To each his or her own, and I’ll gladly abide by that, particularly in regard to the Superbowl. For those who are unfamiliar with this event (which means you don’t live in the U.S. and don’t give a rat’s ass about American sports), this is the final professional football game of the season, pitting the top finishing team in each conference against each other in a commercially orgasmic event.

First, I have to admit that I have absolutely no interest in sports at all. Never have and I doubt I ever will. Watching most sporting events is just about the equivalent to me of watching paint dry. There are elements of strategy that might interest some, but if I want that I might as well watch a chess match, and I don’t care about that either. Otherwise, take away the limited amount of strategy and what you have left is pretty much big men running into each other. Now there’s a thrill, eh?

Other than that, you get to see a bunch of new commercials that are usually a cut above the normal fare. However, sitting through a whole Superbowl game just to see the commercials is kind of like driving fifty miles through a snowstorm so that your kid can sled down a hill for five minutes before complaining he is cold and wants to go home. It’s a damn long trip for very little reward. (I’m open to ideas for a better analogy than that, if you have one.)

Anyways, enjoy yourself if you’ve plunked your ass down in your recliner to watch the game with a bottle of bear in one hand and potato chips in the other. I’m sitting here in front of my computer, which is a hell of a lot more interesting. But that’s just me. Go. Enjoy. Just don’t expect me to care. And please spare me the details. Unless, of course, someone has another major nipple slip at halftime.

Today is Groundhog Day. Yes, it’s a silly holiday and there are some people who think we should just take it off the calendar. But why? We all know that it has no scientific validity. It’s just something inane to help break up the dead of winter for us here in America’s snowbelt, as well as an excuse for some people to party. Besides, if we didn’t have Groundhog Day, we wouldn’t have had the movie (yeah, I know that any day would have sufficed for the movie, but work with me here).

Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies. I must have watched that thing a dozen times. If you haven’t seen the movie by now (and how the hell could you have not seen it by now?), here’s the spoiler:

A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, television weather man – Phil Connors – is sent to Punxsutawney (also in Pennsylvania), along with his producer and cameraman, to cover the Groundhog Day celebration there, it being one of the more “official” celebrations of the day. Phil is a rather arrogant, perhaps even nihilistic, person who has absolutely no desire to cover such a stupid event.

After he does his story on Groundhog Day they attempt to return to Pittsburgh, only to find the roads are closed due to a freak snowstorm. They are forced to return to Punxsutawney and stay the night. The next morning, the clock radio comes on in Phil’s room announcing that it is Groundhog Day, at which Phil scoffs, until he finds that, indeed, it is once again Groundhog Day. To shorten the story considerably, Phil finds himself stuck in a time loop, living the same day over and over again, and he is the only variable in the day; all other people do the same thing day after day except for where they interact with Phil.

For a good part of the movie Phil struggles against his fate, killing himself many times, manipulating people around him to achieve his ends, doing pretty much whatever he wants within the limits of Punxsutawney, with each new morning bringing another repeat of the day with Phil being no worse the wear for the previous day. Eventually, Phil starts to reexamine his life and makes changes. Then one day he appears to finally put it all together. Having become a decent, functioning human being, he is released from his time prison to go on and live as a changed man.

Yeah, that took a bit of telling, but I don’t think I can shorten it any. While the movie is cute and potentially thought-provoking (some might say that it is just an old fashioned morality play), the thing that tweaks my imagination is what I would do if I were in the same situation.

So I set it up in my mind as it appears in the movie – day after day, each day is much the same as the day before. You personally have the option to change your behavior while all around you pretty much follow their own daily routines. As I was thinking about this, it suddenly occurred to me that this is my life. Holy Smokes! The only thing missing is that I am getting a day older each day, while Phil did not.

Ah, but there is what fascinates me. What if we had all the time in the world to do whatever we wanted to do? Think of all the learning and experience you could gain? The way the movie is set up, the only thing that transfers from one day to the next is Phil’s memory of the previous days. This is his blessing! He cannot retain a single physical item that he didn’t have when the whole thing started, but he can learn and retain that learning. In the end, that is his salvation, and it is something that I kind of envy.

On the other hand, we have to deal with reality. No one is going to stop the clock for us. We get older every day, as does everyone around us. And as in the movie where Phil could not change everything that happened around him every day, neither can we. Nor can we really count on retaining the “things” we have. All we really ever have is what is in our heads! So why do we waste our time on acquiring things and not learning and experiencing to the fullest of our ability?

Damn good question, eh? Maybe that’s something for us all to keep in mind tomorrow morning when we wake up. We have been given one more day on this earth. Are we going to waste it, or use it to grow? Sometimes I think I should watch this movie every week to be reminded how lucky I am to be alive and how I am squandering the greatest resource any of us has – time.

Pretty much every one of us was born into this world crying; our only means of protesting our displacement from the comfortable place where we didn’t have to do a thing to survive to the place where life is a constant struggle. If we had been left alone to lie at the spot where we were born, our lives would have been very short indeed. Instead, for most of us, we had our basic needs provided by others for many years. At some time, though, each of us reached the point where we decided to take on the responsibility for our own survival and our own lives.

I am fifty-nine years old – almost sixty – and somehow I feel that have I never faced that responsibility squarely and accepted it. It seems that my entire life has been a constant effort to deny reality; to pretend that actions have no consequences and that things will always work out for the best in spite of my actions or inactions. Not only have I lived my life this way but, through my actions, I have encouraged and allowed others within my sphere of influence to live the same way. Now the proverbial pigeons have come home to roost and it ain’t pretty.

In theory, in seven short years I should be “retiring.” In reality, because of my profligacy I will never be able to retire. I have come to accept a truth that I have always wished to avoid. Not only will I never be able to retire, if circumstances arise that force me to leave the working world, the quality of my life will fall to the point where the will to survive may disappear.

Can I, at this point in my life, actually take control of my life? Am I able to take responsibility for what remains of my future? And, perhaps more importantly, am I able to allow those who have depended upon me to assume responsibility for their own lives, their own decisions, and their own actions or inactions? I’m not sure.

Perhaps it is very presumptuous to think that I have not allowed others to run their own lives. Well, actually, it is very presumptuous, but the truth is that my financial support and my involvement in their lives has allowed those people to make decisions and act in ways that they would have otherwise been unable to do, or at least would not have chosen to do. I accept the fact that I may have encouraged other people to make bad decisions by giving them the means to do so, but now I am faced with the fact that I can no longer provide those means and I feel guilty about not being able to do so.

Logically, I can accept the fact that every individual makes their own choices and is responsible for those choices. I accept that in my own life. I may not be happy with the result of the choices I have made in life, but I cannot blame anyone else for the choices I have made. I accept full responsibility for my current state in life. It ain’t no ones fault but my own.

It is quite another thing to accept that the people that I care about and love will have to suffer the consequences of their own decisions. My natural inclination is to protect and shield those people from as much unpleasantness as possible. Of course, this all assumes that I know what is best for them. It means that I have been trying to protect them from what I see as bad situations. It means that I have considered myself the arbiter of what is right and wrong in their lives. What in the world ever made me think that I had the authority, or the knowledge, to do so?

As I said earlier, I feel guilty about not being able to continue to provide for the people I care about. It is almost as though I consider any person unfortunate enough to have become involved in my life to have become my responsibility, and my failure to be able to support those people in the fashion in which I assume they need to be supported weighs mighty heavily on my conscience. Perhaps this is why I have no friends; it would be too great a responsibility to feel this way about everyone who comes into my life.

I do not like to see other people in pain. My reaction to someone in pain is to want to put my arms around them and shield them from whatever is causing that pain. I know that I cannot do that for everyone, but I have tried to do so for the very few people I have let close enough to me that I accepted that responsibility. Now, when words are not enough to compensate for what money can do, I am powerless. I will have to let those people suffer the consequences of their financial decisions and there is nothing I can do about it. I cannot protect them anymore, and I don’t know how to handle the pain that causes me. I have failed them and can find no succor in the idea that, in reality, only they can be responsible for themselves.

It looks like I’ll be going out of this life crying as much as I did when I came into it.

It’s the last day of January. The days are getting slightly longer, enough so that it is noticeable. Even though we have February ahead of us and the temperatures are anything but balmy, at least there is the sense that spring will be coming. It is always easier to be optimistic about spring when the days are sunny, as yesterday and today have been. Let’s hope the weather will be milder the rest of this winter. Temperatures no lower than the middle twenties will be fine with me, thank you.

Now, wasn’t that a most enlightening post? A bunch of words about nothing. That pretty much sums up most of my posts, I guess. It’s hard to be interesting or witty when your life is pretty much just an empty hole. I just didn’t want the end of the month to go by without another post. So there. It’s done. Good night.

Ah, “to do” lists – things of wonder and amazement. I sat down last Saturday (click to read that post) and made up my list. Want to know what I discovered? If you don’t get anything on the list done then you don’t need to make up a new list the next week! Actually, I got a couple of the things on my list partially done, so I did make a little headway, so I guess the list helped a little bit. Let’s see what I can finish this weekend.

I have always hated – well, strongly disliked – “to do” lists. I suspect that part of the reason for this is that my wife would create lists so long that only Santa Claus could possibly complete every item on the list in the time allotted. Such lists were more an exercise in frustration than in organization.

Today, however, I woke up thinking, “I should make a ‘to do’ list for this weekend.” Huh!?! Me? A “to do list?” The world is obviously about to come to an end. Well, before panic set in, I started making the list up in my head, and guess what? Even thinking about making a list up helped me organize my weekend.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – that’s what lists are supposed to do. Big revelation, eh? Maybe not, but only because I realized that I don’t have to list every little thing in minute detail, nor do I have to expect to get them all done within a certain time frame. The trick is prioritizing, and then not getting sidetracked (or, if you do get sidetracked, figure out if that should have been on your list in the first place and then reevaluate your list). So, first order of business today after I write this post is to make my list, which will largely be just writing down what is in my head and sorting out what comes first and what can slide until next week or next weekend.

Of course, this all depends on being in the proper frame of mind, which is actually 95% of the trick to properly using a “to do” list. If you decide that all you want to do today is sit on your ass in front of the television (and that’s not on your list) then the system is going to go all to hell in a hurry. However, today feels good, so on with the list, and best wishes to you this weekend as you work through your list. You do have one, don’t you?

I generally liked what President Obama said today about the national security problems brought to light by the failure to prevent a terrorist attack on one of our aircraft. I think that it was perhaps the strongest statement of his position on the subject since his election. However, there are two issues with which I take exception.

The first item is the general position that there is essentially no one to blame for the failure to “connect the dots.” I’m sorry, but there is. At the time of 9/11 we had agencies (the CIA and FBI, at least) who were not communicating with each other on matters of national security, though not necessarily through any fault of their own given the legal constraints that had been put on the agencies earlier. The Department of Homeland Security was formed specifically because of this situation and was given the mission of coordinating this information. There can be no denial that the failure to “connect the dots” was the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security, and that the head of that department failed in her duty. There is someone to blame but there is no will to place that blame where it belongs.

Make no mistake about it, the Christmas Day terrorist attack was not an attempted attack, it was a successful attack, ameliorated only by dumb luck. People in the Obama administration should be held just as accountable as if the three hundred people on that flight had lost their lives.

I am glad to see that President Obama did not avoid the use of the word terrorist in his speech, but he studiously avoided the phrase “war on terror.” I would have loved to have seen the reaction of his supporters if he had used that Bush-ian term, but the fact is that what we are in is a war on terrorism, not just, as Obama claimed, a war on al Qaeda. While there is no doubt that al Qaeda is the biggest and most visible Muslim terrorist organization plotting against the U.S., it is not the sole combatant on the other side of the war.

Not all radical Muslims belong to al Qaeda. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, is not known to have any direct ties to al Qaeda nor was he operating under their instructions, but he is the type of domestic terrorist with whom we are also at war. Al Qaeda is not the only terrorist faction worthy of our security efforts and President Obama would be well advised to broaden his definition of the war on terrorism. Let’s hope that there is no need in the near future to again try to “connect the dots” of failures in our security agencies.

I like to think of myself as a rational, thinking, reality-based human being. I don’t believe in effects without cause. I believe in personal responsibility. I believe in solving a problem using hard science based on hard evidence. I believe that society is best served with that kind of thinking. Somehow, though, all that goes out the window when it comes to running my own life.

As a rule, a living organism does whatever it can to assure survival. That is the first order of business for all life because without making that effort, life would cease to exist. Much of the effort made to survive is a based on the pain/pleasure, stimulus/response cycle. If you are in pain you do whatever you can to alleviate that pain. If you are a hungry lion, you go find an antelope to kill and eat. If you are an antelope, you look out for lions because being eaten is painful, to say the least.

Human beings aren’t wired quite as tightly as most other creatures on this earth. Oh sure, if we stick our hand into a fire the pain will cause us to pull it out, but we are also capable of pouring gasoline over ourselves and lighting ourselves on fire. Surely a lion or an antelope would watch that and think, “What the hell?”

So it is with our personal health – both physical and mental. In spite of hard evidence and painful personal experience, we can somehow ignore it all and continue behaving in a way that will only lead to self destruction. It truly is amazing that we have that capability. More than amazing, it is distressing. It calls into question our real capacity for rational thought, and I have to admit that I find myself in that situation.

There is no one that can grow old and retain one-hundred percent of their youthful bodily capacities. Given that obvious fact, would it also not be obvious that we should do everything that we can to delay the onset of any physical disability? Obvious, yes, but far from enabling, as I can personally attest. With old knees that have worn out, an aching back and rapidly vanishing strength and flexibility, you would think that weight loss and physical conditioning would be a priority. Well, the human brain inside my head doesn’t seem to be able to act on that.

It’s not a matter of rational thinking or lack of knowledge. I know what I should be doing and I know the consequences of not doing it, but somehow I cannot motivate myself to act. You would think that the pain that results from not acting would be sufficient to stimulate the response that would go far in relieving that pain, but once again, the human mind is capable of pitting the human body against itself.

Perhaps it is a matter of warring factions. While my body says, “Hey! Take better care of me. Lose some weight, get some exercise, eat better,” my mind is saying, “Hey, you’re depressed about your life, go ahead and eat what you want and blank out your emotions by mindlessly planting yourself in front of the television. Who needs exercise?” I’m afraid my mind has been winning.

The truth is that I’m sick of this war, but I can’t seem to facilitate a truce between the factions. Is this to be a war to the death? Well, technically, yes – I can’t get around that. The real question is how much more quickly that death will come without finding a reasonable compromise between my mind and my body. On the other hand, I have always found that in a conflict, compromise almost always means that both sides have lost, and I know that my body should not give up the fight for health, in spite of all the propaganda my mind throws at it.

I really do not want to spend the rest of my life, however much time that might be, in physical pain and suffering because of the frailties of my mind. Whether I can allow my mind to let go of the many issues that drive it close to the edge of insanity is questionable, but the results of not doing so are inevitable. In the end, as is usually the case, my life is pretty much in my own hands. What a sorry place for it to be.

It would seem that President Obama is in a bit of a pickle. As most people know by now (and if you don’t, what rock have you been hiding under?), there was a terrorist attempt to blow up an airplane flying into Detroit on Christmas Day. There is no doubt that this was a terrorist action, with information clearly indicating that this was a plot facilitated by al-Qaeda. The terrorist himself – Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – has claimed that he is only one of many who are planning the same type of attack on American targets.

It is only by a stroke off dumb luck that the Obama administration didn’t have a full blown terrorist catastrophe on its hands. However, having dodged that bullet, and having knowledge that other attacks are in the planning, what has Obama decided to do? As of now, it is being handled in our normal judicial system, with the terrorist being given all the rights and privileges due an American citizen (which he is not).

Why, you might ask, isn’t this terrorist being interrogated using all available means to find out everything he knows? Why is this not be a top priority, seeing that another attack of which he may have knowledge could occur at any moment? Why? Because Obama is stuck between being President of the United States and protector of it’s people, and the rhetoric of the left to which he has subscribed that says that such interrogation is criminal.

It’s a tough spot to be in, and I wouldn’t want to be him. Coerce this terrorist to spill his guts using every available legal mean and you run afoul of your political base. Don’t do everything you can to get this information and have another attack succeed and you are toast as the leader of our country and are directly responsible for deaths that occur as a result.

It all seems so simple and easy when you don’t have a real world situation to deal with. Now President Obama does. It seems that al-Qaeda is more than willing to teach Obama the lessons he needs to learn. Too bad it will be the citizens of this country that will pay the price of his education.

It’s a new year, another beginning. It is, as the saying goes, the first day of the rest of your life, as is every day of your life. Despite that fact, we put much more significance on the first day of each new year, resolving to make changes in this new year that will correct our failures in the past.

Once upon a time I used to do that. I would spend part of January 1st writing down the things that I hoped to accomplish during the next year, including changing certain undesirable habits. Of course, I failed in my undertakings within the first few weeks and never attempted them again during the year, or at least not with any more success than that achieved on the first attempt. Since that time I have not bothered to set myself up to fail in my resolutions. I have enough failure issues without having to create more at the beginning of each year.

While I no longer make New Year’s resolutions, I have always comforted myself with the fact that I could make changes at any time. If I failed now, I could pick up the mantle later and carry on from that point. There was always the possibility that I could make changes in the future. Suddenly, I find that possibility dwindling down to zero. The old saying, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” has taken on a new meaning. No longer is it about procrastination, but about actually having the ability to do something today that you will not be able to do tomorrow.

For example, no matter the resolution you make, if your old knees make it a chore to walk fifty feet there is no way that you are going to be doing the hiking that you have always wanted to do. That carpentry job that you would now like to explore is beyond your physical limits, and building your own house is so far fetched as to be laughable. Those cigarettes you’ve been smoking for the last forty-five years have made it next to impossible to travel much, having to lug an oxygen tank around everywhere you go.

When you hit this point you realize that there are a limited number of “the first days of the rest of your life” left, and that each of those days will bring more limits to what you can do with them. I imagine that at some point in time one just decides that there’s no point in making any plans. Then again, that’s probably just the pessimist in me exposing himself. He likes to do that. It’s the only thrill he gets nowadays.