[PART TWO] “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” – John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America

My Fellow Americans (see what I did there?),

I get a lot of views on this blog from people around the world. I just want to clarify that I don’t have a problem with people from other places. We are all God’s children. I admire aspects of other cultures. But I am proud to be an American, and I want to do my part to make it the best it can be. I think that that greatness will in turn make the world a better place. That being said, here are some recommendations for things that Americans can do for their country.

1. Buy American

From what I’ve heard, the most common reasoning for not buying American is the cost. If you buy things made in China or wherever, it may be cheaper, yes, but it still comes at a price. Commerce with other countries opens up the potential for reliance on other countries. I’m all about self-reliance, so I would think it would be better to be able to be more dependent on our own manufacturers, our own workforce as a whole, to generate the goods we need to get buy. Sure, it might cost a little more in the short term, but the nature of supply and demand and the capitalist system in general will drive prices down once we’ve make the investment in and the commitment to American Enterprise.

Also, you get what you pay for. In the triangle of cost, quality and time, you lose quality when you get it fast and cheap. If you’re willing to pay and wait, you can get something that will last longer. I don’t know why, but ballpoint pens stick out in my mind. If you buy a hundred cheapo stick pens, before long you’re going to wind up with a hundred cheapo stick pens that don’t work. If you spend the extra money on a pen and you keep track of it, you’ll spend less in the long run and you won’t have a pile of worthless pens laying around. I don’t know about you, but I hate when I pick up a pen thinking it’ll work and it doesn’t. It’s infuriating. Moving on.

The same goes for just about anything. Meat, produce, clothes. Support American Ranchers and Farmers. A word of caution on the clothes, though. I used to be a Levi’s man. They were the only pants I ever wore. At 6’5″ and 250 lbs. it’s hard to find pants that work, but for a while they were doing the trick. Somewhere in there, they stopped making them in America, or I began to realize that they weren’t being made in America. It was right around the time that the starting splitting in the crotch area after not having them for very long. Like I said, I used to be a Levi’s man. Now I wear Dickies. Born in Texas, made in Texas by Texans. Damn straight. 

Overall, just know what you’re buying, demand more from the producer, and buy American. I understand that you may not be able to buy everything and that nothing happens overnight. I also understand that there are many high quality items that come from other countries (Japanese knives come to mind), but just be more conscientious and explore an American alternative. You may be surprised what you can find. 

2. Complain Less

Nobody’s perfect. European countries aren’t perfect and they’ve been doing this a lot longer than we have. Our country isn’t even 250 years old and we’re still doing a damn good job of making it happen.

I know you probably don’t have everything you want in life. I know that things are hard sometimes and it seems like you can’t get a leg up. Trust me. I know this. But it’s not America’s fault and chances are it’s nobody else’s. Things happen. Choices are made and they don’t always work out. What are you going to do about it? Play the blame game or get back to work? If you get a flat tire, you fix it and get back on the road. Complaining about it won’t take the nail out or put the spare on. Roll up your sleeves and get to work.

I saw some statistic recently about the amount of time the average person spends complaining each day. Like nine minutes. Imagine how much more you could get done if you spend that hour a week doing something productive. You could start a blog. You could do any of the Five Minute Betterment exercises on this blog. Or, if you’re really that unhappy about the way the government is doing something, you could 

3. Become More Active in Your Community

Get out there and vote.  Or if you don’t think the candidate can do the job well, run for office yourself. Get involved in a charity at your church or with a non-profit that services a cause you care about. Or just go meet your neighbors. Build relationships and get to know the people around you. Make a change on a small-scale. The little things add up and you could wind up a part of something even larger. 

The internet (invented right here in America) has redefined what the word community means.  It has enabled us to connect to people great distances away without having to leave out homes or our hometowns. There is information and communication at our fingertips that was unimaginable fifty years ago.

Used correctly and responsibly, the internet can be a valuable tool in helping us to find out more about the people and things and businesses and places around us.  You can use it to find people who feel the same way you do or find out more about something. 

4. Learn More About The United States

The history books aren’t always accurate, but a lot of times the truth is much more interesting. We’ve done so much in our short time as a country, you could literally look up the History of American Anything and spend hours learning about how and why it started, changed, grew, or even failed on this soil.

Find out more about the people that have done the things that interest you.  Connect with others with the same interests in your town, state, or other parts of the country. Take a trip to a local historical site or plan a vacation to somewhere you’ve never been. Learn about the good and the bad. Find out what Americans have done wrong and what Americans have done or can do to fix it.  Most of us wouldn’t completely write someone without knowing the whole story. So learn the whole story. 

If you learn all you can and you’ve done all you can and you still don’t like it here, 

5. Move away

That may sound harsh, but it’s true.  If you truly think you’d be happier somewhere else, then go there.  You’re an American and you still have the freedom to leave. Maybe you’d prefer somewhere where they have Universal Everything. Maybe you’d like a different climate, or Communism, or another language or culture. That’s fine. Go ahead and go. You have that freedom here and it’s a beautiful thing. 

– –

In the end, you deserve to be happy. You deserve to pursue your happiness, but no one’s going to give it to you.  So get out there and do something that’ll make your life better and make our country and most likely the world better if only a little bit.

Use your freedom but take it for granted. Work hard and reap rewards.

God Bless America.

Patriotically

Glass

[PART ONE] “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” – John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America

JFK.  Definitely one of my favorite presidents.  I did a nice homage to DDE a while back if you’re interested.  There’s just something captivating about the office of the President, and it’s always intrigued me.

I couldn’t be President, I can tell you that right now.  Definitely not in modern times.  All the news networks dissecting what you say and over-analyzing the minutia of your every action.  You know, it wasn’t always like that.  Sure, you’d hear him on the radio or see him on the TV, or read about him in the paper, but it didn’t seem so.. nit-picky.  People didn’t get their feelings hurt because they didn’t have time to. A hundred years ago, the world was in the throes of the Great War.  Fifty years ago was Civil Rights Movement.  This year?  The media is lambasting President Trump for getting an extra scoop of ice cream.  That’s not to say that there aren’t more important things going on.  THERE ARE.  But where is the attention paid?

Not totally unrelated, but the term ad hominem refers to a personal attack, or “attacking an opponent’s character rather than answering his argument.”  Apparently, there’s now a term called ad feminam  which appeals to prejudices about women.  Okay.  I’m going to come back to this, but there is something you need to know before I go on.  I am married.  My wife and I have two daughters.  We encourage them to do the activities they want to do.  Because this is America.  But they don’t get free reign over the whole house.  Because we’re still the parents.  Moving on.

I’d like to touch on another phrase now, from our very own Declaration of Independence: the Pursuit of Happiness. If you have time, I would suggest you Google the origins of the phrase. I know most people agree where Life and Liberty came from, but the old PoH is a more widely disputed nugget. Check it out. Life and Liberty are pretty straightforward in my mind. No one should end your life and no one should imprison your mind or your body.

These are part of the wealth of rights that as Americans are blessed with at birth. Rights that people in other countries aren’t. We can believe what we want, marry who we want, speak out against the things we don’t agree with, stand trial when we are accused of a crime.  The list goes on.  It is the government’s responsibility to protect those rights. But it is not the role of the government to provide.

I’ve talked about this before.  Charitable acts should come from charitable organizations. Not the government. When the government (or anyone else for that  matter) tries to make everyone happy, then no one is.  When the government removes itself from the daily and personal lives of it’s citizens, the citizens are free to, you guessed it, pursue their happiness. 

I know that the pursuit of happiness of not promised by the Constitution, but as a foundational and somewhat universal idea in our culture, I want to base the following notion off of it.  The PoH implies an action. Or rather, a lack of hindrance. The government will not stand in the way of you pursuing what makes you happy.  More importantly:

The government is not responsible for providing you with happiness.

Bold and italicized because I mean it. The government is too big and too focused on giving people things when we all were given one of the greatest gifts in the world: American citizenship. I understand that not everyone can break out of the situation that they were born into. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t have the chance to. Hard work is a beautiful thing and it seems like a lot of people are more content to complain than to do something about it. See my previous post about hard work for examples. 

We take a lot for granted here and I feel like a lot of times we don’t give back. In fact, I feel like a lot of Americans speak badly about our Great Nation because they haven’t achieved their happiness. That’s not the government’s​ fault. And it’s not my fault either. Spend your time and energy not demanding what the government can do for you, but what you can do for yourself.  We’ll discuss next post what you can do for your country.

God Bless America.

With the rights granted to me as an American Citizen by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution I sign this

Freely,

David Glass

“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” – Vincent Van Gogh

Hello Old Friend,

It’s Holy Week again, a time of year that I’ve really learned to appreciate over the past several years or so.  Spring as a whole is a really powerful time of year in the Church, with Ash Wednesday and the Lenten abstention, then the progression of the Passion and Death of Jesus (Palm Sunday and Good Friday) and his ultimate Resurrection (Easter).  Add these traditions to the natural blessing of new birth among both flora and fauna, and it’s clear to see that this is the perfect time to revisit, restrengthen, resurrect one’s faith in God, however He might appear to you.

We went to Mass on Sunday and while I sat next to the three women in my life and turn palm fronds into crosses, I begin to feel something, an idea, an understanding, opening up inside of my mind.  While this blossom hasn’t fully bloomed, I felt like I needed to take it out of mind brain and put it on the page so that I can read and re-read and dissect it and hopefully reach more solid ground with it.

I’m not 100% sure how Palm Sunday goes in other churches.  I don’t remember it when we went to a Methodist, then Lutheran services growing up.  But I do know that when you go to Mass, there is a part where the story from the Last Supper through the Death and Burial of Jesus is read aloud and the congregation reads the part of the condemners of Christ.  We read the words that were used to condemn our Savior to death on the cross.  We play the part of the unruly mob.

It threw me off the first time, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me.  We are the descendants of the people who condemned Him.  They swore His blood upon their hands and upon ours as well.  It was humanity that wanted and needed the death of Jesus.  Not just because that unruly mob hated him and the things he was saying.  Not just because the wanted to silence a rabble-rousing do-gooder that spoke against the status quo.  That’s why they wanted him to die.  They, we, needed Jesus to die because it was laid out in Scriptures.  Our Salvation was dependent on the Resurrection and thereby the Death of Jesus on the Cross.  We, as Catholics honor a crucified Christ because it is in that moment that the Scriptures were partially fulfilled.  There is no resurrection without death.  There is no Christianity without the Crucifixion.

I feel it more and more each time Palm Sunday comes around.  I feel shame and guilt that people would betray and humiliate and degrade and falsely sentence Jesus and that they would try to feed him wine with animal bile and shove thorns on his head and make the whole of the affair that much harder to endure.  It’s hard to imagine being in that position.  Knowing the end result and enduring the punishment in the meantime.  Watching your closest friends deny and betray you.  Listening to the crowd yell for you to die because you tried to teach people to be good to one another and reject the evils of the world.  Enduring the suffering.  Enduring.  Suffering.  The Passion.

That’s what this whole post is about really:  the meaning of Passion.  That’s my Holy Week revelation for 2017.  You see, the word ‘passion’ derives from the Old Latin word ‘passio’ meaning suffering or enduring.  It’s a struggle.  Passion isn’t supposed to be easy or comfortable.  It should be a struggle.  Life isn’t easy or comfortable so the things that matter shouldn’t be, either.  I think that passion implies motion and force.  Passion is a river, not a lake.  It moves and flows and adapts and sweeps and crushes and propels and delivers and hinders.  Or perhaps it’s an ocean.  With depth and mystery.  I don’t know, I like the river because rivers have such a constant and powerful presence in the Good Book.

Passion is the journey more than the destination.  It gets you to where you need to be, where you’re called to be.  It’s the lead-up to the Cross, the Resurrection, the Salvation.  Take that from the Book and introduce it into your life.  Find what’s worth struggling for and embrace that struggle because it will lead you to your glory.  And don’t be afraid because God is with you, all the way.

 

Faithfully,

Glass

“Winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they’re making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that’s the difference.” – Lou Holtz

 

I used to watch a lot more Notre Dame football.  My mom’s side of the family is Irish Catholic so there was usually encouragement to ‘marry a redheaded Irish girl’ and go to Notre Dame.  I didn’t do either of those.  I married a beautiful half-Mexican brunette and went to a smaller Catholic university in Central Texas.  When I got older, my brother and his friends and I would celebrate (yes, celebrate) the start of each football season with a Game Day gift exchange and a whole lot of beer.  Then, we’d celebrate each game after that without gifts, but still with a lot of beer.

Within a few years, my brother went overboard with the drinking and prescription drugs and a whole lot of bad decisions and some of the resentment has kind of rubbed off on the Notre Dame experience.  It’s totally irrational, I know, but it’s just one of those things.  So I haven’t watched a whole lot of games these past few seasons.

That’s not to say that I don’t still bleed Blue and Gold.  And that’s no to say that I don’t still enjoy that rich history of one of the longest-running football programs in the nation, which is why I chose to use a Lou Holtz quote for this post.  But this post isn’t about football necessarily, it’s about hard work.

If you’ve read the last post, you’ve probably pieced together that I work with/supervise some guys that are terribly hard workers.  It’s hard for me to understand why someone would go to work and not do work.  My parents taught me the value of hard work and the joy of completing tasks and I get a lot of satisfaction out of putting in hard work.  It makes me worry about the future of the human race when I see people who move in slow motion or who sit around all day and talk or do nothing.

That’s why I like this quote.  I wouldn’t necessarily call these people ‘losers’ but I think it a person’s attitude towards their work really speaks to their character.  If you sit and complain about having to do your job, then why are you there?  What makes you think that anyone owes you anything if you’re not doing anything in return?  What makes you so special?

I’ve had a lot of difficult jobs.  I’ve worked twelve-hour shifts stocking beer.  I’ve worked sixteen hour shifts at a psychiatric facility for children.  I’ve taught in the projects.  Every one of those jobs and the handful of others that I’ve had all had their difficulties.  I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever really had an ‘easy’ job.  But I always made it a point to get after it when I clocked in.  I pushed myself to learn and grow in the job and if it wasn’t a good fit, then I would find something else.  That’s not to say that I didn’t have my moments of slacking off or being off-task, but I always got the job done.

If you sit around and you don’t get anything done, you start to feel like your job is worthless.  Which isn’t true.  You’re the one who’s worthless because you’re not doing your job.  If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, that’s fine.  Find something that you are passionate about (more about that in the next post).  But if you’re at work, do work.  It’s simple.

Isn’t it?

I think that this attitude is a symptom of a greater disease in our culture.  This idea that showing up is enough and that competition is bad.  You can’t hurt anyone’s feelings.  We have to take care of everyone.  Welfare.

Whatever happened to “no such thing as a free lunch?”  The way I see it, there are plenty of people that are getting free lunches because a bunch of other people are working their butts off and pumping money into these social service organizations.  Why is the government providing handouts for people who don’t want to work?  Why are the rest of us footing the bill for people who have no intention of even trying to remove themselves from the government teat?  Where did we as a nation go wrong?

The fundamental role of the government should be to protect, not provide.  Charity should come from, you guessed it, charities.  Let people choose where their hard-earned money is going.  Because this is getting out of hand.

But I digress.  My point is that hard work built this country.  Hard work is good for you.  Hard work is good for everyone.  So get out there, pick something worth doing and get to work.

 

Diligently,

David Glass

The Novel

Good morning,

I’ve been quietly working on a novel for the last several months. I’m not very many pages into it because it has become one of the most painful processes that I’ve encountered in some time. It’s semi-autobiographical and draws mainly from the period from my dad getting sick up to more or less when my second daughter was born. I’ve had it squirreled away, partly out of worry that it will show my humanity in a way that I’m not 100% comfortable with, but what’s writing if not terribly personal? I figured it’s time to let it breathe a little and maybe get some feedback. Only two people other than myself have had access to it so far. 

 Here is the first page or so. I’ve got a couple of working titles but for now let’s just call it

Room Full of Strangers

I was born in a room full of strangers.

The doctors, my parents, everyone a blur in the delivery room.  A world of unknowns beyond those four walls of which I was completely unaware.  This feeling is not one that I’ve always been able to identify, to confine or define.  However, in retrospect, it’s one that has always been there.

Me.

All alone.

In a room full of strangers.

—

I found myself most recently in a stranger-filled room the day my father died.  My wife was on a food run.  My mom was downstairs.  I discovered that a new inhabitant had taken up residence in the room I had left minutes prior.  A stranger with familiar, familial features.

Can it be? I thought, and for one, brief moment, my world froze in a solid silent vacuum as the reality of my dad’s lonely death seeped into my eyes and ears, my nose and throat, my pores.  Death, on tiptoes, stole the man I knew and loved and left in his place a strange, empty shell; someone new and unfamiliar.

Did I know this man, my metamorphosed father?  Of course I knew who he was once was.  In his previous iteration, he was there in the delivery room.  He was there in the emergency room when I broke my arm, the courtroom when I married my wife, every childhood bedroom that a sicker, younger version of myself occupied.  But then, now, in that moment, he is, was not that man.  In that moment, in that room where I watched him slowly grow older, sicker, more broken, he became a stranger once more.  A week later, a lifetime later, a lifetime ago.

The memorial service.

Were we remembering the same person?  Or so many iterations of one person?  The uncle, the husband, the businessman.  My father, my hero, my friend.  The people in that room that I’d met before were as strange as the ones I hadn’t.  Ah yes, I’d say, of course I know who you are.  Who, I’d think, is this person?  Thank you, I’d say, for your condolences.  Why, I would think, are you here?  I saw everyone there through melancholy lenses.  People changed by, dressed in, obscured by death’s cold hand.

Even I, my most familiar self, was not who I had been.  My reflection, a refraction.  My memories and perceptions hung at arm’s length in the rough-hewn obsidian remains of my soul.  Darkness?  No, no.  Darkness gives the illusive promise of a reciprocal light.  The graying world as I saw it seemed fake, painted, staged, wrapped in cellophane.  I could perceive in the corner of my eyes a barrier separating me from the rest of the world, like the lines around a moving cartoon, defining it from its surroundings and confining it to itself.

Confined to myself, to the what’s it called? Cortege?  The funeral procession, the line that defines those that belong to the living and those that belong to the dead.  I look to the left and a stranger is standing there.

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” – Abraham Lincoln

Alright.  I’m back.  Back back.  Back for more.  Back with a vengeance and a bone to pick.

WARNING: It’s not usually like this around here, but I say the word “shit” a lot in this one.

One of the positive things that has happened over the past year is that I got fired from my job.  Wait what?  Yeah, I said it.  Getting fired from my job was one of the better points in my year.  I hated that job.  I worked 55 hour weeks getting paid peanuts to stock beer in grocery stores.  It was long and the company was/is a joke.  When my dad got sick the second time and went into hospice, do you know what my boss told me?  “Remember, you’ve still got a job to do.”  Cold-blooded, man.  The salesman that covered my region said the same thing.  One of the many things that my father bestowed upon was a stellar work ethic, so getting the job done was never an issue, but they chose that route.  It was a bad place to be.

So anyway, I worked Friday-Tuesday.  I came in one Friday and my boss pretty much lays into me because the beer in the cooler wasn’t rotated.  All he ever told me was that the beer needed to be rotated on Mondays and Tuesdays.  He yells at me, my supervisor calls as I’m walking to the back of the store and he gives me hell.  Then I get back to where my boss is and he starts up again, ultimately asking me “do you even want to work here anymore?”

I didn’t have an answer.  I didn’t want to work there.  I didn’t want to not have a job but I definitely didn’t work there.  So I shrugged.  That was enough for him and the end of my time there.

Whatever.  Their loss.  That’s not my point.

Neither is this.  I went for about a week trying to find something, anything to get some money coming in.  I applied for unemployment.  I sold some of my belongings.  I did what I could.  After that first week, a friend of mine that just worked weekends at the beer place calls and says that he might be able to get me on at the traffic products company he worked at during the week (his “real job”).  Traffic products?  I thought.  I don’t know.  But I needed money like nobody’s business so I told him I was in.  So I came in and I busted my ass like I always do at work.  I hustled to learn the products and processes.  I was making less than I did at the beer job, but like I said, I have a pretty damn good work ethic so I got in there and did the damn thing.  Within a week, I went from being a floater to having a legit position.  Within a few weeks, the owner promoted me to Warehouse Foreman.  Over the next few months, I continued to hustle and learn and get the warehouse into shape.  A few weeks ago, I got promoted to Production Manager, overseeing the warehouse and the in-house sign shop.

And that is part of my point.  Hustle is important.  Work is important.  Responsibility is important.

Now that I’m a manager, I get to, well, manage other people.  I’ve got the Production side of it, but I’m not a huge fan of, well, other people.  I’ve got about seven guys total that I supervise and their kind of a mixed bag.  A couple of them are something else and one in particular has proven to be a real piece of work.  He’s been there for about a year.  He stayed around even after a bunch of people broke off and created a competing business.  He stayed even when shit got real heavy and we were overwhelmed with the size and numbers of sign orders coming in. That’s great.  But he also makes a bunch of mistakes.  And he gets stoned a lot of time before work.  And sometimes during work.  And probably always after work.

So he’s gotten in trouble for other things that may or may not have had to do with him being stoned.  I don’t think he’s a bad guy and I could give a shit less what he does after work, but I can guarantee that his personal stuff is bleeding into his professional performance.  He’s had some more issues lately and made some dumb mistakes and we’re also (unrelated) trying to cross-train some other people (myself included) to do the sign design on the computer, a task which, until now, was more-or-less exclusively his to do.  Now, he’s (understandably) worried that he’s training his replacement (not necessarily true).

I’ve been in this situation.  I trained a guy a few jobs back that wind up getting the promotion that I had been training for.  It’s a terrible feeling.  But I didn’t give up and let things fall to the wayside.  I’ve never gotten into a bunch of trouble at work (just fired out of nowhere!) and been worried about someone else taking my job, but I imagine it’s not too far off.  I imagine that I would be walking on egg shells trying to make sure that I didn’t rock the boat or piss the big bosses off.  But what does this guy do?  He rocks the boat.  He pisses the big bosses off.  And now he’s that much closer to actually losing his job.

This blows my mind some, but what really gets me is his response to getting formally in trouble today.  He assumes the role of the victim.  Oh, everyone’s so hard on him (they’re not).  Oh, he’s done so much for the company (not really).  Oh, he was just taking a few minutes to vape in the warehouse (big no-no).  Oh, nobody likes him (not true).  What the hell, man?  You messed up.  A lot of times.  And you got a hundred extra chances.  And everyone coddles you and tries to make it easier for you so as not to ruffle your feathers and you don’t feel appreciated?  Give me a break.

My point in telling you all of this, whoever you are, is that you have to take responsibility for you: yourself, your actions, your life, etc.  No one’s going to take responsibility for a grown man.  No one wants to spend extra time and effort making your life easier at their expense.  Maybe they will for a little bit, but not forever.  And why would you want that?  If you’re unhappy somewhere, go somewhere else.  God Bless America.  40 hours a week is too much time to spend somewhere that you hate that much.  Also, are you giving it your all?  All 110%?  Roll up your sleeves, do it to it, and see if your situation improves.  If it doesn’t, it probably wasn’t meant to be.  And that’s okay.  No one’s going to hate you for wanting to do something else.  No one’s going to kill you for leaving your desk, your office, your job.

Take responsibility, take charge of you and all of your shit and figure it out.  Because no one else is going to do it for you.

That’s all.

 

Responsibly,

Glass

“Strength shows, not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hello old friend.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I have four good friends, including my wife.  She’s the only one who lives close and out of the four, I’ve known her the shortest, although most of the time it feels like I’ve known her my whole life.

The next closest is the one I’ve known the longest (going on twenty years now, buddy!).  He lives about three and a half hours away.

My next closest geographically, and the one I’ve known the next longest (what is it? 13 years now?) lives about eight and a half hours away.

The farthest lives about seventeen hours away by car and I met him a few months after I met the last guy.  We made that drive once.  From there to here.  It was an amazing experience.  We drank caffeinated beverages and ate No-Doze like they were candy.  We drove through a exaggeratedly-lit tunnel in and under Alabama that I still see in my dreams sometimes.  We skated across the foggy swamps of Louisiana in a fog of our own.  We jammed Tom Waits and Modest Mouse and whatever else the burned CDs and iPods had in store.  It was something else.  Surreal but Hyper-real.  Life-changing to say the least.

We don’t talk as much as we used to.  Life’ll do that.  But he’s still one of my best friends and when we do talk it’s always a treat.   I talked to him earlier today.  I’ve had a whirlwind of a past year or so and I’m trying once again to start over for the last time so I needed some feedback.  Do you know what he left me with at the end of the conversation.  Verbatim:

“.. get the blog back!  Its been almost a year man”

Damn, Bones.  You got me again.  So here it is.

I didn’t know what to write about when I started this.  I just knew that I wanted to get it going again.  Make some changes.  Do some things more and and some things differently from here on out.  Restart.  Start again.

It’s been a rough year.  We observed? celebrated? the one-year anniversary of my Dad dying a few weeks ago.  I’ve dipped in and out of depression and anxiety and anger and fits of manic happiness and numbness.  I got fired from my job for not doing something that I was never told to do.  I got another job and have since nearly double my wages.  My wife and I had another beautiful baby girl, born on what would’ve been my father’s 69th birthday.  I’ve been beaten and lifted and soothed and then beaten and lifted and soothed all over again.  It has been, in my own words, “a landmark year.”  But I’ve gotten through it.  Not flawlessly or expertly or effectively and sometimes just barely.  But I’ve gotten through it.  So far.  I don’t think the struggle will ever go away.  I don’t necessarily want it to.  But I’m changing the way I react to it.  I’m going to struggle regardless, so why now struggle for what I want?  For me, my wife, our family.  I’m starting anew and I’m starting here and now.

My wife, my best friend told me today to “choose my hard.”  She said it’s all hard: going to work, doing the things, why not pick the hard that works for you?  Goddamn brilliant.  So I’m choosing this for her, for me, for us, for anyone and everyone and no one.  I’m choosing my struggle and carving out the life that I think is worth struggling for.

Here we go.

 

Again,

Glass

“I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was.” – Daniel Day-Lewis

I enjoy Daniel-Day Lewis.  He is definitely one of my top five favorite actors.  That list pretty much goes like this (not in order this time):

Daniel Day-Lewis (DDL)

Tommy Lee Jones (TLJ)

Gary Oldman

Bill Paxton (B. Pax)

Today we’ll put Willem Dafoe

People, one person, a friend, former friend used to tell me that I look like Bill Paxton.  I don’t see it, but I’ll take it.  Have you ever played that drinking game called Circle of Death or Waterfalls or whatever with the deck of cards and each card is a certain little game/task?  When we played, there was always a card that was “Categories” which I think might be its own drinking game to some extent.  The person who draws names a category (i.e. makes of automobile), then you go around the circle and each person has to name something in that category (Chevy, Ford, Mercedes etc.).  When you get to someone who can’t come up with an answer within about five seconds the round is over and that person has to drink.  I used to play that game with the afore-mentioned former friend.  Do you know what my go-to category was?

Bill Paxton movies.

Because he has been in a ton of movies.  Many of which I have seen.  Even more of which I can name.  Speaking of Bill Paxton, did you know that he “is the only other actor, along with Lance Hendrikson, to have been killed by a terminator, an alien, and a predator on screen (per IMDB).”

Anyway.  Back to DDL.  Because this post isn’t about B. Pax or DDL really.  It’s about privacy.  Or the opposite of it.

I want to talk to you about public bathrooms.

I consider myself a pretty private person.  I use a pseudonym on this here blog and I try not to get too specific or personal.  In real life, I don’t have a lot of friends and I like to take time to get to know someone before I open up and tell them a whole bunch of stuff about me.  I feel like it works better that way for everyone.  I used to avoid public restrooms at all costs mainly because I think they’re pretty gross, but I’ve been working 10-12 hour shifts in a town a half an hour away from my house for the past several months now, so it’s become necessary to use public facilities more often.

Here’s the thing.  I know that stores don’t have to provide a restroom.  Many don’t.  I know they don’t have to provide a spotless, sterile environment for customers or passersby to use at their convenience.  Because that’s what it is: a convenience.  But if you’re going to put time and money and manpower into creating a bathroom for people to use, here are the things that bother me the most.

1. Warm Seats.  Let’s get this one out of the way because there really isn’t much of anything that anyone can do to eliminate the incredibly unsettling sensation of sitting down on a public toilet seat that someone else has already warmed up for you.
2. Paper Towels/Hand Dryers.  I am concerned about the environment, but not so much that I won’t grab a handful of bleached, pre-consumer, white paper towels to dry my hands instead of standing there hunched over against a wall trying to dry my giant hands with the equivalent of a warm spring breeze.  If I’m going to use a hand dryer, it’s gotta be an XCelerator (is that what it’s called?) or the Dyson blade, because I need gale-force winds to dry my hands.  Time is money.  The thing that really bothers me about the hand dryers has to do..
3. Inward-Opening Doors.  There is no place for an inward opening door in a public restroom.  Why?  Because not everyone washes their hands, but everyone has to open that door.  And if you combine that with a bathroom that installed gentle breeze hand dryers, you’re pretty much going to be opening that dirty-ass door with your moistened fingers.  Unless you have one of these bad boys:
   

The StepNPull is one of the most brilliant inventions, as long as it’s probably installed and the hydraulics on the door aren’t set to Herculean.  Speaking of doors.

4.  Gaps in Stall Doors.  There can’t be more that maybe 1/16th of an inch space between the door and the frame on a bathroom stall.  Otherwise, I feel like someone is probably going to peek in.  It’s unsettling.

5.  Automatic toilets.  I would almost rather use my foot to flush a manual toilet that use a poorly calibrated auto-flush toilet.  There’s something really frustrating about an automatic toilet flushing way too early or not at all.  Then you have to push the button on the side which could very well be covered in microparticles.  Of poo.  And speaking of the toilets themselves.

6.  Urinal Troughs.  

Quite possible the worst bathroom fixture in the history of bathrooms.  I definitely don’t want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some other dude while we’re urinating.  They had these in my elementary school and I thought it was weird then and I still do.  I’d rather pee outside.

–

Thanks for listening, Dear Reader.  I know this is a far cry from my usual profundity but it’s been on my mind lately and I thought I’d put it out there.

 

Publicly,

Glass

P.S. – Here’s a glimpse into of one of my favorite restrooms in Central Texas, located at the new Brookshire Brothers off FM 306 up by Canyon Lake.  Each of the two sinks has three spouts like this: one for foaming soap, one for the water, and one for the high-power hand dryer.  The dryer also has a light to let you know that it is, indeed, the device that will DRY your hands.  Bathroom tech at its finest, am I right?

“The word ‘happiness’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” – Carl Jung

I’ve been avoiding this post.  I’ve been avoiding this whole blog to be honest, save for the occasional stats-check here and there.  I haven’t written anything in about five weeks, which is along time, even for me.  I’m going to tell you now that this post is not going to be a very pleasant one, at least in the beginning.  It is going to be very dark and then probably darker and very emotional and then it should end on a positive note, if all goes well.

You see, my dad died on March 8th.  I typed and retyped that sentence a few different ways to maybe soften the blow (I hear I can be overly blunt sometimes), but the truth is that my father is dead.  He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last summer, it was 95% gone by November, then came back with a vengeance and took his life.

My wife and I consulted Betsy Braun’s book Just Tell Me What to Say when we were trying to figure out how to break the news to our four year-old daughter.  We didn’t tell her much during the first round of chemo because the outlook was good and we really didn’t know what all was going to happen.  Then the cancer came back and we felt like we should prepare her for the worst, especially once my dad decided that he would rather stay at home than suffer through another round of chemo.  So Betsy Braun says to be honest and use the medical terminology and avoid euphemisms.  During the first round:  Papa has lumps inside his body called cancer that makes him sick but the doctors have a very strong medicine called chemotherapy that they think will help and they know a lot about cancer so they’ll know the best ways to help Papa get better.  Later, during hospice:  The medicine didn’t work and cancer is making it harder and harder for Papa’s body to work.  Papa’s body is going to stop working soon and he is going to die.  Then:  Papa died today.

This is difficult.  I can remember her reaction to each conversation.  I can remember the works coming out of my mouth feeling like barbed wire but sounding much smoother.  Trying to stay strong for everyone around me.  I think it might be harder now in some ways though, now that the shock is gone, and the memorial service and internment have passed.  I feel like a  lot of other people have moved on and maybe don’t think about him as much as I do.  I know they don’t.  But I think about it everyday.

You see, I’m the one that found my dad.  My wife spilled her heart out to him, we left the room, and when I returned less than five minutes later, he was gone.  I still think about his face.  His eyes.  His hands.  I think about the Medical Examiner coming to the house and the funeral home workers coming to get him in the hearse and how terribly sad it all was and my  through all of it.  I kept/keep thinking it’s a joke and that he’ll call or come around the corner and we’ll all be pissed that he played such a mean joke but so happy that he’s still alive.  I think about all the things he’s going to miss and how I should’ve called more and how I miss him so much that it physically hurts.

My dad is dead and I was not, am not ready for it and each second, hour, dayweekmonth that goes by is that much further from the last time I’ll ever see him alive or otherwise.  I held his hand as the warmth left it and my heart filled with pain and sadness and I sat and played guitar for him while we waited for the official people to come and officially say he was dead and take him away.  I helped the guy take the hospice equipment out of my parents’ bedroom and out of the house so that my mother could sleep in the room again without the glaring reminder that her husband had just died there.

Her husband, my dad, my hero is dead and I keep hoping that I’ll feel better about it if I tell myself a hundred, thousand, hundred thousand times a day, but it doesn’t.  I was not, am not ready for him to not be here.  I was not, am not ready to be an adult without him in my life to provide me with the paragon of what it means to be a husband, a dad, a hero.  There are so many big things coming up that I want his advice on, that I want him to see and be a part of.  I want my daughter to have two grandpas because I didn’t.  I want her to have strong, decent men (and women) in her life so that she grows up with high expectations and standards for interpersonal relationships.  I want my dad around because he was, is the best man I know and I miss him so much it hurts.

—

It’s almost exactly one day later and I’m glad I stopped where I did.  That train of thought tends to dip into some even heavier stuff that I probably shouldn’t ever put in writing or say out loud.  I talked to my wife last night.  I talked to my mom, too.   I slept better; I feel better.

[My dad’s death is like a semi-colon; a break in the sentence that unifies the pre&post the before&after in all of this.]

One of the biggest thoughts I have about all of this, something that I wrestle with almost every single day, concern the Why’s.  Why him?  Why us? Why now? Why not that guy? Why did the cancer go away in the first place?  Why did it come back?

The truth, The Truth is that our world in its entirety, life  Life as a Whole is beyond our understanding.  I believe in God and Jesus.  My God is not a white-haired old man, but an energy that permeates everything and creates a balance within all of existence.  This thought, this idea of a balance is what keeps me going when the going gets tough.  Faith is a powerful tool in situations like this and situations that aren’t like this at all.  Faith is the current in the river, the warmth in sunlight.  I feel better today, but I don’t feel great everyday.  I have to wrap my head around this and have faith that my dad is in a better state.  That his energy lives on and that his soul is balanced and cleansed and where God intends it to be.

I miss my dad.  I know that it is going to continue to be hard without him around.  But I also know, because he told me, that it’s important to keep living my life.  It’s funny but I appreciate the days like this, the ones where I feel good and energetic and happy? more, mainly because of how sad I’ve been recently.

So, in closing.  I would like to proudly announce that Mrs. Glass and I are expecting Baby Number Two!  We don’t know if it’s a boy or girl yet, but the due date just so happens to be on my dad’s birthday!  We are so very happy and thankfully my dad got the opportunity to see the first sonogram while he was alive.  I now that wherever he is, he’s looking out for us, all of us, and that he lives on in our hearts and our blood and our name and our memories.

I love you, Dad.

 

 

Half-full, half-empty,

Glass

“So we’re gonna walk through the roads of creation.” Bob Marley, ‘Exodus’

[Four Windows by David Glass available in the Kindle Store HERE]

 

Before I get into the bulk of this post, I want to take a moment and say thank you, Dear Reader for all of the time that you’ve spent perusing my blog.  धन्यवाद to my Readers in India. благодарю to all of the Readers in Russia.  This month I celebrate the one-year anniversary of this blog, and while I have not found (made) much time to write posts, I have told myself that it’s time to get back into it and hit this writing thing hard.

Fun fact: The United, India, and Russia are my three largest readerships, however, in 2015 I had views from 50 different countries I believe I have some additional countries to ass to that list from the past two months.  I share this because it blows my mind.  I have a hard time visualizing other people reading this around the world, but it warms my heart to know that they do.  So thank you, thank you, thank you.  I hope you continue to read and enjoy this journey with me.

 

Speaking of writing, I was looking at my Kindle Direct Press report again, realizing that my marketing skills are, well, apparently non-existent.  I keep saying it’s not about the money, so I’m giving them away one at a time for free.  Starting now:

– – –

Exodus Mining Company

The Exodus Mining Company was founded in the southern region of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in 1959 with plans to capitalize on the restructuring of the Egyptian government after the World War II and the subsequent British occupation.  With the creation of the Republic of Egypt looming, the EMC’s founders thought, not unwisely, that the demand for building materials would blossom alongside the burgeoning government.  Exodus’ owners dumped their life savings into the equipment necessary to mine the region’s younger and older granitoid deposits and persuaded the existing interim officials to look the other way as they began making preparations to dig.

It seemed like a foolproof plan.  The granite served a number of purposes appropriate to government building.  Sculptures to heroic new leaders, memorials to the fallen, veneers on buildings and the buildings themselves would all require a substantial yet aesthetically pleasing material with which to be constructed.  The market for abundant reservoirs of said material was set to boom, and Exodus was set to be at the forefront of that financial upswing.

Work began as planned at the end of their first year, but it wasn’t long before unforeseen obstacles slowed the EMC’s progress in the desert.  Despite the fairly consistent makeup of the rock, the machinery could not seem to penetrate more than a few meters.  Explosives malfunctioned or failed to detonate.  The rock itself seemed to resist all attempts to excavate it.  Workers, family members of the founders, began to disappear from the makeshift lodging that had been constructed as temporary housing.  Some of them were found dazed atop the mountains, muttering and clawing at the dirt and stone with raw and bloodied fingers.  As the vehicles had not been moved, the rest of the workers were presumed to have merely wandered into the desert, their trails erased by the blowing sand.

Even stranger were the visitors.  At first it was just people from the surrounding villages claiming to be drawn to site.  Then people from other parts of the region, then the world.  Men and women of all ages arrived unscathed from the direction of the deep desert sometimes with children in tow.  Some of them seemed normal enough, but others seemed to have been pulled like loose threads from the fabric of time, as if there being in the present were more uncomfortable than their barefoot journey through the sand.  Within a week, the only thing common among the visitors was the pull they said that dragged them there, not like a pleasant aroma but like a hook in their heart, as if the only relief was proximity to the exposed stone.  Like the stone itself held the cure to some deep and destructive disease.  And so the came, hundreds of them, drawn into the mountains to find a peace they only understood on the most profound levels.
Another month or so passed and the Exodus Mining Company quickly eroded into history, forgotten by most like the dust is was birthed from.  As for the visitors, their trip into the mountains Sinai was as fragile in their minds as the path they took, but the peace that remained was a lasting vestige of their departure into the desert.

– – –

Seeing as how the whole thing is up, I thought I’d also share some commentary about this piece.  I came up with the general idea years ago, that someone had mined Mount Sinai and turned the rock into concrete which was then used to build a structure that drew people from all over.  Originally it was a highway overpass and there was a sort of homeless modern Moses prophesying from under the bridge, so to speak.  People would be drawn but (a la Cassandra) people would balk at his words until the end of the story when the proverbial camera pans out and people are seen walking en masse to the site as the sun sets over the overpass aaaaaand scene.

A few aspects of this approach didn’t work for me, ultimately leading to a total restructuring of the story.  First, the focus was too much on the man.  The idea was supposed to be that the stone, not the man, was drawing the people and the overpass version veered away from the stone too much towards the end.  In that same vein, the whole idea of a structure at all became a problem.  I thought: overpass, no; street or highway, no; then settled on a government building.  The problem with a highway was that I had originally wanted the story set in the US, but couldn’t conceive of a concise and reasonable way to explain why the US would import Egyptian granite for the building of the any sort of American road when there is plenty of rock here in the States already.

Some research needed to be done around this time to make sure that I was being geologically accurate and establishing a concrete foundation (no pun intended) for the semi-religious premise that would float above it.  The actual site of the Biblical Sinai is not universally agreed upon, so it took so reading to decide which site or region I wanted to use.  Also, I needed to confirm the uses for the materials found in that area.  Finally, after deciding on a government structure as the focal point of the religious aura, I had to find a time in Egyptian history that would facilitate the need for extensive mining of raw granitoids.  I got it all sorted out and got ready to start writing.

One last thing was bothering me, however.  I didn’t want to religiously idolize any government entity and, again, take away from the fact that it was the stone that held the residual-ish power.  So it all came down to the mine.  I had the time and the place,  I created people with a general backstory (focus on the stone) and worked to keep the narrative on the effect of the stone versus anyone or anything in particular.  I chose Exodus as the name of the company because of the Book in the Bible of the same name and because I think it added some connectivity and clarity to the piece.

It was a real joy to research and write and I am very proud of it.  I hope you enjoyed and I encourage you to share it with someone you think might enjoy it as well.

Thank you as always, Dear Reader.

More to follow.

Deeply,

Glass