How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Lawn Mower

Step 1 

Never stop believing in yourself. Remember when your Mom said, "there is nothing you can't do if you just try hard enough." Take that and really run with it, I mean go all out. Don't turn back. Invest yourself. 

Ok. Now.

The lawn mower WILL NOT start so we need to "FIX" it.

Step 2

With no prior experience or know how, jump right in and unscrew things on the lawn mower that may or may not be the problem. Remember what your mom said, you can do this.

Step 3

Place those pieces in the grass beside you. Don't worry, there is no way you will lose an important piece, you put them right by your side...in the grass....safe.

Now. Lets have a look at this thing. Wow, you really don't know anything about these things. No matter, that leads us to:

Step 4

Begin to jiggle stuff.

Step 5

Once you have Jiggled stuff. Begin to remove stuff you Jiggled.  ITS CLEARLY IN THE WAY.

Now that the thing is out of your way, you can really start progress. 

Step 6

Remove a 2nd thing accidentally and permanently. Panic a little. 

This is where the first signs of doubt creep in. "Does this mean I will never be an astronaut?" ...Yup. Your grandfather is 80 and could take this thing completely apart and put it back together while eating a pudding cup, but then he never had the internet to distract him from becoming a real person. NEXT.

Step 7

Dog is disappointed in you.

At this point, weigh your options.

Q. Are you able to fix the lawn mower?

A. Not any more.

Q. Can the mower be repaired by anyone ever again?

A. Not Probable. 

Good. Your work is almost done. Now you make it look like you were never there and tell your wife you need to buy a new one. Which leads us to:

Step 8

Fist hammer that thing you took off back on.

Well Done.

Step 9

That piece had small parts you may or may not have lost in the grass. Do a quick 15 second search to find what you can and then give up. No sense in wasting time. Now, tape the pieces you found to that part, unless you remember the scientific angle in which you took them off. You Don't ? Ok. Tape it is.

Step 10 

Screw that thing that was on top of that other thing back down onto the thing.

Now your cooking.

Step 11

Put the cover back on. Now you know why it came with one. It should have read: " Hey you, yes you, don't touch this."

Step 12

Put that damn thing back in the shed EXACTLY how you found it and never mention it. 

You did so well! Thats how its done.

Never stop believing in yourself.

How the Birds, Beat with Summer Heat, Still Keep Their Promises.

       The cool mornings of spring are gone. A window left opened for a night breeze will only yield the sounds of sleepless birds searching for cool puddles in the dark black heat. Summer has arrived to challenge freshmen life just clear of the bony grip of winter in its arrogant youth. I lay. Still. Shirt less.
       The birds grow quiet. Finding relief, they retire. Exhausted. Behind frozen lids a white land meets the horizon. A storm, cold and stiff, settles in. Hands become cracked with ice and wind while legs end just below the knee and feet have forgotten sensation. I lay. Motionless. Packed like fresh fish. Eyes Open. Breath dancing in circles.

       The birds wake with labored song. Tired yet determined to fulfill their commitment to the sun, that grand entrance of the day their ancestors swore to cherish. Eyes Open. I lay. Still. Glad with perspective.

Where The Dark Lives

       Being uneasy stalks a person like a striped cat in tall grass waiting for hours as little birds hop unknowingly closer in their search for seed and fresh worms. Its wild tail slapping the ground on both sides in untamed eagerness to hold beating wings between clean paws. Fear needs no reasoning, no excuses, no warning. No one needs the darkness of woods, the shadows of trees at an open back, or calls in the distant dark to pull a hat down low over the eyes and walk faster toward the light.

                                     For One I Love, You Are Not Alone.



.

One Ticket To Somewhere, Please

       The middle of May has been slow to approach and each day brings a season altogether different than the day before. Today has barely seen fifty degrees for more than a few hours and even in this mild weather I have struggled to find a warm place to sit. If I had forgotten why I despise winter it does not escape me now. All the simple pleasures come with a certain labor to either ignore or endure the uncomfortable cold. Its this kind of cold that brings out the melodramatic monologues that eventually make me laugh as I reread my words with deep criticism.  But honestly, Its cold and I hate it.

        Its my "fix it" nature that drives me to buy two gallons of bright yellow egg-shell non-toxic paint (you know, for the children's sake) and paint the living room into a burning Sahara with added little touches of improbable fiction for my own happiness like Giraffes and Lions floating on the endless golden sand dunes. Now we're getting warmer. Here comes the Saharan snow cone salesman. He has all our favorite flavors in a three sided glass case swaying like an ocean liner on the back of a camel. Relax, the ice doesn't melt because its in a rear compartment on the flavor savor that has blacked out windows and its own, get this, solar powered refrigeration system. Yes. That just happened. I ask for one "Rainbow Swirl" and one "Dead Ninja Turtle". He asks "Whats a turtle?"  I skip the part where I ask him how he knows what a ninja is and explain to just add the green flavor then blue, purple, orange with red all over. "Duh?, right?" Even for a desert dweller "Rainbow Swirl" came pretty natural to the callused roughed skinned rider. After the exchange of a few gold coins I found in my M.C. Hammer desert camo "jammer" pants that probably were left over from a 1980's Aladdin's Castle arcade token collection I spent my childhood hoarding, we walk happily over to a park bench and sit beneath the shade of a giant Magnolia tree.
       Seriously, you're going to question this story's realism  due to the obvious non-indigenous tree species I've set our final scene with after we just got a great snow cone from a desert camel rider? Please. Just enjoy your snow cone and this nice warm air. 

Wait For It...

      I've been waiting. Waiting to see my child born. Waiting to complete my college education. Waiting for winter to be out of my life. Waiting for a house checklist to be full of scratched off tasks instead of staring at all the empty square boxes next to them.
      It would seem that waiting is one of those things that doesn't really exist. Like an emotion you can't see or touch, as in hoping or hurting, waiting seems to stand passively in the background. You see a person crossing their arms, twiddling there thumbs, pissing away their future, but you can't pinpoint that they are just waiting.
      I woke up angry. Livid that I had made no forward motion with my life in months. Sure I....

• Bought a house
• Painted house
• Filled house with furniture
• Made Baby
• Painted baby's room
• Painted baby's furniture
• Read half of 6 parenting books (surely, that equals 3 whole books)
• Trained Dog not to jump fence
• Chased Dog
• Mulched yard
• and filled Shed and Attic with all the stuff I've always had, have no idea what it is, but can't bring myself to get rid of. 

      That much I certainly did.

      But all of those things were the passive actions in my life. What I've truly been doing is Waiting. Waiting to win the lottery even though I have never played. Waiting for someone to say "Wow, you are so talented. Here is a Gagillion dollars. Way to Go!" Waiting to be given a honorary Phd from Harvard. I keep thinking if I can just wake up and get motivated or if I go back for that fifth cup of coffee that finally I will really get this train a' rollin'. At age 29 I've realized people don't just wake up at 30 as adults. Everyday you have to take one more step to becoming who you want to be, where you want to be it, surrounded by the people you want to be it with. I better start stepping.

The Polaroid Hat

              A few months ago a great friend of mine got married. Naturally, all the excitement turned to the Bachelor Party. I remember buying the ticket to Las Vegas, walking through the airport, and then boarding the plane back home while popping Excedrin Migraine and inhaling some Cinnabon minis. It all happened that fast. But sometimes the little details of a trip get lost in the feeling that of all life's ups and downs you just logged one huge UP for the record book. Slowly but surely the memories will come floating in to be labeled, framed, and organized in the library of my mind. 

            Coming back from Vegas there is a zip to life all together absent otherwise. Snapping fingers and striding around with Sinatra tunes on repeat in your head makes life pop like velour and white shoes. All one can hope for is to drag both feet in the afterglow, humming all the way back down to reality. I keep pulling up these memories as if someone threw them all in a hat and shook them up. I reach in feeling around for "the good ones" but they are all the same shape and size. Pulling out what looks like a polaroid of a close friend too drunk to walk, sitting indian style riding an escalator upstairs to another casino. That one is " a good one". Good ones don't always surface and that's when I wish I could just dump out the contents of the hat on the floor and walk over them looking for all the squares filled with color,  the brighter the better, and then leave all the dim and blurry snapshots lying on the floor where they were most likely taken in the first place. In time those memories will surface less or become altered in story so long that they grow a little color of their own. However, in this moment, our short song and dance with Vegas is still fresh on the mind and each grab in the hat reveals a square filled with color from corner to corner. 

Groundhog Day

          Waiting in small leather chairs, Betsy and I sat at the women's imaging center making small talk and fidgeting through magazines without reading any of the words, or for that matter even knowing which title we were holding. She would point out great ideas on how to recycle wine bottles into everyday useful items, and, to her disdain, I would flip through her magazine (while she held it) if I saw a funny picture that caught my eye. My attention span has always suffered from anxiety. Typically ideas land in my mind like planes on a runway, only stopping to fill to capacity and then take off into the great wide open. Today they are buzzing the tower, doing touch and goes, and some are just circling as if there is no space to land. Today, we are finding out if our baby is going to be a boy or girl.
        
           They called for Betsy and we walked down the hallway passed the crazy pastel interpretive art that is probably a mother and child, but looks like two grapefruits square dancing. This is when I think I could be an artist. I'm wrong. She goes to change and I fight the urge to touch all the buttons on the picturemahicky they have left me with unsupervised. This is where my planes all take off at the same time and leave the runaway empty. It seems we should be lying on a hill somewhere with binoculars pressed hard against our eyes staring down at a hole holding our breath. Some time passes before we see a small fury head ease out to check if the coast is clear. Then, out comes the groundhog one wobbling limb at a time while we all watch to see if it has a penis. Hard to tell at this angle. Betsy walked out in a gown and I snapped out of my day dream realizing I had been holding my breath.

      
         She laid down and out came the belly jelly. At this point there are no planes left, no airport even, just a black and white screen and a heart beat. Little hands. Little feet. But no penis. Because we are having a little girl,  Harper Elizabeth Collum,  and that's all I can think about.