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CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 18, Verse 6 & 7

"A fool gets into constant fights.  His mouth is his undoing!  

His words endanger him."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

As soon as I saw the picture, I cringed.  Not because it was disappointing or revolting or wrong-- because it was lovely.  Because I knew what was coming.  Down, down below.

In the unruly bowels of the Comment Section.  But we'll get to that.  Unfortunately.  For now, let's focus on the positive.

The picture I saw, that lovely, cringeworthy picture featured two beautiful African-American women dressed in pale-blue short-sleeved shirts.  The older one has her left hand resting on her belt, and she gazes knowingly at the younger one, who smiles back with a disarming air of innocence, but meeting the gaze upon her ounce-for-ounce.  Mom wears badge #3636, and has worn it every day for twenty years.  Daughter is just getting used to #1523. 

Mother, Beverly, after twenty long years in a rough district, will retire in a few months.   Daughter, Sicily, seems to know how lucky she is: "I can say that not many people get the opportunity to do something that they enjoy doing with someone they love, respect, and look up to - and I have that right here.  I have that right here."

I wonder, when Philadelphia Daily News writer Stephanie Farr, no stranger to the Philadelphia Police Department, and what writing about its men and women, can bring about, ever considered that writing a beautiful, honest, touching story about a mother and her daughter policing the same city, in the same District, might evoke in her readers.  Maybe she knew.  Maybe she knew and she didn't care.  

"Passing the Baton," written about Beverly and Sicily Milligan, will hopefully, one day, be a story that never needs to get written-- because mothers and daughters on a big city police force together will be as commonplace as a father and a son ("my dad was a cop, my uncles are all cops, my grandfather was a cop, my great-great grandfather's muttonchops were cops, etc").  One day there won't need to be an article like Stephanie Farr's.  One day there won't need to be a Pride Day, either.  Because we'll all just... get it.  

Well, maybe not all of us will.

My cringestinct proved to be right on the money about Philly.com's readership, and their worldliness.  Their openmindedness.  Their social graces.  Their abhorrent, revolting, repugnant racism.  

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Six out of twenty-eight comments.  Though, if I ran Philly.com, I'd probably have gotten rid of at least five more, but that's where subjectivity comes in, I suppose.  Maybe I'd be a heavy-handed kind of editor.  Maybe I'd be the kind of editor who abolished comment sections altogether, because I don't really understand why they have to exist.  Not to sound like a holier-than-thou curmudgeon-in-training, but I got my first Letter to the Editor published in the Philadelphia Inquirer when I was seventeen years old.  And there were approximately two dozen after that, in papers around the nation (I have a big mouth-- you're just figuring this out now?) and in Canada.  Some of them, looking back on it now, weren't worth the paper they were printed on, but someone with a desk and a phone (and probably suspenders and a combover) decided that they at the very least came from the heart, and that somebody out there would benefit from reading what I had to say.  My letters were vetted.  Michael McCombover gave them a pass.  He called me to verify my identity and then, the next day, or in a few days, I got to enjoy seeing my words and my name in print.

These commenters don't get vetted.  And they never see their names-- just their avatars and their screennames.  And the vitriol that they spew doesn't need to get read by anybody.  Certainly not Beverly and Sicily Milligan who, I'm sure, as police officers, no, as BLACK police officers, no, as FEMALE BLACK police officers have been and will be called everything in the book and beyond.  They're big girls, I get it, they can take it.  But why subject them to the disgusting barbarity of anonymous, atrocious words of hate and ignorance in what should be their finest hour: appearing together, side-by-side, looking like the picture of pride and beauty-- no: Honor, Integrity, Service.  Why?  Didn't the people who run Philly.com know what was going to happen?  Why couldn't they have closed the comments for that article.  

No.  Just assign some poor intern to sit at a computer screen and give him/her instructions to hit "Refresh" every four seconds and delete the first "N-word" comment that pops up.  Why?  Because of freedom of speech?  Freedom of the press?  Freedom of shittalking shit to behave like shit.  These are the freedoms people like those commenters love to defend, while conveniently forgetting about "and liberty and justice for ALL." 

For 22nd District Officers Sicily and Beverly Milligan.  

I am so very grateful to Stephanie Farr for writing that eloquent, heartfelt piece, but I hope to God one day will come when she won't need to, and her editor won't need to block comments or delete comments or wonder about what the comments will be and fuck the comments.

Fuck them.  

Hate-filled trash just terrified of a world where a black woman could grow up to do a thankless job like her mom, a world where she could slip her hand into a white glove, hold it up and swear to protect, serve, defend, and possibly take a bullet for a heartless bastard who would never even think about doing the same.

One day maybe we won't need an article like "Passing the Baton."  But, I'm ashamed to say, in 2014, we definitely do, and maybe it's good that we are allowed to see why.  Even if all we can see is This comment was deleted.  

Does This Friendship Require a Lot of Oil Changes?

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 19, Verse 4

"A wealthy man has many 'friends'; the poor man has none left."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

I'm not sure if I have a lot of friends anymore.  What I am sure of is that I have some cognitive distortions, which is a fancy, psychobullshit way of saying that my thinking is fucked up, so, when I sit down and feel sorry for myself and cry into my decaffeinated tea about the dearth of friendship in my life, I have to pinch myself (I originally mistakenly typed "punch myself", and I guess that would be effective, too, though people would eventually start to wonder about the bruises) and ask myself, "Is what you're thinking really true?  Or is it bullshit?"

Sometimes I have to ask myself things.  Things like that.  

For instance, an old high school friend of mine opened up a really cool restaurant with awesome food-- it's Jewish-Italian (like she and her husband) and I've made it a point, whenever an old high school friend of mine is home visiting from wherever the fuck they've moved to, I take them there.  And I've been there with a different person maybe four or five times.  So, that right there says, okay, I have four or five friends.  Plus the friend who opened the restaurant.  Though she isn't really someone I would necessarily hang out with, every time I come to the restaurant there is a very warm, lovely hug (she's a great hugger-- some people just have it, I don't know what it is) and a genuine smile of happiness and she'll always make time to sit and talk, no matter how busy the place is.  And that all feels good.  It doesn't hurt that the food is so delicious it should probably kill you.  Eat enough of it and I guess it will.

I was reminded, this past weekend, that I have other friends.  Well, maybe they're really my wife's friends, but she's pretty generous with sharing, and she shares her friends with me, and it's seamlessly just... worked between us all.  I share some of her personality quirks that attract a certain kind of person to her, so I suppose it's natural that they'd get attracted to me.  No, not in that swinger kind of way, but, hey, I'm open to whatever.  

That's a lie.  I'm not open to whatever.  I'm closed to whatever.  I'm closed.  I'm closed to things like that.

We have this dining room table-- it's made of oak.  It's beautiful and ancient-- thick, heavy wood.  It was given to me by a friend.  Actually, the sister of a friend.  And she's kind of my friend, too-- even though both of them are nearing seventy.  That's two more.  Some of my friends are old.  Anyway, this table has leaves that you can use to extend the table.  I think maybe we've done that once or twice before.  Having a table that has leaves that you never use is kind of like having alcohol in your house that you only "keep for company" and that you never open.  

My parents had liquor in their liquor cabinet that they only took out when my great aunt and her husband would come over.  One day, they came over and my father looked for the key to the liquor cabinet and he couldn't find it.  So my great aunt and her husband moved to Florida and died.  The liquor, however, remains, malting away inside that cabinet which, ever opened again, would probably knock you stone dead with the stench of urethane and cat urine.  That's what I remember it smelling like when I was a little boy.  

Maybe that's why I don't drink.  

So, on Saturday, we opened our home and our table and, around it were seated ten people (okay, two of whom were my wife and I and two were our children) smiling and laughing and awkwardly joking and sharing personal anecdotes and eating good food and being generally very nice to be around.  Friendly.  Friends.  They were all gathered to mark 10 years since my wife's brain surgery.  Her Brainaversary.  They drank soda and spritzers our of cups marked "Bird Brain", "Brainiac", and, my favorite, "Shit for Brains".  They ate watermelon with a little placard that read, "Now That's Usin' the Old Melon!".  People brought over brain-themed food items, including deviled eggs (those fuckers really look like autopsied brains-- I, unfortunately, know that from experience), Smart Food popcorn, and they ate my wife's Monkey Brains, and a pretty awesome no-bake Jell-O cheesecake brain mold.

This one got a hunk of parietal lobe, that one got occipital.  It was all good.  These weren't necessarily my people, but they were my kind of people, and that was definitely enough.  My sister-in-law was there, too and, over the years, she has become my friend, too.  She moved here from St. Louis to be closer to her sister and our children, but she, through working at my hospital and just through life, too, has become my friend, too.  Someone I can effortlessly bullshit with, or just be quiet with, or profane with-- and it's good.  Hell, she gave me the topic for this blog because I've been pretty spent on inspiration, and a lot of things, of late.  Parenthood will do that to you-- you have been warned.   

I was lucky for three years-- I got to see my closest friend every day at work, and every other weekend, also at work.  Now I see him every three months or so, and that's okay, but it's not the same.  We text every day, because that is how it should be, that is how it must be, that's kind of how we are.  It's not so good.  And it's also the story of my life.     

My wife, of course, remains my best friend.  The one whom I can tell anything, say anything, believe anything, throw anything at or to, go through anything with-- you know, like brain surgery.  We were very young when that all happened, chronologically, and together.  We were very young together, very young at being together.  You know what I mean.  But, as I cuddled her in her hospital bed, nuzzling up to her even as her skin stunk and her head-wound was a mess of matted hair and blood and pieces of God knows what and staples and antiseptic, as Hunan the Intern opened the door and saw us together, he assumed I was her husband.

I wasn't, yet.  But we both knew that was coming.  Hunan was onto something.  I'll bet he's a great doctor today, that schnook.

My best friend and I don't celebrate bullshit holidays like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day and Father's Day, not because we're better than anybody else, but Brainaversaries are far more important to recognize.  Birthdays are good, too-- but all that other manufactured stuff can go to hell.  We don't need it, but I know for sure that we do need friends, even though they are tremendously hard to come by and sometimes harder to keep.  Friendships, like cars, can sometimes depreciate if you're really not up on the required maintenance, and they do require regular oil changes.  Since I can't imagine that anybody reads this fucking blog anymore, whether they're my friend or not, I'll be emailing this URL to everyone that I consider my friend, because I want them to know how I feel.  I don't do that nearly enough.  I guess we can consider this the latest in a series of long overdue oil changes.

Happy Brainaversary, my love.

Why the fuck isn't there a Happy Friend Day?