Cry Havok

My eyes water a lot more in my 40s.

I'm fleetingly aware that my emotions have been out of whack for most of my life. I'm still not sure what emotional health really looks like; without a model, I'm unclear that I'm doing it "right."  But the depressions are shallower and briefer, and I like to think the mood swings have improved as I age. (Although they started surfacing again a few months before Player 3 was born. Maybe they were more untriggered than resolved.)

Another sign that the terrain is shifting though, is how much more frequently I tear up at music—compared to the "never" of my youth.

I have a long-standing love of Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love music. A few years ago, I noticed that just the opening chords of his song, Nothing Like a Train, make me moisten around the eyeballs. When I hear them, I relax. It feels like everything will be OK.

"Irrational" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and feelings are almost by definition irrational. But there's no reason for me to feel "OK" about this song. It's a sad song. I just do. A couple of Dar Williams ditties do it to me too, and a tune by the Weakerthans. Something in the folk/rock makeup that turns the spigot, somehow.

Most recently, I've noticed it at church. The community we're settling into in Austin, Servant Church, does hymn standards much more often than my beloved Circle of Hope.

Circle's DIY ethos extended all the way to worship music. They wrote a lot of their own songs, and cribbed a few others. That was fine.

But hymns have been winnowed. You don't generally hear crap hymns. Since most hymns are more than 20 years old, there's a clear consensus on what the good ones are, and there's a nice catalog of them. You can sing the good ones on a rotation, and it takes a long time to repeat.

These old, tested songs, I did not know how deeply they had burrowed into the masonry of my heart. "Immortal, Invisible" is not what you'd call a tearjerker, but that thing unpacks majesty. Somewhere in the second or third verse, once it's good and warmed up, I need a tissue.

Will this phenomenon intensify? I imagine embarrassing myself as I get older, turning weepy every Sunday, more frequently dashing to hit skip on a shuffle play because I don't want to cry right now dammit.

I don't like that I've become this way. But also, I love it. I spent a bunch of years in a Cold War with emotion. Like an arm slept on, I can expect some prickle as this limb awakes.

I like to move it

According to some social science report I'm not going to bother researching for this post, moving is one of the most stressful events in an adult's life. And it is!

A lot of the stress revolves around how much petty crap you have to remember to do. Address changes and tying up loose ends at the old place and still walking the dog at the end of the day.

I imagine that if some disaster hit, a fire or earthquake or war—from which we all made it out safely—and we had to flee our old home and start up in another location... that would have been almost preferable. Just drop the mic and walk away.

Instead there are literally dozens of hanging tendrils from the change that remain unaddressed. Nothing terrible, but all need to be done.

No one's bothered to make a list of what remains undone, so one floats by occasionally (Did we get the car registered yet?) and free-floating stress just drifts in, interrupting and complicating whatever else you were doing. (No! And it's overdue! Hope no one notices!)

My wife has commented before that I only get irritable over small things. She has been surprised by my calm during large, intense events. When our beloved (and sometimes behated) dog almost died, she was, I think, almost angry at how casually I behaved.

But then, I knew what I could do and what I couldn't. I knew what my responsibility and capability was. I wanted Autumn to live, but if she didn't, it was out of my control. If she died, we would grieve and keep living. If she lived, we would play-fight with her and take her down to the river for swimming again and things would be well.

Contrast that to a bat-swarm of responsibilities that come after a move, with no clear boundaries or action plans, or even a scope of what must be done. And we're not even done! We're just in the starter apartment! Buying and occupying a permanent home is still on the horizon!

But I still like moving. I like new places. Circle of Hope in Philadelphia taught me the joy and value in staying. But that pied piper plays a mean flute, and now I'm stressed in Austin.

Lent 2015: time-wasting

This Lent I have set myself the quixotic sacrifice of time-wasting.

It's sort of hard to know what's wasting time and what's fiddling. Sometimes reading a comic book is wasting time, and sometimes it's productive stimulation and sometimes it's research.

But as a concrete expression, I have barred myself from my ipad. No dinky time waster games for 40+ days. No reddit on the tablet.

I can still waste time on my desktop, and I do. Or even on a couple of analog time wasters I've got here. But when I find myself wandering that direction, I am at least aware of it and try to veer back in the direction of doing something instead of nothing.

At the Ash Wednesday worship we went to, it was impressed on me that the vice, the thing you give up for Lent, is not the point. You walk around and you're like "I'm giving up hooch for Lent." But that's not the deal.

The deal is that when your vice is gone, you've kicked your own crutch away. The vice was covering over a hole and now you have an obvious hole in you. 

Depending on how long you've had that cover-up there, you might not even know what's living in that hole these days. Maybe it's just an emptiness. Or maybe it contains things you put in there because you didn't want to have to look at them any more. And now you're looking at them. For 40 days.

But that's not the point either! The real point is that God is there to help you fill up the hole. The point is more God. And the by-product is a wholer, holier you when you two are done with that.

For me, living in a brand new city strips even more away, because I have a lot of free time. Which means a lot of opportunity to waste time. Which means a lot of opportunity to stare into the hole and asking God what kind of spackle this thing is going to take.

Restless and deprived of my usual consciousness salves, it's been grim so far. I've been reading a book on the Holy Spirit which isn't grabbing me. Tonight I finished a book of Robert Howard's Solomon Kane stories, which has actually been more productive. (Solomon Kane—worst Puritan ever or pure psychotic?)

But I'm hopeful about what things will look like come resurrection day. The antsier I feel now, the more I hope for an epiphanic payout. A lasting change instead of the returning tide of mild hedonism.

Go Not-Very-Far Together

The African proverb says that if you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far, go together. It doesn't say anything about how exhausting going far will be when you go together.

I've been in Austin for about a month. Only now am I not falling into a comatose stupor at 10 pm every night and waking up 10 hours later, barely refreshed, having dreamed seemingly every somnolent moment.

M talks about not knowing how to make friends. I think I know how, except that there's a one-year-old in tow, who does not give a red-crayon shit about the ennobling discussion I'd like to have with a just-met would-be peer. Being responsible for a young child is like having a hobby that somehow pushes you away from sharing your interests with others.

I know how to find places where like-minded people gather, make ingratiating small talk, and slowly entwine my life with those of promising strangers. It's hard, but I understand the mechanics. I've never tried to do this under such odd restraints though. I have to flee the scene during afternoon nap time and the very second dinner ends to make it home in time to bed down the loveable demand factory.

I do not see how the African proverb makers found the ability to go anywhere together. We can barely make it to the Chipotle and back.

I would think the entire proposition untenable, except that billions of adults do it every day. 

BABYMETAL

I found this at boingboing, and it's pretty much got my head in a vise now. Amazacrazy.

1000 Pieces of Paper

Tonight I emptied a box labeled "1000 Pieces of Paper". I filled 1000 Pieces of Paper some time after college, before I moved away to work for TSR. It was full of college papers and notes and things I wrote.

 A whole lot of it got recycled tonight and a little of it got kept and winnowed into a smaller box.

We've been on a throwing-away kick around here lately. Player 3 has a proliferating amount of his own stuff, and the house has only revealed three dimensions for storage. 

It is a solution of cleansing and sorrow to do this. Saying goodbye to things is more than the things. It is saying goodbye to the person you were or wanted to be when you decided to store those things in the first place.

I've often thought that I'd be happier if a storm blew through our house and destroyed all my stuff. I would miss it, but not much. The DIY version of this however, requires you to bring the catastrophe. You must eventually destroy yourself if natural disaster won't oblige.

In the intervening 20 years, I've changed out some contents of 1000 Pieces of Paper. But it still contained a lot of mass from the mid '90s. Mass I've hauled across the country twice with a few extra tour dates added.

Looking through it tonight was a date with shame. Zippy was an ok dude. Fun at parties. But his interior life was confused and frequently depressed and ohgod so immature. I doubt I could look 24-year-old me in the eye.

A big part of the loss was realizing how terrible a thinker I was. Shallow. Dim. My philosophy notes were nonsensical. My writing had so little perspective. Now I have to put that down. I was never brilliant, and I'm probably not pulling it out in a pinch. I cannot be who I wanted to be; I have to be who I am. It's grounding, but palpably disappointing.

Here's some brightness: I saved nearly everything to do with role-playing games. A bunch of really dumb ideas there too, but the Russian judge was easily ignored as I reviewed those. Half-formed hopes about your future are disposable once you collect the courage and/or wisdom to do it. But creativity has no shelf life. You never know when something you made can be remade. Can't throw that away, however dumb it was.

I failed to grasp most of the Theological Perspectives on Modern Literature class I took in 1990. I don't need reminders of that. But as I storm middle age in 2014, I want every gun I ever drew on a church bulletin in my bag. I've got some personal demons to fuck up, and that cartoon with the surprisingly sophisticated perspective is probably a better tool for the job than a 5-page paper circumscribing my precise failure to grasp Camus.

Snowden Commentary Dec 2013

I am a big fan of what Edward Snowden has done in revealing the 4th amendment abuses perpetrated by the NSA. Big fan, love your work.

True, Snowden is a criminal under existing laws, but much of what we've been allowed to see of those laws indicates they are illegal as well, so who's zooming who? And while legality is a matter of high importance, it has never, ever been the marker of good or right. Legality and goodness should be very best of friends, but they do not share a passport. A long line of martyrs keeps attesting to this. Reminds one of the parable of the tenants.

Snowden has shown himself to be restrained and principled in his communications post-affair, while several members of the U.S. government have behaved with red-faced bluster. The primary journalists spreading the leaks demonstrate care and responsibility in releasing information, while the leakees unlawfully detain journalists' loved ones and force leaders of sovereign nations out of the sky in their manhunt. Even unsophisticated observers such as myself can read these stars.

Every time a new piece of information arrives, I feel an impulse to blog about it, but have nothing substantial to add. "Right on!"; "Well what do you know?"; "I'm angry at the government's plainly foreseeable abuses in the wake of the PATRIOT Act."

Anyway, these are sentiments better expressed in a service featuring hashtag appendages. Blogging -- well, this blog anyway -- is for having an opinion and working to express it well.

If you've only kept up with this out of the corner of  your eye, I encourage you to catch up. It now looks like this issue probably won't just fizzle. Something will probably be done. But will enough be done? Will good or right things be done? These are not settled questions. Your participation is relevant.

Privacy in this modern world remains arguably our biggest American issue right now. That includes issues of income equality, sluggish job market, deficit reduction, same-sex marriage, and anything involving Middle East policy. There are bigger world issues: climate change and antibiotic overuse come to mind. An excellent case can be made for the prevalence of untreated sin as the biggest issue facing humanity, which, if faced, could solve many of these other issues virtually overnight.

But I'll confine myself to talking about trees instead of forests. Myopic as it might sound, privacy is the big American issue.

Ironically, you need to go to a British source for comprehensive information. The Guardian is a London-based newspaper that has been in publication in various forms for 192 years. They have been the primary journalistic outlet for reporting on the Snowden leaks. They present information in clear, easy-to-understand articles and organize the entire story well at their website.

If you've fallen a behind on the whole deal, see their overview of what's going on.

And for what it's worth, I am angry about the government's plainly foreseeable abuses. Encourage your congressperson to repeal the PATRIOT Act. It hurts us much more than it helps.

Welcome, Player 3

Here's a quote from Penny Arcade's pseudonymous Tycho Brahe (Jerry Holkins to his mother) back in 2010:

There’s quite a lot about mainstream culture that I found fundamentally incoherent before I was married, another threshold was crossed when the nurse handed me a son....  Previously, I had something like a schematic of the required emotions....  I knew what I was meant to feel, and could produce an iconic representation of that response. 

I assume the unwritten conclusion to this thought is, "The things they told me were true and that I faked to get along are really-for-reals true. This is a lot of feelings all at once."

I've experienced this. It's not just my lens; people treat you differently once you're married. And you get more jokes. I suspect the same holds true for having children.

I have yet to experience this emotional rush. I've noticed as a new father that you read lots of people talking about the emotional rush of it all, how in one instant they become changed people forever. I've heard this line spoken in earnestness to my face.

I have an unsupported suspicion that the flat affect is a more common result than the flood of joy and life-changed magic purported to be the standard experience. Because nobody wants to be the cinderblock who has a baby and then is like, "OK. What's next?" I certainly don't want to be that guy.

But I am! So, now what?

===

I refer to Player 3 as a "need blob" because that seems to be his primary THING. He's a humanoid blob who constantly needs things. And he only has one word, so he provides fairly binary communication about those needs. And you know, that's how that's going. Standard-issue baby stuff. But I'm not filled with ineffable pride and joy and hope.

The presumption is that these feelings will arrive. I will get the jokes eventually. But I'm not clear that happens for everyone. I don't think my father ever really fell in love with me. I think I was always, on some level, an unknowable need blob to him.

I'd like my relationship with Player 3 to be different. There's still time. As long as one of us is alive, there's time. My suspicion, however, is that something less simple, less easily relateable will occur over time. I want to love him, like him, help him become a man whom everyone loves and respects back. I think I can do that without new-father effervescence.

Happy literal birthday, Player 3. We'll talk soon.

Biting Elbows music video

This video is amazeballs and rated R.

Don't be fooled by the resting-state boobs--it's a violence thing. Amazing first-person violence that you should watch full screen.

Biting Elbows - 'Bad Motherfucker' Official Music Video from Ilya Naishuller on Vimeo.

Tote bags, part 1

I have never in mortality purchased a tote bag, but they keep showing up like loose electrons. So I decided to document them. Here's one I got because my employer changed its name recently and decided to celebrate by ordering useless shit from China.