Two boats, thee uh helicopter, and oh hey thee uh toilet papers gone : A Redux

I will preface this re-post with some basics for you folks, tonight at approximately 9:15 p.m. myself and those fellow fightclubbers I've grown so fond of, learned via various news outlets that our employer, sold our company, our jobs, our futures, our years of service to the tune of 17.7 BILLION. This comes after years of being told this wouldn't happen and a few recent months of reasonable speculation and some public fishing by thee uh guy in charge. In the years since joining this particular fightclub the threat and rumor of the company being sold has come to be a yearly exercise in fear based management. Tonight (Lastnight, if you happen to have slept), the yearly fire drill turned into an actual fire.
What does it mean? It means each and every employee has been lied to by omission. Some guy at whichever news outlet broke the story first, knew before us, our bosses, or their bosses, even had a clue.
It means this organizing drive is about to kick into high gear. The only employees with any security are those who are UNIONIZED! Here's lookin at you Brooklyn! Really though, what thee uh fuck does it mean for the rest of us?

It means get loud, get public get down with the facts and know your rights while you still have the rare opportunity to save your job! Right now there are workers in Brooklyn sleeping while the rest of us prepare for the worst. It doesn't have to end on the unemployment line, though it may, if we don't stand together, help each other with the life jackets and get in the boat! Let there be no mistake about it, the boat is big enough for all of us if we are simply willing to do the work! Together, as a Unit, by simply saying YES to a unionized work place we provide ourselves with a chance that based on what I've read will not likely remain once this sale is complete. A chance at securing our jobs much like our Brooklyn Brothers and Sisters have already done.

When things get crazy or when one of her kids has one of those "Duh!" moments my mother will look at us, laugh and say, "Two boats and a helicopter!". This is my take on this epic parable, by whatever name you call your higher power, whether or not you believe in one, or twenty, or none, please take from this what is important and relevant and true for you and also forgive me my swearing but for real I was a trucker once...

A man is on a roof after a bad storm because his city had flooded, he's praying for God (or as I call him Jeebus), to save him, and a boat comes by. The people in the boat say "Hey, Guy, jump down get in, lets go!" The man say's, "No, it's cool you don't have much room in there, I'll be ok, save some women and children and such, Jeebus will save me!" The folks in the boat argue a bit but eventually say ok and move on. The water is still rising and the man is still prayin on the roof when the next boat comes by. They have a few seats and the waters so high he can walk right in off the roof. Once again the people in the boat invite him in and once more the man says "No, Jeebus will save me!", and the boat floats on. Now it's getting dark and the man is clinging close to the chimney as the waters continue to rise, he hears a loud noise coming closer and then out of the sky, directly above him comes a bright light, its a bird, its a plane, JEEBUS HIMSELF? Nope, a helicopter, from which a rope ladder drops and a man on a microphone yells, "Hey, Hey you there, on the chimney, in the red suit, with the white trim, grab the ladder,you'll drown down there! GET TO THE CHOPPA, IT'S THE ONLY WAY OOOOOUUUUT!" The man clings tighter to the chimney shaking his head no and deliriously yelling something about some guy by the name Jeebus coming to pick him up with some other guy named Rudolph. Finally the copter has to go, and they do. Leaving the poor waterlogged man who thinks he's Santa, to drown on the chimney.
The man gets to heaven after some screaming and flailing and demands to see God. God says to herself, and all the Angels, ~Well, this, I have got to hear, send this dude in. She nudges the Angel to her right and says watch this, and turns herself into Samuel L. Jackson, cuz come on, what's not funny about that! The man looks at her and says, "God, Jeebus, I knew you were black! Seriously though? What the funk? Why have you forsaken me? Why did you let me drown out there?!!!?" With this, God stands, laughing, she holds his face in her hands and says, as only Samuel L. Jackson could, "MOTHAFUCKA, I sent you TWO  BOATS and a mothafuckin HELICOPTER, If you think I was gettin in that water myself, you were sadly mistaken. I don't SWIM, HA!" She laughs and the angels laugh and she hugs the man and they all laugh and eat cake and that's that.

 If at any point the man had thought outside the box of his expectation, he might not have drowned. Life  changes every day. We make decisions based on expectations, based on fear or lies or both, lies other people tell us, lies we tell ourselves. That man told himself God would save him, to the point he actually believed the sky would open and God would carry him to dry ground. Instead he got a prankster in the sky. It wasn't what he expected. The boats, the helicopter he didn't accept those and he didn't expect to see the pearly gates or Mr. Jackson that day, but it happened. If he'd had the chance for a do over, I bet the man would have hopped right in the first boat, said thanks, and been livin high off the insurance money to a ripe old age. But life is short, we don't always get second chances and sometimes you have to fight your fears through to safety even if the boat is fueled on hope alone, boats float in rising waters, fear doesn't, a teen aged lifeguard can tell you that.

When your employer sells your company, your family, your security, your future, the boat IS a Union and that Union is the CWA.

"The Labor Movement was the principle force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress." ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Lighthouses, Guilds and Unions.

When I was a kid my mother and Grammi took us to see the lighthouse in our town. It was some kind of big deal. We waited in line for what seemed like an eternity, finally made it to the top and were then advised, that we would not, could not, go outside. To which a child me, expressed my rage and disappointment to what I imagine was a member of the U.S. Coast guard, " DO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME I WALKED UP ALL THESE STAIRS AND I DON"T GET TO GO OUTSIDE?!?", so naturally, they let us outside. Last Saturday that Lighthouse was open for the first time in awhile. I missed it though and it's cool I had other things going on.

Back in April I made a life changing trip to church, no I didn't find Jeebus. I did, make a life long friend. Whatever happens over the next 30 or so years before the worms eat me, The person I met with, that sunny April Sunday, will forever hold a place dear to my heart. In a brief conversation I attempted to explain (with what little I knew then) how important it was to organize, to recognize our value, stand up and do the work to make 40 hours a week a little less intimidating and a lot more enjoyable, satisfying even. In what little time we had to discuss organizing I did my very best to stress to this person that it would not be easy but it would be worth it. 

Every day these last few weeks I have had to remind myself of that. On a personal level I miss the beach, my friends, my Harley (Aka Merle, whom I have finally ridden, but not nearly enough!), running around with my army of nieces and nephews and all the things that make summers better than winters. On a professional level, I have a job, so that's cool.This week, for the first time in five years I went to work early. with a smile on. Because hope. 

Hope in my personal life, that's been easy. I made changes, tried new things, figured out what worked and what didn't, cleaned out the negatives and practiced living the positives. In my professional life,it's a daily struggle. Then came hope, in the form of a union. It came crashing in like all the best adventures in life do. At the worst possible time. I made a decision to make myself available, to try and find answers to do whatever I could to help the people who have helped me survive my employment situation, my fear, my anxiety, my last hopeless place. I don't sleep as much as I should, For the last month I've had my face in my phone more than I ever wanted to texting, talking, emailing, like a jerk. A jerk on a mission though. My mission: Not lose my income. This eventually turned into: Not go down without a fight. That eventually turned into: Inspire others to not go down without a fight. The natural evolution of this, is clearly, save the world. 

I don't want anyone to walk into the place they make their living and wonder if the rules changed overnight, or if today is the day they lose that living for essentially being human. I don't want to watch people be treated badly by anyone. I know that seems pretty simplistic, I know it's childlike even, but it's true. I don't want to stand by with a fire hose and all the water and just watch the world burn. That ain't me. I want to put the fire out. I want to see the world rebuild stronger, kinder, realer. I want to see the world we live in and the people in it, live better, treat each other better, be better. Yes, I do believe we can all be better from CEO's to landscapers, Politicians, Policeman, Teachers to Carpenters, Nurses, Housekeepers, we can all be, live, experience better, both at home and at work.  All it takes is people, recognizing people, respecting each other, Listening to each other and looking out for each other on just the most basic of human levels.

Call it community. Call it tribal. Call it a guild, call it a union. Call it whatever the fuck you want but, "Never under estimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world, In truth it is the only thing that ever has!" ~ Margaret Mead said that shit long before I was even born. It's just as true, and real, and important today as the day she first thought to say it. Why aren't more of us living by this? Where are all the children inside us who wanted to change the world with whatever magical thought we believed would do just that. 

To my professional family, my work family, my brothers and sisters in the struggle to simply be heard, Thank you for getting me through my work week these past few years, months, weeks, days, Are you ready to fight though? Really. Are you done feeling hopeless? Because I didn't walk up all those stairs not to go outside, and I certainly didn't risk goin up in flames that day I walked into church to come this far and give up now. I fear spending this whole summer walking up those stairs of hope only to be told I can't go outside, but I don't fear my employer because I know there is power in facts and numbers. Who benefits from a Union? Employees. Who doesn't? People who don't have one. Who benefits from fear? Employers. Bullies. Dictators and occasionally 6 year old children in lighthouses.

The room with a view.

Someone said to me yesterday "Hey I heard you're a writer." I laughed because he followed it up with this bit about how I should write a sitcom and I thought ~ Yea, I don't really want to. I smiled and was polite - for me - then he explained how it was better with a visual expression of the things he thought I want to write about. I thought ~ What the fuck is the point then?!!! Will good sitcoms suddenly be more meaningful than Shakespeare?, what I said was nothing I smiled politely and moved on with my day. I came back to that conversation before writing this and thinking about how I haven't written on here lately because I'm doing other stuff, living other lives. I haven't stopped writing though. I write more regularly than I have in a very long time. It's a whole different writing experience to take your adventures and the characters you've met and try to find a balance between the actual factual people and the exaggerated  hilarity, humanity and humility of their stories colliding. I make that shit sound either fancy as fuck or downright pretentious. The real of it is though I have no clue what i'm doing, no idea if what I'm doing is worth anyone reading or worth trying to do. It could quite possibly all be utter nonsense. I could fail. I fuckin hate failing. I loathe the feeling of failing at anything, even things I don't particularly give a shit about. That said imagine how bad I'm going to feel if I never reach the goals I have regarding my writing.
Now, replace my writing with anything in the world. Any dream or hope you may have ventured to have any person you thought you would be when you were a kid. Think about it, simmer on it, are you doing it? Are you living the life you wanted? Are you the person you wanted to be? Are you miserable or happy? What do you want for yourself? Who the fuck are you? Are you movin and perhaps more importantly are you groovin?

 Suddenly the fact that I keep writing down fractals of ideas and beginning stories without finishing others as I go, doesn't seem so bad, because, well, what the fuck else am I working for if not to be a better human, a better me and so, a better writer. What is life, if not to some extent, a lesson in learning when to walk away and knowing if and when to go back. Bam! Instant inspiration. I want to be the type of person who is always writing something. I hope eventually something I write makes a difference somehow to someone else but also I want to be able to take care of myself. By which I mean get money. I want to write about Fuckin Bitches and Get Money for it so the way I see it I will...as soon as I stop being afraid and just do the shit.

 I have been in this intense growth spurt of awareness to who I am and mostly I think I am becoming a pretty fuckin awesome human being but I know my deepest failures and I know I can be a far better one. I think all too often we allow it to be all too easy. We say, Fuck it. this is where I am so this is who I am. We allow our fears to swallow our hopes and dreams and aspirations of being who we wanted to be before we became who we are. I could have been a million far shittier versions of myself if I had just accepted who I was at any of my past moments of doubt. I've slowly learned to give myself a healthier insulation of people who are both supportive and understanding of who I am. People who respect where I've been and can see where I'm going, who get me and love me even if they don't really know me. I relapse on that from time to time but more so lately I feel like I'm getting the hang of this living thing. I'm progressively happier as I recognize and address my flaws and failures. I am living to be someone I respect. It feels pretty good mostly.
We shouldn't be afraid of failures, of messes and mistakes. I don't want to be. That's not to say I'm not, but, the heart of it is, we shouldn't be afraid. If we are going to be, then we should pick better things to be afraid of. I am afraid of failure, it scares me more than anything in the world, but I am also afraid of not living the big beautiful adventure filled life I have been planning since I could think of cool shit to be when I grew up. I'm afraid all of the people I love not knowing how much I appreciate them even if I can't surround myself with them or immerse myself in their lives. I am afraid of missing really good sunsets and lives lost way too soon. I'm afraid of a world where no one is who they want to be and I'm afraid of dinosaurs making a comeback due to grossly negligent scientists...among other things.
You see? There's way better things to be afraid of than being a shitty writer and even those aren't worth the cost. Yes, there is a cost, there are casualties of fear, hope, dreams, adventures, love. All things that get lost when you choose to be afraid rather than keep it movin and groovin. More than that I dare say we ourselves get lost when we let fear tell us who we can or cannot be. When I die I want some one to get up and say "That bitch lived. She was one fun, fearless, fucking bitch of a cunt." I want to be remembered someday for doing the shit I said I would and even if I failed, at least I'll have done it. Not tried. Actually, done it. That. That's the shit right there. That is what living is to me among countless other equally important things. Life is an adventure and the way I imagine it adventurers need fear only to keep them moving. I'm an aspiring adventurer, writer, human. I never want to stop collecting characters and stories and moments. I want many things for my life but mostly I want to keep movin and grovin until I can't anymore.

Dangled carrots don't play guitars...

Sometimes I wonder if anyone sees half the shit I see in the world. I've been extremely fortunate to have many chances in this life to change my trajectory. To figure shit out. I will never have it all figured out, Never will there come a day where I know it all. I don't know shit really, not a goddamned thing. I know how I've lived, I know it hasn't always been roses. I know where I've been and I like to think I recognize something of that in the people I choose to surround myself with. Life isn't easy for anyone. Anyone who tells you their life is easy, is a goddamned liar. Someone who tells you their life is getting easier, that's someone to believe in, that's someone to stand with. The world we live in doesn't give us anything. we earn it, with battle scars and wounds that don't ever quite heal. Over the course of my life I have (Not always on purpose) made it my mission to keep a hard head soft butt mentality. I never learned to stop hoping, wanting and looking to the best in people, in myself. I lost myself in many ways and for a long time lost hope in all of the things I wanted for the world and myself. I still had hopes but they were pretty useless hopes, the hopes of an angry fuckin midget. The type of shit you hope for when you're not a total piece of shit just a little - broken.
For many different reasons my life got stalled for a while in a fairly broken and fucked up place. Occasionally, things would get better and inevitably something would come crashing down and I'd let myself be a sloppy mess of a person again. I still have lapses of judgement, I still fuck my own shit up from time to time, but somewhere along the way I've remembered how to hope for the right things again. It's not about expecting things to go the way I want them to, it's about hoping for the best even while preparing for the life parts.

Life will kick your ass if you let it. Sometimes we let it, we put our faces down, bend over and let it kick us with a big dirty boot and we say "Thank you". Those times can be for some people, more frequent than others. People cry about this or pray or scream from the rooftops, others silently move on with their shit. No two people ever feel the boot in the same way and while there are groups of people who may respond to this the same way, you never know why any one person is really responding to something with one emotion or another. It's endless possibilities of causes all relevant to only one person in truth. I believe in people and hope and myself after an excruciatingly long hiatus, but I am no where near done yet. I was a very angry person once for like over a decade, but the fact of the matter is I'm still kinda angry sometimes. I just like to think I handle it better more frequently than less these days.

I played Rockem Sockem Robots the other night with an extremely worthy adversary, we snorted like piggies and made a ridiculous amount of noise and we laughed more joyfully than anyone ever really truly laughs anymore, you know with bills and kids, wives, husbands, jobs, bosses, mortgages, who really laughs at the silly shit often anymore? I'm not talking the, that was funny laugh, but the deep amazing carefree laugh of life being simple. No past, no future just here, now and enjoying it. I strive to be more in that moment as I figure my shit out. It's getting simpler, once in a while to just be. To enjoy the really amazing parts of life that I might have missed out on if I'd taken the short road instead of the long one (or in some cases the extra long one with the circle rounds every ten miles or so).

 From time to time I've been known to make bad decisions as a rule, that's another thing I've really - no really, I'm totally serious, REALLY been working on. I'd like to think I've made some minor progress on that over the last few years, but change don't happen over night and a lifetime of crappy decisions doesn't suddenly get wiped clean with intentions to make better ones in the future. People have a way of either bringing you down or lifting you up but at the end of the day you decide which people can do what in your life. I can do a lot of things but refuse to keep believing people have to make each other feel shitty to feel good. I won't say I never want anybody to feel shitty, there are zillions of people I think should be thrown into a pit of lions, some for barely any reason at all, but at the end of the day even the shittiest people in my life get multiple chances before I cut them loose. I'm not talking the friends you fade out with but the ones who stay in your life but just keep bringing you down. I try to believe that they just need someone to believe in them, to hope for them while they figure out how to be - better. In some people I see little slivers of who they are capable of being and like a sucker, I give-em, Just. One. More. I have friends who get upset when other friends don't like them but the truth of it is, I don't really give a shit because I like them. Until I don't. To end up on my shit list for real, as in no coming back ever, you have to be a repeat offender and you pretty much have to cut me so deep I actually feel it. That shit ain't exactly easy, For either of us.

Why isn't it easy? What am I rambling about? What the fuck does one have to do with the other? When is this post going to finally be done?
Soon. A lot for me. I'm getting there and because to be in my life and kill my hope these days you have to be basically fucking my corpse.
 I mean my hope and joy and fierce gratefulness at the life I currently have isn't impossible to kick down a set of stairs and bruise pretty badly, but I'll still get the fuck up. I am much more agile then I look. I've lived a life not a bad one at all really, a pretty damned good one so far, but it's not been without some painful lessons. I've lost irreplaceable pieces of my life by being angry, by not enjoying the people around me and by forgetting who and what matters. I matter. The people I love matter and the people who love me matter. The rest of the world can all fall in line after those three in no particular order. People make a difference in your life to the degree you let them. I choose the survivors of real life, I choose, to hope we can all come out better than we imagined, to believe that where you've been makes you who you are, but you can always be more. Always grow and always find a way to be KINDER, if for some reason we are too weak in a moment to simply be kind. Be it to ourselves or to others.

I believe that life really could be as simple and silly and fun as Rockem Sockem Robots. It's some pretty basic shit, but what makes it fun is who you're playing with. No sore losers, no cheaters or overly boastful winners ever walk away happy from shit like that. The same goes for life, so why NOT enjoy it? Why not surround yourself with people who walk away generally happy no matter what happens. People who are hopeful despite their knowledge of real life, people who handle sadness and pain with a little humor and people who accept that sometimes you might be the weird hat girl or smiley, or an avid lover of unicorns, an Aunty, or a friend and other times you may be the angry midget, but you're evolving and it's good. Why not surround yourself with people who want you to be better because the world is full of people who want you to fail for one reason or another. Why waste love on people who don't see the slivers of potential, in people, in life. Why would you do that? Why does anyone do that? Not all of the people in my life see my life the way I do. Not a single person I choose to keep in my life would pull me down to get ahead of me. If they would, I'd like to say fuck em but really I'd still, like a true sucker, hope they'd figure it out, but not on my time. I'm too busy plotting spectacular dinner parties, having adventures, watching sunrises, laughing at knock knock jokes and remembering who I wanted to be when I grew up to let the things that hurt me define me or put me out. Nothing in life is easy but sometimes you've just got to find the fun, the hope, the happy shit, hold onto it and believe that the people and things that matter will eventually catch up. Even if they won't.