Life – arbitraryuser

Ten things

Get your priorities straight
There is nothing more important than enjoying your life. Making sure that other people are enjoying their lives comes in at a close second. You are not a useful human being if you are not enjoying your own life.

Don’t sweat the small stuff
Gary Player famously said that the more he practiced the luckier he got. You can reprogram the way your brain reacts to truly stressful situations by practicing positive, stress-free, reactions to the little things that go wrong every day.

Get some perspective
Most of the stuff you worry about is simply not important. Your family and friends are what matter. They are irreplaceable. Your car getting stolen, your house burning down, losing your job, while all sad and frustrating, should not result in emotional trauma.

Emotional trauma is scar tissue
Years ago I broke my big toe by kicking a wall. It was stupid and every now and then my toe hurts for no reason. If you repeatedly kick a wall your toe is going to hurt all the time and you are not going to be able to enjoy your life.

It’s not over until you’re dead
Your health is important, but not more important than enjoying your life. I’m not suggesting you start a small heroin habit, but worrying about your health is futile unless you’re doing it while calling a doctor.

Put on your big girl panties when dealing with family
There are situations in life where you just need to make hay, even if you’re allergic and the sun isn’t shining. The normal rules of engagement do not apply for family. “Not talking” to some branch of your family is an incredibly sad outcome that should be avoided at all costs. No one is asking you to paint each other’s nails while watching Thelma and Louise on VHS, but for everyone’s mental health, including your own, sometimes you just need to get out there in the rain and start throwing around some hay.

Appreciate what you have
Be thankful for the things you have, not because one day they might be gone or because others don’t have them, but simply because you do have them.

Stretch
This is not a computer game. When you die your life is over. Try and be incredible or die trying.

Yourself is the best you you can be
Countless Facebook posts will encourage you to sing like no one is listening. That is rubbish. Being yourself is the only way to be happy. This is not rocket science. If you want to sing, sing. If you want to spend your weekend reading a book to your cat, do that.

Stop
Close the door, put away your phone, sit down and spend some time thinking. Call it whatever you want but just do it, daily if possible.

Leaving TrustFabric and joining Praekelt

This news is a few weeks old but I kept on meeting people who hadn’t heard so I figured a blog post was in order.

I have officially left TrustFabric and have joined Praekelt. Leaving TrustFabric was a hard decision. If Joe can pull of what he’s got planned, and I think he can, he will change the way we manage and share information online. I want that to be a reality.

My first few weeks at Praekelt have been great. I am now in a pure strategy role. Travelling back and forth between JHB and CPT, meeting amazing, talented people, having my mind expanded and learning constantly. My diverse background (travel, banking, advertising, telecoms, ISPs, online dating etc etc) is proving to be useful in ways that I never thought possible.

I’ll keep you posted.

Why we do what we do.

Weather permitting I’ll be leaving next Wednesday. I’m going to sail about three and a half thousand miles, across the South Atlantic, from Cape Town to a tiny group of islands called the Falklands off the coast of Argentina. I like to think that the reason I am doing this is obvious and for most of my friends the reason seems obvious too.

Though, every now and then I get asked “Why?”. As if it would be simpler to just fly there. Which is true. It takes 44 hours to fly from Cape Town to Stanley on the east Falklands. 44 hours and 5 separate flights. Sailing there takes 25 days and you sail through some of the roughest seas on the planet. The Falklands are about as close as you can get to Antarctica without actually being on Antarctica.

Is it dangerous? Of course. There are more dangerous things one could do, but when you’re 2000 miles away from the nearest hospital and in a very unpredictable environment, anything can happen.

Will I miss home? Of course! I’ll miss my wife, my cats, my comfortable bed, being able to take a warm shower whenever I want, deciding what I want to eat, being able to be alone, going out to get a coffee etc etc. I’ll be stuck on a 75 foot yacht with 7 people I barely know.

So why am I doing it? I don’t really have an answer. I have answers. But the sum of all those answers is not the answer.

I want to stretch my mind. I want to sail away, leave land behind, wake up in the morning and have to check a map to know where I am. I want to be surrounded by nothing but sea.

I want to learn to be a better sailor. We live in a world full of experts who know nothing. Rockstars who learnt everything they know in the previous 3 weeks. We’re all bullshit and truth bending. Teach yourself brain surgery in 24 hours. When your life is in your own hands you’re forced to be honest about your abilities.

I want to push myself and see where the cracks appear. I want to be bored and be forced to write. I want to spend an idyllic evening on deck eating freshly caught fish. I want time to think. I want to be scared. I want to ride out a storm and watch the sun rise on a perfect morning. I want to see land and long to touch it. I want to have a story to tell and to write those stories that are banging around in my head. I want to miss my wife, my friends, my family and my country.

I want to fly home and know why I sailed away in the first place, but I’m sure I won’t, and that is why I am doing it.

You can, satellite gods willing, follow my adventures here http://arbitrarysailor.tumblr.com/.

Why I am going to stop banking with Standard Bank.

I think it is important to preface this by saying: Shit happens. It will happen at every bank, every online retailer, every restaurant, no matter who you are or where you go. What separates the good from the bad is, and always has been, *how you fix the problems when they happen*. Unfortunately when greedy business practices become institutionalised and the institution chooses to tie the hands of anyone trying to remedy the problem, well then you are left with little option but to walk away, with your money.

Strike 1. When all other banks are offering SMS updates for free you choose to charge customers.

Strike 2. You offer that service free to your private banking clients, ignoring the demographic that represents the bulk of your income, and instead decide to charge them even more.

Strike 3. As a customer with a Standard Bank home loan, vehicle loan, cheque account and credit card I am patently aware of how much money you make out of me every month. When I speak to the most senior person I am deemed fit to speak to (not actually the bank manager) I am told that even the bank manager is unable to waive the R17 fee. That sort of hand-tied’ness makes me want to cry.

I could handle greed.
I could handle badly thought out products.
I could handle incompetence.

But I can not handle all three simultaneously from an organisation making hundreds of rands off me every month.

Time to do some bank shopping when I get back.

Don't rust.

Speak to any sailor long enough and eventually they’ll moan about the number of yachts that sit in marinas year round without ever being used. It’s depressing and a huge waste. Don’t live your life sitting in the harbour.

Lonely robot in a wasteland
rusting in a lonely harbor
Lonely robot in a wasteland
rusting in the harbor’s water
I Blame Coco – Selfmachine, The Constant.

A ship in a harbor is safe- but thats not what ships are built for.

Content and delivery.

Recently a friend who’s in the magazine industry was complaining about how their company (who is a very large media company) continually cut the magazine budgets while spending gob-loads of money on their “Online” and “Mobile” people. The techies have access to iPads, iPhones and brand new Macbook Pros, while just down the passage there are magazine teams, retrenched to a fraction of their previous size, running on 10 year old macs.

The print-media industry is no doubt floundering. Seeing demand for their products dropping by significant numbers every year (We’re talking overall sales figures of around 20% what they were 10 years ago) while ad-sales is becoming more and more brutal due to the “global economy”, but probably more realistically because they’re losing ad sales to online channels. Fewer people want to buy newspapers and magazines and they media industry is making less and less (from ad sales) off the reduced distribution numbers.

So you can imagine the kind of pressure the industry is in and how incredibly easy it would be to come to the very foolish conclusion that the correct remedy is to spend those gob-loads on “Online” or “Mobile” to the detriment of the content producers.

My father was a printer, technically an offset lithography “machine minder”. He was badly paid, worked long shifts, went to work in blue overalls and came home covered in ink. The work was tough. You needed to have an expert eye, understand some of the chemistry, have delicate hands and be able to perform running repairs on dangerous machines. We’re talking about giant room sized printers and the “minder” having the ability to hear that the third roller bearing on the transfer shaft dingle dangle needed oil in the next 30 minutes or the machine would fail. (I’m paraphrasing)

The reason my dad was badly paid even though his job required so much skill was because lithography was an old technology. The mystique had been removed from the process hundreds of years earlier and the machines looked after themselves just enough to allow an unskilled worker become fully skilled in 3 years of on the job training.

The technology was mature and there was solid competition in the market. This drove the printing prices down, which pushed the salaries down, which meant that eventually the job of “machine minder” was only slightly more attractive a career than something like panel beating.

Compounding this, in the last 30 years printing has evolved to the point where the machines are easier to use, faster and even more reliable. Instead of hiring one or two “minders” per machine you can now have a few roaming engineers for an entire factory of printers. Putting ink on paper has never been cheaper.

My father moved to the publishing world about 30 years ago and has been wearing chinos to work ever since… Though I’m pretty sure he would still prefer to deal with machines than colleagues.

The costs and skill required to deliver content will always drop. Technology takes care of that, whether it’s a slightly more reliable room sized printer, or software that makes building an iPad app easier, the world is pre-programmed to make processes more efficient.

However, We will never have Artificial Intelligence that can drive to Darling and write about an Evita Bezuidenhout show, take photographs of the flowers in the Karoo or write about swimming with dolphins on a cool Sunday morning.

100 years ago quality content made money… Nothing has changed and it is unlikely to ever change. How content is delivered should never become more important than the content itself.

You might be able to wow people with your swanky iPad application with annoying faux-turning-pages animations, but eventually, just like the printing press, the technology will mature and everyone will be building swanky iPad apps. The cost involved in building those apps will drop and the big boys will be consistently competing against small, leaner, startup content producers. It took hundreds of years to get the cost of printing so low that we could print a daily newspaper and sell it to the masses. The cost of producing an Ipad app drops constantly and, as the technology evolves, it becomes trivially easy for anyone with some good ideas and camera to create something that other people want… and god forbid, would actually pay money for.

So, if you happen to be the CEO of some big ass media giant, spare a thought for Gutenberg and then Google “ios and android development frameworks” before deciding not to buy your content producers some decent computers. You could even do it on your iPad.

Letter to my 15 year old self.

Hi, it’s me, the 30 year old Jonathan. Here’s a list of things I wish I’d known when I was 15.

Stop trying to be cool. Being “cool” requires you to act “cool” so you end up acting like other people who are also acting “cool”… Eventually everyone is acting like someone else. Just be you.
You have an extraordinary amount of free time, most of which you waste watching TV. This might be your single biggest regret. STOP IT. Do something else, write software, hitch-hike to joburg, whatever, just stop watching TV.
Take risks, be unpredictable, do things spontaneously. You might get in trouble but it’ll be worth it.
Don’t let yourself become a nerd, but also don’t worry about being a nerd. Nerds are cool.
History is actually very cool. Don’t drop it. Accounting is lame.
God, in any form, does not exist. Humans have always created gods to explain the things they could not understand. Creation, Solar Eclipses, “miracles” etc. Native Americans dancing around a fire asking god for rain is no different to Christians praying for healing etc. Read up on the Placebo Effect and then think about religion.
Be a good person. You don’t need a book to tell you what is wrong and right. Don’t tease anyone for any reason.
Don’t waste your time trying to get a girlfriend. Girls are awesome but you don’t need a girlfriend now.
You’ll make some great friends over the years. Make an effort to be a good friend back.
You can be anyone, achieve anything. Who you are is as much a journey of discovery as any other great adventure.

The end. Don’t stress kid. You’ll be fine.

ps. Invest all your money in Google and Apple, but only after they fire Steve Jobs the first time

Grocery shopping went like a dream.

Have you ever had a real life experience that was so utterly bizarre that you thought it might have been one of those annoying dreams… like the one where you’re stuck in a warehouse full of tinned goods and just can’t find the exit… Just me then?

So today I go to Claremont Pick and Pay to do some grocery shopping.

The first level of parking is full… I drove around twice.
The second parking level is full. It’s not marked very well so I almost found myself stuck in a queue to exit.
The third parking level, which I didn’t know even existed, was full too… Everywhere there were people desperate for a parking spot.
Eventually I find myself on the forth level waiting for a guy who turned out to be just dropping off his gym bag in his boot.
Without exaggerating, by this stage I had spent about 15 minutes looking for parking and decided to just park my car near an entrance and wait for someone to leave.
I waited about 3 minutes until a bay opened. I parked and headed to the nearby entrance.
The lift didn’t indicate which level the shops were on so I took a gamble and pressed “G”.
When the doors opened and I walked out, around a corner and realised I had done something stupid because I was basically inside a Virgin Active.
At this point I’m like “Ok, I give up, I’ll just leave now and try this whole shopping thing another day”.
So I head back to the lifts… Once inside I’m faced with buttons G through 9. I parked on P4. There are no P’s.
I press 4 hoping that maybe that’ll be it.
The elevator door opens into a swish office suite lobby.
I feel like I’m in the twilight zone.
Unsure of whether to go up or down I just randomly start pressing buttons.
Over and over again the doors open and I’m faced with office suites… Now I’m wondering if perhaps, on that ground floor I’d re-entered into the wrong lift.
A girl gets in and I ask her which floor is the “top level of parking”. She confidently tells me it’s 6, which is where she’s going, and so I confidently follow her…
We exit the lift, turn right, she swipes a tag to open the door and I’m starting to get nervous… Relax, she assures me that there are stairs I can use to get onto the right level.
We walk out onto a parking platform, she points out the stairs in the distance and starts walking away.
About 3 seconds later I realise I am in the completely wrong fucking place. This is an entirely different parking garage in an entirely different side of the building.
I turn back to note the locked, rfid tag protected, door separating me from freedom.
The girl has disappeared and suddenly I need to pee.
I walk over to the door and luckily a few seconds later it opens… I act cool. Me, no, I’m not lost… I slip through as the dude who totally realised I was lost walks to his car.
I head back to the lifts. I ask another random woman where the parking is. She has a clue and asks me whether I mean the corporate parking or the public parking.
My angel informs me that the level I am looking for is 2… I had already tried 3… so close.
As we head down, the lift doors open on the fourth floor. Three people walk in. Making a total of 5. The doors won’t close and the Overload sign starts blinking.
The most rotund of the guests exits making a comment about this lift being faulty… “Own it” I think to myself.
Eventually the door on level 2 opens and I recognise the decor…. this was indeed where my car was… I turn right and exit into the familiar parking garage resolved to just go the fuck home.
As I walk to my car I notice large writing on the wall. “<- Gym Lifts Shopping/Trolley Lifts ->”
“I’ve come so far, why quit now?” I think to myself as I start walking randomly in the direction of the arrow to find the other set of lifts, which turn out to be about 200m around the corner.
Eventually inside PnP I start shopping. This is about 40 minutes after arriving at the parking garage.
I overhear a dude saying “Babes, Where are you?”. “Where you left me” she replies… Typical guy says “Where?”… The girl, obviously losing her patience says “Jesus! In the next aisle!”…. a second passes before a random man replies “Jesus would never forsake you”. Everyone giggles except an old granny who for some reason is staring at me.
I can’t find the sugar and ask a shelf packer. He motions that he’s deaf and doesn’t understand me. I, don’t ask how, happen to know the sign language sign for “sugar” and instinctively, before I can stop myself, sign it… The guy’s face lights up like he’s met an old friend and he takes me to the sugar. I sign the “thank you” sign and he signs the whole “it’s a pleasure” thing. At this point I’m basically waiting for the part in the dream where Natalie Portman needs my help to rescue the world.
I pay and make my way to my car, carefully making sure that I pay for my parking ticket on the way because I just know how that would end… I would be the guy at the boom without a ticket and 5 cars behind me hooting and making comments about my mother.
I get to my car. The parking lot is still madness and a very attractive gym bunny girl is parked waiting for an opening. She smiles at me like I’m about to rescue her world.
I can’t find my keys… then I feel them (through my pants) in my back pocket… but for some reason every time I put my hand into my pocket, it is empty. I’m like SERIOUSLY starting to doubt my sanity at this point.
So I can feel my keys but can’t get them out, so, through my pants, I molest my ass in an attempt to, through the fabric, locate my car key so that I can at least unlock the car (remotely) and start unpacking the trolley, biding myself some time to solve the “keys *inside* my pants” conundrum.
Attractive gym bunny girl is staring at me while I appear to be having a stroke and pleasuring myself at the same time.
The car unlocks and I start to unpack the trolley the whole time wondering how I am going to get the keys out from *inside* my pants without attractive gym bunny girl phoning the cops.
I close the boot and run the trolley over to the trolley place. Still wondering how the fuck my keys are playing hide and seek with me.
Trying my best to hide behind a pillar I reach into my back pocket again… I again reach the logical conclusion that I reached earlier. I MUST have more than one pocket, but I just cant find the opening to it.
Eventually, after what seems like an hour of public indecency, I manage to get my hand into the TINY, *other*, pocket that contains my keys and triumphantly pull them out, trying hard to stop myself from making a point of showing them to attractive gym bunny so as to explain my recent retardation.
I get into the car, pull out and drive around the rabbit warren than is the various levels of parking lots, cul de sacs, private parking zones etc, to find the exit.
I end up in one of those narrow spirally ramps, heading downwards towards a boom, there are four cars in front of me, two behind me, There is no “forgot my ticket” slipway and the car at the boom seems to be having a ticket problem. Minutes go by while I practice my breathing techniques.
Eventually I get out of the mall… I feel triumphant, like a hero, returning home after an epic battle in a foreign land.

That is my story. Every ounce of it is true. I would not believe it either.

Defining moments

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about defining moments. Those splinters of time that shape who we are and act as decision making references for the rest of our lives. I find it odd/sad that some of the people I talk to don’t have defining moments or perhaps they do but just aren’t aware of them.

Here are mine:

Fishing
I was probably about 8 years old. We were on holiday at the Brede River. Like most boys that age, I really wanted to catch a fish. We had tried unsuccessfully from the jetty but firmly believed that the real fishing was out on the boat, after sunset. The dads had made promises that always seemed to dissolve into comfortable couches and post-braai bliss… and it was our last night there. I decided that I was going to go and catch a fish off the jetty, and, in the absence of bait, I decided that bread, mooshed up onto the hook, would have to do. The parents were understandably sceptical, but I was adamant and marched down to the jetty in the dark and cast my line into the water. A few hours went by and I had caught nothing and eventually started falling asleep and decided it was best to go back inside.

I remember walking back into the house thinking how awesome it would have been to be carrying a huge fish! At that very moment, thinking about how great it would have been to catch a huge fish, it dawned on me that no one ever catches a huge fish unless they put their line in the water. You have to be in it to win it.

Bravery
I haven’t witnessed much bravery in my life. I’ve never seen someone run into a burning building to rescue a puppy or lift a car to free a trapped driver. Sometimes however bravery takes the form of personal courage. Courage to stand up and do the right thing, even if doing so may make you look like a loser in the process. I was 15 and my little clan of nerd friends had a favourite whipping boy called Andrew. Andrew was often the butt of our jokes. One particular day, in the absence of Andrew, the jokes got progressively meaner. Then someone piped up and said “Come on guys, that’s not cool… lets stop”.

I realise that that might seem trivial when compared to rescuing puppies from burning buildings, but if you’ve been a teenage boy you probably know that sticking up for the “loser” isn’t the cool thing to do. In that moment I realised how brave my friend was, and more importantly, how I wanted to be like him.

Your happiness is your responsibility
I think I was about 19 years old. I had recently broke up with my girlfriend, it was New Years Eve and all my friends were out of town. I got so bored and depressed that I decided to just drive around. I wasn’t suicidal or even close to tears… but in that uber-pathetic moment I decided that I was the only one responsible for my happiness. Simple.

Web Based Accounting Software
After many years working as a developer in a bunch of different industries I found myself working on a web based accounting package for a British company. It was painful work and the boss had overcommitted and we were working stupid hours with pizza as “overtime”. One evening, while working late, I decided that this wasn’t for me. I’d only been there for 3 months, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had been putting my heart and soul (and life) into other people’s businesses all over the world for the previous 5 years and I was finally done. I resigned in the morning. I was never going to let a job take priority over my life again.

For about a year I floated around doing odd freelance dev jobs, I even got a job as a barman so I could meet cool people… I made a lot of friends, I managed a band, I lived in a digs with some cool people and some psychopaths. It was fun.

I can be a Butcher
About mid way through my year “off” I decided that I could do anything. Nothing was above me, and similarly, nothing was beneath me. Not that I consider butchers to be at the bottom of some food chain, it was just that being a butcher was probably the furthest thing from what I had done up until then. I never did become a butcher, but I’m pretty sure I could be flippen awesome at it if I wanted to.

A loaf of bread or a pie
At about the same time as the “I can be a butcher” moment I found myself rather broke. There was a shoprite up the road from where we were staying. I walked there, hungry, with only a few rand in my wallet. I had to decide whether to buy a loaf of bread or a pie. I bought the pie.

Many people would consider that reckless. It was reckless I guess, but, I wanted a pie. I had faith that tomorrow would somehow bring more money or feed me. I’m still here so I guess I was right.

I don’t want to make light of it, but I also know what it’s like to live off almost nothing. I know that I was incredibly happy during that time, my life didn’t suddenly fall apart the minute I cancelled my medical aid and couldn’t afford to buy one of the “nice” toothbrushes. That realisation has helped me be a little more willing to take bigger risks in life. In it to win it.

Water
I really like hiking. Especially on Table Mountain. I’m not nearly as fit as I should be, as my waistline is testament to, but I do occasionally just go for walk. It was during one of these spontaneous walks that I ended up about 6km away from my car without any water in the middle of a ridiculously hot summer’s day. (This was on the contour path near Platteklip with my car parked at Kirstenbosch). I came across this tiny little trickle of water, seeping down a rock. I was so hot I ended up basically licking the mossy rock to try and get some moisture out of it. I spent a good 30 minutes getting water in tiny little doses. (I just want to make sure it’s clear here, I was never in any real danger… I was just hot and tired… worst case scenario was some sunburn.) I was incredibly grateful for the water and in the heat I got all philosophical about water and nature’s provision. I started off again towards the car. About 300m down the path I came to a river. Not exactly the Holy Ganges, but enough water that I could actually fill my water bottle will real water, not sandy moisture. What did I learn from this? It’s tough to explain. Perhaps the simplest way to put it is to just say that sometimes in life you need to be make sure you’re not being an idiot by walking a little further down the road.

Death at Sea
Almost 2 years ago I went on a little sailing trip. Myself and another guy sailed a tiny little yacht from Hout Bay to Knysna, and then back to Mossell Bay. (It’s a long story). The reason we couldn’t go in at Knysna was because a huge storm had kicked up and the Heads were closed. The boat didn’t have a functioning radio, life raft or EPIRB. The flares were old and our engine was dead. At sunset, when we realised the storm wasn’t going to die down, we decided to sail to Mossel Bay where the harbour was protected by a breakwater. The swells were picking up and at some points our tiny boat was pretty much dwarfed by the water around us. We were sailing a yacht designed and built for the Vaal Dam in some of the strongest wind and biggest swells I have ever seen. We were being pushed around like a matchbox in a pool full of cannon balling fat kids. The boat’s keel was creaking as if it wanted to snap off (something that would result in almost instant sinking) and then suddenly, in the pitch black, howling night, we hit something. HARD. The entire boat stopped dead for a second. I still don’t know what it was but I do know that I have never felt closer to dying in my life. I imagined myself floating in the middle of the sea, with my tiny life jacket trying to get dodgy flares to work even though the chances of someone seeing them were pretty much zero. The keel didn’t break and after 5 days at sea we eventually got to Mossel Bay in the early hours of the morning.

What did I learn? I don’t know… But I want to do it again. It was fucking awesome.

My favourite Dr Seuss quotes.

blockquote{
color:#40321F;
}

I think the world would be a better place if we replaced all the self-help books with Dr Seuss.

You’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting,
So… get on your way!

A person’s a person, no matter how small.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go. Oh the Places You’ll Go!

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

Today you are You, that is truer than true.
There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.

I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed) Kid, you’ll move mountains.

I’m afraid that sometimes you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ’cause you’ll play against you.

Onward up many a frightening creek, though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak. Oh! The places you’ll go!

Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all.

I’m glad we had the times together just to laugh and sing a song, seems like we just got started and then before you know it, the times we had together were gone.

I want that last one read at my funeral.

Category: Life