Category: Personal

Three years ago my guts were twisted about whether to move to Kentucky with my girlfriend or stay in North Carolina with my bandmates in My Dear Ella. I left the band, joined my girlfriend (now my wife), and my life abruptly changed course, as it had numerous times before. I’ve stayed in touch with Eric (MDE mastermind and my closest friend) since my departure, and several times I’ve flirted with the idea of moving back to NC, at least for the nine to twelve months my wife will be doing her doctoral research in Mexico. Per the original game plan, my wife figured she’d be heading off to do her research in the fall of ’06, as in right now, but the vagaries of grad school have been such that things have been considerably delayed, so now we’re looking at next fall at the earliest.

So many twists and turns, and it turns out that Eric recently dissolved My Dear Ella and formed a new outfit, Death of the Sun [pictured above]. It also turns out that D.O.T.S. needs a bass player to complete their line-up so they can take the world by storm. Do I smell the intoxicating effluvium of destiny? Or is it just the same old clump of bull-poop I’ve been dragging around on my boot-heel for years?

I don’t know. Part of me would love to cast off the shackles of normalcy and step out on that thin limb again. Maybe this time things will be different. Maybe I’m ready for greatness. But then again, having been down this road before, I’m all too aware of the costs, the doubts, and the insidious pattern that compels me, every four years or so it seems, to jump whatever ship I’m on in favor of the S.S. Something Else.

“Bob” is a palindrome. So is “rise to vote sir,” but strangely this just wasn’t enough to get me to the polls today. Truth is, I don’t care who wins any of the races here in Fayette County, Kentucky. There, I said it. I don’t care. Bill Hicks nailed it when he said: “I’ll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. ‘I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.’ ‘I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.’ ‘Hey, wait a minute, there’s one guy holding out both puppets!'”

I wanted to care. I really did. I even went online this morning to read up on the various candidates’ positions. Not only did I have a hard time making sense of the issues and discerning differences between positions, but every one of these people struck me as fake, plastic, and utterly unworthy of my endorsement. So, I watched some clips of Family Guy on YouTube while I drank the rest of my coffee.

I know what you’re thinking. I can see those fingers wagging at me: “You have no right to complain since you didn’t make your voice heard!” The trouble is, my voice was saying, “I don’t care! These people make me sick!” How better to express such a sentiment than by not voting.

Everytime I saw a slimy, negative campaign ad on TV, I said to myself “I will not vote for anyone who endorses such garbage.” By the time election day rolled around, there was no one left who didn’t stink like a dumpster. I just have no stomach for the abject inauthenticity I’ve seen on display for the past several weeks. While I was typing the last sentence, they announced the results for Mayor of Lexington on the local news and showed some footage of the new mayor’s victory speech. The guy’s been mayor for ten minutes and he’s already reading his speeches. Can’t these fucking androids just speak from their hearts? I’m sorry, but I feel better for having taken no part in this.

In 2004, I voted for John Kerry even though I found him repugnant. It was a vote against the other guy, nothing more. Had there been a Nazi or a rapist on the ballot, maybe I would’ve stood in line today to hold back the greater of two evils. In fact, despite all this vitriol, an hour before the polls closed I was still considering voting against some people. I was doing my grocery shopping, a chore I do every Tuesday afternoon on the way home from work. I went to the beer aisle to pick up a six-pack (my wife and I have a little pizza-and-beer-night thing on Tuesdays) and I was met by a big sign saying “No alcohol will be sold until after the polls close at 6pm.” You gotta be kidding! That was all I needed to justify an official election day boycott, since it turns out no candidate had promised to overturn this ridiculous ordinance during their campaign.

I work in a psychiatric hospital, and when a patient gets out of control, we often present him or her with a choice: “You can either walk to the ‘quiet area’ or else we’ll have to escort you there.” Now, a fifteen year old kid who’s been institutionalized her whole life is apt to respond with a “Fuck you!” and a gob of spit. She knows when a choice is not really a choice. She can see the guy in the white coat holding up both puppets.

David Jon Peckinpaugh has been ruminating on Parenthood over on his blog. In his latest installment, he says:

“I have been wondering again about being a Parent and how I received the Gift of Life because my Parents chose to have children… and allowed it to happen. I am specifically wondering if the choice not to have children is a breaking of Life’s Trust? After all, might we not owe an obligation to give to Life the opportunity for a new form–which is what each of us has received? Of course, this is totally in keeping with the notion that Life Is A Gift. If we view Life as a Gift then we will want to share that Gift.”

Interesting… I’ve never thought about my choice to be childless in these terms. I guess I don’t think of life as a gift. I don’t think my parents looked at their decision to have kids in that way either. I think they wanted to raise children and enjoy family life mainly because that was how they wanted to live their lives. I don’t know for sure though. I’ll have to ask them about it. This goes back to the whole “self-centeredness” thing. I always bristle when someone suggests (as they often do) that it’s self-centered to not have kids. After the fact, once the child is born, it’s true that it would be hard to be self-centered and be a good parent. The question is, What’s the motivation to have a child in the first place? You’re the first, David Jon, I’ve heard talk about “giving the gift of life.” Most people seem to want something for themselves, i.e. the wonderful, deeply meaningful experience of being a parent. Life may be a gift, but who’s the gift for? It’s my feeling that the vast majority of humans are at a self-centered stage of personal development when they decide to procreate, and thus they look at the newborn child as a gift—for themselves. This is evident in the language most people use to describe the decision (i.e. “I want to have a baby” or “I want to be a father”). And like a child who gets bored with his Christmas toys by February, too many parents remain self-centered and leave kids feeling neglected, unwanted and unloved.

Of course, someone who decides to have children from a place of relative selflessness will look at and experience parenthood from a relatively selfless perspective. But then again, childlessness can also be viewed and experienced from a relatively selfless perspective. After all, there are millions of children (and adults) already in the world who could use some attention, so one need not create a new being in order to bestow gifts. And the ultimate gift, as I see it, is not life, but love. I could get my balls blown off in a minefield (ouch!) and still give love. And I can give it to anyone at anytime.

I don’t know, David Jon, what goes into the decision to create life, because I haven’t made that decision. But I have made the conscious decision (every time I put on a condom) to not create life, and I certainly don’t feel like I’m withholding a gift from anyone. The truth is, I’m not sure why I don’t want a child (for now at least). That’s why I’m having this discussion with you. Thanks for that.

My friend David Jon lit a fire this morning with his latest blogging on the transformative power of parenthood. He makes several interesting points, and I have no doubt that parenthood can be a profoundly deep, spiritual, humanizing, enlightening experience for everyone involved. Just saying this much, however, and I realize I’m in over my head here. I’m thirty-six years old, and neither my wife nor I have any intention (right now, at least) of having children. “Why not?” one might ask. Good question.

I love kids. Always have. At family gatherings I’m the one running around in the back yard with all the kids while the big people stand around like stiffs making idle conversation with each other. My own parents had always assumed I would be family man, and now they — along with my siblings — scratch their heads wondering why I persist in being so self-centered. This is when I get pissed off a little. Because unlike David Jon, I have spent my life surrounded by people who hold parenthood up as the ultimate spiritual experience, at least in the sense that Paul Tillich used the term “spiritual,” i.e. whatever matters most to a person. However you slice it, where I come from, raising children is assumed to be the highest purpose in life. And yet growing up, I never met a single adult who seemed radiantly happy and fulfilled, at least not in the way I yearned to be. And I never heard anyone talk about having and raising children in the way that David Jon talks about it. On the contrary, I was always left with the impression that most people had kids or wanted kids for the most self-centered reasons imaginable, i.e. to keep up with the Jones’s, to pass on their genes, to keep their family name going, to mold little beings in their own image, or to justify continued misery at a soul-sapping job. Where I come from, everyone gets married, has kids, and works at least forty-hours a week. In fact, to this day I know very few people who choose to be childless. If having kids, in and of itself, is such a transformative, life affirming experience, one would expect widespread peace and love instead of widespread misery and ignorance.

When I was a younger man getting ready to take on the “real world,” it seemed that adulthood promised to be, for the most part, a period of gradual physical, psychological and spiritual decline. It just made sense for me to rebel against the status quo. Hec, I never thought I would get married, but here I am. And I may yet decide to have children. If ever I am a father, I have no doubt that it will be a wonderful, spiritual experience like none I’ve ever known. But why should parenthood be any different than loving relationships in general, in that the depth of the experience depends on how open, awake and unfettered I am in my capacity to relate to others and to be alive?

I’ve worked with kids whose parents pimped them out for crack money, or used them as punching bags to vent their endless frustrations. I also have a friend who says he’s discovered what it means to be human through caring for his sons. Any experience can help to free us from our spiritual prison of self-centeredness. Maybe parenthood is uniquely suited for this. I wouldn’t know, I guess.

For all the ballyhoo about psychospiritual growth and seizing the day and whatnot that finds its way into this blog, it’s incredible — and downright discouraging — to discover that one bad day can seemingly negate months of perceived progress. I know it’s only a feeling, and “this too shall pass” and all that shit, but it took literally one crappy experience at work for me to consider changing careers. Hec, I was ready to move out of the country after my train-wreck of a discussion group yesterday evening. I gave the kids (patients on the Adolescent Chemical Dependency Unit) an assignment, asking them to write down the one person (could be living, dead, family member, celebrity, whoever) who they considered to be “the bomb” or the coolest person ever, then give me five reasons why. I was trying to get a discussion going about values and about what we can learn about ourselves by thinking deeply about who we look up to and who we despise. By the end of the group I felt as disconnected from these kids as I do from suicide bombers.

The majority of the kids espoused a core value system on par with a bad gangsta rap song, presenting the most abject vision of vacuous materialism, criminality and self-centeredness one could possibly imagine. To say I was discouraged would be putting it mildly. I felt utterly powerless to even plant the tiniest seed of positive change in these kids. “They’re too far gone,” is all I could think. And while I know that many of them will grow out of these self-limiting beliefs in time, I can’t help but recoil at the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they are too far gone. Maybe we all are.