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At the beginning of the year, I made a list of items I resolved to accomplish. (I called them resolutions, but frequent commenter Junior corrected me.) However, life’s been pushing in its own direction, and things from my past, which I cannot control, have come back to determine the path of my future. While I’m fervent in the belief that history is not destiny, sometimes past actions—things you couldn’t necessarily control or simply bad choices that were made—require resolution before being able to fully move on.

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“I learned that I was right and everyone else was wrong when I was nine. Buck Rogers arrived on the scene that year, and it was instant love. I collected the daily strips, and was madness maddened by them. Friends criticized. Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips. For a month I walked through my fourth-grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I burst into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone, and life simply wasn’t worth living. The next thought was: Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.

“I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction. Since then, I never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

– Quote by Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing

Dreams are a funny thing. Listen to them, and you’ll inevitably encounter ridicule. Listen to the wisdom of the masses, and yes, you become normal, part of the pattern, part of the tapestry that makes up the background of history. But you also become boring and forgotten. Ah, but to ignore the detractors and listen to your own dreams. That is where the artistry in the tapestry comes in, for it is those things which jump out of the pattern, the seemingly improbable, yet inevitable black swans which make the tapestry come alive. Remember: The failures in life are remembered for their failures. The successes are remembered for their successes. And the rest, the majority of people in the middle? Why, they’re simply forgotten.

“Former Rays’ pitcher Joe Kennedy, dead at 28.”

This was the headline I woke up to on the morning of my 28th birthday. Didn’t help any that the next story was about how “Today in 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot.”

Happy birthday to me. Talk about a frightful omen, but I intend to make it to 29, thanks.

Last night I found myself thinking about life, about my road to 28, after the local news ran a story about happiness, saying that most of us have been decreasingly happy since the 1950’s. Of course, by that standard, my life started out bad and it’s gone from that to miserable ever since.

I disagree.

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Recently, a commenter to a previous post on panic attacks, Mike, started sharing his story and issues with panic attacks. In response to one of his comments, I wrote the following, which I decided to make into a full post. Here I chronicle how it was that I overcame my panic attacks. Since putting what I’m about to describe into action I have not suffered one more attack. It wasn’t easy, and I can’t promise that following these steps will work for you, but if it helps even one person then this is already more than worth it.

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If you’ve ever read Lee Iacocca’s autobiography (Iacocca: An Autobiography), or heard any of the history surrounding him, you know one thing: he’s a straight shooter. (If you haven’t read his biography, for the love of God, go to your library and pick it up, or buy it at a bookstore somewhere. Heck, most thrift stores have copies of it which you can get for really cheap. Check out the Amazon retail partners (linked above) if you want cheap and convenient.) At the age of 82, this guy’s been firing off left and right about what he sees as right and wrong with America today, and I’ll tell you, I agree with him, big time.

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