HONESTLY, THAT IS A GOOD SIGN

Talking about and being willing to explain and defend opinions like the ones I spoke about earlier is actually a sign of health for me. Making sense of the dangling threads of social phenomena, studying the causes and effects of provided information is what I have always done, as long as I have been aware of myself. Going all disinformation at the slightest opportunity is a premium part of the packaging that is ‘Mark Madness’ (a cool sobriquet if I heard of one… a word play of the NCAA’s basketball tournaments ‘March Madness’). Would have really worked well as a boxing nickname, but c’est la vie, say the old folks, you never can tell!

…AND I STILL HAVEN’T BEEN OUT TO GARDEN CITY

Doing what is best is never predicated on doing what is convenient or easy.

A lot of my personal effects are already ahead of me, being stored by Nebraska in Omaha. But as far as being able to live without a few books, assorted papers and a couple of pair of old jeans, and who can’t live without stuff like that?

When I was but a bonnie wee lad delivering the Detroit News (the largest circulation of any evening newspaper in America) reading the small, agate type that often included the results of Premier League results, wondering what it took to play for one of those names of cities in jolly ol’, I also would wonder about running away to SoCal and sneaking across the border to start my boxing career as an underage professional. In high school, I was convinced that I could start out fighting plenty of 4-rounders to build up my experience and survive on my wits, sleeping in my car (a late 60’s metallic blue VW 412 station wagon!), and picking up the language and endearing myself to the locals as ‘their fighter’. I miss those fantasies that maturity and naysayers took away. Between that and going off to Montreal and attending McGill University still nags at me… because those are the only two childhood dreams that I don’t think I took good cuts at.

I’d have rather been pulled over in Missouri, an alert sent out thru police channels looking for a runaway teenage boy heading for the border in an old VW station wagon! Even if I didn’t make it, putting enough of a plan together and to act on that plan would have been good enough. Reading about the legendary fighters who began their careers as poor kids in the barrio, like Ruben Olivares, Bobby Chacon, maybe I would have been able to build a fanatical following in El-Ay like theirs or become a West Coast sensation as a teen as Mike Tyson did when he began boxing professionally.

As far as going to McGill, I took and passed French for three years but it never really took. ROTC and boxing began to cast looming shadows over that and lacking real direction or interest in what was going to happen to me upon graduation, I went ahead and seized on what I thought that I knew.

STILL, AS WAY LEADS ON TO WAY

Would be super neat to get a job part time at Fairlane, maybe at the Star Theatre or in one of the hotels around there, whether it is working in the laundry or running room service, would matter much to me. I’d even wash dishes if there was an opening in that department. Neat, defined, boundaries between work, home and school and I don’t know if I could ask for more. It could happen.

A lot of what goes on with me is hard for me to define. ‘Temporal displacement’ is the words that come to mind when I am ‘out and about’, locally. Sometimes I ‘know’ where I am at without actually ‘knowing’ where I am going. Or you could flip flop it, doesn’t matter. What ends up happening is I keep pressing on until something recognizable pops into view or the awareness clears and I know where it is I am heading and keep on going.

The dizziness (vertigo) means I will never be able to drive again (among other ‘can’t do things) and I had gotten pretty good at balancing myself on my bike, but since I haven't be riding as much as I had, I wonder if I will be 'back where I started', where lil' Mook would tell me 'be careful' whenever I went out with Trixie! That I can ride my bike is good enough for me, because given my level of fitness I can ride until I remember where I am at and get to where I am going. Not only that, I feel that learning a ‘new’ place is a benefit for me as I think that it causes a different region to ‘light up’ in my head. That makes the new region an area that I can access in lieu of the parts of my brain that doesn’t light. Or so I like to believe.

Am I having am second thoughts? Hmm, I don’t know what ‘second thoughts’ are, so I don’t feel that is what I am doing. Though I am not a ‘Tim Taylor’, I do know that you need to ‘measure twice, and cut once’.

Even if I haven’t followed that rule all of the time.