What Happens to a Dream Deferred?

What happens to a dream deferred? Langston Hughes posed this question many years ago and it has stuck with me my entire adult life. You see, there comes a time in every man’s life when he comes to a crossroads and has to make a decision. Left, right, forward…or turn back and go home. When it comes to mountain climbing, sometimes the decision isn’t the man’s to make alone. Sometimes the mountain gives the man more than one reason to tuck tail and retreat to the warmth of his living room, bar stool, or wherever the plan was hatched to tackle such a massive heap of ice and rock.

For me, this massive heap was Mt Rainier. My two previous attempts at summiting this enormous volcano were thwarted by equipment failure and the elements, respectively. This mountain was my white whale and I was Ahab. However, they say the third time is a charm, and for my friend Erik and I, frozen and dehydrated from the sub-zero winds, it was just that. There is nothing sexy about hiking to the top of a 14,411 mountain. I liken it to the sport of wrestling…all guts and very grueling. It’s 70% mental and 30% physical. With all the motivation in the world tucked under my yellow climbing helmet, I reached the top in 7 hours. Once you achieve a goal of this magnitude though, you feel invincible. Bulletproof. That is I.

At 8:30 a.m. on September 5^th, 2010, I was at the second highest point in the lower 48 United States, looking down onto a fluffy sea of clouds, wondering how many people out there were still asleep and dreaming, while I was wide awake and living out mine. A changed man? Most definitely. My dream deferred did not shrivel like a raisin in the sun. Instead, it basked in the UV-rich glow of high altitude rays, fulfilled and beaming.

Company

Some of you out there might recognize this.

COMPANY

She went home one day
How the people always do
No more looks the other way to what has been

She left home one day
Kept her sweaters tucked away
And a newer life
is what I think she wants
I think that's what she wants
Yeah, that is what she wants

I tell her that Autumn makes me sad
She's got a memory for things like that
As the rain falls
Down upon my orange hat

Shall we
Talk about each other?
Simple questions
"what's your favorite color?"
As I show her pictures of my little brother

Why couldn't you've come to me much earlier than this?
A crisis from the past has left me prejudiced
The pain of four years bears a bruising burden
The angel wear no halo or white curtain

She tells me
Facts about her friends
Seem to mimic mine with certain things
Who has left us
And who now wears rings

We stay
Awake 'til four or five
Glances
Shared between the thoughts of life
I can't remember ever having such a good time

Something deep
Is what she don't want now
She might just change her mind tomorrow anyhow

Why couldn't you've come to me much earlier than this?
A crisis from the past has left me prejudiced
The pain of four years bears a bruising burden
The angel wear no halo or white curtain

-RFJM 12/95

Missing in Action IV: A Football Coma

Yes, it's been a while.

I have an excuse though, honest.

You see, every autumn, I fall into what I like to call, "The Football Coma." Oh, no...you won't see me in the gym or out on the local running paths. No, no no. I eschew fitness during the "Coma." Where you will find me is either parked in front of my 50" plasma, over at a friend's house or at a local sports bar. If it's a college game, you might also find me tailgating at the stadium. All of these scenarios have one thing in common: they include a fair amount of imbibing frothy beverages that we call "Beer."

Enter my dilemma.

It is a scientific fact that beer is a depressant. I know it. You know it. Mel Gibson knows it. And because football games occur pretty much every day of the week in the fall (except Tuesdays and Wednesdays) and on many different channels (we have FiOS), I find myself faced with a plethora of opportunities to watch some gridiron goodness. Lucky me, right? You be the judge.

Have you ever seen the Adam Sandler movie, Click? You know, the one where Christopher Walken gives him the magical remote control at the Bed, Bath & Beyond that allows him to skip through the stodgy periods of his future? Well, in the movie, when he skips over those periods he kinda just coasts through in a zombie-like state, never remembering what took place during said timeframe. It's much akin to what my 9th grade math teacher, Mr Rolph, accused our whole algebra class of being..."a buncha drones!" It's also much akin to my whole autumn-from September through to February. I sit there and zone-out.

Part of me thinks that Mr Rolph was right. In his Big Gulp-fueled diatribe, he ranted about how we couldn't pay attention in class because we ate "a bunch of crappy food, like Scooter pies," for lunch. This coming from a guy who had to leave at the semester to have surgery to repair a stomach ulcer!

I digress.

Twenty years later, I get the gist of why he blew up that day. He wanted our undivided attention and just couldn't get it thanks to the likes of Hostess, Coca Cola and Frito Lay (well, that and he was kind of a douche). He had a point, but we didn't listen. Instead, we laid limp in a lazy languor of Hot Pockets, Fudgesicles and Donettes. We were a big part of the problem.

Now extrapolate this condition to include a mind altering, feeling numbing elixir (a "downer") coupled with an adrenalized game consisting of peaks and valleys (an "upper"). Throw a cheese pizza or some sort of buffalo chicken product into the equation and you have a man replete with intense stupification. The mix of stimuli cancel each other out, leaving overworked motor neurons on both sides of the fence to produce a buzzed and fuzzed state. Now I'm no physician (probably because my math grades were glaringly inferior...go figure), but I am quite certain that there is a scientific term for this state. I just call it "The Football Coma."

So you see, I've been under a spell people. My will to resist is futile. Like victory chances given to any of Chuck Norris' foes. Futilitus maximus. Like a roundhouse kick to the face from the great bearded bad-ass of the black belt. I'm a goner from the minute that first college pigskin is booted until the last piece of confetti falls at the Super Bowl!

Good thing I'm not a big baseball fan. I'd be screwed!