Posts – Page 17 – Hugh's Blog

Names Matter

She looked tentative and uncertain, like she wasn’t sure she was in the right place.

Hell, I wasn’t certain I was either, to tell the truth, and I was allegedly the guy in charge.

I had just preached at the chapel service of the small homeless ministry I ran at the time, and the service was now over, and I was doing that sort of thing I do after I preach where I am already thinking about how I can retreat and hide and recharge, yet recognize that some folks need to metaphorically touch you after they heard you speak, often as a way of processing it.

“I’ve never been here before…” she starts. But I knew this. Anyone who watched her body language would have known. Besides, I knew why she was there. She had been part of a group of students who had volunteered with our meal program the day before, and had heard me talk about our little chapel service, and she was one of several people who had come to watch.

This often happened, and we never really knew what to do about it – we welcomed everyone, but it was always a bit weird knowing people were there to watch you work. There were times it felt like being in a zoo, only we were the attractions.

“But something just happened, and I want to talk about it.”

I encourage her to go on.

“All my life, I’ve prayed for those who were homeless. But today, y’all named people who were homeless. All my life, I have prayed for people who needed jobs. You named people who needed jobs. I’ve always prayed for people to be safe in the cold weather. You named people who sleep outside in the cold weather. It was the first time I have ever prayed for people who are poor by name.”

Names are sacred things. Names matter. Names contain magic. In the story in Exodus, when God sends Moses on a mission to free the slaves, Moses wants to know God’s name before he will do it. You can’t set off on a mission of that size just because some no-named bush that was failing at burning in the desert told you to.

The Jewish writer Martin Buber wrote about “I – it” relationships and “I – thou” relationships. In short, I-It relationships are relationships where the proper name of the persons involved do not matter. I do not need to know the name of my server in a restaurant to have a pleasant dining experience. Any competent server would work, and if one was out sick, another could fill in.

But there is a Chinese restaurant we like to go to not far from our house. It has a thriving takeout business, but few people eat in – so we do. In these pandemic times, it is a way for us to eat in a restaurant, and yet because the space is practically always empty, we feel very safe while we are there. Because of this, we get special attention and always tip well.

And the owner of the restaurant has a ten-year-old son named Lucas.

Lucas is big for his age. I would have put him at 12 or 13, and he looks like he would rather be playing video games, but his mom says he is her apprentice, and she stands by him as he takes the orders, and nudges him we he doesn’t say “Thank you”, and he brings the food out on shaky arms, but the whole time, you are just rooting for him.

If I went in there tomorrow and Lucas wasn’t there, I would ask about him. Lucas matters to me in the way the anonymous server in a place I am not known does not. I mean, I care about the no-named server in the abstract, but I care about Lukas specifically. Lukas and I have an “I-thou” relationship.

When we know names, it changes the dynamic completely. I once planned on cutting down a tree in the backyard of a house I owned until I learned the tree was an elm tree, and having learned about Dutch Elm disease, it felt sinful to cut down a tree that had thus far beaten the odds.

Somehow, knowing it was an elm made it different than knowing it was a tree. The specificity mattered. It having a name mattered. Because the tree was an elm, I knew things about it I didn’t know when it was just a tree. I knew it was a native, and part of the food system for the local habitat, and endangered, and however annoying, was worth protecting.

Because I knew its name.

Giving it 80%

In 2012, I spent a week at Mepkin Abbey, in South Carolina. Mepkin Abby is a Trappist monastery, and they invite folks to come and stay with them as a form of retreat. A friend I really respected did it on the regular, and encouraged me to do it as well.

I really enjoyed my week there. It was lovely, and the campus is beautiful, and it’s right on the Cooper River, where you can sit on the bluff and watch the boats roll by. The campus is filled with Live Oaks that literally drip Spanish Moss, and the silence there is magical, punctuated by the chanting of the monks seven times a day.

You are also invited to eat with the monks, and they have a simple, vegetarian diet. Again, one of the struggles those of us with ADHD have is the inability to create structure, so a simple diet with simple rules appealed to me, and I think there is definitely an ethical argument that can be made for not eating animal flesh. So, when I came back to the “real world”, I decided I would be vegetarian.

I lasted strictly about six weeks, and gave up trying completely within three months. Because it was easy to fail at being vegetarian, and when you have the sort of life I do, where lots of people want to feed you, and a huge part of how you expressed your spirituality involved eating with others, it became super complicated, super-fast. In the end, it just wasn’t sustainable for me at all.

My last few days have been chaotic. I went from having a week in front of me with virtually no outside meetings planned to having my entire week scheduled almost instantly. Which is fine – in the work I do these days organizing Faith Leaders, it is like that sometimes – you are forced to react to something someone else does and then your whole schedule changes.

But what that does mean is that my whole routine is thrown off, and instead of cooking dinner for my family like I do most nights, this week I am eating a lot of sandwiches and take out, and because I am living on the phone when I’m not in front of a Zoom camera or at City Hall, I had to miss going for a swim today.

Most of my career has been filled with reactive crises like this, and in the past, I have often used that as a reason to not prioritize my health, and to not eat well. But these days, as I prioritize my health and try to avoid returning to the burnout that almost took me out, I am seeing things differently.

I want you to pay attention to what I did there – it literally is about seeing things differently – I am looking at things through a different lens, and it has made all the difference in how I view the world in general and my health in particular.

If you get ill and, as a result, don’t take a shower on a given day, you didn’t fail – you just didn’t do something you normally do. You don’t decide that because you failed at cleanliness you will henceforth renounce soap. You don’t decide you will now sleep in a mudhole. The next day, you take a shower again and you are back on track.

And tomorrow, I will be back at the gym. I didn’t fail at being healthy. I didn’t fail at anything. I just didn’t do what I normally do. But tomorrow, I will. Because this way of life is sustainable, and I don’t fail if I don’t do something just one day.

It’s easy to fail at “Being Vegetarian”. Hell, it’s easy to fail at “dieting”. But it’s almost impossible to fail at “focusing on my health”. Saying I am focusing on my health recognizes that it’s about what I do most of the time, not what I do one time, that will make a long term difference to my health and my life.

I tend towards extremism – again, my brain loves simplicity – but I am trying to remind myself these days that even though I can’t give it all I have, if I can give it my 80%, then that’s enough.

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 Box at the Side of the Road

It didn’t look like much, sitting there on the side of the road, sticking out of a box along side a broken air popper and a lamp with a missing lampshade. But you couldn’t fool me – I knew what it was.

My brother-in-law was visiting us – this was in the before times – and had gotten up early and went for a walk in the neighborhood. When he came back, he had told me that a few streets over, someone had set a bunch of trash at the curb.

“And sitting right on top of it all is a cast iron skillet.”

I drove over to check it out. It was, in fact, a cast iron skillet; a 10 inch one, to be exact. It wasn’t any collectable brand; just a no-name workhorse of a skillet, the sort that used to be in every southern kitchen, and still hangs on the wall of mine.

But, it had been a long time since somebody loved it. It was filthy, and covered in rust. I put it in my shed to “deal with later”. And then a few weeks later, a global pandemic happened, and my mind became filled with other things.

But last week, I came across it again, as I was moving some things about, and decided it had been neglected long enough.

In the book Hannibal, the author Thomas Harris has Hannibal Lecter write a letter to Clarice Starling, in which he says the following:

“Do you have a black iron skillet? You are a southern mountain girl; I can’t imagine you would not. Put it on the kitchen table. Turn on the overhead lights.

Look into the skillet, Clarice. Lean over it and look down. If this were your mother’s skillet, and it well may be, it would hold among its molecules the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love.

Sit down at the table, Clarice. Look into the skillet. If it is well cured, it’s a black pool, isn’t it? It’s like looking down a well. Your detailed reflection is not at the bottom, but you loom there, don’t you? The light behind you, there you are in a blackface, with a corona like your hair on fire.

We are elaborations of carbon, Clarice. You and the skillet and Daddy dead in the ground, cold as the skillet. It’s all still there. Listen.”

I love that. Cast iron is sacred to me, in a way other skillets are not. They have soul, personality, character. Perhaps it is the vibrations in the carbon. In any event, it was time to make things right.

There is a lot of mythology around cast iron, but it isn’t rocket science. It requires a modicum of care, and there are rules to its use, just like there are rules to how to use nonstick.

So I ran a sink of hot water and dish soap, and scrubbed it down with a Scotchbrite pad. I scrubbed the grease and the rust off, and when it was done, it was a pale grey with some splotches of rust here and there, but clean. I then poured white vinegar in the pan and scrubbed the rust, adding kosher salt to make a paste.

With cast iron, your two enemies are acid and water. But the dose makes the poison, and first, we have to strip it down before we can season it.

After it’s clean, I turned the burner of the stove to low heat, and then set the skillet on it for 10 minutes or so. I want it dry as can be, and the heat drives the moisture out. While that’s happening, I turn the oven on 450 and let it heat up, and get out the vegetable oil.

There is a lot of mythology around seasoning the skillet, but it’s just that – myth. All you are going to do is create a thin coating to protect the skillet. And virtually any oil will work. The old folks used lard, because that is what they had, but plain old vegetable oil will work a treat. What we are going to aim for is 4-5 thin coatings. You don’t want one thick coating, because it will glob up and get sticky.

OK, now your skillet is on the burner, and dry and scalding hot. Pour a small dot of oil in the skillet – like, twice the size of a quarter, maybe. Then put on an oven mitt and, with a pair of tongs and a folded up paper towel, smear a thin coat of oil over the entire skillet, inside and out. I can’t emphasize how little oil will be on the skillet at this point – a thin coating, with no oil remaining when you are done smearing. Your skillet will look the same as it did before, only slightly darker from the oil.

Now put it in the oven upside down and leave it there for 30 minutes. It might smoke a bit – this is not failure. Using your oven mitt, take it out and repeat. Small dollop of oil, smear it all over, thin coat, put it back in the oven for 30 more minutes. And again. And again. Do it at least four times.

You put it in upside down to keep any oil from pooling. There shouldn’t be any oil to pool, if you used as little oil as I told you to, but still – better safe than sorry. The fourth time, just turn the oven off and let it cool, with the skillet in it. And when it cools, you are done.

It’s now ready to use. You don’t have to be precious with it. Use it to fry bacon, make cornbread, or really to cook anything, although you should probably avoid heavily acidic dishes like spaghetti sauce. And when you are done, use a scrubby pad to clean it with a little soapy water – the no soap thing is another myth – dry it off, and put it away. I usually dry mine by putting it over low heat for a minute or two to drive the moisture out, then wipe it down with a few drops of oil.

And that’s it. Using it continues to season it naturally, and your drying it and wiping it with oil protects it. Keep it dry and it will, properly treated, outlast the kitchen in which it is stored. I do not, however, recommend storing it in a box at the end of the driveway.

Advice You Will Ignore

Since posting my story of burnout, I have had no less than 5 conversations with people in similar places. All people in the so-called helping professions, all doing good work, all exhausted.

I used to teach classes on self-care, but if I did it now, I wouldn’t call it that. Because sometimes, the most self-loving thing you can do is walk the hell out the door, never to return. And I’m not really interested in helping uphold failing systems that rely on the sacrifices of good people to survive.

But, I do recognize that exhausted people have very little capacity to effect change, or to fight for their own liberation. And if giving someone the tools to conserve even a portion of their energy for their own use gives them margin to effect change, then it’s probably worth doing.

Here are some things, in no particular order, that I wish I had learned and taken seriously early in my career. Many of them I have shared before, while others I have only recently learned. None of them are definitive – in most cases, they are starting points for you to investigate. Most of them are inexpensive, or can be budgeted for. None of them involve spa-days or pedicures.

I also want to say that you will probably ignore all this. I did, and I was the one teaching it. But I really wish I hadn’t.

The most important thing you can do, if you want to change the world, is to survive long enough to do it. It has been my experience that dead people have very little influence on society.

Buy yourself a calendar, and write things down. A calendar is an integrity document – things that go on it are promises to yourself and others. Important things get scheduled. Schedule non-work things – lunches with friends, trips with your spouse, doctor visits – just like you would an appointment. Guard these against work intruding.
You need a few people you can trust without question. Schedule regular time with those people.
Make friends who have nothing to do with your work. You are more likely to keep up with friends if you schedule them as appointments. Like, the 3rd Friday of the month at 3 PM is always “Coffee with Judy” on your calendar.
Related to number 3 – the more standing appointments you can have, the less you have to think, and the fewer decisions you have to make. Set it as a recurring meeting in your calendar and then you never have to think about it again. This can be everything from the barber to the gym to the therapist to the coffee shop. I had a period there where every Tuesday afternoon from 2-5 was just when I did my writing, and every Wednesday morning I met with my direct reports.
Remember always that you, as a person, are nowhere near as important as you think you are to anyone at your work. If you dropped dead tomorrow, they would have your job posted before you were in the ground. If removing you from the picture will kill it, it’s already dead and you are just paying for it to stay alive with your energy.
Decisions you make when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired will probably be bad decisions. If you feel any of those things and are facing a big decision, HALT. (Get it?)
Sleep is everything. If you aren’t getting at least 7 hours of sleep (without self-medicating) on a regular basis, do whatever you need to do to make that happen.
A surgeon must protect her hands to protect her ability to work. You must protect your energy for the same reason, and just as rigorously. Energy is like money – it’s easier to spend less than it is to make more.
Develop a life and an identity apart from your work. You won’t always be Pastor Sarah, but you will always be Mom. So maybe don’t invest so much energy in something that won’t last.
Read books and watch movies that have nothing to do with your work.
Find affordable luxuries to pamper yourself with. You are unlikely to go broke because you bought the good face soap rather than the generic, but the good soap will make you feel special every time you use it.
Take the vacation. In blocks of 5 days in a row or more.
Develop rituals in your life. They will ground you and give you things to do when you don’t know what to do.
The more options you have in any given situation, the better you will sleep and the more peace you will have. Fight to have as many options as possible.
Eat the best food you can afford. It is both fuel and pleasure.
Daily exercise – even if it is just a walk around the block or riding your bike to work – is crucial. And no, all the steps you get in while at work doesn’t count.
You are probably dehydrated.
The temptation to use chemicals to manage your state is overwhelming. A “beer after work” is easy to become a “bottle of wine after work”. Find non-chemical ways to manage your state.
If you don’t work from your home, figure out how to turn work off before you walk in the door of your house. Transitional rituals (like stopping at the coffee shop on the way home, or silencing your phone after you park the car in the driveway, or walking around your garden before you go in the house) can help with this.
If you do work from home, figure out how to signify when you are done with work – like, closing the laptop, or shutting the door to the office. I will often walk around the block when I’m done, as a way of telling myself I’m “walking home”.
There are no such thing as guilty pleasures. Like what you like. If that is eating ding-dongs while listening to Taylor Swift, own that shit. The sheer amount of guilt people will try to put on you is nearly endless, so don’t guilt yourself.
Your ability to survive long-term in a world filled with ugliness is directly related to how much beauty you have in your life. Beauty is like Vitamin C – your body needs it, and yet cannot store it. Search for beauty and surround yourself with it like your life depends on it. Because it does.

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.

Breaking Slowly

I recently began doing morning pages again. If that means nothing to you, the least you need to know for the following story to make sense is that I am doing three pages of handwritten freewriting each morning. You can read more about the process here.

Anyway, since I’m doing this intentional practice, I decided to buy myself a decent pen to write with. I’m not precious about things, but I find that paying attention to things means I respect them. So, having a dedicated pair of shoes to go walking in, and a dedicated chair to read or meditate in, and to the point of this story, a new notebook and pen to write in.

So, after reading lots of reviews (because obsessing about small things is another thing I do), I decided to buy a Pilot Metropolitan Gel Rollerball. Mostly because it uses the same refill as my favorite pen – a Pilot G2 Gel Pen.

Amazon had them in stock, but for some reason, the earliest I could get it delivered was about 10 days away. Office Depot didn’t have any in stock at their store near me, but I could order it and have it delivered in 48 hours. This is a lot of effort for a $20 pen, but again, this was special.

The package was supposed to arrive today. It (the package) did arrive today. The packing slip that was enclosed said it was a pen, but it was not. It was instead a business card holder, like you would put on your desk.

No big deal – I went on the website and there was a huge button that told me that Office Depot was all about taking care of business, and that I could talk to a live chat agent. What followed was a comedy of errors. The live chat person was typing in what appeared to be broken English. They responded to my questions with answers meant for someone else. They told me I would have to return the business card holder and they would have to receive it before they could resend my pen. Then they told me that they would mail me a check (you know, like it’s 1997) as a refund, and I would have to reorder the pen myself.

At this point, I called their 800 number (which I apparently should have done in the first place) and I spoke to a really nice man who told me his computer terminal was broken, and asked me to hang up and call them again later.

At this point, I’m more than 30 minutes invested in trying to solve the case of the missing pen. Any cost-benefit analysis is out the window. Now, it’s personal.

I call back, speak to a lovely person named Paul, and I explain to Paul on the front end that if I seem frustrated, it is because I am, but I am not frustrated at him, but at the trouble I have been having with Office Depot, and I hope he can help me. As an aside – I find this technique to be extremely helpful, as it places them on the alert that things have went wrong, and it lets them be part of the solution – almost like they are striving to be better than their colleagues.

Paul listens, has me on hold for 30 minutes (no lie, but at least I’m on hold) and then comes back on and tells me my new pen will be here on Tuesday. Yay, Paul.

But here’s the point: Look at how many things were broken in the process of my buying a $20 pen. This is a major brand name pen – a few years ago, any chain office supply store would have had it in stock, on a shelf. Amazon, masters of logistics, can’t get me this pen in less than 10 days. Again – this is not an obscure pen. Office Depot messed up the order in their warehouse, shipping the wrong product, and nobody noticed. The Live Chat operator can’t type, and obviously didn’t understand what I wanted. The first operator’s terminal was down, and was unable to recommend I do anything but try later. It took 30 minutes of my being on hold to get Paul to do something as simple as agreeing to send me what I originally ordered.

The pen was not obscure or rare. Office Depot is not a Mom and Pop company. It’s all just broken, but it’s not obvious at first, and it isn’t a collapse. It’s just breaking… slowly.

A friend the other day described what is going on right now as, “Like the end of the Roman Empire, but with Wi-Fi and streaming”, and the more I think about it, the more on the nose that sounds. My local grocery store was out of canned vegetables the other day. Like, all of them. Two years in, the local Kroger has never recovered their paper towels stock to pre-pandemic levels. I went to buy a particular saw from the local Home Depot – which their website said was on sale, and that this store had 11 of in stock – and there were none on the shelf, and nobody there knew where any were. We literally had to talk to 3 employees and 1 member of management and invest 30 minutes to find a saw they had on sale.

I’m not complaining about the employees – everyone is, I’m sure, doing the best they can. But it’s obvious to me that the system is overwhelmed. Nothing is happening like it should, and yet, everything is still going. Sorta.

I get asked sometimes why I keep a deep pantry of food, and why we invest in redundancies, like the ability to cook food by three methods, or the ability to heat our house by two different utilities, or why I have cases of water in the closet. It’s not that I think there is going to be a major Armageddon scenario, where we are all eating acorns and wearing bear skins.

Instead, I think things are just going to wind down, slowly at first, and then faster and faster until it just breaks, and then we will have to fix it. But the slow part will take decades, and we have to survive while it’s happening. The Capitalists will do everything they can to hang onto our consumption, and so they are investing heavily in a façade of normality, to keep us going.

I think, eventually, things will balance out. But until they do, a lot of people will be hurt, and if history is any guide, it won’t be those of us buying $20 pens, but rather those who can least afford it.

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 10^th 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.