My Daughter Has Many Wounds: Fireplay Classes In Norway

So I had flown all the way to Norway to teach the art of fireplay, and I had nothing to set on fire.

Oh, I had bodies waiting for the flame; fortunately, my wife (my favorite fire bottom) had come with me. And I had wands, and fire blankets, and fire cups.

What I did not have was fuel. The TSA wouldn’t let me bring that much fluid on the plane with me. And considering a major portion of my presentation revolves around “Don’t use any other fuel but isopropyl alcohol because the others are unsafe,” that posed a major challenge in teaching.

Fortunately, I’d just pop down to the local Norwegian pharmacy and get myself some rubbing alcohol.

…I thought.

So I found myself a chemist and asked for rubbing alcohol.

“…rubbing… alcohol?” they asked. Their English was quite good, but the concept was obviously beyond them. Fortunately, my sweetie – famed International Person Of Mystery Fox – had taught me never to rely on brand names for medications when travelling. It might not be called Advil in another country, but you could always ask for ibuprofen.

“Isopropyl alcohol,” I said.

“What do you want it for?”

Okay, yeah, nobody had ever asked me that before. And I didn’t think they’d much care for the answer of “I’m going to set people on fire with it, but it’s safe, mostly.”

“My wife, she, uh, has a wound,” I said instead. “That needs, uh, disinfecting.” Gini helpfully pointed to her elbow, underneath her coat, miming discomfort.

“Ah!” His face brightened. “You want antibacterial cleanser! We don’t have rubbing alcohol here, but we have this.”

He got out a tragically small bottle of disinfectant that said, tragically, NONFLAMMABLE. Plus, it was $6.80 a bottle, as opposed to the .89 cents for a huge bottle of rubbing alcohol.

I bought it anyway, hoping, and made my excuses. Then I sent a panicked email to my Norwegian handler – THERE’S NO RUBBING ALCOHOL IN NORWAY I GOOGLED IT NOBODY CAN FIND IT I CAN’T TEACH THE CLASS.

She replied, “Oh, we have that! You just have to ask behind the counter for it.”

I went to another pharmacy so the first guy wouldn’t recognize me, feeling like a meth addict trying to buy enough NyQuil. This time, I got a woman with considerably worse English.

“Hello,” I said, flashing her the email. “I need isopropyl alcohol. My friend says you keep it behind the counter.”

“What do you need it for?” she asked.

Now. You might think we would have devised a smarter cover story by now – but in my defense, I’m very stupid. And I wasn’t quite clear why every pharmacist in Norway seemed hell-bent on knowing what I needed this for.

“My, uh, daughter,” I stammered. “She has many wounds. That need… cleaning.”

“Ah!” Her face brightened. “You want antibacterial cleanser!” She started to head towards the $6.80 tiny, inflammable bottle.

“No!” I said, nearly reaching out to stop her. “My daughter, uh, she… she doesn’t like that.”

“Why not? Is she allergic?”

“She’s, um, American. She likes her rubbing alcohol. And she, uh…” I stammered, mind fogged by jetlag. “She has many wounds.”

“Many wounds,” she said suspiciously.

“…yes.”

“You need a doctor’s note to get the alcohol,” she snapped.

Now. Later on, several very kind Norwegian convention handlers brought me the right kind of fireplay alcohol – so much I gave some away at the end of class. And they all looked perplexed: “We bought this at the chemist’s easily,” they said. “We just told them we needed disinfectant to clean our counters. Why did you have problems?”

I dunno. Maybe it had something to do with the creepy-ass, haggard American who was sleepily babbling on about his mangled daughter who thirsted to bathe in gallons of rubbing alcohol, and decided this sleazy fucker needed a prescription.

Note for next international fireplay class: prepare my excuses in advance.

Thank You For Inconveniencing Me.

I try to help my wife around the house.  But it’s hard, because her default mode is NEVER MIND, I GOT THIS.

I tell her I’ll do the dishes after I clock off-shift at work, only to hear the clink and rattle of dishes because “They were sitting there, I had free time.”  I tell her I’ll put out the trash when I’m done writing and then hear the “floomp” of bags being toted out the door.  I offer to help her in the kitchen while she’s cooking and she sometimes lets me in, gives me a couple of terse orders to do the most menial of tasks, but then a few minutes later she’s like, “Actually, I’ve got this,” which is her nice way of saying “Get out my damn way, son.”

Then she collapses in the evening, wondering why she’s so tired.

I love her, but it shouldn’t be this much of an effort to do the dishes. Especially when I don’t care that much about the dishes – I’ve still got that bachelor mentality that the best way to deal with dirty dishes is to let them marinate in the sink for a week or two.

It’d be really easy for me to settle back and let her do the work that I, largely, don’t care about.  I mean, I like having dinner, so I’d miss that, but the kitchen being messy or the trash waiting outside for another week or two wouldn’t bother me all that much.

Except slowly, surely, over time, she’d drain her batteries doing all the housework, and that’d make her unhappy.

So I spend a lot of my effort chasing after my wife.  Reminding her “Hey, I’m busy right now, but I will get to that.”  Hearing the clink of dishes being put away and racing into the kitchen to thunder “CUT THAT OUT” as she scurries away guiltily.  Remembering that yes, I am tired, but if I don’t take the trash out right now then she’ll do it, so I haul myself out of the couch right after work to get that shit done so she’s got one less task on her plate.

And she still does more housework than I’m comfortable with, honestly.  Part of that’s societal conditioning – she’s raised as female, she’s expected to do the cleaning – part of that was her family dynamic where she had to be the responsible one or nothing got done, and part of that is that she is an endearing butthead and would rather get things done her way (the right way, of course) than cede ground.

Yet over the years, there’s been a tentative trust built up.  Because she does get tired.  And she has, on some level, come to realize that she needs help sometimes, which is hard for her to admit because she copes with problems by remembering that she’s a Strong Woman – she handles stuff, she fixes things, she needs no help at all.

So if I forget and leave a mess somewhere, she’ll ask, sometimes, in a vulnerable voice, “Hey, would you mind doing these dishes now?”

And again: I do not want to do the dishes, because in my mind we should let them pile up until we have no choice but to do the dishes.

Again: this is a bad time, because I was in the middle of playing videogames and I was just about to get into an awesome boss fight.

Again: I could make a grunting noise and say, “Sure, I’ll get to it later,” and know that she’d get frustrated and do them for me, and one problem would be solved.

But instead, I groan and get off the couch and take her hands in mine.  “Thank you for asking me,” I tell her, smiling so she knows I mean it.  And she gets to go do a bit more sewing, or listening to her YouTube videos, or just feeling better because the house is cleaner and she feels like we’re a team together.

In a very real sense, what I am saying is “Thank you for inconveniencing me.” Because her default mode, as with so many other partners I’ve witnessed, would be to never inconvenience me at all and let the inconveniences pile up on her side until eventually the relationship collapsed.

I do the dishes.  It’s an irritation.  But it’s also an honor: she trusted me enough to say “Hey, I’m tired, could you help out?”  Which is a trust I take quite seriously, especially when I have someone who already does so damn much.

It shouldn’t be this much of an effort to do a task I don’t want to do.

But I’m damn glad I’m doing it.

Portrait Of A Hoarder

I took my wife down to the shelves and shelves of books in our basement.

“I want to try an experiment,” I told her.  “To show you why purging my book collection is so painful for me.  So… point at a book.”

She blinked, uncertain.  “Any book?”

“Any book.”

She hesitated, because to her they were mostly clutter – books I hadn’t read in years, and probably wouldn’t read again.  She’d have been much happier if I just chucked them all out and requested the ones I wanted to go back to from the library, like she’d done with her collection.

But she cared about me, and so she ran her finger along the bookcase until she found a well-worn paperback with a blue spine.  “Spellslinger,” she said.  “By Alan Dean Foster.”

…and I’m back in my Uncle Tommy’s basement, eleven years old and on the hunt for books, my feet on that Godawful orange shag carpet that smells vaguely of mold because we hadn’t installed the sump pump yet.  The books are all on this dark wood screw-together bookcase with carved pillars holding up the shelves and no sides, so unless you place the books just right you’ll miss the pillars and they’ll all slide off onto the floor.  

Still, that place is a mystery comfort for me.  Tommy lets me read anything from there, which even at my young age I recognize as a rare privilege – I can get all the Stephen King books he’s purchased, though mostly his tastes run to mysteries.  And so I prowl looking for something that catches my eye, and find Spellslinger. 

I don’t know anything about it.  Tommy buys lots of books, often because the cover looks cool.  And this one has a hippie with a turtle.  I figure I’ll give it a shot, and it turns out to be one of those series that both Tommy and I click with and we keep going to Waldenbooks to buy the rest of the series….

My wife nods as I relate the memory to her, and she chooses another book.  “Which Reminds Me, by Tony Randall?”

…and it’s lonely, working at Borders headquarters, because I have social anxiety and don’t know how to ask anyone how to hang out with me at work.  I have been struggling for two long years to try to make a friend and failed continually – partially because I have a girlfriend at home who also has some level of social anxiety, but we’re tearing each other apart because two years of having only each other for company is not what we’re suited for.  

But on a trip out to Connecticut, to one of the best stores with one of the best clerks, I meet a guy named Jim and we click on any number of levels: he’s into RPGs, too, and he takes his job seriously, and we start recommending books to each other.  I don’t know it, yet, but soon he’s going to get a job at Borders HQ working with me and he and his girlfriend are going to become the lifeline I need at the loneliest time in my life.  

We’re at his house, hanging after my visit, which is amazing to me – he asked me, I didn’t have to ask him.  I’m looking at his shelves.  “Tony Randall?” I ask.  “The guy from the Odd Couple?” 

Jim lights up.  “Oh, he’s a master storyteller.  Funny as heck.  You have to read it, here, take the book, I think I got it from the discount section.”  

I take it home.  It feels like the end of loneliness.    

“Okay,” my wife says, slowly.

“One more.”

She looks at the shelf.  “Bonk, by Mary Roach.”

“Shit,” I say.  “I have no memories associated with that one.  It’s just a damn good book.”  I toss it on the growing purge pile behind me.  “A book I can get from the library if I feel like rereading it.  Try again?”

“Clive Barker, Books Of Blood, Volume IV?”

…and I’m in my aborted attempt at college in New York City, discovering that my parents have paid a shit-ton of money for me to become a psychologist and I hate classes.  They’ve given me an absurd amount of spending cash to live on my own, so much so that it covers food and expenditures, so I can also buy comics with what I have.  

I’m pretty much bombing out in classes, and I’m such a neurotic dramatic mess that I’m also destroying the friendships I have, but I do still have enough spending power to wander through New York City and fall in love with it as only a native can do.  

And near me is one of the best bookstores in the world, Forbidden Planet.  I’m on a hunt for the rarest of books – Stephen King has said in a FANGORIA interview that Clive Barker is the best new horror short story writer, and I trust Unca Stevie blindly, so I’ve been hunting for Clive Barker books everywhere.  I’ve read two of the Books of Blood and they were indeed as amazing as advertised, but they’re only published in England, so I haven’t been able to find any more – but every book store I go to I hunt for them, and there encased in a plastic slipcase, at an overseas-inflated price, is the latest Clive Barker book and oh God I’m going to have a wonderful afternoon curled up in my bunk bed reading….

That’s the problem with my book collection, really.  It’s more of an externalized memory.

I have dim recollections of my past unless some external trigger stirs them, or I do my raconteur trick and ball them into a story – a story which, as time goes by, becomes increasingly about the effect of the story and less to do with the actual history of what happened.

These books root me.  Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I go downstairs and wander through this locus of my history, feeling the snippets of my history these books evoke.  Getting rid of that copy of James Lileks’ “Notes From A Nervous Man” isn’t just jettisoning some random book – it’s potentially losing that feeling I had when I was a clerk at Borders Books and they put me in charge of the humor section and James was the pride of the first obscure book I found that I fell in love with, and recommended, and gave myself a stamp of erudition.

I’m terrified of losing that.

So I do purge my bookshelves.  I got rid of about three shelves’ worth of books yesterday, and I gave some of them to good homes with the friends who came to our Oscar party, which made me happy.  Books should be loved.

But it is a source of conflict with my wife, I know.  She’d prefer an empty home, free of knickknacks.  She often jokes that she wants so few possessions she can pack them all into a van and just leave with an afternoon’s notice.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a valid approach.

Yet for me?  With my foggy ideas of my own past?  I fear leaving that behind would set me adrift in some fundamental way.  I know it has happened time and time again to people – my heart quails whenever I see refugees forced to leave their homeland behind – but for me, my possessions help anchor me to who I am because my brain is not up to the challenge.

Pick a book.  There’s a part of me in there.  I know it’s foolish, needing so many.

But it’s who I am.  It is, quite literally, who I am.

Will You Help Me Raise $750 To Fight Children’s Cancer?

My goddaughter would have turned ten this year, and that “would have” is your sign that this story does not end well.

I, along with many other loving relatives, held Rebecca when she took her last breath  on her sixth birthday – but that journey to her deathbed was long and agonizing.  I don’t think you can understand just how devastating cancer can be until you see an entire family riding that rollercoaster of hope; this test result looked good, this scan came back indicating everything is stable, and then the doctors sniffle back tears as they tell you that they’ve done everything they can do but this little girl won’t see her sixth birthday.

Rebecca was extraordinary.  She was determined to get her birthday cake.  So she held on, wanly eating cake the night before, passing on the next day.

I wish you could have met her.

But since you can’t, the next best thing I can do is my damndest to make it so that other kids won’t die of cancer.

And so on March 25th, I will shave my head to raise funds for cancer.  Admittedly, shaving the little poof of hair I have isn’t as significant as when I was luxuriously-maned metalhead, but it’s literally all the hair I have to offer.  (And it’ll be the first time I’ve been bald since I was a baby.)

I’m hoping to raise $750 to fight children’s cancer in the next three weeks.  If I hit that donation, I’ll post pictures of my incipient dome.  I’ll even take requests for anything else you might like to see me do.  So if you have the spare funds, I’m asking you to donate as much as you feel comfortable.

Because Rebecca has more of a legacy than many other kids who passed.  She’s tattooed on my arm.  She’s had a charity founded in her name.  Hell, because her Dad was an influential web designer, her favorite color is permanently embedded in your web browser.  That comforts me some days, even if it’s not as comforting as having her around gratuitously insulting me.  (She was the most sarcastic five-year-old you would have ever met.)

But I think of the other kids who died, and are dying right now, the parents hoping with all their hearts for some medical treatment that will stop that impending funeral.  Because remember, cancer’s not some monolithic disease, it’s actually a thousand difference variants, where some strains are more deadly than others.  A lot of cancers that were once death sentences are now commonly survivable.

And I think, “Maybe a couple bucks might make the difference for some child.”

If you think that too, well, I’d appreciate your donation.  Love to you all.

Winning Arguments Doesn’t Make You Right.

My favorite webcomics creator Tailsteak Tweeted this today:

The longer I live, the less correlation I see between winning arguments and being right.

— Tailsteak📎 (@tailsteak) February 23, 2018

As an veteran winner of arguments, lemme tell you why the man is right. Because I had a shameful habit of debating with lovers about what was “fair” in our relationships.

I won every argument. Rationally. Coldly. Cleanly.

They all left me because I was a dick.

Turns out walling people’s emotions off with logic ultimately loses.

But it goes deeper than that. Because what often happens when you “win” an argument is that you’ve simply chosen a battleground that favors your approach:

• If you’re quick on your feet, you can “win” any verbal argument against someone who’s slower to form their rebuttals. Take it to a slower pacing, like exchanging emails, and you might find the day it took them to come up with a response completely dismantles your point.

• If you’ve got access to more “facts,” you can “win” any argument against someone who isn’t as encyclopedic as you are. You see this all the time with creationists, who can pull out reams of plausible-sounding pseudoscientific BS they fling in the air to confuse people who don’t know any better. Or, if you want a real-life example, read the impassioned essays of economists before the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, each trotting out scholarly study after scholarly study to “prove” that this wasn’t just a fluke, tech stocks would rise and never fall. None of their “facts” saved them any money when everything tanked, but they sure did have a lot of information to throw around.

• If you’re more tolerant of the stress of conflict, you can simply outlast anyone debating you by standing tall against all comers until they get frustrated or upset and walk away. But endurance isn’t correctness.

• If you’re more charismatic, you can pepper your argument with jokes and write compelling essays spoken in a mellifluous voice that can put a nice fragrance on stinking dogshit. And especially if you’re playing to people’s biases, you can propose fractured ideas that’ll still have people yelling “YEAH!” no matter how many logical gaps that argument has.

• If you’re logical, you can memorize a list of logical fallacies and poke holes in legitimate concerns all day long until you prove that black is white. It doesn’t hold up to common-sense scrutiny, because life’s messy and feelings aren’t binary, but hey! You’ve never met anyone like the person they’re describing, so that person must be imaginary! STRAW MAN!

…and so on.

The point is that a lot of arguments are “won,” but not really. The people convinced are convinced more, the people who are dubious remain dubious. (And yes, if you think I’m somehow not richly guilty of this, please recognize that I most certainly am guilty as heck. Though I’m trying to get better.)

What I’d argue – and of course I’m arguing now – is that true winnings are holistic. They involve all the variables – engaging both emotion and logic, altering opinions instead of barraging people until they walk away, ensuring the “facts” that hold up your side of the debate match reality as closely as possible in a complex universe.

I don’t know what percentage of arguments that have been counted as “won” have been truly won, even if we break it down on a person-by-person basis. Even leaving aside the people who can’t be budged from their starting opinion, I suspect any number of arguments that someone’s claimed “victory” for were just winning a battle, not the war.

But it’s something to ponder as you’re arguing with your friends and lovers: are you valuing cleverness over thoughtfulness? Are you hauling out facts that aren’t really facts, but are actually a justification for your biases? Do you hold the upper hand only because you’re more belligerent?

I’m not trying to convince you, man. Because I probably can’t. I can only ask the questions.

In the end, on this one, you gotta convince yourself.