How I Got My Parents to Buy A Color TV

I shudder to think of what could have happened.

What happened was bad enough.

Of course, you know I was a curious child, which has gotten me in trouble ever since.

And my dad, a Korean War Marine MP knew one thing – money didn’t grow on trees.

Put those things together and we have the ingredients for a combustible situation.

Speaking of combustible. . .

Some weekday morning in the summer of 1967, upon awaking, I went down to the basement with my sister to watch TV. We were one of those families where the TV was in the basement, which was something of a family room/den (not the richly appointed ones you’re probably thinking of) and not the ‘living room.’ The living room was NOT covered in plastic and used for entertaining only.

You had to cross through the living room to get anywhere in the house. In the beginning, my playpen was there but other than that, I don’t recall it being used for much else except to hold our beat-up second hand furniture my parents were gifted when they got married.

This would change.

So here we are watching a Woody Woodpecker cartoon and I notice one of those Tupperware cups we had so many of (mom gave and attended Tupperware parties – all the kitchen wear was Tupperware, everything else was from Sears). My parents had been watching the TV the night before and what ice that had been in the cup had melted, leaving about a half-inch of water in the bottom.

By the way, the TV looked exactly like this:

 

It was the BIG expense when my parents moved in to the new house in 1961. Every new home had to have a TV and they were all black and white.

By 1967, color sets, which would set you back about a month’s pay, were sweeping the nation as the latest status symbol/must have item. I became aware of the wonderful world of color watching local TV shows that broadcast in color like Captain Penny.

Captain Penny

Captain Penny was a kid’s show which starred Ron Penfound (warning: we’re going Deep Cleveland here), who would dress in an engineer’s uniform and show Three Stooges cartoons. I don’t think Penfound really enjoyed springing the Stooges on young impressionable kids. He used to say it was OK to laugh at them but don’t act like them. I think WEWS TV5 (“First in Cleveland”) got the Stooges stuff on the cheap so Penfound had to show them.

He had a cast of characters that would do various skit appearances and had ‘Jungle Larry’ (not Larry Fine) bring in exotic animals from his theme parlk, but the one thing everyone waited for was ‘Pooch Parade.’

Pooch Parade was sponsored by the Animal Protective League of Cleveland and featured dogs up for adoption from the kennel and other dogs which owners could not keep anymore. For some reason, our Springer Spaniel ‘Dutchie’ (God my dad had a way with nicknames; I won’t tell you what mine was but it was close to Dutchie) was on the show. To this day I don’t know why we had to give Dutchie away.

Man, this is getting long-winded. Stick with me, it gets better.

ANYWAY. . . Captain Penny would introduce the dog and then say, “for you folks watching at home with a black and white TV, this dog’s coloring is . . .”

Dad, why can’t we get a color TV?

“D’ya think money grows on trees, kid? Nothin’ wrong with that TV. Just be thankful ya have one.”

The resentment grew. One night, I was waiting for ‘Bonanza’ to start.

I beheld some weird psychedelic image on the screen.

This is what I saw. 

“The following program is brought to you in living color . . . on NBC.”

No, it’s not.

Dad, why is it not in color?

“Shut up you.”

One more aside, I swear, before we get to the good stuff.

I was notorious for getting in trouble by sticking things in places they shouldn’t go (stop with the dirty mind, I was four-years-old). Example: my favorite was sticking bobby pins in wall outlets. It’s a wonder I didn’t have the weirdest hair on Golden Gate Boulevard. So my parents had to buy the plastic outlet caps which I spent hours trying to pry off.

I was curious. If I was better at math, I would have grown up to be a mad scientist.

So, here I am looking at the TV and the water in the bottom of the cup and for reasons known only to God, I wondered what would happen if I poured that bit of water down the back of the TV set?

Look, I never said I was ever mentally balanced.

My sister was curious too but I think she was just egging me on.

I don’t remember much from when I was four but I do remember this.

Remember the opening to the old Mister Magoo cartoon where Magoo lands up driving through a power plant? Remember the noises that made?

That’s pretty much the noise that was made when the water hit the vacuum tubes.

The TV went dark.

I froze in horror.

Mom came downstairs screaming at both of us. This is the part where my memory is a little cloudy as trauma tends to do that to children.

We ran from her up to our bedrooms screaming.

I remember leaning against my bedroom door, sobbing and retching, waiting for my father to get home. Because when he did, I knew, I KNEW, he was going to kill me.

It wasn’t the first time and it would not be the last.

Eventually my father came home. I was called down from upstairs (as opposed to being called up from downstairs).

I remember trembling as I came down the stairs one agonizing step at a time.

My father put his hand around my shoulder (would he crush my head?) and pointed downstairs at the dead TV and said that was something I was never to touch.

And that was it. I went back to my room believing in miracles.

It was a few years before I found out what really happened. At some dinner party at our new house, circa 1971, my dad was regaling her hosts about the time my sister broke the TV.

“Oh that wasn’t her,” I brightly said. “That was me.”

There was a moment of silence. Me and my big mouth strike again (again, not the first time, absolutely not the last).

“Wait. . . YOU?” my dad said.

My sister, hearing my screams of impending death, took pity on me for the first and last time in her life. To save me from getting my ass beat, she copped to the crime. And she got what I thought was the beating.

To this day, she has never forgiven me.

As for this revelation, the child advice columnists of the day said corporal punishment needed to be dealt out at the time of the infraction, so the child would associate the pain with the act.

It was four years later and although my father was mad for being tricked into beating the wrong child, he was not going to beat me now.

Of course, there is a bright side to this. You can tell by the title of this essay.

Originally, we were told by our parents that because of this, we would never have television again – EVER! I couldn’t fathom such an existence. Without the “Vast Wasteland,” life would be . . . a vast wasteland. My childhood would be ruined. The neighborhood kids would laugh at us.

That lasted about a week. My parents were bigger TV junkies than we were.

Dad got an estimate to fix the set. It would have cost as much as he paid for the TV originally.

Somehow, someway, dad decided to get a new TV. And it would be color. And it would be from Sears. And the only reason is because he probably got it on payments since he worked there.

I remember the day it arrived. It was YUUGE!

The photo is the 1965 model, ours was two years newer, a little longer, but still had that nifty ‘works in a drawer’ feature that refused to stay closed after a few years. It was in that ghastly ‘colonial’ style my parents loved so much. I always wanted ‘contemporary’ (being a modern, hip kid), we all hated ‘Mediterranean’ (red velvet? Really?) so we got ‘colonial.’ I had no say in the decision.

And it was placed in the living room, mostly I think so that mom and dad could make sure neither of us would approach it without being seen. It might have well been surrounded by razor wire.

It would be an entire year before I was allowed to approach King TV and only with one of my parents watching me. I always remember being allowed to switch the channel to watch ‘Flipper’ as God intended – in color.

“Everyone loves the king of the sea. . . “

I found out later that dolphins can really be bastards

Whenever I hear that theme song, I remember color TV.

But wait! There’s one more revelation – one I didn’t learn until well after my father died.

Mom knew.

“Of course I knew,” she said thirty years after the fact. “I saw you standing there with that cup in your hand and your wide eyes.”

Then why didn’t you say anything?

It came out slowly. She was afraid dad would kill me and she knew dad wouldn’t kill his little ‘peaches and cream.’ I don’t know what he did to her and I never asked.

And my mother spent the rest of her life trying to make it up to her.

So she knew it all along. As Captain Penny used to say at the end of every show:

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool Mom. She's pretty nice and she's pretty smart. If you do what Mom says you won't go far wrong."

Nostalgia or Reality? The Travails of Someone Who Remembers Too Much

I wanted to write something light today, maybe a story from my younger years not punctuated by my father's threats of violence or my mother's benign neglect. In short, without the grand hand-wringing mess of angst this blog has, unfortunately, turned into.

It's difficult to write lightly when you're angry and depressed, but here goes.

Nah. I came up with one story just now in my head and it relates to something that happened at work.

The world has changed a lot since I was a kid. People always say that and they're right. Others say you only think things have changed - people, as they will, generally remain the same. There's some truth to that.

In June, I got reported for something I said at an employee luncheon. I was remembering all the stupid dangerous stuff I did as a kid, mostly putting bobby pins in wall outlets (I blew a lot of fuses, much to dad's consternation) and using my sister as an experiment to see what exotic things I could get her to eat, such as deodorant.

I said "between God and my mother, it's a wonder how many times I tried to kill myself as a kid."

Of course, in light of what had gone before the VA Employee Gestapo saw fit to throw that on top of the list of charges brought against me for 'inappropriate behavior.' That was one of the ones that didn't stick.

But as I recall, at the time it was no laughing matter for my mother.

Dennis broke vases, I broke TVs. Hah!

In fact, these incidents raised eyebrows around the neighborhood (it was the mid-1960s and most moms were stay-at-home) and, even worse, among my father's side of the family. They never did like my mother and the feeling from my mother's side of the family toward my father was mutual. It rarely flared, but just simmered under the surface with an occasional cutting remark over gin and tonics on Christmas Eve the worst it generally got.

Dad, to his credit, did most of his fuming in the car. It was the only time I was privy to the juicy gossip of family infighting. Otherwise, family business was treated like the mafia's 'family business' and I was not a part of that family - of sainted adults.

In any case, there was one incident I actually remember that caused mom a lot of grief with dad's relatives for some time, probably because the evidence was captured on Kodachrome.

I don't know why I did it, but one day when mom was enjoying a cigarette, I ran up for a hug and got the lighted end dead center on my forehead. I had a little red dot, like a bidi, for weeks. As it happened right before Christmas, my little red-dotted forehead was captures on still photos and family movies.

Nothing, even my father's ranting against her housework, hurt my mom more than criticism about her parenting. She rarely said anything about it but when she did, I could tell it hurt her terribly. My sister and I, but really mostly me, were a load to handle. I would have and still do, try the patience of a saint.

But no one came to the door with the police for any of that. I wasn't being abused. The kids across the street we played with were being almost ritualistically beaten by their father. They paid for it later when their children cut them out of their lives.

As years went by and stories were told, it did become funny. Well, not the time I destroyed the TV, but that's a story for another day.

Man, I was bad.

When I was around 12 and playing what passed for Little League ball in my hometown, we had a ball diamond next to a railroad overpass. One day, for some reason, our coaches were late so we climbed up on the trestle and looked down at the road the train crossed.

One of us (not me) decided it would be fun to drop pennies on cars below us. A lady called the cops and, sure enough, an officer came and called us down from the trestle.

We got a stern lecture, for sure. The cop knew us, knew we were not bad kids but also knew that if he didn't tell us how dangerous stupid stuff like that could be, we wouldn't learn.

He left and we all swore not to tell the coaches or our parents. And no one did.

Nowadays I wonder if we would have all gone down to the station in handcuffs, been booked on some charge and sent to juvenile court.

I guess that's the world I mourn the most. It had nothing to do with terrorism, politics or social upheaval. There was a unsaid standard that saved legal and extralegal punishments for acts that deserved them instead of the one-size-fits-all type of legalism-cum-fascism we live under today.

It was like comparing the world of Mayberry with East Berlin. Now everyone is watching everyone looking for a 'see something-say something' moment which might get them a hero's badge on TV. Historian William Manchester called the McCarthy era The Age of Suspicion, but I think he'd change his mind if he were alive today.

Now do you remember? That's Ralph on the left. 

How many people remember a cartoon called Wait 'Til Your Father Gets Home, (1972-74) where Ralph, the neighbor (voiced by Jack Burns) snooped around the neighborhood looking for a Commie behind every bush?

He was a punchline. Now he's a Real American.

Yeah, it wasn't all sunshine and roses, I'll be the first to admit. I remember the Vietnam protests and Kent State. And I can't blame it all on the hysteria following 9-11; this had been brewing for some time. The change came in a way that it was almost imperceptible unless you had a memory for time.

Our society not only became more legalistic, it also became more unforgiving and less trusting. Technology brought us not only paranoia but the ability to more easily separate ourselves into warring tribles. We lost the glue that held us together as a rational people.

And once lost, we can't get it back.

Tears in the Rain

One afternoon in the first grade, I was on the bus heading home. I was about to learn a lesson in responsibility, actions and consequences but I didn’t know it. It was, as has been the case in much of my life, and incident I caused to happen.

When I look back on the times I have ‘gotten into trouble,’ my actions usually resulted from shame, fear or anger – there was a lot of that around my house to be sure. This incident was from another cause – my overweening desire to be liked and be the center of attention.

I was having an animated discussion with a kid named Brian. What we were talking about I don’t remember but I do remember I was playing ‘the little professor’ role my grandpa Tanski tagged me with.

I was supposed to get off the bus at the corner of Wilson Mills and Thwing. About half a mile from my stop Brian said “hey, isn’t your stop coming up?” I remember replying ‘no, no, not for a while.’

To this day, I’m amazed that my desire to prattle on trumped common sense. Of course I knew where my stop was. I even remember looking. But I couldn’t tear myself away from my grand exposition of whatever the Hell I was talking about.

A few seconds later, Brian said something along the lines of ‘dude, seriously, this is your stop.’ Even the bus driver looked back momentarily in the mirror and slowed a little bit, but not seeing me, she kept on going.

A few second later it dawned on me that I had, indeed, missed my stop.

I ran up the aisle to the bus driver and begged her to turn around and let me off. She said she couldn’t do it; probably due to the rules of the Chardon Local Schools bus system. I didn’t understand it at the time, but she was responsible for me and now, much her to dismay, she was more responsible than usual.

So here I was, trapped on the bus, taking it to the final destination – the bus garage.

And no amount of begging and pleading could convince the bus driver to let me off. At that point, I would have walked back a few miles if I had to.

So back I went to sit with Brian. Even as a child, I could never hide my emotions – my face always gave me away.

‘Dude you’re gonna be in trouble.’

‘I know.’

Every minute that went by, the panic increased. Unknowingly, the panic of my parents was increasing at the same time as, at some point, they had come home and, surprise! I wasn’t there.

A first grader, of course, has no idea of parental panic. I was just convinced that my parents would be pissed for the simple reason I missed my stop. I was not thinking of the lurid, horrible fantasies that were playing across their minds of my abduction and torture or perhaps I was hit by a car walking home and was in the hospital – or morgue!

At the bus garage, the driver put me in her car and drove me home. All I remember about that was her car had a red bench seat and she scolding me. Well, that was OK because I deserved it. I felt horrible and stupid. How could I have allowed this to happen?

I don’t know if the driver called my parents from the bus garage but they were waiting in the driveway when we got back.

They thanked the driver profusely.

And then I got it. And I got it good.

I got screamed at really well, mostly by my father who learned the trade of a good dressing down from his Marine Corps drill instructors.

I mean, right in my face, spittle flying and everything. I don’t think I was hit, but if I was, I probably have blocked it out of my memory.

I thought about this incident today for no other reason than a memory came to me when I was a parent.

You know, you drive and your mind wanders and if you’re me, like staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m., bad memories seem to pop up and I land up processing them for the thousandth time.

When my younger son, who was afflicted with autism (is that the correct term? I don’t even know anymore), decided to take a hike while my then wife and I were drawing him a bath, I felt that panic. We had only turned our backs for about half a minute and he was out the door, in stocking feet, headed down the street.

I ran out to the street and looked both ways – I did not see him.

Pure panic.

We got lucky. There was a couple in their front yard.

“Are you looking for a little boy,” they asked. “He went that way.”

It was a miracle they didn’t call child services on us. To this day I am forever grateful.

But at that moment, I had a pretty good idea of where he was. Sure enough, he had ducked into the schoolyard playground next to our street and was sitting on the swing with a big smile on his face, waiting for us to push him.

Autistic kids have a great need to keep to their schedule and an uncanny sense of time. It was 6 p.m. It wasn’t bath time; it was ‘swing me’ time. And we had thrown in an unscheduled bath and he was having none of it.

Both boys are grown now.

But we still worry. And always will.

Kids don’t get it and you can’t expect them to – until they have kids of their own.

So when I think to myself – ‘they grew up so fast and I didn’t treasure those moments like I should have,’ I think back to the terror of that evening on Chase Drive and can only imagine the terror in my parents’ imagination on Thwing Road on that long ago afternoon in 1969. I have mixed emotions.

So what is the grand point I’m trying to make here?

It’s this: night after night on the news, we see mourning parents who have lost a child or a brother or sister to violence. It doesn’t matter where – in Pittsburgh, in Chicago, in Charlotte, in Tulsa, anywhere. And I think many of us have become inured to the agony of their grief as these images parade across our screen. I think we do that because we choose not to identify with the mourners. 

Also, there seems to be so many of them that we’d be overwhelmed if we invested emotions in every one of them.

And there is ‘compassion fatigue’ that has been talked about for decades.

I remember when I was a child my mother and I were watching the news. A high rise apartment building was on fire and people, faced with the terror of the flames, clung to the window ledges until they finally let go.

My mother was crying. “Oh my God,” she kept saying, “Oh my God!”

She was a school teacher. Every child in her classroom was her child. Every child in that school was her child. And they would remain so for the rest of her life. She didn’t see random bodies falling to their death; she saw someone’s child.

Last night in Charlotte

‘Parent’ is an interesting term. Of course, the first dictionary definition is “a mother or father.” But the second definition, as a verb, is this: “be or act as a mother or father to (someone).”

The root is from Latin: parent- ‘bringing forth,’ from the verb parere.

We bring forth.

We create the world for them.

They, in turn, create another world for those they bring forth.

This world, where death is random, hearts are hardened and everything seems to be coming apart is not the fault of any one person or organization. We as the children brought forth created it. We as the parents of those children set the stage.

May 4, 1970

You can take the view that parents are solely responsible for their children and that people are solely responsible for their actions. I used to think the same thing when I was younger because I had no idea of a world that existed in which not everyone could rise above their circumstances and not everyone has the parenting I had to learn to make good value judgments.

I suppose we could just turn off the news. I want to, but I can’t.

What I would like is that for image of violent death, we consider the grief as a parent; the panic when the call comes in in the middle of the night; when they fall to their knees at the feet of their dead child; when someone sees the cell phone footage of their child dying on the street. That once, that life was someone’s child. And we were all someone’s children. And at least once, our own parents panicked and feared the worst.

We created this world, not George Soros, not the Koch brothers. We did. And having sown the wind, we reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8).

Paulo Coelho said it best:

“Whenever someone dies, a part of the universe dies too. Everything a person felt, experience and saw dies with them, like tears in the rain.”

Chicago

God Help the Sensitive Child

I hate the world today. . .

Collateral damage of America's bully culture

Another of these stories – another dead child – a nine-year-old suicide-by-bullying. Make sure you read the local story which is linked to the Daily Mail.

This line:

Baber said Jackson tried to fend off the bullies with humor and sometimes by force although he had lost he desire to fight them in recent weeks. His grandmother also helped build him a clubhouse to help him make more friends.

Got me thinking.

Humor, the last line of defense – don’t kill the funny guy. Humor is the only weapon of the truly powerless: if I can make them laugh, maybe they’ll leave me alone.

But after a while, even resilient kids reach their limit.

They even built Jackson a clubhouse to try and help him make friends. Can you imagine that? What more could these people of limited means do? Arm the kid?

Of course not – nine-year-old kids aren’t allowed to defend themselves with guns. But the bullies have fists, feet, rocks, pipes, any old thing at their disposal. In our culture, we worship bullies because they ‘toughen up’ the pussies; doing society a favor. Or dispose of the weak links, in this case. We love bullies. One of the biggest of them could be our next President.

As for the attacks on Jackson, remember, if no one in ‘authority’ sees it, legally, it doesn’t happen. 

And even when school administrators see it (you will never find a bigger more craven coward than a school administrator) they will most likely do nothing.

And another child dies from bullying. It happens so often now it’s hardly newsworthy.

Why?

I can only speak from my personal experience. I had a few strikes against me as a kid that made me the target of occasional bullying

• I’m fat – always been, always will be

• The funny last name. Bullies can do so many innovative things with a person’s last name if it’s not something like ‘Smith’ or ‘Carter,’ or something appropriately non-ethnic. I used to brood in my bedroom asking why I had to be burdened through no fault of my own, with my last name. I hated it.
  
• Working class parents in an upper middle class Catholic school. Never the best clothes, snacks, vacations, parent’s cars, sexy jobs, etc. etc. Kids notice every class difference. Wonder why?
  
• Overly-sensitive. Do you read books as an 11 year old that are not ‘boy’s books’? I was mercilessly teased for reading World War II history and great literature like ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ Do you like listening to Neil Diamond rather than BTO? When someone insults you, does it show on your face immediately no matter what you do? The pack will find you and make you pay. God help you if someone sees you pick a flower.

There’s more but those are the big ones.

I can remember all the times I tried faking illness so as not to be sent to school. I can remember, one morning, in the third grade, literally crying hysterically not to be made to go to school because on that day for some reason, I knew I was going to get it worse than normal.

I tried to get my mother to transfer me to a public school.

She told me they sent me to Notre Dame because I’d “get the shit kicked out of me” in the local public schools. Yes, my mom said that to me. Again note well parents: children remember EVERYTHING.

So instead of physical bullying (I could get that from dad), I had to be content with constant verbal bullying. I did get into a few fights but did everything I could to shy away from conflict. It has become a lifelong trait – from my dad, my boss, my family, etc. As Mellencamp sang, when I fight authority, authority always pounds me into pulp. Or something like that.

So the big question – did I ever consider suicide as a 10-year-old?

That’s actually a hard question to ask because I experienced such a swirl of emotions at the time.

Then, as now, all I wanted was to be left alone and treated with basic human decency. I wanted to strike out at these kids but I knew I couldn’t so the revenge fantasies stayed just that – fantasies.

I wanted someone in authority to do something. I mean, did they not have eyes or ears? The nicest nun I had the whole time at NDE, Sister John David in the third grade, saw me get beat up over a scrabble game but could only offer a bit of consolation – she did nothing to the kid who beat on me, which sent a message to the whole class.

I could NOT ask my father for help. That would be admitting to him that everything he thought about me was true. He was already wishing he had had another daughter – maybe she would go hunting and fishing with him. My mother listened but always felt that I should be able to handle these situations with words. A local martial arts school opened up and I asked mom about it, knowing that it would not only help my confidence but since everyone always called me names for being fat, it would certainly help that too.

She thought about it for a few minutes and then decided against it. “I don’t want you to get a big head,” she said.

Seriously.

But because of her actions, or lack of actions, she WOULD send me to a shrink at 14 (too late). THAT would fix everything.

Seriously.

At some point, I reached the phase where I wish I hadn’t been born. I remember that. I don’t know when that started, possibly the third grade or thereabouts. Most of the time, I dealt with the whole mess by escaping into my imagination where I would construct a parallel universe in which I was . . . loved, appreciated, befriended.

Or I escaped into the world of books.

My dad had lots of guns. It would have been ridiculously easy for me to have gotten one, loaded it and killed myself. The thought really never occurred to me. I think the biggest reason was the fact that although Notre Dame Elementary was an eight year prison sentence, I knew that if I just could make it to graduation than things would be better. I was like a convict counting the days on the cell wall – which I actually did in my room with a calendar. I started my countdown at 1,000 days to eighth grade graduation.

There was hope. When you have hope of a better future, you can put up with a lot of shit.

I had that then. Jackson, in his world, couldn’t see any hope. I wonder what he did see? I wonder what he felt? We will probably never know as the story mentioned, he kept these things to himself.

Not all kids are built with the same steel. I wish we’d recognize that. But in a place like Raleigh, West Virginia, you have to believe there aren’t many ways out for a kid like Jackson. It’s perfectly believable that he would conclude that his life, as it was now, would forever be.

God help the sensitive child. 

Post No Bull

I spent a good deal of time writing a new post that would have appeared here about. . . now.

It was an experimental post that encouraged you, dear reader, to find me disgusting. Sort of a George Constanza reverse experiment. Since I have had a hard time throughout my life making lasting friends and having people like me despite my personality disorder, this was an attempt to do the exact opposite of what I usually do.

That is to say, by coming across as a complete ass, you dear reader would find me cutting, edgy, interesting etc.

And, frankly, I had a ball writing it. I thought it was cutting, edgy and genuinely tart.

Knowing that because of my condition, my perception is quite often skewed, I had my wife look at it first.

She didn't laugh once.

I think, in one respect, she doesn't like seeing me put myself down so savagely, even if it is done ironically.

But she also said it was particularly mean spirited at times.

A big part of what I write has to do with my experiences growing up with an undiagnosed mental condition and talking about my family is a part of that. But this time, my wife felt I laid on the snark with a particularly huge and nasty trowel.

And deep down inside, I know she's right. It was meant to be.


But, again, this is part of the process of trying to understand and control my behavior. It's a perfect illustration of how I tend to offend: what seems funny and edgy to me might be repulsive to you, the reader.

It can be something I write or say. It really doesn't matter. Perceptions are everything.

So I'm going to let it sit in the queue and stew for awhile and come back to it later, possibly for a re-write but knowing that I often get a very different feeling about something from one day to another. Tomorrow, or some other day, I might look back on what I wrote and think 'good God, I almost published that shit.'

The takeaway is that, for many of us, we get to the point where we don't trust our own instincts. And I don't trust mine anymore. It's a byproduct of bipolar.

I won't lie - it hurts. But I would rather follow the advice of someone I love and trust than possibly wound the blog - which has helped me as therapy through writing - than stubbornly insist that everything I write is golden. When I have been wrong before, I've been spectacularly wrong.

I guess it's progress that I can recognize and admit this.

So maybe someday you'll read it in the proper context or maybe not. But I didn't want to hit the hay tonight without writing something about The Post that Wasn't.

Because for me, it's all about working it out in print and learning from the misfires is a part of that.

It doesn't grow on trees . . .it comes from the loan arranger (where's Tonto?)

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