Posts in the “personal” category

A post from 2017:

For everyone who is upset by the actions of the current president and other political leaders, I urge you to take action. By “action” I don’t mean posting things on social networks. I mean writing your senators and congressmen. I mean peacefully marching and demonstrating. I mean supporting others who are marching and demonstrating. Every time you think about sharing a post, send a check to the ACLU and other organizations that are fighting against hate, oppression, destruction of the environment, etc. Otherwise, it’s just a lot of people preaching to the choir.

Back on this day (May 30th) in 2012, I turned myself in to the police in Virginia Beach. What happened was that I accidentally ran a red light the day before — and I mean it was really, really red — the day before. I was trying to figure out how to get to a grocery store and I was looking at everything but the traffic light.

I was about to leave town and didn’t want to deal with this after I left Virginia, so I called the police and told them I ran such and such a light at approximately such and such time, and I’d like to pay my fine before I left town. They had cameras on all four corners so I figured I was screwed. The woman I spoke to worked for a little while, then came back on the phone and said I was fine, they had no record of it.

This is a picture of me as a pitcher in high school. I don’t want to say that we were poor growing up, but I wore a large outfielder’s glove while pitching because I was afraid to ask my dad for a new glove, and the shoe on my right foot — the one way up in the air — was cracked in the middle.

(Many thanks to Dwayne Heidtbrink for the photo way back when.)

Working with yoga is often interesting. You stretch and twist and focus, trying to be very conscious of your movements, and then one day in the middle of a twisting pose you see your left foot coming out from behind your right ear. At first that’s a real surprise, a shock. You think, “Well, that can’t be my foot over there,” and then you realize it is your foot, and with that comes a strong sense of accomplishment, and maybe a little smile.

Then you do the same pose in the opposition direction, but twist and stretch as you might, your right foot doesn’t come out from behind your left ear. You know you can’t push it any more, at least not while doing the pose properly, so you realize there’s a bit of an imbalance. You accept that there’s still more work to do, but it’s a good thing, so you push on.

I think life is like that too, or can be like that. If you enjoy the struggle, if it’s a worthy struggle — a path with heart — the effort comes willingly, and with its own rewards.

(a facebook post from this date in 2013)

Working with yoga is often interesting. You stretch and twist and focus, trying to be very conscious and aware of your movements, and then one day in the middle of a twisting pose you see your left foot coming out from behind your right ear. At first that’s a real surprise, a shock. You think, “Well, that can’t be my foot over there”, and then you realize it is your foot, and with that comes a strong sense of accomplishment, and maybe a little smile.

Then you do the same pose in the opposition direction, but twist and stretch as you might, your right foot doesn’t come out from behind your left ear. You know you can’t push it any more, at least not while doing the pose properly, so you realize you have a little imbalance. You accept that you have some work to do, but it’s a good thing, so you push on.

I think life is like that too, or can be like that. If you enjoy the struggle, if it’s a worthy struggle — Castaneda’s “a path with heart” — the effort comes willingly, and with its own rewards.

My phone says I have 18 songs by the Cranberries and Dolores O’Riordan. Some of the favorites are Zombie, Linger, Dreams, Electric Blue, and War Child. RIP, Ms. O’Riordan.

~ January 15, 2018

In other blog posts I've mentioned that I think meditation can be a great tool for improving your concentration, so I thought I'd take a few moments here to explain how to meditate. It comes very naturally to me these days, but if you've never meditated before you may not know how to get started, so I thought I'd share this very simple technique here.

How to meditate

This is the very simple technique I learned when I first started meditating. Even in Zen schools, meditation is very simple. The secret is in the daily practice, the repetition that builds the new neural connections in your brain.

I like to listen to audiobooks when I drive around the country, and on my last drive back and forth to New Mexico I listened to the Pema Chodron audiobook, When Pain is the Doorway.

At some point in the book she talks about the storylines that constantly run around in our heads. I can’t remember if she was talking about a specific painful experience or just about storylines in general, but when I got to my hotel I made these notes about what she said: “Go beneath the story ... that takes a while, and meditation is the tool for that, to let go of inner dialog and come back to the direct experience.”

“Low self-esteem is the root cause of practically all the pain and misery in the world. It’s what drives war, and torture, and genocide. It’s what evil is. Do you think Hitler liked himself? Or Cortez? We hate others because we hate ourselves.”

~ Leonard, on Northern Exposure

The prettiest song I’ve heard in quite a while: Love at the Five & Dime, by Nanci Griffith.

(I thought maybe I knew this song from the 1970s, but it wasn’t released until 1986, so maybe it was a Texas thing.)

And you know the sun’s settin’ fast
And just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’Cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
Goodnight

~ from the song Our Town, by Iris DeMent
(and known by NX fans)

While the Super Bowl was a disaster (from a Denver, Colorado, perspective), I’ll try to remember February 2, 2014, as the day I watched Love Actually. Still a favorite quote:

“Okay, dad. Let’s do it. Let’s go get the shit kicked out of us by love.”

When I left Alaska in 2011 I didn’t have enough room in my car for all of my books, so these are the ~104 books I left behind.

“Goddamnit!”

Every so often a woman in a lucid dream this morning yelled out like that, so after the fourth or fifth time I had to ask her about it. “Why do you keep saying that?,” I asked.

“Gets your attention, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“There you have it.”

“There I have what?”

I had my old RAV4 for about eight years. I bought it because Toyota supposedly had good quality, but I sold it on this date a few years ago because I had a lot of problems with that car, including the time it filled up with water shortly after I bought it.

Mandy Patinkin’s two favorite lines from The Princess Bride:

(2) “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.”

(1) “I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I do not know what to do with the rest of my life.”

~ from this video

I don’t remember where I saw this, but I like the saying:

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.”

When I was 20-23 years old, I lived in this apartment building in Texas. I’m not sure about that red/brown tree in the foreground, but the big green tree in the middle of the building was there way back then. Thank you Google Maps for the opportunity to look back in time (without having to travel 1,000+ miles).

I had hoped to stay away from the hospital a while longer, but after a telehealth call, I had to visit the local hospital today.

In the area of the hospital I went to there were only four hospital employees and no customers except for me. One woman at the front door was a gatekeeper. She asked questions and checked to see if I had a fever. After that there was one receptionist working and two people in the lab area.

After checking in I went to sit down in my usual area, and then I noticed that seating area was gone, and most of the other chairs had been removed. All of the medical offices down the hallway in the first picture were closed, and then I saw the blue sign on the way out.

A little bathroom wall inspiration (in the form of creative writing) for the day. Fear nothing! :)