Category: blog

The Apocaloptomist

It was Thanksgiving morning in 1986, I think, that my Daddy’s friend got gunned down in a trailer park by his cousin. There was liquor involved, and a shotgun, and much screaming, and my Dad’s friend, who had tried to get his cousin to put down the gun and go sober up, was instead shot down and left to bleed out on the gravel in front of his house.

I remember it was Thanksgiving because we were getting ready to go to my grandmother’s when Dad heard the news. He told Mom he would be back soon, and then hopped in his truck and went over to see the family. It was a dirty, shabby story, with no way to clean it up or make it make sense. It was the sort of tragedy that happens when families squabble and there is both alcohol and guns involved.

Eventually, Dad came home, and we went to my grandmothers and ate, while Dad pushed the food around on his plate, and then got up and went for a walk, leaving us all at the table.

In the weeks that followed, I heard Dad and others talk about the man who had died. He had been a leader in his small community, had served on the Volunteer Fire Department, and was generally seen as someone to look up to. That he died trying to de-escalate a bad situation only added to his personal legend.

It was the first time I really thought about what people would say about you after you were dead.

* * *

A while back, a friend sent me the Urban Dictionary entry for an Apocaloptomist and said, “It’s you!”

I looked at it and realized, sadly, that it was. I do believe the world is going to shit, but still at least hope it turns out OK. I am inordinately hopeful, in the midst of overwhelming evidence that the world is crumbling around me.

I’m not some Pollyanna – In fact, I’m somewhat resigned to the facts: The world is getting warmer, the systems that hold us together are failing us, and our politicians have sold us out for campaign contributions. But if the world is ending, well, what sort of person do I want to be when the world ends?

Do I want to be the guy on the jet, eeeking out every bit of hedonistic pleasure, or the person committed to the very end to hold on as long as possible, to scratch and scrimp to save as many people as possible for as long as possible?

“What sort of person will I be when the world ends?”

I think about this question all the time. Not the specific form, but the general: What sort of person will I be when X happens?

What sort of person will I be when the supply chain runs out of food? Will I be the sort of person who had enough food to share with their neighbors, or the sort of person who sits on their roof with a gun, to defend their homestead?

When I am old and my grandchildren learn in school about the Obergefell v. Hodges, the same way I learned about Brown v. The Board of Education, what sort of story will I have for them when I get asked about where I was? What sort of person was I in the years up to Obergfell v. Hodges? In the years after?

When I am “…layin’ on [my] back, lookin’ at the roof of the church / Preacher tellin’ the truth and it hurts”, to quote DMX, well, what sort of person do I want them to say I was? What sort of person do you want to be when you are dead?

I don’t believe in the great man theory of history – that some are born great, waiting on history to recognize them. Instead, I believe history is made by those who show up, who decide to take a stand, who, when given a choice to do something or to do nothing, choose to do something.

And I will, as long as I can, be the person who does something. And I know I’m not alone in that. It doesn’t all depend on me – there are lots of us that choose, in the moment of truth, to do something.

And maybe, together, we can change things. We can definitely try.

And that gives me hope, in spite of the facts.

 

The Decision

George was 57 – just 7 years and change older than I am now – but he looked 70. He smelled of urine, he slept outside, and hadn’t showered in months. He shuffled when he walked, and a naturally small man, he was a popular victim when it came to street violence. When we first met, he had been mugged three times in the previous four months.

It hadn’t always been that way. George had been the dairy manager at a grocery store in a Raleigh suburb. He lived in a middle class brick house, in a subdivision. His wife was a school teacher. He had one daughter, who had gone to a good state university.

The house was no longer his. Neither was the wife. And the daughter had a restraining order against him and he had been trespassed from the bank where she now worked.

George liked to drink. And for years, he made it work. He would have a hard day at work and come home and drink a few, to take the edge off. Eventually he had to drink in order to go to work, too. Then he started drinking during lunch.

He wasn’t a bad drunk. He just got silly, and then sleepy. He got fired when his boss found him passed out in the dairy cooler. His wife got a divorce shortly after that. He was too drunk to fight, or to show up for court. He lost everything.

He had been on the street for 5 years when I met him, drunk as a lord. We hit it off well, and eventually, he decided to quit after having a heart attack. He went into a rehab facility where he stayed sober for 100 days, and then he went into a halfway house facility, where he got another 100 days, and then he went into a private apartment where he got less than 10 days. He didn’t have the money to pay the rent the next month, having drank it, and was back on the street.

I saw variations of that story play out over and over for more than a decade. I watched people – good, hardworking people, lose everything they had because of alcohol.

I didn’t grow up around alcohol, but not for religious reasons – it was because once Dad began drinking, he didn’t have an off switch. So he drank his last drink when I was 4. His half-brother lost everything because of drinking – wife, kids, stole from his mother and my dad, and as a result was exiled from the family for years and years.

I later learned my mom’s side of the family had people with similar stories. People who drank to forget trauma, who drank to manage pain, who drank and drank until it cost them everything.

I drank my first beer when I was 15. We stole it from the store I was working at that summer, and drank it hot behind the carwash. It wasn’t very good, but the cheers, the social approval, the back slapping – that felt amazing.

In the Marines, I drank a lot, because it was a social lubricant. Cheers, the social approval, the back slapping. My girlfriend Heather was an alcoholic, trying to cover the pain of being Queer in a world not ready for that.

I drank when I was a Financial Advisor, because I hated my life, often having to down a pint of vodka in the parking garage in order to stomach going into the office.

And when I became a pastor, I learned some folks drank as a way to signify that they weren’t some hellfire and damnation fundamentalist. “Hey, I’m not like those conservative jerks that called you a sinner: I drink single malt scotch!”.

The 12 years or so that I worked with people experiencing homelessness was the time in my life I knew the most alcoholics, but honestly, a good portion of them were social workers, pastors, and medical folks who just didn’t have other tools for dealing with what they felt.

And because the only people in the world who did know what you felt were the people you worked with, you could grab a drink after work, and then you get the chemicals from drinking and the chemicals from the social interaction, and you didn’t have to feel what you felt anymore.

One day not long after George lost his apartment I noticed that was what I was doing, and so I quit drinking after work with my peers and started looking for healthier ways to deal with what I felt.

Because that’s the thing: Abusing chemicals (whatever the chemical it is) is a way to hit pause on what you are feeling. And then you hit pause the next time you feel it. And then one day, you hit pause earlier than you did last time. Until one day, you haven’t felt that thing in a long time.

As an aside, this is one of the things that makes sobriety for an addict so hard – because suddenly, you don’t have your coping tool any more, and the last time you had to feel what you are feeling was whatever age you began using.

I’m not some religious wacko that believes there is no such thing as responsible usage of alcohol. Honestly, I love a good Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot, but since Renee can’t drink because of her medications, I often would have a bottle go bad before I would finish it. Or else I would finish it all at one setting, which worried me more. So I quit drinking at home.

Eventually I went from being a person who was worried about drinking too much to being a person who just doesn’t drink.

I didn’t “need” to quit – it just made my life easier to quit. And it greatly reduces the number of ways I can screw up my life and financial future.

And because I don’t “need” to quit, but chose to, I can choose not to. Like last month a friend I was staying with offered me a glass of wine, and I had one while unwinding with them. It was maybe my second drink in two years.

I’m not telling you what you should do – Lord knows I am powerless over the pull of caffeine on my brain in the morning, but then again, I don’t know anyone who lost their house because they drank too much coffee. If your life is working for you and the people who love you, then rock on.

So, why AM I telling you all this? Partly because I’m big on admitting when something scares me, as a way of reducing its power over me. And honestly? Losing everything I own because of addiction scares the hell out of me.

But also, because I have lots of people in the so-called helping professions that read my stuff. And if that’s you, maybe you have noticed that the beer after work can easily become the six pack after work, or the glass of wine before dinner can become the bottle of wine every night. Maybe you tried “Dry January” and had a dry 4 days instead. Maybe you drunk text your friends at 3AM and then spend the next week apologizing for what you said.

Maybe you drink as a way of hitting pause. And maybe you’ve thought about not doing that any more.

I just wanted you to know that it’s OK to do that. To drink a Diet Coke at the bar instead of the mixed drink. To not have friends you can only tolerate when you are doing shots. To really feel the things you feel.

It’s OK to stop, if you want to.

On the Other Side of Burnout

I’m not sure when it happened.

Maybe it was taking Nancy off the ventilators and watching her die as a result of the drugs she just couldn’t beat. Maybe it was when Liz died when relapsed and someone gave her laced heroin. Or before she died, when she was severely sexually assaulted and then went back to the guy who did it. Twice.

Or maybe it was when Eric was murdered in front of me, or when I visited Steve in jail after he killed another guy, or when I watched the woman I promised I would sit in the dark with, die while I watched.

But I don’t know. Maybe it was when trusted employees tried to destroy what I had spent years building, or when I got pulled out of the mothballs when the news needed a talking head on the 10th anniversary of my friend Martha’s murder, or maybe it was just when I realized the big church that wouldn’t give us any money was going to keep referring people to us.

I don’t know when it was, exactly. But at some point, I burned out. I just couldn’t watch my friends die anymore. I just couldn’t keep going. But at the time, I didn’t know that, either.

Twelve years. For 12 years I did that work. I was the person you called when you had no one else to call.  Sometimes that looked like fighting the hospital bureaucracy that wanted to discharge you to the streets when you had no home and sometimes it looked like fighting the city that said you didn’t deserve to eat, but for 12 years, I was that guy. I was really, really good at being that guy, too. Hell, I even liked being that guy.

Not long ago, I tried making a list of the people I loved who died from poverty in those 12 years, but they all tend to run together after a while. I know it was dozens. Sometimes they visit me in my dreams. Every winter people I loved would freeze in the woods, and we would find them after the thaw. I still get triggered by snow – I feel anxiety creeping into my bones when I watch the winter weather forecast.

I taught classes on self-care, but like many before me, I was better at coaching than I was playing. It isn’t that I didn’t have good boundaries – I did, and do. I just didn’t know when to quit. I didn’t know how to stop.

In 12 years I had one vacation that lasted more than a week. The first five of those 11 years I barely made minimum wage. My wife had a heart transplant in 2015, and within twenty-four hours I was doing crisis management on the phone while she was in a medically induced coma beside me.

It wasn’t that I was bad at my job – I was really, really good at my job, actually. I was just tired. I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. I had a whole year there where I could not sleep unaided. I would have nightmares when I was asleep, and panic attacks when I was awake.

And then, in 2017, the depression came on like a wave and damn near killed me. I was just self-aware to recognize it for what it was, and I got some help. And once the fog lifted, once I wasn’t standing in the storm anymore, I realized I needed to stop. It wasn’t so much self-care at that point as it was survival.

After the fog lifted that fall, I knew I had to leave. I had to. So, nine months later, I did.

* * *

It was three and a half years ago that I drove a U-Haul 12 hours across the country and pulled up in front of an apartment building that would be our home for the next six months while I found us a place to live.

I didn’t just need a rest, I needed to build something new. I needed to learn how to be a different sort of person. I needed a new way to be Hugh. A way that was kinder to me, and to the people who love me. And it’s happening, albeit slowly.

I’m prioritizing my health these days, which means I don’t get as much done as I used to. Adrenaline is, after all, a hell of a drug. I sleep at least six hours most nights. I prioritize movement, and I’m attentive to what I eat.

Things don’t happen as fast as they once did, and I get tired faster than I used to. They say that goes away over time, and it has some, if slowly. I still have trouble sleeping, but not as much as I used to. I have a lot of anxiety around money, but that has always been true. For years, my fundraising strategy involved crisis, You don’t have to be Freud to see that was unhealthy, even as I try to find sustainable ways and methods to replace it.

My family is a day trip away, and that feels pretty amazing. When Dad died in 2020, it was a tremendous gift to be so accessible, even in the midst of a pandemic. I have always been better at loving than being loved, but these days I am trying hard to learn how to do that, too.

While still committed to justice, and perhaps even more so than before, my work is much more behind the scenes than it once was. I’m on no reporters speed dial.  I have more influence and fewer adversarial relationships now than I did in those days. I am pastoring a small group of people who don’t need me to survive, but who just love me because I am me. Unlike my first 12 years of ministry, I can give my home address to people I minister among.

Like all of you, I have had to do this while trying to survive a pandemic. This is exhausting, but a different kind of exhaustion. At least now, I don’t feel like I’m the only one interested in my trying to survive.

And holy hell – I have hobbies now. Things I do for pleasure. I have off-time. I have moments of joy.

Should you find yourself where I once did, I don’t really have any answers for you. I just know that sometimes you can be really good at something, and yet that thing can still kill you. I, unlike many folks I knew, survived. I buried people who didn’t. I don’t know how or why, but I squeaked through, and I made it out the other side.

I’m older now. I am not as strong as I once was, but think maybe I am wiser than before I began. At least I hope I am.

But most of all, I’m glad I’m still here.

A Crowded Table

Our dining room table will seat 8 comfortably, 10 in a stretch, and we have squeezed 12 in on at least two occasions.  It’s not a pretty table – it’s that honey oak popular in the eighties – but one day, I will build a better one. This table’s primary selling point when we bought it was that it was cheap and big. We scrounged yard sales for extra chairs, to expand the capacity from the six that came with it when we bought it. These chairs sit empty these days.

When we bought the house, it was suggested that we knock out a portion of the wall between the kitchen and dining room to make a more open floor plan – but we are the weirdo’s who don’t like open floor plans. Having a kitchen open to the table means looking at dirty dishes when you are eating supper with people you love. So we have a large dining room, with a large table, between my office and the kitchen, which holds our huge table, empty chairs, and some of our favorite artwork from friends.

We have a guest room, with a queen sized memory foam mattress that has been slept on 3 times in 22 months, a record all-time low.

This house, which we love, was purchased based on some assumptions: That we would entertain regularly, that we would routinely have guests in from out of town, that cooking for other people would be a thing I do regularly, that hospitality was our primary spiritual practice. None of those things are happening, and haven’t been done with any normalcy in almost two years and that shows no sign of changing soon.

This virus, and our national lackluster response to it, has stolen so much from me – hell, from all of us. If I were to make a list of things we used to do often, but no longer do, it would be a lengthy list. But other than eating with people, the thing I think I miss most is the lingering. When I have met folks face to face, it is a rush to be done, to get out of the place, to be done and get back to safety. I miss just being in the part of town where a store was, and deciding to pop in and just see what they had new. Of having a free Saturday morning, so you decide to hit up some antique malls just to see what was out there. It’s been so long since we just “killed time.”

My favorite part of any meal with other folks is the lingering – when the meal is over, the dishes are empty in front of you, and yet the conversation continues, ebbing and flowing. Perhaps there is a cup of coffee in front of you, and occasionally someone will munch on a roll or decide in favor of another piece of pie, but mostly you are just relishing each other’s company, and it all feels so right and comfortable and safe, and no one dares end it by getting up.

I miss that. I miss the joy of cooking things that would make people happy, of getting to share my gifts and the stories behind them with people who sat at my table, in my house, and telling them the stories of why we eat this dish this way, of who painted that picture on the wall, of why that drawing is important to us. I miss hosting a crowded table.

One day, it will be like that again. One day, I will cook stockpots full of food again, one day we will have overnight guests regularly again, one day, we will have crowded tables once more, and for me, when that happens, the world will feel more right, more just, more hopeful than it does right now.

Take care of yourselves, and your families. Get vaccinated if you are not, and get boosted if you can. We need to get to the other side of this – I am so looking forward to regularly hosting a crowded table once more.

This Is What I Do Now

Content warning: Discussion of weight loss and food monitoring.

In March of 2021, I emerged from a winter of severe depression to face several facts:

  • I was three months away from being 49 years old.
  • I was in horrible physical condition, largely as a result of trying to survive a year of what my eye doctor calls the pandamnit.
  • My Dad had died just five months before from a virus virtually nobody in my state was taking seriously, and it seemed to be specifically targeting the obese and people with high blood pressure.
  • I was obese and had high blood pressure.
  • My wife was immunocompromised, and while I am limited in my ability to protect her from this virus, I wanted to do everything I could to make sure I did not die, leaving her behind to deal with life in this dystopian hellscape.

You know what didn’t figure into my decision-making at all? My appearance. These days, my body looks like a Crisco can on top of two tooth picks. I used to be slim and muscly. But I also used to be 19. I don’t expect to look the same way at 49 that I did at 19.

I didn’t want to be “skinny”. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to not die. I wanted to not have the joint pain and diabetes and heart disease men in my family get in their fifties. But mostly, I wanted to not die and leave Renee behind to try to survive in all this.

I’m not telling you what you ought to do. I’m just telling you what I did, and the thinking that got me here. You do you, boo.

Like many folks, I have lost weight before. But they were all “diets”, designed to help me lose weight, with no real plan for what happens after that. But that wasn’t my goal this time: I wanted to live.  I needed to change my life.

Actually, that seemed overwhelming. So I decided to do a thing I do when I’m starting a new project: I ask myself what I want the end to look like, and then work backwards. In say, a year, I wanted to be physically active, have lots of energy, and have healthy blood pressure and blood sugar levels. And then I wanted to maintain that for the rest of my life.

I like to eat. Food is important to me, and table fellowship is important to me, so food restrictions that make it difficult to eat with other people and receive hospitality from them are nonstarters for me. Unsure what that would look like, I eventually learned of the connection between my ADHD and food that made me constantly overeat – that my object permanence issues caused me to eat mindlessly, and I had no idea how much I was actually eating.

So I started tracking my food. No goal, just using an app to track my food. I needed more data than I had. It turns out I was routinely eating about 3500 calories a day.  Was that good? Bad? Let’s do some research!

Now – I am the first to say that the medical establishment targets and discounts fat people unfairly. I was just looking for data. And according to the medical establishment, people who were my height had better health outcomes on average when they took in about 2,000 calories of energy a day. And people my age tend to have better health outcomes on average when they are moderately active for 30 minutes each day.

So, now I had a benchmark. Could I live on 2,000 calories a day? It took several weeks to get it dialed in, to see what the things were that triggered mindless eating for me, the things that told my body to snack, the things I did routinely (like eating peanut butter out of the jar every night before bed) that set me up for eating more than I realized. I also was reminded that I thrive on routine, so, as an example, once I realized that most of my breakfasts were usually one of three things, or that I tended to eat one of four things for lunch if I was working from home, that became a habit.

For example, ¾ cup of oatmeal, ¾ cup of blueberries, 10 grams of butter =  breakfast for 272 calories.  It became a habit, and thus, a thing I didn’t have to think about. I was teaching myself to be aware of food in a way I hadn’t before, but I was also teaching myself what a “serving” size looked like.

Growing up, it was a sin to waste food, so you ate what was on your plate. A serving was however much was on your plate. How much cereal should I eat? Well, how much is in the bowl?

Turns out, a serving of Honey Nut Cheerios is more than you think it is, and a serving of milk is too much for that amount of cereal. Just learning to eat actual portions of food was huge in my progress. (1 cup of Honey Nut Cheerios and half a cup of 2% milk is 200 calories, by the way.)

For the first time in my life, I was actively, consciously, eating, instead of passively.

Meanwhile, I started waking every day. A bit more than 2 miles each day, a little more than 30 minutes. After a month or so, it was another habit. Later – much later – I would add swimming and weight lifting into the mix.

I never had a “goal weight”, because the goal was to be healthy, not to lose weight. The nearly 100 pounds I had gained as an adult was because I was taking in a lot more fuel than my body required. If I balanced my energy outputs and fuel intakes, that would sort itself out.

And there is no finish line. This is just what I do now. There are days I eat more than the 2,000 calories someone my size should eat regularly, but other days I eat less, and because I don’t have a goal, I can’t relapse. Some days I get busy and don’t exercise, and it doesn’t matter – because this is just what I do now. It doesn’t matter what I do any one day – it matters what I do repeatedly. I didn’t need a diet – I needed some new habits.

I don’t restrict anything. On my birthday, I ate cake. At Christmas, I ate fudge pie. Tonight, I ate tater tots and chili dogs. (940 calories). There is no such thing as bad food – just food that has more energy or less energy, and I don’t need to store extra energy, so I eat what my body needs, which is about 2,000 calories each day.

Now, because somebody will ask: Yes, I have lost weight – just under 50 pounds so far. It’s been very slow but I don’t care, because the weight is not the goal: My being healthy is. Theoretically, I will lose another 30 pounds or so before my body settles out on a balance between my energy use and 2,000 calories of daily fuel, but it doesn’t matter to me when it happens, or even if it does.

And how’s that coming? Well, I swim about 30 minutes most days, and my resting heart rate has dropped almost ten beats a minute since March. I can walk a brisk pace for miles and carry on a conversation with you the whole time. And this afternoon, my blood pressure was a quite sound 118/64, far better than the hypertensive 155/99 I was at just before the pandemic started. I don’t get extreme headaches after eating any more, and I don’t wake up in the middle of the night craving water or sugar anymore.

I feel good. I have the healthiest relationship with food I have ever had in my life. I feel like I can do this the rest of my life, because I’m not on a diet: This is just what I do now.

So You Had A Relapse

Hey there.

Yes, you.

Can we talk?

I saw you with your New Year’s resolutions. You were going to quit drinking. Or start saving 10% of your paycheck. Or start meditating 30 10 minutes every day. Read to your kids every night. You joined the gym. You bought a new planner.

You had plans, friend! You had the best of intentions.

New Year, New You!

And yet, here we are. Ten days into the new year, and you already took that drink you had forsworn, have eaten things you didn’t plan to, have skipped a day at the gym, meditated twice, overdrawn your checking account.

Dammit! How did this happen, you ask? You had a plan!

But as Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Plans happen in a vacuum, and life, sadly, does not. So the healthy food remains in the cupboard, you haven’t saved $10 yet, and you’ve already had your first hangover this year. When life happened, your plans went out the window.

And now you feel like you have let yourself down. And maybe you feel like a failure. Like you can’t change.

I have spent more than 15 years watching people dramatically change their lives despite horrific odds stacked against them. And in that same time, I have seen people with every advantage as their lives fell apart. I know a little bit about how people change.

People change when they are ready. It’s that simple. If you are truly ready to start meditating, to quit drinking, to start saving money, if you have reached what people who study these things call the “action” stage, you will make changes. And if you are not, you won’t.

The chart up there is from the “Trans-theoretical Model of Change”, and it changed my life. Literally. The idea is, as people change, they go through stages.

First, change isn’t even on your radar. Then you are considering it. Then you are determined, and maybe start researching. Then you take concrete action. And it’s easy to think you have changed. This was you on January 3rd.

Action.

But then.

It’s important to realize that relapse is also part of change. In the 12 Step Programs, the literature suggests that most people relapse on average 7 times before they quit the behavior they want to change.

So, you had a relapse. You went back to doing whatever it was you used to do. It’s OK. It happens. Most of us don’t get it right the first time. What matters is, if you are ready to change – like, really ready – that you start again. Because once you realize you have made a mistake, the most important thing to do is quit making it.

You don’t have to wait until tomorrow to go back on your vitamins. You don’t have to start exercising next week. You don’t have to wait until New Year’s Day to pick up a new habit. You don’t have to start being sober again tomorrow.

You can be sober from now on. You can eat the way you planned to starting now, at the next meal. You can start meditating today instead of tomorrow.

If you are ready, you can change. Even if you relapsed. Especially if you relapsed.

Because you already did the hard work of getting to the action stage.

Because you deserve the benefits of your change.

Because it doesn’t matter how many times you fall down.

Because it only matters how many times you get back up.

Why Do You Like to Cook?

Kaylee, age 13: Uncle Hugh, how often do you cook?

Me, age 49: I cook something almost every day, and some days I cook two or three times a day. Why?

Kaylee: Well, I could tell by the way you stirred the food around that you know what you are doing. Do you like cooking?

Me: I do. I really do.

Kaylee: Why?

Me: Hmmm. Well, there are several reasons. The first is that when I left home, I could suddenly eat anything I wanted. But most of the food I could afford and had access to wasn’t very good. So learning how to cook was a way to be kind to myself. I deserved to have good food, and the only way I knew to get it was to cook it myself.

But more than that, it was that there were people in my life that I dearly loved, and now they were gone. And when I thought back over my memories of them, most of those memories involved food. Like today, we ate chicken and dressing. I can never eat chicken and dressing without thinking of Aunt Louise. But how often in your day-to-day life do you get to eat chicken and dressing? But by knowing how to make it, I can feel that good feeling any time I want to. Knowing how to cook is like having a photo album filled with people you love, that you have an opportunity to see any time you need to eat, which is multiple times a day.

Another reason I like to cook is that most of my adult life has been trying to solve unsolvable problems. Like, no matter how hard I work, people are still hungry, still homeless, still lonely, still addicts. You can work hard all day, all week, all month, even, and at the end of that time feel like absolutely nothing has changed.

But I can have some rice and some sausage and a pepper and an onion and a few other things, and it doesn’t look like anything at all, but if you know how you can turn that pile of random things into jambalaya. I can start with chaos and end with something that tastes good, that reminds me of people I love, and that makes other people happy and fills your belly in the process. It’s the one part of my life I can fix. I can turn the chaotic into something good, and I can usually do that li less than an hour. How cool is that!

But my favorite reason? Today. We sat around a table, and we ate food that was good, and we talked about stories from our past, and people we missed who were not there, and the food reminded us of meals we had had like this before, and the people who had been there, and for a minute, we all felt very loved. I love knowing how to make that happen.

On Branding

People who know me well know how much I love Jacques Pepin. If you do not know, he is a classically trained French chef, who began his apprenticeship in France at the age of 13, who worked in Paris and the was personal chef to three French Presidents, including Charles de Gaulle. Eventually, he would move to the US in 1959, would work at La Pavilion in New York City, and was offered the job as chef to John F. Kennedy when he was President.

Pepin turned him down, and instead went to work designing menus for Howard Johnson’s. which was then the largest chain of sitdown restaurants in the country. Imagine turning down the opportunity to be the White House Chef to work at Applebee’s, say.

When asked in an interview why he turned it down, he said, “Be chef to a President? I had already done that. I wanted to do something new.”

I’ve always admired him for that. To not take himself so seriously. To be willing to put aside the accolades and to be so self-confident that the prestige doesn’t matter to you. To be content to have “done that” and to try something new, something that isn’t what people expect from you.

I have blogged, off and on, for 19 years, for myself and for organizations and companies I ran. Then since 2007 I have been active on Social Media, for the last 5 years or so most heavily on Facebook. And all of those forms of online expression benefit you most when you “brand” yourself. When I started blogging, I ran a small bookstore, and so I wrote mostly about that, and so I was branded as a “bookseller”.

When I moved to North Carolina to start a homeless ministry, I wrote about issues of homelessness and faith and issues like LGBT rights and racism that intersect with homelessness, and became branded as that guy. The last 3-4 years I did that work I had begun to be sought after as a trainer and speaker on those issues, and was pastoring a weekly worshipping community made up of people experiencing homelessness, and someone called me the “pastor of last resort” and I got branded as that.

But even normal people get branded these days. I have a friend that curses like a sailor in person, but she won’t use swear words on Facebook.

“People wouldn’t expect me to do that there”, she told me.

In other words, it would be off-brand.

An early influence on my understanding of ministry was a white Mississippi Baptist preacher named Will Campbell. He was one of those larger than life characters that thrive in the Deep South, a Baptist preacher who smoked cigarettes, drank bourbon and cursed a blue streak. But he also did some of the most important behind the scenes work in the Civil Rights movement, and wrote a book that called out the mainline white church back in the early 1960’s.

In an article about Will in Rolling Stone back in 1990, there is this paragraph:

He does not like to be called the Reverend Campbell because “it sounds condescending and a bit imperialistic. Some people call me a counselor,” Campbell says, “but it’s such an arrogant concept—like I can do something better for you than you can do for yourself. I’m not a reverend, and I’m not a counselor. I’m just a preacher.” Even the word ministry gives him trouble. “I don’t really have a ministry,” he insists. “I have a life.”

Over the last month, I have blogged every day, without a theme. Some days I talked about my struggles with ADHD, and other days I shared a childhood memory or talked about Southern food traditions or shared something that happened to me that day or wrote something somebody found inspirational or just told a funny story.

If I were smart, I would only write 3 times a week about, say, Southern food, and have beautiful images and printable recipes and put together a collection and then a cookbook and start a podcast where I interview other white dudes (because aren’t most podcasts basically white dudes interviewing other white dudes?) about food, and before you know it, I would be a “brand”.

I watched a YouTube video the other day where some influencer was tending to his backyard chickens, and his 10-year-old daughter was with him, and he put the camera in her face and she knew exactly how to mug for the camera. She was being trained to be a brand at 10 years old.

But in a world where everyone is trying to put a label on you and put you in a box, to refuse to stay in their box is a political action. I keep a file open on my computer, and most days I jot things in it. Like a running journal. On January 1 of 2021, I wrote:

I wrote exactly 2 things on my blog last year. Just 2. Part of that is Facebook cannibalized my blog, part of it is that the newsletters took another part of it, but mostly it was that I was unsure what to write about. Branding and all. So to hell with branding. I will write about walks, and spoons, and woodworking, and gardening, and depression, and food, and sermons and all of it.  I don’t have a ministry – I have a life, as Will C said. Publish and be damned.

It took me a while to get there, but this blog is the result of that entry. This blog is intentionally unbrandable, because it is not a brand – it is my life. I am funny, and angry, and sentimental, and Southern, and opinionated about cornbread and beans and a sucker for Christmas and cynical of all of it. This blog is about all of those things, because it is the story of one guy who is trying to live a good life.

To paraphrase Will Campbell, I don’t have a brand. I have a life.

On Goals

It’s a strange time of year.

Not a bad time, just… strange. It’s a sort of liminal space, where pretty much everyone that can be is done with 2021, and yet 2022 hasn’t started yet.

I try to hold this week as free of commitments as I can, so I can do reflecting on the year that was, and set some intentions for the year to come. But one thing I don’t do is set goals – for New Year’s, or ever.

There are several reasons for this. One is that I spent some time working in a toxic sales environment, and goals were super manipulative ways to get us to produce more. And I hate being manipulated. So when I finally quit that job, I decided I could quit goals, too.

But they weren’t hard to give up, because the reality is, my brain doesn’t work that way. As someone with ADHD, I have an interest-based nervous system. If I’m not interested in the project, no amount of external goals will get me there. And if I am interested, then you can’t make me ignore it. This is both my superpower and my kryptonite – I am not externally motivated.

Goals prey on your dissatisfaction. But I’m not dissatisfied.

Don’t get me wrong – I have things I would like to do. For example, I want to go to both Europe, and Puerto Rico. But if I end up not being able to do that, I will be OK. I work hard to make sure we have enough income to maintain our quality of life, but I am old enough to know that if I made 50% more, I would not be 50% more happy than I am now. Our car is 10 years old, and it makes me just as happy as the 3-month old car I rented a few weeks ago to go on a road trip.

In 2022, I want to be a good husband, want to learn skills I do not currently have, want to have enough income to maintain our quality of life, want to meet interesting people, want to make the world better than I found it. I don’t know what any of that will look like. In fact, there are dozens of ways any of that could look that I would be happy with. But that’s what I want.

A concrete example: Right now, we are looking into renovating our kitchen in the next 18 months or so – like, a down to the studs, new appliances, new cabinets, new floor renovation. I’m interested in it, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how it can happen. I read articles, watch videos, research appliances, make lists and budgets, and try to figure out ways to make more money to pay for it all. So I guess you could say that is a goal. But I would never say, “By April 15th of 2023, we will renovate our kitchen.” It will happen when it happens, which is fine, because I enjoy this process. And should our priorities change, and we decide to keep the existing kitchen, that’s fine too. And in the meantime, I’m learning things I did not know, doing work I enjoy, and keeping busy with something that interests me.

As I look back over a career of counseling people who were dissatisfied with their life, their dissatisfaction could often be traced back to their having picked a goal they wanted to accomplish, rather than asking if the work was worth doing.

In the last chapter of The Great Gatsby, Nick says that Gatsby paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. For Gatsby, success could only look one way. The big house, the public acclaim, and crucially, the girl. If any of that did not happen (and, it didn’t), then he processed that as failure. Never mind the fact that he was rich, was acclaimed, was living in a literal mansion and had rose from nothing to prominence. Because he didn’t meet his goal, he wasn’t, to his mind, a success.

So, goals. I don’t set them. Instead, I commit to pay attention, to find out what I’m interested in, and do more of that. I try new things. I give myself permission to fail. And above all, I ask myself if this work is worth doing.

Because for most of us, life isn’t victory or defeat, but the slog of the daily routine. Most of life is process. And if you hate the process, if you don’t think the work is valuable in and of itself, then no amount of success will make up for it.

Leaving Exile

A few days ago, I was talking on the phone to someone who had moved to a new city, after living a long time in the old one.

“It feels different, somehow, living here. Like, I know I intend to stay here. I want to invest here. I want to own a home here, and maybe raise a family here. [The last place] wasn’t like that at all. It was just a place to live because work had moved me there.”

“Ahhh,” I said.

“Ahhh?”

“Yes. You just described the difference between being an exile and being an immigrant.”

I went on to explain that when you are in exile, you leave one place for another, but there is always the hope you will be able to return. Your heart, if you will, belongs someplace else. Immigrants, however, plan on building a life in, and committing to, the new place. There is, if nothing else, a hope that the new place will be where they will write the rest of their story.

It’s like the difference between renting a home and owning one. The owned home will always be cared for more by its occupant than the rented one because they have committed to it for the long haul. They are not just sleeping in a home but investing in it, caring for it with the hope that it will take care of them, too. The renter does the minimum because it does not make sense to invest in a place you will not be staying or profiting from long-term.

I know this because it was my story, too. When I moved to North Carolina 15 years ago, there was never any intention that I would be gone forever. I knew that one day, I would be back. And 12 years later, I was. While in Raleigh, I was in exile.

It doesn’t mean I didn’t invest in Raleigh – I did. I did good work there, helped a lot of people there, and made good friends – lifelong friends – there. But my heart wasn’t there. My heart was in Mississippi, a place that has nurtured and held my people for 200 years. In the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah, the people in exile are told by God that even though they find themselves far from their homeland, they should plant gardens, build houses, and to work for the good of the land in which they find themselves, because whatever hope they have of prospering will come from that place prospering.

That was my experience in Raleigh. I worked hard there. I built things there. They prospered. I prospered. But it wasn’t home.

You can argue that it’s semantics, but I think it’s more like a mindset, or a framing story.

Because life is different when you intend to stay.