Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 19

‘Tis the season for making New Year’s resolutions – like resolving to write more in one’s blog.  The season for breaking New Year’s resolutions is also fast approaching.

It has been so long since I’ve post on my blog that even Nigerian spammers have forgotten me…

Speaking of New Year’s resolutions, last year’s was to run a thousand miles in a year.

I didn’t make it.

Saying I didn’t make it doesn’t mean I failed per se, it just means I didn’t realize the lofty goal that I set rather flippantly in the middle of a run before doing any real math about the issue.  With 612 miles logged for the year, I just missed the consolation prize of thousand kilometers but was obviously well short of my target.  I don’t consider my miss a glass half empty, but a glass 61.2% full.  In the end, I came much closer to realizing my resolution than most.

For the record, the resolution for this year is to beat 612.  With only five miles on the books so far this year, I’m not off to the best of starts.

A longer, more coherent post would have fleshed out my run resolution into a full blown essay which would .  Here in Random Semicoherent World, I can just draw a line and pivot to a completely idea, like this list of my running highlights for 2016:

5) The first nine miles of my second half marathon run with Ms. Boss.  The last four after her leg of the relay was finished, not so much.

4) Running a color run with Ms. Boss and my youngest Bosslette.  While I don’t need to run another color run ever, I did enjoy being active with one of my daughters.

3)  Running with Ms. Boss and my sister on Thanksgiving morning.  The two sisters-in-law talked the entire time, the longest conversation they’ve had in years.

2)  A moment of joy for Ms. Boss during a race on a cold day when she realized the people up ahead were handing out tissues.  I’ve never seen anyone so joyful for an opportunity to blow their nose in my life.  It made me smile for her happiness.

1) The thirteenth mile of my third marathon with the tears streaming down Ms. Boss’ face when she saw the finish line and knew that her first half marathon was in the books.  She worked hard for that moment and I was privileged to be there with her when we finished hand in had.

Despite my running and the fact that I ran my fastest half marathon back in November, my weight is creeping back up.  Ironically, to provide myself solace over the fact I’m giving up my hard won gains, I’ve been known to grab a handful of Goldfish.  Now that the holidays are behind me, all my excuses should be too.

So, after months of neglect, another post is in the books.  Let the spamming begin…

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 18

I fully support Colin Kaepernick’s right to be a complete asshole.

During the Olympics, I heard an interview with John Carlos, one of the two athletes who raised their hand in a gesture interpreted as a black power salute when he won a medal at the games.  Whether you support him or revile him or something in between, you must that his actions were effective – his notoriety has far outlived what it would have had he simply brought home his bronze medal.

The Black Lives Matter movement isn’t completely off base – I know first hand that there are racist cops out there. Still, I can’t support a group of people who paint their adversaries with such a wide brush while ignoring their own bad apples.

Part of my job responsibilities include listening to radio transmissions from a state prison. It’s almost like hearing them move cattle instead of prisoners.  I know that I’m a writer and should be able to use my words to describe how this makes me feel, it’s such a strange thing to hear, I just can’t.

Life is not white, nor is it black. It is, in fact, despite anything I might have believed growing up, one-hundred percent gray.  That’s been no more apparent than in my forties.

Ignore for a moment trying to determine how I know this, but crime does not happen the way it’s shown on television. It’s much more complicated than that.

Bad circumstances cause people to do bad things.  It doesn’t always mean the people are bad.

Occasionally, my wife will wake me up in the middle of the night and say there’s something funny going on in the house. After years of whispering a reply to her, I now speak nearly as loud as I can in reply? Why? Because criminals don’t want to tangle with you any more than you want to mess with them. On the very remote chance they are in your house, let them know you’re coming so they can leave the way they came.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 17

School starts tomorrow. This makes me happy – my brood have had way too much time on their hands.

Some technologically-forward school districts have forms you can fill out online and submit. Our school district isn’t one of them. Fortunately, my clan is now old enough they can fill out their own. Their handwriting is much better than mine.

In the whole debate about whether cursive should or shouldn’t be taught in schools, I fall firmly in the ‘shouldn’t’ camp. It’s a complete and utter waste of time. This time would be better used gluing your fingers together – at least that is what I did when they tried to teach it to me in second grade. For the record, yes, my handwriting is all print and it completely sucks.

My father made me take Personal Typing when I was in high school – I thought that was a complete and utter waste of time.  Twentysome years later, I’ve only had two jobs that haven’t required some sort of typing – dishwasher and bus boy.  I haven’t done either of those in twenty five years. I guess I need to admit he was right.

Yes, I did use algebra today.  In fact, I used calculus as well. I will neither confirm nor deny that I found those useless as well when I was young, although I drew fake album covers during that portion of my life instead of slathering on the Elmer’s.

I hated – h a t e d – my junior English teacher. It took me years to discover she was the best teacher I ever had.  Any great piece of writing that comes out of this blog is as much her doing as it is mine.  I’m very sorry, Mrs. Carmichael, wherever you are.

I get insanely jealous in June when the kids head into summer break, same with snow days. Back to school is a bit of a schadenfreude moment for me.

From the Fan Mail Department:

In my view, if alll site owners and bloggers maade good content as you did, the internet will be much more useful than ever before.(sic)

See, there you have it:  C.L. Boss – making the Internet more useful than ever before. I guess my next move is to click on the link about how he can grow my Internet traffic.

Speaking of good blogging on the Internet, this blog would probably be much better if I actually, well, you know, blogged – something other than a list of random thoughts every couple of weeks.  I guess we could always ask for suggestions from the audience… if there actually is one.

Time for bed – for the first time in months, it’s actually a school night.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 16

So I noticed something when my alarm went off this morning – the sky appears noticeably darker when I wake up.  This morning, it immediately brought to mind that it was August 1st.  August 1st was a significant annual event in my youth as it was the day the AM radio station in town signed off at 8:30 instead of 9:00.  Sharing a channel with a ‘clear channel’ radio station in another country, it was only allowed to be on the air from dawn until dusk.  Most every evening in the summer, you’re sitting their listening to the ball game and suddenly the announcement of ‘this concludes our broadcast day’.  My understanding is that these days, the station is allowed to broadcast at night at greatly reduced power, but is playing Southern Gospel Music.

Why listen to AM radio growing up?  It was almost a necessary evil.  I lived less than a mile from 50,000 watt FM station that played… wait for it… elevator music.  ‘Beautiful music’ is what they called it.  ‘Hell’ is what I called it.  Just about everywhere on the dial… e v e r y w h e r e… you heard this station playing instrumental after instrumental designed to put anyone under the age of thirty into a coma.  Those above 30, like my parents?  They sang along.  Imagine, if you will, being a thirteen-year-old kid lying in bed with the knowledge that the snow was piling up outside and desperately wanting to know if school was on the next day and having to endure the agony of ‘beautiful music’ while doing so.  It almost wasn’t worth it.  There was a reason growing up that I continually stated that I was in the ‘<radio station call letters> Death Z0ne’.

Living where I did growing up, our idea of fun, once we reached driving age, was driving somewhere we could listen to some decent music.  A mere mile away from my house, you could start hearing pop music stations, but that isn’t necessary what I was looking for.  Being in an area that was quite rural, country stations abounded, but I never have and never will develop a liking for that crap – Rock and Roll was what we were looking for.  Evenings like those involved finding a secluded spot on the top of the hill where we could sit in the car and listen to a station sixty miles away for an hour or two.  As we grew older and bolder and more able to secure ‘adult beverages’ we located a hill twenty miles away where we could listen to radio from the big city eighty miles away while drinking ourselves into a semi-stupor.  That was the saying in my home town:  ‘There’s only two things to do in down – drink and <blank>.’  You can probably fill in the blank.

For the record, I grew up with three television stations… four if you count a really fuzzy one.  When my kids tell me they are bored, I absolutely have to laugh.

I recently went back to my little town.  The Rock and Roll station I listened to growing up can now be heard quite well most everywhere in town.  The ‘beautiful music’ station cleaned up their signal and changed to rock and roll shortly after I moved away, but has now joined the legion of country stations in the area.  All of this matters not today – you can listen to anything you want at anytime you want courtesy of mp3s and the internet.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 15

Yup, changed my colors because I can.  White was getting to be a little much on the eyes.

From the comments department…

I was just looking at your Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 11 – The Life of C.L. Boss website and see that your site has the potential to become very popular.

Wow!  You don’t say?  Tell me more…

Now, let me ask you… Do you need your site to be successful to maintain your way of life?

Now there is where you lost me.  You apparently can’t be that big of a fan – I’ve already said that this blog is a money-losing proposition.  I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that if I get tangled up with what you have to offer, it will make it even more so.  Try again.

Work this week involved attendance at the local county fair for a couple of days.  While I was all about the fair in my youth, it’s not necessarily my idea of a good time anymore.  The last time I actually paid to go to the county fair, my five-year-old daughter coerced me into going on the ‘pink ride’.  I consider it to be a miracle that neither of us lost our lunch in the middle of the midway as a result.  That daughter is now seventeen.  Fortunately for me, my time was spent not doing a whole lot of anything while sitting in an air conditioned vehicle far away from any rides.

While I started this blurb ready to make the claim that I consumed no ‘fair food’ while there, I must admit to consuming some kettle corn.  I like me some kettle corn – sweet, salty, crunchy, and full of fiber.  The other two food items I consumed can be bought at local restaurants and do not include the word ‘fried’ so they don’t count… do they?

I was once convinced by someone not to eat a fried Twinkie.  I was pretty sore about that missed opportunity for the longest time.  Two years running I have had the opportunity to right that wrong.  Two years running I have passed.  Consuming fried snack cakes is a young man’s occupation – I’m not one of those any more.

Here’s a little factoid about C.L. for you – I once made the second best bread exhibited at the fair in the rural county that I lived in.  My reward was a nice purple rosette and a small cash prize in addition to bragging right thirty years late.  My only blemish – I baked on a very humid day and had a few too many bubbles in my bread.  At various times in my life I’ve made bread, but these days bread is carbs and carbs are bad.  I’ve finally gotten over this disappointment.  My daughters, however, have not.

You only need four ingredients to make bread:  water, flour, yeast (in some form or fashion), and salt. You can not believe what you are able to do with those four things with just a little bit of practice.

One of the great tragedies of my life is that I had no idea what the difference was between margarine and butter until I was well into my twenties.  I thought they were the same thing.  They are, I can assure you, not the same thing.  My family was a margarine family – we had copious amounts of the little containers to prove it. When I discovered the awesome goodness that was butter, it was an epiphinal moment.  Only on the rarest of occasions has margarine ever graced my house since then.

I want to apologize to you, dear reader, as well as my junior English teacher for the large amount of passive verbs that have been used (see, there’s another one… and yet another one) in the writing of this blog entry.  It took quite awhile for the world to convince me that passive verbs are (damn it!) evil, but I now comprehend how they lead to dull writing.  Perhaps I now have…. er… never mind.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 14

I had one of my fans reach out to me today and ask me why I haven’t been writing in my blog lately, but it wasn’t as much what she said as how she said it. May I offer a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to Ms. Boss for her encouragement.

Another fan offered additional piece of advice in a comment on Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 7.  It reads as follows:

It’s hard to locate knowledgeable people on this matter, but you sound like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks

So there you have it folks, straight from user ‘darkness reborn hack free’ – I’m knowledgeable AND I know what I’m talking about, especially when it comes to random semicoherent thoughts.  As someone famous once said…

You can always believe everything you read on the internet.  – Abraham Lincoln

We need to get caught up on some ‘goings on’ since I haven’t published any of my natterings for the last month.  Here’s a highlight – I marched in a Gay Pride parade last month, I even held the sign for the group I was marching with.  Yes, you remember correctly, there is a ‘Ms. Boss’ in my life.  No, while I’m not the most machismo man in the world, I’m not gay.  Why did I do this?  It’s simple, someone I care for asked me to.  You know what?  It was a lot of fun.  I’m absolutely willing to do it again.

Not thrilled with either ‘the Donald’ or ‘crooked Hillary’?  There is an alternative – https://www.johnsonweld.com.

Even before I knew much about soccer, I’ve wanted to attend an English soccer match – there’s something about the atmosphere that I’ve always seen in highlights from those games.  I got half a chance a week ago when I saw and English Premiere League team take on my local team.  It’s definitely on the bucket list now.

When I say I didn’t know much about soccer, here’s kind of what I mean – my rural high school did not have a soccer team until I was a senior.  Reason? Soccer was something that Communists played, real men played football.  Yes, I was a ‘real man’ and did what I was supposed to do, but looking back twenty-five years, I wish I would have had the alternative.

August is rapidly approaching and hot, humid weather brings back memories of ‘two-a-days’.  For those who aren’t privy to the term, a ‘two-a-day’ is a high school football practice where you work your ass off for two hours, enter a vegetative state for about two hours to recover, then work your ass off again for another two hours.  Despite drinking a gallon of fluid, it was not uncommon to lose five pounds by the end of the day.  It was difficult, but I do look back on the fact that I survived it with pride.

I played football from seventh-grade to twelfth-grade.  I wasn’t very good – while the letter I got when I was a senior wasn’t a ‘gimme’, I didn’t have the required amount of quarters played until my last game.  I enjoyed playing in the games and some of the fringe benefits of being a football player in a small town, but I didn’t much care for practice or, truthfully, being near the ‘jock culture’.  If I knew then what I know now, I might have been a better player, but I also might not have played football at all.

In some ways, I think football is dying in this country as due a number of factors – sociological, physiological, technological among others.  I was a fan growing up, but if I watch sports in the fall these days, its more likely to be something else.  Disagree? This page has a comments section – use it.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Voume 13

It’s been awhile.  I’ve been busy.

I really feel that I should say something about the Orlando shootings, but I just don’t know what to say that would be meaningful.

I’ m a straight guy and I marched in a gay pride parade last weekend because I was asked to.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don’t understand homosexuality.  The thought of being intimate with a man just really doesn’t do it for me.  I do, however, know a thing or two about love.  If two men love one another and their being together makes them happy, why should I care or interfere?  Just because I don’t understand something, doesn’t mean I should condemn it.

Why are Christians so quick to condemn Muslims as a whole for the actions of a few radicals?  I seem to recall someone saying something about sin and casting stones…

I don’t understand guns.  I even work in an environment where guns are a large part of the culture – the majority of my coworkers have assault rifles. I shot a few beers cans in my younger years and it didn’t do much for me.  However, much like homosexuality  (brace yourself for an awkward statement), just because I don’t understand it, doesn’t mean I condemn it.

I do understand media.  They make a profit out of other people’s misery.  I will condemn that.  Unfortunately, they are a necessary evil.

Here’s something that annoys me.  My work exposes me to many things that make the news. Time and time again, I see them get the facts wrong.  Yet when they cover something I don’t know about, I accept it as the gospel truth. Seriously?