HUBRIS

I've long had the desire to pass on what limited wisdom I have to share. With babies on the back burner until I’m confident that I can both financially and psychologically handle one, I seek to espouse my vast life experience to anyone who’ll listen.

When I stand before a class of freshmen, all wide eyed and bushy tailed, and weave my tale of woe, it’s fascinating to watch. They look me over and ready themselves for another long winded talk about the dangers of whatever. They’ve heard it all before, seen movies, read books. About halfway through they perk up. I grab their attention and they’re glued to the end. I'm always sorry I don’t leave more time for questions.

The questions vary widely, from general inquiries about my age to ignorant questions about what kind of gun I used or if I ‘took care’ of the woman that ratted me out.  I know my message has fallen on deaf ears when a kid asks something like that.  Out of the whole crowd I'll entertain many, interest a few, and truly reach one. The one emails me or gets in touch through the blog to say I inspired them to seek help. It fuels my desire to publish my memoir and go global, or at least to Rhode Island.

But nothing is as humbling as a loved one you just can’t reach. When I finally got sober I entertained visions of converting my brother. I invited him to hear me speak at a meeting in the hopes he’d see where he was headed.

“Wow, you were bad.” He’d say.

“No worse than you.” I’d reply.

“I never stole from Dad.”

I left it alone. I stole to push Dad away, while he remained subserviant. What he couldn’t see was that we were serving the same master--self medicating to cope with the pain.

In the end we parted ways, seven years and counting since we’ve spoken.

So I adopted a surrogate brother, one who listened intently to the advice I doled out. He did more for me than I for him. He gave me faith that although change is optional--it’s not impossible.

But he stumbled along the way, got tripped up by transference. I recognized it for what it was but couldn’t get him to see the forest through the trees. I never imagined the cold, hard, whip of his anger would be turned on us. He left without saying a word.

But that is the punishment for my hubris. Another brother sacrificed on Anger’s Altar.

Foot in Mouth and Head Up Ass

I have no affinity for meatheads. Those Archie Bunker described as, "Dead from the neck up." Managing Gold’s Gym in Saugus, I dealt with them everyday, asking them not to drop the dumbbells and placing heavy sanctions on grunting. Monopolizing weights in an unconventional manner, one of the strict rules, took finesse to enforce. At first I approached them with the chip on my shoulder fully exposed. My brother was a meathead, brawn fueled by searing anger. Meatheads are generally irrational, demand respect they don't give, and interpret reprimands as invitations to a fight. One guy called me a faggot after I asked him for the fourth time to stop slamming the 100lb dumbbells on our brand new rubber floors.

I tried to discard the chip and approach them without anger, which only begets more anger. I was nice, made sure no one else was around when I talked to them, and gave more chances than was warranted. I realized my prejudice against men acting like inflated boys stemmed from the fact that I suffered from the same malady.

On Tuesday I left work and traveled to Planet Fitness to work out. I became a member because my neighbors wanted a trainer and joining was easier than paying their daily workout fee. Planet Fitness is a bare bones club. No dumbbells over 60 lbs. No group exercise classes. Barely any trainers and the ones they do have make $10 an hour. They are so strict that they have what's called a Lunk Alarm, a siren that sounds whenever someone disobeys the golden rule: Don't act like a meathead.

I was in a dogshit mood. When I sat up after a set of bench presses with the fifties and placed them on the ground, they made a thud. The Lunk Alarm reverberated through the building. Someone behind the desk beckoned a floor trainer to inform me that dropping weights is not allowed. I was shocked, but acquiesced, nodding in acknowledgment before walking away in disgust.

I noticed the other trainers congregating, whispering about the bad attitude on the floor and what to do about it. I kept my head down, turn up my ipod, and reminded myself that thuds are open to interpretation. I did another set of presses, over exaggerating the softness with which I put them down. Then I went to the seated row where I felt someone's presence over my shoulder, "Excuse me." he said.

"Yeah." I responded.

"Take your headphones off, please." he ordered. I took one off. "We're not set up for circuit training. I need you to go and clean up those dumbbells."

I considered the list of possible responses flying at me from all directions, most notably, Don’t worry pal, someday you'll make more than ten dollars an hour, but I abstained and said, "OK."

Before I could do my set, he interrupted again and barked, "I need you to do it now."

I paused. My temples flared. I bit down hard. "Right away." I answered, and did what he asked.

For the rest of the workout he hawked me from the desk, waiting for me to defy another unspoken gym etiquette rule. I behaved, frothing at the mouth.

Before I left I approached the desk and said, "Sorry about all that," and walked away, realizing that the universe gave me a glimpse of just how raw my anger still is, and how when it clashes with someone else's it's a recipe for disaster.

I guess two raws don't make a right.

The Kraken

I should've known he was a demigod. At sixteen, he drove my mother's Chevy Citation into a brick wall with such force; the engine block breached the dash and his chest cracked the steering wheel. He tried to hurl the case of beer he'd been swilling over a fence, but the ensuing rain saturated the cardboard and gave out mid swing. The cops burst onto the scene as Budweiser's rolled down the hill.

The Kraken, as he'll be called for the duration of this post, was sent from the depths to wreak havoc on commuters. His roar sounded like: "All this drunk driving is bullshit. What they should do is test you after one beer. If you can drive fine, then they should put a one on your license, two beers, then you get a two, and so on. I drive better drunk," meaning any spark of fear was extinguished with a dose of alcohol. Predicting incidents was as easy as predicting the sun's presence in the morning sky. It started when he stole a car from a neighbor, twice, and was caught doing donuts in a field.

Whenever an innocent driver needed to be harassed, or a brazen driver silenced, The Kraken was released to stalk the streets and highways. Three hours late picking me up from work one night, he followed a woman home that cut him off. He had no designs on her; it was her husband he sought. The poor woman drove around her apartment building with The Kraken in tow, screaming for her husband to intervene. When the husband came, he was swallowed whole.

Someone beeped at him after he cut them off. To scare us, they chased us, swerving as if to side-swipe our car. The Kraken called their bluff with a whip of the wheel and slammed into their port side. The tables turned and we chased them. But their vessel was faster and they escaped with only dented side panels.

During a simple trip to the store, we happened upon some innocents, angered by a flat tire on the side of the road. Their profanity in a school zone was too much for The Kraken, he swerved toward them to provoke the response that justified the beating they took. The Kraken's girlfriend shouted at me, "Go out there and help him!" I responded, "Help him do what," knowing the incident was over; The Kraken was already in the car, driving away.

While doing 50 in a 30, The Kraken gunned it when a police cruiser flashed his lights in pursuit. We would have made it if The Kraken's blind rage allowed him to think more than one move ahead. Turning right would have concealed us. We turned left. The cop arrested me for hindering his investigation after I lied when asked if The Kraken was trying to outrun the police.

After six DWI's and the threat of mandatory jail, The Kraken swam to Florida in a used, metallic maroon, Trans Am. During traffic stops, he adopted an alias, giving authorities my name and social security number. I'd routinely travel to his lair to turn myself in for warrants issued in my name. They'd drop the charges when the officer that wrote the citation failed to pick me out in a photo line up.

I recently found out that after decades of revocation, The Kraken got his license back. I will breathe a sigh of relief on the T tomorrow but will pray for safe passage over the Charles.



  

Ass Mode

Do you know someone? Sure you do, you're a superstar. But how many people do you really know? I'm talking about intimacy, tried and true. It's knowing when a person is about to burst with anxiety, and being the only one able to bring them back from the brink. Rachel does that for me. Friday, after a particularly long week, I came home to pizza, Kombucha, and two cupcakes from Whole Foods...all my favorites. She encouraged copious amounts of TV, and left me in peace as I saturated my brain with sugar, salt, fat, and mindless television. If that isn't love...

As cliché as it sounds, its a two way street. I am an expert at detecting the slightest hint of anxiety in Rachel's voice. With a mind running on warp speed, she can sometimes be forgetful, losing things like her keys. There are sign posts that she's going to the 'Bad place' and I step in as soon as I hear her starting to retrace her steps out loud. I find whatever she's looking for, usually somewhere obvious, and avert a crisis that would inevitably spill onto me eventually, (Like the time she chastised me when two horseflies stalked us all the way up a mountain and she screamed, "Bryan! Fix it!!!")

There's my brother-in-law, The Reverend Austin. Not always the most astute, he at least knows when to back off when I'm in Ass Mode. And I delight in his allowing my intrusions into his life since it reminds me that if I were able, I'd make a damn good therapist.

These are the people that stay with me in the face of my biting anger, when I feel capable of twisting both of their heads off because they take forty five minutes to pick out a pair of shoes. So who knows you?

That Familiar Ring

I find marriage preferable to dating. If I could pinpoint one experience that tipped the scales it would be the time I dated Sophie.

We met on a dating site. I had just about given up on whole internet dating after five dates with women who posted pics of themselves from high school, when they weren't seventy pounds overweight. Sophie emailed me and we set up a date for the following night. She was thin, pretty, with long curly locks of jet black hair. We hit it off so I decided to take her somewhere fancy for dinner. The conversation flowed, but with each successive wine, red flag number one (ultimately ignored) waved in my face. The more she drank, the more shifty eyed she became. By the end of dinner it looked as though she was watching a tennis match the way her eyes moved pendulous in their sockets.

The next red flag waved at me the first night we spent together. It was ten o'clock and she said, "If you want to have sex we better hurry, I just took my psych meds and they make me very sleepy." She nodded out in the middle of foreplay. I should have cut my loses then and there, but I'm male.

Rather than listen to the nagging voice in my head assuring me this could only get worse, I invited Sophie to my cousin's wedding. It was more about putting on airs since all my cousins were star athletes, married to pretty girls. Sophie was my trophy.

During the rehearsal dinner, Sophie ordered drinks as if Prohibition would be reinstated at midnight. By the end of dinner she was slouched in her seat, eyes darting to and fro so I feigned a stomach ache and got us out of there. Crisis averted? Crisis postponed.

Since no booze would be served at the church, I felt safe. Sophie looked amazing in the dress I bought her. She was sociable and impressed me to the point that I decided it might be ok if she had a drink or two at the reception. In all the grandeur, I lost track of how much she had. Walking out of the bathroom she ran up to me shouting, "The DJ said I could sing, I'm gonna sing!" and zipped off before I could catch her.

By the time I made it back into the hall the DJ was announcing her, "And now, to sing for the bride and groom, Sophie!"

The thump of It's Raining Men started. I scanned the room but found only the piercing stare of my 80 year old grandmother. I moved out of her direct line of fire and took a seat to wait it out.

"Humidity is rising," she sang, "Barometer's getting low. According to all sources, the streets the place to go..."

Confined to the stage, it seemed that I'd only have to live down a modicum of embarrassment, until, "Tonight for the first time, just about half past ten, for the first time in history, it's gonna start raining men..." She left the stage and started slinking around the room provocatively. The wave of horror passed, the crowd clapped to the beat, and the wedding party was into it.

It was at, "God bless Mother Nature, she's a woman too. She took off to heaven and she did what she had to do," that she approached my uncle, the father of the groom, and proceeded to give him a lap dance during the chorus, "It's raining men, Hallelujah!"

My head had reached the table by then, my face seven different shades of red when I heard the youngest of my cousins yell, "Yo Bry."

I ignored him.

"Hey, Bry!" he called again.

I looked over.

"Why's your girlfriend so shy?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB3Gv4oZdWo

State of the Union

Rachel and I have regular talks, prompted by her, about the state of our lives together. Some of our knock down drag out brawls have stemmed from these chats, mostly due to my resistance to the change she'd like to impose. Most talks begin with a simple question that usually gets the hairs on the back of my neck to stand. She'll ask, "So, what do you see us doing with the rest of our lives?"

If my typical 'I don't know' fails to back her down, I'll try to placate her with an answer that disarms her, "We're going to try to be as healthy as possible so we can love each other longer." But this is a short term answer, providing little time to flee, or come up with something tangible. If I can't, the physicality of my depression surfaces, my shoulders slump, and my tone wanes. My one word answers are like spurts of gas on a fire. My hope is that if I piss her off enough I won't have to deal with the reality: I just don't know.

This answer worked in the past, but again, only temporarily, she'll give me my time, and space, with an assignment, "Why don't you think it over, because it's something I'd really like to discuss with you."

I've grown to hate this. Mostly because when the time she allots expires, it's talk-time cubed. This backs me further into a self imposed corner, I lash out, and we fight. It comes down to this--Because of my felonies, I find it hard to dream the way she would like us to. I feel inept because the choices I've made in the past dilute my hopes for the future. I don't want to dream for fear we'll hit the CORI roadblock and feel the pang I feel daily over the fact that I'll probably never return to being a therapist for addicts.

Our talks follow a pattern: Rachel brings up the future, I shut down, she pries me open, I admit that I feel like I'm holding us back, she comforts me, and I postpone yet another attempt to move forward. But with Rachel, it's sink or swim.

I do have a plan: I started this blog as an exercise in writing, so thank you if you're a follower. Second, it forces me to write and follow a deadline (I try hard to write every Sunday). After reading other blogs, I've realized that if you don't know me (and maybe even if you do), this is pretty boring shit. If you happened upon my blog without my prompting, please let me know, but I doubt you exist. Thirdly, I started Change is Optional because I'm rewriting my memoir. The last version garnered some attention from agents. I even signed with one last year, but let the contract run out after I realized it just wasn't good enough.

Perpetrators is almost finished. Aspiring authors write blogs because an agent's second question before offering representation is, "What's your platform for marketing this book?" Most writers mention their blog, which is a great platform if you have tons of followers who leave comments.

So please spread the word, join the blog as a follower, and leave a comment now and again to help me not only publish, but stand tall during State of the Union talks. Believe me, it helps.

PS...I told Rachel that after the book sells we'll buy a farm and I'll write about our adventures living off the land, unless we starve. I also plan to advocate for restructuring of the CORI laws, so that felons like me can spread this message, especially to kids: the consequences of your actions may reach further than you can ever imagine.

Thanks Again...