Years ago a group of us went to Sacramento for a train show. My friend K. and I shared a motel room, while my dad and one of his friends Don shared an adjoining room.

When we go to these out of town shows we banter and poke fun with each other. We also go out and eat. We always eat at a good restaurant where we each pay a fraction of the check. At other meals we flip coins to determine who pays.

Basically we all flip a coin until everyone except one person has the same side showing. The odd man wins the privilege of paying for the entire meal.

My dad drove to Sacramento, K., Don and I met at the airport and flew in. When I met up with them at the airport they were just finishing breakfast. Don looked at me and said something to the effect of, “You’re too late we just paid the check.”

Just meaningless words said to get a laugh at another’s expense.

Later that day we hooked up with my dad, checked into the train show, and then went to have lunch. Don had a salad and glass of water. I had a lamb chop with a dinner salad, I don’t know what the other diners ate.

When the check came we started flipping coins. Don won. Or maybe he lost. He grumbled about paying $50 for a $4.00 salad while the rest of us thanked him for lunch and laughed at his complaints.

Over the years we’ve all paid for meals as a result of the coin toss not going our way. You either pay graciously or you get laughed at for being cheap. You also learn to just have what you want because you might end up paying for everyone’s lunch.

We went to dinner on Thursday night and guess who won again. Good guess. Don won, and bitched even louder. We laughed at him and told him to act like a man.

Friday is trading day. We spend the day running around a convention hall filled with toy trains reconnecting with people we only see a few times a year. It’s a lot of fun, and we invite our friends and interesting new people to go to dinner with us at a nice place.

When we invite people we tell them we split the check after tax and tip between each diner equally. That means if it’s $400, each person pays $50. The bar bill is left to the drinkers to settle. Usually the cost runs $50-75 per person plus drinks.

Some people don’t go with us because they don’t want to spend the money. Some don’t go because they don’t like the type of food – we never get big crowds when we go to sushi places. And most don’t go because they have other plans, or maybe they don’t want to put up with our clowning.

We usually go to places where you order a piece of meat, and side dishes for the table. Some of the places like Al Baker’s in St Louis and The Baron’s in King of Prussia PA, cook the side dishes at the table. I don’t remember the name of the Sacramento restaurant, but they didn’t cook the vegetables at the table.

There were about 12 of us, and the restaurant put us in our own little room. We had a waiter and a bus boy serving just us. This serves them and us well as we are a loud and boisterous group.

Did I mention profanity? No. How about a loud, profane and boisterous group. Basically we’re a bunch of men who play with toy trains and act like little kids.

The dinner that night was no different than many others. Maybe a little more over the top than usual because there weren’t any wives or girlfriends in attendance, but still a good time.

Don acted quite judgmental about the behavior at dinner. He started making snarky comments which only served to cause us to start poking at him.

If it sounds like we’re a bunch of immature kids maybe you’re right. Or, maybe you’re just being judgmental.

Anyway, after dinner the check came and someone did the math. I don’t remember the amount we each paid, but it didn’t seem high to me so it was probably in the $50 range. I remember the times it was $75, and I really remember the time we each chipped in $150 at a sushi place called Hashimoto or something like that in San Jose.

Hearing the amount he owed, Don started bitching. “I only had a pork chop and some salad. That’s not worth $50.”

Immediately we all started making fun of him for being a cheap bastard. This did nothing to improve Don’s mood, but was entertaining to the rest of us.

After dinner we broke up into smaller groups and went off to check out the local nightlife. Don went back to his room to sulk.

Saturday is another trading day, and there is a banquet in the evening. K. and I didn’t go to the banquet, and we didn’t spend much time with Don that day.

On Sunday morning, Don came into our room through the adjoining door and started in with comments about how messy the room was. K. and I had been bored by the local bar scene and went back to the room to watch movies. We watched a movie and ate peanuts.

Now I will be honest here and say the room was a bit trashed. We didn’t punch holes in the wall or even flood the place like we did one night in Pasadena, we just had the bedding wadded up on the floor along with assorted snack wrappers, peanut shells and beverage bottles.

Don’s poking at us so we laugh and poke back. We walked into his room and K. said something like “This room smells like a whorehouse.” I looked at the room and said, “you guys have two beds?”

Don got upset about the whorehouse and two beds comments. My dad wasn’t a morning person so he just grumbled a bit and got up.

I looked at my dad and asked, “Did Don want to cuddle when you were done with him?” My dad said something like “What the hell are you talking about,” and went into the bathroom for a shower.

K. and I laughed, but Don got quiet. We left him to wait for my dad, and went off to have breakfast.

Later we met up at the convention center and started packing up the trains we’d failed to sell. California enforces sales tax collections at the shows so one person will get the tables and deal with the taxes for the group.

I’d paid for the tables so people started giving me money for the tables and the taxes on their sales. One guy from California offered me money, but hadn’t sold anything so I told him not to worry about it. I figured the goodwill from letting him keep the $12 he owed me was worth it, and seeing the single set of trains he’d brought was worth it. (As an aside my dad later bought that set of trains and it was one of his favorite trains.)

Anyway after I refused to take money from the California guy, I turned to Don and asked him how much he sold. He said about $2100. The sales tax is 8.25% so after doing some simple math I told Don to just give me $200 to cover the taxes and the tables.

Don refused to pay the taxes or the table costs. He said he’d spent so much on meals feeding me that I shouldn’t expect him to give me anything.

I called him a “cheap fucker” and went back to packing my stuff up. Don walked off in a huff. Both my dad and K. told me to lay off Don.

I didn’t have another conversation with Don that weekend. Don started avoiding me. He’d been going over to a mutual friend’s house I was helping build a train layout on most Wednesday nights. He started calling my other friend to find out if I’d be there so he could avoid me.

If Don saw me at a show, he’d glare at me and turn his back. I don’t think we spoke for years. Or rather he didn’t speak to me.

I remember seeing him in Pasadena a few months after the Sacramento trip. I called out “Hey Don, how are you doing?”

He brighten up and smiled while turning his head to me, but when Don realized who was calling his name, he told me to “Fuck off and die.”

The people standing around me were shocked at his behavior. Over the next few years, we repeated this little scene for audiences at various locations all over the country.

Don never had many friends in the train clubs. I have lots of friends, and my father was a founding member of the “good-old-boy-network.” Because Don refused to be around me, he didn’t get to hang out with many others either.

Seven or eight years after that weekend in Sacramento, Don ended up in a registration line immediately before me. Faced with the choice to move to the back of the slow check in line, or to be rude and ignore me, we talked.

Don died a few months later. I didn’t go to the funeral. My dad told me few people went. Don just didn’t have very many friends.

I was planning on calling this essay “If you can’t stand the heat stay out of the kitchen.” But I don’t think that fits well enough.

I don’t know what the lesson in this story is anymore. I started out writing about someone playing along with the banter and BS and then copping a resentment because his feelings were hurt.

Maybe this story is about taking resentments over slights and walling yourself away? Maybe it’s about judging other people so you don’t have to look at yourself?

Somewhere over the course of the weekend, Don choose to be a victim. Being a victim he needed a bully and choose me. These immature statements that riled Don so much were no different than the dozens or hundreds said that weekend.

There were many more statements coming at me than I was dishing out, but I don’t remember most of the things said that weekend because I wasn’t seeking to be a victim. I was only one of the guys hanging out playing with trains and eating at nice restaurants.

Maybe this is about protecting ourselves from being honest? There is no doubt in my mind that Don was a cheap bastard. I don’t know why he would be ashamed of that, but it certainly set him off.

I went to college when I was 18, 19 years old because my dad paid for it, and I didn’t have to work. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so I just floated along. The only consistency in my life back then was my ability to show up at the right bar on cheap drink night.

Anyway, I passed many of my classes just by showing up infrequently and doing a minimum of homework. The math classes were beyond me because I didn’t show up often enough or do the homework. I ended up thinking I was bad at math.

I also thought I was bad at writing. I took English 102 – the term paper class 4 or 5 times and failed it every time. The last time I took the same instructor again and redid the same paper using his red marks as a guide for improvement. The fucker failed me again and said I hadn’t done as much work as the other students. I told him I’d done 5 times as much work as the other students with a look of impending rage on my face and he changed my grade to a C.

Years later I decided I didn’t want to be a roofer for the rest of my life. I’d looked around me and saw there weren’t any old roofers. This motivated me to go back to school.

I took placement tests and started taking classes at night. I thought I knew somethings, but ended up in an algebra class that was about the same as the one I’d taken in the 7th grade.

At first I was surprised because I seemed to be good at math. Later I realized I was good at math, but the key was doing the homework. I did the homework for every lesson, and if I had problems with it, I did extra work until I mastered the concepts.

When I transferred to ASU, I had to take 2 semesters of accounting that wasn’t offered at the community colleges, so I took other classes I thought would help me. One of them was a class called “Writing For Professions.”

I took the writing class because I was sure I didn’t know how to write. Over the years since I’d fooled around going to college I’d avoided writing anything because I was a poor writer.

The class was 5 term papers over a semester with classroom instruction on style and grammar. I felt it would help me as I got into more advanced classes.

I remember the first draft of the first paper well. I had a virus on my computer that made the printer do weird things. It played songs with the impact head, and I couldn’t figure out how to set the pages. Luckily it used tractor-fed paper so I could cut the pages up with scissors.

When I turned the paper in, the teacher said it was a rough draft and the formatting wasn’t important! When I did the final draft, I took a disk to a copy center and had them print the paper with the correct margins and such.

I did all the papers that way. I surprised myself by getting the highest grade in the class. I mentioned to the teacher I had always thought I was a poor writer, and told her the story of taking English 102 five times.

The teacher said English 102 wasn’t about teaching writing, it was about teaching people to follow directions.

Thinking back, I remembered a teacher marking off points because I’d used unlined note cards. I had another teacher drop my grade because I’d used a company’s annual reports, and he felt I should have treated the different reports as one report so I didn’t have enough footnoted sources.

She was right, and my attitude toward my writing ability changed. I had assumed I was a poor writer because authority figures had mislead me. Those teacher when I was a young student told me I was a poor writer when I really was bad at following meaningless directions.

Oddly, after taking the Writing for Professions class, I never wrote another term paper. The upper level economics classes didn’t require them.

Even odder still, I never worked as an economist. I worked for 18 months as an analyst for a marketing company, then became a writer.

At one time in my life, I focused on the things that happened to me. Worse than that, I exaggerated minor things in my mind and then complained endlessly about them.

I’d learned as a child not to brag about my accomplishments, while being exposed to near constant complaining about minor things.

My response to any situation was to looking for the part I could complain about.

Today I don’t do this. Today in most situations I realize it’s just life and not worth spending additional time on.

I wrote this common saying down shortly after my brother died. I’d always thought people would become peaceful and serene when confronted with a terminal illness. I felt a strong sense of disappointment and sadness when my brother died because he had acted the same way – actually worse – in the last few months of his life.

Later I realized we can only do what we know how to do. He’d lived his whole life acting the way he did, and to expect anything different from him during his most trying period was unrealistic.

This site isn’t about him. It’s about me.

My behavior during this period was a return to my darkest past. While I congratulated myself for not doing drugs, I displayed every other inadequate behavior.

When the emotions came I didn’t have enough practice using my newly found tools. So they weren’t the tools I reached for first.

When I wrote this saying down I was first realizing the importance of becoming familiar with my tools.

The only way to become familiar is through use. By using the tools before the shit hits the fan, I train myself to reach for them first when chaos happens.

I was a freshman in high school when I first heard this line from a Cheap Trick song. I was going to meet a girl at a desert party, and the police shut it down. I saw some kids I went to school with and jumped into the backseat of a car. I can still remember being squished into the backseat of a ford Capri along with two large speakers traveling through a mountain pass and hearing this line for the first time.

That night was also the first time I did LSD. I was so stricken by this line, I went out the next day and bought the album, but it never repeated the acoustics of the small car and loud sound.

Within a few months of that night I was doing LSD on almost a daily basis. I was thrown out of school for constantly ditching classes. I had begun the process of escaping into my mind.

I had surrendered to my insecurities and embraced my fantasies. The drugs became my ticket and my excuse.

Over the next 20 years, I sold myself away repeatedly. And cheaply.

Even when I managed to get off the drugs, it was only as a result of surrendering my individuality.

Today this tells me to go with the flow, but never forget who I am. I’ve forgotten this many times.

Quote from the Cheap Trick song Surrender on the album Live at Budakon

Fear of rejection cause us to avoid meeting new people, drive people away or walk away from people before they can reject us. Then we judge them harshly so we can avoid being honest with ourselves.

Fear of responsibility leads us to keep jobs beneath our ability.

Fear of censure leads us to not standing up for ourselves and causes us to associate with people who aren’t really worth our time.

Fear of failure leads us to settle on lives that aren’t fulfilling.

To avoid exposing our fears, we blame others for our miserable boring lives.

Some of us avoid taking responsibility for our lives by giving “God” the role and then when we feel under-whelmed by our boring lives chalk it up to “God’s Will.”

When we attempt to settle in relationships, jobs, and our future, we are choosing a fear based life. Settling means choosing a fear based life.

The only way to overcome these fears is to walk through them. Define who we want to be and what kind of people we want in our lives and the walk through the fear to create the lives we want.

To create the lives we desire and deserve.

This reminds me life’s about action.

Think about how in the war movies that we’ve all seen, how they fire their artillery. They’ve got the guy that crawls up there to the front with his binoculars, and he’s looking out with the radio and the binoculars, and he gives off some numbers and the people in the back with the cannon fire the thing.

The forward observer watches where it lands and says, “You want to move a little bit to the left, a little bit to the forward,” and gives them some more numbers.

They fire again. The forward observer looks out and says, “Fire for effect,” and then they just let the whole barrage go.

What they’re doing is they’re firing their cannons to aim their cannons. In the artillery, they have a whole line of those cannons back there. They’re not all firing for the observer to watch. It’s one cannon firing so the observer can see where the shells are landing.

While that’s happening, all of the other cannons are getting ready. Then once the first cannon knows where it’s aiming, all the other cannons aim, and then they all start firing.

It’s about going out and creating a mess, which I’m pretty good at, and then looking at the mess and saying, “How can I do this better?”

It’s about going out and taking action, then looking at what we’ve done, spending the time doing some introspection, taking aim, and then moving forward.

That is so powerful. I think that for many years I got caught up in everything had to be perfect before I could do anything, caught up in indecision.

With this model, the fire, ready, aim, I’m able to just go out, get something done, build up some momentum, and ride it to completion.

Hurdles have been a major problem in my life. For many years, I got very little done. I realized this was because I looked at hurdles as insurmountable walls.

For example, on one of the first books I ever wrote, I was unable to visualize the entire book. And yet, I was able to visualize each chapter individually. I had no idea how they’d fit together, but could see them separately.

So, what I did was I set myself a goal that every day I’d write a chapter. Then after I had all of the chapters done, I’d figure out how to put them together.

This allowed me to get these books done without getting trapped by the hurdles.

Looking back, I think in a lot of cases I’d made these hurdles bigger than they really were, because I was afraid. I was afraid of finishing the book and putting it out there were people could see it. I was afraid of not living up to my standards or not being profound enough.

Hurdles allowed me to avoid risks.

Once I got to the point where I just worked my way around the problem areas, I found myself finishing projects

At that point, I no longer could hide. I needed to step up and say, “Hey, here this is,” and take responsibility.

In every situation, I need to ask myself, “Does this activity move me towards my goal? If not, why am I doing it?”

I’ve found this to be extremely important, because I am easily distracted. Maybe it would be a small project where I could make some money quickly, which doesn’t move me towards my goals but it does help me pay my bills, so it’s acceptable. Or maybe I would get caught up in something because a friend needed help. That’s also an okay thing for me to do.

I frequently found myself doing projects because they were impressive, because I wanted to show off, or because I was bored.

As I started asking myself would this help move me towards my goals and my future, I learned to focus on what was important, where the priorities are, and removed a lot of distractions and unproductive activities.

Go out and compliment everyone you meet. Be sincere and watch their reactions. I had somebody suggest this to me a number of years ago, so I went out and started complimenting people.

“That’s a nice purse you have.”
“This is a great cup of coffee! Thanks for making this for me.”

By watching others I learned something very interesting. It’s very difficult for us to accept compliments.

As I thought about this deeper and I complimented more people, I realized that there might be two reasons for this.

First in the example I mentioned about the purse, the woman probably thought I wanted something from her. She might be thinking I am complimenting her in order to start a conversation. So, she’s not going to accept the compliment and she doesn’t see it as being sincere.

Secondly as seen in the other example, the nice cup of coffee, some people just aren’t able to accept compliments.

I need to look at what I’m doing when I am bestowing compliments. Compliments are not a way to manipulate people, like the woman with the purse. They’re a way to recognize people.

Once I started thinking about compliments in these terms, it changed the way I complimented people. And also, this is an odd result I wasn’t expecting, when people started complimenting me, the sincere ones felt better and I was more able to accept the compliment rather than defray them.

We’ve all heard people deflect compliments. “Oh, it wasn’t that big a deal.”

I learned to say, “Thank you. I worked very hard on that. “Thank you for recognizing me.”

This not only improved the way I interact with others, it helped me learn to enjoy praise.