We've Only Got a Hundred Years to Live

Contentment makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.
--Benjamin Franklin

Time is more important than money. The richest man in the world only has 24 hours in a day. The poorest has the same. You can make more money. With a few good choices and a little determination you can double your income but you can't add a minute to the day. Of course we can make changes that allow us to live longer. But the trouble with living longer is that those extra years come at the end, when we're old.

Even so, time IS more important than money. Money is a wonderful thing, certainly. It is opportunity and choices. It is the engine of security and pleasure. It can mean freedom from worry. It can give us mobility and status. Sadly, in our culture more people are enslaved by money and money worries than empowered or liberated. We are a want culture. People are preoccupied by what they don't have, and anxious over the possiblity of losing what they do have. Madison Avenue works hard to create and heighten this anxiety. It sells a lot of products.

If we can find the courage to let go of all our dangerous and destructive preoccupations what stretches out before us is a fabulous abundance of time. We can slow it down by the simple act of appreciation. Our lives are full of unloved moments and unappreciated beauty. We have a wealth of unnoticed blessings, a treasure of untapped potential, a mother lode of talent, opportunity and hope within us.

Mitch Albom wrote a wonderful book, For One More Day, about a man who is given his life back. Every morning, we are given our lives back. We can do good or ill. We can connect and heal wounds. We can grow and develop our strengths, explore our purpose and our dreams. Or we can waste the time altogether. We can crawl into a bottle, or merely continue the same old habits that keep us stuck and bored and uninspired. The time passes either way.

One of these mornings soon I ought to begin to live more intentionally. What if I began the day prayerfully, reflectively, earnestly? What if did something other than fire up the computer and play low stakes poker and drown my synapses in a warm bath of distraction? Tom Robbins once said, "We are put on this earth to enlarge the soul and light up the brain." Most days, I don't do anything like that. Most days, I'm just wasting time. Like Andy Dufresne says in the Shawshank Redemption, we have to make a choice: "Get busy living or get busy dying." We ought to give some thought to this choice, but most of us are too busy.

Love is Where You Find It, If You Hang On Long Enough

I found a new love.

Hunts makes this lemon pudding that comes in three-ounce cups. You get four to a pack on sale for a dollar, and it's so creamy and tart and tasty that on the days we buy some when I wake up all I can think of is that there is another pudding cup in the cupboard.

Love is like that. It takes over our thoughts and makes us a little crazy. Sometimes a lot crazy. The loss of love can make your heart hurt so bad everything else seems numb and pointless. You can get to a point you don't care what happens to you, or you almost hope for something bad.

Of course my pudding infatuation is relatively harmless and transparent. I can get over that easily enough. I can move on to chocolate milk or moon pies, or drown out the craving in my head with a movie or a book. Or I can stock up the next time it goes on sale. Ultimately it's just a hook to get you into the story. But there's no doubt about it. Love can hurt like nothing else. It can make you crazy in the head, for real.

My wife knows a young woman who is having a baby alone. She liked the guy and got a little uncautious, thinking that hey, this is cozy and he loves me and maybe I get pregnant and maybe I don't and if I do maybe he'll want to be with me and have the baby and we can stay happy like nobody's business with our little family. It's the white picket fence fantasy that has seduced many young women, the longing to be held and loved forever, the thinking that this time everything will come out right. She wanted to give fate a little nudge ahead, but what she got instead was a huge disappointment.

The guy panicked and dumped her. Turns out he just wanted a few laughs and a girl who was a fun tumble. The idea of settling down and giving up his apartment and big screen and refrigerator of cheap beer didn't sound so good at all. At first he said he'd be there and see her to the end of it but then he started missing the appointments and then he stopped returning calls and then he got rude and hurtful to make her go away. He just wanted the whole thing to go away. He was ready to move on.

Now the baby growing inside her is no longer a tender connection to someone she wanted very much, but a painful reminder that she's alone and no one wants her much at all. She tries to get excited about holding and loving the baby, giving her life to being a good mom, but she feels cheated and betrayed and unworthy. Her hormones are all over the place and she'd like to drink or get high and just be numb for a while. Only she can't. She shouldn't. But it hurts so much. She doesn't want to be inside her head anymore. Who would want her now, fat and pregnant with somebody else's kid? If she didn't have Marie to talk to she just doesn't know what she would do. And Marie is going away for the long weekend, to see her mother and brother and sister in Crescent City.

When I was a young man I loved someone very much, and the time came when the relationship went a little sour and I was sick with worry over it, not ready to feel that much feeling, depressed and blue and full of hormones, and I bought an eight pack of Miller High Life in the six ounce bottles and I got in my gray Chevy Chevette and drove it too fast on a rainy highway. I wasn't trying to hurt myself or anyone else I just didn't care what happened. It was a twisting two-lane road with a high rock cliff on one side and a steep ledge on the other that looked down to the Willamette River. Pouring rain pooled on the road surface cracked with age. I pushed the speedometer to eighty.

The car hydroplaned and I fought for control. Too late. It spun out, careened toward a wide spot on the left and hit the rock wall. It tumbled over and landed back on its top, the windshield smashed. I crawled out the driver's side window with just a scratch on my forehead. I had no business being alive. A hundred things could have happened at that speed on that corner, and only this one did. I've been by there a hundred times since. There's no logical reason for me to be alive, except I am. Another punk kid being stupid, just lucky to be alive. I walked to the police station to report it, and the cop gave me a ride home. Some people I knew helped me turn the car over on its wheels. It was totaled, a crumpled mess. I bought an old beat up white Ford pickup with the proceeds from the insurance company, something sturdy and slow.

A few months later my daughter was conceived. I was with the same girl and it was the morning before she went off to college, and we were feeling blue and sorry for ourselves and had sex. Ridiculous clumsy sex, our first time, over in two minutes, but enough that she was having a baby. At first I tried to hide from the reality of it. We planned to get married but at first we weren't going to tell anyone about the baby. We were in love, and we were going to make this work out right. How can I make the same mistake my parents made?

I was a clerk in a small-town grocery store with no prospects, just 22, woefully immature. I had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, the source of the depression and moodswings that sent me into the tailspin on Old Willamette River Highway. Stephanie came on the first day of June. She was beautiful and pink and perfect. But I couldn't have been less ready to be a father. And I didn't do a particularly good job of sucking it up.

Life overwhelmed me, like it does a lot of people. I didn't have a purpose or a plan or the sense to look for guidance. Before I knew it I was thirty and then thirty five, and the dim hopes I had for myself were long gone. At one point I was living in a cardboard box on Swan Island. I didn't think clearly. Things would get out of control.

I stabilized a little and found better work. I remarried, unsuccessfully, and again, unsuccessfully. Now I am old and wise. But I wish I could crawl back into that car with that young punk kid, and tell it that tomorrow is another day. Calm down, have some lemon pudding, and trust yourself to find the place where you belong.
Not that I would have listened to The Time Traveler or his wife. I probably would have had to punch the punk out and toss the keys. It doesn't matter now.

So many babies are born in panic and haste, in a forlorn hope to make life more like a fairy tale or a dream. So many mothers to be cry themselves to sleep. If you meet one of those young mothers today, don't lecture her or judge her. Don't scorn her or look the other way. Take her hand, buy her a cup of tea, hear her story. Give her a reason to hope, knowing someone understands. Make the beginning of that baby's life a lighter and safer place.

Random Mumblings on a Nothing Monday

Didn't do much this morning. Slept in, watched Sports Center, ate too many Starbursts, played internet chess. Kobe's legacy is safe for now; Lebron's is in doubt. His coach got fired and his elbow is swollen and he's rumored to be on his way out of town for the big money. Don't give a damn for either one of them. The NBA bores me to tears. Starbursts, on the other hand, are the true answer to the one-food-stranded-on-a-desert-island question. Cherry Pez doesn't come close. Stephen King was dead wrong in Stand By Me, although the Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me are movie contenders for the same kind of question.

Didn't work out or play poker. Not feeling inspired or connected or engaged. I think I have sleep apnea. I wake up with a really dry plaque-y mouth and the longer I sleep the more tired I feel. Ron Ingersoll broke my nose in a pickup basketball at Malibu in the summer before my senior year. It didn't heal straight; you can still see the crook, and ever since one nostril is virtually useless. It turns sleep into a series of near-suffocations. They can fix that kind of thing but I think it involves a big mallet and a huge bandage on the middle of the face, and I'm not sure if I'm up for that. I'd rather do nothing and complain about it. This is the surest sign of growing old: I am storing up laments for the lawn chairs at the Old Folks Home. Yet I can't see myself in one of those places, with the scent of stale urine and impending death permeating the air. I'd rather die stubborn and drive too fast, anything but that miserable surrender of just living from meal to meal.

I've got to walk to work in a couple of hours; that will be my sole accomplishment for the day. A day of nothing momentous and not much effort--it's okay to have one of those once in a while, particularly on a Monday, but the danger is it can become a way of life, of resigning and smothering all your ambition with the soft pillow of the status quo. Much better to go out with out a hoo-ah bang, make up a story and stick to it like Al Pacino in Scent of A Woman. Drive blind if you have to and be outrageous. It's far better than smoking yourself to death in your chair. Talk your way into the Red Ferrari, flatter the repressed history teacher with anecdotes of LBJ. It's way better than peddling sugar for the rest of your life. Find the fire under the dress. Life is cold ashes without it.

Just the Ticket

In the sweet, tender, funny world of the movies, love usually wins. The hero finds his mark and the light is perfect. Hurt and disappointment are no match for magic, a leap of faith, or the deus ex machina. A rundown building is transformed into a bustling restaurant, the embodiment of a dream. The steady, dependable guy loses out to the charming rogue, who goes legit with all his roguish charm intact. Nobody yearns for the roguish past. It's still there, along with a little extra cash in the till every night.

It was lovely to watch Andy Garcia play Gary Starke in Just the Ticket, a streetwise ticket scalper who's been orphaned since he was 13, and never had a real job or even a social security card. His only phone is a clunky thing he probably bought from Fat Max or a corrupt or recently fired telephone linemen. It patches a pirated signal direct from the fiberoptics. He's made a family of his own out of his crew of quirky chums, San Diego Vinnie and Cyclops and Harry the Head, occasionally scoring well enough for a party and occasionally cooling his heels in a cell in the bowels of a stadium. They let you go when the concert starts but they take your money and your tickets, unless you have the savvy to bounce them out of sight before you get collared.

Gary has style. He's unreliable and irresponsible but he can fashion a night out out of a thrift store dinner jacket and a two dollar bunch of flowers, taking the cleats out of his white golf shoes to complete the outfit. Gary loves Linda Palinski (Andie MacDowell) but he's disappointed her twenty times too often, and after waiting for him far too long she's had enough of his schemes, all of which have never quite panned out. She's met a kind guy with a good job, and a registered letter comes in the mail that may contain the ticket to her dreams, dreams the might make Gary a distant bittersweet memory. All he has in the world is a tennis ball of cash, a one-room flat and Blinker, his mangy but remarkably calm dog, who takes in everything with an endearing and quiet loyalty.

Gary dreams of two things: Linda, and making the big score that gets him Linda, gets him to a life beyond scratching and clawing for the next busload of Japanese tourists. He's running out of time. Linda is about to open that portentious envelope and a smooth, cool customer from Miami, with cellphones and beepers and a carload of muscled thugs, is outbidding him for his old sources and beating him to the corners he used to own. Gary's crew doesn't seem up to the task. His guardian angel Benny is punch drunk and slowing, not able to pick out the cops half a block away. Cyclops has a baby coming and can't stay off the junk.

But the Pope is coming to town and if Gary can pull this off, the score of his dreams, it just might set up the redeeming left hook that wins him Linda once and for all.

The magic is still there, that's certain. Despite all the logic pulling her in the other direction Gary's charm is the one drug Linda can't resist. That smile and puppy dog eyes pull her in every time. But when he lives her waiting one more time, after a big loss and a beating and a losing battle with a bottle of rum, it doesn't seem like anything can save the day. All the charm and street smarts in the world won't get him out from under this one.

Ah, but this is the movies. Any doubt that it works out the way it's supposed to? I can't help it; I'm a sucker, I cried. It was sweet and charming and funny, delightful and hopeful. Everything I like in a movie. It even had a terrific soundtrack, put together by Garcia himself, who's a musician on the side. Apparently he has street smarts of his own. A Joe Frazier story he tells in the jail cell is a thing of wonder. The tennis ball in his hands becomes the cornerman's sponge and Joe Frazier's heart pumping out of his chest in the twelfth round, and you are buying every duck and jab.

I heartily recommend Just the Ticket. It's an antidote for the blues and a lift to the spirit, but I can't recommend it as a roadmap for life. I just don't have this kind of charm or magic anymore, and I've lost hope that exists here in the world where I live. The great thing about movies is, they can skip the past, or allude to it and overwhelm it with music and light and stars. We can't. For us the past isn't even past. There's no magic antidote to hurt, not when the credits end. We wake up to a world where all our secrets and secret fears and unspoken sorrows are as present as they ever were. Healing is elusive. Pain and sorrow are stubborn. Fear, the paralyzing and negating and corrosive poison of evil, erodes and corrupts and decays everything we try to do. In real life we seldom get to the magic. We surrender it day after day until we reach a point that we deny its existence and roll our eyes and sneer at anyone who appeals to faith or hope.

If the love you have has become disguised chiefly as bitterness and disappointment, maybe it isn't love at all. It might be obsession or codependence or hanging on or fear of being alone, but it isn't love. Love is rewarding. Love fosters confidence and hope and strength. Love isn't easy, but it has an underlying endurance and tender purpose that nothing can shake. Love doesn't threaten or bully or leave you feeling angry and alone, at least not over and over. If the love you have makes you feel this way, perhaps its time to find a mark of your own where the light reaches your starving soul.

The hopeful part is, we still have the heart to buy a ticket and dream, which proves our hearts aren't dead. Anger has misplaced our hopes but it hasn't destroyed them. We can love again. We can even learn to love each other, but that will take more courage than anything else in the world. Starting over is always easier, though it's a poor substitute for a dream and a leap of faith.

I'm Looking Through You: What Do You Know?

You don't look different but you have changed.

It's easy to stay self-defeated in this misbegotten world. Negative messages are everywhere, and every billboard and commercial is strategically designed by experts to give us the maximum amount of anxiety about ourselves, our appearance, our age, our clothes, the suppleness of our skin and the whiteness of our teeth. If you're not careful you'll swallow it whole. You'll start to believe the lying lies and the liars who tell them: you'll stop believing you are the whole, perfect living amazing miracle that you are.

Let no one and no sixty-second commercial adorned with emaciated models convince you otherwise. It's a powerful moment when we begin to develop the courage and unshakable conviction that we are just right just as we are, and that you and I possess a tremendous and undauntable power, the power to change things by changing the way we look at them. Equally powerful is the transformation that begins when we acknowledge the patterns in our lives and claim the power to change them.

I don't want to blow her anonymity but I want to celebrate someone's courage: five days ago she made the decision not to drink anymore and went to her first AA meeting, and for five days she has been clean and sober. Already she has started to detox. Already her spirit is stronger, even this strong: she told me last night there were two times this week she wanted to drink, when the tension and stress started to mount and the temptation grew to just be numb, but she chose her strength instead. She's been to two meetings now and we might go to one tonight. An amazing thing begins when you decide your life is more important than a quick fix or an easy way out. I love her more every moment.

She sat down with her daughter and told her. I don't want to be this lost, numb person anymore. I don't want to wreck my marriage and I don't want to be unavailable and detached, lost in my fog. I don't want the uncontrollable rages and the cravings that fuel them. I want clarity. I want hope. I want the abundant life my God promised me instead of the half-life I find in an empty bottle.

I'm not naive. I know this is only a beginning and not a victory. But the thousand-mile journey to true intimacy and joy begins with the willingness to face the buried hurts and secret longings and fears that have kept us in prison. Life doesn't get better until we accept the challenge to crawl out of our convenient escapes and claustrophobic habits. This is way the clarity begins, not with a bang but a tearful admission: I can't do this on my own. I get by with a little help from my friends.

Today is not your day, and tomorrow doesn't look good either

Sometimes poker is a fragment of an old saying on a tee shirt, "Today is not your day, and tomorrow does not look good either." All you can do is maintain the proper mindset, make good decisions, and let the chips and cards fall where they may. It takes skill to make the right raises and calls. It takes luck to make them turn out the way you wanted them to.

It's quite a ride, watching the chips wash into the pot like the roll of the surf. Sometimes you feel like you're in the pipeline gliding along with 30,000 pounds of ocean gliding over your head. It's exhilarating in a way all its own. Waiting, waiting, studying, getting on your board with just the right lean and tension in your thighs, feeling the strong pull, knowing that it's time to shoot ahead. Time slows down the way it does in all absorbing activities.

I was in late position with a good stack, about 10,800 in chips with the blinds at 250 and the antes at 25. It folded to me and I decided to put a move on the pot, steal the blinds with a three times raise and jack-four suited, knowing I'd dump it if I got reraised, knowing I had position after the flop if I got a call. The big blind called, a weak-tight player with about the same-sized stack. Okay. Now we see a flop.

It came out three rags, six-four-deuce rainbow with one heart, a good flop for me really. He'd never put me on a pair and I could probably win it right there. He checked. I bet three quarters of the pot, 1550, a continuation bet that I would have made whether I missed or hit. Right away he snap-raises all in. Hmmm, I thought. That flop hit you that hard? I didn't put him on a big hand, something terrifying and catastrophic that would end my tournament. If he had had a big pair he likely would have reraised me preflop. If he held a medium pair like eights nines or tens he would have bet the flop, not wanting to give a free card to my king-jack or whatever the hell he thought I had. His play hadn't been that sophisticated for a fancy trap. Most bets mean what they say they mean, and this bet was weird and erratic, especially the quick pace of it, and I knew, somewhere in my chip-surfer's heart, that the guy wanted me to fold. That's all it was. He was putting a move on my pot, putting me on continuation bet with two big cards, and he had a little something and wanted to pick up a cripple by representing a big scary hand with an erratic illogical bet. If he was holding the set or the overpair his raise would have been for half his stack, or he'd wait till the turn to hook me deeper. He doesn't want a call. That's why so much. My fours, my meager little fours, were good, and if I called him I would be a favorite for 21000 delicious beautiful tournament chips ahoy with a cold glass of milk as close as my refrigerator.

I was in the pipeline. I've never been in a tournament with a clearer read on a hand. It felt good to be thinking so clearly. I knew this guy. I'd been watching the game attentively and I had a good feel for how he played, and I was sure this was the right time for a close call. He checked-raised all-in because he put me on nothing, and the little something I had was good enough to win. I was sure of it, or at least sure enough of it to make the play. I pushed the call button, and now my tournament life and a chance at a few hundred dollars was in the center of the cyber-felt. Call, both players all-in.

He turned over three-three. Most low limit tournament players get enamored of wired pairs, and will defend them beyond all logic. All-in check raise for twenty-one thousand, with six outs: two threes for a set or the four fives for a straight. That's all he had. I was right. I'd made a perfect call, and played the hand beautifully, using my position to create deception, inducing a big raise from an underdog hand. With his six outs in play I was about a 3-1 favorite to be among the chip leaders. Beautiful. Exactly what you hope for, exactly the situation you hope to create when you click on "register" and sit down with your bowl of cereal. Now the rest was up to the turn of the cards, the luck part.

The turn came a jack and now I had two pair. It looked better but didn't mean anything in the hand. He still had the same six outs. The two remaining threes would give him a set, and a five made him a low-end gutshot straight, the miracle draw that made him bet so crazy to begin with.

All this happened in four heartbeats. Things move fast in cyberspace poker, a hundred hands an hour. I barely had time to calculate the odds, and I was a little stunned when the five of clubs came off on the river. At first I didn't believe what I was seeing. I was thinking chiefly about pair versus underpair. I had to count it out, as the invisible hand of the invisible dealer shoved the cyberchips to the donkey: two, (three), four , five, six: the luckymotherfuckingsonovabitch had made a straight. My tournament was over. The donkey had prevailed.

Tournament poker is all about survival, and that's why it's such a compelling game. Although it looks good on TV you want to avoid being all-in, because any time you are you are one card away from taking out the trash and getting ready for work. Your tournament life, that slender stack of chips, is on the line. Ideally you want to accumulate so many that no one can touch you, but that rarely happens. You have to run really good, win a few critical confrontations, to reach the point where you can make decisions while everyone else is making plunges and stabs at the pot. Had I won the 21,000, I would have been there, in the comfort zone. I could muscle them sometimes and exploit their desperation others, getting in for a fraction of my stack and all of theirs, picking my spots, seeing flops and waiting for hands while they had to play crazy with their starting cards. In poker as in life, money begets money. The big stack can play position and push people around, force them to bad decisions, make them uncomfortable and get them leaning the wrong way. But most of the time you are somewhere in the middle of the dogpile trying to keep someone from gnawing on your hind leg, surviving and counting your chips, watching the blinds rise, hoping for a good play on your money, hoping to catch the right wave.

Today I lost. I made all the right decisions, including a critical one at the end, but in the end it didn't matter twenty cents. I busted out 3200th out of 8000 players, but I had a shot at beating them all. It takes skill to get yourself in the right situations, but it takes luck to survive them, and today I didn't survive. String together five or six wins in those 3-1 edges and you can make a final table. Lose one early and go home.

It's very easy to overdo the poker-as-life metaphors. I'm not that philosophical about it. I want to win, that's all. I want the day when things run my way, when I win the big hand and outrun one or two of my mistakes, and I win a chunk of money. I'd like to cash in for a couple of thousand and take my wife to a nice dinner and pay off a bunch of nagging bills, get out of the hole. I make enough month to month doing it that I'm ahead for the year, so all my pastime costs me is the time I invest in it, which admittedly is exorbitant given the modest return. What if I gave all those hours to something more worthwhile, say a comprehensive job search or a fiercely disciplined workout regimen, or writing a book?

That's a legitimate question. What would my life be without poker? I'd like to quit, but first I'd like to break through and have the right decisions turn out right, just one time, and make a final table for a chunk of money. It's unfinished business. I want the cards to turn my way, just to see it can happen. I can't explain it. Losing drives me crazy, and I don't want to quit till I win. I suppose that's the definition of an addicted gambler, but keep in mind I play for a few dollars at a time and maintain a winning record. A few hours a week I practice this discipline mixed with obsession. I'd probably be better off to chose another obsession, to apply my discipline to another purpose, but I haven't found one that engages me so much. There's nothing like riding the wave. I could just do without the wipeouts.

Glen Frey wrote a song in the eighties that explains it about as well as anything ever could. He was talking about drug smuggling in the days of Miami Vice but it's all the same. He wrote, "It's the lure of easy money; It's got a very strong appeal." Gambling has been around a long time, probably for the same reason. The Roman soldiers who oversaw the crucifixion threw dice for Christ's clothing. Travis McGee won his houseboat with a busted flush. With wry humor he named it for the moment. Gambling is the stuff of the seminal moment of history and light fiction. Every hand has its own story. Wild Bill Hickok got shot in the back holding aces and eights, the ultimate bad beat. Doyle Brunson won back-to-back World Series with a ten and a deuce. Sometimes legends are made and sometimes weapons are drawn, and lives can be changed forever or even ended.

In 1787, a young Beethoven came to Vienna to take lessons from Mozart and Hadyn. Suppose they'd taken him to a gambling house, and he started playing cards. He might have had his head down studying a hand when his Immortal Beloved came into the room for the first time, never noticed her red dress and the half-smile on her lips. All of his symphonies might have been unfinished.

Or, that night the cards might have turned different. Sure of his decision he'd look up just in time and announce his call. Her knowing smile would hit him like an electric charge of fate. The dealer would riffle the river card and set it down with a decisive snap, Beethoven not even looking, locked on her incredible face, the beginning of all his inspiration. "Queen of hearts," the dealer announces. Her card. The chips shoved toward him made a sound like crickets and looked as beautiful as a waterfall with a rainbow in the middle, as beautiful as her. Mozart and Beethoven win enough for a villa in Tuscany, enough to live in luxury in the fresh country air and compose to a ripe old age. The Beloved graces his balcony under the morning sun. All in the turn of a card.

Every night the cards reveal a destiny or deny one. One guy gets the cascade of chips and the other the bare felt of despair. Often the decisive moment defies logic planning and discipline. Van Morrison said, "It ain't why why why. It just is. It just is." Poker is like that. When the river card falls, it just is. For some tomorrow would look better if they avoided the cards altogether. I sometimes wonder if I'm one of those guys. Maybe I've had my head down too long and missed my moment, studying stuff and nonsense when I should have been listening to one of my wife's stories and memorizing her captivating face.

One Quick Vague Entry Before Work

Your real life begins as a search for purpose and meaning and hope, and it unfolds beautifully and powerfully when you start taking action in the direction of your true path without apologies or fear. Know what you want. Know what you are living for. Find it in a movie or a movement, a book or a meeting or a group, a cause or a small child wrapped in your arms, but find it and be sure about it. Initially the cause can be no greater or grander than staying alive, but no matter what, begin with the cause you have and embrace it fiercely. Let everything you do be for that purpose, and live your truth. Laugh, cry, and rage when you have to, and live with all your might.

Someone I love very much has made the decision to go to AA, and in doing so she may save us both. We were dying together in a fog of rage and anger, cold and not seeing anything clearly, and that one loving hopeful act brought us to a place where the future seems possible and the heart finds a way out of misery and regret. I am so grateful for this new beginning that I don't want to curse it by saying too much. But watching someone you love reach out in hope instead of striking back in anger, it fills me with joy. I know I am strong enough to discard anything, but I didn't want to face the awful test of discarding everything and being alone. I stood my ground. And someone I love very much has honored me by standing hers and choosing hope.

So today I am very happy, and I celebrated with a good night's sleep.

The Misery Index

Officially, The Misery Index is an economic indicator that combines unemployment plus inflation. It is often cited by politicians in their attempts to blame the other guys and get elected. You can largely ignore this index. Things are always bad and getting worse; it doesn't do any good to think about it. Your mother and grandmother were right. Be thankful for what you have.

Personally, The Misery Index is the gap between the life you hoped for and the life you have. The important thing to realize here is, this gap is your own damn fault.

We have to own our misery. We have to acknowledge it. And then we have to tell it to shut the hell up.

We are responsible for our expectations and our dreams. We choose what we create, and most importantly, we choose how we look at it. One of my favorite movies of all time is Moonstruck with Nicholas Cage and Cher. Grandma Rosie loved that movie. She liked the line when Olympia Dukakis says, "Old man, you give those dogs another piece of my food and I'm gonna kick you 'til you're dead!" It sounds like something she would have said, blunt and practical and funny.

My favorite line comes early in the movie. Cher has gone to patch things up between her fiancee and his younger brother, who haven't spoken in years. Ronnie lost his fiance and his hand and he is bitter and blames his brother. Cher is moved by his story, they have a drink and a bloody steak and fall into bed. The next morning she is frantically gathering her clothes and dressing in a closet--we have to forget this ever happened, she says, this is a secret we have to take to our graves. The moonstruck Cage looks plaintively into her eyes and says, "I'm in love with you." The future wife of his estranged brother, whom he just met 20 hours ago. She slaps him across the face, "Snap out of it!"

Snap out of it. That's the line. That's the secret to happiness. The solution isn't finding a new job or a new love or some magic panacea. It isn't Neuro Linguistic Programming or Scientology or winning the lottery. It's waking up to the life you have. It's being fully engaged where you are. Put on a favorite movie and snuggle up. Go see the new baby movie. Or visit your laughing, smiling, cooing granddaughter, the beautiful squishy miracle who lights up the world. Find the humor in your life, and the hope. Rediscover the language and the stories and the inside jokes and stupid expressions you used to share with the one you loved. Watch Napoleon Dynamite together, or The Princess Bride or Secondhand Lions, true stories full of heart and humor and devotion, and remind yourselves of the heart and devotion you have for each other.

Snap out of it. We don't have to succumb to The Misery Index. The solution is looking us in the mirror.

Parenthood

Parenthood is a series on NBC with an ensemble cast featuring Craig T. Nelson, Bonnie Bedelia, Peter Krause and Lauren Graham. The actors do a beautiful job portraying the Braverman family. The elder Bravermans are survivors from the 60's who raised their children in Berkeley, and their grown kids have gone on to become a shoe company executive, a hard-driving corporate lawyer, a sound man, and a bartender who has moved back home with her parents along with her two teenagers after a disastrous relationship in Fresno.

The show is available in OnDemand, and I recommend watching it from the beginning to fully enjoy the multiple developing storylines. What I love about this program is the honesty and genuineness, the complex relationships between the characters, told with humor and heart. There are no pat answers among these passionate people. Things aren't perfect. Life has rough edges and failures, and problems that don't neatly solve themselves in 40 minutes of script. The writing is sharp and the characters are strong, and like in real life the Bravermans have to accept contradictions and small compensations, the moments of beauty and togetherness that redeem everything else. Eight year old Max is in a meltdown panic attack because his pet turtle is lost, until they find him in his grandpa's shoe. Grandpa Braverman is crashing at his eldest son's house, because his wife has kicked him out over his dishonesty and infidelity. Nothing is simple. The hardass elder Braverman says to his son Peter, "You are ten times the father I ever was." His son looks him in the eye, level and calm, with just the right amount of bitterness and forgiveness and says, "No dad, that's not true. Probably five times." They grip each other's shoulders, just shy of a full embrace.

Things aren't neatly wrapped up. There are no pat solutions or quick fixes, and the hurt doesn't just go away. It's poignant and powerful stuff. You have to see it.

All our families are a mix of beauty and clumsy selfishness. We all have our hurts, our regrets, our secret fears. Ideally it's the moments of healing we remember, the celebratory dinners and the times we collapse together in laughter, the stirring memories and pagentry of The Backyard Olympics, the time we traveled 500 miles overnight to be there when we were needed. It doesn't balance things. We just hope it is enough to heal the heart and touch the soul.

Saving Silverman. No, Really

Let me take another crack at this. Some days I get carried away with thinking too much. On any given day the evening news will feature the worse eight news stories there are in the world. It's just the nature of things. They have to give people a reason to tune in after the commercial. The anxiety sells a lot of products. They will never say, "ten thousand NFL athletes and former athletes went home to their wives and children after work today. They hugged their wives and tossed a football with their boys, and mowed the lawn. Locally, Joey Harrington raised ten thousand dollars for his charitable foundation and went to Mass." It just doesn't have the same punch as the sordid and deplorable actions of a couple of monsters.

Imagine too some diarist of a philosophical bent, in the midst of The Bubonic Plague or The Holocaust, writing to himself (because that's what all of us are doing, as much as we want an audience) "everything is impossibly grim. The end is certainly near" or aggrieved words to that effect. He would have been dead wrong. Even if he himself were dead the next day.

The beauty and chief virtue of humankind is our resilience. We erect monuments to the dead and plant gardens, and we go on. We withstand evil and disease and unwise kings. We birth our babies and raise them with love and hope. Especially the mothers. That's why this day is so important. The follies of humankind, the excesses and outrages and demoralizing failures, are chiefly the work of men. Women are the true wisdom of the world. They nurture the hope. They instill the dreams. They keep things together when everything is collapsing. They keep everyone fed and bathed, and endure another day, no matter what the headlines are. Mothers are the strength and heart of civilizations. They are the reason hope is possible, the soul of our resilience.

Last night we watched a movie called "Saving Silverman." It was utterly silly, full of stupid pratfralls and gross jokes. Neil Diamond saved the day with a song. Everybody got married in the end, for no plausible reason, and Jack Black discovered he was gay and in love with his high school football coach. The movie didn't make a lick of sense, didn't track from one scene to the next, didn't have a point or a purpose. And I loved it. It was the perfect antidote to all my self-important misery. People still love. They still hope. It's a sunny day and I'm having a cold beer in my living room, just six ounces to be sociable, and my wife is chatting with the Latino mother who lives upstairs, about exercise moves and hair color and kids. Mothers will resolve the cultural conflicts. They'll connect to one another and raise their kids with pride. "We're comin' to America" Neil Diamond sang. Welcome home.

It's Mother's Day, and Stephanie Demands a Happy Post

Happy Mother's Day to one and all. I take back every pessimistic thing I ever said.

A Manifesto of Indifference

No containment box will hold back the mess we've made of the world, when football heroes are rapists and a man disciplines a three year old boy by scalding him with boiling water. I can't contemplate a world like this. Mark Twain called it a dreary space-lost bulb, and that was before yahoo and youtube and CNN, before the twenty-four hour news cycle and Tennessee flood and the volcanic eruption of bad news that haunts our waking hours and our dreams. I don't have an answer or a hope, not for this and the way things are. All over the world press conferences are held, and self-assured men in suits stand before podiums and assure us that this is the best course of action and everything possible is being done, when nothing can be done. Will the end of days be anymore frenzied and chaotic? Can anything reverse the momentum of senselessness? Was Sodom or Gomorrah any more lost than we are now?

Men behave badly and undo themselves with unchecked appetites and perversity. Greed leads inexorably to ruin and incalculable losses. Who set this all in motion, and what can make it stop? I get tired if I think about it for twenty minutes. If I watch the evening news I'll fall into a pit of despair. Unless something fundamental changes in how we strive to master ourselves, the grip of uncertainty will overtake us all. From Iceland and Tennessee came the grim reminder of the words of Will Durant, "Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice." The Permafrost is melting, and our hopes and certainty with it. We are the fools who think we are in charge, unaware the kingdom of humanity hangs by a thread, a thread that the jackals of violence and greed and mayhem lunge at viciously every day.

I can't think about it anymore, at least not today. The ruin and suffering and cruelty is too much. I have five beautiful grandchildren with another one kicking merrily in the womb. It's a sunny day in Spring. I won fifty dollars playing poker on Monday and another sixty yesterday. I'll take my superficial comforts and small victories. I haven't got the strength or wisdom to take on the world. I'm not sure anyone does. I don't have any confidence in the men standing at the podiums. They've told these lies before.

The Thomas Crown Affair

Pierce Brosnan plays a suave financier who pulls off an elegant heist: he stole four hours of my precious time. I tried to watch this movie three times but fell asleep three nights in a row. The plot was as flimsy as the material on Renee Russo's party dress, as awkward and unrealistic as Brosnan's golf swing.

I like crime caper movies generally and usually root for the criminals to get away with it. Elmore Leonard is particular good at the crime caper, creating heroes who are tough and cool with snappy things to say. This script could have used an Elmore Leonard. Real life crime is seldom as glamorous as the movies. In real life a prostitute is a sixteen-year-old runaway savagely beaten and brutalized, victimized by a depraved NFL Hall of Famer who's run out of second chances. In a movie a hooker has a heart of gold and perfect makeup and a five thousand dollar dress.

Crime movies are escapist fare, a break from the decayed realities of our fallen world. In movies greedy corporations don't set the oceans on fire. A clever con men rips off a few million in gold, bricks of currency, or jewels, and if he has a clipped British accent and a perfect head of hair, he probably gets the girl in the end.

But this one didn't work for me. I tried but couldn't stay awake. There were holes in the plot that distracted from the elegant and expensive scenery. Why would the notoriously territorial NYPD allow a glammed-up insurance bounty hunter free reign of the precinct and the evidence? Wouldn't the sprinklers that washed away the disguise at the end of the movie have caused several million dollars of damage to a room full of priceless and irreplaceable artwork? How could five men in bowler hats confuse an entire SWAT team and twenty surveillance cameras? Would't the cops just shoot them all? Just asking.

The whole thing just felt too pat and familiar to me. The glider scene was supposed to be glamorous and seductive but it just felt cramped and fake. Renee Russo's not suited for heavy drama; she does better as the girlfriend in ironic comedies where she can half-smile and be bemused by the men acting like boys. In serious roles she just seems to be trying too much, and you never lose the feeling she's an actress trying to act. Even the sets were distracting. I felt I had seen Pierce Brosnan here before, all dapper and British, and any moment one of Dr. No's henchmen were going to emerge from around the corner with a gleaming Luger with a huge silencer, or Meryl Streep would burst forth from the flowering ivy at the Caribbean villa with a song from Mama Mia. I couldn't experience this movie as a story. It was indistinguishable. The love scenes fell flat. Brosnan and Russo writhing on tables and staircases just felt like two mannequins posed with their legs twisted around each other, or a child posing two dolls in a disturbing way. I didn't believe them for a second. A Latin dance number was supposed to convey risk and sensuality and danger, but I couldn't get my mind off that dress, as thin as a sausage casing and about that erotic.

Usually it's fascinating to get a glimpse of the lives of the superrich, to see how much freedom and opportunity and pure joy a lot of money can promise, but this felt too remote and fantastical, Brosnan sliding under two thousand-pound security gates without anyone noticing, not even getting any dust on the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit. His Croatian crooks didn't sing despite the threat of thirty years, and a forgery tossed together overnight fooled the experts at the Museum. It just seems like the good guys would be a little more careful and harder to dupe, that the someone would put two and two together before the crook could count to ten. Brosnan had everything. Why would his character risk destroying an empire over a picture he could buy a hundred times over?

The real life titans of mergers and acquistions are pretty faceless and uninteresting men with an army of bright lawyers that oversee their every move. Their empires are carefully shielded. For every Donald Trump, flamboyant and self-glorifying and so hungry for attention he engages in public feuds with lightweights like Rosie O'Donnell, there is a Warren Buffet, who lives in the same five-bedroom stucco house he bought Omaha 53 years ago. Four years ago he announced plans to give 85% of his fortune to charity, donating $10 million to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and $50 million dollars to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He went to public schools. He started his empire with paper routes and putting pinball machines in barbershops.

Make a good movie about his life and rise to success, and that could be pretty entertaining stuff. But please, no predictable writhing on the staircase. I like the kissing parts as much as anyone, but they are only interesting if the characters have convinced me they have a reason to like one another. Two bony-shouldered clothes racks wrestling their way out of expensive silk just doesn't do the trick all by itself.

In Praise of Chocolate Cake

I'm having a breakfast of raisin bread toast and homemade chocolate cake, a carbo-rush more potent than heroin. Euphoria rushes down my bloodstream. I have the sleepy half-closed eyes of blissful drunk. My stomach is full and happy, and for now you couldn't convince me that there is a single thing wrong with the world. Except that I just ate the last of the chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is the best cure for most of what ails us, at least for a short while. Other cakes and most pies won't do as much.

Chocolate cake is the warm hope of a worthwhile future. It centers the mind and quiets the soul. I recommend it, in moderation and in occasional moderate excess, for all ailments of heart and thought. Imagine the first genius who harnessed this magic. A leap forward for civilization greater than the wheel. Finally in the dreary cold rains of hunting and gathering and the snuffing out of fire there was a comfort, a reason for living more dependable than sex. Pour your glasses high with cold milk and toast: to chocolate cake and homemade frosting, a mouthful of bliss, a gift from the distant past, and as good a reason as most to strive another day.

We have to hang on to gentleness and our simple joys, because the world hurtles on to an awful and uncertain end. Greeks are storming the Parthenon. A crazed Pakistani immigrant hatches a half-baked bomb plot on the streets of New York City, trying to turn a used Nissan Pathfinder and bags of fertilizer into an instrument of hopelessness and savage glory. In Arizona Latinos are the new Jews, and in a few months they might be required to wear yellow stars on their coats. Yet something has to be done to stem the tide of lawlessness and violence that flows north from Mexico, the torrent of illegal drugs and street kidnappings and vicious gangs.

The fate of the world oozes up to shore in sticky tarballs and rages like an out of control fire. Everywhere there is mayhem and uncertainty. If you stop to think about it, you have to wonder if it's time to run to the hills or learn to shoot, master the art of living off what's left of the land in the aftermath of the apocalypse. The United States owns 5,113 nuclear warheads, and all it takes is one to touch off a gushing flaming ecodisaster that nothing could contain. Within 10 miles of the blast everything would be leveled. The air would be poisoned for many lifetimes.

It's no use. I can't think about this, or spend another moment wondering about the unmanageable and unimaginable mess we have made of the world. It's impossible to think globally. The stock of the world plunges 500 points in a day. It erupts into flames at the touch of a button. The trigger is caressed by the thumbs of a thousand crazed madmen with hearts full of horror and rage. They have to most to say about the future, and what they're saying is unintelligible. It's a language no one can understand. It's fueled by hate beyond reason and a frenzy of misguided purpose. They love death and vengeance. Do you think the next jihadist will make such clownish mistakes, be thwarted by passing street vendors or the passengers on an airliner?

Now I'm ready for a nap. The best days have gentle beginnings, and leave aside the miseries of the world for a while. Chocolate cake isn't the answer, but it's better than most of the unanswerable questions that plague the evening news.

Home is Where the Heart Belongs

Life gets in the way.

Marie likes a show on the Oxygen network called Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood. I like to watch it with her, one of a dozen or so shows we watch together. Good TV can spark dialogue and togetherness. It's a little like a baseball game. There are these spaces in the action you can fill with talk and companionable silences, and the action on the screen makes a nice backdrop to learning a little more about each other, how you feel and what you need and what you like.

Despite the trappings of celebrity Tori and Dean come across as genuine and engaging people, with the same real struggle to make love stay that we all face in our demanding and compartmentalized lives.

In a recent episode Dean came home from working out of town promoting a film he'd been in. Tori showed him a keepsake she'd found while cleaning a drawer, two airsickness bags from the early days of their love, on which they'd written together a bucket list of their hopes and dreams for each other. On alternating lines they'd written tender promises, to have lots of babies, to have sex once a week in dangerous places, to kiss on the beach in Hawaii and share a romantic dinner in a villa in Italy. Tori had framed the bags, sweet beginnings scrawled on the only paper handy, scrawled in pen on a romantic trip when every moment seemed hopeful and alive. Through the blessings of fame and money they'd achieved many of the goals, but now after two babies and a jewelry line and motorcycle racing and their careers and child rearing and their show they'd reached a place where a distance had grown between them. The stresses and demands of ordinary living have broken an awful crack in their happiness. "Life gets in the way," Dean said. "Tori and I are growing apart, and I hate it."

Every day we face dozens of competing choices, small and nagging ones that obscure our brightest intentions. Evil tries to obscure the light in our lives and choke our hopes. We become starved and thirsty, and vulnerable to temptations that will turn a problem into a crisis and poison everything we ever hoped for. We forget that we have the power to let go of misery and regret and live. There are no shortcuts. Love is something you claim and keep. But in the moment of realization and in the steady practice of right choices, a joy can be earned that nothing can replace.

Life gets in the way of living. We don't mean for this to happen but it does. Our joy and magic are overrun by the noxious weeds of misery and regret, of making do and getting things done. Time runs away from us. The pressure to perform and keep up and meet everyone else's expectations overwhelm our deepest needs. Essential things get ignored for trivial obligations. We hurt inside out of unmet need, a cyst of anger forms near our heart.

The challenge is to maintain the balance, to keep the keepsakes in their frame. At all costs we have to avoid the fatal error of ignoring the essential amidst the loud and persistent demands of the mundane. Take time to hold the one you love and be held. Whisper to her how important she is, how delighted you are in her. Reclaim the magic. The excitement hasn't left, it has just been replaced with something deeper and more enduring. A diamond has to be cleaned and polished. Without the proper care the luster is lost under a layer of neglect. Polish away the neglect. With embraces. With tenderness. With affirmation and acknowledgement..

We have to refuse to let the stresses and demands of ordinary living crowd out the joy and magic. We have to reclaim the adventure and excitement, and find it in each other. Too often we suffer in silence when we long to kiss in eagerness and belonging. Be the first to apologize. Make the first move and the second and the third. Reach out. Say what you want. For too long the person we long for more than anything in the world has been half a bed away, and it might as well have been ten thousand miles. Hope seems distant when love is broken. Every beat of our heart is a drumbeat of emptiness on a forlorn march. The wall between us seems higher than our hopes can reach, or so it seems in the agonizing silence. Nothing aches like an unmet touch.

To see Tori and Dean struggle so honestly is lovely and inspiring. I hope they make it. I believe they will. And I know I will never stop loving my wife, or telling her how glad I am she is near me. Today is a good day. We are going to Old Country Buffet for breakfast, and there will be laughter and unlimited bacon. Both are a tonic to our souls. Nobody is richer than we are this morning, not even on the veranda of a villa in Italy.

Insanity is Repeating the Same Behaviors, and Expecting Things to Change

There is evil in the world, and that evil wants to enslave us in sad hopeless lives.

Evil wins when we rob ourselves of joy and possibility and get stuck in a loop. When the hopes we had become a prison of disappointment and self-defeat. When bitterness and suspicion rule our hearts.

As babies we are born with a deep expectation of joy and fulfillment. Madeline and Ethan, our youngest grandbabies, look out at the world with a joyous and welcoming smile. They are so well-nurtured and safe that they are ready in every moment to laugh and play. They great everyone they meet with bright expectation and openness. The delight in their faces draws others to them. Their lives are fulfilling and safe and happy. Nature gives this light to babies, and experience takes it away in far too many cases. God bless the parents who raise babies like these, the safe happy babies, who become good people with trusting and inviting and nurturing souls.

There is evil in the world, and the evil seeks to enslave us. Evil wants us to lead hopeless lives, to replace the safe, nurtured inviting soul within us with emptiness and sorrow.

The chief tools of evil are powerful negative emotions. Guilt. Fear. Anger. Sorrow. Regret. Inadequacy. Anxiety. Loneliness. Doubt. Evil creates a prison and we confine ourselves to a squalid corner of it, next to the overslopping bucket that serves as a latrine. The bucket is rarely emptied. The stench of self defeat fills our nostrils and infects our every thought.

When you are locked in these dominant negative emotions they define your every step and all your encounters with other people. Your suspicion arouses their suspicion. Your anger triggers their anger. Your negativity becomes an unwelcoming force field that echoes throughout the world and defines precedes and predicts your every experience. The joyous welcoming face you had as a baby is replaced with a bitter or angry or fearful one, a mask of defensiveness, and every step you take is an unwelcoming tread in darkness. The light is off. The darkness never stops putting it out.

Misery will find you and keep you in its grip. You will become a slave to habits. You will repeat patterns and revisit the same awful moments over and over. Fights, arguments, quarrels, struggles, and dirty looks will greet you wherever you go. You are surprised and resentful to find how frustrating life is, what jerks people are, but what you fail to realize is that the jerks and rude jackoffs you meet are merely mirrors into your own lost soul. People are reflecting back what you are giving out. You have become the perpetual victim of your own lost enslaved soul.

It is so sad to watch someone you love live out this kind of misery, and to be pulled down into the misery yourself. Deep within all of us is the proud, whole, confident, well-loved baby we were meant to be, the joyous and expectant child. Evil strengthens its grip on the world at every turn, fills its jails with cells of despair. Outrage and sorrow keep us there. There is no need for a key. In the prison society we create, we become the sadistic guards and impose random and crippling punishments on each other. "See, you knew this would happen. This is how it is. Don't listen to the voice within you that tells you it ought to be different. This is where you belong."

We give ourselves a daily beating, and the world administers blows that accompany our own. The blows of self-defeat and painful memory echo in our perfect ears. We recoil at the hideous and sore-infested monsters we become. We become repulsive in our masks of hatred, the cloud of darkness that envelopes our being. Lonely, dark and guarded, we walk into every room and every encounter with lost and fearful faces, and every place we go becomes like the prison within us. Our faces and our posture say, "I'm hurt and I'm angry. I'm guilty and defeated and sad." And the evil in the world senses our distrust and sorrow and piles on with more misery. The hounds of hell will never leave us alone.

It doesn't have to be this way. Life isn't meant to be a sorrowful death march, a crushing weight of sorrow and neglect. There is hope in the world. There is beauty. Good is stronger than evil, and ultimately wins. But we have to find the happy expectant child within us, and nurture it back to life. We have to unlock the key to our anger and sorrow and release ourselves from the prison of doubt.

Or we can keep repeating the same miserable behaviors with the same awful results. The choice is ours. Empty the bucket of misery, or let it foul everything we experience forever.

This is important: the journey to life and sanity and hope is not meant to be taken alone and without help.

We have to connect to other people.
We have to learn to celebrate and nurture ourselves and those around us.
We have to have a spiritual practice, a reflection and understanding that strengthens and sustains our hopeful core.
We have to replace the self-defeating and destructive habits in our lives with something of value.
We have to create community, laugh and dance and sing and comfort one another.
We have to recognize that evil haunts the shadows, and constantly seeks to reclaim us, to reclaim us for the prison of sorrow and misery.

Today I will take the first steps toward being whole and nurtured and nourished. I will nurture and nourish others, and embrace their hopes along with my own. I will expect joy and success and claim it. I will live reflectively and appreciatively. My curiosity will awaken, and slowly the happy expectant child within me will define me again.

It is a challenging journey for all of us, because we have been in prison for a long time. Remember that evil doesn't have to win. Hope is stronger, and more resilient than you can possibly imagine. I want love to win in your life, and I want it to win in mine.