The Power of Competitive Spirit

I wanted to take a moment of your time to share with you a lesson about dedication.  I will be pontificating for a while here, but I haven’t had the chance to brag as much this year as I have in the past, until now.

Like all MSHSAA (Missouri State High School Athletic Association) sports, tennis opponents are governed by the size of the school.  There are two divisions in Missouri:  big schools and small schools.  Many small schools do not even have tennis available.  Tennis has a rich history dating far back in time, to the 1500s in France (even earlier I've read).  It is a game that is available to anyone that has access to a racket and a public court.  We are blessed in Belton to have 10 courts available at Yoekum Middle School open to the public 9 months a year (nets are supposed to be taken down in the winter).  But as public as the sport may be, that does not guarantee that all participants have an equal shot at success.

Me at 22 - A Poetic Reflection of My Time in Kirksville

An Intersection Never Reached

            Streets like Washington and Jefferson and other great leaders

                        set the roadmap across this college-town Kirksville

A student living on borrowed time with a borrowed money for a

predicted future and features that can lead to great new leaders

            The irony of repeatedly picturing myself standing literally at the corner of

                        Normal and High Streets

            The smell of last night’s spilled beer isn’t something I’m crying over like milk

because I know that tonight I will get the opportunity to spill again

Escaping into the Pages

I love when a book forces me to look up from a page to assess my own world.  That moment where I am so engrossed in someone else’s world that I lose myself for a bit.  That moment in Richard Wright’s Native Son where a decapitation is seemingly the only possible solution, where I feel Bigger’s struggle so much that if I was to stop reading I would kill off

An Afternoon in Westport

At the corner of Pennsylvania and Westport Road sits Kelly’s Westport Inn, residing in the oldest building in Kansas City, MO.  What was once The Albert Boone Store back in the 1800s now houses one of the more recognizable watering holes in town.  Cattycorner to Kelly’s sits Beer Kitchen, a recently opened taproom of specialty beers.  The contrast between the two could not be sharper.  But it is perfect for this setting:  Old meeting new, relics meeting up-and-comers. 

And the meeting isn’t limited to the buildings and businesses.  In just a short amount of time quite of few people come to recognize others in the area, bumping

The Failure of My Father

My father, for many years, considered himself a failure.  He had a Masters Degree in a field in which he had never become a professional.  He was entirely overqualified for a fairly menial job for the county government. 

He is a loving father who has overlooked that his curiosity has become the foundation for my own education.  His failure professionally never crossed the mind of his two boys and daughter who, growing up, saw him as a wealth of knowledge from which experience was constantly opportunity. 

That possibility would find itself in the most innocuous locations.  I remember

Shoes in the Dryer

You know that sound of wet shoes clumping around in a clothes dryer?  That thump, thump, thump that echoes through whatever room, hallway, or end of the house no matter how many doors are shut?  Ideas do that in my head, round and round, sometimes spilling a story so sensory oriented that I cannot shut my ears to it.  That is what forces me to write sometimes. 

I find ways to deny this force most times, but some times it is too overpowering to deny its time on the keyboard.  It has kept me up when lay my head down to sleep.  It has kept me from being able to concentrate over dinner.  It has forced me out of bed at 3:30am and writing until I had to shower to go to work.  Those times where it has forced me to action have not been enough to establish a habit or a pattern of willingness to compose, so I find ways to dampen that noise.

My earliest memory of writing creatively was in second grade, where I was able to see an entire movie scene falling out onto a page in front of me.

Brief thoughts about the days of my youth

The days of my youth have been filled an adventure that spilled out my back door into fields that bordered the safety net of suburbia.  The emptiness of the woods and pastures contrasted with the other side of the fence, sharply with the houses in my neighborhoods, split-level and nearly identical.

Exploring the fields, felt like I was building my own world.  In my head I was going places that the friends who I was with were not, or at least that wasn't conveyed to me.  I saw possibilities of empires next to that pond, armies hidden in that forest wood.  Hidden dangers in that field of wheat.

The fields were slowly being developed into more houses and more civilization that was seemed pre-programmed and established, something that seemed to dismantle the world of possibility that I had built into my mind.  As the dirt piles that the construction equipment stacked and raked were, for a brief moment, my mountain to conquer.  The sides became giant berms to cycle my bike around, to pivot again and tackle an unleveled portion of earth.  All of my friends played “king of the hill” and played it like a game.  It made a bigger impression on me though.

I wasn’t just king of the hill.  I wanted king of the universe.  Not a king for power, but a king for freedom, because as the landscape changed around my house on the edge of suburbia, and the houses seemed huge in their conforming molds, bastardizing the freedom of the nature that it replaced, I sought to maintain the sense of possibility that I had when my earliest days of wilderness exploration began. 

This dismantling of the possibilities with the structure of normalcy, of repetition, of wealth and consumerism, left a great impression on me.  I had never discovered Thoreau or Emerson in my childhood, but I feel that I had gone to those fields deliberately, and that I was driving life into the corners to discover the possibilities of what this universe had to offer.  My youth was filled with the adventures in my mind that leave me less inclined to find that when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.

Liam's big 2nd Birthday!!!

Little Liam is dancing his way into his second birthday!!

Yay!!

Here is the best... He is really interested in a chicken, and lets everyone know about it at Winstead's one afternoon...

Looking Ahead

About a month ago, I planned on doing a whole series of posts (GP was in on this too) for this upcoming weekend.  It seemed perfect as Friday was St. Patty's Day and the next night was SKC's home opener (for the unwashed).  It'd be a sort of weekend bonanza.  I thought about doing a pre-weekend post about expectations, one during the festivities (left unedited), and then a post-weekend piece about what went right and what ... didn't.

How could I not do something for St. Patty's Day?  It's only one of greatest days of the year.  See the included photo from GP's introductory post back at the beginning of this blog.  We're only about 2-3 hours deep in that photo.  Good times.  It seemed a no-brainer to mine this weekend for some quality blog posts.

Unfortunately, I'm a moron.  A little over a week ago, I realized that St. Patty's Day is actually on Sunday, and adding insult to injury, the SKC game isn't even a night game.  It's a 2pm kickoff.  Both of those created a severe degradation of enthusiasm for my weekend exploits.  I'm still going to try to churn out something about the weekend, though.  About what, I don't know yet.  Maybe it'll just be about beer and its bubbly goodness.  Maybe I'll (properly) introduce the internet to boccer.  Maybe GP will inspire something more in me... or in both of us.

MM#8: Internet/Cable Issues Part III

 

Whoops! Forgot about posting the third part. That should've been done a few days ago to wrap up this line of thought. Sorry 'bout that.

So, as I said in the second part, this final letter was sent to customer service and was Cc'd to many of the top executives at corporate. Only history knows whether it was sent after the exchange in Part II or right before. Regardless, it never earned a reply from anyone at Comcast. That wasn't entirely surprising, but it was somewhat disappointing. However, while it was mostly just me spouting off with my fingertips, it does contain one of my favorite lines I've ever written.

MM#7: Internet/Cable Issues Part II

Many years ago, my internet provider was Comcast. I can't remember how long I'd had them before I started having issues, but it was at least a couple years and probably closer to five. Actually, now that I think about it, it had to have been a decent amount of time. I distinctly remember customer support's favorite fix-all for any issue I had was for me to buy a new modem. They kept saying that mine was “out-dated.” No, my modem wasn't the newest model, but it was perfectly fine. It certainly wasn't going to hinder my speed as I was only using their slowest/cheapest plan.

Honestly, service was pretty decent for most of my time with them. I don't recall experiencing anything out of the ordinary until my final year as a customer of theirs. That year, the quality didn't decline; it fell off a cliff. Two words: intermittent interruptions. Without warning, as service failures often go, internet access was gone... and then it was back. Sometimes the little lights on the modem would reflect the service interruption; sometimes it looked perfectly normal. Sometimes it'd last an hour; sometimes it'd last all night. Inconsistency was the hallmark of the failures, and it was the noose around the neck of the technician.

MM#6: Internet/Cable Issues Part I

People have been having issues with cable companies since the beginning of … well, cable companies. Most complaints about these companies are legitimate and entirely understandable. In many locales, the cable provider has a monopoly over the customers. Sure, you may also have the choice of getting satellite service instead, but if you want cable, you often times only have one option. Even in locations where you have multiple choices, the entire industry of television/internet providers is monopolistic in terms of how they operate. Everyone pretty much offers the same thing, and it's usually roughly the same price. 

Another story start from GP

“Like a vision of hovering, mystical reality that captures the eye when you shut your eyelids tight and rub your fists against them… then open your eyes, the image fades, and nothing typical can restore that image, no description, no poetry… the only way to recreate the vision is to shut your eyes and rub again…”

Mylinda knew that these moments came and went with her husband every couple of months, and like she had done for the many wandering rants before, she continued straightening her hair in the mirror. 

“I mean, I don’t understand it either.  Think I should go to one of those dreams doctors?”  Will seemed to indicate that this wasn’t a rhetorical question. 

Precision - Vol. 1

I recently stubbed my toe, bumped into a wall and missed properly setting a cup down on a counter all within a few seconds of each other.  While this was shocking initially (I don’t consider myself clumsy), I haven’t forgotten about the incident.  Why has that moment rolled back and forth in my head so much?  Because it has led me down a long path of contemplating the importance of “precision.” 

MM#5: Pizza and Logic

The following is an account of a recent visit to my local Papa Murphy's.

GP Gone AWOL

MM here.  If anyone has seen or heard from GP, please describe when and where your last encounter was with him in the comment section.  He's been missing and unheard from since roughly January 6th, when he was last spotted fiddling with his wife's iPhone.  I fear he may have Tron'd himself and become stuck inside the device.

GP, if you can read this in your new digital surroundings, please let us know you're alright and that you haven't been deleted by some weird frisbee disc.  Also, if you see a program in there that looks like Olivia Wilde, tell her that MM says hello.

Come back to us, GP!

MM#4: The Sickness

Oh you Royals. You're so silly. You're just playing with us, right? Just teasing? You didn't actually re-sign Luke Hochevar to a new contract, did you? Hasn't he had enough chances to prove he's not worthy? If you count a finger for every time you say that this could be the year he steps up from “promise” to “production,” and you need a second hand to get through all of them... well, maybe that's a sign, don't you think? Surely, after six years you know what you have in a player. Surely you can't be serious, right?

MM#3: Failure

Contrary to what you may have heard, failure is an option. It's actually one of the more prominent options, but people just want to convince themselves otherwise. There's also degrees of failure, or rather, conditional failure. Currently, my efforts here have resulted in some of the latter – good ol' conditional failure. I always knew I was fighting against inevitability, but I honestly thought I could make it more than two weeks before succumbing. Sigh. There's nothing like realizing you've underestimated your own futility.

Digital Device Fears

This Brave New World of electronic storage has exacted a new fear in my heart: the loss of information.  I am quite overwhelmed with the constant threat of losing information. Having a young child in the house exacerbates the issue as now the photos and video that cannot be replaced is under constant threat.

I know I have backed things ups.  I know I have backed things up two or even three times.  In separate locations.  Multiple formats.  I know this.  But I have to "restore" my wife's iPhone.  Do you realize what that means?  That means wiping everything clean.  Clearing it out.  

This is nerve-wracking.  I feel like I am performing electronic surgery.  It is constant stress.

GP

MM#2: Glorious Groupon (Updated)

How can you not love the questions (and answers) page for popular Groupon deals? I'm just gonna copy and paste a bunch of them (from the same offer) here after the jump and let you guess which one was my question. No prizes for guessing correctly.

MM #1: 'Tis me

So I'm apparently Meticulous Mullen.  My brother, GP, thought it was an appropriate title.  He's not wrong.  I do like to be detailed in what I say/write.  What's the point in writing something if the reader ends up with a misunderstanding of what you meant?  Maybe it equals a few extra paragraphs to achieve clarity, but isn't that worth it in the end?