Mama's Mornin' Brew

Mama was in her chair a day or so ago, you know, the one with electric eject that helps her stand up an' all?

Well, the lights in the windows of her 91-year old eyes said she was home as I handed her a mug of coffee and pulled my chair up.

So I was on that chair lookin' in them eyes, watching the smile rise from the coffee mug's heat warming hands road-mapped with the wrinkles of her years.

She sipped and smiled. She always says "I could live on fresh bread 'n butter and a cuppa good coffee," so I asked, "Mama, how you likin' the coffee this mornin'?"


"It's strong enough to make a jackrabbit stand up and spit in a bulldog's eye," and, through my nodding chuckle, I was reminded how grateful I am to have come from her Southern and genteel stock.

No Survivors in Clueless Collision with Reality

Oh, I can feel her fingernails dragging down, digging into my back as I grit my teeth and squint to keep from growling and rolling over for another round beyond my overspent limit.

It's she, rolling me over, stradling me, her knees at my ribcage, but it's only her grin that fuels me to slay dragons of my business surrounds that day (one that finds me singing aloud on the commute).
I grab a shower, gray suit, dark green-turtled tie she gave me from our Brooks Bros. stop in San Francisco. A sweet kiss and traditional bun squeezes send me into the daylight's freeway fray.


Voice-mail on the way home, "I took my stuff, am gone, and have a new phone" cause the tears-blinded hurtle of my car into the driveway to find an emptyness where there's not a shred of her existence outside picture frames and a damp towel. Her secret, greater love has won-out, cocaine surpassing me taking control at nearly a thousand bucks a week and spiriting her off to Texas with an enabler more clued-in than I.

Star - Comet - Meteor - Crater

Hey, POTUS ? This one's for you.

Last month I missed my numbers. And the prime-mover domino has been tipped, meaning, I may be on my way out because numbers are cumulative. It's been God's grace, a little science and a little magic (sorry Buick or from whomever I've borrowed the phrase) that I've made my quota thru these rough times. Repeat and referral business, and just plum, dumb luck has eeked me thru. Til now. Thank you Mr Happy Face. Oops, President Happy Face.

Your facial expression, here, doesn't belong to the slick-tongued, high-hoped, inexperienced congressman a portion of the electorate exalted. It looks, here, as if you've had a head-on collision with the reality that you're a dismal failure. Even your Dem-cronies are now realizing that their own grins are stuck there from the egg-on-yer-face fried by the drying and rising heat of public opinion that you are inept.

Some of us knew how things would go before we cast our votes. But you've skated thru a year, gotten your giggles from playing with Air Force One. Spoken with great passion and conviction only to produce ill winds and rancor in the America most of us love and for whom some of us bled. And died.

Your handlers convinced some that you had brains and leadership. Regardless of whether or to what degree I continue to wonder that whether or not you posess those resources, I wonder if you could recognize any in your surrounds.

I heard a phrase, Mr President, I'll share with you: "Talent is the ability to recognize genius." Ponder that. Write it on your shaving mirror. Maybe, just maybe I'm giving you too much credit, here, but you might just posess the faculty to-- just once, and maybe in the nick of time to help our country--recognize someone in your peeps with talent; someone who can recognize the genius it'll take to engineer a recovery that's spiritual, emotional, patriotic and wholesome enough for us to bounce back.

You sure ain't got it, can't do it. And those who have your ear need to be replaced with better minds, folks with vision beyond the hood ornament of your limo.

Ouch, you've just appeared on my TV screen. Here you go, again. You're on e-span grinning holding a Lakers' jersey, with a Coach Phil Jackson sound bite, kibitzing with Magic Johnson. Where are your priorities? What the fuck are you thinking?

Or keep playing with cameos and sports stars and Air Force One and going down in history as the era's Nero serenading our downfall.

Stewardship of the Intangibles

He risked it, taking cheap mortgage money to buy-out his disabled-wife...a housemate since their divorce 5 years earlier.

Not long after the ex's finding her dream-home in the woods, Ted fell in love with a woman and her four small kids, and --following the home's remodel--lost it to the mortgage wolves.

His job has been wavering and life may find him unable to take a vacation anytime soon with his missus of 2 years and her kids for whom he's been a transformer. So I begged him to come to the travel show where I've spent my working weekend.

They came and left and at day's end, a prize drawing announcement was made that he had won a 7-day all-inclusive trip from ClubMed.

It occurred to me that I can hold hope and faith when that vessel seems shattered or gone from a reach of a friend.

Tiger Woods: Are the Chinese Right?

The Chinese New Year in February will begin the year of the Tiger. Hasn't he gotten enough publicity?
A: No.

This rant is for Mr. Woods' enjoyment and reflection. Since it's for you, I'll just call you "Tiger," as, I'm nearly twice you're age.

You're not the 1st man to make a mistake. Nor are you the 1st to have gone for the forbidden fruit casting consequences aside. The difference between you and the rest of us 'Joe Nobodies' is that did so is that you fucked up under the brightest spotlight, on the biggest stage, of sports hero-worship in the history of modern record-keeping.

I'm glad you're not out there competing, because I'd hate to see you fling a club at a heckler near your tee box and get carted off in handcuffs. I'm of the opine that, with your unmatched concentration and hair-triggered demonstrative temper, a few well-timed remarks on televised golf tourneys might just send you the rubber room. Might even cause the cameras to stop following you on live coverage, for fear of capturing another flavor of indiscretion.

Pitiable. Not because you have everything for which the rest of us would beg of God 1%-, but because you're you, Tiger. The papparazzi have a worldwide, 24/7 A.P.B. out for you. And the mainstreamers in media would love to have their glory in an exclusive. You're a self-sentenced recluse. And your kids. And Elin.

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall." Ouch, Tiger. Damn shit HELL, ouch!

You may change your whole life. Or lifestyle. Or not, although I wouldn't wager you'll follow the footsteps of the Domino's Pizza founder and give it all to the church. But, if you tune out your agent and handlers and lawyers and staffers whom you pay for advice.... If you roll your ego into a tight little ball and launch it from the Privacy's aft deck with that ancient 2-iron you love, and then throw in the 2-iron....

You know what? Maybe.... Just maybe if you lie down on a cool patch of beloved grass upon which you putt and play, and listen to Him who invented grass, you'll get the message. Reread the last sentence if you need to, noticing that I didn't say "talk" to Him. Just listen. I'm not convinced your ego's so swollen you can't decipher God's voice from you're own sense of common sense (which stock is way, way, way, down).

What's important? Whose opinion of you counts most? Can you paint a vivid picture of the Dad you'd want for your kids--and can you see how to become him?

Here's a precious secret I learned too late in my own life: Love is a behavior.

I found peace through grace. But it took an awful lot of humility and still struggle as if it's bad-tasting medicine. But I gotta, cuz I need to be able to sleep at night and shave this face in a mirror.

The Chinese--oft-regarded as wise--may just be correct, again. I'll pray that they are, and for you.