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Tension Mounts, On With The Body Count

My editing background noise this afternoon is the first album from Body Count, the metal band with Ice-T on vocals. Some of it is uncomfortable to listen to. But, truth be told, I absolutely adored this album back in 1992.

Mood music:

Listening to it now, I shake my head at the liberal use of the N-word. I hate that word. But because an African American was singing it, the 22-year-old me thought it was ok; that the hateful nature of the word was somehow neutralized because it came from Ice-T’s mouth.

Back then I thought it was a big joke. In my drunken moments I would play the most violent songs on the album (“Cop Killer” and “There Goes the Neighborhood”) and cackle myself blue. My friends joined in. They weren’t bigots, either. They were just caught up in the nonsense, too.

But looking back, it was more than a childish joke. On a couple different levels.

First, there were real racial tensions in 1991 and 1992. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since a bystander recorded the police beating of Rodney King. In the spring of 1992, a jury let the officers off the hook and L.A. erupted into vicious rioting. That was scary stuff. Some people suggested a race war was at hand. The 1960s were probably much more dangerous in that regard, but for my generation that was the worst we had seen in our adult lives.

Second, my attraction to that album  illustrates what an angry person I was back then. I was just getting started with the band Skeptic Slang and all the lyrics I was writing were tirades against my lot in life.

I had yet to understand that life was never meant to be fair, and that there’s no such thing as happily ever after. I learned these things, eventually, thankfully,

My thinking back then was immature and depressed. If this album helped me through it and kept me sane so I could make it out the other end, so be it.

It’s a snapshot in time.

Nothing more, nothing less.

imgres

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When The Grass is Greener on Your Side

I had an eventful trip to the therapist this morning. I had a migraine and was trying hard not to puke all over his nice blue carpet. There was couple’s counseling going on in the office next door, and the walls seemed awfully thin.

You could hear pretty much everything, including the wife going into a rage at her husband. Their therapist seemed to be making a valiant effort to hold it all together.

My therapist was uneasy about the whole thing. I think he was annoyed that it was distracting us and it was none of our business, though we couldn’t avoid hearing it.

But for some reason a warm feeling came over me, despite my head feeling like it had a knife lodged in it.

I felt bad for the people next door, and I’ve seen friends’ marriages fall apart lately, which hurts a lot.

But for all my challenges and quirks, I wasn’t having to do the kind of appointment that went on next door.

Marriage is work. Always will be. But I love my wife more and more every day. She’s built a business from nothing. She stays true to her Faith. She’s a super mom. She’s been tolerating my shit for many years. I’m proud of her. And we make a point to talk things out instead of letting things slide.

So in the therapist’s office, listening to the dysfunction next door, I was feeling like the grass is greener on my side of the street, despite some of my more recent struggles.

I’ve been going several weeks between appointments the last year. But this has been a rough winter.

I’ll be making weekly visits for a while.

And that’s fine with me, because I’ve done enough therapy to know it works if you keep at it.

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Vince Neil Makes Me Sick

Updated Dec. 20, 2011: Vince Neil suggested in an interview that he might leave Motley Crue next year. Maybe they’ll let John Corabi back in. I always liked the album he did with them…

I’m a big Motley Crue fan. Their music helped me process all the anger of my teens and in adulthood Nikki Sixx’s story of sobriety inspired me to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

But as I watch a new interview with Vince Neil, I find myself wanting to shove my fist through the screen.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:1LS36NmkndFTjsLwrTPVGB]

Neil just finished  a 10-day stint in jail for driving drunk in June 2010 after a party at the Las Vegas Hilton, and he sat down for an interview about the experience.

Two things rub me wrong right off the bat — The reporter interviewing him is his girlfriend, entertainment reporter Alicia Jacobs. Straightaway you know he’s going to be handled with kid gloves instead of having his feet put to the fire as it should be. The other thing is the music they play in the background, which sounds creepily like the stuff you hear in those late-night bullshit Lucinda Bassett infomercials.

Blabbermouth.net, a metal news site I’m quite fond of, has the interview clips on its site.

The interview excerpts Blabbermouth highlighted shows Neil hasn’t learned a thing:

On people’s criticism that he got away with a slap on the wrist and that his punishment should have been harsher because of past experiences: (Neil “past” includes a felony DUI in a 1984 accident that killed HANOI ROCKS drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley and injured two others, leaving at least one of them with permanent brain damage. Neil was unharmed, did 30 days in prison, 200 hours of community service, and paid millions in restitution.)

Neil: “I paid my debt to the society 27 years ago; I did what was required of me then. I was sentenced to jail, I did my time, and I paid an enormous amount of money — two and a half million. But I would have gone to prison if I didn’t. So that’s what I did. And so a lot of people say, yeah, I bought my way out. Well, that’s not really true. Most people would have gotten two days time served and pay a $500 fine — so [they would] never do any jail time. I got 30 days. I think a lot of it was kind of based on what happened to me 25 years ago, with the accident. And I didn’t do a lot of time then.”

On what lesson he’s learned this time that he didn’t learn back in 1984:

Neil: “I was 23 years old. I just turned 50. So, really, it was almost half of my life ago. I was a kid and all of a sudden I had a lot of money, all of a sudden I had fame and I let it go to [my] head. This time I just made a mistake.”

Part of me feels like I should be sympathetic. My own addictive behavior certainly impaired my ability to drive safely back in the day. I never drove under the influence of alcohol, but if you read my “Anatomy of a Binge” post, you can see how shoving junk down your throat while driving makes you a bit dangerous to others on the highway. It’s hard to stay in the lanes when one hand is on the wheel and the other is rummaging through four bags of McDonald’s.

I did this sort of thing many times before I found the 12 Steps and a program of recovery. So, admittedly, what I’m about to say is hypocritical.

Vince Neil makes me sick. His lack of contrition over what happened in 1984 fills me with rage. He could have tried a lot harder to turn a brutally tragic situation into some good. Nikki Sixx has spent much of the past decade trying to help people understand and confront addiction. He never had to, but some higher power has pushed him in that direction.

Sixx was also probably luckier than he deserved. He did his share of drunk driving back then. In fact, some believe his heroin addiction started as an attempt to self-medicate shoulder pain he was in after smashing his Porsche to bits in a drunken haze. By luck he never killed anyone — unless you count the two times he overdosed himself into several minutes of clinical death.

Since Neil’s youthful mistake left one person dead and at least one of the people in the other car brain-damaged, one would hope he’d have spent the following years making amends and becoming a symbol of self-improvement.

Instead, he bragged in one interview that he was the OJ Simpson of the 1980s and now, he says last year’s transgression was a simple mistake. He also shows little remorse for the 1984 accident. He talks about doing what the justice system required of him. Had he not served his time back then, he would have been locked away for much longer in prison, he says.

I know I should probably hold back the judgmental feelings. I know as well as any recovering addict that the itch you get makes you repeatedly do things you know are wrong. I never killed anyone, but my depressions and binges hurt everyone around me in other ways.

I guess I can’t get past this and be more humble because I’ve learned something else: In that moment of clarity when you realize you have a big problem that’s going to ruin you and others without corrective measures — you see what you’ve done in the rear-view mirror and, in time, you develop an overwhelming desire to make amends.

In fact, the 12 Steps requires you to make amends.

Maybe Neil has done these things out of the public eye. I hope he has.

But the public face he has put on this whole affair just tells people they can keep making bad choices without consequence.

One more thing: Something like addiction is a disease, not a choice. But that doesn’t mean you get a sympathy pass for making putrid decisions under the weight of that disease. Even if we don’t have a choice on the sicknesses that afflict us, we still have plenty of choices in how we choose to conduct ourselves.

In my own quest to learn right from wrong and make better choices, I’ve been inspired by people like Nikki Sixx, even if he is a narcissist. Hell, I can be a narcissist when I’m not being careful.

But I can’t help but feel like that’s still a lot better than being a 50-year-old prick who keeps making bad choices, flaunting them and then pretending he’s earned a right to be stupid because he spent a few days in jail.

What a joke.

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We Need Routines, Part 2

Here’s one reason February has been such a bitch: My routine has been so far off the rails that it has been hard to keep my perspective. It hurts the whole family-work dynamic. For a person in recovery, routines are beyond huge.

Mood music:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YzKLRM-pr4&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

Being the restless, boredom-shunning soul that I am, I always look forward to the next trip. I always miss my wife and children during these outings, but it’s also good to get out of the normal environment from time to time. It tests you and can even rejuvenate. I’ve also learned that recovery is portable. You can take your program just about anywhere. I’ve also learned that God is with me wherever I go, and that makes it much easier to approach life in a fearless way.

Here’s the problem: Do too much of this sort of thing and you hurt yourself and those around you. That’s exactly what I did in late January and the first half of February. I went to Washington and San Francisco within a two week period and came home violently ill. Served me right, but my family didn’t deserve having to carry on while I was passed out on the couch.

I thought I had the groove of a traveling man down pat, but I was being stupid.

Last week was a lost week of sorts. I was home a lot with my family, but mentally I was pretty vacant.

But it’s a new week. I’m in the office doing routine things. This afternoon I’ll go home and do more routine things. And I’ll be happy doing it.

I started on the path back to sanity yesterday by going to Mass. Driving there in a snowstorm wasn’t sane, mind you. But by the time Mass was over I felt so happy to be back. When you travel and focus on work too much, God gets the shaft, too.

That point was driven home to me when I did another routine thing last night and went to a 12-Step study meeting.

The main topic was fear and the things addicts do because of it. People discussed how their fears — over being accepted, over an abusive, drunken spouse, over work — made them drink, drug and binge eat. I sat there silent because I’m still too early in the Big Book-study process to share at these meetings, but I had a different, stranger take on fear than the rest of the room. I’ve lived in their brand of fear, to be sure.

My problem of late has more to do with the collateral damage caused when you lose the fear that held you back. You get a big lust for life, which may sound all well and good until you realize it’s just another extreme way of living.

Extremes are like absolutes: Both have caution signs plastered all over them. You go too far in one direction and neglect other, important parts of your existence.

I’ve always been a man of extremes. I’m either badly depressed like I was last week, shut off from the rest of the world, seeing only the calamities, or I’m ON — working, playing and grabbing on to every activity I only think I can handle at the time.

The middle speed in my engine rarely works right. It’s either all or nothing, and that’s a problem that may well plague me for the rest of my life.

But I’m not giving up without a fight.

This much I know: I’m always closest to the middle gear when I follow a rigid routine. That includes three weighed-out meals sans flour and sugar, an early bedtime because I rise early, at least two 12-Step meetings a week, regular check-ins with my sponsor, regular visits to the therapist, and daily prayer. It should also include time set aside after work to catch up with my wife and kids.

This is the stuff I need to work on, and I don’t tell you all this in a search for sympathy. We all have issues to work on every day. We all have our good days and bad days. I’m nothing special. I just happen to have a blog where I can process this stuff aloud. 

The blog has become another important part of my routine.

But my use of it can become unbalanced, too.

This is just one of the crosses I carry.

But 10 of my crosses are absolutely nothing compared the Cross Jesus carried. I just forget from time to time.

Some of you think that kind of talk is nonsense.

Nobody’s perfect.

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Learning to Adapt and Liking It. Maybe

Of all the things I’ve always been considered pretty good at — writing, drawing, etc. — one of the things I’ve never appreciated enough is my ability to adapt.

Mood music:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bh7eE3zW2c&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

When OCD is out of control, adapting to change is pure hell. You want everything just so, in just the right amount and the right amount of order. Change anything and the person who loses control goes into a tailspin.

But in recovery, adapting to change is a gift I’ve only recently come to appreciate. When you finally realize you don’t have control and you surrender, it becomes easier to pull off.

I used to be terrified of job changes. I remember the day before starting at The Eagle-Tribune and the day before starting at TechTarget. I was strung out on anxiety and walked around full of depression and dread. By the time I got to changing jobs again in 2008, I had already evolved in my recovery enough that the dread didn’t come. The day before I started at CSO Magazine, I was giddy as a kid on Christmas Eve. I was learning to adapt.

Now I’m learning to adapt some more. I’m learning that my current process of distributing this blog needs to be tweaked. And I’m ready to adapt.

This form of adaptation should be easy because it requires me to do less, not more.

When my old colleague sent me a note calling me an “obsessive poster” it gave me real pause. As I mentioned yesterday, I can be obsessive in that task. There’s some publishing science behind what I do and I explained it, but I admit I am obsessive-compulsive about being part of a discussion and worrying about my words being missed along the way. It’s purely selfish, and I’m not proud of it. But I can adapt.

And so starting today, I disabled the automated tool that has made it far too easy for me to tweet and Facebook posts multiple times a day.

I’m pulling it back to three times a day: Once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once in the evening, so the blog will still be exposed to those online traffic cycles. But no more posting things every two hours, for example. That’s just me being ridiculous.

Also — eventually — I’m going to build a separate Facebook page for this blog. That way, the folks who really want it have a place to go and connections that don’t want it won’t have to suffer the barrage.

I’m not sure if the Twitter approach needs changes, but I’m open to suggestions. My security writing already goes out on a separate Twitter feed, though I still push the security content from my personal Twitter page. Do I want to make a separate feed for the diaries? I don’t know yet. But I realize it might be necessary.

LinkedIn is a much more complicated beast, because that is a purely professional social networking platform. I’m not sure how a separate OCD Diaries presence on LinkedIn, separate from my security presence, would work. Complicating matters is that A LOT of my audience on the security side reads this blog as well. I don’t want to make it harder to find.

So you see, I need to adapt this stuff to be more in tune to people’s sensitivities. I can’t change the flavor of the blog. It’s mine and I don’t write it to please people, though it is pleasing when someone gets something from it.

I can change how I deliver my posts, however. 

Ideas are welcome. The change in posting frequency starts now.

The other things will be worked out in March.

I also want to include more local music on here, but sound quality is important. So to all my musician friends, let’s talk.

Seize the day (or evening, in this case).

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Search and Destroy

In the haze of my sickness of recent days, I’ve been listening to a lot of music. It’s not like I can do much else. This afternoon, I’ve turned my obsessions over to The Stooges.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFfnAvqf1pw&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

The opening lines to “Search and Destroy” drag me kicking and screaming back to the mid 1980s, when destruction was my idea of a job well done.

I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm

I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb

I am a world’s forgotten boy

The one who searches and destroys.

I used to hate everyone and everything back then. Burning objects and plowing rocks through glass wasn’t simple destruction. It was something to be done with craftsmanship and pride.

In the concrete storage room off the basement in my old Revere house I’d collect beer bottles from the frequent parties I’d have down there. Every time the pile got big enough, and it never took long, I’d go in there, light up a cigarette and start throwing rocks.

If there was a large pile of broken glass on the floor at the end, I would consider it a good day’s work.

It would be like an afternoon of chopping wood, only… different.

I played a lot of records on my shitty little stereo system while I did that. The Ramones always got me in the mood for breaking things.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa6O0yFv1bE&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

Van Halen’s “Fair Warning” album always did the trick, too. It’s been said that Eddie Van Halen wasn’t in a happy place during the recording of that record 30 years ago, and the darkness is all over his playing. I guess that’s why it’s my favorite Van Halen album.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3aW7oofNgs&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

I don’t break things anymore. Not out of anger or depression, anyway.

But I still listen to the music and it still makes me feel better.

I like to think of it as progress.

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Something Broke

Day four of being sick. I’ve been bouncing from couch to chair to bed, looking for a place to be comfortable. I’ve been sleeping a lot. It’s a helpless kind of feeling.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsp6jfzNGk8&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

The other day I wrote about covering the RSA security conference in 2005 with a fever and coming home broken. This was something of a repeat performance.

Some people relish the opportunity to lie around and do nothing.

I hate it.

Lying around means I’m useless. The world is humming along without me, and that pisses me off, too.

So what do I do about it? 

There’s nothing I can do but lie around some more and let myself heal.

Maybe while I’m down for the count I’ll be able to figure out when things started going wrong.

I’m anxious to set things right.

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A Look In The Mirror

Written in early 2011, after one of my more spectacular failures as a husband and human being.

I’ve been dealing with a pretty sour mood in recent days. This post is my attempt to explain it all.

The other day, I wrote a post called “When the Truth is a Lie” and a lot of you commented that I’m too hard on myself. I appreciate that, but I don’t think I was being as open as I needed to be at the time.

I’ve realized a few things in recent days. One is that I’m not the bucket of honesty everyone thinks I am. Sure, I reveal a lot about my struggles. But I hold back a lot, too. Some of that is for the best. We all need to keep some things to ourselves, don’t we?

But this week, in a moment where I was feeling stupid about the things I forgot to do in my hurry to catch a plane, I lied to my wife and everyone on Facebook who was following the thread.

I found a Valentine’s Day card from her in my suitcase when I got to San Francisco. Then I remembered that I left her card at home, unsigned. I meant to do it right before I left, but forgot. She would have understood.

I lied about it, anyway. I told her I forgot to take it out of my laptop bag.

Why did I do that? I guess it was one of the stupid things you do in a moment of guilt. She found the card in a drawer while I was away. Naturally, she wasn’t happy about it.

Who could blame her?

I’ve always had a hang-up about Valentine’s Day, and I always seem to find a way to screw it up when I should be doing what everyone else does: Using the holiday to remind those around you that you love them. Especially the spouse and the kids. When I hurt my wife, I lose the ability to function.

If you look at the posts I wrote while I was in San Francisco, you can see this stuff slowly eating away at my soul.

Why am I telly you this? Marital disagreements are a private thing, after all.

I’m doing it because I didn’t just lie to Erin. I lied to everyone who was following that Facebook post.

I’ve realized something else recently: I’ve gotten a little too full of myself. I’ve had success in my professional life, and with it I’ve gotten praise. That praise has been addictive, so I push myself harder. In this case, I did more travel than I was mentally or physically prepared for. The result was my coming home violently ill. Thursday and Friday, I couldn’t move from the couch or the bed. Those who know me will tell you it takes a lot to render me motionless like that.

I was definitely down with sickness. But maybe some of it was me feeling heart sick about not living up to who I should be.

My life has gotten very busy. I’m involved with things at church and in the security community. I have a busy family life.

My skills at going through all that and prioritizing need work.

Family comes first, of course.

I also realize that I can’t just drop out of sight and stop doing what I do here.

I need to find the balance.

I also have to remember how small I am in the grand scheme of the universe.

I don’t have all the answers right now.

But I know I have to find them.

Meanwhile, to those I’ve lied to or been pompous and cranky to this past week, I’m very sorry.

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Well, That Was Stupid

Almost every time I visit the therapist, right after he asks if I’m taking the same Prozac dosage as I was at the last visit, he glares at me through his glasses and says: “Remember, never put yourself in a position where you run out.”

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRat644_o_k&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

Those words ring through my head every time I travel. I’m always paranoid about it and the first thing I do when packing is put the pills in the bag.

This time, I failed.

I got through airport security and sat down at the gate, and opened the bag to grab my evening dose.

Nothing.

Clearly, I left them in the hotel room.

My first instinct was to panic. But panicking never works out for me so I’m doing the only thing I can do: nothing.

It’s three hours ahead of me back home and the pharmacy is closed until 8 a.m. So when I get home, instead of crashing like I need to because I have a fever and sweats coming on, I have to deal with that first thing when I get through the door.

This really pisses me off. But it’s my fault.

There have been rare occasions when my doses would be disrupted because of one reason or another. One example is that when I get a bug and need antibiotics or other cold and flu medications, the Prozac doesn’t work nearly as well. Once or twice in the four-plus years I’ve been taking it, I simply forgot.

Sometimes you get bone tired and it happens. 

I’ve been fried this entire trip, so clearly my attention span wasn’t firing on all thrusters.

The other times the dosage was disrupted, the damage was minimal. I’d have a moody day or two (Sometimes I have those even when I’m on top of things). I’m hoping this instance will be the same.

This was a successful trip in terms of work productivity and networking. I did a lot of writing and met up with a lot of professionals in my industry. But emotionally this outing has been less than stellar.

A dark mood has been hounding me. I explained why in the last post.

God has been with me, though. He has graced me with some wonderful friends in this business, and they look out for me. That can be a rare thing on the business side of life.

I’ve also been through enough hard therapy over the years that I have other coping tools to get me through that I didn’t have a decade ago.

For all that, I’m thankful.

I can no longer boil over the things I can’t control. When I passed to the other side of airport security, with my flight time ever closer, I effectively lost the ability to control things.

Now I have to do what addicts in recovery are trained to do: Let go and let God.

I’ll be on the plane soon, and chances are better than average that I’ll sleep the whole ride, thanks to the bug that’s coming on.

I’ll just have to wait until I’m home to fix this one, and that is that.

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When Honesty Is A Lie

I’ve figured out another reason for my sour mood in recent days, and now is as good a time as any to get it off my chest.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/6YzKLRM-pr4

A lot of people have been coming up to me here in San Francisco praising me for being “so honest, open and courageous” in this blog. It was a similar thing when I was in Washington D.C. for ShmooCon a couple weeks ago.

I appreciate those feelings. I really do. But when I look in the mirror lately, those words don’t ring true.

Maybe I’m being too self-critical, maybe not.

But the feeling is there. And it stings.

Here’s the thing: I do open up about a lot of things on here. That’s why I do this thing. If one person can open up about himself, I figure, others will be less afraid to be honest with themselves and they’ll be happier for it.

But don’t think for a second that I tell you everything.

I still have trouble sometimes being honest with myself and other people. It’s not that I hide anything particularly insidious. It’s the more typical things:

If I run into a PR person who wants to pitch me something I’m not interested in, I often lack the honesty to tell them I’m not interested. That strings them along and gives them false hope, and it’s not fair to them.

When I talk to people about how I’ve cleaned up from an addiction, I’m not so revealing about the other addictions I still let control me (computer gadgetry, for example). Sure, I wrote about that and just linked to it. But I think I’m far more hooked on technology in ways that make life less manageable than I initially let on.

I’m also not honest enough about just how hard it is sometimes to be social and sober-abstinent at the same time. Last night I stayed in the hotel because I wanted nothing to do with people.

I’m not saying what I’ve written before was a lie. It wasn’t. But it wasn’t the full, naked and ugly truth, either. I hold little details back. Some things just feel too private to share.

I guess that’s just part of being human.

Whatever the case may be, I don’t want people thinking I’m better than I am and inflating my head with high praise.

Instead, just help keep me honest.

(Image originally appeared on the SodaHead site )