Pirouettes in my Brain

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 26, Verse 4-5

"When arguing with a rebel, don't use foolish arguments as he does,

or you become as foolish as he is!

Prick his conceit with silly replies!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

As I was driving to work this morning, I was treated to a story about botched young adult circumcisions in South Africa.  Not just bungled procedures, but inept aftercare by "very young, inexperienced female nurses."  Call me what you will, but, if I were a young adult who had just been circumcised, I'm not sure having my mutilated genitals and my wounded pride tended to by a nurse of that description would necessarily be unenviable.  

Of course, I suppose it would be if said nurse wrapped the bandage so tight that it ceased all blood-flow to my penis, resulting in tissue death, gangrene, and, yeah, amputation.

In 2013, these incorrectly-performed and dubiously cared for circumcisions resulted in 43 deaths, and countless disfigurements and irregularities.  Out of how many, I don't know, but that seems to be a pretty significant failure rate for a procedure that was executed on my son by an octogenarian on my parents' dining room table in front of a not wholly insignificant audience, many of whom, I hasten to add, were armed with iPhones.  No photographs were permitted by the mohel during the actual procedure, and I cringed when he said that, because I'd like to think that nobody in the room, at least nobody who was related to me by blood, would need such an admonition but, sadly, I knew that probably wasn't the case.  I wish he'd said "no eating", too.

And as I turned the wheel of my Volvo this way and that way, as I do on my automatically adhered-to meandering route to work, best performed when 75% asleep, I couldn't help but think about medicine-- how far we've come, how slow we've rolled, how much we know and how much we don't.  I was thinking about what would happen if a victim of one of these Dr. Tremblefingers operations stumbled somehow into a state-of-the-art American hospital.  He'd be all septic and infected and they'd administer drugs to stabilize all his functions and they'd drain puss and they'd save whatever inches they could so that, when they guy recovered and felt like hitting the clubs again, he might, one fortuitous night, end up taking a cab headed straight to Poundtown.

Because, when your dick's infected, and you take an antibiotic, you can pretty much tell if that's working.  Your pee-hole stops frothing, I mean, it's pretty obvious.  If you've cut your goddamn arm off with a grapefruit knife and somebody applies a tourniquet, the bleeding will stop, and you can pretty much see that, and that's good.  

I've been on Viibryd for a good few months now, and, when the psychiatrist or the therapist asks me if I'm working, I always feel slightly exasperated.  I want to say, "What?  You mean you can't you see my dick isn't throwing up anymore?"

But, of course, it's not like that, is it?  There's nothing really to see.  It's just me, cross-legged in that chair, staring absently at the carpet, or my therapist's knee, or at a pile of paperclips on the desk.  Or the guacamole stain on my trousers.  (Thanks, son.)  And I'm supposed to talk about how I've been doing for the last two weeks, or the last month.  Like I know.  I want to bring in supporting testimony from friends, family, and coworkers.  I want it to be a trial, and I want the medical professional to make a ruling.

I don't want to be the judge.  

Besides-- I can't see anything.  I mean, seriously: what the fuck is this?

Is that what Viibryd's doing inside my brain-- spinning the Christ around like that?  When the ads say "The way in which Viibryd works is not entirely understood," are they really saying, "We don't know why Viibryd does pirouettes in your stupid dysthymic head"?

So, when they ask me, I usually say, "I don't know."  But I suppose one thing I have noticed lately is more sillies.  More prancing and dancing around the house.  More goofery with the children, and with my wife.  More lightness of being.  More pirouettes 

And so I told my therapist that.  He doesn't take notes during session so, afterwards, in between me and the next guy, as he sips Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee and bites a piece of a Nutrigrain bar, I don't know if he checked off a box that said, "Eurythmic", or if he scribbled "more sillies" or what, and I know it's not an empirically valid estimation of, well, much of anything.  And I still think about death and brood about my shortcomings and I am terrified of the future and there's the hopeless insecurity of tomorrow and the dismal, petty failures of yesterday, and the incompetence of today that I haven't even processed because I'm far too entertained watching that blue and gray and white and red Viibryd spinning and twirling in the glow of my computer screen, too busy thinking about you and what you're thinking about me and what we're thinking about each other and I just spent ten minutes clutching my sweet, tear-stained son because he was crying in his crib in the dark and if I have passed on this little monster to him I will be very sad indeed, but at least his circumcision was a success so, you know, we've got that.

And that's something to dance and be silly about.

The Untrained Apprentice

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 26, Verse 10

"The master may get better work from an untrained apprentice

than from a skilled rebel!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

When I was hired as an EMT in 2005, I hadn't ever sat behind the wheel of an ambulance.  Why exactly that happened is rather a long story, and it's kind of illegal, so I guess the less said about that the better.  I had my share of fender-benders in just shy of two years on the street, but, fortunately, I didn't kill anybody, and I managed to leave with my reputation, such as it was, relatively intact.  But Mario Andretti I was not-- not even when we ran lights and sirens.  It was more like "Driving Miss Daisy."

I kissed a concrete barrier at a gas station, bumped ever so tenderly into a U-Haul van on a suburban street and, on the very day we moved into a new base, drove straight into the wall of our brand new garage, ripping wood and fiberglass off the frame door.  That earned me a round of slow claps from my colleagues who were standing around the garage watching the show.  

Nevertheless, although it's possible that I'm seriously kidding myself, I think people liked me in those days.  Most people.  Most of my coworkers, almost all of the patients, lots of the nurses (one even slipped me her phone number!) and one of my supervisors liked me enough to hang up his white shirt and sit beside me in the truck every day for over a year.  Well, there were other reasons why he did that.  On our last shift together, I bent down to lift the stretcher up with Mike and I said to the patient, "Going up, sir: third floor, underwear, socks, stuffed animals."  Mike grinned as we popped the stretcher up together.  "Well," he said, "there won't be another one like you."  

Maybe they knew what they were doing, hiring me.  Maybe they just didn't care.  Shiftwork is shitwork, and it's all about getting warm bodies out on the street, warm bodies stuffed into crap-box ambulances, clock in, clock out, do your trip sheets, document, document, document.  Chirp chirp!  Throw on a fresh sheet, get a run, hit the lights.  They don't care who you are, as long as your shirt is buttoned and tucked in.  Actually, they only care about if they're looking for a reason to fire you.  They were never looking to fire me, but they weren't exactly jumping up and down to promote me, either.   

I took that job because I didn't know what the hell else to do.  Being unemployed doesn't feel very nice, especially when you're in a relatively new relationship and you're still going out and meeting new people who invariably ask "and what do you do" immediately after learning and forgetting your name.  Nevertheless, the idea of starting a whole new job and, basically, identity, completely from scratch was terrifying.  And it made me long for the days of apprenticeships, some people knew you didn't know shit about shit, and they actually took the time to take you under the wing and teach you something.  

You know, unlike school.  Particularly EMT school, which taught me that everybody passes the test as long as they could pay the fee (most of them couldn't) and you don't make crass comments at the autopsy (some of them couldn't do that, either).  But the actual teaching was done by a burned out medic who had kidney stones and it seemed like once a week we would find him doubled over in pain, sweating like a hog on the floor when we'd come in for class or back from lunch.  One day, maybe half-a-year after I had been on the street, I heard someone call my name as I walked with my partner through a local hospital's telemetry wing.  It was my old instructor, lying in a bed hooked up to several IV's being pushed behind me by a nurse.

"I always knew you'd be the only one to fuckin' graduate!" he said to me.  

"Actually," I pointed out, "I was one of two who graduated."

"Yeah, but that other scumbag got arrested last month," he said with a wry smile as the nurse turned him down another hallway.

I think I would have really enjoyed being an apprentice, because I like looking up to elderly, wizened people.  The craggier the face, the better.  I respect downy, silvery hair and bad teeth, crinkly old potato fingers and halitosis.  That says to me: kid, I've been there.  And now the Junior Executive V. P. is thirty-two and he's already plotting to walk on your spine all the way to the Maserati dealership to trade in his Audi while you fumble and dither and diddle yourself behind your desk because it's all you ever learned to do because nobody bothered to teach you anything because you're supposed to ride the log flume out of the womb knowing how to write proposals and calculate averages and fix flat tires and clean your gutters and diagnose and communicate and solve for x and extrapolate the conjugation of the functional conjunction of y.  

Why?

I don't know.  Because something changed.  The world changed.  No more apprenticeships.  No more mentors.  There's just you and me, and, I hate to break it to you, son: but you're on the stretcher and I'm behind the wheel.  

  

The Middle Ground

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 1

"If you must choose, take a good name rather than great riches;

for to be held in loving esteem is better than silver and gold."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I'm learning to accept that I'm a man of extremes.  

And it's rather annoying, because I don't often practice what I preach.  (Who does, right?  Certainly not preachers.)  When I advise others, it's often with words and tone and timbre that stink of conciliation, smoothing things over, reasoning, rationality, compromise.  When talking to others about their problems and their conflict, I'm much more comfortable steering others towards that middle ground.  I like the middle ground-- for others, it's fine-- it's soft and grassy, cool and clean.  You can walk upon it barefoot or shod only in socks, and you'll be okay.  Sure, there might be a pebble or two, but they're small and round.  You won't get a blister walking along a path on the middle ground.

In my own life, though, I'd lose my way blindly crashing around through thorny bush and terror tree such that, if I ever tried to find the middle ground, I'd probably die trying to get there.  And it'd be ugly.  I'm either here, or quite a far ways over there.  There's nobody that I tolerate, accept, who's just, you know: there.  I either love you, or I'd sooner take a shit in your mailbox and kick you in the throat.  

That's, well, that's me.  Mister Prince Charming.  Got me LOTS of dates in high school.

My extremes are often in conflict with one another.  They don't make sense.  For instance, take the opinions of others.  Now, you'd think that someone who so rigidly categorizes people would have a pretty easy time dismissing the opinions of the mail-box-shit, throat-kick crew, and focus solely on the thoughts and feelings of the people whom I love, but you'd be wrong.  I vacillate between not giving a shit what anybody thinks about anything I say or do or think or wear or eat, to being wildly obsessed with it.  If I know that somebody is angry with me, or doesn't like me, well, that's pretty much all consuming for me.

I can't help it.  Of course, neither can preachers, apparently.

And I'm not quite sure why it's this way with me.  I was never taught to conform by my parents, never instructed to do this or that, hold my knife this way, comb my hair that way so that others wouldn't think I was a freak/gay/retarded/untoward/pro-simian/incompetent/priggish/equine.  They let me do whatever I wanted and, I suppose, if there were some negative social repercussions, they expected that I would deal with it/them.  If I had some bright idea to dress up like a nun with my friend and run around our elementary school's track while my father video-taped it, he was right there with the camera, no questions asked.  Though, looking back on it, I'm not sure he'd know which questions to ask.  

About... that.

And I wonder, sometimes, who I'd be if I were a little bit less concerned with the thoughts and feelings of others.  While my parents never taught me to give that much thought, I, evidently, somehow, taught myself.  I developed some idea that, if I was #1, that this was somehow bad, sinful, arrogant, unkind.  Un-Christian.  Yes, I worry about being un-Christian.  Is that wrong?  William Blake said, "The most sublime act is to put another before you."  And maybe I bought into that a little too much.  Maybe just hook and line would have been enough.  

Because, sometimes, I feel like I'm a sinker.  Dipping below the surface of others' stares and thoughts and perceptions and my perceptions of their perceptions and the hairs on the back of my neck responding to their potential looks of disdain.

I don't know.  

It's exhausting.  So, of course, is anxiety, and insecurity feels a lot like anxiety, and it's a component thereof many times.  "What are they thinking about me?  Did what I say come off like I think it did?"  "Did I forget to zip up my fly?"  "Did I forget to put my penis back in my pants?"  "Does this open fly make my penis look fat?"  You know how it is.  There's a lot going on in this little hamster wheel upstairs.  

And, as you know, it's a very un-Christian hamster wheel.    

Ne-twerking

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 21, Verse 2

"We can justify our every deed,

but God looks at our motives."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

So, I guess you're just not enough for me anymore.

Looks like my appetite is just too ravenous for only you to satisfy me they way I need to be.  There is a fire within.  There is a coal in the ember.  There is a pussball in the fistula.

(Sorry, that was disgusting-- hope you weren't eating.)

I'm doing something I haven't done since 2008, and I am horrified to fully comprehend just how long ago that was.  I joined a blogging network.  

Well, I haven't fully joined yet.  My "membership", such as it is, is pending.  It's been nearly 24 hours since I signed up.  I don't get it-- why the drama?  Are they scrutinizing me to make sure I have the necessary elan to stand beside the multitude of people writing about baking a different cupcake recipe every day for a year, or the freckle-shouldered English majors writing odes to Plath?  No.  They're more shrewd than that, these blogging network... people.  They're probably running my credit report right now, and examining my DNA on the ceiling at some shady motel under one of those "Dateline" black-lights.  Let them look-- whatever sordidly pusillanimous and shamefully wicked deeds and words and thoughts they might want to uncover are all here anyway.

Well, mostly here.   

I don't know why, on the one hand, I was so reluctant to join a blogging network.  I joined twentysomethingbloggers.com when I was, you know, a twentysomethingblogger, and I got a fair amount of readers out of it, and a couple friends (YES SOME OF MY FRIENDS CAME FROM TWENTYSOMETHINGBLOGGERS AND MY WIFE CAME FROM JDATE GET AND I CAME FROM OCDJEW.COM SO GET OVER IT) as well.  

But when I turned thirty, I checked out thirtysomethingbloggers and it was a haven for prescription drug and erectile dysfunction spam, which doesn't say many good things about thirtysomethings, but, needless to say, I was a little turned off.  So I bought some little blue pills from Canada and abandoned ship.

Nearly four years later, my little blue pills all well gone and my first blog suffering from a dysfunction all of its own, I began thinking about reaching a wider audience.  Why?  I mean, come on, people-- just LOOK at this blog: why should you get to keep ALL THE GENIUS to yourselves?  I suppose, of course, my "need" to be part of something larger, to gather more wide-eyed innocents at my knee for story time, speaks to the undeniable narcissism inherent in writing.  We like to pretend that it's this solitary pursuit, just a socially awkward, bespectacled guy in a t-shirt and corduroys listening to Maritime music on headphones while his children snore away in cribbies next door-- but that's just one part of it.  Then there's the part where we hit "Publish."

Publish (said derisively) It should be "Send."  What I do is "publishing" the way what Nicholas Cage does is "acting."  My mother kindly informed me on Sunday, while we were playing around with my children on her catfish vomit-hued living room carpet, that two of my former classmates had recently published successful books.  I knew about it, but it isn't real unless you hear it from somebody else.  You know, like your mother.

"I know, Ma."

"They got great write-ups in the Inquirer!" she announced.

"Honey," I said to my daughter who was jumping up and down on the rug in ecstacy, "would you please kill your grandmother for Daddy?"

She looked at me and laughed hysterically.  My daughter, that is.  My mother gave me a deadpan that could have slain Harvey Korman in his wingtips.  

So maybe that's what it is-- jealousy, wanting to be in a larger pool, a hunger for a more impactful twice a week jaunt into the writerly world.  Even if it's more Send than Publish.  But I think, of course, that it's about more than that.  It's about wanting some more connections.  To know that what I'm doing and saying is reaching people, people I know, people I don't know-- I don't really care who it is.  Because, as hermit-like and as quiet and as solitary as I can be and often want to be, there's that part of me, that small but very pungent part of me that wants to know you're there.  

And, if you've got a hot sister-- she can come too.  

Bloody Wisdom

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 30

"Punishment that hurts chases evil from the heart."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Tonight, I made a really good pizza.  Unfortunately, in the process, I almost grated my middle finger off.

I'm not being a baby.  It's a brand new grater, so it's extra sharp, and the cut is big and deep.  Three Band-Aids.  And it's soaked through.  

It's kind of hard to blog with an injury like this.  The bandaged finger keeps fucking everything up, and I keep trying to switch what my middle finger would do on the keyboard to my ring finger, but this runs contrary to what legendary pantyhose queen and emetophobe Mrs. Dougherty taught us in 6th grade typing class.

"F... J... SPACE!  F.... J.... SPACE!"

Really, kids-- that was a class.  And I'm old enough to have taken it on a typewriter-- albeit an electric one.  

So, due to the fact that I'm erasing every third I write and re-typing it, this isn't going to be a terribly long entry.  In fact, I think I've already done two this week, even if they were both about my father.  I was thinking to myself, as I was bleeding all over the bathroom sink, about my eldest sister.  I don't know if she still believes this shit, or if she ever really did, but she used to tell me that she thought, when bad things happened to people, that it was really God speaking through the dog-shit under the sole of your shoe, or the icy step that resulted in your shattered vertebrae.  Or the extra sharp cheese grater effortlessly skinning you alive while your two-year-old twins play happily over there at the table.  

And so I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about how much more attractive and seductive religion would be if it really was like that.  If death and mayhem and brain-dead mothers on ventilators and bastards getting whipped cream pies in their mush actually had some sort of logic to it, and not this kind of "we mere mortals cannot possibly know His reasoning" because that's kind of bullshit, isn't it?  We know.  We can know.  We can know that, when a nun gets run over crossing the Roosevelt Boulevard by some drunken Fishtown scumbag in a 1983 Firebird that that's kind of fucked.  

Unless, of course, she used to delight in beating the piss out of scared little gingers because their handwriting slanted a bit too sharply to the left, signaling that, obviously, they were combined with Satan.  Then I guess it makes sense.  Then I guess maybe I could stand behind that.  

Maybe this little accident tonight with the cheese grater is payback for how I used to imitate my elementary school principal in the playground during impromptu performances for my peers.  Maybe it's because I've never been to Israel or because I don't call my parents or because I think people who "can't eat gluten" are full of shit.  

GOD I CAN'T ST%ANSD ALL TEHSE TUPOS!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, that's what it's like without correcting every seven seconds.  

Fuck it.  IO'm doine.      

Show-Man

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 8

"A king sitting as judge weighs all the evidence carefully,

distinguishing the true from the false."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

So, they buried Ariel Sharon today.  It's okay.  You can make jokes about it because he's basically been dead for nearly a decade.  To call what he was since 2006 a "vegetable" is even kind of considerate.  There's way more vegetables I'd do it with before I'd be caught dead with that crypt keeper.

See?  It's funny!

The thing is, being a narcissistic prick, when I first heard of Sharon's passing, I immediately thought of my father.  Not who he is now, the Red Lubster-lovin', nearly bald, Americanized mush-pot carrying around a phone book-sized wallet held together by a rubber band-- the man he was: a mustachioed, dashing, olive-hued, Sabra-fucking, cigarette-puffing warrior of the desert.  I was thinking about that man.  

He served under Sharon.  Well, pretty much everybody did.  Still, I was thinking about who my father was in those days, and who Sharon was before he became a mean fat old bastard, and then a perpetual ICU patient.  I could ask my father, in fact, I think I have.  I remember driving along a winding road one day years ago, probably when Sharon first stroked out, and my father said that they had dispatched Sharon to Vietnam so that he could learn something about the tactics being employed there.  When Sharon returned to the Holy Land, he gathered thousands of soldiers around, my father included, and stated soberly and, like a true Israeli, that he had learned, "not one fucking thing." 

I know my father killed people.  He's not the kind of veteran that you have to tiptoe around and never walk behind and never mention "the war" (there were a few, you know) but you don't exactly want to go around asking for gory details, just like I'm not too keen on hearing a Spalding Gray-like monologue about the night I was conceived.  This past weekend, while my wife and babies were visiting my parents, my father and my nephew put on a little show at the dining room table.  It consisted of two brightly colored rubber worms each inside a tall drinking glass, in front of which sat my father.  At the far end of the table sat my nephew, aged four, playing a plastic bugle, drums, Bosendorfer, a variety of musical instruments.  While he played, my father jerked and moved around spasmodically in his chair and tugged on two invisible strings tied to each rubber worm and made them dance with excitement.  My mother and sister and wife were laughing, and even my babies were smiling.  I was standing there, holding my daughter staring.  Just staring.  And all I could think was, "this man has killed people."  My father looked over at me and, catching my expression, he must have thought his performance needed a little bit more pizzazz, so he plunged one of the rubber worms-- the orange one-- straight down his throat.

"He's a total show-man," my wife said to me tonight as we reminisced about the snake charmer act while emptying the refrigerator of dead things.  She's right, of course.  I want to own the performing arts in my family, but any urge I have to get up in front of people and make a fucking ass out of myself comes straight from him, passed down through his crazy blood into mine.  It's in there-- it's all in there.  I'm just more subdued about it-- tempered by my mother's ceaseless shyness and introspection, calmed by living in a land that isn't under attack, or threat thereof, every moment of every day.  I don't need to let it all hang out at the supermarket-- it can wait for the stage.

Usually.

       

I want to go on record, at this point, by stating that I'm fully aware that this is the second post in a row about my father, and that's okay with me.  Frankly, I don't understand the guy one single bit, I'm constantly frustrated with him and confused by him, I'm always pulling away from him and running towards him at the very same time.  I'm embarrassed by him and obsessed with him.  And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Because he and I are one; show-men to the end.

Lunch Hour

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 7

"It is a wonderful heritage to have an honest father."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

When I worked downstairs on the unit, I took care to warn my supervisor.  

"I'm meeting my father for lunch today."

"Oh, shit," she'd say.  "I guess I'll take you off the schedule for the afternoon.  Just sit in here and update the treatment plans on the computer."

She knew.  Well, she learned.  After a while, it became clear that chances were better than good that I was going to come back into the chart-room at 1:00 ready to cut somebody's fucking head off.  Best to keep me away from acutely and persistently ill psychiatric patients.  Facilitating a group on Developing Patience probably wasn't such a hot choice for me to be doing after spending an unfortunate lunch hour inside my father's Buick, screaming at him and driving away from the park where we meet at top speed, thrashing the car into traffic, flogging the motor, crushing the accelerator under my foot as if it were an offensive cockroach.

Nowadays, for some reason, the lunches with my father have gotten better.  Maybe because life is less volatile now.  My brother-in-law has been dead for almost two years, just about as long as my children have been alive.  Sure, there are money woes and assorted travails and troubles, but, by and large, the sea is calmer.  There is less calamity.  Less emergency.  A dearth of drama.

Of course, he and I don't particularly need drama to go at it.

Last week, we met up at the park.  He brings the main course ("You bring a drink and dessert," he must always instruct via text the night before, as if I don't know the routine by now), typically from "Red Lobster", which he pronounces "Red Lubster", because I guess they don't really have much use for or occasion to talk about lobsters in Israel.  Anyway, we there we sit, an Israeli and his son, eating the most un-Kosher of bottom-feeding oceanic fare in his latest leased lux-o-ride.  Things always start off innocuously.  Some small talk.  Bullshit.  This, and that.  

Then, a hot topic is explored.  By him.

"So, how is your... therapy going?"

"Fine," I say.  Truthfully, I don't know how my... therapy is going, but I don't know what else I'm supposed to say to him, so, that's what I say.

"And your medication?"

"Well, I'm on a new medication called Viibryd, and I guess it's working," I paused to consider a shrimp on my fork that appeared inordinately large for a joint like Red Lubster, but then I realized that it was two shrimp sixty-nining each other.  I frowned.  "Actually, I don't know if it's working."

"Well," my father, the girdle-manufacturer, said, "just don't let him increase your dose-- I talk to a lot of people and they all say that's the worst fuckin' thing they can do."

I closed my eyes.  There is no way out of this: the car, the conversation, the family, the vortex, the galaxy.  There is no way I can't challenge him.  There is no way I can shut up.  There is no way.

"Oh, you talk to a lot of people about psychiatric medication?  Like who?  The Syrian guy who cuts your fabric?"

And now, in case you missed it: it was on.  

"Well, are you still depressed and anxious?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Listen, Mummy-- do you really think that you--" he stopped himself.  Restraint is anathema to my father, so I cannot imagine what inappropriate thing he actually stopped himself from saying, only instead to say, "you know 90% of the people out there are depressed and anxious."

"Really?  Wow.  I don't recall reading that statistic from the National Institute of Mental Health.  Does it hurt your hemorrhoids at all when you pull your stats out of your asshole?"

He laughed at that.  It was a sign that I was winning the most absurd argument I've had so far in 2014.  

He relented, but the damage was done.  Him changing the subject at that point was about as effective as someone who has just hit your car massaging and kissing your smashed fender, but it's at least better than them backing up and ramming into you again.   

Don't get me wrong: I love my father and, clearly, he loves me.  He also loves to make up statistics, and he's been doing that for a long, long time (his favorite is that "80% of cops are corrupt", but I've also been treated to "80% of teachers are a fuckin' retard", "90% of people in this country don't know shit from NOTHING!" and "90% of priests will fuck up a little boy" (in my father's lingo "fuck up" means "molest", not "emotionally disturb", though I suppose the one inevitably leads to the other) and, believe me, I'd love to read a research paper written by my father in his younger academic days:

"Copernicus thought the earth revolved around the sun, but 90% of people thought he was fuckin' retard who didn't know SHIT FROM NOTHING!"

 I don't know what it is about us that creates conflict and tension, though I'm sure some independent third party watching it from a location of relative safety could figure it out in approximately seven seconds.  Feel free to clue me in yourself if you've got a handle on it.  

Maybe it's because he is so firmly entrenched in his own reality-- where his statistics are viable and his memory is infallible.  How he remembers it is law.  I tried to explain to him, during this particular "mental health" lunch, about how I've been this way for a very long time.

"I never slept.  I would stay awake in my bed, terrified, staring at the ceiling, until the sun would start to shine outside my window, and then I would let myself fall asleep for maybe two hours before I had to wake up for school.  I'm talking about how I had black circles under my eyes in my second grade picture because I didn't sleep.  I would call out for Mommy, just to hear her voice telling me she didn't want to hear my voice till morning, just so I knew she was still alive."

"Well, I never knew that."

"Of course you didn't.  You were fucking asleep.  Besides, I wasn't calling out for you anyway.  And anyway, by the time you were ready to wake up, I was falling asleep."  He stared at me.  "This went on for years, Dad."

"I didn't know-- I mean, if you say it, I guess it's true."  This is, of course, precisely the thing someone says when they think you're probably full of shit.

"It doesn't matter now," I said, "I'm thirty-three."

"How do you sleep now?" he asked.

"I have two-year-old twins," I said, "I don't sleep now."

"Well, you know," he said with a small smile, "neither do 90% of people."

Smacked Ass

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 13, Verse 1

"A wise youth accepts his father's rebuke;

a young mocker doesn't."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Sometimes, in life, you're just chatting away with your barber, and the subject of corporal punishment comes up.  Maybe, another month, you're talking about capital punishment.  Who knows how these things happen?  

They just do.

If you know me at all (and, just so you know, you do) you probably know that I've gone to the same barber who gave me my first non-mommy-spinning-me-around-on-the-toilet-and-giving-me-the-Moe-Howard-special haircut.  He's closing in on eighty, but even over half-a-century of ardent cigarette smoking hasn't dulled his good Italian looks.  Of course, the false teeth help.  

Anyway, today, as my locks were tumbling down around my plastic gown and onto the floor below, waiting to get swept away by the slightly overweight broom princess, the subject of corporal punishment came up.  I have no idea how.  These things, as I may have alluded to earlier, just happen.  Like pimples.  And jokes about dirty vicars.  And people who like Jodie Foster maybe a little bit too much.  

So this thing happened today, and my barber was telling me what the problem was, as he saw it, with corporal punishment.  Oh, boy, I thought.  Here we go.  

"It's that so many parents these days hit their kids out of anger," he said.

Right, I thought.  As if you're going to discipline your child with your hand out of compassion, or slight hunger.

And I was thinking to myself at that moment: well, old buddy, you've got a wide breadth of vocabulary on you.  You've got tact and style and a fine ol' way a' talk that makes people feel right cozy like: are you going to use your tasteful, carefully-selected words to gently offer this aging hair care professional whom you've known all your life a different perspective on the world?  Are you going to judiciously counter his views and proffer your own kinder, gentler ways as a fitting substitute for the barbaric practice of physically harming your own children to prove a point or drive home a particular lesson?

Want to know what I said?

"Well, right.  Because, when you're angry, you're just not in full control of all your faculties, and it would be easy for a parent to go too far."

"Exactly!" he said.

Snip snip snip.  

Snip.

Internally, I shook my head.  To actually do so would have caused unfortunate and undo damage to my do which, to be honest, doesn't look so hot anyway.  I wasn't internally shaking my head at him-- at his truculent insistence that there is nothing wrong with laying a hand on your child, (you know, as long as you're not angry) but at myself, for essentially agreeing with him, and validating him.

Look, I get it.  He's nearly eighty: his spanking days are over.  That came out wrong.  (So did that, but you know what I mean.  Perv.)  But it's not about him; it's about me.  About my spineless reluctance to avoid confrontation.  To abhor it.  To run screaming from it.  Well, silent screaming.  Real screaming would engender too much chance for confrontation.  Someone might yell at me to "SHUT UP!" and then, well, that's a confrontation.  I have strong opinions, but don't always have the willingness to back them up, especially if it's involving someone I care about.

You know, like my barber.

Can't we just have a conversation about how annoying it is to drive down a highway with the setting sun directly in your fucking face?  That's something we can all agree on.  And it doesn't involve hitting defenseless children who are under your care and it doesn't involve hurting anybody's feelings or making anybody mad or making anyone sweat or causing undue stress or concern or even the slightest little teensy weensy bittle tittle of discomfort.  Because driving into the sun fucking sucks, and you know it and I know it.  

Even my barber knows it.  He also knows that, every two months or so, my eyebrows need to be trimmed.  And that breaks my heart in a way that I can't really fully describe to you.  I don't want to grow old.  I don't want to spank my children.  I don't want to be angry with you or my barber or the sunset or my children or my father or his father, or yours.  

Snip.

A Good Vomit

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 12, Verse 25

"Anxious hearts are very heavy, 

but a word of encouragement does wonders!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Scott Stossel, already the editor of "The Atlantic", and the nephew of the mustachioed TV journalist John Stossel (not sure which of those two distinctions is more meretricious, depending upon the quality of John's uncle-tude) is on the road to getting appreciably more famous.  He just wrote a book about his anxiety, his innumerable therapeutic and psychopharmacological interventions, and his significant phobias, the most severe, according to Stossel, is emetophobia: a fear of vomiting.  

Stossel hasn't vomited since 1977 (he knows the exact month, day, date, and time-- I don't) and he also knows that he hasn't vomited since then, and he also knows that the fear of this thing he hasn't done since Gerry Ford was in office is irrational.  He knows all that.  He's a pretty smart guy.  Funny, that the editor of "The Atlantic" is a smart guy.

Isn't it?

My former best friend was, and, I'm assuming still is, an emetophobe.  I lived with him for a few years and, as far as I can recall, it didn't impact our friendship too much.  It's interesting, looking back on it, that, for someone with a deathly fear of rauwlfing, he sure ate Papa John's pizza a lot which, just thinking about it, makes me want to throw up every inch of my intestines.  

As I was listening to the interview with Stossel on "Fresh Air" today, I, of course, thought about my former best friend.  My ex.  Whatever he is.  And I was intensely annoyed that I couldn't enjoy a simple radio interview with this intelligent, very talented, not altogether funny freak without that enjoyment being intruded upon by memories of my former best friend.  I can picture him, standing in our dorm room, grinning, the same way he used to when he was in fourth grade, when we first met.  He has big teeth, and big, black hair.  I wonder if any of it's gray now.  I can see him in his black jeans, white t-shirt and white socks.  He wasn't exactly a fashion plate.  Black sneakers.  Black Tague watch. 

I remember.

I guess he won't ever get his chance to write his book about emetophobia.  Of course, I'll never get to write my book about anxiety, about obsessive compulsive bullshit, about dysthymia, about worrying I'll be found out as a fraud and a phony and a bastard and a mean, yucky meanie man.  

Stinky butt.  

I don't want you to know the truth about me, and yet, it seems like all I do is graffiti it all over your face.  And mine.  There's graffiti over the map of Israel and it's telling my terrible story and I hope it diminishes my glory so you will finally know and stop reading this blog and leave me alone and think to yourself, "Jesus, he really was right."

Maybe that's the only thing that would make me truly happy: for you to go away.

Please, don't go.

I wasn't just annoyed, of course, about being forced to think about my old best friend, but because Scott Stossel's bankrolling his mental illness, and, gee: I'd like to do that.  That'd be swell!  Sign me up.  I want.  He's smarter than me, but I'm funnier.  I'll even pull down my pants to prove the point.

Christ, he's not even really Jewish.  Where does he get off anyway, pretending to be anxious?  Come on, man.  

I want to show him.  I want to teach him a lesson.  I want to go to his book signing in my neighborhood.  I'll sit in my car in the Barnes & Noble parking lot with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (dark meat) and eat that shit in under two minutes flat, wait in line with his book clutched to my chest and then, when I get up to him, I'll fucking throw the hell up all over him.  Then we will see what's what.

Then I'll have something to write about.  You know, for money.

A grand adventure.  A good vomit.  A tall tale.  That's what my life's missing.  It has all the typical stuff, the peaks and the valleys, but there's nothing there that's really ZING-KA-ZOING, you know what I mean?  Nothing that really grabs you by the lapels or the taint and pulls you closer and says, "Now, listen here, my darling; this is a tale that ought be told for approximately a $250,000 advance."  

And maybe that moment will come and maybe it won't.  Maybe I won't need a Colonel's Original Recipe bucket to make it all come true for me and for my family, and, if it doesn't happen to me, for me, for us, well, I will have to be okay with that, like I've had to be okay with so much.  Like we all do.  We can't all have John Stossel for an uncle, and we can't all hide our stinky butts from the world or hang onto our best friends like our childhood dollies forever.  All we can do is what we can do, and that will just have to be enough.  It will have to be enough for you, and, I guess, for me, too.  I suppose, as long as I have you, I'm good.

Anxious, but good.       

Peter Pan Advice

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 3, Verse 21

"Have two goals: wisdom-- that is, knowing and doing right-- and common sense."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I don't have to write a snide and sardonic post about how New Year's Resolutions are junk and bunk and baloney and bullshit.  That won't get me any props or pussy or points.  It just isn't necessary.  You know.  I once "resolved" that, when my old dog died, I would get a dog that wouldn't shed.  In April, we brought home a Basset Hound and, every week, our vacuum cleaner sucks up enough dog to make a canine shag carpet for the set of "That '70s Show," so I think we all speak the same language here.  

I've never been too good with goals, either.  For three years, I ran a group called "Community Meeting" from 9:30-10:00 where patients were made to come up with their two goals and their "method to achieve."  Most mornings, for most men, the goal was "go to groups" and the method was "just go" and going around the room of fifteen men took approximately four minutes.  It took me longer to read out the schedule of activities for the day.  Some days, if I was feeling frisky, I would try to drag it out by trying to extract more substantive goals from the moderately less recalcitrant in the room, or try to spark conversation among the group.  But, most mornings, I let it go, and group ended in under fifteen minutes.  It was embarrassing for me, but nobody seemed to care.

I remember one Community Meeting not too long before I left the unit where a patient and I were talking about his goals.  He was being discharged that morning and I mentioned that his goals were all the more important because he was leaving the structured environment of the hospital, and I talked about how discharge isn't really the end of something, it's the beginning, and a particularly psychotic and physically imposing patient stood up and started screaming at me, getting inches away from my face, roaring about my "PETER PAN ADVICE" and I just stared at him, waiting for the crushing blow to my jaw, not because I had balls, but because I didn't know anything else to do at that particular moment.  Some patients started telling the trouble-making patient to shut the fuck up and leave the room.  When he didn't, many of them did.  Some of my colleagues eventually came in and escorted him out.  Something I couldn't do myself.  As I tried to keep my trembling internal, I continued the meeting for the "benefit" of the three or four patients still left in the room.  For my own benefit.  For my own pride.

I had no business being in that room, not on that day, or any other.  My goal was the same every day, just like theirs.  My goal was to get out without being found out.  Without getting knocked the fuck out.

Getting out.  

Come to think of it, I don't exactly know how I've done with aspirations either.  I'm not sure I know to what I aspire.  I don't know what I'm reaching for, or striving for.  Ascending towards.  What is that, exactly?  My aspiration was never to own fifteen-or-so cars roughly as many years, but it turned out that way.  I never aspired to write grants, but I did want to be a professional writer.  So I guess this is the funny, not-so-funny way of that particular aspiration getting worked out while getting gummed up in the works.  I never sat around dreaming about having twins, but here we are.

Here we go.

Wishes are another thing.  Whenever I find myself before a birthday cake, I'm always closing my eyes and wishing for no harm to come to me or anybody I love.  The people whom I love.  I wish I loved more people, or I wish the people I loved knew how ardently I love them.  You can't let people know how much you love them, even if you love them hard and hot and feverishly and fiendishly, because people don't understand it when you tell them and if you try to make them understand it just comes out all bungled, like Clouseau trying to walk importantly into a room.  It just doesn't work.  Because there's a trick step and Cato's always around the corner and there's a vase on the floor and a there's a bermb and it's going to blow your little yellow skin off and I'd take a bullet for you but that sounds ridiculous and silly and you're Tess and I'm always guarding Tess.  

Always.

I guess all I can say is that, in 2014, I'm going to try to be more tolerant.  Of white people.  Because, Jesus Christ; they say some really fucking stupid shit.  You know?