Inspirational Person/Youtube Video of the Day and Inspirational Person of 2019 : David Goggins

A year ago today, I did not know who David Goggins was, which says nothing at all about his well deserved fame, and a lot about how generally out of the world I am, in regards to any event or person who I do not figuratively trip over.

David Goggins, has been described as the man who the hardest men on the planet,  look at as an inspirational tale. And with good reason. I did a post a while back that links to some of the coverage that introduced me to him.

David Goggins is a man who does not suffer fools, and does not suffer excuses, and lives by a grinding work ethic, that makes the hard or difficult or grueling day most of us think we are dealing with, literally pale in comparison.

He is a man who to some extent ensconces himself in the miserable and suffering, to find what lies beyond.

He is a hard relentless man, for an oft hard relentless world.

But he cares, he cares.

By his own estimation he is a natural introvert, a natural stutterer, a challenged learner, a fat man, and by any estimation he has transcended all labels that was put on him by others or by himself. When most of us make excuses for our failings, David Goggins at some point, at many points, said no… no more.

In a world that loves mediocrity, David Goggins learned to loathe it with a passion and a response and a tenacity that can only be called… relentless. “No you are not Big Boned…. You are fat!!!” to paraphrase Goggins.

He can come off as a gruff and a brusque human, in his language, in his stance, in his relentlessness, but what is clear is that relentlessness is shield and armor… for a man who cares deeply for all of us, and our wars against mediocrity.

Spending ten hours calling your followers for the holidays? Who the eff does that??? Who subjects themselves to that??? David Goggins does. He doesn’t hold himself up as perfect, and he’s not asking you to be perfect. He is asking you to when you get kicked in the teeth, (which you will, it is what life does) to get up, and be harder to knock down next time.

The most inspirational person I know this year, who I do not really know, someone that is outside my circle of friends and family (who if we are lucky are the ones to most tangibly inspire us), hands down is David Goggins. His story and his videos this year taught me clearly something we allow ourselves to forget, that no one cares about the things we complain about, no one, and they should not, what people should care about is the things you spend time fixing. You are either a complainer or a problem solver, part of the problem or part of the solution.

 

David Goggins calls you to be part of the solution. Whatever your specific solution is. He welcomes you to the war.

 

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Two Chills

I saw two things yesterday that gave me chills.

One happened early in the day when I was traveling through the east coast of the United States. I was driving and I looked up and I saw it, and it undoubtedly saw me.

How could it not? That is what it is designed to do.

It was the stuff of fiction, of dream, and perhaps more truly… nightmare, made real, made concrete… made manifest.

In fiction you would have called it perhaps the Eye of Sauron, if Tolkien’s lore holds sway, or perhaps Big Brother, if Orwellian references are not lost on a world moving dangerously sideways. But in fact it was more amazing and horrific than both those references.

We sometimes do not realize we live in the future, are the future that endured, of a bloody and brutal 20th century, and while that is not the future yet, of flying cars and jet packs and conversing with aliens, the future we are living,… of cloning, and test tube babies, and sexual reassignment, and genetic modifications, and decision making machines designed to kill men, and engineered diseases, and ethnic cleansings, and endless wars, and information super-highway, and super social media, and entertainment systems in most homes that are one code-write away from being constant surveillance and data gathering/marketing tools, this future is as miraculous and as horrifying as any scifi tale of invasion.

It is more terrifying. Because the future we live in is plagued with countless terrors, we are not so lucky as to have a single bogeyman. No… our corporate-beholden governments create countless destroyers of man’s liberties and mankind’s lives, not just one.

I was driving and I saw something that should never float above an American city, or any city, floating there. I saw the Eye of Sauron, I say again, because it sounds romantic, but more… because it feels most true.

I saw this:

FIRST LOOK

And it is a sight that I fear that all of us will be seeing, if we do not with all oppose it. For all the talk of not abusing the rights of the people, the fact is, that is what the blimp is designed to do, its very existence over American cities is an affront to the idea of a government of the people. What I saw in the sky yesterday was Ferguson and Palestine writ large, it is a show of force, it is the act of an occupying army.

Too much to make of it? I fear its existence is proof that we have made too little of our liberties. And time is running out to make more.

And what was the 2nd thing that gave me chills? That night I watched Lawrence Olivier and Gregory Peck give blistering performances in a movie that in 1978, almost 40 years ago, was the height of fantasy, but today feels as close as the next news cycle. I’m talking about THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL.

Between facts that feel like fictions and fictions that feel like facts, the ground feels precarious, and the watchful skies… deserving of being watched.

Perhaps we should watch… together.

Memorial Day 2013

I heart Kim Delaney!

So Kim Delaney gets escorted off of stage for a rambling speech at a military awards function.

My thoughts?

My memory of Kim Delaney is from the short lived 1989-90 series TOUR OF DUTY, I know she starred in NYPD BLUE and MIAMI VICE and is currently starring in something called ARMY WIVES, but, beyond the first year of NYPD Blue, I haven’t watched any of that stuff.

So what I know of Kim Delaney is a hazy memory of a show from over 20 years ago. But I remember having a huge crush on her. And having seen recent pics, time if not quite life, has been very kind to her. She looks even more attractive, if not happier, than that woman of two decades ago.

But my opinion of her seemingly troubled speech??

Things happen. People have bad days. We all do.

Life gets in the way, for all of us.

Our lives don’t turn out like we want them to. Marriages fail, Family try you, friends betray you, jobs limit you, and governments disappoint you. And acting is the only job, where none of that is supposed to get in the way of you smiling for the cameras… both on and off duty.

But things do get in the way. Bad days, like rain, falling on the just and the unjust alike. On the famous and the unknown.

The only problem is when you’re a celebrity those… bad days, instead of just being between you, and maybe a few co-workers or family or acquaintances, those bad days are shared with millions if not billions of strangers.

Your bad day… made infinitely worse by… celebrity.

Take Mel Gibson. He has a bad day. He says things he shouldn’t when he’s in pain. Who amongst you is any different?

Tiger Woods, all of them. I refuse to judge, because I realize there is not one of their detractors, that can walk in the fishbowl the media makes of their lives… and not be crushed by it.

I realize that ‘casting the first stone’ was written for just such situations. I do think the press crosses the line, and I don’t think an actor sells his liberty when he sells his services.

I don’t think they sell their right to privacy or the occasional bad day.

Kim Delaney had a bad day at an awards show (I personally wouldn’t have been at an award show for a bunch of right wing leaning types myself, but hey, to each their own), but so what.

Stuff happens.

Life gets in the way.

Leave her be.