Muddling Through Somehow

My wife is a Christmas junkie, and through the years her overwhelming enthusiasm has managed to virtually erase my own Scrooge-like tendencies. And you can't really pull off a humbug pose with two young kids nipping at your heels--even the hardest heart melts like Frosty in the greenhouse at the sight of your own offspring bursting with joy on Christmas morning.

So I'm not trying to resist the cheer this year. I'm letting it in, and I'm extremely grateful to be able to celebrate and revel in the love that surrounds me. And isn't that what Christmas is really all about, Charlie Brown? (Enough with the shepherds already, Linus. Save it for right-wing radio.)

And yet, there's a reason that the suicide rate skyrockets this time of year. Circadian rhythms, shorter days, the constant barrage of manufactured blah blah blah...It's not that for me, so much, actually. Instead, I am reminded of very specific losses during the holiday season, in ways that we probably all are, and those wounds feel as fresh to me now as they did over a decade ago.

I see a couple ghosts, in other words, more clearly than ever this time of year, and I can't pretend that I don't. I don't want to pretend that I don't, because I still love them, I still miss them, and I'm grateful that they're still here, even if it cuts me deep to catch a glimpse of them in an empty chair next to the Christmas tree. I'll take those reminders over real absence any day, and in my own way I'll try to thank them for hanging around to keep an eye on me and help guide me forward. Because God knows I need them, now more than ever.

So here's to a clear-eyed, open-hearted holiday, absent of expectations and filled with real love and joy. And lots of booze. And chocolate.

Speaking of which, I'm still ploughing through on the fitness front. I've lost 7 pounds in the first week and have slipped into a fairly workable exercise routine. The real challenge lays ahead, of course, and I'm taking Christmas day off to indulge as I see fit with the belief that I can hop right back on the wagon the next day. We'll see.

And because there is no way to avoid Christmas music in the Huntington house these days, I present to you what has become far and away my favorite holiday song, sung with just the perfect bittersweetness by Sweet Baby James--assuming I can get this embed code to work. I don't care if it's cheesy--it's a flat-out beautiful song, and it perfectly captures my mood right now. So have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.

Drop Meets Bucket

Four days since the leaf turned over and I'm still kicking. Three pounds down, ain't ate no cheezburegers, and I've managed to get in three more or less vigorous workouts. I dare say I'm feeling spry, if not quite unstoppable. I'll take it.

But of course the land mines await my approach, as always. Fuck it, it's Christmas! And I'm so stressed out and work is so crazy and somebody ordered pizza for the lunch meeting and I didn't have time to go to the gym and then I'm in Vegas for work, and you simply *can't* be healthy in Vegas, because really, what's the point? And then it's my wedding anniversary, and then it's my son's birthday party, and then it's Valentine's Day, and I'm still *so* busy and somebody ordered Chinese for the lunch meeting and then...

That's the old story, anyway. A process of surrender, one day at a time, as if I were completely and totally powerless in the face of a vast conspiracy intended to convince me to give up. As if I had no say in the matter whatsoever, as if my life was not my own.

Bullshit. Please, finally, sitting here closer to 40 than 30, let me be done with that weak-willed, passive numbskullery. Every moment, every action or refusal, is a choice. My choice. Whether I like it or not. Man up.

Four days in, three pounds done, and I ain't ate no cheezeburgers. I'll take it.

PSFAADSSAYHBITLIIIA

Today is the day I kick off Project Stop Fucking Around And Do Something Serious About Your Health Before It's Too Late If It Isn't Already, or PSFAADSSAYHBITLIIIA, for short. Go me!

My goal: lose 75 pounds by my next birthday, September 20, 2010. That's approximately 10 months away, which means I need to average somewhere around a loss of 2 pounds a week in order to hit my target. 75 pounds is a relative drop in the bucket toward a truly healthy sustainable weight, sadly, but I've decided that I need to set measurable goals and proceed toward them in a challenging but realistic fashion. One day at a time, and all that. I'm using a free online nutrition calculator/food diary/exercise journal called Fit Day to chart my progress, and I'm going to track and analyze everything I eat, keep a food journal, and record my exercise.

I started this morning, and I've managed to make it to 3:00 PM without killing anyone. I hit the gym at lunch and trudged through 45 minutes on the elliptical, and I've been drinking water and sticking to a low-fat, relatively high-protein menu that is a bit of an improvisatory work in progress. I'm going to exercise five times a week and weigh myself every morning.

It's important to me that I hold myself publicly accountable toward my goal, so I'm going to do my best to post here as often as I can with status reports. If it goes off the rails, I'm going to write about it. If I succeed beyond my wildest dreams, I'm going to write about it. Which means this blog may get pretty boring, and I'll probably stop updating my facebook status every time I post something. So if you for some reason you want to monitor the progress of my fitness initiative, check back directly on the blog as often as you'd like.

Here's to desperate measures...

Talking 'Bout It!

My six-year-old son tends to repeat a certain phrase, usually an exclamation of excitement or distress, repeatedly throughout the day to greet certain developments. A catchphrase, if you will, much like an ESPN announcer or a bad comedian. Often, these phrases are slight variations on actual phrases commonly used by English-speaking humans. Most recently, he's been saying "Talking 'bout it!!" whenever he gets really excited. An example of conversational usage would go something like: ME: "Hey Robbie, it sure rained a lot today didn't it?" HIM: "Talking 'bout it!! There were huge puddles everywhere!!"

Now I of course find this to be the most endearing thing in the world, but it's also interesting to me in a linguistic sense. In this case, it seems like he's conflated two common phrases he's heard on TV or from the adults in his life--"tell me about it" and "that's what I'm talking about!" and unknowingly created his own, new exclamation. I love that language works that way, and I rue the day when he will stop creating his own Robbie-isms and start saying exactly what all the other kids are saying. That will of course happen (and if it didn't he'd probably eventually be publicly humiliated by some asshole kid on the playground), but it will mark the end of certain part of his childhood when it does.

Even the youngest of us don't stay young forever. That's the closest thing we've got to certainty in this life.

Thanks, Given

At the risk of writing a hallmark card, here are a few things I'd like to remind myself I'm thankful for as we commemorate the rape of Native American land this holiday season:

I am thankful that I still have the ability to remain surprised by life.

I am thankful for that everything is a story, and that stories get me through the day.

I am thankful that I can still find kindred spirits whenever I look hard enough.

I am thankful that I can still believe that we are more alike than we are different.

I am thankful for the lulling distraction of television sports and the way it can fill the silences in difficult rooms.

I am thankful that I can almost always see a path through, whether I have the strength to take it or not.

I am thankful to have a job, today, and food for my family, and a roof over our heads, a structure to contain the love and chaos and joy.

I am thankful for all I've learned and some of what I've forgotten in this long, crazy year that ain't over yet.

I am thankful for the sound of the coffee grinder, every blessed morning.

I am thankful for the smell of my two-year old's hair when I hold him close and he nestles into my chest, the smell of the unbridled, overflowing love that he has for every second of every day.

I am thankful for the brilliant, sensitive, defiant, inquisitive, emotional, loving, playful face of my six year old son, whether it's grimacing in anger or bursting with happiness.

I am thankful beyond words for my partner in life, love and occasional misery, the wife I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.

I am thankful for my father, tough as nails, heart of gold, constantly fighting his way back and attuned to the simple joys of life at every moment.

I am thankful for my mother, the matriarch, the heart, the soul.

I am thankful for the friends who put up with my craziness, who give me comfort and strength and laughter and joy and then always piss me off one way or the other.

I am thankful for health of my family, and the wonders of medication that more or less keep my insanity in check.

I am thankful for Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon.

Most of all, I am thankful for the home I have to return to at the end of every day, good or bad, to find the warm, safe, glowing embers of love burning bright. God am I thankful.

Emerging, Briefly

I haven't written anything in awhile, mainly because I've been too preoccupied living the circumstances of my life, which has meant: accepting and then adjusting and then panicking and then accepting again and then having a wonderful time being unemployed and taking my kids to the park and then suddenly going back to work. Also, I've watched a fair amount of TV.

So I'm back at work after a two week interlude, back at the company where I spent 8 years before I left for my little Hollywood adventure, and I'm extremely grateful for it. I fully recognize how fortunate I (and my family) are to be employed again so quickly in this economy. My challenge now is to do my job well and maintain a healthy balance, continue to pursue a creative life on my own time, prioritize my mental and physical health and be fully present as a husband and father. Sounds easy, right?

Stay tuned for the continuing adventures...

Idiot Wind

"Oh the wind is lashing lustily
And the trees are thrashing thrustily
And the leaves are rustling gustily
So it's rather safe to say
That it seems that it may turn out to be
It feels that it will undoubtedly
It looks like a rather blustery day, today
It sounds that it may turn out to be
Feels that it will undoubtedly
Looks like a rather blustery day today."
--Winnie the Pooh

Today is not one of those days where I remind myself to see the good in everything and look up at the sky and smile. Today is another kind of day. A curl up on the couch and lick your wounds kind of day. Except I'm not doing that either. I'm not sure what I'm doing, really. Walking around as if everything makes sense, I guess. Showing up. Sometimes that's the best you can do.

The rare Southern California wind is blowing mightily, and I don't expect it to offer any answers. T minus two days until I am officially unemployed, and still uncertain about what comes next in a practical sense. I have never been able to stand the in-between days of my life, the not knowing, the neither here nor there. It's both a strength and a weakness, this aversion to being unmoored, and I recognize it as such. It's also, far too often, an excuse to give in to my own worst instincts and throw myself a pity party, which I'm not going to do this time.

I've been doing really well facing this transition so far, if I do say so myself. Focusing on the positive, plotting my moves in a level-headed fashion, seeing recent events as an opportunity to take control of things and structure my life and my thoughts in the right way. And I still have that attitude, all those things are still true. But today...ah, I don't know. Today I feel small, and weak, and a little bit useless. Expendable, I guess. Fuck that.

I think I need to get a little mad, actually. I need to rage a little bit, get it out of my system, feel some kind of stake in some kind of battle. Apologies in advance to whoever crosses my path today, and apologies in arrears to those who already have. Sometimes a brother's just got to work some shit out.

Couldn't Call It Unexpected

About a week and a half ago I had a really bad day.

Not a horrible day. Not even a day that ranks in my top ten worst days of all time. Nobody I love died or was diagnosed with anything or went insane or decided they didn't love each other. Nothing happened to my children, or my wife. My foundation was not shaken in any real way.

But this is what did happen: I lost my job, more or less, through no fault of my own. In a couple of weeks I, like 9.5% of the American workforce, will be unemployed. And that's not great news.

I'm not going to go into the details, for a lot of reasons, but suffice it to say that while I was of course extremely saddened by the situation, it also wasn't entirely unexpected nor, I honestly believe, is it entirely a bad thing. I've spent 4 hours a day in my car for the last eight months, arriving home to sleeping children and an exhausted wife far, far too many nights, and not entirely clear where the career path I had chosen was leading. I think, now, that I know exactly what I want and how I want to get there, which is something I definitely didn't know eight months ago. I'm grateful for that realization and believe I can put it to use, one way or the other.

So I haven't been blogging much lately. Instead, I've been "processing" this development, and preparing for whatever may come next. I've been updating my resume and writing cover letters and having lots of conversations with lots of people about lots of things. I've been trying not to panic, and, for now at least, pretty much succeeding. I haven't been second-guessing my choices, or wondering what would have happened if I hadn't made certain decisions at certain points in time. I've been telling myself the truth, which is that I'm extremely grateful for this professional experience, that I knew when it started it was an experiment. Sooner of later it would have been time for me to take the lessons I've learned and move on to the next thing, and it turns out that time is now.

Of course that realization is always easier when it's not being forced on you by circumstance, but that's the way life works sometimes. Most of the time, actually, in my experience. And I would like to have the strength, grace and confidence to recognize that reality and take it for what it is.

I read somewhere recently that when you boil it down, every decision we make is essentially a choice between hope and fear. Surely that's an oversimplification, but I find the notion appealing. I know, for certain, that I have chosen fear far too many times in my life, and I would like not to do that anymore. I would like have the strength to choose hope.

I don't intend to write about this much from now on, but it's an elephant in my particular room and I couldn't keep this blog going if I didn't at least express and process the news here to some degree. So there it is. Onward and upward.

People of Walmart

I was born and raised in Vista, California. It took me 23 years to get the hell out of that town, but only took seven more years for me to get back (Loretta). Six years ago my wife (who is also from Vista) and I, expecting our first child, left the wilds of urban San Diego and bought a house in our provincial, conservative, suburban, comfortable, troubled hometown, which we swore we'd never do. We're still there. We love the house. We love being close to our families. Sometimes we even think we've made our peace with Vista, and could just as easily stay here forever. But in our heart of hearts we both suspect that's probably not true.

I work in Los Angeles and have a four hour round-trip commute every day. If I'm going to keep doing this job, or another job in this industry, we know we'll have to move to LA sooner rather than later. We've been confronting that reality in our own ways a lot lately and I think it's safe to say that net-net we both see the idea as a positive one. We worry about uprooting the kids, we worry about not being as close to our parents, we don't like the idea of leaving a house we've put so much love and elbow grease into, but those are details rooted in the big Fear of Change that nags around the margins of any major life decision.

The truth is, we'd rather be in a real city, we'd rather our children grow up in a place where they're exposed to a wide variety of cultural stimuli, we'd rather be closer to the epicenter of the kinds of arts and ideas that our respective professional and creative lives are centered around. We could stay in Vista forever and be perfectly happy, of course--it's not a life and death decision. But we both think that's probably not the path for us, at least not right now.

It's more complicated than it should be, for me at least, because I still haven't quite worked out the way I feel about my hometown and what it represents. Some days it feels to me like a very sad place, a tree-lined pit of despair and pale compromise, a breeding ground for mediocrity and sameness from which no beauty or greatness could ever spring. That's how I saw it when I was 15, to be sure, and I cultivated that perception well beyond it's sell-by date, in large part to make me feel better about myself. But I'm not 15 anymore, I'm not holed up in my room on a Saturday night listening to Smiths records and reading Fahrenheit 451 and cursing the football team. I'm a grown-ass man.

And, yeah, OK, the town still doesn't have a bookstore. The closest thing we get to a foreign film at the local movie theatre is Inglorious Bastards. The biggest culinary news of the decade was the opening of the California Pizza Kitchen down the block. The sheriff's department seems to open fire on Hispanic males for the crime of walking out of 7-11. I could probably score crystal meth at the bus stop on the corner. There are 3 Walmarts within a 10 mile radius. I can't count the number of "Sportsmen for Bush" bumper stickers I *still* see on huge trucks tooling around town on any given day. That's all true.

But does any of that really matter? It's all in what you choose to see. Some days I can get over myself, I can put that 15 year-old kid's voice out of my head, and I can look around me and see real beauty and real depth and real love. I can see people who are just trying to get through the day and still taking the time to help each other. I can sit on my patio and listen to the birds and smell the neighbor's barbeque and in those moments there is nowhere I'd rather be.

And often I experience disgust and love for my town in almost the same moment. The other night I was coming home late, after a particularly stressful week that had kept me out of the house and away from my children far more than I would have liked. I promised my oldest son that I would bring home a very specific Star Wars toy that happens to be sold exclusively at Walmart. Please understand that my objections to Walmart are wide and deep, philosophical and visceral, political and sociological, deep-rooted and pervasive. In other words, I hate everything about Walmart and I have vowed repeatedly to never set foot in one ever again. But my kid wanted a toy, and my love for him trumps both my wavering principles and my weak stomach, so I sucked it up and made the stop.

I held my nose and looked at everyone in the store with my usual mix of disdain and condescension, secure somehow in the belief that I was out of my element, that I was not one of these people, that I was just a tourist with a mission. I found the toy, made my way past the throngs to the 10 Items or Less aisle and took my place in line. The man in front of me, who had a cart with what I'm sure were exactly 10 items, shot a glance back at me. What the fuck are you looking at, I thought. Mind your own business. And then he turned around again, and insisted in a gentle and kind tone that I go ahead of him. I protested but he wouldn't have it. Maybe he could tell by my body language that I was in some kind of pain and needed to get out as soon as possible. More likely, he was just being kind. He was just a gentle and dignified man committing a small and simple act of kindness. When I left I thanked him, and called him Sir, which is a word I never use, at least not in earnest. But I meant it. I was genuinely moved by the gesture, and I was filled with shame for my ugly thoughts about the people around me. You're a fucking snob, I thought to myself. Why do you need to dehumanize these people just to make yourself feel better about your own value? Why do you need to pretend that you're not one of them, that you don't come from where you come from? What fucking shame is there in going to Walmart, or living in Vista, or not wearing vertical stripes to try and hide your morbid obesity? What the fuck is your problem, chump?

Well, I know the answer(s) to that last one. I've got a lot of problems, clearly, and the vast majority of them, like this one, are entirely of my own making. And none of them are Vista's fault.

The Sporting Life

My father is, among many, many other things, a lifelong connoisseur of American sports. "Fan" is not the right word in his case, because that's not what he is. He doesn't participate passively and root feverishly, he immerses himself into the sports that he loves and studies their rhythms and properties, lets them seep into the fabric of his life, participates in them in any way he can. He was a great athlete in his youth, a Triple A pitcher for the Chattanooga Lookouts, the farm team for the Detroit Tigers, and a professional middleweight boxer for 12 fights. He coached baseball, football and basketball for years at the high school level, and when he retired from teaching and coaching he spent many years as a freelance sportswriter for local papers, attending every sporting event he could, whether it was professional baseball, college football, track and field or even junior college basketball.

He's 85 now and doesn't get around much anymore, but the first thing he does every morning is scour the sports page at the dining room table and plot out his television viewing for the rest of the day. I spend a portion of most Saturdays at my parent's house, visiting my mom and dad while the kids run around wreaking havoc, and now as ever the constant background noise of whatever college football game or baseball game happens to be on offers a kind of nostalgic and peaceful reassurance that I can't even describe. It is the sound of my father in his element, and I find it joyful.

I grew up immersed in this world and took to it with my own kind of enthusiasm. I was not an athlete, as anyone who's met me can attest, and though my natural interests from an early age tended more toward books and movies and fantasy worlds than baseball and football, I did inherit my father's ability to see the beauty and intricacy of sports. More than anything, though, sports offered a way for me to *experience* my father, I realize now, to participate in his life and his worldview in a way that is enormously important for children and their parents. He gave me the gift of the thing he loved, without ever forcing me to love it too. He just tried to show me why he loved it, I think, in so doing modeled for me how one can love something and take joy and comfort from it, how one can use the things they love to help them get through the day and better understand and participate in the universe around them. He did what all great fathers do, I think--he tried to teach me how to live not by dispensing wisdom or making rules, but by showing me what he believes the world has to offer.

I'm thinking about this stuff today for a lot of reasons, I guess. My father is getting older, my children are getting older, I find it harder to make room for abiding pleasures in my own hectic life. I don't really give much of my attention to sports anymore, not in a substantive way. I haven't been to a baseball game in a few years, I try to watch football here and there on a weekend but invariably find myself unable to really concentrate after a few minutes, I don't take the time to read the sports section of the newspaper very often. But it is always there for me, and I can return to the pleasure it offers at any time, for however long I like. And I do return to it, without even realizing it sometimes. I find myself stopping on the sports station while scanning the radio on my long drive every now and then, and I linger there, reassured and soothed by the banter. I am in those moments 11 years old again, drifting in and out of sleep in the passenger seat of my dad's old Chevy truck on the way home from another Padre game, my head on his shoulder as he drives, Jerry Coleman's voice on the post game show, a warm and tender feeling in my stomach, the lingering taste of salted peanuts still on my lips. I know I could leave the office tonight and drive to Dodger stadium (are the Dodger's in town tonight?) and buy a ticket and get a hot dog and have the time of my life, all by myself, if I chose to. That is a gift my father has given me, one of many. A way to be at home in the universe, wherever you are.

Anything at all

I haven't been writing about my progress in executing my food and exercise plan here lately because...well, what did my second grade teacher say when I told her how boring I thought the class was? If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

That notion never really took with me, so I may as well buck up and face the music. I've been more or less flailing the past few weeks when it comes to wellness. Good days here and there but more bad days than not. No exercise whatsoever, save chasing my kids around the park or the beach on the weekend. Periods of thoughtful food choices interspersed with mindless gorging. Too much drinking.

And the thing is, I don't feel particularly motivated to turn it all around right now. I want to, I know I should, I go through the motions of planning it out, and then...I give in. I get stressed out at work, freaked out about something else, blah blah blah...and then I comfort myself with food. I feel some pleasure, in that moment, and then I feel like complete shit afterwards.

And so that's the update. I don't know. I have all the tools at my disposal, I know what I need to do, and I'm just not really doing it. I'm disappointed in myself, I feel like a slug, I feel powerless and lazy and silly.

So here's what I'm going to do: go home and play with my kids. Eat a healthy dinner with my wife. Watch the season premiere of The Biggest Loser. Then get up tomorrow and try again.

Where We Come From

A confluence of events related to my family has put me in a very specific state-of-mind, and I've been distracted all weekend with thoughts about identity, about how we become who we are, how we are shaped by where we come from and what we don't know and what we fear and what we love. What happens to us with age, emotionally and physically, how we do or don't get away from where we come from and what that means for the people we become and the people we create and the people we love.

"We are what we think. With our thoughts, we make the world," so sayeth The Buddha, and it's hard to argue with that. Train your thoughts to make your world, and the world will be yours. But for most of us, as I think the Buddha also points out, that's really really fucking difficult to do. Some people are closer to it than others, either by conditioning or natural temper, and they exude a kind of strength and steadiness that draws others to them and radiates security and confidence. My father is like that, he knows and I think has always known intuitively how to control his mind and keep his light shining through all manner of pain and trauma, and I am inspired and awed by his example, especially now as he struggles more than ever with physical limitations but refuses to lose his will and optimism.

So I try to follow his example of stillness and strength, as best I can, and even though I face nowhere near the adversity he's had to battle, I've had nowhere near his success in keeping the demons at bay. But that's my story, often told, and it's not my story that's been running through my head this weekend, it's somebody else's. The details aren't important or appropriate to share, but the thoughts have led me to a few different conclusions.

First, EVERYTHING MATTERS. Everything we do, every day, all day, is enormously important, ripples through the universe in ways we can't possibly understand when we're in the moment. I have to remind myself to trust that, even when it feels like the opposite is true, to take myself and my actions seriously, and to therefore let my principles guide my thoughts and behavior. And for me, that means, very simply, to always act from love. That's it. Let love guide and instruct my every action, all day long. And that's very hard to do, for me. My enemy in this pursuit is not so much anger or hatred, though I have those impulses and though those things are certainly the opponents of love, but for me it's much more fear, laziness and selfishness, which are also the opponents of love. When I think about my footprint in this universe, I realize that the harm I have done has rarely come from malice or greed or hatred, but rather from from *not* acting on something when I should have. And the reasons I didn't, always, are rooted in fear and then manifested in either or both selfishness or laziness. And that's just as bad, in many cases, as actively seeking to do harm. You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution. Silence is consent.

The second realization I think I've come to (I don't know if you can call these things realizations, really--they're not new thoughts to me, but I'm feeling them in a way and with a clarity I haven't before) is that nobody ever really sees the whole board, nobody can ever really know what's in somebody else's heart, that it's completely impossible to see the world as it really is because the world is constantly shifting and moving under our feet, it's completely impossible to truly anticipate and understand and correct and console and guide outcomes and to really believe otherwise is a fool's errand, is monumentally arrogant and short-sighted, is probably something akin to unpardonable hubris and stupidity, and is something I've been guilty of pretty much my whole life. In the larger scheme of things, I know absolutely nothing. Not a fucking thing. Which makes the first point even more important, in my reckoning. If I can surrender the illusion of control, it might become possible to play my part in the universe conscientiously and with love and meaning. Everything matters because everything is part of everything else, and I can chart patterns and analyze results and learn from mistakes, but I'll never really know the way it all fits together, I'll never outsmart the universe. The best I can do, in the day that I'm in, is to act with kindness and love, to give off the kind of energy I want to get back.

And in that way I help create the place my children will come from, which is my greatest responsibility, my greatest weight, my greatest joy, my greatest challenge. Be who you are, my lovely boys. Be who you are.

sun, etc.

I'm bored with myself. I want a break from my head. I want to reset my thoughts. I'm tired of these cycles. I'm tired of glimpsing the man I want to be on the horizon and then scaring him away. I'm even tired of that thought, tired of the recognition that I'm my own worst enemy, tired of dragging myself into the crazy cave and then seeing the ray of light shining in and deciding it's all going to be ok. I'm tired of carrying this weight I've accumulated through sheer laziness and self-sabotage, it's making my back hurt. Literally and figuratively. I'm tired.

Welcome to this month's edition of Tom Battles His Demons and Tries to Shape His Ass Up, version 562. Welcome to the world's worst self-improvement blog, a neverending chronicle of false starts and trite epiphanies followed by flourishes of despair and melancholy. Rinse and repeat.

So this week, again, I press the reset button. I feel the sunshine on my face. I decide to grow up. Yadda yadda yadda. Try not to skip ahead. Maybe the ending will surprise you this time.

Anyway, what the fuck else am I going to do? Sit on the couch and watch Everybody Loves Raymond re-runs and play video games and entertain myself with snarky comments and get fatter and fatter until I'm one of those people on the discovery channel who have to be lifted out their house with a crane? I don't even like to play video games, and Everybody Loves Raymond sucks.

So this week I hereby resolve to ask the following questions of myself:

--Really? Are you even hungry? ARE YOU EVEN HUNGRY?

--What possible causative value can arise from thinking about this thing obsessively instead of doing this other thing ?

--Are you acting out of love?

--What are you children seeing when they look at you?

--Are you being useful?

--Are you having fun?

--Is this thing you're yelling about really as important as you think it is? Should you maybe just shut the fuck up and go take a walk instead of being this guy? Do I need to ask you that again? Because you're still yelling, so I think maybe I do. Let me rephrase that: Do you really want to be an asshole? Really?

Let the sunshine in!!!!!!!!

Make it New

"The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; it is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new."
--Norman O. Brown

In his famous Nobel prize acceptance speech, the American novelist William Faulkner said that all great writing is concerned with "...the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."

I haven't written anything here in almost two weeks because I take this blog seriously, I feel I would be doing myself dis-service to write anything inauthentic and every time I consider the notion of an honest accounting of my own heart's conflicts lately I can't quite face up to the challenge, I can't quite bring myself to take a breath and try and shape something into coherency, I can't stand apart from the thick of the battle and gain perspective. I am, in other words, going a little crazy, and I don't want to scare anybody by putting that on display. As Bob Dylan once sang: "If my mind's thoughts could be seen, they'd probably put me on the guillotine."

Which is not to say I'm having a breakdown or wandering around sobbing and cryptically quoting Bob Dylan and Faulkner to strangers at the supermarket, despite my occasional urges to do so. I'm going to work and laughing and watching Top Chef and playing with my kids and being normal old Tom for all the world to see. I'm keeping it together, and the only one who really knows how crazy I am right now is my poor wife, who is occasionally forced to bear the brunt of an outburst.

My battles are all interior and deep-seated and arising unexpectedly to take me by surprise. This is not the existential panic that is so often the background of my head, the who am I? latenight musings on mortality...it's both smaller and more pervasive than that, somehow. I feel discombobulated and vulnerable, unable to control any situation. I have what is to all appearances a minor staph infection on my leg that is responding well to medication, and I freak the hell out, sure that I'm going to die from antibiotic-resistant superbug, refuse to touch my children so as not to infect them, sleep in an air mattress in the computer room so I don't infect my wife, wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, call my wife five times a day to make sure the kids are okay. I've written about this before so I won't go into it too much again, but basically I'm in a state of intermittent panic and anxiety--what if this happens, what if that happens, assuming the worst, focusing on the direst possible outcomes, my mind racing with potential calamity around every corner. Like a scared little kid.

And as usual I am comforting myself with food. I am also laughing harder than usual, making more jokes, shaking more hands, in inverse proportion to my internal discombobulation, like the Wilco song: "How to fight loneliness...you laugh at every joke, drag your blanket blindly, and fill your heart with smoke" Ok, enough with the quotes.

Writing that down it sounds far worse than it is. I'm having beautiful moments of pure joy and happiness, too. I'm bored, too. I'm taking care of business, too. It's just that I'm also going a little crazy, too, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Stay tuned.

Welcome to Crazytown, Population: Me

Anxiety is creeping back into my head (my stomach, my fingers, my teeth) and setting up shop lately. It's a demon I battle, or don't, all the time. A few years ago I started having what I think were panic attacks on a fairly regular basis, at that time usually triggered by concerns about my children. I would obsess, endlessly, about possible ailments, scour google for symptoms, and turn every cough or bump or stomache into something that had to be monitored every second. I knew enough to know that my behavior wasn't healthy, for myself or my children, and after a particularly harrowing day when I had to flee my desk and take shelter in a conference room, hyperventilating and callling my wife every five minutes to check my kids for symptoms of some horrible malady I happened to read about that morning on WebMD, I admitted I was powerless and made an appointment with my doctor and got myself a ticket on the Lexapro train.

I also tried to address what I felt were lifestlye issues contributing to my state-of-mind. Way too much work stress, unhealthy lifestyle, guilt about not spending enough time at home, a kind of early (hopefully) mid-life career crisis, lack of exercise, internalizing and taking responsibility for other people's unhappiness, the constant, crippling fear of my own mortality. I took real steps to try to get my mind right: huge career change, renewed focus on nutrition and exercise, an intellectual exploration into my own thought patterns, a commitment to tell the truth to myself and really listen to the world around me, a rigorous accounting of how I actually spent my time and what it actually gave me back. And all those things helped, a lot. I genuinely feel like I've made progress toward becoming a healthier and more useful force in the universe. And I think I'm easier to be around, I think I'm connecting with people and a deeper and more meaningful level, and I'm generally not freaking out about every minor hiccup.

Except that I kind of am, again, now. The shooting, stabbing pains in my stomach, toes, chest, teeth have started to come back when one of the kids gets the flu. The sleepless nights, the strange panic out of nowhere triggered by the most minor thing, even a version of a full-blown panic attack sitting on a bench at Legoland with my kids a week or so ago, staring at every face that passed me by and seeing only aliens, feeling like a prisoner trapped in my own self-pitying skin, fully and completed alienated from the "normal" moms and dads and cousins blissfully buying cotton candy or laughing with each other, fighting my own contempt for their happiness, convinced that I am unable to function in peaceful day-to-day way, constantly uncomfortable in my own skin, a gift of heredity or karma or chance that I'm sure I've now passed on to my own children. Desperate for RELEASE, which I invariably seek in food, or alcohol, thereby further sabotaging the hard work I've started to do to get myself back where I need to be, spiraling further down into the selfish hole of alienation, building more walls between myself and the world around me.

And all the while murmuring to myself: KEEP IT TOGETHER, KEEP IT TOGETHER, KEEP IT TOGETHER. Don't give in to this. Figure it out. You're stressed out about work. You're stressed out about your son starting kindergarten. You're stressed out at the distant prospect of maybe having to move some day. You're stressed out about money. You're worried that you're not present enough for your wife and children. These are all real things, but they are manageable. They are the stuff of living your life, and you WANT TO LIVE YOUR LIFE. You just don't want to do the hard work of getting your mind straight, part of you is just desperately seeking an excuse, you're letting your laziness disguise itself as craziness, you're just putting on a mask. KEEP. IT. TOGETHER.

And that's what I'm trying to do. Looking for all the world, most of the time, like regular old Tom, quick with a joke or a rant or whatever you need, mostly calm, mostly happy. Fake it til you make it. KEEP IT TOGETHER.

And how are you?

Loving the Messenger

I work in the film industry.

It feels strange to write that down. I’m 35 years old and what I’ve really always wanted to do was make movies. I was the kid who memorized the listings in the TV guide and could tell my mom’s friends exactly what would be on every channel every night. I was the kid who stayed up late at night when I was 14 reading Pauline Kael anthologies. I was the kid who obsessively listed the top 10 Woody Allen films in his journal, changing the order every few months, experimenting with putting Zelig ahead of Purple Rose of Cairo and wondering if Annie Hall would always be number 1? (The answer, of course, is yes).

 But that kid became a man who didn’t make movies. That kid became a man who wrote press releases and then managed people who wrote press releases and spent years trying to convince himself that there was something beautiful and universal about video compression technology or semiconductor equipment manufacturing and it was enough just to love movies, to eat them and breathe them and dream them but to go to work all day and do something else.

 And then one day my friend, who unlike me had the courage to do what he loved a long time ago, invited me in. He said: just stop doing that. Come up here and make movies, with me. Like Peter Pan at my bedroom window: you don’t have to grow up. You never did, who are you kidding? I have some faerie dust, let’s go get Captain Hook. And I said yes.

So, now, I work in the film industry, seven months and counting. And I pinch myself when I wake up every morning and get in my car and drive for 2 hours and am still kind of amazed when I get here and find out that we’re still in Neverland.

My friend, Peter Pan, produced a movie recently called The Messenger, before I got here, when he was at a different company. I knew about the movie when he was making it, I heard the stories and understood what he was trying to do and rooted him on, from afar. I never read the script but I understood the context of the movie from my secondhand exposure to his world, which is now kind of my world too. And now the movie is here, done, finished, ready to be presented to the universe. And I just watched it.

 So maybe that’s all a way of saying that I may not be the most reliable narrator when it comes to describing this movie, if that’s what you’re after. I am probably not, strictly speaking, objective. But I am a guy who knows how to watch movies, and that’s the only way I can think of myself, even now. And I just saw a beautiful fucking movie.

The Messenger is about Casualty Notification Officers, which means the U.S. Army officers who have the unenviable job of informing loved ones when a soldier has been killed in combat. Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson play the two officers, and Samantha Morton plays a widow with whom the Ben Foster character makes a strong and unexpected connection.

The first thing to say about The Messenger is that it is a Great Movie. Let’s just get that the fuck out of the way so I can breathe a little. It is in there, now, in my consciousness, it is part of my cinematic memory, part of the language I will forever use to describe what is possible in the medium. It’s in the canon. That’s the level on which this movie demands to be discussed and evaluated.

 There is a quality that runs through all the movies I really love that I’ve never been quite able to exactly name. Sometimes I think it’s empathy, or compassion, but it’s more than that—empathy and compassion are products of it, but it’s something specific to the medium. The movies I love understand the power of the camera to put us inside a moment, and they take that power very seriously. Which means that every moment they offer is worth being inside of, if that makes any sense. Great movies drip with authenticity, even if those movies are fantasies, even if the worlds are invented and unreal. They capture a moment in movement, and by doing so elevate it to a kind of observed and therefore ever-so-slightly heightened reality, in which we recognize our world for what it is: complicated, intoxicating, brutal, beautiful, frightening, heartbreaking, holy.

That’s what The Messenger does, in what feels like a million different ways. I know that when people see this movie they will talk first about the acting, about Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton and Steve Buscemi and Jena Malone. And they will be right to do that, because the acting is extraordinary. And they will talk about the subject matter, of course, there will be a dialogue about how this is or isn’t a “war” film, and there will surely be an appreciation and analysis of the way the movie treats a very specific kind of grief and honor and survival. And that’s all there, too, and worthy of discussion. And the writing, the line the script so deftly walks when portraying scenes of unadulterated pain and grief, scenes where one false word would take you out of the film altogether and never let you back in, the pitch-perfect tone of the dialogue throughout the whole film. That’s there, too, and again it should be recognized.

But what I find extraordinary above all else about this film is the way it succeeds in creating an undeniable reality in which these scenes play out, in which these lives are lived. This is truly a movie that locates the universal in the specific, which I offer as the highest kind of praise. It’s an instinct we recognize from religion, I think, and of course from Art—a way of finding unity in the particularity of experience.

That particularity comes from the acting and the writing and the directing and the power of the content, but it also comes from what we’re shown and what we hear. When I think about the movie now I think about the sound of AM radios in cars bleeding into the half-heard music coming from inside a house as the car pulls up, the sound of children playing the way children actually play, the image of a little boy taking a yellow ribbon off a tree, the sight of a lone piano bench on a lawn next to a moving truck.

What all of that adds up to is a movie that breathes and sweats and laughs, a movie that is alive and asserting itself in front of you. And that can be uncomfortable, because we’ve grown used to thinking of movies as things that sit apart from our experience, things in which we escape. This movie offers no escape. It offers something much better, in my estimation: it offers an invitation. It offers a way in. This movie is a knock on the door.

Which is to say: the experience of this movie is inseparable from its subject matter. The Messenger is about a lot of things, on the surface. It’s about grief and survival and friendship and honor and kindness and redemption. It is unexpectedly funny and warm and intensely emotional and gripping at the same time. It is a movie about damaged people who have to deliver the worse news possible to other human beings, and it’s about what those people do to survive and how kindness and love are choices that anyone can make, at anytime, and it’s about how those choices are made, how we get to them, in very specific ways. It’s a movie about acts of courage and heroism on sunny summer days standing at clotheslines and sitting on fishing boats and drinking in neighborhood bars.

In other words, it’s a movie about how we live our lives, all of us, all of us who have experienced trauma and grief and sadness and taken solace in laughter and love and music and friendship, all of us who worry about how we will raise our children and help our friends and find meaning in our own lives. And in this sense it is an intensely optimistic movie.

 The title of this movie describes the main characters, of course, sets out for us what their jobs are in a stark and declarative way. But the title is also something larger than that, it is a description of a role that all the characters serve for each other to one degree or another, and it is a role that, at the risk of sounding too precious about it, we all play every day. We are all messengers, after all, and what matters is the message we bring. So implicit in the title is also a question: what message does The Messenger bring? The answer, I think, is a simple one, but one we all need to hear right now: Choose love. See it through. Feel the pain, keep your eyes open, see it through. And choose love.

minor output

I don't have the intellectual energy to sustain a narrative today, so I'm going with the tried and true "Notes and Observations" format that served genial small-town newspaper columnists so well for decades. Anyone remember newspapers? They're what movie gangsters would use to wrap up dead fish.

--I experienced what I can only describe as a minor panic attack on Friday evening at Legoland, which I think may be the perfect place for a minor panic attack. It's a long story  but the question that provoked it, and the question that remains in my head, a little bit, is: What if I'm not a good father?

--I never really responded to Peter Pan when I was a kid. It seemed too...cute, maybe? Too neat? I liked my fairy tales a little messier. But now, at 35, I love it. I guess that one isn't too hard to analyze, actually. 

--Sometimes movie trailers are so good that I don't want to see the movie because I know there's no way they can sustain the brilliance of the trailer. Two recent examples: A Serious Man by the Coen brothers and Where the Wild Things Are. I can't figure out how to hyperlink, but go to the Apple trailer site and watch them.

--I had a bad weekend with food, the kind of bad weekend that can re-awaken cravings I thought I had willed away, the kind of bad weekend that can erase progress if it's implications aren't resisted. I am resisting, albeit weakly. But I am resisting. 

--The cognitive marching orders I've given myself lately are: Call it what it is. Even if you're only talking to yourself. Always try to call it what it is. Don't let yourself pretend you didn't know what it was. Take away that option. 

--I'd like to think I'm magnanimous by nature, that I tend to always see the good in people. Lately I've made a kind of crucial discovery: that's not actually my nature. I'm kind of cynical and pessimistic in a lot of ways, instinctively, and I have to do a fair amount of work to get past that, and that's the reason I tell myself that I'm magnanimous by nature and I tend to always see the good in people. It's my way of working to get there. Fake it until you make it, as the group I should probably be a member of says. And it's true. I've made real progress exercising my empathy muscle, so much that it almost looks like it's always been there. 

--I can drink a frightening volume of single malt scotch in one sitting without getting too drunk. I could be a competitive scotch drinker.

--I feel that it's time to discover a completely new genre of music that I've never listened to and lose myself in it. Afro-jazz, maybe?

--I love to *come home*. It almost makes going away worth it. 

 

Execution Dependent

I've been working in the film industry for the past seven months and part of my learning curve has involved getting used to the industry-specific jargon that flies through the air in every meeting. Prior to this job, I spent 12 years working in technology marketing and communications, so I think it's fair to say that I've gained invaluable experience when it comes to wading through minefields of bullshit business-speak in search of a trenchant point. I'd have to guess that the world of high-technology pretty much sets the curve when it comes to private sector jargon creation, arguably coming in third overall behind academia and the military. But Hollywood is pretty high up on the list as well. For example, if a piece of dialogue is too obvious or cliched it's "too on-the-nose." That one tripped me up for awhile. How can something be "too" on the nose? It's either on the nose or it's not on the nose, which I think is the whole point of the original (non-bastardized) phrase. 

One piece of film industry jargon that I'm kind of obsessed with lately is the phrase "execution-dependent," which roughly means that the success of a given idea depends on how well the movie actually ends up being made. Now, at first glance it seems like everything should be execution-dependent, right? In order for the movie to be good, it has to be well-executed; well-written, well-directed, well-shot, well-acted, etc. But the coded information implicit in that phrase has to do with the bankability of a concept--it's a way of quantifying risk when people are deciding whether or not to invest millions of dollars in an idea. If something isn't execution-dependent, it means the idea is so marketable and commercially appealing that even the worst version of the movie it inspires is still likely to be successful. Kick-ass muscle cars that turn into huge robots, plus a super-hot chick, for example, ain't that execution dependent. It's straight cash money dollar bills. A Dickensian tale about an orphaned Indian slum boy who flashes back on his life story while playing a TV game show that he hopes will reunite him with his long-lost slumgirlfriend, on the other hand, is pretty damn execution dependent.

The way I've heard the phrase used most is an expression of concern about the level of talent required to make a given project successful. Rather than saying "I'm not confident that your team can pull this movie off," you say something like "it's a great concept, we'd love to give you a bunch of money to go make it, but it's a little too execution-dependent for our risk portfolio." 

I am both repelled and excited by this phrase and it's repercussions, is my point, and I've found myself thinking about other areas of my life in a similar way. My grand change-of-life diet and nutrition plan, for example, is extraordinarily execution-dependent. Conceptually, I'm on solid ground. I've got it down, philosophically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. I know exactly what I need to do and at all looks beautiful and liberating and life-changing from here. The problem, such as it is, comes in the execution. Ain't that a bitch.

I haven't exercised this week, in other words. I worked out three times last week and I'm still eating the right things and I'm losing a bit of weight, but I can't seem to get myself on track to take it to the next level with real rigor. Discipline!! Self-control!! Get your ass on the treadmill! Execute!!

 

Aren't We All

I'm keeping the faith. Hit the gym again today and sweated my ass off on the elliptical, then almost pulled a muscle in my shoulder patting myself on the back. Eating the things I should be eating, not eating the things I shouldn't be eating. Not obsessing about the scale, but weighing myself every morning to chart my progress.

Also: Since I've come back from vacation, by and large I've been  grumpy as hell. I have cruel thoughts all the time about perfectly nice people and on occasion I find myself actually giving voice to those thoughts without even realizing it. I'm quick to feel slighted and disregarded and superior in most conversations, and I struggle to recognize and transcend those instincts. I am easily overwhelmed by a kind of lazy cynicism, or maybe it's laziness disguised as cynicism, that seeps into and affects the quality of my thinking and intellectual and creative output. I am not suffering fools gladly these days, as my mother used to say. And I'm really tired, all the time. I'm seeing difference, not unity. I'm feeling feisty and combative. 

And somehow I think it's necessary for me to feel all these things right now in order to get myself to something else, if that makes any sense. I'm inventing a running narrative, as we all do, all the time, and right now my narrative is the kind of  shitty, self-reflexive, snarky black comedy that I would have no interest in actually sitting through. Except that I am sitting through it, because it's all around me.  I'm working something out, I think, and I kind of don't want to rush it. I don't want to nurture it either--I don't want to actually *be* this guy for any prolonged period of time--but I don't want to be who I'm not either. I want to earn a positive outlook, not try one on like a new hat. This is how things tend to work for me--everything kind of seems shitty even though I know it really isn't and then suddenly everything doesn't seem so shitty anymore. Or else it still does, which means it actually was shitty and it's time to change something. That's not what's happening this time, I don't think, but either way, something is propelled. It's all a step forward.  

Right?

But Seriously...

I've decided that the "easing into an experiment" phase of my weigh-loss plan has ended and the regimented, disciplined, get-on-the-scale-every-morning-and-chart-your-progress phase must begin. The vacation is out of the way, the summer birthdays and 4th of July parties are out of the way, the grief pangs for the loss of fried cheese chocolate goodness is (mostly) out of the way, and I'm fresh out of excuses.

So here's what it's going to be, for now: 45 minutes of exercise four times a week--lunchtime cardio or swimming at the gym on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and one hour long walk, hike, swim or elliptical workout at home on the weekend. No red meat, no fried foods, limited starches, lots of water. Focusing on low-fat meals and small fruit or grain snacks. Wheat toast with a dab of peanut butter for breakfast; bannana or yogurt for a mid-morning snack; a sensible lunch of either chicken with brown rice, turkey sandwich, grilled chicken salad; pretzels or a granola bar for an afternoon snack; and a sensible dinner (light pasta, fish, chicken, etc.) along with a salad at night. Frozen yogurt or smoothies when I need a pick-me-up. Lots of coffee, still, always, lots of coffee. Beer on the weeknights, permission to drink the hard stuff on the weekends. Not ready to give up alcohol just yet.

That's how I'm going to do it. I'm not counting grams of fat or calories, I'm not going to be religious about making sure I get enough of this or not too much of that. I'm going to stick to relatively healthy foods that I know I like in moderation and force myself to be vigilant about an exercise regimen. I will slip, on occasion, and if I have uncontrollable insane urges I will give in and not beat myself up about it. My watchwords are BALANCE, MINDFULNESS and SELF-CONTROL. Listen to my whole body, not just my stomach. My stomach is a greedy bastard, and it lies. 

I started yesterday, and so far so good. I'm going to try to stick to my original plan and post something here every day to help keep myself accountable. Full speed  ahead.

Somewhere Else

Back from paradise. I can't say I completely maintained a healthy lifestyle on our 10 day Hawaiian jaunt, but I didn't completely lose control either. I started out strong but by the end of the trip I was indulging in teriyaki beef and macadamia nuts and two days into the mainland return I'm struggling to pull myself back onto the wagon. I don't feel like applying rigor and mindfulness to my habits, I'm tired and still half in vacation mode and I'm craving a jolt of energy, fun, adventure, edge. I'm not ready to come home and start acting like a grown-up again. How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house!

Except that it is. And I love it. 

I'm just drifty and wistful. I had a disturbing dream the other night in which I was saving an abandoned baby from a crackhouse and giving a eulogy at a friend's funeral wearing only my bathrobe. I haven't been able to shake the feeling it left in me for the past few days. Hopeless and resigned and distant, the kind of sadness that is a prelude to detachment, like a shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders, a "what are you gonna do?"

I don't want to get old. I don't want to watch myself from up on high. I don't want to shake my head in resigned bemusement. I want to be here, where I am. I don't like feeling this way. I think I need to get really drunk.

Aloha Interlude

We leave for Hawaii tomorrow, for 10 days, and not a minute too soon. I hope not to open the computer much on our trip so I most likely won't post anything for the next week and a half, if all goes well.

And I haven't written much this week, either, mainly because I haven't let myself calm down and breathe much, which was part of the initial purpose of the blog. All in all, though, I'm doing allright. I'm maintaining with food and have gotten past several big moments of temptation and I've been in a good groove with most other things. I'm moving along, in other words, and working hard to keep going, and cannot wait to lose myself in my family and the beach and fresh pineapple juice and maybe even actually read a book or two (!) I have to get past the flight anxiety and my superstitious karmic pessimism, ie. the idea that anytime I actually let myself look forward to something it will be horribly ruined as a lesson in humility and a reminder about the how the universe actually works--but other than that I'm primed and ready to go.

Couldn't Call it Unexpected

I ate too much this weekend. In fact I think I might have twisted my ankle falling off the wagon. Thankfully the wagon was going pretty slowly, as I didn't build up much real speed in the last few weeks, but I tumbled off it pretty solidly all the same. It's not that I indulged *all* my appetites or set myself back too far--I opted out of birthday cake not once but twice, for the the love of Christ--but I did let myself have a taste of chaos again, and I stopped being actively mindful about my food choices. But the weekend is over and I'm crawling my way back to the straight and narrow, bloody but unbowed. It could have been worse, and in fact usually is, as far as my indulgences go, so I'm going to avoid the cycle of self-pity and defeat that usually leads me to abandon a lifestyle change after the first bump in the road. I saw this coming, I know what it's about, and I don't need to let it stop me.

I don't actually feel too guilty, in other words, which I'm taking as a good sign, and I've done just fine getting back in control today. But I'm also getting bored. And that's a big part of the problem too. What I don't fully understand just yet is why I feel so much happier when I'm a little bit out of control. Because I do. Immaturity? Insecurity? Laziness? Or just something about my temperment? Or maybe it's purely sensory, which underscores again for me the fact that the only way to really evolve this experiment to the next level is to start adding real structured physical activity to the mix. I need to release something with exercise, as much to keep myself challenged and interested as anything else. But I'm really fucking tired and lazy and I just don't want to think about going to the gym or taking a long walk, and we're leaving for Hawaii in less than a week anyway, and there's all that work to do, and my time with my family is so precious as it is, and...and...and...ugh.

In Dependence

I've now gotten through a solid two weeks of not eating like a 10 year old let loose at a fried cheese buffet, and though I've definitely hit ups and downs it feels like I've stabilized a bit. My appetite has adjusted, finally, to the portions and frequency of my dining, which is just a way of saying I'm not completely starving all the fucking time, though I'm still far from satiated. I haven't exercised much, at least not in a methodical or organized way, but I have made a point to walk more and consciously be more active in my daily life. I've lost a bit of weight, but I'm trying not to focus on that, both because I know it's easy to drop pounds when you first start and because I want to remind myself that I'm doing this as a lifestyle change, not a game to hit a certain number. I've even gotten through a few social settings without throwing myself off-track, and have managed the trick of moderate temporary indulgence followed by a quick return to mindful food management. So far so good, in other words.

But here's the thing: my routine is about to get thrown way off track. It's a holiday weekend, for one thing, and my next few days will be littered with food-filled get-togethers and friends in from out of town, all of which are big triggers for me to move into celebratory-cum-nihilism-life's-too-short-let's-savor-its-sweet-nectars mode. Even more daunting is our upcoming trip to Hawaii, a scant 9 days away, which stands as a much-needed respite from our busy, hectic schedules. It's a relaxation measure, in other words, and this kid just don't know how to relax without a bag of chips or an extra-large pizza. I suppose I could try to score a big bag of weed on the island, but ultimately that would just exacerbate my desire for the aforementioned items. It's sad, but it's absolutely true, and I'm trying not to freak out about it. My wife is fully supportive of this lifestyle change and certainly will not introduce any temptation, and we're going to be spending a significant amount of time with two of our best friends, who understand probably better than anyone else I know the struggle I'm facing. So that provides a modicum of comfort, a quantum of solace if you will, but I can't say I'm brimming with confidence that I'll survive the trip with my new lifestyle intact. As I said before, I'm trying to eat like a normal person, and even normal people throw caution to the wind when they spend a week lounging on the beach and sipping Mai Tais.

So I guess it's time to get past the normal-person stage. My relationship to food is far from normal, in truth, and if I'm going to make this work I have to accept and adjust to that fact. I need to put some measures in place and be diligent about continuing on this path, and I think I will. I believe I can. But it ain't going to get any easier.

My Sweet Love

"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,--and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings'."

--William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

I've written a lot here about my own struggles to recognize and control my own self-destructive habits and patterns. I think about those things a lot. I think about how hard it is to understand what I really want, how hard it is to figure out how to get it, how hard it is to be useful and hopeful in the world. And those things are all true, for me. But what is also true, what is more true, in fact, is that I am deliriously, unbelievably, bursting-at-the-seams happy where it really counts. At the end of the day there is one simple reason for that, there is one thing I know with absolute conviction deep down in my soul, one thing that offers daily proof to me that the universe is more intense and beautiful than we can ever know. That one thing is a person, my soulmate, my best friend and deepest companion, my beautiful, incandescently graceful wife, Dawn Marie Buettner-Huntington.

My wife saved my life. I believe that, in ways that I can't even express. And she's kept on saving it every day since we met, just by being who she is. Who is she? Well, it's true to say that she's beautiful, kind, loving, creative, nurturing, charming, funny, that she's a wonderful mother and a source of constant, unconditional love and support, that after almost ten years of marriage and almost twenty years of friendship she still surprises me on a daily basis with hidden reservoirs of strength, vulnerability and emotion, that she inspires me to try to become the best version of myself, that she charts her own course in the world by instinct and will, that she possesses a kind of stiff inner compass that always points the way forward, that just thinking about her face sitting here at my desk makes me smile. All those things are true, and more. But the thing that saves me, every morning, the thing that really preserves my faith and optimism about the universe, is that there exists another person in this world who is willing to dedicate every fiber of her being to building a foundation of love and joy by my side. She is in it, in other words, until the end, and she is going to do the work, no matter how hard it is, to make sure we get to the end. And that's all it takes, because once that woman's mind is made up it's all over, jack. *Nobody* works harder than her, nobody possesses a stronger will or a more focused determination to complete a task. And one of the tasks she's chosen to complete is to construct a beautiful family, fueled and guided by love, and by some insane stroke of cosmic luck, she's chosen to do it with me.

That is the reason, less I overstate my neurosis, that I am writing a blog and taking walks around the block to deal with my issues rather than shooting heroin or jumping off buildings or muttering nonsense on a street corner somewhere while the birds shit on my head. I believe in love, I believe in hope, I believe in the power of human will and the strength of kindness and compassion because I SEE IT EVERY DAY.

Happy birthday, Dawnie Marie. I love you.

I Want You to Hit Me as Hard as You Can

I haven't written much this week, even though I initially vowed to write something every day. If I had stuck to that vow the last few days you would have seen posts that look like this:

l[FJKHASEL'FKAJSDF[OKASJF[OASIFNAS[ODKVM AW[IODJSVAWDF;LASKDFJASL[DKFJASDLFKJAS
FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKASDFJASDL;KFJASDFLKAJSDFAL;SKJDOIKKKOPLLKJN454LKJ!!!!????!!!!!!!!

...because that's more or less how I've been feeling. I've been struggling to stay on the straight and narrow and keep my mind right, and it's been a lot harder than I thought it would be. I haven't been able to focus, I haven't been able to carry on particularly meaningful conversations, and I've wanted to beat the living shit out of everyone I know at one point or another, most significantly including myself, Edward-Norton-in-Fight-Club-style.

Now, on Friday afternoon, I feel like I've achieved something monumental because I've gotten through five straight days without a cheeseburger or a candy bar or a coke or a piece of pizza or a bowl of ice cream or a burrito or an Egg McMuffin or a donut or...

You get the picture. All I've really done this week is eat food like a normal person. That's it. I haven't really exercised, I'm not counting calories or fat or keeping a food journal, I'm not making sure I get enough greens or fruit and not too much starch and all that. I'm just not eating really bad things that I really like, and I'm not eating too much of anything. And that alone has been enough to completely alter my reality and throw my mind and body into utter turmoil. That just shows how far gone I've been for the past few years and how much I have left to do.

But I'm a little closer, this week, to getting where I want to be. I'm closer than I was last week. I haven't defeated my demons, but I've decided fight them, and that's something. The casualties of that battle this week, in no particular order, were: my peace of mind, my productivity, my ability to see anything but the absolute worst in everyone I encounter, my ability to get a full night's sleep and my ability to provide the necessary emotinal care and feeding to my family.

So here's to next week.

Didn't Even Have to Use My AK

Today was a good day. I took it as it came. I felt even-keeled and clear-headed, at times even confident. I felt like a grown-up, I felt like I could handle what was in front of me. I haven't felt that way in awhile. It felt nice. I'll recognize it as fleeting and I'll try not to be too upset when I fall apart tomorrow or the next day, but today, I'll take it.

I was still incredibly fucking hungry today, all day long, don't get me wrong. But it felt like...background noise, if that makes sense. I felt like I could just recognize it and then move on with my business. I know I won't feel like that every day, but just knowing that I can feel like that every once in awhile is something. It wasn't a great day, but it was a good day, and there's still an hour or so left so I know anything could fuck it up and I ain't trying to tempt the Gods or anything, so I think I'll just stop there. Goodnight.

Appetite for Exhaustion

I had a bit of breakthrough this weekend in my quest to better understand what's really driving my own negative behavioral patterns, aided in large part by a friend who reached out and shared some incredible insights. And while I feel a certain relief at a glimpse of clarity, I'm also completely fucking terrified by it. This little experiment I've been engaging in with myself is starting to get pretty godamned serious, and I think I'm really approaching put-up-or-shut-up-time. This promise I've made to myself to tell the truth, to report what I think I see and by doing ask the universe for help is bearing fruit in it's own way, and it's not an experiment any more. It's shaking something fundamental loose from my consciousness and I'm getting a glimpse of how serious that is, how much work it will really take to see it through, how high the stakes are. And I freaked myself out.

So today I'm trying to take deep breaths and take it all in. Today my goal has been a simple one: be aware of my choices. Say this sentence in your head: I am hungry because I feel vulnerable. I am hungry because I feel overwhelmed. I am hungry because I want to escape this task in front of me. I am hungry because it's lunchtime and I haven't eaten since breakfast. Oh, wait, ok, eat. Now where were we? I am hungry because I'm not used to having turkey and brown rice for lunch and my mouth doesn't believe this is all it gets. I am hungry because all this thinking about why I'm hungry is making me fucking hungry. Take a walk. I'm hungry because I just took a walk and I want to reward myself. Ok, eat an apple. I am hungry because that apple tasted like shit. I am hungry because WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE SOMEDAY. I am hungry because being hungry reminds me that I am who I am. I am hungry because I am overwhelmed.

Ok. Ok. Ok. I am hungry today. Ok.

Elephant

I started this blog as an outlet to force myself to be honest and process difficult thoughts, a kind of you-can-run-but-you-can't-hide-journal. I'm not sure that's what it still is. I enjoy writing in it, I think it has been useful to me in a number of ways--it's helped me organize my thoughts and I think it's improved my thinking and probably improved my writing in some ways. But I'm writing less and less about the things that are wrong with me. I don't think I'm being less honest than I intended, but I'm probably being honest about different things than I should be honest about in order to help myself. On a certain level I think I've started to try to impress the people I imagine reading when I write a post, which is not what I want to be doing. I want to use this as a forum to face the hard things I've been avoiding, not another way to avoid them and feel better a out myself.

The overwhelming elephant in the room that I'm trying in various ways not to confront is my atrocious physical health. I'm in real physical danger due to my unchecked obesity and I've failed for years to honestly address it. If I don't take real, drastic action now then I'm playing Russian Roulette with my life, and by extension the lives of my family and everyone who loves me.

I'm taking real steps, starting today, to get serious about my health. I'm approaching it with an open mind and a dedication to rigor and discipline. I'm probably going to be writing a lot more grumpy and boring posts about food urges and how hard it is to force myself to excercise in the next few weeks, is my point, and less long-winded whimsical meditations on family and the meaning of work. So I apologize in advance if it gets boring.

Guilt and Consequences

I drove out to the lovely Torrance Highway Patrol office this afternoon to pick up a copy of the official collision report regarding my recent traffic accident. The report, among other things, is a document of blame that exists to declare which driver was at fault. I was rear-ended on the freeway, completely blindsided, and was assured by everyone I spoke with afterwards that there was no way I could have avoided it. But for the last 3 weeks I've been obsessed with the possibility that I somehow did something wrong. A weird kind of guilt has festered and weighed on me in a completely ridiculous way. Even if I was at fault, somehow, it wouldn't really matter in the larger scheme of things. Nobody was hurt, everyone was insured, and surely if I had contributed to the collision in some way it wouldn't make me any less decent or valuable in the universe. It all has to do with some deep-rooted insecurity I have about my ability to function as an able-bodied, responsible adult in the world. I still see myself as an overgrown kid playing grown-up, wearing somebody else's leather shoes, using somebody else's disposable razor, depositing somebody else's checks in somebody else's bank account. I await the inevitable crack in the facade, the moment of unveiling when those close to me finally point and say "Who the fuck does this guy think he is? You're not fooling anybody, bub. Back to the kid's table." And I recognize that feeling to be as much wish-fulfillment as it is real insecurity. I don't want to be an adult! I don't want to have to think about credit card balances or cholesterol or living wills or ironed shirts or hotel reservations or any of that shit. I want to be at the kid's table, laughing until snot comes out of my nose and making fun of the grown-ups and sneaking a piece of pie before dinner. How the fuck should I know how to drive a car on the freeway? I don't have time for that shit. I've got branches to swing from.

But I am, as I heard someone say the other day, a grown-ass man. And I can take care of my shit. I'm not Fredo Corleone. I welcome my responsibilities, on an intellectual level, I want to honor them and I want to enjoy the life I have constructed for myself, because it is beautiful. But I also want to be able to shrug off the weight when I feel it pressing down on me, I want to keep it all in balance and *always* be able to take illicit joy in an afternoon alone at the movies or an inappropriate joke. I want perspective, in other words. Who the fuck doesn't?

Anyway the report absolved me completely. Party P-1 was at fault, and party P-2, yours truly, was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I felt giddy when I read the report on the bench outside the office, I felt liberated. That's completely insane, I realize. But I kind of don't mind it. I'll take my liberation where I can find it, even if I have to invent oppression to get there.

The Highway Patrol office walls were filled with pictures of officers who were killed in the line of duty, with a brief description of how long they served and how they died. The picture above the collision report window was of a man who died in 1972, a year before I was born. He looked unbelievably young in his uniform, like a 15 year old kid dressed up as a cop for Halloween. The caption said he was killed when he responded to an accident call and arrived at the scene to find a horse trailer overturned, with three horses inside. The horses were injured and apparently going wild, and another officer was instructed to go inside the horse trailer and shoot them. The first bullet missed a horse, ricocheted off the trailer and struck the officer standing outside, killing him instantly.

I read it twice to make sure I understood the details. It's got to be one of the strangest, saddest, weirdest things I've ever heard about in my life. My elation at the absolution provided by the collision report was short-lived and tempered somehow by that photograph, and I keep imagining the scenario in my head. What happened after the guy got shot? Did they go back in and shoot all the horses? Did the horses get out and run down the freeway and get crushed by a semi? What happened to the other officer who fired the shot, how could he ever have gotten over that tragedy and gone on with his life? Did the guy have a wife, kids, parents? How did they react to the incredible circumstances of his death? Was it his it his first week on the job? Did he ever even really get to be a Highway Patrol Officer before that moment?

It doesn't matter if I think I'm a man or a child or a mongoose. The universe is deep and unknowable and harsh and beautiful. Until it isn't.

Work Beats Jail

When I was a kid I witnessed a knock-down drag-out argument between my mother and her younger brother that left quite an impression on me, one in a series of observed blow-ups that dot the landscape of my youth and doubtless did much to form my worldview, and not necessarily in a bad way. This particular event occurred when I was probably 12 or 13, one of those glorious endless summers when I had all the time in the world to explore the universe, lose myself in books, movies and the Pacific Ocean. My uncle would come down from Northern California and rent a beach house for a few weeks and everyone in the extended family would gather there, an open house overflowing with kids and adults and food and conversation. On one of those evenings my mother and her brothers were talking and singing and reminiscing, a few of them were certainly drinking or imbibing other aids to modern living, and the conversation somehow turned to the topic of Work, with a capital W. My mother, a high school teacher who has devoted her life to helping children and has inspired and changed countless young lives through her passion and dedication, made the statement that she "loved" her job. Her younger brother, then as ever a kind of mythical figure in my life, a brilliant, poetic, raucous, free-spirited and extraordinarily kind and sensitive man who also possessed a keen and biting wit and an easily ignited Irish temper, took issue with her proclamation and ridiculed the notion that anyone of substance could truly "love" their job, no matter what it was. Work, to him, was at best a necessary evil in the world and at worst a soul-crushing institution designed to destroy the spirit of humanity. He was also, at that time, a teacher, and a damned good one, but he made no bones about the fact that any good he was able to do in his job was in spite of it being a job, not because of it. To "love" your work was to him to admit defeat, to cede control, to shut the door on the wild and beautiful spirit of the world outside the closed parameters of your (then) 40-hour-a-week obligation. I remember him saying how horrendous he thought it was that the first question anyone asks when they meet a new person is "What do you do?", which really only means "What method do you employ to acquire money in the world?" Why is it that we have decided that particular question defines us? Why do we not ask "What do you love?" "What do you read?" or even "What do you eat?", "What are you afraid of?", "Where have you been, what have you seen?" You may have the right job, and if so good for you, you're luckier than most. But you don't fucking love your job. Stop kidding yourself, and stop devaluing the very notion of love by saying that.

It was a quite a scene, and it did not end well. My mother, no shrinking violet to be sure, was reduced to tears, and everyone else chimed in on one side or the other, and the night got out of control. It blew over, as those family fights always did, and there were plenty more summers and plenty more arguments to come. I, as a kid who loved his mother, was on one hand appalled and upset to see her attacked and felt horribly for her. But on the other hand I was quite taken by my uncle's ideas, and they stayed with me. A few weeks later my uncle sent my mother a letter, a beautifully written quasi-apology that continued the discussion in a much gentler manner. I don't remember all of the details but I do remember the last line. When he was young my uncle was a hell-raiser, and he spent a few months in a juvenile lock-up in Campo in East San Diego. He wrote vividly about the details of that experience and ended the letter by saying "Work beats jail, but not by much."

He had seen both work, jail and some third thing that was a life of his choosing, and he knew what he preferred. I can't help thinking now that I came into the game with a chip on my shoulder, in part because I took some of those notions to heart in a kind of idealized way when I was far too young to truly understand what they meant. My uncle did not choose to hate his jobs, and he surely would have been happier if he could have not hated them. My mother truly did love her job, and I don't believe she had to give up anything deeper or more valuable in order to do that. Both things are true. But I'm afraid I romanticized the idea that work is a "necessary evil" in a way that has done no favors to my intellectual or emotional development. I don't think I've earned that realization, the way my uncle did, I think I chose it as a kind of pose and have used it to define my own identity and set myself apart from the life that I am actually living. And that doesn't feel like bravery, the way it did when I saw it in my uncle. From this vantage point, looking in the mirror, it feels like fear.

I am 35 years old now, and I've never been to jail. But I've been to work, and I've not been to work. And I prefer the latter, without reservation, but I don't want to believe that *has* to be true anymore. I don't have to love my job, but I don't have to resent it either. I can try and make it part of a larger journey, I'd like to think, I can try and use it to find a way to be useful, to give and receive the energy of love, the way my mother has done her whole life. It's worth a shot, anyway.

My uncle died of lung cancer at the age of 55 in 1996, when I was 23 years old, and his death left a huge void in our lives that has not been filled. His legacy is one of love, kindness, beauty, art and wakefulness. He was courageous and sensitive and tortured, in his way. And as is true of all my heroes, I find him when I need him. I need him now, as much as I ever have. And here he is, slightly different than he ever was before, rolling around in my head, helping carry my thoughts where they need to go. Not this, that, or maybe that, or maybe this. Keep asking. Keep feeling. Keep laughing, and fighting, and then apologizing and admitting you know nothing except what you know and you didn't mean to hurt anyone, but what you really meant was this, and this is why. Keep your heart open, but call bullshit when you see it. Especially if it's in yourself.

Beaten Path

My weekends go by too fast these days. There's a line connecting Friday evening to Monday morning. It feels slack and loose for about an hour, and then suddenly I've pulled it tight and run smack into the week without even knowing it.

I had a bit of an abbreviated workday on Friday and took the boys to a local park in the afternoon that has a small walking trail. The summit of the small hill provides a breathtaking view of the The Olive Garden and Marshall's, our finest local merchants, so it's really not to be missed. We wandered up the trail together, meandering and poking trees with our sticks and I'm sure we cut quite a figure: two tow-headed rug rats bursting with energy trailed by a sweaty fat 35 year old in King Size Dockers, clutching a diaper bag and a Diet Coke.

But we had a nice little adventure in our way, and it felt good to get the blood flowing a bit and look at things from a slightly different angle. At the end of the walk i thought: I can do this, I can be a normal guy who goes on walks with his kids and points out the different kinds of trees, I can sit on a bench at the end of the trail and breathe in deeply and watch my kids on the playground and take in the moment. I need to remember that I can do this, that these simple moments are constantly available to me and are worth seeking out. The way to slow the weekend down is to slow myself down, and sitting here on Saturday morning I vow to give it my best shot for the next 48 hours.

You're Going the Wrong Way!!

Driving home from the airport last night, it took me 10 minutes to realize I was heading in the wrong direction on the freeway. I was in National City before it dawned on me that I should be on the 5 North, not the 5 South.

This afternoon at work I dialed my home number when I meant to call somebody else and was startled to hear my wife answer on the other end.

I routinely fall asleep in my living room watching TV after the kids have gone to bed, then wake up at 3:30 AM with a sore neck and a headache and drag myself into a bed that by that point is invariably already filled with one grown adult and two young children.

I thought I would be able to work from home tomorrow but I can't, I have to drive up to LA for a meeting. This weekend we have a five year old's pool party to look forward to on Saturday. And another five year old's pool party to look forward to on Sunday.

I'm fucking tired. My wife is even more fucking tired. Our kids, it seems, are never tired.


I'm not complaining, don't get me wrong. Alright, I am complaining. I'd like to have a nice romantic dinner with my wife. I'd like to get a full night's sleep. I'd like to spend a lazy Sunday reading the New York Times from cover to cover.

WAH!! POOR ME!! I'M SO TIRED!! WAH!!

Yeah, I feel like I shouldn't be complaining. It feels self-indulgent and ungrateful and juvenile. I'm not suffering, I'm just whining, and I feel like I have to temper those complaints with a declaration that I'm happy about the choices I've made. I am grateful for my life and I don't take it for granted. I want my children to healthy and young and crazy and demanding, I want to be challenged by my job, I want to be busy.

But I'm just really fucking tired today. And if that's my biggest complaint, that I really should be grateful, I suppose. So take this as a giving of thanks rather than a complaint, then. Take it however you want. Take it up your ass for all I fucking care.

Whoa, where did that come from? Sorry. I'm going to go ahead and not delete that sentence because it just made me laugh out loud. I can't offer profundity every day.

Did I mention I was tired?

Ground Control

I'm traveling today so I don't have time for a long post. Sitting in the airport bar 10 minutes away from boarding my flight home from SFO. Double Jack and Coke, thank you very much. And me without my vicodin. Can I squeeze in one more drink before the flight? Who am I kidding, I could squeeze in three. Room for lots of Jacks in here, the more the merrier!

I am not a good flyer, to say the least. I've gotten better over the years, out of necessity, but all that really means is that I've gotten better at concealing my sheer terror. In addition to my mental anxiety I face the very real physical reality of being a HUGE man attempting to squeeze his HUGE ass into a seat made for anorexic toddlers. As always I'm praying for an empty flight. Pity the poor motherfucker who gets seated next to me if it's full.

Last call, time to drink up and face the music. What a wimp I am.

Anger, Management

I grew up in a very loving household overflowing with laughter and energy and encouragement. We also had more than our fair share of yelling, slamming doors, the occasional flying object or punched wall, cars peeling out of driveways, etc. One was not taught to hold back.

I took me awhile to understand that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily operate that way, that sudden dramatic outbursts aren't always taken in stride and shrugged off as necessary venting by people who aren't used to being yelled at, to understand the unintentional harm my anger and aggression could inflict on people I love and respect. I'm still trying to strike the right balance, trying to temper my temper without sublimating my emotions, trying to unlearn what needs to be unlearned and keep what needs to be kept. Trying to find the wisdom, as they say, to know the difference.

I had the good fortune to meet an earnest, intelligent, open and spiritual person today who exudes a kind of even-keeled stillness, a man who has clearly dedicated his life to trying to learn how to live and seems to have found a way to use his work to explore those issues as well. It was an example I needed today; I needed to feel that energy. It made me calm down and breathe and hum a little song under my breath, just sitting in a meeting for a few hours and taking in somebody else's beautiful spirit. It gave me a kind of hope. How great is that? How wonderful that we possess the capacity to be surprised by each other, the capacity to give other people what they need without knowing it, the ability to spread peace and stillness by finding our own peace and stillness? Man may hand on misery to man, like the poet says, but he can hand on a lot of other things too, the things you need to make the misery bearable. I think you just need to find them when they're offered, you have to know when to be quiet so that you can hear them.

So I guess that's the balance I'm looking for. I'll always need the catharthis of a good throat-clearing, chest-stomping outburst now and again--it's part of who I am, it's part of how I process. But I can channel it, I think, if I can slow myself down, if I can do the spiritual work of tuning up my mind and spirit. "Teach us to care and not to care; Teach us to sit still," as TS Eliot wrote, probably trying to get at a very different thing (but that's ok too, I'll hear it how I need to hear it today).