I went to an emergency training course.
The facilitator started off by saying, “Raise your hand if you know the consequences of severe head trauma.”
I raised my hand and said, “Immediate promotion to at least vice president of the company.”
At least I got the rest of the day free.
X
It hasn’t been that many years ago, though it seems it, that I had to do taxes. I didn’t mind doing them, but that year was a nightmare. I had to submit 28 casino declarations as a result of jackpots. Not mine. It took hours just for that portion. I didn’t mind going to the casino. Travel a bit, and gamble for a bit. Casinos can be a lot of fun. I was a terrible gambler, and though I would sometimes risk more if the slot asked for more money than I made in an hour after taxes, that stuck in my head. But I’d go for walks or sit and read while my partner passed hours seated in the casino. She won quite often, no doubt about it. You don’t get 28+ jackpots in a year without spending a LOT of hours in casinos. Again, I enjoyed casinos to a degree. But I did get frustrated when she’d blame me for not engaging in activities that weren’t casino-related. How can you have time for other things when casinos ate up most of your free time? Work consumed the rest. I was happy writing, doing picture projects, walking, and just spending time wherever I was. The other thing was the secrecy about going to the casino. I had no problem saying where I was going. But when you’re gambling that much, on a long enough timeline, everyone knows you’re not winning, no matter how many jackpots say otherwise. My partner didn’t want everyone to know where she was or how often she went. Whether it was her close family or the religious owners of the company she worked for. I get it. But that secrecy crept into conversations. I haven’t been back to the casino since. Now that it’s all in the past, I wonder what might have happened had we spent even half of that time on bicycles, walking, or visiting places or would-be friends instead of inside the noise-filled casinos we traveled to. It’s a moot question. But it’s one of the many reasons I say everything is much more complex than people are told. It usually is. People are told stories, or they hear things, thinking they know all the variables and understand the linear conclusion we came to. They don’t. Because they don’t know. I was perplexed by the contradictory attitude of letting work consume you only to pour that money into an activity that provided temporary entertainment. Let a job rob you of energy and free time and give it to that kind of entertainment? I would have rather spent time out walking and doing other things without the money. And I tried. But you go along for a complex series of reasons that seem different once you’re away from it. I caught hell for the way I was about watching TV. Like any other activity, I’m attentive. I hate watching things while scrolling on a phone or puttering around the house. That’s what HGTV is for; background noise. If watching TV is a mutually enjoyed activity, part of the allure of it is watching it together; otherwise, you’re just occupying space and burning time away. I shake my head that my tv-watching was turned into an accusation of controlling behavior. I’m that way with reading, writing, or anything I’m engaged in. The reason I mention it is that I never strongly made the same point about casinos: they literally ate up a huge portion of our free time and money. And I would have loved to be doing other things most of the time. Was I being controlled because I was spending my life doing something that I enjoyed to a degree but would have rather been enjoying life some other way? That’s the kind of connection people miss. And they definitely weren’t told. And all of it had an impact on how we ended up.
Love, X
Fate in the creek redux. It sounds like an elitist country music song. The mossy stones in the bed of the creek are slipperier than the nostrils of a 7-year-old in January. But the birds are chirping, bicycles and pedestrians are passing by above and beyond the rise that borders the creek. The sunlight is casting deep and mercurial shadows across the shimmering water. While it might not equal the smell of frying bacon on a random Saturday of my youth with my grandparents, It beats the hell out of working. I’ve always loved this but I must be getting older. I’ll know for sure when you hear me say that I have a favorite spatula. The only way it could feel any better is if somebody were carefully traversing the bed of the creek to hand me a slice of pepperoni pizza or a large french fry. Summer is definitely coming. But it’s not here today. Just a cool breeze and enough sunlight penetrating the canopy of the trees…
X
It’s feet in the creek time of year again. It feels as good as you think it does!
+
X
Many people are unaware of the fact that the song, “How Do I Live Without U” was inspired by a minimally malfunctional typewriter.
X
A new house is being finished adjacent to my apartment simplex. I told the landlord that I GUARANTEE I could get the new owners to cough up a new privacy fence if we take down the old one. He seemed doubtful: “That’s a lot of money. I don’t see how.” I smiled and said, “I’ll do the cleanup by the fence naked.” I could hear his eyeroll from five feet away.
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“No one is as focused on both math and time as someone on the interstate trying to determine if they really need to be or not.” -X
“Who left the make-out mannequin in the hallway?”
“You mean the CPR dummy?”
“Uh, that explains an awful lot.”
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From my new book, “How Not To Manage.”
So many of us go to work and put our nose to the grindstone. And sometimes we have people who are focused on extraneous things instead of getting the actual work done.
Love, X
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 