From outside the box

I've been on a little break from blogging. Actually, I had some technical difficulties getting onto my posting site but it's all good now. This two week break has changed my perspective somewhat on this whole blogging thing. Besides keeping up with other nor cal blogs being posted, I took the time to read back over a lot of what I have written during the past several months and I realized a few sharp contrasts between my blogs and everyone else's. For one thing, most of the folks on this site stick to one particular theme while I seem to be all over the place. Sticking to a consistent theme is probably better in some ways because you are predictable in your subject matter and that probably gives the blogger a more consistent following of readers. When you are all over the map like I am, somebody may find interest in something you wrote one day and then wonder where the hell your coming from the next. This can't be too savvy for developing a solid group of readers.

You could make the case that writers who stick to a consistent theme are more focused and disciplined in their writing, and I wouldn't argue with that. But I like the variety. I like to write according to my mood. If I get angry about an issue, I will write about politics. If I feel reflective about my life, I write about life. If I feel goofy, I try to write something humorous. That's the beauty of it all! We are all doing what we want to do, nobody is telling any of us what to write about. I'm sure that every blogger has their own personal reason for why they are writing about the things they are. For me it's just fun, a creative outlet. I'm not trying to convert anybody to my personal beliefs nor do I care how many readers I get each month. I'm just happy to have this opportunity to express.

In reading over my old material, I have noticed another interesting trend. It seems that when I express a strong opinion, I usually get more comments. A blog on politics will usually get a comment (more like an intellectual challenge!) but the life stories and humor blogs don't seem to attract as much attention. I'm not sure why that is....just something I've noticed. So if you are one of the few people that read my stuff often, I would ask one thing of you. Try to separate my sarcasm and humor from the serious stuff. I like to do a little bit of it all and sometimes folks take me serious when I'm just having some fun. Maybe that's a price to be paid for writing wherever the wind takes you.

Speaking of wind, years ago I played in a band called "Windy Day". I know, that's a real seventies name, but it was a real seventies band. We played and sang all original songs. Now as a musician, and I think I am speaking for most musicians here, sometimes when we played there would be a full house and sometimes most people weren't listening, they were too busy talking and stuff. But there would be one, or two, or three people that were locked into what you were doing, and you knew they "got" your music, you could just tell. And those were the people we would play for. Any band would rather play to five people who are "locked in" than to play for 200 who could care less or weren't paying attention. That's kind of how I see this blogging thing to be. That's why the numbers don't really matter. Besides being a creative outlet, it's awesome when somebody "gets you" and even if it's just one or two people, well that's just icing on the cake of expression!

Posted by Joe Shaw at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not one to complain about things. Well....that's not completely true, I do complain occasionally. OK, so I complain a lot....whatever. But there is an emerging trend happening in Chico that I think takes away from the class of our town. I'm talking about people standing on street corners with advertising billboards and signs or dressed in silly costumes. And they're not just standing there. Often they are dancing, waving, spinning, whatever they gotta do to get your attention. I do have to admit that sometimes when I'm sitting at a red light it can be an entertaining diversion for a few seconds. But really....how much more "in your face" advertising do we as a society have to put up with?

I think this whole trend started with young teenage girls trying to get our attention for their car wash. And speaking of young teenage girls, isn't it funny how shy they are at that age but when you put them on a street corner in a cheerleader outfit or a swim suit, trying to get your attention for their car wash, they seem to loose all inhibitions! They go straight from Ally Sheedy's shy character on the "Breakfast Club" to acting like Richard Simmons after a triple shot of espresso in front of an audience of pumped up overweight soccer moms!

But seriously, we need to limit our avenues of advertising. Corporations are already finding newer and more subtle ways to get into our subconscious. Our psyches are being bombarded daily from radio, billboards, television, newspapers, magazines, junk mail, place mats in restaurants, ball point pens, coffee cups, even banks are starting to display corporate crap on their counter tops. We think that when we shop, we are making our own rational decisions about what we are buying but....are we? They are getting into our brains! I want to have a "this Bud's for you" just thinking about it. And now we have people dressed as chickens, uncle Sam, raggedy Ann dolls, all these different characters on street corners trying to charm you into whatever business they are dancing for. I know these are mostly young folks working for minimum wage, so I don't hold it against them personally. But sometimes as I sit in my car, watching them bounce and wave, I picture a giant anvil falling out of the sky and....never mind, that's not very nice.

I think my disgust with sidewalk advertising is a direct result of my one time visit to Tiajuana several years ago. Every bar we walked by had a "barker" out front, just like how they do at carnivals, trying to get the white guys to come into their bar and see the naked women. Did they really think this kind of "in your face" soliciting would work on intelligent, educated American males? I was insulted and put off by these kinds of cheap advertising gimmicks, not to mention that they were exploiting poor Mexican women. And I let them know how I felt as I exited each bar.

My point is that Chico has always been a laid back easy going kind of town. We don't need characters on street corners trying to get our attention so we can spend more money. If these tactics prove to be successful then others will try it. I mean, what if the homeless decided to start panhandling at every freeway off ramp and entrance to shopping plaza's, then we would have a real mess on our hands!

Posted by Joe Shaw at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am a stubborn man. I am stubborn because I do not learn from other peoples mistakes, I have to make them all for myself. This has been a hindrance and a gift in my life. Like so many other areas of our life, I think this all goes back to childhood experiences. Isn't it a shame that we are so affected for life by what we go thru in those formative years? In a lot of ways, we are still stuck in high school. I've spent my whole adult life trying to deprogram how so many of those early experiences affected me. When we have a negative experience and then, based of that experience, reach a conclusion about how things are, we call that a "personal issue". We all have them. What's important is what we do with them.

In the fifties and sixties, we were lied to about so many things that many of us developed "trust issues". It started with Santa Claus. Then it was things like....don't go in the water for 45 minutes after you eat or you will get cramps and drown, communism is out to take over the world, breast feeding is immoral, marijuana will make you insane, masturbation will make you blind, smoking will stunt your growth, we are in Vietnam to keep the world free, if you sin you will burn in hell for eternity, guys with long hair are gay, sitting to close to the TV will make you cross eyed, sex is a dirty thing....and the list goes on. Some things we were told were believed by the older generation, they were just ignorant. Other things were out of a desperate attempt to control us.

By the time I was a young adult, I was at the point that I didn't believe anything anybody told me until I tested the waters for myself. This led to a lot of healthy as well as unhealthy experimenting. I've stuck my hand over a lot of open flames (so to speak). The positive side of all this is that when I learn something, I learn it from first hand experience and I know it well. I don't say that you can't learn from other people's experiences. If I could, I probably would have had less heartache in my relationships with women, done less drugs, got less speeding tickets, never gotten in all the trouble I did in high school, been a better father when I was younger, and so on. But for me, life has always been about living and learning, not listening to advice from older and wiser people.

These days I try to integrate others experiences into my life, but I'm not very good at it. I still stumble around my own foolish mistakes. That's ok, it's who I am, it works for me. I think that these are the traits of the artist, the progressives, and the rebels of established ideas. We are the doubters and the questioners. We are the ones who will try new things and fall flat on our face. We are the ones who easily make fools out of ourselves at parties because we don't know how (and don't like) to play it safe.

Everybody is unique, we are all different in some ways. We either try to fit in or we use that uniqueness to pave our own way. We can take pain and turn it into creativity. We can take the lies we were told and turn them into a quest for truth. We can take victim hood and turn it into self empowerment. We can take indifference and turn it into showing love for others. We can take all those unresolved childhood issues and turn them into something productive and good. We can even use stubbornness to our own advantage. It's our life, it's our choice. We can't change what we experienced as children but we can decide how we are going to live our life as a result of those experiences. So if you read this and learn anything at all from what I just said, your missing the whole point!

Posted by Joe Shaw at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Youth is wasted on the young and love is wasted on youth....how true. One of the biggest catch 22's in life is that by the time you've figured out some of the mental mazes and emotional intricacies of dating, romance, and love, you're too old to give a crap. As always, I'm generalizing here. I guess some people enjoy the game well into old age. Others have found their soul mate long ago, and for them, there is no game, they're just enjoying their life together. Myself, I got burned out on it all a few years ago, by my early fifties. I spent the first fifty years of my life dating, living with women, being married, having kids, falling in love, mistaking crushes for love, going thru divorce, fighting custody battles, paying child support, raising kids alone, getting my heart broken, breaking someone's heart....you name, I did it. Now that I am entering the second half of my life (assuming I'm going to live to be 120), I have finally found peace and contentment....alone. I do not miss the drama or the games and I have no regrets about any of my relationships. I have learned much about myself thru all of them. I can just sit back now and pretend to be a wise old (older) man and give advice to younger people who never asked for it and don't really want to hear it. That's what older folks do. So if I may be so bold, I am going to share some observations on relationships and dating as well as offer some advice. Now one could make the point....what the hell does he know, he's never made a relationship last, and they would probably be right. But here's the thing....I'm going to do it anyway!

Part one....men. Men are all idiots when it comes to the opposite sex. We do not understand women. We think women are interested in what we have to say, so we talk a lot and try to impress them. We do not know that, quite often, women are only "acting" interested.... they do this for us. We don't know how to listen as well as women do. We do not understand why women do not see sex the same way that we do. We do not realize that women have prolific vision that goes clear around their head. They are aware of everything we do, even when you could swear they are not watching. They know when we are checking them out and they know when we are checking out other women. We don't understand this because we aren't even aware of things we are looking right at half of the time. We do not know how to read red flags or when to back off. We do not know how to read body language as well as women do and this is one of their bigger advantages over us. Once we get them into our life, we try to make them into mommy. Basically, we don't know how to take care of ourselves, were all looking for a mommy.

My advice to men in general....Listen more and talk less. Learn the basics of body language i.e. if she is leaning over the table when you are talking....she's interested. If she is leaning back with her arms folded, change the subject or just shut up. Learn how to cook and clean a house. Don't be in a position that you need somebody to take care of you. Learn the "never a 3rd chance" dating rule....you ask them out once and if they turn you down, and the excuse sounds sincere, try again later. If they turn you down a second time, whatever the reason, be done with it. At this point, if they really want to go out with you, they can call you, after all, you've already put yourself out there twice. Know this and know it well....they do not care about your hobbies unless it is her hobby as well. They don't care about your car, your karate, the song you wrote (unless it's about her), any sports, your childhood, your physical ailments, and especially....your past escapades with other women. Here is how you will impress her....shop with her now and then, talk more about her, remember special days, bring flowers for no reason, cook for her, write poetry for her now and then, even if it's bad poetry, give special attention to babies and small children, and always be a bit of a mystery. She loves the challenge to try to figure you out. But most important of all, keep your power! When you beg, chase, can't let go, get too needy, act helpless, or even try to out argue her, you loose your power. Personal power is the same as integrity, and that is never worth loosing over anybody. And women are more attracted to integrity and personal power than anything else.

Part two....women. You women understand men better than we understand you. That should be an advantage to you but the problem is that you deny the truth about men. You say you love men for being men, but on some level you seem to punish us for not being like you. You are partially responsible for men trying to fool you during the early phases of dating because you cannot accept the truth about them (although you understand it quite well) and what they are really all about. Weve been conditioned to try to fool you. When you find out that half of what we presented ourselves to be is all bullshit, you go about trying to mold us into what it is you thought we were or what you want us to be. This makes us crazy! Once you realize who a man really is and what he's all about, you should accept those things about him or drop him. The best thing about you is that you are capable of loving on a deeper level than men are. I am a firm believer that women should be running the world. Your weakest area, your most self defeating quality is that you fear being alone, and you fear it to the point that too often you settle for less than what you deserve. Some of you are too easily abused by men and too quick to forgive. Flowers should NEVER make up for any kind of abuse. Women put men down for being too easily attracted to physical beauty when in reality, your not much better. However, as you get older, you do look for deeper meaning in relationships. Although you tend to get past physical attraction as you age, men do not. We are shallow that way. That does not mean that we are not capable of loving deeply and sincerely and being true to our commitments, it just means that we are always going to notice beautiful women, we have no control over that.

My summation....Relationships would last longer and have deeper meaning if we could just learn to accept each other for who we are and not try to change everything about the other person. This does not mean putting up with cruelty or really bad habits. We do have to adjust some things about ourselves to be in a relationship, but should never have to deny what we are all about. If we could all become that which we are looking for, it would be easier to find what we are looking for i.e. if you want to be loved, then practice loving. Give away that which you are searching for....it really works. We all want somebody else to make us happy and that is an illusion. Falling in love feels great but it's not happiness, it's a rush. Happiness comes from within, not from without. We find happiness within by living honestly, being true to our highest ideals, and chasing dreams. I think the best relationships are when two people share a dream and chase it together or at least support each other in their own quest.

My disclaimer....In the end, I only know what has worked for me. Life is easier to preach about than to live it. I hope I am not preaching, I like to think I am just sharing. I also like to think that I am living my life to it's fullest potential. If I have insulted anybody in any of the views that I have presented here, well, tough.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have been listening to, as well as watching, right wing radio and television personalities for as long as I can remember. Even as a kid I used to watch this guy on television who was a far right wing nut, but I enjoyed the drama. I think his name was Joe Pine. Anybody who disagreed with him was labeled a communist. Nowadays we are called socialists. Socialists are people who believe that the money the government collects from it's people should be used to benefit the people....I know, that's a far out left wing concept. But back to my point....Although I disagree with much of what I hear from right wing commentators, I must admit that from time to time, they make some sense about something. Often, I will change my attitude or belief on a particular issue because of the logic presented by the conservative I was listening to. But more often, I listen to keep informed. I believe it's important to know how all sides of an issue are viewed. And even more important than that, I like to know why somebody sees something so different from the way I do. That has always been interesting to me.

Here's the part that I do not understand in all of this, and I'm going to generalize here. What I am going to say is definitely not true about every conservative, it's just a common theme I have noticed over the years. Why is it that conservatives do not like to listen to other points of view? They may listen or read just enough to present an argument, but they really do not want to understand where others are coming from or why they might believe the way they believe. I have never talked to a conservative that watched a Michael Moore movie or Al Gore's documentary, watched Keith Oberman, Bill Maher, or ever listened to air America. Do they really think they are so right that it doesn't matter what another's opinions are? If this is the case, well, that's just plain ignorance.

A few years back my nephew, who is a born again Christian, sent me a book. This Christian intellectual had written a book explaining to other Christians all that is wrong with new age thinking and why it is wrong. My nephew figured that if I read the book, I would understand why my beliefs were so wrong. Let me explain here that I am not a classic new age freak by any means. I do not have crystals, don't care much for astrology, and I don't chant, not that there is anything wrong with any of this, it just doesn't ring my bell. I do however, find a lot of truth in the writings of people like Depok Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and Neal Donald Walsch. I told him that I would read the book if he would read a book that I sent to him, and he agreed. Here was the main difference between us....I understood his positions as a Christian because I lived and studied Christianity for the first twenty years of my life. He never studied what I believed in and I thought a good book would at least give him a basic understanding of my beliefs. I had no intention to try to change him as he always did me. I sent him "Conversations with God", book one.

To make a short story long, I read thru the book he sent me. It was painful reading because there was nothing new in it for me and the author was actually wrong on many of the concepts he was trying to explain in the book. Actually, he didn't know what he was talking about! A week after I sent my book to my nephew, I got it back in the mail with an angry letter that said, in essence, this book was all crap and he wasn't going to waste his time on it. OK, so I sent a letter back to him explaining that the purpose of him reading the book was not for him to believe what it was saying but to understand why people like me might believe some of the things we do. I went on to say that the great general Napoleon studied his enemies, wanted to know how they thought, how they were raised, and what education and war experience they had. He knew that the better he understood his opponent, the better chance he had against them on the battlefield. Since my nephew had always claimed to be a missionary for Christ, one who wanted to change people ways of thinking, I thought it would serve him well to know how others might think, at least in this area. We didn't talk for two years after that exchange.

The point of this story is the same point I take issue with right wing thinkers on. Why are they so resistant to learning about how and why others think differently? Are they afraid they might learn something new? Does it anger them because other people think differently? Or could it be that we get comfortable in one way of looking at the world and do not want to challenge our comfort zone? I guess one answer is that if a certain way of thinking serves you, why change, why even explore or listen to any alternatives? I believe that when you are comfortable with your own reality, when you know who you really are and what you are about, you are not afraid to venture outside the box of your own ideas and beliefs. What can it hurt? You might even learn something. I know I have. I hope that in the name of freedom and all that is holy about this country, that the voices of any and all rationale thinking people, are never silenced and never ignored. Not Rush Limbaugh, not the loudest most obnoxious hellfire pulpit pounding preacher, not any atheist, war protestor, new ager, liberal, conservative, Hollywood leftist, ugly person, green, yellow, red, white, or black person, nobody ever! In fact, we should all listen a little more carefully to each other, and with an open mind and an accepting heart....you never know.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)