Are you getting everything you can out of this life?
A self-less, feel-good blog about love, life, and work by career coach and existential adventurer, Cliff Flamer
My daughter is an empath of the highest order, Jedi-level capabilities.
When it comes to emotions, she’s as absorbent as a sponge, silently sitting there soaking up the mood molecules around her.
There is a disturbance in The Force, father.
She knows when the conversation is h… Read more...
I was 22. My girlfriend wouldn’t let me sleep because she wanted to fight, so I left the house. It was 3am and I didn’t have a plan.
I would have slept in my car, but she had driven the car home that night, so I didn’t know where it was parked.
I ended up on a pa… Read more...
We bought a ridiculously huge Slip N Slide.
Technically, it’s not even a Slip N Slide. It’s a commercial grade, 40-foot long inflatable blue water slide with 7-foot tall inflated rings that spray water down on you as you slide through. It takes up our whole yard.
(Fortu… Read more...
I wouldn’t say I grew up in a bar…
But there were a few formative years where I spent a lot of time in one.
Fiddler’s Green: a dive bar with an attached restaurant on Center street.
My dad’s best friend was the bartender, so he always sat at the bar and order… Read more...
My mom is starting to lose her memory.
Sometimes there are sweet moments, like how she reveres a sunset from her balcony while we drink Budweiser tall-boys.
And then there are the hard moments, like when I watch her forget where she is while walking down the street, when she messe… Read more...
Since roller coasters aren’t an option anymore due to my proclivity for dizziness (sob), I went to the water park with my daughter, instead.
We hit the Big Kahuna, The Typhoon Lagoon, and the wave pool.
But it was 70 degrees, not nearly warm enough for a water park. Even a la… Read more...
On the way to camp this morning, we passed Hazel’s elementary school and she started sobbing. I asked her what was wrong, though I already knew.
“I miss Miss Zimmerman,” she said from the back seat. And then she cried real hard, as if the words out loud were tell… Read more...
If I hadn’t stopped scrolling, I wouldn’t have started petting Ziggy.
If I hadn’t pet Ziggy, he never would have put his head in my lap and looked at me with those eyes to take him for a walk.
If I hadn’t gone for a walk, I would not have run into the Italia… Read more...
I agreed to play 30 consecutive games of Castle Mania with Hazel, or “The Troll Game” as we call it. (She had advocated for 50 games but I talked her down.)
Castle Mania is a simple but surprisingly suspenseful card game where you team up with each other to prevent a p… Read more...
My peeling deck is a trophy.
The damp garage, the unmanicured garden, the semi-clogged drain, my frayed hoodie.
Though ugly and inconvenient,
these things
are proof
that my focus is in the right place.