when you point your finger when your plans fall through ...

God give us strength.

btw wdw ....

is the reason i even have this blog. i couldn't access my "myspace" blog, so I followed a friend's lead and jotted down my thoughts about this place. it lay fallow for a year ot two, and it has now been almost 8 years. 

early thoughts

so day one at the happiest place on earth is in the books. i didn't do too well. 

i'll blame the fatigue of not sleeping for about 24 hours on a longish drive for my being exceptionally tired and cranky. 

seriously — every setback, regardless of how trivial, was setting me off. (blew up especially well onthe two women in my life, whom i dubbed the " thunder and lightning of tension.")

thoughts to follow later: this joint is shrinking; and it's freighted with the same burden as christmas. 

meantime the boy is consistently being surprised and delighted. 

further updates forthcoming. stay tuned. 

God help us all. 

"insanity is hereditary ..."

haddad riverfront park, 12 june 2015.

... as the joke goes, you get it from your kids.

spent a hot evening on kanawha boulevard and riverfront park ostensibly to celebrate "growler fest" and pick up a free beer jug but settling for good live music and really good ribs.

i don't know why, but i suddenly got a glimpse of why my dad always grew so tense when we would go on vacation.

and i think it goes something like this: we are going outside our comfort zone into less than ideal conditions with limited provisions at our disposal and, somehow, anything that could cause the party to stray past the arbitrary buffer established to mitigate the limited circumstance into which we are putting ourselves merits an immediate and forceful correction so as to avoid complete and utter disaster.

(in other words, when things don't go according to plan, they must be met with lots of shouting.)

i mean, really. it's an afternoon out with the family. why the need for tension? yes, it's hot. yes, it's crowded. yes, you'd just like to sit down, eat ribs, drink beer and listen to music.

yes, it's too bad the water bottles you brought weren't properly sealed in the backpack and leaked down the back of your shirt. and, yes, it's also too bad the children aren't eating the $7 hamburgers mommy bought them. and, also yes, they're not going to comport themselves as pint-sized adults when it's muggy and they want to play in the sandbox and decide after leaving the water with mommy while you went on a walk that they're thirsty and 20 minutes after throwing away $20 worth of food that they're hungry.

the baby listened to mommy and got in the picture.

the conditions you're parachuting yourselves into are not ideal; why would you expect a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old to miraculously shrug off disappointment and inconvenience and suddenly possess laser-like focus and a lasting attention span?

the kids didn't eat. they also didn't release themselves from your grip and go running into the crowd. they didn't cry when you didn't buy bottled water or ice cream. they didn't throw a fit when you wouldn't walk to the end of the street barricade well past the last stand of shiny, parked motorcycles and it was time to go home. they were friendly and listened and obeyed your commands to say "please" and "thank you" and "hello."

you'll soon be going to the happiest place on earth, the vacation kingdom of the world. it's going to be hot. it's going to be crowded. it's going to be filthy with costly and unnecessary souvenir enticements. and it's going to be peopled with folks wanting to make their own personal dreams come true — sometimes at any cost, including that of their dignity.

you're going to need to be ready for that. you might want to remember that at play, as at work, you're going to need to accentuate the positive and, in spite of the heat, stay cool.

outside the box

friday afternoon.

these guys are in that prime age where their thoughts from rising until sleeping are on playing. these thoughts will come to be interrupted by school, homework, crushes, dating, jobs, tests, school, work, dating, marriage, family and home. at least that's what happened to me.

clouds on the sun

bitterness isn't something you're born with. it's more like a gradual staining of your outlook. 

being witness to injustices and scheming gone unpunished or even rewarded time and again can only sour your perspective on the world. 

landlords who pollute neighborhoods with the worst kind of tenants. health insurance companies who will gladly take your premiums yet rig their requirements so as to deny you preventative services — favoring stockholders over clients. news organizations that cry poverty to escape budget cuts even as the ax falls around them — and still have to denigrate or steal stories they get beat on. 

yeah, these are the things that steal joy and can turn a man's heart hard.