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.

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.

I think there have been some really disturbing trends in U.S. politics recently, and when I look the social forces behind those changes I can’t help but get the feeling that a large portion of Americans are increasingly unconcerned with the factual truth of pretty much anything. To put it another way, the national dialogue is no longer about who’s right. It’s about who’s loudest, or most passionate, or prettiest, or some other factor that I don’t even understand.

Don’t get me wrong, people have always been fickle and I know that. But through most of our history as a country there has been a general respect for facts, in the sense that an argument obviously contradictory to the facts is seen as a weak argument. This seems not to be the case anymore. What I think has happened is this: Those who hold opinions contradictory to the facts have begun saying things like, “Can anyone really know what the facts are?” in a way that causes people who profess to know the facts to appear arrogant or self-righteous. It’s been shockingly effective.

Let’s take a current political example: the crisis associated with the fact that the national debt is very large and growing rapidly. Our current president has made no discretionary spending decisions that have served to increase the debt; in fact last year he reduced federal spending by 2.4%. He has not substantially decreased or increased tax revenue. Yet, the national debt has increased by 12.5% under his watch. An intelligent person, wondering what confounding factor might have caused this result, would do a little bit of research and discover that his predecessor enacted tax cuts estimated to cost $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years and provided no direct means to fund those tax cuts. They would also find that the current president attempted and failed to discontinue those tax cuts.

These are the facts of the issue; there are no statements of opinion involved. Because the facts are quite clearly that the President has done nothing to hasten the debt crisis, and in fact has attempted to prevent at least one possible cause (the tax cuts), in a normal universe someone making a claim that the President is at fault carries a substantially increased burden to prove his claim. If he presents no compelling evidence, or no evidence at all, to support his claim, he is dismissed as either a lunatic or grossly misinformed.

Yet in America today both opinions are given equal time and attention in the media, as though they are equally valid and predicated on equally valid assumptions. Worse, close to half of Americans seem to agree with the assertion that the President has caused or hastened the debt crisis. It bears repeating, so I’ll say again that in this case, the assertion is totally, demonstrably false. Unless new facts are presented, there is no rational reason whatever for anyone to agree with it.

We have apparently become so concerned with pleasing everyone that we are no longer willing to tell people when they are being silly. As a result, our own national Silly Party is rising to prominence, claiming legitimacy, and making news headlines. They have no obligation to prove anything they say and are free to base their claims on their personal preferences without regard to external factors.

As for those of us who still believe that ideas can be incorrect, at what point do we have an obligation to stand up and start calling people on their crap?

The album is unequivocally awesome, but having only listened to it in the car or on stereo, I had no appreciation for the experience with headphones. I have no explanation for the train of thoughts I had with that album on repeat, maybe it was the atmospheric quality of the music.

I fell into a spell that I remember from years ago. Everything I saw was so gorgeous that I ached to share those sights. I didn’t want to wake Michael so instead I filed them away, realizing even as I did so that I could never explain those images. Without context, they were meaningless.

And I remembered why I had decided that writing was what I wanted to do. I didn’t decide it because I thought I was smart or had insight to offer anyone. I’m not smart, and I don’t have any special insight. I didn’t decide it to give a voice to all my critical thoughts because that doesn’t make anyone a happier person. It doesn’t; I’m sorry.

It was a desire I had for a long, long time. I’ve talked so much about my childhood in therapy and everyone has traced onto it what they want to see. Whatever tiny trauma there is, they expand it in scale. Because that is how they can make sense out of someone depressed enough to attempt suicide.

My childhood wasn’t bad, though. I mean, I blow the bad things up in my mind too. But so much of my childhood was perfect moments I’ve filed away. Moments so perfect that when I imagine them in my head again, the edges are feathered – like a dream sequence on Saved by the Bell. When I was young, I used everything I had at hand to show people those things. I tried music. I tried coloring. I tried photography. I wasn’t bad at any of those things, but never very good, either. Not nearly good enough to paint the images in my head.

But writing, even when I was bad, I was still better than most people. In a few classes of creative writing in college, I realized I could write. Maybe still not well enough to do justice to the images in my head. But well enough to move people.

I don’t remember when I stopped accumulating massive quantities of those just-perfect moments. If I were to guess, I’d say it was about when I entered endless therapy and medication land. I could lay blame to the endless parade of increasingly stronger SSRIs, and that probably wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate. Now that I’m totally off SSRIs, my brain is doing heaven knows what to try and repair my botched brain receptors. But, I think blaming the drugs is the easy way out.

It had more to do with my attitude. I felt helpless and broken. I could still see those images, but through a veil of self-loathing. Nothing looks pretty enough from behind that veil.

When I sat on that train, with my headphones on and my music blaring and Missouri flashing by my train window… I wasn’t conscious of even being me. I wasn’t there to DO anything. I was there to be a witness.

As Kilgore Trout says in The Breakfast of Champions, the meaning of life is:
to be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience of the creator of the universe,
you fool.

Anyway, a blog is really not a forum for writing of that sort. But I intend to focus a lot more on being a witness, and less on being a critic.

Speaking of critic… Amtrak is awesome. It beats planes by having simple security and a load of leg room. It beats cars because you don’t have to pay for gas, and you don’t have to stop everything to eat or wee.  We’ll see how our Holiday trip goes, but I feel safe in assuming it will go swimmingly.