Hugh's Blog

The Movies I Can’t Watch

The longer I am away from doing work on the streets, the more I realize how traumatic that work actually was, the ways it impacted me and my brain, and the very real ways it continues to show up. Here’s a small example:

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but if I had to guess, it was probably in 2016 or so, when the worst of the burnout was coming on. It was probably inevitable, spending as much of my time as I did cleaning up messes other people had made because of their bad choices. But somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to watch people engage in self-destructive behavior. Even if they are only actors, pretending to do it.

For example, last year, we watched the movie The United States vs. Billie Holiday. It was a masterful movie, brilliantly shot. And I got up and walked out of the room at least five times. If you don’t know, a central theme of the movie (as well as a central theme of Holiday’s life) was her recurring bad choices around drug use.

It’s not the drug use itself that bothers me, really – it is seeing her have a way out, and making a choice you will end poorly. It’s like the opposite of empathy, or perhaps more like negative empathy – I understand what she is feeling, I just reject it. And I can’t watch it. I literally feel anxiety at watching people make self-destructive choices. And sometimes, it’s so bad I have to leave the room.

Or another example: I recently discovered the British crime drama Unforgotten, which has five seasons of back issues on Amazon Prime. Each season follows one storyline, and the idea is that we are following a police unit that deals with murders that happened 20+ years ago. Now that the murders are being investigated, all the people who were involved and haven’t heard anything about this case in forever and went on with their lives now have this all dredged up again. It’s fascinating and very well done.

But in season two, a character makes recurring bad decisions that are self-destructive, and the choices could impact a child. I had to stop in episode 4, and just skip on to the next season. I couldn’t watch someone make self-destructive decisions.

Unfortunately, people making self-destructive choices is a major plot device in TV and movies.

Take people who cheat on their partners, for example. I can watch a movie where that happens, as long as there isn’t a scene where they consciously make the decision to do it. I’m Ok with people who live a life of crime, as long as there isn’t a scene where they consciously violate someone’s trust, like stealing from Grandma to fund their addiction. If there is a scene where they appear to be making a choice, and they choose a self-destructive option when they had a healing one available to them, I will probably get up and leave – at least for a while.

These things are legitimately triggering for me. And there isn’t an easy shorthand explanation for the specific trigger. So, I get caught by surprise a lot, which makes watching anything other than kids cartoons pretty hard.

It is similar to the way I can’t handle being around people who are drunk, but it’s actually worse. I feel dread and a sense of doom for the people engaged in self-destructive behavior. I feel – literally feel, in my gut, in my bones, even – what I imagine they should feel, but don’t.

Brains are strange, though. Because I saw two violent murders happen in front of me in the years I did that work, and while I don’t particularly enjoy realistic violent movies, they don’t bother me in the same way that movies about drug use or self-destruction do.

That’s the thing about trauma – you don’t know where it will show up until it does.

Creamed Chicken

They say smell is the oldest of the five senses we humans have. I certainly believe it – There have been times I haven’t smelled a thing in 30 years, and then I do, and I’m instantly taken back. It’s as if the smell is somehow a shortcut to the exact spot in my brain where that memory hides.

I will always remember that hot summer night on Parris Island whenever I smell rotting fruit. I will always think of my Great Aunt’s bathroom when I smell rusting metal. The smell of strawberries instantly transports me into a walk-in cooler in Byhalia, MS, where 16 year old me would hide when I should have been working and would eat the Louisiana strawberries that I should have been putting on the store shelves.

And the smell of hot tuna always transports me back to my momma’s kitchen on a day in 1980: A day I should have been in school, but was home instead, sick.

It was a cold day, and I had been running a fever all night and so Mom let me lay on the couch and watch The Price is Right on TV instead of going to school.

I had dozed off, somewhere before the Showcase Showdown and she gently woke me. The TV was off, and I felt a bit better, and she sat on the couch beside me and asked if I was hungry.

“I’m about to fix some creamed tuna over toast,” she said.

I told her I didn’t know what that was.

“I know. But I love it, and your dad doesn’t – he calls it cat food – and since it’s just us today, I thought I would make some.”

We walked into our small kitchen, and I drug a chair over to the stove, to watch.

She got out a small pan and drained a can of tuna. We only had the kind packed in water, because Dad was watching his cholesterol – and she heated up a can of cream of mushroom soup and stirred in a can’s worth of water, and added the tuna to it while it heated.

In the meantime, she put four slices of bread in our toaster, and when the toast was done, she tore it into small pieces, which she placed in the white Corelle bowls with the small blue flower trim they had gotten as newlyweds. She set them on the oak table that my grandfather rescued from the fire in the 1930s.

She took a serving spoon from the drawer and spooned the tuna mixture over both our bowls and then stirred it well, to coat the chunks of bread with the ersatz roux.

The kitchen did smell vaguely of cat food, to my dad’s point, but not obnoxiously so. At that moment, it just smelled good, and safe.

I still love it – creamed tuna over toast, even if I don’t make it that way anymore. I would learn, later, about bechamel sauce and seasoning and the value of aromatics. But that would all come later.

Mom and I didn’t have a lot of things that were just ours – we still don’t, actually – but our love of creamed tuna over toast was one of them. And to this day, when I don’t feel particularly well, I will make a version of this dish and just know everything is going to be OK.

I want to go on record that there’s nothing wrong with making it the way Mom did. I mean, if you are sick, or have been pulling lots of shifts, or just don’t have a lot of energy, spending 10 minutes dumping two cans into a pot and then pouring it over toasted bread may be all you have the energy for. And if that’s true, then go for it.

But, if you find yourself with 15 minutes and a smidgen more energy, you can make something remarkable. These days, I often make this using chicken, because my wife shares my dad’s feelings about seafood, and I want to keep living here. But you can replace the chicken in this recipe with tuna and it still works.

Everything you will need for this is in your pantry, or at least should be. Bread. Flour. Butter. Some leftover chicken. Salt. Pepper. Chicken broth, An onion. Milk. Love.

Before you get started, let’s talk about chicken. You can use leftover chicken of any sort. White meat. Dark meat. Canned chicken. Leftover rotisserie chicken. Chicken legs you bought on clearance and poached specifically for this dish. It doesn’t matter. Really. They all have different flavor profiles, but they are all good. You will need to shred it up, and you need about two cups of it.

You want to start with two tablespoons of butter, which you put in a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat.

While it’s melting, take a small onion, and dice it fine. You don’t need a lot of onion, and if I’m feeling fancy and it’s after payday, I would probably use a large shallot for this, and if it’s a few days before payday, I would probably use the 1/2 an onion sitting in the crisper drawer in a ziplock bag leftover from God knows what.

Sweat the onions for about five minutes in the melted butter – don’t let them burn, and this means you may have to reduce the heat. Then put in two tablespoons of flour, and, using your whisk, get the flour coated in the melted butter. Just like when you are making milk gravy, you don’t want this to burn. This is a white sauce, so all you want is the flour and oil to be mixed well.

Slowly add a cup of half and half, a 1/4 cup or so at a time, whisking all the while, until it’s all mixed in. Then do the same with the chicken broth – add it slowly, while whisking, until it is a lovely velvety smooth, and probably slightly yellow. That color is one of my favorite colors. The smell right now is something else, too.

If you are feeling fancy, this is where you throw in about half a cup of what we called English peas, and you probably call green peas or sweet peas. Little green round peas, preferably frozen, is what we’re going for here. And then add the chicken, stirring it all in, so the lovely creamy sauce covers the chicken and peas, and the peas look like little green islands in a light yellow sea.

You want this to simmer for about 5 minutes, to both warm up the peas and chicken, and to thicken the sauce. If it gets too thick, you can drizzle in a bit of hot water while stirring, and also remember that it will thicken a bit as it sits and cools.

While the sauce is simmering, start making toast – two to three slices per person is about right. When the toast is done, I like to rip it into rough chunks about 2 inches square. Then pour a generous half cup of sauce over the top, and if you have any, sprinkle the top with fresh chopped parsley.

This is one of my favorite meals. There are variations galore. This will serve two hungry people or 4 polite ones, but it scales up perfectly – 2 tablespoons of fat and flour per cup of broth and cup of dairy.

This is also lovely over biscuits, served like you would sausage gravy, or over plain white rice, which is how I serve it for supper or when company would show up unexpectedly in the before times.

Go buck wild and use whipping cream or half and half if you are a generally optimistic person, but whole milk is what I use most often. Some of you are scared of your food and will be tempted to use skim milk, and while I would discourage you, I can’t stop you.

Some people, I have learned, just want to watch the world burn.

Poverty Charges Interest

The ways having grown up in poverty affects your brain, even when you are no longer in poverty, often feels unreal. Decisions you inherited from other people affect how you interpret things, feel things, and perceive things for the rest of your life.

Like the feeling of fear when you see a truck from the water department rolling slowly down your street when you KNOW you paid your bill and you are sure they are not coming to your house.

The shame you feel in the pit of your stomach when the register is broken and your card is declined at the store and you know to the penny how much is in your account and you KNOW it isn’t your fault.

Then the shame you feel when you realize it declined when you are buying a bottle of wine and some nice cheese for a party at your house, and you wonder if people in line behind you, who see all of this, are judging you for what you are trying to buy. Because how dare you, poor person, enjoy things!

The panic you feel when you are getting low on food, even though you have money in the bank and live near the grocery store and you are in no danger whatsoever of going hungry or even being uncomfortable.

That you will, for the rest of your life, always prefer mushy green beans from a can instead of the much healthier frozen or fresh green beans, because that is what you grew up eating, and the frozen beans taste “weird” to you.

Having grown up poor means berating yourself for buying the good olive oil instead of the generic, even when you can afford it. It also means feeling a little guilty about buying olive oil in the first place.

And we won’t even talk about how hard it is to pay for butter instead of margarine.

The constant feeling that if there is money in your checking account, it is because you have a bill you have forgotten to pay.

Having grown up poor, you will often have a strong resistance to paying for quality. Yes, you know the more expensive, better quality item will last longer and is thus a better value. But you also know the comfort of paying $30 for a thing, instead of paying $65 and having $35 more dollars in the bank. Because there have been times in your life when you had a problem that $35 would solve.

Despite the reality being that you are no longer living in poverty, you feel relief when you automatically sort by price. You find yourself judging people who shop in stores you can afford, but don’t believe people “like you” shop in because in your head you are still the kid who got made fun of because he wore girls’ jeans to school. And for the rest of your life, despite your circumstances, you will always feel slightly uncomfortable, like you are wearing someone else’s clothes.

So instead of buying the more reliable car, you buy the cheaper one, which is less reliable and requires expensive repairs. Or you buy cheap clothes – almost certainly made from oppressive labor practices, which only drags others into being victimized by your experiences. Or your reluctance to pay for good, quality food leads to dental work, diabetes, or other health problems. Or you buy the cheaper technology, which isn’t exactly what you need, but close, so you are always just off, a little behind, a little less than what is needed.

Like the payments on your student loans, whose principle you paid off a decade ago but the payments resulting from the usurious interest rates continue to decimate your budget month after month, the after-effects of childhood poverty linger long after the original deprivation is gone.

Poverty charges interest.

Current Events

I really dislike blogging about current events. There are a number of reasons for this: One is that these posts take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours to write, and I don’t want to invest that effort in something that will have a short self-life. Another is that I don’t have the staff or resources to do it well, and with the exception of a very few subjects, I don’t have the knowledge. And that shallow sort of posting that would result just encourages hot-takes, which provokes much more heat than light, which is sorta the opposite of what I want to do.

As I write this, there is a news story that has the attention of a lot of people. A lot of people are commenting on it – all people who don’t know any of the participants, and largely are people who don’t share any major identities with the participants. And I have resisted saying anything of substance about it, and I have had some people message me and ask why.

So, I thought I would take this time to tell you a story.

On Sunday, June the 12th of 2016, I was at the beach. I had snagged a weekend away and had turned off my phone, and we were enjoying the small town of Carolina Beach, which was our happy place when we lived in North Carolina.

It had been a rough year, and we were thankful for the weekend away. That Saturday night, after a day at the beach, soaking up the sun, we ate at our favorite restaurant and I ate popcorn shrimp. It’s funny the things you remember.

The next morning we lounged around the hotel room, moving slowly. We went out for coffee and donuts and then headed towards Fort Fisher, to take the Ferry to Southport, a cute little marina town and home to perhaps a dozen antique shops and flea market operations. Once there, we intended to grab lunch before spending the afternoon antiquing before slowly edging ourselves toward the 3-hour drive home. It was a trip we had made many times.

We stopped at the Fort Fisher Park gift shop – I was looking for a particular gift for a friend, and I had seen something similar at the gift shop before, so I stopped there, to see if they still had it. They did not. Renee and I hit the bathroom before heading to the ferry, and when I was done, I went to the car to wait for her.

While I waited, I turned on my phone for the first time in nearly 36 hours. It was around noon, and I got a bunch of texts from friends – all of whom were LGBT. All of them mentioned a nightclub shooting.

It turned out the night before, a madman had shot up a nightclub in Orlando, deliberately targeting members of the LGBT community. He killed 49 people and wounded 53. I called Kelly, who was the assistant director at the LGBT Center in Raleigh at the time.

She was in tears.

That night they were planning a vigil in Raleigh. They wanted me to be there. Could I do it?

Yes. When Renee came back from the restroom, we changed plans, grabbed a quick bite, and headed home.

That night I sat in a parking lot, holding a candle and listening to Trans folx and Queer folx and Gay folx and Non-Binary folx cry and confess their fears, their anger, and their rage. I hunted out the folk I knew, hugged them and prayed with the ones who wanted it, and listened to the ones that didn’t.

The next day I wrote a post that went sorta viral, with a title like, 6 Things Straight Christian Folks Can Do In the Aftermath of the Pulse Shooting. It got lost in a site redesign, but it wasn’t brilliant. It did things like asked us to listen, to offer help as defined by the people who needed it, and to curate and amplify and prioritize the voices of people with less power than we had. It was the most shared thing I wrote that year.

Then on Tuesday, I got a call from the LGBT Center. They had a group of people who were grieving hard, and they wanted a clergy person to be there to help them process, and would I be willing to do that?

I reminded them that I was straight, and questioned if I was the right person to do it. They laughed and said yes, but that the Ven diagram of clergy folks and people they trusted pretty much only had me in the overlap.

So I said that of course I would.

That Thursday night, I sat in a room, surrounded by people who had been persecuted by people who looked a lot like me and had held exactly the same credentials I held, and together we talked about the things that scared us, and the things that gave us hope, and mostly, I just listened and held space. And after that was done, there was hugging and crying and for not the last time in my life, I felt honored that I got invited to sit with hurting people in the midst of their pain.

I don’t tell you that story to highlight my role. I wasn’t any sort of hero or star at all. But I did want to tell it to make a little room to talk about something else: How to use our platform.

Historically, only movie stars and politicians had platforms. But now, we all do. And the whole world is listening. Even people like my great-aunt, who has 222 Facebook friends and is a retired librarian, have a platform these days. I mean, imagine the length a retired librarian would have had to go in 1995 to get her message out to 222 people. Now, she need only hit enter on a post on Facebook.

So, since we all have an audience, I think we all have an obligation to use it wisely.

When something happens, I do a sort of internal algorithm. It starts with something like, am I more identified with the victim or the oppressor in this? When the Pulse nightclub shooting happened, the victims were largely Latinx and LGBT, neither an identity I hold. However, both of those identities have been persecuted by Straight Christian people, which ARE two identities I hold. So I identified, in this case, more closely with the oppressor.

Another question is, “What can I do?”. Where can I bring my gifts to bear? I can show up, in a way that doesn’t center me. I can ask the people affected how I can be helpful and then do that thing. I can use my assets (like a social media following) to speak to people who look like me and tell them what I had learned.

And the last thing I consider is, “What is mine to do?”. In that case, I made myself available, and then as I was asked, I showed up in ways they deemed helpful.

But I had, at that point, worked with and among the LGBT community in Raleigh for a decade. I had a deep well of trust built up. I didn’t just show up with my hot take on what they should do, or ought to feel, or how to move on. They didn’t need my words – they could speak for themselves. They needed my solidarity. So, based on trust acquired over a long period of relationship, they asked for what they needed. And I said yes.

So, that is how I handle contemporary events. I don’t do hot takes. I don’t rush to have a position on controversial issues. I don’t use my platform to incite anger. And I don’t ever want to tell people who have been harmed how they ought to feel, or what they ought to be doing.

Instead, I ask myself: Am I the victim or the oppressor? What can I do? What is mine to do? What needs to be said? Who needs to hear it? And, perhaps most importantly, am I the person who needs to be saying it?

Sometimes, that means I’m just amplifying minority reports and voices. And sometimes, it’s calling out people who look like me and asking them to do better. And sometimes, that looks like being silent.

DIY Guy

When I was in financial sales, my mentor was a man named Jerry.

Jerry was a dapper man, always in a sports coat and slacks. His shoes were immaculate and shiny. He went through the carwash every time he filled his gas tank. His image and appearance were very important to Jerry.

We would have lunch every Friday, and on one particular Friday, he said he had to go to his mechanics when he left the restaurant because he had an appointment to get new windshield wipers put on his car.

I told him that was ridiculous – that he shouldn’t spend money on something like that, because it would be so easy to just do it himself.

“Hugh,” he said. “You don’t understand. I want to always make enough money that I never have to do it myself. It’s not just that I don’t know how to do it myself – but that I never want to know how to do it myself.“

That would bother me to no end. There is no way I would drive somewhere and then pay someone to do something I could do myself in literally 5 minutes without getting dirty or even inconvenienced.

But if there are two kinds of people when it comes to Doing-It-Yourself, Jerry was one kind of person, and I am the other.

It’s not even that I particularly enjoy putting on windshield wipers. I just can’t imagine paying someone else to do it. I can’t even imagine asking someone else to do it.

A few years ago, it was late on a Saturday and I was outside, measuring the spot for the new potting bench when I realized the faucet on the patio was leaking. Not a huge leak, but a pinhole of spray.

At first, I just thought the hose was loose, but then saw it was coming from behind the faucet. I got out my monkey wrench and when I turned the faucet to tighten it, the pipe broke off under the house. It was a 70-year-old galvanized pipe, and it had finally rusted through.

At the time I didn’t know where the water cut-off for the house was. Since it was gushing all over the patio and not in the house, I decided to let it spray while I figured out how to fix it.

I crawled under the house with a flashlight and saw the broken pipe was 1/2 inch galvanized pipe and what I needed was most likely a 10-inch nipple. Then I went to Home Depot – water still spraying all over the patio.

30 minutes later, I have a new faucet, a 12-inch nipple (just to be safe), and some plumbers tape, because while I own at least 10 rolls of plumber’s tape, I can never find it when I need it.

I crawl back under the house, holding a flashlight in my mouth, and disconnect the nipple, causing water to no longer spray all over the patio, but now to gush under the house and all over me.

It was then that I noticed the corner where the pipe is had, in the past, been some raccoon’s litter box, as now raccoon turds are floating in the water that is rising all around me.

Lovely.

I get the old pipe loose, and when I knock it out, loose mortar in the brick wall falls into the hole through the wall, keeping me from putting the new nipple in. Back out from under the house I go.

Back on the patio, I take a hammer and the old nipple and bust the offending mortar lose, and then crawl back into the raccoon-turd-filled swimming pool that is my crawlspace. This time I wrap the nipple with plumber’s tape, slide it through the wall, and with my monkey wrench, get it installed and tight. Water is no longer gushing under the house – it is now back to gushing all over the patio.

Then I crawl out of the raccoon septic tank, drenched to the bone and trying hard not to think about what germs are all over me, and then wrap the nipple that is jutting 2 and a half inches proud of the foundation wall (it turns out it WAS a 10-inch nipple after all, but I figured it was better to be proud than to be short) with pipe tape, and then put on the faucet, with water spraying everywhere, including all over me. Then it’s finished, and I turn off the faucet and everything is mercifully quiet again, except for the water dripping off everything, including me.

Elapsed time: 1 hour and 15 minutes. I paid less than $15 in materials. It was on a Saturday night, so it would have been an emergency plumber call at $175 an hour if I had been able to get one at all.

I had never replaced a faucet before that day. I had a vague idea of how the plumbing works, and maybe $30 worth of tools. The biggest thing I had going for me was being willing to do it. Or, put another way, I had an orientation or a bent toward doing it myself. I honestly never considered calling a plumber.

On some days – like that one – it saves me a lot of money to do things myself. But sometimes, it really doesn’t.

Like right now, I’m in the middle of changing platforms for one of the newsletters I publish each week. I am not a coder. Or a programmer. I’m just a slightly above-average user of this sort of technology.

When I began blogging back in 2003, I taught myself HTML. And then rudimentary CSS, and learned how to do some basic work with databases and then PHP. Not because I really wanted to know how to do it, but because I couldn’t imagine having to ask someone else to change a picture for me on a website, or to tweak the font or increase the padding on an image. I couldn’t imagine asking for that sort of help even if I could have afforded it.

And along the way, I learned how to do lots of stuff, and for sure saved a lot of money.

But, as I said, right now I’m changing platforms. And the new CMS I’m using is one I’ve never used before. Like, it works entirely different than any CMS I had used before. But, I said, I can learn how to do this!

I then spent some 30 hours trying to figure out how to do it. I have been tied up for over a month – off and on – trying to work out a solution that was within my technical abilities. Have watched a dozen tutorials.

Yesterday I broke down and just paid someone to do it for me. They charged me $95, and now it’s done.

It frustrates me beyond belief that should it break, or I do something wrong and somehow screw up a setting, I will not be able to fix it, and will have to pay someone else to do it. I feel stupid because I couldn’t do it because I have all the tools to do it – just not the knowledge.

But sometimes, it just makes sense to pay someone else. It is hardly the best use of my time to learn a whole new type of niche tech that only does this one sort of thing that literally nobody else I know will ever use. That is very different from learning how, say, WordPress works, which powers ⅓ of the public websites on the internet.

It still bothered me more to spend that $95 than I care to admit. But that’s just the sort of person I am, I guess.

Streams of Consciousness

I’m sitting at my desk, after supper, with Leonard Cohen playing on the Amazon SpyBot, and I’m wondering what in the hell to write about today. I’m tired, and not feeling it, but I believe in magic, so let’s just do some stream of consciousness and see what happens, shall we?

I normally have my post finished by now – I have a number of stubs and half-finished posts in my hard drive, but after looking over them today, nothing strikes a chord. I will finish all of them eventually, but none of them excite me right now, and I try not to force it. When it comes, it comes, and while I can fake it if I have to, I don’t have to right now.

We had creamed chicken over biscuits tonight for supper, and one day I will tell you about that, how to make it, and why I always think about Dad whenever I make it. But I don’t really have the energy for that tonight, either. It’s good, though, and you will like both the story and the recipe. But that can wait for another day.

I’ve had a wonderful week this week, both at work and at home – a week filled with delightful walks in my neighborhood, pleasant talks with several of my neighbors, who bless us tremendously with their presence, and getting to have an impact on moving my state closer to a more just place for all of us to live. Of all the places I have ever lived, I love this state so much. It’s not better than any other place, but it’s a really good place, and we love it so.

We have good neighbors, by and large, who have lots of kids who are always happy to see me. I think I’m destined to be the kindly old guy in the neighborhood that always has hard candy in his pocket. I feel like I’ve been training for this my whole life. People give directions to each other based on our house non-ironically: “It’s the third house on the right past the house with the swing and the giant chicken.”

My new bicycle does nothing to disabuse the neighbors and their kids of my eccentricity – if anything, it enhances it. I intend to get a bulb horn to honk at the kids as I go by. I feel like I probably ought to develop one of several stories I have in-process about being a good neighbor and having good neighbors, but the problem is that I can put everything I know about having good neighbors on a post-it note: Be kind. Stay in your lane. And expect to be a good neighbor first. Hard to flesh that out into 800 words.

The world is opening back up, which excites me and terrifies me all at the same time. I have a lot of thoughts about that, but I’m feeling pretty good right now, in my post supper fullness, watching the sun go down behind the trees across the street, listening to Leonard sing about how he hated to see another tired man lay down his hand like he was giving up the holy game of poker, while the highway curls away, and I realize that to write about any of that will surely ruin my mood.

And then I remember that today is the anniversary of that day, long ago, when a faith community that knew me and loved me anyway recognized my gifts and formalized their recognition of those gifts by ordaining me. I am always convinced I am the most unlikely of ministers, but I have managed to carve out a spot for myself in that world, being the sort of pastor who can be heard by people who really don’t like pastors. Sometimes, I wish other pastors were as grateful for me as the people who don’t trust them are, but if I have to choose, I’m confident I made the right choice. But I don’t really want to talk about faith much these days – especially on the internet, where we really only generate heat and not light. Sermons are, in my opinion, better seen than heard, anyway.

Leonard just told me that there ain’t no cure for love, and I think he may be trolling me at this point.

So, tonight I am just sitting here, typing instead of writing, and feeling tremendously grateful, and a little afraid – the way I always am a little when I don’t have words – and hopeful and tired, but the good kind, that comes from being poured out and used up and not the bad kind that comes from watching your soul being burned out, leaving only husks behind.

I have known that, too, and am glad this is not that.

But mostly, I’m proud to be sitting in my office surrounded by books and music, with a full belly and a clear conscience, with the tools to express myself, if not the desire, and I look longingly at the new books that arrived today and know that what I want most right now is to brew myself a cup of tea and to turn this thing off and to curl up in the armchair and slip gently into that world which exists only between the covers of books.

Goodnight, friends. I wish you every good thing.

Transition Rituals

A while back I wrote a post that was almost entirely a list of things you could do to take better care of yourself, especially if you were in a helping profession. Two of the items on that list involved transition rituals.

A transition ritual is when you change state or context – like, going from work to not work – and you have some way to mark the occasion, to tell your brain that the transition has happened. I would argue these are always important, but if you are neuro-atypical – such as you, like me, have ADHD – they are vital.

Because while neurotypical people may be able to zip in and out of states and contexts, multi-tasking to beat the band, those of us who are neuro-atypical assuredly cannot.

For example – if you stop by your local every day on the way home and grab a beer – that’s a transition ritual. There are healthier ones, for sure, but it’s a ritual all the same. When I used to work in an office, I would pull up in the driveway of my house and walk around my yard, checking out the flowers and looking to see what was in bloom before I went into the house after getting home from work. It was a way to tell my brain I was home.

These days I work a lot from home (I mean, don’t we all?), and so it’s harder to demarcate what’s home and what’s work. So a thing I will often do is go for a walk around my block when I’m done for the day, as a way to tell myself I’m “walking home.”

But there are other transitions that have rituals, too. In the morning, I make myself coffee with a reverence that approaches that of the Japanese Tea Ceremony. When I go into my workshop to work, I always spend the first 10 minutes or so straightening up and sharpening the tools I will use that day. At night, I turn my phone to do not disturb before I put it on the charger.

When I sit at my desk in the morning, I open my upper right-hand desk drawer, take out the Mead 80 Page Composition Notebook that lives there, uncap my Pilot Metropolitan rollerball pen, turn off the monitor on my computer so I won’t be distracted, and set my cup of coffee on the upper right-hand side of my blotter. Then I’m ready to write my Daily Pages.

Lots of transition rituals. I’m not alone in this. David Sedaris once said something to the effect that he always goes swimming while on the road for his speaking engagements, not because he likes to swim, but because he likes the rituals involved in getting ready to swim and after he has swum.

These sorts of rituals may sound fussy, but especially for those of us who are not neurotypical, they can be lifesaving. Because for folks like us, transitions can be hard. A disadvantage of hyperfocus we ADHD folks have is that pulling us out of that zone can be incredibly disorienting and can feel almost violent at times. So, I have found that having distinct rituals to mark the transitions can be helpful in changing states or contexts.

The two solutions I have developed in my own life to deal with this are A) transition rituals and B) to state your needs. It often feels super-fussy to prioritize what you need to be your best self. But telling people what you need is a way to love them.

It also helps people love me better, because when I tell them what I need (like, a soft landing when I walk into the office, instead of being hit with a list of decisions I need to make when I walk into the door) they will absolutely get a better interaction with me, and whatever I bring to the table will be better thought out and more useful.

Showing your work

In school, I would often get in trouble in math class for not showing my work. I would know the answer, could even figure out the answer, but the process I used was often a combination of intuition and huge logical leaps, none of which translated well to paper. As a result, it was often hard to show how I had arrived at that conclusion, and thus had a hard time “showing my work”, much to the chagrin of both my math teachers and my grades. Math aside, however, I have, especially as an adult, become a huge fan of showing my work.

Very little is new in the world. While the technology to do something may change, the thing itself seldom does. For example, there is a very real difference between people like me who write on blogs, and people like the pamphleteers of the 1700s in Colonial America that stoked the colonies onto Revolution, but it is largely a difference of technology and not type. Had blogging been available to Benjamin Franklin, he would have been far more dangerous.

For those of us who are doing work that is self-generated, as opposed to work that someone else tells us how to do, we are constantly scrambling, looking for models or examples of people who are already doing the sort of work we want to do, so that we can glean from them how to do it.

There’s nothing scandalous in this – in the ancient world one learned to be a rhetorician by reciting the speeches given by famous people, and by so doing, one learned how to deliver a speech, as well as phrasing and sentence structure, so that when you went to write your own speech, you had a mental model to compare it to.

But first, you have to have a model.

If you work at IBM in sales, this isn’t a problem at all. You will be assigned to work with a seasoned veteran who will show you the ropes, who will walk you through best practices, who will tell you how he organizes his day and how to handle the follow-up. But I don’t work in sales at IBM. I, like a lot of so-called creatives, have to generate my own work, have to figure out my own solutions.

In the early days of blogging, we are all out there, floundering. I remember when my friend Richard, who also had a blog at the time, showed me the analytics he had set up on his blog for the first time. This was in perhaps 2004, and they were primitive compared to anything we have now, but I didn’t even know such a thing existed. But once I did, I knew what to look for and there was no stopping me.

Often back then, bloggers would have a colophon on their blog, either in the footer or on a separate page, where you told what tools you used. This gave a newcomer to blogging breadcrumbs to follow. If one wanted to start their own blog, now they had links to follow, terms to Google. It was an incredible act of generosity to people who didn’t have traditional tech backgrounds or who came from historically disadvantaged communities. FYI: mine for this blog is here.

When I was looking for creative models for this sort of creative universe (or Hughniverse, as a Patron called it the other day)of projects I have, I lucked across Craig Mod, who writes long essays about how his business works, which had links and examples galore. One could almost take that essay linked to above and duplicate his workflow. You could absolutely duplicate his tech stack.

So, a thing I am committed to doing going forward is showing my work. How did I build a blog from scratch? How did I put together a newsletter? What host do I use? Should I use Substack or Mailchimp? How did you arrive at that conclusion?

In other words, I’m going to start showing my work.

The Banality of Good

I believe it was Kierkegaard who said that life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forward. I could go look it up, but even if it wasn’t him, you know what whoever it was is getting at – we never understand the present nearly as well as we understand the past, because the past can be examined.

And examine it we do. In the current mess we live in, it seems every journalist, thought leader, guru, and pundit has a different opinion about how we got here. If we took away all the posts that blame others for where we are, would Facebook even be a viable business?

The past is written in stone, however, and will not change. While the past is useful for teaching us what went wrong, the future is written in sand, is infinitely malleable, and is where we should put most of our efforts.

How do we get there from here? How do we build the world as it is into the world as it could be? How do we change the future?

Having been in movement work for well more than a decade now, organizing poor people in the South, I have had the privilege of knowing some of the best activists and organizers in the US – some of whom are famous, but most of whom you have never heard of.

A while back, one of them – a woman who creates a place of refuge and safety for people without homes in a Midwestern town – and I were talking about a group that had just come through to tour her facility. The group was from an out-of-town church, and they had heard of her work and wanted to come to see the “radical” work this woman was doing.

She told me the group seemed happy when they left, but that while leading them around, she had felt a bit like a fraud.

“It doesn’t feel radical. It just feels like my life”.

I told her she was in good company – that Dorothy Day had felt the same way. In the postscript of Dorothy Day’s memoir, the Catholic activist and founder of the Catholic Worker movement describes how the movement came about, or at least, how it felt.

“We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, ‘We need bread.’ We could not say, ‘Go, be thou filled.’ If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread. We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded. We were just sitting there talking and someone said, ‘Let’s all go live on a farm.’ It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”

It all just happened. We were just sitting there, talking when it happened.

Of course, the truth is, the Catholic Worker did not just happen by accident. But it wasn’t the result of a grand plan, either. The reality is that it was the result of countless decisions. Ordinary decisions.

In her writings on the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “The banality of evil”. We want to believe, she argued, that massive evil is caused by external forces. Hitler was a psychopath, say, or that Eichman was mentally ill. But that isn’t true.

The reason massive evil happens is because of countless small compromises, countless small decisions that, on their own, are relatively benign and ordinary. Big evil is the result of little evil, quiet evil, banal evil done again and again and again.

I have come to believe the opposite is true as well. Goodness, Peace, Love, Harmony – whatever you want to call it, isn’t the result of grand sweeping gestures, but tiny micro-actions, repeated often. And that the banality of goodness, to coin a phrase, is the sort of thing Dorothy Day is describing in her postscript. Somebody said “We need bread” and so, instead of saying back, “Well, that sucks,” they went and got them some bread. And then they did it again, and again.

So, the good news in all of this is that if Goodness is brought about not by Saints, but by small decisions, then we all get to be involved. We all get to play a part in turning the world as it is into the world as it should be. And every little bit – our little bit – counts.

Secondhand Memories

Her name was Dorothy, and she had two sisters, Louise and Wilma. I was born on her birthday, and she loved me without reservation. Her life was a tragic one, the stuff of Southern Noir. She married for love twice, and both husbands would die tragic, unexpected deaths, both of them would leave her with a young child she had to raise alone, and both of them left her scant few resources with which to do it.

My father was her youngest son, and she died when I was four, and I only have two memories of her. The house she lived in was my grandfather’s house – he had moved her into it when they were married, in search of second chances, both of them having lost spouses and raised children on their own.

The house was old and drafty. It had been moved from its original moorings at some point in its past, using donkeys and greased poles, and so the doors no longer shut properly, and the windows may or may not open, depending upon whim and humidity. It had propane space heaters for heat, and in this memory, it was very cold, and early in the morning.

I was up before my parents and was walking around in my pajamas, looking for a grownup. I found her, wearing her housecoat, squatting flat-footed in front of the space heater in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette.

It was the cigarettes that killed her, of course, but slowly. She smoked because it was the 70s and of course she did. We brought a hospital bed into her living room, in front of the window so she could see what was going on, and so she would know who was coming to the house. That was where she spent her last days – watching the driveway, looking for company.

In this memory, she and I are laying on that hospital bed in the living room, in front of the window, and she was reading a book to me. The blanket was an animal print – I remember the cheetah and the lion and the giraffe – and she would tell me stories about each of them in turn. The pillow we lay on had a corner that had unraveled, and bits of foam rubber were poking from it. I don’t remember the book, but I remember feeling loved, and I remember her laugh that would end up in racking coughs.

That is really all I remember about her on my own. I have lots of stories filed in my head about her, but they are second-hand stories – stories dad told me, or her sisters told me when I was older, or that mom has told me recently since Dad died. Like I know her favorite flower was the orange daylily, but that is only because every summer, Dad would tell me that when the orange ditchlilies would bloom.

And she loved the music of Roy Orbison – especially Pretty Woman. But again, I know this secondhand, from hearing that fact relayed to me my entire childhood whenever it would come on the radio.

I was born on her birthday as a gift to her. Because of my size (10 pounds, 11 ounces) and Mom being tiny, I had to be born by cesarean, and so Mom got to pick the date. They picked Dorothy’s birthday. I’m told she loved this and was elated. But that’s second-hand, too.

Since we moved back to Mississippi a few years ago, I have planted lots of flowers. Shasta Daisy, yarrow, Asiatic lily, columbine, flags, and roses. So many roses. And daylilies. Lots of daylilies.

Including orange ditchlilies at the end of my driveway.

In a few months, it will be my birthday again. I will turn 50 this year, and were she still with us, she would be 111. Renee asked what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I told her I don’t have much planned. I will sit in front of my living room window, and listen to Roy Orbison, and read a book that makes me feel loved, and every so often I will gaze out the window toward the end of the driveway, looking for company, but not without also seeing the ditchlillies that always bloom on our birthday.