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We’re in sync

Thinking in a particular way

Last Friday was National Cheeseburger Day and I was in the middle of writing Sara that I wanted to maybe have a bad dinner of burgers and fast food when she wrote me first – as I was writing out my own message.

Her: I’m craving chicken nuggets. Like BADLY 😂😂
Me: Wait, what?!? I was just about to write you that it’s National Cheeseburger Day and we should eat trash tonight.
Her: Really?! We are in sync!

Clearly, she is my person.

Similarly, years ago, my brother called me to tell me that he’d just bought a box of Certs because he couldn’t find a box of Certs that he bought previously.

So, he looks around his house for where to put it, so he’ll remember where it is, thinks of a perfect spot, and goes to put it there only to find…the box of certs.

That’s actually happened to me a number of times.

Like, I bought some plastic repair putty called Sugru that my brother mentioned to me years ago to fix all sorts of things.

When I got it, I remembered that my brother told me to keep it in the fridge.

So, I was thinking of where best to put it and decided to keep it in the butter drawer in the back where I found…a package of Sugru.

Evidently, I bought it when my brother suggested it and forgot I had it but, luckily, I came to the same logical conclusion of where to keep it.

I was thinking about alla this because I’ve literally been marveling how close my dad and I lived to each other in the same neighborhood and how often I’ve walked past his office where I’m sure he had all these hopes and dreams, successes and failures.

But then, as I thought a little more, I went back to that old debate of nurture over nature.

It makes sense that my brother and I would do identical things – he with the Certs, I with the Sugru – because we were both raised the same way by a father that stressed logical thinking and contextual observation AND because we are so genetically similar.

Likewise, it makes sense that my dad and I would gravitate to the same neighborhood; there are between 350 and 400 neighborhoods in NYC so this is a pretty large coincidence.

I’ve been thinking for days, “What if we had some shared hopes and dreams in the exact same place?”

But, the fact that my dad and I would choose the same ones at roughly the same age does make some sense as he was taught to think in a particular way and he, in turn, taught me to think in a particular way.

But maybe there’s more (or less than) than that.

These two co-workers – Dave Green and Andrea Urmston – worked together at Manchester airport, bonded instantly and joked that they felt like siblings, only to later discover that they were brother and sister, separated at birth.

Or consider Becky Gibson and Ralph Slawter, two siblings separated for over 30 years that ended up living just a few doors apart in the same nursing home without realizing it.

(Another really weird sidenote, I actually dated someone that had the same name as one of the two women I just mentioned).

With those two, it wasn’t nurture as they were all separated and raised different. So, it has to be biological/nature.

After all, they shared genetic temperament traits like: Social capacity/energy, sense of humor, interpersonal behavior, etc.

And they also gravitated toward similar types of work, which was structured and mechanical in airport operations.

It supports the idea that genetics nudges people toward certain environments.

And, while writing this, I just remembered that my sister and I – completely independently of each other – chose the exact same marble and showerhead for our respective bathroom renovations.

Maybe with my dad and me, it’s enough nurture and nature that these coincidences aren’t all that strange.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll find more as I continue to scan stuff and look through old pics.

I’ll keep you posted.

Location: the gym, telling them I’ll have to leave
Mood: anxious
Music: I’m telling you, it’s meant to be, my dear. (Spotify)
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Three doors down

My crap club

Me: For god’s sake, why is the container in the sink?
Her: I was letting it soak.
Me: It’s glass, there’s nothing on it. It doesn’t need to soak. I was gonna put the rice back into it.
Her: Just get another one!
Me: That was the one I left on the counter just to put the rice back into it!

Sara, like Alison was, is a huge neat freak – something that I probably need in my life.

But Sara’s incredibly patient as my room has been a mess for months now – and I’m closing in on a year.

It all started back in January when my mom handed me some 14 photo albums that I decided to scan to preserve – something I shoulda done a while ago.

It’s been a head trip as I’ve vividly remembered some things but others are a complete mystery to me.

Then, in June, my sister handed me a briefcase that was just absolutely stuffed with rando papers that my dad had.

I told you then that it deserved an entry of it’s own and that’s this one.

Because I realized after I took it that it was my dad’s “important documents go-bag” – social security cards, licenses, birth certificates, that kinda thing.

Man, did I find some treasure.

I’ve scanned about 13 photo albums with two more to go (these are the two in worst shape, so I saved them for last) but just started doing the papers.

This needed to be done because it’s been taking up a solid chunk of my bedroom, so about two months ago, I started scanning.

Wanted to share two things with you: The first is that I found that he – totally randomly – wrote out all the places he lived up to when I was born.

The second is that, I didn’t realize how much our lives seemed to…overlap?

Dunno what the word is.

He never told me that he lived on the Upper West Side; from June 1969 to May 1971, he essentially lived just a few blocks away from where I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life.

How crazy is that?

And that hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Chinatown where I’m always taking Sara and the boys?

That’s literally right next door to the office he started.

I just took that pic right above the last time we were there.

The restaurant we eat at has the blue and yellow sign on the right and my dad’s office was that building right in the center of the photo.

I dunno why, it just makes me wish he was still here so we could chat about it.

I don’t think he ever realized himself how close our apartments were from each other.

Nor did I ever realize that I’ve been eating outside his old Manhattan office for decades.

That door below is the one he used to get to his office. The restaurant we always eat at is three doors down from there.

There’s so much more I wanna tell you, so much more that I’ve found in this pile of old albums and scattered papers.

But I think I’m still processing it all.

I sometimes don’t realize just how cavernous the hole his death has left in my soul until I actually realize how cavernous the hole his death has left in my soul.

If you’ve never lost anyone that prior sentence probably doesn’t make any sense.

But if you have, then it makes total sense and I’m terribly sorry for your loss.

What a crap club to be part of.

Location: in front of the oven, baking bread and squash
Mood: surprised
Music: There’s another world inside of me that you may never see (Spotify)

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Not an entry about knives

Er hat ein großes Messer

Sara: What do you call a reluctant potato?
Me: I’m not…
Her: A hesitator!
Me: (sighing) Yeah.

I don’t actually watch much television or movies, but I did when I was younger.

I’ve always preferred reading but my attention span is that of a gnat these days – I blame YouTube and the rise of quick online articles.

But I still read every night, and I’ve been really trying my darndest to get the kid to read – oh he came back from camp today, BTW.

Him: It’ll be so weird to wake up without all my friends around.
Me: Sure, but I’m here.
Him: Yeah. And I get to sleep in my own bed.
Me: Always a good thing in my book, kiddo.

Speaking of books, I realized that, not only does he not fully understand how much he’s losing when he doesn’t read, I don’t think most people fully understand how much we’re losing.

Worldwide literacy only happened around 1965 – which is when over 50% of the world could read.

Assuming that 25% of the world being literate is considered widespread literacy, that only happened around 1925 – almost exactly 100 years ago.

That means that reading as we know it today was really only prevalent as a human-based means of communication for almost exactly 100 years.

Assuming, arguendo, that homo sapiens have existed for 300,000 years, that means that we’ve only been reading for .033% of our existence – not even 1% of 1%.

(I have no idea why I have that picture but, there you go)

  • If I show you a knife, you see the knife, and think, knife!
  • If I show you a picture of a knife, you see the knife, and think, knife!
  • If I show you either the word messer or 刀, you probably don’t think of a knife.

But Messer means knife in German while 刀 means knife in Chinese.

To know that Messer means knife, you have to know:

  • The alphabet and the sounds each letter can potentially make.
  • That the letters m-e-s-s-e-r together make the sound “mess-er.”

Only after you know those two things, you can picture a knife. It’s an added layer of complexity.

But if I said, Er hat ein großes Messer, to understand that sentence, you need to know all the aformentioned AND what each word means individually, AND the grammar structure of that sentence.

Then, and only then, do you picture a man holding a large knife as the sentence reads, in English, He has a large knife.

That’s a huge number of mental steps to achieve one single picture – that of a man holding a large knife.

And this ability to construct such a picture has only happened in 0.033% of our entire existence as a species.

It may be that the ability to write and read was only a blip in time for our species. We may well regress to the point where we can only communicate via the spoken word like children.

And then our brains will lose something singularly unique on our planet, perhaps the universe.

The ability to turn seemingly random squiggly lines into vivid pictures and understanding in our heads is highly unnatural and special.

Because, as I told you years ago, language is telepathy.

On August 23, 2026, at 9:03PM, I wanted to make you think of a man with a knife in Germany from my small apartment here in Manhattan, New York, USA and you did.

If you really sit down and think about it, that is amazing.

And that is what we’re at risk of losing if the kid and his kids don’t read.

That’s something I find just profoundly sad.

Him: But I read already.
Me: Dude you ate, right? But you’re gonna want to eat again, yeah? Books feed your mind like food feeds your body. And if you don’t feed you body properly now, then you won’t grow up ok. It’s the same with reading.
Him: (sighing) OK, another 20 minutes and then can I play?
Me: Oh for…OK. Read for another 20 minutes and then you can play. But you gotta read, man. It’s so imporant, you don’t even know…

Location: getting sidetracked in Brooklyn with my treasure
Mood: more complete
Music: der hat ein Messer doch das Messer sieht man nicht (Spotify)
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Getting from the world without expectation

Experience Camps

Me: I dunno, it’s a little early.
Him: (sighing) Ok, papa.
Me: (thinking) You know what, let’s just go. I don’t wanna be the reason we miss the bus.
Him: YAY!

The kid went off to camp today.

The same really wonderful camp he went to last year, Experience Camps.

Neither of us got any sleep last night: He, because he was too excited and I, because…well, I’m me and still an insomniac (although much better these days).

Even though we didn’t have to be there until 10:15 at the latest, we took off super early.

It was raining when we arrived – an empty parking lot in the middle of nowhere Brooklyn.

There was literally no one else around, so we just sat around for around 40 minutes until someone actually showed up.

Camp Counselor: So, what’s your…wait, you’re the guitar kid!
My son: (laughing) Yeah!

He was one of the first kids on the bus. He couldn’t wait to go.

I saw my own bus off in the distance and ran for it; it was gonna be a solid 15 minutes before the next one.

Heading home, I thought about something someone said once:

My son’s at an age where he still gets from the world, without expectation of giving anything return.

Soon, it will start to demand from him. And then Life will both demand and take.

And then my son, the child, will be gone forever, and he’ll be not-yet-a-man, and then a man.

None of which I’m prepared for.

Don’t think I’m ever prepared for the goodbyes.

Suppose no one ever is.

Him: I’ll be back soon, papa.
Me: I know. I’ll still miss you.

Location: in front of my non-functioning PC, realizing I’m gonna have to take it apart to get to a tiny battery
Mood: grumble
Music: I’m not losing you (Spotify)
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Everything is so plastic

Looking for something real

Met up with the Medemerge Doc the other day again for lunch.

It was funny because we’d ordered some beers and they didn’t have the one I liked so I got a backup.

Waitress: (walking over to our table with a full beer) The bartender got the wrong beer for someone and I didn’t want this to waste. Do you want it?
Me: (scoffing) Like we’re gonna turn down free beer.
Her: (laughing) Here you go.

While the doc and I were chatting – about AI again, but that’s another entry – I heard a voice call out:

NFL Player: Is that Logan Lo from Scenic Fights?!
Me: Hey! What are you doing in town?
Him: Had to take care of some things. Flying out first thing in the morning.
Me: Was it something I said?

Afterward…

Doc: That seems to happen to you a lot.
Me: That’s the kinda stuff that happens when you live in the same neighborhood for 32 years.
Him: (shaking head) If you look around and thought, “I wonder whicha these guys have been here 32 years,” I doubt they’d pick you.
Me: I choose not to get old.

Speaking of choosing not to get old, came across the most fascinating article the other day.

Essentially, the article says that the modern LED lights we use everywhere these days have very little red light in them.

And you know those red-light masks that everyone is wearing to fight wrinkles and such? Well, our modern lights are the opposite of those.

Perhaps that’s one contributing factor to why I age so slowly, because a solid 1/3 of all the lights in my apartment are grow lights – that is to say, full-spectrum light bulbs that feed plants.

I do it because I have plants all over the pad, which I feel we need – we need some bit of nature in our lives, more than just the 30 seconds it takes you to walk past the one tree on the street.

Well, it turns out that they may have more benefit to me than just that.

But that’s how it should be.

When we were walking to meet up with my Friends Around the Way the other day, we walked past this ground floor unit with all these fake plants in the window.

Her: What’s wrong?
Me: That just drives me crazy.
Her: The plants?
Me: The fake plants. Everything is so plastic and fake these days. Look at all the light they get – they could *easily* grow real plants, but instead of imperfect real plants, they want plastic fake plants. If that doesn’t encapsulate the world today, I dunno what does.

Everything is so fake these days.

I think most people are hungry for real things but don’t realize it until it’s too late.

And I’m not just talking about plants.

Editor’s note: Assume I make a tiny commission via Amazon Associates or something with every product link I have. I gotta figure out a way that’s not annoying to put this warning on alla my posts.

Location: all over Manhattan today
Mood: productive
Music: When I was a child, I loved the nature. Now I barely see it (Spotify)
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Self-loathing is a huge problem

I have a theory

Me: Lemme tell you this joke I heard once.
Her: OK, whacha got?
Me: A genie appears to this fella one day and says, “I’ll give you a $1 million but only if the person you hate most in the world gets $2 million.” Before the genie can even finish, the guy says, “Done!” And the genie goes, “I’m surprised you agreed so quickly.” And the man shrugged and said, “Why wouldn’t I want $3 million?”

We all have these secret and semi-secret beliefs that we keep to ourselves or share only with a select few.

For example, my friends in real life know that I believe that people don’t eat nearly enough fermented foods and that a hallmark of what it means to be human is empathy.

These are the kinda things that either one:

    1. doesn’t normally bring up in everyday conversation, or
    2. shouldn’t bring up in everyday conversation.

But recently, Hunter Biden said something that I’ve believed for years decades, which is that the most bigoted and angry conservative politicians that vote against LGBTQ+ rights are secretly closeted homosexuals that are deeply unhappy.

And it’s their internalized struggles that cause them shame and manifest in angry obscene rhetoric and homophobic policies against the LGBTQ+ community.

So, personally, I’ve always had this theory that, the more homophobic you are, the more likely it is that you’re gay yourself and just hate yourself for it.

Time-and-time again, we’ve seen things that seem to bear this out.

I mean, the number of examples we have are ridic:

  • The fact that whenever there’s a large conservative meeting, there’s always an uptick in Grindr – a gay dating/hookup site – activity in that area.
  • The number of formerly anti-gay crusaders like John Smid, the leader of a homosexual conversion group that ended up marrying another male pastor like himself.
  • Ken Mehlman: The former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and manager of George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, heavily touted anti-same-sex marriage initiatives to bring out the vote. In 2010, he publicly came out as gay.
  • Roy Ashburn: A California State Senator that never met an anti-gay rights legislation he didn’t like. But, the same year as Ken Melman, he too came out after being arrested for a DUI while leaving a gay nightclub with another fella.
  • Randy Boehning: A North Dakota State Representative who also never missed a vote denying any rights to the LGBTQ+ community. He was outed in 2015 after a man he was messaging on Grindr released unsolicited explicit photos Boehning sent him.
  • Ed Schrock: A US Rep from Virginia who co-sponsored the Federal Marriage Amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He dropped outta politics in 2004 after an activist leaked audio recordings of Schrock trying to solicit sex from men.

Those are just politicians. There are so many other examples.

If I listed them all, we’d be here all day.

Legit, every time I hear someone talking about how much they hate this person or that group, I always think: This dude probably wishes he was that person or in that group.

I think that so much of the misery of the world today comes from self-loathing.

There’s no way you can tell me the orange pedo and Musk don’t – deep and not so deep down – hate themselves.

Because they had awful parents and awful parents create awful kids.

I think so much of the world would be better if there were just better parents who loved their kids no matter what or who they are.

Even if they’re inveterate liars.

Man, Billy and Gertrude really knew what they were talking about when they said, The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

For me, there’s at least one person whose side, I am always on.

Here’s hoping that he’ll be better at being human than I.

Him: Can we video chat?
Me: Oh man, papa’s got…you know what? Sure. But let’s keep it to 10 minutes, ok?
Him: OK!

Location: a downpour, right outside of a hotdog joint
Mood: hot and sticky
Music: I hear the words I’ve spoken and everything comes out wrong (Spotify)
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We’re all children until 33

It is I

Me: I don’t think you’d recognize me back then with my glasses and double chin.
Her: I’ve seen pictures! I mean, sometimes I look and think, “Is that Logan?” But it’s gotta be, he’s the fat one!
Me: …
Her: What? You were a fat kid! You say it all the time!

When did you truly first feel like an adult?

As a kid, I woulda thought that I’d feel like an adult at 21. What a laugh.

Being at my mom’s place last week was interesting for a host of reasons, not least of which was that she immediately fell back into being my mom circa the late 1980s/early 1990s, and I resisted – as much as I could – doing the same.

That got me to thinking about an article I read recently where scientists had identified five distinct ages of the human brain over a lifetime

Now, I always felt like I was pretending to be an adult alla way up until I was 33 or so. That’s when the Reporter and I broke up and I decided I wanted to see what it was like to just date a lotta different women.

And I brought you along. See, I turned 33 in 2006, 20 years ago. Right when I started this blog.

Well, it turns out that it wasn’t all in my head.

The latest research shows that we all have four major mental changes in our lives that occur at: nine, 32, 66 and 83.

I have definitely seen my own kid change radically these past two years.

And I know that 2005-2007 were the most impactful years of my life up until that point in terms of personal growth – when I was 32 to 34. I met Alison when I 35 and I often told her that she wouldn’t have liked me if she had met me just a few years earlier.

Because I wasn’t the me that she met.

In some ways, after she died, I feel I reverted back to my old self for a (long) while. I remember thinking familiar thoughts from long ago for a while that I don’t anymore.

I have to thank Sara for pulling me back, honestly.

Years ago, I told you the story about St. Augustine.

The story is that St. Augustine was once this womanizer who once famously prayed, da mihi castitatem et continentiam…sed noli (“Grant me chastity and continence…but not yet”). It should be noted that he’s also the patron saint of brewers, as an aside.

Anywho, he was a frequent visitor of prostitutes before he changed his life around. Afterward, he went back to visit an old place and ran into a prostitute he used to know in that biblical way. He continued on his way so she tried to get his attention for his usual and called out to him, Augustine, it is I.

To which, he replied without stopping, Yes, but it is not I.

It’s the opposite for me.

I feel like I’m more like the me that I was before everything went down with Alison and my dad than I have in…well, I guess two years before all the madness started.

The last day I can remember – which isn’t necessary the last day it actually happened – when I felt the way I do now was when I was in Hell’s Hundred Acres so many years ago.

It’s almost as if I was lost in woods in winter all this time and found… well, not my way out, exactly.

Rather, it’s like I found a welcoming cabin – still in the winter, still in the woods, but it warm, cozy, and familiar. I could rest before the next part of my journey.

I’m grateful for the rest.

And I wonder what will happen with my head when I turn 66 for my next journey.

I hope I will still write about my terribly pedestrian life.

And I hope you’ll still read about my terribly pedestrian life.

Location: the studio for Scenic Fights
Mood: ex. haus. ted.
Music: the man I was before (Spotify)
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The Hakka Round House

Survival to Kitsch

Me: I dunno. I think we might be bored. And it’s in the middle of nowhere.
Her: I think we should see it. You’ve always wanted to see one and now’s our chance. I’ll handle all the logistics.
Me: Well, ok, I guess…

One of the things that Sara did for our trip, because I’d mentioned wanting to visit a Hakka round house – called a tulou (土樓) – was to discover that there was a replica round house built in a town called Miaoli in Taiwan.

I mentioned us visiting it briefly and said that I’d tell you about it someday.

Seems like today’s the day.

This is me standing in front of the replica.

It’s not so much a house as it is more a round apartment complex with an open courtyard in the middle.

For the replica, they built a glass roof over what is usually the open roof.

You can see how there are rooms all along the side of it.

Now, the reason that these things were round was pretty simple: The Hakka were living in a world that just didn’t want them and was always trying to kill them.

So, the buildings were round so that archers could defend the home from all angles.

They had walls that were up to six feet thick at the base to prevent siege weapons from breaking in.

On mainland China, there’s a whole preserved village of them in Fujian – what we saw in Taiwan was merely a replica of one.

Again, they weren’t so much homes as they were mini-fortresses that were meant to keep the inhabitants – my people – from being murdered.

I mean, think about that for a second.

Even if you’re not told that you’re hated and despised, just looking around you – being in remote areas living in fortresses that were meant to be completely self-sufficient – how do you not grow up feeling like an outsider and unwanted?

This was the mindset of the Hakka for thousands of years and one has to think that this mindset permeated everything about us.

In some ways, the Hakka are truly like the Jewish community in that, like them, the Hakka really focused on education and vying for positions of power.

Because, like the Jewish community, the Hakka were tired of being powerless and persecuted, so we have been over-represented in the military and politics post-WW2.

In fact, post-Mao, the most powerful man in all of China was Deng Xiaoping, a Hakka.

He modernized China more than any other single human being, including Mao himself.

In other words, (and this is purely my opinion but I think I’m right) he made modern China more Hakka-like and this is why China is so powerful now.

And that is why I’ve said, so many times in the past, that the US is not prepared to go to war against a country like China.

America is not prepared to go against a society that has, because of Deng, a culture based on education, power, and survival.

The Hakka survive shit.

You don’t know what you’re up against.

This isn’t the China that the US carved up in the 1800s and Japan beat in the 30s and 40s. This is one that’s modern and has learned its lessons.

Now, the immediately preceeding two pictures are of more replica round houses, this time, built on top of a department store in my my mom’s hometown of Hsinchu in Taiwan.

I find it funny that these things created for survival and defense have now become cultural kitsch.

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And like I said in my last entry, I think the Hakka culture explains so much about why I am the way I am: Focused on knowledge and education but never forgetting that survival is as much an issue of physical ability as well as mental acuity.

The Hakka round house is a synecdoche of the Hakka people, in my opinion.

Me: I think I’m finally gonna write about the Hakka round house. Hey, thanks for insisting that we go [when we were in Taiwan]. That was really cool to see.
Her: Oh, sure! I’m glad we got a chance to go.

The interior of the Yuchang tulou. By Gisling – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
The exterior of the Yuchang tulou. By Gisling – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Location: my regular rectangular pad
Mood: ridic busy
Music: I learned my lesson young (Spotify)
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I’m not exactly Chinese

Travelers, safe at home

Me: (years ago) It’s hard to explain. Essentially, it’s kinda like how Jewish Europeans were looked at by other Europeans. [My people] mainly look like everyone else but everyone else hated us for how different we were from them.
Lea, my Irish friend: (in her Irish accent) Ah, you’re a traveler!

When I was a kid, I read the Diary of Anne Frank, and it really messed with me. I only ever read it that one time because it shook me so much.

Couldn’t wrap my kid brain around it; I had Jewish friends and they looked exactly like all the other Caucasian kids.

This was from when we visited Vienna.

Remember that this was the 80s and, at that time, Asians were only starting to move into Queens so there weren’t a lotta us.

I remember thinking, “Man, white people are so weird. They hate and try to kill off an entire group of people just because they’re different.”

It wasn’t until way later that I discovered that this wasn’t limited to Jews and Europeans.

The Indians had their caste system, the Japanese had their Burakumin, and the Chinese – I later discovered – had…us.

You see, I’m not exactly Chinese in the same way that a Jewish citizen of France may or may not call themselves “French,” and/or “Jewish.”

My family – prior to my marrying Alison and then Sara – is 100% Hakka, which is what we called ourselves, for at least the last 700 years. This means that I’m genetically 100% Hakka.

Man, did I mess that up.

But that’s neither here nor there.

Just like the Irish called their itinerants “travelers,” the Hakka literally translates to “guest people.”

We were “guest people,” because no one wanted us, so we were essentially nomads

But we were called less savory things and treated even worse than that.

It was estimated that in during one reprisal, the Chinese killed 30,000 Hakka every single day for weeks.

That’s just a tiny bit of our story but essentially, people have been trying to kill or get rid of us for centuries.

That’s why so many Hakka are in Taiwan. There’s a dark explanation that I told for years and still tell.

We’re kinda like the Jews of China. No one wanted us and everyone was always trying to kill us. When there wasn’t any more China to escape to, we left the whole mainland and went to Taiwan. My parents went even further and came here.

But it’s true.

And it’s deeply imbedded into the psyche of many/most Hakka that the next reprisal could come at any day, so safety has always been a theme of this blog.

So too is embedded the concept of home, probably one of the top two or three recurring themes in this blog.

The place that this mindset shows up the most, though, is in our houses.

But, this entry’s getting long, so I’ll wrap it up in the next one.

Oh, but here are some pictures of classic Hakka food before I go.

Location: my little slice of the world
Mood: stressed
Music: I’ve been travellin’ a hard road (Spotify)
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Categories
personal

Everything you have now you once wished for

More than anything

Him: (playing guitar and suddenly noticing me) Hey, what are you doing?
Me: (standing at his doorway) Sorry, was just in the kitchen and heard you play. Didn’t mean to scare you.
Him: Oh. Do you want to hear what I’ve been working on? I can play you what I got so far.
Me: (wiping hands and sitting down) Sweeet! I’d love that.

My last entry stuck in my head because of a line I wrote which was that there was once a time I dreamt of having all that I have.

    • I have a great kid that is smart, talented, kind, and healthy. That alone is worth the world to me.
    • Speaking of kids, as a kid, I had this thing called Compuserve for like two weeks because I got some sort of free trial of it somehow. It was pre-pre-prehistoric Internet. And I thought it was the most amazing thing ever. My mind could never have imagined internet and alla you people reading me.
      • This is to say nothing about the communication device/GPS/music player/video camera/photo camera/translation device/television/video game system that we all keep in my back pocket 24/7.
    • I regularly look at Sara and think, “How on earth did I convince someone as drop dead gorgeous and sweet as Sara to marry me?”
      • Granted, I may have incriminating dirt on her, but still…

    • I wrote a book, or two, that I’m proud of and this blog has been 20 years of me just putting my thoughts out into the aether, hoping someone responds – and, most times, someone does.
    • I was a respected member of the bar, and my office regularly tells me that they’d love for me to come back and do more work; I remember being in law school anxious that I’d never find a job.
      • Heck, I remember being sick with anxiety about even making it to law school, or college, or my high school, or my middle school.
    • When I was a fat kid, I dreamt, more than anything, to be slim and have friends. I’ve now been slim for at least 12 times longer than I’ve been fat.

    • I’ve always had massive imposter syndrome when it came to my ability to fight but I just destroyed a guy that was my level, twenty years younger than me, and 40 pounds heavier than me. Just…destroyed him. And this happens more often than I would have expected.
    • My mortgage is paid off some six years early and I live in the heart of Manhattan, something I dreamt of all the time when I was in Cornell.

I could go on, but I don’t wanna sound like I’m bragging.

I’m not.

I’m just reminding myself that everything I have now I once desperately wished – more than anything – for.

And I couple this idea with another one that I heard someone say once: You’re in the middle of the last big great thing you wished for.

Alison and I dreamt so much – you cannot imagine how much, which is why her death guts me – about being parents and now I am one.

Yes, it’s not at all the way I thought it would be and it’s far more difficult than I ever would have imagined.

But still, I have to remind myself that I’m in the middle of the thing that Alison and I (mainly Alison) worked so hard to have.

May is tough on the kid and me for reasons you know, and this year has been no different.

But I’m better enough now to recognize that I need to be grateful for all that I do have and not dwell on everything that I don’t.

I’m also not in a hurry for the next big thing because this thing I’m in now, is pretty good.

Mostly.

Me: Hey can I…gah! What’s on your face!?
Her: (face mask on face and with a southern accent) Look Logan, you’re used to “Tryna Get Me a Man, Sara.”
Me: Wha?
Her: This here is “Done Got Me A Man, Sara.”
Me: I don’t think this is what I signed up for. 
Her: (shakes head) Too late. No backsies.

Location: where I belong
Mood: grateful
Music: There’s so much more. Be grateful (Spotify)
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