Sporadic

Well, so, I’m about to be 40. The 66% complete mark of my father’s life. The 48% complete mark of my grandfather’ on one side and 67% complete of the other. It’s a time to reassess. I’m a mid-level tech project manager working on web projects that will have to be re-done in between 2 months to 2 years by people who I hope are not me. That’s the nature of the web, imperminance is the rule. I get it. However, this is not what I envisioned for myself. Let’s go back and get the skinny on how me at a variety of other ages thought we’d turn out:

4- Fireman: Look at them! The trucks are shiny! The sirens are nifty! I don’t know what they do, but that whole truck / siren thing looks like it’s about the coolest thing on the planet. I want to have a fireman on my cake this year!

7- Han Solo:  Luke is awesome, but c’mon… Han has a blaster and drives a space ship. Luke is basically his bitch. Everytime Luke gets into trouble Han has to dig him out. Greg told me that there’ll be 9 movies in total. If we see one movie every three years it’ll be 2000 when they’re done. We’ll be seeing the last one at the age of 30! 30!?! Who’s 30? Oh like I don’t even think my mom’s that old. That’s like a million years from now. Let’s go kill water striders in the creek!

13- Shut up! I’m not growing up! You’re stupid. Leave me alone!

15-Astronaut: Okay. Han Solo doesn’t exist. If we want to go into space, we’re gonna need to learn how to fly fighter jets like Buzz Aldren. Maybe join the Air Force? I hear that if you have anything less than 20/20 vision that they basically send you to hanger and hand you a wrench. I can still be one. I’ll figure it out. The world is my oyster.

19- Hemingway: I read books! I wrote important sounding short stories! I drink! We sit around the cube at Bethany and talking about important deep things. We like Hemingway! We’re gonna be just like him in the 20′s! Maybe not Hemingway. Maybe I’m gonna be Eugene O’Neal. No matter! Why choose? We’re all gonna be famous writers! Kids are gonna hafta study Us!

22- Reporter: I’ll write about war zones! I’ll have a column like Dave Berry! I’ll settle in around 40 and work on that first novel like Voneguet did. Newspapers are never going anywhere! Let’s start a ‘zine!

24- How the F@#$ should I know what I’m gonna be? Maybe I’ll own a record store or something? You gonna pass that thing over or just bogart it all yourself.

27- Retired: This Internet thing is never going away and I’m gonna make like a gazillion dollars for ever. It’s gonna be the freight train to awesometown from here on out. I’m gonna hit some start up and then just sit back a travel. Yup! I’ve got this thing licked.

28- Famous Comedian: The bronx is a freight train to the big time baby! Robin Williams opened for us!  We’re touring and stuff. We’re funny all the time. Pass me that Jack and let’s write some funny sh!t and we’ll perform it and people will say we’re awesome!

30- Doomed/ Poor House/ Street Vagrant: This internet thing is never coming back. We’re completely ruined. I am gonna live out here in a shack in the woods forever. This pooch is screwed. Expect nothing. get nothing. Maybe I should develop a meth habit?

35- Middle Management: Okay. We’re fine. You’re not destitute. Things don’t suck. Just ride this thing out. Put a couple dollars away. Retire at 67 and then fritter the rest of your days away until the sweet embrace of death. You have friends! They’ll come by. You’re fine. Just sit tight.

39- Shut up! I’m not growing up! You’re stupid. Leave me alone!

I hope you enjoyed that trip though my failings to fulfill my own perceived promise as much as I did. 2 weeks from now we’ll see how it works out. I’ll keep you posted.

So we just changed floors at work. New floor, new desk, new things

One new thing is a new door. A new door shouldn’t make any difference right? Unfortunately it does. What it’s done is put the same song in my head all day every day.

There’s this band that you should have heard of if you haven’t called Tilly and The Wall. They’re from Omaha and like all those Omaha bands have some loose connection to wunderkind Conor Orbest but that’s not important right now. This is the important thing:

They do not have a drum kit, what they have is one girl that tap dances and two others that stand on top of boxes and kind of stap their feet along with the music. It creates a really interesting percussion section. It’s really good, which is why I say- go pay attention if you haven’t.

So on their first record they have a song called “Bad Education”. I think it was the single, but I’m not sure. I couldn’t find the album track but here it is on letterman:

It starts with this kind of ‘stomp stomp crack’* which is the exact noise that front door makes every time someone comes or goes. Then my brain, being completely trained by years of trying to be funny by connecting one thing to the hopefully illogical next thing as fast as I can, completes the “sentence” by starting the lyric. And like I said, it’s a good song, so then it stays in my head for a while. But I’m used to thinking of more than one song on any given day so it’s weird. I’ve had tilly and the wall and not just tilly and the wall…”Bad Education” in my head non stop for two weeks.

Even when I listen to something else it goes away until I stop listening and then someone leaves. Then it’s back.

I guess there’s worse things, the door could sound like the beginning of a Chicago song**

On another separate but still musical note, if you haven’t heard the band “Lost in the Woods” give them a listen. I heard them on NPR “first listen” and they’re a little weepy but the sound is tremendous- they call themselves “Orchestral Folk” it’s like Neutral Milk Hotel with a little less punk and more strings.

*Note to Nancy Reagan: “Stomp Stomp Crack” way better than “just say no”

** Or a Steve Miller song… or etc

So I get forwards from a variety of sources, and those forwards tend to fall into 2 key categories:

1. Dirty/ Bad Jokes, Example:

While a woman is keeping vigil beside her husband’s deathbed, he says to her, “Before I die, I have something to confess to you.”
“Shh, not now,” she replies.
“But I need to tell you: I cheated on you, with your sister and your best friend and your mother and the next door neighbor” he admits.
“Yes, I know,” she replies.
“I need to clear my conscience before I die… ”
“Shh,” she counters. “Just lie back and let the poison work.”

2.  Forwards from republicans about how bad President Obama is, Example:

I do not like this Uncle Sam,
I do not like his health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks,
or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like this speaker Nan ,
I do not like this ‘YES WE CAN’
I do not like this spending spree,
I’m smart – I know that nothing’s free,
I do not like your smug replies,
when I complain about your lies.
I do not like this kind of hope.
I do not like it, you BIG Dope.
I do not like it NOPE, NOPE, NOPE!

So I wanted to respond to the republican screed with some of my own poetry:

I wonder if this “poet” knows
That the oil out in the gulf it grows
Not because of the current folks
But because of Bush’s regulation jokes

I also wonder if they see
That most Americans can’t pay the fees
And therefore end up out of luck
When they are health problems struck

I think that those people all lose sight
That these problems didn’t come overnight
Big war debt, and no taxes for the rich
Put the economy in a drainage ditch

Now it’s fun to blame the man
Who inherited the past’s mis-plan
But everyone who’s all complain-y
Might want to check with Bush or Cheney

Explination of the crap pond mentioned in “Spin Grandma”.

So the day before thanksgiving arrives and I have house guests. Mom and Bob are in from down south, and Jen is staying with me because the guy she’s subletting from is back for the holiday.

This is fine, I have the space, but what I don’t realize is that my plumbing cannot take the strain. For the past couple weeks, I have noticed that when someone takes a “longer shower”* that a shower smelling pond builds up in my garage. This is not a big deal, but I’m worried because it doesn’t bode well for the future since it means my sewer line is not draining properly.

On the day before thanksgiving, this comes to a head. The pond is back and it’s not just shower residue…there’s um…”sewage” floating in my garage. Yes, friends ans neighbors- I had a growing crap pond in my garage on the day before people would be coming over to eat things and presumably… excrete them.

Suddenly, the “well I should probably do something about this” became a mandate.

so we :

1.) snaked the drains (disgusting but no result)

2.) Called the landlord,  which then led to:

3.) tore up the deck because he *swore* there was a bigger plumbing intake down there and I had just covered it up

4.) Stood around staring at the crap pond

5.) tried snaking the drains from the other side which led to:

6.) some random woman saying “The city should be able to snake it from the street for you”

7.) called the city and then

8.) waited

9.) and waited

10.) Finally the city guy shows up at around 9pm and he snakes the city side and there’s no subsidence in the crap pond. Then he says “Flush a toilet” and I say “No, because it’s just gonna fill the crap pond some more”.

11.) Finally after some pleading and cajoling the city guy agrees to put his flush hose into my garage drain. First I cram it in and try to get it to move… it doesn’t. Then the city guy helps out. He wangles the thing for about 5 min and finally with a geyser, which we watched from the street, the crap shoot in the city main drain flows free and

12.) The crap pond drains away. The final draining of the crap pond leads to

13.) I hose all the crap into the drain and then liberally spread Clorox all over my garage floor, for which I ruin a par of brown cords (bleach stains) but now my drain flow through and everything is great

It took like 12 hours, and 7 people and 14 “street consultants”**, but the disaster was averted and the pond was vanquished!

Thanksgiving went off without a hitch but the thing I was most thankful for was family or friends or yummy food… it was that there wasn’t a lake of human poo in my garage.

amen. 

* Read: more than 5 mins

** Comments like “wow you got a real mess on your hands”

*** BTW the title is a reference to the crap demon from Dogma, in case you don’t remember here’s the screenplay… just search for Golgatha if you want to read the appropriate scene.

On my way into work today I was wearing the same jeans I was wearing a few days ago. It’s not that I’m a dirty person but anyone who really understands jeans knows that most pairs have about 4 or 5 wearings in them before you need to wash them.* So reach into the pocket and find some change from a previous wearing. There’s two quarters and 4 pennys. Now quarters you have to keep- that’s 50 cents, you’re almost to a pack of gum. But the pennys, you may dispense with.

Years ago, when I was living on Valencia Street with Devyn our next door neighbors were a bunch of 20 somethings from Indiana. Great guys. We’d play basketball, there would be cross apartment parties, Devyn developed and then rejected crushes on most of them, it was a generally genial and social environment. So one day I’m walking back from who knows where with Chris and James and suddenly Chris throws a penny up and then kicks it “punt style” into the street.

“What Are you doing!?” says I, alarmed, because my depression era grandparents have hammered home the fact that you keep and roll all your change. They’re probably spinning in their mauselum at the thought of this.

“Penny kicking” says Chris, “I am going to show you a game that will provide you years of enjoyment.”

He was probably kidding, but he was right, once I got past my initial fear of throwing away money, I realized that this was big fun. Competitions can be held. Cars can be targeted. Squirrels can be marauded. All you do is drop kick you penny. It can be played anywhere. Although I do recommend a “standard shoe” like a doc martin or the like, Tennis shoes can be difficult because the penny can stick in the webbing.

Don’t get me wrong, I still keep and roll change, but only if I forget to kick the pennys first**.

However, over the years since then I have wholeheartedly enjoyed booting a penny across a parking lot.

MO Update:

Thanks to everyone who donated. Our team made $6,793.48, which Microsoft will double! I alone, thanks to many of you made $545! Awesome! Thank you!

-

*unless you spent the day standing a small crap pond in your garage, but that’s another story.

**It can happen.

So I had this weird dream a couple nights ago and I wanted to make sure I could recount it. I’m not sure if it’s funny or if it’s signs of my larger sociopathic tendencies and fear of the republican party. I woke from the dream, not wanting to forget it, I scrawled out these notes on a beside pad:

Adverb

Obama

Subsidy

republican

pronoun

deregulate

From that, I have total recall of the dream, which goes…a little… like this (1..2..1..2..3..4 Hit it!):

To speak, everyone needed to buy each word as they said it. So if you wanted to say “Hi honey, how are the kids? Where’s tea?” you’d have to buy all those words from the various words markets. Just like there’s a meat market and a grocery, there were noun markets and verb markets, etc. So I was the guy who sells adverbs*. I was plying my trade as someone who sells adverbs would, when this world word recession hits and the adverb market tanks. Everyone in the word market is struck equally, except the guys who sell pronouns.

The pronoun industry, during the previous administration had be completely deregulated by the republican party who ran on the slogan “If you can’t say it with pronouns, then you’re probably gay”.  So suddenly it’s so expensive to buy words that aren’t pronouns that people are only using pronouns and then acting out the rest of the sentence. For some unknown reason that I can’t explain anymore than I can explain the rest of the premise the only verb anyone wants to use is “to hump” which is symbolized by a humping motion. So a collection of sample sentences might be:

SHE (points at a woman) (humping motion) IT (points at a couch). At which point the woman would then be required by the republican deregulation laws to hump the couch.

THEY (point to a group of dogs) (humping motion) HIM (points at a guy). The dogs hump the guy

This happened in the dream for longer than I feel comfortable telling you.

So the Obama administration, hoping to bolster the other word industries** subsidized the other words so that we can bring down prices and allow for “more effective communication”. This is roundly dismissed as word socialism by the right wing pundits, however, since they are right wing pundits they refuse to use the subsidized words so they can only use pronouns and the humping motion. They have to resort to images to indicate their nouns which eliminates all radio talk shows. Fox news eliminates the crawl because they can’t use the words “humping motion” and substitutes a constantly changing roll of small pictures of cars and girls in bikinis. However, above for the main content all of the TV pundits take their turn doing the same sentence over and over again which goes like this:

HE (points to crudely drawn crayon picture of Obama) (humping motion***) IT (points to American Flag)

This content runs 24 x 7.

Meanwhile, the rest of the nation, with it subsidized word industry quietly goes about its business. Eventually the word industry recovers and the democratically controlled congress, using the payback and interest of the word subsidy, repeals the pronoun deregulation. French Prime Minister Sarkozy send a giant gilded “O” to America in thanks for allowing the entire world to begin using full sentences again. It’s placed in Long Beach Harbor.

At the same time a team of radical right wing lumberjacks carve a giant “W” visible from space into the Canadian north woods.

At this point I start laughing, for real, not in the dream and wake myself up.

There you have it. Do with that what you will.****

—

*From Schoolhouse rock

** And cut down on chafing

*** BTW, if you’ve never had a dream where Glen Beck repeatedly does a humping motion I *highly* recommend it, even now, remembering it, I’m chuckling to myself

**** I’m pretty sure I can commit any crime at this point and then use this dream to prove out my insanity plea.

I haven’t posted in a while and so I thought I’d do one of those clearing house posts that I used to do when this was an email. There’s a lot of small stuff to get to, but no connected topic.

To start: I’m spending the month of November growing a mustache to raise money for men’s health. It’s part of a big push to raise money for prostate and testicular cancers under the name “Mo-vember”. It’s a really silly way to raise money for a really not silly topic. You can donate/ watch my progress here:

Mustache Face

And speaking of mustaches, in the past year or so every time I walk to Bart there’s a guy who lives in the second floor apartment on 24th street facing the Bart station, who has a bunch of lovely painted portraits of local retired newscaster Dennis Richmond. I have no idea why. I have no understanding if it’s ironic or a tribute. The commitment, however, is real. Every morning, this guy has trotted out one or more portraits of Dennis Richmond and put them on his balcony. It’s one of the many reasons why San Francisco is a wonderful place, people are willing to do insane stuff and no one even blinks. Like put up giant pictures of people in thier windows.

For years, I used to play this game which I called “Plane Nun” which draws its name from a story I think I remember my uncle telling when I was a kid. The story goes like this:

He would travel frequently and got bored telling the same stories from flight to flight and so he decided to just make something up. He starts to tell some guy he’s sitting next to he’s a brain surgeon* but soon realizes that he’s sitting next to an actual brain surgeon so he confesses the ruse. The brain surgeon loves the game and so they start fresh with new personalities and play the whole flight.

The brain surgeon was a minor league short stop and my uncle was a nun. Purportedly, when they exited the plane the flight attendant says to my uncle “Take care, sister”

I have played this game on and off for a while. My favorite instance was when I told a pipe-fitter from Akron that I was the  guitar player from 90′s band “Filter” .  At the end of the flight he asked me for my autograph for his daughter. My ruse was believable enough for several reasons, Filter was from Cleveland, so it makes sense that I would be flying to Pittsburgh especially around the holidays, Filter wasn’t famous enough to be recognized and he was a 50 something pipe-fitter. My guess is that since Filter fell off the earth right after that and his daughter was 14 that the autograph was probably a prized possession. I was even enough of a band dork to know the right name to sign (Richard Patrick) I mean, how would she check that? So she had a theoretical autograph from a semi-famous guy and Filter probably got an  album sale that they wouldn’t have.

Anyway, so I have just figured out that the game was played on me.

Here’s the ruse:

I’m on a chairlift at Homewood last season and I’m riding with an older guy who has a sort of Aussie accent. We do the standard “what do you do” conversation and he tells me he’s a voice actor. I say “Wow, that’s neat! Would I have heard you?”

He spins a yarn about how he’s the Gieco Gecko. Tells me a whole story about how they fly him down to L.A. once or twice a month to record new spots. He lives in Tahoe year round on the retainer they pay him. It’s believable and just like the guitar player for Filter, it’s just unfamous enough that why would I check on that?

I have been telling folks for the past year about how I met the Gecko and blah blah blah.

Yesterday I’m trying to find out whether I can get the series “Red Dwarf”** from Greencine and I’m following around some links on the web and I find a link to “Jake Wood, British Soap Actor and Voice of the Gieco Gecko”. So I check into his info on Wikipedia and IMDB. First of all, the unassuming middle aged aussie fellow is not a mid-thirties British soap actor and second of all he doesn’t live in London with his wife and two children.

I guess that’s fair. I mean, I’ve been duping people for years, why wouldn’t somebody have duped me? It actually makes me happy that there’s someone else out there playing the game. Sort of gives the universe more certainty.

–

* Uncle Jay worked for Westinghouse, I think he did some kinda project management before he retired a few years ago, so…not a brain surgeon.

**Late 80′s British sci-fi sit com in the vein of Doctor Who***

***Yes I know, I’m a big dork. Shut up. Go ask Jody about which Star Wars is the worst and why or ask Ivy why light sabers are certain colors for certain characters.

I know it’s been ages. I forgot my password and then I forgot that I forgot my password and then I forgot to forget that there was something to remember. Basically I slacked out for about 3 months.

However, I got an email from our old friend Sarah and she asked what had become of the bucket list and I realized that I had better get to it.

Fortunately, there’s something that I’ve been wondering about and so it lends itself to a instant topic.

In most major metropolitan areas* there are these folks who have what’s called a fixed gear bicycle or “fixie”. These are bikes that have, as you might imagine, only one gear that they are in all the time. Not unlike that huffy you had when you were 7. The difference, dear reader, between these bikes and your huffy is of course that the people that ride these are not 7… oh and most times these bikes don’t have brakes.

The other day I was explaining to Jen what a fixie was and I tried to explain why there weren’t brakes on the bikes and I couldn’t. According to some of the more popular fixie websites, it has something to do with being really connected to the road, bro.

Fixie culture seems to indicate that if you want to be …um… “super connected to the road” you must also be the kind of hipster that claims “I don’t even care what you think man, I’m just gonna be myself”**

As far as I can tell, fixies are like skateboards with more moving parts. You are required to outfit your fixie in all sorts of expensive ways like turning over and then sawing off the handle bars *** or sticking one of those idiotic center bar pads on it or making your wheels not match, or painting it some kind of spacey lime green or sticking one of those goofy mag wheels on it**** 

According to The fixed gear gallery: “In general, these bikes tend be more light weight and simple, requiring less maintenance than other bicycles. The lighter weight and continuous feedback through the transmission can translate to increased performance in some conditions, such as a better sense of control on slippery surface.” What they don’t tell you is that since you’re clearly too cool for brakes, it’ll also make you a menace if some objects gets in your way quickly.*****

I’m sure that were any of the fixie enthusiasts to actually come to my website (they won’t), they might call me a “hater”******. I’m okay with that. Anyone that tells me they love the simplicity of something and then spends hours and hours fixing something up needs to hear about their double standard. It’s like my friend in high school who told us her didn’t care about what people thought and then spent like 6 months perfectly adjusting the # of safety pins in his very carefully etched leather jacket with “The Exploited” painted on it. I even remember the day he told us it was finally just right.

I guess I should be glad they’re not driving cars….

—-

*and especially here in SF

**And then working very, very, very hard to look like he doesn’t care, while still wearing all the right deisel fashons and bike messanger gear.

***Known as the “flop and chop”

**** but only on one of the wheels  (see rule 3)

*****Like a dog or a child or a swiftly moving 2 x 4 being swung at you from a conscientious resident of the sidewalk you insist on riding on (hey buddy, isn’t that a bike lane over there? Yes, right over there? Oh, you didn’t realize that you could use the bike lane for your ….uh…bike?)

******that’s youth speak for someone who doesn’t like the thing that you like used in a sentence like this “why do you haters got to hate on my super cool neon bike with no brakes”

This one is not funny.

However, there will be funny things in here.

Billy passed away last Tuesday after a 5 year battle with Cancer.  Just typing that make me tear up.

I traveled to Jersey this past week for the services and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I took the red-eye out of SF on Wednesday night and proceeded to spend like $40 between the airport and the plane on booze. It worked and I slept most of the way. I landed and Betsy was nice enough to loan me her pull-out for the next few days.

That evening was the visitation at a funeral home over in North Bergan, not that far from where Billy grew up. I never made it in to the room for the viewing- I know what Billy looks like and that’s the memory I want to keep, him laughing at some stupid thingI said, him makingfun of Troy, him sitting out on the deck in North Carolina with a beer. One thing that was for sure,  the turn out was as much a tribute to Billy as it was to his choice in friends. The room was the largest that the home had, and it was filled to over flowing. There were relatives, friends from scouts , from grade school, from high school, from college and beyond.

For the most part, from my encampment just outside of the door to the room, I talked to a wide circle of folks and we shared funny stories and the things that brought us to him.

Billy’s Dad told a story about how as a camp counselor, Billy forbade his campers from even touching his jeep. This didn’t stop them. They threw the jeep in neutraland wheeled it down to the lake, and then covered it witha tarp*. Billy came back from whatever he was doing, realizes his jeep is gone and seeks out the troublemakers, who deny involvement. Then he mounts a search party that finally uncovers the jeep almost a mile away**. Then he goes back to these “troublemakers” and orders them to push it back and then of course respond with the sit com ultimate “But you told us not to touch it”.

For my part, I told the story about the time that Billy was the most angry with me, which was when he came out for my 30th birthday party which was at a club across town. We of course get really loaded and I end up being poured into a car to go back to the afterparty at my house. Billy is left at the party. Not on purpose, as I mentioned I was drunk. These were the days before cell phones, so he has to find people who he thinks know me and then convince them to give hima  ride back to my house. He gets there and I’m in the kitchen talking to some chick and he comes up and says “Excuse me sweetheart” and then hits me in the forehead. The to me he says “Where do I live?” and I say “Uh, Jersey?” and he says “Yes, Jersey, so how do I know where you live?” and hits me in the forehead again before walking off to the fridge and grabbing a beer. The anger bled away and it became a funny story to add to the lexicon.

The next day was the funeral which was a big Roman Catholic deal at a church around the corner from his dad’s house. I was asked to be a pall bearer and it gave me a vantage point both personally and  philosophically. As I entered the church, everyone was already seated and I got a chance to see the looks for people as I came in. They felt the same thing I was feeling “why in the world am I carrying my friend, who was my age? What god thinks this is just? How is this even happening?”  Then the bag pipes started. Jesus, bagpipes? Was this a scene from a horrible Mark Walberg movie about crooked cops and revenge? No, sadly, it wasn’t.

I spent the whole service trying to concentrate on things that would draw my attention away from the gravity of the matter at hand. Mostly because I knew that once I fell apart there would be no putting me back together. I rewrote every hymn we sang in my head to be a Bob Marley song. I read every single station of the cross (boy, you Roman Catholics are creepy). I tried to hear funny things that the eastern Europeanpriest’s accent caused***. I wondered about the tile image on the back wall of the church****. All the while the priest at the front with the beard intoned things about how we can never know god’s way, and that these things are part of his greater plan. Then after he finished his excuses, the bagpipes start again and the slow procession out of the church. It was the worst. Here was the end of something, the slow walk off and instead of a slow pull back shot from the crane and then the credit roll, our lives were going to continue. Without Billy.

Then we proceeded to the cemetery. On the way I saw what happens when you are an EMT and your sister is a cop. There was definitelysome pull with the police and ambulance world. A Ambulance, lights on full, leads us out… trailing the procession of 40+ cars were at least 4 motorcycle cops and two regular squad cars. I was in the end of the procession so I got to see the results of all that flash, people were out on their lawns, stopped on street corners, looking. “Who was this head of state? This great leader?” I know Billy was, in whatever your preferred idiom of afterlife, laughing. He screwed up traffic in two boroughsand on one major inlet to the GWB, they stopped traffic on the Palisades parkway! Screw you, people trying to get away early for the shore! 

The cemetery had a nice view, which I think is the ultimate irony: great view so we’ll stick you in the ground, we’ll see the valley, you check out all this dirt.

Slow to anger, quick to laugh, he was a guy that everybody liked. Yes, he came off as a big scary Jersey guy until you talked to him…but as soon as you talked to him you found a giant teddy bear who was a fluent in Vonnegut as he was in football. He was the renaissance man of the 20th century. No, he couldn’t play the lute, but who plays a f*&%ing lute these days?

It also made me realize how seldom we as modern day folks tell each other how important the relationships that we have are.

I spent Saturday in the park with Halle, Jillian, Betsy and Scott. We didn’t do anything. We threw a Frisbee, we drank some beers, we shot the breeze. However, it’s little moments like these that make up our lives and make them worthwhile. If there’s a lesson we can learn from this whole thing, it’s that the relationship that we have are the most important things about our lives. So take a moment and tell the people who are important to you that they are.

His family has asked that those who would like to pay tribute to him please give money to the American Cancer Society. If you want info about how to do that, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll send over the details.

Cancer sucks and we should figure out how to stop it from taking more great people from us.

–

*Camouflage!!??

** Seriously!? How do you decide to push a jeep a mile?

*** “Everyone”, as he lifted his hands up,”raise up your pants!”

**** Images: 1 Jesus, crucified, 2 penitent clergy people (1 male 1 female), 1 monk looking dude and strangely: a guy in business suit (who to my mind was clearly a time traveler from 1973)