Say what you will about Mister Rogers. His speech and mannerisms may stop being cool after you hit puberty, but the lessons he taught are timeless and ageless.
My friend Olivia Gatti shared this quote from Mr. Rogers on Facebook awhile back:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers–so many caring people in this world.
The man was so right.
I suspect Olivia had the earthquake and tsunamis in Japan on her mind when she decided to share, and it certainly fits. There’s been so much tragedy in the last decade, from 9-11 to the tsunamis of late 2004 to this latest event, and for many children — especially those with emotional disorders — it can be enough to terrorize to the core, no matter how far away they are from the given disaster.
The fear meant a lot of things. Working myself into a stupor over the safety of my wife and children. An obsession with cleanliness, which was interesting since depression always meant my personal hygiene took a dive. It also meant a fear of world events. When that Nostradamus movie “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” came out on HBO in the early 1980s, I was terrified by the “future” scenes.
Later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, I thought the scene from above was playing out and it left me in a huge depression, one where I stayed in my basement with the lights off.
Similar emotions took hold on Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, those emotions took hold on everyone that day.
It fed a lot of my addictive behavior in adulthood and blackened parts of my childhood that might have otherwise been happy — even with the bad things that happened. Bad things happen to everyone. That’s life. But some people can maintain a certain level of happiness despite it.
Mr. Rogers learned a powerful lesson from his mother. I wish I had it in my head to focus on the helpers growing up. In hindsight, they were always there:
–My friends, who have always helped me make sense of things, made me laugh and done all the other things a person needs to get through the day.
–Many of the people in my faith community, who showed me how to accept God’s Grace, even if I still suck at returning the favor.
With the bigger events like what happened in Japan, it’s so easy to see only the calamity, death and sadness. It’s easy to get fixated on whether such a thing could happen where we live.
But when you look at it the way Mr. Roger’s mother suggested, it becomes a different picture altogether. The bad stuff is still there, but you also see that no matter what happens, there will always be enough kind souls to help the rest of us through to the other side.
When you can see the good in people even during the darkest of hours, it restores your faith in humanity.
Back then, I fancied myself a poet. I joined the Poet’s Society. I grew my hair long and started wearing a pair of leather pants I had borrowed from Sean Marley (back then, I could actually fit into them). I wore a suit jacket and leather boots to complete the look.
I didn’t like who I was, so it made perfect sense to try being someone else. It was a habit I would indulge in many times over.
It was also a side-effect of the fear I used to carry around. The first Gulf War was about to begin and there were a lot of kids worried about getting drafted, including me. So we tried to relive the lives of Baby Boomers from the 1960s as a bizarre comfort ritual.
One guy from Lynn took it further than me. He wore tie-dye t-shirts with fringe boots. He was a big guy and looked more comical than anything else. He would tell anyone in the smoking room who would listen that John Lennon was something close to the Second Coming of Christ.
Me and Sean took a bus ride with this guy down to Washington D.C. for a peace rally in front of the White House a couple days after the war started. That was quite a sight: Me trying to look like Jim Morrison, the other guy trying to look like Jerry Garcia. Sean was the most normal looking of the three of us. Those who knew Sean and his frequent hair-color changes will appreciate the absurdity of the sight.
The war ended quickly, but then Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” came out, with Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison. I latched on to Morrison’s rejection of his family. I wasn’t getting along with various family members, so there was another easy out from dealing with life.
I started drinking harder alcohol and fasting because that’s what Morrison did. When I would shift from fasting to binge eating I would grow a beard and just carry on like I was the Morrison of later years, when he got bloated from drinking and grew facial hair.
The dean of students at N.S.C.C. brought me in a copy of Rolling Stone from 1971 — the issue covering Morrison’s death. He let me keep it, and wrote a note across the bottom right side of the cover about how Morrison was an interesting figure, but that I needed to find my own path.
I also started singing in a band called Skeptic Slang, where I started trying to perfect the grunge version of Morrison.
Then I started to really get out of shape and lost the ability to keep up with the hours musicians typically kept. I turned my attention to journalism, and that’s where I made my career.
Of course, I developed a lot of the bad habits that fit the stereotypical image of a reporter in the 1970s and 80s — bad eating habits, drinking and smoking and other things a person can rarely afford on a reporter’s salary.
I stopped listening to The Doors for a long, long time. But the other day, for whatever reason, I started listening again.
But it’s not the same as it was back then.
I have a real life now, and it’s easier to be me than somebody else.
Besides, I’ve tried to be other people at other points of my life.
It didn’t work out.
I do still have the facial hair, but I found it easier to maintain a bald head than maintain the hair style.
To be me is much simpler in that respect — even if being me is hopelessly complicated in other areas.
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.
I was talking to a priest the other night about therapy and getting diagnosed with a mental disorder when he frowned. “Everyone struggles with something,” he said. “It’s not good to slap a label on them and make them be defined by it.”
Back in the fall I was going over a talk I was to give at an upcoming Cursillo retreat. I mentioned the words “mental illness” in there because my struggles with that are partly what brought me to my Faith. The priest stopped me cold:
“I don’t think you should use those words,” he said. “EVERYONE struggles with something. If you throw out labels someone will get offended.”
A few years ago, that would have pissed me off. I would have seen it as the priest belittling me as I was trying to be honest about myself. I also would have cursed him for not understanding the nature of mental illness.
But this guy deals with emotionally distraught people all the time. He has seen people act in rational and irrational ways in his day, and knows that sometimes we have to be careful with words.
It’s also commendable that they don’t want people to have labels.
Some people use the labels they’re given to limit themselves, even feel sorry for themselves. As a kid, I used my Crohn’s Disease as an excuse not to do a lot of things. I cried flare-up the day I had to get in a swimming race during gym class. I used it as an excuse when the stress was getting to me at The Eagle-Tribune and I opted to stay home than spend another night in the newsroom.
Later, after I was diagnosed with OCD, I was tempted to break out the mental illness card when I was scared to death of a business trip that required getting on a plane. I laugh when I think back at that one, because today I love flying. And besides, at that point I wasn’t about to out myself. I was still too afraid of the stigma.
But I disagree with those who say a diagnosis is a bad thing.
I resisted getting treatment for years because I was terrified of what a diagnosis would mean. But I sank so low at one point that I became willing to do whatever it took to be sane.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
–A diagnosis can be a useful thing, if you’re willing to use it to make yourself better.
–Using a diagnosis as an excuse not to do things is pathetic. To do that is to be a slave to fear. I only started to get better after I faced down the fears.
–A diagnosis isn’t a label that’s tattooed on your back like a scarlet letter. It only defines you if you let it.
–Other people might still try to label you, but they’re just being stupid and they can’t stop you from achieving your full potential.
Yeah. I have a label on my back. But it’s not an excuse to get away with bad decisions.
It IS something that reminds me that I have to take care of myself.
A lot of changes to my program of sobriety and abstinence are under way, and I feel like I’m running on nuclear power. Last night was my first Big Book Step Study meeting, which is quite different from the speaker-discussion meetings I’m used to. It only took me a few seconds to realize why I had to be there.
Mood music:
A lot of times when someone sobers up or stops binge eating, it’s a white-knuckle experience.
It’s not just because you’re missing your junk and the momentary feeling it gives you. It’s because the hole in your soul — the thing that drove you to addiction in the first place — is still there. If you don’t deal with that hole, you might stay clean for a year or two. But sooner or later, you’ll fall right back into the old, insidious patterns.
Speaker-discussion meetings are a vital tool for the initial clean-up. You can’t start working on the hole until you stop the addictive behavior. It did me a ton of good and I still need to go to those events, but it’s no longer enough. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is all about dealing with the hole, and studying it more closely is a must if I’m going to stay clean.
Studying the pages will also pull me deeper into the meaning of working the 12 Steps.
I also have a new sponsor starting this week. Instead of me simply telling him my plan of eating for the day, we’ll talk about the deeper issues at the heart of sobriety and abstinence. I’m looking forward to it.
My life is full of Blessings. This program is the one that allowed for everything else.
I’m glad I’m starting to take it more seriously.
A guy at last night’s meeting noted that there are two types of addicts:
–The type who is doomed and DOESN’T KNOW IT, and
–The type that’s doomed and KNOWS IT.
The latter type has a better chance of escaping that fate, because in knowing you’re headed for disaster you might be willing to take action. I’m glad I was that type.
I had an advantage: Several years of brutal therapy for OCD. The tools I had to develop to manage that are a lot like those you need to clean up. And it was all about identifying the hole in my soul.
It’s still there, but I think it’s getting smaller all the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this place, especially after talking to one of my best friends, Mike Trans, who I happened to meet in that room. I also met a brilliant writer named Peter Bebergal and Al McLeod, another close friend who is godfather to my son, Sean.
Things were stormy at home during this period (1989-1992). I wasn’t getting along with my parents, though in hindsight that was more my fault than theirs. My sister was in the throes of a serious depression and was suicidal much of the time.
The world was a stormy place, with an imminent war with Iraq on the horizon (the first Gulf War). Back then, my fear and anxiety was wrapped tightly around current events I had no control over. I was convinced we were all getting drafted into the army and I wanted to live life to the fullest first.
I spent a lot of my time in high school fucking around, so I had to go to NSCC to shore up the academic side of my brain. I managed to do that somewhere in those years. But mostly, I hung out in that smoking room.
Getting there was easy, because NSCC’s Lynn campus was only five minutes from my house. Back then, I either hid in the basement of the Revere house or in the smoking room at the opposite end of the Lynnway. These were intervals of bliss between the painful periods.
There, I seemed to get along with everyone. I met Mike and Peter (you should read the book Peter co-authored with Scott Korb called “The Faith Between Us,” by the way. It’s a life-changing read I’ll blog about in a future post).
I met people who were in the Student Government Association and Program Council, so I joined those groups, making new friends like Ann Ball, Michelle Lesnever, Trish Bean and Samantha Lewis. Peter led a poetry group, so I joined that. My band Skeptic Slang was coming together, so we used poetry readings in the cafeteria as a place to jam.
These people were a first for me. I didn’t feel the need to put on my armor around them. I felt like I could be myself in a world where everything else was awkward. Being myself meant binging a lot in private and getting my fill of pot and alcohol, but I did most of that stuff in private, anyway. Around these new friends, my normal side — what came closest to normal for me, anyway — could come out for fresh air. I wrote a lot of bad poetry and song lyrics to share in the poetry group and dove into student government activities as if it were the United States Senate. Looking back, we all had some growing up to do. But I think we were still smarter than the real senators of the day.
That smoking room — NSCC in general — was a happy place for me. Salem State topped it because that’s where I met Erin, but without the comfort of that cloudy little room, I might have lost whatever grip I had on sanity at the time.
A couple more side notes: In this room, Peter Bebergal said something that I would understand all too well later in life: “You can’t turn toast back into bread.”
I also remember sitting at a table with Al, talking about Revere, home to us both. We started talking about the Paul Revere School when it dawned on both of us that we had known each other before, during those middle school years. As I often like to remind him, I hated his guts back in Revere.
But it’s all good now.
By the way, I recently visited the Lynn campus of NSCC. It’s not as bright and shiny as it used to be. Back when I was there it was still a fairly new building, constructed on a site where buildings burned in the Great Lynn Fire of 1981.
Someone in program told me that she’s afraid of fat people. Being in the same room with obesity fills her with terror. She’s worried that if she shakes a fat person’s hand, she’ll “catch the disease.” I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. It’s for real.
Naturally, I was taken aback. For one thing, why is she willing to be in a room with me?True, I’m much lighter than I used to be. But the word “slim” doesn’t exactly fit me.
To me, the whole thing is too far off the sanity charts to comprehend. My first instinct was to tell her she’s an idiot.
Then I remembered something important: When you are trapped in the grip of an addiction or mental illness, logic and sane thinking no longer apply.
I should know. I’ve been in the grip of both. I’ve had fears that were just as whacked. I never felt anxiety around people who are heavier than me. But there have been times when I thought of them as a lower form of life than myself. Since I was thinner, I was better than them. I thought this way even when I was 285 pounds and binge eating multiple times a day.
That’s just as bad as fearing an obese person. It’s probably worse.
Long before I found recover and the 12 steps, I used to be set off by the dumbest things. If a very old woman was sitting behind me in church, I’d be afraid to shake her hand during the part of Mass where we offer each other a sign of peace. Old people spread germs, too — right? That’s what I worried about. Forget that I’m a father of two boys below the age of 10 and kids are the biggest germ factories around.
I was afraid of plastic chairs. I was afraid that if I sat in one, the chair would stay stuck to my behind when I stood up. Actually, right before I entered OA, that very thing did happen.
Crowds used to scare the life out of me, so much so that I chose to stay in my room all the time.
So, all things considered, someone’s fear of fat people doesn’t seem as far removed from reality as I first thought.
Still, it’s a bad obsession and I hope she can free herself of it.
