A (Not Unpleasant) Puck to the Brow

One of the most overused bits of advice in modern wisdom is: "Live in the moment -- live for now and not yesterday or tomorrow." That's meant to help us keep our heads in the game, as it were; no regrets, no time wasted in attempting to engineer the future in ways in which it was not meant to be engineered. But, in one way, don't you find that we are hard-wired to the now?

In certain situations, this hard-wired nowness becomes really evident.

I often have these...moments, regarding my wife. Yesterday morning, taking advantage of the chance that my Easter break from school gives me to slip back in to my Count Dracula schedule (late nights, not [necessarily] neck-sucking) and to lie late into the morning/afternoon in bed, I had one of those moments. (Don't worry -- this wont get weird, I promise; or, at least not any weirder than it already is.)

I looked over at my wife. She was playing Scrabble on her phone, or something, and I had a thought that occurs to me once in awhile: Who the hell is this woman and when, exactly, did my life get attached to hers? I'm glad it did get attached to hers, don't get me wrong...but wasn't I just playing in a sandbox? Wasn't I just thinking thoughts about me and the man I might become and the life I would have as a grownup? Wasn't that just, like, six minutes ago?

The Path to Awesomeness

Last night, after a day of Easter visits and of seldom-matched gluttony, even for my family, my older son (ten) was in an uncharacteristically euphoric place. He's a happy kid -- don't get me wrong. But, during the car-ride, on the way home, he was simply brimming with enthusiasm for the day we had just spent:

"Wasn't that a great day? That was an awesome day -- what a great night, too. Don't you guys think that was a great night? And, man, isn't this a great town that Uncle Matt and Aunt Bean live in? Look -- they have a bank and a car store and pizza places and there a Walgreens...and a church. Everything is, like, right here -- you could walk to anything you wanted in, like, five minutes...and..."

And on he went, spurred on by me. I was having a blast pointing out even more things to him: "And look -- a place for Chinese food. And there is a liquor store in case you ever want to get drunk (laughs from the kids -- sidelong glance from the wife)... and a doughnut shop and..."

...and the kids got more and more rev'ed up about the neighborhood as we went, ridint the Hawiian wave of post-holiday joy.

[For the record, that particular liquor store has up, on  its marquee, maybe my favorite home-grown advertisement of all time: "COLDEST BEER ALLOWED BY LAW."]

Anyway, I wondered about this extreme good mood -- what had made it such a good night and day for my boy?

A writer named Gretchen Rubin, author of a book called The Happiness Project -- a book that I haven't read but that my wife has told me a lot about -- maintains that in order to achieve happiness, we should do many things, once of which being: Remember what made us happy as children. Those things probably still apply, if in an altered or slightly updated form.

Greek Man Dies for Mythical Money

On Wednesday, I put up a post about my dad saying that if everyone in the world were like him, little children would be safe on the streets. It was little philosophical reductions like this, by my dad, when I was young, that probably set the machine of thought in motion for me.

One of his stories involves a time when he was watching TV with some friends during the Vietnam war. They were taking in a news report about the war, with film from the battlefield. My dad said, out loud: "Look at that."

"What?" a friend replied.

""People are actually shooting guns at each other."

Oblivious to my father's point about the absurdity of the human condition, one of the friends turned to another and said, "What the hell's the matter with this guy?"

I am a fan of reducing things to what, I hope, is their essence, as my dad was trying to do for a hopelessly indoctrinated audience. That's the only way we can get to truth, as far as I'm concerned.

So, how about this one: a man kills himself in Athens, Greece, over his financial woes, claiming, out loud, that he doesn't want to leave his kids in debt.

Over money. Money. There's another soul ground up by the machine's gears. Another result of our brilliant social/financial/political organizations that have developed over the centuries. A man ends his life over shiny metal -- or, worse, the paper that represents it...or the digital code that represents the paper that represents the gold...or, that is, represents the gold that is supposed to be in the coffers -- safe in some vault -- that is represented by the digital codes that represent the paper that should represent that gold, if it were, in fact, plentiful enough to actually support its representation by the paper that is now digital code for money that might or might not actually be there, depending who you talk to...

Be that as it may, a man is dead. Look what we've done. A life ends over bills. The worst thing about that is that, to many, it doesn't even sound absurd; the same way it didn't sound absurd to my father's friends when he stated the obviously horrific, so many years ago.

Indeed...

This just popped into my head today as I was talking with a class that is writing a paper about school violence.


My father once said:

”If  everyone in the world were me, a little, three-year-old girl could wander out of her front door at three o’clock in the morning, out into a big city, and she’d get picked up and find herself safely at home before she knew it . But everyone in the world is not me. “

Amen, Dad. Amen.


Seems so basic, doesn't it?

My dad, arranger and composer, Joe Matt (his professional name from a
time when it was best not to be obviously Italian -- center),
in the studio with celebrated
jazz organist
Joey DeFrancesco (2nd from left)

What I Love About Me

You know what I love about me? There's only one thing, really, that I think is perfect about Chris Matarazzo. Just one.

Before I tell you what that thing is, it's important that you understand that just because I grew up in the American generation that heard a song that told me "the most important person in the whole wide world is you" three times every Saturday morning on TV, it doesn't mean that I bought into the pervading approach to self-evaluation...

...I don't believe people can do anything they set their minds to. I don't believe positive thinking is the answer to every problem. I don't believe "attitude is everything." I don't believe that arrogance is an acceptable way to express confidence. I believe that we should be careful when we make statements like the one I am making here.