Brother ChiSing: 1969-2016

Well, we knew this was coming for months, but somehow nobody was even remotely prepared when Brother ChiSing died on Monday.  Brother ChiSing was my Buddhist monk friend and spiritual director of the Dallas Meditation Center, sometimes called the Awakening Heart Center. He founded the Center back in 2007 with a few friends and some rented rooms at Unity Church of Dallas, and by the time he died we had had our own building and there were something like 200 of us, not counting the walk-ins and general hangers-on.  Besides running the Center, Brother ChiSing recorded music, appeared at local interfaith events, hosted meditation workshops for beginners and just in general did as much as one human being can possibly do to get non-Buddhists interested in meditation.

He's been eulogized plenty on Facebook and there's not one but two memorial services coming up.  We weren't good friends and I wasn't part of the "inner circle" so I feel a little weird about adding my own "what-I-remember-about-ChiSing" thing.  But, I'm gonna do it anyway.  I was one of the few people showing up at the Unity Church back in 2007; not one of the original founders but I was there pretty early on.  The main thing I liked about ChiSing was his endless enthusiasm, which was sort of like a puppy being placed on the floor next to a bunch of new toys. When giving talks he often interrupted himself because such-and-such had just come to mind and he just couldn't wait until later to tell anybody, leading to a lot of "Where was I?  Oh yes..." moments.  And sometimes we never did get back to the original point, whatever it was, but the trip was always fascinating no matter where we ended up.

Brother ChiSing started out as a fairly liberal evangelical Christian pastor of the Baptist stripe.  He ended up getting kicked out of that role when some of the higher-ups "discovered" he was gay, though I can't imagine he was ever very quiet about it so they must have been pretty obtuse.  How he ended up becoming a Buddhist monk was going to be the subject of a book called "From Baptist to Buddhist and Beyond," and I don't know how far into it he was when he got sick.  I hope he left his notes with somebody because I'd love to see it finished.  Anyway, ChiSing met Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village in France sometime in the early 2000s and that meeting put him on the Buddhist path.  I've never met the man myself, but I understand Thich Nhat Hanh does that to people.

Anyway, I remember plenty of Sunday evenings at the Unity Church meditating and listening to ChiSing's talks (some of which can be found here, and really, you should give one of them a listen if you have a few minutes.  They really give you a better idea of what the man was like).  ChiSing also hosted daylong meditation retreats about once a month, and I looked forward to those like it was Christmas.  Even when my work schedule changed and I couldn't get to the Sunday night services anymore, I tried never to miss those daylong retreats because they were awesome.  Once, when I'd first been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was still on a manic tear, I thought about not going to the retreat because I wasn't sure I could sit still.  But I went anyway, and kind of bounded into the church like Tigger from the Pooh stories. Bound bound bound bound bound up to the circle of meditation cushions and then dropped down onto one of them.  I looked around at everybody and said, "HI!!"  I could see Brother ChiSing trying really hard not to roll his eyes.  But anyway, he was incredibly patient with me, and I actually did calm down enough to meditate that day.

Another time, I went to a half-day meditation thing, to which I was the only one who showed.  There had been some kind of mix-up with the schedule, apparently.  But ChiSing and I sat and meditated together, and then we went over to the Thai temple to drop off some food for the monks (which is good luck) and just to have a look around.  It's a beautiful temple with a huge golden Buddha inside, and on the wallpaper inside are numerous Buddhist stories, including one picture of a man drowning in delusion while looking at Facebook!  ChiSing pointed this out to me like a kid would show off a tree house he and some friends had built in the forest.  It was a fascinating afternoon.  

In 2012 Brother ChiSing went to Thailand and entered a monastery for a couple of months.  He came back with hair that was about 1/4" long.  Sort of the "punk rock" look.  It was SO not him.  He put up with a lot of teasing about his hair, some of which came from me.  I think I dubbed him "ChiSing Rotten" (after John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten) but that might have been Cornell.

Anyway.  In 2014 ChiSing announced he had been to the doctor, and found out that he had nasopharyngeal cancer.  Chemotherapy was probably never an option due to where the tumor was located but he'd decided against it anyway.  He did have some radiation and some herbal therapies but mainly, he tried to do as much as he could in the time he had left.  During this time, the Dallas Meditation Center got kicked out of our building so it could be torn down to make luxury condos.  This was probably one of the biggest tragedies of his life, but he was focused on getting the rest of us through it instead.  We are now renting space at the CSL Dallas, which is fine, but having a permanent building would really be nice.  Our funding kind of comes and goes with the seasons, though, and landlords have this habit of wanting to be paid every month. To say nothing of employees, maintenance people, etc.

Through most of 2014 and up through this year, ChiSing split his time between his family in Houston and his Dallas family of friends.  He had just decided to enter hospice last week.  He died in his sleep Monday morning.  Not many people have the opportunity to make the kind of impact ChiSing did.  He was lucky.  He will be greatly missed.

Under The Rocket's Red Glare

The other night, Joan and I went to a classical music concert.  Well, technically I guess it was a romantic-modernist music concert, if you understand that the romantic period in classical music began in the 1830s and died about 1940, and everything after that is modernism.  (Otherwise we'd be in post-post-post modernism by now, and that could get confusing).  Anyway, the ensemble is called The Dallas Winds, and they're pretty amazing.  At least, I think they are.  Another thing about romantic-modernist music; sometimes it fails to sound like music and just sounds like--sound.

But they seemed like they knew what they were doing, so I'm going to just say they were pretty amazing.  They get paid for this, after all.  To get paid for playing an instrument--any kind of orchestral instrument--you have to be pretty amazing.  There's only so many jobs, and all of them are filled, and the music schools churn out new kids every year, all young and eager and out for blood, and you have to sort of wait for someone to die to get a chance to audition for one, and if you ever wondered why clarinet players turn up dead at such an alarming rate, well, now you know.

Incidentally, and this actually does bear on what I'm going to tell you, Joan's been having a lot of trouble with her knee.  The one she had the surgery on back in 2009.  It's got permanent arthritis in it now, there's not a whole lot anybody can do about it apart from replacing the knee, which is just Right Out, and some days she just sort of limps around with a cane and hopes she doesn't have to stand up too fast, or without help.  Naturally, the day of the concert was one of those days. I dropped her off in front of the venue and went to park the car, then walked back through a maze of twisting streets, positive I'd lost the car for all time.  Turned out I'd also dropped her off in front of the wrong venue, so she'd had to walk down to the right venue, with the cane, and--yeah.  This evening was not starting off well.

But we got inside, and we had pretty good seats right near the stage, and the seats were comfortable and kind of fuzzy.  Upon sinking into hers, Joan said, "I hope you're going to help me up."  Yeah, sometimes if the seats are too low it's hard for her to struggle back out of it again.

Which was just about the time that the wind ensemble struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner."  Of course.  We're in Texas; it's probably a state law that every concert starts with "The Star-Spangled Banner." And by this time, all the other seats around us were filled in, so in order to get over to where I could pull Joan up out of her seat, two or three people would have had to move.  So Joan didn't stand up for "The Star-Spangled Banner." Which I didn't think was a problem at the time.  I mean, it's probably not a state law that you have to stand up for "The Star-Spangled Banner" if you can't get up.

Unfortunately, there was this guy behind us.  I think you know the type.  Old and loud.  Well, in his seventies, anyway, and he'd been expounding at a pretty high volume about a number of things before the concert started.  Of course he was right behind us.  And of course he took issue with Joan not standing up.  And of course he had to yell, loud enough to be heard over very loud music, "What's the matter with you?  Won't you stand up for your country?"

Or words to that effect.  And Joan said, "I can't."  And he didn't hear her, of course, what with the shouting and the music, so I stuck my head between them and said, "She can't stand up without help, sir."  And he grunted something that I'm sure wasn't terribly complimentary, and by then the song was over and we all got to sit down.  And so the concert started.  And I miss most of the first piece because I'm wondering how I'm going to get Joan out of her chair now.  If she manages to get on her feet without help, am I going to have to lean over and explain to this guy about her arthritis and the cane and so on?  Is that any of his business?  Or should I just let him yell, "Oh hey, you can stand up now..."

Well, as it turned out, he didn't.  We snuck out early and missed the last piece (by some guy named Hindemith).  But really, the whole thing was kind of disturbing.  I can't imagine that anybody in a wheelchair ever gets asked why they aren't standing up for "The Star-Spangled Banner."  Or anybody with crutches for that matter.  But a cane--well, it's not very noticeable, I guess.  And the whole thing got me thinking about people with invisible disabilities.  Take, for example, people with disabled placards in their cars.  Not all of them are obviously disabled.  Some of them look perfectly fine, but they probably have something wrong with them that you can't see.  Nerve pain, maybe, or multiple sclerosis.  And they have trouble getting around.  You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get those placards, figuratively speaking (if memory serves, they didn't want to give Joan's mom one because she didn't have a driver's license and therefore, according to logic, never got in a car.  I guess it didn't occur to anybody at the DMV that somebody else might pick her up and take her somewhere once in a while.)

Take people who are mentally ill.  You may not be able to tell who they are, because they look just like everybody else, but there are some people who have a lot more trouble getting through the day than the rest of us.  They probably don't have disabled placards, but some of them have mornings where they can't get up and nights when they can't get to sleep.  They may have wildly fluctuating energy levels and some days they just hide in the house because they can't cope with the human race.  I don't think most of y'all would yell at someone for not standing up for "The Star-Spangled Banner."  Well, maybe you shouldn't give somebody a hard time and call him or her lazy if he can't make it in to work today.  Maybe that's just the way it goes sometimes.

Anyway, I'm sure there are classical concerts that don't involve having to disclose your entire medical history to a complete stranger.  And I'm sure we'll go back for one of those.

More About This Lutheran To Buddhist Thing. Part 3.

Believe it or not, this blog has a mail service.  Yeah, it's not as sexy as Reddit or an RSS feed, but if you comment on here with your email address, and you like actually want me to, I'll add you to the list of people to whom I send new posts as they're posted.  Mostly I'm sending it to certain family members, who wouldn't read my stuff otherwise.  Too much trouble to check my Web site every Thursday (well, most every Thursday) or they're not on Facebook or they don't like to browse on the Internet or whatever.  This is convenient, in a way, because if I wanna talk about them, all I have to do is not send the post when I'm done.  Yeah, it's kinda cowardly, and there's that tree-falling-in-the-forest thing (if a post is posted on Blogger and there's nobody around to tweet about it, does that post still exist?) but I get to get plenty of stuff off my chest that way, without hurting anybody's feelings.  And really, would you want to send a post critical of a person directly to that person?  Even if you did, you wouldn't do it, if you were a Lutheran.  It's way too direct and problem-solvy for a Lutheran.  And I was once a Lutheran.  So there you are.

This here is one of those posts. Yep, another discourse on my ongoing confusion with religion.  Which started pretty early.  I think I was about five.  Apparently in some Sunday-school discussion, we'd been talking about the poor widow who only had two shekels to give to the temple, which God appreciated much more than the sacks of gold brought by the more well-to-do believers because she gave all she had.  (You might think God would just give the two shekels back and say, "No, really, I'm fine without these.  Please take them and, I dunno, buy food for your kids or something." Maybe God would.  But temple administrators?  That's a whole nother story.)  Anyway: It occurred to me that I had a lot more than two shekels and I wasn't giving God all I had, which was evidently bad.  The most valuable things I owned at the time were my gold birth ring and a collection of Barbies.  The ring was a lot more portable.  So after the service one Sunday, I sneaked into the sanctuary, put it on the railing in front of the altar (the altar was off limits; even before paralegal school, I knew the before-the-bar rule) and left it there.

Well, you know how this ends.  Somebody saw me and turned in the ring, and the pastor figured out who I was and returned the ring to my mother, who returned it to me.  And I got in all kinds of trouble about leaving important and valuable things just lying around places (and at church, no less).  What was I thinking?   I don't remember if I explained about the poor widow and the two shekels, but I probably tried to (at that age I was still trying to explain stuff; I don't think I gave up on that until I was thirteen or so, and one might argue that in fact I never really did).  Anyway, the whole religious aspect of this incident just got totally overlooked. Which, again, if you're five, is all manner of confusing.

Everybody gets mixed messages from their parents.  It's part of being human, I think.  My bag of mixed messages, when it comes to religion, runs something like this: It's very important that we go to church every Sunday.  Because it's just something this family does.  You need to dress up and look pretty so we can look nice as a family but don't try to look nicer than anybody else or do anything else to call attention to yourself.  Yes, they talk about religion there, but don't listen.  Be attentive to your Sunday-school teachers. Just don't believe anything they tell you.  Because religion is a bunch of crock, really.  Don't believe in God.  Or if you do believe in God, don't tell anybody.  Especially not people at church.  They'll think you're a holy roller, and you don't want to be a holy roller.  There is no devil and there is no hell but you shouldn't ever lie, cheat, steal or have sex, because otherwise you'll go straight there when you die.  Finally, the way you feel at church is not important and you shouldn't pay any attention to it.  If you get involved with religion based on the way you feel, you'll end up in a cult or living on the streets with the Jesus Freaks. But it's very important that we go to church every Sunday.  Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

You can see how this might get confusing for a five year old.  Hell, I'm 45 and I'm still confused.  Even during the whole last five years I was living at home, when I refused to go to church and waged World War III about it with my mother every single Sunday, I don't think we ever once had any kind of actual religious discussion.  By which I mean, "This is what I believe. (Statement.)  What do you believe?"  That just never, ever happened.  Again, I'm 45 and about all I can tell you about my parents' religious beliefs is that I don't think my mother believes in God at all and my dad might believe in intelligent design, based on something he said once in a discussion about evolution ten years ago.  That's it. That's all.  If one of them ever dies, I suppose we'll have the funeral in the Lutheran church, but for the life of me I don't know why.

The tricky bit, here, is that I really wanted to believe in God.  It's very comforting to think that if you need help, there's somebody up there who can send it, and that if you fall down, somebody will pick you up and put you back on your feet.  I could wrap my brain around the concept of God, but I couldn't really believe in it.  And Jesus was right out.  I mean, the guy was cool--long haired radical, taught people to do what was right instead of what was popular, wanted his flock to take care of the widows and the orphans and anybody else who was obviously having a hard time, ended up dying for what he believed in--but the son of God? (Actually, he never said that.  He called himself the Son of Man.)  None come to the Father but through me? Nope.  Couldn't do it.  Could not even for one second believe that God would just pitch you out if you didn't come by way of his caddy.  That was totally antithetical to anything being God would mean.  And by the way, I do have at least a shaky grip on what being God would mean.  So far I've absolutely refused to play any video games that even hint that you control the environment, like SimCity or Black & White or even virtual fish aquariums. And I thought the scariest part of The Talisman, by "Big Steve" King and Peter Straub, came near the end, when Jake was with the Talisman for the first time and realized that by holding it, he had become God.  That sort of thing upsets me tremendously.  I cannot handle it.  And so this I can say about God with complete certainty:  He is not me.  And I was never cut out to be Him.

(Yes, even in my manic phases, where sometimes grandiosity takes over and I start believing that everything I do takes on Extreme Significance and therefore must be done Exactly Right.  Thank God for meds, because seriously?  That sort of thing gets old quick. There's only so many times you can walk down Fifth Avenue between B Street and Broadway at exactly 11:15 in the morning on a Wednesday in order to avert the Something Bad that might happen. Sooner or later you just have to get some work done.)    

So to end the story if it has an ending, after some 26 years in the Lutheran church, a lot of years as a nonpracticing nothing-in-particular and these last four or five as a Buddhist, I have not the foggiest idea to whom I'm praying.  I could address my prayers "to whom it may concern," but it's easier to just say God. You know, that supreme being I don't believe in.  I believe in a Higher Power (yes, 6 years in OA hasn't been a total waste of spiritual time), but what that is, I couldn't tell you.  I believe in a sort of universal force for good, something out there maybe made up of all of the beings that ever were, are or will be, that just sort of wants what's best for everybody and thinks we should all be a little nicer to each other.  So Buddhism fits this pretty well, seeing as Buddhism isn't terribly concerned about the nature of God.  As my Buddhist monk friend told me, "If there is a God, then He needs to be enlightened.  If He is already enlightened, then we should strive to be like Him.  If there is not a God, then we don't need to worry about it."

He said that.  He really did say that.  Honestly,  I could just smack him sometimes.  Which would be a very un-Buddhist-y thing to do.  And my Higher Power probably wouldn't be happy about it either.

Stand Back. I Have Arms.

You guys, I know I just did a blog post, but I'm gonna have to do another one because I'm getting very concerned about all the stuff I'm reading about that guy in Santa Barbara who shot a bunch of people on Friday.  (It is a Buddhist In The Bible Belt policy not to publicly identify criminals who evidently want publicity.  This here's a religious blog, not a public-relations firm.)  Mainly I'm concerned about comments like this one from blogger Bernie O'Hare: "Guns may not kill people, but cRaZy people with guns do. Before anyone is permitted to own a gun, he should be forced to undergo a mental health evaluation."  Or this one from John Boehner, senator from Ohio and that guy who tans himself orange all the time: “There’s no question that those with mental health issues should be prevented from owning weapons or being able to purchase weapons." Or constitutional law professor and Second Amendment expert Adam Winkler on CBS News:  "We are making it too easy for people who are mentally ill to get access to guns."  Or this gem from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "If the nation can’t come together on the simple proposition that it should do everything possible to keep mentally ill people from acquiring or possessing weapons, then sanity has fled us all."

Just out of curiosity, are you guys talking about me, here?  Well, yes, you are.  Of course you are.

I'm a pretty ordinary person.  I own a house, have a wife, cats, car.  I hold down a regular job.  I love kittens, apple pie, baseball and Mom.  Oh, and I'm mentally ill.  Yeah, I forget about that once in a while, but it's definitely been on my mind for the last couple days. There's something deeply disturbing about watching a nation of people debating whether or not you, too should be allowed civil rights.  And here I was thinking all I had to worry about was whether or not Texas would legally recognize my marriage (and the answer, as it so often is, is maybe).  

Oh, and please don't start telling me I'm not one of "those" mentally ill people or that you meant those "other" mentally ill people.  There are no "others."  We all fit under the same definition.  No one has ever suggested I'm about to grab an AK-47 and go out on a rampage, but if you believe that "mentally ill people shouldn't be allowed to buy weapons," then you're throwing me into the pile.  And frankly, I'd rather be a part of that pile than have you single me out and explain to me why I'm somehow special or different.

The idea that mentally ill people shouldn't be allowed to buy guns is based on two errors in logic.  The first is that only mentally ill people go on shooting rampages.  That's a false correlation.  I'm sure people want to believe that only mentally ill people would want to kill a whole bunch of people in a Columbine or Sandy Hill-like attack, but the truth is that in a lot of shootings, the shooter was never diagnosed or even suspected of being mentally ill.  The shooting in Santa Barbara actively targeted women, specifically beautiful blonde women, because the terrorist in question believed that such women had rejected him.  Since it targeted a specific group and was underlined by specific beliefs, Santa Barbara was an act of terror, not an expression of mental illness.

The second error is that if a mentally ill person wants a firearm, he or she must be about to go on a shooting rampage.  Well, if you believe that, you may be interested to know that over 19,000 of the United States's 31,000-a-year gun deaths are suicides. (WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports, 1999-2010.) In fact,  the overall suicide rate is rising so rapidly that it now outnumbers deaths from car crashes. Over 80% of those suicide deaths were white males under the age of 40 (WIAQARS, supra.) You know, the same people who go on these rampages.  The statistics are clear: Putting a gun into the hand of a mentally ill person is a lot more likely to result in a suicide than a homicide.  And while nobody's suggesting suicide is a good thing, neither is being murdered, and the mentally ill have a much higher chance of becoming a homicide victim than they ever do of killing anybody.

I do not own a gun.  I have, in fact, never owned a gun.  Joan used to own a gun, and I shot it once in a while, but it wasn't my gun and I rarely even thought about its presence in our house except when my idiot neighbor began harassing us back a couple of years ago about a fence we didn't want to build or pay for.  During that particular saga, I was pretty damn glad we had a gun.  Now that we don't anymore, I don't particularly miss it, but if Fencegate were to rear its ugly head again, I'd feel better having a weapon in the house.  Especially if you're female, firearms are the great equalizer.  A woman may not be able to fend off a physical attack as well as a man, but hand her a gun and the discrepancy disappears.  Anybody can become a good shot.  It takes practice and patience, but it can be done, and there's no gender difference in knowing how to aim and learning how to take a kick.  

(I can imagine your surprise.  A Buddhist with a firearm!  Well, I also took karate classes for quite a long time.  I don't think there's anything involved with either owning a gun or knowing karate that automatically makes me a bad Buddhist.  I might, in fact, point out that the first defense in karate is ALWAYS to run away if you can.) 

Senator Mark Pryor said that Second Amendment rights should be returned to individuals "after they’ve recovered from their mental illness." Oh, well, that's great.  First of all, you don't "recover" from a mental illness.  If you have one, you've got it for life, and while your symptoms may come and go, and your medications may change, the illness itself isn't going anywhere.  For another thing, if they're constitutional rights, you don't take them and return them.  They are yours from birth, or from the moment you set foot in this country.  Yes, I know criminals lose the right to vote and certain other rights as a result of a conviction, but simply being sick is not the same thing as being convicted of anything. In short (let's put this in bold caps) BEING MENTALLY ILL DOES NOT MEAN THERE IS ANYTHING INHERENTLY WRONG WITH YOU.  It just means that you have a condition, like lots of other conditions, and you deal with it, just like lots of other people deal with theirs.  

I, for example, choke down a handful of pills every morning (six, if you want to know, and three more at night), see my doctor every month and check in with another doctor, again every month, to make sure things are going all right.  I don't have any wild mood swings, I'm not deeply depressed and I'm not running around like a headless chicken trying to do forty things at once.  In short, I'm acting like a normal person, which is to say that things are balanced.  Do I wish things were better or different?  Yes, sometimes, but that's not something a pill is going to fix or not fix.  Certain things are, after all, up to me to change or to leave the same.  

Now let's look at Joan for a second. Joan is diabetic.  Every morning she checks her blood sugar to make sure it's in the normal range.  She also takes a number of pills (I've actually forgotten how many) and a bunch of supplements to control her blood sugar and to keep her blood pressure from getting too high.  She also sees a doctor once in a while; not as often as I do, but then I have better health insurance (for which I pay through the nose).  No one has ever suggested that Joan should be banned from owning firearms. Her condition would have kept her out of the military, but then, so would mine, and despite many misreadings of the Second Amendment, it's not true that only "the militia" is allowed to keep and bear arms. 

What if her blood sugar goes too high or drops too low, and she goes on a shooting rampage? Well, I can't imagine Joan going on a shooting rampage, but if she did, I doubt her blood sugar would be to blame.  For the same reason, a mentally ill person going on a shooting rampage is not necessarily going on a shooting rampage because he or she is mentally ill.  He or she may just be a terrorist, and you don't have to be mentally ill to be a terrorist.  Take, for example, the pro-lifers who attack abortion clinics and/or doctors.  Nobody's suggesting they're mentally ill.  A little out of balance with their own statements of principle, maybe, but at the end of the day they're just boring old mundane terrorists.  Like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. 

I know it'd be comforting to believe that anybody who would shoot a bunch of people has to be crazy.  Having that belief allows you to divide up society into "us," the ones that would never do such a thing, and "them," the crazy people who would do such a thing.  But that's just not and never will be the case.  The truth is that anybody can be provoked to violence. Get into an argument where you feel that you have a personal stake in being right and let somebody push the right buttons and you might very well snap, haul off and slug somebody.  Which is why Buddhism preaches nonattachment to views and nonattachment to the whole notion of needing to be right.  If you're not attached to those things, you're less likely to be provoked to violence in defense of them.   

Hm. I've noticed that most of the people who go on these shooting rampages are white male Christians.  Maybe we should base the right to own firearms on religion.  Unconstitutional?  Yeah, probably.  Just like the idea that mentally ill people shouldn't be able to own firearms.  That pesky Second Amendment just keeps getting in the way.  And, people, that's what a Constitutional right is supposed to do.  If you don't have the right to do something, or not do something, regardless of popular opinion, then it's not a right.  It's just a suggestion.  And they didn't write a document called the "Bill of Suggestions" two hundred and forty-odd years ago.  Our system of government may be messy, but I wouldn't trade it for anybody else's.  

Would you? 

(gr) Attitude

”All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.” ~Buddha

It's that time of year. The planes start flying and all thoughts turn to dead birds and for what you're grateful.  I don't do my family Thanksgiving, but I still get together with a group of friends and muse about how lucky we are to live in an environment that's relatively undamaged (since we're exporting our ecological damage to China) and where most of us have jobs (that pay next to nothing and provide only minimal benefits).  And while I cling to Joan, who's the most important person in the world and for whom I'm eternally grateful, I have to tell you that I reached a new nadir in my fabulous career as a paralegal.  I'm afraid that not only are things not getting better, they're getting worse instead.

Yes, I've been taking my meds.  Yes, I'm seeing my doc again on Monday.  He says to trust him, which I do.  But if I were anyone else I'd have thrown up my hands in despair by now and taken a job herding cats, or maybe artificially inseminating rhinoceri.  I wanna pound my head against the wall, I wanna shake myself and say, "What the hell is wrong with you?" More important than that, I just want this whole thing to be fixed.  It's a damn good thing I'm a Buddhist, because if I were any other faith I'd have missed the part where Buddha said, "Don't trust your brain.  It will lie to you."  (Or words to that effect.)

Losing control over your own brain is terrifying.  Terrifying and frustrating.  Two years ago I was one of the star performers at the firm.  What was different between now and then?  I go over and over this.  Over and over this.  I haven't figured it out yet and I feel like I'm running out of time. But I keep trying.  I'm seeing this guy (a psychologist, not a paramour--sorry, I'm really not all that salacious) who's helped me come up with strategies so I won't get behind and manage distractions better.  The second I get to work I strap a notebook to myself (it's on a passkey tether) and put a pen in my pocket so I can write down anything and everything that comes up.  I'm even using Evernote, though I probably could be using it better.  And I have rules for when to do what, and a chime that rings every hour to remind me to stay in the moment.  I hang around after hours and sneak in when we're closed to catch things up.

And I don't wanna give up.  Well, some days I do, because something else has gone wrong and I'm tearing my hair out and wanting to scream because what in hell was I thinking  and I can't remember and more important, can't understand (or, for that matter, make myself understood).  But usually I wanna keep working until they pry the keyboard from my cold pre-retirement fingers.  I wanted to be this particular lawyer's last-ever paralegal, work for him until he decided to retire and then retire myself because there wouldn't be any point in continuing without him.  I think he's going places. I think he will do great things.  I think he deserves the best support possible.  I gave him that two years ago.  I feel like I can give him that again.  But when?  How about now?  Is now good?  Hello?  Universe?

Oh, and I got into a car wreck (!).  On the way home, somebody rear-ended me on the freeway.  It was just a stupid accident.  But I gotta tell ya.  This is, I think, my fifth collision and still, that incredibly loud bang has been following me around and giving me the creeps for a day and a half.  I was in a Really Bad Collision thirteen years ago (in the same car, no less), where a guy ran a stop sign right in front of me and I T-boned him.  I had nightmares and flashbacks to the collision for about six weeks.  Well, Jesus God, I could have killed the guy.  I managed to crank the wheel hard enough that I kind of slid into him sideways instead of hitting him head-on, which kind of broke up the force of the collision, as it were, and distributed it over more of the car. So we both lived.  Anyway, this morning I had a crystal-clear flashback to that wreck (I still remember it, like a movie) and the sound of the brakes and the incredibly loud bang. And I'm like, now? Really?  I need this now?

(See previous blog post.)

Anyway.  You can't trust your brain.  It will lie to you.  This is not a collision from 13 years ago, this is a minor fender-bender on the freeway, the kind that happens every damn day all over Dallas.  I am not hopelessly incompetent, I am just having a very hard time at work for some reason.  It's not my brain deteriorating past the point of usefulness, it's just the drugs, and we'll get the combination right and everything will be fine.  So that's my pre-Thanksgiving complaint.  And I'm not grateful. I'm just stubborn.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody, and try to be more grateful than I.  Because right now I suck at it.

Uh, Now? Really? Right Now?

So Joan's in the hospital.  For those of you who missed the beginning of this saga, lemme catch you up.  Joan had a tumor on her leg, and the docs thought it was a thing called a lipoma (a fatty tumor) but because it was growing so fast, there was a decent chance that it was a liposarcoma.  Anything in the medical world that ends in "sarcoma" is usually Not Good, so they did the surgery pretty quickly.  And the tumor turned out to be a lipoma--a nuisance, but essentially harmless.  It was one big one with budding little ones, and that was a bit strange, but anyway, there was no "sarcoma".  So that was good.

Then, about two and a half weeks after the surgery, the wound site--which was healing fine, though it was a bit swollen--started turning red and unhappy lookin'.  Back to the doc we went.  The doc took one look at it and said, "Okay, I'm admitting you to the hospital."  The lack of "sarcoma" notwithstanding.

That was last Wednesday.  Joan's been in the hospital ever since.  That's--let me see here--six days in the hospital.  I've been going to work, going to the hospital, then coming home and crashing into bed.  Today I finally did the effing dishes and made up the beds with clean sheets.  And now I'm sitting here writing this because my brain won't wind down.  

Have you ever noticed that when it rains, it pours?  The best possible example would be 2001.  In a span of three months, the Twin Towers fell, a guy in my church choir died, Joan's mom died and Stuart Adamson died.  I mean, I'm sure they all didn't plan it that way (except maybe Stuart) but I had just started to crawl out of a crippling depression and by that December I'd turned around and crawled right back into it.  I wouldn't really be back to normal for another couple of years, during which I made such a mess of my life that when Joan made the first suggestion about moving to Texas I said, "Great, how long will it take you to pack?" instead of "Where? Isn't that near North Dakota someplace?"

And since the universe really listens to me when I tell it these things, let me just reiterate that I don't need my wife very sick in the hospital when I'm trying to a. keep my job and b. not go crazy.  Okay? Okay? Hello? McFly?

That's the thing about being me.  It's like I'm Oklahoma.  Most of the time I'm fairly peaceful, running a casino in a small town in Durant County, but then suddenly the sky darkens and this tornado rips through everything and destroys jobs, friendships, mortgages, relationships.  Tornadoes are entities unto themselves once they really get going, but they need supercell thunderstorms to set them off.  In 2001, three people I cared about dropping dead in a matter of weeks was the supercell. And the Twin Towers thing didn't help.  (By the way, I have no idea if there's actually a Durant County in Oklahoma.  I just think there should be.  The man got the railroad built, didn't he?)

In case this isn't obvious, things are just Not Going Well at the moment.  Not going well at work, not going well at the house (though we got the first part of the major plumbing repair done, for less than we thought it was going to cost, and even managed to squeeze in a new water heater as part of the deal).  Not going well here on the old laptop, with my writing group, with swimming and with being alive generally. I'm pretty sure I've already heard the tornado warning sirens kick on a couple of times, but then, maybe not.  Maybe they were false alarms.  Anyway, I feel like I'm sitting here in a weather tower, watching one hell of a big supercell start to rotate not all that far away.  And wondering if there's anything I can do to keep it from sucking (pun intended).

But, as my doc keeps reminding me, everything's different now.  I'm medicated, I'm meditated, I'm surrounded by good friends and I'm Doing All The Right Things (except for hitting the sugar, and I'm doing that pretty hard).  I'm not drinking anymore, I'm not a member of a Lutheran church filled with easily-ruffled feathers and my options for getting into trouble are somewhat limited.

Plus, there was that moment on the freeway where I was hurtling toward the hospital after a ridiculously long day at work and getting more and more upset at the way things were going when suddenly it occurred to me that if I couldn't stay calm in this situation, of all situations, I did not need to be calling myself a Buddhist.  And I like being a Buddhist.  Even if you have to stay calm through some pretty hairy moments.  Like tornadoes.

The thing about tornadoes is, you can't really predict them.  You can say, "Oh, yeah, conditions are perfect out here," and then watch a supercell rotate all day and do jackshit nothing.  Or you can think this is just a little spring shower and suddenly the alarms go off.  So if you can't predict them, the best alternative is to duck into a well-built underground shelter while one goes by.  Which is the equivalent of staying calm in a catastrophe.  Yes, even in Durant County.  If it exists.

Mini-Post: Still In Free Fall...

...but it's possible that my silly parachute might open after all.

For those of you who missed The Blog Post That Cannot Be Posted, let it be known that just in general, things sucked rocks.  And they still do, but there are cautious signs of improvement.  I still have a job, and we're still making the mortgage payments.  We still have a huge plumbing repair but we got the first half of it done for a lot less than we thought we'd have to pay.  Joan had to have surgery on her leg, but the tumor turned out to be benign.  So a whole lot of the end-of-the-world crises du jour seem to be working  out. As they almost always will if you let them alone for long enough.

Last night I called a doc I used to see a looooooooong time ago, when I lived in Arizona (what was that,the early 1990s?  Good Lord, I think it was.)  After I ran my assortment of symptoms by her, and detailed my cornucopia of pharmaceuticals, she said it sounded like at least two and maybe three of the drugs I'm taking aren't working,  She wants to remove this and add that, lower this and maybe not take that anymore. She wants me to go on FMLA for two weeks to accomplish this. (My firm's too small to be covered under FMLA, but especially if we wait until December, I can probably do it.  Basically nothing happens in the legal field between December 20 and January 3, anyway.)

So now I gotta get all this verified by my Main Doc, but if she is right, then all I've ever been is depressed. And I have been depressed before. One would think I would know the symptoms by now, but I don't.  Didn't, anyway, this time. I associate depression with feeling mopey and sad.  Feeling hopeless and devoid of all life is a different thing entirely. The manager kept telling me I seemed like a whole different person, though.  Aha, perhaps now we know why.  Does depression affect one's competence at work?  I guess it might.

And so, as I sit here at Afrah with a tablet and a keyboard, an akkawi pie and a milkshake that escapes being a milkshake because technically it's an "iced cappuccino", I am reminded once again that I have a frick'n serious medical condition.  One that requires constant monitoring, maintenance, meditation and medication. And fewer afternoons sitting in a cold living room watching plumber guys move back and forth with their hands full of PVC pipe and stranger things. Yeah, I know.  I'm just sayin'.

Out of the Closet. (And Into the Freak Box.)

Well, this was bound to happen sooner or later.  It's hard to keep a secret from people you work with every day.  Besides, four can only keep a secret if three of them are dead. And I made it through three and a half years, which is considerable.  But the cat's out of the bag, the classified file is open on the desk, the skeleton  just came bumbling out of the closet. And so did I.  It's been a long strange trip, but I'm Out At Work now.

No, I didn't tell them I'm gay.   They know that. I told them I'm bipolar.   THAT they had no idea.

I might add I did this Against Medical Advice.  Well, against some medical advice.  Not every bipolar person/mental health professional subscribes to the same magazine, but the General Agreement among my gang of friends is that One Does Not Tell One's Place of Employ anything they don't absolutely need to know.  And honestly, I wasn't planning to tell anybody anything, until either my symptoms became obvious or I needed a Reasonable Accommodation of some sort or other. [Reasonable Accommodation.  Remember that phrase, kids.  Your workplace doesn't  have to do everything it can to make your life easier if you're disabled, but they do have to be Reasonable.]

See, last year at Christmas I got a glowing employee review.  Seriously.  Glowing.  I think it was mentioned that I needed to work on my prioritizing and try not to get sidetracked quite as much as I was, but other than that, Employee of the frick'n Year.  Practically.  And I got a nice raise and a bonus.  Well, I just got another employee review and it wasn't nearly as glowing.  Not nearly. My boss said he was basically having to micromanage me, that I seemed to have no idea how to prioritize my work, that I'd lost track of all my cases and lots of other stuff you don't want to have written about you when your job is to be conscientious, accurate, thorough and, well, manage lots of stuff. Not so much people but stuff.  Information.  Items.  It's hard to do that when you're not prioritizing, being micromanaged and you've lost track of all your cases.  Tends not to be good for your clients, either, and since the clients are the only reason  you exist, well...

Now, I could go through this review point by point and argue with a lot of it, but there's really no reason to.  And I can't complain that it was a news flash because it wasn't. For the most part it's true, and for the most part, it all stems from the same source.  That part of my brain that's just a little bit more interesting than most.  Practically every single darn thing on all three meticulously typewritten pages is a symptom.

Which leads me to wonder, why now, and why didn't I see this coming?

Well, I'm not sure about the why now, but I did see it coming.  Have seen it coming for a couple of months, in point of fact.  Look, I've been ridiculously lucky. And I had this idea that as long  as I took my meds when I was supposed to and did everything my doc (s) told me to do, I'd be Perfectly Normal.  Alas, I am not and never will be normal. I wasn't even normal when I was normal.  And, yeah, things happened that could have alerted me that all was not well.  But I guess I didn't know they were this bad.  Or were getting this bad.  But fundamentally, it doesn't matter why this happened. What matters is how to fix it.

(That's always my first instinct.  Fix it. I heard an appropriately September 11-themed story about a mom who, on that day in 2001, was watching TV and crying, like many of us were.  Her four-year-old daughter came in and asked her what was wrong.  Not wanting to lie to this child, but not really able to convey what had happened to a child that young, she said, "A lot of people have died.  It's a very sad day."  The four-year-old said, "I'm a big girl, Mommy. I'll fix it."  Yeah. That sounds like me.)

 Anyway. I saw Doc#2 yesterday. He can certainly help Fix It.  Changing behaviors is kind of his specialty.  I see Doc #1 tomorrow, to see if something medicational needs to happen.  And in the meantime, I experiment with alternate strategies. I make lists.  I ask a bunch of what seem to be stupid questions.  I  try very hard to get more sleep. And I try not to let down the side at home, because according to Joan, the symptoms of whatever-this-is are showing up there, too.  What she said was, "It's like you're more and more willing to just let things slide."  And in the name of clean cat boxes, that can't be good.

The hope, here, is that things will improve enough by December that I can get back into the Good Employee box, even if I also have to reside in the Freak Box.  And that the news of my Delicate Condition doesn't spread beyond the manager and my immediate boss.  I know, I know.  Four can keep a secret if three are dead.  Hopefully I won't deck the first well-meaning fool who asks me, "It's not like you're Napoleon, is it?"

Splitting Hairs, Or Tablets, Or Whatever

This is interesting.  My boss's boss's son, who is all of seven years old going on thirty-five, wrote his own antivirus software today.  You know, a product to rival McAfee or Norton or something.  He said he did it because the pop-up windows in the antivirus software he already has frighten him.  (Yeah, you're working away and minding your own business and suddenly there's  a window open on your screen announcing with garish colors and a loud noise that, by God, your antivirus software is On The Job: That irritating little infostealer.jumcar has been rendered harmless and you, the nice person who shells out the $49.95 a year, can go on about your happy life.) So he wrote his own, with no pop-up windows.  It just works away in the background, completely invisible unless you actually want to see what it's doing.

Did I mention he's seven?  When I was seven I was still trying to master the fine art of laundry. I'd more or less figured out the washing machine, but darned if I could figure out how the clothes got out of the washtub and into the dryer.  Fairies, maybe.  Or elves.  I was pretty big on elves.  Goes with the Icelandic heritage.

Speaking of reliance upon imaginary beings, I may have mentioned at some point that I'm sort of an experimental proving ground for what seems, to me, like a rather large number of pharmaceuticals.  Not all of them have side effects--well, I could say that I'm not experiencing all of the side effects--but one of them does and it's the one that bugs me the most.  In a nutshell, it messes with my brain, or to use the lexicon, it slows down the cognition.  Which means what?  Well, that my short term memory sucks, basically.  At work I'll flick from one monitor to the other (dual monitors at work -- very cool) and in the nanosecond between Monitor A and Monitor B I'll have forgotten what I'm looking for.  Which means I have to go back to Monitor A and look at it until I remember what I was looking for on Monitor B, which looks like I'm sitting there staring at a monitor doing nothing.  (Sometimes I move the mouse around to throw people off.)  Occasionally I have to go back in time, step by step, to figure out what I was thinking about and why I need the information that's now pulled up on Monitor B.  Like so:  "Okay, I glanced down at the Post-It note on the monitor which reminded me I needed to compose a Rule 11 agreement in the Burns matter which means I haven't filed the amended petition yet because I have to do that at the same time and I need to get to that today and before that I was thinking that I really need to refill my water bottle which probably came up because the defendant in the case about the German shepherd was reaching for a water bottle when she lost control of her car and--yes!  I was looking for the photos of the interior of the car that show the water bottle smashed against the dashboard and the odometer stuck at 45 mph!" And I go back to Monitor B, before I lose momentum.

And that happens basically ninety times an hour, every hour I'm awake.  You can see how it might get slightly irritating.

The other problem is simple words.  It doesn't happen when I'm typing, usually, but when I'm speaking I might tell you that the defendant just filed a motion for summary juniper, I mean judgment, summary judgment, yeah, one of those.  Or I might say, the defendant just filed a motion for--and then stop as the words I need go flying past their exit ramp on the freeway, and stand there like a fool while whoever I'm talking to, which is practically always my boss or my boss's boss, looks at me like I've just grown nine heads.

So I've put up with it for a couple of years now, and it hasn't gotten any better, and it may in fact be getting slightly worse.  Today I took the bold step of actually asking the prescribing physician what would happen if I were to taper off of the stuff.  He said I'd see an immediate improvement in That Sort Of Thing, because it's dose-dependent and if you go down, even a little, there will be a reaction.  However (there's always a however), I'd also see an immediate increase in moodiness and emotional volatility.  So it becomes a balancing act.  My mission:  Find a dose that doesn't irritate to extremes with the missing words and the distracting thought patterns, yet doesn't have me flying up to the high highs and crashing down to the low lows, since I've already done that parade and I didn't care for it at all.  Though, the high highs were fun.  And being able to stay up and write until three in the morning and still go to work the next day was awesome beyond awesome.  But it bothers my wife.  Believe me, you can tug on Superman's cape and you can spit into the wind, but do not ever bother your wife.  If they don't teach that in premarital counseling, well, by God, they should.

So I'm starting out by splitting one of the doses in half and taking a dose and a half every day, instead of two doses.  If this doesn't send me spiraling down into the cellar, I might go down to a single dose a day in a couple of weeks and see how that goes.  And unfortunately, that might be the end of it.  I don't think I'm going to get completely off the stuff, which was what I was hoping.  Because if I got off of that one, then I could get off the one that I'm taking to stop my hands from shaking, because that first one makes my hands shake, and if I got off both of those, it's remotely possible that I could maybe not take the little blue ones, or take them less often, and then I'd be taking half as much medication as I am now and that would be pretty cool.  Less to keep track of, for one thing.

This disease sucks rocks sometimes.  In case you were wondering.

Death, Taxes and Real Estate

I dunno if this is true of all real estate agents everywhere at all times, but the ones I've dealt with, at least, seem to have a kind of selective hearing.  Whatever you say, they pick out the stuff that's relevant to what they've already decided to do.  So, when I say, for example, "First off, we're looking for a duplex, not a single family house, and it needs to have at least one and a half baths," they seem to hear, "xxxxx xxx we're looking for x xxxxxx xxx x single family house, and it needs to have xx xxxxx one xxx x xxxx bathx."  "We don't have any kids, so we don't need to be near all the best schools" turns into "xx xxxx xxxx xxx kids xx xx xxxx need to be near all the best schools."  And don't even ask me what "Please don't show us any more ranch houses in suburban Arlington" turns into.  It's kind of untypeable.  It may not even be audible to human ears. 

It gets worse when we're talking about money.  Mention that your absolute maximum is $175,000 and they'll somehow find a way to make that $250,000.  ("Don't worry, it will sell for $225.")  And the mortgage broker?  My friends, if you have the misfortune to have good credit, the mortgage broker will finance you well above and beyond anything you can even remotely begin to afford.  I mean, I wouldn't lend me that much money and I'm a nice person.  I can't imagine a total stranger lending it to me, even if they knew more about my finances.  Which they don't, apparently. 

When we bought the little 3-bedroom palace in Far East Dallas, we did it only after we fired three real estate agents.  We didn't have time to fool around.  We had less than two days to fly to Dallas, find a house and buy it, so when the real estate agents started jerking us around, I fired them.  To be fair, each time a new one came on board I told him or her what the last one(s) had done to piss me off ("Please don't do this, this or this.")  When they did it anyway, or found some other new and exciting way to make this whole process completely counterproductive, I fired them. 

Until we found Sondra, and she was a candidate for sainthood.  She put up with me, for one thing.  She drove us all over town in the pouring rain, for another.  She found us the perfect house, got the deal done, arranged for us to close on the house in Phoenix, Arizona while we were driving between point A and point B, and even got the gas turned on for us when it turned out we'd forgotten that little detail.  Our only regret was that we couldn't give her the commission for selling our place in San Diego, because she certainly earned it.  So naturally she was the real estate agent we wanted when we were selling our place in Dallas.  But something's happened to her and she's No Longer With The Agency.  We're meeting our new agent on Sunday.  Meanwhile, our selling agent is scaring up things we can't afford, and--oh, it hasn't been a lot of fun, okay?  At this point I'm like, let's just sell blood, turn tricks on Harry Hines Boulevard, whatever, get the ridiculous sum of money and fix the stupid pipes, already.  Except then Tracy and Tammy wouldn't have anywhere to go.  Sigh.  I guess we'll just have to plod along.

Speaking of plodding along, it's time I came out of the closet.  No, not about THAT.  About the other thing.  The scandal that's been building since August.  Okay, I confess; it's all true.  After almost eighteen years of marriage, I'm seeing this guy.

Who's a therapist.

What, you expected me to suddenly morph into a suburban swinger?  You can take the fat white Lutheran chick out of North Dakota, but you can't--yeah. 

Anyway, he's a nice guy, but he's still a guy, so not a spark of romantic interest can possibly be kindled.  Although I do catch myself trying to mother him in a put-your-sweater-on, it's-cold-out sort of way.  No idea why.  It's the same way I treat my boys, I mean my lawyers. (They're all my boys.  Even if they're girls.)  Those who have children, mother.  Those who don't have children mother their cats and their therapists.  Sigmund Freud would have a field day with that one. But, sometimes a cat is just a cat.  

About six months ago, I was in a state.  Like Texas, only even more fucked up.  I still don't know what exactly caused it--something about writing and a mid-forties crisis and I'm not sure what all else--but my unique craniobiology guarantees I'll go through the occasional low period.  I don't know if that's what it was.  I do know that between my psychiatrist bugging me and Joan worrying about me, I finally got on the Internet and looked up psychologists until I found one that looked like a good match.  We met.  He was.  (Which is odd; usually Girls Are Supposed To See Girl Therapists, but I've never done a very good job of that--I relate better to dudes, I guess).  And I started feeling better pretty fast, without the aid of chemical interference (or, I should say, any more chemical interference than I've already got--man, this condition sucks sometimes.) 

So now it's six-ish months later and I feel better and I'm not sure what to do.  With this guy.  I mean, I'm positive I still need to be there every Wednesday at six.  There's no question about it, really. I sort of look forward all week to going there.  And when I get there, I actually relax for about an hour.  As Joan puts it, to quit now would be like saying, "Oh, yeah.  I'm fine, so I don't need meds anymore." (And then she'd throw me out of the house, which, considering that we haven't found a new one yet, would kind of suck.)  I just don't know where to go from here, what to say, without dredging up a lot of gunk from my sordid past that I don't really wanna even touch much less talk about.  (I subscribe to the three-sentence method of discussing past traumas: "Yes, that happened.  It was nasty.  Let's move on.") 

I dunno.  Is it possible to do therapy wrong?  Because if it is, I'd find a way.  I'm very good at finding lots of ways of doing something that will not work.  Maybe that explains my bad luck with real estate agents.  Or maybe some things in life are merely certain.  Death, taxes, real estate agents who don't listen to you. 

Well, it could be worse. 

It could be Arlington.

The Way I Feel

The way I feel is like a robin/Whose babes have flown to come no more 
Like a tall oak tree alone and cryin'/When the birds have flown and the nest is bare.
--Gordon Lightfoot

Work has been insane lately.  This whole month, Boss Jason was supposed to be in back to back trials.  All the cases ended up settling or getting kicked--that's the legal expression for not making it high enough on the docket to get into the courtroom.  It's like getting bumped from an airplane.  You have a reserved seat, but so do several other people, and only one of you can sit there, so the Airline Employees (mysterious creatures, them) determine who goes and who stays.  In court, it's the Court Coordinator who decides, and she (she's usually a she) is even more mysterious than the Airline Employees.  There's really no point in asking her why she's doing what she's doing because the answer's almost always going to be, "That's how Judge _____ likes it."  Remember, kids, the Judge is the one with the robe, the one you don't want to piss off.  But you don't want to piss off the Court Coordinator, either.  She's the one who decides if you get the nice seat at the front of the courtroom or the one in the back next to the restroom and the woman with the two screaming babies. 

Anyway, the settling of a case is usually a Good Thing, and while the kicking of a case is generally a bad thing, there's usually a little sigh of relief that goes on.  There wasn't in this instance.  I was counting on my boss to be gone for long stretches of time so I could work on the six (count them! Six!) sets of discovery that were due the last few days of the month.  We moved them all to a span of about four days because we were pretty sure that those would be the only four days in the month that Jason would actually be around to read, edit and sign.  I was pretty much counting on his being away so I'd have the necessary stretches of time required to write the things.  There's a lot of writing involved in discovery.  You use some of the same phrases over and over again (among my favorites: burdensome, oppressive and harassing; not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence; vague, misleading and calls for speculation), but it's still writing, and hey, I like to write stuff.  The thing is, when Boss Jason's around he interrupts me a lot. Not to be a jerk; it's just the way his brain works.  From the beginning of January I had blocked out how many days I'd need to do each set, with extra time for editing and gathering exhibits, and set up a schedule based on what was due first.  Then the trials started getting canceled and I watched it all not-happen.

So the last two weeks have been sort of a mad scramble as I'm trying to get these things written, edited, over to Jason for signing and out in the mail to opposing counsel.  I mailed the fourth set today and there's only two left, but I. Am. Exhausted.  It doesn't help that I picked up an ear infection somewhere (ear infections are for kids; what am I doing with a blocked eustachian tube and thick fluid sloshing around behind my ear drum?) I put up with it for about four days before it started growing a knot on my neck, at which point I finally went in to see the doc.  I don't know if it was the delay in treatment, or what, but the sucker's taking forever to go away.  (The knot in my neck is gone, though.) 

The ear infection has kept me out of the pool for almost two weeks.  I'm in chlorine withdrawal and I'm afraid I'm gonna forget how to do the breaststroke kick at this rate.  I can't get back in the water until we confirm there's no hole in my ear drum, which won't be until next Tuesday.  I'd be working out in the gym in my office basement but, uh, it was closed for three days due to a water leak.  Then when it reopened, I couldn't seem to get down there.  I had every kind of bad luck; a deposition scheduled right before lunch.  A doctor's appointment that couldn't be at any other time. My bag's been sitting under my desk, unused, since Monday.  It's starting to look like I might finally get there tomorrow. 

Ear infection plus lots of work stress plus the ongoing fun of trying to sell a house and looking for a house, plus no exercise plus stuff that's been going on in therapy that's, well, very sad, has all combined to make Jen not a very happy camper these days.  In fact, I'm pretty darn mopey.  You know, I take my meds, I go to therapy, I do what I'm told for the most part, but it's kinda depressing how easy it is to set me off. All it takes is knocking me out of my routine, and not even for that long. It's like I hang around up here on a little four-footed stool of exercise, meds, work and good self-care (enough sleep, good food, that sort of thing).  Lose one of those and things get shaky.  Lose two and the whole thing falls over sideways. 

Well, I'm gonna do something halfway amazing and show up on time to my OA meeting tonight.  Maybe.  And maybe if I do I'll get a foot back.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Let it never be said that Buddhists don't get mad.  We tend to be more even-tempered than your average bear, and we don't get mad often, to be sure.  When we do get mad, though, it's usually because we see some being giving some other being, who doesn't really deserve it, a hard time. At least, that's when I get mad.  And when somebody's giving an entire group of people a hard time, regardless of what group of people, I tend to hit the fucking ceiling.

Before I go any further, though, I'd like to offer a general apology to Muslim women.  Not just the one or two of you who might have been in the Baylor Tom Landry Fitness Center dressing room this morning at about 7 a.m. local time.  No, I think this one should go out to all .8 billion of you.  I had a chance to stand up for you today and I didn't take it because I am a fucking coward.  I'm sorry.  I hope I really mean it when I tell you it won't happen again, because the things I regret in my life are by and large the things I haven't done.  The jobs I didn't take and the adventures I didn't go on and the confrontations that I avoided because I was scared.  I have a way with words, ya know, and when I waste a chance to make them count I just seethe inside.

So, okay. Tom Landry Fitness Center, 7 A.M.  Look, I know the Concerned Women of America work out there.  How can they not? It's a nice, tony place. Sort of a country club without golf.  I'm just a low-rent swim team member who gets to use the place for an hour or so in the morning. And I hear these conversations that make me shake my head in amazement and sometimes want to pound it against the wall.  Most of the time I can ignore them, though.  I mean, people don't like total strangers walking into their conversations to correct the facts of something they picked up from Fox News.  And it's none of my business, anyway. I've got much better things to do than save people from their own stupidity, especially when I know they won't even be a smidgen grateful.

But this.  This was beyond the pale.  This was two ladies talking about the Book of Revelation and how it was all "coming true."  How it said in the Bible that in the end times, our President would be a Muslim.  That the Muslims claimed to have a peaceful religion, but in reality they wanted to take over the world and force everybody to be a Muslim.  That they wanted to institute global jihad because they believed their messiah would only come back to a state of chaos.  That even if only 1% of Muslims believed this way, there were so many of them that the world was in serious danger.  It said so in the Bible. "It's really scary," one of them said to the other.  Yeah.  Bullshit is scary.  At least until you REALIZE IT'S BULLSHIT.

I have an exercise I do when I hear what appears to be hate speech.  I change the group of people being mentioned to another group of people and see how it sounds.  If it sounds unbelievably racist to say, for example, that the Jews claim to have a peaceful religion but in reality they want to take over the world and force everybody to be Jewish, or that the blacks want to institute global jihad so the black messiah will return, then it's hate speech.  This was definitely hate speech.  I'm fortunate not to remember all of it because I think I'd start foaming at the mouth.

Anyway, I struggled out of my clothes, tried to get my stuff together, while half my brain ran to the end of its chain and barked and the other half of my brain held onto the chain and kept repeating, "Do not go over there.  Do not involve yourself in that conversation."  I thought of the time some bitch was going on and on about Obama and I'd burst into song to shut her up. I was too angry to do that; I'd have had to sing something by AC/DC or Stiff Little Fingers instead of Beethoven, and AC/DC and Stiff Little Fingers are not popular among the Concerned Women for America set. The only thing I could really do was get my earplugs in as fast as possible and get out of the dressing room as fast as possible, so I could get into the pool as fast as possible and swim as fast as possible so that I could cool the hell down as fast as possible.  Which took about 45 minutes, in case you're wondering.

I'm not gonna bother to refute most of those statements, but the President-as-Muslim one is just too ridiculous to let lie.  The Bible, or rather the Book of Revelation, was written a good 70 or 80 years after the death of its supposed author, John the Baptist.  It reads like a good acid trip and was probably brought on by poisonous mushrooms.  I'm supposed to believe that this book references the President - of a form of government that does not yet exist - of the United States - of a country that does not yet exist, on land that is not yet known to exist, across an ocean that is not yet known to exist - and states that he will be a Muslim, a religion that does not yet exist (around the year 600, people, in case you're wondering)?  Even for me, who once believed that she could be recalled like a defective automobile and stripped for spare parts, that's a bit of a stretch. Yet the Concerned Women for America are all over it.  Have they actually read the Book of Revelation?  Or anything else in the Bible?  Or do they just take Cal Thomas's word for it?  I mean, seriously.  Is there any thought process that goes into this stuff whatsoever?

Here's the part that really frosts me.  I took off out of that dressing room because I didn't think there was any way I could say anything without totally blowing my stack.  Once I'd calmed down a little, I realized I could have shut the whole thing down without even raising my voice.  All I would have had to do is walk over there, put my hands down on the counter and say, in a soft voice, "Ladies, there are Muslim women in this dressing room right now.  Go ahead and talk smack about them if you want to, but please keep your voices down."  That's it.  That's all that needed to be said.  It wouldn't have been rude, I wouldn't have come across as a bitch, I just would have made them aware that their conversation was being overheard.  That probably would have stopped it entirely and if there were Muslim women in the room (and the odds are in my favor there; lots of nurses and nurse's aides use the fitness center, and lots of those nurses and nurse's aides are from Someplace Else, and lots of those Someplace Elses are Muslim countries), somebody would have spoken up for them.

Believe me, there are plenty of times I wish somebody had spoken up for me.  The times I've overheard conversations about "the gays" this and that, or "the crazy people" this and that, or better still, "so and so did (insert bizarre behavior here), he must be bipolar."  And there I stand, invisibly lesbian, more invisibly bipolar, thinking to myself, "I'm nothing like that.  We're nothing like that.  Where is he getting that?" and not having the guts to speak up.  It happens less and less often these days, since I'm getting older and my tolerance for bullshit is dropping, but there's always a sense of threat there, a fear that if you out yourself as a member of the group being discussed, all that negative attention will turn on you.  If you're lucky, they'll just yell at you and call you names.  If you're not lucky, they might beat you up or kill you.

That's why we need to speak up for each other.

I'm sorry I didn't do that today.

Talk Thursday: Convention

As I crash the Muslim restaurant of my sweet dreams, I'm pondering the whole concept of convention.  Why?  Because it was my idea, that's why, and also because everybody I follow on Twitter is absolutely refusing to shut up about the hurricane that's going on down in Tampa.  No, the one in Tampa, not the one in New Orleans.  You know, the one where whoever's keynote speaking can't go more than two minutes without saying something stupid that offends half of America.  Or the other half.  Sometimes both halves.  I'm trying not to pay it too much attention.  I may just have to sign off Twitter for the duration.  And I'm not sure what I'm gonna do when that other convention fires up.  Different keynote speakers, same two-minute habit, except they generally don't offend me personally.  The last few days I've felt like scaling Fountain Plaza and yelling, "Can't we all just get along?" as the helicopter buzzes by to film the opening sequence to Dallas.  

Apparently we can't.  Apparently it's been the fate of personkind to be divided into two factions that fight over everything since we were cave men (and women).  The only thing that's ever united the two feuding factions is the presence of a bigger, badder enemy.  So, unless there's an alien invasion (we can always hope), we're stuck with our two sets of clowns until November.  Which, despite all appearances to the contrary, slowly approacheth.  

(A guy I know on Twitter is trekking all over Europe.  When he was in Scotland last week, a Scotsman came up to him and asked if he was American.  When he acknowledged that he was, the Scotsman asked, "Are the lot of you fucked in the head?"  The sad thing is, I don't know if he was talking about Todd Akin or our latest mass shooting.  Latest.  Mass.  Shooting.  Think about that for a second.  I mean, that's like saying World War Two to a space alien.  "Wait a minute.  You had a world war and you did it more than once?!"  How embarrassing.  Please, if any of you ever have a close encounter of the third kind, try to keep off the subject of recent American history.  It's best if you just explain about Steven Spielberg and go from there.)

Meanwhile, I've been having a tantrum.  Tantrum, midlife crisis, whatever you want to call it.  I saw one of my docs today, and he summed it up pretty well by saying, "I imagine it's pretty hard to be you."  Well, uh, it is.  Thank you for noticing.  I have, as they say, A Lot On My Plate.  The latest thing that I feel absolutely outraged at not having under my firm control is the fact that I have nothing under my firm control.  That is, I'm forty-three years old, I have a house, car, cats, wife, responsible job and all the other trappings of adulthood (even my very own credit card debt!), and yet I can't take care of myself like an independent human being.  

I can hear all of the Buddhists laughing out there.  There is, of course, no such thing as an independent human being.  All of us rely on each other.  Don't think so?  Well, take a look at this laptop, here.  The one I'm typing on.  I didn't build it.  Yeah, regardless of what Obama said or didn't say.  It's true.  I did not build this laptop, yet it is essential to my well-being in ways that only become screamingly obvious when you take it away from me.  And I do mean screamingly obvious.  I didn't make my clothes, my mala bracelet, my car or even this unbelievably delicious fried kibbe and akawi pie that I'm snarfing down between sentences.  Other people did all that.  I need them, and they need me.  You can't navigate a lawsuit without a paralegal.  (Well, I suppose you can, but you wouldn't want to.)  You can't run a law firm without the guys that make the copy paper and the pens and the cute little laminated tabley things that pass as desks anymore.  You can't make copy paper without trees, and you can't make trees without dirt and sunlight and a lot of time.  So, technically, I am a product of sunlight and dirt and time.  And I can't take care of myself.  That's obvious.  So what, then, is the Big Deal?  

Well, the Big Deal is that besides the dirt and the sunlight, I seem to need a team of advance-degreed professionals.  Sometimes I end up in their offices, like I did today, and they say stuff like, "I imagine it's pretty hard to be you," and send me into a tailspin.  I called up Joan and ranted and complained and wanted to know why, after all this time, I still couldn't take care of myself.  And she said, "Jen, you are taking care of yourself.  You're going to see your doctors when you're supposed to.  You're taking your meds when you're supposed to and you're doing everything you're supposed to do."  She's right.  I've even been off sugar for (gulp) seven days now.  The New Guy has inspired me to new heights of--of high things.  "But I don't want to have some committee following me around for the rest of my life," I said.  "I want to be able to stand on my own two feet."  "You do stand on your own two feet," she said, "and those two feet take you where you need to go, when you need to go there."  (Well, she said something like that.  I have a good ear for dialogue, but it's not perfect.)  

Big sigh.  Minor grumbling.  Settling down, wiping the foam off my face.  Okay, okay.  I may not be able to exist as an independent human being, since no one really can, anyway.  But that doesn't mean I have to like it.  And I don't, just for the record.  It'd be interesting, though, if we could get everybody in the same place at the same time and just hear what all of them have to say.  The New Guy and Dr. Patel and Dr. Simon and Dr. King and Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and what's-his-name from China.  Throw in Avalokishvara for some variety and maybe a little Vishnu.  Good heavens, it's starting to sound like--a convention.  Nobody call Fox News.    

Mini-Post: Ranting About Guns and Mental Illness

Yeah, I'm gonna go off on a rant here.  Don't worry, it won't take long.  The subject once again is guns, but this time it's about taking them away from mentally ill people, seeing as we've had an epidemic of mass shootings lately and, hey, it's easy to blame the alternately sane.  But, I gotta ask: Are you referring to me? I am, after all, bipolar I, which is the "bad" bipolar disorder, the one that gets all the attention, the research funding and the Charlie Sheen publicity.  Obviously People Like That shouldn't be allowed to own weapons. Save 'em for the warmer, fuzzier, Catherine Zeta-Jones type mentally ill people.  

(By the way, I love the way this article talks about "keep(ing) guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally ill people."  Thanks, Michael Bloomberg, for lumping us all together.  I'm sure the criminals appreciate it too.) 

Oh, but wait.  I'm "different."  I don't wanna kill scads of other people, just occasionally myself, so there can't possibly be any harm in letting me have a 9-mm Glock.  What's the worst that can happen?  I blow my brains out and save some serious Obamacare bucks?  Besides, what are you going to do, traipse around the country and stamp "Do Not Sell Guns To This Person" on the forehead of every depressed housewife who's ever taken Prozac?  

If you ask me, I'm the one that needs the handgun, and a lot more than you do, because sooner or later the frick'n villagers are gonna descend on Flamingo Lane with their torches and pitchforks to drive me out of town because I'm clearly too dangerous to remain within the community.  They better hope I'm not in my manic phase when this happens or I'll--I'll WRITE all over 'em.  

Jen has spoken. 

Talk Thursday (on Wednesday): From That Moment Forward

Hope y'all don't mind a Thursday post on Wednesday, but I have Other Plans for Thursday night. Yes, this means I'll miss my meeting, and what's worse, I'll miss the World's Greatest Pita Bread. But for once it'll be worth it; I'm going to a book signing. Yes, I know the last time I went to one of these, things got a little lachrymose, but I don't think that's gonna happen this time. You see, the book signing, for which I had to buy a $40 ticket weeks in advance (rather, Joan bought it for me; thanks Joan, you rock!) is for the King.

No, not the King of Pop. The other King.

Big Steve.

Yeah. Stephen King.

Okay, yes, it's taking place at the Majestic Theatre, and I'm in the cheap seats, and the odds of actually getting my precious volume of 11/22/63 anywhere near the Sharpie marker of the Master of Horror are extremely small. Arguing, for the moment, that I even have a volume of 11/22/63, because I don't at the moment and I don't think I'm funded to pick one up between now and then. But still. I'll be in the same room with the guy who created the Walkin Dude and Johnny Smith and Delores Claiborne. Blockade Billy and Leland Gaunt and Dr. Louis for Godsake Creed. I think that's worth missing pita bread, don't you?

So here's my Talk Thursday column, a day early and a little bit beside the point. The actual topic, from the Topic-O-Meter, was too long to fit into the title bar; it was something like, "If I had to go back to one event I've experienced and relive my life from that event forward, it would be..." See what I mean? But I think "From That Moment Forward" covers it. In any case, I thought about it for all of about five nanoseconds and knew exactly what moment we were talking about, here. We were talking, of course, about the night Stuart Adamson kissed me. And the happy-go-lucky days that followed.

Normally I don't smooch and tell, but since the other pair of lips is no longer in this world, I figure it's okay. Anyway, it's not the actual smooching I want to talk about. It's the happy-go-lucky days that followed, or hours that followed, or all the stuff that happened afterward. To make a long story short, I was in Birmingham, England at the time, which, if you've never been there, is kind of the British Detroit. I think they actually do make cars there, or did at one time, and it's a rough town where bad things happen to people sometimes (though, of course, never with guns). I was at a club, where a concert was about to happen, and a poll tax riot broke out (if you don't know what a poll tax riot is, ask someone). In the ensuing chaos I got whacked on the head with something and knocked cold for somewhere between several seconds and several hours. When I came around, a bouncer was holding up his hand and saying, "How many fingers? Who's Prime Minister?" I got the first one right but not the second one (Ms. Thatcher having retired some years before), so he figured I was fine and turned me loose.

Here's a news flash: If you're hit on the head hard enough to lose consciousness, you almost certainly have a concussion and possibly something even more serious. There are three things you need to do in this situation: You need to not drink alcohol, not go to sleep, and seek medical treatment immediately. What I did instead was chug a few beers, sing along with the crowd and then crawl back to the hostel where we were staying and fall fast asleep. Doctor? Nah. Never even occurred to me. Now this is the moment we freeze-frame so that I can go back in time, fix it and have everything turn out differently.

Instead of drinking, singing and sleeping, this is me going to the hospital and explaining I was just knocked unconscious. This is me, hanging around in the E.R., bored out of my skull, being observed by medical professionals until the following morning, when they've decided I'm not in any immediate danger. Instead of spending the next two weeks hanging around in England and Scotland and acting increasingly weird, I'm accepting the very wise suggestion of one of the medical professionals and going home early. Not the end of the world. I've already kissed Stuart Adamson; what else do I expect to do, knock boots with Sinead O'Connor? Oh hey, this is me, going to my Regular Doc once I touch down in the States. This is him, examining my X-rays and discovering -- gasp! -- a greenstick skull fracture above my right temple. This is the MRI I'm having that discovers the damage to my right temporal lobe, which has either caused (a long shot) or made worse (much more likely) my bipolar disorder.

Stars and garters, here's me at the tender age of twenty-one, seeing a psychiatrist for the first time instead of waiting until I'm forty. Here's me getting prescribed a sheepload of medication and adjusting, slowly, over the next eighteen months or so. Here's me not getting confused at work and wandering off; here's me not mouthing off at all the wrong times in front of all the wrong people; here's me not dealing with crushing migraines my whole last two years of college. Hey, see that tornado that started ripping up my life right around this time? Well, here it is not happening. Here I am getting out of a lousy relationship and being happily single. Here's me getting a decent job right out of college because I never screwed up all the jobs I had before that.

In short, here's me having a halfway normal life.

SCREECH!!! That's the needle skipping across the record and bonking against the metal thingy in the middle. (Do they even have record players anymore? I have one, but, you know, do people? Does anyone under thirty even know what one is?)

The fantasy just doesn't go that far. I may be halfway something, but normal isn't it. And let's face it; isn't normal a little--ya know--boring?

Talk Thursday: Drought

Yes, I know we're in a drought. It's about the only thing they talk about on KEOM radio's Texas State Network News, after they get finished talking about Governor Goodhair running for President. (About which I know very little because I refuse to listen. The reporter gets as far as, "Governor Per--." and I've changed the station to the 24-hour classical channel.) I don't exactly need reminding. My entire backyard is dead, even the very stubborn asparagus. I'm doing what I can to keep the trees alive, and the front yard still has a little green here and there, but pretty much this is the year that lawn care became moot. A neighbor of ours is losing his magnolia tree. It's falling down, limb by limb, in a spectacle that's both ghastly and heartbreaking. And us North Texans are really getting off easy compared to the rest of the state. Lots of farmers have lost their entire crop, cattle are dying all over the place and there are wildfires - of course there are wildfires - chomping through all the dead vegetation, taking out homes and businesses and just in general destroying things.

So it seems kind of ridiculous to use up my allotment of cubic Internet inches whining about a drought of the mind, but that's just what I'm gonna do. You see, while y'all weren't looking, I went and wrote another book. Okay, some of you were looking. That's okay, I forgive you. That makes a total of five (count them! Five!) since I started this blog. This last one is called Taken by Storm, and it was all about the daughter of the heroine in one of the earlier books realizing she has some of the same problems Mom has, as well as some new and different crises that Mom never got around to. This one was remarkably short (72k words), definitely YA, and kind of a departure from my usual stuff. What's more, my mother liked it. No, she really did. And I started writing query letters and I started getting the usual rejection slips and then--

Nothing. I dried up. It was like somebody pulled the plug, and all the good words went straight down the drain.

When you're used to writing for about an hour a day, every day, at home or at a Starbucks or at Afrah or maybe the back room of Half Price Books, and you're used to churning out a page or two at least, and you're used to having two or three projects going at once, all in different stages of done-ness, and everything just comes to a screeching halt one day, it tends to throw you off your stride a little bit. The first thing I did, after a few days had gone by and the words still weren't coming, was panic. Oh dear God that I don't even believe in, what if this was forever? What if I'd said everything I had to say, and told the tales I had to tell, and the rest was just silence? What would I do for the rest of my life? Where would I go when my brain needed a vacation? Would I have to start doing drugs? Play video games? Find a real-life version of being wired, like in Strange Days?

Well, that's why I write. I dunno why anybody else does.

As the days trickled by and the words still didn't come back, I got depressed. Easy to do if you're bipolar - in fact it happens on a regular basis, like day follows night - but it's easy to forget that, too, when you're in the middle of it. So I moped around and spent ridiculous amounts of time trolling the CNN chat boards - yes, I know I'm not supposed to do that - and just in general felt sorry for myself. Washed up at the age of 42. Done in by a drought of the mind and left to wander the earth as one of the walking dead. Well, only about 40 more years and I can die for real, I guess. Obviously I'm not gonna have anything to show for having been around, so I might as well just be quiet and not upset anybody. I started to avoid the computer during my regular writing time. I started eating sugar again (yes, I know, don't lecture me -- I'm getting back off it; my psychiatrist was livid) and just in general did everything I wasn't supposed to do. Except swimming. I kept swimming.

Then, a couple of days ago, something happened. I dunno why, but I sat down at the computer and wrote a couple of pages. This morning I did it again, though it was only about half as much. Who knows if this is the rain returning after La Nina or just a rogue low-pressure zone; the result is the same--productivity. And perhaps the first little glimmer of hope that things might possibly get better.

(Attention literary agents: This would be the perfect time to throw me a bone. I'm soft-spoken, housebroken, won't bite and have had all my shots.)

So we'll see what happens. If things keep getting better, great. If they don't--well, let's just not go there. Meantime I hope it keeps raining in North Texas. I hope we have a hurricane, in point of fact, and a wall of water floats away a DART transit bus, just like last time.

Especially if I lay off the sugar.