Oddball Update

Today was Apple’s birthday. For some time now, we’ve been planning a “shopping outing” to celebrate the occasion, and I even took the day off (with plans to work tomorrow instead) so we could enjoy it undisturbed. So as soon as we rolled out of bed this morning (at a leisurely time, I don’t mind telling you), we set off.

It was a great day. The weather was perfect — between 65 and 70 degrees and partly cloudy — and there seemed to be very few crowds everywhere we went. We first went to Coastland Center mall, then moved northward to Coconut Point to do the bulk of our shopping. Like a kid in a candy store — or several of them, rather — Apple moved from place to place, checking out all of her favorite outlets and looking for fashionable things that caught her eye.

We capped off the festivities with two great meals: A nice lunch at Calistoga, recently opened inside the Coastland mall (and with an expanded menu, too, which this chain had badly needed, IMO), and then later, a wonderful dinner at Blue Water Bistro. The latter is a new seafood restaurant at Coconut Point with a wide selection of fresh and exotic fish, like the Kajiki (Pacific Blue Marlin) I chose. By nightfall it was getting chilly, but we ended the night by enjoying a waffle cone of chocolate ice cream. Mostly because we wanted to test the theory that ice cream tastes better when it’s cold outside, not when it’s hot. (For the record, I think we both found the theory had merit.)

We also went to the Apple store at Coconut Point — yes, Apple as in “Apple Computer.” Apple — my wife — needs a new laptop computer, as her aging Dell Inspiron 8600 is slower than a dinosaur whose feet are Krazy-glued to the floor. The more we thought about its replacement, the more an Apple Macbook seemed like the perfect machine for her. She got a chance to play with a Macbook in the store today and seemed quite taken with it, plus I’d like the chance to get more familiar with the Mac platform, so we’ll probably go further down that avenue later this year. I also got to play with the new 16 GB iPod Touch, and I have to say, I’m smitten. Apple suggested it would make a good birthday present. She’ll get no argument from me.

I must also mention that I tried on the Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones in the Apple store, and was completely blown away at just how effective they were in reducing — nay, completely eliminating the sound around me. By comparison, the $60 Sony noise canceling headphones I bought last year seem like they don’t even do anything — and they hurt like hell to wear for more than an hour! I had always thought that Bose QC headphones were horribly overpriced, and they may still be, but given how well they perform, I think they are worth the money. Flat-out. I prefer “around the ear” style headphones, so I’ve decided that I need to get myself a pair of QC2’s before our next trans-pacific flight. Seriously, with headphones like that, I might actually be able to sleep on a plane!

Overall, it was a fantastic outing, and a day very well spent. Apple told me happily that it was one of the best birthdays she’s had. Admittedly, at first it seemed like the day might go awry, especially when I missed a call from Comcast about my appointment and had to spend about 20 minutes on hold (plus two dropped calls) in an attempt to get that squared away. My grandpa also called around 1:00 to say his car was refusing to start and he was unable to get to work, so on our way up to Coconut Point, we dropped by his place and gave him a ride. We’re not sure what happened to his car, but given the symptoms, I suspect the cold snap we had here a couple days ago killed its battery.

Over dinner, Apple and I had a chance to talk about a range of topics, but the discussion mostly centered on life and all of its twists and turns, and in particular, how one chooses to deal with those twists and turns. We are both of the mindset that everything that happens in life — and everything that doesn’t happen — does so for a reason. It’s how you react to what life gives you that matters most. This sort of thing is, naturally, easier said than done. But in the past couple of months, I think we’ve both been doing a better job of properly handling life’s ups and downs.

For me, the difference came when I decided to stop working so goddamn much. Last fall, when I was working three or four simultaneous jobs and letting my life go completely down the toilet in the meantime, I couldn’t handle anything life gave me. Every minuscule little inconvenience seemed like a personal affront, every unforeseen problem became something to scream and yell about and lose sleep over. Since I’ve dropped all of those side jobs, I find myself much better prepared to deal with those things I have to do — my day job, making plans for the future, taking care of day-to-day things like car maintenance and getting my bike fixed.

Rather than feel like my life is in chaos as long as any little thing remains undone, now I feel almost neutral about it all. It will all get done, and get done in its own time. This week I picked up the oil for my GTO, which I’ll change soon. Later this month, I’ll get the tires rotated and an alignment done. Next month, I’ll get my bike fixed. Everything that needs to be done will be done. There’s no need for me to run around shrieking or lay awake at night obsessing over these tasks.

More importantly, I feel like my mind is much clearer now, clear enough for Apple and I to actually spend time talking, thinking, and planning for events further than three days in the future. Last fall, when I was shoulder-deep in work, you couldn’t ask me what I wanted for dinner next week without overwhelming me and making me get all pissy with you. Now, we’re making plans for our next trip to Thailand (to take place sometime this spring), and beyond that, where our lives are going in the next few years. Two things that we’ve decided for certain is that we want to have a child, and that we don’t want to raise that child here in southwest Florida.

I’m really just about done with this part of Florida, truth be told. Apple once said to me, “We’re here too early. This is a place where we’ll probably want to come and visit when we’re retired. But right now, we need something else.” This becomes all the more true when you add a child into the mix. Let’s say we have a four year old son. What the hell is he going to grow up doing if we stay here in this retirement paradise, where every ounce of “fun” is meted out at approved locations and in approved ways? Where we don’t have a backyard, where we don’t even have a patch of grass we can walk on without ruffling somebody’s feathers? This town is no place for kids. It’s not even a place for young adults.

We’ve been looking at moving elsewhere, and while we’re at it, changing our lifestyle. I spend 99% of my time inside the house, sitting in front of a screen. It’s not that I don’t enjoy this, but this simply isn’t healthy. My friend / boss / work colleague is in a similar situation, except he hasn’t yet gotten to the point where he’s begun to control the number of work hours in his day, as I recently have. While hanging out at our house this week, he lamented feeling trapped in his room, spending all of his time working — and for what? There’s never any end to it, and never any immediate benefit to sacrificing your social and family life. He said he finds himself continually slipping further away from reality, and that if he were rich enough to hire people to do all of life’s mundane things for him, he would become one of those eccentric, twitching weirdos who hates people and never leaves his room. Because it’s all too easy to do.

We’ve collectively decided that we need to break out of these self-destructive habits, force ourselves to get real lives. I don’t want my child’s idea of a role model to be his video game-playing father who never leaves the house, the only dad who doesn’t attend his kid’s activities because he’s too busy working or too anti-social to interface with other parents.

With the newfound clarity I’ve wrested from my schedule, I’m planning to go on an exploratory excursion to Texas with my colleague, who used to live there (and loved it), just to get the lay of the land and see what it’s all about. Honestly, everyone I’ve ever known who lived in Texas (or used to) couldn’t find a bad thing to say about it, and I’m sick of basing my entire perception of the United States of America — a perception which has been rapidly souring in the last few years, I’m sorry to say — on one town in Florida where the people are dumber, meaner and plain-old more disgusting than anywhere else I’ve ever visited on planet Earth, no fucking joke. Every time I get a taste of somewhere else — the wonderful folks of Australia, the warm and welcoming Thais, or even just the kindly southerners in frigging Valdosta, Georgia — I feel like I want to get the hell out of this superficial wasteland of runaway narcissism in which we live.

I want to live a little further away from the establishment. I want to have more land. I want to have the freedom to do crazy shit on that land just because it’s there, because it’s mine and because no one can tell me what to do. I want to ride ATVs. I want to drive my muscle car on back country roads. I want to learn how to shoot. I want to have backyard barbecues and sit on the grass with my wife and watch the sunset. Hell, I want to mow that grass, because having to mow it means it’s there to begin with, and yes, call me crazy, but I actually enjoyed mowing the grass when I was a kid!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to live in a shanty on the side of a mountain. I need infrastructure and technology access, and I need at least a semi-urban area within reasonable driving distance. But I don’t want to live under the iron fist purview of this piss-ass, managed community bullshit anymore. Maybe when I’m sixty years old, I’ll come crawling back to this — but I am not going to blow the best years of my life sitting on a stool in the corner because there’s nothing else to do. You’ve heard of the film “No Country For Old Men” — well this here is no country for young men!

While I’m taking life by the horns, I’ve also decided that this is the year in which I will bring the classic Trans Am down from Michigan. Years ago, my parents ceremoniously gifted my dad’s 1979 Trans Am to me, “passing the torch” of this, the single most spiritually valuable material possession in my life, to my hands. And since then I have sat on my ass and waited for the “right moment” to do something with it, a moment which will probably never come. How many of you ever waited for the “right moment” to do something and were subsequently able to recognize it when it appeared? When asked why he never showed up to offer his condolences at the site of a disaster, a character in one of my favorite radio plays responded, “I was waiting for the right moment.” When he was then asked what happened, he answered, “I missed it.”

While my parents were visiting us over the holidays, we all had a chance to eat dinner together one evening at one of our favorite restaurants. That night, Apple and I listened to a great deal of interesting and never-before-heard stories about my family and its ancestry, stories from generations ago all the way up to my parents themselves, around the time of my birth. My mom loves to tell the tale of how, while she was cooped up in the hospital while I was being observed and treated for jaundice, my dad and her father were out traipsing around, looking at this black Trans Am that my dad wanted to buy. At one point, while visiting my mom in her hospital room, my dad excitedly told her about the car and how he thought he was going to buy it. As my mom tells it, all that was going through her mind was, “I’m stuck in this hospital, they won’t let me see our son, and you’re going on about a CAR?!”

It must have been pre-ordained, somehow. I don’t know how my dad knew that he had to buy that Trans Am, but he knew it had to be done. I like to think that the spiritual forces at work were guiding his hand, that someday he knew — even if not consciously — that this beautiful black machine would become like a treasure to his son, adorned with gold, and legendary, like the steed of a hero. As my parents’ lives have become increasingly complicated, to where time to maintain an old car is far too short, and as I sit here waiting for my metaphorical “right moment,” that cherished treasure could fade away and disappear from my grasp.

Growing up, I was regaled with old mens’ stories of their childhood dream cars, and their regrets at letting them go. What kind of idiots, I always asked myself, would part with something if it meant so much to them? As I myself get older, I can see how the meandering twists and turns of life and time can snatch people, things and memories from you while you’re paying attention to something else, something you thought — at the time — was more important. Except that when you’re older, you never remember what that all-important something was. You only remember what you lost while you were busy with it. Chances are, that all-important something wasn’t so important to begin with.

We never know where tomorrow will take us, what wonderful things we will gain, or what precious things we will lose. Before life gets any more complicated, I want to capture at least one of my childhood treasures and preserve it for the years to come. One day I’m going to have a child of my own, and I want him or her to share times with me like I shared with my own father. I want that Trans Am to mean something to him or her, just as it meant something to me. And when he or she is grown, they won’t have to be a “car person” to look back fondly on the memory of a weekend cruise they once took with their dad. It was never about the machinery for me, it was about the spiritual connection. And I’ll be God damned if I’m going to let that rot away into nothing, let that legacy die here because I was too busy or too lazy to do something about it.

When I’m old and gray and sitting on a porch somewhere, nobody is going to hear me lament about what could have been, about how I let go of the things that meant the world to me for the sake of some utilitarian, here-and-now purpose. I will not be that sad, empty old man. If we can’t find the strength and courage and make what we want of our lives when we’re young, how the hell are we going to do it when we get old? There isn’t going to be any tomorrow, except the tomorrow we make today.

I said a few days ago that I’m not in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps I’ve graduated beyond those petty promises to oneself, and moved on to a much more important and enlightened state of mind. A state where one doesn’t just pledge to do something — instead, where one actually does it. Where thoughts of doubt and worry don’t even intrude long enough for one to consider the need to make a pledge — because one simply does the right thing, right from the beginning, with no regrets and no looking back.

Ten years ago, after much personal introspection, I made a series of life-changing decisions, decisions that took me around the world, united me with the woman of my dreams and sent my career off to a successful start. Never once did doubt arrest my forward momentum. And now, ten years later, I am not going to surrender to the life of easy choices, or become a feeble man whose modus operandi is to always take the path of least resistance. I refuse to succumb to the crushing peer pressure of this lifestyle I’m immersed in, the pressure that compels me to do the easiest, quietest and most orthodox thing I can think of and not step outside life’s “safety lines” that have been drawn, all-too narrowly, on the road before me.

I know now that I have more life-changing decisions to make. Come hell or high water, I’m going to make them. And as in 1998, I’m not going to look back any more.

Tagged as deep thoughts, Life, Randomness + Categorized as Life, Randomness