Day 41

A picture of my pet:


I don't know what to do for this one; I've never had a pet.  It's not just that I grew up virulently allergic to every animal with the slightest cuddle factor - it's that my father was and is even more so. I grew up predictably afraid of cats and dogs. Families always had to put the pet out when I came over to play, and sometimes that didn't help.  My sister got turtles when I was twelve or so - no dander - I got salmonella poisoning.

I love cats and dogs now, although I exhibit a decided dog preference.  (I assume this has something to do with growing up in a house where affection was conditional upon performance, and cold even when we were thus rewarded.)

My allergies have subsided over time - and are still awful - Dad's have worsened.  Maybe when I move out; I have a feeling my eventual home will feel much more complete with a canine roommate.

Still, I feel like there needs to be a picture of something, so here's one of T-Bear:

yes, dammit, it's a teddy bear named T-Bear.  It was better than my series of bears named after movie theaters.

He might not be a pet, but he's the possession I've had the longest, and there were times in my childhood I swear the bear could talk with a look - "You're pathetic," he often said.  I know, T-Bear.  I know.

Day 40

A picture of my favorite Disney character:

Who doesn't love the Terror That Flaps?

Ol' DW and I have similar gifts for declamation, and an unfortunate proclivity for klutziness in critical moments.  And like DW, I am the termite that devours your floorboards and the surprise in your cereal box.

Day 39

It is a period of geek persecution.  Dash Stryker, hiding his filmic preferences in an unknown location, has won his first imaginary battles against the GALACTIC EMPIRE.  During this time, gift-purchasing for Stryker was easy; his father found many snap-together models, including the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.  Holding his X-Wing in one hand, and a Star Destroyer in the other, Stryker raced about his bedroom, pretending to be custodian of the stolen plans that would save his people and restore freedom to the galaxy...

A picture of my favorite movie.

If John Williams isn't playing in your head right now, be warned: you are not going to relate to this post.

After graduating sixth grade, I took a few summer school courses at my soon-to-be middle school.  The idea, I suppose, was to acclimate me to a new campus, smooth the transition.  And, likely, to get me out of the folks' hair - I was such a wreck of nerves that summer, I must have driven the whole block insane.  I met a handful of new and interesting people, but my favorites were these three guys - I don't even remember all of their names - who constructed makeshift lightsabers from broom handles and masking tape, quoted from the Trilogy verbatim, and discussed Timothy Zahn's then-groundbreaking novel exploring the lives of our favorite characters eight years after the credits rolled on Jedi.  It was like coming home - I didn't know anyone else had obsessed over those movies like I had.

This is not just 'before the Internet,' remember, this was also before Lucas messed with his own product (so to speak).  The prequel trilogies were less than a myth and more than a dream - a faint whisper, on the edge of hearing. Yes, you're all thinking, and probably should have stayed that way.  I mostly agree.

I learned of the prequel movies a few years later, stomping the streets of Pacific Grove and Monterey with Ian and his crew.  Mallrats had just come out, and all of a sudden, being a geek was slightly more permissible.  I was allowed to know about comic books, and this was the discussion that afternoon.  I don't remember what prompted me to change the subject, but I remember Ian's other Black friend (yeah, I said it, because it's true) looked at me with a sort of crazed joy and said, "Boy, don't you invoke the Holy Trilogy unless you know what you're talking about!"  Ten minutes later, after the geek bona fides were established - I mean, plenty of people know the line, but how many people know how to spell "Tosche" Station? - he told me of the Great Plan.  To tell the story of the Clone Wars, of the Emperor's rise and Vader's fall, as Lucas had always intended.  I'd known about the digitally-remastered theatrical re-release, so I assumed that's what he meant.

"No," he told me, that crazed look returning.  "I know this."  I never learned how - probably some fanzine I'd never heard of.  Nevertheless, the prophecy (and don't get me started on that meshugas) was fulfilled, at once realizing and sundering the hopes of every fanboy who knew how many y's were in Kashyyyk.

From 1983 to 1993, there was nothing new in the Star Wars Universe.  From 1993 to 1997, all we had were novels of a slightly less long time ago - then the Lucas returned and defecated in his own spiritual wellspring (dammit, I liked the Ewok celebration the way it was).  The reason no true SW fanboy will desert the field, in spite of the ever-declining quality of new Star Wars product, is not because Star Wars = crack.  It's because Star Wars withdrawal = crack withdrawal.

In 2000, at the end of my freshman year, I realized just how far my obsession with the Original Trilogy had gone - nobody could watch the damn thing with me.  I didn't even realize I was reciting the lines; Matt had to point it out (on his way out of the door).

And now, if a product, joke, news story, YouTube video, or porno (yeah, that happened) somehow involves Star Wars, I get the forward, as though my geekhood has created a Pavlovian response in my friends.  Star Wars --> send to Dash.

Not exactly a bonus picture.

A Sickle Cell Sufferer's Guide, Part 3

You were having a normal day. Or maybe, you were having the greatest day of your life.  Maybe it was the worst in a long series of bad ones, and you'd been pushing yourself too hard.  In any case, there was that just-one-whatever-too-many moment, and the slight disorientation kicked in.  Your day as you knew it is now over.  You look up, yanked entirely out of whatever moment you were in, and turn your attention inward.

I was fifteen, just into my second semester of tenth grade at a new school, less than a month before my first musical theater performance on a new stage, when a layup instigated one of the worst Sickle Cell crises I've ever had.  It was a shot of perfect form - left to right under the hoop, ball over the shoulder, finger roll, nothing but net; when I landed, there was that spasm, that slight nausea, that "Uh-oh."

Maybe it's entirely specific to each of us, what we experience physically in that moment, but the "Uh-oh" is not. Neither are the emotions.  The older we get, the more emotions we attach to our bouts with this bastard.  (Y'know, the illegitimate offspring of crappy hemoglobin genes and...okay so it's possible to take a metaphor too far.) Those emotions are overwhelmingly negative, and often serve to make dealing with an active pain crisis even more difficult.

But, like those embattled nurses at the ER, you must triage, so the emotions are either stuffed, shoved aside, or otherwise allowed to fester while you deal with the immediate threat.  Beg off of whatever you were doing - no matter how important it was, your most important responsibility is to get home, horizontal, hydrated and medicated quickly.  Get ahead of this sucker, cut it off at the pass.  Take Tylenol, Advil, Aleve, and a couple liters of Arrowhead to the side of your bed and prepare for the madness.

Do you remember being told that, in the event of a nuclear attack, you should get under your desk?  Because if we're all going, it's nice to have something over your head turn to ash before you do...or perhaps just get fatally irradiated first.  I know that's essentially what I'm suggesting; we both know that in the event of a major crisis, you might as well take Pez, M&Ms, and Reese's Pieces with your water and enjoy the sugar rush - if you can feel it around the blinding agony.  But sometimes, the crisis is minor and knocked out with a little OTC TLC, so we'll try that first.

Let's assume that doesn't work.  You know what the next step is; when you decide to take it is entirely individual.  My concern is usually to end the crisis as quickly as possible, once I know my over-the-counter friends aren't going to save me from my personal Fat Man.

Day 38

A picture of the best part of my day:

I'm the not-a-morning-person guy, taken to the ultimate extent.  This is probably because of my sleep schedule, which is so incredibly crappy as to invalidate the name on most occasions - and on other occasions, cannot be said to exist even in that sad state.  When I do sleep, sometimes it feels like I don't rest, which makes facing the day ahead challenging.

I do it anyway. Usually, I do it without the massive dose of caffeine I'm always tempted to consume; on work days that require me to be up before seven, temptation wins.

In either case, when I see the day winding down ahead of me, I start revving up to get there, excited to get some rest - this has the predictable, self-defeating effect on my ability to rest, but what can I do?  This dynamic is the main reason I haven't made it out for many of those after-meeting dinners; the meeting lets out at 9pm, and I'm already envisioning life under the covers, eyes closed, drifting off into whatever sleepless daydream I concoct for myself.  (When you dream while you're awake, it's all about wish fulfillment - meaning, lightsabers are often involved.)  I love my recovering friends, but you know the rule - the rarer a commodity is, the more greatly we value it.

My Increasingly Regular Dose of Brevity as Regards Zack Snyder Being a Big Ol' Copycat

If you'd titled the (second in a decade) reboot of the Superman Franchise Man of Steel before The Dark Knight came out, you'd have been a prince among men.

Also:

I'd have said Amy Adams could do just about anything, until I heard about her playing Lois Lane.

And:

Thanks for getting my hopes up with all this talk of Viggo as Zod.  Don't forget to let me down, though!

Day 37

A picture of the people I spend most of my time with:

Why, you're right!  There are no people in this picture, how astute!

 I feel really hinky about violating folks' anonymity in my blog.  I mean, there are all sorts of pictures on my Facebook profile of us doing sober things, but there are also all sorts of pictures on my FB of me doing drunk things with people in years past, and it's been my experience that most can't tell the difference without seeing the drugs being consumed.  When I start writing about what's actually going on, though, I need to take a visual step back.  So here's the unit patch of Alcoholics Anonymous.  (Symbolizing, if you were curious, Unity of purpose on the left, Service to other alcoholics on the right, and Recovery from addiction as the foundation.)

I spend most of my time alone; days can go by without me seeing the other members of my household.  This is a function of many things, and I can finally honestly say my proclivity for isolation is at the bottom of the list.  I'm plenty willing to get off my ass and go do something with other people anytime there's something to do and they tell me about it - I even occasionally invite myself places.  I'm just not the one coming up with the ideas.

But over the course of any given week of my life these days, during this Boring Phase, the people I see most often are recovering alcoholics - specifically, those at my Friday night meeting.  This has not been true throughout the course of my sobriety.  In the first months, maybe even the first year, I wasn't at all comfortable hanging out with other alcoholics.  They inspired me; they helped me; they gave me my laugh back.  But socially, when we weren't actively sharing the skills necessary to stay sober, I didn't know how to act around them. In many cases, our addiction and the personality traits attendant thereto are the only things we have in common.  My sponsor is an older, ex-military, Republican, office guy.  It should come as no surprise that, at least initially, I was somewhat more comfortable with the Vassar crowd - despite the drinking.  (It's a little harder to be around for the pot-smoking - their drinking, after all, won't get me drunk.)

Sometime in February of 2007, when I'd been sober for nine months and change, one of the old-timers (referring to length of sobriety, not life, y'understand) at the Friday night meeting asked if I was coming to dinner after, or what.  "You think you're too cooool to hang out with us, is that it?"  Which was funny because the answer was the precise opposite and I'm fairly certain she knew th answer was the precise opposite. I went to dinner that night; eventually, it became a habit

I've fallen out of the habit, quite a bit, but these are still my people.

Day 36

A picture of my "other half:"

May 1998.  Bet we both wish we were still this skinny.

I suppose we could look more different, but it'd just be comical.  I really did try to think of someone new to show you - maybe a picture of my sister - but this is the honest post.  Lacking any sort of romantic other half, I have to go with the person who constitutes the largest part of me to be found outside of me: Ian.

Not that this is an entirely agreeable or even comfortable state of affairs, our long brotherhood notwithstanding.  Given the amount of internal conflict within each of us, and the elements of our personality - defects and assets - that are near-identical, arguments between us tend to reflect arguments we've been having with ourselves.  And y'know, externalizing that junk - where it cannot be safely ignored or rationalized away - is often a mistake without a therapist present.  (And although both of our mothers would fit the bill, they learned to get out of the way decades ago.)

I think we've passed through the worst of it - mostly but not only because we've each changed, individualized, enough that our internal conflicts don't mirror each other as much as they once did.  Our arguments have lost a great deal of emotional intensity - which is good, because they have only swelled in intellectual intensity.

I swear, sometimes I think we should just skip the discussion phase, draw our Colts, and settle this like gentlemen.

Day 35

A picture of my favorite place to eat:

Ventura Blvd., how did I ever survive without you?

We've more or less moved the Confession Booth here - and good show us, because the food here is both good and appropriately priced.  It's always hard to order, because it all looks so good...but the portions are friggin' huge.

Day 34

A picture of my currently most played CD:

I done told you already, haven't I?

This was the first of Cave's albums Ian played for me, in his Salinas apartment during what arguably could have been the worst year of my life.  I sat on the floor, stoned, and the almost uniformly dulcet tones and snail's-paced rhythms took me for a slow ride down the Styx.  Cave's macabre spirituality is, on his other albums, an order to take heart and a journey through his metaphysical universe (Ian called him the boatman of the Apocalypse; I said he was the court-bard of the aftermath).  On The Boatman's Call, it's most often cold comfort, apparently for Cave himself and for the listener only by afterthought.  The first lyrics to be heard are "I don't believe in an interventionist God..."

Later on, he invokes Kant and cries.

Cave is capable of classic-rock-style belting, but I prefer his smoky baritone.  And as much as I love his occasionally wild instrumentation, there is also something to be said for the piano-bass-percussion simplicity of Boatman's Call.  (Namely, that I can go downstairs right now and improvise my favorite three tracks without missing a chord.)  And if the melancholy apprehension of the music against the joyous certainty of the lyrics to "Are You The One That I've Been Waiting For?" - because it's not a rhetorical question - doesn't move you, then you might be a little too confident in love.

All said and done, I'm just more in a mood for this album lately than for my other favorite, Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus.


Runner-up: Sting's Brand New Day.  You've got countrified blues featuring James Taylor, a tent-revival call-and-response gospel number, and a funky jazz solo in 7/8 - and that's all in the same song!  A little ambient music, some bluesy bossa nova, a lullaby, Youssou N'Dour doing the desert thing, the requisite titular single - but with an unpublicized Stevie Wonder on harmonica - and the Sting-requisite song about a prostitute...basically it's his Graceland.

Day 33

A picture of the house I grew up in:

The piano was right on the other side of the big window. The neighbors hated me and that piano...hey, bet they still do!

This is the best I could do.  Really! You can see most of the front of the house in the background.  Although we moved into this house when I was fifteen, it remains the place where I did most of my growing up - if we understand that to mean maturing.  I learned hard lessons in the rooms of 11576 Chiquita Street.

I wish I still had the more prestigious shots of 11576.  I wish there were pictures of 4838 Vista de Oro, where I lived from ages 4-15.  I considered trekking across town to take a shot - the house didn't look all that different, last I saw - but then I reconsidered.  Creepy guy in a car across the street, taking a picture of your house?  Wrong neighborhood for that crap, and Rudy the Sheriff (and father of my childhood nemesis Wesley) probably still lives at 4856.

I'm still learning the hard lessons at 11576 - the hardest of which is coming to accept the many reasons I still live here.  I've had my time away, to be sure, but dammit I'm thirty years old.  I know plenty of other thirty year-olds are feeling the economic pinch, but...see what I mean about having a hard time accepting?

A different house stands here now.  Four years ago, we moved around the corner briefly while my parents tore down the structures that stood on our property and built their dream house.  I didn't involve myself overmuch - okay, at all - in the process. It's their house; I'm just a guest here.

Incidentally, the foreground is me (zoot-suited, baby!) and my high-school girlfriend Dorothy waiting rather impatiently for the mothers - mine, D's and Freddy's - to stop taking pictures, the afternoon of my senior prom.

A Sickle Cell Sufferer's Guide, Part 2

Okay, I know it hurts.  I know it hurts like a knife or a gunshot wound, like industrial metalworking equipment is being applied to your flesh from the inside, like you're stuck between Enterprise and the ground and the transporter's malfunctioning.  And I know that one thing people like to do when they're in pain is prove just how stoic they can be, just how much the pain isn't bothering them.

This is fine, as long as you're not in an emergency room.  Play to the triage nurses; they're the ones who need to see exactly how much pain you're in.  As my mother once told me, as we approached a crowded ER, "Scream." It was something I hadn't done as the sole result of excruciating pain for years, by that point in my adolescence.

Once you get a bed, you can go back to playing it cool for the doctors and the nurses.  The worst thing that can happen is that when they ask you how much pain you're in and you tell them, they won't believe you.  Who cares: docs have to treat the level of pain you report.

But triage nurses can look at your stoic self and say, "Eh, she don't look so bad, let's move her down the line some."  So you're stuck outside watching Maury administer yet another paternity test while the sprained ankle who limped in twenty minutes after you gets cleared inside.

There's such a thing, my comrades-in-arms, as an overabundance of pride.  Don't try to play it off.  Don't play it up, either - if you're planning an ER visit, you probably don't have to.  Just realize that if you feel like writhing in that tiny uncomfortable plastic chair, it's okay - nobody's going to think any less of you, and you'll probably get help faster.

Last tip for today; even though the triage nurses don't really like you to get up and ask them how long it's going to be, you should probably do it at least once every ninety minutes.  ER waiting rooms get crowded; paperwork on each patient gets buried; time moves faster for them in their haste than it does for you in your pain.  Let 'em know you're there.

Day 32

A picture of a crazy night:

Rachel, and J.C. (my childhood crush)

There were fifty students in my sixth grade class, few enough that we all knew each other.  By that last year, we had mostly put aside the bullying and divisiveness that were the hallmark of earlier years - there were still cliques, naturally, but little conflict between them.  If we adhered strongly to the fiction that we were all friends, in those last emotional days before people who'd spent all their waking years together finally went their (not entirely) separate ways, I think we can be forgiven - and it wasn't that much of a stretch.

By 1997, Ian was the only friend from elementary school left in my life - it stayed that way for years, and though in most cases we parted friends I did not mourn the loss of the other Centipedes (beat that for a crappy mascot).

It was actually a strange connection that brought my friend Rachel (left) back to me: she had gone to high school with a couple of kids who later attended Vassar with me.  So it was that I ran into her in Matt's apartment sometime in 2004.  Weird! we both thought, since we hadn't entirely parted friends.  But we gamely put our behinds in the past (as Pumbaa advised), and just like that were friends once more.

Over the next eighteen months or so we'd meet up randomly - especially during the time she was dating a VC buddy who was doing a sketch comedy show with Matt.  One of the things we said, as old schoolmates may, was that it'd be nice to get the 'old gang' back together - at least, as much of the 'old gang' as was in Los Angeles at any given moment.

Imagine my surprise, given the small nature of such talk, when it actually happened.  My old friend Rachel - one of the best, back in the day - was and is very much a doer of things.  She was the one who in years past convinced me to tell J.C. (my childhood crush) that I had a crush on her; she was the one who in 2005 found just about every Centipede in the greater Los Angeles area and gathered them into a venue with food, alcohol and music.

Early 90's music, of course.  Whoomp!

Amazing things ensued.  I saw my buddy Amos - our friendship actually precedes our ability to speak or walk in a bipedal manner, thanks to our parents and a play group (rather unimaginatively named Playgroup).  I saw four of the other five Black students from my class - the last lives on the East Coast.  And for the first time in nearly a decade, I saw J.C., my childhood crush.

She was engaged; that didn't take the luster off of the moment.  This is the type of mid-twenties experience that's supposed to be reserved for cinematic explorations of the quarter-life crisis.

I'll be the first to confess I have dramatized much of my elementary-school experience.  It's a way of distancing myself from that awkward boy who was so incapable of holding on to positive reinforcement or creating lasting pleasurable memories.  So mostly, that night, I remained silent about my own perceptions of elementary school - they wouldn't have been very fun recollections in any case.  I listened to the perceptions of others, and forgave them ahead of time for stating those perceptions as fact.

I mean, it's entirely possible that I was the Most Punished kid in class, and occasionally the things for which I was punished were my fault alone - but mostly, I got busted for fighting back.  (And, if you ask my parents, fighting back while being Black.  I still don't know how often or even if this was the case.)

Still, it was fun - and entirely surreal.  So surreal that it rates in my book as a Crazy Night.  Fifteen or so 25 year-olds gather in Laurel Canyon, get drunk in a house sprung from a dream Bret Easton Ellis had the night before, and watch their sixth-grade graduation video.

(I still can't believe I didn't get a solo; there was only one kid in the class who could sing as well as I could.)

 We've had one big party and several more smaller evenings out since; weird, right?

Bonus Picture! The Centipedes of 1992.

Day 31

A picture of a tradition I have:

More Ventura Boulevard.  My house is a brisk walk away...not that I've walked it since high school.

It began junior year of high school.  If D, Freddy or I had something we wanted to discuss in-depth, something that was perhaps too sensitive to discuss on campus - although the campus was tiny and the walls had ears, the larger factor was a demonstrated inability to whisper when one of us got going on a rant - we'd pack into the car and head off to this McDonald's.

Sometimes we only had forty minutes to hash it out - sometimes we'd sit there for hours.  I think it was Fred who named it The Confession Booth.  For the first few years, this referred specifically to our preferred booth (near enough to the condiments, far enough from the bathrooms, good line of sight to the door); later, it described the general activity of dining at McDonald's while talking through some major event.

Those sessions were critical release valves - without them, each of us would have burst from the buildup of social pressure.  Girl 1 had almost certainly found out through Girl 2 how I felt about her! What would I do?  How should I play it?  Why the hell did I trust Girl 2?  Other Guy was too fierce a competitor for Girl 3's affections; Freddy needed a game plan, but first he needed to be able to say "FUCK OTHER GUY" - every inch the archetype of the Nice Guy, there was no way Fred was going to let that sentiment out where anyone but his brothers could hear it.  D was in an off-again phase with Girl 4, and was having conflicted feelings about Girl 5 - Girl 4's best friend. I should mention, Girls 1 and 2 were also best friends, and each of these scenarios occurred - no generalizations here.  These comprised the core conflicts of our last two years of high school (well, mine and D's - Fred was two years below).  In many ways we only had each other to go to - in other ways, of course, we each stepped on the toes of the other with the best of intentions.

Those sessions, though now they most often only include some two of the three, and usually take place in better dining establishments, remain a critical release valve - all the more critical, as the pressures are no longer just social.  It was at a Confession Booth session that I first gleaned the problems that would end Fred's first marriage; at another, D shared some of the racially-charged issues between himself and an employer that would eventually lead to their separation.  My own concerns have been no more trivial than these, my need for my brothers no less dire: addiction and recovery, forging a career path relatively late in life...all are Confession Booth material.

And sometimes, every so often, I really just need the McFries and my boys, so I can complain about how much I miss Girl 6.  They're sick of hearing about it, but they humor me.

Day 30

A picture of someone I miss:

one of these things is not like the other ones...

This one I've had in mind for over a month now, and in all that time I still haven't figured out exactly what I want to say.

I've already explained that Matt was like my evil, mirror-universe Jiminy Cricket; he was also the first person other than my parents to drive me to the hospital while I was writhing in pain.  He did that for me, freshman year, on just a few weeks' acquaintance.  (I'm pretty sure, it being freshman year and all, that he also had to find the hospital.)

Years later - after the Class of 2003 graduated (Dash-less, as you can see) and Matt moved out to L.A. to pursue his career in comedy to inevitable success - he looked at me in one of his rare moments of calm seriousness and said, "I don't think I ever went to an Axies show.

"I'm a bad friend."

I don't remember how I replied, but perhaps now you understand just how gifted a comedian was my friend Matt Carey.  Even in the most solemn and serious of moments I can remember us sharing, Matt said something utterly laughable.

Matt moved out to Los Angeles in January of 2004.  On December 3rd of that year, he suffered a heart attack and died.  He'd just broken a record of comedic success at Improv Olympic in Hollywood; in another two weeks, he'd have been married.

This grief process took a long time, since I spent the first eighteen months after his death intoxicated as often as possible.  I've long since found acceptance, but I will always miss Matt.  I miss his gifts for understatement and for overstatement; for boiling things down just a little bit below their essence; for convincing me of the absolute truth of whatever ridiculous lie he'd concocted on the spot; for standing in a hospital room and making me laugh at my pee in a bottle even while I'm horribly ashamed of it (that, by the way, was the other indignity of Day 25).  I miss his ability to make everyone around him just a little bit better, and a hell of a lot funnier.

But in quiet moments of internal debate, when a choice of actions is before me - when I waver between the wallflower and the wild child, I can still hear his voice.

"Come onnn, Daaave..."

Day 29

A picture that can always make me smile:

Vassar, 2001-ish.  If wis.dm were still around, what they'd be saying...

Is it the fro?  The pick in the front?  Wearing my (Ray-Ban) sunglasses (inside) at night?  The amazingly collegiate collegeness of it all?  Three of the funniest and most brilliantest Vassar Girls in our crew?

It's all of those things and more.  The smile I get every time I view this picture may be a shallow one, but the prompt didn't ask for a picture that always made me smile deeply and meaningfully.

Heather (on the left) is the only person pictured I still have any regular contact with, although I know where Roxy and Katie are and what they're up to.  In fact, the other picture I was thinking about is of me and Katie (on the right), dancing up a serious sweat at a friend's wedding three years ago. But this one has given me so many more smiles over the years.

Day 28

A picture of something I'm afraid of:

This is the closest I could come. Well, it's the closest an exhaustive Google Image Search could come.

I grew up believing with certainty in my eventual Greatness; I'd even chosen - early on - the field of battle upon which I would emerge not just victorious, but unscathed, unchallenged.

Life took over, reality set in.  As a twenty-four year old active addict suffering from depression and Sickle Cell, I deserted the field, battle unfought.  The coward's path, which could lead only to Mediocrity.

I got stronger; I realized that I didn't have to win an Oscar to be satisfied with my contribution to the world.  This other path I've chosen is harder, but fits into reality better.  I know I can do unique and meaningful things with my life, things that will last; I no longer fear Mediocrity.

There's a long distance between Mediocrity and Greatness, isn't there?  A crowded field that narrows along the journey, until you're picking your way down the gilded narrow path with little company in sight.  What I fear is being lost in the field, having my contributions lost in the field, somewhere just north of Mediocrity and way south of Greatness.

I don't need to be Great; I need to be Notable.  I need my contributions to have scope and somewhat indelible impact.  I need that, not to soothe my inner teenager's pride but to answer The Question: what the hell has all of this suffering been for?  What was the point of enduring indescribable emotional and physical torment for the first too many years of my life?

If I can't make the innumerable shit-storms of the past count for something, and count big, it's gonna be awfully difficult to find Meaning in the path I've walked whenever I reach its end.

Day 27

A picture of me and a family member:

Outside of church, ca. '98-'99

Yep, Cat's in the Cradle, that's us.  Or at least it will be, someday, when I have a wife and family and a job that actually keeps me busy and pays the bills.  So we're pretty much stuck at the end of that verse where the son's all, whatever with your affection I just want the car.

I'm not entirely being fair to myself.  Let's just say Dad and I have our similarities and our differences, and the interplay between the two has occasionally led to very bad, very loud arguments which are a thing of the past.  These days, not every disagreement is an argument, and the arguments we have are wholly civil.

Of course, I had to teach him that an "interruption" is not what happens when he reaches a period, there's a pause, and I start to say something but he's decided he still has the floor - but hey.  He's the Dad.

 As with every generation, I look up to him, and still I see all the ways I'll do it "better" when it's my turn; hopefully, this will not merely entail trading one set of character defects and family dysfunctions for another.

Day 26

A picture of something that means a lot to me:

ca. 2007

So, here we are.  The Four Horsemen, as we sometimes refer to ourselves - named not so much after the forerunners of the Apocalypse as for Ric Flair's wrestling squad (two of us have an ongoing love affair with the now-WWE).

I've already introduced you to myself, to Ian and to D; the fourth Horseman is my brother Freddy.  I often think of him as a little brother - this is less because of the fact that he's two years younger than me, and more because of the difference in our life experiences and our perceptions.  Fred has, on the surface, an easygoing nature that belies the serious consideration he gives to much of his life; he just doesn't trouble himself with too many things that don't affect him directly.  He also often sees black and white where the other three here pictured see only shades of gray.  It makes for some interesting exchanges, this diversity of point-of-view.  It's also worth noting, though what it means we aren't yet sure, that Freddy is the only one of us who's been able to find and secure any real long-term committed relationship.  In November, he'll be married to his girlfriend of nearly four years.

What means so much to me is the friendship that sprung up between the four of us.  I met Ian in first grade, D in tenth; I met Fred the next year (also tenth grade; long story), on the basketball courts at lunchtime.  Freddy met D a few weeks later, and they bonded over their aforementioned love of wrestling.  When Ian moved into my house in the Summer of '98 - a dubious and storied move with still-echoing repercussions - the circle was complete.  The bond between the four of us survived all sorts of melodrama (shared equally, I believe) and Machiavellian manipulation (mostly Ian's, he'd admit); unsurprisingly, girls were at the center of it all - less surprisingly, the same girl in a few different cases.  I won't cheapen this bond or myself by evoking that tired and misogynistic rhymed couplet, nor would I so devalue the friendships I had with those young women - nevertheless, it was this bond of bros that passed the tests of time, distance, and conflict.

Now, these men are my touchstones to my adolescence, my compatriots forging forward into adulthood, my support system when I'm sick, and my comedic partners in sickness and in health.  This is a friendship without which I don't think I'd understand myself or my life half as well as I do; certainly, I'd be diminished, and that life would be much more difficult to live.

A Sickle Cell Sufferer's Guide, Part 1

 "Med-seeker."  "Clock-watcher."  "Junkie."  The last is my favorite, because it's the most honest I've heard.  People really think these things about us, don't they?  They have no idea what it's like, for us.  In our personal orbit, our allies are the hematologists - occasionally - and the career nurses, usually the ones who've had some pediatric experience, who've been there and know our suffering to be real.  Here's our first hurdle, my comrades: convincing other people we're really in as much pain as we claim.



We suffer from a disease that almost only affects Black Americans - this creates a socio-political dimension, an angle that has nothing to do with our health and everything to do with our appearance and the stereotypes other people have about us.  This is not a second hurdle, my friends; it's a sad reality that raises the height of the first one.


There are other hurdles, of course, depending on whether or not we can even afford the frequent health care we require, and whether or not we have access to the quality of care that will get us back on our feet and back to our lives quickly.  I've been so fortunate, to be able to afford that high-quality health care, to be able to remove that concern from the front of my frequently troubled mind.  If this has not been your story, I am pained to know it.  But we share so many other battles, don't we?


I'm thirty years old; I've just pulled myself out of yet another bout with Sickle Cell, and I'm in the cleanup phase.  You know what I mean: the drugs are just about fully flushed from my system, the swelling from the infiltrated IVs has started to recede, I don't feel the urge to crawl in to Mommy's bed and huddle into the fetal position so often; but there's still recovering to be done.  I've got homework assignments left to turn in, this blog to reinvigorate, and oh yeah my life to live again.  Because it feels like a little hiatus from life, doesn't it? It feels like we have to stop and drop everything and dedicate the full powers of our hearts and minds to coping with this pain and what we must do to arrest it.  In fact, that's exactly what our bodies require of us, and we have no choice but to obey - that level of pain is so much harsher a master than any Simon Legree.

When the whips of our master finally subside, there's a moment of shocked relief, of returned breath, of looking around the room and waiting for the next blow to fall.  Even as we return to our daily lives, that waiting often fails to leave us in peace, doesn't it?  We'll get so excited about new opportunities, only to remind ourselves that our vision of the future is contingent upon our ability to rise up and face it.  It's easier, so often easier, to surrender any notion of a future; to live day-to-day, not in the healthy way espoused by 12-Step Recovery and therapists everywhere, but in the manner of the terminal patient who wonders upon each sunrise if he'll be granted the gift of seeing the sunset.


Each of us has our list: the List of Things I Really Wanted To or Almost Got To Do, But Got Sick Instead.  My list is not short, and there are some very big items on it; but I've begun a new list, the list of Things I Got To Do Even Though I Was Afraid I Couldn't - and it's growing fast.  These are the little resiliency tricks I want to share from time to time.  I also want to share my experiences, the ones I know you can relate with, because the single most empowering two-word phrase in the English language is "Me, too."  I know, literally, your pain.  I have felt it, and the despair that comes swiftly behind and sometimes well ahead of it.


I want to pass along my little tricks for hospital survival, like how not to strangle that one nurse that's driving you nuts (remember, she's on a long shift, doesn't understand Sickle Cell, and will be out of your life in just a few days).  I want to remind you that the humor of the gallows is your friend.  I want you to know, and I want to remind myself, that a full life is possible for each of us - as long as we know how to cope with its necessary interruptions.


Its dull and throbbing, sharp and stabbing, seemingly never-ending, universe-narrowing, are-you-sure-that-scale-only-goes-to-ten-asking, emotionally crushing interruptions.

Day 25 (The Return)

I'm feeling much better.  Still got some school to catch up on, but what else is new?  Let's move on.
A picture of my day:

The IV's connected to the IV pole is connected to the AC power is connected to the wall.  The nurses can still hear me saying, "I will never break the chain."

Okay, that's not entirely true, I just wanted to quote two songs in my first paragraph (and I wanted one to be Fleetwood Mac).  I do unplug the IV when I feel like sitting by the window - in that case I go from being chained to a wall via an ungainly yet sensitive apparatus, to being chained to an ungainly yet sensitive apparatus.  Huzzah!

It's not all bad, but it's mostly pretty bad.  It hurts, with a pain indescribable to those who haven't felt it.  People who suffer from migraines are pretty close to the mark; however, I've suffered from some pretty debilitating migraines, and while the side-effects are gnarly, the pain is just not as bad in intensity.

When I'm hospitalized, my day becomes a tedium of sleep and pain and indignity (one unmentionable such is pictured; can you spot it?), and being seriously mindful of the fact that I'm now a recovering addict mainlining a powerfully addictive drug.  The doctors and nurses ask me questions about how much pain I'm in, and how much pain I can tolerate, and seem shocked that - though I am in the hospital to recover from this crisis - I toe the line very close to that upper limit of pain tolerance.  I'd rather have some pain than be lit on morphine these days.  I've played the atavistic Laudanum Patient in the past, and it only brought me more pain - literally, since abusing opiate painkillers hyper-sensitizes the brain's pain receptors.

When I first got sober, I was afraid that life as a recovering-addict Sickle Cell patient would be a constant tightrope walk; this was a thought sprung of despair, and despair came with it.  I was wrong; it's only an occasional tightrope walk, and I have the assistance of many good people in picking my way carefully across when the need arises.  Now, it's a thought of realism, and pragmatic hope comes with it.

I used to watch crap-awful TV during my incarcerations.  As a child, my mother watched ABC soaps; since she was bound by her love to sit by my suffering side all afternoon, I watched them too, without complaint - bound by my gratitude and my love.  (The only possible benefit of this was that I met Sarah Michelle Gellar and Nathan Fillion long before Joss Whedon did; this benefit is dubious.)  Now, Netflix Streaming whiles the hours away.  I watched all of Dollhouse during my hospitalization, and all of Avatar: The Last Airbender during my brief home recovery.

I could write an entire book about the days of Sickle Cell crisis and recovery; perhaps that's a task for another time.  Or another post!