I don’t know whether it’s just in the air or if there’s a mutual reflection on our past losses. But whatever it is, I can’t help but notice a common thread of consciousness through many people I know and love. And coincidentally, Memorial Day is upon us and enables a reason to preempt “New Music Monday” with an excerpt about reflecting on loss and the sacrifice of others.

Memorial Day is traditionally observed in remembrance of our military loyalists who protect and serve our freedoms so valiantly sought for by our founding fathers. The military infrastructure of our nation is strong source of identity and the brand equity of the United States. That being said, I’d go far enough to say that not one of us in this nation doesn’t know someone who has served our country, possibly shed blood for our people, or passed on due to their vigilance in protecting our way of life.

Today is an important day to salute back to the great members of our military who give us what we have here today. Simply, you get to complain bout your government and bitch about state immigration laws because we had visionaries and servicemen who knew freedoms such as free thought and speech were unalienable rights as a human. For that very ubiquitous element of the United States that many of us routinely take for granted, we should be deeply and sincerely thankful. We are the fortunate ones.

Many of our countrymen have been lost along the way to developing and preserving our freedoms. We owe them our lives and our prayers. To those that protect us today, we owe them our unconditional support and unwavering belief despite personal or public opinion on the necessity of waging war abroad. So an element of this post is to give sincerest thanks to those that protect the borders of freedom both in a military campaign and in our classrooms. Freedom as we know it is always being attacked in the most unexpected of areas. I personally extend my gratitude to those family members and brothers out there that have protected my freedoms. My brother-in-law, my father-in-law, my God-father, and my Uncle are just a small number of examples who have ‘taken one for the team.’

We should all be grateful for our nation despite the unfortunate nuances and issues it currently contains. Just like our great nation, none of us are without fault. However, we, and our country, strive to do our best following our philosophical doctrines and moral compasses to make the right decisions.

But a more contemporary extension of Memorial Day is to that of reflection on our lost loved ones. I think we all can relate to this. And as I mentioned above, I can’t help but notice a common thread among my family and friends. On more than one occasion in the last few days, family and friends, and myself for that matter, have had conversations, thoughts, feelings about, or of, our lost loved ones.
I can honestly say that I saw four blue Subarus in one day. If that isn’t a sign of my brother, I don’t know what is. Another example is that of the great news my wife has experienced in regard to her health. Yet, another example in the memories of her strong and dedicated mother who we lost. And along those same lines, my father, normally stoic and the interminable tough guy, was openly emotionally in his comments about wishing that he could have had more time to know my wife’s mother better before we lost her. My cousin’s wife also lost her brother to terminal illness. She too has been openly reflecting on that loss and shared enveloping thoughts and emotion with my wife. The last few days, I’ve thought of my aunt and cousins in Sacramento with the days leading up to Memorial Day. My little second-cousin will be getting married soon and I’ve at long lengths how much my uncle, her grandfather and an Airforce serviceman, is looking down and guiding her along the way as she marries her sweetheart who too, is a serviceman. These are five strong examples of the legacy of remembrance in which Memorial Day is also suited.

And while we show support for our current and lost serviceman and women, we also shed a tear for those important souls in our life which we lost along the way that were able to enjoy the freedoms provided by our service people. Our lost loved ones were never able to live out the entire dream of freedom that we hoped they would. However, they each individually and collectively shaped our consciousness and changed and improved our views of existing and living in here under the flag of our great nation.

Today is a great day to reflect on both; our nation and its loyal and dedicated servicemen have provided a place of existence that we are sheltered from harm and can live in peace. We are very fortunate to have passionate men and women who unconditionally have paid the greatest cost to protect that very freedom we live. We are the fortunate ones. And moreover, we have been emotionally scarred by those we have lost along the journey of life. Most were taken too soon and before what we perceived to be an approved timeline. These losses left marks on us like scars. But the scars are the witnesses of pleasant and peaceful memories of loved ones who changed us forever.

On a day like Memorial Day in the United States, I find that we all should dedicate one moment to give thanks for what we have in our great lives. People who love us that we know and people who love us that we don’t know. Our loved ones and our unconditional servicemen and women have dedicated their lives to the love and passion of our lives.

Happy Memorial Day to all of you and much respect to our lost loved ones.

Trials and tribulations; A three word description that succinctly describes my wife and her health ailments. In this entry, I’ll try to best to explain a milestone recently met that’s lifted a large weight off our shoulders; more specifically, off my wife’s shoulders. While running the risk of over dramatizing, let me say that the collective of my wife’s health ailments are short of being terminal or life threatening. They’re more along the lines of being just real big pain in the ass daily. Until recently. The latest information had us face to face with mortality and the unexpected changes that life tends to hurl your way.


To appropriately set the stage that I’m not exaggerating about my wife’s challenged quality of life; let’s start with a brief attempt at a summary of her ailments. I'm not a doctor, but I did spend some time in a Holiday Inn recently. I’ll take some heat from cataloguing this here but I’m hoping to put the context of the news into perspective.

Let’s see if I can get most of them; there are the chronic headaches. There’s the TMJ. There’s the tailbone issue from some injury which makes sitting, standing, and whatever difficult. I’m not poking fun at her; I’m merely painting a general picture of the challenges. The more serious ailments; there’s the hip dysplasia that doesn’t allow her to walk long distances or stand comfortably. There are the complications which suggested we would never have a second child. And most importantly, there’s the 300-lbs gorilla in the room in regard to the sudden passing of her mother and the legacy of terminal illness.

For all of the above, my wife has been through tons of tests, had hundreds of medications prescribed, met with various medical experts, tried holistic alternatives for the pain, and even tried séances with witch doctors with bad mojo. Well, maybe not that last one. But the most important test occurred within the last weeks:

Genetic screening for the cancer gene.


All of the other tests for all of the other stuff may have been more invasive, more demanding, and required a longer commitment. This genetic screening was just a blood draw followed by a waiting period for the results. I can only imaging what it’s like to sit in a lab, with a needle in your arm, and wondering what the results will be. Go on live your life normally while you wait. I couldn't do it.

First of all, I hate needles. Let me qualify that with that I hate needles which are in my bloodstream. Needles with ink = I like. The answers to your future are traveling up that sterile needle into a vile. Such a trivial exercise in healthcare now exists as a gatekeeper to your predetermined existence and longevity on this terrestrial orb. It’s hard to believe the small red contents of that vile can possibly unravel such a large knot of untold genetic secrets. But it’s just that. And while we as humans can live with the worst of news and conditions, we do enjoy the occasional good news and positive health findings for inner peace.

As uneventful as blood draw is, I can’t help but imagine what was going through her head at the time. But for her, she has always been much more methodical in her thoughts than me. Logic tends to ‘escape’ me at times. From our conversations, it was just another day in a nondescript doctor’s office, then lab, and then home. To me, she portrayed the whole experience as a ubiquitous event that we ‘all go through.’ In a testament to her strength, she’s unflappable through any event, situation, or disaster just like her mother.


But the history is there, whether she externalizes it or not. Her mother passed away from cancer far sooner than we expected. It’s completely fathomable to be affected by the terminal legacy that you inherit with cancer. But my wife never really talks about it. That could be because I take up most of the bandwidth in our house. It wasn’t until the news arrived via a call on her cell phone that I knew how deep this went.

It was a typical work day for me in the office with grown men requiring babysitting. My wife headed south from our home with the boys to attend a birthday party for our cousins’ son. The party was hosted at a building where children could relentlessly bounce, climb, and earn rug burn after rug burn while sliding down air-filled slides and scaling inflated castles. Now it seems strangely appropriate that she received the call while at this party. The news must have sucked the air right out of the room equivalent to the quantity of air in that slide that Son #1 was wrangling. After the news reached her cortex, the neurons began firing effectively, the information was being written into her consciousness, and there was comprehension, she began making the calls to inform us of the results. Of course, no one answered the phone.


If you haven’t figured it out yet, the results from the genetic cancer test run on my wife’s blood came back negative. And negative results are actually positive news. My wife doesn’t have the cancer gene. That’s very good news. It all came just days before Mother’s Day. And with that, we can’t help but think that someone special, taken too soon by this disease had something to do with breaking a terminal cycle of mortality. Does the news preclude her from future ailments? Probably not but that’s because we are never promised tomorrow. However, what we do know is that the probability of my wife being here to see her very own grandchildren is now MUCH higher. I am thankful for the forever we now have.

And now for an angry non-conformist post….

There’s a policy at my place of employment which outlines that social networking should not be used to misrepresent the company. Every year we go through ridiculous training classes to remind us that the company doesn’t like social media and its employees disseminating information in an uncontrolled medium. So I’m hesitant to post anything here which may infer bad press. The idea here is for it to be a friendly reminder of ‘who’ owns you.

I’m fine with the training and the recommitment to ethics. I’m all for corporate morality and helping HR check off a box in an effort to successfully avoid litigation from some executive’s inescapable fall from grace. But what I’m not fine with is the hypocrisy of an enterprise which routinely reminds its employees of ‘doing the right thing and you will be recognized.’ Gone are the days where people did things for the greater company good. Instead, it’s the ‘me-first’ attitude. Granted, I’m seeing this from my knot-hole and such a broad generalization of culture is not necessarily true.

My general state of malaise comes from this over-arching re-organization happening in the workplace. It’s the corporate version of musical chairs. With corporate downsizing only barely in the rear view mirror, we’re now reorganizing with limited or no discussion of organizational strategy and goals to measure this new performance by. What do we hope to achieve with this? No answers. But we’re hiring like crazy and people are changing jobs at a frequency inversely proportional to Son #1 changing his chonies.

Before all of this transpired, I had grown increasingly uneasy with my job. I was under utilized, I wasn’t intellectually challenged, and my talents and experience were being swept under the proverbial rug. That being said, I took this position years ago to be an agent of change for the perception of the businessman (a tattooed freeride mountain biker CAN sell airplanes). While my position isn’t intellectually challenging, it’s hugely stressful and I’ve proven my abilities through my hard work, persistence, and work ethic that I can accomplish an inordinate amount of work with a limited amount of resource. I’m effective and play well in the corporate sandbox with others. However, despite all of that, my skills and talents routinely are lost in the position. It’s widely known that I want to try new intellectual challenges around the organization but apparently hard work and effectiveness are not wanted.

This has left me with little choice but to consider moving on. The opportunities here are much more visible but are few and far between and heavily anchored in politics. Unfortunately for me, I don’t subscribe this level of bureaucracy. I’ve found over the last few months that hard work, persistence, leadership, and customer satisfaction are only a small part of the bureaucracy pie being served. The other annoying piece is that of self-promotion. I’m finding that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The loudest and most gratuitously self promoting individuals earn the advancements. In my current position, I’m fighting perception of it being non-technical. Combine that with the lack of volume projecting how cool I am, all the sweet things I can do, and my kick ass designer suits, and I’ve been lost in the shuffle.


So as the cliché goes, if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them. Let’s not say I’m ‘falling in line’ with these blatant self promoters. What I’m doing is taking a proactive approach to a business condition which I can’t control. With a little control over the messaging about me, I’m able to shift perception. Truly, this is entirely out of my hands yet I can at least work towards a convincing level of commitment to my background and experience. Interestingly enough, I’m starting to see some positive results. Nothing has stuck yet and there are no new sure-things. But at least the message about my abilities is now being heard and being positively responded to.

Now back to your regularly scheduled posts with positivity. Ha.

We try to expose Son #1 to new experiences in an effort to assist the concept of free will. So a few months back after soccer concluded, we asked him,” Do you want to play T-Ball?” His answer; “Are my friends playing?” Let me paraphrase the decision here because that conversation went from long to longer, it’s enough to say that we registered him for T-Ball.


I’d say we’re almost to the midpoint of the season and there are several differences I’ve noted in comparison to soccer. The most obvious; it’s not the same sport. I’m sure this comes as no surprise. But where I’m going with this is more on a philosophical level. I’ve never played either sport ‘formally’ but every boy kicks a ball or swings a bat at some point in life. The major difference is the level of intimacy among the kids, the game, and the even the parents. The lack of ‘energy’ has been a let down at times.



Basically, T-Ball has sucked so far. That might be a little harsh but the parents don’t mix, the kids don’t pay attention, and there is a lot of standing around. I should have coached my own team even though I don’t know the first thing about baseball. Oh wait, yeah I do. You need tobacco. The one thing I do know is how to inspire the kids, get them keyed up, and excited to play. With a little luck just like soccer, I can get them to play their positions and have fun. Because I’m lazy, I chose against coaching my own team or even volunteering on my son’s current team.

Okay, T-Ball hasn’t totally sucked the ENTIRE time. My earlier statement was overdramatic. It’s been pretty fun watch Son #1 swing the bat. He has experience playing T-Ball in his grandparent’s backyard so hitting in practice and the game was nothing new. We don’t watch baseball so surprisingly; he knew how to run the bases with out much coaching. Overall, I’d say that it’s been fun to watch him get after it. He’s had a hit that beamed off of the pitcher’s head. He’s had some good base running. He’s even drawn some great dirt portraits with his foot while in the outfield.



But I think my displeasure is isolated to one area; leadership. I like the two coaches; an old dude and his son-in-law. I think they have a firm grip on the fundamentals of the game and even have a well-oiled practice plan. Where I think they suck is in regard to discipline. Five year old kids are the devil spawn of a gold fish and a road runner. Their memory is shorter than a Tattoo from the ‘Fantasy Island’ and they have more energy than the lightning-struck clock tower in ‘Back to the Future.’ There’s a lot of running, climbing, and screeching. I feel like they could establish a little bit more order and authority with a little louder voice and some ass kicking. We played a team that had a giant as a coach and he was all over the kids in a semi-polite ‘don’t-play-in-the-dirt-or-I-will-beat-you’ sort of way. But seriously, he was a tall dude AND the kids listened. So I’m thinking we need a little of that harshness. Our coach is a nice guy but he’s a grandfather. And by definition, you are supposed to be easygoing. As an example, he emailed all of us parents and was concerned about the amount of ‘horseplay’ in the dugout from kids who weren’t in the game. He went on to request that a parent be stationed in the dugout each inning to regulate. I’m thinking to myself that if he dropped the hammer on these kids, they might sit still a little more and this wouldn’t be needed. Now they’re five year olds and you can’t really control that. But I think you can moderate the goldfish-roadrunner behavior.


And then….we had a breakthrough. The negativity in my feelings has been softened a bit since our last game. I call it a breakthrough because all of the parents were cheering. I can only surmise that we all felt the same way (maybe a mutual disdain for boring T-Ball). All of the kids played hard and it was a blast watching them make plays and have fun. I sat behind the backstop in what I call the best seat in the house. Kids were hitting the ball hard and running fast while on offense. On defense, the coach was calling in to the players to watch for the ball and where to throw it next. Kids were nodding in confidence after the instruction. Now, there was still a ton of screwing off in the dugout and outfield. I can’t expect a miracle over night. But I think I can speak for all of the parents there that this was the best time we collectively had at a T-Ball game.



So now that I’ve flamed the coaching and the game here, I feel better. And now that we have had a solid game under our belt where even the parents/fans participated, I like T-Ball and feel great going in to the remaining practices and games. I still might coach so I can yell, I mean ‘instruct’ kids in how to play and respect the game.

When you lose someone in your life and they pass on, you find yourself wondering why and searching for answers to large philosophical questions. The answers never come. So then you shift your context. You try to look for signs. You want to know two things: Are they doing better now and are they still out there watching over you?

In everything, you look for a sign that they’re still out there. You look high and low and over-analyze every little bit of wind, sound, our leaf falling. You look so hard and become so focused on wanting to connect with the loved one you get tunnel vision and miss the obvious. The human eye has almost 180 degrees of a forward facing field of vision. However, this narrows when you focus your eyes on an item. That field of vision is reduced over 75% and becomes approximately 40 degrees. So you can see that it’s fairly easy to miss things happening around you when you are focused on something.

This definition of sight is a perfect analogy which correlates to the search for signs after the loss of a loved one. I’ve spent the last 6 years in search of the answers and signs that will remove the veil of secrecy covering the face of the universe and its plan. And every time I start to excavate the unknown, I get so wrapped up in the begging for answers that I lose sight of the overall context. Others like my wife were saying that they saw a blue Subaru or a Monarch butterfly or heard a sound, or had a vision. Nothing for me. How could he be communicating with them and not with me?

After getting it together and trying to comprehend the complexity of the fabric of existence, I came to the conclusion that these are the signs I was looking for. He was just acting through a channel I was always tuned in to; my wife. Now, it’s easier for me to recognize the signs out there with the acceptance of the above. Now I see the blue Subarus and the butterflies. Now I know he's around. More specifically, he's with our kids.


The other day, while being ousted from our house, we were on our way to my parent’s for refuge. Somewhere midway through the trip on the valley freeway, Son #2 began to laugh and screech uncontrollably in a fit of happiness and joy like we've never heard. My wife and I glanced toward each other and chuckled a bit not yet considering the levity of the situation. It was easy to brush it off as Son #1 acting like a circus freak and entertaining his younger brother. So I glance back over my right shoulder in to the row behind me. I see Son #1 fighting to stay awake. As a side note, Son #1 has never been able to stay awake in an automobile during travel. He's like a travel narcoleptic.

Back to the ride. Son #1 had nothing to do with the laughter. Then my wife and I start to realize there was something bigger. It was a visit by my brother. He was entertaining Son #2 in some sort of way we will never be able to comprehend in our fleshy existence. He enamored Son #2 in is own unique way to keep him entertained on our drive down the highway. Whatever he did, Son #2 has never sounded more happy and joyous.

I’ve worried that Son #1 and Son #2 will never know my brother, their uncle, like I knew him. But I’ve come to realize that’s not necessarily a bad thing. They’ll know him through my stories, heartache, joy and reflection. But more importantly, they’ll know him in a much more intimate spiritual way than I’ll ever know. For that, I’m grateful. That’s wisdom, love, and comfort I will never be able to provide in my parenting. And while that may make me sound like I have shortcomings, that’s not the case. It’s more a matter of knowing that there is something more out there that a lost loved one on the other side can provide. He’s being the uncle that I never imagined he would be.


So now I know, when Son #2 goes to bed, fails to fall asleep, and is mumbling incomprehensible words to himself in his room for hours on end, he’s really talking to someone who's there that I’ll never see. Maybe he’s explaining that he isn’t going to eat his dinner or how he’s going to take his brother’s toys. Who knows? But I do know that the signs are out there for us to read. There are the slaps to the back of the head, there are the blue Subarus, there are the Monarch butterflies, and there are relationships with lost loved ones which you and I will never understand. We’re too focused on what we lost to know what we’ve gained. Better yet, what our children have gained. Heavenly playmates and guides to lead them down the dimly lit path of life. I know they’re not alone.