Strange Biller's Rise To Fame

The Hindenburg

2008-08-11T17:55:12Z

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=to9ocqk14u

1. Why were the filiming the Hindenburg in the first place? I mean, were they so hard up for entertainment that they filmed every zeplin to float around?

2. There were 97 people on board and only 35 died. Are those other 62 people the luckiest bastards in the world? Take a look at that news reel and tell me how the hell those people survived - is this like that Bruce Willis movie Unbreakable?

3. Plus, it happened in New Jersey - getting burned to death in New Jersey is like adding insult to injury. Kind of like the 100 people that died at the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island a few years back - bad enough you have to die in a fire, but does it have to be at a Great White concert?

4. That's probably enough disaster humor from me for the day.

Dead celebrities

2008-06-23T20:40:17Z

So, what's the cut-off age for a celebrity to die and we don't think it's tragic? I have seem several people refer to George Carlin's death today as a terrible and tragic, but come on, the guy was 71 - he wasn't 28. Sure, 71 is somewhat young to die these days, but it's hardly the kind of tragic death at an early age that warrants being terribly sad over. It's not like you knew the guy.

Now, it might be useful to say that each celebrity death should be judged on it's own, but you know that's not how I roll. So, for future reference, the cut-off score for your death to be refered to as "tragic" is 70.

Poll #14

2008-06-09T20:23:56Z

View Poll: The Question

On the one hand, reading "important" books is a good way to sound like an educated douche-bag at cocktail parties. On the other hand, you can give people the same impression by merely reading the synopsis of an important book at some randoms educated douche-bag's website. And it takes less time.

For instance, here's what you need to know about War and Peace:

The novel tells the story of five aristocratic families, particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs, and the entanglements of their personal lives with the history of 1805–1813, principally Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. As events proceed, Tolstoy systematically denies his subjects any significant free choice: the onward roll of history determines happiness and tragedy alike.

It's possible that someone you spout the above non-sense to will know more about the book than that, but highly unlikely. If you happen to strike up a conversation with someone who turns out to be a professor of Russian literature, cause a diversion by feigning food poisoning and rolling on the ground while holding your stomach.

Sometimes you don't even have to know what the book is about - you can merely throw out an interesting intellectual fact about the book. Should the subject of Gravity's Rainbow come up, wait for someone to mention that it's a shame it didn't win a Pulitzer (don't worry - someone will mention it) and then you chime in with your disbelief that the three member jury on fiction unanimously voted to the 1974 Pulitzer to Pynchon only to be over-ruled by the other 11 Philistines that made up the board. I mean, they chose to give the award to no-one that year. WTF, dude?

Actually, don't add the WTF, Dude. That won't help your case that you are a sophisticated scholar.

Poll #13

2008-06-05T12:53:38Z

View Poll: #13

On the one hand, the runaway bride (who probably has a real name, but she may as well just change it to Runaway Bride) clearly has crazier eyes in a strict Crazy Eyes contest because she never appears in photgraphs without the crazy eyes look. However, she wasn't trying to be president of the United States and standing in front of God and the whole country with her crazy eyes, so in that sense Hillary gets more mileage out of her look. Sure, she isn't always looking like she's getting ready to drink the poison Kool-Aid, but when she does throw on the bug-eyed look it looks super sinister and extra-crazy.

Poll #12

2008-06-04T13:26:54Z

View Poll: Question #12

What genius came up with the Wonder Twins' superpowers, anyway? I mean, how random is it to find yourself with the ability to turn yourself into a bucket of water? Which also brings up some strange conceptual issues, like why he can transform part of himself into a bucket when everything else about his superpower says he needs to be some kind of H2O based product. Seems like for consistency purposes he should have needed to become an ice bucket filled with water, right?

Of course, the ability to turn yourself into an animal is only slightly less random and marginally more useful. Luckily, the idea seemed to be that she could turn herself into an intelligent version of the animal which is nice because it would have been a totally useless power to turn into, say, a monkey only to start masturbating wildly and flinging poo at the bad guys. Granted, that would have been an awesome episode. I certainly would Tivo that if I thought such a thing existed.

Poll #11

2008-05-28T17:22:29Z

View Poll: Question #11

Four more hours of sleep never seems to do anything for me except losing four hours of my life. Sure, having two beers at 10 a.m. will only make you feel good for a while - IF you only have two beers! Solution: Start drinking again with determination! Hangover gone, new buzz arrives! Win-win.

Poll #10

2008-05-27T20:58:17Z

View Poll: Question #10

A tough call - vegans are really annoying and they make life difficult when you have a group of friends together and now all of a sudden your dining options are really limited because Johnny-Bacon-Is-Murder won't eat at at any restaurant that uses vegetable oil because Corn is also murder. On the other hand, at least these people have convictions and they stick with them - not like those people who are all, "Oh, I'm a vegetarian. But I eat fish. And cheese. And pork." What the hell - make up your mind. You're either in or out. You can't be half a vegetarian - that's like being pregnant part of the time. Do you eat meat? You are an omnivore that prefers to minimize your meat consumption, not a vegetarian.

Look, you don't see me wandering around pretending to be a Jew but only if you accept my modifiers that I still wear a crucifix and take communion. Honestly, I don't understand you people.

Poll #9

2008-05-23T12:49:39Z

I couldn't figure out how to get the video to appear under the poll. I am lame.

View Poll: Question #9

Clowns. Creepy, disturbing and entirely unentertaining. Wikipedia states that "in most cultures the clown is a ritual character associated with festival or rites of passage," which is funny because I don't remember clowns at my confirmation, high school graduation or the first time I had sex. And, frankly, I don't really think I was missing anything because of a lack of people in white face paint, red noses and enormous shoes.

Plus, as the video implies, clowns have given us the single worst cultural phenomenon of the last 100 years, the Insane Clown Posse. WTF, people?

Poll #8

2008-05-22T17:20:40Z

View Poll: Question #8

I didn't want to do two entertainment related polls in a row, but yesterday someone made a comment that segued into this one nicely, so I'm breaking it out a little earlier than planned (you didn't think there was a pattern to these things, did you?).

I love movie trailers. I can't stand being late to a movie more because I miss the trailers than because I miss the beginning of the movie I'm actually watching. They can make a trailer that will make any piece of shit movie look good - recently I watched the trailer for There Will Be Blood and it looked fantastic. Then I watched the movie and found myself I wished I'd only seen the trailer and left it at that. Granted, you'll never get to see the end of a movie if you only watch trailers, but then again, most movie endings are so predictable that you don't really need to. Is it a romantic comedy? The guy will end up with the girl. Is it a horror film? The most famous actor and actress in the trailer will live. Is it a sports movie? Underdog wins. And so on.

Poll #7

2008-05-21T17:34:35Z

View Poll: Question #7

Sure, TV rots your brain and those idiots that talk non-stop about the latest episode of Big Brother or the Real World are living proof of this, but on the other hand I'd rather stick my face on the waffle iron than have a conversation with someone who manages to mention his lack of a television every time we speak. And it's not like these people without TVs are spending their spare time discovering a cure for AIDS or ending world hunger - most of them seem content to spend most of their non-television watching time telling other people about how they don't watch television. Odd.

Poll #6

2008-05-16T02:48:48Z

View Poll: Question #6

On the one hand we have Jenny in a slinky dress, and that pretty much speaks for itself because, well, hot woman in a slinky dress. On the other hand, there is something about the idea of a powerful, athletic woman that says the softball outfit is even hotter. I could go either way on this one.

Poll #5

2008-05-14T16:21:57Z

View Poll: Question #5

I kind of like these old fashioned sayings like "the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach." They just carry so many fantastic implications, like women should concentrate on baking skills in order to win a man because not only is cooking pretty much the only thing women are useful for, men are apparently so shallow and easily manipulated that you can be a terrible person but if you can bake a wonderful apple pie you're in like Flynn.

Poll #4

2008-05-12T13:43:17Z

View Poll: Question #4

Honestly, if I read one more article lamenting the death of the venerated institution that is the printed daily newspaper I'm going to storm down to the Boston Globe offices and destroy every computer in sight and make them go back to putting out their product using Underwood typewriters and setting the type by hand. For the love of Pete, the only people who give a shit about this are the self-aggrandizing reporters complaining about it. For one thing, the printed word is still a loooong way from disappearing entirely - technology still has yet to come up with a perfect alternative to books, magazines and newspapers. You know why? Because even Amazon's Kindle, snazzy as it might be, is a lot more risky to be dragging around with you than a $15 book or a $.75 newspaper. When I'm riding the T reading my Globe, I want to be able to dispose of it on the floor of the Green Line train like a good American - gettting my news with a Kindle means I have to drag that around the rest of the day no matter what I'm going to be doing and, quite frankly, when I'm stuffing dollar bills into the g-string of a stripper at Centerfolds I don't want to have to keep track of my Kindle.

When technology does finally figure out a way that I can get digital news media and still later enjoy myself at Boston's only gentlemen's club, that will be the end of printed newspapers. And you know what? Still nobody will care except reporters themselves. Big deal, I say.

Poll #3

2008-05-04T22:05:47Z

View Poll: Question #3

Approximately 70% of the murders in the US are committed with firearms. That sounds pretty scary by itself, but what about the other 30% of murder weapons? Why don't they have catchy slogans, too? Knives don't kill people, people kill people (14% of the time). Blunt object don't kill people, people kill people (5%).

And if you really wanted to get to the heart of the matter, your slogan would be "Guns don't kill people, people you know kill you (77% of the time)." And to a lesser degree, "Your boyfriend or husband is most likely going to kill you (33% of the time in females)." Whereas men don't seem to have much to fear from their wives/girlfriends (2%). Evidently men have to seek out someone to kill them while women seem able to find a potential murderer sleeping right next to them.

Poll #2

2008-05-02T17:18:55Z

View Poll: Question #2

This may depend on context. Am I walking down a busy street during the middle of the day and I quickly recognize the little man as a painted fire hydrant or am I walking down a darkened alley with my head full of vodka and Red Bull and I nearly have a coronary as I spot a tiny demon lurking in the shadows ready to leap on me and devour my soul? I could go either way on the issue.

A poll

2008-05-01T17:21:31Z

View Poll: Question #1

On the one hand, I'm not a big fan of one culture "owning" a specific thing, be it clothing style, music, likelyhood of driving an Audi, etc. On the other hand, for the life of me I can't understand white guys with dreadlocks. Maybe it's partially due to the fact that I think of dreadlocks in general as a fashion statement that simply says "I don't take care of my body very well."

The pretentious book meme

2008-04-28T00:29:50Z

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
~~Don Quixote~~
Moby Dick
~~Ulysses~~
Madame Bovary
~~The Odyssey~~
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies*
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
~~Atlas Shrugged~~
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
~~A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man~~
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
~~Dracula~~
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys*
The Once and Future King
~~The Grapes of Wrath~~
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
~~The Corrections~~
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
~~The Sound and the Fury (~~I've tried to read this three times and just can't finish it)
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything*
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
~~The Scarlet Letter~~
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
~~Watership Down~~
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I've read 26 and started but not finished 11 - all of the books I didn't finish were because I didn't want to finish them. I doubt I'll ever pick up and read any of the 11 I stopped reading halfway through. The starred titles are the books on the list I'd like to read if I ever get around to it.

Excellent

2008-04-27T21:08:24Z

Today at work we were able to save a guy who had been having a heart attack and I would have guessed was going to be completely gone by the time we even got there. He had been at a canoe race down the Charles River and and was fairly out of shape. During one of the portages across one of the mill pond areas, he collapsed several hundred yards into the woods. When we were dispatched the caller sent us to the wrong side of the river so we lost valuable time there. Luckily I had a medical call at this same race in the same area the year before so I was able to guess where, exactly, he probably was and I turned out to be right.

On the way in to the call in the back of the truck I had the foresight to check the oxygen level in our tank, knowing that we would be in the woods and away from the spare on the truck - turns out someone had left it on and it was nearly empty, so I was able to change it out before we arrived with no loss of time there. When we got on scene, we grabbed the portable AED, the oxygen and bag mask and ran to where the guy was. A physician and a nurse were on scene doing CPR when we go there and we immediately hooked him up to our defibrillator and a shock was instantly advised. Everyone stood clear and the medic hit him with the defib and the guy immediately came to life and started breathing shallowly (he still needed to be bagged) on his own and had a weak but clear pulse. We put him a back board, scooped him up and ran him out of the woods. My captain jumped in the back of the ambulance with the medics and I drove us to the hospital. By the time we got to the ER he was starting to come around, albiet in a violent and confused manner.

A lot of things happened just right to make this save possible and it was nice to see them all come together - competent CPR on scene before we arrived, knowing where he might be when the call to dispatch was wrong, gettting the oxygen bottle changed before we were in the woods, getting the leads on him quickly and properly. All those things needed to happen just right and it was nice to see them all happen the right ways at the right times to save this guy.

Diablo Cody's tattoo

2008-02-26T17:37:26Z

I thought I noticed something different about Diablo Cody's tattoo at the Oscars - and I was right. Which, if you want to go by intepretation, means she is available and away from that terrible Jonny person (what kind of dingbat doesn't know there is an "h" in Johnny?), which further means she probably wants to move in with me and do weird stripper/screenwriter things.

I'm thinking about breaking up with Dunkin Donuts

2008-02-25T16:43:35Z

I rarely buy anything except coffee at Dunkin Donuts and I long for the days when all they sold was donuts and coffee. It was quick and orderly - you order your medium regular or large black and move the hell out of the way. The first problems came when they started to have the breakfast sandwhiches (a long time ago, but I still remember it before that), but I could tolerate that because it was just one thing and it didn't slow the line down too much.

Then a couple of years ago they started offering latte and esspresso - this is when things really started to get out of hand. They began offering all these exotic drinks and some of them were iced and all of them take 10 times as long to prepare as a cup of coffee, so the lines and wait times started to get longer especially during rush hours.

As if the lattes and breakfast sandwhiches weren't enough, now they started offering these damned flatbread sandwhiches which are, apparently, things that need to be "toasted" and require even longer than the regular sandwhiches. Now this damned line is practically at a standstill even during off hours.

And as if all that weren't bad enough, some of the stores are changing their coffee style to something more akin to a Seattle based coffee product. At first I thought they had merely started burning their coffee at some places, but I came to realize that certain stores have an entirely different coffee than what used to be the standard.

Look - DD coffee has never been fantastic. It's always tasted a little like dirty dishwater, but at the very least it was consistent dirty dishwater and, as a New Englander, if there is one thing I thrive on it is routine. Now you're telling me I have to keep track of which actual franchises are serving dirty dishwater and which are serving burnt dirty dishwater? Too much, I say.

And as a final straw, they have removed the tip cups from the front counters, indicating that DD has finally made a plunge with both feet into the mainstream fast food market. I'm sure some of the wizards up in the coorporate office think this will expand their marketshare, but I fail to see how. I never went to DD to get fast food - I went there for a consistent cup of coffee at a reasonable price. I don't want to go there to get my lunch or dinner and I'm not going to start.

Not what I promised

2008-02-05T16:40:55Z

I told you I would write a story about this summer and the National Guard, and I am working on that now, but for today, here's something I already wrote and is ready to go (inasmuch as my work is ever ready to go - I don't edit).

I don’t want you, kind reader, to get the impression that I feel like I need to have alcohol to have a good time. While it is true that many of my good times do, in fact, involve massive quantities of alcohol, there are those occasions when alcohol is either inappropriate or unnecessary to have fun. Sometimes you need to have drugs of some kind.

Now, we’re not going to get into my teenage years and anything that may or may not have happened during that time period. After all, I have teenagers myself and if they get wind of this book and read it, I would have way more explaining to do than I am prepared for. I’m not an idiot – I know that kids are going to be kids but I don’t want my kids blaming me for the dumb things they do. They aren’t going to use me as an excuse.

Ephedrine. That was the substance of choice when I was an infantry soldier. Ephedrine has a few legitimate uses, if I am not mistaken. It is used as an asthma medicine and a weight loss drug. It is also used as a stimulant to keep you awake forever if need be, although I think it is no longer marketed under that particular use. But, back in the day, you could go to any convenience store and buy ephedrine under the names of .357 Magnum and ???

I used ephedrine for two purposes when I was in the field. To stay awake during the incredibly long and mind numbing hours that we were awake and to curb the voracious appetite that being in the field creates. It’s one of the biggest, meanest tricks of the infantry that while you are doing to most physical work to create a major appetite you are constantly underfed or being forced to survive on only MREs. If you’ve ever eaten MREs for more than two meals in a row you know that gets pretty old after a while and you wind up preferring hunger over the MRE. Another interesting thing is that while you may get three meals in a day they generally come at regular meal times, so despite the fact that you may be awake the entire night and moving and working, you won’t eat from 1800 until 0700 or so the next day. Just the way the schedule works.

The biggest, meanest trick of ephedrine, for me anyway, was that yes it will curb your appetite, but if you take it on an empty stomach it will give you cramps. So I developed a habit of saving a small amount of food from an MRE – a brownie or whatever – then eating that just before popping a few pills to keep me up all night. Actually, this was the habit of many of the infantry soldiers.

It’s usually around 0300 that we would see Jim and the Naked Indian. It was always alarming.

An interesting thing I have found about masses of people in full-on hunger and sleep deprivation mode is that it is very simple to get them all to see the same thing. Now, I’ve sampled my share of mind altering substances and to me, they don’t have a genuine hallucinatory effect – often they merely make you see things move in a funny way or they might make you mistake certain objects for other objects that are similarly sized and shaped, but they don’t make hallucinations out of thin air (granted, this is only my experience – it’s possible I just needed better drugs or more of them to get this effect).

Good old fashioned involuntary sleep and food deprivations, however, will make you see things that are not there at all – it’s not a matter of mistaking your dog for a badger. It’s a matter of seeing Jim Morrison and the Naked Indian standing there watching you, clear as day where there are no people, no trees – nothing there to actually be mistaken for a dead rock star and his nude Native American companion.

And when you add ephedrine to this sleep and food deprivation, you get hallucinations even quicker than you would otherwise. I don’t have a scientific explanation for this – it’s like my explanation for God. It just is.

When members of my company first started seeing Jim and the Naked Indian, I was skeptical that it was a joke and that nobody had actually seen this pair of miscreants actually hiding behind trees, singing to them, dancing around the perimeter, etc. But sure enough, there I was, patrolling along one night, hungry and tired but not really hungry and tired because of the ephedrine, I looked over and there was the Naked Indian. I found this to be weird and a little upsetting because I expected to get a good look at Jim Morrison, too, but he wasn’t there at all. As we kept walking through the woods, the Naked Indian would slip behind a tree, only to re-appear from behind another tree 100 meters later. This went on for what seemed like a long time.

I didn’t see Jim Morrison until the next time I saw the Naked Indian, and after that I always saw them together. They never seemed particularly upset, nor did they seem particularly happy to me and although other people swore they sometimes danced and sang, I never saw them do that and they mostly just seemed to be keeping watch over us, which provided a comforting feeling.

At least, until I would realize I was seeing things and then I’d want to freak out a little bit because that’s a pretty freaky feeling. But Jim and the Naked Indian were usually kind enough to slip away for a while when I was in that moment of clarity, only to reappear again later when I would again start to “zone” as we called it.

I didn’t like to use ephedrine when I wasn’t in the field, although I admit to using it on at least one cross country drive in order to stay awake. I didn’t like the feeling ephedrine gave me – just the effect of not falling asleep. Some of the guys liked to mix ephedrine with their drinking, which I always thought was a bad idea.

One of the other soldiers had a deep half moon scar on his cheek to prove that ephedrine and alcohol don’t mix. A scar he got in jail.

No shit – one night while hopped up on ephedrine and booze he got picked up for drunk and disorderly. He was trying to sleep (unsuccessfully) on the top bunk and decided to get down when he slipped and smashed his face on the bunk across the way, gashing his face wide open. Needless to say, he always phrased it as being a scar he got in jail.

He’s a fireman now, you might be shocked to find out.

Must, post, more

2008-02-05T04:25:59Z

I haven't been posting because I haven't been writing. I'm going to change that and get some more stories cranked out. I'll start tomorrow with a story about this summer - not even a young dumb Biller, but and old dumb Biller. I'll have to look back and make sure I didn't already write this, but I have a nice story about the National Guard from August.

Jobs

2007-12-20T21:02:40Z

I really like my job, but I don't like where I'm working. Which is to say, the fire department I work for is as messed up as a soup sandwich and I want to find a new place to work, preferably in the same field, but I've also taken the police exam, too. I've been saying that I would take whatever new job comes up first out of the following: Lynn Fire, Lynn Police, MBTA Police and Boston Police.

My number came up for the Mass. Bay Transit Authority police department, so I went to the initial contact meeting. Where my number is on the hiring list i would most likely have gotten the job, but after looking into it I decided to turn it down.

First of all, MBTA has railroad retirement which means my current retirement would transfer over like it would if I went to a municipal department (this would be an 8 year set back with my military time and FD service), so that was pretty much it. Also, they only get half of the Quinn Bill which is the incentive pay for having college (most departments get 25% of their base pay for having a masters which I would have in about a year if I got hired, but MBTA gets 12%). Finally, their base pay is actually lower than what I get now, which is amazing considering that our department is the bottom of the barrel for a city this size in Massachusetts and we going into our fifth year without a pay raise.

So, I'm waiting again. It looks like the Lynn PD might be hiring for the same start date of March 3, 2008, which would mean I have a good shot at that. My first choice would be to stay in fire services, but I wouldn't mind a little change of pace, either.

Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, you never come out the way you went in...

2007-12-20T02:11:54Z

...ask for water they give you gin, the girls all say no but then they give in.

This is why I love my city. I went to a junior high holiday concert tonight where I saw an Asian girl named McMannus playing the dreidel song on the violin. If they'd had her holding a kinara for Kwanzaa we would have had all the bases covered in one shot.

Explosive Child

2007-12-04T00:36:01Z

I recently read a book called Explosive Child by Ross Greene and it was amazing. This is a boring entry about one of my kids, but I want to make this post because I can't believe I waited this long to read this book.

My older son, AJ, has always been a difficult child to handle - from the time he was two years old he threw the most incredible tantrums that seemed to know absolutely no boundaries in terms of length, volume or or intensity. Even before that as an infant he was often an inconsolable baby. As he got older Stacy and I wondered why his tantrums didn't diminish as most children's do - in fact, if anything he had more violent, more explosive tantrums as he got older.

It never stopped. He is now 12 years old and we have tried everything we could think of to get him to learn to control himself. No amount of punishing, no amount of pleading, no amount of bribery could prevent him from throwing these tantrums. As he got older he would run out of the house and for a year or so now he's been willing to run away and hide until his anger subsided - sometimes in the garage, but sometimes he would leave and go around the neighborhood without shoes, without a jacket, etc. Stacy and I were at the end of our ropes - he had been through two therapists (three, actually, if you count the family therapist) and no one could help. With his current therapist Stacy and I had started to discuss the possibility that he might need to be medicated to protect himself and those around him - something we really had tried to avoid.

Mark, the therapist, recommended that we read a book called Explosive Child by Ross Greene. This actually wasn't the first time he recommended it to me, but he was a little more insistent this time and so I went home and ordered a copy for Stacy and one for me. I think I had been a little skeptical that any book would be able to understand AJ because I had never seen or heard of another kid like him. Still, we wanted to not use medication so we gave this book a chance first.

Unbelieveable. The stories in this book were exactly like AJ - it was like it was written from inside my house. I was immediately hooked because even if there was no useful information on how to help AJ, at least I was finally hearing about other parents going through the same things we were. The raging, the genuinely appologetic behavior afterward, the total inablility to prevent himself from blowing up once it got going.

I won't go into the whole entire book because it's not interesting at all if you aren't living it for 12 years, but the basic gist of the book is that these kids have poorly developed skills in the area of flexibility and frustration tolerance. The book encourages us to look at it as we would look at a learning disability that needs to be dealt with in a manner that is productive and addresses what the actual problem is, i.e., you can't make him have these skills, you have to teach them. And it gives a great structure of how to communicate with him in a way that he can understand and in a way that is teaching him how to deal with his lack of frustration tolerance and flexibility.

I saw genuine results in this the very first time I used the technique and it's been getting steadily better with him since. It's amazing.

There are a couple of funny things about this - first is that we suffered through this alone for many years because it used to be that he rarely threw these fits outside the home. Which was frustrating because it felt like he knew how to control himself elsewhere, so why not at home? Turns out he was just expending so much energy keeping it together at school, etc, that he totally let go at home. The thing was, nobody else ever saw it. We would try to describe it and for a long time people like my family didn't even believe us.

When he got older and more comfortable throwing a tantrum in front of my family, they got a few small doses of what he could do, but still nobody who lives outside our home has ever seen him at his worst.

The other funny thing was the advice we would get - it was all over the place. Be firmer, choose your battles, be consistent, be his parent not his friend, just give him a good spanking. And at one time or another we tried just about all of it and not one thing ever got the results this book did.

Actually, I take that back - the way we always got the best results were when we handled him in ways that are basically similar to the method described in the book. I think Stacy was always a little more intuitive on this front than I was.

Anyway, I wanted to share this because it is nothing short of a miracle. It had already made me really appreciate him more as a kid and he's more fun to be around.