I’ve been thinking.  Some may think that’s dangerous but I’ve been thinking.  Are we at a new normal?  Shootings.  Terrorism domestically and abroad.  Murder-suicides.  Xenophobia.  Isolationism.  Geopolitical and religious unrest leading to violence.  Racial tensions.  Donald Trump.  Do I need to go on?

Today I don’t want to write about sadness.  But unfortunately, I need to touch on it to take this narrative where I want it to go.  I am saddened by the perceived new normal.

I’ve been thinking that I’m writing too much negativity; Writing about too much sadness.  Yes. I review music now and then but it seems as if I’ve lost my inspiration.  Lost my humor.  Lost my enthusiasm.  But this isn’t a woe-is-me piece.  I’ve been thinking about keeping perspective in life.  I’ve been thinking about being a parent in this ever changing reality.  A schizophrenic reality.  How do I be a parent, how do I be a dad in this reality, this new normal?

I’ve been thinking.  And with the help of an inspirational acquaintance, I’ve come to a conclusion:

It’s not going to be easy.  But it’s going to awesome.

My normal doesn’t have to be negative.  It can be laced with excitement and creativity and learning.  And I can pass those experiences on to them.  Or…..they can pass them on to me.

An example of this is their imagination.  I’m tough on my family at times.  They spend way too much time on screens and social networks.  But one night I was reminded that imagination is alive and well in my two boys.  Three words: Liquid motion toys.  You know those desk/office tchotchke items that have water and colored oil in them.  You watch the oil drip through in some sort of hypnosis while wasting away your day in a cubicle dreading working for the man.  There’s the fancy kind with various shapes, passages, channels, spinning wheels and colors that look like some sort of trinket you could buy duty-free from and in-flight magazine on an international trip.  Then there’s the not so fancy kind that you can find at the dollar store that look like they were slapped together in a Chinese sweatshop.  You know the kind that you wonder if the seals are going to break and the water-oil mixture is going to end up on your carpet.  Those are the kind my kids have.

Both have the same toy which is roughly the size of a smart phone.  And coincidentally, my kids are dying for a phone which will not happen anytime soon.  Enter children’s imagination.  In their desperation to be tethered to a cellular network and behave like a grown up, these kids carry these liquid motion toys around pretending that they’re smart phones.  These two dingbats walk around the house acting like they’re on some super-secret mission critical important phone call with each other.  The funny shit is that you can hear them.  Everywhere.  The ‘range’ of their phones isn’t that good so they need to be in the same room so they can hear each other.  If they’re in different rooms, their volume increases.  So much for privacy and security, eh, Hilary Clinton?

But it gets better.  We were sitting in our living room the other night watching the Vanilla Ice Project and his latest Palm Beach renovation.  I was flanked by the kids.  One was sitting on the easy chair to my left and the other was on the couch to my right.  Apparently, these phones are ‘smart’ devices which they can check their email and update their social network statuses.  Neither of which do these imagineers have in real life.  Oh, and these smart devices have games on them too.  Both kids sat there narrating to each other the level of Minecraft they were on.  Things like, “I just mined diamond ore in the nether” and “Watch out.  There’s a zombie villager in that building” were among the banter back and forth between the two of them.  Eventually, they were playing on the same level and discussing how one would destroy the other’s creations.  It was really no different than back in the day saying “I just rolled and 8 on my 10-side die” and “That’s plus-8 magic points now your orc village is burning in flames.”

I looked at them both and then at the ‘phones.’  Yup.  These are STILL liquid motion toys with colored oil.  Nothing had magically changed.  I’ve been thinking about how lucky I am to have the fake cell phone imaginative experience with my kids.

I’ve been thinking about some of the simpler times we spend together.

With summer here, we spend a lot of time in our backyard drinking, burning things and having fun.  The other night, we were outside on the eve of yet another business trip.  We BBQd some hotdogs to which the boys devoured with a lack of fight which is pretty rare.  After dinner, a PTA mom came over to hang out with my wife.  What this means is wine will be drank; a lot of it.  She has two kids, one of which who is in Grom #2’s class.  Her youngest one requires a little more support.  That night got me thinking about support and perspective.

To get to the point, Grom #1 and I have been playing football in the back yard.  Running plays like post and flag patterns and XY fly routes.  As the game wraps up, my wife mentions that her friend’s little guy is enamored with the game happening around him.  She asked that I sit down and play with him for a bit.  I plopped down in the cool damp grass and ‘threw’ the football to him and he handed back.  Then I threw the ball up in the air a caught it.  As I did, he laughed and pointed higher.  So I threw it higher and higher and he continued to laugh harder and harder.  The smile on his face was immeasurable.

That got me thinking about the small things we can do to bring smiles and laughs to our kids no matter how challenging things are.  Grom #2 has had special resources during his development.  As a parent, things can be difficult and you sometimes ask “Why?”  I learned early on there was no way I could fix things for him.  But I can set an example of perseverance and unconditional love and support.  Together we can make it.  Anywhere.

Everyone has their struggles.  We have our successes and failures, our wins and losses, our strengths and insecurities and our loves and broken hearts.  And eventually, they’ll have all of those too and we need to be there for them all.  Every moment with my kids is an opportunity to teach them something important about life, compassion, determination, and perseverance.  And every moment with them is an opportunity for me to learn how to listen to how they feel and what they’re going through no matter how trivial I may find it.  For them, in that moment, it is everything to share with you.

“And that’s what dads do. They pass the best of themselves to their kids.” - SG

When I look outside and see the darkness of the gray fog and clouds strangling the afternoon sky and watch as the trees stand lonely in the eerie mist, I can’t help but find myself drudging through my decisions and being horribly introspective on my soul searching.

Standing uncomfortably close to this window, I find myself leaning hard against the glass with all of my weight.  What if the window broke and I fell from this floor onto the chilled concrete below?  What would change?  Would I be running just as fast to catch up with something unattainable?  But I catch my self thoughtlessly wandering this path of pain, regret, and confusion.  Recovery is one thing that I’ve never believed in.  There’s a hole, a crater, an emptiness that you learn to avoid when walking, even in the dark.  You memorize your steps as if to avoid stubbing your emotional toe against the foot of a bed.

On this roller coaster, I’ve tried to find peace and solace in the music of the moment.  There was that ‘one’ song that could whisk me away from the otherwise loathsome self-drowning pool of despair.  In its painful beauty and honesty, “Black Gives Way to Blue” by Alice in Chains founds its meat hooks into the weak sinew of my heart.

With great clarity, I find myself listening to the tune nearly a dozen times.  It’s so solemn and speaks of coming to grips with the crater now in life’s path.  I guess that’s more of the personal message that I feel is being directed toward me as if it were sang by a ghost.  I guess that’s one of the most intriguing aspects of music.  We can listen together or apart and interpret or connect differently but yet be inspired to become someone better or stay strong along the path.  As an art medium, it gives so much more universal connectivity to people than other forms of art.  It actively invokes so much more emotion out of people.  Strangely, the feeling of inspiration in sight of a great aesthetic piece is never as moving as its musical equivalent.  I guess that’s the curse of art: To effectively communicate emotion through many senses and staying relevant to all.

Away from the window, I can sit at ease with my head between the earpieces and completely wrapped in the enveloping blanket of sound that is music.  I am carried to a cloud of peace and out of the private hell where the voice of the ghost explains that it’s OK today.  It’s OK.

Alice in Chains is a band that holds a major chapter in my life.  Growing up in the northwest, I was aware of their existence but I suppose their relevance is a matter of perspective.  For me, I always related to the tortured and heart-wrangling lyrics.  I felt not-so-alone when I listened.  But during the bands most notable prominence, I wasn’t interested in hearing the message.  I was busy trying to find my inner suburban anthropometrically challenged gangster wearing my Jay Jacobs baggy pants slung low off of my posterior with a hint of undergarment in plain view.  And now, here I am, surrounded by other individuals carefully carrying out their routine job activities while I stumble through the murkiness of foggy emotions.  It’s the blur of life swirling around me that stops me from getting any focus on composure.  All hallways look the same.  There are no signs to give me direction on this path.  The only clarity is in the music.  This is the way ‘I feel right now.’

I can count on this like a trusted friend.  Not once but other times too.  I remember rediscovering AIC in the late 1999.  Living in Los Angeles changed me at a sub-contextual level.  I was desperate and driven, confused but confident.  In my desperation, like a battered dog, I followed an invitation to spend a weekend with a friend in Las Vegas.  The weekend was met with the ingestion of substantial amounts of chemicals into one’s system.  In the fog of (un)consciousness at some point in the time continuum that weekend, I stumbled into a music store in the Forum near Caesar’s Palace.  Drawn to the music playing?  Maybe?  Following someone?  I don’t know.  For reasons I will never understand, in my disturbed state, I was cognizant enough to hear the music that was playing through the store speakers.  “No Excuses.”  It spoke to me.  To this day I still remember looking up at the monitor playing the video in that store.  The next morning, I gathered myself up off of the hotel room floor, trudged my way back to my car, and drove back to LA in that hot sun down the I-15 freeway. An awakening.  After that, I didn’t look in the mirror of my beach apartment wondering when would be the end.

Today marks another day where I am uncertain how I arrived at this emotional low point.  The journey is slow enough that you don’t notice any of the milestones or warning signs.  All I can surmise that I’m stranded somewhere along the highway in between the exits if identity crisis and disenchantment.

As I‘ve said before, music provides waypoints for your travels through life.  In this instance, it’s Alice in Chains which marks today.  But the music and the voice of the ghost reassuringly reminds me that despite my disenchanted perception, black will give way to blue, pain can turn to hope, and loneliness can turn to acceptance.  And just like a loyal friend, it will be there again for me the next time.  Inspired to lift one’s self up again I wrote the following:

“It’s a choice to be grateful, any moment this can end

My two reasons to believe in something once again

With the sun shining bright, can’t see too many dark seasons

Don’t know what I’m doing here, I’m grateful for my two reasons”

I’ve noticed a pretty significant change in Son #2.  It’s not his height. It’s not his weight.  Hell, it’s not even his social aptitude, or lack thereof.  It’s how much he talks. It. Never. Stops.

I had Mr. Mom time over the last few days.  Not only did that amount to ‘boy time’ as Son #1 categorizes it, but it also warranted me a careful evaluation of the behavior of these children.  The bar was set low; my wife had one request of me.  That’s one ‘formal’ request.  There are always the silent unspoken understandings of not burning the house down, not shooting the neighbor’s chickens with a pellet gun, no statues of the Lady of Guadalupe in the front yard, and no cookies for dinner (is breakfast OK?).  But the ‘formal’ request was to fill out some sort of form with questions about Son #1.

In any event, the form is only context here.  The real story is the questions on the form; Questions on vocabulary, imagination, comprehension and the like. While I struggled answering the questions in this context, I concluded how easy it would be to answer these for Son #2.  The reason for this deductive conclusion was two things.  The first is obvious; Son #2 is pretty imaginative and creative (more on this below).  And second, he wouldn’t shut up so there was absolutely no way I could ignore him while I attempted to answer the form’s questions.

What became painfully clear were his machine gun-like conversation abilities and I wasn’t going to be able to ignore him. He never stopped talking.  While that was a challenge in and of itself, the real hurdle was his use of the word ‘Dad.’  It was all of the time.  At the start of every sentence.  At the end of every sentence.  In the middle of every sentence.  Sometimes two times in a row to get attention.  Sometimes in an elevated tone to make a point.  Sometimes…well, it was a lot.  My ears still hurt while I’m writing this.

I was trying to work from the home office but it was pointless given the verbal assault I was taking.  So I thought to myself, “Self, you should count how many times he says ‘Dad’ in an hour.”  I’m not going to get any work done so let’s have a little mundane fun.  Because his mind and tongue were in perfect harmony with thoughts being directly spat out by his mouth, there was no time to waste.  I jumped up and grabbed a notebook and a pencil to scratch down the collection of raw data.  This was market research at its best. For this to have truly been accurate, I would’ve needed a hand-held clicker to keep up with the frequency of his ‘Dads.’ 

From my crude data collection techniques, I recorded 82 ‘Dads’ in the course of 60 minutes and I think this was a down day. Those of you who are professional statisticians may find my sample size too small.  However, let me challenge you to sit in the same room with Son #2 when he’s telling his stories. It’s like a 50-cailber peppering of words, sounds, hand gestures, and arm waving.  He’s hugely imaginative in his story telling.  I learned everything there is to know about Skylander Giants, being Player 1 in a video game, being Player 2 in a video game, being player 5 in a video game, Bouncer is his favorite Skylander Giant and he’s SOOOOOO happy to have him, Hot Dog the fire Skylander is coming to Earth next week, Bouncer has upgrades that make him shoot lasers out of his eyes and missiles out of his fingers (insert childish laser and missile sound effects here), the Skylander Giant named Swarm is his brother’s, he really wants Lightcore Prism Break because he shoots blue crystals out of his arms, there are two maps for Skylanders and Skylanders Giants, and many more things that I’ll spare you from listing here.

And now, back to the data. I recorded 82 ‘Dads’ in 60 minutes.  Let’s break this down:

Number of ‘Dads’: 82

Time elapsed: 60 minutes

‘Dads’ per minute = 82 / 60 = 1.367 per minute

‘Dads’ per second = 1.367 / 60 = 0.023 per second

Time between ‘Dads’ = 1 / 0.023 = 43.9 seconds

That means every 44 seconds in the course of an hour, Son #2 said the word ‘Dad.’

People like to count ‘Ums’ and ‘Uhs’ during speeches and interviews on TV.  I just chose to collect a little data from a more relative source.  Son #2.  And let me tell you from personal experience, the challenge of recording the word ‘Dad’ was a big one.  Even the sharpest of minds and fleetest of data recording would’ve been challenged to hold serve in verbal court with Son #2.  Maybe it wasn’t the most productive thing to do for an hour but it did stop me from agonizing over some ridiculous work emails request marked ‘Urgent’ that I needed to respond to or the world might end.  Instead, it became a sport of adventure and a distraction from the monotony of professional life.  If nothing else, it was entertaining and laughable.

And most importantly, in the essence of saving our livers, I won’t be making a drinking game out of this.  We won’t swill a beer or take a shot after each ‘Dad.’  That would not be wise. But it would make the conversations more challenging to follow.