Bipolar Life in 2012

In typical fashion I’m a day late on reflection. Seems that all the year of 2012 blogs are already out and done.

I was at a show the other night, the Vilification Tennis group doing their F**K 2012 show. They are a wildly inappropriate insult comic group and always a blast to go see. You will think “Oh, you didn’t” at least once during the show, often while laughing. Here’s a video of them at the renaissance fest.

 I cannot repeat the Red Hook jokes, but they did help me personally to find some way through that shit that has been weighing on me for the past month.

Well, during the show, one of the activities was to ask the audience who had the shittiest year. They asked people to raise their hands to share. I thought over the past year.

I started off the year 4 months into unemployment that would last another 2 then got some sort of contract-work-employed for a couple months. I would have declared bankruptcy if I’d had the $1,500 for a lawyer. I was 3 months into pre-foreclosure on the house. I told my mother I'd had thoughts of suicide in two emails, and she never responded. I broke off contact with my family. I’ve hit my heaviest weight ever in the last week. Wife is now living in the uncertain contract position life where we never know when she will be paid and how long she has a job. Wife’s years of school loans are coming due at a rate of $900 a month to begin with. We enter 2013 with no savings, no safety net, and capped off the holidays by walking out on Christmas weekend with wife’s family after her grandmother said one too many criticisms of wife (a long list 33 years deep that includes how she was too big to ever get a husband, too dumb, useless and now added too loud, so thanks for that new complex). Also had a fun fight with her family members who were complaining about homeless people begging for money, when we were literally weeks from being among them when I finally landed my job.

Yet. I didn’t raise my hand.

And not because I was scared to speak in public. I don’t have that fear.

I didn’t raise my hand out of some sort of “could be worse” thing.

For every piece of crap part of my life over the past year, I also thought about the things that went right.

We sold the house before it was foreclosed, without owing money. I got hired by an awesome company and doing what I love – writing and creating. I am doing better without my family, and now know they can’t manipulate me through money, even when times are at their worst, and no longer accept money from them. I do pretty well feeling like shit about life on my own without their help, and Wife’s work is uncertain, but it’s a fuck of a lot better than working for Lisa Larson et al. at Hennepin Technical College. She gets paid closer to what she is worth, is respected for what she can do, and has gotten to know my colleagues better than me since she’s more of a people person than me. We get to go to work together every day and eat lunch together. We got on a debt reduction program. We quit smoking in August and it has stuck. Once I got my job, we have been able to start fully participating in life in the Twin Cities by having fantastic dinner experiences at The Melting Pot, the Lexington, Mort’s Deli, and more. We spent our anniversary in the St. Paul Hotel, where we got upgraded to the poshest room where presidents, dignitaries and celebrities stay. We’ve gone to Twins games, Paul F. Tompkins, Wits, Sleepwalk with Me with both Ira Glass and Mike Birbiglia at the screening, the It’s A Wonderful Life Radio Play, a Roast of Ebenezer Scrooge, the ballet, Art a Whirl, the Walker Art Museum, Northern Spark, the Aquatennial fireworks, Prairie Home Companion, Canterbury Downs horse races. Instead of not being able to go to things because we’re broke as shit, we can’t go cause we simply can’t find the time cause there’s too much we want to do. We’ve had trips to the North Shore, Duluth, and Red Wing. Wife’s best friend made it home safely from Afghanistan. Wife overcame fear of heights to go with me up Lutsen mountain in a gondola. For one month, we were both happily employed full time (more than we’ve ever been). We’ve been relatively healthy this year. I’m off all medications. Our cars have miraculously made it through another year.

2012 continued our bipolar life, which would have been a good alternate name for this blog. Highs, Lows, and few inbetweens.

BTW, the guy who won the shittiest year award: Got the Harley he’d saved up for years for, six months later, got hit by a drunk driver and spent three months in the hospital. Yeah, that would suck ass.

Cell Phones will KILL us all

I have this theory. Not supported by facts. Just a gut feeling

Cell phones will kill us all.

Dead.

It’s not as if they haven’t warned us about them for years. Notice how a cell phone has helped to make this woman completely oblivious to violent horrors. This one starts so sexy you worry about your mother walking in, but trust me, stick around and you'll see what I mean.

Not only are they distracting us. They will start to kill us.

They might rain death from the sky:

Be used as weapons to kill each other while Britney Spears sings in the background.

Or, hell, they might just start shooting though the atmosphere and kill left and right in what is not even the most ridiculously violent cell phone commercial I’ve seen. Considering the events of the last few weeks, I'm betting people at Motorola wish they'd never done this one. In fact, I have trouble believing it's a real ad or someone's spoof. It's got to be a spoof, right? Right? I'm too lazy to find out.

This observation was prompted by seeing an ad a few weeks ago where the guy’s heart was replaced by a cell phone or something. It's called Droid DNA, and if this shit doesn't scare you, I don't know what will




Now, there's a fucking reason that this shit did not fly in the Matrix universe. Yet here it is presented as some sort of "bonus" to your cell phone prowess. What the shit sort of universe do we live in now where we are meant to identify with the smug guys who share shit between their phones like video of santa falling off a stair banister and really messing his internal organs so bad his mother wouldn't recognize them (sidenote: Little known fact, we are all just little organ farms for our parents, so they are very familiar with them)





 I’ve always wondered what the hell is up with uber violent ads for cell phones, or creepy ads where computer arms interact with the phones. I don’t know what the hell these ads are trying to say that’s positive. They seem more like a warning.

I avoided cell phones until I had to get one for a job. Then I’ve kept it low tech. I have a dumb phone. I don’t use it to go online. I use it to call and text. Sometimes I take really crappy pics with it, but beyond that, nothing. I enjoy having a cell phone, but don’t care about the high tech ones.

I was at lunch with coworkers and one of the more tech saavy guys saw me pull out my phone to check the time, and made a comment about being old school. Yes. And when your phones start to kill you or the rest of humanity, I will be here, hiding. 

Got wife to watch Blink

So I'm a bit of a Dr. Who fan. first episode I remember is a vague recollection of the Tom Baker version on PBS when I was hanging out at a friend's house in 7th grade. His dad watched it. I noted it, and it stuck in whatever brain cavity things from that time period stick in that you can recall decades later, cause I don't remember shit about ANY OTHER watching habits of parents of friends, or even the friends themselves.

Then many years later, I was flipping around the channels and caught an episode of the reboot, the one where Rose meets her father on the day he died. It's pretty nuts, and I remember thinking "Wow, that guy from Shallow Grave is in this." Since that is what Christopher Eccleston was to me.  I also saw the second episode around that time, must have been a marathon or something that day on PBS.

A couple years go by, I hear things, and Dr. Who shows up on netflix or something, so I check it out. And I soon get hooked.

I've been raving about it ever since meeting the wife. I also raved about Lost and Battlestar Galactica. She watched them, enjoyed bits, and hated other bits. She really loathes having spent so much time on Lost, as the only redeeming factor was Desmond/Penny to her. But she keeps trying, and I keep trying her stuff.

I hesitated watching Big Bang Theory and The New Girl, but I am thoroughly hooked by those shows after some time (although Big Bang Theory is a season or two behind, since we don't get TV really, and their show isn't easily available for people who like to use Netflix, Hulu+, Amazon Prime, and Redbox - so yeah, it's my fault that I don't watch the ONE thing they are available on).

Wife even made a wedding vow to watch Doctor Who with me. This was not prompted by me at all. This was what she came up with.

We slogged through. She had me fast forward the nightmare enducing parts, like the WWII gas mask two parter. If it's creepy as fuck and gross to boot, she doesn't want to play.

So she's decided after a season and a half of Tennant and she wants to skip ahead to the next doctor. She just doesn't like Tennant like she did Eccelston, and she's seen some of Smith. Before we can do that, I said, there are a few key episodes you still have to see. Blink and Silence in the Library I think, since they introduce major additions to the Whoniverse. We'll miss out on the Master's intro, but seriously I think if wife saw the head spider things that come from that one and I wouldn't be able to get her to sit through another episode ever. He hasnt' been an issue in the Smith years anyway, so no worries. (I know jumping ahead is sacrilege to some people, but screw you, did you start with the first episode 50 years ago and watch every one in order? No you didn't cause that isn't possible unless you are British and old, and if that's the case why the hell are you reading my blog?)

Here's a bit about Blink for the uninitiated:


Tonight, after a day of cooking, wrapping gifts, cleaning and more chores, we sat down and watched Blink while wife did some online shopping for gifts. First 25 minutes, she wasn't into it. After hearing from me and others that it was THE BEST episode, she was not impressed.

Just Like McKayla

So after the needling, I asked her to hey, tone it down, and put down the computer, let me rub your legs, and let's close out the last 13 minutes. 

And she loved it. 

Yeah, it's that good. 

Tonight I saw Crazy

Tonight I saw crazy. Wife and I left work and on the way home, I convinced her we should just stop at the grocery store and get her a flu shot. I already had mine a month ago, but she was a walking target, and she's hard enough to take care of when she has a cold.

The ladies at the grocery store pharmacy thought it was funny that I was "making" her get one, as wife put it.

After the shot, we had to linger around the store for 10 minutes to make sure wife didn't have a crazy reaction to the shot. Unfortunately, they told her the side effects that could happen, so for the next ten minutes, wife kept telling me her lips were tingling and that she was feeling weak.

We got some coffee creamer, energy drinks, and much needed toilet paper as we are down to our last rolls. We were discussing whether we should get buns or not when it happened.

This 40 something blonde woman with a cart and 12 pack of soda comes up into the bread area. "Hey, excuse me!"

She's talking to another woman that's near us.

"Excuse me, but you have no right to hit my car like that."

Obviously, shit was going to go down. I didn't get a look at the other woman. The 40 something blonde was well dressed with a long black coat and looked "Businessy." That's the only term I can think of to describe her. She was talking on about the parking lot.

Wife and I, being highly non-confrontational creatures except with each other and our families, scooted down the way a bit and out of ear shot. I had my back to them. Wife kept watching them over my shoulder. Not long after, the blonde woman came by again, her wheeled cart bumped my hand cart. She was looking at my wife.

"Nutcase."

She was looking for some sort of comraderie with the wife. But she wasn't getting it. Wife and I moved on. Wife had forgotten about any tingling lips and faintness she had been experiencing.

As with everything that isn't fiction, there were two things that stuck with me.

One, the woman had taken the time between whatever had happened in the parking lot and then to get a cart, grab a 12 pack of soda, and then track the other woman down in the bakery. WHO DOES THAT!?

Two, the best she could come up with during all that time was "You have no right to hit my car."

Me to wife while driving home: "I mean, really, what do you say to that?"

I told wife this is why I want her with me when I leave the house, because things like this are too much for one person to absorb without help.

Wife: "You mean this happens all the time?"

Me: "No, but it happens enough."

The Target Clerk Dipshit Conundrum

I don’t know what it is with me and clerks. Maybe it’s just that I have more contact with them in usual life. I have another short anecdote about a clerk. It may not be as embarrassing as the “I love you” incident, or as fascinating as the “trapped in the car wash” scene, but its up in my top five cause it happened a week ago and I still can’t shake it.

So wife got this lovely shirt for me for my birthday. The T-shirt is run of the mill screen print with this design on the front:

And that’s it. I love it and wear it on weekends. What’s really nice is I get compliments on it from fellow fans of the Doctor. That’s right, random strangers stop me and tell me, Nice shirt! One of my coworkers squealed in delight when I wore it on casual Friday, the other two had no idea what the big deal was or really heard of the show.

That’s all preamble to the following conversation had at Target last week. I was wearing the shirt. I was with the Wife, and we were checking out with a small hand cart full of items. The line below is when I slip between what was actually said, and what happened subsequently in my head. Enjoy.

Clerk: What’s with the shirt?

Me: Hmm?

Clerk: What’s the deal with the shirt?

Me: Oh, it’s just a show.

Clerk: I get that, the Daleks and all, but what’s the deal with it?

Me: Um, it’s just the Daleks crossing Abbey Road.

Clerk: Yeah, so, is there a point to it?

Me: Um, well, I think it’s just mashing two well known British icons together into one image.

Clerk: Huh. Whatever. I don’t see redfoot. Where’s redfoot?

Me: Um, I don’t know.

Me: Listen here you dickwad. I love that we live in this new internet age where you don’t have to feel bad for having a hobby and apparently feel that no one can love something as much as you. You remind me of  a hipster version of simpsons comic book guy, and you need to take down the superiority a notch. Really, it’s a show, I like it, I wear a shirt to display that appreciation, which is the only shirt I own with anything, not even a logo, on it (besides the subsequently bought tshirt with a Sherlock design). Just because someone doesn’t go through the trouble of learning every fuckiing nuance of a decades old tv show doesn’t make them less than you in whatever fucked up version of reality you live in. There’s no mystery to the shirt, it’s a mashup of two images. That’s it. No mystery to solve. No clever little Easter eggs for only the “true” fan to appreciate. What you see is what you get. Now go choke on a fucking adipose  you twat.

Me: have a good night.

Clerk: (shrugs and turns to next customer)

Off my meds. Feeling OK.

Part of being on antidepressants is the kooky thing where when you have been taking them long enough, you think you don’t need them. You feel fine. Which is what you took them for in the first place.

I don’t always feel that way, but I am a guy, so sometimes I just plain forget to take them. I put the pills by the sink in the bathroom, in the kitchen, or anywhere else I am sure to be in the mornings, but invariably, they become part of the background decoration of that area of the apartment and I just look right through them and don’t remember to take them. Then the next day, I’ll be freaking out about something, or feeling panicked or shitty, and then it occurs to me that I forgot my pills.

I had that happen again three weeks ago, however, I didn’t notice missing my pill for four days. And by then, it wasn’t because I was panicking. I just noticed I didn’t remember taking a pill for several days.

I had started to take the pills back in Fargo, when I was trying to help fiancé find work in the area while keeping going at a job I no longer found challenging or fulfilling. I had started to skid down the sadness road. I thought about death a lot, not like suicide, but  just a sort of thinking about death a lot way. It’s just easier to think about death than a job you don’t like, a family that doesn’t support you or your fiancé, a job market that is insane, and a world that thinks so little of everything you do.

Yeah, so I got some pills. They helped. I didn’t think about death quite so much. But things were still shitty beyond reckoning. By this point, we’d moved to the cities, wife had a job but not me, I had cut off my family because they didn’t support my wife and any attempts to explain my feelings about the situation were met with a general statement about how it was all in my head. To be frank, I haven’t tried speaking to them since March and life has gotten a lot easier without them. They’ve tried to get in touch 3 times since then by email. The last one had the sentiment “We miss you and will welcome you back whenever you are ready” which is nice, but again asks me to accept all blame and that I’m nuts and that they did nothing wrong. Also, wife sent a lengthy response in May or June about what they could do to make things right, but they haven’t taken us up on it.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I accidentally quit taking my pills, and by the time I noticed, I also noticed that I was OK.

Part of this, I think, is the general state of life affairs right now. I’ve got a job I love, I get to work with Wife and have lunch with her, I don’t have to deal with my family, and wife is out of her own hell hole of a job at Hennepin Technical College. Things are going well.

They could always be better. Wife is now applying to job after job and going through the same mindfuck I was going through in my job hunt: mostly that you can take two hours out of your day to go visit with an interviewer, send a thank you, send a follow up a week later, and still never get the common courtesy of a thank you for applying call or even a note to say they went with someone else. I go balls out and want to send a snide letter, but wife still thinks it may be possible to be hired after three weeks of hearing nothing and doesn’t want to send anything even slightly aggressive. I talk a big game, though. A few weeks ago, against my better judgement and at wife’s request, I reached out to the mnartists.org editor to see if she was interested in another piece from me. Though she can’t explain what she wants, and the pieces she publishes are far less professional than she seems to think they are when my own pieces weren’t meeting some professional standard she said she had, she seemed to think that it was me who couldn’t meet her expectations. Rather than get snipy, I just let it go and wrote a piece for the blog that I still haven’t had time to retool for pitching to other publications.

Then I watch shows like New Girl, a show I like, but last episode the main character is trying to get a job, is sitting in a waiting room with 5 other applicants, which NEVER happens and if it did you should run away since they don’t know how to stagger schedules so people aren’t waiting for hours. She breaks down and cries during her interview, freaking out the interviewer. Later in the episode, she goes back and interviews again. We are meant to believe that this attitude got her the job. BULLSHIT. There were five other perfectly reasonable people in that waiting room who probably didn’t break down and cry during their interview, and you’re telling me she got it over them? I hate America. Still like that show though.

Another thing along those lines is movies about mental illness. Everyone gets cured through sheer force of will. How fucking American, right? If “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” has it right, all we need to get through crippling depression is to spend a week in a ward, and all our problems will be magically solved.

So anyway, I have been off my meds for three weeks now, and I’m doing OK. It’s weird to get emotional over things now. Songs can get me misty if they hit me at the right time. I wept through the last half hour of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which is a really awesomely good movie, but probably not worthy of a good cry. This is painting me as a crying conundrum, but it really isn’t that often, and it’s during genuinely emotional things and not over seeing something like a puppy in a teacup. I’m enjoying these new emotions and the catharsis they bring rather than not feeling or bottling to boil over later.

Not sure if I will continue to try life without meds, or if I will go back on them. Wife is in my corner either way, so that’s nice. 

Emotional Gut Punch at the Minneapolis Photo Center

Today I went to the Minneapolis Photo Center because a friend of mine, Dan Koeck, had a couple photos in one of the three exhibits they opened up yesterday.

I'm planning to write more eloquently about the exhibit to see if I can't get my foot in the door at one of the magazines in town that cover such things. Tonight though, I'm still trying to come to terms with what I saw and how it affected me to the point where I just had to leave the building, go back to my car, and cry it out.

First exhibit:

Mark Seliger, a former Rolling Stones photographer who has probably shot your favorite photos of bands and actors, has a book out of the same name as the exhibit. The poster is a bit misleading, since the other 20 or so photos are portraits of Holocaust survivors, and most of those seen out of context don't scream Holocaust survivor. Take this picture for example: 

What was tough about the exhibit wasn't so much the photos as the quotes from the interviews. I don't have a copy of the book, so I don't know how they got these people to give such mind-blowing quotes, but I would be reading along and come across emotional gut punches that turned any preconceptions I had into dust. "The day we received the tattoos was a good day for us; we had received them as if they were passports for life."  

"Sometimes people ask, "Did it make you a stronger person?" I don't think suffering makes you strong." 

One sole survivor of her family talks about leaving her mother in the bunk, knowing she would be dead when she returned, how she escaped and moved to New York. "I never discussed the Holocaust with my husband." 

Another: "I find that the best ones went, and we who survived are the worst. My father and brother could never survive, not even a day. They were fine, sensitive, idealistic."  This same person discusses suicidal thoughts after the war. "I gave myself a year. I told myself that, if I could make a human being out of myself, I would continue. And if not ..." 

Those three dots still bring the tears to the surface. 

Holy fucking shitballs, I was glad to be the only person in the exhibit, reading these stories, writing down the quotes that suckerpunched me. 

Then, in the hallway, the second exhibit. The theme and name is "The Human Condition: A Survey of Humanity" 

So after reading the stories of Holocaust survivors, I was taken through a wide array of photos showing the best and worst humanity has to offer, the joyous and the depressing, the weird and the amazing. Here's the winner of this show, titled "My Father, Pensive" 

And it just makes you want to fucking wrap yourself up in puppy kisses and orphan dreams cause I see myself, too, sitting there in 40 years wondering what the hell's next. 

Another photo had me creating a hell of a story for two little girls and the state of their lives when this is where they live: Check it out here. They apparently live in those mini-tubs? Shit, man. 

And this one, the second place winner, must be seen in person. It's called Before the Briss, and the lighting is just unreal. 

So, after being primed with Holocaust survivors and then washing through decades of photos that detail atrocities and triumphs of the human soul since then, (more here), you come to the third exhibit, Photographer Doug Knutson's portraits of Nobel Peace Prize winners. 

Now, you'd think after the raw nerve scrubbing of the past two galleries, that portraits of nice people would be just the thing to help salve the open wounds of your soul. Not so. 

Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, The Dalai Lama and others look right at you, in you, and you can see their goodness and feel how you pale in comparison, and you finally can't hold it back any longer and have to leave to go back to your car and back to your wife who is in her fourth day of sickness but getting better, and back to your life of personal and interpersonal struggles. It's a cold day. The first layer of snow sticks to the pavement in this rather dismal, industrial section of north Minneapolis. Winter is coming, and we're all going to need some emotional super-juicing to get through it. The exhibits run through Jan. 4, so go see them.