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Godspeed, Barney Gallagher

Update: Barney Gallagher passed away this morning. He was a wonderful man who lived his life in a way we should all learn from. Godspeed, Barney.

Like everyone else who has worked at The Eagle-Tribune, my life has been touched by Barney Gallagher, an old-time journalist who reminded us young ones what the profession was about.

Mood music:

I’ve been informed that Barney is gravely ill. This post is to honor the man and ask that you all say a prayer for him.

I first met Barney when I interviewed for the night editor job at The Eagle-Tribune in 1999. Then-managing editor Steve Billingham was asking me questions when he stopped, looked up, and said, “Hey, Barn!”

I looked up to see an old timer perusing items on a cork board at the back of the newsroom, next to where Billingham worked at the time. Barney walked around smiling, stopping every few feet to say hello to someone.

He was ALWAYS smiling.

As night editor, I got to know Barney well. It seemed as though he could magically appear at the scene whenever a fire, car crash or other incident happened on the streets of his beloved Haverhill — camera in hand.

As I’d sit there frantically working my way through a pile of stories I had to edit for the next morning’s papers, he’d breezily walk in with that smile of his, looking as relaxed and fresh as if he’d just had a 10-hour nap, roll of film in hand for the dark room to process.

Haverhill Editor Bill Cantwell once said, only half-joking, that Barney slept with a police scanner under his pillow.

Barney’s insight became immensely important to me when I moved to Haverhill to start my family in early 2001. I knew little about the city other than that my wife grew up there. I turned to Barney’s “My Haverhill” columns for an education on my new home.

Through his work, I learned the history of the city, names of the most noteworthy characters (the late harbormaster, Red Slavit, comes to mind), and, with his columns in hand, I set out to explore the neighborhoods, the river and the open spaces. He taught me where the seediest parts of town were located, as well as the most beautiful.

Above all, his columns always captured a theme we imperfect beings tend to overlook in the hustle and bustle of daily life — that a community is only as good as the people living there, and that anyone could make a difference for their neighbors.

When I’m having a bad day, cranky from all the petty fires fate likes to light in our path, I often think of Barney and his smile. By the time I got to know him he was already well into his senior years. He had been through it all and carried on secure in what few could understand — that life’s storms always passed into oblivion, and that if we kept our cool, we’d be left standing.

His life is a case study in how we should conduct ourselves. I thank God that I was lucky enough to know him.

I’ll end with this picture of a young Barney Gallagher, drink in hand, cigarette in mouth, symbolizing the old-school journalist. Thanks to The Eagle-Tribune’s managing editor, Gretchen Putnam, for posting it this morning on her Facebook page.

You’re in our prayers, Barney.

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Beyond Boing Boing: Xeni Jardin Inspires Me

I’m a long-time reader of the Boing Boing site and have always been particularly fond of the work of editor Xeni Jardin. Her openness in talking about her breast cancer makes me appreciate her all the more.

Jardin’s greatest strength as a writer has always been her ability to focus on the human side of technology, and she was doing just that in early December when she live tweeted her first mammogram. She poked fun at a procedure that scares the hell out of most women who have one for the first time, saying, among other things:

Comparing her experience to Katie Couric’s TV-documented colonoscopy some years back, she said:

At the end of this string of tweets came this:

She filled in the blanks with a column later on, in which she described having an ultrasound:

Dr. Kristi Funk is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor’s name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water.

She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we’d hoped to find.

“The first thing you’re going to learn about working with me is that I’m a straight shooter,” Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.

“That’s how you know you can trust me. I’m going to tell you everything, and I’m going to tell it to you like it is.”

I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer.

As the words sank in, the Mars rover crawled over another steep ridge, out of the crater and into a valley, and found one of my lymph nodes, larger and darker than the others. A rocky prominence. A sentinel node. No water there, just fast-dividing cells that kill.

I believe that we are looking at breast cancer, and that it has spread to one of your lymph nodes, she said. 

Since then, Jardin has taken her readers through every step of her treatment experiences. She started a Twitter exchange the other day about how to wake up veins that have collapsed from too many IV needles. Having suffered through the collapsed veins as a kid when Crohn’s Disease made regular IV drips necessary, I knew how valuable this kind of exchange was.

She has tweeted about the sickening effects of chemo and not being able to taste her coffee in the morning.

She’s done it all with a lighthearted demeanor that makes the suffering accessible and less scary. For us, at least.

I’ve always had enormous respect for those who share the experience of a medical procedure many consider embarrassing. Many women are reluctant to get their boobs flattened into pancakes, just as I’ve never enjoyed the frequent colonoscopies I have to have because the childhood Chrohn’s Disease makes me a high risk for colon cancer in middle age.

But when someone shares the experience, it becomes less embarrassing and, more importantly, less mysterious and scary.

That’s why I’ve always respected Couric. Her on-air colonoscopy happened before Facebook and Twitter, where people share so much that nothing is surprising anymore. She did it to raise awareness after colon cancer killed her husband.

It made the procedure a lot less scary for people.

Jardin has done an admirable job making breast cancer treatment less scary. I think that will inspire a lot of women to get early mammograms that may well save some lives.

This post is to thank her and encourage my own readers to tweet her some words of support as she continues the fight. Her Twitter handle is @xenijardin. Thanks.

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The Most Important Book Ever Written About Sharon Tate And The Manson Murders

I’m reading a book called “Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice,” written by Tate family friend Alisa Statman and Brie Tate, niece of Sharon Tate. It may well be the most important book written on the Manson case.

Mood music:

The simple reason is that it captures a family’s grief and struggle to move on — something all our families have dealt with in various forms.

Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family's Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for JusticeI’ve written a lot here about my interest in the Manson case. This past November, I drove to the Tate and LaBianca murder sites during a trip to L.A. The story tapped into my fearful side at a young age, when Channel 56 played the two-part “Helter Skelter” movie every year. But until I downloaded this book onto my Kindle, I never truly appreciated what the Tate family has been through all these years.

I knew Sharon’s mother, Doris Tate, was a tireless victim’s rights advocate up to her death in 1992 and that her daughter Patti (Brie Tate’s mother) carried the torch until her death from cancer in 2000.

The Tate family has spent the last 42-plus years living with its tragic ties to criminal history. The book is a collection of narratives written by Doris, Patti, and P.J. Tate (Sharon’s father).

P.J. writes about having to go to the Cielo Drive house shortly after the murders to clean up all the blood and collect his daughter’s things. Patti writes about her struggle to hide from the prying world and live in quiet, only to have her family history come back to haunt her every time.

You see how Doris emerged after a decade of mourning to become a tireless fighter for victim’s rights, prison reforms and keeping her daughter’s killers in prison. You see P.J. and Patti getting upset with Doris again and again for keeping the family in the spotlight through her work. The wreckage of their lives includes all the usual tormentors: addiction, gut-shredding guilt, fear and anxiety. You see them learning to live again and finding purpose.

It’s the ultimate story of battling adversity.

I wish this book had come out before my L.A. trip, because I would have looked at those murder sites with a different set of eyes.

The Manson case has been a source of obsession for many, many people over the years. There’s the natural curiosity about what drives human beings to kill. There’s the horror and blood aspect that sucks people in. But what often gets lost is what kind of people the victims were, and what happens to those they unwillingly leave behind.

This book is all about the latter. That’s why I think it’s so important.

I think Brie Tate did her family proud with this work. I look forward to seeing what she does in the future.

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Sorry, But You’re Wrong

I got a lot of response to yesterday’s post about possibly killing this blog (Thanks for all the support!). Everyone asked that I continue, but supported my idea of expanding the topics.

I still have decisions to make, but y’all gave me some great ideas on how to take this forward.

I did get one message to the contrary, though. And because I disagree with the writer’s point, I’m going to share it with you. I’ll keep the person’s name out of it, of course.

Mood music:

The writer said:

All I will say is that a blog like this is probably not doing you any favors.

When you know a person for business purposes, you dont want to know about their psychological disorders. If you want an extension of our writing, great. But a blog titled like this makes people who know nothing about you have predisposed notions that there would be something off about you.

That could be ignorance on their part, but why put something out there that is otherwise none of their business, when it shouldnt be an issue in dealing with you?

Blogs like this have got people denied jobs and all. Ignorance? Probably. But either way, how does a blog named for this subject otherwise help you? I cant see a single way it would unless you want to prove the ADA should apply to you.

My thoughts:

–I don’t write this blog for favors, and certainly not for sympathy votes. I write it because good people have been screwed over because of the stigma, which you actually describe quite well. I reached a point in my life where speaking out and sharing what I’ve learned was more important than what people might think of me.

–I knew I was taking a risk when I started this. Fortunately, everyone I work with supports me. The simple reason is that I proved my worth long before I came out with these stories.

–You’re absolutely wrong to say no one wants to know about this stuff. Within days of starting the blog, the vast majority of feedback came from people in the security community who have their own demons and were grateful that someone was talking about theirs. Depression, anxiety and addiction run deep in our community, and when people have a place to talk about it and find ways forward, it makes them better contributors to the industry, does it not? I think it does. By the way, a lot of the folks I speak of are in upper-level jobs — the kind you do business with.

–Part of doing this blog is to help people see that they need not be held back by adversity. That too is good for our community.

–I do agree that I risk being viewed only through the prism of what I write about. That’s why I’m considering changes. But that change isn’t going to be to reverse course. I continue to believe openness is the best approach.

Thanks for the feedback.

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Two Wombs, Two Vaginas And A Lot Of Balls

Joke all you want. In my opinion, Hazel Jones, a woman with two wombs and two vaginas, (the condition is called uterus didelphys) has more balls than many of us ever will.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/yxOHm8M8BcQ

Jones opened up about her condition on the This Morning show, and The Huffington Post ran this article, which says in part:

Embarrassing Bodies health expert Dr Dawn Harper explained on the show that Hazel’s condition occurred because the uterus tube septum failed to break down when Miss Jones was a baby, meaning two uteruses formed instead of one.

Uterus didelphys, more commonly known as ‘double uterus’ happens when a woman’s uterus forms differently and goes on to develop into two uteruses (wombs). While the condition itself is not uncommon, having two separate vaginas is extremely rare.

”The two tubes have made two separate uteruses and two vaginas and two cervixes. And although it’s relatively common to have a septum within the uterus, to actually have two separate uteruses is much rarer – one in a million,” explained Dr Harper.

MIss Jones first discovered something was wrong when she reached puberty and started her periods at 14.

“That wasn’t fun. I used to suffer from horrendous cramps and my periods could be very heavy. I now know that my periods were worse because I have two wombs,” Hazel explained. “It wasn’t nice. I had friends and I tried explaining to them I was having problems and they had no idea what I was doing wrong.

“I always noticed there was this thing there,” said the 27-year-old.

She also revealed that she had to lose her virginity twice as she had two hymens – the thin membrane surrounding the external vaginal opening – to break.

She explained: “If you are not aware that you have got this, it can be really uncomfortable as I thought I was having cystitis and urine infections from a young age when I was tearing the middle septum.”

I’ve read a lot of comments about this and the vast majority of them are stupid jokes about the horror of this woman having two periods, thus making life doubly miserable for the men around her. The rest of the jokes are all testosterone-driven.

The jokesters fail to give her credit for having more balls than they ever will.

To publicly talk about something so embarrassing, sensitive and painful takes courage. I’ve read that her condition is not uncommon. Those who suffer from it must feel an enormous amount of shame. It must ruin their lives in a lot of ways.

Now that Jones has spoken up, the others will not feel so freakish and alone anymore. I’m not just talking about other women with her condition. I’m talking about all the “embarrassing” maladies people live with.

I’ve often been asked why I choose to “flay” myself in this blog, as one fellow put it. I do it in part to let others know that they are not alone and that they don’t have to let their demons win.

Jones doesn’t deserve ridicule. She deserves thanks.

Hazel Jones Two Vaginas

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Pearl Jam’s Brush With Crohn’s Disease

Watching some of the “Pearl Jam: 20” documentary, I learned something I didn’t know about lead guitarist Mike McCready: Like me, he has Crohn’s Disease.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/Phez1FvzGbY

Knowing what the disease does to you when you’re under attack, I’m impressed he’s been able to keep the kind of touring schedule Pearl Jam is known for.

How anyone can spend two hours a night on stage when they’re taking Prednisone is beyond me. I’ve done a lot with my life despite the disease, but I doubt I could have done that. Physically I could have. Not mentally, though. Whenever I’ve been on that drug my prevailing desire has been to tell the world to fuck off.

McCready performs an annual concert to benefit the Northwest chapter of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America and has been pretty outspoken about his bouts with the disease.

It’s another example of how no one with the disease has to settle for a lesser life.

McCready was reportedly diagnosed when he was 21. I was diagnosed when I was 8 and the worst of the attacks for me ended by the time I reached 17. I’ve been freakishly lucky, though the effects of the disease and the Prednisone use certainly contributed to the mental illness and addiction that has clung to me light a wet blanket in adulthood.

That’s life, though. The curve balls are hurled at us and we can duck, get hit or learn to catch them and make the best of it.

I’m glad McCready is doing the latter.

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Merry Christmas, Mr. And Mrs. @gattaca

My friend Dave Lewis and his wife Diana have had a brutal year, with her fight against cancer and all. But she has made huge progress since her summer diagnosis.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/PXtxVndvLSM

Many of you know Dave (@gattaca on Twitter) as founder of the Liquidmatrix Security Digest. He is also senior security analyst at AMD and someone who works tirelessly to promote events that make security professionals smarter and better.

Diana had to go back into the hospital this weekend with a fever and the doctors initially suspected she had meningitis. But according to Dave on Twitter, things are looking up:

“Some good news. The problem isn’t as bad as was from first impressions. Microbe only a threat the picc line. Once removed, antibiotics FTW,” he said.

They’ve come a long way, thanks to their fighting spirit and help from family and many, many friends.

I’m asking those who read this to keep Dave, Diana and their young daughter in your prayers. They are not free and clear yet, so the prayers are still needed.

In the meantime, I want to wish this family the best of blessings this Christmas.

Life often hands us bitter pills that can get lodged in the throat. None of us can avoid it, but I think we’re tested for a reason, whatever that reason is. You either put up a fight and keep your wits, or you get eaten.

This family has been a case study in how to face adversity the right way.

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Because It’s Not All About Me

A friend nominated this blog for a Liebster Blog Award. I had no idea what it was until I looked it up, and it seems I may not qualify. But many others do, and I’m going to tell you about five of ’em.

Mood music:

First, a few words about this award: It’s meant for blogs with less than 200 followers that a fellow blogger feels deserves more attention. As part of getting nominated, you’re asked to pay it forward, nominating and linking to five other worthy blogs.

I constantly keep an eye on the page views here to see what topics people are most interested in but I usually overlook the follower count. When I got nominated, I figured I wasn’t at the 200 threshold. But with this, I decided to have a look.

Followers: 2,931

That seemed freakishly high to me, then I saw a breakdown: 55 WordPress.com blog followers. 90 WordPress.com comment followers. 2,786 Twitter followers. So, I may or may not qualify, depending on how you spin the numbers.

But I don’t care if I qualify or not. I’m paying it forward anyway, because it’s not all about me, and because I get a lot out of so many blogs that I’m dying for you to check them out.

Let’s start with the friend who nominated me. I’ve been friends with Linda White a long time. Her kids are in the same classes as mine. She always shares the amusing stuff her kids say, and finally, after years of her friends suggesting she do a blog, she started one: Crud my kids say: http://crudmykidssay.wordpress.com/

Her kids — “The Girl” and “The Boy” — are a riot and are sharp as knives. I always smile when I read about them. You will, too. Now to start nagging Linda to write a second blog about the hilariousness (to those of us on the outside) that ensues when you work for a big retail chain.

The second blog is a new one by another mom with a razor-sharp wit and the talent to capture it in a blog. I don’t think she wants her name out there yet, so I’ll simply guide you to “Not Now Honey. Mommy Has To Blog” — http://notnowhoneymommyhastoblog.com/

Read it and you’ll see the makings of a modern-day Dr. Seuss.

The third blog is from my old friend and Rockit Records colleague Christian Campagnia called “Caffeineandcookies” — http://caffeineandcookies.com/

Christian has a wit that’s one-of-a-kind and there’s a rawness and honesty that keeps me coming back. A couple weeks ago I had the honor of spending the day with him during a visit to Hollywood. He got in the passenger seat while I drove around to a bunch of famous Hollywood murder sites. I think he feared my driving more than where we were going. Either way, it was a lot of fun.

The fourth blog is from Dr. Annabelle Rc, author of “A Life Lived Ridiculously” — the companion blog being “Crazy In A Crazy World” — http://www.ridiculouslife.net/crazy-in-a-crazy-world.html

She’s an authority on OCD and has fed me many ideas for my own blog.

This fifth blog is Ocdbloggergirl (http://ocdbloggergirl.wordpress.com/), written by Lisa Burleson. Like me, she writes in an attempt to sort out the daily challenges of life with OCD. Her observations are raw and unflinching, and reading about her challenges makes you realize how so alike we all are. When you realize you’re not alone, life’s big challenges become less insurmountable.

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THE OCD DIARIES, Two Years Later

Two years ago today, in a moment of Christmas-induced depression, I started this blog. I meant for it to be a place where I could go and spill out the insanity in my head so I could carry on with life.

In short order, it snowballed into much more than that.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA

About a year into my recovery from serious mental illness and addiction — the most uncool, unglamorous addiction at that — I started thinking about sharing where I’ve been. My reasoning was simple: I’d listened to a lot of people toss around the OCD acronym to describe everything from being a type A personality to just being stressed. I also saw a lot of people who were traveling the road I’d been down and were hiding their true nature from the world for fear of a backlash at work and in social circles.

At some point, that bullshit became unacceptable to me.

I started getting sick of hiding. I decided the only way to beat my demons at their sick little game was to push them out into the light, so everyone could see how ugly they were and how bad they smelled. That would make them weaker, and me stronger. And so that’s how this started out, as a stigma-busting exercise.

Then, something happened. A lot of you started writing to me about your own struggles and asking questions about how I deal with specific challenges life hurls at me. The readership has steadily increased.

Truth be told, life with THE OCD DIARIES hasn’t been what I’d call pure bliss. There are many mornings where I’d rather be doing other things, but the blog calls to me. A new thought pops into my head and has to come out. It can also be tough on my wife, because sometimes she only learns about what’s going on in my head from what’s in the blog. I don’t mean to do that. It’s just that I often can’t form my thoughts clearly in discussion. I come here to do it, and when I’m done the whole world sees it.

More than once I’ve asked Erin if I should kill this blog. Despite the discomfort it can cause her at times, she always argues against shutting it down. It’s too important to my own recovery process, and others stand to learn from it or at least relate to it.

And so I push forward.

One difference: I run almost ever post I write by her before posting it. I’ve shelved several posts at her recommendation, and it’s probably for the best. Restraint has never been one of my strengths.

This blog has helped me repair relationships that were strained or broken. It has also damaged some friendships. When you write all your feelings down without a filter, you’re inevitably going to make someone angry.

One dear friend suggested I push buttons for a good story and don’t know how to let sleeping dogs lie. She’s right about the sleeping dogs part, but I don’t agree with the first suggestion. I am certainly a button pusher. But I don’t push to generate a good story. I don’t set out to do that, at least.

Life happens and I write about how I feel about it, and how I try to apply the lessons I’ve learned. It’s never my way or the highway. If you read this blog as an instruction manual for life, you’re doing it wrong. What works for me isn’t necessarily going to fit your own needs.

Over time, the subject matter of this blog has broadened. It started out primarily as a blog about OCD and addiction. Then it expanded to include my love of music and my commentary on current events as they relate to our mental state.

I recently rewrote the “about” section of the blog to better explain the whole package. Reiterating it is a pretty good way to end this entry. You can see it here.

Thanks for reading.

"Obsession," by Bill Fennell

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Slaying Old Fears In The Hollywood Hills

This week I’ve been in Los Angeles on business. But I’ve been slaying some old demons while here.

Mood music:

Let’s go back 20 years — July 1991 — when I came out here with Sean Marley on my first trip to the west coast. I didn’t really want to go because I was afraid of everything and everyone. But Sean was red hot about the idea, and back then I was always out to impress the man. So off we went, on a 10-day California trip that would take us as far north as Eureka and as far south as Los Angeles. We lived in the rental car the whole time except for L.A., where we stayed in a friend’s apartment.

In L.A., we hooked up with a guy who used to live in the Point of Pines in Revere. I didn’t remember him, but he and Sean were tight as kids. Michael was his name. Michael took us to visit a couple of his friends who were living the stereotypical Hollywood lifestyle. They had a band, but sat in their cramped bungalow all day, surrounded by towers of empty beer cans and cigarette boxes, watching all the bad daytime TV they could feast their eyes on.

One of them asked me where we were from. The Boston area, I told him.

“Dude,” he said through the cloud of cigarette smoke encircling his head. “That’s a pretty long way from here.”

The statement filled me with more terror.

A pretty long way from here. From my safe place in the basement apartment at 22 Lynnway, Revere, Mass.

Terror.

That’s pretty much what the trip was. Sean ate it all up and had the time of his life, despite me.

I didn’t know back then that I suffered from OCD-induced fear and anxiety. I was still many years away from the therapy, medication and spiritual conversion. I had no idea what the 12 steps were when I was 21. Too bad, because I SHOULD have had the time of my life on that trip, too.

But that’s what fear does. It robs you blind. Robs you of everything that should make life worthwhile.

Fast-forward to the present. I’m back in LA on business. But I decided I was going to do a few things I couldn’t do last time I was here because of the fear.

I rented a car and drove all over Los Angeles and went as far south as Orange County, using the same freeways that scared the daylights out of me back then.

Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills

I took walks all over the place and mingled freely with people — something else I was afraid to do before.

I went deep into the Hollywood Hills and drove to some old murder sites because as a kid these places left me obsessed and afraid. The Manson Murders was particularly scarring on my young mind. From the first time I saw the TV movie “Helter Skelter” in the late 1970s through the first time I read the book from beginning to end in the 1980s it’s been the stuff of nightmares. That has fed the obsessive part of me. I read that book two or three times a year and knew exactly where every murder scene was before setting foot on the plane.

So I traveled to Cielo Drive, where Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, and Waverly Drive a half-hour away, where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered the following night.

Behind that gate, Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by minions of Charles Manson
Cielo Drive, as seen from across the canyon. The house at the far left replaced the house where Sharon Tate and friends were murdered
On the second night of terror, minions of Charles Manson went to this house and murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca

I also visited the scene of the Wonderland Murders.

Scene of the Wonderland Murders

Along the way, I visited the Sunset Strip, the cradle of Rock ‘N Roll History.

Every band that ever mattered played here
Motley Crue lived here for nine months in 1981-82. Parts of the Shout at the Devil album were written here

Driving in strange places scares me less and less the more I do it. This was a big step in slaying the old fears.

The scary glow of the Manson Murders was also dimmed considerably this trip. When you look across the canyon to where the Tate-Polanski house once stood, the scene is peaceful. Driving to the gate of where the murders happened killed the mystique for me.

I think I’ll put the old “Helter Skelter” book away now.

The lesson of this post is that facing fears is sometimes the only way to slay them. I did the hardest work on myself long before this trip. But the journey has been the icing on that cake.

When you learn to manage your fears, a whole new world is opened up before you.