To Be Cool

I never wanted to be cool.  More specifically, I never wished to be cool. It seemed that was the number one goal of all the kids around me during my formative years.  It’s an American tradition.  Seek out the cool kids and emulate them and you will be cool.  There are benefits to being cool. One, you have a better chance of being part of the world of cool kids.  Two, girls like cool.  Three, America likes cool.  We live in the dichotomy of a society that has survived through some semblance of law and order, but to ignore or denigrate that law and order makes you popular.  It’s good to be bad, or at least to look like you’re bad. Every generation has their own interpretation of cool, and I believe the way to go when I was a kid was to overtly not give a shit about anything.  Apathy was very cool.  My problem was, I cared about everything.  I cared about my friends and family, I cared about people getting screwed over by other people.  I cared about way too much. There was no way I was going to feign apathy for more than a few minutes.  My entire personality was built upon a sturdy foundation of giving a damn.

I had no chance of being cool.  Maybe I internalized that at a young age and understood that to do the things that made you cool were just beyond me.  I think that, and an incredibly hefty dose or tragically low self-esteem and anxiety sealed the deal.  I understand the urge to be cool.  You get to meet people and have something to talk about.  Being cool is fun, and you get the added bonus of knowing that all the people around you also are peering in to see all the cool shit you’re doing.

Maybe I just knew I couldn’t hang with the cool kids.  It’s not a big thing.  I managed to survive and continue to do so. 

What I wanted to be was weird. That didn’t take much.

However, I have always wanted to be cool. By this I mean, that I need the average temperature to be between 45 and 75 degrees around me at all times.  I have such a ferocious hatred of being hot that I fear that it has influenced my decision making more than it should. I lived for a quarter century in the most humid area in the country and I felt every notch of the thermometer creep up over the years.  Summers in Orlando in the 1980’s weren’t unbearable. The winter was pleasant.  Overdevelopment and global warming altered the climate to such a degree that it slowly drove me mad.

I had to move to Oregon.  I require mild temperatures and cool breezes.  I need shade to actually mean something.  I need altitude and multiple jacket options.  I feel invigorated with every deep breath of autumn air.  Summer heat makes my brain boil.  I get irritable and I don’t want to move.  It’s tough to eat or sleep. 

I write more attentively and more effectively when I’m cool.  I sleep more soundly. I’m a better husband and friend.  I’m a better neighbor and citizen.  I feel the smile spread across my mostly unexpressive face.

As soon as I see summer décor go on sale I get bummed.  Yeah, I really don’t care about summer all that much.  Lawn chairs, barbecue grills, bathing suits.  To some, it is the best time of the year and there are a million pop songs to prove it.  Me, I bide my time until all the beach umbrellas are replaced by colorful backpacks and crayons and aisles of back-to-school crap.  I love it.  It means the ‘ber’ months are coming and I’ll be able to breathe again.

This isn’t about sunshine, which is all the more beautiful in the fall.  This is about heat. It hit the 100’s last week and it’s going to hit it again in a few days.  In Oregon, there are years where the heat barely shows up at all.  This isn’t one of them.  I don’t care if I’ve gone soft since Florida, I don’t care that they have it worse in Arizona or Texas.  I don’t care.  I want long walks through brisk breezes.  I want the urge to make soup.

One of the most transformative experiences in my life is when Amy and I visited her sister in Seattle in 2001.  It wasn’t all the natural beauty and the allure of Seattle or Portland.  It was my first morning.  I sat out on their deck overlooking Puget Sound.  It was May, and the temperature was in the fifties.  I drank a cup of strong coffee as dense clouds meandered overhead.  I wore thick socks and felt the chill of the air for a solid hour until I needed a refill.  I knew that when we got back to Florida I was going to be bummed out and I had to figure out a way to get back out here.  I wanted to get back to a place where the climate was more…me.

A cool place.

What Do We Do With The Kind People?

I’m reading a very well-written book.  It’s not that I normally read garbage, but the styles are meant to entertain and grab the reader.  This book is a thinker. 

There was a passage that stuck with me.  One character was describing he deeds of the great people of history, and she said that kindness must come before brilliance, or what is the point of it all?  It stuck with me because if I’ve had a constant in my life, it is to be as kind as possible in every situation.  Every time I miss that opportunity I consider it a failure.  I have thought a lot about this in my life and I don’t exactly know where kindness fits in when considering the grand scheme of our culture.

I went to church when I was very small.  I don’t remember liking the experience and the sitting and kneeling and standing, but I do remember what I was taught about Jesus.  Jesus was kind, accepting, loving, peaceful, forgiving and he helped the poor.  That stuck.  If I just hung with those traits as close as I could, I was doing the right thing, no matter what I believed later in life.  I read books by Kurt Vonnegut, who didn’t think much of humanity but believed our one true responsibility was to be kind.  I wanted to be the kind guy, and I can safely say that to many of the people I know me, I am that guy. 

It is me.  It is by design.  My belief is that we need this in the world.  So, I try to be just that.  I screw up, I swear, I get laid off, I eat too much, I get depressed and angry, I argue and get petty and reactionary.  But I try to remain kind.

As an adult, a kind man has few places to fit in.  Being kind is a detriment in a capitalist dynamic.  You must learn how to sell, or sell yourself, which requires deception and lying.  Competition brings out aggression, which does not breed kindness.  Most men assume kindness is weakness, or feminine, or immature.  I don’t know how to interpret this.  I’m a cog in the machine like everyone else, but kindness has no place in the machine.  When I’m competitive, I don’t relish winning all that much.  When I have to sell myself, I want to identify with someone, not impress them. 

This is just how my brain works.  To some, I am sappy.  I am a sucker.

(Then again, education with kindness could mold the greatest minds we’ve ever witnessed. Democracy laced with human kindness can last forever.  Capitalism laced with kindness could be stronger than any system on the planet.)

Kindness doesn’t make headlines, only at the end of the news broadcast do you hear about something kind.  The president and his followers aren’t kind. They gained control by glamorizing the exact opposite of kindness.  The predators and egomaniacal assholes coming to light in the #metoo era aren’t kind.  They wouldn’t lord power over others if they were.

I’m a kind white male. Straight. In my forties. What can I do?  Does anyone who looks for recognition or justice give a damn about what I think or do?  Does it even matter?  Is that the entire point?

I don’t need that type of help.  I’m fortunate. But I would like to let others know that there is kindness in the world, and the people who practice come in all shapes, sizes and colors.  They are men, women and gender neutral, they are wealthy and poor.  They are smart and dumb.  I know. They might not make the news, but I can vouch for their existence. Maybe that’s why kind people are around.  Just to serve as a counterpoint to the unkind. Their tiny little deeds don’t shape society or bend global events to their philosophy. They only remind people of the kindness buried deep within.   

The Good Capitalist's Guide to the Holiday Calendar

Congratulations, you’re an American consumer.  Get ready for a life of shiny new items and a deep hole within yourself that will never be filled. The following is a quick guide to the calendar as it pertains to the holidays.  It is a list of the type of holidays, what is expected of you, and how much money you should spend on food, drink or plastic crap.

There are three main types of holidays.  Eating days, Drinking days, and Gift days.  All of these require some thought beforehand and a budget to accompany each one. This guide is here to help you, but if you ever get lost or confused, just go to the seasonal sections of your local superstore and they will be prepared for the next big holiday.  Even if it’s months away.

January is a quiet month.  The only true holiday is MLK Day, and no one has figured out a good way to blow your money on it.  Give them time. Superbowl Sunday is at the end of the month or the beginning of February, which is the first big Eating holiday of the year.  Its both an Eating and a Drinking Day, but since the game is supposed to be for the whole family, you have to work in soda and chips for the kids, too. By then, all your resolutions to lose weight are out the window, so go ahead and enjoy the seven-layer dip.

Valentine’s Day is next.  It is a gift holiday, and the trickiest one of the year.  You have to judge the loved ones in your life to see who deserves what level of recognition.  Chocolate? Cards?  A dinner?  The pressure is on to prove the amount of love you have by the planning and expense you make.  What about a ring?  It’s a big jewelry holiday.  One of the few Flower holidays. Make sure you choose the right style of rock with an artificial market value or its bad news for you. Plus, children get to fill out cards for all the good-looking kids in their classes.  Sorry, weirdos!

March is St. Patrick’s Day.  A Drinking day.  Just drink.  If you don’t drink, take this one off.  It’s meaningless. The rest of March and April are mostly quiet periods, as you gear up for the summer spending season.  Easter occurs during this month, and I still really don’t know the proper way to celebrate.  It may be the strangest observance ever.  Eggs and chocolate for the kids, getting dressed up and church for everybody else.  And, there’s a rabbit in their somewhere.  A low-pressure holiday.

With May brings the new phrase “Mom’s and Proms”.  Everyone better think of a gift or a dinner for your mom, and if you are a teen, you have money to blow on a one-time dress or tuxedo. Even knowing, as we all do, that Mother’s Day was promoted by Hallmark to sell crap, we all observe it like was decreed in the Rosetta Stone. Buy dinner, buy flowers, or buy a gift, or you are a terrible person.

If May is Mom’s and Proms, June is “Dad’s and Grads” Let Dad get in on the action!  You must now buy something for a person who’s even more difficult to buy for than your mom. Don’t forget the graduates in your life.  This is usually a cash month.  Gift cards all around.  Its all the grads really want, and the dads don’t give a damn.

We all celebrate July 4^th in some way.  Almost everything is closed.  If we’re not grilling or drinking outside, we’re shooting off fireworks at night.  It’s one of the two Fireworks holidays, which is odd because not all fireworks are legal everywhere. This is America!  That doesn’t keep my neighbors from getting started long before the sun goes down.

August is a hot and shitty month.  It also has no holidays. Good.  Save your money.  The big ones are around the corner.

Memorial Day in May and Labor Day in early September exist to bracket the summer months.  They serve as excuses for three-day weekends. They are days of remembrance, spent sleeping at the beach or drinking on a boat.

When the fall comes, roll up your sleeves.  Clear some room on that credit card and get ready.  Halloween used to be for kids, but in the last few decades, it is now for everyone. You need costumes. Your kids need to be monsters, ninjas, princesses, superheroes, and the latest internet meme, but you better come up with something as well if you want to go out.  But don’t be lame.  Or do.  Don’t put too much effort into it.  Or you should.  Just buy something, dammit.  Load up on candy and make sure it's so much that you have it leftover to snack on well into November.

Thanksgiving is the Eating holiday of the year.  More money than you spend on any one meal, and you get to eat it in ten minutes or so. Make room in the budget for everyone’s personal favorite side dish, until the table looks less like a family gathering and more like a Vegas buffet.

Christmas.  Oh sure, there are other religious holidays, but not one of them has the immense marketing campaign as the reigning king.  Christmas is December.  It is a series of festivities.  Office parties, friend gatherings, trips, lighting ceremonies, extended family visits…all with gifts, food, and drinks in tow. The gifts can be anything and they are plentiful.  Anything and everything can be a gift and your job is to figure out who gets what and how many.  Don’t forget the trees. The ornaments. The lights and decorations.  The dinner.  Something for your dog?  Do it.  The added bonus is you need to keep this all under wraps.  Speaking of wraps, don’t forget this year’s wrapping paper, tissue, bows, tag, boxes, gift bags and you can’t possibly give that special someone a gift card in an envelope!  Buy a box for that card!

And lastly, we have the most useless holiday of them all, New Year's Eve.  Fireworks at midnight. I guess you drink or something…I’ve really never given a shit either way.

Now that you know how to celebrate, get out there and start spending!

Blog Post #124 - Invisible Boy Made Friends

             I remember my senior project in my high school TV Productions class was a video about my friends.  In retrospect, it was a stupid idea.  I guess I got a decent grade, but when it was judged, I heard that the video really didn’t make a lot of sense unless you knew the people that were featured. They were right.  At the time, that little circle of people we all try to create was all that really mattered to me at the time.  That was also bad news for me.

             Instead of criticizing myself for that time (anymore) I found myself understanding why it happened.  I think it is an exercise in self-love, or forgiveness, or wisdom, or something you can find on Oprah’s bookshelf.  As you get older, memories creep their way to the fore.  It’s as if they are being shaken loose from an old photo album.  You see a photo you haven’t thought about in decades.  Sometimes it floors you.

             The memories of my childhood, from about 14 to 18, are mixed.  Some bad, some good.  Anything under 13 is almost certainly depressing.  They are sad.  They aren’t singular traumatizing events so such as they are a cumulation of a very young life spent almost completely alone.

             The memory was this:  1984 or so.  My parents would occasionally go over to the home of a work friend.  They would hang out in the backyard, drinking beers and having fun.  My brother would probably be back there trying to get some attention of his own.  But I would be in this strange living room, sitting a large couch by myself, watching an old TV with 3 channels.  For hours, I would sit there.  That was normal to me.  The saddest part?  I would look forward to going.  I could sit in a different home and watch nothing on a different TV.

             Our parents left us alone most of the time, plus my parents worked long hours.  Earlier than the previous memory, I have a few of my brother and I being completely alone on Friday nights.  This was in one of the shittiest neighborhoods in Orlando. (We would one day live in the shittiest.) We lived in an apartment complex and would stay up because our parents would hang out after work on paydays. I remember a neighbor that made us soup one night, probably at nine o’clock.  I was eight.

             One bonus about living in Orlando was that my parents were both Disney employees and we would get to go to the park a couple times a year for free.  When I mean ‘we’, I mean my parents would drop my brother and I off at 9:00 when the Magic Kingdom opened and then would pick us up at night.  They didn’t spend the day with us.  We wandered the park alone with a few bucks for lunch.  We did have some fun, but we were still alone.

             I’ve written before about feeling invisible. I have cobbled together these memories plus a few revelations from my mother that this started very early.  You see, I have an inherited mental condition.  It makes other people feel uncomfortable, and even today, you can be ostracized and isolated because of it.  I was born…smart.  From what I gathered, my family noticed very early.  I was around 4 or 5 when my father withdrew from me.  I don’t know how my extended family reacted. Although my grandmother celebrated it, even if she didn’t exactly know what it was and what it meant.  She liked me. But because my intelligence wasn’t embraced, I didn’t know how to deal with it out in the world, especially at school.  So, again, I was on my own.

             So, until I was 10, it was me, my little brother, and my TV. 

             Getting back to my friends.  We have all read one thousand greeting card-quality quips about the importance of friendship. We’ve watched all the tear-jerker movies about true friends. We all want them and feel lucky to have them.  My reason for writing this is how my friendships actually saved me from God-knows-what hellish existence.

             I went to a different school every year until fifth grade.  Different towns, different states. Fifth grade was a big one.  I was now in a nice school in a decent neighborhood, and I would be starting my first year of gifted class.  Gifted class was one day a week with a bunch of dorks like me, doing projects and being smart.  In my normal classes, I was approached by a kid in my class while we were out playing in recess.  He asked me about my T-shirt, and because he did that, I had someone to talk to.  Because he asked me to come hang out with him at his house and play with Star Wars toys, I had somewhere to go and goof around.  His name is Eric, and because I am eternally grateful, I am still friends with him to this day. That was almost 36 years ago. 

             In gifted class, I had a similar experience.  I met a few people like me (a few of them were girls! What???) and became friends with one of them at the same time. Sam recognized we had similar dorkiness and we liked to be funny.  I also got invited to his house to hang out and listen to Duran Duran records. We are still friends, too.  I know his kids and I’m anxious to meet his grandkids. (Huh?) It was great. My whole life was invisibility and waiting for The A-Team to come on, and now I had two friends.

             They did this. They made this happen. I would have never done it.  I would have to wait years to talk to a girl or even try to a kiss a girl.  I was awkward, painfully shy, cross-eyed, nerdy-smart with a complete lack of self-esteem.  With a couple friends, I had a chance.

             The teenage girl who would one day become my wife was one of the few people I forged a friendship with.  It was a big deal in my life, to have girls as friends. It would also mean a lot of relationship construction would be completed when we actually started dating, which was a plus.  High school was drudgery and aimlessness.  I had no idea what to do, and no guidance from anywhere.  Eventually, that time is over and your friends move on with their lives. They move away, get jobs, start families.  Most people understand this, but when no one is looking out for your interests, the most obvious shit can be a shock.

             A shit-shock.

             I kept close the best I could, with phone calls and letters and mix tapes.  I’m pretty good at that stuff. The only other person I had ever traded letters with was my cousin Denise.  We’ve never lived in the same place and we’re the same age. I guess that is what you had in the days before Facebook.  You’d get a letter from your cousin a few times a year and you would go back and forth, bitching about life and cracking jokes about whatever.  I come from a large family, and she was really my only tether to them.  I still have every letter I received from her, and again, we are still in touch.  Although, now we text the Three Amigos references.

             My sense of invisibility influenced nearly every decision.  I dreamed of doing stand-up comedy. (This crowd will laugh and love me.)  I wanted to teach college (These students will pay attention to me.)  I want to write books. (They’ll all love my stories and think I’m awesome.) When I had children, the invisibility had a difficult time raising his head.  You are the sun and the moon to your kids. I loved it and I loved being a father.  I loved the attention and giving it right back to them. You truly get a chance to right some wrongs when you have kids.   I don’t know how good of a father I was, but my kids never felt unseen or unheard.  I probably overdid it, to be honest.

             Amy and I have been together for a little over 26 years.  We’re about to be 46.  You can probably imagine the topic of attention has come up once or twice.  She is just one person.  She is an awesome person and a wonderful partner to have in life, but no one human can provide the amount of attention I need.  The hole is just too damn big.  My job is to remember that, and her job is to remember I am trying to tame a tenacious beast.  

             That’s where friends come in. I have spread it around the best I can.  My friend Jo and her brother Andrew are the only ones out here in the Pacific Northwest.  Jo endured raising kids right alongside me for years, and we both have similar needs to be seen and appreciated.  It is nice to get to see someone in person and chit chat, too.  Texting is nice, but it’s just you know…texting.  Another friend from high school communicates this way.  I think technology helped me keep in touch with Andy, who lives about 3000 miles away.  Having a conversation once or twice a year is cool, but it’s the little back and forth of dumb jokes and observations that I always missed.  When you meet someone cut from the same cloth, it’s the shorthand you develop that is most appreciated.

             I’m not just thankful for these people in my life. I needed them. I am indebted to them because of my condition.  My dream is to be gregarious and memorable and make an impact on people.  But in this stage of the game, I don’t know if I’m wired that way.  This could be it for me. Self-promotion is a struggle, socialization is as foreign as the rings of Saturn and I don’t have a network of people to access to increase my circle. 

             I am living proof that learning how to be a friend, or at the very least, reaching out to someone else can change lives.  It can save lives.

             

Puppies, Cookies, and Giggling Babies

(Just giving the new title a shot.  This is classic bait and switch...)

Nowhere, in any ancient text, or contained within any bylaws of this culture, does it stipulate that one must remain in touch with everything.  We have been examining our addictions to social media and what it does to us lately. Nice. I have to add that the notion that any one person has to have up-to-the-minute information at the ready at all times is ludicrous.  This isn’t a question of willful ignorance.  The question is what it always has been: How much time from my finite life am I willing to devote to this shit?

I had to take a step back.  I wasn’t as addicted as some and I managed to escape political arguments for the most part.  My problem was its poisonous effect on my creative process.  Facebook, Twitter, and all the websites they draw content from are drenched in opinions and critique, often by dumbasses or others who are paid to write commentary for clicks and advertisements dollars. 

This blog is full of my opinions and my feelings from a singular perspective.  I’m also under no delusions. No one reads this. This is for me. This is a practice site for me because I am opinionated.  I do it for word count.  I do it because I journaled for 20 years before I ever started a blog.  The time devoted to social media has nothing to do with this site, it has to do with the shit I really care about.  I write books. I want to get better at writing books. 

Writing books is some hard-ass work.

You have to juggle a million ideas and keep them spinning in the air for a good 90 days straight.  That’s for just the first draft.  Three months is a lot of time to let self-doubt and foreign opinions creep into your process.  Negativity can take root and kill an entire project.  It can keep a musician from completing a record, or a young artist from practicing their skills to get good. 

Of course, I want my books to sell a million copies.  Anyone who says different is fooling themselves. I want it so I can continue to write for a living. What I’m not excited about is drawing one million critiques.  That comes with the territory, but there is no rule that says I have to read them.  I don’t want to know what they think. Good or bad.  Good is something I can glean from sales.  If I sold a bunch of copies, it must be good enough for someone to read.  But the critique isn’t for me.  It’s for someone else. 

And ‘critique’ is giving it more credence than it deserves.  It’s just everyday assholes and their opinions.  This sucks.  This is lame. The thing I like is better.  Weak. Dumb.  Does anyone need that at all?  For anything?

Personally, Facebook has comments that make me feel bad.  That’s really what this is all about.  It's not all negative, but it's enough to make it worse than real life. I mean that.  In your day-to-day, how often do you encounter someone who is specifically trying to make you feel like a piece of shit?  It’s life, so it does happen, but every single day?  That’s what social media is.  It’s an outlet for the weak-minded and the angry to take it out on the world.  Maybe they need that to survive.  Fine.  I don’t have to be there to experience it.

There is nothing wrong with anyone being out of touch with the current culture. Nothing.  The culture itself made that a crime.  ‘Pay attention to me every day or you are old and lame and a pariah and not worth listening to.” When I was a kid in the eighties, I didn’t give a shit then, either.  I’ve never cared about staying current with anything.  I found it pointless and exhausting.  Shallow and fleeting.  A waste of time.

There’s that phrase again.  A waste of time.  We should always keep an eye on those things in our lives that are a waste of our time.  If there anything more precious? Really?  If I can save some time by deleting Facebook from my phone, and save myself from the venomous fangs of negativity it injects into me, then why wouldn’t I do it?

              I feel as if I could on for another thousand words writing about how this applies to the news as well. Same shit.  I know who sucks already.  I know how to vote in November.  If you feel that you should get involved, then do so.  At the moment, I’m not involved.  I’m doing my small part to battle negativity, which isn’t good for anyone.

The Hideous Monster Called Low Self-Esteem

When you are on the road to mental health recovery, you can make a lot of startling discoveries. I’ve been actively working through this stuff for about eight years, but it truly started when I was about eighteen.  I had to understand what anxiety really was.  I had to learn about depression. I had to learn how I affected my wife and children. It was hard.  It still is hard. I didn’t realize how low my self-esteem was until recently.  I knew it was low but looking at its history and its impact over the years was staggering.

Here’s an example. My kids have all passed through their teen years.  During that time, like most teens, they are concerned with their looks.  They want nice clothes, and they want their hair to be just right.  My daughter changed her styles, her haircut, her makeup and everything.  She was finding herself.  My boys, too.  They are much more clothes-conscious than I ever was. 

At some point, just a few years ago, I thought about this.  I wondered what I was like in high school and beyond, and I wondered how the thoughts of myself compared to my kids. I assumed that low self-esteem manifests itself with a shitty opinion of your own body and looks.  It’s common.  My problem was, I never thought about it. At all.  It certainly wasn’t because I was an empowered person with a progressive sense of self and a notion that beauty is relative.  It wasn’t that.  I also didn’t look in the mirror and immediately think I was ugly or gross.

It was neither.  The truth is, I had accepted that I wasn’t worth looking at years before.  Probably when I was a little kid.  I accepted I was stupid looking so early that it was just second nature.  I never wished to be like the handsome people because I might as well wish that I could fly or shoot spiderwebs out of my wrists. I was a poor kid with no cool clothes, either, and why would I need them. At least I didn’t beat myself up about it.  I just knew I was gross. I was an amorphous nothing and anytime anyone noticed me, I was shocked.

Messed up, right?

Another one: Speaking of shocked, I can’t believe anyone remembers anything I’ve said or done. I mean anyone.  My wife of 23 years.  My three kids.  The friends I’ve had for 25-30 years. My mother or brother.  Anytime they bring something up from the past involving me, I am still surprised.  Do you hear what I’m saying? I can’t believe my own wife remembers any story I’ve told her.  In the back of my mind, I can’t believe she stored that information about me.  If a friend quotes something I’ve said back to me, I am almost choked up.  The feelings of validation and belonging are so foreign, that I have to remind myself that I get both of them on a regular basis now.  But the low self-esteem never recognized that.

The next one’s a little darker.  Strap in.

I was involved in one of those conversations about being stuck on a deserted island. Maybe a shipwreck scenario. What would you do?  My brain chewed on the idea of what would I be able to provide if I was ever in that situation.  What could I contribute? Well, I can’t build anything, nor do I have any medical expertise. I don’t hunt and I don’t fish.  It wasn’t long before my mind concluded that the best way for me to help the other castaways would be to drop dead on the campfire and be the next dinner. My low self-esteem dictated that I was so worthless, that my only contribution would be as a slab of meat.

I still feel all these feelings.  It's pretty brutal.  But with meds and perspective, I can put them in their place.

             I still remember this quote from The TV show Northern Exposure.  The character Ed suffers from severe low self-esteem and his uncle informs him: ‘Low self- esteem is the root cause of practically all the pain and misery in the world. It's what drives war, and torture, and genocide. It's what evil is. Do you think Hitler liked himself? Or Cortez? We hate others because we hate ourselves.’

             If it takes the rest of my life, I will strive to extricate it from my body like the tumor that it is.

I Want to Tell You Something

I was born to be a professor.  Or a comedian.  Either one.  Isn’t that strange?  I know exactly what my particular set of skills and attitudes point to, yet I’m not in either profession.  Relax, it’s not a sad story.  But the reason I know what I am supposed to be is still a very real presence in my everyday life.

I wanted to be a comedian because I love thinking up funny things.  The performance came second.  I liked the comedy notebook.  Scratching down ideas and stupid shit. Making connections and hoping that they haven’t been made one hundred times before.  Once I learned what the life of a comedian was like and the dues that one had to pay, it wasn’t the same.  I still loved the notebook, though.  Later, I thought about teaching.  I wanted to learn a ton about history, then spew it out to a bunch of college kids.  I never got that far.  I was in the mix as a high school sub for a while and I couldn’t cut it.  But I still loved to learn about stuff.

What I am now left with, plus a desperate thirst for attention that will never be quenched, are the motivations that led me to those job ideas.  Those motivations are connected.  They underline a desire to tell you something. 

That is what my purpose is.  I want to tell you something.  I want to make you laugh.  I want to give you information.  I want to make you feel something.  I also kinda want the credit for doing so, if I’m being honest.  I think it’s a tough job.  But, I was born to do it.

You may think I am a big know-it-all that wants everyone to see how smart I am, or how funny I am.  That’s not…entirely untrue.  Conveying information to others effectively isn’t something just anyone can do.  How many people in your life do you know who can’t tell a story for shit? Or, they can’t get to the point?  Maybe they can tell a good story, but their stories aren’t about anything interesting at all?  It takes skill to condense information and parse it out. 

You must have the ability to read an audience.  What is your relationship?  How much time do they have?  Are they in the mood for humor?  What’s the likelihood of them already knowing the ending?  

Timing is everything, right?  Is it time to share this?  Can it wait?  Is there ever a time to relay this info?

Mastering this stuff comes from feeling and experience.  A skilled teacher takes information and frames it in a way that will best take root for his students.  You can’t just read the damn textbook aloud.  I don’t know jack shit about computers.  Everything I learned is ancient history.  However, when it comes to explaining something to a novice, I am so much better than a lot of people with advanced IT degrees.  Why?  Because I want to tell you something. I want you to know.  There’s a way to do it right, and people like me know how to figure that out.

So where does that leave me?  Well, I still have a friggin’ blog, for one.  I had a blog before this one and a podcast that ran for a few years. How could I not?  I want to tell you something!  I write books and I still jot down jokes occasionally.  I might need them someday!

It’s me and the Mrs. now.  The kids are grown and doing their thing. All my friends are old farts like me.  I still want to tell them stuff. I thought it was a flaw that needed fixing. I have a need to share almost every little detail of my day.  I honestly do not know what I expect in return.  Maybe recognition. Attention. Validation. A cookie.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s not a flaw.  It is a part of me that isn’t going anywhere.

It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating.  It’s annoying and a little sad, but the need is still there. It’s why I write.  Even though sometimes I wish I would wake up without this constant need to tell you something, I don’t see it happening.