Merman or Whale? a Man's response...

A while back, at the entrance of a gym, there was a picture of a thin, tanned attractive male with six-pack abs. The caption was " This summer, do you want to be a merman or a whale?"
The story goes a smart-ass man (who could fit most of a AA battery inside his belly button and a pronounced limp) answered in the following way:
"Dear people, whales are always surrounded by friends, (yadda, yadda, yadda…………..) You get the point. Blue whales have 1000 lb testicles, and penises up to 8ft in length, the largest of any animal in the animal kingdom. SCOREBOARD WHALES!!!!
Mermen, as with Mermaids, do not exist.
If they did exist, beneath their 6 pack abs, is a freaking fish torso with nary a dong to be found because, well, fish just aren’t packing!
At a time when the media tells us that Ryan Reynolds has talent because of his perfect cheekbones and washboard abs, I prefer to watch Phillip Seymour-Hoffman in Capote, Boogie Nights, and maybe even Moneyball because he actually HAS talent.
We men, we gain weight because we don’t cry, we just suck all of the pain of life in to a deep dark pit in the center of our stomach until there isn’t enough space so we develop love handles, man teats, FUPAs, and dickie-do’s (our belly sticks out farther than our dickie do…).
We are not fat, we are just carrying the weight of trying to be strong for you around in the form of a ball of stress that is destined to land us in an early grave after we eventually fucking stroke out and fall over dead in a plate of cheese fries at out kids 10^th birthday party.
Every time I see my fat pasty self in the mirror I tell myself, "so what you have to use this mirror to manscape now because you can’t completely see your junk past your stomach? If you got a tool like that you gotta build a shed for it! Am I right???" and then silently weep to yourself because you also realize that if you were more flexible you could actually have sex with your own cavernous belly button, and then you go eat cheesecake and watch football.
(the man in the picture is Irish model Pat Bastarde) feel free to tag yourselves J let’s get this going around the world!!!

what happens when you go bat shit crazy (Caution! not a Charile Sheen self-help book!)

Without ever really realizing it until almost 11pm last night (July 16th 2008), yesterday marked the second anniversary of the catastrophic incident that left me forever changed. Without really dwelling too much on the physical outcome, the sheer absurdity of the after effects that rocketed around in my brain like aftershocks is more worth discussing. Most significantly because they were not real. Allow me a little room to preface this, and then I will get to the hilarious meat of the matter.

June 16^th, 2008 I had a gran-mal seizure while shopping in the frozen food section of the local Kroger’s grocery. I was walking down the aisle and I caught my reflection in the freezer door glass as I turned the corner. I made eye contact with my reflected self’s eyes, and the reflected me stopped while the real me continued to walk. The last thing I remember was walking forward, looking back at my now stationary reflection in the glass, thinking, “wow! How the hell did I do that?” Twenty-two minutes later I woke up on the floor with an oxygen mask on and paramedics beginning to come into focus, asking me questions in a language I couldn’t yet understand. A blinding pain began to radiate from my pelvic area and into my mid-back. It would seem that as a result of my flopping and twitching like a flounder tossed upon a muddy bank I had managed to break a vertebrae in my back, T5 to be precise, as well as the biggest bone in my body at it’s thickest point. The greater trochanter of my femur was nearly splintered in two. I have seen this particular bone described as a “quadrilateral eminence”, a term that I like to use when describing my now apparent limp. “Eric, why ever do you limp so?” People may ask. And I respond to wit in a very exaggerated southern gentleman drawl, “Why I seem to have fractured my quadrilateral eminence some time ago, I do declare!” It always sounded better than I had a giant-ass seizure as a result of my own moronic and self-destructive pill habit. The result of this series of unfortunate events was a trip to the ER to have my left leg reattached to my body. Followed by 12 days of partial paralysis, post-seizure psychosis, and a marathon of “The Deadliest Catch” for 3 days straight that made the psychosis extremely unique and interesting, to say the least.

 “Why” You may ask? How is it a perfectly healthy 34 year old man with no history of seizures suddenly just, well, had one equivalent to a 9.4 cerebral earthquake? mid-life epilepsy? Post-concussive seizure disorder? No and no. Just a short-circuit. A glitch in the matrix brought on by complicated dose of chemistry 101.

I had been prescribed an anti-convulsant medication called Depakote ER. It is also gaining popularity as a mood stabilizer in people who are cyclothemic bipolar, a misdiagnosis I had received while vacationing at a chemical dependency rehab the prior September. When you first start taking it, it is like a Jacob’s ladder going off inside your head whenever you close your eyes, especially when you try to go to sleep. It alters your brain chemistry to try to balance out the imbalance that brought you to pharmaceutical solutions in the first place. Like lithium, it is rapidly metabolized in the blood stream, often resulting in constantly increased dosages to obtain the same effect over time. When I was taken off it, I was up to 2500mg / day, the maximum dosage. I switched doctors, who also told me that the medication wasn’t going to work, and changed everything I was prescribed. I stopped taking Depakote cold turkey. The problem with that is, you CAN’T stop taking an anti-convulsant cold turkey because it will bring about the very thing it was designed to prevent. A giant fucking seizure.

 In the days building up to it, I started to feel more and more disconnected from reality. Sleep became impossible. I felt like my brain was trying to suck my spinal fluid out by using my spine as a straw. I could feel it vibrating behind my eyes. My head was wrapped in cellophane and when people spoke to me it all sounded like the adults on The Peanuts cartoons.  I thought that the best thing to do was to counter these effects by medicating as heavily as possible. During this period in my life, that was the canned response to everything. Knees hurt? Medicate it. Feeling sad? Medicate it. Can’t find your car keys? Medicate. The new Doc has prescribed me alazapram, 3mg per day. I know, right?  Now is when I feel compelled to introduce you to a concept I call “junkie logic” and it’s sidekick “junkie math”. It has to do with the rationalization of real world things in terms of how someone with an addiction will manipulate them to use to our advantage. Oh yeah, “Hi. I’m Eric and I am an addict. My drug of choice was pills. Any kind,  and in ridiculous amounts” I am required to use that qualifying statement from now on as a recovering addict. It’s in the contract. I don’t make the rules, but I now chose to abide by them. But I digress…

Now, with that qualifier in mind, and having full working knowledge of it vis-à-vis confessional one-on-one session, this man STILL prescribed me 90 1mg tablets of Xanax. That is the equivalent of giving a morbidly obese person tickets to a deep fried Twinkie buffet. You might as well hand both of us a loaded gun, because nothing good is going to come of this, nothing at all. The tempest brewing in between my ears was beginning to reach a feverish crescendo when I applied “junkie logic” and decided it was time to medicate. Can’t sleep? Medicate. Feel like a small amphitheater of people is simultaneously reading all 26 chapters of The Catcher In The Rye inside your head, and in different languages? Medicate. Stressed out about how the overall effect of this was having an effect on my job? Medicate. Medicate, medicate, and medicate. Medicate to the tune of 90 alazapram in 15 days. This is where junkie math kicks in. if 3 per day are good, then 6 or more per day must be great! This stuff doesn’t cure any of the problems I was having with sleep, stress, and the cacophony of chatter in my head that was to be the built up to the seizure. It was rather like icing smeared across a very hideous cake. It didn’t fix a damn thing, it just filled in holes with its “sweet escape” goodness. This is the same junkie math that compelled me to utter, “do you know how many pills I can buy with $500?” to the admission nurse at the Prevention and Recovery center I voluntarily admitted myself into the previous year when she told much how much my insurance deductible was. Rehab at that time just taught me how to be a BETTER junkie, because I wasn’t ready to quit for real, I just wanted people to think so to get them off my ass. I went in taking Loracet and beer, and a month after getting out I was taking Oxycodone and absinthe. It was like a junkie informational bazaar. Again I digress…

In the hospital, my left leg was successfully reattached using screws, rods, and pins and copious amounts of morphine, dilaudid, and tramadol. This suited my opiate receptors just fine. They were like Agustus Gloop swimming in a river of chocolate. Pristinely tickled shitless. Being prone on my back and nodding in and out, reading or computer usage wasn’t an easy endeavor, lest I wake up drooling into the keyboard of my HP Pavilion… again. So I opted for TV, and more to the point (finally you rambling bastard!) a marathon of “Deadliest Catch”. You see, my over active mind in a opiate induced demi-glaze took the sea faring nautical theme, and planted it as the seed of my post-seizure psychosis that was fueled by rapid benzodiazapene withdrawal. As the stronger opiates were gradually tapered away, much to my chagrin, they were replaced with standard hydrocodone painkillers. In laymen’s terms, this is the equivalent of going from looking for a way out of the woods with a halogen floodlight, to using a single element gas lantern. Both can be used for the same thing, but the former is a hell of a lot more intense on the light spectrum! Regaining feeling, let alone motion in my leg was taking longer than expected, and after 7 days I was discharged in a wheelchair. Now my wife was for the most part, fit and healthy, but by no means could she hoist my immobilized and partially paralyzed self from a chair into a bed, and vice versa. For this, we solicited the kindness of my next door neighbor with whom we had recently befriended. As I lie in bed for hours upon hours at a time, by myself while my wife ran the rest of the household in my absence, my grip on reality began to erode. Slowly, methodically, I began to formulate a rationale for what had happened and put me into this dire predicament. Calypso, the goddess of the sea. It had to be! It was the only thing that made sense. She had sounded the call for all sailors to take to the sea, and I had ignored it. For this I was to be stricken down with rickets and then driven mad. The rickets explained my bones shattering like glass, so stage one was already complete. I then asserted that Calypso had placed a curse on my ship (house), and there would be a sign on board that indicated just this fact. Something, a charm, and artifact located on the windward side at present course, far aft and on the port side. Sure enough after screaming obscenities at my wife and neighbor from my wheelchair on the back porch, he found it. A bamboo pole about 2” in diameter with a shot of rope tied to it in the back corner of the yard. Alas! We must destroy it! I was convinced that the messengers put it there. The messengers were a rock band that only played their summoning music for the same audience of followers in an abandoned Captain D’s restaurant with the windows blacked out to keep the non-believers from looking in. Gene Simmons was an original member, but wanted to write music and tour so they kicked him out. I was to be given 3 tests, and if I passed them I would be freed from Calypso’s curse never to be harmed by it again. This was all revealed to me while watching The Secret of Nimh on the living room TV, from my bedroom 30 feet away…. The TV was on in the living room and I could see it from the bed, but I couldn’t hear it. My sub-conscious made up the filler in a post seizure psychotic state and I was convinced of its reality without a doubt. Needless to say after 3 days of this my wife called the shrink at 11pm on the third day and explained what was going on. He diagnosed it as post seizure psychosis, coupled with a dangerous withdrawal from the alazapram, and prescribed a Librium taper that served kind of like a “control-alt-delete” for my haywire mental state. After 48 hours of Exorcism-like heavy breathing unconsciousness, I woke up feeling refreshed and asked the people gathered around my bed, mouths all agape, if I could have a glass of tea.

If a memory dies when no one is around, does it make a crash, does it make a sound?

"It's not just that this kind of early death has become a fact of life that has become disturbing, but that it's been accepted as a given so quickly". - Lester Bangs in 1973 about Janis Joplin's death

I found out at about 9 p.m. last night that Mike Starr was found dead in his apartment in Salt Lake City. It honestly didn’t surprise me because of his well-documented struggles with addiction. It’s operating purely from a place of speculation to assume that this was why and how he died, as no official cause of death has been determined at this point. I cannot help or hide the fact that it fucks with me and bothers me, Try as I may. because it certainly does. In my mind that brings the death toll to 43%. 3 now of a group of 7 guys that got me through a defining period of my life are gone. I was a young confused teenager wandering blindly in an adult world that I wasn’t in any way prepared for and frankly scared to death of.

December, 1992. It’s after Christmas but before New Years Eve. I arrived at the East Coast Naval base I was assigned to on a cold and wet night. The kind of cold and wet that is just incomprehensible, even to an Indiana boy who had been spoiled by being a Texan for 11 of my then 18 years. I didn’t have a car, less than $40, and didn’t know a soul or even where to go on base. I got in on a Friday night and ended up spending 3 nights in the wrong barracks like a squatter because my boat was dry docked at another base up the river, unbeknownst to me at the time. I didn’t have the proper dorm I.D. to eat at the mess hall so I walked a few miles to a McDonald’s and ate. Back on base in the barracks that weren’t mine, dozens of young men were drinking and raising hell. No one was friendly, familiar, or recipient of a stranger. I was absolutely certain that I had made the biggest mistake of my life. I didn’t want to be here, a thousand miles from home, with all of these crazy frat-boy type people. I didn’t want to shower in a dark, open room with 12 showerheads hanging from the wall. I fucking wanted to go home Jack! The first of the month hit, my $256 paycheck hit the bank and I found out where I was supposed to be and got transported there at last. Now it was snowing. I was housed with a few hundred or so 18-30 year olds from all over the country and still didn’t know a soul. I found out that I could buy alcohol on base with my I.D. and I also found the Base Exchange and bought a few things, including cigarettes, vodka, a Walkman, a copy of Alice in Chains Dirt and Nirvana Incesticide on cassette. I didn’t know any of these people and was intimidated to be around most of them, so I recoiled into a world that existed between the 2 foam pads of my ear phones. This became my fortress of solitude. My happy place. My Cave. Walking around the seedy streets of Portsmouth, Virginia alone with 7 friends clipped to my hip. Kurt Kobain. Dave Grohl. Chris Novaselic. Layne Staley. Jerry Cantrell. Sean Kinney and Mike Starr. No matter how anxious, scared, confused, and conflicted I felt, I always felt just fine walking around and listening to those songs. "Down In A Hole" "Hate To Feel" "Rain When I Die" "Sickman" all contained snapshots of feelings and emotions that I too felt and identified with in a way that I had never identified with a song before. I began then a lifelong journey into immersing myself in music and the beautiful way that another person’s turn of phrase about something perhaps personal to them could unilaterally translate into a personal meaning for you as well.

From Dive "Kiss this, kiss that yeah. Live alone, lone single. At least, at least yeah, you could be my hero…" and they were my heroes. They were flawed, confused, conflicted, imperfect human beings who found a way for me to understand that I wasn’t the only flawed, conflicted, imperfect human being wandering around in the dark. I began completely identifying with lines like "Down in a hole and I don't know if I can be saved. See my heart, I decorate it like a grave. You don't understand who they thought I was supposed to be. Look at me now a man who won't let himself be…"

Kurt, Layne, and now Mike have all now succumbed to their own demons. People can sit in their glass houses and cast stones and dispersions about the perils of a "rock star lifestyle" and that what happened to them was and inevitable byproduct of their choices, and by and large they would be right. Jerry Cantrell once said, "We deal with our daily demons through music. All of the poison that builds up during the day we cleanse when we play". I deal with those daily demons by listening to and watching them play. I have long ago parted ways with the notion of actually trying to emulate anyone by being a musician because want, desire, and passion do not beget talent. I mean, lets be honest. I don’t have Rolando’s talent for music, James’s talent for the sketchpad and pencil, Patrick’s impeccable eye behind a lens, but I can and will write about it. That’s my niche. I will be content to be the Lester Bangs of this, our little online single- serving communal. It is in this that all of the poison that builds up during the day is also cleansed for me. Sometimes it is cathartic and totally refreshing, like an ice cold Fiji water, and other times it’s like drinking from a warm garden hose; both will take away your thirst, one just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. In this instance, score one for the latter. Rest in peace finally, Mike Starr.

The trouble with mixtapes...

I was driving yesterday to go visit my 3-year-old son for the first time since the dust from all of this has begun to settle, listing to a mix CD of random songs that I like, when this acoustic version of “Creep” came on. Track 17. I let it loop, over and over, 4:15 at a time and I began to see it and feel it, not just hear it. I started to take in the lines that Thom Yorke wrote about a man afraid to talk to a woman because of his own insecurities, so he follows her, lost in the background. The beauty of interpretation and interpolation is that it is infinitely subjective.

“…When you were here before, couldn’t look you in the eye. You’re just like an angel, your skin makes me cry…”

Pulling in the driveway, returning to the scene of the crime. One innocuous argument finally becomes the straw that broke the camel’s back. Years of defensiveness, discontent, and emotional starvation, played out on a grand stage for an entire family to see. In a time of mourning, no less. Both of us tried to grasp tightly to keep a relationship together that had long since turned caustic and had begun to spoil. Built upon a foundation of sand, we had started out as two depressions drawn together to create a perfect storm. She didn’t look the same as I remembered. A tad older, more human. I felt nothing, nothing but excitement to see my son. It’s her late mother’s house. Our pictures together still adorn the hallway wall. Copies of the same picture at my home that after that night my teenage daughters turned down in their frames. I’m still not sure if that was done for me or for them. I feel nothing.

“…I wish I was special, you’re so fucking special. But I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here…”

Playing on the floor in his room. Old Star Wars action figures she found while cleaning out the garage. He laughs with his eyes and his entire body when I do voices for each character. She’s in the room, making small talk about this and that. I feel nothing. Time for a brief smoke break, precluded by a stop at the restroom. My neurosis oftentimes led me to dark and shameful places. The old me, once in the bathroom with the door closed would make observations and summations like the following; 3 toothbrushes in the holder. Hers, my son’s, and…an unknown third. Any pill bottles stashed in the usual places? Condom wrappers in the trash can? Men’s deodorant in the cabinet? None of this happened this time. I stood and stared back at my reflection in the mirror, I felt nothing.

“…I don’t care if it hurts. I want to have control. I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul. I want you to notice, when I’m not around…”

I’m realizing on a daily basis that I am not in love with her, and haven’t been for a while. I was in love with the idea of her. I love her, but I’m not in love with her. For years I have cried out in vain at the fact that I felt no genuine love from her towards me. It felt forced, contrived, and hollow. I was perpetually sharing a couch and a bed with someone who was inches from me physically, but emotionally in another universe. Resentments begin to build and barriers are erected, battlements for an impending war of attrition. I was so caught up in my own hurt and feelings of neglect; I never noticed that it was actually how I felt all along as well. I had subconsciously tried to fool myself into never acknowledging in but rather focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real. I became contaminated by my bitterness, no longer able to see the forest for the trees. It hurts to be alone and to have failed at happiness again, especially with the collateral damage that it caused in all of the lives that I effect. I needed to regain control. She thanks me for stopping by to see them, and for the conversation that I don’t even remember being in. My son doesn’t want me to go, which tears at the fiber of my being, but I must. She looks at me and I smile and say goodbye. I feel nothing.

“…Whatever makes you happy. Whatever you want. You’re so fucking special, I wish I were special. But I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here…I don’t belong here…”

All we ever wanted was to be happy, and to make each other happy. We found a way to do that, but it is not defined as winning, just degrees of losing. The only thing we have in common is our son and our music. Let’s no longer make each other miserable trying to anneal each other in fires of discontent. I do feel something. I feel sadness. Remorse. Failing another person and children who depend on you for their serenity leaves a little dirt on your soul that is hard to wash clean sometimes. I’ve carried bitterness around my neck like an albatross for a long time about things I have said and done that I can’t change. I am sensitive, and I don’t do superficial emotional attachment well. Never have. Never been the one night stand kind of a guy, and when I have found myself in those situations I become neurotically troubled by it. I can’t be the guy who never calls and moves on, to provide a smile and a head nod the next time we come into contact. At the same time, at what level does contact after the fact seems desperate, suffocating, and over bearing? Have this juxtaposition of thoughts fire off in your synopses several times a second, and you will see. It is my default mechanism, my modis operandi. Now I am just rambling….

I’m sorry that it went down the way that it did, but we just became people that we didn’t like, and we took that dissatisfaction out on the other until it poisoned the well. I will close with the coda from track 18, same mix tape.

“…for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself…”

I want to end by thanking my friend Eric Hampton. Eric is an amazing musician who at a critical point in my then young life taught me how to appreciate music and to experience it with all of my senses, to think musically. Eric showed me the bass line to Radiohead’s “Creep” on a right handed throw down bass that, being left handed, I had to play upside down. Nothing complicated, not counting opens, 2 strings, 3 changes with a scale at the end, then repeat, close your eyes, and just feel it..Thanks Hamp