I missed a step yesterday. As I re-read my post, I thought, the transitions here, from Elvis to Rock ‘n Roll to my personal navel-gazing to fear, aren’t flowing properly. But I had other things I wanted to do, so I let it stand.

But now I remember I’d wanted to say something about fear. Something positive, difficult as that may be to believe.

First of all, I was going to say that, in case you were wondering about my problems with book orders in the bookstore due to the internet being down, that it all got worked out. The IT guy came up and burrowed under my desk a while, and then went down to the server and discovered that the problem was there all the time. So I got my service, and all the orders were placed on Thursday (except for the orders of that one instructor who never gets his orders in until just before classes start. I figure if he can live with it, I can live with it).

I employ a mixed media approach in ordering books from publishers. I use the internet to research the books, learn the publishers and ISBN numbers, and after I’ve transcribed all that information on a spread sheet, I call the publishers’ 800 numbers to actually make the orders. It seems to work best for me that way.

And that’s remarkable, under the circumstances. Because I hate calling people on the phone. When I first took this job, the phone calling was one of the duties I dreaded most. It’s related to my Avoidant problem, as you’ve probably guessed.

But I got past it. After I’d done it a couple times, I learned that if I was prepared, making the calls with my orders wasn’t all that difficult.

I need to highlight this in my mind, which is why I highlighted it above. Within my personal scenario, the warped lens through which I look at my life, there is no place for improvement. I see my life as a place where everything is going downhill. Nothing ever gets better. Instead, the inevitable slide takes me, eventually, to the place where I lose my job, my home, all my friends and family, and end up wandering the streets yelling at imaginary enemies.

But this got better. I actually improved at something. I overcame a fear.

I’d better stop now. If I write any more, I’ll find a way to sabotage it.

Have a good weekend.

The family reunion went great. Fine weather, good turnout. Everyone was genial, and nobody said anything to offend me.

And yet I went home miserable.

Well, what do you expect? I’m me.

It started out fine. I drove down early to catch the 9:00 a.m. service at my old home church. Even when I got corralled into joining an impromptu quartet of relatives to sing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” for the special music, I figured the experience couldn’t have been much worse for us who had to sing than for those who had to listen to us. Attendance was summer light, but the church was comfortable and I enjoyed the sermon. (The theme was “Be ye faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life,” in case you’re checking up on me.)

Then I drove out to the farm where the reunion is held nowadays. We had a couple hours yet before lunch, but I helped set up chairs and chatted with a few cousins.

Then people started arriving, and it got more difficult. Not bad. I was doing OK, though there are only three questions anyone asks me:

1. “Making any more trips to Norway?” (Answer: “No. I’m house-poor now. I may never get back to Norway again.”)

2. “Writing any more books?” (Answer: “Yes, but my publisher dumped me and my agent went belly up, so I’m back at square one.”)

3. (This one was only asked once, but was unquestionably posed silently by many:) “Now that Cousin X has surprised us all by getting married after all these years, are you gonna surprise us too?” (Answer: “Probably not, because I’m crazy in a way that women find particularly off-putting.”)

But I was holding up OK, until my brother Moloch casually mentioned something he said I’d said a long time ago, that I didn’t remember saying, and of which I’m ashamed now that I know about it.

That was when the trapdoor opened, and I plunged down—not into emptiness but into sewage, a noxious mixture of fear of other people and loathing of myself. I pretty much shut down for the rest of the afternoon, mostly just speaking when spoken to (which means, in all probability, nobody noticed any difference).

I drove home as soon as I could get away, and went to bed early.

I can’t even handle a pleasant afternoon with family. I wonder if I’m sliding toward complete agoraphobia. Which would be a bad thing for someone who doesn’t have anyone to sponge off for his upkeep.

I’m somewhat better today. It was a low fall and a quick bounce-back. But of course the bounce-back always ends up a little lower than the place where you started.

Those crazy Russians–this is too funny to ignore. Orange Jack points to reporting on Russia’s claim on the wealth of the Arctic by staking a flag on the ocean floor. Canada had a response, but that’s not as funny as what Reuters tried to pull.

Tonight Hugh Hewitt (who obviously hates me) messed up my evening walk by broadcasting a debate between David Allen White and Christopher Hitchens over the existence of God.

This isn’t what I want in an exercise partly designed to lower my blood pressure. So I had to switch to the cassette function of my Walkman. I climbed down in the basement to find a cassette that hadn’t flaked off all its oxidation. I found an acceptable Sissel tape, and so saved the walk.

I hate arguments. If the Calvinists are right, and I’m not among the elect, I expect Hell to be a room full of people arguing at the tops of their voices forever. I shrink inside when people argue. I don’t have to be one of them. My fetal-position instinct kicks in.

I admire logic and disputation. I have immense respect for men like C. S. Lewis, who could go at an argument with a colleague for hours, then laugh and share a beer with him. That’s the way it ought to be. Questions should be talked out to the bitter end, all permutations nailed down, and there should be either consensus or an agreement to disagree. And no one should bear hard feelings.

Wish I could do it.

In harmony with this theme, my doorbell rang tonight, and there was a young woman “organizing the neighborhood for NARAL.” Last year they sent a tattooed, one-armed lesbian with her female “bodyguard.” This year’s representative was more presentable, though she avoided avoiding a cliché by having a stud in her nose. No visible bodyguard.

How does she dare go out alone like that, in a country steeped in rape and violence against women?

Anyway, I told her I wasn’t interested and backed away. She asked me why not, and I told her, “I’m pro-life.”

“I’m a sexist pig,” I added, as I closed the door.

That’s my zinger. I pull out the insult I expect from my opponent, and I use it on myself, to disarm them. “Your feeble bullets have no power over me, because I just shot myself!”



It doesn’t even make sense to me.

But let’s not argue about it.

Have a good weekend. I’m down to Kenyon for the biennial (semiannual?) every two year Walker Family Reunion on Sunday.

I thought of saying I’d share pictures, and then I thought, “Why?”

Bookreporter has a long list of books which have been ruined on the big screen. I mean, adapted: Books Into Movies

Apparently, there’s a scuffle going on over a petition to allow more freedom in the definition of chocolate. There’s possibility the Food and Drug Administration will allow companies to substitute vegetable fat for cocoa butter in producing a chocolate confection. According to the website Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate, “it would allow for the unlimited use of vegetable fats from any source and at any level to replace the added cocoa butter in milk and dark chocolate and still allow the product to be called chocolate.” In candies made of white chocolate, which is supposed to have cocoa butter and no cocoa solid, this new standard appears to allow for candies with no cocoa at all. I suppose if you call it chocolate, then it is chocolate.

Lynsey Hanley complains about BBC TV in The Guardian.

Three years ago, we got rid of our television, depressed and driven to brain-ache by what had come to pass for peak-time programming on the mainstream channels.

It seemed that every day’s lesson to the masses was this: working-class people live on grey council estates and shout a lot; middle-class people are snooty and frosty and only truly human when shouting a lot like those people on council estates do; and there’s nothing in life that can’t be solved by a visit to B&Q.

…

Every so often, but not nearly often enough, the BBC remembers what it’s there for. It’s there not to target, but to unite, people with disparate interests. In the words of Huw Wheldon, the BBC’s managing director in the early 1970s, its role is to make the popular good and the good popular . . .

Is that what TV is supposed to do? I never knew.

When I upgraded the blogging software (which is Bloo for those interested in breaking out of your current blogging shell), it reset the rotating quotes at the top. What do you think of those quotes? Likes and dislikes? Suggestions?

Here’s a drawing of two toilets, two books, and two labels which inspired a long discussion.

Better today, thanks for asking. Went to bed early last night and slept hard until the alarm woke me. It was almost worth the deprivation of the previous night to enjoy such luxurious, concentrated sleep.

Here’s an interesting (interesting to me) post from a blog called Shape of Days. The author employs some language I wouldn’t use myself (be warned), but it was interesting to see another blogger writing about his emotional disorder. Indeed, his problem, Borderline Personality Disorder, is a cousin to my Avoidant Personality Disorder. I believe AvPD used to be diagnosed as Borderline, until they refined the criteria, or something.

His problem seems to be more severe than mine, which is some comfort, I guess. He blames it on a “brain defect or malfunction,” and I’m pretty sure mine, on the other hand, stemmed from simply growing up in a crazy environment, where I had to learn crazy behavior to survive. My first mistake was in choosing my parents. The second mistake was that I seem to have run into some remarkably toxic adult authority figures on my way up (or whatever way I was going).

Chief among these was Mr…. I’ll call him Mr. Woundwort. He was football coach and physical education (we called it Phy Ed in that time and place) teacher for our Junior/Senior high school, which meant he was licensed to poison my life for six full years.

The man was a sadist. That wasn’t just something his football players said as a joke after drills. Everyone knew he was a sadist. He was mean at the core. There was a story, a bit of schoolboy folklore, that said he’d accidentally killed his own brother when he was a kid. I don’t know if it’s true, but it would help explain a lot if it were.

Of all his hates, and he had many, his hatred of fat kids was chief. He singled out the fat kids, humiliated them. I was a fat kid. I was on his list from the first day.

One day he had us doing calisthenics, and he noticed that I couldn’t do a push-up. Yes, I wrote that right. I was a farm kid, but I didn’t have the upper body strength to do a single push-up. This was one of many clues which had already proved to me that I was unworthy and defective.

Mr. Woundwort decided this called for special coaching. His own kind of special coaching.

He set the rest of the guys to some game or other. He took a folding chair and a yardstick, and he took me to a corner of the gymnasium. He told me to get into push-up position in the corner, and he sat on the chair and told me to “Do one.” I tried and failed.

He hit me on the butt with the yardstick.

He told me he would keep telling me to do a push-up as long as it took, and every time I failed he’d hit me again.

We went on like that for the rest of the hour. By the time it was done my meager muscles were quivering, and I was sobbing uncontrollably. He had to let me go (he told me he’d test me later, and if I couldn’t do one by then, I’d have to take Phy Ed with the girls), and after showering I went immediately to the school Guidance Counselor, and told him what had happened.

I’m one of those who believe that educational standards have fallen appallingly since those days. I believe students today are coddled and over-rewarded and underdisciplined.

But there are limits, and Mr. Woundwort had gone over the line. Even in those days, I think, what he’d done with me was too much. I don’t know what happened, but Mr. Woundwort eased up on me after that, at least to the point of not punishing me sadistically anymore. So I think the G.C. probably had a heart-to-heart talk with him and made some threats.

I suspect Mr. Woundwort thought I was homosexual. Which is kind of ironic, since one of his prized football players (another sadist, as it happened, one who beat me up many times) later “came out of the closet,” and eventually died of AIDS.

I never told my parents about it, not even when I was grown up.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d take Mr. Woundwort’s side.