Tag: blog

bereaved

We’ve been diverted from our regularly scheduled program.
Bereavement does that.

Time just keeps on ticking by, though, doesn’t it. It’s interesting to me how death is a part of life, and everyone gets to witness it, and everyone gets to experience it eventually. Cultures have developed intense and methodical storylines to explain what blissful series of events may happen beyond the event that our earthly bodies must eventually undergo, while also giving believers a list guidelines to follow beforehand – then these storylines become the justification for taking the lives of those who worship a different sky-dad.

*** If that sounds callous or offensive,
feel free to take it up with your religious leaders.

Yet here, in the first world, despite our common painful experience as witnesses to the inevitable, it can feel like nobody cares.

If you have ME in your life, it’ll almost definitely feel that way. I’m an emotionally dysregulated neurodivergent 40-something man who’s processing speed with things like this is akin to the spinning beachball that your antiquated computer with show you at the first sign of trying to do 2 things at once. I can apologize for that but I probably won’t; because to my mind, an apology needs to come with a changed behaviour and I’m not sure there are any upgrades to my processing speed at this point.

We had a family member pass away. I say ‘we’ because it wasn’t anyone in my immediate family, but an in-law. And… I’ll save the details out of respect, because I am not part of the narrative that the man’s children are setting. I am a supporter on the inner circle, and I did have a relationship with the man.

He was a very thoughtful conversationalist. A curious mind who loved to know the ins & outs of everything from politics to business. Always respectful, and had a very keen sense of justice. I will miss talking to him and helping him out with the odd task here & there.

A week ago, as I was on the verge of an ‘Irish-Goodbye’ at a family function, I was nudged to let him know I was leaving, so I did. He stood up, and shook my hand, and thanked me for coming. If I was going to have a final encounter with someone like him, I’m glad it was exactly that.

Are we judged by our deeds in the time we spend on earth? I don’t know and I really don’t care. Every last one of us is flawed, and although I am more than willing to have the conversation about whether or not we have free will on a normal day, this is not a normal day. Our existence must be more nuanced than that, but if that is indeed how it’s done then I’d be a lot more concerned if I had a religious belief system that I was betraying in the shadows like a hypocrite, than the flawed and (mostly) transparent man slouched behind his laptop on a mid-week holiday afternoon, typing all of this.

He had his flaws and his traumas like the rest of us, but he walked upright in the light, and he did the very best he could for his family and they; or rather, WE will miss him dearly. The lessons he imparted during his time with us will live on in the lives of his children and his grandchildren – and that’s about as immortal as any of us get to be.

I’ll grieve more outwardly when I’m ready. For now, I have hurting people around me and I don’t really know how to process that beyond recalling my own past trauma and cracking absurd jokes that; FORTUNATELY, I have learned to keep to myself.

In closing; I fight the urge to say what we everyone says when they’re experiencing this…
Give time to your elders.
Hug your homies.
Call your dad.
All of those hashtag-like sayings.

You might not actually do it.
I have a hard time with those things.
But I think the people I love who love me back know that the one time I gave them a hug… years ago… I meant it forever.

event fatigue

What a week… or two.

The past 11 days has been all over the place to the point that I struggle to know where to begin. Last tuesday, my child (who I struggle to say ‘no’ to) asked for some help with a project.

That project involved dismantling, cutting, and re-assembling, and adding some structure and a veneer to a wooden box that would house the Edmonton Fire Cadet Class 12 legacy gift, a project my daughter was almost solely responsible for. What was assumed to be an evening project ended up being very involved.

While I was doing that, the kid was preparing a short length of fire hose to be painted – but not just painted – it was to have the Fire Cadet Class 12 crest, which she designed, across 3 stacked sections of hose before being discretely mounted inside the aforementioned frame.

I rebuilt the box Tuesday evening, while the kid made a plan for the ultimate display.

Wednesday morning, I dealt with the failing of our provincial mental health support system, as an assessment I was looking rather forward to getting done… that had already been delayed… was rebooked without my knowledge. There are a number of ways this miscommunication can appear to be my fault, but upon sharing the details with a couple people this past week, none of them were surprised. I lodged a complaint with AHS and received 4 separate, VERY apologetic phone calls from AHS and put on the top of a cancellation list… which is a strange move for a large underfunded organization who apparently did no wrong.

In the evening, we went shopping for supplies in a torrential storm (since we couldn’t work outdoors anyway). Thursday evening, while I was otherwise occupied (rehearsing for a show I had on Friday, HA!) she sanded and stained the box and frame during a brief few hours of tolerable weather, and friday morning I added the newly stained veneer to the newly stained box, and mounted the 3 lengths of hose inside roughly 45 minutes before my soundcheck on Friday. The gift was signed by all the cadets at their graduation ceremony at City Hall, where it was presented.

It was all very high-pressure for the kid, and she handled it all very well, and got the job done. The ceremony was incredible, and my daughter was singled out for a monetary prize from the Cadet Corp’s major sponsor.

The next day was father’s day, which meant very little for me as there was a bit of a family reunion happening. I attended and was overwhelmed. I forgot to call my own dad… and still haven’t done so 6 days later… sorry dad.

Monday, the kid collected her diploma from high school… which should be exciting – and was, don’t get me wrong – but really most of us were most excited about the cadet grad two days prior, and ultimately relieved at the success of that.

By Tuesday, I was ready to hide in the waves of sound that can only be made by my rock & roll band, and the boys didn’t disappoint. That was a great jam, and we’re very excited about our upcoming shows.

On Wednesday, I received copies of our latest record and solidified some release party plans for a few months from now (but we will be bringing these records with us for the summer shows, of course!)

I’m suitably ready to collapse.
To give you an idea of how it all feels, I go to work to relax now.
But I am reminded of the depressive feeling that comes with finishing a long race, or coming home from a tour with nothing ‘spectacular’ on the horizon to look forward to. It’s a funny feeling that I am very aware of, and doing my best t handle

The kid? Still going… she’s been to a couple of friends’ graduations and narrowly avoided repelling off a 7 story building as a final cadet gathering. She hurt her wrist a while back and really didn’t trust it, but I’m proud of her for going up in the first place.

She turns 18 in 6 weeks.
A couple weeks later, I become an uncle again.
Shit’s bonkers, I tell you. BONKERS!

All in all, I am plagued with the infamous Ferris Bueller quote at every turn.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Since all of that; and I’ll save the details because it’s really not my place to comment or update people about this sort of stuff, but this house has 2 parental family members in the hospital for some pretty serious stuff, and some of the commentary from the staff and volunteers there is pretty ominous.

We’re hoping for the best and preparing for some life-changing stuff here, just in case.

not my story to tell

I don’t post about it a whole lot, but I’m a dad. I know I’ve mentioned my daughter in this blog before, but I have a reputation as a bit of a public figure, for lack of a better term, and as my profile was starting to raise within the community and my band started to gain a profile, I made a conscious decision to not post about my kid.

Lots of other people do that…no shade… but I wanted for her to be her own person and generate her own online persona IF she even wanted to do that at all.

She has.
Terrific.

I ultimately wanted for her to be recognized as an individual, rather than “Fat Dave’s kid” or “Davey’s daughter” or whatever, and if the price of that is that I get recognized every so often as ‘someone’s dad’ then not only is it a small price to pay, it’s proof that it worked. At this point, I’d rather be the one with a certain level of anonymity, but hey – we carry the chains we forge.

I’m very proud.
She’s done amazing things.
Not the least of which is finish high school (very) recently… she just finished the last of her exams. She’s maintained honours throughout high school up until this semester… but since she got accepted to University back in January, she’s kinda on to the next thing, and understandably so. I’m sure she’d tell you all about it.

Next week, she’ll also graduate from The Edmonton Firefighter Cadets program, and it’s quite likely she’ll receive a scholarship upon doing so. It’ll help her get through a very cool program she’s already enrolled in and been accepted to. That program has welcomed her into a very small demographic of people who’ve seen some specific types of fires, and have lived to talk about it.
I’m sure she’d tell you all about it.

She’s been a certified yoga instructor for 2 years. She got certified to teach shortly after she turned 16, and may have been the youngest certified yoga instructor in Canada for a while, but she’s been doing it for a while and is less young, so that crown has been claimed by someone in Calgary. At any rate, she’s been leading classes and picking up subbing shifts for a couple years.
I’m sure she’d tell you all about it.

She artistic, and musical, and caring.
She’s an entire human, and she feels like one because we’ve made a point of treating her like one. There’s a long way to go yet, of course, but later this summer I will get to be a father to a LEGAL adult JUST as a new baby arrives in our extended family.

You wouldn’t know the difference to look at her, though, since my under-aged kid has multiple tattoos and carries herself like a confident adult. Restaurants mistakenly seat us in the lounge sections on occasion and it’s of no consequence, in spite of some potential legal repercussions. Her mother and I are onboard with tattoos, and for a kid who’s seen adversity, anger, and sadness and still managed to come out the other side of her adolescence while still being a good – no, GREAT person, a tattoo or three is an easy thing to say yes to.
I’m sure she’d tell you all about it.

There have been stones in her passway, and she’s maneuvered them – occasionally stumbling, sometimes pretty hard – but has dusted herself off and kept going, like a boss. She’ll continue to do so.
I’m sure she’d tell you all about it.

At any rate, she’s a goddamn dynamo. She’s staggeringly funny, and an absolute trailblazer, much like her namesake. She’s carving her own path through this life. I’m proud to be in her corner for absolutely anything, no questions asked, and I’m happy that I’ve found occasion to tell her that. And, even though both of us hold our cards pretty close to our chests…

… I’m sure she’d tell you all about it.

failure to land

“Failure to launch” is not a problem I deal with very often. In 44 years of bumping into walls (and hyperfixating simultaneously) with everything from navigating my own skill set in the workforce, to self-propulsion within the arts, I’ve developed a pretty vast knowledge base in a number of areas… project management, contract negotiation, self-promotion, delegation, songwriting, copywriting, policy writing, web content writing, videography, design, photography, guitar playing, composition, music theory…

… it’s a long list.

I thought for a long time that I was a one-trick pony.
In reality… it’s a hell of a trick.

Getting off the ground has never been a challenge for me. But I do have a comfort zone… and as a result, I’ve cratered more than a few projects before they really had a chance to develop out what I can only conclude is a fear of success – the notion that getting good at the wrong thing will make it so that the money will keep me in place and my soul will forever be unhappy has dogged me for a lot of my life.

Since identifying this roughly a decade ago, I’ve worked hard to counter this action. I thought I was keeping myself free, but really I was tethering myself in this safe and familiar struggle.

I now understand this to be a neurodivergent trait. ADHD, specifically.

Negative self talk plays a big role.

What’s interesting though, is that in the face of uncertainty, I’ve been pretty adaptable. I find a safe place to recoup, and I move forward from there. I’m certain that it’s a trauma response of some kind, but I suppose that’s fine, because (a) we ALL have unresolved trauma, and (b) we are learning machines.

I think back to my split with my wife 15 years ago, which was a tumultuous and difficult time, of course. I spent some time living in my emotional state… and then I got to work. My rent wasn’t going to pay itself, and I knew immediately that the way I treated my new ex-wife was going to directly affect my daughter’s relationships with men. Fortunately for me, when it comes to ex-wives, I hit the jackpot… so I got to work on being the best man I could be, which is simultaneously not hard, and impossible.

What we can’t see in the moment is that there’s a process involved. No species ever decided to evolve, but there’s evidence of it everywhere. I never thought “one day, I’ll be THIS, and live happily ever after” because that doesn’t exist in the moment – it exists in the future.

My understanding that “this is a process” exists exclusively in the past and I am only aware of the process because I followed it. There’s lots of guys out there that don’t have a clue about any of this… and that’s their journey, not mine.

That process worked.

My daughter turns 18 this year. She’s spent the majority of highschool on the honour role, she’s more self aware and independent than I ever could have been at that age, and the day she was admitted into University – a day that is still very fresh in my mind – was the day I could officially say that she oupaced her old man. I’m very proud.

I only understand now that there was a process… and thank god I followed it.

In the moment, that process doesn’t mean anything.
The only thing that mattered in each moment of the past 18 years was “How do I love this kid?“

It’s the same for everything else I’ve ever done: How do I solve this? How to I climb this? How to I conquer this? How do I enjoy this? How do I survive this?

It’s in retrospect that I am skilled at anything.

I always wanted an immediate result.
A magic pill.
An answer key.
A hand.

But those things were never availed to me.
If you’re ever wondering what “God helps those who help themselves” (which I believe is a Benjamin Franklin quote, not a bible verse) really means… that’s what it means.

permission to feel

I’m someone who spends a lot of time in their own head. I struggle to shut my brain off at the absolute best of times and quite often, there’s nothing more comforting to me than to field a question about something that I am particularly well-versed in.

Beyond that, I take medication that acts as a stimulant, that – if I were to intellectualize it – allows the energy level of my body to catch up to the energy level of my brain where there can be some sense of equilibrium. It may even divert some energy, but that remains to be seen. These are ADHD meds, and since I am AuDHD (combining forces of Autism and ADHD), my Autism is a little more ‘free to roam,’ as it were.

The assertion that Autistic people don’t feel emotion is incorrect. They just process it differently. I would argue that they feel emotions to a higher degree and that regulating those emotions are more of a challenge… so don’t confuse that monotone voice and that deadpan look for anything other than what it is – honesty. If you’re seeing that face and hearing that voice, then you are looking and talking with someone who is not ‘masking’ their disability, and if it feels awkward, it’s not the Autistic person who doesn’t know how to react, it’s you.

Anyway…

… with ADHD meds working in full force, I’ve ultimately never felt more autistic than I do now.

Sorta makes it sound like I live even MORE in my head than before, right? Well, kinda. Except I can put thought to action way more easily without my ADHD symptoms clouding judgement and distracting me, metaphorically tying my shoelaces together.

There are not a lot of Autistic people who will tell you this, but I actually love my autism. Being able to see how I function differently from the people around me is not a new thing… I’ve always been different – but to know WHY and HOW is a comfort I’ve never felt before.

It’s allowed me to walk in the truth that I am very smart, and very resourceful, and good at a lot of things.

It’s got it’s challenges… especially for a “tough guy, rock & roll guy, a hot rod guy, a dad… of a daughter…” and all of the other tropes that beset men. Don’t get me wrong – I know this whole society was set up for me to succeed, but it comes on the condition that we must all be as stoic, stiff-lipped, and unrelenting as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit.

… now who’s not regulating their emotions?

Right.

The truth is that you can have a good life and still be sad. you can be smart and also make a poor decision. You can be a professional and still perform poorly.

And… you’re allowed to feel shitty.

Shitty is a feeling that is just as valid as happiness and just as important to acknowledge, live in, and move through. It’s repressing that feeling that hurts you, because you hang onto it, and add to it, until it’s bigger than you.

I try to remember these things when I’m consoling someone who’s sad, because I have to ask myself if I’m trying to make them feel “better” because it makes the dynamic in the room less awkward for ME… when really, the person being consoled should be made to felt SAFE to feel those feelings.

a thousand papercuts

I never in a million years would have described myself as someone with anxiety.

And I still don’t.

The end.

Well, not not exactly.

Do I have clinical anxiety? no.
Do I get anxious about things? Yes, I suppose we all do, but I honestly thought I might be the exception to the rule, because I generally felt the same about most things in my life. I never really got too worked up about ‘the small stuff’ as a general rule because in the grand scheme of things, I could anticipate a desired outcome if a few things were given special attention. So, generally speaking, I would operate at a baseline that I would really only deviate from in special circumstances.

I realize I’m speaking in broad terms, but that’s because I have always done this.

Then I started looking into natural supplementation to assist in recovery from athletic fatigue – i.e. I was running a lot and wanted to run more, and more frequently – and I happened upon an article about ‘cannabidiol’ – a cannabinoid that is fairly cheap and plentiful for those of the age of majority up here in the land of legal weed, better known to most as CBD.

There are several weed stores within dog walking distance, and they’re all pretty friendly to my giant Dane/Hound, so I did a little observational research of my own and found that it worked decently enough as described, but it also offered me an education in what my baseline for operation really was.

On a scale of 1-10, I’d have told you that I operate in the 1-2 range on a daily basis for stress and anxiety, but it was more like a 3 or 4. Again, not staggering, but I’d been hovering around the 3-4 mark for so long that it felt like nothing. As it happens, I’ve been living and coping with “1000 micro-anxieties” of which I was in unaware.

A better name for that is “overwhelmed.”
And being constantly overwhelmed is symptomatic of other things.

It’s truly amazing what we can decide about ourselves, and subscribe to… until we suddenly can’t anymore.

Popping a CBD caplet put me down to an actual 1-2.
And then I knew something that I could never un-know.

Now, again… not an anxious person by definition, and I won’t start to say that I am at any point but it was fairly eye opening to go from ‘not worrying about the little stuff’ to ‘actually not worrying about the little stuff.’

So, I found a little thread… and I tugged on it… and through some of my own research and podcast-listening and conversations with other neurodivergent folks – whom I seem to be surrounded by, for the most part – I decided to go for a formal diagnosis for AuDHD (the one-two-punch of ADHD and ASD, together at last).

I was put on ADHD medication, and as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, with the ADHD dog now on it’s leash… I’ve never felt more autistic.

So, there’s an origin story for you, lol.
44 years of believing things were a certain way, and that everyone has a similar experience.

But, no.
They don’t.