Real Joe

This Real Joe blog has been dormant since 2008.

It’ll remain so until there’s a new blog and radio show/podcast to take its place.

There was a tragic story in last weekend’s Strib, Tragedy follows invitation to prayer, about the Rev. Kyle Lake, a minister who accidentally electrocuted himself as he launched a 30-day campaign at his church based on the book, Suprise Me: A 30-day faith experiment. The book’s author, Terry Esau, was there. Esau, in a Q&A with the Strib, reportedly said:

As you realized what was going on, I was going, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I couldn’t believe it. My first feelings were anger. I thought, You’ve got to be joking, God. You can’t be serious… Kyle believed that stuff happens, and it happened that day. He violated the physical laws of nature. Electricity is there. If you violate it, it has consequences. I don’t know. There are so many things that happen. And I know there’s the theology that says God causes and ordains all things and there’s also the concept of free will, that we get to choose. Where do those things collide and come out? I don’t really know.

I like the basic idea of Esau’s experiment because it avoids the pitfall of false prayer, i.e., asking God to give you what you want. He writes:

Every day, for thirty days, I pray and ask God to surprise me? “Surprise Me, God.” Nothing more, nothing less. Three words. Not asking for something in particular. Not giving him my list. Not presenting my agenda. Just inviting him to barge into my life in any old way he pleases-to crash into the busyness of my schedule and mess with it.

I’ve not read the book but where I think he goes wrong — and the electrocution illustrates it — is presuming that God can pull levers in the physical universe. It’s a destructive belief and undermines the potential of a truer, more helpful prayer, eg, “Help me see something surprising today” or “If something surprising happens today, help me respond in a way that’s helpful.”

When I told my daughter about the article, she reminded me about this Far Side cartoon of God at his computer, poised to “smite” the dufus guy walking under the dangling piano. I love this cartoon because it’s the perfect illustration of how many people view God.

Five years ago this week, my dad died of miscellaneous complications from a hospital visit. Today is the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. Julian Lennon has a statement on the diary/blog page of his website that includes this:

He was the father I loved who let me down in so many ways. Who knows how our relationship might have developed if he had not been murdered … it’s painful to think that his early death robbed me of the chance for us to know each other better.

Those are my sentiments, even though my dad wasn’t murdered and lived to be 80.

My wife and I were volunteers for this event, the Melaleuca Freedom Celebration’s National Guard Appreciation Run on Harriet Island in St. Paul. (She works for the company. See the coverage in the Star Tribune: Runners linked by love and satellite.)

When the race ended, National Guard members stationed in Iraq could talk via satellite with friends and family. See more photos starting here.

Kent Nerburn is a book author who I’ve helped become a blogger. His books have made a difference in my life – as a father, a husband, a citizen, a man. He’s been to Northfield a couple of times to do readings.

He’s in the UK this week but he’s blogged three times in the past 24 hours about the shooting rampage at Red Lake High School where he once taught.

Read his posts for insight and inspiration.

3/21 – 9:15 PM: Red Lake shootings

3/21 – 11:12 PM: Red Lake Redux: They are all our children

3/22 – 11:55 AM: The Circle — A Story from the Heart of Red Lake

3:15 update: Thanks to Tony, a blogger named Hammer has now posted about Red Lake with a link to Kent’s blog. Thanks, guys.

I’m heading to the Mayo Clinic’s St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester later this afternoon. My motorcycle buddy Jim Douglas and I are paying a visit to Jon Harmsen who was severely injured in a cycle accident about a month ago.

Jon is the son of another friend, Larry Harmsen whom I’ve known and gone biking with for many years. (Jim and Larry rode on the very first RJ Tour back in Nov. 200.) Jon joined us on our one-day Real Joe Motorcycle Tour that we held back in August. (No, I never wrote about it. I did take photos, but lost them in a hard drive crash.) A couple weeks later, he and his wife rear-ended a van and they’ve both been in the hospital since. Details and updates on CaringBridge.

I may moblog some photos from the hospital.

No, no that SOS.

I mean “shot of solitude” SOS which I wrote an essay about 4 years ago (blog post is still us but not the essay.)

One of my Wigley and Associates‘ weblog clients is Eden Prairie Police Chief Dan Carlson. Earlier this morning, he blogged a Week in Review post in which he gave a little glimpse of his activities from his personal life. It ended with a paragraph about the importance of quiet time.

This week I was cramming to get our taxes done (yep, I’m a laggard) and catch up on client work. On Wed. morning, I noticed that the background tension/noise in my head was approaching apeshit levels so I took time for a 30 minute SOS walk in the Carleton College Arb just after sunrise. Ahhh. That simple break got me through two-days of tax prep and is still reverberating. I gotta remember to do it more often.

I started this weblog over four years ago, part of a plan to make Real Joe into a media property, on a par with other big web content sites. The dotcom collapse took care of that, as well as my own naivete about what was required to create a sustainable online content business.

I can’t say I’m any smarter about the latter. But after a four-month hiatus, I’ve discovered that I miss blogging for Real Joe. Something about the regular discipline of reflecting about what’s going on in my life and the cultural sea I swim in… and getting some feedback from other guys who are doing likewise.

I just ordered Real Live Preacher’s new book that’s based on his blog, supplemented with some essays. I’d like to do that someday. But in the meantime, I’ll just blog for myself and a small audience of family, friends, colleagues, and a few strangers. How often? I don’t know. My self-employed income is as tenuous as ever, so I can’t devote much time here. I’m aiming for shorter, more frequent posts.

I hope to have a meeting in another week or so with two guys I know who are bloggers. We plan to brainstorm on ways that we might collaborate on a blog.

I’m in Duluth for the US round of the World Trials Championship, taking photos and blogging for the organizers. I did this two years ago but this time it’s a paid gig for my Wigley and Associates business — the first time that a recreational hobby of mine has been a business revenue-producer and business expense-taker instead of a drain on the family budget. Which helps on the home front, minor though it is.

I’m increasingly liking the self-employed life, and if I can get my book Small Business Blogging done by the end of the summer, I’m guessing I’ll like it even more. My big challenge now is being organized and self-disciplined enough so that I get enough billable hours each month and enough book-writing time in each day. I can’t really afford taking a vacation because of the hit in billable hours I’d take. So either I get way ahead of the game by accumulating more billable hours than normal (it’s surprisingly hard to get more than 20 per week). Or I get a book published and generate recurring revenue from it. I like the latter option.

And if I can pull it off in the business blogging world, then I’ll be better equipped to try and pull it off in a Real Joe-related endeavor, like my stalled Ego Orgasms book.

Ever had your sperm count checked? I did, waaaay back 29 years ago or so when we were trying to get pregnant the first time. We tried the Symptothermal Method to no avail and the next step was for me to get checked out.

I don’t exactly remember the instructions the doctor’s office gave me but I recalled the scene when I read Stuart Green’s Sex and the Married Man column in this month’s issue of The Rake. His buddy’s wife had a fit when she found out he used a ‘dirty’ magazine provided by the fertility clinic to help him do what needed to be done to make the required deposit.

Lucky for me, my newly wedded wife had no such hang-ups. As I headed out the door with a, um, glossy magazine tucked into my coat, she sent me off with a with a “Hey, have fun!” smirk and a smooch. It never occurred to me to thank her for not going ballistic. Maybe I’ll do that today.

Real Live Preacher, anonymous for 18 months, announced his true identity this week: Gordon Atkinson, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas.

But the bigger revelation to me was that last week he announced he was cutting way back on his blog. He’s got a huge (by my standards) following: 1500 readers per day. And yet this has become a problem for him.

The past couple of weeks I’ve had my civic hat on quite a bit in my hometown of Northfield, moderating an online forum on local issues, taking photos of community events, blogging, etc. It’s satisfying because I’m making a contribution to the civic health of the town and of course, I get occasional kudos. But it also connects me to townsfolk and as a bit of introvert, I like the way it happens.

So while I have pangs about neglecting Real Joe, and would like to have Atkinson’s traffic problem, I’m aware of what I could lose if “success” in its typical trappings came knocking on my door. My civic hat is one that would likely be tossed aside.

I competed in the first observed trials event of our club’s season over the weekend… and I finished both days, the first time since last July when a small plague of Uncategorized aches and injuries descended upon my not-yet-geezerly-by-god body.

I rode better than I expected, in part due to the gem of a motorcycle I was on. But I actually tried out my Malcom Smith/Phil Mickelson smiling strategy just about every time I got on the bike to ride a section or to ride between sections. I rode more relaxed than usual and I had waaaaay more fun than usual. My concentration still sucked at times. Radical thought: Maybe next time I’ll even try it while I’m in section, like Malcolm.

I think I’m onto something here.

Last Thursday morning, I woke up after having a very vivid dream that Dru Sjodin’s body had been found. It was so startlingly real that I immediately wondered if I’d read about it online the night before… or if I was having one of those experiences where one’s dream foretells an event that actually happens. My son Tyson had a dream that he was in a car accident only a few minutes before the van he was in was hit head-on by a drunk driver.

Sjodin’s body was found on Saturday. I told this to my mathematician buddy Bruce Morlan, wondering whether this might make me a minor league clairvoyant. He said I’d need to know a few more details and kindly blogged the details:

– Those who dream of an event and the event happens
– Those who do not dream of an event and the event happens
– Those who dream of an event and the event does not happen
– Those who do not dream of an event and the event does not happen

He put it in terms of dreaming of tornadoes: “To scientifically determine if our dreams are predictive, we would have to deliberately collect all four of the numbers shown, particularly annoying would be finding out the true number of people who dreamt of tornadoes that did not happen, only slightly less annoying would be trying to collect the number of people who dreamt of things other than tornadoes when tornadoes did occur.”

It occurred to me that the same could be said of people who pray for future events, like the safe return of Sjodin. If she’d been found alive, there would have been a torrent of media quotes about how it was a miracle, that God answered the prayers of the millions who were praying for her safe return since the day of her dramatic abduction and the nationwide news coverage of it.

As I read some of the stories of families receiving the bodies of troops killed in Iraq, no mention is ever made of prayers or God. Yet surely most of these people prayed diligently for the safe return of their loved ones. And just as surely, many of them are now having a crisis of faith because of their lack of understanding of the differences between false prayer and true prayer.

What’s also puzzling is how supposedly enlighened members of the clergy are generally silent on these kinds of intercessionary prayers. Jesus wasn’t hesitant to criticize the way some people prayed, but it’s apparently politically incorrect to tell people that prayers for future events are not only mistaken from a statistical point of view (as goofy as believing that dreams predict the future) but potentially harmful to their relationship with their God/higher power.

Yesterday I was standing at the return counter at Best Buy and the guy examining the digital camera I was bringing back on the exact 14th day since I bought it looks up and says to me, “You’re a couple weeks past the return date. We have a 14 day return policy.”

I tell him that the first camera I bought was a month ago, but I brought that one back and got this one instead… 14 days ago. He patiently explains that their policy applies to when the first camera was purchased. Basically, I’m fucked.

My dad had a tough time returning stuff for credit or exchange. I have a vivid memory of him trying to return a Skill saw to a hardware store — I must have been around ten. He ended up screaming and swearing at the store manager. I thought he was going to punch him.

So I’ve inherited the problem though I don’t quite get what the mistaken thinking is. As I stand at the counter, I feel beads of sweat forming on my forehead. It’s as if I’ve been asked to give an impromptu speech in front of a thousand people. My body’s reading some goofy signal from my brain that this is a life or death, fight or flight situation. I don’t quite have my dad’s temper so my inclination is to walk away. Then it occurs to me that I’ll have to face my wife when I get home. She’s the queen of merchandise returns and seems to actually enjoy the negotiations when things get sticky. She’ll be privately aghast at my weak-kneed behavior, and although she’s sensitive enough to not berate me for it, she will be upset.

So I pause and it then occurs to me to make an offer. “How about I get another camera and keep that one instead of returning this one for credit?” He goes off to check with his supervisor and comes back with an approval but they’ll have to charge me a 15% restocking fee. A seasoned negotiator would have argued to have that fee waived since the repackaging I did was flawless. But not me. I’m just relieved. I’m now the proud owner of a Canon PowerShot A70.

Looking back on it now, I’m still not sure what goes on in my head in situations like that. It must be a fear of being a wimp, being taken advantage of, bullied — the legacy of my bullying father who had no reluctance in expressing his disdain anytime he saw a hint of Momma’s boy behavior in me.

I tell myself now that it’s time to shelve that reaction. Next time, I’ll take a deep breath and see it as a dance of sorts, a chance to get better at negotiating, a challenge not unlike climbing a wall. The idea is to not so much as to emerge victorious over someone but to create a win-win situation — a business lingo phrase I hate but I don’t know what else to call it. I’m sort of picturing it now in my mind’s eye. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

I watched the final round of the Masters last weekend and couldn’t help but notice how Phil Mickelson kept smiling. It wasn’t just after a good shot, either. He often kept a smile on his face the entire time while walking to his next shot.

(Photo not from the Masters in Augusta.)

It made me wonder whether this was a strategy suggested by his sports psychologist, one designed to help him stay relaxed in a high-choke situation.

His smile in the midst of intense competition reminded me of legendary dirt biker Malcolm Smith, whose prowess in a variety of motorcycle events and ever-present grin were chronicled in the all-time classic motorcycle movie, On Any Sunday.

There is research demonstrating that by deliberately smiling — putting your facial muscles in a grin position — you can often trigger feelings of happiness, assuming, of course, that your intent is sincere. Smiles, like tears, can be associated with a wide range of emotions.

So while I’ve not yet tried it in any athletic competition, I’ve been trying to trigger a smile whenever I’m aware that my head chatter has drifted into fretting or worrying about something in the future. It’s a step beyond Eckhart Tolle’s observation: “One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.”

Rather than waiting for my silent watcher to trigger this internal smile — which typically doesn’t happen but once in a while — I’m skipping right to the smile.

The result is a pleasant little rush, most often flavored with some gratitude. Example: Sonuvabitch, I forgot I have to do X for client Y. But I have to also get the fricking Z done and then… Oh, I’m fretting. [Forced Smile] I love my work. And I’m lucky to have a lot of interesting shit going on in my life right now instead of being bored or depressed. So I’ll get to those to-dos when I get to them but for right now, I’m just going enjoy the taste and warmth of this cup of coffee.

David Brooks is turning out to be one of my favorite columnists. His column on the Pledge of Allegiance One Nation, Enriched by Biblical Wisdom is but one example:

The lesson I draw from all this is that prayer should not be permitted in public schools, but maybe theology should be mandatory. Students should be introduced to the prophets, to the Old and New Testaments, to the Koran, to a few of the commentators who argue about these texts.

From this perspective, what gets recited in the pledge is the least important issue before us. Understanding what the phrase “one nation under God” might mean — that’s the important thing. That’s not proselytizing; it’s citizenship.

I enjoyed Mitch Albom’s first book, Tuesdays With Morrie. But a few months ago, halfway through his second, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I gave up and returned it to the library. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered my about it or why it didn’t grab me like his first.

Now I know why, after reading this David Brook’s opinion piece in last week’s NYT: Hooked on Heaven Lite

All societies construct their own images of heaven. Most imagine a wondrous city or a verdant garden where human beings come face to face with God. But the heaven that is apparently popular with readers these days is nothing more than an excellent therapy session. In Albom’s book, God, to the extent that he exists there, is sort of a genial Dr. Phil. When you go to his heaven, friends and helpers come and tell you how innately wonderful you are. They help you reach closure. In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It’s all about you.

“Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it,” Christopher Lasch wrote in “The Culture of Narcissism.” Lasch went on to call the therapeutic mentality an anti-religion that tries to liberate people from the idea that they should submit to a higher authority, so they can focus more obsessively on their own emotional needs.

I’m drawn to the Perennial Philosophy, popularized by Aldous Huxley in his book The Perennial Philosophy. I’ve not read the book but keep coming across references to it by authors who interest me, including one of my favorites, Timothy Miller, in his book How to Want What You Have. Huxley summarizes the fundamental doctrines common to the world religions in his introduction to the book Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God:

First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human Beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible foe a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

More to come, including a long quote that Miller uses in his book from This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience by Alan W. Watts.

We finally got away for our 30th wedding anniversary last weekend — a mere two months late. We went to our current nearby favorite bed and breakfast, the Thorwood Inn in Hastings

and stayed in a room called the Annie Laurie, one of many with both a fireplace and whirpool a few feet from one another.

As we luxuriate in a B&B like this one, one of us usually says something to the effect of, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have a bedroom like this at home — or at least a working fireplace and a hot tub in the backyard?”

And it would be great, of course, but I can’t help but think that, like every other luxury in life, we’d soon take it for granted and it would lose much of its special appeal. And getting away from the house, especially when the honeydolist is seriously lengthening and the dust bunnies madly procreating, is one of main advantages of a romantic getaway.

So for now, I’ll just consider us damn lucky to be able to afford a night away once in a while. And even more lucky that we’re still having romantic fun at this advanced age.

I’ve started reading a self-hypnosis book. I suggested to Robbie a couple of weeks ago that she might try hypnosis as another tool for dealing with her severe tinnitus. It turns out that one of the authors, Kevin Hogan, lives in nearby Eagan where I grew up and has a whole book and a section of his website devoted to tinnitus, which he suffers from, too. She’s trying to get into see him.

The book, Through the Open Door: Secrets of Self Hypnosis, is a how-to for a number of problems typically treated by hypnosis, including weight problems, smoking, lack of exercise, and Uncategorized phobias. It’s a little too filled with hype lingo for my taste, as evidenced by the number exclamation points!!! But they deal with a few more generic problems, and two caught my eye: procrastination and self-confidence. I’ve realized that my self-confidence often goes out the window whenever I’m competing in sports against someone who’s at or above my ability level. There are other times, too – some public-speaking situations, some business meetings. Their description of a self-hypnotic technique has some appeal, ie, easy to learn and devoid of new-agey lingo. I started practicing it yesterday and as soon as my fucking back allows me to start playing racquetball again, I’ll try it. I may take a whack at the procrastination technique, too, as soon as I get a Round Tuit.

I’d read something recently on the Putting Family First weblog about the importance of just enjoying your kids, playing with them for the sheer pleasure of it, rather than with the primary motive of teaching or improving them. Or maybe it was a newspaper article — I can’t seem to find it now.

And then I read Kent Nerburn’s blog about how he’s trying to raise money for a cemetary headstone – a child whose mother he discovered at his gravesite one day and wrote about in one of his books.

Kent blogged this:

I firmly believe that we are all called to live a life of service. But very often, the service is not something we choose, so much as something that chooses us. This particular small act has chosen me. It chose me on the day I first saw that grave with its decorations and wondered what it was all about. It has been mine ever since, waiting for me to have the courage and initiative to make the gesture that it demands.

It’s an interesting story that’s still going on, but its effect on me lingered and bore fruit in two odd ways when it meshed with the “liking your kids” stuff.

I play racquetball with a single dad whose teenaged kid, now 18, sometimes hangs out at the club and plays. I saw the dad in the lockerroom last week and while we were chatting, the kid called him on his cell. They engaged in some good-natured banter and when the dad hung up, it suddenly occurred to me to say something to the dad about how much he seems to like his kid. I’d noticed it before plenty of times, but now, under the influence of Nerburn’s prod, I ventured outside my comfort zone a teeny bit to tell him.

It triggered a long conversation about the history between the two of them, and ventured into the dad’s relationship with his own dad. I think the guy was pleased to have me notice and to talk about it — he didn’t say so but he seemed to talk about it with pride. I can relate. I like my kids and always have and it’s a source of pride, too.

And all this came together as I sat in a bookstore, collecting my thoughts before having dinner with my sibs. I was anxious, like I always am before we have dinner, as we’re not close. And then it occurred to me that I didn’t have to have a specific outcome. It was enough to just enjoy having dinner with them. Yeah, we had some problems to talk about but that needn’t get in the way of a pleasurable good time. Increasingly, I’m aware that there’s a lot I like about my brother and sister so why not just go for that?

And my anxiety dissipated.

We chatted over dinner for nearly 3 hours and would’ve gone longer but the restaurant was closing. Cool.

I’ve got a new post to Ego Orgasms titled Mental Arm Candy.

I don’t know whether this kind of advice-giving is appropo or not. I have a couple of quotes relevant to it that I read several times each week. It’s my attempt to make sense of these quotes and apply it to my daily life. I could be going about it the wrong way, though. I just have to pay attention enough to see if I’m getting feedback.

When we see, we ourselves become living lights for others to see by. – Polly Berrien Berends

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing. – Albert Schweitzer

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. – Albert Schweitzer

I got a thumbs-up on my knee from my orthopede on Friday. He doesn’t want me playing competively because the knee isn’t quite ready to absorb impact from someone who runs into me. But the since the likelihood of that is pretty small, I played my first racquetball game yesterday since early September. I wore my brace and stuck to singles.

I didn’t play too badly and was having a grand time, but then, sonuvabitch, my lower back started hurting. Ahh well, maybe that’s my body’s way of getting me to follow my surgeon’s advice.

A guy I just met a week ago told me yesterday that he’s active in AA and has been sober for many years. He’s been divorced a long time and began telling me about his dating struggles. He said he recently asked his sponsor if he’d ever find someone and if he did, would she be beautiful. He said his sponsor told him that he would find someone but that the woman would only be as beautiful as he deserved.

This struck me as wrong-headed advice and for a moment I hesitated on whether or not to say so. But since he was going out on a limb a bit with me, I thought I’d go out on a limb a bit, too.

I told him that I thought if he did find someone, he’d attract a woman who was about as beautiful as he was handsome, and that hoping for anything more than that was just an ego orgasm — a false belief that having arm candy will somehow make him happy, heading down the path that Donald Trump or any other number of aging celebrity geezers have trod. “Stinkin’ thinkin'” I said, using one of AA’s helpful mantras.

I asked him if he’d used on-line dating services and he said he hadn’t, that he’d considered it but that it seemed desperate — that his sponsor told him that serendipitous meetings are the way to go. Hence, he’s joined various clubs and groups hoping to meet someone.

I said I knew many people in town who’d found their partners through on-line dating services, that I thought it was a more straightforward, honest way to meet someone rather than joining a group pretending to be interested in the activity but really on the prowl.

I paused, thinking, “What the hell do I know about all this, having been married for 30 years?” But then I figured, I know a minor version of this ego orgasm all too well. It doesn’t necessarily go away even though I’m happily married. I still succumb occasionally to trying to make smiling eye contact with attractive women strangers and if they smile back, I have a little ego orgasm — mental arm candy. I’m making a little progress, though. Half the time now, I’m able to catch myself afterwards with an “Ahh, there I go again,” a gentle whack, smiling at myself just as Eckhart Tolle predicted:

One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it. – Eckhart Tolle