Happy Birthday Ambrose.

How lucky we are.

On February 14 eight years ago I got a small gift-wrapped box and a card from my boys' mother. We lived in a small apartment, I remember standing in front of the Ikea table in a dining room which was really more of a dining corridor when she handed me the present. My only child Ezra was probably sitting at the table playing quietly with his toys and whispering to himself. It had been a sleepy time that past three years with only three people and one very small dog, who was probably shuffling around looking for crumbs below Ezra's feet, which were a few years from reaching the floor.

The card had a 1950's-style cartoon illustration of a grinning man rolling dice. It said "Happy Valentine's Day..." and on the inside, said, "...Let's get lucky tonight." Under that she had written, "Whoops, looks like we already did."

I sensed that I was missing something. Then I opened the present. It was a pair of booties in a clear plastic box. I looked at the booties. Then I looked at the card. Then I lay down on the floor on my back in the middle of the dining corridor.

She'd been introducing the idea of another kid a lot and I'd resisted. There's no un-cliche way of describing how I felt about Ezra, so I'll just say I adored him. It was a mission of mine to give him everything of myself and at the time I thought that meant all of myself. But I did imagine what it would be like if the happiness that I had were doubled. So I'd been tricking the reluctant side of my head by not making precautions and by responding to the anxious thoughts with a "whatever happens happens" attitude.

Tonight nine months later was the last night of that short, sleepy age, three years of having only one kid. My luck was just about to change.

One word.

Fingersache.

Weird shit from my camera.

September 21, 2010 again.

Saw this sign walking the dogs:

"Princess Parking Only

everyone else will be toad."

September 21, 2010.

As of now 10:01 am, this quarter of a latte left in the refrigerator since Sunday afternoon officially becomes mine.

September 20, 2010.

I think we said one word was OK but here's eleven.

I go up and down.

I was 21 when I first got diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. I think they were just trying to figure me out, and that made the most sense at the time. But I'm afraid it has continued to make sense as much as I've tried to find a hole in the diagnosis, and stayed up nights looking for another explanation, and now it's just a known thing, I have the disease.

What brought me to the doctor the first time was an attack of depression that lasted a few weeks. Weep weep, can't get out of bed, I suck, etc. It was a feeling of suddenly being heavy, physically, and also so heavy even your thoughts can't climb up to defend you. They tried Paxil there at the county clinic, experimenting for a month or two with different dosages, and it just didn't work. Then one day my psychiatrist, an Indian man with a heavy accent, said: "I think you are manic depressive." I can still hear him say it. I had already swallowed being an alcoholic, a drug addict and a total asshole. This was worse. I was in the same spectrum as the people in the slippers with the corkscrew hair and the TV on all day.

I still analyze the information he had at the time 17 years ago to see if it was really enough to go on.

When I was 13 and my dad was in psychology school, one afternoon he looked up from one of his textbooks and jokingly said, "Kid, I think you're manic!" I do remember making sound effects and doing stupid voices, and I remember there being a kind of excitement and energy behind it. He was joking, but when I try to make myself believe the diagnosis I tell myself that memory was a sign.

The only other thing I can remember is this one summer when I was 18 or 19 and had a job giving lectures at a petting zoo. I used to drink a lot of coffee because it was free and make a lot of sound effects and do stupid voices. I remember a teenage girl who worked there telling me I was cra-zy. She said it smiling, I made her and everybody else laugh, but what I remember was the quality accompanying the smile. I was funny but in a borderline kind of a way. The coffee is interesting. I've always been drawn to stimulants. That first time I went to see a psychiatrist when I was 21 I was maybe nine-months sober, completing the last stage of an outpatient rehab. If I'd even ever been manic at all it did make sense that it was self-induced. Drugs and alcohol made me do things easily described as crazy, a stupid kind of crazy.

Other than those two memories---the comment from my Dad and from some girl---all I remember is the depressive part of manic-depressive. When I think of what that felt like as a kid I picture a lump of buttery dough with sticks for hands. No name to put on it then, I just felt tired, tired at home and invisible at school. I do think that a lot of what went on in school would make anybody depressed however. Later in high school I started drinking and when I did a kind of angry despair would go howling through me. I remember a lot of nights riding my 10-speed as fast as I could or wandering up to the Catholic church on the hill overlooking my street, and in all these memories there was always the same feeling that the sky was not just absent of any kind of God but that he had actually forcibly removed himself from existence just to spite me. The stars winking up there were like the lights that get left on in stores after they have closed.

After I went on medication for bi-polar disorder I couldn't deny it anymore. Every time I would forget to take the medication the same thing would happen. For two days my eyes would dilate and I'd sweat and I'd grind my teeth a lot. I knew something was off because it was the same sweaty dilated feeling I used to get when I used certain unprescribed chemicals but now, it was happening without them. After the two days I'd get depressed. Depression for me veers back and forth between the heaviness and a weepy, empty-world kind of feeling and a very intense, hot irritability. Nothing is right.

I've tried different drugs at doctors' recommendations and the one I'm on now really works. I became a fan of it on Facebook because it is near miraculous in doing what no vitamin supplements, traditional remedies or SSRIs could do.

I'm telescoping a lot, there are many more pieces to this story.

There's how I got to the county clinic with the help of a drug/alcohol counselor from Jamaica and what it was like walking in there, the laminate floors, the battle-scarred office furniture. There's my therapist who recommended what now are some of my favorite movies and in between, recommended actual therapy, mostly it was his kindness that stays with me. There's his glasses and the discrete lines of his facial hair, and later, the mystery of an unnamed indiscretion (after I'd trailed off from seeing him anymore and only stopped in for prescriptions, the receptionist, in her Long Island accent, said she "just couldn't believe the accusations about him"). There are my two successive psychiatrists, the first with his curt but lilting pronouncement of six words that changed a life, his own wispy mustache and mole glasses, and the latter with his bushy red beard and sparkling eyes, a Scottish elf with the magic pen. There's the two-year period I went off my medication and returned to it again gratefully. There's chain smoking and other things we'll just not bother to mention ever, thank you. When I think about all of it it's too overwhelming to try and write down but I tried.

I felt inclined to tell this story now because I had an off weekend. That old feeling has been breezing in and out of my body in waves since around Thursday, the feeling of being temporarily occupied with too much gravity and then bouncing back up again. Having been on the meds for a while I really notice it. I practice meditating a lot. It gives me just enough space between myself and the feeling to realize something is askew. But even with this insight I've still lost sight of that space a few times these past few days. A lot of that has meant snapping at the one person who deserves it least. This particular time the hot stagnated frustrated side of depression has prevailed.

I'm not sure why it happened. I think it's because I haven't slept much this past week. Also, confession, I'm absent-minded. There was one day I forgot to take one pill, but I realized it and took extra the next day. My doctors said I'm allowed do do this. However, a couple hours of forgetting combined with being tired is enough. I picture a piece of fabric in a textile mill running very smoothly through rollers, somebody falls asleep at their post and the machine wrenches, smoking, to a stop. The fabric gets torn.

Even now I can feel it, a sense of heavier air curling around the edges of the space I'm sitting in typing. There's also a "warm vibratey feeling all up through my guttiwuts" as Alex says in A Clockwork Orange. It's the thing that makes you sleep, a defense covering me up with a blanket until it all passes. It will pass. It always does. I fight it hard. I go running, I clean the house, I work, I make myself get up and take a shower and run errands, and on a moment-to-moment basis I watch for the random negative thoughts my brain generates completely out of context so I can smack them down again. Like one of those whack-a-moles. Occasionally one gets by me but it's not so bad.

Nothing is so bad anymore.

September 18, 2010.

She is on one couch on one side of the room with her dog, I am on the other couch on the other side of the room with mine.

"We don't have anything together. I mean, you have your dog and your kids and I have my dog and my kids."

"It's true."

"So tomorrow I say we go to Animal Control and we adopt a rescue dog."

"I'm not bringing anything else that poops into this house until something else that poops leaves."

Glencollie Glendog

Dialogue from this morning, albeit one way:

"Put - that dog treat - down. Dog treats are for poopers."

Tell me thy company, and I will tell thee what thou art.

“True culture is in the mind, the mind,” he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.” “It’s in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things, and how you do things is because of who you are.” -Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor

I guess Grandmother just couldn't completely escape the time and place of her birth. True she spoke four languages, helped the needy and was probably one of the only middle-aged female children of Sicilian immigrants marching against Vietnam. And yet she couldn't escape the tendency to make the generalizations of less tolerant times about people of different ethnicities, religions and lifestyles. In her case very weird generalizations.

First of all, any two people of the same gender who spent any time together in public were homosexuals. One time we were riding a tour bus in London. She leaned in toward me and my dad conspiratorially and said, kind of half-covering her mouth but really not, "Those two gentlemen over there are gay."

"Mother," my dad hissed, with a well-practiced hushing kind of whine. She was always very loud, and his way of talking to her still bore traces of an adolescent complaint from many years of these kinds of interactions. "How can you possibly know that?"

"Well one of them's overweight," she said, "and the other one has bad teeth."

Second, although Grandmother's exceptional cultural openness led her to become an honorary member of the Nichi Bei women's society, and meet with the wives of Japanese diplomats once a month for tea, she still assumed all Asians were Japanese. Out of the same worldliness Grandmother spoke three languages besides English and loved to talk to people in their own tongues. Her Spanish was so good, she got us front row seats at Cats, having impressed the Ticketmaster salesperson with her accent and her familiarity with his native village in Spain.

I learned something about people's basic need to connect with each other studying the way the faces of traveling Italians, Spanish speakers and French people would light up as this American woman stopped to give them directions fluently in their languages. This familiar expression of disarming warmth did not extend to the faces of many Chinese and Koreans she mistakenly greeted with the friendly "Konichiwa!" she had learned from her Japanese friends. Being not only sick of generalizations about Asians but also having been invaded by the Japanese, they would usually give her a very strained but polite smile, and a few openly sneered.

Grandmother flew my dad and then me around the world, taking us many times to France and various parts of Italy. One time we were in Milan drinking coffee at an outdoor cafe. A very large group of Asian men wearing suits started to gather a few tables over. By their body language and their dress and their briefcases it was pretty clear they were in town for some kind of business convention. Perhaps you see this coming. Grandmother nodded her head in their direction. "Japanese gays," she said, matter-of-factly, before taking another sip of her espresso.

Yogi's choice.

"So breathing in, stretch your arms out, way out, feel the tendon fibers stretching... and... snapping. Good. Good. Now, spin your hips so your loose, dislocated arm swings round and smacks you in the face. Great. Really let it fly, keeping your shoulder tucked, inhaling through the navel and exhaling...that's it, now drop into prananda sana and hold in widow's pose opening, keeping your heart open, and offering. Now dive down to the floor and flex your buttocks. That's it... Really push... [braaap] That's OK; the prana will come out where it will. Now. Relaxing your arms, tuck your elbow up, up, up into your left nostril and blow, letting all the energy out. Put your knee up behind your head and inhaling, exhaling push your liver out... through your asshole. Great. Ok now bananadana fo fanna, collapse into child's pose, and cry like a fucking baby.

10 things.

Ten things I've learned from my lady.

1. In more situations than I would have thought, it is practical to say

"Fuck it" or some version of that, with good results

2. Likewise with holding grudges

3. Bread lasts a lot longer in the fridge than a breadbox, with no loss of integrity

4. There are more combinations of colors than I would have imagined

5. Yard work can be very satisfying

6. Painting walls can be very satisfying

7. Generally, things go better with salt

8. A peanut butter cup tastes good on a salt bagel with cream cheese

9. Firefly is the best television show ever created

10. Lovin rules.

September 11, 2010.

Ambrose and Lucas have been begging me to let them put a banana peel on their heads. I didn't mind but every time they asked, at that moment there wasn't occasion to peel open and waste a perfectly good banana. I also never asked why. This weekend someone had banana in their cereal so I found out.

The ratio.

It is not mathematically possible for two sibling children to behave well at the same time. Tonight my nine-year-old son threw himself writhing onto the bed, weeping until he fake-choked, because I said we wouldn't order pizza and would be having mashed potatoes and Ikea meatballs instead. His brother, usually the one to throw fits, pumped his fist excitedly "I love Ikea meatballs! They taste great with gravy!" He checked on his brother who was banished to his room to see if he was feeling better. He chattered away talking and asking questions. The good behavior of one child is proportional to the bad behavior of the other.

Cheater.

The date up there is a lie.

I should have wrote this tomorrow.

Typo of the day (2).

From Beth: "junglasses."

Glasses that let you see archetypes. Or for looking at tigers.

Misheard of the day.

I use the Heart Hospital pharmacy for convenience but I always forget the number. I have a Google Apps thing on my phone that you can speak into and it will search for what you said.

I got "Shark hospital pharmacy."

Sounds like this week's indy band.

Typo of the day.

"Has browns:" Hash browns that have passed their peak.

Downward fucking dog.

Beth and I did a .5-hour Yoga for Weight Loss routine tonight. I sweated so much I slipped on the laminate floor and during one of the poses my lower back suctioned to it. I remember a lot of shallow panting because my gut felt especially burdensome all wedged up in my lungs and the woman in the video just kept softly narrating, talking about my "heart" and "opening" and "offering."

I was already sore --- I had my first official patients this afternoon as a student intern in Tuina which meant around two hours of pushing and grasping and chopping and digging my elbows into people's stubborn muscles in a very small very hot treatment room.

I want to say something funny or tie this up cutely but I can't really lift my arms so good night.

September 8, 2010. A few minutes later.

What's the expiration on that I-shouldn't-have-said-that feeling? In the moment it feels like you'll be an idiot forever.

However today I'm reciting this thing to myself.

Don't hold a grudge.

I forgive people a lot in the end, even, like, the asshole who once stole my car.

But not myself.

So shut up.

September 8, 2010. Afternoon.

I am awake and yet my heart is not hurling itself against my sternum as if it were trying to break through. Green tea has its merits.

September 8, 2010.

The sun's out but it's cool and there's a breeze and the kids are occupied. September has its merits.

I remember upstate in Fall.

Until two years ago one of the happiest times in my life was the two years I went to college in Geneseo, NY. Every September started with a wide-open reaching anticipatory feeling, me going out as the wind and cooler weather rolled in. There are fields and leaves and old houses and a valley there. Those two Septembers marked me forever thinking this is what September should be.

I pass the Test of Manhood.

There was a friend of mine who I remember first meeting in Kindergarten. He was one of those accomplished natural climbers, like my younger son is today. He was always at the top of the jungle gym and I was always at the bottom.

Later in high school one night a group of us drove to a baseball park which after the games were over and the little kids and their parents were gone became a place to drink beers. This friend was with us and we stood around a 12-pack perched on the end of the open tailgate of another friend's truck. Pot burned brightly in a pipe bowl crackling in the dark before becoming consumed again by ashes. The quality of night made everything look pixelated.

"Want to try the Test of Manhood?" this friend asked. I felt swimming static in the lowest part of my gut. I only like feats of courage that I choose for myself and past "tests" of this kind had involved heights or had otherwise not turned out well. Heights affect me with a very primitive fear. Even if my mind is OK with it the rest of me starts shaking involuntarily. But if I'm challenged to do something I have to say Yes because I've never given up on feeling I have to make up for something, the unabashed cowardice of my childhood.

Next to this park was a playground and in that playground was a set of monkey bars, not the kind that go straight across suspended between four posts, but bow-shaped, starting at the ground and rising to about six or seven feet before going down again. I'm ashamed to say six feet seems really high to my reptile brain. As he explained, you have to walk from the bottom to the top without using your hands.

"When you get to the top you have to stand up as straight as you can. Visualize in your mind slipping and falling, your legs going through the spaces between the bars so one of them goes directly into your balls. Imagine the agony, the way that kind of pain goes all the way up inside of you. Then walk the rest of the way down."

The bars were gritty with wet sand as I stepped from one to the next and then the feeling of the sloping metal pressing into my feet and the sense of the strength of my own legs pushing transformed the fear and standing at the top confidence rushed into my lungs and my chest and I for that second stood very tall.

I buy my first Mac and narrowly escape a fumbled attack by born-again Christian terrorists.

I've been researching used Macs on Craigslist for a month now and I finally got one on Saturday. I exchanged texts with the owner throughout the day to plan and get directions and when we finally met he was a very nice, slightly nervous, newly-graduated-from-high-school teenager. He was tall and had a fastidiously shaved head, discrete sparkly earrings, a silver chain of some kind and very white teeth. Maybe an Addidas zipup jacket, don't remember. His friend had one of those baseball hats with a stiff, straight brim which he wore slightly to the side. Both of them stood and smiled and shook my hand when I introduced myself. The owner explained that he'd be starting at one of the local community colleges. He was selling this MacBook because he wanted to upgrade, partly for school and partly for gaming. He'll be getting a Pro which has a faster processor. Both of them gave off a very harmless vibe that wouldn't allow me to even think of hard-negotiating them which I sensed I could've done.

Beth came with me and after I exchanged money and computer she and I walked out to the car. Written in some kind of grease paint on the window of the black car parked next to mine it said, "Too bad you don't know where I live you dumb fuck." I puzzled over it and moved on, but Beth suggested maybe the kid had written it thinking it was my car, which is also black, albeit a way different make and model. This got me started with the paranoia. Was the MacBook broken? I'd sat there with him in the coffee shop where we met while he booted it up, deleted some of the files he wouldn't be needing, got rid of his profile and set me up with one. I tried out an audio and data CD successfully. It didn't seem possible he'd have the skill to rig up some kind of delay so it would break on me after I got it home; it took Microsoft decades to perfect that. I had made a joke when he was deleting his files, asking him if they were stolen CIA files and would people in black SUVs start coming after me once he left the MacBook in my hands.

When we got home Beth told me she had blogged so I decided to read it on my new MacBook, not even bothering to hide my excitement (several times on the ride home and later I said "I have a new computer!"), at last having a laptop that would boot up right away and even after you've closed the lid snap out of hibernation and take you wherever you need to go. She was sitting next to me on the couch. I typed "http://butnevertheless.blogspot.com" and the browser opened on a painting of Babylon or something, people in robes pulling around donkeys huddled under the threat of locusts, the title of the page reading "Mega site of Bible studies and information."

I laughed and typed the address again. Same thing. And again. Puzzled and a little anxious I turned to Beth. "Let me see," she said and I handed her the laptop (it's so light). Usually when she says that whatever it is I can't do ends up being right when she does. But not this time. She did it one more time and it worked. She pointed out we'd been reversing two of the letters without realizing it.

I've gone back into the history and seen I actually mistyped the address to Beth's blog three different ways, and each one took us to the Mega site of Bible studies and information. I guess the former owner installed some kind of a Christian hijacking virus but, since he hasn't gone to college yet, it's kind of an amateurish one. Or maybe the people at Mega site for Bible studies and information are smart, manipulative internet marketers who bought three different misspelled domains like those guys who register "Yahgoo.com." If so it is very odd they'd choose a URL so similar to Beth's, and using Blogger. I still don't have any theories about who the dumb fuck was. That was just weird.

I'm writing this on the Mac now. The keys make that soft comforting clicking sound exactly like Beth's, because it's the same model, I'd sought it out specifically. It does start up right away unlike my HP laptop and is totally white making it about as un-PC-looking as you can get, with its softly glowing backlit apple icon, looking more like a computer terminal in one of the ships from 2001. So far all the web sites I've gone to have been the ones I intended to go to. The hijacking and potentially even the dumb fuck thing were all part of a benign plot to jolt me out of my misperceptions about Christian terrorists, who really are very nice guys.

I should've written this yesterday.

Not even a full week into the... well it wasn't supposed to be a competition but OK, "competition" that I suggested, I forgot to blog. So you win the blog throwdown for now, Beth. I didn't entirely forget, I was composing a post in my head yesterday intending to write it down but fell asleep unexpectedly. And I'm going to write two for today to make up for it. By the way I went back and reread the terms of our arrangement to see if there was a loophole, because I did write in one of my work blogs yesterday. I wrote in it. I didn't hit "publish" yet. So I'm doubly sucking. However, I'm biding my time because sometime in the next few weeks she's going to forget...

Starting Tuesday,

As of September 1 Beth and I committed to write something in our blogs every day for one year. Hers is: butnevertheless.blogspot.com. The only conditions are it be every day and at least one-word long. More than one post a day is acceptible if not desirable---I expect this opportunity to post more will encourage the competitive spirit that's already wound its way into the agreement. Yesterday after posting this she sent me a chat reading "you're it." I had my own reasons for suggesting this challenge and she had her own reasons for going along with it. If you are one of my own three to five readers I hope somewhere in here will be something you'll enjoy. If not I appreciate your sacrifice because it will help me form a writing habit. Also it might help me not talk so god-damn much. Until tomorrow, or later, Eric.

September 2, 2010

Since I was little, by virtue of my parentage I've been able to play any song by ear on the piano --- but only with one hand and one finger at a time. There was a Yamaha baby grand in the downstairs of the house I lived in for 18 years growing up and yet only tonight, at 38 years' old, have I ever played any piece with two hands. Ezra taught me the left-hand part of the Ode to Joy.

September 1, 2010

I bought Ambrose a copy of Lassie Come Home to practice his reading. It's really very nice, literary in an English countryside sort of way. Tonight we were reading how Joe's dad used to lovingly brush Lassie's hair for an hour in front of the fire. Cassie was sprawled out in front of us, drooling, random tufts of matted hair poking out. She's shedding now, and little swirling tornados of hair bump along the floor or turn lazily in the corners of every room in the house if you move, breathe, or even think of moving. I went and got the brush and we all sat around her and she sighed gutterally with the attention of the brush. In minutes there was a loose clump of hair the size of a football at least. Ezra got an empty Gap bag and started putting the hair in it.

I'm going to keep this after she dies, he said.
That hair smells like she already died, I said, throw it out.
No he said.
Give me that bag. That hair is foul.

I did snip a little piece of hair from both of my beloved dogs before they were buried and cremated respectively. One was a tiny Yorkie and the other Cassie's sister, Mazy. The locks of hair from both dogs are caramel with streaks of wiry sable. I have samples of Ezra and Ambrose's first haircuts in an envelope. I don't know why Ezra is thinking about Cassie dying. She's dumb as hell --- even her hair is dumb; she kept her undercoat through the whole hot summer and is only shedding now in September, when she'll actually start to need it --- but she's definitely alive.

Titled.

This was the quote that gave me the idea for the name of this blog.

"In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two.
The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked.
Then there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can't - he goes back inside himself.
Which one is real?
They're all real."

-Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog

Visit with Mom/Grandma August 2010

Mom was here for five days to visit while also staying with the boys for me while I went to a weekend workshop. They did scavenger hunts, went to the library, played hangman, and Mom worked with Ezra who is suddenly playing two-handed pieces like "Fur Elise" and the "Ode to Joy" where last week he was still using one hand. When I got home we all spent time together. Saturday for example we went to the Minnesota State Fair. If you are from the East Coast (I never knew I was from any coast until I moved here and suddenly am grouped along with everything from Maine to Georgia apparently). You can see such novel things as pigs wearing ribbons, milking demonstrations, and people in real cowboy hats, looking everywhere for Wilbur and Charlotte and finding them several times over, and each year the fair vendors try to top each other for the most unhealthy possible concession. The buzz creates a lot of traffic. E.g., a few years ago someone introduced deep-fried candy bars, then Twinkies, and every year since there is a new abomination. I had spaghetti and meatballs on a stick last year. When we first got there this time the boys "convinced" us (repeated their intention over and over with variations until we just gave in) to go on the Space Tower.

It was high. Maybe Mom has some better pictures of the view. I wasn't thrilled to look out the plexiglass window much less take pictures of what I saw. Vertiginous.

A novelty is the butterfly room. We spent some time in there picking up butterflies. When they are lively they will land on you and stay there. This evening we needed to give them some help. They may have been towards the end of their short lifespan.


At one point I was explaining to Ambrose that "monarch" meant "king" and an adult man surely over the age of 50 leaned in and asked me to repeat it. What did it mean? In his defense, I believe he was a fictional character who only ten minutes before had, disoriented, stepped out of the pages of Garrison Keillor's latest novel. These other pictures are particularly grainy. World's Largest Boar, "Reggie," 1,500 lbs:
The River Rapids Boat Ride. We got a free go-round and ended up very wet. We laughed a lot.
The boys enjoyed the animals but in the only picture I have you're seeing the effects of deep-fried Twinkies and cheese curds on their energy levels.We did a lot of other things but didn't take many pictures so I'll have to skip ahead to the last day, when Mom and I took the kids to the bus for their first day of school. That morning:
The bustop.
I'm glad I've been over the shock of Kindergarten twice so 4th and 1st Grade respectively were relatively painless. While I moaned about the end of summer the past few weeks, really I start doing that around August 1, this year is more of a beginning than anything. My new professional life means I can put the kids on the bus more often, pick them up, and even start doing stuff around their school once in a while. For me changes are coming I can't quite believe. A sense of arriving or just starting to arrive. That also adds a different quality to September. But back to the visit, it's hard to explain my thoughts and the history behind them seeing Ezra so eager to play the piano and practice and listen to my mom, watching them work together. Seeing him make the same concentration-face he made arranging his Matchbox cars in a line at ages two and three. Finding the paper left behind numbering things to find on their walk to the library and imagining Ambrose's reaction to finding a Volkswagen, a baby in a stroller, a man with a cane. How seeing my mom's unmistakeable handwriting on that piece of paper kicks off a flashing filmreel behind my eyes, more dreamlike with each frame, of the tags on the presents of 37 Christmas mornings. This history puts its own frame around pristine new moments in time. And then again sometimes the weight or the lightness of certain moments makes their histories irrelevant.

Thanks Mom. Thanks Grandma.

I listen to dead people.

E and I have gone to a few concerts together, all of them bands she likes. I've enjoyed them or found them at least provocative and interesting, Andrew Bird was by far the best. But I went on Ticketmaster to see if I could find shows for artists I already like or at least whose songs I know. I found Buddy Guy and BB King. Everyone else I'd like to see barring Stevie Wonder is dead---Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, James Brown---or I'm ashamed to say nearly so old I'm forced to wonder if the show will be any good. Please surprise me. Otherwise I retreat fully into memories of a time and a place I can't remember because I was never there.

August 18, 2010

Did I mention that I hate our goddamn fucking dogs? I left the room for maybe two minutes and the top part of the sandwich I have been saving from the really expensive restaurant I got taken to yesterday for a business meeting, the part with the bacon on it and the grilled bread, is now gone. Bitches.

August 18, 2010

I haven't talked about the topic of hypomania yet in these posts but today I'm having what I just decided to call micromania. It's actually just a strong desire to write partly fueled by caffeine but having been once and continually diagnosed you get in the habit of treating every state like a syndrome. Today walking the dogs for example I was composing things in my head that I felt I needed to rush home and get down before half of them were lost inevitably. I'm not saying any single one of them was remotely good because that would be arrogant but they were at least clear --- the words were there. Part of micromania is that the creative urge seems to be against better judgment. Better judgment is the voice telling you you should be working at all costs. I have a lot of work to do. Lately I have been seriously questioning the voice of better judgment. Sometimes it's just judgment period. In all senses of the phrase I don't work like other people do.

I invent a new phobia.

It's called blancheaphobia and it is a fear of accidentally bleaching dark clothes that you like. Is something a phobia if it's actually happened to you, more than once? Once I decided a Clorox spray and paper towels would be a great way to clean up the plastic in the beige interior of my '97 Honda Odyssey. Wherever the rag touched the carpet it was ruined with orange-colored spots. Another time, same product, I leaned up against the bathroom counter before fully wiping off the spray and left a horizontal bleach mark across a dark blue shirt. Then there are the times the washing machine decides to throw random bleach splatters across my clothes, even when there hasn't been bleach in it for a few loads. It's dangerous. I still use Clorox spray but I change into old clothes first and I stand way back holding the bottle as far away as I can.

On phobias, I am also a checker. Ezra and I went on a camping trip last weekend and before we left I made him stand there next to me as I checked each dial on the stove, twice. First I wiggle them to make sure they're really off. Then I check to make sure in wiggling them I didn't accidentally turn them on. Then I do it at least one more time.

After trying to convince myself this is phobic behavior and that I should, deep breath, try and check things only once (the iron, the oven, the stove, the water running) or not check at all, that's the one time I come home to find I've left the stove on.

I check twice leaving a restaurant to make sure nothing has fallen under the table.

On the checking. I can't fault myself entirely because I was trained as a child in the inevitability of losing things. I grew up watching my father lose every possible thing that could be lost, a pathological level of forgetting that caused a lot of trouble. I still remember him tearing around the house once hissing out a garbled version of "where are my keys," which were in his mouth. The first time we left for England, for him, it was to move there for good, he had thrown out his new passport and kept the old one after getting it renewed for the trip.

He found this out on the line to check in at the aiport, lugging all the shit that wouldn't fit in the hold or that had not gone with the shipping, including the Dune action figure of Sting that his second wife who was with us at the time had given him as a joke. Sting sat stiff-legged on top of the luggage as my Dad tore through his bags in the middle of the line at the airport, cursing.

Was he cursing himself or cursing fate, or both? Bleach is an outside force, though even when the washing machine is at fault I still blame myself. I should have known somehow, the thinking goes. When I have actually forgotten something or screwed something up by not thinking it through however, I blame fate. Nobody asks for a hole in his head like the one I have, a missing space that fills up easily with worry and compulsion. It's another phobia, fear of one's own capacity to forget.

August 18, 2010

I've had some one-on-one time with Ams because his brother has had sleepovers. When Ams is by himself there is little temper, no stomping, kicking, yelling, protracted wailing or throwing of objects. No war toys. There's just a little boy who plays with stuffed animals and can't seem to get enough of me.

Polish Festival '10

I will destroy Earth. Hell is better.

More camping pictures.

2nd Annual Scout camping trip, Ezra and Dad.

This year's:

Last year's:

August 9, 2010

Being so self-directed lately I veer back and forth between thinking I should take this opportunity of being self-employed to explore creative but entrepreneurial things I wouldn't have the time or flexibility for previously or feeling like I need to rack up as many billable hours as possible. It came to me this morning that if you focus on any one thing too much however wholesome or necessary it seems you are in danger of missing something else.

July 6, 2010. Afternoon.

Working in the coffee shop. There is a little boy here younger than my kids will ever be again with his pacifier and his small shoes and big cheeks, sitting with his grandfather (who happens to be an ex-Hippyish duuude with a long beard). They are enjoying each other's company. Being a grandparent is my only hope for always having little kids around, forever. If my children don't reproduce some day I swear I will kill them.

July 6, 2010. Morning.

Dream: Suspense/intrigue adventure. Sadistic villains chased me for reasons unclear. (Example of sadistic: earlier, one leered, studying diagrams of meat cuts, planning my death). I entered the lobby of an industrial plant crowded with corporate and plant workers, even security guards. Someone holding a puppy stopped my pursuers, convincing them to adopt it. They lost interest in me. Without urgency I walked away.

Lies my father told me.

Ezra has a routine ear infection so I had to take him to the pediatrician yesterday morning. In the car he asked me what I looked like as a kid.

"Well, your Grandma was a big fan of characters called Raggedy Ann and Andy..."

When we got to the doctor's office I looked up Ragged Andy costumes on my phone and clicked on one of the most ridiculous-looking results from a Halloween shop. "Kind of like that," I said. "She died my hair red, and drew dots on my face every morning." Ezra keeps his cards close so when he laughs at something it kind of breaks away from him. Not only is it an endearing mannerism but the fleeting moment of genuine bonding, sharing amusement over an apparently privileged piece of embarrassing information, almost broke my resolve.

There was a long wait for the doctor and the sterile examination room left nothing to occupy kids' or attention-deficient adults' attention. "I wonder if they'll do an eye-polishing today."

"What's that?"

"Well they're supposed to do it every couple of years for kids. There's this glass tube with a vacuum attached. They hook it right here (I pointed to his orbit) and it sucks your eye out into the tube. Schluuuup. Then they can clean it off. To get it back in they reverse the vacuum and it blows back into your socket."

"Really?" he asked, eyes wide, lips pulled down in an anxious, mortified bow, "You're laughing." I hadn't been able to keep a straight face that time.

Money's tight so I'd asked the sleepy-eyed pediatrician for the cheapest possible antibiotic, which was a pill. Waiting at the pharmacy I told Ezra I should warn him, it was a suppository.

"My teacher told me infinity's not a number," Lucas said. "She's lying!" Ambrose replied. "You're in preschool. Teachers don't start telling the truth until you're older."

Some albums need to be listened to all at once and don't work as invividual MP3s. Radiohead's In Rainbows is one, another is Thom Yorke's Eraser. I was feeling sad that "listening to albums" was a thing in the past with electronic music but apparently with good storytelling, which a well-conceived album is, the pieces of the story are drawn to each other and you just can't break it apart. It wants to be told that way.

Trying to decide if I like being called a "man." My impression of man as a kid which I guess I still hold is coffee breath and stinking up the bathroom. No offense dad.

I name the folder where emails from my bank get sent with a "z" so they're not right in front of me when I log on. I changed an angry ex's name in my cell phone address book to "Take a breath" so I'd see that when she called. In my laptop I call my "work" folder "workin" and once, when I had a shitty job, I changed that folder to "I'm so grateful I have a job." How did people practice denial before technology?

Father's Day '10

Had a really nice Father's Day. The boys made me cards and E bought me the most perfectly chosen Dad-type gift on their behalf. Most unexpected present was from Merry, who has no familial obligation to me but wanted to get into the giving spirit, a keychain with a rubber sandle on it that said, "I ♥ Chad."

Capitalism, in 140 characters or less.

I am an unlikely capitalist. I fell into business by accident, well actually I chose it, but during a period of uncertainty and I'd say even weakness. I was really more of an academic, non-profit kind of person. Not too far out of college, well, of dropping out of college (I finished not too long after) a friend of mine from school got married. All of these people were there at the wedding who I hadn't seen for a year and a half. They all seemed to have jobs in Manhattan working in "Marketing." I was working as an evening supervisor in a homeless shelter on Long Island. Another friend of mine, my best friend from high school, had a job at a startup software company. He got me a job writing for them; it was 1998; it was exciting and people in .COM were looking for anybody smart and interesting even without traditional business experience. That one wedding led me to make a decision I'm still living with today. I've been trying to dig my way out ever since. I'll write more about that later.

Anyway. I spend a lot of time thinking about "business" and whether or not it is evil or useless. I had progressed and got jobs at large corporations where I saw very smart, very cool, very creative people do amazing things together and always thought, if only they were building bridges or wells in India or something rather than selling home theater systems and potato chips. Some of these people never see their kids anymore. For what? I wonder if someday their children will look back and think "I never saw my mom growing up, but it was for a good cause. She grew the Pop-Tarts division at Kellog by 25%." I toy with communism, which is a recipe for total frustration, because good luck with that one.

Over the past 11 years I've seen capitalism at first as evil, then as an unecessary evil, then as a not necessary but realistic and practical evil given human nature, and then I guess just seeing it as the-way-things-are. Lately my thinking is more positive. Many people in the corporate sphere are trying to do some good and believe in what they're selling, even home theater systems. And then there's, you know, Band-Aids and dish soap and bananas and shit you need. I don't think the failure of communism is not having three hundred different brands of toilet paper --- I don't need that. It's having none because bureaucracies don't do a good job getting people what they need.

So, I meditate, and sometimes when I do that answers to some of the things I philosophize about during the day in my car or walking the dog pop into my mind very clear and simple and inarguable. Today the thought arose:

"Everybody needs things that they have to buy."

The diapers and band-aids and bananas have to come from somewhere. Also, who am I really to judge what people need. My ability to play mp3s is arguably unecessary but man, it adds a lot of dimension to my life to have music.

Everybody needs things, and currently, they have to buy them. So they have to be marketed and sold. This makes me feel a little better about the time I will spend helping shareholders at large corporations, many of whom are probably nice people looking to build college and retirement funds, make money. The messed up thing is, I entered the business world to make money, and I'm still not really. When I do actually start making money in business I will feel even better about it.

The TV Diaries.....

.....Week of June 16. Working from home with the kids this week and getting an interesting cultural education.

June 13, 2010

Hot advice for males who love Big Lebowski and keep trying to share it with their ladies, who don't seem to get it. As much as you love the John Goodman bits, skip over them.

June 8, 2010

Trying to plan what to do with this sliver of very productive time, the pre-10:00 am hour. The annoying and desperate part of my brain is pushing me to write, as if this is the last time I'll ever be able to. What I feel like doing is studying for an exam, the subject matter is fascinating. So it's raining and I'm going to sit here in the comfortable chair by the window with two dogs sleeping nearby and read through these notes. It occurs to me I'll get restless in maybe 25 minutes. My urges burn themselves out quickly. Then I'll be interested in writing and do it when it comes naturally. Writing will get old, and, naturally, I can move on to the next thing in the list with my full attention. If I force any one of these activities during a time when my natural energy for them is at its least, that activity will be so exhausting it will leave none left to do the others.

A successful man is like a piece of bamboo on the surface of rough water. Hollow of intention, he floats gracefully on the cresting waves of his undiagnosed A.D.D.

More on June 7 - after afternoon

I was talking about the subject of the earlier post with E and she said she's known a lot of people who kept it all together as drunks, but were maybe more self-centered than others. Self-centered could mean unapologetically selfish, or just clueless about the effect of their actions on other people. I told her I thought I was self-centered, and kind of a fuckup. She said "absent-minded." This reminded me of something.

I was in New Orleans 11 years ago wandering around at night and came upon a girl with a palm reading stand sitting in the dark. Nearly nobody was around, it was in the courtyard of St. Louis Cathedral which was closed up for the night from visitors or services. Side note, her face was painted white and she had black lipstick and she said she was a Satanist. Anyway, she read my palm for five dollars. Sitting there in front of me she studied my hand. She said I've had what I didn't realize were some "million dollar ideas" so far in my life. Tell the truth, there've been a few times I thought I was on to something I later did nothing with. She listed off some things about my life to come that I don't remember but one of them was getting married, which she said in that same listing way, as if she were telling me I'd buy toothpaste more than once over the coming years or have a mailbox on my home. The tone was different than the comment about the million-dollar ideas, which the way she said it sounded like she found me interesting. Then she paused, studying more closely, and there was a look of what I perceived as caution or alarm as she said "...and you'll have two kids." I didn't know what to read into that. It scared me. Would they be born hopelessly deformed? Would they die? Not so far. But that comment was another story. What I remembered today was her saying I had a long life line, but that I was very accident prone. This much is true. And it certainly extends from being absent-minded. She was also right about the marriage.

I don't know if I'm a fuckup, or self-centered, or just absent-minded. I do know I feel sometimes messily put together. When we're that way, it's the unique and creative, adaptive way we sew it all up again that makes us interesting, isn't it?

June 7, 2010 - afternoon

At odd times memories of my drinking days come back to me. Today, driving home from school, maybe I was thinking of a guy I saw flip his Harley and survive a couple years ago on the same highway, I remembered that saying from AA "God loves children and drunks." I don't know about the children part. A lot of inexcusable things happen to children around the world every day every second. But it is true, drunks seem to make it through lots of disasters implausibly unharmed. Walking away from car wrecks for example. It's like the feeling you have when you're drunk, that you're wearing a heavily padded spacesuit looking at the world through a fogged window, affects the physical world and things bounce off of you. Thinking about it led me to think about some of the recovering alchoholics that I've known. Most of them were "drinking people." They had a hard-living approach to life and drinking was a part of it. Then there are those rare few people you'd either never suspect of drinking or of having their drinking be a problem. Really quiet socially awkward people on the one side, on the other rich professionals who drink a lot openly but still keep it all together. This led me to this question, are most alchoholics fuckups first, and alchoholics second? I don't have an answer. I seem to be both at once.

June 7, 2010 - morning

Was cleaning up this morning, putting in order and removing the dust from things so that I could set up an environment to write in and there were two movie cases on the table. "Gamera" and "Kiki's Delivery Service." Before they were swept up and placed squarely on top of each other I noted that these choices seemed like the types of things you'd find laying around in a house where we both lived. Started thinking about the director Miyazaki in particular. His movies ask you or invite you or trick you into entering a place where you have to accept spirits and gods and maybe immortality. There's already some room in my beliefs for things like that and in fact there are some actual ghosts and deities way back in there. Elizabeth not so much. And yet thinking about some of the things she reads and watches if you had to generalize them would be fantasy. Sometimes the differences between what she and I believe seem very different. And this morning I was thinking maybe not so different. We're both willing to entertain the idea of these beings from the stars and shadows I just take it a little too far. That made me think that with people in general it's not so much what we believe that makes up the distinct philosophy of our singular personalities but the stories we like to hear.

Dogs, three different ones.

My dog. I tried to take a picture of her a few minutes ago and she wouldn't look at the camera. She acted guilty and shied away exactly like she does when she's taken a dump in the house. But I didn't find any. I must seem mad because I keep leaning down and looking directly into her face.

Cassie not looking at the camera.

Lydia on the other hand, still sprawled out on the bed, thumped her tail happily when I went upstairs to get her picture. She is bold, brassy and slightly aloof. In some ways the "L"s in their names were the only thing Lincoln and Lydia really had in common. Lincoln was constantly behind, next to, and around us, where she spends much more time alone. He happily went along with it when you grabbed him and pulled him close to you. Lydia will cuddle, but completely on her own terms, and she has to initiate. She sleeps in the bed with the humans, and when she's picked her spot, she seems to summon weight out of the air and drill herself down into the mattress. You kick her and push at her; she leaps up for a second and retakes the exact place.

Lydia thumping her tail on the bed.

Like a dog Lydia will eat nearly anything. Cassie, I have to lock her in a room with her food, then go in there and repeatedly pick up and place the bowl in front of her until she finally, tentatively noses a few kernals out onto the floor and nibbles at them. She won't fetch. In so many ways, I'm still convincing her to be a dog. She most often has a look of nervous anticipation and cluelessness as she paces the house (E is taken to calling her "Pacy") following you close and then stopping in front of you while you're walking, like a gate.

I'll post better pictures of both dogs later. The camera is having issues.

But she'll tuck her head into your lap when you pet her, never leaving until you stop. She clacks her teeth together when I come home and leaps up to put her paws on my chest. She stretches out next to me on the couch and we spoon. She has charmed and adopted Elizabeth. Another story, how I got her, but her breeder knew she deserved and needed a family back on the Collie farm (when her name was "Classy") because of these qualities. At last, at night, Cassie abandons all her aprehension and becomes as much like a dog as she is capable, belly up and oblivious. No longer seeking our company or approval, peculiar characteristics that are uniquely her own come out and you get a glimpse of a mysterious and inscrutable self. Like people, dogs hold tight to something of their own. And like people, the feeling in your chest of forever reaching for another glimpse of someone's secret self is probably what we're talking about when we talk about love.

Perchance to dream stupidly.

I haven't slept much the past two nights. Part of it is being wracked by stupid dreams. Here was one: Elizabeth and I were working on a “social media strategy.” Apparently this involved taking a ride along a canal in a medium-sized boat to collect and dispose of diaper footballs.

I remember the boat was kind of nice. It had stripes painted on it and brass rails, a cabin below. Fronting on this canal were a series of luxury condos, and really nice restaurants with big glass windows. Inside one restaurant, which had pale yellow exterior stucco walls and trim cut from rich, dark wood, you could see big potted plants and tables with white tablecloths set for lunch. This district was like some of the posher stretches of the London canal system. The canal was narrow and the boat traveled really close. You could step off right onto the balconies of these buildings.

Apparently, the balconies were littered with diaper footballs. (Non-parents: a diaper football is when you fold a used diaper up tightly, securing the contents into a ball you can easily toss into the garbage). We got rid of the footballs by tossing them overhand into the water. My girlfriend was telling me why it was important to get rid of them as soon as possible. If you don’t, she explained, they freeze overnight and become like rocks. Homeless people throw them through the windows of people’s home and of businesses. Then they rob them.

The meaning behind this dream: not sure. Work is preoccupied with social media lately, there's a child in the house who has still been in diapers --- which tends to be more apparent when warm weather brings out the essence of things --- and Elizabeth is smarter than me. She usually has to be the one to explain things. Also, workwise, I think this dream confirms my whole mind is in agreement about being done doing shitty jobs.

May 19, 2010

Sitting on the porch last night with the kids eating popsicles looking out at the yard and the tree and all this outside I have to myself for the first time in years, I commented that the Buddha statue my mom gave me had become nearly obscured by overgrown grass. Ambrose said it didn't matter because he was just, you know (he smiled tentatively; was he unsure he had the right word) meditating. Ezra asked me if I could "teach him Buddhism." "Two things" I told him, "Pay attention, and be nice."

He gave me a look like I was kidding him. How could it be so simple. Wasn't it an arcane system of gestures, words, rituals. And part of it didn't make sense, or maybe sounded too pedantic: "Pay attention?"

"Pay attention means like, listen to somebody when they're telling you something," Ambrose said. "Yeah that's part of it," I said, "It also means notice things. Notice the grass. Notice the tree. Notice the taste of that popsicle. Notice the sound of the birds. Notice that squirrel running across the wire." (Ambrose, who had been smiling, laughed).

This was a really trite and tired way of saying it, I know, however true it might actually be, but that moment of last night in that single pristine moment they seemed to get it. After all, all they had to do was look around.

I have to go away.

It's very hard to get any work done in a coffee shop when "Father & Son" is playing, what with the lump in the throat and all.

May 14, 2010, 10:40 a.m.

Stopping by the kids' school to drop something off and ending up making tie-died shirts with your kindergartener outside on a bright, cool Spring day is one of the many good reasons for getting laid off.

Just like Jelly Roll.

Listening to Astral Weeks this morning in the car it was wet and the streets and parks and buildings outside the streaked, dropletted glass were ranging like the expansive continual unwinding feeling of this album which is soul music like Van's other albums but soul unthreaded. More spaces between the notes. Like the windows are open on a rainy spring afternoon, blue notes but coming from another room down the hall or up the stairs where someone's got an old ray charles record on.

I got a home on high / in another land / so far away / so far away.

I felt that way a long time walking around with my eyes closed looking for something invisible. But music, any kind of music, even blues with its love and loss and being broke, is a way of remembering what's right here.

Dear Mr. Morris.

...it has been six months since we broke up. I'm happy to say that at last, I don't miss you every day. I don't miss the foul-smelling hands and clothes. I don't miss brushing my tongue, gargling mouthwash, and scrubbing my face hands and arms every time I want to kiss my lady. I don't miss doing the same shit to hide from my kids the fact I'm doing something I hope they never do. I don't miss going out in the cold. So, please stop sending me emails. I don't want to read them anymore. Cut it out with the embedding sexy pictures of yourself into movies and TV. Yeah, your sultry blue curls are enticing but I know what kind of baggage you bring with them. And please, stop sending your friends to stand outside and blow on me with your familiar perfume. I don't want to smell you anymore. Check back with me in six months if you want, but I suspect I'll feel the same. Besides. I have a new intimate friend now named Caffeine. Regards, Eric.

"I'd like to dedicate this song to anybody with hearts, any kind of hearts, and ears."

-Jimi Hendrix' intro to a cover of Like a Rolling Stone he did at Monterey Pop Festival.

Me and the Heron.

I heard just the opening of this one morning on the clock radio and that was enough for me to know I had to track it down and when the DJ said it was Gil Scott-Heron it added even more urgency to my needing to find it. (The whole album is available on emusic).



The spoken word on this record will make you want to write poetry even if you're not a poet. It reminds me the few times I tried to compete, badly, at the Nyorican Cafe but it excites me the way the idea of spoken word once did and I'm trying to write poetry again so thanks, Gil, for yet another indelible contribution to American culture and to my life.

May 6, 2010

Ezra and Ams sang together in the car this morning, Ezra teaching his brother the words to a rainforest song from school, which he belted out full volume as Ambrose tried to keep up with his own sweet little voice.