Stopped

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 9

"Who can ever say, 'I have cleansed my heart;

I am sinless'?"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

My life has been a series of "stops" lately.  Or, rather "stopped's".  

I've stopped taking my Viibryd.

I've stopped looking at porn (how do you really know for sure that they're eighteen?)

I've stopped my Facebook account.

I've stopped trying to get rid of my car for something more economical.

And what's the other thing....  Oh, right:

I've stopped blogging.

For a good while there, I was like clockwork.  Monday Thursday, Monday Thursday, Monday Thursday.  

March.  

Tick 

tick 

boom.  

Even when a Proverb really didn't make sense, I beat it into submission until we got where I wanted to go.  These Proverbs are really just along for the ride-- and I think they know it, too.  They know.  I mean, really-- what does Proverbs 20, Verse 9 have to do with not looking at porn anymore, or any of the other jumbled shit going on in my brain that I feel compelled to try to put down?  I don't know.  

It's been about a month since I've been off my medication.  I was just telling someone the other day that I don't seem to notice any difference (I'm certainly not shedding pounds like I was hoping I would) and then, just today, I noticed a difference.  Short with my children, inattentive, restless, agitated, exasperated, frustrated, down, vacant, closed.  

Stopped.

Now, yes, we all have "off" days, but this was a little too "off" for my liking.  I wonder if part of it's the heat.  It was 84 today, and muggy, sloppy and slow.  Even just standing in the kitchen, there was sweat on my brow and my skin felt like it would set my arm hair on fire in an instant.  I don't do well in the summer.  I snap easier, I'm more overworked, more raw.  Less patient and less refined.  I guess being half Israeli only does so much in regard to tolerance for the heat.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do-- am I supposed to go back on my meds?  Were they making me "nice"?  Funny?  Effervescent?  Were they making me who I was, or someone I never was?  Or were they very expensive sugar pills?  Hey-- maybe that's okay-- I like sugar.  If I need medication to get me back to who I was before, why the fuck is that?  What happened, and when?  And why?  I don't want medication and, much more, I don't want to need it.  

My birthday is on Monday-- I will be thirty-four.  This will be my first birthday sans-Facebook in quite a few years, I guess, and it will be interesting to experience my birthday free from the exploding Wall phenomenon.  Obviously, there will be a dramatic decrease in well wishes-- Gary from elementary school will probably not remember-- but I wonder if whatever contact I do receive on my birthday will be of a higher quality, if it will come from the heart, from someone I didn't expect.  Of if there'll just be texts from my sisters and my parents and my best friend, and dinner with my wife and my babies and the dog and presents on the couch.  And I wonder if that will be just fine with me, or if that's what I'll say to conceal the hurt at being forgotten about by my 458 "friends"-- whomever they were.  

Of course, my life hasn't all been about "stopped's" lately-- I've started some things, too.  I auditioned for a film/television/commercial talent agency to try to get my name and my gorgeous face out there.  If I get anything, I'll probably play a doctor holding a clipboard, explaining the side effects of the latest grape-flavored adult suppositories in a commercial that'll air between two and four-thirty a.m. on that Christian network, but I'm okay with that.  Work is work.  I also started to not be afraid of flying solo as a director.  I'm directing a show, all by myself, like a big boy, for the first time in a long time, and I am terrified and head-over-heels with the show already, and I haven't even cast it completely yet.  And I started something else, too... what the fuck was it?  Oh, right:

I've started blogging again.

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?     

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.