Rebel-Headed Level

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 1

"Happy is the man with a level-headed son;

sad the mother of a rebel."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Take a good, hard look at these two kitty cats:

 

                  Him                                                                             Her

God, how I love them.  

On the left, you have my father.  See the look of befuddlement, consternation, near-anguish on his face.  Note the creased brow, and the bank manager's placement of the fingers on the right hand pressed gently against his lip, beneath his massive, thoughtful Iraqi-Israeli nose.  Note the cell-phone-cum-calculator in his left meat-mit.  This is my father trying to figure out how his son, a man who earns a respectable salary-- the most he's ever made in his life-- can be simultaneously starving to death.  He calls it a problem.  I call it "multitasking."

Now, turn your attention to her.  There is very little that I can or need to say about this picture.  This, friends, is my mother.  This, at her most unguarded, is who she is.  If an ordinary, run-of-the-mill picture is worth a thousand words; this one is worth a tome.  I snapped it tonight at my sister's 37th birthday party.  My father was trying to light a candle that had no wick.  This is the reaction.  I'm so proud of myself for capturing this fleeting, illuminating moment that I now know what National Geographic photographers must feel like when they catch the cheetah the very instant it snaps a floppy gazelle's tender neck with its teeth.

It hasn't been an easy forty years of marriage for these two kooky funsters, but, then again, I suspect it could have been far worse.  After all, my father could have turned into a PTSD-riddled drug abuser, wife-basher, and my mother could have been more afraid of men than she is of her own shadow, my eldest sister could have turned out, um, worse?  My middle sister could have turned out, uh, worse?  And I could have... I don't know... been born without-- lungs or knees, I suppose.  And that wouldn't have been any fun.  How do you take a kid like that to the bank to make a deposit?  I used to love going to the bank with my mother.

 My marriage is seven years old-- we're practically marriage infants when compared with my parents, but we're gaining on them-- slowly, very slowly.  I wouldn't say that marriage is especially hard.  But it's no rainbow-fart either.  I'm at that stage in my life where I know mortality is creeping 'round somewhere, lying in wait to ambush my parents with a stroke or a fall or a clot, and I am also, not coincidentally, at that stage where I want to pump them for information about everything.  I want to know how they paid for college for all three of us.  Were they drug mules or were they smart investors (my money's on the former-- I guess it's good I don't have much money), how do they really feel about each other, when we're all gone and the lights are off and the house is still?  How do they really feel about (gulp) us?  Are we disappointments?  I have no doubt, in many ways, we are.  And that's kind of a hard thing to accept about yourself, but, in another respect, it's easy, because they've always encouraged me to live my life as I see fit.  

"Don't worry about pleasing us," my mother used to say to me, "who the hell are we?  We have our own problems to deal with."

And that they do.  That they do.  I won't bore you with them, even though they're not all that boring.  But, hey, this blog's for my problems, bitches-- and don't you forget it.  

My eldest sister was born in 1967.  Flaxen-hued hair and movie star sunglasses.  My favorite picture of her was snapped when she was maybe four-- stricken with a high fever and her cheeks all splotchy and her hair all stringy like hay, she was clad in a light blue nightshirt and was in the middle of racing across her bed.  A picture snapped at just the right moment-- a crazed look in her boiling eyes.  She looks wild and gentle and fun and haphazard all at once.  

The middle one bounded in like Tigger ten years later.  All curls and piss and vinegar-- a personality far bigger than the house that tried, in vain, to contain it.  She was and is still all over the place.  There's a picture of us on riding toys in my grandparent's driveway.  She's in a gray dress and I'm in a sailor's suit.  She's making me laugh, or maybe it's the other way around.  Either way, our heads are both thrown back in glee.  My grandfather's Chevy Impala is visible in front of us with its reverse lights on.  "Oh, look," I say, on the rare occasions when I'm looking at the photo album with someone from the family, "there's Zayda, about to back over two of his grandchildren."

1980 was my year.  I wore my bowl-cut and my sweatsuits for far too long-- but you knew that.  I wanted to change my name to "Moe."  I wanted to go to Catholic School so I could wear a tie and a v-neck sweater.  I wanted to grow up and marry a Korean girl as I watched the 1988 Seoul Olympics in wide-eyed fascination.  I found the page and the stage and my dick and its tricks and I emulated newscasters and Peter Sellers and I practiced my pratfalls in my room and in Borders Books & Music.  I don't know what my favorite picture of me is-- they all kind of make me sad, for one reason or another.  Maybe one of me onstage-- being somebody else.

Maybe this one, from "Pirates of Penzance."  Maybe because it's the last time I felt like I really had control, command, like I really knew what I was doing.  Maybe because you can see my wife, if you squint, lurking there in the background, backing me up.  Maybe because I really am the very model of a modern Major-General.  Maybe because this is what I was meant to do.

Maybe.      

We Put the "Fun" in "Funiculì, Funiculà"

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 23

"A fool's fun is being bad;

a wise man's fun is being wise!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

It's easy to get all weird and xenophobic when you start thinking about the ways in which people from different cultures have fun.  

The French call it "divertissement."  If you're a sweaty, hog-palmed Cockney bastard, you call it "AVIN' A LAUGH, GUV!"  

I was curious, for instance, about what soldiers who were stationed in Iraq do.  Seeing as I don't know any active-duty soldiers (Does it surprise you that I'm not exactly a Jarhead magnet"?) I asked Yahoo! Answers.  

This is what I found.

Four years ago, "C" (probably not his real name) said:

"Gladiator battles to the death with scorpions or whatever other creature they can find that will fit in a bottle of water."

Another individual postulated that, according to his buddy, "they touch themselves a lot."  Hopefully they wash their hands after playing around with those scorpions first.  

Queen Elizabeth has some interesting hobbies/interests, according to a 20/20 profile done on Her Majesty in 2012.  She evidently enjoys a good game of solitaire (though the Brits call it "patience", because they're Brits), she loves horseracing and horsebreeding (not breeding with them-- that was Catherine the Great.  And Caligula, though he was just practicing for his sister) and she learned how to fix and rebuild truck engines during WWII, though I'm not sure she'd remember how, or whether she'd want to get her pastel outfits all greasy.  She also, apparently, channels the late Peter Sellers in that she does remarkably uncanny impersonations-- probably of heads of state who are nowhere near as funny as she is.

To blow off a little steam, Al Pacino, as you probably expected, wrestles wild bison to the ground and kills them by punching them repeatedly in the face until they are blind, insane, and near death.  Then he stands up, urinates on them, and sets them on fire while screaming, 

"TRENT, HARRY, JIMMY--WHEREVER YOU ARE OUT THERE:

FUCK YOU, TOO!!!!!" 

Look, fun is a very personal thing, and who am I to judge, really?  Some people like listening to Andrea Boccelli sing "Funiculì, Funiculà", some people like going to those, um, donkey... shows in Juarez, and that's okay, I guess, as long as everyone (including the donkey) is a consenting adult.  In April, we're going to take our Basset Hound to the Boardwaddle in Ocean City, NJ-- an event where hundreds of Basset Hounds descend upon New Jersey, many of whom will be in costume (the dogs, not the owners-- well, I suspect some of them will be, too) and, for many Basset Hound owners on the East Coast, this is the absolute highlight of their year.  And that's okay, for them.  For me, it'll be a fun, silly event and hopefully we'll get through it without the children having a Basset-sized melt-down because it's too hot or it's too windy or because we're not adopting five other Bassets and cramming them in the car with us.

I suppose fun has been on my mind because I'm not entirely sure what I do for fun.  Watch "Frontline"?  Blog?  I don't quite know that those activities are necessarily classified by anyone who's a real authority on the matter as "fun".  They bring me some level of enjoyment, as does playing the banjo and, um, eating and drinking Caffeine Free Diet Coke.  And I enjoy going to plays, and (sometimes) acting in them, but I don't know that it's "fun".  Maybe it's as much fun as watching two scorpions going stabby inside an empty Fiji water bottle, but the word "fun" to me conjures up images of my children laughing hysterically as they're being tickled, or a dog with his head out the window of a car and his tongue slapping crazily against his face or some dickhead on a rollercoaster throwing up and not even noticing it's happening because he's in ecstasy, or on it.  I used to hop in the car and go for a drive-- to nowhere in particular-- for fun, but now that gas is $3.60 a gallon, this activity has kind of been robbed of its pleasure value.  

Maybe I'm overthinking this.  I do that sometimes.  At least I'm not the kind of guy who thinks hiring a midget for a Bar Mitzvah, stag party, or St. Patrick's Day is fun.

Seriously:

http://www.rentamidget.com/

Nom-Nom Time

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 21, Verse 4

"Pride,

lust,

and evil actions

are all

SINS."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

So, my allergist and I had a little talk today about my blood pressure and my weight.  Sure, technically, he's not supposed to have much to do with either, but, considering I spoke openly with his predecessor about "Rushmore", bowties, and pros and cons of dating outside the Jewish faith, I guess this isn't too far a stretch.  At least this is medical.

I won't bore you with a prattling discourse on my systolic and diastolic numbers, but let's just say they've been on the increase.  They're not in stroke-range, and he politely refused to classify it as "hypertension", but he did click the ICD-9 (watch out, 9-- you're going the way of the fucking dinosaur!) code for "elevated blood pressure" on my entry in his fancy-prancy electronic medical record.  

"Does it have one for "fat"?" I asked, leaning forward on the exam table to squint at his flatscreen monitor.

"Gee, I don't know," he said, moving his mouse around, "let's see."  I love it when medical professionals humor me.  He typed in "fat" in the e-medical record search.  

"Well," he muttered, scrolling down the drop-box options, "we've got 'fat cells', 'fatty deposits'--"

"Oh!  Click that," I said, "I've got loads of those bastards."  

"Look," he said, "how old are you?  33?  You're an old man."

"I know," I replied earnestly, "everything's going to shit."  

He then proceeded to tell me that he is forty-seven and he's depressed because he's "got to carry these things" (reading glasses) around with him everywhere, and that he had a problem with his thyroid, and he started to say the word "colonoscopy", but he stopped himself.  

"Thank you," I said, holding up my hand as he smiled.  

"Look-- what am I going to tell you?  'Exercise more'?  Who the hell has time for that?  Especially you with a job and two little kids running around.  See your primary care doctor-- follow up on the blood pressure."  He reminded me that, when he first met me, I was taking police academy physical fitness tests, and drinking Muscle Milk or Anvil Juice or whatever the fuck it was to fatten up.

It wasn't successful-- the fattening up or the police thing.  

Now, I don't need the help of any product you can find at GNC.  It turns out that getting a desk-job, having twins, and steadily aging is the best way to gain weight.  Now, to put things into a little perspective: I'm six foot tall and weigh 154 pounds.  According to the C.D.C., which is never wrong, not even about Ebola being the funniest disease that ends in "a" since Trachoma, my Body Mass Index is 20.9, which is within "Normal" range.  

But, is that enough?  For a long, long time, pretty much ever since early adolescence into my early thirties I have been classified as "underweight" for my height.  Now, that's not necessarily a good thing, but it's been part of my identity.  It's part of what makes me funny (looking) on-stage.  It's part of what gets laughs, and all I have to do is walk out into the lights.  Or-- is it?  Maybe I'm funny enough being "normal".  Maybe I've been relying on my awkward height-to-weight ratio as a crutch.  Maybe I don't need it.

Maybe I have an eating disorder.  I wonder what the empty bowl that once housed approximately two dozen Cadbury mini-eggs would have to say about that.  Good thing fucking Fiestaware can't talk.  

I eat too much sugar.

My portions are big.

I love carbs.

Forgive me.  Pardon me.  Grant me atonement.       

A few weeks ago, the Honeybaked Ham Company catered a lunch at the hospital.  I missed it, but, the next day, there was a half loaf of heaven-scented bread in a plastic bag on the counter by the mailboxes in reception.  I took two pieces back to my desk and, at 6:15am, after eating breakfast, I inhaled them as giddily and exuberantly as a full-fledged fat girl playing and splashing in an inflatable wading pool filled with ranch dressing and corn syrup.  

And then I waited until normal business hours, and I called the Honeybaked Ham Company and asked if they sold their bread by the loaf to the general public.  

"Um, yea," the guy said hurriedly.  Knives and things clanked onto metal countertops.  It sounded like a very busy morgue.  

"Do you just sell one kind of bread-- I mean, I want to buy a specific kind of your bread."

"Uh-- yea, we sell white, wheat, rye-- just come in and you can buy whatever you want," he said and was clearly about to hang up.

"WAIT WAIT WAIT!" I begged hoarsely, "are you still there?"

He was still there.

"The bread I want-- I don't know what it's called, but it was at the hospital where I work.  There was a catering.  It was just sitting there-- the bread."

Pause.

"What kind of hospital is this?" he asked.

Pause.

"A psych hospital."

Duh.

"Oh, yeah-- we did a catering job there a couple weeks ago.  You're talking about the Hawaiian Honey Bread."

"YES!" I screamed.  That had to be it.  Something so wonderful had to be called that.  My mind went immediately to lyrics I had sung as John Wellington Wells in "The Sorcerer," where I lie to Dame Sangazure and tell her that I cannot love her because... I am ENGAGED....

To a maiden fair,

With bright brown hair,

And a sweet and simple smile,

Who waits for me,

By the sounding sea,

On a South Pacific isle.

I closed my eyes at my desk and imagined her; bronze-skinned, bare-breasted, almond eyes gazing at me with a sultry, desultory longing as her pristine island teeth and supple, moist lips lovingly land on a slice of that bread.

Their website refers to it as "honey-kissed Hawaiian bread" and that's not just ad-man Mad Men hyperbole.  I haven't bought a loaf yet, but you can be sure that I won't be whining or crying about my BMI when I bring home a loaf.  And I will bring home a loaf.  And it shall be kissed by my windswept, Hawaiian temptress and delivered unto my trembling mouth by her tender touch.

"Yeah," he said, "we sell that, too."

Here Comes the Test

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 23, Verse 9

"Don't waste your breath on a rebel.

He will despise the wisest advice."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I try.  

Oh, how I try to be good.  A good boy.  I try, you know-- I really do.  

Sometimes, though, I just can't help it.  Most good boys can't, you know.  

I try very hard to go about my life and do what I do and be who I am without much thought to the opinions and thoughts of others.  But sometimes, just sometimes, every now and then-- I fall short.  I catch myself wondering what the mirror thinks as it looks back at me in the morning.  I try to dissect the silent judging glances, stares, eyebrows and lip creases of those seated across the room from me-- those who look, and those who don't. 

Why don't they look?  What am I-- llama vom?  

No.  Llama vom would at least be interesting enough to look at.  At least, I'd look at it.

Since leaving Facebook, oh, not even two weeks ago, I've become, oh, a little self-conscious about who's reading this blog now that I don't have a forum of 438 "Friends" to blogvertise to.  I tried joining a 30something blogging network, but I might as well have joined a leper colony for all the positive P.R. it's gotten me.  

Earlier in the week, I penned what I thought was a really strong entry-- a very funny post about some foibled, fabled days of my childhood-- getting punished-- or, not, really-- at the hands of my parents.  According to my Blogger.com stats, it was read by two people.  One of them was my wife, and the other was my best friend.  Now, an audience of two isn't as shameful as it sounds, because I'm awfully fond of those two people, but let's just say that I was hoping for a bit of a wider circulation.  

Of course, something to remember and not take especially lightly is the fact that I was, quite literally, convulsing with laughter while writing that entry at the memories it sparked in me-- long forgotten and packed away somewhere in the recesses of my brain-- bringing them forth again brought forth a real joy.  Sure, a sick joy, but a joy nonetheless.  And my wife reminded me on the couch later that night that there is no crime in writing for oneself.  "And you sure did that tonight," she remarked with a smile.  

And maybe that's going to have to be good enough, because maybe there really is nobody really out there anymore.  Maybe at 102 posts, this particular thing has run its course without a platform upon which to sustain it.  Or maybe it's just going to continue to be what it was, or be what it is, and do what it does-- and I suppose whether it's to you or to me doesn't really make much of a difference anyway.  Because I need a belly laugh every now and then too, and if I have to get it from myself, well, there are worse things in life.  I'm being tested now: I am coming face-to-face with the truth about why I write.  Is it to send something out there into the ether to be read and appreciated by someone else, or is it some internal struggle I'm working out and you're kind of an afterthought?

I don't know.  That said, though, I've got to say-- you're one hell of an afterthought.    

I Know the Number

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 15

"A youngster's heart is filled with rebellion,

but punishment will drive it out of him."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I have to imagine that, just considering probability and my smart mouth, I was at least occasionally punished as a child.  If I was, though, I don't remember it, and it's not because I was concussed by my father's closed fist.  No, that never happened in our house.  There was awful blue carpeting on the stairs and the word "fuck" was said with greater frequency than the word "salt" or "and", but there was never any hitting.

At least, not of me.

He gave my sister a few good smacks, though, though he claims, conveniently, to not remember.  We tell these stories, laughing, in the living room.  He laughs too, which, (I guess?) is good.  There was the time where we were all placing our ice cream orders and he asked her what she wanted and she answered, "Vanilla".  He said, "What?"  And she made the mistake of uttering, "I said 'vanilla', what are you, deaf?"  That earned her a thick Israeli palm straight across her face.  Another time, he threw a full cup of water ice in her face, though I don't know what crass remark of hers prompted that frozen projectile.  Maybe I would have gotten smacked around if I had been more into cold desserts.

There was a decent amount of verbal "abuse", if you want to call it that.  Of course, I'm sure any child born to an Israeli father could claim at least the same, if not far worse.  He screamed at us as if we were privates in his regiment.  Eating our Cinnamon Toast Crunch too loudly the breakfast table on Sunday received an emphatic, "JEEE-SUS CHRIST!  ENOUGH WITH DA FACKING CRUNCHING, ALREADY!"  I never fully considered the irony until this moment of a man whose native tongue is Hebrew using "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation.  Classic.  Breaking something on the kitchen floor-- a plate or what have you-- resulted in him asking, rhetorically, I learned, "WHAT ARE YOU, FACKING KEE-DEEING ME?"  Making fun of him and his accent, we quickly learned, was enough to make the man almost completely implode.  One day he took us on an ill-fated trip to visit the Pepperidge Farm factory.  He got hopelessly lost.  He stopped by the side of the road at some movie set-looking old gas station where the pumps still said "Esso" and asked some toothless hump in a pair of overalls, "Excuse me-- how do I get to, uh-- Pappen-dridge Farm?"  The farmer cocked his head and stared at him.  My sister and I almost passed out in the back seat of the Buick from holding in our piss as we exploded in a torrent of laughter.  He turned to us with a virulence I had never seen before and screamed, "SHAT DEE FUCK UP, YOU TWO ASSHOLES!  I AM TRYING TO DO SOMETHING FACKIN' NICE FOR YOU FUCKS!"

This, of course, made us laugh harder until my neck almost burst.  He drove us home in silence and said nothing to either of us for two days.    

In spite of all this, and more, I don't ever recall being sent to my room-- I always ended up running there myself before anyone could send me there.  He yelled and screamed at me, but I don't ever remember an explicit "punishment" per say.  Once he poked me in the stomach with his index finger, I don't remember what the hell that was about.  And I remember crying and, you know, running to my room.  Fortunately, I liked my room.  I think I even liked crying in it.  I am relieved, of course, that it was just yelling.  His father used to chase him around the house and, once he caught him, he'd beat the shit out of my father with his shoe.  And you know how they made shoes back then.

My mother, of course, was a different story.  Once I did something bad-- who the hell knows what it was now-- and she told me she was disappointed in me, and I considered wearing black for a year.  Maybe it was the time that I took an axe to the basement wall-- that one's still kind of hard to explain, even now, with almost four years' experience in psych.  I told my parents, when they asked why I'd done it, that I was bored.  They came down a lot harder on my sister, who was supposed to be babysitting me but who was watching "The Hard Way" (James Woods, Michael J. Fox-- great flick) in the basement at full volume and I could have been building an atomic bomb on the sofa next to her and she'd never have known.  I don't know what her punishment was, if anything, but at least she didn't get a frozen custard or something slammed into her face.  Was I punished?  No.  Would a normal parent have taken money out of my allowance until I was 27 to pay for the damage I did to the wall?  Yes.  I guess they're not normal.

Remember how I told you earlier that I liked my room?  Well, once I called my mother a "witch" and she chased me around the house, which was quite an athletic feat for a woman like her.  I was stunned that she was up to it, and that scared me.  She almost got ahold of my arm but I broke free and I was terrified about what she was capable of doing to me if she'd caught me-- I'd never seen her like that.  I ran into my room and I slammed the door shut, and shoved my bureau up against it.

"DON'T TOUCH ME!" I screamed, "I KNOW THE NUMBER!!!!"

There was silence on the other side of the door.

"What number?" she asked breathlessly from the hallway.

"THE CHILD ABUSE HOTLINE!  I KNOW THE NUMBER!"

Truthfully, I didn't know the number.  I did, however, know the slogan "In case of child abuse: know the number" courtesy of the commercials that played endlessly during episodes of "Rescue: 911" that any child psychologist worth his salt would have known I shouldn't have been watching.  I also, not that it mattered, didn't have a phone in my bedroom.

I don't know if I'm going to punish my children.  I didn't really know what grounding was, other than ordering an airplane to land, until I was in high school, though I'd heard it said enough on "Diff'rent Strokes".  I don't know that not getting punished spoiled me, I think it just made me weird and fucked up, and I suppose that's punishment enough.  Still, all things being equal, I'm learning to be okay with it.        

100 Chips of Wisdom

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 6

"There is treasure in being good, 

but trouble dogs the wicked."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

"Chipped Wisdom" turns a hundred today.  100 posts filled with abhorrence, anxiety, acrimony, tumult, temerity, and tempestuous tummy-rot.  

Why, this calls for a celebration, but I don't think I'll be answering.  Celebrations just aren't my style.  I'm more into quietly farting in my corduroys, drinking Caffeine Free Diet Coke and watching "Frontline" on PBS.  The next one is going to air on March 25, and it's going to be about tuberculosis.  

Just so you know.

I started this blog, appropriately enough, on April 1, 2013.  It's taken me just under a year to wring out my brain with sufficient vigor to produce 100 posts, and, all this time later, I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, for whom I'm doing it, or why.  Maybe no writers really ever get to fully ascertain the answers to those questions, and maybe that's fine for them and maybe it's fine for me, too.  I don't know.  

Three big things happened to me since I started this blog:

1.) I got promoted at work.  In July.  It's terrifying.  Nobody should be promoting me.  What's wrong with them?

2.) In April, we got a basset hound.  She's the most beautiful, awkward, lazy fucking thing I've ever seen.  And I love her.

3.) I shit-canned Facebook.  And that's recent-- happened last night. 

I suppose I should talk a little bit about why I did that last thing there.  Like most decisions I make on a daily/hourly basis, it was impulsive, hot-tempered, and arrived at through a mixture of bubbling vitriol and intense paranoia.  One shouldn't make decisions when one is angry and/or afraid, but that's kind of how I live my life.  Of course, I'm also afraid of being angry, so that rather complicates things, and means that, most times, decisions don't actually get made.  Which is maybe a good thing.  

The hospital where I work came out with a social media policy (Hello, 2004!) yesterday and I took exception to many of its dictates.  So, in true passive-aggressive fashion, I signed their policy, went home, and deactivated my Facebook account.  

Marc Zuckerberg clutched at my sleeve and implored me to think of all the minions I would be leaving behind.  "Your 483 friends will miss you!"  I laughed at that and hit the happy button and, you know what?  I feel pretty amazing.  And I don't feel pretty amazing in that "Aren't I so chic to be so iAmbivalent way?", I genuinely feel better.  Today, I sat down and wrote a long e-mail to a woman with whom I have been friends since I was in third grade-- my oldest friend-- who lives in California.  And she answered, in a way that really made me feel happy and satisfied.  There was no status to Like, no glib comment or shallow attempt at wit.  It was actual, real communication-- and I've been so hungry for it, and maybe that's what I'm doing here-- making some attempt to reach someone, anyone, in a meaningful way.  To matter.  To be good.

Because, on Facebook, I felt very, very bad.  A voyeur.  Playing at Oscar Wilde.  Mostly just promoting my blog and ignoring friends' birthdays and photographic evidence of their meals or their children's achievements.  And add to that feeling scared that somebody was watching what I was writing on social media was just the slick, stomach-upsetting icing on that Cakebook.  Do I have to start un-friending people in administration?  Or former colleagues from the unit?  Do I have to start worrying about who's "on my side" and who might get angry at me for something in the future and turn me in to the H.R. police over some dumb comment I made?  Why?  I worry about enough things-- both reality-based and thoroughly magical; I don't need that.  

Give me my anonymous blog, which can no longer be conclusively tied to me now that Facebook's gone, and leave me the hell alone.  Let me do my thing.  Let me have my creative outlet.  And, if you don't like it; change the fucking channel.

What's funny is that, now that I have cut the rope from Facebook, I have nowhere to promote the blog, so I have pretty much shot myself in the foot as far as readership goes.  This, however, doesn't bother me.  I was never really trying to connect with people I know; just people.  

You.

Whomever you are.

If you know me and love me or even just can stand being in the same room as me, or if you stumbled your way here as a result of Googling "Alpaca dildo", I'm okay with that.  Because you're here, and I'm here and, in the end, that is what counts.  

At least, I'm here for now.  I don't know if Chipped Wisdom will be here in 200 posts, though I suppose it's conceivable that it will be.  After all, I do love me my routines, don't I?  And, it's not like two posts a week is a particularly strenuous output, even for someone who despises changing his trousers every day (necessary when one of your hobbies is quietly farting in your corduroys) because it means the effort of taking off and putting on a belt, and switching the wallet and chap-stick to the new pair.  And matching.

Everything has to match.       

I'm Flying

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 7

"Only the good can give good advice.

Rebels can't."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I just broke up with my therapist via e-mail.  Isn't that trashy?

Well, I suppose it's more avoidant than trashy.  I told him that I was discontinuing our sessions over e-mail instead of during our regularly-scheduled session on Tuesday because I'm an "errant coward and a sappy pussy", and I don't know why I said that, because he knows both of those things.  I think they're my Axis II.

Even though he keeps trying to make me listen to sandal-wearing shamans masturbating on their podcasts, that's not the reason why I'm not going to therapy anymore.  It's dollars and cents.  If it were free, like it was in college, I could probably go talk about myself once a week until my dying day, because that's the kind of humanitarian I am, but our finances are taking such a concussive hit from childcare that it is necessary to make some sacrifices.  

It's funny to think of giving up therapy as a sacrifice.  It's such a New York, Woody Allen, pedantic, East Side, Jewish, pencil-prick thing to say, but it's true.  The plain fact of the matter is that ceasing therapy will save our family $1,200 a year-- a damn sight more than shitcanning my iPhone was saving us.  That, by the way, amounted to a $240 a year savings, and, last weekend, I caved in and re-activated the iPhone.  In spite of our draining bank account, I haven't looked back on that one.  iT's niCe to have an iPhone.

Maybe I'll go back when the babies start "school" in the fall and we're actually able to save a little money.  But maybe I won't.  I don't know.  I'm feeling pretty good of late.  The Viibryd seems to be doing its thing, making pirouettes in my brain or whatever the fuck it's doing to my seratonin, I have more energy around the babies, I'm more sprightly and ridiculous.  Sure, I still think about death pretty much all the time, but I don't know that there's anything or anyone that's going to necessarily be able to help me out with that.  I think that's just kind of my thing, unfortunately.

I was thinking a lot about death this weekend, especially.  That's what happens when you go to see a high school production of "Peter Pan" on a Friday night.  One of my private acting students was in the show and I went to go support her, and also, more selfishly, to go back to Neverland.  It's a place (where dreams are born and time is never yea yea yea) where I never, ever get tired of going-- either as an audience member or as a mustache-twirling, bewigged, Captain of misery, murder and loot ("eager to kill any who says that his hook isn't cute).

"Peter Pan", for me, is the most emotionally complicated show with which I've ever been involved.  For most people, it's about never growing old and the magic of fairy dust.  For me, it's about nostalgia, love, pain, and death.  

I was cast as Captain Hook when I was in seventh grade and, not to be immodest, I rocked out in a pair of Girl Scout boots that belonged to the costume lady's daughter, a Michael Jackson wig and a handlebar mustache drawn on with eyebrow pencil.  It was the role and the show that made me and theatre shack up together in a big way.  The applause during my curtain call rained down so hard it almost made my little 12-year-old heart freeze up-- it was narcotic.  But I got brought down hard a few months after the show closed when one of the Indians, who was a close friend of mine, went to go have her wisdom teeth out.  She went into cardiac arrest during the procedure and she died.  Shellshocked, I went to her funeral with the director of "Peter Pan".  I stood in the receiving line absolutely terrified-- I had no idea what I would do or say when I got up to her parents.  When I got up to her mother, she looked at me and said, "Oh, Captain Hook-- she loved you so," and she hugged me so hard I thought we would both break.

Seventeen years went by before I got cast in "Peter Pan" again, as Captain Hook again, directed by the same woman who directed me in the show in middle school.  I called my mother and told her I was going to be playing Captain Hook once more and she said, "Oh that's wonderful, honey-- are you going to play him gay again?"  

Not one to miss a set-up, I replied, "Of course."

I suppose even someone who's not obsessed with death can't help but think even a little bit about mortality when you're playing a role as an adult that you once played as a child.  You can't help but think about how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.  I was delivering lines in exactly the same cadence as I did as a thirteen-year-old, which doesn't really say much for how I've grown as an actor.  At least my voice changed.  It was wonderful, though, I'll admit-- to be surrounded by love and wonderfully talented children and a show that I hold so very close to my heart.  Standing off-stage every night, listening to the overture, waiting for the clock to play "Tender Shepherd", and the curtain rising, wondering whether the audience would applaud for the set, waiting for Wendy and John to dance-- "playing at Mother and Father".  That's my favorite part of the show.  

On Friday night I was back in Neverland again, watching that high school production-- trying not to compare myself to the Captain Hook on the stage (he played it very dark-- sorry).  I was really taken with the vocal abilities of the girl who played Peter Pan-- an astonishingly powerful performer-- capable, competent, confident, commanding-- everything Pan needs to be.  

It wasn't until intermission when I learned that, in January, she became an orphan under horrifying circumstances-- in an instant-- a terrible, shocking, disgusting instant-- a life changed forever.  And suddenly, all the lines she spoke and the lyrics she sang in Act I were searing through my brain.  Lines about mothers and fathers and Lost Boys and Act II was an absolute blur.  I just wasn't there.  I tried to be there, but I was far, far away.  And "Peter Pan" just got a little more emotionally complicated for one more aging Captain Hook.   

I probably would have spent a good part of Tuesday talking about this to my therapist, but, instead, I'm talking to you.  And I'm okay with that, because I love you and talking to you is free and I know I have to work on not judging myself and being mindful and keeping perspective and noticing my emotions and my tendencies and making little changes and accepting and acknowledging and just being. 

I know.  

And I also know that, some day, I have to be in "Peter Pan" again.  Maybe I'll be forty, or fifty, or older, and that'll only add another layer on top of what is already there for me.  But that's alright.  Because it's not all youth, joy, and freedom, and it's not all Christmas and candy, Michael.  Sometimes you have to take your medicine, just like Father.       

Sweet Sixteen

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 18, Verse 15

"The intelligent man is always open to new ideas.

In fact, he looks for them."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

If you listen to anything a sixteen-year-old says, that makes you stupider than a sixteen-year-old.  Though I'm often lauding his brain-power, my father must not have been too bright seventeen years ago, because, when I told him what kind of car I should own once I got my driver's license, he not only listened, he allowed me to go ahead and buy it.  

A 1990 Ford Crown Victoria, late of the Delaware State Police, I reasoned, was the perfect car for a horny, impulsive, emotionally unstable teenager with knobby knees and an addled brain.  In arguing my case, I emphasized that police package vehicles had beefier brakes than their civilian counterparts and were therefore safer.  I judiciously omitted the fact that the car was hiding under its runway-sized hood an obscene 5.8 liter V-8 engine that produced a testicle-trembling 285hp.  Note: police-package engines and undeveloped teenage brains should not be combined.  

It was very early on in my motoring life when I realized my innate knack for killing cars.  That Crown Vic, having survived years of abuse at the hands of the Delaware State Police (Dover barracks) died after just four months of having my name on the title.  My name on an automobile title, I soon came to understand, may well have been written in poison.

In the years that came rolling along, I went looking for the new experience.  I owned a Volvo, then a Taurus, then I wanted the old experience again, so I got another Crown Vic.  Then a Chevy Impala.  Then a New Beetle.  Then I rolled into anonymity in a Ford Focus.  Switched over to my wife's PT Cruiser.  Got another Volvo.  Went all Japanese and shacked up with a CR-V for a bit.  Now I'm in a Volvo again.  Hey, at least it's fewer than one per year, right?  

"It's a good thing you're not about women like you are about cars," my wife has sometimes remarked.  

Or glasses.  

Or watches. 

Or breakfast.

Ideas and ideals, though, are pretty constant with me.  It takes me many, many years to change my mind.  I'm not sure why, really.  I'm definitely rigid, but I wouldn't call myself totally impervious to reason or rational argument.  Unless, of course, I think you're an asshole, in which case pretty much anything you say I'm going to turn up my nose at.  But if I respect you, I'll listen, if I can bring myself to attend to what you're saying and not get lost thinking about sex or the next time I'm going to ingest bacon.  I find it so hard lately to pay attention to anything-- it's not you, dear; it's me.  

My views have softened on some topics and issues, but mostly I'm still whacking away at the same windmills and running myself ragged trying like Christ to prove to myself I'm not a bad man, and violently shutting my eyes and ears to anyone who tries to convince me otherwise.  And that's exhausting, in case you haven't tried it.  I'm still trying to prove I'm socially active.  Still trying to prove I'm a writer.  Still trying to be a good boy.  And I don't know especially why-- nobody seems especially turned on by my efforts, and I guess that's okay.  I'm not trying to make anybody's pants sticky, but I don't exactly know what it is that I am trying to do.  

There are days when I want to leap back into the velour bench seat of a 1990 Crown Vic, turn the wheel with my pinkie finger, mash down the accelerator and be treated to a symphony by Dante from under the hood.  But these days I know I'd be fixated on watching the gas gauge needle go down as the speedometer needle moved toward the right.  It had the coolest horizontal speedometer.  God, I loved looking at it.  

        

Now gas is $3.61 and I'm feeling the pinch and I'm terrified of everything.  I mean, that car only had ONE airbag.  Can you believe we were so CRAZY?  

We were so crazy, my loves.  Gas was $1.50.  We didn't know.  We didn't care.  We were so young.  We didn't have children.  We had pimples and anxiety and schoolbags and sneakers and I really wore sneakers back then-- really, I did.  But not shorts.  It wasn't that bad.  

It was horrible.

I like to think that I've smartened up since those days.  In group sometimes I read a "This I Believe" essay written by a woman who'd had one published during the original Edward R. Murrow days, and then, fifty years later, wrote another essay called "Have I Learned Anything Since I Was Sixteen", the age she was when she wrote her first TIB essay.  

As for me?  In many ways I think that, no, I haven't.  The only thing that I'm learning, though, is to be okay with that.  

Psst-- Come Here. No, Closer.

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 12, Verse 5

"A good man's mind is filled with honest thoughts;

an evil man's mind is crammed with lies."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

It's funny how ideas evolve over time.  I can remember back when being "good friends" with someone meant that, when you had dinner at their house on Friday night and his father went around the table and kissed everyone on the top of the head, that he kissed you, too.  Later, being good friends with someone meant that you got invited to the sleepover where Cinemax softcore would be showing on the extravagantly-sized basement TV.  For years, we didn't have a TV in our basement.  We had shuffleboard.  Because of this, and other factors, I knew I had to work an angle or two in order that I might secure a friend or two.

So I decided, pretty early on, to be interesting.

I would have opinions that were outside of the norm, I would spout invective and slander, I would make shocking remarks and comments of questionable taste.  People, I figured, would be interested by someone who said interesting things, especially things he had no business saying.  You know, as a nine-year-old.  

When I was very young, I learned that I could make my barber double over in paroxysms of laughter by imitating Pee Wee Herman, Moe Howard, and the incompetent Yugoslavian shampoo girl that he had recently fired.  She barely spoke English, and she would mutter what I guess she thought was casual conversation at customers in her incomprehensible, garbled clamor as she quite literally climbed on top of them and all over them while she struggled to hold the sink nozzle and control the pace of the shampoo bottle's output.  I thought perhaps my impressions, or international and neighborhood celebrities, could win me over friends.  

Maybe I was right-- I don't know.

Something I'm only recently realizing is that what friendship is, by and large, if it's anything, is the act of getting close enough to someone such that they let their guard down enough to share with you what they really think.  You know what I mean: what they really think.  

Really.

Those quiet 1am conversations where truths are revealed due to casual, un-careful openness.  To be close enough to not be afraid, or what they might say or think or tell.  To be able to look someone in the eyes over a plate of questionable food at a suspect diner and lay your heart bare as if it were an item on the greasy, laminated menu.  To not hear qualified thoughts or apologies in advance, or caveats or political correctness.  

Goddamned political correctness.

Sure, you can never actually know someone, but I think it is possible, with a friend, a real, true friend, to know at least what he or she thinks about some things.  Their real and true opinions, and to see them, in some moment or other, as other people cannot: stripped of pretense and image-crafting.  The Unstagram.  And I don't know how many people you get a shot at having that with over the course of a relatively appropriate lifespan-- four?  One?  I suppose, if you're terrifyingly unlucky, you never know what that's like.  I'm definitely fortunate to be able to say that I've had it with one person, and lost it.  I may have it with one or two others, sometimes I'm not sure.  And I guess the other question that makes me slightly uncomfortable is: does anybody have it with me?  

I mean, okay, if you look at the 97 posts on this blog, it looks like I'm a pretty straight up person, I kind of put it all out there in a way that looks and smells very much like I don't give a shit who thinks what about it.  But I don't know if that's true.  I don't know if that's who I am.  What if this is all just a bunch of nonsense I spew and it feel like the real thing at the moment but then I go to sleep and wake up and it's all different, that everything I really am is locked away so deep inside even I don't know it's there.  

We're so careful.  So afraid.  We think that, if someone tries too hard to get to know us that we'll break.  And maybe that's true.  But I love knowing the truth-- that moment when someone leans across the table and whispers, "Psst-- come here.  No, closer," because they're going to tell me something real, and I think in this plastic, photo-shopped, status update time we're all drooling and desperate for something unlocked, something unguarded, something unedited, something breathtakingly real.

Ready, or not.