News of the Weird

The front page looks increasingly like the cover of the Weekly World Wide News.

Ice storms in Atlanta. A captive killer whale kills its trainer. Catfight among Olympic ski team divas. Champion golfer gives up sport, checks in to sex rehab clinic for three-month stay. President enlists Batboy to spearhead new healthcare effort. Okay I made up the last part. I don't think even Batboy could get healthcare reform passed in Congress. Unless maybe he ate about 800 medical lobbyists.

The news is increasingly weirder and more extreme. There are events everyday that make you tilt your head and go, "huh? Really?" Truth has always been stranger than fiction, and now it is stranger still. Homerun champion Mark McGwire, an admitted steroid user, is now the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals. His brother has written a tell-all book. Andrew Young, former campaign manager for John Edwards, reveals Edwards convinced him to tell the world that he, not Edwards, was the father of Rielle Hunter's love child. The deception and arrogance is stunning, but Young has it all on tape. He too wrote a tell-all book. So many tell-alls have been written, the confessions are no longer shocking. Ted Haggard, minister to millions, is brought down by a scandal involving meth and gay sex, after years of being an outspoken critic of homosexuality, addiction and drug use.

What does all this prove, or say about us? Why do we love train wrecks, the sensational, the extreme. the bizarre and unbelievable? Why do we find it everywhere?

In truth, there is nothing new under the sun. A few thousand years King David of Israel spotted a hot chick bathing on a roof, started a torrid affair with her, and sent her husband to the front to die so he could have her for his own. Ambition and arrogance are nothing new. Great men, and men who craved high places, have risen and fallen since the beginning of time.

As humans we are fascinated by stories like these because we are mystified and horrified by them. We have the innate sense that within ourselves there is the capacity to be loving, kind, wise and hopeful, and there is also the powerful compulsion to be greedy, grasping, vile and selfish. We watch this war play out in the lives of others, and shake our heads at their sad fates, secretly grateful we never ascended so high or got exposed so completely.

There is none righteous, no, not one. We're all capable of terrible things. We've all contemplated them, and had moments we'd die to have exposed. Our lives are messy, unbelievably fleeting, often sordid and sad.

But we have our moments of grace. We have our hopes, our lovely tender thoughts, and each other. The other day our grand daughter Bryce was drawing with crayons on typing paper at the kitchen table. Grandma had made her a snack. Bryce is a delightful, amazing child. Her very presence creates a calm, a hopefulness, a tender quiet in the room. She was talking to us as she drew. "This is me, and momma, and sister. This is a family. Families are always there for you, and they never leave." She is four years old, a wonderment and an unending joy.

Part of our fascination with the news of the weird is relief that our worries our ordinary and the challenges that fragment our families are surmountable and small. We don't have a love child stashed in a half million dollar house. Our spouses have not been eaten by killer whales or hauled up to die at swordpoint. Most of the time, the crises we face are controllable.

And when the wrenching and insurmountable come our way, as they inevitably do, we have our family. And families never leave.

We're Never Gonna Survive Unless We Get a Little Crazy

There was nothing glamorous about my first day on the road. I slept in the car in a church parking lot with my leather jacket for a blanket and my forearm for a pillow, curled in a fetal position in the back seat. I didn't sleep much. The first night you notice every sound and the street lights keep you awake. You've got to get good and tired to sleep in a car. Most of all you have to avoid the cops. They love to harrass people who are struggling. They'll ask a lot of embarrassing pointless questions and search you, be as demeaning and bullying as possible.

I waited till light and went over to work and used the wifi in the game room until ten, then went over to the pawn shop and tried to hock my golf clubs for meal money. They had six sets over in the corner and shook their heads. Then I played poker at the library. It was a grind all day and I couldn't get any traction. I avoided trouble for most of a tournament until I got shortstacked and had to gamble and then someone behind me would either wake up with a hand or flop one. I hate taking the worst of it. I hate it even more when I get my money in in the right situation but it doesn't break right. Cards don't run in a linear way. You run good for a while and everything works, then for a day or two it seems like you're constantly getting burned.

I've been beating the game for small steady money for a couple of months now, about a hundred a week. There's an opportunity cost pursuing a poker dream, though. It takes a lot of hours to squeeze out those small profits. We had a beautiful week of early spring weather these last few days but I didn't get outside once. The cherry blossom trees have started to bloom but I haven't taken a single walk. I need the money. I can't help but feel maybe Marie and I would have done a little better if I'd given her more time and affection instead of having my face buried in a laptop. We really needed the money though. With my job and her unemployment we were falling further behind every week. I get collection calls and late notices and wind up taking payday loans and cash advances, just a disastrous enslaving cycle of playing catchup.

At work they're instituting a new sales quota and my days are numbered. I just can't bring myself to suggest new products to people who are already pissed about the old ones. I'm very mechanical on the phone anyway. A robot. A drone. An effecient complaint-taking machine. I try to use a polite tone but I dread every minute of it. I work with very nice, earnest, sincere people but most of the customers are indignant and nasty and contentious. I really want to solve their service problems but often it seems they want to make someone suffer first. Sometimes it gets personal and full of stress.

My big dream is to win the three dollar rebuy, about seven to ten thousand in one chunk. What would that mean? Breathing room. A chance to come up for air. Of course it isn't enough to solve all my problems but it's enough to create some opportunity and choices, to make some headway and break out of the cycle of drudge.

I'm supposed to meet Thomas and Stephanie and the grandkids for breakfast tomorrow but I don't know where and my phone is broken. I hope Steff checks in on the blog, and I hope she's willing to buy me breakfast. I wired myself an installment from Pokerstars but it won't hit my account till Monday, I think. I tried to sell my Bible and dictionary at Powell's but they didn't want them. The dictionary was too old and the Bible had highlighted passages. I have another one in my desk at work. I nearly sold my soul for a dollar menu cheeseburger but reason and circumstance intervened.

Marie packed my things today and sent me an email telling me I could come by and get them. We were both grieved and hurt and frustrated, and skirted around all the arguments one more time but avoided letting to come again to full flame. She is a strong, amazing, alluring woman. I will never forget her and never replace her. But our life together, for a variety of reasons, kept turning out crazy dangerous and sad. I hurt her in ways she could never forgive or forget. She wounded me in her hurt, in ways so searing and painful I could never breathe without anxiety and fear. In the beginning we were a fairy tale and by the end we were combustible and exhausted and shaken to our core. I've never loved anyone so much or so poorly. I miss her. I wish we could close our eyes and be ten thousand dollars richer and waking up with forgiveness and possibility and hope. Part of me wants to run home this very second and lie down with her in our bed. Part of me knows we'd probably repeat all our sad mistakes all over again. I wish I could have made this right.

For me, I just have to get to Monday and then to payday. I did a light workout and showered at the gym. For dinner I had four squares of Valentine chocolate. Today I tried hocking my golf clubs at Beaverton Pawn, selling my driver at Play It Again Sports, then selling the books, but nobody was buying. The Pawn Shop offered me another loan on the laptop but the laptop is the seed corn, the lifeline. I'll wait till Monday, check the account again in the morning.

Weekends are easy for sleeping in your car. Businesses are closed so there are all these empty business parks and not a lot of activity. It's easier to not be noticed. I don't have anywhere to go, not really. There's my family but I burned those bridges long ago.

I stay connected with free wi-fi and keep in the game. I'll try to squeeze out a few wins and when things settle down I'll take some time to reflect. I'm 55 this year. More and more it looks like I'll wind up like the old man. Life is so strange and it passes so quickly. We all just want a little comfort and hope, but it's so easy to lose your way. Perhaps I should restudy the law of attraction and try to identify a workable destiny in all this chaos. Right now, I just need some sleep.

Tiger Woods Speaks and Says Nothing

He was rote, robotic and unconvincing. He spoke from a script and answered no questions. He connected with no one. There was no light in his eyes and no heart in his message. He pandered and posed.

It was the most unconvincing performance of Tiger Woods' life. He read the script, clearly uncomfortable with his lines. He said what had been prepared for him and parroted the buzzwords of addiction therapy. Most of what came out of his mouth was a hollow plea to an audience of one, and she is probably the most unmoved of all.

Tiger Woods read a prepared statement before a handpicked audience, leaving as much unanswered as before. Without a golf club in his hands, without a trophy or his trophy wife, he looked like a deer in the headlights or a fish stabbed on a spear. He doesn't know how to do this. He doesn't know how to be a real person caught in a vulnerable position, a failed, flawed human being like everyone else. It was sad, seeing him flounder and grasp, seeing how little understanding he has of how to be a human being.

The Richest Athlete In The World had everything: success, money, adulation, a beautiful wife and family, accomplishment. He had great goals and ultimate achievement. He'd reached the pinnacle in his profession and was poised to go down as the greatest ever in his chosen game. Now he is lost and embarrassed, and exposed as one of the most empty, unfulfilled, hollow, shallow men on the face of the earth, a man without conviction, hope, belief or purpose apart from rolling clutch sixty foot putts better than anyone else in the world.

He gave up everything he had for sordid thrills, for the cheapest floozies he could find, the darkest corners of human existence. His speech was another denial and a deflection. It had no heart at all. No one is moved to sympathy or understanding, and no one, least of all Tiger Woods, has learned a thing.

Strange Doings in Duckville

Who's in charge here?

In the seven weeks since the Rose Bowl the Oregon Duck football team has had nothing but trouble. Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for someone is doing a Poor job of keeping this group focused.

There are only three things a football player should be doing in the off season: 1) going to class, 2) working on strength, conditioning and improving their skills and 3) enjoy being a college student. But number three does not include stealing things, punching people, hitting women or getting arrested.

It seems like every week there is a new incident and more trouble, and by now it's getting embarrassing for the university. The Ducks are rapidly developing an image problem that has blown up all over the national sports news, and the real concern is there may be an underlying problem of discipline and character. Reports out of Eugene these days sound like the excesses and outlandish criminality that plagued schools like Florida or Miami or the Huskies of the late 90's.

Coach Chip Kelly has been strangely quiet. One lame statement is the only public action he's taken, while LaMichael James is wearing an ankle bracelet and Jeremiah Masoli is up before a grand jury. Someone may get kicked out of school over this, and probably should.

The goal is to do things the right way, focus on the prize, and stay out of trouble. Oregon's football players have lost their way this winter. Here's hoping they get back on track soon.

The Thin Red Line

I read an article from the front page of yahoo yesterday that talked about how more and more Americans are dispossessed by the economic crisis, finding themselves on the other side of the thin red line between the reasonably comfortable lifestyle we take for granted and the despair we never thought possible:

For people who cannot afford rent, a car is the last rung of dignity and sanity above the despair of the streets. A home on wheels is a classic American affair, from the wagon train to the RV. Now, for some formerly upwardly mobile Americans, the economic storm has turned the backseat or the rear of the van into the bedroom. "We found six people sleeping in their cars on an overnight police ride-along in December," says John Edmund, chief of staff to Long Beach councilman Dee Andrews. "One was a widow living in a four-door sedan. She and her husband had been Air Force veterans. She did not know about the agencies that could help her. I had tears in my eyes afterwards."

"Cars are the new homeless shelters," says Joel John Roberts, CEO of PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) Partners, the largest provider of services for the homeless in Los Angeles County, which had nearly 50,000 people homeless in 2009. Of these, experts estimate that up to 10% live in vehicles - even though doing so is illegal in most of the county. A similar situation is true for many other regions across the nation, especially in the Sun Belt. A woman lives in her BMW in Marina Del Rey, a swank L.A. address on the coast. PATH outreach workers Jorge Guzman and Tomasz Babiszkiewicz say she was an executive recruiter until the Great Recession. "She was self-employed for 36 years," says Guzman. "Now she sits in the car with a blanket and reads. She has not told her daughter."

Back in the eighties I lived in my car for a while. It was a beige Mazda GLC with a brown stripe on the side. I slept behind schoolyards and at rest stops and in K Mart parking lots. I had a job at the Nike Air Sole plant, making about 8.30 an hour. I couldn't get the money together for an apartment and didn't want to tell anyone. Once a week or so cops would come by and roust me. I slept with a baseball bat and once they tapped on the window with their guns drawn. It was a narrow-barrelled black aluminum bat and I guess they thought it was a barrel of a rifle. I showered at the gym and slept in my clothes with a red checked flannel blanket and gloves and a stocking cap. After a few months the car broke down and I created a shelter out of cardboard in a thicket on Swan Island. By then I was making 8.50 an hour picking orders at the office supply warehouse for Boise Cascade. A friend of mine sensed I was in trouble and got me a job at the garbage company, and a few months later I got an apartment. I'd been homeless for a year, part of it living with friends, part of it out of my gym bag or a plastic sack.

Nobody means for that to happen to them. Unless you've been through it you have no idea how quickly your life can spiral out of control. A couple of quick unexpected events, and the safety net you thought you had disappears from under your feet. Before he was discredited by his own series of bad decisions John Edwards used to say on the campaign trail that most Americans are one medical bill or one car repair away from personal economic disaster, from homelessness or living with their relatives.

Our lives are way more uncertain than we think. Even for good people, people who have done everything right. Relationships crumble and jobs get outsourced to someplace far away. Cars break down. Investments fail. Homes get foreclosed. The handsome, strong husband gets sent to a place where reason and law have no say, where the rule of law is replaced by the rule of the Kashkolnikov and C-4 and suicidal fanaticism. He has a beautiful baby boy and a little girl on the way. He should be on the deck grilling hamburgers and on the rug playing with their Legos. Instead the Rush Limbaughs and Glen Becks of the world have him half a world away, defending their comfortable life.

Ask the people of Haiti how quickly a comfortable life can be shaken to rubble. Believe me, it doesn't take an earthquake. Just ten unexpected minutes, or a piece of paper with a letterhead you never hoped to see, and you are shaken to the core. At that moment you feel like you have no core at all, just an empty place where your soul cries out like the silence of the lambs.

Sometimes You Find Hope In Strange Places

We had a disagreement Thursday, but the lovely part was we talked it out. Marie did something that didn't sit right with me, but the next morning I told her how I felt about it and she listened. No defensiveness, no counterarguments or deflections, she just listened and made me feel I was being heard. I didn't make accusations, I just talked calmly and told her how her actions made me feel.

We're far from perfect as a couple. We've had ups and downs and trials and scenes you couldn't put in a movie. Irrational, out of control crazy moments. Down to our last thread of hope or sanity. But that conversation on Thursday was sane and reasonable and mutually respectful, and when it was over I felt as hopeful about us and I ever had. We listened to each other and tried to work it out. We still have all our old problems and hurts, but this time we tried something that worked better. It was a good day.

The Worst Blog Post Ever

If I don't pick up the quality here at BlogCentral, I'm going to have to fire myself. Seriously, these last few days I have written some of the most self-indulgent whiny drivel in the history of writing, except for the Jake-loses-Brett-to-the-bullfighter chapters of The Sun Also Rises. And you know what happened to the guy who wrote that.

I promise I will snap out of it soon and write a whiz bang snap crackle pop Blog entry with energy and insight. Or you can throw a pie in my face. Please make it banana cream.

Honk If You Hate Your Job

There are probably surveys to confirm or refute this, but I'm on my 27-minute lunch break and don't have time to look it up:

90% of Americans hate their job.

Okay maybe it isn't that high. Maybe I'm just old and bitter. It could be that 89.2% of Americans are just damn glad to have a job. The other 10% are unemployed.

Working for a living, particularly for a large, impersonal outsource-you-tomorrow corporation is a bitter slog, a drudge through eternal winter. It grays and dulls us. We are bent by years of mind-numbing policy emails and sunny updates on new company initiatives. If you have a job like mine, the customers' shrill dissatisfaction rings in your ear like an out-of-tune heavy metal band. The sound of the missed high C of bitter invective will never stop ringing in my ears.

I hate my job. I dread it every day. I log in with a heavy sigh and spend the whole day with one eye on the digital clock in the lower right hand corner of the monitor, just praying for the next nine or 27-minute interlude of blessed silence, when I can wolf down a sandwich or granola bar in relative piece.

I know I have a bad attitude. I should count my blessings, or think of the wonderful possibilities my work creates for me, health insurance and money to buy food and a roof over my head. But on a day-to-day basis, it seems like a bad trade. You know in primitive societies the hunter-gatherers work about 10 hours a week? The rest of the time they spend in the social unit, embracing their babies and singing and crafting and telling stories. They sleep peacefully in their primitive huts. They never wake up in a cold sweat wondering, "what if I lose my job?"

This worst part is, I'm really terrible at it. I work in customer service and the longer I do the more I discover, I really don't like people. I'm terribly misplaced. I should have planned better and become an accountant or an IT guy, someone who can hide behind mountains of data, someone who is expected to be surly and arrogant. Yeah, that's the real me. I should have been a contender, a famous writer, or the discoverer of the post-it note. But here I am, 2nd cubicle from the window, staring out with a sad resigned sigh. What was I thinking, fool?

I can't imagine what it would be like not to be the minion of some petty middle manager, not to suffer and dread work. Some people somewhere enjoy what they do and feel useful, feel confident they are valuable to their employers and secure in their future. That must be wonderful. I hate my job. And the day I lose it will be a terrifying and awful day. I'm getting older, that's sure, but I'm not getting any smarter. If I don't win a big jackpot or get discovered by a long lost rich uncle it's going to be a very uncertain year.

Love Don't Cost A Thing--except probably your sanity

Random observations on a life gone wrong:

Later that night when I was at work Marie sent me a text message. "I wish you would come home," it said.

I called her on my lunch break. "I can come home, but things have to be different. It can't be crazy and dehumanizing anymore."

So after work I drove home. She was in bed when I got there and I kissed her and we went to sleep. It had been an exhausting, stress-packed day.

We keep trying. We keep forgiving each other. We keep hoping things will be different. I guess we have to be different.

I feel so much pressure and uncertainty over money I never stop worrying. Today I got an email from Kaiser telling me I was unqualified for their patient specialist position. Five year's customer service experience and a college degree, and I'm not qualified for a screening interview.

It's a tough world. I'm not sure I'm qualified to be a husband either. I know I love Marie, but I'm not very good at loving her.

The donks are beating my head it at the poker tables right now. I am the undisputed king of losing with a 4-1 advantage. 88 vs. 22, ace-ace vs. ace-five suited--it doesn't matter when you're running bad. No lead is safe. No amount of patience and calculation will survive the onslaught of the next heartbreak river. It will turn around in the long run, but in the long run we'll all be dead.

At least then I won't have to worry about jobs and budgets and complicated love. To sleep, perchance to dream. The rub is, I have to get through fifteen more Februaries before I can retire. I already feel old enough. Maybe I could qualify for some kind of mental disability. Insanity, after all, is repeating the same behaviors and expecting things to change.

Tomorrow Is The Superbowl, and I Couldn't Care Less

It's not that I'm unmanly and not a sports guy. I read every word in three papers and four blogs about the Oregon Ducks, I break open Rob Moseley's Oregon Duck Football blog far more often than I do my Bible (what does that say about me?) but I'm proud to say that this year I haven't watched a down of the NFL, except for the snatches of plays that catch me captive on the overhead tv monitors at the gym.

I'll glance at the scores in the paper, or scan the headlines on the front page of ESPN.com, just enough to know the latest twist and turn in the Brett Favre soap opera (chucked another heartbreaking interception in the critical moment of the NFC championship game, playing will-he-or-won't-he with his teammates and the press in his annual effort to gain attention and avoid minicamp) and that the Saints shook off forty years of failure to grab a shot at Superbowl glory, while Peyton Manning stands poised to cement his legacy as one of the all-time greats with a second ring. I know these things. I just don't care.

To me the NFL is prepackaged football. It's a four-hour Coors beer ad wrapped around a Las Vegas floor show, blood and mayhem and posturing. All the players are juiced and everyone knows it. The linebackers are athletically gifted psychopaths and the wide receivers are sexual predators rich enough to hire expensive lawyers and buy off their victims. It's sordid, cheap and flashy, just like Vegas itself, and the Super Bowl is the most bloated and over promoted event in American culture. Most of the games have been a flat bore, the food is a densely caloric nutritional train wreck, and the halftime shows have been embarrassing. Fifteen minutes of lip-synched geezer rock. Mick Jagger looking like a pickled teenaged girl in reverse drag, strutting around an exploding Liberace stage singing "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" at 62. There's nothing satisfying about the Superbowl. It's a 4000 calorie meal with no flavor, just a lot of fat and salt. Who are they trotting out this year? The Who? Perfect.

Everyone makes a big deal about the Superbowl commercials. What does it say about us that on Monday morning people will have all these earnest conversations about beer ads and a cute talking puppy dog trying to sell us something? The most creative minds in America devote millions of dollars to devise new ways to sell soda or a video game. Dude, where's my country? One point five million children are sleeping in cars or under bridges. Sixteen year old kids can't read or do basic math or execute a grocery list, and we want to sell them better video games? Who's in charge here?

Go ahead and watch the Superbowl, but it's four hours of your life you'll never get back. It's another season where nothing really happened, where large and grossly overpaid genetic freaks smashed into each other for no worthwhile purpose, where every video shot and breathless color commentary has been done a dozen times before. There's nothing new in the NFL. It's just bigger and faster and louder, like the newest video game. Peyton Manning and the Colts will win by twelve, but no one will remember three years from now without Google. I think I'll take a nap.

I Want a Love Like That: How Do I Have to Change to Make It Happen?

We had a lovely day yesterday. Marie made steak and cabbage and we shared a bottle of wine and played Sequence at the kitchen table. We watched "Julie and Julia" in bed and made love, and before she fell asleep I held Marie in my arms and told her I loved and adored her. That's a perfect day. We laughed, we spent some time in thought and reflection, and we had a good meal with a bottle of wine. A perfect day with no shouting or insults or moments of doubt and misery. We were okay inside and out. I won three five dollar sit and gos, $22 each. The Ducks recruited a standout defensive tackle and the man from the temp agency called Marie about a job. I had dark chocolate M&Ms for dessert, in bed, holding a beautiful blonde who, miraculously, belongs to me. How did I get so lucky? A perfect day.

All days can't be perfect, but I want a love like Julia and Paul Child had in that movie. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci did a superb job of conveying the life of two people who couldn't get enough of each other, who felt "you are the butter to my bread and the breath to my life." Paul delighted in his wife. He adored her and encouraged her. They had a fabulous time together and strove to make every daily reunion and every bedtime warm and attentive. He wasn't interested in her flaws or picking her apart, her tall gawky eccentricities, her odd and scattered aspirations. He loved HER. All of her. Every turn of her head. Every moment of being with her. Her companionship. Her presence. He embraced her dreams. It was beautiful to watch her blossom in his love, to achieve her dreams in the steady flame of his adoration. It made a touching and inspiring story, and most importantly, a true one.

Live a true story today. Look up and notice the delights of your life, and the person you were given to share them with. Consider how miraculous it is that someone would choose you and endure the hardships of you, who would make the effort to provide for you and serve you and embrace you, to make the human difference of not giving up and staying where they belong. It doesn't happen every day. Not everyone is so lucky as to be loved and kept close. It's a lonely world. Most people's stories are far from true, and far from complete. Don't waste the chance to live yours. Notice the one you love, and dance with them in the kitchen. Give the fire a little fuel before it dies from neglect.

The World's Fastest Indian Spends A Night In Rodanthe: the joy of the bedroom double feature

The best movies resonate.

They give voice to feelings you never knew you had, to longings you were only just beginning to sense. You walk out of a movie that affects you like that, or you watch one at home, and there is this holy, tingling feeling, like the deepest part of you has been touched. You feel more alive and more awake, and your heart and mind are open to possibilities and new beginnings, to the stubborn reclaiming of the lost hopeful believing awakened alive person you have always longed to be. Movies are a wondrous magic, transporting you to another time and place, and then returning you to your own, awakened as if from a perfect and illuminating dream. I love a good movie and the way it can touch the heart and the soul.

Marie and I saw two today: "The World's Fastest Indian" and "Nights in Rodanthe." No, they weren't perfect movies, and I can't tell you how many stars they had or how many billion dollars of box office they did, I can only tell you I was mesmerized and transformed by them, by the courage of the performances and the powerful life-changing emotions they captured.

In "The World's Fastest Indian" Anthony Hopkins plays a person I once longed to be. His deft portrait of Bert Munro, a 68-year-old New Zealand man who travels to America on a rusting freighter to set a world land speed record for motorcycles, is captivating and charming for many reasons. One is Hopkins' consummate skill as an actor. Another is the character himself. Munro lives with uncompromising vitality and courage. He has a dream, an energy, an authenticity of spirit that engages other people and endears him to every one he meets. He forms community wherever he goes, a magic of acceptance and resolve and heart. It's wonderful to watch this movie unfold, to watch how hopeful life can be, how powerful the simple fundamentals of genuineness and purpose can change everything and everyone it touches. Once I wanted to be a Bert Munro. Before I buried my life under a mountain of crap and fear and obligation and timidity. Before I started hiding my heart and energy away.

Munro tells the young boy who lives next door, "If you haven't got a dream, you might as well be a vegetable." "What kind of vegetable?" the boy asks. "Oh, I don't know, any vegetable. A cabbage."

It takes courage to keep the dreaming, aspiring part of you alive. It's always easier to be numb and distracted. It's easier to plod along and accept mediocrity or sullen inattentive duty. And it isn't that we have run off and join the circus, or try out for the Giants. That isn't the point. The point is preserving your commitment to hope. The point is connecting, hearing, and knowing other people. Bert Munro's handshake meant something. His friendship was a gift given with a sacred understanding of what friendship can mean. People trusted him and wanted to help him, because in him they saw a person who was truly alive, a person who valued them in an authentic way. There was a spirit and energy alive in him that exists in us all, but too often gets lost.

We ought to have two dreams: one, to create or achieve something that expresses our destiny or highest hope; and two, to touch and encourage others along the way. We ought to be alive before we are dead. We ought to take some risks of spirit. We ought to love rather than merely exist.

When my wife is most angry with me she often says, "You don't even know me. Do you think you know me at all?" I'm sad to think her lover may have known her better in a few brief months than I do after five years of marriage. We all have an innate capacity to understand and appreciate other people. Some men have a rare gift for understanding women. For connecting. For saying the right things. For creating an atmosphere of security and trust. For soothing the hurts and satisfying the hungers. For captivating the imagination and freeing the soul. They can do all this for the woman they love and change her heart forever. I'm not sure I'm one of those men. Maybe I'm too stubborn or too selfish. Maybe I try too hard in some areas and not enough in others. I'm clumsy sometimes. And I'm not gifted in giving, and certainly not endowed with the energy or the prowess to sweep a woman away.

I know my heart is open. My defense is always, "That's your fault." Meaning, you haven't allowed yourself to be known. You've hidden a part of yourself from me, a secret part you have stored away in bitterness or regret or disappointment or stunted expectations. You're not dreaming with me. You're not available to me, not completely. On some level you've decided I'm not worthy or capable of that kind of trust.

Like all defenses mine is not entirely fair. Perhaps not remotely fair. The second movie, "Nights in Rodanthe" is a story of life-changing, empowering, memorable love. At the end of the movie the grief-stricken mother tells her daughter, "Hold out for that kind of love, because that's what you deserve." It's what we all deserve. We all deserve a love that is free from cruelty, fear or craziness. A love that is safe and sacred. A love that honors, encourages, and sets us free.

My daughter found that kind of love. I am so happy to see her so happy, but a terrible trial is ahead of her. Tom leaves for Afghanistan in just a few weeks. I agonize over the uncertainty and the lingering threat of ultimate tragedy in their lives and the lives of their precious children. She'll have their second baby three months after Tom deploys. He'll be half a world away, in dust and mayhem, surrounded by madmen who want to kill him for a holy reward.

Here at home, we cling to hope. We have our good days and bad, our moments of misery and brokenness and regret, our tender mercies. I want to be a good husband and an alive, aspiring person. I know those were just movies. But real life ought to have the essential urgency and purpose of a good movie. It ought to be as vivid and real. We should never give up hoping. We should never settle for less. All of our experiences and discoveries should resonate and hold our attention. We should be as amazed by own lives as we are by Anthony Hopkins' facile gift for bringing life before our eyes.

It would be helpful to have someone to talk to who understands these things. I wish I had a friend. I don't mean that in a pitying way. I haven't taken the time or made the choices that inspire that kind of friendship. I realize that is a deep hole in my life. I realize I need to live more thoughtfully and with more intention.