Death and Superman.

I suffer from major depressive disorder, with a side helping of anxiety. That's the easy part to explain. What it did to my heart, my mind, or my sensibilities is a bit more involved.

To be honest, I don't know exactly when it started. I was five, just shy of six, when I realized that there were skulls under all the faces of the people around me...people I loved, revered, relied upon for food and shelter. I doubt that's more than a fleeting symptom, but it's as far back as I can go.

Skulls were death. The cartoons were quite clear about it, whether it was the wispy skull-and-crossbones from a newly-opened bottle of poison, or a warning sign in an abandoned mine, or the glowing fright-mask of a Scooby-Doo villain.

Of course, it didn't help that my great-uncle, Neil, and his wife, Gert, died within a year of each other, right around this time. One moment, blurred as it may be in my failing hindsight, we were piling into the car to drive an interminable fifteen minutes to go visit them. There would be a smell of age, inane adult conversation that seemed more focused on the pre-parental world, and ribbon candy. Then, after a brief eternity, we would invert the process and go home. If it was a particularly banner day, we might stop somewhere exotic, like McDonald's, for dinner.

So they were dead. I was told in somber, condescending tones; my grandmother, a very seasoned and not quite functional alcoholic, didn't want to upset me. Of course, the concept of never seeing these decent, if bland (to a five-year-old) octagenarians was heavy. Sure, there had been times when I'd have rather given up ribbon candy for life than sit in the car with my obnoxious older sisters, but...but dead. Gone.

At this point, I had only really been to church (my parents were vaguely Episcopalian, at the time) for holidays and Sunday school. The idea of sitting through an entire hour of sitting, standing, singing, and kneeling was predictably hostile. They wouldn't even let me bring toys, although I often managed to sneak them in. There was always one pocket they forgot to check. I didn't think Jesus would mind; we knew nothing of his childhood, certainly, but every depiction of him, either visual or anecdotal, indicated that unless I was a moneychanger, I would be welcomed at the right hand of the right hand of the Father.
But other than in spirit, no pun intended, he wasn't there. Death was, and I could touch the absences it granted, both in the congregation (our church skewed old or unhealthy, demographically speaking, to the point where it was forcibly merged with another dyspeptic and geriatric operation across town) and at home. Death had dominated the market share of my attention, and for lengthening sojourns, I sought his address. I just wanted to know where everybody was. They were missing, leaving these jagged punctures in a very small life, and I had to find them.

I don't think my grandmother meant any harm, but we spent a lot of time together. She was my primary caregiver, during the day, despite needing increasing amounts of supervision herself. She, much like my father and sisters, was bipolar and self-medicating. That magical combination led her to pop off whatever was on her mind, and usually with all the diplomacy of a cruise missile strike.This was never easy to attend, but it quickly proved horrific as that age, or that era, was the first time I could feel the end coming. It was like my brain had fallen off the high side of the seesaw, and while it was a long way down, the bottom could not be avoided. In my youthful curiosity, I asked my grandmother if I knew any other dead people.

This was an inopportune moment to be watching The Little Rascals, I tell you. I think only Spanky McFarland was left, at that point (as he would be for at least a decade more; I met him in college, but didn't think to offer my condolences about his legion of deceased co-stars.)

And then she told me that Superman was dead. This was just before Christopher Reeve burned his spitcurled visage into our collective consciousness, so other than the cartoons, George Reeve was all we had.
And he was dead.Death was bigger than Superman. Death always won. Always. He was the 1972 Dolphins of cosmology; undefeated, even if the wins were by narrow margins.

Perhaps in supplication, I started wearing my Halloween costume, a skeleton suit, around the house. Whenever Grandma was having company, I assumed I should wear the home team's jersey. I'd seen grownups do it with the Yankees and Jets; why should I not foreswear my Joe Namath pajamas and let the world know who I was rooting for? It seemed like acquiescence, really. In my neighborhood, it was expected that you would worship a New York or Boston sports team. I was simply focusing on a bigger game.

This was poorly-received, to put it mildly. My parents, understandably perturbed by my new fandom, may have commissioned my sister to throw the costume away while I was at nursery school, or perhaps while I was locked in a closet, a favorite pastime of my sisters. I often just curled up and went to sleep, which failed to entertain them. I considered it nothing but a waiting game anyway. They always let me out eventually, and if my mother's strident calls turned into coarse invective when the truth was exposed, so much the better. I knew I was going to die, but I didn't want to be, or get in, any trouble on my way.

That was something that came to me before I found about Death, ironically enough. Attention, even in the smallest doses or closest quarters, was something I wasn't always interested in. I wasn't always doing anything remotely questionable; sometimes I just disappeared with a book or toy, or, when my mother went shopping, there were a number of times when I would walk into Sears with her and we'd go our separate ways. Granted, that started around the age of seven, by which point it was obvious, even to the casual shopper or seven-year-old escape artist, that Sears had a completely awful and barren concept of toys, except for during December. The record department was next stop, and then it was back to Mom. We had a flow, a routine. Despite both of us suffering from anxiety and depression, we really functioned quite well as diverging teammates.

It may be worth mentioning that I used the most direct routes possible, clambering through display racks of clothes or over lawn tractors in the home improvement section. I was on a very tight schedule, after all. My mother was a notoriously fast walker.

And that was six, and parts of seven. I discovered Death and Star Wars, in that order. It offered no comfort that Jesus, like a more terran Obi-Wan Kenobi, could be expected to whisper guidance in my ear as I approached the Death Star trench of second grade. I couldn't believe in the Force anyway. A week after we saw Star Wars, I saw Alec Guinness in another movie. And then Elvis died. Elvis and Superman. Death was getting more and better guests than Dinah Shore, and she had Burt Reynolds on speed-dial.

By the time I was seven, I was convinced that I was going to die someday.

Now, I'm not saying whether I will or won't, but seven is a bit young for that information.

What Must Be Known.

I recently asked a very, very astute friend of mine to critique this blog, mostly for form. Content is another

story, and one I'll address shortly.

It's too dense, I was told. Too long, and it should be double-spaced.

I agree. I'm going to work on the format, and learn how to double-space on this dashboard.

In terms of content, that means I'll have to learn how to serialize or achieve unprecedented brevity.

I never learned how to write content anyway, so wish me luck, but expect some changes.

Cheers. Time to get educated, I suppose.

Do Nothing (A Letter To My Sons.)

This is going to run long, even for me. Label it poetry, or prose, or fiction, or whatever. I felt it, and I hope you do too.
Do Nothing.
The things they don't want to tell you are the things you should be listening for, little man. You'll never spend a day in the sun unless you know where it leaves shadows, and the human heart is a labyrinth, even to its owners. There are crevasses deeper than space, and they are usually invisible until you are standing over a sudden drop. She doesn't want to tell you about the gentleman callers, or the credit card with your name on it, until it is far too late for you to do anything.

And what you must do is nothing. 

What you can do, what you must do, is find a moment, maybe more, each day, to still your breathing, unwind the turbines that grind in each ear because you have been goaded unto such unnatural speeds and lost your rhythm...and listen. Do nothing but listen. Do nothing but look at her eyes, and watch the pupils. They will dilate in time with her breath under a lot of circumstances, and if she catches it for a second, stalls that one small eternity with her eyes a bit too wide or too far out of alignment with yours, then there is something behind her face you need to know.
The only way to find out its name is to make it tell you. 

Secrets are a currency, and most people are incredibly stingy. You'll have to let the unintended truth walk halfway out of her mouth, then slip the hook in under it before she can recover. Otherwise, you have to wait. That wouldn't be such torture if you didn't already know she had something to say, some ash to spit in your mouth when your smile opens to laugh.

And what you must do, again, is nothing. 

Violence is the last resort of the frustrated mind; it's what people without words, without brains, without control are left with. That's not you. It's one thing to have a skill set; it's another for it to replace all forms of communication. Do not let them take your words from you. Do not raise your hand in anger, against man, beast, or property. Once you are known for a lack of control, everyone owns you except yourself. Hands down, eyes and ears open. 

Pay attention. Most of the answers you need are between breaths, between words, in between the typos and just under the context. You will hear them shuffling around in the hyperbole; you will see them shamble at the back of her eyes on a sunny day, when she realizes the fleeting nature of joy and her contributions thereto.

But first, you must do nothing.

The good secrets are in her too; they are hidden in touch, in the silences when you are slouched together and your breathing synchronizes. There are good secrets, too, in everyone. Life would be worthless and pathetic if it only rained all the time. The good secrets will be your reason for tolerating the bad ones, or their lack will be why you find a new hidden library in someone else.

Love will kill you a thousand times, if you are lucky. But between those deaths, you will live more than anyone ever.

Disappear.

The first trick I ever mastered was how to disappear. It was a survival skill, though I've since adapted it to recreational pursuits.
I wasn't always the tall, handsome, muscular, self-effacing simian you see today. I was a mid-sized fat kid, not granted the girth for the fierce strength so often equated with the tubby, but not small enough or coordinated enough to shirk off the pounds as mere juvenile adipose. I was awkward, even for a human cylinder.
I had my brain, though, such as it may have been, so I did a lot of contemplation. I could not confront my pursuers, as I was as philosophically ill-suited for violence as I was physically inept; I would have to simply avoid them.
Every day.
To and from school.
About three-quarters of a mile, each way.
In a housing development with not so many trees.
It seemed hopeless, and for the most part, it was, but I've come to realize that I had a slight advantage.
Invisibility is not actually the bending of light; if I could have done such a thing, I'd have rearranged the photons into a force field with a sizzling front edge and tanned the lot of them at about a thousand feet out. Instead, it involves not being where you are...which, if you are prone to major depressive disorder, is actually second nature. Your brain, that foul enemy of proper seratonin uptake and arbiter of hateful shame, doesn't want to be anywhere anyway.
And first, you must still your mind. To me, that meant I was halfway home. My mind was so stilled, I sometimes heard it sloshing around in the meningal soup while I was hopping fences or slipping behind sheds, avoiding the open road and its horrors with negligible audio accompaniment.
Of course, the slightest sound turns you into a deer in the headlights; that's the bonus platter of generalized anxiety, a cart-horse equation that, coupled with the comorbidities of diabetes and being a victim of bullying, may never be resolved with any finality.
So your mind is stilled, to the point where the blood in your ears, which is pounding pounding pounding, is reduced in the mix. The world, every bird, every gate, every car, every snickering adolescent who hates the literary and/or overweight, is a lion's roar in a monastery.
Next, you have to move. Given the flatness of my feet and the yellowed-rubber of my sneaker soles, I learned to push off, heel to toe, with next to no report, even on gravel. I doubt my ankles will ever quite recover, but it was necessary. I am here to tell the tale, and yes, the gum soles are squeakier than the black or white soles. Trust me. I studied this.
What if you spot your erstwile tormenters and they are right in front of you? That part is something I actually stole from their beloved game of baseball. You see, the pitcher's head is a tell, if you're on base. He can fight the urge, but where his head goes, his body (and yes, the ball) follows. Watch the back of the head, dead center over the medulla oblongata, and you will know where they're looking. No amount of walleyedness will help them, as long as you draw a set of imaginary triangles to depict their vision and their range of motion. The key is to stay in the blind spot for as long as possible.
In time, all of this becomes sublimated, like any survival skill.
And I was maybe seven or eight when I started studying it. So much for the formative years ending well.

Crackpot History.

Give yourself one wish. That's what I came up with, when I was first learning self-care. Whatever that wish is, that first instinct should tell you what's going on at the center of your mind. Use that. Analyze that.
Even looking at it now, I become derisive, self-critical to the point of bitterness. What could I have wished for? This is followed, of course, by what *should* I wish for?
My mind, actually. That's what I wanted from the very start. Really.
I was born into an upper-middle-class white family; as blind chance goes, I was impossibly fortunate. To say otherwise, to say that the pressures weren't mostly negated by the benefits, would be nonsense. The table was set, and the food was going to be amazing.
How unkind it was, then, to also be born with hereditary major depressive disorder. For our metaphorical purposes, it consituted an eating disorder. No matter how much I profited or what came with the immense inherent privilege, I would not be allowed to enjoy it. I never really felt guilty about being in my position, did my best to help others once I realized where I was coming from, but...nope. No joy. A quick flicker of this strange medley of hopes and hype, that I'd made things better for a nanosecond, that I could help people somehow, and that I could and would help more as I got bigger or better...and then it was gone. Death was back, and hungry. The earliest that I can recall this feeling is six years old, a year after my grandmother told me all about death, and how it would get us all one day...probably starting with my ailing father, who wouldn't be there when I got home from school. This could happen at any time. Any moment. Even during snack time. Snack time, that sacred period of peanut butter and social homeostasis, was no longer a safe haven. It was like finding Idi Amin hosting your block party...and realizing some of the neighbors weren't there.
I was a child. You're only supposed to explain death to children in very broad strokes. The fact that my paternal grandmother was an unmedicated bipolar sufferer spares her such expectations, particularly from within. Still, it was easily the worst gift she gave me. This includes the macramed slipper-socks from 1976.
And to be really charitable, giving a six-year-old slipper-socks is probably not as bad as educating him about what we now call COPD. Imagine knowing that the ruler of your personal demimonde is going to drown in front of you, and there is nothing you can do to save him (or, by extension, yourself and your reality.)
So there I was, the Maude-less Harold of my first grade class, the spokesmonkey for juvenile neurosis. (No, there was never a telethon. Who would have called? Our parents, with whom we could not relate?)
To say I may have been an awkward child is also impossibly vague; I had no aptitude at sports, no social skills beyond those of a trained marmoset, and I wasn't all that good-looking. I wasn't sullen on the outside, but I was only truly gregarious around adults. I'd been trained to be, and it was a role I excelled in. Precocious humor was my forte; its subtleties were lost on my peers, however, until at least high school.
Inside, I soaked in a black swamp of knowing I wasn't a good enough son, a good enough student...and I had no friends. When I did, they were all going to leave anyway. I knew how; even if they didn't abandon me, for which they could not be blamed, they would die. I was inches from drowning, inside my head, at almost all times.
That feeling followed me, with growing intensity and a gnawing sense of entitlement, until I was about forty-two years old. It's not actually gone, but the drugs and the talking and the thinkarounds and the drugs have really drained that quagmire. On a bad day, it gets up to my waist. Then the sun comes back up, or somebody sends a virtual high-five on Facebook, or my girlfriend sends a picture of her desk, or...or I just find a way to answer my own wishes. I've learned to seek the tiniest photons, the little packets of energy that make up what we know as light, with the same avarice I used to find fear and doubt in all possible environments.
In between six and forty-two, though, I wasn't my best self. I dated, married, divorced, dated again...and had three children. My sons show no sign of this monstrosity, other than the marks of having been my children. My fear and anger are cause for constant apology, because I will never be sorry enough. They know, and have almost always known, that my feelings and behaviors were unacceptable. I made a point of telling them that, so they wouldn't think I felt justified in being shrewish.
And yes, I have apologized to most of my partners, even the ones who knew the score when we met. I do my best to treat people more kindly than fairly, but...there were lapses. I was very jealous, very insecure, and probably not as much fun as I was trouble. (I don't mean that in a bad-boy sense; there would have been more apologizing to do.)
I dropped out of college because I couldn't be bothered to improve myself. Jobs, chosen because they'd have me, fell apart. My health declined into mild horror. The rest of the world did what it does, for good or ill, but I can assure you that I took little pleasure, or at least no reasonable duration of it, in the good. (Dad died seventeen years after Grandma warned me he would; he buried her, and my beloved uncle, a decade prior to joining them. With him gone, I abruptly slid into the upper lower class.)
I became a Nets fan, too. That should have been all the warning sign a clinician would need, if you know anything about basketball. The technical term is "masochism", I believe.
I lost my footing and slipped off the world.
Here I am in space, then.
Make a wish.

Girl Germs.

I can’t tell you when it started, but the steady stream of mixed messages has definitely informed my perspective (or, as Frank Zappa once put it, “messed my mind up.”) I was born in 1970, approximately the same year as the birth of the modern feminist movement. To say that I have been tossed between worlds since approximately that moment is a bit of an understatement. 

 

I’m not sure when I became a feminist, or when I started identifying as one. I wasn’t given a choice, in my opinion; my mother has a will of iron, and comes from a long line of nurses. She was not going to give up her career when she met my father, nor do I think he was foolish enough to ever suggest such a thing. As fate would have it, he developed an utterly debilitating galaxy of cardiovascular and respiratory disorders when I was still an infant…so my mother was the one who taught me how to throw a ball, drive a stick-shift, mow a lawn, punch without breaking my thumb, kick a soccer ball, whittle, and remove my own splinters. The concept of a world where all women were not my mother was, despite seeming simplistic and Freudian, improbable at best. In her poem “Men”, Lorenza Calvillo Craig says that my gender are “totally unable to see beyond the body of a woman,” and “erroneously decree that a woman hath no spirit, no soul.” While I met a lot of people like that, not all of whom were men, in my elementary school years, it sounds a bit primitive. It also sounds like something you shouldn’t say to my mother (or me, for that matter.) My father, had he been told this, would have chuckled lightly and mentioned something about that denier needing a bit more education. 

 

So they had souls from the get-go, these mystical creatures who were not my mother. That didn’t preclude them from being attractive; if anything, knowing that we were equals was a bit of a relief. I was an awkward oblong eggplant of child, with no balance and unfortunate fashion choices. If I could just find a woman who saw past that, I could…well, I could do something. The idea was too fantastic, even to my eight-year-old self. I would liken it to a dog chasing squirrels; you know you’re supposed to do it, nobody has really explained why or why not, but what do you if you, well, catch one? (I ask this as a middle-aged man who still lacks a reasonable answer to that question.)

Coming from a small, middle-class neighborhood, I felt a lot of pressure from my betters, most of whom had to hammer that idea home on a regular basis (sometimes literally.) I can’t agree with their enactment of Joseph Pleck’s male-power hierarchy, as found in his article “Men’s Power with Women, Other Men, and Society”, but I understood, even at an early age, that it stemmed from their own regressive paterfamiliae. There had to be a pecking order, and, as someone who didn’t see a problem with girls (other than perhaps their superficial nature, or the inventory on hand), I was bound to get pecked pretty hard and pretty often. 

 

And despite coming from the same environs, even the same block, Dad was not like them. He wasn’t the most progressive soul, but he’d learned a lot about people simply by talking to them. It lent him a mercy, on some fronts, that was missing in other houses.

Stan Gray, in his article “Sharing the Shop Floor”, depicts a social maladroit known as a working class patriarch. These are men who, upon escape from their employers, come home to exercise all the power they lack on, say, the shop floor in question. That just was never going to happen in my house, and for a variety of simple reasons. They include the instinct for self-preservation.

My father had all the authority he could handle: he ran a newspaper, worked with several local charities, and came home to a somewhat-well-oiled, if Rube Goldberg-designed, machine that was run by my mother. If he had tried, in the tradition of those patriarchs, to put his foot down, I have little doubt that she would have, perhaps on a good day when my teachers weren’t calling about all that homework I was too busy to do, asked him to switch jobs. I come from fairly intelligent people, and that includes my father. If, as Barbara Povee Polk alleges in her essay, “Male Power and the Women’s Movement”, it is “in men’s interest to maintain…power and privilege”, Dad definitely sold us (men of the Seventies, anyways) out. 

We weren’t the only ones who were stretching the boundaries, though. One of my best friends’ dads took off to the West Coast with his secretary, so his mother, like mine, shrugged and stepped up. While the old roles and activities were maintained, no one seemed to bat an eye about who was doing what. Everything had to get done, though. Boys had to play sports; if girls did, too, then nobody cared who was coaching or driving. Boys were supposed to be tough; if the person teaching them that stoicism was a woman, well, it was the Seventies. It would be at least another twenty years before the activities were similarly blendable, although many efforts were made. They were shrugging efforts, like allowing girls to play youth soccer with the boys because only the boys had a league. None of us had operable hormones yet, and everybody got dressed at home, so it was not a thing. Of course, the parents’ encouragement differed, and our roster seemed to be a little more homogeneous by about midseason…but that wasn’t the institution. West Haven Youth Soccer appreciated every check, and they were high-minded enough to take anyone’s money. That mentality trickled down to the coaches, especially mine. It wasn’t like we were going to win, but even a loss was better than a forfeit based on too few players. 

 

That focus on roster size would show up again later, just as puberty reared its draconian head. I still thought about girls (though I now suspected they were becoming women, particularly in nomenclature, but maybe in other arcane ways as well), but with little exception, they were either absent or quite vocal in their unwillingness to be that metaphorical squirrel. I went to an all-boy Catholic high school, hung out with comic-book geeks in downtown New Haven, where there were only Yale undergrads (if more of them had been Primatology majors, I might have married my way out of the suburbs), then went home to a neighborhood where there was one girl my age (Debbie N., who preferred more athletic guys. To each their own, but she really was the only girl. No pressure, Deb.)

There I was, in a world that didn’t fear or hate me. Worse, it was indifferent. I just couldn’t seem to find my demographic, even after I got a driver’s license and started hanging out at the mall. It’s possible that I was too advanced for them. I blame my parents…who occasionally insinuated, probably jokingly, that I certainly spent more time with men than women. My retort was based in fact: if they’d moved us to a neighborhood with more girls, especially ones with lower standards, I’d have brought home at least one pregnant girlfriend already.

A few short years later, that response stopped being funny…but that is a whole other story.

One swing is always empty.

As thrilled as I am that people are being forced to discuss gun control, I'm reminded of earlier shortsightedness.
I'm from Senator Chris Murphy 's home state, to offer full disclosure and express maximum pride.
As most of you know, I live a block from the beach. Yes, it's lovely. Yes, you're always welcome. Please wear sunscreen, and remember to stay hydrated.
By the beach lot is a wonderful new playscape...pink and shiny, it has a bell that gets clanged throughout most sunny days. Children scream and caper, and it gets boisterous till just after dark. (It's too close to the main road, so only the bravest stoners pass by it, and I've never seen any stay.)
It is dedicated to the children of Sandy Hook Elementary. You may have heard their story. A white male, raised in a gun-happy microcosm, decides to ventilate the world.
I said children. Yes, I did.
I want you to imagine, as I did, your child, your niece, your nephew, confronting an unstable individual who is equipped to hold out against a small Soviet incursion. Days before Christmas, and the only weather we here can recall is a lead rain.
Children. Yes, that's what I said.
So when they're clanging and banging and shrieking with glee in I have lost count of the number of languages, I think about all the children who can't. They are silent beneath the soil, haunting family trees they will never extend, because white people have been driven mad for the instantaneous gratification of having godlike power over life and death.
I've never met a group so focused on their rights to the point of rabidity...I don't know if there's a cure, but I know this:
Killing is wrong. Hating people because they aren't like you is wrong. Taking your bad day, real or biochemical, out on others is wrong.
That much I've got. The rest is strong suspicion.
There's nothing wrong with guns, as the NRA likes to say. No, there isn't. My qualms arise from the people who need bigger, better, faster, more...of a deadly weapon. It indicates genuine mental illness, the get-out-of-scorn card for white shooters young and old. If it weren't its own society, this white-knuckled world of erstwhile defenders of defense, they'd qualify as mild sociopaths.
The government has not taken a single one of their guns. Every time that bell clangs, though, I wish they had.
Children, I said. Children.