Another Salted Milestone Plus Some Links For Better Blogging And A Birthday

My photo blog is now fifty posts old. Which, in human terms, means it’s about to start stealing cars and hiring homeless dudes to buy it alcohol and smokes. So, basically it’s eleven.

My photo blog, Salted Shambhala, probably has as much to do with my life and recovery as this one does. Just with more sexual innuendo, music and savage beatings. And photos. Mostly photos. And, as well as publishing my fiftieth post, I also changed the layout to make it prettier. Go Team Salt.

The reason I started the photo blog was to have someplace where I didn’t have to write about me. It was just to have someplace to do creative stuff that had nothing to do with punching a spigot into my chest every week so I can bleed my life out.

People who use blogging as a recovery tool have to be as honest as possible, otherwise we’re just writing nonsense. It’s like being in therapy, if you’re not honest in the group, or with your doctor, you’re wasting your time.

So the photo blog allowed me to use other writing muscles. To use my different writing voices. It was meant to be a place where I didn’t have to write about me… directly. But what I think it has evolved into is a place where I can retrain myself to write news again on a regular basis.

Just in terms of style I’ve limited myself to using fewer than 350 words per post. Which, for me, is remarkable. I think the average post here on Salted Lithium is 1100 words. And hardly any of them ever involve plans on building a bomb out of a tennis ball, duct tape and 500 match heads.

I highly recommend starting a second blog to anyone using their current one as a recovery tool. As a recovery tool to help me recover from my recovery blog, my photo blog has helped with my recovery almost as much as my recovery blog.

Speaking of tools… I’ve found a few websites that might help other bloggers feel better about themselves. See? I totally care what happens to you.

A Blogger’s Disclaimer: We’ve all had people come to our blogs, read half of one post and decide they know enough about our lives, and our recovery, to leave messages which dismiss our struggle, our beliefs, even our hobbies. Each time these people leave their notes it takes a little piece of energy out of us. The more hateful and/or bored of these people are called trolls, and they can suck the life out of our fun faster than if the Jonas Brothers walked into an orgy.

The disclaimer covers personal relationships and privacy; copyright and courtesy; offensive language and materials, and; feedback and initiating contact. It gets into stalkers, how ex-lovers should treat the blog/blogger, how the writer doesn’t owe the reader anything… it’s pretty extensive. He has link codes for text and some images… which aren’t great, but you can make your own. If you use any of it, definitely link back to the page. He’s a blogger as well, and deserves some respect for coming up with a great response to the people who want to piss us off.

Do not assume that you know everything there is to know about a writer simply because you read their weblog on a regular basis. Any judgements you make will be based on the information they have provided you about themselves, which is probably vague, incomplete or embellished. Whatever opinion you form on them as people, or their life as a whole, is probably best kept to yourself. Remember, you are the reader.

Blogger’s Legal Guide: What happens if you’re blogging anonymously and your ISP is subpoenaed for your identity? What is your responsibility under the law for the comments left on your blog? Can linking to a site make you an accomplice to libel? What legal recourse do you have if someone takes a comment you left in their forum and edits it so you’re admitting to being a paedophile? What is a “DMCA”? What part of my blog is really trademarked and copyrighted if all I do is write out “trademarked and copyrighted”?

If you’re at all interested in the answers to these questions the Electronic Frontier Foundation has them… plus, you know, a whole lot more.

FAQ&A About Defamation: Most people believe the freedom of speech laws in their country give them the right to use whatever words in whatever order they want. They’re wrong. Making shit up about someone is illegal. So what if someone writes lies about you? What if a forum develops where you’re the target, and people are writing lies about your life?

Most of us have absolutely no idea how to protect ourselves from libel. This site is called “Chilling Effects”, it’s part of the Internet + Intellectual Property Justice Project, and it’s maintained by the University of San Francisco School of Law.

File Den & Drop Box: WordPress has a number of “short codes” which allow us bloggers to easily slip videos, music and all sorts of other stuff into our posts. To embed a video from YouTube, for example, you simply type out [youtu be=URL_here] in the HTML editor. WordPress also makes a paid upgrade available so you can upload music to your blog and embed it into your post simply by typing out [aud io=URL_here] (copy, paste and take out the single space).

But if you want to play music on your blog you don’t actually need to upgrade your account. You can simply create a free account at a file hosting site, such as File Den or Drop Box, and insert the link into the short code like you normally would.

So… free tunes for everyone. Unfortunately, if you’re surfing using a slow speed or no-speed Internet connection, the player doesn’t buffer well.

I also found, and added to my blogroll, some smart and irreverent personal blogs written by people who are dealing with their lives.

I definitely recommend taking a look at these blogs, and even putting them straight into your blogroll… you know, if you want to be cool like me. So, in no particular order:

The She Chronicles

existere (latin): to stand out, to emerge;

Crazy Is The New Sane;

No Quick Fix, and;

A Roller Coaster Life-Living With A Bipolar Teenager.

Some of them are just starting out, some are starting over, and some have been around for awhile… but they’re all definitely quality blogs.

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No Post Day | PS3 Down

My PlayStation3 froze a few days ago, and won’t restart. It’s busted. According to my little brother the problem is fairly common, his own PS3 has been sent back to be fixed a couple of times. He thinks the optical laser is burnt out. Which would make sense. I’ve had the system for almost thirteen months now and I don’t think I’ve gone two days in a row without using it more than a few times.

I’ve had a PlayStation since 1996. The PS3 was a gift from my little brother. They’re a great way to turn your brain off, or at least the parts that only get in the way. There’s a surprising amount of clarity to be found in performing acts of great carnage while sitting in a comfy chair.

If I can convince Sony to take my PS3 back for repairs it’ll take another six weeks for me to get it back. This is going to leave a huge chunk of time I’ll have to fill somehow.

So my questions for this sacred No Post Day are:

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1. What are some things you do when you’re writing and you need some time to properly define an idea?

2. What activity, or activities, do you think I should incorporate into the new 20-30 hour hole in my week?

Bonus points if you can incorporate “freebase caffeine” into your answer, and extra special bonus points if you leave out “be productive”.

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Friday Conversations With My Psychiatrist | June 12, 2009

This was my first appointment after telling my parents about my girlfriend being pregnant. It was not a good ten days. There is a level of passive aggression in my family that is unrivalled.

When I first told my mother she seemed happy, at least after the first few moments of indecision. After her first hersitation she seemed happy, even excited. For the next week, however, she let her anxieties show in questions like “are you sure you want to be a father”, “are you happy she’s pregnant” and “is this something you want”.

Do I want to be a father, and am I happy my girlfriend is pregnant. How could I possibly be expected to answer those questions? To me she might as well be asking if I’m going to raise my child or abandon it like my father did me. How can that even be a choice?

More recently she decided the lack of positive response from her and my step-father was my fault because I wasn’t “taking the lead” and I haven’t been “happy enough”. But I was happy when I told her, and also when I told my step-father, and the response from him was as though I had pissed in his cereal. He barely even shook my hand.

One of the things about my mother’s brand of passive aggression is how she’ll create the problem, then offer her own solution as though you were too stupid to even realize the problem could be fixed.

This was the email she sent just before Father’s Day, which was when I planned on telling my extended family about the pregnancy:

I do – kindly – ask you to think ahead of the overall impression that you want your family to have – such as:
- this is good news
- we care for each other (when you say ‘we’re just girlfriend and boyfriend’ it leaves me feeling empty. Especially, as the two of you are now linked for a lifetime. You are more to each other…)
- we look forward to the child’s arrival

There is so much in so few lines. Among many others things, it’s like I couldn’t be trusted to explain the situation to adults. So I sent an email response to her crap:

[My girlfriend] and I are dating, we are girlfriend and boyfriend. I can’t help how the labels makes you feel. We are happy together, and are completely aware that we are tied in some form for life.

I’m not sure where this “you must lead us with joy” thing comes from. So far my friends have all reacted positively. When I told you about the pregnancy I was smiling and I told you it was good news. You reacted with caution, but then became excited after I convinced you I was happy about it, then you went looking for [my step-father]. When I told [him] he reacted badly despite my smiling and moving to shake his hand. Was I supposed to jump around and smack his shoulder? I smiled, he didn’t.

Most of this happened between appointments, and will be something I actually discuss at my next appointment, but the beginnings of my mother’s anxiety attacks on me began within a few days of my telling her about the pregnancy.

Father’s Day went well. Barely. Everyone responded like I thought they would. Which was basically not the kind of happy-joy-joy crap normal families might exhibit. But I’ll get into that in another post.

In my previous appointment I had complained about some sleeping irregularities. So my doctor asked me about my sleeping patterns. They’re much better now that I’ve set some boundaries with my girlfriend. I’ve established “me time” days and “we time” days, so I can better prepare for our time together.

Because of the complications with the pregnancy I had been pretty much living at hospitals between midnight and 4am, then out with my girlfriend and her son, then dealing with my own life and taking care of my grandfather. So sleep, for over a month, was a non issue because I wasn’t getting any.

My doctor made sure I knew my seroquel was now the generic kind, and some people have been complaining about sleep being harder to come by… I’m not sure, but I think I have noticed. But if there’s a difference it hasn’t been difficult to overcome.

I’ve never been capable of setting schedules, or living up to them. I stopped showing up regularly for high school in grade ten, I dropped out in grade twelve and again in grade thirteen. I was fired from my first radio job because I slept through two 5pm drive-time shows in a row, then I slept in again and missed the appointment with my boss where I’m pretty sure he was going to fire me anyway.

I was kicked out of College in my second semester for not showing up for days on end, they had signed the paperwork to kick me out four months earlier, but allowed me to stay on the strength of a feature article.

I grew up as the ward of a pack of communist revolutionaries, with a mother and father who were, respectively, largely and completely absent. After my mother escaped she had to work, which meant my brother and I were latchkey kids and alone until the early or late evening.

For the five years after I left high school I was unmedicated, untreated and unemployable, so my guidelines were set by the welfare office.

So trying to set some boundaries in my life is something new. So is keeping a schedule. I haven’t been very successful with either yet, but they are something I’m starting to understand. My doctor thinks this will be a nearly impossible process, and I agree.

And then things got weird. Somehow we got onto the topic of betrayal, and how I’m never sure if my reactions to even the slightest betrayal are normal.

Nine years ago someone who called me brother, who used to call me the best friend he had, took a photo of my sister and put it in his back pocket, telling the other three or four friends we were with, that he was keeping her for later.

Our other friends were nervous, but still in on the joke. In my head, at the time, I picked him up by his neck and slammed him onto the pool table. But in reality I had to ask him three times for the photo back. Our relationship was never the same after that, at least not for me. But I allowed it to continue without confronting him, so the resentment kept growing.

After about a year I moved away. And when we found each other again he was still going with the “brother” rhetoric, but I really couldn’t be bothered. But what was the right reaction in the moment?

My life is made up of several instances where I feel a friend has betrayed the trust inherent with friendship, and I’ve never reacted properly in the moment. So the resentment builds up, until finally I just cut them loose. I stop calling, returning calls, whatever, and they have no idea why because I either can’t recognize the moment, or if I can recognize it the moment is long since past.

A lot of times I’ll pin my response on something small, like receiving a suspicious glance, and that’ll be what I base my decision to stop seeing the person on, but really it’s something else from much further back.

It takes place in the blogging world as well. If I have a decent relationship with someone online, but they allow someone else to attack me in the comment section, I’ll take them out of my blogroll and never comment there again. And it doesn’t have to be an overt attack… it can just be a respect thing, like if I feel disrespected I’ll just shut the relationship down completely.

Sometimes I’ll go back and review, just to make sure I’m not overreacting… but the thing is, I may not be overreacting according to my own criteria for betrayal, but my criteria could be overly sensitive.

I really don’t know if my reactions are normal.

My doctor suggested it might be some kind of alpha male thing, where the power was taken away from me and I couldn’t respond in an overtly “alpha” manner. He thinks I need to practise my relationship techniques.

I don’t see it as being completely “alpha” directed. I think the relationship I have / had with my mother plays an enormous role in my “fight or flight” response.

I don’t like blaming my mother for much, but when you’re a thirteen-year old kid and you’re in an argument with your only parental figure, who happens to be a genius, an incredibly strong-minded woman, and insanely stubborn, you’re going to end up just sitting there and taking it until she’s done.

And I did take a lot from her.

My mother spent ten years as the second-in-charge to a rabid pack of overly-educated revolutionaries. Some of whom liked to include the five-year old me in their “debates” / criticism sessions. My brother and I never stood a chance.

I think it’s primarily the betrayal, but there might be some aspects of confrontation avoidance at play here as well. Like, how dare someone put me in a situation of confrontation. Maybe that’s the betrayal, not necessarily only the photo in the pants stuff.

But still, how to respond to the betrayal / confrontation properly, and in the moment, is the problem…

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My Last Father’s Day As A Spectator

Today is Father’s Day. It’s a day which has always meant something different to me than most people. Father’s Day for me was always a day to remember something I never had. It has been a day to remember being abandoned. A day where it was always made clear to me I had a father who did not want to share in my life.

Well, this Father’s Day is about something else.

Early Sunday afternoon, probably on the deck at my parents home, I’ll be telling my extended family about my girlfriend’s pregnancy. I hate talking about myself in front of people. Especially when I know there’ll be a whole lot of judging going on. But it has to be done, and doing it on this day makes sense.

So what I’m going to do is stand up, ask for everyone’s attention, and I’m going to say “Today is my last Father’s Day as a spectator. I’m very proud to say [my girlfriend] and I are having a baby.” Maybe some other stuff as well, but I figure that’ll be as much as I can remember.

Then I sit back and plan how I’ll respond on Father’s Day in eighteen years when my incredibly successful daughter hands me the keys to my new Ducati 1098 R Bayliss LE Superbike, and says “Happy Father’s Day… dad.”

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Five Great Songs And Five Things About Me Because Six Of Each Would Be Conceited

The pad of my right thumb is at least twice as large as my left. I noticed this a couple of weeks ago. It took about eight seconds for me to realize why… my left thumb controls the stick, my right thumb works the buttons on the PlayStation controller.

I haven’t found a reason to use my newfound power, but when the need arises — and it will — my thumb will be ready. Really, you have to figure I’m just one super-thumb among thousands. Most of the dudes of my generation have been playing videogames since before the C64 was cool, so surely we’ll find a way to harness the thumb power we’ve created.

Someone I blog with is leaving her role as a volunteer at a food bank / soup kitchen in Ottawa so she can concentrate on beating the cancer in her breast. It’s the same food bank and soup kitchen I used for three (or more) years back in the early 1990’s.

Back then my girlfriend eventually got tired of me being borderline homeless and being on social assistance. So I put together a résumé for a job at a pool hall. It was pretty short, I had some bartending experience, a few months as a producer at an Ottawa university radio station, I helped organize a summer day care program near my home town, I spent six months as a fishing guide at a remote camp and there was all the summers I spent as a farmhand.

Next Week Our Baby Grows Arms And Legs Which Will Come In Handy When She Has To Mow Our Lawn

If everything goes according to plan my baby will be borne in the same hospital where I was hospitalized for a month twenty years ago for being suicidal.

How weird a circle is that?

My girlfriend and I had our first appointment with the high-risk pregnancy group at the Ottawa General Hospital on Tuesday. Compared to the service and general competency of the rural hospitals we’ve been hanging around in so far, the OGH was covered floor to ceiling in crushed velvet and diabetic-friendly chocolate was pouring from the fountains.

The location of the birth is one of quickly growing list of things I haven’t planned for yet. My girlfriend’s three-year old son was meant to borne in the same hospital, but things happened too fast and now his birth certificate has the name of a town I grew up making fun of… our high school used to beat their high school in everything.

My Grandfather Turns Eighty-Seven So We Visit Our Favourite Place

My grandfather turned eighty-seven on Saturday. On Friday we took a tour of Eastern Ontario, then a ferry across to Quebec where we split the pizza special at a roadside place where they cook on an open fire. Afterwards we took the mountain road back to his hobby farm.

He bought it in the early 1960’s. At the time he worked in Montreal as an engineer at a large construction firm, but he took some college level agricultural courses and set out to be a gentleman farmer.

As an engineer he worked on some of the largest construction sites in Canada, including Churchill Falls, one of the largest dams in the world.

So, spending his summers a hundred miles from anything urban, and listening to the stories his neighbour’s had to tell about hunting, fishing, what time of year was best to plant which crop and not thinking about procurement schedules, or unions, or how to manage hundred-million dollar budgets, the farm became special for him.

Our Mothers React To Their Babies Having Children

Eventually we had to start telling people about my girlfriend’s pregnancy. We had hoped for another few weeks, but because she needs to take time off work to relieve some of the stress on her body, that meant telling her boss. And in a small town, when you tell one person you might as well be taking out an ad in the paper.

Our basic thinking had been, since the first trimester is typically when the worst things tend to happen, it would be best to not have everyone’s hopes up only to have them crushed. My girlfriend has had two tragic endings to pregnancies before, so this one is considered “high risk”.

So far the “high risk” part has meant pain for her, and multiple 3am trips to the emergency room for the both of us.

So she planned on speaking to her boss on Monday. Which meant I had to tell my parents on Sunday — I also sent an email to my younger brother, and the oldest of my sisters.