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five quick thoughts on the train

 

1)

The worst is to age without cause or live without reason
The worst is to be complacent with mediocrity,
or to accept the ordinary.
And above all,
the worst is to age late in life without feeling the glory of reflection . . .

Even the rough experiences add season to life,
and anything without season
is bland.

One day, if I pull off my trick,
I will wake up and be older.
And if my memory is clear. I will look back and remember
the times I broke night and watched the sun come up
over New York City.
I will recall what the full moon looks like
over the Atlantic Ocean,
and I will sigh with satisfaction because I lived
instead of wondered.
Continue reading →

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Something from The Daddy Diaries

“OUCHIE!”

That’s what my little girl says when she hurts herself. Over the years there have been different levels of “OUCHIES!”
Same as our country’s defense has different DEFCON levels; five being peaceful and one being an all out war, “OUCHIES,” come with their own levels of severity. In regards to parenting and childhood, DEFCON five is peaceful and one is an all out panic with frantic screams for 911.

Father’s and mothers have different responses to each DEFCON levels. Often, fathers confuse Continue reading →

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My Sunday’s thought on God

When I was a young boy, I used to ask God to make deals with me,
but the deals never worked out.
I used to talk to Him about this and I would ask God why.
But he never answered me.
When I asked an adult about this I was told, “God doesn’t work like that.”
Then I asked, “Then how does He work?”
The adult smiled, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

That answer was not helpful.

For a long time I was the anti-god. I was against all religions, especially Continue reading →

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making it out alive

I am standing at the verge of a change; only, I am unsure which direction it will come from or when this change will happen. I cannot put my finger on whether the change will be good or bad. I can just feel it coming . . . and closing in slowly. I tend to overthink myself when this happens.
I feel edgy, but writing helps.

I sometimes sit with my friend Clyde for lunch.  We talk about the old days when Continue reading →

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Regret

I stared through the bars and looked up at the ceiling in the corridor.
“You should have never turned around,” I thought to myself.
“You should have left when you had the chance…”

As the door closed after my escorted walk down a foul smelling hallway, with frosted windows at the ceiling height to the wall to my left, and caged cells to my right, I heard the loud banging of hardened steel crashing into steel.
Then I heard the sound of the guard’s footsteps as he walked away.
I could hear the complaints of an old drunk, unsure of why he was locked in a holding cell, and occasionally shouting, “And where the hell are my Goddamned shoes?”
The echo from the drunk’s vomiting sound, retching, as if his insides were spewing from his mouth, painfully rang down the line of caged men. And each time the drunk would heave, someone in one of the other cells would scream, “Shut up, old man! I’m trying to sleep.”

Everything about this place was awful; the smell was Continue reading →

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friends and bagels

The problem with life being busy is time escapes me and I miss out on the things I enjoy most.
With my schedule, today becomes tomorrow and then days become weeks, and weeks turn into months. Next, the year has gone and half of my plans were forgotten, the rest were canceled because of work, and I missed the chance to see those I love most or enjoy my weekends.
As friends we say, “We’ll keep in touch,” and we try to. We really do. But the world gets in the way. Work becomes hectic and life has its minor casualties. It becomes so that months peel off the calendar, and I almost forget the last time I spoke to my closest friends. Continue reading →

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remembering where I came from

It amazes me how one could get away from their madness and then return as if they never left.
This is what happens in a relapse.
As a recovering addict and alcoholic, I am aware of one truth above all else and that is I cannot and will not ever test the waters. And by testing the waters, I mean entertain the ideas of, “Maybe I can have just one,” or think that my years away from active addiction means I could probably, “Handle it.”

I have seen people go backwards and fall worse than Continue reading →

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Size Does Matter

Time and size change as they relate to age . . .
In the beginning or early stages of life, everything seems so big and incredible. As a grown man, I stand two inches above my Father’s height, but as a boy, The Old Man was a giant. His hands were large and capable but mine were small and unblemished. They were untrained and untested. If asked, I believed The Old Man was capable of anything. I believed his hands were strong enough to hold the world together. And I thought this because The Old Man held my family’s world together.

In relation to time and size, my early classrooms looked tremendous. Back then, the school year seemed to last forever and the summers were nothing more than a blink of time. But now, months fly off the calendar and years shed regardless to my opinion of the season.
On the playground, the monkey bars, swings, and the slides were all so tall to me. Yet, as a grown man, I have visited some of my old playgrounds.
Some of them look the same, only now, the ladder to the Continue reading →

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rain

Out of nowhere, the sky turned from sunshine into gray. Then suddenly, the rain came down in sporadic droplets until the sky opened up like a bucket of water pouring over our heads.
I watched the storm through a window beneath the second floor roof. The people scattered on Lexington Avenue, and within minutes, the sidewalks were empty of all its pedestrians.

I looked down from the window and watched the taxi cabs speed through the flooded streets with their windshield wipers swinging from left to right.
Three longhaired girls hid from the downpour inside the front vestibule of an office building across the street. Beside them, the coffee shop seemed crowded and the tables by the window were filled with people watching the storm and sipping over-priced coffee from an over-sized white mug. Continue reading →