The Midnight Hour

While I abhor literary ego-stroking, some catching up seems prudent, as much has changed in my life recently. So I shall seek to refrain from boring you, but be warned, this post is all about my boring life. Nothing of value lies within. Enter at your own risk. No refunds will be issued.

First, I am writing for the New York Times again in their Homefires section.  My first piece from this season is now live here.  I was thrilled to be extended this opportunity for a 4th time and am looking forward to being called a vicious baby killer in their comments section.  I’ve also become a contributing editor for Primer, an online men’s magazine.  I truly believe that Primer offers great content that is lacking from traditional men’s publications like Men’s Health, GQ, and Maxim, so I’m happy to be a part of it.

Next, as you may have noticed from my pictures, my hair is not exactly within regulations anymore.  No, this isn’t some kind of rebellion against the grooming standards that were forced upon me in the Marine Corps.  I’ve always wanted long hair.  See, my hair becomes a curly, frazzled bird’s nest whenever it exceeds about two inches. In order to get long hair I have to traverse a horrid stage where my mother can still recognize me, but if I’m standing on a street corner drinking coffee, someone is likely to drop change in my cup.  I’ve never been willing to traverse this stage because in high school I was concerned about getting a date.  I was married during college, after college came the Marine Corps, and now here I am: my first opportunity to grow long hair.  I plan to get it cut as soon as I look like the Beastmaster.

Next, I’ve made two trips to the ER in the past six months, which is more than the previous six years combined. This started with an allergic reaction. I’ve never had an allergic reaction to anything. I considered myself immune to the biotoxins that plagued those with inferior immune systems. Still, I awoke early on a Saturday morning and took an Aleve for muscle pain. I returned to bed and found sleeping difficult. My arms began to itch, but whenever I scratched the itching only spread to different parts of my body. I began to feel hot. Something told me to go look at myself in the mirror. I turned on the light and struggled to understand the form staring back at me from the mirror. My face was red as a beet and a rash was spreading across my chest like swine flu hysteria through a gaggle of soccer moms. On my way to the ER my body played a really neat game of swelling and contracting different parts of my face. First my nose swelled, then it receded and my lips swelled. This actually gave me a lisp when I spoke. My wife found that funnier than I did. Next my eyes swelled, and my vision became blurry. At one point my scalped itched terribly and a bystander on Highway 431 could have observed me flailing my head violently from side to side, scratching it with both hands as my wife drove me to the ER at 60 mph. Homer Simpson had taken the controls of my body’s nuclear power plant and was throwing levers and pushing buttons at whim.

My second trip to the ER was to relieve the worst pain of my life: a perforated ear drum. I recently started wakeboarding, and one day on the water yielded a series of bad falls. The first had given me a slight concussion, making me unable to remember the names of everyone in the boat. That should have been my cue to hang it up for the rest of the day. Alas, I did not. My next fall brought my left ear against the water at the speed of the boat (21 mph) plus an angular velocity that I estimate at “holy shit.” That trip to the ER happened to coincide with a local rodeo, which brought some of north Alabama’s most interesting characters to the ER to get repaired. While clutching my ear I had such thoughts as

“Yes, he’s definitely trying to put his shoulder back in its socket like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Wow, he did it!”

“I wonder how long she had to search for that peach-colored cotton tank top to match her peach-colored boots.”

“I think that man with the mullet and the Jeff Gordon t-shirt just kissed his son on the mouth.”

While I had admittedly tied myself to a boat in order to slide across water on a piece of plastic, I couldn’t help but think that tying myself to a bull and yanking on his testicles was an unquestionably worse decision.

The last and largest development in my life is becoming an entrepreneur. I have partnered with a friend to open a CrossFit affiliate in Madison, Alabama. CrossFit is a health and fitness program that develops a broad, inclusive fitness through very rudimentary equipment, methods, and movements conducted at high intensity. A Marine I served with in Iraq unknowingly introduced me to CrossFit. I always noticed him looking up crazy workouts on crossfit.com and performing them outside our work area. Fast forward three years and now I’m the crazy one in the gym hanging by gymnast rings, jumping on plyo boxes, and performing lewd acts with barbells. In early September I was certified as a trainer. I look forward to facilitating change in other people’s lives as CrossFit has changed mine.

However, opening a business has also fully exposed the bureaucracy surrounding anything that touches government, or even wanders closely enough to smell it (and it smells bad). Local and state governments are seriously like the mob when it comes to taxes. “Oh, you want to set up in our part of town? That’s gonna cost ya. We’ll be taking a cut each year. Call it a tax on your privilege of operating in our area…a privilege tax.” We haven’t earned our first dollar of revenue, but we’ve written countless checks for permits, licenses, privilege taxes, and use taxes for no other reason than we’ll have our collective knee-caps broken and be put in jail if we don’t comply. If I extorted another individual like this, then I would surely be thrown in jail. However, the cruel yin to that yang is that if I don’t comply when I am extorted by government, then I’ll be thrown in jail.

Jovial complaints aside, opening my business has been a great endeavor. I found that I will create endless time and energy for a task that rewards me directly in accordance with my competence. If I know my competence will go unnoticed or unrewarded, then I am much less apt to completely devote myself to a problem. However, every ounce of energy I pour into my business is retained and not lost to anyone else (until we become profitable and government extortion begins anew). My efforts create a product that is a reflection of me, and I will do anything to make it an accurate reflection of my desires and intentions. While maintaining my full-time engineering job and laying the groundwork for an evening job has been an immense strain on my schedule, I make time for the things I care about. I can’t think of anything more exciting than positively impacting people’s lives in a way that is rewarding to both of us.

Lastly, I’m very close to completing my MBA from UAHuntsville. That journey will conclude next summer.

I hope you’ll keep up with my posts on Homefires and Primer.  Feel free to comment here or on each site individually and let me know what you think.  I’ll be updating this blog whenever a new article from me goes live on either.