It Hurts

I hate to say: “I told you so” but it would seem that this face does have its limitations and that people of different ethnicities have prejudices too.  I now know a little about having someone biased against you by the color of your skin. When my father was younger he was prejudiced and at the time I thought he had good reason because some urbanites chose to throw bottles and scale flattened beer cans at he and his coworker firefighters. He was after all trying to protect them but oppressed people felt he was just part of the establishment they were so dead set against. 

I guess I was living in a dream world to think that someone who I thought was a friend was just putting me on. Maybe he didn’t know himself and he put on a great show that he embraced all cultures and races but in the end he retreated to his comfort zone. I know that this will change, as the children of the new immigrants will no longer carry the partiality of their parents as my parents tried to impart on me. I have to tell you though after this episode it hurt and hurt me deeply. I will get over it of course but…

And now that I have written about it, I can let it go. 

I'm A-Fibbing

It was going along so great. Drinking caffeine not to excess mind you, eating more than my fair share of Easter chocolate and getting my 7 spins a week in. 

Then yesterday I forgot my meds, and even though my intuition said bring that prescription bottle there may not be enough pills in the car, I ignored my own inner voice and wham my heart started to pound away and I  wound up just living (fortunately) through it. I get too complacent and it’s a part of me that is just pure lackadaisical. There is no other word for it other than carelessness and frankly just taking my life too lightly and thinking I am invulnerable even though I am not saying that overtly it is what in fact I am implying.  

Today I had to cancel my KSC for 8:30, which I think, is her best class but it was just not in the cards today. My theory about exercising through my ‘episode’ is pure madness, although there is still part of me that believes strenuous exercise is the answer for these ‘runaway’ charges inside my ticker. Two Bystolics and I am back on regular HR and hoping and wishing I can stay with my regimen without any more gaps. 

Afflatus

There never seems to be enough time to talk about what I want to talk about because I get so easily sidetracked on tangents that seem like long branches that have no ending. What I love is that my afflatus for now has so much to say and it would take up a month of Sundays to tell all the stories I want to tell.

Migraine

Once in a great while I am beset with migraine headaches and I am sure that the severity of mine doesn’t come close to the ones some of my friends and others endure. I do know that they are quite unbearable and make ordinary headaches seem like a hiccup by comparison. I used to get them with much more regularity and thought it might be linked to chocolate or caffeine but this latest one had no symptoms other than waking up with mild head pain. I never know when they will strike and it just makes being productive such a difficult task and for me when I can’t produce I feel like a shark that has stopped moving. 

Loose Fittings

You know how perishables are marked: “Best When Sold By” and carry a date stamped on the plastic tag or on the top of the milk container? All of the relationships in our life have an expiration date as well although we probably haven’t thought of it in quite that way.  

Ultimately when we die our entire string of relationships end but no one looks at those statistics. I am talking about the ones that are the sum total of all the people we have known in our lives. Ponder that for a moment. Think back to your earliest memory. If we begin in 1st grade and then work forward into elementary school, junior high (middle school today) and then high school the number of people that start to collect in our consciousness was probably at it’s zenith and then the numbers started to taper off as our life kicked in past adolescence into adulthood. How many of us can still have friends from school that we still talk to? Yes the social media has enabled us to maintain casual acquaintances but how many other relationships we had sworn were our best friends have disappeared to the corners of our mind and out of our sight and senses?  

People of course change and move away, have their own families, adopt addictions, get angry with us for reasons known and unknown to us. The list goes on as to why these friendships wither and die. It saddens me to think that some of the friends that were my best friends have gone never to be heard from again. Best friends that were true friends that we could count on when things got rough. I remember my first best friend named Bob and when my 16-year-old sister died he was the first friend that showed up on my driveway. So many others couldn’t cope and were well just fair weather friends. Not Bob. I could count on him always. Yet he moved to the Carolinas, joined the Navy and became a born again Christian. I haven’t heard from him in more than half a lifetime even though his memory never ceases. 

Then there are those associations as I like to call them rather than friendships that are merely loose fittings, relationships that came to us by happenstance or with some luck serendipitously only to evaporate when the common link that is often just circumstance disappears. I think about my long distance running community, disco nation, my drug culture friends and then my AA buddies. All of them have virtually disappeared. Even sadder I don’t remember their names. 

I like to think that everyone that touches our life does so for a reason; hopefully it’s to enrich each other’s lives or when it ends painfully to teach us a lesson. I think that if I think of every relationship beyond our immediate family and those people that are less transitory as a loose fitting. I can enjoy them with a deeper intensity knowing full well that they too will disappear, as my stick gets shorter. Loose fittings doesn’t mean these relationships are not important it just means they have an expiration date so I will enjoy them before the bread goes stale. 

Small Change

The best time to talk about change is when you have already taken some measures in the change. I think that small changes are the best because they don’t really need any premeditation. Take a simple habit like waking up in the morning and after making my K-cup of coffee I used to switch on the television to either Sports Channel or TCM without any real motive. You switch it on and your mind is adrift in a mindless place,  always hoping to be entranced in  what happenstance on the screen might have in store for you. 

I just started over the last month to keep the screen dark and open my word application and just start typing. The real passion that lies in me is writing because as I continue to flex this muscle the more definition that seems to appear in my writing physiology. 

Change for me is about small incremental things. . Except drinking of course which was a dramatic change. I have never regretted that one and it also allows me to know that when significant change is required I can make it even if I don’t want to. Not all change is good of course even when societal norms say that it is needed. I have acknowledged who I am and I am done making excuses because as long as I keep a considerate eye for those that love and know me I can’t go wrong. 

It' Nine O'clock and All is Well?

I awake and the first thing on my mind is not dashing off to spin class. What’s up with that? I know that I follow my intuition and that was not my first priority this first Monday in April.  Maybe the last 6 months it was but not now.  

Monday always seems to bring that urgency that I must do something to foster my business plan which seems to be always up in the air and not like anyone I know but it’s probably just the same only the planning is different. I have been struggling with this since 1995 and 2011 is no different except for the fact that I have read the last chapter and I know it will be all right in the end somehow. God doesn’t take me this far to drop me on my head.  

I do know that I have to get back to private journaling because like my other blogs there always seems to be someone looking. I love it that way but if I am to be truly introspective I need to keep some words away from eyes other than my own. 

Each Dawn I Die

When I wake I can’t help but move past some of the things I am not interested in doing. Most of the time I am wrong about my projections but there are times when I just have not learned my lesson and continue to do the same thing expecting different results. Take this morning for example. I have yet another appointment with an agent that is just not cut out for this business but I am going back yet again more for his sake then trying my abilities out on a man that is just too skeptical to be open.  No matter I will try without complicated illustrations to see if he is open to holistic finance. Some are just not and are too biased against salesman such as myself, and that’s okay but if that is indeed the case we need to move on and say: Next!

Friday always makes me happy but also wondering where the week went. I know it sounds like a cliché but the time becomes more fleeting as I start my downward trek.  James Cagney’s Each Dawn I Die might sound a little morbid but somehow apropos.