Trolling for Mermaids

It was 100 degrees at 4:00 yesterday but I was sitting on my beloved back deck, more or less dressed...well, less really...on my cell phone talking to Robert who lives in Prescott, Arizona.

Gary, my next door neighbor began yelling my name, so I strategically stood up while continuing the phone conversation. (I can multi-task!)

"Is your power on?" he asked with his hands cupped around his mouth. Gary is a retired hippy. I am not certain how he was able to pull this off but I respect the hell out of him because he did. Though he is a yankee and power is evidently very important to him. I strategically opened the sliding glass door and learned that I had no power either. Who knew?

So I nodded that I didn't and he thanked me and went away. I returned to my phone conversation with Robert. "So," he continued, " vital, challenging, passionate activity is good for you. It is good for your health. It is good for your mental health. It is good for your life. When you do things that you are passionate about, you are doing what God created you to do."

And it was one of those statements that is so simply true that the world stops spinning for a second when you hear it. And it did.

My life has never been convintional, as a former Board Chairman who choses to remain anonymous, once told me.

But I am not convinced that there is much passion in convintionality. Or anything is vital about it. Or challenging. Or that it is especially good for you. Nor am I certain that convintionaility accomplishes much. I mean it gets you by but who wants to merely get by?

"You got no reason to believe it," Robert continued, "other than you got no reason not to believe it." Robert does have the ability to reduce the entire argument for the existance of God into a 17 word sentance.

Congressman Jack Kingston once told me in his Washington D.C. office, "Elliott, the thing about you is that you have figured out a way to finance the things that you are passionate about. All of these people come to me wanting me to finance what they are passionate about. But you have done that so I just make investments in what you are doing because it is already financed."

I remember thinking to myself, "Damn, I want to be a beach bum. Something's gone wrong here."

Then through the miracle of Face Book, my friend David Harmon-Vaught whom I haven't seen or talked to in 25 years, wrote me. He had been thinking about me when he heard a quote on an audio book. "Some want to live within the sound of church and chapel bell. I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell."

And Johnny O immediately popped into my head. I know, I know...what in the hell does he have to do with any of this? Other than hell is probably in both of our futures because we've both raised so much of it in our lives. And he is as unconventional as I've ever been.

And I've hung around hell a lot more than I've hung around church or chapel bell. I'm pretty sure that this is true for Johnny O too.

As a matter of fact, I am talking to a friend as I write this who is in the middle of a hell time, and she is letting it out and I am listening to her. And I think to myself as I tell her that she is loved, "Been there. Done that. Threw the tee-shirt away."

So it's Friday. And I have vague ideas about what I want to do next but it will be something or someone that is vital, challenging, passionate activity for me. Everything else will take care of itself. So.

I'm going trolling for mermaids.

What are you doing today?