Real Joe

These life-changing windows, of course, give rise to thoughts of what dreams could come true now, what risks and leaps can be taken, perhaps must be taken now or never. – Sheila Lennon

Sheila’s mother died recently which prompted this “taking stock of my life” reflection.

I didn’t have this reaction when my dad died a couple of years ago, mainly because I was deep into launching Real Joe at the time… and that felt like a taking a leap to make a dream come true. It still does, though I now wonder what risks and leaps I’m not taking that could make my dream more sustainable financially. Or am I thinking about this the wrong way?

There was a refreshing dearth of religious quotes and proclamations after the nine coal miners were lifted to safety yesterday. After a quick scan of CNN, the AP, and the NY Times, I only found one “it was a miracle” and one “praise the Lord” — both of those uttered in more colloquial than religious terms. Pennsylvania Governor Mark Schweiker made a goofball statement about “providential intervention” and one woman said, “I knew I couldn’t lose my dad and my husband. I just knew it” after recounting her prayerful efforts, understandably forgetting that women everyday do indeed lose their fathers and husbands to accidents and wars and disease and starvation and you-name-it, despite their prayerful pleadings.

But the miners themselves set a much more positive and inspiring tone with their accounts of their emotional survival strategies below — their “live or die as a group” vow, lashing themselves together with rope; their writing goodbye “l love you” notes on cardboard to their loved ones and stuffing them in their lunch pails; their talking with each other about the last thing they’d done with their families; their ’snuggling’ with one another to keep warm and provide emotional support. And the quote that got the most play in the media was about a marriage ritual. “The only day in my life I never kissed my wife goodbye before I went to work. That had to be the day.”

To me, this is the cool story… that these tough, “We need some chew” guys seemingly had their emotional shit together, during and after their rescue. I wonder if anyone else will notice?

July 31 update: Star Tribune columnist Kim Ode noticed: Be Glad for a Miner’s Kiss.

The Hot or Not web site has moved into weblogs, so I thought I’d give it a go…. one of my PR tasks-of-the-week.

If you hang around long enough, life provides. – Bryan Stauning

Norm passed along this quote when we were talking money stuff this week. I told him that I needed to insert a little phrase in it to make it work for me — If you hang around long enough and learn to stay awake, life provides.

My dad hung around plenty long enough but because he never woke up and learned what life was trying to teach him, he missed out on a lot — satisfying relationships with friends, family, community, money, you name it. He died with very little peace of mind.

I spent last weekend doing our taxes, as the extension deadline is fast approaching. My wife spent a good chunk of time redoing our budget, as we need to tighten up for a while to pay off our tax bill and a few other debts. We’d been tense with each other for over a week prior. She’s been worrying not only about what our tax bill would be, but also about a lean-looking August as far as income from my contract work.

It came to a head on Friday when we went out to dinner after my bike trip with my son. We were having a great time chatting and playfully batting seeds that were dropping from a vine next to our table on the outdoor patio at WA Frost. But when the subject of going on a camping vacation came up, she turned gloomy and stern about our financial situation and, pfffffffffft, the wind quickly went out of my romantic sails. I said “Can we talk about this some other time?” She agreed but I couldn’t quite get beyond it and later in the car on the way home, she confronted me about my mood. I wasn’t really aware of it, but once I started talking, it was clear I was still hung up. And she said the whole situation had been affecting her for weeks as well, that she didn’t intend to rain on our picnic but that it just came out.

I hated to admit it, but I was feeling like I was a lousy provider, that I wasn’t doing my part to bring home the bacon and support my family. To be confronted with our financial situation during a romantic dinner was a real bummer. Later, she said, “It’s not so much the lack of money that’s affecting our relationship, it’s our not dealing with it as a team.” She hit the nail on the head but it took me till the next day to realize it. And that was all that was needed to provide me the incentive to get the taxes done. I had to miss a motorcycle trials that I planned to ride on Sunday but I didn’t mind. By Sunday evening, we’d reconnected. But I can now see why some men get depressed or turn violent when they lose their jobs. It’s easy to embrace the mistaken idea that you’re not manly if you’re not providing.

Now my worry is the camping vacation. I all but promised my daughter that we’d be going, as we’ve not taken a family vacation since 1999 and we’re lonesome for our favorite campground, TwelveMile Beach in Upper Michigan’s Picture Rocks National Lakeshore. Norm says to go, that we’ll be resentful if we don’t, and that we won’t be as energized to work our respective businesses in the fall. I tend to agree but it’s hard to make a case for me taking two weeks away from “incoming producing” and “prospecting for new business” when I’m the one who’s put us in this position. All I can do, I guess, is push hard between now and then and see where we’re at when the time comes.

All this angst over money matters is the perfect backdrop for a different perspective. One of my sons and I played a financial education board game this week with a group of people we’d never met. My wife discovered Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad series of books and web site a few weeks back and the three of us have been immersing ourselves in examining his way of thinking about money and income.

The game, Cashflow 101, soon available to be played via the web, was damn interesting and fun — a sophisticated and more real-world Monopoly-type game where the goal is to get out of the Rat Race by having more passive income each month than expenses, no matter whether you draw a job card as a doctor or a janitor.

This could be an interesting development in my life. My wife’s waaaaay ahead of me, as all her monthly income from Melaleuca is residual. But I’m mentally primed to shift from the E and S side of his Cashflow Quadrant to the B and I side where I’ve been dabbling the past 3 years. Reading his books just reaffirms this and gives me access to tools, information, and people to accelerate the shift. I wonder where it’ll take me. Us, I mean. Or maybe just me. She objects that I’ve dismissed her financial sensibilities for years. Ouch. It’s AFOG time. Good thing our marriage is AFOG compatible right now.

Physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. – Robert Pirsig

And as I’m increasingly discovering, I have a lot more control of my moods than I realize, as long as I take the time to examine the goofball thinking that’s usually creating the mood. Last night before dinner, I put on all my riding gear and planned to hop on my trials bike for a little practice session before dinner. It was the first time in weeks that the weather was cool and dry. But I couldn’t get the damn thing started. Aarrrggghh. Time for a bad mood. But I stopped myself. Shit happens all the time with motorcycles. I’m lucky to have a bike at all. I could go for a bicycle ride. Or sit on the porch and read in the cool breeze. Yeah, I’ll do that.

No more bad mood.

One of my twenty-something sons and I took a little two-day bike trip last week. He’d given me a coupon good for one snowboarding lift ticket last Xmas that I’d never cashed in since it was such a shitty warm winter. I knew I wanted to do something outdoorsy with him, as I’ve done that with each of my sons in their younger teen years… short “coming of age” biking and kayaking trips with one of them at a time. It hadn’t occurred to me do something similar with them now that they’re in the their twenties so this trip woke me up to the possibility.

We each rode a recumbent bike — he borrowed my daughter’s and I borrowed a friend’s.

Recumbents are the Harley choppers of bicycling, we decided. We fancied ourselves as Easy Riders, Wyatt and Billy touring the countryside on our Captain Americas, with Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” playing in our goofball brains:

Get your motor runnin’
Head out on the highway
Lookin’ for adventure
And whatever comes our way

Soon after we left Northfield on Thursday the squall line of an approaching thunderstorm began bearing down on us. We were in heaven. We both love storms and there’s something special about a summer thunderstorm in the rural countryside where you can see it coming for miles. We kept riding till the last minute and then took 45 minutes of shelter in a horse barn till the downpour and lightning let up.

A steady light rain the rest of the afternoon rescued us from what would’ve been stifling heat and humidy on our way to the Mississippi river town of Red Wing. But we soon learned we had overestimated the comfort of recumbent riding. No, we didn’t have the sore necks or tailbones usually associated with touring on drop-down handlebar bikes when you’re not conditioned for them. But we hadn’t anticipated that our legs, especially our knees, would object to a steady regimen of hilly country roads, recumbents or no. But discomfort on a trip like this can be a good thing. This passage, from Chapter 2 Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has long stuck with me.

John was worried Sylvia would not be up to the discomfort of this and planned to have her fly to Billings, Montana, but Sylvia and I both talked him out of it. I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much. And when thinking about Sylvia’s moods and feelings, I couldn’t see her complaining. Also, to arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context, as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land. If John and I and Chris arrived with this feeling and Sylvia arrived seeing them as “nice” and “pretty,” there would be more disharmony among us than we would get from the heat and monotony of the Dakotas.

So our mutual knee pain, along with the sting of rain on our faces on a couple of 40 MPH downhills in a cloudburst, became our shared adversity to celebrate when we sat to a big dinner at the end of the day… and where we inadvertantly administered more self-inflicted pain, gorging ourselves on lousy pizza and crappy cheesecake.

We found a cheap room at a rundown no-tell motel, where we stashed our bikes alongside our bed, hung our wet clothes from the lampshades, and crashed for the night. Here’s a flattering shot of me, fresh out of the shower, trying to mount a rear view mirror on my helmet. The reading glasses are a nice touch, don’t you think?

We had an uneventful but luxurious, with-the-wind ride home. Our knees appreciated it.

TV is chewing gum for the eyes. – Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright died in 1959. I wonder what he’d say after reading this Newhouse News Service article, A politically incorrect revolt is in full swing on the booze-and-babe media boom, or Maureen Dowd’s column last week, juxtaposing the story of the rape and murder of 5 year-old Samantha Runnion in Stanton, California with the showcasing of sex and violence at the summer TV tour at a hotel in nearby Pasadena.

An interesting flip-flop is evidently occurring among senior citizen women, chronicled in this Who Needs a Husband? piece in the NY Times.

“… the men in our age group seem to want something quite different. They want a wife. They want what they had before, a woman in the house to do all the things that a wife is supposed to do — which is, to wrap it up under one big label, To Take Care of Them.”

Maybe I should send the article to both my mother and mother-in-law.

A sad and touching essay on Salon on what it’s like trying to be a dad while in prison.