Celovebrity

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 8, Verse 17

"I love all who love me.

Those who search for me shall surely find me."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I've decided: I could never be a celebrity.  I don't have the talent for it.  And I don't mean the talent necessary to accomplish celebrity, although that's certainly debatable, too; I mean the talent for sustaining it.  For perpetuating it.  For feeding that monster, for oiling that machine, for dressing that Reuben.  

I wouldn't, I don't think, be able to process that idea of having fans.  People who repeat my catchphrases at social gatherings or predict the day I'm going to die as part of their celebrity death watch club.  People who would go, "Oh, man!  Remember that scene in ______________" and have them talk about a movie I was in.  That, to me, just does not compute.  Because I feel like, aside from being thoroughly confused by these people, I feel like I would hate them.  I would detest my fans.  It would be like (OH, MAN! REMEMBER THAT) scene in "Life of Brian" where Graham tells all his disciples to "FUCK OFF!"?  

Well, it'd be like that.  

The anniversary of Graham Chapman's death was a while ago, and I'm embarrassed to admit I only knew about it because of Twitter, which I am on because I maintain the work Twitter account.  Our local radio station does a "On this day in suchandsuchayear" thing every day at around 6:30am, and, yes, I'm already at work, dear, thanks for asking.  He died on October 4th, 1989, with John Cleese and Michael Palin at his bedside, both of whom had to be escorted from the room as they were in, or close to, hysterics when the time came.  I remember watching about Graham's passing on "Entertainment Tonight".  I was all of nine years old, and his death had a significance to me even at that early age.  Two years prior, a British classmate of mine introduced me to Python, far too early, and I was hooked on whatever I understand and infatuated with whatever I didn't.  

I was a fan of Graham Chapman's before I'd hit puberty.  

To me, celebrity is about little more than the passing of time.  Life plods along as it must, until Harvey Korman or Walter Matthau dies.  Or Bea Arthur.  Or Gilda.  Or Graham.  And the voice comes on the radio and announces it or you hear about it on Facebook (and it turns out not to be a hoax) and your world shifts a little.  Tectonically.  It moves.  And you get off-balance.  I mean, look at us: we're a Pacino culture.  

Dog Day Afternoon

Scarecrow

Serpico

The Godfather

And that's just the seventies.  This screaming, apoplectic Italian hurricane has been a cinematic force for forty plus years.  What are we going to do when the voice comes on the radio to tell us that we've lost Al?  We're seriously going to lose it.  

Hoo-ah.  

And when he dies, a page will turn.  Something will have broken.  Something falls apart.  

I feel like a large part of who you are is defined by how you feel when a certain celebrity dies.  When John Cleese and Michael Palin or any of the other remaining Python boys expire, cease to be, and go to meet their maker, I may have to be institutionalized for a little while (hopefully I'll get a discount because of my line of work).  And some days I feel like I'm just marking time until a celebrity in whom I am particularly invested dies.

I don't know really what celebrity is, though I expect it's love if it's anything.  To love is to feel ardently for someone in spite of what you know about them or suspect you know.  Celebrities, I'm pretty sure, are probably mostly all rotten to the core, hollowed by being hallowed if they weren't all shit inside to begin with, and yet we simply don't care.  Because we're fans.  And that's what fans are, people who know or probably know and don't care.  

I'm glad I'm not a celebrity.  I don't have the stomach for it.          

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.

Advicesticles

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 8, Verse 6

"Listen to me!  For I have important information for you.

Everything I say is right and true."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

A while ago, I wrote a blog that contained some pearls of wisdom that came before swine and left be bruised and battered like a buffalo from Ikea with shallots and a Bearnaise sauce for tuppence a bag.  And, because some folks said they enjoyed it (they didn't say it in the Comments section, nobody does, NOT THAT I MIND, MY SWEATY LITTLE FORESKIN-GATHERERS, NO, I DON'T!) and because I kind of like giving advice, I figured I would do that again.  These are some things that I want to tell you-- if not advice, then declarations about life that I've picked up from being alive for thirty-three years that I thought you might like to know about.  

Aren't I special?

POCKETS

If you're a man, and you own trousers that have regular pockets that you slip your hands into from a diagonal angle as well as jeans or jean-style corduroys, where the hands descend into the pockets at a directly vertical trajectory, be aware that, the day you change from one style to the other, your brain is going to tell your hands to do the wrong thing-- i.e., you're gonna shoot those hands straight down like you're settling into the pockets of a well-loved pair of Levi's and your hands are going to just smooth out the front of your pants.  And, when you do that, you're gonna look like a fucking idiot.  So, if that's something you're not okay with-- you've been warned.

BREATH MINTS

Hi.  I don't "do" breath mints.

Sorry.

I understand that I drink (decaf) coffee and that I eat garlic-encrusted rhino tongue and that plaque likes to cuddle up inside the little crevices of my knocked-about teeth and I don't brush after every meal or every quarter hour like my 11th grade history teacher did but, do me a favor-- don't offer me a fucking breath mint.  I will always turn it down with a forced little smile that says, "HEY!  I know why you're doing that!  And I don't care!"  You wouldn't offer to rub some rose petals and cinnamon sticks on the underarms of some sweaty intern at a board meeting, would you?  No, you'd sit there and pretend not to notice.  So... try that, and shove your breath mints up your ass-- CUZ YOUR ASS SMELLS LIKE ASS!

GAWKER

I remember once a little while ago we had a speaker come in to our place of business to give a talk about sex addiction.  Unlike most inservices, which are actually designed to make long for death and are, therefore, rather poorly attended, this one was packed.  The guy was a licensed clinical social worker I think, and from what I remember he managed to make sex addiction sound not terribly interesting, which, I guess, is a real knack in and of itself, but he shared some anonymous client stories and that was enjoyable.  One thing that struck me, though, was his tale of a client who came to him for help because, "He was a gawker.  I mean, he had this problem.  He gawked at women."

And I remember sitting there thinking, "Wow.  I didn't know you could bill for that."  

Not that I can remember specifically who was around the table at the time, but I was probably gawking at at least three different women during the course of that presentation.  I certainly wasn't GAWKING at the presenter, who probably needed a BREATH MINT AND CINNAMON DEODORANT.  

Look, I get it.  I realize that we live in a society where every moment you're alive is at the very least a faux pas and at worse a bombastic damnation of the highest order-- but, gawking?  If gawking at women is a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, then fine-- just put me in a fucking straight jacket.  But make sure the buckles are loose enough so that I can still-- you know.

SHORT MEN

I'm six foot tall and, therefore, I own this fucking cheese.  I didn't realize I felt that way about my stature until only recently when I've noticed that, when a particularly short man walks into the room, I furrow my brow and scrunch up my face GAWKING at the guy with a look that says, "Why isn't this Oompa Loompa getting me a danish and waxing my car?"  And it's funny, because I have no muscles other than the essential ones I need to turn my car's power-assisted steering wheel and step into and out of the bathtub-- I'm not particularly overbearing or intimidating, and yet, when the short guy walks out of the room, I shake my head a little and look up to the sky as if to ask, "Why did you bother making that?  He can't pick apples or help Mildred at the market reach the Sun Chips."

YOUR WIFE'S BIRTHDAY

I don't know about your wife (but I'm GAWKING at a mental image of her right now) but my wife's birthday is in two days and I'm so fucking excited I COULD SCREAM!

(Sorry.)

If your wife's birthday isn't your favorite day of the year, there's something wrong, and you should immediately look into that.

That's the end of that bit-- there's no joke.  I'm serious.

CHAIR

With $329 of my Bar Mitzvah money, I bought an enormous blue, crushed velvet La-Z-Boy recliner that could have provided shelter for a family of sixty-seven Mexican illegal immigrant field mice.  I loved that chair like I don't know what.  When you have enough disposable income that you want to shed some of it and don't know what to do it on: buy a nice chair.  Doesn't have to be some white trash recliner, it can be something from Dane Decor or Macy's-- something that fits your life and your lifestyle, but parking your sorry ass down on a nice, comfortable, well-made piece of furniture is always going to be worth the money.  

Particularly if it vibrates. 

And now, some pearllettes...

* If you ever get a chance to talk to a crazy Haitian guy, take it.  If possible and practical, record it.

* Just once, apply for a job with a resume that is 100% fictitious, including your name.  Keep the right phone number, though, just to see if their H.R. bitch calls.  Guarantee you she will.

* Donate a respectable money to a charity you know or care absolutely nothing about.

* Skip down a crowded hallway.  When someone confronts you or makes a comment, stop directly in front of them, grab their head firmly, and lick their eyebrows.

* Get rid of your iPhone.  It makes you look stupid.  It makes me look stupid, too, and I hate looking like you.

* Learn six banjo chords.  I did-- it's a hoot.  I think learning a 7th would completely spoil it.  Don't you?

* Watch documentaries, particularly ones where they interview old men.  Old men know EVERYTHING.

* What old men don't know, 33-year-old bloggers do.  Don't believe me?  Ask my mom.

* STOP GAWKING AT MY MOM, YOU SONOFABITCH!

Okay, I'm done now.  Go get yourself a breath mint; you fucking stink.

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.

Harriet

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 11, Verse 4

"Your riches won't help you on Judgment Day;

only righteousness counts then."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I might have worn my hair like Moe until I was thirteen, but Harriet did it for at least ninety years.  

Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two-- I don't know, to tell you the truth.  And I'm ashamed of that, that I don't know.  They'll run her obituary tomorrow.  It'll be there, online, with a picture of a candle.  Someone will write something, someone from her condo club.  And then I'll know how old she was when she died.  

And that'll be fine.

Harriet died in the condo where my grandfather slipped away twenty years ago-- if that's even possible.  He was getting ready for work, tying his tie in the expert Windsor knot only a veteran haberdasher could execute.  And he collapsed in a heap.  She didn't know what to do.  Nobody knows.  Andrew Calhoun sings a song about that,

"When he died, he died in her arms,

When he died, he died in her arms.

And she did not say the right thing,

And she could not save his life."

For a long time, I was angry at her.  Her condo was in walking distance from the hospital.  She dialed the information number instead of 911.  Seconds ticked and seconds tocked, the clock in the hall taunting her.  

Taunting them both.

Well.  Doesn't matter now.  Never did.

When I think about Harriet, stories stream back.  She married my grandfather in 1975, and, since I was born in 1980, as far as grandmothers went, she was all I ever knew.  I avoided referring to her as my "step-grandmother" because it's a weird and clunky moniker.  And for the same reason I don't refer to my "half-sister" that way, because, in my eyes, she's not.  She's it.  The real deal.  No step, no half.  Not to me.

Some of the stories I don't remember, because I was too young.  There's the one about me in the bathroom with her at her house and she advised me to "point your little thing".  Legend has it that I looked at her demurely and said, "Harriet-- it's a penis."  Not too long after that, she admonished me for letting my younger cousin eat crayons.  "Oh, Harriet," I said, waving her off, "they're non-toxic."  I used to run and play in their tomato and cucumber garden in the back of their old house on Argyle.  The smell of those cucumbers was absolutely intoxicating.  I still remember it.

It's funny, a few weeks ago, I was walking the children in their stroller, and we were walking down Argyle, as we'd done plenty of times before, only this time, this last time I went down that street, I stopped in front of Harriet and Zayda's old house.  And my eyes devoured it, as if I was seeing it for the first time in a thousand years.  But I've lived in the same neighborhood my whole life, I've never not been in front of or passing that house, I probably drive by it every single day of my life but, some how, that time a few weeks ago was different.  I must have been standing there for a while-- remembering sitting on its front step in my blue shirt and clip on navy striped tie holding onto a stuffed Smurf, next to my older sister, she clutching a barbie.  My Moe haircut gleaming in the sun.  I remembered the time the neighbor's Audi 5000 slipped into drive and crashed through their garage.  We took a picture of its grille and front end, jutting out amongst all that splintered siding.  

I must have been standing there for a while.  I must have looked lost-- something.  I noticed a woman walking a dog in my periphery.

"Are you all alright?" she asked me.  

"Oh," I said, embarrassed, "I'm just-- my grandparents used to live here."

"Oh," she said before saying, "come on, now" to her dog, but I internalized it as if she were an English constable who'd just said, "Right now, sonny, move along" and so I did.  I moved along, the way the days and weeks and months do, after you promise to drop by with the babies, and you never do.  Because that's the way it is, and that's the way it goes.

Move along, sonny.

Harriet liked to move along, especially behind the wheel.  She was perhaps the worst driver I ever knew, and she knew it, too.  She laughed about it.  She almost mowed down two women walking on the sidewalk once, took out a row of some poor bastard's hedges instead.  On her way down to Virginia she was stopped by a state trooper for careening her Lincoln Continental at dangerous speeds.  She explained to the trooper that she was listening to an Agatha Christie novel on tape and it was "just too exciting for me".  On another occasion (there were many) where she was pulled over, my young cousin shrieked, "OH MY GOD, ARE YOU GONNA ARREST MY GRANDMA?!" 

He probably should have, or at least taken her license away.  

Sometimes you just need to remember.  And laugh, and shake your head.  And go to the funeral on Sunday.  And do what you're supposed to do. 

Yitgadal v'yishtabach s'hmei rabah.

And she did not say the right thing.  

And, Harriet, it's called a "penis."  

And it's okay.  

I'll Learn

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 13, Verse 6

"A man's goodness helps him all through his life,

while evil men are being destroyed by their wickedness."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

People like to begin things-- chapters, personal essays, memoirs, term papers, prophylactic wrappers-- with quotes.  Some people favor quotes by MLK, Jr or Gandhi, others like Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin.  Some people like to quote movies.  There's probably few people, though, who start things with quotes from movies featuring Sylvester Stallone, and fewer still who, if they did, would choose "Copland".  

Fortunately for you, I'm different, and not just different for the sake of being different.  Not always, at least.  I happen to like "Copland" and there's a great quote spoken by the actor Ray Liotta.  Well, he doesn't exactly speak it as much as scream it in a cocaine-fueled roar,

"BEIN' RIGHT IS NOT A 

BULLETPROOF VEST, FREDDY!"

And how.

For people who haven't quite caught on to that idea, it can be, admittedly, quite a shock when you're called on the carpet for doing something "right", even if you've seen it coming.  And I saw it coming, and I did what I did anyway.  I did something that I thought was going to help keep people I love safe.  I did something that was definitely knee-jerk, definitely reactionary, definitely impulsive, but I did it out of love and because I know, in my heart of hearts, that it was the right thing to do.  Only thing is: none of that matters.

See, I have yet to grow up.  And I guess, when I grow up, I'll learn to be political.  I'll learn to gauge how I'll be perceived, how people will "take" something.  I'll learn perspective-taking.  I'll learn to massage and finesse and be deliberate and calculating.  I'll learn to let things take their course and I'll learn to keep my head down and I'll learn to sit and beg and roll over and play nice and play dead and play fetch and all the rest of it.

Now, all I have is my moral compass, and it's working just fine.  I just can't look at it anymore.  Not for a while anyway.  It gets me into trouble.  And I don't get into trouble at work.  It's not my style.  It's not my thing.  For three years I managed to smile and joke my way into people's hearts.  And now that I'm actually doing things, it's not working out so well.  

It's not so good.  

And I can't just shut my goddamned mouth and go along with the program because, quite honestly, sometimes the program isn't very nice and it isn't very good and I've always been someone who throws down a flag.  I should have been a fucking referee, but I don't know anything about sports.  I know when someone's being a bad boy, though.  

I know that well enough.

I also know that bein' right is not a bulletproof vest, and yet I content myself to walk directly into gunfire, my head up, my eyes clear and unafraid, because I think that something or someone will save me.  Maybe my goodness will save me.  People think I'm "good."  Do I have enough goodness?  Enough cred?  Enough cache?  If I check in with someone else first, if I wait 24 hours-- if I can just do that-- if I can hold on.

Breathe.

Wait time.

Let the anger subside.

Let the tide roll in.

Let the George Winston CD play.

Let the lights go down. 

But I'm still here.  Still here with the same ethical dilemmas crashing and pounding and burning in my head.  And I have to do something.

Me?

Why.

I don't know.  I don't know why.  It's just always felt like that.  I guess, if I couldn't be a real police officer, I'll be a moral police officer.  A zealot.  A crusader.  Someone to wave a banner and save a manatee and be a thorn in the side of the people with flags in their offices.  Be somebody's hero.

Anybody's.  

I'll take anybody.  Anybody who'll have me. 

Twice-Told Tales

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 13, Verse 3

"Self-control means controlling the tongue!

A quick retort can ruin everything."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I think I'm beginning to feel a certain amount of empathy for my math teachers, even my earliest and possibly most enigmatic math teacher; my father.  I'm feeling their pain.  I'm getting where they were coming from.  

I am, in short, a very poor student.  

And I always was, it was always that way.  I just wore glasses and tucked my shirt in and this threw teachers.  They didn't know what to make of it.  Single digit scores on math tests, and yet looks like Paul Pfieffer.  

Does.  Not.  Compute.  

And so I spent a significant portion of my academic life not computing.  In all senses of that word.  I slid, skated, glided, sailed and slunk by without accomplishing much of, well, anything really in school.  Sure, I wrote a lot of stories and won some public speaking contests.  I got a story called "When Yellow Geese Eat Chairs" published in a national magazine when I was in middle school and got five dollars out of it.  But my homework was done on the bus on the way to school, if at all, and I once convinced a teacher that I didn't do a Spanish project because my grandmother had died.  

She, at that point, hadn't.

Not only was I apathetic about school work and, occasionally, brutally dishonest, I also learned at a painfully slow speed.  Not to say that I was "slow", but it took me a while to figure things out.  Like that fucking Major Molineux story.  Who knew "Toby" and "Kunta" were the same person?

Actually, looking back on it, maybe I've just gotten slower-- maybe I really was fine in school (besides math, obviously) and my synapses and my pistons and my o-rings are just now starting to falter.  Maybe fatherhood has made me stupider.  It certainly isn't making me any brighter.  

So my learning curve is getting broader, or wider, or more concave.  I don't know.  Obtuse.  At any rate, it takes me longer to figure things out, to make connections, to get the main idea.  Would you repeat that?  What do you mean by that?  Every anecdote, I find, must be a twice-told tale which, for people who don't mind talking, isn't very bothersome, I guess.  I find that I'm in meetings furiously scribbling down everything the dumb fuck in front of me is saying for fear that I won't be able to tease out what's really important, and, convinced that I know absolutely nothing, I must assimilate everything.  

And so I learn nothing.  Or, if I do, it just takes a painfully long time.

One thing I am learning, very very slowly, is to watch my mouth.  Especially when I'm angry and/or passionate, because what I say and how I say it is often unfiltered and unappreciated.  And I get it, I understand.  And part of me agrees-- I wouldn't appreciate it if someone talked to me the way I talk to people sometimes, but sometimes I just don't see any other way to make people care.

Which, of course, you can't do.  

You can't make somebody care about their job or their Spanish homework or their yard if they don't, even though you'd really like it if they did.  And that's something I'm learning very, very slowly.  I expended so much energy when I was younger taking pen to paper with vitriol leaking out of my inkwell, insisting with every ounce of fury my vocabulary could muster, that people care about what I care about.  

But it doesn't work.  It didn't, and it doesn't.  

No one ever gave me a satisfactory reason as to why I should care about math, so I didn't.  If they had a crystal ball and said, "Gee, you know, in 2013 you're going to be writing grants with complicated budgets and you're going to have to understand audited financials and P&L statements and 990s and maybe it would be good if you fucking knew how to add and subtract" I might have taken some notice.

But probably not.  

Because, maybe underneath it all, I am a shrewd youth, and may rise in the world, with or without the help of my kinsman, Major Molineux.