What If #1:

• What if you told the Republican Congressmen and radio show hosts that the only way to hold on to their power base was to nationalize health care - or any other program?
• If Barack Obama actually hated White people, why on Earth would he run for President of these United States?
• What if everyone on the Democrat side of the isle were White? What would the isolated minority be complaining about?

By the Way, Really: What Do You Think?

My friend, this is a thermal exhaust port for me: I vent my shit here, and it helps me stay laser-focused elsewhere (my recovery and my spiritual life, building interpersonal connections, staying on point professionally). But this thing isn't gonna blow my mind any unless someone drops the occasional pair of intellectual proton torpedoes, dig? I need y'all to help out. You come across something, send it to me, with or without your opinions and thoughts. (Tell me if it's okay to post those thoughts, if you do send them.)

I need fresh perspectives to remind me of the limited scope and fallibility of my own. I don't take myself too seriously, but sometimes I value my brain higher than I should. Oddly enough, hearing where you come from, adding information to the mix, deflates me some. I need you right now.

I have been and always shall be, your friend.
Dash

ps. Yes, that is a Star Wars metaphor. I just compared my brain and this blog to the Death Star. See what I mean about needing deflation?

I Believe in...

You and Me, A Thing Called Love, life after love...that not everything is gonna be the way you think it oughtta be...take your pick.

Before my termination of employment, I spent quite a bit of time loitering around Pasadena, loath to go home between school, therapy, work, or any combination of the three. So I took to hanging around Vroman's, which quickly became my favorite bookstore. On one occasion, I happened upon this book, This I Believe, a collection of essays culled from the vast number submitted to NPR. In it, various people - from all possible walks of life, all levels of fame/recognition - set out in very brief, straightforward, concrete essays just what it is they believe in most strongly. They share that which is most central to their self-determined raison d'etre. I wondered if I could do it; then, just those few months ago, I couldn't have done it. After all, one of the guidelines is brevity. 350-500 words. I can't order lunch in 350-500 words. Expressing a core belief? Couldn't do it.

Now I can. This, I believe:


I believe in mere destiny, that every sentient being walking the Earth has a small but indispensable purpose.

The God-Consciousness lies within us all, waiting to be accessed: that special spark of life in each of us that's more than the sum of its parts. The stuff of old stars that was in the Earth before the Earth solidified, and is now in us all. The quantum mechanics that bind us all at the tiniest levels, where physics as we know it don't work properly. We are all connected, if nothing else, by the very matter which constitutes us.

Think about it: basically, either everything happens for some reason, or nothing happens for any particular reason. If it’s the former, as in my philosophy, how can any of us not have a destiny? In the course of a human life, you never know what you've said that had profound influence on someone. Many are the times I've been talking with an old friend, or a colleague, and heard, "Man, I always think about what you said..." and proceed to rattle off something that sounds like me, that I cannot remember saying.

It’s a revelation; I lived for so long under the belief that my life was pointless, that the end of my value to the world had been during my squandered college years – and that it’d been entertainment value. I was a dropout, a do-nothing, the guy on the couch.

Then I discovered a truth: chemical addiction had a terrible power over me, and was largely responsible for this horribly skewed perspective of a life that was, after all, nowhere near finished. I achieved sobriety a little over three years ago, and life has been a spiritual journey ever since.

With newly cleared eyes, a cleansed mind and an open heart, I have been able to see so many strange confluences, “coincidences” too serendipitous to be random. I was afraid to try and reconnect with an old flame far away, in order to make amends – only to have her email me for the first time in three years to let me know she was in town, and could we get some coffee? Just today, I began wondering about two dear friends I hadn’t seen in a while. The first turned up in front of me two hours later, pestering me to join her for dinner – and the second turned up at the same restaurant we’d chosen. It’s these little things that convince me, hands-down, that there is a latticework design to human existence, and each individual life is a thread with its own place and pattern.

I do not know what my mere destiny is, but I can feel inside, in that god-conscious place, when I’m on the path toward it. I am now, and have been richly rewarded for the steps I’ve taken.


Okay, brevity makes my writing suck more. Back to verbosity.

Detritus

Hello Friends,

So I just finished my This I Believe post/essay. As I state in the post, one of the guidelines is brevity. If you know me by now, you've gathered that a) brevity is not my strong suit, b) I am aware of that fact, and c) don't care. I say what I think needs saying. You skim, and cull from it what you think needs reading. Deal? Okay.

Because of that, editing this essay down meant cutting out a whole lot of stuff that got me around to my point. I'm posting it here, because I still want to say it. So, This I Also Believe:

This I believe: I believe in mere destiny. I believe that every sentient being walking the Earth has a purpose. But see, too often those who speak of destiny speak of some grandiose Destiny, some Ultimate Purpose - and too often, they are speaking of love. If the entire point of my life is to find whomever I will love who will also love me, and to spend the rest of my life with her....how will we not drive each other crazy? You can't -- no, I'll speak for myself, I can't put that on any one other human being. Too well, I know what the twin weights of expectation and disappointment can do to the psyche, no matter how benign the expectation or how minimal the disappointment.

People will always disappoint you. It's a reality; it's not a particularly sad one, for me, because it flows quite nicely with what I'm getting at. People will always disappoint you because (just to pick one reason off of the tree of human nature) their ideas of what they need to be doing are not always going to be your idea of what they need to be doing. In my adolescent pride and arrogance, I often tried to lead my most cherished friends about - not by the nose, but rather by a gentle hand at the small of the back, saying to them that this or that would be better for them than their present course of action or inaction. That this person would be better (or worse) for them than the current object of their desire. I thought I was the benevolent director, who came, who saw a production that was an utter mess, and set things to rights without stepping on any toes. I saw chaos; I thought I could gently impose order.

I got what I deserved. Three or four of those ten people (yeah, we kept track) are still in my life today, and even now, when discussing this particular portion of our shared history, they may grow a little silent, a little taciturn. They have never quite believed that they are free to offer any (constructive!) criticism they wish to me, or have simply never chosen to offer such criticism for their own reasons, but that's fine. I know what this silence is. The playing out of the last of my "Just Desserts" - for when we try to control what we love, do we not destroy it?

People will always disappoint -- If you place expectations upon them. Don't expect anything of them. Let them live their lives. You've got your own to worry about, and I'll explain why I believe that no matter who you are, that's an exciting proposition.

I believe the phrase "Intelligent Design" is nothing more or less than a two-word description of a central thesis of every organized religion of which I am aware, a spiritual commonality. In defense of a God, or an overarching Order to things, people look about themselves and see a world that is so complex, in a universe so incomprehensible, that there must be some "outside" force or power that ordered it all in this manner. A divine hand, whose will imposes order: the Titans and the Olympians, the Aesir, the Egyptian Pantheon, the forgotten gods of Sumer, the Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; and, of course, the great god to whom they must all bow, the concept into which they have all (courtesy of the Holy Roman Empire) been subsumed: the Judeo-Christian triune God, who is called Lord, Abba Father, Adonai, Allah, but whose name is seldom spoken by those who believe. I don't write it here out of respect, as much for those who believe as for my own upbringing, but I mention it because when I say God, I am not referring to this most benevolent of He's-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I speak of the God-Consciousness. The part of us that touches the divine. I don't attempt to define the divine (heh), that's beyond me. But I know it's there, as sure as I know my name. (Hold on.....yep, check. David Alan Sherrell.)

Your life is important. Your mind is utterly unique - if you happen to be an identical twin, you know this for sure. The twinned mind is said to operate according to the principle of quantum entanglement - that what is done to affect one brain at a certain level, will affect the other, no matter the distance between them. And yet, you and your twin have developed completely separate identities, have you not? What I believe this means for the rest of us is that what goes on in our heads and our hearts is intrinsically indispensable to the latticework of life on Earth. So do not allow your mind, and most especially do not allow your heart, to become Dumpsters. Don't settle for survival, for sustenance, for food, clothing, and shelter. Climb the Hierarchy of Needs. Self-Actualize. Live, truly live. Love, get your heart stomped into little-bitty emo-bits, and love again, this time with gusto, next time harder. Wring this world of every experience that comes across your path, seek out whatever others interest you, and wonder actively about the rest of them.

If you live this life, you will have fulfilled your mere destiny, though you know not what it was. Perhaps some average functionary's mere destiny is to raise a child who goes on to be a doctor who saves the life of the woman who develops the vision that leads mankind into the next Enlightenment. This little cubicle-dweller, who thinks no big thoughts save the occasional idle wish to be the Jerry Maguire of his office, who merely walked through life with the sole purpose of succeeding - essentially, living the real-world equivalent of the Game of Life - could be that integral link in the chain that produces a kinder, less violent, more self-aware and self-loving human race.

I spent my youth and the lion's share of my adolescence not belonging, and hating both that fact and myself. I was a frail and sickly child, and only appeared healthier as a young adult. By eighteen I had already survived more than a few bouts with death. And yet by my nineteenth birthday, my life would be called 'successful so far' by any standard: I had a 4.2 GPA, I'd been accepted to my first-choice school (and my mother's alma mater), Vassar; I'd successfully performed not one but two lead roles in the school musical, my last hurrah on the high school stage - it's like starting in the last game of the season senior year, for us theater kids; I had a girlfriend who was the sweetest girl I knew; I had my pahtnas, my brothers, on either side of me, two men who - if they didn't always get me, always accepted me for me. I had three short months until I was three thousand blessed miles away from my family, and yet close enough to my mother's best friend (as good as family if not better) in case of emergency or homesickness. Even chronic illness characterized by debilitating pain could not break my inexorable march forward.

Addiction could, and did.

My Semi-Annual Dose of Brevity, As Regards Obama, Hawaii, His Birth Certificate, and the Most Irrelevant of the Right Wingers:

Don't name them. Birthers? Even as ludicrous as the name and the whole concept are, naming them legitimizes them.

Reasons

The reason I'm here: a friend whose mind I respect and admire, and whose opinion I value greatly, has asked me to write. Anything. (A book, he says. Who's got time, energy, or the central thesis for a book? I can't even keep a central thesis to my posts.) His plea was, though not the first along these lines from friends, family, loved ones, the first one I took seriously. "At least friggin' blog," he says.

Be careful what you wish for.

He had sent me this article, about a topic near and dear to my heart, and asked me to pontificate.

(Pontificate - v. to speak or express opinions in a pompous or dogmatic way," from the Latin pontifex pont, pons (bridge) + facere (to build or make). Note that pompous and dogmatic are synonymous with the chief epithet of the Pope. Just sayin'.)

I held forth in my accustomed fashion, without any thought to brevity:

• “For many black middle class, and black elite, accomplishment and class identification are simply ways to differentiate themselves from the masses, from the stereotype of being poor, black, uneducated, and intellectually inferior.”
• Uh-uh. Mr. Reya is actually demonstrating what I believe to be the root cause of any perceived need of the Black Elite and/or Middle Class to self-differentiate: fear of persecution from those with whom they would identify. It’s a hell of a thing to say, “I am this; this is a large part of who I am,” and have the majority of those who also identify in that way say to you, “No, you are not. We reject you.” It happens on a very, very regular basis. I’ve heard it said of Professor Gates, Cornel West, President Obama – note, these are all Black literati. Sam Jackson and Denzel Washington, Michael Jordan, Dr. Dre and Chuck D., even Kanye West won’t get these allegations, despite their affluence, intelligence, or how well-read they are, because they “represent.”
• Or, in other words, this is what happens When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong.
• “Having become less isolated and thus more exposed to the contempt and hostility of the white world, but at the same time cherishing the values of the white world, the new black bourgeoisie with more money at their disposal, have sought compensations in the things money can buy. Moreover, their larger incomes have enabled them to propagate false notions about their place in American life and to create a world of make-believe. (Black Bourgeoisie p. 148 -149)”
• I haven’t had my hands on Black Bourgeoisie since my Vassar days, but I wish I could look for what on Earth “the values of the white world” are. My guess is, consumerism, valuing appearance over substance, keeping up with the Joneses and damn the cost, and liberal or lenient child-rearing models. I could go on, but you get the point. Too often, Black Americans (among others) conflate “white values” or “white ideas” with “American values” and “American ideas.” I’m not sure either label fits very snugly.
• I don’t know what world of make-believe we’re supposed to live in. I’ve said it often enough of myself, and it’s true of most in the Black American Middle Class: we’re too poor for the rich folk, too rich for the ‘poor’ folk, too Black for the White folk, and too “White” for the Black folk. When your desire to be acknowledged as nothing more or less than what you choose to identify as meets universally with nothing but dismissal and/or scorn, what world can you devise for yourself?
• In other words, it’s not just the White world whose contempt and hostility such Black Americans as we are exposed to (as I’m sure you noticed).
• “Affinity fraud”
• What a horrible, horrible term. The idea being, those with whom you wish to identify somehow possess the insight and power to determine whether or not you truly identify with and relate to them, in your heart and mind. To my knowledge, no racial classification or socio-economic stratum has developed telepathy in their pursuit of keeping their boundaries closed to all, save those who belong.
• If anything, there’s a phenomenon by which Black Americans have time and again voted against their self-interest because of religious identity, socioeconomic identity, and regional identity. Racial identity, to my knowledge, hasn’t historically had a large enough effect on the voting patterns of Black America writ large – at least, not until recently. If Blacks could be swayed by arguments of racial unity by someone claiming affinity, Prop 8 would never have passed. Instead, they were swayed by arguments of religious and moral unity by others claiming affinity. If the Civil Rights Movement had been more powerfully evoked…who knows?
• In such an environment, this [is] the probable response he’d get from the average black man, "Player, your struggle ain’t mine, don’t come crying to me when shit changes up on you."
• Well, the ‘average Black man’ may (or may not, which is how I’m leaning) indeed speak to his friends and family in that way; I just highly doubt that’d be anyone’s response if he found himself in a debate with Professor Gates. It’d be like telling the President, “G’awn witcha bad seff” if given the chance to meet him in the Oval Office. Really, that’s a very condescending conclusion.

However, if you put aside the stinging and baseless condemnation of Professor Gates and other Black literati, I mostly agree with the premise that, as a social group, Black Americans are starting to identify more with their particular class than their race. I have noticed a lessening of the principles behind the Talented Tenth – that the advancement of a relative few talented, educated Black Americans would serve as the rising tide to float the foundering ship of Black America.

I just don’t blame the Talented Tenth for that. We live in a culture that prizes “keeping it real” – a culture that rewards mediocrity and apathetic stagnancy. This author is catastrophizing and limiting to Black America a dynamic I’ve seen the country over: fallout from the growing belief that the American Dream is dead. It’s not Black America that’s dispersing and going our separate ways, it’s any and every culture that had heretofore bound together in search of opportunity, betterment, advance, to leave a better life for their children than they had. I’ve heard a poll quoted that most Americans no longer believe they’ll be able to leave their children better off than they themselves were. My ethnic studies professor once said “If you’re working right now, on the books, and paying into Social Security, thank you – because you won’t see a dime of that money, Social Security will be dead long before you retire. I’m good, though, so thanks.” This is the prevailing belief – even amidst the hope the Obama administration generated during the election and the months after and even through the first hundred days, there was a sense that the best he could do would be to minimize the scope of disaster.

So nobody in “the masses” is really listening – not because they’re consumer-zombie barbarians, but because they’re running on fumes in the Hope department. And again, this isn’t just Black America. Community is dying, but not just in Black America. People are becoming more selfish, but not just in Black America. It’s one thing to look at how the fallout from this phenomenon affects a specific race and/or socioeconomic class, and quite another to presume that the phenomenon only affects that group. The latter premise allows the author to conclude that Black America is somehow being subsumed: at the upper level, into White America, and at the lower, into Poor America.

It’s bullshit. We’re as much Black America as we’ve always been, and this blog is proof of it. My current understanding of one thing Black America has always been: on a constant, painful search for identity, at (often violent) odds with itself, fearful of both continued oppression and continued advancement, and above all, fearful that our identity will be stripped away entirely before we have a chance to define it. Many Black Americans tend to (mistakenly) ascribe power over their ability to self-identify to others, and is it any surprise? Black America is just plain used to others having the power. Freedom of choice is very, very new to this group: I am of only the second generation to experience it. In any case, having signed away this power, all that’s left are the labels ascribed to them, these ‘masses’, this ‘average Black American’; those Black Americans who refuse to accept the labels, or who remain in active search of betterment, are scorned – because we scorn what we fear. Especially when they might win, and then what does that mean to me, if I’ve refused even to fight? It must mean that I am apart from these, these who win battles of progress. But I may take solace in knowing that if I am apart from them, I am at least in good company – it would be more comforting to me to say then that they are apart from me. They are other, they do not belong, and we must not and will not allow them to identify with us – because our hope is gone, and to rouse it is painful.

I could go on for a year. My brother and I have this discussion frequently, both as Black Men fighting all of these pressures I’ve outlined, and as Black Men who have chosen professions in which we are de facto shepherds of our Black American clients. In his case, they’re all Middle Class and Elite youth. In mine, they often are the beaten, hopeless ‘masses,’ but who come from all walks of life with one thing in common: having turned to drugs to shut out the hope, the fear, the despair. We who have taken back (with pain) the power to self-identify, and to hell with anyone who would label us differently or strip from us that with which we label ourselves, observe the continued search for identity as a sort of shadowboxing match – all you really need do is stand up and say, “this is what I am; these are the ways I identify myself.” There are battles to be fought, surely, but they’re battles of economic status and enfranchisement – we must continue to wrest the freedom secured by so many other Americans, but they are external battles. To struggle for the freedom to identify yourself, to find your own identity, is to struggle with yourself – your doubts, your fear, your despair. And too many Black Americans (this author, I believe, among them) are choosing the wrong battles. Furthermore, when they lose (as one must invariably, when battling oneself), they strike out at those who appear to be “winning.”

This criticism of Professor Gates, to come back around to the point, is absurd. The idea is that somehow, due to his success, intelligence and/or affluence, he no longer has the right or claim to speak against the indignity and omnipresent threat of racial profiling, even in the wake of being a victim thereof. So what if he didn’t really think about it before? So he’s a little in the dark. I’m sure he’s been tailed home several times, and has just fallen out of the habit of looking because he knows he’s where he belongs, on his way home. Personally, I would love to see a world in which more Americans of various stripes had the luxury of forgetting how “vulnerable all people of color are to capricious forces” like a rogue cop. Nothing about that blissful ignorance, though it may affect his ability to relate to the “masses” on a more quotidian, external level, has anything to do with his right or privilege of self-identification. Neither does whom he chooses to marry, where and how thoroughly he was educated, nor – most ridiculous of all – who has and who has not heard of Professor Henry Louis Gates. How is that not a symbol of the ignorance of the “several working class Blacks” being polled? And, if they haven’t heard of him, so what? He isn’t Barack Obama. While he’s certainly on my list of “Black Americans all Black Americans Should Learn a Little About,” he’s certainly not on my list of “Black Americans all Black Americans are Supposed to Know About.”

And as to the rest of the allegations of his being out of touch, I wonder what gets discussed at board meetings of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund if not the plight of Colored Persons in need of Advancement and Funds for their Legal Defense. (Okay, I know the answer to that last, but you gotta figure the aforementioned plight works its way in there somewhere.)

Thus Pontificated

D

And now here we stand, you and I. You have read what you would of the background I have chosen to provide (to call it "my background" would be worse than disingenuous), and you have seen a sampling of what is in inventory during an honest appraisal of my Weltanschauung. Will you be back to visit? I make no promise of regular updates, but it's quite often that the world sees fit to inspire or annoy (guess which happens more frequently) me to the point that I need to get "it" off my chest. I hope you'll come around now and then; I don't mind being alone in the forest with my one hand clapping (yes, I've tried, yes, it makes a sound, if you're stubborn enough), but I'd greatly prefer if maybe just a few occasional readers left some feedback. I don't have much of a real mission statement, since all that was asked of me was that I share my perspective on the world, my take on things.

But when I get on my high horse, you'll be the first to know. When I get knocked down, you'll be the first to know (likely, the topic - if you're skimming - will be "Tubthumping"). When someone else puts me on an ivory tower and I forget to laugh uproariously at the notion, you'll be able to tell. Y'wanna know what I think? --wait, y'do? Why?

I'll be back. But what do you think?

Say It Loud

Greetings, Friend Reader, to the first post of the new blog. Now that you've (ostensibly) read some or all of the stuff I just copied over from my more private, personal blog, I hope you'll take my observations, opinions, off-color color-commentary on Color, my missives of musings from the far-off state of mind, made manifest and maintained here, with a grain of salt the size of the Serengeti. I'm just a supporting character in the story of the world, here to shatter the fourth wall. Are you on stage with me? Or have you been in the audience so far? If so, get up! Get out! Get into it! (Why yes, I did just quote Tevin Campbell!) It's a large story, the story of the world, and even if ya didn't know it, like Jim Carrey's Truman, you've got a part to play.

Without further ado (well, except for the ado of saying "without further ado," and the necessary follow-up commentary, and...right, right, here we go--) :

I was fired three days before Christmas. Three days after Christmas, I thought it would be a good idea to start a blog. Then the shock of the massive change in my life passed, and I was totally disinterested in life for two months. Exactly one thing from that period is worth mentioning: my trip with my mother to the Inauguration. Thus, mentioned.

What the linked-to videos do not show is the discussion my mother and I had on the red-eye flight from LAX to IAD. Thrilled to no end about the changes afoot in the world, Mom and I batted thoughts, opinions, perspectives, feelings and intuitions back and forth for nearly the whole five-plus hours. (The lady in front of us was not impressed.)

I will not bother to chart the course of our discussion here. As you may have noticed of me, I have a meandering method of coming to the point - I'll only do it once I'm sure you've got all the information I think you'll need to peep my perspective. My mother has the same proclivity.

Her eventual point was one I've heard before. It was personal, and had to do with differences between the manner in which I identify, racially, and the manner in which she does. Now, I'm not talking terminology; we do differ in that way, but words are just representatives of concepts, and the concept behind all that terminology is the same. I like "Black American," so let's go with that. Occasionally, for flavor, I'll say Negro. You won't hear that other word in my narrative "speech" - I leave it for others to abuse. If I happen to quote them, so be it, I ain't a-scared. (You may also catch my occasional lapse into dialectic writing, or lengthy parentheticals; I write how I think.)

But I digress. The identification process I refer to is not what we identify as, or even what that thing (Black) really is, but what it means to us. What does it mean to my mother, who marched in protest rallies in her teens, to be a Black American Woman? She was a dirt-poor and brilliant child, living in Ohio and Michigan towns whose industries had abandoned them. She wouldn't thank me for telling you the rest, but suffice it to say that she's faced the hardest times you can imagine (song lyrics will be quoted often), and seen them through, and excelled. Her brain took her to Vassar, which took her to UM postgrad, and along with my father, eventually took her to a lucrative professional career. By the arrival of 1980 and David Alan Sherrell, my parents were practically the Black scenester ideal of the 80's: the young, upwardly mobile Black Professional, the "Buppie" - The Huxtable. (A friend once asked me if my mom was "Black like Claire Huxtable." Far from being offended, I responded immediately that Claire Huxtable was Black like my Mom.) This image has fallen from favor in recent years, but I won't allow it to be wiped from the annals of our struggles that it was a valued concept, part and parcel of the American Dream for many less well-off Blacks. Education, vocation! That's the way "out."

What does it mean to me, to be a Black American Man? Born at the tail end of Generation X, 'released' the same month as The Empire struck back, I am a child of the 1980's: of inexorable progress, of interconnectivity, universality, of irony (fuck post-irony, let the 'tweens have it), of observation; and yes, of rampant consumerism, of apathy, of voluntary disenfranchisement (a concept that should not exist), of snide, ignorant derision, of the very unexamined life we were so exhorted against. I remember when MTV played music videos, when MP3 players were Discmen were Walkmen, when the NES beat the Commodore 64 all to hell (and '64' does not refer to bits). I am Yo! MTV Raps and The Cosby Show. I am 227 and A Different World. I am The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (more on this later). I am also Saved by the Bell, 90210, My So-Called Life, and (though I am loathe to admit it, it played a role) The gotdamned Real World.

From the end of school until the late evening, I was educated (some would say, raised) by television, by our housekeeper who began employ with us as my baby-sitter in my first years, and yes, by my mother (though she never quite 'got' me), who had left her job when a) my sister was adopted, and b) when my father was more than able to provide us with a life of not just comfort, but real luxury.

Money was not ever tight in my house, but it was made clear to me: we are not rich. Mom & Dad are rich. (This was, line for line, also in a Cosby Show episode; I have no idea which came first.) The difference between rich (you have money to burn) and wealthy (your grandchildren will still be burning your money) was explained to me in detail - because I went to school with kids who partied in mansions and lived on I-shit-you-not Mount Olympus. (God, the conceit. I drive past it all the time, and only recently has it really begun to gall me.) I had a carpool driver just like any other kid; unlike most other kids, he was the sixth man on the Los Angeles Lakers and the Best Defensive Player of 1987. When we drove home, we cruised down Crenshaw Blvd. playing Koo Mo Dee's "The Wild Wild West," the unofficial theme song of Showtime. A vivid memory of mine from childhood is being in the Laker locker (say that five times fast) room, and somehow coming face-to-naked-crotch with A.C. Green.

What does Black mean to me? At the time, it meant "community church" actually being a church in our community, gospel choir rehearsals at home; it meant difference, being teased, being proud, at school - first it was just the lessons of Black History Month, then G-Funk made living in 213 much cooler than living in 90210 or the then-brand-new 310.

Being a Black American Male is as much a part of me as my ability to sing, my overactive thought process, my addict's brain and my recovering spirit; they're the largest puzzle pieces that make up Me. Because my Blackness is indisputable (you'd be surprised how often that is not the case) and obvious, it is one of the first identifying characteristics applied to me. I accept that gracefully; I am, after all, Black. And damn proud of it. I can't at this point, imagine wanting to be anything else. But there's much more to the trip. I have had, in a way my mother has not, to define myself 'against' others. My mother was Black, Negro, Colored, and that's all she was allowed to be by powers beyond her control, until victories in the Civil Rights Movement and her own brainpower empowered her. I was free to be whatever I chose, as long as I understood: I wasn't like the rest of my neighbors, because my daddy was rich (and my ma was good-lookin - still is - but my livin' ain't ever, ever been easy), drove a BMW; because I went to a private elementary school in West Hollywood; the list went on. I could go to church with my peers, we could bike around the neighborhood together, play 'intendo (as some called it) or SEGA, shoot hoops (I sucked the whole time I lived there; price of being short and sickly); but I wasn't like them, didn't quite belong. I wasn't the only boy in the neighborhood with this kind of issue - but I was the only one I knew with the mouth to make it worse. Because I just wouldn't take it. Even at a young age, I resisted attempts to label me, not that I knew that's what I was doing. I just knew I was being picked on, and I had to stand up for myself. I never threw a punch, but I'd also never met a fight my mouth couldn't start. (I've learned to use that power for good - I can stop just about any fight, too.)

And at school: I was different. Classes were tiny, and my sixth grade class had about fifty kids in it. Six of us were Black, which at the time was pretty good numbers (percentage-wise) for a private school. But boyo, when I took that leap into seventh grade, at the illustrious Harvard-Westlake (razzumfrazzumracistrazzumfrazzumpsychoticfrazzum), I learned that there was more to being different than just being different: there was being judged. Only my own people had done that to me so far, really. I mean, kids say stupid shit, but kids are only regurgitating what their parents say - which is why, by the way, I shouldn't be blamed at four years of age for telling my teacher she was just some dumb old White Lady.

Now I was getting it from all sides. I did. Not. Fit. Not that I had no friends; this was 1993, and I was in good company with the other misfits - even if I never quite forgot that they had that choice. They chose Nirvana over NKOTB (and really, at that point, few seventh graders had). The first time I was addressed by that most storied and painful of slurs, I stalked the kid around the basketball court for a solid five minutes without working up the rage to nail him in the solar plexus. But damn, I tried. "I'm sorry! You can call me Chink!" He was Korean; I pointed this out to him before I walked off. To the dean's office, or to call my mother, I can't remember. (Probably the latter; I was ill-equipped for confrontations with non-familial adults at the time.)

After all of this has been reported to the dean, a kindly old lady, her response is: "Well, you must have done something to provoke it, what happened?"


I guess my point with this whole narrative is: my mother fought hard to give me the kind of life she did not have, growing up. The virtues and vicissitudes of that life combined with my natural and inherited predilections to form my racial self-identification. My mother has essentially told me that she is disappointed in how unimportant being Black seems to be to me. (My father and I don't have this kind of talk.)

Pwwahhh? Put me in a world where Black doesn't have to be the beginning and the end of me, and cock your head in disapproving confusion when Black isn't the beginning and the end of me? Now I'm getting it from my own mother, this where-do-you-fit-in thing. Only thing is, I've figured it out: there are many places I belong. I belong in the private school circle, amongst children of Hollywood and big business and professional sports. I belong in Baldwin Hills, and in Ladera Heights, the modest white-flight homes and it-ain't-much-but-it's-clean neighborhoods mostly unsullied by the gang violence a few miles in any direction but north. I belong in the rooms of recovery, keenly aware of the disease(s) I possess, and the near-total lack of awareness of it in the public eye. I belong on the sidewalks and streets and beaches of Monterey, Carmel, Salinas, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, where my best friend and brother in punditry retreated after fourth grade, and where I have ever since found a respite from the insanity of Los Angeles.

Because I am Black American. And I am proud of it. But I am Angeleno. I am Vassar, Oakwood, The Center for Early Education, Glendale Community College. I am sober. I am melody, rhythm, and rhyme. I am America's Dream and her Nightmare. I am Black America's dirty little secret, that fifteen year-old and suspiciously rounding girl sent to live with relatives "up north," that season when Julia Louis-Dreyfus was only shot from the waist up. I am what Black America's conservatives and reactionaries try desperately to pawn off on White America, on Rich America, on any other America. But I am hers, and she is mine. I am more than Black, but my origin story undeniably begins - in media res - on the sweltering Southern cotton fields of a Scot named Sherwill. My melody, rhythm and rhyme were born there. Fear of a Black response to all that was born there - Fear, if you will, of a Black Planet - gave birth to the tidy white-flight neighborhood in which I was raised to be so much more than the sum of my parts. And the terrifying reality:

I am not alone. I am legion.

But what do you think?

EDIT: I have invited the aforementioned, inimitable and inestimable Mom to read my blog. You'll know when it happens; it'll be the "DAVID ALAN SHERRELL---!!!!!" heard 'round the world.

Now We're Getting Somewhere...

Ah, here's a good central thesis on why I am the way that I am, and why I see things the way I do. See, I told you there was a method! I don't share my deeper thoughts, analyses, and feelings with strangers. Now, we're not strangers. You know enough about me, and you'll learn more.

Good evening, Reader, I hope your day has been as relaxing as mine. I spent quite a bit of time asleep today, and although I didn't do much, I did manage to accomplish some of the organizing to be done in my bedroom. It's a nice bedroom, it really is. It's the fact that it's located in my parents' house that frustrates me.

For the first twenty-six years of my life, I was bound by their expectations of me; I judged myself against them, and nearly always failed to measure up. When I was fifteen, my father asked me for a ten-year plan: where was I going to college, what would I study, where was I going to grad school, how many Master's Degrees I would pursue, etc. He insinuated - in fact, he may have flat-out instructed me - that without such a plan, though it may be adapted as circumstances dictated, and without strict adherence to it, I would not be the accomplished family man he assumed I wanted to be. That I would not accomplish anything of worth in my life. In truth, at the time, I think my life's ambition was to be a professional singer and actor, and to have just one girl so much as like me or think I was the least bit cute; "family" was not anywhere on my list of things I expected to be as a "man."

I couldn't provide him with that plan, nor could I come up with much for the five-year plan he asked me for when I was twenty-one. I'm okay with that now; I have no clue what the time-frame of my current plan is, I just know that I like it. It seems to represent my best interests and my desires, and pays respect to what I think it my part to play in the Great Story.

A friend of mine, who may actually get some face-time in my thoughts, recently complained that "saving the world is fucking hard" - and she's right. I just intend to focus in on contributing my small efforts to heal this one aspect of the world. But that was not what my parents had in mind.

It occurred to me, recently, that I've always taken for granted that my parents were always right. Not because they're my parents, and "parents are always right" - I was raised to question things, not blindly follow them (well, except for my parents' dictates, but they failed to realize that you can't teach a child to question everything and to follow your orders without question). No, it was really because as the central authority figures in my life, they quite often showed me how the World was shaped, in the process of disciplining me, teaching me, and even in praising me. They said, more than once, that my sister and I could not find better parents than they were, not for us; I believe it went something like, "Go ahead and run away! If you can find someone willing to take you in, they're more than welcome to you. I'm the best you're going to get in this world." And my mother's career as a clinical psychologist lent a terrible credibility to her views; she wasn't just speaking as a mother, in my mind, she was speaking as one with the education and experience to know the objective truth of her pronouncements.

My father is another story. He simply conducted a verbal reasoning seminar each time we reached loggerheads. He would either ask me what I was thinking when I did X, Y, Z - and really expect me to lay out for him in a bulleted list exactly what I was thinking - or he would simply control the conversation, leading me from point A through natural conclusion, obvious deduction, and simple-fact identification, to point W, and then leave it to me to understand how X, Y, and Z flowed naturally from there. He presented this logical procession to me in such a way that to contradict or gainsay it in any way was to deny reality itself. He didn't - and, in my mind, doesn't - understand the concept of perspective, of inherent subjectivity.

And as many who have argued with me in the past - that old friend I mentioned, not least - will attest, I have inherited this particular bastardization of the Socratic Method. It was a survival mechanism; the only way to have my perspective on life stand up against the intellectual assault of my parents was to present it and to defend it as one would a master's thesis.

It is a corollary of the combination of my parents' high expectations of me, and their assumption of the intrinsic objective correctness of their perspective on life, that I was never shown an ounce of affection that was not qualified. "Of course I love you; you should know that." "What do you mean, you want more physical affection? Last time I tried to hug you, you just pushed me away, I figured you didn't want me to touch you." "If you think I'm not proud of you for everything you've done, or that I don't respect all the hard work you're doing now, you're out of your mind."

That last one always struck me as a little amusing. Because the truth is, these sentiments are only verbalized in any way, shape or form, when I ask for them. During one of these discussions, my mother found cause to tell me that unconditional love was a fantasy. Her words, not mine. The words of a clinical psychologist, telling me that unconditional love was simply a human impossibility, against our very mental makeup.

My reasoning life has been far longer than it really had to be, if you ask me; I could have been left to the average internal life of a child without real psychological damage. But I wasn't just raised to question everything; I was raised to analyze everything. And for all the time since I demonstrated any ability to do that, I have been pitted against my parents' analyses of various dynamics or realities. And until recently, I "lost".

Recently, however, I finally came to understand that my parents were not always right. Of course, in one sense, I've known this since adolescence, when I came to understand certain things about myself that my parents simply could not. But this realization runs deeper than incorrect or inaccurate observations; I'm talking about ways in which their fundamental approach to parenting was not always right. They tried; they did their best, and unlike my father, I am fully capable of understanding that a human being's best effort is, in fact, the best they can do. (The number of times I've said "I did my best" or "I'll do my best" only to be told to "Do better" would be most easily written in scientific notation.) My AA sponsor is fond of telling me, "Forgive your parents; they were stupid, but they did the best they could for you." I'm certainly aware of that, and I really don't have much of a hard time forgiving them. It isn't resentment that spikes when I consider the depth of their wrongs. It's just pain.

Pain, in this sense, is just an emotion; it's sadness. Deep and abiding sadness, yes - for the time being. Sadness at wrongs visited upon me, yes. But not intentionally. My parents have yet to realize that they are bad at providing emotional support to me, and that this disability has descended into incapability over the last several years. (In inverse proportion, it hasn't escaped me, to the increase in the consistency of their disappointment with me.) I feel as though I've lived my entire life not knowing something was missing, only to have certain people point it out for me in my adulthood; now, being aware of the lack, I find it all but impossible not to look back, and retroactively experience the full dearth.

Until recently, I've apologized for my parents anytime someone pointed out the rather harsh way I was reared. They love me, I'd say, I know they do, because I've seen what parents who don't love their children can do to them. Or because they support me materially. Or because we still speak after all the times I've disappointed them in big ways (leaving college without graduating and being arrested leap to mind). I had a pretty cushy childhood, with all the things any growing boy could want.

I'm through apologizing. Yes, I had a cushy childhood, chock-full of things. It's even been suggested to me, by many people quite close to me, that I was so spoiled that a certain sense of entitlement may never leave me. Even if this is true (and I doubt it), then it's also true that a certain feeling that I don't deserve to be loved has also never left me; this feeling is also a direct result of the manner in which I was raised - if I was showered with nearly everything a growing boy could want, then the most important thing was one of the only things missing. Emotional support. Positive reinforcement. Someone recently defined true "love" as "unconditional positive regard." Yeah, I've never had that from anyone in my family. And I may never experience it from them. But I have, now, experienced it, even though it's hard for me to do so.

It's painful that this difficulty arises from a near-total lack of history with this experience. I'm entering adulthood with something of an emotional handicap: I'm far more capable of experiencing and receiving the negative regard of others than I am the positive, and because many don't know this about me, they see the manner in which I deflect or avoid their praise or affection as a rejection, or indifference on my part. There's nothing I can do about that. The best I can do is to love, and to be loved, with the whole of my heart, and to demonstrate that love in all the ways both small and large I know of.

I am quite physically affectionate: it's truly uncommon for me to pass nearby a friend without some sort of casual touch, even just in acknowledgment. I love hugs. I recommend everyone try to fit at least twelve good hugs into their day, as that frequency of emotionally positive physical contact can actually instigate a positive neurochemical response: it can actually give us a boost not just in our sense of well-being, but in our ability to experience that sense. Fantastic thing, dopamine, never been able to get enough of it. (Hence and per, y'know, being an addict.) I'm trying to smile more often, and more genuinely; that's a real uphill battle. I was taught to laugh not long ago. You'd think laughter is one of those things we pick up so early on in our development that it's almost an innate human behavior. The knowledge of and ability to engage in laughter may be learned that early on; but not too many people, in my experience, remain able in adulthood to laugh from the soul, unselfconsciously. To laugh a laugh full-bellied and loud. It's another small thing I do to stave off that negative-affect state I'm so susceptible to.

And I don't blame my parents for all of that susceptability; they're merely unwitting players of a role, a contributing catalyst within the unbelievably complex mechanism that is my emotional life. There are so many more factors to examine. This is just one that has weighed heavily on me in recent days.

Ever yours,
Dash

I'm On the Outside Looking In

And I wanna be back on the inside, with you...


This blog is from one of my harder days last year. There's a method to my introductory madness, promise.

I'm not good at "belonging". I'm good at making friends, I'm fairly good at keeping friends - I guess I'm not that good at being friends, being with friends. But this doesn't surprise me in the least.

It's no exaggeration to say I was the class scapegoat, growing up. Even when I would get along privately with many of my peers, publicly I was outcast. I had a few incredible friends, and that was it. That was all I needed, but I didn't get very well socialized.

That lack of socialization has manifested itself in various ways at various times in my life. As a child, I had a Charlie Brown complex - y'know, "why's everybody always pickin' on me?" As a teenager it was much the same, until I got burned out on caring at all. I really got okay with being "unpopular". I thought I didn't deserve friends, being as uncool as I was. Then I left my little Los Angeles private-school bubble for a few weeks a year, those last years of high school, and found that both in Indianapolis with my father's family, and in a little town on the outskirts of Monterey, CA with my best friend, I belonged - people liked me, for who I was. I discovered I was funny, I was talented, I was a unique human being with something to offer the world. I started to wonder if I just changed when I hit the city limits, when the plane touched down or the train began to brake.

I never found an answer I could believe in. I knew that I found myself unattractive physically, but that I really liked just about everything about me on the inside. I was a smart kid, I had real talent on stage, and amongst my small group of close friends, I was funny.

I got tired. I ran low on the energy I devoted to over-analyzing my social identity. Then my oldest, best friend handed me a Heineken and told me to lighten up. I got drunk for the first time, and while it didn't immediately turn me into everybody's buddy, it certainly made me think I was.

It wasn't until I started college that the "social lubricant" factor of alcohol (and pot, and even a little coke a few times toward the end) took over. I developed this identity - I don't know if it was really me, although I like to think it was. I don't think I was a phony - I just wasn't totally wracked with social anxiety anymore. I came out of my shell - I wasn't afraid of people and what do you know? I had friends, hundreds of them. Many of them are still friends, nearly ten years later. I was a social cipher - I was an athlete with the jocks, a music geek with the choir kids, a frat boy with my a cappella group, theater snob with the dramaramas, etc. I didn't worry about whether or not all of these people liked me. Of course, I had the occasional issue surrounding that with my roommates, but the fact that they chose to live with me for the first three years of school was a good indication that we had a good bond. And we still do - I'm going to see one of them and his longtime girlfriend sometime next week.

So alcohol really greased my social wheels. I was invincible; I was even a success with girls, to hear others tell the story. (Sex wasn't quite as important to me as drinking, eventually.)

But a little over two years ago, that stopped working - well, no it didn't, but my body was going to die. My spirit pretty much already had, and so would yours if you'd spent years effectively telling yourself you were only good for anything with poison in your body.

So out with the old, unsuccessful, lethal coping mechanism, and in with the 12-step social model of recovery. Taking the steps outlined in those programs, I've learned who I really am. I've learned not just to like what I see in the mirror, but to love every aspect of myself. I've even learned to love others,

Easy To Be Hard

Just cleaning up the old blog before I get a-started on the new one...

My friends,

I work in drug and alcohol treatment. It's a given that I see some seriously funny shit, and I see some seriously fucked-up shit. And what gets to me every time is the razor-thin paradox of the sober alcoholic: on the one hand, we joke around about life-and-death matters; we joke a lot, and those jokes would sound offensive, to say nothing of unfunny, in their ribald or iconoclastic nature. On the other hand, recovery from this disease is deadly serious, and the smart addicts never lose sight of that. It's a tough line to walk, being able to joke about your DUI or your child support payments or whatever, take it fairly lightly, but be absolutely serious when it comes to recovery and remember the stakes at all times. I'll be the first to acknowledge that sometimes, those of us who've managed to keep the balance for a little while must make it look easier than it really is - there is, at times, a very real and very heated internal battle being waged over the decision to remain abstinent, and to continue working a solid program of recovery.

But there are times - and this, as you might glean from the fact that I'm posting this here and now, is one of those times - that I get fed up by all the fucking around people in treatment do, both literally and figuratively.

Recently, two people died of prescription medication overdose in the treatment facility I attended. Inpatient. Within two days of each other. It's rare, but it happens. This is a facility run by the country's leading addiction expert. Two people died, less than a month ago. One of them was a man I'd known fairly well, through his numerous attempts to achieve lasting sobriety. He was a gay marine - which I say in order to highlight both the strength and courage he must have had, and just one of the central characterological conflicts that kept him struggling for sobriety and led him to this (some say intentional) overdose. He was, to many of his "trudging buddies" (friends in recovery with around the same amount of sober time), a hero. He is dead. And today I watched a girl overdose on the same medication. She's alive, so far as I know, but as they loaded her gurney onto the ambulance, she blew us an irreverent kiss goodbye.

This girl, and a few of her friends, had been playing around for weeks, before and after these deaths. They looked like they were having a good time, and I only ever saw them outside of their groups, so I hung around, shot the shit, had a good time with them. But the longer I stuck around, the more I realized it was all play, no work for these kids. And this is where I go for my recovery - it's not my job (yet) to shepherd these kids through early sobriety; I have my own internship, on the other side of Pasadena, for that.

So all I did was gently hint, even jokingly, that they might want to spend some time thinking about the fact that they had landed themselves in an acute psychiatric care facility. Then this happens. Shortly before the ambulance arrived, a girl I spoke to had deemed her rehab experience "relaxing". My response - "If rehab is relaxing, you're doing it wrong."

Relaxation is, to be sure, an essential component of treatment for any biopsychosocial disorder, especially if you expect the patient to participate in their own cognitive-behavioral treatment. But relaxing isn't the first thing that should come to mind. We make you work for your relaxation. Rehab is frightening, intensely emotional, frustrating, scary, clarifying, edifying, rewarding and terrifying. And amidst all that, as we beg you to change everything in your life that led you to us in the first place, we ask you to relax. To look inside and find some of the peace - sober - that you were seeking, knowingly or unknowingly, through poisons. (However awesome the poison was.)

The things we did when we didn't know any better may be incredibly funny (like getting my ass kicked at night basketball by Kelly Dupuis and using the "race card" to get us all out of consequences for that night's mischief). Most of them are, with a little perspective. But once we take responsibility for our actions, past and present, we have to laugh with a conscience. We have to be aware that what's funny, in the end, is that we survived the shit we did, that we're free enough from consequences that we're in rehab, drawing breath, with our full wits about us. (Eventually - the wits, in general, come back later, and slowly.)

This girl could have died today, and I watched her fellow "inmates" joking, smirking, playing around even as the gurney was being wheeled away. That scares me. I have lost more than one friend to this disease, because the seriousness of their peril escaped them completely.

I also have friends that are further along in their recovery. One of them, if not further along in recovery than me, certainly has more time abstinent than I do. And I watch them play in their clique, talking shit about each other behind each other's backs, placing more importance on sex than true friendship and mutual support. It's silly, it's high-school bullshit melodrama, but as long as they're sober it's no big deal, right? Uh-uh. Some of these kids are going to get so wrapped up in each other, in themselves and their psychodrama, that a drink, a joint, or a pill is nowhere near as dangerous to them (in their minds) as being around "him", "her", "them", or "that place". Even after the brief span of sobriety I've managed, I've seen it happen so often that the new funny, for me, is kids (as old as 60-something, but kids nonetheless) coming in, thinking "I'm going to be different; I've got this thing licked already, and there's too much fun to be had to worry about piddly things"...like the consequences of your choices....

It's lethal, kids. That's what I want to say, but in order to maintain the credibility I need in order to convince them of more easily-grasped concepts (like, "drugs are bad for you"), I can't lay that on them. They won't trust me, and right now they do. Trust is the core prerequisite for a successful therapeutic alliance. I only wish I could spare them the pain they will almost certainly experience learning their lessons the way I learned many of mine - the hard way. (I still haven't met a metaphorical brick wall I didn't want my forehead to get up close and personal with...)

I'm going to lose more friends to this particular symptom of this disease. It's a statistical inevitability. As my mentor would say,

"Oh well."
Aren't you glad you're not an addict?
But what do you think?

Cruel To Be Kind

What's the price of surrendering to evil? When does the price become too dear? Is the sale of a child into sexual slavery, to supposedly pious overlords, a valid sacrifice if it saves the lives and the persons of nine more from being violated? Can our souls survive even such a noble compromise with evil, without being indelibly stained? Who would weigh heavier upon your conscience - the dozens of lives you sold away, or the safety of the children you protected, nine times greater in number?

At first I thought, "this is why I believe there is some evil to which there can be no valid and noble response except to resist its influence with all we have, even at the potential cost of our lives." But if I spent my life resisting that foul 'compromise' then who would stand for these children?

This is, to me, a moral double bind. There is no right answer, only a choice between a morally reprehensible action and a morally reprehensible inaction. In that circumstance, I'm probably as likely to take the action as the inaction.

Like nickelodeon used to ask,

"what would you do?"

Whadd'ya think?

What You Own

Another old post of mine from another blog. Rather personal, but hey - know who you're reading, my teachers always said.

My mother knows the language of recovery quite well - she learned it studying psychology. Today, she mentioned, in reference to something, that she felt she was enabling me. She told me that she and I were going to have a joint session with our therapist soon, because she had some issues she felt we needed to work out. I love it.

I've been refusing to enable my parents for almost a year now - in fact that is, in my opinion, the source of at least half of their frustration with me. I don't co-sign their psychological and emotional abuse; I don't tailor my objectives or perspectives in conversation in reaction to theirs ('triangulating' we call it). I don't consider it an imperative that I do a given thing just because they do. When making amends to them for wrongs I've done them, I don't allow them to dictate the terms of the amends - my father, for example, demanded a "deeper" apology for something; I just said, "I didn't apologize to get your forgiveness, I apologized because it was the right thing to do". (And make no mistake, there have been many wrongs I've done them.)

I don't do (or not do) these things standoffishly, I don't make a big deal of it. In fact, my only response to my mother was that if it was important to her, I'd go do this session. But alcoholism is a family disease - meaning, while we call it a biopsychosocial disease, because it does encompass all of those systems within the addict, the truth is that you're not going to come to a full understanding of an alcoholic unless you take a family systems approach. I cannot be the only sick one - it requires the sickness of several others to contribute to mine. Even if it didn't, even if everyone who said "I don't need to participate - you're the sick one" was correct, they'd still have to have developed some interpersonal dysfunctions, even if only in reaction to my disruptive influence. And nobody in my immediate family other than myself is seeking treatment for this disease.

So when my mother comes to me with stuff like this, I take it in stride, but I'm bemused at the irony. I'm always being told, in essence, to own my own responsibility, my part in things. Well, that's fine - the problem comes in where people try to assume the authority to tell me what my responsibilities are. I'm not saying I'm the only one who gets to dictate that, but I am the one with the final say. It's my choice - as it should be, since any consequences are mine to own as well.

Mom and Dad have a little problem when my perception of my responsibilities to them don't line up with their perceptions of same. Tough shit. I seek outside guidance, to make sure that my choices are valid and respectable, and the right choices for continued recovery, but the final choice, the ultimate accountability, and all of the consequences, lie with me. (Even if others are negatively affected, it's still my responsibility, and therefore my consequence.)

My parents are probably never going to own their stuff, their baggage, the ways in which they've wronged me - I've learned to accept that. But just because they want to put it on me, doesn't mean I'm going to take it. There's a definite recovery-oriented gap between me and them, and I'm through trying to manage it and myself at the same time.

The Way I Am

I get now that many people in my life (even my parents) don't have quite the understanding of me that they think they do. They see what they see, and that's a part of me, but they assume it to be the whole, not taking whatever inner life I might possess into account, and they judge me - not unkindly, not harshly, and almost always with love - incorrectly. Hell, there are people with virtually unlimited access to my inner life who don't have anywhere near the whole picture.

I imagine this is the case with you too, reader.

I dunno about you, but I'm constantly thinking, constantly reevaluating, constantly in flux. I am no more or less David at any given moment of my day, but wholly different world-views may be operating within me from one portion of my day to the next. My central thesis, if I must state one, would be that given all possibilities, all the "what ifs" and "if only's," all the more favorable or less favorable outcomes we could wish for; given the magnitude of the quantum possibilities for change in a given life at any given moment, and how they're compounded exponentially from one choice to the next, one action to the next; the best manner to dispense with all of these considerations, the most useful and spiritually sound approach to the question of "where am I right now in relationship to others, to the world, to the god-consciousness," is to assume that I'm where I'm supposed to be, and that I'm supposed to be in the best place there is for me to be. This is close enough to Candide that I'm moderately shocked with myself for being there, but it's not a statement of unflagging optimism; rather, it's a functional assumption that carries me through the shit-times. Because I'm more than capable of imagining, as I often do, a significant percentage of the myriad ways in which my life could be "better" than it is now. But my life is, now. And that's both an inescapable, immutable fact (inasmuch as inescapable, immutable facts are ever really inescapable or immutable - or facts), and something for which to be profoundly grateful. I've managed to free myself of the debilitating tendency I had to live in the past, to pick over each of my past decisions and wonder which ones were the most destructive, and which led me to whichever foul end.

And I've learned that, no matter the present circumstance, my present position in life has some meaning later on; each action I take, if it's the right thing to do, bears later fruit; and, if I abide, this will always be the case. So worrying about others' perceptions of where I am is just about as useful as worrying about my own; which is to say, not useful in the least. All I can do is walk through the day, confident that with each right choice I make (or, most-right, in a choice between equally unappealing alternatives), I'm progressing. I'm headed somewhere, and that's all that matters. We call it staying out of the results.

There's more to the equation, I don't believe in predestination; I believe there's plenty of room for my free will in the Design. And I've shown myself capable, time and again, of fucking up the pattern. But when I'm going with the flow, all I need my will for is putting one foot in front of the other and keeping my eyes, ears, mind and heart open to new information. I can leave the rest up to Somebody Bigger.

Princes of the Universe

This is an earlier post to an earlier blog, that maybe one person knew about.

I have a friend, Greg, who is traveling down to Florida next week. He's been doing this off and on for the almost exactly two years I've known him, gone weeks at a time, caring for his ailing mother. His siblings are on it year-round, and he goes down there whenever he can manage it to spell them for a bit. Because, as another friend was remarking in this same conversation, it positively sucks having to be responsible 24/7 for the care and well-being of another (parent or child, although it is perhaps more taxing in the former case for a plenitude of reasons) without relief or assistance.

This time, it's different. Greg couldn't specify a return date; he'd gotten the call that his mother was close to passing on, and it was his stated intent to go and to stay until the end.

My mentor was frank, even blunt to the point of harshness, about the real tragedy here: "We were never meant to live this long," he said. And he's right. Our bodies have not had generations to adapt, on a Darwinian level, to the ridiculously long leaps forward we've made in health care over just the last few generations. It really wasn't all that long ago, in the eyes of evolution, that we were leeching each other, that doctors were more often than not alchemists or mystics, each a faith-healer in his own right. (Hell, we didn't license doctors until sometime in the early-mid 20th.) We married at what is now middle-school-age; these days, most parents are afraid of allowing their 8th-grade children to recognize their own sexuality, much less anyone else's. "Birth Control" would have been a thing unheard of; nine times out of ten, the harshness of life took care of that - miscarriages aside, the chances of a child living to the age of five were dwarfed by the chances of a child dying long before.

And now, in some of the most ridiculous nonsense I see in this country, we're not allowed to end the suffering that comes attached to this longevity. Our bodies give out before we die. Our brains, lightning-quick to adapt and regulate to keep the organism alive, go into crisis-management mode, triage-ing conditions left and right; and, though our bodies are well past useful in any real sense of the word (y'know, like, walking is useful), like the song says, our hearts will go on.

But heaven forfend we simply terminate that triage process. No, we'll keep Aunt Shirley supplied with ever-increasing doses of morphine, until that becomes a crisis for the body to manage; we'll intubate, have her breathing through and pissing into a tube, shitting into a bag, and breathing with a machine before we allow her to expire. And I'm not just guessing here: it was my Aunt Shirley. Just as my mentor commented that the last time he was at the bedside of an elderly dying relative, she told him "Bobby, I pray every night for the Lord to take me home," my aunt said (and I'm paraphrasing, because she had a tendency to go on) "I've seen all I wanted to, done all I was meant to, and I got to see my niece and nephew grow into amazing adults. I'm ready to go."

And how can we get doctors to assist in this painless passage? Well...has the patient by any chance committed a capital crime? Because while we absolutely will not ease the suffering of the terminally infirm, we can't wait to end the lives of those with fully functional and healthy bodies and minds who have violated our society's most sacrosanct laws. I say, we should start dummying up rape and murder charges for the elderly. Then we can request changes of venue to death-penalty states. Hey, we could even cheapen this process, since you're almost guaranteed a no-contest plea. Then you request summary execution, and bada-bing, bada-boom, mortal coil successfully shuffled off.

When it's my time, if this is my path, there's only so long I'm going to want to fight the end. If there's no substantial hope of me getting back on my feet and continuing to offer whatever gifts I possess to society and my loved ones, then it's time to pack it in. My mother has the complete opposite view (for now; I suspect that if she was actually laid up in bed with no hope of getting up, she'd frustrate herself to death): "Keep my ass alive, I don't care how much it costs," my sister and I have been exhorted often. Of course, she's also given us all manner of other instruction on her geriatric care, that I'm sure we'll ignore or she'll rethink; but I'm hoping that we won't have to be responsible for that for very long. Shirley was in her mid-sixties when she fell infirm, but my mother has been - if not a model of physical health - than much healthier, now, in her mid-fifties, than Shirley was a decade ago.

But I digress - my point here is that Bob put the hammer to the point. We currently aren't built to live as long as we do, and our society treats our elderly and infirm like millstones about its collective neck. My ethnic studies teacher is fond of noting that anyone below the age of thirty is essentially paying into his Social Security, since we'll never see a penny of it - it'll have gone bankrupt long before our retirement, at this pace. (Especially if Congress votes to use it to pay off some of our massive debt...but that's another blog for another time.) My point: since evolution is pretty much never going to catch up to advances in modern health care - by the time the human body will be pretty much universally able to function with reasonable utility at the age of ninety, we'll be keeping people alive until their mid-hundreds - society must find a better way of filling the gap.