Tryptophan

it's thanks-freaking-giving, baby! a whole day of seeing people i actually like! gorging myself on all things sweet and savory! smoked turkey and giblet gravy, sweet potato casserole, corn bread, spinach balls, cranberry sauce! maybe a little football, i might talk to people...

it makes me glad that the pilgrims came over on the nina, pinta and santa maria in 1776 to escape nazi oppression. i'm glad that first thanksgiving feast was brought by neil armstrong and charles lindberg all the way from sydney, austrailia. so glad that the indians brought prime rib and tilapia from the casino buffets to feed the soldiers at the alamo. and so glad that my leonard education gave me a firm understanding of history so that i can appreciate it all...

i don't know if it's possible for humans to overdose on tryptophan, but, by God, i'm going to try...

it's cold in san antone...

oh, God, i hate the cold. say what you will about the heat in texas, but it's not like being cold.

it's concentrated pain that starts on the skin moves to the joints and then settles into your joints. your skin contracts, dries, and flakes; any scratch or smack is agony, your lips crack and bleed. all extremities ache and become painful to touch or move... no really, ALL extremities. that's not a broken bone or arterial bleeding, this is a serious injury. your heart rate slows, your blood coagulates, hypothermia sets in, you become lethargic and you slowly accept your fate. you freeze to death. your family divides your belongings and end up throwing most of it away.

you'll seldom hear me complain about the heat, but the cold i'll gripe about.

i played the red river valley...

i grew up in texas, i like it here, i might even be one of those people who have an unnecessarily high level of texas pride. the culture and history of texas are such that i love it, that's what drive people crazy about it. europeans hate americans because we think we're better than they are, that's also why most americans hate texans... jealousy knows no loyalties.

i have, however, been experiencing something contradictory to my national pride, having fallen for a girl from the wrong side of the river. not that there's anything wrong with the reservation, several of my ancestors were born in the indian territory (when it actually was the indian territory), there's even a cherokee in the list, but the inherit inferiority of the state is undeniable to even the staunchest defender of the land rush zone, after all, they don't just give away good land. in fact, the only time i can find that considerable chunks of texas were simply given away was by the spanish government and that was considered quite an honor. i mean, a slice of heaven from the queen? rock on! land in the bleakest parts of west texas is cheap, but you still have to pay for the honor.

what's the big deal about the lone star? i can't tell you. are we the most beautiful state? no way. biggest? not quite. richest, most populated, most popular, oldest, trendiest? no, no, no, no... i can't explain the majesty if you don't want to see it, because if you're willing then you've already seen it. there have been more song written about texas than, well, the rest of the united state put together...

she doesn't like it when i talk this way, when the interstate prejudice that has been drilled into me since infancy rears it's ugly head, but she simply sighs shakes her head and writes it off as mere enthusiasm... she's a good girl.

work, work, work...

i've worked all my life, it's really all i know how to do.

at ten years old i was, for the first time, paid for my labor. my cousin, grant, and i were contracted by my mother to pull weeds in the greenhouse for 3 dollars an hour, and glad to get it. for five hours we pulled weeds from the pea gravel coated, fire ant infested, black texas clay; our hands were cut up from johnson grass, covered in ant bites, and blistered from stubborn crab grass, but at the end of the day we each had $15 and three more greenhouses to weed. that day i learned to never work for family...

at sixteen, equipped with my own transportation, i got my first real job. oh, i'd done odd jobs for neighbors and work plenty of gigs for dad, but this was a real job with real work, a real boss and real pay. for $6 an hour, 40 hours a week, for three months i worked steel construction. unfortunately, the summer of 1997 we had nearly 100 consecutive days of triple digit heat and it only rained once... on my day off. my boss was a great guy, the now late ronnie wren, but he was never there, so i was at the mercy of brett the gang boss. i learned how to out work grown men, to out think a boss who doesn't give you quite enough information, and how to treat a welders burn to the eyes.

through college i went to work the family biz: working show floors, loading trucks, driving trucks, unloading trucks, setting shows, reloading trucks, driving trucks and re-unloading trucks. the show and destination might change, but the M.O. was pretty much the same, some gigs were fun, some were just work. i learned how to work a show, work to a deadline, deal with the client, to bribe the dock master, and always take care of your crew.

the work i do now is not all that different from the work i've always done. it's usually cleaner and it pays a little better, but the lessons i've learned along the way still play into it. ultimately, this work i more rewarding to me because it's my work, what i love and that allows me to invest more into it than i would at a different job.

maybe that's just the way it works, maybe not but i feel fortunate. my dad always said, "you can't call it work unless you'd rather be doing something else," but i say "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life."

you know,it's going to be alright

you say you want a revolution? well, you know we all want to change the world...

given an infinite amount of time we'll all make jerks out of ourselves, it's not a question of "if" it's only a question of "when." knowing this, all one can hope to do is both postpone the inevitable and/or choose to allow it to happen in a controlled environment where it is either acceptable or merely allowable.

i'm not perfect, as those who have had even cursory exposure to me can attest, and not being perfect makes me susceptible to the aforementioned rule, thus i go to great pains to allow myself to be a jerk as little as possible and usually fail miserably at these efforts. these failures have become fodder for those who enjoy nothing more than to recount these stories repeatedly in front of the very people i'd avoided looking like a jerk to in the first place, which often results in my acting like a jerk again. see a pattern?

this is where you can change the world. this is where you can make a difference. forget green peace, salvation army, good will, and habitat for humanity... almost all of the greatest atrocities in human history were perpetrated by jerks and egged on by jerks, all we have to do to save the world is stopped being jerks to one another. it's so simple... it's not even original, an early proponent of this idea ended up getting nailed to a tree for suggesting it, but that didn't make him wrong! on the contrary, it just proves that jerks don't like to be called jerks and will respond unpleasantly.

so do you part! knock it off!

what's the difference between smart and smarter?

think about the people you know... family, friends, co-workers, bus drivers, waiters, anyone. now, divide those people into two groups, those you would consider of above average intelligence and those who are average or less (there's no need to be mean, though). now, having done that, try and identify the element that consistently divides the two. isolated ideas might include problem solving, language and verbage, vocational proficiency, musical prowess, people skills and salesmanship; any of these would work case by case, but the only one that fits across the board is the ability to sell ones self.

i'm not a shrink or sociologist, i'm not issuing I.Q. tests, nor did i ask you to, the test field was completely perceptive and you, the reader, grouped these people based on your opinion not anyones intelligence, there by, the people in column A are there because they sold themselves better than those in column B, and you bought it. so the answer to the original query is confidence. it's all about believing what you say enough that you can sell it to other people.

i have a friend who is better at this than most and as a result he has accomplished almost enough to meet his ambitions but definitely enough to feed his ego. Six times out of ten this confidence is backed up with at least fifty percent of the experience needed to make it legit, but he leaves a lot to chance. even so, people eat it up.

i, on the other hand, tend to sell myself short on a great deal of levels and, as a result, i have a hard time selling myself to people. (enter male prostitution joke here)

from whence does this difference come? one mans born a hero, his brother a coward; one man born a prince his neighbor a pauper.

i don't know... i guess i'm not smart enough.

patriarch

one of my earliest memories is a trip to a hospital in terrell, tx. i was three or four years old and riding around on my fathers hip when we, as a family, gathered around the bed of J.P. Oden Sr and watched my grandfather say goodbye to his dad. i think that's what stuck with me, not the foreboding mortality, not my cousin kyle teasing me about brains kept in jars, not the fragile old man lying in bed tied to countless machines, but my grandfather calling that old man "dad."

that is all i remember about J.P. sr, but today as we gather around J.P. jr in an eerily similar fashion, i remember my grandfather in a very different way. it's hard to tell if my memories of the room in terrell are being sharpened by these similarities or if i'm trading details between today and yesterday, granddad looks so much like his father that it almost feels like the same experience.

Johnny Oden lived more in his first twenty years than i will in a lifetime, perhaps that can be said of his whole generation, but granddad had it in spades. born in montague county, tx in 1924, he is the quintessential depression baby: tough, frugal, and with a wisdom that comes from seeing the world change around him.

in 1937, granddad was a boy scout living in longview when he got his first taste of adulthood. that year, a gas leak at the school in new london, tx, caused an explosion that killed and buried the children of an entire town, and at thirteen his boy scout troop was called in along with national and state guards to pull bodies from the rubble. no one in the family would hear him talk about it until 2006.

in 1941, shortly after the attack on pearl harbor, johnny lied about his age and color-blindness to enlist in the navy. serving as a pharmacists mate on a warship he sailed around the world three times and put in at ports in asia, austrailia, the phillipines and pearl twice before the end of the war.

in 1945, after dating for six weeks and four days, he married my grandmother and they loved each other for over 64 years. they raised two sons, saw six grandchildren and, currently, eight great-grandchildren. he worked lots of jobs through his life, from milkman to truckdriver to traveling saleman, whatever it took to provide for his family; they never did without.

my grandfather was one of my heros, he never said anything that he didn't have to but he always told us he loved us. he was baptized in the thirties in a muddy creek off of a red dirt road in east texas. he seldom talked about God but he taught me how to pray, he prayed over every meal in his house until i was 16... when he started to ask me to do it, a responsibility i was hardly ready for. he taught me to fish, tie a knot, and be a man; to love your family and do whatever is required with dignity and honor.

today was so alike that day in terrell, but so different. the baby on his dad's hip belonged to my sister, kyle talked mostly about his daughter and not brains in jars, and no one was surprised by the love and admiration shown to the patriarch i've known all my life.

As we prayed over him today, his last with us, we said the Lord's prayer the way my father taught us and a prayer very much like the one i'd heard my grandfather say all my life: that God would guide us, protect us, and forgive us our many sins.

amen...

sleep deprivation results in...

when i was young i had a blanket, it was yellow and had a brown dog on it. it wasn't expensive, it wasn't particularly nice or even that clean most of the time, but until i was four or five it was never a considerable distance away from me. people would call such a talisman a security blanket, as if to imply there was some insecurity in a child that is resolved by having access to a familiar object, but this was different. i didn't feel insecure or incomplete without my blanket, i, instead, felt guilty about the blankets feelings of neglect or abandonment. i actually felt bad about leaving my blanket behind... that's just weird.

perhaps it's the result of my being incredibly sensitive and caring about the people and (ahem) things around me, but more than likely it was just an obsession that was developed out of habit. an obsessive personality can be a dangerous thing. i say "can be" because it also has it's uses. one of my favorite obsessives is tom morello.

morello is known to most as the innovative guitar player for Rage Against the Machine and later Audioslave (arguably the same band minus Zak DeLaRocha), but before he was the socially informed, anarchist rocker morello was a sociology student at harvard university. this ivy league iconoclast picked up the guitar relatively late in the game, in his late teens, but his passion was undeniable. one day a friend and fellow picker suggested, "tom, if you practice one hour a day, you WILL get better." so an hour a day it was, every day, and morello did improve.

but i have not told all... morello logically deduced that if his playing improved in an hour a day, two hours a day would improve it twice as fast. After several weeks he was surprised to find that he was improving considerably more than twice as fast on the double time, so he stepped it up the three hours, four hours, five hours, and finally six hours a day. come hell or high water, tom morello practiced guitar for six hours a day, everyday while he completed a degree in sociology at Harvard. his obsession was such that despite 103 degree fever and a final exam the next morning, he was obliged to begin his regimen at 2:00 am in order to satisfy his routine. it was this grueling training that gave him unbelievable prowess and ingenuity, making him instantly recognizable in his music.

i wish my own obsessiveness was that focused, but it has help me in several areas.

while i did, at one point, practice guitar for up to four hours a day, clearly my sessions weren't as productive, but it, doubtless, built the foundation for the meager understanding i have today. i have been known to adjust a kick drum mic almost constantly for an entire show, or even an entire weekend, until i find the EXACT sound i like. i have, in the past, written long, wordy articles about completely random thoughts and blurbs that run through my head and publish them on semi-public forums just to try and remember how to write.

besides, until someone slaps me with a restraining order, how could my obsession get me into trouble...

totality

Assume you have two men, one builds cars and the other works on the assembly line at Ford motors. Did you notice the difference between these two men? while it could be argued that both build cars, the flaw in that argument is totality. only the man who builds the car from the ground up has the big picture, total control over quality and creativity. mr. assembly line is all about routine.

is routine bad? of course not, patterns exist to make things understandable. most people don't have that big picture knowledge of anything, we might have partial knowledge of many things but that non-pervasive element of totality remains elusive.

tonight i was asked: why? why do you work seven days a week? why don't you fight for those days off, days that could be spent living and not working?

i immediately rattled off the half dozen rationalities that keep me from asking that question myself: no one else was available, i was asked and that's enough, it's my responsibility, etc. these answers smacked eerily of excuse, lacking any substantive reason. further query was necessary...

i can boil it down to two reasons, respect and pride. there are two groups of professionals that i deal with: those i respect and those i work with. those i work with are just that, people who do similar tasks as i do and look forward to friday and payday. these people aren't flawed, they just operate differently than i do.

the people whom i respect drive me to work longer, smarter and harder, encouraging me to reach that totality i require, the big picture. they expect excellence, perfection, everything you have, a pride in your work as a hallmark you leave behind.

the problem is that, like most men, i have so much of who i am wrapped up in what i do. working with these people make me better at my job, my job defines me as a person, so being better at my job makes me a better person? noble but shortsighted at best. i want more...

"...You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet..."

Oubliette

i'm not one to be morose for the sake of drama, but i don't have the best self esteem.

i say that. while i've never been inside your head, i'm willing to bet we share the same number self doubting, self depreciating moments in an average day, or else you're an egotistical jerk that i'd rather not associate with. to a person who struggles with these kinds of feelings, the idea that we are all suffering from a kind of corporate malaise is comforting; believing that you are as inferior as i think i am makes me happy. call it shadenfrueda.

as a counter-measure to this "inferiority complex," many of us, present company included, project a version of ourselves that we think we want to be. jr high health class would call it self esteem vs. self image, i myself, while constantly doubting my own ability and self-worth, do apparently project such a confident version that many consider me arrogant and cocky... so maybe i over shot a little bit. suddenly, i'm obsessed with whether or not i, in fact, am both of these... a vicious cycle doth thus begin.

this cycle of thought runs nearly constantly in the back of my head and must be constantly ignored if i want to do anything out of routine. i don't believe this is the healthiest way to cope with such a situation, but shrinks aren't cheap so it'll do.

despite even this discussion, i'm not a self-loathing cutter who wants to be dropped into an oubliette for the rest of my life, though it sounds relaxing. i merely suspect these leanings are normal and get over it, knowing that i'm as capable as anyone else and better looking to boot.

how that for self-affirmation?

wordy dating incompetence

there are so many things on which i have absolutely NO clue. while i'm a self proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, have no allusions, i am definitely a master at none of them.

however, i do have the uncanny ability to get myself into situations for which there is no other recourse than learn my way out of it. this attribute has found me in tight spaces stripping wires, high places rigging ropes, and low places trying desperately to claw my way up. it not only forces me to be in places i would love to avoid, but puts me with people i, other wise, wouldn't have known, a blessing for a fairly anti-socialite such as myself, people with the knack.

scott adams defines the knack as a intuitive understanding of all things electrical and mechanical accompanied by utter social ineptitude. since i don't claim to have the market cornered on either one of the former traits, neither do i pretend to fall complete victim to latter. being the product of a texas, black-dirt farm, however, i don't interact well with others, and this is the wet paper bag that i'm currently learning my way out of.

as does a good thinker not always a good engineer make, neither does a good speaker always find his social agenda full, but when a knack-ridden rural-ite finds himself in a social situation he tries desperately to move attention off of himself. example:

several weeks ago i met a young lady for dinner and she, unexpectedly, brought several other lady friends. having come straight from work, i was not necessarily dressed to impress and not feeling too terribly charming. yet, there i was with four lovely young women, one especially, trying to live up to the opportunity. on the outside i was poised, confident, witty and calm, but it was, predictably, an all together other story in my head.

i was constantly repeating, "don't say anything nerdy, don't say anything nerdy," when one of my female companions said (over the wine i only pretended to fully appreciate), "what is it you do?" dammit!

oh well, live and learn...

fireflies...

it's been some time since i've felt the need to relay my inmost thoughts to the masses on an all-together unread blog. if these posts are read by no one but myself and the NSA, my time will not be ill-spent.

tonight i sit idly, waiting for the proper time for things to happen, with tiny white spots burning into the backs of my retinas. if these spots are the results of simple eyestrain brought on by hours of computer use, then a blog describing them is more than mere futility; it would be an example of stupidity reserved for people who drink beer and use chainsaw simultaneously, an exacerbation of one's sentience. knowing a problem and acknowledging it through the same scenario that brought on that problem to begin with borders on the ridiculous and even insane!

yet here i sit, the blinding white spots of irritation, which are almost certainly precursors for cataracts, burrowing their way through my brain into my stomach and all i can do is stare at the source of my troubles wondering, "why? o, why, machine, do you detest me so? to promise so much, require so little and reward me nothing but a feeling of accomplishment in today's minutia, a trivial understanding of the workings of things; it would be comedic if it wasn't so cruel."

or maybe i'm just tired...