Baptism by Rain and Bacon

I haven't been sleeping well lately. There's no real reason. My mind just doesn't want to shut off. Seeing as how most Americans don't get enough sleep I'm guessing you can sympathize. I downloaded one of those neutral noise programs for my iPhone called White Noise. It doesn't have as many sounds to choose from as some of the other programs, but it was free so I'm not complaining.

The best noise of the program is its rain setting. Since this is a basic program you can't adjust the intensity of the rain, but I'm still impressed with the realism of the steady downpour that rumbles from my 3G's diminutive speaker. It's difficult to be bombarded by a barrage of mental diarrhea when you're laying contemplatively on your back as you meditate on the obligatory mental image of the rapid splash splosh of uncountable drops causing the surface of a puddle to dance and shimmer with light.

Of course, as I write this I'm at Waffle House again on a hectic and dramatic Friday night at 3 AM, where the sizzle skittle of an unending order of bacon on the grill is doing a good job of bringing my thoughts to singularity. Like the sound of rain, if I can just manage to focus enough to hear the bacon over the cacophonous crowd and the discordant clashing of plates and utensils, bacon is consistent, steady, dependable; it washes over my senses and cleanses me, at least for a moment, of the sins of intellectual dissertation which blockade my calm.

So, perhaps, instead of prescribing warm milk to curb those disabling episodes of insomnia you should fry up some bacon. Just make sure you're wearing something protective because you'll never sleep with 3rd degree burns on your sensitive areas!

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof!

Another Night at Waffle House

I can't begin to estimate how much money I've spent, late at night with nothing better to do, eating and hanging out at the Waffle House. If you aren't from the South, you probably don't know what the hell a Waffle House is, so I'll describe it. You know how you always want something meaty, greasy, unhealthy, but downright delicious after you've just spent the last few hours getting sweaty and drunk at a nightclub on Friday or Saturday night? Well, that's pretty much why Waffle House exists. It's one of those places that hasn't changed a bit in 20 or 30 years so you know exactly what to expect as soon as you pull your car into the parking lot.

Over the last 15 years, I've come to Waffle House an average of once a week, although in my early days I would come about 3 times a week. Back then, I would bring a small, thick notebook with me in which I would write a few pages of story material for a novel each night. For some reason, the drunks who would plop themselves at the bar next to me would always want to know what I was writing and if it involved the Waffle House or them. Of course, why the hell wouldn't I let this strange, inebriated, barely coherent person be the star of my novel? At the time, I just wanted to be left alone, so I would tell them no and ignore them while they continued to slosh through a one sided conversation about how you could tell alot of stories about the stuff that goes on at the Waffle House.

The thing is, the drunks were right. I think that's why I love the place. In my quest to get my life back on track I've discovered that one of the most important things about being a Lifer is to try and live your life with passion and commitment. There's plenty of passion at Waffle House on a daily basis. And there's plenty of people who should probably be committed (rimshot). Every night that you are there you see people enjoying themselves. They eat, they talk, they laugh, they hold hands, they act as though Waffle House, and the people that work there, are a part of their family. It doesn't matter who is working behind the counter, if you've been to Waffle House more than once, those people ARE a part of your family. You grew up there, you lived life there, and you learned important lessons. And if you eventually learned what a patty melt plate, smothered, covered, chunked, triple scramble on the side is, well that's an added bonus!

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof!

The Perfect Wedding

While doing a little research for this blog I stumbled onto another blog which struck me as a surprise, initially. It's called "An Approximation Thereof" and so far is following a young Pennsylvania Gen Xer's path to marriage. Coincidentally, it was begun exactly one week prior to my first blog posting. I have a permanent link in the sidebar (labeled Coincidental Kindred Thinker) for anyone who wants to check it out.

One post in particular spurred me to thinking about my own thoughts of what a perfect wedding should look like. Upfront, I should mention a few things:

1. I've known for years what my idea of the perfect wedding is, even down to color schemes dependant on season, although I have no color scheme for summer since I don't personally think anyone in the South is in their right mind to get married when it is 95 degrees outside! Your guests are going to be wearing formal attire, and you will either be wearing a full rented tuxedo or a luxurious gown that you, or your parents, took out a second mortgage just to buy. You shouldn't make people sweat more than they have to, and nothing will ruin memories of your perfect day like indelible pit stains on that dress that once made you look like the beautiful princess that you really are! And, no, it doesn't matter that we now have air conditioning. People are going to have to be outside eventually.


2. Yes, I am a man. I say that only because when I have conversations with friends or acquaintances about this topic they point, stare, laugh, and make jokes at the expense of my masculinity! My fantasies about the perfect wedding are not just for my benefit. Women tend to want their wedding to be THEIR perfect day. Well, why can't it be OUR perfect day. I WANT my wife to look like the beautiful princess that she is, but I also want to look like the handsome prince that I can be. And we should set our perfect day in a spectacular wonderland of grace and pomposity appropriate to the occassion at hand.


3. Yes, I know the grandeur of the wedding has no real bearing on the eventual quality of the marriage. Look, my grandmother got married to my grandfather (whom I never met and have always referred to by his first name, Harold, so saying he was my grandfather seems slightly ackward) by a Justice of the Peace during one of Harold's furloughs from WWII, the last great noble war. They loved each other deeply for around 20 years before Harold died in the 1960s.


4. To the abject horror of every woman I've ever told this to, I even have thoughts on what makes for the perfect wedding dress. I've been to too many weddings, or been forced to watch wedding videos, or look at photo albums, and have seen too many overly ornate, overly tight, impractically long, uncomfortably Victorian-style dresses! Please understand this: WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL!!! Even the ugly ones have something attractive about them. (Men, on the other hand... If we don't have a chisled body like Michaelangelo's David, we can pretty much hang it up 'cause we're destined for a life of ill-fitting jeans and loose flannel shirts.) So, please, don't buy a dress that distracts from your own inherent beauty. There's a reason chefs put gorgeous looking food on a white plate; there's a reason photographer's mount phenomenal pictures in a simple frame with a white matte. We should look at the ART, not the frame. Ladies, never forget... YOU are the art! The dress is but a frame. I'm not going to marry the frame; I'm going to marry the art. And that's what I, and everyone else, should be looking at on OUR perfect day.

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof!

I'm Only Happy When It Rains

Okay, maybe that's not completely true. I'm happy at plenty of other times, but good luck finding a song about rain that doesn't sound like a total downer!

It rained pretty much all day. And it wasn't just rain, it was a COLD rain with a steady breeze just to punctuate how cold and rainy it was. It was the first rain of the fall and I was so not prepared for it. It was in the upper 80s for highs the days and weeks before, but today only got up to 65. I didn't bring a jacket or an umbrella, so I stood for a few minutes inside a building with all the other shmoes who were caught off guard by the rain, as well.

For a moment I realized how strange it is that people will wait inside, or under an overhang, waiting for rain to die down enough to walk outside, as though rain were some sort of toxic waste that must be avoided as much as possible. I remember back when I was a little kid, maybe 5 years old or less, I used to LOVE to stand under the edge of the overhang on my grandmother's front porch. The porch was small and had four or five steps leading down to the yard. I would stand in just the right spot so that all the runoff from the roof would pour down on me and get me even wetter than if I had only been standing in the yard. I would laugh and splash around while my grandmother would try to get me to come back into the house. Eventually, I always did, and Mame, although I still called her May May back then (alot of kids from the South have odd names for their grandmothers, like Me Ma, Mammie, Ma May), would fuss at me for getting the floor wet while she dried me with some almost threadbare towel.

After my girlfriend left, one of the things I tried to do to move my life in a better direction was to try and relive some of the childhood experiences that I used to love so much, or some things which I never really did but probably should have. I climbed small trees, picked up a frog and looked at it up close, played with Matchbox cars, and splashed around in the rain, stomping through puddles just to get my pants soaking wet. If you haven't done any of these things in a long time, or ever, I HIGHLY recommend it. There's something so comforting, and yet exhilarating at the same time, about doing things as an adult that you used to love as a child. There's a bible verse somewhere in 1 Corinthians 13 that basically goes, "When I was a child, I thought and acted like a child, but now I have put away childish things." Now, 1 Corinthians 13 is all about love, which is probably necessary for us to really be happy. But, in retrospect, it seems like bad advice to suggest that we must put away childish things. I can tell you from experience, there is NOTHING that makes you feel as happy as taking the time to just jump up and down in a puddle in the rain while you get completely soaked and you just don't give a damn!

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof!

Dance Like You Mean It

You may have noticed that I have a link in the sidebar to iDance.net. No, it isn't yet another Apple "i" related bit of marketing ploy. It's actually a website where you can download instructional videos for dance moves, most of them Lindy. I'm not really promoting them, or anything, I just think its a good place to find dance moves. The truth is, I suck at Lindy. I wish I didn't, but it's a very hard dance to get into if your town doesn't have a large Lindy community. Raleigh has a somewhat reasonable dance community at large, but the Lindy subgroup is quite small. It doesn't help that all of the Lindy dancers have been doing it for years and have become a bit jaded toward dancing with beginners.

I started dancing Jitterbug swing, a dumbed down cousin of Lindy, about two and a half years ago. To be honest, I began literally the week after my girlfriend left me. She had been dancing various styles of dance since she was a child and, shortly before we broke up, thought it might be fun to go swing dancing with me since I had shown her the movie Swingers and mentioned that I had always wanted to learn how to dance like they did in the movie. If you haven't seen Swingers you MUST rent it. The best way to describe it is to say that it is a chick flick for guys. And if you are a male Generation Xer like me you have been one of the characters in the movie at some point in your life. I'd love to sit here and brag that I have been Trent, but let's face it... I've always been Mike. Now I'm just waiting for Heather Graham to start showing up at the Elk's Lodge so I can ask her to dance!

It seems pretty pathetic to admit now, but initially I wanted to learn how to Jitterbug not as part of my quest to change my life around, but rather to see if I could impress my girlfriend and maybe win back her affections. Since I haven't seen or heard from her in at least a year I'd have to say that the plan didn't go as I'd hoped. Somewhere along the way, however, swing dancing taught me that I could live my life alone again and not have to subject myself to the self-imposed prison of work, sleep, eat, work, sleep, eat that I had created for many of the last 10 years of my "life". Swing dancing gave me an outlet to at least be around other people and not have to stand on the sidelines, staring enviously at others as they lived and enjoyed life. No longer did I have to wish that I was good enough to be around other people, or blame myself for being a "failure" at something which I had never had the nerve to even attempt.

I think that's probably one of the big keys to being a Lifer: Working up the nerve to scream aloud, in the words of Peter Finch in Network, "I'M A HUMAN BEING, GODDAMNIT! MY LIFE HAS VALUE!" And don't just say it. Mean it. Believe it. Feel it. And then at least try to do something about it. It doesn't matter if you end up moving in the wrong direction, but you've got to start moving in a direction.

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof!