October | 2006 | Diarrhea of a madman

Archive for October, 2006

The positive adoption language debate

Posted in Adoption, Rants on October 18, 2006 by Brad

OK, I honestly do not get it. Why is there this obsession with positive language? I am not sure that it actually achieves anything other than disharmony. Well-meaning people are shot down for using the “wrong” terminology and any salient points they may have had are drowned in a sea of uptightness about the language they used. This used to happen all the time on the forums I frequented, to the point where I got so frustrated with people reeling off on inconsequential tangents that I wanted to perform unspeakable acts of violence on them. Probably still does happen there, but I quit torturing myself and am no longer privy to the myriad unfolding dramas. Masochism is fine, but only in a sexual way.

I honestly, truly do not care whether I am called a first father, life father, birth father or sperm donor. They all work on some level. I only find them disrespectful if they are used in a disrespectful way.

What I find truly baffling is use of the term adoption loss. This is supposed to be a positive term, I think? Considered an improvement over gave up or relinquished. Except… don’t you tend to lose things through being careless? I lost my sunglasses… because I thought they were on my head and forgot I had put them down on a counter somewhere. I was careless. I lost my watch… because I wore it in the mosh pit at a Pearl Jam concert and it came unhitched. I was careless. So does losing a child to adoption not imply that I was careless? Hell no. I did not lose him. I made a choice for him. A parenting choice. It was certainly not careless.

But, you know… this political correctness shit is how we lost the fine art of dwarf-tossing too. Those guys were not being tossed against their will… and I am OK with being called a sperm donor.

12 Comments »

Brick is red

Posted in Addiction on October 18, 2006 by Brad

And so is my keytag!

Ninety days clean. I win Life.

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The reluctant resume

Posted in Addiction, Lamentations on October 17, 2006 by Brad

I have been unemployed for several months after being fired from my last job for repeated failures to show up. With my 90 day keytag looming on the horizon, it is time to spruce up my resume and take the plunge back into the work force. Except… my resume looks highly suspect.

1998 – 2005 Basically the same job at ostensibly the same company, which just happened to get bought out several times making it appear that I in fact worked for three different companies in that time.

2005 – 2006 Less than one year in a very different environment to the previous. Terminated in less than stellar circumstances.

Ack. Makes it look like I could not cut it in that environment, which is absolutely not true. I was really enjoying doing something different and I would love to get back into that field, but… hell, if I was an employer and looking at a resume like mine, I would not even interview the guy. I guess drugs finally have caught up with me and screwed my career.

6 Comments »

Ah the irony

Posted in Addiction on October 17, 2006 by Brad

This morning as I was taking a shower, I noticed the bathroom ceiling was crawling with mold. As the taller of the two parties occupying this ancient abode, I took it upon myself to spray mold killer at the offending entities. I have no idea what is in that stuff, but it kind of got me high. I find it amusing that, in attempting to remove a fungus (some of which are known for their psychedelic properties) I gave myself an unexpected buzz anyways.

I am not counting this as a slip. Yeah, I know, been down this road before. There was no intent, it was just an unexpected side effect of a cleaning product. Case dismissed. Today is Day 89 goddammit and I am NOT FUCKING THIS UP.

Sorry about the fluff

Posted in Addiction, Adoption, Lamentations, Observations on October 12, 2006 by Brad

I have been avoiding posting anything about adoption or addiction these past couple weeks. Which is silly, because that is why this blog is here. Just I have been having difficulty separating issues out from intimate details, and I do not want to post intimate details here for obvious reasons.

Anyways, a couple weeks ago I spent some time with my son’s father and he sent me down a path of self-discovery. I realized things which had been lurking but never really surfaced. Things like…

I did not really want to get/stay clean. Using drugs was an excuse not to deal with having a kid and recognizing my place in the adoption triad. I kind of knew that already. What I did not do before was put myself in Sprog’s shoes and see that I am indirectly placing blame on him for me being an addict. Woah. So not cool. And the truth is, me being a fuck-up does not make Sprog’s parents any more his parents than they already are. It does not make them better parents, in fact it makes it harder on them as parents when they have to try to explain to him why I am flaky.

Sprog lives with them. He is their son. He will always be their son – no matter what – and nothing I do, good or bad, will ever change that. So there is no logical purpose behind my self-destruction. I can continue to fuck myself up, and sometime in the future Sprog might be able to say that he is glad he did not have to live with me because it would have sucked. Or I can quit wallowing and create an environment that Sprog can be proud to have come from. Do I want his pride, or his pity?

I am feeling better about recovery than I ever have before. There was always a measure of guilt to being clean and sober, but that is gone now. It is OK to be clean.

Now I just have to reconcile my guilt about not doing this before he was born. My guilt at what amounts to choosing a stack of white powder over my beautiful son.

4 Comments »

Huh

Posted in Lamentations on October 9, 2006 by Brad

Would you want to go see a band called NA Way?

Me either.

I am going to fight for my right to not look like a tool.

Black bandana, sweet Louisiana

Posted in Addiction, Veganism on October 5, 2006 by Brad

Salon has this article about my home state of Louisiana. It tugs at my heart strings. Southern Louisiana really is unlike any other place. There is always a feeling of homecoming, of belonging, when I go back there.

I try to recreate that feeling here where I live by attempting to replicate my mother’s cooking. Except… Mama never cooked tofu gumbo. Mama’s gumbo has shrimp, mudbugs and oysters or chicken and sausage. The first time I went back to Louisiana and announced I was a vegan, my mother looked at me as if I had said I was gay, and there will be none of THAT shit going on in her house! And obviously this diet was not good for me, because I was emaciated and sick looking (no Mama, that is the heroin), so I would eat chicken and have seconds, and that is final. So I compromised and just picked out all the meat. The next night she cooked red beans and rice. Heh.

Anyways, the article I mentioned above speaks of “Enola Prudhomme’s Low-Calorie Cajun Cooking” which makes me chuckle because it is so very at odds with the things I have watched my mother do with butter, cream and the inevitable bacon grease. And then of course there is the beignets. I mean, how unhealthy can one bunch of people be? So actually it is nice to see this book in existence, nice to know that my motherland is moving forward with the times. Now all I need to do is find a Vegan Cajun Cooking book and all will be golden.

Of course Mama will probably never speak to me again.

1 Comment »

Yes, I changed my theme again

Posted in Mumblings on October 4, 2006 by Brad

It is pink in honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

I like breasts, OK?

3 Comments »

Mama, put my guns in the ground

Posted in Adoption, Lamentations on October 4, 2006 by Brad

Interesting how these school shootings seem to happen in little groups. It must be awful to be a parent this week, to send your kids off to school fearing they will not come home again. The only worse thing I can think of is to be a birth parent in a closed adoption, wondering if that was your kid that got shot.

Salon has an article about how to protect schools, and Cecily has a very good post about gun control. Personally, I am not sure what the answer is. Because it really is not just about the guns. Guns do make it quicker and easier for people to kill people. But that really is the root of it all, the fact that people want to kill people. The question is, why do some of them go through with it?

The guy in the Amish school shooting lost his newborn baby girl 9 years ago. This was mentioned as a possible factor. But… many people have lost babies, and they do not go around tying up little girls and popping them in the head, because frankly that is not a fucking logical step for most people’s brains to take. So today I was trying to figure out his train of thought and the best I can come up with is… God took my baby girl, these Amish people live for God, so I am going to take God’s little girls in retaliation. Actually it worries me that I was able to construct a logic train from that. I feel dirty.

Does it really boil down to an entitlement issue?

Obviously the guy was mentally ill. And here is where we run into the crux of the problem. Because people jump on the mentally ill bandwagon – and that leads to stigmatization of mentally ill people, because mentally ill people do crap like that. Except… most of them don’t. Most mentally ill people suffer in silence, many of them are not even diagnosed because hell, who wants to be diagnosed as a crackpot? Even for those who are diagnosed, followups are never done. I was diagnosed with major depression in 2003, he offered me drugs, I declined (because I don’t do drugs mmmkay!) and that was the end of it. That could be your next school shooter right there!

There needs to be more education about mental illness to reduce stigmatization and allow people to be comfortable in seeking help. And for Christ’s sake, make it affordable. The last thing someone on the brink of a breakdown needs is financial stress.

Treat the sickness, not the symptoms.

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Diarrhea of a madman