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!

BEST FATHER'S DAY EVER (almost)

This is what my lovely wife and kids got me for Father's Day this year! It is exactly what I wanted and I have already waxed both cars once and will likely do it again this weekend. How insane is that? The old gripe from dads is that we always get tools or equipment designed primarily to fix or build something that the wife has always wanted or needed to be done.

The good thing about me is that I am not handy in the least. For instance, we need a retaining wall in our back yard as the current situation with loose rocks intermingled with dog poop doesn't look as good as it sounds. I cannot, however, build anything. Last time I tried to fix the gate to our yard, it wasn't two days before I was asking our neighbor to fix the mess I had created. First, the whole assembly was crooked and dragged along the concrete during opening and closing movements. Second, it was horribly constructed with flimsy bits of wood and whatever screws and nails I was able to find in the parts bin. So I'm no Bob Vila!

Ah, but this car polisher is an exceptional machine. I may wax every car in my neighborhood. And seriously, our cars shine like forty billion suns in a galaxy of mirrors. What a dumb post this is, you might say. In fact, an English professor I had at a low-brow San Joaquin Valley junior college told me that the descriptive writing assignment that I dedicated to my 1981 Malibu Classic was inane and pointless..."who cares" was his exact comment. What a jerk! It's not like I was enrolled at UC Berkeley!

When I was just out of high school in the mid-1980's, my friend Tim Hudson swore by auto wax from The Wax Shop for his 1966 Dodge Charger, though I don't know if that brand is around any more. Anyway, I am using Mothers Gold Carnauba wax on my cars now. I probably should have started with a cleaner, then a sealer and glaze, but I am a big fat pansy and I just wanted to get the shine on. Plus, I'm dealing with 2 and 4 year old cars, not beaters from the rust belt.

So there you go, Dr. Beloof from Coalinga, CA, another rant about how stupid I am and how shiny my car is because of my wonderful wife and kids. I vow to dedicate my next story to my economics professor at that same "school" who drove a 1978 Oldsmobile Delta 88 diesel. Sweet, huh?

And the only reason that this was 'almost' the best Fathers Day Ever is because my boy is not yet home, but will be on Monday!

Mike Boster - "My Journey" from Hope Community on Vimeo.

Why I Hate My Financial Advisor

To be blunt, straight away, I will simply say that my financial advisor is a boob. He's short, red-faced, and toothy. In addition, he talks far too much. Aren't these people supposed to listen rather than jabber on endlessly about the advantages of trusting them completely with every single financial decision you will ever, EVER make?

So, I hate him with an intensity and bubbling rage that, heretofore, I have not experienced. My previous advisor, with the same company, which I won't mention...OK, I will, it's VALIC, those bastards that nearly ran the world into the sun with their greed and hubris-driven insanity. Nonetheless, my first advisor was Asian, and I simply adored him. Not because of his ethnicity, but because he freaking listened to me, which, as I may have mentioned, my new advisor seems to be unable to do. In fact, Mr. Short Red cannot cease with his talking. I just met with him for 25 minutes and was barely able to get in a word. Bring back the Asian!

In closing, and to reiterate, I hate my VALIC advisor, even though the Bible implores us all to not hate our advisors. In the spirit of reconciliation, I will make all efforts to reduce my hatred to simple loathing. My weekend, however, has been ruined by his stain on my office furniture. I may require an early exit so that I can beat the crowd to Trader Joe's for a bottle of pinot noir to go with our delightful tri-tip this evening. I have spoken!

Cab Snow

At some point in mid-summer of 1989, I met a curious fellow named Corky, who became by best friend for a period of close to ten years. As fellow change monkeys, we aspired to do more at Harrah's, eventually leading him to the sports book and me to the valet parking department. All the while, I was faithfully attending classes at the University, doing reasonably well, and making progress toward a degree in geography. I'll get in to why I would have chosen such a peculiar major later on, for now, I was simply moving forward. Corky had tried college before and gave it another shot at Nevada, which for him was in one day and back out a few days later. University life just wasn't his gig, he was going to make it big betting on sports.

By the winter of '89, we both had moved in to our pinnacle positions at Harrah's and had become regulars at a bar called 'The Stuffed Shirt,' which is an idiotic name for a bar, but it was just across the street from Harrah's on 2nd Street and the bartender there, Jim, offered a free drink, usually after our 8th or 9th round. 'One for the road,' he would call it, which just seems insane thinking about it now, nearly 20 years out. Double fisting Coors Lights, playing pool and blasting Journey on the jukebox became our regular after work entertainment for months on end.

Mid winter in Reno can be grim, gray, freezing cold and depressing. While the first snow of the season is a welcome sign of change, the snows that come in late January are more bleak and tinged with dreariness. Emerging from 'The Shirt,' as we called it, one black 4:00 a.m., filled to the absolute brim with beer and reeking of cigarette smoke, Corky and I decided to go back over to Harrah's and regale our graveyard shift buddies with tales of drunkenness and how we clumsily attempted to hustle a couple of tourists at pool. Of course we needed fresh beers to fortify us as we stumbled through the casino, shouting at dealers we knew and placing crank pages with the hotel operators, "Paging Hugh Jass, paging Hugh Jass," and making general fools of ourselves.

Usually, one of the shift supervisors would speak quietly with us, exhorting us to leave at once lest we be reprimanded for being in uniform on property while completely drunk. So we usually left. Chugging the remainder of his beer before exiting, Corky expelled a ghastly and horribly loud burp just as we were emerging onto Center Street. The windows on the doors are heavily tinted and we did not see a small group of ladies coming in as we were leaving. One of them was unfortunate enough to bear the direct blast at a distance of no more than a foot. It was awful, one of the worst things I've ever seen. This poor lady was simply walking into the casino to have a good time (though it is in the wee hours of the day, so I guess you take your chances in downtown Reno) and suddenly she is hit with the stench and fury of an exaggerated belch directly in the face.

I recall saying something like 'Oh my God' and running from the building with Corky staggering behind me, laughing wildly and flailing around like a psychotic freak. He had his Harrah's tie wrapped around his skull like a headband, sort of like Rambo, but drunk and substantially less menacing. Out into the icy streets of Reno, slick and filthy from last week's snow. A rattling taxi bounced by on the pothole-chocked street, expelling a chunk of snow-caked ice from its' wheelwell. Corky lunged into the roadway and seized the brown and gray clump, screaming "cab snow, cab snow!" Immediately, he was running with his new prize back toward the Harrah's entry doors, staggering and laughing like a lunatic. Once inside, he held the hunk aloft, high over his head as it dripped muddy water onto his shirt. "Cab snow for sale," he shouted, "fresh cab snow from the streets of Reno!" Security was on him at once, pushing him back toward the doors. I had made my way to the bar and decided to order up a new beer and watch the spectacle. Upon his forced exit, Corky launched the chunk back into the street, screaming something that I couldn't make out from where I was sitting. After maybe ten minutes, I saw him skulking around another entrance door and then making his way to the bar, his shirt and face streaked with mud. "Where's my beer?" he demanded. "They don't serve street pigs like you in this place," I told him. Five more beers each and we determined it was the end of the road for this adventure, noting the rising sun and the arrival of dayshifters on the scene. It was nearly 8:00 in the morning and we were both due back to work by 3:00 that afternoon.

The suited men in more respectable positions at Harrah's were arriving for their workday, frowning disapprovingly at us as we made our way to the parking garage, both of us unkempt, shirts untucked, stumbling along the sidewalk. Corky was more of a spectacle than I was, covered with dried mud and grime. "See you in a few hours," I mumbled as he staggered out of the elevator to find his car, no real idea if he had stopped at the right floor. He'd figure it out, I thought, and I quickly got to my own car and headed for home.