An Immigrant In The Country Of Love

This essay started when I tried to express my gratitude to my dad for a burger, and my friend Deborah for her generosity -- two cocktails, a beer, and another burger was the specific damage. When putting the post together in my head, I realized that I'd done a print expressing the theme for the last issue of Swill. I almost never incorporate humans in my art -- but when I did this piece, I used a photo of Deborah. Odd loops, odd loops.

Can you picture your house? Not the house you live in, not the house you grew up in. Your internal house. The place your soul lives.

The image of my house comes instantly to mind when I call on it. The sky is cool gray, the ground is warm gray, the house is neutral gray. No rain will ever fall from the roiling clouds that stream across the sky; they're heavy with the debris of distant explosions. The ground is blasted ash, worn into coral-like shapes by the wind; boots sink inches into it. You cannot walk without destroying the only beauty in the landscape.

My house is a concrete cube. Curved and pointed, black horns and thorns sprout in rough profusion along its edges. On each side, high and in the middle, there is a small window. There are no doors.

If you see this house, your death has been contemplated. Probably not considered with intent, but if you see this house? Your body is an object. Objects are broken sooner or later. This is war, and no-one survives.

The top of the cube is open to the weather and undefended. I never thought anything that flew would want to hurt me.

I have decided to move; you have taken me to a different place, and while I understand why I made my house the way I did, it no longer acts in service to my life. I still spend much of my time there, but I prefer to live with you. One day I will walk away and I will not feel as if I'm leaving home. On that day, I will become a citizen of the country of love.

I've been mistaken for a military man by people who have served. I believe this stems from my basic approach to life -- it can erupt in savagery at any moment, so be ready to fight all the time. I have consciously struggled my whole life to be open and available emotionally to the people around me, so it's been a surprise to find that there are parts of me I've guarded so fiercely that they've never been touched before.

Illness and poverty have stripped away certain illusions I have entertained about myself, and my place in the world. I have always valued myself based on utility. What am I good for? How can I contribute? What can I do to help?

And despite the kindness that has been shown to me over the years, I've seen the world as a fundamentally hostile place to a much greater degree than most people do. To the point where it has undermined my ability to function in the world. I know what it is like to be hated, and I know what it is like to be despised and I know what it is like to be held in contempt and I know what it is like to be feared.

Much of love is new to me.

I'm not talking about romantic love. I'm talking about the binding regard and affection that people have for one another. Now that I'm in a place in my life where I am of virtually no practical use whatsoever, I have been brought face-to-face with what I currently regard as the root good in life.

Connection. Kindness. Mutual regard. Affection.

It is easy enough to give lip service to these things. When you see them clearly, they are frighteningly powerful. These days I find myself periodically overwhelmed by the sensation of being cared for. The idea that I'm a passing concern in the minds of people I will never meet. The idea that I'm a source of pleasure and solace in the lives of those close to me. I don't sob, but tears flow painlessly from my eyes, and all I can do is endure the feeling that I am cared for, thought of, held in regard, valued. It is joy experienced with the same overwhelming intensity as rage.

The idea that we live in a hierarchy angers and frightens me -- but that anger and fear are being ameliorated by the notion that kindness is also an organizational principle, and it's one that has been brought to bear on me.

Here's what brought this home to me. What dropped right on the roof, where there are no defenses.

I mostly gave up solitary drinking a while ago. I stopped buying comic books more than a year ago, ending a lifelong habit in order to finance my writing education. The very last bit of my money ran out a while back, and I am currently living on kindness and the seeming likelihood that I may receive a disability pension.

This means that there are no little indulgences readily available to me. The tiny treats that I used to coax myself an inch at a time through life are, at least for the moment, over, and have been for some time. If something goes wrong, I don't have the option of promising myself a reward. If things go right, I don't have the option of celebration. There is nothing special at my command.

I missed this dreadfully at first. Dearth sucks.

But here's where things got squirrely on me.

I do get a drink and a smoke. I do get a book and some music. From time to time I get to eat at nice places. I've even traveled a little.

I get the small pleasures in my life from the people around me, and they are given to me because I am valued. Because time spent with me is a small pleasure in itself, a nurturing indulgence, and people like it. What initially seemed like incredible generosity on the parts of my friends has revealed itself as compassionate self-interest.

If I read a new book or look at new art or listen to new music, it is because the missus got it for me at a yard sale. So when I take in these aesthetic experiences, they are flavored by the knowledge that this is something the missus desired for me. She like it when I get things I like. It makes her happy when I enjoy them.

When I have a drink, it is because someone I respect and admire wants to have the experience of drinking with me.

If I take a trip, it is because my company is desired.

When I fell ill, I was cared for, and the manifest kindness of the people around me was overwhelming. And now, as my life continues, that kindness has failed to abate. I've always understood that I'm not supposed to kill myself because it would make other people miserable. I'm just starting to understand that to my true friends, my delight in life is a tangible and valued resource.

This is radically changing my experience of life. I'm gaining a much more feminine perspective -- I value myself based on who loves me as well as what I can do. As a result, I feel more valued both internally and externally. And the process of connecting with the world is increasing in intensity as it builds -- I'm a long way from equilibrium here.

What I thought was true was wrong. I am not actively hated. The world does not seek my destruction with intent. Most intent that is held toward me is positive. I thought I had a house but it wasn't a house. It was a bunker. You know who lives in bunkers during peacetime? Prisoners. Now I don't have a house, but I'm at home in the world. Uncertain but at ease. I don't know where I am, but I don't feel lost.

When I decided to take my art into the world, I approached it as though entering battle. My metaphor was entirely incorrect, and much of the emotional destabilization of the last years has been due to this.

Now I see my art differently. I see myself differently. And I see my place in the world differently.

I am no longer at war. I have been taken into the country of love, and war has no place there. I have to face the challenge of allowing people to be kind to me. Altruism is a basic desire, and to allow others to fulfill it is a kindness in itself, and I have to struggle for that kindness.

To ask for what I need -- let alone what I want -- is one of the greatest difficulties in my life. To do so when I am useless for nearly all practical purposes runs contrary to my rules for myself -- while I certainly wouldn't apply this to others, useless people should die. I feel as if I have been presented with a coward's life.

But if I'm honest with myself, I know that the feeling of having done something good for someone is terrific. And to a certain degree my resistance to having my needs and desires met is a form of hostility. A preemptive rejection.

I am learning to be open about what I want without expectation of either fulfillment or disappointment, how to be grateful without resentment, and most of all to appreciate that there is a mutualism in generosity, and that sincere gratitude and appreciation are worth the trouble just so I can feel as if I'm taking my part properly.

First I felt like a shovel. Then I felt like a broken shovel.

Now? I feel like a treat. I'm a stinky cheese, a single-malt scotch, a neat nugget of the kind bud, a hit of DMT. You wouldn't want to live on a diet of me, but for some folks? If they don't get a little now and then, they feel deprived. Being a luxury item is disturbingly pleasant.

I do not believe I will always be poor. I know how people who know react to my work. I think I will go someplace.

But I am no longer conducting a war. I am no longer staking outposts with my work, and I am growing less interested in chastisement and more interested in the cultivation and encouragement of life's joys and beauties. I can do Swift and Kafka fine; I can do the Thompsons Jim and Hunter. I can Giger your ass nine ways from Sunday, Bacon you til the cows come home. That end of the spectrum seems juvenile in isolation. I want to be able to do Bach and Renoir as well. I am trying to pry my arms open so I can embrace the world.

Hell is easy for me. And I never take the easy way.

I am not pursuing a career in the arts. I am using my talent and abilities to enter into new places so that I can find more friends. Thusly do I accommodate the trauma of discovering that the art world is a social world. At some point, some of my friends will make money with some of my projects. (This sounds dippy. It's solidly practical. Just you watch.)

This is the hidden gift of the outsider -- I belong nowhere, but my friends are everywhere. I have drank with winos and with millionaires, and I am realizing that my whole attitude toward the human species is racist, and that I need to get over it. There is an element in my regard for mankind that is genuinely hateful. I need to cut that shit out. People are people, and I like people.

I do not have a house in the country of love. But I have been made so welcome that I do not feel the need yet. I'm still a warrior, but I like having parts of me that aren't edge or armor. I allow myself that luxury both because of you and for your sake.

As I've said before, I don't love myself, but I don't need to love myself. I have a team that takes care of that little problem, and they do a much better job than I ever could.

If I had a great big blog, I couldn't say this. But this is a small room, we pretty much all know each other, and any strangers that wander in are either welcome or entertainment.

So.

Thanks, y'all. I appreciate it.

Considering The Virtues Of Stress

"You need to act as though you're allergic to stress," the nurse said. "Like a peanut allergy."

For those who might be stumbling onto the site for the first time, this was said to me last winter when I'd been told to go to a psychiatric health center by some emergency room... well. You know. Like that. It's one of those stories.

Anyway, I agreed with the nurse. And that's how I've tried to live my life. Minimalization. Cut back on the input. Don't get involved. Don't get political. Don't get into hassles.

Right. If stress is such a toxin to me, then why have I had the habit of stalking the rough parts of the Oakland/Berkeley border looking for trouble when I'm emotionally distraught? Why is a public exchange of hostilities with a street crazy something that brightens me up for days?

If I'm allergic to stress, then why did I cheer up and start eating and sleeping when we had a series of shootings in our neighborhood a few years back? Why do I sooth myself with things like dangling from heights and cutting?

I don't even have to get as far as cutting most of the time. Simple negligence of low-level physical safety means that I've never had a moment in my life when I didn't have half-a-dozen little scrapes, bruises, cuts, and dings healing. I never thought to ask about that until just a couple of days ago, and the missus was horrified.

When I moved from Richmond to Santa Cruz, what did I say? I feel like I been drug up from the depths and my swim bladder's coming out my mouth.

Let's put this in another context. What about the reading on Friday? I loved that. But let's consider this.

How do I feel about crowds?

One of the most uncomfortable conversations I have ever endured in my life was one where my wife was on one side of me, my first girlfriend on the other, both making physical claims on my person while discussing my shortcomings. Thank God for open bars.

Anyway, one subject that came up was crowds. It turns out that what I perceived as the occasional dry witticism was actually a steadily muttered series of descriptions of mass murder, including specific details I will not print here because they would work. And that every time I was in a crowd in either of their companies, I'd begin emitting this at some point.

Ew. I stopped doing that.

But I didn't stop thinking it. I hate crowds, I hate large groups, they frighten and anger me. I have been attacked by crowds. I have been surrounded by crowds and forced to fight people one by one.

And I adore standing up in front of crowds. Love it.

Here's what I think now.

I think I need stress. Lots of it, on a regular basis.

I think that growing up the way I did left me needing stress. When I collapse it's because of a lack of concrete demands as much as anything else.

But I think I need stress applied under circumstances where I have control. Where I am confident and active and functional. And there are places in the world where this happens. I need to place myself in situations where my strengths are the strengths that apply.

These circumstances alter the proportions of stress hormones released under stress. There are two types of stress reaction -- prepare for performance, and prepare for a beating. I need to train myself to respond to stress with a performance-enhancing mix. Let me tell you, that is a serious cocktail.

Honestly? If I wasn't fucked up physically, I'd start checking out martial arts and danger sports, but my back is too vulnerable. So that leaves me with one arena in which to exercise this particular peccadillo.

The arts.

The most stressful situations for me are social ones, especially dealing with strangers. But the world of the arts is partially a meritocracy, and I do well there. The long-dreaded, long-avoided task of putting myself out into the world has proven to be very different than what I've been led to suspect.

People tend to react well to me. I get some hassles, I'm dorky and awkward at points, but I've got something going here. I'm being not simply received by the world, but welcomed. I may as well see if I can get some mileage out of it.

So I'm going to engage in human society.

If only for therapeutic reasons.

Why I'm Scared Of White People

So my reading -- you know about my reading, right? Here's what Joe Clifford, the guy running the thing, says:

It's a brutally honest piece about violence, ignorance, and racism, a dangerous topic, and Sean doesn't shy from illumining his own prejudice and weakness, his own part in the play--but just as importantly, he does not apologize (as so many writers in his spot might do) for the same in others. In short, it's a gritty, real, and raw story about American, urban living in the modern age. I am proud to have him read at Lip Service West. (And you should come, because he's right: he fails to bring 10 people, I take the thumbs. Them's the rules. He knows that going in.)

Lip Service West
Friday, August 12
5512 San Pablo Ave. Oakland, CA
7 p.m.

There will be wine and cheese and hot dogs and such things as well as a solid line-up of writers performing edgy autobiography -- this actually is an enjoyable event.

Anyway. Speaking of race and violence, I just put things together, and I realized one of the reasons white people scare me. Aside from Goldman-Sachs. Yes, I am white, but I'm fucked-up white -- my mom was raised by an ama, spoke Tagalog before English, and had the physical habits and mannerisms of a Phillipino. Since I have fetal alcohol syndrome, I have epicanthic folds in my eyes, and have been mistaken for Asian more then once. I grew up in a community that was primarily African- and Mexican-American, and a lot of my speech patterns and mannerisms come from there. I get called everything from 'rice boy' to 'mister man' to 'funky nigger' when I step out of my door.

In other words, yeah, I'm white, but I am under no fucking obligation to be a goddamned example of whiteness, okay?

Anyway, white people creep me out. It's true, and I need to get over it, but there are reasons.

Good reasons. Don't-go-in-the-attic-reasons.

The subject of UPC codes on books came up in one of my email discussion groups, and I just got a full and massive white person flashback. Everything fell into place and I understood why I don't just think of white people as people who tend to be pink-to-buff, but as a group.

A conspiracy.

It started when I was a kid. In my school, whites were very much in the minority, and there was a filthy little trick the administration played in order to increase racial tension enough to mandate regular beatings for the vulnerable.

There was a series of classes, one for each grade, that was designated as being for 'bright' or 'advanced' children. Which meant any white kids who weren't regarded as actively defective, and any non-white kids who actually were bright.

Yes, I was known to be bright. Bright the wrong way. They did not want to encourage that shit.So the only white kids in my classes? The other losers. That's what made them stand out. And I was the biggest loser of them all -- or, rather, the skinniest and weirdest.

I saw the kids in the advanced classes, and they seemed as though they were all together, a unit, and somehow even the other white kids in my class were part of it. I was white, but I wasn't one of the White People.

Events occurred, and junior high, high school, and all along I still feel as though I'm outside of this thing -- but I also know that I'm the kind of person who's prone to feeling this way. How could there actually be a White Thing?

In high school, this white guy named Marty sits in front of me in math, and tells me just the craziest shit I've ever heard a human being say out loud and expect to be taken seriously. There are lasers burning invisible UPC codes into people's foreheads (Marty ruined zebra labels for me), and that lets the government control their minds, and everyone's history is on file with a computer called The Beast, see, like the Beast in Revelations, and...

I mean, he went ON. He did not stop. And every word was crazier than the last, and he insisted that he'd learned this science fiction shit in church. Which I knew was bullshit, because come on. There is no way you'd go to church and hear stuff that was, well. Obviously, transparently false. Nutty.

At that time I was working at the Point Richmond Child Development center, and one of the instructors there invited me to attend her fiancee's baptism. It's always a little hard when someone targets you for conversion -- it's a compliment, but a terrible, stupid, embarrassing compliment that's impossible to receive gracefully.

When I show up for the baptism, I'm first taken aside to attend Sunday School, and that's where I get a shock. All the biggest assholes --

Okay. Black dudes? Generally, one fight. A lot of the time, they'd even act as though they were friends with me afterward, which confused the living fuck out of me. The bad ones?

Black girls and white boys. Black girls would actually hurt you, cut you, do tricks with bobby pins that left blood blisters, and they'd look right at you while they did it, faces cold and mean. It was important to them that you know they didn't like you and they wanted to hurt you.

White boys were just too fucking dumb to live. Stupid, mean, and looking for another white boy they could safely pick on. And every bad-news white boy I knew was in that Sunday school classroom. These were the shitheads who had beat on me for years, just pounded on me until I got scary and they stopped, and here they were talking about the Prince of fucking Peace, and the Love of Christ, and you know?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

They were so glad to see me. Real warmth. Whether I got a beating or a cookie depended entirely on how these thuggish sluggish meatloaves related me to their favorite fairy tales. This is a human trait that always inspires me with genuine revulsion.

Anyway, that guy Marty from my math class was there. And he had not been shitting me. All of them were spouting off about how the Wankel engine had been predicted by the Elders of Zion and so on, all of them just radioactive with mutually-reinforced self-approval. So pleased with their lunatic beliefs that they just glowed.

Anyway, after spending an hour listening to these poorly-crafted hominids congratulating themselves on being compassionate, humane, and altogether Christlike, we adjourned to the...

Fuck it. You had to call it a theater. It had theater seating, and a huge glass tank behind red curtains on a stage, and it was dark except for the stage. The preacher came out and began an extensive sermon, one dealing specifically with the yawning mouth of Hell and the torments awaiting the unbeliever.

He was preaching to me.

He had clearly been informed that I was coming, and he addressed himself directly at me, going so far as to point at me in order to punctuate such words as 'sinner.'

How very nice, I thought to myself. As my eyes grew accustomed to the lighting, I was able to look around me and see...

... them. The White People. All the pale folks I seen in school, the ones who had nice clothes and nice lunches, who played together. The ones who had hit me, kicked me, threw stones at me, called me faggot. The girls I had crushes on. The ones on the inside of the White Conspiracy.

All of them, looking at me, smiling hopefully, faces shining in the dark.

Attention: I'm OK Now

Well. It's been weeks since I've had a mood swing or an episode of vomiting. I'm feeling consistently optimistic and excited, and I've never written stronger material than what I've produced recently. My episodes of paralytic confusion have almost entirely dissipated, and I've recovered from my withdrawal from psychiatric medications.

So I'm declaring myself officially well, for the foreseeable future.

The missus has said all along that this period of crisis has been about my fear of success. That's not quite right, but it's definitely leaning in the proper direction. I've got another piece to write about this, but essentially, my journey into the world of professional fiction has been much more complicated than I thought -- I am being forced to change my relationships with both myself and society in general in radical and expansive ways.

I was able to tap-dance around the increasing levels of stress in my life until I started puking. Hospitalization and my first round of treatments left me feeling like a psychiatric patient instead of an artist, and that period of last winter and spring was one of the points in my life where I really hit bottom.

Interestingly, I did not experience true despair. The burden of self-hatred that had been lifted from me at the Viable Paradise workshop has made these times dangerous for me in the past, but now the temptation to self-destruction is much weaker. And the missus, rather than drawing away from me, treated me with a sort of tenderness that hasn't been part of our relationship before.

But I'm better now.

I've started counseling in the last few weeks, and that's helping to solidify the gains I've made over the past months. The missus, bless her heart, decided that I had fallen through the cracks in the system, so she found a counselor who would trade for bodywork. This does make me feel a little weird, but very grateful. I'm still on the lists for public assistance, because it would be a good idea for me to have access to sleep aids and tranquilizers, but I feel good about the person I'm working with now.

My counselor is not a psychiatrist, so she does not see me as a collection of fascinating symptoms, a sort of living crossword puzzle, which is the reaction I get from medical types. Her position is that I'm in the process of assembling myself into a functional human being, and she seems excited by the prospect.

I've decided that the optimum state of mind for me is not that of conventional mental health. That just isn't an appropriate ambition for me. Rather than fighting my nature, I'm learning to embrace the positive and ameliorate the negative.

For instance, rather than struggling with my sleep, I've gotten in the habit of going to bed between nine and nine thirty, then waking up at two or three, going to my studio to listen to music and look at art books for an hour or so, then go back to bed and lay down. I don't always get back to sleep. I don't usually get back to sleep. But if I lay there quietly in a meditative frame of mind, I get enough rest so that the next day has a warm fuzzy hallucinatory edge rather than a sharp, brittle one.

And right now I'm getting my eating habits in order. Cleaning up my studio. And so on. And so forth. Regaining a sense of control over my life.

I know I'll go through the cycle again -- it's pretty likely that I'll be useless for a month or two in the middle of the winter, for example -- but things feel different. Even when the recent situation was at its worst, I didn't feel as threatened or endangered as I have at comparable earlier points in my life.

One of the reasons for this is that I felt as though I was part of a community. Both the science fiction world and y'all here on the net have formed some attachments with me, so I felt a continual sense of...

"Well, I guess I can't afford to lose here. It'd fuck shit up for too many people."

I know when I contemplate everything from your health to your careers, there are times when I feel concern. Sometimes I let people know, sometimes I don't, if it doesn't seem quite needed.

But I have also felt concern from you, and that helped keep me focused on getting past the situation rather than sinking into it.

One very interesting aspect of this whole thing is that I turned to a lot of self-help and popular science books for assistance, and I am damned lucky to be going through this during a time when cognitive science is starting to really understand how the mind functions.

I have been doing some very deliberate skull hacking, and have even been integrating this information with the techniques of meditation and ritual I learned while studying occult traditions. As the man said, "We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon/Our method is science, our aim is religion." (Yeah, I know, he was an asshole. All my heroes were assholes. This is key to my identity crisis.)

So.

Right now, the process of reconstruction has advanced to the point where I am working again, and substantial improvements are being made to my support system. I have greater stability than I did before going through the crisis. I am happy-by-my-standards, and pleasant company.

Yes, my life situation could be better. Sort of. Yeah, I would like to be financially stable, and not a lunatic, and so on. But when you have a life filled with good people, a sense of purpose, and the ability to pursue that purpose effectively?

What the hell is there to complain about?

Jungle Hat

I'm in the process of returning to functionality, or rather the process has hit the point where it's obviously working. Nice to get some results. Here's how it started.

I was walking to go pick up my niece one afternoon. Because I have a shiny bald head and do not drive, I'm a hat person. Purely practical, but I've recently started thinking of them as part of a developing look. Hats are tricky. They're one of those areas of life where the chance of coolness is matched by the risk of dildonics.

Anyway, at the corner a big family was waiting for the bus. Mom and Auntie were talking trash while the kids went nuts, and as I came by, one of the little boys, probably seven or eight, planted himself on the sidewalk in front of me, scowling fiercely, knees bent and arms akimbo. (How often do you get a chance to use that word properly? I think this might be my first.)

I ball up my fists, lift my upper lip so my teeth show and my eyes go away, and shuffle toward him, fast, so he's startled but he doesn't have a chance to move.

He looks up at me and I grin at him, give him a thumbs up, and dodge past him respectfully, step off the sidewalk but give him just a little bit of a messin' shove -- I don't send him sprawling, it's just a hey-buddy.

And as I step past him into the crosswalk, he yelled. "Hey! Did you see that man? I want to go with that man! He had a jungle hat!"

Right then, I remembered being a little kid and getting that feeling of running across an adult and wanting to be part of their lives, or to have something of what they had. And I thought about how the boy oaf would respond to the adult me.

I would have had exactly the same response that kid had. I am in cold fact exactly the kind of person who most thrilled me when I was a child. The problems that have been weighing me down would have seemed both pitiable and romantic, more the latter than the former. They certainly wouldn't have provoked any judgment.

And I thought to myself, why don't I get to be the man in the jungle hat? I mean, why don't I get the fun of being one of those people? As I mentioned earlier, there are some areas where your chance of being cool is balanced by the risk of being a dildo, but hey. My chances of conventional dignity, respectability, and success are not just slim, they simply do not exist. It is too late. I am who I am.

I've known this for a while, but it's hard to really embrace yourself when it's obvious that you're an oddball, and self-acceptance means being a little more of a visible freak.

But my problem currently? What's been screwing me up over the last while? It isn't mental illness, and it isn't chronic pain, and it isn't poverty. What is is, is a lack of mojo. And mojo does not thrive in conditions of self-denial.

I needed my mojo back.

So I took steps. Here, courtesy of Nick Mamatas, is a taste of the results, which are still coming in. Nick's post deals with issues relating to the personal side of professional relationships, and should it ever become widely known, its essential decency will represent a threat to his carefully-maintained reputation as Satan incarnate.

If you're interested, next post will carry a big blast of bragging, and some practical techniques for mojo reacquisition.

That picture up there? That damn well looks like a jungle hat to me.

Finding My Story 4: First Five Memories

Well, I know I've written on this subject in the past, but I can't track it down anywhere. My memory is that the piece dealt specifically with my first three memories -- further reflection has increased this number to five. They would be from the ages of two through three.

Please remember that by this point, I'd been conversing at an adult level for some time. My level of thought, while not mature, was not really that of a child -- or, rather, it was that of a very strange child. Writing them down, this time, what strikes me is the sense of judgment and decision. These are the times when I made up my mind.

1.) My first memory is of a simple moment. My mother and I are walking hand-in-hand down a steeply-sloped city street. A story has a sign projecting from it, and years later I will recognize the image it bore as the 7-Up logo. Little legs, steep hill. San Francisco.

2.) I do not know for sure, but my memory of the light -- clear, mild, steely-gray -- makes me think this took place in San Francisco as well. We're in a large public space, a square paved with concrete, my mother, father, brother, and I, and I've found something. I don't know if it was a sculpture or a climbing structure, but at that age all structures are climbing structures.

So I split off on my own to go climbing, and when I'm hanging by my knees I slip and hit my head on the ground. The pain shocks me to tears, and I cry out, "Mommy! Daddy!" and they come running.

But the minute the words leave my mouth the whole situation seems ridiculous, fraudulent. I have never called my parents 'mommy' and 'daddy'; that's for babies. I call them Mom and Dad.

Why did I call them Mommy and Daddy? Because I was hurt and scared. But why call them? They can't do anything about a bumped head. It's been bumped, and there's nothing to do but wait for things to get better.

Before my parents reach me, I've promised myself never to call them Mommy and Daddy again.

I never did.

3.) I am lying in my bed at night. My brother sleeps in the next bed over. Between us is a banner; on his side a lion, on mine a wooden soldier. I hated that soldier. He was not on the same side I was. I wanted the lion.

I have to pee. I'm scared to get up and walk through the dark, and the sense I have is that the dark has scared me badly for a long time. (To be honest? I still get fears in the dark, and I kind of like them.) I make the conscious decision not to get up. I pee.

And years later when I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I recognized Joyce's description of wetting the bed as one drawn from experience. Just as he said, it is warm, and then it is cold.

As the urine cooled, I realized that wetting the bed simply wasn't an option. I felt angry with myself. I felt like a fool.

I would never do it again.

4.) That took place in our house in Richmond, where we'd moved from San Francisco. It was located so as to maximize convenience for my mother's mother -- it was near her work, it was on the same block as a Christian Science church, and it was a two-story house with upstairs and downstairs apartments. We were on the top floor, my Grandma Jean on the ground floor.

Thinking about that situation now, thinking about the difficulties between my grandmother and my mother? That must have been pretty brutal for all parties...

Anyway, because of the nature of the times and the cast of characters involved, I went to Sunday School on my own. Part of me is thinking, "Hey, it was literally two doors down, and we aren't talking about a normal kid, we're talking about me." But still -- letting a three-year-old walk to church on his own does sound a little crazy to me.

The memory in this case is of a nice sunny morning. I'm dressed in my church clothes, a charcoal-gray suit with short pants held up by suspenders.

Walking through the parking lot, I am contemplating the questions I have asked -- "What do you mean, God is Love? But if we're perfect reflections of a perfect principle, then how can we be capable of mortal error?"

(Okay, maybe it wasn't crazy to send me to church on my own. Maybe it would have been crazier to have to field these questions from a three-year-old.)

Their answers were the vague, poorly-reasoned horseshit you always get when you ask those questions, and they did not satisfy me, and as I walked home it hit me that those answers would not satisfy anyone who really wanted satisfaction, and that they never would. That the people in the church did not have the answers, and going to them for information was nuts.

I was not obligated to believe them, and there was no point in trying to get them to make sense. I did not have to do that. All I had to do was give them a quarter a week until I was old enough to stop going to church.

I can't tell you the sense of relief this gave me. The horrible weight of all that God nonsense, that 'You killed Jesus' crap, just evaporated. The fallibility of adults was a source of great comfort as long as I knew I was right and they were wrong.

5.) At that same house, I saw a cousin of mine attacked by our dog. I know she reads this blog, and I'm not sure how or even if she remembers this -- she's a bit younger than I am, and she wouldn't have been much more than a toddler when it happened. I'll be a little less colorful in my expressions here, because of this.

I was with our dog on our back porch. My cousin brought out a styrofoam tray with uncooked bones on it. (I now wonder what they were doing in the kitchen.) She teased the dog with the bones, and the dog bit her face. I called for help, and adults quickly came. Reconstructive surgery was required, and the dog had to be put down.

My emotional reaction to this was a curious one. I was both angry with and worried about my cousin, I knew this meant the dog I loved was going to be killed, I thought this might mean my cousin would die. My main response was a sense of shock and resentment at the poor judgment of my cousin. It dawns on me that I was three, which would have made her two or so. And I really, honestly felt that anyone who'd do something as stupid as that deserved what happened to them. I mean, she's two. She should know better!

Now that I think about it, at three Libertarianism would have made a lot of sense to me.

Next up? One of the real elephants in the room. My sorely-missed brother, Duncan Dead.

Finding My Story 3: Toilet-Training Pterodactyls

Reading yesterday's post, thinking about Mom, one of the things that strikes me is the weight of disapproval she dealt with her entire life. Looking at things that way, it's a familiar dynamic. I was always conscious of the people who were basically members of her fan club, but she must have felt some of the judgment directed at her.

But she did the best she could, kept progressing and growing throughout her life, tried as hard as she could to adhere to her own moral code even at personal cost. Her self-indulgence was obvious, but her self-discipline was not. She didn't care to advertise that part of herself, at least not to me. Just did her own thing her own way, head down and quietly plowing forward.

There's at least one specific trait I got from her. It's something I admire in others and resent and regret in myself -- the inability to live by rules contrary to one's own. It's a condition that occasionally requires sacrifice and effort. In my case, I think part of it comes from social confusion, part of it comes from self-will. Looking at my parents and siblings, I ain't the only one. It started early, the night Dad found a pterodactyl on the toilet.

(This story was told to me several times by both parents. "We thought it was normal.")

So they're starting to get an idea how pterodactyls reproduced... you aren't familiar with the questions around pterodactyl reproduction? Okay, quick version.

Pterodactyls were the first group of flying vertebrate animals we know of. They're regarded as archosaurs, which makes them close relatives of both crocodilians and dinosaurs. And right now, they seem to have reproduced in a very different fashion than birds.

The pattern in birds is nest-building, parental care, etc. However, birds vary widely in the amount of care they need as infants. In pterodactyls, there's currently speculation that they laid eggs with leathery shells in moist, hidden spots, and left them to hatch on their own. The hatchlings emerged ready to hunt and fly right from the eggshell. Independent.

After bringing me home, my parents settled into a routine where they'd put me in a crib in the living room at night and then go sleep in their bedroom.

This worked well. They were usually able to sleep through the night. But by the time I was a few months old -- I wish I had a number -- the pattern had settled into something a little different.

Rather than finding me in my crib at night, they'd get up and find my empty diaper in the crib, and my naked froggy body underneath the crib. It would have been summer by now, so I can see how they might be casual about this.

"They really are little monkeys," my mother would have said. "He can climb before he can crawl. How fascinating!"

"I can't believe he holds it in all night," Dad would have said. "That diaper is dry, and so is the floor. This is indeed a mystery."

One night he got up to pee. I imagine he was still a little groggy from the night before, possibly a little hungover. Shuffles through the dark, not wanting to move too precipitously. Opens the bathroom door, and feels the cold hand of the uncanny settle on his heart.

Something white and bony crouches, arms and legs sprawled over the toilet seat. It lifts its head, meets his gaze with expressionless black slits and croaks irritably.

He screams.

It's me. His little pterodactyl.

Finding My Story 2: The Getaway

When I was in elementary school, sometime early on I noticed my parents celebrating their anniversary. By then I was able to add two and two, so I did a little subtraction and found the evidence supported the notion that I was conceived three or four months out of wedlock. (That makes me just a bit of a bastard.)

When I was born, my mother was twenty and my father was nineteen. Trying to imagine the situation, looking at the timing -- I don't know, and I probably will not ask, but I would be willing to place a five-dollar bet that my mother figured out what was going on and then clamped down and held onto the secret for at least a couple of months, maybe more. And during that time, she kept on doing her thing, which was smoking and drinking.

I mentioned that my mother's mother, my Grandma Jean, was a very proper woman. My mother? From an entirely different planet. Virtually no basis for mutual understanding.

In her early years, my mother was raised by an amma in the Philippines, and she spoke Tagalog before she spoke English. When I first saw Lynda Barry's drawings of her Philippine grandmother, she squatted and smoked exactly the way my mother squatted and smoked. Exactly.

(This introduces the question of what my Grandma Jean did to occupy her time in the post-war Philippines. Given the shadiness of the whole situation, I find myself curious.)

My mother began smoking and drinking heavily in her early teens and continued until the end of her life in her early sixties. When I was a child, she loved to tell me how she started drinking early by convincing her mother that ale was a non-alcoholic beverage, so she was allowed to brew for herself and her friends.

Mom was the center of her social group. That was her natural role -- wherever she was, her people would gather. And if she picked up and moved to a new place? She'd quickly gather a new group of friends. In her presence, lively, funny, intelligent conversation sprang up naturally. You read about pub culture from time to time? Mom was pub culture.

She was also tiny -- never topped a hundred pounds unless she was pregnant. Nervous as a terrier. Vomited more than anyone I've ever known -- you actually had to watch your speech around her if you didn't want to cause an incident. A compulsive reader, her particular vice being mysteries, the endless round of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. She was also wanted to be a writer and was a very promising artist who was badly hampered by self-doubt.

You know the Elwood Dowd character from Harvey? "I used to be very, very clever, but now I'm very, very nice?" If Dorothy Parker went through a similar transmutation you might have something like my mom. Everybody loved her. She was smart, and she was funny, and she was nice, and she was drunk.

She was terrified of her mother. The Grandma Jean that had always been so good to me was the same woman who more or less drove my mother to drink by the time she was thirteen. Grandma Jean had a cold side that I could only detect by its effect on others, and whatever was wrong between them in the first place could not have been helped by the fact that my mother was a rabid party animal with four-wheel drive.

What was my mother doing at that point in her life? She was out of high school, and I don't think she tried college until some time later. I wonder if she was just living at home.

So I imagine my mother getting pregnant, and holding onto the secret, staying there in a state of indecision, still relishing the fact that she's the only one who knows, one eye on the clock, the other on the calender, smoke in one hand and beer in the other...

From what I can piece together, my father came into Mom's social scene from the outside, after everyone else knew each other for years, just sort of swooped in and there they were.

Dad's a big, good-looking guy. Handsome enough to irritate at times -- we've been mistaken for brothers more than once. He's a writer and political animal, and helped found the National Association of Letter Carriers. I'd like to note that he's a different man now than he was then. Quit drinking and smoking, generally put himself together. We're very close these days and spend time together regularly.

But back then he was a scared kid working on his own drinking problem. His mother had remarried, and he didn't get along with his stepfather.

So one fine night, my parents -- and I may well ask Dad about this -- sat down to discuss their situation, and make some concrete plans for the future.

And then they fled the state, telling no-one where or why. Hit the ground running. For a while they traveled with a con-man, a story I regularly pressure the old man to write.

While working on this, I had a flash of inspiration and looked to see if there were any recorded effects on a fetus if the mother experiences stress or anxiety during pregnancy.

It turns out that there are particular stages of development when a mother's stress can cause very specific types of impairment. And that mother's moods have been documented as expressing themselves in their unborn children. And that cortisol, a stress hormone that's particularly significant in the development of PTSD, travels through the placenta.

When I was a kid, Mom stated to me repeatedly and directly that she never smoked or drank while pregnant. I never asked, but she told me. Spontaneous denial is pretty much the effective equivalent of confession, and that is how this one payed out.

When I recently spoke to psychiatrists, Dad manned up and suggested that I get checked for fetal alcohol syndrome. The diagnosis was positive.

(This, incidentally, explained one of the great race identity mixups of my life. See, black people -- not African Americans, I'm including folks from Africa and the Caribbean -- tend to assume I'm Asian when we meet. It is not like a subtle thing and it's happened since childhood. Over and over again.

"Excuse me, I don't mean to be personal, but are you part Japanese?" was the most graceful phrasing. "Hey, rice boy! Hey, rice boy! Hey, rice boy, I'm talking to you! Oh, I'm sorry, white boy. I thought you was a rice boy," the most abject. Got a gray fucking beard and she called me boy.

And my brother and sister would speculate on my paternity with seeming seriousness -- there were candidates. Now, the resemblance to my father is unmistakable.)

You don't give someone fetal alcohol syndrome by having a stray beer here and a glass of fucking wine there. Mom got hammered, and I got hammered right along with her. And I'll bet anything the wee fishy proto-oaf found it a fucking relief.

Let me be straight here. I am not blaming Mom. If I was a pregnant teenage alcoholic sitting in my room and then fleeing my family across the country? I would not do that shit sober. It just wouldn't be sensible.

Anyway, Mom and Dad went from Richmond, California, to Ceder Rapids, Iowa, to have me. Didn't let anyone in the family know until the day I was born.

When I was a kid, Mom would tell me that they were so poor that for the week before I was born, all she could eat was ice chips. This is plausible. But I also recently read that a small mother having a large baby would sometimes be starved before delivery in order to reduce the birth weight of the child.

And so we have a picture of the nature of my gestation. I will set aside my sympathies for the other parties involved, as this is my story. I began life whiplashed between anxiety and drunkenness, and at the end of my term was starved into diminution. I entered the world already loaded with both genetic and developmental baggage, and the world I entered into was an Iowa February.

When I was hanging out with Mom in my late teens and we were both drunk, my will snapped and I opened my big fat mouth. "Mom, why on Earth didn't you have me aborted? I mean, what were you thinking?"

She looked at me with that monkey smile of hers, eyes gentle and sad, rocked on her heels and blew smoke from her nostrils. "Seany, I needed someone to talk to."

Finding My Story 1: Ghosts Are Gaps Shaped Like Grandfathers

This is my impression.

On both sides of my family, the bulk of my ancestry immigrated from Britain during the early colonial period. On my father's side, many of them were Quakers, and participated in things like the Underground Railroad and protests for the rights of Native Americans and so on, and refused to fight in wars and so forth. I know less about my mother's side of the family, but was told that there were connections to both Meriwether Lewis and Thomas Jefferson.

Mostly, they were small farmers. My father was raised on a farm, and my mother's mother was raised on a farm, and it's small farms all the way back so far as I know.

My mother and father both came from single-parent homes.

My mother's family moved to the Philippines immediately after World War II, and it was there that my maternal grandfather vanished from sight. When I lived with my grandmother in my early twenties, every time I drank, she would tell me about how he died. Every time the story involved alcohol, and every time it was different. The degree of departure from reality this indicated was my first sign that my grandmother might be as crazy as I.

My maternal grandmother, my Grandma Jean, was very close to me. She was the one person in my childhood who provided me with a safe place and a sense of being cared for. She was a brilliant woman, a flapper-era UC Berkeley graduate with a career as a children's librarian that was publicly recognized by everybody's favorite president, Lyndon Johnson.

She was a world traveler, amateur photographer and natural scientist, and full-blown religious lunatic who habitually engaged in meditative practices for twelve to fourteen hours a day, no fooling. She slept four hours a night, and when she wasn't specifically doing something else, it was Christian Science. She was proper, correct, the kind of person who concerned herself with how forks were being held and whether infinitives were being split.

It is important to note that as generous and loving as Grandma Jean was to me, she had a basically adversarial relationship with my mother, which I was never closely involved in.

It was at the family get-together following her death that I heard an alternative version of reality. Supposedly, my grandfather actually become a wet-brained alcoholic while in the Philippines, and my grandmother smuggled him back to the US after claiming he died in order to claim his pension from the merchant marines. She stashed him in a St. Vincent de Paul up in Oregon under a false name and visited him yearly until he died.

I've also been told that a man who worked as an MP in the South Pacific during and after WWII once looked at a picture of my grandfather standing next to his best friend. He pointed at the friend and said, "That son of a bitch was the biggest diamond smuggler in Asia."

My father's father I know a little more about. He was a kind, gentle man with an intimate contact with nature who unfortunately would occasionally get naked on the bus and claim to be Jesus, which made him a disgrace in his small, religious community. After he began self-medicating with alcohol, my maternal grandmother had him institutionalized, where he eventually died. I spent my childhood believing that he had hurled himself from a high place -- the mental image was always a metal mesh catwalk, a man in shackles, a look of resignation as he jerks out of the hands of the guards -- but my father has since told me that he died of a heart failure, partially as a result of overeating in response to his situation.

Like my maternal grandmother, my Grandma Knight is a very religious woman, though in a much more restrained fashion. (By which I mean to say, she's religiously observant, not nuts.) She's a conservative woman with a strong personality. After my grandfather was institutionalized she provided for her family for a number of years during the fifties and sixties, I believe working at a meat packing plant. Again, remember that this was a small rural community, and reputation counted for a lot. Or so I imagine...

Neither of my grandfathers was spoken of when I was a child, and they fascinated me. In some ways, I don't quite seem like anyone else in my family, and I always imagined that my grandfathers the missing parts of the puzzle. I had to piece together my images of them from overheard conversations and dropped remarks and hesitantly answered questions and piles and piles of outright lies. But I wound up imagining that I was somehow a cross between them, that the mystic of the woods and the seafaring soldier-of-fortune combined to make me.

I don't know their names. I never knew their names.

There are things I'll never know, but I do know this much --

Until now it never struck me that if the revisionist version of my Grandma Jean's story is true, they both ended their lives in a virtually identical fashion. There may be something to this coherent narrative stuff, but it's already getting kind of creepy, isn't it?

Finding My Story: An Explanation

It’s always interesting when two obsessions find a point of intersection. My long-running fascination with the idea that story and narrative have neurological basis, and are biologically inherent in human beings, and my recent research into the emerging sciences of the mind as applied to personal development and therapy hit an interesting nexus last week.

I suffer from a mosaic of mental illnesses ranging from fetal alcohol syndrome to OCD, and bipolar, but the big boy most of the year is post-traumatic stress syndrome. (During late winter and early spring, depression takes the lead, but that’s another subject.) No doubt further inspection would reveal more details – but the thing is, is that under the right circumstances, I function at a high level. It represents a quandary.

Since I’m close to the bottom of the income level, I’m not in a position to pay for the intensive therapy and/or medication that my situation seems to require. So I’m investigating my alternatives.

This is one of the alternatives.

It seems that a healthy individual has what is referred to as a coherent personal narrative. They have a clear sense of who they are and where they came from. My sense of self is fragmented and easily subject to disruption. In people with PTSD, this lack of narrative, of self-story, is symptomatic.

This next statement has not been demonstrated, and may be proven false. But my informed intuition tells me that story has a specific type of neurological effect. When someone is engaged with a story, specific areas of their brain are also engaged.

And given the hierarchy of the nervous system, it seems reasonable to propose that there is a feedback system engaged, where the language centers interpreting the words send their meanings to the parts of the brain involved in sensory perception, in recalled memory, in emotion – that when one engages in a story, one’s brain and mind become active and integrated, and this neurological activity is the real reward of narrative.

To have a story of your own, a sense of who you are and where you came from, a sense of place and purpose. These are complex neurological events, and they can be impaired. And repaired.

People who know me, know I have stories. But what’s the big story? I do not know, and life has put me in a position where the future is both thoroughly unpredictable and oddly optimistic.

I’ve approached writing about my life over and over again, rarely with success. The stuff I’ve done that’s cut closest to the truth has gotten me a consistent response from readers – this is your best stuff, but you need to do a lot of work on it.

So it goes in the trunk…

I’ve also resisted writing directly about my life because I don’t want to come off as engaging in race-baiting, family-directed guilt-mongering, insufferable complaining, claiming status as a victim or martyr, etc, etc, etc.

This is different. I am not in a position to pay a therapist to extract and interpret my narrative for me. But I can try and create the narrative myself. So that’s what I’m going to do. I am going to try and put down the Story of Sean. (See, even using the name ‘Sean’ seems weird to me. I don’t Sean-identify.) If I perceive my story as representing a danger to my reputation or the public well-being, hey. It’s me or you at this point.

Here are the rules. First off, these posts will not feature art. That would represent an additional level of effort that might keep me from continuing if I hit a rough patch. And this will also serve as a warning to those who prefer to avoid vicarious trauma.

Since this is supposed to be a story, I’m delivering it in rough chronological order. There will be a bit of leaping about if I run across a juicy running theme. If it makes since to say, “This happened in kindergarten, and then something like it in fourth grade and when I was twenty,” then I’ll do that – but for the most part, I intend a steady forward plod.

Next, this is a coherent personal narrative, not a literal documentation of the truth. I will stick as closely as possible to the truth, but I will also include tall tales, lies, and misconceptions, clearly labeled as such. These things also play a role in a personal mythology, and that is what I am creating here. One of the reasons I’ve been resistant to this notion in the past has been my sense of dedication to verifiable truth. Unfortunately, the most important stories of all, the stories of our lives, are composed of the flimsiest of materials – memories and other lies.

But this is what you work with. Recognizing it as a mythology helps me live with this.

In addition, there will be whatever asides as seem necessary to provide context.

My approach to these will be as casual as possible, but I am a writer, and I will be keeping an eye on the possibility that these posts may turn out to be the first draft of a finished work. That said, the novel comes first, and I can’t devote the energy to this that a serious project demands. But a casual approach may generate good results – not too much filter.

I’m putting this out on my blog for a number of reasons. One, is that I’m going into a profession that makes me a semi-public personality. Well, this internet crap is like training wheels for celebrity. As someone with terrible boundaries, it’s not a bad idea to mark them clearly. The other is that this is a format where I’ve established a currently-interrupted habit of productivity.

We’ll see how far I get. It’s an intimidating project, making sense of a life.

Especially a life like this.

Loco Motion

None dare call him Hoverbutt.

So, I haven't filled you in on Laszlo the dog in quite some time. He's now a thoroughly established member of the household, and I have to say it's a relief to have a thoroughly non-neurotic component in the social machine.

And here's the thing. He's my dog. Not a matter of ownership; he's my dog the way the missus is my spouse, or the Hon. Richard Talleywhacker is my guitarist. It's a mutual relationship, mutually agreed upon.

This is kind of a big thing for me. While I'm an animal person, I never really had a dog that was my dog until I moved in with the missus, and her Shar Pei bonded with me. Not to go into the sad details, but the poor dog wound up getting weird around children, so we had to put her to sleep. It wasn't easy on me, and since then I've had a bit of an emotional barrier between me and the household pets. Never thought of them as mine; I loved them, cared for them, but there was a distinct degree of reserve.

But Laszlo won me over. The simple joy he takes in my presence is something I can't help but return. I suffer greatly from anxiety at night, and I cannot express the comfort I feel when I'm laying there in the dark and I feel him stretch out against me or rest his head on my leg. I think of the first day I met him, how I turned around and saw him staring up at me like he was making a wish. I can't help but think that his wish came true.

It makes me feel good.

And like me, he has a tendency toward inadvertent physical comedy. It isn't simply awkwardness -- that lacks the touch of poetry that lifts ridiculous moments into the realm of the sublime. Rather, there is a combination of desperate, frenzied energy and a calm, joyful confidence in his athleticism that is frequently seriously misplaced.

As a long-bodied dog, his specialty is an arching leap that reminds me irresistibly of a dolphin. Shame about the landings, which typically involve the kind of crumpling that makes me fear for his long-term spinal health.

Usually I get to see these when he's getting ready to crash on our bed. His freedom of motion is limited, based on Roxie the terrier's growling territoriality, and the human reluctance to have certain body parts trod upon.

So Laszlo will pick his spot -- usually the lower right-hand corner -- and launch himself in a lovely gravitational curve that ends in a sprawling thump, rapidly followed by scratching, slurping, and snoring. "Sweetie! Watch how he springs into inactivity!"

But the other day he came up with something brand new. I think he may have been the first animal to ever make use of this particular type of locomotion. Science fiction writers, take note. Imagine a world where all animals move about in this fashion.

He and the missus were working on the concept of sit, and he had a conceptual breakthrough. You could see the light bulb over his hairy little cranium. The word, the act -- he was thrilled to sit. (I am not being patronizing. The missus and I are terrible at training the dogs, and they deserve all credit for any breakthroughs.)

Anyway.

So thrilled he was that his hindquarters rose an inch off the ground out of sheer joy. He forced them down again -- which compelled them to rise in response to his triumph. But Laszlo is a good dog, and his will to do right would not be defeated by a happy rear end. Down.

Up.

Down.

Up.
Down.
Up.
Down. Up.
Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.Up.Down.Up.Down.Updownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownup...

And he lifted. He rose like a fart-powered hovercraft, fidgeting to such a degree as to render himself frictionless on the hardwood floor, and began to skitter about, slowly rotating as he careened off the furniture and finally drifted out of sight into the bedroom. Have you ever played air hockey? He moved the way an air-hockey puck moves.

The missus was almost paralyzed with laughter, but she was still able to clap her hands and holler. "Laszlo! Here! Sit!"

Laszlo shot out of the bedroom, scrambled frantically to make the turn, hit full speed on the straightaway, then sat down when he was six feet away from the missus.

He slid those last two yards in the sitting position and came to a rest at her feet, gazing up lovingly, tail wagging. It was nicely done.

More then that, it did a damned good job of reestablishing his credibility. After that, most dogs would have wound up being labeled 'Hoverbutt' for the rest of their lives, but not Laszlo. It's been a couple of days and the name hasn't come up once. His dignity may not be all-encompassing or of the greatest magnitude, but it can take a good bit of battering and come out intact. Even enhanced.

And let's face it. The typical sit session is about the human telling the dog what to do. That was not the story here.

I'm not sure what it is this dog has, but I hope it rubs off.

Malcolm Gladwell: Notes Toward A Practical Theory Of Life

So I've been going through my usual midwinter funk, this time with extra sauce. I haven't been blogging because a) my thoughts are too disordered for me to be able to write well, and b) there would be too much temptation to complain.

However, it has not been entirely miserable. I've done a fairly healthy amount of reading, and it has been remarkably rewarding. I'll want to mention John Waters's latest book, for instance, but the most significant experience I had was discovering the works of Malcolm Gladwell.

I've been communicating with a number of people on their reaction to the book Outliers, in particular Catherine Schaff-Stump. Here's part of our exchange, and here's another. I promised I'd acquire the book itself and respond to the work rather than the response to it.

Well, when the missus was visiting family in Florida, I had my usual withdrawals. One night I woke up at midnight, knew I was awake, and went prowling around for something to read. Fiction gives me difficulties these days; I wanted something soft and easy to understand. I found a book on the shelf called Blink, a yard sale rescue item.

I was blown away. When I started thinking, "Man, those people talking up Outliers ought to be reading this guy," I remembered the time my brother and I spent nearly a year with him trying to get me to read this short story in Omni called Johnny Mnemonic, while I pushed Neuromancer on him, both of us convinced we'd found the greatest science fiction ever. Of course after all the fighting and outrage had cleared out, we realized we'd both discovered William Gibson. (Typically, Duncan found him first. I'm always late to the party.)

I got up from bed and checked the computer; sure enough, Gladwell wrote both books and a third called Tipping Point. So the next day I walked to four different local stored and located Tipping Point, and then performed an act of grim dedication. I bought Outliers new, in hardback, from a big chain store. God have mercy on my sin-blistered soul.

This is exemplary non-fiction, with direct, intelligent prose and an understated but distinct authorial presence. These works gave me the much-appreciated pleasure of the company of a congenial mind, one rich in intelligence, common sense, diligence, and humanity. I do not agree with everything he says, and I feel that in Outliers, he begins to have serious trouble with unstated theses and the making of assumptions -- there is a sense of fatigue there. Or possibly desperation.

Because underneath the smooth surface of his presentation, Gladwell shows every sign of being passionately concerned with one of life's most serious question, and by implication concerned with life's only serious question.

Why do some people succeed and some fail? More specifically, why do so many gifted people fail? How is it that some people are able to change their circumstances radically, while others seem trapped by their position in life?

How does this apply to me?

How should I live my life?

That is the only important question. All others derive from it. And Malcolm Gladwell made me think about it. Hard. Because he doesn't just have speculation. He's got solid, verified observation, and he draws useful conclusions. He's been thinking about a lot of things that have occupied me recently, and he's in a position to have a better understanding of them then I do.

Rather than do a serious critique -- which will come, after I've had time to seriously read and notate the books -- let me tell you how my attitudes and approaches to life have changed in response to my initial reading. I did not digest these books, or ponder them, I gulped them down in raw steaming chunks. These are the personal responses I took away.

1
My big problem is not mental illness, it is class. It would be proper for me to attempt to gain access to the perquisites of the middle class, rather than defiantly shake my fist from the gutter.

My sister and I spoke of this yesterday morning. The difference between the way she was raised and the way I was raised left her a member of the lower middle class, and me a member of the lower class. It is distinct.

This is an issue in my relationship with the missus. She's upper middle/lower upper class, and the clash between my short-sighted fatalism and her arrogant entitlement provides us with hours of amusement.

In these books, Gladwell points out over and over again, subtly and overtly, that poverty carries with it a mental and emotional burden, and this burden predisposes a person to failure.

To be working class is to know that all you have has been given to you, and it could be taken away at any moment. Any bad decision you make can cost you everything. Starving in the gutter is not a metaphor; it is an activity. Have you ever felt your belly eat itself? Fuck you. And there is no profit to be made from your commitment, passion, and action. No benefit accrues from effort. The guy who spends half the day jacking off in the men's room takes home the same check you do. And honestly, if this is the best you can do you're a loser, plain and simple. You are a burden, everything you have is taken away from someone else, and if you attract any attention it will come in the form of trouble. So if you like attention, you better like trouble too.

This is the real key to my experience of life. I know people who are, like me, high-functioning mentally ill. And they own houses. They have careers. They take vacations.

Because somewhere down the line they got the information that they deserved to have their needs met. That the world was going to provide for those needs.

And this feeling of basic confidence in one's right to exist is a powerful thing. It might be more honest to say that the elimination of pride and confidence is shattering. That it prevents a person from functioning properly in the world.

So now I know why it's important for me to feel as though I deserve to have my needs and desires met. This condition I exist in is not virtuous; it is a pathological response to stress and trauma. It inhibits the quality of life of those who care for me. And it will certainly shorten my life if indulged.

But I find myself resistant, and the resistance is based on two feelings. One is that I am falling into sin, that to care for oneself is both vain and definitively selfish, the other is that my ability to physically dominate a situation might be compromised by an appearance that says anything other than, "I do not give a shit, and I am ready to die at any minute."

Honestly? You ask me what I want to look like? My mind immediately flashes to one of those Somalian dudes with a hyena on a chain. This must be modified at the very least.

So how does one go about addressing such an existential disaster?

Gladwell posted some signs, and I found they led somewhere productive.

2
Style Is Substantial

Nice is a word that's always given me problems. I am a tremendous supporter of nice in the Elwood Dowd sense, but the importance of things looking nice, or being nice has always bothered me. "Why should I have to dress nice, why should I have to clean up?" was a question whose answer always hinged on other people. Why should I have to dress differently just because of them? I don't mind clutter, I know where everything is. Why should it make any difference?

Gladwell makes it plain, over and over, that it makes a difference. A big difference. Coke tastes different out of the can. When New York literally cleaned up its infrastructure, it metaphorically cleaned up its crime problem. And when I wear a sport coat, people treat me differently. Because I went to the trouble of telling them that I'm a person worthy of respect.

In our house, there is a sharp division of height. Everything over five-six or so is mine. And for decades, there have been piles of books and CDs and bags of old bank statements and every little bit of crippy-crappy that gets handed to me that I don't care about accumulating on the tops of our shelves and dressers and so on.

Thinking about how New York got cleaned up, I started the week by clearing all those off. Interestingly, it's lighter downstairs -- they were actual hovering dark presences. More importantly, I'm trying to send a message to myself -- no more darkened unexamined corners. Everything out in the open, neat and tidy.

And now I understand that clothes are a language, and a personal signifier as well. The semiotics of personal presentation are the most controllable aspect of one's public person, and frequently it's the most instrumental.

I typically dress in a ragged T-shirt and too-big jeans held up by a too-big belt and muddy hiking boots. My hair is usually overgrown and vaguely... Ever see a picture of Gabby Hayes? Like that. I've had people throw change in my lap while I was waiting for the bus.

My clothes and person say, 'this is someone who is almost but not quite able to take care of himself, he's clean enough so that he probably doesn't live on the street, but if he wears pajamas they have feet.' Like it or not, this is a limited but accurate view.

I'm going to figure out how to make my appearance make the equally limited-but-accurate statement that, 'this is an artist, confident, and capable, a professional creator fit to act at the highest level.' I have it on good authority that I am not a wannabe, I'm a professional waiting to get paid. Time to start dressing in a fashion that allows others to view me in that light as easily as possible.

This is going to be a whole other post or series of posts in itself. Conquering my style issues is going to be a fucking bear.

But at least I know.

(A brief postscript -- the missus went mad and dragged me to a thrift store this afternoon. I agreed, but told her I would not buy anything that didn't grab me. That if I was going to make the clothing thing work, it would have to be based on positive feedback and pleasure -- on a sense that I was doing something that I wanted to do.

So when we stepped into the store, they were playing the Edgar Winter Group instrumental Frankenstein [you know I love this one - bwa-bwa-bwabwa-bwabwabwa-bwa!], and the very first men's garment I saw was a Ramones-style leather jacket that fit me? [I'm six-three and oddly built.] This is a garment I've wanted for more than twenty years, and the first time in my motherfucking life I go clothes shopping for fun I find one for thirty dollars, half off. Well. I changed my attitude. If I get to rock, this is going to be fun! When I picked up my niece this afternoon I dressed up a bit; she and her sister agreed that I was definitely on the right track.)

3
I Am Part Of Something Larger Than Myself

I know how important other people are to me. I'm starting to figure out how important I am to other people.

These books make it plain that we are literally part of one another. People who spend time together divide up mental chores unconsciously, by ability -- so when you're together, each of you has an extended mental capacity.

You ever get together with someone and just go, 'whew, I needed that?' You did need that. And they needed you. And guess what?

Your successes and failures impact the quality of their lives in a myriad of ways both subtle and overt. When we rise, we lift other with us. So there actually is a moral obligation to treat ourselves not just well, but in a way that maximizes our health and joy in life. Because we are always examples and models as well as individuals.

This applies to art as well. While Gladwell didn't deal with the arts per se, these books strongly reinforced my notion that art is one of the primary influences on the weltenschaung, and that as an artist regardless of my conventional success and failure, I have already began to exert an influence on the tone of the world. There is a real power here, and one largely unrecognized.

But I now feel that by exerting myself in my chosen fields, I can have a positive effect on both the people I care for, and the world at large.

Further. I am not simply an isolated individual. My well-being is of significance to many others, and by failing myself, I am failing them -- and these patterns have all kinds of complex feedback loops.

People who are happy and strong make me feel better. They help me. The more happy strong people there are, the better. So if I can turn me into a happy strong person, I make life better for others. It's a straightforward conclusion. To seek benefits and advantages for myself is not an entirely selfish pursuit. To seek abnegation and minimization is not a selfless act; rather, it is the pursuit of eccentricity at cost to those closest to me.

4
I Live in a Rice Economy

One of the flaws in Outliers is Gladwell's failure to think things through to a conclusion. I feel as if his need for journalistic distance is at odds with the very personal drive behind his work.

The section on rice cultures was where his thoughts scattered. He convincingly argued that rice cultures have the strongest work ethic because rice cultivation is successful in direct proportion to the labor and skill of the farmer. The harder they work, the more they are rewarded. The smarter they work, the more they are rewarded.

Gladwell states that we could learn from these cultures. But learn what? He emphasizes the effort and time involved in successful rice farming, and demonstrated that this level of commitment produces spectacular results anywhere it is applied.

But he also points out earlier in Outliers that that level of commitment is a hardship, is demanding, and if it doesn't produce a profit in itself? It is expensive, and someone other than the practitioner must foot the bill. It is this simple. Do I really have to point out that this is a fairly serious class issue as well? I wouldn't have gotten my outlier hours in if I hadn't been a) crazy and b) disabled. This is how America trains its artists, he said bitterly.

He also points out that the values of a rice culture evaporate outside an environment where there is not a directly perceptible connection between effort and benefit. Like it or not, in our culture the connections between labor, ability, and success are frequently diffuse and unpredictable. Many people find no healthy motivation to engage in life on this basis. Gladwell does not address this issue -- I'm not convinced he pondered it consciously while writing this work.

But I am an artist. I know from experience that I am happiest when I work a ten-to-twelve hour creative workday encompassing a variety of challenging activities, and that my work drastically improves under those circumstances. Work is healthy for me, and the more I do, the better I am, the better my odds of success.

As I said, this post might have been a bit muddled, a bit pointless. I'm struggling with the midwinters right now. Haven't eaten in two days, and the ulcer feels like someone's trying to dig their way out of me with a Popsicle stick. Blaaaaaaaaaaargh. But I am not giving up, not wallowing in negativity and passivity. I am making progress.

I've got warm feelings toward the work of Malcolm Gladwell. If you see him, tell him I said thanks.

Ten Thngs I Have Done That You Probably Haven't

In response to John Scalzi's taunting post, here we go.

1. Faced down a Hell's Angel after he rammed the car I was in with a pickup truck. (I didn't know he was an Angel at the time, he thought I was a deaf-mute channel for the Devil...)

2. Nursed a fledgling sparrow to maturity. Best part? When it landed on my shoulder days after I let it go...

3. Written Cockney dialog for Cockney actors and a Cockney audience, as broadcast on the BBC.

4. Debated Mortimer Adler to a standstill at age 14.

5. Befriended a baby elephant, who then tried to keep me.

6. Heard a fellow student shot to death while in my typing class. I'm typing now, if you notice.

7. At a friend's request, operated on his dog's ear to drain a hematoma; the vet who put in a drain later confirmed my diagnosis and praised my work.

8. Laid a brick path around a planter, starting in one spot, laying bricks as I went, and the bricks at the end slotted perfectly with the bricks at the beginning. A pal went behind me and mortared as I went -- we knew I could do it, even though I'd never laid bricks before. Artist's eye, motherfuckers.

9. Pushed a needle all the way through my thumb in fourth grade, for reasons only G. Gordon Liddy would understand.

10. Turned down work as muscle for a mid-level drug dealer.

And you?

What The Hell Is Going On?

I'll tell you about this later. It should be -- oh, shit. Is that a bear?

It's been a while since I've posted. Life has been interesting in the proverbial sense...

But here's the big news.

1. I made my first performance, unless you count speaking at weddings and funerals.

2. I spoke to a psychiatrist, and have tentatively begun treatment.

3. Swill is out.

So I'll talk about the shrink first. Get it out of the way.

It was interesting. The nurse running the place immediately slotted me for a two-week stay in the bin, to be monitored while they determined my medication.

She said, "They'll be delighted with you."

Thus we have my relationship with the mental health profession. It's kind of like Where The Wild Things Are. "Oh please don't go! Oh please don't go! We'll eat you up, we love you so!"

I wound up speaking with the doctor for quite some time. Near the beginning of our interview, she said, "Normally these are much shorter, but you're so interesting!"

In my lowest moments, I can think back on moments such as these, and comfort myself with the thought that women find me of great clinical interest.

So, I've mentioned in previous posts that I've been diagnosed with agitated depression and borderline schizophrenia. Well, the doctor told me that there is no longer such thing as agitated depression, and 'borderline schizophrenia' never existed -- some shrinks use it as a shorthand for, 'well, there's something going on in there, and it's making me nervous.'

What she said? Post-traumatic stress disorder (which, interestingly, Jim MacDonald diagnosed for one of my autobiographical characters) and obsessive-compulsive disorder. "You've got a little bipolar, too, but all artists have a little bipolar." And I'm hypomanic. If you know me personally, look up hypomania and nod in recognition.

There was something I very much appreciated. I mean, she's letting me keep my bipolar! (Well, hypomania is pretty functional.) She specifically stated that the goal of my treatment was maximum creativity, minimum medication. "Maybe just stabilizing your sleep would be enough."

Yes, yes, yes.

She also said something interesting. "I don't think you represent a danger to yourself or the community at all." She said it with the definite air of a woman making a contradiction. I suspect it was directed at the nurse, since the doctor didn't put me in the bin after all.

Instead, I received an initial prescription for two anti-depressants and an anti-psychotic. Which I guess is minimal medication for such as me.

The missus, bless her heart, after all this... after making me go to the emergency room, insisting that I do the follow-up, driving me to the appointment...

"They're putting you on a caaaaahk-tail! That stuff is poison! It's addictive, you know. Have you talked to ______ about how they feel on their medication? (the individual in question has behaved violently when not on meds) You won't be able to work."

And so on. Her great fear is that I'll wind up a broken zombie. I told her that if she doesn't like what it does to me, I stop. The point of this is to make me as easy to live with as possible. So we'll see. She's having me hold off for a few days, which is fine with me. Get one last band session in with beer before the long drought -- no drinking with meds.

I think talk therapy will be more useful to me -- but it's going to be a long time before I can get that going. Turns out Berkeley is hurting for low-cost counseling.

And so.

How'd the performance go? First off, let me thank everyone who showed up. I have got a swell community and I am grateful for it.

And as for the performance. It turns out that my completely unreasonable confidence was not unreasonable at all. I have a talent for performing that isn't obvious until I have an audience to fuck with.

I'm good at it. Real good. The video will go up at some point, but I will tell you in honest pride that I kicked ass. I was told a number of times by a number of people that I was 'the hit of the evening.' What's sick? I didn't need to be told. I knew it; I was there.

This was something for me. A while ago I began attending readings, and soon found that I wanted to be on the other side of the podium. I can even put a date on the birth of this ambition -- my birthday in 2009, when I attended the Litpunk reading. To concieve an ambition, and see it through to completion at a high level of skill in a prestigious venue? On purpose? Dang. Didn't know I could do that shit. Bodes well for the future.

Okay, I'll confess. When I was told that I was going to be opening, I smiled and nodded and agreed internally that it was only smart to put the new guy in first. First time out, you can't expect too much.

But something in me said very distinctly, "You're gonna eat that."

Not a nice statement, is it? But there it was. Something in me felt challenged, and responded. I don't think I would have done as well if I didn't have a wee touch of malice in my motivation.

It was interesting. I was in a distinctly altered frame of mind. Normally that kind of busy-busy atmosphere -- people bustling around, eating, talking -- shuts me right down. Instead, I was able to smile and converse, but I felt a real distance from everyone. That was my only bad feeling of the evening -- I felt guilty about not being able to spend real personal time with all the friends who had come out to support me.

And here's the other thing that was weird. When I looked at the audience? They were all just a horrible undifferentiated blur, a genially horrid many-handed monster -- except for women I found attractive, who gave the impression of being arranged like chocolates in a box. Very disturbing. Between that and the disassociation, I think I have a better understanding of how celebrities get into trouble.

But I'll tell you what. After an initial stumble, I had them. I got laughs I wasn't expecting, but when I turned the screw they shut the fuck up and listened. The missus later explained that stumble to me. At the start, I mentioned that I'd brought the wrong copy of the manuscript.

At first I argued with her about that -- I was just being candid, which is part of my thang, etc. But on further thought, I decided she was right. (Sweetie, here it is in front of everyone -- you were right, and I was wrong.) I think an audience likes being told what to do -- if you have convinced it that you are in charge. By admitting an error, I cast doubt on my authority, which made the audience suspicious until I proved my mettle.

And once I thought of it that way, I realized the pleasure I'd experienced in performing. It was that of dominance. Control. I work hard on being polite, deferential, cooperative, a person of service. I do this because the alpha male I have locked in the basement is a motherfucker and I do not trust him.

Performance gave me a time and place to let him out for a while. I liked that. I want to do more. And it felt safe. It was appropriate for me to be extreme, demanding, and unquestioningly in charge. It was the time and place where I was serving by ruling, to put a ridiculously overweening caste on things.

And like I said, it's safe, it's harmless. I mean, some crazy artist getting sick power thrills from the control of crowds? What could possibly go wrong with that?

I'll tell you about Swill tomorrow.