The long and winding road

For the thousands of you (read one or two) avid readers of this blorg (yes) and any of my in-line Twit friends you'll notice one thing about me. My "style" is not original it is borrowed, rather stolen, from dozens of writers that live in my front hemisphere. Strange because there's barely enough room in there for me, but there they are nonetheless. It's hard to get back into the practice of writing more than 17.5 words per message, so your indulgence with this and any of the other wayward missives that may hatch is requested and/or appreciated.

There was a time when I thought I had the great American novel inside of me. It was a time when I lived with the likes of Zig Ziglar and Tom Peters, Jim Rohn and Wayne Dyer, Norman Vincent Peale and Roger Dawson. August company to say the least, but they were living on the shelf in my office and I was their promoter (pimp). It was fun to pretend that the business I created put me in direct contact with these luminaries of the motivational business scene, when in reality I was helping them become comfortably wealthy while I struggled to pay the bills. For the time when "the office" was actually up and running (2 years?) I did have the opportunity to work with some large and medium sized businesses, either by doing sales trainings or by filling in a motivational chasm that needed bridging. I saw people and their businesses and their lives running on cruise-control, even when, in some instances, the road had ended and they never bothered to look up from the wheel to notice. Many had the good sense to slam on the brakes or make an exaggerated turn in order to avoid being crash-test dummies. Some didn't. My job was to help them and, hopefully, their staff put their eyes back on the road. If they didn't I would agonize over ways to customize a more cogent message for them. It took a while before I realized that some businesses and people had their radar turned off, or had failed to hook it up in the first place. Loud crashes would sometimes follow.

Those aforementioned messengers and their messages, for good or bad, grabbed hold of me for more than the briefest of moments and took me places where I thought I wanted to go. Granted, I do revisit those places every now and then to this day, but it's for a cup of mental coffee and a "hi, how are 'ya" kind of stopover. I could never live there again, not because there weren't valid and inspirational messages, but because much of it just wasn't real, even to the people that were collecting the jing. An indictment of all the people therein? No, just another comment from an observer of the human condition (I just dropped in, to see what...). Whoops, I guess that would have to include me then too, with that old guilt by association thing. Your honor, at this time I would like to submit an Alford plea.

Let me just put away that broad brush for a split second and state, for the record, that I HAVE learned that there is no perfect message or perfect messenger. There are some damn good ones, but almost (N)obody is perfect. In my experience, perfect messages are corrupted. Perfect (M)essengers are corrupted or compromised. This is the human touch. It's unavoidable. Humanity touches it and there just has to be a fatal flaw; the birthmark that exists on a nearly unblemished skin. Oh so smooth to the touch, but there's more to messengers/messages than single sense feedback. We all want depth and substance and continuity, and dozens of other personal spices folded into the batter in order to make it a nourishing and appealing cake. Reality is biting into that cake and finding out that after the first swallow you really need to either wash it down quickly, or spit it out. There are, however, some cakes that look "okay" and, once tasted, become sensory delights; you just can't stop devouring them. It's a special bakery that can produce such delicacies. Experience teaches you to recognize a mistake when you make it a second time (love that one). So too with cakes.