Monday Miasma

It hit like a dull headache, a black bomb, an overripe tomato to the skull. The radio alarm began its insistent bleating at 5:25 a.m. as this hot, bleary Monday morning made a rat-like appearance on the horizon. Rolling out of bed to get the shower going for my beautiful wife, thankful for Mr. Coffee burbling away around the corner in the kitchen, I stumbled around the house like a weary drunk, hoping that the calendar was wrong, that perhaps it was still Sunday. After staggering around with the iron, clothes for the day, and a sloshing cup of caffeine, I made the bed, balanced the budget and put something good on the iPod for my workout later in the day. This American Life with Ira Glass, Dave Ramsey's 39 minutes of financial wisdom, and maybe a few running tunes to keep me from an early death. Fortified with the first effects of pulse-quickening coffee, I shower, get dressed and then help my wife get squared away for her early commute. I wave as she drives off under crystalline blue skies, heat already rising off the blacktop. Brown, parched mountains in the distance.

Egg white omelet, bowl of oatmeal, vitamins, kids off to school. Driving in on the freeway I see cadavers hunched behind wheels, swerving and jockeying for lane position. Monday smearing itself on me, I signal to exit, park under the scalding sun and ensconce myself behind this screen, arteries constricting, blood pressure rising. I count the MINUTES down between arrival and next available departure. Finally to the gym for relief...escape. The workout hour flies, the afternoon drags like a hundred years in Kansas. 4:30 arrives five days later and I race out of here like a rocket-fueled demon. Racing home on the freeway, my gray Honda sedan screaming around less motivated motorists. Home, and all of its unique issues, comes into view and I am free for 12 hours.

This is no way to live. At all. Enduring stress, pounding boredom, zero motivation. Interest long-gone. $93536.04 every year gets me what? A house that I hate, white trash neighbors...where did I go wrong? It was the worst decision of my life to buy the KB house in February of 2007, it's price already fallen $100K with another $75K to go, unknown to me. I have no debt except this house...and the rental property. Certainly not an 'income' property. No other debt. Savings not insubstantial, though lagging for my age.

I am seeking the courage, the direction, the wisdom...to move away from this, to increase the angle of my trajectory. To enter the Narrow Gate, not just seek it.

Matthew 7:13-14 (New International Version)
The Narrow and Wide Gates
"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Demons

For the first roughly 34 years of life, I believed I had no aberrant, peculiar or disagreeable habits or personal disabilities. The last ten years, however, have proven me wrong. Patience, once my shining hallmark, has eroded to the point that it now abruptly ends, mid-whatever-crisis, and vanishes completely without warning at all. On a related note, much of my tolerance is gone, though I notice this mostly at Wal-Mart, where I still inexplicably find myself far too often. I won't even go in to the vitriol coursing through me during these visits, but suffice it to say that I have few nice thoughts about many of my fellow shoppers.

Preparedness is another area that finds me lacking. It isn't that I don't eventually get prepared for whatever event is happening (usually involving a trip...to Wal-Mart), or that I don't make consistent progress toward the goal of actually leaving my house, it's just that I take FOREVER to get out the door! Do I have keys, money, correct shoes, hat, jacket, are the windows closed, stove off, doors locked, lights off, water off, things straightened up (OMG, that's another issue), alarm on, dog out, where is my cell phone, do we have grocery bags, library books, lists, children aboard and ready to roll? And there is my wife, sitting in the running car, wondering why it is taking me 17 minutes to get out of the house.

Order-Structure-Cleanliness-Efficiency-Precision. Oh dear, this is huge, simply massive. Probably my worst trait of all time in that I want these five qualities in every aspect of my existence. And the thing is, I rarely feel that everything is in order to the degree that will allow me to feel comfortable with the state of affairs in which I find myself. Check that, not rarely, absolutely never. Never is the word that is accurate because there is always something out of place, dusty, broken, missing, unkempt, ajar, askew, bowled over, incomplete...I could go on with many more adjectives and descriptions of unacceptable conditions, but I won't because I am about to have a stroke-seizure-heart attack just thinking about such heinous things. At the very least, I need a personal valet-concierge-maid-butler-gardener-nanny-car washer-body guard-personal trainer-interior decorator... preferably embodied by one individual who performs all these functions silently and virtually invisibly.

Check this definition from Wikipedia: Perfectionism, in psychology, is a belief that perfection can and should be attained. In its pathological form, perfectionism is a belief that work or output that is anything less than perfect is unacceptable. At such levels, this is considered an unhealthy belief, and psychologists typically refer to such individuals as maladaptive perfectionists.

Sloth-Laziness. The king demon that tries to wrestle me to the ground at every turn. "Why make your bed or iron your clothes or clean up your dishes after breakfast" it screams at me. "You would rather get drunk, eat pork rinds and sleep in the garbage can" goes the bellowing. Just where is that valet-concierge-car washer anyway? Mowing the lawn?!

Correct Decisions. I want to be able to execute every single decision in my life, from investments to what to wear to Wal-Mart to what gift I bring my wife, with precision and accuracy never before experienced in human history. Maybe this is over the top, but I don't care at all, it is blunt truth.

Knowledge. Simply put, I want to know all things so that I am prepared to make perfect decisions at all times. "There is no substitute for knowledge." Is W. Edwards Deming still alive?

Now I am beginning to laugh at myself because this is ridiculous. Nobody on this earth is perfect. I know that there is only one that is perfect, and that one is Jesus Christ. The Bible exhorts us to become more and more like Him, so that is my pursuit. Until the time comes that we are taken in the twinkling of an eye, perhaps I should work for Lexus. Or Wal-Mart.

Halfway to Mt. Rose

We made it to the falls today with all 3 kids, plus another mile up the trail to the Canyon of Death, where we turned around. All told: 6 miles of dirt today!