Piloting my Father

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 19, Verse 27

"Stop listening to teaching that contradicts what you know is right."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

(NB: In spite of what you might suspect from the smell of the first paragraph, this isn't a "Daddy Blog.")

My children went through a three or four month period where they slept clear through the night.  We'd put them down at 7:00 or 7:30 and it was smooth sailing all the way through the full 12 rounds of the clock.  This hasn't been the case for a long time.  Now, they awaken anywhere between 11:00pm and 4:00am, and they don't go back down without some, um, interventions which are provided by two bleary-eyed, sleep-stupid parents whose every small-hours movement is by this time mechanized and efficient.  This, for the moment, is how it goes.

Now you might think that two twenty-six-month-old bawling urchins (actually, it's usually just my daughter, but, as any savvy parent of twins will tell you: one up, both up) in the middle of the night sucketh thou heartily, last night, it turned out to be a good thing.  

My daughter announced her raspy Cock-a-Doodle-Doo at 3:31am and I threw the covers off and padded down the hall to her room, picked her Uppie Daddy, cuddled her, and brought her to her mother.  On my way back to our room, I noticed that my cremasteric muscles (girls, you may want to look that up) were in overdrive and that my leg hair was standing up on end.  I handed my daughter off to my wife and said, "Jesus, it's fucking cold."

"I know," she said, "what the fuck?"

We're so Shakespearean at that hour.  I scooped up my still-sleeping son, brought him into our room and immediately went downstairs to turn up the heat which, in the middle of a Nor'easter, was only set at 62.  That's dumb, I thought, turning the dial to the right.  

And.... nothing happened.  So I went to the basement, which felt like an igloo, and proceeded to engage in every Jewish man's worst nightmare, fiddling with unfamiliar things in the dead of winter that have no fewer than four warning stickers featuring the silhouette of a man reeling backwards as the result of an explosion.  

Yeah.  It's like that.  Bye-bye cremasteric muscles.  

After around twenty minutes, I put our children back down and said to my wife, "I need you downstairs with me."  I figured, if I was going to blow the place up, I at least wanted her to be with me when it happened.  You know, so there was no way the medical examiner could say I was trying to kill everybody by myself.  Together, she and I did troubleshooting.  We found hard-to-access panel doors.  We found the pilot light.  We debated about whether trying to light it would blow a crater in the earth and what size it might be.  At one point, she looked at me and said,

"Whose father should we call: yours or mine?"

We are, it's sad to admit, still of that age.  I briefly weighed the pros and cons of either option in my head, the doddering, cerebral psychiatrist who lives over 300 miles away, or the strapping, foreign soldier who lives practically down the street, I settled on a man who's twice been to desert combat, founded his own business, and once called my oldest sister a "FUCKING DICKHEAD!" for letting me play in the ocean as an eight-year-old when I had a cold.  Everyone on the beach that day within six miles of our location heard him.  

He came over at 4:30, because that's what he does.  He asked some asinine questions, because he makes sure to do that, too.  He was helpful in some respects, though he mostly reinforced what we already knew: we were fucked and had to call the emergency number for the heating company, which I did at around 5am.  Outside, it had already snowed approximately eight inches.

The guy on the other end of the phone was understandably unenthusiastic about receiving my call.  I get it-- the proudest prayer an on-call technician or service worker can make is,

"Dear Lord, make my phone silent tonight.  Let everybody out there work it out for themselves.  And let me have score some awesome head tonight and sleep the night away.  Amen."  

Unfortunately, for this guy, it was not to be.  I told him that, after around two hours of fucking around we managed to get the pilot light lit, but it would not stay on.  He said, "Well, sir, I just got up and it's snowing real bad, I mean, I'll get into the office and see if we can get somebody out to you some time today."

That, my friends, wasn't what I wanted to hear.

"Okay, well, I get that it's snowing and it's early but I have two two-year-olds in this house and they can't stay here like this, so you need to get out here.  This is an emergency.  That's why I called your emergency number."

"Sir," he said, his emphasis, not mine, "I will do what I can to get to you."

Ten minutes later, I threw my father out because he was starting to make me nuts.  My wife and I cuddled together under a blanket on the couch.  She fell instantly asleep.  I stared at the muted television watching endless coverage of the storm outside.  It's amazing how much people say the same thing over and over again and think they're doing a great job or something.  Anyway, at some point, my father texted me to ask if the heater was fixed.  I should have ignored his text, but I replied that I hadn't heard from the technician  again yet.  Then I got this:

"I'm sorry ..but at a time like 

that with babies don't Wai for 

ass hole ..t call u .. They r

Red necks illiterate ass holes"

I knew, at that exact moment, my father was calling the heating company and raising absolute fucking hell.  Funnily enough, less than five minutes later, the technician called me to report that his van was stuck in the snow.  I told him to be careful and to get here when he could.  As soon as I hung up, my father texted me again:

"I know u r nit answering..but

I got the head of [heating company's

name]. I'm bringing him to your house."

An hour later, after my father helped dig him out of a snow-bank, the technician was at our house.  He looked like a beat-down dog.  But, in twenty minutes, he had fixed our broken pilot tube and had our furnace a glow in beautiful blue flame.  He apologized multiple times for taking so long, I thanked him and sent him on his way.  Then, I texted my father and said he should call the heating company and apologize for his behavior which, I suspect, was less than gentlemanly.  He replied,

"Sure I'm going to clean his 

ass for A year."

Later that evening, my mother called to check in on all of us.  "Your father is killing me," she said, "I can't believe the way he was talking on the phone to that heating technician-- poor bastard.  I'm going to write a nice letter to the company."  I told her I was going to do the same.

"He just doesn't understand how to behave.  I guess we can never use them again to service our heater.  But you make sure you can save your relationship with the company."  

I'm thankful, at least, that one of them gets it, that one of them doesn't careen through the world with the bullish, uncontrolled entitlement of a beauty queen on steroids and PCP.  While there are a lot of aspects of my personality that I very much wish were different, I think my temperament is pretty well balanced, a nice mix of the aggressive and the passive.  I can turn it up when I need to, but mostly I try to facilitate and appease and negotiate and accept what I need to in order to keep moving along.  We were cold, but we weren't freezing to death.  The problem had to be fixed, and it was.  Did it take a long time?  Yes.  Did the guy maybe stop for a coffee before getting stuck and then coming to us?  I'm sure he did.  Do I begrudge him that?  Nope.  Because he's not a fire fighter or a cop or an EMT, and there was no stench of gas in the air.  Of course, any time the comfort, safety or stability of any one of his family members (even the FUCKING DICKHEAD) is threatened, my father becomes a frothing, rabid maniac who will eviscerate anybody who tries to minimize the situation by not immediately snapping to attention at the sound of his voice.  And I guess there's a part of me that certainly understands that, and maybe there's even even a blue-flamed glimmer inside me that likes that.  But it's sure lost them the good graces (and business) of more than a handful of plumbers, electricians, and HVAC guys over the decades.  It takes a technician who's willing to go chest-to-chest with him, and, in today's people-pleasing, litigious society, most companies won't back up a front-line guy who does that.  And I've done it my fair share of times, and it never has gotten me very far.  

Hmpf.  I guess this turned into a "Daddy Blog" after all-- just not the kind you were thinking.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch the Olympics and watch these athletes flex their cremasteric muscles.        

Purple Lenses & Mr. Moo

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 21, Verse 21

"The man who tries to be good, loving and kind finds life, righteousness, and honor."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I don't remember when I first saw him-- maybe I was four or five.  He stood there, there on the corner of a busy intersection, dressed in brown slacks-- he looked like the kind of guy who'd call 'em "slacks", a plaid shirt, cardigan, and a tweed flat cap.  The hair that poked out front underneath that cap was gray and puffy-- what was left of it.  He wore a pair of glasses with purple tinted lenses.  When I was a little boy, I didn't know that old men wore purple eyeglass lenses to help them see when they had macular degeneration.  I just thought he was a cool, old black man who rocked out in purple sunglasses.  Because that was his thing.  

Anyway, when we were on our way to somewhere or other-- probably the mall (we were all mall-chicks back in the '80s, weren't we?) our Oldsmobile was stopped at the traffic light at that busy intersection, and that cool, old black man in his purple glasses looked straight at me, he smiled a toothy grin, and he waved.  It was a slow wave, palm extended, fingers spread apart a little bit, from side-to-side.  He had a stub of a cigar in between his first and second finger.  I waved back.

Maybe an hour-and-a-half later, we found ourselves approaching the intersection again.  But our light was green.

"Slow down, Daddy!  Slow down!" I yelled from blue velour bench seat in the back, "it's my friend!"

My father, easily confused but accustomed, from his Israeli army days, to taking orders, gently activated the Cutlass Ciera's drum brakes and the car rolled at a calmer pace and, as we passed old Purple Lenses, I waved frantically from the back seat.  And he reciprocated, a little less enthusiastically, but a wave is a wave.  

We only ever went by that intersection on weekends, but if he wasn't out there every single time we did, it seemed like he was.  

"Does he just stand out there all day, Mommy?" I asked my mother.

"He probably goes in at dinner time," she speculated.  She must be right, I thought; nobody can be that friendly to strangers on an empty stomach.  I wasn't so narcissistic even as a young child to think that I was the only one that Purple Lenses waved to, but I did refer to him as "my friend" and I very, very much did look forward to seeing him.  Not because I didn't have other people in my life who looked forward to seeing me, quite the contrary, but because he had no particular reason to be nice to me, or to like me, or to pick me.  He couldn't wave to thousands and thousands of motorists and their kin-- he had to pick and choose.  And I was one of the chosen ones.  Maybe he liked my Moe Howard haircut, which I faithfully maintained for far, far too long.  Maybe it was the black circles under my eyes from lack of sleep that told him I could use a friend.  

I don't know that I noticed his absence however many years later it was.  He wasn't out there all the time, and maybe I just expected, in the beginning, that he'd be there, you know-- next week.  Next week he'll be there, on the corner, lazily holding his cigar, smiling.  The Mayor of the Intersection.  The Ambassador of the Street Corner.  A few months went by and we took an autumn drive together as a family.  As we approached his corner-- it was his corner-- my mother turned around in her seat and she looked at me, reading my face as only a mother can.  She held her hand out between the seats and offered it to me.

"I think he must have died, Tutty," she said, using my favorite childhood nickname to soften the blow of the news I already knew.  

"Who died?" my oblivious father asked.  

It was hard to accept it when, a few more months later, a real estate sign would mark the lawn in front of his house like a headstone.  

I'll bet he was a good grandfather, I thought, and that was a comforting thought to someone who was a tad lacking in the grandfather department-- one being half-a-world away in Australia, and the other, though far more local, a bit... emotionally inaccessible.  

When I taught, I don't think I really understood when mothers of young boys would come up to me and tell me what it meant for their sons to have "a positive male role model."  In fact, it annoyed me a little bit, because it felt like they were congratulating me for having a penis and truculent facial hair.  But, looking back on my own growing up, I guess I get it.  My friend on the street corner taught me a lot about friendliness, and that it doesn't have to be just restricted to friends.  Mr. Moo, the elderly Asian man who ran the shoe shop on Haverford Avenue was always dressed in a shirt, tie, and vest, with shiny brown shoes and bright silver hair and I liked the way he looked and he always bent down to talk to me.  I didn't have to look up at him, but I looked up to him.  Maybe he's why I like to wear ties-- I don't know, I never really thought about it before, but I would ask my mother if we could go visit Mr. Moo on lazy afternoons when I didn't need any shoes.  And we would take the four minute drive down Haverford just to say hi.  

Sometimes I worry about myself, which keeps me busy and, you know, off drugs.  Well, the illegal ones.  I worry that men like Purple Lenses and Mr. Moo are disappearing and, if they're not, if they are still there, people aren't noticing them.  I don't know that we're noticing each other anymore.  I hate to sound like a fuddy-dud, but if we're sitting in the back seat, staring vacantly into bright screens, mindlessly scrolling our lives away, how will we ever look up to see that old black man in his tweed cap on the corner?

Look up, my loves.  And don't forget to wave.           

Goodnight, Clarice

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 23, Verses 13 & 14

"Don't fail to correct your children; discipline won't hurt them!

They won't die if you use a stick on them!
Punishment will keep them out of hell."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Hi!  Have we met before?  I think we have.  You might remember me as "that callous, needle-dicked fuck who blogs while wearing earbuds so he can't hear his two year old daughter screaming like a soon-to-be-murdered housecat in the next room".  

Currently, Antonio Salieri's Symphony in D Major, "Il Giorno Onomastico", is blasting its way through the circuitous paths of my ear canals, and my head is slightly throbbing, and I like it.  Sometimes the violins and the horns are so fucking loud it's like my ears can see stars.  Of course, every time it goes all mezzo piano on me, I can still hear her, which sucks.  It's cognitive dissonance for sure.  I have no doubt that children this age weren't allowed to hear live music at concert halls in Vienna, and if they were, and one started acting out like this, they'd bayonet it.  

Lord knows we tried everything.  My wife went up first, to shush and soothe.  To hug and hold.  Then, after I successfully unclogged the Danube-esque kitchen sink, it was my turn to try my hand at nurturing in the nursery.  I tried the "reset" method; repeat the pre-bedtime ritual-- the books, the cuddles, the night-time song, the tucking the covers in, the whole bit.  My son bought it last week, hook, line, and snorer.  It worked, and I felt like a hero.

My daughter, though?  She didn't bite.  Right now, it sounds like someone's biting her.  Right now, it's Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, K 453.  Oh, Pandora-- thou doth have a sense of humor!

Perhaps you would not have pegged me for the kind of guy who could engage in a relentlessly narcissistic and self-indulgent pursuit like blogging while his beloved daughter is howling at the moon, tears streaming down her face less than 5 feet away behind a closed door in a dark room, and, to be honest, I wouldn't have thought I was that guy either, but, apparently, I am.  And I don't particularly like admitting that to you.

Then again, maybe I do.  Maybe that is what I like.  Maybe I like exposing my wretched, fetid underbelly to you and point to it energetically, shining a light on all that is foul and mean and cruel, to let you know what an easily manipulated dumbass you are for thinking better of me.

To teach you a lesson.  To let you know that you really don't know.  That nobody knows.  

I can tell myself it's okay.  That she's just overtired and she has to cry it out so she can go to sleep.  That no amount of re-sets or snuggling or goodnight moon is going to do the trick, she just has to knock herself the fuck out.  After, you know, whomever's biting her is done doing that.  But, I don't know-- isn't there always something else?  Something else to try?  Shouldn't I hold her until she collapses?  But, if I do that, as soon as her back even touches that mattress, no-- as soon as she feels her weight shift as I contemplate putting her down, the siren will sound again, the lambs shall scream and scream and scream loud enough to wake the dead night watchman in his pine box.  And we'll have to start all over again.  And it'll be 11 o'clock by then.  

And we'll all be fucked.  My daughter, my wife, Salieri, Wolfgang, and I.  Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you.  I am their champion.  I am their patron saint.  I am the father of all fatherly fuck ups.  Even Father Duffy.  He was a-full-a-shit.  

Mozart got quiet for a second.  She's still going.  

ff     

That's a music joke!  

HA!

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE!

(Unless you're my next-door neighbor, that is.  She's probably calling the police right now.  Fortunately, her Cambodian or Vietnamese or whatever the fuck she is accent is so thick they won't be able to understand the address and they probably won't come.)

I heard on the radio recently that, when people used to talk about "Bach", they were talking about "C.P.E. Bach", not "Johann Sebastian Bach", which is who people nowadays are talking about when they say "Bach."  He didn't really explain how that happened, how one Bach became a different Bach, how one eclipsed the other and how nobody really gives a shit about Carl Philly E-Dawg, and all I can think of when I think about that is: did either of those powder-headed, stocking-assed motherfuckers have daughters and how the hell did they deal with it when their daughters were two and were exploding their lungs all over their nursery ceilings?

They must have drank.  They must have drank a real. fucking. lot.  

Oh, who am I kidding?  They composed in some villa somewhere while some hired village wench dealt with their offspring.  And everything was going fine.  Because they still drank a real fucking lot.

I'm listening to some jubilant shit by Domenico Cimarosa now.  It's not nearly loud enough for these present purposes.  I mean, there's a refrain that's pretty loud, but then it gets quiet and I have to wait for the refrain to repeat itself before it drowns out the unChristly sounds my daughter is making from inside her crib.  

Maybe it's just the chair he's sitting in, but he looks like a fucking stuffed porpoise.

I shouldn't be making fun, but, honestly?  To me he looks like a guy who never put a crazy two-year-old girl to sleep, so he doesn't get much respect from me.  Besides, Cinnamon Roll: you in my house.  Now, play: and make it forte like SHIT, motherfucker.

Teachable Moments

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 25, Verse 3

"You cannot understand the height of heaven,

the size of the earth, or all that goes on in the king's mind!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

In third grade, there was a kid named Ari.  You went to school with Ari, too.  He had a ton of curly blonde hair and, somehow, defying the predominant mental image you are now conjuring up of him in your mind, he wasn't cute.  How you can have your scalp kissed by such golden locks and not be punim-pinchably adorable is an exasperating mystery, but, hey; that's Ari for you.  

Ari drooled.  That mental image changing yet?  It should, because, when you're nine weeks old, drooling's pretty much a given.  But no mother or father wants their nine-year-old son going to Mrs. Griffin's classroom wearing a bib.  Adding to Ari's increasing list of misfortunes was his lisp, which was just about as subtle and endearing as Truman Capote's.  

And, he was chunky.  Not fat, per say.  Just, you know-- fat in the ass.  

As you can maybe see now, all in all, at least outwardly, Ari wasn't quite the prize package, and, sadly, some of his teachers let him know it.  While I don't have too many memories of this particular time of my life, I do distinctly remember one moment in third gradery where Mrs. Griffin was showing us some words on butcher-block paper propped up on an easel.  She had written the words in austere, thick black Sharpie.  

"What's this word?" she asked us, pointing to the word "Determined" with her marker, peering at us from behind her Sophia Lorens.  We looked at the word, then we looked back at her.  Ari might have raised his hand.  Maybe he didn't and she called on him anyway.  Either way, she said his name.  And he said,

"DEETER-MINDED!" 

And we laughed, because that wasn't how you said that word.  Looking back on this display, this obviously would have been the moment where Mrs. Griffin sharply admonished us for making fun of Ari, but the way I recall the event, she rolled her eyes, looked at him and said, "Deeter-minded?  Really, Ari." and proceeded to call on somebody else who gave the correct pronunciation, while Ari quietly contemplated suicide or, more accurately, said to himself, "One day I will be wealthy enough to buy and sell all of you and you, Mrs. Griffin, will be festering and rotting under the ground onto which I shall gleefully piss while my square-jawed chauffeur warms up the Shiatsu massaging Alcantara-hide throne in the back of my Bentley Mulsanne."

I don't fault Mrs. Griffin necessarily.  It's hard to always know what to do and what to say in a given situation, especially when you're an authority figure.  I was once the Assistant Director at a summer camp.  One of the young girls I had as a camper was a sweet girl with albinism.  As with many people with albinism, she had an eye condition called nystagmus, where the eyeballs move rapidly back and forth.  She also had extremely poor vision, and so when she read she had the book almost quite literally pressed up against her face.  And her hair was the color of straw and her skin as pale as 1% milk.  But she was one of my special girls, because, when she was three, my wife had her as a pre-school student, and we had become close with her family.  Well, one day, we were rehearsing a scene and another young girl looked over at her and said, "What's wrong with you anyway?"

Instantly, my body temperature soared to 164 degrees and my spine began to sweat.  I could have torn that little fucker's face right off with my fingers.    

"HEY!" I shouted, my head spinning towards her so fast I thought my neck had snapped, "WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!  Don't you EVER talk to her like that again, do you understand me?"  

The girl bit her lip and I thought she was going to take a shit in her shorts, which she very well might have done.  And that would have been alright with me, actually, though I probably would have gotten fired.  And maybe I should have anyway.  It wasn't a very good conflict resolution strategy, and I certainly didn't mediate in a positive, affirming way that turned it into a "teachable moment",  and I don't think I did my flaxen-haired favorite any favors either.  But I did what I had to do to stop the situation in its tracks, as I was deeter-minded to do.

And, in that moment, I felt for old Mrs. Griffin, who did wrong by Ari, and by all of us by not showing us the way with grace, skill, and tact.  This from a woman who told a room full of nine-year-olds that the most memorable moment of her recent trip to Australia was when "a drunk Koala I was holding peed all over me", so maybe tact, skill, and grace wasn't her thing.  

It's not my thing either.  Of course, I try.  I try to be good.  I overcompensate with deference and candied words, but if you read me and know me and have spent any longer than a minute-and-a-half inside a car piloted by me then you know.  I can be mean and spiteful and cruel and, if I ran into Ari today, I'm not so sure that I wouldn't say, "Hey, have you learned how to pronounce 'determined' yet?"  I'm not exactly sure I was one of the kids who laughed at him, but I'm reasonably sure I was.  

Unless, of course, I was very different then.  

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.

The Untrained Apprentice

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 26, Verse 10

"The master may get better work from an untrained apprentice

than from a skilled rebel!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

When I was hired as an EMT in 2005, I hadn't ever sat behind the wheel of an ambulance.  Why exactly that happened is rather a long story, and it's kind of illegal, so I guess the less said about that the better.  I had my share of fender-benders in just shy of two years on the street, but, fortunately, I didn't kill anybody, and I managed to leave with my reputation, such as it was, relatively intact.  But Mario Andretti I was not-- not even when we ran lights and sirens.  It was more like "Driving Miss Daisy."

I kissed a concrete barrier at a gas station, bumped ever so tenderly into a U-Haul van on a suburban street and, on the very day we moved into a new base, drove straight into the wall of our brand new garage, ripping wood and fiberglass off the frame door.  That earned me a round of slow claps from my colleagues who were standing around the garage watching the show.  

Nevertheless, although it's possible that I'm seriously kidding myself, I think people liked me in those days.  Most people.  Most of my coworkers, almost all of the patients, lots of the nurses (one even slipped me her phone number!) and one of my supervisors liked me enough to hang up his white shirt and sit beside me in the truck every day for over a year.  Well, there were other reasons why he did that.  On our last shift together, I bent down to lift the stretcher up with Mike and I said to the patient, "Going up, sir: third floor, underwear, socks, stuffed animals."  Mike grinned as we popped the stretcher up together.  "Well," he said, "there won't be another one like you."  

Maybe they knew what they were doing, hiring me.  Maybe they just didn't care.  Shiftwork is shitwork, and it's all about getting warm bodies out on the street, warm bodies stuffed into crap-box ambulances, clock in, clock out, do your trip sheets, document, document, document.  Chirp chirp!  Throw on a fresh sheet, get a run, hit the lights.  They don't care who you are, as long as your shirt is buttoned and tucked in.  Actually, they only care about if they're looking for a reason to fire you.  They were never looking to fire me, but they weren't exactly jumping up and down to promote me, either.   

I took that job because I didn't know what the hell else to do.  Being unemployed doesn't feel very nice, especially when you're in a relatively new relationship and you're still going out and meeting new people who invariably ask "and what do you do" immediately after learning and forgetting your name.  Nevertheless, the idea of starting a whole new job and, basically, identity, completely from scratch was terrifying.  And it made me long for the days of apprenticeships, some people knew you didn't know shit about shit, and they actually took the time to take you under the wing and teach you something.  

You know, unlike school.  Particularly EMT school, which taught me that everybody passes the test as long as they could pay the fee (most of them couldn't) and you don't make crass comments at the autopsy (some of them couldn't do that, either).  But the actual teaching was done by a burned out medic who had kidney stones and it seemed like once a week we would find him doubled over in pain, sweating like a hog on the floor when we'd come in for class or back from lunch.  One day, maybe half-a-year after I had been on the street, I heard someone call my name as I walked with my partner through a local hospital's telemetry wing.  It was my old instructor, lying in a bed hooked up to several IV's being pushed behind me by a nurse.

"I always knew you'd be the only one to fuckin' graduate!" he said to me.  

"Actually," I pointed out, "I was one of two who graduated."

"Yeah, but that other scumbag got arrested last month," he said with a wry smile as the nurse turned him down another hallway.

I think I would have really enjoyed being an apprentice, because I like looking up to elderly, wizened people.  The craggier the face, the better.  I respect downy, silvery hair and bad teeth, crinkly old potato fingers and halitosis.  That says to me: kid, I've been there.  And now the Junior Executive V. P. is thirty-two and he's already plotting to walk on your spine all the way to the Maserati dealership to trade in his Audi while you fumble and dither and diddle yourself behind your desk because it's all you ever learned to do because nobody bothered to teach you anything because you're supposed to ride the log flume out of the womb knowing how to write proposals and calculate averages and fix flat tires and clean your gutters and diagnose and communicate and solve for x and extrapolate the conjugation of the functional conjunction of y.  

Why?

I don't know.  Because something changed.  The world changed.  No more apprenticeships.  No more mentors.  There's just you and me, and, I hate to break it to you, son: but you're on the stretcher and I'm behind the wheel.  

  

The Middle Ground

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 1

"If you must choose, take a good name rather than great riches;

for to be held in loving esteem is better than silver and gold."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I'm learning to accept that I'm a man of extremes.  

And it's rather annoying, because I don't often practice what I preach.  (Who does, right?  Certainly not preachers.)  When I advise others, it's often with words and tone and timbre that stink of conciliation, smoothing things over, reasoning, rationality, compromise.  When talking to others about their problems and their conflict, I'm much more comfortable steering others towards that middle ground.  I like the middle ground-- for others, it's fine-- it's soft and grassy, cool and clean.  You can walk upon it barefoot or shod only in socks, and you'll be okay.  Sure, there might be a pebble or two, but they're small and round.  You won't get a blister walking along a path on the middle ground.

In my own life, though, I'd lose my way blindly crashing around through thorny bush and terror tree such that, if I ever tried to find the middle ground, I'd probably die trying to get there.  And it'd be ugly.  I'm either here, or quite a far ways over there.  There's nobody that I tolerate, accept, who's just, you know: there.  I either love you, or I'd sooner take a shit in your mailbox and kick you in the throat.  

That's, well, that's me.  Mister Prince Charming.  Got me LOTS of dates in high school.

My extremes are often in conflict with one another.  They don't make sense.  For instance, take the opinions of others.  Now, you'd think that someone who so rigidly categorizes people would have a pretty easy time dismissing the opinions of the mail-box-shit, throat-kick crew, and focus solely on the thoughts and feelings of the people whom I love, but you'd be wrong.  I vacillate between not giving a shit what anybody thinks about anything I say or do or think or wear or eat, to being wildly obsessed with it.  If I know that somebody is angry with me, or doesn't like me, well, that's pretty much all consuming for me.

I can't help it.  Of course, neither can preachers, apparently.

And I'm not quite sure why it's this way with me.  I was never taught to conform by my parents, never instructed to do this or that, hold my knife this way, comb my hair that way so that others wouldn't think I was a freak/gay/retarded/untoward/pro-simian/incompetent/priggish/equine.  They let me do whatever I wanted and, I suppose, if there were some negative social repercussions, they expected that I would deal with it/them.  If I had some bright idea to dress up like a nun with my friend and run around our elementary school's track while my father video-taped it, he was right there with the camera, no questions asked.  Though, looking back on it, I'm not sure he'd know which questions to ask.  

About... that.

And I wonder, sometimes, who I'd be if I were a little bit less concerned with the thoughts and feelings of others.  While my parents never taught me to give that much thought, I, evidently, somehow, taught myself.  I developed some idea that, if I was #1, that this was somehow bad, sinful, arrogant, unkind.  Un-Christian.  Yes, I worry about being un-Christian.  Is that wrong?  William Blake said, "The most sublime act is to put another before you."  And maybe I bought into that a little too much.  Maybe just hook and line would have been enough.  

Because, sometimes, I feel like I'm a sinker.  Dipping below the surface of others' stares and thoughts and perceptions and my perceptions of their perceptions and the hairs on the back of my neck responding to their potential looks of disdain.

I don't know.  

It's exhausting.  So, of course, is anxiety, and insecurity feels a lot like anxiety, and it's a component thereof many times.  "What are they thinking about me?  Did what I say come off like I think it did?"  "Did I forget to zip up my fly?"  "Did I forget to put my penis back in my pants?"  "Does this open fly make my penis look fat?"  You know how it is.  There's a lot going on in this little hamster wheel upstairs.  

And, as you know, it's a very un-Christian hamster wheel.