A big fear that I have – aside from obvious things like being able to provide my family with food, clothing, and shelter – is that no one will miss me when I’m gone.

It’s an inane fear, I think, because when that day comes I’ll probably be unaware of whether I’m thought of constantly, occasionally, or not at all. Still, the uneasy feeling persists.

We all want to leave something memorable behind.

Going through life as an optimist has one major drawback. Believing that tomorrow will be a better day can sustain you through tough times until your tomorrows start to feel like yesterdays. You use your age as an excuse for not starting something new more often than you ever had before. You spend your time looking back instead of ahead, wishing you could alter the unalterable, as another day gives way to night, leaving one more day’s worth of things undone.

I’m not unique in this, I know, but when assessing one’s own life, the perspectives of others don’t count.

Not to worry. Having these thoughts isn’t leading me toward the abyss. They are just reflections of a life half-lived from a guy who has lived his life less boldly than warranted. And why is that?

There is no upside to timidity.

Many of us shy away from opportunities until those opportunities expire.

It’s been a life-long dilemma. Sometimes, I’ve been able to break through shyness, apprehension, and plain old fear to do the things that I wanted to do. Each success should have caused me to be less fretful the next time. That would have made sense, but that’s not what has happened.

People are not sensible creatures.

Each new challenge brought with it the same insecurities that I’ve felt since I was a boy, causing me to battle those fears ferociously just to get to the beginning. The energy expended in this exercise always leaves me wondering if I could have done more if I wasn’t preoccupied in this way.

The shyness that is so adorable in children, should be left behind with other childish things if we are to reach our full potential.

This brings me back to my big fear. There are so many thoughts in my head that I have not allowed out. I cling to them as if they have value only as secrets between me and my Maker, but the opposite is true.

If I love you, I should let you know. If I am angry with you and I don’t say it, how can I blame you if you seem unfazed? Telling the truth, my truth, should never be tempered with cowardice – it loses all credibility.

If fear keeps me from trying the next adventure, taking the next step toward achieving a goal, or saying exactly what’s on my mind no one will ever know what I have to offer. Of course, the things that I offer can be embraced or dismissed by others, but only if I put my thoughts and myself out there.

After fifty-one years on the planet, you’d think that I’d know that already.

I couldn’t tell you if it was thirty-two degrees outside or sixty, whether it was raining or not, or if the sun had bothered to come up at all. I didn’t care.

All I wanted was for the pain to stop.

No position was comfortable for more than a few minutes, although I swear I tried them all. The bed, the floor, the chair – each locale was as joy-free as the last. Covers on, covers off. It didn’t seem to matter as I felt both hot and cold at the same time.

A scheduled test was abruptly cancelled because of an “abnormality” found in my blood work.

“Keep your same appointment at my office,” was what I was told, even though that appointment was more than two weeks away. It’s hard to know what to draw from that. Something’s wrong, but it can wait? Is it because the thing that is wrong is no big deal, or is it because there’s nothing that can be done about that thing? These aren’t the types of thoughts that should be on your mind when you’re already feeling helpless and ill.

Are they?

It started on the evening of the 17TH. While on my way to the company holiday party, I felt a sharp pain in my lower back. I’ve strained muscles before, so I knew that wasn’t it. It was a different kind of pain that moved from my lower back to my right side beneath my belt and back. I pulled off the road to stretch, but that did nothing.

There’s no accounting for how the mind works. I had missed the last two parties and was going to this one solo. I didn’t want to miss it again, so I got back in my car and continued my two-hour drive.

“It’ll be fine,” I thought.

Trying to chit chat during the cocktail hour proved pointless. I could barely stand. Ten minutes later, I let someone know that I was leaving. All I wanted to do was make it back home.

Forty minutes later, I admitted to myself that I could not keep driving when I spotted a police car on the side of the road. He was writing someone a ticket, so I pulled in behind him and honked my horn. It was dark, so I wasn’t surprised to see the officer approach my car with caution. I didn’t think to turn on my dome light. That might have helped.

I explained my situation while staring into his flashlight. I could barely see his face, but I sensed the tension ease when he understood that I was in distress.

“Just relax, sir. The ambulance is on the way.”

My wife and oldest daughter found their way to the distant hospital with ease. I’m glad that I bought my daughter that GPS a couple of years ago.

“Kidney stones,” was the diagnosis I received after the CAT scan.

I was discharged that evening and referred to a urologist who explained the treatment that was to occur after some additional testing – first a blood test, then an IVP (intravenous pyelogram) test with a radiologist – the latter was the one that was cancelled because of the abnormality. That’s when my mind began to wander.

The drugs prescribed by the emergency room doctor, and later by the urologist, helped manage the pain, but there was one side effect that I could not ignore. I couldn’t go. A call to the doctor yielded only advice to try over-the-counter remedies, which weren’t working. I stopped taking my prescriptions. By the tenth day, I would have given anything just to go. Talk about being focused on one thing!

The fifth remedy I tried finally worked.

The original pain from the kidney stones has subsided. Aspirin alone has been sufficient in moderating the discomfort. But I’m tired all of the time. And there’s still the matter of the blood test result. It makes you think.

Thinking is bad.

On Friday, I’ll know more, but until then, I will go about my business, as if all is well.

Maybe this story will be a reminder to you as it has been for me: Take nothing for granted. Tomorrow is promised to no one and uncertainty is the only thing that we can count on.

Happy New Year, my friends…

… live, love, do.

There’s nothing radical about going to work every day.

Of course, that presupposes that you have a job to go to. An increasing number of us do not. For me, that’s the whole point of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

People are not radical – especially as we get older and take on more responsibilities. That’s just the way it is. It’s hard to imagine carrying a sign, chanting slogans, and risking arrest when we are busily running as fast as we can to keep that hamster wheel spinning.

JP Morgan Chase doesn’t care if the social fabric of the country is disintegrating; your mortgage payment is due on the 1ST. Your boss expects you to keep your focus on the bottom line. Your children need things that you must provide.

Who has time to protest?

We are overworked, overwhelmed, and scared to death of falling off the wheel.

We leave the risk-taking to the young. They have nothing better to do, right?

It’s okay to admit it. Most of us are not cut out to be heroes. It’s easier to turn a blind eye to the suffering of the few while we try to make our own way. Unemployment is just a number to those who are employed – it holds no more importance than a batting average or a Neilson rating. We hear the number, we shrug, and we move on.

But to the unemployed, it means everything. When millions are looking for work that isn’t there, the future looks bleak.

For years, there has been a whittling away of the social safety net. It’s a net whose first strings were strung when the country was at its fiscal worst. We learned what can happen when the economy goes to Hell, so we took steps to avoid a repeat in the future.

Good idea.

Then it happened. The rich began to feel that they weren’t rich enough. They used their wealth to game the system. Too many politicians have a price, and Wall Street was able to meet it. How else can one explain the repeal of laws that were enacted to keep the greed of bankers in check? It’s commonly believed that banks took too many risks which led us into a recession. Bullshit.

There was no risk involved in what they did – at least not to them. They were golden from the start. It was an ingenious plan:

• Lie, cheat, and steal from investors as you package bogus mortgages and sell them as if they were bonds.
• Get the ratings agencies to bless your offerings with AAA ratings and collude with insurance companies to cover your butt when the crap hit the fan.
• Call in your markers with all of those politicians that you “carry in their pockets like so many nickels and dimes,” by lobbying for and getting huge bailouts. (Apologies to The Godfather.)
• Gouge consumers, toss them from their homes by the millions, hoard cash, and continue to devise new schemes for ripping people off.

Do we really need more reasons to be angry before we actually do something about it?

I’m not headed to downtown Manhattan today. I’m not proud of that, but there are other things that we can do to support the activists and it begins by paying attention.

There are no excuses for being uninformed. Even the media is slowly recognizing the movement. There’s something happening here. You don’t have to go to Liberty Square yourself, but you can Tweet it, blog it, or spread the word with some good old-fashioned talking.

My thoughts are with the activists and my check is in the mail.

They are fighting the good fight. If they are successful, society will benefit. If they are bullied into submission, or starved out from lack of support, each of us who chooses to stay on the sidelines will own a part of the blame.

The woman told her story with such clarity that she could have been speaking of something that was just experienced.

The details, the guts of any compelling story, had the ring of a yarn told and retold over the years. She spoke of her remembrances of September 10, 2001.

I was on my way home from work yesterday and had tuned in to NPR and caught their All Things Considered program: “The Day Before America Was Interrupted: Nine People Recall Sept. 10, 2001”

A man from Omaha, Nebraska was next. His story was just as detailed.

For those who lived through the horrors of September 11TH, the memories of that day are indelible. The chronology of 9/11 – where we were, who we were with, and what we felt at each point of that dreadful day are vividly replayed in our minds, especially when the sad anniversary nears.

Buy what about the day before?

As I listened, I strained to recall my “day before”. I could think of nothing. I realized that I had absolutely no memory of September 10TH. It’s funny how the mind works. It’s as if the immense sorrow of 9/11 has commandeered the available space of my brain for that period of time.

This is a three year old video that was recorded on a cheap webcam, so the image is grainy. Seven years after the attacks, I spoke of what I remembered about that day. I made no references to September 10TH.

Ten years later, what do you remember about the day before?

A few minutes ago, I learned of a contest that’s running on About.me. Jon posted a tweet that caught my attention.

The About.me contest to get your face on a Times Square Billboard is one of the most narcissistic things I've ever seen on the Internet.

August 23, 2011 5:31 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@JonMwords

Jon Mitchell

I went to my profile, read the contest rules, and clicked the Opt-In button. That was the easy part. The hard part is going to be using my powers of persuasion to get you – yes, you – to click on this link and cast your vote.

Go ahead. It’ll open in a new tab, so you can come back to this post when you’re done.

I’ll wait.

There, that was easy, wasn’t it? Please be sure to tell me that you’ve supported the narcissist in me, and know that I love me you, my loyal readers.

Okay, back to the story.

After opting in, I was presented with options for spreading the word, so I started by tweeting this:

Want to scare the children this Halloween? Vote for me to be the face of @aboutdotme on a Times Square billboard: http://t.co/w2nPSkX

August 23, 2011 5:38 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@RamonEColon

Ray Colon

@RamonEColon Do you have the balls to ask people to vote for you?

August 23, 2011 5:39 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@JonMwords

Jon Mitchell

@JonMwords Just did. :)

August 23, 2011 5:40 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@RamonEColon

Ray Colon

Now all that’s left for you to do is to spread the word by sharing this post. Think of it as your good deed for the day.

Jon was right, you know. This contest is narcissistic at its core, but these days, that’s what passes for normal.

I tug at the clips until they snap together.

When the held breath is let go, my waistband feels like a truss. I haven’t worn this suit since the last funeral and I’ve put on a few pounds since then. There is no give in the material. My back begins to hurt, but I’ll just have to deal with the discomfort for a few hours because it’s time to say goodbye.

The drive is long and lonely. No music plays as snapshots of memories fill my mind. There are smiling faces in most of them.

She was a happy person, always friendly and welcoming. Many people will be there to say goodbye to this lovely woman who was the wife of my best friend.

Robin died last weekend.

They had love in that marriage. It was the kind of love that poems and songs are written about. It’s easy to forget that bonding like this between two people still happens, but it does. It was probably good that they met later in life, with much of the silliness of youth behind them. John was lucky to find her. Robin was lucky to find him. Their love affair lasted fifteen years.

They were inseparable, until now.

I find it impossible to think about her and their marriage without thinking of myself and mine. Of all the things that we yearn for in life, connectedness with another soul is the most important. We may not always remember this, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Sharing our lives with a special someone, being intimate with our thoughts and feeling safe when we are, and knowing that we face the world as one makes everything else seem trivial.

We had that once, and I believe that we still could, if only…

There is stubbornness in the world, lots of it. Marriage can be hard. There are plenty of opportunities in a relationship to inflict misery on one another. Hurt feelings are worn like badges of honor, but there is no honor in holding a grudge.

Funerals are a time for tears. For some, they are tears of mourning a lost love. For others, they are tears of having thrown love away. How impious it must seem to He who made us that couples should act in this way.

But they do.

Working full-time from home this year has turned me into a cave-dweller.

Days can go by without my seeing the sunshine. Aside from my family, the rest of the world is piped in through my DSL.  But morphing into a mangy Neanderthal has unintended consequences.  My video-making has suffered.

I used to make a lot of videos, and I’ve come up with some pretty good ideas lately, but none have been recorded because I only shave when the nubs start to itch.

It’s a little disturbing, I know, but I can change anytime I want. Or can I?

“I look like Ted Kaczynski.”

My oldest daughter looked puzzled.

“You know, the Unabomber.”

She shook her head.

Because this happens a lot, she knew what to expect – a brief history lesson.

“Oh, no! Here it comes.”

She’s a teenager, so it’s unfair to expect her to be up on the history, knowledge, and cultural references of all that has come before. Unfortunately, her disinterest in these things also applies to current events – unless they are featured on MTV News.

Of course, I don’t know everything either.

About a year ago at a local Tweetup, I asked, “So who is this Seth Godin?”

It was either the first or second time that I had attended, so I was still trying to figure out what the group was all about. They are a friendly group of people who have an interest in social media and I enjoyed their company, but it’s been a while since I’ve attended. They referenced Seth a lot in their group discussion.

Lisa offered the first response, “Seth Godin.” I couldn’t tell if it was a question or if she said his name in the way someone would say, “Elvis” or “Madonna” and automatically assume that I would know who the person was.

“Yeah, is he some kind of social media guru?”

Daria, seated to my right, looked up.

“Yes, he’s famous. You should read his books.”

Since that day, I have read one of his books. I think that it was Jason who loaned it to me. I haven’t been to a Tweetup in a very long time, so the book hasn’t been returned. That could be why he unfollowed me on Twitter. I’ll have ask him when I see him.

I subscribe to Seth’s Blog and I’ve watched some of his interviews. He’s a very interesting guy, but it seems to me that a lot of his fans are not doing the things that he continually asks them to do.

He’s like a rock star in Social Media, so people disseminate his posts daily. Like those who tweet famous historical quotes all of the time, there’s a striking dearth of imagination involved in retweeting Seth over and over again. He probably doesn’t care about any of that because he advocates building real relationships and not the kind of dogmatic response to his every utterance that some fans seem to have.

He writes insightful posts, but so do a lot of other people, so why is so much attention paid to this one individual? From everything that I’ve read by him, that’s exactly what he urges people not to do. Don’t parrot what he says, mimic what he does, or live in the shadow of his words.

Be yourself.

I think that any good teacher would advise that you sit and take in their lessons and then rise from your seat and make those lessons work for you. If you can derive inspiration from Seth’s posts, that’s great! If you draw it from elsewhere, that works too.  Take that inspiration and go do the thing that brings you joy, become the person that you want to be, and do it in a way that is uniquely you – even the unshaven, no sunlight seeing, fuzzy slipper wearing you.

The odds are long that you or I will ever achieve the kind of success that Seth enjoys, but if you did, wouldn’t it be a shame if the person that makes it isn’t really you?

We don’t know each other.

We’ve never met nor spoken on the phone. I couldn’t even tell you what she looks like, but I follow her blog and learn about the parts of her life that she chooses to share. Intelligent, thoughtful, and caring are just a few of the words that I would use to describe her. Many comments to her blog go unanswered, which is usually a no-no for me, but for her, I make an exception.

She’s suffered heartaches.

Real ones. Somehow she keeps moving forward.

I can usually find the bright side in anything. It’s an aggravating trait to some, because many people are quick to point to the negatives in life as examples of how things are; of how they will always be. Those who have that mindset harp on “what’s wrong” instead of celebrating “what’s right.” They curse what is lost and neglect what they still possess. Venting comes as easily to them as taking in a breath.

Alicia is not one of those people.

I have problems. We all do. The world has problems. Lot’s of them: War, famine, economic tumult, and a seemingly endless string of natural disasters. We become numb. The size and scope of the world’s problems are just too much to take, so we insulate ourselves from the horror and begin to forget how to feel.

There’s a bond that is formed between people who follow each other’s blogs. We read most every post and grow to feel that we know each other better than we know some of the people with whom we share air. I have a handful of relationships like this. These connections are often difficult to explain to others. People tend to reveal more of themselves on their blogs than they do in their day-to-day lives with acquaintances.

I know that I do.

Last night, Alicia wrote about the anniversary of her widowhood. Seven years is a long time and minds have a tendency to bend toward forgetfulness, but I suspect that she has a clear memory of every time that she has begun to call his name, turned to look for him, or woken up expecting to see him lying there beside her.

I can’t imagine the hurt that follows in the next moment when reality returns.

This morning, she posted a vignette from last night. This one brief personal story of her and her boys struck me very deeply.

She’s been on my mind all day.

The clumsy comment that I left on her post did not adequately express how I feel about her. I hope that I’ve done a better job here.

I think that we’ve become too accustomed to our world of harsh realities. We may feel for each other, but I don’t think that we empathize with one another – at least not often enough. As I read her words this morning, her pain was in the room with me, and through that pain I felt connected to her in a very real way.

Read her story.

It will make you sad, but it will also make you feel.

I wrote this last March, but never posted it. It turned up today and reading it made me laugh, so maybe you’ll get a laugh out of it too.

“Well Jane, it just goes to show ya.”

It’s still early in the day, too soon to tell really, but already I feel different.

I’m not in the mood to be nostalgic, contemplative, or even happy. Today is my fifty-first birthday. It’s a day that will pretty much go unnoticed.

I lift my mug and savor a sip of coffee. As I drink, I let go a sigh. The steam fogs my glasses for a moment. The coffee is strong. It’s stronger than I feel this morning. I take in a long drag from my cigarette and send a plume of smoke into the air. It’s there for me now, ready to be sucked in and drawn out again with every breath. These are two habits that I should have given up long ago.

“It’s always something.”

Life can be hard, but I have no cause to complain. My problems are neither unique nor unworkable and I know that things could be worse. Things can always be much worse. I’ve just been preoccupied lately with my worries.

“If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

I poke my fingers through the blinds and peek out onto a cloudy day. I’ve read that the weather isn’t supposed to affect our moods, but it does. If the sun were to come out I know that I would feel much better.

The house is silent as everyone else sleeps. The only sounds that I hear are the hum of my aging computer and the click of the keyboard as I type. Oh, and the sighs.

My legs ache, my fingers feel crampy, I feel a cold coming on, and I still have the crick in my neck that I woke up with. As Roseanne Roseannadanna would say:

“I sound like a real attractive guy!”

I laughed at myself as I wrote that last line. Laughing always makes me feel better.

Happy birthday to me.

I’ll leave it to Roseanne to say the rest.

“It’s always something.”

“If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

“Either you smoke or you have a sweat ball hanging from your nose.

____________________

Enjoy this clip of the late Gilda Radner as Roseanne Roseannadanna on Saturday Night Live, courtesy of Hulu.

Nero may have had it right when he fiddled while Rome burned.

Once the die is cast and calamity is upon us, there’s little that an individual can do – even an emperor.

The historical accuracy of Nero’s actions notwithstanding, the scenario is a perfect description for what has been going on in Washington. 536 people (members of the Senate, the House, and the President) can choose to put an end to this self-induced crisis, or they can fiddle for a few more days until the deadline, when we can all see what happens.

I used to write about politics much more often. I thought it was important and I’ve always tried to look at the positive aspects of politics. I don’t rant and rave, resort to name calling, or turn those with opposing views into caricatures.

None of those things are helpful.

Politics is more important than that because the issues that our elected officials are supposed to address affect us all, so a more serious approach is warranted.

But ever since last year’s midterms, I find that I have no words to describe the paucity of positive activity that has taken place since those elections. I predicted as much last September in my A One-Term President post, where I wrote:

I don’t think that Republicans will gain enough seats to wrest control of the Senate, but whether or not they are in control, the next two years will bring few improvements. The margin of votes in the Senate will be razor thin, so neither Party will be able to muster a 60-vote super-majority.

Gridlock in the Senate is a foregone conclusion.

This prolonged debt ceiling melodrama has even gotten the attention of people who do not usually track what goes on in Washington, mainly because the entire fiasco is asinine at its core. The immediate concern is the raising of the debt ceiling. Without passage of this formerly routine bit of legislation, the lives of every citizen will be negatively impacted in one way or another. The idiotic idea of linking the debt ceiling and the deficit has created a problem of their own making.

This is exactly what a struggling economy does not need.

To be clear, the debt ceiling concerns money that has already been borrowed and spent. It has nothing to do with deficit reduction, so it is being used as a bargaining tactic – nothing more. Using it this way is not surprising, but bringing us this close to the deadline because of it is.

If the US defaults, borrowing will become more expensive for everyone. Businesses will pass along the added cost to consumers, who as usual, will get shafted. No surprise there. They can argue about budgets and deficits all that they want, but they should not be playing this dangerous game with the debt ceiling.

For those who see all government as bad, you are being proven right — even if it is an inside job.

Congratulations.

To those who cheer on the conservative Right in their efforts to curtail spending on the backs of the least well off, your short-sightedness will cause pain to your families.

Congratulations, again.

Congress and the President have brought us to an unhappy place. So much time and effort has been wasted and nothing has been gained. Whatever the outcome, it’s a certainty that we will all be worse off. The only real question is by how much.

Today, I’m not going to call my Representative, my Senator, or the President to complain.

They are not listening.

Instead, I’ll do some fiddling of my own as I try to enjoy this last weekend of pre-default America by ignoring the shenanigans of the fiddling 536. Like everyone else, I will just have to deal with the fallout because we have ceded all of the power to five hundred and thirty six individuals who cannot seem to agree on anything.

Just a few months ago, the idea of a US default seemed like crazy talk. It doesn’t seem so crazy now because it’s the crazy people who are doing the talking.

How embarrassing for us to have chosen these 536 to lead.