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Just a few thoughts on how we change and grow during our inevitable ageing.

Beautiful Days: The weather here has been "perfect" for almost a week, now. So perfect that it defies easy explanation and almost makes one feel guilty for enjoying it so completely. Yesterday I did a large shrub trimming job and never overheated despite wearing full covering from head to toe. Normally in August the heat would kill you for attempting something like that, but the high was only 74 and a friendly breeze blew the whole time. Yippee! Today I will go back and make any final cuts that were missed yesterday and finish the cleanup before returning home and working on my fence. It will be nice to have all that done.

Looking down the road a few weeks, I am planning a trip to upstate NY for a motorcycle rally at Watkins Glen. There will be five or six of us going, mostly on BMW bikes, and I have been invited along for my fine campfire cooking and for being friendly when things go wrong. Whatever the reason, I am happy to go and help make everyone else's time even more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise. We will be out for five days exploring the area and making new friends while searching for the perfect mug of beer in various pubs along the way. Food is always a major part of our enjoyment in any motorcycle trip, but it's the little watering holes we find that end up making the memories we talk about for years. Some of those memories are of extraordinary tolerance, some of amazing music performed by the most unlikely people, and all of them tinged with knowledge that it is a one time deal- never to be recreated and therefore very special.
Another unforgettable part is the camping spots, which have ranged from ultra dull to mind boggling beautiful, and how we transform that little patch of dirt into "home" for a time. Comfort is hard to find when you travel by motorcycle because you have so little room to pack anything and every item you do bring has to function perfectly to justify the weight. That makes you appreciate sitting in any kind of chair, especially if it is next to a campfire, and doubly so if you have a cold drink next to you and a hot plate of food in your lap! The little things become a VERY big deal.
Oops, time to go!

See ya.

Matt.

Tuesday August 12, 2008 - 12:30pm (EDT) Permanent Link | 0 Comments
It feels good to be here.: There was a time when blogging was fun, when friends were near, and the sheep were scared- er,no, that was another story. But this one is almost as interesting and is much less likely to give you some embarrassing disease that makes you feel baa-aa-aa-d.
This is a story of writer's block, why it happened, and all the fun you can have whilst experiencing it. (Ok, I made that up about having fun with it, but I DID do a lot of motorcycle riding trying to get my head straight, and THAT was enjoyable!) The very first step in developing a solid case of writer's block, I found, was running out of good influences in your life. Once you have no more good influence in your immediate realm of friends/associates then you start to lose your ability to influence others in a positive manner and begin the slow slide toward being a grumpy old frump. For those who have not reached advanced age yet, despair not, for you can even become a frump at younger ages if you set your mind to it hard enough. All you really have to do is stop doing the things you enjoy and distance yourself from those individuals in your life who are intent upon telling you the truth about the silly things you are doing. It helps to listen to people who have a negative view of life, have had seven or more nasty divorces, or simply have any type of untreatable mental condition that ends in "osis". NOW you are really on your way to becoming a shameful person.
It would be nice to say that all that is fantasy, that it was not really true, but it accurately sums up the past several years of my life and explains many of the bad attitudes that I have developed since leaving that distant group of friends who had always been such a good influence. It seems that the wisdom they imparted was starting to transform my basically negative personality into something a whole lot more appealing and more mature. But they all lived far away and it was painfully expensive to visit, so I started to find excuses not to make the trips even though I knew that it was self destructive to stop. Part of it was my excessive pride not wanting to feel the least bit inferior to anyone, even if they had great experience to share and were willing to teach. Part of it was shame at not having yet achieved something great like many of my friends had and not wanting to share my failures even if it IS how we learn. I chickened out and turned my back on the only mentors I've ever had in my life.
The reversion to my former state took a while, a little piece of lost maturity at a time, until I recently found myself angry at some little thing that should not upset any person my age, any person at all really. I sat there seething at someone else's lack of courtesy toward the rest of humanity and especially toward me. Most of all towards ME, and that was when it became clear that I had screwed up and lost so much of what used to make me someone to like. Someone who had once received the greatest compliment of all from an old friend: that if they had not known me before, that they would be happy to make me a friend now. Said another way- You are so much better of a person now than they ever gave you credit for, and they are happy you have grown up. I got a bit teary-eyed thinking of that, and all the ways that compliment has been betrayed since it was given almost six years ago.
After that time I have chosen my peers, how shall we say it…? UNwisely. It seemed innocent enough to hear out other people when they talked trash about things, thinking that letting them blow off some steam would help relieve some of their burden, but that is wrong. It only encourages people to dump more crap into your lap and if you allow it to continue, you are only inviting more and more until you could start growing mushrooms, lots of them. It would have been smarter to call them out on what was wrong, to tell them the truth, to be a real friend. But I did not. To make it worse, I did not pass along anything good to them in any other way, instead taking the easy way out and agreeing that their situation really sucked. Now they KNEW that the situation was bad and fed off that. Crud. It is a mess, and I created it. In spite of trying to change and improve the workplace I had to inhabit, the whole thing backfired when I lost my own perspective and got sucked into the muck of negative thinking. My own stinking fault, no one else's.
When you have nothing nice to say it is sometimes better to say nothing at all. Hence, the writer’s block!
Now after a three-month absence from that workplace, all that remains are the negative thought processes and a lot of knowledge about how metal is creatively crushed to make a modern automobile. A few good friendships endure out of four hundred people I knew on a first name basis, regrettably few. It would be nice to think that more people back there would claim friendship, but I would not count on that. At the end of any phase of life you tend to look back and evaluate what you did right, wrong, and what you will do differently next time if you get the chance again. The last eight years have been mostly well-spent and have seen great benefits for our family, though some of it did come at a cost, as anything worthwhile will.
The next eight years will be a lot different, surely, and I can do more than just hope that will be so. For the "lucky" guy who caught the Home Run ball was wearing a baseball glove and the "lucky" executive worked smart to outpace the rest of the world. They did not wait for the ball or the deal to drop into their laps, no; they went after it with a singular purpose and succeeded. One win begets another and other benefits flow as you start to work toward your own dream, toward building your own maturity, and start to forget about yourself in favor of enabling others to improve their own lot in life. This progression makes sense, and I will cover more of it later.

'till then,

mTw

Thursday July 31, 2008 - 10:46pm (EDT) Permanent Link | 2 Comments
Mellow notes: For your listening pleasure... Rick on the guitar!

Friday April 18, 2008 - 11:16am (EDT) Permanent Link | 0 Comments
A good place to visit this summer.: A friend of mine made this video at his favorite vacation spot at Put In Bay, Ohio, and I thought you might like to feel some of the peaceful beauty it has to offer. Sit back and enjoy!

Later! Matt

Sunday April 6, 2008 - 07:34am (EDT) Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Mistake with the new cat- OUCH!: So a while back Windi talks me into taking on a foster cat from a friend of hers who had to move into a rental and could not keep pets. It took three weeks for me to acquiesce, but eventually "Sadie" was picked up and transported to our humble home where she immediately fell into the odd man out position. Her name should have told me something about her temperament since Sadie is very very close to Sadistic, and only a few letters away from the ultimate bad name.
For weeks I have worked on this cat, trying to win it's affection and nearly succeeding, at least when I am feeding it little tidbits of food or giving those wonderful kitty massages that every cat enjoys oh-so much. And everything was great, even when she was trying to wake me up during my sleep time.
It was all OK that is, until she decided to jump up on the high dresser amongst all the breakable stuff there and land directly upon the alarm clock. This woke me up, quickly, because I knew that one wrong step would result in the clock turning on at full volume. Yes, it does have a switch that does that, and the song on the radio is usually Michael Bolton or something else that would totally keep me from going back to sleep. Hence my haste in picking up the cat, and my downfall for not realizing that the mostly sweet cat was: A- not declawed, and B- has sharp fangs. Not teeth, no, because teeth are something that you show when you smile, not something that you sink into the hand that feeds you ( twice ) all the way to the gumline.
Ordinarily a person would throw anything they were holding if it sunk it's fangs into them, or simply drop it, but I was standing there in my underwear with delicate bits quite vulnerable and I was instinctively protective of them being hurt by a suddenly wild animal. So I turned around and quickly put the cat down on the bed, earning the second bite to the forearm ( all the way to the bone ) and also one huge slash of claws across the back of my left hand. As the cat tried to run away it apparently did not know that it still had a claw hooked into the skin on my arm, but that did not stop it from leaping away- and stopping short in midair as my skin's elasticity ran out and the hooked claw held tight. It turned with eyes glowing bright green in the dark room and all the air let out of it in a display of hissing I have never before witnessed. After .00001 seconds of thought, I responded by roaring at the top of my lungs and that seemed stun the animal for a brief second as it was still trying to pull away. Fortunately all I had to do was twist my forearm downward slightly to disengage the claw, but it took an awfully long time for my sleep-addled brain to realize this.
After mercifully releasing the cat from my skin, I stood there muttering for a moment, something about manganese I think, and then headed for the medicine cabinet to asses the damage, which was substantial by my own wimpy standards.
It took ten minutes to stop the bleeding from the claw slashes, but the puncture tried to plug itself up immediately, damn it, so I had to squeeze a lot to bleed it out. Even at that it would not bleed much for me, and I knew that it needed to do so. Great. So the bleeders need to stop and the non-bleeders need to start. No wonder it took so stinking long!
Now I have to stay up and monitor the wound, according to a medical professional, because it could quickly turn into a bad infection that could require a trip to the ER, but the way it is feeling right now that trip to the doctor is looking pretty likely.

And you are here to share the pain with me, along with that feeling of having been really stupid for a moment. Next time I shall certainly remember the danger that animals can pose... and get the target pistol instead. ( Kidding, just kidding. )

Later,

Matt

Wednesday March 19, 2008 - 11:15am (EDT) Permanent Link | 5 Comments