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This is my blog. I am now a blogger. |
| This will most likely be about my bad habits and weird sense of humor. |
| It is a good day to sit around the house in shorts and a t-shirt with greasy bed-head hair, drink coffee then somehow fall asleep during the Tigers game only to wake up in the bottom of the ninth to witness the completion of a sweep by the White Sox over my team. It is a gloomy Sunday afternoon. Reading a few blogs on this site and a few others on myspace inspired me to write one of my own. But I am lacking something pretty major to be able to write a true blog, or basically to write anything at all. I have not been getting out much, you see, and it can be difficult to write about nothing. I don’t care how creative you are, if you’re not experimenting new things, or living a life in all three dimensions, which is active experience with yourself, others, and God (or yourself, others, and nature for Atheists), you’re not going to write a blog the way it is supposed to be written and you’re not living a life the way it was intended to be lived. When I say, “you’re,” I am speaking for myself. It is a defense mechanism that I use to shy away from the truth about myself. It is much more comfortable for me to quickly go from first person to second when I lay a direct attack on myself. Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” My inner critic likes to remind me of that quote whenever I sit down to write. I rarely finish a project; I’ll be lucky if this very one comes to a completion. I have definitely stood up to live on many occasions. I have experienced a lot, which can come quite naturally for a naïve, spontaneous youngster like I was. All of my major geographical moves across the state have been decided in less than a week prior to the actual move. When I was 19, while on the phone with my sister, who was in her last year in the Education program at CMU, she suggested I come to Mt. Pleasant to live. Within three days my bags were packed and I was cruising up to her apartment in my 91 Olds Nighty-Eight excited and ready to start the next chapter of my life. About a year and a half later, on a drunk summer night back in Marshall, I drove home, ran up to my room, grabbed all the dirty and clean cloths I could carry and threw them in the back seat of my car and then sped south down I69 until I had to pull over near Indianapolis to get a few hours of sleep. When I woke up, I filled up with gas and decided to go southeast for a while. I ended up on the border of West Virginia, and stayed there for a few months in a Holiday Inn parking lot then a roach-infested motel room after Holiday Inn security kicked me out. I knew that it was time to go back to Michigan after I got fired from my Subway job and ran out of money. When I got accepted to NMU (which isn’t hard to do), it wasn’t four days later when I packed my little Prelude up and headed north until I got to Mt. Pleasant. I went to a bar there to take a break from the road (I wasn’t too bright), and ran in to some old friends. Turns out they were having a party that night. After a long night of drinking I got back in my car and trudged my way north, finally making it to Marquette about 16 hours later. When I arrived, I stunk. I was greasy and still very hung over. I had a little hope, though. I was starting a new life. I didn’t know a single person in the town, and it felt good. After finding my dorm room, taking a shower, feeling good and all freshened up, I got on my bike and rode around the brand new town. It was a cool night, and I was lost in every direction I was heading. It felt good. While trudging up Third Street I decided to park my bike by the steps in front of Vangos and have myself a cold beer. After three or four beers I rode around Marquette lost and buzzed until I found my way to the water. I sat on a rock somewhere by McCarty’s Cove and smoked a few cigarettes, then got back on my bike and guessed my way back towards my new home. But The Wooden Nickel came in site before I was to find my dorm and I don’t recall ever making it back to my room that night. Two years later, a few days after deciding I was going to stay in Marquette for the summer, I was heading south again in my newly restored, piece of shit Prelude. I stopped in Petoskey to visit some friends on my way home. My visit lasted throughout the summer. That was about four years ago. And now here I am sitting down trying to write. |
| Sometimes I wonder about things. Like, I wonder if the blind get offended that we call our white window shades, blinds. I wonder why we call our television sets TV’s but we don’t call our telephones TP’s. Did toilet paper steel the TP acronym? Who came up with Love Seat for the smaller version of a couch? Why didn’t they just call it a Mini? What’s love got to do with it? Who was it that sang that song? I wonder if the person that invented paper clips got pissed off when the stapler got invented. Or vise versa. I wonder what life would be like if there were no such thing as a sewage system. Would everything be greener? Would every place smell like shit? How do they find room for all of that shit? I wonder who it was that started the whole trend to put pictures and magnets on refrigerators? When refrigerators first came out, was it just natural human instinct to stick a picture on? I don’t think they did that for iceboxes. I can understand why a toaster is called a toaster but why isn’t the oven called a baker? Would this offend Bakers? Aha, I think I have the answer to this one. I bet it was a Baker that invented the oven. I wonder why drug companies choose such odd names for their drugs? Is this due to lack of creativity, or extreme egocentric false self-knowledge? Does extreme egocentric false self-knowledge make sense? I wonder how many different kinds of dog breeds there are now? Why do they call the little dogs, Toys? I wonder how many different kinds of wild animals there would be if we somehow found a way to breed them like we do dogs? Who came up with the peanut and butter combination? Such a good idea. I welcome anyone to share his or her own wonders. |
| Words do not change the world. Words enlighten, they entertain, provide an escape, but they come far from changing the world. Action, true physical action is what changes the world. My hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke brilliant words through his speeches. They enlightened and educated many people, but in the end, it was his works of action that had made all the difference. It was his action that indeed changed the world. Early on, he got arrested many times, but that is part of what it took to reach into the minds of millions in the long run. It was the action that followed the education that had made the difference, which had changed the world for the good. I am done with using words in trying to change the world. Bitching about current events and poverty and government does nothing but add to the smoke bomb of bitching. All it does is make the smoke a little more thick. There is that old cliché that insanity is when you do the same things and expect different results. I find that to be true. I am insane. Einstein once observed, “The significant problems we face in life cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” I guess Einstein was a pretty smart man. He didn’t just think that up and say it though; he applied action to his thoughts and changed the world as a result. I am not so self-centered that I believe I can change the world. I do understand that I am nowhere near the true integrity and brilliance of MLK and Einstein. But I do believe that I can and have the ability to apply action to some of the problems that we face. Writing this blog isn’t going to clear any of the smoke. It’s what I do after I write this blog that’s going to really determine anything that’s worth writing at all in the first place. |
| Before I pulled the first smoke out of a hard pack of Reds (the worst kind), I reached under the plastic film to grab an orange folded booklet that had caught my attention. It looks like a cover of a miniature book, and in bold white letters atop the orange it says, “IF YOU DECIDE TO QUIT SMOKING…” On the upper-right corner there’s an arrow that points to the right, inviting me in to read the four-fold packet. I was sold. The cancer stick could wait. I decided to quit smoking about three or four years ago. “The more you know about how to quit, the better your chances for success. Quitting smoking is a very personal experience. There’s no one way that works for everyone. QuitAssist™ is an information resource that provides easy access to expert information from public health authorities and others to help you find your own path to success. Online at philipmorrisusa.com or call 1-888-784-7848.” I quickly closed the booklet from Phillip Morris USA and read the cover again. “IF YOU DECIDE TO QUIT SMOKING…” I wasn’t so much insulted by the words on the cover, it was the ellipses that raised my blood pressure. It was indeed those three dots that had temporarily caused my shortness of breath. It was like they were smirking at me, daring me to open the booklet and read the message. And when I looked up QuitAssist™ on the internet, the ellipses were still fresh in my mind, giggling at my searching for information on how to quit. After scanning the website for a few minutes, and surprisingly finding a careful, well thought out quitting plan, I looked inside the packet again and read the sentence, “Quitting smoking is a very personal experience.” Phillip Morris USA is honest, I'll give them that, and there’s no question that they can be personal. Maybe they felt that their integrity was threatened because of lying in court, saying their tobacco products are not addictive. Or maybe they were court ordered to provide information on how to quit with each pack sold. Either way, I don’t care. All I know is that I will quit when I’m damn well ready. The last thing I need are three mocking dots and a understandable, clearly legitimate quitting plan provided by the supplier themselves. After I closed the website window, I stepped outside to the porch with a cup of black coffee in hand while the first cigarette from a fresh pack of Reds dangled from the corner of my mouth (Not really, I'm just trying to seem cool). I puffed and drank my stimulants while rocking in a chair, thinking about how I was going to write this blog. |
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Of course, I didn't know how to smoke, or anything about inhaling, all I did was suck and swallow. 