100 Chips of Wisdom

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 6

"There is treasure in being good, 

but trouble dogs the wicked."

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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.       

Responding

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 29

"God protects the upright but destroys the wicked."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

If you ever needed proof that religion is full of steaming hot shit, you need look no longer than the eight words quoted that begin this post.  

God protects the upright but destroys the wicked.  Sorry-- I just had to write it out fully a second time to see if they were kidding or what.

Apparently, they're not kidding.  

Don't worry, my dear sweet ones.  This isn't going to be a vitriolic post about the two faces, hot feces steaming stench of religion.  No.  I'm not in the mood.  This is going to be a mix of the good and the bad, the same kind of bad as me, things that are on my mind.  This post will probably meander like a gray Camry piloted by a grayhead somewhere along the gray streets of Graysilvania.  

Remember that post about the old Russian nanny?  We hired her.  She was great.  And then she quit.

Hey, it was a good week.  A really good week.  Some parents never even have a good nanny for a good week.  

She gave us some bullshit.  Pain.  Her shoulder.  X-rays.  I don't know.  Maybe she didn't like our kids or our house or the commute or the fact that we can't pay her what she's worth or that we're Jewish or that she found a better gig or I don't know.  Or maybe it really was her old Russian shoulder.  I'm so tired.  I'm so tired of hypothesizing and moralizing and responding.  When I worked on the unit at the psych hospital and someone would go off, someone would push the panic bell, and I'd respond.  A million thoughts raced through my head as I'd run-- toward what, you never knew-- you just responded.  

When felony car Six-Zebra-Four didn't answer the multiple dispatch calls on March 9th, fifty years ago, LAPD officers responded.  From everywhere.  They converged on Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger's Plymouth, abandoned on the side of the road.  The officers were gone.  They were miles away, standing side-by-side in a pitch black onion field, their arms and hands raised high above their heads in supplication-- or was it surrender-- while two career criminals pointed guns at them.  For a second, their hands touched in the moonlight.  Two police officers, both Marines, alone and sweating through their sport coats in the night.

Campbell was shot dead and Hettinger ran through the screaming darkness.  He escaped a bullet wound, but he was forever damaged by losing his partner, haunted and taunted by unceasing thoughts about what he could or should have done differently, labeled a coward by his department.  At Ian Campbell's funeral, Hettinger wandered over to Campbell's mother and murmured, "I loved your boy."

They had been partners for two weeks.

I went to a social media workshop today, and I wanted to throw up the entire time I was there.  From 9:45-11:50 the bile was riling.  Rising.  Writhing.  Former beauty blonde glossy lipstick pageant queens making twice what I make were prattling on about Likes and Tweets and Pings, Clicks, Impressions and Analytics.  And I listened and took notes and crossed my legs and forced it down and everything hurt.  Self-important prats.  Disingenuous.  Inauthentic.  Superficial.  And my mind was sick.  It was thinking about nannies and shoulders, and a white-hot bullet crashing into Ian Campbell's mouth and racing for the bell through a field of onions screaming in the hellfire of darkness.  

And I didn't know what I was going to talk about in therapy.

Don't worry-- I managed to think of something.  I always do.