Contagious Voice (A.K.A. The Time Travelers Guide To Dragon Riding)

Well....this is the tale of my second encounter with a knife wielding assailant. After several years of training and black belt level skills, as you might imagine, this time things turned out differently. But "how" differently suprises even me. Just goes to show you there's more than one way to handle a pig sticker.

Well...that's it..apparently I'm a fraud. Not in the "I'm gonna take your money" sense, but in the "my personal history wasn't the miserable existence I have been telling myself it was" sense. But maybe you knew that. In fact...I suspect you couldn't have missed it. To me it seems that the whole "negativity bias" thing creates for each of us a blind spot that is only revealed when we attempt to tell our tale and fill in all the available details. When we do that....(when I did that at least) it became blatantly obvious that there was a gaping whole in the middle taking on the precise size, and shape of the heretofore unacknowledged moments of pure happiness. Why is it these things are so hard to notice and appreciate? Is it just me? Or so we all spend nearly 100% of our waking hours time traveling as we flit from past hurts to imagined future hurts in an insane dance trying to tiptoe over the minefield of pain that exists in our lives? Is it also possible that in doing so we miss 100% of the present....the only place where peace and joy actually exists? After all...when we remember joy...don't we experience the pain of it's passing? And when we imagine joy....don't we wallow in frustrated anticipation of its arrival? Could finding lasting happiness be as simple as stepping from the time machine and noticing the joy that can truly only be experienced in the moment? And if we stayed in the moment...would we learn to see pain as the rare and fleeting thing it appears to me to be?

Remember all the times you wished you knocked the school yard bully right the f--- out? Well...this is that story. Only it didn't end the way I thought...and in the end, I'm not sure who ended up being the bully in the long run. What do you think?

This is part 2 of "The Things We Learn From Peanutbutter And Cheerleaders" (or was it the other way around?) I'm STILL telling the origin story. Yes...STILL...but if you're listening this far then you know that I'm doing this as part of a project to develop the "voice" behind these stories and refine the "moral" of them as it were. The ultimate goal being to develop content for my speaking career. So there I was....recently duct taped and slathered in Jiffy then marched home to the beat of a stick whacking me on the head. Where...OH WHERE...could it possibly go from here? You'll just have to listen and find out. :-)

This story...like all really good stories...begins with me being "peanut buttered" by a cheerleader. Not my finest moment, but in a way, that moment (or at least the decisions following that moment)gave me a first fleeting glimpse of my purpose. (I'll let you chew on that one for a moment). I think you'll see the episodes are starting to come together in a consistent format now as I dig through the past and attempt to knock the dust off my origin story. In this episode I get into the topic of "threshold events" and how our lives can pivot in any moment based on the actions we take in response to the feeling "enough is enough!"

Well...I did it. I talked to my Dad about what he remembers from the incident in the woods involving the 2 men holding me ar knifepoint. Now I can share that story with a clear conscience. If you are squeamish about hearing stories of childhood abductions and the terrible things people are capable of, I encourage you to listen all the way through to hear what took place just as the unthinkable was about to happen.

Yet another day has gone by where air have avoided having what I anticipate to be a painful conversation (sorry...nobody here but us chickens) with my Father about what he remembers of his part in the terrifying incident that happened in the woods all those years ago. In an attempt to find some personal sense of closure with the issue in this episode I let you listen in on my internal monologue as I walk myself through the process of transforming a sense of panic into a sense of happy anticipation.

Still working on developing my "voice" for these stories. This episode is another component of my origin story where I experience my first "15 minutes of fame" as they call it. I'm maybe 8 years old and anxiety induced mutism (A.I.M ?) strikes again leaving me alone and stranded on the side of a road. A stranger found me, and what happened next made the front page of the local newspaper. (Remember those?) :-)

In this episode (along with trying to figure out the software) I tell the story of my first attack of what I'll call anxiety induced mutism. I'm sure there is a technical name for that but as I'm not a shrink I'll leave it at that. I was 6. I was laid up in traction at a military hospital in Germany. I was alone in the middle of the night....and I REALLY had to pee!

Still trying to figure out podcasting. In this episode I talk more about my backstory and how an incident with botched anesthesia left me awake and agonized but unable to speak or move during a terifying surgery when I was 6. , and how it affected my personality growing up.