Thoughts of a Common Man

I drove 400 miles today and worked about 15 hours. All the while I was thinking about people who don't do their jobs to the best of the abilities every day. You all work with someone, right? Someone who would rather piss and moan about what they're not getting than what they have. I was thinking about all of this in regard to my brother. Perhaps someone didn't do their job the way that they should. I know for a fact that there was a nurse that worked so hard she could have pulled off wearing a sign that said 'world's best nurse.' I also know that there were a couple of real idiots that kind of mailed it in a shift or two, and I thought of this in context of what we lost. Not that doing their job to the best of their abilities cost my brother, but it certainly didn't help, did it? So, it galls me to think that there are people who feel they are owed a job, a paycheck, medical benefits, and sick time, personal leave time and vacation time. Yeah, we all need th...

Everyone sort of needs something to hang onto, right? Some sort of faith in what we've always believed is still somewhat believable. Over the course of the past three weeks or so, I've been loking for signs that show me that it's all right to live and smile and play and work and bitch about the WGAF things in life. That light that flickered and went off. The door that suddenly opened in the middle of the night. That dream that had Jeff speaking to me as if he had simply left to get a gallon of milk and didn't really mean to scare us. How about the pull on the slot machine that won me $500 just after I glanced up and said, "Help out a brother?" Do any of those things mean anything? Could the light bulb just have cut out on its own? Did the door suddenly open because the windows were open? Slot machines are blind luck, anyway, right? I've been around the corner and back on this one - Blind Spot was a book about understanding loss and dealing with grief. I wr...

We have a small roller coaster that comes apart into five pieces. Five pieces of crap that I need to kick out of the way whenever I want to get the mower out of the garage. Five sonouvabitchin pieces that are always stuck directly under my feet whenever I'm carrying materials to and fro. Five m-fing pieces that never get picked up out of the driveway after a party and always get rained on and are always filthy. Our conversation took place last summer: Me: Can we get rid of the damn roller coaster yet? The kids are ready for friggen' college. Her: Let's hang onto it. It's a symbol - when the roller coaster goes they are officially not kids anymore. It'll make me sad. Me: I'm telling you - it's either me or the coaster. Her: Do what you have to do - one more year on the coaster. Fade to early this morning. John, Farrah and Rocco were over for fun. In fact, counting the neighbor kids there were eight children here. I took them all for a walk around the quiet bl...

Why is such a small word yet it carries so much in the way of description when you consider all of the possible meanings. When my kids were young, and probably when all kids were young, why seemed to be their favorite word. "Dad, why are there clouds on some days and no clouds on other days?" "It has to do with the air," I'd answer. "I don't know a lot about it but when cold air and warm air meet they make clouds." (I don't even know if that's quite right, but the joy of it all is that kids will normally buy your answer, even when you're bullshitting them. Of course, there is always the follow-up question). "Why?" "I don't know." Through the years there have been so many discussions that started with the kids asking why and me admitting, sometimes because I didn't feel like talking about it, that I just didn't know. Other times, I fed them bullshit and tried to see how far they'd carry it. "Mom, ...

As if the month hasn't been bad enough...Winnie actually got married. I used to love The Wonder Years and I felt all of Kevin's angst as he tried to get Winnie Cooper to love him. I'm not kidding. My heart ached each week for poor Fred Savage because Winnie was just so perfect. And did you see her as an adult? She still looks real good to me. Yet the thing about the show that was so effective was that it took a long, hard look at love in the purest of forms - the first love. And Kevin romanticized each and every moment. He was nervous holding Winnie's hand, nervous kissing her, nervous that she was looking at another boy. During high school and most of my way through college, I had that bigger-than-the-world view of love and that was why I was so in love with Winnie. She was every girl in the world to me and to millions of other guys, I imagine. I suppose the world is a different sort of place today - freaking Winnie Cooper is married. I suppose she couldn't wait fo...

My brother's birthday is today and he just ate a steak as big as the back tire on my car. He also had a lobster tail, rolls, corn, and a pasta dish. That was at one sitting. As we finished up the chat, his wife served him a piece of chocolate cake. God Bless him. To sum up Jim, you only need to know a quick story about a trip he made to the hospital one morning to relieve me from the night I spent there. He showed up at 5:30AM and handed me a breakfast sandwich as soon as he walked into the room. I wiped the sleep from my eyes, took the sandwich, and I caught a whiff of him. "What the hell is that smell?" I asked. "You smell that?" he asked. "It smells like shit." "It's on you," I replied. Jim turned his sneaker over to find a big clump of some sort of feces on his shoe. He immediately started to gag and impulsively wiped his foot on the carpet in the waiting room. "Brilliant," I said. "Now you have to sit in here all day s...

Despite my belief that tramps like us, baby, we're born to run, I don't much believe in running away from tough times. After all, a sad, pitiful bastard getting on a plane in Buffalo gets off the plane in Florida as a sad, pitiful bastard, doesn't he? Yet despite my distaste for laying around and doing nothing - it is exactly what I intend to do. I have a great desire to look up at the sky, shake my fist and ask why. Not sure I'll get many answers, but I do know that I might get some sun and I definitely am aware that there will probably be a few Heiniken Lights mixed in. So where do I stand in this battle, you ask? There are many hours when I don't believe that it all went down like it did and that soon, things will be back to normal. There's also a tremendous void in everyday conversation with the only guy who's call I always took. It didn't matter if I were climbing a ladder, or yelling at a client, I always answered that call because I knew for a few...