Roger Ebert, who for some reason has one of the smartest and most consistently readable blogs on the Internet, wrote the other day about child-rearing. His basic argument is that kids today are crippled by the short leashes their fearful parents keep them on. I think he makes a lot of mistakes of the “my generation is better than yours” variety, but his core premise, that something is twisted and wrong in modern society, rings true to me.

One thing Kara and I have in common is that we were both given a lot of leeway by our parents, in comparison to our friends. I think she took advantage of that more than I did–I was always kind of an introvert–but that’s just who we were/are. Today we’re both of the general mindset that what really matters in life is going places, doing things and meeting people, and I think that has to do an awful lot with the environment we grew up in. Too much safety and stability really is debilitating.

About eight months ago, we moved from the suburban community where my immediate family lives to Frederick, MD, with the idea that a city would be a nicer environment to live in. Frederick is a small city, but we live right downtown and are–at least theoretically–constantly surrounded by opportunities for human contact.

My commute to work sucks pretty hard, but I really do like Frederick. It’s charming. What has surprised me, and I think Kara as well, is that we feel just as socially isolated as we did in the suburbs. I’ve tried to strike up conversations with some of our neighbors and it’s just been weird. People our age go to shops and bars and clubs to socialize with other members of their group and ignore the rest of the world. What I’m increasingly realizing is that there’s nothing wrong with our little city¹; this is just the world we live in. Spontaneous face-to-face socialization has taken a back seat to adding people to your friend list and lurking moar.

People of our generation and the adjacent ones seem to be, broadly speaking, the product of parents who instilled a crippling fear of the post-1960s world in their children. A lot of them just don’t talk to each other. At the same time, people in their 40s and older are still gregarious.

It’s only gotten worse since we were kids, not very long ago. Check out the Parenting section on Yahoo! Answers sometime if you really want to be depressed. Like one of the commenters on Ebert’s blog entry said, every question that begins with “should I let my child…” is answered with “of course not, are you nuts?”. Everybody wants to know if their kid has ADHD². Everybody’s kid has been diagnosed with some obscure personality or learning disorder from the DSM-IV. Lots of people want to know how to get their kids’ teachers and/or principals fired. One parent who asked how to deal with a neighbor kid bullying her son received three answers, all of them telling her she should press charges. Are these people for real? Wait, stop, I already know the answer to that question, and it’s freaking depressing.

You know what it really comes down to? Selfishness. People treat their kids like cherished possessions. There is a tiny chance, every time you let your kid out of your sight, that he or she is going to be injured or abducted or murdered or molested or something. Anybody who lets that happen to their kid is going to feel terrible. Most parents would apparently rather stifle their children than accept that risk. I’m just thankful that mine didn’t.

1. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with us, either. We’re mostly sane and we aren’t frightfully ugly or anything.
2. I have been diagnosed with ADD, or whatever the cool kids call it nowadays, so I am allowed to make fun of it with impunity.

We come in, screaming like waves shattering on a beach. We are battered by rain and by wind. Clouds and lightning keep us from seeing ourselves or our world clearly.

We are, essentially, alone. Our struggles are fought mostly alone, mostly internally. We can reach out and hold hands, but we came in alone and we leave alone.

This can be terribly depressing. But it isn’t – not necessarily. There is vitality and energy all around. We can feed off that electricity.

And there are always calm spots in storms.

I think Thanksgiving and winter holidays become important because the actual, physical world turns against us then. Not just our own mental world, not just the world we create. Nature itself turns against us.

Yesterday, the weather snapped here. It was sharp and windy and misting. The wind in the mid-west/ plains/ wherever we are is something else. It made me think about the holidays.

I think the holidays are about creating your own vitality in a dying world. I mean that literally – in Winter, your world has turned from the sun, and without the sun we start to die. So we make our own light – fires, candles, 3-d televisions.

And we create our own calm and peace, too. We do that by establishing rituals and traditions, by giving of ourselves to the needy around us and by thanking the people who have helped us and held our hands throughout the year and in years past.

As years go by, and as I stay many miles away from family and friends I care deeply for, the holidays make more sense. Giving makes more sense. Gratitude makes more sense. None of us live in an easy world.

The world is a storm.

At first, I was irritated because I was only finding counselors who identified as ‘Christian counselors.’ I find this offensive mostly because I don’t give a crap what religious beliefs my counselor ascribes to. Michael pointed out that in middle-American English, Christian roughly translates to “good person with similar values.”  And I figured  my refusal to see someone based on that identification was as goofy as the people who would only see someone with that identification. I was wrong, at least, in this case.

I tried to stay positive. The building the office was in was really neat… built in the 60′s and labyrinthine. Hallways that dead-end and stuff. Great place to shoot a horror movie. So I was excited about the building. The waiting room was pretty spare. I filled out my paperwork, noting with a chuckle that the counselor in question treats for sex/pornography addiction (which, I don’t believe exists). And so, after maybe ten minutes, my appointment began.

The room was not disturbing, at first. It looked out onto a pretty lake, and the sun was out. There were pretty normal books laying around (The Feel Good Handbook, kids books about divorce, that sort of junk). So I talked for 20 minutes and then she said the magic, horrifying words, “I have a treatment I’d like to try with you.” And my bullshit flag activated.

So she gave me a lecture about EMDR. For twenty minutes. She uses bilateral sound and bilateral sensation. And she put the headphones on my ear and I was like, this reminds me of binaural tones. Which Michael used to make me to listen to so I could sleep at night.

Then she said, I’d make you go more in depth about the traumas you’ve undergone. And I looked her in the eye, and said, “Honestly, I was a child for most of this stuff and couldn’t give you any more details than I have.”

As I wrote her a check (since she couldn’t give me a receipt for cash… seriously?) , I noticed she had *three* separate certificates for hypnotism. As in, regressive hypnotism. As in, hypnotize trauma patients and implant shit in their heads.

These things mostly amused me. But the most disturbing thing to me is this: I cried, and she sat and watched me. Didn’t hand me a tissue, didn’t reach out at all. This woman, this cold and awkward woman, is making people relive traumas. You can’t break people down emotionally and not be there to hold them. Hell, Donnie Darko’s counselor held him. I have never known a counselor who didn’t at least move closer when you cry. My last counselor actually would hug people – in sessions, leaving sessions. She told me once it was her job to make sure everyone left feeling loved and accepted. I miss that woman.

There’s a lot more ridiculous counselors than I thought. For my part, I’ve mostly soured on finding someone locally whose not crazy. Guess I’ll just take my ass down to Mel Bond, our local faith healer. For my part — a hypnotist counselor and a faith healer are both ripping off the poor, desperate and stupid. In much the same way.

But, the appointment cost me $12, I got a laugh. And, it reminded me I could be worse off. I’m not perfect, but I’m not a crazy counselor and I’m not her patient. Winning.

Fast forward many guitar-free years and Michael buys me an electric guitar. At this point, I can’t play a damn thing because it’s been so long. And I have to learn how to use a pick and I have to change the whole way I’d approached the puzzle of the guitar.

I think the hardest thing for me, in terms of being motivated to write, was this idea that I didn’t see too many women with electric guitars doing things I found sonically interesting. Please feel free to enlighten me, I’m sure I’ve missed loads of ladies. I liked the riot-grrl punk stuff, I liked Liz Phair, I liked the folk-y women like Ani DiFranco. But while I had the sense that those women were making compelling music, it wasn’t anything I particularly wanted to play.

So, when I heard St. Vincent (Annie Clark) a couple months ago on Sirius, I was pumped. A woman who can sing and play guitar was making music I found sonically and thematically interesting.

So I dragged Michael to see her locally, mostly to evaluate her talents in a live setting. I was not expecting very much. And, she can actually sing and play guitar quite well.

Combine that experience with my relatively recent discoveries of My Bloody Valentine and Failure (I know, I’m so far behind the the times that it’s ridiculous), and I’m eyeing my electric guitar anew. Most likely, nothing will come of it. But it’s nice to see a puzzle differently.

Oh, and I can recommend St. Vincent albums freely, as there’s no RIAA related junk associated. I’m very much enjoying both Strange Mercy and Actor.

I’m not strictly speaking about my diet, although that’s certainly an aspect of me that has changed in a dramatic way in what amounts to being overnight. I put on 70 pounds over the course of five years, and I’m more than halfway down in the course of half a year. And dieting is relevant to what’s going on mentally, of course. At some point, regardless of the relentless compliments or positive feedback, you have to do battle with the fat-titude (fat-causing-attitude) demons again.

Or maybe, the self-loathing demons? That’s where my fat-titude begins, almost certainly.

I hope that certain times of the year will not always be colored by my hospital stays. I don’t think they will be. I can wake up on January 16 now and know my dad died that day without reliving the moments and giving myself panic attacks. I guess my hospitalizations were traumatic experiences, but probably only because I couldn’t believe how far I had let myself fall.

Then, I was too busy mourning how much I sucked to pick myself up and find something worthwhile to work towards.

I’m not going to talk about, specifically, what’s on my mind. I don’t need to talk about the details that knocked the breath out of my chest today, at work. I’m not sure it’s healthy to fixate on those details. It’s okay for me to write them down as they occur to me and let them pass into the mists of my mind, again.

But what I want to say is this – I’m battling those demons on a different field now. If it’s not level, it’s tilted in my direction. When my fat-titude jumps up now, I’m already forty pounds lighter. I eat less even when I pig out. I do yoga almost every morning. It’s a lot harder to gain weight, now.

I want to tell you that it’s easier to love myself, but sometimes, it’s not. I still feel guilty and stupid for what I’ve done in the past; for who I’ve been. I think I will feel that way for some time. But then I think of what I’ve done — in a year’s time, in six month’s time, in 3 month’s time. I think things have mostly gotten consistently more awesome – internally and externally. I’ve worked for that. I work for it every day.

I want to explain to myself why I get up in the morning. I feel like I just do it. Sometimes the cat wakes me, sometimes the sun wakes me, sometimes my alarm wakes me. But on 99% of mornings, I wake up straight away and get down to business.

I don’t know why, yet. Maybe that’s why I get up every morning. Searching for the answer feels better than giving up.