Real Joe

According to StarTribune reporter Pat Reusse, Mariano Rivera kissed the pitcher’s mound after the Yankees won game 7 of the ALCS against the Red Sox.

“I went to have a conversation with God,” Rivera said. “I was thankful to the Lord, because there’s nothing better than this. I had had a big conversation with The Man and he came through.” What had The Man told Rivera? “You’re going to win this game,” Rivera said. Does that mean God is not a Red Sox fan? “No, he’s not a Red Sox fan,” Rivera said.

Reusse should have sought out Boston’s Trott Nixon for a comment. Nixon won an extra-inning game for Boston in the ALDS with a homerun and gave credit to the Lord. Nixon faced Rivera in the late innings of game 7 and could have won it with a homerun had the Lord seen fit, I guess.

And last Sunday night, after Yankee pitcher Andy Pettit won game 2, he was asked by a Fox reporter how he managed to contain Marlins phenom Juan Pierre. He credited his friends and family around the country who were praying for him… the Lord just blessed him.

My wife and I watched an episode from season 2 of The Sopranos on Sat. night. Paulie was pissed at his parish priest because despite all his tithing, he got a message via a spirit medium that some of his mafia hits from years back were going to land him in hell. He was willing to accept that he might deserve a few thousand years of purgatory, but hell? No way.

The nation laughs at the childish Catholicism of the Sopranos but for some reason, there’s more than a little respect afforded to professional athletes who espouse similar bullshit.

I had my two-week knee check-up today with my surgeon. I can now shed my crutches and the CPM machine. I only have to wear the knee-immobilizer when I’m out of the house. I can go for walks, drive, and if I want, I can try swimming (ugh) and bicycling (yeah). My rehab therapist says I’m about a week ahead of schedule, so he’s nonstop on the warnings to not overdo it. I’ve been good so far.

I get an occasional pang of longing for more activity, especially these past few Indian summer days. Seeing and hearing motorcycles tends to trigger it, but I counter with a gentle mental whack, “It’s okay, you’ll likely have plenty of these days to enjoy next year. Plus, there’s lots of shit to enjoy right here.” And so I’ve been listening to some classical piano music that I’ve never heard before. And closely watching some of the playoff baseball games on TV. And, believe it or not, I’m reading a novel, The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Unbelievably good. I never read a novel unless I’m on vacation.

So yeah, it’s a pisser to be laid up, but life’s still good.

I walked into the physical therapy clinic on Friday without using crutches and the therapist said, “Jeez, you’re doing really well for only a week and half post-op.” When I told her it was only a day and a half, she grabbed her chart to check if I was telling the truth. When I showed her that I could do a leg lift with my bum leg, she called over her fellow therapists to marvel at the wonderboy, a patient that she then stated she wanted for herself since as a part-timer, she rarely got to start with a patient from day 1. “Instead of leftovers, I got fresh, quality meat,” she laughed.

This was a heady experience, of course, and I could see that I’d like working with her. My lookma ego (AKA “Look, Ma, no hands!”) got saddled up and was off to the races until my “silent watcher” paid a brief visit, indicating it would likely be a bad outcome if I went along for the ride. I was grateful when, at the end of the session, she followed me out to the scheduling desk and said that as much as she’d like to work with me, it would probably be better for me to mainly work with one of the full-time therapists. As we left, I told my wife that I was glad to be scheduled with someone else since it would be hard to deal with someone who was impressed with me all the time. Trying to impress is my Achilles heel. And having someone around who’s easily impressed with me dumps a motherload (pun intended) of psychological cargo on my psyche.

But the good side of all this was a heightened awareness that lookma’s going to be lurking constantly throughout my recovery. Every time I sat down to do my homework exercises this weekend, it (he?) would pay a visit, with something like, “Just wait till my new therapist on Tuesday sees how well I’m doing.” Maybe 25% of the time I’d catch it, dismiss it with an offhand shrug, and then just try to focus on counting the repetitions or my breathing, or putting my hand on both knees so as to notice the differences in the muscles as they tensed and relaxed. If I get better at paying attention, this shit’s going to make me stronger in more ways than just my knee.

An early morning reflection from my hospital bed via audblog. (3 PM update: I’m now back home, doing fine, thankful for powerful drugs.)

I’m having ACL surgery early this afternoon, part of my civic duty to check out our town’s new hospital, as well as my patriotic duty to help stimulate the medical economy. As my son Graham wrote in his birthday card to me recently, “You’re not getting older, Dad, just more interesting to the medical profession.”

I stay overnight tonight, then on crutches for a while. I hope to be able to work at my PC via my recliner, though I’m not sure I’ll be up for that tomorrow. My wife laughs at how optimistic I am about how soon I’ll be mobile. Might have to post via Audblog only for a day or two or…

I’ve been too busy since I got back from Blogger Con yesterday to do much reflecting about this. And I have a presentation in the Cities this morning on weblogs for non-profit organizations so I don’t have time to walk in the Arb or write in my journal, either. Which bugs me. Not having enough time for a little solitude is almost like not brushing my teeth or taking a shower. It’s no biggie but it’s unsettling in a small way.

Back from Blogger Con in Cambridge. The session content was mainly pertinent to my day job with the exception of a Sunday session titled Weblogs and their Spiritual Context by AKM Adam, a professor at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and well-known in the blogosphere for his AKMA’s Random Thoughts blog. Heath Row has a transcript of the session up on his site, including my questions/comments about the degree to which he reveals his own struggles as a priest in his blog.

I can see why Joey deVilla, Accordion Guy (also an attendee) called AKMA the Ferris Bueller of the Blogosphere. The guy’s a hoot.

AKMA brought his son, Si, with him to haul his luggage since he just had surgery. (Si has a blog, too, SiBlog.) I got to chat with them on several occasions, including at Logan airport where we had a great little discussion about false prayer (epitomized by Red Sox slugger Trot Nixon who gave credit to God for his game-winning homerun on Saturday.)

I’ve added a blogroll to the right-hand column, with just three weblogs right now: Kent Nerburn, Real Live Preacher, and The World According to Chuck. More often than not, these guys are reflective in their blogs as they struggle to make sense of their daily lives. And they write good. heh. If you know of other blogs of the same ilk, let me know.

I’ve removed the Google AdSense box. They were right… it works better on a page with content that doesn’t change.

I’m heading to Boston tomorrow (Cambridge, actually) for a weblog conference at Harvard Law School called Blogger Con. It’s been a while since I’ve gone to a conference of any kind just as a participant… nothing to sell, no presentations to make. Just collegial connections to make and stuff to learn. I probably won’t blog much from there.

I spent an hour this morning walking through parts of Carleton College’s Arb taking photos and reveling in the beauty of a frosty fall morning. It actually wasn’t the first frost — that was a couple of days ago — but this was a hard frost, around 20-25 degrees F.

Last year I took a few photos of the first frost (they sucked, mostly) and I’ve been looking forward to this year’s ever since. It’s a peak SOS (Shot of Solitude) hour in which I’m more focused than usual on my surroundings, my brain chatter relatively quiet.
I’ll narrate a few of the photos but you can also just scroll through the entire gallery.

* I’d never notice these dead weeds if they didn’t have white hats on.

* This walnut tree was not only shedding green leaves at a rapid rate. It was also dropping a walnut every 30 seconds or so. At first I thought someone was hitting golfballs in the pond. Note the splash rings radiating out in the water.

* I don’t usually have much luck shooting into the sun because I have no clue what I’m doing; but I got lucky with this one, whisps of fog forming on the ponds midst the frost-covered islands.

* I’ve never taken a picture of a sundog before.

* I think this is the only house within the city limits that’s adjacent to the Arb.

* I normally don’t see a red fox but once every couple years, usually scooting across a county road. Today, I met one on the trail and had my camera ready. Too bad I didn’t have a monster zoom lens.

* “Where does the frost go, Dad?” “Well, son, as the sun rises, the the tree shadows get tired of protecting the frost so they abandon it. The frost dies because it can’t keep up. Moral of the story: You can’t be spoon-fed all your life.”

* With such a hard frost so early in the season, the green leaves, mainly from the walnut and ash trees, were piling up everywhere, a somewhat unsual occurrence. These made an interesting pattern on the black path. These covered a truck downtown. And these piled up in front of our house.

So I now have a photo gallery section to the website, which I’ll keep adding to.

After a few months off, my high school-aged daughter and I are back to our weekly dinner dates, something we started a while ago. We’re trying to do it on nights when my wife is working so it varies. Though she never objects, I’ve never been quite sure how much she likes it. But this week she initiated, so there’s my answer, at least for now.

My wife asked one of my sons last week if he remembered his “angry year” ten years ago or so in his mid-teens and how, after we spent two weeks camping and using a talking stick around the campfire several times, he came home markedly changed for the better.

I learned about a talking stick back then when I was working at Utne Reader and they published the a cover story on “Salons: How to Revive the Endangered Art of Conversation and Start a Revolution in Your Living Room.” (One of my job titles there: Salonkeeper. Utne now publishes a book titled, Salons: The Joy of Conversation. And The Salon-Keeper’s Companion: An Utne Reader Guide to Conducting Salons, Council and Study Circles is still posted online.)

We used our talking stick a few more times as a family after that summer’s camping trip but I’ve not thought much about it since. Last week I happened to be reading Ekhart Tolle’s new book, Stillness Speaks. His central thesis about stillness seems to gel with physicist David Bohm and his theory of dialogue, which I also first heard about in that issue of Utne. Likewise, dialogue is one Peter’s Senge’s five disciplines for a Learning Organization.

Monday night, I built my first fire in the woodburning fire cage that I got from my wife and kids for my birthday.

It was a perfect night for a fire… crisp, clear, no wind, leaves falling. It occurred to me to invite my daughter out to sit with me in front of the fire and pass the talking stick back and forth. She’d been in minor hot water with us several times during the day and so it seemed liked a good time to tap into whatever help we could get from dialogue and stillness.

I explained to her my crude understanding of what can happen with a talking stick and dialogue. I told her that since the person holding the stick knows that they won’t be interrupted either with criticism or praise, they’re less defensive and are more likely to speak more honestly and more openly… from the heart. Other people there are more likely to really listen and try to understand the person with the stick, since they’re not preparing to reply. And since nobody needs to worry about being interrupted or even having anything to say if they don’t want, there tends to be many periods of silence, way more than usual. This decrease in verbal and mental chatter makes it more likely that everyone’s subconscious can more readily tap into something larger or deeper.

Christians might call this God’s Grace; physicists might call it the field of potentiality in the quantum void of the atom; George Lucas might call it the Force; new agers might call it the wisdom of the universe. Lately, I’m more drawn to the phrase “field of intelligence” in part because of all the attention to the human genome project and the decoding of large sequences of human DNA . It’s hard to deny that’s there’s no small amount of intelligence packed into the cells of every living thing.

So I let down my own hair a bit and talked about my struggles that were and are very similar to the ones she’s having. She talked a bit and then we took turns ticking off a few things we were feeling grateful for, and that was it. Nothing earthshattering, and she even had one more run-in with her mother after that. So who knows what benefit might come from it, if any. But I’m confident that it was good for both of us. And it’s got me thinking.

Another gem of a column from Stuart Greene in the October issue of The Rake: Sex & The Married Man: More Than a Mouthful.

I like it that he’s unbabashedly a fan of his wife’s front and back porch — great line: “Personally, I don’t want what I haven’t got. Maybe that’s because I’m a butt guy, and my precious has the finest caboose on the tracks” — but there’s one thing he’s missing, summed up in the ancient adage that I don’t hear much anymore in these days of boob jobs and penis enlargements:

It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have.

This ain’t trivial for two reasons:

1) gravity and age take their toll on both sexes and especially on women after childbirth; sagging can be delayed but it’s inevitable as most long-marrieds can attest; and

2) no matter how perfectly proportioned your sweetie might be in your mind, a male’s propensity for variety lurks in any marriage, as Greene himself acknowledged in his last column defending married men going to strip clubs. (That column kicked up a storm of interesting letters, both pro and con. See the Letters to the Editor.

So while I agree with Greene that boob jobs too often miss the mark by focusing on size instead of shape, it’s somewhat of a moot point for anyone interested in long-term marital sex satisfaction — like me. What’s needed is more attention on how us marrieds can keep the sparks flying with the assets we each have without resorting to short-term anatomical fixes or siphoning off the energy via strip clubs or — to be balanced — romance novels, trashy, high-class or otherwise.

I’ve got ideas and some experience but I can’t go into details without stirring things up in a bad way on the home front.

Stuart, I’m guessing you’ve got the cloak of anonymnity, so let’s hear more!

After getting my brace refitted two weeks ago, I thought I’d give racquetball one more try last week. I did, and my knee objected by popping out again, this time, in a manner that left no room for any further indecision. So I was on crutches much of last week while negotiating a time slot for ACL surgery in the next week or two.

While laying awake that first night, trying to find a position for my knee that would allow me to sleep, I flashed back to a couple of things that helped me get through till morning.

A few field hospital scenes from Ken Burns’ Civil War PBS series came to mind, particularly those showing piles of limbs ten feet high outside the amputation houses. I tried to imagine what it would be like to recover from an amputation back then, in those conditions. It helped me make a mental shift, so that I began treating my dumb-ass knee pain like a hangnail in comparison. I’d yelp in pain when I shifted my knee and then I’d laugh and swear goodnaturedly. [I wisely chose the living room couch for these antics so as not to inflict damage on my marriage.]

Secondly, I remembered this blurb from Timothy Miller’s book, How to Want What You Have. “Pain cannot be avoided… Suffering, on the other hand, is optional and unnecessary… Whether something hurts, and how much it hurts, depends on what you are paying attention to and what you feel you have gained or lost as a result of the injury… Pain may be borne with resentment, fear, and anguish, in which case it becomes identical with suffering, or it may be borne with good cheer and a light heart.”

The examples he uses in the book to illustrate this are right up my alley: a guy who wrecks his knee while making a great play to help his team win a company softball game vs. a guy who wrecks his knee on his only day off while helping his ungrateful jerk of a brother-in-law fix his house. They’re both in equal amounts of pain, but only the latter suffers. I wrecked my knee doing something I love, and I plan to return to it when I heal. So I decided I had nothing to complain or get bummed about, and thus far, I’ve been able to maintain that attitude. We’ll see how it holds up.

We’re heading to Lake Superior this weekend for a little more adventurous geocaching in the Duluth area while we take in the fall colors. I doubt the colors will be this good

because of the drought we’ve had this year. But no matter… we’ll take what we get.

Lake Superior can be more than a tourist destination for me. The dozens of trips I’ve made there as a kid growing up, as a teen on my own, with my wife while we were dating, and then with all our kids as they grew up have collectively carved a special place in my psyche. There’s a spiritual element now when I go, or at least a potential one, depending on what I’m doing there. I won’t have much time for solitude or reflection on this trip, but that’s okay. I’ll just be grateful for the recreation with my wife and daughter, plus whatever sweet memories get triggered.

Tomorrow is the 150th anniversary of St. Peter’s Church in Mendota, MN.

My family belonged to the parish while I was growing up and I went to its Catholic school from 5th through 8th grade. My mother was a teacher there for many years and is still a member of the church.

This StarTribune article today on the celebration features the current pastor, Kevin Clinton, a guy who was a year ahead of me in the seminary, both Nazareth Hall and St. John Vianney.

I have mostly fond memories of the church and school, even though we had to go to Mass every day, memorize the Catechism, and follow silly rules like no talking at lunch. The nuns (Sisters of the Precious Blood) weren’t the vicious type. And the priests were okay — no evildoers that I know of.

Now that I think about it, I think the small, intimate nature of that school and church community played a part in my getting involved in the launching of Prairie Creek Community School (now a charter school) back in the early 80s when our boys were starting school. The big local public elementary schools were foreign to me, and my wife and I wanted something different for our kids. This influence continues. This year, my daughter is attending the new ArtTech High School here in Northfield, also a charter school and small — about 100 kids.

Utne’s Web Watch has a blurb on the Sexiest Movie Scenes Without Sex by Leo Schlink. The link to the original article is broken but here’s the working link.

It’s all part of Utne’s Sep/Oct cover story, Unleash Your Erotic Intelligence.

“Everybody’s not doing it. That’s the word from Newsweek, The Atlantic, and other trend watchers: Couples are having less sex these days than even in the famously uptight ’50s. Why? Busy, exhausting lives is the easy answer. But how Americans view eroticism in the wake of recent sexual and social revolutions may be an even bigger factor, according to a growing number of researchers and social observers. — The Editors”

The lead story is online: In search of Erotic Intelligence: Reconciling our desire for comfortable domesticity and hot sex by Esther Perel, Psychotherapy Networker. (The other articles require an online subscription.)

Thanks to Tyson (one of my kids) for pointing me to this Washington Post article yesterday:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson prayed on his Christian Broadcasting Network, based in Virginia Beach, that Isabel would turn from the coast. He asked God to put a “wall of protection” around Virginia Beach and the East Coast. “In the name of Jesus, we reach out our hand in faith and we command that storm to cease its forward motion to the north and to turn and to go out into the sea,” Robertson prayed on “The 700 Club.”

My prediction: no matter what the storm does, he and many other like-minded ministers, will “thank God that the storm didn’t do more damage” or that “no lives were lost” or that “more lives weren’t lost.”

In this week’s Time: Real Men Get The Blues: Depression is twice as common among women as men, but it may be the guys who suffer most.

Often just as effective as any drug is cognitive therapy, a form of the talking cure that teaches depressives to reframe their view of the world, questioning the catastrophic or fatalistic spin they put on otherwise innocuous events. The two approaches — medication and therapy — work especially well together.

The Time piece doesn’t explain why the two approaches are often equally effective, but here’s a site with an explanation:

“… our brains are physically altered by what we experience and thus learn. It is as if the chips in your computer were actually rewired somewhat every time you ran a program. In brains, the software is the hardware is the software. (Computer geek-speak for brains: “squishware.”) This helps explain, for instance, how both drugs and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) can not only relieve depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) — they both have been shown in PET scans to have very similar effects on patients’ brains! (Trivial point: CBT for depression and OCD usually produces more lasting results than drug treatment, i.e., it carries lower risk of relapse.)”

I’ve never been depressed that I know of, but being aware of my mistaken ideas/dumb-fuck thinking and then reframing them has made (and continues to make) a huge difference in my daily life. So cognitive therapy ain’t just for big problems, IMHO.

A footnote to earlier posts (here and here) re: married men visiting strip clubs: Lap dancing banned in Los Angeles: “The City Council has voted to ban lap dances and all other physical contact between entertainers and customers at strip clubs, bikini bars and adult bookstores. A “no-touch” rule would require dancers to remain at least six feet from customers – even when dancers are tipped.”

Seems like a good idea to me.

My wife and I went geocaching for several hours last weekend. On the last hunt of the day (covered bridge park near Zumbrota), we met three delightful local kids on the trail (Jeffrey, Crystal, and Cassie) and they asked to join us on the hike back to the cache.

I met and fell in love with my wife when we were both working with troubled kids at St. Joseph’s Home for Children in Minneapolis back in the early 70s. Among the various reasons I was attracted to her was her magnetism with kids: she delighted in them and they in her. And I saw it all over again on this little geocaching jaunt. The kids were just mesmerized by her. And I loved watching it unfold. I’m a lucky guy.

My kids and I took my mother out for pizza this week to celebrate her 80th birthday.

It went okay but it pisses me off that I let myself briefly turn into a teenager once again.

I can’t exactly remember what triggered it, but I told her about a scene from a Sopranos DVD that my wife and I just watched. Tony and his wife Carmela host a reception at their house after their son Anthony’s Confirmation ceremony. They catch him smoking dope in the garage with a couple of friends. Carmela screams at the kid: “Can’t you be a good Catholic for 15 fucking minutes?!”

At some level, I knew both the swearing and the poke at Catholicism would upset my mother… and it did, though to her credit, not very much and only momentarily.

I have to get better at how I draw my boundaries with her. I know how, but unless I’m vigilant, I relapse.

I’m experimenting using Google’s AdSense service. They give you code to place on your site and it generates context-sensitive text ads automatically. When people click through to the ad’s website, you earn varying amounts of money.

I have the option of filtering out sites it selects that I don’t like. I’ve discovered that it’s reading the text of the weblog, since one set of ads I’ve noticed is related to what I posted here. Which ain’t bad, but I’m trying to fine tune it. (BTW, I’ve edited this post to remove references to the ads that I’ve removed, since Google sees that text and generates ads for it.)

Real Live Preacher tells a story about his wife’s love for him: “In the days when J. and I were engaged, she once answered the door of her apartment with a banana in her hand. Understand that this woman hates bananas with a religious zeal. The smell of a banana makes her skin crawl, and one bite makes her gag. She was in a very silly mood that night….”

The World According To Chuck: a riveting story about his autistic son:

The rages started when he was about 4, and they were ugly. His rage, my rage. One day he punched his mother, just hauled off and decked her. I grabbed him and dragged him to his bedroom, tossing him on the bed. I’ve never had the stomach for corporal punishment, so I just yelled at him, and he yelled back. He was out of control, writhing and screaming in anger, and in my frustration, I slammed his closet door, shattering the mirror. He screamed louder, now horror mixed with rage, and he pointed his finger at me. “YOU did it! YOU did it!” So I picked up a nearly full water bottle, emptied it over his head, and stormed out…

But he lost his laugh, and I think sometimes it’s my fault. I think I should have known, should have recognized signs, should have understood and should have done something earlier. Thousands of dollars have been spent on counseling, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, medications and tests. We’ve done the best we could, but I still wonder, still think I could have intervened at the beginning, helped him more. This is stupid, I know. Still. I have nightmares.

Chuck’s still suffering. I wonder what his mistaken idea is?

We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them. – Duc de La Rochefoucauld

This article about philanthropist Zell Kravinsky, Kidney donor pushes his altruism to the extreme, appeared in the NY Times in August. Brainwash (the online magazine of America’s Future Foundation) has a posting about it on its weblog including one comment from Kravinsky.

I’m guessing he’s neither the devil nor saint that people are making him out to be. His wife is evidently threatening to divorce him over it but to me, that’s just an indication that their marriage was troubled already. Sneaking behind your wife’s back to donate a kidney isn’t all that different from sneaking to have an affair. Or in my dad’s case, buying a motorcycle without my mom knowing about it and hiding it at his brother’s house. Or in my case, sneaking off on day-long motorcycle rides when my wife thought I was at work. All were signs of troubled marriages.

True, these behaviors were not altruistic like Kravinsky’s but when he says (in his blog comment) “It’s cool when you can save a life without depriving anyone of your company. Some of you “nutjob” and “jerk-off” spotters should try it–for sheer satisfaction, it beats a raised eyebrow and a sneer” it seems to be he was doing it as much for the pure self-pleasure as he was for trying to make the world a better place… as well as taking a poke at his wife, for whatever reason.