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Duncan Likes Pink. So What?

Duncan is raising a few eyebrows in church and school because his favorite color is pink. Apparently, it’s only OK for girls to like this color. Right off the bat I’m annoyed, because girls don’t get the same crap for wearing a so-called boy’s color like blue.

Duncan has a pink winter hat and a pink knitted coin pouch. When a priest saw him wearing the hat last year, a look of concern came over him. “Well, I guess there’s still time,” he said.

This past Sunday, Duncan showed the school principal his coin pouch. “That’s an interesting color,” she said.

By the way, that pouch was stuffed with coins Duncan couldn’t wait to put in the poor box.

I once asked Duncan why pink is his favorite color. His answer: “Because girls like pink. And I like girls.” Innocent words from a 7-year-old boy.

Here’s why I’m getting pissed off at people for making a big deal out of what I think is nothing:

This is how you start a child down the path of social anxiety, pain and dysfunction. You take something as innocent as a color choice and start suggesting there’s something wrong with him. The implication is that, because it’s a so-called girl’s color, he’s going to be gay when he grows up.

When I was a kid, I got hassled over the more old-fashioned stuff, like being overweight. I also kept believing in Santa Clause longer than the other kids my age. Being fat meant being damaged, unworthy of the same respect everyone else got. In high school, I used to watch teachers belittle students who dressed like hippes. The kids were drug-injecting wastoids as far as some of the teachers were concerned. I knew some who were, but I knew others who were not.

Make a kid feel stupid over how they look or what they wear and after awhile they’re probably going to start believing they are damaged goods.

I’m not going to let that happen to my kids without a fight.

Duncan can like whatever color he wants to like. If you have a problem with that, you can come talk to the boy’s ugly, still overweight Dad.

I’ll probably tell you you’re being shallow and judgemental. You’ve been warned.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how schools tend to deal with kids who are different. Kids like the one I used to be.

The school we send our kids to, a private Parochial school, is wonderful on many levels. My favorite thing about it is the other families who send their kids there. Many people who have become dear friends. Most importantly, the kids are getting a daily dose of God there, which is something Erin and I care deeply about.

But I see something there that bothers me. It’s something that’s a problem in a lot of schools.

It’s the sports mentality. The idea that the ONLY way to measure a kid’s potential is by how he or she does in sports.

My children are not much into sports. Both are more focused on art, science (especially Sean) and music (Duncan’s passion). Some might call that different. And because sports is such a huge deal in their school, I don’t think their talents are being put to the test as they should be.

Last year, Erin pitched the idea of a “Mad Scientist” program for kids who love science. The program would cost the school nothing and the principal expressed interest. Then it went nowhere. Kids like Sean lose out on this one.

But the sports. Oh, how the school loves its sports. The teams win big. And that is encouraged at all costs, even if it means only a quarter of the kids on a team get to play while those who “aren’t good enough” spend all their time on the bench. The goal is to win. If you’re not good enough to make that happen, you take a seat. Not the best way to challenge kids to reach their full potential, even if their potential doesn’t look like much to judgmental, competitive eyes.

This isn’t just a problem where my kids go to school. Everywhere you look, it’s all about the sports. The football team. The softball team. The hockey team. The basketball team.

Sure, sports are important. Sports bring out the best in many children, and can be as important an outlet for troubled kids as music, art and writing was and still is for me.

If a kid doesn’t want to do sports, so what?

If a boy likes the color pink, so what?

God made all colors for everyone to embrace, not just some for the boys and some for the girls.

Get over it.

battle_scars_by_eddietheyeti
“Battle Scars,” by EddieTheYeti
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Asking to be Assaulted?

Sometimes people say things that make me feel sorry for them. A few years ago I might have called them an idiot or something more Revere-like. Today I can only shake my head and feel pity. Here’s an example from the NerdChic blog.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie3NinwlX6A&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Noirin Shirley writes in her blog, NerdChic.net, that she was sexually assaulted during a conference late last week. She names the guy who allegedly did it to her, and goes on to explain a lot of things that has netted her post 150-plus comments.

Here’s an excerpt:

At some point, it was too late and too loud to reasonably continue. Everyone cleared out (Nick, you are a *god*, for spending the extra five minutes to clear the carnage, so that I could wake up in a room that showed no signs of what had happened the night before!), and we headed to the Irish pub next door that has become our local.

Some food, a few more beers. Squeezing everyone up so I could sit next to someone I wanted to talk to. Laughing at the events of the week, and the night.

And then I went to the loo, and as I was about to go in, Florian Leibert, who had been speaking in the Hadoop track, called me over, and asked if he could talk to me.

I’m on the board of Apache. I’m responsible for our conferences. I work on community development and mentoring. If you’re at an Apache event and you want help, information, encouragement, answers, I will always do my best to provide. So this wasn’t an unusual request, and it wasn’t one I expected to end the way it did.

He brought me in to the snug, and sat up on a stool. He grabbed me, pulled me in to him, and kissed me. I tried to push him off, and told him I wasn’t interested (I may have been less eloquent, but I don’t think I was less clear). He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling.

Now, if this did happen, it sounds horrible. But since it’s currently her word against his and everyone has a right to be deemed innocent until proven guilty, the fact that she mentions the guy by name is unfortunate. The place to name names is with the authorities, not the blog-reading public. That’s my opinion, anyway.

On to the comments:

A lot of people have dissed this woman for her own bad behavior that night, for dressing in a supposedly provocative way, putting herself in a situation for this to happen, etc.

Let’s look at the comment from “LOL@you” —

“Get over it, some jerk groped you and now your whole life is ruined? You’re an attention whore who got the wrong sort of attention, that’s how it is sometimes. Calling this guy out is fine if you want but recognize that you’re clearly an idiot. There is “what’s right” and what is smart, as an adult you ought to know the difference by now you big baby. Keep waiting for the law to intervene and clear away all the jerks and pervs and you’ll live a long, sad life only to learn in the end that the cops, lawyers and politicians you think give a shit are the biggest pervs/jerks out there and will only help you to help their career. Just stop being such a drama queen/attention whore and you’ll be fine … “bicycle shorts under my skirt” …LOL. Do you realize what a social misfit you are?”

Whoever you are, LOL@you, I feel sorry for you because you lack the stones to say who you are. When you call someone a whore and say she deserved it for how she dressed, at least show yourself. Failure to do so makes you a coward.

I don’t care how Noirin was dressed. You simply don’t touch another person without their permission, man or woman. If this guy really did what Noirin claims, he deserves to be held accountable — in a court of law, should she choose to press charges.

To suggest she was asking for it is a clear indication that your understanding of right and wrong is severely underdeveloped.

That’s how I feel about her claim and some of the responses. Now that I got that out of the way, I have a bigger point to weigh in on.

Some of those who commented called her a baby for bringing up something like this. My view is that she could have done it more tastefully, mentioning all the details but not naming the guy, but if she was traumatized, she should be able to express herself.

If you don’t like that she did it in her blog, you don’t have to read it.

I can’t claim to be better than her when it comes to naming names. I’ve done it before, with disastrous results.

When my friend Sean Marley died, I mentioned in a newspaper column less than a week later that it was a suicide. I went into too much detail about how he did it. The price is that most of his family won’t talk to me today.

In that case, I could have handled the telling of the tale better.

I could have let a certain period of time pass before naming him and the nature of his death like I did, for all to see.

I’ve mentioned him a lot in this blog, and by now everyone knows he took his life. But the dust was left to settle for several years in between. I write about him now to honor his memory. 

In fact, in the last few years I decided there was a stigma around depression and addiction and that I had to try and break it.

In doing so, I’ve told you things about myself that some have deemed risky. I’ve been asked if I worry about losing my job for acknowledging my struggles.

Acknowledging that you were sexually assaulted is risky, too. If you in fact were assaulted and you refuse to be quiet about it, you are taking a risk. But it’s a courageous risk, which is hopefully done with class.

Since she chose to name names, I hope she is telling the truth. If she is, I commend her, despite some of the sloppiness in the process.

If all this is a lie, then I can only feel sorry for her, too.

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Me and My Wall

When I get tired and angry, I have this wall I put up. Erin is usually the one who crashes into it.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpAbUvl3eTk&fs=1&hl=en_US]

She’s been building a freelance editing business for the past year, and the hours she puts in would kill a lesser person. I’ve taken on a lot of extra things around the house to help, and for the last week or so the fatigue and frustration has set in.

Not frustration with Erin. Frustration over the situation.

This is a much better situation than what we faced several months ago, when all the freelance work dried up and we couldn’t figure out how we were going to get all the bills paid. Now there’s a ton of work, and at the end of the day we’re both wiped out.

The problem is that I don’t immediately catch on that I’m frustrated. I figure it’s just me going into OCD mode. I’m just tired, I figure.

That’s when I become a prick.

Erin will try to engage me in conversation and I’ll shut down. I put the wall up. I don’t realize I’m doing it, and that’s a problem.

For all the sharing I do in this blog, sometimes it’s still ridiculously hard to open up to those closest to me. I’ve worked hard on fixing that in recent years, but I’m far from there.

One reason is that I’m still a selfish bastard sometimes. I get so wrapped up in my work and feelings that it becomes almost impossible to see someone else’s side of things. That eventually blows up in my face.

I also don’t like to be in a situation where there’s yelling. There was plenty of that growing up, and I tend to avoid the argument at all costs.

I’ve gotten better at this stuff, but I know I still put that wall up at times. Putting up a wall can be a bitch for any relationship, because sooner or later bad feelings will race at that wall like a drunk behind the wheel of a Porsche and slam right into it. Some bricks in the wall crack and come loose, but by then it can be too late. The relationship is totaled. 

I’ve come to realize this will always be a danger we have to watch for. It’s a danger in any marriage. Carol and Mike Brady never really existed. If they did, they could have used a few good fights. They wouldn’t have wasted so much time sitting up in bed reading boring books.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, it’s time to put the big-boy pants on and get back to work on that wall.

Maybe one of these days I’ll tear it down once and for all.

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Passing Insanity to Your Kids

This weekend a friend asked if I worry about passing the “crazies” on to my children. The answer: Every day. But here’s why I don’t despair about it like I used to.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZeybYbTblM&fs=1&hl=en_US]

First, a few facts: Some of my quirks were definitely passed down to me from my parents. The OCD comes straight from my mother, and the emotional wall I sometimes put up to deal with it comes from my father. That binge eating would become the root of my addictive behavior should surprise no one. It runs deep in the roots of the Brenner family tree.

I see signs of my defects in Sean and Duncan every day.

Sean has more than a few OCD characteristics. When the boy gets into something, be it a computer game or Legos — especially Legos — he goes in deep and lets the activity consume him. In other words, he approaches these things compulsively.

Duncan, like me, gets a bit crazy when the daylight recedes. His mood will swing all over the place and he has the most trouble in school during winter time. To help remedy this, Erin recently bought me and Duncan happy lamps — essentially sunshine in a box. Despite the skepticism Duncan and I shared over it, the things actually seem to be working.

I don’t curse the fact that the kids inherited some of my oddities. As far as I’m concerned, those quirks are part of what makes them the beautiful, precious children they are.

Here’s the thing: I don’t want to purge this stuff from them. I just want them to know how to control it in ways I never could at their age.

To that end, they have a lot going in their favor: First of all, the traits they’ve inherited from their mom will be priceless weapons in whatever fights are before them. She has given them — and me — a spiritual foundation that can’t be broken.

The other big win in their favor is that I’ve gone through a lot of the pain and hard work so that they hopefully won’t have to.

I’ve developed a lot of coping tools to manage the OCD, and I can pass those skills on to them.

There’s also not as much stigma around this stuff as there used to be. There IS some, to be sure. But my kids won’t be written off as behavioral problems and tossed into a “C group” like I was. I won’t permit it.

There are no certainties in life except that we all die eventually. I can’t say Sean and Duncan will never know depression or addiction. A parent can put everything they have into raising their children right. 

But sometimes, despite that, fate can get in the way of all your hard work.

It’s not worth worrying about those unknowns, though, because you can’t do anything about it. All I can do is my best to give them the tools I didn’t have at their age and pray for the best.

One reason I don’t worry as much as I used to about these things: Sean and Duncan are much smarter than their old man was at their age.

That has to count for something.

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Killing in the Name of… FarmVille?

We’ve all had our tough roads to travel. Some roads are harder than others. Is that any excuse to kill your own child because your fake FarmVille universe was intruded upon?

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNzIKoAy2pk&fs=1&hl=en_US]

This story makes me want to slam my head through a closed window:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) Alexandra Tobias, a Florida mother accused of shaking her 3-month-old son to death after he interrupted her FarmVille game on Facebook, has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. The 22-year-old was charged in the January death of her baby, Dylan Lee Edmondson. She entered her plea on Wednesday. Tobias told investigators she became angry after the baby cried while she was playing the  computer farm simulation game, and she shook him. She also said she smoked a cigarette to compose herself and then shook the baby again, at which time he may have hit his head, the station reported. State guidelines call for 25 to 50 years in prison, but a prosecutor said Tobias’ sentence could be shorter than that.

This story hits me not just because a mother killed her own child. It’s a story of addiction. My impression is that this woman has an online gaming addiction, which can be just as insidious a disease as alcoholism, drug dependency and, in my case, binge eating.

That’s where my sympathy ends. In fact, I can’t say I have any sympathy. My friend Lori MacVittie sounded off on this case in language I wholeheartedly agree with. On her Facebook page she said:

“There’s an excuse for everything, even killing a 3-month old child over a stupid game. I’m addicted, I’m depressed, I was deprived as a child, wha, wha, wha. Grow up. It’s called choice. Everyone has them. She made the wrong one.”

I can speak from experience on this. As readers know by now, I’ve been around the block a few times. At any point along the way I could have used my troubles as an excuse to go into a life of crime and maybe kill a few people along the way. I certainly had my moments where, if you interrupted my binge or gave me shit about my OCD quirks, I would fill with rage.

I’ve thought about punching people many times. But I never did.

Because I had a choice. I chose not to step over the line.

Now, to say we all have choices and we all have the power to do right or wrong is to oversimplify things. When a person suffers from an addiction or a mental struggle, they are not always in their right mind. When that happens, you’re capable of all kinds of evil, no matter how hard you try to hold back.

I strongly believe there are suicide cases where the person is so far gone into the world of depression and despair that they no longer have the capacity to make sane decisions.

My childhood friend, Mark Hedgecock, became a thrice-convicted pedophile because of his baggage. The baggage was only part of it. He had a choice and made the wrong one three times.

He acknowledged as much over the phone a few months ago. He knows he’s a monster and that he probably shouldn’t be on the street. Bottom line: He did what he did and has to pay for it for the rest of his life. It’s sad, though. It’s a waste. But he was trolling for teenage girls on Facebook over the summer, showing he can’t help but repeat his mistakes. 

He had a choice. He made the wrong one.

This FarmVille-addicted mom had a choice. She made the wrong one. Now she’s gotta pay.

That doesn’t mean we have to like it. She killed her kid in a moment of insanity. It’s a tragedy. period.

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Facebook Follow Friday

There’s a thing we do on Twitter called Follow Friday, where we list people we follow and suggest others do the same. I’m starting a new tradition: Facebook Follow Friday. Here’s why:

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TksqEIl1uxU&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Facebook has become a place where people spill out their state of mind like blood. Sometimes, it’s beautiful to see and I get something from it. Other times I just roll my eyes.

I use it as a place to share this blog and the security articles I write for CSOonline.com. I also like to share the crazy talk that comes from my kids’ mouthes, and whatever music I have blaring at any given moment. Some appreciate it and follow me for those things. Others don’t like it and have unfriended me. I’m fine with that. If you don’t like what I’m pushing, why would you follow me? OK — maybe it bothers me a little. But I’m no different than anyone else in this regard.

Anyway, there are a lot of people on there that inspire the hell out of me, so I’m going to start acknowledging that. Think of it as one of my 12-Step things: I spend a lot of time repairing relationships that turned to ash during my darker years, and a lot of time  focusing on people I’m grateful to have in my life. This is just another extension chord. Next week I’ll start putting these on my wall. For today, though, I’ll list people in the blog.

This week’s Follow Friday on Facebook:

Erin Brenner: She’s my muse, my love and I’d be nowhere without her.

Ken White: A newcomer on Facebook but a dear friend.

Linda White: The other half of Team White, her posts are loaded with razor-sharp humor and observations about people around her.

Amanda Corthell: I don’t think I could live without her traffic reports from the mess that is I-93. It always makes me grateful that she’s sitting in it instead of me.

Mike Greco: The man knows his guitars inside and out, and he knows how to rock.

Christian Campagna: His posts will take you to a bizarre world you didn’t know existed. It’s a place where you will laugh hard and appreciate some excellent music.

Lauren Karpenko: Her posts are always uplifting and inspiring. You can tell she’s in love with life, and it rubs off on those who are connected to her.

Lori MacVittie: So smart it’s scary. Humor with lots of snark built in, which suits me. And her updates on The Toddler are priceless.

Randi Defilippo Dockery: I enjoy her sometimes racy humor, because it beats the hell out of reading a bunch of whiney posts. 

Faith Morrill: A Corthell cousin who is going to take the world by storm with her writing. She just doesn’t realize it yet.

Maureen Wilder Cefalu: She might be surprised to find her name on here, since we only recently connected on Facebook and in high school we really didn’t talk much. She was with one group of kids and I was with another. But here’s the thing: In junior high she was one of the few kids who treated me with kindness. We bonded over Def Leppard at the time. It helped make those two years a little more bearable. Thanks for that.

Don’t fret if you didn’t make the list. I got a lot of friends, and I’ll mention you all eventually.

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Out of the Closet, Into the Light

My kid sister-in-law told me a friend of hers has admitted to some hefty demons. I won’t mention the person’s name (I don’t know her, actually), but I know where she’s been.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5F6rwEF15hN1jnhNk2YQHn]

This is a little message for her friend, in the event she someday stumbles upon this blog:

Outing yourself is a hard thing to do. When I did it, I was terrified at first because I thought my mental struggles would be used to define who I was. It gave me an appreciation for what it must be like when a gay person comes out of the closet.

I felt weird around my family at first. Ill at ease might be the best way to describe the feeling. I’m sure they felt the same. That I had OCD and related addictive behavior didn’t surprise them much. As my sister-in-law will tell you, I’ve always had an abundance of strange behaviors.

The people I work with were most surprised. I guess I did a good job of fooling them back in the day. But they have never defined me or treated me differently over what I’ve opened up about. I get the same fair shake as everyone else.

Since people keep their demons hidden for fear of bad treatment at work, it was an eye opener for me when I got nothing but support for coming out with it.

After awhile, it’ll be like that with your friends. They’ll appreciate you more, and they’ll be grateful that you came clean. Some of them will learn from your example, even though they may not know they need it yet.

I understand one of your problems is compulsive lying. There’s no need to feel like a freak over this, because everyone with mental health struggles and addictions lies. I certainly have. Hell, I’ve never met a so-called normal person that hasn’t lied. It’s not something to be proud of or accept. Lies imprison us and make our troubles deeper. But when we can stop living the lie, there’s a new peace and freedom that’s very powerful and hard to describe.

When I decided to stop living lies, I felt 100 pounds lighter. Physical pains went away.

I understand you are looking at taking medication. I take Prozac and it works. But I’m convinced it works as well as it does because I went through years of hard therapy as well. That’s the most important thing you can do: Find the right therapist to talk to. Therapy will provide you with mental coping tools that will make you stronger. By that point, medication becomes the mop that wipes away the remaining baggage.

Things may get worse before they get better. When you start dealing with this stuff, you find yourself learning how to behave all over again. You will still go through periods of depression.

This is when any addictions you may have will tempt you. Fight it at all costs. I didn’t at first. I completely gave in to my addictive behavior and I paid dearly for it. Even if you don’t think you have an addiction, it might be worth considering a 12-Step Program. The tools you learn from that will help you cope with the mental struggles at the heart of your troubles.

Coming clean doesn’t mean you get to live happily ever after. But happily ever after has always been a bullshit myth. But you will have an easier time dealing with the tough times. That may not make sense right now. But it will.

Here’s the thing about one’s demons: When they hide in the dark, out of view, they own you. They’re too powerful to beat.

Opening the door and forcing the sunlight on them is hard as hell. But once you take that step — as you just did — the demons start to shrink. The light always kills demons. They turn to ash and you become a lot bigger than they ever were.

That’s what I’ve learned from my experiences, anyway.

Congratulations on taking that first step. I wish you the very best.

–Bill

 

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Cut the Drama, Rage Boy

My old friend Clarence liked the post I wrote about him awhile back and jokingly asked me to write another one. OK, buddy, but you’re not gonna like this one.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72rWAe0pUdQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Note: I’m keeping your true identity out of this, so your anonymity is preserved.

I meant everything I said in that post. In fact, I cherish your friendship a lot more than I did even then. But you have a special challenge I have a little experience with (a lot of experience, actually). I’ve tried to explain it to you in person and on the phone, but I’m not doing a very good job at it. So I’ll do what I always do in situations like that and put it in the written word.

You carry a lot of rage inside of you. An old priest I used to know described it as Irish Alzheimer’s Disease — you forget everything but the grudges.

You talk a lot about how this friend has betrayed you or that friend is driving you to the point where you want to “rip his f-ing head off.” You describe these verbal rages as “taking moral inventory.”

It’s good to take moral inventory. The problem is that your taking inventory of other people’s morals instead of your own.

Taking inventory is probably not the best way to describe it. I used to have to take inventory of shoes in my father’s warehouse and all it did was bore me and make me do stupid things like chainsmoke and talk trash about others.

I used to spend every waking hour stewing over everyone I felt had wronged me that day, week or year. I call it my angry years. Stewing is an exhausting activity, and nothing good comes of it. Build up enough resentment over time and it’ll eat you alive before you have time to feel the teeth going in.

I had one hell of a temper when I was younger. To call it a byproduct of OCD, depression and addiction would be a stretch, because I think the temper would have been there even without the mental illness.

Some of the more colorful examples of my temper:

– Hurling a fork or steak knife at my brother in a restaurant on New Years Eve 1979 because he made a joke I didn’t like. The more dramatic among my family members say it was a steak knife, though I’m pretty sure it was a fork.

– Lighting things on fire out of anger, including a collection of Star Wars action figures that would probably be worth a fortune today. I would pretend they were kids in school who were bullying me. Never mind that I bullied as much as I got bullied.

–Throwing rocks through windows, especially the condominium building that was built behind my house in the late 1980s.

–Yelling “mood swing!” before throwing things around the room at parties in my basement. It came off as comical, as I intended, and nobody got hurt. But there was definitely an underlying anger to it. I was acting out. 

– Road rage. Tons of it. I was a very angry driver. I would tailgate. I would speed. In the winters I would intentionally spin out my putrid-green 1983 Ford LTD station wagon in parking lots during snowstorms. While in college, I nearly hit another car and flipped off the other driver while my future in-laws sat in the back. Traffic jams would infuriate me. Getting lost would fill me with fear and, in turn, more anger.

I could go on, but you get the picture, Clarence.

You gotta drop the rage because it’ll never make you feel better. It certainly won’t help you deal with the relationships that give you the rage.

Focus on your own betterment instead. You ARE doing that and you’ve made a ton of progress.

But that rage will hold you back from your full potential as a human being, so cut the bullshit and move on.

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Random Thought on Leadership

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership these past few days. I’ve known some good ones and some bad ones.

Observation:

When you’re all about loving people and helping them along, that’s leadership.

When you’re all about power and getting people to do your bidding, that’s middle management.

I’ve been a middle manager. I’ve met some who are the salt of the Earth. But I sucked at it.

Most of the time, it’s lonely in the middle.

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Welcome to the Outcast Club

An old friend is reminding me of the outcast I used to be and how like-minded people tend to stick together — even when they shouldn’t.

I was actually quite a prick to Stevie Hemeon. I used to punch him in the Theodore Roosevelt School yard because he was one of the few kids I was strong enough to hit. He never deserved it. Yet he still hung with me, kind of how high school chum Aaron Lewis did later on.

In fifth grade, we were on the side of my house messing around with an air purification vent my parents had installed because of my brother’s severe asthma. Somewhere in there, one of us — probably me — stuck a garden hose in the vent and turned it on. We left the hose in there, assuming one of us had shut it off. It flooded the finished basement bedrooms and that’s probably the most pissed off my father ever was at me.

I told him Stevie stuck the hose in the vent. That was an early lesson that lies never help. They just land you in deeper trouble. My father is no dummy, after all.

Stevie moved to the Beachmont section of Revere and I didn’t see him again until high school. Before transferring to the Voke I spent the first two months of freshman year at Revere High, and Stevie was there. I was an asshole to him the entire time. And still he hung around with me.

Why? I think because we were both outcasts, and outcasts tend to stick together.

After 25-plus years, Stevie and I reconnected on Facebook. I immediately apologized for being a jerk back then and, it turns out, he never carried bitterness about it. From his perspective, it was just young, stupid kids doing the stupid things kids do. He never held a grudge.

Stevie has been through the medical wringer in his adult life, almost the reverse of my situation, where my biggest medical difficulty happened in childhood. His Facebook page describes his adult life pretty well: “A hemodialysis patient, who is getting a fourth shot at life. With my past, medical demons, hodgekins and guillian barret’ syndrome. A walking medical mystery.”

He talks a lot about his ailments on Facebook, but never in a bitter way. There’s always a positive spin to it, which is nothing short of amazing to me. He’s the only dialysis patient I know of who describes going for a treatment as “having a blast” with the staff and fellow patients he befriended along the way.

I remember a similar situation when I spent all those weeks in the hospital in the 1970s and early 1980s. A special bond forms among the patients on a given floor. You laugh together, watch the same TV shows and play pranks on each other. It makes me wish I could reconnect with some of my fellow patients from those days. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen, because at least two of them didn’t make it to adulthood.

In any event, that bond creates something of an outcast club. Because of our illnesses we couldn’t really play sports or do other things that made you “normal.” So we bonded over being misfits.

I’m glad I reconnected with Stevie. I admire his positive attitude in the face of illness. I’m pretty sure a lot of other former classmates feel the same way.

It’s just another example of the people God puts in your path to teach you the lessons of life.