I finished watching “Band of Brothers.” The writers spent the last episode following the company in its last wartime posting. At the end, Richard Winters, one of two officers that make it through the entire series, explained what happened to the other soldiers that we had followed through the campaign. I remember when I first watched this episode on HBO (this was before my no-cable rule; I had a ReplayTV and while I recorded each week’s episode, I ended up watching them live more times than not), I was a bit disappointed by what happened to the soldiers. Except for a Wall Street Journal journalist, they didn’t amount to anything that I considered special. They lived their lives as simple men: mechanics, carpenters, human resource managers, and other mostly blue collar professions.

The reaction to this still embarrasses me. I tend to measure a person first by their intelligence and second by their jobs. It’s a silly measure, when I think about it. People are more than their jobs and they’re more than their intelligence. What the person does and how they think are important aspects, of course. But it is not the full measure of the person. Their accomplishments, be they family and friends, or effect on society or other people, is the true measure of a person. I think I tend to measure people by characteristics that I have in abundance. It’s easier to judge other people by these standards because I’ve excelled in them, and therefore they must be important from that perspective. What the soldiers in the series did—and I’m not speaking of what they did on the television, but what the real people accomplished as dramatized by the miniseries—made them great men.

When I first watched it, I assumed that Richard Winters, a Major by the end of the show, would be a CEO or important official in the civilian world. It doesn’t work that way. We shouldn’t define great people by these types of accomplishments. Let me try to put that another way: a person may be great based on their accomplishments, but a different person placed in the same situation may have been just as great. The alcohol is still fogging my brain a bit, and I’m not doing a good job of conveying this notion.

I’ll back it up a bit. To use the miniseries as an example, we could not predict a soldier’s courage before he entered the battlefield. There are character traits of people that do not show themselves until put to the test. This is why I keep going back to that “Fight Club” saying: how can I know my own valor or characteristics without a test? Ah, like most things I speak about, this one comes back to me. Not only was I embarrassed by my thoughts on the professions of the soldier, the fact that they were tested and I wasn’t also concerns me.

My thoughts are cloudy and my logic is not sound. I’m sitting on my porch on a beautiful Seattle summer day. The temperature reached into the seventies today, and now hovers in the upper sixties. It was clear and wonderful with only the remnants of clouds floating through the sky. It was the type of day where it helped to stand in the sun because the breeze felt cool and I welcomed the warmth of the sun.

The difficulty in my writing, as I said before, is a result of the buzzing in my heads. I drank a glass of wine with dinner at my local Italian restaurant. It was only a glass, but it sent me on a bit of a loop. I had hoped to write grand thoughts in my Moleskine at dinner or by the lake, but it didn’t happen. Instead, I worked my way through yet another New Yorker, attempting, always feebly, to catch up with the never-ending onslaught in my mailbox. I ate a heavy chicken cutlet Parmigian, which was better than I remembered. They still don’t use salt in the kid-friendly restaurant, but the cooked the chicken with the perfect amount of cheese, and I cleaned the plate, including the mound of spaghetti. I wasn’t paying attention much to what I ate I was a bit surprised when I looked down and realized it was all gone. I must have been hungry than I thought. This week my eating habits have ranged from healthy salads to greasy pizzas and everywhere in between. It was nice to end the week on a delicious meal (since I’m flying out tomorrow to visit Doolies (yeah!), I consider this my last dinner in Seattle).

Before dinner, I took a wonderful walk to my favorite spot by the lake. The spot is about a ten minute walk from the Castle, down a steep hill and across the park. Seward Park, which is the namesake of my neighborhood, juts out like a thumb into Lake Washington. I prefer the right side of the lake (looking at it from my porch and while approaching it, that is; I’m not sure which way is north from here thanks to my directionally challenged brain), where there are cemented rocks along the water shaded by large trees. Families of duck float near the spot, and the woman I wrote about last time was throwing tennis balls into the lake for her white dog to fetch. She was with a different woman this week, but they both seemed happy. A SUV kept its doors open and played loud music in the parking area behind my favorite spot. It broke my concentration a bit, but I didn’t mind. I would have preferred silence, of course, or at least not changing the song every thirty seconds, but, as too many people say at work (I’m becoming one of them, no matter how hard I fight), “it is what it is,” or, in this case, “it was what it was.”

The water was cleaner than last time I sat there. Much of the muck and twigs had washed away. I didn’t write much or think about much. Instead, I enjoyed the quiet lapping of the water on the rocks, and watched the birds fly around me. Four small birds with blue backs received much of my attention. They flew acrobatic circles near the water, diving and hovering and circling above the water. They were fast little birds, and flapped their wings almost constantly. The tiny birds would have impressed fighter jet pilot with their feats, turning and twisting, seemingly at the final moment, to stay millimeters above the water.

I thought about a bicycle ride tonight, but I decided against it. While I enjoy parts of bike riding, walking agrees with me more for contemplating and writing. Not that I accomplished much of that—well, not until I returned home and started pounding out these words—but I did have hopes for the trip.

Doolies had a particularly good attending at work today, and he corrected her on her use of “like,” telling her she sounded like (hehe) a teenager every time she used. I decided that Doolies and I were now on “like” and “umm” watches, trying to improve our speaking patterns. Doolies claimed that it was too hard, but my continuing ridicule of her should fix her of that notion. I called to check on the status of the engagement ring, and while it won’t be ready for this weekend, it is ahead of schedule, and the saleswoman said it should be ready around the fourth of July.

I spoke with my mother briefly today, and she referenced my writing. She agrees with my video-game-induced-headache theory. Now, it’s not hard for her to agree with this theory since she probably thinks I spend too much time in front of computers—something that, I would like to remind her, has paid off handsomely in my chosen career. But even with that said, as I said earlier, I am leaning toward cutting down on video game nights. Tonight might have been one of those nights, especially since I will leave Seattle tomorrow night and not have a chance to play video games until next week (if at all). Had I played tonight, I would not have written this. I would have been left with the two sentences I managed to write before getting home from work, and the twenty or so words I sketched into my Moleskine during my dinner and walk. Not that there’s much here of value, but I’m still of the opinion that this writing will somehow help me in my Quest.

I don’t think I’m going to attempt much in the way of stories today. Yesterdays were a half-hearted attempt, and I thought about them while walking. I’m still gnawing on the continuity and subject matter. I have decided on the story for Nanowrimo in November. It’s based loosely on one of the short-short stories I pounded out, which was, in turn, based on a story idea I had written down long before. I’m not sure how much development I’ll do on the idea before November—or even if I’ll wait for November to use the idea—but since Chuck has declared that he has an idea, I wanted to have one as well. It’s no Pink Sweater, but, then again, I never want to think about that wretched pile of words again.

I don’t have much else to add tonight. I find myself with a few hundred words left and in the terrible position of having to fill them with, well, filler. I’m not a fan of these ending paragraphs, but I’ve found that occasionally I’ll hit upon something that actually interests me. I’m hoping to focus more on storytelling in the coming weeks. I seemingly have forgotten how to write stories, finding myself, instead, writing fragments of about a page length. Even my list of what I should do while writing has not helped inspire me (not that I thought a list written while in the fathoms of not writing would help me produce much).

I’ve been thinking of trying to break up these long musings and post them in separate subjects. That way, it should be easier to identify the subjects and find the stuff that is worth reading. The problem with that strategy, however, is that then I have to name each of those fragments. The real reason I wanted to do that was to make my writing more accessible. But as I think about it more, I’m still not convinced that I want these long musings to be accessible. They’re written for me—as I’ve made clear in my much older writings—and the work involved in breaking them out seems not worth the reward. I still enjoy these writings (as all writers should) and that’s all that counts, at least in my small, black book.

My laundry should be ready soon, and I’ll get to folding them before piling the clothes I’ll bring to California tomorrow morning. Doolies planned a nice weekend for us. We have two reservations at restaurants, a date to watch “Batman Begins,” and tickets to an Arthur Miller play. But that’s all second billing to seeing Doolies again. I can’t wait to be with her more than just on these distant weekends. She’ll be staying in Seattle for the month of September, and I can’t wait for that to happen. It’s difficult not to be able to hold her whenever I want to. But I know good things are worth the wait, and Doolies are definitely a good thing. The Doolies name, as I think I’ve said before, comes from the “millions of Doolies” that I always say when I hold her—the meaning for me is that I will be with Doolies a million moments, and therefore there is a million of her. I never articulated that before, but that’s what’s creeping through my brain.

I draw to an end a few minutes before 10pm. It’s time to fold laundry and prepare for a hopefully crow-free night’s sleep. I haven’t done anything about the crow problem, by the way. I’ll get to it when I get to it (of course, had I done something about it, I would now be sleeping much better and would be in general happier—which is a small price to pay for the fifteen minutes it would take me to buy the ladder, but I digress. When have I ever made it easy on myself?).