Dear Skate­boarder whom I nearly hit with my car last night,

I real­ize that it was late, you were skat­ing across the straight seg­ment of road between two turns so your view hid any oncom­ing traf­fic, how­ever I must cau­tion you as I was going, at the time, below the speed limit and yet I came around the bend to nearly slam into your frag­ile form. Instead I chose to slam on my breaks, in doing so I also pressed the horn and held it.

I must admit I admired your abil­ity to trip off your skate­board, remain on your feet, stop the board with one foot, and never spill a drop of your mocha-latte-frappachino. How­ever, when you ges­tured dra­mat­i­cally for me to drive past you as you stood in the road, and I con­tin­ued hold­ing my horn, it struck me that you thought I was honk­ing to make you aware of my presence.

This is not the case.

I am fairly cer­tain you noticed and were thus aware my Honda Ele­ment as I sat mere feet from your body. The horn was because we were in a stretch of road where peo­ple would be com­ing around curves and pos­si­bly not pay­ing atten­tion such that you, or more impor­tantly me, might be hit still. So my judi­cious use of the horn was intended to alert other dri­vers who might turn the cor­ner while we stood there.

I must say though, I did not appre­ci­ate your mim­icry of those with men­tal hand­i­caps as you skated in front of me. As you were clearly a genius, I felt it in poor taste to both make such an action, and direct it towards me. I under­stand you were try­ing to save face with your friends who had smartly stopped at road’s edge and were thus watch­ing your moronic actions unfold, but it still might not have been the best choice.

As you skated on and nearly were hit by oncom­ing cars in the next two lanes of traf­fic I pressed the gas and drove away, hop­ing you made it safely across the road. Since I heard no tires skid and no horns honked, I have to assume you did.

But fuck man did you piss me off.

– Patrick

I can’t believe I let the bald spot post rest atop my blog for so long. Wow.

I’m busy. As always. I write a lot, but now it’s not on here, it’s on Twit­ter and on Man­a­Na­tion. That being said, I’m going to be revamp­ing this blog to still be about me, but also a lot about my trav­els and life. I had a real­iza­tion that I live a charmed life and it mer­its using it for pur­poses of entertainment.

I’ll be shar­ing sto­ries from the road as I travel for Magic tour­na­ments, in fact I’ll be explain­ing just what it is I do, because to peo­ple who don’t play Magic: the Gath­er­ing, I just travel a lot — I’m like an inter­na­tional Man of Mys­tery. And as awe­some as it is to have peo­ple think that of you, unless you carry a license to kill, it’s best to dis­pel con­fu­sion and explain. Usually.

I’ll be review­ing restau­rants as I get to eat at a lot of unique places and, tak­ing a les­son from my bosses, one of the joys of trav­el­ling is find­ing the deli­cious places to eat and be social with others.

As a gadget-geek I’ll be shar­ing what­ever doo­dads and giz­mos I’m play­ing with, whether they be phys­i­cal gad­gets or online web­sites I might be beta testing.

I’ll be phi­los­o­phiz­ing, the­o­riz­ing and ver­bal­iz­ing thoughts, feel­ings, and beliefs.

And with that, I declare the new era of TrickJarrett.com, offi­cially underway!

You’ll notice that I’ve moved the blog to http://www.trickjarrett.com/blog/ — Don’t worry, if you sub­scribe to my RSS, then noth­ing is going to change. I just took the oppor­tu­nity to make trickjarrett.com a land­ing page that linked out to my var­i­ous pres­ences online.

I regret it every time I get a hair­cut, but it’s there. No, it’s not on top of my head. As Rite the styl­ist said this week­end, “Boy you’ve got four heads of hair on one head.” Indeed it’s true. I was born with a full head of hair, and I’m show­ing all the signs of tak­ing it to my grave.

But I do have a bald spot.

It’s man made too, that’s the worst part!

Out of stress and ner­vous­ness, at my old jobs, I plucked at longer-than-desired side­burn hairs until one day I real­ized I had cre­ated a minia­ture bald spot. Stress invaded me. It inhab­ited my mind.

And the worst part? It wasn’t all dis­tress, some of it was eustress that I sim­ply didn’t know how to process.

If no one has ever taught you to drink water or swim in water, all you know how to do is drown in it.

Learn how to process, ana­lyze and accept stress. I’m still learn­ing, but I’ve got it 95% licked.

Life is easy. Really.

Stop and think about it. Look how easy it has become to sur­vive in devel­oped countries.

Com­pared to Haiti or Uganda or some other third world coun­try our lives take mon­u­men­tal effort, idiocy or bad luck to truly screw up beyond repair.

What isn’t easy is excelling. Whether finan­cially or socially or pro­fes­sion­ally, being above the curve requires either sus­tained hard work, one time great­ness or knock­ing it out of the park on that one crit­i­cal time when it mat­tered most and where so many have failed before.

I’m not going to lie. And it’s all stuff I’ve said before, but I’m over­weight. I’m fat. This post is going to be a string of con­scious­ness post laden with pop cul­ture ref­er­ences and quotes. Buckle up.

Go home, take a paper bag, cut some eye­holes out of it. Put it over your head, get undressed and look at your­self in the mir­ror. Really eval­u­ate where your strengths and weak­nesses are. And be hon­est. — Joan on Mad Men

The sen­ti­ment here is clear, you have to be objec­tive. If you look at your­self, you see you, but when we look at oth­ers — peo­ple we don’t know, we judge them. We judge them based on how they look. The bag on our head, even the metaphor­i­cal bag, enhances your abil­ity to dis­as­so­ci­ate your­self with your body and look at your flaws, and your strengths.

The key to my exer­cise pro­gram is this one sim­ple truth: I hate my body. You under­stand that the sec­ond you look in the mir­ror and you’re happy with what you see, baby, you just lost the bat­tle. — Perry Cox on Scrubs

Change only hap­pens when we have become so dis­sat­is­fied with the cur­rent state of things that we must change. I left the com­edy club due to a sin­gle staff mem­ber who made my work­ing there unbear­able. And thanks to him I dou­bled my salary, then dou­bled it again the next year. All because I worked with a class-A rag­ing ass­hole. Now, I must find that equiv­a­lent in my body and use it as lever­age to cause change.

Here is the thing though, you can­not take a leap of faith with­out know­ing where you’re aim­ing to land. Oth­er­wise you end up being one of the char­ac­ters in Super Smash Broth­ers where you fall to your death, fall for­ever and never reach your goal.

A goal is akin to a dream. Sep­a­rated by a thin veil. Dreams require we admit to what they are, and risk to our­selves that we may not real­ize this dream. Like ask­ing a woman out on a date, chas­ing a dream exposes our­selves to danger.

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
– W. B. Yeats

I first heard this in the movie Equi­lib­rium, and then I looked up the poem. Pow­er­ful stuff. It finds another risk in admit­ting our dreams, that oth­ers will crush them. Chil­dren dream of Santa, and it falls to par­ents to one day tread on that dream to edu­cate them about the world. If my dream is to have six pack abs and a body of a god, then there are hun­dreds of peo­ple who will tell me it’s impos­si­ble, I’d never get there. And here is where my resolve, deter­mi­na­tion and bull­head­ed­ness come in. To them I say: Fuck off. It’s my damn dream so get off my cloud! This post is what hap­pens when I stay up late watch­ing Fight Club and cod­ing PHP.

Earn your body.

I do not know where I heard this quote, I apol­o­gize to who­ever said it and came up with this great truth. In so many ways I’ve spent my life tak­ing the “free demo” of my body. Even dur­ing high school sports I strug­gled to push myself and earn it. For a short while after col­lege I was earn­ing my body. Daily work­outs. Eat­ing well. And I was earn­ing it, see­ing the pounds slip off. Then I didn’t fall of the wagon, the wagon exploded around me and my body slid back­wards to the worst shape of my life. Here is a sim­ple truth: Your body wants to be fat. Fat = sus­te­nance and in famine it means you can live longer. But unfor­tu­nately for your body, your goal is not to sur­vive famine, it is to sur­vive time. And sci­ence shows that time is con­quered by not accu­mu­lat­ing that fat. And so it’s time I begin earn­ing my body again.

This is your life and it’s end­ing one minute at a time. — Nar­ra­tor, Fight Club

The time is now. Not tomor­row. Not next week. I need to start earn­ing my body. Tonight. Aside from the desire to look appeal­ing, it has become more and more appar­ent that my future requires I make these changes. Both of my par­ents have fought dis­ease, my dad is a can­cer sur­vivor and my mom died from her dis­ease (for­give me for not going into more detail, I don’t need to delve deeper than I already am.) My fam­ily has his­tory of heart dis­ease, dia­betes, alco­holism, and more. A clear sign that I should get mov­ing and stop wast­ing time. So what stops me? Fear.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total oblit­er­a­tion.
I will face my fear.
I will per­mit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be noth­ing.
Only I will remain.

Fuck fear. Sim­ply. I’m able to do this if I become ded­i­cated and stop cheating.

I’m going to earn my body.