Josh's Thoughts

Good day to YOU, faithful reader! This month’s writings and musings will focus on me.  I know that this will be quite self-centered, but I need to refocus and reframe my mind to heal my mental health.  This month I will be discussing some of the topics that I love. This month it is all about Comics, Video Games, Reading and Writing!

COMICS:

I have been collecting comic books since I was about 15 years old. My first set of comics was The Avengers vs The X-Men, a 4-issue limited series! It was intense and super interesting. Since then, I have broadened and then focused my affinity for specific characters. Just so you know, I have no love nor hatred for either DC or Marvel. I think that their pantheon of characters is diverse and interesting.

My most favorite DC character is the Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. There is just something about his characteristics that strikes a chord in me. He is the man without fear, yeah I know, that is also Daredevil’s tag line, but Hal had it first. I was deeply saddened when DC decided to kill him off after making him a villain. But come on, his entire city that he was sworn to protect was obliterated during the Return of Superman!!

My most favorite Marvel character is Thanos. The Mad Titan who collected the Infinity Gems and wiped-out half of the universe to please Lady Death! What isn’t there to love! Again, I would have to say that it’s his nihilistic view of the universe and how no one is going to help him achieve his goals that appeals to me most. That and the fact that he can go toe-to-toe with the Hulk!

I have always enjoyed the Fantastic Four as well as various Star Wars comics. It’s the escapism, the fantastic journeys, then pitfalls and the triumphs that make me come back for more!

VIDEO GAMES:

This one is easy. I love video games for the simple reason that I can escape from my worries and anxieties and pound on someone to let out any anger or rage that I might be feeling. It’s an escape. I love the RPGs and the shoot em ups. I especially love the LEGO games! Yeah baby! Give me some LEGO Batman or Skywalker Saga or Lord of the Rings, or even Pirates of the Caribbean! Ah, I have many consoles, from the original NES to my current Switch, or from the Atari 2600 to my XBOX 360. I have played them all, almost. I have been a Nintendo snob and shied away from the Playstation stable of consoles. But that’s because I couldn’t figure out the stinking controllers back in the day!

READING AND WRITING:

I’m lumping these two things together, because I couldn’t write without being able to love reading. I have an extensive personal library with over 1000 books, that range from Fantasy, to Horror, to Science Fiction, to Historical Reference. I have favorite authors (Greg Bear I’m looking at you), to favorite series (The Star Wars canon), to favorite characters (Harry Potter). I have collected books that I enjoyed as a youth when my mother used to take me to the local library and check out books, (Crestwood House, Monster Series) and even a series of mystery novels from my middle school days (Alfred Hitchcock presents The Three Investigators)! Thank God for the internet! I have spent hours trying to track down missing volumes from some of my series and countless others reading my treasures. Yes, I call them my treasures.

But why do I love to read and write. Well, I guess it comes down to escape, again. Seems to be a theme running here. I grew up poor. Not living in the dirt, washing in the pond poor, but pretty poor. I had hand me down clothes and toys. My parents weren’t rich and I have two younger brothers and an older sister who had Downs syndrome. Sometimes the only way to escape them was in a book or video game or comic books.

It’s not that I didn’t love them or anything else bad. It’s just sometimes my brothers would fight and argue to get our parents attention, while my mom focused on my sister and her health issues. Instead of joining the knuckleheads to get attention I chose to bury my nose in a book.

I don’t think it was a bad decision, but I do see that, even now, I struggle to connect with my brothers. Sure we are much older and with our own families, but our recollections of our youth are widely varied and skewed. I tend to remember things a but more rosily, while they don’t.

Also, I just want to state for the record that I did have friends. Mark and Tommy were my two best friends growing up, but life decided that we were not meant to be friends through high school. Tommy’s dad passed away in a terrible car accident and he moved in with this grandparents. He was never the same since. We stayed friends in high school, but drifted apart. Mark’s parents decided to move to Ohio because his dad was being relocated before we even made it out of Junior High School. I had other friends as I grew older, but my truest friends sit on a set of shelves that I made and I know that they will never leave me,

TTFN.

Good day to YOU, faithful reader! This month’s writings and musings will focus on me.  I know that this will be quite self-centered, but I need to refocus and reframe my mind to heal my mental health.  This month I will be discussing some of the topics that I love. This month it is all about Godzilla, Star Wars and LEGOs!

GODZILLA:

My love of Godzilla started when I was young, so young in fact, that I cannot remember how old I was when I first laid eyes on the big green lizard. I do remember seeing a portion of the original black and white Godzilla in his first appearance on an old black and white TV late at night on a Saturday. It was some kind of creature feature or something and it was Godzilla laying waste to Tokyo. I was hooked.  I took to building cities out of LEGOs and knocking them down by walking through them, pretending to be Godzilla.

As I got older, 7 or 8, I was able to watch several other Godzilla movies, but my love for him had dwindled. Until one day, my mother had taken me to the local library, and I found a book called Godzilla, from Crestwood House and it was part of a collection called the Movie Monster Series. I borrowed it and read it cover to cover, it was after all only about 50 pages. But it showed me some of the other monsters, known as Kaiju, that Godzilla fought. My love for him was rekindled and reborn! I vowed to watch every Godzilla movie that there was! But alas it was the 1980’s and the internet hadn’t been born yet!

Flash forward to 1986, my parents let me rent Godzilla 1984 from the local Blockbuster. It is a reboot, of sorts before they did that kind of thing, and Godzilla is not fighting any other kaiju. He is again a force of nature that cannot be controlled and by the end of the movie I was in tears. The sound of my hero falling into the volcano and screaming, still gets me to this day.

Flash forward to 1995. I’m now a teenager and graduated from high school. My friends and I stumble into a music and movie store, and I spot a 5-volume collection of Godzilla movies in VHS! I couldn’t buy it fast enough! I then spent the next few years trying to track down them all. But alas, again, I need to wait. Patiently. Darn it!

Flash forward to 2004, I’m married and have an infant son. The internet is in full swing, and I am able to track down many of the obscure movies, but a few still elude me. Then DVDs come out and now I am doubling down on my obsession. I track them down. ALL OF THEM. I sat and watched them, sometimes in order, sometimes just the ones that have the best kaiju. My son watches with me and becomes intrigued. I have passed the Godzilla gene on to him! Many video games and figures are released as he has become a global icon and I have to decide if I am to collect those as well. I chose to get the video games and my love for him has never diminished.

I have said all of that and yet I did not say why I love Godzilla. I guess, as I mentioned before, its because he is a force of nature. He cannot be stopped or controlled, but he has the best interests of the world at heart. He is a protector. He stands up to the bullies. I like that.

You can see how much I love Godzilla by checking out the webpage that I put together for him!

STAR WARS:

Whoo, where to begin. I am a child of the 80’s and I grew up with Star Wars. From the action figures to the cereal. I loved Star Wars. I had many of the action figures, some I inherited as hand-me-downs from my older cousins, and a few of the ships. I loved Darth Vader, still do! He was such an evil villain, but he redeemed himself in the end of Return of the Jedi. I identified with Luke Skywalker, an orphan left to navigate the galaxy with no family, other than is sister and friends. I am adopted and don’t know my birth family. It’s a stretch but just go with me here. I ate up the books, figures, video games, board games, and even the costumes of Star Wars. Then the prequels came. I was ecstatic and super excited, then Jar Jar Binks came onto the big screen and my inner child screamed in anguish. But wait, he’s just comic relief, let’s see Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, what a minute, he’s a kid!! WTF!?!? Yeah, it didn’t get better from there.

As time went on, my love for Star Wars has waxed and waned but my love of Darth Vader has remained strong. As I have gotten older, I kinda understand where he was coming from.

LEGOs!

I LOVE LEGOs! My first set was a mixed box of blocks from my cousins, as most of my childhood toys were. My first really complete and brand-new set was the Alien Stalker! I remember getting it for Christmas one year and I played with that thing all year! I still have it to this day albeit with some replacement parts, but it is complete.

As I grew older, my love never waned. I purchased many sets over the years and I still am. I guess one of the main reasons I like building LEGO’s is the feeling of discovery and the feeling of making something. I tell people that look at me weird when I bring up LEGO, “It’s like building a model that you can build and then take apart and enjoy building again and again and again.”

I have always been a maker. Whether it is making plans, trains, and automobiles out of LEGO or curio cabinets and bookshelves out of wood or computer programs and games to enjoy or even dreaming up worlds to write about, I love making.

TTFN!

Good day to YOU, faithful reader!

I hope your Thanksgiving festivities were happy and warm and filled family. I spent some time reminiscing about my past Thanksgivings this week.

My dad used to wake up really early and start working on the turkey and stuffing. He would fill the bird then fill a full, old style, oval pressure cooker with bread and celery and mushrooms and whatever else he used for spices. My brothers, sister and I would wake up to the aroma of cooking turkey and voices of laughter and happiness emanating from the kitchen below.

After breakfast my family would sit and watch the Hudson’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We loved to talk about the different floats and ballons and of course the marching bands. My mom would tell us that if wanted to join band in school, maybe someday we would be marching in the parade. How right she was. I did join band and in 1990 I marched in the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Detroit, MI! I was excited but freezing! It was so cold, that my lip stuck to my trumpet mouthpiece and in a panic I yanked it free and proceeded to bleed for most of the parade. I marched but barely played. It didn’t matter. All I was thinking about was my family. They did not come down to watch me march live. They stayed home, where it was warm and toasty, to try and record me (or the band) on the television. When I got home later that day, my parents were super excited for me, my siblings couldn’t care less.

As for the rest of Thanksgiving, my dad was engrossed in only two things. Cooking the turkey, and watching football. He was a sports fanatic, and he loved the Detroit teams, but was willing to watch whatever teams were playing any sport. I hated it when he would watch sports. It was so hard to get his attention. Ah well, it’s all in the past now.

When I look at my kids, I regale them of stories of my youth and I hope that someday they will do the same with their kids. I hope they will look back fondly on these holidays and wish they could back and do them all over again. I know I do.

TTFN

November 26, 2023

Good day to YOU, faithful reader! The topics of this month’s blog entries are going to center around my anxieties and fears.  This will hopefully allow me to visualize and externalize my weaknesses and how to deal with them.

This month I am going to talk about me.  I struggle. I need help. I am alone most of the day, except for my dogs, and it is difficult. I hesitate to say “depressing”, because I don’t really think that I am officially, clinically depressed. I used to have work friends that I looked up to and could talk to about life’s speed bumps. After my dad passed away, I don’t have any male figures that are older than me to talk to. When I say “older”, I just mean 20years or more older. I have some scout friends and I have talked to them, but it isn’t the same.

I am afraid. I’m afraid of what is going to happen to me as I get older. I have no idea what my bloodline has laid out for me since I am adopted. I say it so much it is feeling like a crutch or dodge. But it is true. I only know that my birth-mother’s father, so maternal grandfather, had several heart attacks. He may have died from one. I don’t know! So, as I age and I start to feel a twinge in my chest, that is where my mind goes. I have been to my primary care physician, and he has assured me that I have not had any heart attacks or have any heart issues to worry about. I do have high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, but don’t we all?

I am scared. I am scared of what I cannot control. Not in a bad sense, more like in my previous posts about my kids and my dogs, and my wife. It is what ails them on the inside that I can’t fix. I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on T.V. Okay, bad joke. But when my family comes to me and says that they have a pain or ache or are sick, my stomach drops and my heart begins to beat faster. I try to take a deep breath and push out the intrusive thoughts of impending doom and start small. Maybe, after all, it is something that a cold pack, warm compress or some ibuprofen will fix. But it is that initial shock of learning about the injury or illness that pushes me to the edge of the precipice and there I stand, staring out into the void wondering if this is the end.

I worry too much. I worry about my kids, my dogs, and my wife long before I worry about myself. That is it too. I put them before myself. I have always thought of myself as a provider, and primary carer and wanting to help others before myself. But it seems that it has become a detriment to my mental and physical health.

I have started reaching out for help. I have started talking to my wife about all of this. Somedays she is willing to sit and listen and comfort me. Other days she rolls her eyes and sighs, as if to say, “Here we go again.” I know that I can get myself into a vicious circle of worry which impacts my physical health, which then makes me worry more. For those days, I do have some medication. I haven’t taken them yet. I am scared too.

I am reconnecting with God. I have always read my daily bible email, which contains a sentence or two of scripture, but during this time of year there are little white books that have lessons for Advent. I am reading those everyday and following a plan to read a chapter and verse from the bible. I have even decided to read through my prayers again. I have not really had a bad relationship with God, but I feel more connected to the universe when I am outside, in the woods, listening to the wind blow through the leaves, and the creatures run about and live. That energizes me WAY more than sitting in a stuffed church on hard pews listening to some old fart tell me what the bible means. I have always hated that. But let’s not go down that road. Maybe another time. When I do pray, I pray to God and my father. Some people would try and correct me to God, THE father. But I would just smile and nod while thinking of my own dad, up in heaven, looking down and hearing his voice telling to “Knock it off, and cool down. It’ll be better, you’ll see.”

TTFN

Good day to YOU, faithful reader!

I want to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving and the warmest wishes for a safe and happy holiday season! I will be keeping a level head this year and taking smaller portions of turkey, stuffing, salad, mashed potatoes, dumplings, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, cherry pie, lemon meringue pie, apple pie, and of course, pumpkin pie! I’m feeling full just writing it!

Seeing as how I don’t know how or when my ancestors arrived on this continent, I can only dream about the pilgrims as they landed on Plymouth Rock after an arduous journey across the Atlantic Ocean to escape religious persecution. I imagine that my ancestors were of the indigenous variety, watching carefully from the woods as the strangers disembarked from their massive wooden ship.

I actually don’t have any Indigenous Peoples DNA in me, of that I am certain. I am descended from folks that lived in Ireland, Germany and Russia. I think they came over during the civil war or maybe even later and saw the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor!

Happy Thanksgiving to all and to all, take smaller bites!

TTFN!

Well, crap. Hello and welcome faithful reader. I am in the throws of reliving a bad dream from 7 years ago. Picture it, July 2015, hottest summer on record. Neighborhood air conditioners were cranking and running day and night, ours was no different. Well, the wife remarked that it was kinda muggy in the house. I agreed and decided to do some trouble-shooting. Breaker tripped? Nope. Cooling fan stopped by object? Nope. Overheated? Maybe, but doubtful. Time to dig deeper. I pulled the cowling off to check the internal wiring, not that I know what I am looking for but it was worth a shot. Low and behold the answer was staring back at me with bulging eyes. The onboard capacitor was swollen and distended like a can of soda that has been shaken by a young kid learning about pressure and physics. I reached out to several heating and cooling companies and they wanted $300 just to come out and troubleshoot, never mind the $50-$80 for a replacement capacitor! Well, that’s just crazy!

So, I decided to fix it myself. Well, a simple Amazon search and $20 later, I had the replacement on the way. I thought that let’s start here and if it doesn’t work, then I’m only out $20! After a few minutes of cursing and sweating, then a quick prayer to the big man upstairs, I flipped the breaker and miracle of miracles, it fired up and we had cold air again!

Now here I am sweating my butt off in July 2022, going through the same steps. I have the part ordered and it should be here today, before 10pm. This time though, we are going to get it fixed and limp along until we can replace the entire unit. It was installed over 20 years ago and has been working ok, but we know it won’t last forever!

In other news, I just dropped $1200 on new tires for my Ford F-150 truck. The previous set was balder than Mr. Clean on free hair cut day! I had been telling my wife about it for a while, but it wasn’t until my brother-in-law mentioned their lack of tread while were camping in Cadillac. Well, as I said, $1200 bucks out of the coffers and now my truck has new Cooper brand shoes!

Let’s hope the new part fixes the AC because I am ready to hide in the basement where it’s cooler!

TTFN!