Progressive Compliance

 I was ten, and all I wanted was what everyone else had.

I was twenty, and I fought everything everyone else had.

I was thirty and tried to convince everyone I had what they had.

I was forty and thought I would lose everything I had.

I was fifty and realized I had more than I had ever known.

If I have learned anything, I have known so little for most of my life.

I comply, eventually. Is that ever worth anything?

One thing I am sure of:

The fight has always been within.

Photo by KS KYUNG on Unsplash

I have been my most significant opposing force.

What would it be like if I could turn back the pages of my life and erase those fruitless struggles with my greatest adversary?

The question is, however...

Are those battles the ones that taught me the most and gave me the greatest returns?

It is hard to comprehend.

I have always said it is "no way but the hard way."

Stop the madness

Sometimes, I wonder what is up with me. I have taken the food business thing further than I ever have before. I absolutely am pushing forward too. I was all set to apply for my catering license which will allow me to produce and sell food made at home, but I do need to take the Serv Safe Managers Certification. That is the big one, and once I have that, apply for the license, undergo an inspection. Because I have not had the time to study for the test which is actually administered live on video with a real person, I have not moved forward in a month.

I had an early morning meeting at work yesterday which caused me to skip breakfast. At around 11, I ran up to a local gas and convenience store that had a food kitchen with a drive-up window and dared to call itself a "Bistro", desperate for something to eat. I knew it would not be good, but how bad could it be? 

As I looked at the warming bin's offerings and its ridiculous prices, I knew I was in trouble. I ignored what I knew and kept steady on the effort knowing that I must make a choice out of things I did not want to eat. Scary things that sounded interesting, such as fried hash browns with bacon egg, and cheese embedded inside of them. I could only imagine those ingredients having at some point being in a blender.

I picked up something called a "breakfast empanada". It was flaky on the outside and was shaped like those old hostess fruit-filled pies from the 70s. Other than those two words, there was no description of what was inside. Although there was a paragraph of fine print ingredients printed on the back of the label, the best I could see, it was merely a list of chemicals and may as well been a Material Safety Data Sheet. 

 Needing to cut to the chase I asked the people behind the counter what was in them, (I am not picking on them) who were the most un-culinary type of people I had ever seen.  I could picture them sitting on rocking chairs in rural western Pennsylvania on the porch of a run-down cottage. Everything was so out of place that it is still bending my mind even now. I was told egg, sausage, cheese, bacon. With tears in my eyes, I bought this abomination.  You guessed it, it tasted just like a Dunkin Donuts breakfast sandwich, by which I mean, dusty cardboard.

For lunch, none the wiser, I went to Walmart to get the things we needed for the house. There is that Twilight Zone-ish void that happens sometimes when you are at Walmart. You go in, walk around for ten minutes, and suddenly, you cannot account for the last hour. If aliens are experimenting on us, then most likely, they are anesthetizing us while shopping, and doing who knows what, leaving us with these gaps in time while Walmart provides the perfect cover for them.

Suddenly I realized there was no time for lunch, so I went to the hot food bar.  I already knew I was in trouble. My friend Dave has warned me about this place. He once said he had to resort to this place providing most of his meals one winter in Florida. "I don't know what sort of Satanic Nutrient Extraction Process they use on that food, but I started to notice I never felt good anymore. If I had a cut, it never healed." As I stared down the barrel of my options a friendly patron stood next to me, smiling and telling me, "They are just pulling fresh mozzarella sticks and popcorn chicken from the fryer now." I should have listened to him, but instead, I blatantly ran into the culinary dumpster choosing a 6 pack of chicken wings that was already in the warmer.

After eating this back at the office, I had to clean the area, remove the trash, and change the bag, to get the non-food, burned-down-village smell out of my workspace.  Texturally it had to be similar to what it would be like to chew through a plaster wall. The next morning, I could still smell a faint remnant but could find no surface that was not thoroughly cleaned.

It gets worse. Friday back in the office, I had lunchtime errands to run and had no time to select a decent lunch. Avoiding McDonald's and its familiar assault I stopped in Hannaford and checked their hot bar. Stupidly not learning my lesson, I grabbed the bag of Nashville hot chicken tenders, bent on righting yesterday's wrong, hammering the square peg into the round hole. What ensued was 10 hours of intermittent stomach cramps

I have no one to blame but me and I know that. But let me tell you something. We as a society NEED to get it together. This non-food food is so abundant I get worried that the real food will disappear!  We need to stop the madness! How on earth can they charge what they do for this Frankenstein like garbage? I am of course an idiot for buying this crap and that is on me.  I needed this lesson, however! Nothing lately has shown me more than how important it is that I push forward. It is not just for me or for my family. It is for the good of everyone!  I owe it to myself and yes, I owe it to you! I need to take this very bad thing and make it into a lesson and a motive to do it. It is always rage that makes it happen for me, everything else is not enough. After all, it is in the name: FIGHT FOR TASTE!

The facade of summer

 There is a time of great forgiveness. A time in which it is deemed the hard times are over. The power of the sun makes us second guess the dark and uncertain of our overall existence.

A common saying, to “ make hay while the sun shines” is more profound than it may seem. It is real courage and real power to do what must be done because incredible imbalance awaits. To be a person who sees it all is a great gift.

I’ve been through 4 completely different lives now and can honestly say I have walked both sides of the barrier. The scars, even though they are scars, in latter years have graduated to trophies. It is odd how much chaos can fortify you and bring peace in a world losing its gravity.

Like a fiery aircraft landing in a jungle, the destination will come. All of the days struggling and all the days coasting, they suddenly make sense, like geometric calculation. I would like to say I always knew, but really, no one could. But in my heart, there was something, yet, I could never imagine.  You just know.

The odyssey of chaos

 In the last couple of years, I have learned that I thrive on disaster. The more chaotic a situation, the more in my element I am. This is where my love of contingency was born. I realize that just saying these words may seem wrong or off-center. It is nothing so weird. I was raised at a time when it took serious creativity to get by abundant limitations. I am so thankful because even though I say that there were limitations, there were also people who provided solutions to keep me and my family safe.

Many of the survival skills in life that I learned, I learned from people around me and developed the mindset that consistently worked out better ways to solve everyday problems. In doing so, solving problems monetarily was erased from the manual. I subconsciously removed that as an option and as you might guess, there are an infinite number of possibilities.

So, yes.  Most of the chaos was an implied threat to daily life. Eviction, the loss of a couple of refrigerators, two years without a car, loss of income, minimum wage, things that many families endured. Although my Mom did a very good job making sure my sisters and I still could be children, I could feel the intensity of the struggle and developed my contingent mindset.

It is pretty amazing how being raised this way can mold all the decisions you make on a daily basis for decades to come. There is a cavalier sort of attitude that as the world becomes more materialistic and disposable, I was out to smite it, throughout the course of my life.

 There are so many interesting side effects that come with this ability. I’ve created the demand within myself to expect creativity in almost every decision no matter how great or small. I am fascinated at how it is actually developed into my running into a task and expect that I will fully deploy the assembly, execution, and delivery, every single time. I have even detected this type of creativity in my sons. Obviously, that comes from learning it from me as opposed to it being born out of necessity. But this is something I certainly want to be careful

In two days, I am starting our second camping trip of the season. This one will be without a camper and upon a very rural mountain. The regular method that I have of doing meals, which is bringing a pile of food and then creating something is a headache. I am pleased right now that I can perceive this as a mess. It means I am understanding my approach to things more than I ever have before. So instead of going on my typical creative and complex path, I have decided that I’m going to put some serious forethought and preparation into all meals. Because this is such a primitive camping experience, I’m going to do my best to build a bunch of parchment and foil packets with delicious food in them. Metaphorically this is huge!

I think somewhere along the way my demand for creativity in finding solutions somehow translated into choosing complex methods. I have always joked that for me it was, “no way but the hard way“. Really, the foil packets are not the only thing that I’ve been doing this with. So many small decisions when compared to the weeks, months, and years of your life, add up to significant differences. So yes, the great experiment continues. You might say that this is not far of a departure from other ideas that I regularly deploy, and you’re right. But if the last couple of years have taught me anything, a worthy question to ask before taking on an effort is: “What is the return on investment of this effort?“ Basically, is this worth spending time on?

So, I look forward to this weekend. Looking forward to not having to create things on the spot. I look forward to freeing my mind space to enjoy the moment opening the cooler and placing that foil packet in the coals and not having to perform, which is what the alternate feels like sometimes. Here is freedom.