A Little Effort On My Part Wouldn't Hurt

I guess things have been going ok since I’ve moved down to the Detroit area. I’m working, seeing people on a regular basis and I’ve seen more Tiger games and concerts than I can count. It’s nice to be relatively close to a number of things to do and see. You’d think I’ve got everything one could possibly want. Well, you know me; I couldn’t possibly be satisfied with my lot.

Ok, that’s not really the right thing to say. Something within myself just isn’t right. I woke up a few days ago to get ready for work and I swear, the first clear thought that came into my head was telling me how great it would feel to throw some stuff in the car and just take off. I hopped in the shower, got ready for work and still, I kept thinking how easy it would be to just go. Where? Who knows? Why? Who cares? I’m just feeling like I’m being pushed down towards the ground. Kind of like fighting gravity and I’m not really sure how long I can, or want to keep pushing back. It’s really a strange feeling to explain, I just, I don’t know.

I was driving around the other day just trying to clear out my head for a while and found myself near the zoo. I’m normally not a big fan of zoos, I’ve always said the only thing I ever got out of them were sore feet, but decided to walk around there for a while. There’s something to be said for being all-alone in a crowd. There’s been numerous times in my life that I’ve felt that way emotionally but this was the first time in a while I was actually trying to be a alone in a crowd. It’s kind of nice being by yourself and being able to listen to others converse and have no expectations to give your thoughts on whatever they may be talking about.

I don’t know what it is about the whole concept of expectations that both bothers and frightens me so much. I’ve spent most of my life fighting against any that were ever had of me. I must say it’s certainly something I’ve been incredibly good at. I remember, as a kid, I would find out what anyone expected of me and do everything possible to ensure my failure at satisfying that goal. I wanted, so badly, to not go along with what others wanted or thought but wouldn’t dare want to stand up and say it. That might cause some sort of confrontation and I’m really bad at that. So, I always made my rebellion something that would stand up with my own version of logic rather than against anyone in particular. I still find myself doing that today.

I have such a hard time finding the middle ground of being social in my life. I moved here because I really needed to be around people. I’m now finding myself almost afraid to see them. All the old questions come into play: will they still like me the more they know me? Why would they? Etc… I know, to most people, this is all so ridiculous. There’s also a huge part of me that sees it the same way. Lately though the fears are getting more of a stronghold than I’d like. I’ve avoided people like the plague. I had my Fantasy Football draft last night and was invited to a party I could have gone to afterwards. My original plan, two weeks ago, was to go to the party after the draft was over. Midway through the draft I started getting the jitters and found a way to get away early and headed home. I couldn’t even consider the concept of going to be around more people, it scared me to no end.

I know, when I’m thinking logically, that nobody has any expectations of me that I wouldn’t have for myself and friends have even less than that. It’s the thinking logically part that seems to be resting more and more lately and I’m working on waking it up. I know that I and I alone do these things to myself. My therapist says it must be exhausting analyzing every thing I do or say before the fact and she’s probably right. Maybe I just need a little rest from all the ciphering. Think I’ll work on that next.

Boy Could He Play Guitar

In1976 Peter Frampton released an album that ensured that his life would never be the same. “Frampton Comes Alive” was easily the best selling album of the year and made Frampton a mega star. He was everywhere. You couldn’t turn on a radio or television without ether seeing or hearing him or something about him. The sad part about it, and I’ve written about it before, is that it almost made listening to him intolerable for many years. The other consequence of becoming the superstar he became was that it changed who he was and what he was about musically.

Peter Frampton is a guitar player and a mighty fine one at that. He’s not only a really good player; he’s ridiculously underrated at it too. I really believe that if the live album didn’t achieve the heights that it did, he’d be considered one of the top five or so guitarists of his era. That’s the problem with his becoming a pop star, people stopped taking him seriously as a musician. It’s truly a loss to the public that we all shut him out of our musical tastes so many years ago.

I saw Frampton at Meadowbrook Theater last night and really enjoyed the show. Opening with a song by Junior Walker and The All Stars and closing with George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is something you don’t normally hear from an artists with as large a catalogue as his. He did the obligatory numbers from the live album and his cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” was spot on, as you’d expect. What Peter Frampton mostly did last night though, was play the guitar.

A few years ago he won a Grammy Award for best pop instrumental album. He played a few songs from that album along with a couple from his as yet to be released new cd and you could just see what it did for him. He played guitar. He made it seem that it was what he was born to do. I looked him up on the web the other day and found he was self-taught. That’s impressive but a number of folks have done that. When you see that he taught himself at the age of eight, well, you can see how I’m moved by it. Even with the encore of the Harrison song, he had a good 10-minute “jam” with the band that though seemed effortless for him, was some pretty nifty work. He also played an instrumental version of Sound Garden’s “Black Hole Sun” that was really pleasant on the ears.

I normally get incredibly bored whenever I’m at a show when the band goes into those long swooning guitar solos that were a staple of most concerts I went to as a kid. This was different though. Peter Frampton sings with his guitar, and as stated already, he does it really well. Though he played numerous musical passages throughout the night, I never found myself getting restless. He played like it was meant to be and he played it without the fanfare or ego that normally comes with it. He just seemed to be in a really good place musically and looked like he really was enjoying himself. I was too.

More Complex Than It Seems

There are numerous problems that arise when someone writes the way I do. The blog has gotten more personal as my thoughts have focused more and more on the life I’ve lived and all the issues and challenges, real or imagined, that I’ve dealt with. I’ve pretty much laid out, for public review, everything I think and more importantly, I believe, how I feel. I have never hidden anything about myself to whomever feels the urge to read, and or comment about who or what I’m about. I’ve written about why I write, about how when I have any kind of stress or pressure I have an absolute need to write.

I’ve introduced my family, friends, and even my ex wife to the readers of this blog and I’ve never had any reason to ever believe I would feel the way I do right now. I’ve run into something that I simply can’t be completely honest about and I don’t know what to do about that. I’ve run into this dilemma that has not only confused me but has shaken me to my very core and I’m screaming inside to let it out and I don’t know how to go about doing that.

The reason I am so conflicted is because the things that have literally knocked me on my ass have not only happened to me, but to family members as well and I could never take the liberty of putting their private life up for public inspection. I truly could not care less about what others think of me after reading the things I write about myself. Of course I enjoy it when others say nice things about something I’ve done but even if they all thought I was completely off my rocker, I’d still keep writing the same way I always have. I cannot, however, assume that others involved in certain things feel the same way.

I have truly never run across this type of situation, when it comes to my writing and it’s leaving me with no real release and that’s truly not a good thing. I need to write my screams, my fears, my laughter and even my tears, yet if I did, others in my family may feel hurt or embarrassed by it. I will say that everyone is as well as can be expected and we’re all hoping things only get better but it isn’t going to happen overnight. This is really going to take some time and my emotional release for the last four years or so has been this blog. I don’t know how much of a release I can get by censoring myself. Some serious thought and reflection needs to go into this. Trust me, it’s not as simple as just not posting, if it were there’d be no issue at all.

Rock n Roll Saves The Day

I had to be at work this morning at 4:00. That’s never been a fun time to start working. It means I’m up at 2:30 to get ready and get in the car for the drive. Being in retail, I’ve worked all kinds of crazy hours, of course, working the normal day shifts have always been preferable.

When I started in this wonderful business I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to get away from I was in San Diego and would work from one in the morning until 10. I’d go home from work and, being in my 20’s, it was no big deal to stay up the rest of the day. I’d party with my roommates, go to the beach or just generally hang out until about seven or eight at night. I’d then take a short snooze, a few hours at best, and get ready to do it all again. No big deal, living on three hours a night.

Wow, have thing changed. I normally get to work now at 5:30 so you would think an hour and a half difference wouldn’t be that big of a deal, wrong! I felt a step behind all day. Just couldn’t catch up with myself all day long. The more into my workday I got, the more my back hurt or my legs would feel like they weighed a ton. Then, of course, my head started playing games with me. You know, mid life and what have I done with myself, why didn’t I stay in school, how come that kid doesn’t seem as wiped out as I am when we both came into work at the same time, did I leave the coffee pot on. Ugh!

The workday ended and I was feeling old and useless and I just wanted to go home and crawl into bed and never get out again. I got into the car and started it up. I turned on the radio and the all news station started telling me the world’s problems. Oh no, the mood I was in was certainly not conducive to listening to this kind of stuff. I needed to get myself up. I had to make myself believe that I wasn’t finished, that I wasn’t too old to keep up with the kids. That I hadn’t turned into the old man my father was at my age.

I started flipping around the radio stations looking for a little juice that the local stations might be able to provide. No luck. Either the songs were too new or just plain not loud and hard enough to put a little spirit back into this old soul of mine. I turned on the satellite radio and started pushing the buttons on that, boy, talk about 57 channels and nothing on, this was dreadful. With my satellite radio you can see what song is playing and the artist on the little screen. I kept running through the stations to, what seemed, no avail. Then I saw it.

Across the screen I saw the words “Mama Kin”, a song on the very first Aerosmith album from way back in 1973. It’s a definite rocker and would certainly cure my ills. I hit the button to get to that station and all I heard were the last couple notes before a different song by a different artist came on. Damn! Mind you, I was still in the parking lot at work. My car, being the mess that I keep it, has a ton of cd’s in it. They’re just strewn all over the place. I know I have that cd, I wondered if it was in the car. After searching the cd’s in the front seat with no luck, I got out of the car, opened one of the back doors and climbed in to search under the seats, there it was: my treasure of the Sierra Madre, as it were. Aerosmith’s first album.

I put the cd in, rolled down the windows, turned the volume way up and as the first few bars of “Mama Kin” came out of the speakers I headed home. As each song on the cd played I seemed to feel a little better. By the end of the cd I was just pulling into my driveway. It sort of fit just right. I no longer felt totally exhausted, yeah, I was still tired but I was still able to take Lucky out for our walk up to DQ and get a Blizzard. I came home, played around on the computer and watched the game. Not an incredibly taxing evening but I did have the ride home to remind me that no matter what your age or physical condition is, you’re never too old to rock n roll. It was a needed lesson

Shakin All Over

“Nervous tension, mans invention
is the biggest killer that’s around today.
Let the tension out or it will build and build
And sadly strike you down some day.”

Very strange feeling came over me today. Out of the blue I just had this sense of impending trouble. That’s not really how it is, let me see, it’s like I feel as if the, excuse the language, proverbial shit is about to hit the fan. Really weird, I feel as if someone’s ready to pop out from behind the next wall I pass and crush me. I truly can’t think of anything I’ve screwed up on, well, except for all the stuff I’m always blaming myself for but that’s normal. This is different.

My heart feels like it’s beating so hard that it’s about to rip right through my chest. I stopped at the store on the way home to get something and went to the blood pressure machine and it showed it to be much higher than it normally is. What the hell is this all about?

“Valium helped me for a while
but somehow Valium always seems
to bring me down. There’s no pill I can
recommend whose side effects aren’t
guaranteed to send you round the bend”.

Ok, it’s now the next day and I kinda figured out what the anxiety was all about. See, there was a comedian in town that I wanted to see and I told a number of people about it, while letting them know the details of it so they could join me if they wanted to. Well, it soon became much bigger than I wanted it to. At one point I had received 13 emails from different people saying they would see me there. Those kinds of numbers, though kind of asked for by me, made me really uncomfortable.

I don’t know why it made me so nervous but I swear, it happens way too often. I have no idea what there is to be afraid of, if that’s the right word. I spent most of the day yesterday thinking of ways I could get out of going at all. I literally argued with myself the entire time I was at work. I kept telling myself that I really wanted to see the performer so why would I punish myself by not going? On the other hand, the beating I gave myself all day and the day before was just as bad, if not worse.

What did I have to be nervous about? Nothing at all, of course. I’ve always had a hard time going anywhere to meet a group of people but I’ve always been able to deal with it in a fashion that the only time I would feel really off balance about it was in the car on the way there. Lately though it’s been getting harder and harder to contain the nerves into that short little time frame of the drive. I’ve been working on this for quite a while and it only seems to be getting worse. How can it be that I let the world know about something, then get all crazy inside if they want to enjoy it as much as I? Headin up to the shrink today, I’m sure we’ll talk about this for a bit. Jeez, sometimes it’s such a chore.

By the way, the two sets of lyrics are from a Kinks song called “National Health”. I tried to find it to put it on the playlist for the blog but it’s not available.

Where Was The Turning Point?

Went to lunch with a few people I knew as kids yesterday, two of which I hadn’t seen since we were kids. We’ve been in contact online though so it wasn’t like meeting a total stranger. That’s so much easier, you know, chatting up people online before actually seeing and talking to them again. You’ve already found the common ground needed to start and move any conversation forward. It was good to see everyone, as usual, and we all seemed to have a nice lunch along with good conversation.

Of course seeing these folks brings along with it memories of youth and the commonalities we all shared. Same schools, hang outs, etc… What we always find ourselves talking about more than anything else of course, are the people we all knew. They could be teachers we shared or had heard about, all the parents we knew of each other’s friends and most importantly the old friends themselves. Have you heard from so and so or did you hear what happened to so and so. This so and so character is easily the most popular person brought up in these conversations. It’s always good to hear when someone you knew back then is doing well and living the promised life of youth, it’s also pretty tragic to hear of those that haven’t fared so well.

There’s always the kids that you remember as the ones, when you think about them, you always thought would end up in trouble or dead at an early age. It’s really not that shocking to find how spot on your thoughts were when it comes to a number of these folks. It’s also a very pleasant surprise to find those that you saw as little else but future prisoners having, at some point, turned their lives around and are now productive members of society. Of course there’s the complete opposite of that. The ones you remember as the “good” kids that have somehow taken that wrong turn in that road we all come to a few times in our lives. I know I’ve had that opportunity to make that wrong turn myself and though I may not have taken the turn that could have led to great success in whatever one does, has indeed kept me out of the perils that many have faced. Granted, it’s probably my fear of taking any chances at all that has kept me out of both the great success and the trouble that I’m talking about.

Once in a while I’ll go to a web site of whatever states prison system I happen to be thinking of and will punch in the names of those that I thought may have taken up residence in a state facility. It rarely surprises me to see how correct I’ve been in these thoughts I’ve had of these folks. I think about the time spent with these guys and remember thinking, even back then, how these kids were going to end up in trouble. It’s weird; I was never concerned for myself. I knew I wouldn’t get into any situation that would lead to that type of life yet I knew a number of these kids wouldn’t have the wherewithal to make sure the fate that awaited them wasn’t a sure thing.

I often wonder what it would be like to sit down and talk to some of these guys today and share memories. I’d like to see how theirs differed from mine. Was their a time when they simply gave up and said, I’m going to break into this house even though they knew the odds of getting caught were great? I’d love to ask them questions like that among many others. How does the same kid that used to come over in the middle of winter and just hang around all day smoking cigarettes and ordering pizza from Primo’s end up with such a different life than me? We were all kids once; we all did the same things back then. At what point did either of us come to that fork in the road that gave them the opportunity to make such a horrible choice? We all have regrets, some more than others. Theirs, however, have to be so much deeper than any regret those that haven’t faced such a life have to face. I mean, they were just kids too, hanging out at my house or your house. Where did it all cave in on them?

Sometimes You Just Know

I was driving up to East Lansing to see my therapist the other day and was thinking, once again, about how fortunate I’ve been in the last number of months. Reconnecting with so many people, chatting with them daily, be it online, by phone or in person. It’s brought so many things into my head that, like I’ve stated on numerous occasions, it becomes quite overwhelming. Something that really hit me while driving is how young we all still are. Imagine our parents at this age doing and talking about the things we do.

I told my therapist that I had an epiphany on the drive. I said it suddenly hit me why I really like this whole Facebook thing. I said it’s a lot like High School and I never participated in these games that are so prevalent on the site way back when. What I mean by that is not to say I was above that kind of thing, I just never hung around the school. I wasn’t popular by any stretch of the imagination and, I am here. It’s a nice feeling. Granted, it’s all kind of a fluke. By that I mean that it’s a great deal easier to spew out my thoughts or comments from here in my chair than it would be in person. If I had just started showing up places without knowing these people I doubt I’d have said a word. This way they’ve gotten to know me, and I them, long before I have to put on that face we all put on when we are out and about.

The relationships I’ve developed on Facebook are almost like when you start having a crush on someone. You know how that goes, there’s nothing anyone can say about the one you’re falling for that could possibly make you feel any less enamored of them. After a while that feeling fades and faults are found. The goal here is to keep those faults hidden long enough so those that are close feel they’ve invested too much to just go away. I know I’ve thought about what could happen when the newness of all of this wears off and I sincerely hope the relationships developed continue on.

Going back to the high school reference, as more and more people have hopped on the Facebook train, certain cliques have developed. 30 years ago the only clique I felt I could possibly fit into was that of the few friends I had that wouldn’t think any less of me for just getting high and watching television, certainly not the popular group. Here, on Facebook, I’m in that popular clique. I’ve actually found myself not talking to some simply because they aren’t part of said clique. That’s horrible I know but like I said, it’s just like being back in school. I’ve become friends with people, outside of the Internet, that certainly weren’t friends with me years ago.

It’s kind of like redemption for me in a way. As a teen, I would see the people that were a year or two older and wonder why we couldn’t hang out together, be friends, confide in each other. I always thought that I had something that could interest them. Most, if not all these kids were friends with my brothers. That alone, as kids, is more than enough of a reason for me not to belong in their circle of friends. As one gets older, age makes those sibling complications disappear. Just getting older has given me this redemption I believe I have been seeking all these years. I had such a hard time understanding it back then and, yes, it feels good to be proven right, as it were.

Like I said at the top, I feel so lucky to have this virtual world to live in right now. I’ve got friends, literally, around the world because of it. I have had numerous conversations with people who have downplayed their use of Facebook as just something to pass the time. I feel far different than that. I have told many of you and I will continue to say that Facebook has changed my life. I have developed close relationships with so many people that the normal life I’d lived for the past five years has made a complete circle. I go out on a regular basis, never did that before. I look forward to my time away from work just to be able to socialize with friends, never did that before either. This is very real to me and I can’t repeat enough how much it has done for me inside.