TIME WAITS FOR NO MAN

Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.
- Mason Cooley

My PDA crashed.

If you don’t carry a PDA, perhaps you cannot know the seriousness of my situation. If you do, you no doubt feel my pain.

Once a person inputs all of ones days into the PDA, adds the contact information for every person one has ever known and synchronizes and backs up all that information, there is no turning back. A PDA is only slightly less than a flesh-and-blood life coach. Properly maintained it tells you what steps to take, when to take them, which direction those steps should fall and it provides phone numbers and addresses for all those you might need to call while on the journey. It even grabs all your email for you if you tell it to. It can hold family pictures. It can tell you your flight and hotel confirmation numbers. It can remind you what you need at the grocery store, what books you want from the library, which movies you want to rent... Mine would even talk to me (though I never figured out how to get it to do that). At least it used to do all that. Now it is gone. And for the past couple days I have been clumsily attempting to stay on track without it. It hasn’t been pretty.

The good news is, today (after an appropriate 48 hour mourning period) I went out and bought a new one. The new PDA is at this moment plugged into the wall receiving its initial charge. I have two more hours until I can set it up and get on with my life.

Two hours. I can wait. Really. I can.

I’d twiddle my thumbs but I’m typing.

From where I sit writing these words into my Mac I can hear the clock on the landing at the top of the stairs ticking. Tick, tick, tick tick tickticktickticktick. Time passes slowly when you’re waiting for your PDA to charge up for the first time. Two more hours and I can plug it into the computer and transfer my life into its memory. Until then, I sit. I wait.

It has been said the hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure. I never have liked that clock. It used to chime every hour on the hour until I opened up the back of it and removed some of its innards. Now it just ticks.

The Irish playwright Dion Boucicault once said, “Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.” Fun guy, Dion. I’ll bet he was the life of the party. Bet he never had a PDA crash on him. In fact, I’m sure of it. He died more than a-hundred years ago. Time finally killed him.

I have so much to do. Can’t wait to get started.

One hour and 58 minutes to go.

**
A long time ago, back when I started doing my first morning radio show and found it difficult to get going so early each day, someone told me a mousetrap placed on top of your alarm clock will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep.

I prefer the subtle electronic chirp of a PDA alarm.


(To send Brad an email: click on his photo at the top right of this web page and then click “email.”)

LIGHT SOURCE

I had lunch today at a little Greek taverna where a few years ago on a warm summer evening Lucy and I dined on the patio under the stars. It was a great night. Today I took a table just inside the door, directly under a speaker in the ceiling playing preposterously tragic Hellenic ballads. It was late for having lunch so the place was empty except for a swarthy-looking guy behind the bar and a short, friendly, plump woman who brought my menu and waited on me. She was obviously enjoying the music as she turned it up after seating me, smiling from across the room to get my approval of the increased volume. I didn’t mind, though given the tone and drama of the music I half expected the chef to come stumbling out of the kitchen covered in tzatziki sauce, a rotisserie spike sticking out of his chest and a note from his lover clutched in his hand telling him she was running away with the busboy and a plate of spanakopita.

With rotisserie on my mind, I ordered gyros.

I hadn’t eaten Greek since the five hours I spent in Greece in August. That was the trip that found me, between Kuwait and Albania, unexpectedly hiking up the Acropolis. I had dined in Dubai after my “escape” from Afghanistan, caught a two a.m. flight that took me to Athens via Kuwait, and found I had just enough time before my Olympic Air flight to Tirana to do some sightseeing. So I grabbed a taxi, hiked up to the Parthenon, took a bunch of pictures and grabbed an espresso and a plate of dolmathes in the city before heading back to the airport.

After all I had been through the ten days before, upon landing in Athens I almost convinced myself I was too tired to do anything but find a place to lie down in the airport and sleep. Imagine. I could have missed the Parthenon and the dolmathes.


I think it was about halfway up the steep, rocky hillside of the Acropolis that my heart nearly burst open, all the emotion, all the gratitude nearly spilling out and flowing like a river back down the hill. I stopped my ascent long enough to snap some photos of the whitewashed neighborhoods and the city spread out below, stretching all the way to the Mediterranean sea on the horizon. I could just make out a cruise ship floating on that distant blue. The beauty was so brilliant I couldn’t take it all in. After the dust and desolation of the Afghan countryside, the light and warmth of Greece was nearly too much. I had been just 24 hours before in the middle of a war-scarred land. The contrast between dark and light was arresting.

Isn’t it always?

I remember one time years ago flying out of a blizzard in Chicago on a non-stop to Hawaii. I began the day in a dark, cold storm and ended it on a beach watching a golden sun sink into the ocean, leaving the horizon painted with deep orange and red hues.



Climatic redemption in less than 12 hours, the light and warmth pouring down on everything. If only I could carry that with me back home...




Of course, spend enough time face turned toward the sun and you will carry it with you even in the darker places; like the light of the full moon rising into a night sky, its brilliance really only a reflection of the source of light.



(To send Brad an email: click on his photo at the top right of this web page and then click “email.”)

A CLOSE SHAVE

Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do. - Anonymous

I was driving along the freeway heading to a meeting yesterday when I happened to glance over at the guy in the car next to mine. We were both traveling at 60 miles per hour in fairly heavy traffic.

He was shaving.

Not with an electric razor. He was shaving with a blade. He was dry shaving at 60 miles per hour on an eight-lane freeway at 2 o’clock in the afternoon.

Coupla thoughts...

First off, if you’ve made it to two o’clock in the afternoon without shaving, why bother? Take the rest of the day off.

Second...dry shaving is, well, tricky even when you are standing in front of your bathroom mirror, let alone when you are driving at freeway speeds in a Jaguar sedan.

Third, where do the whiskers go?

And get this... This morning as I was getting ready for the radio show, I came across a survey that found almost all of us do things we probably shouldn’t do when we drive. My thing is talking on the phone. My car is more of a mobile phone booth than a mode of transportation. I get in the car and generally dial a number even before I pull the shift lever into drive. I get more done behind the wheel than most people do at the office. My wife even bought me a Blue Tooth thingy so I could talk hands free. I haven’t been able to make it work, but I put it in my ear anyway just to look cool.

(By the way, why do they call it a “blue tooth?” You stick it in your ear. Perhaps if you stuck it in your mouth... Why would you put a tooth of any color in your ear? What’s with the body part moniker? Why not a blue kidney or a blue spleen? “Hey, I hate to be the one to tell you, but you have a spleen stuck in your ear. It’s blue. You might want to remove that.”)

Anyway, the survey I read said seventy-three percent of people talk on the phone when they drive, so I have a lot of company. Sixty-eight percent of people say they eat when they drive. I don’t do that. 19% fix their hair. I don’t have enough hair to fix. There’s no fixing what’s left. And get this... 2% shave. Jaguar guy is not the only one.

So go ahead and shave.

But remember, while it takes around 8,000 bolts to hold together an automobile, it takes just one nut to scatter it all over the road.


(To send Brad an email: click on his photo at the top right of this web page and then click “email.”)

WRITER'S BLOCK

A friend once said this: To overcome writer's block just sit down and pound on the keys.

Q;oidhf nkqfow hwqdf hwefiuopqefufeh poiwdhf fdoo


Well, that didn’t work.