Motley Moose – Archive

The inauguration speech the president delivered was as eloquent as usual, it still lingers. I’ve reread it several times now and continue to be absorbed by this passage;

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We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

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Drifting back into my own early history there were some significant markers, profound and perception altering events that would rearrange everything I knew, memories that remain vivid to this day. I’d like to tell these stories from the perspective of the kid I was then, try and recreate the time and the place and the mood.

I was born in 1955.

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Biological: Social anxiety disorder may be related to an imbalance of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Neurotransmitters are special chemical messengers that help move information from nerve cell to nerve cell in the brain. If the neurotransmitters are out of balance, messages cannot get through the brain properly. This can alter the way the brain reacts to stressful situations, leading to anxiety. In addition, social anxiety disorder appears to run in families. This means that the disorder may be passed on in families through genes, the material that contains instructions for the function of each cell in the body.

Psychological: The development of social anxiety disorder may stem from an embarrassing or humiliating experience at a social event in the past.

Environmental: People with social anxiety disorder may develop their fear from observing the behavior of others or seeing what happened to someone else as the result of their behavior (such as being laughed at or made fun of). Further, children who are sheltered or overprotected by their parents may not learn good social skills as part of their normal development.

Shauna

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Like most professions, jobs that involve personal contact with clients, it’s inevitable that we have a few favorites, people that we linger with over lunch a few minutes more just because, send an e mail to say nothing more than hi to start a conversation. There are professional boundaries though, I have succesfully adhered to them myself in the many relationships developed in my own businesses, rather easily.

But I’ve never had animals as clients before.

It’s an odd adjustment to make, thinking of beautiful, vibrant and happy animals as clients but we are a business, one that offers a great service but a service nonetheless. I love all my charges but there are a few that over time become family and that’s where it gets hard, really hard when they leave.

One, Bones, a fiesty and playful boxer recently moved away to enjoy a suburban yard, that I could accept. Rus, a third level Shutzhund trained German Shephard was sold after competition judges found the tiniest of defects in her gait, guaranteeing that she would not advance any further. That was just too difficult to understand and more than worthy of a diary to be written to tell her story, the pain lingers.

And then there was Shauna who passed away last week.

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This is Dedicated to My Pal Shauna

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The What, I walk dogs, I care for cats and occasionaly an odd assortment of little pet creatures. By industry standards at three years plus, I’m a longtime veteran.

I had planned on telling you how phenomenal my employers are, about how our mission statement might be a model for other businesses to emulate, but I made the doing the fun part first mistake of writing about the woozles, heh so this diary will be too long if I did.

The What part can wait and probably deserves it’s own diary.

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The Why, well that’s easy. I’m an animal lover, always have been and always will be. My wife is too and the joke around here is that we have 10 pairs of legs in our family: 2 humans, 2 pooties and 2 woozles. There hasn’t been a time when I didn’t have a pet and when it wasn’t a cat or dog, it was a lopp eared rabbit.

The more immediate question is why now, at 58? That answer has some history, all recent and none of it very positive really. Although I’m happy doing what I’m doing, the journey to get here was painful and there are scars still healing.

I’ve been self employed almost my entire life and I’ve reinvented myself three times, starting three completely different businesses on a shoestring, chasing a passion. At 48 I was ready again. I loved to cook, I’ve always wanted a little cafe and at that age, cooking seemed like a career I could continue until I was ready to retire or unable to work. Industry people I spoke with had their doubts but I know what I can accomplish when I make up my mind, so I went for it.

I spent two years learning in kitchens, working 14 -16 hour days, commuting for hours and honing my craft. I applied for line cook positions at two restaurants and set up both interviews in one day. The restaurants were across the street from each other and I was hired for both jobs, one morning shift, one afternoon.  

I worked my way up to managerial positions at both spots, trying new recipes, designing menus and managing staff. I was seemingly on my way, it all pointed positive until the the bottom fell out of the restaurant business here in Chicago, between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2007. It was the foreshadowing of our Great Recession and of worse things to come.

I was laid off from both restaurants the same week and I spent the next two years, the most difficult years of my adult life, without work. We’ve all heard the horrible stories about the new discrimination of fifty year olds, I was suddenly a statistic with a very odd resume. I never gave up looking and in a very quirky,

‘I really don’t care what I write on this application because no will really read it’, answer to a question about something I was passionate about, the answer got my app noticed.

I wrote paragraphs extolling the many virtues of our Honda Element. Worried sick about having to sell it because we were getting so heavily into debt, I was already beginning to miss it. I recieved a call from the interviewer the next day. We spent an hour talking Honda, he finally decided to buy the one he had test driven, oh and I was hired.

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When the arthritis got so severe in my hands that I couldn’t hold a paintbrush any more I switched over to computer generated art. I can do everything I did with pen and ink and a paintbrush with an ergonomic mouse. I use Bryce 7 for the main work and DAZ 4.5 for most of the figures as well as Photoshop for touch-ups and other places like Turbosquid to get my models. DAZ is currently offering the composing software for free at http://www.daz3d.com/.

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Hello Mooz. This is a repost of a favorite diary, I hope you don’t mind. I thought it would be a semi-introduction as well as a sample of my sometimes, stream of conciousness writing style and maybe a mid winter pick me up.

If it’s ok, I’d like to resume my self adopted role as a diversion, an interlude from the difficult stuff we sometimes have to wade through. Writing helps me cope a little better, I hope reading my work helps you as well.

Please note that there are unintentionally ‘linked’ paragraphs throughout. The coding in the preceding pic produced it, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t remove it. Sorry.

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 There is no way for me to prove, regretting now I never kept a journal of my 22 winters here in Chicago so I could point to a notation on a page, yes, this is definitely the earliest I’ve ever seen bees. It was March 7th when I muddied my knees to take this photo. The ground still not frozen and no crusty inches of dirty snow creating havoc for crocus shoots struggling to make their stand, instead in full bloom now in swaths across front yard lawns everywhere.

 So many purple and orange reasons to be cheerful under clear blue skies after weeks of uninterrupted sun incubating their arrival, stirring expectations of long lazy days that start warm and end warmer. A short sleeve shirt and moist sweaty skin a prescription for anything that ails me. The six month unwelcome and emotionally debilitating hibernation of winter as I experience it and have learned to dread, the sunless skies, the grey after clouded over grey never came to be this year. My body and psyche so grateful for the unexpected reprieve.  

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I woke up from my weekday post-work, cozy on the couch nap around 11pm, dozing off during one of the MSNBC shows and shuffled on down the hallway, to check in on my daughter.

Little O is 12 and she was hosting a school friend on a Friday night sleepover. I peeked in to find them laying on the foldout futon with their backs facing the door, shoulder to shoulder, an earbud in one ear, legs splayed and toes wiggling, their heads bobbing to a personal beat as they each watched a youtube music video on their separate smartphones.  

It was a picture worthy moment, the two of them, friends since second grade but now in different schools quietly enjoying themselves. The soft uplighting was perfect but flashing a pic, well, that just seemed invasive. So I resisted the temptation to reach for my camera and let the moment pass into memory. There was a time and it wasn’t all that long ago when and without any hesitation, daddy would have snapped that pic but my daughter is twelve now…… twelve going on eighteen?

Yeah, things are changing and they’re changing rather quickly.

Proceeding to the end of the hallway, I found Ms. O at her desk busy knitting away, as one eye kept an eye on a Breaking Bad episode she was watching via NetFlix on her MacBook. Glancing up, she grinned as I told her about the girls and she raised her eyebrows in that, ‘Yup, yup, I know’ expression she flashes me sometimes, when she’s kinda’ busy. I have one of those looks too. After 10 years of marriage most of us do, I hope.

Turning but still in the doorway, I stood there for a moment, murmuring,

‘We’ve become them?’