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Joey Ramone Fought The OCD Stigma And More

Joey Ramone, legendary vocalist for one of my favorite punk bands, died on this day in 2001, but he has remained an inspiration to me for many reasons.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/Tub9e6uxqu8

For one thing, he suffered from OCD and was hospitalized for it on at least one occasion. Given the subject of this blog, that would seem reason enough to celebrate the man. But there was more to the man that I identified with. Besides, if you do a little Google research you’ll find that a lot of famous people have OCD, including Howie Mandel and Harrison Ford.

The think what most inspired me was that someone so damn ugly could get up there and be a rock star. I’ve always considered myself ugly. I don’t really mind, and this isn’t an invitation for people to say, “Oh, no you’re not.” To me, it’s simple fact, and something I’m admittedly a little proud of. Being a pretty boy was never something I aspired to.

Joey Ramone reveled in his ugliness with that glowering stage presence. He talked funny (he was from Queens, after all) and his eyes were almost always hidden behind a pair of shades. 

I dare say, there was something absolutely beautiful about the man.

When someone thinks they’re doomed to a less than wonderful life because they have a mental illness or physical defect, just look at what Ramone did. Then you can try to tell me you can’t soar above the things that seem like limitations.

A few items that might interest you:

–One of the many reasons I fell in love with my wife was that  back in our college days, I would sometimes see her in the car behind me on the way home, head bopping back and forth. One time, the day after seeing this, I asked her what she was listening to. The Ramones, she told me.

–The night of my senior prom, I skipped the event (I couldn’t find a date anyway) and tried to sneak into a Ramones concert at The Channel. I never did make it in, but I don’t regret trying.

–Joey was said to have come from a dysfunctional family. It’s no accident that I chose “We’re a Happy Family” as the mood music for my post about families and drama.

–Joey fought from the lymphoma that ultimately killed him for much longer than most people knew. Few knew because he didn’t whine about it. He kept going until he couldn’t anymore. He was reportedly listening to the song “In a Little While” by U2 when he died. According to the Wikipedia page on Joey Ramone, “This was during U2’s Elevation Tour, and from that point on during shows Bono would introduce the song as a tune that was originally about a lovestruck hangover but that Joey turned it into a gospel song.”

Back in my Revere days, I would play the Ramones repeatedly as I chain-smoked in the storage room under the concrete patio. That’s a happy memory from a not-always-happy period of my life.

Happy Birthday, Joey.

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22 Years Ago: The Day Kurt Cobain Died

I remember exactly where I was 22 years ago this week, when I saw the news flash about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I was lying in bed, depressed and reclusive because of frequent fear.

Mood music: 

I was living in Lynnfield, Mass., at the time. I had a room in the basement, just like I had in Revere. But this space was much smaller — a jail cell with a nice blue carpet. But I did have my own bathroom, which I never cleaned.

Erin and I had been going out for less than a year, and I was waiting for her to come by after she finished work. I had been sleeping after a food and smoking binge and I still had a few hours to kill, so I turned on MTV, which still played music videos at the time.

There was MTV news anchor Kurt Loder and Rolling Stones editor David Fricke, holding court like Walter Cronkite following JFK’s assassination in 1963. Fricke expressed concern that depressed teens who listen to Nirvana might view suicide as the heroic thing to do; the only answer. “This is about your kids. You need to talk to them,” he said.

Erin arrived, we expressed our mutual shock, then we went out to dinner.

Though I was given to depression at that point, it wasn’t the suicidal kind, and would never become that. I’ve always been the type to hide in a room for long stretches, staring blankly at a TV screen, when depressed. Suicide was something I never really thought about at that point. It was an alien concept.

Then, a couple months later, a close friend attempted suicide. Two years later, he tried again and succeeded. In the 15 years since then, I’ve worked hard to gain the proper perspective of such things.

When Cobain died, I assumed he went straight to hell. I never gave it a second thought. Suicide is one of the unacceptable sins, like murder, the kind that gets you sent to the fire pit.

Today, I’m not so sure.

Kurt Cobain was unprepared for the crazy fame and publicity that came his way. He dove into heroin for solace. You could say the whole thing literally scared him to death.

Fortunately, he left behind a strong body of work.

When I listen to Nirvana, I don’t think of Kurt Cobain stuffing the tip of a rifle up his nose and pulling the trigger.

I think of how anxiety, fear and depression are universal things, how the sufferer is never, ever truly alone, and how we never have to be beaten.

I don’t need drugs to feel like Sunday morning is every day, though two anti-depressant prescriptions do help.

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When We Err, We Learn. When They Err, They’re Idiots

A good friend from the security industry, Eric Cowperthwaite, recently caused some debate with a blog post about security breach victims getting demonized for failing to prevent break-ins. Other industry friends disagreed.

The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.

Mood music:

Let’s start with Cowperthawaite’s key point:

In the information security community there is a tendency to blame the victim first, rather than the criminal. And as soon as that starts to work, much of the community begins to pile on like sharks smelling blood in the water.

I’m not even going to name all the times this has happened and give examples. We all know about the retail company, the coffee company, the software company …. the list goes on and on …. that didn’t have perfect security, got victimized by a criminal, and we tore into them for “the thing they didn’t do.” This is so wrong, I don’t know where to start.

Boris Sverdlik and George V. Hulme see things differently. Says Sverdlik:

Most orgs aren’t in the business of security, they are in the business to make money. If you believe most companies do their darnedest to protect their customers then you are living in some other world I wish I could be a part of. The truth is most companies don’t give a shit about security until they get popped and when they do they will do the bare minimum to keep appearances up because nobody holds them liable. My job as a security professional is to reduce the risk to an organization and if I can’t 100 percent say that I’ve done my best I deserve to be blamed.

Hulme adds:

I don’t think an organization like Target that had a puke IT culture and didn’t bother to have a CISO or a point person on consumer privacy gets a pass on anything. And that company DEMANDED to scan Driver’s Licenses to buy things like Nicorette gum. As I was a customer at Target for years, that’s the only justification I need for that opinion.

The discussion went back and forth several more times on Facebook, but I think those capture the prime points.

Once again, what’s true in the security industry is true in the rest of the world. Is how we treat people who fail right?

We have a tendency to blame the victims. It’s not a good practice in the first place, but what’s worse is that it’s hypocritical. We all make mistakes and get things wrong. When it happens to us, it’s a learning experience. When it happens to someone else, they’re idiots.

That said, Sverdlik and Hulme are right to point out that companies tend to not give a shit about security until they get hosed. To that end, ridicule is justified.

But I’ll tell you what matters to me: how honest the victim is.

When a retailer is the victim, its customers are victims too. When the retailer tries to gloss over its culpability, the pile-on is deserved. Not because it suffered a breach in the first place, but because it wasn’t honest about what it learned and what it were doing about it.

We need more compassion, but we need accountability and consequences, too.

swift kick in the balls

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We Need Our Critics

A friend sent me a graphic that hits home, given that one of the realities of being a writer is that people will regularly disagree with you.

Mood music:

The Disagreement Pyramid, a play on the Food Pyramid, puts the most constructive criticism at the top of the pyramid, illustrating its rarity. The most common type of comments fall to the the bottom of the pyramid — the destructive, useless comments. Created by Loudacris, the pyramid is based on an article by Paul Graham.

disagreement hierarchy

To make sense of this masterpiece, I turned to Dave Marcus — a friend from the security industry who tends to disagree with more than half of what I write in this blog.

I’ve always viewed my friendship with Dave as an example of how you can disagree and debate in gentlemanly fashion. We don’t call each other names or accuse each other of attacks, except for when we’re kidding around. But it’s not always easy. Dave once condemned one of my posts as “escapism and blame.”

More recently, he expressed frustration with my posts about burnout in our industry and suggested I was simply projecting my issues onto everyone else.

So I asked him which category we fall under on this Disagreement Pyramid.

“All of them, actually,” he said.

People often hate to be criticized. We like to think we’re special and that our words are gold. But, really, we’re usually expressing ourselves in a moment of time — which means we don’t always have all the necessary evidence at the time we’re making an argument.

I’m certainly guilty of that, though not as much as Dave might think.

That’s why we writers need our critics: They keep us honest and make us better.

I’m less likely to listen to people who use the tactics at the bottom of the pyramid, but I’ll always have an ear for folks like Dave.

And when we’re old men and I’m wearing a hearing aid from all those years of loud music, I’ll simply switch it off when I think he’s going too far.

I’d like to think he’d do the same to me.

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Binge Eating, Heroin Overdoses and Suicide

My first full-time reporting gig was for The Stoneham Sun newspaper, part of what was then Community Newspaper Company. (It’s now Gatehouse Media.) It was a fun job, giving me a priceless education in local politics, public safety and criminal court proceedings. But in some ways, it was the darkest year of my 20s.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/1e3m_T-NMOs

It was a year of vicious binge eating, 80-hour workweeks for little money, depression, anxiety and the suicide of my best friend, who slowly fell into madness while I was too busy working to pay attention.

I remember feeling relieved on Fridays because it was the start of the weekend and depressed as hell on Sunday mornings because it meant I’d soon be diving back into late nights of selectmen meetings, ambulance chasing and writing deadlines. I comforted myself with multiple daily visits to the McDonald’s drive-through and the various gas stations along my driving routes where I could tank up on candy bars and Hostess products.

I wanted to show everyone how badass my work ethic was, and I never seemed to leave the newsroom, except for my forays into Stoneham to collect police and fire logs and find people to interview for stories important and insignificant.

I gained about 40 pounds in that one year alone.

That summer, my friend wound up in the mental hospital. I visited him once or twice, then got wrapped up in my work again. Through much of that year I took Sunday-morning walks with him and another friend. But I was so anxious over the next story that my head wasn’t really there. I usually walked a few steps behind them, lost in thought.

He got out of the hospital but never shook his depression. I knew it was there but figured it would pass. That November, he proved me wrong.

I only took a few days off before returning to work. My first assignment upon returning was to get to the bottom of a heroin death. It took a few years for police to figure out that the overdose was part of a larger plot by some thugs to silence a few kids who knew too much about their gun-running enterprise. They gave one boy a fatal overdose of smack and later murdered a girl whose remains eluded the authorities for years.

At the time, though, all I knew was that a seemingly all-American boy with everything going for him was dead. He wasn’t the type to try heroin. I interviewed his family and, with my friend’s suicide still eating at me, I decided to write about what I was feeling. Specifically, I tried to answer the question: Why do good people step down dark and deadly avenues? An editor wanted to publish it. I said OK. I put things in that column that never should have been revealed. It was deeply personal stuff that wounded a family already mired in grief. They won’t speak to me to this day. I don’t blame them.

By year’s end, I had proposed to Erin and by January 1997, I was on to a new post covering Lynn, Mass. But it would be another couple years before I pulled myself from the mental abyss. By the time that happened, I was 280 pounds.

It took another 15 years to fully make peace with that part of my past.

Lettin___It_Out___Ink_by_EddieTheYeti

“Lettin’ it Out,” by Eddie Mize. Go to his website to see more.

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When Work Becomes Everything, This Happens

As someone who takes work very seriously, an article on LinkedIn by Jeff Haden really hit home. The man in his story had a life in which the personal and professional were so tightly wound that he lost all hope when the business ran into trouble.

For me, family and friends come first, and I know I’d have all the support in the world if I ever ran into trouble on the business side. But there was a time when all my self-worth was tied to work. That’s not good when you’re in an unstable industry like newspaper publishing.

This article captures the lesson I ultimately learned, with one caveat:  I never found myself in a situation as severe as what this unfortunate soul encountered.

 

“Why You Need to Go Home Early Today“

By Jeff Haden, ghostwriter, Speaker Inc., magazine columnist

woman crouched in depression

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Knowing You’re a Punk is the First Step in the Cure

I was an absolute punk this morning. I was incensed over tech problems, dropping F-bombs and punching the desk with my fist.

Mood music:

It’s a typical problem for someone with clinical OCD. You want to control everything, though you know it’s impossible.

In mid-rage, I learned a friend had just lost a sibling.

Rage turned to guilt.

I’m no special case. We all lose our patience from time to time and act like spoiled brats. More often than not, it’s over little things, like missing a favorite TV show or getting stuck in traffic. It’s much easier to blow up than to be stoic when things don’t go our way.

The news I received this morning in the middle of my tantrum just goes to show that someone else always has it worse. I know what it’s like to lose a sibling, and I truly feel for my friend and pray for his family. I needed a hard slap of perspective this morning, but I wish the lesson came from someplace else.

Appreciate what you have. Hug those around you, and don’t sweat the little things. If you fail at any of these, just try again.

I’ll work at following my own advice.

Perspective-is-everything

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How Barnaby Jack Lived Is More Important Than How He Died

Last summer, my industry was wounded by the death of famed hacker Barnaby Jack. In January, we learned that he died of an overdose, including a mix of heroin, cocaine and prescription drugs.

People made a lot of stupid comments back then, especially those responding to The Register‘s article. One jackass called him a loser who wouldn’t be missed.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/0LFVQpDKHk4

I didn’t know Barnaby as well as some of my infosec friends did, but I always enjoyed talking to him. He was friendly, fun and brilliant. I was a huge fan of his work, and when I think of the important business he had before him, I want to punch the idiot who called him a loser. As for whether he is missed, I know people who were pretty close to him who are still devastated.

I mention all this to set you up for an article from Metro scribe Donna Chisholm. Unlike the sensationalized crap written in January, this article does him justice.

Oh, it doesn’t skate around the dark stuff. Chisholm writes:

On a Thursday afternoon, alone in bed in his comfortable top-floor apartment, opposite The Ritz in San Francisco’s Nob Hill, Barnes died of an accidental overdose of heroin, cocaine and prescription medicines.

The scope of the tragedy is laid bare. But the balance of the article focuses on what’s really important: how he lived.

She writes of the 2010 Black Hat presentation that sent his star soaring:

He became world famous in 2010 when, at the annual Black Hat convention on computer security at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas — despite its name, it’s where the white hats gather — he showed, with all the flair of a Vegas magician, how he could remotely hack into an ATM. Bank notes flew all over the stage, his peers cheered, and Barnes stood at the podium and nearly pissed himself laughing.

She writes about his shift from ATM hacking to exploiting weaknesses in heart pacemakers and insulin pumps. “As he did with the ATMs, he first bought the devices and took them apart to see how they worked, and talked to patients about how they used them,” Chisholm explains.

Was his partying the result of a hidden pain, a hole in his soul? Perhaps. But we all have those holes. We’re all broken in some fashion. Some of us try to numb the pain with drugs. Others turn to excessive spending and binge eating. Some find the balance needed to control temptations. Some don’t.

That’s what being human is about: facing struggle after struggle, making mistakes and, hopefully, overcoming obstacles.

Barnes had his struggles, to be sure. But it didn’t stop him from doing the kind of work that will benefit countless people for generations to come.

Others will build on his work. What he started can’t be stopped. Thank God for that.

Barnaby Jack lived well. He was a blessing to those around him and a master at his craft.

That matters far more than how he died.

Barnaby Jack

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32 Years Ago Today…

On March 19, 1982, the world lost one of its greatest musicians in a plane crash: Randy Rhoads.

Mood music:

The songwriting and guitar playing he did on Ozzy Osbourne’s first two solo albums — “Blizzard of Oz” and “Diary of a Madman” — is required listening for anyone who is serious about playing the instrument.

He was also something rare in Rock ‘n Roll: a humble man who was ready to give up his success and fame in favor of earning a degree in classical guitar at UCLA.

The man’s goodness as a human being and prowess as a musician has been a big influence on me. Make no mistake about that. Whenever I need the inspiration to do my absolute best — whatever the task — I put on one of those albums. The mental sluggishness leaves me every time.

Rest in peace, beautiful soul.

 Randy Rhoads

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So Sorry, I Forgot You Know Everything

In the course of writing this blog, I get a lot of flack from some people. That’s fine, because I know I’m not always right. But there’s a certain class of people who get under my skin: those who claim to have all the answers.

Mood music:

There’s the reader who bristles whenever I write about medication for depression, OCD and other disorders of the brain. She knows the answer to just about any mental disorder, you see. It’s simple: Adopt a gluten-free diet.

There’s the fitness fanatic who thinks people talking about their weaknesses are some lower form of life. Just lift weights and adopt a paleo diet. All else is the stuff of someone who cries a lot and makes excuses for everything.

While I respect their opinions and am thrilled they found something that works for them, their one-size-fits-all school of thought is flawed.

Sure, there are plenty of cases where medication is the wrong answer. People are misdiagnosed all the time, and they end up on meds that make things worse. But there are also many others who turned to medicine when all else proved inadequate. Like me. There’s a science to mental disorder, and the meds are designed to address specific problems. A gluten-free diet may help a few people. But a universal treatment? Smoke another one.

And though a lot of people get by just fine without discussing their weaknesses, others need to talk in order to address the things that hold them back.

I will continue to discuss my challenges. Not because I want sympathy, but because doing so leads me down more useful, effective avenues. Also, the vast majority of feedback tells me it helps other people do the same.

Those who don’t agree can keep telling me so. Or they can go read something else.

Middle Finger Mushroom Cloud