I love my job. It’s very strange and very particular, and makes me feel valued when I get frustrated and take a step back to look at it. I am like Liam Neeson in the way I have a very particular set of skills, except mine won’t translate as well when I’m done working here. I don’t want to go deep in depth about my job here but if you are curious about it check out episode #40 where we interviewed Dave Z and talked quite a bit about what we do to make money.

At the risk of sounding like a douche by saying “ nothing is the same since I have had a kid “, it’s true. Very few things are the same since Dax was born. The three weeks I took off were rad but at the end I did kind of miss work if only because I got so used to doing it all the time, but I was and am happy to be back. I didn’t forget anything major, which was a concern, and was able to step right back into the swing of things. But I FEEL different being here. I get bored way easier. Like, much much easier. Maybe bored isn’t even the right word but uncaptivated is too generous to how captivated I was before by my work.

That’s normal, I know that, to not always be fully enjoying what you are doing but it leads to being much more easily distracted. It’s even carried over into the podcast, albeit to a lesser degree. I attribute that to the fact that I feel very passionate about what we are doing here and enjoy and also need the conversations that Colin and I have every week. There are not many places I can openly, freely, and confidently talk about the things we talk about.  It’s a release for me and an opportunity I didn’t often get before we started the pod.

I shared with my wife today, and put into words for the first time, that one of the things that has changed for me is my work. I no longer feel fulfilled by my work like I did before. I’m not able to plug in and tune out like I was before Dax was born. I’m not sure what to attribute that to yet. Whether it’s just the time I took off work, still getting used to my new life or that my priorities have shifted completely.

I’m not going to start looking for a new job or anything, especially before I figure out why I’m feeling this way, but this new lack of fulfillment has further solidified for me that I will probably have to find something new to do to have the life style I want. It has also further solidified for me that the podcast is probably the way to do that. If I want to be able to be with my family as much I can, want to try and do what I can to change and improve the world around me, and want to be able to express myself, have honest, thought provoking and idea challenging conversations, then building this podcast to a point where my life and the life of my family and co host can be supported is the best option I have.

That’s been the whole point of this from the beginning. For us to have an outlet for ourselves and thoughts that we felt people could benefit from, and if we can support ourselves or even thrive while we are doing it then that’s even better. I’m not sure exactly what I expected it to be like this first year. I certainly didn’t expect to be making money one year in (which we aren’t), and I don’t know that I even expected people to be listening. I suppose in that sense I’m exactly where I thought I would be.

Starting a business is hard, which in the end is what we are doing. And I think starting a business in your 20s is particularly hard because you don’t know who you are yet. I feel confident and blessed that I was able to begin to get a grip on who I am this early. That I even have a clue. I have a lot of people to thank for that.

Myself partially for working and making mistakes but not ever giving up no matter how bad I wanted to so many times. I also have to thank my mom for birthing me and giving me a shot at life, and then for doing an excellent job raising me. My grandma for doing the latter. My sister for teaching me to deal with difficult people. My wife for always pushing me and supporting me through anything I want to do. Even make mistakes. Colin for joining me and again pushing me to try my hardest and challenge my own thinking up until this point. And now finally my son. For changing my life and forcing me into a reality point of what I need to do with myself.

I want to run a media network. One that we started. I want people working for us and reporters in the White House press room. I want to read news from my journalists that is breaking, and that is vital to the American public. I want to take that news and report, along side my good buddy Colin, every single day of the week. I want people to trust our name, because they know that we won’t lie and neither will our journalists. And most of all I want to do it honestly, so that my son can see that it’s possible. For helping me get here mentally I can never thank any of these people enough. All I can do, is DO IT. All I can do is work and strive and yearn for success until I achieve it. I can reach these goals and dreams to show my son and my family and my loved ones that their time was not wasted. To succeed is the only way to repay those who showed faith in me and there for my only option.

From here I use the advice of Dr. Jordan Peterson. The best way to achieve a large goal, is to set small ones that are a pathway to the large one. So now, I reframe my thinking. I need to look at my job as the incredible opportunity that it is that provides me with everything I need to support my family and support the podcast until the podcast itself does that. I need to use the time I have and make the most of it and do research for the podcast. Use my lunch to write my blog posts (which is what I’m doing right now) and try and get my name out there, to try and get OUR name out there. People want what we are offering. They just don’t know it yet. Somethings people know that they want. Cures to diseases. TV whenever they want. Pizza delivery. And some things they don’t. Like honest news and cold. Hard. Facts.

On a very big episode 50, Don and Offie address some concerns expressed by a viewer  with a small look into how Don sees the Government, break down the Green New Deal  and the positives, negatives, and inconsistencies, a little about The Bern and why we WON’T be going over any candidates yet, why Amazon is pulling out of New York and why it may or may not be a bad thing , big picture thoughts about money, socialism, taxes, and intersectionality, and a Pats filled SPORTS!!

HERE is the link for the episode where we covered the “Amazon” or “Head” tax that was passed and then repealed in Seattle.

We love to cover topics requested by the fans. We are here for YOU. If you have ANY questions or ANY topics you want covered, let us know. We are ALWAYS open for requests.

All of our podcasts originate on SoundCloud but can be found ANYWHERE you can find a podcast including Apple Podcasts. Our Pre Shows are live on our Facebook and then go up on our YouTube on Tuesdays followed by the full show on Wednesday.

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I am finally back. I want to start with an insane shout out to my partner in crime in these affairs for being about the best business partner one could ask for. Not only did he check up on me all the time, he covered several blog posts for me and intended to cover an episode until that unruly brother of his took him on a duck hunt. But who can blame him.

As of right now, Dax is 3 weeks and two days old. Jordyn is feeding him while we watch “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” while I write this post. This three weeks has been… the most trying of my entire life. I never lacked respect before, but now have a new found respect for everyone who has children that have made into adulthood happy and healthy. I have already started to learn things as a father and also had to learn some things for myself that people had already tried to warn me about.

When you have a baby everyone has advice or their own story. Some of that stuff is really helpful. Weird ways they burped their baby or something like that which may come in handy. Also if you have a boy, he will pee on you. And then you will make sure he is covered always. But he will still get you.

One of the things that always caught me was that so many men told me that the moment I held my baby everything would change for me. That women are mothers when they find out they are pregnant and men are fathers when they hold their child. I looked forward to that.

When Dax was born I didn’t experience that instant feeling that everyone talked about. I don’t know if it’s because I was so tired or it didn’t go exactly as we planned or what, but I didn’t feel that and then was nervous. This is all so new and I didn’t know and still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. All I can do is what feels natural.

I took three weeks off of work and had a fair amount of time to think about what I wanted or whatever was on my mind. And it took until the third week for me to figure it out. Dax has some days where he is inconsolable. The nurses at our local hospital call it “the phase of purple crying“ and gave us a DVD to help us deal with it. It essentially breaks down that sometimes your baby just cries, and there isn’t anything to be done. Eventually you have done everything but the baby is still upset and it’s easy to get frustrated or upset with yourself because you might think you are doing something wrong, when really you aren’t.

So it’s in the middle of one of these days where I’m trying to let Jordyn get some sleep because she is up every time he wants to eat which can be exhausting. So I’m holding my baby who is screaming at the top of his lungs and has been for 45 minutes, and that’s when it hits me. I know I love him because I wouldn’t accept this behavior from anyone else. Not even my wife. I would just walk away for a while or if it was someone else’s child I would never watch them again.

But when Dax is this upset, as frustrated as I am, all I want is for him to be happy. I want him to be calm so he can sleep and eat and be fulfilled. But it’s not just with this behavior, it’s with everything. Right now in my area we have an average of about 9” of snow and anyone else I would force to go places with me if I wanted them to. My son, I didn’t want to even leave the house if he didn’t have to. I’m limiting the small children I bring my baby around because I am afraid for him to get sick when he is this young. I told my mom yesterday that all I want for him right now is to be safe.

I am beginning to understand what people mean when they say the love you have for your child is indescribable. I don’t mean that in the cliche way like “oh man it’s just so intense I can’t even describe it“. I mean I don’t understand it. Being a father to a newborn is something that is foreign to me in the way my brain works. I have lots of experience with babies and newborns, but spending 3 weeks straight with something that makes no logical sense is extremely difficult to even really comprehend when you live your life based on logic. Because the behavior of a baby is not dictated by any logic past eating, pooping, and sleeping. On my best days I can be very understanding, but on my worst days at 2:30 in the morning? Not always the case.

As I watch my son flail his arms around and every so often slap himself because he doesn’t even know that his hands are attached to his body, I am astounded. Astounded that human beings brains are so wildly complex that we can begin as creatures that are barely sentient and learn and grown and evolve in just a few decades to put people in space or learn to put someone’s face on someone else’s body. It instills an appreciation for people that I did not have before, but now do not think I will ever lose.

I cannot wait to see Dax grow up and choose a path for his life so that I can say that I have seen the entire scope of his progression of intelligence, at least as much as I could. I’m sure when he is an adult I will eat those words and want this time back when he relied on us and was actually comforted by us instead of annoyed by us. Right now I just try to take it day by day and make sure I am doing everything I can to do my best everyday.

Donavan Phillips

On our the first classic episode in a few weeks the birth of the first Salt of The Streets baby is announced and the boys get back to the basics with hopefully what will be final shutdown related coverage, the current political strife in Venezuela and different ideas on how to handle it, the recent arrest of Roger Stone, new abortion laws being introduced, a new law considering exeptions from vaccines, lots of red dead talk as well as the first few weeks of father hood and of course SPORTS!!

Things were crazy the last few weeks but should be getting back normal so you can expect our usual pre shows on Saturday and the occasional Sunday, new episodes like this one every Monday, the full video on our YouTube on Tuesday, am the written and audio blog posts on Thursday. All audio originates on our SoundCloud and then can be found anywhere that you can find a podcast.

We love feedback from the listeners and of course answering any questions you have or covering any topics you request. You can reach out to us on ANY of our social media either business or personal and we WILL answer. We also have T shirts for sale that can be purchased from us at any time. If you leave us a review wherever you listen, take a screen shot and send it to us you will get $5 off of your first shirt.

Written by: Colin Offenbacker

Welcome back to the Salt of the Streets Blog, Colin here again this week, filling in for Don. Instead of doing the 3rd part of my Iran-Contra series this week, I’m going to be discussing something a little more contemporary. I’ll be back again next week with more Iran-Contra but today were going to be talking about some of my personal frustration stemming from the partial government shutdown. If you didn’t catch Don and I’s hour and a half long conversation on it on the last podcast your seriously missing out. We covered a million different aspects of the shutdown, but I still have a chip on my shoulder about the whole thing. It’s an avenue we didn’t focus on too much, but today, I’m going to get into it.

I’m going to start out by telling a story.

Now, I feel like I should preface this whole thing by saying I do have a pretty mushy soft spot in my heart for little random acts of kindness and charity. That being said, last week I was thumbing through my facebook feed and stumbled upon a post that left a single salty tear slowly rolling down my cheek. It was a post from the wife of an old Coast Guard shipmate of mine. The first thing that caught my eye was the picture attached to the post. It was a picture of an opened card with a simple sympathy entry inside, it said “Just remember, YOU’RE NOT ALONE in this.” And below this was a hand written message, reading, “Sorry your family is affected by the government shutdown. This isn’t much but hope it can help in some way.” The cover of the card didn’t have an address written on it, no return address, just the family’s last name. That right there tells me that the anonymous do gooder was perhaps someone local to there community. They weren’t looking for any recognition, they simply wanted to help a family, a friend, or maybe a neighbor, who through no fault of there own were in need.

This post filled my heart all at once with both joy and sadness. Joy for the selfless act of anonymous charity. Sadness, and rage due to the fact that an active duty service member and his family, do to the shutdown, were in a position to necessitate an act of charity.

Being a prior member of the United States Coast Guard myself, I have been highly agitated by the federal governments complete blundering of the political situation centered around The Wall. As I prefaced in the beginning of this post, I won’t be rehashing all the things Don and I discussed around the shutdown here. No, I have a separate bone to pick today.

This time, my animosity is focused on “my people”. The social and political commentators from the Conservative side of the political spectrum. Particularly Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire and John Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine, both of whom host shows I listen to as part of my regular podcast regiment.

They, like many on the conservative side of the spectrum have seemed to beat the drum of, hey so what if some 800,000 federal workers are either furloughed, without pay, or are having to work, without pay. I am very much of a similar mindset, when it comes to most bureaucratic branches of the federal government, but, when one of those branches is an active duty military branch, my lack of sympathy reaches for the hand break and screeches to a stop.

This ridiculous shutdown has been going on now for the ladder part of a month, with no end in site. All this time, there has been more than 40,000 of our nations young men and women in the United States Coast Guard standing there watch, braving perilous waters to perform search and rescue operations, interdicting massive drug shipments, stopping and often saving the lives of, what would be undocumented/illegal migrants who were trying to make the dangerous voyage across literal oceans to get into this country, and a dozen other various missions. All without being paid.

The complete lack of almost any conversation around this idea of an entire branch of the military missing out on paychecks, and by conservatives no less, seems fundamentally wrong to me. As someone who generally lands on the conservative side more times than not, I always thought that regardless of politics we stood by our military, we supported our troops, at home and abroad. It’s a fundamental core belief. Apparently taking shots at the bevy of democratic presidential hopefuls coming out of the woodwork, or at the lefts latests rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is more important. Don’t get me wrong, I love to destroy the crazy things that come out of her mouth as much as the next guy, but it’s like shooting the broad side of a barn with her. It may be fun, yes, but there’s no substance to it, at this point it’s all just part of this “own the libs” routine they all seem to be playing. All while our nations finest are baring the brunt of another ridiculous game of political softball. I’m disappointed, I’m angry, I mean these are “my people” and they’re dropping the ball on calling out the government for there stupidity and shear incompetence.

Do we need a wall? I mean, who the hell am I to say. I don’t know, I would like to think that in 2019 we could be a little more sophisticated than a fucking wall, but in the end, this is political debate that should be happening on the floors of the House of Congress and in the Senate. That’s how this is supposed to work for god sakes. If we the people, working through our elected representatives haven’t collectively figured out the answer when it comes time to fund our over-bloated government, tough, we’ll have to continue to debate and to politically negotiate while we continue to fund and run the behemoth governmental machine that we’ve all helped build.

In closing I want to leave you with just a few of the statistics put out by the U.S. Coast Guard covering Fiscal Year 2017:

Removed over 223 metric tons of cocaine; 31,190 pounds of marijuana; 6 kilograms of heroin
and other opiates; and 168 kilograms of methamphetamines worth $6.6 billion wholesale.

Interdicted 2,512 undocumented migrants.

Responded to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria assisting more than 11,200 persons.

Conducted over 5,300 hours of icebreaking operations to support movement of cargo worth
over $1.5 billion through ice-impeded waters of the Great Lakes and the Eastern Seaboard.

Not counting hurricanes, they responded to 12,270 pollution incident reports; responded to 16,069
Search and Rescue cases; assisted 22,004 people; saved 4,228 lives; and protected more than
$76 million in property from loss.