We’re in our new place. WE’RE MISSING OUR DINING ROOM TABLE AND OUR COUCH BECAUSE OUR MORON MOVERS BROKE THEM BOTH, but we’re in our new place.

You know how the night before your movers arrive you’re Generally Anxious, because there’s so much at stake? You’re spending insane money, everything you own is vulnerable, there’s a whole schedule thing that has to happen, etc.? And then you know how, when the move is over, you go, “Whew. See? Everything turned out fine. All that worrying for nothing”?

Yeah, I didn’t have the second part of that experience. I should have worried MORE.

I should have been waiting for our movers with a shotgun, and told them to go back.

They dropped our antique, much-loved, we’ve-had-it-for-25-years Duncan Phyfe-style dining room table OFF THE BACK OF THEIR TRUCK, and split it like a bad infinitive. They ruined our down-filled couch: hugely deep gouges and rips galore. They broke one of my bookcases. My office furniture looks like someone attacked it with a hammer and wood file. They did about $1,000 total worth of damage to the interior of our apartment, AND the apartment across the hallway from ours, which at one point the landlord had to open in hopes of it helping them unjam our couch from our doorway.

Anyway: Awful. REALLY bad. SO much of our stuff is damaged.

It was like watching The Three Stooges — only not funny.

And (having used this company before, and been delighted with their service), I basically waived the supplemental insurance option going in, so, if I’m lucky, I’ll get maybe $150 for the stuff it will cost me thousands to fix or replace.

I have a thing in my head, where if I’m upset about something — if something’s gone wrong, or has become inconvenient for me — I think “First World Problem.” If I’m out of butter: First World Problem. Sound of leaf blower annoying me: First World Problem.

My down-filled couch trashed?

First World Problem.

Have to ride someone’s unprotected wifi signal in order to post something on my blog because AT&T is two days late turning on my internet service?

FWP.

Love!

I hate making suggestions for what other people should do or think. It’s just  an obnoxious thing to do.  If there’s one thing I think we could all use less of, it’s people telling us what we should and shouldn’t do, think, and be.

Luckily, when I give advice, it never fails to be inspiring and breathtakingly helpful. And good thing, too. Otherwise, I might ever be mistaken for one of those intrusive, overbearing,  judgmental  windbags who are forever telling people what’s really best for them.

Here’s my advice for what to do today, Memorial Day 2008: Do not go to the beach. Do not drink beer. Do not make a point of in any way enjoying the fact that you have a day off work.

Instead, spend the day being emotionally devastated over all the young, strong American soldiers who have ever been killed in war. Think of the men who have lain awake through the long, dark night, knowing that at dawn they would charge and die. Think of all the soldiers who so readily put the lives of others ahead of their own. Who gasped their last on foreign soil. Who so believed in what America stands for that they considered it an honor to die for it.

Well. That is an awful lot of pain to spend a whole day on.

So I’m changing my advice. Spend as much time as you can emotionally bear on our awesomely brave champions, our passionate patriots, our beloved defenders who in their prime purposefully and willfully gave their all.

And then have that beer, if you want. Go to the beach. Joyfully celebrate the life and freedom for which so many strangers to you — so many brothers and sisters of yours that you never met — traded their lives.

Here’s to them all. I hate to think of what my life would be without them.

Beginning this weekend, my wife Cat and I are moving to a new apartment.

Moving. As in boxes. And tape. And … excessive, American-style ownership.

And, eventually, me in a corner, crying.

We’ll be in our new place Wednesday, May 28.

Yay.

We are very, very, very glad to be leaving the place in which it very much feels as if we’ve been trapped for the last two years. We’re only moving about ten blocks away, but it’s like ten blocks between Yucksville and Yaysville.

Still. Moving. Moving means work — lots and lots of work. Those of you who’ve been reading me a while know that work and me go together like ice cream and a sandstorm. But what can I do? I’m stuck packing. In my office, from whence I am now a’writin’ this, I have four, double-door, 7-foot tall bookcases jammed with so many books my bookworms are suing me for inadequate living space. The tops of those cases are piled with books. And I’ve got at least five more cases worth of books lying in piles all over this room.

What I like best about my library is that having it makes me look smart. What I like least about it is that whenever I have to move it, I end up looking like a “Before” ad for a chiropractor.

Okay, I have to go pick up Cat from work now. We’ve got rolls of tape, half the world’s cardboard supply in boxes, packing paper, dish packs, felt pins, rope, pulleys, dollies, loading ramps, backhoes, dumpsters, teams of Teamsters standing by, wrecking crews out on the street ….

You know, I used to actually be a card-carrying member of the Teamster’s union. I used to load 150-200,000 pounds of food onto trucks throughout the night out of a  warehouse in Long Beach, CA. I was 22, 23 then, and built like … well, like a 22-year-old who spends 12-hours a night throwing around half a million pounds.

I’m not that guy anymore.

Right around this time tomorrow I’ll be wishing like heck that I was, though.

Well. Or not.

Anyway! Wish us luck!!! Love!

I believe that the number one reason people are unhappy in life is because they refuse to believe that when they were kids their parents either didn’t love them, or loved them in a way that was so deeply tweaked it amounts to the same thing.

It’s my belief that the reason people refuse to accept the truth that when they were kids their parents treated them awfully is grounded in the fact that as very young children they instinctively grasped how terribly vulnerable their parents not loving them made them. We spend the first years of our lives utterly dependent upon our parents for everything we need. If they don’t choose to give us what we need, we die. I think that’s something we understand pretty soon into the game.

And so children with crummy parents do virtually the only thing they can do, which is to immediately, absolutely and without question convince themselves that, despite all evidence to the contrary, their parents really are good people who really do love them.

Loving Parents = Survival.

Unloving Parents = Death.

Not exactly what you’d call a choice.

As surely as one day follows the next, children who are forced to build their lives upon a truth they can’t possibly face turn into adults whose lives are built upon a truth they can’t possibly face. And so as adults people with unhappy childhoods continue to suffer: they’re angry; they’re forever imagining themselves victims; they’re easily upset; their relationships don’t work; they don’t know who they are. They don’t know who they are because the core truth of who they are was lost in the lie they had to tell themselves in order to survive life with their unloving parents.

Adults who are lost and unhappy in life have a simple, terrible choice: either accept the fact that their parents didn’t love them—which is to say utterly and completely reject their parents—or continue to be lost and unhappy. They either toss their parents off their shoulders, or they keeping sinking with their parents on their back. That’s it. Those are the choices of someone raised in a dysfunctional family. 

And people always choose sinking with their parents on their back. And they do so for a perfectly understandable reason: It’s still in their mind—it’s still in their heart; it still defines the psychological paradigm of the only life they’ve ever known—that rejecting their parents means they die.

They may be drowning, but at least they’re alive.

If you’re unhappy in life—if no matter what you do, say, think, or believe, you’re still dogged by this feeling that something fundamental just isn’t right with you or your life—you might want to give some thought to the idea that you have Genuinely Lousy parents. That maybe it’s not you. That maybe it’s them. That maybe it’s always been them.

That maybe the reason you’re so burdened is that you’re carrying around weight that doesn’t belong to you.

Have the thought that your parents were awful, that they were in no way emotionally or psychologically prepared to have children.

Go ahead. Reject your parents.

It won’t kill you.

As the one and only Jesus put it, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 

(The follow-up to this post is My Point: Reject EVERYTHING So God Can Arrive.)

As I write this, it’s 3:30 in the morning. I went to bed at midnight, and am now up in order to drive my father to the San Diego airport, from which he’ll fly to Atlanta, and then on to his home in North Carolina.

For the last three days he’s been staying at a hotel near my home. The room he’s in has afforded him a commanding view of downtown Encinitas and the pristine ocean just beyond it. It’s also afforded him a keen opportunity to be so aware of the trains that come barreling and howling just below his hotel that I’m pretty sure he thinks I got him that room just to make sure he really has recovered from his various heart attacks.

“Holy cow!” I  yelled the first time one of the trains came thundering by. “I forgot about the train tracks!”

“What?” he said. “I can’t hear you!” He looked at his wristwatch. “That’s the 12:00 express to Los Angeles! It’s running a little late!”

My dad thinks he’s real funny. He’s wrong about that – but it’s nice he thinks it.

As some of you may know (via this piece), I was last night supposed to go with my dad to the San Diego Book Awards, to see if my book “I’m OK-You’re Not” won their “Spirituality” category. We ended up not going to the ceremony, though, because my dad just wasn’t up to it. What he was up to, however, was sitting around with me in his hotel room for twelve hours smoking cigars, sipping bourbon, and listening to the Frank Sinatra I’d brought over to play on my portable CD player.

I had a really, really nice day with him yesterday.

I don’t think I won anything at the SD Book Awards; if I had, I think one of the people I know who did go to the awards would have already emailed me a congratulations. No message probably equals no cool little SDBA trophy-thing for me.

I think right about the time they were announcing the winner of the Best Spirituality book, my dad and I were cracking up at the various things we were imagining must have been going through the head of the pretty hotel maid who earlier in the day had cleaned the room while he and I stood around and made exceptionally lame small talk at her.

“We’ve probably prompted her to rethink her life,” said my dad. “Thanks to us, she’ll probably go to college now.”

“Thanks to us, she’ll probably go to the police,” I said.

He laughed. And I laughed. And Frank Sinatra sang to us about what life was like, when he was seventeen.