A Back Entrance

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 12, Verse 8

"Everyone admires a man with good sense, but a man with a warped mind is despised."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Almost three years ago, when I went back into therapy for the first time since college, I sat cross-legged, like a girl, in front of that guy and said,

"I just don't know if I'm a good man or a bad man,"

And, fortunately or unfortunately, he didn't cock his head, squint his eyes and say, 

"Are you fucking kidding me?  How old are you?"

I don't like the words "identity crisis", because I think they were made up by some slackass with too much time on his hands and a very good grasp of what educated white people will grasp onto to explain why they're annoying, plus I don't think being unsure of yourself is necessarily a crisis. It might be.  I don't know.  I've never watched "Dr. Oz".

I'm not quite sure why I went back into therapy.  In college, it was free, and I rocked that couch every week for a significant portion of my time there.  Other people my age looked forward to beer pong, Frisbee golf and pussy, while I always got up out of bed faster and with more energy on the day when I knew I was going to therapy.   

In college I treated therapy the same way I treated everything else: like it was a performance.  It was a one man show and it just so happened that there was one person in the audience, too.  And that didn't matter to me-- the way I performed there might as well have been a thousand people crammed into that hopeless office replete with '70s-era furniture and a broken HVAC system that made the room approximately 327 degrees all year long.  I loved telling funny anecdotes from my past to the therapist, who never really thought to rein me in.  For me, watching him laugh, until he was sometimes doubled over in his chair, was therapy, and I would leave the Health Center practically walking on air.  I was doing what I was born to do: make someone else feel better.  Forget that that was supposed to be his job.  

Well, sort of.  

I didn't really understand the point of therapy in college, I just knew that, of all the buildings on campus, even the theatre buildings-- that was the building in which I belonged.  I knew it, it couldn't be denied or argued.  In fact, I was so sure of this that when I came in to schedule my first appointment, the stereotypically dowdy secretary said, 

"You know, there is a back entrance that you can use for your appointments."

I looked at her like she'd just said something dumb.

"Why would I want to use that?"

Of course-- why would I want to use that?  I was just going there to perform a 50-minute monologue.  Looking back on it, I now realize that this is pretty much as healthy an attitude as you can have about utilizing behavioral health services.  Private entrance?  Why?  I'm not going to get pube extensions or have a swastika done in henna on my forehead-- I'm going to talk to someone who can hopefully give me some insight into my life, my behavior, my thoughts, my feelings and my relationships. Why should I need to slink into some hidden away door shrouded in trees and secrecy?

Of course, that insight that I'd hoped to gain kind of didn't happen, at least not all that much.  You know, cuz I was far too busy pretending I was Spalding Grey.  Which-- don't get me wrong-- was great fun.  I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for it.

And so when college was over, I stopped going to therapy.  After all, what would a guy with a freshly-ended relationship, no direction, an oversized nose and a B. A. in Theatre need therapy for anyway?  I went from job to job, stupid apartment to stupid apartment and, all the while, I wrote.  I wrote plays and editorials and commentaries and I pissed people off and I made people laugh and I appeared in shows and I made very few friends and lost quite a bit more, I started dating this cute girl who was living in Pittsburgh and miraculously she moved out here and became my wife and all the while, through the living and the crying and the writing and the eating and the television and the operetta and the paychecks and the junk that passes for antiques and the family dinners that grew rarer and the jokes and the meanness and the huggles and the sleeping, I guess that thought started to get more and more incessant-- 

Am I a good man or am I a bad man?

Obviously, I know that this particular dichotomy, like most of them, exists only in my head, and only to torture me and make me hand over $50 every other week to a guy who probably doesn't need it, at least not from me.  

But, here we are.  

I don't try to entertain anymore.  Sometimes I see myself trying to shock him-- with some depraved thought I've had, or some terribly awful comment I've made that I repeat for his benefit.  A cutting remark, an acerbic bit of nastiness that I've offered up from the meaner part of my soul.  

He's perfected the art of being nonplussed.  They teach it to them in school, and I'm sure there are those out there who are better than him-- but he's good.  

"I know you want me to agree with you sometimes," he said to me once, "that you're bad-- but I just don't see it."

"You don't understand.  You're not with me all the time, you're not in here.  You don't know."

"No," he said, "but I know enough."

Maybe that's what this blog is, in the end, it's me ripping off my shirt and tearing at my skin to pull everything apart to show you, to make you see, to force you to look and inspect and be horrified.  But maybe there's just a doddering old man in a funny tie behind the stupid curtain.  

Well.  At any rate; I'm going through the front door.  

I Can't Say

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 21, Verse 14

"An angry man is silenced by giving him a gift!"

CHIPPED WISDOM:

My birthday's coming up soon.  I'll be thirty-three.  I share my birthday, May 12th, with a host of colorful characters who were, are, and always will be, more famous than me:

Katie Hepburn, famous star of the silver screen and the first woman to wear pants at Bryn Mawr, or something.

Florence Nightingale.  She was a nurse, you know.

Skater dude Tony Hawk, Sheen dude Emilio Estevez, and Ving Rhames, the funny Secret Service agent from "Dave".  

Hahaha-- he said, "I can't say".  

That's funny!

Usually, around about this late Aprily time of year, I start to get a hankering for certain material items that might serve to fill some kind of voidiferous void in my existence.  Some hole that one might put something in, say, something from an antique shop.  Or say, e-Bay, which is really just an antique shop without that musty smell that makes you somehow instantly have to take a huge shit.  

Don't ask.  I'm no gastroenterologist.  I don't understand it.

This year, I got nothing.  This is kind of driving my wife up the wall, as she cares about these things and wants to make me happy, and that's nice.  I suppose what I really want for my birthday is a wife who cares about making me happy on my birthday, and I've got that, so I'm pretty good.  A month or so ago, I asked for permission to demolish our old vacuum cleaner that sucked (HA!  "I can't say".  GENIUS!!!) and for further permission to purchase a new one which I thoroughly vetted.  (It's a Shark Professional Navigator Lift-Away Upright Vacuum, Model NV356e and no they aren't paying me to endorse their product but they kind of fucking should now that I think about it and if you're a Shark marketing asshole who stumbled upon this blog while Googling your product, I think you should send me a check.)

So, I spent $200 on this vacuum, and I absolutely love it.  Now that we have a Basset Hound that sheds like a bastard (and isn't 100% potty trained -- why?  I CAN'T SAY!  AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!) we need a vacuum cleaner that rocks the Casbah, whether Sharif likes it or not.  That was kind of a gift.  From me.  To me.  I love using it.  I love emptying out the canister that fills up with unholy amounts of dust and shit in a matter of, oh, three minutes.  It brings me immense joy to know that, for the next twenty-seven minutes, our living room carpet is clean.  

(Ish.)

So, what do you buy for the man who has a lovely wife, two beautiful babies, a slobbery, almost-there dog, and a Shark Professional Navigator Lift-Away Upright Vacuum, Model NV356e and who, hence, has everything?

I CAN'T SAY!

I'm pretty ambivalent about my birthday this year.  I don't know why-- I always have a good time, especially since I've been married.  My wife knows the protocol.  She decorates the dining room, the way my parents used to do for me when I was a boy.  And a lot... older than... a boy.  There is a delectable home-made comestible that is set ablaze in the customary manner.  And there are always thoughtful, useful, silly, wonderful gifts, even when she struggles to come up with something.  She always pulls a hat-trick out of her ass, and, while that sounds uncomfortable, it is always appreciated, and always just right.

This year, though?  I don't know.  I'm somewhere else.  I'm resisting.  I'm not allowing my brain to go there.  My father hates his birthday, or at least he pretends (very well) to hate it.  "WHAT BIRTHDAY, EVERY DAY IS MY FUCKING BIRTHDAY!" he'll roar in that precious Israeli way of his.  I kind of feel like every day is Victoria Day, but I'm in therapy for that, and other things.  Speaking of which, I want to be not depressed anymore.  Or angry.  Or anxious.  Or hopeless.  Or sad.  

Can I have that for my birthday?  Do they have that at Kohl's?  Is there an apostrophe in Kohl's?  

My birthday parties growing up were always at home.  Always.  Me and my awkward friends assembled in the dining room and I held court around the table, which handily extended to accommodate the pre-pubescent awkwardness, imitating uninvited leper classmates and socially imprudent elementary school teachers with whom we were all familiar.  Home-made (my mother was different then) cake was served and then we would go out side to play a lusty game of Ga-Ga, an Israeli sport that mixes soccer, dodgeball and counterinsurgency tactics, with my father (who was never different).  I loved being outside playing this game that involved grass, a ball, and the very real chance of getting injured, which clearly means that I was definitely different then.  After the game, parents picked up their children and were generally not amused to find that the party favor for attending my party was something living: a hermit crab one year, newts another.  There were Siamese fighting fish and baby frogs, too.  I'm glad we gave up this pet party favor thing by the time I had my Bar Mitzvah, or my friends' parents would have had a hell of a time shoving their kids' new donkeys into the trunks of their sedans.

May 12th will be a quieter day this year, I think.  I have the astonishing good fortune to be off on my birthday this year, and that is present enough.  I will cling tightly to my family and my dog on my freshly vacuumed rug and wonder about how I ever got to be thirty-three, and what the hell does that even mean anyway?  I hope you know, because Sharif don't like it.  Why?  

Eh-- you know.  

Wicked

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 28, Verse 1

"The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as a lion."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Lots of kids want to be cops when they grow up.  This is one way in which you know for sure that kids are stupid.  Who wants to get paid dirt, put on a badge and a uniform that makes you a hated member of the establishment, a symbol of oppression and despised by many both young and old, and be expected to shovel the shit of the nation at 4am while normal people are sleeping safely in bed cuddling whomever and, oh, yeah, if you're really unlucky, you'll get shot or stabbed or run over or crashed into doing it?  Who in the fucking hell would want to do that?

RIGHT!  A FIVE YEAR OLD!

Now, obviously, we need police officers, so it's a good thing that approximately 700,000 American kids never grow out of that particular phase.  I grew out of it, but it took me till I was twenty-nine.  And I wasn't particularly keen on growing out of it.  I fought it tooth and nail.  

I sublimated in several ways.  I wrote a book about cops, and, to promote it, I rubbed elbows with cops, and their wives, and their widows.  I spoke at gatherings of cops, some active, some retired.  At a book signing where my life was threatened, cops put their lives on the line when they showed up in uniform and in plainclothes to protect me.  I wrote articles and commentaries and personal essays about cops, cops who were felled, and cops who felled suspects, whom I thought were being vilified by the press and by popular opinion.  In 1999, legendary musician Curtis Mayfield wrote me an angry email in response to a piece I'd written in the Philadelphia Inquirer about cops and about a particularly famous cop-killer.  Then an impulsive and hotheaded 19-year-old, I tossed a furious email back at him and suggested that, "the next time you feel compelled to spout off your ignorant views to me on a subject you know nothing about, why don't you try jerking off into a hand-towel and save everybody the effort of reading your filth?"  The next day, I saw MSN.com that Curtis Mayfield was dead.  

That's right.  I gave him "Something He Can Feel".

I suppose I sublimated by becoming an EMT in 2005.  Badge.  Dark blue uniform.  Lights and a siren that went woo woo woo.  Even though I was just a transport EMT, schlepping bodies from MRI appointment to rehab to nursing home to psych hospital to home, I did my fair share of "emergency" runs.  But you'd think that a cop wannabee would have been an action junkie, that whenever we were told to run lights-and-sirens it would have been a real "Dukes of Hazzard" moment for me, but my stomach always turned as I switched on the red lights.  I hated it.  It terrified me.  There was nothing exciting about barreling down I-95 in a decrepit, poorly maintained ambulance with bald tires and a suspension held together by rubber bands with some dying asshole in the back being worked on by another asshole who was allegedly your "partner".  I guess I should have known that the emergency life was not for me.  The pit of your stomach never lies, you know.

I've always struggled with meaning in my life.  What's the point if there isn't a point?  And I wonder if that isn't why I've been drawn heavily to artistic pursuits-- the life of a writer or of a performer, someone to be read and talked about (Wilde said, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about", and he was right, goddamn him) or the life of a police officer, someone to be respected and remembered.  Maybe I thought that a higher profile existence would give my life meaning, purpose, or direction.  It's the kind of conclusion a five-year-old would draw.  Oh, you're scared of death?  Well, do something important so you'll be remembered.

As usual, I went to the extreme.  Because that's kind of what I do.  

As part of my EMT training back in 2005, I had to do a twelve hour shift at Jefferson Hospital's E.R.  I took vital signs, asked dumbfuck questions, stared at pony-tailed nurses whose asses looked impossibly delicious even in dumpy pastel colored scrubs, and I generally got in the way, like a student is supposed to do.  Well, at some point in the night, some homeless tranny barricaded him/herself in the E.R. bathroom and was apparently smoking crack.  She refused the nurse's commands to come out, and one of them said to me, "Get the security guard at the front desk."  I went out there, and there was the front desk, but there was no security guard.  I walked back into the E.R. and as I walked back in, the bathroom door flung open and the He/She flew out and took off through the E.R. doors.  

"STOP!" I screamed as I maniacally took off.  It was maybe eleven o'clock at night, and my breath was hard and cold in the night as my boots thumped against the pavement.  In pursuit.  Suspect fleeing.  Southbound on 11th.

STOP!  STOP!  STOP!

Oh, I realized.  They're yelling at me.   

I turned to see a breathless, overweight security guard and E.R. tech were panting behind me as I finally put the brakes on.  

"What are you, fucking outta your goddamned mind?!  We don't chase!  When they're off our campus, it's the cops' problem.  We ain't the fucking cops!" The guard yelled at me between gasps for air.  

No.  We ain't.            

It's Alright, Honey

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 14, Verse 13

"Before every man there lies a wide and pleasant road that seems right but ends in death."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I've been married since 2006, but, when the shit really gets caught up in the blades of the fan, I call my mother.  Jewish boys are like that-- maybe you've heard.  And when venting about this conundrum or that, oftentimes there is silence on the other end of the line.  

I'm trapped in my current job.

We can't afford to pay the nanny.

The babies are sick.

I'm terrified I'll never make more than $30,000 a year.

The house is falling apart.

The family is falling apart.

We have too much stuff.

I'm anxious/depressed/scared/sad.

This.  That.  The other.

She's heard it all before.  Christ, she's been a mother to some neurotic, clinging idiot or other since 1967.  You think she hasn't heard it all before?

So, yeah.  Sometimes there's silence.  What is there to say sometimes?  There are no comforting words, sometimes.  There are no pearls or gems, sometimes.  So she listens.  Eventually, she sighs.  Oddly enough, her sighs are comforting.  Her exhalations, to me, have wisdom.  At the very least, even if they don't have wisdom, I know that, if she's sighing, I've been heard.  Finally, she'll conclude by saying:

"It's alright, honey.  It'll all work out in the end."

The first time I heard her say this, maybe three years ago, I took the phone away from my ear and looked at it quizzically  with my brow furrowed in-- I don't know-- surprise?  Alarm? 

"You mean-- in the end end?  As in, what I'm worrying about won't matter cuz we're all going to die?"

(Beat.)

"Well, yeah," my mother replied, laughing a little laugh of-- I don't know-- surprise?  Alarm?

I laughed too.  Because, shit: she's right.

Since that conversation, when I call her, sometimes I wait for that line-- sometimes I don't even wait and I give it to her.  

"Well, I suppose it doesn't matter because it'll all work out in the end, right, Ma?"

And she'll laugh.  I like when my mother laughs-- especially about death.  Or maybe she's laughing about life.  The futility of it, the silliness of it.  What we put ourselves through.  All the hand-wringing and the envelope-licking, the potty-training and the gutter-cleaning.  Maintenance.  Pluck the unibrow (I told you you'd learn all my secrets if you stayed here long enough), replace the washing machine, upgrade the cellphone, fill the tank, scrub the pan, go on vacation, come home.

Laundry

Laundry 

Laundry

Laundry

Laundry

Laundry

It's funny, if you think about it.  Most of the time we're too deep in it to step away and look at ourselves, tottering around, being funny.  I like to step outside myself and watch what's going on.  If I'm ever sitting around at the table sort of staring off at nothing, I'm not psychotic, I'm kind of just watching the show.  I'm trying to enjoy it for what it is.  Because I get so caught up in the terror of the moment, the choking fury of my little problems and struggles that I sometimes forget that this whole stupid thing is about being nice to people and paying your bills and bringing up children who aren't sociopaths, polluting as little as possible, making enough money so you can dither around the halls of your retirement home in non-thrift shop pants, leave some non-embarrassing amount to your offspring, and dying quietly in your Stryker bed.  

When my mother's mother was wasting away from lymphoma, her husband bought her a Basset Hound.  That's exactly the kind of well-meaning, though completely inept thing my emotionally retarded grandfather would do.  As if to more clearly demonstrate the inappropriateness of the gesture, the poor Basset Hound died shortly after being acquired.  "When that dog died," my eldest sister told me recently, "Bubbe said she stopped believing in God."  Then, of course, Bubbe died.  My mom was 25, and had already been a mother herself for 7 years.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened to me if my mother had died when I was twenty-five.  When I was twenty-five, I was working on an ambulance as an EMT and I was making $11.33 an hour.  I had gotten engaged that year, and I had decided to pursue a Master of Education degree.  I have no idea how it would have changed me.  I don't know if it would have put the brakes on everything.  I don't know if I'd have gone back to school, if I would have gone through with getting married.  Would I have turned to drugs or alcohol, attempted suicide, become severely depressed-- I don't know.  I don't know how she made it out of that hole herself.  Her relationship with her mother was very different than the relationship she and I have-- still, I don't know.  I'm often disappointed in myself because of the relatively poor and disordered way in which I cope with stress and anger and frustration in my life, and I cannot imagine how much worse off I would be today if I'd known real, true tragedy growing up the way my mother did.  

I know tragedy now-- I've seen it in the lives of countless people who come through the crippled gates of the place where I work, and I've finally seen it in my own family, too.  I know what it smells like and tastes like, I feel it in my skin and my hair and my eyes are so tired and dry and there's still laundry to fold and it really doesn't matter matter matter because it's alright, honey.  It'll all work out in the end.

My mother's laughing.  I can hear her.  I hope yours is, too.  

The Doggy Paddle Back to Land

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 26, Verse 11

"As a dog returns to its vomit, so does a fool return to its folly."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

So, by now you know about my thing about airplane disasters.  Today, a passenger jet en route to Bali, where my wife and I honeymooned lo those many several years ago landed just shy of the runway.  About a hundred feet shy.  In the Indian Ocean.  Hey, these passengers were most likely water lovers anyway, right?  It's a good thing, too, as lots of them, apparently, swam back to land.  The plane split.  Everybody lived.

I wonder, though, how many of these fuckers who lived through that harrowing and horrible experience, are going to be excited about getting on a plane anytime soon.  If it were me on that flight, faced with the prospect of essentially 24 hours flying time just to get back, I might just be calling Bali my new forever home, and there are worse places to call home.  Like, for instance, all of them.

From 1980-2003, I was not a dog person.  My family didn't have dogs since my eldest sister was a young child.  They had Basset Hounds, from when my mom was a girl until she was a young mom herself.  As one Basset died, it was replaced with one of a similar vintage, and each one was called "Gypsy".  No one ever accused my family of being imaginative.  By the time I rolled out on the assembly line (that's what my grandfather called, um, I guess, my mom's uterus), my family was dogless.  My mother had gotten fussy in her late twenties and educated about the perils of childhood allergies (which, in retrospect, was good as I turned out to be allergic to everything, from grass to dust to cornmeal and chocolate to ragweed and my own elbows) and so no dog would grace our threshold for many many years.  

When my middle sister became independent, the first thing she did was get pets.  Those turned out to be mice living in the stuffing of her first sofa.  After that, she got a dog.  Then she met an idiot who moved in with her, and this idiot had a dog.  When she and the idiot broke up, she had two dogs.  Right around this time, I finished college and moved out on my own.  My girlfriend at the time had just broken up with me, after inviting me to her parents' house near Boston for a long weekend (I got right back in the car and drove six hours home, thankful I wasn't relying on an Indonesian jet to get me there) and I was very lonely.  So, I adopted one of my sister's dogs, Finley.  I was hooked.  They really get their claws in you, those bastards.

In 2009, my wife and I miscarried.  We were devastated by the loss and we responded to that grief by adopting a second dog.  Where Finley was a saint, Molly was a succubus.  A terror.  A nightmare.  She peed and pooped everywhere.  She was skittish, manic, wild and she was not to be tamed.  In 2011, we gained two babies, and lost two dogs.  Finley's health deteriorated to an appalling level.  He could no longer hold in his previous iron-clad bowels, he couldn't stand, he cried all day from arthritis pain, he couldn't eat.  It was horrible.  It ended the way so many of these things do-- on the floor, on a blanket, with me, a doctor, and a needle.  I cried so hard I couldn't see, and I don't know how I made it home without crashing the car.  You'd think it would have been easier to get rid of Molly, but there were disgusting tears there too on the day when I re-surrendered her to the shelter we had adopted her from two years earlier.  Two absolutely terrible years.  We couldn't do it.  She was ripping our house and our sanity apart.

I couldn't have it.

Now, the crazy rides again.  Tennessee, a four-year-old Basset rescue, waddles through our house with all the absurdity and charm she can muster.  And she does it effortlessly.  I tell people that making mistakes doesn't make you bad or evil-- I tell people that for a living-- and I wonder if getting another dog is a mistake to begin with.  Maybe it's just impulsive, or foolish, or asking for it.  I guess, if it turns out okay then it wasn't a mistake.  If it blows up in my face, it was.  What can I say?  I'm a sucker for a sob story with nine teats.

Seriously-- nine.  I counted.  I don't know what you do on your Saturday nights.

I love the way the center of the top of her head smells-- right where the thin white stripe of fur traces between her obscenely long ears-- like... dog.  Like magic.  It's the perfect spot to kiss.  I bury my nose and my face in those endless wrinkles and I think that this can't possibly be a mistake.  Yeah, the nanny's terrified of her (even sent my wife a crying face emoji text today) and I don't think she's a complete win with my children yet, but I suppose they (the kids, not the nanny) will grow to love her the way I do.  The way I loved Finley.  The way I wanted and tried to love Molly.  

Tenny had a hard life, and, for these first few weeks, I know she's going to make our lives hard.  But we'll all get used to each other and it'll all get better.  It's funny.  I never wanted to be a dog person.  I didn't understand it growing up.  My friends had dogs and they were okay, but I was never dying to have one.  But after Finley died and we gave Molly back, I was completely lost, adrift out in the ocean, clutching to my seat cushion, waiting.  Waiting for my short, long, slobbering savior. 

Some people just never fucking learn; and I'm glad I'm one of them. 

When I'm New

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 21, Verse 23

"Keep your mouth closed and you'll stay out of trouble."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Once, I wrote an email to a professor that almost got me thrown out of college.

Once, I wrote story that got me fired from a job.

Once, I wrote editorials in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News that got me death threats.

Once, I wrote an anonymous blog and I got tired of it, so I started another one that wasn't.

And I realized I couldn't.

"Majesty," Mozart says in the film Amadeus, "I am a vulgar man, but I assure my music is not."

I'm kind of the opposite, I guess.  My writing is base, it is unrefined and obscene, it pulls no punches and accepts no mercy, particularly on its subject.  Is it honest?  I don't know, maybe it's as honest as it can be without destroying me, but it loves to tell stories.  Stories that are shameful, embarrassing, disgusting.  My writing uses metaphors that would make a Des Moines housewife frown-- it's okay, she's not my target audience anyway.

Or, maybe she is.  If I could make my mother frown with my incendiary rhetoric, I knew I was on the right path.  If she just laughed, I wasn't going far enough.

While my writing is vulgar, I'm not entirely convinced that I am, which I guess is a step in the right direction.  Maybe 3 years of therapy is starting to work. I know I am not perfect, I know I am not always kind or smart or just.  I know sometimes I don't do work the way it should be done.  I know sometimes I don't do home the way it should be done.

I know.

Overall, though, when I take in as much of the human experience as I can, I suppose I'm just okay.  Like you.  I like you.  Will you stay here with me for a while?  It's still me, even though I took away my name and my picture.

You know.

One of the reasons I want to leave my job is because I'm so tired of looking over my shoulder.  I guess I don't want to feel like that on this blog either.  I don't want to have to be afraid, of someone saying something, identifying me, linking me to some inane story with the word "fuck" in it and therefore deeming me unfit to walk amongst the rest of humanity.  I'm so tired of being afraid all the time, and in the digital age, there is a lot to be afraid of.

Then, of course, the question becomes, "Why don't you just shut the fuck up?"

Right.  I could do that.  I have done that.  But I don't want to.  There's something in me that wants to come out.  I was going to say "has" to come out, but that's a little theatrical.  It doesn't have to, I won't sizzle and turn to dust if it doesn't.  I don't want you to think that.  I don't need to write and the world doesn't need me to either.

I just want to.  Pretty badly, I think, as things go.

I have a big mouth, and I've always hated it, since I've had it, that is.  I didn't always have a big mouth.  As a boy, I would hide behind my mother, probably for longer than customary.  I wouldn't say anything to anybody, even though, apparently, I was speaking in sentences by nine-and-a-half months.  I didn't start opening my mouth until I got comfortable.

Behind a computer screen.

After I'd been in a job for over a year.

After I'd known someone for a very long time.

I get bold.  Brave.  Sloppy.  Silly.  Acrid.  Asshole.

I get a little asshole.

Suddenly, this meek little gimp has opinions.  Suddenly, he swears.  Suddenly, his brow knits and his bile surfaces and his arms cross in front of his chest and he sours.  Finding your voice is empowering, but it's not always nice.

I like being nice-- moreover, I like being thought of as being nice.  I like to be spoken well of and thought highly of and to be respected.  Maybe that's why I try my damndest to change jobs every year or two, because that's when I'm at my best: when I'm new.  When my mouth is closed.  When I'm bewildered and apologetic and eager to please.  When I'm quiet.

I'm a good boy, when I'm new.

When I wrote that letter to that professor in college, I was half-way through my Junior year.  I mean, I practically owned the place-- you know.  The Head of the Theatre Department shouted at me in his office with the light off and the door closed,

"DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!  SHE DOESN'T KNOW YOU!  I KNOW YOU!  I KNOW HOW YOU ARE!"

And I thought that was interesting, because I didn't know what he was talking about.  I guess, looking back, he was talking about how I am when I'm not new anymore.  I guess he was talking about how, when I get angry or sad or indignant, I prefer to bodyslam my demons and my enemies with words, and I like to douse them in propane and light them on fire, just to be sure the audience is paying attention.

And it's cost me.  And I guess it will continue to do so, because I never learn.  I don't want to grow up and write like a big boy.  I'm still stuck in this juvenile cycle of dick jokes and shit-talking ribaldry.  I'm Peter Pan, typing with a captain's hook.

Anyway, staying out of trouble's no fun, is it?   

Sissy

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 3, Verse 25

"Be not afraid of sudden terror, or of the darkness of the wicked when it will come."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM: 

It's funny what you remember.  I remember nice things-- like my first kiss with the woman who would become my wife (precipitated by my undeniably romantic utterance: "Let's get this over with already") and I remember the surge and roar and growl my first car's engine made when I stomped hard down on the accelerator as an idiotic 16-year-old.  I remember how it felt to be ensconced within my mother's arms as a boy when I was sad and I remember the exhilaration of riding the conveyer belt at my father's factory when I would go with him to work on Saturday mornings for his customary half day.  

Wouldn't you know it, I also remember things that are not so nice?  

You don't forget being bullied.  My bullying was not so terrible, but it was rather consistent, and it lasted I think longer than is probably customary.  I was bullied pretty heavily in college.  My hallmates covered the doorknob to my room in a substance that was most likely ejaculate, which made shaking hands with my doorknob, um, unpleasant.  They downloaded porn of dubious quality and taste onto my desktop computer when I wasn't there and my roommate let them in, and probably supervised the operation-- then they made pictures of obese women masturbating the subject matter of the screen-saver.  

Cute.

One intoxicated gentleman decided to trim his pubic area while sitting on my bed.  With my office scissors.  While I was sitting in the chair next to him, daring me to do something about it.  He was a lot bigger than me, and, you know, he had office scissors.  With pubes stuck to them.  I chose the Gandhi route.  

Predictably, the bullying occurred, though not to this degree, in high school, and middle school, and elementary school-- where kids first establish a pecking order once they realize some kids are different than other kids and are, consequently, to be targeted.  My bullying, however, started even earlier than that.  My kindergarten teacher, after witnessing my perhaps excessively negative reaction to a picture of a tarantula in a storybook, yelled, "Oh-- don't be such a sissy!"

It hurt to hear it, and I crawled under a table in the corner for the better part of the day and cried, but really, it was good advice.  If only I'd listened.  

I'm not scared of tarantulas anymore-- though, to be fair, I can't say I've ever seen one in person... let's just say I'm not scared of pictures of tarantulas anymore-- though I do have a significant amount of fears.  High on the list is a fear of dying in an airplane crash.  Now, I haven't been on many airplanes, so the probability is very low but, every time I fly, I am about 90% certain that the flight is going to terminate in a twisted inferno necessitating consultation of my unfortunate dental records.  How my wife ever got me on many, many planes to get me to Indonesia for our honeymoon without the aid of copious amounts of Ativan and ether is beyond me.  I guess you do crazy things for love.  

When I was eight years old, Pan Am Flight 103 fell from the sky and its remains, and the remains of its passengers and crew descended on the town of Lockerbie, Scotland.  I had a youthful affection for news anchors because they wore three piece suits and so I watched the news all the time as a kid, and I was mesmerized by the images of the broken plane, lying inert and in tatters, as helpless and bewildered local policemen stood impotently around the scene.  Nothing to do.  No one to help.  

Nothing.

I watched endless footage of the bodies set alongside one another, in endless rows, in a makeshift morgue, covered in shrouds.  They reminded me of candies in a box, just all lined up, identical looking in their wrappers.  I watched film of hearses coming to the morgue to take this body or that to this morgue or that.  If I wasn't watching that, I was watching reruns of "Monty Python's Flying Circus"-- so I'm not really sure which one is healthier. 

One day, speaking of healthy, I assembled my family, and a friend of my 11-year-old sister who had the misfortune to visit our house that day, in the living room.  I brought in our Casio electronic keyboard.  I put a toy hearse (what?  Didn't you have one of those growing up?) on the glass table in the middle of the room.  I lined a bunch of Playmobil action figures (supine) onto the table and methodically covered each one in a white Kleenex.  I played a modified version of Chopin's Funeral March on the keyboard and then loaded a Playmobil figure into the back of the toy hearse, drove it to the opposite end of the table, unloaded the action figure, and repeated until all of the Playmobil men and women victims were successfully deposited.  I wish I could describe for you the facial expressions of my family members, and my sister's friend, but I never looked up once.  When I was done, I wordlessly picked up my gear and walked out of the room.  Maybe I knew what I was doing was wrong.

"You were trying to develop mastery over your fear," my wife said to me recently.  I'm not sure that's true, and, if it is, I don't think it worked.  Yeah, I've flown to Pittsburgh, North Carolina, Australia, Indonesia, and Ireland, but I've been an absolute wreck each time.  Not only that, recently, when we had some free time to ourselves and it was my turn to pick the evening's televisual feast for the evening, what did I choose?

"Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel.  Subject matter: a 1978 mid-air collision between a passenger jet and a Cessna over a crowded section of San Diego, killing 144 people.  I mean, what was I supposed to do?  "Bob's Burgers" was a re-run.

Fear doesn't stop me-- not from doing anything, really.  It doesn't stop me from working in a dangerous place with dangerous people, it doesn't stop me from flying or driving too fast or doing things I know I'm not qualified or capable of doing.  It doesn't stop me from loving or losing or taking risks.  It doesn't stop me from eating salty and fatty foods, or from going downtown to see a show.  It doesn't stop me saying how I feel.  But it does haunt me in a way-- I know the darkness of the wicked is always there, even when it's not.  It's fastening its seatbelt and returning its tray and its seat-back to the upright position next to me.

And it's always letting me know, never letting me forget that, deep down, where it counts the most, I'm still a sissy with a bowlcut and an aqua blue sweatsuit, hiding under the snack table, fighting back tears with everything I've got.

Like Steve Martin

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 16, Verse 31

"White hair is a crown of glory and is seen among the godly."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

My great aunt was a ball buster.  She organized her own funeral, right down to the type of roses she wanted placed onto her coffin by her mourners.  

Steel cut.  Get it right.  

She wrote her own eulogy.  The only thing she didn't do was read it herself.  And I'm surprised she didn't.  

Her mother was a ball buster, too.  When we put her in a home, she ran away.  We put her in another one, and she ran away from that one, too.  And she stopped speaking.  She didn't lose her ability to speak, she just, you know, stopped.  

My great aunt went completely white at age 19, like Steve Martin, and, when I heard that, at age seven or eight, I prayed it would happen to me, too.  I wanted prematurely white hair so badly I could taste it.  I could taste the, you know... white... hair.  In my mouth.

Mmmm......

I wanted it.  Give it to me, I begged the Follicle God.  Give it to me GOOD.

And, in a small way, I got it.  At maybe twelve, I got two white hairs.  

(I inspected my hair in the mirror every single morning.  It took a while to get ready for school.)

Now, maybe, in retrospect, these hairs were blonde or whatever-- just bereft of enough pigment to make brown, but, to me, they were white.  WHITE!  The absence of color!  I was overjoyed.  

This is it, I thought, this is the beginning of my pubescent graying... or... whiting.  My premature maturing.  At only 12 years old!  I was WAY ahead of schedule, I was leaving my great aunt in the dust!  

Alas, it was not to be.  At nearly 33, I've got more than two white hairs, to be sure, but I have a very long way to go before I go completely white or gray or whatever the hell my head is going to do.  And, to this day: I'm pissed.

Looking back, I don't think I liked being a child very much.  Sure, you can play at make believe and that's nice, but once I discovered theatre, I realized you could be a serious-looking adult AND play at make believe (and people would CLAP for you and say nice things to you afterwards!) then THAT was what I really wanted.  I wanted to spend time in the office supply store sitting in oxblood leather chairs and playing with "PAID IN FULL" ink stamps and talk to nuns in the supermarket and write about airplane disasters and the Irish Republican Army and I didn't want to be in middle school while I was doing it.

I wanted to have gray hair.  

White hair gives you authority.  It lets people know you've been around, you are to be taken seriously, you are to be heard.  A white haired person doesn't read a story to his mother in the living with an impassioned voice only to hear stunted silence at the end punctuated only by a dry, "That's very nice, Gabriel."

I'm still waiting to be taken seriously.  By you.  By me.  I look in the mirror and I see a brown-haired joke.  Immature.  Naive.  Struggling for every cent in the bank.  Overeducated and underqualified.  Still so very young.  

When I'm in a show, when I play at make believe, I typically am portraying somebody who is at least in their fifties, and usually a lot older than that.  It's been that way since middle school, and I suppose that's no accident.  That's who I want to be.  So I sit in front of a make-up artist, smelling her breath and trying not to stare at her breasts as she leans into me in that way that make-up artists un-self-consciously can bring themselves to do because, let's face it, most male actors are gay anyway, and I sit patiently while they work their magic on my still-young face.  Lines and shadows, everywhere-- along the nose, on the chin, crease the forehead, furrow the brow, draw on the neck, crinkle the eyes.  And whiten that hair.  

That's how I play at make believe.  

I wasn't very good at being a kid.  When I sing nursery rhymes to my children, I always end up making up half of the song because I don't know them.  

"Three blind mice,

Three blind mice,

See how they run,

See how they run,

They all got up on's the farmer's wife,

She cut of their heads with a carving knife,

Did you ever see such a sight in your life

As three blind mice?"

I mean, that's probably close.  My wife corrected an earlier version of this song where I sang about the three blind mice running up the clock.  

"That's Hickory Dickory Dock," she said disapprovingly.

Whatever.  I sing them patter songs and Canadian maritime shanties.  That'll put white hair on their chests. 

It'll happen when I'm fifty or sixty.  I'l have what I've wanted since I was a boy, and I suppose I won't know what to do with it when I get it.  Like the antique Volkswagen Beetle I'll get once I'm white-haired.  What will I do with it?  Polish it?  Drive it gingerly around the block twice a year?  Be afraid of it?  

I'll be afraid of the white hair, too, because it will foretell death, which is something I'm not too excited about.  I won't be able to enjoy it once I get it.  Sure, I'll finally look serious enough to grow the big, Civil War-era walrus-style mustache flowing down to my chin that I've always wanted once my hair is white, but I'll probably be a disorganized, impotent wreck wandering around K-Mart with my fly undone and my mouth agape sniffing the life-size Martha Stewart cut-out display.  But maybe then I'll be happy, silver-tressed in my coffin-- it'll be a sight to see.  Just don't bring me steel cut roses.  Or I'll cut off your head with a carving knife while you run up the goddamned clock.  

A Lion in the Street

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 13

"The lazy man is full of excuses.  'I can't go to work,' he says.  'If I go outside I might meet a lion in the street and be killed!'"

---  

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Usually, when I'm asked how long I've been anxious for, I answer, "since 1985".  That goes one of two ways with people-- it either abruptly halts the conversation in its tracks, which is almost always my preference, unless I'm talking to a young woman with size 34-B breasts, or it prompts more questions, which only make me more anxious.  People want to know if I'm "kidding" when I say that I've been anxious since I was five.  

No, I'm not.  I don't kid.  I don't know what "kidding" is.  Harvey Korman once said, "Funny is when you're serious", and I find that I'm never not serious, especially when I'm trying to be funny which, I guess, is what "kidding" is.  I don't like that word, though.  "Kidding" sounds like something a creeper uncle does in the basement to his nieces and nephews and then tells them not to tell.  I don't "kid", I tell the truth.  It's much funnier than trying to "kid".  

Once I learned about what death was, courtesy of "The Jewish Book of Why" (Rabbi Alfred J. Kolatch, hardbound edition, currently housed on a 2nd floor shelf at my mother and father's house [the book, not the rabbi]) and I realized that death applied not only to me (which upset me) but also to my parents (which upset me greatly) I began my gentle descent into anxiety.  I thought about it, um, often.  That is to say, constantly.  While I was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  While I was reading "Ziggy".  While I was yelling to my mother from the toilet that "My penis does tricks when I think about Vanna White!" While I played the cantankerous old man in my elementary school's production of "The Gingerbread Man".  While I slept.

Oh wait-- I never slept.  Because my parents could die while I was sleeping and then I'd have to wake up and pad down the hall to their room and find their bodies.  

(Of course, they would perish in unison-- that's how it happens, you know.)  

In my second grade picture, I have hair down past my shoulders and a terrible blue sweater and bags under my eyes to match it.  I'm trying to smile but it's hard when the photographer is saying, "Say, DEATH!" and you can't say it because you're too busy deathing about death.  Also, I'm leaning against a log in the picture, too.  A log?  What are we-- in Vermont, for Christ's sake?  Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

In my brain, there are always lions in the street.  They're in the trees and in my bronchioles and in the cake batter, too.  They're in my shoes and in my heart.  I am filled with fear and dread and worry and petrified that, if I let down my guard, if I become a smidgen less hypervigilent, my parents will die, and I will go broke and the house will implode and my twins will go mad and my wife will combust and the car will get leprosy and I will, well, probably be relatively untouched except for a social disease or two that I'll have mysteriously contracted from having a nocturnal emission in the same time zone as a prostitute (or a quarrlesome woman) and I'll just be left there to watch it all happen.  Impotent.  Powerless.  Vacant, like a dream.  

A lion in the street?  Bring it, motherfucker.  Maybe that's what being anxious really means to me-- not being lazy.  I look at people who take a more cavalier approach to life and, mentally, I scold them.  "You're clearly not working hard enough at being cautious," I think, "at being miserable, at wringing every last drop of fun out of your life because life is scary and bold and furious and there are deer crossing and there are trains coming and there are pitfalls and layoffs and takedowns and there are lions in the street and you just have no idea and one day you will stand at a gravesite and say Kaddish or whatever over your mother and your father and maybe then you will understand and there'll be lions in the coffin and they're waiting for you with fur and teeth and eyes and claws and don't you ever stop looking over that bony shoulder of yours, mister, cuz I love you and you don't understand."

Okay.  You call it "laziness", I call it "anxiety".  All's fair in love and war, Mr. Potato Chip Man.

Wrong, Sir, Wrong!

"What's wrong with the world?"

That's how it begins.  I mean, who wouldn't want to read on, right?

I suppose you'd like to know what's this all about, what is he doing here, what does he want from us, and why should we stop by here to visit?  Well, these are all good questions, and I want to be up front with you right from the start that I don't have very many answers.  At least, the answers that I do have aren't very good.

After two tries at anonymous blogging, I've decided to out myself.  To go public.  All natural.  Less sodium.  Full retard.  Why?  I don't know, because I'm stupid, I guess.  Because anonymity was too easy, too safe, too... fun?  Well, I'm a married man with twins, and Christ knows I shouldn't be having too much fun.  Or sodium.

Anyway, I was sitting at home one night this week picking my feet in Poughkeepsie when I had to pee.  "Bodily functions are so annoying," my wife frequently opines, and she's right.  They get in the way.  They're tiresome and routine, more so for some than others, and they interrupt moments of brilliance.  I know, I know, you're going to say that your bowel movements have inspired moments of genius, right?  You realized you just had to propose to so-and-so in mid stream, or you had that idea for invisible, razor-flavored chewing gum while you were straining for glory.  Well, you're just silly, that's what you are.

And I'm silly, too-- cuz it happened to me.  There I was, standing before the toilet when I looked up at our shelf that contains several literary offerings.  There's "What's Your Poo Telling You?" which is more reference guide than light reading, and there's a book I stole from Muhlenberg College's health center back in 2002 before I graduated called "Making Responsible Decisions About Sex", there's "Instant! Maori" and I've looked at that several times and I don't know what the fuck that's all about or how it got into our house much less our bathroom.

And then there's that other book.

Before my wife and I had kids, we used to do silly stuff together.  I don't mean stuff with Saran-Wrap and dental floss-- I mean quixotic adventures, stuff that every young couple does when they're all lost in schmoopiness and they have no clue about the cost of a tank of gas.  One day we decided to take a field trip to the Herr's Snack Factory in Nottingham, Pennsylvania, a mere 47.2 miles away from where we lived at the time.  We were the only adults on the tour not attached to any children, but that was not an experience totally unfamiliar to us.  We tagged along with the random, tow-headed, mulleted kiddies.  We saw the big machines and the ladies in hairnets and surgical-style booties, we tasted chips that probably came off the factory floor and we were unceremoniously dumped off at the gift shop where we were expected to plunk down five times the price of our admission ticket on shit we can buy at WaWa on the way home.

But the best thing that you could possibly take home with you from the Herr's Snack Factory wasn't on sale at the gift shop at all-- it was free.

Fucking.  Free.

While my (not-quite-yet) wife visited the ladies room-- see?  bathrooms feature prominently in life, I'm telling you-- I wandered around the large waiting area between the restrooms and the gift shop and there, on a bench of sorts were strewn hundreds of little pale blue books that featured the Herr's logo on the bottom of the front cover, and the words

Chips of Wisdom

in the middle.

I picked one up and leafed through it.  Scanning the pages, I saw a lot of stuff about Proverbs, quarrelsome women, and prostitutes.  An eyebrow warily raised, I put it in my pocket.

A few minutes into the drive home, I pulled the book out of my pocket and tossed it over to the passenger seat.

"Here," I said to my short haired, bespectacled companion, "this should keep us entertained along Route 1."

And it did.  We laughed.  We wept.  We learned that we shouldn't visit our neighbor too often, or we might outstay our welcome.

Well, neighbor-- you'll never be able to outstay your welcome here.  You can visit as often as you like, and I encourage you to bring your friends.  You can even bring your Friends.  I hope you Like my new blog.  I hope you learn a thing or two about neighbors and prostitutes.  For instance, did you know that, "a prostitute is a dangerous trap; those cursed of God are caught in it"?

Well, apparently, it's true.  I know because I read it in a book I got at a potato chip factory.

Jim Herr, in his introduction to "Chips of Wisdom" states that he frequently referred to the Book of Proverbs when making important decisions in life and in commerce (I guess there aren't too many "quarrelsome women" in the Herr's Snack Foods empire, probably not too many prostitutes either) and he sought to edit and compile some of his Proverbs favorites into this neatly packaged, accessible little book.  Yes, I find some of it funny, and that will be reflected in this blog, but I hope I come across as genuine when I say that the goal behind this blog is not to poke fun at Jim Herr or "Chips of Wisdom" or Proverbs or Christianity or God.  If I poke fun at anyone here, it's going to be at me, because that's sort of what I've been doing ever since I learned how well self-deprecating humor fit my skin.

I want to use the Proverbs, and Jim Herr's quest and desire for wisdom, as springboards for my own personal wrastlin' with faith, existential issues, my religion, my professional and social struggles, to make sense of my family and my life-- and, sure, to have a little fun, too.

But, not too much, remember?  Because I am a devoted husband and a father of two fifteen-month-olds and a soon-to-be-again dog owner, we're going to limit the fun to Monday and Thursday postings, and see how it goes.  I hope you like it here, and I hope you come back for more.  Otherwise, you're WRONG, SIR, WRONG!  You LOSE!  You get NOTHING!

Sorry.  Jim Herr, Willy Wonka, same thing.

"Chips of Wisdom" seeks to answer "What's wrong with the world?".  I suspect you already know, and that's good.  That means you're going to be my friend.  So hold on.

Here we go.