A Death In The Family

It is a common question to ask you where you were or what you were doing on the day you found out that John F Kennedy was shot. The news was so Earth-shattering that pretty much EVERYONE can answer that question (I was walking home from first grade when I overheard some of the older kids in front of me talking about it).

Well, today that question has changed. As of now, and I would imagine for quite some time into the future you will hear people asking, "Where were you or what were you doing on the day when you found out that MICHAEL JACKSON died?"

Well, I was still trying to figure out my digital converter box and was scrolling through the myriad features when I heard the announcement of his untimely death break in under the menu item 'parental control'. I dropped the remote in surprise, and couldn't make the menu screen go away at first, so I could only hear the TV sound and not see the video. At first I thought something had happened to Joe Jackson, the music icon from the 1980's, until I realized they were talking about Michael's father Joseph. Then I thought it was his father who had died. Then I got a call from a friend who clarified it all for me, at about the same time as I managed to rid the screen of info I couldn't figure out and see for myself what was going on.

I couldn't believe it! Michael Jackson dead? I JUST went to one of his concerts... 26 years ago! (too soon for humor?) The worst part is he was YOUNGER than me (by a year). Because of our age similarity I had always used him as a benchmark. Was I doing things at the same time as he? Did I get married when he did? Did I have kids when he did? Did I build myself an amusement park in my backyard when he did? Did I make my first platinum album when he did? Okay, so some things we didn't share...

In a morbid game of telephone tag, I of course called everyone I knew, trying to be the first one to pass along the huge news to them. In one shocking moment I realized that I was a gossipmongering muckraker, but I just didn't care. It was gratifying to hear their fantastic reactions:

"OH NO HE DIDN'T!""SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

"You're lying to me, you scum-sucking, whore-banging, ugly-ass muthafucka!"

"WAAAAAAAAAH!"

But the one call which almost made Jacko's passing worthwhile was to my know-it-all friend who is in the music business. He must have been in the bathroom when the news came on because he is a TV junkie and never turns the media off... it was highly unlikely I would find out before he did, so when I surprised him with the news he was almost violently incredulous...

"No effin' way!"

"Yes, they broke into regular programming to tell us. I missed an earth-shattering announcement about Brooke's triplet babies on Guiding Light!" (I've never seen the soap, but he wouldn't know that...)

"You're bullshitting me!"

"I shit you not."

"You shit me so. There is no Brooke with triplets on Guiding Light."

DAMN! That know-everything prick did it again! "A hundred bucks says I'm right about Jacko." THAT stopped him. He knows I never bet unless there's a 100% chance I'm right. I could hear him flipping through the channels and at every stop, announcers were in the middle of saying, "Michael Jackson is dead at 50." I could HEAR the color draining from his face. "I can't believe it."

"It's a good day for you, pal," I joked. "Don't you sell antiques?"

He glowered at me over the phone. "USED records."

"Oh, right. Well, how many Michael Jackson ANTIQUE USED RECORDS are you going to sell today?"

His voice grew chipper and I could imagine the lightbulb over his head flaring. "Oh, yeah! Gotta run... I've got inventory to load!"

I had to laugh... there's no sweeter sound to a businessman than the jangle of a cash register.

But a call to another friend didn't go so well and is one of the two reasons why this post is featured in my 'Anger Management' blog and not in my 'Happy Happy Joy Joy' blog.

The other reason is that I don't have a 'Happy Happy Joy Joy' blog. If you've found one, I promise it's not mine.

His response to the news was curt: "One less pedophile in the world. Good be gone."

I did not need to make out a feeling finder to know he had reached a trigger point with me. In a flash I felt incredulity, rage, shame and violence... and grateful that he was miles away at the moment.

I'll get back to the conversation shortly, but I want to cover my reasons for the emotions I was feeling, and to do that I need to share a little background about myself.

I have made it a matter of personal pride that I can separate my feelings for an artist and the emotional response their art brings. As an example I bring up Don Henley, singer for the rock band The Eagles. As a roadie years ago I personally witnessed behavior I found reproachful and for that reason I have little respect for the man. This does not stop me from enjoying the music he creates, nor from buying his CD's, although I have to admit I don't like the idea of him profiting in any way.

We could also look at Meatloaf, a performer for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration, but whose music I cannot tolerate. My respect for him prevents me from hurting his feelings, so please don't tell him I said this.

Michael Jackson was a true artist, writing and performing dozens of mega-hits over dozens of years. He was an inspiration to a generation of young artists, an idol to people from all corners of life and an object of desire to many others.

He was a sensitive who was pushed into the public eye way too young and without enough emotional support, whose quirks and affectations began to surface with alarming regularity... the purchase of the 'Elephant Man's' bones, building of an amusement park on his property, the marriage and quick divorce from Elvis Presley's daughter, dangling his baby out of a hotel window, the questions of his sexuality... and then there were the allegations of impropriety with one of the many unsupervised boys who slept in his bed with him.

I have great admiration for his musical genius, and hold in awe his breathtaking dancing abilities, but I have to ask myself if it is okay to see him positively, and I have to admit that it is.

For one thing, I am not really a fan of idle gossip (despite my admission at the outset); I have no desire to injure someone's career or personal life with damning talk. I think passing along the news of someone's demise is merely informational, not actually damaging. But speculation is all too often mistaken for fact, and with alleged information as serious as pedophilia it is of paramount importance to GET IT RIGHT.

The fact is that Jackson, in an interview, admitted a childlike perspective, and if he is to be believed, there was nothing more going on in his bed than the comfort of innocents, minds so pure as to be uncorrupted by adult ideals. For Jackson, who had been molded into his current form by manipulative and self-serving adults, the purity of those young minds was the appeal, not the flesh.

If he can be believed.

I am always struck by numbers. Over the years, there were many children who stayed with him at Neverland Ranch. Were they ALL treated the way the plaintiff described? If so, where were they all during the trial? That question alone causes me to think in the direction of parents seeking payouts.

Think about it. Would you allow your tweener to spend the night alone at ANY famous adult's house, unsupervised? If the answer is yes, then I have to additionally ask, WHY? What would possess you to allow such an event to transpire? In asking, I came up with a few possibilities for answers:

1. You are naive, or an idiot, or a fool.

2. You couldn't give a damn what happens to your child.

3. You are close personal friends with the star; more like family, having spent thousands of hours alone with them in the past, and trust them without question.

4. You know about the pedophilia and approve of it, thinking of it as a necessary step into adulthood, just like it was for you.

5. You have been lied to about the entire event, with no mention of kids in beds with the star.

6. You see the potential for an enormous payout from the rich fool, who would gladly give it to preserve their career.

You see where I'm heading? The court found the testimony of the plaintiff and his parents to be shaky at best, and although other children had been there, done that, there was no corroboration. Case dismissed.

Getting back to the conversation with my thoughtless friend, I have to admit that at that moment I was not at my Anger Managed best. The moment his comment sunk in completely, I had some choice words for him. In no particular order I called him an ignoramous, a knuckle-dragging wildebeest and a slant-scalped twitterhead. I also accused him of seeing the world through moron-colored glasses (that's moron, not maroon).

Quick to respond, he shot back allegations of his own; calling me a straight-bashing heterophobe; accusing me of storing salamis on my person by sitting on them, HARD, and citing my own misconduct with the twelve little boys in my root cellar (how on EARTH did he know about them?). It progressed from there.

I suggested he should be tied in a cage with six sexually charged bulls in heat. He thought to unhook a chain saw chain and pass one end all the way through my digestive tract, relinking the two ends when it came out the other side and turning the machine on. I mentioned my goal of luring him into a metal room that was actually an industrial wine press and selling the liquids that emanate from the press to his grieving family as special 'buffalo broth'.

He paused for a moment. So did I. Then he said, "So Michael Jackson died, huh?"

I said, "Yup, about an hour ago."

He said, "I loved Billie Jean."

I saw that as an olive branch, so I asked, "Would that be the song... or the tennis player?"

I suppose I expected this... he hung up on me. Though before he did, he asked, "Coming to AM class next week?"

I said, "I couldn't miss it."

Anger Management Bi-Weekly

Or is that SEMI-weekly? I can never figure that out! Well, whichever one is twice a month, that's the one I'm shooting for. Excuse me... AIMING for.

And that's also what I'm aiming for in my now VOLUNTARY anger management meeting. It needs a new name, though... what we do there is so much more than management of anger. We console the sorrowful. We congratulate the triumphant. We encourage the effort. We suggest alternate strategies to better deal with stress. We repair friendships and massage relationships.

We are the New Age woo-woo fix-it crew!

And don't think all the handyman work is coming from the facilitators... the therapists... the psychologists... oh, whatever name you give them! Nu-uh! Much of the good advice is uttered from one Angry Managed to the other. We have much to learn, but we also have much to teach.

My first lesson-- when someone has an altercation of some kind and is forcefully encouraged to come to a 52 week anger management session, the person he had the altercation with has to attend a 52 week session as well! Sound extreme? Hear me out.

The number of angry people who actively seek out angry encounters is pretty small. Far larger is the number of people who are walking around, outwardly calm, but on the inside are just ready to snap and awaiting some kind of impetus. While it's true that a smiling, friendly person just MIGHT cause that breaking point, it is far more likely that an encounter happened because TWO angry people who were ready to snap bumped into each other. Wrong time, wrong place.

Whoever hits or hollers first, loses.

Unfortunately, while the arrested and punished party receives emotional help for his issues (via 52 weeks of anger management therapy), the other one receives nothing... nothing but the black eye, that is. And a bruised ocular region will not help the person with their own anger issues.

So yeah... whenever there's a fight, BOTH people gotta go to AM classes. And that can happen in the PM as well (tee-hee). It's good for both of you.

It's like castor oil for the emotions.

You see, there's no such thing as an innocent party (for the most part-- no absolutes in this blog please!). If there's a dispute, it's rarely between someone with one strong opinion and another with NO opinion whatsoever-- no, violence happens when TWO people are angry (once again, MOST of the time).

I realize that the reader can imagine scenarios where one person is just an evil bully, picking on innocents left and right, leaving a wake of hurt and damaged people in his path... and like I say, I'm certain that occasionally happens. OCCASIONALLY. The far more likely scenario is that there is a buildup of frustration and other emotions within the violent person that BURSTS out at moments of heightened emotion, usually followed by immediate regret.

Regret, you say? Don't you mean regret at the punishment about to be meted out by the criminal justice system?

Well, sure... but that's not the only kind, nor the most important. Most violent people are GOOD people pushed to do BAD things. That is a valuable fact, and it goes a long way to preventing a permanent label from being affixed to the violent person. 

As it turns out, most violent encounters end with sincere regret at the violent person's own inability to control their emotions, regret at the physical damage to the person they have just caused, regret at the emotional damaging of the relationship with that person and about a dozen other feelings of personal failure. The violent person is going over and over the last few moments of the encounter in their heads, trying to analyze the failures in their emotional armor, what caused the outburst and how to prevent future ones. There is no more fragile, sorrowful person than the violent one who has just had an outburst.

And that's a good thing. That tells us that despite the physical outcome, the outburst was an emotional pressure valve releasing, allowing the pain to dissipate before some truly horrific, rifle-in-the-bell-tower event came to pass. There may be a black eye or a busted bone, and while that is not in any way a good thing, it is way better than making funeral arrangements from a jail cell.

Don't get confused, dear reader. I'm not advocating violence. I hope to see violence disappear off Planet Earth in my lifetime. That's not going to happen, but it is my HOPE. What I am pointing out is the slim silver lining of a minor outburst. It is something we are resilient enough to bounce back from-- not only the person who committed the violence, but the unfortunate who was the victim-- and hopefully learn from our mistakes so that we may never repeat them. 

An incident where everyone is still alive at the end of it is extremely hopeful, because you can't come back from an encounter which involves someone's death. And sure, there are degrees of non-death injury, including the kind where everyone is wringing their hands for 18 hours in the emergency room before getting the relieving news that their loved one is going to make it... and that is a terrible thing to have to experience (I would imagine)... but at the end of it you have your loved one back.

And don't think I'm suggesting that the person who committed such grievous violence should just walk back into the life of the person they hurt so badly... I am NOT. The emotional wounds from such an event can be incredibly deep and pervasive. I'm just saying that the person is alive to experience new emotions, and that in itself is a blessing. No, if the degree of damage is such that it requires an extensive hospital stay, then the violent person needs to feel, on some level, the pain of their victim, and there's probably no better way than a limited prison sentence living among society's most violent aggressors. 

Well, there's one 'better' way, but eye-for-an-eye is a sentence which is no longer meted out. Not that there hasn't been extensive discussion on the emotional healing which might come from being locked in a room for twenty minutes with a baseball bat and the guy who nearly killed  your daughter, but the overall emotional damage to society might not be worth it.

It all comes back around to society. We've built our social system around laws rather than around logic, which is why it always seems to be on the edge of spinning wildly out of control. Logically we should design life so that we are all as content as possible. Instead we've designed it so that we can all be as free as possible. But that's not happening either, because with unrestricted freedom comes unfortunate side effects, so laws are put in place. "You can be free, but not TOO free."  So we end up with a society which allows people to be selfish and greedy and cold and uncaring. When those behaviors are allowed to spread and flower into the majority of the population, we all suffer as a result.

How can we re-structure society to eliminate, or at least vasty reduce, the number of emotion-producing-events that drive violence in our people? Since we're not likely to re-structure our biological response system, at least not in the short term, what other way is there to keep people from getting emotionally bottled up and ultimately exploding?

Now is a good time to mention my OTHER blog, the one which seeks to address that very question. It's called 'Finding The Perfect World' and can be found at:

 findingtheperfectworld.blogspot.com

I'm not going to praise the virtues of that blog-- I'll let you do that. It is simply a collection of ideas which, when implemented together, will likely create a place for us all to live which is by many definitions 'perfect'... not like heaven, just designed perfectly for us humans with all our foibles to live in contentedly in peace and prosperity.

But the overview is this: Eliminate the fear in life and you eliminate most of the 'evil' which feeds on fear. People who are afraid of poverty, starvation, sickness and death will do whatever it takes to prevent those things from happening to THEMSELVES and THEIR LOVED ONES (and screw everyone else). While it seems huge and immutable, the laws which guide how we live are subject to modification. Change enough of them and society as a whole merges into a different 'operating system'.

The next post I write will incorporate every change I mention in the other blog, so it's time to get you up to speed. Read it. You will be quizzed. 

Okay... you will probably not be quizzed. BUT, you will be enlightened, and really, that's all I'm hoping for in this leg of the Perfect World Theory. The next generation of humans will do much better than us, and the generation after that will do better than THEM, and so on. I predict if we follow this plan we'll be living within a perfect Earth society in less than 200 years. 

Right about the time that aliens from the planet Zorgon attack.

Not Ready For Prime Time Quite Yet...

I know you're gonna ask, so I'll just say it... the vacation hasn't happened yet. I'll let you know.

In the meantime, I find that taking a week off from group was not only cathartic, but to my surprise, it was also expected of me. Nobody even anticipated my arrival, because I had completed my obligation to the court and was no longer required to show up. I'm a rehabilitated man, in the eyes of the court. The Judge used almost those same sentiments when he saw me last week.

"You have completed your mandatory 52 anger management sessions. You may be excused." I think he also said, "Next case." Warm guy. But no matter-- the tether has been broken, the chains have been removed. I'm free!

What am I carrying on about, you must be thinking... it's not like I have just been released from some dark and dangerous prison-- it was a once-weekly AA meeting for mostly mild and meek guys with flashpoint issues. I know, I know. But I DO feel as though my MENTAL bonds have been cut, and I am again alone to make my own decisions, right or wrong. 

I also feel like I am up on a tightrope without a net. When I went to a weekly meeting, I had a support group, peers who knew exactly what I was talking about and respected me enough to help me get through rough patches. Now, I'm supposed to fend for myself, go bravely into that good night? Frankly, I'm worried.

I think back, even to recent days, when I experienced brief stints of frustration and rage at how many people break the golden rule towards each other, and with such startling regularity. You might know, that that is one of my trigger points. I want to see people treat each other well, and when I watch some fool behave in a selfish, greedy, angry or childish manner towards their fellow man, I just wanna TAKE THEIR FUCKING HEADS OFF!

Which of course, I do NOT. People NEED their heads. Besides, it's very difficult to learn the lesson I am about to rain down upon them if they have no brain in which to store the new information, right?

Also, if I've learned one thing in AM, it's that people are far less receptive to learning new things if they are defensive. Whatever I want to teach those soul-forsaken rapsnappers had better be done in a way that doesn't insult them or put them on their guard, and then they will remember, right? I have to believe that's true, because otherwise I'm certain I'll find myself right in front of a judge again, and maybe one who will use me as an example. "Behead that man!" Nah, I don't want that. I NEED my head.

So I keep silent. "It's not my battle" has become my mantra. "Don't get involved" is a poster over my bed. "Live and let live" is the tune I hum over and over. "Change Daily" is stitched into my underwear... MOM! STOP DOING THAT!

And when all else fails, I know of a place I can go, where troubles are all the same, where everybody knows my name. And when I'm done at Cheers I head over to the AM class to get the real work done. Which is where I'm heading tonight, because I have some unloading I need to do, and there's not a better place to dump shit than in that room. There, the shit gets pored over, dissected, separated and placed into recycling. Really, it's the best place to go if you want to green the earth. There's one bin for plastic, one for metal, one for fear, one for frustration, and there's a dumpster out back to toss your anger, one that gets emptied three times a day.

Yes, I said it. I'm goin' back. I'm caving in and returning to the womb. Do I feel like a loser? Absolutely. But do I feel like a loser for going back? Absolutely not. Because if there's another thing I've learned, it's that you can accomplish more with two people than with one. You can accomplish more with three than two and so on. My class with a dozen or so souls gets a lot done. Following that logic, we need to have an AM Revivalist Meeting and collect about 5,000 angry people under one tent-- imagine what we'll accomplish with that many minds! We can discuss that later.

Anyway, off I tread to my ole stomping grounds. I'm not the first in my class to do so... there are two others who were court-mandated, and then returned to a voluntary status once their duty was fulfilled. All throughout the year I attended there were at least three voluntary members in each meeting. As the year progressed that number rose. Maybe it's the camaraderie we share... maybe it's the power held in these tools of awareness and control... or maybe it's the two very cute therapists who work with the group, I don't know. Anyhow, people are crowding that little room, and I would hate to see the dynamic change... again. 

When I started there were two therapists in the room. About 6 months into my 'treatment' one left to open another group, and we received the two new therapists we have now, bringing the total to three. The original head facilitator has been there since the beginning, to his credit.

People might be surprised that I returned, since I so often went head to head with the head honcho regarding head treatment. I did not do it for fun, nor for spite. I genuinely believe that Anger Management is a band-aid that covers the cancer-- it's not going to cure anything, just cover it up and make it look civilized. But since that is the best we can hope for in this slow-moving and backwards-thinking society, I'll take it. Even though the big boss man made sure to do a reality check whenever I pulled out the soapbox, sometimes taking me down a peg or two (or six) in the process, I'm not one to interfere with the learning process. As a former teacher, I know it's sometimes important to knock down the incorrect learning in a resistant student before the right stuff will take hold, and I welcomed his considerable input. I'm not going to say whether or not he swayed my opinion, but I certainly respected his enough not to let my big mouth take over the room.

Off I go to the brain shoppe. I have to sand a little resistance out of my mind and fill it with acceptance. Either that, or I go for the coffee and donuts.