Bluebird Singing in the Dead of Night

I was thinking about this today…you can only be responsible for yourself when it comes to families. It ends at you. It might not start with you or have anything to do with you, but you can only be accountable for what YOU are doing. No one else in the world, but what you do.

This is what makes The Simpsons so funny. They are all independent of each other. Read Peanuts over several years and it’s the same concept…you is what you is (wow, a Popeye homeage in the middle). You can marry someone and completely disagree and say they do stupid stuff. You can have a kid that does stupid stuff. Your parents can do dumb stuff. Yes, they have consequences with it, and you can be sympathetic, but it’s their thing and you just kind of comment on it and hope everything is ok. Heck, our animals are Snoopy all bound together…smarter than us all maybe.

The Simpsons are classic American. It’s absurd, but it’s not all that absurd when thought of as an allegory for how every “family” acts.

I tried explaining this philosophy to Big A and she looked at me and said, I swear, “I think you are taking a cartoon a little too seriously.” Et tu, Brute? She got me there. I do think it’s funny to watch The Simpsons over time.

But I still laugh at them because they are a family. That part won’t change and it’s why I laugh. They don’t stress over stuff. But it’s also why I was impressed that an eight-year-old girl could bust my chops back to size, because I was taking it too seriously and thinking of the philosophy of what makes it so good. It is just a cartoon…but a family pratfall, to boot.

Michael Phelps has, I think, 14 gold medals from the Olympics. I’ve held one of somebody else’s once, and watching him on 60 Minutes yesterday I was thinking about that. The one I held was a gold from the Berlin games, and it was freaking heavy. I feel honored to have touched, and played with one…what is it like to have 14? That is just plain awesome, in a truly awesome sense.

I spent most of the last month finding someone to go to the inauguration with me. No, I didn’t walk around and randomly ask, but I had about a halfdozen people that I know I would enjoy the trip with if they were along.

In the end, I just had to decline the tickets. The kicker was that I had to name the other person with me, and there got to be a point where that just was not happening.

*SIGH*

So instead of a couple airline tickets, I bought some books, instead. They are very vain history books that I have always wanted. They will be a good read and look good on the bookshelves.

I pulled that John Lennon reference out of my ass and it was correct…I wrote it and I thought, “Ummm, let me check that one. It’s pretty obscure.”

But I was listening to it, and I not only confirmed it was pretty much spot on and it was “Beautiful Boy,” but I was also reminded that it has my favorite line from any song ever.

“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

I can not tell you why that line even hit me when I was nine years old like a ton of bricks. But I will try…of course…

It’s the moment I stopped and thought about music. There might be a little more going on there. And I can tell you the moment when I first heard it and even tell you the conversation happening in the car. I can tell you the DJ on KJR-AM. It froze me.

But it was the line in a song where, for the first time, I thought of it all as poetry and deeper than beebop-along stuff. Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. And as I get older, it gets more and more true. Everyone should know that song. It’s simple and it’s brilliant. There is really no genious to it, musically. I feel a little of that with some Tom Waite and Randy Newman stuff I have; a simple twist of something that kind of jumps out and bites you in the ass even when you’re a kid.

Someone is going to write a great history of the 20th Century and that song is going to be important for a few paragraphs during the pop music part. I’m sure of it. It kind of ends the 1970s.

Who knows?

So, my post about keys was over and I proceeded to lose about half of mine.

Iam an airhead when it comes to details, but pretty good with strategy. It took me about an hour to outhink myself.

Here’s what happened…

Just after I got my keys all put on different key chains, I thoughtI’d better hide the masters. Why, I’m not sure, but I was talking on the phone with somebody about something more important at the time. Then that phone call turned into two more phone calls about things that I really needed to dealt with, and blah blah blah…I zombied through hiding the keys. I mean that…I knew I was hiding them, I just had NOOOOOOOOOOOOO conscious thought about where other than the pure logic of why it made sense.

Get it? The logical side of my brain was working on the phone call, and the ceative side was hiding my keys. At least, that’s my guns and I’m sticking with them. The point being, I got done with these intense phone calls and realized I had no clue where I hid the damn keys.

This is really interesting thing how the brain works. I boiled it down to the fact they were easy to find and they were someplace I would never looked. I could walk through it to the moment I looked at SOMETHING and had an “AHA!” moment. I just could figure out what that moment was or what the resulting hnding was physically.

Poor P. Seriously, she had to go through me re-creating the Alamo to find them. I have so much appreciation for the shit she puts up with from me, I can’t even begin to express it here. Really and truly. She is a zen of patience with stuff like this. She and Big A are by far the things I am most thankful for and I am humbled by them both.

So on I slogged through the house where it was obvious and I would NEVER look.  Bingo. P hit it 1000-percent on the nose. She nailed it. A simple suggestion and the mystery was solved in 10 seconds.

How cool is that that my wife knows me that well? Think about that one. She is so good at just thinking through logic things and nailing the logical solution after 20 years around me, it’s astounding. And super appreciated.

People, she is good.

But I still fiddle with the thought of the brain. My dad said one time that I sounded “bored” when I talked to him while I was writing and working during the day. I actually have to plead guilty when I write, that I do get bored. Incredibly bored at times. I even feel a little isolated and lonely. When you really fiddle and faddle with writing, it’s a tough road to hoe. I think John Lennon talked about it in “Beautiful Boy” or whatever he called it. It’s not like writing writes itself. You can throw me for a good loop or a bad loop if you call me or talk to me when I am in a manic mood about getting things written.  Now, 90-percent of the stuff is crap, but if you want social or non-writer, I am checked into that Motel 6 and there is really not much you can say; I’m a low-rent renter.

But here I was today talking on the phone about something very strategic, and I was in the middle of writing, and then I hid the keys. People that have never written know exactly what I am talking about, I hope, because I am stumbling over it all.

Hmmm…one more try…you know where you get in the idea of how to drive from Point A to Point B, but you might crash and burn, but your first thought is that you still need to get to Point B?

Oh, flubbers…I tried to explain it. Maybe I’m just not a good writer.

But I found my keys.

Keys, keys, the glorious fruit, the more you have, the more…you don’t know what the hell to do with them all.

I just counted and I have 71 keys or FOBs on my ring, and they are all current to something, someplace. Most of them aren’t even to something in my home, but lockers or boxes or houses and stuff in other places far from my daily grind.

But for the first time in years, I really started thinking I need to get my act together with this and lighten it up a little. I mean, I don’t need the keys to a locker in Seattle when I go to the corner store for milk; that’s just silly.

P did agree on something for another part of life organization, with the bar code system for books, CD and records. I have to figure all of my keys out myself.

I would have just assumed have a good salad and then a cheeseburger today for Thanksgiving. I’m just not an eater for show or anything. Everyone says that I don’t eat anything, but I have stuff at home on the shelves or in the fridge that works just fine when I want it. So, am I suppose to stuff things down just because it looks more “normal”? I like turkey, for instance, but I am not going to act like I am hungry for it at three in the afternoon and act all normal about it. That is just silly. We eat in the evening.

I have never understood that whole thing. Who eats at two or three in the middle of the day? It’s kind of crazy.

So I need to completely readjust my bowels or something to eat on this one-day schedule and like I am eating normally?

Give me a break. Throw me the leftovers and make me a sandwich five hours later with the leftover turkey, mashed taters and gravey with cranberries.

I actually eat pretty healthy, but it looks weird because everyone seems to thing I don’t eat or something. I just eat when I’m healthy and I mix it all up. It’s not rocket science. It’s not rude to just say you don’t want to eat at that moment.

So tonight I ate T-Day dinner and three people made comments that I didn’t seem to eat anything. Again, who the hell eats at 2:30 p.m.? Think about it. It just throws everything off if you aren’t hungry. Huge amounts of food on a Thursday afternoon…not normal in any culture, or for most bowels.

Big A and I have two contests that will never get old.

Who can have louder farts and who can have smellier farts.

Father-daughter bonding is fun.

I was looking at out DVR/TV setup, and then nosing around P’s computer today…

I never turned her computer on or touched it!!!! I was just being nosy…

And you know…

She has an SVGA cable plug in her computer. I’m a geek. I started fiddling, and she can actually plug in to the whole TV setup with the right splitter and some freeware. So then, I thought, why not just patch it all to an external Fireware drive and if you want to record something, it just happens off one of the receivers.

Working in the lab late one night…

No…I don’t have it all figured out, but now I see how it’s done. I can picture it. I even know what the small parts are and where to get them. The idea would be to take what is on my DVR and transfer it to an external hard drive and then play it on an airplane or something through the laptop.

A project! Like I need another one of those. But this would be more like a hobby thing just to see if I could do it.

The only problem I have is that P won’t let me even come close to touching her computer to fiddle and faddle. It’s not that she has something to hide, I know, it’s just that I am so hard on computers and keyboards, she says no. Well, that and the fact I experiment so much I get more garbage drivers than I can keep track of, so there is no reason for her clean machine to not run lean. But I am wholly and completely intrigued by the thought.

If you use headphones a lot with the compter or iWhatevers…check out the Koss volume control thingy. I stumbled on it, and I may buy a couple more for about $3 each. It’s really simple and it keeps all your headphones at the same level if you just move it from device to device without changing the volume. Think of it like a sound “surge protector.”