It is What it Is

You wake up, look at the clock and realize you have to be at work in 2 hours. As you rub your eyes and attempt to shake off the fog from the night prior, you look around and see three people sleeping on the floor and beer cans scattered everywhere. The activities from last night's soiree come flooding back. You laugh and light a cigarette. You smile at some of the things that took place the night before as you also try to block out some of the others. You finish your cigarette and walk around the living room and start kicking the folks on the floor to wake them up. You notice one has a black eye and that's when you feel the pain in your hand and look down and see your knuckles are swollen."Again?", you say to yourself. Everyone rises like the walking dead and exit as the scent of another wasted night and brain cells follow them out. No goodbyes, hugs, hand shakes or any of that, just blood shot eyes and attempts to find their cars. You survey the room, laugh again and get ready for work. It is what it is... Peaces and Creases TBN Out

Coaching

I grew up playing football, basketball, baseball and soccer as a kid. Then I ran cross country and track. You might have noticed you didn't see softball anywhere in that statement. Not really a sport (if you want to call it one) that I know much about. Jokes, but fa real I don't know much about softball. I was a pick up player for an adult softball league for about a minute and a half. That is the extent of my experience with softball. Now I find myself as the MOR for my daughter's 8U team. Let me translate for those of you who have not had the oppurtunity to immerse yourself in this beautifal game that the little one's love to partake. MOR means Manager on Record and 8U means 8 and under. So I am managing a group of girls who are in or around the second grade, a sport I know nothing about. Well that is not totally true, I've been coaching my little one since 6U in some shape form or fashion. You may be asking me where I am going with this, because I just asked myself the same. Being a coach for children is an amazing experience. Real Talk. I may be deficient in my knowledge of softball but these kids don't know that. They just want to have fun playing a sport regardless of which one. I've coached cross country, soccer and now softball. Softball is a different animal but I will speak on that later (lots of expectations). I LOVE being called Coach George. These kids that you are instructing have placed their complete trust in you as a coach. You tell them to go that way, they go that way, you tell them to run for a mistake, they run. They believe in you and trust that as their coach you are telling them the right thing to do without question. That is an amazing feeling. One of my favorites when coaching youth softball: I'm yelling at one my players from the sidline and they turn and look at me, glove and hands on knees, we lock eyes and I deliver my instruction. She knods her head and says "yes coach". THEY DO IT even know I barely know what I am doing! It's a beautifal thing to be a part of. Obvioulsy as they get older things will undoubtebtly change. The fun department will start closing it's doors and the competitive department will start putting a Walmart on every corner. I get it, its inevetible. The fun of the sport will eventually be overtaken by select teams, high school ball, eventual scholarships etc. That is the way of the world. However, not every girl is going to, or strive to make a select team, or play on thier high school varsity team, earn a scholarship. Some girls just want to have fun and learn the game of Softball and I am grateful that I can be a part in making that happen. I get asked to coach every season and I make a big deal about how I'm not going to do it. I end up doing it everytime, "GLOVES DOWN, PLAYS AT 2! YES COACH". I don't have to convinvce them the play is at 2, they simply believe that as their Coach, I am telling them the correct thing to do. And that's the beauty of coaching any sport. Peices and Creases TBN Out

Last Try

Is it Sunday already? I need to climb... or mow the grass... or do absolutely nothing. BUT that is what I have done all week. But I deserve a week off, I did a triathlon last weekend, dont I deserve a week off? Then the proverbial angel on my shoulder says, "NO! You havent climbed in like 2 weeks! Get your ass up". So in order to circumvent my conscience I message B-Town to see if he is climbing. Of course he says yes. Mind you it's a tight game between the Sixers and Wizards, first round of the NBA Playoffs and my feet kicked up on the couch enjoying the absence of my wife and kids.Then my wife returns home from the store and I attempt another way out of going to the gym. I say: "You know I'm thinking about climbing today, but haven't I done enough, don't I deserve a week off"? Crickets... she doesn't even respond, just starts unloading groceries. So now I have no excuse except for my own weak one's. So I get off the couch and tell myself just put on some pants. Then a shirt. Ok lets just start driving in the direction of the gym and if you change your mind you can always just turn around and head home. I hop on the beltway and it starts pissing cats ansd dogs. I'm like YES! Perfect reason to turn around and go home (the devil on my shoulder tells me). But Angel is like: well your already on the beltway, might as well just keep on going. So I say fuck it, might as well. I arrive and there is like 9,000 cars in the parking lot. I walk thru the doors and immediatly to my left I see B-Town intensly watching a guy climb something that immediatly made me want to put some chalk on my hands and jump up there with him. HAHAHA. Not at at all, homeboy was climbing a V10. So on a scale of 1-10, 10 is the hardest. It actually made me want to turn around and go right back to my truck, rub chalk on my hands so when I got home I could tell me wife that I climbed. I just walk by and hope they don't see me enter. They did not. I warmup on some easy routes and get up my confidence to go speak to my buddy. Here is what I say, "this is where the professionals hang out I see"? My buddy is engrossed in his buddy climbing a V whatever. Thankfully his wife luaghs at my comment or I might have had a panic attack. B-Town acknolegdes my existance and goes back to being a spider monkey.His wife kinda tries to talk to me into some routes in the "Pro Zone" to which I politely decline and go find the "Loser Zone". Ok, so now that I am done with that complete tangent I can get to, as they like to say in climbing "The Crux" of this story. I put in some good work in the "Loser Zone". Then I see this group trying this route.... the holds are purple (which means easy) so I automatically assume it's easy. I watch a guy try it, pretty heavy set gentlemen, and think well he can't make that move because he's fat. Excuse my courseness, thats not nice to say but it is my story. They eventually move along. Now its my turn to try this route that I so crassly called this guy fat because he couldnt make a certain move. I get up there and low and behold I cant make the same fucking move! Who's fat now idiot! I try once, twice, three times. Some hippy ass chick is laying next to where I am embarrassing myself and gets up on my route. I'm not happy about it but I do want to see if she can send it. Sorry I'm using a lot of climbing lingo, "send" means reach the top/finish. Long strory short she fucking cheated and used a boulder from another route. So I'm like shit that wasn't helpful. So I try a fourth time, and I actually do worse than my prior attempts. So I tell myself I have one more try. I'm making built in excuses before my last try: "its been 2 hours bro, you havent climbed in 2 weeks, you are tired". I shut devil down, chalked up and stared at my enemy. This is it George, youre going home a loser. Pfft, SENT that shit like a postal worker! Peaces and Creases TBN OUT

Pain and Patience

How long can you do it? How much can a person endure? You try to do the right thing only to be slapped in the face repeatedly. Do you give up or keep beating your head against a stone wall? Maybe it's worth beating your head against a stone wall. Or is it? Where is the breaking point? This opening is completly irrellevant. This post is two fold. Pain and patience, perhaps two words that encompass the same concept. I believe they go hand and hand. Let's start with pain. There are two types of pain: physical pain and emtional pain. When I stub my toe (ouch) that really hurts. You get shot in the arm (ouch) that hurts as well, probably a little more. You fall down a flight of stairs and sustain a couple of injuries (ouch). Then there is the pain where feelings get involved (not a fan of this type of pain). Referring to emotional pain. We have all experienced emotional pain i.e. the loss of a loved one, a break up from a long term relationship, someone called you a nigger. That type of pain. Both hurt, but scraping your knee on the concrete and a parent telling you are worthless and will never contribute to society hurts a little different. Am I right? I could accidently touch a hot stove and burn the shit out of my hand... but your significant other telling you I slept with your sister burns just as painfully if not more. Let me get to the point I'm attempting to make, pain is pain regardless... it fucking hurts. The ultimate question is, does it leave a scar? Physically or emotionally? One is visible and the other is not but do they not hurt the same? Physical scars last forever but do emotional scars? Can emotional scars be healed? Secondly is patience. Some have it and some don't. Why is that? People are born with legs, feet, a head, and a torso. Why are they not born with patience? I realize this is a silly premise but stay with me for a moment. If we can be born with a brain why can we not be born with patience. Seems pretty simple to me. "Iv'e been waiting for three minutes for my latte!" Hmmmm, can't wait 4 minutes? That's an easy example. The patience I am refering to is a little more nuanced in the sense of dealing with a bunch of bullshit and not losing your shit. Like your wife treats you like an asshole and you suck it up. Your kids act a fool in the morning before school and you don't scream at them. That's patience. A kid on the softball team you are coaching can't field a ground ball and you don't yell at them like they murdered your first born (I've seen it happen). So now let me bring this all together; patience and pain or pain and patience are brother and sister. Patience sometimes invovles pain, and pain sometimes involves patience. Here is a good example that I literally just came up with: as a boxer you may have to get punched in the face over and over again but if you are patient they will tire themself out and you win the fight. Or if your significant other is impatient and you are patient, that can become very painful. Bottom line, patience is a choice. Pain is an outcome. Peaces and Creases TBN Out

Fa Real

Wow, this how far out of practice I am… Im writing in Microsoft 2010 on a laptop that should be considered a typewriter at this point. I would write directly onto my blog but what typewriters have internet access to all you smarty pants who were just thinking that. Don’t get me off topic. I really had something to say; at least enough to move me to use this ancient artifact (Ryan I need the laptop back that you were supposedly fixing!) to do what I like to refer to as writing. I believe this should work as my introduction… I can feel you salivating for what I am going to say next you greedy degenerates. Now that that is out of the way I will get started, assuming I remember what it was I was going to get started on in the first place. All joking aside this is a happy post (I have to keep all of the murderous, violent ones to myself for legal reasons, you can understand). Life is an interesting experiment if you will. I’m asking you to allow me to refer to life as an experiment. A scientific experiment: with a hypothesis, data, results, all that bullshit. If you were to look at my life in its entirety that little line graph we use when gaging such data would be by all intents and purposes unreadable; it would be all over the place. What I mean by that is that I have had my up’s and my down’s, mostly downward on the hypothetical graph I just described. Now I look at my station in life and I can’t help but be floored! I turned into a decent human being, not that I always wanted to be one because society is a bunch of homegrown bullshit fed to the masses. But low and behold here I am eating that bullshit, feeding on that bullshit, having daily shits that relieve me of that bullshit! But hey, I aint mad at me. We adapt or die. I chose to adapt. Let’s not get it twisted, I’m still George Harold Anderson the motherfuckin IV. Just a little less emphasis on the “motherfuckin”. I can still drink with the best of em and still carry a mean left hook but I can also go and watch my daughter play softball and/or gymnastics. Instead of trolling bars to collect teeth I now troll softball fields to collect high fives and fist bumps. I guess this written word is a reflection on my journey in life. At this time 12 years ago I was living behind an abandoned Circuit City in Tulsa Oklahoma wondering where my next meal was going to come from. Now I’m looking at a deck my friend and I just built, a shed I built, a gangster ass treehouse I built for my daughters, a trampoline, and a fire pit in the backyard that burns away all my prior indiscretions. I also put up a hammock which I never use. I put it up not to lay in but more the fact that I know I can lay in it any time I want to. That my friends is not happiness, but contentment. I’m writing this beautiful ode to the life we are so fortunate to have. I tried suicide twice…. Makes me that much more thankful to be living. Peaces and Creases

What is Normal Anyway?

I am going to remove myself from this post and watch myself type from a distance because I don't want to be affiliated with whatever comes from the mind of this mad man. So I'll just let him take it from here.

Thank you for the introduction kind sir. I'll wake you when I'm finished. But we both know I am never truly finished; there are not enough words in human language that could contain or begin to convey the things that run through my tiny brain. So this will just be another futile attempt to simply scratch the surface. Buckle in because non of this will make any sense.... or will it?

2020 has been an unprecedented year to say the least. It has been interesting. It is still kind of surreal to walk around and see people wearing masks everywhere you go. Its like something out of a Phillip K. Dick novel. Hand shakes have become weird, college applications and standards have changed, NBA basketball is being played in a bubble, substance abuse and domestic violence is on the rise, people are standing during the national anthem (or are they kneeling, I forget?), black martyrs, social unrest, economic discourse, Joe Exotic got arrested, the list goes on. Oh and its election year to boot. I just realized where I want to go with this rant. Rant is a harsh word, lets call it a collection of disjointed thoughts and ramblings of a man that is close to his whit's end. Nope, I can't even be concise enough to call this a rant.

My life is so upside down and sideways I don't know whether to drool incoherently clutching a bottle of whisky or go streaking while screaming Black Lives Matter. Neither of which are far from actually happening. I mean come on, something has to give. You can't expect people to be holed up in their homes with their KIDS AND SPOUSE all day everyday trying to decipher this godforsaken remote learning which alone would drive a person mad, listening to a president who says god knows what just burping up thoughts on tweeter, while all white people are trying to find out if they are racist or not, while eyeballing someone who's mask is slightly below their nose determining if they are actually 6 feet from you. It is madness! Don't get it twisted I love my wife and kids, but come on, not that much. I'm not trying to see them 24/7 365. If you're thinking to yourself that's a fucked up thing to say, fuck you kill yourself because you think the same but I'm saying it, so a thank you is in order. Your welcome. So the question becomes how do we maintain some semblance of sanity during these apocalyptic times? Well don't look at me, I don't have the answer, or do I...? Of course not, don't be ridiculous. I will say this though, during these very trying times we are getting an up close and personal look at our humanity that I think we would otherwise miss if not for the calamity we call the new norm. Isolation can remind us that we are social beings deep down despite all the shit we talk about him or her. It is human interaction that keeps us civil and not the other way around. So when I feel the walls starting to close in, I picture myself in a fighting hole staring down the sites of my M16 in bum fuck Egypt all alone and it helps me to put things back into perspective and realize that I wouldn't change this madness for one second of that lonesomeness. So embrace it people, it could be worse. Embrace it before we return to our mindless day to day that we refer to as the norm.

Stay Salty

Peaces and Creases

TBN Out

This Just Happened

It's a feeling like no other. Squeezing the trigger in the hopes that it hits it's mark. I don't mean a target, center mass, silhouette shooting. I mean when your target is another living human being. You look down your sights and actually see the inhale and exhale of another, who breaths just as you do. Your eyes begin to waiver, your palms begin to sweat, and for one brief moment you forget what you are there for. This is absolutely not the time to question your purpose, although it happens regardless. A terrible mental state to be in when in combat. Because the enemy may not be questioning any of the existential gobbidy gook that has hindered you from doing what you have spent the last 3 years training to do. Boom, like that you're dead, because YOU STOPPED TO THINK ABOUT IT!

War is not a play ground, and or a sand box where you show a girl your knickers. You play for keeps. When I came to that realization I cried like a fucking baby. No joke. Hmmmm, I might not go home on leave and fuck Julie like I been dreaming about since I got out of boot camp. I might actually leave here in a body bag and get that 21 gun salute. So I better get my head on straight, my eyes on the target, palms dry, and my trigger finger ready. Shoot to, guess what.... kill. End life. Otherwise it might be mine that is taken.

I don't know where I'm going or how I started on this morbid rant. I'm gonna guess it has something to do with the COVID. Mortality is not something we like to, or address very often. But I have, and it was eye opening and it scared the shit out of me. However, it did help me in a lot of ways. Death is not what actually scares me. It's not living that does. So I like to keep my head on a swivel and my trigger finger ready for whatever life may thro at me. Good or bad. Stay frosty

Peaces and Creases

TBN OUT