Picture Perfect

That good-looking guy in my profile picture, right there at the bottom of my sidebar. That guy in black and white, with the cheesy smile and the scruffy-chic hair? Yeah, he's a lie. He doesn't exist. The guy writing this is an older, fatter version. Don't get me wrong, that's definitely me, it's just me four or five years ago, before I had kids, before I got married, and before I quit the gym and stopped kidding myself that protein shakes were an adequate substitution for cheeseburgers.

"How could you deceive us like this?" I hear you cry. "We thought you were a moderately good-looking youngish man, and now we find you are an average looking, average aged man! The lies!!!! The lies!!!" Well I'm sorry, but there are a number of reasons for my betrayal. Firstly, it's what my mother would call a "white lie", it's technically not entirely a mistruth, and who is it really hurting (aside from the lustful young ladies whose dreams and hopes have been shattered)? I could look like that again, if I liked. Aside from the extra twenty...ish pounds I've added, I'm aging quite well. No crow’s feet, no grey hairs. I could hit the gym, and purge myself of fast food and soda. And chocolate. And ice cream and cake. And... well, and pretty much everything I eat. I could start buying my clothes at A&F again (with da popped colla!), and go back to fancy expensive hair salons (yes, I was one of those guys). I could use moisturizer and exfoliate. And I would look at least as good as that guy. Probably better (truth be told, I was already beginning to tank when this was taken – I'd, by now, hooked my wife into a long term relationship). So really, that guy still exists: I just ate him. 

Another reason I don't have a more recent picture is because there are literally no good photos of me in existence since the turn of the decade. I don't just mean because I've let myself go. I still have the same face, and while I'm no George Clooney, I'm certainly not Quasimodo's twin brother either. I just don't have any pictures where I'm sober, or smiling, or without a wan paper-thin smile draped over thick layers of anxiety and depression. Most of the portraits I've taken recently have been with my newborn daughter. Or with my son. In most of those I look exactly like the dad of two small kids: like I haven't shaved in days, like I'm  about six weeks overdue on a haircut, like I look as if I maybe had a quick shower -- we're talking "Apply, Lather, Rinse". No fucking "Repeat" for me. Not on my son's watch.

There's more to it than that though (and this is where the sad, dramatic, violin-ey music comes in). Look at me. Look at how fucking relaxed I am. We're not talking stiff-drink-and-a-valium-relaxed either. Which was my go-to source of relaxation for most of my adult life. We're talking the kind of relaxation that comes with being in love, without a care in the world, free of all responsibility, with a healthy disposable income, and a penchant for having fun. I’m on vacation, having cocktails and cheesecake Goddammit! This photograph fell within a three month window when I felt completely free. And it shows in that photo. And in all the other photos since, I haven't fucking felt that way. And that shows too. I'm happy, and I'm deeply in love – with my wife and my kids. I'm financially dependent, and I'm healthy, but that's maybe one of two times in my adult life when I've felt like I had the universe by the balls. The other was when I was 20, which doesn't really count. And I probably won't feel this way again until I'm an old man... and that's ok.

After you have kids, nothing is ever the same again. You start to see the world differently; everything becomes a "what if", or a "but maybe" or a "oh shit". You know when you're a teenager and you steal your dad's Ferrari and drive it all around Chicago, and you're worried about your cocky best friend scratching it, well multiply that by a fucking million when you have kids. When the weight of every poor parenting decision, every strange looking rash, every heart-ending moment when you lose sight of your kid for a millisecond at the mall or the playground, stays with you day and night, you know then that you'll never quite relive your carefree twenties. But I wouldn't swap a second with my two little Ferraris for one more photograph like that. Being a parent is the hardest, most taxing, most willfully, endlessly stressful thing you'll ever endure, and yet it's worth every second of it.

H.E.R.O.

Nondescript Super Hero Type Character

If you haven’t picked up on it from some of my other blog posts, I’ll spell it out: I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately. That’s nothing too unusual for me; I suffer from depression and anxiety. My doctor told me. Depression, for the uninitiated, isn’t a simple case of feeling a bit blue, a bit glum; depression is a way of life. You might punk your hair up and listen to death metal on the weekend, then show up for work on Monday in a suit and tie, but we’re the guys with tattoos on our faces and gauges in our nostrils. We’re living it 24/7. We don’t have bad days, or a bad weekend; we have bad fucking years. My depression usually lasts for about three months at a time, maybe longer, maybe shorter. And I don’t just feel sad or wistful: I get headaches, I can’t eat, I succumb to alcohol, I keep the blinds closed until my wife can bear it, I wear pajamas 90% of the time I’m home, I miss work, I go into short bursts of panic when the phone rings or there’s a knock on the door, I don’t cry at sad things – I cry at happy things, but worst of all, I walk around with this emptiness, this emotional black hole that sits in my chest with the weight of a collapsed star, and eats… just eats away at me, at my humanity. So yeah, I’ve had that going for me for the last few months.

But here’s the good news: I can feel it start to lift. A lot of this is just timing; it’s the gradual and natural healing process. Some of it is experience; I’ve come to terms with having this illness and have learned when, and how, to say “fuck off depression” and kind of force myself to get over it. But there are some awesome changes going on in my life right now, and I surprise myself by how excited and happy I feel lately (seriously, having a happy disposition is a depressive’s Holy Grail). In two weeks (maybe sooner), I’m going to have a daughter – the absolute mind-fuck of awesomeness this brings is starting to sink in. We’re cutting her out, so already that’s one decision we’ve taken out of her hands – the first of a lifetime full of them. I guess therapy has helped too. My therapist played a key role in getting me to write again, and that sure has helped. The outcome of that is this blog, and I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about it, from people who don’t know me, and thus don’t have reason to offer false platitudes just to protect my gentle ego. But most of all, I’ve had the unconditional support of my family: My son and my wife.

When I was about 15, I had every inch of wall covered with pictures of Rock Stars and Sporting heroes. I had a poster of every member of the Manchester United ’94 double-winning team. Individually. I had about 50 posters of Eric Cantona. And while my hero worship for these guys never faded, the pictures eventually came down (there comes a point in time of every man’s life, when he either starts taking pictures of fully-grown, athletic men in awkward positions off his walls, or else starts putting them up; they’re a different kind of picture). Nowadays, although I’m still a fan of sports – to the point of obsession – I don’t really look up to the guys on the field anymore. They’re not my heroes. Sure, I can admire them, and I can appreciate the action and drama they create in my life. For a start, they’re all younger than me now. It’d just be weird to worship a 22 year old because he can throw a ball real good. Ditto with music: I can be moved by a piece of music, inspired by lyrical genius, but I wouldn’t cry if Robert Smith died tomorrow, like fifteen year old me did over Kurt Cobain. Nor do I try to find deep, hidden meanings in their lyrics, as if God’s signature was hidden somewhere in the second verse.

Le King

My heroes are a lot closer to home now. More tangible. They’re my heroes because I love and admire the sacrifices they’ve made in their ordinary, everyday lives, not for fame or fortune, but because it was right, or because they had to just to get one foot in front of the other. Because of pure, old-fashioned integrity.

My Dad is my hero: he faced his death with a stoicism and strength that’s still unfathomable to me as a mature (no really…) adult, and a father. Even in his dying moments, he tried to protect us all from the worst of his pain. But more than that, he was a man of incredible integrity, who didn’t take bullshit off anybody, who believed in himself at all costs; he a man with razor-sharp intelligence – he studied math for fun – but most of all, he was a kind man, and an awesome dad, who never failed to make my Brother and Me laugh. And even though I haven’t seen him in 15 years, he’ll always be a hero to me.

But I have another hero in my life. Right here and now, the one person who continues to stand side by side with me, through my darkest days, through all the shit I’ve created in her life, is my beautiful wife. My wife suffers from a long-term chronic illness, which sometimes is a complete drag and the rest of the time makes the simple act of existing painful. It’s the kind of illness that would have destroyed me years ago, but every day she gets out of bed, eats breakfast – sometimes through a thick mist of nausea – gets in the shower, puts her make-up on, makes her hair all pretty, and says “Fuck you Ulcerative Colitis” like a fucking boss!

She cares for our son while I’m at work, with no family for support, despite the fact that she’s 37 weeks pregnant, and often enduring the kind of suffering most of us can only guess at. And she’s awesome with him. She does little art projects with him, and teaches him his colors, and numbers, and letters. She’s even thought him to read a bunch of words. And she’s sweet and loving and patient with him to an extent that seems almost impossible on reflection.

And she’s sweet and loving and patient with me too. She didn’t sign up for an alcoholic with depression who’s let himself go a little, but she sure as hell is sticking by him. My wife is the main reason why I’m starting to feel better. Without her support and love, I’d be drunk in a studio apartment somewhere, weeping silently while I furiously masturbate to some kind of strange foreign pornography. But she’s protected me from that life – Goddammit, she’s swooped in superman style, and saved me from that life. A life of bad pornography and tears. Her problems are hers, and my problems are hers, and though that might not be fair, she gives zero fucks because she’s my wife and she loves me. And I love her. Immensely. She’s my hero for all that, and more.

Plus… she’s super fucking hot!!!

Beards n Bellies

Zach Galfinanaiakinaniakis 

My wife seems to think I’ve let myself go, over the last few years. She says I don’t take care of myself like I used to. I’ve let my gym membership expire. Twice. And I invest neither my time, nor my money, in grooming myself like I did when we first met. My answer to that is: be careful of what you wish for.

It’s true, I sometimes cut my own hair, and go unshaven for days on end (but hey, facial hair is nothing to run from right? Beards are cool now. And I live just outside of Portland, Oregon. Beard capital of the world. Even some of the chicks have beards. Maybe). And yeah, I might have packed on a bit of weight around my gut and jowls, but she’s a damn good cook. And to be honest, food is one of the few pleasures I haven’t yet sacrificed for one reason or another. When you don’t drink alcohol, and you haven’t had sex since the summer, and your idea of a Saturday night is watching Stuart Little 2 on loop, with a whiny three year old, come back and tell me you’re going vegan. And I’ve essentially replaced booze with soda. Sell your shares in Anheuser-Busch and buy Coca-cola, I’m mainlining that shit.

But what my wife fails to remember is that I spent a lot of time, money and effort on my appearance for the very purpose of snagging hot, blonde chicks that otherwise would be out of my league. Aka: her. My motives have changed, and that’s a good thing. I’m a dad and husband now, and $50 haircuts and expensive clothes are the domain of younger, singler men in search of their prize (“you sir have just won, two kids, a wife and all the responsibility and burden your broad shoulders can carry – and then a little bit more).

Ultimately – and this is what’s sometimes hard to admit – I agree with her. I have let myself go a little bit. If I told you I wake up and feel a healthy sense of self-worth and just, well… just the fucking energy to lift some weights, shave, style my hair and floss, then I’d be lying to you. I have spurts. I have times when I’m ready to take on the world, but they’re little islands of an archipelago surrounded by an ocean of languor (I robbed that line from The Dice Man, then changed it to make it look original. It’s a little trick us mediocre writers like to call “blatant plagiarism”).

The sad part, is I’m not sure why. A part of me knows that well-groomed David was a fake. That the guy who made the effort did so with the ultimate goal of someday not having to. That isn’t fair on my wife though. She didn’t sign up for the guy in his pajamas, eating cold Pizza at four in the afternoon, watching the game. Ok, she married a guy, so she kind of did sign up for that, but not every fucking day. But a bigger part of me knows that it’s more than that. I’ve allowed myself to put walls up, to hide away from the outside world. I suffer from anxiety and depression, and I have had sleepless nights about the responsibilities I’ve taken on (I’m a delicate soul – don’t judge). I’ve used alcohol to cope, and all I got out of that was pain, a label, and a copy of the big book. And now I have to figure how to cope with all the tricky, nasty parts of life. And really I don’t want to. That’s why I go to therapy, I guess. To figure it all out.

So I guess it is that I’m allowing my exterior to reflect my interior. “I’ve let myself go,” is really another way of saying, I’ve parted, or hidden from myself. Which is kinda what I’ve done inside. I just hide from all the debris and complications I’ve gathered in my 34 years on earth (most of which I’ve been privy to their creation; some of which just blind-sided me like birdshit on a new jacket).

There is no real moral to this post, by the way. Just maybe that I look like shit because I feel like shit. And that I’m really trying to figure it all. So maybe I’ll see if I can start from the outside: clean up the diet, bring my gym gear to work (we have a gym, awesome huh?), maybe hit a nice barbershop, and trim the ol’ nose hair.

And the soda? From my cold dead hand…

Our Last Dance Together...

I’ve started listening to The Cure again, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I first started properly listening to The Cure after my first ever session of therapy. I had been experiencing emotional pain that I hadn’t known possible. It scared the shit out of me, to be honest. When you think of physical pain, you have a map of it in your head. You may never have had your hand chopped off, but you can kinda, maybe take your mind to that place; to how horrible that might feel. But emotionally, I was in uncharted waters. Until then.

I rode the bus there – I think I had intended to drink heavily afterwards, or before… during if I could swing it – but because the session with my therapist went so well, and because I vomited all this congealing, rotting bile of emotion onto her office floor, and because afterwards I felt a glimmer of hope, and maybe because it was a crisp October afternoon, I decided to just walk home. Past the bars, past the liquor stores: just home. I had bought Disintegration a few days before. My ex and I had liked some of their more upbeat tunes. The poppiness of Just Like Heaven, and Friday I’m In Love along with a bunch of other favorites bands from our past had added a flavor of blitheness to the previous summer. I guess I’d never been a huge fan of theirs before that but I picked up a copy of the album few weeks before our split. Though I hadn’t yet listened to it. Couldn’t, if I’m honest.

I put it in my Discman (I’m not gonna lie – I’m old) and listened to it on the walk home. And I didn’t stop listening for the rest of my twenties. Robert Smith’s lyrics and music were simply who I was – and, more importantly, the part of me I couldn’t figure out – converted from brain chemistry to sound. They fucking echoed through every cell in my body. And for the next five years every friend, girlfriend, family member, colleague, shop-teller, fucking passer-by were bombarded by my obsession with this band.

The break-up with the ex had destroyed me. I sometimes wonder how I survived it. That kind of trauma can’t be compared to a physical suffering, because if it had been physical I wouldn’t have survived (there were many physical side-effects: I lost a shit-ton of weight, and essentially became an alcoholic around then, for example, but the white-hot core of agony was purely emotional). Still, to try to give it some context, I liken it to a car crash. A sickening smash from which I emerged forever changed – scarred and disfigured.

And then the pain kind of reached a breaking point, whereby for no other reason than it simply could not get any worse, it had to start getting better. Like when you’re travelling so far away from home, you eventually reach a point where you’re returning. That’s what happened that day, the day I bawled my eyes out in my therapist’s office, and listened to Disintegration in full for the first time. And there I found something just like me; with exactly as much shadow as light, and exactly as much hope as despair.

Eventually I started to recover. I fell in love again. I matured. I got married and had kids. I bought an iPod and put fucking Britney Spears on it – gym music. I started listening to Just Like Heaven and Friday I’m In Love again. Eighties rock became my soundtrack. In a way (Oh God, this is corny as fuck) I felt like I was cured (barf!). The scars have faded; like little silver ribbons, they remain a part of me. I’m better for them, but I wish they weren’t there. And I still miss the ex from time to time; in ways that it shouldn’t, my heart sinks when I remember her. But it never lasts long.

I have therapy tomorrow. It’s my second visit. And no, I haven’t cried yet. Shit happens: I sometimes find it hard to cope with stuff. I can feel blue too easily. I suffer from fucking depression and alcoholism – it’s clearly not a bunch of flowers. But I’ve a good job, a great wife, an amazing son, and a daughter on the way. I’m just listening to The Cure again, well… because they’re awesome!

0,-1,-2... Dammit

Nokia 3210. My First True Love. I'm OK, it's just a bit... dusty in here, is all!

There was once a very brief but glorious period of time in the history of humankind. I like to call it the 'Golden Age of Human Interaction'. It was perhaps a circumstance of my age, my social circle, and my locale. But the best we ever had it, was when text messages were limited to 160 characters. Do you remember that? 

I refer to my age, and location, because I was earning way too little money to actually waste time with dialogue, and pay-as-you-go credit was by far the cheapest way to afford to use a phone in 00's Ireland. So we – my friends and I – were limited to having exchanges of verbal communication using 160 characters or less. "Coming out tonight?", "Can't. Sorry.", "Why not?", "Exam in the morning.", "Cool. What about the weekend?", "Sounds good." That was it: Conversation over. Back to dial-up internet porn before the page had even loaded her boobs.

Of course, like Icarus and his obscenely strong arms, ever reaching toward the sun with those waxy wings that somehow melted in cooler air, we didn't realize how good we had it. There were those conversations (usually with girlfriends) when you needed to squeeze those extra digits into 160 measly little spots. Some among us, like the little Orwellian prophecies that we were, figured ways around this: we used numbers as words, and letters became syllables. Ever straining at the leash of technological boundary we began to revert back to a primal state. Utterances such as "Cn u cum out l8r", became commonplace. Something had to be done. And eventually, phone companies caved, and allowed long, gaudy paragraphs of deep, tortuous insight, and fumbling explanations that trailed on and on about why "It was a joke. Everybody knows sarcasm doesn't come across on texts. I didn't really mean you're a fucking loser." to come in to being. We had eaten the forbidden fruit, and were banished from our Eden of brief, concise and above all only-when-fucking-necessary communication.

It's maybe why I like Twitter so much. I'm not particularly active on Twitter, but that's simply because I've no fucking friends (I probably lost them all when texts got longer, and they discovered I was a jerk). And because my kids aren't old enough to embarrass yet. But I love how the focus is strictly on getting the information across, and not the means of doing it. If you want to get into get into a debate about sports with @bobsadick, then you better damn well have your facts at hand. It's the one true pulpit of social media with which to get your words out. Sure, you can scream and shout about religion, and post shitty pictures of your dinner, just as you can on hovels such as Facebook and the thankfully dead and buried MySpace. But it's all garbage there; nothing else. At least on twitter, there's a chance, an outside shot you can discuss with a respected journalist, or scientist, or -- fuck it -- celebrity something you give a shit about.

And then, of course, it's the greatest filter of intellectual vapidity known to man. As my super-awesomeblogger buddy proves, when you're truly thick as shit, you can't hide behind waffle and bullshit to deflect from the true absence of character or ethos within you (I'm looking in your direction, Kim K). When you truly have nothing to say, say it on twitter, and give us all a good ol' knee-slapping chuckle. It's the least you can do for suffocating us with your bullshit lives on every magazine stand and TV station.