take five

The other day I drove down to Peoria, IL for a client meeting. The meeting was to start at 2pm, I got to Peoria early and was parking my car outside of the office building by 1:30. As I was completing the parallel park, the phone rang, it was the man I was supposed to meet with. He said he had already left the office and was on his way to the hospital to see his wife who was having dizzy spells and all but fainted at work that day. I will not mention now why this gave me pause but he cancelled our meeting and all of a sudden I had driven two and a half hours for no particular reason. I decided to complete the park and walk around for a little while. It was a perfect day outside. I made a couple calls to notify a few foks of my predicament and decided I would find something to eat. As I was walking down the street I saw a seemingly homeless man asking a young guy about my age for a quarter. Of course I assumed the young man would make some excuse, as we do in Chicago, and keep walking. He did not, in fact he reached into his pocket, took out his wallet and said, "Here, I'll give you five." The homeless gentleman said "God Bless." and I had passed them and they were out of sight and earshot, but certainly not out of my mind.

Trying to suspend the assumption that people from Peoria are that naive about homeless people that they would give a guy five dollars and think it's going to turn his life around or he is going to buy a loaf of bread for his kids or something. Of course, I have given my share of dollars to the homeless but time and life in the city has made me realize that money, either in the form of a dollar passed from one human to another, much less millions passing from our citizens to the government and then to the less fortunate means nothing unless there is accountability and a desire for self sufficiency.

Maybe the Peorian was just having a great day, maybe he made off big at the casino that day, maybe he had enough money to go around and could have paid for my lunch, who knows, I am taking this whole scene out of context but you will find in future posts, the smallest things have a tendency to set me off and impose a single occurence on the meaning of life or the order of things, and most excitingly, the disorder of things.

me too

I feel now is the best time to start my blog; when I have nothing to say. So many times I have tried to persuade myselft to start one with delusions of grandeur and my mind races as to what I will post and the masses that will be attracted. They will identify with my thoughts, rock with my experiences, laugh at my humor.

There is something funny that happened as I was starting my blog, its harder than they make it out to be. I was actually mildly discouraged when I could not come up with an original title for my blog. What is that supposed to mean. Are all of my secret sayings and meaningful phrases shared by someone else in this world. So of course my set up was delayed because obviously I had to navigate to every blog that was named after the word or phrase that I had just unsuccessfully entered.

So here I am, foreman eighty six. If you know me chances are you have no idea what it means but know exactly what it is. I'll let the rest of you in on a little secret, it is the email address I have been using since I moved off of the aol kick and into the free email world of yahoo. I chose yahoo over hotmail at the time and have not waivered since. I don't know why I brought that up, I don't think I've ever thought about it but here you are, I warned you I had nothing to say.

I think I've kept this email address not only out of convenience but as somewhat of a statement of nonconformity. You see, when most people graduated high school, or maybe more around the middle of their college career, when they stared applying for serious summer jobs and internships, everyone signed up for new email addresses that were firstname.lastname or flastname, or something else that sounded dull and professional. I kept the same the whole time. Of course my business emails have changed and I have used those, but this one is for eternity. Even with the advent of the trendy, for members only gmail, I have stayed true to my yahoo roots and they have been good to me. They charge me next to nothing for going on 5 years, they have built up my storage limits by seemingly one thousand times what it originally was, they changed their interface to match the user friendly microsoft outlook interface, and they keep most of the spam out. I don't think I've ever thought about my email as much as I just did but now that I have, i am quite grateful for what yahoo has given me. now i sound like a commercial, not to mention a rambling idiot. I am stopping this first post and starting a new one about 5 dollars.