You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
When you do your best and your best isn’t good enough.
I took an ass chewing today.
The sad part is I thought I had done more than expected, more than needed.
I thought my effort was superb and bullet proof.
My task was widely applauded by many upon completion.
I went to bed satisfied, knowing I did a lot with a little.
I am the man, I fell asleep thinking.
How wrong can you be?
Apparently a lot.
The next day, I am told that I wasted time, lost the day and my efforts essentially embarrassed an organization.
Wow.
I was stunned, as I looked at the top of my nicely shined shoes.
I feel like I walked into an alternative universe where up is down and black is white.
Hey you did a great job is what I figured I would hear. Instead I got you really sucked some serious ass.
“I don’t care if you are mad!” The angry words shower around me.
I feel the hot breath of venom and irrationality.
That’s when I start to drift away from the tongue lashing.
I start to laugh in my own head.
Mad?
I’m not mad. I don’t even care. I feel like blurting it out.
“I DON’T EVEN CARE.”
My best is extraordinary. If you don’t realize that, then you are low-level noise in my world.
I start to think about the other things I would rather be doing. I day-dream about the other places I would rather be.
I stare at the shiny shoes on my feet. I like these shoes. I bought them for myself. I don’t buy shoes. It’s been a decade since I have had a new pair. For some reason, I saw these and decided, hey buy those shoes. And I did.
I lose myself in the endless, interminable black shine of my slinky new loafers.
As my vision inhales the sub atomic particles of leather and shoe polish, I am suddenly on a journey through a black hole. I am an interstellar pilot entering a worm hole. I wonder why my voyage affects anyone but me.
Why am I not aging and people back on Earth are 70 years old.
How will I get home? What’s it like to lay in a berth filled with water and then be put to sleep for 40 years? How can that work? How many times does your heart beat per minute when you sleep for forty years?
I pull back through the worm hole and let the light of a collapsing solar system encompass my brain.
My senses are over loading. Up and down are replaced by spacial dimensions that are as foreign to me as tap dancing in an active volcano.
I focus on my shiny black shoes. I wiggle my toes.
Yep. That’s my big toe. I can see it pulsing ever so slightly inside the shoe, just pushing the soft Italian leather.
Cool.
I smile without letting on that I’m smiling.
“You embarrassed me,” I hear from the periphery of my mind.
The words are hard to hear. I am suddenly in Long Beach in 1986. Indy race cars are blowing down the street which has been transformed into a road course.
I see bright red Marlboro racing cars, bouncing over asphalt as the drivers try to do 180 degree hair pin curves while negotiating for the inside position.
I hear Revving engines, downshifting through the gears, spinning through a cork screw.
The engines roar like a thousand power drills whining, expelling energy.
It’s a chaotic symphony of piston pumping fury.
I see the crowd cheering on a beautiful sunny California morning.
The smell of high-octane racing fuel permeates the air, mixing with the salt floating in from the Queen Mary parked in the Harbor.
“We failed to execute.”
The words pass by my ears as I stare at the carpet fibers of the office.
The pattern is hexagonal. It is bland, beige, maybe puke.
I feel like puking.
I think about all the times I have puked.
Some puke is sickness oriented. Most are party stories gone bad.
There are so many good stories. So many parties. So many wretched moments of excess.
Isn’t that weird? A good story about puking?
My brain is an open Rolodex spinning through the clouds.
I suddenly remember being in Dallas. It’s a frosty night and we are leaving a bar and we are heading for a breakfast joint at 2 am.
Suddenly my stomach does a back flip and a wave of heat and nausea flow over me.
I hit the power button on the cab window and lean half my body out of the car.
“Uh Oh,” I hear someone shout. “He’s gonna blow.”
That’s the last thing I will hear. The wind is blowing ferociously and my ears are filling with a whistle blown by the frozen tundra.
Yak….
Suddenly a flow of liquid regurgitation is jettisoning from my mouth like a booster rocket separating in orbit.
The liquid lunch explodes forward and is slapped by the 40 mph wind. It immediately bends at a ninety degree angle, backward and slaps against the rear window.
It splatters like a milk shake dropped from a 3rd story window.
I sense the people in the back seat pushing to the other side of the cab.
“And we are going to kick ass from now on,” I hear as I tune in from a foggy place deep within my mind.
I tune back out.
I think about laying out on the beach without a towel as a high school kid. Just lay down with the burning hot sand on my stomach. I don’t have a towel. don’t care. I use dry seaweed for a pillow. I didn’t care then. I don’t care now. I feel the granules of sand sticking to my perspiring cheek. I lift my face out of the sand. I am wearing half a sand beard across half my face. Why I think this is cool I couldn’t tell you. I just know that I really could care less what the fat Kansas lady with the two fat kids staring at me think.
Gaze away woman. I am a life force that cares not.
I look up from the ugly beige carpet.
The talk, the words are still coming at me like linguistic darts of bile.
It reminds me of the Saturday spent cleaning the cages at the SPCA.
Instead of cleaning up dog crap, I played with all the dogs. Not just one or two, but all of them. I opened up every cage and let them all out. I played hockey with a soda can and they chased that can and it was doggie bedlam.
The community service manager tried to make me stop.
I laughed at him. I was 16. Good luck.
That was wasted energy.
Run dogs run.
At the end of the day, I was told that I couldn’t work off the remainder of my community service hours at the SPCA.
I didn’t care. I felt like Papillon helping four-footed prisoners escape their metallic cages of death.
That was wasted energy then.
This is wasted energy now.
“You will produce. You will win.“
The words are hollow, meaningless.
Don’t challenge me. Don’t dare me. Don’t corner me.
I’m a sniper. I’m a pit bull. I’m an angry serpent who strikes and thinks later.
A man once tried to discipline me.
I simmered like a pack of M-80’s, fuse lit, angst running full tilt like a 1000 flashing bulbs at the carnival.
I will later approach and with all my might, bang on the glass window where he is seated.
He is on the phone and didn’t see me. The noise sounds like thunder as the window bends inward, and somehow doesn’t shatter. He jumps out of his seat with a shocked look that was worth the moment. It was a dangerous move. It was a move that came without much thought. It was pure me. I wanted the man to know that he didn’t have the balls to do for one second what I do every day.
Much to my surprise, he stared at me and never mentioned my egregious insubordination.
“So you all got it. I won’t tolerate it…”
I search my mind. It’s a cloud. I drift off again.
I remember standing on the roof of the apartment complex. I’m essentially 3 stories high. The roof is gravel and tar paper. The gutter is flimsy and the pool is a long way down. To clear the hard cement deck, I will have to push out with all my might. To not be crippled, I will have to hit the deep end of the pool which may not be much more than 7 feet deep. That’s not a lot of room for error when you are jumping off a 3 story building.
Someone told me that I didn’t have the guts to jump. Apparently I’m a ticking time bomb when challenged.
I look at the party below me.
They are chanting jump. jump. jump.
Oh well. Don’t want to disappoint.
I take 3 big steps and push-off.
I feel my foot slide in the loose gravel. Then I feel the gutter give ever so slightly. My trajectory is off. I am falling fast. I am now just praying I will clear the cement ledge.
BLAM
My knees explode into my chest and then into my chin as I slam into the bottom of the pool.
BAM.
I am dazed.
I push up.
I am suddenly breathing air. I see stars. My jaw hurts where my own knees tagged me like Muhammad Ali.
Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee.
I am alive.
It is crazy. It is exhilarating.
Sorority girls are applauding like I am wild circus act.
I climb out of the pool soaking wet.
I walk to the keg.
I am suddenly the man.
“You are crazy,” some frat brothers say.
“You are crazy” I will hear over and over and over.
I smile. It’s hard not to when I think back on this moment.
Compared to the balls it takes to jump off a 3 story building into a 7 foot pool.
This is romper room.
I look at my loafers.They are beautiful, and tranquil like the water in the pool from the 3rd floor.
“Now get out of here and produce” he says angrily.
I lift my eyes to meet his.
I smile.
I don’t care what he just said.
I know that I will jump off a building and I know he’s afraid to pick up his own dry cleaning in a tough neighborhood.
One day all this will be a memory in life’s rear view mirror.
I almost want to thank him for allowing me to go on a mental vacation that reminded me to stay the course.
If you are going to succeed, you have to know who you are, you have to believe in who are.
That’s never been a problem. Sometimes you just have to have the right pair of shoes.
Life’s Crazy™