Failure…

27 Feb

…One word with so many meanings.  Failure can be catastrophic, inevitable, or even imminent.  Just thinking the word “failure” is not usually a good way to start anything off so using it as my first blogged word ever might be a bad idea.  In fact it might be a really bad idea (although I think it‘s too early to tell) but I can say with almost certainty that it is not my worst idea.  That idea –the worst- is always just around the corner for me.  Just when I think I’ve done the stupidest thing I could possibly do at worst possible time and in the worst possible way, I surprise myself with yet another bone headed maneuver.  The phrase “without bad luck, he’d have no luck at all” should have been stamped on my birth certificate.  I am a magnet for mistakes, missteps and plain misfortune.  I don’t want this to sound like I’m complaining, more like stating a simple fact.  Looking back I can certainly take comfort in the fact that none of my mistakes have been of the “life or death” variety, more like the “what the hell were you thinking” types and in hindsight, most of them will make wonderful stories for my retirement home (if I live that long).  In the meantime I suppose I can feel some pride in that I am “gifted with the gaffe”.

Which brings me to my first and most important topic:  Icarus.  I don’t know a ton about him – the main highlights I remember are from some remaining nuggets of  knowledge lodged in my brain when I was in elementary school but essentially the story goes like this:  In ancient Greece, Icarus and his father, Daedalus (a great inventor, craftsman and overall skilled dude) were imprisoned on an island (I have no idea what for…).  Daedalus, being the clever guy that he was goes about finding a way off the island for both of them.  His solution?  He fabricates wings out of wax & feathers to allow them to fly over the prison walls, out over the sea and back to the mainland and freedom.  The freshly constructed wings came with only one warning:  don’t fly too close to the sun or the heat will melt the wax and the wings will fail.  Obviously, this story is still told because, yup, Icarus does exactly what he’s been told NOT to do.  He flies too close to the sun, too busy soaring and basking in the sun to notice his increasingly unstable wings.  Ultimately he plummets to his death furiously flapping wings that are too damaged to do any good.  One of the many lessons being taught here is that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should (oh and using wax as the main ingredient for a pair of wings is clearly not recommended).

Anyway, the story of Icarus resonates with me for a number of reasons but the one that stands out is just how close he came to escaping his prison if he had just listened to his dad.  Instead he was too caught up in the glory of flight and essentially found the sensation so overwhelming that he craved more and more.  Bottom line, he got greedy and forgot the main mission in front of him – had he stayed level headed and recognized how good he had it by being able to escape, instead of flaunting it, he would have made it to safety.

So how does that relate to me?  Well for all intents and purposes you can think of me as Icarus and you can think of the bus as, well, an actual city bus (#11 to be exact).  You see I started writing this blog simply because I found myself riding the public bus system to and from work and wondering how in the world had I gotten here.  The simple answer to that question is as a result of a “transportation transgression” (again another mistake that I really should have been smart enough to avoid but just like Icarus I was too busy focusing my attention on something that ultimately meant nothing) but the long answer is something I don’t think I quite understand.  For whatever reason throughout my life I have I tended to zig when I should have zagged; dodged when I should have ducked; and stopped when I should have gone.  I’ve always considered myself a good person (for the most part I do my best to stack up good karma points like cord-wood) so I’m not purposefully trying to get into trouble – I try to live my life in a way that enables me to give back to others and generally attempt to make this world a teeny-tiny bit better than it was before.  I guess at some level I can’t help but wonder if the “reason” for my continual stream of mistakes, misfortunes and misadventures is so that I can relay to others some of the entertaining stories I’ve accumulated.

I have always wondered why such strange stuff happens to me and over the years I’ve had many friends & acquaintances say “this could only happen to you” (of course only after they had stopped laughing ) but I never really gave it serious thought until I was walking around Las Vegas on a bright & sunny Sunday afternoon in October reflecting on how I had just been discharged from the Sunrise Hospital emergency room after what can only be described as a Vegas trip gone horribly wrong (I knew it wasn’t going to end well the second I found myself being wheeled out of the Imperial Palace hotel by paramedics – through the gaming floor on a busy Saturday night but… actually, that’s a story best saved for another day).  ANYway, on that afternoon (while walking around and nursing my wounds and gently sipping ginger ale), I distinctly recall thinking that maybe I really was put on Earth to entertain others with my tales of my woe.  That maybe my misfortune could be someone else’s fortune (so to speak).  So here I am, riding bus #11 and wondering both about how it all came unglued and about what it will take to put it back together… 

-To be continued (I think)…

Number Eleven is alive…

27 Feb

So bus #11 runs right by my apartment building.  I didn’t know that fact when I first moved in and nor did I care back then but flash forward to today and my choice of apartments looks pretty well thought out (almost like I knew I would do something stupid to be in a situation that required regular use of the public transit system…?)  Anyway, the bus stop location is pretty convenient and the schedule is relatively consistent but just taking that bus by itself won’t get me to my final destination – for that I need to string another 2 buses together (or just one additional bus if I’m up for some walking).  I don’t mind changing buses partly because it’s sort of the like a time based game – will #11 get to the bus station before #35 leaves… (oh the drama) and as long as the answer is “yes”, I usually feel pretty good and chock up a little mental “win” for myself.  When the answer is “no” I feel like the entire planet is against me – as if every car on the road that day slowing down traffic or every bus rider who pulled the cord for a stop were collectively plotting against me and my quest to be on time.  I get so pissed that it’s comical – really it’s ridiculous, especially because I could have avoided all the stress and anxiety by very simply leaving the house a few minutes earlier.  Easy as that.  BUT that is not how I view it at the time – all I see is my precious ride #35 blowing clouds of black smoke as it high tails it away from me at what seems like lightspeed.  In my mind I picture all the riders high-fiving each other as they motor down the road…  those bastards.

  But in reality the “lucky” riders who made it onto Bus #35 are not high fiving (nor are they wearing little party hats like I also sometimes imagine).  In fact, they are most certainly sitting separately from one another in complete silence or at least as much silence as a 15 year old city bus can provide…  #35 is basically a rolling crash box, every nut and bolt creaks and groans like the bus was assembled 30 years ago by a pre-schooler with plastic tools.  Interestingly enough after months of riding I have become a bus “aficionado” in some sense.  The buses on #11 are usually the newer, cleaner and quieter ones while routes #35 and #78 get the scraps of the fleet –buses that are about one oil change from the big junkyard in the sky.  The new ones are labeled (very, very obviously) as HYBRID.  The still run on diesel and still produce a decent amount of noise & black smoke, so I’m not sure how efficient they really are but they have to be better for the environment than the old ones (plus their seats aren’t as sticky).  The newer buses also have improved ingress and egress as the floors are lower to the ground than the older ones.  I also dig their fancy high intensity head lights (I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who is actually geeky enough to notice a detail like that but I’m ok with that) and the lighting is generally improved throughout.  Needless to say the newer buses also have less graffiti.  Oh, and carvings (… why do people always carve up public property?  It’s not like you can carve your name on a bus seat and claim that you own it).  The reduced amount of human induced torture helps considerably with the overall generally cleaner feel of the newer ones.  Like I said, I’ve become quite the bus connoisseur since this whole adventure began… so I got that going for me – which is nice.

  Anyway, I’ve been debating which screw-up story to tell first.  After all, the first story could set the tone for the entire series (and believe me, there is a series of screw ups to review) so I don’t want to set expectations too high (like starting off with one of my best stories involving having to retrieve my fake ID from a strip club with my parents on a Monday morning) nor set it too low (really, who doesn’t have a “showed up at the bar with wood chips on my back because I stopped on the way to lie down to listen to a cool song” story?  Obviously I was a few drinks in at that point – why would a completely sober person stop at any point to lie down to rest in a random mulch bed?  If they were having a heart attack, maybe, but even that sounds a bit moronic).

   So I guess that’s what I need to work on now; where to start?  Let me think about it and get back to you…