January 16, 2011 · 5:33 pm

“You Can’t Stop Living!”

Osteochondr……. what?

When I was in 9th grade I was diagnosed with a knee disorder called Osteochondritis Dessicans (OCD).  From the Mayo Clinic Website OCD is described as:

Osteochondritis dessicans (os-tee-o-kohn-DRY-tis DES-uh-kanz) is a joint condition in which a piece of cartilage, along with a thin layer of the bone beneath it, comes loose from the end of a bone.  Caused by reduced blood flow to the end of a bone, osteochondritis dessicans occurs most often in young men, particularly after an injury to a joint. The knee is most commonly affected, although osteochondritis dessicans can occur in other joints, including your elbow, shoulder, hip and ankle.  If the loosened piece of cartilage and bone stays put, lying close to where it detached, you may have few or no symptoms of osteochondritis dessicans, and the fracture can often heal by itself. Surgical repair may be necessary if the fragment gets jammed between the moving parts of your joint.

 In layman’s term’s a doctor recently described it as “the manhole cover is coming off.”

No, this isn't me, but it hurts as bad as it looks!

 Throughout junior high I had been having left knee pain during athletics and activity, symptoms like locking up, throbbing sensations, sharp piercing pains.  My father, being in the orthopedic sales business, knew all the best local orthopedic surgeons and in the fall of 1981 we finally decided to get into see someone and have some x-rays taken.  OCD was the diagnosis.  Of course at the time, that didn’t mean anything to any of us.  Unfortunately, now I know the condition all too well.  The treatment I was to choose from?  Either knee surgery or a one year period of inactivity to try to allow the loose cartilage to reheal to the bone in my knee and hopefully fend off many future issues.  As I was only 13 years old at the time the choice was clear, stay off the knee for a year and see what happens.  This didn’t mean complete rest or crutches, just avoid sports for a year, no running around, no hard-pounding activities. 

I stayed inactive as much as I could that year, hard for a teenage kid who was very active.  I rode my bike a lot because that was approved by the Doc and I hoped for the best.  A year later, the knee was somewhat better, but still caused problems occasionally.  But consensus was that there had been some improvement so with my parent’s and the doctor’s blessing I resumed a normal childhood.

Let me tell you about my un-storied basketball career.

I was a somewhat athletic kid, but never a superstar athlete in school… no, not even a star athlete in school… well, actually not even an athlete in school.  But I was a BEAST on the driveway basketball court at my house, running and jumping and knocking down 40 foot shots from the bushes in my front yard.  Myself and Don and Vinnie and Scott and all the other kids around the neighborhood would play basketball constantly, my driveway being the court of choice, in the spring, in the summer, in the fall, even sometimes in the winter.  But I never made it to the “big leagues” of the local public schools.  I went to junior high and high school in Smithtown, New York, a suburban town on the North Shore of Long Island about midway between New York City and the eastern tip of the island.  It was a sizeable town with a large number of kids and there were two big high schools.  Athletics were very competitive and if you were not at the top of the heap you just weren’t able to make the teams, that’s just the reality of being an average kid at a big school.  But I wanted to give it a shot, I wanted to try out in 9th grade for the freshman basketball team, I was ready to step out and go for it.  Then came the diagnosis, Osteochondritis Dessicans, and I had to forfeit my attempt at playing basketball that year.  Amazingly, only 12 kids tried out and by default, all of them made the cut, they needed all 12 kids to field the team.  Had I been player number 13, I probably also by default, would have made the team.

A year later, when basketball tryouts came again, I stepped up and gave it my best shot.  This year there were several more kids plus the core 12 kids that had played together and gelled the year before.  I didn’t make the team and I remember how disappointed I was.  I remember thinking if only I had been able to play the year before, the year when they didn’t cut anyone.   I would have become one of those core kids and been in a better position in 10th grade to make it successfully through that tryout.  But it wasn’t meant to be that year and that was the last year I tried out for any sports.

So, what’s my point?

My daughter just made the 7th grade girls basketball team and I am giddy with delight.  We are in a much smaller, rural school district than I grew up in and I hope my kids have better opportunity than I did.  The middle school she attends recently held their girls basketball tryouts and the coaches selected two teams and they actually had to cut a bunch of kids.  I’m not one to push my kids into any activity, sports or otherwise that they are not 100% invested in themselves.  I am here to act in a supporting role, and she and I talked about the tryouts a lot in the weeks leading up to the first night on the courts, you know, the usual stuff… do your best, if you don’t make it we’ll practice harder for next year… blah, blah, blah.  But in reality I was so terribly concerned about her not making it because I didn’t want her to feel that disappointment that I still remember so vividly.  As I look back now I understand that for me it wasn’t really a big deal and didn’t have any significant impact on my life.  But for a kid whose life, whose existence is so limited and fragile, it is a big deal… it’s a HUGE deal, and I didn’t want her to have to go through the feeling of not being good enough.

In the end, she made it and I am a proud Dad and she is a proud kid and for now all of the stars are aligned.  Will they always be aligned?  No, of course not, and I’ve tried to make that clear to her also, that each year the competition gets harder, the kids get bigger and stronger and more athletic, the games get more serious, and the day may come that either she decides or a coach decides that she no longer makes the cut.  Maybe that will happen and maybe not, and until then we will bask in this year’s 7th grade basketball season.

Within the last 3-4 years I have had two knee surgeries to repair the OCD issue in my left knee.  The first was not successful, the second, I actually traveled to Chicago to the Rush Medical Center and was operated on by Dr. Brian Cole, one of the team physicians for the Chicago Bulls and White Sox.  That surgery was moderately successful and I was able to be a lot more active than I had been in the years before.  It has since begun to deteriorate once again, but even though its painful at some level everyday, its something I’ve learned to live with and deal with.  There may be another surgery down the road at some point, but right now I just don’t want to take on the 6-8 weeks of crutches and the brutal months of rehab.  It’s terribly difficult and I have to weigh the costs and the benefits.  I still play basketball once a week with a bunch of old guys like myself.  We run hard for two hours, we have fun, we get some badly needed exercise and the next day my knee usually hurts a lot more than it would on a regular day.  I love it though, and I always tell myself and anyone that questions why I do it, “you can’t stop living!”

I think that is a good motto to live by.   I hope my basketball playing daughter always feels that way too!

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January 15, 2011 · 11:10 pm

Language of the 10 Year Old

Today was a good “spend time with my kid” day.  This morning my son J and I got up early and spent the morning helping some nice folks at the local historical museum move some boxes and tables and displays they had set up for the Christmas holiday.  I am a Scout leader and we and another family had volunteered to help out for about an hour.  J and I had breakfast beforehand at the local eatery and then went and did our work.  Later in the day we started working on building our pinewood derby cars, another scout activity, for the race that will be held next weekend.  Finally, this evening  J had a flag football game which my wife and I went and watched (and which they won).  So now I sit here, at the keyboard, a glass of wine by my side, feeling like I did, at least in some part, my fatherly duties today and I’m ready to blog a little.

In the truck on the way home tonight, after commending my son for playing a great game, throwing in a little constructive criticism, and talking about football, I mentioned to him that I would need to use the computer tonight when we got home.  He said, “that’s ok Dad, I can watch the two shows that M (sister) recorded for me on the DVR today.  “What are those”, I asked.  He said some word that I didn’t understand, and I just chalked it up to him speaking “language of the 10-year-old” which is some kind of ancient mysterious mythological Japanese influenced futuristic video game language.  I haven’t learned to speak it but there is a lot of talk about Bakugan’s and Pokemon’s and G-Power and battles and HP and dragonoids and other stuff that I haven’t quite figured out how to pronounce or spell.  He speaks it a lot and often because I don’t have any remote clue as to what he is talking about, I stare at him like some kind of simpleton and repeat the following  phrases over and over;  “uh-huh, okay, yeah, uh-huh, that’s really cool.”  Regardless, we drove home, grabbed a bite to eat, I fired up the laptop, he fired up the TV.

Shortly after getting settled I glanced up at the TV and saw these Lego ninja guys running around on the TV screen.  You know those little Lego guys with the yellow heads that are shaped like the propane tanks that are hooked to your gas grill, but whose popped-on hair rivals the best styled guys at a hollywood awards show.  Those little guys whose hands are just a “C” shaped curve so they can carry their little Lego tools. Those guys with their big square legs.  Those guys that hurt like a son-of-a-bitch when you step on them!  There they were, little ninja versions, alive on the screen, moving around with elbows and knees and their mouths moving and their eyes blinking.  I’m gonna tell you, right here, right now, it was a little creepy! It was like some kind of nightmare you might have on a Christmas night, after drinking too much wine and rum-soaked egg-nog and after helping your son build the five or six, 800 piece Lego kits that Santa Claus brought down the chimney.  It was like a 2011 version of the classic Nutcracker Suite, with Lego characters coming to life and battling their enemies with knives and swords rather than the little German girl dreaming of her Nutcracker Prince coming to life and winning that epic battle against the Seven-Headed Mouse King.  Okay, yeah, you’re right, that’s tons more creepy and demented……..

In any case, as I looked over I asked, “Hey, are those Lego guys?”  “Yeah, Dad” he said, why else would it be called Lego Ninjago you dumbass?”  Ah ha!  There was that word that I heard in the truck on the way home, that “language of the 10-year-old” word that I hadn’t understood. Of course he didn’t really say “dumbass” although the intentions were clearly there.  I wanted to say “sorry I don’t speak ‘language of the 10-year-old’ and I didn’t really understand you in the truck, but I didn’t want to make you repeat it like 10-12 times cause I was pretty sure I still wouldn’t understand it and then we would have had one of those conversations where I say, ‘uh-huh, okay, yeah, uh-huh, that’s really cool’.”  But I pretended that it all made perfect sense to me and that I wasn’t creeped out by the little Lego Ninja characters and that I wouldn’t have nightmares about them climbing up the stairs tonight and tying me up like the Lilliputians restraining their giant Gulliver.

When the show ended, J looked over at me and asked, “Hey Dad, you know those Ninjago Spinners that I told you about that if you lose, the guy loses his weapon?”  “OK Steve”, I thought, “don’t panic, search the memory archives, where it is, where’s that conversation, I know it’s in there somewhere, filed along with all the other eight million things you’re trying to remember, filed under “N” for Ninjago Spinners, c’mon buddy, you can do it, it’s  right there, it’s right there….. ”  I visualized my little green “loading” bar, just stuck there, not moving, no longer processing….  “Oh shit, the connection is down….. no it’s not there, it’s lost, its mis-filed, it’s been fed through the early onset memory loss shredder!!!!”  “Uh, yeah, okay buddy, yeah I know, what about that?” I anxiously replied.  “Well” he said, “if you ever buy that for me, get me the red one.”  “Okay buddy, cool” I said, and J walked away satisfied with my response.  Phew!  That was a close call, I was almost discovered as being ignorant and uneducated in “language of the 10 year old”.  That must have been one of those conversations that ended in “uh-huh, okay, yeah, uh-huh, that’s really cool.” 

A few minutes later I turned back to the TV and an episode of Sponge Bob was on.  “Much better”, I thought, “I love Sponge Bob, he speaks English, he makes me laugh and he doesn’t give me nightmares!”

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January 14, 2011 · 11:56 am

This Song’s For You

 I want to write a song.  I have wanted to write a song for years.  I tried writing a song about my Mom when she passed away 8 years ago but I couldn’t find the words.  I want to write a love song for my wife, a song that we can sing together and share for the rest of our lives.  I’d like to write a song about my son, about what a great kid he is and how we are best friends even before being father and son.  Or better yet, I want to write a song for my daughter, a Daddy’s girl song.  I want her to finish growing up and have her own song, written only about her, that she can tell her friends her Dad used to sing to her, that she can sing to herself when she is feeling down, that I can sing to her at her wedding.  She is 13 now and I am running out of time.

I don’t know why songwriting is so difficult.  I can sit here at my keyboard and knock out blog post after blog post about things happening in my life, about humor, about emotions, about happiness and sadness.  I can write about these important people in my life, word after word, line after line, paragraph after paragraph.  I can write about work and play and life and death.  The words emerge easily once I start tapping the keyboard.  Driving home from work a blog post idea will pop into my head and I’ll have it “written” before I even park and get out of the car.  It seems to come naturally and each day I strive to find something interesting to write about, a post better than the day before, a topic that is meaningful to my readers and to my family and especially to myself.

But I haven’t been able to write a song.  I’ve tried… I’ve sat with my guitar and struggled to come up with some basic chord progression and a melody that has some appeal.  I’ve tried to get the lyrics to flow through my head, just like the blog posts do now.  So far it hasn’t clicked.  The inspiration is there but the ability to put it “down on paper” continually eludes me.  Maybe it’s because song lyrics tend to have to be rhythmic and mysterious and vague.  Maybe it’s because I am trying to write the lyrics and the melody at the same time.  Maybe I’m just trying too hard to write that perfect song, to not fail… because the stakes are so high.  It’s like, this is my only shot, this is the song that my daughter will take with her into adulthood, or this is the song that my wife and I will sing to each other as we sit in rocking chairs with gray hair and wrinkled skin and reading glasses perched on our noses.  Damn, that is a lot of pressure!  It has to be right, it’s has to be special, it has to be flawless.

I found this quote from Jackson Browne, my absolute, super-fragilistic, all-time, favorite, hero musician and singer-songwriter.

“Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that’s instructive to yourself – some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn’t have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that’s what’s happening in the song.”

I think what I hear him saying is… don’t try too hard, don’t think too hard about what you are writing, just let the words develop into something magical.  Find the inspiration from the events in your life, the relationships, the experiences, both good and bad, then set them aside and let the lyrics appear on the page.  Maybe it becomes easier with each song that one writes, just as these blog posts have seemingly become easier to write with each passing day.   Maybe I just need to set aside some time, be alone, and try to make it happen. 

You know I’m not one for New Years Resolutions.  Perhaps finally writing a song should be my New Years resolution for 2011.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be from the heart.

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January 13, 2011 · 12:19 pm

Getting Fu…Fu…Freshly Pressed!

WARNING… R RATED… JUST SAYIN’

I want to be Freshly Pressed!  I want to have my blog on the FRONT PAGE of WordPress.com, like some ROCK STAR on the Marquis at the Detroit Fox Theatre, lit up with neon and bright twinkling lights.  I want to get thousands of hits and comments and have screaming fans like the adolescent girls, pulling out their hair at a late-sixties Beatles concert… or a 2011 Jonas Brothers concert.  I want to be listed there, on the front page, along with the other ten or so FRESHLY PRESSED superstars getting repeatedly clicked, each click like the camera flashes at a celebrity press event!  That’s what I want…

A few weeks ago, when my blog was just starting to put its roots down, I e-mailed the editors at WordPress.com, introducing myself and inquiring about getting FRESHLY PRESSED.  I received a very nice and professional response from WordPress.com that included this line:

“Please note that “bad stuff” also includes offensive language, so unfortunately that would rule out several of your blog posts right off the bat.”

Wow, that fucking sucks is unfortunate!  Those three or four fine folks that have been actively reading my blog know that I occasionally emphasize my writing with some not-so-proper language.  I don’t swear nearly as much as Sara Swears a Lot but I do occasionally throw in a fuck or a shit improper word… you know just to add some exclamation for my loyal readers.  But, truth be told, I don’t really have a mouth like a trucker or a street whore call-girl or even a rum-soaked, shit-faced inebriated pirate.  I’m mostly a pretty clean-cut, respectable guy!  So I figured I’d at least introduce myself to the editors at WordPress.com.  Yeah, I know what your thinking, what are the chances of a fresh virgin rookie writer like myself getting noticed when I only had like four crappy-ass beginner articles on my site.  But I thought, well maybe it would be like that time when I was walking stupid-drunk responsibly through a casino in Vegas, pulled a quarter out of my pocket, jammed it in a slot machine like I was buying some peep-show-sex video at a truck stop porno shop with my fingers crossed and… YEAH BABY, HOT FUCKING DAMN gee whiz… hit like a hundred-dollar jackpot!   That day kicked some serious ass was really special.  Plus, in my e-mail I included a link to my article about finding the idyllic life, which at the time I thought was my best fucking, you’re gonna make a sweet-ass living as a writer most profound article.  Now, since I’ve been busier writing than a one-legged, in-bred redneck in an ass-kicking contest a professional author, I’m starting to think maybe my article about nasty goat shit being a farmer is my best article!  But regardless, a week or so later I received that very pleasant and professional response from WordPress.com.  I’ll be honest, I was totally like fall off the back of my fucking truck surprised astonished to hear back from someone.  No shit Seriously, I mean these poor mother-fuckers loyal WordPress.com employees probably get bombarded every day by douchebags promising writers like me, thinking they’re the next great J.D. Salinger, when their writing probably really sucks as bad as a nasty bitch stripper in a two-bit, run-down titty-bar isn’t that great   But it was a nice response and she gave me several links to articles on how to improve my blog’s readership.  They were some really helpful shit great articles and I’ve started to follow most of the points that were referenced and my readership is growing faster than a flock full of screwing rabbits bumping uglies in their rabbit hole ever.

So, now I don’t know what the fuck to do how to proceed.  If I keep using offensive language I may never live my dream of getting FRESHLY PRESSED.  And that would seriously suck some major ass be so very disappointing.

Editors, can I start over?

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