Meet my new husband!

#AlternativeFacts

"Selma to Stonewall"

For nearly a decade and all of an era, my President -- my conscientious, intelligent, egalitarian, accomplished, diplomatic, relentlessly inspiring and unapologetically yes-we-can-ing President -- has brought our nation a mountaintop eight years of dignity and clarity and principled leadership and national apotheosis and -- yes, as promised, as expected, as delivered, as savored day after day after day for two consecutive, exemplary, triumphant administrations -- hope. Calming hope. Inspiring hope. Enduring hope. Presidential hope.

And for the first time in the history of our noble, beautiful, glorious, always-full-of-wonderful-life-changing-promise country, he made me a part of it. A part of the dialogue. A part of the people. A part of the staggeringly hard-fought, always-on-the-front-lines-of-vital-importance equality.

And I am so grateful, Mr. President. So exhilarated. So proud to be a part of your vision. Your promise. Your world.

You have indeed brought us -- all of us, across the country, around the globe -- change we can believe in. So I thank you. We thank you. You have made us immeasurably, profoundly, everlastingly better.

And though we knew this day would come and you and your family would step down with the grace and respect and dignity that have been the hallmarks of your leadership, it's still overwhelmingly difficult to say goodbye.

Flashback Friday: Bleach and Pee Edition

Any Bleach will Do. No, wait! One Blond Angel in Heaven. No, wait! Bleach Every Hair on Me. No, wait! Girl, Girl, Girl, Blond Guy. No, wait! Those Flaxen Days. No, wait! Jake's a Megablond.

Rats. I mean goats.

I just wish there were a clever way I could encapsulate my 20-year-old bleach experiment and my concurrent transcendent experience playing the oldest brother (because I was the oldest guy playing a brother) in Theatre Cedar Rapids' transcendent 1999 production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technical Dreamcoat" with these three lovely, talented ladies and a cast of about 750 other lovely, talented people. And one technicolor coat. And one dead bloody goat. And one promotional photo of the dancing brothers that spent a lengthy amount of time holding court in one of those temporarily-captive-audience advertising signs above a urinal at a restaurant across the street from the theater.

Because apparently you have to close every door to pee because any pee will do when you're inspired to go, go, go and then buy tickets to Joseph at Theatre Cedar Rapids in 1999.

But apparently there's just no concise way to tell you that.

Flashback Friday: Confidential Message to my Niece and Nephew Edition

You know that eternally burning question about how if man evolved from apes why are there still apes that accomplishes nothing more than exposing a lazy intellectual belligerence and a staggering lack of science education on the part of the questioner? Well, I lead with that question from the disorienting fog of a groggy morning belligerence on my part inspired by a probably never-to-be-understood fathomless chasm of a referential leap that is the dangerous byproduct of checking Facebook before you crack open your breakfast Diet Coke and being accosted by this photo in that ugly orange Memories frame as it leers hauntingly at you from the top of your news feed. But it nonetheless establishes a sturdy evolution-related platform from which I feel compelled to shout to you this dire warning:

Evolution is real and THIS IS WHAT YOU CAME FROM and you and the generations that follow are cursed with an ancestry forged by the unholy alliance between the houses of Montgomery Ward the Musical and Quilted Maxidress on the Prairie and if you don't marry into a healthy gene pool you and all your progeny will eventually find yourselves clad in matching flammable polyester houndstooth sportcoats and coordinating eyelet-detailed blouses attached to patchwork dresses parsimoniously crafted from every scrap of hoarded leftover toaster-cozy fabric in your sewing room.

And no matter how adorable you all are -- and just look at how adorable we all are! -- there will always be a gay uncle who will verbosely dissect your wardrobe choices and gently mock his younger self for being so button-bursting proud to wear a flammable polyester houndstooth sportcoat just like his idolized dad's and post his rambling, incoherent manifesto on social media before he's cracked open his breakfast Diet Coke.

Don't say you haven't been warned.

Look! Small adorable animals really DO love me!

It turns out that Bitch Kitty is just an unpleasant poop drop of an outlier on the Every Small Adorable Animal Totally Freaking Loves Jake bell curve -- which isn't even a bell curve at all; it's an enormous universe of purring head scritches and snuggly dogpile naps. With one distant life-sucking black hole known as the Bitch Kitty Belt.

Anyway, I just enjoyed a beyond-delightful evening with superfriend Susan, a freakishly -- FREAKISHLY! -- enormous red bell pepper cut protectively into non-threatening bite-size strips, her four endlessly delightful and Mary Poppins-polite children, and two small adorable dogs that -- I'm sorry -- simply could NOT get enough of my pet-magnet charisma. I tried to take a selfie with both of them, but we all know that the moment you switch a camera to selfie mode, every dog in a four-ZIP-code radius becomes a newborn kitten in a room full of coke-fueled butterflies. So I was able to capture only one dog and the selfless, devoted, undying, instant-soulmate love we share for each other. I think his name is Barney. Or Chester. Whatever. I suck at dog names. The important thing is we've found each other, he's healed my cavernous emotional Bitch Kitty scars and it's far more important that we focus on me than on remembering his name. Which might be Amos. Or Zebulon. Whatever.

Bonding Bonus! Darby here and I are on the same thyroid medication! Except his is the delicious peanut-butter-flavored dog version and mine is the throat-closing earwax-and-corrosion-flavored person version. But the important thing is we've found each other and we share our undying adorable-pet bond. Me and good ol' Dexter. Or Herman. Whatever.

Medical shit

1. I just saw my dad's heart! It was all bloody and veiny and still beating in the triumphantly raised hand of the Mayan priest who savagely ripped it out of his cruelly non-anesthetized thorax in a centuries-old ritual to ban staggeringly repulsive hypocrisy and men with melted-candle faces, first practiced by Mitch McConnell at the dawn of the vampire age. (HA! I kid! Using the art of sarcasm! In reality, Mitch McConnell has a whole melted-candle head. Plus he puts the Hi! in Hypocrite.) But I digress. I actually saw dye flood the veins in my dad's heart on a grainy computer screen as his surgeon told my mom and me that his exploratory cath surgery showed no heart blockages so everything about him heart-wise is fine. And -- I kid you not about this because it would never in a million cat years occur to me to make this up -- the nurse actually and with an authoritative, straight face told my 77-year-old blind father with an established history of heart problems and COPD in the middle of an Iowa winter that he's not allowed to go skateboarding for a week. A whole week. Who comes up with this bullshit? A whole fucking week.

2. So it turns out you lose all your radio presets when you put a new $160 (including labor) battery in your car. Which I know technically isn't medical shit but the hot mechanic at Sears -- which, incidentally, is probably hemorrhaging money and closing stores because it's selling all of its merchandise at 75% off right now -- did have to excise -- which is often used as a medical euphemism for "hack out amid pools of squirty blood and, depending on where on the body we are, maybe the occasional accidental poop" -- my old dying car battery. All of which I'm bringing up just so I can say "excise." And "accidental poop." And "hot mechanic." And, of course, so I can complain that I lost all my radio presets and now I have to retrace my steps and figure out what they were so I can reprogram them all. And who in this world has that kind of time?

3. Speaking of my dad's heart, it seems that on top of all my other this-is-getting-beyond-ridiculous fucking medical issues, I've perhaps also inherited his proclivity for heart problems as well. Because it turns out I I have an enlarged heart quadrant thingamajig, which is a condition that I believe is commonly called cardio-bipolardepressionisn'tenough-thecopayswillkillyou-pulmonary-thenursewilltalkyourearoffandeventellyoushehasenormousfeet-atleastMYfeetarepretty-itis. But I'm not a doctor so I might have misspelled that. Anyway, i had to leave in the middle of Dad's post-stickahugelongthingupyourgrointoyourheart recovery to go get an echo-my-eggo (or something like that; again, I'm not a doctor), which is basically a four-location ultrasound for your heart, only with those sticky pads that rip off all your chest hair and (hopefully) no surprise baby. And a chatty nurse who eventually tells you she has enormous feet. Anyway, I'm now encased in slimy gel residue and I'm missing key patches of chest hair but I did make it back to my dad's hospital in time to jam his Mayan-snatched heart back into his bloody, open thorax, get him all dressed and cleaned up, and help my mom get him back home in time for a cozy, restorative nap.

4. Remember the part up there about my this-is-getting-beyond-ridiculous fucking medical issues? Well, in the last few months I've lost most of the strength, dexterity, fine motor skills and feeling in my right hand, which makes it almost impossible for me to hold a pen, cut pancakes with a fork, start my car, open the toothpaste, squeeze my nail clippers, clip on my CZ chandelier earrings and do pretty much anything else any non-medical-catastrophe-circus-freak can do without even imagining to imagine a world where simple everyday tasks like these are even remotely difficult to impossible. Anyway, it all apparently stems from a compromised nerve in my elbow and it's so severe my doctor sent me to a surgeon yesterday who -- holyshit thankfully -- recommended that I wear a custom arm splint to bed for four weeks first and see if that fixes it. That's right: I went from temporary disabling surgery to a simple sleepytime arm splint -- that, along with my CPAP nose pillows (and Ishitnounot that's the industry term for the rubber air sirens you stuff up your nostrils) and CPAP ultra-secure two-strap headgear and socks because my pretty feet get cold, makes me irresistibly irresistibly irresistibly mega-ultra-come-ravish-me-now sexy-kitty unfairly genetically-superior-lust-objecty in bed -- in one two-minute conversation with the surgeon. And after a lengthy, ponderous, obsessive, life-defining discussion by the the custom-sleepytime-arm-splint-making lady about my choice of Velcro-strap colors that nobody would ever see because I sleep alone in my parents' basement in the endless winter darkness (and I steadfastly kept saying blue every time she tried to confirm with absolute certainty that I was selecting the color that was truly truly truly right for me), I chose blue. And now I get to sleep every night for four weeks encased in a custom sleepytime arm splint (with blue Velcro straps!) to maybe hopefully eventually make it possible for me to reclaim my long-dormant ability to clip my toenails again. Which to me is eminently worth it because a right-handed person who can't use his right hand is nothing more than a filthy syphilitic baby-kicking bipolar claw-hand with an enlarged heart quadrant thingamajig who doesn't deserve to eat reasonably bite-size forkfuls of pancake.

5. Bonus list item! My custom sleepytime arm splint (with blue Velcro straps!) was engineered with an as-advertised 30-degree bend at the elbow. So it looks kind of like a massive concave banana (with blue Velcro straps!) when I'm not sexily sleeping in it. Once I'm all healed and my fine motor skills are restored, I'm thinking I might use it as a handsome table centerpiece or a merrily unconventional hors d'oeuvre tray. But I'm currently a filthy syphilitic baby-kicking bipolar claw-hand with an enlarged heart quadrant thingamajig who doesn't deserve to eat reasonably bite-size forkfuls of pancake at the moment so I welcome your suggestions. As long as they go with blue Velcro straps. And they don't involve skateboarding for at least a week.

You'd think someone with a high I.Q. would know better than to use a comma splice

Jake and the Night Visitors

We sure have some creepy ornaments. And some breathtakingly-adorable-child-picture ornaments. And, curiously but still admittedly Christmasy, a saucy tasseled velvety dress beveling possibly tangoing but more probably mistletoeing lady ornament. And, for reasons known only to the tooth fairy, a wooden bunny ornament. A wooden Christmas bunny ornament.

But, of course, the only reason I'm making this post -- aside from finally exposing the Christmas terrors of my haunted, haunted childhood wrought by our creepy pantsless flat-handed pantyhose-head child-eating demon elf ornaments -- is to report that I have completely denuded our Christmas tree.

Dude. I totally just said denuded.

Just because

The tree was supposed to come down today but it got a last-minute stay of execution due to a complex legal technicality I'll try to sum up as succinctly and understandably as possible by saying that everyone in the house was exhausted and took a lot of naps. But I'm a sucker for dark houses lit by tiny lights on cold winter nights, so even though it's staggeringly past my bedtime I'm still sitting here in the post-midnight silence under the constellation of tiny tree lights just because I have one more chance to do it and it makes me happy.

Flashback Friday: Totally Not Flexing Edition

My ex and I used to have cats named Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. Don't laugh. I SAID STOP LAUGHING. Anyway, the cats didn't seem too terribly pleased with their names -- and for some reason they always had murderous, pie-making scowls -- and it was a rare occurrence that one of them would actually deign to sit on my lap. It was also a rare occurrence -- ahem -- that I would put my hand awkwardly behind my head and gratuitously flex my bent arm like I honestly thought people would believe I always took selfies of myself doing crunches on the couch with a murderous, pie-making cat on my lap.

So the important takeaways here are 1) That couch is actually blue, 2) My tattoo is a Sondheim quote that neither proves nor disproves that I'm gay and just happens to be on an arm that I just happen to look like thanks to unintentionally flattering camera angles I'm flexing as I do crunches on the (blue) couch with a murderous, pie-making cat on my lap, 3) OK, I think I might be gay but I'd never admit it on Facebook, 4) Oops, 5) The cats now live with our delightful and internationally savvy friends Brian and Tim, who have cleverly renamed them Tigris and Euphrates, 6) They (the boys and the cats) looked neither murderous, pie-making nor scowly the last time I saw them, 7) I wonder if I can get this list to go all the way up to 10, 8) Probably not, 9) Well, maybe, 10) Bingo!

So. Yeah. La La Land.

One glorious four-act symphony of jazz riffs rendered in music, choreography, plot, cinematography, character development, set decoration, visual composition, movie-musical quotes, leitmotifs and relentless, thoughtful, loving attention to detail. It flatters its audience by trusting us to connect the dots, celebrates the unbridled joy of spontaneously breaking into song, and winks self-awarely at the adorably implausible plot holes that make personal finances fluid and Doris Day parking plentiful and tap shoes and story arcs and even gravity appear and disappear without regard for any scripted accountability. And though there are some wispy singing voices and some not-quite-synchronized soundtrack-to-visual issues and poor Emma Stone seems to walk miles and miles and miles in unforgiving stilettos, La La Land is hands-down one of the most glorious movies I've ever seen.

NEW RULE:

If we're exchanging chatty pleasantries in, say, a work cafeteria or a similar-to-not-similar setting and you casually and correctly toss out the word "fungible" -- which ranks among my favorite obscure, admittedly pretentious, and actually quite specific and useful ten-dollar words -- you must marry me before sundown.

FINE PRINT: You must be male, gay, occasionally employed, reasonably tall, show-tune equipped, non-shoe-volume-judging, bitchy-cat-enchanting, less embarrassing than anyone named Donald, and enamored of guys who can without warning completely black out and open gruesome disfiguring wounds from crashing to the floor and chipping the ceramic tile with their faces.This offer is null and void to any hypothetical female woman to whom I hypothetically proposed for casually and correctly saying "fungible" in a work cafeteria or a similar-to-not-similar setting on or around the January 4, 2017, conventional lunch-eating timeframe. DUDES ONLY.

New Year's Resolutions

• Read at least one of the books I bought last year
• If I can't accomplish that, at least take two minutes to alphabetize them by author
• After grouping them by genre
• But they're probably all about musical theater anyway so that step is pretty much done
• Gloat online that I got them all on sale except for the one I heard them talk about on NPR and I went right to B&N to buy it and it was on the wrong shelf and the poor guy helping me worked so hard to find it for me that when he finally did I felt like I'd be a jerk if I didn't buy it so I did even though it was over $30• Oh, and eat better, go to the gym more often, fold my laundry sooner so it doesn't pile up and get wrinkly, get the cat to like me, and stop saying fuck

Follies: Oh aren't I proud to be?

Guess who just got cast as Finch? Not me. Because I'm WOMPER, the coolest rhythm-challenged nerd-boss in the history of rhythm-challenged-nerd-boss-themed musical theater! (And lest you think I'm lodging a passive-aggressive complaint here, you're wrong. Because I'm stoked! And not just because I get to be in front.)

I've always wanted to perform this song, but without the tedious chains of most of the rest of the show. And now I get to! In front!

You, ya got me! Me, I got you! As my backup singers! Booyah!

Get your tickets and come see me in Follies!

Headwound World

I'm back at work after my whirlwind vacation at Headwound World. I'm wearing my new coat from Mom, my new shirt from me and my old backup glasses, which are embarrassingly eight years out of date and have a bad habit of sliding right off my nose and toppling onto whatever I'm doing. Fortunately, we have yet to encounter this problem in the bathroom.

One caveat: if you are an international supermodel applying to make out with me, please note that my upper right lip -- which I almost completely bit through at Headwound World -- is still rather swollen and quite painful and is preventing me from doing a thorough job of brushing the front of my upper right teeth. Please complete your Jake Make-Out Application Packet as usual but -- if you are approved for the program -- you'll now have to allow up to five minutes beforehand for me to find a mint. We assure you this situation is temporary and we regret any inconvenience this may cause you. Thank you for your consideration.

Blackouts and ERs and Cops, 2.0 My!

OK. First of all, I swear I am not trying to make Facebook my public diary of dramatic medical catastrophe. That's why I frequently pepper my posts with whimsical stories about our sick cat or my parents' pending mortality. But -- aside from selfies, cat pictures, way-too-easy Trump jokes and long folksy narratives on the let-me-tell-you-an-amusing-yarn importance of family -- dramatic medical catastrophes seem to be all I have to work with on this, the last dying gasps of the carnivorous year that ate all our beloved celebrities. And you have to admit that bipolar depression is so stupid fucking dumb that all you can do is laugh at it. And with my surgically redacted filter, my meandering sense of humor and my location deep in the bipolar trenches, I like to think I'm able to find what's funny, dig deeper to figure out the least appropriate way to look at it and present it to you in the way that's most likely to embarrass my family. So there's that.

Now. On to the gruesome scabby stuff.

So what do you think happened to me?
1) I got in a rake fight with an Amish guy.
2) I sandpapered my face so Kellyanne Conway and I would look alike in our smash Broadway reinterpretation of "Twins."
3) Bernardo really banged me up in the rumble under the highway at that part where the music gets really atonal.
4) I've always gotten dizzy after standing up too fast. Twice in the past I've blacked out and hit the floor, but it was on carpet and I landed on my back in that flattering S shape like when Donna Reed, the wholesome Hollywood actress from rural Denison, Iowa, might get slapped by Joan Crawford, the weirdly manly Hollywood actress from Wire Hangers, Ever, in an impassioned living-room quarrel over men or hemlines or eyebrows and lipliner or whatever it was that women with their hair pulled back too tight used to slap each over back then. So anyway, this, my 798th cocktail of bipolar meds, don't do jack fucking shit for my depression but they do an award-winning job at making me super-light-headed. And this is the awesome part: Monday evening, after emerging from a particularly demoralizing depressive collapse, I was trying to be all productive and shit and the washing machine ended so I jumped up to put the laundry in the dryer, took two steps, felt another dizzy spell start to hit, grabbed the walls to steady myself, completely blacked out, fell Timber! forward, slammed my face into the white ceramic tile in our hallway, lacerated my right eye and the right side of my face with my broken glasses, bit mostly through my upper lip, loosened a tooth, bled like a whatever, scraped an odd snakeskin texture into the back of my left hand -- which is weird because all my other injuries were on the right side of my face -- and gave myself my first concussion. And let me give you a little insider knowledge, just from me to you: Concussions aren't a glamorous football badge of honor; they are insidious fuckers that hurt longer and deeper than you can imagine plus they give you this gruesome sensation that you can feel every surface of your brain, especially the parts that you've maybe permanently injured.

So the takeaway from all this is pretty obvious but I'll say it anyway for all you fellow concussives out there: Doing laundry can fucking kill you.

There's so much more to this adventure but I've been typing this post two or three painfully cross-eyed sentences at a time -- on the still-cracked screen of my iPhone, no less -- before getting so exhausted I needed yet another nap -- and you'd better appreciate that Joan Crawford sentence because staying awake long enough to write it was like slamming my face into a ceramic tile floor -- so I'll tell you the rest in mercifully brief -- but in reality probably tiresomely long -- bullets. Even though my Google search lied to me about how to make bullets on my iPhone so I'll have to use their lesser-and-more-embarrassing-because-they-eat-marshmallow-fluff-right-out-of-the-jar-and-wear-blingy-jeans-and-voted-for-Trump cousins, the hyphens. Sigh.

- I came to in my sister's car on the way to the hospital thinking Christmas hadn't happened yet and -- for one brief glorious moment -- not knowing I'm bipolar.

- I had an ABCDEFG -- or whatever it's called -- at the hospital to see if I'd broken any bones in my face. They told me I didn't, but from the lingering and sometimes breathtaking pain in my head I think they're playing some kind of cruel hazing prank on me to initiate me into being Bradley Cooper's boyfriend.

- My sister wouldn't give me my phone for fear I'd take lurid selfies and write embarrassing-to-the-family posts on Facebook about my adventures (DUH. I mean HA HA! AS IF!) so I joked -- joked! -- with the nurse that he should send in some cops and silly clowns and a circus band to accompany their wacky hijinks that would distract my sister from the fact that they were secretly taking my phone from her and giving it to me. AND HERE'S THE PART INVOLVING THE COPS THAT I VAGUELY HINTED TO YOU ABOUT: Soon after the nurse left, there was a knock on the door and THREE COPS WALKED IN in response to a complaint over a cruelly denied selfie opportunity. I -- the consummate actor -- played right along with their clever charade, demanding they wrestle with my sister to get my phone back. When they politely demurred, I -- the consummate stealthy flirt -- asked the cutest cop to take a picture of me and I'd give him my number (do you SEE what I did there? even with a fake not-broken face!) so he could text it to me. And then we could text each other a romantic location to meet and pick the colors for our destination wedding as soon as my face healed. But he -- pretending to be oblivious to my stealthy ways -- politely demurred and we all had a hearty laugh and I went back to the business of I-just-smashed-my-head-into-a-ceramic-tile-floor bloody pain.

- I joked with the stitches doctor that with every 10 stitches I should get a chalupa and he gamely -- and adroitly -- played along for quite a bit of superlatively clever banter as HE STUCK NEEDLES IN MY FACE and gave me 13 stitches divided into three different locations, none of which individually totaled 10, which I assume is the reason I didn't get my damn chalupa.

- At one point, I heard myself tell the stitches doctor I had no aspirations to be a model -- which is sadly true -- so I didn't care if he left scars -- which I guess is also true -- so the net-net of this harrowing experience may be enough facial scars that I get to play Thug #3 who gets thrown off the yacht by Jason Statham, who, after the director yells "cut" gently towels me off before we sit down to pick colors for our destination wedding.

WHEW! I somehow managed to tell a relatively short story -- in fits and starts between barely restorative naps -- in the godawful longest way possible. But I leave you with a more current selfie of my disfiguring wounds taken right at the scene of the crime: the white ceramic tile floor I slammed my face into four bottles of Tylenol ago.

Since dear, spunky, inspiring, heavily bipolar Carrie Fisher -- a woman I truly respected and adored -- has now drowned in the moonlight, strangled by her own bra -- as she requested her obituary to read -- I will be honored to take up her mantle as a celebrity bipolar poster child. Except without the celebrity part. And more face scabs. And I'm more of a filter-compromised blogger than an international poster child. But still.

I know all of this jumbled verbal coda is a stretch -- and I know I've managed to write another 10-mile post between naps -- but this entire adventure happened because of a little bipolar pill -- and the deadly evils of laundry! -- so I want to end this with two iconic Carrie Fisher quotes:

“I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving it, but bring it on. Better me than you.”

"Being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge ... so if you’re living with this illness and functioning at all, it’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of."

Blackouts and ERs and Cops, 1.0 My!

So this happened last night. And my head and my brain are in such screaming pain right now that I feel compelled to type this very slowly on here before I attempt to escape the pain with sweet, sweet sleep. I'll give you all the blood-soaked details when I wake up and the pain subsides and my eyes uncross. 

But I will tell you that one of the three cops involved was really cute.

Depression will tear you down. But the world can help you up.

Depression will tear you down from happy to despondent in a matter of minutes and will pin you there with its hands on your throat and its knees on your chest so you can't breathe and you can't move and you can't think and you eventually can't even summon the will to care.

It will override your sense of reason and convince you that despite any evidence to the contrary everyone hates you, you're better off dead and you'd better figure out how to get that way soon or you'll just prolong the agony and the hopelessness and the fact that you just don't matter.

It will destroy you from within, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, certainty by certainty, and leave you battered and bloodied and empty and profoundly profoundly profoundly exhausted whether it slinks away like a fog or sprints away like a wolf with a ripped-up part of you in its teeth so it can hide and feast and grow stronger and lie in wait until its next attack.

It will make you lonely and defeated, desperate for some semblance of validation through a lunch date or an actual date or a party invitation but too scared and awkward and exhausted to follow through until people stop inviting you anywhere because they know you won't show up.

It will dig in its claws and fight to the death the drugs and the counselors and the hospitalizations and the electroconvulsive therapy you eventually turn to in desperation as you endure irritating and embarrassing and possibly permanent side effects and withdrawal effects on your frustrating, endless quest to remember what normal feels like and to attempt to reclaim it.

It will compel you to write alarming texts to your friends and repeatedly, off-puttingly post your graphic, brutal, unfiltered, unapologetic thoughts on social media in a futile attempt to explain yourself, empty your head, get to sleep, try to normalize whatever the fuck is wrong with you so you can finally overcome your choking sense of isolation and think readily and lucidly and productively and walk the earth with confidence and never never never spend another moment foggy and dark and despondent and immobile and alone and sleeping sleeping sleeping and fucking scared you'll do something stupid when you should be breathing and laughing and eating and participating and loving and feeling loved and just goddamned fucking LIVING.

But you know no matter how bad it gets, it will still give you moments and days and maybe even weeks of reprieve where you can see where you need to be, feel what you need to feel, do what you need to do, and memorize this precious knowledge so you can hopefully look at your next attack objectively and learn how to ride it out and minimize the damage and maybe even be embarrassed enough to apologize for the profanity and the disturbing imagery you use when you're buried up to your neck in lava and you're trying to claw your way out and explain yourself so people will understand and maybe help you or at least embrace you flaws and all and help you regain your footing, your dignity and maybe your place in this bright, friendly, joyous world filled with people and places and experiences eagerly waiting to welcome you with wide open loving inviting arms.

The big picture

It's 11:30 pm and in this slightly dark and judiciously cropped tree selfie, Christmas at our house looks postcard-perfect. But in reality there are boxes and bills and blankets and coats and wet shoes and easily 20 bottles of meds and folding tables and stuff to clean up sick-cat barf and plates of half-eaten cookies and basically something that needs time and attention on every counter, table and square foot of floor space in sight. It's exhausting and defeating just to look at. And none of us is sure how it got this bad.

But in the big picture, it's small stuff. And it really doesn't matter. I moved home two years ago in part to take care of my dad. And I'm thrilled to do it. I drove him to two doctor appointments today and helped get him changed for an X-ray and we drove to the hardware store to get him a rubber tip for his cane and we had lunch and got some Christmas stuff and took our kitty -- who is actually pretty sick -- to the vet, where he proudly told the doctor that HIS dad had been a vet, and it was an honor and a joy that I'm here to take care of him. And tomorrow we start all over again with two more doctor appointments and more Christmas shopping and probably lunch and I'm going to remember and savor every moment of it because when he's no longer here I can look back and say "I took care of my dad. And we had lunch. And we laughed at dumb stuff. And he told me stories about my relatives and what cool old buildings used to stand where in the city and where he and Mom lived before I was born and which of his friends who've died he really misses and how he hates to be blind and I took care of my dad."

And that street runs two ways. I've been on a two-year emotional roller coaster of bipolar highs and debilitating lows and lengthy hospitalizations and miserable, crushing side effects of taking and withdrawing from maybe 30 psychotropics (which, all things considered, I still think is a really cool word) and quite literally sleeping my life away as we try to find a med combination that doesn't make me unstable and embarrassingly fidgety and relentlessly, overwhelmingly drowsy. And my mom and dad have been my super-advocates all along, organizing my ever-EVER-changing meds, making up a bed for me on the couch on the days I can barely crawl home from work, making sure my insurance is up to date and I'm not missing a dizzying array of doctor appointments with a dizzying array of doctors and making me pot roast and Jell-O with fruit in it and in general just being awesome.

But we're not special; millions of families are facing millions of medical problems, some easier than ours and some crushingly harder. And millions of families also have messy houses, especially around the holidays. And there's a glaringly obvious metaphor in there that can be interpreted in positive or negative ways. For me, it's all good. We'll get the house picked up and back in order soon. My mom will eventually forgive me for announcing to all of Facebook that we live in pestilence and squalor. I'll get my meds -- and my brain -- straightened out. Mom and Dad will or won't get sicker or better and I'll be right here to take care of them.

And my slightly dark and judiciously cropped tree selfie might not show our struggles and messes, but it totally captures all the warmth and joy and love and -- I'm sorry -- really ugly ornaments in this house, in this family, in this world of uncertainty and unfairness and hope and fierce, unbreakable devotion.

HBD2BIL

Happy birthday to my wonderful brother-in-law and father to my children. Well, technically, they're not MY children but I love them more because I used to buy them candy on the sly when they were much younger because THAT'S WHAT UNCLES DO so keep your self-righteous judgey condemnation to yourselves, you judging judgeypantses. Where was I? Oh, yes: My brother-in-law has raised two decent, thoughtful, informed, involved kids (one of whom will bake chocolate-chip cookies at the drop of a hat and the other of whom will consume all of them if we don't lie and tell him they're up on the roof so he should go look there while we secretly (and maybe guiltily) eat all of them), obsessively power-washed his driveway on every day that ends in y, missed a few big sportsball games on occasion so the rest of us could watch musicals populated with frolicking men in ill-fitting tights as a family, and volunteered to climb the high, scary, pants-wetting ladder so I could stay safely close to the ground on the low, scary, pants-wetting ladder when we painted his house. Most importantly, he has always, without fail or even slightly crumbling resolve, shooed the entire family out of his kitchen so he could do all the dishes -- even after the 14-course state dinner we hosted for Angela Merkel just because we enjoy saying her name -- and thus saved me from having to do dishes, which I hate more than folding laundry or watching Donald Trump do that anus thing with his lips. So everybody call him at work today and sing Happy Birthday in whole notes so he can really savor the experience. And buy him gift cards from Michaels because that place gives him hives and I think if he could just buy some dried branches and styrofoam cones without using his own money, it could be like a gateway drug and he could conquer his fears and be making pipe-cleaner snowmen skating merrily on oddly shaped mirrored ponds by Christmas or maybe Epiphany for those of you at the end of the alphabet.