Waking Up With Cozumel

I like to watch a town come to life. It begins Cozumel around 5:30 am and it starts slow. A hotel sees of a pilot in the dark and another car goes by 2 or 3 minutes later. Around 6 am a man in an unrecognizable uniform that has orange reflective bands pushes a large…

Butterfly Effect

If the butterflies only knew….

Old Blue Bricks

Old Town San Juan, Puerto Rico. Old blue bricks are like old blue people. They are askew and broken in tiny and monumental ways but they are still holding their position. They could not be more unique and discolored by experience but they fit in. Their role is what they are. They are the silent placeholders…

Barista Movement

I’m tired but I’m not “yell at a barista” tired. Sometimes I am though and it’s all I can do to not snip at a customer service rep or grumble at a slow walking person in front of me at the airport or… yell at a barista? I don’t know if I’ve ever been that…

Routine Spontaneity

That pivotal moment… do i work out? Do I work? Do I immerse myself in whatever bad news is coming out of Washington? Do I go back to sleep? Do I sit quietly in a room with my thoughts for the day? Am I doing that now? Routine saves me from all of those choices….

The Hope Garden

Any morning can have hope. Any person can have hope. Getting the two to align is the real trick. I have spent many mornings running into things, feeling overwhelmed, wondering what happened to my hope. Wondering if I could manufacture it from a memory that I had of hope from the night before. The answer…

The Cicadas of Laziness

Quick note… Morning came late again today. Late shows two nights in a row. I loved the audiences so much that it made it bearable to be away from home. Being away from home has its guilt. While I mill around trying to make my time useful, my wife has no reprieve from a relentless…

The Political Broken Home (Lesser Of The Two Evils)

The lesser of the two evils. Is that how we do everything? I, like a lot of people, am from a broken home. Has the rise of the “lesser of the two evils” style of parenting that my parent’s generation pioneered corresponded with the growth of the political environment that we are currently in? There…

The Kindness Of Me

The kindness of strangers is the kindness of me.  If you ever feel lonely, imagine how the people around you feel. I want something from the world and when I don’t get it I feel an emptiness that I call loneliness. Did I create the same for others? If I am taking than I am…

Catch 22 Day

Everybody is up so I am up. The dogs are up. The kids are up. So I am up. There was a time when I slept until I didn’t like sleeping anymore and that is a time a barely remember. I think it was fraught with indecision and loneliness. Maybe it was a terrible time…

It May Rain

It rains on the sunniest days and sometimes it looks like rain and never breaks. The memory and understanding of these are the things balance us. I miss ease sometimes but never knew it when it was upon me. I am stronger now than I was but I felt much stronger before. Knowledge takes away certainty…

Perfect parenting (sarcasm)

Parenting is terrifying, unrewarding, and doomed if you do not face the perfectionist inside of you and do away with it completely.  I cry when I get time away from my kids because I start reliving my failures as a parent.  The thing all those failures have in common is the perfectionism that has driven…