The Forum Pt. 2

As The Forum was technically out of the purview of the school, I was free to publish whatever I wanted.  I was strongly encouraged to get a faculty advisor.  I selected the Wills professor who liked to make sex party and heroin jokes in class.  He said this edition was one of the funniest things he'd read, period, but he couldn't advise me to release it in this version.  I took his advice because, you know, I needed a job after school.  Five years later though, I present to you my unfettered vision:
 
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The Forum Pt. 1

 

The pinnacle of law school-dom is being an Editor in Chief.  There are only a handful of publications (USC has Law Review; ABA Real Property, Trusts, & Estate Law Journal; Journal of Law and Education; and the International Journal of Law and Business).  Editors in Chief are some of the brightest legal minds of their graduating class. 

My law school grades were not abysmal, but they were roundly mediocre.  And I had (have) no fervent desire to practice law.  However, my third year of law school, I was the editor-in-chief of the law school's satire newspaper (no, I didn't invent it).  The Forum had a history of existing but no one publishing anything.  I managed to get two issues out in the fall.  I joked that the other Editors in Chief could have their successful careers, trophy wives, and respect of their peers; I had more readers (non-parent division) than all of them combined. 

Without further ado...

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Good Luck With That

I knew the day was coming, but I didn't know it would be today.

Pop: "You know I'm going to get you to do what I want you to do."
Me: "You know how good you've been at that over the years." (Editor's Note: He has not; at all)
Pop: "I'm going to bribe you."
Me (knowing where this is going): "Uh huh."
Pop:  "I'm gonna tie inheritance to you getting married and giving me grandchildren pretty soon."
Me: "Yeah...that'll do it." (Editor's Note: It won't)

That said, if any fun, adventurous, hilarious, wildly intelligent, beautiful single woman wants a piece of a retired teacher's nest egg and is willing to grow my spawn inside herself, by all means holler. 

Oh, and you'll need to have money of your own until the old man kicks the bucket because I'm flat-broke.

Coach Clark

Randy Clark was a giant to me as a boy. And I'm not being figurative. I mean he was huge.  I was maybe 5'5" and maybe 100lbs, at most, back then.

He was the varsity basketball coach and the middle school principal. And if he wanted to be, he could be scary (he was the principal after all...he gave me my first lecture on sexual harrassment in seventh grade), but for the most part he was gregarious. He was my classmate Eric's dad too.

I didn't know him as Randy, of course. I was a 12 and 13 year old when I was in middle school.  I didn't know him as Mr. Clark.  He was Coach Clark.  That was that.

I remember various things about Coach Clark. There was that lecture (and all that was my classmate Paul's fault. After I'd been in the vicinity after Paul had dropped his pen and told the girl whose desk it dropped under to "spread your legs so I can get that" which got us a finger wag, we were in the lunch line and a different girl cut us. Paul told her "get to the back of the line, hoe." She asked what he called her and I said "a garden tool."   wockawockawocka).  He taught me social studies in 7th or 8th grade and I remember when he took my text book from me at the end of the year to show the class that it needed to be clean with no markings and, out of the 500 page book, he happened to open it to the page where I'd scribbled cusswords earlier in the year.

Oof.

Then, at the end of the school year in 8th grade, my family life went to hell in a handbasket.  Lawyers were involved; custody was contested.  I literally didn't have a place to stay.

And Randy Clark (and his wife Ellen) stepped up and took me in.  Yes, I was his son's classmate and he was the principal, but Eric and I hadn't been super close and...just...and.  That was a big, damn deal.  The Clarks didn't have to bring me in and they did.

I stayed with the Clarks for the last three weeks of the school year.  The legal whathaveyou resulted in me moving away for high school. I happened to run into some of my former classmates and Coach Clark in Hilton Head a couple of years later at some academic something or other.  Other than that, life has gone on: high school, college, the army, law school, whatever this period is.  I ran into Eric five or six years ago in Columbia.  We both looked much different (7 inches and another hundred pounds will do that).  We made small talk. That was that.

I ran into Eric again last night. I asked him how he was doing. He told me Coach was in the ICU.   A group of faces I haven't seen in twenty years appeared to comfort and support Eric.  There were many faces I didn't recognize. But I had no doubt they were men and women that Coach Clark had an impact on.  It wasn't my place to insinuate myself into their congregation so I left them be. 

I let my mind wander to that time he and his wife showed me extraordinary kindness.  As a 13 year old going through a crappy time, I appreciated it. As a 34 year old, I am awed and indebted to them.

Today, I learned that he has passed.

I am being figurative: Randy Clark is a Giant.

If Only, Kurt. If only.

I don't want to say "there are times where you feel helpless", because, most of the time you're helpless and you just refuse to admit it to yourself.  Most things you can't control, no matter how much you think you can.  However, I'm gonna say that "there are times you feel helpless" because even if you can't control things, many times (even if only sometimes) you have a chance to at least nudge them in the direction you're looking for, but, occasionally, rarely (thank God), you can't even do that. 

When you're a kid, you give up easily. Things are "impossible!" As you age and learn stick-to-it-iveness, though, you start to believe that pretty much anything is possible, that if you bear down and focus and get on it, you can achieve what you set your mind to.  Sure, sure, some of that is fantasy, but adults (the worthwhile ones) refuse to accept that anything simply can't be done.

Every once in a while though, there's no second opinion you can get; there's no figuring a way out of the problem; what's done is done. 

My grandfather got a chest x-ray as part of a regular checkup and there seemed like there was something on his lung, so they did another x-ray. Everything came back clear.  Six months later, he had another x-ray done.  Cancer everywhere.  Turned out that, on the second x-ray six months before, a rib had blocked the small cancer spot that had shown up on the first x-ray.  Didn't matter that the x-ray tech should have thought of that six months earlier.  By the time they realized what had happened, he was done.  Yes, yes. There's chemotherapy and radical treatments and whatnot, but when that sort of thing happens, there's no fixing it.  He died.

As a soldier and a pragmatist, I'm more aware than most that life is precious and that there are no do-overs or take-backs.  I'm comfortable with, well, if not "comfortable" at least I understand and accept, the fact that sometimes "bad" things happen.  There's not much use crying over spilt milk or pondering what could have been if things had been done differently.  Time travel doesn't exist.

Nearly all psychological therapy can be distilled down to acceptance, as in "What happened happened and can't be undone. You need to accept it and move on."

Of course, none of that is to say that because I am aware of the unrelenting nature of time and fact that I therefore have no problems accepting difficult happenstances.

I am better at acceptance than many, particularly when it concerns myself.  If something bad/unfortunate happens to me, "thems the breaks" and I try to move on with my day (hypocrisy acknowledgement: yes, there are things I have never let go of).

When something bad happens to friends and family though, I have a particularly hard time with it because I refuse to accept that there isn't a way out for them.  And, even if I accept that there isn't a way out for them, I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it, because...well... just because.

Because I love them and don't want anything bad to happen to them no matter how unrealistic that is, because that's what loving someone is.

Would that it were "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

But...

The Shutdown: What Happens When Folks Don't See Outside Their Bubble

I am absolutely, completely baffled that non-Tea Party politically-affiliated folks are absolutely, completely baffled by the "Government Shutdown."  I am this way, not because I'm a Tea Partier, but because I'm an objective observer who doesn't live in a bubble with people with the exact same views as myself.

You Better Know Who You're Talking To

That last thing on earth a guy on a date wants to have happen is to get drawn into an argument with a total douchebag.  But, tried as I might to avoid it, it happened anyway, and the douchebag had the nerve to pull out the "PhD in Obscure Something Something at  Famous West-Coast University" as the argument-ender.   I was non-plussed.