What are your top ten favorite movies?

Any Tom Cruise movie, he hasn’t made a bad one, the first Terminator, the first three Star Wars, all of the Quentin Tarantino movies, the three Lethal weapon movies, Close encounters of the third kind,any Clint Eastwood movies all the westerns and Dirty Harry movies even the Any which way you can movies. The Jaws trilogy, the God father movies, there are so many movies I can have about, these are just the tip of the iceberg.

What positive emotion do you feel most often?

Contentment. Ninety percent of the time I am just content with who I am, where I am, what I have and comfortable in my own skin. Let me preface this with the fact that it has taken nearly my entire adult life to get here, even though the mentors in my life have been telling me for years this is all that really matters in our lives it still took me forever to get here. I have spent many hours and years with my children on the importance of self happiness how we are the only ones who can impact our feelings and our lives. We all know how difficult it is when we have to deal with the pressure of the world, especially those teenage years when peer pressure is raging through the schools, the malls and even our neighborhood. I can speak from experience when I say nothing anybody says to us can alter our own way of thinking or how we feel, the key is training our mind to be stronger, greater than anyone and anything. Our minds tell our bodies what to do, controls every aspect of our being. Control your mind you control your world.

What is a word you feel that too many people use?

I have such little interaction with people it’s hard to pinpoint one word and I think with all the words in the English language and all the people in America as well as the world we may never find that one overused word. Plus with the different generations we have it makes it more difficult to find that word. I do have the privilege of spending time on the English language because my wife who is from Thailand is studying English to improve her own vocabulary. It is mandatory boggling how difficult English is with many words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings or different words that mean the same thing. I have no idea how all this came about, I find the challenge of trying to explain our language crazy at best. Thankfully I rarely shy away from a challenge and in the process my wife is teaching me Thai and sad to say I butcher the crap out of it, but we are a work in progress and happy to have our time together. I will say my all time favorite word is motherfucker, it has a great strength to it and can be used quite a few different ways.

Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone.

My wife will tell you I am too kind to people which to me is a mystery because by and large I don’t like people, being out in public irks the fuck out of me, but the is something in my subconscious that overrides my thoughts. One of my wife’s coworkers wanted to open a bank account but her visa expired and she doesn’t have a social security number, this came up just as a matter of fact-ish so I immediately looked for and found a bank that lets you open an account without a SSN, I told my wife the next day we were at the bank during they’re break between lunch and dinner I vouched for her and it’s been great for her for over a year now. A friend of ours needed to be picked up from the airport the time worked out good for me she I immediately said yes. Over the last 15-20 years I find myself saying yes all the time and it drives my wife crazy which is weird because I say yes to her all the time. I’m the guy that actually shows up when you want to move something and/or somewhere, it feels right to me, I don’t think I’ll ever figure out why mostly I think it’s because I wasn’t so nice in my younger years, maybe because I did so many terrible things it’s my subconscious way of making things right. I want nothing in return, well maybe a smile and a simple thank you.

What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?

So many, but it was also a different time in the world, families were much closer back then. We had friends from the neighborhood, from school and we were all very social. My parents loved Sunday dinner and we all had to be there which for me sucked big time. I have 3 brothers with wives so 3 sister in-laws who seemed to be vying for the top tier for my mother and father. None of them got along with each other or my wife, so for me it was a shit show every Sunday. I also worked for my dad with one of my brothers and that brought a lot of difficulties to the table. My parents loved Christmas and that was a mandatory be there holiday. When I moved away my dad said always be home for Christmas and I did until he was gone. When we had kids we tried to create traditions, but divorce put an end to that as well as parents who couldn’t get along at all. For me traditions keep you locked into an old behavior and belief, kind of like ground hog day. After awhile the excitement wears off and it becomes a pain in the ass chore that you only do because you’ve been doing for so long. There’s more to life than that and it’s different for everyone, the Sunday dinners ended and I don’t think anyone was heartbroken the same with Christmas, at some point you move forward on your own.

What are your future travel plans?

My wife and I will be traveling to Thailand later this year, my wife goes there every year to see her family I go every other year because of my work. Usually when we both go we travel from Bangkok to other countries this year it’s Vietnam for five days. When we began dating we would talk about our expectations for the future neither of us wanted children so the next best thing is traveling and over the past eight years we have been traveling all over the world, it has been the greatest experience of my life. I recommend traveling wherever you can. We travel outside the country because we love experiencing different cultures, we eat the local foods mostly walk through the cities so we can see the architecture. We don’t travel much in America mostly because we don’t feel safe like we do overseas.

Which activities make you lose track of time?

Any form of exercise, no matter what I’m doing ie; running, biking,swimming, walking I am a total John Doe. I don’t bring anything other than water with me no music no phone nothing that’s how I was raised and I don’t see a reason to fix what isn’t broken. This behavior drives my wife crazy, but she doesn’t see the benefits. It’s the only time you can really listen to your body, you get to really connect to what’s happening inside you, it also allows your mind to expand to new dimensions. I grew up without all of the outside distractions so that’s what I know, I tried using a Walkman when they came out, but found it a royal pain in the ass, I was unable to listen to myself my body my spirit. Now, we have at least one generation that will never know that connection they have been bombarded with white noise and outside influences. No one knows my body better than me, I don’t rely on “doctors “ as much as myself, I found the very best medicines many years ago and they have never let me down.

What are you most excited about for the future?

At 64 years old I’m just a few years from retirement which means I can spend more time looking for my purpose in life. I don’t know many people that have found it, but the ones I have appeared happier, satisfied more content with their lives. I have had many, many different jobs I even had a couple of careers, but I have never had one and said to myself this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. I have settled for jobs more times than I can remember, but bills need to be paid and who is going to pay them?? Even at this stage in my life I have settled for a job the just pays the bills. I have had an emptiness in my heart as long as I can remember I tried to fill it with anything I could find which always resulted in negative results, it was nothing more than self abuse that I was able to overcome by facing the fact that the hole in my heart cannot be filled I had to learn to live with the emptiness and I have. Even now when my life is the best it has ever been it’s a little empty, my wife ask me a lot why I look so sad I just say I’m not because I really have no reason to be. Perhaps I’m betting on my retirement to fill that hole, maybe it’s just not meant to be filled.

What’s your definition of romantic?

I, like many men believed being romantic was fine wine and dinners, flowers and manners, conversations of dreams and family faith and careers basically putting on a show until you seal the deal then what? 50-60 years of a constant decline in the “love” you promised, little by little the drifting apart happens and either one of you are able to bring it back together. I myself realized I lied to my first wife as she did I because we believed our marriage would last, it did, 10 years towards the end we wanted to kill each other. I would spend the next 15-20 years learning what I did wrong why it went wrong and how to correct it. I started by looking deep inside myself to find what I really wanted out of life, my path was limited by past mistakes that followed me through life, but I was able to find my true self and in the process found someone who loves me as much as I love myself and her and it’s been an amazing experience, we definitely lift one another up, we’re always aware of each other so much so that we can be our true self without judgement. We burp, fart blow our noses and every other human behavior in front of each other happily. For me that is romance that will last our entire life.

How do you express your gratitude?

Saying Thank You is a good start, but really that’s just short term for the long haul you need to acknowledge the ones you love as well as yourself. Tell them you appreciate them and show them how much they mean to you. Be aware of those who fill your heart and your life.