Surely, I’m not the only one.

For most of my life, things have always seemed secure and generally routine.  The world’s tragedies were things delivered to my doorstep once a day by the 5am paperboy. More detailed news was something I voluntarily walked to the TV to turn on. There were no remotes. Tragic news didn’t wake me from my sleep via smartphone and even later when I could afford a computer, it didn’t erupt onscreen with images of devastation, tragedy and world corruption without my search or consent.  Fewer and fewer remember those days not so long ago when the world at least seemed more stable and predictable.

It happened again yesterday, twice.

Maybe it was since 9/11 or even a little before, but that seems a good marker for when the world as I knew it changed. The reality that my country, town and family were no longer shielded from the unpredictable became the new order of thinking. Then all the mass shootings, the waves of home invasions, news of meteoric threats to our planet, notifications of natural disasters within seconds of happening and acts of sheer terrorism were suddenly off the charts, occurring in places nearby we all thought were surely off limits.

I was driving home yesterday when the second moment hit.

Same as the first, there was nothing particularly different.  In traffic, music low and about three miles from putting my feet up after a long but productive day at work, it was quick, fleeting and uninvited.  That CVS there could suddenly blow up.  What if North Korea got a hand up this time and one was incoming, destined for the valley in front of me in ten…nine…eight…?  That guy in my parking lot looks suspicious, perhaps lying in wait to gun me down and take my car and my future.  I even shot a glance to the sky when the reflection of a plane-that-might explode mid-air caught my eye. Where are my kids right now?  Did I tell them I love them when we talked last? Crazy invasive flashes of tragedy to paralyze me for a brief instant as I turned down the radio and cracked open my window in hopes they’ll evacuate my mind and fly out.

But I’m not crazy, and surely, I’m not the only one.

Each time, the moment passes. I relax back to finish the drive home and wonder. This is America, but not the same America I used to feel confident affording me the protections against these kinds of threats that must happen a hundred times more often to those in third world countries and nations like Syria and less stable others of the middle east where driving home from work is a daily unpredictable fear and arriving home could easily find it and your family obliterated by tragedy created by evil men with guns and bombs and ideologies.  It’s hard to imagine what a daily reality like that might be like.  Crazy, but I think I’m starting to.

I’m not the fearful type.  My time to go will be my time and I know where I will land afterward.  But the encroachment of evil is happening more rapidly than any time before, a record pace in our American history, and to date, my crazy little moments of doom-wondering  pass, but for how much longer?

Odds are, there will come the day when what I’ve only imagined walks right up to the door of my own home or the corner CVS and knocks or opens fire on my secure little mind, and surely, I will not be the only one left wondering if I was actually crazier to believe otherwise.

Though I try my best to remember

the months and years I can never forget,

every time it’s the month of September,

I most often remember regret.

Regret for the times I was never…

Regret for the times I was lost…

Regret for my lack of endeavor…

Regret for all that it cost.

But regrets now take no lead,

because from them I’ve been freed.

Regrets bring strife, but remembering brings life;

An incredible distinction, indeed.

September fourth it was over,

Now it’s September fourth of nineteen,

eight wonderful years I’ve been sober,

eight sobering years I’ve been clean.

But I’ll always remember September

and thank God I survived to regret

the lost years I’m alive to remember

And the best still ahead of me yet.

If I’ve learned one thing, haters are gonna hate if it’s the last thing they do. Fortunately and sometimes, it is.

The best thing about having a dark, sordid past, is having a public dark, sordid past. For those who know me and many who don’t, if there’s one thing for certain, I’m pretty transparent. It took handcuffs of course, but since then, my past is so widely known and told in so many of my own and others’ stories, it’s pretty much old hat and inconsequential anymore. My stories themselves however, have helped free many who’d held themselves captive to their own.

Today, he leaves on the trip of a lifetime, and I don’t expect he will return in one piece.

Going home for the first time in 40 years rarely returns the same person.

Things change. People change. Stories change. And his youthful life on a now abandoned small town Colorado farm, is liable to answer many questions he would rather not. But it’s time to grow up. And he is driven.

The last time I got really angry about something, I really didn’t.

It’s rare that something upsets me to the point of being angry anymore. Disgusted, yes. Irritated, sure. But angry, almost never. I credit four years of a psychotherapy degree, 15 years in practice, and six years clean and sober for that rarity.

Anger is always the second emotion.

Anyone who’s read a book on managing emotions knows this but fewer know what it really means.

People don’t actually get angry, but as one of my favorite instructors once put it, “They should all over themselves.”

Martha was one of those weird professors with a new age twist on pretty much everything. But having run out of grains of salt taking in her lectures, one day the epiphany finally hit me.

There are few things that get me so riled up that blood pressure medicine is the first remedy. Thanks to Martha, though, the second is a quick evaluation of the shoulds, oughts, musts, need-tos, have-tos, got tos and supposed-tos that overcome us all at times.

For the record, as if it really matters, my angering short list includes a)incongruous people who publicly profess one virtue, yet practice another in private. The other two include self-absorbed people and bald-face liars, both of which round out my personal anger trifecta.

But why?

Anger is the second emotion…second only to deep and erroneous beliefs that things and people should be different, better mannered, more fair, decent and, well, more like me.

Plenty of good people fit that bill, but there are plenty who don’t, won’t and don’t care to.

In my recovery from drug addiction, the Serenity Prayer was the cornerstone: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. The healing power of this prayer lived out within a congruous life has helped me address my angry moments therapeutically, long before they become destructive words or behaviors to myself and others.

People ‘should’ all over themselves.

If anger is the second emotion, then the taking of a big disgusting ‘should’ in your head is the first.

When I was a therapist, I used this simple illustration:

The speed limit is clearly marked 45mph. People should observe that limit. But however reasonable, life-saving or safe the speed limit, if I pull onto that street, I am bound to encounter an 80 year old blue hair in a Dodge dart going 20 and/or a dude in a Ford F-150 going 70. Failing to embrace this possibility beforehand is a certain set up for becoming angry and saying or doing things I will regret later.

Changing my expectation of situations and the behavior of other people to a language of “I hope that…It would be nice if… or I’d prefer that…” before I pull out into traffic, potentially mitigates against an angry response if my preference of what happens doesn’t actually come to pass. Our heads are full of mistaken beliefs and expectations such as these which embrace more of what ‘should or ought to be’ than what, in all honesty…and sadly…, really ‘is’ in this world. So when I’m stuck behind the blue hair, I accept the imperfection of the situation and arrange away around her, and maybe even chuckle at her timidity. When the truck blows by, though startled, I can save myself the rage and perhaps wonder if he’s late to watch the birth of his first born. It doesn’t make it right. It just makes the moment tolerable.

I’ve learned to be creative. Not so much for the sake of others, but for the sake of myself. “Be angry and sin not in your anger” is the key to control and the solution is to abandon the mind’s misbeliefs of a perfect world.

God, grant me the serenity in this imperfect world.
And God bless old Martha, wherever you and your blue hair are now after all these years.

I’ve bought more panties, bras and pads

than any gay man should.

More comfy purses to fit my arms

than any straight man would.

To beauty parlors, nail salons

and pharmacies with you.

Been here and there and everywhere…

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Our little walks and tearful talks

and stories of your life,

Have filled the days with laughs so thick,

can’t cut them with a knife.

I get us lost, you drive me mad

and tell me what to do

But we always end up back at home…

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

The butt of jokes and puns of posts

that make so many happy

That Q-Tip hair, the clothes you wear,

you always look so snappy.

So many pics that you have nixed

and some you never knew

You make life fun to be your son…

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Clockwork calling days and nights

to see how your day went

You always ask reciprocally,

The way that mine was spent.

I can’t imagine how it will be

some day when yours are through

You’re woven deep in my days and weeks…

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

No clue what I will do.

With a little luck, patience and a few decades, most 18 year olds eventually turn 50.  Some arrive a little sooner, but barring tragedy or developmental setback, nearly all arrive safely and on time with enough life experiences to have made it worth the wait.

When I was 18, so was my entire world.

A society of 50 something year olds was an unconscionable concept. It was a morgueful of the old and diapered on canes, cursing gravity through dentures between sips of chicken noodle soup someone else fed them. Nobody wanted to be there, they just arrived one day on a short bus to the grave.

At 18, 50 something was a distant age of unnecessary people.

I wish back then I’d known otherwise.

Today, the gears of my world run on 50 year olds.

I’m talking about all my friends from high school and before who made it here unincarcerated, consciences intact, generosities abundant and much kinder hearts for their journies.

The career I chose is one that helps the most unfortunate of the 50 plus generation who are indeed, diapered and caned, dentured, dying and worse. What was unconscionable at 18 is my everyday reality now where I work to add a little glitter to the not so golden years of the poorest group of senior citizens this country has ever created.

Thankfully, I don’t work alone.

I have a lot of 18 year olds who help me.

People like Steve, Misty, Lori, Cece, Tama, Jenai, Karen, Marc, Anne, Heidi, and all those who have re-emerged from my high school woodwork to support my cause. The captain of my high school football team, the first runner up at junior prom, the bass player from band, songleaders, student council secretaries, and even the weird kid from the lunch room…they all grew up and into really cool people who now partner with me 40 years later in my pursuits to feed, clothe and care for people we all once thought unnecessary and fortunately, have not yet ourselves become.

We are all still a bunch of dreamy-eyed 18 year old high school kids who eventually woke up to realize that all people are necessary to make this world a better place for all people.

So shout out to a lifetime of friends who still have my back just like we were 18 all over again, only kinder now, and up for challenges of life that make a difference.

“There’s a bad apple in every bunch” and other pacifying clichés are a premature resolve to situations for which there are no simple solutions.

Some people are thugs, some are racist, and some are overly enamored by power and authority. The human condition is littered with them about as inseparably as babies and bathwater.

Some. Not all.

Information technology, surveillance videos and camera phones deliver them to us 24/7 for rush judgments and have trained us to render instant clichés and unenlightened opinions before the next breaking news story takes the limelight.

But when that next limelight is but the same story in a new venue, clichés are useless. The power of fear these stories induce demands a more substantial literary device. Throwing a cliché at a bunch of dead people is no longer a solution.  Like thoughts and prayers, it never promised to.  If people were truly thinking and praying as much as they say they are, a solution would have emerged by now instead of just another useless platitude.

I don’t think the question is whether we are all equal, but rather, do we want to be?

We say we fight against discrimination between the differences of people at the same time we are mad at work differentiating ourselves, climbing the ladder from a lower rung onto one better and more distinguished. Success in American culture unfortunately lies squarely in the value of being better than. Where’s the pride in being equal?

Some who can’t seem to climb become thugs. Some who have climbed feel compelled to prove it with power and authority. And the rest of us either take sides or create clichés to exempt ourselves from the problem while secretly profiling the “some” as “all” but publicly offering only fleeting thoughts and shallow prayers of hope that the next time it won’t happen in my neighborhood.

There are no good apples.

All are bruised and imperfect in some way, yet misled by a private logic that they are “better than” in their fight to the top of the basket while denying the real truth that all apples were created equal and together, can make a very satisfying pie.

Chop off our own bruises and imperfections and we all look the same in the basket.

That is, if we will risk being equal as it was originally intended.

I once knew a man who had a serious brush with depth, failed to resurface, lost his life and, thank God, was never the same again.

Each of us is given one, perhaps two moments in a lifetime to dramatically change course if we want it bad enough, have vision to notice the opportunity and the courage to act upon it.

This world would have us believe that succumbing to the shallows is the only safe existence. Never venturing into unknown waters, we risk dying without discovery of our purpose or the endowment of a superpower which equips us to see past the drivel of the commonplace and into the extraordinary unknown.