Newman And A New Man

Saturday September 27th, 2008 - Lake Villa, IL

It’s amazing how it takes someone’s death to make others take notice of their life. I was never a particularly close follower of Paul Newman’s career but he was such a household name for so long it was hard to avoid him. Everyone has seen at least one movie that he’s been in and most of us a lot more than that. He was a full blown old fashioned movie star.

I had read a little of where he had cancer and looked like he wouldn’t live very long but he was 83 so how big a tragedy was it really? He’d had a very good life and a long career and was as about as successful as anyone could want to be. Good for him. But what really caught my ear today was that his companies raised $250 million for charitable causes.

There were tributes to him on every form of media that has news broadcasts so it was a difficult task to miss the details of his life. Looking at it as a body of work I’d say he was a true success in every sense of the word. He did what he wanted to exactly on his terms.

By the time he was my age he was a movie legend. I live in a basement like ‘Spot’ from The Munsters. I can’t relate to his successes but I absolutely relate to his maverick spirit. I have done what I wanted to do with my life and didn’t care what anyone else thought of it and that’s what he did too. The only difference is he had millions of dollars to finance it.

He discovered racing and did that as a second career for many years and was good at it. I respect a person who finds his passion and is able to make a living at it. That’s not easy but he did it. What put it over the top for me was hearing of his charitable work with kids. He walked the walk and that to me is what true success really is. He did it the right way.

I bet he gave back more than he took from life and I admire that the most. If there is that next world I talked about yesterday I bet he’s probably got a good start going right away. I never really thought about his life until he was gone. Then it caused me to really respect a person who lived life the way I think it should be lived. Too bad I never got to meet him.

Maybe someday when they fish my bullet riddled corpse out of a swamp a new group of people that have never heard of me will stumble upon my verbal enemas and hopefully be entertained and/or enlightened by them. Either that or the police will comb them carefully in search of the clues as to what made me snap and go on that six state bloody rampage.

Actually doing this every day is a major reason for me not going on the rampage. I have a chance to gather my thoughts and empty my head at the end of every day and I’ve come to enjoy it. It’s a chance to flush my inner toilet once a day and I feel clean and refreshed.

I also feel good today that I took fourteen hours to sort out my computer files. It’s a task I’d been meaning to do for even longer than answering my emails and today was that day. I sorted and edited and deleted and rearranged and added to and I have made progress like I haven’t done since I don’t know when. I organized my projects and contacts and bought some discs and flash drives so I can back up all my data. For once. I feel like a new man!