It Used to Be

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 31, Verses 6 & 7

"Hard liquor is for sick men at the brink of death, 

and wine for those in deep depression."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

It used to be, if you asked me why I believed in the death penalty, I could tell you.  And I would tell you.  I wouldn't just tell you about it, I'd write about it, too.  I wrote about it, a lot.  It's recorded.  It is on record.  

Now, it all seems like somebody else's thoughts and words.  And bile.  And animus.  And violence.  I'm in there, somewhere, of course.  I'm in there somewhere, floating around, circling the drain, watching for cues, thumbing my nose at the memory of myself.  Back then-- way back then.  

I don't believe in the death penalty anymore.  I've seen what it does-- I mean, I haven't seen somebody being put to death by the state-- but I've seen how it martyrs people, I've seen how it turns people's brains to yogurt.  If you read Monday's post, or the book I wrote when I was in college, well, you know what I'm talking about.

You know.

It used to be, if you asked me why I like to wear ties and what I call "Tier 1 pants" (trousers that could pass for suit pants, typically necessitating dry-cleaning that I wouldn't be caught dead spending money on) and dress shirts, I could tell you.  I'd prattle on about self-respect and dignity and how my grandfather was a haberdasher and all of that muck.  But, really, I don't know why.  I have a hundred ties.  Maybe two hundred.  There's around a dozen bowties.  And sometimes I look at them and I don't know what they're doing in my room.  Why do I wear ties and not bowling shirts, or flannel shirts?  Now, it's just what I do.  I wear ties to the beach.  

Gee, that's silly.

Used to be I could tell you why I liked sad folk songs-- I could tell you why if you asked me.  I'd talk about how they're moving and they're poignant and about how their stories of sorrow or loss or struggle speak to me, and about how they're more lasting than, I don't know-- than that other stuff.  Now, if you asked me why I cry when I hear Dar Williams's "When I Was a Boy", I'd probably just take a sip of coffee and change the subject; to the weather, or the bomb, or the gumbo.  Let's talk about something else, cuz my mom and I, we'd always talk, and I'd pick flowers everywhere that we'd walk.

But you knew that.

Used to be I knew why I wanted to be a cop.  I'd tell you a story about-- I don't know-- something, anything to explain it.  To make sense of the most irrational desire of my life.  I'd explain it away for you until it almost made sense, until it almost made your brow stop furrowing.  I'd talk until you left me the fuck alone about it.  I'd talk and talk and talk until I almost understood it myself.  I'd tell you that it started in high school, or college, or the months after college, after she'd broken up with me and after the book and after I waved to Charles after getting that stupid piece of paper wearing that oversized trash bag, but, a couple months ago I was looking at pictures that my father took of me back when I was nine or ten.  I'm dressed in dark pants, a dark blue polo shirt and a child's-sized police hat.  I have cheap metal cuffs and I'm doing various police poses-- talking on an imaginary radio, pointing off in the distance while squinting my eyes (probably at the direction a "suspect fled on foot"), even cuffing an imaginary suspect up against my father's white Oldsmobile Ciera.  There's a badge on my chest, with a piece of black mourning tape over its center.  

I don't know.  I really just don't know.

Used to be I could tell you why I don't drink.  Why I've never had a drink.  Why.  People think I'm in recovery, but I'm not even that advanced.  I'm so entrenched in my own bullshit I don't even have the slightest idea what I'd be in recovery from.  Maybe I don't drink because I'm frightened.  Maybe it's because I think alcohol is evil, that people who drink behave like idiots.  Maybe I don't think I need any help behaving like an idiot.  I've got that covered pretty much.  Maybe I don't want to be out of control.  Life's pretty out of control as it is.

Isn't it?

Used to be I could tell you anything-- even if you didn't ask.  Now, I don't know what to tell you.  I could have told you, once, very clearly in writing.  I was always afraid of speaking, because I never knew what was going to come out.  I'm still like that, but now it's metastasized to infect not only my speech but my writing.  I still don't know what I'm talking about.  Or why.  I don't know who I'm addressing, who is out there, why I'm writing or why you're reading.  But I suppose all I can say it that I like that you're here.  Here with me.  "Stay with me," I used to say to my mother so she wouldn't leave my bedside as I lay there, awash in anxiety and fear-- irrational and sane-- and she would stay.  She'd stay with me.  

And I always knew why. 

Just Another Porpoise

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 25, Verses 21 & 22

"If your enemy is hungry, give him food!

If he is thirsty, give him something to drink!

This will make him ashamed of himself, and God will reward you."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I'm trying an experiment.  

Don't worry-- it doesn't involve spraying Maybeline into Thumper's eyes or replacing Christian babies' blood with Ecto-Cooler.  It's just a teensy little experiment.  

A writing experiment.

Tonight, I am going to see if I can be a little bit more in tune with, or attuned to, my emotions.  Now, I'm obviously off to not such a hot start because, if I was, I wouldn't have done that cutesy little phrasing (in tune with, or attuned to-- God, shut UP) because I would have been paying closer attention to what I'm feeling right now and less attention to being clever.

I'm not, that's why I have to pay attention to it.

What I'm feeling right now, frankly, is cold.  Not emotionally, but physically.  My feet are freezing and my nose is schnuffling, and my shoulders are cold.  I've got a sweater on, and pretty thick socks but this room and this house are both drafty and I don't have the wherewithal or the ambition to go downstairs and turn the heater on.  If I had one of those nifty apps on my smartphone I could turn the heater on using that, but those are for assholes.

I don't need HVAC cellphone apps to be an asshole.  I've got it covered.

I suppose I'm feeling a little lonely tonight.  My wife is at her band rehearsal and the babies are asleep, as is the dog.  I could wake her up to play with her, but that feels a bit selfish.  Plus, she'd probably just get riled up and bark and yelp and wake the babies up, and that would be mightily sad for all involved.  I usually don't mind being alone, but I don't like the way it feels right now.  I feel like I want to call up a friend, but why?  What would I say?  

"Hello in there?"

It's frustrating when you're not sure where to go with a piece.  That nice moment there doesn't mean much if it's not picked up in a thoughtful way, or an energetic paragraph that goes somewhere else.  It sort of just hangs there, doesn't it?  Like some forgotten dream, that we've both seen...

I've been worried recently that I'm not terribly funny anymore.  And I've been thinking about it a lot.  In writing and in life.  That I maybe don't have the knack for it, or the energy for it, or the interest in it.  I looked at the homepage of John Elder Robison's wife's blog for some random reason today, and it made me crack up, just silly captions she put under pictures or the way she phrased things and I was thinking, "I used to do that, didn't I?"

But maybe I'll be funny when I'm supposed to be.  Maybe, right now, when I'm not feeling funny, I'm not supposed to be being funny.  Oftentimes, people are funny because they have to be, or they think they have to be, to cover up what they're really feeling-- to help someone else out, to prove something to themselves or the world.  It's our way of making Ecto Cooler out of lemonade.  It's a neat trick: Hey!  I can do that!  Look at me!  I'm depressed as hell but I can still make you laugh.

It's a neat trick.  Better than a goddamned porpoise bouncing a beach ball on his fucking nose at Sea World.

I saw a headline today, I guess it was on an advice column, and the title read, "Should I Take My Child to Sea World?" and I was thinking "No, you fucking stupid cunt," and I was thinking about how much I wanted to smack the asshole who wrote that, and then do the same thing to the asshole who printed it, and then do the same thing to everyone who clicked on it and read it.  And then I thought, if my children want to go to Sea World, I am going to take them.  And then I will want to slap myself.  Because I am my own worst enemy.  My mortal enemy.  I'm going to be around myself forever.  

No, don't take your lousy lopsided miserable kid to Sea World.  Buy him a Siamese fighting fish instead.  He'll love the fucking thing because it's beautiful, and Sea World isn't beautiful.  I've never seen it; 

but I know. 

The Mental Health Conspiracy

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 8, Verse 1

"Can't you hear the voice of wisdom?"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

When you work with people who have serious mental illness, you become paranoid.  No longer is "the walls have ears, my friend" just an avuncular piece of advice from a desk-jockey lifer: it's real.

Or at least, you think it's real.

But, isn't perception reality?

So.  It's.  REAL.

But in addition to a terrifying fear of my superiors, to wincing every time I drive down the long, twisting driveway festooned with Tim Burton-style gonna-get-you barren trees that lead up to the Draconian building I call home for far too many hours each week, I feel, I don't know... conspired against?

Is that the right word?  

Maybe.

So far, no grants that I've written have gotten funded.  Many are still "in the pipeline" as we professional grantwriter assholes call it (I'm sure there's many a vivacious Urban Dictionary definition for "in the pipeline" that do not relate to development and fundraising) but the ones I've heard back on have all been a resounding, "NEIN, FRAULEIN!"  Okay, so maybe I'm not a good grantwriter.  Or maybe nobody's jumping up and down to throw money at forensic mental health.

Then there's the op/ed, commentary pieces I've written to the newspaper.  I did one in August, one in September, and one this month.  None we run by the paper.  Now, granted, there's a lot of competition, but I don't want you to think I'm bragging when I say that I have a 9-out-of-10 success rate when it comes to getting commentaries published in the paper.  At least, that was my success rate before I started writing about mental illness.  Now the tumbleweeds start to dance by.

It's possible that my writing skills have tanked in recent years.  That's possible.  

Other people do seem to get published when writing about mental illness.  I just today read a very interesting piece about Assisted Outpatient Treatment today and, underneath the author's name all the way at the bottom was a picture of a young woman standing outside closing a flannel shirt over her bra and the caption below read "10 SMALLEST CELEB BREASTS" and I was thinking to myself, I'll bet at least a hundred times more people clicked on that link than read the article I just read.  

And I got sad, because as much as I love small breasts, particularly those attached to celebrities, I just shake my head in despair when I think about what mental health competes with on a daily basis.  On Philly.com, for instance, there is a whole page about "HEALTH".  What are some of the "articles"?

The big story is an expose about how Cliff bars and their counterparts aren't really as "healthy" as people think.

Catch me, I might swoon.

"New Method May Improve Face Transplant Methods" which, I'm sure, is relevant to so many people on Philly.com, certainly more pressing and urgent than a story about mental illness, which impacts 1 in 4 Americans, probably more people than who need concern themselves with face transplant methodologies.

And, the question to the answer that nobody asked: "Breast Implants a Boost to Women's Sex Lives?"  Not satisfied with merely one story about silicone slappies (featured twice on the page, mind you) there's also "Breastfeeding After Implants Won't Cause Sagging, Study Finds".  Gee, that's good to know!

Oh, and let's not forget the gem, "Smaller Testicles, Better Dads?"  Well, I guess it's a nice complement to "10 Smallest Celeb Breasts."  I wonder if smaller breasted celeb moms are better moms than big breasted celeb moms.  Stay tuned, I guess.

Now, if you bother to scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN, past the stories about Tom Hanks having Type II Diabetes and "Use By and Sell By -- What Does it all Mean?"  (IT MEANS USE BY THIS DATE, AND SELL BY THAT DATE-- WHAT THE FUCK?!!!) you finally will get to a little section of stories about "Mental Health".

What are they?

There's a piece about a link between gum disease and Alzheimer's.

Oh.  That's... uh... helpful?

An article about autism (always), and two actually interesting pieces about Parkinson's and depression and depression in pregnancy possibly leading to psychiatric issues in those children later on.  But, like I said, you have to really work to find those pieces, and they're the sort of pieces that offer straight information about rather benign subjects.  They're not talking about how the jails are the biggest mental health "treatment" centers in the country, or about how under-trained police officers are gunning down the mentally ill, or about how competently-trained police officers aren't, or about how the stigmatization of individuals with mental illness by the news media and the entertainment industry is actually killing people, or about the public health crisis of 38,000+ suicides every year in this country, or reasons why psych patients don't want to take their meds and, well, you get the fucking idea.

Hey, we're Americans.  We wanna read about small celeb breasts and Tom Hanks taking Glucophage.  

I get it.

It's the Mental Health Conspiracy, hard at work.  Beating you down, every day, reminding you that you are, in fact, its wholesome little bitch, bending to its will, responding to its caprice.  You are not acting of your own volition, you are powerless to stop it.  It comes in waves.  We have them all in jails, so we build mental hospitals.  People don't like the mental hospitals, so we de-institutionalize and put them back out on the streets with inadequate supports, and they get arrested and thrown back in jail because we've gotten rid of the hospitals.  And here we are again.  But, if you talk about it, God help you, because if you say the wrong thing in the wrong room near the wrong person, it's LIGHTS.  OUT.  

It's diplomatic seclusion.  It's political restraints.  

It's time for your non-profit needle.  

I'm terrified of saying the wrong thing, so most of the time, I just say nothing.  But I can say it here, right?

Well.  Probably not.  Maybe for now, only because nobody's listening.  Nobody but you.

Just us chickens.  

No no-- sheep.

Behold, I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves.

Baaa.

The Comic Javert

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 7, Verse 4

"Love wisdom like a sweetheart; make her a beloved member of your family."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

People think I'm wise, but I'm not.  If you're reading this blog to soak in the words of a sage, well, there's more wrong with you than there is with me, and I suggest you see a doctor and get rid of it.

I was, at one point, however, wise enough to know that I should be seeking wisdom from people who probably had it.  My criteria for people who have wisdom is admittedly narrow in scope.  They have to be men and they have to have white hair.  

When I was lost in my life at one point, I think it was 2003 or thereabouts, I wrote to Andy Rooney.  A friend of mine who worked in show business got me his email address, and I wrote to him to ask him what I should do with my life.  It's kind of embarrassing to tell you that I did that, but he wrote back.  He told me that advice was like spinach, and that, if I wanted to be a writer, that's what I should do.  His email, I hasten to add, was absolutely littered with punctuation and spelling errors.  I suspect that, if it had been a letter, banged out on an old Underwood typewriter, it'd have been letter perfect.  

Before Andy Rooney, I aimed a little lower, one might say, and wrote to James Best, who played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on "The Dukes of Hazzard".  While Best himself acknowledged once in an interview that "all I'll be remembered for when I'm gone is 'cooo cooo cooo!'", he is himself a Shakespearean-trained classical actor, was once a very handsome leading man type, and also not too bad of a painter.  This was in my should-I-be-a-cop-or-an-actor phase-- probably 2002, just after graduating college and breaking up with my girlfriend and moved back into my old room in my parents' house and feeling the bottom of a monkey cage.  I figured he'd be a good person to write to, being an actor who, for years, played a police officer, albeit a terrible, corrupt, and inept one: the comic Javert.  James Best told me I should give acting a shot because, "there is no career this side of Heaven more rewarding".  I guess he must have seen Catherine Bach naked in her dressing room once.

I didn't do that.  I did buy one of his paintings, though.  And, more than ten years after writing to him, I adopted a basset hound.  In memory of Flash.  

The fact is that I've always been more reliant and more trusting of the advice of people I respect and admire than my own intuition, which I have to believe is faulty, flawed, unfortunate, disordered, and dopey.  My poor office mate at work, who has the misfortune to be older and white-haired, is constantly peppered with and judiciously fields what he (I hope) affectionately calls "mother-may-I" questions from me as I sit hunched over in my chair, fidgeting, staring endlessly through the screen of my laptop, nervously sipping from my brushed aluminum decaf coffee dispenser, clearing my throat, crossing my legs, changing a word in a proposal, as if that word, that fucking word will make the difference between getting a project funded or not.  As if one word will somehow offend the recipient.

Is this alright?

Do you think?

What if I said?

Should I?

Could I?

Is it okay if I?

Will?

Won't?

Why?

Does?

Know?

No?

One day I'll show up to work and the lock on the office door will be changed, and I'll understand.  

It's funny to me to think that, some day, maybe thirty or forty years from now, some naive little pup with dubious evaluative standards will look upon me as someone to go to, someone at whose knee to gaze up and ask questions and expect answers with meat on their bones.  If I've gained any wisdom through the decades I'll tell the guy or gal that I'm having a stroke and to come back later.  

I do know some things-- but I don't think they make me especially competent or wise.  Here's a summary of what I've learned to date:

* Don't be a theatre major.

* Alcohol is guaranteed to make you an idiot, but not drinking isn't guaranteed to make you not an idiot.

* Marry for love, not because you're worried about what people, especially your parents, will think or say.

* Once in your life, drive, if not own, a huge, old American car that gets less than 15 miles a gallon.

* Short cuts are meaningless-- take the route you like the most, just drive fast.

* The skin on the chicken might shorten your life, but who cares?  Eat that shit.

* People who have been dealt a terrible, striking blow by life are special, even if they're kind of assholes.

* Listen to a Howlin' Wolf album really, really loud in the car in the summer with all the windows down.

* Women in tank-tops are a lot hotter than women who are naked.  Generally speaking.

* If your father's ever hugged you tightly while you're both sobbing, you're both doing something right.

* Humor is very, very powerful.  

* Writing is very, very dangerous.

* Live as far away from other people as you can reasonably afford.  People are horrible.

* Golf is completely fucking stupid.  So are most sports, but golf's at the top of the list. 

* Bowling's okay.

* Don't be afraid to write to old guys with white hair.  Just try to keep the mother-may-I's to a minimum.

Missa in Angustiis

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 30, Verses 2 & 3:

"I am too stupid even to call myself a human being!  

I cannot understand man, let alone God."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Orson Welles once said, "I don't pray because I don't want to bore God".  I guess I feel kind of the same way.  I suppose, in some sort of perverted, disorganized and unfortunate way, these blog posts could be construed as a type of prayer.  Something is created, if you want to be kind and call it that, and it is sent out, maybe sent up.  Prayers are pleas, right?  They're missives intended to be heard, if not heeded.  

Hear us, O Lord.  We beseech you and so forth.  

I'm doing the same thing, if artlessly so.  Hear me, O Best Beloved.  I beseech you and so forth. 

Whether we're secular or pious, we've been sending things out, and maybe up, for a very long time.  Whether it's been psychotic scribblings on walls or Haydn's "Lord Nelson Mass", a tumultuous and terrifying play about Vietnam by David Rabe, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet on a deadline or a whistleblowing expose of greed or incompetence or worse-- it's all prayer.  Every raspy, erotic exhalation and every turn signal and each creak of the rocking chair and each diaper change.  Every cough and every tear.  

Every, every minute.

And I suppose that's why people think they need religion because, without it, we don't know what the fuck we're doing.  We're like fumbling with buttons in the dark.  We're too stupid even to call ourselves human beings.  We're lazy and scared and there's a mess on the desk and dog shit out back and twins tenuously asleep in the next room and everything is precarious and we're all holding it in or holding back or waiting for the next thing.  

What is the next thing going to be?

I remember when my brother-in-law died of cancer.  He was thirty-four.  And the babies had just been born.  And I was thinking, what could it be?  The next thing.  Even in the couple of months from his diagnosis to his death, there were many "next things".  More MRIs.  More scans.  More tumors.  More texts.  More calls.  Every time the phone rang or went "bleepboop" it was bad.  It was so bad.  And I don't think I ever prayed for him.  Not formally.  No Hebrew.  I mean-- he wasn't Jewish, so maybe it wouldn't have gotten translated right anyway.  But there was plenty of prayer.  My kind of prayer.  

This.

DO YOU HEAR ME UP THERE YOU FUCK?

I love it.  You pray to the guy who did it. Hilarious.  A scream.  A howler.  Crazygonuts.  Fucking phonies.

The high holidays are coming again.  They always do.  We're going to go to services and march around with the children behind the torahs.  It is what it is.  I don't believe in it any more than I believe in Santa Claus.  Hell, I believe in Santa Claus more-- at least I get to play him at the psych hospital.  And read "A Christmas Carol".  I love that.  There's no prayer more prayery than that.  Dickens in the Day Room.  

It doesn't heal a soul.  It doesn't do a thing.  But it does what art is supposed to do: take you out of the place you are in, for a moment or two.  Take you out of yourself.  Out of your own psyche.  Your own troubles.  Your own shit.  It does it for me as much as it does it for them.  

My children are having what my wife calls "The Language Explosion".  In laymen's terms: they're talking their little asses off.  

mamadadacarshoessipcupuppacrackercookiewatercookieavodacoballbeepbeepbearblankieandalltherestofit

One day, they're going to start asking me about God and religion and humanity and why people use nerve gas on each other and why the former president put a cigar in that idiot's vagina and why the neighbor doesn't like us and why are there little shiny bits in the street that glisten like diamonds and why diamonds are a girl's best friend and why they don't have any friends and what were we like before they were born and what happens when we die and why do birds suddenly appear and bluebirds say.

What the fuck do they say?

What the fuck do I say?

What will I say?

I'm kind of hoping they befriend an old man.  Not a creepers old man with a dirty trench coat and a comb-over and a ubiquitous white van, but a wizened old man, all crinkly behind his gold-rimmed glasses and his well-worn wingtips and his faded corduroys who'll sit on his porch and tell them stories about the way it was and he'll have clever, quaint, slightly biting, deadpan and droll way of looking at the world.  And they'll soak in his words and his wisdom and they'll repeat his aphorisms at school and their teachers will call them "old souls" and they'll know things-- they'll just know.  

You know?

Because I don't.  I just don't know.  And I know that's supposed to be one of the bravest things you can possibly say, but these are troubled times.  They're always troubled times.  And I just don't know.   

RARRR!

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 27, Verse 4

"Jealousy is more dangerous and cruel than anger."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

"I'm not really sure I understand," I said to my therapist, crossing my legs like a girl the way I do, "that I understand the point of getting angry."

He raised his eyebrows at that.  He's a good eyebrow raiser.  He doesn't raise one, quizzically, like a therapist might, he raises both at the same time, making him look rather like an eight-year-old Macaulay Culkin whenever I say something even remotely surprising or unexpected in session.  He intimated that I was angry at him, which I wasn't but, the moment he said that, making the session about the interplay between me and him, I got angry.

"I noticed that, when you got angry at me, your attention wandered away, and you got quiet and sort of shut down."

I stared at the wall-hanging on his, well, where else would it be-- his fucking wall.  Hanging there.  It had frayed edges, like a little rug, and I didn't like how the fringes at the top sort of just flopped over like a bunch of spaghetti noodles.  It looked silly.

"What?"

---------------

I don't know how to be angry, and I don't really think anybody else does either.  Sure, you can take anger management classes, or teach them, but I don't think that means very much.  Once, a patient told me "you're not allowed to get angry inside a psych hospital" and I went all therapist on him and talked about how anger isn't the problem it's the expression of it and how there are appropriate ways to be angry but, really, he was right.  Pace angrily, and we're going to watch you.  We'll "give you space", but we're putting a plan in place.  Go to your room and slam your door, we're telling a nurse.  Yell and scream?  Well, guess what.  We have ways of dealing with that, too.

Early on in my confused adolescence, (I know, whose isn't?) I tried using my precocious nature and facility with the English language to express my anger through letters, when I felt slighted or like there had been some sort of injustice.  At fourteen, that got me dis-invited back from a summer theatre program.  At twenty, it almost got me thrown out of college.  

Every time I get angry at my wife, it feels disgusting.  Sometimes we're "fighting fair", sometimes we're not.  I don't think that really matters a damn.  It's still disgusting and hurtful and shameful.  When I scream at my father, it feels great.  It's cathartic.  I'm releasing endorphins and testosterone and triptophan or whatever and that's great but it always feels horrible afterward.  Like, I expect, drinking feels, you know, after.  Or sex, you know, with the wrong person.  Or the wrong hole.

Whoops.  Went too far.  That happens sometimes here.  But you knew that.

Of course, holding it in doesn't feel so hot either.  I know, because I've done it my entire life.  And letting it out in a very controlled, precise, measured way feels, well, very controlled, precise, and measured.

And that's not so good.  What's the point?

"The point," my therapist said, "is that people get angry, and that's okay."

Wow.  Can I have that on a bumper-sticker?

---------

I got angry after reading this today.  I get it.  The author got 6.7 thousand Likes on Facebook and 217 people tweeted it and 469 people shared it.... some other fucking way.  And he's an internet phenom and I'm an internet schmuck-nom, and that's wonderful and all.  And I remember when I was dumb enough to write, um, a whole book to my then-unborn children.  And it was full of the unfettered depths of my psyche and it exposed them to all of the awful stalagmites that grow unchecked in my head, the depravity and the heat.  And I said provocative things to them, these then-unborn children of mine and isn't it droll to say something like "Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Some Fucking Awesome Sex" but, God, do I see through you, you meme-machine.  You hipster.  You Friend of the Like.  You wouldn't know the first thing about being a father, even though I know you are one.  SO.  I don't care.  I don't care if you've fathered a veritable gaggle of girls.  Your self-righteous, better-than-thou attitude is sycophantic and cloying and playing to a breathless cadre of twenty-something girls on Facebook you want to fuck who think you're SUCH AN AMAZING DAD and gee if only YOU'D sired my children everything would be going fine.

And everything is going fine.  

So, I got angry, and I'm not sure there was a point.  Maybe I'm jealous.  Maybe that's worse than anger.  Or maybe I'm right.  Either way, I'm definitely hungry.  I wish I had a peach to eat, but there's just goddamn Granny Smith apples.  

Tomorrow will be better.   

Wicked

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 28, Verse 1

"The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as a lion."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

Lots of kids want to be cops when they grow up.  This is one way in which you know for sure that kids are stupid.  Who wants to get paid dirt, put on a badge and a uniform that makes you a hated member of the establishment, a symbol of oppression and despised by many both young and old, and be expected to shovel the shit of the nation at 4am while normal people are sleeping safely in bed cuddling whomever and, oh, yeah, if you're really unlucky, you'll get shot or stabbed or run over or crashed into doing it?  Who in the fucking hell would want to do that?

RIGHT!  A FIVE YEAR OLD!

Now, obviously, we need police officers, so it's a good thing that approximately 700,000 American kids never grow out of that particular phase.  I grew out of it, but it took me till I was twenty-nine.  And I wasn't particularly keen on growing out of it.  I fought it tooth and nail.  

I sublimated in several ways.  I wrote a book about cops, and, to promote it, I rubbed elbows with cops, and their wives, and their widows.  I spoke at gatherings of cops, some active, some retired.  At a book signing where my life was threatened, cops put their lives on the line when they showed up in uniform and in plainclothes to protect me.  I wrote articles and commentaries and personal essays about cops, cops who were felled, and cops who felled suspects, whom I thought were being vilified by the press and by popular opinion.  In 1999, legendary musician Curtis Mayfield wrote me an angry email in response to a piece I'd written in the Philadelphia Inquirer about cops and about a particularly famous cop-killer.  Then an impulsive and hotheaded 19-year-old, I tossed a furious email back at him and suggested that, "the next time you feel compelled to spout off your ignorant views to me on a subject you know nothing about, why don't you try jerking off into a hand-towel and save everybody the effort of reading your filth?"  The next day, I saw MSN.com that Curtis Mayfield was dead.  

That's right.  I gave him "Something He Can Feel".

I suppose I sublimated by becoming an EMT in 2005.  Badge.  Dark blue uniform.  Lights and a siren that went woo woo woo.  Even though I was just a transport EMT, schlepping bodies from MRI appointment to rehab to nursing home to psych hospital to home, I did my fair share of "emergency" runs.  But you'd think that a cop wannabee would have been an action junkie, that whenever we were told to run lights-and-sirens it would have been a real "Dukes of Hazzard" moment for me, but my stomach always turned as I switched on the red lights.  I hated it.  It terrified me.  There was nothing exciting about barreling down I-95 in a decrepit, poorly maintained ambulance with bald tires and a suspension held together by rubber bands with some dying asshole in the back being worked on by another asshole who was allegedly your "partner".  I guess I should have known that the emergency life was not for me.  The pit of your stomach never lies, you know.

I've always struggled with meaning in my life.  What's the point if there isn't a point?  And I wonder if that isn't why I've been drawn heavily to artistic pursuits-- the life of a writer or of a performer, someone to be read and talked about (Wilde said, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about", and he was right, goddamn him) or the life of a police officer, someone to be respected and remembered.  Maybe I thought that a higher profile existence would give my life meaning, purpose, or direction.  It's the kind of conclusion a five-year-old would draw.  Oh, you're scared of death?  Well, do something important so you'll be remembered.

As usual, I went to the extreme.  Because that's kind of what I do.  

As part of my EMT training back in 2005, I had to do a twelve hour shift at Jefferson Hospital's E.R.  I took vital signs, asked dumbfuck questions, stared at pony-tailed nurses whose asses looked impossibly delicious even in dumpy pastel colored scrubs, and I generally got in the way, like a student is supposed to do.  Well, at some point in the night, some homeless tranny barricaded him/herself in the E.R. bathroom and was apparently smoking crack.  She refused the nurse's commands to come out, and one of them said to me, "Get the security guard at the front desk."  I went out there, and there was the front desk, but there was no security guard.  I walked back into the E.R. and as I walked back in, the bathroom door flung open and the He/She flew out and took off through the E.R. doors.  

"STOP!" I screamed as I maniacally took off.  It was maybe eleven o'clock at night, and my breath was hard and cold in the night as my boots thumped against the pavement.  In pursuit.  Suspect fleeing.  Southbound on 11th.

STOP!  STOP!  STOP!

Oh, I realized.  They're yelling at me.   

I turned to see a breathless, overweight security guard and E.R. tech were panting behind me as I finally put the brakes on.  

"What are you, fucking outta your goddamned mind?!  We don't chase!  When they're off our campus, it's the cops' problem.  We ain't the fucking cops!" The guard yelled at me between gasps for air.  

No.  We ain't.            

When I'm New

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 21, Verse 23

"Keep your mouth closed and you'll stay out of trouble."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

Once, I wrote an email to a professor that almost got me thrown out of college.

Once, I wrote story that got me fired from a job.

Once, I wrote editorials in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News that got me death threats.

Once, I wrote an anonymous blog and I got tired of it, so I started another one that wasn't.

And I realized I couldn't.

"Majesty," Mozart says in the film Amadeus, "I am a vulgar man, but I assure my music is not."

I'm kind of the opposite, I guess.  My writing is base, it is unrefined and obscene, it pulls no punches and accepts no mercy, particularly on its subject.  Is it honest?  I don't know, maybe it's as honest as it can be without destroying me, but it loves to tell stories.  Stories that are shameful, embarrassing, disgusting.  My writing uses metaphors that would make a Des Moines housewife frown-- it's okay, she's not my target audience anyway.

Or, maybe she is.  If I could make my mother frown with my incendiary rhetoric, I knew I was on the right path.  If she just laughed, I wasn't going far enough.

While my writing is vulgar, I'm not entirely convinced that I am, which I guess is a step in the right direction.  Maybe 3 years of therapy is starting to work. I know I am not perfect, I know I am not always kind or smart or just.  I know sometimes I don't do work the way it should be done.  I know sometimes I don't do home the way it should be done.

I know.

Overall, though, when I take in as much of the human experience as I can, I suppose I'm just okay.  Like you.  I like you.  Will you stay here with me for a while?  It's still me, even though I took away my name and my picture.

You know.

One of the reasons I want to leave my job is because I'm so tired of looking over my shoulder.  I guess I don't want to feel like that on this blog either.  I don't want to have to be afraid, of someone saying something, identifying me, linking me to some inane story with the word "fuck" in it and therefore deeming me unfit to walk amongst the rest of humanity.  I'm so tired of being afraid all the time, and in the digital age, there is a lot to be afraid of.

Then, of course, the question becomes, "Why don't you just shut the fuck up?"

Right.  I could do that.  I have done that.  But I don't want to.  There's something in me that wants to come out.  I was going to say "has" to come out, but that's a little theatrical.  It doesn't have to, I won't sizzle and turn to dust if it doesn't.  I don't want you to think that.  I don't need to write and the world doesn't need me to either.

I just want to.  Pretty badly, I think, as things go.

I have a big mouth, and I've always hated it, since I've had it, that is.  I didn't always have a big mouth.  As a boy, I would hide behind my mother, probably for longer than customary.  I wouldn't say anything to anybody, even though, apparently, I was speaking in sentences by nine-and-a-half months.  I didn't start opening my mouth until I got comfortable.

Behind a computer screen.

After I'd been in a job for over a year.

After I'd known someone for a very long time.

I get bold.  Brave.  Sloppy.  Silly.  Acrid.  Asshole.

I get a little asshole.

Suddenly, this meek little gimp has opinions.  Suddenly, he swears.  Suddenly, his brow knits and his bile surfaces and his arms cross in front of his chest and he sours.  Finding your voice is empowering, but it's not always nice.

I like being nice-- moreover, I like being thought of as being nice.  I like to be spoken well of and thought highly of and to be respected.  Maybe that's why I try my damndest to change jobs every year or two, because that's when I'm at my best: when I'm new.  When my mouth is closed.  When I'm bewildered and apologetic and eager to please.  When I'm quiet.

I'm a good boy, when I'm new.

When I wrote that letter to that professor in college, I was half-way through my Junior year.  I mean, I practically owned the place-- you know.  The Head of the Theatre Department shouted at me in his office with the light off and the door closed,

"DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!  SHE DOESN'T KNOW YOU!  I KNOW YOU!  I KNOW HOW YOU ARE!"

And I thought that was interesting, because I didn't know what he was talking about.  I guess, looking back, he was talking about how I am when I'm not new anymore.  I guess he was talking about how, when I get angry or sad or indignant, I prefer to bodyslam my demons and my enemies with words, and I like to douse them in propane and light them on fire, just to be sure the audience is paying attention.

And it's cost me.  And I guess it will continue to do so, because I never learn.  I don't want to grow up and write like a big boy.  I'm still stuck in this juvenile cycle of dick jokes and shit-talking ribaldry.  I'm Peter Pan, typing with a captain's hook.

Anyway, staying out of trouble's no fun, is it?