Not with a bang

I have a friend who's dying. I can't save him. He may not see fifty and he's probably going to die alone because he won't reach out. Probably thinks he can't.

I know what this friend needs to do, and what he needs to do will be painful and difficult. It will require a faith on the level of abdicating his sovereign right to make his own decisions, at least for a while. It will require him to tell uncomfortable truths. The odds of that are...well.

I watched another man I love wither into a frail husk in front of me when his wife passed. He got lonely. He rattled around his house with little to do but mow the lawn. He stooped. He met his golfing buddies once a week and talked sports and weather and lawn care, until that ended. He stopped putting sheets on his bed. His mind started to go until he'd moved from forgetting the date to not comprehending how a day could have a number.

Then he met a woman. He dated again. And he has returned to us, to life.

These men are like most men. They've each only got one really close friend: the women they love. They have no one else to burn for. Without those women, or with the wrong one, they start to die. Slowly.

My wife tagged me on this essay that's making the rounds. I've been chewing on it for a while now. And I hesitate to speak up at all, because "what about [white] men" is a disproportional analysis. But then again this is a pretty solid episode of the hit series Patriarchy Hurts Everyone, so here I go.

I'll tell one on me too.

I had a job half my life ago selling jewelry. We had a fairly tightly-knit staff. Someone, not sure who, got in the habit of ending conversations with a little musical "love yoooouuuuu..."

It caught on. Should this ring shank be replaced? Yes, and add an unset/reset charge for the emerald. Okay, love yoooouuuuu. Love yooouuuuuuu.

Months went by and those love-yous got a little less drawn out and musical. One day someone pre-pended the earnest pronoun "I".

Can I have Saturday off? No, sorry, Josh is off. Okay, I love you. I love you too.

This was my twenties. Three other salesmen on that staff with me, and another man I connected with by chance. All stood with me on my wedding day. We're now scattered across four states and two time zones. We still stay in touch. We still proclaim our love. One day I kissed one of them on the cheek when we hugged hello. I surprised myself; I don't kiss anyone who isn't family. But it felt like breathing, so I kept it up.

Didn't always have that, though. I've had years of mere existence, staring every evening at a screen in my living room, reaching out to strangers there in the aether and wishing everyone in my physical proximity would leave me to live in my own idiot head. I was starving myself.

One day I stood before my wife, nearly in tears, saying "I miss my friend." A week later she was pressing a plane ticket into my hand. I did not deserve that or her. I'm trying to make up for that now.

Now I have another, local group of friends. We have a regular dinner thing. We talk. About sports, about lawn care. About our terror and shame and hope and love. I recently told one of them that I love him. The others are on deck.

Let me tell you about my boy.

My boy burns hot. My boy feels every drop of his feelings. You are his friend, even if you haven't yet met.

My boy loves. Profoundly. So much that it's hard to get him to tell me his darker thoughts. I can see the wall of embarrassment: what if Dad loves me less if I tell him? And I will own that sometimes the messiness of his feelings inconveniences me, that I reach to contain it and keep us on schedule, rather than guide him through.

I know that the world is going to do its damndest to beat his love and affection out of him. I know that I have to be vigilant, or I will help it. I have to protect him from me.

What I have seen, time and again, is that men are starving as I have starved. And we have to dress up our love and need in no-homo bullshit to justify it to each other. Iron John forest howling. Promise Keepers. White men doing hakas. Hugging that inexplicably involves hitting. Love yoooouuuuuu.

Yet I tell my son: Enough. Could you just calm down. Breathe, buddy, it's not that big of a deal. Every blow tempers him. I do not tell him enough that we feed each other with handfuls of our insides. That making a feast of our hearts makes them beat more loudly.

We are obsessed with masculinity. Masculinity is cosplay and individualism a cancer. We smother the best parts of us in the name of some facile made-up John McClane bullshit. We chase the myth of the self, as if the self exists. So now it's hard for us to turn the the person next to us and say "I'm really happy right now," much less admitting out loud that we're absolutely fuckin' terrified. And so we die.

I learned emotional labor and emotional nourishment relatively late in life. But there is my boy, and there are these men, this boy and these men for whom I burn. I look into the eyes of men who have found what I found and sometimes I see the wild and exultant desperation that I feel, the fear that this can't go away, not ever, or I'll die. It lashes my heart to the earth.

I was alone when I spilled my blood into the walls of my house. I was alone when I shook the soil of my home out of my shoes and onto an island in the Danube. I was alone when I forded a creek in search of my son, trying not to scream.

These stories, you need to hear them so that you know that we are here, you and I. If I do not tell you them, I will die, and if you do not hear them, then I never will have lived.

Listen:

Why We Camp

It's an hour past dark and we have a decent fire going. For which we are grateful, because the temperature's probably going to drop around forty. I am shod in a beatdown pair of Merrill slip-ons, which I have propped up on one of the rocks ringing the fire. I am so entranced by the flames that it's awhile before the nerve endings in my feet report that my soles are melting. I jerk my shoes away and some of them stays on the rock.

People with guitars at campfires are irritating. They only know old hits. Playing old hits around a campfire is like farting during a funeral.

It's September two (three? I am losing time) years ago and we are around a fire at Lake Ouachita. I am reading aloud to my children from my Father's Day gift. Its best story begins with a woman killing her stepson, tricking her daughter into thinking she had killed him, then cutting him up into stew meat and serving him to his father. From there the story builds into something lyrical and lovely and hopeful, and ends in happy tears. I feel grateful to read this while the smoke of the fire saturates everything. I note that my children don't so much as flinch at the horror of it.

The smoke. The smoke always gets in the hair on my hands, in the knees of my jeans. This is a dad thing to say, but the smoke smells honest to me, as do gasoline and lawn clippings and puppy breath. These things smell only of what they are, as if odors could be onomatopoeia.

It is two days ago and I am soaked through with rain and sweat. I am sick of the wet and squelch. I and my son have hung hammock tents between the trees and among the chiggers. We are using the reserved campsite tent, which has cots and a concrete floor, only to store gear. I have done this to pretend that I am still young, because thumbing my nose at the coming squall is surely going to make me feel young.

Instead I lose half a night's sleep to worrying about my boy every time the storm wakes me. This does not make me feel young. Is it bad enough yet to grab him and run for the cots? What if he's afraid to say that he's afraid? But we wake not long after dawn, bone dry and cozy. I let him sit in the shelter tent while I break his gear down in the rain as penance.

I have perfected my chigger bite remedy. It involves scratching the bites until they bleed, then swabbing them with alcohol and swearing. After that, clear fluid rises out of them, and I swab and swear some more.

It is over a quarter of a century ago and I am at a Church of Christ retreat. They are too polite to let me know that they think I am hellbound. I slide out of my top bunk in the middle of the night and land headfirst onto the concrete cabin floor. I vomit several times, am rushed to the ER and diagnosed with a concussion. They pray over my head. Two days later, I pull a groin muscle during capture the flag. They pray over my dick. It will be years before I realize how funny this is.

I do not remember the first time I felt wind on my dick. But I remember vividly how it felt.

It is early winter and we have gone on a campout with older scouts. We are a thirty-minute drive from the city, but we have gone down what feels like America's longest gravel road. We have pissed off the deer hunters by filling a prized spot with hollering children. We camp in freezing weather, our pack huddling around a log fire whose heat is reflected and amplified by a shallow cave wall. I keep my feet near the fire but remember my Merrills. I will be awakened several times by sore hips and cold and will go home rejuvenated.

It is sometime in the 1980s. I am sleeping on the front bench seat of a pontoon boat in the middle of Truman Lake. I fall onto the floor as I would do in that churchy cabin years later, but the fall is only hard enough to wake me. I sit up and watch the moonlight go hilltopping on the water. I imagine I am a sailor on my first of many nights at sea. Tomorrow we will get soft-serve at the Estes Drive-In on the way back.

It is 1991 and I am eating runny eggs and burned bacon on the side of a Colorado mountain at five in the morning. I am watching goats chase each other over the rocks. My horse has tried to bite me three times. I realize I will remember this meal on my deathbed and pour more gritty coffee into my mouth.

It is last spring and my daughter and I are hammock camping in the backyard. Dogs are barking. Some asshole neighbor is playing country music from a car stereo. The breeze is steady and it's cooling off. It is her first time solo in a tent and I am worried that she will get tangled up in her sleeping bag. I am worried that she will be cold or afraid. She shows me what she is made of.

Later I ask her if she and I could go on a real one sometime, just us, maybe to Pinnacle Mountain, and she jumps. She jumps.

Twitter has become a park filled with bats and perverts →

From the estimable Julieanne Smolinski.

There was nothing to be afraid of.

Scott Snyder on the changing landscape of childhood fears.

Look. Up in the Sky.

That's what I remember: Hot summer nights, sweltering in my bedroom, reading comics and dreaming and drawing, while life went on outside the window.

Imagine a jail cell, yeah? A fallout shelter, where the walls are covered with so many drawings you can't tell it's a prison anymore. It's so bright and colorful: sexy girls, handsome musclemen, adventure.

You start to forget it's not real. You don't realize the world's ended for you....

The world DID end. Something happened to me, something worse than the bomb, and it all died. It's just taken me this long to catch up.

Alone in the world. Alone in my room.

Now the superheroes are as fucked-up as the fucking rejects who write about them and draw them and read about them. All the heroes are in therapy and there's no one left to care about us.

No one at all.

— Grant Morrison, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery

I had this goofy-ass theory about the whole Edward Snowden thing. Well, not really.

The idea was this: if you were president and wanted to make good on a promise of a more open and accountable government after years of it consolidating power and rat-holing secrets, legislative haggling would get you nowhere. This would have to be a ground-up thing. The people would have to scream for it.

So one way to really get their attention? Wag the dog, orchestrate a live-action drama.

Snowden's right out of central casting for this, right? Young, good-looking kid, not highly educated, sort of an everyman. He looks like a young Gordon Freeman. His name's even a sort of slantwise portmanteau of Eddard Stark (nobleman killed by his candor and desire to find the truth) and Jon Snow (Stark's literal bastard son, exiled and trying to exist beyond the reach of civilization). Nice Easter eggs for the Nerd Century.

Then potboiler potboiler, Hong Kong China Russia Germany South America (Nazis!) Central America Russia Russia intrigue black hole Bolivia planes Spain France...Russia? Russia! Major players nearly all current or former authoritarian states famed for monitoring and controlling their own people.

So you concoct this whole thing, wait for people to get angry, let yourself take the fall as the bad guy, and grass-roots change begins. You successfully shove your nation off the path to becoming a police state. Talk about legacy.

Hell, even a spy novelist said he wished he'd written it.

Yeah, dumb. It's a wish, a fantasy. I don't believe it's real, not because I've all but abandoned hope in our government or the possibility that we can actually restore the sanctity of the rule of law, but for one simple reason: It would never work.

It's a great story, but people would have to care. That's the hard part. They'd have to care. Most've spent the last dozen or so years throwing up their hands and sighing, or worse, nodding in fervent agreement with whoever waves his flag the hardest or holds his cross the highest.

Age hardens in me the conviction that we are all of us broken in some way.

If reading about heroes doesn't inspire us to action, then why do we dream up stories about them? Is it just a balm, a way of enduring one more day under fluorescent tubes? Is it just a dream of a world we don't live in and don't know how to make? That can't be all there is to it, can it?

I love Grant Morrison because Grant Morrison believes in heroes. Not tough guys dressed in drab tones, but old-school heroes. Bright colors. Spandex. Kittens from trees. Men of Muscle Mystery. And the best part: he believes that that kind of heroism is, in its way, real.

I wrote last time of optimism. Life responded by tossing me headlong into a test of my commitment to that ideal, and I became an insufferable bastard.

None of which invalidates what I wrote before. I still believe in optimism. I still believe that it is a choice. But for me, it's a hard one.

Morrison will tell you that we are on the cusp of a new birth, that we will evolve into something more. He says it with the certainty of a man who has flipped ahead and read the last chapter.

I believe in that future too, but it's just a belief, not his certainty. To me it is only a possibility, the hope of which I sometimes cling to.

And I see that we are broken. And I wonder if we'll break that possibility too.

A young boy I love very much is being bullied. Some other boys who call themselves Christians are picking on him for being an atheist.

This boy I love has had suicidal thoughts. He recently admitted them to his parents. I think about it, and I pity his parents for the rage they have to swallow. Mine's only a fraction of theirs, and I caught myself fantasizing about terrorizing these children to get even.

Children.

I believe in modern-day gods and titans too, but I think they only exist if we choose to make them exist, and I can't see one here any more clearly than I can in the news. I see only that boy's fear and depression, the pathetic and damnable smugness of his tormentors, and my even more contemptible desire to heap his sufferings on their heads a hundredfold.

Professing a belief in something means doodly-shit if you abandon it in the worst case. My president believed in accountability until he saw the hard costs of it. Those kids believed in the teachings of Christ until they were confronted with someone who thought Jesus just another hero that someone made up. Me? I'm trying to remember that I don't believe in revenge or giving up.

Perhaps it's because so many things have come so easily to me that I find that last instinct as natural as breathing. It got hard; I'm going to bed.

I'm shamed by that boy, the one that I love, who has kept going in the face of torment, who had the guts to tell his parents he was thinking of ending his life. He's more of a man than I.

I'm shamed by the one Christian friend of his who has the sand to stand by him when the others threaten the same treatment. Give that boy a cape and some heat vision. Better yet, give him a church or a shelter to run.

I've never been anywhere near the brink of killing myself, but I do know what it's like to enumerate it as a possibility, to know that it's easier to be dead than you. You carry that possibility around in your back pocket, occasionally running your fingers over the bulge just to confirm that it's still there. Its presence isn't scary or sad, only a fact, reassuring in its way. An off-switch, break glass in case of emergency. Everything bad will stop. You don't need it yet, you just need to know that it's there.

It seems so reasonable to keep it there in your pocket, and it's only in your more lucid moments that you realize how alone that reasonableness is.

This boy that I love got knocked on his ass by that much loneliness, and he stood back up. While I was grumping about my bank account and my busted-ass car and compiling my list of petty grievances, while a dear friend's daughter finally and understandably grew weary of a lifetime of defeat and broke the glass, he stood up. This boy that I love.

I hope he keeps standing up. I hope life lets him keep his legs. Because if so, god damn, the hero he will become.

You Know How I Feel

Just listen to this.

You probably have already. Somebody covered it on some TV talent show and it went kerflooey everywhere. I think you'll agree that it's pretty damn wonderful.

I was painting my daughter's room just now while listening to it and that thing in my chest went twang and I welled up a bit and I started thinking about why it does that to me, other than Ms. Simone's turpentine-syrup voice. There's something raging in the scaffolding of that song, and I think it's this: She's singing about how happy she is, but she's doing it in a minor key, not the most obvious choice for the subject.

Her voice casts a solitary declaration out into the dusk. Then comes the BUH BUHBUH BUHBUH artillery of the horns. She follows along but doubles down against their descent, her voice rising up with a threadbare and gritty shade draped over it. The contrast between what she's singing and how she's singing it exposes the raw nerve of that joy, reveals it to be the act of defiance that it is.

It's just goddamn hard to be whole.

Now, I've got nearly every advantage in the world. I was raised middle class by the world's best parents, was labeled "gifted" at the age of three, got two college educations, am able-bodied, look faintly nosferat-ish but not unattractive, and I have no major mental illnesses or behavioral disorders. I have spent my life splashing in an endless puddle of love and opportunity. So if it's this hard for me sometimes, I cannot imagine how it must have been for her, a mid-century African-American woman who came up from poverty and got slapped around by schizophrenia.

"Talent is a burden, not a joy," she once told a crowd. "I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you." But she was us. She was us magnified. I wish she had known that.

Out of that loneliness comes the loudest line: "Freedom is mine, and I know how I feel." The words and notes demand to be belted, but she makes them a threat. Freedom, motherfucker, do you speak it.

We sometimes dismiss optimists as naïve, but I'm calling bullshit on that. If my own well-stocked larder is any proof, pessimism is cheap. Optimism, like joy, starts with a hard choice.

Optimism is belief in the possibility of joy. Joy needs freedom. Freedom means not being owned. It means casting off bonds and ballast. It means choosing defiance. Optimists have sand.

It is hard to be whole. It is an impossible chore, and it is the nature of our predicament that, if we are to have any hope at all, we must choose it.

Sleep in peace when day is done. That's what I mean.

Memento Mori

I talk to myself. A lot. I don't feel like I've actually lived a day unless I got to spend at least 20 minutes of it talking to myself. Because I am a goddamn crazy person.

It started when I was a kid, I think mostly because I had trouble holding a coherent thought in my head unless I wrote it down or said it out loud. There was a semester or two there when I would study for philosophy exams by breaking into lecture halls and pretending to teach the course material to the empty room.

Yep, that's nuts. It's embarrassing. Doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a normal, healthy person does, right? But it's been over three decades now, and I'm not sure I know how to stop. Plus, confession time: I like doing it. Maybe it's narcissism, maybe it's my weird and contradictory relationship with quiet, I don't know. But I love talking to myself. It comforts me, grounds me.

So I'm in my car the other day and I've decided to spend my lunch break driving around and talking to myself. I'm driving around and I'm talking to myself about, I don't know, JavaScript or an ISO formatting issue or my kids or Neil Gaiman or whatever. I don't know. But it was nothing of import, just me thinking out loud. Like a crazy person.

And then a thought popped into my head, a derpily-obvious but nonetheless-there-it-is thought:

You are going to die.

It hit me as though it were going to happen sometime in the next ten minutes.

Earth-shattering, I know. But I had a french fry in my hand and form validation on my lips, and it broadsided me. I recoiled and gathered myself and said it out loud: "You are going to die." Then I said "Fuck." Then I asked myself a question.

Say you're going to die in three hours. You've already said goodbye and thanks and I love you to your friends and family. You even got to shake Grant Morrison's hand, to hug Brooks Hansen for writing The Chess Garden, to tell Tom Waits a dirty joke and join him in a round of "Goodnight, Irene". They've all been pulled away, and now you have three hours to do what you want with your time. What would you do?

You'd want to leave a marker behind, however temporary, right? I'd want to make something, and I'm better and faster with words than anything else, so: I would write.

What would I write? That's where it gets hard. But I think I would once and for all completely untether myself. Not a confession of sins, but one last stab at reaching for your hand and talking about the things we have in common and hide from one another.

Maybe it would be an essay, maybe a story. Maybe I'd do something clever and address my children while really talking to adults. Lord knows that's never been done before.

But I would write, and I would write something that mattered, if I had it in me to do so. I'd go deep purple on that motherfucker, too.

Which raises the obvious question of why I'm not doing more than dabbling infrequently with that now. Good question.

No, this isn't the typical "I'm going to quit my job and find my way as a writerly writer" revelation. I'm too smart to just shitcan what I've spent years building to pursue a life of poverty and frustration and predatory contracts. I like my job, I do, I just don't care about it all that much.

I think that has to mean that I'm going to start doing this more, so I have built myself a system that allows me to take writing breaks from my coding. Right now I'm typing blind on a covered iPad while staring at a monitor that says this:

{
    xtype: 'hiddenfield',
    flex: 1,
    fieldLabel: 'Label',
    name: 'documentationIndicator'
}

I'm writing this while I stare at that and the whiteboard at the other end of the table, just as Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club while pretending to take notes in meetings. I'm going to write blind, every day, and when things come out that are post-worthy, I'm going to post them. No promises on frequency.

I'm going to do this because I've learned this about myself in the last year: My brain does not have a stable state. It's growing or dying, and only learning makes it grow.

Every day I fertilize it or poison it. I can fertilize it with a technical challenge even if the work I'm supporting is boring and mundane, but that all goes Agent Orange when I'm pushing 200 fields around a form or debugging a validation routine.

So I must fertilize, and if I cannot find a way to make my living doing something I truly love, then I will bring my love into my work, and I will do it in secret. Don't tell anyone.

I'll do it because I may be dead in three hours, and I want my children to open my Dropbox (kids: look in the "notesy" folder after Dad croaks) and find something sublime in there when I'm gone.

I was cleaning up that folder and found this in an unnamed textfile the other day:

It should have fun
It should be funny
It should have adventure
Heroes should fall
Heroes should rise
Things should go boom
No boobs, unfortunately
Han Solo should science a mammal

Yeah, I don't know either, but any ground where I can lose and find stupid shit like that needs to be tended.

Look: None of what I'm saying here is particularly profound or daring, I know. But it's hard. It's hard not to hide from it. When I was young, I used to sleep to hide from my anxieties and fears, and though I threw away that pacifier long ago, I found other, subtler ones. Now I'm trying to rid myself of them. Only in the last year or two have I felt like I'm waking up. And wow, the stuff I missed.

So the new plan is I'm going to spend the back half of my life writing my obituary, though I'll be damned if I know what form it will take. I'll try like hell to make it an honest one and a good one. There will be overwrought and overwritten weepy time stuff, and there will be dongs. Just you wait. But it will be my obituary, my testimony.

So I'll write the opening now, and then we'll start figuring out the backstory together.

Matt Reed was born on the 110th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination and died on its bicentennial because stories are tidy like that. He died, appropriately enough, in a theater, though he was not murdered.

He was watching a stage production of Daniel Pinkwater's seminal novel The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death when the nanobots in his bloodstream malfunctioned, swarmed to his brain, and over-stimulated the neurons that housed the combination to his brother's first bicycle lock. Experts are still trying to determine why this caused him to combust.

Onlookers reported that Mr. Reed had shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" in the manner of Marcus Junius Brutus and John Wilkes Booth, but a scan of the nanobot logs indicates that he had instead shouted a slurred "six two three two", which analysis suggests was the bike lock's combination.

Mr. Reed leaves behind his beloved if overly-sassed wife Jennifer; his son Jack, inventor of tiger invisible robot technology; and his daughter Georgia, Roving Warlady Empress of the Fourth Obfuscation.

Mr. Reed died as he lived: terrified, confused, and on fire.

Danger Devil Dracula Delta Lima Five

Just realized the other day that this year is a silver anniversary. 25 years ago this summer, I got to go to Hawaii and stay with my aunt for about a month. I rode a boogie board almost every day. I ate my very first pizza with pineapple and ham.

I got to do this because my parents needed me and my brother out from underfoot for a few weeks. This was because a doctor looked at some scans of my dad's body and said he'd be dead of renal cancer in two years.

When a doctor tells you that, if you're my mom, you find a very polite way to tell him to either change his attitude or else go fuck himself, and then you start Making Plans, plans that involve sending your kids to your sister's and curb-stomping some cancer. And that is what she, what they did.

Dad had a tumor in one of his kidneys and another one metastasized on his hip. The word "grapefruit" came up, as I'm sure it has in your life. It usually means that it's time to start sourcing caskets and marble.

But my dad, you see.

My dad.

My dad fights.

This is my dad. Right here, this is my dad.

My dad was drafted. My dad was sent to war. My dad made a good friend over there.

My dad's friend blew up. Trip wire. He made a mistake, came back to camp the same way he left. You're not supposed to do that. Boom, there went my dad's friend. I don't think my dad ever got over it, not really.

This is my dad.

Right here.

He picked up...I want you to listen to me right now.

He picked up what pieces of his friend he could find.

My dad picked them up.

And he carried them with him. Through the heat of a Vietnamese jungle. He carried them so the family would have something to bury.

I have no idea how he did that. When I think of that story, I literally — literally — pray to God that I never find out.

That is my dad, right there. That is a hyperbolic story that perfectly encapsulates my dad. Except that it doesn't, it's not enough, because I'm a dad and I know that for that one big story, there are a million little sacrifices he made before and after that no one noticed.

My dad was Danger Devil Dracula Delta Lima Five. That was his Army callsign.

Danger Devil Dracula Delta Lima Five. Fight that.

I hate cancer. I know you do too, but I don't know if you hate cancer the way I do. I think of cancer as a person, I really do, and sometimes I wish it had a house so I could drive there and, I don't know, slash its tires? Throw biscuit dough at its house, challenge it to a fight?

It killed my other mom, my wife's mom, on New Year's Eve. It robbed my wife of her mother, my children of a grandmother they will strain to remember.

It murders people. It strips them of their dignity, leaves them bald and hollowed out and impotent and incontinent. It steals their balls and breasts and wombs and we pretty much invented it and there is not enough hate in the world for it.

So 25 years ago this summer, my parents sent me off to one of the best vacations I ever had. And I, selfish 13-year-old little shit that I was, thought more about my own adventures on Oahu than I did about my dad trying not to die. I'm okay with that, really, because I know teenagers are narcissistic and I know my parents sent me away primarily to make me forget, and I still have my dad.

My dad.

Grenade went off behind my dad. Blew him into a tree. Mortar round went off by him, spat shrapnel into his leg, some of which is still there. Orders for one of his medals included the phrases "complete disregard for his own personal safety" and "selfless concern for others". It included the phrase "devastating barrage".

And then my dad came home. My dad always comes home.

Danger Devil Dracula Delta Lima Five.

My dad can beat up your dad, if your dad is war or cancer. My dad is tougher than war and cancer. Beat that.

This summer is the 25th anniversary of the last time my dad didn't die.

25 years.

My dad.

Happy anniversary.

Cost/Benefit Analysis 101

About a month back, I stopped taking my attention pills out of concern that they were staking what optimism I had to an anthill and breaking out the sorghum. I was in what you might call a bad way. So I talked to a doctor friend, put the pills down, and set an appointment to talk to my psychiatrist about it. I went nine days without taking my thinkum.

Now lacking its lubricant, my brain settled right back into the fog of the previous 35 years. Meetings turned into high school jazz band concerts. Things I love started to bore me again. And hey, what's on TV?

But here's the problem: I immediately got happier. The fog was a struggle, but man did my general dissatisfaction evaporate.

The psychiatrist cautioned that likely the pills didn't create that unhappiness, but dug it up. And he was right; starting a new medication brought much of it back. Blowing back the fog uncovered some stuff I hadn't wanted to see.

So this has me thinking about costs, which is to say that I'm thinking about scarcity. Finding drive and ambition at mid-life presented itself as a choose-your-own-adventure version of Flowers for Algernon: If you want to slip back into the fog of contentment, turn to page 39 and let's look at some pretty mice. If you want to be prodded by a nebulous cocktail of passion and terror that disrupts every corner of your world but so far exists beyond your capacity to understand or channel it, turn to page 67 and let's punch us some goddamn Martians.

Yes, there's Martian punching in Flowers for Algernon. Having fun ain't hard if you have a library card.

Even so, the fog still beckons. The epicurean ideal of retreating to the garden to reflect and create has its allure. I imagine sitting at a desk writing for my dinner or plunked down at a workbench making something with my hands, and yeah, I'm not a little bit in love with the romantic ideal there, if not the reality I know that would come with it. But: quiet, contemplation, refuge. Manna.

Thing is, I also know that I'm not necessarily here to be happy. The point of being is to get to work, to make things better, or else who gives a damn. Change is made by people who grab a used snorkel and wade into the sewer. It comes from those who cut themselves and bleed into boring, thankless, necessary work. They don't allow themselves the luxury of retreat, if it's even available to them. They know that if you're not helping, you're in the way.

So I guess I'm asking; Do we have to choose between being happy and using our lives to the extent that we should? Do we even have a say in the matter? How much satisfaction can a man claim for himself and still sleep the sleep of the just?

Maybe it wasn't a revelation. Maybe this is just the by-product of what happens when you give my brain a stimulant. Maybe I'm in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Maybe I'm just bored.

I have not a clue, but no way I'm going back. I begged to be made to burn and it happened and it turns out that that hurts a lot. There's zero that's romantic about it, I don't give a tinker's damn what the poets told you. Like love, burning is hard, especially when you're a middle-aged man with no idea where or how he's supposed to combust. It demands payment.

This business of dissatisfaction is a slog, and I'll be honest, sometimes it borders on despair. But I'm finally beginning to feel like I'm in the world. And I don't have a clue what I can do with that, but it's going to be something.

Also, I got a new job.

Exit Stage Left

So this essay by Wallace Shawn made the rounds almost exactly a year ago. It's one perspective on why so many artists, actors particularly, tend to skew toward economic liberalism or, in his case, socialism.

But economics isn't why I linked it. I linked it because of this part:

We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there’s a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he’s playing himself in his daily life, he’s playing a part, he’s performing, just as he’s performing when he plays a part on stage. He knows that when he’s on stage performing, he’s in a sense deceiving his friends in the audience less than he does in daily life, not more, because on stage he’s disclosing the parts of himself that in daily life he struggles to hide. He knows, in fact, that the role of himself is actually a rather small part, and that when he plays that part he must make an enormous effort to conceal the whole universe of possibilities that exists inside him....

And as I walk out onto the street on a sunny day, dressed in my fortunate bohemian costume, I pass...the grim-faced domestic worker who’s slipped out from her employer’s house and now races into a shop to do an errand, and I see nothing, I think nothing, I have no reaction to what I’m seeing, because I believe it all.

I simply believe it. I believe the costumes. I believe the characters. And then for one instant, as the woman runs into the shop, I suddenly see what’s happening, the way a drowning man might have one last vivid glimpse of the glittering shore, and I feel like screaming out, “Stop! Stop! This isn’t real! It’s all a fantasy! It’s all a play! The people in these costumes are not what you think! The accents are fake, the expressions are fake -- Don’t you see? It’s all --”

Boom.

Every now and then I'll be walking to the office I choose to work at from the car I chose to drive, wearing the jacket and shoes and pocket hanky I bought for myself, and for just an instant, I wonder where I am and what the hell happened. Whose life is this, whose jacket? Who cast me in this? Why do people expect me to walk into this office and sit down and do this job, don't they understand that we're only reciting this script we've never read because we've all (insanely) agreed that it's real?

Shawn's mob of characters abides in me too. Sometimes they won't shut up. There's an athlete, a doctor, a salesman. A preacher, a murderer, a philanderer. A politician. A musician. A homeless addict. A writer, ker-chortle ye not, and dozens where each of them came from. They're in there, these men, waiting only for circumstance to let them out.

The really loony thing is that I don't want any of them to solidify and become permanent, not even the one that I let out every day for everyone to see. I want to contain them all, give each the fullest range of expression I can allow without hurting anyone. I don't think it's fair that any of them should be favored over the others, not even this one that's worked out pretty well for me so far, because I love all of them, even the scary ones and the bastards.

George Saunders was in a plane he knew was going to crash. And he caught the eye of the woman sitting across the aisle, and they held hands as the plane went down. They held hands because they knew each other, though they had never spoken before.

You see things for what they are when they're about to end. You see the costumes, and you think maybe you could change them just as easily as putting on a new jacket. Or, hey, maybe try nudity for a change, if that's even possible.

It doesn't take tragedy or crisis to show us this. Anything that jabs at the center of us is enough.

Usually it's a new thing. A song you never heard before that sounded as if it were plucked from the sky. Someone farting in the middle of a eulogy. Your son swimming nude across your freshly-shellacked hardwood floor. The cat leaping onto your ass mid-thrust. Or, maybe, the wind catching you just right as you're crossing your office parking lot.

Every now and then I'll hear a guitarist bend a string a certain way or a harp blower curl his tongue back and suck hard or, shit, something like Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre, and I know that at the center of me is a factory that forges that exact sound from my liver and my terror and my semen and my shit and my joy. Stories do it to me too.

I know that sound is in there, I can hear it echoing off my spleen, and I need to let it out of me now now now or I'll burst. But it passes. It's like finishing sex without getting to come, but it passes.

Then comes a welcome quiet, and I forget for a while. As Shawn points out, to live with this conscious knowledge every moment of your life would be unbearable, would paralyze you, would make even the daily chores that sustain your life seem absurd. It would lead any sane person to think themselves mad. I sure as shit feel crazy admitting all of this to all of you. But I've got to figure a way to let that sound out, don't you?

To understand it is to understand that so much of what transpires, so much of what we think of as The Way Things Are is what it is because we agree that it is, and therefore there's little that can't be piped to /dev/null and replaced with something new. You just have to get enough people to agree to change their clothes, that's all.

It's not quite that simple, of course. There's work to be done first, a new set to be built, new costumes to be sewn and fit. But I suspect it begins with a conviction: I'm not going to play this part any more.

Why I Run

I'm closing in on a nine-minute mile. It's only over 5k distance, so no big whoop. I'm going to have to push harder to comfortably maintain that pace for anything longer than a 10k, but still, I'm a few steps down the road toward a sub-four-hour marathon. Woo hoo.

Had a good one last Friday. Beat my 5k record of the previous week, which beat my record of two days before, which beat my record of a week prior to that. I'm on a good one right now. Feet: Gently Chewed.

Thing is, I don't often enjoy running. I hate it, sometimes. Sometimes it's everything I can do to drag myself out there, sometimes I get a mile or two out and think "screw it, there's popcorn at home" and turn back. So why do it?

Shortest and most obvious answer is vanity. I'll cop to that. There's also a smörgåsbord of diabetes and cardiovascular disease in my family, and I'll be damned if I'm going out like that. But I think there's something else in there too, something that may not be exactly venerable but at least on the up-and-up, morally speaking.

Terry Pratchett, may the Nezperdian Hive Mind of Chaos smile upon him with one its six mouths, once wrote that "Too many people want to have written," and that's pretty much how I view going out for a jog. I don't want to run. I want to have run.

Specifically, I want to be on that cool-down walk that starts at Steve's white Chevy pickup and goes down the slope and around the curve and finishes at my driveway. That walk, even after a bad run, tells me I have given my due and earned my rest.

I've left at least some of my cares on the pavement. I've sweated, I've pushed myself, I've produced a frankly disturbing amount of mucus. I've made my down-belows smell like my left-behinds. My feet are mildly to moderately raw. There's a good round of stretching and a shower in my near future. Best of all, my muscles are slack, my shoulders are back, and my head's surrounded by cartoon bluebirds.

I loved hallucinating when I was young and stupid. A mental experience that's nearly impossible to describe? For a guy like me, that's its own advertising. I loved watching my brain unfurl. I remember lying in the middle of a country road with three good friends, looking up at the stars and talking about exactly the kind of shroomed-up pseudo-profundity you'd expect we were talking about. But it was Technicolor, and to us children it sure sounded profound. For a few hours, it took away so much grey.

I heard a thing once about a study conducted of those rare musicians who can start composing songs on the spot. No planning, no backup band, no nothing, just pick up their instrument and out comes a song nobody ever played before. They did neurological scans of these guys as they played (yeah, I know, the old Radiolab brainscan plot point, but still), and they found that the part of the brain associated with censoring ourselves wasn't firing for them. Their creation sprung at least partly from a complete lack of self-consciousness.

Indeed, I've found myself circling the boundaries of sleep with a hyperactive imagination, dreaming up images and landscapes and movement and shapes and colors that were captivating, wishing to Christ I could somehow record it all and play it back later. But then the sleep came, the moment went, and all I have left is the longing.

The drugs let you do that while you're fully awake. That's the hook. A heightened facility for letting go of yourself and chasing the weird shit out the basement of your brain. I was hooked on that. I wanted it all the time. That's why so many artists are addicts. Booze and drugs are lubricants. They make it easier. But it never lasts, and that's the cost.

Sometimes running does a bit of that to you. Sometimes pushing yourself to your physical limits makes your mind more fluid, more curious, more starved to imagine. Sometimes merely being worn out is enough to keep you from censoring yourself. Sometimes, as after last Friday's run, I hear grasshoppers from a block away and smell barbecue from last week and wrap myself in the conversation that is outside, and I dream while walking.

When you get to distance, sometimes you reach a state like auto-hypnosis. Mile...I dunno, ten? Twelve? Fifteen? You seem to both delve within yourself and yet lose your sense of self. The padding of your feet on asphalt. The rhythmic breathing on the brink of entropy. The twisting of your abdomen and spine. You are abstracted.

In the middle of you is an empty thing. It is dark. Not evil or foreboding or devoid of life, but like what I imagine outerspace to be: quiet, patient, spinning, waiting to be discovered.

Nietzsche looked into it and saw nothing. Kierkegaard saw what he believed was the gulf separating humankind from God. I don't know what I see, but I hear silence. I can lose myself in that silence. I can get out of my way, for at least a little while. When I emerge, things are a bit different. I don't know how. But I feel cleansed.

Soon after my son was born, my mother-in-law came over for a visit, and I excused myself to go do eight miles on our treadmill and get my head right. She shook her own head when I was done and marveled that I, the parent of a newborn, could have the energy to do that.

The answer, of course, was that spending an hour throwing myself onto the ground was my survival strategy. Find that center, lose myself in it, come back. Energy? I was a new father. I was a tangle of bedsprings. When his little sister was born and I was no longer doing distance? That was harder to endure.

And then there is that fix. Endorphins swabbing the decks of my brain. A quiver in my leg. The groaning of my iliotibial bands when I grab a knee and its associated ankle afterward and pull. The water. The water. The water.

I make it to Steve's truck, and I wipe my head with my shirt and start to walk. I dream of the apocalypse. I dream of my children and the world they will inherit, which is to say that I dream of the apocalypse. I dream of being president and harp blower and algorithmist and blacksmith and writer and volunteer, and my quadriceps shake and for a second I take my eyes off of the pointy things in the street and I look up at the moon. Sanya Richards-Ross congratulates me through my earbuds and I realize that this is the wake of an acid orgasm, only more painful.

Which makes it more interesting. And more real.

Pushing myself to that center makes me malleable, moldable. If the pain and tiredness aren't too much (and at this distance, they never are unless it's hot), I am ready to see things. I am ready to work.

I'm addicted again to a thing I don't often care for, but this one's going to give me more time with my family, and it won't lie to me or pick my pocket.

Could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I just quit drinking.

Rise, My Creation, Your Master Commands

You've probably figured out that tools are important to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about them, and I like to write about them too.

Problem is that most of the tools I rely on every day are, predictably enough, software, and there's already a big crowd of people who write about software and getting work done. There's Sven and there's Patrick and there's Sparky and there's Eddie and there's Drang and there's Brettsy von Terpington and there's Merlin and there's Merlin and there's Merlin and there's more besides. I don't feel like trying to duplicate their success.

I was ruminating on this the other day when I had made my third failed attempt at a post I still haven't given up on about how I use alerts and notifications to emulsify awesome sauce. I found myself slipping into doing some variation on the sort of thing I read in my RSS feeds every day, and let's face it, if I do that, there's really no point to this place.

That got me wondering what the point of this place is, and I was surprised at how difficult that question was to answer. I thought on that for days, and then a very scary career opportunity presented itself, and the answer tumbled out of my skull.

I was trying to get work done but had just finished one of those conversations that completely derails your brain with scary possibilities, and as a result, I was worse than useless. I was literally experiencing a mild fight-or-flight response thinking about it, swept up in a mix of exhilaration and the sort of terror one feels when confronted with the dead-eyed ghost of a six-year-old Japanese girl.

I had anti-focus. I knew I had to process it before I could get anything done, so I started typing, and eventually, the following came out.

A note before we dig in: Please pardon the grandiosity (and random perspective-shifting). I tend to tinge purple when I'm brain-dumping and I hadn't intended it for public consumption, but I don't think I should edit it too heavily, for honesty's sake.

This is what I wrote:

The thing is that you are meant to do something on this earth. You are meant to change things in some small way. That is why you were given hands and a mind and a heart and legs. You were meant to do things that make people's lives better. You certainly were meant to always be working to make yourself better. This [opportunity] is the devil you don't know, sure. But would you rather be impotent and underused?

This thing in me that wants to live, I want to let it, and I'm not sure of how. I worry about the costs. But I desperately want it to live. Sometimes it seems I can physically feel it burning in my chest, and I don't know if that's real or not, but I damn near don't care because it feels alive.

The job's not going to give me that. No job is, unless it's a very special one. I'm not sure that even necromancing my old dream of being a decently-paid writer would do it for me, not really. Once you're doing what you love, the trick is to keep loving what you're doing. And how many people get paid to write what they want?

That sense of being alive, I've found it in music and art and books and women and movies and funerals and Jennifer and the birth of my children and I'm hungry for more of it. I want to find it in me, in my life.

"Your life is coming to you," I hear that thing say, and I think, it's here. I'm living it. What else is there?

To build something, for starters. To feed and amplify wonder. To make others feel a hunger and longing for that feeling and to be lost in it.

You can write about OmniFocus. You can write about notifications. You can write about clutter and focus and tools and tricks, but it should always be connected to your heart and your fear and your life and your longing for something you're not sure exists. That is your blog. The intersection of tools and dreams, usefulness and impracticality, fear and longing and love and sex and giving and meaning and failure. A glorious Kurt Vonnegut butthole-shaped crossroads of life.

That is The Tool Shed. Looking for a way to build dreams and change out of the things of this earth. Talking about the stuff we all know but don't say. Finding a way to help that thing live. Not a whole lot of blogging about that.

Now look at notifications and OmniFocus and tools and your job in THAT light, fucker. Where are the angels and goblins in your contexts?

Woof. Is that Bill Shakespeare? I don't have my glasses on.

But I hope the gist is clear: that thing at the center of me lies mostly beyond my comprehension, but I'm pretty sure it is at least partly a call to do work. Not necessarily my job, not even necessarily an avocation like this place, but something that matters, something that changes things in some small way. I can't quite shake that loose.

I'm only now starting to get comfortable with the idea that all life is searching, that when you feel like you've arrived, it's pretty much all over. So if this site really does last and is to be anything, it is to be a chronicle of that searching, with a keen eye on keeping it bullshit-free.

I'm encouraged by the surprising level of reaction I've gotten from people who have read this site and the new friends I've made because of it, but the real reason I know this place is on the right track is that every time I write something like this, I'm choking down panic. That means it's worthwhile, because it means I'm selling my heart.

Now I think I'll call my shot: Spinning the Wheel of Topics, the next post will be about trying to spend more time acting and less time reacting.

Arrows and Options and Vomit, Oh My

Everybody in the world's commenting on this essay by Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, so I figure I might as well bumf around on it too.

I stumbled across it via the Radiolab iPhone app (which is excellent) in the middle of a pisser of a day: low focus, bad workout over lunch, and kicked off with this post from Rands in Repose in my RSS feeds. The Rands post announced that he will now start advertising jobs as a way of monetizing the site that might actually benefit his readers. He asked this question:

There are many forms to not being busy. You might just be getting your day started with a cup of coffee, you might be on your lunch hour, or you might have seven precious minutes to take a deep breath amongst your crushing responsibilities, but here’s my question: is the lack of busy more fun than your job?

And I was just getting my day started with a cup of coffee, but I thought, well...yeah. And then I went back to navigating my way through the best career advancement opportunity I've ever been handed. Yeah, I know.

I was feeling more than a little down on myself -- bad workout, bad focus, bad answer to that Rands question. Then I found Jad's essay.

It's about how Radiolab started and the deep existential dread Jad felt trying to get it off the ground and make it good. It's about the joy of not having a plan.

In it, he brings up three ideas that kept me standing still until I'd finished reading the whole thing: pointing arrows, the adjacent possible, and running toward things that make you want to vomit.

Pointing Arrows

I'm a messy person. My house is a wreck, and I'm lucky to have kids to blame for it, but it isn't their khaki shorts on the bookcase. Still, there are many places in my life where I crave order like it's oxygen, particularly when I am contemplating a new project or task. I don't need (or want) all my days to look alike, but when it comes to the important stuff, I do need to know the plan. I need an anchor point. An outline, a process diagram, a syllogism, something. That's what my brain craves: logic, sequence, order, plan.

That's precisely what frustrates me about living. I often grope for a plan for my life but have yet to grasp one. Truth, I normally can't see beyond the next move or two in my own career or personal life. And so my life has mostly felt like a chain of back roads I've meandered along. I was okay with that when I was young and immortal. No more.

My hope? Looking for that moment when something seems to shift, when a chance encounter illuminates a possible way forward.

My life has been pierced here and there by those pointing arrows, as I bet so has yours. Those little moments open up possibilities that make my brain pay attention for a change. They invite me to go left instead of right, often without a hint where I'm being pointed, just a glimmer that it could be important. Listen up. Pay attention. It feels like something important's happening.

This job and my last one were pointing arrows from the first interview. Falling for my wife, of course, was a pretty big one. So was that Back to Work podcast I wrote about before that completely changed my life. And so was Jad's essay.

I always follow those arrows. I never regret it.

The Adjacent Possible

I love that term. I love the concept more. It's the change right next door, the one you can make right now. I love it because it's what makes the uncertainty tolerable for me.

When I'm overwhelmed with frustration because I don't know where I'm headed or what my life is finally going to amount to, I am calmed with a simple thought: What can I do now? What can I change?

It usually ain't much. The answer is often "keep heading this way and see where it leads". Sometimes it's "you've hit a dead end and you should have planned for this weeks ago". But sometimes it's something new.

My adjacent possibles are easy to enumerate because they are few. I am a husband and father, which pretty much trumps all other considerations. That takes away a lot of sexy (and probably therefore illusory) possibilities. It means I don't have time for hobbies, let alone something like starting up my own business, but it also keeps me from doing anything truly stupid. It's one thing to do something that scares you. It's quite another to do something that could hurt your kids.

But that's another thing, too: my job is to protect them and provide for them, but it's also to lead by example, and that example has to include that you go for the thing you think you should be doing. Trouble is I don't know what that is. I'd love it to be doing something like this, but as of yet I have no way to monetize it. File it under "things I hope I work out one day" and keep writing stuff like this because I love it and I think it's important.

So I keep my eyes open. I look for what's next door and hope it leads to a good place.

Anthony Hopkins once asked a priest "Father, what is the shortest prayer a man can pray?" The priest replied: "Fuck it."

It's okay that I'm not a master of life strategy. It's easier to make choices when you're not surrounded by dozens of possibilities and terrified of getting locked into one. Speaking of terror:

Gut Churn

Fear's a tough one. Fear and self-doubt have been my most faithful companions in life. Making a step toward something that terrifies me is, well, terrifying. But.

I don't know if it's the need to be a good role model to my kids, my growing awareness of my own mortality, or simply that I'm getting to be too old to give much of a damn, but these days I find myself more inclined to push myself toward doing things I find scary. Or at least I find myself telling myself that I should.

I've been quietly working on a thing with a guy that scares the shit out of me, a thing that I very much want to see the light of day and may die if that doesn't happen, a thing that seems silly to care that much about and won't earn me a goddamn dime. No, it's not a thing I'm going to tell you about. Even you, Mom.

But it's a pointing arrow. It's an adjacent possible. It sure as shit churns my guts when I think about it. It may lead nowhere; it may lead somewhere merely pleasantly distracting. But I have to see.

I'm scared of it, and right now I kind of suck at it. If (when) you behold the first couple of efforts, you'll detect both that fear and the suck. But that's why I have to do it. It's the monster in the closet, and I'm not going to kill it. I'm going to ask it to dance.

"Like" This, For the Love of God

So Facebook is pretty terrible.

I know a lot of you hang out there. I used to, briefly, but it got to be too much. I spent my time at Facebook like I do every church I've ever belonged to--with one foot out the door, the main reason for sticking around being the wonderful people I'd see there.

Sixty percent of my reason for leaving was Facebook's Josef-Mengele-with-a-chainsaw approach to my privacy and data security. They've been playing grab-ass with people's data for years, and it generally takes the threat of a federal investigation to remind them that scruples exist.

(Just as an aside, I wonder whether most people understand what can be at stake. Witness the Girls Around Me app shitstorm of awhile back, in which people's Facebook and Foursquare accounts were turned into a potential tool for sexual violence. That app's dead now, but the ability to get that data isn't.)

Anyway, there's still that remaining forty percent of the reason I left, and, paradoxically, it's identical to the reason I stayed: the people there.

I love Twitter, though it's slowly turning into Facebook. Someone once said that Facebook's the family you're born with and Twitter's the family you choose, and that's true, but don't take that to mean that I don't love the family I was born with. On the contrary, I adore them.

Family Is Hard

I love every person who I followed on Facebook, I do. And that's why it was excruciating to see the old high school friend parroting a facile stance on a complicated issue that they heard from some braying television jackass, the colleagues I hold in high esteem using idiotic phrases like "death boards", the people I would die for gleefully supporting policies that harm other people I would die for.

I die a little every time I see it, especially when I see someone swinging someone else's life around like a dead cat because they can, because to them it's not real, it's just an issue or a "stance". Sometimes I want to grab those people and shake them and ask them how they can dare be so wonderful and so necessary to me and yet be so glib about other people's lives.

There's the "hide" button, of course, and I've used it, but only for acquaintances. I can't bring myself to do it to people who have touched my life deeply, people who mostly post touching, funny, uplifting stuff. So I walked. Maybe that's a cop-out.

I'm just self-aware enough to be pretty sure that others among my friends and family likewise have shaken their heads in disbelief and sadness at things I've written online, and that's why I try like hell not to talk politics in public fora. I know some of them read my Twitter feed and this blog, and I'd rather not cause them that same pain. I frequently fail at this, though, when I get angry or feel like making a yuk-yuk or am otherwise irrational. It's hard, I get it. But I'm trying.

Boy howdy, am I glad I'm not on Facebook this month.

On August 1, the Best Babysitter in the World got the kids excited about going to Chick-Fil-A. This, midway through one shitter of a week--she wanted to take them there that day of all days. And that's not a conversation I wanted to be forced to have with a five-year-old boy who's excited about chicken and indoor playgrounds. How does one explain both human sexuality and otherwise good people supporting hate groups to a five-year-old boy in the same conversation? God bless my wife, who handled it with love and tact.

Parenting sucks sometimes. Okay, weekly. But mainly, all this just leaves me tired all over.

GRAR RAR (I'm a Scary Monster)

The Internet Rage Machine is powered by bile and lubricated with froth. It cannot wait to tell me every single day of my life who I should hate, who I should support, who is a hypocrite, and who is a saint. (Answer to that last one: Fred Rogers. Everyone else is suspect).

The net effect is that it strengthens my ambivalence and apathy more than my resolve. Don't get me wrong, the issue of equal rights for my LGBT friends and family is an important one to me, but I also shop at Target and still buy food that comes from ADM and Cargill and I'm sure that at least half of my income goes to moustache-twistingly evil places, because it's impossible to avoid them. They're running things, after all.

I can't do nothing, of course. I'm exhausted with discussions about which comedians supported Daniel Tosh and which didn't, but I'd like to see rape culture in this country be given herpes and set on fire, and I know that problems don't go away if we don't talk about them until everyone damn near starts rending their garments. Every now and then, someone actually learns something new. I know I do. Occasionally.

Still, it's all devolved into one big game of Issue Volleyball, and not the sexy kind of volleyball with the sexy athletes in the sexy panty outfits pulling the sexy wedgies out of their sexy bottom cracks.

And I'm tired. I'm tired of "winning" and "losing" and I'm tired of dragon fighting and I'm tired of outrage and I'm tired of a world in which I can't get a fucking chicken sandwich without punching a trans person in whatever genitals they have that are none of my business.

I'm also convinced, and I talked about it some in that last link, that at least some of this is a shiny thing dangled before us to distract us away from the more fundamental problems of money and power.

The one time I had a shred of respect for Karl Rove was an interview I read in which he admitted that he didn't want Roe v. Wade overturned. Why? Because he knew it would do to the GOP what the Civil Rights Act did to the Democratic party: it would destroy them for at least a generation.

I didn't put a link in that last paragraph, because I can't find one, so I'm beginning to doubt my memory there. But look to history: In the first six years of the Bush administration, with unprecedented control over all three branches of government, they did precisely zippo to re-criminalize abortion, which they claim to be one of the party's flagship issues. Nothing. What does that tell you about priorities?

I'm tired of that corruption, and I'm tired of those who profit from "us" vs. "them". Surely I'm not the only one. And just as I cringe at the growing political tribalism of modern-day Christianity and rolled my eyes clean out of my head at the presumption in the phrase "I'm a Christian" that the Best Babysitter in the World offered up in response to the Chick-Fil-A thing, I can't quite bring myself to carve up my loved ones into those two buckets and toss the one labeled "Them".

Nor do I think the accelerating trend of politics-as-blockbuster-movie is going to end well for any of us. Surely there must be some other way. Preferably one that no longer necessitates "Hide" buttons for anyone.

Hey, maybe this is a start.

Fear and Bandages

I’m about to yammer on for a bit. There will be no tl;dr summary. Buckle in:

Speaking my mind, particularly in mixed company, has never been my strong suit. In person, I mean. I can hide behind text and say withering things with the best of them when online, but out there in meatspace, eye-to-eye, my internal censor is one very active little dude. I’m sure that’s a common phenomenon.

I do this sometimes out of concern for others’ feelings, sometimes to avoid conflict, often out of shyness, and often because no matter how hard I try not to, I start advertising myself in the conversation. That last is a part of my personality I’d like to drag into an alleyway and take a hammer to. Call it my inner Shadoe Stevens[1].

Awhile back I wrote a post on the nature of intelligence and the admittedly first-world problem of not being as smart as I used to think I was. I (Neil deGrasse Tyson, actually) contrasted true smarts with mere fact collection and regurgitation, usually done to either impress people or shut them down.

Then I did another one on Tim Kreider’s open letter to the Tea Party, in which he frankly laid out both the similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street and the nature of their mutual antipathy.

Those things didn’t seem at all connected to me until I came across a MetaFilter post (yes, MeFi again, shaddup) about Charlie Kaufman’s recent lecture at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (PDF link). A touch long, but the first six pages are where the real meat is, and I’ll chunk out some quotes below.

It’s ostensibly a speech about screenwriting, but it really isn’t that at all. It’s a speech about fear and emptiness and uncertainty and selling yourself and being honest and kind. It’s about what separates us and prevents us from opening up to one another. All of which is at the core of good writing, mind, because writing is either about life or else it’s lies and masturbation. Which is to say, advertising.

I’ll try to restrain myself with the quotes, but it won’t be easy:

Here’s a recent quote that I found: ‘We do not talk, we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.’ That was actually written in 1945 by Henry Miller and I think it’s timely…. People all over the world spend countless hours of their lives every week being fed entertainment in the form of movies, TV shows, newspapers, YouTube videos and the internet. And it’s ludicrous to believe that this stuff doesn’t alter our brains.

It’s also equally ludicrous to believe that – at the very least – this mass distraction and manipulation is not convenient for the people who are in charge. People are starving. They may not know it because they’re being fed mass produced garbage. The packaging is colourful and loud, but it’s produced in the same factories that make Pop Tarts and iPads, by people sitting around thinking, ‘What can we do to get people to buy more of these?’

And they’re very good at their jobs. But that’s what it is you’re getting, because that’s what they’re making. They’re selling you something. And the world is built on this now. Politics and government are built on this, corporations are built on this.

Interpersonal relationships are built on this. And we’re starving, all of us, and we’re killing each other, and we’re hating each other, and we’re calling each other liars and evil because it’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning.

That’s pretty much the nut of it, and that’s when I made the connection at an embarrassingly late age: Served up at the root of all of this—the self-advertising, the spittle-flecked political division, the moralizing, all of it—is an American-sized portion of fear and emptiness. It’s a costume to conceal weakness: I am brave and I have a sword and you are either a knight or a dragon and I just dare you to be a dragon.

I’m not sneering. I’m as susceptible as the next guy. I embraced political drama too and only abandoned it after cable news turned it into a living reductio ad absurdum (the Latin is to impress you). In my short time among them, I positively goddamn wallowed in the Tim LaHaye-esque demonic conspiracy dramas and revenge porn so adored by the evangelical community. I get it, because it’s my malady too. I must make you love me or else take you to school:

It is an ancient pattern of time usage for me, and I’m trying to move deeper, hoping to be helpful. This pattern of time usage paints over an ancient wound, and paints it with bright colours. It’s a sleight of hand, a distraction, so to attempt to change the pattern let me expose the wound. I now step into this area blindly, I do not know what the wound is, I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least unable to be articulable.

I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.

I’m going to find a way to paraphrase that and turn it into a goddamn tattoo.

I have for years heard an inner voice urging me to open my heart wider[2], and it’s mostly gone unheeded, because of fear and being completely uncertain about how to start. One doesn’t just start a conversation with “I’m absolutely fucking terrified”.

But one can start an essay that way, and so I’m here and I’ll just go ahead and kick it off. Things I’m afraid of, in no particular order:

• That I am not the good man everyone believes me to be


• That I will fail my family


• That I will screw up my kids


• That I won’t leave a legacy, that I will die with the memories of those who have known me


• That I will never get good at making things with my hands, or even find an act of creation I can stick with


• That I will never get out of my own head, or find quiet there


• Of people, mostly that they will hurt me


• Of embarrassing myself


• That I will be found out


• That I am not much of a man


• That I will never find a way to set aside my pettiness and judgment


• That I am weak and will always be thus


• That I will never do anything worth a damn with myself

Why the list? Because I think I’m finally getting to the point where my exhaustion with painting over that wound is outweighing the fear. At the ripe old age of almost-thirty-seven, I might actually be growing up. And I’d rather we talked about stuff.

Also, five bucks says most of you share in at least one of those, and I’d like to explore that. I’d like you to be able to talk to me, or someone, about it. To wit:

What I’m trying to express – what I’d like to express – is the notion that, by being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves and the world, and ourselves in the world. We are not the passive audience for this big, messed up power play.

We don’t have to be. We can say who we are, we can assert our right to existence, we can say to the bullies and conmen, the people who try to shame us, embarrass us, flatter us, to the people who have no compunction about lying to us to get our money and our allegiance that we are thinking – really thinking – about who we are, and we’ll express ourselves and other people won’t feel so alone.

That’s at least a big chunk of what I want this place to be. Also doo-doo jokes and pictures of Christina Hendricks.

I dunno. I don’t have any more answers than Charlie Kaufman. I have all of his uncertainty. Perhaps counterintuitively, I find that uncertainty encouraging. The road forward is usually rocky, in my experience. Solid, even ground means you’re walking in a circle.

Seriously, go read the first half-dozen pages of that speech, even if you’re not a writer. Then write down your own fears. Then set the paper on fire. Then laugh and make something.

---

1. 
   I kid. I love Shadoe Stevens and was delighted to hear his voice once again when Craig Ferguson took over The Late Late Show. Stevens is a hugely underrated comedic talent, and every time I hear his voice it’s suddenly 1987 and I’m home sick from school and watching game shows. Circle gets the square.  ↩
   
2. 
   Not the “shoot the president to impress Jodie Foster” kind of voice. This isn’t to be taken literally, kids.  ↩