Obama sings

This particular weekend

About Time

I hear a lot from people who want me to mention them in this blog. Well, not a lot. There is Winter Storm, who pesters me for a mention, but until this second, I have resisted. How about Mr. Anger? I have mentioned him a few times, depends on his mood, because he reads the blog and writes me cryptic notes if he thinks I am secretly writing about him. It takes some ego to think a diatribe about the first African American president is somehow related to Mr. Anger, but there you have it. My Dumb Friend has asked me why I have not included him and our silly history in here, and then I remind him, "dude, you are always there, somewhere..." That should keep him busy.

I was just thinking, on my way home from West Virginia, which is amazingly beautiful, how many women I love. Well, first I was thinking about the women I have loved. Whenever my mind focuses on past love, She is always the first to appear. She was the first person I ever fell madly in love with, possibly the only one whom I actually fell madly in love with. Love is such a strange thing, with power of first blush, and kissing and passion all mixed together is such an explosive package, no wonder it fails us so many times in life. She was so dynamic and smart, beautiful, sensual and just a slight bit crazy, which happens to be the way I like them.

We stay in touch, she and I. Spent the night together a couple of years ago, after a night out, sharing a meal and memories. She remains grounded, beautiful and still sexy as all get out. She has parenting advice for me, which is always helpful, since I have only about 300 close friends who are always offering parenting advice.

Speaking of advice, I hardly ever mention children in this blog and for good reason. First, just recently I found out, to my shock and horror, that not only do they read this from time to time, but friends of theirs do too. Which is much worse, because if you read back to some of the early posts, or email for links to last years blog, you see some very personal stories, some very sad stories and some incredibly nasty and graphic stories. All true. For the most part.

I do have a couple of children that live with me. And I am about to make that big dramatic turn that is so much fun to do. See, when I fell madly in love for the first time, and it fell apart (as it has often done in my life) I actually believed that I could never fall in love like that again. Then a couple of years later, while living in Los Angeles, I fell madly in love again, but that ended even more tragically. There is a point here, and that is that the first blush of real adult type love is so powerful and when it ends, if it does, it does not have to, but for many people it does, when it does end, it hurts so bad and you kind of make a promise to yourself to never fall so madly in love because when it ends, it hurts.

I felt that way for a long time, protecting some sort of interior love thing that allowed me to move from relationship to friends with benefits, to all sorts of other derivative relationships and on and on. Then these babies showed up, how, I am not quite sure, but one day, there they were and a few months later, it was them and me, alone. I will never forget when they did show up, because the love you feel for babies that you made is even more powerful than the love you feel for sexy people who wink at you and ask you out on a date.

Now I have a son and as his father, we are working out our adult relationship. I have two daughters whom I could not imagine life without. Well, sometimes I imagine life without them, but that never lasts long, and when I come back to reality, I realize I am not only madly in love with them, but blessed in a very deep way to be a part of their lives. Both are amazing and smart and beautiful and easy on the eyes and fun to be around. Once or twice, possibly more, but I forget, we do not get along. Here is the thing about hands on parenting, as they age you realize what a gift it has been to spend days with them, countless hours playing catch or drawing birds or throwing rocks in the water or simply napping. I know some people who have, for whatever reasons, had child care professionals raise their children and for the life of me, I don't get that. Even on the worst days with children around, in retrospect, those are some of the best days.

Fathers and daughters have unique relationships. It has been my experience, as both a brother to a sister and a father to two daughters, that mothers and daughters do not always have the same profound relationships as fathers do with their daughters. I have given this some thought, and one thing I think causes conflict is that as a daughter matures and gets talkative and fun to be around, fathers often feel protective, so they spend more time with their daughters, while this is happening, sometimes a mother will become jealous of the time spent with the daughter and instead of actually talking to her husband, she grows resentful. What I have seen countless times is that as the daughter begins to grow up and become a young woman, the mother grows more distant towards her flourishing daughter and to make up for that divide, the father invests even more time with his daughter. A vicious cycle begins and mothers, who look in the mirror and see the effects of parenting and age, and then look at the youth and vitality of their daughter, and become jealous of the attention their husband now showers on the girls, grow ever more resentful. Again, I have seen this numerous times, it is not true with all mother daughters, but it is true enough.

I think I have decent relationships with both of the girls who currently live rent-free here. They both bring so much to the table, in terms of beauty and brains, that I am almost always happy just to be near them. They need me less and less in their lives, I am barely a driver for them at this point. I like to watch them. Over the past decade they have matured beyond anything I could have imagined.

At some point I really believed I could never be powerfully in love again. I thought my heart had hardened and I could never just love without fear. Daughters give you that gift of loving without worry. Years ago I could not imagine loving so deeply, and yet, I know my days with them are numbered. Part of the job of parenting it knowing that someday you need to fade to the background. It is happening on almost a daily basis and in some ways I hate it. They will love someone else, hopefully madly and passionately. They will move on, move out, move away. I know it, they know, hell they remind me of it on almost a daily basis, and yet I love them, my daughters, because they are amazing and beautiful and stunningly brilliant in their own ways and I will always, for as long as I breath, love them with all my heart.

Comments and Inception

First, stop emailing me with comments to posts. You don't like Poo, I get it. Comment on the fucking blog. I never ever answer email from people I don't know. Ever. Well, I did once, and it ended badly.

A week or so ago I went on a date and we saw Inception, the best movie of the year. It hurt a little because as many of you know, I once dated Leonardo DiCaprio, for a short time, but it was intense. Anyway, it is a great movie. Go see it. I would say, get really stoned first.

Anyway, watch it.

Poo

Hello people who have pets that are walked in cities.

A couple of years ago I was living on a farm in upstate New York. The kids and I adopted an angry lesbian Australian Shepard who has come to accept our defects and actually seems to enjoy our company. While we lived on a farm, she basically had freedom like no dog should ever have. She could come and go as she liked, enjoy the cool waters of the large reservoir nearby and even order pizza is she felt like it. That last part is a lie, but she does like pizza.

I know she made dog poo somewhere on that farm, but where it was never seemed to be important to me. She was secretive about it and I was fine with that. Then we moved to a city and this dog that had acres of land to run and play in, was all of a sudden a house dog, a city dweller. When she went for a walk, we carried a plastic bag and when she pooped, we picked it up like some sort of golden nugget. We bring these precious bags back to our house and dispose of them in a humane fashion.

So, today, I was walking to the Apple Store and low and behold, a small back on someones stairs. Plastic bag. With dog poo in it. My mind whirled. Is this a protest? A hate crime? Did someone just drop it by accident? When I am carrying a bag of poo I know exactly where it is at all times, like a nuclear scientist handling a glowing rod of danger. No one could just lose a bag of poo.

So, I am thinking, someone went through the trouble of walking their dog, bringing a bag, bagging the poo and then? Then they just left it? Stranger things have happened, stranger things have captured my attention, but my question of the day is why? Why do it? Why pick up the poo if you are just going to drop it somewhere? Why not just let your dog poo wherever it feels is appropriate? Why leave it on my path to the Apple Store and not, say, near a Gap Store? Truth be told, there is a Gap Store near the Apple Store, but let's not change the subject.

So I say, to the poo person, please go that last step, from walking the dog, to picking up after the dog, to actually disposing of the bag, so those of us walking around on a beautiful day will not have to view a steaming bag of dog poo.

Thank you.

Well, unless that dog poo really is golden.

In this economy

I may be lucky, I have friends from all strata of life, from highly educated and super successful to high school drop out and working minimum wage. I have always seemed to fit somewhere in between, not the dimmest bulb in the socket, not the lowest paid worker on the line.

I got a call yesterday from a friend who has often been in the same boat as myself. Working, making some money, sometimes more, sometimes less. Now he is making nothing. Laid off a month ago, he was convinced his skills, both technical and people, would land him something, quickly. That has not been the case.

What do you do when you are closer in age to retirement than college? It is a question more and more people seem to be making. It seems that we have entered a new phase of economics, where the most skilled, the most talented and being passed over for the cheapest worker, no matter what it is they bring to the table. Mind you, I have hired people before, and sometimes the only option is to hire the person willing to work for the lowest wage. Maybe that is the case with most jobs now.

My sense is that most businesses are as nervous as most workers when it comes to the future of America. This has nothing to do with who the president is, but more likely, who the president was. In my opinion, and I had a very heated argument during a dinner in Philadelphia this past week, George Bush is the worst president of my lifetime, and this is a lifetime that includes Richard Nixon. In some ways, Bush has been a brilliant manipulator of economics and fear. He was able to get huge tax breaks for the richest Americans and get the rest of us so worried about the next terror attack that very few of us bothered to look at the evidence that Iraq was conspiring to actually attack, or do much of anything else.

You do those two things, lower taxes in a time of war and lie a country into a war that has no end plan, and you doom a generation to bewilderment and cynicism. To do this while talking a good game of bipartisanship, all the while loading the supreme court with the most conservative judges in recent history is another milestone that will not soon be forgotten. Juggling these missteps would be enough for most presidents trying to ruin our country, but instead and sitting back in the Texas ranch and thinking he had really thrown a wrench into the American system of equality and capitalism, Bush borrowed and spent like a bimbo with a gold card. His debts, his spending, his growth of government, use of torture and other war crimes will certainly lead many to name his worst president ever, but what he also seems to have done is leave the country in such a funk that there does not appear to be an easy way out.

Generally, over the past 20 years or so, the economy has found a new bubble to inflate. Investors could not throw enough money at the internet bubble in the 90's. The housing market followed when internet stocks went from thousands to pennies. The housing market, again in part thanks to George Bush and his economic policies, burst big time, we were left with trillions of dollars of bad investments. What to do those mega millionaire investors who hover over Wall Street must have been saying. Where is the next bubble?

What if we are out of bubbles? Having sent many regular manufacturing jobs into slave labor camps in third world countries, many people in America are finding it impossible to find a regular job. President Obama seems preoccupied with silliness and accepting bills that are so watered down as to be meaningless, other leaders, like the Palins and Gingriches, have no new ideas and resort to, imagine this, more tax cuts for the wealthy. A country at drift, fighting two endless wars, having been lied to and bankrupted by a president with no vision, and now, alone in supremacy and deeply in debt to other countries, we must find a way to not only create a stable economy, but actually nurture and grow one.

My job searching friend is looking everywhere, way beyond our borders even, not for a well paying job with outlandish benefits, but for work that pays. I wished him the best and offered a room just in case. How did we get here and how do we get back?

Sunday visual