Daily Archives: May 19, 2013

Life and Death at 40

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Well, today’s the day. I am officially forty years old now, and thus, I am dead.

Obviously not in any literal sense. After all I am still here writing this, and unless I have become a very literal ghost writer, that sort of implies I am still around and my bucket is, as yet, unkicked.

But the pre-40 me is dead, dead, dead. I have decided to treat turning 40 years old as the demarcation point between my previous life and the life I want to lead now.

This date shall serve as a big thick heavy black line across the ledger of life, and everything before the line will be nothing but a terrible dream, a long illness from which I am recovering, and when it is gone I will be ready to go back to living my life as it was supposed to be, before I got sick.

My therapist recently reminded me of some advice I have given to myself (and others) many times : I am not my illness. I am not merely a depressive.

Sure, I have been sick a long time and it’s kept me on the sidelines of life. But I am no more my disease than a person with long term cancer.

I am a normal, healthy, valid human being who happens to have contracted a nasty illness called depression in my early twenties and have suffered from it ever since. But it no more defines me than my shoe size or my eye color.

It is very tempting to cling to one’s diagnosis. After all, before your diagnosis, you had no idea what was wrong with you, and being able to name your demon is almost infinitely better than not knowing.

After that, the diagnosis becomes the identity that you desperately need because of the way depression has of suppressing your true identity. It seeps into all the empty spaces the disease leaves in your psyche until, eventually, it becomes hard to remember that things were not always this way.

You were not always depressed. You were not always sad and fearful all the time. You didn’t always hate yourself. That is the disease talking, not you. You are a real, valid, worthy person with a disease that happens to be good at making you feel like shit.

But you are not shit. You are a wonderful person who happens to feel like crap right now. And no matter how long your disease has been around and no matter how long it lingers in the future, that will never change. You and it are separate things.

Remember the last time you had the flu. Sure, you felt terrible. Sure, it kept you from being an active part of the world for a while. Sure, you had to do things to manage your symptoms and speed your recovery. Sure, the symptoms were often really gross and disgusting and there were times when it felt like the damned thing was going to be around forever.

But you knew it was only temporary, and that all you had to do was take care of yourself and endure the symptoms and eventually, it would all be over and the experience would fade into just another bad memory of something that almost feels like it happened to someone else.

Remember what that was like, and hold on to that experience. This too shall pass. Depression is an illness and not a part of who you really are.

And no longer how long it will last, no matter how long it has lasted, that will never change.

So today, the old me dies. The sun has set on the previous version of me, and risen on a new and improved version without the accumulation of errors and memory faults inherent in the previous version.

But don’t worry, my faithful public. All the features that you know and love from the old version will be retained. The changes will be mostly under the hood stuff. Mostly to fix that tendency of the mood and self-worth subroutines to crash one another. That is definitely not a feature. It’s a bug.

This suicide of mine is purely metaphorical. All the wonderful features like my sense of humour, my wit (not the same thing), my kindness, my gentle spirit, my empathy, and most of all that big old brain I lug around with me will all be there.

But I plan to expand my ambition, my imagination, my courage, my enthusiasm, and uninstall all that tired old bullshit about being worthless and useless and a drain on others and blah blah blah.

I am a wonderful person with a hell of a lot going for me. Other people would be tickled pink (and spanked red) to have all the neat brain powers I have.

So I am not very good at physical things. I am clumsy and uncoordinated and there is a missing gear somewhere between my hands and my eyes. So what? That is a tiny thing in this modern virtual world. There are more ways to make a living (or at least a life) using only your brain and a computer keyboard than ever before, and they continue to grow.

All I have to do is go out there into the warm and sunlit world and get myself noticed. Obstacles will be circumvented, navigated, and even, if absolutely necessary, bulldozed over.

I am wicked awesome and it is time I embraced that fact, held it close to my heart, and made sweet, sweet love with it until it and I are one.

Time to shed my skin and bask in the sun till I dry out. Toss out all the heavy baggage I have been lugging around and travel light, with nothing to hold me down.

There will be depression. There will be fear. There will be doubt. There will be times when I feel like just giving up.

But I will never give up. I will just keep on believing in myself till my dreams come true.

This, I swear to you, to the Universe, and to myself.

Time to be born!

Nudity and Bill Nye

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More link n’ load tonight. (Lock and link? Nah. )

First, one I have had hanging about and mixing with the wrong crowd in my browser for almost a week now, the charming story of a family of four that went for a little bit of a walk down the road.

Completely bare-ass naked.

This is a highly quotable article. For example :

Another witness, Charlotte resident Jill Mead, told the paper that the sight “blew [her] mind.”

Really, dear? That’s all it takes to blow your mind? The sight of an old lady, her daughter, a toddler, and an infant walking down the road in the State of Grace, clad in glory, popped your noodle?

I find that adorable. But then again, I have lived with nudists and I am a sexually deviant pervert. So my frame of reference might be a little different.

Here’s one from the officer in charge of the case, Captain Rod Farley, regarding the conclusions drawn from the medical and psychological examination of the two adults :

“It didn’t appear that they had any problems short of that they didn’t have any clothes on,” Farley said.

Don’t you just love that gift for understatement many people from the South have?

But the true beauty comes from the simplicity of the explanation :

As for the inspiration for their public nudity, the women gave as good a reason as any: Farley said they told police, “the Lord told them to get naked and walk down the street.”

Kinda hard to argue with that.

Now the kids, they will be fine. Infants barely even know clothes exist and toddlers are not sold on the concepts yet either. This odd excursion will do them no harm.

But as for the adults, apparently, both women agreed that God had told them to walk naked down the streets, and that’s what really blows my mind.

What was that conversation like?

Grandmother : Well, God just told me we should walked down the street naked with the kids.
Daughter : Yup. Me too.
Grandmother : Well, best get to it, then.

And then they just shucked down and went for a stroll.

The alternative is that one of them talked the other into it, which I find equally hard to believe.

And what about the officer? What kind of day did he have? There he was, on his third Krispy Kreme, and he gets a call from dispatch.

Officer : There’s a what on Providence Road? You’re kidding. And all of them buckass naked? Not a stitch on? Alright, this I gotta see. I’m taking the call. But send backup. With blankets.

It must have seemed like a gently amusing dream. Just one of those odd little things that happen in life. I can’t imagine a single person being truly upset by it.

Frankly, the whole thing strikes me as adorable.

Of course, the police often have to deal with nudity.

Nude Police Lineup by Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart is a hero of mine. His gentle style of comedy is, to me, absolutely beautiful.

The other news item I wish to address is this latest teapot trapped tempest.

Here is the headline as it is making the rounds on Facebook : Bill Nye Booed (not Boo’d, you knobs) In Texas For Saying The Moon Reflects The Sun

And as such, it is perfect Internet bait for all of the Asshole Atheist crowd to crow about and point out how stupid and superstitious all those inbred yokels down in Texas must be.

So that set is falling all over themselves to post things like “And to think, these people vote!” and “No wonder these people have Rick Perry as their leader” or the always elegant and original “*facepalm”.

Yeah, good thing us cool people aren’t smallminded bigots intolerant of those different from ourselves while patting ourselves on the back for being The Right Kind Of People, right?

And that’s how the Asshole Atheists and Sadistic Skeptics would like you to interpret the article that foes with that headline, but that is not the truth at all, and I can show you the smoking gun.

Here it is. Emphasis mine.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

Note the important words there. He brought up. Nobody asked him a question. Nobody was suggesting teaching Genesis 1:16 as science in schools or making it part of Texas law.

He was the one who brought up the Bible in the first place.

In other words, Bill Nye The Asshole Guy started the fight. He is the aggressor here. He deliberately attacked these people’s faith and now is acting all disingenuously butthurt because they got mad at him for it.

What the hell did he expect to happen? They would look at him and say “Gosh, you are right, Science Guy. My faith is a sham and the Bible is a pack of lies. All hail Bill the Science God!”

He knew exactly what was going to happen. He poked these people in the eye, and not even to make a point, just to generate this kind of bogus news story so he and all his bigoted atheist skeptic friends could masturbate their egos over it.

Tell me, Nye, would you have done that in a synagogue? Or a temple? Or a black Baptist church?

In doing shit like this, all you do is confirm to these people that scientists are out to get them and there is no possibility of middle ground between you and them.

You, sir, are no humanist, secular or otherwise. You are an abusive bigot religion-bashing just to score points with your bigoted friend, and that makes you no better than the people who you oppose.

In fact, you are worse than them, because you are smart and educated enough to know better.

I had a hard time forgiving you after that detergent ad where you sold out your credibility and your responsibility to teach the truth to children just to make a quick buck.

You chose money over science, Nye, and that is something I will never entirely forgive you for. What were kids supposed to think when they saw you shilling for some megacorp?

Still, over the years I got over that, mostly. After all, I loved your show, I loved you on Almost Live, and I have enjoyed your recent work.

But this erases all that and puts you further into the red than ever.

You are a bad person who did a bad thing Bill. You have fallen in with the Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Neil DeGrasse Tyson bunch of tiny minded “skeptics” whose idea of science is to shit on all beliefs other than your own and close your minds and your hearts to the vast majority of humanity.

And that is just plain unacceptable.

You are dead to me until you renounce your wicked ways and come back into the true light of promoting understanding, cooperation, tolerance, and acceptance in humanity.

That’s what a real humanist does. It’s what a real liberal does.

It’s what real human beings do.

Come back to being human, Bill, before it’s too late.