Tell Me Everything

Though she’s not due until the 29th of this month, the pregnancy is full term as of tomorrow. The dawn of the drop zone is stayed by a single, nearly full moon.

This baby brought nesting unlike what we experienced with Otis. As he gestated, we enjoyed the first throes of parenthood. There was a crib to buy, a nursery to outfit. I washed and folded tiny clothes for the first time in wonder. And sure, I spent a few days, maybe a total of a week, assembling an earthquake kit and cleaning grout, but that first go-round was more of a marvel.

This pregnancy didn’t reach the marvel stage until after we remodeled both bathrooms and laid new carpet. Apparently, I also needed a steam vac, a thorough clean of the storage space (so long, box for a 2005 Mac G5 tower that no longer works!) and a propane generator before the marvel really set in. Otis had to be transitioned to a big boy bed, a new dresser — essentially a whole new suite of goods to make room for his coming sibling.

There was writing to be done. Legitimate writing, this time. A script that had the interest of someone who could give it a real push. Now, while the shot remains impossibly long, it was an opportunity to take seriously, and I did, and so that got done too.

And also, of course, I had physical preparations. When Otis was born, I was swimming a few miles a week, and I remember how much that helped. Also, people take a lot of pictures when a baby’s first born, and one often walks around without a shirt on so baby can get that skin-to-skin, so just for the sake of my vanity in posterity, that old Bikram has really come in handy.

But now is my favorite part, the final bit of nesting. It’s the part where you don’t buy anything, or get high and clean frantically, or cross things off a list. It’s the part where you prepare your soul to meet a fresh one. It’s something the mother of the unborn child does naturally, as she must. The long stretch of sobriety and daily closeness with the child with whom she’s sharing her body automatically weakens her ego and allows for heightened sensitivity to the ringing core.

For the partner, and especially in cases where children are already established, it takes seeing the baby move on a regular basis, a few nights of your wife’s sleeplessness, a few days of her stumbling around in etherial spacey-ness, and maybe a hard, underlined date on the calendar to remind you that now is the time to turn inward, to find the Self beyond the self, to look for and to see God in everything.

Soon we will share this home with a person of indescribable peace, helpless and permeable in every way. There is no sense of other to the newborn baby, not for many months. In that time, how can one not strive to mirror the essential goodness we carry when we arrive on this earth? With all the gifts a child brings when they come into your life, how can one not at least try to give this very small one back?

Does it mean you have to sacrifice yourself? Absolutely and clearly not. It’s a cutting off of resources to the Afghanistan war in your soul. This is a gaining of Self. It offers an opportunity to forgo chagrin and to leave behind the burden of assuaging fear. The hard scramble, the endless waltz with the person you’ve made yourself up to be has real and determined reason to finally end.

As I still and open, I pray sincerely that as the perfection of the newborn baby turns into the real-world challenge of child who needs of me a million different things I’m able to hold onto these feelings and resolutions.

When people offer the cliche “Having kids is the best thing I’ve ever done, and also the hardest” I like to think this is what they mean, and I want to stand with them in that, for their sake and for mine.

There’s a baby on the way, and instead of experiencing the blind apocalyptic panic that I did with our first pregnancy, this time, I’m gettin in shape.

What they don’t tell you about small babies is that you need a specific group of muscles that you don’t already have. These are called Dad Muscles, and they can be broken down into a few different categories - rocking/bouncing to sleep muscles, defensive muscles, endurance muscles and recovery muscles. A full discussion of these forthcoming, hopefully in the paid section of this site (also forthcoming).

So, if you’ll excuse, I’m going to work out some ideas here and share them with you and then delete this post and pretend I never published it if any paying outlet becomes interested.

The long and short of it is that the whole family needs to recognize that a coming child means you have to get your ass in shape. Expecting mothers have a marathon of unknown length to compete in. Not knowing what you’re body is going to do while it tries to expel the human that’s been growing inside of it is something in-and-of-itself to train for. For the birth event, peak physical conditioning required.

Once the child is born, you’ve got 7-10 pounds rolled into slightly less than two feet. If they made a gym weight that perfectly represented the weight and size of a baby, you wouldn’t touch it. “Too light, that’s for pusses.” But if you had to carry it around for twenty minutes (or up to an hour?!) in a very specific position, and/or wrap it up and put it into an “ergonomically friendly” carrier and drape it from your shoulders, I promise that you’ll burn through muscles you didn’t know you didn’t have.

The tricky thing about carrying a tiny baby is that there’s no good way to support your arms as you cradle it. Again, no problem to get it into position and get it comfortable, but five minutes in, all you want is to rest your arms on something while you hold the baby, but you can’t, because you’re holding the baby. Even if you’re sitting, you’re holding the baby. You gotta lay back or put it down, but you can’t, because that wakes the baby up. You got to hold it, probably for at least another twenty minutes.

Now, the same exercise on no sleep at 2:30 in the morning. Your mind starts to crumble even before your back, shoulders, arms and neck. The pain you’re anticipating heightens the pain that you experience. And all for the sake of something 10ish pounds and two feet long. It’s simply incredible.

Having gone through exquisite middle-back agony in Otis’s first few months, I’m trying to get ahead of the problem with a dedicated Bikram yoga practice. I swam a lot before Otis, but for me, it wasn’t enough. Too much chest and shoulders, not enough middle back. There’s a “spine strengthening series” of poses in Bikram that I’m hoping will hold this next baby for me.

I’m also banking on the excruciating heat and rigor of Bikram yoga to build the mental endurance required in carrying and soothing baby. The mental game of Bikram is one of it’s most challenging aspects. It will take discipline to apply it to the mind-breaking rigors of night duty, which can entail up to an hour of pacing a room, singing quietly and waiting for sleep to come.

And of course, you always want to be in shape enough that you can beat off any attacking zombies and/or mutants and still have the energy to tear your safe and bug-out bags out of the rubble and haul your family into the car after the shit goes down. But that kind of goes without saying.

Nothing in the world! There is nothing you can name that it anything like a dame!

Nothing walks like a dame……..

Nothing talks like a dame…..

Sorry. I had weird project dreams all night. Couldn’t stand it. Spent what felt like days trying to finish this movie I’d made that was just a shambles. John C Reilly wouldn’t help me reshoot, he was busy with a play he was staging and asked me for money to help get it done. (I said I’d do $50). Lucas was in the original cut, but he’d twisted the thing and turned in a Crispin Glover-esque-performance that left me with little to nothing and then disappeared. I had no place to shoot, terrible ideas on how to fix it and time was running out.

And so first thing this morning, I want to write, but I need to cleanse the pallet. And so, this, for absolutely no reason whatsoever except that it came into my mind cleanly and washed away that sour dream. Maybe you need something similar?

Editors note: I’ve never seen this movie nor the stage production. I really only know this song from Boys Chorus freshman year of high school. Show stopper. This versions good, too, I guess.

I’ve been avoiding this one. Hard to wrap my head around starting the New Year with a sadness, but so it is.

Ol’ Deetch (nee Mr. T). Last saw him before we left for Colorado, and got the report when we got home that he was last seen the evening prior. Didn’t come home for final meal, didn’t come in for breakfast. Not totally unusual. The Deetch is something of a work-a-holic, and with a bathroom remodel in process and the weather fine, it was unconcerning that he took a day off.

But that day turned into two, then three. I started seeing phantom reflections, I check the door again and again. I dreamt he came home with a badly damaged eye but we were so relieved to see him. I sat on that aching edge of expectation and hope. I stayed as long as I could.

Then, on a quiet walk home down the edge of the big canyon, the night temperate and still, I carefully backed away.

I picked up T with his brother Susan as kittens while I over-wintered at the Lake House in Tomahawk, Wisconsin. They had been found on the side of the road on a slate cold November day and temporarily adopted by my neighbors, and as soon as I saw them, I knew they were mine.

As a kitten, Deetchy was molded by one scarring incident where I left them in the house for a few days unattended. They were probably a little young for it, but it was a big house, warm, and I knew they’d be fine. I checked all the doors to make sure they couldn’t be trapped anywhere and then left. When I came back, Susie came sauntering up for a hello, but T was nowhere to be found. I followed the mews to the downstairs bathroom, where I accidentally locked him in during my failed safety effort. No food, water or bathroom for two-plus days and, somehow, none the worse for wear. In attitude and appetite, the cat was just as I’d left him.

But I think it was this episode that lead to Deetchy’s wanderlust. He was a cat that was never happy indoors. It didn’t make any sense to him why this should be the case. I hadn’t known outdoor cats before, but as he got older it became increasingly clear that this cat was made to roam.

His destiny was fulfilled when we moved into the Chalet in 2005, and I’m very happy to know that Deetch got to spend more of his life on the loose than he did cooped up in an apartment. In his out-of-doors life, he was a tussler who’d come home with some pretty good bite wounds. I imagine he gave as good as he got. He never hunted birds, but he was known to take down lizards, moles and even a few good size squirrels. Overnight adventures were not out of the question, though because these canyons are populated by a substantial number of coyotes and bear-sized raccoons, we tried to bring him in. Some nights, he just wasn’t having it. Some nights he wouldn’t come back for final meal and some nights after he ate, he meowed and clawed at the door so I’d let him out.

And that’s how it ended. It’s nice that this street’s so quiet and that the idea of someone capturing him is so low, because I can reasonably imagine his death came at the hands of another animal who wanted to eat him. It’s kind of terrifying to think about, and I hope the actual deed was fast, but in the end, at least he continues something — a flow of things that he fit in gracefully.

And I know this is just a cat, and that if I were to read a cat eulogy of such length and earnestness I would be tempted to roll my eyes a little bit, and that you may never forgive me for this and that I may end up back where I started and that and that and that and on and on and on.

But I had to write it and I had to write it like this because that’s how I’m thinking about it and that’s the writer I want to be and this is the kind of year that I want to have. It’s the kind of year I want us all to have.

Deetch with Susie, 2006, Los Angeles

Billy Bungeroth has been playing the same moves since I’ve known him. Ah, maybe not since I’ve known him. The first moves I remember him making were in the fourth grade and when got up on the cafeteria tables and did a dance in his Indiana Jones hat. Actually, maybe they are the same moves…

We were treated to a JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound show at the Satellite (nee Spaceland) on Friday. Simply blown away. I recognized that guitar stance from the Waverly dorm, when we were playing a made up song for Ric Flair (leader of the Four Horsemen), and in those days it seemed pure goof. Now, in the coolest clothes playing perfect licks stage right of a more-for-real-than-I-could-have-known power soul group on stage in Los Angeles, it was perfect, how it was always supposed to be. Same moves, different results.

Billy Bungeroth is making the rounds, and due in your neck of the woods sometime soon. When he does, make the effort to see him and you won’t regret it. This band he put together is absolutely legit and red hot. JC Brooks is the real deal, and there’s not a weak link in the group. Here’s the where to get the new record, which you absolutely should get.

JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound “Want More”

I forget when Bill went on a “Youth Still Rules” campaign. It was sometime when we were all young enough for it to make sense. That flag continues to fly over his camp, and he does right by it. When they offer you a place in their ring, you take it, and you try to look as good as you can. To that end, photostrips:

The best part about playing music is playing it with friends. It’s just an incredible feeling to share a song with someone, to work on it, to have fun in it, to make something out of nothing together. It’s the best reason to learn to play the ukulele I can give to anyone.

Playing music with Alice was a bright spot in my musical life. Hilarious, sparkling, talented and just so fun to be around, Alice is one of the true good ones. She’s from the South and absolutely nails the country whine.

We never did anything with our relatively short-lived partnership, except for enjoy it. It turns out that those country duets are harder to sing that you think. You miss one note and the whole illusion is kind of blown. But we tried, and we had fun. And there’s a lot to be said for that. We were called “The Weenies.”

Here’s a couple songs that remain from the few recordings we made. They’re a little rough, and certainly unedited, and I love them and I’m excited for you to hear them.

This is a link to a song called Let’s Invite Them Over

And this is a link to a song called D-I-V-O-R-C-E

I miss the most notes in this one, but why not? We’re Not the Jet Set

Happy birthday, blog. You turned five years old while I was on my first and longest hiatus from you. Because you’re a blog and therefore incapable of feeling, I’ll just say happy birthday now.

So here’s to five years of personal blogging ten years after personal blogging died out. It’s only me and Beans keeping it real these days, it seems, macr.o-blogging details of our small, privileged lives. Oh, there may be others other there, I’m sure there are, but as with this blog, it will remain their friends and parents who read it, and not me

Anyway, thanks for helping to get me to do weird things, like vandalize Wikipedia and entice strangers on Craigslist, and for the space to process my love for the mixed martial arts and celebrate the good works of my friends and for an often needed outlet and more often needed kick in the seat.

I may be flawed, but I’m lucky and grateful, and I think this chemistry must have some sort of balance to it. How else would it figure that my incredible family would support a four day getaway to the Esalen Institute for a stretch of interrupted writing and music?

If you don’t know it, the Esalen Institute was founded 50 years ago by progressive intellectuals as a place to engage in experimentation in human potential, offering thinkers like Alan Watts, BF Skinner, Tim Leary and Fritz Perls a place to teach, learn and be. (Their wikipedia page is worth checking out if you have 5 minutes.) It’s situated in the middle of Big Sur in an impossibly beautiful confluence of river, redwoods and ocean. It’s currently occupied by the “Hipperati,” the most elite hippies you can possibly imagine. Their eyes are bright and clear from clean living, meditation and yoga, and they drip with hemp, jade and sacred feathers.

I shouldn’t be allowed four days of freedom in such a place. I should be deep in a salt mine, slaving away. I should at least have to participate in one of the workshops Esalen offers, and had indeed conceded this, having signed up for “Writing that Scares You.” But a few weeks before, they called and told me that the workshop was cancelled, and that if I wanted, I may come up for Personal Retreat.

And so it was that I found myself perched on high, grassy cliffs above the Pacific ocean, eating delicious meals from the food grown in the gardens, soaking in the sulphur tubs and existing entirely outside the time and space of my real life in order to better connect to the thing that makes me do what I love to do.

We’ll see if the writing I did up there is worth a damn. I got a huge chunk of it done, and that was great. The music I recorded was simple and quiet and I’ll share some of it with you here.

I can’t say I earned any of this. But I will tell you that I enjoyed it immensely.

This is a link to a song called Foggy Dew, recorded in the bench pictured below.

while looking at this view of the sea…

Wow. This is the first time I’ve ever taken so long a break from this since I started it. And I have to say, I don’t regret it. I’m pretty sure I’ve lost every reader I had (Eric, John, Mom, Whit). Can I rebuild a new readership? Definitely not. Have I breeched all trust? Absolutely.

There’s something refreshing about this new space.

Anyway, here’s the reason I stopped writing. It’s something from a letter I wrote, so if the recipient reads it, they’ll just have to deal with the fact that I cut and pasted from their letter onto my blog. But it’s a story that I don’t want to have to write again. It was sour enough to recount it the first time…

After years of skirting and flirting with the edges of the psychedelic darkness, I finally had my first true meltdown. It…wasn’t good. But it wasn’t all bad, either.

The month was June. My small family was headed to Chicago the next week, and I had one last Saturday to sneak in a day at the Russian Baths with my friend and fellow Saunamen Mr. Eric Helin. I drove to his house to pick him up and I made a snap decision to try and pull into his tiny driveway rather than double park on his narrow street. It was my first big mistake of the day.

Unplanned and ill-conceived, this maneuver ended in collision with the car parked south of the driveway. Though this car was parked a shocking distance from the curb – a distance I couldn’t have known when I decided to turn – the fault was mine and I knew it. The damage – considerable. The back rear panel and part of my (wife’s car’s) door were smashed. The car I hit, a white, mid-oughts Mercedes, took its damage to the bumper and indicator lights. Having more body-work knowledge than I care to admit, I put the estimate at $2500.

But I soldiered on with the day. Helin was a comfort, and tried to cheer me with stories of his recent trip to Southern France. I did my best to put the incident out of my mind. I’d already called Elizabeth, who reassured me that it was “only money.”

And so it was that we split a piece of medicated banana bread from a local medical marijuana dispensary that Yelp users had brightly reviewed.

Being a recently diagnosed sufferer of chronic back pain, I enjoyed status as a legal user of medical marijuana. As such, when visiting this particular dispensary as a new client, I was given a free edible. After choosing banana bread, the pharmacist (?) informed me that this piece contained two, maybe three doses, and that I should expect to “go to bed.” I figure this is perfect for the sauna, and 2 - 3 means 2, so Eric and I split it.

The effects came on slowly. We enjoyed a stretch in the hot room, pool, and then Finnish sauna. And then, about an hour and a half later, we were able to tolerate none of those places. Helin and I made it to the roof, where we made a final desperate attempt to keep our souls from fleeing our bodies for all time into the endless vacant blue sky above. “I’m losing it, Helin,” I said, making one of my endless wide circles around the sun-deck, “I need your help.” “No can do,” he said, grinning Then he added, “That would make a nice photograph.” He was looking at the stained side of the building. I worried he was disappointed with me, that I couldn’t handle my weed and was killing a good buzz for him. I could verbalize none of this. All I could assume was that I was in this alone.

I tried to eat, having heard that the remedy for eating too much pot is to eat some non-medicated food. We brought a lunch, as is our way, but I couldn’t make my throat work to consume food. I worried about choking, and this made my throat work worse.

Visions of the car accident that had kicked off this day quickly consumed me. How could I have let that happen, and then how could I be in this place now, so far from home, still in charge of a car to drive? I checked the clock. 10:30 am. Jesus. I thought, by 12:30 I should be able to see the other side of this thing.

I paced the deck, worrying about Otis having a father who talks to his shoes, a strange mutterer he can’t be left alone with. I apologized to everything and everyone I’ve ever known. I recognized my drain on my family, on Elizabeth, on society, on the world. I saw it all coming to an end, my children in infinite suffering because I was incapable of even the most insignificant sacrifice or change. I entered the darkness, and was sucked down into it.

Quaking with fear, I checked the clock again. 1:45. I was not on the other side of this thing.

Some lizard instinct told me to retreat to the sauna, that heat would help me metabolize this terrible drug faster. And so I went. First into a 215-degree sauna, beating my back, shoulders and legs with a broom made of eucalyptus leaves, and then into a cold swimming pool, groaning out the disarray. And back and forth like that again and again. I’m usually good for this routine for 20 minutes before I need a break. I think in my banana breaded state I stayed on for close to two hours.

I was feeling a bit more steady when I found Helin in the lockerroom with his shorts around one ankle and staring up at a soccer game, mostly naked but for the shorts that remained about one ankle. “Meet me on the roof, Helin.” “I’m watching the game,” he said, smiling. That’s when I understood he was in as bad of shape as I.

I made it to the roof and soon fell asleep. When I woke up, Helin was next to me, and we were on the other side. We could see the light at the end of the tunnel and were giddy with relief.

I got home and fell into Elizabeth’s arms. I was shaky for the next month.

The period of reflection, introspection and healing that followed this experience was intense. I got a series of massages to quell the lingering physical effects of the massive anxiety. I revisited some favorite self-help (A New Earth, Tolle, Ekhardt, Simon & Shuster, 2008), I booked some time with an expensive psychotherapist. I flossed. I stopped drinking and smoking pot.

I negotiated with the insurance company and the woman who’s car I hit. I fought it, but the fault was indeed mine. I filed my first insurance claim and got my car fixed on their dime. I would take a point for this. But I would take a point for a lot of things that happened that day.

So it was that I neglected this blog. It wasn’t a part of the rebuilding. But now I’ve got a bit of steady on. I’ve finished another draft of a screenplay that I’m working on, I’m getting deeper into my yoga practice. My house is in order, our babies grow. I am ready to return to sharing.

Hi, bloggins! I’m back.

“Never delete anything,” they told me when I signed up. “With all this space, you’ll never have to!” That was the cheery optimism of 2005, and it didn’t seem all that crazy.

Here we are six years later and after a few days of being locked out through Apple mail, I signed into to the web page to find that I was 95% full. I had six years of email, and they wanted me to do something with it. Or else.

Google offered a couple links. “Buy more storage” or “Get help managing your Gmail account.” I clicked get help, but it took me to “Buy more storage.” No shit, Google. No shit.

I don’t think you need much more than a quick glance at this blog or my site to know that I squeak by online. I’m miles from savvy. My “creative solutions” were few and ineffective. I searched a few senders (American Airlines, old jobs I used to work) and deleted. 94% full. I tried to search for messages with lots of photos or attachments. I was given back thousands of results.

My iPhone stopped being able to connect. Days passed and I was subjected to the constant humiliation of having to log in through the website. I sifted through the past six years slowly, slowly, what a waste of time. Otis started squeaking upstairs. I moved all my sent mail into the trash. Delete forever.

There. At least I still have the things people wrote me.

And then, to test the snap-action, I went back to find some old conversation Elizabeth and I had about the Waking Life shoot. I’d seen it when I’d been combing through. It was one of those simple exchanges, a little piece of life that was fun to revisit. I smiled at our 2006 jokes, pet names. This was the beauty of never having to delete.

Her emails were there, but mine hadn’t been automatically copied below. Now it was just half the conversation, and it wasn’t as fun.

I could have bought more storage, or I could have taken my time and figured out how to clear out 12000 emails with some precision. But I didn’t. I went slash and burn. Sometimes that feels liberating. This isn’t one of those times. This feels like a bill of goods.

I’m hoping a flood of comments comes in about how email is trivial and one should delete everything every day and then weepy sentiments about the great emails — a firestorm of a debate. I’ll print it out and save it forever.