Kavinsky

The song of the day is 2012's Nightcall by French musician, producer, DJ, and actor Kavinsky (real name: Vincent Pierre Claude Belorgey).

And God Said

Nothing has been happening lately. I have to drive Nuria to the USCIS field office in Norfolk, VA on Thursday next week. I think I may have a small hole in my left rear tire. I pumped it up to 35 pounds and I'll be checking it from day to day to see how long it takes to leak down. I plan to buy a can of Fix-a-Flat to take with me. I'll also be taking my tire inflator, which I always have in the back of my Jeep. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Other than getting ready for that trip, nothing has been happening to me. Oh, there was one thing. God visited me while I was lying in bed. I couldn't sleep, as usual, and then God appeared. I was alone in bed. Suddenly God stood beside my bed. He was very glowy. 

"Are you God?" I asked.

"I AM," God said.

"I think I just pooped in my underpants," I said.

"Don't worry. I will magically clean them when I leave."

"What brings you here tonight? Are you always with me?"

"I am. Always."

"Were you with me when I fell off the pier in Hickory?"

"Yes. You swam back to the pier, and you don't know how to swim. Remember? That's why you're alive today."

"Were you with me when I got swept out to sea off the coast of Nags Head?"

"Yes. I showed you how to slip into the water and kick while holding onto the inner tube. That's why you're still alive."

"Were you with me when..."

God interrupted. "What part of  'I am always with you' are you having trouble understanding?"

"You have me there. But so much bad stuff has happened in my life, that I have doubts that you were always with me."

"I understand. You had bad times. But remember, those times could have been much worse. You never got killed or killed another person with your car when you drove recklessly as a teenager. You did so many reckless things and skated through them without a scratch. I was with you."

"Will you be with me until I die?"

"I will be with you for long after your body dies."

"Thanks, God." 

"You're welcome. Good night."

I went to sleep immediately, which was strange, because I usually have insomnia all night.

Nuria Homeward Bound

My partner, Nuria, is flying back from Costa Rica to Richmond, VA, today. Her plane left Juan Santamaria International airport at 1:21PM CST and is due into Fort Lauderdale International airport at 5:30PM EST. Her next flight leaves at 10:05PM and takes her to Orlando, FL at 11:22PM. Then she gets on a flight at 9:10AM tomorrow morning and arrives in Richmond at 11:33AM.

After all that traveling and spending two days awake, I know she'll be tired. I hope, when she arrives here, she has enough energy left to go to the grocery store, buy food, then come home and cook a meal, clean the house, change the sheets on the bed, and wash and dry the laundry.

I know what you're thinking. Why don't I do some of those things? The answer is: because I'm a man, and men don't know how to do any of that stuff.

The odd thing is, before Nuria moved in with me, I used to do all those things. Come to think of it, I mostly ate frozen dinners, I didn't clean the house, but I did wash and dry the laundry. The washing machine and the clothes dryer did most of the work, but I did have to push a button and turn a dial. Cooking a meal usually involved pushing a button or turning a dial, too. That's my strong suit: pushing buttons and turning dials. If Nuria can carry the dirty clothes to the cellar and put them into the washer and add soap, I can handle the rest. "Hey Nuria, where do you set the dial on the washing machine?" After she answers me, I can handle the rest. And people say cooking and cleaning is a lot of work!

The truth is, Nuria is very old-fashioned in some ways. She feels certain things are her job, and everything else is my job. I mow the yard. I call a roofer to fix a leak (I don't climb on roofs any longer). I call a technician to clean the boiler every year. I keep the oil tank filled with #2 heating oil. I paid to replace ten windows on the ground floor ($8300). I paid for a new sliding patio door ($2430). I paid for a new garage door ($1900). If you're a homeowner, you know the list goes on and on. I'm glad that Nuria wants to cook and clean. I just hope she doesn't read this blog post and get some new ideas.

5:30PM:  

Nuria just landed at Fort Lauderdale. She sent me this photo as the jet was arriving. Next leg of the flight: 10:05PM to 11:22PM. It will, of course, be dark, so probably no photo.

Winter Monday

It's a beautiful winter day in central Virginia. At 3PM the sun is shining brightly and the temperature is 54°F. I just went out to the garage and cranked up the lawn rocket. I mean, the lawn tractor. (Sometimes when I'm driving it, it's a lawn rocket. That's when I'm flying across the yard, with the uneven earth bumping my butt up and down on the seat.) The tractor's battery still works. So I put a charger on the battery and in an hour I'll go out and remove the charger. I try to boost the charge every week instead of letting the battery sit dormant through the winter as I usually do, so that maybe, when spring and grass-mowing season arrive, the battery will still start the tractor. The battery usually lasts for two seasons, but with periodic charging and luck, I may get a third season out of this battery. 

In six days my partner Nuria will return. She left to fly to Costa Rica on January 9, but it feels like she's been gone six months. I wonder how it feels to her. She's with her family, and she's been visiting her doctors and her banker and she took a two-day trip to a beach with one of her family members—daughter, or sister, or both—and I'm glad she's getting some fun. I'm sure it makes living with me more tolerable.

I'm charging Nuria's Garmin. I gifted her with it a couple years ago. Bad idea. She's never used it. I've never used it. I've tried to use it, but it's too difficult. I used to have a Tom Tom and it was easy to use. I thought a Garmin would be similarly easy, but I was wrong. If I need a GPS on the road, I use Waze on my phone. It's easy to use and is a very handy program. It is not without the occasional error that sends me in a circle, but those are easy to figure out and get out of. In times gone by, I've driven all over the United States, from Atlantic Coast to Pacific Coast, from Montana to Texas, with nothing more than a paper road map, and I never got lost. I didn't care if I did get lost—it would simply have made the adventure more interesting.

It's almost 4PM. In other words, it's time for breakfast. Breakfast is the first meal of the day, regardless of when it's eaten. It is the meal that breaks the fast of not eating since the previous day. Hence the name "break-fast". I haven't eaten anything today and at 4PM I'm becoming mildly hungry. Until next time, stay safe.

Bob Seger

The song of the day is 1980's Against the Wind by singer/songwriter and musician Bob Seger. Seger is accompanied in this video by country music singer Jason Aldean.

Etiquette

Every day I receive a phone call from a person who sounds like a young woman, possibly a young teen, but maybe not yet a teen. The voice asks to talk to Wayne. The caller never identifies herself, nor does she state the reason she is calling. She just asks, "Can I speak to Wayne?"

I don't reply. I don't reply because I don't know who she is or why she wants to talk to me. It could be a con, a trap of some kind. More than that, I don't reply because she treats me with disrespect. I am far older than this young person, and I expect someone of her age, who doesn't know me, to address me by my last name. I think I've earned that. When I was a young teen, I called older people mister or missus and I used their last name. I would never think of calling a much older person whom I didn't know by his or her first name. That would be very disrespectful.

But of course, many kids today are not taught the rules of respect. Their parents weren't either. They are being rude and don't know it. That's not my problem. I don't take their phone calls because they don't give me enough information to make an informed decision. Who is calling me and why are they calling me? They never say. They just ask to talk to Wayne. 

I look upon this behavior as a small example of a larger problem, which is the general decline in respect and civility in our society. I see so much of our society becoming a society of savages. They have no manners and they don't care. They respect nothing and no one. People who respect no one, including me, may find that they receive little respect in return.

Children and young adults: try to learn basic manners. The effort will always be in your best interest.

Elmer

When Nuria left for Costa Rica, she put me in charge of her plants. What could go wrong?

I know how to water plants, and she told me when to water them, and how much water to use on each plant. Most of them have done well. Except for this plant, which I call Elmer.

Since the photo was taken, I've cut off all the brown leaves, which doesn't leave much of Elmer, but he does look better.

I've watered Elmer and he gets plenty of sunlight, so why does he appear to be dying? Maybe Nuria's green thumb can save him when she returns. She'll be back on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope that's not too late for Elmer.

To Connect With God

1. Be truly authentic. Be yourself no matter who you are around. Your authentic version of yourself is who you are, not the version you show others. There is beauty in authenticity, which you see in the very young and the very old, because as you come into this world, or leave it, you don't care what people think. Accept yourself.

2. The reason you are here is to learn, to create, to embody love, and to use the power of love to create.

3. Love everyone. Truly, unconditionally, love all people and all of creation.

4. Listen to your inner voice. Listen to your conscience, it's a direct connection to God.

5. Use technology responsibly. If you get too distracted then you will not recognize the inner voice.

6. Release all prejudice. Love the soul that exists inside each of us.

7. Exercise the power of creation. Earth is the classroom. We can create; it begins with our thoughts, our habits, our actions, our character, our destiny. So control your thoughts.

8. Avoid negative influences: toxic environments, relationships, jobs, schools. Call on the Creator to bring a barrier of protection between us and negative energy.

9. There is a purpose for evil. We are always learning from our mistakes. Without evil there is no good.

10. We are all one in creation—in God's body—because we carry the spark of God within us. All earthly beings carry that. Harming another being harms God.

My Secret

I wrote this to a friend who lived in Costa Rica, after he invited me to visit him several times. I hoped that after reading this blog post he could understand why I always declined his invitations. But now I'm too old to care what people think about me, so I'm telling my secret. What follows was part of a personal email to him.

All of us have secrets. We have things in our history that we are ashamed of, and we don't tell anyone about them, even though keeping them to ourselves is another kind of burden. I had a secret for over 50 years, and now I'm going to tell the world (or at least the tiny part of the world that reads my blog).

I wrote about this before in a blog post titled Panic You should read it if you want to understand panic, but for now, just stay with me here. 

When I was about 22 years old I began suffering from panic attacks. You may not understand them but they are disabling and a sufferer finds himself avoiding many situations. Some people who have panic attacks become housebound. They cannot leave their homes. Some people can walk as far as their mailbox but then they have to go back inside their house. I did not become housebound only because I took a lot of Valium, which is a tranquilizer.

At this same time, I was working in Burlington, North Carolina. My job sometimes required me to travel. I flew to San Francisco, Denver, Albuquerque, New York City, and smaller cities whose names I've forgotten. I enjoyed traveling. I also loved flying and I even took flying lessons for a while. I quit taking them because I didn't want to fly an airplane while taking tranquilizers and I didn't want to have a panic attack while at the controls of an airplane.

Eventually I had to quit my engineering job as well as my dream of flying. For about twelve years I could not work at all.

I cannot explain how a panic attack feels, but it is terrible. A person with panic attacks watches their life grow more and more limited as time passes and they discover more and more situations that cause a panic attack. For years I had to take a lot of Valium to go into a restaurant. No one in my family understood it, but they accepted that I was suffering and they helped me to the extent they could. I was very lucky to have people in my life, including a medical doctor, who supported me in my situation.

When I had a full-blown panic attack, I could not even see the people around me. They were like shadows. Nor could I hear anything. I got to a point where I could not go through the grocery store checkout or order a burger from a fast-food counter. I went to a doctor and he hospitalized me for several weeks. He said I was suffering from "nervous exhaustion and chronic fatigue".

When I was about 28, my best friend and I bought a camper van and traveled all around the country. For meals we usually ate in restaurants. (Sometimes we would cook a simple meal on the van's little propane stove.) When I went into a restaurant and ordered a meal, I was, of course, in a state of anxiety. By the time my meal was brought to my table, I was so anxious that I could not remember how to eat. I would pick up my fork and stop. Then I would think: stick the fork into some food. So I would do that, then stop again. Then I would think: raise the fork to your mouth, and I would do that and then stop again. Then I would tell myself to put the fork in my mouth.  Then I would repeat everything, step by step, to get the next bite of food to my mouth.

You probably think it is impossible to "forget" how to eat. But a panic attack consumes all of your brain. Your adrenal glands pour adrenaline into your bloodstream, your heart pounds, and every bit of your brain screams "RUN."  It is as if you are being attacked by lions. A primitive part of your brain takes over. Your body goes into overdrive. Your muscles become stronger. Your heart pumps more oxygen to them. For a short while you are stronger and able to run faster than you have ever been. In the jungle, in the days when people actually were attacked by animals, this rush of adrenaline was a good thing. It could save your life. But when you are sitting in your car stopped in traffic, or sitting in a business meeting, or dining in a restaurant, it is a very bad thing to have to deal with. I  have gone into a restaurant, ordered a meal, and then changed my order to takeout because I was not sure I could sit there long enough to eat my meal.

Panic attacks are the main reason I am single. How can I date women when all I want to do is get out of the place as fast as possible? But I became an expert at hiding the panic attacks. I could sit beside you and be having a panic attack and you would never know it.

The last time I flew on an airplane, I began to feel a panic attack starting. I had some Valium in my pocket and I swallowed it. Then I ordered a few shots of whiskey. I got through the flight, but I don't know if I'll get through another one.

Over the years, I have been to many doctors. I have been to psychotherapists. Didn't help. I've been to hypnotherapists. Didn't help. I tried a therapy called "systematic desensitization" that was administered by a physician. Didn't help. So I took all the therapy sessions all over again. Didn't help. I tried a therapy called "progressive relaxation". Didn't help. I tried EEG (brain-wave) bio-feeback. Didn't help. I took a pricey 12-week self-help course from a place in Charlotte, NC, called the Center for Help for Anxiety and Agoraphobia through New Growth Experiences (CHAANGE). Didn't help.

Things are a little better now. I take a medication (it's called an SSRI anti-depressant) that has a side effect of preventing panic attacks. However, the medicine doesn't prevent the anxiety that leads to the panic attack. The anxiety is still there. When I approach a certain situation that used to cause panic attacks, I can feel the anxiety grow stronger and stronger. But it no longer produces a panic attack. Instead, my body begins to have diarrhea. I have to stay glued to a toilet until I take a sufficient amount of Imodium, which is a "tranquilizer" for the intestines. By the time the episode ends, I am too sick to even drive a car. If I am out with someone, I have to ask that person to drive my car while I lie on the back seat. That has happened.

When you visited me, my main concern was about what I would do if I had so much anxiety and IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) that I could not drive. Neither of you have a license to drive. Fortunately, that did not happen; I had no problems. But as much as I enjoyed your visit, I had this shadow hanging over me. It is always present. It has hung over me for more than 50 years. And I know it will always be there. I guess all of us have some kind of personal demon and that was, and is, mine.

Panic or agoraphobia is a special kind of hell. I woud not wish it on my worst enemy. Yet I know I am not alone. Many people have it, but are reluctant to talk about it. No one can understand how crippling it is unless they have experienced it. 

So there, that is my secret that you have finally dragged out of me. I never talk about it because it is very embarrassing for me to tell people and I know they will not understand. But you have asked me to fly to Costa Rica enough times that I feel you deserve an explanation. I hope you can understand the reason I have said "No" has nothing to do with you. The reason is my personal problem. There are many things I would love to have been able to do during my life. I see people who have adventurous worlds, and go scuba diving and mountain climbing and flying jet planes, and I don't understand their world. I do not live in their world. I never will.

If you want more clarity on this subject, now you can go read Panic. And thanks for stopping by.

Nuria Come Back

My partner Nuria is visiting her family in Costa Rica. This is a problem for me, because I have forgotten how to take care of myself. Nuria has spoiled me, and I didn't realize how much until she left me. I used to live alone and that was never a problem. Then Nuria entered my life and "took over" cooking and cleaning and doing laundry. As a result, I haven't eaten any food today (it's 5PM), nor did I eat any food yesterday. The day before that I ate 12 chocolate chip cookies. Oddly, I don't feel hungry. I feel a vague, sick feeling, but not hunger. Nuria will return in two weeks. If I'm still alive and able to function, I will meet her at the Richmond airport and bring her home. I think the odds of me living until February 11 are about 50/50. But am I complaining? No. I'm just saying: "Nuria, if you walk into this house and there is a skeleton lying on the floor..."