocks are plummeting and then soaring and then plummeting. And apparently every single mother fucking roll of toilet paper is getting bought up like there is no tomorrow because SHIT IS HITTING THE FAN.

It's important to talk about these things, and we should talk about them, but here's a blog post that isn't about any of that.

Welcome back, by the way.

So the house we lived in downtown was a duplex apartment type place. The ground floor had 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a common room, and it had a front and back door to the outside. It also had a staircase down, which took you to a short tunnel that let you get to where the laundry and some other storage space sat in the basement, and there was a staircase up the the attic, a front balcony, and the door to one of the bedrooms on the 2nd floor, where my friends and I stayed. We had our own kitchen, we had the 4 bedrooms and a bathroom, and we had another main door to the alleyway on the side of the house. And we had our own way down to the basement to get to the laundry and storage, which connected with the path that the ground floor apartments had access to. So, even though there were two different places, you could get from one apartment to the other without leaving the house, and we were friends with the group that was one the first floor for the first year that we lived in this building. So this set up made a lot of sense.

It was not quite as advantageous, however, when that group moved out and the random group of guys that took their spot moved in. I'm not saying they were bad guys, just that I didn't know any of these guys and they could have been psychopaths or meth dealers or Spurs fans, I don't know.

Anyway, about a week or two after they moved in, these guys met two of the guys in our apartment, and they hit it off. They had a mini party and got familiar, and I'm told that they gave them the OK to stop by our place anytime that they needed something.

I was not a part of this conversation. I was out of town until the next evening, I don't remember why. But I had no idea who any of these guys were, and at this point we had more random people over than I would have preferred. I had had a previous apartment of mine robbed and wasn't in the mood to invite a similar situation. So I at least had my antenna up for sketchy people hanging around under weird circumstances, especially when no one else was home.

Enter "Woody".

...now that I think of it, I think that really might have been his nickname. I was just going to make one up, but...why?

Woody had been at our place the night before and had learned about the two different ways to get from upstairs to the downstairs side, where he now lived. He was a big dude, like 6'3 or so, muscular with a Robin Thicke-like haircut. I met him for the first time at about 11:30pm on a Friday night because he woke me up while stumbling around our apartment when no one else was there. I had gotten back from wherever I was a few hours prior, and had been tired enough to try to go to sleep. At the time I got back, there was no one home. I assumed they had only left recently, because all of the lights were on, the front door was unlocked, some reggae music was still playing fairly loudly, and the oven was still on since god knows when. You know, the typical way our house looked when I got home. So I shrugged it off, turned stuff off and cleaned up a moderate amount, and quickly went to bed. Well, that was probably around 9:30, 10ish, we'll say.

A while later, I drifted out of a weird sleep to someone stumbling back and forth in the hallway. I tried to let it go for a bit but they just kept bumping into either the wall or the banister next to the stairs. So at the time I figured they were one of my roommates, drunk out of their minds, who just needed help getting the last few feet to whichever bed, or to where they could stand over the toilet or have their head hanging out of the window until their body had properly rejected the proper amount of previously chugged cheap liquor. And I didn't want any of them to fall back down the steps to their possible death, so I lean out of the door to find this big ass goof standing there, looking confused that I'M there, as I try to figure out who the hell he is. And he kind of gives me a half-baked attempt to explain that he's my neighbor and he was at the house last night and a bunch of other shit you might say if you got caught trying to break into someone's house.

So I did my best to play it cool, and I told him it was cool and that he should try to get in through the passage where the laundry machine is, and I lead him down that way and close the door behind him. I didn't lock it, I remembered later, but I just figured he'd get through there and he'd be home. Well, about 10 minutes later, I hear the same stumbling in the hallway, and it's Woody again. And I'm like "Dude, seriously, what the fuck are you already doing back up here?" and it wasn't clear if the door on his apartment's side was locked or if he just couldn't figure out how to get through to his side. Or if he didn't even try. Regardless, he was back up there and it was like he forgot that I was still there. He even got indignant with me, "C'mon man, I was just here last night!" like I'm going to just shrug it off that a stranger is in my house again on such a quick interval. After a quick and spirited debate on why I wasn't comfortable with him yet, I finally reasoned to get him through the other way, through my roommate's side door. I then locked it behind him, and locked the front door so he wouldn't just walk around and repeat this a third time. And so that I wouldn't pummel him to death out of sleep-deprived frustration.

It would later turn out that Woody was telling the truth and was just drunk out of his mind after all, but I never really got past that image of Woody that I started with. I'm not saying it's fair either, but honestly, it just felt that the basis for any real trust was eroded before it even began. Trust, among other things, is very much based on a feeling more than anything really factual. Oh sure, we use facts to justify whether or not we trust something, but we don't honestly need to. Trust can come from truly nowhere, despite evidence to the contrary and tons of people saying they trust the opposite, and you can choose to just believe something that you want to, and that trust can just endure on its own power. It's kind of a crazy concept. It's part faith, part expectation, and part experience.

I'm sure if you think right now, you can find something or someone that has crossed you more than a few times, and you still keep coming back to them, thinking next time will be better. Maybe a friend or family member that is not reliable,  but likable so much that you can't help but give them another chance. Maybe a sports team, that has never won the big championship but will continue to get close over and over again, and you just keep rooting for them because maybe next time they'll not break your heart. You might even believe in certain institutions like banks, political parties, or food suppliers that have had numerous scandals that they never seem to fully reform from, but you just keep giving them your money because you want to believe in them regardless. I get it. I really do.

I think we want to be able to trust in most cases. We want to believe things that we are shown, sounds and voices we hear, smells we smell, and feelings that we get, but those feelings are not always necessarily telling us what we think or want them to. Actually, smell is usually pretty accurate, there aren't many things that have deceptive smells. Usually when you smell bullshit, you know to watch your feet closely. But plenty of things are built or designed to look like one thing yet serve as another. Sounds don't always communicate the full danger that is impending our way, and people go out of their way to show one feeling or emotion with their voices when they truly feel another. And feelings. Oh, feelings and their habit of leading us astray. How do you even trust your own feelings? On one hand, they're always there and you have no choice but to at least consider them, and on the other, there are way too many times that the way we feel about something has absolutely no reason behind it, and we trust it anyway, usually to our own detriment.

I'll say this: a guy I was told about by a friend from college said something to him, and I always thought it was an interesting quote to have. The saying was, "Trust everyone until they give you a reason not to. And then never trust them again." And if that sounds quite ominous and a bit scary, well, it should, because the guy who that quote is from was the head of a teamsters union and, frankly, known to be connected with organizations that I would rather not disparage on record. But the phrase itself makes a lot of sense. Trust is not easily acquired, very quickly can be lost, and may take a lifetime to get back once it has been broken. And then, when trust is lost in one place, it becomes easier to distrust everyone around you, until everyone you meet looks something like this:



For example:

I've mentioned before that I used to work at a car rental company. We got a lot of interesting characters at my location, also in downtown Madison. The majority of the people that rented there were great people, very friendly if not eccentric characters. I had a regular that would always rent a full size vehicle and would freak out if the car was white, but otherwise she was always very nice and talkative. I even met Kurtwood Smith, the dude from That 70's Show, while he was campaigning during Obama's re-election bid. Before you ask, no, he did not threaten to put his foot up my ass, no matter how many times I asked him to.

The thing is, there would also be, mixed in with the good crowd, a much more shady level of customers. There was a good mix but it was still a little glaring when you stop and think about it. You would get these normal folks with families and it would be very straightforward, and then you would get high school kids looking to see if you would "loan them a car for 25 minutes right quick." I had a guy I'm sure was too high to realize which state he was in, a woman who put loose change into the cd player of the car, a guy who paid with check every time just because he could, and oh yeah, a guy who rented one of our Mustang's, only to fill his address out as the post office, keep the car longer than he said he would, and then try to get me to return it in the system before giving the keys back to him so he 'could fill up the tank and run a few other errands'.

I know I'm a bit naive even at my current age, but I definitely have had to keep my guard up at work to not trust too much, because working there I genuinely did want to help people. I wanted to make it as easy as possible to get in and out, no muss no fuss. Moving is stressful enough without anything going wrong. But I usually was given some sort of warning before someone was going to do something shady.

Which brings me to an elderly man that came in to rent a moving truck. Let's call him Wendell. Short, small frame but with a bit of a belly. Balding white hair, thick glasses, had a white, buttoned short-sleeve shirt and khakis. This dude had the look of someone's beloved grandfather. Frankly, he looked even older than a Wendell should. Wendell came in without a reservation to rent a small truck, since we usually had a truck on site to advertise that we offered them too. It was a nice quick conversation, he mentioned he just needed to move a few things across town that were too big for his car, and he could probably bring it back after a weekend, and it wouldn't be a problem if he had to come back later to get it. I explained that the truck would be available right then and there for a fairly low daily rate plus a certain mileage charge over 200 miles that he wouldn't even need, and its next reservation wasn't until the following week, so he could get it right then and there if he had a way to come back and get his car, which he said he did. So he got the truck, I got credit for getting a walk-in rental, the company got more revenue. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not really.

I vaguely remember looking at the truck rental part of the system the next week, I saw that we were down a truck somehow and needed to get one from another location. Okay, no big deal. It didn't even occur to me until later to look up and try to figure out why we suddenly needed another truck. Did we get more rentals? No. Did a truck get in a wreck or need maintenance. Nope.

Then I look at existing rentals and I see that the rental from the last week, with Wendell, was still going. And that looks weird, like it could be a mistake somewhere, but isn't the end of the world, we have other resources. And plus I'm still getting credit for an unplanned rental in the system. I'm sure he'll get the truck back to us sometime this week.

So then an entire week passes. Then 2. Then a month. 6 weeks. 2 months. And this rental is still going. During this time, we called to check on the guy, trying to remind him that his daily rate (which was around $30 a day, I think) is still going. Tried emailing him. No response. My manager asked about it a few times, if there was anything off about it. I told him no, because I didn't think it the least bit of a suspicious based on how I met Wendell. He exuded someone you wouldn't need to doubt, for any reason. It didn't even occur to me that I should have looked twice at the rental, and the guy had all of the proper identification, and his credit card worked. So I'm still convinced this is all a big misunderstanding.

And then I received a let from Independence, Missouri.

Which was weird because it's the only letter I had ever received at work for that location. It arrived and just kind of sat on the back desk that we had set up, so I missed that it had arrived for a day or two. The thing is, it wasn't addressed to me, Victor Dupuy. It was addressed to "the very nice man that helped me on [whatever date he rented the truck] who I'm hoping will do me a huge favor..."

So for whatever reason, I finally see this letter and it just kind of clicks who that could be referring to. So of course I open it, and it's from Wendell. I don't remember exactly what it said, but I'm pretty sure I still have this letter somewhere just because of the sheer disbelief I was in for a full day after I read it. The gist of it is, this guy wrote me a letter apologizing for stealing this moving truck. He had no intention of ever returning it back to us after the weekend of when he rented it from me. He needed a moving truck that could take his stuff to where he was moving in Missouri, and he knew it would cost way more to arrange the truck as a one way rental. So he said it was going to be a daily rental (which by the way have both a daily charge and a mileage restriction) and after he was done moving he tried to return the truck in Missouri, which caused confusion on several levels. The place in Missouri figured out where he had driven from and was able to calculate the one-way rate that he actually owed, not to mention the additional fees for doing something different than previously agreed upon. You could easily make the argument that this guy thought he would pull a fast one on us, and it did not work even a little bit.

He went on in the letter to really try to tug on the heart strings. He mentioned he had recently also had a heart attack, then he said he had tapped all the money that he could to try to pay down his debt. Friends and family could not help him, and he was all alone in Missouri and had no one else to turn to, and could tell when he met me that I was a genuinely good person, and would I please do him this favor and honor the return price that I had given him anyway.

Now, there was a split second where I felt bad for the guy as I was reading the letter. I could picture this frail little guy just barely able to scrape by and make this long drive, and doing it in marginal health and at an older age that maybe he got confused with the agreement and blah blah, I tried to at least play devil's advocate for a moment to consider that everything he was saying was true.

And then I remembered that he was a stranger who had lied to my face, stolen rental property from my company that we had planned to use a few times over the past few weeks by then, had tried to return it to a different company for a lower price than he actually owed given the services he had used, and now wanted a favor. And he couldn't remember my name (it was printed on the rental contract).

I'm not saying he was a scam artist or anything, necessarily. But he didn't do things the way he was supposed to and, realistically, trying to help him out of the mess he was in would have constituted fraud. Fraud that would be easily verifiable and would only screw me over too, while not actually helping him. If I closed his rental on site, which was the only thing I could have done for him, then it would look like we had the truck on hand again to be rented. Which we didn't. So that would probably come up, and when it did, the end of the story would be impossible to justify. Everything else was not in my court, and would have to be worked out with wherever the truck actually was. I told my manager about it, and he had a pretty good laugh before fixing it in the system. That's the last I heard of it, since I couldn't help Wendell even if his sob story had worked.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do people favors even when you don't have to. I'm not saying you can't trust your instincts about people, and I'm definitely not saying that you should become jaded and distrusting about old white people that look like they're named Wendell. I'm saying two things:

1. People show you who they are. Believe them when they do. Even if they show you one thing face-to-face and write a letter that's completely different, you still have to take all sides at face value and understand who you're really dealing with. Whether or not you trust people from the start, always acknowledge those that show that they don't deserve it, and always factor that into them as a person moving forward.

2. I've been to Independence, Missouri. It sucks. Serves you right, Wendell, you senile bastard.

Later.

"You're Just a Man"

Supposedly, we are defined by two things in life: our patience when we have nothing, and our humility when we have everything.

This is restated a ton of different ways, I found out. Some are old-timey maxims from grandparents, while others are rap lyrics. "Same people you misuse on your way up, you might meet on your way down" to "Started from the bottom, now we're here" kind of stuff. And keep in mind, having nothing or having everything are very relative terms. But the general point still stands. What we do with what we have (or don't have) matters.

Plenty of people know about the movie, Gladiator. It did win Best Picture in 2001, so, yeah, go figure. Surprisingly less people know that it had some actual characters from history. But I don't want to talk about Russel Crowe's character, Maximus Decimus Meridus (I should though, people would read a blog post about a vengeful gladiator). No, I want to mention the guy played by Richard Harris. The character was Marcus Aurelius, who in real life was the Roman emperor from the years 161-180. The whole thing from before about what how we react to having nothing or everything, that's attributed to him. There's a story about him, that he had a servant follow him around, everywhere he went, for a particular reason. Anytime someone gave praise to Marcus, for whatever huge or small thing, this servant would lean in and whisper to Marcus Aurelius, "You're just a man." First of all, awesome job to have. I wonder what the application for that must have been like. But second, such an important thing to be humble with that level of power.

Here's a sculpture of Mr. Aurelius, looking like his bad self:



Funny thing about it, we're usually very interested in humbling the man at the top, who has everything. In my opinion, we're much more accustomed to shrugging off those of us that have nothing. Those of us that, some might even say, are nothing. Despite the fact that there are way more of us out there who are and/or have nothing, that could be infinitely higher and may bring more to the world. Those of us in squalor, in filth, on the very bottom, with little to fight for and even less to fight with, those are the people who need to hear it just as much: you're just a man. You are not an animal, you are not a monster, you are not a screw-up, a waste, an obligation, a douchebag with no future of non-douchebagery. You are just a man, or woman.

And don't get me wrong, maybe you are, and maybe you aren't all of those things, because frankly, we're probably all those things at individual moments, but we don't have to be for our entire lives. It doesn't have to define us... necessarily. I should put an asterisk here, because some us are capable of great things, and we should definitely get credit for them. Others will do terrible, really awful shit that we shouldn't get to just brush off because it's inconvenient to us.

But perhaps the great majority of us should have someone who always is in our ear, reminding us that we are just human. You snag the winning touchdown in a backyard game a football? "You're just a man." But then you drop out of college and get a dead end job at a factory? "You're just a man." But you work your way up and become the best supervisor they've ever had? "You're just a man." Ooh, but you dropped your coffee in the car and knocked down a telephone pole. "You're just a man." But then you saved a family of Korean immigrants in the next car who were about to all be killed from an explosion? "You're just a man". The cops found weed and cocaine in the car you were driving? "You're just a man. Whose under arrest for felony possession." But it comes out the drugs were planted on you, and you take down a bunch of corrupt cops and get a key to the city from the mayor and... I don't know why I'm still going with this, sorry.

As per usual, I have a story to back up my theme of this post. But for once, not my own. I'm going to tell you a quick story about someone who I don't think would tell their own story quite this way. And I don't have to worry about not saying his name, because I didn't actually meet the guy, but I was present for what I have to believe was both a huge high and a sequence of lows that followed. Here's what happened:

A few years ago, Tara and I were coming back from Greece where we spent our Honeymoon. It was an amazing 2 weeks at 2 different islands, and had amazing pictures, and all these fun trips we'd taken, and we had tour guides in a few spots, and the food was outstanding everywhere. But at 2 weeks, it was time to come home and we were ready to be done traveling. And getting back from Greece is, to put it mildly, a huge pain in the ass.

We had to fly into Athens at like 11PM and stay overnight, because there was not going to be another flight into Athens in time for our 6AM flight to Amsterdam. So, we camped out in a hallway in the airport in Athens. I think Tara got a few hours of rest, whereas I didn't sleep at all. Then we get on the flight to Amsterdam, in which I did my best to rest but didn't, and had a slight layover there before flying to Atlanta. Now, I definitely got a few hours of rest going to Atlanta, but I got kind of jostled a few times from the guy sitting behind me on the flight. I got clocked in the head a few times by his elbow or something else, so I kept waiting for him to do it again, and I was now not only exhausted from traveling but much more irritable than I might otherwise be.

With that in mind, we get into Atlanta, and our flight out gets delayed. There was this huge nasty storm that had just come through the are, but we were flying in the direction that the storm was traveling, so we had to wait for it to clear out. And we were in a terminal that was under construction, and the flight was overbooked, and there was a huge crowd of people in the same boat, all trying to get on this flight, all crammed in the same area, and all seemingly just pissed off from having been in transit for hours and hours with little sleep or food.

With that in mind, Tara and I are just standing there in the middle of this crowd. And it just so happens there is this large group of about 20-30 Irish nursing students trying to get on the flight with us. They are all really cute, they are all petite or petite-ish, and stylishly dressed, and there are a bunch of little groups of them but it's apparent that they're all there together. Also in the immediate vicinity is an incredibly goofy looking individual that I'm going to call Marvin for the purpose of this story. I don't know what his name actually is, but damn if he didn't look like Marvin.

So Marvin, to set the picture up right, is about 5'6, husky but not fat, with the Chili Bowl haircut, wearing a conspicuously strange t shirt, it had some item on it like 'television' or 'radio', something that you would never expect needed to make a t-shirt for in the first place. Almost like the only reason you would wear it was because you didn't know what t-shirts usually had on them, and you chose the weirdest possible one but no one ever said anything about it. He had rainbow colored tube socks and painfully white shoes as well. And you're probably wondering why I remember all of this, and honestly, I kinda wonder that too. I'm telling you, this guy just stuck out that much, I had to take a mental image that I can't just delete after all this time. It was like the 80's were in the seat next to him on the previous flight and threw up on him when the vomit bag wasn't there.

Now, again, I'm sleep deprived, I'm hungry, and I'm annoyed at the travel delay. So I'm not in a great mood, and neither is Tara, so we're both just standing there, waiting for our tickets, not really listening but just kind of hearing things around us. And we both hear what I was sure is the absolute worst pickup line of all time:

"Hey, can I ask you guys a question? Do you think I should get my eyebrows waxed?"

...

So I could tell from the voice that it was Marvin, and Tara knew I heard the same thing she did, so she gives me a light slap on my shoulder as she says, "Don't look." Because I was totally going to look. I was going to give one of those, "The fuck you just say?" type looks. And I basically did anyway a few seconds later. But I'm sorry, did he just fucking say that? All the ice breakers in the world, all the way you can start a conversation, and THAT was your top choice? What didn't make the cut? Inquiring about which anal lubricant is best for giving colonics? But that was what Marvin went with, that was what he decided to use to start a conversation with two very attractive 20-something sporty Irishwomen. Imagine the cajones that must have taken.

So you could imagine my surprise when the aforementioned crater of a pickup attempt netted an actual conversation. Not just a quick response of something like "uhhh, sure I guess." No, these two actually engaged what he said, and mentioned a few male friends they had that did something similar. And they mentioned some trends in fashion that supported him thinking of his body and his style in a different way. It was a surprisingly compelling conversation, and he had a decent thing going. I was impressed, and so was Tara. We sat there and listened to a good 5 minutes of this guy pull a damn clutch move.

And then, it seems that time caught up with him. Because the conversation ended. There was just a lull in the interaction, and any normal man would have understood that they needed to either have a normal kind of next step, or to just accept that the moment had passed, and to move on. And that was almost what Marvin did, because he did make real attempts at making a normal conversation happen, but it went a little bit like this:

Marvin: So what kind of work do you guys do?
Irish student: We are all in the same nursing class, we have a trip for the next month and a half  for the end of our program (it was something like that, I don't remember that part anymore)
Marvin: Oh, that's cool. You should let me develop a website for your group so you can get good exposure. I would just need your contact information.

I got another shoulder slap not to turn around when that one came out, because it was the worst of a few real attempts for him to turn a hell of a ice breaker conversion into what I can only assume he thought would be a sex filled summer fling with way too many slutty nurses. And I'm not calling them slutty, because none of them necessarily gave off that vibe, but I somehow think the concept of what Marvin was pushing toward involved copious amounts of no-strings-attached sex for this random of all random dudes. I know, I know, I totally judged Marvin in this way. Get past it.

Also, we were not the only ones to notice this conversation go south. Other passengers in ear shot made eye contact with me when I started giving off the looks of, "I'm uncomfortable, and this shit isn't even happening to me". I came close to turning around again, and trying to put a verbal stop to it. Just, literally waving my hand in the air and saying something like, "Dude, it's over. You have to stop this. Please don't creep them out anymore than they already are, this is not going to get any better."

There was no real climactic end to this. I didn't look to see if he actually walked away on his own accord or if the girls found a way to slink away or even other nurses helped them find another spot to stand for what ended up being another 30 minutes. But that was about as uncomfortable as you can think to just sit there and try to replay what you've done. It's not even like I would have known what to say to someone that experienced such a range of success and failure in a small amount of time. But maybe he didn't need anyone to give him a proper recap of this experience. Maybe he only truly needed someone there to say that they understood what he was trying to do, and they still were rooting for him in his never-ending quest to overcome those damn socks (for real, it was a PROBLEM). He could have used pointers, he could have used encouragement, he could have really benefited from just a hug and a different shirt with some sweat pants to cover most of what was going on there. Or perhaps, the best thing to give him, in the depths he had found in the Atlanta airport, was just a dude, who could lean over and whisper in his ear, "You're just a man....

"You are just a man...

"Now get your shit together, dude, you look like the smaller kid from Stranger Things."

Bye Bye.