crazy day

Yesterday was a perfect illustration of a day that thankfully does not happen very often, but when it does you are glad it is over by the end of the day. I woke up at 5:20 AM to a sound in the kitchen below us. When I reached downstairs I saw my oldest son finishing off his cooking of eggs for breakfast and was sitting down to eat them. He told me he wanted to get back to his Army schedule. I went back upstairs and fell back asleep. I got up at 7:30 and started working on my autobiography, which continued all morning long. I am now writing about my experiences while in Belgium before I went to India. My writing has slowed down the past couple of days as I kept a detailed journal while in Belgium, so I am trying to summarize a few stories from my journal instead of writing from memory or duplicating my journal. My oldest son decided to go back to sleep so besides my wife I did not see any children all morning long.

For a couple of days our refrigerator was not working properly. The freezer part was as cold as the non-freezer part normally should be. We took it as an opportunity to clean the inside of the refrigerator and threw about half of the contents away. The very first thing on Monday, I called M & H Appliance which had helped us in the past with our dryer. The technician finally showed up yesterday around noon. He took off the inside wall of the freezer to reveal the coils which were completely covered with ice crystals. He got out his trusty commercial hair dryer and after fifteen minutes had the coils completely deiced. He popped off the heater part under the coils and found it was broken. Since he had a spare part in his truck, we had a working refrigerator in under an hour and it only cost me $150.

Then the children all started waking up around noon. Our oldest came down and complained about his throat being sore and his ear hurting. He asked me what he should do about it. Then after my great advice of taking proper rest with plenty of fluids, he wanted to know where his mother was as he wanted a ride to his friends to celebrate New Years's Day. He repeated the same set of questions about his sickness and needing a ride, which to both of us parents were mutually exclusive requests. Kids.

Then I get a call from a friend of one of our sons who was suspecting pot smoking and wanted to know if we suspected the same thing. Of course you want to believe the best of your kids but having lived through many teenagers, we knew that could hazardous to our mental health to completely trust teenagers in this day and time. I went to search the music shed for a missing cell phone and I found a glass bong hidden in one of the guitar amps! My day was not getting better over time. When I approached one of my other son's about it as I told him I was going to break it, he told me not to as it was his friend's. Kids.

On Monday I had taken my middle son to get his driver's license as he had lost it due to his poor grades in school. That is a good thing about the North Carolina under eighteen driver policies that if you fail any classes in school you loose your driver privileges. As a parent you don't have to argue with your children, it is the law. Well your kids can still argue of course, but we have the written law in our favor. We went to the local DMV and found out that to get your driver's license you have to have proof of insurance. I called our car insurance and of course they took him of our policy since he lost his license. I had him reinstated so we could get his license only to learn that by doing so he double our existing cost of car insurance by $100 per month. My wife and I decided that he would have to pay for that in order to get his license. Without a job he cannot pay for it. Without a license it may be hard to get a job. Round and round it goes. Then I told my son all of this and he said he needed a cell phone before he could get a job to pay his part of the insurance in order to get his driver's license. At least he had Christmas money to pay for his own cell phone. Kids.

The only good news for the day was that during this week for the first time in many years all of the kids have been in our bonus room playing Guitar Hero, Rock Band and lifting weights together. It was a shock to see them all together, but definitely a good thing. SO they can enjoy each other after all.

My wife and I ended the day trying to watch an Indian movie that was pretty bad so we shut of the movie after thirty minutes and called it a day. Life in the fast lane with kids can be tiring!

Beautiful Boy vs. Tweak

Last month I reviewed Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and this week I finished his son's book Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff. I must say that drug or alcohol addiction when in the family is not fun. I only read these books because we have lived it, maybe not to the extreme mentioned in these books, but that does not make it in any way less painful. For me, they are both hard to deal with as they transform a person from who they really are to someone else, who I don't want to see or get to know. I think it is interesting to read how the father became addicted to his son's addiction to the cost of neglecting his wife and other children. I have been there and no that feeling. I also like this pair of books as it also shows the son's side where he talks a little about his family, but he is so self consumed that while on drugs that totally consumes him as he must get high again and again. For me, it is very difficult to know what is true or not in such a book as how can someone know what happened when they are stoned out of their mind and without normal senses? Reading this book just gives you an idea of how someone who is an addict thinks and lives to really understand how addiction grips someone and does not let go easily.

In the tradition of my blog I will refer to some of the comments from Nik's book:

• I felt like everyone else had gotten this instruction manual that explained life to them, but somehow I'd missed it. pg 17


• I always thought once I was an adult, independent, whatever, these feelings of hopelessness and despair would go away. I could be like those characters in the movies. Drugs and alcohol gave me that feeling. pg 63


• It is like someone came in and with a vacuum cleaner and sucked out my brain - removing any trace of joy and excitement, leaving me with nothing but his overpowering hopelessness. pg 132


• Staying sober right after coming back from a relapse is no struggle... I always seem to forget why I needed to get sober in the first place... And, each time, I get a little closer to being dead. Things fall apart more quickly. I hurt more and more people. pg 142


• But there's also this part of me that is so dissatisfied with everything. pg 150


• I also have incredible anxiety socializing with people. I mean, if I'm at work, or I'm high, then that's okay. But sober, going out with people my age, I am just really uncomfortable. pg 161


• As long as you look for someone else to validate who you are by seeking their approval, you are setting yourself up for disaster. You have to be whole and comlete in yourself. No one can give you that. You have to know who you are - what others say is irrelevant. pg 195-196


• I guess I'm just selfish. My needs always come first - that need I have to escape or something. pg 202


• Suddenly I can't wait to leave - get back on my own - not have to deal with this cutesy, overprotected, sugarcoated world of my dad's family. They're keeping their children so naive, so unable to cope with hardships of the REAL world. pg 203

perfection vs. addiction

Is it possible to be perfect? How about close enough so you don't cause grief? How good is good enough? Does it matter if we cannot be perfect on this earth? Such big questions don't normally come up very often. For some odd reason I have been thinking about it lately.

At the same time I have been reading another book on drug addiction beautiful boy: a father's journey through his son's addiction by David Sheff. I must say that this book helps more than A Million Little Pieces by James Frey or The Heroin Diares by Nikki Sixx. Having lived a couple of years through our son abusing himself and drugs and the hell it caused, I must say as in everything there is always someone who has it worse than we do. Yesterday I asked my son if he ever did crystal methadone and he said no he did not but every one he knew in San Antonio did. Now that is just another reason we are happy that we left that stage of our lives behind and returned to NC. Maybe a couple of quotes from this book:

• We pretend that everything is all right. But we live with a time bomb. It is debilitating to be dependent on another's moods and decisions and actions. pg 228


• A using addict cannot trust his own brain - it lies, says 'You can have one drink, a joint, a single line, just one.' pg 261


• An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you find it. Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you. pg 265


• If they don't die or do too much damage, there's a chance, always a chance. pg 272


• I said, I'm a drug addict and alcoholic. He shook his head. No, he said, that's how you've been treating your problem. What is your problem? Why are you here? pg 295


• Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. pg 302


• I want to open up and hear Nic and believe him, but I am unwilling to tear down the fragile dam that I have constructed to protect myself. I am afraid I'll be drowned. pg 303

There has to be a middle ground somewhere. Either way the mental institution is just a heart beat away if he try to attain perfection in ourselves or our kids.

music and teenagers

My teenagers often asked me if I like the music they are currently listening to on their iPods. The question comes up most of the time because they are into retro music that was popular 20-30 years ago. I am beginning to understand the truth behind the Indian school of thought that life is circular. Long hair was popular when I was a teenager and is now popular. Bell bottom jeans are starting to become the "in" thing again. Rock bands of the 70's and 80's are touring again and making tons of money doing it. We seem to be making the same mistakes over and over again!

To end 2007 I picked up a book we gave our teenage son who has rock star aspirations. It is such a shocking book of unbridled hedonism and self-pleasure which was the norm for rock-n-rollers of the 80's. My teenagers don't understand why I did not like Motley Crue, Black Sabbath or Blue Oyster Cult when I was their age. For me as a teenager these bands were just too weird as they were forcefully against anything Christian and went the other extreme to openly talk about satan. Not that I was in anyway following Christ or his teachings, it was just too odd for me. Then my teenagers ask about AC/DC, Led Zepplin, Guns-N-Roses, Metallica and such bands who the local red-necks around me enjoyed so clearly I could not listen to them. I went to the logical extreme and listened to bands no one in the whole area I lived in had even heard of, who were at the real edge of the culture. After reading this book, I see what sex, drugs and rock-n-roll can do to a person. Please do not read this book as it will send your system into a state of shock. Here are some quotes from this book:

• Why take a shower if you're only going to get dirty again?
  
• Why make your bed if you're only going to sleep in it again?
  
• I've never been to Eden but it's nice I hear tell, When I die I'll go to heaven 'cause I've done my time in hell
  
• Days like these I hate to leave my house. I can muster up a fake smile and be cordial, but deep inside I feel nobody really likes me... and worse...nobody understands me.
  
• I love playing our music but I can't take the monotony of playing the same set every night.
  
• Stood in front of the mirror today and all I could see was death.
  
• I dreamt my whole life of making music and I have every reason to be happy yet I can't be.
  
• In the mornings when I wake I can smell death on me. It's right around the corner and unless I get out I'm not gonna make it.
  
• Why did my mom always want to be with someone other than me?
  
• My life is loud. Everywhere I go, people are talking to me, but nothing is as loud as the screams in my head. They are far off, distant, and I can't make out the words...I have come to realize it's most likely the drugs.
  
• You gotta give it away to keep what you get.
  
• What I've learned in this life so far is to let the little things go as much as possible and try to swerve to miss the big things.
  

The most amazing news for me is that Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx's girlfriend Vanity has since becoming a follower of Christ. It is such a huge transformation to go from immersed in drug addiction for so many years to what I see on her web site today. As opposed to the shocking web site Nikki Sixx still has but at least he claims to have left drugs and alcohol addictions behind. Sometimes I wonder whether people really believe in what they are doing, or they do it for affect to shock people and to make money. I can only make sure how I live.