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I took this picture months ago while walking around Guatemala City. I did not know what it meant. Exactly three days ago, I looked up “Justice for Genocide” on Google and that was the day that General Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity–that last one always strikes me deeply–convicted of being inhuman, the first time a former head of state had been sentenced in his own country for such crimes. Good for you Guatemala. Thank you. The erosion of trust for the powerful is in full swing here in the United States. Barak Obama is presiding over three disasters–dead Americans in Libya, apparently left to die without backup, that’s bad. The IRS has apparently been exerting itself to overly investigate conservative non-profits during an election year–that stinks. Worst of all, the Associated Press has had their phone tapped for months and then their records confiscated in the interest of the public “interest”. I am not interested in that. I want an overly free press. Way overly free. Without that we are in danger of tyranny. I am a social liberal (fiscally I am probably a Libertarian). I am willing to wait for all the evidence to come out, and I don’t believe all the evidence will come out, before I make a judgement, but I am hard pressed to believe that any reason to target political groups unfairly by the IRS or that the Justice Department would ever have good reason to tap every phone at the AP, is justifiable. Can’t swallow that.

This Guatemalan dictator killed thousands. We have much to be grateful for here in the United States, even now, but the relationships between us and “them” is growing narrower. It is growing scarier.

I am thinking about justice and crimes. I am thinking about my side of the street. I am thinking about owning what I do to hurt other people and what I have to make right. I am also thinking about where that ends and where I stand up for the fact that I am a good man even though I make mistakes. This is something I don’t think countries do. Can they take this step? Can anyone tell me of a time when that has happened? For my purposes in my own life, it doesn’t matter except that I won’t look to nations to learn morality. Politics is a different subset of human endeavor. Ethics, ideals, morals, integrities–these are things that well up in me, in you, in the individual, but don’t seem to be a part of governments or politics. That is why it is critical that government exists to support the individual, both for freedom and responsibility (they are as tied to one another as the A and B sides of a record). When we rely on governments to define ethics, morality etc, we rely on an entity that will wiretap the press, allow the IRS to target unsavory sorts, etc. I need to maximal freedom so that I show up for my side of the street, clean it up and be a better man today than I was yesterday.

I joined a writing group for a while. I should be in several of these. I like to write and I am not terrible at it. I like words and I know what lots of them mean and I can sometimes string them along so that they eventually believe my lies. The writing group fizzled, even though the titular (weird, awesome word) head, Will Akin assured us we could continue on even if all we ever submitted was a “damn haiku” once a month. I didn’t even get that done and I fell out of the group. I wonder if it persists and I still think I should be a part of it. This has nothing to do with this photo I took out at Smith Rock.

I am not really a sports photographer, but I could be I think. I took lots of sports photos for the 1983 Carroll High School Anchor yearbook. I would spend hours in the darkroom of the journalism classroom. Mrs. Walraven, an odd woman with a hawk shaped face, gave me a key to the classroom where the darkroom was and I was often there past midnight. She trusted me. She trusted no one, except her students. Those of us who could hang in there with her bizarre paranoias long enough to learn how to write a news story or take a journalism photograph or draw a semi-ironic cartoon etc, those of us who did those things, she loved. She was teaching us journalism. I learned how to edit (the lack of evidence in this blog notwithstanding) a story. The facts in order of importance, supported by salient quotes. Cover the five “W’s” and that ‘s it. It is harder than you think. Try it. I loved it. I could remove the silly feelings from the thing and just crank away on the “facts” as I now know they should be called.

So I spent many days of hours in that darkroom. I kissed a yearbook editor in there once. Mostly though I worked very hard at learning photography and how to print photos in baths of developer and fixer and washes. It is incredibly complex. I won’t list all the steps here in the interest of the previously mentioned editing. You can just trust me. Or this example: It’s like playing the guitar. What a ridiculous instrument! It’s hard. Trust me, again. I can’t imagine who thought of it, some demented genius.

We like doing hard things. Must feel good. It does feel good. Sometimes I make my life hard. That is different. It does not feel good, but it is all still me. The important thing is that I hold with all of me, on to me, no matter how hard I have made it. That is the hardest thing I have ever done, every day.

I haven’t been writing. I haven’t been checking in with myself. I haven’t been drinking in the life my body is moving through.
I have been raising my son. I have been loving my wife. I have been doing my best at work.
I haven’t been carrying my camera. I haven’t been screeching to a stop when the wind blows plastic through barbed wire in a beautiful way. I haven’t been stopping.
I have been sleeping…more. I have been stopping earlier, sometimes. I have been better to my colleagues at work. I have started running, a little.
I haven’t been holed up in my privacy. I haven’t talked with some friends. I rarely cook dinner.
I am talking with some (other) friends. I am writing now.
I am grateful
for the light on thorns
for the curve of the park in front of our house
for the word arc.

I am not done.

If I had a Sunday morning off while I was a surgery resident, it felt like Christmas and my birthday every time. They did not come often. I worked over 100 hours/week and was on call either every third or every other night. The year I stopped being a resident, laws were passed limiting resident work hours and that is a good thing. I do however, have whining rights so that when a younger surgeon complains, I can tell them I walked to the hospital and back uphill both ways and without shoes, etc.

Anyway, Sunday mornings. In my memory, the day started with diffused light through kitchen curtains, hot coffee in the press and an endless day ahead of us. The smell of the coffee, of course, better than the coffee can ever be and then the smell of the grinds going down the sink when the press is spent. Really, this post is about that. My memory of those spent coffee grounds just before they swill down the sink—not burned but cooked, for sure and done. The acid in them is revealed and they have given up all their flavor. Today, I smelled that again. I hardly drank any of the cup I poured. I mostly just lingered in the aroma of the cup and the spent shells of the beans that fired.

On those rare Sundays off I would almost never be off at the same time as my wife who was also a resident, but in pediatrics. Her schedule was usually every fourth night which was in opposition to my usual every third night. If we landed on a Sunday morning together, it was truly special. I am a person who likes my alone time but when the day together with my partner happens only once a quarter, I am in for that. It was usually about sleeping as long as humanly possible because one of us had been up the night before or both had. In any case, sleep, top priority.

We would live the two hours of morning before noon as if they were an eternity. Eggs and b. and the coffee and an English muffin. I would like to say we hiked across the plains or climbed a new route, but mostly the morning lingered in to the afternoon and two young, exhausted doctors made their way eventually to the store for dinner and a video (!) or we hung out a bookstore or we tried to find the energy to talk about the future…we weren’t good enough at that and eventually the present tense of fatigue and my own lack of wakefulness led to the end of our marriage. Many residents crashed on the rocks of residency. It really felt like a climb that simply could not and would not end. I was in it for seven years. I worked unquestioningly for any length of time that any person on the ladder above me said to work and sometimes there were four or five people above me on that ladder.

The end result of that work is that I know when a person is “sick” as in really ill. I know when I need to get my ass out of bed and go to the hospital and when I can wait a few hours and store up rest. I can’ know that unless I have been through the fire of having seen it all, easy and hard, for seven years.

So this morning the coffee roasted and as I poured the spent grinds, I smelled the past, was grateful for my young self that learned those hard lessons; and I wondered about what other route I might have taken up this climb, my life.

I don’t wonder so much now how I grew up thinking that life was going to be for me as it was for Steve McGarret (played by Jack Lord, actually born John Joseph Patrick Ryan–that’s three cool names) on Hawaii Five-O. Obviously, and I hate I have to say this, the original H5-0, not the current, ridiculous remake. I don’t wonder so much now why I didn’t grow up in the Brady house, although I wanted to then and I mean the actual house. I didn’t care so much for the “family”; I was actually looking at the design of the house and the designs that Mike Brady (played by Robert Reed, actually born John Robert Rietz–good idea to change the name, Bob) came up with as the cool but kind of annoyingly non-confrontational dad on the BB. (I have researched it and Robert Reed was actually a Shakespearean trained actor who got mad at the slapstick schtick, so to speak. Look here http://boingboing.net/2007/12/30/mike-bradys-angry-sh.html. I don’t wonder because I now know the producers/writers/designers were creating something for me to dream about, something without the grinding wheels of war from the forties, without the mess, something better and brighter, possibly pastel even. I get that now and it is ok with me. I was too young to fight it as a teen in the sixties and seventies (since I wasn’t a teen, I was only six when the decade turned). I simply grew up with it. My anger turned on at the appropriate hormonally driven age, which corresponded with the eighties–another story.

Anyway, I liked the design from the time I was a kid. I liked the low flat roofs. I like ranch houses. I like the dream of “midcentury modern”, the fifties and sixties architecture. I should differentiate here in that I don’t like the blinded, soggy thinking of what is portrayed as American middle class from this time. I like the architecture and design. Somehow I would like to be from the Beat Generation (see Jack Kerouac, actually born Jack Kerouac–see, better already, more honest for sure!) in my thinking but non-ironically live in a beautiful sprawling ranch style house with a pool. And, to my credit, this is kind of who I am!!

I am not saying I want to move to Palm Springs, where we just went for a very hip, modern-type weekend and where this photo was taken in the emptied office of a parking garage–how hip is that? But to live somewhere warm and in a house with clean lines, and be friend with earnest, honest, real people living important lives and not simply lost in the simple rectangular shapes of the time in my memory when things worked out ok in 24 minutes, plus 6 for commercials.

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PS: I do realize this light is not actually a midcentury modern piece, but the photo, for me, evokes that time somehow. The stairwell is from the sixties probably or seventies and the whole scene, literally in a parking garage office, was too good. If you are a die hard purist, I beg your forgiveness.

I have four words for my son
for his learning. These are springboards.
They (you know, “them”) will teach him how to read and add/subtract
in those rooms.
After that (before that really, as in right now), this, these:

Passion
Curiosity
Daring
Love

If he has a question he will read and learn. If he needs to count, he will add and subtract or he will do differential equations if his passion leads him there, if his desire to be a loving man, and curious, leads him there. He will take risks if I don’t snuff his daring. He will be led around his by life, (un)leashed to his passion…

if we (me and Rose, and you, his village–we need you, you know!) have anything to say about it.

Right?

Just the photo. After my last post, I think it best to leave the words out…I say this even though I know that it will be hard for you not to go back and read it.  It’s bad.  Just owning that.  But you could stay here, on this post, with this odd, interesting image and make up a little story about it.  It was image 13 on a 12 frame roll. It should be square but the film was done, and so it cropped itself.

Ok, see you when you get back.

I would love to say that you start with a blank. But it’s me.
I start with a blank.
Then I have eggs and toast and coffee on the road and
then I end up somewhere with my cube shaped camera
that I hold like my lovers breasts…i love it, seriously, because it connects me to a past you don’t care about and future which literally does not exist, but i hold it like a cubical warm croissant on a Sunday morning, every time, like that. I can’t explain it, but I describe it hoping you get how powerful the mechanical thing is to me.

Then I make a picture. I don’t take a picture. I am making something not taking something–sounds like stealing. I am collaborating with a particular moment. You are invited, after, but still that original moment is there, somewhat frozen, although I hope you write a poem about it and…thaw it.

This blue window
opens, flutters an invite:
Wind wanders through here

I came across this little girl who was kidding around with a tuk tuk driver(note the little red tuk tuk in the corner) who was parked. She stuck her tongue out and he called her
“muy fea”–very ugly. She gave him the look I photographed here, fearless, funny.

At some point in my life I came to believe that I had low or no self esteem. Maybe it was the pattern of decisions that neglected to include what was better for me. An example, you ask? Dating toxic women without even knowing they were toxic; refusing to stand up to abusive people in my work life and the extra fun corollary (that always follows refusing to stand up to bullies) of becoming a bully in my work life.

This last one is what is on my mind, the bullying thing. On my recent trip to Guatemala as part of surgical mission team, I had the opportunity to work with people who have known me, but not worked with me in some time. In that time I have done some work. Multiple people said to me things like, ‘wow, you are nice now,’ ‘you are not the guy I thought you were’ etc. These compliments stung a little, because I know I had been a hard guy to be with in the operating room, the halls of the hospital, the ER. I still can be, but it is less, truly. It is less because I like myself better, accept that I deserve to be here simply because I am here–more on that in a sec.

At some point a child gets beat down enough or their neurotransmitters fail or they swallow some lie about their fundamental badness and they get the idea that they are worthless. I did that. I made it a belief. In terms of behavior, beliefs drive the bus. Beliefs generate my feelings (you didn’t know you made up all your feelings?) and my thoughts and my actions follow. We can argue this if you want, just write to me or post a comment. For now pretend I am right. The little me gained a belief that he was worthless, leading to feelings of pain/shame/anger leading to actions to avoid these feelings (medication) and/or to pass them on (bullying). It was not until fairly recently that I decided to challenge the belief. I challenged the belief because it was causing a lot of damage. Also, I wanted to start living within my values and the constant attention on myself that denying my self worth requires, forced me to live outside of my values. I am a person who does not want to center every waking minute on me. I value selflessness, in other words. The effort to hold on to the shame and the false belief that I am worthless was becoming an ego trip of monumental proportions and also was way past being boring for me and everyone else. How then to accept my self worth?

I accepted yours. I asked myself if I believed that you deserve to have my basic respect simply because you exist, because you are a part of humanity. Answer: yes. If that is true then how to I go about excluding myself (for lack of worthinesss) from the group called humanity? How do I say I don’t deserve to belong to that group especially when saying that forces to me to spend every waking second proving how unique my shame is–so unique I don’t even deserve the basic human respect every person believes for only drawing breath? That is a lot of energy, a lot of ego. It started to look ridiculous.

I am here and because of that I have my attention and respect. I don’t have to prop my esteem up on the wreckage I create in an effort to level everyone to my nothing. I am responsible for my own protection and love, first. It is not on you. Somehow learning this has allowed me to be a better, not perfect, guy at work. I can deal with my ongoing feelings more easily because the fundamental belief is changed. In fact if I start to feel the shame I have to talk myself in to it because the shame is incongruent with my belief about my worth. I still do feel it, but it is now more like a memory than reality.

I liked this little girl because she didn’t flinch. She didn’t believe him. She laughed and went on with her snack. I realize I am totally making up the story of this little girl, but oh well. She helped me feel the love that the people who work with me were showing. I had enough of me in the game to let it sink in and know I deserved it.