Category Archives: Personal

Apr 28 2008
Home-Based Business, Personal

Off The Grid – Part 2

I think I know what my problem is. It’s a simple problem to define, but not so simple to solve. I don’t like being anywhere at a specified time. I don’t like to stay anywhere for a set amount of time. I want to come and go as I please. I want control of my time… period. Is that so hard to understand?

I know that there’s nothing special about that desire. Everyone wants to control their time. My problem is the “crazy” that starts bubbling up in me whenever I feel trapped somewhere. I start getting irrational when I feel trapped. I simply desire mobility.

I can remember standing in the back of a semi trailer when I worked for the now defunct Roadway Packaging Systems. I was a truck loader. I stood at the end of a giant conveyor belt while box after box rolled my way. I was supposed to: 1. take the box, 2. look for the last three digits of the destination zip code, 3. write the digits on the box with a red wax pencil and 4. stack the box in the front of the trailer.

As the boxes rolled my way I would catch glimpses of the sky between the brick wall and the trailer opening. I wanted nothing more than to squeeze myself into the six inch space and escape. That day I fought this desire until my lunch break. At lunch I called work from a pay phone and quit my job without explanation. There was no good reason, but I had to quit. After I hung up the phone I went to a city park where I used to play as a child at sat under the open sky for an hour. I felt weightless.

No matter where I work this desire to be free lies in wait, just under the surface. When I was a Kinko’s delivery driver I enjoyed a nice level of freedom, but even then I would fantasize about driving away in the delivery truck. Just keep going north on 75 and figure out the rest later.

Now I find myself behind this computer. My view of the world for eight hours a day is through a computer monitor. I can see what the weather is like at weather.com, because there are no windows in this small office. I’m stuck in this chair each day, and I talk to people almost exclusively over the phone or IM… rarely face to face. I can feel the crazy bubbling up a little more each day.

I’m no longer in the place where I can just walk out and go sit in a park. I have little people who depend on me. These little folks keep me sane… or at least responsible. For that I thank them.

My escape will need to be better planned this time, and it will need to have some staying power. This is part of dropping off the grid for me. I need to find a way to generate income while avoiding a position within corporate America.

There are options. More to come.

Apr 21 2008
Home-Based Business, Personal, Politics, Raves, Religion, Society

Off The Grid

I’ve never really considered myself to be a counter-culturalist. In my mind that label is reserved for old hippies and people with extensive body piercings. Held in comparison with the general population I imagine that I come across as the picture of conformity. There’s nothing overt about my appearance or behavior that speaks to anything other than maintaining the suburban status quo. However, I cannot escape the idea that I do not belong. This idea really isn’t anything new to me. I’ve felt this way for most of my life. The difference now is my perspective. I’ve been trying to “fit in” for all these years with varying degrees of success, and I’ve recently had a revelation: I don’t want to fit in.

The term “off-the-grid” is generally used to describe people who have chosen to unplug from the electrical grid that supplies most American homes with electricity. I’m using the term in a social sense. Just as there is a network that has been built to make it easy to get electricity into your home, there is a social system that has been established to make living ‘the American Dream” simple and standard. The problem for me is that the outcome is templated and boring. I no longer want to conform to the set standards in order to achieve a standard life.

The two main ingredients for living off-the-grid for me will be self-employment and home-schooling. Two topics that elicit simultaneous pity and revulsion from typical suburbanites.

More to come on this subject.

Apr 04 2008
Personal

Pull Ups

In March of 2000 my wife and I had dinner with our friend Mike Staires. Mike was the Executive Director of Shepherd’s Fold Ranch, a Christian summer camp in Oklahoma, and he was on a staff recruiting trip in Dallas. Sarah and I had been living in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area since 1998, and were making a meager living playing our music and selling CDs. Being nearly broke, we asked Mike if he needed anyone to lead worship at camp that summer. This was in the days when we could take on a summer camp salary and be fine. At least it would be steady work for a few months. Mike gave us the gig, and we moved to “The Ranch” a couple of months later.

As I’ve mentioned before, Shepherd’s Fold is where my wife and I met in 1993. In the early 90s, when I was in my early 20s, I worked three summers there. They were some of the best days that I can remember. Those were the care free days of suntanned skin, sleek muscle tone and young love.

It had been a long time since either of us had worked at camp. It’s strange when you return to a place where you hold so many great memories from your more youthful days. I expected that I would just pick up where I left off. In my first days back I was given definitive proof that I had indeed aged.

At SFR there is a low-ropes course that includes a feature called “The Wall.” It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a 12 foot wall that you and your team are supposed to climb over. The goal is to get everyone over… no matter what. When I was a camp counselor it was always interesting to see people get over this thing. Usually the boys could get over by merely getting a hand on the top. They’d just pull themselves the rest of the way over. The girls generally needed a little help from spotters stationed at the top of the wall. Then there were those that were in such shape that they had to be dragged up and over by spotters on the ground as well as the top. These people were to be pitied. They were usually the ones with a little too much pie on their plate at lunch time. I’m not trying to be cruel. It’s just the way it was.

When I was a counselor I was among those who could get over the wall on my own strength. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Grab the top, pull up and go over. Simple.

Flash forward six years and I found myself dangling from the front of the wall. Two spotters were gripping my arms while I kicked my right leg awkwardly upward for a third spotter to hoist my sorry ass over this effing wall. Terrible.

The funny thing to me was the fact that I was taken by such surprise. I had lived my life since camp under the illusion that I had not aged… that I had not gained twenty pounds, and that I had not been sitting behind a desk wasting away at work. I grabbed the top of the wall, pulled and watched my strength fail.

I’d like to say that I have taken steps to remedy the situation since then, but I haven’t… until now.

Last weekend I bought a pull up bar. It’s the kind that you mount in a doorway. The instructions show a buff looking fellow doing pull ups with weights strapped to his back. The instructions also say that a beginner should start off by doing one set of eight to ten reps. When I read this I thought, “Shee… I can do more than that.”

I did two full chin ups my first time out. That was all I had in me. I basically did four sets of two. On the last set I helped push up with my right leg. Again… terrible.

Why was I surprised again? Why did I think that I had more strength than I actually do?

In my head I am about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, even though I just had my thirty-sixth birthday. I am the age that my dad was when he bought our house in Bedford. I have three children and two mortgages. I’m a grown up. Wow.

I’m not discouraged though. I’ll be able to do three sets of eight to ten chin ups soon. I’m working on it, and I’ll get it done. I’m encouraged by the realization that real change takes hard work. It’s work that I’m up for. I’m there. I’m ready. There is something in the wind these days. I can’t tell you what’s coming, but I feel excited by the shift.

Next step… three reps.

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