Fight 4 Taste

  All of my love by Led Zepplin plays in the background as I sit, sipping perfect coffee in front of the campfire after a rainy night. It was 1979. My 14 year old innocence unsuspecting of the daring moves ahead to remove me from my cloud like nativity.     That power that pulls a young person into the complex fourth dimension of existence. It is a detour that one’s older self would tell the younger one to avoid at all costs.   It still rages on. There is a war indeed. Now that I am older, i watch my own sons take the detour. I know it’s power. I know the conviction of the heart of a young man to act as a human shield. Is it a right of passage? Is it a gauntlet that files down the rough edges of our souls? Is is better or is it worse? But it’s all a mystery, when you find you’re still on the road. 

  A great cup of coffee, raging fire, sound of light rain drops on the forest. And a four day old earache, relentlessly slapping me, trying to pull me out of this moment. I hate pain. It works hard in so many different ways to take center stage of my life. This morning I am engaged in an all out battle with it.  The rain holds off for about 3 hours but then inevitably yields to a forecast too bad to be wrong. It is a great sound, rain on the canopy and the crackle of the fire. We had to retreat from the warmth of the fire because of the rain. Now it only provides sound and visual effects. I knew this was coming. Don’t act surprised. The song the rain sings opens up days passed in my life. Rainy days usually. My childhood, my sisters. It would be a crime to deny myself this sensory experience. The sounds of the rain is quadraphonic (surround sound for you millennials). It is a testament to our creators power. The world can grow on one drop of rain at a time, and the same drop c...

  The coffee watch is on. Those eternal moments in which the combination of propane stove and coffee, percolator make so much noise. It is almost industrial. But then that grand entrance with that first appearance of clear water into the glass perk top shows up, accentuated by the sound of perking coffee that in my recollection does not sound like anything else on earth except maybe the sound of a distant steam locomotive pulling a hill. I turn down the burner so low, the flame is on the edge of not even being there. This is the careful process of massage, the art of creating amazing coffee in a traditional percolator. If I had it my way, I would still make coffee this way every single day as if it was 1977. This busy world challenges ideas like that with “essential tasks” that we have been re-programmed into thinking that they are indeed essential. The forecast for this weekend is riddled with rain, showers and storms. Thankfully, I am watching this coffee perk, the birds are sing...

  Coolidge state park. I just realized that we have not camped here in 13 years! That is crazy! We have come up here for the day many times. Several of these memories stand out. The last time we camped here was memorial day weekend of 2010. We had not booked anything in advance and had a difficult time finding some thing but after dark on Saturday of memorial day weekend, we hooked the Cherokee up to the pop-up and drove up. Noah was four and Liam was seven. On the way here I can still recall getting emergency calls from truck drivers as we were driving past Echo Lake, because I was still working for GMH back in those days, but not for much longer. Because as a family, we were always late, and we would always arrive after dark. I used to do this thing where I would set the camper up, unfolding the pop-up in pitch darkness, and I was excellent at it. Well, one reason might’ve been that I was being sort of sarcastic about how we always arrived after dark and showing off a little bit ...

 In the last couple of years I have learned that I thrive on disaster. The more chaotic a situation, the more in my element I am. This is where my love of contingency was born. I realize that just saying these words may seem wrong or off-center. It is nothing so weird. I was raised at a time when it took serious creativity to get by abundant limitations. I am so thankful because even though I say that there were limitations, there were also people that provided solutions to keep me and my family safe. Many of the survival skills in life that I learned, I learned from people around me, and developed the mindset that consistently worked out better ways to solve every day problems. In doing so, solving problems monetarily was erased from the manual. I subconsciously removed that as an option and as you might guess, there are an infinite number of possibilities. So, yes.  Most of the chaos, was implied threat to daily life. Eviction, the loss of a couple of refrigerators, two year...