I just wish I was a little hungry again…Part 2

The Ganger is back.  Even though he hasn’t done an extreme amount of walking a lot has been going on.  I will not do much hemming and hawing I will just get right down to it this time.  Strap in folks you may be in for a long ride.

When I started this blog my first entry was a bunch of nonsense that popped into my head one night when I took some…medication…to help with my eyes for a night.  That nonsense however had a point.  The entry was titled “I just wish I was a little hungry again.”  It was based on a quote from The Crow (the ganger is a movie person) and that quote and the blog entry speaks to satisfaction or a lack there of.  I was talking about always chasing that next addition to my collection or the next big thing.  It always leaves me a bit unsatisfied.  I spread my self so thin trying to do all of the things I think I want to do that I end up not having the time to do any of them, and then I chastise myself for not doing chores or playing with my son more (now on this account that it is a matter of perspective and that I do a great deal with my son) and I spend more time beating myself up than I do getting anything done.

There will be a lot of accusations here, and they will all be directed at myself (mostly), when I teach classes at church I follow this same format where I pick out a problem with myself, one of my own flaws or sins and I teach about that rather than accusing others.  Any resonance you find with your own life is on you and a chance to do better if you feel the need to do so.  There will also be a lot of fight club references.

     The things you own, end up owning you. -Tyler Durden

The main point here is stuff, possessions, materialism and what it does to our value system.  My main drug of choice is comic books.  I have had a longstanding love affair with comic book characters, and now that I am able I am collecting the ones I wanted back when, while reading new series.  All of the new series it seems.  I have long been grinding at myself for what I spend on these things and when I went to school even though I was making money from the G.I. Bill and using part of it to increase my collection, I did not have time to read them all, or any really.  What I did was pile them up until the semester was over.  At the end of the semester I found my interest diminished by the size of the pile, my wallet lighter, and a mess that I did not know what to do with, and yet the nature of mild addiction made it hard for me to cut back.  Now having a second child on the way helped to spur me into action on this one matter.  Had to start putting away more money, and making sure there was more in the account and that I freed up some of my time to focus on what is important.  It helped to reinforce all the little mantras I had come up with.  “your son can not eat comic books, he can’t wear comic books, he can’t sleep under comic books.”

    This got worse after I went to school.  I have been places that are in extreme poverty, I have seen children in Baghdad playing in garbage piles, being under fed, dying from sickness that we treat so easily.  Anthropology and World Regional Geography just gave me a number to quantify how absurdly I was living (and the word quantify.)  It taught me that the international standard for poverty is a person living on less that 2$ a day, thats the price of two comic books.  I can’t fix the worlds problems no matter how I try, but I think in some way this allowed me to convince myself that I could do as I pleased with me and mine.  My son is three and I’ve piled so much stuff, toys, on him that it borders on ridiculous and I did it, it is my fault, but I am working on it and fixing it.  There is a saying “the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the next best time is today.”  I can’t take back all the things I have bought, I can’t undo it, but I can make tomorrow a better day by getting back to a better standard of myself.

    Many of us do OCR, or obstacle course racing, which is in itself ironic.  We have become such an…advanced society that we have to seek out physical adventure.  For me I will again reference Iraq, I have a bug, a need to go out and do these things.  For others it is the need to for the very first time get off the friggin couch and live a little.  There are as many reasons for racing as there are racers themselves.  My race of choice is Spartan race.  Many of us call ourselves spartans and read the spartan code, and yet there is a part of it that we forget because they do not mention it.  The word Spartan has become a descriptive term.  I first read it in the book “Cain” a man was described as spartan because his home did not have a single thing that he did not need.  Thats what spartan has come to need.  In this sense I am not spartan at all.  I have a lot of stuff I and my family do not need.  I have so much stuff in here that I cannot pick it all up, so many teas I have to keep a book to know which ones I have tried, so many games that we have never played some of them, so many movies that I feel the need to make lists to remind myself to watch them. We are pushing the weight limits for our military moves.  If I would move some of this out I bet we could fit into a smaller house and save our selves some money (MA housing prices not included, you can pay a lot for very little up here.)  I describe myself as being Un-Fight Club because of this.

We work jobs we hate so we can buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. -Tyler Durden

      Take note, Club is not the golden standard.  It is not the light or the way.  I try to be a better man and lead a Christian life without intruding on the rights of others.  I have my faults and I confide some of them to you.  Fight club is a BOOK and a MOVIE both of which can be first classified as fiction.  It has some nifty quotes, some of which violate its own principles.  It is a movie about getting back to basic life that we paid money to go and see, and later to own.  Having a DVD player to watch fight club is very un fight club.  It is not a realistic approach to life and I could talk about that all day.  However some of those quotes have a point.  Realistically we will never be full like our ancestors.  We do not live in their world.  I have a work out tool that simulates chopping wood and heavy melee weapons for heavens sake.  However when we do need to get realistic is when this materialism gets into our minds and poisons our value systems.  This is where I stray from my own story some.  Ill start with an opinion.  Our kids used to want to be people with talents and skills, who had made a contribution to society on some level.  They wanted to be Babe Ruth because he could hit a ball and his love of the game, now they want to make the money that athletes make.  They wanted to be singers because their music was beautiful and inspiring, now there are actually kids who want to be the Kardashians…the most untalented hacks to ever be on tv.  We now make tv about being on tv.  Heaven help us.  The most recent example I have is a story from a friend of mine.  She says that a new girl came in to work at her job.  She was not dressed for the job, she was in need of work and now that she had it she most likely would get the clothes to go with it when she could.  She should be getting support for being willing to work and face the job down in what she had.  Instead my friend was pulled aside by a coworker and the coworker mocked the girl for not being able to afford the clothes she would need on her first day of work.  My friend being the upstanding person they are went out and got the girl what she would need.  She did it on a budget, but the girl was very grateful, grateful in a way that should make a person like me hang my head with the excess I show sometimes.  The coworker did not stop, she thought that work had made the girl go change, and that this was funny.  The rest of them explained that my friend had helped her out.  This was not for my friends credit, or to the girls shame, it was to shut this unstoppable moron up.  It worked.  Now I would ask that someone get ahold of her and try to help her pick this mess up if she can be helped.

     Now we work up to a solution.  I know to much stuff sounds like a good problem to have.  I am trying to become more grateful and to live it.  To be hungry again really means to be satisfied and content and live a life I deem to be worth living and to have true value.  One of my favorite pictures I have seen says “To love your children spend twice as much time with them and half as much money.”  I love that, and I am trying to live it.  I have been taking my three year old geocaching.  Today he told his mother about it and that means something.  I have not spent a dime on it ( helps that I already had a car and smart phone), and I am not putting down all spending (see my fenway article) but that was huge that a three year old points out that I took him to the woods rather than let him watch more tv.

     Now for a workable solution.  First we implemented a budget with the envelope system.  I think it important to note that I have not created debt doing any of this, that thankfully is not one of my problems, but a budget never hurts and creating a tangible limit like the envelope system is not a bad idea.  Next comes the purge.  I got out a note pad and I numbered 1-30.  Those thirty slots were possessions I was immediately able to declare safe from the purge.  Most things were not off limits.  Tooth brush, most of my clothes, etc were off limits.  I say most because even though I consider my taste in foot wear simple its possible to pile them up.  However after that I filled those 30 slots.  I left room to state why I wanted to keep those things if need be.  IF you want to read the list you can, if not skip it and go on reading.

1. Bible-Specifically the one my wife gave me.
2. My nice watch.
3. Black GR1.
4. My pipe my son gave me.
5. Ka-Bar-Wife gave me.
6. My Camera
7. Journal
8. Skallywag Dagger
9. Tomahawk-wife gave me
10. Hob nail tea set
11. mjolnir pendant
12. large one of same above
13. drinking horns
14. blowing horn
15. lock wife gave me from afghanistan
16. pocket watch-wife gave for last anniversary
17. record player
18. records
19. tournament chess set-Mother gave me for birthday
20. nine mens morris board
21. pocket knife
22. red sox foam fingers-took son to game
23. Bruins foam fingers-same reason
24. black Louisville slugger
25. 35 lbs kettle bell
26. 53 lbs kettle bell
27. military watch
28. wedding ring
29. Ka-Bar-OIF model my uncle bought me
30. Bone dice cup

There you have it.  Those are the 30 no questions asked.  Now it gets interesting.  Now everyday I pick something I want to keep and I right it down, and then however I have to pay for it by getting rid of something.  I can sell it on eBay, give it away, yard sale, whatever have you, but it has to leave.  I have the will to make this work so that I will not bring in replacements.  Like I said I won’t get the money back for a lot of these mistakes, but I can fight to not repeat them.  This system forces me to decide what is important, to de clutter my life, and spend more time living.  I can’t say that it will work for you, or that you will need it, but it is helping me.  They are things, and they will not own me.  Another friend of mine once said “Shut up Bledsoe is about to tell a story, and they are always good ones.”  I want to make sure that I am always out doing the things that make those good stories not sitting in my piles of crap still being hungry because I have to much.  It is time to get hungry, time to get grateful, and get busy living.

Hrolf The Ganger