Happy Father's Day to all friends, family and aquaintances! Happy Father's Day to people I don't even know, that may have stumbled across this blog on accident. In the past it seems I am always working on this day, rather then relaxing. Years in the restaurant business taught me one thing: We're going to be busy so put your own plans on hold. Not this year. A career change has suddenly given me these weekends off. So, this year I spent most of my day reflecting on many wasted Father's Days, and how it came to be that I could even consider my parenting skills worthy of such a day.
Through time I have learned a lot of methods of being a parent while watching different people with their own kids. While growing up, I learned parenting from some of my friends' Dads. Most every Dad I know, I have stolen some of their techniques and ways of handling things. When your own dad had maybe 5 or 6 rules for you, it always stuck out more when other parents would put additional rules on your friends. Come home at midnight? What's that all about?
Even my own Dad with some of his worst moments of parenting, I at least gathered some sort of "What to do..." or "What not to do..." for every situation. His anti-drug talk always stuck with me the most. "If I ever catch you doing drugs I'll break both your arms". Be very clear here, my father had no capability to break any arms, he was 5'3" and 140 lbs after eating and still wearing boots. To be fair with all the posturing and veiled threats my Dad had made over the years. I don't think he ever even cuffed me in the back of the head, when I did something that truly deserved it. These messages however stuck with me. Dad evidently felt strongly enough about drugs he would wish bodily harm upon his kids rather than see them fall into that abyss. Not, a bad thought actually if you see the destructive nature of so many narcotics. It's not an approach I take, but I know it's important to let your kids know there might be consequences. This would be one of his rules for me. The rest of the rules Dad deemed important entailed don't break any laws, and don't get anyone pregnant. That's pretty much all he asked for and I pretty much tried not to break most laws(there have been instances), and nobody got pregnant before they were supposed to(there were no instances). So, in a way his style of parenting was a success with me.
I have watched all of my friends and brothers raise their kids and have marveled at the job they do. I look at their kids and I hear their dad's in their voices and see the mannerisms they have emulated. I try to integrate what I think works, and I ask questions.
Mostly, I learned about being a Dad from two brothers who had done their own fair share of helping raise me when no one else was bothering with the idea of it. I learned a lot of what not to do from their advice when I was 8, after all they were both only 11 and 14 at that time. They had some pretty bad advice. Mostly I have learned a lot from them over the past decades as they have raised their own crews of incredible kids, who are now going on to make families of their own. Those are the two guys I admire the most.
Personally. I try to keep my own opinions on raising kids to myself unless someone asks. I have learned one thing in this life about parents. When you give unasked for advice about raising kids to other parents: They don't like it. So I keep it to myself and observe, every once in a while I ask a question or just talk about how I handle some things with my own kids. If someone wants to know something I usually answer.
Some might think my parenting skills as....well.....less. So, not a lot of people probably hold me up as a "This is how you should parent guy". I enjoy the free-range parenting more than most. It's how I grew up, I just like to add a few more rules, but probably not as many as I should. I want them to learn on their own too, develop their own way of solving problems and interacting with society. So, far my children have amazed me every step of the way. I hope they get jobs soon, we had our own paper routes by 7. Graham's almost 8, he's falling behind. I guess that's the difference between then and now. Mostly, nobody reads the paper anymore. I also used to light fireworks off when I was 4, I now hand the kids their sparklers. Wheee! Probably a  good thing since I remember looking down the barrel of my lit Roman candle to see what was taking so long when I was 6. Luckily, my Mom moved my hand causing the candle to be aimed in the sky just in time before I would have gotten the nickname of  Cyclops. Good times! So there's some parenting advice right there: Never look down the wrong end of a lit Roman candle. See, we can help each other.
Everyday of parenting is a growth process and I try to be a little better than the day before. I wouldn't be the Dad I am without all the other Fathers out there. Being a Dad takes a lot of doing things on the fly. We are supposed to fix things, bikes, footballs, homework, hearts and minds. It's a tall order. We all do our best, and sometimes we don't lean on each other like we should, it wouldn't be as macho if we asked another dad for advice. Sometimes we come through with an 'S' on our chest, other times we just fall short. We were supposed to know all this stuff by the time we had kids right? Yeah, right.

So, I'll end it like I started it. Happy Father's Day to all the family, friends, and even the guy in Walmart losing it a little bit in the toy section. Thanks for all the coaching you didn't know you were giving me over the years! I sorely needed it.

Find your passion. Three words that somehow evoke fear, panic, doubt, even denial. The passions have always been there in my head. Everything I've wanted to do, every little thing I've wanted to achieve. But the programs of your hardwiring in your brain can kick in pretty fast "Can't make any money at that?" "What will people think of that?" "What if it fails right away?" or worse "WHAT IF IT SUCCEEDS RIGHT AWAY?" These are just a few roadblocks running through at any given moment. I'm not looking for just success. I think just about anybody can do that. I am looking for individual success in something I am passionate about, not what you or anyone else is passionate about.
 The old saying goes, find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. I've worked a lot of days, then, I think everyone has. There are those and you see them and read about them, that truly have no idea what year it is. They are having so much fun fulfilling their lives in a manner that they have a passion about. Just, think if the whole world was doing something they were truly passionate about. Wouldn't the world be something truly great? I hate to go to far into alternate realities, but how much less hate in the world there would be had Hitler truly pursued a career as an artist and kept working at it? Would there even be an atomic bomb? Could the greatest scientists ever assembled have come up with something far more useful to the benefit of mankind than the ability to dispose of it? The butterfly effect is crazy in that one specific scenario. Now, I'll get back on task.
Pursuit of a passion is a pursuit of happiness. The journey is the goal. Every single one of us goes through it. The hardest part of every journey towards any goal or dream is the people that surround you. Some are good, some are bad. For sure I have rested squarely on the "bad" at more times than not, for some people. More than likely if there was a story about my influence it would be more like the grasshopper than the ant (no literary or cartoon reference left unturned). It's hard to keep everything upbeat and moving forward, it's hard to turn that around. Eventually, you can look around and you have attracted what you are going to attract for like-minded people. Some you keep, and some you don't. When you do turn it around(a little)you find the people that were like you, become fingernails on the chalkboard. Just listening to them agitates you and drives you back to where you don't want to be anymore.
There is a story I have heard on several occasions, it only made true sense to me a few months ago when told from a perspective I was ready to accept. Most people know it as the crab mentality. If there is a single crab in a bucket, it will surely escape. If there are several crabs in the bucket, every time one crab tries to escape the other crabs in the bucket pull it down in the bucket with them. If they are left to their own devices all of the crabs would die(well except maybe the last one)as they prevent each other from achieving a goal in leaving the bucket.
In my head I was always the crab trying to escape and reach the goal. As it turned out, I was the crab trying to make sure no one else was getting ahead, because life in the bucket was supposed to be hard. That's what I had told myself, and that is what everyone had told me. Luckily someone talked me into trying to turn that around. She pulled me out of the bucket with her. I am very thankful for that(love you honey!). Seeing the world with a different perspective is a lot more fun than it used to be.
Yes, the crabs in the bucket are still there and some of them will always be there. I am doing my best to pull them up and out. I'm not perfect. I slip, I question, I peek back in the buckets and see what is going on. I get angry with the crabs in the bucket. I get angry with the crabs outside of the bucket. All of the above. No one said it was going to be easy. It takes leaps of faith in people, to know when they are done with just "making it through the day." I try to help those crabs when I can, in turn I hope it helps me. If none of that makes sense, then just think that nobody likes crabs, of any sort.
 Every day begins with the potential to be as great as the effort I put into it. If I pull a few people up and out with me in that effort, not such a bad thing.

(No crabs were hurt in the writing of this blog. As far as I know they will all be released eventually and free to live out their lives as they deem fit. If you weren't thinking of crustacean crabs while reading this blog please get your heads out of the gutter. I am in no way, shape, or form a licensed therapist or even a reasonable person at most times. Taking any advice from me can be enlightening yet somewhat disturbing to some who viewed me as the guy in the back of the class just trying to make it through.......)

The two stood at the edge staring down. In the 10 foot diameter circle of lacquered wood sat the object of their attention a pond of infinity. It swirled in the cosmic dust of purple, gold, silver, and blue in all different hues surrounded by a shroud of black, speckled with pinpoints of brightest whites. It was a tapestry of the universe built into a basement floor. How difficult is it to explain what would be considered a horizontal gateway into space that looked like an outer space rabbit hole. Well.......
"Holy fuck." said the visitor.
"That's an understatement." replied the other.
A moment ago the two had pushed the large bookcase out of the way revealing the hole and the flight of stairs leading down. The owner of the home flipped a makeshift light he had set up. Not too, bright, he had done that on purpose. When they got down to the bottom, he clapped. The lights, flipped off.
The visitor raised an eyebrow, he was about to make a joke, then it caught in his throat and the swearing came out instead.
He had tried to prepare his visiting guest with anecdotes and innuendo. How did one prepare another when showing him the cosmos locked in his basement? Cosmos for Dummies was sold out. He had tried to find some such book at Barnes and Noble. Closest he came to it was something called Dr. Strange graphic novels, books by a few theorists of incredible intelligence with convoluted ways of explaining the fabric of the continuum, and horror stories by Lovecraft. He tried to read them all. He actually enjoyed the Lovecraft. The homeowner hoped a many tendrilled things was not going to reach through the infinite and tear reality asunder. So far the whole thing had just sat there mesmerizing, like a lava lamp. It was intense, yet relaxing. He could stare at it all night, perched in the great black leather furniture he had found around it. Neither Science nor Science fiction was ever his thing...until of course, it now was.
It all started when he had purchased the property a year ago. It had been a fairly easy purchase of a rather ancient property, locally speaking. The previous owner, a college professor from the area, had simply disappeared. No family, no heirs. An investigation by local authorities turned up nothing.The house came up on auction. It needed some fixing, which of course, the new owner was somewhat good at. He had purchased it for way below it's value.
It was a great house. Three stories and a finished basement. It was Victorian or Gothic, or a combination of both, the owner always told people. Sometimes he'd just scratch his head, shrugging his shoulders and answer "Dunno, it's a house." Either way the square footage to dollar ratio made it a no brainer for him. It was only crazy in the sense that he really didn't need a house. He was past owning a house for living out his days. He had explained to the visitor upon it's purchase that it was a hobby to occupy his time and purely an investment to flip. Just to take his mind off of things. The visitor had been over a few times, dropping by with his daughter, who loved running through and getting lost.
"How have you kept this a secret?" questioned the visitor.
"I dunno," shrugged the owner,"I just have."
"There are a million questions here. What have you done so far to investigate this thing?" he tipped a beer up and swallowed the bitter fluid from the bottle. It was at that warm stage, where you knew it was kind of gross but he drank it anyway. He waited for an answer.
"Nothing. What could I do? I have no idea what I have here."
"Well....was it here right away when you purchased it? How was it missed pre-auction."
The owner, tipped his own beer, then scratched beneath the foam and mesh hat that spoke about a preference for fishing over everything else. Then he unfolded his tale of unlocking the secrets of the house he had built. Measurement-wise the home never meshed. The exterior versus the usable rooms and where plumbing and electricity should have matched up, never quite did.  It was a head scratcher and most people would have let it lie, just chalking it up to the overall size and twists and turns within the home. He would not. He had desperate need to know how things ticked, how things were put together. Take things apart and put them back together. Years of working at the local plant in the maintenance department had made him that way. Eventually, from city hall floor plans and careful measuring he took a 10 pound sledgehammer to the wall behind the built in shelving in the 2nd living room. It took him about a morning but it revealed the hollow and the stairway down to the center basement that had escaped so much notice in all the years the house had existed. So, with the largest flashlight he had he began a trek down a set of stairs that had been built to head into the dark heart of his home. Like Batman or Van Helsing maybe? He didn't know it was going to be more like Scooby Doo and Shaggy. Eventually.
What was revealed the first night by a flashlight was a very nice space framed with dark hardwood trim and matching flooring. Great pieces of leather furniture stood sprawled around the center. The walls lacked decoration, but clearly were built for great portraits with the eyes cut out behind them for watchers in secret passages to spy upon poor souls that entered the space. In the center of the room with high ceilings was a large circular frame surrounding what the new owner had thought was some sort of LED display. Maybe the original owner had worked for the local display sign manufacturer. If so he had done a bang up job, it was all so real. The floor mounted screen had amazing depth. The display played a single picture of what space looked like in outer space. The true outerspace without the glare of the city streetlights and neon. The kind of pictures you see while laying on the hood of a car out in the dark of a midnight gravel road. He approached the screen carefully, but in the darkness he missed a small step up and he tripped forward, falling on the hardwood. Pain shot up his knees and hands as he caught himself. When he opened his eyes in a grimace, he saw the flashlight sitting on top of the screen, then it simply fell through the screen with a small popping sound. He stared in wonder and fear as the flashlight slowly turned in the space the light revolving and then winked out. He knew it wasn't a screen and thanked nobody in particular for falling forward at the right time. He had felt humming vibrations through his palms at that time. He also smelled the hot electricity in the air. The portal was powered somehow.
 He had spent many nights just staring at the portal to everywhere. Eventually he had to show someone.This brings him back to now. They had moved closer to the portal, the owner kept a respectable distance and urged the visitor to do the same.
"Wow." Breathed the visitor. he had polished his beer off, leaving nothing but the empty amber glass clutched in his left hand. He paused and looked at it. He was more than a little tipsy at the moment. They had split a twelvie before coming down the steps. His life and everybody else's lives in the whole existence of whatever he was looking at played in his mind. The bottle flew from his hands without consequence.
"NO!" Cried the owner. Not sure why he yelled. He had seen the results with the flashlight. Yet, somehow he felt they shouldn't push their luck. Welp, they were in it now!
The bottle landed on the cosmos' contact lense. The owner hoped the giant eye wouldn't blink. The bottle sat there, on it's side. Serenely afloat on what would be considered the Holy Grail of Stephen Hawking. A small ship bottle, without the ship, waiting to see the infinite. Then it did. It sunk slowly as if pushing through a thick gelatin. Then POP! It was on the other side. It fell. They both stared in amazement as it floated away from them. It kept falling away towards the colors of the cosmos. It was the most beautiful moment of galactic littering ever seen. Then the owner of the house emptied his beer bottle and threw it at the surface of the portal as well. It repeated the same process. They stared.
The rest of the evening they repeated the process with all sorts of objects: full bottles, full soda cans, sticks, light bulbs, milk jugs, batteries, turned at flashlights that twirled with the lights of the gods. They laughed with each success or each failure of creating beer and Mountain Dew asteroids. Could there really be a failure? It wasn't their experiment. They had happened upon it, to them it was fully functional entertainment. Eventually the visitor had to leave., it was late. He promised to not speak a word of what they had done until they decided what to do with it. He stumbled out into the night. He prayed a sigh of relief when he got home safe. His wife rolled over an arm flung across him as he nodded off, the moon and the stars laughing at their own show as they peered through the half turned blinds of the slumbering homes across the night.

A month passed by and just about every night the two conspired around the cosmic hole in the ground. It was an endless source of fascination and entertainment. The two bonded over the whole thing and came out the other side closer than they had ever been. It was....fun! Lots of fun!

Most of the time the owner of the house thought of the visitor and the great times they had while hovering around the hole. This was not one of those times. he sat in the doctors office. He knew what was going to happen. He knew the man in the white jacket was not going to walk through those doors with amazing news. There were consequences to a way a man lived his life. He knew that. He knew it all along. He began to sob quietly to himself. He closed his eyes as tears, long held back, now flowed. The door opened and the doctor stepped through the man ignored him and continued to cry. Nothing would happen to change the results he already knew. Nothing could happen.

One day the owner of the cosmic portal showed up at the door of his visitor from so many nights. He walked in the door. It was pre-planned a birthday for the daughter of the visitor. The mother of the birthday girl was so excited and hugged her husband's guest.  The two exchanged pleasantries, as they always had in the past. Eventually the other kids showed up and the celebration began. They ran around all over, there was shouting, screaming, cake and ice cream. It was standard party fare. The birthday girl hugged everyone when the goodbyes came, especially the friend of her father. She knew he was special, even at 2.
Eventually the party dropped off. The two men met in front of the house. The owner stood short in the front of the small ranch home of his usual guest, the snaps of his plaid patterned shirt twitched as he dug in his breast pocket for his cigarettes. He pulled one out and balanced it in his lips. He lit it quickly from years of practice, his hand still shook though.
"I have a plan." He puffed looking down at the hard cement walk.
"A plan?" answered the other man.
"Yep. I have a plan. I found it this morning." again a volume of smoke escaped his lips as he exhaled. "I'll get a hold of you later this week. Should arrive by then."
"Ok." the other man acquiesced. He was tired from managing the events of the Birthday party. What was the point of discussing it any ways? They parted. The owner of the universe walking away with out a care in the world puffing on the cigarette. The visitor smiled as he watched the old man strut down the sidewalk, he would show up and see what the plan entailed.

Later that week the visitor received a call and showed up at the residence of the owner of the cosmos. The visitor pulled up to the 3 story house, he had received a call to drop by and let himself in. The house was teal. The trim was a burgundy, and there was white in other places. It was truly an idyllic home. He would have liked to grow there he thought, seemed like a kid could have gotten himself into a lot of trouble with that much space to explore and make stories up about. Such stupid facts he hadn't really noticed until this moment. The visitor swallowed hard, and with trepidation, stepped towards the home. He visualized one lonely man and what appeared to be the entire cosmos in a static wormhole of some sort located in the found basement of this house. It sounded official to the visitor's ears. He wasn't a scientist, so what the hell, let's call it that.
He walked through the house. It had pictures of them both on the wall. Both in younger states. He loved looking at those pictures, always had. It was time caught in the proverbial bottle. They had arms around each other, or had conquered something that seemed unconquerable. Here they stood again on the edge of the unconquerable.
He walked through this room and that and came to the knocked down brick wall in the second living room. Sidestepping, he angled through the sledgehammered entrance and made his way down the makeshift stairs the previous owner had made to his altar to the heavens.
The owner stood there at the bottom. Looking up at him. Only difference was he was looking through a domed face shield of a helmet. He wore an astronaut's suit. A space suit! The whole scene was so surreal, the visitor lost his footing, slipping down several steps and then catching himself.
"This is your plan?" He cried. He didn't know whether to laugh or throw up!
"Yep."
"Ridiculous you can't do this!" The visitor spoke in hard assertive tones.
"Oh..I think it's happening." the owner had the face-shield flipped up. He was smoking. It was that look. A mixture of alcohol and determination. The visitor knew this was not going his way.
"Where the hell did you get this thing?" the visitor stalled for time.
"Ebay."
Ebay! Of course he bought it on Ebay! Who knew the owner of the house even knew how to use the internet. That alone was sci-fi enough for the visitor, and the books he had noticed scattered around the old house as of late.
"Is there an MTV Flag with it?" The joke would have been old for most, the owner of the house would not have gotten it. The owner had never understood his generation, or music for that matter. The visitor kept throwing out questions and statements in hope of talking the homeowner out of his plan.
"You can't leave us now! There is too much left to do for us here!"
The owner smiled and pointed his silver white astronaut glove at the cigarette in his other hand.
"I think the risk has already taken care of me." His grimace spoke volumes about his health. His eyes were old, older than ever.
As usual his explanations for everything had fallen short. The two looked at each other. Finally, the visitor looked away. The owner smiled and turned towards the cosmic oblivion at his feet. He slammed the shield shut, the cigarette inside the helmet with him.
"Dad. I don't think I can do this without you.", whispered the visitor. He had always felt like a visitor in his Dad's home.
The man in the suit smiled, not daring to look back. It would have changed his mind.
"Of course you can. You have been for years." The voice was muffled through the shield of the facemask and the words floated around his back to the man. Yet, the son heard it clear as a bell. It tolled.
With the last of his words the father stepped forward. His body began to sink through the thin veneer of all time and space and with a pop he was on the other side. His son watched him fall away, the silver of the suit reflecting the lights of the cosmos. A peaceful swirling of the universe around a man as he contemplated his final place within. He waved to his son as he somersaulted towards nebulas far and away. The son stared over the cosmic pond, his tears landing on the surface,then popping through to the other side instantly transformed to ice. It was weird that his tears would carry enough weight to sink, but they did. They glittered as snowflakes blowing in the imagined solar winds. He watched until he could no longer tell his father from the picture of the universe. The son turned and trudged up the stairs. Tomorrow he would brick up the wall and sell the house. He walked outside and looked up at the sky, blinking back more tears coupled with a brief smile, he shuffled off into the night, heading home. The moon and the stars enjoying their cosmic show as he walked.

(Happy Birthday Dad! There isn't a day that goes by.......)

An open letter to Northern State University, the City of Aberdeen, the SDWCA and the South Dakota Wrestling Community

There are no selection show Sundays. There are no office pools on Cody Pack's chances at the Championships. Wrestling is difficult arduous sport from the time you pick up a headgear to the day you hang it up. There is little glory. Stands are usually empty with just the cheering of families and a few friends. Lessons are learned with your face in the mat or counting the lights. I often found the center of the mat was the greatest solitude I could find. The quiet muffle of the crowd making it through my headgear to my ears. A zen quality of thinking of your next two or three moves and the simultaneous reaction of the body putting those into action while processing what an opponent is currently doing. The delirious feeling of giving it your all, and sometimes your arm not being raised despite all your effort. It is living in the moment while thinking of the future and forgetting the past.

In recent years, the sport has taken a bashing, sometimes even by me. It has gotten better in aspects that shouldn't be part of the sport but have been integral to it's past and the old school ways of thinking concerning nutrition. It has fought it's way back from extinction from an Olympic Committee that would rather put more obscure sports in action than a rich history of tradition.
In our own microcosm of the world the wrestling community has been setback by the recent decision of Northern State University to halt the program for "study". I don't believe anyone is buying that. However, the quick reaction for consideration of the SDWCA is to cancel the State Youth Tournament in Aberdeen, SD next year. The tournament was a request by the NSU wrestling to have as a fundraiser for it's scholarships. Think about that! A university reached out to a youth program in order to save it's program. Smartly(can't remember if that's a word, but I wrestled.), the SDWCA agreed to do that in order to protect the sport it nurtures in youth across our State. What a great idea! Unfortunately the unfortunate happened, the NSU program was put on the chopping block. At least it got a courtesy excuse, unlike University of Nebraska-Omaha which was just summarily executed alongside it's football program. UNO had a very successful program, so the NSU excuse of 2 bad years doesn't hold much weight with me either.

Now, I have laid the ground work of the problem. I can see why the SDWCA is thinking about the decision to remove the tournament from Aberdeen. On the surface this looks like a reasonable request. However, wrestlers and their communities are tougher than that. We can not simply take our headgears and go home when things get tough. If the University is serious about a "courtesy study" then a committee of concerned wrestling parties should be formed. Frame the beliefs that wrestling deserves to be part of the University still. A solution should be found. If this wrestling team is that important then we should be looking to help still run this tournament in Aberdeen and as a complete community raise funds to help with scholarships to maintain the continuation of the program. Not just NSU, but all the colleges in the state maintain a program. I do not know where all the funds go for all the clubs, but combined we should be able to create some sort of scholarships for our South Dakota Wrestlers to attend university in pursuit of knowledge and to compete. This could help us retain the best of our wrestling talent instead of them leaving the state to represent other colleges. Should the tournament be held in Aberdeen and NSU fails to reinstate the program then funds raised should be disseminated in a fashion that benefits the sport as a whole in the state.

Facebook posts and petitions are nice, but funding is funding. Coaches in every sport and at all levels of education know this to be true. To protect this sport that so many of us grew up. Now we are passing on to our children, because we know it to be one of the purest sports out there. No ball, no pads, we all weigh the same(in theory anyways), just skill, desire, determination and work. We must truly combine the talents we all forged through wrestling and have taken into our adult lives and come up with a better solution than "let's just move the tournament". NSU may be the first shot fired, there are more Universities and more programs at stake. If we retreat in the face of this adversity, then every college knows that we are not just measuring our support with the number of facebook likes and twitter reposts. True support is measured in dollars whether through funding or butts in the seats. A hard truth, brutal but true. Wrestling is very much like life, you reap what you sow. The wrestling community cannot afford to let another program shutdown with barely a fight. Simply moving the tournament is barely a fight and will sow the thought process that this is alright. Supporting the sport needs to happen with calm, reason, and  viable solutions.

(I decided to use this blog for an editorial opinion piece, which is really not it's purpose per se. It is to work on my writing ability, so I kind of hit the objective. Also, I'm not a narcissist so I can't always write about myself. )

Life is full of coincidences. We all have them, some insignificant and some seemingly meaningful. These events are just occurrences to which we add our own stories. Still, what is life without a good story now and then? Pretty boring. We often look to our past to for signs of what we should do in the now. As long as we don't dwell on it and allow ourselves to move forward there is nothing wrong with that.
This last week my little girl turned 9 years old. It's pretty incredible to think in reality it was so long ago. Yet it seemed like yesterday. I realize this is cliché and everyone with kids says the same thing. There is a reason for that. It's true, these years fly by. The birth of any child is so embellished in your mind that it is so easy to pull up that memory because of it's intensity. So, yes, it seems like yesterday.
About 6 months prior to the birth of my daughter my dad passed away, and my grandmother passed away 3 months after him. It was a tough time to say the least. Stories are always thrown out between relatives at times like this where we remember some of the smart or dumb things the deceased did. My Dad was nowhere near immune to these types of stories. Dad had a workshop in my hometown, he was pretty good at fixing things, working on cars, etc.. It was full of part time projects he would work on after his day at the plant or on the weekends. His mechanical intuitiveness was always something I marveled at. His workshop was full of all the tools kids aren't supposed to touch today. Band saws, table saws, welding equipment, cutting tools, you name it. My brothers and I would screw around and try to play tag with welding masks on, inside this shop with all the machinery. Real safe stuff like that. Mostly, we wanted to learn how to use the equipment and maybe get to do something cool. I was 4 or 5 years old. I didn't get to do anything that required metal revolving teeth and electricity.
We also stored things inside the shop. In particular we had a bin of mostly sports equipment and some toys. It was full of bats, rackets,  and various balls. I think we kept it there so we would have some other things to do outside the shop when we were hanging out and getting under foot.
Now, as most people know Dad had a pretty good drinking problem and more than once I'm sure he drank beer(I believe it was the 70's so Olympia or PBR was the brand of choice at the time) while working at his shop. In one very good instance he was painting something yellow. Well, he either overshot his target or aimed on purpose, he was known to do stuff like that in his alcohol driven jerkiness. Long story short, he painted the bin full of our toys. The end result was a bunch of sporting equipment painted half yellow. The other half was facing down or away from the spray and retained their original colors. We held on to many of these items for years, and always produced the story when asked why our tennis racket was half yellow. We thought it was funny after a while (That's called a coping mechanism)
Now we shoot back up to nine years ago and my daughter was being born. It hurt like hell that Dad would never see his granddaughter. Despite all of our differences and arguments, I loved him very much, even in his various states of being towards the end of his life. So, even in that joyous time, there was some sadness leading up to Lilly's birth for me. I won't bore you with the details of her actual birth. A few highlights: it was a back-birth, forceps were used, at one point my wife caught me watching Seinfeld (The English Patient episode), Apollo Ohno won another gold(USA! USA! USA!)and we had one of the best old school nurses to ever walk the halls of Sioux Valley Hospital(Karen you will always be a legend and will be missed! She always remembered Lilly whenever we saw her after that!) It all ended around 3ish in the morning, and we had acquired our beautiful baby girl.

The next morning I walked down to get a coffee from the stand in the cafeteria. I ordered the usual mocha, grabbed a newspaper and handed the lady my ten and waited for my change. She handed me whatever the change was and as I was about to put it in my pocket, I glanced down in my palm. Nestled among the coins was a dime, it was half yellow  and the other side was the normal silver. I don't believe in much as far as a higher entity, but I took this as a good sign of things to come and maybe the old man had seen his grand daughter arrive in this world. Maybe....maybe not. I don't know if there is some sort of oxidization or science to explain why one half of the dime was yellow and the other was normal. I just know this is the only time I had ever seen, or have seen a dime like this. In reality as long as it means something to me, that is all that matters.I've held on to that dime for all these years. I never put it anywhere safe. It never gets spent. It has made it through 3 moves, including this last one as I'll explain in a minute. I let the dime have it's own journey just like the rest of us, and it always shows up so it won't be left behind.

Close to Now: Lilly just turned 9 last Thursday(as I have already mentioned). On Saturday I went back to Chamberlain to move some more of our stuff in a u-haul. As I was cleaning up and getting ready to leave I looked down on the floor of our bedroom and that half yellow dime was sitting there near a corner. I scooped it up and put it in my pocket. The drive from Chamberlain to Sioux Falls is a long one, if you've ever made it you know what I am talking about. It's a road that stretches as far as you allow your mind to let it, an endless landscape of snow, dirt and brown dead prairie. It was a nice time for reflecting on the coincidences of spray painted toys, the loss of my Dad, the birth of my daughter, growing up in South Dakota and the people(and things) I shared that journey with at the time and where I am going. I'd say that's worth a dime.

Writing is not hard. Not writing is hard. The past couple weeks have been doozies. It's been a mixture of moving, wrestling tournaments, getting the house ready for shows, preparing the kids, getting ready to move a business, a bout of good ole gout, changing insurance carriers twice, kids changing schools, starting a new position and just plain life. In all of that the goals have been hard to keep. Running on a gouty toe? Not fun, not even a little bit. I still did it on one occasion as I tackled what I assume is one of the steepest hills I think I have ever tried to run up in my life. I was in the army in North Carolina, so I think there have been comparable, although I was 18 and weighed 165 pounds at the time. Writing has been sporadic as well, a couple days during the weekend that a page didn't get put down as we were out of town and we were focusing on the kids having a nice time before the final move.Still in the back of my head I was composing and working some things out in between swimming pools, Discovery Centers, acute care, and wrestling matches. The Acute Care was for the toe again, everybody else in the family is fine. Nobody drowned or was hurt in a wrestling match. When you have so much going on that takes you away from your other goals it is very easy to fall back and listen to the time wasters in your head. Don't do it. Get back on those goals as soon as you can. Of course this is said by the guy who has been working on this specific blog for a couple weeks and is rewriting it in hopes of salvaging it.

Aging can be tough. It is the fighting of the midlife crises, all the goals, little to gigantic, that slipped through with the erosion of personal time and perceived responsibilities. The whole figuring out if you wasted the first 30-40 years or not(For the record, I don't think I did. i just didn't use them to maximum effect). The big deal is what do you do with the next 40? I often wonder at what point our internal mechanisms lock up the autopilot and we just say "I'm cruising for the exit signs! I can make it from here!" I was just about there in my own head, but there was a tingle in the back of it that said, "I'm not going to let you do this to us!" And there came the lack of satisfaction in the way I was handling life from family to career. Because in my head(I don't say heart, that's just an organ for pumping blood.)I knew I could do more, but at what I want to do. That's what is important.
I'm sure a lot of people don't feel they can change. That they have the weight of the world on their shoulders and there is no way out, but 65 years old and a social security check. My dad lived that way, it was a harsh self-torture of booze and hopelessness. Not recommended.

 There are a lot people who know how lucky they are living their dreams. True story: not all dreams are the same. Don't let anyone talk you out of your own. Every dream if pursued with passion, intent, and purpose can be achieved. It's as simple as that. The people that do that are the people that inspire me. Here's a tidbit, those people didn't "get lucky" they made those things happen for themselves by directing their focus and energy into making those things happen.

I recently posted a meme on my facebook wall. This should be news as I detest memes for the most part, I usually find them vague and too much fluff to hide behind. Sometimes I think people use them as shields and "cyberwalls" as we fakebook through to the next post about what we are having for a noon meal. This meme spoke to me, mostly because it was a said by one of my favorite people in the entertainment industry. The quote goes like this: "No such thing as spare time. No such thing as free time. No such thing as down time. All you got is life time. Go." The man who said this is Henry Rollins. He has been around for decades in music or spoken word. If you've ever followed his music or his poetry or his interviews, that guy believes it. Intensity doesn't even begin to cover his demeanor and go at it attitude. I hadn't thought about him in a while and when I saw that meme. It just blew me away. It's entirely true. If I truly live in the present and try to make sure I am moving forward and building the life I desire. I don't have a second to spare. If I am thinking, better be thinking about improving myself. Every second on the couch not spent with my kids is another second spent manufacturing my own Cat's in the Cradle. Every second you read this blog is another second you don't spend with your wife, your family, your friends, your goals. Tricky, for me, because of course I want you to be reading this blog. Hopefully, you are using it to help yourself, or at the very least discredit what I am doing under your breath from the personal discomfort I am causing you. The goal is to use every moment to fulfill the life you wish to create. There are no wrong answers of course, it's all individualistic. If at the end of the day I really threw 100% of myself at every situation, then I can't be unhappy with the result. I did all I could. However, if I hold back, if I tell myself "I can't" or "I didn't" or "That wouldn't work", then I've self-sabotaged my own goals. Everyone knows when they do this, admitting it is another story. If I do that, why set out to do anything at all. Use your life time wisely. Tricky thing is you spend some of that life time every second.  No refunds.

The hectic panic of trying to strive through life at a 100% is challenging to say the least. You set goals, you manage your kids, your job, your relationships. You still have to find time for your dreams in there somehow. There is interesting viewpoints on living at 100% from all facets of life. Slow down, enjoy life or life's too short, you got to keep on moving! If that is not clear enough: Part of life wants you to sit with a Corona on a beach, part of life wants you to be Bud Light and play ping pong against Arnold Schwarzenegger! The good news is either way gets you a beer in the end. Goal accomplished! Do you see where these mindsets can butt heads pretty quickly in my internal monologues? At the suggestion of one of my friends, I started reading a book to help me learn to try and not cram so much writing into one day with instant expectations that I will publish after a year, as well as it takes time to craft a book/story/manuscript. (Unless you're Stephen King. He has made some sort of deal with something Unholy and wakes up with a manuscript under his pillow every 3 months. That's strictly my opinion with no real proof of Mr. King's unholy deals.). To really slow it down, rather than just stream words onto a page and hope it sticks. The different methods various writers use to arrive at the end of their stories. All are varied as snowflakes. There is no one way to do it. I guess I kind of knew that. Internally I am taking it that the difference between a decent writer, a good writer, and a phenomenal writer is the extra time taken on working on their books. In short the book is telling me to find my own time to write and how to write. The most interesting part of the book is to do an experiment where I take an average day and put all the things into various time slots. Then see how that scheduled day fills up. This exercise would work for anybody really. If done mentally, that schedule fills up pretty fast for any of us. Work, kids, kids' activities, friends, family-time, Spouse-time(or significant other for you non-committal types), hobbies, exercise and of course personal dreams. That's a lot. It's easy to see why so many dreams or even hobbies fall to the wayside. I also see why parents try to get their kids to enjoy the same hobbies and activities. Which there is nothing wrong with that in the least. Schedule-wise if we all enjoy the same activities, it frees up a lot of other time and I think we bond better as people.

Living in the 100% doesn't mean you have to take every thing that is thrown at you and say "yes". It means accepting the things you want to do and putting all of your effort into them. If you choose to do it, do it. It's O.K. not to want to do everything. It's giving your all to the things you have CHOSEN to do. If you are going to be in a relationship with someone, be in that relationship. Schedule time for that relationship and be present in it. My wife and I figured out the other day(well, we probably always noticed it) that she'll sit in her chair and I on the couch when we have our At-Home-Date-Nights and watch our DVR'ed shows(The Blacklist, Modern Family and Parenthood should always be part of your 100%). Mostly this puts a nice side table between us that we each use for snacks and beverages. Is that 100%? How dumb is that? The whole time past the age of 12 I wished there would be a hot girl sitting next to me. Now, I have one right in the house, and we sit in two different spots because we need a place to put the cheese and crackers. Silly. The new rule is we sit next to each other, and of course the dog will not leave us alone. So, she sits with us as well, like our own chaperone, obviously she is just trying to get her paws on the snacks. There isn't anything wrong with some new rules to break up habits we fall into as people. Sometimes spontaneity needs a kick in the pants with some ground rules.

How did this come to be an issue for me? Last night we(once again "We" means my wife and I) started brainstorming all the things we wanted to do once our family relocation was complete. Eat better, drop a bunch of the processed foods, go on family walks, date nights out, etc, etc. That list can build pretty quickly. I understand we didn't need to do all those things and it was just brainstorming. In my head though, it was conflicting with the book I was reading about limiting your commitments in order to make time for writing. Not finding time, MAKING time. A big difference when you think about it. I would say I started to shut down about it after a bit. I was seeing my dream being pushed to the wayside. My internal daily planner was filling up rather quickly and I found I didn't want to suggest anything because my goal is to write, but my family, my wife all take the 100% as well, because without them what is the point anyways? This doesn't mean I don't want any part of those ideas. It just was a little overwhelming to think of all that being implemented, when I have suppressed a personal dream of my own for so long.

Instead of shutting down, I should have kept going and then offered the solution I had been reading about. We should have mocked up the previously mentioned personal schedule with all the items we absolutely want/need to do. Then insert the new ideas/tasks/dreams in to the same schedule, in short find a place and time for them. I'm not usually a draw-out-a-plan-guy-for-my-personal-life, but I'm getting there(I don't think I shocked anybody with that bit of information). However, I like the idea of actually penciling in what a day looks like. It's not set in stone, but it can show us what we do or do not have time to accomplish. Maybe, list things as being part of the 100%, generally things you can not do with out: family, work, a goal. The insert the ideas we may not be sure about, but it's always something we have wanted to try. Stressing to make sure we have the tasks in our schedule that we normally do no matter what. For instance personally, I always like to have some screw around time, especially as a person who likes stories. So, yes T.V., music, and reading are important to me, as they do lend inspiration. It's also always nice to sit and think for a half hour about nothing and everything(I believe people call this meditation, but I'm not that deep). I need to put those in a timeframe and when I would normally do them. After all that is done look for actual win-win situations that actually may free up time: Go for a walk with family, maybe that could count as exercise as well for the day. Get to exercise and get to spend time with family. Win-win.  T.V. time can be part of Stay-at-Home Date-Night. It's all good. After it's all done and penciled in look at it together. Can we scale it back? Or do we see we have plenty of time on other days to accomplish/do things left on our brainstorming list?

I find that everything we really want to do can fit into a schedule with my family. As long as we talk it out and communicate and work towards our win-win solutions.  Everybody loves puzzles and making things fit.We are on the same team, working on the same schedule balancing puzzle. It's not such a bad idea to put that 100% effort into the puzzle that constitutes our daily life.

(Once again. I am not a life coach, what may work for my family may not work for some. If you feel you need a life coach please get one. I am for hire. Currently my advice is free, mostly because I haven't found anyone willing to pay me for it yet. I would also like to thank everybody that supported this blog by reading and sharing it. Between this site and the first one around 2000 people have visited it, no confirmation for sure if they actually read it. Anyways I feel that is a win-win and makes me feel pretty good about my efforts as well as gives me lots of practice writing non-fiction. I also apologize if Mr. King or Mr. Schwarzenegger are offended in any way. I would love to play ping pong with the Governator. I also would love to have as many published works and movies as Mr. King, except for Graveyard Shift. I still want my money $4 back from that awful movie. Thank you!)