Rev Kane on his arrival at Amicalola Falls State Park (2014)
I slow down when hiking. The rhythm of nature is more leisurely. The sun comes up, it moves across the sky, and you begin to synchronize to that rhythm. ~ John Mackey
A Happy Little Announcement
While I have mentioned it in other posts, including my recent post on turning 60. So I won’t leave anyone in suspense, I’m planning my second attempt at thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) in late March or early April of 2025. This is partially a celebration of my semi-retirement and also a way to “walk-off” the stress of the ridiculous job I’ve been working for the last six years. This is going back to a long tradition related to the very beginnings of thru-hiking the AT. You see, back when the AT was first put together, a lot of soldiers returning from World War II used the trail to “walk-off” the war.
When I did my first attempt on the trail ten years ago, I met and hiked with a number of guys who were walking off their experiences in Afghanistan. Even though you fall into groups on the AT, you can spend a lot of hours walking alone in the forest, as well as long nights in your tent or hammock. This is a lot of time to get into your own head, have a million conversations with yourself and come to terms with things that are deep and complex. There are rarely opportunities for this level of introspection in life and it’s one of the huge benefits of the trail.
Rev Kane on Rocky Top
As I’ve been talking with people about my plans I often get the same question, if you’ve already done half the trail (1000 miles), why would you re-hike the entire trail? The funny thing is, when I was on the trail I often wanted to ask the same question of people in that exact situation. What I discovered and the answer to the question is that it’s all about community. While I’m an introvert, and wasn’t really looking for a group to hike with, you just kind of fall in with people on the trail. The thing is, people on the trail, are a lot like me. Everyone out there is at least a little bit adventurous, willing to take risks and often a lot more comfortable in wilderness than they are in society. Everyone attempting a thru-hike has put there life on hold for six months. They’ve planned for drop boxes across the trail, given up their housing, jobs and other commitments, or at least put them on hold. These are my people.
I’m a slow hiker, and I may in fact jump around a bit instead of doing a straight thru-hike. So I likely won’t be hiking with a single group throughout the trail. If I just jump in and hit the sections I haven’t done, I’ll not know any of the hikers I encounter and that means an entire hike of making new connections and that’s not the most comfortable or enjoyable reality on the trail for me. By starting out in Georgia and being in the bubble for a time, when I do jump around, I’ll almost certainly be running into hikers I know at least part of the time. This will make the hike a lot more enjoyable. I’m also hoping to have friends and some AT alumni join me on sections of the trail. The thing that breaks most folks on the trail is not the physical aspect. Make no mistake, this is one of the most physically challenging endeavor most folks ever do in their lives. But it’s actually the mental challenge that causes people to quit the trail.
People leave the trail often because they miss aspects of their default life. Sometimes it’s a spouse or partner and at times it’s often their pets or some other aspect of their life. Sometimes it’s the mental aspects of the trail itself. The trail at times can get monotonous, but even more so, being tired, sore and wet for days and even weeks at a time can really wear you down. That’s what almost broke me the first time, just two weeks into the hike. What kept me going? Well for that you’ll have to read my book, Appalachian Trail Happiness, available on Amazon or as a signed copy direct from me, you can email me at happinesskane@aol.com.
On the trail I’ll be reporting out as often as possible, daily photos on Instagram, posts on Threads if I can get a signal and a blog post once or twice a week. Last time I did most of my posting out on Twitter but this time I’ll be utilizing Instagram and Threads as well as the blog, and so if you want to follow along on the daily journey, or if you know friends who might enjoy virtually hiking with me, send them to @michael_rev_kane on both sites.
A slower pace of life can make you happy
Below are a few posts from my last hike to give you a taste for what’s to come, have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking. ~ Earl Wilson
A Happy Little Vacation
So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been off the map and on vacation. This was the second half of my 60th birthday celebration. The East Coast celebration, it was as an opportunity to catch up with as many family and friends as a I could on the East Coast. So I had lunch with my parents, dinner with my sister’s family, visited my aunt, spent some time in Brooklyn with my brother’s family and caught up with a couple of friends along the way. It was a bit of a whirlwind trip and so I also included three days back where my family used to vacation when I was younger up on Cape Cod. The drawing above came courtesy of my five year-old niece. I love the drawing, the detail is awesome, my little beard, my first initial and of course, my psycho bunny hat.
My sister’s family took me out for a birthday dinner and we had a great time. It was a hibachi place so of course mentioning my birthday led to this. Including beams of light erupting from my head.
Visiting Brooklyn of course means two things I love, my brother’s family and real New York pizza. So I spent two days, climbing up and down slides, getting ice cream, getting asked 500 questions and of course getting beat on by my niece and nephews, it was glorious. And of course, out of six possible meals, five of them looked liked this.
This was an incredibly laid back vacation, good people and good food. My three days on Cape Cod consisted of swimming in the ocean, swimming in the pool, laying in the sun, staring at the ocean and eating a lot of bacon wrapped scallops. This morning I wrapped up the eating frenzy with some homemade biscuits and gravy for breakfast.
This was also a very cerebral vacation. A lot of hours on the road and laying in the sun with time to think. My life is about to change in a hundred ways and I’m making some pretty big relationship related decisions. I talked about a lot of this in my last several posts. And now that I’m back, it’s about 140 days to retirement and leaving California. So full speed ahead on getting all of that wrapped up and organized, it will go by fast. So waive the starting flag, here we go.
Finally tonight, whenever I return to SFO I pass this art piece and I absolutely love it. It reminds me of the horses with the White Walkers in Game of Thrones.
The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate. ~ Oprah Winfrey
Remember to Celebrate!
Life is hard, bad things happen, too often things just don’t break your way. But sometimes they do. And exactly because life is hard, you should celebrate when you can. And I do mean whenever you can, celebrate the big things of course but celebrate the little things as well.
Did you just finish a project at work, celebrate, maybe it’s just a nice dessert that night or going out to lunch. But do something to recognize the accomplishment. Did your friend, partner, child attain some milestone or have something exciting happy to them, celebrate. Buy some flowers, make a special dinner, let your toddler, who just did their first day of pre-school, pick what’s for dinner tonight.
We do a pretty good job of celebrating things for our children but we often don’t celebrate things for ourselves. I really recommend getting into a habit of celebrating. Me, I’m a big celebrator, I celebrate my achievements at every level, I celebrate birthdays for weeks and birthdays that signify decades for entire years. When I turned forty I set up a list of forty people, and created ten events and invited all forty to all ten events. That was the first time I went to Burning Man and the year I traveled to Alaska as my fiftieth state that I visited.
This year I turned sixty, so as a year with a zero I’ve been celebrating all year. I returned to my favorite city to celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I’ve traveled to Baja to hang out and play with grey whales, I surprised my family in NY on Memorial Day. Friends came in for the Pizza, Beer and Bagel Festival in San Francisco. Other friends came in for a two-day eating and walking tour of San Francisco. I spent a week floating in a mineral spring pool and getting massage at an expensive resort in Calistoga. I’ll soon be heading east to visit with family and friends and spend a few days in Cape Cod.
The year isn’t over though and I’m still scheming how I’ll celebrate in October and November, and I’m already planning a return to the Valley of Fire for Christmas. And then next year I hit another milestone, I’m retiring at the end of January, so it’s time to celebrate that as well. And the biggest part of that will be returning to the Appalachian Trail to walk again, perhaps a thru-hike but at any case add to the thousand miles I’ve already done on that trail.
Celebrate my friends, life is a meal made up of tasty and not so tasty things, so celebrate and drown that meal in celebratory, tasty and happy gravy!
Some images from my celebratory sixtieth year. Have happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Well, you hit a certain point in life and you develop a certain perspective on how things work. So as I hit sixty I have a few thoughts on life. The fact is, you may or may not agree with my perspective but it’s the one I have, for what it’s worth. There’s no order, rhyme or reason to the way these are listed.
The first and most important thing to share is how precious life is. We get one life and no second chance, we can’t reverse time. To steal a famous saying, we always think we have time, but we often don’t. So treat life as the fleeting, precious thing that it is, don’t wait! Plan, do things in a calculated way, but don’t wait.
Travel, see the world, experience different cultures and different perspectives, it will do so much to open your mind and expand your life.
Be nice to people whenever you can, especially those who can’t defend themselves. But don’t be so nice to people that you let them walk all over you. Always remember, in every interaction with people you are teaching them how to treat you.
Have fun, act like a kid from time to time, do all of the little things that make you happy, whenever you can. One of the biggest failings around the idea of adulthood is that we have to act “grown up.” And certainly there are times that you do, but find time to be a little silly, it’s good for your soul.
Blood is not thicker than water. I know a lot of people won’t like this but family should not be held to a lesser, but to a higher standard than others. You don’t owe your parents shit for having you, they made that decision not you. They didn’t do you a favor raising you and paying for your life. They decided to take on that responsibility by having you. You don’t owe your siblings just because they share DNA, your aunts and uncles don’t get to be assholes, racists, and bigots, etc… and get forgiven just because they are related to you. Your family should be chosen, your family should be those people in your life that give you the love, support and respect that you deserve.
Your job is a job. In rare situations people are actually doing work they would do for free. If you’re in that situation I’m so happy for you. But if not, your job is a job. It’s not your life, you should do a good job, work hard, be responsible, hopefully do work that you enjoy and feels worthwhile. But your employer is not doing you a favor, they pay you as a trade for the work that you do and in fact your work is probably generating far more income for them, than they are paying you. So stand up for yourself, get what you deserve and never let a boss take your dignity.
Learn to love yourself, learn to understand and believe in your abilities and skills. You’re awesome, you’re a completely unique creature in all of the universe, that makes you special as hell, recognize and appreciate that.
Don’t settle too often. Yes, compromise in life is necessary, but the more you settle the more easy it becomes to settle. The simple fact is that you deserve better and most people forget that.
Fall in love, take the leap, put your heart on the line. Even though Tennyson was an asshole, it’s not better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. But the idea of a life, where you have never loved does seem like an unfathomable tragedy.
Forgive, but never forget. So that you are never in the position of trusting that person in the same way ever again.
Get out of your comfort zone. As soon as you start to feel completely comfortable, find a way to shake things up, take a risk, stretch yourself in some way. Getting out of your comfort zone will keep you young, feeling alive and help you live a happier life.
Move your damn body. Sure, go to the gym or do traditional workouts, but you don’t have to, to be a healthy person. But you have to move, walk, swim, garden, chop wood, jog, ride a horse, chase butterflies around or run around trying to catch leaves falling from trees.
Read, it shocks me how few people really read. It’s such a wonderful thing, it expands your vocabulary, keeps your mind active and can take you to places you could never imagine.
Take care of yourself. Sure, help others, be responsible and caring but remember you have to take care of yourself. No one else has that responsibility. And the airplane analogy very much works, you have to put your mask on before you help others.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever read, at the moment of their death, no one ever regrets not working more.
You never truly ever know someone. Think about it, there are things in your life and thoughts you have that you have never shared with another soul. This means of course that every person you know has the same in their life. You’ll never know what those are, you want it simply in musical form, listen to Billy Joel’s Stranger. So trust needs to be a risk assessment every time and the deeper the risk, the better you’d better know someone. And because you can never fully know someone, you can never fully trust anyone.
Spend time talking with cool old people and children and really listen to them. Cool old people will tell you about things and give you insights you’ll never get anywhere else. Children, especially toddlers, will tell you the craziest shit you can possibly imagine. For a month while staying with my sister, my toddler niece would regale me every night with her adventures with her friend Woo-Woo at daycare. There was no Woo-Woo, they didn’t take the boat on the river alone, or drive the babysitter’s car, or feed a pet lion the neighbor had, but the stories were magnificent. And the attention I gave to her was incredibly valuable to her. Talking with old people and children is a massive two-way gift.
The red-neck retirement plan (the lottery) is a lot of fun if you have the money. But never count on luck, count on your work, skill and planning to be successful.
Karma always comes through. I have never seen anyone escape their Karma. Unfortunately, Karma works on Karma’s timetable not yours. So while Karma will collect it’s due, it might not do it at a time that will satisfy your desire to see it happen.
Having a lot of friends, a lot of followers, a lot of admirers is meaningless. In life, what matters are the people that you can call at 4AM and say I’m in trouble, I need you and they’ll be there.
Learn to ask the three daily questions. What did I learn today? What beauty did I experience today? What made me happy today?
Slowdown and breathe! Take your time, life goes by so fast, don’t wish or push it to go by faster.
So obviously I’m on the move again come the new year, February to be exact. January will see me getting rid of many of my possessions and packing up the rest to send east. How exactly I’ll be moving things east I’m not quite sure yet, but I’ll start working out those details in late September.
I guess this is as good a place and time to make it official and public, starting in late March/ early April I plan on another thru-hike attempt on the Appalachian Trail. That decision has been an interesting journey. I remember when I was on the trail and meeting folks on their second attempt who had done anywhere from a couple of hundred to a thousand miles on their first attempt. I didn’t understand why they were starting over from the beginning. I mean if you have half of the trail done, why not just do the second half? So I told myself that if I didn’t finish and ever tried again, I sure as hell wouldn’t redo the whole damn trail.
So of course, I’m starting at the beginning. There’s a really good reason for this, one of the best parts of hiking the Appalachian Trail is the amazing people you meet. And yes, that’s coming from Mr. I hate people. The thing is, by the very nature of attempting a thru-hike, the folks you meet on the trail are not normal. They are people who have put their life on hold for six months to hike the trail. These are people who have dreams and take chances. People who love being out in nature and want to explore. Are all of them amazing people, of course not, but a much higher proportion than you would normally encounter certainly are of that caliber. As such, that first month or so on the trail is filled with interesting people, and great conversations. It’s really easy to connect with like-minded people. Last time on the trail I made at least four life-long friends in a month on the trail.
Last time, after getting hurt and having to come off of the trail for a month, I also had the experience of being off cycle with the folks I had met. It was a very different experience, it meant people being suspicious of you because you weren’t known to them. It also meant at times being the only person in a camp at night and a lot less social interaction. So this time out, I don’t want to miss out on that initial experience in what hikers call the bubble. The bubble, is the term the hiking community uses for that early pulse of hikers who start out the same time from Georgia, typically during March and April. After I get out of Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina, hell even by time I get to the Smoky Mountains, all bets are off. I’m not opposed to skipping around and just hitting the twelve hundred miles I’m still missing. But having started off in the bubble, and being a slow hiker, chances are even as I jump around I’ll be running into familiar faces.
So between heading east, prepping for and hiking the trail I’ll be a full nomad again for six to eight months. That comes with a lot of excitement and a lot of trepidation. Right now, for the in between time, I have no plans or even any idea where I’ll be sleeping.
The plan is, either when I finish the AT, get hurt or just get tired of walking I’ll come off the trail. Then it’s time to get a job. I’m looking at getting a job at a four-year college, working with students and having NO supervisory responsibility, or at least no faculty to supervise. That will determine where I’ll live, but I’m only looking at schools in places where property values are low. The end goal is property where I can start my farm. I created Invisible Sun Farms in my head decades ago, it’s time to make it a reality. Fruit trees, huge gardens, land to forage and hike on and a place where I can pursue all of the things I love, photography, hiking, foraging and natural crafting. Oh, and I definitely need a pool.
I’ll need to work for at least five years to be qualified for Medicare, thank you shitty US health insurance policies. At that point, I’ll likely be less present in North America during the winter months and likely spend part of every winter in Oaxaca, Mexico.
I’ve also started a mentoring business. I’ve been mentoring mid-level higher education professionals. I’ll be carrying a small client load in retirement as well as running out some products available for people to support them in their career goals.
The other big decision I’ve made for the next chapter of my life is that I am no longer interested in being alone. I want someone to be with, travel with, someone who I can make plans with, hell someone to give me a hug after a day like today. I’ve basically been alone all of my adult life and while I’m perfectly capable of continuing that way, I’ve decided to change that.
So that’s the plan, my plans never work exactly the way I want them to. However what I’ve learned along the way is that I usually end up in the neighborhood of where I expected to be. So on to the next adventure and hopefully many more happy days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Currently in my life, I’m living in a bit of the eye of the storm. My life is currently centered on leaving and moving. I’m winding down everything, my job, my time in California and even my current life in most every aspect. The reason I use the term nexus is that I’m at another great change point in my life. I’m going from living on the west coast, in California, where I’ve been living for the last 22 years and in total 25 years of my life. I’m changing careers, for the last twenty years I’ve been the guy in charge, the overworked, stressed out boss of almost everyone I work with. The responsible one, the one on call 24/7, the guy everybody turns to for the answer. My next job will be focused on one thing, working with students more directly and no longer having the personnel management responsibility I have had in my career. Personnel management makes up a large part of a dean’s job, and in my current and utterly dysfunctional college/district, that dysfunction leads to this particular job being almost exclusively personnel management. It is also by far, the worst and most stressful part of the job, so I’ll be more than happy to let that part of my life go. Of course that large amount of stress also leads to a pretty nice salary, I will miss that part of my current job but my pension is pretty solid.
My current life is pretty boring. I don’t have many friends, hell, locally I really don’t have any friends. There are some people from work I’m connected to but my social life is pretty much non-existent. I live a pretty solitary life, this will be important as a driver for most of what I’ll talk to in part 3.
Now a lot of people may argue with this, my life definitely benefits from Instagram reality. The best way I can describe my life is long periods of boredom punctuated by short, intense adventures. My day to day existence has always been a bit boring, but I still find ways to take adventures. Over the years that has included hiking to base camp on Mt. Everest, photographing polar bears in the Arctic, hiking the Appalachian Trail and writing a book about it, swimming with whale sharks, walking across Scotland, biking around Ireland, hell I even almost got killed by ISIS while in Jordan. Most recently I even got to hug a whale in Baja.
I keep my Instagram and other social media feeds full of good stories and pretty pictures. So people see the pictures and hear the stories and so they figure my life is one big adventure. And on social media, this a perception I need to cultivate. My social media feeds lead to book sales and speaking gigs as well as other paying and non-paying opportunities. It’s also a way for me to stay connected to all of those people in my life who are at the fringes of true friendship. People I like, who like me, but aren’t the type of person you call at 4AM when your world has melted down. But people you want to stay at least somewhat connected to in life.
This is also a reality for life as a wanderer. I’ve encountered a lot of people in my life and my travels. But I keep moving and they don’t. It’s been a real issue in my romantic life when our society puts a premium on roots and living in a single place and I’m always moving. American society considers wanderers less than, there is something wrong with us that we don’t want to follow the American script. The fact is, America has always been a place that looks down on people who don’t fit the script. Don’t believe me, ask any 30 year-old childless woman how many times a day someone asks her about having kids? I get the same disregard when people find out I’ve never been married. I get the occasional “confirmed bachelor” suggestion, wink, wink, nod, nod. But typically people just jump to, fear of commitment. It all gives me a laugh. The reality has been that I have insanely high standards that I’m not willing to settle on to be married and check off a box on the script. I’m also not easy for others, my high level of introversion and high personal space needs make me a tough person to be with, particularly if a person doesn’t have a handle on their own insecurities. The dichotomy of me being madly in love with someone and still needing time away from them is really hard for people to handle and it’s understandable. Finally, I have the absolute shitiest timing when it comes to relationships. I have never considered it a necessity to be married, it was always a hope so, not a need to, in my life. But lot’s more about this in part 3.
So right now I’ve been on a several week extended birthday celebration. I got to hang out with some friends at San Francisco’s Pizza, Bagel and Beer Fest. I then had two of my best friends come into town and we did two days of walking and eating in San Francisco. After that I spent a few days in Calistoga doing absolutely nothing. Basically, eating, reading, resting and floating in an Olympic sized hot-spring pool several times a day. And finally I’ll be heading east soon, a few days with family and a few days on the beach on Cape Cod enjoying the ocean and eating a whole lot of lobster.
After that, everything is focused on cleaning up, organizing, and getting ready to move!
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is. ~ Ellen Degeneres
A Wanderer Looks at Sixty
The title is obviously stolen from one of my all-time favorite songs, A Pirate Looks at Forty by Jimmy Buffett, while I’m no Parrot Head, the song absolutely touches my soul. It so perfectly expresses nostalgia for something that actually never happened to you. For those of us who tend toward being dreamers and wanderers this is not an uncommon piece of our reality. I am turning sixty, I’m within six months of going into retirement or at least what passes for retirement these days. I seem to be screaming up on a significant nexus point in my life and it has me very much in a contemplative mood. I’ve certainly been looking back, dreaming about what has and could have been, while planning and dreaming about what’s possible and next.
Part 1 – Where I came from
I was born in Hudson, NY a dying industrial town that exploded in population in the 50’s and 60’s with the great migration and then suffered the same fate as most rust belt towns. The factories closed and the jobs dried up and people who used to have little education but good jobs, were not in such a great place. I grew up under policies of urban development and the explosion of divorce in America. I went from being one of two kids with a divorced parent in third grade to a whole lot of my friends having divorced parents in high school.
I didn’t grow up well off, I guess what you would call it is working class. My single mom worked a lot, so I had a lot of responsibility early, I also spent a lot of time on the street. In school as a kid I had the perfect cover for a juvenile delinquent, I got straight “A’s”. This meant anytime someone needed to be blamed for something that happened, things I often did, the blame didn’t go to the white kid with good grades, it got blamed on the white kid with bad grades or the black kid. I learned about privilege early, I also learned about how to game the system. One of the greatest skills I learned in a rough neighborhood was how to read people. You see, you needed to be a wise-ass, it was required. You had to cut hard with your tongue and at times be able to back it up with your fists. But in hard places there are damaged people, even as kids. So you had to know how people would react to being cut. Would they laugh, respect you or would they punch you in the face. That made reading people a critical skill and that skill has served me incredibly well in the polite society I found myself in as an adult and in playing the bullshit games I’ve had to play in my career. It also made me someone who is unwilling to suffer idiots, or give up my self-respect just because someone has a title.
I was also an angry kid. Life wasn’t great, my family life was nuts, I didn’t live in the best of places. I was small early on, excessively skinny and then later overweight. I had crazy curly hair, I was very smart but not skilled socially. I hadn’t yet learned to curb my verbal impulses, I tended toward brutal honesty and no one taught me about the expectations and niceties of life. I will give a shout out to the first person who taught me a lot of this, including which fork to use. She was my friend Peter’s mom, Mrs. Donatelli. She was an incredibly sweet and kind woman. She hadn’t come from money but her and her husband had done very well, she floated in upper society and she taught me a lot about the rules, and also about curbing my verbal impulses, all over glasses of Pepsi Light with slices of lemon.
My single goal growing up was to get the hell out of Hudson, NY. It was a shit town, the people were small, the Peter Gabriel song Big Time, always reminds me of that town and my mindset at that time. Time does change things and now Hudson, after its main street and a couple of other areas have been gentrified by New York City antique dealers, has become the darling small town destination for New Yorkers. It gets written up in foo-foo magazines for being soooooo wonderful and you can’t get a hotel room for less than $200 a night and that room is a half-step above a Motel 6.
Being smart got me out, I was accepted to Eisenhower College with an automatic transfer in my junior year to the Rochester Institute of Technology as an Electrical Engineering major. How that decision came about, well my high school counselor (my former peewee bowling and little league coach), said to me, “Mike, your dad works for the power company, you’re good at math and science, how about electrical engineering. Sure George,” I responded and my career path was set. Three weeks before I was to leave for this beautiful liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Ontario I got the one and only telegram of my life, Eisenhower College was closing. I was going straight to RIT, stuffed into a triple in a dorm that also held a fraternity, Sigma Pi.
This is one of the biggest what if moments of my life. I was never interested in engineering, had I started out at Eisenhower, I think there’s a real chance I would have found my way to my eventual college major in biology and ended up on a cleaner and accelerated path. Instead, already angry about life, angry about being sent directly to RIT, stuck in a triple and taking classes that I didn’t like, Sigma Pi presented a great distraction. Acceptance, friends, women, booze and drugs.
It would take me about 18 months to fully become a drunk, an addict, a whore and kicked out of college. My parents at the time loved to blame the fraternity, Sigma Pi was just a vehicle to where I was heading. I made some good friends there, got to know some good people, fell in love for the first time, had some insane and amazing adventures. I also got exposed to music I would have never known about, it was in that fraternity that I learned about Genesis and Pink Floyd. Even saw the movie, The Wall at the college theater high on LSD for my first time and the first screaming guitar chords literally made me scream and leap out of my seat causing my brothers to burst out laughing and falling out of their seats. The National Technical Institute for the Deaf was also housed at RIT and so I got immersed in deaf culture, learned ASL and even dated a couple of deaf women.
Leaving RIT was a massive psychological tragedy for me. It broke me, made me feel like a complete failure in life. Returning home to my married for the second time parents was a nightmare of living with my father’s psychological abuse. But also a massive joy to get to spend massive amounts of time with my toddler brother who was the absolute joy in my life. Being a full-blown alcoholic and addict, living at home and working two jobs and going to school, my life was a black hole, and the best thing that ever happened to me. I took that time to make the decision to get clean and sober, to dissect my life and decide who I really wanted to be, to get back to school and get my life on track. I would transfer from Columbia-Greene Community College, a school that was insanely supportive of my recovery, to SUNY Plattsburgh.
My time at SUNY Plattsburgh was a revelation and glimpse of what my life could be. I fell into amazing friends, got elected to student government and became a resident assistant. I flourished, I did well in school, found my way to the correct major for me, a combination of Biology and Secondary Education. I made life-long good friends. I had become responsible, successful, was having a blast and really developing the self-confidence that I had learned to fake having at RIT. SUNY Plattsburgh made me as a responsible adult and a professional. I owe a large chunk of that to a woman named Cheryl Hogle seeing that potential in me, and she did that for so any people at that college.
I spent two years in Kentucky at Eastern Kentucky University to get my master’s degree. A happy accident really, I went there because they had an Ecology program, because my granny was a hillbilly from that part of the world and because it didn’t snow in Kentucky, well pretty rarely anyway. I stumbled into the brightest and best group of graduate students that program had ever had. I made great friends and learned a lot about field biology and ecology. Eastern Kentucky University was also loaded with the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen, per capita likely the most beautiful college campus in America. And seemingly Tennessee shipped all of their pretty women their as well. I was teaching, learning amazing things, doing awesome research and had a great group of friends, it was a magical time. Instead of doing what I likely should have done and taken a full ride to Virginia Tech to continue my research, I took a left turn to answer a voice in my head that said I’d be a great lawyer and went to law school.
Law school was a complete disaster, put me massively in debt and after one year I walked away. I expected to find a bunch of really intellectual folks studying law, instead it was a bunch of dumb ass business majors who were getting a law degree because it was a good degree to have. But it did bring me to California and Sacramento and gave me a taste of the place I would end up living for half of my life now.
After law school I worked for three years at a consulting firm doing fisheries related work with projects in the South Pacific and Africa. It was an interesting job, got me to Hawaii, taught me a ton about tuna, sushi and black pearls and gave me a huge taste for international travel. I left to go to Tennessee to do a PhD in ecology following those lines and it was another disaster. Eight years, no degree, a lot more debt and living in the bible belt certainly had its drawbacks. However, I spent time in Brazil in the Amazon, learned to speak Portuguese, got fully back into teaching and met the love of my life, who married another man on my birthday, welcome to the complete lack of straight lines in my life.
I left Tennessee and returned to California, to the Monterey area, a place I’d fallen in love with my first time in California. I worked at Hartnell College with the best students I ever worked with, had tremendous success and started my career as an administrator. That career would take me to Sacramento (twice), Placer County, the Mojave Desert and finally to the San Francisco Bay.
And in the blink of an eye it’s twenty years later, I’m closing in on retirement, and in my career I’ve become a very different administrator. I was always the innovator, the program developer, the guy who brought in money and pushed the institution forward for the benefit of students. But now, on the back end of this career, I’m the old man on the mountain. I’ve become the person people come to career advice, for how to solve problems and most importantly to cut through the bullshit and politics to find out what is really going on.
The one thing that has stayed consistent is that I’m the person who won’t just sit there and let shit happen, who always speaks up when I think something is wrong and am always willing to ask the uncomfortable question that is on everyone else’s mind. So I’m both a complete pain in the ass to my bosses and one of their most valuable assets. Sometimes they see that, sometimes they don’t.
You’re only human. You live once and life is wonderful, so eat the damned red velvet cupcake. ~ Emma Stone
A cupcake should never cost more than a dollar!
Ok, I’ll make a concession to capitalism and say fine, let the cupcake maker make their money and charge four dollars, to adults. But it should never cost more than a dollar for a kid. Same with cookies, and yes I even mean big cookies. If that cookie or cupcake is massive and super fancy, ok two dollars for a kid. I mean seriously, what kind of world is it, where a little kid earns a dollar and can’t walk into a bakery or a store and buy a cookie or a cupcake.
Where is this coming from you might ask? Tomorrow is my birthday and I love cupcakes. So I bought the above pictured and highly tasty red velvet cupcake and it was cheap, only four dollars. But while I was buying that cupcake I thought damn, little kids can no longer have that simple dollar experience I loved as a kid. I absolutely loved going into the Jersey Bakery in Hudson, NY and buying a dollar cupcake, buttercream frosting and sprinkles on every one. The same with a slice of pizza across the street at the Pizza Pit, the greatest pizza place ever to exist.
Sure, a lot of it is that I’m old and inflation is a real thing, but when I hear about kids getting $20 dollars from the tooth fairy it’s a bit shocking. So I guess a kid could buy their own $4 cupcake with their tooth fairy money. And even recognizing the reality of inflation, what am I really saying? Simply this, childhood is so important, so fleeting and our adult lives are these anxiety infused mad dashes to inevitable insanity. So we need to protect children and their innocence, imagination and naivete as long as possible. And sure, I long to get a piece of that back myself, kind of the reason I love cupcakes, a couple of minutes of reliving those Jersey Bakery childhood moments.
So my friends, tonight I am asking you all for a very special birthday gift in celebration of my 60th birthday. Do something that makes a kid see magic. Take them to their first movie, give them their first taste of buttercream frosting, take them to a major league ballgame, take them on a great hike to a waterfall. Buy them a really cool toy for absolutely no reason, have a dance party with them or read them a story and do all the voices and add in a bunch of sound effects. Simply make some magic for a kid. The really cool thing, is while it’s my present, it’s a bigger one for them and something that will bring you and me a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
To search for perfection is all very well, but to look for Heaven, is to live here in Hell. ~ Sting, “Consider Me Gone.”
This close to perfect!
When I was studying Qigong, sifu would watch my forms and walk up to me, smile and say while holding his finger and thumb a little bit apart, “you’re this close to perfect.” That always stung, I mean I was working really hard, was one of the best students in my class and it just seemed I could never get there. I moved from it feeling like a dig, to thinking it was a tool he was using to motivating me to work harder, to laughing when he said it because I truly didn’t give a shit. Who knows, maybe philosophically that was what he was hoping for all along. What was important to me were the benefits I was gaining from the training both in perspective and physically.
In many aspects in my life, I’m this close to perfect. And honestly I get it, I’m an alien impersonating being a human. And before you jump on the phone to this guy.
I don’t mean I’m from another planet, although my mother has joked my whole life that the aliens left me on the doorstep. I’m not normal, I’ve known that my entire life. This is the kind of self-consideration that can lead to poor self-esteem and loneliness and that was very true of me in my younger years. At some point, after addiction, recovery, clinical levels of depression and a lot of hard work, I ended up coming to the conclusion that, as the Dude said in The Big Lebowski,
It’s such a huge thing to accept and become comfortable with yourself and who you are. That’s why I no longer care how close I am to perfect in other people’s eyes. What matters, is if I am adhering to my values, if I’m giving my best and if I am getting what I want from what I’m doing. I don’t do things like others, so I’m likely never going to be seen as perfect by others and that’s just fine.
The best example is my professional life, I work as a dean. When you say dean people typically go to one of two images. Either some graying, frail older guy in a suit jacket with patches on the elbows, or Dean Wormer in the movie Animal House screaming you’re on double secret probation.
The conventional wisdom in higher education is that as an administrator you need to be some type of constantly professional emotionless robot. If the system shits on you, smile and do the work. If faculty don’t do their job, smile and do the work. If faculty scream at you, call you names, spread rumors, just smile and do the work. And most of my colleagues do just that and eating that much shit leads to these jobs being unbelievably stressful. A long time ago I decided that this particularly ideology just didn’t work for me, so I do not work like an emotionless robot and I demand to be treated like a person.
So this means I demand respect, demand to be treated like another human being and if disrespect is delivered then disrespect is received. It also means that if something doesn’t make sense I question it or disagree, regardless of the title of the person who isn’t making sense. I’ve tried very hard, my whole career to make what I do about one simple thing, the primary purpose that a college exists, to serve the needs of students. In this as well, I’m almost perfect, but over a nearly 40 year career being nearly perfect means I’ve helped a hell of a lot of students. It also means I’ve pissed off a lot of my bosses and a good number of faculty, but they’re not the people I report to nor care about their opinion, I have always reported to my students and the only feedback I need is whether or not I have helped them.
What’s allowed me to adopt this attitude and belief is being comfortable with who I am, what I do and why I do it. That comfort with self was a huge step in me beginning and solidifying my journey to be happier in life. I hope you have or can find that same self-comfort, it will help you have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The Ministry of Happiness 