Take a chance; I dare you

How many chances does one get in life, as allotted by God, or the powers that be -- those unseen forces moving behind life like stagehands doing what the big director tells them? It stands to reason, if you spend any time reasoning within the confines of faith, that chances are predetermined, or fixed. ( **Feel free to attack this question from a non-religious angle. We're all friends here.)

Chances don’t breed with other chances, they just exist until used up, or get missed. All but for a short time chances embody possibility, potential; and then they vanish into the dust storm of yesterday.

Is there a jar of chances up there with your name on a shelf, and it’s left up to you to take them at your leisure? Is it up to you to decide when to take a chance?

If you could count chances I bet it’s pretty hard. How many chances might be waiting up there in the jar? In great numbers they look like a thousand tasty jelly beans. What’s so difficult about taking a jelly bean? Are you intent on saving it up for later? You don’t get to save chances up for later, or store them up by not taking them. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

And who doesn’t feel the pain when they’ve missed a chance? It’s palpable, like a bad taste in your mouth. Your heart aches and the anguish stays with you forever, like a parasite. Before leaving, missed chances mix up a little batch of festering regret for later.

People don’t know how many chances are left in their jars. If I could see mine I’d beg for more chances to love, to care, to give, to connect, to laugh, to try, to fail, to impress, to relax, to let my guard down, to hold a hand, to hug my kids, to see things, to share things, to write things, to taste things, to open up to living.

Take a chance, dammit; take them all!

Snakes and shovels

Our house is in the Echo Hills area of Lewiston. It’s snake country. I notched another kill on the shovel tonight after I dispatched the slithering serpent there to the left.

It's been a while between kills, though. We'd gotten used to not seeing them around, so it's still a shock when one starts buzzing at you. The kids play outside all the time, and our dog Fletcher is outside a lot too.

A few summers back I notched no fewer than 13 kills on my shovel, and buried 13 rattlesnake heads in the back yard with the very same shovel. My neighbors killed some snakes too. Debbie killed two (her stories of snake warfare were like epic tales of battle told around a campfire). Nigel killed six or seven (he liked to go door to door and display the pissed off snakes still wiggling, secured in clamps; he kept the tails). And Jason bagged a couple (he preferred a pellet gun with an attached high powered scope to dispatch his fanged quarry from a distance). Notches were my trophies, displayed right there on my trusty shovel, like a World War II fighter ace displays kills on a plane’s fuselage. We agreed that a den had obviously been disrupted that spring when a new home was built above us on the hillside, accounting for higher than average snake numbers.

My kids received a quick education in snake recognition: 1) buzzing, coiled, head like a balled up fist, pissed off: rattlesnake; 2) slender, yellowish, skinny head, normal tail: bull snake. Either way, get dad. Bull snakes control rodent populations and occasionally hunt rattlesnakes; we spared them and offered complimentary relocation.

One evening the sun was setting. Long shadows extended like blankets across the road as my kids and I spent some time together in the front yard. We liked to play catch, soccer, tag, or whatever. I noticed three robins in the road and went back to playing.

A couple minutes passed and the robins were still in the road chirping, but more like barking dogs than musically like they often do. That’s when I saw the snake. The birds had formed a triangle around it like a zone defense, keeping their distance but nonetheless shadowing it all the way across the street, driving the deaf reptile like cowboys drive a stray steer. I hadn’t noticed the deadly snake before. The asphalt and diminished light served to conceal it from sight. The robins were arranged on the road in such a way as to draw my eye into the middle of their formation, to the venomous snake slithering across the road.

So I grabbed my shovel and applied the business end to the serpent’s head, clobbering it a few times and then methodically slicing its head off with the dull edge of the spade. Not a quick and clean cut like King Louis the XVI’s and Marie Antoinette’s guillotine, however sufficient enough for the purposes at hand. The buzzing tip at the other end lost most of its prior intensity, but managed to give a few more half conscious and dazed reports, refusing to die, and then it was over. It’s important to separate the head from a poisonous snake and bury it; dogs rifle through trash cans and still risk getting punctured by the venomous fangs, and possibly die.

Maybe it’s standard robin procedure when dealing with snakes––a tactic––but it felt like they were doing me a favor. The birds didn’t stick around to watch. Like classic heroes of yesteryear, they were long gone before they could be thanked personally. Of the 13 kills that summer, the birds and their odd behavior make that encounter stand out a little more than others. It was bad too. The snakes were in the driveway, on the road, in the plants, along the fence line, and in the grass. Thankfully, however, one snake at a time.

The venomous buzzworms are out there, you remind yourself—and especially your kids—but our senses dull when we don't see them that often. Today we got a reminder, and I'm thankful for the coiled up package it came in.

The mind wanders

A gentle brook gurgled and lolled through a tree lined bank filled with overgrowth, under us and around us as we sat in the former west and eastbound lanes of the abandoned Indian Timothy Memorial Bridge west of Clarkston, Washington. Cement barricades were set to remind everyone that this structure wasn’t safe for driving anymore. Weddings, though, were okay. Humming birds drank up the last of summer’s nectar in the low trees and watched the ceremony below, hovering like helicopters and then darting away. A single dragon fly traversed the span between arches in anything but a hurry. It loitered there, taking its time as altitude was gained and soon he was out of sight over a tree. Candles lined each side under the arches. Small spiders inspected the flame enclosed in hand-broken glass and scurried in and around the beds of rose petals.

It was a beautiful evening. The site was secluded, intimate, special, and everything was perfect. The bride was exquisite and radiant, the groom youthful and eager.

The mind wanders, though, when the wedding vows are uttered, and when the preacher rattles on about rings. I looked around at the back of strangers’ heads, and looked at the bride and groom, and then looked back at the heads. My attention turned to the sound of the lazy water under foot. The mind wanders. The old bridge made for an excellent metaphor of bringing two lives together across two separate lifetimes. The fact that it was old was peculiar in a way. For most of a century the structure funneled travelers to and fro on Highway 12 as they journeyed home or embarked on new adventures. It has since been sidelined, as it were, out of the way of a newer, wider highway not 50 yards away. A landmark now, but unimportant. Inconsequential. The mind wanders. The peaceful roiling of water under the old bridge meandered the thicket and hidden banks and off towards a glorious steel tube under the “new” road. Into a darkened culvert. The stream now forced to shed its natural charm and accept modern practicality in return. Poetic in a way. Do not all beautiful marriages, over time, yield to the hand of practicality?

Skipping rocks

Standing on the banks of Flathead Lake in western Montana, a truly mystical expanse of water tucked between high peaks and rolling plains, you’ll find countless and colorful stones for skimming over a gentle set of evening waves. Each one a gem, eye-popping, smooth, unique. In bunches they are breathtaking, huddled below the surface and receding off towards the depths—which gives them a dark hue, a touch of green over a speckled swatch of colors; or up on the shore, dried off and indulging in the sunlight, captured in a brilliant pre-dusk ambiance.

The rocks of Flathead conspire to please the eye. Their very randomness of color goes against logic, or seems impossible at best: the pinks, the grays, purples and reds, whites, yellows, and blues. Your eye moves to the one that stands out a little more than the others. Your gaze locks on like a beacon to its singular beauty; your attention commandeered. And it pulls your body in for a closer look, luring your hand to pick it up, to examine its texture and tint, to judge it for skipping potential. To assess its shape and girth, and to scrutinize its burden on the shoulder. All for one glorious heave into the abyss.

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You always know that moment when you’ve asked a friend for too much. They act eager to help but their actions, or inaction, end up betraying whatever goodwill or genuine concern they lead you on with. It puts me in a strange place. Do I call them out on it? Do I guilt them into giving a shit? Or is it one of those occasions to take a hint: to get my own head around the fact that they just don’t care?

3 reasons why BlackBerry works for me (now)

This is not a review; it's my opinion

Pick up the phone

First, and probably most important to me: they still give a damn about the phone half of the smart phone. Up until a few weeks ago, before I switched away from my HTC Droid Eris, it was damn near impossible to send or receive calls without it first pissing down its leg in fear. I tweaked the apps, made more space available by clearing up memory; basically did everything I could think of for the phone to lurk like a Jedi Knight just below the surface of everything else the smart phone was doing and be ready to strike hard and fast when necessary, to answer a call or make an emergency run for take-out food. But, I just couldn’t get there. My Droid Eris went into hiding and hoped no one would call.

I tested my theory out of frustration with my Droid Eris by switching back to the phone I had prior, over 18 months ago, to my BlackBerry Pearl. You know what? That Pearl was beat to hell and had next to no memory or screen real estate, but it was glorious as a phone. I went a few days and re-upped with Verizon to a BlackBerry Curve 3G.

Blackberry is my Jedi now. It devours phone calls like Obi Wan devours trade federation battle droids (yes... I wrote that): smoothly, precisely, and swiftly. No issues there anymore. Not saying that iPhone is better or worse in that department––I couldn’t say; never used an iPhone––or that the 27 Google phones don’t have adequate performance. They probably do. It’s just my gut feeling that BlackBerry still cares a little more about call quality than the sexy newcomers.

Battery to spare

It seems that no smart phone is safe from serious complaints about battery life. It makes sense. The things are always online, always making or checking status updates on Twitter and Facebook, checking email, foursquaring your followers into a slow and painful death by boredom, banking, shooting video of your cat’s amazing cat life, searching on the go, texting friends, oh... and talking to people. That’s a lot of demand, wouldn’t you agree?

Manufacturers give you barely enough juice in the battery to see you through a typical weekday, if you practice “moderate usage” and don’t use your phone for stupid stuff, i.e. the cool stuff. But that’s not realistic; of course you’re going to use the phone for cool stuff, because you’re paying extra for the “data” package. Frankly, our batteries aren’t up to the challenge of the data package. So we trickle in the car, trickle in the office, and trickle off a buddy’s laptop hoping to make it long enough for the next status update, text, or call.

Back to my BlackBerry Pearl theory, I was astonished how long the battery lasted in that thing. All day (7a-11p) and then some. And to be fair, I had Facebook, Twitter, sporadic phone calls, texting, and four email accounts doing their thing all day. Normal for me. How did I forget about that while using the Eris? I could stare at the screen on that thing for a minute and almost see that pathetic green bar shrinking pixel by bloody pixel. To get through a work day (8a-5p) meant trickling. If you planned to go out that night, trickle some more beforehand.

I hear people complain about battery life in iPhones, Droids, Windows Mobile Phone Phone Phone thingamajig, and even BlackBerry. It’s possible, I suspect, that while we’re disappointed in performance, we’ve all really settled for far short of mediocre anymore when it comes to on-the-go stamina from our devices. Smart phone battery life sucks, much like laptop battery life sucks. Get over it. Manufacturers inflate performance figures and real world usage knocks those figures in the toilet.

It’s 3:15 PM, my BlackBerry battery is at 73% capacity. Draw your own conclusions from that. My conclusion is that I’m incredibly satisfied with the out-of-the-box battery life of my BlackBerry Curve (and was amazed at the almost four year old original battery in the Pearl while I re-tasked it for a week).

Social barricade

Lastly, of why BlackBerry works for me (now) is this: my real life doesn’t need to be replicated 100 percent to my social networks. The two are connected, of course. But I don’t need a device that keeps me on the bleeding edge of what’s technologically possible in the social networking game. I just need a device that offers a few conduits between the two. I look at iPhones and they’re amazing pieces of gear. Throw in the iPad for that matter too. Google devices are keeping pace and extending boundaries too (without getting into a huge argument about which platform is superior). BlackBerry is not innovating much comparatively, and is quickly losing market share to both Apple and Google. How that ends for RIM, we’ll see.

But the point is this: for these magnificent pieces of cutting edge hardware from Apple and Droid to soar in brilliance and utterly blow your mind you must commit yourself to wasting a ton of time on them. Sure, you can waste time on a BlackBerry too. However, while the others challenge you to load up their devices with goodies and apps to explore and document the fast-paced blur of your life, BlackBerry re-introduces something many of us have all but forgotten: focus.

1,000 Miles of Optimism

Life seemed to be more fun when your life was out there somewhere, waiting in the future. It was mysterious and you would get to it eventually. Pieces would fit together like a happy puzzle of meaning and fulfillment. From a thousand miles out the future looked perfect, or adequate at the very least. The perfect job would occupy your days with purpose, and the perfect spouse would occupy your nights with passion. Marriage and happily-ever-after would form the bedrock for a successful foray into family. Your kids would be adorable, exceptional, and respectful. Your home: a castle on a hill. Your car: a shiny, head-turning chariot. It was assumed that close friendships would thrive for decades; and that new friends would blend into the soil of your life like rotating crops, or a fast-moving square-dance, always fun and always fertile for meaningful connections. To a certain extent, we all mortgage a perfect life later against a pocket full of dreams.