Mercenaries vs Hessians
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
In today's Keepin It Real, Cam Marston laments the significant changes happening to the things that he once believed were fixed in place. Attitudes and beliefs once firmly held are vanishing. Even predictable things like football rankings have been deeply shaken. ----- To say that our world is undergoing a remarkable paradigm shift today is a ridiculous understatement. Each morning I look over the headlines prepared to be blown away by how formerly predictable things are now upside down or simply gone. On the political front, an economist at a meeting a few years back told us it was...
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Pushing Electrons
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam discusses his largely sedentary life and the fulfillment he gets on the rare occasions he can see the results of his work. ----- Most weeks, my work mainly involves pushing electrons around. I sit at a computer and do stuff. Recently it’s been requests for short training videos for clients to use with their teams. I write scripts, edit scripts and record videos. Other weeks I prepare presentations. Lots of PowerPoint editing, lots of rehearsing content. Lots of time online. Lots of buying tickets. It’s all sedentary stuff. Me plus a keyboard plus a...
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Zip It
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week’s Keepin’ It Real, Cam has a message for parents whose children are playing high school sports as his youngest children enter their final year of high school. Every high school sport is suffering from a shortage of officials and referees. Zip it, he says, please just zip it. ----- The second contact on a volleyball can be a double contact so long as it’s one attempt and doesn’t go over the net. That’s a new volleyball rule set to begin this season. For years parents in the stands would holler “double” whenever they saw what they thought was a double touch...
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Arrogance
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week’s Keepin It Real, there are some arrogant folks showing up in Cam’s life these days. They don't’ commiserate with Cam’s struggles. Instead, they gloat... ----- This is a commentary about a specific kind of quiet arrogance. It’s in the background. But you know it when you hear it. These people are “just reporting the truth,” as they may say. It’s not truth. It’s haughty arrogance. And I’ll tell you where I’ve run up against it recently. The first is citrus arrogance. I planted a satsuma tree in my yard many years ago and it has never produced one satsuma. I...
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Lucy
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week’s Keepin It Real, Cam and his family grieve the loss of their family pet. It was sudden. Their dog, Lucy, was with them for nine and a half years and they buried her late at night in the back yard. ----- The saying is that our dogs will greet us when we get to heaven. I sure hope so. We lost Lucy, our family pet of nine and a half years last night in what was one of the most tragic and heartbreaking nights I’ve ever been a part of. What was diagnosed as kennel cough turned into something different. At 9:30 I was preparing for bed. At 11:30 I was shoveling dirt on top...
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Talent Was Never The Issue
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
This week on Keepin It Real Cam Marston has noticed a trend amongst his empty nester friends and what their hobbies become once the kids are gone. The predictability of it gives him comfort. ----- In my part of the world, the female empty nester is an interior designer or painter who has been caged by her responsibilities as a mother and once the kids are gone, they finally step into their lifelong artistic fulfillment. It’s a distinct pattern around here. The number of friends my wife and I have who start throwing paint on a canvas or buying furniture at market after the kids are gone is...
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Haters
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam Marston got some blowback from a social media post this week. He asks us, "How do you deal with haters?" ----- One year ago, I set a goal to paddle board across Mobile Bay. I completed that goal in May. The second part of the goal was to write about the challenge and be paid to have it printed. That was completed last week when the story was carried in Mobile Bay Magazine. I will get a small payment in a week or so. A year’s planning, researching, note-taking, exercising, preparing and lots of paddling later, the goal was entirely met. Pretty cool....
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The Power of Cheese
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam and a client discuss employee retention issues and he shares and idea that may get you through any business turmoil that may lie ahead. ----- On a call with an upcoming client this week I was discussing one of their challenges. They’re having a hard time recruiting and retaining young talent. “But here’s something we did recently,” my client said, “that may have some sort of impact. We added a snack pantry to the office kitchen and it’s been a huge hit.” "Tell me more," I said. “Well,” she said. “Our young employees know they should...
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July Fourth, Twenty Twenty Five
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On today's Keepin It Real, Cam wishes us a happy Independence Day and reminds us that on July 4th, 1776, nearly thirty percent of the population didn't want it. ----- Happy Fourth of July. Our nation’s independence. It’s a big deal. I don’t think we feel it today like generations did in the past. The significance of it is likely lost on many of us. Those that fought in wars have a different type of appreciation for the Fourth of July but there are so many fewer of them today than there were. In 1980, about twenty percent of our population had served in the military. Today that number is...
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How Do We Get Off This Wheel?
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
A beach conversation earlier this week caught Cam's attention. And he asks if we've ever had so many known solutions to a common problem and ignored them? ----- At a family event earlier this week I asked eight members of my extended family who liked their work. Six people did not their work. Some hated their jobs. Some were just ready for something new. And some were actively looking for new jobs but only something they’d enjoy and were struggling to find anything that they thought they’d enjoy. One had weeks to go before retiring at age sixty. Rather than go to sixty-five, he decided to...
info_outlineLast week I danced in front of a train to try to get it to move.
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Trains have always held great symbolic meaning. They represent the future, a new destination, an opportunity. In movies, the characters board trains in the hopes of greater things down the tracks. Lovers tearfully depart at train stations. Though tragic it’s what’s best for each of them. Bandits of the wild west knew there was a strong box on a train full of money. Convicts break out of jail and if they can make it to the train it will take them away from the misery of prison.
Songs, too. The Midnight Special. Midnight Train to Georgia. Folsom Prison Blues. People Get Ready. Downbound Train by Bruce Springsteen. Lots of train songs. Lots of them. Trains are a metaphor. They represent a passage. A transition. A breakthrough, though that breakthrough is often difficult.
A transition, a passage, and a breakthrough was anything but the case two Thursdays ago here in Mobile. Our GulfQuest Museum invited me to give a speech called The Stories Behind Keepin’ It Real. They wanted the stories behind my most popular commentaries. The stories behind the commentaries most difficult to write. And I offered to play the commentaries and tell the stories behind the ones that never were allowed to broadcast. The ones that were veto’d and blackballed.
Having never given this speech, I was nervous. What would I say? How would it go? I love writing and recording these things, but a formal presentation about them? I was nervous. Excited. Very excited. But also very nervous.
And rolling into the GulfQuest Museum early to get set up I was greeted with…a train. Blocking the tracks. And cars beginning to pile up at the train crossing waiting, like me, to get in. In the cars were my audience. They waited patiently, avoiding the brutal heat by sitting in their cars in the AC. I called the train company to ask them to move the train. “Ok,” the CSX dispatcher said. “Any minute now.” We all waited. I went to the federal transportation bureau website and submitted a form asking them to move the train. Nothing. I called back to CSX about their train. “Any minute now,” they said again. I danced in the tracks in front of the train to try to get the conductor’s attention. I called CSX a third time. Nothing.
I began walking to the waiting cars to assure them they wouldn’t be late to the speech and they wouldn’t miss the speaker because I was the speaker. I begged them to wait. Don’t give up hope. The train will move eventually. Because there is nothing worse than giving a speech to one or two people in a nearly empty auditorium. It’s humiliating. And nervous as I was, I knew an auditorium with some people was better than a nearly empty one.
About forty minutes later, the train slowly rolled away. The speech went well. You can find it on the GulfQuest YouTube page.
At one point I was excited about Amtrak returning to Mobile. Now I hope I never ever see another train.
I’m Cam Marston and I’m just trying to Keep it Real.