I am Alive

When I was sixteen, I was racing three wheeler Honda ATCs with my brother. I came up behind him just as he turned in, and I went up, into the air, and fell off the ATC as it soared... I landed on the gravel, and the ATC came right down landed on me, and bounced clear off of me, bounced a couple of more times, and fell in the ditch.

I got up, and looked around for my body, assuming I was dead, as I knew what happened when ATCs flipped. But I didn't see my body anywhere. As I felt my nose trickle, I realized I was actually alive.

I am alive today. But I know what it is like to die in an accident, and I take nothing for granted. I realize now I was given a miracle that day, one of many.

PWNED!!

Junior got caught smoking pot. So as a punishment, Dad sold his copy of Guitar Hero. Hence the title of my post.

While a very funny story, you have to wonder sometimes how stories like this make the news!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317014,00.html

Boy did this guy sign up for the wrong plan!

This is enough to convert even the most fervently mobile back to land lines!

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSN1322682220071213

Just want to be me

A young Toronto woman who just wanted to be herself paid the price for it at the hands of her father, who wanted her wearing the hijab, according to a slew of news stories.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=162281

It is my hope for my own daughters to persist in the family faith, it really is. And perhaps they will, although young people frequently wander away from it, as I myself did.

But if they do, they'll stick with it on their own. I've done my part by providing a household that puts our faith in its best light. I've never understood cultures where fathers believe they can force their wills so completely on their kids. As a father, I may be responsible for my daughter's well-being... but as frustrating as it is when I make breakfast, I can't decide for her what she likes to eat. I can't set her tastes in clothes.

As for Aqsa Parvez, nobody will ever know what the course of her life was to be. She could have made her family very proud someday, as all kids have the potential to do. But because of her father's cold-hearted rigidity, they will now never know.

Living at home

That's what my daughter's doing, now, along with my granddaughter. It feels a little surreal. It is nice to have a toddler around the house again, doing all the cute stuff that they do. And it is exhausting.

But mostly it is hard to fathom. How could I possibly be old enough to be a grandfather? I certainly don't feel like a grandfather... (and the little one, bless her heart, does not call me grandpa yet... she calls me "Mommy!")

I don't have gray hair, there isn't hair pouring out of my ears, I don't have small spectacles that I stare out over, and I'm not bent and withered.  So how can I possibly be grandpa? Except that I am.

The Iraq war now has a personal dimension. My daughter is quasi-seeing (in this modern 'met over the Internet, never in person' way that people can date now) a young man serving in Iraq, a guy from Texas. So now I have another reason to hope that the war ends soon - the safety of this very polite young man.

It seems that my daughter will be moving into my music room. So my music making is going to be a little harder to do. That depresses me a little. I've grown very attached to making music the last few years... I don't have any sort of social life now, and making music has been how I connect to the world outside of these four walls.

If I lose that, what's left? I will have drawn so far inside of myself that I will be like a black hole with an event horizon... stuff comes into me, but never gets out.