The Dose # 36: “Soup For Me!”

(with all due apologies to Larry David and his Soup Nazi)

I woke up on Friday morning feeling shaky, but good enough to get my ass out of bed and produce.

Wednesday and Thursday were rough. I had the flu and all its attendant projectile symptoms, but primarily a raging fever. I don’t write well when my brains are boiling, and I was getting afraid I was going to let all of my peep-a-roo readers down.

It was very important to execute Dose #33 flawlessly (according to my own standards, of course) and I was pretty mentally handicapped. The flow was slowed, but I’m a pretty persistent bugger, if y’all haven’t figured that out by now. I hit my personal goals and benchmarks on that one, but it was a struggle.

#34 was a bit of a throwaway admittedly. I was sick, and felt like whining. I already had the impassioned plea for networking help cached from a previous writing session, because although we may be getting page views, there really isn’t much feedback or commentary going on. In fact, it’s working title was “Impassioned Plea”.

So I just lumped the whining and the cheerleading together, threw it out there, and slept for two days straight.

I post links to the blog-o-thon on five facebook sites after I hit the “Publish” button on blogspot. My personal site, Skaneateles Talk, Do It, The Shuffling Hungarians Band page, and if the material has something to do with music making, the CNY Music archive group, and then try to re-post on my personal facebook feed site in 6 hour intervals. That’s it.

All the rest of the networking has to be left up to youse guys. The ultimate reach of this thing is really dependent on you. I haven’t found the sweet spot in making that case yet. Unfortunately, there are more passive readers than readers that have attached sharing and participating to the process.

No matter. I won’t give up trying. If you want me to stop yammering on that point, just hit the share button right after you’re done reading. I’ll shut up eventually.

When I posted my “I’m sick and I’m feeling sorry for myself blog” last Thursday, it had a visual component of a a guy in bed with the flu accompanied with the tag line “Someone send a chicken soup I.V., STAT”. A feeble attempt at a joke.

Friday morning my fever finally broke. I was dehydrated, but I could stand up without falling down. I had lost two days of focused work.

I got up, drank two pots of Cafe Bustelo, recaptured my flow and groove as I wrote and did the layout for Dose #35 (Flare Night) for an 8pm publication launch, made a mess of phone calls, walked the dogs, tossed them in the car, drove to Auburn NY to rehearse with my friend Holly for the final preparation for a show on Saturday in Skaneateles with my childhood heroes The Dean Brothers, zipped back to Syracuse and arrived in back home on Helen Street at around 5:30pm. I hadn’t eaten in three days, and the only real food in the apartment in any redundant quantity was in a Tupperware bin for the dogs. I spent my last $25 on gas, and was looking forward to a light repast of shaved turkey, salad croutons, peanuts, and water.

I live above an Art Gallery and Framing shop. As I was corralling my rock and roll doggies before they flew out of the car and out into traffic, I ran into Kate Alibrandi (the shop owner) and my dear friend (and landlord) Styleen.

Kate greeted me with this, complete with “ooh-la-la” inflections:

“You have a secret admirer”

Me (of which the concept of a secret admirer hasn’t been personally felt or detected since 1987) says: “Huh?” replete with Scooby Doo upward vocal inflections.

“Some guy came by with two quarts of chicken soup from The Brooklyn Pickle for you… Eileen put them in your fridge upstairs”

As I was trying to process this, I finally came up with: “Did he say from who?”

“Anonymous”

Really? Anonymous? Oy Vey, do I have issues with “Anonymous” or anonymity in general for that matter.

After Huck and Doo lavished much doggie love upon the gals, I trudged upstairs, exhausted. It had been a long day, and I had to stay up until 8:01 to publish the Daily Dose about Flare Night in Skanny Town.

Why anonymous? Doesn’t that person know just how much an act like this means to me?

My normal intercourse with “anonymous” are with people that want to say hurtful things but don’t have enough spine to attach their words to a real personae, a typical occurrence in feedback based platforms. Have you ever read the trolling commentaries on youtube video forums, NOLA.com, Syracuse.Com, or blogs for that matter? You wouldn’t believe the crap that “Anonymous” can come up with.

This is something I avoid like the plague. If I take the time to formulate and then express an opinion, I attach my name to it. “Dem’s Da Rules” in Georgie’s World. Integrity must come first, always.

But this was a different form of “Anonymous”. Its intent not to hurt, but to heal.

As with The Dose installments about The SAMMY AWARDS (Daily Dosages #20 and #21 / “Lucky Leopard” & “Patina”) resulting in three long stem roses appearing magically in a vase, my last post resulted in actual and virtual sustenance.

Chicken Soup for The Soul.

A lovely way to deliver a message I needed, just at the exact time I needed it.

Because I’m being prevented from thanking “Anonymous” directly, I have to thank every set of eyes that have read 35 consecutive blog installments over 11,000 times in the past month.

“Anonymous” gets what I’m trying to do with this blog, to the point of actually keeping me alive to continue to do it for a few more days.

“Anonymous” gets the message, and understands it, even better than I do. Every single one of you that reads The Blog-O-Thon is a chicken soup bearing “Anonymous”. “Anonymous” just turned you all into Spartacus, or at least claiming that you are.

How does it feel to be the leader of a rebel gladiator army fighting to end the concept of slavery a little under 2,000 years before anybody else thought of doing it?

There are conceptual parallels here, peep-a-roos. I am confident that you won’t end up as floating street decorations on the Appian Way, but growth isn’t pain free either. Breaking concrete blockage in the collective world mindset isn’t exactly a high paying no-show job.

As a very close friend once said, “No one ever died of shame”.

I’d like to tweak that a bit. “Historically, people do die for standing up and being counted for an alternate way of thinking, but usually the ones that bite the dust prematurely are the head of the snake”

Y’all got nothing to worry about!

I love you. You made my day, my month and my year today.

So to the entire Peep-A-Roo Tribe and Daily Dose Addicts, thank you for reading, and every now and again sending soup over when I’m sick. I know now more than ever that I am not alone in this world, nor ever will be as long as I keep the core principles front and center:

Share Love. Show Love. Express Love… and do it with ultimate Gratitude.

Pull off that spiritual hat trick and additional overtime sudden death goal and I can guarantee with absolute certainty that you that you won’t feel alone either.

I’m gonna post a Dose every day to make sure to remind you. The Daily Dose is in the discipline.

And in the soup, of course.

“You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right”

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK “SHARE” BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE “SHARING”, WHAT YOU JUST READ…. DOESN’T EXIST!

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