You Are NOT Making Memories. You Are Making Axe-Murderers.

And that's why therapy. Right there.

     The holiday season. It's upon us. And I say that while holding two equal yet utterly differing points of view in my head: 

     1) Yay holidays! Thanksgiving and Christmas and food and parties and friends and family and claymation TV specials about reindeer and snowmen, and holiday music and eggnog spiked with whiskey just like Grandpa used to make! 

     2) Fuck.

     Holidays weren't battlegrounds when I was a kid. Or at least if they were, I was blissfully ignorant of it. I don't ever remember my family arguing over religious observations versus secular ritual. No disagreements about commercialism taking over everything, or how we had to respect everybody's holiday traditions, or fist-fights about whether it should be called a "Christmas" tree or a "Holiday" tree. (Which, for the record: in my house it's a Christmas tree. Not because I'm working hard to "keep Christ in Christmas," but because it's ALWAYS been called a Christmas tree in my family. Also I've checked, and Christ isn't actually IN my Christmas tree, because if he was it wouldn't BE a Christmas tree, it would be a Jesus tree, and I would charge people to come into my house and watch me cut down the Jesus tree only to watch it rise again. How awesomeness would THAT be?)

     Do you see the screaming child? Do you see the benevolently smiling Santa having to physically restrain the screaming child, so that he does not jump off the lap of the elderly, brightly dressed STRANGER that his parents just plopped him down on? (I have no actual memory of this event, and it's pretty obvious from the look on my face that I am aggressively trying to suppress it, even as it's happening. I really hope I pissed in his lap.) Why as adults do we work so hard to make moments, instead of just letting them happen?

     The holidays are a stress category all by themselves. And I know this. Because I watch Family Feud. This year promises to be more than the usual stress, and that's largely (but not entirely) because I went and fucked things up in my own home, and now there's that on top of holidays, and I don't know if there's enough booze in the universe to make it even a little bit functional, but I absolutely intend to find out. What I'm going to TRY and do is just let the holidays happen, and not try to pretend that everything is all holly wreaths and roast duck and candy canes up my ass. If my daughter doesn't want to sit on a jolly fat man's lap (she's ten now, she fucking better not want that), then I'm not going to make her. And if she wants to be a little sad, or a lot, because of how things are this year, then I'm going to let her. That's not a Burl Ives song, but it's honest. (If you don't know who Burl Ives is, you're too young for this blog. You can only keep reading if you promise to Google him, but I'm warning you now, he's dead. Also, his music was kind of sappy. Hence the reference. This shit all makes sense in my head.)

     I hope you have an awesome couple of months just letting shit happen. Instead of - you know - making shit up.

     See what I did there?

     LB

     

     

13 Things You Don't Know About Me

Goddammit.

     Yesterday a friend of mine posted on her Facebook status something she called "7 Things You Don't Know About Me." Now, my friend is funny, and as I read through that post I laughed, and then I snorted, and then I had to stop drinking my mojito because I was about to shoot it out my nose. And so, when I finished reading her post, I hit the "like" button. My way of saying, "Well played. Damn near shot mojito out of my nose."

     What I DIDN'T know is that I had unwittingly fallen into one of those oh-so-insidious Facebook traps, where if you hit "like" on it you're then obligated to continue it, like a chain-letter from Jesus or a Ouija board threat. Now I don't put any stock in that kind of thing, because I'm not superstitious, but I also know that if there is such a thing as luck in the universe then I have the excessively shitty kind, and if something actually DID happen - like, say, an asteroid collided with the earth and wiped out humanity, or God got bored and decided to rapture all the church folk today at 5:52pm CST, or we actually had a zombie apocalypse - then I worry that somebody, or a lot of somebodies, would go, Hang on. Did Larry continue that Facebook game about Things You Don't Know About Me? He didn't? THEN WHY THE FUCK DID HE HIT THE "LIKE" BUTTON?!? And then all of a sudden, I'm THAT guy. The one who caused giant asteroids to collide with earth on the same day as the rapture and the zombie apocalypse. Because I didn't continue a stupid thing on Facebook that I didn't even know was a thing. 

     So fuck that. Here are 13 Things You Don't Know About Me:

     1. When I was 15 I fired a gun in the house on accident, because I was just that stupid. The only casualty was a bathroom window. And I may or may not have shit my pants.

     2. I have battled my entire life with a feeling of helplessness, or lack of control. 

     3. I would rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue than eat brussel sprouts. 

     4. I have never smoked pot, and probably need to knock that off my bucket list at some point.

     5. I am currently in psychotherapy. (The professional kind, not the kind where you get blind drunk and bare your heart to a bartender, though I've probably done that a few times also.)

     6. Clowns scare the shit out of me. If you ever try and scare me by dressing up as a clown, I'm pretty confident when I say you're gonna die. I promise to feel bad about it. Eventually.

     7. I regret that there are girls I knew in high school that I really liked, but I didn't have the guts to ask out on a date. 

     8. The first time another kid was mean to my kid, I actually thought through the ramifications of punching a child in the throat. 

     9. I man-scape. Because I care.

   10. My favorite snack as a kid (and one we could actually afford) was Miracle Whip on white bread. Today the thought of Miracle Whip makes me violently ill. 

   11. Two years ago at Christmas I got an ear and nose hair trimmer as a gag gift. And now I use that fucking thing all the time. 

   12. I'm a damn good kisser.

   13. IF the world ends via asteroids, rapture or zombies, it will not be my fault. Because I played your stupid game, Facebook. 

     Seriously, though. If you tell me that something bad will happen if I don't share your Jesus post, I probably am coming to find you. And punch you in the throat. 

     LB

     

     

Zombies Wouldn't Want My Brain

     I had lunch today with a really good friend. And we were talking about some pretty important, pretty serious shit. And then our server brought our food to the table. And it was all downhill from there, because this is exactly what happened in my brain:

     Server: Here's your chimichanga.

     

     My Brain: Chimichanga. Chimi-changa. Sounds like an aboriginal tribe somewhere deep in the Amazon rain forest, living off grubs and howler monkeys. Oh shit, now I'm thinking about eating people. That reminds me of Soylent Green, that movie with Charlton Heston set in 2022 (which is actually not that far off), the one where he figures out that the only company producing food anymore is making it out of people. Why the fuck am I thinking about eating people? No way can I eat this chimichanga now. I am literally thinking about an obscure, totally made up Amazonian rain forest culture that is walking, hand in hand, into a giant meat grinder, and ohholyshit wasn't that a scene from Pink Floyd's The Wall, where all the school kids with piggy faces or something were literally marching into a huge meat grinder, and kiddie-sausage was coming out the bottom? I so need them to take this plate away right now. I need nachos. And maybe tequila. Anything that doesn't sound like I'm about to eat something that makes me a cannibal. Or a zombie. SHUTTHEFUCKUP, brain! Seriously!

     My Friend: How's the chimichanga?

     Me: It's people. 

     My Friend: What?

     Me: It's great.

     THIS is why, if you ever go out to lunch with me, you should be okay with booze. Because otherwise, a serious conversation about really important matters concerning family and friendship and spirituality is likely to wind up being a one-sided diatribe about not-real aborigines and rock 'n roll and food made out of people. And maybe zombies.

This Isn't A Feel-Good Post. Seriously.

Holy shit, y'all. Being depressed sucks.

     I spend way too much time in my own head. A psychologist would likely point out that this behavior is a coping mechanism I developed in childhood, probably even before my father killed himself. Things are so much better in my head. For one thing, I’m a better person in there. In my head I’m not short-tempered. I’m not envious of other people. I don’t lie. I have confidence and ambition. Sometimes I’m still a superhero in my own head, but no longer the spandex-wearing type; more the middle-aged superhero who wears jeans and sneakers, and takes the trash out, but can still pick up a car and throw it the length of a football field. Or maybe fly.

     I’m sure it’s not healthy, all this time I spend in my head. Real life becomes more difficult. Like the reality of, say, getting out of bed. Or doing the most normal, mundane things, like helping your daughter with her homework, or taking the car to get serviced, or talking to another human being. My whole life I’ve been labeled an extrovert, and I suppose that’s mostly true, except for the whole part where there are days and days that I’m scared to walk out the front door. Or answer the phone. I’m not an extrovert on those days. I’m not a get shit done guy on those days, or the laugh-a-minute guy who's always got at least three witty ripostes in his back pocket. On those days, I don't eat. Or sleep. On those days I’m the guy who wears a hoodie, with the hood pulled over his head. In the house. On those days I’m the guy who stares out the window for a really long time before saying, Nope. Fuck that. It’s too big out there. On those days I begin to ask myself just how much like my old man I really am.

     I’m having one of those days.

     To give you some context of how stupefying and train-stopping this shit can be, I will tell you that, since I wrote that previous sentence, I have been sitting here, staring at it, and doing nothing else, for over forty minutes. That is completely not normal, especially for a guy who is easily distracted by shiny things. (I just spent the last ten minutes staring at the word "things," until I swear it started to crawl around on the screen, but maybe that was just my eyes, or maybe it's this new laptop that I just bought yesterday and it has some strange word-crawling feature I activated on accident, and now I'm gonna have to chase all my words down and get them back where they belong, or maybe the fucking thing is haunted, which at this point I'd be okay with because at least I'd have to think about something, like the fact that my laptop is possessed, and I don't even know a real priest. Shit.)

     Days like this I really wish the universe would give you a time-out. A 24 hour free pass on life. Keep your hoodie on, watch movies that distract you, if only for a while, don't answer the door or the phone, existence can wait. Yes, you're still going to have to deal with the mess you've made - just not today. That's a really inviting proposition, and also a really scary one. Because I can see stretching one free day into two, into ten, into a month... you get my drift. Past a certain point, you'd become a snake eating its own tail. Which would suck, especially if snake doesn't taste like chicken, as I have been told my entire life.

     So, this is me being honest about where I am today. I'm not asking you to fix it. But if you're also having one of those days, they hey, you got company. 

     And I got an extra hoodie.

     

     

      

Thanks And Sh*t

Thanks, you guys.

     I started this blog a little over three weeks ago, because I needed a space where I could be me. Free of cultural restraints and concerns, free of social politeness, a place where I can say what I actually goddamn think without having to run it through a dozen mental filters to figure out whose feelings I'm going to hurt. I must not be hurting a lot of feelings on this blog, because in three weeks I'm approaching 1000 page views. Now, that's not a shit-ton. That's not a stop-the-presses moment. But it matters to me, because what I'm taking away from almost 1000 page views in less than a month is that I should keep on truckin' with this thing.

     So I'm going to. Because you've made me believe that I can, and that I should. And I really appreciate that. I've recently done some things to blow my life up, and not in a good way. I'm trying to grow the balls to start talking about them here, because my current story (as all of our current stories are) is inevitably tied-up with my history, some of which I've already written about. I'm not trying to generate sympathy or compassion here; I'm just telling stories, mostly true and, I hope, mostly funny, even if they're funny in an ohmygodthatissofuckingtragicwhyamilaughing kind of way.

     If you think this shit is funny, or thought-provoking, or anything at all, I hope you'll share it with other people, maybe people I don't know but you do. And I hope you'll start leaving some comments, because your feedback and your stories are just as important. Your shit matters.

     Anyway, thanks. Really. And I'll see you again real soon.

     LB

I Had To Learn Martial Arts Because My Mother Dressed Me Like This

Holy shit. 'Nuff said.

Thinking and Sh*t

So, pretty much. Yeah.

     I've been doing a lot of thinking, you guys. About thinking. And what I think is, I haven't been doing enough of it.

     Let's talk about what I don't mean when I talk about thinking. I do not mean the process you go through in deciding whether to cook chicken for dinner, or throw the family in the mini-van (that you would secretly like to paint with flames on the side, but can't) and go get burgers. I do not mean your musings over whether or not Alien vs Predator was cinematic genius, or the worst piece of celluloid shit to hit the theater since Friday The 13th Part 9: Jason Kills The Cast of Riverdance. Technically those things are thinking, but they are on the ass-end of what I'm talking about.

     Cognition is an entire group of mental processes. Yeah, it includes decision-making (burgers, and Alien vs Predator sucked ass), but the higher-order stuff is attention, memory, producing (and understanding) language, reasoning, and problem solving. That is what I'm getting at when I talk about thinking, and I think I'm not doing enough of those things. I think most of us aren't. And it's starting to worry me. 

     In addition to being a class clown, I'm pretty confident in stating that I was a thinker in school. In high school especially, I had two particular teachers who simply wouldn't let me skate when it came down to applying my mind to the hard work of thinking through a problem that was bigger than my little world. So I say thank you to Carol Dusebout, a history teacher at Conroe High School who ran a class my senior year called Advanced Social Science Problems. She had me thinking through the problem of global terrorism in 1985, when a lot of my classmates were chiefly concerned about who they were going to feel up after the homecoming game. We learned fucking statecraft in her class. I came out of that experience with a serious desire to pursue a career in foreign relations, until I discovered that I could make people laugh for money, and I didn't need to go to college for that, and I was poor and would rather make money than give it to somebody else. Like college.

     The next thank you goes out to Anna Doyle. She was my English and Lit. teacher my senior year, and she ran a program some of us were in called GT (gifted and talented, which really was just another way of saying we particular kids liked to read and write more than most, probably because we weren't very athletic or popular, and as such had extra time to read and write). Where Ms. Dusebout pushed me into thinking about the wider world, Ms. Doyle pushed into my face (and brain) James Joyce, and Shakespeare, and Orwell. She made me understand through systematic thought that poetry was not just for pussies. She made me read things that I actually had to read. Anna Doyle. Carol Dusebout. I don't know where you are, but I love you both. 

     Somewhere between high school and Middle Age, I stopped devoting real time out of every day to the habit of thinking. I became quite good at reacting, which is not even in the same zip code as thinking. Thinking takes time, and time is something we as a culture increasingly believe we don't have enough of. We are too busy to think, because we have demanding jobs and demanding children and demanding social obligations and demanding media, and all of them demand our time and are clamoring for attention that we have less and less of because our minds are pulled in so many directions that, instinctually, almost as a survival mechanism, we become reactive.

     And what, dear reader, is the cost of living as reactives? Well, for starters, we're less open to new ideas, or at least ideas that are different from our own. We tend to gravitate to information sources that we believe are in line with what we already think about things, rather than seeking different opinions about complex subjects. (More often than not, we just avoid complex subjects.) We synthesize. We simplify. We post memes on Facebook that are grounded in neither fact nor truth, because they're how we feel. And rarely could we truthfully say they're what we think.

     What do I believe in? WHY do I believe it? What kind of a person do I want to be, and to what end? Do you believe you can come at those questions with a derisive picture and a pithy quote on a social network? Fuck, no, you can't. Sci-Fi Author Theodore Sturgeon said that "ninety percent of everything is crap." Don't believe it? McDonald's. People Magazine. TMZ. Any music by Miley Cyrus. The series finale of Lost.  We're buying into the ninety percent, and it's not good for us. Did you ever read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine? The Time Traveler jumps ahead into the future, only to find out that we basically solved all our problems with technology, and have evolved into a bunch of slack-jawed, puny, pinkish, lazy-asses who lay around all day and eat melon. 

     And that's what this is really about, you guys. I don't want to see you turned into a bunch of slack-jawed, lazy-ass melon-eaters. Because I love you. And I fucking hate melon.

     Let's get back to really thinking about shit. It will require time and effort, and something will probably need to come off your plate. My belief is, it'll be worth it. If you don't believe me, then do like Pooh: