Posted on

To Family And Friends Of Gene Schultz, Jr.

The death of information security luminary Earl Eugene Schultz, Jr. this past weekend is something I’m covering as a news item. But I feel the need to come on here and say a few personal words.

First, a song I think is appropriate:

To Gene’s friends and family, I want to extend my deepest condolences for your loss. I didn’t know him as well as you did, but he was kind and helpful to me the few times I met him.

He always broke complex issues down in terms I could understand, and he did so with kindness in his voice every time. He made me just a little bit smarter, and there’s no doubt he had the same impact on countless others.

In my CSOonline Salted Hash security blog, I’m seeing comments that note the deep faith he had:

“Gene is in heaven, with Jesus; and will forever be; about this, I have no doubt,” wrote Harvey Nus.

Another wrote: “Gene was a strong believer in the Lord, for this we can rejoice that he is in the best hands and free from anymore pain.  In the end, this is what matters most, more than his INFOSEC knowledge or his contribution to our field.  He was one of the kindest, humorous people that I have ever worked for and a great mentor.  We are all blessed to have had him pass through our lives.”

I think those words speak volumes.

Peace be with you all at what I know if a difficult time.

Schultz_Gene.jpg

Posted on

Be Yourself, Even If People Hate You For It

The more I talk to fellow recovering addicts and emotional defects, the more I realize we have one big thing in common: We want to please everyone and be loved for it. Unfortunately, it’s an impossible goal that can lead to crushing disappointment.

Mood music:

It’s an especially stinging problem in the age of social networking, where some people have learned to measure their worth by how many “friends” and “followers” they have. Facebook in particular is full of peevers who get picky about what you post even as they post things that annoy others. It’s an atmosphere tailor made for resentments.

Whenever I go to an OA, AA or 12-Step Big Book study meeting, someone always brings up their need to have everyone like them. The reason they became an addict was because that hunger could never be satisfied.

I wrote about my own experience with this in a post called “Why Being a People Pleaser Is Dumb.”

I wanted desperately to make every boss happy, and I did succeed for awhile. But in doing so I damaged myself to the core and came within inches of an emotional breakdown. It caused me to work 80 hours a week, waking up each morning scared to death that I would fall short or fail altogether. I wanted to make every family member happy. It didn’t work, because you can never keep everyone happy when strong personalities clash.

In the face of constant let-downs, I binged on everything I could get my hands on and spent most waking moments resenting the fuck out of people who didn’t embrace me for who I am.

I’d like to tell you I’ve learned to shrug it off and let people go when they didn’t want to subscribe to my personality. But the truth is that I still struggle with it.

When a family member gives me the cold shoulder, it affects me. Never mind that I’ve cold-shouldered many a family member in my day. When I discover someone on Facebook has unfriended me, I go on a hunt to find out who it was and why. Never mind all the people I’ve disconnected from for annoying me.

With this disease, hypocrisy is a constant companion.

As conflicted as I remain, I am coming around to the idea that I have to be myself, even if some people hate me for it. It’s a slow and messy process, but you could also say there’s a survival instinct kicking in.

I’m a devout Catholic who wants to be accepted by everyone in my church community. But my gallows humor and metal-head ways are going to bubble to the surface and I can’t expect everyone to like it.

On the other side of the blade, I can’t expect all my friends in the music and writing worlds to share my views on faith.

I also can’t expect everyone to approve of everything I write here. By extension, I can’t expect everyone to want all the content I insist on pushing through my social networking feeds.

All I can do is be myself and hope that the better parts of me surface more often than the unsavory parts.

Being someone else is simply too hard. Besides, in the end we get judged on who we were, not on who we pretended to be.

Posted on

Four Brenner Men = Trouble

Saturday afternoon illustrated how significantly my family dynamic has changed — and how much some things remain the same. I took Dad on errands, pushing him around in his wheelchair; Sean and Duncan in tow.

The four of us Brenner guys together for an afternoon is a lot like Godzilla running around Tokyo. The difference is that our chaos is usually unintended. Godzilla repeatedly destroyed Tokyo on purpose.

It’s harder taking Dad around in his current, post-stroke condition. But it’s nice having control of the car. Dad behind the wheel was always a nightmare. I drive more slowly than he did, though my driving is clumsy in other ways.

As awful as it sounds, I kind of like pushing him around in his wheelchair. He’s always been there for us, and this is something I can do for him. Sure, he’d rather be walking. We’d all rather see him walking. But recovery is an unpredictable thing, and for now I feel like I can talk to him about the deep stuff and show him things in a way that was tougher when he was mobile and hard to pin down.

I took him to a jewelry store in Malden so he could get his watch fixed and see an old friend (the store owner, who hired me a couple times in the 1980s to stand outside his shop in a Santa Claus suit on Christmas Eve, waving to passers by). I took him to fill and later pick up his multiple prescriptions. I took him to Target and his office, though I refused to let him upstairs. We went to the old neighborhood, the Point of Pines, so the kids could run around on the beach and blow off steam. While they ran around, I wheeled dad past houses of old friends. He took us for dinner at the Porthole restaurant in Lynn. I had to cut up and mash his veggies, just like he did for me when I was a little kid.

As trapped in his body as he is right now, Dad showed in a lot of ways that he’s still the same guy he’s always been, including the loose cannon part.

As we stood at a Malden crosswalk waiting to go to the other side of the street, a car was coming. The driver showed no signs of slowing down to stop for us, so Dad flipped him off. The driver screeched to a halt and, as we crossed, I waved a sheepish thank you to the guy behind the wheel. The guy smiled and waved, clearly amused that a crotchety old guy in a wheelchair just flipped him off.

In the jewelry store the first thing he said to his old friend was that he was packing on the pounds. Dad is always quick to point out to someone that they’re getting fat, oblivious to his own past problems with weight-control.

At the office, he barked orders and asked questions of his employees as if he’d never left. They were just happy to see him out and about.

Everyone knows how Dad can get. But no one seems to mind. He’s done so much for so many people that most know where his heart is at. If anything, his antics are usually a source of amusement. Sean and Duncan, both of whom are at an age where bathroom humor is present and growing, eat it all up, chuckling at their grandfather’s antics as if they were watching “Despicable Me” for the hundredth time.

They accept their grandfather as he is. They study him in fascination, and they don’t pass judgement the way we adults tend to do.

By the time we dropped Dad off we were wiped out. But we were grateful, too, because there’s something special about the Brenner men striking out on their own for a few hours of trouble.

Posted on

Three Years (Almost) Clean

Three years ago yesterday, I went on my last binge. Actually, it was more like reaching the end of a final, two-month long binge. The abstinent and sober life hasn’t been perfect by any stretch. But it beats the hell out of where I was at the start.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA

Compulsive overeating was my biggest, most destructive addiction. It led to health problems that only got worse with time. I became a waste of space and fell short as a husband, dad and friend. I used to think about food all the time — where to get it, when to binge it and how to hide the aftermath.

People think of drugs and alcohol as addictive things, followed by gambling, pornography and the Internet. Food, on the other hand, that’s something we need to survive. If you’re a binge eater, it’s not an addiction, the thinking goes. You’re just a glutton who eats too much. The truth is we are ALL addicts. Some of us need chocolate, others need to watch every episode of their favorite TV show.

This year has probably been the most challenging for me since ditching the flour and sugar. There have been stress factors that didn’t exist before, including my father’s multiple strokes. Last month I decided to restart my program at square one, with a new sponsor and a tightening up of my food plan.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment my recovery started getting wobbly and I started getting sloppy. I don’t know if it’s fully accurate to call this a relapse, but was pretty damn close.

Twice in as many weeks, I forgot to pack an abstinent lunch before leaving the house. When you’re recovery is on sturdy ground, that’s a mistake you NEVER make.

I was skipping too many 12-Step/OA meetings and I stopped calling my sponsor.

One morning I woke up, had a what-the-fuck moment and decided to kickstart things. Hence the “almost” in today’s title.

Last year, my sister Shira asked me what the difference was between someone with a binge-eating addiction and someone who just eats too much without thinking.

It’s a fair question, and a wise one. Here’s how I see it:

Though we all have our addictions, there’s a line someone with an overpowering habit crosses. On the other side of that line, life becomes unmanageable. The fix becomes more important than anything else. You spend ALL your time thinking about how to get it. You burn through money you don’t have and become crafty at lying about it to everyone around you, including the people you love most.

In short, the need for a fix takes your entire brain hostage.

I guess that if I were just a casual overeater, I’d be overweight but life would hum along pretty much as it’s supposed to.

I’m not sure if that makes sense, but that’s what it means to me.

When you realize you need to deal with it, the 12 Steps of Recovery is the map to take you there. It’s very simple. The first steps are the admission that you have a problem that has made life unmanageable, and that you can’t bring it under control without help from a higher power.

There are the basic tools: Having a food plan (mine is devoid of flour and sugar and I put almost everything I eat on a scale). There’s the sponsor, writing, meetings, etc. But along the way, you learn things about yourself and grow in ways well beyond what you expected.

My recovery has lead to many healed relationships and a clearheadedness I never knew before. I’ve been able to reach out to people I’ve hurt in the past and set things right.

It isn’t all roses. The first few months of abstinence were not sober days. I used a lot of wine as a crutch to keep from eating. Eventually I put that down too, because I saw where it was taking me and it scared me. And I’ll be honest: I don’t really miss the food anymore, but I DO miss the wine. Sobriety can be an awkward thing.

I’ve also learned that being clean doesn’t make you a better person. I’ve seen people in AA and OA that will make your skin crawl, and they’ve been clean a long time. Sobriety doesn’t mean you instantly learn how to behave like a good human being. Some people find they were better at that when they had a glass in their hand. Me? I have a runaway ego and some days I still have a bad attitude.

I’m a work in progress. A lot of work.

But I’ll take the me of today over the me of three years ago.