It’s a good day when the two boys and their 2-year-old niece pull me out of bed at 6:30 a.m. Some would say that’s early, but for me that’s sleeping in.
It’s a good day when I can spend the morning doing house work and grocery shopping without feeling bitter or cheated about the lack of laziness.
It’s a good day when one of your best friends comes over with his kids for lunch and, while the kids play upstairs, we hang out in the living room watching music videos and dozing off.
It’s a good day when you get a little time to watch Star Wars with your kids.
It would be a better day if Erin didn’t have to work. But she’s working hard and I’m proud of everything she’s accomplished this last year.
And we’ll have a good night when the kids go to bed — even if we’re just laying on the couch watching TV. Of course, Erin watches TV. I fall asleep.
I’m constantly worried about the kids inheriting my genetic disposition toward mental disorder. But Duncan helps me out, as does Sean, and, increasingly, their cousin Madison. In between the various meltdowns, the three children let loose with a lot of witty words that lifts my spirits.
I think you’ll walk away feeling that life isn’t so tough when you’ve seen it from a child’s perspective.
And now for Part 4…
“The sequel to “Throw Mama From The Train” is being made at Brenner Manor. It’s called “Throw Daddy Under the Bus.” Me, after the kids gleefully told their mom that I showed them the South Park J-Lo Taco songs.
“Tormenting your kids, pt. 54: Release a loud cackle as your children get out of your car and into the school they hoped would close today.” Me, an hour before finding out that the kids were being sent home after only 90 minutes of school.
“You are the picture of evil.” Sean, after I made them do homework on their snow day.
Duncan: “Daaaaad… Sean kicked me.” Sean: “What? We’re playing ninja. Ninjas kick a lot.”
Duncan: “Daaaad, Sean spat on me.” Sean: “I was doing sound effects. They produce spit. You should have had the sense to get out of the way.”
Duncan took a swing at Sean after Sean told him: “You’d be the perfect child if God gave you everything but a mouth.”
Duncan just told me that I’m a “pain in his bum-bum.” He’s not amused that I’m amused by that statement.
“Hanging out with you is challenging.” Duncan, after I wrestled him to the floor in a good-natured game of rough housing.
Early one Saturday morning: Is it bad that I’m letting Sean use scissors in the dark? He says he “can see perfectly fine.” In fact, he says, “I cut better in the dark.”
Sean, pretending to be a clone trooper from Star Wars: “I hate this job. I don’t get MLK Day off. Crap, I didn’t even get Christmas off!”
Duncan, twirling his toy lightsaber: “You can call me Jedi Bob.” Sean: “I’d rather call you an idiot.”
Me: “Come on, kids, come help me fold laundry.” Sean: “Dad, can’t you see I’m in the middle of a thought outburst?”
Erin: I’m always surprised at my children’s ability to read a long-winded, gross joke once and repeat it verbatim.” Me: “I’m less surprised. They’re wearing my genes.”
My 2 yr old niece eats her “cakies” when Duncan walks in, says they’re “pancakes” and walks away. The niece asks: “What’s wrong with him?”
The niece: “I ate all my blueberries. I ate all my blueberries. I ate all my blueberries. I ate all my blueberries. I ate all my…”
“Wow, the pilots really eat their words in this movie.” Sean, after the x-wing pilot gets blown up after bragging about locking on target.
Me to Sean: “I have a thought.” Sean: “There’s a 50-50 chance I’m gonna protest it.”
Sean: “Duncan, how many kids do you plan to have?” Duncan: “20: 10 girls, 10 boys.” Sean: “I can’t watch all those kids. Scale it back.”
Duncan, regarding his brother: “Sean is a moron, loved by all for his moron-ness.”
Me: “Stop throwing snowballs at the neighbor’s dog, Sean.” Sean: “What the heck for?”
The mournful groan that just came from Sean almost makes the niece’s request for “Calliou” worth it. Almost.
Sean regarding my last comment: “Caillou must die-you.”
Duncan on Santa: “If you don’t believe you don’t receive.”
Sean’s 9-year-old reaction to news that Uncle Brian is getting married: “Oh yeah? Whatever.”
Duncanism of the day: If the inside of my head was empty, I’d be light-headed.
Sean’s reaction to the Duncanism of the day: “Duncan, you infuriate me.”
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my father, who is in hospice care. One of the twisted blessings of him being near the end of his life is that he’s opening up more freely than he ever has. One such conversation goes to show that things you see as a kid don’t always match up with what’s really going on.
Mood music:
Like a lot of families, we’ve hit our financial walls over the years and a few years ago I had to ask my father for help. That was a killer, because I’ve always taken pride in making things work without having to do that. It was painfully humbling.
I’m a lot like the character Quint in “JAWS” in that I suffer from working-class hero syndrome. (One of the many excellent lines in that movie was when Hooper told Quint to knock of the working-class hero crap, after Quint kept picking on Hooper for not getting his hands dirty enough.)
In my case, I like to believe that adults should be able to make a living without any help from family and friends. In a financial rut? You figure it out and avoid asking your parents for help at all costs. I’ve looked down on people who have done that in the past. I described one case as someone using their father like a piggy bank.
To me, asking Dad for help always meant failure.
I think some of that attitude comes from the fact that I leaned on my father‘s financial assistance a lot in my 20s. When my 1981 Mercury Marquis finally died a painful death at the hands of its abusive driver, I went to Dad and nagged for a new car. I got one — a 1985 Chevy Monte Carlo.
I look back on that sort of thing and realize what a burden that was on my father. When I got married and settled into my 30s, I vowed never to bother my father for money again. I would manage on my own at all costs.
For the most part, we have. I owe most of that fact to Erin, who is far smarter about finances than I am.
So in the room at hospice, Dad and I discussed the delicate balance of paying for the kids’ private school and keeping the mortgage up to date and food on the table. He floored me with this statement:
“I know what it’s like. There were a lot of those situations when you guys were kids,” he said.
What? I always assumed that he was always on top of the family finances and that paying for things was never a problem.
But thinking back on it all, it makes perfect sense. I just think of the medical bills alone the three of us kids wracked up in the 1970s and 80s. It had to have been staggering, between my multiple hospital stays for Crohn’s Disease, Michael’s asthma treatment and Wendi’s hospitalizations for depression.
My father practically lived at his business, but I always assumed it was because he preferred to be there than at home.
I still believe that to a point. But I think a lot of it also had to do with making ends meet in a world gone mad.
Since I always assumed we were well off when I was a kid, my father clearly did a good job of shielding us from the financial ugliness.
So I thanked him.
“No problem. I love ya,” he said.
Love you too, Dad.
Below: Me with Dad, Wendi and Michael, Christmas Eve 1982.
Seeing The Neighborhoods perform at the Joe “Zippo” Kelley benefit last night reminded me of my old friend Danny Waters. He shared in many of the adventures — good and bad — of my youth.
Mood music:
It was Sean Marley who introduced me to Dan. It was 1986 and I dropped in on the Marley residence (2 doors down from me) on a Sunday morning. Sean and Dan had been up late the night before, drinking. Dan had a mop of blond hair and I couldn’t see his eyes.
The two were delighting in the sounds of a Randy Rhoads solo on a live bootleg one of them had acquired. That would be the first of many times the three of us would hang out like brothers. I was the little brother, and sometimes they treated me like it, laughing over and mocking something stupid I said. I gave them plenty of fodder.
At one point, Dan was living in a house at the very end of Pines Road, a street directly across from my house that ended in a boat ramp leading down to the water. I’d go there and check out his guitars. The man could play.
He was brutally shy, though, and he would be there one minute and gone the next. He also had an almost super-human ability to consume massive amounts of beer without dropping dead, though one time, after downing 20 beers, he practically spent the next 24 hours chanting, “I’m not well.”
The very first time I drank myself into a puking spree was in his apartment next the the Northgate shopping plaza on Squire Road. I sat on his bathroom floor for a long time counting the tiles. That somehow made me feel better.
I would get loaded in his company many times after that. I learned to hold my liquor, and the drinking parties would often alternate between his apartment (he later moved to an apartment off Revere Beach Parkway) and my basement in the Point of Pines.
Dan was good friends with Zane, a kid I wrote about in a previous post. Zane jumped off the top of a building in 1988. It would not be the last time Dan lost a close friend to suicide.
I always felt like Dan was more Sean’s friend than mine, and to an extent that’s true. Those two were joined at the hip between the mid 1980s and 1990s. I never would have met Dan or found common ground with him if not for the friend we had in common.
Dan and Sean also played a lot of guitar together. They eventually let me join in as singer. We wrote a few songs, but I can’t really remember them.
As the years progressed, Dan and I would hang out without Sean quite often. The three of us still hung out all the time, but at one point Sean was in an intense (some would say Sid-and-Nancy-like) relationship with a girl who looked like that singer from The Cure. The two fought as often as they took breaths, and their fights would usually start at one of the parties at my place or Dan’s.
Times where it was just me and Dan included a 1988 show at The Channel headlined by The Neighborhoods, the 1991 Lollapalooza festival with Rollins Band, Body Count, Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction, and low-key nights in his apartment, drinking and watching late-night TV.
One night I freaked out because I consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio of my basement hangout.
The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.
I called Dan.
He drove over and found me pacing up and down the driveway in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. It was well after midnight.
He took me to Kelly’s Roast Beef and bought me a box of chicken wings. The binge-eating addiction was well under way, and I downed the whole thing in seconds. That calmed me down. I settled into a state of high where I’d let out a “heh heh” every few seconds.
Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.
Sean got a kick out of the retelling later.
Later, Dan and Sean got into a scrape and I failed to return the favor and come to their aid. It was the fall of 1991, around the time that photo of the three of us above was taken. We were at Kelly’s and as we started walking back we noticed 10 punks were following us.
I freaked and walked ahead, ducking into what was then a bar-restaurant called The Driftwood. I looked back to see the punks circling Sean and Dan, kicking the shit out of both. I had a bartender call the cops and went back outside. By then it was all over. Dan had a black eye. The two limped their way back to the Pines. I stayed a few paces in front of them.
If I could relive that moment, I would have stayed with them and taken my beating, too. It would have made me a better friend. I’d also enjoy retelling the story today, because I wouldn’t look so pathetic in the rear-view mirror.
In 1996, I was living back in The Point of Pines and me, Dan and Sean would walk to Kelly’s every Sunday morning for coffee.
They would usually walk a few paces ahead and talk about a Skinny Puppy song or whatever else I wasn’t paying attention to because I was starting a deep descent into a dark place marked by fear, anxiety and vicious binge eating. Those days, Sunday was for getting myself into a state of anxiety and depression about the upcoming work week. The job was fine. I wasn’t.
Sean was in much worse shape than I was. I don’t know how aware Dan was of just how bad he was getting, but I was all but oblivious. I was too locked inside my head to see what was happening.
Thank God Sean had Joy. She did everything she could to bring him out of his deepening depression. He took his life anyway, but I love her all the more just for being his wife and shouldering a burden I was too self-absorbed to share at the time.
The day Sean died, I spent much of the afternoon frantically trying to reach Dan. When I finally got him on the phone, he collapsed into a pile of rubble on the other end. It’s not a stretch to say that was one of the worst moments of my life. I knew how tight they were, and Dan was more of a loner than I was, which meant he wouldn’t have as much of a support system as I had. I alienated my support system, of course. But that’s a story for another post.
Dan and I continued the Sunday walks into the spring of 1997. We always bought three cups of coffee. We always left the third cup on the beach wall for Sean.
That spring, Dan dropped out of my world. I wouldn’t reconnect with him until 2009 on Facebook. I spent all the time in between thinking he hated me for not doing enough on my end to help Sean. I eventually learned I was just being stupid.
Today Dan is doing just fine. He got married, had two beautiful daughters and lives in Texas.
He plays in a band called Three Kinds of People.
I miss him, and know we’ll never hang out like we used to. But when I think of how we both managed to survive a lot of ugly shit, it makes me happy.
Two old friends have a son who’s been through the meat grinder too many times in his 12 short years. Some think he should settle in for a lesser life than he’s capable of. I say bullshit.
My young friend’s name is Mark. He lives in a city on the North Shore of Massachusetts. That’s all I’ll reveal about his identity. But his parents will know this is for him and will hopefully share this with him:
Dear Mark,
Because of the mental and physical challenges you face, some grownups think you should set your sites low. They think you’re not cut out for college or a career as, say, a scientist.
They mean well. They know what you’ve been through and they don’t want you to get hurt. But if I’ve learned anything in my own journey through hell, it’s that you can’t always hide from hurt and disappointment. Life is hard. But it’s supposed to be.
It’s how we find out what we’re truly made of.
Item:Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a pampered child whose world view changed when he was crippled by polio in 1921. A lot of people would have given up right there, but he rebuilt his life, became a mentor to other polio victims and was the longest-serving president in history, dealing with war and economic calamity that could have broken the spirit of healthier leaders. Through it all, he carried on an outward cheeriness that put people at ease.
When I was a kid there were plenty of roadblocks. I missed a lot of school because of Crohn’s Disease and lost a brother when I was only a year older than you are now. My studies suffered, and I was put in a lot of the classes where they put the problem children.
Things worked out, though. I got married and had two kids that are much smarter than I was at that age. I have a job that’s allowed me to do a lot of excellent things (excellent to me, anyway).
You shouldn’t settle for anything less than the life you want.
Item:Abraham Lincoln suffered crippling depression his whole life and lost two of his four children, all in a time before anti-depressants were around. He led the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery.
There will be setbacks and those can be discouraging, but you CAN survive them with the right perspective.
Item: The drummer from Def Leppard had an arm ripped off in a car wreck. A lot of people thought his career was over. Twenty-six years later, he’s still drumming.
So just keep trying, and never give up on yourself. Nobody can hold you back. Only YOU can hold yourself back.
One more thing: Having a good life doesn’t mean you get to live without the bad stuff from time to time.
It’s easy for people who fight mental illness and addictive behavior to go on an endless, futile search for the happily ever after, where you somehow find the magic bullet to murder your demons, thus beginning years of bliss and carefree existence.
I like to use this blog as a birthday card for the people I care about. I did one for Sean and Duncan and one for Erin. I did one for my sister. I even did one for my deceased brother. Now it’s Amanda Corthell’s turn.
The youngest of my three sisters-in-law is 31 today.
Mood music:
Yeah, this is essentially the one I wrote for her last year when she hit 30. But my fondness for Blondo is still captured pretty well in here, so I’m reposting it as a reminder to people of how cool she is.
It’s the thought that counts, right?
Amanda was just 12 when I first started coming around. She wore glasses that were bigger than her head and she reminded me of Cousin Oliver from the Brady Bunch. Sometimes she’d act like him, which irritated me a little.
She also had a pretty advanced sense of humor for her age, and I was only too happy to teach her some of my dirty tricks. I showed her how, if you lightly placed a piece of scotch tape on the back of a cat, the animal would squat close to the ground because it thought it was under a piece of furniture. I also showed her the ball-of-tape-on the-cat’s-paw trick, where the cat shakes its paw trying to get it to fall off. Before you call PETA on me, I should note that the tape was placed gently on. It was no more dangerous than making the cat chase that little red dot around as you sit with the little flashlight behind it. The cat lived a long, happy and obese life.
I also taught her the joy of smearing the lens of someone’s eye glasses with a spit-saturated finger.
As she got older, she started to test her parents’ patience. She’d wise off to her father at the dinner table and he’d slam down his silverware in anger, which was always fun to watch. And you could never stay mad at the kid. She was just too amusing.
I started calling her Blondie because sometimes she said things that were worthy of a blond joke or three. The name stuck. I’ve modified the nickname to Blondo in more recent years. It’s funny that the name stuck, because most of the time her hair is some other color.
In recent years, she’s made a name for herself as a photographer. Here’s a sample of her work:
My favorite pic of the niece
She works her ass off, and just got offered a manager’s post at a local studio. We’re all very proud of her for that. I’m also proud that she’s such a good aunt to her niece and nephews.
Happy Birthday, and don’t worry: Stuff won’t start to sag until you reach 40. Actually, I’m in better shape now than I was at 35, so you should be OK.
There’s a lot of good in my life today. I’ll never take it for granted like I did back then.
Have I led a tragic life? No fucking way.
I’ve lost a lot of people I cared for and my body has been through the meat grinder. But that can never take away the blessings.
And it’s not over yet.
To understand this, just think about your own life. You’ve no doubt experienced sickness and death, family dysfunction and career ups and downs.
If you haven’t, you will.
In between the rough patches, I fell in love with and married the best gal on Earth, had two precious children who keep me laughing and loving, I’ve enjoyed a lot of success in my career, traveled to a lot of cool places and found God.
That stuff doesn’t suck.
Then there’s the joy I feel every day in recovery. All the great friends I have, doing a job I love and having the OCD under control.
Would I want to go through the bad stuff again? Of course not. But the weird truth is that I’m not sure I’d change the past, either. It’s easy for someone to wish they had a lost loved one back in their life and that they were less touched by illness.
But without having gone through these things, would I be where I’m at today?
Twenty-seven years ago today, my brother, Michael S. Brenner, died of an asthma attack at age 17. I can’t blame his death on the demons I’d battle in the years that followed. But it left deep scars all the same.
Mood music:
I think the end came for him at 8:20 p.m., though I could be mistaken.
That day a trend began where I would befriend people a few years older than me. A couple of them would become best friends and die prematurely themselves. It was also the day that sparked a lifelong fear of loss.
It’s been so long since Michael was with us that it’s sometimes hard to remember the exact features of his face. But here’s what I do remember:
We fought a lot. One New Year’s Eve about 31 years ago, when the family was out at a restaurant, he said something to piss me off and I picked up the fork beside me and chucked it at him. Various family members have insisted over the years that it was a steak knife, but I’m pretty sure it was a fork. Another time we were in the back of my father’s van and he said something to raise my hackles. I flipped him the middle finger. He grabbed the finger and snapped the bone.
We were also both sick much of the time. He had his asthma attacks, which frequently got so bad he would be hospitalized. I had my Chron’s Disease and was often hospitalized myself. It must have been terrible for our parents. I know it was, but had to become a parent myself before I could truly appreciate what they went through.
He lifted weights at a gym down the street from our house that was torn down years ago to make way for new developments. If not for the asthma, he would have been in perfect shape. He certainly had the muscles.
He was going to be a plumber. That’s what he went to school for, anyway. During one of his hospital stays, he got pissed at one of the nurses. He somehow got a hold of some of his plumbing tools and switched the pipes in the bathroom sink so hot water would come out when you selected cold.
He was always there for a family member in trouble. If I was being bullied, he often came to the rescue. And when he did, he was fierce.
That last day was perfect for the most part. I remember a sun-kissed winter day. I was immature for a 13-year-old and remember reveling in the toys I got on Christmas two weeks before. The tree in my mother’s house was still up, though the decorations had been removed.
My mother and I think my sister took off to run an errand. My father’s house was only a five-minute walk from my mother’s, and when they drove by, an ambulance was outside the house. I’m told Michael walked to the ambulance himself, and he was rushed to Lynn Hospital, which was torn down long ago to make way for a Super Stop & Shop. I sometimes wonder if he died where the deli counter now stands or if it was where the cereal is now kept.
While I was at my mother’s waiting to hear from someone, a movie was on in which a congressional candidate played by Dudley Moore befriended a woman played by Mary Tyler Moore and her terminally ill daughter, who was about 13. At the end of the movie, the young girl succumbs to her cancer on a train.
That freaked me out, and I went to my mother’s room to bury my head in a pillow. To this day, I refuse to watch that movie.
It was in that room that my mother, father and sister informed me my brother was dead.
I spent the remainder of my teenage years trying to be him. I befriended his friends. I enrolled at his gym, Fitness World. That lasted about a week.
I started listening to his records. Def Leppard was a favorite of his, hence the mood music above.
I even wore his leather jacket for a time, even though it was about three sizes too tight. I couldn’t zip the thing. I looked like an idiot wearing it, but I didn’t care. It was part of him, and I was hell-bent on taking over his persona.
But then there could only be one Michael Brenner. I eventually grew up and realized that. Then I spent a bunch of years trying to be just like Michael’s friend and our neighbor, Sean Marley. But there was only one Sean Marley. Unfortunately, people tend to remember him for how he died rather than how he lived.
I eventually had to learn how to become my own person. I did it, but it was pretty fucking messy. There’s only one Bill Brenner, and he can be a scary sight to behold.
The years have softened the pain, though I still have some regrets.
I regret that I often have trouble remembering what his face looked like. Fortunately, I found this photo while rummaging through my father’s warehouse last summer:
It’s a good image, but it’s in black and white. I still have trouble picturing him in color.
I miss him, and find it strange that he was just a kid himself when he died. He seemed so much older to me at the time. To a 13-year-old, he was older and wiser.
At the wake of a friend’s mom right after Thanksgiving, I found myself thinking of Michael and others who died too soon.
In a bizarre game of mental math, I started thinking about how long it took me to bounce back from each death. It’s a stupid game to play, because there’s no science or arithmetic that applies. The death of a grandparent is part of the natural order of things. The death of a sibling or close friend, not so much. Unless, perhaps, everyone is well into their senior years. Even then, you can’t put a measuring stick on grief.
But I tried doing it anyway.
With Michael and Sean, I’m not sure I ever really recovered. To this day, I’m cleaning up from the long cycles of depression and addiction that followed me through the years.
Along the way, good things happened to fill in the black holes. I married the love of my life. We had two beautiful children. My career hummed along nicely for the most part.
As you might expect, I failed to emerge with a general timeline of the grieving process. It turns out we’re not supposed to know about such things. That would be cheating.
I do know that it gets better.
Understanding that as I do, I have the following advice for those trying to get through the grieving process:
–Take a moment to appreciate what’s STILL around you. Your spouse. Your kids. Your friends. If the death you just suffered should teach you anything, it’s that you never know how long the other loves of your life will be around. Don’t waste the time you have with them, and, for goodness sake:
–Don’t sit around looking at people you love and worrying yourself into an anxiety attack over the fact that God could take them from you at any moment. God holds all the cards, so it’s pointless to even think about it. Just be there for people, and let them be there for you.
–Take care of yourself. You can comfort yourself with all the drugs, alcohol, sex and food there is to have. But take it from me, giving in to addictions is nothing but slow suicide. You can’t move past grief and see the beauty of what’s left if you’re too busy trying to kill yourself. True, I learned a ton about the beauty of life from having been an addict, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever wish that experience on others. If there’s a better way to cope, do that instead.
–Embrace things that are bigger than you. Nothing has helped me get past grief more than doing service to others. It sounds like so much bullshit, but it’s not. When I’m helping out in the church food pantry or going to Overeater’s Anonymous meetings and guiding addicts who ask for my help, I’m always reminded that my own life could be much worse. Or, to put it another way, I’m reminded how my own life is so much better than I realize or deserve.
Like I said: This isn’t a science.
It’s just what I’ve learned from my own walk through the valley of darkness.
I’ve learned that life is a gift to be cherished and used wisely.
A friend asked that question yesterday. I’ve certainly been accused of being too hard on myself before. My step-mother reads this blog and told me I should give myself a break. Steve Lambert, former editor of The Eagle-Tribune, said I was too hard on myself when I wrote the “One of My Biggest Regrets” post.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:0OXjHxbrmrkpvqudvzWlDR]
The short answer is that sometimes I am, most of the time I’m not.
When I was at my absolute worst, I knew my soul was in deep trouble and I hated myself for not having the will to do something about it. I call it my long road through self-hatred. Back then I would be hard on myself by wallowing in the corner or, more accurately, in my car, where I would go on many, many binges.
If I had the ability to cry it out back then, I would have probably binged less. But I’ve never been good at crying, so I’d let the rage fill me and I’d do my best to destroy myself. It’s not that I wanted to die. It’s that I hated and wanted to punish myself. Giving in to my addictions was a lot like taking a thick leather belt and lashing myself a few hundred times.
That’s what happens when mental illness and addiction burn wild with no management. You end up being hard on yourself, and nothing good comes of it. In fact, it just makes things worse.
Today I’m hard on myself in a different way. I come on here and write about what a shithead I was the day before, and in the process I fix my course and work on doing better. That’s much more healthy.
I was feeling stupid yesterday because I purchased a new pair of boots and a pair of pants on Amazon.com. I needed the boots, but not the pants. It was a splurge with money we don’t necessarily have. Call it no big deal, but I know better. Sometimes, when I’m not letting the food addiction or wine guzzling control me, I let the spending addiction control me. Or the Internet addiction.
That’s when I have to remind myself that I’m being a jerk. And then I try to do better.
Last night I freaked out my 2-year-old niece with one of my loud laughs. I felt awful for scaring her, but Erin’s explanation of my voice volume immediately made me feel better.
Of course, I’ve always had a loud laugh. It’s also true that many of the stereotypical bad guys in the movies have a loud laugh. The emperor from the Star Wars movies comes to mind.
An editor named Bill Ketter used to have an ear-shattering laugh, and not many people in The Eagle-Tribune newsroom liked him very much at the time (my attitude toward him has softened with time).
I guess to Madison’s little ears mine is a sinister laugh.
But she’ll get over it.
And in the end Erin’s right: My loud laugh was the result of something my niece did.
