Things were never easy for me.
Peace of mind was hard to find.
And I needed a place where I could hide.
Somewhere I could call mine.

Genesis - No Son of Mine (1991)

Three years ago today my father died. It only feels longer than that.

My father was a simple man — simple in the fact that what usually motivated him in life was whatever particular thing he wanted in life at that particular moment, even if that was to the detriment of everyone else around him. It would incense him to no end to see his oldest son outwit and outthink him on pretty much any academic subject you could conceive. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that burning hope and desire for parents to see their children do better than them. Rather, it was, I would figure out later, pure jealously that drove this reaction out of him.

His death stirred up a tropical storm of emotions within my family. The memorial service was a somewhat anti-climatic and unemotional experience for me, however, which led to a rather nasty post-service year of the silence between my brother and sister and myself. My loss had already been mourned many times, twenty-plus years after I stood on the front porch of my childhood home and screamed at him to get out of my life and stay there. My brother and my sister had managed to make peace with my father prior to his passing, so their loss was real, here, and now. They didn’t quite understand how I was handling things so unemotionally, and quite honestly, I’m not sure I understood it at the time either.

For all the nights left to my own devices, not even old enough to drive, to watch over a brother and sister, I always thought, naively, there was a chance we could repair things. After all the belts and boards and bounces off beds and walls for not getting things done exactly the way he wanted, I always thought it was just a phase. Even after I overheard him detailing the plan he was hatching to gain custody of me not because he really wanted me, but because he could use me to cancel out child support obligations on my siblings, I thought things could be different if only I tried a little harder.

Yet, after all that, all I really ever wanted in my adult life was a phone call from him and a true, sincere apology. The problem was we had ourselves a little cold war going on. His pride would never let him admit he was wrong, and my self-protection instinct would never allow me to make the first move of reconciliation. As much as I wanted that phone call and apology, I knew deep down it would never happen, and secretly I was glad I wouldn’t have to deal with it in this lifetime.

My demons are my own, of course. I have never in my life saddled the blame for my own shortcomings on anyone but myself, and every day I try to make a step away from those demons. I can’t help but wonder, however, how much of my lack of confidence, my indecisiveness, and my self-deprecation come from the salts of having my childhood boiled away the way it was. Perhaps I’ll never know how much of it was part of me and how much of it was imprinted on me. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter anymore.

In a weird, twisted way my father taught me a lot about being a man, a husband, and a father, but in the negative. I spoil my family at nearly every opportunity and am patient to a fault with them most of the time. Maybe it was the grand plan of fate to put that experience in my life at the time knowing I would need it in the future.

I go through my days now doing what I can and what I must to provide for my family. I only hope in the end I’ve done enough to ensure sins of the father never become the sins of the son.

Technorati Tags: father, son, fatherhood, death, domestic violence, confidence, patience, family, fate

Was it just another day? Perhaps to many, and in some respects also to me. I’ve said before that the further away we are from an event, physically and in terms of time, the less impact it has on us.

Today many people will remember and pay their respects to the 2,974 souls that were lost on this day six years ago and the millions of lives that were changed forever in the aftermath. I have no interest in discussing the politics of the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent worldwide ripple. I have no interest in being an alarmist, an isolationist, or a xenophobe, then or now. I have no interest in waving a flag or shouting rhetoric. I have no interest in being angered or frightened in general or avoiding travel in particular.

The only interest I have today (and I try to not sound like a motivational poster when I say this) is to begin accepting that within each of us, individually and collectively, lies the power to change our world, both in the positive and in the negative. Self, family, neighborhood, city, state, country, planet, and all points in between: they are all very small hops from each other. How we, as individuals, a society, and a species, use this power in the immediate future will speak volumes about us to future generations.

Last year I did a podcast featuring one song, Phil Ayoub’s “White Feather”. This year, however, I will defer to the much-more-talented Ed Roberts and his Kansas City Weather Podcast tribute to September 11. If you normally don’t subscribe to KC Weather, I encourage you to take a listen to his show for today.

Remember, but keep moving to make the future better, one person at a time.

Technorati Tags: September 11, 9/11, Ed Roberts, Kansas City Weather Podcast, Phil Ayoub

It would be slightly amiss if I didn’t write something about the two year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall into the Gulf Coast region.

What have we learned in the last two years? I would venture to say: not very much.

While the news coverage will concentrate mostly on the “feel good” stories, and they no doubt deserve to be told, we still have a long way to go before we can even think about considering New Orleans “back”. The Lower 9th Ward is still an unimaginable mess, and it was only recently that new housing started being rebuilt in an area that took an absolute beating at the hands of the storm and its subsequent floods.

In consideration of the entire bumbling of the relief effort by FEMA, I think we can put the conspiracy theories regarding FEMA taking over the country to rest for a bit. It’s safe to say FEMA isn’t going to be taking over anything much larger than a child’s sack lunch anytime soon.

Environmentally, Katrina caused as much devastation and contamination (9 million gallons, by some accounts) as the 10.8 million gallon Exxon Valdez oil spill. What will be the legacy of this floating swamp of pollution? The after-effects of something this large and wide won’t be measurable for decades or generations as we monitor cancer and other death rates from the survivors, their decedents, and the people brave enough to move back.

The financial impact is still being measured. The National Flood Insurance Program, already on shaky ground before Katrina, is now $20 billion in the hole and showing no signs of getting on the level in the immediate future. Musicians, once one of the beautiful and amazing pillars New Orleans was built on, are leaving in droves. A city in one of the poorest regions in the country, desperate for capital, is only at 60% of the population it recorded in 2005 and isn’t forecasting a pre-Katrina tax base available before 2009.

Have we forgotten about Katrina? Perhaps a little. There’s a tendency for people to not hold things close to the heart that do not affect them directly — this is why you don’t read or hear as much in the U.S. about the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake/Tsunami that killed hundreds of times more people than Katrina did. The further away from us something like this happens, in both time and distance, the more disconnected we feel of it.

I do question throwing more money at a system that was so diluted in waste, fraud, and downright mismanagement that it’s hard to imagine how we were able to spend $100 billion and have so little to show for it. I applaud the *idea* behind Podcamp New Orleans — I just hope the people who chose to attend that event realize that it’s more that just “making a presence” and putting their credit cards down on the desk of national hotel chains that aren’t hurting that much. If that’s all that’s involved, I’d rather give my money to a more worthy and direct cause.

It may cost another $40 billion or more and another decade to bring New Orleans back to its former glory. What we really don’t need, but unfortunately are always left with, are politicians using this mess as an opportunity to push agendas and photo opportunities. That, more than anything, proves to me we’ve learned absolutely nothing from this mess and are destined to see the same tragedies repeated when, not if, another natural disaster strikes.

Technorati Tags: Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Gulf Coast, Katrina anniversary, media, FEMA, flood insurance, United Way, politicians, natural disasters

I’ve gone through some of my feelings on religion and faith before in this space. I could never (and still can’t really) reconcile something capable of inspiring everything from wondrous works of art to amazing, encouraging acts of self-sacrifice to beautiful music with its ability and reoccurring history of bringing out some of the worst that we as a species should be ashamed of imprinting on this universe.

Where does that leave me? I’m not entirely sure of late. I’ve never really had much of a problem with faith (or belief), just the way it’s practiced by some people. I think it is part of human nature to want more than what we see — to believe in there being a force outside and above us — ever since we’ve been able to turn our necks upward. But after having been burned to a briquette by religion three times in my life now, I’m not sure I can make the separation anymore between faith, religion, and the people who misrepresent both for their own nefarious means.

Does this dichotomy have anything to do with my lingering lack of faith in myself lately? I really can’t say for sure, but I wonder sometimes. I realize that something needs to change actively in my life, though. I’ve taken to slowly, much like a turtle coming out of a shell, surrounding myself with people who are positive and encouraging and remind me nearly daily that I can bring these ideas of mine to form, that I am capable of so much more than I give myself credit for, and that the only person really holding me back is me. The expression “nothing changes by itself” has started to become a regular in my daily life, and I think I’m actually starting to believe it.

A flash of lightning goes across my window just now and I see my own reflection. I’m still not all that fond of what’s reflected back at me, but I do recognize and understand it a little bit more after every flash. Eventually I will come to terms with it and it won’t weigh on me anymore. If I’m lucky, in the process I will end up having a little faith in me.

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The start of this post I wrote from the nicely chilled but slightly cramped confines of a hotel room in a south suburb of Kansas City. The large painting of a bowl of fruit on the wall doesn’t quite qualify as sufficiently distracting from a wall that couldn’t be more bland and white if it was padded.

My brother-in-law, which I Twittered about some recently, is doing quite well after what was a rather nasty trucking accident which stripped a cabin open as a ginsu-knife across a tin can. For spending twenty-four hours in an ICU with vertebrae fractures it looks like he will now literally walk away from this with not much more than some stitches, bruises, and the need to wear a neck and back brace for a few weeks. I wanted to say thank you again to all the people who e-mailed, instant messaged and Twittered back to me the much-needed good vibes when I fell into crisis-management mode Thursday night. I hope I acknowledged all the directs and replies.

Transition now a few hours later: North of Kansas City in a little rest stop just shy of the Iowa border. The air is slightly heavy, but not oppressively so - the breeze, which is dancing off the Missouri River and through the trees, much like a Gregory Hines tap-dance — rhythmic and hypnotizing, seemingly always on the edge of going out of control but never actually getting there, helps keep the temperature tolerable. The smog and bad air of the city have been passed to the south and waved good-bye. I sit on a weathered, but sturdy, bench in the lounge area under a camp shade best described as a rusted-metal-color spaghetti strainer turned upside-down impaled on a stick. Somehow a guy tapping away at a laptop doesn’t seem as out of place here as one would imagine it. My girls scamper and skip around the grass area buzzing around each other like two butterflies of the same colony — never too far apart from each other but otherwise floating around each other in some random pattern that seems non-sensical to the outside observer.

I look over at my wife, blowing at the lit end of her cigarette briefly and walking along the snake-winding path of nearly-new concrete. The last few days, between her brother’s accident and her mother’s theatrics involving same, have worn on her quite a bit, and only now does she appear to realize it’s okay to relax a little. She tends to defer to me in most family crises such as these — in fact it was she that had the meltdown when my father died two and a half years ago while I went about the business of organizing and executing the last minute travel plans. I’ve always found it slightly ironic that I function so well when I need to manage someone else’s immediate crisis despite all my personal neuroses.

It’s time to get back on the road. These trips always seems to be twice as long going back home as they are going to whatever destination was in store. I slide my laptop into the bag past a copy of a book recommended to me by Chris Brogan that I promise myself I will start reading soon. I grab my writing notebook and jot down that final thought and a few more to add to this post at the next stop, which would happen to be in about twenty minutes as the small bladder of a ten-year-old would make quick work at decimating the carefully manufactured plans of the rental car’s cruise control.

A few more stops, including a questionable one at a candy outlet shop, and we’re rolling through Iowa, making this my first blog post written in three different states. After a dinner later and another hour’s drive we’re back home from an unplanned thousand-mile weekend to a house full of cats simply ecstatic at our return. The luggage sits collapsed in the middle of the family room not unlike how I found myself in my chair shortly after. I try not to sound upset at the girls behaving like super-balls on speed, but I think the wear and stress of the weekend has finally started to chip away my self-protecting outer shell, and I raise my voice a couple of times at them. My fatigue and frustration spilled over the high guttering of my tolerances, and for about two seconds a little bit of that darkness that was my father reminds me that it’s still there no matter how much I try to suppress it.

My wife retires for the evening, the exhaustion of the weekend having completed its slow attack against her like the dutiful soldier it is. The girls have a warm bath and finally calm down a little. The youngest starts to fade shortly afterwards as if the bath were a magical elixir. Before waltzing off to the music in her head as she usually does towards her room drowning in green and pastels, she comes up to me, wraps her arms around me like she wraps me around her finger and gives me the usual “good-night hug” I’ve come to actually miss when I’m out of town.

My oldest takes her sleeping pill and sits down to work on her jigsaw puzzle until the medicine takes hold. At ten years old, she’s already graduated to 750-1000 piece puzzles to keep up the challenge for her. She’s almost savant-like in her ability to work these puzzles. She’ll sit down and literally pluck the precise piece she’s missing for the section she’s working on out of the box with hundreds still scattered in it. I’ve watched her put a 500-piece puzzle together by herself in an afternoon using just that method.

It was while watching her work on her puzzle that the whole theme of this post finally came together for me. My wife doesn’t function well in a logistical crisis, so I become the missing piece she needs to keep up and get through. I myself have turned to Chris for advice to find one of the many missing pieces in my own life and personality. My daughter has an uncanny ability to grab out of the box just exactly the piece she’s missing from her puzzle.

In the puzzle of life there is an absolutely huge box of pieces sitting at the side, so the challenge is to find the pieces you need to complete the section (of life) you’re working on. Unfortunately for most of us it’s not as easy as looking at the box and flawlessly and fearlessly extracting the precise, perfectly-fitting selection. We have to pick up a piece, size it to fit, find it doesn’t fit, place it aside, and repeat. Despite Hollywood’s impressions to the contrary, you can’t go through the whole puzzle in three hours or less — this process can and usually does take many years.

It can be very rewarding to be found and become a missing piece for someone, and we all can be the missing piece in someone’s life — be it a spouse, child, friend, social connection, or “total stranger”. Actually being the missing piece is the really easy part — it’s being found by a person needing a piece that is difficult. You need to make sure you’re ready for it, though. If you’re not very prepared — if you don’t have the pieces you need to function as someone else’s missing piece — then you’ll face pressure in duplicate as you try to support someone else while not fully supported yourself.

The thing to remember, and what I still struggle with myself, is that selection of the wrong piece out of the right box does not equate to failure. We have to keep picking pieces out and trying to fit them despite the false moves and stumbles. Eventually, if we keep trying different pieces, we’ll find the right missing pieces, because the missing pieces are everywhere — they are literally the others all around us.

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This weekend was the weekend I got off my ass and got started on some serious cleanups I’ve been putting off forever.

I refreshed my contact info here on the blog site and included my IM handles, by the way, so if you have an IM client and want to add me to your lists, feel free. I cleaned up some e-mail redirectors and forwarders that were going all over the place, including one that was just plain broken and sending some e-mails off into a black hole. I also added another 15 or so lyrics to the randomizer script that sits at the top of the blog page.

After that I did a complete rework of my music podcast page. New database, new theme (with my own color tweaks), and all the free website software upgrades money can buy. I really am liking the new theme over the old one right now. I was able to split my podcast RSS feed so I can still track through Feedburner and support both a regular MP3 feed as well as a future enhanced-AAC feed. I also figured out a way to automatically redirect podcast files to an alternate host after I’ve archived them off the main site without having to change the URL!

Finally, I set up an umbrella page for all of my adventures over at abosproductions.com. Right now it only encompasses the blog here and the podcast there, but in the future I hope it will serve as a portal into some other ideas I’m working on, a few Wordpress themes I’ve tweaked and fixed, a video thing my daughters want to do, a family web site I keep promising to do for the in-laws, etc.

I hope this might be an impetus I need to get moving on some of these things again… change of scenery model and all that.

Oh, the title of the post…. Only the best song ever to work on htaccess redirections to… Jim Croce’s Roller Derby Queen… She was five foot six and two fifteen, after all.

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Tin soldiers and Nixon coming….
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming…
Four dead in Ohio.

The anniversary of the tragedy at Kent State did not pass by unnoticed for me. I find it very appropriate that new evidence and perspective on the tragedy came to light around the anniversary. It’s also appropriate to draw some parallels between Kent State and the recent horror recently inflicted upon Virginia Tech.

Seven years later, a group of determined individuals set out to derail construction of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. While they didn’t manage to completely stop Seabrook, they did manage to start the ripple in the pond that, combined with the partial meltdown at TMI, pretty much doomed new nuclear power plants in the United States.

Setting aside the politics involved at Kent State and Seabrook, I worry that we as a society have lost the will and drive for peaceful protesting. It’s safer to be semi-anonymous on the series of tubes expressing mock outrage than stand up and take action in public — and I’m just as guilty of this as anyone. Who could blame people for staying anonymous in a day and age when daring to speaking out against the group-think gets you labeled a traitor?

It also feels like the things being protested virally online are geared more towards technological pursuits than social pursuits, and it just feels more like a meme than a real movement. Maybe that’s just my twisted perception, but when was the last time you saw a social protest site make headlines in the Washington Post?

Am I saying we should all grab a placard and take to the street corner? Of course not. The concept of freedom of speech also by its definition includes freedom from speech — you are under no obligation to take to any socially-involved cause if you do not wish to do so.

However, if you’re going to protest something, no matter what it is, either online in a podcast, blog post, Second Life group, or other “new media” way, or “conventionally” an act of in-presence non-violent civil disobedience, do it with true passion. Do it because you really believe in the cause, not because you want to feel like you belong in the cool-kids club. Do it because you feel what you’re protesting is a real wrong that needs to be righted, not because it just “sticks it to the man”.

It is better not to speak than to feign outrage. Without the passion and belief in your protest, you do yourself and the cause you claim to be helping a disservice.

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Here I am again in this mean old town.
And you’re so far away from me.
And where are you when the sun goes down?
You’re so far away from me.

Dire Straits, of course, from an album I consider one of the best (if not the best) rock albums of the 1980’s. I thought about quoting Bob Seger to start this post, but it just didn’t feel right, geographically speaking. After all, I’m not east of Omaha right now - I’m in it.

I don’t consider myself a religious person, much to the dismay of my in-laws and my brother, who tolerates my occasional overuse of F-bombs in casual conversation more than any religious person should be forced to. I think it has a lot to do with the fact I never could chose a side in that whole “Free Presbyterians Versus Locked-Up Presbyterians” debate. I do, however, believe in a karma (and Karmyn, for that matter). I believe you will eventually get out of the universe what you put into it, and I believe the universe steers you in directions for a reason, and that doesn’t necessarily mean it will always be good for you at the time of the steering. I believe that it is karma, or perhaps just fate if you want to simplify things, that brought me back to the same city (Omaha, Nebraska) ten years to the day I was in such a hurry to leave.

You see, it was ten years ago today (May 1) my oldest daughter was born. I had accepted a promotion with my employer to move to Omaha in early February 1997. The catch was I had to move “now”, leaving my wife, who was seven months pregnant at the time, splitting living arrangements between my family and hers towards the end of what was a touch-and-go pregnancy. Call me an insensitive clod if you must, but when your employer offers to nearly double your salary, immediately qualify you for health insurance, and move you across states on their dime, you say “Yes” and deal with the consequences as they happen.

On April 30, 1997, the car I was driving (which we had somehow held together for years with duct tape, bailing wire, hope, my mother-in-law’s prayer chain, and many a turn from my future step-father’s torque wrench), busted a piece off the front right wheel area. Thankfully the part I needed to fix the problem wasn’t too expensive, but unfortunately the repair shop didn’t have one in stock and the best they could do was overnight it from Kansas City for installation the next day. I pretty much didn’t have a choice in the matter since the car wasn’t safe to drive without this repair, but I figured I would be okay, since I would have the car back in the morning and my wife’s due date was many, many days away anyway.

Wrong. My wife goes into labor that night, naturally. Mr. Burns and his mice, line one please.

I scurried to the repair shop the next morning and practically paced a hole in the floor waiting for the repair to be completed. I will give those guys all the credit in the world — they busted their tails and did a four hour repair in nearly two flat (and only charged me for two hours labor on top of it). I scurried out of Omaha at 11:00 AM on a race home, having talked to my mother at 10:30 AM who figured I had plenty of time to make it.

This was way before cell phones were as ubiquitous as they are now, so I had no way of knowing my daughter was born a mere 5 minutes after I left Omaha. I walked into the hospital 4 hours later to see my wife holding my new daughter. More than anything, though, I’ll never forget the fact that my wife had make it a priority to clean up after the birth and go so far as to put makeup on so she could “look nice for me”. She’s always tries so hard to gain my acceptance, even today, and often I’m not as forthcoming with it as I should be.

Not being there for my wife when my oldest was born is something that haunts me a little bit to this day, but try as I might I really won’t be able to turn back the clock on that. Looking back at the last ten years, though, I don’t regret the decision that put me in Omaha. Omaha was good to me and for me, in contradiction to the title of this post. The decision to move here set in motion a series of events that have not always been good along the way. In fact, some of those events have been downright painful. Overall, in the end, though, they seem to be good now as a sum whole — in other words, karma has worked. I don’t think there was any inkling ten years ago that I would be here today with the “typical” wife, two kids, house, car, a decent living wage, and relative job security. Not too bad for a has-been-and-a-never-will-be.

I’ve grown up a lot in the last ten years, mostly by force. Then, I was young and stupid, a terrible husband and not much better as a potential father. Now I’m just old and dumb, according to the very same pre-teen daughter. I chuckle and shake my head, try to not become my father for one more day, and hope in the future she’ll realize how many things have been done and how many sacrifices were and are being made for her to have a good life and a chance to avoid the struggles her parents went through. In the end I think that’s all any real parent wants for their child.

I called home this afternoon after my obligations of the day and wished my daughter a happy birthday, told her I loved her, called her the nickname she hates with a passion, and teased her about the funny face she can make by moving just one eyeball. I then drove around Omaha to my old work building (since vacated), the old car shop (since sold), and our old apartment complex (since rented) and realized that karma, instant or otherwise, will knock you right in your head - and sometimes you should let it.

We all shine on.

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So here we are. Bum Rush The Charts has come and gone, and the initial results are in.

While I agree with the wise Christopher Penn on his assertions and observations of the lessons learned, I feel the need to touch on a couple of additional points:

Point: The Internet’s hype machine is alive and well, thank you very much.

If there was one thing we all should have learned from “Snakes On A Plane”, it’s that Internet hype can very quickly outstrip reality. For all the hype, all the effort, and all the so-called “groundswell” for this project, the results can only really be described as disappointing (I said disappointing, not “failure”). Likewise, some of the reactions coming out of the disappointing numbers make my reality distortion field sensors start ringing.

Again, I stress I refuse to use the word “failure” or classify the project as such. That being said, maybe the lesson here is to remember the Internet is the great equalizer and not set future goals as lofty. In the end, the resounding “thud” of the project may have done more harm than good - it will have taken pressure off the very forces the project was designed to scare because THEY will see the process as a failure, if they were even paying attention.

Point: Podcasting needs to stop talking to itself.

Yes, a couple of press releases were pushed out (at $400 a piece - I sure hope there was enough in sales to help recoup some of that), and it did bubble up a small amount of mainstream coverage, but in the end, podcasters were preaching this project mostly to the converted.

As much as podcasting likes to think it’s counter-culture, we’re still only talking amongst ourselves. Not only are we still only talking to ourselves, we’ve managed to already break off into separate cliques (networks, groups, associations), and those not part of the “cool clique” are automatically discounted, discarded, and dismissed - a fact smacked across my face with little subtlety during my recent visit to Nashville.

If podcasting is going to really gain traction, we need to stop talking to our own little cliques. And, in order to do that, we need to make room for the voices outside our usual sphere of comfort. When was the last time you engaged someone not part of your usual circle in a podcast or new-media related discussion?

Point: Stop insulting your audiences.

This is the part that got to me the most. When to you insult the very people you’re trying to pitch a project to (NSFW language) because they dare disagree or question your angle of approach, you’re doomed to turn people off to your cause. I realize one of PCH’s main callings is MYN’s over-the-top swear-filled rants. I also have no doubt he was sincere about his passion for this project. However, when someone with an idea reacts to criticism in such a way as to discourage discussion and differing opinions against the group-think, they do irreparable harm to the projects they are trying to support.

The above is NOT an anti-PCH, anti-Podshow or Podshow-is-evil rant on my part. I’ll save my application of the “evil” label for things that truly deserve it (people that hurt children, dogs over two pounds, and my mother-in-law’s green bean casserole).

Point: Making a difference doesn’t mean making a statement.

I understand there’s a basic human need to “stick it to the man” or “buck the establishment”, and podcasting at its root was born of that emotion, but you don’t need an organized one-day protest to make a difference. Find music you like and become a fan of that person or band. Buy a CD… play it for your friends and family… send an e-mail… show up to a concert. That’s how podcasters and podcast listeners make a difference — one connection at a time, not as a mass mob of action.

I applaud people like Chris Penn, C.C. Chapman, and Mark Nemcoff who stuck their proverbial necks out, figuratively and financially, in order to take on this project, but I hope they, and all of us, can learn the sharp lessons in order to avoid the morning-after hangovers in the future.

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