It had to be my second day on the job. We passed each other in the hall; her walking with a couple of co-workers and I headed to the cafeteria were I would discover that they were still feeding adults the same grayish patties that had been fed to us since the first grade and had always been best described as ‘hamburger-like’. It was one of the few times in my life where I have actually been brought to utter speechlessness and the only time that wasn’t the result of coming over the top of a remote ridge line and taking in a magnificent landscape or stepping in to the nave of a Gothic cathedral and feeling like God had just welcomed me in for the grand tour. It is her beautiful black curls that I see first. The distance between us closes in, I bring my eyes to hers and there is a slight glimmer of recognition. It was the start of an internal conversation that I would carry on with her to this day. A conversation that at first existed only in my head, migrated to actual inter-locutions for a brief, surreal moment and has now receded in to the deep interiors of my mind. A place reserved for misty mountain lakes, the touch of God and the butcher’s daughter.

I live in one of those cities in Middle America where everyone is separated by a matter of just a few degrees. Mike and I first met in Mrs. Park’s kindergarten class. His house was the first that my mom let me ride to on my bike all by myself as he lived just a few streets over in our tree lined suburban subdivision. In the years to follow Mike, myself and the rest of our crew would run these streets with slingshots tucked under our shirts, Rollerblades strapped to our feet and stolen cans of beer rattling around in our backpacks as we ran through gardens and hurdled fences; narrowly evading the cops and breathing a sigh of relief when we finally slid back beneath the sheets, laughing ourselves to sleep. Michael A. had always been the most grown up of our tight group of three. While my biggest requirement in a college was that they offered a student discount on ski-passes, Mike looked for a solid Business Administration program. While I was back putzing around at community college after a fun-filled year of skiing and backpacking, Mike was taking internships and meeting his future wife. While Mike found a great job with one of the city’s most respected employers, I decided to take an English teacher job in Europe. So it was that I found myself coming back to my hometown; a broke, car-less college grad that could speak French, ski moguls and quote Joyce but was pretty much lacking in any skill that could be effectively parlayed in to health insurance and an apartment of my own. My job search consisted of exactly two interviews. The first was a call center rep for some company that I had never heard of but needed someone that could take calls from their customers in Quebec. The next and final interview was with the HealthCare system that Mike worked for. As I was waiting in the reception area of the HR department I noticed some recruitment advertisements hanging on the walls and flashing on the screens of the computer terminals lining one side of the office. Their employment slogan was something along the lines of ‘Only the Best’ and I immediately knew that I was screwed.

I am sure I was hired partly due to the fact that my aunt's friend personally knew the HR Director and mostly due to the fact that the hiring manager, a woman that I could only describe as grandmotherly, had a photograph of Paris taken from the heights of Montmartre hanging on the wall behind her desk.

“I recognize that picture. You must have taken it from the little look-out point just beneath Sacré-Coeur.”

“I sure did! Don’t you just love Paris?”

In fact I didn’t love Paris but decided it best to reign in my negativity. Two minutes in to the interview and I knew the job was mine. Maybe that year abroad wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

A few weeks after I started, Mike left the company to take a Business Manager position with a group of radiologists and invited me to play golf with the guy that would be taking his old job; a guy that was his neighbor and whom he affectionately referred to as ‘The Baby Gorilla’. Any guy with a nickname like that is alright by me so The Baby Gorilla and I started grabbing lunch together and meeting up for drinks. It was just a month or so after I started when Brian (as the Baby Gorilla was called by his wife) invited me down to his office to meet his co-workers. I followed him through the door and the first person that I was introduced to was the girl with the curly black hair. Speechless. Somehow I managed to spit out my name which is monosyllabic and, even in a non-stressful social encounter, still sounds like something that would be grunted by Chewbacca with a mouth full of caramels. Before she had the chance to say it, I looked at the name plaque on her cubicle. It was a French name.

“Hello Jeanne I'm Bill.” I said, pronouncing it the way she later said her mother did.

“Hello Bill, nice to meet ya. Nobody has ever gotten my name right on the first try. I’m impressed!”

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My friend Michael is one of those people that is always doing something. I am pretty sure he has never sat in front of a television for more than 5 minutes; never woke up on a Sunday morning, fixed a pot of coffee and read the paper until noon; and certainly never slept past 6 AM. He has a pottery wheel in his basement and has made every piece of dishware that fills his cabinets. As Christmas presents he has given not one, but a set of poker tables that he fashioned in the woodworking shop in his garage. He has spun bowels, mortar and pestles and hundreds of other little knick-knacks out of the exotic hardwoods that he collects and frequently gives them away as birthday presents. He makes his own wine, is an expert archer, and probably one of the best young finish carpenters within a 500 mile radius. He survived a near life ending motor cycle crash and not even a year after the screws were removed from his leg, he bought another Harley and rode it to Florida where he married his long time girlfriend.

The other day I was at his house and I saw this little motivational query written in blue marker on the mirror that he looks at every morning as he comes down the steps:

What am I? What do I want to be?

Normally I look at little quotes like this and imagine that any person that needs to have stuff like this around is obviously in need of serious help; far beyond anything a poster of Mt. Everest can provide. But seeing this in the house of one of the most motivated and ambitious people I know has made me believe that even the strongest willed of us can use a little something to keep us focused-- a small reminder that we must be in a constant state of evaluation and reevaluation lest we wake up in 10, 20 or 30 years and wonder where the hell our life went.

What am I? I am a 28 year-old man that still takes his dry cleaning to his parent’s house. I live payday to payday and sometimes even payday to next day. Every woman that I have ever gone after has broken my heart and left me a dribbling mess for months on end. Conversely, I have pushed away every woman that has ever chosen me—most of whom any man would be extremely lucky to end up with. My “apartment” is literally a bedroom with a tiny, en suite kitchen and bath. I store the stuff that I can’t fit in my closet in the trunk of my 1994 Camry that only has three functioning doors (unfortunately none of which are on the driver’s side). People that are smarter and more talented than myself cause me to think that if I open my mouth, I will just come off sounding like a developmentally disabled baboon. There are many other neurotic thoughts that I have on a daily basis but I shall spare you the drama and just say that I actually am a pretty confident person. I am not a genius but I am pretty smart. I am a hard worker and I enjoy too many hobbies (several of which I am fairly good at) to list here. I am not ugly and I have been told that I have a great ass. So what the eff?

What do I want to be? I want to be successful in life. I don’t have to be rich but I do want to give my children every opportunity that my parents gave me. I want to meet someone that has as much love to give as I do, and wants to give that love to me as much as I want to give it to them. I want us to have beautiful, well-adjusted children and I want them to honor us as much as we honored our parents. I want to live amongst great friends. I want to provide shelter, warmth and nourishment for the people in my life that depend on me. I want to be remembered as genuinely good person. And on the day I die I want to be surrounded by my entire family; my grandson holding my hand as I held the hand of my grandmother as the last breath slipped past her lips; filling the room with tears of joy.

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I just got of the phone with my best bud Jon. We usually give each other a ring after work to see what's up and to coordinate a game of golf or one of our various other extracurricular activities that we like to do to kill time. Jon's wife likes to refer to me as his boyfriend, as in: "What are you and your little boyfriend going to do tonight? Stroke each others clubs?" This evening's phone call consisted of Jon telling me a story about a brave insect.

"So as soon as I got in to my truck this Katydid flies.."

"Wait, what the hell's a Katydid," I interrupt.

"You know, it looks like a grasshopper. So this Katydid..."

"Well is it a grasshopper,"

"Listen man, I am not a fucking entomologist. It is just this grasshopper looking thing. Will you please let me finish? So this thing, it flies on to my windshield as soon as I am pulling out of the parking lot and the damned thing stays there the whole way home. On the highway and everything!"

"So what did you do when you got home?"

I grabbed a stick, let it climb on, and put it up in a tree. What? Did you think I would have squashed it?"

"Well, you did just tell me the other day about the rock that you threw at that wild turkey that was in the field behind the house that you were working on. You hit the thing from like eighty yards man!"

"No, I was actually really impressed by that little bug's tenacity. Gotta respect something like that"

"You sure do," I agree.

"Is this what you and your boyfriend really talk about," I hear his wife say in the background. "Fucking grasshoppers!"

Well, yeah.

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This was going to be my first post but for some reason I either scrapped it or just plain forgot that I wrote it.
June 26, 2008 I am going to start a diar...err, journal but I guess since it is on the internet I will have to call it a blog. I have always wanted to have a journal but the longest that I have ever been able to keep one going was 3 weeks. It was a travel log and even then, with all the free time in the world on my hands, I didn’t write in it every day. The initial idea was that I was going to record all the cool shit that would happen to me as I traveled through Europe, solo. I imagined all the beautiful women that I would meet, the lasting international friendships that I would make and the resulting invitations to country houses in Provence that would be extended to me every summer for the rest of my life. This would all be written in my travel log and upon return to the ‘States’ (as we international travelers say) I would use it to write a book whose modest yet not insubstantial earnings would allow me the freedom to travel indefinitely. My Swedish wife Brigita and I would educate our children ourselves. We would move from country to country learning the ways of all the peoples of the earth--an education no public school in The County* could ever match. Of course they would go on to University in Switzerland and take postings in the Diplomatic Corps of their respective homelands (Brigita, whose father was invariably an international lawyer, would ensure that each of our eight children would have citizenship in their place of birth…in case you were wondering) and by the time I was 60 my offspring would serve in the highest levels of government of the worlds most powerful countries. Unfortunately nothing especially fantastic happened at all so most of the stuff I wrote down was just a record of how long I sat in this train station or that café and what beverage I had in my hand at the time. I am now hesitant to mention my international phase in casual conversation because I hate being misjudged and lets face it, blogs are all about judging. The first blog entry is crucial. Who is this guy? What’s he all about? The thought of being perceived as pretentious makes me feel like such a sissy. I know that is a pretty lame term but that is just how I feel. I am pretty sure that it has something to do with the fact that I come from a family whose primary concerns are celebrating every (and I mean every) holiday on the calendar by roasting whole pigs, floating down rivers in tractor tubes, or taking each others money in poker games. Cancun is the farthest that anyone of them has traveled and was best described by my aunt as 'kick ass'. As a child I was constantly embarrassed by them but now they are what keep me grounded. “So what’s it like to live with all those commies over there”, my cousin asked when I returned from an extended stint. “At least tell me you got some ass”. These are definitely not the people to discuss the revolutionary design of the flying buttress or the literary dominance of Balzac. But then again, neither am I. Really.
*Western suburbs of a Midwestern American city

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A couple of my friends just bought kayaks and I will soon be following suit. We had been talking about it for months, researching it for a few weeks and this past weekend two of us finally pulled the trigger. I, as I have made apparent, am the sad bloke that lives paycheck to paycheck and will be waiting until this Friday to get a boat of my own. I mention this not out of some kind of testosterone induced, extreme-sport touting male posturing (Hey dude, you wanna slay some phat rapids this weekend?) but rather I think it funny (dare I say cute) that we guys and our guy buddies like to spend time and money on a few common hobbies that we can do together when our wives or girlfriends have to work or simply feel generous enough to let us have a few hours, an entire day or even a whole weekend to play together. The other day I was driving near the park and I saw two bearded fellows on mopeds with tennis rackets strapped to their backs. Those two guys are all about beards, riding their mopeds and playin' tennis, I thought. Good for them.

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