The Lotto Winning Cyst

Self Fulfilling Prophecy.

You (better) know what it means. In case you've forgotten, then let me give you a taste.

Some dude from Washington state drops out of college, convinced he's smarter than the people he's in school with. Hell, he's convinced he's smarter than the faculty. Cocky? No. Determined? Oh yeah. He co-founds a major company and works really hard every day to make his pre-determined self-evaluation a reality. He listens to his confidantes, trusts only those he deems worthy of his vision, and ignores critics that tell him the world is not interested in his version of it. Bill Gates.

Actually, no. That person was Skyler Clark, a skateboarder from Yakima who still lives in his car. But he is one happy son of a bitch. He gets up in the morning with a smile on his face and does what he believes he was born to do. He hurts no one, loves and respects himself, and makes the world better. So, one might argue, does Bill Gates, but I just dropped his name to make you say, "I knew he was talking about Gates." Honestly, they are interchangeable because they both cling to the basic tenet of life that if one finds inner belief in one's self...one is capable of peace, joy, and anything they choose to do. (I made that tenet up, but it sounds both surfer-budhhist, and cool, so roll with it.)

A self fulfilling prophecy is generally construed or used contextually as a negative. It's the easy cop out to a parent saying, "I told you so," to a child that falls off his bike while not wearing a helmet and suffers a fat bruise. The kid had been told something, thought about it, worried about it, made a decision to test it out and VOILA! It came to life, just like Mom told him it would. That prophecy has no spine with a conscious choice to forgo the helmet and see...and in this instance, it's the negative outcome of the desired effect that only has a chance of surfacing.

I would much rather focus on the positive side of a SFP. Consider the wonderful movie, Rudy, starring 5 foot nothing inch Samwise Gamgee himself, Sean Astin. The perfect stature for this role, hard-chinned and diminutive, Astin does justice to the story of Rudy Rutiger, a kid who gets to play football for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish simply because he thinks he can. Is he talented enough? Not by a mile. Does he have the heart? The film wants you to say yes to that question, but the answer is no. Does he convince others to believe in him deeply enough to make his dream real? Nope. That's not it.

Take a big pot of luck (good and bad), timing, desire, belief, heart, stick-to-it-ive-ness, hard work and steam for years over an open fire...and you may get jack squat. It might work out for you. It might not. Add self-actualization and you have a recipe for success.

Rudy got to play for the Irish because he thought, in his brain, that he was going to. He made every decision in his life centered on that belief. He did not work nearly as hard at convincing others to believe him as he did funnel his energy toward maintaining his own central and inner belief. Corny? Yes. But other people saw it as a steam train they could not stop. It was going to happen because he believed it, and never gave anyone a reason to think it wasn't a FACT.

Think about the picture above here with the herds of blue angry faces and one yellow smiler. I choose to see this as our world, yours and mine. You pick which person you are in the picture. And I'm not saying, put on a happy face, take your meds and be off to face the day. I see that yellow dude as the most centered and self-preserved of the group. That guy chooses to enjoy being wherever he is, sees it as opportunity or part of the deal you must deal with. He's in the same economic and world-shaking shitstorm we all wake up to each morning, but it doesn't faze him. He can only control what he can control. He loves being where and who he is because it it where and who he is. He is a walking (or rolling as he lacks feet) SFP. His T-shirt does not say "Choose your attitude", a trite saying that reeks a little of "Just deal with it". Nor does it say "This too shall pass", which sounds too much like an exit strategy for someone without a plan. No, this guy is happy to be. Existential smiley face.

I struggle with control issues. I can't always control my own brain. The brain is extremely powerful, and largely unleashed in most humans. If you need some serious and terrific proof, then click here. When the brain starts down a path, it's difficult to take it off that path, for better or worse. It's the basis for hypochondriacism...I have a lump on my neck. It looks and feels like an ingrown hair. It's obvioulsy from shaving without shaving gel. I should get rid of it. It will go away. It's not gone yet...Is is an ingrown hair? Google neck cancer. One of the 12,083,098,942 articles found in .005 seconds postulates that it might be cancer.

I knew it. It's cancer. Cancer? But it looks like an ingrown hair!

And so it goes until you go to the skin doctor and he removes the ingrown hair and you and your stupid brain take you lighter-by-a-fifty-dollar-co-pay wallet to the store to buy some Barbasol.

What if, instead of Nega-Googling every scary thing in our lives, we simply believed they were positives with challenges that would turn out, not just fine, but really awesome? This neck thingy? Oh that? It's my chance to be a millionaire. Because I have this thing, I'm going to win the lottery or discover gold in my backyard, or forcibly find a cure for cancer. Any or all of these things can be true...but only if you select them as your destiny and then joyfully convince the future to fall in line for you. At the very least, you'll have fun while you're at it.

And no, peeps, it's just a stupid ingrown hair that I need to leave alone. And it's also just a deep recession, and it's just a (not really) brave new world out there we all need to cope with by choosing our outcome RIGHT NOW.

As Captain Jean Luc Picard would say..."Make it so."

Spring Training at the Blog

Spring is literally around the corner, good friends. I just had lunch with him at Lew's, just around the corner from my house. We had a coupla sandwiches (big roast beef and au jus fan, Spring) and a cold beer and talked about what he's been up to since the last time we talked, almost 14 months ago. To be honest, he looked really good. He actually shaved and put on this snazzy dress shirt to go with his faded jeans. It was a really, really nice lunch. I had to pay because he's a season and the Patriot Act prevents him from acquiring a bank account on the count he doesn't have a social security number. At least that was his excuse this year.

You'll notice some wholesale changes to the blog as we progress into Spring. The layout is different, and the title has changed. I chose the word Sarcastik! after looking for a suitable blog title for a long time. Sarcastic was too obvious, kind of like getting a weekly magazine called, Magazine. Sarcastique is cute and clever, but it's also French, and I vehemently oppose anything French on the count of their widespread and unethical treatment of bicycles. I'm pretty sure there is another blog out there called "Sarcastik", but they don't have the proprietary and all important exclamation point. Why misspell Sarcastik! you ask? It's a meld of two words, "sarcasm" and "fantastik" (no, not the adjective, the cleaning product). I was going to call the blog Fantarcasm! but it sounds too much like a disease of the thorax.

I have a Facebook page with a similar name that houses a more group-like effort to destroy my humor and credibility, but the two are very different. In this version, you only get me. Feel free to spout off in the comment section below each entry (and I love and appreciate the feedback) but that's it...Here there are no officers, personal vendettas or jokes of the day. If you're not into 100% CK One, better venture off to some other idiot's plot of internet land and set up your lawnchair.

Just as I write that line, it occurs to me that internet domain navigation and acquisition is exactly like the post civil war Westward expansion of the US. People head out looking for something in the great unknown, throw their flag down in the ground and stake claim. They set the rules for their group (web page) and allow visitors to spend money as they pass through in the hopes of finding a peaceful existence and a place to hang their hat. Coincidentally, the Gold Rush of Silicon Valley happened eerily near the real money grab of the same name from 1849. Weird. Now, much like the internet, we seek land and domain space inside a much more crowded landscape, and pay rent to the original owner (blogspot). Weird indeed.

Pictured above is my boy, Alex Gordon, of the Kansas City Royals. A clean cut hard hitting lefty cut from the same die as George Brett; he even plays third base. He gets the innagural accompanying picture to signify the meat of my blog. I solidly and boldly predict that Gordo will break out in this his third year and put up some All Star caliber numbers. 26 HR's, .297 BA and a trip to the midsummer classic. With him as my beacon and inspiration, I'm going to get better too. I'm going to post more content and with a true direction. Everything in this blog going forward will be better, funnier, more frequent and ultimately, Sarcastik! as hell. Here goes nothing! (also my salary for writing this or anything else) See! That was sarcastik!

I was right

Just a quick PostScript to that last entry...I nailed it.

A-Rod did the right thing, in my book. Hell, I even got some of his verbiage right. "I goofed up big time" is almost a direct quote.

A lot of people want to chase this guy and ostracize him, angered by cheaters, etc. I'll reitterate that people are flawed and will always make mistakes. Test him every week and let him play ball. As for the record books...I agree with pundits that call for a wing at Cooperstown entitled, "The Steroid Era".

Turned on the television today and saw that Alex Rodriguez pumped some steriods into his body back in 2003, the same year he won the MVP as a member of the Texas Rangers. Saw that the press was having a field day with the water cooler topics that were sure to fly around sports bars and airwaves for the next 3 months.

I saw that Barry Bonds was beginning the next phase of his trial or inquest as to the allegations that he doped while playing in the MLB.

Then I saw that there were new allegations of DNA evidence recovered from needles belonging to Roger Clemens' trainer that proved that the Rocket got shot up with more than a little B-12 whilst a Yankee.

Flipped the page and noticed that Aquaman himself was being dropped from the Wheaties box after pictures "surfaced" with him wearing lambchops and smoking dope from a 3 footer. He got banned for 3 months from swimming and will likely not hear the end of this until he retires.

Lance Armstrong accused of doping. Back page of last year's news.

I'm sitting here staring at the biographies of some of the most prolific athletes of the last ten years...hell, the most prolific athletes in their respective sports ever, and they all have something dreadfully wrong with them in common. They are all human.

Humans cheat. On their taxes, wives, husbands, at stop signs, when they get too much change from a lazy cashier, and in sports. Humans make mistakes. They believe people when they tell them that their actions won't have consequences. They listen to people that give bad advice, and ignore detractors that offer the opposing sentiment. Human beings are flawed, and can be downright devious. But most of the time, making a mistake only requires an apology for people to rightly feel empathy and let them off the hook.

Phelps did the right thing. He said he was sorry, young, eager to have fun, and negligent. He is forgiven in my book. Lots of people continue to throw stones at him, and there will be more fallout than he deserves, even if this was the only time he ever smoked weed (it wasn't, and we all know it). But he did what nobody else in this blog has done (yet) and he manned up to his actions. Now, the irrefutable proof of holding a bong in a really clear picture will force you to "tell the truth" and admit mistakes. So I suppose that if there were picture out there with Barry injecting Roger in the hip with a day-glo colored substance that we could universally ID as 'roids, we'd have gotten a quick apology from them, too. Unfortunately in this case, we live in America, and we have a constitution that protects you from having to admit you made a mistake in your life until a team of three hundred lawyers get paid 20 million dollars to sniff out irrefutable proof that it was true. Damn that freedom thing.

Sadly, I wish certain things were exempt from that protection. I can't name a single person that thinks that Bonds, Clemens, Armstrong, Sosa, Palmiero, Phelps, or A-Rod are perfect. Each of them has most likely done something in their professional or personal life that they are not proud of or that they wish they could take back. But since admitting freely their mistakes and laying themselves before the mercy of the court of public opinion would entail such a brutal beating from the very fans they worked so hard to gain adoration from, they listen to their lawyers. They go in to hiding. They let the chips fall where they may. They basically hope it will go away and someone else will make a bigger mistake that will overshadow their own (see: Phelps' sigh of relief after A-Rod's allegations made the headlines).

I would love, just once, for an athlete to take this course after it comes up...

Call a press conference and gather your friends and family there. Look into the camera and occasionally back at your F and F, and say, "I goofed that up, big time. I made a mistake, and I went with peer pressure and I did the wrong thing. I volunteer for mandatory testing so that it won't happen again. I failed you."

Then, and only then, let the chips fall.

I think I'd stand up and clap if A-Rod did that this week. I'll bet you his salary that I'll see a lot more of his attorney than of him.

Postscript:
"A-Roid" and "Alex Roidriguez" have been Trademarked by me, years ago. The fee for using either nickname in conversation, print or on the air will result in me sending you a bill for $10,000 American. You can talk to my attorney if you need proof.

TalkPick of the Week

Which came first, the Chicken McNugget or the Egg McMuffin?
Blatant thievery, that question; stolen directly from Little Jackie and her mega hit (as Wiki would say: citations needed. ) "The World Should Revolve Around Me".

Well, it doesn't.

The line she or some song(?)writer composed is definitely worthy of some discussion, though. It raises a philosophical and moral question that has been plaguing six year-olds for decades. It's a derivation of a riddle that is older than my favorite Ham Jam t-shirt depicting a pig's head being squeezed from the tap of a beer keg (1988), and older still than my brother's Mumpy (disgusting yellow security blanket which was sewn circa 1973 by a woman named Severance).

Its a McSong version of the age old question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" (Wiki says its Egg that evolved, in a landslide citations needed ). People have bantered on about the subject for Eons, and the revolving time-warp it puts your logical brain into is a classic dinner topic for farmers, The Duggars and most any family that owns the Little Jackie album (according to Wiki, there are seven such families You really need to find some citations, smartass. ).

Time honored traditions like a dinner topic are a lost art in today's world.

In my house alone it is possible, and not unlikely, for there to be dinner-time interference from 4 televisions, 3 Ipods, a computer, a Wii, a PS2, a Gameboy, two dogs and actual food chewing to get in the way of a family conversation. I am proud to say that we turn almost all electronic devices off during family meals unless the four of us agree that the episode of Drake and Josh that happens to be on is funny enough to warrant leaving the volume up in the family room loud enough for us to get the gist of what's actually happening on the screen. In these instances, we generally migrate one by one in toward the TV, salad bowls balanced on our heads and dinner rolls under our arms. We admit defeat to being TV slaves with barely a whimper as we crowd the couch.

Well not anymore America. My wife of 15 years has recently and proudly invented TalkPicks (Patent Pending, All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2009 anything you say will be held against you in a court of law...Citations needed), and the craze is coming to a disjointed dinner table near you.

TalkPicks is a play on words. Say is fast or without the aid of front teeth and it sounds like an already invented and patented word. Say it slow, and you have yourself a gold mine...and a really cool idea.

Every Sunday night becomes someone else's turn to pick the TalkPick. The first week she introduced it, I glared at her and tried to feign interest while listening to Drake argue with Josh about who would go and...never mind. She told us that, from now on, we would have a TalkPick every Sunday, and spend the rest of the week becoming fluent in that paticular subject for until it became retired on midnight of the Saturday hence (that's a fancy Olde English way for tossing it forward seven days, old school, yo).

Knowing that diving immediately into "Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory" would go directly over the heads of some of the members of our (Sam and Ben) family, she wisely chose Spongebob Squarepants as the innaugural TalkPick. And the ensuing conversation was absolutely glorious.

We talked as a family for 45 minutes. I was so engrossed, I forgot to eat my broccoli (citations propbably needed). We talked about our favorite characters, episodes, sayings and conspiracy theories. We talked about animation, the time it takes to make one episode (six months to a year), the reason the show enjoyed longevity and even how plausible it was that Spongebob would ever need to clean a restaurant floor using a bucket of water and mop when said restaurant happens to be resting at the bottom of the ocean floor. It was truly glorious.

The next week, we selected World Records as our TalkPick at Sunday dinner. There was some huffing and puffing at first because it seemed dull compared to Mr. Squarepants and company, but my eldest son rescued the day with his Herculean effort to right the ship. He came home from school on Monday afternoon having absconded (checked out from the library) the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records. It was a field day. Did you know that the record for most pushups by a 38 year old man is 56 in one day (held by yours truly (citations needed)) )?? Did you?

My point, however difficult to see, is that we now have a bonafide tradition in my house involving feeling, conversation and words as opposed to Megabytes, HTML and Wikipedia citations.

Because of this beautiful and soon-to-be-permanent tradition in our house, I can now explain to my boys how life used to be at the dinner table without sending a single text message.

BRB. ROTFLMAO.

The Thief And His Pushups

I have two boys.
Sam. Eleven. Gregarious, thoughtful (I'm boasting) and fun loving.
Ben. Six. Sensitive. Wide-eyed and a little too cautious.

This is about Ben, who just left my embrace and headed upstairs to place the pen he stole in a safe place so we can take it back to his piano teacher next week...

Ben broke his leg when he was three. Somewhere in the back of his three year old heart, he grew scared. He jumped off one step when other kids were jumping off three or four. He walked when others ran, sat when they sprinted. He's burned off some of that fear and put himself in harm's way a couple of times since then, but usually because he's not looking where he's going.

He has these huge blue eyes and a totally honest heart, so you can't imagine for a minute that he would become the Keefe thief. But he did, clear as a blue bell today at his piano lesson. I wasn't there, but I could see it in those eyes the second he walked into the house. He looked like he stole the car, ran over the dog, went out with friends and got drunk, tagged the neighbor lady's garage door with green spray paint, and then passed out in the bushes in the front of a cop's lawn. But he is six and I just watched him leave for piano an hour earlier, so I put that anxiety on hold for 12 years from now.

One of the jobs a little brother has is to be amazed at things. You have this big brother that does stuff and you can't be too amazed because you share a room with this guy, and you can't just be dropping your jaw every time he coughs or defeats Bowser on a Wii game. But all the same, keeping your cool isn't easy and sometimes your big bro does stuff and you just want to faint because it seems so cool. But the closer we get to 7, the less we decide to be impressed with big bro and the more we'd like to show him up just a little.

I made a New Year's resolution to complete a minimum of 40 pushups every day this year until 40 seems wimpy and I'm not sore (not yet) and then move it to 50 and so on until I transform magically into a 5' 9" version of Michael Phelps with smaller teeth and fewer cranial hair follicles. I shared this with the boys and they went bananas. They practically cleaned their room to make a place to do pushups to outshine the other. Sam has good core and leg strength (I rationalized after his 3rd pushup left his arms shaking like a hummingbird trying to pose for a class photo). Ben, however, just lit it up. He could probably do 100 pushups if he didn't constantly lose his train of thought and decide to go have a snack.

Sam needed the rationalization not to feel to bad for being outshined Soundgarden style by Ben. He appreciated my praise of his core strength and tried to blow it off. Little bro finally had the upper hand, though, and was not letting him off the hook. He dropped and gave me twenty for no reason and then shot a supermodel-catwalk-over-the-shoulder glare at Sam as if to say, "I know you counted."

And I want to be impressed with both my kids for their achievements, honesty, hairlines etc., so it's really hard not to want to give Ben a high five at this point, which I wisely choose not to do in order to save some emotional scarring for the 11 year old. (Ed. Note: I can hear my father, father in law, brothers, grandfather and high school gym coach now: "Oh man, the pussification of American kids...") Maybe.

Bottom line, Ben is staring at me and wanting this reassurance, so I give him a quick wink and smile and we move on to less competitive activities like going to bed. That wink sticks with you as a boy, and he wears it like an honor badge for two straight days, falling on his hands and throwing down 10 pushups between bites at dinner. Anything to catch that wink and smile again.

Well, I'm glad I gave him that wink now. It occurs to me that needing your Dad's approval and support makes it harder for you to let him down. Ben had the complete opposite look on his face when he came home from piano tonight. Kari and Sam walked in chatty and moved in different directions and left me staring at big blue-eyed Ben, half crying and broken. I was clueless at the time what might have gotten him to that state of mind, but I could sense the body language in the threesome that someone needed to tell me something. He was holding a pen. It was silver and had a ball point tip on one side, and on the other side it came equipped with a laser pointer and a light blue flashlight. This is a an extremely rare find for a first grader; such a marvelous and multi-purpose writing/pointer-of-things-on-the-wall/dog-teasing instrument rolled into one.
He'd stolen it from his piano teacher's apartment, subsequently been questioned as to the origins of such an awesome instrument, and copped to the theft in the car. Mom and Bro told him it was wrong, but they left him alone with his tears and sobbing apologies because they knew it was me he was really afraid of disappointing.

He didn't. He admitted it, told me he was sorry and agreed to return it and apologize.

I couldn't be more proud if he broke the world record for pushups.

Ears and tears

It never fails. Right when Sarah Brightman spills into the high ending of "Time To Say Goodbye", the tears start to well up. This song might be on and I'm driving like a Nor' Easter to make it to a softball game on time, wearing cleats for crying out loud, the manliest of footwear, and the tears start to come. Hell, I could be playing poker with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and I'd cry when she gets to the high part.
Something about music transforms the prefontal cortex (or is it the mandibular lobe?) and bathes my brain in the moment. Am I the only one? No way? Really?
I once confided in a good friend, (and an intellectual guy) that I got really emotional whenever I heard the song "Satellite" by Dave Matthews. I had been reading the album credits one night (pre-dawn technologically, of course, as I actually owned the physical CD) and happened upon the dedication of the song or album to a little girl who had passed away. I can't even remember, and the dedication isn't important, but the words hit me just as the song hit a crescendo, and consequently, so did my heart. It's all about crescendo.
Anyhow, my intellectual friend is a music fan, culturally efficient and wears pink while maintaining masculinity, so I figured he'd have some empathy for my situation and possibly even share a similar tale. The reaction I got was similar to the one you'd get from a 2nd grade classmate upon calling your teacher "Mom" when asking her a question. He still has never let me live it down. He'll call me when he's visiting from Chicago to check on me, and the line of questioning is in the order of:
-How's the family?
-Still love your job?
-When can we get a beer?
-Are you crying listening to DMB right now?
-How's your Fantasy Football team?
Etc.
But the older I get, the more frequently the emotional tags keep coming, each one pasted neatly to a song from the past or present. The latest example is a song I bought off ITunes two days ago that I would NEVER have purchased with your money had it not been for the cry tag that accompanied it. I first heard "Jai Ho" at the end of the movie Slumdog Millionaire right before Christmas with my wife. Unless a movie stars Burt Reynolds and Dom Delouise, I don't watch the credits. Well, that's not entirely true. Anyone who saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off stayed for the credits. And, I accidentally discovered the magical and side-splitting ending to Napoleon Dynamite after the 5th or 6th time I'd seen the movie.
For some reason, when Slumdog ends, you stay. I'll need to see it again to know how long it is between the closing scene and the start of Jai Ho and the (SPOILER ALERT) dance scene, but it seemed like a long time. We didn't move from our seats, thankfully, and it turned out to be another cry-tag moment. There's no reason why...it's not at all sad. In fact it's the movie's most jovial and uplifting time. In addition, the actors are no longer even in character. So basically, this song comes on, the actors (not the characters) start doing this dance to a song by this artist from Mumbai and I am crying.
Before you suggest anti-depressants, let me tell you...It was a good, cathartic little cry just like the one that got me when my boys were playing in their first piano recital three weeks ago. Another came the same day when their teacher sat and played this incredible concerto (or sonata, I can't read music). Just a little tear. That's all. Eyes well up a little and then it passes. But it feels really good.
I might be an emotional goof, but I like it. I look for a song with music and lyrics that builds up fiercely, slowly, and without pretense, and then spills it's guts on the floor. I want my music to puke when the rides over.