The Levis

I just want to go on record that, despite what the kids at school called me, we were not “white trash”. We were “poor-but-proud”. As near as I can tell, the main difference between the two categories had to do with the fact that we owned land. In any event, when I was a child we had very little money.

Up through the fourth grade that wasn’t all that big a deal. After all, all of my friends were in the same boat. In the small, church-based segregation academy I attended until the end of the fourth grade, I was very unaware of fashion. We just wore jeans and shirts – nobody wore Levis. Well, except that one kid. But anyway.

But in the fifth grade, the closing of that school meant I had to go to the consolidated public elementary school. No one at East Tate Elementary wore jeans from the dollar store. All their jeans had names on them – Lee, Levis, Wrangler. And the shoes…no longer could you just wear plain old sneakers. Now there was Nike, and Puma, and Adidas, and Kangaroos (they had a pocket!). And all of those things cost money.

Money we did not have.

I begged my mom to buy me a pair of Levis.

“Just one pair,” I would say. “I will wash them every night.”

But no. Every August we would buy five pairs of cheap jeans that were that horrible, very uncool dark indigo blue color. And we would buy them a size too big, so I could grow into them because we both knew there would be no buying new ones until next August.

But I continued to beg and ask.

One particular Saturday, Mom had been out hitting yard sales and thrift stores, and she came home with a glint in her eye. Held aloft in her hands was a pair of button fly Levi Jeans. Sure, they were slightly faded, but that only added to the appeal.

Monday, I put them on, proud of my new station in life. I strutted when I got off that school bus!

I made it till the second recess, after 4th period. That was when one beloved Child of God informed me that, unlike his Levi jeans, mine had a white patch on the right rear pocket. In other words, they were “girl” jeans.

Oh no. Dear God, no.

As I write this 40 years later I still feel the anguish and shame that went through me as he and his friends stood around me, pointing and chanting. “Girl’s jeans, girl’s jeans. Hugh’s wearing girl jeans. ”

They called me names I had never heard before that called my sexuality into question – words I would look up in the dictionary that night when I got home. I was in fifth grade – what I knew about sexuality was confined to the neighbor’s dog that had gotten to our hound when she was in heat.

I raced into the bathroom, where I hid the rest of recess. I untucked my shirt, hoping to cover the offending label. But my hiding it made it worse, and for the rest of the day, the kids rode me without mercy. Through the remaining classes, people looked at me and giggled, pointing at me. And if I got up to sharpen my pencil, displaying the offensive tag, the laughter was so loud the teacher had to tell everyone to be quiet.

When I got home that day, after the longest bus ride ever, I hid those jeans in the bottom of my closet so I would not accidentally wear them ever again.

It was only a few days before Mom noticed they were out of the rotation. She tormented me to no end that I just “had” to have a pair of Levis, and there she went, spending her hard-earned money on Levis, and did I wear them? No sir, I did not.

In the cold, rational light of 2022, I wish that 10-year-old Hugh had been stronger. I wish someone had told him that clothes were not gendered. I wish the teachers had stood up for him.

But, as Dad used to say, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

I have talked to other people who grew up poor, and they sometimes say things like, “We didn’t know we were poor.” By the time I was 10, I knew we were poor. The kids at the public school never tired of telling me.

But I knew that Mom had bought me those jeans because she loved me.  I knew that she hunted the places we could afford to find them and that the money she spent on them was money that should have gone to groceries, or stuff for the baby, or any number of things. I knew that her buying me those jeans was my mom’s way of saying “You matter to me. Your happiness matters to me. You are worth the trouble I am going to to try to make this thing you want, happen. ” And because I knew all of that, there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to tell her she bought the wrong thing and caused me ridicule.

That was the last time she bought me a name-brand anything. I would not wear a pair of Levis again until I was 16 and working after school at the grocery store and could buy them myself.

And I have still never told her why I quit wearing that pair of jeans. I would have rather had her think me ungrateful than for her to feel shame or to know she caused me to suffer. Ten-year-old me did not want her to think her love for me was, in any way, flawed.

And I still don’t.

Deserved Maintenance

Some years ago, I was talking to the person who was my spiritual director at the time. I was in the midst of unrecognized (by me, anyway) burnout, and she was encouraging me to take some time away. We had found a retreat that sounded lovely to me, but there was so much work to be done, so much need in the world, and the idea of my hitting pause on that merely because I needed time away seemed so wrong to me.

I told her that. I also told her that it seemed so self-centered, this idea of claiming time for myself, of putting my own needs first.

“I grew up surrounded by men who worked hard for very little money. It wasn’t joyful work. It was hot and sweaty, and they thought a lot more about survival than they did rejuvenation. Nobody would have recommended they take a week of retreat at a monastery. They didn’t get sabbaticals. Hell, they barely got vacation. If anybody deserved time for self-care, it was them!”

We were sitting in her sunroom, on her heavily wooded suburban lot. Her little furry dog lay on the floor at my feet, and my tea was on the coffee table, untouched and rapidly cooling. Outside, birds flitted from limb to limb as my words hung in the air.

She sat there, legs crossed, a cup of tea in her hands, elbows on the arm of the chair, chin down, staring into the cup of tea as if it contained answers. Maybe it did.

She looked up at me, took a sip of tea, and said, “You’re right. They did deserve it. And can you imagine how different their life could have been if they had gotten it?”

Damn.

As I try to rebuild a life after burnout, in the midst of a pandemic, and while dealing with depression, it sometimes seems like self-care is a full-time job. I swim almost every day, which takes anywhere from 30-45 minutes. On the days I don’t swim, I walk, which takes 45 minutes. I do my morning pages, which can take from a half-hour to an hour, depending on how the words come. I have a deliberate morning routine and evening routine. I monitor my food. I try to keep boundaries up between work and not work, and I try hard to prioritize family time and time away.

And it can all feel a little self-indulgent at times. Like I’m at the center of the universe, and so if I reply to a simple, non-urgent request on Friday at 4:50 PM that I will take care of it Monday, despite that it wouldn’t take 20 minutes to do, it can feel a bit like I’m being a jerk. More than once, the person asking me for that favor has made it clear that is how they interpreted it, too.

But that’s ridiculous. If I asked if you wanted to go hiking with me on Monday, and you said you couldn’t because you had to work, I wouldn’t be offended. But that’s because it is socially acceptable to spend ⅓ of your life working on someone else’s projects in exchange for money to pay your bills to maintain your house, and not socially acceptable to say that you have promised your wife that Friday night is just for her in order to maintain your marriage.

But all of the things a human needs cannot be purchased with the money that we trade, if we are lucky, that ⅓ of our life for. We also need community and health and connection and peace of mind and rest – all things that can’t be bought with money, but instead can only be acquired by deliberate practice.

So, if we have normalized eight hours, at a minimum, a day earning the money which only takes care of a portion of our needs, what is a fair amount of time to trade for everything else? If eight hours is a reasonable time to spend getting the money, what is a reasonable amount of time to spend on maintenance? If I spend 15 minutes of my day in a morning routine that gives me clarity and focus, is that a wise investment of my time? If I trade 45 minutes of movement for lower blood pressure and healthy glucose levels, is that worth it? If 30 minutes of winding down mean that the 7 hours of sleep I get is restful and rejuvenating, shouldn’t I do it?

We make those calculations all the time, and we always bid against ourselves. But we never ask those questions about work.

People seldom miss work because they need the money. However, they often miss sleep, as if they didn’t need the rest. They eat crap food, while in a rush, often in their car, as if they didn’t need the nourishment and energy that comes from good food. They keep the eight hours of work as inviolate but willingly give up their date night with their partner, or an hour of sleep, or supper with their kids, because they are “busy”.

Your work provides the income you need to live your life – but it shouldn’t “be” your life. You deserve so much more than that.

“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?” Thoreau asked us all those years ago, and today, most of us still don’t have a good answer.

 

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 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.

  1. 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.
  2. You need a few people you can trust without question. Schedule regular time with those people.
  3. 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.
  4. Related to #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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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?)
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. Read books and watch movies that have nothing to do with your work.
  11. 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.
  12. Take the vacation. In blocks of 5 days in a row or more.
  13. Develop rituals in your life. They will ground you and give you things to do when you don’t know what to do.
  14. 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.
  15. Eat the best food you can afford. It is both fuel and pleasure.
  16. 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.
  17. You are probably dehydrated.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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”.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.

The Ugly Part

In our last house, we had a tiny bathroom. Like, 5 feet by 5 feet. The sink was in a tiny 2-foot-wide nook in the corner. All of me wouldn’t fit in the mirror. The tiled tub surround was made up of random colored tiles with no apparent order or design.

But that wasn’t the bad part.

When we moved in, we spent a lot of money getting the kitchen done and buying appliances and getting the flooring right, after ripping up layers and layers of plywood. We didn’t have any money to address the squishy floor in the bathroom. Basically, we spent the next two years hoping we wouldn’t fall through the floor.

It was a one-bathroom house, which also led to our delay, because anything we did to that bathroom would put our only working bathroom out of order. And at the time, I was working an insane schedule running a day shelter for people experiencing homelessness.

When I do something like renovate a bathroom, I have thought about it for months. I get a little obsessive, searching all sorts of ideas out on Pinterest, googling clearances, searching shopping sites for options. And so, when I start, it is a little like being on auto-pilot, because it has filled my head for months at that point. I have already built it three or four times in my head.

Even so, that renovation was fraught with difficulties. The subfloor was rotten, and had to be replaced. The cast iron toilet flange broke, and had to be replaced. The sink fittings had to be replaced. The water shut off had to be replaced. I had to tile the floor. Twice. I have never had anything go as wrong as that tiny bathroom did.

A friend let us sleep at his house the weekend I did the major work, but even so, we had a less than optimal bathroom for about a week. And it took a month of evenings and weekends for me to get “done”. And it all cost, almost to the penny, twice as much as our already stretched budget had allowed for the project.

I will tell you that when we were done, that bathroom was my favorite part of that house. Literally everyone who came over remarked on it. I had penny tile on the floor, corrugated metal wainscoting, and espresso shop-made trim. It was still tiny, and still had a crazy tile surround, but now it looked more eccentric than random.

Now, it sounds like this is going to be a happy ending sort of thing, and the end was worth the hassle and yada yada. And yes, you could tell the story that way, but I skipped ahead a bit. I want to talk about what it was like in the middle of that project.

My only bathroom was in shambles. I was exhausted, and out of money. I had to reinstall the toilet twice in the middle of the chaos because we needed to use the bathroom and had no other options. It looked dramatically uglier at this point than it did before I had done anything. I felt like I was moving backwards.

I was in the middle of what I call the ugly part.

Every renovation has the ugly part. It’s when you had to break up the tile floor. Rip out the sheetrock. Pull down the wall. It looks worse now than it did before you started. And it’s really easy to look around at all the chaos and to feel like this was all a horrible mistake. Maybe you should have paid a contractor to do it. Maybe you should have been happy with the ugly floors. Maybe you shouldn’t have tried to do it yourself.

It’s the ugly part.

Now, if you do enough renovation work, you eventually come to realize that this is part of the process. To fix things, you often have to break them worse than they were before. Things often do have to get worse before they get better. And when you have pulled a rabbit out of a hat a dozen times or so, you come to expect that the 13th hat, there will be a rabbit in that one, too.

But it’s not just renovations that have an ugly part. Lots of things do.

Medical school has organic chemistry. The second year of law school almost wiped a friend of mine out of the process. The third day you lift weights you will wish you had stayed on the couch. That third week of Couch to 5K has knocked me out three times.

Anytime you seek to change the status quo, you will have to disrupt things. Break things. Rip things out. And in the short run, it will look worse. But it’s not worse – it’s just not done.

It’s the ugly part.

It’s part of the process, but it is crucial to remember that it isn’t the end of the process.

Or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. That part is up to you.

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.

Vernacular shelving

Who invented the table?

Who was the first person to make a chair that looked like a chair?

Think about the first person who made a box. Did they have any inkling of how virtually all furniture in the future would be based on their design?

The idea of a thing like a chair, which exists in some form in every culture in the world, having been invented seems strange, because tables and chairs and boxes and shelves and stools didn’t have a singular inventor – they were simultaneously developed by many different people all over the world, and then traveled, infecting others with their designs. And until very recently, most furniture was made by the end user, or at least by someone in their family or village.

Most furniture that has existed in the world was utilitarian in form – they built a chair because they needed a chair – not because they needed something to put in the corner to balance the plant stand in the other corner. And it was made by the end user because until very recently in human history purchased furniture was the province of the very wealthy. Most furniture was made quickly and in a utilitarian manner because the person building it was one bad harvest away from death by starvation.

Utilitarian furniture made by the end user is called “vernacular” furniture by people who study such things. And you need not think it strange that most people could build their own furniture – until a generation or two ago, nearly every house had at least one person in it capable of making a full sit-down supper each night. These are just skills we lost.

But like cooking, they are skills we can reclaim.

I am renovating our 70-year-old unretouched pantry/laundry room right now, which is the first part of the larger kitchen renovation I am planning for this summer. And we needed some new pantry shelves for canned goods. They don’t have to be Instagram-able. They need to hold up cans of food. They need to be painted, in order to protect the shelves and make them easier to clean. They need to be strong.

I need vernacular shelves.

Yesterday afternoon I knocked them out – 60 inches long, 42 inches high, to go under a window in the laundry room. I made them from 1×8 Southern Yellow Pine, the wood of Southern vernacular furniture for generations of my people, acquired from Home Depot. Southern Yellow Pine is stronger than Maple when it has fully dried, and it has a pronounced grain pattern that some people love.

The shelves are spaced 9.5 inches apart, so two normal tin cans will fit on each shelf, stacked on top of each other, and they are 7.25 inches wide, so two cans will fit front to back as well. The top shelf is five inches under the window sill, so the top shelf has room for only one can in height. I used some 3/4inch quarter round as cleats to hold the shelves in place, which were then glued and screwed in place.

Tomorrow I will caulk and paint them so they can cure over the weekend and I can load them up next week.

Literally the only tools it took to make this was a saw, a speed square, a pencil, and a drill/driver, some 2 inch screws and wood glue (These are all simple tools you should probably have as part of a basic DIY kit.). It took an hour to build. It will theoretically hold 266 standard cans of food in a space previously unused, taking up less than 3.5 square feet, and the total cost, not counting paint, even in these inflationary times was less than the cost of a single Billy Bookcase from Ikea, and it will last the rest of my life.