Unintended Consequences

Ahmaud Arbery. An innocent 25 year old man gunned down for the crime of jogging while black. 

Some will argue that this is a sensational statement, but I'm going to make some otherwise sensational comments about that below anyway so strap in. 

This happened in February. It is now May. The two white men involved in the slaying are not in jail. Under Georgia law, given a loose interpretation of the situation while ignoring key facts, what they did to this young man was legal. Emphasis on "loose" and "ignoring".

We wouldn't even be discussing this had not third party video of part of the tragedy surfaced. Any reasonable person, after watching the video, can conclude one simple set of facts. An unarmed person was shot and killed by two armed people. This is irrefutable.

Under Georgia law citizens can not only carry, but they have the power to arrest. And (this is where the slippery slope begins) they have the right of defense when attacked. And this is true seemingly regardless of who provoked the attack. In this case we now know clearly it was the two white gentleman that provoked the situation.

...

I want to try to deconstruct some of the ignorance and unintended consequences of the laws surrounding such situations that won't piss everyone off. And that's going to be difficult. To do this I'm going to naturally paint with a somewhat broad brush and admit that my own biases play some part as well.

But I also hope to belie some notions of political discourse that simply do not dovetail with reality.

There are foundations of the civil rights movement that rarely get discussed. And I could get lost in pointing some of these out. The secularists and atheists involved. The active homosexual leaders involved. The whites involved. I could write a dissertation about the inclusive and broad nature of the financial and foundational contributions of these groups but that would distract too much from my statements. 

What I can say is that I come by this knowledge largely from the efforts of my tiny little white girl mom. A mom who did actually fight in the trenches of the civil rights movement. A mom who helped establish North Carolina's first chapter of the NAACP. A mom who went to jail in the 60's during the Woolworths sit-ins.

A mom who largely got away with what were seen then as militant social actions precisely because she was a tiny white girl. 

This is the person who introduced me to shooting firearms and taught me how to do it well. Well after the crescendo of the Civil Rights Movement when I was 8 years old when she was on her second marriage and divorce and myself having a brother 10 years older she brought me out into a field with a Savage bolt action 22 rifle and began teaching me. I went on in later years to teach riflery and marksmanship at summer camp and became briefly involved in competitive IPSC pistol shooting sports. 

Being raised with secular humanist liberal progressive ideals and an appreciation of firearms didn't feel weird to me. Nor did it to my mother or any of her liberal contemporaries, regardless of the color of their skin.

But boy in this day and age it makes you feel like a unicorn in a wading pool of sharks.

All too often my opinions on the second amendment get dismissed by those on the left who claim that I just have a blind spot merely because I enjoy shooting sports. And perhaps that is correct to some degree. But I also realize just how ignorant so many people are of the history surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and how it ended up affecting firearms legislation.

Gun ownership was at the time a documented and well understood aspect of the movement. Dr. King's peaceful marches were a precise and powerful foil against the white oppression of the era, but there was context too that few take the time to digest. Public peaceful protests were to focus a lens on the less than peaceful retaliation by the state to leverage the media into the conversation. Privately, civil rights activists banded together in loose communities and groups to on a more intimate level publicly defend their neighborhoods with firearms. 

There was a sane divide and distinction that is lost in the conversation today. Civil Rights Activists realized in general that armed protests were not only counterproductive, they were foolish. Armed dissent might have made sense in 1800, but it certainly is a fantasy in 20th century America to believe that any group could overthrow the state. That's just madness and wishful thinking. But individuals living their lives with a firearm handy just in case and not making public political displays WAS a deterrent. And this was true in rural black America as much as it was true in urban black America. 

The modern divide between liberalism and firearms simply did not exist back then. And I argue that it doesn't really exist today. 

After Congress passed The Civil Rights Act of 1965, another law was passed shortly after, the National Firearms Act of 1968. And the proximity was no coincidence. 

Not to make any claims that the militant Black Panthers were fluffy kittens, but their armed protests for civil rights in California led us down the garden path of firearms legislation targeted at blacks in an attempt to seperate firearms from the liberal zeitgeist. A liberal collective made largely of completely safe living white people. And it worked.

Under then Governor Reagan we found the first legitimate attempts in generations at challenging the notion of the second amendment and its intent. Owning guns while black is as foundational and analogous with doing anything else.....like jogging.....while black. 

These legislative moves that began in California swept the nation. A nation in turmoil due to the civil rights movement, the counterculture movement, and the protests against the Vietnam War. And these culminated in the National Firearms Act. 

Largely seen today as a benign and sensible set of legislation, in its day it was equally an attempt to disarm en masse urban population centers. It established the legal precedents used today to continue a narrative about firearms as a social ill. And while parts of that argument seem to make sense on the surface it has institutionalized a divide between liberal values and the unfortunate reality of defending those values. It is a perhaps sad reality to admit to, but carrying a small pistol in an urban environment prior to this wasn't a radical act. It was a realistic act living inside the pressures of culture and poverty in inner city environments. In neighborhoods where ethnic groups preyed on their own this led to only the disarming of those.....who obey the law. It is no wonder that the lawlessness of inner cities of the era merely got worse. 

Unintended consequences. Naive ideas. Solutions that in a vacuum make sense, while completely ignoring human reality through ignorance. A culture where buying a gun at Sears, or Ace Hardware, or a corner drug store wasn't weird in the slightest. 

The danger, the real and legitimate danger of tinkering with the second amendment, has historically done little but exacerbate problems in society. Whether it be to limit or expand the rights to bear arms, it had created unfortunate scenarios that further remove ones liberty from the conversation and hand the rights over that conversation to a body politic.

Just as jogging while black has become a social and political reality we have to contend with, so has being armed while black. 

You can't in good conscience talk about one without recognizing the other......nor fail to  recognize that we have done this to ourselves.

A Moral Compass

I'm going to tackle some very complicated concepts today. And I will likely bore many of you to tears. 

I am an avid fan of history as are many people. But my fascination with it stems largely from a unique and over arching approach. 

A groundbreaking and brilliant documentary ostensibly about history, but in actuality more of a treatise on human behavior, came out from the BBC during my teen years. Directed and narrated by Richard Burke and titled "The Day The Universe Changed" is an exploration in a non linear nature of the tenets of behavior in the modern world, and where those ideas and ideals and ethical tenets come from. Even though it came out 40 years ago it is incredibly relevant in the current time and I encourage anyone and everyone to watch it. 

It alongside the brilliant documentary series by social anthropologist Desmond Morris, "The Human Animal" informed the foundations of my philosophy and worldview as I became an adult. 

Rather than answering all questions, those exposures to history, sociology, anthropology, and ultimately ethics and philosophy encouraged a young man's voracious appetite for knowledge. 

It will leave many who know me personally with contradictions, given my equal penchants for anime, video games, sarcasm, and irreverent and dark often oversexualized memes. Then again most people who know me really well already know I'm a complex and unpredictable motherfucker. 🤷‍♂️

................

Anywho......

I strongly feel we are on the cusp of an historical epoch. A new zeitgeist. One that may go unnoticed for it's scale because of the times we live in where change occurs so fast that we humans are basically just along for the ride. We accept "new normals" with unbridled speed never before seen in human history, simply because radical change occurs every generation now. Often times there are  multiple changes within a generation. In less than half the life span of my child who hasn't hit thirty yet, we went from zero to billions of smartphones. I'm typing this on a smartphone. 

You could scoff and say, if you do know your history, well every time we have a culturally altering event, change happens swiftly. And you'd be correct. But also wrong.

One of the most disruptive storms in all of human history was the invention of the printing press. Its inventor Johannes Gutenberg would go on to......die penniless. Patent law wasn't a thing back then. But within barely more than a generation it disrupted literally everything. The Protestant Reformation, the enlightenment, the Renaissance? These events and periods would not have happened otherwise. 

As a technological innovation the printing press really wasn't groundbreaking at all. It was merely the first time existing well established knowledge had been put together in precisely that way. Anyone today with an elementary school level education could re-discover such an invention. 

But even knowing the great philosophical contributions of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, and Romans before the dark ages, this was the first time in human history that knowledge was democratized on a grand scale. 

What pushed us to this wasn't however some grand tradition in knowledge. No, what pushed this was the collapse of the Augustinian worldview. The collapse of the ideology that embraced the concept that NOTHING about the real world mattered except in how it related to God and heaven. 

This took the black death, the literal death of more than half of Europe to bring about. And it took a LONG LONG time for ancient knowledge to permeate the aftermath. It is ironically perhaps a permeation that did not occur in the Muslim world, a fact we still cope with the consequences of today

In today's world, with multiple continuous centuries of general progress in the human condition, we see a freight train of change begetting change begetting change, continually gathering steam and on an unpredictable course to who knows where. 

We have created and embraced an artificial sort of selective evolution, based on the collective id and ego of our species that far outstrips the timescales of biochemical natural selection. The human population grew six fold in the 20th century on the back of this artificial construct. It also grew the art of warfare to levels of atrocity never witnessed in our species, to where we almost ironically had to adapt to rules of warfare that weirdly put almost random seeming constraints on our penchants for killing one another.

It had painted a maddening picture of how fragile our species derived ethics and cultural moral precepts often crumble in the face of the world we have made.  A divisive author in his own right, Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape paints a damning and historical acknowledgement of this reality whilst giving some ideas of how to address it.

It is an easy topic to oversimplify, but I have to admit there was one takeaway from that book that painted this idea into my psyche most vividly. I'll try to drag up the photo, but in the book he places a picture of what seems like some military and non military men and women engaging in a seemingly typical picnic outing. We know enough about facial expressions, and the limitations in how people make those expressions to reliably and accurately perceive happy behaviors in humans from mere photographs. And it is a seemingly happy scene of people posing for a photograph.

When you know the backstory however, that this was a picnic of the adminstrative staff of the Aushwitz Nazi death camp, you begin to be faced with an unfortunate reality when it comes to human behavior. And what is that?

Human beings can become convinced, individually or collectively, to value ideas that go against their own long term self interests and/or against the interests of their fellow humans. Reliably so. 

It is this reality, alongside the directions technology push us into, that drives much of the human experience. 

Our moral intuitions, based deeply on well understood concepts of social anthropology, simply collapse in situations that do not involve direct interactions. 

If your great grandpa regailed you with his Congressional Medal Of Honor story about how he was the one bomb sight engineer to have pressed the right button at the right moment, under heavy enemy fire, to drop the bombs on a munitions factory in The Battle Of Dresden you'd be awestruck to a degree. But you'd have a differenct feeling of great grandpa if he had in loving detailed described another scenario where the same amount of people died, except it was him entering said factory on foot and killing the same number of people with his bayonet on a bloody rampage because his M1 was out of ammo. 

Proximity distorts our ethics. And this is a natural aspect of being human. The classic trolley problem in philosophy paints this picture as well, even if I feel it doesn't fully address the deeper issue of what precisely constitutes suffering. 

In this classic thought experiment in philosophy you have a trolley running downhill out of control on a track. In the way up ahead you notice five people working on the track. You sit beside a track switch, where if you pull that lever the trolley goes off a side track. Except on that side track is one lone worker who will die if you make that choice. The key is your choice is somewhat indirect to the status of that one guy.

There is a second scenario where instead of being next to a switch you are on an overhead bridge and beside you is an incredibly obese man. Your quick thinking mind is able to calculate that if you simply shove this guy off the bridge into the path of the trolley it will slow the trolley down enough to save those five individuals further on down the track.

Most people when faced with this thought experiment choose pulling the switch as the more ethical choice than deliberately shoving a fat guy to his death, even though the net outcome in human life is the same.

The flaw here is a minor one that doesn't quite take into account the actor and the agency involved with the protaganist in this thought experiment because it fails to address the real elephant in the room, being "what constitutes suffering". Because most people would also agree that perhaps the guy pulling the switch would suffer less in the way of PTSD and regret than the person deliberately shoving another human being to their death for the purpose of that agency.

I won't go into a lengthy rehash of what I've written the last month on the current pandemic, the woes of incredibly polarized national and world politics, or the socioeconomics of a broken capitalist philosophy. 

I just want to note as well as implore people to really think long and hard about what they value, and to at least recognize the slippery slopes and grey areas we now face as a species.

How To Piss Off Progressives With A Few Uncomfortable Statements

Somehow I feel reason is a dying art. Expertise that should matter, often doesn't. We live in a world where information of any kind is literally at our fingertips, and yet we have a populace ill suited to utilize it. 

We educate our populace in the sciences, but we never educate them about what science is or why it is valuable. We spend at least twelve years educating our children without ever teaching them HOW to think for themselves. 

To live a properly "woke" life you only need a handful of things. 

1). Empathy. This is where all positive thought for our species has to begin. You have to care, genuinely care, for the well-being of yourself and those around you to live properly. No one is self made and independent in any truly significant way, except perhaps in the case of sociopaths.

2). Learn something new as often as possible. The world is wonderful and scary and amazing and terrifying. Education doesn't end with high school or college. If it does for you? If you aren't the type to just pick up a book? You're part of the problem.

3). Always be prepared to ask one simple question. "Is this true?" . This is the most critical and important step, and the most difficult. It isn't actually difficult to do in practice at all. But it will be difficult to accept, because you have to do this across the board. Including and especially with ideas and concepts you agree with. You will discover that there is bullshit everywhere and that seemingly simple problems you'd think are as simple as "if only we did this instead" to solve, aren't remotely that simple.

But some shit that seems woke just isn't.

It doesn't take a Nobel prize winning level of intellect to do this. It just takes a certitude to begin every inquiry in your life with a few important tenents. Certitude and especially courage, because once you embrace a few simple concepts you'll likely also become that uncomfortable person in conversation accused of calling bullshit on ideas other people value. But this part is crucial, because there is bullshit everywhere. Left, right, progressive, conservative, whatever. Just as their are conservative values that aren't really conservative, their are progressive values that just aren't progressive. Everyone is to some degree peeing on their own feet. 

The only problem with this is that if you're not an expert it only prepares you to start recognizing what is wrong sooner than what is right. And it is difficult to build consensus with people like this, because people want easily scalable solutions. Solutions with no downsides. And every solution has downsides.

Too many of us approach issues with a winner take all mindset, especially if an issue resonates personally. 

This affects all discourse, and not just the technical. You can't approach any meaningful topic, even with a backpack full of empathy and reason, without pissing someone off. And you often piss off the people behind the idea you champion MORE than those opposed. 

Here are some examples that will 100% reliably land me in hot water with progressives. I focus on these because I am a progressive liberal secular humanist, so it is very important to me to get this house in order, even if many progressive minds wouldn't want me in the room.

We need a newer greener energy infrastructure. We know this. The science informs this. But we are going about this the wrong way, with the wrong priorities. Even though we are at some levels of parity between wind and solar compared to natural gas, coal and nuclear from a cost standpoint that is only true upfront. It takes massive amounts of coal and quartz to make solar cells. Yes coal is a primary ingredient in it's manufacture. And despite every silly documentary on earth showing a picture of a sandy dune when talking about solar, you cannot make solar cells out of sand. Sand may be predominantly quartz, but it is too impure. It'll probably break your brain to realize what company predominantly sources the quartz for this too, Koch Industries. And then you have to replace panels every ten years or so. What you end up with (when you toss in necessary batteries and maintenance) is solar having a similar long term carbon footprint to an efficient modern natural gas plant. The same is basically as true for wind. The technology in materials science just isn't quite there yet. And it's something we should be investing in on a national and federal level. Instead we are still relying on so called "free market" incentives and getting predictably short term profit driven solutions whitewashed as "green". The two primary things we can do now that we aren't doing are political footballs. Our infrastructure for distributing power is century old tech where efficiency gains from rebuilding it nationwide would offer huge gains. We still use AC voltage for lighting and home electronics when these things actually operate via DC today, so we have century old inefficiency built into our walls still. And then there is the elephant in the room that will get me in trouble. Nuclear. Nuclear is not terrible. What is terrible is the 60-70 year old Nuclear tech our energy infrastructure still uses. We still utilize light water reactors due to patent and contract pressures, and no longer even consider building intrinsically better and ridiculously safe molten salt systems (systems that CAN NOT melt down, and CAN NOT produce weapons grade waste). Nuclear is by far the greenest easily deployable method that no one will consider, no matter how good the actual science is.

Ok. That's one tub of hot water. Here's another.

LGBTQ. The alphabet people. I used to think this one was simple. As someone who doesn't identify with any of those letters personally I always approached this topic merely with empathy and the reason behind the concept of liberty. Live your truth, be who you are, love who you love, fuck whomever makes you happy, etc. So long as no one is harmed who cares? After all one of the things our world needs is more genuine love. And you have to admire the courage it takes to live those truths in societies that are less like you. It has real consequences that can affect your ability to stay alive in some places in our world, so I think I completely grasp how important this is. I'm completely on board with the idea that the lifestyles of the LGBTQ community are absolutely none of my business, and yet things I must champion so that I can live my hetero life ethically. With one tiny exception that will land me in hot water.

Trans competitive sports. And this is a layered topic. We know reliably, factually, biologically that transgender is a real phenomenon. Unlike haters on the right who deny this, we have a centuries worth of biomedical science behind this phenomenon. It is real. But, you cannot deny the reality either. Someone born presenting male who transitions to female should not be allowed in female mma, weightlifting, track and field, or pretty much any competitive arena of sports without careful acknowledgement of facts. Growing up with testosterone increases bone density, tendon and ligament strength, and the quality and quantity of muscle mass. Required estrogen therapy preserves these physical advantages, go ask an endocrinologist. MTF Trans competitors in sports tend to utterly dominate their respective competitive classes. Women fought long and hard to have their competitive spaces allowed in sports, and it is still an ongoing fight. To add this variable, which denies science, is unfair. It just is. In the other direction FTM Trans it is problematic due to the realities of maintaining a male presentation (testosterone therapy). Testosterone therapy is banned in competitive sports precisely because it creates a slippery slope of unfair advantage. For a FTM Trans it is necessary, so where should that line be drawn? You cannot turn a blind eye to these admittedly tiny issues, because these issues are real. But heaven forbid you bring them up. You aren't even allowed to discuss this without knee jerk hate being spewed in your direction. Women and men are biologically different and in the general areas of strength and stature men are superior all else being equal. We thankfully live in a world where that narrow set of differences rarely matters. Almost every job that exists gives no advantage to men over women anymore, and that's a good thing. But competitive sports is the rare exception, and it cannot be swept under the rug because it doesn't fit with someone's delusional and sometimes dangerous truth. Watch a MTF trans MMA fighter beat up biological females relentlessly in a ring and you'll be unable to not sense the disparity. That isn't to say women cannot beat men in a fight. They totally can. But any women that does is a technically skilled fighter using those skills to overwhelm a physically stronger opponent in almost every case. Transition to your true self all you want. I applaud that sort of decision and I admire the courage of it. But don't expect all reality to just get out of the way because you don't personally like it. What's fair is fair. Live with your limits like so many have to.

Anyone pissed off yet? 🤔

MAGA!!! 🤔

People become ignorant through complacency. MAGA hat wearing dildos that can't make an argument beyond "freedom!!!!" fail to recognize that the extremes of their worldview are little more than luddism, a misplaced longing for simpler times, and a beaten like a dead horse misrepresentation of patriotism. Times before the industrial revolution when something as simple as diarrhea was deadly. Times when women and children were treated as little more than chattel, and people with a different skin tone were treated worse. Times when basic survival was the only game in town.

As laudable and historic as our Constituition is, it is also a living document.

It did not guarantee nor even desire voting rights for women, people that didn't own land, or slaves (who were still counted for Congressional purposes, but only as 3/5ths of a human being). It deliberately disenfranchised most of the citizenry. 

Oh and it has had to be amended 27 times. So far.

So many on the right (and a far smaller aspect of the left) fail to grasp though just how legitimately horrified the founders would be at the outcomes of their grand experiment for good or for ill. Most would definitely throw up in their mouths at the rabid state of patriotism we have today. 

Why is patriotism not a clever idea? Well it can be, but it can equally become fuel for propaganda. I always go on and on about words and the value in their definitions and origins. Patriotism derives from the Latin "patria" which means "father". So patriotism has its roots ideally in a fealty towards a society. But its just a verbal misstep away from the idea of a "fatherland". When we translated German ideals into English during WW2 it is interesting to note that we used that phrase of similar meaning to patriotism, merely phrased with different words, to draw a distinction.....rather than note a potentially dangerous parallel. 🤔

Concepts of freedom and liberty are vitally important, but they have to be couched in the reality that we live in a collective society. A machine where everyone relies on everyone else to create this thing we call a society. 

From the cashier that rings up your groceries, the construction worker that helps pave a road, to the aerospace engineers that keep GPS working, and to the theoretical physicists whose field made GPS possible and everyone else literally everyone else in between. We couldn't live our daily boring-ass lives without any of these people.

And yet this reality is where most of the apathy and complacency I mention in the beginning stems from. It is an almost insulting denial of reality.

And ALL of that requires a functional government and tax base.  All too often the conversation is two dimensional. Small government vs. big government. The size isn't the issue. The issue is priorities. 

A government's role in such a large collective society is to simply establish the rules. Those rules do define what constitutes winners and losers in a society. But that depends entirely on your definition of winning and losing. A billionaire who gets taxed at a high tax rate and still remains ridiculously wealthy because math (duh!) isn't a loser in any definable sense of the term.

It isn't about what is free and what is not. It's about deciding the minimums of what we as a society are willing to accept to create the environment we want to live in.

As a for instance, for nearly half a century Germany has had essentially free education and universal health care.

You or one of your children could go to Germany today and receive an inexpensive higher education in engineering and the sciences...... Taught in English!! Wrap your mind around that little fact. Don't need citizenship.... technically don't need to really know German that well.

Germany is doing fine. They are not Venezuela. Both are basically Democratic Socialist countries. The difference is priorities. The only difference fundamentally. 

They are merely interested in having a well-educated populace so that the country can maintain its stature as a leader in engineering and science. 

I think we all have a vested interest in not being surrounded by stupid people. Education isn't solely about future career paths, even with the current valid conversation about college vs. technical schools. Many initial careers are more greatly impacted by social connections than ones education. But getting a proper education above all else teaches you HOW to think and problem solve. It is fundamentally empowering regardless of how well or poorly it might line your future selfs pocket.

We can see it throughout centuries of history. The society that innovates thrives. The society that values education and STEM fields flourishes economically. High tides do indeed lift all boats.

It isn't free versus not free. It isn't freedom versus taxes. Such arguments are just vaguely clever ways of misunderstanding and abusing language. It's about priorities and a future we can live with.

Response

I've had an emotional roller coaster the last few months and kinda went in a pity party direction about social media...etc....bleh... Sorry. Things are really personally very difficult right now financially and otherwise. I've been on shaky ground.

But lurking I came across this and just had to toss in my two cents. Probably because it's relevant to me right now in a prescient way.

And it's gonna be one of those "it depends" posts (and I suppose me being selfish and using this post to do some of my own emotional laundry). Apologies...

My daughters are grown now, but when I got divorced they were 9 and 7. So just barely perhaps old enough to see their parents as people as much as just their parents.   As a divorced man with joint custody there was 50% of their lives experiences that I could not protect them from. I knew when I divorced their mother that they were going to end up having to go through a lot of complicated stuff that was unavoidable. And thankfully as bad as some of it was (my ex-wife was and is not the best maker of decisions) it was never as bad as my own childhood.

I decided early on that the only way I could combat that in any meaningful way was to simply be honest and open with my kids rather than fall into the trap of trying to protect them from everything. Because I think that is a trap.

And it wasn't like an immediate idea or a deliberate decision, but it was something I grew into rather quickly over the first few post-divorce years.

With our joint custody it meant sometimes I only had weekends, but with the topsy-turvy nature of my ex-wife's life meant sometimes I had them for long stretches. At first I kept my experiments at figuring out how to have a personal life of my own again completely private from them. But after only a couple of years, I began to realize what a mistake that was. Or at least I began to realize what a mistake it was for us. My relationship with my girls got a whole lot better and a whole lot more personal after I divorced. Some people seem to think you shouldn't become close friends with your children until they become adults but I decided to begin building that relationship with them when they were really young. And things were realistically, financially as well as emotionally tough back then. And the only way I could combat the nonsense that occurred and there was a lot of it was to simply tell the truth, but usually only when asked. I never threw my kids mother under the bus unless they asked me about things. And I always tried to be thoughtful and in a mindful presence when I did that, as well as being thoughtfully candid about my own pain that I experienced when I was married to her. I tried very specifically to not be nasty (even when my ex-wife was and she was all the time) and it helped us develop not only a solid relationship of love but a mutual understanding and respect.

Once we got to that point and I guess the girls were about 11 and 9 at that point, I never kept my forays into having a personal life with the opposite sex from them. In fact at that point I couldn't have if I tried because they were morbidly curious about my personal life. Not just because they were girls who loved their wacky dad, but because they realized they should be as invested in my happiness as I was in theirs.

Even though my ex-wife remarried immediately (she'd had an affair with my ex-best friend) they became estranged rather quickly and just on the sheer numbers my ex-wife had as many successful and failed attempts at relationships as I did over the years.

The difference between us wasn't the ups and downs that you go through when you try and fail. The difference between us was how we let it affect our world. So I never clung to that instinct we have as parents to protect my children or to sacrifice my own life merely for their sake.

And I'm not trying to disparage the struggles of single parenthood, because I do actually know pretty much what that's like. It's just that I feel like you can do a disservice to yourself and those you care about by pulling yourself into a cocoon.

I never felt like I was putting my kids in any sort of emotional danger, because even with all of the ups and downs I had in relationships over those years until my kids were grown, I never felt like I was sacrificing one relationship for the other. Primarily because I wouldn't allow it. About the only thing I ever had to put my foot down about was a few women here and there who would try to talk me out of my time with my kids. You know, get a babysitter let's have some fun tonight. That sort of thing... My time with my kids was a bargaining process at best most of the time so I was always like "nowp!!". I would always leave the option open and I mean always for a woman I was dating to hang out with all of us.  I can also tell you it was difficult and usually impossible to convince women that would be okay.  That I actually had a cool and legitimate strong relationship with my girls and that we always found a way to have a good time no matter what. I suppose it was a bit intimidating. But I suppose not a lot of people have tried to develop that sort of relationship with their children so it was unusual.

I also had experiences in the opposite direction where women would be overly and unnecessarily protective. I say protective but they weren't actually being protective they were just trying to have their cake and eat it too. It's way more about fear and coping mechanisms than a noble desire to "protect". Trust me it is a little insulting after you dated someone for a while when they won't let you know their children. I mean it comes across like it's perfectly okay for me to put my hand up your skirt, but not okay to play Xbox with your son???? That's actually kind of nasty and dismissive and hurtful if you even think about it for a second. Trust me to entertain you, but not trust me to be a part of your life? That's pretty weak. And the opposite of trust.

Now that my girls are grown I actually feel proud of how I handled all that, because I think by example they got to witness both the f*****-up ness that divorce can be, and that everything can still be okay. That the world is a real place with real consequences and not a fairy tale. Kids know the difference. They may indulge their imaginations all the time but believe me they really do know the difference. It gave them the idea that relationships are complex and that you never have to settle nor should you for things that make you unhappy.

Right now I'm also dealing with that "it depends" aspect of things with my girlfriend Laura. Because I'm an empty nester and she has a 4 year old. And as a result I have had to be extremely patient with her overprotectiveness and her desire to be a helicopter mom. And that's not a criticism of her at all. He's only 4, so his ability to be aware of things beyond mom and dad (his actual dad disappoints him pretty much every minute of every day) and veggie tales and chicken nuggets is limited. He's not quite old enough to understand the emotions he's already having to deal with, so there's no need to make that more complicated than it is. But it is foolish to deny that does emotions exist even in a 4 year old. And you can never protect a child or shield a child no matter what you do from reality...... Unless you're too afraid to teach your child about reality. I'm not saying it's easy but its necessary.

Right now to him I'm just some fun weirdo that his mother knows, and he has no understanding beyond that because he's too young to be equipped understand anything beyond that. So when kids are too young it might be too much, or it might be something you need to take very slowly. But once they get just a few years older than that, just a few, in my experience it's really not that big of a deal. And it's not that big of a deal because pretty early on, and I can remember this from my own childhood, your children begin to see your life and try to grasp what it is beyond your role as a mother or father. They have no choice but to do that because they're present in your life. Children from a very early age have excellent bullshit detectors. And at least for me I decided that it was a disservice to mine to pretend to them that that wasn't the truth.

There were many reasons why my marriage failed, but I can tell you the main one.

When two people fall in love and decide to get married they're deciding that we are two people who want to build and existence. And so at least that contract requires two people putting each other above everything else in their lives. Even their children. Whether a couple has zero children or 10,000 children that still has to be true. Children are desirable amazing and precious things that will really teach you the true nature of love in a way you won't ever grasp until you do perhaps, but love and a relationship is not required to make them and bring them in this world. There are things that are both poetic and profound when you make the conscious decision to have children I'm not trying to lessen the beauty of that. But making babies is strictly biology. Anyone can do that and there is no instruction manual required.

My marriage failed because we forgot why we got married. We forgot that children weren't the goal, but merely an addition to what we chose to have with each other. Being parents to our kids and dividing into the roles that Parenthood sort of forces you into, made us lose sight of why we got married in the first place. Being married is complicated. Being married and having kids is even more so. But it is a mistake, a critical and dreadful mistake, to put your kids ahead of everything else.

A lot of people I've talked to strongly disagree with me about that. And the only thing I have to add as a counter is if you put your kids first, you have now turned raising kids into a contest, a war with yourself with your kids and with your significant other over your capacity to have a relationship with all of them. I've seen that sort of thing break up pretty much every marriage including my own that I have ever witnessed. Love is kind of like peanut butter. It spreads. But if you lose the foundation of that love there's no peanut butter to put on the sandwich. I tried to reverse the course of this in the last few years of my marriage, because I finally woke up to the mistake we had made. I reinvested myself heavily into the idea that my relationship with my wife was something worth salvaging above everything else. The reason why that didn't work it's because she couldn't stop playing "mom" long enough to be a wife. And that sounds harsh but it's nonetheless true.

It took me a long time to understand this, and and my current situation I still struggle to get this point across to my girlfriend.

I don't know whether she and I will be together another month another year or together for the rest of our lives. not because I don't want to be together with her for the rest of my life. It's rather that I don't know what our future holds. you have to be in the moment at all times in order to have any kind of meaningful relationship, and when you add a child into the mix that means you have to be even more in the moment and that can be overwhelming.

All I keep trying to tell her is that I love you and because you love him I have to love him too it's really that simple. And maybe it's too simple because she still struggles with letting go and being overprotective. But, I hope at least, it shows her that love isn't a contest. That there isn't a ranking system.

I'm a firm believer that having children will teach you a valuable lesson about love. It simply opens a door that doesn't get opened any other way in your life. But it can also lead to you shutting other  doors that you shouldn't allow to happen....unless that first love with your spouse or significant other that got you the children in the first place wasn't that kind of love.

So I think denying yourself the opportunity of succeeding or failing, even failing multiple times, at forming a relationship that you need for yourself intellectually emotionally intimately and sexually, just because you're afraid of what might happen to the other people you love is a colossal mistake. My children taught me this lesson.

Your Heart

I suppose as close as we have become, we are still very different types of people. Still, no matter what else has happened and no matter what else will happen, I will never not be grateful for the opportunity to have known you.

I am a person of actions. Words. Shitloads of them. And though I have feelings like everyone else does, I've never really been that good at expressing them without words. It is this part of ourselves where we are polar opposites.

I have strived hard to be the kind of person where "reading between the lines" isnt necessary. I've made way too many mistakes in my life, and the number one mistake has always been keeping my mouth shut. It's why I don't anymore, but it's also why I've turned into an incredibly difficult shit to deal with. And that's nobody's fault but my own.

Even though we've known each other for 12 years, I'm sure that would be a legitimate shock to you. Even with all I've said to you. But we've only really come to the point of intimately being close to one another in the last year. So you've been able to get a glimpse of a person you didn't quite know recently even though we've known each other for so long.

Granted, I've always had a big mouth. And I've always been a sarcastic jackass, and most of my life a bit of an extrovert. But I can also say most of my life that's merely been a tactic. And in all honesty I can say it's been a learned and calculated way a relating to people in a friendly and affable manner just so I could keep people at enough of a distance to hide my real self.

The person you know today is a complex and very lonely individual. The more time I have spent over the years since my divorce trying to deconstruct just what went wrong in my life, the more I have realized just how messed up I actually am.

Granted I'm not a complete train wreck. I know I have a cogent and agile mind and intellect. And I can be grateful for the fact that my experiences both good and bad have allowed me to retain my kindness. My mother, who is both the most damaged and impressive person I have ever met, at least instilled in me the value of kindness and empathy.

Friendship, connection, and genuine love.....This is the business of the universe and literally the only things we indulge in that actually matter.

Our ancestors millennia ago struggling to feed themselves every day understood that perhaps better than we do ourselves. Life is struggle and bullshit and pain. It's random. The fact that any of us is alive is the most incredible dice roll there ever is or ever has been. And nothing is guaranteed. Nothing is ever guaranteed.

The struggle, to make a tiring point, is real.

I have tried to embrace this as my truth. Even if it's not actually the truth I still believe it is.

I'm ridiculously smart. I could at least sit in front of a bunch of teenagers and give a discussion of astrophysics and quantum mechanics that would not get frowns from a high school science curriculum staff. And I've never been formally trained in any of that. So I know I'm at least smart.

But I'm also smart enough to recognize that I might not know enough. Ironically being smart, if you're dedicated to skepticism and honesty, means you recognize how stupid you are.

And believe me in some things I completely recognize how stupid I am.

I know you babe. And I can say with confidence I know you better than you have had the courage to allow anyone else to know you.

There are so many things I admire about you, but I also know you live in a really dark place. And I'm struggling to understand that place.

I don't understand why you and I are not blissfully fucking happy at this point.

After 14 months worth of struggling together why aren't we blissfully fucking happy?

I have been ready to step across that threshold for so damn long. I don't understand what holds you back.

And I fully realized even if we were to come to some stunning realization tomorrow and put all of this nonsense to bed and decide to move forward together in every sense of the word that we would be facing a really difficult fucking year ahead. A year of difficulty that is largely my fault.

I cannot expect you to be on board with that. But at the same time you better goddamn be ready to be on board with that. I didn't fall in love with you because it was cute convenient or blatantly sexual or any of that nonsense.

I fell in love with you because I did. It happened. I'm not afraid of that.

You still are.

Please tell me why....

A Complicated Mother's Day

Mother's day was a mixed bag for me. I had to work. My mother passed away four years ago. And I couldn't spend the day with my girlfriend (she is a mother too).

For me, in order to move forward in my life I do often have to pause and look back. Not to be all pithy or trite, but the journey is as important as the destination. And despite it having been personally a very difficult and trying year I do have a destination. The first time I've had one in a very long time. Love will do that for you.

As the vast majority of my life has been a complicated one (some, but not all of which was my fault) I have to get my thoughts out of my head to make sense of them.

So.... Mother's Day. I miss my mother. Very very much. It was always a complicated relationship, and she was always a complicated person. She did her damnedest to raise two sons, but much of her life she was treated with everything from indifference to outright scorn and hatred. By the time I was old enough to understand anything at all  she was already damaged goods.

When my mother graduated high school in 1953, she immediately went to Charlotte to pursue her dreams. She went to college and started to learn to dance and eventually teach ballroom dancing. She competed both nationally and internationally in ballroom dance and got the opportunity to travel the world. At the height of her career, as a teacher of teachers and a district coordinator for the largest chain of dance studios in America, she was in a very unusual place for a woman of her time. She made what we would consider today easily a comfortable six figure salary. She bought owned and ran businesses on the side with her best friend in Charlotte. She was extremely active in the Civil Rights movement and helped found one of North Carolina's first chapters of the NAACP. During this time she met her first husband Bob.

Her first husband, my brother's father, was basically a self-centered egotistical ass. What little I remember of him from my childhood gave me the impression that he cared about nobody but himself. And even though I think he cared about my brother, his ability to step outside of himself and care about other people was probably quite limited. His extramarital affairs are what led to my mother's first marriage dissolving.

Another factor was that she was tiny, and she had great difficulty having children. After she had my brother she had three miscarriages and then just gave up or so she thought. She even had a tubal ligation.

By the time my brother was 8 years old she met and fell in love with the man who would be her second husband, my father. And though I remember almost nothing pleasant about the man, I do know that he was unimpeachably brilliant. His eagle scout badge was earned by helping found the North Carolina Natural History Museum, as he was passionate about nature and wildlife.

They moved to Inglewood California and my father took up a position as a mechanical engineer with Volkswagen of North America. He even consulted with Disney and actually built the stunt cars and camera cars that were used in the Herbie the Love bug movies!

And then lo and behold I showed up. Born yes after she had her tubes tied LOL. I was born at 5 and a half months and only barely survived.

My mother and my brother would tell me stories about our early life out there because much of it I barely remember. They had a Winnebago and went out into the desert digging for gemstones on weekends. They even did volunteer work with the Smithsonian Institution. I still have fragments of some of the fossils they were allowed to keep during some of those digs.

My father did have one problem. Alcohol. It'd be too long to tell the story here, but basically he had issues with alcohol since he was a little baby. Putting alcohol in his bottle was how my grandparents "babysat" him.

Even though I know my mother told me parts of their life back then were idyllic, her as a strong-willed independent professional woman who actually earned more money than he did was the problem. And their ego conflicts led to more and more drinking on his part. His drinking got so bad that he lost his cushy position with Volkswagen. In an attempt to salvage their lives he took the family back to Charlotte his hometown. But all that did was make things worse. As this was the seventies by now, ballroom dancing was a dying art and my mother's career was functionally coming to an end. By the time we were there, my mother was 36 years old. And for a woman at the time it's kind of difficult to rebuild a career at that age after you had spent most of your life dancing and working in theater.

So then everything went to hell. The number of times my father beat my mother and put her in the hospital were countless. By the time we left I think in 1975, she was basically suffering from PTSD though she wasn't diagnosed with that until a little later.

We came back to Spartanburg her hometown to regroup when my mother left my dad. My racist asshole KKK loving Uncle used this as an opportunity to continually belittle her for decades to come. My grandmother was there to support us, but she was timid in the face of my uncle, and even my grandmother had issues with my mother and her feminism and her civil rights leanings. So we were all black sheep in a family that merely tolerated us at best.

All of this led to me having a very unpredictable mother. Unimpeachably brilliant and full of kindness she most definitely was. But I could also come home to a house destroyed, or to my mother being drunk, or to my mother threatening to commit suicide and she did more times than I can count.

When things were okay, she encouraged me to get into the performing arts myself. And so I did for many years. I sang in the South Carolina All-State chorus, and spent a few summers at the governor's School of the arts. I also did a lot of local theater. And I was always expected to keep top grades.

All of these things became escapes for me. They gave me something else to do. They allowed me to put on a face for the rest of the world that I could cope with. Being at home most of the time was wondering what the fuck was going to happen next, and knowing that I was going to have to take care of my own mother when I couldn't even take care of myself.

Things actually got better for a little while. She met an amazing man. A man by the name of Ray Russell. He was a territorial manager for Clairol products and frequented the hotel she managed at the time. They fell deeply in love. And he was a genuinely kind sweet and honorable man as I remember him.

He was also black. Their relationship did not last long. And it failed because my uncle threatened to have him and his family killed (he had children from a previous marriage that I never got the opportunity to meet).

This broke my mother's heart for the last time and afterwards she was never the same. Not even until the day she died.

The chaos got much worse. She eventually realized after an intervention by one of my friends parents that she needed help. So she voluntarily committed herself to the mental institution in Columbia to get that help. This led to me spending the better part of a year at the Spartanburg County children shelter and being inside of the nightmare of DSS and the foster care system. I did towards the end of that run get semi rescued by my brother and his wife. But his wife was a complete psychopath and it was not a very comfortable arrangement.

Eventually me and my mother were reunited, but it just wasn't the same anymore. We were on pins and needles with each other for years, and the time she spent in the hospital really didn't seem to help. She was still suicidal. Still occasionally drinking really bad, and by the time I was sixteen she had so much difficulty holding down a job that I was paying all the bills basically while we were on food stamps and AFDC.

I'll try to shrink the story a little bit at this point, because by this point I got into adulthood and got married. I had developed some really bad habits in my behavior that I wasn't really able to shed until decades later after some hard lessons and a painfully bitter divorce which because of my ex-wife's misbehaviors led to both of my children becoming damaged goods themselves.

I'd given my mother a great deal of power over me. I was always having to be the fixer. She interfered in my marriage greatly, but in hindsight probably rightly so. But I was also a superficial fixer in my marriage. I did love my wife when I married her, but we were never friends. She was just the next project. and because I had so much of my actual true self hidden I was largely miserable for most of the marriage. When my career began to falter due to corporate downsizing that's when the backstabbing and her multiple affairs started.

By the time I got divorced I was completely penniless and broke. I had literally lost everything including my family. And the only person I had to turn to was my mother. And our relationship was prickly to be kind.

When I went through my most recent downsize in 2008 I was so stubbornly opposed to doing that again that I lived in my car for a while before I finally got a job again. That job is with the company I currently work for now.

And at the same time my mother started going blind. So we did it all over again reluctantly except this time I was really genuinely taking care of a very stubborn person.

The last year's of her life I think were the only ones where she was content in any vague sense of the word. She had to rely on me because she had no other choice. But the dynamic between us changed. And it was then that I realized that I was probably the only man she had ever trusted in her whole life. Her relationship with my brother would require writing a book of its own. Their history was fraught with lies deceit theft and even violence. And before she died they never reconciled all of that.

She passed away a sad and heartbroken woman, who still tried hard to be a good mother and grandmother. She felt like throughout her entire life that no one had ever actually loved her. I know because she told me this the day before we had to put her in the hospital for the last time.

When she passed away I had very mixed feelings. Some of which I am ashamed of. But I've had four years to reflect. I felt relief when she passed away. Ashamedly it was because a lifelong burden had finally lifted. But I also felt relief for her. A lot of her story may have been tragic, but I also knew in that last year of her life that she had made her peace with a great deal of it and she was finally at some point truly okay with their being an end.

With all of her flaws, I can still say that I genuinely miss her, and I know I will for the rest of my life. Despite all the negativity above she taught me many valuable things. It is from her that I get my curiosity and my critical thinking. It is from her that I learned the value of kindness and empathy, even though she struggled to have those things in her life for herself.

She raised two boys and got them to adulthood under almost impossible odds, and did so as a fundamentally damaged person. For that I am grateful, and I'm grateful for the fact that I got to know her.

There's still a lot of pain in my heart. But there's no pain at all about what we went through growing up. Not anymore. I've tried to grow too and I put most of those things in my heart to bed a long time ago. She showed me how to do that even though she wasn't really good at it herself.

The pain that's left is simply knowing that she's gone and I'll never see her again. But that's a good pain to have, because it is the proof of the fact that she existed and she mattered.

I take all these ponderings and all these emotions and all these lessons I've learned and just hope that I can apply them moving forward in the life I hope to have from now on with the woman I love.

Thanks Mom! I love you....