Fully Armed Against Change

Thanks for stopping by. Today I’d like to talk about guns. Wait, where are you going? Don’t worry, I’m not going to write an editorial on why we need better gun control. I’ve heard people voice opinions either way but I’ve yet to hear a single person say, “I just can’t seem to make up my mind on the issue. I wish someone would come along to write a blog". 

And there are more interesting things to talk about. Like why do we have so many guns anyway?

I grew up in a town with more cows than people (although I’m not sure if this oft repeated claim was ever confirmed by a census taker, so it might have just been jealousy fueled slander from those East Windsor losers) and while the “hilarious” Smellington moniker seemed a bit exaggerated and immature, it’s quite true that at certain times of the year, the smell of cow manure was an everyday olfactory reality. America is the only major country on earth with more guns than people. And while the smell of gunfire isn’t on every street corner, we do have more gun violence than other 1^st world countries. Just as with cows there comes cow shit, with more guns does there come more gun violence? I’ll meet many gun owners half way and borrow from Lynard Skynard: “Oooo that smell, can’t you smell that smell? The smell that’s around you”.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s a coincidence. But either way guns are to America what cows are to Ellington. Dairy farming accounts for the cows, but what accounts for our abnormal accumulation and possessive clinging to guns in the face of even perceived threats to maybe, possibly, potentially take them away?

Again, in the hopes of being as non-political as possible, let’s not talk about the NRA, or Ted Cruz, Smith, or Wesson. I think the issue possibly has more to do with gender anyway. And possibly race. According to my exhaustive research (Google’s top search selection) white males make up 31 percent of the population but they make up 61 percent of gun owners. They are also the most likely to staunchly barricade themselves against any proposed change to gun laws. It’s practically a special interest issue. No, they aren’t the only gun lovers out there (evidenced by the 2001 hip hop classic "My Dogz Iz My Gunz" by Sticky Fingaz—amongst countless other joints) but if those 31 percent and their political champions in Congress were not given any say in the matter, we would probably have much stricter gun laws tomorrow. Or soon afterwards. Gun non-control almost seems like white males’ last stand.

Because what else do we know about white males? A demographic yours truly belongs to. (Though I can’t claim to be nearly as manly as I am white. I would need to be Mr. Universe to balance that scale). White males used to rule America. Before 2008 not a single President wasn’t white. England had a queen for decades in the 16^th Century (when English royals weren’t just gossip TV stars) but we, the country that has always taken pride in our inclusiveness, had none. We, the country that declared “all men are created equal”. Oh wait……I see the problem there. For a country that has been so progressive in other ways, we’ve really been shockingly conservative and even backwards in our gender and racial roles.

But that’s all changing. We have a (half) black President, we have a female, African American, and Latino Republican candidate. Non-Hispanic Whites are at an all time low 63 percent of the total population and falling. Women represent 60 percent of Bachelor’s Degree recipients. Men represent 90 percent of the prison population. (To paraphrase Chris Rock, guys like to keep it real. Reeeeeal dumb). White males are so 1945. My grandfather, who let me just was not really a racist as far as I knew but mostly a product of a very pre-politically correct generation, used to like to joke, “Black is beautiful, tan is grand, but white’s the color of the Big Boss Man”. Not anymore.   

But assault on white male virility and independence (or at least the perception of it) doesn't stop there. Not by a long shot! If you haven’t heard about the “pussification of America” you probably don’t have a social media account. Everything is now much more about inclusion, diversity, sensitivity, multiculturalism….exactly the sort of stuff no one bothered with when one group had a monopoly on all the power. While political correctness often seems guilty of overreach to me (it’s not only wrong to say offensive things, it’s wrong to say inoffensive things that someone might misinterpret as offensive) it does seem to be an inevitable offshoot of a country in which power and prestige is increasingly shared by many groups, not just pale people with a penis. (Nope. I’m not deleting that because alliteration is classy). Political correctness is a subtle, constant reminder that the once mighty Pale King has had to (partially) abdicate his throne. It's almost as if before 2008, the Magna Carta hadn't been even drafted yet to fully challenge this statistical minority group's centuries long exclusive dominance. 

And because white males dominated for so long, amongst many there crept in an almost unconscious assumption: said dominance was not due to an unnatural manipulation of opportunities and education but rather due to their naturally superior strength and intellect. It’s not that these folks necessarily hated women or people of color….it’s just that they believed they just weren’t as naturally qualified as they were to run things. God and Darwin's will, don't you see? Now let me get that door for you.... So I think to some eyes, our new paradigm is not the fulfillment of the promise of inclusion that we’ve always claimed to believe in, but an unnatural corruption of the pitiless but unavoidable laws of nature. America’s favorite casino owner wants to “make America great again” but considering his stances on Mexicans and Muslims and his particular vitriol for Carly Fiorina, isn’t The Donald's secret Impossible (Pipe) Dream actually to make America more firmly white and male again? A return to a supposed lost paradise where no one asks you to "marque dos" for Espanol and the Carly Fiorina’s of the world are running Tupperware parties, not high tech companies?    

                

But this is about guns. And the question is does anything I just said relate to the gun issue? It’s impossible to say or prove, but my theory is….maybe. (I would make a terrible propagandist). The traditional iconic virile American male is the cowboy, the soldier, the cop, the gangster. All of them are packin’. Guns are the ultimate phallic symbol of power (either that or I’ll never trust a Kiss song lyric again). Guns aren't gender neutral, they aren't transgender, they are the most truly masculine of machines. So deep down, does the whole gun issue come down to this: you can make us attend Sensitivity Training, you can make us go to Bed Bath and Beyond, we will even change diapers, but don’t even think about taking away our gunshow loophole!

(BTW, Gunshow Loophole would make a pretty good punk band name).  

Of course what do I know? I’m no alpha white male. It was only with a sense of great moral ambiguity that I rooted for the Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge, and Bill Walton Celtics of the 80’s. It it wasn't for Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson I would have felt like I was rooting for a Klan chapter. I was the kid who loved Guns n’ Roses but also wondered if instead of saying “back off, bitch!”, perhaps Axl Rose should have said, “back off, miss!”. I mean….isn’t any relationship a two way street? I’m a disgrace to every red blooded, pickup driving, gun toting white male in this country. In the past year and a half I’ve drank more green tea than I care to admit. I've learned that quiche is actually pretty good. I always have to shave my beard when I grow it because I start to scare myself in the mirror. I applied for my Man Card and it came back riddled with bullet holes and DENIED stamped on it with a recommendation to eat a steak, watch a spaghetti Western, and start a hedge fund.

But even a non manly-man like me has been known to worry about his masculinity. I say I'm not a bro, not a jock, so I don't care. But I'm lying. Why did I develop such a sharp sense of humor? Is that a form of aggressiveness in lieu of becoming an outside linebacker? I may not be a bro, but I’m no flower child either. Would I be if I wasn’t so afraid of being seen as a total wimp? I don’t know. But even the flower child guys of the hippie era were thrusting their chests out too against war mongering fascists in the government, etc. Guys are always trying to show you how tough they are! Some feel tough by having guns, some feel tough by not having guns. But maybe if everyone figured out how to be less tough we have less things we needed to be tough about? And maybe if fewer people had guns fewer people would need guns to feel protected from others who have guns? It’s a vicious cycle that’s spun in the wrong direction but it can spin the other way too. Don’t ask me how—again, I’m just a jerk with a blog.

Or we just need to stop thinking in overly dramatic absolutes? Yes, white males now have to share things where they once had a monopoly. But to hear some describe it, whites are on their way to becoming “second class citizens”. Settle down. Sharing is not slavery. And does trying to restrict the flow of guns reduce a country to an effeminate shell of itself? Canada has stricter gun control but they still have plenty of gun owners and their national sport involves skating up to guys and smashing them into the side of an ice rink and waiting to see if they punch you in the face. Do Canadians seem drained of their manhood to you? Those Canucks are no quiche eaters! (I'm pretending to forget Justin Bieber is Canadian--every rule has an exception). 

In conclusion, to my fellow white, male 31 percenters, our day of unchallenged glory is over. The frontier has been converted into a Pinkberry. The kids stopped listening to Weezer and started listening to Weezy. But it’s okay. Sharing is okay. And no gun will protect you from the power of political correctness, black Presidents and female sportscasters anyway, so why take it out on Bambi and Bernie? Maybe we don’t need guns to be powerful anyway. Maybe we just need love! Love is the answer! In fact didn’t Kiss so eloquently instruct on this issue 40 years ago when they wrote:

No place for hidin' baby
No place to run

You pull the trigger of my 

Love gun (Love gun)

Love gun (Love gun) 


I wonder if Imagine would have been a better song to quote. 

Baseball: What Ken Burns Didn't Tell You

Hi, today I would like to talk about baseball. “Ewww, why bother”, you ask? “Baseball is dying!” they proclaim in the media. Except the media has apparently been ringing baseball’s death knell since the 1800’s yet just when you think it’s gone for good it always stages more comebacks than Bette Midler and my forehead acne. Baseball isn’t dying even if the media keeps trying to kill it. Last year the NFL earned $10 billion, major league baseball earned $8 billion, the NBA earned $5 billion and the NHL earned just under $4 billion. An 8 billion dollar failure? We’ll have to wait for the eighth Avengers sequel before we see that again.

But if you go to the ESPN site right now you may note how they order their sports: NFL first, NBA second, MLB third. ESPN is the most powerful sports media driver of public perception in America and they seem to strive to create the (non evidence supported) argument that baseball is 3^rd in popularity and falling fast. The fact that ESPN and ABC are part of the same conglomerate and ABC has an NBA contract whereas Fox has the baseball contract…….maybe not a coincidence? Average attendance at an MLB game last year was 30,000. And that’s with 81 games on the schedule! Averaging 30,000 81 times? That’s more than the NBA, NHL, or even an Eagles reunion tour could ever dream of. Last offseason The Miami Marlins signed slugger Giancarlo Stanton to a $325 million dollar extension. $325 million in a supposedly dying industry? And he can hit 500 foot home runs? AND his name is Giancarlo? If he gets tired of baseball, he has the name and the muscular build to inspire a romance novel dark, mysterious yet irresistible stranger. I don’t know…..51 Shades Of Gray? It’s not hard to imagine the words “Giancarlo” and “smoldering” in the same sentence. Take that, geeky death of baseball predicting journalist guy.   

“But look at World Series ratings!” the critics say. True, they are never nearly as good as Super Bowl ratings. But the Super Bowl isn’t really a game, it’s a circus. It’s a permission slip to drink too much beer, eat too many chicken wings, and bet too much money knowing no one will judge you for it. It’s the Super Bowl! It features a halftime performance from a pop superstar that everyone can trash on the Twitter and Facebook in real time. It’s an excuse for cabin fever suffering people to have a huge party in early February. It provides a once-per-year throwback to the days when everyone was watching the same thing because they only had five channels and no Internet. Comparing Super Bowl ratings with anything is not a fair fight. It’s like saying if you’re not George Clooney, you’re the Elephant Man.  

And nothing as weird as baseball can ever go away. Yes, I would submit that despite its national pastime, Americana, fathers and sons having a catch in the back yard, if you build it they will come reputation, baseball is possibly the weirdest sport ever invented. It’s so weird that no one notices its weirdness because it’s so ingrained into the game! Take this snippet I read about Red Sox 1^st baseman Mike Napoli: Before the Red Sox latest homestand, he had a .162 average (19-for-117) to go with three homers and 11 RBIs. Over the course of the just completed homestand he hit .429 (9-for-21) with five homers and 10 RBIs. WTF? Did Napoli forget how to hit and suddenly remember again? But these wild, irrational streaks happen constantly in baseball. Every hitter is a streak hitter no matter his skill level. Lebron James may have off games but he’s never going to go 2 for 23 from the floor one night and 22 for 24 the next night. Tom Brady—regardless of the air pressure on the ball—is not going to complete 5 of 39 passes with 3 INT’s one week and complete 33 of 36 with 4 TD’s the next. A Bradley Cooper movie isn’t going to gross $500 million worldwide while his next film goes straight to Starzz. Most people at the top of their professions generally fall within a certain bell curve from one game or movie or album to the next—except in baseball. Or let’s consider the guy who personifies the everyday steadiness and consistency of baseball perhaps more than anyone in recent times: former Orioles shortstop/3^rd baseman Cal Ripken, Jr., who broke Lou Gehrig’s record for most consecutive games played. He is the embodiment of consistency. Or is he? In 1990 Cal hit .250, in 1991 he hit .323 with 34 HR’s and 114 RBI’s. The next year? .251. The next year? .257. The next year? .315. And that’s just baseball! Even hitters who generally put up the same numbers each year will have weeks/months where, like yours truly in gym class softball, they are lucky if they can hit the ball out of the infield.

And pitchers? Forget about it. Performance wise, baseball players all embody a kind of bipolar disorder, which is probably why they so often develop weird superstitious, obsessive compulsive habits they have to repeat endlessly such as eating fried chicken before every single game, avoiding stepping on foul lines like they were land mines, obsessively taking off or putting on their batting gloves in the batter’s box, or injecting steroids into their buttocks in a clubhouse bathroom stall. (Sorry—they I mean they used to do that. And like Mark McGwire, I’m not here to talk about the past. And like Sammy Sosa, no habla Ingles). In a game of such wild, hard to control inconsistency, ballplayers have to cling to whatever consistent, controllable things they can.  And the beauty of all this wild inconsistency? We get to see even the greatest players fail. A lot. Sometimes in epic ways. Sometimes for long periods of times. This makes them seem human. Superstars in other sports fail in much less extreme, much more short term ways. This makes them seem superhuman. But superheroes are boring and not even the best examples for the rest of us because they create standards none of us can live up to. Superman is a crashing bore.    

Baseball also provides us with a healthy reminder that sometimes spitting in the workplace is okay. Actually it’s more than okay. Admit it: it would be easier to slog through some dreary Mondays at the office if spitting wasn’t so frowned upon by management. Spitting is so common in baseball that it actually becomes invisible. My grandmother used to say to me, “Ryan, why do they have to spit so much?”. I would then think, “Oh yeah, he DID spit just now”. By contrast, if I had been watching 60 Minutes and an Iranian diplomat gave Leslie Stahl a little more lip than she was looking for and she spit on the floor, I would have totally noticed. Or at the last State Of The Union address if Obama had said Republicans cannot play political games with the debt ceiling any longer and John Boehner right behind him had spit, that would have stuck out like a sore thumb. Only baseball has managed to normalize the (all natural) act of spitting! You probably did it this morning when you brushed your teeth. The freedom of being a ballplayer is the freedom so say, “The world is my bathroom sink”.

Baseball is also the only sport that embodies what we say America is about but kind of isn’t really about. So the Golden State Warriors’ best player is Stephen Curry. In a 1 point Warriors victory the other night he took 21 shots, the next closest was Klay Thompson who took 15 shots. So Curry took almost 1/3 more shots than their second best player—and that relatively low margin for basketball is only because he’s an unselfish player. He took 21 of his team’s 77 total shots—so something like 1/4 of all shots. (This blog is unconcerned with exact math). The Washington Nationals best player is Bryce Harper. Last night he had 4 plate appearances while the Nats’ #8 hitter, the .233 hitting Michael Taylor, had 3 plate appearance—and probably only because his turn in the order didn’t come around a 4^th time. Red hot, superstar Bryce Harper had 4 of his team’s 31 total at bats last night—just under 1/8.

Is Bryce Harper less selfish than Stephen Curry? Actually he comes across as infinitely more selfish and immature and I’m not just saying that because his name is Bryce. But unlike basketball, football, hockey, soccer…..unlike every team sports I know of, Bryce Harper plays in a sport of mandated equal opportunity. There are no rules preventing your best basketball player to shoot as often as he likes or your superstar quarterback to throw as many passes as you want him to throw, but in baseball your best player has to take this turn just like everyone else. He has 1 spot and only 1 spot in your 9 man batting order and he can only bat when his spot comes around just like your backup catcher who may be hitting .189 and is only in the lineup because you’re resting your starting catcher in a day game after a night game. We all know this, but I don’t think anyone steps back and reflects on just what a radical game of equality of opportunity baseball is compared with every other sport and…..life. Even when the rulebook doesn’t dictate it, baseball’s inherent radical equal opportunity surfaces almost by accident. A manager can pitch his best pitcher any time he wants, but because pitchers are stretching the limits of the human arm and shoulder beyond where it should be stretched to begin with, an ace starting pitcher likewise has to wait his turn in the rotation just like the 5th starter who may have a 5.54 ERA. (Or, in the case of the 2015 Red Sox, the “ace” who may have a 5.54 ERA).

Let’s say baseball’s doomsday prophets have an argument. But if baseball is seeming more quaint and out of step with today’s society, could the reason have less to do with the slow pace and everyone’s apparent ADD than with the reality of a game where you are treated like an equal even if you’re not an equal? Maybe we have become so complacent about accepting that the CEO should make 409 times as much as a company’s everyday staff member that we can’t even relate to a game where (at least between the foul lines) the superstars are afforded zero preferential treatment over the everyday journeymen players? And the concept of batting orders and pitching rotations is so ingrained that no one even proposes changing it. I suppose you could make an argument that—for the benefit of entertainment and TV ratings—a manager can choose to bat his best hitter twice in the lineup and have someone else just be a designated fielder. Or he can bat his best hitter in the ninth inning even if he’s not due up that inning. That might be great for “fan interest” and capturing the “young demographic” but these are terrible ideas! And they are terrible because they would kill the team aspect of baseball that makes it so unique. Often you are only as good as your worst hitter or the 25^th man on your roster. People like to say baseball is less of a team game because no one passes the ball to each other but looked at another way it’s the most team game there is. It’s much harder to simply rely on your best player to carry you. It takes contributions from everyone and that’s the whole beauty of it. It’s a less narcissistic game.

Another weirdly beautiful thing about baseball is unlike other sports it’s not a game of keep away. Football, basketball, hockey, soccer….all games of passing/handing off the ball/puck to your teammates and trying to prevent the other team from getting their dirty paws on it. Baseball couldn’t be more different. It’s a sport in which you, the one with the ball, are the one—the only one—who feeds the offense the ball and gives the hitter at the plate a chance to crush a ball 500 feet off you. Of course the pitcher tries to make pitches that the hitter won’t be able to turn into souvenirs but he still stands essentially defenseless before his opponent and hopes it all works out. Now isn’t this a better lesson for life? We can pretend our opponents don’t exist and try to maneuver where we want to go without them interfering—kind of the way politics works these days—or we can actually be the ones who serve our opponents what they need to succeed but take the leap of faith that our skill and guile will get us through. Baseball represents a far more inclusive, self-confident way of dealing with our enemies. No wonder it’s “dying” in 2015 America!

It’s also the only sport that can treat seasonal affective disorder for unfortunate souls living in the north. I had some anxiety and depression this past brutal, awful, God forsaken, heinous, evil winter but spring training was a beacon of light in a dark, snow filled dungeon. I actually started watching meaningless games on TV when I normally just wait until Opening Day. And I realized you can listen to virtually every game on the MLB app on your phone. Grapefruit League games in Florida started at 1 every day, Cactus League games in Arizona started at 4. I became a daily listener. The games provided a portal into a world where it was 81 degrees and sunny. You could even overhear vendors yelling, “Cold beer here! (And water)”. It all sounded like it was coming from pure heaven even if it was only Jupiter, Florida. Football? Watching those guys doing drills in the heat of July just seems like hell on earth.

So baseball may not be our “national pastime” anymore but, like blue jeans, it has too much going for it to ever really die. It’s not the Trapper Keeper of team sports. In thirty years it might still be going strong while the head injury ridden, scandal ridden, domestic violence ridden NFL starts to seem barbaric to a new generation like boxing already does today to mainstream audiences. People of the future may turn to baseball and, to paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, say that a baseball bat is a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time. 

Winter Of 2015 Funeral Party

Hi. I am writing to you on a beautiful spring morning. The forecast calls for warm sunny weather for the next couple of days—but I don’t believe it. I may have a trace of PTSD from this winter. I’m expecting snow.

This winter…..can we talk about it? Do I even dare talk about it? I mean, it’s over, right? It’s not going to creep up on us again when we least expect it? We’re not living in a Friday The 13th sequel?

Worst…winter…..ever.

I wish this winter was a person so you could have at least looked them directly in the eye and said, “Everyone hates you. A lot”. I can’t prove it, but I think this winter froze my soul. It’s still thawing out. But I am emboldened to talk about this horrific time by a conversation I overheard Friday night when I went to the bar up the street for a beer: a guy said this winter really tested him physically, emotionally….. His buddy affirmed this by emphatically saying, “Awful” a couple of times. Not going to lie: it lifts my spirits slightly to hear this. (Or was that the Guiness?). I’m not happy to hear about other people struggling, but misery does love company. I myself thought I might lose my frost bitten mind this winter and I’m still trying to fully recover.  

                                                               

I think my troubles started before the frigid air and endless snow even kicked in. In November one of my high school classmates passed away of a massive heart attack. Granted, while I was once pretty good friends with him, I had only seen him in real life (as opposed to Facebook) a couple of times in the last 15 years, but it still seemed to affect me on a few levels:

1.         I felt really bad for him. A cool, funny, awkward, soft spoken guy. Dying at 41? Very, very sad.

2.         Oh crap. That’s right…..being over 40, it’s now entirely possible to have heart attacks. I knew this, but when a high school friend dies, it’s a message that shouts rather than whispers to you. Sure, I keep myself in decent shape but you never know for sure. Wait….what’s this pain in my chest? Something is horribly wrong! Yep, I’m a longtime hypochondriac. It goes into remission for periods but can flare up. This may have been the initial trigger of a new flare.

3.       Whether I’m going to die instantly or live to 90, I’m now at an age where kids (or middle aged men) I went to school with can actually die OF NATURAL CAUSES. We all know car accidents are the most common cause of death when you’re young, but heart attacks? Now we are clearly in the uncharted territory of middle age. By no standard whatsoever am I young anymore. How did this, like, happen? It seems just yesterday I was a (relatively) carefree 25 year old subsisting without guilt on nutritious dinners of Hot Pockets, Steak Ums (even more delicious when you drown them in cheese), frozen “party” pizzas, and pasta (whole wheat pasta with low sodium and sugar tomato sauce like I buy now? You must be joking. Refined grains and Ragu, bitch!).

(DISCLAIMER: the above use of the term “bitch” is intended in the gender neutral way Jesse Pinkman of Breaking Bad uses the term or the racially neutral way Kentucky’s Aaron Harrison said “F---k that n-----a” after losing in the Final Four to the very white Frank Kaminsky and Wisconsin. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog).

So with this reminder of my increasingly non-youthful age category, the Holidays seemed sad. I’ve become a Scrooge. I’m coming out of my non-holly decorated closet here: I hate Christmas! What’s worse: I hate the fact that I hate Christmas. What sort of jerk doesn’t like colorful lights, cheerful tunes, Santa Clause, gift exchanging, family bonding, etc? I used to love Christmas. But who was Scrooge himself? An older bachelor. Who am I? A 41 year old bachelor without kids but with a former good friend who just passed away from heart disease. Scrooge (and probably this writer) only hates Christmas because it reminds him of his own loneliness. To adults without families of their own, Christmas feels a little like a party you’re not invited to but it still goes on all around you anyway. It all feels almost cruel.

So that was two strikes against me. Strike three came when, partially due to my Holiday blues/mid-life crisis symptoms, I passed up going to my mom’s on Christmas Day. I still saw her on Christmas Eve—my attempted guilt allaying rationalization—but after I didn’t go I still felt crushing guilt to the point where I developed blurry vision—which had happened once before when I was under a lot of stress. After a few subsequent repeated episodes of this, I’ve come to realize the blurred vision actually happens when I start to calm down (the first incident coming when I drank a huge bottle of water while recording a cover version of Winter Wonderland—which I had meant to do weeks earlier) but at the time the blurred vision caused an epic freakout. I was sure I had worried myself into some kind of medical emergency.

The next day I went to the ER and told them I had chest tightness and I was afraid something was really wrong. The intake nurse took me in her office and grilled me—mostly trying to confirm that I didn’t have any suicidal thoughts which I assured her I did not---and I surprised myself by bursting into tears while detailing my guilty Holiday feelings. Another onset of blurred vision ensued. (Again, because the tears were calming). They did an EKG which was normal (although at one point the machine started buzzing like a smoke alarm on steroids when no one was in the room. Being nearly certain of my imminent death, I called for help. A PA came in, shut it off, and said, “Oh, this thing does that sometimes!” like he was talking about an old toaster. Thanks. If I didn’t have heart problems before, I probably do now!). They also did labs—I think they call them “cardiac enzymes”. Also normal. They gave me an IV. Told me to go home. “Get some rest”.

I was almost feeling better until the next day after I went swimming at the gym and…..blurred vison afterwards. Again, I find swimming calming, but at that point I was still refusing to see the pattern. So the day after it was back to the ER, told them I had accepted the fact that I was probably just having a mental breakdown but could they give me Xanax or something? They don’t prescribe Xanax in the ER but they give me Vistiril as a consolation prize. As far as I can tell, Vistiril isn’t much different from your basic Benadryl you can get at CVS as long as you show them your ID and promise you’re not running a meth lab. But it did help me sleep for a few days when I might not have ever slept otherwise, so there’s that.

I’m happy to report I haven’t darkened the door of an ER since, but it’s been an off and on struggle against myself ever since unlike anything I’ve experienced since probably my early to mid 20’s—when, probably not coincidentally, I was facing another transitional phase in my life: the transition to adulthood. I think I just really fear change. I had wanted to stay a kid forever and when I finally graduated college—which I sort of passive-aggressively delayed as long as I could—and I saw the grey, dull, compromised world (so I thought) called Adulthood staring me straight in the face, I was terrified rather than excited. It seemed like all the fun was over. Eventually, as one does, I made my peace with it and got on with life---still reminding myself that I was a “young adult”. But now we have to subtract a word from that phrase. Today it’s middle age staring me in the face. And again the familiar fear and feeling that maybe all the fun is over. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Life begins at 41! At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

And then there was the winter that followed. The worst possible time for me to have to endure the worst winter ever. If I was more superstitious I would swear God or fate or karma decided to make the test even harder for me. I mean once the snow storms became a weekly (or bi-weekly) event and once daily highs of 23 seemed like a heat wave, it just started to seem like the world was ending. There’s really only one logical thing to do in a winter like this: drink. But with my December health “scare”, I became almost afraid of drinking. Or drinking coffee. Or eating salty movie popcorn. Or doing anything unhealthy. I drank green tea, I then tried life with zero caffeine, I tried to load up on fish from Whole Foods (salmon, tuna, shrimp, sardines---natural sources of Vitamin D which we’re missing in the winter), I tried making daily green smoothies (using Vitamin D fortified milk of course). I started going to the gym…..daily. I started using the hot tub at the gym almost daily because I Googled their touted health benefits. All of my health nut tendencies—which have been increasing in the last couple of years to begin with—were in full bloom even if the trees were not. I did notice how all this fun banishing healthfulness completely eliminated my normal winter weight. I’d get on the scale and notice I was under 150 lbs—absurdly low for the non-running season. Huey Lewis’s Hip To Be Square became my life anthem! I wanted a new drug. One that won’t make sick. One that won’t make me crash my (ten speed). One that won’t make me three feet thick.

What a bad idea.

While slogging through such a horrendous winter, a feeling of closed in isolation is probably the worst enemy—far worse than a lack of magnesium or Vitamin D in the diet and far worse than the dehydrating effects of caffeine and alcohol. Particularly true if you live alone, don’t have a dog, don’t have a car, and live in the car culture state of Connecticut. In some ways, my health obsession worked against me. I only went to two UConn basketball games this winter—the lowest total in about 15 years. This was partly due to not wanting to stand in the frigid cold waiting for any more buses than was absolutely necessary but also because of my alcohol phobia. I always get a couple beers at games, could I really go and not drink? Under normal circumstance, maybe. I’ve done it before (maybe twice) but with my battle with anxiety, forget it. Sitting in those cramped XL Center seats for two hours? Especially if I was in the middle of a row? Yeah I guess I had a touch of agoraphobia. (Along with a touch of claustrophobia evidenced by practically living at the Barnes and Noble café instead of staying in my lonely apartment). So I wouldn’t go to games at all. Granted, the UConn men were painfully mediocre this year, but the point is to get out of the house anyway---even if it’s to see a 51-48 battle against East Carolina.

So my goal for the spring and summer……be less healthy. Get back to drinking in moderation, get back to drinking coffee, and get back to eating some food not on the World’s Healthiest Foods site. And for the love of God, don’t eliminate entire food groups from my diet. I’m not going to live forever no matter what I do. Besides, there’s no guarantee that’s better anyway. Some health obsessed gluten free vegan marathon runners die young while Keith Richards and Ozzy Osbourne keep celebrating birthdays. While it might seem like you’re conquering middle age by becoming 100 percent pure in your diet, it might actually be a kind of surrender to your fear of it. And while in a perfect world there are strong arguments against caffeine and alcohol, taking a “holistic” view of the matter, there may be one key argument for them: maybe they have kept me sane all these years. Zero caffeine and alcohol gives you a dose of Pure Reality instead of the slightly distorted view of reality those recreational drugs provide. Pure reality blows. Drugs are the answer.

This winter also had another tragic and embarrassing consequence. I feel less comfortable admitting this than admitting my post-Christmas panic attack: one day in February I’m not proud of when the high reached maybe 8 degrees, I wore a scarf. My mom had given it to me—you know how moms are always worried about you keeping warm—and I humored her by accepting it while fully planning to never wear it. I wore it. Now I suppose I shouldn’t be so anti-scarf. They’re okay for girls to wear, but I just can’t escape the notion that scarf wearing guys are, well, kind of douches. I saw part of a documentary on Three Seconds To Mars on Palladia the other week and Jared Leto was rocking scarves throughout. I rest my case. I know, I need to be more liberated in my thinking! What can I say? Either way I guess I’m officially a douche myself now as well so it doesn’t matter.  

This winter I also learned that I really need to re-learn how to divorce my mood from the weather or move to Florida or California. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a house. I mean…I could move. As a kid, the winter just didn’t bother me much. In fact sometimes I preferred it to summer. (I’ve since realized that is likely only because we had no central air, no pool, and no easy beach access. We northerners complain about hot weather in the same way people in Georgia complain about an inch of snow—but they don’t have plows, sand, or shovels. We each have insufficient infrastructures to deal with our respective weather abnormalities). Winter once meant fun, character building activities like sledding, snowball fights, and diving off our garage roof into giant snow piles. When others (usually “old people”) complained about winter I would look in puzzlement. What? They don’t have access to heat? Or a hat? Or, if they’re truly desperate and lacking self-esteem, a scarf?

This seems like a common phenomenon: kids can handle winter better than adults. One possible explanation is simply that kids a) can’t control where they live, and b) wouldn’t want to live anywhere else if you paid them. As a kid I had zero desire to move away from the rolling corn fields and bucolic cow pastures of Ellington, CT. Your childhood hometown becomes almost the only universe you really care about. The kids in my school were the only people I wanted to impress. Kids in distant faraway lands like Vernon, CT or Somers, CT were mere abstractions, let alone kids from distant galaxies like San Diego or Tampa. The fact that we had cold winters? A small price to pay for living in the only town on earth that mattered.

Let’s just say my love affair with Connecticut has since cooled. Maybe adults start to develop the idea that cold and snow and wind and darkness are just not natural. Like there’s something a little morally and metaphysically menacing and malevolent about it all. (Check out my succession of words starting with m! I own alliteration). This, ironically, seems to be more rather than less true if people have been living in this climate for four decades or more. I think it’s the knowledge that there are actually other humans who live in places where it’s 75 and sunny in January. And not just that: in Florida, for example, the sun even sets about an hour later in winter! Which really makes it just not fair. So maybe the snowed in northern adult burdened with this knowledge begins to feel that maybe the truly unnatural thing is his or her insistence on staying here instead of leaving. Family is the most common reason to stay, but I sometimes wonder if even that reason is often shortsighted. Just taking one isolated example here, but my grandparents moved to Florida right around the time I was born. My grandfather (this was his second marriage) moved thousands of miles away from his kids and his grandkids. On paper, he should have been nearly a stranger to me. But they came up here periodically and my brother and I visited them for sometimes weeks on end down there and we would do everything together. This was much more quality time than we would have ever experienced if they had stayed in Connecticut. We would have probably seen them on more occasions during the year, but I’m sure mostly for those family get-togethers with a dozen people that last a few hours. No doubt in my mind: I was closer to my grandparents because they moved thousands of miles away!

So of course I’m thinking more seriously than ever before of trying to relocate to Florida or California. Maybe the winters just make me crazy now? I can’t even guarantee this would not have happened in the middle of the summer, but I doubt it—at least not with the same severity. It did start to feel like my lingering anxiety and the weather merged into one, forming a tag team more indestructible than Hulk Hogan and Mr. T at the first Wrestlemania. Just when I thought I had finally killed it off it would come back just as once I thought it couldn’t possibly keep snowing and couldn’t possibly stay this inhumanely cold, it would snow more and get colder still. Maybe winter doesn’t create problems, but it amplifies them and that’s almost as bad.

Or I can learn better coping skills. Would I have been better with a pet? Or living in a city with better mass transit? Or with a girlfriend and/or family? Or a job that felt new and exciting and challenging rather than too often a dull and aggravating grind. Probably. I certainly don’t organize my life to best prepare for rainy days—or brutal winters. I also didn’t do enough of the very things I can do already that make me happy and sane like writing, reading, playing guitar. That’s how anxiety is a greedy, evil pest. Once it grips you, you’re so afraid of it lurking around the corner, you go into a hyper-defensive mode and you become actually less likely to do things you enjoy when common sense would seem to say you would be more likely to do them. But it’s playing offense by doing those things that will likely kill it off for good. If you’re playing defense by always trying to be on guard against it, you’re playing the game on its terms, not your own. It breeds a fear of fear itself, which breeds more anxiety. The caged bird only wins if it sings.

But I did start going on offense in some ways—I started seeing a therapist, I signed up for voice lessons (though much like the guitar lessons I took years ago I’m starting to realize it’s about the amount of practice, not the amount of lessons), and I even went to church a couple times! The first mass was really nice, the second one was Palm Sunday. Need I say more? This crazy, wholly unexpected decision was driven by my extreme nostalgia for visiting my grandparents in sunny Florida. We would go to 5 o’clock Saturday mass and I would have to wear long pants. This was the only time I remember being uncomfortably hot in July in Florida (because they had central air, a pool, and a beachside condo). I’m hardly devoutly religious but I think the real point of church is the community aspect. I have no idea whether atheism is true or not, I just know it offers no community. And, say what you want about the Catholics, but there are positive aspects to the teaching. One can say they focus too much on sin, but you might argue they only do so to focus on forgiveness. The theme of forgiveness is everywhere—asking God to forgive our sins but also forgiving “those who have trespassed against us”. Who can argue with that? The priest also mentioned—of course—the death of Jesus and noted how often only through pain and suffering can growth and change occur. In happier times, I would have passed this off as typical Catholic grimness. Given all of my recent pain and suffering and the realization that the only real reason I was there was due to said pain and suffering, I actually almost got choked up by this. Also the priest told I nice story. An eagle ends up living in a chicken coop. A stranger comes by, sees this, and points out the problem to the farmer, “That’s an eagle. You can’t have him living with chickens”. The farmer says, “No, he’s been raised as a chicken, it’s all he knows. He’s just like a chicken”. The farmer calls the eagle and says, “Fly, eagle, fly!”. The eagle flaps its wings and starts to fly until the farmer tosses chicken feed on the ground and the eagle swoops right back down again. Not giving up, the farmer tries again and eventually the eagle flies away and leaves the chickens and the farmer for parts unknown.  

He didn’t supply the moral of the story but it seems clear: we have to be who we really are but sometimes that means having to make painful choices to leave everyone and everything we know and many of our old habits behind. This actually struck a chord with me as well.

But the winter of our discontent is over. Here comes the sun. It’s gonna be a bright sunshiny day. Life starts over. Hopefully better this time