I'm an idiot

Right here, Right now

2006-07-14T08:13:00.000-07:00

Do you remember that song? "Right here, right now" by Jesus Jones? 1991. The soviet union had crumbled under its own weight, Mandela was released, we were getting closer to the Oslo accords. Peace was breaking out all over, we were about to elect Clinton here for 8 of the best years our country has seen, closing out the 20th century. England was about to elect Tony Blair, the European union was gaining strength and looked like it might turn all the bitterness into bureaucracy. Not that bureaucracy is good, but sometimes it beats the alternative. We didn't know it yet, but the internet was about to change everything in unimaginable ways.

So these british mooks had the cojones to sing
I was alive and I waited waited
I was alive and I waited for this
Right here, right now, there is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history

and it seemed so hopeful and so true.

I can't listen to that song anymore. It makes me want to weep. But somehow I thought about it this morning, reading about Israel bombing Lebanon and Lebanon bombing Haifa today. The US military is bogged down hitting a tar baby in Iraq while wolves prowl the world. Oil prices are skyrocketing and our economy is plunging.

I know it's not all his fault, but

Fuck you, George W. Bush.

Someone else's dreams

2006-05-15T13:01:00.001-07:00

"And so Iggy Pop started cutting himself on stage, and the blood ran down into the mud of the mosh pit and everyone started scooping it up to drink like a sacrament!" I'm one of those people who bores his close friends with stories about my dreams. I think my dreams are sometimes entertaining and sometimes help me to have insights into myself. I truly think that sometimes my subconscious works things out in dreams that I can't work out in real life. I've paid a lot of attention to my dreams over time and I think I know as much about dreams as anyone.

I've had dreams where I was sleeping and dreaming a different dream inside the dream. I've even done some semi-lucid dreaming, where you partially wake up inside the dream and start controlling what happens.

There are common events and locations in my dreams. There's the school dreams, of course, now largely unattached from any actual physical school I've attended. I used to dream the standard about starting a class but not being able to find the room until the end of the semester. I went semi-lucid in one of those and decided, to heck with it, I can just make it up next semester. Now I dream about graduation coming up and I've deferred so many failed classes that I'm not going to graduate.

Sometimes at school while I worry about graduating a big hippie gypsy carnival parade comes through. When that happens, the school starts to look medieval, like Mont St. Michel.

There's the big city street, usually my friend Susan from the big city accompanies me there. There's the restaurant, usually the restaurant where I worked through most of my teens. I go back there and they agree to let me work a shift as a busboy for old times' sake. I fall steadily behind and end up in disgrace.

There's the café by the beach above the pier. There's a walking pier not far from there, lined with shops. There's the backstreets of the town where the Mexican carnival is going on. There's the giant Chinatown mall, usually I go there after dark when it's mostly empty. There's the shops above that where I can never find that one Mexican restaurant again.

There's the downtown area where I can never find that one nightclub again. There's a different nightclub made of thick adobe painted very pale yellow where they serve dinner upstairs and have great music shows in the basement. There's the huge steep bridge, so steep that it terrifies me just to climb it, but it always works out fine.

For a long time I had a repeating dream where I was hitchhiking up the coast with some friends, but we got separated in the rain. I always ended up bedraggled, muddy, and wet, knocking on the door of this mansion to ask for some help. It's the Reagan's. Ron and Nancy would take me in and they were surprisingly kind. After dinner we'd sit in the living room looking out the giant pictures windows over the ocean while the storm got worse and worse until giant waves were crashing over the house. I had that dream many times during the eighties. It's my only really Freudian dream.

I even have theories about dreaming. I think that the reason dreams seem so, well, dreamlike is that your mind is like a bad animation artist. It just can't keep foreground and background in synch. You zoom your attention into something, bring it to the foreground, and tell yourself a little story about it.

Like with the restaurant dreams, I zoom in and watch myself clearing a table. I do ok, but my attention is fairly splintered. When I zoom back out, I have to recreate the background and I may not do it in proper synch with the time sense of the "close up". Or, I might draw the background entirely differently. I might put in a giraffe. Or move entirely to the jungle. Then, why am I clearing tables in the jungle? Why are things in absurd combinations?

Or you go from A to B to C, like gardening makes you think of water hose which makes you think of elephant. Then you compare A to C and think, "why is there an elephant in my gardent?"

I believe it's all because of the nature of paying attention to something in a dream.

All this is to explain why I'm so upset about last night's dreams. You understand by now: I take my dreams seriously. I know my dreams, I know the shape and flavor of them. And I know when I'm having someone else's dreams.

Last night I had a dream that had nothing at all to do with me. I was watching it like a movie. It involved a couple who shifted unsettling between being Asian and African. Sometimes they were Koreans in Singapore, sometimes they were from neighboring villages in Africa. They were at an airport, getting on a small prop plane. They argued about their sugar importing business. I sat in neighboring seats and listen.

This is not part of my dream world. I do not know these people.

It's probably the new psych medicine, the Buspar. I'll let it go for awhile, and see what I can learn about this new land. I like using the medications to manage my head, and it will probably settle out soon.

But it brings out the biggest fear I always have with psych medicines, the fear that I will no longer be myself. When do you cross the line? When do you become somebody else?

I'm the only me I've got.

I want candy

2006-05-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

Fucking New Yorker magazine. I've grown to hate New Yorker magazine. When I was much younger I tried to read and enjoy it, although it never had anything to do with anyone so gauche as to live on the west coast. It seemed so sophisticated and intellectual, just like I wanted to be. Now I just associate it with shrinks' offices. I have never ever sat in a waiting room for a shrink that didn't have New Yorker magazine available, sometimes nothing else.

Even a long time ago when I was in the county hospital for psychological services, shall we say, not entirely under my own will, the New Yorker was there. I was in with the gangbangers and drug od's and some off the planet loonies. I was desperate for something to take my mind off my current hell and begged a nurse for something, anything to read. One of the nurses took pity on me and dug around until she found an old – you guessed it, New Yorker magazine. I doubt any of the crack heads had brought it in, maybe New Yorker magazine just grows like mushrooms whenever shrinks are around.

Then there are other rich-people magazines. One of my shrinks, the talking shrink, must have someone in her office who flies private planes. There are magazines for private pilots there. Someone else must build wooden boats, there's a book about wooden sailboats there. Do they really think that people coming in to talk about their problems really are interested in the joys of flying a private plane? Do you think it's calming for people who might be pretty fucked up to sit waiting in your lobby, trying not to be impatient or worried, to think about your expensive hobbies and wonder how much of your wooden sail boat you're making from the fees they're paying you?

Of course, there's Highlights magazine for kids. All doctors who treat kids in any way in this country have this one. It must come with the AMA fees. I used to love this when I was six or seven. I especially used to love Goofus and Gallant. If you never read Highlights, Goofus and Gallant were brief lessons in manners and good behavior offered up in a cartoon. Oh, I wanted so badly to be Gallant, so noble and upright. The grownups all just adored good Gallant. I always wanted the grownups to adore me.

Maybe that's part of my problem.

I have plenty of time to observe waiting rooms at the moment. I've got two shrinks. I've got a psychologist, Dr T, and a psychiatrist, Dr. H. A talking doctor and a pill doctor. There's almost a complete split now between the two types, psychologists can't prescribe (they're not full MDs) and so psychiatrists do nothing but.

I had my second visit with Dr H, the pill doctor two days ago. I like a lot about the ADD medication, but I'm jittery when I come down, my blood pressure is through the roof, and I have even more trouble getting to sleep at night.

Oh, and my libido has crashed almost totally. That's from the anti-depressants. Sex is certainly no less enjoyable, and I can, ahem, perform completely fine, but the urgency is gone. When I was a teenager, I'd jerk off anytime I could get a spare minute and a modicum of privacy. I'd have welcomed a little less compulsion about it then. Now, I'm out near the other end of the scale. I'd like my libido back please.

So the pill doctor suggested I try Buspar, which is anti-anxiety and sometimes counteracts the low libido from the anti-depressants. And, what the hell, we changed to a new thing for ADD, I've got Adderall for that now instead of Concerta. Maybe it leaves the system a little more quickly so I can sleep better.

Early reports are, the Buspar calms me down at night and actually helps a lot with the insomnia. It seems to even bring my blood pressure down a bit. I feel a little slowed down in the day, until I take my Adderall. The two together balance out pretty well. We'll see how it settles over time.

Lucky, lucky me. If this all works out, my moods and concentration and energy levels will be carefully engineered and tuned. I'll be able to be more myself, more positive, more effective. I'll be a happier person, a better employee, a better citizen even. Totally Gallant.

I'll be nothing at all like the people who try to reach their own personal balance using crack cocaine, pot, alcohol, or xanax smuggled from Mexico. No, not at all. Those people are out of control. Those people have problems. Those people are illegal. I'd freak out to find myself dependent on non-prescription medicine, I *do* freak out when I think I'm drinking too much. I'm afraid of turning into Goofus.

Me, I'm more legal than Rush Limbaugh. I'm all analyzed and prescribed, insurance covers it all. It's a whole different thing. Really.

pain

2006-05-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

It was like I was watching the words come out of my mouth in a big word balloon like in a comic strip.

I'd been wrapping my hands for boxing class and Sifu said, "So, how you doing?".

"A little better each time," I replied. I have to keep reassuring him that I'm not going to have a heart attack in class. "I was hardly sore yesterday after class the day before. I was kind of disappointed."

Jay-zus! I can't believe it! I just told my boxing coach that he wasn't giving me enough pain!

Well, he rose to the challenge today. And I did too. We were practicing combinations with a partner, one wearing mitts and the other punching. I partnered up with this friendly farm boy, probably in his teens. Three rounds, combination after combination. I finally learned to go hard for awhile, then go easy and catch my breath instead of stopping all together. Then
15 second turns with your partner, one steadying a heavy bag while the other goes full out punching on it, then reverse. It seemed to last forever.

But I finally felt it today, that satisfying "whaaa!" when you put your whole self into smacking the hell out of those damned mitts or the bag. That's what I love about this sport, sometimes I reach way down and get this power and it all comes out in a smack on the mitt.

I'm gonna hurt tomorrow. I'm glad.

Juggling

2006-05-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

Juggling these various pills is getting to be a pain. There's a sweet spot in the curve where I feel GREAT and my focus is terrific. The upswing can be jittery and the downslope usually just ok. The afterburn sucks, though. Supposed to be 6-7 hours peak benefit, allow 12 for it to get clear of my system. But I can take these suckers at 7 AM and at 11 PM I'm laying in bed listening to my heart pound, I can feel my pulse in my fingertips. By morning I'm usually ok, but often still kind of edgy. Don't know if that's back to "normal" and I just never realized how bad it was, or what.

Well, that and....

2006-05-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

The very first rule of debugging anything (and I use the word debugging in its most generic sense) is: Only change one thing at a time. Otherwise who knows which change caused which effect?

So I'm breaking all the rules, experimenting with about 5 variables at once in my life. First, the new medication. Second, my wife and I are have started the South Beach Diet. In the first "induction week" I've lost about 7 pounds. It must be mostly water, I couldn't possibly burn that many extra calories, but still.

And I'm starting at the boxing gym. Killer workouts that I can only complete about 75%, twice a week. But I promised myself right here in this blog back in Feb or March that I'd do it, and I'm doing it, and I like it.

Not to mention all the stuff that's springing loose and drifting around my brain. And the new medication.

So things could get interesting for awhile.

drug update

2006-05-07T00:34:00.000-07:00

Remember sitting in the eye doctor's chair? That big metal thing in front of your face, he'd switch between different lens combinations. "Which is better, this?" switch "or this? How about this, A" switch again "or this, B?"

I wish there was something like that for psych medications. "Which is better, this? or this?" Instead you've got to wait until one drug leaves the system, wonder about what the additive effect is, think about what else is going on in your life.

So, I'm up again, wide awake at 12:30 AM on a Sunday morning. I'm wondering what effect the ADD medication (it's called "concerta") has had on my sleeping pattern, if any. It was great at first, I'd be so tired by the end of the day I'd just conk right out. Then I found myself laying awake, pulse racing, wondering if this is aftermath of the drug. One risk of it is that it may raise your blood pressure. But it's supposed to be out of your system in 6 or 7 hours, 12 max, and this was happening even when it had been 14 or 16 hours since my pill.

So this weekend I'm experimenting with skipping my pill. I was kind of draggy all day and hit a real lull about 3:30 and napped for an hour and a half. Now I've been trying to get to sleep for the past few hours. The good news is, it feels the same as last night, racing pulse, etc. So maybe it's not a hangover from the pills.

Which is good, because I really do like the primary effect of the pills. I get so much done. My concentration is so much higher. Sometimes I get a little jittery, but I'm remembering today as I go without that I sometimes get a lot jittery just on nothing.

At least the sleeplessness is just annoying and not worrying me.

All in all I think I'm better with the pills. I think it's worth it. But could I see B again?

boxing

2006-05-04T20:25:00.000-07:00

just sitting here after boxing, don't want to move. That was a great workout. The teacher also teaches other martial arts and goes by Sifu. I try not to think "Seafood". He cuts me slack as long as I'm pushing it as hard as I can. I think he's afraid I'm going to have a heart attack. I think he also thinks I'm a wuss, but he gives me credit I think for being in there trying to de-wuss myself.

Only 3 others in class tonite. I think most of the men in class are farm boys from the country. None of them a day over 30, I think. One young woman, cute as a button, like a little bird but tall and thin. Probably not 25. After class today was sparring (light contact) and I saw her go up against a couple of farm boys and definitely outclassed the one her size and weight, and got the attention of the other one who's got probably 40 pounds on her. She's one tough birdy.
During class, as we're working thru exercises I'm having to pace myself - go hard for a few minutes then either lighten up or stop completely and suck air. Even when I'm going hard, I'm getting solid but polite little smackies against the bag or the focus mitts, while all around me are BAM BAM BAM people pounding the stuffing out of their bags.

It's still not as intense as Muay Thai was though - was I out of my fucking mind trying to hang with those killers? The big diff is that there's no kicking, of course - so no pumping huge amounts of blood around as you power your legs around in big ol' kicks, and I can walk the next day, pretty much. But it's perfect for me now, I can actually stick with this and get somewhere, Muay Thai was like bashing my head on a brick wall. I'd go for a week or 3 and then be so exhausted I'd get sick and miss a few weeks. Then starting back was like starting over from square one. Here I think I can keep going, week by week.

Creep

2006-05-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, picture me doing my best Richard Nixon, jowls flapping, chin tucked down to my chest, shoulders hunched up, both hands in a V for Victory. And in my best jowly Nixon voice I say, "I am not a creep." Nobody's fooled.

That’s how I feel sometimes around women. Denying the essential creep-dom that comes along with being a man. My mom was afraid of men so she really tried to raise me to be asexual. She used to be fond of saying, "I knew that at some point you'd grow up to be bigger than me, so I trained you from day one to never hurt a woman." So I've got this weird overstated chivalry, women are fragile flowers who must always be taken care of, and they're scary monsters I could never understand, and they're sexy as hell.

I had my first real date at age 20. I didn't have sex until I was almost 23. I married the first woman who had sex with me, we've been together 25 years.

Oddly, my best friends are always women. I'm more like most women than I am like most men. I am not macho, never have been, never wanted to be. I've never been a jock. I've never enjoyed just thumping on my friends for fun. I've never enjoyed breaking things. I've never ever slagged on women in general. I like to cuddle. I talk about feelings.

I just have to get through the creep barrier, then it's all good.

Because I really think I do sometimes come across as creepy when I first meet a woman, especially if I'm attracted to her or find her interesting. I have one very good friend now who I couldn't even look at for the first six months I knew her because I was afraid I would do something stupid. She's a very beautiful woman. It was particularly awkward because I was her boss. She'd come in my office to talk about her job and I'd look at my desk, look at the walls, anywhere but look at her. How did we get to be such good friends? It's a mystery.

You start off with eye contact, but that's pretty scary because sometimes you can see right inside, or she can see right inside you. Then you're hosed. So you look down OH SHIT! I JUST LOOKED AT HER TITS! DID SHE CATCH ME? Think I got away with that one. Nice tits, though.

Much safer to play with the things on your desk or stare up into the corner of your office like you're searching for bats.

I even went through a phase where I fought a compulsion to look at every woman's breasts. I've never told anyone this story. Every woman, whether they were sexually attractive to me or not, I had to try to sneak a peek at her hooters. My boss at the time was a woman, a great individual for whom I have tons of respect. Also, one of the few women on the planet who I never found sexually attractive. No how, no way. I shudder to think. Still, I had to struggle to keep my eyes off her boobs. It scared me. A lot.

One time I was in a meeting with a very attractive woman and the compulsion struck. I said to myself, ok, when you get a chance, take a good look and be done with it. Maybe you can just fulfill the compulsion and it will go away long enough to finish this meeting. I took a nice long admiring look and I got busted. I never would have guessed that someone could pack so much scorn, disgust, and anger into one withering look.

I could never bear to meet with her again. It's a coincidence that I moved to a different company shortly after that. But maybe not entirely a coincidence.

Eventually the compulsion went away, but it could come back. So I'm very cautious. Keep your eyes where they belong. Don't look, don't touch, and don't let on when you want to.

So when I do meet a woman who I want to be friends with I get so nervous. I want to say, "Here's my credentials, lots of women friends, see, look, here's pictures of my kids. I'm not a creep, really and truly."

What could be creepier?

Better living through chemistry

2006-04-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

So much to say and so little time. I've got about 10 mins here, I'll just spew out some stuff.

My main shrink (psychologist) can't prescribe, so I've now got 2 shrinks. Shrink #1 said that some of the things I say sounded kind of like ADD. So we did some tests, and it sure seemed to me that at the very least it's a useful metaphor for some of the things that happen in my head. Jumping around from thought to thought, can't focus on anything non-fun for more than a few minutes, write 2 sentences and then go check my mail, get a snack, browse the web. Forgetful, anxious, etc etc. Symptoms or missing skills? Problem or metaphor? How do you tell?

I firmly believe that our weaknesses are mirror images of our strengths. I'm a really smart guy. Trying not to brag here, but that's been my internal defining characteristic for a long ol' time. I'm smart as hell. One thing I can do is think about a lot of things at once. Time slice, mostly, but some realtime multi-tracking. I remember once trying to imagine how Beethoven composed however-many lines of music at once, the bass going ba-bum, ba-bum, and the first violins going deedle-deedle-deedle and the second violins going doodle-doodle-doodle. How did he keep that all in his mind at once? Did he have a 16 track brain? Mine is 4 or 5, tops. Finally I realized that he probably approaches it more like a painter, add a dab of blue here, some yellow over there. But I wondered about that for a long time.

So: thoughts bouncing around - strength or weakness? Or both?

One of my all time favorite quotes from Tom Waits: If I exorcise my devils, well my angels may leave too. And when they leave, they're so hard to find.

This all came up several months ago, and I went on the waiting list for shrink #2 to see if she thought I should try new drugs. I finally got in to see her Friday, and as with prescribing shrinks (psychiatrists) everywhere, the answer to questions like these is always the same. Let's try some drugs and see if they change things for the better. If so, then whatever the drugs help is your problem. If not, not.

So now I'm on an updated version of ritalin.

I like it.

I like it a lot.

It really seems to tune down the static. I get a much better signal-to-noise ratio. I can willfully follow a thought for more than a few seconds.

This weekend, while experimenting with new drugs, I took my 2 oldest daughters to this event in San Mateo, CA. It's like a home-built trade show for inventors, hackers, builders, dreamers. I was hoping the girls would get inspired to explore technologies and be creative in new and exciting ways. I was also hoping to have a lot of fun. Both goals were met. The PC maintenance folks "Geek Squad" were sponsors and had a booth there, my daughters got gimme teeshirts with the Geek Squad logo that I think they may actually wear! They soldered circuits, played with breadboards, were amazed by robots, and the ideas started to take hold - hey, I could do that!

At the same time, it was a grand and wonderful place to be experimenting with new drugs. So much stimulation!! I really felt more relaxed with people, had some great conversations and met some great people and learned a lot of stuff. Everyone was so enthusiastic to share their pet project, however geeky or outrageous. It's like Burning Man - we're all geeks here, let's party!

Am I better with drugs or not? Can't tell yet. It's definitely fun. For instance, I think I'm kind of overdriving this morning. This blog post has been fun to write and I've been totally focussed in on it, but I fear it might be a bit of a bumpy ride for you, the gentle reader. Was I more relaxed with people because the static was turned down this weekend or was it just a particularly congenial bunch of folks.

WHoo, the rush is settling down, don't quite feel so hyper now. My 10 minute note is now pushing 30 mins. Somewhat edited.

I'll try to keep a running log of this experiment here.

Swampdog, out.

Huevos

2006-04-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, I guess I've got time today to post my first self-improvement note.

Everyone remembers the movie Annie Hall, right? Do you remember at the end, where Woody Allen turns to the camera and talks about how his life has been ruled by two old jokes? One of the jokes is this chestnut:

Guy goes into a shrink and says, "Doc, you gotta help me, it's my brother. He thinks he's a chicken."

Doc says, "Oh my, that sounds serious, how long has this been going on?"

Guy says, "It's been three years, doc, we gotta do something."

Doc says, "Three years!? Why are you just coming to me now?"

and the guy says, "Well, doc, we needed the eggs"

Ba-dum-bump

What I think Woody meant, what I've always got from this is, whatever behavior pattern you have in your life, at some level you do it on purpose because you think you need the eggs. Whatever you do, however destructive it may be, somehow, somewhere, you're getting eggs from it.

An implication is, you can't change your behavior unless you understand what eggs you're getting from it. If you steel up your resolve to stop your overeating without understanding that you're getting emotional satisfaction from eating, you're doomed to fail. If you hate your job but stay with it anyway, the eggs (immediate paycheck, some security) outweigh the costs (from annoyance to soul-destroying) or the costs of changing (fear of interviewing). When you realistically analyze the eggs and the cost, you may change your mind. If you can get a decent paycheck elsewhere without destroying your soul, it might be better. If the security of your job is illusory, you might be better off without it. If you're really just afraid to confront the fear of interviewing, you can consider whether you need to figure out how to do that and just face it. Or not. But until you know what eggs you're getting and what you're paying for them, you're not going anywhere but in circles.

But, like I said, I've believed in this principle for a long long time. Not quite since the movie first came out (I was pretty young then) but say at least the last 20 years. So why now is this suddenly having such an impact on me?

I recently put two and two together and started applying this idea to a particular destructive thought pattern that had previously been immutable. It's the whole original basis of this blog - "I'm an idiot". Trust me, inside my head "idiot" is one of the kinder things I call myself. And calling myself names is (was) one of the kinder things I did, it was more of an internal mental smack upside the head. It almost hurts to write, my mind is travelling those ruts as I write about it, and I've been mostly free of it for several weeks now. The effect was to derail my thinking, to force it onto this negative track instead of letting it run free.

So I asked myself: What is so important that hurting myself is a better answer than facing it?

And here's where it gets a little fuzzy. I didn't get a clear answer that I can easily relate here. Part of it has to do with a very ugly experience I had about 23 years ago, out of which I decided to just be whoever and whatever I needed to be to get by. I'm not going to tell you that story now, probably not ever. Part of it is ideas I got at this blog - stevepavlina.com A lot of what he says is kind of mystic woo-woo, but much of his approach is very similar to mine. I'll go into specifics in later entries, but two things stand out for brief mention: You've got to be integrated, goals, beliefs, values, actions. You can't change anything all at once, it's like going to the gym. I'd like to be able to bench press my weight, but I can't go down and try to do that every day until my muscles get stronger. I'd quit pretty darned fast. I've got to start where I am, bench what I can, and expand that over time.

So there's no one-to-one correspondence. I didn't answer my question. Or I guess I did, and the answer was simply, nothing in my life is worth hurting myself that way. I wasn't getting enough eggs for it.

Sea change

2006-04-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

I apologize to all my thousands of fans for not posting in such a long time (yes that's a joke, but I've actually got some comments from strangers! I love you Tiffy!). My attitudes are undergoing a sea change for the better, I hope to write soon about what's working for me this time around, but it's big and constantly changing. Don't know if I'll be able to generate the level of spleen that I've been using for entertainment but while I work on it here's a few quick hits.

This is an oldie but goody for me, and I just saw an example around town so I can write about it today. Remember the bumper stickers "If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?" I'm vehemently pro-choice and I HATE those bumper stickers. Fortunately they seem to have mostly disappeared. What I hate about them is the total ignorance of the opposite side's position.

Let me translate that into how I imagine an anti-choice person sees it: "If you can't trust me not to murder my child now, how can you trust me to raise it well?" They see a fetus as the moral equivalent of a 5 (or 50) year old. So let's try it like that: "If you can't trust me not to murder my 5 year old, how can you trust me to raise a 6 year old?" What's the expected response to that? "Oh, ok then, go ahead and murder your 5 year old instead of ruining its life later." Or, "you're right, you're morally reprehensible and it would be better to take any child (read: fetus) you're trusted with as soon as humanly possible and raise it by the state rather than let you raise it."

People, you can't win arguments that way. You've got to understand your enemy.

----------
We bought a new car yesterday, and I'm having slight moral qualms today. You can't screw a car dealer, can you? It's just not possible is it?

We traded in our old van which the mechanic says is on its last legs. It leaks oil, it burns oil, and once in a while when you start off in the morning it spews out a huge embarassing cloud of oil smoke. The mechanic says it's not worth fixing. It's also got a fair share of minor problems that we don't even notice anymore, like a cracked windshield. Tires are not new. We got a decent price out of the dealer, who didn't look that closely at it. He didn't even notice the cracked windshield until after he offered us an amount for the car. He didn't look under the hood to see the oil scum caked in a few places, or the oil cap that got left off one day and fell down and welded itself to the exhaust manifold. I figure it's going to cost them $1000 to get it into sellable condition, and that's if they don't notice the oil problems. If they notice that, they've either got to try to cover it up and offload it on some sucker or take a bath on the car in the auction market (where someone else will buy it to try to offload on some sucker).

To add insult to injury as I was driving the car to the dealer to trade it in and pick up the new one I noticed that the gas tank was empty, the indicator light came on. There's another $50. I didn't plan it that way, but it's $50 out of their pocket.

I do feel a little bad about it - not for the dealer, I could have bargained harder for the new car and squeezed another $1000 out of them that way - but for the poor sucker they foist this thing on. They'll probably still make money on it, and somewhere there's going to be an angry customer fighting with a dealer to get their money's worth.

We ended up spending about $2k below MSRP, about $1k above dealer invoice on the new car, which seems like decent bargaining. When dealers like Saturn talk about "one fixed price" I figure I'd be losing out compared to the average schmo. I'm not a great bargainer, but I think I beat the average, so if I get just average from Saturn I'm probably paying more than I would when I can bargain. Here I think we beat the average and then we got a good price for our soon-to-be-junk old car. So I'm feeling pretty good about it.

And, you can't screw a dealer, can you? It's just not possible.

Appalling

2006-03-27T10:13:00.000-08:00

look at this link before reading my comments.

Ok, my comments. The photos don't show all of what the text describes, which I just find so horrifying that I can't get it out of my mind, it's haunting me. It says that the dorsal view is fully detailed with the baby crowning. I just can't imagine walking into the living room and staring down the business end of Britney Spears with a BABY coming out. Holy freaking gods, that's just mind bogglingly horrible. They describe the artist as wanting to make some anti-abortion point with this, and I think it just proves that anti-abortion people are really anti-sex, 'cause I think every time I saw that I'd be unable to have sex again for a week. I'd get something started, and that image would come into my head and I'd shrivel right up like a dead shrimp.

Fear

2006-03-24T17:11:00.000-08:00

I'm counting seconds. I start off, nice and slow, lugubrious, but before I get to three I'm racing. "One....chimpanzee2chimpanze3chim", three short little hot chimpanzees before my eyes fly open. I'm on Highway 101 near San Francisco, trying to see how long I can drive with my eyes closed.

It freaks people out when I ask if they've ever driven on the freeway with their eyes closed. They give me The Look, and I know they think I'm some psycho death-wish loony. It's not about that at all, though. It's a triumph of reason over fear.

How it works: You wait until you've got a nice clear spot with no turns upcoming, lots of space in front of you and nobody driving wildly who might swerve in front of you and slam on the brakes. You look for potholes. You guess the odds of anything happening that would prevent you from holding a straight steady path for the length of the game. If you think there's any real chance of needing to react to something, you don't play. Reason has to be on your side, or else, yeah, death wish.

Then you close your eyes, and count seconds, "one chimpanzee, two chimpanzee..." You try to hold the pace, one chimpanzee per second, through your whole count. Try not to speed up. Try not to give in and open your eyes before your target count. On a really good day you can pass your target. I used to be able to do a solid 8 chimpanzees regularly, sometimes 10 on Highway 280 up north of Highway 92.

I'm trying it today, and the best I can do is those three short little hot chimpanzees. I was perfectly safe, of course. Nobody had cut in front of me. I still had a long way before the next car. I was square in the middle of my lane. I could have gotten away with 5 or 6 chimpanzees easy, but I just gave in to the fear.

And that's it, isn't it? Reason over fear. I'm always looking at the worst possible case, weighing odds, considering outcomes. People sometimes think I'm a pessimist. But it drives out the fear if you're prepared to face the worst. You have to arm your reason to overcome your fear.

Tonight I walked into the clubhouse of the East Bay Rats motorcycle club. It's a dingy little space in a warehouse district in Oakland. It's like someone's garage, with boxing gear and leather jackets and motorcycle parts stacked around the edges. There's a plywood bar, but it seems like a formality. At any point in time, anyone could be in front of the bar or behind it. I don't see any booze, I'm guessing that they only stock it for parties. There's a soda machine dispensing cans of beer for a dollar in one corner.

I'm here for a boxing lesson. They host open boxing lessons every Thursday. The club president, Trevor, is working with me. I'm starting from zero. He's good, but the real boxing coach is Kwesi, who's training with with a skinny little asian and a white guy with biceps the size of my head. Kwesi seems to really know his shit. "Rotate your shoulders on the jab, really get your obliques into it."

I didn't do very well, I ran out of steam pretty quickly. I was doing ok for awhile, about 15 minutes, but then I ran out of gas and I just couldn't recover between sets enough to make it worth Trevor's time. I'd jab, jab, cross, hook, two times, maybe three, then have to stop and gasp for breath. Before I ran out of steam though, I learned a lot. Gotta rotate the shoulders on the jab. Pivot on your foot for a hook.

After I wimped out, I chatted for awhile with Trevor. Trevor's a big solid guy, he works as a bouncer in the city. I really liked him, he's a decent guy with a lot of integrity and no fear. I could picture him being very intimidating. I could also picture him being completely mild mannered until the time came to tear you apart. Then calmly ripping you limb from limb.

I asked him questions about, what if you really need to protect yourself? What if you're out in the street and the shit goes down? What happens to the rules then? He gave me some great tips. Keep the other guy off balance. He's a bouncer, he always tries to defuse a situation when he's on the job. But otherwise, strike first, strike hard, give it all you've got, and keep the other guy off balance. If you lose, take it like a man, it only hurts for a while. If you lose to somebody once and are willing to fight him again next time, you'll have his respect.

But it's really all about managing your fear. Learning what the worst possible case is and learning that you can handle it. When I get started for real on learning to box, I need to get somebody to punch me in the face. I think that's the reason I want to take boxing instead of tae-kwon-do or some other martial art – at some point when you're learning boxing you're going to get punched in the face. I'm terrified of getting punched in the face, and I need to get over that. I'll bet it's not so bad. I need to train my reason to overcome fear.

And I had plenty of fear coming out here. I'm going to a MOTORCYCLE club. Like the Hell's Angels, people who kick each others asses just for fun. I didn't know if the whole club would be in, and if so, what would they think of this fat old chickenshit tourist? Was I walking into an ass-kicking? I had a bunch of chances to bail out on the way. With Bay Area traffic, torrential rains of biblical proportions, and getting lost in the Fruitvale ghettos it took a solid hour and a half driving to get there, the little voice nagging the whole way, "Are you sure you want to do this?" ,

But every time I'd want to chicken out, I'd think about likely results. Worst possible case? I'd get my ass kicked and end up in the hospital. But at least then I'd KNOW.

In the ghet-to

2006-03-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

"Hey! Hey Mister!"

My mind swims through the hazy late afternoon heat towards awareness. I'm napping on the ratty couch.

"Hey Mister, you awake?"

My eyes come open to see a young black woman standing in my doorway. She's probably about 18. A little heavy, not un-pretty. She's wearing a yellow and white striped tube top and shorts, her hair in a short 'fro. Her friend is peering over her shoulder. She sees I'm awake and strides confidently into the room. Her friend still lurks behind.

"Uh, yeah, awake, yeah, I'm awake" I manage.

"Well you shouldn’t oughta leave your door open like that in this neighborhood if you're asleep. Somebody come in and steal you blind."

I file this away for future reference and get to my feet.

"Hi, my name's Sharon," she informs me, "and this here's Darlene." I introduce myself. She's looking around. I'm just moving in and what little I own is in boxes and trash bags around the apartment. There's some furniture that I got from the cheapest classified ads, I probably could have done better driving around with a truck picking up stuff people had abandoned. The kitchen is still filthy from the previous tenants. Sharon and Darlene aren't real impressed. "You mind driving us to the store for some smokes?"

"No, sure, fine, glad to help!" I'm being as cheerful and helpful as possible. Partly, that's my nature, partly I'm so far out of my element as to need absolutely every friendly gesture I can get. I carefully lock up the place and drive the girls in my 1974 Pinto to the nearest place for cigarettes.

This is my first apartment after college and if I had the slightest sliver of a shred of a clue I would not be here, but I'm an idiot so here I am.

My room mate, James, is out of town; he'll be moving in after a week. He's visiting his family in Modesto for the last week before school starts. Although I've graduated, I'm really not ready to cut the ties with school and really go out on my own. James and I were good friends through most of school.

Well, not really. James is an asshole. Everyone pretty much knows it, especially his friends, but James has a twisted charisma for losers like me and his other friends. James (don't call him "Jim") will look you in the eye and say, without the slightest irony, "I'm here to live the true and intense life, to experience absolutely everything with unflinching intensity." The word "intense" is his favorite word and comes up a lot. Almost everyone listens to him for five minutes and knows he's an asshole and avoids him, or openly mocks him. Me? I'm enchanted. I'm in the fan club. I'm the only male in the fan club; I'm also probably the only one in the fan club who hasn't slept with him. I'm his bitch, though, all the same. No mistaking that.

We'd decided during the summer to get a place together to start the next school year, and I'd done some ad-searching and phone calling. Somehow James was never around to look at the good places, but I found this cheap place not too far from campus. I'd called on the ad, and the owner/manager Mr. Johnson had us over a few times to talk about it. The place in the ad was gone, but he was going to have another place available real soon. Any day now. Real cheap.

Johnson had a heavy duty barred screen on his front door. That didn't worry us, everybody's gotta be careful. Johnson said that he was evicting the people from the place he wanted to rent to us. That didn't worry us, he'd clean up before he gave us the place. Either of these neon scarlet red flags should have warned us away, but didn't.

We were idiots.

The apartment complex was in the middle of a decent if declining neighborhood down by the freeway overpass. The neighborhood was not too bad. It was just a few miles from the fancy neighborhoods up by the college. The apartment complex, though, was a little bit of ghetto right there in our own backyard. The only white faces in the neighborhood were James, me, and friends of ours we could convince to visit.

Here's the standard disclaimer: I'm not a bigot. I'm consciously as open minded as I can be, but I grew up with mostly white faces around me, white or Hispanic. Blacks were a curious alien species to me, to be treated kindly and with respect, but I couldn't help the curiosity. And maybe a bit of fear. Yeah, fear, definitely.

And I was there by myself for the first week. Sharon's warning to lock the doors even when I was there asleep in the front room didn't help my confidence measurably.

I took Sharon and Darlene out for smokes, and I came back to the apartment. I had some broom sticks and other braces that I used to block the windows shut. I'd unpacked the kitchen enough to have a pan to cook top ramen in. I had some bottles of wine that I'd gotten cheap from work. So, ramen and a glass of wine for dinner.

It was still hot, especially with the windows closed up, so I left the door open while I enjoyed my feast. I guess this was an invitation for the neighbors to drop by. One by one they did, I met Marcus and Big John, and Alfonse and Joey. Sharon and Darlene came around. I started opening bottles of wine, which made a party of it. We all sat out on the blasted bit of dead grass between my apartment and Marcus's and drank up three or four bottles of it.

I wish I could remember that conversation. I'm sure I expressed my naiveté and curiosity with astute questions like, "So what's it like to be black in America in 1981?" but I didn’t write down their answers. I'm sure we talked about the "what kind of work do you do?" and the shitty store that I worked in was looking like a shrewd career choice by comparison. Marcus was the only one with big plans, he was going to take the exam and get a job at a prison. That's good money. We didn't talk much about the college I'd just finished.

We drank on into the evening. Somebody brought out some beer. Alfonse came into the apartment with me while I got another bottle of wine. He looked at my room and said, "How come you ain't got one a' them gals spending the night with you?" and I didn't know what to say. It hadn't even occurred to me that it might be possible to get one of them to sleep with me, and it seemed pretty late in the evening to start trying, if I could even think of a way to start.

Pretty soon it was midnight, one am, and people started drifting off to their own places. Big John said, "I'ma stay right here. As long as I've got a beer can to use as a pillow, I’m perfectly fine." and as far as I know he slept the night on the grass.

I staggered in and carefully locked the door. I went to bed on my classified-ad mattress with the big blood stains in the middle. How naïve I was: I assumed that the blood stains were from a woman having a menstrual accident once or maybe a few times. It actually looked more like someone had given birth on the mattress, or maybe been stabbed on it.

That night was about the best time I spent in that place. I was drunk, people were outgoing and friendly, patient with the idiot white college boy. The rest of the time I was there, my mind told me, "it's fine, I'm safe if I pay attention and keep my wits about me." but I was scared. And, we now know, I had no wits. I wasn't in school, my shitty job didn't occupy me at all when I wasn't there, I couldn't afford entertainment. So I just sat there, read books, talked to the neighbors, and tried very hard not to be scared or to feel poor.

When James finally got there, we had huge fights. I just had to get out of there, I spent as much time as I could up at the college with my girlfriend, who'd also returned for the school year. "I spent two hours trying to scrub that kitchen floor!" James would scream. "Where the hell were you?"

I just looked sheepishly at the floor, I couldn't explain. He didn't understand that I needed a break from the place. He was pissed that I wasn't there for him when he needed to adjust to the place.

"Fuck you, I don't care if you don't hang out here with me, I had a fine afternoon flying kites in the park with Marcus!" James was pissed that I wasn't hanging out with him during the days (I guess he'd forgotten that I had a job).

James was pissed that I wasn't his bitch anymore.

"Alfonse and I went up to campus today." James told me one day. "It was kind of funny, campus security was on our ass, I think it's because he's black. We just ignored them, though. I had to tell Alfonse that campus security is a joke" James doesn't seem to share my concern that teaching young out of work black men from our neighboring ghetto that campus security is a joke may not be the greatest idea.

A few weeks later, the apartment got robbed. James had brought in a cheap tv he'd borrowed from a friend of his, and had lost some cheap stereo equipment. Net value probably wasn't over $50. James was furious. He called the cops, tried to get Mr. Johnson in on busting the bad guys, I think he even had some sort of sting going at some point, trying to buy hot goods to light up the "bad guys". James was pissed that I wasn't outraged and helping him get his stuff back. The cops didn't seem that interested either, unless James could use his pissant loss to help them bust some of the known bad guys in the complex. Of course, James never got any of his stuff back, or helped bust anybody at all. He's lucky he didn't get his ass kicked.

To me, his outrage was a bizarre waste of time. You don't belong here, white boy. You are tolerated. Nobody here trusts anybody, not even their friends, and you ain't a friend. If you are extremely careful about locking the doors and blocking the windows, you may be able to keep from getting robbed blind. If you value something, if you can't chain it to the plumbing or find some other way to make it safe then don’t even bring it in the door. Only an idiot would get upset about it. You play, you sometimes lose. In this place, pretty much, eventually you lose.

We moved out a few weeks later. The boxes of our stuff that we took away had hitchhiking cockroaches, it was two moves later before I finally saw the last of them.

I never told anyone that I always wondered if the guy who came onto campus a few weeks later and raped a woman I knew might have been taught that campus security is a joke by James. I'm sure it never occurred to him, so I have to feel guilty for both of us.

Lost

2006-03-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

7 days, just gone. Missing. Lost. It was a week ago today I got the flu, spent 4 days pretty much laid up in bed. The 4th day, I watched dvd episodes of the TV show Lost, which seemed significant somehow. Been getting slowly better, yesterday and today I'm pretty much back in the saddle.

I'd been riding high, too, starting to feel like I was getting it together. I was feelin' the anger, feelin' the power. Starting to feel like it's MY game.

Now I feel like a weak little puppy again, and I look at what's it going to take to get back there again? I feel so far behind on things, like I need to get caught up on all the life that I missed in a week of down time. "One day at a time" is starting to have a real meaning for me - I can't regain that lost time. I can't regain that lost feeling. It's gone gone. Just today, what can I do now? How do I feel now? How do I want to feel?

I think the key is in the gym for me, for now. I think I need to get my body working again.

I'm an idiot.

Insomnia

2006-02-23T01:11:00.000-08:00

I always promise myself. Next time, I'm not going to just lay in bed waiting to go to sleep, I might as well get up and do something.

Well, this is next time. I'm up, dammit, and I'm pissed about it but it's too late to take a sleeping pill so here I am.

What does insomnia mean to me? Well for one thing it's tied to depression, but it's not as obviously correlated as you might think. It goes like this.

My mind is like a big hungry beast. I picture the Tasmanian Devil, spinning and spinning, taking up all the dust and tumbleweeds and everything in its path, and throwing it back out again in a big messy cloud. The problem comes at night, when I want to shut it all down. It just keeps on spinning, and if it doesn't have anything productive to think about it starts looking for shit.

Like: What an idiot I am. What an idiot I was when I was (12, 15, 24, 32, 38, 42). I'll replay idiot scenarios again and again, sometimes I'll think of what I should have said or done, sometimes just cringe at what I did say or do. If I do that enough nights in a row – Hey, presto! I can depress myself right down!

Or even sometimes I'll just lay there while this thing goes on spinning in my head on completely neutral topics. Who did I like on American Idol? What's the strategy I'd take if I were on Survivor? What would I do if I won the lotto? What do I want to take to Burning Man this year?

I try to distract myself. My best trick is, to start obsessing over something completely boring. That's a hard trick – if it's too boring I move on to something else. If it's too interesting I get too engaged with it. Sometimes I have success with this game: Imagine a series of rooms. For each room, I make up a person, a color, and an activity. Picture the room in the right color, with the person doing the activity. I usually organize this by alphabet. Annie in the aqua room is doing acrostics. Betty in the burgundy room is playing basketball. I have to go back and try to hold all the pictures up to the latest in my mind at once – Betty's basketball has to be moving while Annie fills in the acrostics or it doesn't count. If I can keep it going much past Ellen in the ecru room with her etch-a-sketch, I've got a chance at sleep.

I usually have a theme for the activities – all sports, or games, or something. One time it was all sexually charged activities. That didn't work, I got too involved and made it all the way to Mary in the maroon room masturbating before I had to stop for a wank myself.

Tonight? I dunno. Got off on the wrong foot. Too much TV, I've got a bad cough coming on that keeps me from settling in, something is off. I'm really tired from the gym, I did a really good workout tonight and pushed myself really hard. But I'm just not sleepy. I laid down to sleep and SPROING! Wide awake. Nothing good to worry about. No good stories to tell myself. Just endless brain cycles, spinning spinning spinning.

I'm an idiot.

Terri's Birthday Party

2006-02-21T17:45:00.000-08:00

Terri was the girl who carried a rose with her books at high school. Dark curly Italian hair, and the fiery temper that goes along with that. Terri wrote poetry in notebooks covered with florid script. Terri was our class Romantic. Terri was one of my permanent crushes in high school.

I was terrified of girls during those years, stuck somewhere between an old-fashioned gentlemanliness that I'd been brought up in and the raging lusts that held my body hostage. Any girl who didn't treat me with outright disdain was likely to be the subject of at least a short crush, and probably one or more of that night's fantasies. (Ok, who am I kidding? ESPECIALLY the girls who treated me with outright disdain.).

But Terri was different. I had a crush on Terri for years. My fantasies with Terri involved working our way around the country together in a van, having adventures every day like a TV series. At night I'd play my guitar and sing her Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" by the firelight.

I was an idiot.

My romantic approach was simple: Moon about from twenty yards away and hope to be noticed. I guess my persistence paid off with Terri, because we actually managed to become sort-of friends. Well, and we had a lot of classes together. I was close enough to truly torture myself in my elegant longing. Her best friend, Lisa Shallcross, even invited me to a birthday party she was throwing for Terri.

It was actually a dual party, Lisa's older brother Scott and Terri together. It was a pool party. I didn't really know many people there, especially not Scott's loud friends. I was aware of most of them only by name and reputation from school. Our reputations were not at all similar. I could just feel line of division forming between me and them. They were being boisterous and obnoxious and I retreated further and further into my shell. I felt every laugh and shout as though it was directed straight at me. Every laugh said, "You don't belong here, kid. If you don't want to rough-house with the boys you're probably a fag". Terri was completely absorbed with other friends and oblivious to my torture.

The party migrated out to the pool, the big boys were jumping off the porch into the pool and Terri was being mostly impressed. I slunk into the pool and was sitting there, realizing that I just needed to leave. Lisa's dad was in the pool I stood near him for a bit.

Lisa's dad said to me, "You know, in this world, some people are just … soft spoken, and that's just fine."

Lisa's dad is my hero. This story has been in my mind for decades waiting to be told. Here we were, in a place on the border between suburb and hick town, a place where we had a word for cowboy wannabes (we called them "goat-ropers" to piss them off), a place in the mid-seventies, about ten years and 50 miles from a place where Brokeback Mountain could have taken place and this kind man was giving me shelter. He didn't care if I was gay or not (I'm not) but he saw a kid needing a kind word and he gave it.

I spent another few grateful minutes in the respite of his kindness and left the party.

Mr. Shallcross, wherever you may be, you are not an idiot.

Be a man!

2006-02-17T11:12:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw possibly the most inspiring hour of television I've ever seen. It's a show called "Only in America" on Discovery Times channel. This journalist, Charlie LeDuff, goes out and explores weird little corners of Americana. He did a session a while ago on Burning Man, and it was decent – about as good as you can expect on national TV. He seemed to "get it".

But last night's episode was just amazing. It's called "Fight Club". Charlie investigates a motorcycle gang/men's club in Oakland called the East Bay Rats. They don't seem to deal drugs or shoot rivals; they don't seem to be a direct threat to society. They just hang out together, look out for each other, throw parties, and fight. They throw semi-regular fight parties where anyone who wants to can climb in the ring with gloves and mouthpiece and duke it out until it's over – until one fighter can't or won't get up and keep going. They show men fighting men, women fighting women. Charlie, decides to challenge the baddest mofo of all for the cameras, and proceeds to learn more about the members, the club, and a little about fighting.

When he interviews the members, many of the guys tell how they didn't fit in with general society until they found this brotherhood. Most of the guys have interesting backgrounds, these are pretty intelligent guys. The most striking thing to me is, each one of them seems to stand in a deep personal integrity and each one of them had absolute confidence in every other member of the club. "These are my brothers and they won't let me down."

One individual in particular stands out. This guy runs a motorcycle shop that seems to serve mostly Rats. He's a big dude, shaved head and beard. He's one tough hombre. If he took your beer in a bar, you'd probably let him keep it. You might even buy him another one, just in case. He tells about how, before he met the Rats, he got stomped by a bunch of other guys and his friends didn't wade in to help. It would have been two-to-one against if they had, and his guys just stood down. Our man took a severe beating, cracked skull, cheeks smashed in. He lived in a shadowy world of post-traumatic stress for a few years. Then he met the Rats. He knows that the Rats would back up a buddy at two-to-one against, ten-to-one against, whatever. Tears came to his eyes telling his story.

And that gets us near the core ethos, the Man Ethos, at the heart of this story. The Man Ethos is about standing your ground regardless. If you're going to take a beating for standing your ground, you take your beating. They say things like "Pain is temporary, pride is forever." There's no shame in getting beat, there's only shame in giving up.

Our man Charlie faces up to this by challenging the baddest guy in the club. To become a full member of the Rats, you have to fight them. Lots of them. At once. This guy, Big Mike Jackson fought nine Rats for half an hour before they were able to beat him down. It's a record. You can't win in these fights, you're not supposed to be able to. You just have to fight until you can't fight anymore. Big Mike weighs 320 pounds. Big Mike wears a tee shirt that says "I like you. I'll kill you last."

Charlie figures, if he fights someone his size, the best he can do is win and just be another guy. If he fights Big Mike, it's almost impossible for him to win, but if he stands his ground he's a Man.

So Charlie talks to other fighters, gets some coaching, works out. He talks to a doctor in the neuroscience department at UCLA medical center about brain damage and what happens when you're knocked out. Finally the day arrives, and he shows up at the Rats' clubhouse in the (pardon the expression) faggiest outfit I think I've ever seen worn by any man outside of the world of figure skating. (Seriously, if somebody came to a party of mine in that Errol Flynn looking shirt with the poofy sleeves, the lace-up front and the frills? And that scarf tied around his neck? I'd kick his ass. It took a whole other type of courage to walk into that club full of hairy-scary nasty-grimys in that outfit.) But the distraction of the clothing ends when he changes into his fight clothes. And then he climbs in the ring with Big Mike.

Maybe Big Mike has been coasting on his rep for awhile. Maybe he doesn't want to hurt this guy on national TV. Maybe he underestimates him. However it happens, skinny Charlie LeDuff actually sticks him pretty good once. But it's not anything close to a contest. Charlie gets knocked down a couple of times, but he keeps getting up and lasts a whole round. In the second round he takes a kidney punch and staggers to his feet but can't go on. He retires with his pride intact. He's a Man.

At the end of the show, I realize: That's what I need in my life. I need some kind of direct challenge, probably a physical challenge that I can stand up to and say, "I'm a man." It sounds so trite, so Robert Bly, but I've never had that rite of passage. I've never felt like a Man. What's worse, I can think of lots of times when I've equivocated, stood down, bided my time to fight (metaphorically) another day. I'm a diplomat. I'm a mediator. I'm a wuss.

So what am I going to do about that? I don't think I can just go jump in a ring somewhere. Our man Charlie had some serious backing and some time to prep and train, and a pretty good base level of conditioning. Besides, I think I need to grow this thing, I think I need to practice at it.

Ok, here's my goal. Out here in front of the gods, the internet, and everybody. The first of May, 2006, I'll join a local boxing program. That gives me 73 days to get my base conditioning in good enough shape to stand respectably in the program. I need to go to the SF area for a week in March – the Rats offer a boxing class Tuesday and Thursday nights. I'll go to one.

I'm an idiot.

I hate my body

2006-02-15T19:40:00.000-08:00

Ok, no apologies for the title this time. I've always hated my body. I was always the weenie kid, the last picked for sports, too skinny, too fat, too weak.

Or at least I've always believed that. I remember going to the beach when I in high school, wearing a tee shirt even out body surfing partly because I didn't want to get sunburned but really? I was ashamed of my body. I thought my soft little belly was fat. I knew my scrawny little arms were weak. I didn't want anyone else to know, and it didn't occur to me that the effect of wearing a tee shirt was to announce as loud as I could: "Hey everybody, I'm ashamed of my body!!"

I'm an idiot.

I'd love to have that body back. I could lose those few pounds like nothin'. I could put some muscle on that resilient little frame, I'd be so happy if my body today was like it was then.

And I suppose in 15 years I'll look back on this body now - 30 pounds overweight, still not much upper body strength, and yearn for these days too. That's the beauty of self-hatred, how ever bad it is, you know it's just going to get worse.

I remember a couple of times, being stuck into some kind of remedial PE class. Loser class. Guess what? They don't really try to help you become a winner in loser class. They just make sure you know you're a loser. I have so much more sympathy with people who didn't do well in academics for my experiences in PE. How can you possibly expect anything from people when you stick them into the Loser class?

In fifth grade, though, I managed to harness my leg power and Climb the Rope. All the way up. Touched the top. I knew I was in the fifth grade loser class, but that was ok. I had climbed the rope. It was when I realized that the fifth grade loser class was lower than my neighbor and sort-of pal Jimmy Herringer's fourth grade normal class that I gave up.

In high school one year they made a remedial class for us losers. We went to the weight room every day. I think the teacher really hoped we'd make some progress. Which is not the same as helping us make any progress. We mostly fucked around and made fun of the worst losers. Guess what? The pecking order is even stronger at the bottom than at the top. You think people fight and struggle to be the top dog? You don't even know how ugly it gets when you're fighting to not be the bottom dog.

And over the years, I've tried: martial arts (Korean Tae-Kwon-Do, Brazilian Capoeira, Thai kickboxing), best-seller book exercise programs, "Boot camp" exercise class, and dozens upon dozens of self-generated exercise plans. Spreadsheets to track progress. Exercising with a friend. You name it.

But I've got a new plan. Anger and pain. I'm going to punish this body, I'm going to make it suffer for making me suffer over the years. I'm at war with my body. I went to the gym on Sunday and worked my legs so hard they're still sore today, Wednesday. I love that. Today I busted on my abs, doubled the count on one of the crunches I do and added a medicine ball to another one. I did bench press until I had total failure, I had to humiliate myself and wriggle out from under the bar and wrestle it back on the rack.

I'm gonna hurt tomorrow. I'm going to like it.

I'm an idiot.

I hate my mother

2006-02-12T13:49:00.000-08:00

Well, of course I don't hate my mother. And the teenage angst implications of the title are a little annoying, but it seemed in context with the headline of the last post about my daughter, so it stands and to hell with you.

I'm an idiot.

I talked to Mom on the phone this past Thursday, right before Survivor. I knew better than to try to interrupt Survivor. (Who am I kidding? I didn't want to miss it myself. Those people are idiots!)

I tried to get a clear picture from the ongoing drama of Mom's health. She just turned 70. The depression and anxiety seem to be coming along fine with the double whammy of prozac and Seroquel. I read about her meds on line, the fact that Seroquel is called an anti-psychotic really disturbs me. But it's better than the zyprexa that made her gain 30 pounds on an already-overloaded 5 ft frame. Her shoulder pain is just bursitis, she's had that for years, no arthritis joining the party. Her back pain is probably overweight, combined with osteoporosis. Core systems (heart lungs & liver) seem to be just fine thank you very much.

No comment on the memory degradation. I can't tell if she's getting vague from the drugs or starting to seriously lose her memory, but I think it's some of both.

Overall prognosis? Ten or more years of steady degradation of her ability to get around and care for herself while her mind goes away and her heart just keeps on tickin' like a Timex. Probably 20 years.

(Those who know me well know my fondness for the idea of euthanasia. Just fuckin' kill me when I'm done, don't keep the body around. If I'm alert enough to figure out that I've crossed the line I'll do it myself, save you the trouble. )

Where was I? I guess this phone call was where it finally sunk in. Mom's an old lady. And, all she really wants to do is be comfortable and entertained. That's the part I hate.

She's been staying with us during the summer for the past 2 years (we bought her a small place a few blocks from our house). (Yes, it's a trailer, thanks very much for asking. But a very nice trailer. An artist used to live there. Fuck you.)

So every time she's here I keep trying to convince her to get out and explore the world. We live in a very beautiful corner of the Pacific Northwest, some of the most gorgeous scenery you can imagine is a half-day's drive away. There are interesting cities near by, quaint villages, outdoor sports of all types and descriptions. There are hikes and walks and about the highest per capita ratio of parkland in the country. Wildlife galore. Cute little galleries. Art classes.

So the first year I really expected her to take to it, to get out and enjoy this bounty. Go out walking and get healthier, take music lessons, SOMETHING. But when we don't go get her and take her somewhere she mostly just sits, or goes to Wal Mart. She loves cruising the aisles at Wal Mart. My wife did a great job with her that first year, getting her out walking around the lake fairly frequently, overcoming a little pain here and there.

The second year, last year, she was worse. She'd gained a bunch of weight from the drugs, she couldn't walk very far, walking Wal Mart was about the maximum physical challenge she could take. I talked her into going to a doctor to get off the Zyprexa and it was partly a good decision - the weight gain was horrible for her - it was in very large part a bad decision. She went into a downward spiral of unbearable anxiety. Her hands would shake uncontrollably just talking to you. I partly think the drug is a part cause of her problems - her hands never shook like that before she took the drug - but I'm positive you could never prove it.

My main reason, though, was that I saw her getting less and less engaged with the world, more absorbed in a little imaginary world of NASCAR racing, old horror movies, Wal Mart shopping, and the occasional pre-cut craft kit project.

I kept putting ideas and opportunities out for her, but she'd never take any.

And now I accept it. My mom is a passive person. She just wants comfort and entertainment. That's why I hate my mom.

What's so bad about that? What else is it that I want? Challenge, adventure, beauty, self-expression - what are those? Are they just other words for comfort and entertainment?

But the worst of it for me is, there's a big side of me that just wants comfort and entertainment. I dream big dreams of going out and training my body to a hard machine and using that machine to conquer mountains. I dream big dreams of sharpening my mind to a keen edge and using it to go out and write great books or solve the world's puzzles, or build something new and wonderful.

But, all things considered, I think I'd just rather sit and watch Survivor. Shhh, it's starting.

I'm an idiot.

I hate my daughter

2006-02-09T16:41:00.000-08:00

I'm about this close to losing my shit entirely. I hate my daughter, the middle girl, the 9 year old. The stubborn little 9 year old.

Now, anyone who knows me in real life knows that I ADORE my daughters, I dote on them with a fierceness and intensity that no non-parent could ever understand. The 9 year old is especially sweet, she's a loving child always on the lookout for a hug. I love hugs.

But right now I want to throttle her, like Homer Simpson strangling Bart. "Why you little...."

We're in the parking lot outside of Walgreen's. I've got a bottle of eardrops and she's decided that she's afraid for me to put them in her ear. The ear that hurt so much this morning that she couldn't bear the thought of spending the day at Disney World (yes, still stuck on Disney stories) without going to the doctor's office. The ear that we've just spent the past three hours patiently waiting, waiting, waiting over. Waiting for the doctor at the clinic to see her. Waiting for the admins at the clinic to get her paperwork and prescription done. Waiting at Walgreen's while the pharmacy clerk tried to attend to us and also the lady whose husband nearly died of a heart attack last night. Apparently he's on oxygen at the hotel, she's trying to get his drugs but the pharmacy clerk can't make out the doctor signatures to fill out the paperwork and the hospital can't help her. So I'm trying to be patient. Not like I got problems, in comparison.

Three hours of being patient, of choking it down, being the designated martyr for the day, waiting, waiting, waiting. Now we've got the payoff, here's the medicine, and she doesn't want to take it. If she doesn't take the medicine, that whole three hours will have been exactly worth: nothing.

But instead of choking her, I choke back my anger and we agree that she'll try again after lunch. We've got three medicines, an antibiotic pill, ear drops, and some liquid tylenol with codeine for kids. We go across the street to McDonalds.

I haven't eaten yet today, I wolf down some lunch and we start again, this time with the pain medicine. She. Won't. Take. It. I cajole and wheedle and bribe. I'll buy her anything on the menu to get it down with. Or a tee shirt when we get to Disney World. I threaten: we'll go back to the rented condo and spend the afternoon doing homework. She's sobbing. She puts the measuring spoon up to her mouth, gets all primed and.... no. She just can't do it. I seriously consider just chugging the bottle of Tylenol with codeine myself and to hell with everybody, I'll just spend the afternoon stoned at McDonalds with my 9 year old until the police come. More sobbing. The sweet fiftyish cuban lady cleaning the floors at McDonalds brings her toys from the kids meal, she's so sorry for this poor thing.

Finally I decide to back off. This is just the pain medication, let's focus on the other two that might help her get better. We go out to the parking lot and I get the drops in her ears, the pill down her throat. We spend the other half the day at Disney/MGM studios (the Rockin' Rollercoaster is the best ride I've ever been on. It's all about acceleration.)

That night my wife mixes the pain medicine with some juice. My daughter decides she likes it and slurps it up. She gets a little high and thinks that it's fun.

I'm an idiot.

random humiliation

2006-02-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

I think it's in moments of pain and humiliation that the best stories lie. I don't know if that's true. badnewshughes.blogspot.com is my idol. I'm an idiot.

I don't know if this story is going to work, but I'll try.

So there I am, with my twelve year old daughter in line for Space Mountain. I'm looking around, idly checking out the people for either interesting or horrifying people to look at. My vision is not so great anymore, and it's a little dim there in the loading zone for Space Mountain, so I have to work on the focus a bit. I focus on the woman in line ahead of us, just now getting into the front of the Space Mountain car. My first foggy glance registers probably an attractive young woman. My brain is just starting to process the first, most important question - is she a kid? Like I said, I've got a twelve year old, and I've gotten totally conservative about admiring any woman under about age 30. Anyone closer in age to my oldest daughter than to me is pretty much eyes-right look-away. Well, that's a lie. I wouldn't touch anyone that young, but over 20 is lookable. Well, that's a lie, I don't touch anyone anyhow except totally fraternal sorts of hugs. But 20 is still lookable, in a guilty sort of way.

So all this is roiling around and my brain is just registering: "twenty or so, I think, and pretty" when she gets into the car and her short khaki shorts ride up almost to her crotch, showing a fair bit of thigh. Primal instinct, pavlovian training, whatever, snaps to work and wooohooo, I'm trying to look up her shorts for about a second before more developed parts of my brain regain control. I'm not usually an ogler, it's just the sudden flash has caught the attention of my reactive animal brain. Then I look at her face again and she's seen me peeking.

So here's the question - what was that look on her face? Anger? Humiliation? Shame? Embarassment? All of the above? How would you feel, 20 years old, dressed not-immodestly, and some old geeze at Disneyworld is sneaking a peek up your shorts? The car glides by us, and she looks pointedly away with a blush on her cheeks, I think she's furious.

I'm an idiot.

Sorry about all the Disney stories. I'm an idiot. It just happens that my real life is pretty fuckin' quiet so all that gadding about with the hoi polloi loaded me up with stories of loathing and despair.

I hate EPCOT

2006-02-08T17:30:00.000-08:00

I looked around the French exhibit at Disney's EPCOT. Overpriced berets. Overpriced "Minnie Mouse as a French girl" dolls. I went next door to seek respite in a croissant from the fake patisserie. It took ten minutes in line to get a fat doughy overpriced croissant. I looked around at the cheesy faux-fauborg and realized that I hate EPCOT. They've managed to take EXACTLY the worst parts about traveling and bring it all together in one place. The tourist traps stuffed with overpriced tschotchkes, the crowds, the soulless token architecture; it's all here, and for eleven different countries. You can travel the world and it's all just like home, just a bunch of crappy stuff to buy.

I realize that this is as close to travelling as some Americans are going to get. Ever been to France? No, but I saw it at EPCOT. Of course, that's all some actual travellers see in the real France, a few tourist landmarks and some crappy stuff to buy in some tourist trap. But at least there you've got the risk of being insulted by an indignant French man for sullying his beloved Paris with your slack-jawed polyester grabbiness. You've got the risk of buying some cheese that looks completely harmless there on the shelf but takes your head off with its raw moldy intensity.

You've got some risk of life surprising you.

But we're not in France, or Morocco, or China, not even in Canada for gods' sake. We're at EPCOT. There is no risk. There is no life. There's only this purgatory.

I'm an idiot.

Disney and ecology

2006-02-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

I got really sick of the ecological pitch that Disney kept throwing at us. "If we all work together, we can save the earth!". Well, first, I figured out a long time ago that we cannot save or destroy the earth. We can save or destroy ourselves, we can make the earth inhospitable for human life, but this ol' rock gonna keep rollin' along for a long ol' time with or without us. Earth don' care.

Second, the consumption of energy, the ruination of wetlands, the consumption of paper goods and plastic and every other renewable and non-renewable resource on the planet is probably tripled for every moment you spend at Disney.

And it's not just the parks. For miles around the parks, there are the ugliest of strip malls with huge facades carved into faces and animals selling cheap disney knock off crap. Mile after mile of hotels and condos on what used to be wetlands. Gallon after gallon of water sucked up out of the water table to water lawns and fill pools. There was a huge mini-golf place with a water feature, we'd drive by and see gallon after gallon of toilet-blue water washing down over the sides.

Yet Disney continues to send the message "if we work together we can all take care of the planet." Pocahontas does a little stage show (when she throws those colored "leaves" in the "Dance with all the colors of the wind" song, are they biodegradable? Or just some more plastic to last forever in the landfill?). There's a Lion King show where Simba teaches Timon and Puumba about the unanticipated consequences of building condos all over and blocking up the stream.

My favorite was the Kali River Rapids in Animal Kingdom. They show one part where the rain forest has been destroyed by the greedy developers, there's a faux burned out rainforest section. So let me get this straight. They had to fill how much wetlands, and truck in how many tons of plastic and cement to simulate the destruction of the environment somewhere else?

I just wanted to scream, "SO SHUT THIS MOTHERFUCKER DOWN!!" There must be a special hell for people genuinely concerned about the environment who work at Disney.

I guess that became a theme of my trip. Spotting the existential hells that people were walking through in the park. Everything from the special minimum wage hell where you MUST SMILE AT ALL TIMES to the "characters", poor kids dressed up in disney costumes signing autograph books as Cinderella 300 times a day, to the guests, the visitors, accepting this dumbed down pseudo reality as the most magical place on earth.

I'm an idiot.

I'm an idiot!

2006-02-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

Just finished a week's vacation with my family at the Happiest Place on Earth(tm). Don't get me wrong, I had a great time, but there was a constant undercurrent. You see people at their worst at Disney World, it's a place scientifically designed to bring out the greed, the desire to be passively entertained. It turns people into human ticks, living on the blood of this country, this economy, this world. And of course, every vile thing that I saw in the faces of the slack-jawed, the mouth-breathers, the idiots, I knew was reflected back at them from my own face. My kindergarten teacher said, "whenever you point a finger at someone, there are three fingers pointing back at yourself."

And she was right. I'm an idiot. We're all idiots.

So repeat after me, you there. Yes, you, in the electric wheelchair because you're too fat to walk. "I'm too fat to walk. I'm an idiot!".

And you, teen-aged girl with the short-shorts stretched across your fat ass, enough camel toe to carry your lunch and a can of soda, "I'm an idiot".

And you, with the clever saying on your tee shirt. "I'm unique, just like everybody." It's not that fucking clever, trust me. What it really says? "I'm an idiot".

This guy here, with the video camera stuck on his belt and 40 pounds of gear in each cargo pocket so he can hardly walk. Oooops, that's me. "I'm an idiot!"

You, college kid, holding up your digital camera to take pictures of the Cinderallabration, where all the Disney Princesses (tm) come out and dance? You're blocking the view of people behind you. It's a show for little girls. Why are you trying to record this at all? Idiot!

You, lady, taking video of the shuttle boat back to the parking lots. You'll never ever watch that video again. It's pretty boring just being here real time, you want to capture it and relive it? Why? Because you're an idiot! Say it now, "I'm an idiot!"

And you, Cletus-talking fat-assed white trash, pushing your way onto the bench that I'm on, CROWDING MY PERSONAL SPACE, you're an idiot, if I had a weapon you'd be a dead idiot.

I don't know why terrorists haven't struck Disney. If you can get explosives into the country it would be easy to get them into Disney World. Think what a splash you'd make, destroying It's a Small World. A few pounds of C4 oughta do it.

Then on the plane, the guy giving me stink eye because my six year old daughter was briefly disturbing him, playing with her dolls on the tray table and rattling his chair. Do you know how close you came to getting your hair trimmed later while you slept? I was so tempted. But, I'm an idiot.

So stand up, say it loud and proud. I'm an idiot. You're an idiot. We're all idiots.