When I watch a movie with a story line about a father/husband in familial dysfunction, the resolution to his troubles seem so self-evident.

As the viewer, we watch incredulously as this hapless sample of middle-American dimness fails to see the answer that dances so plainly before his furrowed brow.

Many's the day I've sat at the kitchen table, frustration tightening a band across my temples and stirring up foul juices in my gut, while my wife expresses exasperation at my inability to see her "obvious" conclusions about my errors and shortcomings.

"You just don't get it!"

It's become a refrain.

In my junior year of high school a west-coast surfer transferred in. Long hair, frizzy and blonde, smile bright and a mile wide. Infectious upbeat girl-swooning world-shaking culture-making, Jon was an energy force. We felt lucky to be in his crowd.

Those were transformative days for me. Just what I was looking for without knowing it, a place to fit in. I was part of a group without being part of a clique.

I still picture Jon (we adopted his style of wearing Levi cords low on the hips) in the hallway at school, girls omnipresent and good will abundant.

Studies show that men do their works of genius when they are younger because they are more motivated. And the motivation is?

Pussy, of course.

This came as no surprise to me. I'm not oversexed by any stretch, and it's at the root of every ounce of motivation that I've ever had.

The car I drive.
The clothes I wear.
The exercise, the dieting.
My writing. Oh, yeah, my writing. I'm not in it for the money (although that's my cover story). I'm driven by fantasies of women coming on to me because of the compelling power of my pen.

I learned technical climbing from this fantastic guy who took me under his wing (I honestly don't know why, other than I was, at nineteen, a very open and pleasant person), and introduced me to a new way of living. It included a respect for the environment (I will always remember the moment when I threw my cigarette butt on the ground in his presence), a respect for silence, and a respect for the discipline of climbing.

I'm aching with the recall of that feeling of moving forward into life. Of being with people who pulled me into higher planes.

Misery loves company.

I love this new statistic. Only 38% of marriages are happy.

It means that I don't have to feel like a freak anymore. I feel more secure with my perspective that acknowledges the inherent difficulty of being married.

It means that when I try to get through the day without conflict, that I'm more in touch with the pervasive futility that wedlock presents to most couples than I am in denial about my responsibility to work on a relationship that makes us both unhappy.

We still need to put a good face on it for the kids.

I knew my knots and techniques. I had a good feel for finding holds. I had a good teacher. We had great cliffs, and I had a healthy fear. And rappelling was the big pay-off.

To begin a rappel you must lean out backwards over the edge of a cliff until you are in a straight-legged sitting position. This forces you to overcome deeply instinctual survival messages. Once in this position, however, the ride is a joyous descent of bouncing into and away from the cliff face.

It's a precious slice of time, imbued with freedom, accomplishment, enlightenment, and promise.

Go Team! Win! Run, Number 31, run! What's his name? I don't recognize that guy. And who's our quarterback this year? We just got scored on by a guy that played for us last year.

I hope we win, but if we beat them too badly, I'll lose points in the Fantasy League. If we score a PAT instead of a TD, then I have no shot at the football pool. I like watching the home team, but I need to switch channels to see what the other teams are doing.

Being a fan isn't what it used to be.

I have kept some incredible secrets over the years.

My past self, my garrulous, open-hearted former self, was a poor predictor of my later (and present) ability to keep and hold those bits of information never to be revealed.

Years of this fidelity has granted me a reputation among certain people for not yielding to the temptation to release, even partially, even to a single uninvolved party, the sometimes terrible, sometimes embarrassing, and potentially damaging secrets with which they have entrusted me.

I sometimes flush with accumulated knowledge, especially when I hear conversation relating directly to these entrusted, entombed tidbits.

The sound of my angry door slam follows me down the driveway, and my gut gurgles even as I replay the argument.

My ideal self doesn't slam doors. My ideal self doesn't argue with his wife in the presence of his children. And, my ideal self doesn't go around all day agonizing over his errors.

I've become better at letting go of it, which is much better for my mental health. It is not, however, better for my marriage when you consider that the stuff I'm letting go of, my wife is hanging on to, or worse, allowing to fester.

It's a waste of money to keep my grandmother in the hospital. I want her to be well cared for, but I can't help but wonder if this sort of misallocation of medical expense isn't occurring across the country. Multiplied by thousands per day, the waste that her hospitalization represents is staggering, and it evokes contemplation of the equal thousands of poor people going without appropriate care.

My friend's father drove himself to the ER last night after nearly losing a finger on a table saw.
"Which hospital?"
"Coray."
Wincing, "Eww. He'd be better off having the dog lick it."

These guys are really into their hobby. Hey, it's not my thing, but then, I have my own interests. Like bicycling. I know some shit about bicycling. Pretty arcane, too, some of it.

These guys I work with were going on about stocks and grain and chambers and slides. Hobby talk. Cattle or horses? Woodworking? Then I hear flint and black powder and flash, muzzle velocity and sights and reloading, magnums and short-loads and pump-action and repeaters.

To say that these guys are gun-happy is to diminish the term happy.

In this crowd, just the phrase "gun control" evokes apoplexy.

I have fallen out of touch with some wonderful people over the years. During the early stages, I would feel some guilt about not writing or calling. It would get progressively worse. My apprehension and self-loathing would accumulate like leaves in a window well, eventually blocking out the light of joy that the friendship once provided.

It's different now. I still fall out of touch, even with some of those same folks. But these days, I fear that I've missed some terrible transformation in their lives.

"Hi Bill, it's been too long."

"My son was killed in an auto accident."

I lay across the folded mass of vinyl, using my body weight to force out the air. I was determined to make the swimming pool small enough to fit through the attic opening.

It slowly compressed beneath me, and I took these idle moments to watch the leaves flutter on our tulip poplar. The late afternoon sun rippled in reflection, exuberant affirmation of life, of beauty.

But I am the Time Bastard. I was simultaneously getting a job done as I was listening to "Reviving Ophelia" on tape. I was not what you would consider given over to the moment.

"Real Sex," HBO's odd and racy documentary series, evokes feelings in me that I wouldn't have predicted.
Certainly I expect to be disgusted, which I am, by the graphic portrayal of other peoples' sexual interests (perversions might be the sexual equivalent, say, of eating sugar on broccoli).
And I expect to be turned on, occasionally, when my particular tastes (bare breasts) are catered to.
The feeling that I don't expect is nostalgia for my former hedonism. These odd people spinning plates with their vaginas and doing puppet faces with their penises are having a great time.
Sure I'm (yawn) normal.

I'm ready to go undercover.

It seemed impossible whenever I contemplated it before, as I'm unsuited to a life of duplicity. But back then I was thinking of narcs and the like. And death sort of scares me.

Suddenly it's the answer to my dreams.

So I'm thinking of killing myself. By abandoning my life (family, job, etc.) and getting some cosmetic surgery.

I'll then re-enter college as a twenty year-old.
I look young already.
I'm fit, I love school.
And I could really go for some co-eds in my life.

Oh, yeah. This time I'm gonna do it right.

I was young.
I thought I was clever.
It seemed worldly to say, "I'm never going to fall in love again." I knew not the power of my own words to shape my future.

In my defense, the love that scorched me burned too hot and too brightly. After she dumped me, it seemed like common sense was prevailing when I took up the notion to avoid the lap-dog devotion, to eschew the pitiful agony of the less-involved lover, to get a life and a mind of my own.

Nonetheless, "Love like you've never been hurt" sounds like good advice.

I hadn't thought it through all the way. It takes a long time to create a new identity. I had shadowy meetings with the underworld. New Birth Certificate, DL, and SSN. That cost me five hundred dollars. Then somehow it never occurred to me that I would have to change my name. I was at a total loss when Donny
(how is it that I'm putting my plans, my safety, into the hands of this seedy stranger with knee-buckling breath, dirty sleeves, and feral fingernails?)
asks me from the dark recesses of a Southside doorway, "So, what name you usin'?)."

The surround-sound upgrade was a definite improvement, and those new light bulbs that excite the natural spectrum made a big difference, too.
The overall ambience of the body-work room was known in a small circle as a soothing refuge from the noise and complexity of the outside world. The clientele was a devoted collection of wealthy full-time residents of Key West who personified hedonism. Their common point, and the one thing that brought them closest to their spiritual center, was Axel's magic hands. Trained at Esalen and Omega Institute and humming with transmittable energy, Axel had become an indispensable appurtenance.

It's more lifestyle than money, thought Axel, as he considered the variety of his wealthy clients. Some people are perfectly happy with their millions, while others struggle and fret.

He could feel it in their backs and shoulders as he worked his magic with his hands. It was an incredible amount of tension that they stored there.
And secrets.

He knew when he had touched a secret through their skin. That certain reaction that a client makes - a suppressed response, an inhibition to acknowledging the pain produced by unspeakable histories.

When Axel relieved those tensions, a spiritual indebtedness occurred.

Dan had a secret.
It lived just below his left shoulder blade, a nasty little knot of repression that Axel would tease out on Tuesday and discover reemergent on Friday. A particularly persistent manifestation of historical injury.

In a moment of ecstatic relief following an inspired bit of Axel's body work, Dan spilled the secret.

Dan was a hard-body for a sixty-year old, and if it weren't for an equally hard face, he would pass for much younger.

There was not a note of compliance in him.
Not in his look, his voice, or his posture.

A proud, wounded rebel.

It's a healthy thing, is it not, to celebrate minor victories?
I mustn't wait for my non-existent novel to be published before I slap myself on the back.

Write down five good things you did today. Some therapists tool, as I recall, to get the patient out of self-defeating slumps. I have to go easy with this exercise. My wife, surely, would feel that I think enough of myself as it is.

Nonetheless, I am proud that I can occasionally eat ice-cream with almost no feelings of guilt.

At least until the next morning when I get on the scale.

We, the masses, spend a good deal of time convincing ourselves that money doesn't buy happiness.
Healthy though this approach might be for the individual, collectively we're playing into the hands of the haves.

Ever consolidating their power, they've got such a powerful advocate into the White House that they smack their lips with glee every time they think about it. How could the voters open the candy store doors so wide?

GW shifted the tax burden away from the rich and protected their companies from the designs of the meddlesome environmentalists.

Don't get me started. A hundred words won't....

Webshots.

It's the best free download on the net.
On top of gorgeous photos, it's got easy screen-saver and wallpaper management.

Wow your friends.

See exotic locales.

Add life to your workspace.

Substitute your computer screen for the real world.

You may spend all day in a dark room interacting sporadically with a socially inbred group.
Stuck in a repeating loop of discourse, you retreat to your Webshots, to this window on a world with perfect hues and infinite zoom.

Who needs travel?
I've been around the world just this morning, and I took a swing by the Horsehead Nebula.

"I don't care how much the wine is worth." You could just tell how much she enjoyed the role of the righteously indignant. "It's nothing for him to just click and send. He can't even tear himself away from the computer long enough to run up to the State Store for his mother's birthday."

"If you don't want the wine, Mom, I'd love to have it. It probably cost a small fortune."

"It's all money with you young people. There was a time when people used to put something personal into gift giving."

"So, Mom, do you want the wine?"

Dan opened the picture file from Harold. A school girl stared back at him, oblivious to the precarious angle at which her ice-cream cone tipped. Certainly not Harold's girl. He hasn't become that brazen. Or stupid.

He dragged the jpeg to an icon on his desktop. Dan entered his password. The encryption was quickly removed to reveal Harold's weekly message.

The event was on for the coming weekend. Finally. Years of preparation and double lives were going to end on Saturday, one way or another.

Dan took the laptop,
took a last look,
took the train,
and took the pill.

I'm always closing the barn door after the horse.

Slowed down my driving speed after the car wreck.

Got my financial act together after I'd gotten myself into debilitating debt.

Got into shape after my knee was beyond repair.

Repaired the leak after the joists had rotted.

Started flossing after my teeth lost their integrity.

Started reading great literature after I lost my leisure time.

Learned the value of loving after I found myself alone.

Learned German after Hildegarde moved away.

Trimmed my toenails after I got a hole in my sock.

Learned the rules after the game was over.

Happy Birthday, Judi, wherever you are.

I got knocked out of my routine. My Palm failed (I took a tumble in the breezeway), and for the next two days I clunked around like a zombie, surprised and hobbled by my dependence on this modern marvel.

I couldn't call my grandmother because I didn't have her telephone number. My little guy missed his ball game. I postponed my shopping trip because I didn't have my list.

My wife wanted me to give up the Palm altogether. I told her she didn't know what she was asking.

Jealousy is an ugly thing.

Though he is only six, I see in him a "Failure is not an option" mentality.
He is oblivious to detractors and he accepts praise with a grace beyond his years.

I wonder if I have played a part in that. We read that once a child reaches six, the effects of parenting have pretty much run their course. It's worrisome on one hand and liberating on the other.

Sadly, I sometimes find myself taking comfort in the notion that poor parenting can lead to counter-intuitively positive results.

Additional relief comes from knowing that twins often turn out so differently.

We had a great time.
We were loving and caring and we gave each other space.
I erred a few times, and I both suffered and inflicted suffering due largely to carelessness.
I needed to remain vigilant to her hypersensitivity.
Christ, she cried when I called her on a minor detail.
By the end, I was once again the big bad guy.

Later, on the phone, we made up, graciously tripping over each other to put the blame firmly at our own doors.

We are picture-perfect when we are limited to communication by telephone.

Our eyes meet as fiery catalysts.

I intended to exercise my creative muscle by eschewing the daily journal approach to these Hundred Words entries. It has essentially worked that way, if not always gratifyingly so. I would not question it even now, had I not chanced upon some old journal entries the other day that surprised me with the details of my life that would have been lost to me forever. There are only so many hours in the day, and certainly precious few available for writing. Do I use it to record the minutiae of my personal history, or do I continue this questionable practice?