"I arrived at the station...breathless and steaming from the uphill exertion that is my life."

-Bill Bryson

Bryson is one of my favorite authors, and I can relate to that sentiment. Life often seems like a series of uphill sprints, subsumed in an larger uphill marathon. I can't figure out why. Thankfully, though, today is Friday, and for most, the weekend brings a headwind to carry us through this lame, tortured metaphor I'm using.

I'm convinced that life's burdens feel heavier when there's no pleasure to offset them. So do something fun this weekend.

Your soul will thank you come Monday.

Top 10 Signs You're Getting Old (from someone who has experienced most of them)

10. Not only are your muscles sore after a workout, so are your tendons, joints, bones and skin.

9. You wake up in the morning, feel terrible, and think "man, I shouldn't have had so much to drink last night." Then you remember that you haven't actually had anything to drink in ages.

8. Your excitement for upcoming holidays directly relates to the quality of food expected to be served.

7. You avoid any activity that won't get you home by 9. On a Saturday night.

6.4 You have more entertaining stories from a single week of college than you do from the last several years of your life.

6. A crazy weekend consists of running more than 3 errands and staying up past the "Weekend Update" portion of Saturday Night Live.

5. You not only DVR more than one daytime television program, you refuse to leave your house upon returning home from work until you've watched them all.

4. A stranger on the street who you would have otherwise thought was roughly your own age refers to you as "Sir" or "M'aam."

3. You not only have a morning routine, you find the worst part of traveling to be missing out on it.

2. The cashiers at your local coffee shop, Walgreens and Piccadilly already know your order when they see you in line.

1.2 Your spare money goes to home decor rather than a night out on the town.

1.1 You've complained more than once this week that neither tv, movies nor music are as good as they used to be.

1 You complained about this more than once because you didn't remember having complained the first time.

Why Both Parties Should Hate the New AZ Immigration Law

I don't understand the controversy over illegal aliens. If aliens have the audacity and technological capacity to travel here from several galaxies away, it doesn't seem like too much trouble to ask them to get a green card first.

But my central point is about the new immigration law in Arizona, which I'm told, is equally applicable to both those in the state from outer space and those from Mexico. The bill might also include those New Mexico as well, just to be safe. I haven't been able to verify.

In case you haven't heard, the new Arizona law allows police to stop and question people in public places if the officer, by looking at them, believes there is probable cause they (the individuals) are here illegally.

How can one tell if someone else is an illegal alien? It's easy! Generally, aliens are green with large oblong heads and bug eyes. They travel in spaceships. They float around with echoing voices, holding anal probing sticks, looking for human subjects. As often as not, the license plate on their spaceship reads "Mars." They just don't blend in well with human society. More importantly, they very often don't bother to carry the proper immigration paperwork! So Arizona is cracking down. Now, the next time Martians want to abduct a human for their research, I suspect they will be doing it somewhere other than Arizona. Even nearby Roswell or Area 51 might be too close for comfort.

I have no concerns with this law as it relates to those traveling intergalactically, or even those visitors from elsewhere in our solar system. But, it's more than a little bit trickier to discern a human's immigration status by looking at them. And that's exactly the problem with this law. It targets the innocent along with the guilty. It means that if you look vaguely Latino and happen to be dressed poorly in public, you might be subject to police interrogation. If you fit that description and happen to get stopped on a day you forget your wallet (which for me, happens roughly every 12 seconds), I can only imagine what happens next. It's probably about as pleasant as that probing.

Someone smarter than me once said that the Democratic party stands for equality and the Republican party stands for liberty. Both are worthy pursuits, even though these goals sometimes conflict. But this is not one of those times. Most everyone, other than maybe Pat Buchanan, should hate this bill.

The party of equality has worries about racial profiling. The party of liberty-- freedom from government interference in one's daily life--has cause for even greater concern. After all, what's a greater interference than the government having the power to force you to prove to its satisfaction, at any given moment, that you should't be deported? (I guess Martian-induced anal probing would qualify as a bigger interference. But that joke is getting old.) The limited government idea endorsed by conservatives is a concept fundamentally at odds with giving the government the power to stop people based on how they look and make them prove they shouldn't be shipped to Mexico.

Many people get annoyed by police road blocks that stop every car and ask you to show your driver's license. Imagine being subjected to the same every day of your life, not only in the car, but in the park, at restaurants, or shopping in the mall. Even if it (the law) only forces certain people to carry around additional paperwork and answer questions that others don't have to, that's a government-imposed burden that should draw the ire of both equalitarians and freedom-lovers everywhere. The great majority of life's pursuits are less enjoyable after the interruption of a police interrogation.

I was born in Alabama but have a dark complexion and slight Native American ancestry that sometimes gets me mistaken for as a Latino, and most every other race. There are days (Monday through Wednesday. Of the following week.) when I can't find my wallet and just go to work without it, figuring the risk of a getting a ticket is better than not getting to whatever it is I have going on that day. If the risk of being pulled over were arrest for the purpose of determining my potential deportation, I might just call in sick. Or call in ethnic.

Unless I can catch a ride on a spaceship, re-routed from Arizona.

Life as a Sitcom

When I was a kid, I was at the fair one time when a carnival worker stuck at his booth gave me $10 and asked me to buy him a burger and a coke. I took the money and immediately thought of how funny the scene would be if took a few steps away and then started running, money in hand, thus enacting a small measure of revenge for children everywhere who had been falsely led to believe how easy it would be to perform whatever impossible trick required to win the giant stuffed panda on the other side of the counter. I was so intoxicated with the idea, that to the surprise of the carnival worker and the delight of the delinquency-tending friend I had accompanied to the fair, I started running. Mainly because I thought an imaginary audience would find it hilarious, if they were watching. I even started thinking of imaginary newspaper headlines to capture the scene: "Streetwise Kid Turns Tables on Carnival Worker, Avenges Plight of Gullible Children Everywhere."

But I didn't actually want the guy's money. So despite much protestation from my the delinquency-tending friend, once I got out of view I did stop running, walk to a concession stand, and buy the poor worker some food. The look on his face when I returned to view slowly turned from rage to grudging gratitude as he discerned that I had in fact fulfilled his request, albeit with some unnecessary dramatic flair. I'm sure it would have been quite entertaining, had anyone else been watching.

Why do I bring this up? I think we get so used to seeing TV episodes where conflicts arise and find tidily resolve themselves within half an hour that we expect our lives to work the same way. Sometimes we needlessly create our own mini-dramas just so we'll have something to show our imaginary audiences to get them to tune in next week. Sometimes we create our own easy-to-sovle problems just to convince ourselves that our real ones will dissipate in similar fashion, in the next episode. We convince ourselves that we are the main character, so the Writer will magically resolve everything for us by the end of Thursday night. When we do face real problems, we expect them, at worst, to be continued only until next week. When they inevitably don't, we feel disappointed with loved ones, angry at God, and bitter about life, when the only thing to blame was our own faulty expectations. In real life, houses don't sell, jobs come and go, disagreements arise, and others--important people who you can't just write out of the script--have unrealistic expectations of you. Life's problems are rarely solved before the next episode begins.

But everyone wants to live in a sitcom; no one wants to live in a novel.

Things that bother me

When the local news interrupts what you're watching to tell you it's raining, or that it might rain in an hour, in some distant town you've never heard of;

Especially when every other local news station in town is doing the same thing on every other channel;

Anyone making enough noise that someone else not living in the same house can hear them before 9 in the morning or 10 at night;

People who keep repeating themselves;

Bosses who never fail to notice your failures but never seem to notice your success;

People who keep repeating themselves;

Non-functional vending machines;

People who refuse to apply logic to their religious beliefs. Or lack thereof;

Blacked-out sporting events;

"Voluntary" office drives to donate to something or another;


The argument that the Bible doesn't apply to government policy regarding economic issues, when being made by the same people who demand its application to social ones. Conversely, the people who boast of their tolerance toward varying religious beliefs but hate yours;

Including the word "American" to describe someone's racial heritage, as if an "African-American" or "Asian-American" would somehow suddenly be of a different race if they moved to Spain;

People who tell you the same thing over and over but think it's ok because they use slightly different words each time;

People who keep repeating themselves;

People who consistently drive below the speed limit;

Especially in the fast lane;

White socks with black shoes;

Black socks with white shoes;

Churches that label themselves as the "First" of their particular denomination, ignoring what Jesus said about status-seeking self-promotion;

Most Duke basketball fans, NY Yankees baseball fans and Notre Dame football fans, for the same reason;

Mornings when my alarm clock chooses not to sound, for no apparent reason;

Telephone salespeople who won't take no for an answer;

Telephone salespeople who won't take no for an answer;

People who keep repeating themselves;

Facebook friends who share too much personal information or devote every single post to their occupation or hobby, as though you signed up as a "fan" of the person's pursuit rather than a friend of the individual;

The lack of a legal holiday in March, April, June and August;

Having to change my clocks by an hour twice a year, as part of some misguided societal attempt to travel through time each spring and return each fall;

The "comment" section of just about any news story;

Judging a book by its cover;

Unless the cover tells you what the book is going to be about, and it doesn't look very good;

Office meetings;

The prevent defense;

Businesses that close inexplicably early;

Being able to hear someone else's cell phone conversation;

Especially if he is in the bathroom stall next to me;

And he keeps repeating himself.

Sunday Morning

Sleeping in.

Coffee.

Windows open, sun pouring in.

Catching up on the internet surfing and DVR recordings I didn't get to last week.

Coffee.

Purring cat.

Something mindlessly entertaining on tv in the background, just to be comforting.

Baseball in an hour, looking forward to it.

Thoughts of pleasant memories from the prior two days of weekend.

Refusing to turn on the cell phone, pay bills or do anything productive until noon. At least.

Coffee.

Brunch.

Good book, if I get to it.

Nice, long, hot shower, when I find the energy.

Meet the Press.

Espn.com

Rest.

More coffee.

These are the reasons I'm glad my church has started evening services. Sunday morning is my favorite time of the week.

I never knew what I was missing.

Time to make some coffee.

My Morning in Biscuit Hell

So, my office was doing one of those socially awkward brunches this morning where everyone is supposed to sign up to bring something, and then struggle to find something to talk about while everyone sits and eats. I signed up to bring biscuits last week because no one else had, I have a good recipe, and it seemed fairly easy. But we had people over last night and there wasn't really a chance to cook, so I decided to just to hit the Popeye's chicken near my office parking lot on the way in. Popeye's biscuits are better than mine anyway. People would like Popeye's.

But when I got there at about 8:15, I discovered that Popeye's didn't open until 9. The brunch didn't start until 9:30, but we were supposed to be at work and have everything in the room by 9, so that the organizers could put it all together. I wouldn't have time to wait.

There are several other fast food options in that area, but none of them were open other that the rather downscale Church's Chicken. I envisioned disapproving looks for bringing such decidely average biscuits to a social occaions (I live in the South, after all) and decided I'd be better of driving 2 miles North to the next conglomeration of fast food stops to look for something better.

Of course, there was road construciton, and it took me 15 minutes to drive those 2 miles. I finally made it to a McDonald's, but they only sell biscuits individually at .99 a piece, which meant 12 of them would have cost $14 after tax, which was way too much to spend on this kind of thing. So, since it was already after 8:30, I decided there wasn't time to do anything other than just go back to Church's. I got back there at 8:45, 15 minutes before I was due in the office, and just enough time to buy my biscuits, park and reach my office front door at 9. But as I walked to the front door, I noticed a sign stating that their credit card machine was down. I never carry cash, so this was a significant problem.

After a brief moment of panic, I saw the Regions bank across the street and got out 20 bucks. Of course, the run down pick-up truck in front of me sat at the ATM for a good 10 minutes because apparently the concept of inserting a card, entering a PIN and selecting an appropriate amount of money was too complicated. At 8:55, I finally got $20 dollars and went back to Church's, where the cashier was so confused by the idea that I wanted a large order consisting entirely of biscuits that she had to call a manager to complete the transaction (I asked for 10, but apparently you can only by them individually or in packs of 6. The cashier didn't tell me this, or I would have just ordered 12.) Anyway, at 8:58, the manager sold me two six packs for $5.88, which at least justified the decision to forgo McDonald's. I hurriedly parked my car, almost hitting a pedestrian in the process, and rushed to the office, biscuits in tow, making it in by 9:15, and slid my inferior biscuits on the middle of the already-formed buffet.

What did the buffett consist of? A few assorted casseroles and about 6 varieties of homemade biscuits. Next time I'm just bringing napkins.

If Life Came with 25 Instructions

I wish life came with an instruction manual. We learn at an early age not to touch a hot stove or poke an angry bear, but there's a whole bunch of other really important things that we end up having to learn the hard way, often a little too late. For instance, I wish someone had told me:

1. That most people don't really like their job, but they will treat you better if you are not one of the reasons why;

2. That it would be really difficult to stay close with your close friends once you no longer lived in the same town, and that it would be much harder, once you worked full time, to make new friends to replace them;

3. That whichever lane you pick at the grocery store or a traffic jam is going to be the slowest moving, but you would have fared no better had you picked a different one;

4. That your friends and family might have political views different than yours, but it isn't your duty to change their minds;

5. That you cause a lot more damage than you solve by arguing over email;

6. That no one will ever listen to you, about anything, unless they think you care what they have to say as well;

7. That no matter how much you save, you will almost always regret the experience of shopping at Walmart;

8. That you shouldn't write off a potential occupation because it seems irresponsible; you should do what sounds fun. But you should make sure it actually is before you commit to it;

9. That most of the voices in your ear will give you advice based on how they want your life to turn out, not based on what's actually best for you;

10. That there are plenty of items for which you won't miss a thing if you save money and buy the generic version. But always splurge on coffee, pop tarts and toilet paper;

11. That other than your dog, every single person in your life will disappoint you at some point. But you have to forgive them, because you can only have so many dogs before your house smells like poop all the time;

12. That once you get married, you'll have to work really hard to preserve for yourself a life outside of your spouse. But you won't be very interesting to either of you, or anyone else, if you don't;

13. That most everyone works too hard and enjoys too little;

14. That if you've committed yourself to going somewhere but now find that you don't feel like going, you should go anyway, because you'll probably enjoy it once you get there.  And you lose a lot of credibility if people think you are flake;

15. That if you are rude to someone in traffic, you will be embarrassed when they inevitably park next to you at church;

16. That if you get all your news from either Fox or MSNBC then you are looking for affirmation rather than information;

17. That most everything seems easier to do tomorrow instead of today, but tomorrow you are likely to feel the same way;

18. That unhappiness is, barring some chemical imbalance, your soul's way of asking you to make some changes in your life, and your soul will continue knocking until you listen to it;

19. That most of the problems that consume your life today probably won't be an issue in a couple of years, and whatever you are going through, someone else before you has gone through it also;

20. That your human nature will seek out a comfortable existence and material pleasures, but if you don't find a greater purpose, your life will feel meaningless;

21. That you should never buy anything that you'll still be paying for long after you are no longer excited about it;

22. That you probably won't remember a single one of these thoughts in an hour, but the lyrics to that song you hate will be stuck in your head for all eternity;

23. That someone you don't immediately "click" with still might become one of your closest friends;

24. That if you don't at least occasionally change your mind about something, then you probably aren't doing enough thinking; and

25. That if you didn't like this post the first time you read it, you should refer back to #24 .

Things Are Jumping

You can never predict in what situations you might find yourself.

Two years ago, my neighbor put an inflatable, above-ground pool in her back yard for her daughter. I wasn't a big fan of it (the pool, that is), but there wasn't much I could do. They let the pool go when summer ended. It slowly turned into a brownish pool of sludge that was disgusting to look at and an embarrasment when friends came over, but, still, as life problems go, not the worst in the world. Until the frogs came.

With no warning, on a random April day last year a large family of small frogs, all at once, took up residence in the pool. One of life's great mysteries is how a level of volume roughly matching that of air plane passing twenty feet overhead can come out of a critter roughly the size of half your thumb. But, as I painfully learned, it's a fact. We had a whole family of them living 20 feet from our bedroom, tantalizing close to our property line but just outside it. I tried to sleep through the noise, but it was like tyring to sleep through a passing train while laying on the tracks. I just can't decribe how loud the croaking was. If you record yourself screaming at the top of your lungs and play it at full volume while you and your nine closest friends scream your loudest alongside it, you can get a vague idea of the sound of one of these frogs. But we had 20. Surely our neighbor heard it too, I thought, and would someone get rid of them. But either she had the world's best set of earplugs or somehow found endearing the idea of her own varmit-infested backyard wasteland, because she never did anything about it.

I wasn't sure what to do. It was impossible to sleep at night (my earplugs weren't helping). I thought about asking my neighbor to clean the pool, but we had gotten in argument once because she was sitting on her porch at midnight talking loudly and I had asked her to keep it down. She told me she could do whatever she wanted on her property, so I anticipated that in her mind that included the right to have her own private amphibian zoo. I called city code enforcement, who referred me to the health department, who referred me to some other city department that didn't return my calls. I called the police department to report a noise complaint, and the officer, laughing hysterically, promised to come out, just as soon as he composed himself. I'm still waiting.

Anyway, Google returns surprisingly few search results for the phrase "frog poison." I found about 5 Ask Jeeves-type sites were others asked similar questions, but the answers were always to the effect of "you should enjoy the frogs, they keep pests away." But I'm reasaonably sure that whatever pests the frogs might be keeping away wouldn't be keeping me up at night. I would much rather these unnamed pests keep the frogs away.

Of course, I didn't actually want to kill the frogs, I just wanted them to go away. I though pouring salt in the pool might force them to find some other freshwater source. This succeeded in causing the frogs to leave for a couple of days, but they would just return, slightly pissed off and even louder, when the salt evaporated. And it took a whole lot of salt to do the trick, but this is how I spent most of last summer. I was spending an exhorbitant amount of money on salt, and I lived in constant fear of having to explain myself if my neighbor opened her back door as I stood in her yard with a pitcher of salt, but, hey, at least I was sleeping.

The frogs slowly built up a resistence to the salt. I knew I was going to have to come up with another plan when I poured a container of salt in the frogs' pool, only to see a group of frogs pouring sugar on my porch. I was not going to win the battle of baking supplies. I needed another method of getting rid of the frogs.

I read that the chemicals in Round-Up would do the trick, but I can definitely say that's a myth. I poured bleach in the pool. Nothing. I tried soap. Nope. As I sat sleepless with the TV turned at full volume at 4 a.m. one morning, it occurred to me to go out with barbecue thongs and catch them manually. There were a whole lot of frogs out there, but I proved surprisingly adept at the art of swimming pool frog catching with tongs (if I'm ever to win an Olympic medal, this will be the event), so that the noise steadily declined. Very few people come to my cook-outs once I started sharing this story, but this was a trade-off I could live with. In fact, I had mostly managed to erradicate the problem by the time the frogs went wherever they go for the winter.

They came back last week, and took my sleep with them. After about 8 calls, and just as many sleepless nights, I finally reached someone with the city who agreed to come out and tell my neighbor to do something about the pool. This morning, I watched with glee as my neighbor deflated it and hauled it away. It was a moment, from a pure joy standpoing, stood second only to my wedding day. Until I remembered that the frogs certainly would have jumped out of the pool by the time it was hauled away, and will now blame me for the loss of their habitat and spend the rest of their lives plotting their revenge. Right outside my bedroom window.

"The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don't want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vaccum cleaner, we are living stupid stories."

-Donald Miller

This blog is the start of my attempt, 32 years too late, to live a more meaningful story. I'll be posting thoughts on spirituality, life, literature, the National League Central, and most everything else, in the hope that God has taught me something thus far that someone, somewhere, might somehow find beneficial, or at least entertaining. I'm hoping to post at least 5 times a week, but I also promise to write only when I have something to say, so we'll just have to see. I'm not really sure what direction this will go, but it strikes me that the same is true of most everything in life that's worthwhile. Regardles, I'm looking forward to the ride. I hope you'll come along...