Stuck

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 21, Verse 10

"An evil man loves to harm others;

being a good neighbor is out of his line."

---

I'm stuck.

I'm stuck and I'm sticking to a mood of a funk-- of a glowering, lowering mess of a rut.  Don't try to help me, though-- if you offered me your hand, I'd probably drag you down into the sinkhole.  That's what I'd do, and do it I would.

I think I want you in here, down here deep with me in the dark.  I think I want you here with me.  I thought I didn't, and so I said to my wife, flatly, in the kitchen, in my pajama pants with hearts on them, "I'm not going to blog tonight." 

It was a grand pronouncement, though made in that deflated, deadpan, Wes Anderson way.  

"Okay," she said to me in equal reply.  Two yellow Reese's peanut butter egg wrappers lay in tatters in front of her on our red kitchen table.

"Oh-- you ate both of those?"

"What, did you think I was going to save one of them for you?" she answered with a smile.  

I love being married to my wife.  Which is rather a good thing, you know, since I'm married to her.  Other people are married to people who aren't my wife, which I hope is working out for them, since they can't have her.  I have her.  And she has me.  Whenever our children point to the rings we wear on our fingers, we always tell them, "This ring means that Mommy and Daddy belong to each other."  I love that we say that, because it's true, and because it's rather a nice way of putting it, and I'm glad that's what our children see.  When I kiss my wife, my daughter's face lights up and she coos, "Ooh, Daddy love Mommy!"  No dullard there.

In case you weren't able to tell, recounting colorful anecdotes like these is a strategy I'm trying to use to lift myself out of my shitty mood, even though I am caked in it to the eyebrows, and I don't know if it's going to work, I don't know if it's having an effect on you, because I can't see you or hear you.  It's a wonder that any stage actor ever decides to write-- in a way it's so anathema to performing on the stage.  There, you have instant feedback, and you can turn it up or dial it down depending upon the reaction you're getting.  No offense, but writing for you is kind of like performing in front of the residents of a local town's mortuary, or at a cat shelter.  I have no idea if what I'm doing matters a damn to you in any way, and it's frustrating.  It's why, the one time I went on the radio, I was terrified.  All I could see were little needles on little dials going from right to left and left to write.  And they weren't laugh-o-meters.

A girl at the Apple store was flirting with me today-- she had no reason to talk to me, I was waiting for my OS to reinstall and I told her that, but she kept the conversation up, joking and inquiring, excessively, I think, about my line of work.  I even had the perfect opportunity to let her know that I'm married, but I didn't.  Why?  I guess I liked the attention.  She had nice glasses but was otherwise only passingly attractive.  As in, if I passed her on the street, I would have thought, "Oh, she's attractive," and continued on my way quickly changing thoughts to death or my current financial lamentations or fantasizing about how a night's unbroken rest might aid my welfare.  

When I came home, I told my wife about my transgression, which she laughed off.  "That's why you're telling me about this," she said, "it's your incessant guilt-- you can't keep anything from me."  And she's right.  Years ago, when I worked on the street as an EMT, a nurse gave me a piece of paper with her phone number on it, which I immediately threw out as soon as I was out of her sight and I told my wife as soon as I got home.  She laughed.  She was glad "other people saw things her way".  Why won't someone punish me already?

I want to write about work, but I'm too afraid that, if I start to do that, I'll cry.  Not that you'll be able to see it, but still.  I'll know.  And my wife, who's sitting across the room from me happily thumbing through endless screens of palaver and folderol and fiddle-dee-dee would have to deal with that, and I fail to see how that would aid her welfare.  

Or yours.

Like It Be

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 24, Verse 26

"It is an honor to receive a frank reply."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I read somewhere recently that there is a difference between being honest and "telling it like it is."  You know what I'm talking about, probably-- those people you know who say cutting, cruel things and cut other people down only to say, "Hey, you know me-- I tell it like it is." 

DO YA?!!!

I'm not entirely sure if I tell it like it is, or if I'm honest, or if I'm an asshole.  Maybe it's all three, but I'm not sure that's possible.  I try to be a nice, good boy, and not hurt people's feelings if I can swing it.  The more I get to know you, though, the more another side of me comes out, where boundaries fade far off into oblivion, and I get crass-- though not careless.  My crassness is carefully calculated so as not to cause offense-- I feel like I have a pretty good meter of what's acceptable, and what certain people can take and what they can't, and I try to abide by that, because when there's someone out there who doesn't like me, I'll obsess over that until I dehydrate and fall down the stairs.  

I made a little enemy today when I stood up for myself, and my employer, at a meeting.  Funnily enough, I'm not terribly worried about it.  Maybe it's the medicine, or maybe it's because everyone else in the meeting thought she was behaving like a total ass, or maybe I just don't give a fuck anymore.  Maybe I'm getting comfortable enough in my role and in my shoes and my socks and my arm hair and my olive-hued skin to sprout a pube or two.  And maybe that's been a long time in coming.

Maybe.

I wonder sometimes if my new-ish boldness has anything to do with being bullied for my entire K-12 (okay, K-Kollege) experience.  It may very well be that I've said, internally, at some point, "okay-- enough is enough" and that I have managed to locate a little bit of courage deep down in the well somewhere.  I'm speaking my mind more, I'm saying how I feel, I'm trying.  And oftentimes it doesn't matter and it doesn't amount to much, but I suppose the outcome is pretty much irrelevant.  Because you have to say what you think in this life-- even if nobody listens and nobody cares, even if you're low man on the totem pole.  Even if you're half-buried beneath the fucking totem pole.  

Sometimes it's terrifying to think that all we are to other people are obstacles to them getting their way.  Sometimes, though, I'd proud if that's something that I can be.  If I can head off someone's stupid idea, or vainglorious pursuit, if I can be that thorn in their side-- if I can present a reality-check or an opposition when everyone else is complacent, that's a pretty good day for me.  Of course, tomorrow, someone else might have to step in and prick my bullshit balloon, and that's okay-- I certainly don't expel golden turdlettes every day-- that's really okay with me.  I don't mind if you go up against me in this world, because at least I know that you're alive. 

Let's fight about something important-- or something insipid.  I don't care.  Let's just fight.  You and me; me and you.

Let's be alive together.  

Toy Store Pervert

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 6

"Teach a child to choose the right path, 

and, when he is older, he will remain upon it."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I walk through this world guilty of things I haven't done, things I wouldn't do, and things that couldn't be.  

On Sunday, I was out to brunch with an old friend of mine.  We went to a diner run by another old friend of mine.  I was convinced that the diner's owner assumed I was cheating on my wife.  I also assumed that the cute waitress with the bandaged wrist and the harried busboy, the young, African-American family seated next to us, and the hipster asshole in the madras shorts who was standing by the door listening to The Civil Wars on his earbuds, all thought so too.  

When I worked for a small performing arts center, I used to go to all the neighborhood elementary schools to deliver flyers about upcoming productions.  As the receptionist spoke to me through the post-Columbine, yet pre-Newtown intercom system, asking me to state my name and my business, and then as I watched her watching me carry my box of "Seussical!" posters down the hall of local K-through-5's, including my own, I knew she was thinking that the only reason I was there was to run down the halls and systematically lick the anuses of all the boys and girls I could possibly find.  

Or shoot them.

Either way-- a young, white male travelling unaccompanied to an elementary school was clearly not safe.  If I had boobs, nobody would have thought twice about it.  Well, if I was a female with boobs, that is.  And I could have been affronted by the suspicion-- after all, I didn't do anything and wouldn't do anything, but, when you walk around feeling guilty, you don't mind being suspected by others.  Because, to you, it makes sense.  You get it.

I found myself in an upscale toy store on Saturday afternoon, searching for a gift for my friend's 9-month-old baby whom I was meeting for the first time, and for a gift for my twins.  I recently asked my son and daughter what their favorite animals were.  They have lots of experience with Basset Hounds, and cats, who roam free and borderline feral in our back alley-- most other animals they know from books and from Baby Einstein.  We took them to the zoo last year, but it was too early.  They didn't give a fuck.  Every time we would approach a new, thoroughly medicated species and ask them, "What noise does __________ animal make?" the answer from both of them was invariably, 

"NOOOOOO!!!!"

Which is creative, though inaccurate.  

So, getting back to their favorite animal, they both answered readily.  My son said, "Tigee, Daddy!" and made an adorable roar through the bars of his cribbie.  My daughter happily announced, "PINKO-MINGO!" which, of course, is a pink flamingo, and not a communist epithet popular in the 1960s and '70s.  

So off I went on my mission to find my children a stuffed tigeee and a stuffed pinko-mingo.  I knew where to go.  When I walked in through the blue and red doorway, it wasn't quite like entering a time-machine... but, almost.  There were new, gimmicky toys and stuffed animals mixed in with the traditional and the refined.  This was a toy store that carried all manner of stuffed, plush versions of exotic creatures from all over the planet and from varied forms of the ecosystem.  They had a brand of animal that was officially endorsed by the WWF, and I don't mean the WWF frequented by Stone Cold Steve Austin's ilk-- I am referring to the World Wildlife Fund.  

I can still hear myself....

"Mommy?  Can we go look at some of the endangered species animals?" I'd ask.  I'm sure you have fond memories of your doe-eyed, mop-topped 5-year-old asking you that selfsame question.

They were all there: chin-strapped penguins and ostriches and sea turtles and spotted snow leopards, all lovingly and accurately (not anatomically) reproduced for the burgeoning, pre-pubescent connoisseur.  And I pored over them for extended amounts of time.  I called it "visiting" to soothe the inevitable blow of not having one of them, at an exorbitant price, come home with us.  Of course, every so often, on a very rare occasion such as my birthday or a graduation or the anniversary of Golda Meir's hysterectomy, there would be a white box with the telltale WWF sticker on the top:

               

And I had a new friend.  I was not one to adopt Cabbage Patch Kids.  I preferred Capybaras.

They're ordering the pinko-mingo, and they're holding the tiger in a bag for me with my phone number until the pinko-mingo comes in.  I like the gestalt of visiting that same toy store I used to drag my parents to endlessly now for my children.  Even if, shopping there by myself, I do definitely feel like a dirty freak, like they're just waiting for me to grab a stuffed elephant and stuff it down my pants and start moaning Gregorian chants.  But I was able to suspend all of that when a couple in their mid-fifties came in, announcing to the shopkeeper when he asked if they needed assistance that they were "killing time waiting for a dinner table to open up next door-- we didn't even know you were here.  Are you new?"

"Oh," smiled the shopkeeper beneath his reading glasses, "we're quite new-- just thirty-one years old."

"Yes, I used to come here as a little boy, that's how new this place is," I chimed in, making a rare spontaneous and unsolicited utterance to a stranger.  

Everybody smiled and laughed at that.  And then thought, "Sure, perv."   

WRONG, SIR! WRONG!

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 2, Verse 15

"Everything they do is crooked and wrong."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Once upon a time, I got it into my head that I am a bad boy.  This is perhaps as unfortunate as the day when I had my first drink of coffee.  Being the son of an Israeli, that occurred when I was eight years old.  It's highly likely that this notion of my inherent badness got sparked at around the same time-- though I doubt the same instant.  

It's hard to think about anything negative when you're drinking coffee-- especially for the first time.  

I've often tried to think about what happened to my fragile little psyche, and why-- but I've never really been able to piece it together.  Sure, there are theories-- theories that I have, that my psychologist probably has.  I don't know if my parents have any theories on this.  They're probably just stupefied that I'd think that way, because, in spite of my many and varied attempts to convince them otherwise, they are convinced that I'm the Risen Lord Jesus.  In corduroys.  

It would be much easier to blame the nuns.  Catholic kids have it easier, I think, because they can pin their abysmal self-esteem on those filthy fucking penguins-- those bitches in black.  I feel sorry for Catholic kids who went through parochial school because, really, they never had a chance-- unless they conformed to the sisters' ideals of what a "good boy" is-- vapid, vacuous, obedient, physically strong, good looking-- I was going to say "intelligent", but I'm not so sure how much value is placed on intelligence in Catholic school, especially if you have the other aforementioned traits going for you.  

Have I offended anyone out there yet?  God, I hope so.  

But, as much as I wanted to go to Catholic school when I was a boy-- so I could wear plaid ties and v-neck sweater every day and not be called a fag (well, at least for how I dressed) I don't have any nuns to blame for my atrocious self-image-- not even the nun I accosted at the Shop 'N Bag when I was four and asked if she was in "The Sound of Music."  Hopefully I contributed to her atrocious self-image.  But I doubt it.

It's exhausting and annoying-- going through your life thinking that every thought or action or impulse is wrong and bad, that you're corrupt or fake or opportunistic or shallow.  It's even worse when other people don't look at you that way, and you can't help but look at them and think, "What are you-- fucking stupid?  Don't you see me?  Don't you get it?"  

And they don't.  People see what they want to see, and they make myths and stories and pass judgments and gas and it's all very silly when you get right down to it.  

There's a lot more that I want to write, but it's silly, too.  And I have a book I want to read.  It's about airplane crashes.  Go figure, right?

The Wise Mind

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 4, Verse 5

"'Learn to be wise,' he said, 'and develop good judgment and common sense!

I cannot overemphasize this point."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

It's no coincidence that this blog is called "Chipped Wisdom."  It's not just an exceedingly clever and unending morsel of drollery.  It stems from my very deep rooted belief that my thought process, the way I formulate ideas and plans is inherently flawed, harmful, broken and busted.  Imperfect.  If my brain were a product, it would be most readily found in the Scratch-and-Dent section of Best & Company.

I used to LOVE going to Best with my parents when I was a child.  I always seemed to end up in the audio equipment section-- lustily eyeing an incongruous selection of microphones with the ball-top pushed in and stereo speakers that were ripped and de-laminating.  Occasionally, these oddball things would make their way home in the trunk of my mom's Camry where I would display them proudly for a few months, and then either impulsively break them or methodically disassemble them, depending upon my mood.  The end result was the same-- it's not like I was some autistic child prodigy who had some innate knowledge of electronica and could put the goddamn things back together after taking them apart.  I didn't know a motherboard from Whistler's mother.  And I'd be no use at putting that bitch back together either.  

I guess I look at the way I behaved as a child-- not just what I was interested in acquiring but what I would do to these objects afterwards-- and I find it troublesome, that I didn't behave logically.  I wasn't content with MicroMachines or Hot Wheels-- I needed meticulously crafted 1/18th scale painstaking replicas of the Peugeot 505 or models of antique Cadillac hearses, complete with mini casket and gurney and faux-velvet drapes on the windows that cost over $100 to complete my fetishistic play.  And then, eventually, these expensive playthings would meet their unfortunate demise.  

Yes, I was a child.  Yes, you did dumb stuff, too, and you were also weird.  And maybe I want to be dumber and weirder than you were-- maybe that's my narcissism bubbling up to the surface-- but I am nevertheless concerned that my judgment has never evolved or improved as I've aged.  I'm still saying and writing things before I speak, I'm still terrible with money, I'm still reacting to anxiety instead of acknowledging it and controlling it, I'm still eating the wrong things and saying the wrong things and laughing at the wrong things and being generally, well, wrong.  

I'm rash, judgmental, sardonic, apathetic, quick to anger, slow to think-- and those are just my good qualities.

I suppose I'm being particularly harsh on myself tonight because I'm considering stopping my meds.  I don't notice a dramatic enough change, after five months or so, to warrant staying on it in view of the weight gain.  Yes, I could stand to maybe gain even a pound or two more, but I am becoming obsessed with my burgeoning belly, and having to buy new fucking pants, and losing my identity as "the skinny guy."  When I think about the theatre reviews that have been written about me-- the positive ones, at least-- the reviewers have almost always, without fail, mentioned my physical appearance in relation to how funny they thought I was.  Now that may be a truly terrible reason to stop an anti-depressant that may or may not be having a positive impact on my mood, but I don't want to not be skinny.  I want my Ethiopian-like body back.

Is that wrong?

Or is that just another example of why my brain would be discounted by 25% on the shelf at Clover?     

Samples of Stupidity

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 9; Verse 6

"Leave behind your foolishness and begin to live;

learn how to be wise."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Dear God,

Are you fucking kidding me?  

I know all creatures are beautiful in your eyes, or equal, or something to that effect, but, really-- am I on the same playing field as the guy who created this ad?  I am composed of the same atoms and carbon-based material?  Did he eat graham crackers and water (milk is for goyim, even four-year-olds know that) in pre-school, just like I did?  Did he wear little Osh-Kosh overalls and did he cling and clutch to his mommy, well into his mid-twenties, like I did?  Does the bit of skin in between his eyebrows need regular maintenance in order to belie his Middle Eastern roots and keep him off the Homeland Security's terrorism watch list?  Is he blogging away the angst he should have outgrown over a decade-and-a-half ago while his children resist the seductive song of the sandman's sultry siren in the next room?  

Tell me, truly, ex-Special Agent Starling....

I realize, of course, that there is an air of superiority in the tone of this blog post.  I won't deny it, but I won't make it any more superior by saying "I shan't deny it," because, let's face it, that would be too much.  I suppose that feeling superior to anyone, (even if it's a guy chained to a musty desk in some dank basement creating ads for "natural ways to boost testosterone") must mean that my medication is working to some degree, which is good, because it's fucking expensive enough-- and that's with insurance.  

When I cried (almost literally) poor to my psychiatrist, he left the room-- I presumed, to return with a firearm to Old Yeller me up good-- but instead he came back with a cascading armful of Viibryd samples.  

"If my math is right," he said, and I prayed that it was, because mine never is unless it involved Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and the answer is always "6"), "this will set you straight for about ten weeks.  Just come back when you run out-- you don't even have to see me."

"Is this guy legal?" I thought to myself, albeit fleetingly, as I hungrily grabbed all the samples from him, dropping one on the floor.

I asked him if this was an ethical thing to do.  He looked at me.  I tried to dance around the fact that I'm white and employed, unlike many of the people I have often observed in his West Philly waiting room.  He smiled at me.

"That's cute, but you're not depriving these people of anything.  I have enough samples of this to keep you good for at least a few years and, let's face it, the shitty medical assistance that most of these people get gives them better prescription coverage than you have.  Sick, right?"

It was, I had to agree.

There's a lot of things in this world that are wrong and silly, sick or bizarre.  I don't need to tell you that.  You're in the shit, you live it.  You have eyes, you eat Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.  You know.  You're like me, and you're like that guy who designed the stupid testosterone ad with the hot blonde chick in the babydoll dress and she wears the boots and everything is going fine and the Basset is whining and the babies are still chirping and Pandora doesn't give a shit that I don't want to hear that Bach right now but like my mother says "everything will turn out okay in the end.  

And we all know what that means. 

It's all good, though-- just try this weird trick and take your performance to the next level.