FEELING THE PULSE

I really like that some readers left comments for me to read. I laughed at Snomankw saying that he has to read between the lines, becaue it is true that I usually speak in code. They say that everyone writes for an audience of one and my audience is Tom Stamper. If he laughs, then I have met my goal. I know I have an odd way of putting words together, but my pal Tom calls this "turning a phrase" and he seems to dig it. It doesn't always make sense to everyone, but it plays with Stamper and it also plays to my future self, who is one of my biggest fans.

I kept a journal every day from October 1991 up until just before I got married in August 1994. I wanted to really document my thoughts while I was a crazy twenty-something so that I could always step back inside my thoughts during my most creative and ambitious period for a midlife refueling. I recently pulled out the 1991 stuff and since I know the code, I remember exactly what I was thinking at that time without missing a beat. I'm now just an extention of that guy - I still love baseball and movies and poker and Stamper, only now I've got a family and a house in the Valley.

When Stamper and I were first becoming buddies, circa late 1988, he pointed out that a girl he fancied was beginning to spend time with another fellow. I advised Tom that he needed to get in there before they have 'a moment shared.' Tom thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard because we all know of that moment when the unlikely couple imprints on one another and falls under the spell of true love. Tom knew exactly what I meant and it was exactly what he was thinking, although he would have never used that phrase to describe it.

Not long after, I was telling Tom about a 72-car pile-up that had just occurred in South Carolina on a foggy morning. Tom shook his head and said "it all started with one guy who thought he could see through anything." That line still cracks me up nearly twenty years later. Neither line is all that funny in print but when you add in our midwestern mannerisms, they play. Tom and I are so much alike, yet just different enough, that we have been best buddies since the day we met. Do I remember that day? Of course - a mutual friend took us both golfing in Pensacola, Florida, and on the tenth hole, we got hit by a tornado which almost killed us. Not long after, we had ditched the mutual friend in favor of "the board game" - a baseball simulation game which we played around the clock.

I'll be in Vegas all next week with Tom and I am looking forward to it. One week each year I get to trade in the wife and kids in favor of an extended moment shared with my pal.