While on my April trip to Texas, I ran into two über fancy, über chic hotels which had STUPID faucet and shower designs which neglected to indicate which way to turn for hot water and which way for cold. As is my wont, I whined about it.
In the much more droll and mundane hotel we’re staying at this weekend in Victor Valley, these two things caught my eye:
See? It’s not that difficult!
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Farce, Photography, Travel
Rain. An empty street. Little or no color. What comes next?
Is there a rainbow? Or a flood?
Blue skies & puffy clouds? Or lightning, thunder, hail, destruction?
If we only knew then what we know now.
If we only knew today what we’ll know in six years.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography
I have rarely gotten too agitated about birthdays, but there was definitely something going on with this one. For the last month I’ve just had this growing “itch” at the back of my brain whenever I thought about last week’s birthday coming up, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. Until last weekend, just before my birthday.
In short, last Tuesday I turned sixty-eight years old. Today it’s six days after that birthday. But last weekend, I realized that my father had died of a massive heart attack five days after his sixty-eighth birthday.
I’ve always thought that the human brain and consciousness is pretty amazing and there are depths there that we haven’t begun to plumb. But having my subconscious brain apparently be aware of that connection (which is what I firmly believe was going on) while my conscious brain was clueless is just bizarre. And how my subconscious finally got the message across to my conscious side is even more bizarre.
Let me state for the record that I’m not a believer at all in ghosts, the afterlife, spectral messengers, and the like. The Long-Suffering Wife is a believer and she has her own opinion on what happened. We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that. But still…
Two days before my birthday, I woke up in the middle of the night with an extremely vivid dream. In the dream I was doing my upcoming drive to Texas for the eclipse and I had stopped after dark in a remote, almost empty diner. The only other patron in the diner was a sad, lonely woman who wanted to talk to me while I ate, then wanted to come with me to see the eclipse. Her name was Connie Navarro.
Her name was important in the context of the dream, important enough so that I wrote it down when I woke up from the dream, then went and Googled it when I got up. I did not recognize the name at all, don’t know anyone by that name, and to the best of my knowledge I have never heard it before.
Surprise! “Connie Navarro” brings up a LOT of hits online, almost all about one woman. She and a friend, Susan Jory, were both murdered in 1983 in Bel Air by a jealous boyfriend when she broke up with him. He was convicted and given the death sentence, later commuted to life without possibility of parole. Connie’s notable also because of her son, Dave Navarro, who was a guitarist with Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
One of the websites I found near the top of the search results was highlighted. You know how the link is purple instead of blue when you’ve been to that site before? The website was for the FindAGrave.com and it had a memorial page for Connie Navarro. I went to it and then I was curious where I had ever gone to this site before. I didn’t remember that. But there was a “login” button and it found an account for my email address. When I connected, it took me to information about my father’s gravesite in Orange County. Which had his birthdate and date of death. And his age at death – 68.
Um… yeah.
That will leave you sitting there thinking for a few. On the one hand, it’s good to finally understand what’s been tickling your subconscious. And the sense of relief that swept over me left little doubt that I had indeed found the answer to the puzzle that I didn’t even know I was solving. On the other hand…
You can’t make this shit up. Okay, yeah, you can, but I didn’t.
So.
Today it’s the sixth day after my 68th birthday. I’ve officially lived longer than my father did. And I’ve had either an extremely fascinating experience or an extremely spooky one. Probably both.
One thing I remember my dad always mentioning, usually with a bit of humor mixed in, was to be cautious and pay attention whenever I feel “an impending sense of doom.” (You need to hear that phrase in the kidding-around-with-a-five-year-old-son “dad voice,” which I’m sure most of you did already.) I learned what he meant and I’ve often had experiences where something’s “off” that I can’t quite put my finger on. Usually that’s something relatively minor, like messing up a report or attaching the wrong file to an email. I’ve gotten good at hitting the brakes, listening to my subconscious, and doing a last double check to catch those kinds of errors. It has paid off.
This was bigger. More doom. Better quality doom. Nothing but the finest doom for my sixty-eighth birthday!
I’m listening. I just wish my subconscious would take a more simple, more direct route to tell me what’s up.
On the other hand, did I mention that for my birthday I found a truly excellent stick? I didn’t see that coming either.
Filed under Curiosities, Deep Thoughts, Family, Paul, Photography
It’s been a busy few months…
Being in charge of an accounting department, the nature of the beast is that it’s one deadline after another. Monthly financial reports, annual budgets, audits, tax returns. It’s an endless cycle.
There are ebbs and flows. And as with wave motion in physics, sometimes the waves overlap, synchronize, and add together and you get hit with a monster.
Today was that deadline for me and it got met. Barely. As in, emailing out reports at 10:10 for a 10:15 meeting. But it’s good work, solid, everyone’s happy. The nature. The beast.
The feeling afterward really does feel like finishing a marathon. It might not be a triumph, might not be your personal best time, might not even be the time you trained for – but you finished.
From 2010, the first endurance event I ever tried, the Avon Walk in Santa Barbara, a marathon (walking, not running) on Saturday and a half-marathon on Sunday.
I feel like I should be scarfing down bananas and Gatorade…
Tomorrow the next race starts, the next turn of the cycle. As always, working toward smoothing out the troughs and crests, looking for some smoother sailing. But being ready to burn the midnight oil and go to Red Alert when the shit hits the fan.
There will be shit. There is a fan.
This is known.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography
Sometimes when your brain is uber focused on one thing you find that the rest of the world gets a bit hazy and grey.
Something about forests and trees.
Things that are time critical are getting done. That’s good.
Without a smart watch I couldn’t tell you what the day or date is. That’s not so good.
Gotta keep that balance.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography
Here in the US everything has a bar code so that it can be electronically scanned, tracked, inventoried, sold, returned, and consumed. Even fruits and vegetables started having these little stickers with barcodes attached to them about ten or fifteen years ago.
I was eating this pear’s twin this afternoon (the pear’s pair, as it were) and I was distracted. I was eating over the sink to minimize the mess since it was an excellent, tasty, and juicy pear. I was staring out the kitchen window into the back yard, watching a couple of squirrels clean up the leftover bird seed from the morning’s feeding. In my hunger and distraction, I may have bitten in and eaten that little sticker.
It made me pause. Then the questions started. (My brain does that…)
Was I in danger? Probably not I figured. I guess the biggest danger would be that it would lodge someplace and not digest or move on, blocking the natural flow of things, if you know what I mean. (You know what I mean!) But it was small, thin, and lightweight, so it wasn’t like when little kids eat quarters or dogs eat the squeaky thing out of toys that they got by ripping the “indestructable” toy apart in thirty seconds. I didn’t see any surgical interventions in my future.
As some philosopher said, “This too shall pass.”
Would it poison me or degrade into something toxic? It’s not even really paper, more like some kind of thin plastic, or Tyvek. Late-stage capitalism might be encouraging that sort of thing, especially if it actually costs money to use materials that not only don’t kill the consumer but are tested in advance to prove that. But still, there’s also the healthy fear of being sued for $50,000,000,000,000 by my heirs (and not a penny less!) so let’s assume that I’m okay there.
Just in case, should I try to make myself vomit it back up? First of all, ewwwww! Secondly, as stated above, it was an excellent, tasty, and juicy pear. Why ruin that experience with a backwash of gastric fluids? And thirdly, if there was any danger from this sticker going down, having it coming back up with some velocity behind it would have to be more dangerous. Right?
So should I go to urgent care? The emergency room? Um, no. Those places are full of sick people! These days with the flu, the seventh (or is it the eighth? ninth?) COVID wave in full swing, and god knows what other contagious bits flying about, I’m far, FAR safer here at home and taking my chances with the natural passage of the sticker through my GI tract.
Great! I have nothing to worry about! Enjoy the rest of the pear! (I did.)
Except…
It occured to me later that, with the government at all levels having abandoned us to COVID, the best and often only measure for tracking it is the wastewater monitoring. And by “wastewater,” in case you haven’t thought this through, we mean “raw sewage.” And now in about 36 to 48 hours that wastewater is going to have this sticker and its barcode sailing through the system. The testing is all automated, which means computers. The wastewater testing setup probably has various optical and biological testing equipment hooked up to a big computer and it’s running a lot of specialized algorithms to run a lot of specialized sensors and equipment. Which is all well and good, except that that ultra specialized software’s 17th cousin twice removed on its mother’s side is the scanning software from the self checkout line at Piggly Wiggly.
It may be looking for parts per billion of COVID in my sewage, but it’s gonna see that bar code and go off the charts. Or it’s going to launch our ICBMs. Or it’s going to call the aliens hiding in the asteroid belt and tell them to abandon us because we’re neither intelligent or civilized. (If the alien overlords are watching Fox News, this will not be news to them.)
Whatever happens – it might be my fault. Or the squirrels’.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Farce, Health, Photography
Wouldn’t life be boring as hell if everything was always smooth and easy, with no bumps in the road, no detours, no challenges?
Don’t we need a little texture, some rough spots to make it more exciting?
I’m sure we do. That’s a good philosophy…I guess.
But I would like to put a good word in for balance. If we need “textured” times, we also need the “smooth” times.
I don’t know if I would be bored to tears in a stretch of a couple of years where everything’s smooth and easy, with no bumps in the road, no detours, no challenges – BUT I WOULD SURE LIKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO FIND OUT ONE OF THESE DAYS!!
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography
I mean, besides December 27th. That much I had figured out. So I googled it and was told, “Wednesday.”
Not quite what I had in mind.
Wikipedia pulls up a long list of historical events which I’ve never heard of, births of people who I’ve (mostly) never heard of, and deaths of people who I’ve (mostly) never heard of.
And there are mentions of some government holidays in New Zealand and the Phillipines? Okay.
I think I’m back to “Payroll’s Due” and month-end data entry and budget calculations.
Year end 2023, hitting 2024 on the dead run.
Filed under Christmas Lights, Deep Thoughts
As Leo Bloom reminds us repeatedly from his semi-catatonic state near the end of “The Producers,” there is “no way out, no way out, no way out…”
Yet the signs are everywhere.
And, sure, while I had hoped to exit the ginormous parking garage here which would have let me simply turn right, go a half block, and then turn right again onto the correct freeway going in the correct direction, and this exit dumped me out there onto a different street on a side I didn’t even know about in a warren of one-way streets, homeless encampments, and no sign of a freeway, correct or otherwise, a little “exploration” led us back to an onramp.
One rule I always taught my kids when I was teaching them to drive in LA was in a pinch, especially leaving a crowded venue like a concert or sporting event, get on a freeway onramp. You might have a preferred freeway and direction, but that’s secondary. Get on. That will get you away from the crowd. All of the freeways interconnect in almost infinite permutations, so you can ALWAYS get there from here. You might have to travel a few more miles and then go to the 22 to the 405 to the 605 to the 210 to the 101 instead of just going on the 134 to the 101, but you’ll get there eventually. It beats sitting in that parking lot and fighting a gazillion other cars to get on that one, perfect onramp.
So back to the original point – it feels like there’s no way out sometimes. But get moving. Get out of the crowd and get it in gear. You’ll figure it out.
BTW, did anyone else notice that it’s the 20th? That there are like four days until Christmas?
No way out. No way out. No way out…
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography
I suspect that one reason we love (or hate) roller coasters is that, aside from the physical thrills and sensations, we recognize the way our emotional and spiritual real life situations are mirrored in all of the ups and downs, spins and loops.
I just hit a handful of key deadlines (as part of an amazing team, the kind that my Pepperdine MBA program told me about, but which I had trouble believing in at the time – that’s a story for another day) and after more weeks and weeks of stress and long days and all that goes with it, all of a sudden today it’s just…normal. I have plenty to do, and to a certain extent there’s some chaos in trying to figure out which items to pull off of “the back burner” first, but getting it wrong has minimal consequences. Annoyances, possibly. Inconvenience, probably. “Consequences?” Not really.
And then I looked at the Chiefs’ calendar and saw that we’re playing the Raiders in Las Vegas next week, on the 25th, and wait, that can’t possibly be right because we’re playing them on Christmas and HOLY GUACAMOLE, BATMAN! Christmas is in just ten days! When did this happen? Why didn’t anyone warn me?!
I understand intellectually where we are on the calendar. There are lots of lights up outside. There are stacks of gifts waiting to be wrapped and put under the tree.
But mentally, coming down off of that “deadline high” (and being a little bit sleep deprived) I had slipped into an emotional state where I figured that I could kick back, relax, and coast a little bit.
But there’s Christmas stuff to finish and cards to get out and presents to wrap and all of that stuff on the back burner and the budget to be working on at work and a couple of other big projects that are lurking around the corner and all of a sudden the corner is RIGHT HERE and we really, REALLY need to make 2024 the year we find our forever home, buy it, and move…
And above all, having coped for weeks with one critical task and deadline after another, gone (for an hour or two) into coasting and relaxing mode, and now almost immediately being surprised and ramping back up, there’s an element of PTSD. What have I missed? I’m tired, I’m worn down, I’ve let down my guard for an hour, is there anything I’ve overlooked? Day after day after day of critical deadlines, how can I not have one tomorrow? What ball am I dropping? What’s gonna bite me in the ass? I almost forgot about Christmas for crying out loud, what else am I capable of forgetting?
It will be fine. Really.
But.
It is a roller coaster. You can go through all of those plunges and rolls and curves and manage to make it through, but in life you don’t get to just stop and get off the ride. There’s another lift hill ahead. Or a hidden cliff that you’re going to plunge over.
Breathe. ENJOY! Relax.
But you may not get to kick back into cruise mode just yet.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Photography
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