Not Such a Smartass Anymore...

Throughout life, I've been tagged a smartass. Eventually I just adopted and embraced it. It has sort of become "my thing". There are better pursuits than achieving a higher state of smartass-ness, but this, at least so far, seems to be my calling.

It's a good position to be in, the lofty heights of smartass-ness. It's arrogance without pretense. But there are detractors. Below is a conversation I've hundreds of times following any one of my veritable cornucopia of witicisms that sometimes twist the proverbial nipples of those on the receiving end:

THEM: {Fill in any innocuous statement}
ME: {Fill in acerbic response}
THEM: "Smartass."
ME: "It's better to be a smartass than a dumbass."
THEM: "Well you're still an ass."
ME: "Granted."

And so it would go. Until recently. I've finally been beaten. Oh, I knew it would happen, but I figured it would happen 60 or so years from now, in a retirement home located no place in particular, with a window with a view to a brick wall or a dumpster, with no family around me. With my last breath I'd be a smartass no more, and in that moment realize I'd finally been beaten by time. Well, I got my smartass kicked through the goal posts of life and it had nothing to do with me, or the sterile room I had pictured. There's nothing that takes the breath out of you, takes away your desire to do anything but grasp for you next breath than to have the love of your life, the person for whom you'd trade your situation for whenever they are in pain, tell you that they have cancer. There's not a fucking thing you can do about it. "Where's your remark there, champ? Come on, give it to us, we're waiting..."

I'm quite sure there are other ailments and situations that cause the same feeling, and I'm sure my wife felt orders of magnitude "more everything" than I did, but I've never felt so badly in my entire life.

So began the deconstruction and re-building of me. April 4, 2006. In an airport terminal at LAX, en route to Austin. Life stopped. An unexpected, unwanted defibrillation that sent my literal and formerly orderly heart into chaos. And no one bothered to yell "clear". And then life re-started as I held my weeping wife in my arms later that night--a new life, a different life and one I was ill prepared for--there were no jokes, no comments, no amount of smartass-ness that could make this go away or provide any relief.

Hello World

Although I'm often probably far to introspective about launching into a fit of writing, I've been doing a lot less thinking lately and a lot more reaching. That is, I find myself in the car, in the garage, in a meeting at work reaching for a scrap of paper to write down something pithy that has popped into my head that must get committed to paper. Over the past few months, all that reaching has become a large, random assortment of backs of receipts, shop towels and post-its that has reached critical mass. So, I've decided to stop reaching. That is, I've stopped reaching for excuses to not put all these thoughts down into something a bit more structured.

Perhaps it's just my nature to wait, to believe that I've got a handle on things before writing my thoughts down. While some see writing as a way to work through issues, I tend to see writing as a way to digest issues--to give them order. Not so different you might think and you might be right and as this grows (or does not), one might question if there is any difference at all with the stream on consciousness babble that might get spewed. But I digress (and I do that a LOT).

Perhaps it's that we're now to a point in my wife's battle with cancer (more on that to come) that I, for the first time, feel like this really is something I can grasp, that we can beat it and that will be behind us. When I think of parallels in my life that might reinforce this, I think of my mentality in any triathlon that I participate in (not race--lots more on that to come) that stretches the bounds of my fitness or preparedness (today this would be something as short as a sprint race...). In these situations, it's not the morning of the event that I know I'm ready, its not in the swim (that's just sheer survival) and not on the bike--it's somewhere out in the back half of the run segment where I finally let go and think, I've got this. There are still miles to go and struggles to come but there's an aid station or a hill that I pass that makes me take stock in the fact that I'll make it.

Today I find myself there in this battle we've been fighting and I guess I'm taking stock.


But why a blog? Why publish? There's where we get into the need for professional analysis of smartassjones. I suppose that despite the physical unease I get when people read my writing in front of me, I like it being read. I suppose it's somewhat existential. If it's worth writing down, it's worth being read, but I certainly don't want to know when it's being read. Seriously, it makes me physically uneasy. So there really is no good answer. Guess it's right up the alley a person who's at once painfully shy but goes by the moniker of smartassjones. I'm not sure I'll ever publicize the existence of this and thus it may never be read, but it's out there, it exists and that makes it worth a bit more than a journal file on my computer.

"You know, every diary is dishonest
an autobiography with no facts,
yeah, you can relax, it's the end,
and no one will read it"
--Last of the Gold, Caviar

So, hello world.