Tag Archives: parenting

MAUS

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I don’t censor myself much around my kids. I mean, sure, I don’t talk about hardcore porn or tell the really, really awful jokes I know, but I say “fuck” a fair amount. Ryder is eleven, and he knows that swear words have a time, a place, and a use, and he’s already well-versed in what each of those means. And he’s fairly adept at using them correctly. I don’t believe there are bad words, there’s just bad intention and use of words. “Fuck” shows up in Duncan’s current favorite song, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day, and he sings it in the song and races on to the next line. We were considering having him audition for the school talent show and sing that song, but of course we were gonna leave out the second verse, because of course. But we discussed changing the word when singing the full song, and when we told him why, he simply said, “Okay”, and that was that. But the word has no real meaning to him yet at six – it’s just something in his favorite song. Kids really don’t worry too much about the four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, not nearly as much as their parents do. And, lemme tell you, the best way to get a kid to use those words is to tell them not to do it. Forbidden fruit is the best. As Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman say in Good Omens, there never was an apple that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

And then I saw this morning that a school district in Tennessee is banning Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel Maus for its use of “objectionable language” and an instance of female nudity. As usual, my home state is leading the way in ignorance, doing everything it can to slow the inevitable passage of time and evolution away from the institutionalized racism of this country. I’m posting a link to a CNBC article about this event here:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/26/tennessee-school-board-bans-holocaust-comic-maus-by-art-spiegelman.html?fbclid=IwAR0zZzRjdP_OT-F0o10VKXHAXh0coWZtd18NNJ06l-fVj3PWdblJ-Q8TktE

For those of you who haven’t had the chance to read it, Maus is an autobiographical graphic novel written by cartoonist Art Spiegelman. It’s the story of young Art’s father, really, as the senior Spiegelman tells his young son about his escape from Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. It’s about the sytematic persecution, torture, and attempted extinction of European Jews by the Nazis. And yes, it’s a comic book. While the names of every character in the book are those of real-life people who were a part of Spiegelman’s story, the characters themselves are drawn as anthorpomorphic animals. The Jews in the book are mice, and the Nazis are cats. The metaphor is apt, blunt, and powerful. You get exactly what Spiegelman is going for, and it rings true, especially if you know anything at all about what happened in the German concentration camps. Cats terrorize and play with mice before they kill them, indifferent to their suffering because they don’t see them as anything other than prey, beneath them. It could very well be one of the reasons I’ve never been much of a cat lover; they simply display little to no empathy, and that bothers me.

But it’s exactly how the Nazis treated their prisoners. Like animals, like toys, like prey. And Maus rams this point home with alarming clarity and, surprisingly, not as much violence as you would think. I haven’t read the books in a very long time, so I won’t try to summarize, but the impression it left on me is still there. And, as a student of the German language and a fair amount of German history, especially about World War II, I’m very familiar with the context. I’ve been to Dachau. I’ve felt the eerie stillness of that place. I’ve felt the stain that all that blood has left on the ground, visible or not. And it’s not a good feeling at all.

So why is a school district in Tennessee banning this book? The presented reasons ring false. Let’s talk about the nudity objection first: it’s a comic book. This literally means that a naked mouse was drawn on the page, and somehow teens are expected to be sexually aroused by this. I will say that I remember my teens pretty well, and to be fair, everything turned me on. It didn’t take much for me to get worked up, because the hormones flooding my body kept me ten seconds away from a boner at any given moment. The phone book could give a kid a hard-on. But context is important here. Think about the context: a cartoon mouse is going into the gas chamber in a concentration camp. While the hormones are strong indeed, there is no sexual context in that situation at all. Unless you’re into to something that you’re not willing to talk about with your therapist, that is, and maybe that’s a part of it: the people who want to ban it are turned on by it because it’s something they want to see happen. So put a pin in this and come back to it.

Second, the language. The school board says (and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s in the article), in effect, that while kids undoubtedly hear worse at home on TV all the time, this language has no place in the classroom. That, somehow, hearing these words in an educational institution, a place of learning, where history is supposed to be examined and understood, reading a handful of “dirty” words will somehow damage them. The same logic has been used in the past to remove dozens of books from school libraries all across America, the most famous example of which is arguably Mark Twain’s seminal Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, removed for its repeated use of the word “nigger” in reference to the runaway slave Jim who becomes Huck’s best friend and who unequivocally humanizes Huck. (Side note: I wonder if this post will get flagged for using that word.) Here again, the context is what gives any word its power, not simply its definition. The N-Word is used upwards of a hundred times or more in the book, and this offends people, but the word is used daily with a bile on the tongue by white people all over this country to debase and dehumanize black Americans of African descent. And you can say, “Well, black people call each other that all the time!” You’re right. And do you know why? Again, context. Think about who is saying it, and to whom, and why.

But whether the book is removed from libraries all over the country, the word remains, and at some point, a child will hear it, and they will ask what it means. It’s up to their parents to give them an honest, responsible answer, and teach them why it shouldn’t be said. Because think about whom it will hurt. (I feel like this topic deserves its own post, to really lay out what this all means, so maybe I’ll do that someday.)

So back to Maus, and its objectionable language. The article never states explicitly which words are objectionable, but I’ll go out on a limb and guess that they don’t mean the word “Jew”. They probably mean one or more of the good ol’ four-letter variety, probably our fond old friend “fuck”, and it’s the presence of such unwholesome words in a school setting that’s causing all this kerfuffle.

Or is it, really? Let’s talk once more about context. It seems to me, given the recent attempts in schools across the nation to ban the nebulous but somehow oh-so-dangerous-to-society-as-we-know-it Critical Race Theory, what’s really happening is that White America is suddenly being forced to confront its virulently racist past, and it’s very butthurt about it. So, with its last dregs of power and its dying breath, it will try to do what it has always done and bury any material that illuminates just how shitty white people have acted for centuries, especially beneath the noble measure of “Protecting the Children”. Meanwhile, lunatics with guns, primarily white and male, are free to walk into schools anywhere with machine guns and open fire on the children we’re trying so hard to protect. Obviously. I can go on and on with examples of just how little children actually mean to the powers that be in this country, but I’m sure you see what I mean.

Maus is an historical document, and it openly, honestly discusses ugly facts about humanity, and the reason it bothers some people is that they recognize themselves in its pages. The dark side of them that wants “Those People” to know their place, the greedy side that wants to keep all of its power, refusing to relinquish it even in the face of death, the blind side that refuses to admit that we may have done some horrible things in the past, and the selfish side that wants to continue doing all of these things just because we like it that way.

But the Nazis lost. Thankfully, they got smacked down, hard. Not without cost: six million Jews died in the labor camps, and another five million Europeans designated “undesirable” – gypsies, homosexuals, dissidents, whomever they disagreed with or whomever disagreed with them – all rounded up and destroyed. But the scars remain. And scars are excellent reminders. Germany has never forgotten the lessons of World War II because they put their history right out in the open where everyone can see it, feel it. Many of the camps are historical sites. You can tour them, feel the psychic scars of all that pain and suffering for yourself, so that it is never forgotten.

Remember the Americans who fought in World War II? The Greatest Generation? They were appalled at what they found in the camps. But, years before, boatloads of Jewish refugees were turned away from American shores because that same generation didn’t want to deal with the rising horror in Europe, and most of them didn’t like Jews much either. Plus, their ancestors has owned black slaves and treated them just as evilly as the Nazis were treating Jews in Europe, and maybe we just didn’t want to be reminded of that at the time. And there were plenty of Nazi sympathizers in America. Rallies were held all over the country. Japanese internment camps spread across the country like a rash. Both of these events happened in the area of Los Angeles where I used to live. America has yet to reckon with its past, but that day is coming. And there are still Nazis in America, make no mistake about it. The last administration normalized hating out loud, but it had been happening in living rooms for decades. I saw it with my own eyes so many times growing up in the South, and it appalls me to this day. I still see it, even out here on the Left Coast, every single day.

Maus is a testament to the courage, perseverance, and sacrifice of the Jews in Europe during World War II as well as those who risked everything to help them. And there were many. I cannot recommend it enough, and I’m finally going to buy a copy as soon as I get the chance. Because it’s a story that needs to be told, that should never be forgotten. And schools can ban it, but it’s readily available on bookshelves all over this country, and putting it on the list of banned books just makes it all the more interesting to children who are hungry to have their questions answered.

Nazis banned books. It didn’t work. They continue to try, even now, even here, in this country. It won’t work.

And remember this: “Nazi” is a four-letter word. A dirty one, too. And there are plenty of people who don’t want you to say it. But like any dirty word, it has a time, a place, and a purpose. Use it wisely, when it is accurate and correct. And always punch Nazis. Because fuck them.

Hello, Clarice….

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I had an entire post written about a memory from my college days that somehow evaporated after two drafts, and I’m not in the mood to redo it right now. Instead, I wanna talk about Anthony Hopkins.

Anyone who follows my thread on Facebook saw my post the other day about Hopkins winning the Oscar on Sunday, and how he’s apparently the first openly autistic person to win it. That blew my mind – WHAT?!?!? Upon reading the article, Hopkins was apparently diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome in 2017, at about 78 years old. He admits to being very high-functioning, but somehow he had flown under the radar his entire life. Almost eighty years. He says that he did poorly in school, he couldn’t concentrate well, and that for most of his early life he just figured he was stupid.

Imagine that. Feeling that something is wrong with you because you’re not like your peers in some way. Feeling inadequate, unable to connect or to accomplish what others around you are doing with relative ease. Sir Tony simply resigned himself to the fact that he probably wouldn’t go far in life. And yet, when he found something that he loved – the theatre – he threw himself into it with incredible focus and drive. He states that, since he knew he was “stupid”, he would have to work even harder to have any chance of success in the field.

As a result, he trained himself to train himself. He disciplined himself to learn his lines thoroughly, backward and forward, with no room for error, because he felt he didn’t have any. The result is an acting style with a delivery that sounds incredibly natural, never forced, and an actor with an intensity that few can top. Silence of the Lambs is the obvious example, but take just a moment to examine his performance as Odin in any of the Thor movies. The man has gravitas. In the first Thor in particular, Chris Hemsworth sounds sometimes like a bad Shakespearean actor, and I think it was possibly intentional for that film. Swaggering, pompous, over-inflected and grandiose, and again, while I do think it was on some level a choice, check out Hopkins. Tony. Barely. Moves. He raises his voice in maybe two places. But his eyes are rock steady, his body never flinches, and you have no doubt of Odin’s POWER. This guy gives Zero. Fucks. And every single word out of his mouth flows out with confidence, ease, and no need to be pushed. He believes what he’s saying, because the actor is in complete control, and since the actor is in control, the character is in control. It’s impressive.

And Sir Tony does this in every. Single. Thing he’s in. Even a more over the top character like Van Helsing in Coppola’s Dracula just sounds so damn natural when he talks, even when he’s rattling off, “Oh, you drive a stake through her heart and you cut off her head”, It’s so casual and matter-of-fact it almost seems like a throwaway. Hopkins rarely fails to give a less-than-stellar performance, and I’ve admired him for years, ever since Lecter first stared into my soul.

And now, I admire him even more after discovering his autism. Because, without even being aware of it, Sir Tony had to learn how to overcome his own inherent challenges to become one of the most effective communicators in the business, in the world. I have a feeling that he probably has always had trouble making eye contact (a common tic in autism), and as an actor he had to learn how to do it, and that is what gives his eyes their intensity, their focus, their power. I remember learning as a child that eye contact was one of the most important parts of communication, and I made a point of looking into people’s eyes, not only as I talked to them but also as I listened to them. It’s what people expect, and if they don’t get it, they think they’re not being listened to. It’s a common issue with Aspies, although Duncan only has this issue if he doesn’t want to talk about what you want to talk about. When he’s leading the conversation, he looks right at you. Eye contact signals engagement, and he wouldn’t do it when he was in virtual school.

In-person school is going great, however. Every day when I pick him up, I get a thumbs up from his teacher, and he’s starting to tell us things about his day. You gotta ask, but he’ll tell you now. He’s had a new best friend every day for three days in a row, so he’s becoming more and more social with his classmates (you’re his bestie if you’ll play zombie hunt with him), and he’s engaging more and more with more than one person at a time on the playground. He still has his aide, but on Wednesday he did all of his classwork by himself, with no aide and no extra prompting. He’ll tell you he still hates school, but his actions speak differently.

At home he’s getting better, too. His tantrums are decreasing, and his questions are increasing. He has two favorite books at the moment: 1001 Kid Jokes, and my own childhood copy of The Charlie Brown Dictionary, which he’s reading front to back. He can’t read it cover to cover because he’s torn the covers off. We had new friends over for dinner last night, and their five year old girl Winslow became his next new bestie, and they played for hours. It was wonderful to see.

Duncan’s journey is just beginning. There will be hurdles, for sure, but he’s a happy, healthy five year old, and he’s doing well so far. And Sir Tony’s openness about his own autism and his obvious success give me hope that, not only can Duncan be happy and successful, but so can so many other kids on the spectrum, if they’re given the opportunity to focus on something they love, and the love and strength it takes to help them along the way.

While I’m a little bummed that Chadwick Boseman (RIP) didn’t win the Oscar on Sunday, I’m grateful that Sir Tony did just because of what it proves to me and to the world about autism. Not every kid on the spectrum will necessarily thank the Academy, but they can do so much more than we think they can. We just need to make sure that their spirits aren’t broken. Sir Tony’s definitely wasn’t, and he didn’t even have any of the resources that these kids do now.

I can’t wait to see what Duncan becomes. And if he ever thanks the Academy, I hope he takes me and his mom with him to the show.

Calvin, Pt. 2

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I’m trying to rebuild the habit of writing on a regular basis – every day is still a ways off, but I’m hoping at the very least to post on this blog every 1-2 weeks. The ideas aren’t flowing freely out of the tap yet either, so I have to flex the muscle to keep it flexing. But I’m in my chair, the headphones are on, and the soundtrack to Braveheart just started rolling. That’s always been good chill-out writing music for me, ever since college when I first bought the CD. Still works. So here we go.

I thought I’d follow up last week’s post with a little more about Duncan, since coping with his autism is a big part of what this blog is now about. Specifically, I want to go back to Calvin & Hobbes and dig into his love for that again. My therapist asked me last week why I thought Duncan was so drawn to Calvin, and, being the deep thinker that I am, I already had an answer ready to go. I saw similarities in Duncan’s personality and Calvin, and that sent me down a path to an interesting revelation: I think it’s entirely possible that Calvin is autistic.

The parallels are strong: wicked high intellect, trouble staying focused in school. A powerful imagination, a focus on one’s inner life to the exclusion of the world. Difficulty communicating, especially on subjects outside of one’s own interests. I mean, Calvin’s best friend is his stuffed tiger, and the life they live inside his little, expansive head is the stuff of legends. I don’t think for a second that Bill Watterson intended Calvin to be autistic – the strip was written for adults to reminisce in their own childhoods with the knowledge they have as adults. It ain’t really for kids. Plus, Watterson is notoriously private (there’s a documentary about just how reclusive he is), so if that was his intent, we’ll probably never know. But the parallels are fascinating, and these days you can see just about anything in hindsight, thanks to the miracle of post-modernism.

I gave my therapist this answer, and he agreed with me that a case could be made, for sure. I felt like I’d somehow Made A Contribution To The World. I was, for a moment, proud of myself and my own obviously prodigious intellect. And then, right after our session, the therapist sent me a link to a reddit thread about the subject, just to keep me in my place.

So yeah, someone else has noticed it, too. I followed the thread he sent me for a few lines, and the poster had some support, and then someone dropped this comment:

“Or maybe he’s a fucking kid.”

This wasn’t the first comment to disagree and to posit that, most likely, Calvin is just a six-year-old, prone to wildly imaginative play, love of his stuffies, and trouble controlling himself. Absolutely. I even said this about Duncan in my last post: he’s five, but amplified. It’s been an ongoing challenge for us to try to suss out exactly where Duncan’s autism blends in with his age and level of maturity, and it’s damn hard to do. Neurotypical children are often short-tempered, have trouble communicating, especially when upset, and can display a lack of empathy for others. All absolutely true.

But the sneer I read into this comment really lit me up. Again, I don’t pretend that I know what Watterson intended when he created Calvin, I just know I see a reflection of my son in him, and that makes me love both Calvin and Duncan that much more. but there is an implied negativity to this particular comment that I can’t overlook. And you can say that all parents love their children, and of course this is also absolutely true. And (hopefully) no one will deny that raising a child on the spectrum can be extremely challenging – just wait til I tell you about dinner Friday night, or Duncan’s first day back in school – and it is this love, this overwhelming, almost frightening, powerful love, that gives you the strength to get up every morning and keep trying to raise that child, and it gives you a perspective on kids that parents of neurotypical children just don’t have.

And this isn’t a slam on those parents – fuck me, raising ANY decent child these days is a goddamn marathon – but this asshole made it pretty clear in his reddit comment that there was something wrong with assuming Calvin could be autistic. And that pissed me off. And it’s the implied use of the word “normal”. More accurately, Normal. Capital N. Granted, the commenter didn’t say that, and he even qualifies later by saying he’s not trying to be aggressive, but it’s there. Normal.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still new at this, I’m learning to cope with my son’s outbursts and intractability, I’m learning when to hold boundaries firm and when to let some things slide. I’m still learning to love him because of what his condition could give him, and I’m still hoping that he can have a happy, productive life. And I know it’s gonna take a lot more work to get him to some of those places that it would for a neurotypical kid – a kid like his older brother, for instance – and it’s up to me to help him with that. I’m learning to let go of anger when he does something that I don’t want him to do, how to cope with my own fears and disappointments, and how to appreciate his uniqueness, and how to revel in whatever gifts his condition eventually bestow on him.

I DO know that I won’t be ashamed of him, nor will I hide it or treat it like a disease. I know that I don’t ever expect him to be Normal. Fuck that. Looking at the state of the world, Normal was only working for a few people, so then it really wasn’t that normal, then, was it? I’ve always been drawn to misfits, outcasts, weirdos, iconoclasts – these were the kids I was friends with in school, because I didn’t feel exactly Normal myself, either. I questioned things when a lot of my peers didn’t. I called out absurdities when I saw them, I could see when people were in pain. I was just drawn to people who saw the world differently. Normal has never been a thing for me.

As a parent, some of that changes. There are things that have to happen – toilet training, learning to read, tie your shoes, go to school, cooperate – valid, useful, important skills that everyone in the world needs, and a large number of us don’t seem to have, I might add. So maybe Normal doesn’t mean anything at all, and in fact, what we consider Normal might be the exact opposite of what truly IS normal. So I won’t use that word. And most parents of spectrum kids don’t use that word when referring to neurotypical kids, and I totally get it. I slip up every now and then, but, like so many other labels these days, I’m trying to use better ones. I’ll just call him Duncan, because that’s what he says is his name, and I will protect and defend him from anything or anyone who tries to hurt him.

Is Calvin autistic? Actually, like another guy says in another thread, he’s ink on paper. 100% true. Plenty of people have also said he could be a poster child for any number of disorders. Throw open the DSM-IV manual, close your eyes, and point to a word on the page, and he can probably satisfy some of the criteria for whatever you land on. ADHD, sociopathy, you name it. Armchair psychologize the shit out of that and make yourself happy.

But, Calvin gives me a window of understanding and empathy into my son’s condition, and that, for me, is also absolutely true. I loved Calvin a lot when I read the strips in the paper every day, and I loved him when I bought all the collected strips from the bookstore. I loved him when I gave them to my older son, Ryder, to read and to cackle over. And now I love Calvin even more, because he reminds me of Duncan. And Calvin is most definitely NOT Normal. Thank Christ.

POSTSCRIPT: I have to say that we recently hid the C&H books from Duncan for a while, because among Calvin’s vast and impressive vocabulary are a ton of creative insults, and Duncan became very good very fast at using them on us when he gets upset. Not his fault, it’s mine for not thinking about that when I let him have the books, so it’s on me if he ever calls me or anyone else stupid. I’ll own that, and I’ll try to fix that mistake. But I hope he can read them again someday soon. Because I was enjoying reading them again, too.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: I should also add that for the last three days he has insisted that his new name is “Zombie”. it hasn’t stuck yet, but you never can tell…. Thanks, Parry Gripp.

POST-POST-POSTSCRIPT: My older son, Ryder, the main reason I started this blog almost a decade ago, turns eleven tomorrow. I’ll try to write about him next time. Some of the people that follow this blog must be curious about how he’s doing.

Calvin

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My five year old son Duncan loves Calvin and Hobbes. LOVES it. He buries his head in one or more of the several collections we have at the house, every single day. When we go to bed, he has me read several pages of the Sunday color strips to him instead of regular books. He acts strips out, running into the room with a cardboard box on his head and droning, “I am the world’s most powerful computer. Ask me a question”, or using that same box as a time machine with his brother and hunting dinosaurs. We even had a friend make him his own stuffed Hobbes for Christmas (not for sale, we respect Bill Watterson’s anti-commercial stance). Some nights, he goes to bed by himself and reads the strips until he passes out cold, and then I go in and turn off the light. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and turns the light back on and reads again for hours, which leads to awful mornings, so we keep trying to break this habit. If we don’t, it can throw the next several days off, leading to screaming fits and refusal to go to virtual school. So we try to keep his sleep consistent. 

My son is also autistic. We just found this out in November. We’d suspected there was an issue for a while – his preschool had told us for months that he refused to cooperate in class, that his behavior was a problem. He hadn’t talked until he was almost two and a half; he wouldn’t smile at the camera in family photos unless it was one of us taking them; he didn’t always communicate or listen well. We’d had his hearing tested at around three and a half or so, since he didn’t always seem to listen. In March of last year, as he was getting ready for kindergarten in the fall, we had a psychologist from the school district observe him at preschool to see if he should have a full assessment before school started. It was scheduled for March 31, and then California was locked down on the 19th because of the COVID pandemic. No in-person services were to be provided until everything was deemed safe enough. 

Finally, in November, after months of virtual school (I’ll do a separate post on what school has been like), Duncan got his assessment. And the verdict: high-functioning autism, essentially what used to be known in America as Asperger’s Syndrome. Side note: While the DSM Manual no longer recognizes Asperger’s as its own syndrome and folds it into autism spectrum disorder, the WHO still recognizes it as its own separate disorder. There are reasons this makes sense to me: Asperger kids are usually extremely intelligent and communicative and have a much better long-term prognosis. And Duncan is definitely extremely intelligent. Right before the lockdown happened last March, he literally taught himself to read by streaming Amazon Music on the TV. I mean that: he figured it out all on his own. We weren’t even really trying to get him to read much. He knew the alphabet and early numbers, but it was by istening to heavy metal through the Fire Stick that he figured out words. The first word he read on his own: TOOL. He and I share a love of the band, and I’m eternally proud. He also loves Iron Maiden, AC/DC. Aerosmith, and Meghan Trainor. He’s got eclectic taste.

Lockdown has been mostly good for him. We knew that he hated, HATED, preschool, and he cried most times when we left him there (and of course, for that, there is enormous guilt now). His behavior improved, he became more snuggly, and we all got closer as a family. However, the night wakings could be brutal – there was almost a solid month-long stretch where he and I and Julee never got a full night’s sleep. It was exhausting, and it threatened my sanity more than once. He still had outbursts, and we couldn’t get him to cooperate much, and we were too tired to push it too far. And then virtual kindergarten started.

That was a whole new nightmare. We still hadn’t received his assessment yet, so even though we knew there was an issue, we had no idea what it was, and his lack of reaction when we got upset with him, made us worry about so many possibilities. And while everyone hates online school, Duncan REALLY hates it. He can do the work – in fact, he was the most advanced reader in his class, and he picked up concepts quickly and easily, when he wanted to. We would learn later that this proclivity for focus has to do with “preferred activities” and “non-preferred” ones. You can figure that out, but it’s absolutely true. 

Basically, what Asperger’s, or autism, seems to mean in our particular case is that Duncan is five, and his disorder amplifies his being five. Everything that’s difficult about having a five year old is more difficult. Tantrums are bigger, longer, and fiercer. His struggle to communicate with us is bigger, because when he gets overwhelmed, he just can’t figure out how to tell us what’s wrong or to calm down. And his bullshit detector is SPOT ON. He’s honest, even when he’s lying to us, which is both hysterical and worrying. When he doesn’t like something, he Lets. You. Know. If he wants something, he really, really wants it, and if he doesn’t get it, he goes ballistic. We have extra childproof locks on all the doors because we’re worried he might open one and wander off. 

Except that he doesn’t want to be anywhere but with us, his family. Because he also loves us with a fierceness that is humbling. We are most definitely on his “preferred” list, and even when he yells at us, insults us (using insults he learned from Calvin, which is my fault and I’m trying to remedy), and seems cold, he reminds us as soon as he settles down. His anger forgotten, he grabs a book and snuggles up in my lap and asks me to read, because even though he can do it himself, he still wants that closeness. And so even if I’m still mad, I do my best to let go of it and read to him. 

We’ve got a long way to go to really help Duncan be successful in life. And that’s all I want – for him to be able to live on his own, have a job he enjoys, maybe a relationship, whatever will make him happy and fulfilled. We don’t understand how he works yet, even though we know him better than anyone else. The Latin root of the word autism is “auto”, which I had never really thought about as meaning “self”. Duncan is a world unto himself, and it’s a fascinating, scary, dangerous world that we as his parents have to be brave enough, kind enough, and selfless enough to explore. We need to be like the bold, intrepid Spaceman Spiff, throttle that saucer down, and meet Duncan on his own terms. And that’s the hard part, because we just want to be able to get him to do what he needs to do or we want him to do, but we have to come to him. And it’s exhausting, heartbreaking, and rewarding. 

I love my son with all of my heart. I get frustrated and furious with him, and I lose my temper, but I always try to remember that he’s not doing it on purpose – none of our children are, at five. And I have to learn how to be okay with meeting him on his terms, on his world, because that’s where he lives, and he won’t venture out unless we give him a reason to. So, to get him to come to us, we have to go to him first. 

So I’ll be trying to post on this blog regularly, mainly about Duncan, but also about Ryder, who’s still a big part of this as well, and about whatever else happens to be on my mind. I need to start doing this regularly for myself. It helps to talk about it. And I hope it helps me and everyone else understand a little more about autism, because it doesn’t always look the way you think it does. I’m learning, every day. 

Back in the Saddle

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Write. Every day. Whatever. No matter what. Write. Write every day.

Apparently, once I fall of the wagon, I fall hard. I’ve had numerous ideas for posts in the last couple years, even started banging out early drafts of a few of them, and never got around to finishing them. I’m looking at them just below the box I’m typing in, wondering if any of them are worth finishing at this point, since they’re largely dated. No idea. May go back and give each of ’em a once-over just for the sake of it, and maybe save anything promising.

Write. Every day. Whatever. No matter what. Write. Write every day.

I carry a notebook around with me most of the time so I can jot down thoughts and ideas, nuggets of inspiration and whimsies, and, since most of the time my hands are full of baby these days, the notebook doesn’t get much use. The spine, stiff from lack of stretching, desperately in need of some book yoga to loosen it up, get it feeling like a BOOK again. I used to be really good at scrawling random musings in a notebook. Even had one where I played with the format of HOW I wrote all the time, writing upside-down, solely around the edges of the page, spiraling into the center. The kind of shit you do in your twenties that you think makes you “edgy”.

Write. Every day. Whatever. No matter what. Write. Write every day.

I spend more time writing posts on Facebook, ranting about politics (which I did this very morning) or making amusing comments on the latest Onion article (a venerable, worthy institution, one for whom I would love to write someday if I could only remember how to be that funny). I do, apparently, make several friends’ day with my efforts, so it’s not a total loss. But I’m not really saying anything, not generating any thoughts of my own.

All that’s about to change.

Don’t worry, I’m still gonna post articles from the Onion, because they’re funny as hell and some of the most painfully accurate satire there is these days. Can’t live without that. But I’m losing my own voice, and I can’t have that. So that’s why I’m repeating this little mantra.

Write. Every day. Whatever. No matter what. Write. Write every day.

That’s my challenge to myself. Whatever it is, write it. This blog. Plays. Screenplays. Prose, Poetry. My own brilliant satire, whenever I come up with some. Turn the goddamn TV off and write. Put the kids to bed and write.

Oh yeah, I have two kids now. Pretty much anyone who follows this blog is already aware of that. One’s asleep in his crib right now, and the other is outside playing with his dart guns, so I’m stealing a few minutes to get to it and write. I love my boys so much it hurts, but they’re a lot of work, and it makes it hard to do the other work that matters to me, too. But

I’ve always tended to be pretty stream-of-consciousness when I write; too much structure up front stifles me, and if I know exactly were I’m going at the end, I often lose interest in getting there. But, I live in Los Angeles now, and scripts need to be tight, well thought out, and usually of a certain length. I ain’t too old to learn new tricks. So, my professional work is gonna be tightly plotted (with room for improvisation and inspiration), and the other stuff – like this blog – is gonna wander.

But I’m still gonna talk about the things that inspired this whole blog-like thing: I’m a dad, I’m a men, I’m a lot of things, and I’m gonna continue to explore them and write about them. Fatherhood, manhood, guns, movies, fart jokes, books, Star Wars, sex, comedians, politics (once in a while, if I can keep the vitriol down). Anything and everything. and beer. DEFINITELY beer. I’m turning this blog into my little notebook that I thought was so cool. And, I’m gonna start writing in that notebook again, when my hands aren’t full of baby. Damn, he’s big.

I ALSO wanna take a moment to recognize all the new fathers I know from the past year. Whatever was in the water, we all drank it, and DAMN, there are some amazing new creatures in the world because of all of us gettin’ naughty. Congrats to Eric, Dan, Kahlil, Colin, Jonathan, Joey Bag-o-Donuts. I know there’s more, and I apologize for not being able to remember your names right now, but , as you all know, baby brain ain’t just for women anymore. Welcome to the brave new world of raising a responsible human being. You’re about to earn your grey hairs.

I ALSO wanna open up this forum to all the dads I know, new and old, and invite you post your own musings on manhood with me on this page. Basically, let’s start talking about it together. I’m happy to moderate, if anyone’s interested. If not, I feel ya, I’m tired all the time, too. But I’d love to hear from you. No rules on content, format, whatever – you wanna write a play about being a dad, bring it. I’ll post it. Whatever’s on your mind. If you’re so inclined, this is a place to let it all rip. I’m sure you’ve got something to say, so let me know if you want to say it here.

Write. Every day. Whatever. No matter what. Write. Write every day.

If we keep it up, sooner or later we’ll write something worth reading.

 

P.S.: Next time, I’ll write about my new baby boy. Stay tuned….

A Mindful Stupidity

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So I’m giving this another go-round, and I intend to make a habit of it. I’ll be asking all my friends who used to read these posts to start doing so again, and maybe a few new ones as well. This one’s fairly serious, but I promise the next one will have lots of fart jokes.

Measles. Take a look at this clip from last night’s episode of The Daily Show:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/5t2dw1/les-measlesrables

I post serious and snarky stuff on vaccinations all the time, so you’re probably pretty aware of where I stand on the whole thing, but for the sake of clarity, get your kids vaccinated. It baffles me that any responsible parent, from any background, would not take advantage of a scientifically validated and time-tested method of protecting not just children but all of us from deadly diseases.

But it’s the interview with the mom in Marin County that I really want to focus right now. Or rather, the interview and Stewart’s response to it. He says, in response to her comment on her community of thoughtful, well-educated people, “This is Marin County. We’re not rednecks. We’re not ignorant. We practice a mindful stupidity.”

And I think this is at the heart of the problem with the whole anti-vaccination crusade in America, and in fact, with several epidemics in this county not related to disease – prejudice, corruption, etc. We think we’re doing the right thing. With some glaring exceptions, I believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans want to protect their children and give them the best possible environment and life in which to grow and live. But we’re Americans, and we live with blinders on, most of us. Even members of the middle and lower classes in this country suffer from the disease of affluenza, specifically American affluenza – that, simply because we live in the greatest country on Earth, nothing can touch us. We can do whatever we want, ’cause we’re Americans, dammit.

Right.

It has been (and continues to be) a trademark of the American personality that we are loud, proud, opinionated, and emotional, and these terms are still being generous. A large chunk of the world would characterize us as arrogant, boastful, and superior. We think we’re above the bad things in the world simply by virtue of being born in this country. Time and time again, this has proven not to be the case, and when it does happen, we respond in a reactionary way with ignorance and fear. We respond like children. We pull the blanket up over our heads. We cover our eyes and ears and say, “No! No! No!” as loud as we can, hoping it will drive the bogeyman away. We lash out and hit things and people. We look for someone to blame.

But we constantly ignore facts because we get so worked up about things. We sacrifice reason and logic because we’re too terrified to look at the bogeyman and see how we might actually beat him.

Only a few hundred years ago, people had no idea what diseases actually were. They believed disease was caused by demons, and they refused to take baths because they believed that the only way to drive off the demons was with a good honest stink. Just today, I saw a news story where New Jersey governor Chris Christie stated that he didn’t believe that restaurant employees should have to wash their hands so much.

So think about this: Scientific evidence supports, I would go so far as to say irrefutably, that disease-causing germs can be transmitted through human contact with raw meats, fecal matter, and dirty water and other contaminated materials. The simple act of washing hands can prevent the spread of many of these germs. Food service workers come into contact with raw meats of all kinds all day long. Then, like most of us do several times a day, they go to the restroom to relieve themselves. So Christie believes that they shouldn’t have to wash their hands after they take a dump and then come back to touch your food? You can see the path of the germ right there, and now we have a prominent politician saying that there’s no good reason to wash your hands if you work in a restaurant. Why?

Because American believe, above all else, in liberty. The ability to choose the things you do and do not do. It’s my right as an American not to wash my hands after I wipe.

Then (and this is in the Daily Show clip as well), Christie has also quarantined an Ebola worker who had NO signs of the disease on the ground that the government should be able to do what is necessary to protect its citizens. Why? Because we’re afraid of Ebola.

You know why we’re afraid of Ebola and not the measles? Because the measles were effectively eradicated in this country over sixty years ago thanks to the widespread use of the measles vaccine. Ebola is a potentially life-threatening virus that we know about mainly because of its highly infectious nature and prevalence in Africa. no, we do NOT want Ebola in the US, nor do we want it anywhere. But we know about it because it’s still around, and very visible. Measles, on the other hand, exist only in a dream, a story we were told in school. It’s almost a fairy tale to us now. How appropriate that it should suddenly spawn an outbreak in Disneyland, where fantasies are the currency of the realm.

We’re not scared of measles because we thought we beat it, and it can’t possibly hurt us anymore. We’re about to be slapped in the face with how wrong we are.

Now here’s the OTHER side of this: once we decide to take on something like this, we often go too far in the other direction. Refer again to Ebola, and the panic that ensued when a handful of cases were reported in the US. Hysteria due to the fact that a well-known and potentially life-threatening disease that we thought could not touch us had now found its way to our soil. The xenophobes among us went on red alert, decreeing that anyone who could possibly have been infected should be quarantined immediately. Well, some of this did happen, and in some cases this action may have helped. But since there are proven procedures that can used to protect from Ebola infection, it went away fairly quickly, and there were only, I believe, one or two fatalities. The predicted pandemic never happened, and it’s because we stopped it with scientific knowledge and diligence.

But measles? Ah, screw it. I’m not vaccinating my kid. It can’t touch me. I live in Marin County, where my money and privilege will no doubt protect me from a microscopic germ. Unless I don’t have to wash my hands. Or my kid goes to a preschool where kids jam lots of toys into their mouths, play in the same dirt and mud, and grab each other all the time. But my sheer American privilege will serve to armor me against the worst of it.

We ignore facts in favor of our emotional responses, and it can often bite us in the ass. The only reason we are now the dominant species on the planet is because we evolved these giant brains to solve problems, oftentimes without using violence, and our big brains have allowed us to climb so far to the top of the heap that we somehow believe we don’t need to use them anymore.

The bogeyman eventually goes away. We grow older, and we realize that we don’t have to be afraid of the dark, that by acknowledging that we KNOW there is nothing there, we’re safe from it. Also, we have parents that, if they’re doing their job, will come into the room and help us banish the bogeyman from the closet or under the bed. We inoculate ourselves against the imaginary fear of something invisible that wants to hurt us. Much the way a vaccine works. It teaches our bodies how to defend themselves against microscopic intruders. But the truth is that the virus never goes away. We’ve just learned how to defend against it. Vaccines are the blanket we pull up over our heads that makes the bogeyman go away. And it works. But only if we use it. If we don’t, we lay there in terror, imagining what will happen to us whenever the bogeyman finally decides to stop teasing us and crawl all the way out of the crack in our closet.

There’s the old saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There are times when this is true. We know the measles vaccine works, and we know it works better than NOT taking it. The study, refuted for many years now, that vaccines cause autism, scared the bejeesus out of us. We were told that materials in the vaccine could cause brain damage resulting in autism. You know what else causes brain damage? Measles. In children, the disease can progress into measles encephalitis, swelling of the brain which can result in permanent brain damage. Logically, which chance would you rather take? The evidence bears out that vaccines prevent the spread of communicable disease and have no relationship to autism. That’s what we see with our own eyes. But we don’t have to vaccinate our kids if we don’t want to. Because “Murica”.

For millennia people have performed numerous actions to ward off bad luck. Horseshoe over the door, sign of the cross, forking the fingers to ward off the evil eye, not bathing. No one ever really tried to measure whether or not those things worked, and, let’s face it, the Black Death didn’t seem to care much about the horseshoe. Why should measles? Or Ebola? Now, we have something that we can SEE working, and we just shrug it off. It boggles the mind.

And YET, we somehow attempt to raise our kids in a sterile, germ-free environment by constantly telling them to wash their hands, take a bath every day, and Don’t. Get. Dirty. See that grocery cart over there? Wipe it down with that antimicrobial napkin before you even pull it out of the queue. Or Else. It’s absurd to think that we can eliminate ALL germs from our lives, yet we try every second of every day to live like we’re in an operating room. Our immune systems must be confused as hell. Antibacterial soaps have been proven to be no more effective than plain soap and water, and they could possibly be killing off some of the good gut flora we NEED to stay healthy. We can’t seem to get our priorities straight.

And I realize that, in an earlier paragraph, I ranted about washing your hands, but I mentioned a specific TIME to wash your hands: after a bowel movement. Yes, that’s an EXCELLENT time to scrub ’em down, because you wouldn’t want to put that hand in your mouth right now, wouldja? I think that’s a good rule of thumb – if you wouldn’t eat with it right now, wash it. And, I just read an article where doctors believe you shouldn’t give your kids a bath every single day, either, and this ALSO makes sense. Newborn babies aren’t supposed to get baths every day because their delicate skins can’t take it, and let’s face it, they never break a sweat. Bathing them too much can cause rashes, irritating dry patches, and –  in rare cases – infection. My son is five now, and he gets a bath pretty much every three days or so, depending on how active he’s been and how much he reeks. I take a bath every day, but on a daily basis I smell MUCH worse than he ever does. So figure out what works for you and run with that.

I’m not advocating never giving your kids baths. That’s just as ridiculous. But we seem to live in a time of extremes, and it’s gonna catch up with us.

I think that, as always, there is a comfortable middle ground where we can use logic to make rational decisions to emotionally charged questions. But right now we’re so scared of the bogeyman that we just try to ignore it. Measles ain’t the only instance in America of this happening, obviously, but I’m not getting into that right now. But instead of approaching things with an open mind, we trust our own arrogance and remain blissfully ignorant, often with the best of intentions. Because we can.

Not every germ will kill you. It’s okay to get dirty. Wash your crotch on a regular basis, because it gets funky. Vaccinate your kids, because we’ve done a pretty good job of figuring out which germs WILL kill you, and we can stop a lot of them from doing so. Above all, use some common sense, people. It’s something this country has been encouraged not to do lately, and it needs to stop. I wish there was a vaccine for that.

The Flood

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So I’ve been planning to restart this blog for a while now, and I was about to post this on Facebook as a status update when I realized just how long it was going to be. I figured this was a better place for it.

Fellow Nashvillians have been posting the story from the Tennessean about today being the anniversary of the 2010 flood, and I thought I’d share my own experience of that weekend. Hard to believe that was five years ago.

This is what I remember about the flood:

On Saturday, May 1, I attended a meeting of the Board if Directors for People’s Branch Theatre, the small company I was Artistic Director for, at which we voted to shut the doors on the company. We met at the offices of a board member on Nolensville Road between Antioch and Brentwood, and the rain has already begun to pour. As we wrapped up our meeting and headed out, reports were already coming in about washouts along I-24, the exact corridor I would need to use to get back home. I decided to take what I would later come to find out (after living in LA) are called surface roads, following Nolensville Road all the way back into town to the I-40/I-24 junction and Lebanon Road, which I then took to McGavock Pike and all the way into my neighborhood off of Pennington Bend. The rain never let up that entire day and most of the next.

Sunday morning, May 2, the rain finally abated, and Julee and I loaded our six-week-old son into his carseat and took a drive around our area to see what shape it was in. Keep in mind, we lived right off of the Cumberland, and we were aware that downtown was already getting dangerously high (in fact, downtown may have already suffered some of the flood damage; I can’t remember exactly). We drove down by the river behind us to the boat inlet, and at that point in time, while much higher than normal, the water level was still a good twenty feet below the surface line. Two Rivers Golf Course had been pretty much submerged, and we were in awe of what had happened. We returned home with little more thought about it, glad that the worst seemed to be over. However, we kept the news on all day as weather reports continued to come in.

As the day wore on, reporters continued to talk about rising water levels in downtown, and that there was still more to come. Julee began to ask whether or not we should consider packing a bag and heading out, but I honestly did not believe anything would happen. That evening, as it began to get dark, Julee received a phone call from another employee at the Nashville Children’s Theatre who happened to live in the subdivision next to us that they were being evacuated from their home due to rising water levels on the Cumberland. They had two small children of their own and had just moved to Nashville from Atlanta, so they had no family in town, and they wanted to know if they could possibly stay with us for the night if necessary. We said sure, expecting them to come over soon if the worst happened. I still believed we were safe in our house.

Within a few hours, police cruisers were circling thru out neighborhood advising residents to leave their homes, as the river had rested its banks and was continuing to rise. Our colleague’s neighborhood had already been evacuated, and her home was several feet under water.

Our son was six weeks old.

We quickly packed clothing and some essentials into both of our cars – computers, valuables, photo albums. I moved some other electronics upstairs into the upper bedrooms to minimize whatever damage I could, and we loaded our two dogs and our son into our cars and headed out of the neighborhood. Our next door neighbors had decided to stay, and he told me he would check in with me as the night wore on.

We lived in Donelson, and my mother lives in Hermitage off of Old Hickory Lake, so we tried our best to get to her home, but Lebanon Road was shut down due to flooding at Central Pike. We couldn’t get to her at all. I knew she was safe (thank god for cell phones), but we were suddenly stuck with no place to go. The only friend we could get in touch with lived in Madison, and he welcomed us to come for the night. The only problem: it meant driving over the Cumberland. With no choice, we headed in that direction. Thankfully, due to the large shipping traffic, the bridges over the Cumberland are very tall, so there was no chance of the bridge itself washing out. As we crossed, however, we were astounded (and rightly terrified) to see just how much the water had risen. It’s hard to describe, because it just seemed overwhelming. But you’ve seen the pictures on the news, and I have no doubt there will be stuff about it all day long. You remember it, too.

Anyway, we made it across the river and to our friend’s home without incident, and we slept poorly that night. The next morning, we went the back way along Old Hickory Blvd to my mother’s house, and we stayed there for the next several days. I was working on a project with Tennessee Repertory Theatre (now Nashville Rep – things change in five years), and since our neighborhood was on the way back to my mother’s house, I decided to stop and see what had happened. I still have the footage from that visit on my camera.

Our house was fine. Perfectly fine. It sits on a small knoll, and the ground behind us was purposely constructed as a large ditch for runoff in case of such an event, and the ground sloped away from us on the other side of the street. The water came up around our block on both sides, but the ditch and the knoll ensured that, even if the water had risen to that level, it would have run off on the other side, and the worst we would have suffered would have been flooding of our crawlspace. We got lucky. The people behind us had at least three to five feet of water in their homes. Our next door neighbor was also fine, and he was extremely good-humored about it all. From the upper bedroom window in our house, I shot footage of our backyard, only the very back corner of which had any water in it at all. Like I said, lucky.

But here’s what I remember most, and I have the footage to back it up: two men in a small fishing boat cruising up and down the streets of our neighborhood, trying to help anyone they could. Our neighborhood has a boat parking lot, and these two guys and other like them pulled their boats out and got to work. I heard they had pulled someone down from their roof and brought them out to dry land. It was incredible.

And, of course, this happened all over the city. Thousands of people got busy helping each other out, however they could – rescuing others from danger, tearing out ruined wallboard and insulation, trying to save whatever possessions they could. I helped a neighbor around the block whom I had never met do this to his house along with what seemed like every other person on the block. I loaned him my extension cords for the fans he used to try and dry out his crawlspace, and I learned later when he brought them back that he and his wife had moved into the neighborhood at the same time we did. They had, in fact, looked at our house, and since we had already beaten them to it, they had bought their current one, which had happened to be the only other home for sale in the neighborhood at that time. We had looked at that house ourselves. Had things turned out differently, he might have been helping me gut the soaked fiberglass from my floorboards. Again, lucky.

Across the city, people lived up to the idea of the Volunteer State. It was incredible. Julee went to the Red Cross emergency station set up in Donelson to see if she could help out, and she was told that, since so many people had already begun helping each other, there was very little for them to do. And of course, the T-shirts began to fly (I still have my We Are Nashville shirt), and it made me and everyone else very proud of my hometown. All of this, of course, was somehow overlooked by the national news services, a fact later made very clear about two days later by Anderson Cooper on his own show, but the one thing that was remarked upon the most by the time the story did air was that Nashville got to work and helped itself out.

I no longer live in Nashville, but it’s my hometown and always will be. I’m not particularly proud of a lot of the reason it HAS made national news in the last five years, but I am proud of the fact that everyone was impressed by the fortitude, good will, and volunteer spirit of its citizens. This was us at our best, and it’s something worth remembering.

It’s also important and relevant to this blog for another reason I’m proud to be from the South – we know how to do shit. We can get things done. There’s a large element of self-reliance that is very much a part of growing up in the South. Ironicallly, it’s something I resisted for a large part of my earlier life, but once I embraced it, I can’t believe I ever wanted to deny it. I’ve posted about this before, so I’m not gonna rehash, but I can do things with my hands, and I’m forever grateful for it. I can also use my mind, and I’m even more grateful for that. I can put the two together, and that’s the best. And it’s something I intend to pass on to my son.

Actually, to my sons.

Yeah, we’re having another baby later this year. Another boy, and it’s gonna be another thrilling adventure. But I fully intend to make sure that both of my boys know how to build things, how to fix things, how to make things. Whether it’s a table, a song, or a book, I want my boys to make things. I want them to be capable of doing things so that, if they’re ever in a situation like this, they can get to work. And even tho they’re growing up in California, they’ll always be a little bit from Tennessee.

Oh, and I also plan to keep writing this blog regularly again from this point on, so I hope you’re still with me.

http://www.tennessean.com/picture-gallery/news/local/2015/04/30/the-flood-of-2010/26518085/

 

Father’s Day

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So yesterday was a good day. We’re currently back home in Tennessee, nearing the end of our annual grandparent visit. It just so happens this year that we were here for the weekend of Father’s Day, and we celebrated by having a backyard grillout and a day-long rotation of friends and family stopping by to visit and to marvel over the little man. The weather was mostly cooperative, and it was hot but pleasant all day long.

I’ve also been catching post after post of people celebrating their fathers and sons on Facebook all day long, and posting a few congrats and happy wishes to fathers that I know and especially to a couple of brand new dads and one dad-to-be who is waiting on his son to be born any day now. Exciting stuff, and it amazes me how excited I now get whenever I hear that someone is going to be a parent. I remember when we were waiting on Ryder to be born, and while we were anxious and terrified and trying desperately to prepare ourselves, everyone around us was ecstatic. Loads and loads of hugs, smiles, and all the love you could ever imagine raining down on us from every direction. It was a little overwhelming, and honestly took us by surprise. We thought, “Wow, everyone else is soooo excited.”

Now I understand why.

Becoming a parent changes you. I talked about this with the above-mentioned expectant father a while ago, and it’s not exactly news. Of course, becoming a parent changes you. But, not in the ways you expect. You are still you – the essence of who you are is unchanged. You still like the same dirty jokes, you still love beer and pizza (even if your kid doesn’t – the pizza, that is), and you probably don’t feel any more like an adult than you did before you had a kid. But there is now something more. Something else to worry about, something to clean up after, something to snuggle up with, something to chase around the yard, something to make eat his vegetables, something else to love. You become more. It makes you care more about different things, and it makes you stronger in ways you could never imagine.

I’m gonna refer back to my last post about Man of Steel just for a moment – no spoilers, just a general reaction to a specific element in the film. The scenes of Kal-El’s childhood with his human father Jonathan Kent were, to me, the heart of the film. Every single scene was a moment depicting the love of a father for his son. It makes me feel that love itself is more than just an emotion – it is its own thing. This love contains so many emotions that it cannot be considered simply an emotion in and of itself – pride, fear, disappointment, anger, and so many more. It truly makes love itself a living, breathing entity, something that descends upon you and grows within you at the very moment that your child is born, and it becomes the scaffolding for the growth of this new human being. And, along the way, you continue to grow with it, becoming more and more every day, as your child needs you to grow. And as I watched the movie, every time Jonathan Kent spoke to young Clark about who he is and who he will be, the tears welled up, and I felt my heart pounding in my chest.

Every father wants to see his son grow to become Superman, to become a beacon of hope and nobility. And they look to us to see how to do that. In his son’s eyes, every father is Superman. And the love for your child is exactly the source of the strength a father needs.

So Happy Father’s Day to every Superman I know out there – the fathers of Aiden, Denton, Charliemonster, Ammon, Ivey James, and Austin, Ryan, and soon-to-be-welcomed Dash. You are stronger than you know. May your sons’ capes blow proudly in the wind, and may they always see the capes on your shoulders. May they soar into the sky, and may they always look back and see the man who grounded them well enough to allow them to fly.

The Nap

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I’m lying in bed with my son as he sleeps. It’s late afternoon (he’s a late napper), and he’s had a busy, energetic day. He’s trying to refuse naps lately, but he obviously still needs them, so we lie down and take one every day. Yesterday he played so hard that he fell asleep in the car on the way home for naptime, and I had to carry him in and change him from underwear and jeans into a pull-up diaper (potty training proceeds apace) while he was sleeping. Thankfully, he never fluttered an eyelid.

It’s really something else. My wife sleeps in bed with him most nights, and I can understand why. I was against it for a long time, mainly because he had been sleeping on his own since he was a month old and it was working great. He got sick last year, tho, and she brought him into our bed, and from then on he didn’t want to sleep alone. I made my peace with it and have learned to enjoy my own solo time in bed – a queen size all to yourself is nice and roomy – and in general I try to let him sleep alone during naptime.

All of this goes out the window, of course, if he wakes up mid-nap in a panic, screaming for me. Then, as any good dad would, I bolt into the room and lie with him to calm him down and soothe him back to sleep. I usually finish the nap with him after that (and let’s face it, that’s most likely what I was doing on my own, anyway. He’s not the only one who needs a nap).

However, today I had decided pre-nap that round two of coffee was a necessity, and so when the time came to fall asleep with a book on my chest, instead I read fifty pages (Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World) and tossed around some. Just then the familiar cry came from Ryder’s room, the bookmark went in, and I climbed into bed next to my boy.

Ryder often half-wakes like this. Moaning, eyes still squeezed shut, standing on the bed. I speak softly to him, and he lays back down, squirms and moans a little more, eventually makes contact with my body somehow (two days ago he held my nose for five minutes), and sinks back into sleep. So it was today, as he found my side with his feet and stretched out diagonally across the bed. I scoot him around a little so I can actually keep my body weight on the bed an not hang in limbo over the edge, and I settle down to try to snooze with him.

No good. Hence the post. But as I lie here typing into the nap’s best friend, the iPhone, I’m watching Ryder sleep. He’s not as deep in as some days, a little wriggly, but still out like a light. And it’s on days like this that I appreciate why my wife likes to sleep with him every night.

The peaceful look on a child’s face as they sleep is one of the most beautiful things in the world. Completely serene, calm, unconcerned with anything else at that moment. Granted, he’s unconscious, but it’s a wondrous thing to behold, because it reminds me that, for him, the world is a wondrous place, to be explored and claimed and conquered, and every day is met with bright eyes, enthusiasm, and glee.

That’s the face my son shows me every morning when he comes into my room to wake me up. It makes me smile just thinking about it, and it reminds me that, despite all of our problems, our bills, our anger, our defeat – despite all of the shit that we as adults have to deal with on a daily basis to provide the things that he needs, it’s worth it to give him the opportunity to explore this world and to make it his own. And you need lots of rest to go forth and conquer like that.

So naptime is essential. And during that time, I find myself at peace, calm, serene, unconcerned – I reach that same state of Zen that my son lives in, a joyous celebration of the Moment, the Now, and I cherish the fact that I get to share that with him every day.

Then, he shoves his feet into my spleen.

Newtown, CT

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This is not the way I would have liked to return to blogging. I would much rather post something funny and mildly uplifting making fun of the Mayan Apocalypse, but I can’t.

I just can’t. Because, like every other parent I know and most rational human beings, I’m in a state of furious shock at the events of today. I’ve been trying all day to find a way to say some of the things that have been running thru my mind without sounding pedantic, trite, or even political. And yet I’m not sure there’s a way to process any of this without either saying something that is one or all of those things or just screaming.

I am filled with horror at what happened in Connecticut today. As a parent, I’ve spent a good chunk of the day imagining how I would feel if I were in that same situation, and inevitably my heart starts to pound and I get panicked. For parents, this is truly the stuff of nightmares. The absolute terror of something irreversible happening to your child is only topped by the feeling of utter helplessness at the news. I’ve never had anything remotely as awful as what happened today happen to me, so I can only imagine, and I’m sure my imagination, for once, cannot compare to reality. My heart aches in my attempts to comprehend what the families of today’s victims must be going thru, and I wish I knew something that I could do or say that could help in any way at all, all the while recognizing the futility of such an effort. What can you say? There’s nothing that I can think of that would comfort me if someone dared to harm a single hair on my son’s head. If anything, it would most likely add fuel to the fire of my rage.

That’s what I feel most of all right now. Rage. I am beyond outraged that something like this has happened yet again in this country. I am beyond furious that it happened in a school to children. What I want to do most of all is punish the piece of shit who did this. At the moment, I neither know nor care about his motivations or his pain. He ceased to become a human being to me when he made the conscious decision to harm children. And I’m beyond furious that, for many reasons, I cannot exercise my desire for vengeance. And that’s what I want, because if this had happened to my son, I would not hesitate to destroy the filth who did it.

But it didn’t happen to my son. It didn’t happen to me. It is not my place to act on that desire even if it were possible. However, the rage remains, and there’s another side to it. I’m outraged that we continue to allow this to happen. We continue to make weapons easily available to people who should not have access to them. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, yes, but unfortunately it doesn’t say anything about learning how to use that gun responsibly. You look at gun control laws in other countries, and you can see that it does reduce the number of gun-related violent crimes and deaths, and you’d be a fool not to see the correlation. I’m not saying take away our guns – not at all. I’m saying that, if you choose to own a gun, you should accept responsibility for the fact that you now are capable of ending the life of another human being instantly.

Guns make killing people all too easy. It takes no more than the will to do it and the movement of a finger. Hell, I’m expending more effort to type this blog than it would take to pull a trigger and erase another person from existence. That’s an awesome responsibility. Before the existence of firearms, it required a supreme effort to take the life of another human being simply because you would have to do it with your own two hands, and you can bet that he was doing the same to you. It would seem to me that if you had to work that hard not only to try to kill him but also to stay alive yourself, you would understand the magnitude of the responsibility you would bear. But in our race to make life simpler and easier, we have made it simple and easy to kill. Just point and click. And we don’t seem to want to take responsibility for that at all. And that makes me furious.

Politicos and pundits are, of course, saying that now is not the time to bring the gun control debate up, but they’ve said that every single time this has happened in the last twenty years. It was only a few weeks ago when a gunman entered a movie theatre in Colorado and opened fire. We’ve barely recovered from that. It was only a few months ago that another gunman entered a temple in Wisconsin and did the same thing. THIS HAS HAPPENED SEVERAL TIMES THIS YEAR. WHEN IS THERE GOING TO BE A RIGHT TIME? IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

I don’t have an answer, but I know this: we need to take action so that no more babies suffer. It never should have come to this. If this is what humanity is coming to, then maybe having the Apocalypse around the corner won’t be such a bad thing. We seem intent on destroying ourselves in any case. We screw with our food, our water, our air, our genes, we allow corporations to make the worst decisions in the name of profit, and we encourage an attitude of selfishness and fear that makes it next to impossible to trust each other and makes it supremely easy to destroy each other instead. We seem either to take some perverse delight in our achievement at the cost of the suffering of others, or, even worse, we seem to be completely indifferent to it. We just. Don’t. Care. Why should we give a fuck about anyone else? What have they done for me?

We’re all in this together, people. It doesn’t matter what color your skin is, whether you sleep with boys or girls, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative – we all love our children. We all want to see them grow up, laugh, cry, celebrate, mourn, live, love, have children of their own, do amazing, wonderful things. But there are twenty children now who will never do any of those things. Why aren’t we doing something about that?

I know that I’m saying what a lot of people are saying. I don’t feel any better for saying it, even tho I had to. I’m still just angry and sad. And grateful. Of course, I’m grateful, because when I wake up tomorrow, I’ll be able to hold my son and smile at his beautiful face. And I’m heartbroken that I can’t do more to help the parents who won’t.

Jesus, Newtown, I’m so sorry. And I’m angry for you. I’m crying and screaming with you because I don’t know what else to do.