WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!!!

We’re right in the middle of moving seventy-five miles out to Monroe Georgia…but it’s worth it. This is the last move I’ll ever make. I’ve spent the last week working my ass off and NOT getting the packing done. This weekend, the office, the storage room, the kitchen and the dining room will be packed. OS has busted out our bedroom and the kids rooms already, and she’s well on her way to having the tack consolidated and the living room ready.

If I can get my stuff “done” then I get to sit on my vacationing ass and write and play Skyrim. There’s a LOT of incentive to get done before the Moving truck gets here Wednesday morning.

If I don’t post again before the big move (and let’s be honest, I won’t), then I’ll just say “Happy Thanksgiving” and “see you all online from Monroe!”

When I was in high school, I remember how frustrated I was that I could never gain weight. Perhaps that doesn’t make sense from a mid-thirties perspective, but when you’re seventeen and weigh a-buck-forty at five-eleven (and one-forty was probably after a heavy meal and wearing a winter jacket soaked in water…or concrete), all you want is to “bulk up.”

I ran everyday, I had “a runner’s body,” and I hated it. My best friend had a naturally broad build with a thick chest and strong shoulders. He looked like the cover model from romance novels…and it drove me crazy. My jealousy was both good-natured and palpable.

I ate everything. And a lot of it. When I was actively running regularly and working manual labor jobs for six hours a day, I estimate I was consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000-8000 calories a day. And I didn’t gain a pound. Not one.

I used to go to class in the morning with an entire box of hostess “chocolate covered donette gems” and eat the whole thing. By myself. I’d go through liters of Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew; hell, I even ate Coco Puffs in a bowl topped with Dr Pepper instead of milk because I needed the energy hit before showering and heading to the Cafeteria before my 7:00 am class start. I never learned portion control, I just ate as much as I could at every meal.

It didn’t get any better once I left Academy and joined “the real world” and took more direct responsibility for my meals. Even when money was tight and meals were controlled, I didn’t watch what I ate, I just ate as much as I could and enjoyed cheese and refined white flour and sugar seemingly in everything. I worked construction, hefted an industrial nail gun made entirely of steel around for 10+ hours a day, and while I did begin to see my shoulders broaden and my muscles develop, I was still skinny as a rail.

I remember one time, when I was sitting in class eating an entire box of highly-processed imitation-food “donettes,” a health conscious classmate of mine looked at me and said “someday you are going to really regret eating that.” I also remember laughing her off. After a year of marriage and working at a sedentary desk job for the government, I began to discover what she meant. Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty-one…the birthdays kept coming and so did the inches on my waist.

While I “paunched up” a bit around the middle, I still looked pretty good. I rode my bike, roller-bladed with my wife, went hiking on the weekends…I was pretty active. Then the internet bubble began, and I climbed on for the ride.

The amazing thing about dot-com companies in 2000-2001, we worked crazy stupid hours, drank beer by the keg, and ate THE WORST SHIT imaginable. I can’t tell you how many times we’d buy a “bag of Big Macs” because it was close by, or eat multiple pizzas or breakfast burritos or whatever starch and fat filled monstrosities we could stuff into our bodies.

When you work 12-16 hours a day, have an hour commute each way, and a wife who works an opposite schedule, your home meals aren’t any better. We ate out or had pizza delivered for about 80% of our meals together. The ones we did cook at home were lethal; filled with cheese, pasta, breads, and heaped and mounded on our plate like we were afraid we might never see a scrap of food again. Cans of Pepsi and Dr. Pepper were major expenses from Costco, and our weekend activities involved discovering the joys of DVD movies and online video games.

There’s a reason that in 2002 I was captured in a company photo titled “the fat man committee” sitting with two close friends, our collective weight well clear of 1000 lbs. I started that job weighing in at about 220, moderately overweight and moderately active in reasonably good health. I ended that job weighing over 300 lbs and virtually inactive with sky high cholesterol and blood pressure, and with a doctors warning about elevated protein and pre-diabetes ringing in my ears.

And then we moved to Boise. Where I worked, sitting across from my Dad and my Grandfather in the family business, doing a job I sucked at, under pressure, and feeling like a failure. If I thought the dot-com environment was stressful, the family businesses made my prior job look like a stint as a quality tester in a hug factory.

Which brings us back to the summer of 2004.

A part of me wants to write a detailed accounting of the events of that June night, but just thinking about it makes me ill. I’ll be (uncharacteristically) brief and sum it up for you:

• Two bleeding ulcers, an ovoid duodenal ulcer about 8 millimeters in diameter and a lower gastric lacerative ulcer about 3 centimeters long.
• Waking up at 2:30 am and promptly throwing up more than a pint of blood into a trashcan in the bathroom.
• Being carried out of my house on a gurney by four struggling EMTs while my three-year-old daughter watched from the stairs.
• Being told by the EMT in the ER that she decided to start the largest IV because she’d “seen gunshot victims who looked better” on the drive to the hospital.
• Not one but two blood transfusions.
• Waking up from Endoscopic Cauterization alone in a hospital room.
• Having to get a second Endoscopic Cauterization two weeks later because they didn’t see the lacerative ulcer “the first time.”

I ate no solid food for more than a month. You live on Jell-O and broth while taking powerful antibiotics and pain killers, you lose weight. Unfortunately, that weight loss is not sustainable. I dropped from an all time high of 313 lbs to a haggard and sallow looking 265 lbs as of two months after my ride to the ER.

The whole ordeal shocked me into action. Once I was cleared for exercise, I was all about the exercise. We got a treadmill, and I started walking and then running during Mariner’s games, racking up an hour every night. I counted calories, watched my portions, recorded every meal and snack and drink that crossed my lips…and I lost weight.

I got down to 225 lbs without really trying. I lost 20 lbs in two weeks, almost like magic. I kept it off for about a year.

Then it started to creep back. We were moving, the marriage was hitting a rocky stretch, four-year-olds SUCK UP YOUR TIME; I stopped paying attention to what I ate, I stopped exercising, and then the weight started to show up one pants-size at a time.

I spent 2006 in hell. My marriage went into the crapper, and my health pretty much followed with it. I ended up spending days at OHSU being tested for MS and ALS and every other scary acronym you can imagine. I started living alone for the first time in my adult life, and cooking-for-one three days a week. I tried to stretch out and do some things “for me” so I took up fencing, a sport I hadn’t played since high school. I took classes at the Salem Classical Fencing school and I loved them. I found myself eating better by default and exercising strenuously three or four times a week for upwards of three hours at a stretch (and more on weekends).

And my weight dropped without my noticing to under 220 lbs again. I was wearing size 32 pants for the first time since ballooning out of the 28′s I’d worn through high school, college, and my first year of marriage. For the first time in nearly a decade, I went home (alone) to my parents house for Thanksgiving and they didn’t feel compelled to remind me that I was overweight, grotesque to look at, and a big fat disappointment. Well…I was still a disappointment, but the collapse of my marriage was now the ranking source of failure.

A month later I started using eHarmony and eventually met OS (there’s a whole story about Christmas and Birthdays and Roses and Cheesecake that is yet to be told). In the four-and-a-half years since then, the weight has slowly crept back in. OK, not so slowly. Three years ago things were not good.

Then, my little brother decided to get married in Cozumel and I didn’t want to look like this. I constantly thought about starting another diet, buying running shoes, doing SOMETHING to get into shape.

Clearly, round is a shape. I looked like I ate the Michelin Man. Whole.

There’s a funny thing that happens when you’re overweight, you begin to develop an ignorance defense mechanism. You avoid scales and mirrors and cameras. If someone DOES take your picture, it looks like this:

Not a happy face.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about my goal of running in a triathlon. It was inspired by two people, first by my cousin who started running in regional triathlons at the age of 40. He has worked his way up to some pretty good results including age-group wins and overall top-tens.

The second person is Ben Davis of bendoeslife.com. Ben has a video on youtube that I watch for inspiration. I watch it about half-a-dozen times a week.

So, earlier this spring, knowing I was flying to Portland for a company conference with all of my peers, I spent more than $120 on a pair of running shoes specifically designed for “large frame” runners. To provide extra impact cushioning. Because I’m fat.

I used them exactly three times.

While I was in Portland, I saw my Dad and a few friends who all pointed out that I’d lost weight. I was feeling good and took that to heart.

They were liars. Nice liars, but liars none the less.

I’m not all that good at unstructured life changes. I still felt unhealthy. I felt fat. I bought clothes in XL that didn’t fit when I tried them on. I knew I needed to change something.

There’s a secret about doing significant travel professionally, you end up watching a lot of infomercials. A LOT of infomercials. For more than a year I’ve been seeing Tony Horton pitch P90X like it was the answer to all the world’s ills. Adult obesity? P90X. Epidemic increases in heart disease and diabetes? P90X. Sluggish economy and a jobless recovery? P90X. (OK, just kidding on the last one.)

I talked about it with my little brother, he knew people who’d done the program, and done it multiple times because they liked the results. I talked to co-workers and found out that I’m not alone in my interest. I went online and read literally hundreds of unpaid testimonials.

So, for my Birthday, OS and I decided to commit to doing a BeachBody Inc. program. Though I was interested in P90X, OS wisely suggested trying P90 first and “working up” to the more X-tream version after 90 successful days. We bought a new scale, new target outfits, and tossed out a kitchen full of crap food and replaced it (at no small expense) with healthy alternatives.

We have been on the diet for more than two weeks now, and I’m really enjoying it. I honestly like the food (which OS doesn’t believe because I’ve always resisted whole grains, white proteins, healthy carbs, and expanding my vegetable range when cooking).

We’ve been on the P90 exercise plan for more than a week now. Tomorrow is day 10 actually.

When you start the program there’s a little card you fill out with your weight and measurements. Actually using a tape measure and a high-end scale inspired me via mortification. On April 29, 2011 I weighed 282.6 lbs, and I was stuffing my ass into 42″ pants when I should have been looking in the 46″ range.

So I dove into the exercise regime with gusto. The first episode is the cardio program called “Sweat” that lasts 30 minutes followed by 100 ab crunches broken up into 10 sets of 10 reps of different types of crunches. By the 15 minute mark I wanted to cry. Oh, that’s a lie. I wanted to cry three minutes into the “Power Yoga” warm-up.

“Do WHAT with my legs?”

“That asshole is made out of rubber. He thinks this shit is funny!”

“Hey look! My Toes! I haven’t seen those in forever! Why can’t I feel them?”

The next day was easier, the “Sculpt” program being strength training, which is simply easier for me to grind through. I can work the pace a bit to give myself the right mix of breaks and effort, so it actually goes faster.

Then back to Cardio, which was easier the second time; then Sculpt again…etc.

I was feeling healthier. My blood pressure didn’t shoot up every time I walked up three stairs or carred in the groceries. I was beyond diligent with the diet, counting calories and watching what went into my body.

Finally, the one-week mark came, and I weighed myself to see what a week would do. I was so confident. I’d always been able to lose the weight when I applied myself, and DAMN did I apply myself to this.

284.0 lbs.

I was so frustrated I sat down on the toilet and cried. This is NOT how it goes on The Biggest Loser. Those dudes lose TONS of weight. I just wanted to lose a couple of stinking pounds, give myself something to build on. Instead I gained 1.4 lbs. I ate less than 1800 calories and worked my fat ass off…and I gained 1.4 lbs.

On the side of every BeachBody box, and running across their videos and websites is a three word mantra:

Decide. Commit. Succeed.

We decided to do this. We decided to exercise and become active. We decided to fundamentally change what we ate and how we ate it.

Now is the time for the Commitment. The Commitment is hard. Gaining weight on a diet and exercise plan when you try, when you put in the effort, when you just want to see a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel…that’s crushing. But we didn’t decide to “try” and change, we decided to change. In the words of Yoda, “Do or Do Not, there is no Try.” It might be corny and it might be pop-mysticism, but it’s also true. One week does not constitute an actual evaluation period for a life change. Ask me again in a year.

If Ben Davis could get his tired lard-ass up and run. If he could get his ass up in the rain, and the heat, and the dark of night because he believed it would help…then I want to believe it will help me too. Dude is a hero. He’s a hero to HIMSELF. I want to be my own hero. I want to get to the other side and be able to say that not only did I decide, and not only did I commit, but in the end I stuck with it, and I am living proof that we can all succeed.

This time next year I will be healthier, skinnier, wearing pants I’m not ashamed to buy, and getting ready to run in a triathlon. I don’t have to win at the triathlon, I just have to do life. Because that’s so much better than the alternative.

Working in the eldercare industry for several years, we used to pass around a rather grim truth: There are no morbidly obese old people. If you don’t believe me, wander the halls of your nearest nursing home. Two weeks ago I was in no better health than I was on that night in early June of 2004. That time it was ulcers, next time it could be a heart attack, or a stroke, or a brain aneurysm. All of which run in my family.

Decide. Commit. Succeed.

Do Life.

[Word Count: 2699]

Still, a friend of mine pointed out a few days ago that thirty-five is “the age when even the elderly don’t think you’re young anymore.” That kind of hit me.

I’ve spent the last couple of birthday’s a bit depressed or pensive or just sorting stuff out. I’m not really in that place this year. The year I turned 30 my marriage of 11 years fell apart. The year I turned 31 I ended up in the hospital. The year I turned 32 I was unemployed and struggling to find my way forward. The year I turned 33 my daughter moved across the country. And last year I took Sarah back to the airport to fly home after spring break.

Of those years, when I turned 32 (which feels like several blogs and lifetimes ago) I did something I don’t usually do, I made a list of things I expressly wanted to accomplish. I didn’t accomplish some of them because they were essentially abstract and therefore essentially unaccomplishable. But on the other hand, the more concrete ones, like get a job with a specific salary, buy a nice camera, use my passport, scare the shit out of myself…those I did manage to accomplish. In no small part because I wrote them down. I made them concrete. I had something to work towards and compare against.

There are 1827 days until I turn 40.

There are things that I believed would be true about myself before I was 40, things that I feel are now starting to slip away.

What follows is the list of forty things that I want to accomplish before I turn 40:

1. Be selected for and attend Viable Paradise.
2. Have a short story published in an SFWA qualifying publication.
3. Have a novel published by a SFWA qualifying publisher.
4. Join the SFWA.
5. Have a short story published in Electric Velocipede.
6. Have a novel published by TOR Books.
7. Visit the TOR offices in the Flatiron Building in NYC.
8. Meet PNH and TNH in person. Tell them thank you.
9. Meet Catherynne M Valente. Try not to go fanboi.
10. Meet Neil Gaiman in person. Get him to sign my Sandman #1 and Fragile Things.
11. Meet Russel T Davies. Tell him thank you.
12. Write a screenplay for an episode of Doctor Who.
13. Go to a sci-fi/fantasy related convention (ComiCon, DragonCon, etc.)
14. Buy a current generation Mac.
15. Buy a late model-year car/truck.
16. Buy a project car.
17. Buy the tools to fix up a project car.
18. Actually fix up a project car.
19. Take the project car on a serious, multi-day road trip.
20. Buy a motorcycle or officially give up on that long-held dream.
21. Buy a decent acoustic guitar.
22. Learn to play Fields of Gold on the guitar.
23. Learn to play Fragile on the guitar.
24. Learn to play Saint Agnes and the Burning Train on the guitar.
25. Learn to speak French well enough to understand a French film without subtitles.
26. Learn to read French well enough to read Dumas, Casanova, and Voltaire without a French to English dictionary.
27. Learn to speak Italian well enough to understand a Roberto Benigni film without subtitles.
28. Learn to read Italian well enough to read Umberto Eco without an Italian to English dictionary.
29. Visit France.
30. Visit Italy.
31. Buy L-series lenses: Telephoto lens, Wide-Angle lens, Macro lens.
32. Buy a Speedlight, remote, and diffusers.
33. Improve my photography skills.
34. Upgrade my camera to a level appropriate for my improved skills.
35. Run a 5K.
36. Run a Marathon.
37. Run a Triathlon.
38. Take Communion on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Easter, All-Saints Day, And Christmas in the same year.
39. Spend a school-year with my daughter.
40. Buy a house.

I might not do all of these things before I turn 40, but I’m not going to turn 40 without trying do do all of these things.

[Word Count: 695]

When I was sixteen, I didn’t think fondly of “my” van because it wasn’t even my van; it was my Grandma’s van that she had bought for her drapery business and taken all of the benches out of except the one in the back. It smelled like an old van. It LOOKED like an old van. And to a sixteen-year-old kid, it was about as cool as Dan Quayle. I was perpetually “borrowing” it, even though my grandma had no use for it and had her own little Subaru that she drove regularly, it never EVER was “mine” by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet, I had no reason to despise it. It never broke down, it never failed me, it never caused any issue that I can ever remember. It just trucked along like the old, true-blue trooper that it was.

Actually, twenty years later, I have only good memories in that van. We drove it everywhere. We camped in it, moved stuff into and out of dorms in it, it brought me safely home at 3:00 in the morning after a double shift at Rhodes Bake’N'Serv more than once, and it even saved my life when I spun it into a snowbank by being too damn big for the snowplow driver barreling down on me to miss.

Despite the cliché, to the best of my knowledge, no teenager (or adult for that matter) ever got nookie in that van. While I drove that thing across the western half of the country every winter in a seemingly endless ski-bum odyssey, my passengers were all dudes. Even though six could (and on dozens of occasions did) sleep uncomfortably with three on the floor, one on the bench and two reclined in the captain’s-chairs; none of us were interested in the others “in that way” (again, to the best of my knowledge) and besides, privacy simply wasn’t what the wrap-around windows were built for. A “Love Machine” it was not.

The title of this post might not be the funniest thing anyone ever said about The Smurfmobile, but it was certainly high on the list. Other choice lines were:

• Me: “I’ve ridden four-wheelers with wider tires than this thing.”
  Friend: “Dude, we’ve ridden MOTORCYCLES with wider tires than this thing.”

 

• Friend 1: “It’s like a skier delivery van. When the doors open, skiers just pop right out…”
  Me: “Are you saying I drive a delivery van?”
  Friend 1: “Aww, dude, ‘delivery van’ would be a step up. When you’re not driving skiers, this ride’s the lamest thing on four wheels.”
  Friend 2: “Really? You’re limiting it to four-wheeled vehicles?”
  Friend 1: “Well, it’s not a Honda Goldwing.”
  Friend 2: “Touché”

 

• Friend: “It’s not the wobbly steering that frightens me, it’s the cliff without a guard-rail.”
  Minor over-correcting almost causes us to veer into an oncoming truck.
  Friend: “No, on second thought it’s the wobbly steering.”
  Me: “Really? I’d have thought the lack of seatbelts would be scarier.”
  Friend: “…when Matt called it The Smurfmobile I thought he was talking about the color. Now I realize it’s actually a rejected deathtrap built by Gargamel; designed to lure in innocent creatures and then hurtle them down to a horrific death on the rocks below.”
  Me: “The repeated pounding as they tumble down makes the meat tender. If you weren’t a vegetarian you might have sensed my trap.”
  Friend: “That’s…that’s diabolical. And…believable…terrifyingly believable.”
  Me: “Papa Smurf won’t be able to save you this time.”

 

• Assistant Dean: “You drive that in the snow? Nick, stop listening to The Cure…life is worth living! You’re too young to throw it all away!”

While cartoon characters and ski bums are integral to my memories of that van, that last line brings me to the other thing I associate most with the Smurfmobile: the music on the radio at the dawn of the 90′s. I was lucky enough to have the optional AM/FM Radio in the dash, with giant chrome buttons for the five “preset” channels (these could not be changed) and two chrome twist knobs for volume and tuning. To the best of my knowledge there was only one speaker, smack in the middle of the dash, pointed at the windshield and stereo wasn’t ever a consideration in the design. Acoustically, that truck was heinous. The engine sat under a tin cowling between the driver and the passenger, and when you were driving the radio only had one useful volume level, all the way up.

Since relying on the in-dash radio was less than “a good plan” most of the time, and left you at the mercy of either the only local FM pop radio station or endless AM talkshow drudgery, I kept my trusty Sony Duel-Cassette AM/FM portable stereo right on the console next to me, blasting away every moment I was on the road. It ran on four D-Cell batteries, and I would go through at least eight a week. There were times I spent as much at my local Sinclare station on batteries for the tape player as I did on the gas to get me where I was going.

In the early 90s, burning your own CD was still essentially impossible from a consumer electronics perspective, and “portable” players were still exotic and expensive. While about half the music I bought in 1992 was on CD, I was buying that format because I had ready access to players that I could use to record the songs I wanted onto cassette tapes. Because the good old cassette was the end-all be-all of portable personal music.

Making a mix tape was a combination of two things, what you wanted to hear and what music you and your friends had to record from. I had a pretty good collection of tapes and CDs by the start of my Junior year in 1992; and I lived in a dorm with 100 of my “closest” friends…so my music selection for a mix tape was pretty good. All of which was evidenced a couple of weeks ago when I found a mix tape that meant a whole lot to me that year. Well, technically, I found the case and the liner-card with the song listings on it. I’d like to imagine the tape itself is still in that lost and nearly forgotten Sony cassette player, wherever it may be.

As I stared at that Maxell 120CR case, and ran my mind over the songs written in terrible high-school boy handwriting, I was drawn back to an event that stands out for me; not because some grave or significant personal revelation that came out of it…but because it was just a really good night. Since I’ve written about some rather weighty subjects and events that occured that same fall, I thought I’d pull out my little map of Memory Lane and walk down a lighter moment in my past for once.

Gem State Academy was about a mile and a half down Montana Avenue from the Deer Flat Wildlife Refuge along the banks of Lake Lowell in Caldwell Idaho. About another two miles down Orchard and around the curve of the lake was a recreation area with fire pits and a sandy beach by the boat dock. For the purposes of this memory we will entertain the polite fiction that a group of high school Juniors (plus two teachers as chaperons) would have intentionally traveled an extra two miles and not just gone to the bottom of the hill and lit something on fire in the heart of a game-bird and waterfowl preserve. Different people remember this differently. Friends of mine swear we went to the rec area; I know for a fact that wouldn’t have been physically possible, which will become more apparent as this story goes along.

View GSA to Lake Lowell in a larger map

Some other fun notes as background to keep in mind: There were 48 kids in my junior class, and if you go with an average weight of 145 lbs (which seems about right and adjusts for the difference between 6’2″ and-built-like-a-Mac-Truck Steve K and 4’10″ Sherylin who only weighed 90 lbs if she was carrying a backpack full of books, and Really Big books at that) and do the math, you come up with a total group weight right around 7000 lbs. The load capacity of a 1977 Dodge B-300 MaxiVan is rated at 3500 lbs; and that was when the springs and shocks were in a hell of a lot better shape than they were after fifteen years of regular use.

Side 1

On the Wednesday night before our first homeleave, each class had a “class night” activity somewhere on or near the school campus. The Seniors went off campus to the home of a classmember nearby, the Sophomores were in the Cafeteria, and I have no idea where the Freshman class was because they were utterly beneath notice, but if I had to guess I’d assume they took over the gym. Like locusts.

Anyway, our class sponsors (read “captive chaperons”) decided that we were going to head down to Lake Lowell and have an evening singing and sitting around, getting reacquainted after a summer apart. It was also the first time we started thinking about things like class elections, leadership and what direction we were going to have “as a group” in the months to come. As I’d been the class president the year before, I had a sort of defacto leadership responsibility, in the minds of our class sponsors if not in the minds of my fellow students anyway.

“Nicky!” called out one of our sponsors, the living embodiment of Hawaiian jovial good nature masquerading as a high school PE Teacher. “Would you mind driving Kari and the coolers down in your Van?”

“Uh, yeah…sure.” At that moment the cassette in the boombox finished rewinding and as I walked around to the sliding side door the first strains of Nirvana‘s year-old but still ultrapopular Smells Like Teen Spirit began to spill out of the speakers.

From the moment I started loading coolers into the back of my van, classmates began to walk up and ask for a ride. While it sort of started as a bit of a joke, it wasn’t sixty seconds before the obvious goal was to fit the entirety of my class into the Smurfmobile. At the same time.

Five guys were on the back bench, with five gals sitting on their laps. Kids kept piling into the space between the bench and the captains chars in front. I climbed back into the drivers seat, and Keri was sitting with her sprained ankle in the seat next to me. Eventually Sherylin ended up sitting in the seat with Keri, and Tami ended up sitting in my lap. I fired up the engine and said a little prayer. You know the van is full when the sliding door won’t close properly so someone is holding the handle “close enough to look legal.”

“Nicky, take it slow eh?” Coach said to me through the open window and a curtain of Tami’s hair.

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I can get going very fast.”

“…It IS downhill…be careful.”

For a coach, you’d have thought he could have come up with a better pep talk.

Right as the van eased into motion, the final strains of guitar and feedback faded out and the four harmonizing voices of Queen began the acappella opening of Bohemian Rhapsody. Instantly a dozen teenage boys began to shout “Wayne’s World” and “Party On” and “Excellent” and we pulled out of the parking lot and onto Montana Ave.

What happened next is exactly what you would expect with nearly fifty kids stuffed into a blue van slowly rolling down the road with a classic rock anthem playing on the boombox. We began to sing it word for word. Not well, not even getting the words right, but with enthusiasm. Deafening enthusiasm.

Even compared to your average ground sloth I was going very slowly. Crossing Karcher Road was a bit harrowing, but as soon as we got to the other side of the highway it was (literally) all down hill from there. We crept down the road, going no faster than about fifteen miles an hour. I noticed that every rock, bump and crack in the road seemed somehow magnified; and if the steering had felt loose before, it was barely a means of suggesting a direction now.

Right as we were rolling past the rock quarry the electric guitars began to crescendo and then the pseudo-opera bridge had everyone singing about Scaramouch and the fandango and Beelzebub’s son and “poor me” repeated three times…and then something terrifying happened. Forty-plus teenagers repeated a classic scene from a classic 90′s comedy and broke into faux-head-banging that caused the already questionable steering to completely flee from any semblance of my control.

The springs and shocks were completely bottomed out, the steering was barely able to marshal the bulging tires, and forty kids suddenly creating unpredictable side-to-side motions left us swerving across the road like a sailboat in rough seas. I went for the brakes, with Keri screaming, Tami giggling, and the other forty-five kids either singing, laughing, or praying for their lives depending on how closely they were paying attention to the motion of the van or the scene outside the windows. We slowed to about half our speed, but the downhill momentum of twice the maximum load weight was more than the spring-and-drum breaks could completely overcome.

It was one of the most terrifying minute and forty-five seconds of my life. It was also one of the most exhilarating. I will admit now that the newspaper headline “Entire High School Junior Class Dies In Senseless Van Accident” did cross my field of vision.

The van finally slowed and came back under my control when we got to the bottom of the hill, nearly fifty kids were singing the final refrain of “nothing really matters…to me…” and then one lone voice sang out “any way the wind blows…” and we all broke into the giggles.

After that, Van Halen began the piano and power chord intro to Right Now and several classmates were very pleased with the song selection. All the songs from that album had to be recorded off campus, as the album title “F.or U.nlawful C.arnal K.nowledge” with large block letter abbreviation on the cover was banned from school grounds.

Before the first verse was over we’d gotten to the refuge area at the bottom of Montana Avenue. I pulled off the road and onto the beach, and the tires immediately sunk down to the hubcaps in the soft sand. The door slid open and kids seemed to spend longer figuring out how to unpack themselves than they had spent trying to wedge themselves in in the first place.

Lake Lowell isn’t exactly the most beautiful spot in all of Idaho, but for proximity, it can be a pretty nice place to spend an evening.

After Van Halen we had a couple of songs that were standards, starting with the Red Hot Chili Peppers belting out Give It Away.

And then House of Pain performing what I have to admit was my least favorite song on the tape…almost entirely due to the heinous high pitched screech that punctuates Jump Around.

The next song was something I recorded off of a friend’s tape. Guns N’ Roses two album “Use Your Illusion” set was one of the most memorable things that happened in 1991. Another was “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” in theaters. The combination of those two things had pretty much shaped my last summer, and I think every male between the ages of 13 and 30 at the time knew every word of You Could Be Mine, even though the words basically made no sense. The drum and guitar intro remains absolutely ingrained into my brain, twenty years later.

After that came a song that everyone, and I’m pretty sure I mean EVERYONE in my class knew by heart. It was still a year before Aerosmith would come out with Get a Grip, the follow up to their utterly monstrous hit Pump, and the songs from that album were still playing strong on the radio three years after it was released. I swear every song on that album was gold, but it all started with Love In An Elevator. Essentially it was the entire story of Michael J Fox’s movie “Secret of my Success” in microcosm; it was also pretty much the air guitar and hair-rock anthem for the end of the 80′s.

The next song was special to me, as it was the first song I danced to with a girl at a party. U2 released “Achtung Baby” in 1991, with a desire to prove they could still rock like they did on “Joshua Tree” and “Rattle and Hum.” I’d say that Mysterious Ways proved that pretty nicely.

The next song was duped off of a doormmates’s tape, and got a pretty good number of cheers from the kids milling around the van. The Spin Doctors were still new to the music scene, and “Pocket Full of Kryptonite” was still just starting it’s climb up the charts when I copied Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong onto the mix tape.

The next song definitely came off of one of my favorite tapes…but I can’t even begin to explain why it was on this mix tape. I was a pretty big Information Society fan, and the album “Think” was my favorite (of the two that were out at the time) with a ton of great songs. The song on this mix wasn’t even in my top favorite songs on the album…so why it got included I have no idea. Years later though, I’ll say that A Knife and A Fork is a great dance tune, but still an odd choice for what had so far been a pretty rock-centric mix.

I wasn’t a huge Peter Gabriel fan before his album “US” came out. I knew he’d been the lead singer in Genesis before Phil Collins (and before I’d been born, but whatever), and his song “Sledgehammer” was classic; but it was Steam that really caught my attention. And a lot of people’s attention. I think I bought “US” at the same time I bought the blank tape this mix was on, and it probably had a lot to do with me putting together a new mix tape.

The next song was actually copied right off the radio. If Tom Cochrane‘s album was out, I didn’t know about it, but Life is a Highway was a great piece of fluffy driving music, which was perfect for a mix tape primarily listened to while commuting back and fourth to school.

The last song on the first side spooled out exactly as the sun was setting. I didn’t have the Mr. Big album, but I’d say half my dorm had the cassette single for To Be With You, so finding one to copy wasn’t eaxactly a challenge.

With a fire starting to build, we sat around near the open door to the van, singing along to the chorus and watching the sun set over the lake.

Side 2

The tape flipped over, and the second half was much more “my” music and less “popular” music. Don’t get me wrong, they were for the most part songs that charted (with a couple of glaring exceptions) or were otherwise notable…but some of them were hardly pop music by the popular definition.

The first song on the second side came from a disk I remember buying from the import section of Hastings for the absolutely exorbitant sum of $28. I had to use more than half of a gift card from my birthday to get it, based entirely on the one time I heard the first single play on the radio. The euro dance act Enigma had jumped out of obscurity with the 1990 release of “MCMXC A.D.” in France, and the first single, Sadeness Part I, started to chart in the US in early 1992. I remember how cool Gregorian Chant was for about a year after that album hit the air. I still like Gregorian Chant.

The next song was the first of two on this side from the “Boomerang” soundtrack, though I had bought the album it came from sometime in my Sophomore year (and about listened to it TO DEATH). While P.M. Dawn was supposedly a rap duo, they were about as rap as MC Hammer, which is to say, not much by modern standards. I liked a lot of their songs, but I’d Die Without You was my standout favorite.

When this song came on, I distinctly remember Keri leaning back and looking up at the stars starting to twinkle into the night sky.

“..I tend to dream you when I’m not sleeping…” she sang along with the music. She looked over at me, sitting in the open doorway of the van she had thought she was going to die in. “I love everything about that line.”

“Me too.” I said, listening to the music stream from the tinny little speakers. “If I have to take apart…all that I am…is there anything that I would no do…”

The next one was another song from the “Use Your Illusion” albums, this one from the second one, and it is probably Guns N’ Roses most memorable song from the 90s. Also, one of the longest. While I would like to say that November Rain was somehow a deep and significant song for me, I have to admit it wasn’t. I think the video is more memorable overall. In the words of Regina Spektor, “the solo’s pretty long, but it has a nice refrain.”

To my knowledge, the next song didn’t chart anywhere, ever. I will also say that in my circle of friends, it got a TON of play. Everything from “Pretty Hate Machine” got a ton of play, but half-way through Nine Inch Nails debut album came the haunting Something I Can Never Have, which basically created emo angst-techno out of nothing but a Moog syth and really bad day.

I remember everyone near the van quieted down and listened to the song, it was such an arresting piece of work. On one hand, I did take some flack from the sponsor for the f-bomb in the last verse; but on the other hand, I’d say that about a dozen people borrowed that CD over the next couple of months to copy that song to their own mix tapes.

The next track really segued in well, as the start of Areosmith‘s Janie’s Got A Gun is in basically the same key with the same vocal quality between Trent Reznor and Steven Tyler. And it’s also kinda sad and creepy…but in a much more “rock” kind of way.

And then the closer of the trilogy of sad songs on the tape. I was never a huge Metalica fan, and while the “Black Album” was a truly great piece of work, it wasn’t something I ever bought in high school. I just copied the three songs I liked onto various tapes and called it good. Of all the song’s Lars and Company have ever cranked out, I do think that Nothing Else Matters has touched me the most.

The next song is another one I can’t really explain. While I can say that I don’t know of a single mix tape I ever made that didn’t have at least one song by Sting or The Police on it…why I chose THIS song is completely beyond me. I might have been going for another sort of desolate, introspective song to keep with the theme; but honestly this is like my fifth favorite song from the “Soul Cages” album, and I have no idea why Mad About You made the mix.

I know exactly why the next song made the tape, as it was one of my favorite things ever recorded and I would listen to it so much that I could time the eighteen seconds it took to rewind to the beginning by counting one-mississippi, two-mississippi, etc. Don Henley wasn’t really a rock star, but man did I love “Dirty Laundry,” and “All She Wants To Do Is Dance,” and “Boys of Summer,” and “Sunset Grill”…so when his new album came out in ’89 I was almost as stoked as my dad was when he bought it, the first CD he ever bought for his brand new CD player that Christmas. I loved that whole album, but for my entire teen years The End of the Innocence was one of my personal anthems. I knew it word for word, and it crept into my subconscious at strange times.

As the song was ending we started gathering up our things and getting ready to head back up to campus. I stopped the tape and we started rocking the van back and fourth and using branches to give the wheels some traction. After about half an hour of pushing, swearing, pushing, digging, and more swearing, we finally got her free of the sand and rolled back onto the relative safety of Montana Avenue. There was no way I could carry everyone back up the hill, so everyone but Keri and a couple of other girls started walking in front of me in the glare of my headlights. In a moment of complete perfection, the other song from the Boomerang soundtrack (this one actually recorded from the soundtrack) started playing. I’ve never been a huge Boys 2 Men fan, but I will say that The End of the Road sure takes me back. It WAS the song of the fall of 1992.

We sang, as a group, loudly. All the way back up the hill.

As we got back to the school parking lot the last strains of acappella harmonizing perfection died away into the night, creating a perfect bookend to the sounds of that night.

As I helped my last passenger climb down out of the van, Miss V heard the opening bars of Tori Amos tinkling on the piano at the start of Silent All These Years. The look in her eyes as they met mine was a combination of surprise and bittersweet memories blending together. Shared history from earlier that year washed up around us like a warm wave on that chilly fall night.

“I haven’t heard this in months.” she said, still holding my hand and staring up into my eyes.

“It’s still one of my favorites.” I said.

“Sounds too much like a bad day. Like something I didn’t say to someone that I should have.”

“I’m sure they knew what you meant. What didn’t get said. What did.”

She gave me one more bittersweet smile before withdrawing her hand from mine and turning to walk away, back towards the girls dorm on the other side of campus.

I carried the boombox, still playing, with me back to the guy’s dorm. Though I wasn’t supposed to play music that could be heard outside my dorm room on campus, the soft sounds of the last two songs on the tape seemed pretty safe as I walked back across the lawn to the side entrance by the stairs. Enya was someone that my parents had been listening to for a while, since at least their last trip to the UK two years prior. Her new album, “Shepard Moons,” had the title track from the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman movie “Book of Days,” but that was hardly my favorite song on the album. I was much more partial to Caribbean Blue, and that was what was gently playing as I walked into my room and closed the door behind me.

The last song on the tape was really just a short time fill that matched well with the song by Enya, probably because she was the cousin of half the people in the band Clannad. Their song Theme From Harry’s Game had been featured that summer in the Harrison Ford movie “Patriot Games.” I’d actually had it on tape for a several years by then, another artifact brought back by my parents from England, and the renewed interest in it just proved to me what a great song it was.

I listened as the last few bars finished out and then the tape went into that unique white noise that only cassettes that had reached the unrecorded end could make.

I thought about that night, about laughter and music, memories and sunsets, bonfires and starlight. At the time I had no capacity for capturing the important moments of my life as they passed by, but I knew that these had been some truly special moments. Not profound, not significant beyond a warm feeling and the smile on my face, but special none the less.

As those thoughts were running through my mind, the first notes of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” began again. I leaned over and stopped the tape, one time through was enough for one night. We had shortened classes the next morning, and then home for five days of rest. Of course, I had shifts at Bake N’ Serve and the radio station that weekend, and my friend Michelle was having a birthday party on Friday night. A friend of hers was coming up from California, and she wanted me to meet her. It wasn’t going to be much of a vacation for me, but I hoped that something good might happen.

Forty-Eight hours later my whole life would change; but the memory of that Wednesday night will always be good music, good times, good friends, and the anticipation of life laid out before us. The 90s were just getting started, we were half-way done with high school, and the whole world seemed like it was right there in front of us, ripe for the taking.

[Word Count: 5100]

I will say that organizational awards, like any peer award, carry a certain amount of politics. I will also say that there were others in attendance who deserved the award just as much as I did. I will ALSO say that it felt DAMN nice to receive. Oh, and I had absolutely NO idea I was getting it, so that made it a really nice surprise.

Anyway, from now on, when I say “sorry, I was busy with work” I’ll at least have something to look at and know that the people who pay my salary and write my performance reviews recognize my commitment and contributions. And really, that feels by far the best of all.

[Word Count: 235]

Many people have gone through far worse, and I'm certainly not trying to claim some kind of prize for a hard knock life, because I've had it INCREDIBLY easy...but to my surprise, this made a couple of people cry; and I'd never seen one of them cry before...so take that as a warning of sorts...or something. If you choose to skip this, please know I won't take it personally. It's long, it's the worst moments of my life, and the new material at the end isn't there to even remotely "make it better," even with eleven years of distance from the events.]

During job interviews and on internet quiz memes there’s a question that comes up more often than I think most people really want to hear the answer.  I’ve avoided it many times before, but tonight I guess I’m finally ready to talk about it at large…to try and explain how, exactly, a reasonably normal white-child-of-privilege ends up in his early thirties, struggling emotionally just to climb out of bed every morning.

I’ve probably been asked “What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever done?” about two dozen times that I can think of since July 24th 1999. I think I might have answered it honestly twice.

So, what follows is the most full and complete answer to that question I can compose with almost a decade of distance since the events began to transpire.

—

On Thanksgiving weekend, 1998 the air was still warm in the evenings even though the mornings were starting to take on a crisp bite that warned of the winter that was just days away.  My wife and I were well past the three year anniversary mark and life had settled into a pretty comfortable schedule:  same jobs for more than a year, the same cute townhouse, same daily routines.

Then, all those routines, all that sameness, died to the sound of pee cascading off of an EPT test.

Oddly enough, the test was negative.  But the discussions that it sparked led to the end of birth control pills, starting to watch our diets a bit closer, and planning for a future for three instead of two.

One month later, another stream of pee, and the test was positive.

We wanted to keep the conception a secret at first, after all, these things can go badly early on and there was no reason to get our families all worked up if it didn’t “stick.”  Which was the plan we stuck with for almost an hour…if, by “almost” you mean “less than twenty minutes.”

I will remember the sound of that squealing, screaming, hyper-jump-up-and-down enthusiasm that my wife and my mother-in-law shared across hundreds of miles for the rest of my life.  If pure joy and excitement has a sound all its own, that was it.

We had excellent heath insurance, plenty of ob-gyn options in town, several great hospitals in the area and a nice local hospital just a few miles away.  My wife took all her pre-natal vitamins, every necessary precaution  at work and went for her regular appointments with excitement.  I didn’t miss a single office visit either.  I was an ENGAGED father-to-be.  We were excited.

And things were going great.  The heartbeat was perfect (and awesome to hear), the weight gain was happening at a very positive rate, and the utrasound went well.  We saw our son reclining in all his glory safe and sound inside his mother.  In fact, except for baby being uncooperative for an image showing his heart development, everything in the ultrasound images was perfectly normal.

Days turned into weeks, weeks slowly expanded out into months and after what felt like the longest winter and the shortest spring in the history of the world, summer and Lamaze classes were finally both upon us.  Almost eight months of waiting had brought us to the point where the end was finally in sight.  We decided to take the day off before our first class, go to her regular monthly checkup and then go up to Portland and do some shopping for mommy and baby.

The doctor’s appointment went well.  We listened to the heartbeat again, weight was good, everything was good…except my wife’s blood pressure was a bit elevated.  Which might not seem all that important for most people, but for her that was shockingly unusual.

After a long discussion, the ob-gyn on duty decided to send my wife over to the local hospital for a non-stress test.  Basically, it’s just heart rate and blood pressure testing over time while sitting in a chair.  We got to the hospital at about noon, and the test was started before 12:30…hey, it’s a small local hospital.

At 3:00 in the afternoon we realized we weren’t going to go shopping.  We also realized we hadn’t seen anyone in more than an hour, so I went off to find a nurse who could tell us how much longer this was going to take.  We had class that night after all.

By 6:00 we realized that we weren’t going to make it to class either.  At that point we decided I should go grab some dinner for us and potty the dogs at home.  When I got back, they had made it clear that she wasn’t going home that night, instead she had an ultrasound scheduled for 5:00am the next morning.  So, after calling her mom to let her know what was going on, we ate our sandwiches and I slept in the semi-reclining chair next to her bed.

When the 5:00am ultrasound came around, it became clear that everything was NOT well.  What had, up to that point, been a “mostly routine” observation process turned into an ambulance ride 55 miles north to the largest neo-natal ICU hospital in the area.  Through morning rush hour traffic.

I had to pick up her mom from our home (her sister had driven her up EARLY that morning) and we tried to follow behind.  We ended up getting there a good two hours behind the ambulance; and by the time we got to the hospital I was nearly unhinged from the process of trying to get through some of the worst traffic congestion and road construction delays in Portland area history.

Then next two weeks were like one moment of crisis stretched out over thirteen days.  Both my wife and our baby were in serious, but not immanent danger.  My wife had “significantly dangerous” preeclampsia, and there were some significant issues complicating the baby’s health as well.  The first concern was that even after a four hour attempt, no ultrasound could show a fully formed heart structure.

The doctor’s wanted to prolong the pregnancy as long as was safely possible and so we settled in to wait.  My Mother-In-Law slept on the sleeping bench, and for twelve nights, I slept on a thin hospital blanket on the tile hospital room floor.

The only time I left the room was either to go off and purchase some supplies to entertain us and keep our spirits up, or to drive down to the Olive Garden a few miles away to bring back something special for my family to eat together.

If there’s one thing my Mother-In-Law mentions any time these events are talked about, it’s that I was a rock.  My job, my focus, my only purpose in life, was to be there for my wife.  Be supportive.  Be calm.  Be there.

Then, after thirteen long days of waiting and hoping to wait longer, on a warm Sunday night, my wife’s health began to decline and the baby’s health began to decline faster. A little after midnight, the doctors decided they couldn’t wait any longer and an emergency c-section was scheduled for 5:00 am “or sooner if we need to.”

I’ll never forget getting ready for that.  The uncomfortableness of “the bunny suit” and the hair net, the smell of the mask mixing with my own dry breath, and the way the little booties on my shoes made walking to the surgery suite feel like ice skating in summer.

When I walked into the room, my wife was strapped down to the table with a brave smile on her face covering a look in her eyes like a trapped animal tied down to be a sacrifice. I went to stand next to her and I put her hand in mine.  I watched the entire surgery over the screen, describing anything she wanted to know.

I don’t think it took three minutes from the first incision until our son was born.  They held him up over the screen for a moment so mommy could see him, and then immediately whisked him away to the NICU next door to the surgery suite.

My wife looked at me, squeezed my hand and told me to go next door and see what was happening. I looked into her eyes, filled with tears, and bent down and gave her a kiss.  As our lips parted her tears began to run down her face.

When I went through the doorway my son had disappeared through, I could only see one corner of his exam table between the ten or twelve doctors and nurses clustered around him, working with a calm intensity that still bordered on frantically.

I stood there and listened for any clue as to what was wrong.  Any words that might sound like “getting better” or “improving” or even “stable”.  I waited a long time.  They never said anything like that.

After an hour, the lead doctor stepped away from the table and removed his mask. He introduced himself to me as the head of the Neo-Natal department and explained that my son was very sick.  They needed to run many tests and there wouldn’t be any answers soon.

Then they bundled up my son and placed him on an incubator table, attached him to hoses and pumps and wires and every manner of device and gizmo, and asked me if I wanted to see him again.

He was so tiny.  His little fingers could barely grip my pinky.  There were tubes connected to his nose, and IVs in one of his arms and one of his legs.  He was connected to a monitor that showed his heart-rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation, and his breathing rate.

I didn’t need a medical degree to see that things were very wrong.

I went out to the recovery room and held my wife.  She asked for details and I told her as much as I had grasped from the doctor.  I repeated what he said word-for-word at least a half dozen times over the rest of the day as family and friends came up to speed on the story.

July 13, 1999.  It was hot in Portland.  Hot by even Phoenix standards.  Windows were uncomfortably warm to the touch, and stepping out of the climate controlled lobby of the hospital and into the brutal heat of the day was almost physically crushing.  But I needed to find something for my wife.  Something that said “good job, I’m proud of you.”  Something that said “I’m here, and we’ll get through this.”

I found balloons and a card with a cartoon mommy giraffe with her legs all tangled up, but her neck still upright, and the inside read “way to keep your head up!”  It wasn’t perfect, but there’s a limited selection at Fred Meyer’s when you’re in a hurry and it’s more than a hundred degrees outside.

It was a long recovery for my wife.  She couldn’t even keep Jello down for a couple of days.  And what was worse was that she could only stand short trips up to the NICU to see our son before she needed to return to her room to rest.

As the week wore on things started to become clearer on what exactly was wrong with our son.  His heart had both ventral and septal defects, his kidneys weren’t functioning and his lung development was significantly delayed.  By the end of the third day of his life, he was no longer breathing on his own.  Instead, a machine next to his bed quietly and methodically wheezed and clacked air into his body and expelled out his tiny, nearly unused breaths.

By the fourth day, mommy was able to spend much longer holding her son.  And all the wires and tubes and needles that went with him.  We changed his clothes, and adjusted his hat, and read Dr. Seuss books to him as he slept.  Oh, The Places You’ll Go…

And then, after a week, his genetic results finally came back, and all the answers were given to us.  He had Complete-Trisomy 9.  An extra ninth chromosome in his cells.

If Down Syndrom is a Trisomy of the 21st Chromosome (and by extension, of the 21st SHORTEST chromosome), and causes that many complications…well, one can begin to understand why having a Trisomy of the 9th chromosome would be truly catastrophic.

As far as the medical staff knew, he was the first Complete-Trisomy 9 baby to survive to childbirth since at least the 1970′s.  When genetic testing began.  Placing the odds of having a child with that specific genetic defect at something approaching  one in ten or twelve billion.  With a B.

Worse, it meant that he would never be a candidate for the heart or kidney transplants he would need to live a somewhat normal life.  Of course, he was also unlikely to be able to ever lead a normal life of any kind.  Even a limited one.

It was late afternoon, and even though things were being explained, and we were finally getting answers…nothing was feeling any clearer.  He was still laying there, filled with tubes and medicines and needing a machine to breathe for him.

We had waited for and hoped for and counted on getting “The Answers” and yet…yet nothing.  No real answers.  No solutions.  No one was making it better!

We had a choice.  We could keep doing this, keep waiting, and running tests, and praying for a miracle to make it better…

Or we could turn off the IVs, and unplug the tubes, and turn off the machines, and we could hold our child…just our child…for a few moments in a private room.

I remember going into the private room that was just off the NICU…I remember calling my parents…I remember howling like a wounded animal as I cried while I talked it over with my dad.  I remember trying to make someone tell me what to do.  I wanted someone else to make it better…that’s what parents do!

A Twenty-five-year-old child shouldn’t have to decide life-or-death for their own seven-day-old son…it’s unimaginable.  I never dreamed even in my worst nightmares that I would be sitting with my knees pulled up to my chest, crying on the phone as I tried to explain to my parents that we were going to turn off the respirator keeping their only grandchild alive.

I remember walking down to the chapel at the end of the second floor hallway and prostrating myself before the alter.  I remember pleading with God to make my son healthy, to take my life instead.  I remember screaming at the alter at the top of my lungs.  I remember that all that met my heart’s purest outcry, was silence.

I don’t remember walking back to the NICU.

I do remember holding my wife close as we told the neo-nateologist our decision to hold our son and not keep him hooked to machines any longer.  I remember watching them administer the morphine to keep him comfortable with the smallest needle I have ever seen.  I remember my wife singing softly to our son.  I remember holding him for a moment without tubes, or wires, or beeping machines, or whirring respirators.  I remember the small sigh he let out as he died in my arms.

I held it together.  I cried…I wept from the bottom of my soul…but I held reality together.  I put my arms around my wife and we walked to the elevator, out through the lobby and into the evening sunshine.  But it was ultimately the heat.  It slammed into me like a mallet against a gong.

Before I could walk across the parking lot and get into the car, I could feel reality flex and warp like a plate glass window in a hurricane.  And I felt it shatter.  Little shards of reality blew out away from me…everything I’d ever known, or wanted, or felt, or believed…raining down around me like starfall as we walked back to the little green civic parked in the parking garage.  I couldn’t hear anything.  I couldn’t process anything.  All my senses were going numb as the sun was setting.

As a defense mechanism my body reverted to automatic pilot.  I’d driven this route so many times it was second nature…no thought, no analysis, no words.  Just grief.  Like an overwhelming haze that steals time, grief filled every molecule of my existence.  Choking out air, choking out thought, choking out time itself.

But even in grief, things had to get done.  My wife was far from healthy, and she needed rest, but the next day we found ourselves planning a funeral.  For a baby.  We picked out a casket, and a cemetery plot, and program cards, and called our pastor and invited him to speak.

Sitting in the funeral home, I composed a poem to go on the program:

A moment in our arms,
Forever in our hearts.
We’ll see you again,
In the arms of an Angel.

I think at the time I even still believed it.

The day of the funeral was probably the most beautiful Saturday that year.  Perfect temperatures, just a hint of breeze, not a cloud in the sky.  I was surprised at the number of people that showed up for a funeral for a baby that all but five of them had never seen.  More than twenty people from my and my wife’s offices were there, and probably fifty people from my extended family, some from hundreds of miles away, on what was a normal weekend for the rest of the world.  Just another Saturday in July.  I really couldn’t balance the two concepts together in my head.

I remember all the flowers were beautiful, and we donated them all to the church for that Saturday’s service.  I remember staring for the entire service at the little white coffin.  Hardly more than two shoeboxes laid end-to-end.  We laid yellow roses on it, and they lowered it into the ground after we drove away.  Eventually they covered it with a grave marker made of granite, polished mirror smooth, that read:

Kristopher Karl Rogers
“Peanut”
July 13, 1999 – July 20, 1999

Our neighbors had gathered together to provide food, and family and friends stayed with us for a long time to talk and try to make life a little bit closer to normal.  And for that I will always be thankful.

The worst was when everyone went home.  In a quiet house, my wife and I couldn’t make our separate grief align enough to grieve together.  I was afraid to truly grab the pieces of reality that I could still see scattered in front of me.  They were sharp, and it would hurt to pick them up…if I could just make it through without touching them…if we could just go on with life and leave them alone…maybe they’d get better on their own.

After that day, if anyone asked me, “What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever done?” I’d duck the question.  No one wants to hear an answer like “chose to let my son die in peace rather than leave him hooked to life support machines waiting for a miracle,” or “planned a funeral for my seven day old son without jumping off a bridge.”

Also near the top of the list is “not punching out the self-righteous Christians who tell us that we should have prayed harder and trusted God more, rather than kill our son.”  I’ve been told that by well meaning people who never faced anything like the scenario they are so quick to talk about.  Telling me that my son would have gotten better, would have lived, if I’d prayed more, trusted more, wanted it more…that’s just a way to say that God didn’t love me enough…that he didn’t love my son enough to save him…that I must have done something wrong to deserve it.

People who believe in a God like that frighten me.

I wish that was the end of the story.  I wish that was the most difficult thing in my life.  But it’s not even close.

The advice that everyone gave us was that once we were given the ok, we should try again.  That the joy of a new life would make the pain of losing the last one more bearable.

And so, as soon as we were allowed, we tried again.  And it took a year.  In some ways it was the longest, most stressful year of my life.  I changed jobs, we moved to a new home in a new neighborhood, and it was proving FAR more difficult to conceive than we had expected.

Finally, FINALLY, we were successful again.  Almost two years after that first EPT test, we had another peed-on-stick with good news.  This time we were in the “high risk” category and we had TOP NOTCH care from the first day.  We drove 55 miles one way every two weeks to see her doctor from the start.  We had 8 different ultrasounds, including one of the first 3-D ultrasounds given at OHSU.

My wife was sick pretty much from the first day of pregnancy.  Nausea, cramps, sore muscles, everything.  The exact opposite of the last pregnancy.  And the baby kicked like she was practicing for the hacky-sack world championships ALL DAY LONG.

But her blood pressure stayed good, and on June 13, 2001 our daughter was born.  It was a great surgery, and other than getting stuck in traffic (in the same place as two years earlier) everything went like clockwork.

Slowly I was picking up the pieces of reality again.  They cut, and sometimes I’d bleed, and sometimes I’d cut my wife…but I was holding them again.  I was able to grasp them and not let go.

In my world, my daughter was important…but so was my wife.  So was my job.  So was making life go on.  For my wife, nothing was more important.  With our daughter she saw redemption for failing with our son.  Nothing could EVER be more important.

Somewhere between our different grief and the difference in our daughter’s importance in our hearts…things began to change in our marriage.  There’s a lot to that story that can’t be covered here…but five years later I knew I was going to lose my daughter.  Not the way I’d lost my son…but I would ultimately lose her all the same.

My wife wanted a divorce, and I knew from the first moment she said it, that someday my daughter would leave my daily life.  Someday I would become as distant in her world as my wife’s father had been in her’s.

I’d have given anything, and everything, to keep our family together.  I didn’t want to lose even one day with my daughter…but there was nothing I could have ever done to change her mind…by the time she told me it was long past done for her.

We’ve done our best over the last couple of years to keep our daughter equally between us…but my ex-wife has found love again with a man in Oklahoma.

I could fight her for our daughter…try to keep her here, or something…but I can’t do that to her.  In my world she is my beloved daughter.  In her world, she is everything, air and water, light and dark…everything.  My ex simply couldn’t live without her.  And I can’t be the one to hold her here, hold her back from finding love.  True love is wanting what’s best for the ones we love, even when it hurts more than anything.

I believe that I’ll be able to keep my relationship with my daughter strong enough that she’ll always know me…always know that I love her…always be able to call on me when she needs me…

But in just over a month she boards a plane and flies away.  She will always come back and visit, but she’ll never “live” with me again.

And every day between now and then I have to hold on to the pieces of reality still in my hand…no matter how much they cut me, no matter how much of my own blood slicks their surface, I have to hold on.

Every morning when I wake up I can feel the pain as reality cuts me a little deeper, as it severs one more strand of my soul.  And I have to open my eyes and carry on.  But if anyone asked me “what’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done?”  Well, I’d have to admit it’s imagining a moment when my daughter’s flight has taxied down the runway and lifted slowly into the sky…away from reality as best I can grab a hold of it.

When I talk about my dragons, my demons and the things that evilly stalk my dreams in the night…the one that frightens me the most is that someone will see exactly what I am:  Just a boy in a man’s body clutching the shards of his reality like a bouquet of splintered glass that’s dripping with the last drops of blood from his shredded grip.

What woman would accept such a gift?  When I admit that I’m afraid I’m “too damaged” to find true love, I mean that even if I found it, I’m afraid I’m so cut up I couldn’t grab it and hold on.

—

As a bit of a postlude, I thought I would mention that I recognize that there are many MANY people who’s troubles in life FAR exceed my own.  Sexual abuse, personal violence, witnessing murder, there are SO many things that exceed anything that I’ve ever had to go through.  And I have some tiny clue as to how they get through the day, they just grab hold, squeeze hard and do it.

When I was younger, a writing teacher told me that before I could write, I needed to go out and live life.  I couldn’t truly write about it until I’d lived it first.  I didn’t really believe her at the time.  Now, I know how true that lesson is, and I’d give back that lesson if I could.

In the words of the great Baz Luhrmann, it’s not things that you think are important in life that will get you, “It’s the things that blind-side you at 4:00 pm on some idle Tuesday.”

If I could ever give one piece of advice, it’s to cherish your idle Tuesdays, but never trust them.  Live your life like the next Tuesday will change everything you hold dear.

—

Ten years distant from those sweltering days in July, the weather in Salem was mild and the skies were clear. Walking down from the parked truck I looked at the row after row of headstones set into the ground; some so familiar they had become like old friends, some were new and the freshness of the granite was as heartbreaking as the smell of newly turned earth. The baby section of a cemetery is the one place where new neighbors are always a tragedy.

View down into "babyland"

I spent a few moment cleaning grass cuttings and moss from the face of his headstone. I took out the built-in flower vase and walked with my fresh bundle of flowers over to the spigot next to the large tree at the southern tip of the place reserved for infants and children. I used the pocket knife from my truck to cut back the stems of the flowers and filled the metal vase with water. They were cheerful, and I needed the simple sense of happiness to focus on.

Kristophers Headstone

I looked around at the new headstones that had showed up in the last few months, and at the new plots with only the simple plastic marker to indicate occupancy without even minimal details. Toy cars caked with mud, stuffed animals bleached by the sun and grown ragged from the weather, mylar balloons deflated and lying in wrinkled silver heaps; the detritus of love and loss piled up and slowly shifting from headstone to headstone as the grass is mowed and the caretakers do their best to return the bleak trinkets of love to their rightful owners after moving everything out of the path of the machines that keep the grounds trimmed and tidy.

This is the place where my personal faith has struggled and fought and floundered and failed me. This is the clean grass and these are the soft breezes that have witnessed me lose my religion, fail in my discipleship, and forsake my upbringing. In this place it is so difficult to find peace, even with peace all around you. Rage feels out of place, anger feels dirty in my mouth, frustration becomes the weight that I’m ashamed to carry…but I can’t find forgiveness ten years later. It transcends grief and becomes personal failure. This is the place where a little white coffin rests. In this place my marriage began to crumble. In this place I felt the tangible absence of the peace that passes understanding.

I have discussed this event less than a dozen times in the intervening decade. I am a man of many words, yet I have none for this. No reassurance for others that “time heals all things” or that “it gets better” because it isn’t better; I’ve simply become better at forgetting it. Better at not remembering.

Today my daughter is nine-years-old. She is beautiful, and full of life, and everything that a father could want in a daughter. I could not be more proud of who she is and the young woman she’s becoming. And I miss her more than I can describe. I miss the funny cartoon voices we would use to create stories about baboons and chipmunks and the silliest things we could think of. I miss drawing with her, and hearing her stories, and watching her become the storyteller that her grandmother and her father were before her.

So I cherish the moments that I have with her, and every time I hear her voice, and every time I see her on the webcam. I make sure that even though I’m not physically in her life every day, that every day she knows I’m proud of her and that I love her and that I think she’s beautiful. She will never have to wonder if her father loved her. Never feel like she failed to earn my approval. I love who she is, and she will always know that, even from thousands of miles away.

And she looks good in hats.

A cool cat in a cool hat

[Word Count: 5267]

So…two things:

1. Tonight starts the new season of funnies on TV, and I’m watching How I Met Your Mother (my third favorite show on network television) plus the good stuff that comes after it while I wait for Castle (my second favorite show on network television).  I kinda miss having Big Bang Theory (my favorite show on network television) on Mondays as well, but thanks to the power of DVR, it’s not like it actually matters most of the time anyway.
     
2. Less fun, I’ve had some issues recently with stuff being hijacked off of deadcharming.com which escalated over this last weekend.  In order to prevent those posts from appearing abandoned, I’ve decided to repost the choice pieces here and eventually mothball that old site altogether.Which also happens to let me TOTALLY cheat out tonight and repost something, thereby fulfilling my wordcount requirement and still letting me watch primetime.  Yay for cheesing the rules!

To be fair, I’ve significantly re-edited this post, as well as composed a new afterward that explains how things stand today compared to how things stood when I first wrote it.

I was in the same classroom with Miss V from the second grade until we graduated together from academy. Eleven years. She basically encapsulates my childhood and the journey to whatever was supposed to be beyond.

Assuming 40 weeks in a school year, at least eight hours a day, and add in time for Pathfinders camp-outs, church events, and the various non-school things we did together; I’d guesstimate that we spent about 20,000 hours together over the course of our lives. Of that, I hated her for roughly 10 hours; and I was completely in love with her for every minute of the remaining 19,990.

Number of times we talked on the phone: I’d guess over 100

Number of times we rode the ski-lift together: more than I can count

Number of times we “held hands” while ice skating: 8 (I only know this because I recently found one of my childhood journals)

Number of times we “officially” dated: 0

Number of times we kissed: 0

Number of times I saw her undressed: 2 
number of times she knew I saw her undressed: 0 (maybe 1, I’m not completely clear on all the details of the second time. I might have been “supposed” to see her that time, we were about thirteen…I’ll probably never know.)

Number of times she wrapped her arms around me in a swimming pool, grazed my neck with her lips and let me slide my hand under the “fun” part of her bikini bottoms: 1
Age of participants: 18
Number of significant-other’s that were CLEARLY cheated on during that event: 2

Moments of regret that I touched her while dating someone else: a few, but they’re fading every day.

Minutes of regret that we never really talked about how we felt about each other: exactly 9,161,280 (and counting).

There are so many memories about Miss V that trying to explain everything starts to whorl together in some kind of mental tornado of images and sounds and tastes and smells…and then her face, smiling at me like it did as a thirteen-year-old girl washes over everything. For a moment, I’m back to being that skinny, unconfident outsider I always felt like as a kid. And I’m comfortable, because we were always outsiders together.

In the summer before the second grade, my parents completed the process of moving me away from my friends and a school where I was comfortable in a class of dozens spread out into several classrooms; and off to a tiny little outpost of humanity and a school where I was one of six kids in my grade. There were three grades to a classroom…so my overall class size was about twenty, but my direct peer group was six kids. Three boys and three girls.

I will never forget the first day of school, the cliques had already been established, and I wasn’t a part of them. And let’s be honest, I didn’t want to be there, and they didn’t want me there because I didn’t want to be there…ah, vicious circles, aren’t they fun. I was the outsider. I didn’t fit in.

I didn’t fit in at all. I ate meat, I watched movies, my parents had cable and let me watch HBO, I was allowed to read fantasy stories (the teacher confiscated my copy of “The Black Cauldron” because it was EVIL!!!). I was WEIRD. Because I was different.

At lunch on the second day of school I opened my brown paper bag and discovered I had three Oreo cookies. REAL Oreo cookies, not the fake sunshine versions that weren’t made with lard. Miss V was sitting at the desk next to me, she took one look and asked if she “could have an Oreo.” There was an audible gasp in the room. Real Oreo’s were evil. NO ONE should eat real Oreos! They’re MADE WITH LARD!!! (another classmate actually said that out loud). I reluctantly gave her one, waiting for her to use it to make fun of me. She smiled at me and said “thanks,” and then turned back to her friends and kept talking like nothing was out of the ordinary. She ate the Oreo. I loved her from that moment on.

As time went on, things got better. I made friends, I found my place, I tried to become a normal part of the school/group/place I was in; but I never quite made it. I was never the “best friend,” I was never completely at ease, I was never totally a part of the clique. I never felt just like everyone else. I always felt just a little bit like an outsider.

It would be many years before I realized that half of the people in that room felt the same way. Like something was off, like the picture was just a little bit crooked. But I knew instinctively that Miss V shared that feeling with me. We didn’t talk about it for another twenty years, but from that first day, it bound us just a little bit together. Just a little.

The two of us were competitive. VERY competitive. If you could compete at it, we did. If you couldn’t compete at it, we still found a way. We always pushed each other, if not physically then figuratively. There were people who thought we hated each other because we never let up.

Only once did it ever cross the line from pushing to hurting; and though it tears me up, I was the one that hurt her. In the fourth grade girls are very sensitive to anything that might draw attention to ANYTHING about their bodies or their physical cycles. Using that knowledge I said one of the things I regret most in my life.

In small classrooms with few students, collective punishment is probably pretty common. In this case conflict that had cropped up between “the boys” and “the girls” had spilled over into some heated exchanges between several classmates during recess and the ultimate resolution was to sit all of us down in our desks and have us talk it out. There were only six of us after all.

The teacher left the room and instantly the arguments resumed. I have NO idea what we were arguing about. Trivial couldn’t possibly begin to describe it. All I know is that the two sharpest tongues in the room went into combat like a pair of fencers…mine and Miss V. I remember she told me that if I was “going to be a stupid child” that I “should just shut up.” To which I replied calmly that she should “shut up and take a Midol.” The guys both gave me a hearty “YEAH”…as though congratulating me on the power of my counter attack. Miss V recoiled like I had physically hit her, and then broke down into sobs and fled the room.

For the record, I was pretty hazy on what a Midol was actually USED for, but that wouldn’t have been any consolation to a young girl who had just had her first menstruation start the day before. Obviously, I didn’t know that…

I’d say it was about a month before she spoke to me again. I never got a chance to apologize, even though I felt terrible about it. It wasn’t until the first ski-day of the year that things started going back to normal. I rode up in the car with her, and by the time we got to the lodge, things were better. We competed on the slopes, and we rode the chairlift together all afternoon. We were back to pushing each other, and helping the other one up again.

A couple of years later she was doing children’s theater and she would call me after rehearsals. She told me they were doing “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and I was excited because it was one of my favorite fairy tales from an old book my mom had given me. She wanted to know if it was any different from the story they were putting on, so I read it to her. Over the phone. As I’m writing this, I realize I have NO idea why I didn’t go see her perform, my parents certainly would have taken me…I was just too dumb to think of it I guess.

In the eighth grade I made another foolish comment that I would desperately like to take back. For whatever reason boys will pick on other boys about the girls they like. And no matter how much they like the girl, the boy will deny it. Why? I have NO idea. It was a small social circle, and maybe that was just exposing too much that was too personal…I don’t know.

I do know that after PE my friends were giving me “the business” about how much time I spent with Miss V, and teasing me that I liked her (which was painfully obvious to anyone) and for reasons I still can’t explain I said (with too much volume and intensity) “No I don’t! I like Emily you idiots!” Which was a lie. But since every single girl in our class heard it, I was pretty much stuck. I remember seeing the look in Miss V’s eyes as she walked out of the hallway where she’d heard me deny her. It still makes me physically sick, more than twenty years later.

Another thing we did together was Pathfinders. It’s a co-ed denominational version of Boy Scouts with all of the expected issues of hauling a dozen boys and girls ranging in age from eight to fourteen out into the woods. Hazing, tent raiding, ghost stores, sneaking off into the woods together…all that stuff. Miss V’s mom was a leader and that meant she didn’t miss a camp-out, no matter how uncool it was to head off to the woods. Somehow we always ended up spending about ninety percent of the time walking off together talking and laughing and ignoring the rest of the world.

All those hours together, all those hours alone with her, and not once did I tell her how I felt about her. Not once did I just take her hand and look her in the eyes and tell her I liked her. I was always afraid I wasn’t good enough, afraid she’d tell me I was just a friend, just blah. That I was just the uncool, unattractive little boy I was afraid I was. She was the only one who would call me on my shit, and it scared me too much to tell her how special I thought she was, how beautiful I thought she was, how wonderful every word she shared with me was.

Towards the end of eight-grade four of us went to a youth-rally in Portland. It was a long drive and we were leaving early in the morning, so her mom (who was the chaperon) decided all of us should spend the night at her house and leave together in the morning. The four of us spent about eight hours sitting on Miss V’s bed talking silly, laughing and enjoying time together. I came within a hair’s breadth of telling her everything, but there were other people there…it was both heaven and hell at the same time…I wanted to tell her, but I was too scared to do it in front of our friends.

Later that weekend, she bought an ice-cream sandwich. Sitting next to me in the front of the truck, practically on my lap, she finished half of it…licking the end of the ice-cream out of the cookie…and then asked me if I wanted to finish it. As stupid as it sounds, it was as close to a kiss as I ever got from her. I could taste her lip gloss on the cookie, and I can still smell her hair in my face.

I started high-school a week late. It’s a long story, but lets just say that once again, I managed to be the outsider. The first person I saw on campus was Miss V. It was the first moment of relief in a long uphill climb. High school sucks. High school where you live on campus with the entire student body (of about two hundred), shower in front of every guy you know, eat institutional vegetarian food, and can’t have caffeine in any form is just BRUTAL.

No matter what might have passed between us in the past, our circle of friends wasn’t particularly close at first. But we did work together for four hours every morning. She was the Boy’s Dean’s secretary and I was the desk monitor. I sat about ten feet away from her and as there was NOTHING else to do, once again, we spent many hours talking. And a few fighting, but mostly it was pretty relaxed. I heard about her boyfriend, about her girlfriends, about life away from home…and I pined for her silently. I smiled, we talked, same as always.

Our Sophomore year she tried going to a public high school near her mom, and I moved on and tried not to think about her as much as I had the year before. I had a couple of girlfriends, an absolutely crazy roommate, a better haircut, and a chance to realize that “cool” was as subjective as everything else. I found my footing, ran for class president, started working for the radio station, drank a WHOLE LOT of shitty beer, and discovered that life is good.

I don’t remember exactly when she came back…I’d guess it was around Christmas, but it might have been sooner. Regardless, neither of us was the same person by the time she returned. I think I caught her eye a couple of times, but I never knew at the time.

My junior year I met the girl who I would eventually marry and have children with, Miss H. We started a long distance relationship and for an entire year I was happily “off the market” and writing letters and making multi-hour phone calls every night. So much of that year is caught up with her that nothing else really penetrates. I know Miss V was there, and a friend, but everything is washed out in my memories with Miss H.

As a senior Miss H joined me at academy. I’ll talk about all that in other posts…what is relevant here is the last week before graduation. The senior class takes a trip together for a long weekend. As a group we went to central Oregon and stayed at a resort. Six to a condo, we really had the run of the place.

The last evening of the trip about half of us were in the pool, and Miss H was off with her friends enjoying some girl time. I was against the wall of the pool with one my close friends when Miss V and her best friend swam up and joined us. My friend had always been interested in Miss V’s friend, and they paired off as best they could. Miss V and I began reminiscing about all the years together. We talked for about an hour, and at one point she put her arms around me. For balance or support or…whatever.

Our friends got cold and hopped out of the pool to head off for the Sauna. Miss V and I climbed out and went off to the empty hot tub. After a few minutes sitting next to each other she climbed up over me a few inches to look over the wall and see if anyone was watching us. As she slid back down against me she grazed her lips over my neck and intentionally straddled my hand as it was resting on my leg. She looked into my eyes as my hand slid under her bikini bottom. As I touched her, her eyes half closed and she began to lean towards me…and then we heard the voice of one of the class sponsors and she slid away and sat down next to me.

I don’t write this part of our story to expose what was a really personal moment between us, but to highlight just how big of a dork I really was (and probably still am).

The next day Miss H (who didn’t suspect ANYTHING was between Miss V and I) sat on the bus home with her best friend and I ended up sitting with Miss V. We shared buffalo jerky, a couple of Dr. Peppers, and talked the whole way home. We talked of old times, funny things we remembered from grade school and honestly, we were saying goodbye. We just didn’t know it. In a week we would graduate, and we didn’t know when we might see each other again. This was goodbye.

That night I gave Miss V a ride home. She asked if she could smoke and I said I didn’t care. I drove her back to her mom’s apartment and we stood outside for a few more minutes talking. Right at the end, I leaned in to kiss her, but she pulled back. I’ve never known why. I never had the strength to ask. The moment wasn’t right, and it didn’t happen. We were both dating other people. I never told her how I had always felt about her. I was still afraid I wasn’t good enough for her. Still afraid she’d reject me. And that was that. I will never forget the sound of the door closing behind her.

I saw her once, a year later. Miss H and I were on our Honeymoon at Disneyland and out of nowhere Miss V was calling our names. We stood and talked with her and her roommate for about ten minutes. When she found out it was our honeymoon she was clearly surprised. I was afraid she was going to say something about that moment in the pool…but she just smiled and politely found a reason for her and her friend to go.

As she walked away, I saw her give me a look…a look I hadn’t seen since the eighth grade. When I said I like Emily more than her.

Since then it’s been 9,161,300 minutes. And counting.

—

Like many stories we dredge up from our personal history, this one bears the chisel marks and rough edges that come from reshaping our history from what it was to how we remember it.  And like so much of our past, Facebook and social media means that not only do we all now live in a perpetual high-school reunion, our past become less what we want to remember it as, and more what other people perceived it to be.

Miss V is now a nurse who works in the neonatal unit of a large regional hospital (a detail that is personally significant to me) with a beautiful son and a happy marriage, which makes me unspeakably happy.  We want the best for the people that we love, and obviously I’ve truly loved her for a very long time.  I say that with a clear conscience and no conflict of personal interest.  Some people we can love as much for who they are as who they were in our personal history.  We just have to remember to see past the chisel marks and remember the real person underneath.

[Word Count: 880 (new) / 3447 (total)]

A couple of things make it uncomfortable for me to talk about Playboy magazine:

First, I grew up in a conservative world with a lot of focus on “moral values” and “pure thoughts” being pushed pretty much from kindergarten until I graduated from high-school and entered the real world.  Any of the secular things that might have been seen as salacious or risqué were not only prohibited, they were generally treated as though they didn’t exist at all.  I doubt I had an educator or pastor from K through 12 who would admit to having ever seen a movie in a theater, as “theaters were the devil’s playground” according to Ellen White.

Second, I consider myself a feminist.  An actual, “equality for the sexes” true believer.  While I accept that there are some (physical) activities that are inherently more well suited for the average member of a particular gender’s physical build, muscle mass, and bone density; I’ve met women who could do any physical job a man could do including roughneck, work cattle, shoot things, and play american football.

Also, both of the women who readily come to my mind as examples happen to be perfectly straight and hardly “masculine” as an overriding feature, so don’t think that I’m making some kind of exception for the mythical “bull dyke” model of “not-really-a-women” that some guys want to use as the exception to their otherwise complete “men are bigger and stronger” model.  Normal women, regardless of sexual orientation have as much physical and mental toughness as any of the guys I know working in “manly-man” jobs, including construction, truck driving, police work, fire fighting and soldiering.

I also know plenty of very smart women.  I work in technology, which still has a sort of “boy’s club” mentality lurking under the surface.  That club is an endangered species.  Some of the smartest technical minds I know are women, and I have every reason to believe the number of women in tech is just going to keep growing.

Guys who think men are inherently superior to women are dinosaurs, and all that’s left of the dinosaurs are the fossils of their desiccated bones.  Which I think is a pretty prophetic analogy really.

There is a strong strain of opinion in modern feminism about pornography and the objectification and commoditization of women.  Of course, like any issue, that strain of opinion runs a pretty wide gamut.

So let me explain my own opinion on pornography, the sex industry and how a reasonably enlightened (or at least one who tries to be enlightened) man can approach something that is seen as both empowering and enslaving by very smart people on both ends of the feminist spectrum.

I have no problem with the concept of an adult industry where women are paid a fair value for the product they are selling or the services they perform.  Which is exactly how I feel about a male dominated military or a transgendererd androgynous-mime circus.

I have no problem with strip clubs where women are independent contractors who work on their own time and negotiate their own charges while the house takes a door charge and sells ridiculously expensive drinks while providing overhead and a level of security for the participants.

I have heard tell of brothels in Nevada that function on a similar premise, but I have no first-hand knowledge one way or the other.

On the other hand, there are things I’m not ok with.  Sexual slavery is alive and well in the world and there are elements of the adult industry that are built and sustained purely on the…backs…of women (and by “women” I mean female, because age is a real issue) who are trapped into situations and trafficked with less humane care than Michael Vick gave his fighting dogs.

I realize that one arm of the industry is held up by the other, and vice-versa.

Which is why I’m not much of a consumer of porn.  Part of it is just point one above; my parents didn’t consume porn, and I have no frame of reference for porn consumption outside of a college dorm or the occasional link that shows up in an email from “a bud” from work.

And part of it is that the current crop of porn seems to tend towards behaviors that I don’t care to watch.  There’s an implied violence in a lot of porn that makes me uncomfortable.  Does that make me hopelessly “vanilla”?  I don’t really care.  I don’t put my standards of taste up for critique any more than I claim the right to critique other’s.

I’m not talking about spanking or light bondage or what have you, I’m talking about the simulated choking and spitting and implied threat that seems to seep into a lot of the stuff coming out of San Fernando Valley these days.  I don’t find degrading sexy, and a lot of porn pushes the degradation envelope, vis-a-vis I’m not much for porn.

But that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to pornography at a moral level.  As a parent of a little girl, I’ve had to consider this in a very real and personal way.  Since I have a daughter, and I know every girl in porn is someone’s daughter, I have to ask myself how would I feel if that was my daughter on the screen?  How would I feel if she wanted to “work adult” and was open about it?

Sure, it’s easy to assume that all strippers and porn starlets are the product of tragic homes and broken families and are desperately trying to fill some approval void left by father figures…but I know better.  I went to high-school with a girl who went on to be moderately famous in the porn industry, and her parents were sweet and her home life seemed fine to me (as fine as anyone else surviving Adventism in the 90s).

It’s much more realistic to assume that some people (male and female) find themselves down a sequence of events that led them to work adult.  I never thought I’d be a tax software consultant, so it’s safe to assume my daughter might have a similarly strange path through life.

How would I feel?

Probably, I’d ask a LOT of questions (because my prejudices would bubble up to the surface) and I’d try to sort through her decision making.  Mostly I’d be desperate to make sure she didn’t feel trapped into something she didn’t want to do…which means I’d have to be prepared for the fact that just maybe she wanted to take off her clothes for money.

Ultimately, my puritan past means that on some levels, I’d be uncomfortable with it.  Such is the nature of being a father.  And based on that, I have to respect the women who work adult because somewhere, they have a father and I hope he respects her decisions.

What does this have to do with Playboy from before 1975? And why 1975?

Well, the second question is easier, 1975 is when pubic hair became common and full frontal nudity became the norm.  Before that Hugh Hefner spent a lot of time pushing a boundary without quite giving away all the goods.  There was just something more tasteful about the magazine before it won the sexual revolution.  It was more earnest about what it was and what it was selling.  Also, the women had curves (and I don’t just mean boobs and butts) which hasn’t been the case since at least the mid 90′s when I started reading.

Playboy, before 1974 especially, was about women entering the workforce, and the clubs, and the places where adults gathered on their own terms.  They took charge of their bodies, their pleasure, and they didn’t decide who to date purely based on the babies they’d make when they got married.  Certainly, that has happened throughout time, but Playboy was the cultural barometer of the time when those things stepped out of the shadows and back alleys of America and into mainstream workplaces and churches and living-rooms.

Playboy, and the image it projected of confident women in charge of themselves, was as influential for women at the dawn of the sexual revolution as the pill and Helen Gurley Brown.  Not because it changed women’s minds (although it certainly might have) but because it change the minds of many men.

I have to believe that the majority of the women who posed for Playboy did so because they wanted to.  I would argue that despite simple assumptions, Playboy was an inherently feminist magazine.  Sure, it was the victim of some horrible failures of taste, and bawdy humor is often insensitive (I would argue the cartoons were often the most sexist element of the magazine), but overall it’s impact was profoundly positive for the women’s movement.

As someone who loves history, Playboy is like looking through a window into the heart of culture.  Articles by Henry Kissinger, fiction by Arther C Clark and Ian Flemming, interviews with Robert Kennedy and Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali).  Every month the powers that vied to change America came to millions of men through the doors of Playboy’s offices in Chicago and met a gatekeeper who refused any that wanted to conserve the old status quo, the old restrictions, the old conventions.

Today, I think Playboy is essentially irrelevant.  They won.  There is little for them to battle, and a hero without a villain is essentially just another Joe.  They have no more envelope to push culturally, and the internet is far far ahead of them in the salacious imagery department, never to be caught by old media again.

But to someone who loves the past, and history, and really great writing (not to mention some of the most artistic photography of it’s time) early Playboy is a treasure trove of incredible things to read and discover.

Even for a puritan-raised feminist.

[Word Count:  1777]

1. Emails, whitepapers, SQL and Perl for my “day job” for about 12 hours a day.  Now that the other Core Technical Resource has left our group, I’m the Lone Ranger, and the Lone Ranger is BUSY.
     
2. Ten chapters of a new “post-steampunk-proto-rocket-age” novel.  I’ve actually rewritten and re-plotted and redone these chapters 2-3 times.  I hope to get them out to my pre-readers later this week.  We’ll see. There will be more details about this over on serialstoryteller.com in the coming days as I start to ramp that up again.

What I haven’t been writing is a lot of blog posts.  Ok, any blog posts.  Or comments.  Or even very many tweets. You know you’re busy when you’re too busy to tweet…It’s funny how that sentence works equally well if you substitute “lazy” for “busy” as the verb pair.

I spent today re-reading every blog post I’ve ever written.  Both for missedher and deadcharming as well as everything I’ve written here.  A lot of my stuff for here kinda sucks.  I used to write because I had something to say about myself.  Sort of a review and analysis.  Then I became afraid of analysis and I stopped writing self review.  Then, what I was writing got so bland that I stopped writing all together.

I actually started this blog to be a sort of family story/essay collection.  Divided up into real chapters and essentially ready to be some sort of family record of tales I’d heard as a kid and always wanted to tell about the people and places I’d come from.  A record of things genetic and environmental.  That’s actually why I picked “my bad pants” as a title.  I spoke to exactly the kind of stories my family tells, stories that are as much about who we come from as where we come from.  As much about the genes I come from as the jeans I wear, and about the shoes I try to fill and the miles I’ve walked in them.

When I started writing my first blog, I had essentially outlined my own autobiography.  Not because my life story needs to be kept for posterity, but because I figured some of my mistakes may as well help SOMEBODY else realize that people make horrible choices and still survive the consequences.  Something very easy to do as an anonymous cypher on the internet.  And my life is rife with “the funny” so it’s kinda fun to tell, in a self deprecating kind of way.

All this is to say that I have some great material already half finished and just waiting for me to polish it up and post it, and I have even more material in the outline phase waiting for me to get off my ass and write it.

So here’s my plan.  I am going to try to write AND POST every day for a month.  1000+ words a day.  Some of those words will be fiction and I’ll track that over on serialstoryteller.com with daily updates on the fiction progress, but probably half of that will be blog posts and they’ll show up right here.  Every day.  I’ll post the word count along with every post that goes up, so we’ll all be able to see how I’m doing.  If I can keep it up for a month, I’ll be 30,000 words closer to my goal of writing 100,000 words in a year.

For days when I’m mentally stuck and just need a kickstart, I’m going to write about some of my favorite things.  Mostly because it’s easy to write about the things one likes, and partly because some of the things I like might surprise a few people.

Today’s “Thing I Like” is my favorite movie.

When I was a kid my favorite movie was “Star Wars” in a big BIG way.  I watched it every Sunday with my cousin for about two years straight (I’ll write about my dad’s two piece Sony VHS tape system from 1978 someday, because it was the most retro-awesome thing ever made).  I could actually quote every line of dialog AND sound effect from start to finish.  I could even do a pretty accurate R2D2 whistle and talk like a Jawa.

Then, “The Empire Strikes Back” came out.  I’ll be honest, it scared the shit out of me the first time I saw it.  In my defense, I was four.  It became my new favorite thing EVER.  Return of the Jedi was cool, and I fell in love with Raiders of the Lost Ark…but Empire was always my favorite.

When I was 13 I saw “A Room With A View” and I had a new co-favorite.  Merchant-Ivory movies have always been able to crawl into my soul and challenge me in profound ways, but “A Room With A View” has always been special to me.  Something about it has always been untouchablly perfect, almost dreamlike.

According to Netflix I have 142 movies I’ve given five stars to, out of the 1132 that I’ve rated.  Some are classics, some are corny, about 20% are romantic comedies, and the rest are movies where something inevitably blows up.

I would have a hard time ranking my list of top ten movies.  ”The Empire Strikes Back” and “A Room With A View” would be on it of course, as would “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Pride and Prejudice” and “Young Sherlock Holmes” and “Casanova” and “Castle in the Sky”…

But last night, I was reminded (again) that my favorite movie isn’t an epic blockbuster or an intellectual thriller, or a science fiction masterpiece.  It’s not really based on a classic story, or a profound piece of literature.  It’s just two great work-a-day actors doing what they did best at the highpoint of their careers, directed by a director who does this kind of movie better than anyone else in the business.

It’s Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail” staring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan meeting cute and finding love for the third time in a movie together; and this was one time where the third time really was the charm.

A lot of people think of “Sleepless in Seattle” when they think of Tom and Meg.  And that movie was a wonderful piece of cinema, but it’s not about Tom and Meg TOGETHER, it’s about Tom and Meg finding each other against the backdrop of one of the best soundtracks ever collected for a romantic comedy.  They only play opposite each other directly for about 5 minutes of “Sleepless in Seattle” and those aren’t anywhere near the best five minutes of the movie.

“You’ve Got Mail” is entirely the opposite.  They play off each other for more than half of the movie, and those moments are always scene-stealers.  Also, I posit that this is the funniest that Tom Hanks has ever been.  It’s without a doubt the cutest that Meg has ever been.

Also, this movie makes me love New York in a way that Woody Allen can only dream of matching.  New York in the fall when the kids go back to school and central park turns burgundy and orange and yellow; New York at Christmas with the shop windows and Christmas parties, New York in spring when the farmer’s markets set up shop and the community gardens bring life to an asphalt sea and concrete canyons.  It’s a love story to the power of talking about your secret thoughts, and unconventional friendships, and second chances; and it’s all set against technology that we take for granted but was brand new in 1998.  The movie is absolutely prophetic in it’s ability to forecast how the internet would create relationships and connections that would have been impossible just a few years before.

And it’s funny.  Dave Chappel plays a retail executive, right hand man, and best friend to Tom Hanks (which might not seem that special today, but was positively progressive twelve years ago) and he’s funny with the kind of light touch and goofy grin that pairs so well with his simple, understated presence.  He could have been just a caricature on the sidelines (something that Greg Kinnear almost becomes) but he always stays on the reality side of the performance.

Is any of it Oscar-worthy efforts of thespianism? No (although Hanks filmed this right after Saving Private Ryan and was certainly on the top of his game after two Oscar wins and two more nominations coming).  Everything about the interplay between the actors is spot on.  Parker Posey and Dave Chappel get the best supporting lines, and Greg Kinnear certainly portrays a New York obsessed old-media columnist with aplomb if not much depth.

The editing and technical work are also way ahead of their time.  The scenes where Meg and Tom write and read each other’s messages and react in time with the narration (which was recorded in Foley and not played on set) is some of the best technical acting you’ll see on film.  Sure, it looks cute and simple, but it’s anything but.  Tom Hanks once described the filming of “You’ve Got Mail” as more technically difficult than “Apollo 13″ which is amazing, given that the later was filmed largely with him free-falling in a set built in an airplane plummeting towards the earth.

Sure, it’s a Nora Ephron romantic comedy, you know exactly how it’s going to end before the opening credits finish rolling; but it’s not about the destination, this movie is about the sheer joy and beauty in the journey along the way.

There are no ‘splody things anywhere to be seen (well, unless you mean metaphorically, in which case there are detonated relationships, preconceptions and one corpse of a family business littered about), but it’s cute, and funny, and it has a happy ending that makes me smile every time.

And just like “Star Wars” as a kid, I can pretty much recite every line, word for word.

[Word Count:  1653]

Which reminded me that I’m now allowed to talk about my day job in my blog.  The company that bought the company that I work for has a “uniform policy for personal internet communication, social media, and online networking” (and I deeply love the fact that they used the serial comma) which was distributed as both a .pdf and a printed brochure (which, frankly seemed redundant) during our onboarding process.  Now that the rules about talking about my job are more clearly defined than “pull a Dooce and we fire your ass,” I’ll regale all (six) of you with a description of what I’m sure you will agree is the single most boring job description in the world.  The job itself is FAR from boring, but describing it is like watching paint dry.

I am a Senior Implementation Consultant working in the Workflow and Service Solutions Group of the Tax Automation division of Thomson Reuters Tax and Accounting Global Services business unit.  Specifically, I am focused on delivering end-to-end integration of the Sabrix Indirect Tax Solution into complex financial and accounting systems for Fortune 500 and Global 100 customers around the world.

Essentially, if you were a large to super-large company, and you had a software package that automated your financial accounting (and you would), we provide a solution that can be integrated into your financial system that will calculate the appropriate indirect tax treatment for a particular product based on transaction criteria and produce a resulting rate combination, and then optionally record the transaction to a Sarbanes-Oxley satisfying audit record that can generate compliance returns and reports for legal jurisdictions around the world.

My job is to understand super-expensive financial systems (SAP, Oracle Financials, J.D. Edwards, Peoplesoft, Ariba, etc.) and the potential underlying technology platforms (Oracle, DB2, Java, XML, Unix in essentially every flavor from AIX to HPUX to Linux to Solaris, WebLogic, WebSphere, NetWeaver, JBOSS, et. all) and create solutions for integrating our product into those environments.  It’s different every time.

Every customer I’ve dealt with in the last three years has a name you’d recognize.  I’ve met with their CIOs and CFOs and Controllers and Directors of Finance and Technology Managers in boardrooms and conference rooms around the country.  They don’t come to us, we obviously go to them.

If this sounds specialized, well…it is.  There are less than a dozen people who do what I do.  My company employs about half of them.  Our partners employ the rest.

My day tends to involve solving weird interface issues between Java Application Servers and integration packages on unusual operating systems, followed by a call where we discuss chain transactions for VAT recovery and intrastat scenarios around the EU, followed by a call about creating test cases for use tax on cross-border supplier shipments through the tax-free zone at Shannon Airport landing in Newark and Toronto.

I have to be ready at the drop of a hat (well, the ring of a cell phone that never shuts off) to answer questions about incredibly detailed technology issues from IT groups and Software Engineers, followed without pause by questions from tax managers and business unit accountants about software configuration customizations to accommodate detailed and specific tax and financial transaction processes from a non-technical perspective.

And I’m a specialist, generally Implementation consultants focus on one specific integration platform (Oracle Financials or SAP) but I’m one of two people (in the company AND essentially on earth) who goes the full cycle.  I can do SAP or Oracle, but I also design custom integrations from scratch.  Have a mainframe that sits on old AS400 gear and you want to batch process in a nightly run written in RPG and Cobol to our XML process engine?  I can help with that.  Have a completely custom built software system based on some version of DB2 running in Z/OS on IBM mega-hardware?  Yeah, I can help.  Hell, if you run on DB2 I’m gonna get your account, since I’m “it” in the DB2 department.

Fifteen years ago I wrote financial software for government agencies.  Now, I’m one of a handful of people with the skillset to integrate one of the most flexible and powerful indirect tax software platforms into pretty much anything that constitutes a financial package.  Well, one of two if you do something outside of the SAP or Oracle Financials world.

And I am in demand.  The interesting thing about being in the Tax Automation business is that taxes don’t really have a recession.  In good times or bad times, companies pay taxes; and companies that pay taxes want to find solutions that will help them maximize their tax accuracy and minimize their audit exposure.  When a company buys our product they almost always need time with our consultants to guide and assist them with the implementation.  As the consultant in question, this has been good for my job security.

All this job security means that I travel pretty much three out of every four weeks in a month; but now, I’ve been given an incredible opportunity.

My company (before the acquisition) was primarily based right here in beautiful Lake Oswego, Oregon (with our corporate headquarters in San Ramon, California…but that was just so we could say we were a Bay Area software startup ).  It’s great for someone who lives in (and loves) the Portland area, but kinda crap for supporting the eighty-plus percent of our customers who are in the east or central time zones, or the ten percent who are in Europe.  I’ve flown coast to coast pretty much every week in April and May, when I got to fly home.  Before that I’d been in Chicago, Columbus, and New York all for week-long stints multiple times since the start of the year.

People always tell me how “glamorous” it is for me to get to travel, and I will admit that the travel is a bonus to my job most of the time; but after a while life becomes an endless parade of airplane seats, airports, taxis, hotel restaurants and hotel beds.  You know you travel a lot when you land in a connecting airport and have NO idea where you are.  I had a layover in Houston and had to ask someone what airport I was in.  It wasn’t critical to know, I just didn’t recognize the layout, which was disconcerting.  Conversely, I could walk through the Denver and Chicago airports blindfolded and comfortably navigate from gate to gate while on a conference call and buying something to eat.

So, as the powers-that-be are happy with my performance, and have the ability to identify a gaping hole in our ability to support our customers, I’ve been offered a relocation package to move to Atlanta, Georgia and start up a practice that will focus on east coast customers and provide technical leadership for our UK and South American groups in a timezone that can answer before they all go home for the day.

I have to say, I’m excited.  I’ve never lived east of Boise, Idaho; so this is going to be an adventure.

OregonSunshine has been a true trooper as she scouted for new homes and worked on the practical details of our move (and also started to consider a change to her nom de plume).  We think we’ve already found a place to lease for the first year and still keep our “hobby farm” lifestyle, and we’ll be settling the details within the next few days.  I fully expect to be moved before the Fourth of July holiday.

Yes, my job is unusual.  I do technology AND finance…I’m a Geek AND a Nerd.  If anyone read this far without their eyes glazing over or falling asleep at their desk, well, I’m either really impressed or just a little bit frightened.  But I have to admit, I love my job.  I love the challenges and the complexity, and I really love the people I work with and the quality of the work that we do; but it does tend to eat into my free time.  Currently I’m “on the job” for about 12 hours a day…on a slow day.  Hopefully the move to the eastern time zone will help me find more time away from work simply by being closer to the work that I’m doing.  Well, that’s the plan anyway.

So, I’ll try to post more and essay less, but honestly that’s just not how I naturally write.  If things are a bit quiet on this front, keep in mind that I’m probably in the middle of hauling my life across the country.  I’ll post pictures and tweet from my iPhone, so watch the twitter feed for updates.

And wish us luck.  I don’t know that we’ll need it, but it NEVER hurts to have all that we can get.