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The C Group of Paul Revere

Two things can doom a kid to a future of depression and addiction: Overprotective parents and clueless school districts. This is a post about both.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9dW8_qOjzQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Neither case is one of evil. It’s about good intentions gone wrong. I think of the old saying, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions.”

In the case of overbearing parents, this was only partly true for me. My father was all about pushing me out into the world to learn how to survive. My mother was a different story. In her defense, she had already lost a child, so wanting to protect the kids she had left was understandable. While me and my sister still took a lot of abuse, I was also smothered to the point of wanting to explode. And that’s what I did.

I rebelled. I grew my hair long and started staying out all night. I learned to escape not just in food, but in alcohol and weed. Think of the trouble that fish Nemo got into in “Finding Nemo” when his father got too overprotective. Nemo rebelled by going out to that boat and got himself caught in the dentist-diver’s net. Later in the movie, when Marlin, the dad, says he promised never to let anything happen to Nemo, his friend Dory piped up, “If you never let anything happen to him, then nothing will ever happen to him.”

It all worked out for Nemo in the end and it has for me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Before I experienced all the ups and downs that ultimately led to recovery and salvation, I chafed against my mother’s smothering by shoving aside my studies.

The school district knew I was an emotional, troubled kid. I started getting extra help in elementary school because of the toll Crohn’s Disease had taken on my young body. It worked at first, but when I went to the Paul Revere School for seventh and eighth grade, it all went to hell for me.

There, kids were divided into three groups: The A group, the B group and the C group. The first was for the kids who consistently got As on their report cards. To the lower groups, they were sort of an elite class. The B group is where most kids were. Then there was my group, the C group, where the kids with bad grades were sent to rot. That may be a harsh description. I do believe the school was trying to do what was best for students. But the stigma of being on the low end of the student body was damaging all the same.

The C kids were never really encouraged to study their way to the B or A groups. We just got teachers that gave us the bear minimum for work and treated us like troublemakers to be kept in line.

Indeed, the C group was where all the troublemakers were. I was a quieter version of trouble. I mostly hurt myself by dabbling in addictive substances and ignoring the academics. Other kids in my class were always getting into fights and some were already getting arrested. There were some so-called normal kids in the mix who did study their way into the higher groups.

Some of the C kids got picked on a lot, including me, though I also met a lot of great kids along the way.

I remained a slacker in high school and it took a couple years of community college before I found my ability to study hard and advance.

I feel like I found my way despite a smothering parent and the mistakes of the Revere Public School system.

I should also note that this isn’t about bashing the Revere schools. That was all 25-plus years ago. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope the A-B-C system of labeling kids is a relic of the past.

But in the final analysis, looking back, it’s easy for me to see how the mistakes of parents and educators fed into my struggles later in life. I fault no one. It’s not like God dropped us here with an instruction book for parenting and educating. The Ten Commandments aren’t clear about such specifics.

As a 40-year-old dad who takes an active interest in my children’s education, I still feel like I’m winging it for much of the time.

Before I managed to bring the OCD to heel, I was a basket case about making sure the kids were shielded from danger. It just led to me becoming more of a basket case and, because being that way is exhausting, it made me too tired to do other things with them that I should have been doing.

All I can say is thank God for abstinence and sobriety — as much as staying clean can suck from time to time — and thank God for Erin, who has been especially relentless about teaching those boys right from wrong and making them study hard. Together, I’d like to think we’re pretty good parents and that we give Sean and Duncan the right mix of love and discipline.

But because of where I’ve been, I ALWAYS worry about how my actions will impact them.

That paranoia is probably a good thing.

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Sept. 11, 2001

Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. Here’s my own account.

Mood music:

I was assistant New Hampshire editor at The Eagle-Tribune and I arrived in the newsroom at 4:30 a.m. as usual. I was already in a depressed mood. It wasn’t a sense of dread over something bad about to happen. It was simply my state of mind at the time. I wasn’t liking myself and was playing a role that wasn’t me.

I was already headed toward one of my emotional breakdowns and the job was a catalyst at that point. By day’s end, I would be seriously reconsidering what I was doing with my life. But then everyone was doing that by day’s end.

I was absorbed in all my usual bullshit when the NH managing editor came in and, with a half-smile on his face, told me a plane hit the World Trade Center. At that point, like everyone else, I figured it was a small plane and that it was an accident. Then the second plane hit and we watched it as it happened on the newsroom TV.

I remember being scared to death. Not so much at the scene unfolding on the newsroom TV, but at the scene in the newsroom itself. Chaos was not unusual at The Eagle-Tribune, but this was a whole new level of madness. I can’t remember if my fear was that terrorists might fly a plane into the building we were in as their next act or if it was a fear of not being able to function amidst the chaos. It was probably some of each.

This was a huge story everywhere, but The Eagle-Tribune had a bigger stake in the coverage than most local dailies around the country because many of the victims on the planes that hit the towers were from the Merrimack Valley. There was someone from Methuen, Plaistow, N.H., Haverhill, Amesbury, Andover — all over our coverage area.

When the first World Trade Center tower collapsed on the TV screen mounted above Editor Steve Lambert’s office, he came out, stood on a desk and told everyone to collect themselves a minute, because this would be the most important story we ever covered.

Up to that point, it was. But I was so full of fear and anxiety that my ability to function was gone. I spent most of the next few days in the newsroom, but did nothing of importance. I was a shell. I stayed that way until I  left the paper in early 2004. In fact, I stayed that way for some time after that. I should note that the rest of the newsroom staff at the time did a hell of a job under very tough pressure that day. My friend Gretchen Putnam was still editor of features back then, but she and her staff helped gather the news with the same grit she would display later as metro editor.

I remember being touched by a column she wrote the next day. She described picking her son Jack up from school and telling him something bad happened in the world that day. His young response was something like this: “Something bad happens in the world every day.”

Sometimes, kids have a better perspective of the big picture than grown-ups do.

I got home very late that day and hugged Erin and Sean, who was about five months old at that point. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world he would grow up in.

In the days that followed, I walked around in a state of fear like everyone else. That fear made me do things I was ashamed of.

A week after the attacks, Erin and I were scheduled to fly to Arizona to attend a cousin’s wedding. The night before were were supposed to leave, I gave in to my terror at the prospect of getting on a plane and we didn’t go. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life.

There are two types of head cases headed for a breakdown: There’s the type that tries hard to get him or herself killed through reckless behavior, and then there are those who cower in their room, terrified of what’s on the other side of that door. I fell into the latter category. I guess I tried to get myself killed along the way, but I did so in a much slower fashion. I started drinking copious amounts of wine to feel OK in my skin, and I went on a food binge that lasted about three months and resulted in a 30-pound weight gain.

A few months ago I found myself in lower Manhattan for a security event and I went to Ground Zero.

Gone were the rows of lit candles and personal notes that used to line the sidewalks around this place. To the naked eye it’s just another construction site people pass by in a hurry on their way to wherever.

I was pissed off at first. It wasn’t the thought of what happened here. My emotion there is one of sadness. No, this was anger. I was pissed that people seemed to be walking by without any thought of all the people who met their death here at the hands of terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. It was almost as if the pictures of twisted metal, smoke and crushed bodies never existed.

As I started to process that fact, my mood shifted again.

I realized these people were doing something special. No matter where they were going or what they were thinking, they were moving — living — horrific memories be damned.

They were doing what we all should be doing, living each day to the full instead of cowering in fear in the corner.

Doing so honors the dead and says F-U to those who destroyed those towers and wish we would stay scared.

It reminded me of who I am and what I’ve been through. I didn’t run from the falling towers or get shot at in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Baghdad. But the struggles with OCD and addiction burned scars into my insides all the same.

I was terrified when I was living my lowest lows. But somewhere along the way, I got better, healed and walked away. I exchanged my self hatred and fear for love of life I never thought possible.

It’s similar to what the survivors of Sept. 11 have gone through.

They reminded me of something important, and while some sadness lingers, I am grateful.

So here’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, the ninth anniversary of the attacks:

I’m getting on a plane and going to New York. CSO Magazine’s Security Standard event is Monday and Tuesday, and I’ll be there doing what I do best: Writing.

A few years ago I would have found a reason to stay home. Getting on a plane on the anniversary of 9-11? No way.

Today, nothing can keep me away.

In a twisted sort of way, I’m going to honor the dead by doing what they can’t do: Live.

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Spitting in the Eye of Hurricane Earl

I used to be terrified of hurricanes. The fear and anxiety in me would latch onto these storms like Crazy Glue. Yet with Hurricane Earl approaching New England, I’m feeling strangely apathetic.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGfKi6kpdTQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Maybe it’s because I don’t live on the coast anymore. In Haverhill, we’re not expecting much from Earl. Some of it is definitely because a lot of the storm-driven fear left me when I brought the OCD under control.

Let’s do a flashback so you can get a better perspective:

I grew up on Revere Beach and I think the Blizzard of 1978 traumatized me for a long, long time. Every summer, when a hurricane would head toward us, I’d start having Blizzard of 78 flashbacks of the ocean surging down the Lynnway, right in front of my house, and the waves leaping over the sea wall with chunks of ice that hit the closest homes like missiles.

The tops were torn off some of the pavilions along the beach.

They stayed that way until a beach restoration project in the early 1990s. In the 1980s the exposed frames served as a reminder of what these ocean storms could do. For a long time, every nor’easter riding up the coast filled me with anxiety.

The TV news doesn’t help. Impending storms are more often than not pitched as the coming apocalypse.

From the late 1970s straight through the 1990s, I’d shake from weather reports mentioning the Blizzard of 1978 with each new storm. As a young adult, I developed a pattern of throwing a blanket over my head and going to sleep.

That’s exactly what I did in 1985 when Hurricane Gloria grazed us and, at age 21 in August 1991, when New England took a direct blow from Hurricane Bob.

My step-sister still likes to bring up how, on the morning Hurricane Bob was coming, I came into her room and yelled at her to wake up, telling her, “This aint no (expletive) Gloria.” That was me in OCD mode. I’m a little embarrassed every time I think about it, but that’s OK. Nobody got hurt.

That rough weather scared the heck out of me as a kid, I think, was perfectly normal. Carrying that same fear and anxiety well into adulthood? Probably not so normal.

In more recent years, I’ve overcome that fear, and I actually like a good storm now and again. I love to drive through the snow. And when Washington D.C. got smacked with 30-plus inches of heavy snow in a blizzard during one of my visits there last February, I gleefully walked the streets as the storm continued to rage.

This morning, I find myself wanting to grab my camera and drive to Cape Cod, which never would have occurred to me a few years ago.

Instead of fearing the danger, I want a piece of it.

I’m not going, though. Erin and the kids would not approve, nor would my friend Bob Connors, an emergency preparedness professional who has been warning his Facebook friends all week not to do stupid things like that. Since he sometimes supplies me with high-end cigars, I really don’t want to make him mad.

To my friends on the South Shore, I hope everything goes OK and that the damage is minimal.

I still respect these storms, and when we’re under the gun I know we have to be prepared.

I’m just not letting the fear suck the life out of me anymore.

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More Bullshit About Mental Illness

Every once in awhile I read something on mental illness that sends my blood boiling. Please indulge me while I rant about one such item.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPfkK7bcyfE&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I recently tripped across a website called HeretoHelp, a project of the BC Partners for Mental Health and Addictions Information. It’s a great resource for people like me who are recovering from mental illness and addictive behavior. It’s chock full of articles from medical professionals and people who suffer with various mental disorders. There’s also a news feed that includes upcoming events like mental illness screenings. I like the no-bullshit approach to the writing and layout.

The item that set me off was a fact sheet on discrimination and stigmas around mental illness. Specifically, it documented instances where employers view mental illness as a weakness; a reason not to hire someone. I’m not suggesting this form of prejudice is limited to something like depression. How many job candidates admit freely to having a heart problem or cancer? Employers discriminate against that, too, especially when they worry about health care costs and potential disability leave. I’m not even going to suggest that those are evil concerns.

But there’s something that strikes me as more insidious about the perception society has of people with mental illness. If you’re depressed, that somehow makes you a weakling who can’t cope with the normal challenges we’re all supposed to know how to deal with.

It’s true that someone in the grip of depression can’t cope with those challenges. I’ve greeted many “normal” situations like a crisis that threatened to bring everything crashing down. When I worked at The Eagle-Tribune, I was so paralyzed with depression and worry that I missed a lot of work. I also spent many a shift so mentally weak that I could barely edit properly. By the end of my time there, I was as close to a nervous breakdown as I’d ever come. I’d come much closer in the two years after I left that job, but I was in a pretty low place.

I still feel badly about leaving half-baked edits for the morning editors.

But here’s where I was lucky: Though I might have been looked at as weak by some of my colleagues, I wasn’t tossed out on my ass. I worried that I would be, but I had a lot of support from bosses like Gretchen Putnam, who I consider a dear friend today. At SearchSecurity.com, I had another nurturing boss in Anne Saita. I was in her employ when the mental illness, depression and addiction really started coming to a head. By some freak of nature, I was able to do some quality work for her during that time, but trust me on this: Had she not been the type of person I could open up to about what I was working through, I almost certainly would have failed at that job. I was that close to the edge.

In my current job, I’ve been Blessed enough to work around open-minded people that I was able to start up this blog without fear of getting blackballed.

So yes, I’ve been lucky. Others have not been as fortunate, however, and their livelihoods have suffered.

The article makes the following point: “Even clinical depression, which has arguably received the most media attention this past decade, is still stigmatized. A 2005 Australian study noted that around one quarter of people felt depression was a sign of personal weakness and would not employ someone with depression. Nearly one third felt depressed people “could snap out of it,” and 42 percent said they would not vote for a politician with depression.”

Considering that one of our greatest presidents suffered from crushing depression, that last sentence is particularly unfortunate.

The article also noted how addiction is also viewed as a weakness of character, something that a “strong” person could stop simply because it’s wrong.

“Addiction, which is a chronic and disabling disorder, is also often thought of as a moral deficiency or lack of willpower, and there is the attitude that people can just decide to stop drinking or using drugs if they want to. The study of the effects of stigma on substance use disorders is still a fairly undeveloped area, but research is revealing that social stigma and attitudes towards addiction are preventing people from seeking help.”

I love the description of addiction being a lack of willpower, because in the bigger picture a lack of willpower never held a person back in society. It suggests that someone who can’t help but eat junk food all day is somehow better than someone who can’t stop shooting heroin or drinking. Hell, smoking cigarettes with a few beers or a few glasses of wine is more accepted than the illegal addictions.

True, something like heroin can take you to a place where you no longer function in society. But my addiction was binge eating. It was perfectly legal. But the state it brought me to was about as bad as a heroin addiction. When all you can do is lay on the couch and isolate yourself from the rest of the world, it doesn’t matter what you’re addicted to, does it? The result is the same.

Maybe expecting society to  stop thinking of the depressed and addicted as weak outcasts is asking too much. It probably is.

All I know is that nothing will change unless more people in recovery work to break the stigma. I know many drug counselors, therapists and 12-Steppers who are doing just that. But we clearly have a long, long way to go before an environment exists where most sufferers can get the help they need and return to the world as productive members of society.

I’ll do my part by continuing to write this blog and sponsoring others who want to turn their lives around.

That’s all I can do, I suppose.

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Summer of 1990

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the summer of 1990. That was a rough summer with a serious streak of depression. And yet thinking about it takes me to a happy place.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0z6ATxLk8Q&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I’ve had to do a lot of digging into my past as part of my therapy and recovery from OCD. Sometimes I see it as a waste of time, since you can’t change the past. But it is important to get closure on the things that haunt you so you can move on. I can’t explain why. I only know from experience that it’s true.

That said, let’s dive back to this summer 20 years ago.

I was getting ready for my second year at North Shore Community College. I was hell-bent on becoming a writer by this point, but it hadn’t yet taken the form of journalism. Instead, I wrote a lot of song lyrics and poems. If you saw them, you would laugh. My favorite was something I penned as my friend Aaron was throwing up all over my basement hideaway because I insisted he get drunk with me. We split a bottle of vodka and he had eaten McDonald’s beforehand. The puke looked like brown confetti.

I sat on the floor as he passed out on my bed, and I wrote about the fear that I had just killed my friend. Twenty years later, we’re both still alive and kicking.

Back then I was binge eating and drinking with plenty of pot mixed in. To control my weight in the face of such behavior, I would run circles in the living room of the basement apartment for one to two hours at a time.

I remember being pretty down on myself because I couldn’t find a girlfriend. For some stupid reason, I thought I needed one.

I spent that summer working in my father’s warehouse and hated every minute of it. I’d put the headphones on and listen to my metal to pass the time, and the summer became all about getting through the days until the college semester started back up.

I tried to escape in movies a lot. Aaron, his then-girlfriend Sharon (a good friend to this day) and I went to the Showcase Cinemas in Revere a lot. One Sunday, we saw a movie called “Flatliners,” about some medical students who engage in an experiment of near-death to get a peek at the afterlife (or something like that). It was a dark movie, and for whatever reason, it sent me into a deep, deep depression.

That same week, Iraq invaded Kuwait and my depression deepened. I had a real fear of current events back then, and everyone was talking about Saddam as the next Hitler and people were mentioning the WW III segment in the Nostradamus book of predictions. This was it, the start of World War III, I thought.

Ironically, it was Sean Marley — a friend who would take his own life six years later — who snapped me out of it. He was on a real anti-government kick by that point, and he convinced me — rightly or wrongly — that the way to cope was to rebel against everything the government stood for. So that’s what I did. One day, in Sean’s car, I torched a dollar bill with my cigarette lighter after someone mentioned it’s illegal to destroy money. I was a real rebel at that point, in my own stupid mind.

I began to read a lot about the 1960s counter-culture movement in the face of the Vietnam War and that gave me inspiration. I started listening to The Doors a lot.

One movie that made me feel better that summer was “Pump Up The Volume” with Christian Slater. To this day, I think that movie has one of the best soundtracks of all time. Hence my choice of today’s mood music. That Soundgarden song was part of the soundtrack. The movie added fuel to the rebellious fire I was stoking.

A lot of life has happened since that summer. Some of it has been good and some of it bad.

But that summer of my 20th birthday was a turning point for me. I can’t describe it perfectly, but that summer was the first time I really, truly started to examine who I was, what I believed and what I wanted to be. It took nearly another 20 years to figure it out, and I guess I’m still figuring it out.

But that uneven summer was a start.

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40: The New 20

A lot of people get depressed on their birthday. Not me. The fact that I turn 40 today is almost a freak of nature.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVXIK1xCRpY&fs=1&hl=en_US]

When I was sick with the Crohn’s Disease as a kid, I lost a lot of blood and developed several side ailments. I’m told by my parents that the doctor’s were going to remove the colon more than once. It didn’t happen. They tell me I was closing in on death more than once. I doubt it was ever that serious. But nevertheless, I’m still here.

When the OCD was burning out of control, I often felt I’d die young. I was never suicidal, but I had a fatalistic view of things. I just assumed I wasn’t long for this world and I didn’t care. I certainly did a lot to slowly help the dying process along. That’s what addicts do. We feed the addiction compulsively knowing full well what the consequences will be.

When I was a prisoner to fear and anxiety, I really didn’t want to live long. I isolated myself. Fortunately, I never had the guts to do anything about it. And like I said, suicide was never an option.

I spent much of my 30s on the couch with a shattered back, and escaped with the TV. I was breathing, but I was also as good as dead some of the time.

I’ve watched others go before me at a young age. Michael. Sean. Even Peter. Lose the young people in your life often enough and you’ll start assuming you’re next.

When you live for yourself and don’t put faith in God, you’re not really living. When it’s all about you, there no room to let all the other life in. So the soul shrivels and implodes. I’ve been there.

I also had a strange fear of current events and was convinced at one point that the world would burn in a nuclear holocaust before I hit 30. That hasn’t happened yet.

So here I am at 40, and it’s almost comical that I’m still here.

I’m more grateful than you could imagine for the turn of events my life has taken in the last five years.

I’ve learned to stop over-thinking and manage the OCD. When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there. But you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.

I notice them now, and I am Blessed far beyond what I probably deserve.

I have a career that I love.

I have the best wife on Earth and two boys that teach me something new every day.

I have many, many friends who have helped me along in more ways than they’ll ever know.

I have my 12-Step program and I’m not giving in to the worst of my addictions. There’s still the coffee and cigars, but the stuff that made my life unmanageable has been brought to heel.

Most importantly, I have God in my life. When you put your faith in Him, there’s a lot less to be afraid of. Aging is one of the first things you stop worrying about.

So here I am at 40. I feel much younger than I did at 30.

I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.

And so I think WILL have a happy birthday.

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One of My Biggest Regrets

Yesterday I saw many old friends from my Eagle-Tribune days at the retirement send-off for legendary editor Cheryl Rock. It was a great afternoon. But one of the people I saw there brought back the powerful memory of one of the worst things I ever did.

I didn’t talk to Sally Gilman. I guess I felt too awkward and nervous. She didn’t say anything to me, either. She probably doesn’t remember me. But what I did to her was awful.

It was sometime in late 2000 or early 2001. I was the assistant editor of the paper’s New Hampshire edition and I reported to a manging editor who made my brand of control-freakism look like a minor, passing cold. I’ll keep his name out because I’m about to say some not-so-nice things about him.

I was warned about him when I was about to take the N.H. job. One editor said I would have to play good cop to this guy’s bad-cop style. That was very good advice that I didn’t take.

Instead, I gave in to my instinct to please my masters — this particular master, anyway. His attitude was that all the reporters were children who needed their ears slapped back on a regular basis, and he expected me to carry out his will. It was against my instincts, because I wanted to be known as a nice guy. But I pushed on. When he told me to take a reporter to the woodshed because that person wasn’t performing as he felt they should be, I did.

Sally was one of those reporters who was always in his sights. It was ridiculous, because she was older and wiser than we were. She had been covering New Hampshire for many years. She lived there. We should have just let her do her thing, because it was good enough.

But he wanted more. If an idea wasn’t something you could turn into a multi-story enterprise package with seven sources per story, then it was crap. Community journalism was a mark of laziness, apparently.

He was always on Sally to come into the North Andover, Mass. office to work more often. She resisted, because New Hampshire was where the action was. She lived there. She once noted that the New Hampshire plates on her car increased her credibility with sources, and she was right.

Still, it became my job to push her to come to the office. It seems absurd in this day and age, where you can easily work from anyplace that has a wi-fi connection. But even back then, e-mailing in a story was simple enough.

But we wanted the stories inputed directly into the newsroom’s Lotus Notes-based system. We felt we shouldn’t have to reformat copy on deadline. Perhaps we were the lazy ones.

One morning, Sally filed an incomplete story. I can’t remember exactly what the problem was. But the boss was pissed off about it, and he told me to give her a kick in the ass. Her husband was having some serious surgery that day and we both knew it. But he ordered and I got on the phone and gave her a talking to.

An hour or so later, Steve Lambert, the top editor, called me to his office. I went in there to find him, my direct boss, and editor Al White. Considering what I had done, they went pretty easy on me. There was no yelling. Steve just asked me what happened and I told him. The N.H. managing editor sat there with a very red face. It was always red, mind you. But it was particularly glaring in Steve’s windowless office.

It turns out that Sally had called to complain. She was really upset. How dare an editor call her early in the morning to give her a hard time about something trivial on a day when her husband’s life was hanging in the balance.

Steve agreed with her, as well he should have. But he was still calm about it. He told me I needed to ease up. He didn’t want reporters to see me as the newsroom ass-clown. I said I’d keep that in mind and left his office, feeling like I had just been simultaneously stabbed in the side of the head and slammed in the gut with a brick.

Ten-plus years later, the way I treated her is one of my biggest regrets.

Some could try to absolve me of fault because I was carrying out orders. But the truth is that I could have stood up to this managing editor and told him that was not the day to push this poor woman.

I could have been the good cop, smoothing out the rough feelings reporters were having over his management style. It would have been insubordination on my part, but it would have been the right thing to do. Instead, I was just another bad cop, no better than he was.

I badly wanted to tell Sally I was sorry yesterday. But I couldn’t get up the courage to approach her.

I’m going to find her phone number and let her know how sorry I am.

One more note about that managing editor: I eventually reached my breaking point with him and asked for a transfer. Al sent me back to the night editor’s chair. Al was always a hard guy to read, but I think he knew I was a pile of rubble at that point, so I thank him for giving me that second chance.

One night after I returned to that position, I was asked to help the New Hampshire desk process election results from the various towns we covered. Around 4 a.m., the managing editor started to go into a diabetic shock. Another reporter called his wife and I hit the streets in search of a store that was open so I could get him some orange juice.

He later recovered enough to drive home. I stuck around and finished his work. It wasn’t hard, because I’d been left to finish his work many times.

I’m not proud of this, but there were moments after that where I would think about that orange juice I got him and regretted doing so. Maybe, I thought in my delusional mind, I could have saved reporters a lot of future suffering. Fortunately, I’m not the kind of guy who would do such a thing. If someone’s life is in danger, you help them. Pure and simple. That I had those thoughts still fills me with shame.

He’s still in the business, but I have no interest in connecting with him. The feeling is mutual, I’m sure.

In hindsight, that incident with Sally was a classic case of OCD run wild. Back then the condition hadn’t yet been diagnosed, but it was there, eating away at my brain, making me do bad things.

I don’t think I can ever apologize enough for some of the things I did in that job.

I was really coming undone at that point, but I hadn’t yet hit the series of bottoms I had to reach before I realized I needed help.

Today, the lessons are clear to me:

–Treat everyone as you wish to be treated yourself because that’s what God wants and it’s right.

–People who report to you will always do more for you if you skip the hard-ass bit and be more caring and nurturing.

–Finally, being a people-pleaser is just plain stupid, whether it’s a family member, a friend or a boss. People-Pleasing never works. You can never make everyone happy.

When you try, you do really stupid things.

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The Ballad of Joe Zippo

Back at Salem State College there was a friend I would smoke cigarettes with outside the commuter cafeteria. We’d talk about everything from politics to Nirvana, his favorite band at the time. This was back when Kurt Cobain was still alive.

He eventually picked up a guitar and teamed up with my friend and fellow journalist Greg Walsh, forming the band Zippo Raid.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/nnyVCQrFN7Q

I lost touch with him after college, but I’m thinking of him lately. Joe Kelly, affectionately known as Joe Zippo, died in his sleep earlier this month.

I feel awful for his friends and family. One of my close friends, Mike Trans, told me he was planning to go hunting with him soon.

As I read up on what Joe was doing in all the years since Salem State, it’s clear that he lived his life full throttle and touched many, many people.

I’m breaking from my usual tales of mental illness and addiction to honor his memory and shine a spotlight on some folks who are doing the same.

Another Salem State classmate, Stu Ginsburg, is planning some benefit shows along with other folks. Here’s the Facebook page for one such event.

When life gets me down, I think of folks like Joe, who plow through life’s challenges and show others how to live. That’s one way I find the strength to forge ahead.

The full obituary is below. Thanks, Joe, for being my friend in college, and for spreading rays of sunshine across a lot of other lives.

Joseph S. Kelley, Jr. (he was known around Boston as Joe Zippo / played in bands like Black Barbie; Zippo Raid; The Jonee Earthquake Band; Joe Zippo & the Raiders; etc)

January 10, 1970 – August 8, 2010

STEWARTSTOWN, NH – Mr. Joseph S. Kelley, Jr., 40, of Stewartstown, NH, passed away unexpectedly on Sunday, August 8, 2010, at his home.

Born on January 10, 1970, in Malden, Mass., Joe was the son of Joseph Kelley, Sr. and Marie (Valley) Kelley. Joe was a graduate of Malden High School, and he attended college at Salem State in Massachusetts. He was a sponge for knowledge and loved being in school.

Joe was a person who loved to help people and that drove him into the field of healthcare. For many years, he served as an EMT in Salem, Mass., and he was in the process of becoming licensed as an EMT in New Hampshire. For a time he also worked as a dialysis technician for the Fresenius company in Mass.

He also loved nature and to be outdoors, and he enjoyed hunting and just walking in the woods whenever he could. He also adored his two nieces who will miss him dearly. Joe also was a man of deep faith, and loved his church.

Joe is survived by his parents, Joseph, Sr. and Marie Kelly of Stewartstown, NH; his sister, Jennifer Doucet and husband David of Barton, Vt.; his godfather and uncle, William Kelley of Woburn, Mass.; his godmother, Patricia Piazza of Florida; his two special nieces, Rebecca and Annabelle Doucet; as well as numerous aunts and uncles and cousins, all of whom he loved.

There are no calling hours. A memorial Mass will be held on Friday, August 13, 2010, at 11 a.m. at St. Brendan’s Catholic Church in Colebrook with The Rev. Craig Cheney as celebrant.

Expressions of sympathy in Joe’s memory may be made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 501 St. Jude Place, Memphis, TN 38105.

Condolences may be offered to the family on-line by going to www.jenkinsnewman.com.

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Bully’s Remorse

There was a kid in high school everyone used to pick on. He had a monotone voice and was frail. Kids were terrible to him, including me.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5Qy0zLjQy3czoj0yZ7DFkk]

For you to understand what I’m about to get into, a review of the 12 Steps of Recovery are in order, with special emphasis on 8 and 9:

1. We admitted we were powerless over [insert addiction. Here’s mine]—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. [Here’s what I’ve come to believe]

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

So I’ve been thinking about my former classmate a lot these days. I haven’t seen or heard from him since the day we graduated 23 years ago. I often wonder where he is, what he’s doing and if he’s ok.

He was the kid everyone made fun of — brutally. And I was probably one of the biggest offenders for the first two and a half years of high school. On the surface he took our taunts with an expressionless face. How he reacted out of view I can only imagine.

There were a lot of bullies at Northeast Metro Tech (it used to be “Vocational School” and we all called it the Voke) and I was made fun of a lot. I was picked on for being fat, for my lack of skill in sports and other things real or imagined.

So what did I do after being picked on? I turned around, found the kids who were weaker than me and attacked them verbally and physically. Mostly verbal, but I remember throwing punches on occasion. Some of it was the reaction to getting picked on. Most of it was from the growing chip on my shoulder over my brother’s death and other unpleasantness at 22 Lynnway in Revere.

By junior year, I had lost a lot of weight and grown my hair long. I was deeply into metal music by then and I started to make friends among some of the so-called metalheads. He had also latched onto metal as a refuge from his pain (he was also pretty religious), and we started to relate over music.

Junior and senior year I made a big effort to be nicer to him, and in the mornings before classes began I would hang out with him. Or, I should say, I let him follow me around. I was still a jerk but was trying to be nice because I was under the influence of another brother, Sean Marley.

So why have I been thinking about him? Because I don’t feel like I did enough back then to set things right. It’s one of my big regrets.

At our 20-year high school reunion in 2009, someone mentioned seeing him at a bus stop going to work.

Sometime soon I’m going to track him down. I have a couple leads on his current whereabouts.

I simply want to say I’m sorry. Someone once suggested I want to make amends to make myself feel better; that I want everyone to see how cool I am doing things like this and writing about it. Maybe there’s some truth to that — the first part anyway. But it’s about more than that. I want to get to know the dude again, if he’s up for it.

If I get to make my amends, you won’t be reading about it here. Righting a wrong will be good enough for me.

bullies

 

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The Smoking Room

In the early 1990s, as my addictions and OCD started taking on a life of their own, there was a place I could escape to and feel normal for a few hours. This is the story of the smoking room at North Shore Community College (NSCC).

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YyDg9tT0Vw&fs=1&hl=en_US]

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. The Faith Between Us

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.

The floors are a lot more worn out now.

The smoking room no longer exists.

But it lives on in a happier side of my mind.