In all my efforts to get sane a few years ago, I did a lot of stupid things. I’m sharing it with you here so you don’t make the same mistakes:
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/l4Xx_vjGnlo
–Don’t try to control your compulsive binge eating problem by fasting. You won’t make it through the morning, and then you’ll binge like you’ve never binged before.
–Don’t mix alcohol with pills that have the strength of four Advil tablets in an effort to kill your emotional pain as well as your physical pain. That sort of thing might kill you.
–Don’t hate the people in your life for the bad things they’ve done. Remember that they’re fucked up like you and that hating them will never make the pain go away. In fact, it’ll just make it worse.
–Avoid the late-night infomercials. Those things were designed for suckers, especially suckers who can’t sleep because they’re so overcome with fear and anxiety that they see knife-wielding ghosts around every corner. You might find yourself falling for it and spending stupid sums of money on fraudulent bullshit like this.
–Don’t spend every waking hour worrying about and rushing toward the future. You will miss all the beauty in the present that way, and that’s a damn shame.
—Don’t bitch about your job. You’ll just annoy people. Change yourself and your attitude first. Then, if you still don’t like the job, work on finding a new one and keep doing your best at the current job in the meantime.
—Don’t whine about how tough everything is. Life is supposed to be tough at times, and wallowing in it keeps you from moving on to the good stuff. To put it another way, stop seeing yourself as a victim.
It’s 6:14 a.m. and it’s still snowing. But I am big-time thankful for one thing:
The power was on when I woke up, and may yet go out. But I managed to get my coffee made first.
It’s the little things. Or, for this coffee addict, the huge things.
I also stepped outside and found that in my corner of New England, the snow accumulation was not nearly as bad as predicted. Clean up should be easy here. A lot of folks are without power and got up to 2 feet of snow, particularly west of here. My heart goes out to them.
Whatever the weather outside your door, just remember: It could always be worse and this too shall pass.
My neighborhood got off easy so far, but I’ve lived through many catastrophic storms in my day (The Blizzard of 1978, the 1991 Halloween “Perfect Storm” and the 2008 ice storm, to name a few). After all of them, life moved on and it was all good.
Family and friends always helped us through, making sure we had warm shelter and food, especially in the wake of the 1978 blizzard.
It’s like Mister Rogers’ mother once told him: When bad things happen, watch for the helpers. They always appear.
We all have someone in our personal life who we hate. There’s often a good reason for it, especially if you’ve been molested. But we often loathe someone before we’ve considered all the complexities of the relationship.
I’ve been there. But as I get older, the chip on my shoulder gets smaller and I’m better at seeing the other side. In that spirit, let’s consider the following:
Mood music:
A lot of us hate one or both of our parents because we felt neglected or we were physically and verbally abused as kids.
People think I hate my mother because we haven’t spoken much in 5 years, but the truth is that under all the bitterness and resentment I still love her. In hindsight, two of her three kids were very sick as children and one didn’t survive. Her marriage to my father ended badly. She was also from a line of women who had the chronic urge to lash out. Inevitably, some of that’s going to rub off.
In hindsight, I think she did the best she could with the tools she had. The problem now is just learning to get along and setting boundaries that will be respected.
People who remember me from my days at The Eagle-Tribune probably think I hate some of the bosses I had while there, especially between late 2000 and early 2002. I did for a long while, but no longer. Looking back, one or two people struggled with their own health problems and were equally prone to depression.
When you spend every waking hour in fear that you’re not going to measure up and that someone somewhere is out to get you, you will have a hard time being a nice person. When we feel embattled, we have trouble seeing that the person at the focus of our anger is dealing with his or her own pain. Pain makes you do bad things — sometimes to yourself, sometimes to others.
On the flip side, some have questioned my devotion to the Catholic faith. A lot of people hate priests who sexually abused children and I can’t blame them. Molesting a kid is one of the best reasons to hate someone that I can think of. You’re especially going to be inclined to feel that way if you were abused or if, like me, you have children. It’s also easy to hate when you run into churchgoers who hammer you with all their self-righteous views while hypocritically ostracizing people who don’t fit the prim and proper mold. But in our moment of anger, we forget that priests are human with all the same weaknesses we have.
Those who act on their darker impulses deserve to be removed from the picture. It becomes a matter of safety and justice. But when you consider how close a lot of us come to stepping over the edge, it’s hard to keep hating. Besides, a person’s faith shouldn’t be about the damaged humans you have to deal with at church. It should be about you’re direct relationship with the Man upstairs.
If we want to hate and flip off the guy who cuts us off on the highway, it’s worth considering that the guy probably had as shitty a day — or worse — than you’ve had. We’re all capable of being dicks after a rough day.
If we want to hate the weather forecasters because it’s pelting rain and snow when we’re craving warm sunshine, we should remember that at that moment, we’re just being stupid. Especially if we live in New England, where the weather patterns often defy even the most seasoned meteorologists. Besides, its supposed to be hot in summer and cold in winter.
Duncan and I took my father to the last place on Earth I wanted to be Saturday afternoon: The family business in Saugus.
Some of you know it as the blue, white and gold striped building across from Kappy’s Liquor store on Route 1. I’ve been trying to keep him out of there since he was released from rehab. Given his slow recovery from two strokes, I didn’t want him climbing stairs.
I also didn’t want him doing work things that would raise his blood pressure. You could say I’ve been trying to insist he do something I would never do: Sit at home and stay out of trouble.
Mood music:
But by the end of the afternoon, it occurred to me that maybe — just maybe — some of us well-meaning family members need to loosen our grip.
The first clue was that he insisted on leaving his wheelchair in the trunk all afternoon. He got around using his walker. As often as he could, he lifted the walker off the ground and took some steps without the help.
Of course there’s the constant danger of an accident. Maybe he’ll slip and fall. Maybe his blood pressure will spike to dangerous levels and set him back further. But when he was contained like he was in the hospital and rehab, you could see the depression setting in.
Saturday he was in the best mood I’ve seen him in since the first stroke in May, and I think it’s because I did loosen the grip and let him do what he wanted: Go through 37 years of paperwork in his office. He knows he’s going to be home a lot more than he would like. He’s going through the drawers of his desk to find things to save and clean out the stuff that has no more value: Phone bills from the 1990s, for example.
We got in the office and I plopped myself down in a chair, staring intently at my Android phone. That lasted about 30 seconds.
“Billy, see those two book cases next to you?” he asked. “I need you to empty them and put everything over here…”
This was familiar ground. As a kid I worked in his warehouse. I pretended to work, anyway. Those who remember the younger me will recall a long-haired slacker with moods that would rise and fall like a hammer in the hands of a coke addict.
I always felt like I was in a cage, chafing against my father’s constant orders. I rebelled hard. I’d hide behind boxes in the back of the building, chain smoking when I was supposed to be filling out inventory sheets.
In hindsight, I had the same problem you see in a lot of idealistic college kids: I thought this work was beneath me. I was too smart for this shit. I was destined for bigger things. Or so I thought. Back then I often confused being educated with being smart.
My father’s lessons about hard work and the value of a dollar eventually caught on. I just had to have two kids and a mortgage before I got it.
This time, I put the phone down, got up and started the clean out. I found a couple empty canisters used to store blueprints and gave them to Duncan, who happily grabbed scissors and markers and set about building himself a couple missile launchers.
He was also in good spirits because we found a package of “carpet skates” my father bought for the kids a few years ago but shelved because he figured I wouldn’t be crazy about the boys sliding across the living room and smashing into furniture.
I found this picture of me, Michael and Wendi visiting Santa Clause sometime in the early 1970s. I’m holding the doll and sulking over something, perhaps the fact that my siblings got to sit on Santa’s lap and I didn’t.
I also found boxes of trinkets my father had collected from the Republican party over the years. It turns out that he got a lot of stuff in the mail for his donations: Gavels with Newt Gingrich’s signature, a medal with Ronald Reagan’s likeness carved into the center, autographed pictures of George W. Bush thanking “Mr. Brenner” for his support of the party.
Dad let me walk away with one of the Gingrich gavels. I never liked the former House speaker, but there’s something cool about holding a gavel in your hand. It now sits on my desk at the office, where I’ll probably bang it on the mouse pad during moments of fidgeting, to the annoyance of co-workers.
There had to be nearly 20 years worth of these trinkets. Some people, like me, would have proudly displayed them around the office. Not my father, though. Appearances don’t mean much to him. The trinkets sat unopened in white boxes on the shelves, buried under blueprints and billing forms.
As I was playing with the trinkets, Dad was finding a lot of things from the past, some of it painful.
There were outtakes from my late brother‘s yearbook photo shoot.
And he found my brother’s death certificate.
I’m sure he’s looked at it a hundred times or more, but this was the first time I saw it. Death certificates are cold documents with a thudding finality to them.
They say nothing about the life. Just the cause and location of death, age, occupation (student), parents, place of death (Lynn Hospital, which is now the site of a Stop & Shop) etc.
Last year, I spent a few afternoons in the warehouse across the street, digging through a bunch of rotting old boxes in search of old notebooks from my song lyric-writing days. I never found them. It turns out, though, that I was like the Nazis in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — digging in the wrong place. All the interesting stuff was sitting in my father’s office all along, collecting dust.
It could have been a morbid trip back in time, my father closing out the defining chapters of his life as he prepared to spend the rest of his days in solitary confinement.
But it wasn’t for one simple reason: That whole afternoon my father stubbornly moved around without a wheelchair, determined to do whatever the fuck he pleased, no matter what well-meaning loved ones were telling him.
He was preparing for the next chapter, and like many of his actions over the years, it was a teachable moment for me.
A reader who recently found the two posts I wrote on addicts as compulsive liars had a sad story to share. Her husband, a compulsive spender, gambler and drinker, lies to her all the time. He apparently sucks at it. She always finds out.
Mood music:
How, she asked me, does she deal with a person like this? She still loves him, and in many respects he’s still the great guy. But lies are a cancer on even the most tried and true relationships.
It’s a hard question for me to answer. For one thing, it’s self-serving of me to tell a person like you how to talk to a person like me. My instinct will naturally be to tell you to go easy on him and calmly talk it through. It is true that yelling at a liar won’t make him stop. In fact, it will probably compel him to lie even more, convinced that any shred of honesty will result in a verbal beating every time.
This part has been especially challenging for me over the years. I grew up in a family where there was constant yelling. Because of that, I react to yelling like one might react to gunshots. I instinctively avoid it at all costs, and that has led to lies.
But if your significant other is stealing money behind your back to buy drugs, a friendly, smiling reminder to him that grownups aren’t supposed to behave this way won’t work either. The liar will simply thank God that he got off the hook that time.
You just can’t win with a liar.
I lied all the time about all the binge eating and the money I spent on it. I’m guilty of the lie of omission when it comes to smoking. And in moments where I felt like I was in trouble, I lied about something without meaning to. The instinct just kicked in and a second later I was smacking myself in the head over it.
Here’s where there’s hope:
Lies tire a soul out. It weighs you down after awhile like big bags of sand on your shoulders. Guilt eats you alive. That’s how it’s been with me in the past.
If you’re like that and there are any shards of good within you, you eventually come clean because you want to. Remember that lying is part of two larger diseases: Addiction and mental illness. Nobody wants to be sick.
But while some who get sick wallow in it and make everyone around them miserable, others are decidedly more stoic about it and try to do the best they can with the odds they’re dealt.
I was a miserable sick man but eventually, through spiritual growth, I tried to become a more bearable sick man. That meant dealing with the roots (addiction and OCD) and the side effects (lying).
I still fall on my face. But I work it hard and seem to have gotten much better than I used to be.
I credit Erin for a lot of this. She could have either thrown me out or thrown up her arms and turned a blind eye to my self destruction. But somehow, she has found a middle ground in dealing with me. It hasn’t always been pretty. But we’ve had our victories along the way.
You want to know how to talk to a liar who’s been caught? You’re better off asking her than me.
I went to see “The Way” with Erin and saw a lot of myself in the characters. You’d see a lot of yourself, too.
Mood music:
The summary of the film is this (stolen from IMDb): Tom is an American doctor who goes to France following the death of his adult son, killed in the Pyrenees during a storm while walking The Camino de Santiago, also known as The Way of St. James. Tom’s purpose is initially to retrieve his son’s body. However, in a combination of grief and homage to his son, Tom decides to journey on this path of pilgrims. While walking The Camino, Tom meets others from around the world, all broken and looking for greater meaning in their lives, and discovers the difference between the life we live and the life we choose.
I don’t identify with Tom as much as I do his walking companions, especially a Dutchman named Joost and an Irish writer named Jack.
Joost tells Tom he’s making the journey because he needs to lose some weight to fit into his suit for an upcoming wedding. Jack is on the journey because he thinks there might be a book in the experience, and he’s trying to break his writer’s block.
If you rolled these two guys into one, that would be something close to me.
Despite the official reason Joost is there, he proceeds to eat his way across Spain. For much of the movie, he’s comforting himself with food. Jack is a blowhard who likes to talk about living like a real pilgrim, living off the land for survival and such. But he uses his company-issued credit cards to enjoy all the comforts of the local culture.
At one point, after a lot of wine, Tom interrupts Jack’s latest verbal tirade, calling him a bore who thinks he’s better than everyone else because he’s writing a book. The truth is that for all his talk, Jack’s carrying a lot of spiritual pain. It reminded me of some of my own bluster and hypocrisy. But it also reminded me of the healing power of writing, and how important it is to me. Not that I needed the reminder.
The scene that really hit me hard, though, is one where Joost is in his hotel room, about to tear into the feast he’s ordered from room service.
He’s wearing an open bathrobe, staring at himself — and his bloated belly — in the mirror with disgust. He stares at the tray of food and goes to take the first bite, and it’s there that you see the shame and pain in his eyes. The truth eventually comes out that his wife won’t sleep with him anymore because he’s too fat. He wants to please her, but he can’t stop himself from eating and popping pills.
All my past binge eating, wine guzzling and obsessive pain pill popping came back to me, as clear and awful as if I had just done it all the day before. I really felt bad for Joost at that moment.
By film’s end, Jack seems to have had a spiritual re-awakening and Joost seems to accept who he is, saying he’s just going to buy a new suit.
The recovered binge eater in me wasn’t particularly satisfied with that outcome, but it’s clear by film’s end that each of the characters came a long way in mending their broken souls.
For most of my life I’ve been an avid walker. As a kid I walked the full length of Revere Beach every day. In my 20s and 30s, I’d go out almost daily and take long walks. For all my recovery from addiction, the walking is something I haven’t gotten back into as much as I should. This movie has me rethinking that one. It reminded me that I walked for a spiritual lift as much as it was for weight control. In fact, a lot of my walking life was done in the midst of binge eating.
I’ve been able to control my weight in recent years without all the walking. But I think I need to get back to the walking anyway.
A good walk can help me set my mind and soul right. It doesn’t have to be a walk across Spain.
In fact, I’d much rather walk Revere Beach or the hilly terrain where I live now.
It just dawned on me that today would have been Sean Marley’s 45th birthday. You’ve seen much here about how his life and death shaped me. But right now I just want to point out all that was cool about him.
Mood music:
–He was a gifted guitarist. He could learn to play just about anything, and could write great musical bits when he wanted to. He gave me my first guitar for Christmas in 1986. It was an Ibanez strat model. He had what I think was a Guild electric guitar with a dark blue or black body. I sold the Ibanez several years later and it’s one of my biggest regrets. Sean was pissed but forgave me. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to his guitar. I hope someone’s putting it to good use.
–He was a great writer, and was a very disciplined diary keeper. He showed me several posts over the years, but I haven’t read them since his death. I know they are in safe hands, though.
–His hair went through more changes than Hillary Clinton’s, in both style and color.
–He reveled in listening to bands that weren’t as well known. He was listening to Kix several years before they achieved moderate success. He turned me on to T-Rex, Thin Lizzy and Riot (not Quiet Riot. This band was just called Riot).
–He loved the sea as much as I did, which makes sense, since his father Al was the one who really taught me to appreciate the ocean.
–He was a vegetarian who could not understand why people had to kill animals for food or any other reason. I never caught on, but I respected him for it.
–He was a very spiritual man who was always seeking. He eventually rebelled against the Catholic faith he was brought up on, but he was always reading, writing and exploring who exactly his higher power was.
–He used to find a lot of bizarre z-grade horror movies for us to watch. I can’t remember half the titles, though the Toxic Avenger was in there somewhere. One movie involved aliens who drank their own vomit. He thought that was especially funny.
–He was a Libertarian way before it was the popular thing to be. In fact, in the 1988 presidential election we both voted for a practically unknown politician named Ron Paul. He was the libertarian candidate. Sean voted for him because he was a true believer. I just didn’t want to vote for Bush or Dukakis.
–He was always taking classes, studying and studying some more. He had a serious, deep academic mind. He never stopped learning.
–He was my brother. Not by birth, but our souls were interconnected.
When Erin and I were still engaged, we did the two-day marriage course that the Catholic Church makes you take before you can get married (Pre-Cana). We got this priceless advice early on: “Never go to bed angry with each other.”
We’ve worked hard in 13 years of marriage to follow that advice. When we argue, as any married couple does, we always try to work out our differences and make up before going to bed.
It has worked pretty well, though most still-madly-in-love couples will still tell you the angry to bed, angry to rise part still happens.
We all get self righteous and even a little pissed at the inconvenience of being disagreed with. It’s part of being human.
Today my younger brother Brian married the love of his life, Sharane. During a brief but beautiful ceremony, the man who officiated over the vows gave that same advice we heard all those years ago:
“Never go to bed angry.”
It’s not always easy advice to follow. But trying to follow it has served me and Erin well.
At the wake for Al Marley yesterday, Father Richard C. Messina gave a stirring description of what he thinks the afterlife might look like.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/ZADcJdFY-0w
He described how people get excited when a baby is on the way.
“The baby will be here soon!” friends and family will say. Then the baby arrives and the aunts, uncles, grandparents and family friends come to meet the little tyke. It’s the beginning of life.
That, Father Dick said, is what it must be like in Heaven. Everyone who went before you is up there saying, “Al is almost here! We’ll see him soon.” Then you die, and everyone up there excitedly comes to greet you.
“I have no doubt Sean was there to grab him by the arm and pull him to the other side,” Father Dick said.
I know he’s right. In the room in the funeral home where they show a slideshow of the deceased’s life, there were some pictures of Sean I hadn’t seen in a long time: Sean, with a jet-black mohawk, cutting his father’s hair, wedding photos, family trips to the beach in the 1970s and 1980s.
Buried in the slide deck was another picture I hadn’t seen in a long time. It’s my brother Michael and Al, sitting on a log. They appear to be doing something with a fishing line. Both have big smiles on their faces.
