That Didn’t Turn Out Like I Planned (or Public Nudity Was Not My Best Look)

4 September 2020

Labor Day was something I used to anticipated with great glee. More often than not in the years pre-kids it was a drunken camping weekend.  Canoes, brews and outdoor stuff to do made the end of summer just one of the greatest times.  After kids, as often as not, our family went to Toronto and watched an airshow.  We didn’t pay for waterfront seats we just watched the planes that swooped over the downtown and in the area down by Queen’s Quay. We did other things too, we ate out, we went to movies and we often would see a play. The anticipation level is not high on this pre-Labor Day Friday.

Clearly and unequivocally this year is different.  Due to our nation’s poor handling of Covid 19 we are not allowed into Canada.  Toronto is thus a no go. Also, my kids are not much for camping. Thus, three days spent here around the house will be what Labor Day is for us.  Maybe we will watch an outdoor movie.  Maybe we will picnic. Whatever we do it will be small and it will be local. What I don’t plan to do is any painting.  Or power washing.  Or work of any material nature.

Maybe I will take some of my blog posts and try and string them into a coherent narrative.  I have been posting for 13 plus years now. I began at the urging of my dear friend Chris. She used to listen to me tell my tales in a coffee shop on Ottawa Street in Lansing.  She seemed to strongly believe I needed to capture some of the mixed reality/fantasy narratives on electronic paper.  Thus, I started a blog in 2007. At this point it has over 851 posts.  Some are quite short.  Others are much, much longer.  Here is one that I like a great deal https://onetruenorthspace.blogspot.com/2011/01/of-beach-and-books-iv-night-ride-home.html  

When the pandemic hit, I created a new blog. The reason I created a new blog was because Facebook banned me from posting links to my old blog on my feed.  Four or five times I have written them asking why, but I never get an answer. So be it. Well, it was both that ban and the fact that the pandemic created a new reality for me and for the world at large.  Given the paradigm shift in how we live our life it seemed to me that I needed a new focus.  I needed to talk about now, not high school and college.  I needed to talk about the realities of this life we are forced to live due to a tiny little virus as opposed to the reactions of the poor people who were exposed to the many times I was naked in public. (My children are so ashamed of me).

As I walked about today doom scrolling through my podcasts, I had to turn them off.  I need three days without the virus, without our societal dysfunction and racism, and without Nate Silver’s modeling of voter behavior.  Listening only to the ringing in my ears and the sounds of nature I kept thinking this life of mine has not turned out exactly as I planned.  A life in the law spent in Michigan, two kids, two kinds of cancer, well none of this was on my bingo card as I left Pedricktown, NJ. I actually thought I would end up a college professor teaching some weird course at a small liberal arts college. My home would be a brick townhouse and I would be living alone at 60 with an Irish Wolfhound after several failed marriages. 

As I contemplated where life has brought me to, I realized that at each step of my passage from the cradle to the grave the ground underneath me has shifted and changed my direction and that all my plans were for naught. Yes, that would be the perfect title if were to somehow edit the 89 posts of this blog with those of the old blog into a coherent narrative.  And then I thought of one of the most life changing events in my existence, that nude jog through PGHS.  Without that moment I would not be who I am.  The way thing played out and the notoriety that ensued completely shifted who I was to become.  As a result, somehow, I would have to work that experience, and a couple of college streaking escapades, into the title. I think the above captures it perfectly.

Have a great weekend this Labor Day my friends.  Remember we are all in this together. The song below is for every man and woman who ever spent the years putting their time in laboring at "The Plant".