So I started therapy last month. The idea is to fix me.
How, exactly, am I broken you ask? Well, I have trouble maintaining romantic relationships. My MO is always the same. Meet someone, fall in love, get comfortable, start to question my own worth, start to question her worth if she can be with someone as worthless as me, start to focus on what I perceive as weaknesses in her, break up. I've done it more than once; more than twice. I'm ashamed and saddened by it.
But I was never able to accept that I couldn't fix it myself. I always thought "I'll think long and hard about it, figure out my problem and find a better match next time."
My most recent bout with insanity was in May when I broke up with my amazing girlfriend of almost two years. I realized what a mistake it was pretty quickly, but I thought "She's away from me now and it's best if she keeps going." Months later, though, I missed her more not less. This was new. I felt like my heart still belonged to her, like it always would. I wanted to be worthy of her again. Most of all I didn't want to hurt her or anyone else ever again.
I didn't know if she would want me back, but I needed to be emotionally capable of being with her if she did. And even if she didn't want me any more I needed to be fixed in case I ever found someone else. So I sought help.
So far it's been interesting. Based on my family history my therapist must think I'm a likely candidate for a serial killer, heheh. I guess I never realized what an unhealthy bunch we were. Substance abuse, spousal abuse and child abuse are very popular pastimes in my family, it seems. I haven't really ever had any long-term stable relationships around me to serve as examples. I mean don't get me wrong, I don't blame any of who I am on other people. I'm my own man and my problems are my own as well. But my therapist thinks that the root of my problem lies there in my early childhood. It's funny that those strange early experiences which I always thought of as making me unique and kind of interesting, the experiences which gave me strength, also gave me my greatest weaknesses.
It kinda makes sense thinking about it now. I've no trouble giving credit to my family for shaping me in positive ways, so why do I have such difficulty blaming them for the negative shaping?
So I'm wading through my internal bog and loosening up the corpses buried there. I know I can't do it alone, but I finally feel like I can do it. With help from Miss Lady Ma'am (the therapist) and V (my former / future gf) of course.
Yep. Turns out that amazing girlfriend of almost two years still missed and loved me as much as I missed and loved her. It's a long process, but we're rebuilding us. And I intend to keep earning this second chance for the rest of my life.
So I'll keep you updated, nonexistant reader, as I move forward into a brighter future. Come along for the ride.
Peace,
Dunny
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
The Perseids
Are my memories of a childhood, lived with reckless abandon, all manufactured?
Did I invent that summer, 9 years old, when I slept under the stars in my vast desert back yard waiting for the Perseids without worrying about whether I would be abducted, raped, mutilated etc?
What a fucking great summer.
Did I really spend every waking moment of my seventh summer building a clubhouse in the woods, miles from home, without being beaten up or murdered by other children?
And is it POSSIBLE that I made it all the way through primary and secondary schools without being shot to death by my classmates? Or even worrying that I would be shot to death by my classmates?
Funny. My grandmother used to worry about how much more dangerous it was to be a child in my time than it was in hers.
At five years old, I hitch-hiked with two uncles in their early twenties from southern Illinois to northern Montana and back. It took us a month. I could tell you some stories from that one. Can you imagine allowing a child of five or ten or even fifteen to hitch-hike today, regardless of who was with them?
Is the world really that much more dangerous or filled with insanity now than it was thirty years ago? I mean let's look at the facts. 1978. The hippies had been largely replaced by the druggies. We stayed in a commune for part of the time we were gone. But this was hardly the tie-dye and flowers commune you might picture from 1968. All that remained of the flower children by '78 was sex, drugs, drugs, sex and the occasional firecracker lobbed at the social workers by the children of the left-over flower children who went totally unsupervised most of the time. Trust me on this one, I lit the first fuse. It wasn't a communal place in the 'to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities' kind of communist thinking. It was more of an 'I am so fucking stoned I shat my pants and didn't notice for two days' kind of commune. It gets sadder every time I remember it.
So what is it about now that makes the mother of my children fear to let them out of her sight? What has changed? When my daughter turned nine she and her brother couldn't even play in the front yard of their house without adult supervision because someone might swoop in and make them disappear forever. When will she be able to sleep under the stars, waiting for the Perseids?
I think it must have something to do with our information addiction. How many times did you check your Twitter today? Your email? Your Facebook? How many times did you hug your kids or tell them that you love them?
My daughter pointed out to me the other day that hers is the first generation raised from day one with total immersion in information the scale of which was never before imagined. That got me thinking. The constant plugged-in state is completely normal to them, not the neato innovation the rest of us are still amazed and/or frightened by. They are taught to read and write and love and hate by the internet. Their friends are mostly virtual. Their interactions are synthetic, sanitized and without consequence. Much of the time they're not able to draw a distinction between Fred Rogers and Fred Kruger until it's too late. They're all just teachers to a child with no guidance. And before you yell at me about home-schooling and web-nannies, no I'm not talking about YOUR children. I'm talking about OUR children; that sad invisible majority with two working parents and time on their hands. What we are left with is a nation with more technology than sense. The current parental generation doesn't see the looming problem because it's still new to us and not fundamental to our way of social-life. The next generation doesn't see the problem for the opposite reason; it's a normal and welcome part of everyday existence. The classic image of the TV babysitter has evolved into the internet surrogate parent.
And believe me; the hypocrisy of using a blog to complain about the internet hasn't escaped me.
So if the internet is our scapegoat for overloading and depersonalizing the minds of our children, let me ask you this: how many school shootings were there before the advent of television, or more specifically 24-hour news? Now that Fox News (may their knives chip and shatter), CNN, MSNBC, al Jazeera and a dozen others bring us live coverage of every massacre and bombing, often as it happens, there seems to be a lot more of them, don't you think? How many eighth graders would come to the conclusion that taking a gun to school to kill that bully is the best course of action without a little help from a perfectly coiffed anchor explaining exactly how the Columbine pair got their guns easy as you please at the local gun show, and then meticulously explaining how they arranged the blood bath which followed? That was a really long sentence. I hope you weren't reading aloud.
A hundred years ago murderers pretty much had to come up with their own ways of killing people. How many copy-cat killings do you think there were in 1910? With the current state of the art, you could slaughter a house full of people and within 24 hours everyone in the world has seen pictures of the corpses covered with a thin sheet. They'll read the vivid description of how you butchered each member of the family, along with a time-line of the evening's events, and how the nation mourns the loss, and how much poor little Cindy loved horses and hoped to someday save the rain forests of Honduras. Within 48 hours, half of the internet users in the world have seen leaked photos of the corpses with no thin sheets covering them on sickpics.com, and within a week some jerk has started a Facebook profile devoted to you and how cool you are. It gets 250,000 hits in the first day of operation and you have three marriage proposals. It's standard operating procedure now for the judge to make sure the killer doesn't profit from selling his story from prison. Ain't that somethin'?
So is our world more dangerous now than it was twenty years ago or are we just seeing more of the bad things? And are we seeing more of them because we really need to be informed or just because of a vicarious mass bloodlust we've acquired? Is the combination of young minds conditioned to learn from the television and internet merging with the steady stream of death and destruction on 24-hour news to create a geometric progression of suffering?
Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not saying we should forsake technology. I'm just trying to point out the price of that technology. Sure I think it's great that I can get any information in existence instantly and without ever having to put on my pants, but it's not just the 'normal' people who are utilizing these tools.
What we must realize, as a society, is that every useful tool can be misused; and will be. Columbine, Virginia Tech and the endless stream of Columbines and Virginia Techs to come are the price of our real-time stock quotes, instant messaging, MASH re-runs and 24 hour news channels. Is that a price you're willing to pay?
I guess my parting question is, if the world really is so much more dangerous now than it was when I was a child and that world was so much more dangerous than when my grandmother was a child, what hope is there for my grandchildren?
Will the Perseids ever fall again?
Did I invent that summer, 9 years old, when I slept under the stars in my vast desert back yard waiting for the Perseids without worrying about whether I would be abducted, raped, mutilated etc?
What a fucking great summer.
Did I really spend every waking moment of my seventh summer building a clubhouse in the woods, miles from home, without being beaten up or murdered by other children?
And is it POSSIBLE that I made it all the way through primary and secondary schools without being shot to death by my classmates? Or even worrying that I would be shot to death by my classmates?
Funny. My grandmother used to worry about how much more dangerous it was to be a child in my time than it was in hers.
At five years old, I hitch-hiked with two uncles in their early twenties from southern Illinois to northern Montana and back. It took us a month. I could tell you some stories from that one. Can you imagine allowing a child of five or ten or even fifteen to hitch-hike today, regardless of who was with them?
Is the world really that much more dangerous or filled with insanity now than it was thirty years ago? I mean let's look at the facts. 1978. The hippies had been largely replaced by the druggies. We stayed in a commune for part of the time we were gone. But this was hardly the tie-dye and flowers commune you might picture from 1968. All that remained of the flower children by '78 was sex, drugs, drugs, sex and the occasional firecracker lobbed at the social workers by the children of the left-over flower children who went totally unsupervised most of the time. Trust me on this one, I lit the first fuse. It wasn't a communal place in the 'to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities' kind of communist thinking. It was more of an 'I am so fucking stoned I shat my pants and didn't notice for two days' kind of commune. It gets sadder every time I remember it.
So what is it about now that makes the mother of my children fear to let them out of her sight? What has changed? When my daughter turned nine she and her brother couldn't even play in the front yard of their house without adult supervision because someone might swoop in and make them disappear forever. When will she be able to sleep under the stars, waiting for the Perseids?
I think it must have something to do with our information addiction. How many times did you check your Twitter today? Your email? Your Facebook? How many times did you hug your kids or tell them that you love them?
My daughter pointed out to me the other day that hers is the first generation raised from day one with total immersion in information the scale of which was never before imagined. That got me thinking. The constant plugged-in state is completely normal to them, not the neato innovation the rest of us are still amazed and/or frightened by. They are taught to read and write and love and hate by the internet. Their friends are mostly virtual. Their interactions are synthetic, sanitized and without consequence. Much of the time they're not able to draw a distinction between Fred Rogers and Fred Kruger until it's too late. They're all just teachers to a child with no guidance. And before you yell at me about home-schooling and web-nannies, no I'm not talking about YOUR children. I'm talking about OUR children; that sad invisible majority with two working parents and time on their hands. What we are left with is a nation with more technology than sense. The current parental generation doesn't see the looming problem because it's still new to us and not fundamental to our way of social-life. The next generation doesn't see the problem for the opposite reason; it's a normal and welcome part of everyday existence. The classic image of the TV babysitter has evolved into the internet surrogate parent.
And believe me; the hypocrisy of using a blog to complain about the internet hasn't escaped me.
So if the internet is our scapegoat for overloading and depersonalizing the minds of our children, let me ask you this: how many school shootings were there before the advent of television, or more specifically 24-hour news? Now that Fox News (may their knives chip and shatter), CNN, MSNBC, al Jazeera and a dozen others bring us live coverage of every massacre and bombing, often as it happens, there seems to be a lot more of them, don't you think? How many eighth graders would come to the conclusion that taking a gun to school to kill that bully is the best course of action without a little help from a perfectly coiffed anchor explaining exactly how the Columbine pair got their guns easy as you please at the local gun show, and then meticulously explaining how they arranged the blood bath which followed? That was a really long sentence. I hope you weren't reading aloud.
A hundred years ago murderers pretty much had to come up with their own ways of killing people. How many copy-cat killings do you think there were in 1910? With the current state of the art, you could slaughter a house full of people and within 24 hours everyone in the world has seen pictures of the corpses covered with a thin sheet. They'll read the vivid description of how you butchered each member of the family, along with a time-line of the evening's events, and how the nation mourns the loss, and how much poor little Cindy loved horses and hoped to someday save the rain forests of Honduras. Within 48 hours, half of the internet users in the world have seen leaked photos of the corpses with no thin sheets covering them on sickpics.com, and within a week some jerk has started a Facebook profile devoted to you and how cool you are. It gets 250,000 hits in the first day of operation and you have three marriage proposals. It's standard operating procedure now for the judge to make sure the killer doesn't profit from selling his story from prison. Ain't that somethin'?
So is our world more dangerous now than it was twenty years ago or are we just seeing more of the bad things? And are we seeing more of them because we really need to be informed or just because of a vicarious mass bloodlust we've acquired? Is the combination of young minds conditioned to learn from the television and internet merging with the steady stream of death and destruction on 24-hour news to create a geometric progression of suffering?
Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not saying we should forsake technology. I'm just trying to point out the price of that technology. Sure I think it's great that I can get any information in existence instantly and without ever having to put on my pants, but it's not just the 'normal' people who are utilizing these tools.
What we must realize, as a society, is that every useful tool can be misused; and will be. Columbine, Virginia Tech and the endless stream of Columbines and Virginia Techs to come are the price of our real-time stock quotes, instant messaging, MASH re-runs and 24 hour news channels. Is that a price you're willing to pay?
I guess my parting question is, if the world really is so much more dangerous now than it was when I was a child and that world was so much more dangerous than when my grandmother was a child, what hope is there for my grandchildren?
Will the Perseids ever fall again?
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Pre-9/11 Mentality
I had another blog once, on Myspace. It had a couple of good entries I'd like to preserve for posterity and share with you, my loyal reading masses (oops, no readers yet). Here's one of my faves from back during the '08 presedential campaign. Enjoy:
Yesterday someone accused me of having a "Pre-9/11 Mentality".
This label has been tossed around so much lately as an insult directed by hard-line conservatives at, well, everyone else (oh, except now Obama is using it on McCain, too) that my gut instinct was to get defensive. But then I thought about it.
What is a "Pre-9/11 Mentality" anyway? I did a search and came up with a few things. Here's my decidedly non-hardline-conservative perspective on the things they think are insults: If you believe that the world is no more or less dangerous today than it was on 9/10; if you don't actively fear terrorism; if you don't believe that freedom should be traded for security; if you're skeptical at best about the unilateral application of "preemptive strikes", "ghost detainees", and "regime change"; if you still believe that the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of religion, and the freedom to peaceably assemble should not be abridged; if you believe that torturing prisoners is un-American; if you believe that our place should be to lift up and not tear down…
Then you probably have a pre-9/11 mentality.
You know, on September 10th I lived in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I believed it. No, more than that. I knew it. When I was younger I always thought how lucky an enemy soldier must be to be captured by us. I could not even conceive of a prisoner being abused at our hands the way I saw ours being abused in war movies. Shortly after September 11th, when it became clear that the terrorists had won; had forced a fundamental change in the way we live our lives, I realized that I didn't live in that place anymore. The freedoms our fathers and mothers had fought and died for were being tossed aside or whittled away in the name of safety. The United States was no longer the land of the free; or should I say it was the land of the not AS free as before. And if we had still been the home of the brave, we never would have allowed such a tragedy to occur. And when I say "tragedy" I'm not talking about the tragic events of 9/11, but the tragic rape of the constitution and bill of rights that came in their wake.
The price of freedom isn't just blood and bullets. It's also vulnerability. When we are free to go and do as we will, we are vulnerable to attack at any moment. But it is the love of that freedom which should make us go defiant and unafraid even in the face of evil. September 11th was part of the price of that freedom. And instead of remaining resolute and refusing to be terrorized we have turned in our neighbors to the secret service for unpatriotic bumper stickers, tapped each other's phones and email without warrants, redacted supreme court briefs warning against frivolous use of redaction, and ultimately dishonored those who paid for our freedoms every day since September 11th, 2001.
So the next time I'm accused of having a Pre-9/11 Mentality I think I may just thank the smug cocksuckser spewing what he thinks is the 21st century version of "pinko".
Or I just may knock him on his ass and say
You're goddamn right I do, bitch. And you just got knocked the-fuck out by a yogurt-eating hippie.
Peace, homies. It's not just for the dead anymore,
Yesterday someone accused me of having a "Pre-9/11 Mentality".
This label has been tossed around so much lately as an insult directed by hard-line conservatives at, well, everyone else (oh, except now Obama is using it on McCain, too) that my gut instinct was to get defensive. But then I thought about it.
What is a "Pre-9/11 Mentality" anyway? I did a search and came up with a few things. Here's my decidedly non-hardline-conservative perspective on the things they think are insults: If you believe that the world is no more or less dangerous today than it was on 9/10; if you don't actively fear terrorism; if you don't believe that freedom should be traded for security; if you're skeptical at best about the unilateral application of "preemptive strikes", "ghost detainees", and "regime change"; if you still believe that the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of religion, and the freedom to peaceably assemble should not be abridged; if you believe that torturing prisoners is un-American; if you believe that our place should be to lift up and not tear down…
Then you probably have a pre-9/11 mentality.
You know, on September 10th I lived in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I believed it. No, more than that. I knew it. When I was younger I always thought how lucky an enemy soldier must be to be captured by us. I could not even conceive of a prisoner being abused at our hands the way I saw ours being abused in war movies. Shortly after September 11th, when it became clear that the terrorists had won; had forced a fundamental change in the way we live our lives, I realized that I didn't live in that place anymore. The freedoms our fathers and mothers had fought and died for were being tossed aside or whittled away in the name of safety. The United States was no longer the land of the free; or should I say it was the land of the not AS free as before. And if we had still been the home of the brave, we never would have allowed such a tragedy to occur. And when I say "tragedy" I'm not talking about the tragic events of 9/11, but the tragic rape of the constitution and bill of rights that came in their wake.
The price of freedom isn't just blood and bullets. It's also vulnerability. When we are free to go and do as we will, we are vulnerable to attack at any moment. But it is the love of that freedom which should make us go defiant and unafraid even in the face of evil. September 11th was part of the price of that freedom. And instead of remaining resolute and refusing to be terrorized we have turned in our neighbors to the secret service for unpatriotic bumper stickers, tapped each other's phones and email without warrants, redacted supreme court briefs warning against frivolous use of redaction, and ultimately dishonored those who paid for our freedoms every day since September 11th, 2001.
So the next time I'm accused of having a Pre-9/11 Mentality I think I may just thank the smug cocksuckser spewing what he thinks is the 21st century version of "pinko".
Or I just may knock him on his ass and say
You're goddamn right I do, bitch. And you just got knocked the-fuck out by a yogurt-eating hippie.
Peace, homies. It's not just for the dead anymore,
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Welcome New and Returning Students
As I look out across the sprawling desert compound campus of George Washington Hayduke Elementary School I'm reminded of the immortal words of our founder and namesake when he said, speaking of our beloved wasteland, "This is the only thing in the whole goddamn world worth a fiddler's damn. The rest of creation can fuck a goat."
The spires and hoodoos and canyons and caves that make up our desert home are alive with colors and critters and character. We rejoice in the beauty and majesty contained herein and strive to drive a surveyors stake through the heart of any who would seek to spoil it.
For those of you who are new to GWH, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Principal Dunmyer. For the next few years I'll be your guide and teacher. Your parents have entrusted me with your safety and the molding of your mind and soul. Together we will become champions of the wasteland and defenders of freedom.
You are in for an experience unlike anything you could imagine.
You are now Monkeywrenchers. May God have mercy on all our souls.
The spires and hoodoos and canyons and caves that make up our desert home are alive with colors and critters and character. We rejoice in the beauty and majesty contained herein and strive to drive a surveyors stake through the heart of any who would seek to spoil it.
For those of you who are new to GWH, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Principal Dunmyer. For the next few years I'll be your guide and teacher. Your parents have entrusted me with your safety and the molding of your mind and soul. Together we will become champions of the wasteland and defenders of freedom.
You are in for an experience unlike anything you could imagine.
You are now Monkeywrenchers. May God have mercy on all our souls.
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