Big Boys Don't Cry

When I pay attention I realize that I am (or have mostly been) trying to be tough. By tough I mean brave, fearless, courageous, gutsy, intrepid. Ringing in my ears are the commands to childhood: Big boy’s don’t cry, don’t be a scaredy-cat, don’t be a pussy, a wimp,. a spineless hon-yocker, yellow bellied coward, a gutless yahoo.

These orders come not just from adults, but from peers. Other boys take up the chant when there are no grown up men around. A skinned knee will cause your best friend in second grade to yell into your face, “don’t be a pussy!” or “Grow up, cry baby,” or “what’s the matter with you, you forkin’ faggot” or the more honest challenges: “Man-up,” “grow up,” “take it like a man.”

So, when I was very young, I figured out that it is vital for young boys to fake fearlessness. I did figure out how to be a fake. One key to fearlessness is the phrase, “keep a stiff upper lip.” You tighten your jaw, and tense up your lips. That will keep the lips from quivering. Stick your chest out and tighten the muscles in your neck, shoulder, and pectorals, along with the muscles around your eyes. If you can look fierce enough the tears near enough to the brim of your eyelids, can look like the steely gaze of a psychopathic killing machine. That Charles Manson glare looks menacing, but, at least in my case, it was a mask made out of my own face that hides my true, weak, cowardly nature. Next, you must clench your fists. This will make your observers think you are ready to fight, while hiding the fact that your fingers are trembling.

Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid.

~Franklin P. Jones

Bravery and toughness must be practiced. That is why you are dared to walk through a graveyard alone at midnight, sneaking into an abandoned and rumored haunted house. Sometimes the practice involves real risk. You can be dared to jump off a cliff into the river, or to swim across a lake, or to trespass on a rival gang’s territory, or to steal a car, or inject the brown liquid from a dirty spoon.

The Jackass videos are proof positive that men are insanely committed to showing the world that they are not afraid. The fact that some of our peers die taking stupid risks is necessary for these fearlessness practice sessions to work.

Unless these practice acts are known to be real risks then these un-risky risks prove nothing. Remember the scene in the now classic movie THE CHRISTMAS STORY where one kid is dared to stick his tongue to the freezing flagpole. As long as it was just a dare the boy being taunted still has an out, but once his is “double dog dared,” well, there is nothing left to do but stick your tongue out and lean toward the flagpole. These “double-dog dare you” acts, if they don’t kill you, teach you to act like you are brave.

In Tim O”Brien’s autobiographical novel, The Things They Carried there is a section where he writes about getting his draft notice. He contemplates fleeing to Canada. He is in a fishing boat, within a few yards of the Canadian boarder, and he wants to go, he wants to flee, but he doesn’t. He then states that he didn’t go to Vietnam because he was brave, but because he was too cowardly to go to Canada. He went to Vietnam because his cowardice prevented him from making the moral choice of not going off to a war he felt was immoral, unwarranted, and an unforgivable waste of American lives.

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.

~Thomas Fuller

The thing about practicing fearlessness is that eventually, over time, you can fool yourself into believing that you are actually NOT afraid of anything, even stuff that is illogical not to fear. Far too many men have paid a heavy price for standing up to our fears, and from viewing ourselves as actually, or at least potential heroes.

We become calloused to our own emotions. When I was 15 years old I taught myself to play the guitar. My guitar was cheap and the steel strings and the neck of the guitar were uncomfortably far apart. To make the chords required me to press hard and the wire cut into my finger tips and it didn’t take long before my fingertips were raw and eventually they were bleeding. Over time however, I developed calluses. The skin on my fingertips grew hard and thick, and the strings could no longer cut into my flesh, because my fingertips were as tough as shoe leather. My body’s ability to callus over where needed did eliminate my pain, but it also made it hard for me to pick up dimes. By not feeling pain, I gave up feeling anything at all. There is a similar gain and loss in pretending to be brave. By killing the body’s ability to react to fear, we end up losing our ability to react to all emotions.

I am a father, and the purest most unconditional love in my life is for my son Ryan. There is no one on this earth that I care more about than my grown up son, and yet, when he calls I find it almost impossible to talk to him. I grow tongue tied. I think so much that I have trouble sleeping, but when he calls, I can’t think what to say to him. I’m grunting answers to his questions and asking the most inane questions, and in my head I hear my own voice yelling at me, “Talk to him, stoop-o!” “Enjoy this chance to hear his voice.!” Gather every word he says and enjoy them now and revel in them later.”

After he has hung up, I sit around demanding an answer: What is wrong with me?

Answer? I have protected myself from pain and fear by stifling my own emotional life, and now, it’s like being forced to converse in Spanish when I have never learned Spanish. I don’t have the words of emotion, I don’t understand the rules of emotion, I have a thousand things to say to Ryan, and not one clue how to say anything.

I’m afraid I don’t like the consequences of my manly efforts. Macho, to my mind, is not Much-o.

Not Answers QUESTIONS!

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming
perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”
Soren Kierkegaard.

I read about this experiment done to a dog. The dog was placed in a divided box. There was a short wall that divided the box into two equal parts, but the outer walls were so tall that the dog could not jump out of the box, only from one side to the other.

The floor on each side of the box was wired so that the experimenter could electrify one side or the other with the flip of a switch.

The experiment when like this: the observer would flip the switch, the dog would be uncomfortably (but not fatally) electrocuted and the dog would jump over the short wall to the other side of the box to escape the electric shock. After the dog settled down and felt safe in the new side of the box, the observer would flip a different switch and electrify the floor on the side the dog has newly occupied.

This process would continue, and gradually the time between shocks was narrowed. What they found is that eventually the dog just stopped trying to escape the electric shock. The dog learned that no matter what he did he was going to get shocked. After this realization came to the dog the dog would just lay on the electrified floor and accept the electric shocks.

The study called this Learned Helplessness.

I feel like that dog. I have tried to improve my life, advocate for my own wants and needs, and to seek relief and escape pain, but after 59 years of this, I have learned that I am not going to be OK. I have learned that despite my efforts I am always going to be UNaccepted just as I am. I am incapable of being OK through my own efforts. I am made out of defective stuff.

For me, the journey into myself resembles a bug in the tub circling the drain. I go around, and then through and then down into the darkness, where I feel trapped in an illusion that was woven around me starting at birth, and the weavers never take a holiday.

The thing is, I just don’t think I can get answers until I know the content of the questions. Here are the questions I seek to answer:

What do I really want? [Not what I think I want, but what I really/actually
want.]

What brings me joy?

Why do I feel the way I do?

What are my fears?

Who has wounded me?

Whom have I injured?

How do I cope with regret?

Do I need to have enemies?

Do my needs make me selfish?

Is there anything wrong with being selfish?

How do I forgive?

Whom and what will I love?

Is it important for me to address issues of sexuality?

If sexuality is important, then how should I express my sexuality?

Do I have a right to occupy space in the world?

Do humans have “gifts”?

If humans have gifts then what are my gifts?

What have I sacrificed to win the approval of other people?

Have my sacrifices ever won the approval of other people?

What advantages or benefits do I enjoy by having the approval of other people?

What would have to happen for me to feel like I mattered, that I have value?

Are there things to which I have blinded myself?

Have I disowned my power?

Have I limited, or denied my potential?

Is there ever a time when it is OK to give up, to stop trying, to be resigned to my
circumstances?

Would seeking answers to these questions change my life, or change my attitudes towards my life in positive, beneficial ways?

SAY WHAT YOU THINK YOU MEAN!

It is oddly true that what I say is often opposite to what I actually feel. Fore example:

I’m not mad actually means I am mad, perhaps even livid.

It’s not the money, it’s the principal, means, It’s the money.

I don’t care, means I care. Often it can mean I care deeply.

You didn’t hurt my feelings, can mean, I am hurt and there will be no scar because this wound will never heal.

Whatever you want, means, I know that you don’t care about what I want.

Why do I do this word dance? I’m a really bad dancer. Why do I so often say exactly opposite of what I feel? Of course, there are times when I am out right lying. I admit it. If someone I care about wants to do something I don’t want to do, I will still go along, hide my preferences, disguise my disappointment, and I will say the thing that gives the other person permission to drag me off to some event I know I’m just going to hate. I will swallow my own preference and give permission for us to buy something I don’t want, to allow something I would disallow if it were up to me ONLY. Actually, there is no single reason for why I lie or why I lie to myself, or why I am so ignorant of my real feelings that my lie is actually a mistake of ignorance. Saying one thing and meaning the opposite is, for me, an extremely complicated question.

The answer, of course is as faceted as a Tiffany cut diamond, Very often, I don’t say what I feel because I don’t know what I feel. To some people a feeling hits them like an ice pick and they know exactly where they hurt. For me, however, feelings are more like punches received in a struggle. I have these dull aches and I am never able to be sure where they came from, or which blow caused this deep indistinct pain.

I just noticed as I write that all my references to feelings in the last
paragraph are feelings of pain, and negativity. Does that mean I have no
feelings of joy, and happiness, or does it instead mean that I am allowing
negative feelings to dominate my mind and I have discounted all pleasure and
contentment?

The point is, in relationships and therapy, it is just not always helpful for the questioner to say, “Just tell me what you want,” or “Just tell me what you are feeling,” or “Tell me what’s wrong."


To me, the thing that gives my life meaning is the fact that I think. Thinking is my favorite activity. But if my thought processes don’t know what I feel then how reliable are my thoughts? Actually, all of my thoughts are a tower built on a foundation of incomplete information.

I wonder if thinking is my enemy. I think myself into corners. I trust my thoughts and they are being churned out by a defective brain and a wounded history. I wrote this poem about falling overboard and being left alone in the sea. I imagine that my will to live sends me swimming toward a shore but not thinking that I could be wrong about which direction the location of the shore can be found.

Thinking by tex norman

I fall off a fishing boat
into the ocean
on a moonless night
and start swimming for shore.
I could be heading toward shore.
I could be swimming further
out to sea.
I’m thinking about the shore.
I haven’t considered the very
real possibility that I could be
heading in the wrong direction.
Is action thinking?
Should I have tread water awhile
and arrived at some theory
based upon known facts
that would have given me
a chance that I might actually
be heading in the right rather
than wrong direction?
Can instinctual action be called
thinking?
But I was thinking.
In unknowable situations
thinking and knowing have
little in common.
I can drown just as easily
heading in the right direction
as the wrong one.
It wouldn’t matter if I was
heading right if the distance was
greater than my ability to swim.
Things look so utterly,
hopeless and unknowable
that I am tempted
(we are all tempted) to say
why bother thinking at all.
It doesn’t guarantee success.
The instinctual action
is just as likely
to get you back to shore
as drown you. And yet I think.
I choose thinking.
I wonder what I’ll be thinking
about when I inhale some of the sea?

The Perfume Inside Me

There is a story from India about a deer who, one day noticed a very enticing smell. This smell was just tantalizing, beguiling, it was a mysterious and heavenly odor that blessed the very air it invaded. Somehow, in some mysterious, inexplicable way the deer knew that if only he could locate and possess the source of this wonderful smell, then he would be happy, fulfilled, and his entire life would make sense. This fragrance was so powerfully addictive that then and there the deer committed himself to searching for the sources of this cologne.

This odor-quest sent this deer to dry desert regions, icy mountain peaks, steaming rain forests, and along pristine beaches kissed by ocean waves. The smell seemed always very close, and yet, no matter where the deer searched the source always eluded him. As the deer neared the end of his life, exhausted, weary, and defeated the deer collapsed toppling into a ravine, and as he tumbled the point on one of his antlers pierced his belly. As the deer lay breathing his last few breaths he could tell that the wonder musky scent was coming from inside his own body. The deer died realizing that what he had searched for all his life was found inside of himself and had been there all along.

The point of this little parable is that we sense that there is something wonderful within our reach, if only we could identify it, and reach out and possess it. We may feel that our life is a riddle, and every riddle has a solution, but so far the riddle of our lives has remained a cruel conundrum. There is a book popular among the gospel prosperity preachers and their following sheep called, The Secret. The title is as enticing to us, as musk is to a young buck. I would imagine that all of us believe or at least once believed that there was some sort of secret, some answer, some key that would unlock the mystery of our lives, that would flip a switch and turn us on to a wonderful, joy filled life instead of this empty sack life we are forced to endure now.

I like the deer story. I like the point that says you can seek for something outside of yourself, and what you seek was inside of yourself the entire time. I like the story and the point but a neat story and a cleaver point do not necessarily equal THE TRUTH.

I grew up spending hundreds of hours listening to sermons and lecture-based Bible Study classes (those not in THE TRUE CHURCH might call these sessions Sunday School). By the sheer excess of exposure I grew to love stories that made hermeneutical points. Cleaver wording, and modern parables with cleaver twist endings were what delighted me at some point in my childhood. As I aged, grew jaded, bitter, sullen, and, yes perhaps even a little angry, I got a little split personality problem over stuff like this. Part of me still admires a good story or cleaver wording that seems true because how could anything so cleverly worded not be true? Another part of me is just suspicious, full of doubt, ready with a sneer and snide remark, and maybe even a little prejudice, a bit predisposed to doubt and reject.

There is a cleaver quote from the movie City of Angels that is both an example and insightful. The Death Angel Seth, played by Nick Cage says:

Some things are true

whether you believe

in them or not.

This line is both cleaver and true, but it doesn’t prove anything. Obviously you can doubt something that is true, but that does not mean that believing in metaphysics, God, Area 51, or Big Foot are true. The City of Angels quote is incomplete. The quote should go:

Some things are true whether you believe in them or not. Some things are false that you fervently believe are true. Some stuff you believe is true is actually, o' wow, true. The trick is knowing what is and is not true (or what is or is not false), but there is no chances that you will be able to distinguish lies and truths from one another perfectly, and every single time.

Because I write so much, and I rarely have an opinion that I keep to myself, I have had to come to terms with the uncertainties in my life. Here is how I approach most stuff I believe and doubt: I try to have the right positions on stuff, and I proclaim those positions and beliefs with vigor, and act as if I am absolutely sure I am right, and all the while I am urging my mind to stay open and flexible and to be willing to change my mind, to tweak, adjust my beliefs, or to toss everything out and start over.

Life is Too Short

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways. ~Stephen Vincent Benét


Life is short. Even a long life is short.

Some people believe in an afterlife, or a life after this life. Often these people also believe that the next life is better than this present life. It is as if this life we have now is just to prepare us for the next one, or as if this life is our time to be assessed, evaluated, and the quality of our next life depends on how well we perform during this probationary life.

If you believe in an after life, you may also believe that your enjoyment and your needs just don’t matter so much, because things no matter how disappointing things are for you now, you get to go to a perfect place, where some higher power will be absolutely sure that this time, you’re going to have a great time. It doesn’t matter how common your life was, how belittled you were, how beat down, because things are going to be great in the next life.

In my mind it is a stupid idea. If you are wrong, if you have placed all your happy eggs in your Next Life Basket, and there is no next life, then you have wasted the one and only life you have.

I do, however, think that one can believe in God and a next life and still enjoy this present life. I just think most of us, thinking we have an eternal second chance will just not be as diligent about squeezing as much joy from this life as is possible.


Her is my new year’s resolution: and I never do this: I want to care about myself, and commit myself to squeezing all the joy possible out of the lemons of my life, and be willing to add enough sugar to taste the sweetness of each moment, each day. When faced with fun and unnecessary chores, like folding underware, I will opt for fun.

MicroMacro Me

There are two words that come into my mind from time to time, and around wave their long lanky limbs about wildly to draw my attention to themselves. Once one or both of these words have my attention they send my thinking off in a direction I’d rather not go, but do go. Those pestering words are Micro and Macro.

You can actually take college courses on Macro or Microeconomics. I, who have never successfully balanced a checkbook, never think about Microeconomics. Me discussing Macroeconomics is like being a one legged man in a butt kicking contest; it’s just a stupid idea. My mind is actually obsessed with the words Micro and Micro. Micro means small. Micro means you look at whatever you are looking at in maddening detail, that you obsess over minutia. A single strand of DNA is way too excessively big for a Micro thinking scientists. Micro scientists can easily spend a lifetime on a tiny gene, a little sliver of that DNA strand. Macro is the big view, the long view. Macro thinking looks at the whole system. Macro thinkers refuse to be thrown off track by some tiny little anomaly, they want the big picture, the gestalt (gestalt in this context means a symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts).

I obsess over my life in micro and my life in macro. I fixate over micro vs. macro living. I am consumed by micro vs. macro values. I consider whatever happens to be going in my life first in all its micro implications, and then I hold those same conclusions up beside its macro counterpart so I can see how things hold up.

It is like looking at life through a telescope. I look at my life through a telescope. I look first through the big end and see everything small, where even the closest objects look tiny. I look next through the small end and see everything in the macro.

To me, and maybe my wife and son, my life has some value, some significance. If I were to die today, at least two people would be upset. But in a hundred years, my life or my death means a little less than nothing. If you think of the worst thing that could possibly happen to you today, obviously you would be devastated, crushed by that horrible event, you would be left to group for something to hold on to, you would search for some moral compass to guide you or else you would not be able to go on with your life. Take that same event and view in the macro and those crushing, shattering, earth shaking events well may be left as historically interesting events, and more likely than not, unworthy of historical reflection.

Consider the assassination of President Kennedy, and President Garfield. Which is more significant to us, at this very moment? Most would say President Kennedy. I was in the 8th grade when the principal came on the PA system and informed the school that President Kennedy had been killed. Everything shut down. There was nothing on TV for three days but coverage of this single event. Today, that event that dominated every moment of every day for days, that event that turned an unpopular president into the most popular President, that event that may well have enabled President Johnson to pass Medicare and civil rights, and the direction and values of the United States turned on our national micro reaction to that event. Today, young people read about the assassination of Kennedy as a historical event. Often these students have teachers that were around when the assassination occurred, but it is more and more common that both the students and the teachers know the Kennedy assassination as a historical event. All of us (other than a few history buffs) take the assassination of James A. Garfield in the macro sense. We didn’t know Garfield. We may be affected by the assassination of Garfield, but if we are, we don’t realize it. Here we have the sudden, tragic murder of someone who well may have been the most powerful head of state on earth, and today , a mere 128 years later, that powerful man’s death means almost nothing to almost everyone. The death of a baker in Poughkeepsie, New York in July of 1881 is a million times less significant to us that what happened to Garfield.

The point is, that when you take the long view, when you stand back far enough, after enough time has passed the details drop away, and the significance of stuff that was vital, can become very, very insignificant.

This is what I do all the time with my own life. I obsess over the tiniest events in my day. I analyze my life in a minutia obsessive fanatical manner. I can journal for 6 pages over a bowel movement, I can write a 30 line poem about stubbing my toe. I get so caught up in my life, and trying to make sense of the seconds, that I miss the whole day. Then, I will, from time to time, step back, look at my life, and realize with a sinking certainty, that it just doesn’t matter; that I just don’t matter.

This micro/macro approach to my life has been both helpful, and astonishingly unhelpful. This thinking process that I do to make sense of my life, makes my life seem senseless, and senseless is not helpful if you have a tendency to be despondent.

I'm A Citizen of Wacko Town

If I were to admit to anger it would be over a week I spent in the Nut House.

My shrink doesn’t like me to use synonyms for the psych ward, but the internal annoyance I hold for that experience requires me to refer to that place in a derogatory and unflattering manner. Actually I have a whole list of disparaging euphemisms for that sad sack prison: Crisis stabilization unit is far too dignified for that place. Psych Ward is not politically correct, not when you consider how ugly and divisive politics is. So here is my growing list of offensive slang for THAT PLACE:

• The nut house,
• the booby hatch,
• bughouse,
• the funny farm,
• the laughing academy,
• the enchanted kingdom,
• the madhouse,
• the nut factory,
• the rubber room,
• the snake pit,
• the coo-coo’s nest,
• the moron motel,
• Club Crazy,
• imbecile boot camp,
• the Crazy House,
• the Happy Hotel,
• the Cracker Factory,
• Pee-Wee’s Fun House,
• the Calm Down Cottage,
• Brittany Spear’s Space,
• the Spook House,
• the romper room,
• loser’s palace, and
• the disorient express.

All you need to start an insane asylum is an empty room and the right type of people”

After my week at Goofyville (I need to add that one) I have this list of grievances:

I was pressured to “sign myself in.” How was that done? I was told that if I didn’t go voluntarily that the police would come and Baker Act me. I was lead to believe that if you were Baker Acted committed, that fact became part of your record and would show up on employment background checks.

I thought these places were reserved for people who were a threat to themselves or others. I had stopped taking my meds. I was depressed, hated my life, and I felt like, if I died that would be a relief, but I was not overtly trying to hurt myself. I was not doing something to kill myself; I was just stopping my meds. We have no problem when a cancer patient, in agony, decides to stop medical treatments that would prolong their life. They were not killing themselves, they were just letting nature take it’s course. In my mind that is what I was doing.

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape
finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius

Because they fear you might harm yourself, they do a search that includes spreading your butt cheeks so they can see if you have a box knife tucked into your rectum. Humiliation is not a great addition to depression.

I had sweat pants with a tie in the waist band, so I had to wear a hospital gown until my wife could go to the store and buy me some sweat pants with no string. I go in to this room full of alcoholics, bipolar depressants, despondent depressants, and one schizophrenic wearing two hospital gowns, one put on backwards to cover up my back side and the other the regular way to cover my front side. I looked all puffy and my bare legs advertized the fact that I haven’t worn shorts in full sunlight in about 8 years.

"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage."
Ray Bradbury

There was a big room with one tiny TV mounted high so no one could grab it and use it as a weapon. The whackos voted on what they wanted to watch and that witch show called charmed was the favorite. They must have had some special Nut House Cable because that TV showed one Charmed episode after another. To this day, flipping by, if I click past a Charmed show I get this visceral sorrow, an instantaneous pity party and I get to relieve that week in 30 seconds or less and I’m left with an ache like someone had just played a game of flinch and punched me hard in my bad shoulder.

"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the univese."
Johann von Goethe

They had crayons and children’s color pages to occupy the bored and no one was more bored than me. I wanted a pen to draw with, or at least a pencil. They did have those tiny miniature golf pencils, but they wouldn’t sharpen one so I could have a sharp line.

I was finally released after 7 days, ordered to stay home from work an additional week. When I finally got back on the job I was called in and told I had to go home and I could not come back to work without a letter from my psychiatrist saying I was ok to work. My shrink didn’t want me to do the job I was doing and refused to give me the letter. So now, not only was a humiliated, and imprisoned I also lost my job. I wasn’t fired. I was encouraged to resign for medical reasons. (I had a medical condition called whacky brain disease.)

If I was mad, who was I mad at? My shrink, my wife, my self and God.