a Sporting Life

GOYHW: I’m fuckin unicorn… that’s obvious, right? Halloween’s not usually my thing, but this last one beat all.

fuckyeahbicycles:

brokenandwhole:coldhearted:icanread:(by sndr)

Strangest thing. I logged onto Facebook this morning to find on my home page a link. The update was by a friend of a friend. The link was to a post on his blog. He suffers from PTSD stemming from childhood trauma. Coincidence of coincidences, I suffer from PTSD stemming from childhood trauma. I wanted to reach out to him. I thought it was important (insert enough dark humor here to make this sound not like a Dr. Phil episode please).

Anyway, this is what I wrote:

[Name redacted], I don’t know if you remember me. I met you at Throbbing Gristle - I’m [name redacted]’s friend, Cian. I suffer from PTSD, too, also stemming from childhood trauma. I don’t know if I have any words of wisdom, I just wanted to reach out, digital hug style.

Cognitive therapy really helped me but that was a bounded and limited investigation. I undertook the investigation with a wonderful therapist and I set very clear goals. I basically wanted to stop stopping myself. I’m more or less okay with the occasional deep lethargy, with the not-too-often fits of complete disconnect, with the fact that many of my loved ones don’t understand me at all. But I just want to do one thing in life and I don’t want to stop myself from doing that…

So cognitive really helped in that regard but I hear what you’re saying in terms of its overall usefulness. I don’t want to be defined as a survivor and all that bullshit. These are the facts, though: Our survival skills have been on high alert since we were young. I can survive but I don’t know if I’ll ever thrive. I guess we just try to find the people who can help us build the tools that we need? I don’t know.

I don’t really have much access to my past, the trauma wall is still up, though, with a few cracks in it. I’m okay with that. I’m okay with it coming down some day. I’m okay overall with likely being alone. I’m a fucking handful, I understand. I’m shaking as I type this. I’ve muttered random names and words that are swirling around my head again and again and again, and played off like I was breaking into some snippet of song or a distant melody line. Whatever, I’m a weirdo, I always will be, I’m okay with that.

If you ever want to get a drink (alcohol and I are like this) and just chat, let me know. We don’t have to talk about anything in particular, we don’t have to hold hands and cry. We can just be two dudes who might understand something of the weight behind certain words and phrases each other speaks… I can tell you about the time that my college psychologist finished listening to me after I spilled all, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and defeatedly said “I didn’t think it would be *that* much.” Hilarity abounds!

@[Name redacted] I can’t speak for [name redacted] but in my own experience and observation of others, people suffering from PTSD resulting from childhood abuse are often incredibly open and upfront with their condition and their various scars. I think it stems from having some development halted abruptly while still a child. There’s often no armor. That sounds great in some sense but it’s really not. Sometimes the only way I’ve managed to get by is to be so disarmingly open and honest to the point of making everyone else extremely uncomfortable. That’s really the only weapon in the arsenal. Trying to divine the motives of others is an exercise in futility. My ability to reality test was for a long time virtually nonexistent, I had to depend on a few select others to interpret situations for me. With the inability to form a single barrier and an interior life as orderly as a Jackson Pollock painting, the only way to get love is to be so open, so unguarded, so completely laid bare for all to see.

We’re in some odd emotional territory when vulnerability is often one’s greatest strength.

Suffice to say it’s been a weird morning. The above photo was the first one on my dashboard, I didn’t want to pick it really to accompany this entry but it doesn’t seem that I have choice. Fun, fun.

Edit: sorry, Tumblrs, probably none of you wanted to read this. I mainly posted it for my non-Tumblr friends, the ones who know and love the complete wreck that I am…

hammerito:

ohai-jennifer:

;) lovin’ it.

The original hipster. Cardigan? Check. Sweet pants? Check. Chuck Taylor knock-offs? Check.

He just showered too much, damnit.

There are those days when cynicism clouds the sidelong gaze. The days which I look back on childhood, the childhood endemic to a certain America, and see a lot of cheap plastic, shoddy production values, and dime-card sentiment all hustled to turn a buck.

Then I remember Fred Rogers.

There are so many stories. The limo driver Mister Rogers insisted be invited into a television network executive’s home for dinner when he discovered the driver would have to wait in his car outside. The boy with autism whose first words came after seeing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The Stanford educated gorilla Koko who didn’t miss an episode and, upon meeting Mister Rogers in person, embraced him before proceeding to remove his shoes.

Then, of course, there is the fact Mister Rogers saved PBS. The Nixon administration (can there be a better villain?) wanted to slash the funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fred Rogers, at the time a lightly known children’s television host syndicated in a few markets throughout the country, testified before a congressional committee with a straightforward and simply-worded plea:

I’m very much concerned, as I know you are, about what’s being delivered to our children in this country. And I’ve worked in the field of child development for six years now, trying to understand the inner needs of children. We deal with such things as the inner drama of childhood. We don’t have to bop somebody over the head to make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut or the feelings about brothers and sisters and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations and we speak to it constructively.

…

We made a hundred programs for EEN, the Eastern Educational Network, and then when the money ran out people from Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago all came to the fore and said we’ve got have more of this neighborhood expression of care.

And this, this is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying that you’ve made this day a special day by just you’re being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you. And I like you just the way you are.

And I feel that if we in Public Television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.

The outcome? Congress doubled funding for PBS.

My favorite story, though, is the one about the Impala. Fred Rogers drove a rusty old Impala, never bothering to trade it in for a newer shinier version, a new shinier toy. One day, after the taping of his show, he found his old Impala gone from the parking lot. He filed a police report. It made local news.

Less than two days later, the Impala was returned to the exact spot from which it was stolen. Everything the same, except for a note attached: “If we’d known it was yours, we never would have taken it.”

Here this hopelessly corny man, a lithe little man who wore sweaters that his mother knitted for him every day on television, could move the conscious of even the most hardened.

My first memories of Mister Rogers are of his hopeless corniness. For various reasons, I don’t remember the early years of my life, those tender ages which Mister Rogers so directly and deftly nutured from behind the warm glow of a glass screen. I remember squirming through the show, being downright bored with much of it.

I remember wondering why I bothered to watch the show at all. Mister Rogers looked like he stepped out of another time. The music was sweet but annoyingly so. The lessons of each episode I felt like I already knew.

But I continued to watch. I returned to the Neighborhood every day probably a little longer than was appropriate for my age. I returned for that message of care which I so desperately needed. I returned for that assurance, for that positive affirmation, that was so hard to come by elsewhere. I returned for the calm comfort offered amid the turbulent and dramatic world childhood can so often be.

I don’t know how well I’ve absorbed all the lessons of Mister Rogers. I would probably fight someone if they spoke a cross word of old Fred Rogers. I’m sure he wouldn’t approve of that. I curse and drink and stay up late. My intentions haven’t always matched my actions, sometimes much too much so. I’ve hurt others and haven’t always known how to apologize.

Still I know if Fred Rogers were around he’d likely be more than a little forgiving of falling short the saintly line Mister Rogers sketched. He’d probably say the same thing he always did when people were trying to coax a judgment out of him to suit whatever ends: “God loves you just the way you are.”

ISSUE 05 of the Norman Einsteins is now online! Go forth, kiddies.

And, if you like the magazine and haven’t already, sign up for the monthly mailing list. Email join@normaneinsteins.com. It would make my day.

ISSUE 04 of the Norman Einsteins now online!

ffffound:

july10.jpg (JPEG-Grafik, 500x375 Pixel)

I lost my Batman shirt somewhere between three big relationships and the smattering of women for whom, for brief hot moments, the definition of our proximity wavered from “girl I’m dating” to “friend” with a knowing wink.

The shirt was wrapped in stripped paper Christmas ‘89. It served as a trophy of sorts. That summer Tim Burton’s Batman movie hit the theaters, theaters I visited no less than seven times. Since I at the time considered Batman the finest film ever made, I brandished my repeated viewings with pride, the shirt merely an acknowledgment of already measured feats.

I grew up, more or less, but still wore the shirt even when a succession of films overtook Batman’s place in my hierarchy. Resevoir Dogs to The 400 Blows to Ikiru, all reflected a supposed refining of sensibilities with age and experience.

The shirt’s persistence in my wardrobe begged to differ.

The prime suspect in this mystery, Shiva, on facing intervals apart, in a coquettish sotto voce, would request an unwashed shirt, a set of olfactory jumper cables, I guess. After our lips’ last part, I would hand her a crumpled ball of 100% cotton. She would bury her face, like one of any great beauty, one at once childish and severe, instantly within.

I left Batman with Shiva a few times. Batman proved to be a favorite of the naked or near naked women who wandered in and out of my life. If I caught some nymph in a favorite tee of mine, I would work up mock annoyance in a mock lather all the way to mock anger, providing myself fitting excuse to throw her back on the bed, dispose her of the shirt, and engage in one of those ritualistic comedy of errors love or lust drives us to perform.

I’ve lost a lot of shirts over the years. Innumerable black-pocketed tees I’ve replaced with startling regularity. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology navy-blue worn with a smirk all throughout college at an institution that wasn’t M.I.T., yet similarly overwhelmed with its sense of self. The smiling skull Marine olive-green worn in honor of my buddy who eventually served in Afghanistan and Iraq, worn and lost before either of those wars were prosecuted, lost after I forgot any such defense of its screen-printed logo: Mess With the Best, Die Like the Rest.

These kinds of losses are meaningless unless we make metaphors of material, a currency for moments tender or trying. A faded black t-shirt with a peeling yellow logo seems a small price to pay for pieces of variegated loves.

Still, sometimes, I just want my Batman shirt back.

adidasoccer:

I think…

Leo will win Player of the Year this year..

zachlinder:

The Onion: Ted DiBiase Worried About Current Status Of His Million Dollars

BEL, CA—Once known for his extravagant spending and diamond-studded outfits, former professional wrestler “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase has reportedly fallen on hard times, admitting Tuesday that he did not know the exact status of his $1 million fortune. “Well, the economy has been real bad lately, and Virgil has made some terrible investments over the years,” said DiBiase, shaking his head and adding that he hadn’t slowly counted a stack of bills in the backseat of a limousine in more than a decade. “I also lost track of where my briefcase is, and that had about $5,000 plus a bunch of IOUs in it.” DiBiase went on to claim that “everybody has a price,” and said he was currently accepting offers to kiss people’s feet for $100.

mightyflynn:

suicidesqueeze:

Andrew McCutchen, walk off home run!

You didn’t know Pirates could fly, huh? What about the lasers… you knew about those right?

nbaplayoffs2009:

Welcome to LA, Ron Ron aka ThugRaider37.

He should be in a dune buggy…