WHAT I'M DOING

WHAT I’M DOING

An Andrew Ramble

“Showing up is 80% of life”  -Woody Allen

Most of my realizations occur within the confines of the fifty three inch by eighty six inch tile box otherwise known as my master bathroom.  There must be something about certain bathrooms that focuses thought, because I've heard of this phenomenon occurring with folks from almost every walk of life.  The thing is, today I didn’t have just any thought, today I had The Thought. Much like The Apostle Paul being knocked from his horse on the road to Damascus, this thought was the biggie of my life up to this point.  This is it:  I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!

 This epiphany doesn’t just apply to my life today; or my life as an adult; or my career; or my tastes; or my role as a husband and father.  Not knowing what I am doing permeates into and through every facet of my existence.  My accepting of this cosmic clarification goes back as far as I do and cannot be understated.  What I’m getting at is that this quirk of mine goes back to my days in the womb.  No bullshit, it’s the God’s honest truth.  I literally didn’t know how to be born.  Mom needed a C-section, not because of my size (at under six pounds I was certainly small enough). I just happened to be one of those babies that decided to lay side to side and never realized that this whole endeavor was part of a larger process involving the birth canal and a short trip.  So good old Dr. Dugan came in and removed me via skylight.  And like most, this is where the story of this, often oblivious, “not knower” started. 

I turned fifty this year, and while this milestone has brought about an inordinate amount of reflection and self evaluation, it has also brought about an equal measure of acceptance.  The acceptance that more than sixty percent of my life is now over (Eighty Percent if I exclude the anticipated Crapping In My Pants Years) and I will undoubtedly go out of this world the same way I came in.  Asking myself these two simple questions: What the fuck was I thinking? And, What the fuck am I doing?  But still, I look back on the vast majority of the things I've done: I look to the few places I've been and I recall the dreams I've had, and I think that life itself must be an extremely easy affair, because even me, an often detached and clueless participant in my own existence has made it this far all with one foot in the present and the other in some remote quadrant of outer space.

So like I’ve been saying,  I've been pretty much out of it my whole life.  Never was it more pronounced than during my childhood.  From age four ‘til about age thirteen I was totally “out there”.  While other kids were learning letters and numbers, telling time and eating paste,  I was staring at the wall.  Other kids were playing games and socializing.  They went from building blocks, to Cub Scouts, to reading and writing, to Little League, to church, to Friday night roller skating.  I went from staring at the wall to staring out the window.  I didn’t read until late.  Math in almost all forms still eludes me, and writing?  Well, if you’re reading this then you can fully appreciate the gravity of my shortfalls.   I honestly don’t remember much about being in school back when we were supposed to be learning the three R’s.  It all just seemed like a hive of activity that went on around me.  I had some friends on my street, I had Monster Movies, Planet of the Apes Movies, and from age nine onward I had Star Wars.  Learning really wasn’t a concern on any level, I just went through some motions while the motions of the  world mostly went over my head.  Sports, nope, I missed the parade and the first game of the first little league game of the only season I ever participated in.  Why?  I dunno.  I guess I just never got the memo.   Talent, nope, from handwriting to art to music to taste, the wiring just doesn’t exist within me.  I recently came across some old school papers of mine.  As I looked through them and thought about the crayons and construction paper, the dotted line writing paper and the now yellowed report cards, I had a moment of complete self honesty.  And this was it: “Wow I was really a total retard.”  Okay, maybe that’s a little strong, after all I was a nice little tyke, but still I  was far from being the typical kid, and here is the beauty of the whole thing; I had no friggin clue.

 Now relationships were a whole other thing.  Family relationship are universally demented on almost every level, so I won’t even go into those here.  As far as friendships go, I always had a fair amount of neighborhood kids and a solid block of buddies from high school onward that I am still blessed to be in frequent contact with.  For “guys” friendships are easy that way.  And when it came to girls?  Well, most young men face their own battles on this front.  So what I’m gettin at is that when it comes to women, I  really don’t need to recant any unique experinces here. I think it can be  agreed upon, across the board,  that if you have an X & Y chromosome, then you DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING when it comes to women.  Any guy who states otherwise is full of shit.

The real not knowing what I am doing comes in the form of career preparation and execution.  This is not to say that I’m not happy in my current position as a Maintenance Man, because truth be told, it’s actually the most rewarding and enjoyable job I have ever had.  This disclaimer aside, how does a guy who was a decent high school student and an A/B college student end up as a Maintenance Man?  What was I doing when people around me were focusing in on a profession, completing internships, establishing career objectives, setting a path forward for their lives?  I was spacing out, thinking about my plans for the summer and the easiest possible route towards a degree.  The first move in not knowing what you're doing is not having a shred of interest in anything relating to the “left over jobs” that might someday be available to someone who knows naught.  For me that was finance or business.  I now know that if you want a career in business, an interest or aptitude in this field is probably something you should have developed.  So for the fifteen odd years I worked in Banking and Mortgage, I probably should have had gained some skill set going in or during my tenure in these positions.  But naturally I didn’t.  Who knew?  Not me, that’s for sure.  

Then I followed my heart.  This is the most detached,  not knowing what you're doing thing you can professionally do. Sure it sounds great, but it’s a fairly uneducated approach to ones financial future, especially when you consider the hard reality.  A disinterested Mortgage Risk Analyst with three little kids at home, a mortgage, a boat load of monthly expenses and a wife who was then a stay at home mom decides, “Hey, I always loved doing carpentry, I did it for a while for my Dad’s company, I’ve done a little to supplement my income on the weekends, what the hell, this is how I’m now going to make a living.”  Talk about having your head up your ass.  I didn’t know how to run a business, especially one that needed to generate the revenue necessary to survive at that time.  I didn’t truly know the market.  I wasn’t properly capitalized.  And I really didn’t know what I was doing.  But I learned.  I learned that you can’t operate that type of business without being devoured by stress and debt.  I learned that a job is often better than a trade, and a job with a bunch of trades could be the best thing yet.  And it only took me forty nine years to figure this all out.  In the end, careers are not made or lost because you do or don’t know any number of things.  They are made or lost because you are willing to do more than some other schmuck or you’re willing to learn a little more than the dopes around you.  That much, this dope has learned. 

The absolute apex of my befuddlement is fatherhood.  Man, talk about not being ready and really not following the step by step approach.  First off, I didn’t even know how to hold a baby when my first was born.  I would just hold out my hands flat at chest height and my wife would place the baby on them. So poor baby Jake got held kinda like I was smelling a fresh baked apple pie.  Then there’s the more traditional aspects of being a father to three sons.  Again, being that I’m generally clueless and uninterested in sports, I was not able to pass this on to my sons, so now they are slightly socially detached and generally clueless about sports and the social structures surrounding them, which undoubtedly will result in at least one of them turning into a serial killer by his 30th birthday.  Maybe by then they will have realized that they don’t know what they’re doing with their lives either?  Dynasty!

Then there's the whole “talking” part of fatherhood.  My go to approach is to give my son’s a lot of leeway until they become unbearable, then I essentially resort to screaming and threatening their lives.   This might be seen as another aspect of incompetence on my part, but as a father of three teen-aged boys, be assured this is the one thing I do which is totally by the book.  Despite my ineptitude and detachment, I somehow ended up with three very different, but equally amazing sons.  They all have sharp analytical minds, copious talents, and bright joyful personalities.  So this just goes to show, you really don’t have to know squat to be a parent, and if you do in fact think you have a handle on being a dad, then you are likely the one who will be shouting; I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING, before you know it.

Finally we arrive at my death.  Why jump ahead?   Because between now and then my life is mostly on autopilot and I really don’t need to know what I’m doing any longer.  However, there’s still one thing I plan on getting wrong.  And this is my final resting place.  Cremations and coffins just really aren’t the thing for me when it comes to an eternal decision.  (I just have too many phobias in life relating to both of these methods.)   After all, I came into the world not knowing what I was doing, so why not go out making everyone wonder what I was doing.  Therefore my final resting place will be within the root ball of a tree.  Such a thing exists however I don’t know if it is being done in the United States.  But if possible, I see it as the perfect way for my future grandchildren and great grandchildren to climb the limbs above me, seek shade under the branches spread out across me, and maybe on some crisp autumn morning many decades from now, one of my descendants will  look at the sunrise as it comes up over the the top of my tree’s highest branch…. I can already hear them saying; “Whoever planted that tree knew exactly what he was doing.”