How am I alive?

I guess I started pondering that question right before Halloween. I was combining candies and considered Payday, peanuts around nougat. I started to put it back thinking of horror stories of children and peanuts these days. Then I remembered the peanuts in the M&Ms and the Snickers and decided I wasn't clearing the decks for something parents should review anyway.

Within days, I also saw a report on the growing percentage of children allergic to common things in our world.

It made me wonder, am I lucky or has something gone askew in the human condition? Because when I remember how I lived my childhood, I guess I should be dead.

We ate everything. The kid who was allergic to something was quite the anomaly. School lunches were an assembly line with Sloppy Joe's guaranteed one day and pizza another. Memory fades, but I'd suspect the other three days were top of the nutrition chain and reviewed to be allergy approved.

But it's even worse. I think of the creeks in which I played and sometimes foolishly ingested. I realize the world has gotten generally dirtier in the decades since. But I lived in a burg next to an Air Force base and airplane manufacturing site. Near the creek, they had a dump site which I recall once had an fighter jet tail section. The manufacturing site was also where they developed composites that eventually became the stealth technology we use today. Who knows what all leached out from those operations as they went through failed composites, leached into the creek from which I was catching crawdads on a string with bacon tied on the end.

And then there were my bicycle habits. The bike itself would probably be considered an outlawed death trap. Stingray, high rise handlebars and a gold banana set with sparkles (funny how what was fashion at one time would now get my sexual preferences questioned).

Our daily use of the bicycle would also be considered deadly today and only allowed as an extreme sport with adult supervision with paramedics standing by. We just found the biggest, steepest hill around, put a launch ramp at the bottom comprised of a big rock and a board and went flying.

Most importantly to the overprotective parents today, this is without helmets. In our day, such headgear would be more dangerous than banging your head as it would get you beaten to a pulp daily. I've never quite understood the mandate of helmets when I think of the plethora of bicycle rides for my friends and I, the amazing wrecks, and the dearth of head injuries. I've had friends who've been saved by their headgear as adults, but it seems as though we've legislated for the very few from my own experience. I also find it especially ironic as today's helmets remind me of half of the deadly peanut shell.

Then, there is night. Night is a special memory for me. Even for a child, there came a point in Texas when day just was too debilitating to be outside. But summer evenings were an escape, a chance to burn off energy and see the world in literally a different light. We got to run the streets in the night, and dash through backyards. There were almost no fences for some reason, the neighborhoods weren't cordoned off house by house but an open field. If I lived my summer nights now as I did as a child, I'd be shot within 10 yards. Although no self-respecting parent can allow their child to enjoy a summer's night in a world suddenly full of disappearing children and Nancy Grace trumpeting the failures of everyone but herself which led to the tragedy.

Surely, if I were a child today, I'd be dead. Maybe that reality - or that view of reality - is what makes childhood seem so much shorter these days.

Stages

I have an odd hobby. I'm a stage sampler.

Using tactics that can be described between sneaky and blatant, I find my way onto performance stages.

It's not simply some fantasy/hero worship. I've had official access to many stages and during The Lost Years when I helped manage some performers, I stood on stages with various performers to argue not over who went before an audience in what order, but who conducted sound check in what order. I understand stage pettiness.

And although I've been on stages with thousands of people out front and gazed upon the adoring throngs, I'm not so enamored with that either. To me, I guess it's like a history lesson.

I look from blank stages out onto the audience site and try to remember the vision for when I'm on the other side. I trace backstage to dressing rooms and consider the ingress and egress of musicians. I look closely at the backdrop and note the vast difference between the flimsiness you see in immediacy and the falsity from an audience. I consider the floor and review whatever is in my memory of the footsteps and perspiration of performers I know have worked and played in that spot.

Some of those stages are ones anyone can access, like Gruene Hall and Luckenbach. Although I was lucky enough at Luckenbach to find a posted set list from the previous night's Pat Green show, which I stole.

Some just take the right timing, like the Austin Music Hall and La Zona Rosa. Although those were as much fun for the ragged room/nasty couch backstages into which I sneaked.

Some are just pure luck and timing, like The Erwin Center when I walked in the wrong door at the right time.

But without doubt, my favorite is Austin City Limits. I was in the building on a Saturday morning to do a public television show as an alleged watcher of the economy. Like lots of television and movies, it was a bunch of hurry up and wait. So I wandered. And in an adjacent studio, I got into ACL.

The famous backdrop and the corridor through which so many unbelievable performers had passed to applause growing in their ears. The simplicity of it all. The boards that had supported a score of names I reviewed in my mind. And the view all those people had of the simple bleachers in front of them.

I'm glad I squeezed that one in. As we speak, a new studio is being constructed for ACL in downtown Austin, ensuring it will be engulfed in the shadow of all the condo buildings that are so not Austin it makes the famous ACL backdrop have to be either misrepresentative or pointless. I always laugh at venues which move and carry the stage itself or a piece to the new spot. It's kind of like carrying around a lock of a child's hair in your pocket. It's not the smile or scent or complete package that creates the whole, it's a false sense of connection.

So I get to carry all those complete stages in my mind's eye, especially ACL. What's next, Madison Square Garden?

Friends II

Circumstance has led to the need for an addendum to the previous post because a new question has arisen. How forgiving should you be as a friend?

The reality - there is someone who I really what to be my friend, and believe we have been friends. But there has been a lot taken for granted. Repeated failures to follow through on agreements and promises. A belief that a basic apology or profession of feelings makes it all okay. So, I very likely put a knife in the friendship this weekend.

Of course, I feel guilty and sad. I'm too focused on my limited friendships to be casual about losing one. But there comes a point when you must have self respect.

A friendship is a two-way street. Both people have to invest. Each has to treat the other as valuable and worthwhile. It requires time. It requires dedication. You cannot expect a friendship to be self-sustaining. It needs nurturing.

I have friendships that have endured for decades although the interaction between myself and the friend may have gaps of months or even years. But they were each established long ago over long periods of more work. They have a foundation.

But for newer ones, I believe they need time spent together. Friendship grows or withers with interaction. Because within that interaction you see proof of trust, connection and mutual respect. The two prove they value one another by what they do, not what they say.

I have been told I'm too rigid and I'm unrealistic about friendship. Some came to that conclusion from experience, and I agree with them. There have been times in my evolution where I spent more time telling everyone to constantly prove it than actually looking at the reality. I hope I've remedied that somewhat, and believe the proof it's better is in the fact some who fed me my medicine have come back around as friends.

But I still have a line I have to draw. I'm one who does not allow myself to be taken advantage of for very long. I know it limits my friendships. But it also makes the ones I have real. I used to honestly believe one strike and you're out. But as my own foibles became so much more apparent, I've come to realize so many factors can cause a friend to fail you now and then. Circumstance, maturity and humanity can cause my friends to fail.

Yet I still must have a limit. I believe it makes me more valuable as a friend. It maintains my self respect. And it expresses my expectations, which allows people to choose to meet them or not.

I can forgive. Even more than once. But not forever.