the recent storm, debby, brought back the pond i live on. it had gone completely dry which was the first time in well over 10 years i had seen that…. but in a few days debby came and changed it back to a pond.
my friend renee did this collage. this is just the text picture i got of it. i haven’t seen it actually yet.
here is a recent drawing i did. i am not crazy about it.
went to joshua tree for vacation earlier this year. we had a good time. here’s a rare shot of me and c.
Wow. What a story. I am often interested in current events and so I follow the news in an off-hand lazy way. I’m too busy to read lots of articles or get behind every movement. But I read headlines. I follow the trends. I like politics. I like economics and design but don’t follow modern design like I would if I had 10 more hours in a day, ha.
Back to Karen. It’s a big story. Big like the balloon boy story. I followed that story in a weird way. I never see TV, to the tune of one or two shows a year plus every gator game… and I happened to see the Keene’s on wife swap by a bizarre turn of events. Then by another unbelievable twist I witnessed the breaking news of the balloon boy on live TV.
I followed the Susan Boyle story loosely. I was mesmerized too by her audition.
But now it’s Karen. I love this story more than all the rest. Because it’s indiegogo and it’s so awesome.
I saw the video a day or two ago. I did not watch it. I saw it on indiegogo and I did. I checked 4 or 5 times during the video how much time was left. I couldn’t take it. before it was over I decided it must be a hoax. I thought for a minute that the kids were so tight with this woman that they made a deal with her to make this video and then start the donation site and split the money as a prank. I briefly convinced myself that this is the story here.
Now I’ve watched video of the aftermath. I’ve read the comments from the stories. I even copied a few things from the comments below. Why? because I love this story.
I have a pizza joint. We had an unfortunate fire and raised $37,000 on indiegogo to help the employees who would be out of work. It was the most amazing show of love and support I have ever actually witnessed first hand from a community of like-minded individuals. It repairs my belief in people. It expands my understanding of human compassion. It somehow fights fire with fire. It somehow takes a bad thing and makes it good. It is a caterpillar to butterfly metamorphosis… it is the good outweighing the bad for a change.
Below are the comments from people on the Washington post coverage. These are just a few I copied that stuck out to me. I love this sort of human complexity followed by the counterweight of human compassion. It is a terrible beautiful world.
Candice Nicole
You NEVER lose when you give
HondurasPCV
3:46 PM EDT
Paul’s question is valid, and it’s one that I share. So the decision of an admirable elderly woman to take the high road in the face of shameless verbal abuse spewed upon her by a group of middle-schoolers is [currently] valued at $300,000? And now the creator of this fundraiser, Max Sidorov, is benefiting from a similar fund created for him by someone else– to funnel [financial] appreciation his way for starting Karen’s fundraiser (currently a paltry $2,000 in comparison to Karen’s sizable nest egg). Will someone then start a fund for the guy who started a fund for Max to show him [financial] appreciation?
I love Karen’s story, by the way, and I genuinely hope she enjoys every penny of the donations she receives. But IT IS a peculiar occurrence to see one woman’s act of humility/suffering/bullying assigned a monetary value by society, regardless of whether or not you think she “deserves” the donations coming her way.
Andrew B
3:47 PM EDT
Paul – You just dont get it. People aren’t “giving money”, they’re giving support. Money is just the means in which the support is being provided. And the exceeding level of funds raised for Ms Klein should lead you to understand the way that video made people feel. I donated regardless of the fact that the funds were exceeding the goal by $195k, not because I want to see her go on a more extravagant vacation, but because I wanted to lend my support to her. Money is not going to erase the pain she endured, nor will any vacation that she can possibly take, but the thought of thousands of strangers making the least bit of effort just to know that they’re thinking about her could possibly put a smile on her face. And that is worth any donation to me.
itsbettertogivethenreceive
7:31 PM EDT
Yeah it’s a bad thing thousands of Americans came together to donate $20 or so each to a bullied elderly lady. Yeah that is throwing money away, yet billionaires like the Koch brothers spending 400 million to buy elections is no cause for concern or throwing it away.
Plus did you ever think that maybe just maybe some people who don’t have much rather skip a night out and give what little extra money they have to someone who was wronged because they felt bad for them and felt they deserved a nice vacation. I just wish we all were this kind all the time and took up causes everyday.
Satchel Raye says (not in any forum other than this post):
My heart is bruised when I watch a video like this. I wonder how anyone could be so insensitive as to not see other humans as reflections of themselves. I don’t want to believe one person could ever be unkind to another. Thanks to folks who give when their heart tells them to give. Thanks to a world where a fund can somehow counterbalance an injustice. I like it.
sigh.
i guess it takes being tested to our limits to truly appreciate being free. being happy. being satisfied and content.
i’ve spent so long being stressed that i forgot how it feels to be happy.
it’s not perfect. it’ll never be perfect. i will likely always strive to make it perfect.
but it’s definitely better. it’s awesome. it’s amazing. it’s more than i ever expected.
the fire was bad. the result it good. the people are great. the food is as good as it can be.
my mom and my nephew. family. another whole section of my life.
satchel’s is 60% of my life at this moment. it was 100% a month ago. it was 90% 2 days ago. that’s a good thing. father’s day is close. father’s day is better than my birthday. father’s day this year is special.
i’m going to the beach to relax. to celebrate.
i love gainesville as much or more than the best of ‘em. the people i meet and engage with get it. they help me understand the deal.
i need my family more than i need satchel’s.
satchel’s is gonna have to fly with it’s own wings while satch gets a break and takes a deep breath.
it was the hardest thing i’ve had to do yet. rebuilding that junky pizza joint was a test of my resolve and ambition. it took me straight to the limit of my capability. it think it may do the same thing for everyone who tries to work there. the dang beast takes you to the limit of your available energy and ability and leaves you there to assess. can you handle it? can I handle this?
these were the first real customers to show up after the fire: i don’t think they even knew there was a fire
i can enjoy today more – from suffering more yesterday. i have grown from my adversity. i have learned from my mistakes.
i love gainesville. i love pizza. i love family. i love to celebrate. i love to love
i have very strange taste in music. i like a lot of kinds of music but my favorite kind of music tends toward the super cheesy. my wife may be the only one who knows this about me. and now the great big world knows. ha. anyway, i tell you that to tell you this- there is an old album (CD) i used to own by sara evans. sara is an awesome “pop country” singer who always looks hot and awesome on her cover. i could belt out her songs with the best of them once upon a time.
over the past 10 years i’ve gone through different computers and multiple hard drives on the same computer, and now my collection has but one sara evans song. i know i could go out to the garage and dig deep and find my ikea bag of cd’s and spend about an hour coughing through the titles to find my old sara evans cd but i just don’t have it in me. i went crazy and just bought her greatest hits.
i have this small pool that i like to swim laps in but lately i’ve been too busy to deal with and the water has gotten so cloudy in my absence and around the clock at satchel’s lifestyle, that as hard as i try to remedy it with chemicals, it never gets right only reeks of chlorine. my wife texted me today, while i was at work on this fine sunday afternoon, saying that she is now “banning the kids from the pool because they smell toxic.” so i came home and drained the pool and started to refill it. at this point it seems like the only solution to clear water again.
on another note i am always setting reminders and alarms on my phone. i set alarms to go off when i arrive at work (location based alarms.) and to make it more dramatic and important seeming i make it the most obnoxious- the house is on fire- alarm you can imagine. it’s like a repeating foghorn loud and low. very alarming sound. every time it goes off if anyone is in the car with me they get immediately worried. “what does that mean?” um… “i’m supposed to remember to call joe shmoe.” i get these alarms so often lately that i pretty much ignore them anyway and have to keep setting them later to remember to do the next day what i set myself to do the day before.
tonight i was trying to buy sara evans greatest hits on iTunes. since this is the first time i’ve bought something on iTunes from this new computer (that i got from amassing mega credit card points…) and my wallet was in my truck so i snuck out to grab the credit card and came back in to my wife at the door, woken from a sound sleep, wondering what in the world is going on? i’m defensive. “i’m just getting my credit card from the car! what’d i do wrong?” (all the while feeling guilty too thinking somehow she knows i am purchasing sara evans greatest hits and is about to chew me out totally because she is NOT a cheesy music fan like me.)
” no the alarm was going off over there. what is that alarm?” turns out my phone alarm went off to remind me to turn off the water to the little pool so i don’t wake up to a flood. it had chosen the moment i walked out to start it’s obnoxious banging horn. oops.
anyway, i may be in the doghouse tomorrow, not because the alarm went off to remind be about the pool but because i bought and will try to listen to in her presence, sara evans greatest hits.
it was struggle struggle – slog through the muck…. and suddenly it’s – here we go – the TV station is interviewing me, the pressure is on to do this thing right and smoothly, and i’m excited. and nervous. and ready. and weirdly ‘not ready.’
i am making the whale logo the “official” satchel’s logo for now. new whale logo shirts coming soon. but not these color combos. but you can’t see the real color combo yet….
and we have a special new shirt coming out. but not leaking those yet either… well what good is a blog then? if i don’t tell you about the cool new stuff? hmmm. not sure the answer to that.
it’s 10:30pm and i want to go to work for a couple hours….. i wonder if that’s a good idea…
i am glad to have put together a video of the last few months. i wonder if i can share it on this blog site? let me try:
no. it doesn’t work:( i hate this blog site. i can’t even show a youtube video. or i can’t figure out how….
you know what? it’s got something to do with plugins. i have heard about plugins forever and have no earthly idea what the hell they are. i read about them. i think i have an inkling of what they are. it seems impossible to actually use one. i am on the wrong blog site for sure. the sad part is that if i post on Facebook, someone will know what to do. sad why? i don;t know. i like the blog. it’s more personal. it’s more secretive. it’s cool ya know?