She stood next to the freeway

The wind blew against my sun soaked face as I absorbed it and the scenery around me driving in a convertible on the south side of the island of Maui. I'm not sure what heaven is, but this was as close to it as I could get. On my left was the Pacific Ocean crashing against the white sand beaches in a rhythmic pattern set almost to the music from my stereo and on my right the lush green mountains and sugar cane fields. All that was missing to this epic ride along the coast was that dream girl sitting next to me. As I pulled from one tiny beach city into the next there she stood. This gorgeous light brunette vision hitch hiking, waiting to hop into my passenger seat, to take this incredible Hawaii vacation to another level, and I drove right by. I didn't stop and it took about five minutes of intense dialogue with myself before I turned the car back around to go get her, but when I pulled back by she was gone.

In life we get many chances, some of them we take, and some we drive right by. Who knows what would have happened if I had stopped and picked her up. Perhaps she would have just told me to drop her off in the next city. Maybe she would have chopped me up like The Hitcher. Or she could have said, keep driving, and we'll just see where the road takes us. That was what I contemplated the rest of that drive. One more opportunity lost. Natural instinct told me not to pull over for hitch hikers, and yet that natural instinct never included beautiful goddess-like women waiting for a ride. No idea why I didn't stop immediately. Fear maybe. Fear of the unknown and fear of rejection. Maybe she would have looked at me and laughed and said "yeah right buddy, have a nice drive I'll wait for the next car." The truth is she would have probably gotten in the car and I would have had an even better memory than driving past her.

How often in life do we make like that drive in Maui? Do we drive past something and look back in regret and pull around only to find it is too late? Maybe we try to replicate something we lost only to find it is nowhere near what we were missing in the first place? There are many things we hold onto for nostalgia. Maybe it is an old love letter, pictures of an ex-flame, or old baseball cards from our youth. Something we hide or hold dear but if replicated actually diminish the value of our memories. It's never the same when we reconnect with an ex-flame. Life changes us and also changes them. Our perceptions are altered and maybe we held them to higher acclaim in our memories than they could even possibly live up to. We link them to a time in our life that is long gone and can never be reclaimed. This person won't give us time back. They will only reflect ourselves in how much time has passed.

This works in sports too. I know that my favorite baseball team the S.F. Giants just won the National League West and are in the playoffs. I was ecstatic that they won, but not as much as when I was younger. I remember that in 1989 when the Giants made it all the way to the World Series I was enamored with them. I would listen to every ball game that season on the radio. Hank Greenburg was the announcer and I would listen to the games sitting in my bedroom with all my baseball cards laying on the floor. Each Giants batter that would come to the plate and I'd hold their baseball card as if they were playing on the field in front of me. I would live and die with each game. When Will Clark or Kevin Mitchell came to the plate it would take the Jaws of Life to pry me away from the radio. In fact I can still see Clark's majestic swing in the NLCS series against the Chicago Cubs smashing a grand slam over Wrigley Field. He was electric that series, and yet I know my youth played a huge role in how I remember things. When the games ended on KNBR 680 I would listen to Ralph Barbieri's show afterwards and his final words after each broadcast: "Remember Angels fly because they take themselves lightly." To me at 12 it was the coolest sign off ever, yet in hindsight it wasn't that cool at all. In fact it was taken from someone else and why is he talking about the Angels?



Will "the Thrill" Clark

 I would remember how great a player was in my mind and yet looking back at their actual stats for those same years would see that they were merely mediocre players at best. They weren't dominant. They were good. As a child we believe our favorite athletes can do no wrong, but as adults we are seasoned enough to know they are merely human and full of flaws themselves, including terrible performances. Before the awfulness of Barry Zito the Giants had another awful left handed pitcher in Atlee Hammacker. Sports still bring out our childish whims though. While the Giants struggled to finally win their division I resorted to that 12 year old boy pouting and ready to rip up all my baseball cards. I texted my good friend and fellow Giants fan and moaned how I didn't care about the Giants anyways. I said that they never put food on my table. They are just over priced athletes who don't care about us, but of course I jumped right back on the wagon once they finally won.

It makes me wonder how many of us are aspiring to unrealistic goals. Perhaps it is a goal we set as a child that in hindsight has no way of being accomplished or appreciated by our adult selves. Perhaps it is a life we are now living that we thought would bring us fulfillment but is not. We do most of our dreaming in our childhoods. Most of our goals and dreams are formed long before we go through a school system and maturity process which seems to diminish what we once longed for. I guess we all can't be astronauts or movie stars. We are not all going to be the next Hemingway or Mozart. There can only be one Bruce Lee right? I know that my goal was never to be a banker or to sell products and services that I didn't make or create myself. I guess I don't have to worry about that one anymore, their goal now seems to not have me doing that! But, even in school a business degree feels to me that I am doing this for back up purposes. I am not an accountant nor the next corporate raider that is going to make a killing on Wall Street. I don't have Mark Zuckerburg's brain and will not revolutionize the Internet. I would love to have the talent of Charlie Kaufman or the talent and drive of Stephen King. I'm always amazed at how many novels these writers can churn out and what it even takes to write one. Yet here these guys get a new one to print every two years if not sooner.

Life is the road we travel. It can be on a highway along the coast in Maui or some dirt road in the middle of Modesto. It doesn't matter where it is as long as we know where it is going. Are our dreams realistic or not? Do we have the capability to accomplish them or are we just holding on to a far ago memory? Do we even want it anymore? What kind of life are you living and what can you do to improve it or maintain it? I can't go back and pick up that woman who was hitch hiking on that amazing day 6 years ago. That moment is long gone, but I don't have to drive through life blindly anymore. I can stop and start over. I can change directions and appreciate the scenery while doing so. I just need to get my head out of the clouds, out of yesterday, and into October 2010 and beyond. It's good to hold the past to remind us but we need the present and the future to drive us. Where is it taking you?

What's so social about this?

The other day I watched the film Teenage Paparazzo that came out on HBO starring Adrian Grenier about our fascination with celebrities and the illusion of being famous. It was about a young 14 year old boy who is a paparazzi and who Adrian turned the camera around on to educate on the perils of the spotlight and the unforgiving flashes of the cameras. We see this boy become consumed in his own celebrity and the attention it yields. His mom becomes an enabler just like the parents of so many other young stars and gives in to his whims. Adrian soon realizes the errors of his ways in his own project and that he simply is feeding the same beast that he abhors: everyone's fascination with fame and our seemingly train-wreck watching culture.

Here we are now and news is that an 18 year old college student killed himself because his roommate secretly videotaped him having sex with another man. Not only did he film the encounter, but he aired in on a streaming webcast. This comes a few months after another young girl took her own life when she was harassed online by other bullies. The social media can bring friends together and it can also tear lives apart. It can make people unwitting stars in videos that were never authorized or permitted to share in the first place. This new media gives access to demented individuals who thrive on hurting others and a wider audience at that.

It's hypocritical of the major news media to start harping on the online media channels now, but it will be coming. You will hear from CNN, ABC News, and Fox about the cruelty of the Internet. How the web has spawned this gonzo journalism culture and that people now have too much access to hurt others. The news media for decades has fed on sensational journalism to sell their advertising. They need ratings and train wrecks sell. They will expose the frailties of Facebook and Twitter, Skype and Youtube as they aspire for the next natural disaster to send their camera crew to. This isn't so much about the tools that the Internet provides, it's about how we choose to use them. The problem today with a lot of the younger generation is they are using them for social status but gaining nothing emotionally. They are surface builders, but feed nothing underneath. We look at pretty pictures, or are dazzled by funny videos, our lives becoming a music video.

The social media sites and Internet in general is used solely for most as a distraction, rather than a tool. That is not the fault of the providers. This is the same argument for gun control. You can't blame the manufacturers. You can blame the sellers if precautions weren't made, but guns are going to be here. It's what we do with them, it's what we do online. You can't limit free speech but we can prosecute crimes of Internet bullying, and Internet harassment. It's a different culture, and it came at us quickly. There is not the same protection and security that we had even a decade ago. The faster technology moves, the more quickly predators and criminals move through it. It's simply like adding more water and pressure to a water slide. Our policing can't keep up and are simply in a reactive mode and yet if they become proactive we will cry out that it violates our privacy. It's both. It's complicated.

Is technology good? Could I survive without a touchscreen smart cell phone? Could I live without Facebook and even this Blogspot? A Mead notebook worked just as fine before, but only I read my thoughts and opinions. Now I can broadcast them for all to read and view. Sometimes I feel I expose too much and I wonder if I do it for attention. Was it necessary to share that? Was that just vindictive? The platform we are given online is global. Anyone can surf for this stuff and even if you delete it, it may already be too late. What value am I truly providing on here? Is it better to hold a Kindle in your hands and have access to hundreds of books, or do you lose the value of actually holding a book in your hands and reading it? Don't we stare at computer screens enough in our lives? Isn't the smell of an old classic book or the feel of turning a page more satisfying? I don't know.

Free falling is anything but free

I kneeled in the plane overlooking the open world below me. I heard the snap of the buckle attaching me to the instructor with the parachute on his back. While I knew he was behind me, and as I assumed he didn't want his life to end on this day, I couldn't see him and could only hope that it was tightly fastened.The crammed airplane seemed to sputter in the air and its slow ascent in elevation seemed to turn a rambunctious crew of passengers into silently praying ones. If the intention was to put us in the most frighteningly small and ancient aircraft to inspire our bold descent out of it, it worked. I was desperate to jump.

In 2002 I was determined to go skydiving out of a plane. It was a late summer, or early fall, day in Snohomish, WA. I successfully gathered a crew of co-workers and friends at the time and orchestrated a trip I was determined would be life changing. I had been thinking about jumping for a long time, ever since my first love and high school girlfriend had told me of her tandem jump soon after our final break up some years earlier. It seemed to one-up me. Not only was she moving on to a new boyfriend back in CA while I was miserable in cold and rainy southern Oregon, but she was also pushing the envelope and expanding her horizons. She was the brave one. Here it was years later and I was determined to even the score.

What is it about break ups that inspire us to change our ways? Why do we do the things we wish we had done when we were in the relationship to begin with? This girlfriend was always so safe and passive, for her to jump out of a plane was completely out of character for her. While she was coping with our break and floating in the sky I was wallowing in my poor decisions. I seem to have the wallowing thing down. I've had my heart broken twice in my life. She was the first to do so. I even google stalked her a few years later after I moved to Seattle. She got married to the guy she started dating after me. Her life turned out exactly the way she used to talk about when we were together. She became a school teacher, he was a banker, she lived in San Luis Obispo. I'm sure they had a white picket fence and two kids. I'm not sure if I missed her so much as I envied her commitment to her life goals, and how she seemed to fulfill all of them. I was just a revolving part in her plan. Once I was no longer in the picture she just found someone else for the role. She was a director and myself just an actor in her life feature film. I also feel like I didn't fit the required bill for my last girlfriend as well. Maybe that is just my own insecurities talking, but I feel as though I didn't make the final cut. Perhaps the next guy auditioning will be the one that fills that role.

There is a feeling of complete emptiness as I fell from the sky. It was not life flashing before my eyes so much as my face getting pulled back by the g-force of me falling into the earth. My head cleared as I dropped. There was no time to think, just be, just fall. In the air there is nothing holding you up, there is nothing to hold on to. There is no balance. You fall, and fall, and fall...and then when you feel like you can continue falling forever the chord is pulled and you stop falling. Your heart is pounding so hard in your chest and your smile from the rush so intense that the world you peer down upon does look different. Your eyes see things differently. The colors more vivid. The air crisper, more invigorating. What I carried into that plane and into the sky now gone, replaced with gratitude, amazement, and wonder. Those were the same feelings I had climbing the summit at Havasupai.

I know that life has a plan for me, I still don't know what it is. I know that I'm unable to grasp the concept of fulfillment when I'm not sure what it is that will fulfill me. I do realize though that life can not be a free fall from a plane. That is an escape. It is a rush that can be revisited but it cannot be a lifestyle. Otherwise I will just rob banks, surf, and jump out of planes with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves like in Point Break; I'll wear the Obama mask. No, life has to have balance and something to grab on to. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to make sense to everyone. It doesn't need to be so damn structured and planned. And if this life of mine so far was planned then I'm a sick puppy. Obviously we control some aspects of our lives but we can not control them all. We just adjust and make do and overcome obstacles and keep a positive outlook on life. In the end it is not the possessions that we remember in our final breath but the life we saw unfold before our own eyes, even if the view was straight down from 12,000 feet.

Fall term

Tomorrow I start school again on my 14 year degree program. By now I should have a doctorate right? Nope this will be a BA, as in I've been in school Before Amazon; also before Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I started at Southern Oregon University in 1996 a year after I moved up to Oregon from Central California. I was an idealistic communications major. I was a journalist. A year removed from winning a top writing award in LA for all high school journalists. My journalism teacher gave me the word "vision" when he handed out words to his seniors. My vision was my direction in life and where I was going. Someone should have told him I have bad eye sight.

Somewhere between the Alanis Morissette CD playing in my car and my rebellious attitude with my professors I discovered I wasn't going to enjoy college as much as my senior year in high school. In high school all of my papers I finished in English were automatic A's. I could write them in ten minutes and garner wide acclaim from my English teacher on my natural brilliance. In college I was dirt. I was just one of many bright writers now forced to conform to a structured piece of writing that if I deviated from I was failed. Follow the guidelines. Conform to our rules. Your freelance nature means nothing here child, you are just another mind for us to manipulate. I realized then how corporately structured universities were. They didn't want free thinkers. They wanted free listeners. Free to listen and absorb and follow instructions or feel free to fail. I battled with all my might to adjust to this new way of thinking, but I did fail. I told off one professor and discovered that the next one after was no better than the last.

I could not accept this new way of thinking. I bolted to Seattle in early 1999 and into a more structured model than the university: Corporate America. There I stayed for the next eight years. I couldn't transfer my credits up to a university in Washington because there were holds on my account with SOU for not finishing required classes. They held me hostage. The only way I was going to finish my degree was moving back down to OR or starting all over again somewhere else. When I moved back to Southern Oregon in 2006 college was the furthest thing from my mind. I just wanted a healthier lifestyle. I had found activities to distract myself from the cold soulless embrace of the corporate structure but they were not healthy activities. The habits I started to fit in and move up the ladder actually stunted my growth. Maybe not career-wise as I was rising, but my creativity was dying a slow death. My "vision" was now being clouded in all sorts of liquid: rain, alcohol, and tears.

I've had friends drive through Southern Oregon from Seattle and say with disdain that there is nothing here. It is definitely not the metropolitan of Seattle. One friend said she would just keep on driving. Maybe I felt that way too a few years before I moved here, maybe even a couple after. And yet Southern Oregon has a different feel to me now. There is a balance I have here I didn't in Seattle. There are four seasons. There is more lightness in the air and maybe even more smiles from people you come across. Those are small things, but they are huge. Seattle is big and shiny. The buildings glow and sparkle at night. The Needle illuminates the sky, but it is cold. It is a cold and structured city. At least it was to me. I have friends who live downtown in different districts that love it. Maybe it is just perception. Yet that was a perception I couldn't get past in the time I lived there. I felt that people were more guarded and even friends. The openness was minimal and emotions much more calculated. I couldn't live a lifestyle like that. I would act out just to feel anything. Almost like a child desperate for attention from their parents.

Back to Medford and Ashland and school and slow days. I started back at SOU in 2008. I switched my major to business and found I could conform a lot easier. I had been doing it for the past 12 years anyways! Corporate America made me a good student for corporate university. I definitely noticed the professors treating me differently. It seems age and experience are more highly esteemed than youth and individuality. At least then and now. Maybe SOU went through an awakening themselves in the 10 years since I had last attended. I know that the required courses I was supposed to take to move forward in '98 were no longer required. Maybe they just needed the revenue.

I'm a year and a term away now from finishing if I go 16 credits a term. It will be difficult to do that and work full-time, yet I'm also committed to completing this. I also though realize that a degree won't complete me. Sure, it'll make job prospects in this economy more accommodating and it will be a burden off of my back, but it is just a piece of paper. It is just a reaffirmation that I can follow instructions and conform to rules and guidelines. I've done that. It doesn't prove anything more to myself than that. Does that make me a sell out? I don't know. Am I selling my passion to prove I can conform, or am I being realistic? Does this just provide a back up plan? It certainly isn't the "vision" I anticipated.

Blue skies and hot air

The blue sky looks inviting today. While yesterday I woke up to a canopy of grey clouds above, today it is a canvas of light blue. I think about random things sometimes. My blogs just veer in whichever direction I'm going that morning. Today it is about possibility. The blue sky is an optimistic one. I think about being in the air. I think about hot air balloons.

I grew up in central California and I remember as a child that there was a weekend every year where there was a hot air balloon event. The colors illuminated the sky as they rose higher and higher into the clouds. Sometimes there would be upwards to ten of these balloons in the sky at once floating above the earth. As a child I wasn't sure which part impressed me the most. Was it the balloon in the sky or the early dawn before when they lit up the balloons in the darkness. Each balloon looking like some large exotic lamp from a foreign land in the purple glow of the morning light. I wanted to jump in that basket and ride away to wherever the balloon took me.

The first hot air balloon took flight in 1783 in Paris:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB32OLW7suA

This is my favorite clip from John Adams. It shows the optimism of a new country being born tied into the beauty and wonder of man's first flight. Who'd have thought it was the French leading the way huh? Actually one of the coolest parts of my European trip was this out of the way museum we found outside of Paris. We were supposed to go to the Louvre but heard the line was too long. The weather and skies in Paris were not optimistic. We had a day to spare before our plane to sunny southern Spain. We stumbled into this "international museum" according to our French cab driver. It was an air museum and not the art work we anticipated. We laughed as we viewed the prowess of the mighty French air force units. The Concorde was a cool thing to see and that was definitely made in France. Yet the most inspiring and surprising part of the museum was the hot air balloons and I found the balloon from my favorite scene.

This is what life does sometimes. We go to Paris by accident, and a middle of nowhere "international museum" by another accident, and then I find what I really wanted to see. This was far more impressive to me than the Mona Lisa. This was man's ridiculous belief that we could have a balloon whisk us into the heavens. They probably wanted to lock them up before they showed it was possible. Yet it wasn't the grey clouds above that inspired this journey into the sky, it was the blue. Just as the ocean has attracted sailors and adventurers for centuries upon centuries, the blue sky called out to two French men and two Americans in 1903 in North Carolina.

I remember this when things are not where I want them to be. I remember that life can change in a minute. That what we thought we wanted can shift in the wind like a balloon and lead us somewhere even better than we imagined.

Letting go

For the first time in a long time I let go of the guilt. It started last night in anger. I've been mad about a lot of things. I've felt that the world was against me, that God was against me. So we had a little conversation. Lately I've had my doubts and my questions about life, existence, and purpose. There are millions of doubters out there if you want to research the stuff. Youtube clips, websites, and even blogs that specialize in debunking their so-called myths and enlightening us with their so-called truths. All I know is what I feel. Last night I felt a huge weight lifted off of me. The guilt and pain I carried around on my back lifted. I crumbled to the floor in tears. There was a lot of anger and guilt inside.

A girl online the other day called me emo...whatever that means. I think I'm a generation past emo, but if it means I've been especially melodramatic then fine. I agree. I have been way too concerned over things that I'm discovering were not worth being concerned over. Emotions and feelings I was expressing were not being matched, or maybe even felt by the one I thought shared them. I blamed myself for the way my last relationship ended. I wasn't open enough. I didn't express myself. So I created a blog and wrote all my expressions. I wasn't committed. However ridiculous that argument was, afterall I had just taken her to Europe. If that doesn't show commitment in a year and a half together then I guess I'm hopeless. I was opposed to marriage. I never said that. I only said that it was too soon to discuss seriously. Maybe that was my downfall. I always wanted a wife and children, I just thought being single so long it wasn't really an option for me anymore. I've seen the light on this one. I know it is possible and I do aspire for that when it's time.

I made the mistake to keep reaching out when there was no longer anything to grab on to. I still felt it. I thought it still existed. Instead of the response I had hoped for I once again got the door slammed in my face. I've made my last reach. I realize that it was probably one too many. There won't be a fourth. I'm done.

I'm not upset though. That is the craziest thing. I'm over it. I feel like the guilt has been cleared from my conscience. I no longer hold that sole responsibility I was carrying on why things didn't work. Sometimes things just don't work. It is not necessarily anyone's fault. People just don't mesh. What we felt was true isn't anymore, maybe it was once, and maybe it wasn't at all. I think the lack of answers always bothered me. But, maybe the answer is there are no answers. It just is. I've had to accept the just is answer a lot lately. I want to dig deeper and fight it but in the end the only one who suffers for that effort is me. I'm letting go. I can't hold onto to something if there is nothing to grab on to. I can't dig for something that doesn't exist. I accept that life just throws us curveballs. We can swing away and knock them out of the park or we can fall over flailing in the attempt. I'm just going to take the pitch. Next time I'll hope life throws it down the middle.

The phantom post

One of my favorite movies is The Illusionist with Edward Norton. In fact right after watching that movie I went out and bought a book about Houdini. There is something mysterious about magicians and escape artists in the late 1800's, early 1900's. Before the movies, before the Internet, we looked to these performers to captivate us from their creativity and imagination.

Houdini lived a very fascinating life and travelled the world. He had to keep his act top secret because there were many copy cat performers in those days. It was very difficult to keep track of them because of the flow of information in that time. A performer could view your act in New York and set up shop across country and perform the same act to an audience that had not witnessed the original. They would not know the difference until the original performer appeared in their city. Usually an artist of Houdini's caliber had already improved upon his original act and expanded his performance so by the time they witnessed him there was no comparison to the copy cat performer. That was one of the brilliant traits of Houdini, he never settled on a successful act, he was constantly improving upon it.

I'm going to revamp this blog into a few things I love: history and how it pertains to the world we live in today. From other amazing blogs I have viewed on the Blogspot I realize my musings about daily life are not quite the draw. I need to revamp my act. This will share some things you may not have known about our past and also relate them to the way we are living now. Life in the late 19th century and early 20th was very difficult. The disposable income was very meager and even star performers of Houdini's magnitude had to struggle to maintain their lifestyle. It wasn't a world where semi-talented people became instant celebrities and made millions. They had to work for everything and even then they were not guaranteed rewards. In fact Houdini may not have enjoyed Eisenheim's performance in The Illusionist because a lot of it related to the supernatural and spirits. Houdini did not appreciate magicians who performed that act. He was an escape artist and not an illusionist. Everything he did, he did for real in his eyes, where as an illusionist simply fooled us. He spent much of his life before his death uncovering psychics and mediums that had become so popular with the masses during that time. What people believed had to be real Houdini showed how it was done with illusion.

Now we are are fooled by business projections, stock returns, and life gurus. There is the promise of instant and never-ending wealth that never appears and television producers who make average, everyday people television stars only to make them magically disappear a few years later. The greatest magic acts today were sold to us by politicians, Wall Street and Madison Avenue. They dazzled us with words and graphs. They flashed images of immense beauty before our eyes and fed us reassuring words on how everything before us could be ours. But they were selling their wealth, not ours. We didn't get the true value, we got the packaged item behind the product and it was not a "Houdini act" because Harry Houdini was the real deal. It was an imitation Houdini and we are still buying it.

The reason I titled this the phantom post is yesterday I posted a revealing post about myself. I realize that while it is important to be open and honest with myself, this blog doesn't need to burden others with that. My personal growth is my own. I am making the necessary changes but need to do that in a private secret "Jon blog" hidden somewhere in a vault with extra locks that even Houdini couldn't pick. There is enough information of me already swirling through these magic machines we type on everyday. They won't get everything! I still need a job. I refuse to let my blog disqualify me when they have access to so much to do so already. So in honor of Eisenheim and Houdini, I simply made it vanish....