Mired in Muck?

When I take a look at the stats generated from views of this blog I have to shake my head. While there are hits from people who are curious about what I may write in here, most of the traffic comes from strange people searching strange terms related to people that I have mentioned in here, and 99% of it related to the women mentioned. 

Maria Molina - Fox Weather
(now the blog hits roll in)

Yes, its all sex stuff. We all know that it sells. It attracts our attention, it draws us in and it captivates us. 

Even my dirty podcast is centered on it even though there is a bottom line of the podcast. That is to point out that whole nations of people live lives behind closed doors that make them look hypocritical when one finds out that much what they say in their daily lives isn’t close to how they are living. 

My podcast was created at a time when I needed to get a whole lot off of my chest. I still have a lot to get off of my chest but as far as that particular time is concerned, I think I have exorcised those demons. 

It’s not like things are really a whole lot better but I think I need to direct my attention elsewhere and it might end up as a new show. It may very well be one where no one listens because it just won’t have the same juicy and controversial stuff in it. But until that actually happens I won’t make a promise here about anything.

I won’t make that promise because when I say that I want to, or am going to, do something I say it to try to generate support of some sort. I’d really like to know that a project that I want to create has some people urging me to do so or to say that they would like to help or support it in any way whatsoever.

But I don’t know if it’s the state in which I live (which I have often thought that was simply the case for over 20 years) or just the state of our society in general.

I recently offered to do a few free comedy hypnosis shows so that I could gather material for a few 30-minute online videos that I wanted to create as sort of a show that I could use to market my shows or perhaps even as a pilot for an idea I have. I had a couple of guidelines…be near me, have at least 50 people or so, and let’s do it sometime when I am not busy.

I had a couple of inquiries but two weeks have gone by and even with the added incentive that these potential hosts could raise money nothing came of it. Is that bizarre or what? In a time when money is tight and people need laughs or have an opportunity to raise funds for a cause without the expense for my particular show, no one can get motivated enough to make it happen.

I wonder what it takes to light a fire under someone’s ass anymore.

For years I produced a local television show that highlighted local athletes. It was one which was popular locally and it ran for 10 years or so and it was fun and it was needed around here. I still run the video production service into which it blossomed.

I’ve been trying hard to gather interest in re-launching the show in an online version. I throw it out there every now and then. I try to spark interest in people to help with it. Nothing.

Could it be that my pitch is bad? Perhaps. Could it be that my leadership skills are lacking? Perhaps.

I recently posted a GoFundIt page to try to generate funds to start the show. Not a dime has been offered. Not one dime and that’s even considering that a lot of the people who were featured on that show over the years saw that fund-raising page. 

 http://www.gofundme.com/localsports

Could it be that the whole idea just sucks so bad and I am just completely blind to it? Perhaps, but based on the prior experience, I would say no.

I think it’s simply that we are in such a state of malaise over these past ten years that it is going to take something quite drastic to motivate people again.

Frankly I think it’s a change in President but if we get Hillary Clinton we’ll get another 8 years of this crap, but that’s a much deeper conversation for another blog.

Yes, I do think it starts there but do we have to continue to let ourselves stew in misery for many more months and years? What will it take to move us? 

I can see why people get discouraged and find it hard to try to do something or get involved with something that is worthwhile in any sort of way. We see what gets rewarded, don’t we? We see fucktards like Miley Cirus and Justin Bieber earning even more attention and more money for being complete asswipes. While they may both be talented to some extent they aren’t close to being as talented as some people I know just here in Delaware and I’m not talking about me (for a change.) 

I know actors and actresses who are stunned to see the parts that children of already famous actors get who can’t hold a candle to those who are doing the same types of parts locally. 

Forget about entertainers (I am one so it starts with that first for me, sorry) and think about regular people trying to make it out there.

Every time our government creates a new regulation it puts another obstacle in the way of a small business owner who now has to figure out how to navigate through the new maze without the resources that the bigger companies have to use for which the regulation was created anyway. 

I don’t recall if I ever wrote this here or not but here it goes anyway. A while back I was living with a woman who had a kid who was paralyzed from the waist down. He had a hard time financially as a result and there was an opportunity on which I tried to capitalize and help provide the kid with a chance to work which would also chip in a few bucks for my monthly expenses. A local park needed a food vendor so I bought a hot dog cart. It was something simple that the kid could run as long as someone helped him set up and break down on days which it operated.

You would think that would be a pretty simple thing, right?

Guess again. The hot dog cart had a grill and two bins for hot dogs, one to cook them and one to hold them. It had a cooler for drinks. That was it. Of course there was an acquisition cost and supplies and an initial food purchase. I planned for that.

Then I had to start dealing with the government. I initially wanted to set up at someone else’s business. 

First, I had to deal with the State Division of Revenue for a license and pay a fee. Second, I had to go to the County Division of Land Use with a detailed map of this business outlining where the cart would get parked and pay a fee. Third, I had to go the Department of Transportation to get an entrance and exit waiver and pay a fee. Fourth, I had to go to the Department of Health – twice – for inspections, and that was AFTER completing an application that was about 50 pages long and paying a fee…TWO fees. Fifth, I had to go the Division of Motor Vehicles and pay $500 for the privilege of purchasing the hot dog cart. Sixth, I had to go to the County to pay a fee for a permit. THEN came the IRS. No fee at first but you know they get theirs later. 

SEVEN different government agencies just to open a hot dog stand.

Do you see ANYTHING wrong with this? The average person can’t deal with this sort of thing without a lot of help. It was so discouraging that I nearly gave up on myself. It cost about $7000 before we sold one hot dog. Then people complained about the $1.75 we had to charge per hot dog because they have no clue what goes behind running a business.

There was just a story about an 11-year old girl who has the entrepreneurial spirit and starting baking and selling cupcakes. She was doing so in order to work to raise money to get a car when she turned 16. Her parents were going to match funds that she raised. This should be a classic case of someone who does something that others should emulate.

Then the government shut her down.

They shut her down because she didn’t have permits. It’s an extreme example, I know…there has to be SOME rules but what we have now are too many. It only serves to crush our spirits.

 Feds Clamp Down on 11-Year Old

We had to hear about income inequality last night from a man who despises the successful and does whatever he can to demonize those who have succeeded. Many of the hundreds of new governmental regulations administered under his watch are designed to either punish the successful or keep them from acquiring more wealth. Of course its said that everything done is supposed to lift up those who aren’t successful and help them move forward in life. But it simply doesn’t. 

When people take a look at who the enemy of our mighty leader is right now…the successful…why would anyone want to take steps to reach that success and earn the related scorn that would come with it? I can see why people are hesitant, doubtful and even scared at times. Who wants to hear that if they start to make a lot of money that the government is going to come take more of it? Who wants to hear that if you make it in America it’s because you have stolen from someone and became successful off of the backs of others? It’s disheartening. 

It’s evil, is what it is. Our spirits are crushed in this country. Our hopes are dashed. And it’s done purposely so that a “great helping hand” will step in help make everything right. We’ll have things done for us and given to us…just continue to support those who will provide for you and everything will be ok. 

Those of us who want to do something different, step outside of the box, and make something happen used to be those who were admired in this country. Now? Not so much it seems. 

I still see light at the end of the tunnel. As depressing as all of this can be, and is, at times, I still am optimistic. I will still toss out ideas and try new things because for now I still can. I still believe that inside all of us who are American, and who came to America looking for what I seek and have experienced,  and know what really made this country successful is a spirit that can be rekindled. It might take a bigger match to light it. It might take doing something totally unexpected and what others are yearning to see or hear. But at the same time it takes a bunch of people to rally around it and support it when they see it or hear it. 

That is sort of the catch though, isn’t it? 

So today I ask you to ask yourself, “Am I willing to rise up and take bold new steps to make a difference? If not, am I at least willing to support someone who is?” 

Because if we aren’t we will continue to be bogged down in garbage, mired in the muck of mediocrity and simply destined to fail.

Done

Marshology

There are millions of people who blog and/or create some sort of alternate way of communicating with people from around the world via the internet.

Since there are so many I have wondered for the past few months why I should really even bother trying to find an audience when an audience would find it very hard to find me.

That is even considering that I have been doing one form or another of this sort of stuff since 1995.

How crowded is this arena now? For example, when I started podcasting nearly 3 years ago I had my show hosted on a site that, at the time, had roughly 200,000 other podcasts hosted. 

That site…just that one…now has over 800,000. Those are just audio podcasts.

I’m not one to think that anything that I have to say is profound, funny, amazing or anything of the sort. I really just like doing all of this sort of stuff. I don’t make any money doing it these days so to put a great deal of effort into it is nonproductive. I just have fun and sometimes I do it to kill time.

But at the same time I have a lot to get off of my chest even if it’s just a form of therapy for me and I don’t bottle up all of my emotions inside to the point where they manifest into some new odd affliction down the road for me. 

This morning, though, I was thinking that I almost have a duty to talk about certain things because I have life experience that can be passed on to others that they may find useful. 

What ran through my mind was a list of top 5 regrets that nurses hear from dying patients.

·  I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

·  I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
 

·  I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
 

·  I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
 

·  I wish that I had let myself be happier. 

I’m going to talk about the first one on that list right now. 

I remember growing up in the hot days of the Cold War that children from Communist countries were funneled into certain career paths in their lives. If a kid seemed to be a good athlete she was turned into a gymnast or a shot putter; if a kid was bright he was going to be made a scientist; take any sort of example of a kid who demonstrated an aptitude for anything in particular and a path was chosen for them and they were forced down it.

I also remember taking aptitude tests when I was a kid. I remember being told that I was fit for two certain types of occupations – music and law, which are two completely opposite sides of the spectrum. 

Fortunately our country was still free despite those subtle attempts to sway our population into thinking differently about how we should raise our children so as to benefit the common good and the collective like the communists did. There is no worse way to crush a human spirit than to force it into something it doesn’t want to do.

Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony
Dance or starve?

Not that either of the fields for which I had an alleged aptitude are horrible; I just had other plans for myself. 

One thing for which I basically had zero aptitude was sports. I loved playing sports but simply didn’t have the genetics to succeed as many others even in my own small hometown did. But I worked very, very hard at it because I loved sports and had my own successes throughout those days that I counted as successes because they were based, partially, on how they compared to what others thought I could do.

Never, however, did I attempt any sort of athletic activity because of what anyone else thought. I did so only because that was what I wanted to do. 

Baseball was my favorite, and best, sport but early injuries to my arm made it difficult for me to throw correctly and then a knee injury at 16 before arthroscopic surgery was available ended any real chance for that path. Even so I still knew that I could outhit most other people and since hitting a baseball is one of the most difficult things to do in sports, I always considered that a success that I achieved because I worked hard at doing something that I loved to do and became good at something no one thought I should ever do.

The next 12-15 years were filled with regular jobs and lots of booze. Horrible years for me and for those around me.

My family’s financial situation made it such that it was not in the cards for me to go to college so I had to work. I graduated high school early at 16 and walked from my last day of class to my first full-time job.

Right away it was obvious that working for the man was pretty much not for me.

I worked at a Burger King when I was 16 for a while. I was hard-working and motivated. I wanted to become a manager and even at that tender age the store management began a process with me to make me a manager. 

That meant an interview with a regional supervisor. The interview was very short, though, because he brought to my attention something that I had written on my job application in response to a question that asked something about my goals in life. I wrote, “To be my own boss and control my own destiny.” 

I remember writing it like it was yesterday. I also remember that jerkoff telling me that it was an “immature” statement and that meant that I wasn’t ready yet to move forward with the company because “everyone has a boss.” 

Even before I was working full time I knew that I wanted to work for myself and control my own destiny. 

I DID know, even then, that even though I was a non-conformist that I had to conform enough to survive until such time as I could write my own history. Today that remains true and since I have clients, they are my “boss” so while in one sense it’s true that I will always have a boss, I do, to a great extent, decide who they will be for me. 

I saw my father get fired from jobs when I was a kid and watched how my mother was treated in the work force when she decided to go to join it after my sister and I were able to take care of ourselves. I never wanted to have that happen to me when I got older and knew that the only way was to be on my own when I could. 

Then there came a day when everything changed and once and for all.

One day I had a vision.

It wasn’t a hallucination but rather a daydream that was much more vivid than what I had ever experienced.

I saw myself on TV hosting a sports show.

Keep in mind that I had never been on TV, was 33, didn’t have any training for it in ANY area of the field whatsoever and on that day I decided that I was going to do just that - produce and host a local TV show.

Usually when we decide to do things in our lives we start to tell people that, right? This was no exception; I started to tell a lot of people what I was going to do. I was very excited about my new opportunity that in no shape or form was an actual opportunity.

The response from people to what I was stating I, rather emphatically, about what I was going to do was stunning. There was almost universal criticism, scoffing, and ridicule. 

Frankly it was all very confusing. Why would anyone tell me that I couldn’t or shouldn’t do something like this? It’s one thing to say suddenly that I am going to build a set of wings and jump off of a building today. It’s quite another to say what I was going to do but apparently many felt the two projects were equal.

I was actually counseled by someone who told me that at my stage in life I should be happy with what I had because of the old adage, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush,” amongst other such “wisdoms.”

What really then hit me hard was a realization that I NEVER had to live the way anyone told me and do what anyone told me other than to obey laws and to not hurt people along the way. Who was anyone to tell me how to live? 

I realized that stepping out of one’s comfort zone, trying to take the lead and advance oneself in life serves to make other people very uncomfortable in sitting in their mediocrity. Many of the people in my circle of life at the time were stifled by mediocrity.  I believe that because they thought I may actually go out and do something and succeed at it that it would make them look bad or feel bad.

Thirty days later I turned on my local TV channel and there I was on it. This time it wasn’t a vision, it was a reality. I had done what pretty much everyone thought I could do.

Most importantly I decided not to conform. I escaped and lived outside the box into which others had packaged me and was never more proud of myself. 

The small company that I created is still in operation today. There were a few other examples between that period that were related to that business and I went through much of the same criticism although there certainly were less naysayers after that.

That is until 12 years later when I had yet another vision while driving down I95 through Philadelphia one day and I read a billboard that was advertising a hypnosis school. 

Hypnosis was introduced to me when I was a kid and I always had a back-burner interest in it but this advertisement painted a new picture in my head. 

The picture was of me performing a show in Las Vegas. 

Imagine now what people were telling me when I decided that I was going to become a stage hypnotist and work in Las Vegas. I was now 44 and the business that I had built from my first vision was doing well for me. I had absolutely zero need to do anything else with my life, even based on my own standards since I was working for myself in a creative environment that was perfectly suited for my desires. 

My girlfriend at the time thought I was crazy. Thankfully she didn’t do or say anything to discourage me because I would have ended that relationship (which she might find shocking to know if she read this.)

Think about that vision while you are thinking about how many people you know who are in bands, or tell jokes, or do some sort of stage act the type of which one might be able to see in Las Vegas. Well over 99% of people who venture into the entertainment field work their entire lives and never get the chance to take such a stage. There were many people to whom I mentioned what I was going to do and where I was going to do it who gave me that familiar look from 12 years prior that I vividly recalled.

Perhaps many part-time, or even full-time, entertainers don’t have such a goal. Maybe their goal is to simply create, have some fun on the side or make a little extra money on the side. I don’t criticize what other people’s goals are particularly since I can’t stand it when someone does that to me. 

But when you start to think that three years later I took a stage at the Bellagio in Las Vegas to perform my show in front of a crowd of over 1000 people, does it make you then wonder what would happen in one’s life if they simply adjusted their own bar?

If we stopped living as other people told us we had to live what would we truly be capable of doing? If we were able, and encouraged, to develop and articulate our personal visions how would our lives improve? How would our society improve in that case? 

One of the greatest things my parents did for me was to allow me to explore the many options that life had to offer me. Yes, I even explored playing instruments and indeed was pretty good at the violin when I was a kid. Yes, they were disappointed when I decided to stop playing it. But there was one thing that my mother always wanted for me and that was for me to simply be happy.

When it comes to this subject about what I do for a living I certainly am happy. I am, in no way, rewarded with riches at the moment. But I certainly do not have any regrets about the paths that I have chosen because I DID, and still do, have the courage to live my life true to myself and not the way others have tried to tell me to live it.

That is a short version of just that first mentioned life regret. This is a blog, after all, and people these days probably don’t even read this far down the page. 

If you have, though, let me mention something else. 

Every single day I wake up and I wipe my slate clean about a lot of things. I had been in a bad relationship a while back with someone who crushed my spirit on a daily basis. I don’t think she realized it at the time or came to a complete understanding of what she was doing even though I told her that, but that’s something else. 

We fought pretty hard from time to time as well. But every day I would wake up and it was a new day; it was time to start the rest of our lives with a fresh, new beginning. I forgave and forgive easily and I move on with my life. One thing I know from my personal experience is that when we hold on to resentment it crushes us. Resentment eats away our insides…our hearts and our minds. It’s an evil virus that corrupts happiness and health. We have to let that go and we have to flush it from our system.

There is an actual way to do this that I was told when I found myself in recovery from addiction. That method is to simply pray for the person who has caused you resentment. 

When I was first told about this I scoffed because I was never someone who prayed or was religious in any way. I was then told that I had to pray that the same person who had wronged you was to get the same wishes that I would want for anyone that I loved or who had never hurt me. I was told that it might take some time but that I should do it until the resentment was gone. 

Now just having read an entire piece about how I should live my life the way that I wanted, to find out that I would even momentarily entertain the thought of doing something like that might seem hypocritical to you. But the truth is that rarely anyone does this anyway so I was really taking advice from someone who lives outside the box himself even though this is advice that is frequently given.

So I prayed…and I prayed…and then I prayed some more. I am not even exactly sure to whom I was praying but I did ask God for help in removing my resentment and praying that everyone on that very long list had every blessing imaginable. 

One day I realized that I no longer harbored those old and deep-seeded resentments. It didn’t happen the next day, but it only took a couple of weeks. It was, dare I say, a miracle for me. 

That physical and mental process allowed me and still allows me today to wake up every morning with a fresh look at what is in front of me every day. It keeps me positive when the negative has happened. It allows me to forgive and to be in a position where I can be forgiven. It allows me to be simply happy, which was my mother’s goal for me. 

The next thing that I had to learn to do was get some gratitude in my life. I needed to be grateful for what I had – my health, my standing in life, the people in my life and count everything that I had as a blessing.

Most importantly I had to do these things in tandem (pray to remove resentment and have gratitude for what I had) because if I didn’t, I would lose everything good in my life that I had. Make no mistake that when I am blessed with something positive I will do whatever it takes to keep it. I certainly make my mistakes along the way trying to do that, but if I remain grateful and I lose those resentments promptly I will be able to hold on to what I have.

Ok, so it takes work on other people’s part too. There is only so much that I can do. The girl in the past relationship to which I referred didn’t live that way so it was ultimately over but I did my part. SHE is the one who told me that she had regrets about what happened. I had no regrets about it since I did exactly what I knew I should to keep it alive. 

I’ll close this thought by saying this, and I write this down so it can be re-read and pondered until it sinks in deep and eventually turns on that light switch for someone reading this who simply has a light switch that is off in their head at the moment. I have found that, for at least me, praying and being grateful IS the magic cure. We search and scour the world over for mythical and magical elixirs that we can take to help us with this particular subject. We seek help from the most highly trained professionals for the answers to our problems in this area. But the answer is so simple and so profound that when that light switch gets turned back on you may slap yourself upside the head because it was there the entire time. 

Finally…never…never, never, never…push something out of your life that can only bring good into it and is only good for it. Never do it. Wake up, smell the coffee before you drink it and then climb out of the boiling cauldron of life misery soup in which you are sitting that is keeping that light switch turned off.

Done.