Once a song by a band Killing Joke, the title comes to mind today when the temps dipped into the 80's for much of the day. I had forgotten how blue a cloudless sky could be.
So yesterday was the Boys Club post-mortem appreciation meeting combined with the planning for the Crystal River canoe trip in June. The meeting was conducted in the essence of all prior Boys Club events and meetings, namely shameless disorder, confusion, randomness and frequent loss of direction. It started with a prayer, and frankly, that's about where the focus ended. The rest was random, mindless opinion, undocumented hearsay, pointless long-winded personal stories, all interspersed with a plate of the best lasagna I've had in quite a while. Like most County Government meetings, the best thing about it was the food, in this case Italian, not donuts.
Over dinner, the topic turned to Big Oil, CAFE Standards, electric cars and bio-diesel. One gentleman claimed that China is ready to turn out a 300 mi. rechargeable electric car (undocumented hearsay) which prompted another guy to wonder why we're not pursuing bio-fuels more rigorously. Maybe because we burn more resources making it than we get out of it (my mindless opinion...unsaid of course). That and the fact that by making fuel out of food, we're taking food out of some child in Sudan's mouth.
Needless to say the topic teetered on the edge of the whole political tightrope we Christians love to talk about. Luckily someone reeled it in before we went there.
From there, it's hard to tell where it went. We talked about how the year went. The consensus was that it went well, except for the boy who's Mother claimed that he got a first degree concussion from getting hit by a ball in the head. You know, based on what I see, and prevent from seeing, from week to week, I have to say "Thank you Jesus; only a first degree concussion". Never mind that I almost separated my foot from my tibia on the baseball field with the kids last week. I won't count that. Or sue the church. I will make a note of it though for the next time I have a notion that I could still play short for a Triple A team. I guess doing yoga and walking a lot doesn't use the same muscle groups as leaping for a shallow fly ball. It's still sore.
Much like the meeting, so goes this post. I'm not sure where I was going. Oh yes, after we talked about how the year went, we talked about what we should change. There was a lively discussion of how to better run all the events; post time, gym time, and story circle. Very few notes were taken, so I'm sure many of the ideas went the way of the garlic bread and were passed away this morning some time. Even the notes that were taken were scratched in some hybrid far-Eastern, long-dead dialect that resembled a 4.5 Richter earthquake reading. Translation would require either a half dozen linguistic PhD's, or a great deal of single malt scotch. To say the ideas are dead, kaput, extinct, nada, nyet, gone, never happened, dissolved, long forgotten, or not-gonna-see-daylight, would be putting it mildly.
Fear not though, the second half (more like the middle 3/16th's) was devoted to planning the best event of the year, in my eyes at least, Crystal River. Unfortunately for all the planners, the notes ended up on the same pad as the unintelligible bullet points from the first 1/2 of the meeting. They might as well have been written on an etch-a-sketch and at the end of the meeting, everyone could have a shake. Either that or a magic slate. "I wanna pull the mylar, I wanna pull the mylar!"
What were the key insights to planning for this year? Other than a large, foreboding spreadsheet with lots of empty slots for volunteers at various posts, I'm not sure. As the meeting was "running a little late", (i.e. 10 minutes over with no signs of losing steam, or gaining direction) I took the chance to beg out of it saying my daughter was waiting for me. Turns out she was. For all I know the meeting is still going. After all, it was a hell of a spreadsheet.
Please bear in mind that none of this is meant to be malicious in any way toward what I think is an outstanding organization, though I use that term loosely. Boys Club teaches boys respect and Christian values and because it is run by men, for men (boys) it tends to be run like an onside kickoff at times. The boys LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it; the mothers PRAY for it; and the fathers I think would participate if there wasn't an age limit. So it's all good. Being part of the problem myself (as a leader), I can poke fun at it. I might run it differently if I was in charge, but I can't say how because, I lost my notes.