The Writer's Poke

  Murders are rare in Rochester, Minnesota. To my knowledge, only one has occurred in the past two years, and it took place in my neighborhood – about a ½ mile from my front door. My neighborhood loops in a circle, and the backside of the circle is a crappy road surrounded on both sides by brush and woods. A few houses sprinkle these woods, but it’s basically an isolated spot. Sometimes in the summers, we’ll walk the loop. I’m not paranoid, but every time I walk this section – even before the murder – I find myself wondering what I’d do if a car drove up, and the occupants inside started to mess with me. Would I stand and fight? Would I try to flee into the brush? Or would I just stand and wait to see my fate? I feel safe where I live, but I try to be conscious of my surroundings at all times. When the young man was murdered – apparently the victim of a drug-related crime – no police officers swept our neighborhood looking for the suspects. In fact, we ...

One of my fantasies is to visit India in July. I dream it to be, well, hotter than hell. The upside to that, of course, is less tourists. I dream it to be dirty, and I dream it to be crowded, and I dream it to be poor. On the other hand, I dream it to be the opposite of those things, too. I dream of India because I have never been there, and I honestly have no idea what it’s like. Why dream of India? Fair question, dear reader, but do you have control over what dreams invade your sleep at night? Neither do I, and neither do I have control, really, over what I dream about when I’m awake. It’s a cliché to say that life’s a dream, but behind the cliché is at least some truth. While I dream of India from miles away, other people have taken the leap to experience their dreams in person. What do they see when they arrive in the place once only dreamt upon? Does the reality live up to the dream, or is the reality simply an extension of the dream – experienced a...

I like to think I’m special, but if forced to examine what makes me special, I might have to be honest. I’ve had a lot of breaks and opportunities. You have, too, right? People that have had a chance to explore their specialness have been blessed with a luxury that other people all around the world have been denied. Human potential. I strongly believe in it, but I also recognize that most people do not live in circumstances that allow them to realize their potential. I’m sure that many – probably all –   kids born on May 24, 1973, have talents, skills, perspectives, etc., which make them every bit as special as I am. How many of them have already died before figuring out what made them special? How many continue to live in developing countries, spending most of their energies finding ways to survive from day to day? At this point in my life, I don’t feel like I’ve reached my potential. I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be in that regard. I keep studying, and I keep ...

  Frank and Louie is a two-faced cat. Or, to put it another way, Frank and Louie is a cat with two faces. Seems pretty freaky when you first see it, but my thought is simply this: Does it know how to use a litter box, and does it use its litter box each and every time it goes to the bathroom. If so, then that cat’s alright with me. We’ve been keeping our cat, Turkey, locked up in the basement because she keeps peeing on our beds when she’s upstairs. She’s literally lived in a barn for the first few months of her live, and I suppose you can take the cat out of the barn, but you cannot take the barn out of the cat. Last night I felt pity for her and I let her out of the basement. She was good all day yesterday, but this morning as I was running around getting ready for work, she peed all over my comforter. Maybe it was a relief for her, but it didn’t provide me with the same feeling. Needless to say, Turkey is now back the basement and will be for the foreseeable future. ...

  So how often do you lie? And what do you lie about? 1.       “How are you today?” “I’m fine, thanks.” Maybe you’re not fine at all, but the social convention is to say that you are. It’s a friendly gesture, and it’s almost the equivalent of shaking hands and saying “hello.” But if you say you’re fine when you’re not, are you lying?   2.       “Do I look good in this dress?” or “How do you like the meal?” “You look good” or “It tastes good.” If these responses are not true, what is the benefit to telling the person the truth? Is it worth hurting someone’s feelings? Sometimes we lie to protect people we love from being hurt. Is this really a bad thing? After all, we know when the people we love want to know the truth, and we also recognize when they don’t want to know the truth, don’t we? The above questions may be examples of when people don’t want to know the truth, or at least don’t mind if w...

Sometimes change is thrust upon us, yes, but I'm much more interested in the changes we initiate ourselves.   Why do we initiate change in our lives? We can walk in the same direction for years, but then all of a sudden, we decide to walk in a different direction. It’s likely that there’s a build-up leading up to the moment we make the decision, but the moment itself “clicks” us in. After the clicking moment occurs, it will take another series of events to ever cause us to change direction again. Sometimes the clicking moment occurs because we’ve experienced a significant event. For example, I stopped biting my fingers this year; that wasn’t one of my planned goals, but after getting a bad infection and having to visit the ER at 2 a.m., I discovered it wasn’t all that difficult to stop. Most clicking moments don’t include a visit to the ER in the middle of the night; most changes we make originate from more subtle origins, and sometimes the reasons behi...

The Chinese have a saying, “May you live in interesting times.” It’s supposed to be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, I suppose, because at least you’ll never be bored. A curse, perhaps, because you will always need to be alert to both dangers as well as change – no matter how positive those changes might be. I heard another saying on the radio yesterday, but I didn’t catch where it originated. Maybe Russia. Anyway, it goes something like this: “May you get the life you want.” Again, the idea behind the saying is that it can be both a blessing and a curse. If we are in charge of our lives, then we need to be careful, very careful about what we want. For as the world-famous philosophers The Pussycat Dolls remind us, “Be careful what you want ‘cause you just might get it.” This reminds me of one final saying, which I’ve always assumed to be taken solely as a blessing: “My cup runs over.” That’s from Psalms 23:5, and yes, it’s about definitely about blessings. ...

If you visit Jamaica, you might end up at Dunn’s River Falls. And if you do, I won’t think any less of you. The idea behind this attraction is neat enough: Start at the bottom and climb your way to the top. Is it worth $50 a person for the experience? I’ll leave that up to you and your budget to decide; keep in mind that the cost includes the ride there and back, which can be a fun adventure in itself. However, it doesn’t include a lot of “hidden” costs… Other than the high price of admission, the problems with Dunn’s River Falls are many. First, prepare for it to be insanely overcrowded. On days when cruise ships are in port, as many as 7,000 tourists will be trying to make their way to the top with you that same day. In other words, you will be holding hands with strangers from top to bottom, and you’ll probably be more preoccupied with people than you will be with the “amazing experience” you would be having if you were by yourself or with a small, intimate group. As long...

Serendipity, by definition, implies “happy little accidents,” and no one plans for accidents, right? Accidents, by definition, just happen. The serendipity of success, however, isn’t quite as accidental as it may seem. Success may be serendipitous, but if it is, most of the time there’s an underlying element of planning involved.   Successful people, in other words, work to be successful. They plan to be successful; they are motivated to be successful. Could someone accidently trip over success? Perhaps, but how likely is it that such success is long-lasting? Not very likely, I would say. So how did the painter Bob Ross have so many “happy little accidents?” He had them by actively painting. He wasn’t seeking mistakes, but if he made them, he turned them into opportunities. Some people might immediately stop painting and start over with a new canvas. Ross didn’t. He simply incorporated the mistake into the painting, and the painting was inevitably all the be...

I used to have a simplistic view of what it meant to be smart. If you knew a lot of stuff, I thought, then that probably meant you were smart. Then I started to understand that knowing a lot stuff didn’t mean much. To be smart, you had to know what to do with that knowledge. You had to be able to apply it in useful ways. Knowing stuff, and knowing what to do with what you know – that’s what makes someone smart.  What if you know a lot of stuff, but you can’t express that you know it? Or, maybe you can even apply your knowledge in unique ways, but not in ways normally acknowledged by standard measures. Can you still qualify as being “smart”? When we’re in school, how smart we are is generally measured through our ability to test well. Tests are generally in written form, and so as long as you are able to translate your knowledge into standard responses, you’ll be able to demonstrate just how smart you are.  Actually, I don’t have a problem with this. For...

In Disc Golf, a player throws a disc at a goal. Sounds simple enough, but often times, the person throwing the disc must avoid trees and other obstacles. Avoiding a big tree should be easy enough, but when the focus becomes the tree and not the goal, “ironic effect” error can come into play – much to the detriment of the poor tree. Why is it so easy to focus on the obstacle or the problem rather than the goal or the solution? Well, in the case of the tree in the above example, it sometimes becomes the most obvious place to focus. It may, in fact, literally hide the goal from view. The goal is there, but it’s out-of-sight. When I first started playing Disc Golf, one person taught me to turn my back to the goal. Visual the goal in your mind, he said, and approach the shot mentally. Know where the obstacles are, yes, but don’t make the obstacles the focus. Make the goal the focus. Blind people play Disc Golf, and some do really well. I’ve often thought that the blind might...