The Emerald Rose

       Yup! I do a lot of thinking on the weekends because I have the time, in fact that would be my “hobby”,….thinking! I thought I would just write a blog about what goes through my mind in the hour or so it takes to write this blog each time, and my friends, today, being my birthday I get a “kitchen pass” to go to the Pub, not that I need one, but I am looking forward to it today.

         As Julia Child used to say, “Bon Appetit”, and take two valium when you r head starts to hurt from reading 🙂

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       With big blocks of time, no “drop dead” time constraints like an insurnace meeting at 10am, that you need twenty minutes to prepare for, or a Board of Directors Meeting at 3:00pm that you know is going to run til 6pm and absolutely nothing is going to wind up being accomplished, incessant telephone calls with life altering crisis like, “We didn’t get a pool pass and the kids all want to go to the pool can we get one this morning from you?”, or better yet, “There is dog poop on the sidewalk by the mailboxes, you need to take care of it,…now!” But on the weekends I still get e-mails and calls, but now I can dicern who is a serious caller or mailer and who is a “Space Cadet” and deserves to just flat be ignored and by Monday morning they will have forgotten thier rant from Saturday morning.

         So what do I think about,…let’s see. I think about my wife and how we should be in a far better place than we are right now, and what can I do to improve it, or at least take away some of the pain fo it. I think about our kids and how they are finally, albeit in thier 30’s, coming around and pursuing more education and how the now KNOW the value of the education and THEY are paying for it to boot. They understand investing in yourself, and that makes me proud. I think about my grandchildren and the big gooey bag of shit we are getting ready to give them in terms of insurmountable debt and even higher walls to scale to hope for the American Dream. I think of the guys on CNBC, and Wall Street, like Steve Gasparino, and Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer who are pure passion machines that care for this country and it’s people, not the Bernie Madeoffs and Stanhope who slink around like a snake and have injected venom into our society. I think of the Rabb family in Boston, without whose support the Boston Symphony Orchestra would be floundering, and how Bernie Madeoff has severely wounded their ability to meet the philanthropic commitments to the community. I think of my friends at the Pub, and their ups and downs in life, I think of all matter of things.

          I think of my friend Jim Sims in Malta, an educated survivor who has learned to smell the roses, watch the sunsets, value each day for what it is and still think and ponder what the world is all about. I think of my friend John, whose Mom has Alzheimer’sand he has quit his job to be with her until there is no more he can do for her. I think of my friends from everywhere and how their lives have turned out, my friend Steve who traded thirty years of hard work and long hours to be able to retire secure, but having lost his wife to an affair because she really believed the Romance Novels and the Danielle Steeles of the world were right and a simple “I’m sorry” made eveything go away. Even though he remarried and says he’s happy, “the sauce” is showing it’s toll on him. I think about how to keep current on all my bills and obligations in this total mess we find ourselves in in this country. I think how nice it would be to feel as though I really could sit down and read a novel and enjoy it without my microcosm intruding and making those little voices and thoughts constantly battling in my head for attention. I think about how much harder it is to even put on socks as you get older,(OK, I need to workout more!) I think about how little I eat for desserts, sugar items, fast food, bread, and all the other stuff that’s “bad for you” yet I still weigh in too high for my own liking. (The BIGGEST question is simply is it the two or three pints of Guinness a day that are keeping it on me? This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday for us “mackerel snappers”, papists, or whatever you call us, and I’ve decided to test myself and the allegations from my wife that it is the Guinness, and give it up or Lent.) Please bear in mind that this may cause my blogto become a cesspool of anger, angst, vindictiveness, rude and crude and otherwise “open mouth , insert foot”. It’s only forty days and I’ve obviously input mid-way points that Guinness is permissible, Friday March 9th, because a friend is coming back from SedonaNew Mexico for a weekend and we both enjoy talking and pints, and March 17th, St. Patricks day, after all I’m an Irish American as well as a Catholic, you sure don’t want to piss off St. Patrick and the Pope in the same day, …who knows what might happen.

        I think about the 80% blockage in my Carotid artery, just one, the other is fine, you tell me how that happens, does cholesterolall go one way? I’m really curious and none of the enlightened Doc’s have yet to be able to tell me. I think about the $6,000 bucks worthof testing they’ve done thus far and what part of that little party I ‘ll have to pay for, what withdeductibles, co-pays, left handed widgets and whatever else it is they throw in the policy. Oh and “The Boy King” threw a curve and dumped the whole company into a new “employee leasing company” with all new health insurance, which means annual deductibles start all over again in March, gee ain’t I lucky! All the shit I’ve incurred thus far is mostly “deductible” stuff, and I can’t imagine the costs of the “Vascular Surgeon” I have to go see March 10th, and the ensuing “procedures” are a 3 for $10 variety. (A friend told me the going rate for the type of work I’ll probably get, either and “angioplasty”, or a “stent” are in the $10,000 to $20,000 range. (Wonder what the rate is to “roto-rooter” the whole freakin’ vascular system, shit  may as well get everything done while we are in playing!) I wonder about the insurance guy I was talking to yesterday who told me if they did go ahead withthe surgery I would henceforth be deemed totally uninsurable in the private insurance market. I think about the Boston Red Sox and how they will do this season, I think about the Web-ex pc now program that used to work on my computer which has every freakin’ engineer at the Web-Ex company scratching their head and saying “Duh,…I duunno! Try rebooting it again.”  That would be re-boot number 246 since I started counting and guess what? NOTHING!

        Well just wanted to share where my head goes on the weekends, (Oh forgot about Church, Sunday mornings from 8 am til 9am. I believe in a God, I think he has a little warped sense of Humor sometimes, but I certainly don’t know who else could have put this whole thing together, let alone keep it all spinning 24/7.  I believe there used to be a herasy called Jansenism in which it is alleged, “one religions as good as another”. I do sometimes think a lot about that as I am “a man of the world”, hence have a number of friends who range from athiest, through agnostic, to “rabid” evangelical to devote Judiesm, and even a few Islamic folks. I do think and therefore struggle with the concept that God loves anyone the less because they are not a Roman Catholic who recieves all the sacraments and beloieves everything told them as “gospel”

        Just realized I’m free-wheeling again. Time to move on, back to work, such as it is, tomorrow.

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