N.I.C. REDUX
Hot under the collar and her bosom heaving my wife stormed into the kitchen after a long unappreciated day at work and dropped her overstuffed faux-Gucci purse on the butcher block island with a thud. The Terror of Muirfield Court squealed with delight and raced to greet her while the noble Akita similarly abased herself , tail wagging and head shaking as she sniffed every strange scent on Rochelle’s pant leg.
“Hi, honey,” I said from my designated place on the couch, where I had been doing some of my best thinking all afternoon long.
“All of my friends at work think I am married to a meth addict,” she informed me.
“Hmmm, that seems like a bit of an exaggeration.”
She played with the child and the dog for only a moment before returning to her object of rancor.
“Did you write in your blog that you got a DUI?” she asked me.
“Not to my recollection,” I said, quoting a long line of American political crooks.
“Did you write you were in the County Jail?”
From the look on her face the last two words of this sentence evidently left a feces-like odor in her mouth.
“You know,” I told her. “You’re still quite a sexy babe when you get your color up like this.” I’ve had a lifetime of dealing with bitterly disappointed and angry women and I have found that lavish flattery will often, but not always, accomplish what outright lying can only hope for.
She didn’t take the bait. “Did you get a tattoo that I don’t know about?”
“Only in an existential sense.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Glad of an opportunity to veer her off course, I expounded, “Aren’t we really, all of us, tattooed by life? Doesn’t life, with it’s unceasing series of cosmic beat-downs and casual cruelties, just tattoo the living daylights out of us?”
I can’t dance, and I can’t jump, and I can’t write, but I can sling the shit with the best of them.
Unfortunately she was not buying what I was selling.
“What did you write in your blog?”
“N.I.C.”
“What?”
“N.IC.,” I repeated in a particular voice I have that makes it seem as if I am having to explain basic subtraction to an especially dense 3rd grader.
My wife hates this voice.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“If the first words out of Vivienne’s mouth are shit and fuck, you will only have to look into the nearest mirror to find out whose fault that is.” I love playing the guilt card.
“Back to your blog,” she told me.
“No Impulse Control,” I said and pointed to where The Terror had the poor dog pinned in the corner and was tearing out tufts of tail fur and screaming with delight. “I give you Exhibit One, Vivienne Finn. No Impulse Control.”
“What the hell does that have to do with your writing in your blog about drinking, drugs and DUI’s. All my friends think I am married to a crack addict.”
“Exhibit Two,” I said and turned my head to where The Princess of Pandemonium was now standing atop her Choo-Choo and clambering from than onto a rickety old wooden chair, from whence she was headed for the large cast iron wood burning stove where, having imperfect balance, she could topple and kill herself.
“Vivienne, get down from there right now!” my wife screeched in a harsh voice.
Vivienne, of course, ignored her.
The dog had settled somewhere between us, her dark gaze moving from one face to the other as we further danced our long tango of love in the 21st Century. Though she may not have known the words, the dog seemed to be getting the gist. She turned her regal head and somberly regarded the high flying child on her precarious perch with a look that said, “Please fall, Devil Child, and thus end this reign of terror”
Rochelle removed our daughter from the heights and placed her on the floor where Vivienne renewed her assault on the canine population with emphatic vigor. The dog shook her off and stood by the window looking longingly at the great outdoors.
“What does Vivienne’s lack of impulse control have to do with your writing about getting thrown in jail for a DUI?”
“Poetic License.”
“Are you trying to irritate me?”
“Oh, after ten years of marriage, I no longer have to try.”
“Ha, ha, now you’re being funny. 2 weeks ago you were Mr. Cranky Pants, and now you want to be funny.”
If I was being funny, she didn’t seem to find the humor in any of it.
“Look,” I said, the very soul or reasonableness. “Vivienne suffers from N.I.C. and so does her dad. I was just trying to make light of the situation, that’s all.”
“I think I liked you better when you were depressed.”
“No, Dr. Moses fixed me.”
“And when you weren’t blogging.”
“Hey, it was your idea to get me blogging, there’s no putting the genie back in that bottle, Sister.” She also loves it when I call her ‘Sister’. “Have you actually read the blog?”
“No,” she had to admit. “But I heard enough about it at work today. All the nurses read it. They think you’re fucking hysterical.”
“Every artist loves to be admired,” I admitted.
“I’m going to go read the blog,” she said and picked up Viv and headed to the computer room.
The dog came over by the couch and stood in the perfect position to have her butt rubbed.
Naturally I obliged her.
“You don’t mind if I blog about you, do you, Kebu?”
“I have a brain roughly the size of your fist. I can’t waste precious gray matter on extraneous concepts like blogs.”
“You fascinate me endlessly,” I told her.
“Likewise, I am sure.”
“What is it you do think about?”
“I spend most of my time dissecting and cataloguing smells,” she told me.
“I believe you.”
“This world is an amazing cornucopia of odors. I find it fully engaging. For instance I could smell the anger on The Woman when she came in. And I could smell the fear on you.”
“I’m not afraid of my wife.”
One of the things I am best at is lying to my dog.
“No, of course not,” she agreed.
I scratched her butt some more and we let the subject of fear ebb away like briny water from a tidal pool.
“I like to think about food,” she admitted.
“I’m with you there.”
“That recent batch of Biscotti you made is most delicious.”
“Perhaps you’d like a piece.”
“Or two.”
“I live to serve you. All this fussing and fighting with the missus has given me a raging hunger.”
I heaved myself off my blessed couch and lumbered towards the cookie jar. I had a few more minutes to live before the wife returned from reading my blog, and so I figured I might as well spend it doing something I was really good at; feeding Italian cookies to a dog.
HER GUARDIAN (a new oil painting by The Dirty Diaper Dad)
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
NO IMPULSE CONTROL
When my daughter became fully ambulatory at the age of 14 months or so, her purpose in life morphed from putting every small object she could lay hands on into her greedy little mouth, into hovering near wherever I was and darting her fat little hands onto whatever I might be holding.
You would think this would be cute. But you would be oh so wrong.
It lost it’s cuteness quotient pretty quickly I can tell you.
If I was doing a crossword puzzle, she would grab the puzzle, then the pen. If I was enjoying a cup of tea, she would grab the cup, then the tea spoon, then the tea bag. It made the most mundane tasks seem like such an endeavor that it really began to get my dawber down.
She evidenced a special fascination with my glasses, and my glass case. If I held her she would poke her fingers first in my mouth, then in my moustache, then in my nose, slowly working towards her real objective; my glasses. Then quick as a snake she would grab the frames of my eyeglasses, twist cruelly and yank them off my head, making certain that her oily, grubby fingers were sure to smear the spectacles.
And there was no safe place for my glass case. If I left it on the kitchen counter, she would boost herself up and yank it down. I finally resorted to placing it in the middle of the dining room table, only to find her sitting atop the table some time later. She had moved her choo-choo train over near a dining chair, climbed up the choo-choo and thence to the chair, and thence to the tabletop. Where she had then clambered out and seized her big prize; Dad’s eyeglass case.
What made this all the more depressing was that she had just learned how to blow her nose (and don’t you know a toddler get’s a lot of practice blowing her nose because, you guessed it, she is a total sneezing, coughing, germ-producing pathogen who has invaded our living space with the sole purpose of being ground zero for the next great influenza epidemic). And inside my glass case I keep a nice clean, soft chamois, specifically designed for cleaning my nice, new eyeglasses. And because she has just learned to blow her nose and she has a runny nose all the time, she delights in opening my glass case, yanking out the chamois, thrusting her beak in it and honking like the beejeezus.
Then she looks up at me as I frantically remove her from heights of the table and says, “Goo grirl.”
This is her baby-speak for “Good girl”, which is what we say whenever she blows her nose in a more appropriate item, such as a Kleenex or hankie.
What are you gonna say, “Bad girl”? I mean she has just done what you have been training her to do, which is blow her snot filled nose. It just happens to be in my nice clean chamois. And so every time I clean my glasses now I get a glue-like residue of baby snot smeared across my glasses and I think to myself: “What the fuck did I do to deserve this?”
Let me assure you that a middle aged man crying is not a sight for the weak of heart.
It was not long after the chamois smearing incident that I was sitting on the sofa with the Sunday crossword and a cup of tea (while wishing for something stronger, say, hemlock) and Vivienne The Terror approached. She hovered near me, eyeing the tea cup. He hand began to edge towards it.
“Don’t do it,” I told her.
He hand hesitated a moment, her eyes locked on mine, and then the hand, inevitably, began to slither forward once more.
“Don’t touch it,” I warned her.
She paused for only a moment and then the hand shot out, as quick as a cobra skewering a rat, and she latched hold of the tea mug. Of course it spilled all over the coffee table as I became unhinged and slapped her wrist in a vain effort to unlock her grip.
“That’s not being a good girl,” I told my beautiful, willful, persistent daughter, vainly seeking to make some sort of intellectual connection. “That’s being a Bad Girl.”
It dimly occurred to me that in some previous lifetime I had liked, no, even adored, Bad Girls, in all their incipient glory. But this was not what I meant when I talked to my dark-eyed daughter.
At which point my better half Rochelle joined the conversation from where she had been listening to this mockery from the kitchen.
“Her brain is not fully formed,” my wife instructed me.
“Go back to your place in the kitchen,” I told her. “I’ve got this totally under control.”
“That would explain the tea all over the carpet and your calling our daughter a ‘Bad Girl’, I suppose.” She was mopping up the spilled tea as she said this, and gently re-directing our daughter away from her elderly father.
I often ignore my wife and this was just another occasion where I did so as I addressed my daughter; “Vivienne, when Dada says No, he means No.”
My wife was still speaking to me and though I was trying to drone her out I heard something like; “She can’t understand you. Her brain is not fully formed. She has no impulse control.”
This last phrase caught my notice and, unwittingly, I turned my attention to The Wife. “Say that again,” I commanded because it makes me feel good to tell my wife to repeat things.
“She has no impulse control. Her brain is not fully formed. She’s only eighteen months old."
Rochelle can get away with saying stuff like this because she is Physical Therapist and know everything.
“NIC,” I said.
“What?”
“No Impulse Control.”
A fortnight later I was sitting in the group holding cell in the Sonoma County Jail after a 62 hour bender. Things had ended badly with a lot of broken glass and twisted metal. There was a dull throbbing behind my eyes, and the inside of my mouth felt like I had rinsed it out with battery acid. Someone, I’m not naming any names here, had vomited on my crotch and not bothered to clean it up. Somewhere along the line I had lost my right sock and shoe. But on the plus side I had acquired a bitchen-looking Maori tattoo that ran the length of my left forearm. It burned like hell.
The man sitting across from me had lost his teeth to a lifetime of meth addiction. I could smell him from six feet away and it wasn't a good smell. His hair stuck out at crazy angles and his left eye wandered lazily from pillar to post. He was holding an animated conversation with a point just above my head. The gist of the conversation seemed to be; he had not meant to stab that bitch, he would never stab that bitch, he, in fact, really loved that bitch.
For not the first time in my life I was glad I was not that bitch.
Seeming to acquire a new focus his eyes settled on mine. “What’s your excuse?” he demanded.
“My brain is not fully formed,” I told him.
“Huh! I’ve heard that one before.” He snuffled indignantly.
“No, it’s true. I suffer from NIC.”
“Enayewhat?”
“No Impulse Control.”
“Oh, the judge’ll like the sound of that.”
I was hoping he was right, he sure sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
When my daughter became fully ambulatory at the age of 14 months or so, her purpose in life morphed from putting every small object she could lay hands on into her greedy little mouth, into hovering near wherever I was and darting her fat little hands onto whatever I might be holding.
You would think this would be cute. But you would be oh so wrong.
It lost it’s cuteness quotient pretty quickly I can tell you.
If I was doing a crossword puzzle, she would grab the puzzle, then the pen. If I was enjoying a cup of tea, she would grab the cup, then the tea spoon, then the tea bag. It made the most mundane tasks seem like such an endeavor that it really began to get my dawber down.
She evidenced a special fascination with my glasses, and my glass case. If I held her she would poke her fingers first in my mouth, then in my moustache, then in my nose, slowly working towards her real objective; my glasses. Then quick as a snake she would grab the frames of my eyeglasses, twist cruelly and yank them off my head, making certain that her oily, grubby fingers were sure to smear the spectacles.
And there was no safe place for my glass case. If I left it on the kitchen counter, she would boost herself up and yank it down. I finally resorted to placing it in the middle of the dining room table, only to find her sitting atop the table some time later. She had moved her choo-choo train over near a dining chair, climbed up the choo-choo and thence to the chair, and thence to the tabletop. Where she had then clambered out and seized her big prize; Dad’s eyeglass case.
What made this all the more depressing was that she had just learned how to blow her nose (and don’t you know a toddler get’s a lot of practice blowing her nose because, you guessed it, she is a total sneezing, coughing, germ-producing pathogen who has invaded our living space with the sole purpose of being ground zero for the next great influenza epidemic). And inside my glass case I keep a nice clean, soft chamois, specifically designed for cleaning my nice, new eyeglasses. And because she has just learned to blow her nose and she has a runny nose all the time, she delights in opening my glass case, yanking out the chamois, thrusting her beak in it and honking like the beejeezus.
Then she looks up at me as I frantically remove her from heights of the table and says, “Goo grirl.”
This is her baby-speak for “Good girl”, which is what we say whenever she blows her nose in a more appropriate item, such as a Kleenex or hankie.
What are you gonna say, “Bad girl”? I mean she has just done what you have been training her to do, which is blow her snot filled nose. It just happens to be in my nice clean chamois. And so every time I clean my glasses now I get a glue-like residue of baby snot smeared across my glasses and I think to myself: “What the fuck did I do to deserve this?”
Let me assure you that a middle aged man crying is not a sight for the weak of heart.
It was not long after the chamois smearing incident that I was sitting on the sofa with the Sunday crossword and a cup of tea (while wishing for something stronger, say, hemlock) and Vivienne The Terror approached. She hovered near me, eyeing the tea cup. He hand began to edge towards it.
“Don’t do it,” I told her.
He hand hesitated a moment, her eyes locked on mine, and then the hand, inevitably, began to slither forward once more.
“Don’t touch it,” I warned her.
She paused for only a moment and then the hand shot out, as quick as a cobra skewering a rat, and she latched hold of the tea mug. Of course it spilled all over the coffee table as I became unhinged and slapped her wrist in a vain effort to unlock her grip.
“That’s not being a good girl,” I told my beautiful, willful, persistent daughter, vainly seeking to make some sort of intellectual connection. “That’s being a Bad Girl.”
It dimly occurred to me that in some previous lifetime I had liked, no, even adored, Bad Girls, in all their incipient glory. But this was not what I meant when I talked to my dark-eyed daughter.
At which point my better half Rochelle joined the conversation from where she had been listening to this mockery from the kitchen.
“Her brain is not fully formed,” my wife instructed me.
“Go back to your place in the kitchen,” I told her. “I’ve got this totally under control.”
“That would explain the tea all over the carpet and your calling our daughter a ‘Bad Girl’, I suppose.” She was mopping up the spilled tea as she said this, and gently re-directing our daughter away from her elderly father.
I often ignore my wife and this was just another occasion where I did so as I addressed my daughter; “Vivienne, when Dada says No, he means No.”
My wife was still speaking to me and though I was trying to drone her out I heard something like; “She can’t understand you. Her brain is not fully formed. She has no impulse control.”
This last phrase caught my notice and, unwittingly, I turned my attention to The Wife. “Say that again,” I commanded because it makes me feel good to tell my wife to repeat things.
“She has no impulse control. Her brain is not fully formed. She’s only eighteen months old."
Rochelle can get away with saying stuff like this because she is Physical Therapist and know everything.
“NIC,” I said.
“What?”
“No Impulse Control.”
A fortnight later I was sitting in the group holding cell in the Sonoma County Jail after a 62 hour bender. Things had ended badly with a lot of broken glass and twisted metal. There was a dull throbbing behind my eyes, and the inside of my mouth felt like I had rinsed it out with battery acid. Someone, I’m not naming any names here, had vomited on my crotch and not bothered to clean it up. Somewhere along the line I had lost my right sock and shoe. But on the plus side I had acquired a bitchen-looking Maori tattoo that ran the length of my left forearm. It burned like hell.
The man sitting across from me had lost his teeth to a lifetime of meth addiction. I could smell him from six feet away and it wasn't a good smell. His hair stuck out at crazy angles and his left eye wandered lazily from pillar to post. He was holding an animated conversation with a point just above my head. The gist of the conversation seemed to be; he had not meant to stab that bitch, he would never stab that bitch, he, in fact, really loved that bitch.
For not the first time in my life I was glad I was not that bitch.
Seeming to acquire a new focus his eyes settled on mine. “What’s your excuse?” he demanded.
“My brain is not fully formed,” I told him.
“Huh! I’ve heard that one before.” He snuffled indignantly.
“No, it’s true. I suffer from NIC.”
“Enayewhat?”
“No Impulse Control.”
“Oh, the judge’ll like the sound of that.”
I was hoping he was right, he sure sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
COD-LIVER OIL FOR THE SOUL
(When the Dirty Diaper Dad last left you he was in the able hands of Dr. Moses, the Naturopath, seeking respite from his broken brain. I take up where I left off.)
I learned from Dr. Moses that naturopathic medicine differed from allopathic medicine (that is, western medicine) in one fundamental way. Whereas western medicine treated the symptoms of a sickness, usually by prescribing drugs for it, naturopathic remedies sought to address the core, underlying, cause of the sickness. And to do this it was necessary, obviously, to find out what the real problem was. He told me the medication I was taking for anxiety/depression only treated the symptoms, and that, in fact, one of the meds was actually harmful to my liver. Something my doctor had never mentioned.
When was the last time you spent 90 minutes with a physician? In my experience the doctor rushes into the examining room, spends as little time with me as possible, finds out what is wrong with me, prescribes some medication and then rushes out to see his next patient because, invariably, he is running behind schedule. I’ve never spent 90 minutes with a physician. That is, until my session with Dr. Moses. Over the course of an hour and a half we went through a detailed medical/mental history. He was very thorough. He asked me about my goals for my body and my mind. Once he had a good picture of who I am and how I got to where I’m at, he gave me a detailed overview of how my system worked, explaining that it was his goal to get my system in balance.
He told me that there were 5 or 6 key markers he could test for and then determine exactly why I was undergoing the symptoms that I was experiencing. And even though my current medication was pretty heavy stuff he encouraged me to not quit cold turkey, but rather to gradually wean myself off them while at the same time brining on line natural supplements and vitamins that would treat my underlying condition.
It all made a lot of sense to me. I asked him had he treated men with similar problems and he answered that he absolutely had, though no two cases were identical.
I left his office with vie vitamins and supplements and, just as importantly, a sheet of paper detailing my plan to get better. For someone like me, having the plan in hand was almost as important as anything else. I could look at this plan when I got wiggy and remind myself, “Oh yeah, I do have a plan to get better, and I have a doctor to work this plan with me.”
That’s important for a neurotic, self-absorbed guy like me. Even though I don’t act like it, I don’t like to be alone. I want help, even though I usually won’t ask for it. And after my meeting with the good doc, I felt I had help and I had a plan to get better.
Funnily enough, one of the supplements I went home with was Cod Liver Oil. Now, when I was a lad my mother made us swallow a tablespoon of this hideous elixir most mornings during the winter. It tasted so bad you would have to gulp down a glass of orange juice right afterward. And then as I sat at my desk in St. Gregory’s Elementary School in my scratchy corduroy pants I would keep burping up the awful taste of the Cold Liver Oil all morning. But here’s the great thing; now Cold Liver Oil is made with different flavors – I chose Orange naturally – and it hardly has any taste at all.
This is what I call real progress.
Just when you think there is no hope for mankind, what with tsunamis and nuclear reactor meltdowns, global warming and the decline of America, then you discover that some smart chemist has been working behind the scenes to make Cod Liver Oil you can actually swallow.
Is life great or what?
(When the Dirty Diaper Dad last left you he was in the able hands of Dr. Moses, the Naturopath, seeking respite from his broken brain. I take up where I left off.)
I learned from Dr. Moses that naturopathic medicine differed from allopathic medicine (that is, western medicine) in one fundamental way. Whereas western medicine treated the symptoms of a sickness, usually by prescribing drugs for it, naturopathic remedies sought to address the core, underlying, cause of the sickness. And to do this it was necessary, obviously, to find out what the real problem was. He told me the medication I was taking for anxiety/depression only treated the symptoms, and that, in fact, one of the meds was actually harmful to my liver. Something my doctor had never mentioned.
When was the last time you spent 90 minutes with a physician? In my experience the doctor rushes into the examining room, spends as little time with me as possible, finds out what is wrong with me, prescribes some medication and then rushes out to see his next patient because, invariably, he is running behind schedule. I’ve never spent 90 minutes with a physician. That is, until my session with Dr. Moses. Over the course of an hour and a half we went through a detailed medical/mental history. He was very thorough. He asked me about my goals for my body and my mind. Once he had a good picture of who I am and how I got to where I’m at, he gave me a detailed overview of how my system worked, explaining that it was his goal to get my system in balance.
He told me that there were 5 or 6 key markers he could test for and then determine exactly why I was undergoing the symptoms that I was experiencing. And even though my current medication was pretty heavy stuff he encouraged me to not quit cold turkey, but rather to gradually wean myself off them while at the same time brining on line natural supplements and vitamins that would treat my underlying condition.
It all made a lot of sense to me. I asked him had he treated men with similar problems and he answered that he absolutely had, though no two cases were identical.
I left his office with vie vitamins and supplements and, just as importantly, a sheet of paper detailing my plan to get better. For someone like me, having the plan in hand was almost as important as anything else. I could look at this plan when I got wiggy and remind myself, “Oh yeah, I do have a plan to get better, and I have a doctor to work this plan with me.”
That’s important for a neurotic, self-absorbed guy like me. Even though I don’t act like it, I don’t like to be alone. I want help, even though I usually won’t ask for it. And after my meeting with the good doc, I felt I had help and I had a plan to get better.
Funnily enough, one of the supplements I went home with was Cod Liver Oil. Now, when I was a lad my mother made us swallow a tablespoon of this hideous elixir most mornings during the winter. It tasted so bad you would have to gulp down a glass of orange juice right afterward. And then as I sat at my desk in St. Gregory’s Elementary School in my scratchy corduroy pants I would keep burping up the awful taste of the Cold Liver Oil all morning. But here’s the great thing; now Cold Liver Oil is made with different flavors – I chose Orange naturally – and it hardly has any taste at all.
This is what I call real progress.
Just when you think there is no hope for mankind, what with tsunamis and nuclear reactor meltdowns, global warming and the decline of America, then you discover that some smart chemist has been working behind the scenes to make Cod Liver Oil you can actually swallow.
Is life great or what?
Friday, March 18, 2011
MR. CRANKY PANTS RIDES AGAIN
Friends have mentioned to me that I have not posted to my blog for some time. I could say that I haven’t been inspired or that I have nothing to say. But that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth is that I lost the use of my mind last month and only recently regained it. A massive depression settled upon me in February and it has made writing, and much else in my life, seem superfluous.
Those of you who know me well, or have read this blog faithfully, are probably commenting, “Gee, Dirty Diaper Dad, we are not under the impression that you are a hotbed of good mental health. On your best of days you are a work in progress. And, honestly, you don’t have too many ‘best days’ as far as we can tell.”
And I, ignoring your biting sarcasm (which, I should tell you, seems a little beneath you) would agree with you. But this latest mental meltdown was unlike my usual stuff. I’ve battled the Black Dog – to use Churchill’s moniker – since my teens. I’ve done talk therapy, chemical therapy, and when nothing else has proven effective, I’ve called upon a large and diverse collection of self medications. I’ve done physical exercise like a demon since my mid twenties solely to achieve the dopamine effect it produces. Hey, I’m nothing if not resourceful.
Still, from mid-February on I was in the grip of a gloom I couldn’t shake. I was moping about the house like a broken-hearted teenage girl. I was saddened for no discernable reason, I was angry at the world, and even though I was working out an hour a day in the vain search for the dopamine high, I was putting on weight at an alarming rate.
And, just to make the effect completely horrific, the inside of my head felt as if some wire had shook loose and was sparking against the inner wall of my skull.
Needless to say I was a real pleasure to live with during this period. I ignored my wife. I barked at Vivienne when she did the things a normal toddler does – steal the dog’s food, bath in the dog’s water bowl, hurl herself at sharp objects, clamber up bookcases. I even rudely bumped the noble Akita out of my way when all she did was follow me around in the eternal hope that I would give her a piece of biscotti.
My wife is a physical therapist who is currently attending Sonoma State to attain certification as a health care navigator. As part of this study she is exposed to a large swath of alternative healing methods. And thus, she sat me down one day and said, “Bubba, you need to see somebody about this depression.”
“Nobody can help me,” I told her. Mr. Positive Thinking I am not.
“You need to see your therapist,” she said.
“What’s he gonna do?” I am noted far and wide for my imitation of a whining, petulant child.
“He’s helped you in the past.”
“That was then, this is now. And nobody can help me now. I am well and truly screwed forever.”
I know this sounds pathetic and it seems sad that an adult could really think this way, but it was a true reflection of my inner torment.
“You need to see your therapist,” she reaffirmed and I grunted acquiescence. “And then you need to see someone else as well, because this latest bout of depression is different from your usual gloom.”
“I’m screwed forever.” After a lifetime in search of a personal outlook I had finally stumbled upon my mantra, and this was it. “I’ll go see David (my therapist) but no one else.”
Ignoring me she said, “I think you should see the Naturopath, Doctor Moses.”
A relative of ours had suffered from a mysterious stomach disorder for years. Allopathic Medicine – that is, Western Medicine – did nothing but throw greater quantities of pharmacology at the problem, and she didn’t get any better. After hearing Dr. Moses lecture to her class at SSU, Rochelle had brought her to see him. In short order he had identified the causes of her discomfort and prescribed natural supplements and cures. Wonder of wonders, after years of suffering and western medicine run-around, she was cured in short order.
“Dr. Moses can’t help me,” I told my wife. And why did she insist of interfering in my life? Couldn’t she see I was doing just swimmingly on my own? Geehsh, some people are such busybodies.
“Well, Mr. Cranky Pants, that’s what we’ll find out,” she said. “Because you’ve got an appointment with him next Friday at ten in the morning.”
“I don’t want to go to a naturopath.” I didn’t even know what it was, but I wasn’t buying any of it; new things frighten me. But I couldn’t tell my wife this because I am also afraid of showing others how I really feel. I’m super well-adjusted you can tell.
“And I don’t want to live with a depressed, angry retired guy. But, ha ha, the jokes on me! Because that’s what I’ve got.”
“Sarcasm does not enhance your natural beauty.” She seemed angry and I thought this might calm her down.
“And yet, sarcasm is all I’ve got to get through this interminable winter living with you, The Mopester. So you can either try seeing Dr. Moses or you can try living alone, without me and Vivienne.”
See, I told you she was angry.
On Tuesday I saw my therapist and he sided with my wife, the dirty bastard, telling me he was delighted that I would be visiting the naturopath later in the week, as it sounded as if my present mental condition was likely due to some chemical imbalance in my system. I began to suspect that the world was aligned against me in a sinister cabal. And as Friday and my appointment with Dr. Moses (and what kind of name was that anyway? Did he look like Charlton Heston and have a great wavy beard and carry around stone tablets upon which he prescribed herbal supplements? Could he part a path through the quagmire of my depression as he did the Red Sea?) approached I perseverated on the supposedly inflated cost of his services – because, wouldn’t you know it, our health care system doesn’t pay for anything but allopathic healing – and Mr. Saved The First Nickel He Ever Earned began to complain to me about the waste of money this visit would be. And I probably wouldn’t get a damn thing out of it anyway and I had better things to do, and so I picked up the phone to call Dr. Moses and cancel this stupid appointment that my wife had pushed me into.
And it was at this precise moment that my moral compass glided silently into the kitchen on soft paws, yawned cavernously, showing her sharp canines and bone-cracking rear molars, licked her lips, sniffed the air for freshly baked biscotti and asked, “What are you doing, Pack Leader?”
“Nothing,” I said and guiltily put down the phone.
“You wouldn’t be cancelling that appointment with that nice Jewish Doctor would you?”
“What do you know about that?”
“Just because I don’t talk a lot, doesn’t mean I don’t hear everything that’s said.”
I walked to the other side of the kitchen and leaned up against the counter next to the cookie jar. “I wasn’t cancelling the appointment.”
What do you call a man who lies to his dog?
Pathetic, that’s what.
“I am in the grips of the worst depression I’ve ever faced,” I told the dog. “I’m already on two types of medication, both of which seem to have passed the point of efficacy, and I am scared that this new doctor won’t be able to help me either. And then I will be fresh out of solutions and staring at living the rest of my life with my brain permanently scrambled.”
“It is at moments like these,” Kebu said, “that I am glad I am a dog.”
“You don’t get depressed, ever?”
“It is not in my nature. I try to live in the moment.”
“Lucky you.”
“Yes, lucky me, indeed. Long runs with you in the freezing rain as you, unsuccessfully it seems,try to excise your many demons, the child yanking my tail, and those wild turkeys parading through our yard like they own it.”
“My wife is fed up with me.”
“You’ve been a wretch.”
“She’s threatening to leave me if I don’t get straightened out.”
“As much as I owe all my allegiance to you as Pack Leader, I will be accompanying The Woman if she departs.”
“Not you too?” Did it get any worse than this; even my dog was leaving me.
“Yes, me too. Though you are undisputed leader of this pack, I just adore The Woman. I would even tolerate The Child to be with The Woman.”
“But I make your biscotti.”
“You humans play dirty, don’t you? Still, I’d rather live biscotti-less than be without The Woman.”
“So I guess I will be seeing Dr. Moses after all.”
“Only if you want to maintain your position in the pack. You’re no good as leader the way you are.” Her gaze shifted to the cookie jar beside me. “All this talking and thinking in cogent patterns has tuckered out my tiny canine brain, might we refresh ourselves with a piece of your world-class biscotti?”
And so it was that on Friday I found myself in the naturopath’s office at the appointed hour. My brain hurt. I was anxious and dry-mouthed. I was trying to keep an open mind. I was trying not to be pessimistic and judgmental.
I wasn’t having a lot of success at anything lately.
Dr. Moses walked up and introduced himself. I followed him back to his office. The lighting in the office was soft and inviting. His children’s finger paintings adorned the walls. I sat in a really comfortable chair. I looked at the doctor. He didn’t look anything like Charlton Heston; he was 20 years my junior, trim and professional looking, with beautiful prematurely gray hair that swept back from his forehead. His eyeglasses were the most stylish I’d ever seen; they made me instantly envious.
In short, he looked like a guy who totally had his shit in one sock. I began to relax. Moses looked like a guy who totally knew what he was doing. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Maybe this guy could help me. For the first time in ages the nasty metal band that encircled my brain began to relax. I took a deep breath and settled deeper into the comfortable chair.
Maybe I was going to be alright after all. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, but maybe their was actually some hope in my life.
He asked me what I knew about naturopathy. I had to admit that I didn’t know one damn thing.
He smiled and said, “Jeff, let me tell you how I work.”
And so began my adventure with the good doctor Moses. And I’ll tell you more about it the next time I write in this bog – which I promise will be sooner rather than later, now that I have regained the use of my mind.
Friends have mentioned to me that I have not posted to my blog for some time. I could say that I haven’t been inspired or that I have nothing to say. But that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth is that I lost the use of my mind last month and only recently regained it. A massive depression settled upon me in February and it has made writing, and much else in my life, seem superfluous.
Those of you who know me well, or have read this blog faithfully, are probably commenting, “Gee, Dirty Diaper Dad, we are not under the impression that you are a hotbed of good mental health. On your best of days you are a work in progress. And, honestly, you don’t have too many ‘best days’ as far as we can tell.”
And I, ignoring your biting sarcasm (which, I should tell you, seems a little beneath you) would agree with you. But this latest mental meltdown was unlike my usual stuff. I’ve battled the Black Dog – to use Churchill’s moniker – since my teens. I’ve done talk therapy, chemical therapy, and when nothing else has proven effective, I’ve called upon a large and diverse collection of self medications. I’ve done physical exercise like a demon since my mid twenties solely to achieve the dopamine effect it produces. Hey, I’m nothing if not resourceful.
Still, from mid-February on I was in the grip of a gloom I couldn’t shake. I was moping about the house like a broken-hearted teenage girl. I was saddened for no discernable reason, I was angry at the world, and even though I was working out an hour a day in the vain search for the dopamine high, I was putting on weight at an alarming rate.
And, just to make the effect completely horrific, the inside of my head felt as if some wire had shook loose and was sparking against the inner wall of my skull.
Needless to say I was a real pleasure to live with during this period. I ignored my wife. I barked at Vivienne when she did the things a normal toddler does – steal the dog’s food, bath in the dog’s water bowl, hurl herself at sharp objects, clamber up bookcases. I even rudely bumped the noble Akita out of my way when all she did was follow me around in the eternal hope that I would give her a piece of biscotti.
My wife is a physical therapist who is currently attending Sonoma State to attain certification as a health care navigator. As part of this study she is exposed to a large swath of alternative healing methods. And thus, she sat me down one day and said, “Bubba, you need to see somebody about this depression.”
“Nobody can help me,” I told her. Mr. Positive Thinking I am not.
“You need to see your therapist,” she said.
“What’s he gonna do?” I am noted far and wide for my imitation of a whining, petulant child.
“He’s helped you in the past.”
“That was then, this is now. And nobody can help me now. I am well and truly screwed forever.”
I know this sounds pathetic and it seems sad that an adult could really think this way, but it was a true reflection of my inner torment.
“You need to see your therapist,” she reaffirmed and I grunted acquiescence. “And then you need to see someone else as well, because this latest bout of depression is different from your usual gloom.”
“I’m screwed forever.” After a lifetime in search of a personal outlook I had finally stumbled upon my mantra, and this was it. “I’ll go see David (my therapist) but no one else.”
Ignoring me she said, “I think you should see the Naturopath, Doctor Moses.”
A relative of ours had suffered from a mysterious stomach disorder for years. Allopathic Medicine – that is, Western Medicine – did nothing but throw greater quantities of pharmacology at the problem, and she didn’t get any better. After hearing Dr. Moses lecture to her class at SSU, Rochelle had brought her to see him. In short order he had identified the causes of her discomfort and prescribed natural supplements and cures. Wonder of wonders, after years of suffering and western medicine run-around, she was cured in short order.
“Dr. Moses can’t help me,” I told my wife. And why did she insist of interfering in my life? Couldn’t she see I was doing just swimmingly on my own? Geehsh, some people are such busybodies.
“Well, Mr. Cranky Pants, that’s what we’ll find out,” she said. “Because you’ve got an appointment with him next Friday at ten in the morning.”
“I don’t want to go to a naturopath.” I didn’t even know what it was, but I wasn’t buying any of it; new things frighten me. But I couldn’t tell my wife this because I am also afraid of showing others how I really feel. I’m super well-adjusted you can tell.
“And I don’t want to live with a depressed, angry retired guy. But, ha ha, the jokes on me! Because that’s what I’ve got.”
“Sarcasm does not enhance your natural beauty.” She seemed angry and I thought this might calm her down.
“And yet, sarcasm is all I’ve got to get through this interminable winter living with you, The Mopester. So you can either try seeing Dr. Moses or you can try living alone, without me and Vivienne.”
See, I told you she was angry.
On Tuesday I saw my therapist and he sided with my wife, the dirty bastard, telling me he was delighted that I would be visiting the naturopath later in the week, as it sounded as if my present mental condition was likely due to some chemical imbalance in my system. I began to suspect that the world was aligned against me in a sinister cabal. And as Friday and my appointment with Dr. Moses (and what kind of name was that anyway? Did he look like Charlton Heston and have a great wavy beard and carry around stone tablets upon which he prescribed herbal supplements? Could he part a path through the quagmire of my depression as he did the Red Sea?) approached I perseverated on the supposedly inflated cost of his services – because, wouldn’t you know it, our health care system doesn’t pay for anything but allopathic healing – and Mr. Saved The First Nickel He Ever Earned began to complain to me about the waste of money this visit would be. And I probably wouldn’t get a damn thing out of it anyway and I had better things to do, and so I picked up the phone to call Dr. Moses and cancel this stupid appointment that my wife had pushed me into.
And it was at this precise moment that my moral compass glided silently into the kitchen on soft paws, yawned cavernously, showing her sharp canines and bone-cracking rear molars, licked her lips, sniffed the air for freshly baked biscotti and asked, “What are you doing, Pack Leader?”
“Nothing,” I said and guiltily put down the phone.
“You wouldn’t be cancelling that appointment with that nice Jewish Doctor would you?”
“What do you know about that?”
“Just because I don’t talk a lot, doesn’t mean I don’t hear everything that’s said.”
I walked to the other side of the kitchen and leaned up against the counter next to the cookie jar. “I wasn’t cancelling the appointment.”
What do you call a man who lies to his dog?
Pathetic, that’s what.
“I am in the grips of the worst depression I’ve ever faced,” I told the dog. “I’m already on two types of medication, both of which seem to have passed the point of efficacy, and I am scared that this new doctor won’t be able to help me either. And then I will be fresh out of solutions and staring at living the rest of my life with my brain permanently scrambled.”
“It is at moments like these,” Kebu said, “that I am glad I am a dog.”
“You don’t get depressed, ever?”
“It is not in my nature. I try to live in the moment.”
“Lucky you.”
“Yes, lucky me, indeed. Long runs with you in the freezing rain as you, unsuccessfully it seems,try to excise your many demons, the child yanking my tail, and those wild turkeys parading through our yard like they own it.”
“My wife is fed up with me.”
“You’ve been a wretch.”
“She’s threatening to leave me if I don’t get straightened out.”
“As much as I owe all my allegiance to you as Pack Leader, I will be accompanying The Woman if she departs.”
“Not you too?” Did it get any worse than this; even my dog was leaving me.
“Yes, me too. Though you are undisputed leader of this pack, I just adore The Woman. I would even tolerate The Child to be with The Woman.”
“But I make your biscotti.”
“You humans play dirty, don’t you? Still, I’d rather live biscotti-less than be without The Woman.”
“So I guess I will be seeing Dr. Moses after all.”
“Only if you want to maintain your position in the pack. You’re no good as leader the way you are.” Her gaze shifted to the cookie jar beside me. “All this talking and thinking in cogent patterns has tuckered out my tiny canine brain, might we refresh ourselves with a piece of your world-class biscotti?”
And so it was that on Friday I found myself in the naturopath’s office at the appointed hour. My brain hurt. I was anxious and dry-mouthed. I was trying to keep an open mind. I was trying not to be pessimistic and judgmental.
I wasn’t having a lot of success at anything lately.
Dr. Moses walked up and introduced himself. I followed him back to his office. The lighting in the office was soft and inviting. His children’s finger paintings adorned the walls. I sat in a really comfortable chair. I looked at the doctor. He didn’t look anything like Charlton Heston; he was 20 years my junior, trim and professional looking, with beautiful prematurely gray hair that swept back from his forehead. His eyeglasses were the most stylish I’d ever seen; they made me instantly envious.
In short, he looked like a guy who totally had his shit in one sock. I began to relax. Moses looked like a guy who totally knew what he was doing. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Maybe this guy could help me. For the first time in ages the nasty metal band that encircled my brain began to relax. I took a deep breath and settled deeper into the comfortable chair.
Maybe I was going to be alright after all. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, but maybe their was actually some hope in my life.
He asked me what I knew about naturopathy. I had to admit that I didn’t know one damn thing.
He smiled and said, “Jeff, let me tell you how I work.”
And so began my adventure with the good doctor Moses. And I’ll tell you more about it the next time I write in this bog – which I promise will be sooner rather than later, now that I have regained the use of my mind.
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