Category: Uncategorized

It Can All Happen In An Instant

Rob Says2 Comments

2017-12-018a

A little over a year ago, I had knee surgery. I tore my outer meniscus on my right knee by simply getting out of the truck. No weird twisting, no over-exertion, nothing like that. Just opening the door and stepping out.

Since it was a work related injury, I was covered under the worker’s compensation fund. Before I could get the surgery, I had to get an MRI to see exactly what was going on inside my knee and be able to pinpoint where the damage was and how much damage was there. Before I could get the MRI, I had to do physical therapy. MRI’s and surgery ain’t cheap if you didn’t know, and worker’s compensation wants to try everything else possible before going the expensive route.

While I was doing physical therapy and was waiting for the go ahead to get the MRI, I was hobbling along, doing the best I could with a bum knee. One evening, my girlfriend and I decided to take a shower together. It’s a regular routine for us. If you don’t shower with your partner, I highly recommend it. It’s a great excuse to see them nekkid, it’s a chance to get your back washed, it’s a great way to conserve water if that’s your thing, and it’s a chance for a moment of intimacy.

While we were in the shower, we talked about our days, we washed each other, and my girl decided to give me a shave. This is one of her skills that I love about her. The willingness to show affection and take care of me. She started by shaving my head and then moved on to my face and neck, making sure to not shave the beard off. While she was shaving my neck, I’m standing with my left leg locked and my right leg slightly “askew.” I say that because I couldn’t lock my knee on this leg because of the injury. While she is shaving my neck I’m looking up towards the ceiling. I start feeling a little bit funny and so I say, “I’m feeling a little light headed.” I was planning on squatting down in the shower to get the blood flow back into my brain. Yeah right. Good idea. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.

I come to in the bottom of the tub. Any time in my past when I have passed out, my hearing is what comes back first. Followed by my vision and then my body. It’s strange passing out, you don’t realize until after the fact that you did. Coming to is like waking up from a dream. You can hear things going on around you, but you think you’re dreaming them. My experience has been that when I’m “waking up,” everything is chaos. This time was no different.

I can hear her screaming my name over and over. I hear her say that she’s going to call an ambulance. I hear her leave the bathroom and go into the bedroom to grab her phone. About this time, my vision comes back and I realize I’m lying in the bottom of the tub. The shower is off and I’m soaking wet. Why the fuck am I lying in the bottom of the tub?

My girl comes running back into bedroom, buck naked and soaking wet, phone in hand. She’s crying. I tell her, “Hang on. Don’t call an ambulance yet. Just give me a minute.” My body and brain are still trying to reboot and get back online. I don’t know exactly how long I laid there in the bottom of the tub, but it felt like hours. Finally my brain and body are talking to each other again and I feel stable enough that I think I can get out of the tub without too much problem and hopefully I won’t injure myself any more than I already have.

My girl helped me out of the tub and walked me to the bed so that I could lie down for a minute and get my shit together. As we pass the bathroom mirror, I glance at myself, and I shit you not, I’m ghost white from head to toe. I lied down on the bed and let my brain and my body finish getting their shit together, and I ask her what happened. She preceded to tell me the very little that I knew, the part about me saying that I was feeling light-headed, and then from there the story got interesting.

“You stiffened up and then your mouth went slack. You started slowly sliding down the wall of the shower. I grabbed you and I started saying your name and you didn’t answer. You went completely white. I didn’t want you to crash down and bust your head open or something, so I tried holding you up, but you were dead weight. I started slapping you across the face to get you to respond, but you didn’t. I couldn’t hold on to you so I helped you slide down the wall and into the bottom of the tub. I was saying your name over and over, but you wouldn’t respond. I started freaking out. I thought you were dead. I thought maybe you had a stroke or a heart attack or something. Your eyes were open the whole time.”

That’s when she really started sobbing. I sat up and held her and told that everything was going to be all right. That I was going to be fine. That I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. She was really freaked out by the whole experience. If memory serves me correctly, this was the first time that she had ever seen someone pass out for whatever reason.

While it has taken me a while to write about this experience, and it’s taken you however long to read about it, the actual experience when it happened, the passing out and coming to part of it at least, was under 30 seconds. From me saying that I was feeling light-headed to coming to at the bottom of the tub and telling my girl to hold off on calling the ambulance was less than 30 seconds.

Yeah, so? What’s the point?

The point is that your life can be over faster than you can blink your eyes. You can be going along, minding your own business, doing whatever it is that you are doing, and just like that, it’s over.

You may think that what you do doesn’t matter, that nothing matters. You couldn’t possibly be more wrong. Everything matters. All of it. What you say, what you do, it fucking matters.

When I passed out, I had and have no recollection of what happened. Zero. I only know because of what my girl told me. I’m not sure what happens after we die, I don’t know about reincarnation or some kind of afterlife. The thought that I put to word, but feel a little shiver of fear when I utter it is, there is no afterlife. There is no reincarnation. When we die, it’s like turning off a light switch. One moment you are there, the next you are not.

Everything matters. You have this one life to live. What you do with it is up to you. You don’t know when your time is up. It’s up when it’s up. What are you doing to make the most of your time here? What kind of legacy will you leave behind when you are gone?

Oh, my surgery? I had it about a month after my incident in the shower. The doc fixed it up fine and it’s healed as much as it’s going to. Squatting is a bit painful for me now, I have to do a modified squat to get down. I can’t run as fast as I used to, and I can’t run for as long either, my knee starts to fatigue. When a storm is coming on, my knee gets achy, it’s my own personal barometer I guess, and it hasn’t been wrong yet. When I went in for the surgery itself, they put me under via anesthesia. I remember being wheeled into the operating theater, getting some chitchat with the nurse, and then waking up in a recovery room. It literally went like that. No talk about, “Okay, we are giving you the sedative, you should feel warm and tingly, we need you to count backwards from 10 to 1,” type of shit. I was talking and then I woke up. The surgery was a little over an hour. That’s an hour of life that I know nothing about other than through other people.

Light switch on. Light switch off.

What you do matters. Everything matters.

Sharpen your Mind. Weaponize it. Start here and here. Sign up for my newsletter here.

My Cats Send Their Regards

Rob SaysLeave a comment

Let me tell you a story. It starts everyday when I get home from work. The long haired Maine Coon hybrid, his name is Nermal, is waiting for me, like a dog, at the top of the stairs. He’s so excited to see me. He’ll start crying and meowing as I’m locking up the door. He’ll cry and meow as I’m walking up the stairs. He’ll meow and reach up and put his front paws on my leg as I reach the landing. He wants me to pick him up, which is no little thing, considering he’s about 20 lbs of cat. So I’ll pick him up and carry him into the kitchen and I’ll rub his head as I’m doing it. He’ll push back against my hand and his motor will be running the whole time. His purrs are very loud.

Kubuki, my tuxedo cat, will come out from behind the stereo entertainment system, or out from under the kitchen table, or out from under the couch, where ever she has been hanging out, and she’ll cry and start rubbing up against my legs, begging to be petted.

This routine happens every day. From what the girlfriend tells me, Nermal will start meowing and crying when I leave the house. He’ll either go down the stairs and cry at the door, or he’ll sit on the landing and do it. Apparently he’ll do this for quite some time. My girlfriend has tried to shut him up, distract him, try to get him to come to her during my absence, all to no avail. I guess my cats are devoted to me.

Later in the evening, or during a lazy weekend at home, when ever my girlfriend or I try to sit on the couch with our laptops, the cats come along and want to be front and center. They will sit right on the laptop itself, right while you are typing whatever it is that you are typing. We can push them off and two minutes later, they are back. They will try to force themselves either on us, or in between us while we are relaxing in the living room.

The only “peace” we get from them is when we go to bed at night, and that’s only because the bedroom is a “cat free zone” because we shut the door at night. Even then, Nermal especially, will sit outside the door and do this guttural, weird, “meow howl.” He is going “feral” as I call it. I can open the door and tell him to shut up. That only encourages him. I can use a spray bottle filled with water and hose him down. I’ve done that many many times. All it has done is get him to move out of range. He’s a smart bastard.

What is the point of this story? I’ve realized that I have learned many lessons from my cats. The lesson I’m illustrating here is Persistence. My cats are nothing but persistent. They will have their way eventually. They are pretty patient about it too. Nothing deters them from getting what they want. They want to be on me? It WILL happen. Sooner or later, it will. What does this have to do with anything?

It is about EVERYTHING. Everything you do, you must be persistent. You want to get in better shape because you let yourself go? Persistence. You didn’t get fat overnight, you ain’t gonna lose it overnight either. You want to make more money? Again, persistence. You’re going to have to get up and get your ass out there. You’re going to have to hustle.

Want to start your own business? Persistence again. When you first come up with an idea, it’s awesome. You are full of piss and vinegar, ready to take on the world. You’ve done some research and found something that you would like to do, and so you do it. You build a website, you get your license to do whatever it is that you want to do. You get your tax I.D. You even find some product or service to sell, whatever that is and then…..

Nothing happens. No customers are banging down your door to buy whatever it is that you are offering. So you place some ads, you tweet your shit on twitter, you post on facebook a bunch of times, you take an ad out on Craigslist. And still nothing.

This is where persistence is key. You HAVE to keep going. Otherwise your business will fail before it had a chance, before it even got off the ground. This is the part you DON’T hear about on YouTube videos or on some course that you bought on the internet. This is where it becomes WORK.

Persistence is getting up at o’dark thirty everyday, rain or shine, and going to the gym. Persistence is when you don’t see any results at all, but you keep hammering at it anyway. Persistence is when you have faith that something, sooner or later, will happen. Persistence is when you go out chasing women and you get blown out. And you WILL get blown out. But maybe, just maybe, that next one will say yes to your invitation. You won’t know until you go after it. One thing I do know is if you quit, you WON’T be getting that woman that is right in front of you.

Persistence is getting your ass out of bed every day to go to work. Especially when you don’t want to. Persistence is writing another e-mail, another blog post, making another phone call, crafting another tweet, posting another picture on IG. All when you are the only one that is reading them or looking at them. All when everybody doesn’t read that post, doesn’t answer that call, or hangs up on you.

Persistence is pushing ever forward even when you sometimes want to give up and watch Netflix.

Think about your kids if you got them, or how you may have been as a kid. When you and your family went on a road trip, what did the kids do the most? “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” That was me as a child. I’d say it so much my Dad would get pissed off and say, “Don’t make turn this car around!” And then I would say it again for good measure. That’s persistence.

Look at these two lovelies:

How can I say no to that?

Persistence is work. You have to keep at it everyday. Even when it seems pointless and stupid. Even when you don’t want to. Especially when you don’t want to.

“But I’m tired!” Yeah? Me too. Cry me a river. I’ll get plenty of sleep when I’m dead.

As a final note, my cat’s both sleep with one eye open. There’s a lesson there too, but that’s for another day. 😉

Sharpen your Mind. Weaponize it. Start here and here. Sign up for my newsletter here.

Beardruff

Rob SaysLeave a comment

pexels-photo-247885.jpeg

Beards. I’ve had one for years. I started out with a goatee, and now I’m sporting the full beard similar to the one in the picture above.

I’ve had some young gentlemen ask me about my beard, specifically how to grow one that is as thick as mine is. Hate to break it to you men, I haven’t found a product or a solution to growing that thick, full beard. Maybe there is a genuine product out there, but I haven’t found one.

What I’ve found is that most of it comes down to genetics and time. Do the men in your family have thick full beards? If so, you’ll have one too. Eventually. That’s where the time part comes in. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t grow a thick, full beard to save my life. I had these patchy spots on my cheeks, somewhat near my chin. My beard was also very scraggly and thin at that time. This went on until I reached my mid to late twenties. At that point, all of the patchy spots grew in, and as time has gone on, the thickness and fullness has truly reached its prime. I’ve even had a guy claim that I have a “magnum opus” beard. No light gets down to the skin, you can’t see my chin and cheeks underneath the hair. I get all sorts of comments and complements on my beard these days, from both men and women alike.

I’m not writing this to brag about my beard, really I’m not. I’m writing it because with having a beard, there are many issues and responsibilities that come with it. My biggest issue has been “Beardruff.” Flaky, dead, dry skin that comes out of the beard and ends up as an unsightly pile of “dust” on your shirt. Like dandruff, beardruff blows.

There is something you can do about it though.

George Bruno over on Youtube created a great video on how to deal with beardruff. Check it out:

He’s really just touching the tip of the iceberg with beard care. Not only is what George talking about great, but there’s more.

You really need a great beard oil. Beard oil will help soften your beard and make it more manageable. It can also help with the itch that you get when growing out your beard.

George turned me on to Kingsmen beard oil. Their Holy Grail beard oil is fantastic. It’s smells amazing and a little goes a long way. A side benefit about this beard oil is that the women enjoy it too. Try it, see what happens. I’m not shitting you.

Beard oil is the first step. After that, you really need a beard balm. Beard balm is great because it further softens your beard and helps bring it under control. My beard used to be all over the place, like it had a mind of its own. With beard balm, that’s no longer an issue. Instead of having this wild rat’s nest hanging on my face, I now have a very manageable and well behaved beard. Kingsmen also make a great beard balm. The Holy Grail beard balm works great. Same great smell as their beard oil. Both are very affordable.

So check it out. Pick some up. Thank me later.

728
2016: Before oil and balm
2018 after beard oil and balm