The Dark Hand

It sneaks up on me in unexpected ways. Something goes just slightly wrong. My boss glares at me. The wife and I don't have dinner together. Or the news - the news drags me down often. Stories about children - stories about despair. The floods in Colorado. Meaningless deaths, natural disasters, shameful political behavior.

It doesn't matter if the story on the 5:00 news is big or small. It doesn't matter if I'm being fired or if the boss just growls at me a little. It's like I have a trapdoor inside my heart, and if I step the wrong way, down I go.

Depression is something that I live with. I don't think about it very often, but my mother was bipolar. My brother was almost certainly bipolar. Manic depressive, that's what it used to be. Manic highs and lows. You go up hard, you come crashing down like a plane that's run out of fuel.

I have had my bouts, when it was hard to focus or concentrate on anything except the sadness. After 9/11, I crashed hard for a few months. I was in a funk. I couldn't stop listening to the news, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't concentrate. I would cry unexpectedly, unpredictably. I went to therapy. I got better. But it never goes away. The dark hand never stops reaching for you. It's just that, for a while, it can't reach you. That doesn't mean it's not still clutching.

Anyway, sometimes I don't even know what causes my funks of depression. Sometimes it's just a collection of small things, inconsequential in themselves, but the combination of them just seems to set me reeling. And I'm in the cloud. The dark cloud, the cloud that follows me around like Pigpen's cloud of gloom. And nothing can snap me out of it.

When I'm depressed, it's like a horribly sick game of chess. I see how one thing can lead to another, can lead to another, and pretty soon I'm imagining how easily I could end up sleeping in my car. Or declaring bankruptcy again. Or maybe I'll lose this job, too. I can see everything going completely, awfully, catastrophically wrong. Every blue sky looks like a looming monsoon.

There are days when all I want to do is sleep, when anything else just seems to be too much effort. There are days when I don't think I can stand the effort of doing my job, talking to other people, being part of the world. And I just want to pull the covers over my head and go away. When I was younger, that was a solution to the petty aches and pains of teenager-hood. I slept a lot. I'd come home from school at 3 in the afternoon, go into my room, and nap until dinnertime. It's easier than feeling.

I could be an alcoholic very easily, I think. I can see that the cloud of alcohol haziness would be a comfort in times like this. The blur of not seeing straight, of not quite being able to hold your thoughts together. The comfort of not holding onto things. Like time. Like memory. Like feelings. I can see the appeal of that. But I don't drink. Not really. I don't let myself. We keep only a small amount of liquor in the house, and I only drink one or two drinks when I'm out. I don't drink at home. Maybe a beer. That's it.  

Mostly, it's being aware that I have this tendency. I can get depressed. I can sink hard into despair and sorrow and sometimes I don't even know it's happening. So I try to check myself. I try to evaluate where I am and whether or not I'm sinking. When I am, sometimes the best thing is to tell my wife what's happening. It's not her fault. Depression isn't anyone's fault, anymore than you can blame cancer on your obnoxious neighbor or your sister who never calls anymore. Depression is a condition that exists in my body. It's a biochemical defect, an error in the coding, and sometimes it flares up. If I know it's there, I can watch for the signs. And if I watch for the signs, I can pull myself up out of the nosedive before I fall too far.

You, dear readers. Thank you for listening when I just need to talk things out. This blog, after all, is mostly so that I can say things out loud. This - this depression thing - is a thing that I need to talk about sometimes.

If you experience this too - if the dark hand reaches out for you sometimes, talk about it. Let your loved ones know that it's a part of your life. Because it's a part of theirs, too. And they care about you, and they can't know how to help you and how to be there for you if they don't know what's going on. So talk to your friends. Let people know. Educate yourself and take care of yourself. Start a blog, hell, it's still legal. Don't hide. We don't need to be ashamed. We didn't do anything wrong. Don't be ashamed that you suffer. It's hard enough just suffering, without feeling like we're somehow failures too.

Killers and Cops

For years, I avoided shows and movies that I thought were callous about the value of human life. I didn't read detective books or watch movies about serial killers (everything from Pulp Fiction to Silence of the Lambs.) Many people who have lost loved ones to violent crime tend to do this - I'm not alone. (For more, listen to the brilliant episode of This American Life called "How to Rest in Peace.")

I seem to be watching a show now that is immersed in the "serial killer" genre, and that has me thinking.

Now, first, the show is brilliant. Luther is the show. I'm a little late to the bandwagon - it came out in 2010 and hit our side of the pond in 2011. I'm watching it now on Netflix, and I'm riveted. It stars Idris Elba, who is one of the most compelling actors I've ever seen. Luther is driven and ruthless and unpredictable, a pitbull in the clothes of a homicide detective. He's haunted by what he does for a living. But his chief tendency is tenacity. He will not let go of a crime until he has tracked down the perpetrator and either brought them to justice or otherwise stopped them.



I love the show. I love the depth of each character, the fact that characters never seem to do what you expect them to do. I love that the writers inflict real consequences on their characters. Like Joss Whedon, the writers of this show know that to care about the main characters, you have to see them in genuine danger. Luther might lose his job. He might be killed. He might lose people about whom he cares dearly.


And I love his foil, Alice Morgan. She is an adversary for him, a foil, his dark conscience that whispers the worst things into his ears. When Luther wants to bring someone to justice, Alice wants to stab him to death and leave him in the street. There is a scene in the fourth episode - if you've seen it, you know the one I mean. The scene places Alice and John Luther at opposite ends of a phone line, and they both end the scene screaming, broken apart at the seams. Alice does something unspeakable and when Luther tries to chastise her for it, she screams at him, "I did it for you, pig! Filth! I did it for you!" It explodes off the screen. I've rewatched the scene at least five tiimes, and I may do it again tonight before I go to sleep.

And it's about killing. Bodies fall. People are killed, serial killers track their victims mercilessly and dispatch them brutally. It's a very bloody show. But ... and maybe this is because I don't watch a lot of these shows... the murders have consequences. They are bloody and messy and they leave holes in people's lives. The detectives are upset - traumatized sometimes - by what they see. This is as it should be.

I can watch a show like this. They care about the lives of people and they pursue killers, not as puzzles to be solved, but as menaces to be removed from society.

When my brother was murdered, I thought we would never find the killers. My brother was one of a thousand victims in New Orleans, a city that was facing thousands of outstanding warrants before Katrina even happened. The city was overrun by crime and its police force was drowning. They wouldn't find the killers. They didn't have the time or the manpower to find them.

Four years later, one of the killers was found. And arrested. And I attended his murder trial, along with my father. And he was sentenced to life in prison (the most severe penalty I could accept - I refused to go along with the prosecutor if they pursued a death sentence.)

John Luther is a superhero of sorts. He's brave and true, ruthless and relentless, and he does things that most of us would never imagine. He puts himself in danger, time and again, to catch the bad guys. I like the idea that detectives are like that. When the most horrible thing happens to a loved one, I am comforted by the idea that those detectives, those police officers, are as haunted as we are. That they are staying up at night, trying to figure out how to solve the case. That they would do anything in their power to find the perpetrators. John Luther is a rampaging bull, but speaking as someone who has had to rely on the dedication of police detectives and inspectors and prosecutors, I'd always want someone like him on my side.

Superheroes and Super Kids

This image is from Tiny Superheroes, an awesome nonprofit that you should support. Go here to do that: www.tinysuperheroes.com.

I need to update my blog roll. Since our kiddo was diagnosed with Asperger's, I'm reading a whole new crop of blogs.  In the meantime, here are a couple of articles that restored my faith in humanity.

Gandhi Vs. Wolverine: The Adamantium of Peace

I presented the litany of usual suspects: the Joker, Lex Luthor, Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, etc. Then she asked who Wolverine’s enemy was. And that’s when the conversation shifted.

“We are.”

That wasn’t the answer my daughter expected, nor was it what I expected to say, frankly.

It was just a conversation about comic book heroes, but any good parent knows to seize an opportunity to impart a message about acceptance and diversity. So we spent a few minutes talking about the fact that in the X-Men mythos, other average people tend to be the ones who can’t accept that there are people different than they are. Then again, I confessed, it might take me a few minutes to get used to someone who absorbs my energy through skin-to-skin contact.

Then she asked about Iron Man’s villain.

My answer was simple: “Actually, I think he is the enemy.”

And then there's this:

"Time to Listen":  Autism and the simplicity of relationships

...he calls out, “Mom – What is Mary Poppins about…?” 

I respond from the kitchen, “It is a story about two kids who are really struggling. They don’t behave very well and they are unhappy. Their parents are too busy and no one wants to be their nanny. Then Mary Poppins comes along and she teaches the children to find joy in being children, and she shows the parents how to notice and listen to and pay attention to their kids. Then her work is done… and they become a connected family …and Mary Poppins goes to help another family.” 

H concurs, “That is what I thought – the parents didn’t have time for their kids…” 

My curiosity kicks in, “Why do you ask?” 

“I was just thinking about it – and I wanted to know if I was right. I was! That is what I thought: the parents didn’t have time for their kids – and then they learned what was important.” 

“Do you think your dad and I spend enough time with you?”

The best way for any parent to learn how to do their job is to see how other parents are doing it.  Thanks to the magic of the internet, blogs give us a window into the living rooms of other parents and other kiddos. We're all struggling, but we're all doing okay.

Father's Day - Signs of Hope

Father's Day is often a dreadful day in popular media.  I wrote a bitter and frustrated post about it a few years ago, after reading a particularly infuriating post in a national magazine.

So imagine my surprise when I saw this commercial, depicting a dad doing ... well, doing what dads do. He was swaddling his kid. 

His wife called to check on him, and he responded that he had matters well in hand. He was a dad. Dads didn't need help - they managed. So she hung up, and then he pulled up a YouTube video to see how to do a better job of swaddling his kid. 

I probably could have helped him with his swaddle technique, if he'd only asked.

And lo and behold, a dad swaddled his kid on national television. And it was a beautiful moment. It was a real moment. He wasn't perfect, but he was trying his hardest and he wasn't intimidated. He was doing what dads do. (The commercial is called "Swaddle Master. I know a thing or two about swaddling, so I loved it.)

Another commercial, this one for toothbrushes. (Yeah, I know.) But holy cow, this commercial slayed me. Dads holding their kids, and playing with them, and teaching them stuff. It's so simple and just so perfect.



I wish I had a third commercial, so it would be a trend piece. But whatever. Two is good.

Oh, wait, here's a third. It's not a commercial, but it still works. It's a new piece by Louis CK that ran on CBS Sunday Morning for Father's Day.


And this one is great because it adds a lot of elements that are also true to life. Louis is full of doubt and self-loathing and that fiery, angry defiance that defines him. "No, screw you, I'm going to do it THIS WAY!!"

Fathers are doubtful. We are consumed by doubt. We're not sure we're doing it right. The problem with dads having taken such a backseat role in parenting for so long is that now, we're not sure we know how to do it.

Here's the secret. Moms don't know what they're doing either. No, really, they don't. They DON'T. There is no magic innate motherhood gene. We all just learn by trying it and screwing up and waking up the next day anyway.

But we're not hopeless. Lots of dads are doing just what they're supposed to do. They change diapers and hold their kids and kiss their boo-boos and look at report cards and fix lunches. They strap in car seats and make dinners and wipe tears away and make their stuffed animals talk in ridiculous voices.

We do what we're supposed to do. We're not boobs. We're not idiots. We're people, and there are some great ones, and some really lousy ones. But in between, there's a hell of a lot of us who are just doing the job, day after day after day. I saw a great quote today, one that I'd never seen before. "Being a great father is like shaving. No matter how good you shaved today, you have to do it again tomorrow." It's from someone named Reed Markham.

We don't want medals. Just treat us like human beings. When you see a dad taking his kid for a walk, don't think "oh look, daddy's babysitting." That father is being a parent. It's not special anymore to see fathers doing the parenting thing. The world is changing. This year, for once, I'm a little more hopeful that the change is being noticed.

Richie Havens, the Voice of God

People have used the phrase "the voice of God" in a lot of ways. To me, I hear Richie Havens' voice and I hope that's what God sounds like. That unique combination of authority and compassion is so hard to find. His voice just cuts right through to the soul.

I loved Richie Havens. I love Richie Havens. My dad had the soundtrack to the Woodstock movie, which is where I heard him for the first time. And I heard this.



Later, seeing this in the movie, made even more of an impression on me. He had his eyes closed nearly the entire time. He wasn't singing the song - he was channeling it.

That's what Havens did. He was a channeler. The voice that sang those songs was deep and heavy with emotion: sadness, empathy, heartache, elation, joy. He could add new meaning to unexpected songs. His versions of "Just Like a Woman" and "Here Comes the Sun" are legendary.

But have you heard this? The original is a classic, but he finds new depths of despair in this song.




I was very surprised a few years ago to hear Richie Havens' voice again in a movie. Remember Collateral? With Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise (back when people still thought of him as an actor first)? This was on the soundtrack.



The lyrics are simple, but Havens does so much with what he's given. The song is impossible to imagine with anyone else's voice. Even the moans - could anyone moan with as much conviction as him?

God bless Richie Havens. I'm heartbroken to hear of his passing. He was one of the first connections musically that crossed my dad's generation and mine. And many years later, I had the opportunity to see him live at Seattle's Folklife Festival. I've seen big name legends. I've seen Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Solomon Burke. But seeing Richie Havens was like touching eternity. I could have sat in the grass and watched him all night, and I think he would have been content to strum his guitar and sing all night.

Inspector Gadget Saves the Day, Maybe

My kid is watching an Inspector Gadget movie that he found on Netflix. I want to save you the trouble, in case your small child is thinking about watching it.

If you're able to tolerate Inspector Gadget, it's fine. It's about the Inspector discovering some giant egg that hatches into a gigantic flying lizard who wreaks havoc all over Metro City. Wacky hijinks ensue, and everyone seems to have a different idea what to do with the lizard. The mayor wants to turn it into a tourist attraction. Dr. Klaw wants to use it to destroy the city. Inspector Gadget wants to make it his juggling partner.

There's some weirdness in the show. Penny is 16 and doesn't look much like her original version. (Her voice is identical, which frankly is just weird.) There's a GadgetMobile, inexplicably voiced by Bernie Mac. (My guess: 1) money, 2) he wanted to impress his kids.) There's a Scottish bad guy, for no apparent reason.

The whole premise of Inspector Gadget is that everyone is incompetent. Let's just lay that on the table. The inspector is the biggest buffoon, of course. Every time he solves something, it's by complete accident. But the bad guys are also incompetent, and come up with absurd schemes that never work. And never make sense. The mayor is an idiot, the chief is a doofus, pretty much everybody is an idiot except the dog.

Here, the movie ramps up the incompetence factor. Dr. Klaw (who has the best voice of the show) wants to control the lizard, so he has his henchmen try to feed it some kind of remote control electronic device blah blah whatever. The lizard won't eat it. What kind of super villain has plans that fail because an animal won't eat something?! Goon.

The Scottish assistant is also incompetent. Penny is helpless - she seems more of a damsel in distress than she ever did in the show, in fact. She does a lot of screaming and flailing and crying for help. She has a boy who seems to have a crush on her (again, was there ever a boy in the show? We didn't need this subplot.)  The boy's also an inventor, but he completely fails at inventing some kind of potion that ends up saving the day. So the world is saved because Inventor Boy screws up.

It's a fine waste of time, but just be prepared as an adult to yell at the screen a lot. It's computer generated, so it doesn't have the warm feel of the original cartoon. One other difference: it sadly doesn't have the voice of Don Adams, who passed away in 2005. The guy who does the Inspector's voice does a fine impersonation, but it's clearly not the original voice.

I always thought that the device of the show was that Penny and the dog were the real brains behind the Inspector. But here, nobody has the brains. They all seem so confused that it's amazing the entire city doesn't come crumbling down around their ears. It's a little disappointing on that front. Still, like I said, if you're stuck inside and your kid has to watch something, it's not the worst thing on Netflix.

What the hell?

Maybe there have always been stupid people in the world and it's just easier to hear about them because of the connected world. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, everything makes it harder to hide your offensive stupid horrifying behavior.

But an honest question here. What the hell is happening in this country?

• In Florida, a police sergeant shows up at a shooting range with targets that resemble Trayvon Martin. You remember Martin - the 17-year old boy who was shot dead by his neighbor, who then tried to hide behind the "Stand Your Ground" laws in Florida? Now he's a shooting target. Nice.

• A judge in Montana emails around a "joke" that apparently suggested that President Obama's mother had engaged in bestiality. 

Let me say that again, just to be clear. He sent an email that suggested that the mother of the President of the United States had sex with a dog. Nice. Remember all those times when people said things like that about Barbara Bush? Yeah, me neither.

The judge has since retired. He wasn't terminated. He retired, which means that now the state will be paying a lifetime pension to a racist idiot.

• In New York, a teacher assigns her students to "think like a Nazi" and make a persuasive argument as to why "Jews are evil and the source of our problems."  The school has apologized. No word as to whether the teacher faces any punishment for this heinous behavior. 

• This comes after ANOTHER New York teacher was called out for story problems about beating slaves. The assignment was in 4th grade.   Nine and ten-year old kids were asked questions like "a slave was whipped five times a day. How many times was he whipped in a month?" No word if this teacher was fired, but the whole school is undergoing "sensitivity training." Ahem.

• And then, there was the Georgia teacher who took it one step further, asking questions about how many beatings Frederick Douglass received. Also, this lovely example: “Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”

In GEORGIA. Which has a history of, y'know, slavery. Again, no word if the teacher was fired, but the principal was apparently looking into "what staff development is needed for the teachers."
 
Can someone explain exactly what kind of human resources training is needed to remind people that beating people is wrong and treating human beings like property is also totally the fuck wrong?! Jesus almighty Christ on a cracker.

I don't even know what to say. If a teacher assigned my kid something like that, there would be hell to pay. I'll be damned if some tone-deaf idiot is going to be indoctrinating my kid with their stupid racist 19th century ideas.

And the rest of them? I don't even know. What I'm going to do is raise my son to be open-minded, and to not be afraid to question authority. We all lose when people behave like absolute pigs and no one speaks up.

You Are Being Watched

We were in a fast food place the other day. I was pouring a cup of diet Coke from the fountain. I didn't even think about it, because I had done it so many times. Place the cup under the ice dispenser, get ice, put the cup under the Diet Coke spigot, push the button, fill the cup up near the top. Wait for the bubbles to disperse. Fill it up again, and wait again, and then fill it to the top.

That's just how you do it.

And then I realized I was being watched by a pair of seven-year-old eyes.

It's a humbling thing, seeing your child watching you. I wish I had been doing something really cool, like recoding a website or dismantling a carburetor. Or cooking the perfect omelette. But instead, I was just pouring a cup of soda. And my kid was watching me to see how to do it.

It must happen all the time. All the things I do all day that I don't even think about, and he just studies me like a walking textbook. Pouring cereal. Tying my shoes. Making coffee. Shaving my face. So many things.

I remember doing it myself, of course. I have clear vivid memories of watching my dad as he did the simplest things, things he hadn't even realized were things, if you see my point. Things like parallel parking. Like throwing a football in an effortless spiral. Like ordering food in a restaurant. And I watched him, because that's how you learn how the world works. You watch your parents. And the way they do things is the way that it's done.

Is that a little scary, parents and parents-to-be? Good. Because you need to keep it in mind. You are being watched all the time. Whatever you're doing - good, bad, lazy, admirable - your children have their eyes on you. Make yourself someone worth watching.

Photo from flickr user @ANDYwithCAMERA. Used under Creative Commons license.

"I've Got You."

We were watching the ocean waves crashing, far out in the distance. My son and I were walking on the beach, looking at patterns in the sand, looking at shells. I was lazily watching him. He was happily running on the beach, filled with joy. 

It was a bitterly cold day on the beach. But it was the ocean, and when you have a chance to see the ocean, you see it. We had traveled out to the Washington coast, and after a lackluster day, we drove to a place where we could walk out on the sand and see the ocean in its full glory. 

The weather was turbulent. We had been hit with a couple of surprise rain squalls. There were white caps on the water, and the waves seemed particularly explosive. 

A group of kids was out closer to the edge of the surf, and I heard their parents getting excited because the tide was coming in closer. The tide crept in toward them, soaked their shoes, and they went running away giddily. The tide kept rolling in, slowly but determinedly.

"Son, we need to get back," I called. "The tide's coming in too fast. We don't want to get wet." 

And then the tide devoured the beach. It came up to our feet, and it kept coming. My shoes were suddenly waterlogged; then it was up to my ankles. Then my calves. Then my knees.

It kept coming in, like a bathtub that had filled up suddenly. Oliver began panicking and screaming. I grabbed his hand, and we ran as hard as we could toward the dry sand, while the water roared around our legs. 

The water was up to his waist. He was running in slow motion and screaming at the top of his lungs. He was about as scared as I've ever seen him. I just held tight to his hand and I kept shouting back, "I've got you! I've got you!"

"It's trying to pull me in!" he screamed.

"It won't. I've got you, son. I've got you." We ran and ran. 

Finally, the enraged wave receded, and we were able to reach dry land. His mother, shocked, raced up to greet us. Oliver was still screaming, shivering from the bitter cold water that had drenched him. We ran back to the car where my brilliant wife had stashed an extra set of clothes for him. (I had no such luck. I didn't expect to need an extra pair of clothes. I had to drive back to town and buy a pair of emergency sweats.) 

~     ~     ~

They call them sneaker waves. We didn't see it coming; you never see them coming. The tide was actually going out, or so we thought. That's why we were so complacent. We thought we were safe.

Sneaker waves are dangerous things. They are impossible to predict and they take people completely by surprise. They pull people out to sea. It happens. I don't like to think about it now, but it does happen. Sometimes, they pick up floating logs or huge rocks, and then you have a dangerous wave with a weapon. Imagine, seeing a 1000-pound rock floating in toward you, being carried by an out-of-control wave.

I had seen the signs. The signs on the ocean beaches don't mess around; they use phrases like "you can die" and "you will be swept out to sea." But I didn't think about them. I thought those warnings were for people stupid enough to go wading out in the water. I didn't think we were in danger on the sand, so far away from the edge of the water.

I can't even describe how fast that wave came in at us. It moved with the speed of a monster tentacle in a horror movie; you think you're safe and suddenly PHWIP! it's wrapped around your waist. We went from dry and safe to overwhelmed and terrified in a matter of seconds. 

If it had kept coming, I don't know what would have happened. I would have picked him up and run if I had to. I would have thrown him to shore if I had to. It hit with the speed and the shock of a car crash, and here I am, a day later, sitting in a warm office, still shivering at the memory of the wave that tried to pull me and my son into the Pacific Ocean. 

The Rules Haven't Changed

(Note: I'm going to start working more to keep this blog more active. I have lots of readers out there, apparently. Thousands of you have found this post about double-swaddling, and I'm grateful to each of you for reading it and sharing it. I keep being amazed that people still read this blog, and especially that you still read posts I wrote years ago.

I used to blog a lot more when my kid was smaller. Now that he's older, I have to remind myself I'm still a blogger dad. I'm putting it that way because "daddy blogger" just seems like an insult. 'Oh, you're a daddy blogger, how cute!' No, I'm a dad. Who happens to have a blog. My job is being a dad.) 

When Oliver was little, it seemed like I would blog daily about what was going on with him. When he was a baby, it was easy. First of all, I was home with him for the first year of his life as a stay-at-home dad, so I had lots of time to sit and contemplate his existence. He didn't do much, but it was amazing watching him. He would roll over, he would look at me, he would reach his little doll-like hand out to me, and I would sit and think about how miraculous it all was, and then I'd write a blog post about it.

I'm working now, and he's going to school. So we don't spend nearly as much time around each other.

I'm fortunate, though. My wife and I have a staggered schedule, so she goes to work early and I get the morning shift with him. He wakes up three hours before he goes to school, so we have plenty of time to be with each other. He plays with Legos, he reads, he watches old shows like Godzilla and the Power Rangers and the Fantastic Four cartoons, and we eat breakfast and we talk about stuff. About school. About the kids in his class. About stuff.

And then we drive to school at a breakneck pace, trying desperately to make it before the second bell rang. Usually, we miss it but I just walk him to class anyway.

When he was a baby, I had to feed him bottles of Mrs. B's milk. It was very hard at first, and for the first couple of times, he fought and thrashed and wouldn't let me feed him. It was upsetting for me, and obviously, he wasn't digging it either. So I looked around a couple of other blogger dads, and I figured out that the more anxious I was at feeding time, the more anxious he was going to be. So I started forcing myself to be calm during feeding time. "You're all right, little man. It's just me, and it's just your lunch. No big deal." The more I relaxed, the better it went. Success breeds success, so the better the feedings went, the better I felt about them.

The same is still true. Especially now that we know he has Asperger's, I have to pay more attention to how he's feeling at different parts of the day and how I might be contributing to that, consciously or not. Our mornings have been problematic for a while, and I realized what the problem was. We have three hours - THREE HOURS - to get ready for the school day. And yet, I'd been waiting until the last five minutes of the day to ask him to do some basic things - going to the bathroom, putting on his socks and shoes. And my son is not a person who likes to be rushed. So he'd dawdle, and he'd get distracted, and inevitably it would take him twenty minutes for him to do something that I could do in 30 seconds. And we'd be late.

What's wrong with that equation? What's wrong is that I'm thinking about how I would do it. I would move faster. I would look at the clock. I would realize how late it was. Well, my son is not me. He does things at his own pace. And I just need to accept that. Instead of trying to force him to be me, I need to accept who he is.

And for me, that meant changing our schedule. Now, I give him a full twenty minutes to do those final last-minute steps before we walk out the door. And it works! We make it to school sooner. There's also less yelling, less hectoring, and less resistance from him. I just give him enough time to do his thing. If he gets distracted, I still nudge him back on track. But it's not an emergency anymore. I'm respecting who he is. And I have to remember that my anxiety level feeds directly into his. When the last conversation before school includes a lot of yelling and badgering, it can't be good for his psyche. I like it this way.

So the rules when he was a baby are the same as they are now. When I'm stressed, he's stressed. When I calm down and relax, things go better. He's still the same kid he always was. And I'm still the same dad, who sometimes forgets that.

Weirder than Life Itself

We were watching some goofy story on CBS Sunday Morning about an underwater sculpture park.

My son took one look at it and declared, "that's weirder than life itself."

We don't need to go to church. My son is in touch with the mysteries of life. He gets it.

There's One in Every Class

Photo from Flickr user Jez Page

How can you compose a eulogy for a six-year-old?

What do you say? They're not even at the beginning of their lives. What do you have left? Crayon drawings. Favorite books. Evanescent videos, recordings, photographs. Of course, photographs. We all take thousands of photos of our kids as if they're going to be snatched away from us any moment. We capture every moment, every romp in the park, every play date, every birthday candle, as if it will be the last.

If I think too much about what it must feel like, I just die inside. It cripples me. Because those kids who died in Newtown were our kids. Those children were just like the kids in my son's classroom.

I was just in my son's classroom on Friday. He has a decent-sized class. And there's the usual diversity. You've got the chatty kids and the sad, lonely kids who cry sometimes, under their desks or behind a table. You've got the girls with the pretty pretty hair they can't wait to tell you about. You've got the girls who barely seem like they comb their hair in the morning. You've got the bright-eyed, curious ones, filled with joy, beaming as though from an inner light. The ones who see every adult as a helper and every kid as a friend they haven't met yet. You know the kind. There's one in every class.

And you've got the odd ducks. The ones who glower in the corner, who make big red X's on their papers instead of completing assignments. The ones who flap their arms and shake in their seats and maybe they talk to themselves a little bit. Maybe they wear clothes a little odd, a little askew. They're quirky. I like that word. Quirky. It's not judgmental. I know a lot of quirky adults and I bet they were quirky kids, too. There's one in every class, you know.

Anyway, the arm flappers. The odd ducks. There was one in Newtown. One who died. His mother gave a eulogy for him. She said that he flapped his arms, and one day she asked him, why, and he said it was because he was a beautiful butterfly.

I didn't know this kid, but apparently he had some language challenges. Yet he could still express this, because it was the only possible answer to this question. Of course he was a butterfly. Just like my son is a monster. Of course this is true. It has to be. It's the only thing that can be true.

That kid was autistic. My son is autistic. For a while, I just said he had Asperger's, as if it was some different thing. But my kid is on the spectrum. He is autistic, and when I think about that beautiful butterfly, flapping his arms, I can't help but see my son.

He's not a flapper, by the way.  That's not his thing. He's a spinner, though. Sometimes he spins around and around, and sometimes he takes scarves or belts or just lengths of string and spins them in his hand, around and around and around. He jumps on beds, and he loves giving kaboom hugs. Y'know, the kind of hugs where he starts across the room, and gets a running start and charges at you and KABOOM! You get a hug that rattles your teeth. That's my kid. That's what he does.

I can't think too much about what happened in Newtown, but I know this. The kids in those classrooms were just like the ones in my son's classrooms. The bright ones and the dark ones, the pretty ones and the smudgy ones, the steady, calm ones and the arm flappers. Those kids remind me too much of his class, and your children's classes, and every classrooms. These weren't characters in a movie or a novel. These were just kids. Like my kid. Like yours.

Goddammit. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to sleep tonight. I just keep thinking about that little boy, the beautiful butterfly, and my heart breaks and breaks and breaks again.

A Gun Culture

I have friends who tell me that the problem isn't guns, it's our culture. It's our society.

I agree - the problem is our culture. And our culture is guns. We have a gun culture in this country. In our culture, when people collect guns, it's a hobby. Like collecting tea pots. Or rare stamps. People can talk about the stock, the craftsmanship, the rarity of the particular production year, and forget that what they're talking about is a weapon designed to kill.

I'm a parent. If I were not a parent, I'd be fully prepared to get medieval about this latest massacre. You know the way that anti-abortion people parade around photos of dead fetuses? It's the most grotesque, most shocking way to make your point. I'd be doing that with the pictures of the children who died in Newtown.

But I can't do that, because I can't even look at the pictures. I change the station when a story comes on.   I have a child. I have a son, and I'm going to go drop him off at his school this morning, and I'll probably take longer to say goodbye than usual.

I am heartsick, people. and I am every time this happens.

I remember the first time. It was in San Ysidro, California. A man shot dozens of people at a McDonald's restaurant, just like the one where my son and I had dinner on Wednesday. He had an Uzi, along with other weapons. It was 1984.

I remember Columbine. I used to live in Colorado, so that hit home for me. Before that, there was the kid in Moses Lake. And Kentucky. And Mississippi. And Jonesboro, Arkansas. Yes, there were school shootings before Columbine.  Lots of them.

Too many. Shootings in schools. Shootings in shopping malls. In restaurants. In homes. On street corners. Too many.

So what are we supposed to do, live in a police state? Station an armed officer at the door of every school, every mall, every public place? Turn our country into a military zone, all because we can't admit that guns are as much a part of our culture as Sunday football?

We have to do something. This is no longer acceptable. It wasn't acceptable in 1984. It wasn't acceptable in 1999. It's beyond acceptable now. We should all be rioting in the streets, demanding that our nation's leaders act now to keep guns off the streets and out of the hands of unstable people. We should all be angry. I'm angry. I'm sick - my heart is sick - but I'm angry. And today, we need to use that anger to demand change.

Blogging Greatness: The Worst Burrito Ever

Look, I can't compete with this. This might be one of the best blog posts ever written. Plus, his own illustration! Just read this:

Dear guy who just made my burrito:

Have you ever been to earth?

On earth, we use the word “burrito” to describe a tortilla filled with things you eat. Pretty simple stuff, and I’m surprised you at least got that part right. My burrito was, in fact, filled with food. In this, you and I agree and are friends. But this is also where my lifelong hatred begins for you and anyone else whose brain has been repeatedly scrubbed with the same mixture of bleach and Pop Rocks as yours has. Because that should have killed you, but left you around long enough to do what you did to me today. Let me explain:

You’re an idiot.

Let me further explain:

Burritos are eaten from one end to the other. So that means when you assemble a burrito with motherfucking ZONES of ingredients going that direction, you create a disgusting experience for the burrito’s end user. When you make a burrito, you should put the ingredients in layers lengthwise. That way, every bite has AT LEAST A FUCKING CHANCE of getting at least two types of ingredients, and there is little chance of becoming almost hopelessly trapped in a goddamned cilantro cavern.

Yeah. It's all like that, and better. Stop reading this and go read Luckyshirt's blog. Tell him I said hi.

Weird Dreams: Marc Maron, My Wife, and Drug Abuse

I don't often talk about dreams, but this one was a doozy.

My wife and I were on a bus of some sort. Who knows where we were going? In the world of dream logic, we may not have been going anywhere. The destination was the bus. Whatever. Oh, and also the bus had drivers in the front and in the back. Which sounds impossible, according to the laws of physics as I understand them.  Again - dream logic.

All of a sudden, a familiar face comes onto the bus, a guitar case strapped across his back. It's Marc Maron! What's he doing on the bus? (Why did he have a guitar?) He comes with an entourage. He's there to record a podcast, live on the bus. He's got some huge console that looks like an old reel-to-reel recorder, apparently to help record the show.

The next part of the dream is bizarre. Marc apparently has staged sequences as part of his podcasts. People prance around in costumes, singing choreographed numbers. This is weird. Definitely a WTF moment. (Pun intended.)

The next thing I know, my wife is singing along, delightedly, with the songs. I look at her and I realize that something's wrong.

"You've been taking drugs?!" I say to her, aghast. Her eyes are bright and delirious.

"I feel so good! I never sing anymore," she responds.

"What drugs did you take?"

"Unidentifiable!" she responds in a singsongy voice.

and ... that's all I remember. So if you're reading this, Marc Maron, you're not allowed in my dreams anymore until you apologize for getting my wife high on the dream bus.

Mitt Romney: Let FEMA Go Bankrupt

If you're one of those people on the East Coast bracing yourself for the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, my thoughts and prayers are with you. (Yes, I'm a prayer kinda guy.)  I have family in Massachusetts, and I'll be anxiously watching the hurricane path over the next few days.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is still running for president. And in case you're still deciding who to vote for, please remember that Mitt Romney hates FEMA. He thinks disaster relief shouldn't even be part of the federal government.




"We should take all of what we're doing at the federal level and say, 'what are the things we're doing that we don't have to do?' And those are the things we've got to stop doing."

So yeah. FEMA is just a wasted budget line. Let's wipe out the budget, so we can kick more tax breaks back to rich folks like himself. Bear that in mind as the flood waters come rolling in, as roofs crumble, as we see the inevitable shots of rescued citizens and homes in ruins.

And, as Greg Sargent noted, Romney doesn't even stop there.

"There’s another nugget here worth highlighting, though. In that appearance, Romney also suggested it would be 'even better' to send any and all responsibilities of the federal government 'to the private sector,' disaster response included. So: Romney essentially favored privatizing disaster response."

So yeah. Blackwater gets to run your disaster relief. Good luck, civilians!

But just in case you really get hammered from the hurricane, Mitt has advice for you. Just go home and call 211.

The Job: Not Perfect, but Not Hell

This would have been a different post a few days ago.

A few days ago, I would have been raging about how I'd found yet another idiotic employer, one that didn't have any respect for the contributions of their employees, where I was once again being overworked and underappreciated.

I might have lamented the entire job sector in which I work, and maybe I would have idly wondered about becoming a mail carrier or a construction worker. It would have been seething with bitterness and resentment. And I would probably have gotten a lot of sympathetic comments from my friends and followers.

I can't write that post.

I can't allow myself to become jaded. I was scarred by my last job. I left wanting to burn the entire place to the ground. I don't ever want to work in a place that insane and dysfunctional again.

But I also don't want to have that kind of rage within me again.

Look, I have a good job. It's not a perfect job. There are moments when I don't love it. There are things I'm asked to do that I think are silly. I don't get as much money as I should.

But unlike my last job, I like going into the office every day. My co-workers like me and appreciate me and laugh when I send them silly cat pictures and Bruce Lee videos as responses to work emails.

They respect me. My last job didn't respect me.

They appreciate me. My last office couldn't have cared less about the quality of work I was doing.

They make me feel welcome. In my last job, I'd run into my office, close the door, and keep it closed for as long as I possibly could.

Most importantly, this job did something for my confidence. I was working in a place where I felt like dirt, and they gave me an escape. More than that: they said "we want you." Not just "come here and cower for a while," but they gave me an emphatic "come here; we want you; we're going to fight to get you on our staff." I need to remember how much better I have it now than I did six months ago.

So yes, there are petty annoyances. There are things I wish were better. I'm going to be sending out a few resumes to see if I can find a better offer elsewhere. But I don't hate my current job.  I refuse to hate it. I won't let myself go to that place again.

Romney: Sacrificial Lamb?

I'm not a professional political pundit, y'all. Just a smart-aleck sitting in his office writing stuff.

But I've never seen an election this weird in my life. Ever.

Romney may be the worst candidate this country has seen in a hundred years. He's an embarrassment. He is wooden, he's unbelievably bad speaking off-the-cuff, he has all the charisma of a turnip, and he doesn't seem to have any idea how to craft a winning policy.

But more than that - he seems to be doing this on his own.

I mean, sure, there are people like Reince Priebus who are paying lip service to him on the talk shows. but look at all the conservatives who have been undercutting him and questioning his candidacy. (This was happening before the damning videos came out, by the way. It's only going to get worse now.)

Erick Erickson:

But while we may be focused there, the fact is the Romney campaign isn’t functioning well. Lucky for you and me the election is not today. But something needs to happen in Boston and I am less and less hopeful anything will happen.

David Frum:

The policy problem is that the Romney campaign offers nothing but bad news to hardpressed Americans and the broader middle class.  How do you message: I'm doing away w Medicaid over the next 10 yrs, Medicare after that, to finance a cut in the top rate of tax to 28%?

 David Brooks:

Personally, I think [Romney is] a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign. 

And these are people who should be in his corner. Obama will always get hammered by progressives for not being aggressive enough on issues like demilitarization, stopping climate change, supporting full equality for LGBT individuals, etc. But in the end, they'll vote for him because they know he's better than the alternative. I'm not sure everybody in the Republican party believes that.

So here's my theory. (It's not a new theory, but it's the theory I've come to believe.)

I think that the GOP never expected to win this election.

You know how baseball teams will dump all of their veteran players, bring in a bunch of fresh-faced youngsters, and say that it's a "rebuilding year?" Well, this is a rebuilding year for the GOP.

They don't think Romney will win. They don't even particularly want Romney to win. It's obvious that many of the powerful people in the Republican party don't like Mitt Romney - not because he's an elitist jerk, but because he's a "moderate." They'd rather have a Tea Party-style paleoconservative like Paul Ryan be their flag bearer. So they're using this election to say "you see what happens when we run pretend conservatives? Next time, let's run a real one!"

Mitt Romney's being thrown under the bus. Just think about his competition. Santorum? Gingrich? Nobody of any serious political stature ran against him, because nobody expected the GOP to win this election. Romney is their sacrificial lamb. So after the election, the real fun begins. Watch the turmoil that happens in 2013 and 2014 as the varying factions try to take the reins of a Republican party that's falling apart. We're going to see a civil war for the heart of the party. That's the real battle being fought here.

The Ghost of a Tiny Bit of Cheese

This morning, Oliver told me that all of the ghosts and zombies and skeletons are "under his command." All except one.

"Which one isn't under your command?" I asked. Inquiring minds want to know.

"The ghost of a tiny bit of cheese."

"Oh. Well, what does the ghost of a tiny bit of cheese do?"

He paused for just a moment. "It runs away from the mouse ghost..."

Happiness is Good: A Work Update

I've been at my new job for about five or six months. Last week, I was riding down the elevator with a colleague and she turned to me and actually said, "Isn't it great that we get paid to do this?"

It is.

I'm doing what I've done for years: website, communications, press releases, working with the media, and dabbling in social media. It's a good office. It's a GOOD office.

Why? The answer sounds so simple as to be absurd: they support each other. They understand what it means to work as a team, and they do it without hesitation.

There is a happy chemistry in the office. People joke with each other, compliment each other on a job well done. They talk about their plans for the weekend, the boyfriend or girlfriend, cute kid updates. We chat about music, baseball, and still manage to get a tremendous amount of work done.

See how silly that sounds? But at my last office, all of that had disappeared. There was no joy, no friendly banter. People were miserable. Their souls had been crushed by thankless work, supervisors who were literally thankless (they had forgotten how to praise or even acknowledge their hard-working staff), and a budget crisis that seemed hopeless. Staff meetings were miserable, awkward, painful. Departments worked to undermine other departments, and people stared daggers at each other. It was awful.

I couldn't want to get out of there. I started sending out resumes, and to my shock, I got several calls after only sending a handful out. Several interviews followed. (I called in "sick" to my job, and no one noticed. I felt not a tinge of regret.) And I was offered this job.

I fought hard to hide my smile when I told them I was leaving. They asked me to fill out an exit interview. I was brutally honest. They asked if I would recommend the company to a friend, and I said no. I don't think the HR director had ever heard that before. I didn't enjoy saying that, but the truth needed to be told.

In the last job, I would drag my feet coming into work. I started working a day from home because I couldn't stand the toxic environment. But this job is different. I can't want to get to the office. Of course, I'd rather spend the day with my beloved wife and beloved son. But the job is good, people! I'm having fun. And everyone should have a job where they have a little fun.

I'm learning so much. It's an industry I've never worked in, and I know nearly nothing about. But that was true when I worked on health care issues, and when I worked in environmental issues, and even at my last job. It's more fun that way. In the sense of what I do - the press releases, the social media, web updates - it's old familiar ground. But I'm soaking in information every day about this new industry. I'm in a new world, again. And I'm having fun.