Skin Me

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I’m not the best friend in the world. I know this straight up, and I’m not too proud to pretend otherwise. I rarely answer phone calls. I’m terrible at making time for others, far too often. I’m absolutely awful at keeping up.

But on the flip side, I do think I’m a pretty good friend, overall. I never break dates, unless there are issues with emergencies or what not. I’m honest (sometimes to a fault). I try to give thoughtful gifts, at the appropriate times. I mostly stay out of business that isn’t mine, except when asked.

But even moreso, I try very hard to be a decent person, especially to my friends. I am considerate of their space and property. I make no assumptions about things that I am welcome to do or use. I try to leave things the way I found them.

I don’t think any of these are exceptional behaviors. In fact, this is the least I think that people should expect from me, or anyone else.

Like anyone else, I get angry, even at my friends. They’re not perfect, and neither am I. But I tell my friends when they’re doing something that bothers me; I expect the same of them. Open communication and honesty are the cornerstones of any relationship in my world, much less a friendship.

And it saddens me to see any of my friends getting taken advantage of, or mistreated, or being on the receiving end of inconsiderate, self-centered behavior. There is very little that angers me in the world; you can, for the most part, do or say anything to or about me, and it’s water off this duck’s back. But don’t fuck with my friends; while I’m perfectly aware that any and all of them are well-capable of taking care of themselves, I still get a little protective. It’s the curse of being the oldest of four kids, I guess.

And I won’t do anything directly, because most of the time, I’m peripherally involved in or aware of the situations going on around me. For the most part, my life is soap opera-free; I cut ties with ninety percent of the dramatic people in my life years ago, and made a promise to myself that I would avoid such people as much as possible in the future. But my friends are grown-ups, and if they choose to befriend those types that I feel are best off left alone — well, it’s not place to tell them otherwise, and so I don’t. But when pressed hard enough, I will step in and provide a defense, even sometimes at cost to myself.

I’ve watched my brother James get badly mistreated by an ex, and it infuriated me repeatedly. I let it go, as it wasn’t my place to do anything about it (particularly if he wasn’t doing anything about it), but it still would creep into my field of vision every so often. It’s happened to many of my friends, in fact, and I have to keep reminding myself that the only person that can change things is them.

But it still makes my skin crawl: to think that there are people walking this earth, breathing the same air as me, who would call themselves your friend and then treat you as nothing more than a tool for their convenience. I know we’ve all had rough lives. Some of us weren’t raised very well or taught how to be decent people outside of our own gains, but I’ll bet we all know the Golden Rule, yeah?

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

It’s really about that simple. To pretend otherwise is just selfish and ungrateful, and eventually, that sort of behavior will come back to haunt you — whether you accept accountability or not. And who will you turn to then, when you’ve pushed everyone who cares about you away?

But on the flip side, those people do serve a really good purpose: they make me look like the greatest of friend, even in spite of all my faults.

See? It’s all about perspective.

Things not to say to the doorman on your way in to the bar, no matter how happy he looks

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“But I turn 21 next week!”
Well, darlin, as of next week, you’ll be able to enjoy all the alcohol you want at any of the fine drinking establishments in town, and the number of guys you can add to your bedpost notches will grow dramatically. Until then, sounds like you’ll enjoy drinking at home.

“I just got out of jail for beating up a door guy.”
If this is a challenge, it’s not a very smart one, since when you fuck with one member of a bar staff, you tend to fuck with them all. If it’s meant to impress upon me that you’re just here to have a good time and won’t be disruptive, you may want to spend a few hours working on that approach.

“This is no way to treat a regular.”
Wow, really? I don’t recognize you, you don’t recognize me — you must not be very regular.

“I don’t have an ID, but they let me in here last week.”
First, thanks for jeopardizing our bar license twice in a week. It doesn’t matter if you’re 21 or 81, if the ABC board decides to have one of it’s random raids on a night when you’re in, we’re screwed — including large fines for every person on staff that night, and for the bar as an entity. And I don’t want to get my ass kicked by the bartenders, the barback, the owner… It’s not just that you have to be 21 or older to drink in a bar; you must have PROOF that you are 21 or older. That’s the law. Don’t take it up with me. Talk to your congressman.

“Yeah, I was banned, but Bartender X isn’t here tonight.”
Well, shitmonkey, the rest of us are.

“I’ve got three grams of coke I’m looking to unload.”
Not in this bar, champ. Even if I’m sympathetic to your cause, as it were, I enjoy having a bar to come to work at, one that hasn’t gotten shut down in a raid. Take it elsewhere.

“I love to get fucked up and FIGHT!”
I love telling you at the door that you’ll be getting fucked up elsewhere, because the least favorite part of my job is breaking up fights.

“I’ll blow you if you’ll let my underage friend in.”
This used to seem like a worthwhile trade, until you consider that these girls have probably been to a few bars already, and I’m not a big fan of contributing to the town square fountain.

Ah, weekends at the bar… What fun you can have. Or so I hear.

These Memories Can’t Wait

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Yesterday is a cancelled check;
Tomorrow is a promissory note;
Today is the only cash you have,
so spend it wisely.
–Ancient Chinese Secret

I don’t remember my grandfather very well (speaking maternally, as it were; my father’s father died before he and my mother ever met, and so I know him only through the stories my father and his brothers and mother have told over the years). He was, if memory serves (and as I’ve noted many times before, if it’s prior to the age of 12 or so, memory serves about as well as most of the people I worked with at Ruby Tuesdays), a mean, grouchy old man who really had little use for children.

Keep in mind that I don’t say this with any bitterness. I don’t remember him ever being really spiteful toward me or Mandy, nor did he ever (that I recall) lay a hand on either of us. He just was sort of there in my peripheral vision when we would go visit my grandmother, Merv. I do recall Saturdays watching wrestling with him, six-year-old me sitting on their blue leather recliner while he sat in his customary position at the far end of the sofa, smoking his cigarettes.

The clearest memory that I have of him is him towering above me on the stairs in their house as he showed me old coins that he had, explaing what they were and where they came from. The specifics have gone the way of Theater Appreciation 102 in my head, but what I remember the most vividly was that he was talking to me, and even smiling every now and then. I think I was about seven or eight at the time, and it confused me; grumpy old Da was being nice to me, and even at that age I knew something was amiss.

It was shortly after that that my mother sat me and Mandy down and explained Alzheimer’s to the both of us, and our adventures in the world of the mnemonically challenged began.

I always thought it was funny, at that age — the idea of a grown man wandering out of the house in his underwear, getting lost in his own neighborhood, forgetting the names of grandkids, his only child, his wife and sisters. But I started seeing more and more what it was doing to my mom, and to my grandmother, and the seriousness set in.

He eventually died from some abdominal something or another; I was thirteen, and have little to no memory of him after the stairway conversation. It seemed, strangely, like a relief for my mom and grandmother, something I wouldn’t understand for another fifteen years.

Shortly thereafter, my grandmother moved down to Birmingham from Nashville, to be closer to my mom and us (my mother is an only child). That would have been around ’87 or so; by 1990, my parents had finished building their new house with a connected apartment for her to live in. I had moved out in the summer of ’89, after high school, and again, my memory gets fuzzy regarding family stuff, but I know that it was before my divorce in ’94 that Murv, too, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Whether from youth or emotional distance from my grandfather, the only effect the disease had on me in round one was watching the effect it had on others. This time around, it was much different. Murv was the one person outside of my immediate family that I had ever (or would ever, to this day) feel any sort of connection with. It was painful to watch the slow decay of her memory — even more so, I think, because I wasn’t living with her and seeing it every day. Instead, I visited weekly, and thus the progression was more noticeable.

She would ask over and over, ten or twenty times in the course of a visit, if I had talked to Jen, if I had found someone new yet, how my classes were going (I hadn’t taken classes since ’92). I never minded answering repeatedly, though, because there was still that grandmotherly concern there. It wasn’t long — maybe I mean to say that it wasn’t long enough — before she started misrecognizing me, first as my father (which was tough to spot, since we have the same name), then as my grandfather, then as one of her brothers who had passed away many years earlier (my mom had to tell me whose name she was calling me).

Her physical health got worse and worse; she was having small strokes, which were causing jumps of progression in the Alzheimers, and she developed some sort of cancer in her shoulder. Mom and Dad moved her into a nursing home, so that she could get the constant attention that she needed. I didn’t visit much; it was too hard for me, and frankly, she wasn’t my grandmother any more, not even in mild flashes of recognition.

In April of 1999, we went to Nashville for her funeral, and I finally understoof the relief that I had seen in my mom’s eyes all those years earlier. My grandmother had disappeared somewhere along the way back, becoming little more than a barely functional shell of meat along the way; she was in a better place, no matter what I believe or don’t about an afterlife. My mom had taken on the maternal apron for the her own mother, and now that extraordinary burden was off her shoulders.

I think there’s some sort of irony to be found in my memories of both of them being almost dominantly pre-Alzheimers. And that’s exactly the way I’d prefer it, honestly; maybe it’s delusional, or pathetically nostalgic, but I don’t really care. They’re my memories, and I’ll do with them as I please, knowing full well that genetics or an act of God may take them from me on a whim.

Once, long ago, I saw the sun inside the fire
But now my eyes are burned and blind
The time has come to walk the road into tomorrow
And put the memories behind
-Frames Per Second, Awakening

Did an emo kid crawl up your ass and cry itself to death?*

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And to continue borrowing from the same source, I finally figured out why I have such a big problem with passive-aggressive behavior. “You know better. There’s nothing passive about my aggression.”

I have a great respect for those who speak their minds without playing mindgames. It’s direct and open, and refreshing due to its rarity.

There is such a thing as too much, obviously. Some truths don’t need to be spoken, for there is nothing gained, at least in any discernible positive sense. Not that I think that lies should be told; I’m just advocating a don’t tell if not asked policy in such situations. If you confront me, I’ll give you honest answers to any questions you might have; just don’t expect me to volunteer said answers if there’s no point behind it.

But this isn’t so much about honesty as it is directness. It’s about telling friends or family or lovers or coworkers that you have problems with them or their behaviors, instead of telling everyone else and potentially doing unnecessary damage to their reputations. It’s about knowing that most of the people around you aren’t mind readers, and aren’t going to magically figure out what’s pissing you off. It’s about treating your fellow person with respect.

Confrontation is not fun. Passing bad news to someone is not something that most of us would ever choose to do; firing someone from a job, breaking up with your significant other, evicting someone, sentencing someone — very few of these things are matters that any of us look forward to doing. It automatically puts you, at least in the eyes of the recipient, in the role of the bad guy, and very few of us dream of the day we get to finally put on our black hat and march out to the scorn of the world.

But a passive-aggressive approach to such situations doesn’t help anyone. In fact, it only prolongs the pain, for both parties, in the meanwhile doing nothing to advance toward a solution.

You can pull the glass out of the wound quickly, suffer through the pain, and let the healing begin. You can avoid it altogether and hope for a bit of luck, some natural healing and no infection (on balance, though, you risk more pain and worse damage in the long run). And then, alternately but seemingly the most popular option all too often, you can go at the glass in your foot by reaching through the chest and trying to sneak up on it, or by picking at your toes with a knife until your foot decides to get angry enough to get the glass out itself.

Okay, fine. So the analogy falls completely fucking apart. Which, I think, just goes a step or two toward proving my point for me, that being direct is the best policy. As such:

Stop being passive-aggressive. It’s a really ugly look, and serves to accomplish little more than pissing a lot of people around you off. You don’t want to be the bad guy? That sort of behavior makes you worse: the snivelling underling of the villain, too cowardly to ever be of any real consequence.

That, and you start sounding like an emo kid crawled up your ass and cried itself to death.

* Blantantly stolen from R.K. Milholland’s Something Positive. If you’re not reading this every day, you’re missing out on what is, hands down, the best ever webcomic for snarky, so-unhip-you’re-hip-again nerd types ever. Ever. Seriously. Stop doubting me, or I’ll shove a Dungeon Master’s Guide in your eye socket.

Nature vs Nurture

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British child psychologist Lyn Fry, an expert on feral children, has travelled to Ukraine to meet a girl brought up by dogs.

23-year-old Oxana Malaya from a village in Ukraine is a feral child, one of only about 100 known in the world. When she was three, her alcoholic parents left her outside one night and she crawled into a hovel where they kept dogs. No one came to look for her or even seemed to notice she was gone, so she stayed where there was warmth and food.

Kerfuffle. Is that even a word?

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I am reminded of two things today:

1. Misery loves company.  Misery should be more considerate.  Company might have enough on its plate that dealing with misery is a little too much.

2. I give people way too much credit sometimes.  I’ve noted repeatedly that I consistently expect the worst and hope for the best; I would like to be the hopeless idealist and keep the worst furthest from my mind, but time and again, people knock me back to my senses and remind me that the worst is a good thing to expect.

Yes, vague again.  Because something that is not my problem — not even peripherally — has become my problem.  And the reactions to said problem are so totally opposite of what I would do (and what I would hope any and all of my friends would do) that I am left speechless.

Sigh.  Cause and effect.  Actions and consequences.  Accountability.

Cherish that last quality when you find them in people, folks, because it is far rarer than I would wish.

It’s far easier to imagine and create scenarios in your head than to accept responsibility for your life, I know. But guess what?  It does you no good, in the short term or long.

This, too, shall pass.  But damn, did it have to come my way in the first place?

The Year of Living Dangermousely

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You would not be completely out of place to question my sobriety, based purely on listening to the voices in my head that get heard on this site. Many of my actions seem hasty, brash, and unconsidered.

But I’ve not gotten this far in my life without learning a few tricks.  I’m adaptable, and my overly analytical side does have its benefits. If I was capable of long-term strategizing, I’d be a brilliant chess player; sadly, while I can run through the possibilities (what we computer programmers might think of as a tree search) faster and more completely than is apparent on the surface, I haven’t the patience to consider the statistical odds of a given board position eighteen moves down the lines.

When considering an action, I ponder the best and worst possible consequences, as well as the most likely (always somewhere in the middle).  Once you’ve realized the worst-case scenario, you simply decide: is the reward you gain from your action worth the highest potential cost to yourself? If so, take the action (with the caveat that you have to accept the outcome gracefully and graciously; do everything with dignity, even eating humble pie).

And I follow my gut, that feeling that simultaneously resides at the base of your skull and in the pit of your stomach.  Logic and reason are wonderful, and help in the measuring game outlined above, but all the animals that came before us on this earth have survived so much longer than us on instinct. It’s a powerful tool that we are too often wrongly taught to ignore.

It’s good that I am adaptable, because the specifics of my life introduce a lot of change.  I’m not complaining; after all, it’s largely by choice.  A simple twist here and there on my lifestyle, and I become just another fish caught up in the tide, floating wherever it takes me, sedentary and simple.

Sometimes the changes are spread out, considerate of the rest of the things on my mind.  Sometimes they come hard and fast, an onslaught, one after another with no end in sight.  When it rains, it pours.  But that’s life, and you do the best you can to roll with the punches while considering the best way out with as little damage to yourself as possible.  And that’s in the worst case scenario; I much prefer the situations where I am trying to maximize the good, as opposed to minimizing the negative.

Sitting on your hands and worrying, stressing, crying or screaming at the gods with shaking fists does nothing except make you feel worse.  It doesn’t stop the change, it doesn’t make things better, it doesn’t heal the wounds or fix what is broken.  You have to figure out what is within your realm of control and what is out of your hands, and then you have to accept that those things are what they are.  Clint Eastwood’s crusty Gunny Highway in Heartbreak Ridge put it in my head in my teens: “Improvise.  Adapt.  Overcome.”

It always seemed honorable to me, and still does.

It’s not change that I have issues with; it’s the changing, often the initiation thereof, that is the worst.  My moments with CL are far better than I could ever have hoped for with a girlfriend, but I could never have gotten here without the divorce.  And yeah, the divorce process itself sucked, and there were a lot of moments of pain involved, but once the transition was done, I realized that Point B was no worse than Point A, and probably even better, in some ways.  Alternate (and far less poetic) analogy: I can’t wait to move, to be in my new apartment with hardwood floors and air-conditioning and bathroom light that works, but the packing and unpacking and address changing and utility switchover and seemingly infinite trips up and down stairs with boxes in hand may be my new least favorite activity ever.

Change is good.  It keeps life from becoming dull without introducing the need for drama or man-made excitement. And it’s a big part of life.  It pays to learn to deal with it, if not to enjoy it.  And, if all else fails, drinking heavily is both a good painkiller and scapegoat for your decisions.

Hey, I never said I wasn’t drunk.

I’m not waving, just drowning…

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Words may be light from me this week.  I’m under a real-world deadline, a freelance deadline or three, and I’m trying to finish packing and start moving.  But you can take small solace in the fact that I have lots of funny stories to tell, one day.

Maybe.

Sigh.