An Open Heart is Occasionally a Ghastly Wobbling Lump of Gristle Viewed Through a Framework of Surgical Steel Clamps and Springs

This week I join the ranks of Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Tolstoy. Like these towering, culture-affecting giants, I offer my Confessions to a waiting world, to posterity. You see, we great thinkers must ultimately unburden ourselves. What choice have we, huh, Tolstoy? By opening our hearts in this act of generous self-abnegation, we defang our detractors, bestride human history, and speak to an audience of millions, more or less. I shall confess all the hidden secrets of my wounded heart, all those terrible thoughts and acts I have hitherto concealed from a frankly disinterested readership. What, did you think I got these sterling journalistic creds by being a duplicitous jackanape? Well, think again. I mean… think again later so I can get on with the confessing.

Here are my manifold disclosures, intermingled here and there with philosophical affirmations and other verbose products of my overactive Islets of Langerhans. Take these, and may they serve you in your own pilgrimage to healing truth and verity.

Confessions

Often when I am verbally eviscerating Big Oil I am behind the wheel of my car. 

When I discover a tiny spider, comfortable and cozy in a gossamer web stretched across our condo patio in a manner clearly designed to introduce the little fella to my wife’s screaming face, I will gently bat him over the hedge and onto the lawn with a broom. Sorry, little guy. I mean no harm, and I hope you are as dumb as you look. 

I once minutely peeped my eyes open during prayer and saw our Bible Study leader staring at the shag carpet with a haunted expression. 

I do believe the detailed UFO abduction story of Barney and Betty Hill (1961) was largely true, but for one element: I believe the Zeta Reticuli “Star Map” famously and uncannily reproduced by Betty under hypnosis was not a portrayal of that binary system’s cosmic neighborhood, but an aerial night shot of Poughkeepsie. 

As a child I was always troubled by Captain Kangaroo’s bangs.

In third grade my friend Bruce and I were sent to the office, where we were paddled by the school principal, Mr. Dykeman. We’d been caught running around the playground during class time. Bruce went first, and when the paddle hit his rump his facial expression elicited from me an involuntary laugh. This constituted an early and memorable lesson in “when to be especially careful not to emit an involuntarily laugh.”

When my kindly dentist administered a whiff of calming nitrous oxide to a nervous 13-year-old Jeff, I threw up on him so violently it knocked the periodontal probe out of his hand.

I was a teenage soccer player, and they actually named the team after me in what I later came to understand as packaged humiliation. I was a terrible and wildly ignorant player. In one key game I saw the ball rolling in at speed and ran into the goal area, where I reached down and swept the ball away with my right hand, wondering at the stunned stillness of the surrounding players. “Yesss!” I brayed internally. When the other team missed their penalty kick, coach grasped my arm and, believing I had made some tactical calculation, shouted “…thanks for using your head, Jeff!” My nitwit grasp of the rules was thus positively reinforced until sometime later when I married a European. At least by then I had the wherewithal not to ask “…why don’t they just pick the ball up?”

My high school Driver’s Education teacher, Mr. Amerson, had injured his larynx as a young man and could only speak in a whispering rasp. During my driving lesson I attempted to turn left on a red light and Mr. Amerson waved his arms and rasped with such helpless alarm his voice left him entirely and I thought he was having a seizure. 

In fifth grade a girl who fancied me put a love note on my desk. “Dear Boy,” it began. I wrote her what I thought was a polite and thoughtful reply, declining to reciprocate. The next day she and two other girls beat me up during second recess.

A Bible-quoting teetotaler at the time, I tried to keep up with my dream date at a standing room only Psychedelic Furs concert and wincingly drained every red solo cup she handed me. Thirty minutes into the concert I collapsed in a literal heap at her feet. A sprawled fool in a phony new wave blazer, I regained consciousness staring straight up at an inward-leaning circle of concerned concertgoers as a stranger lightly slapped my face. “Oh, no,” I thought. “Oh please no.”  

* This is but a sampling. I ask two things, reader: that you please consider following my lead by healing your own tormented conscience, and that these abject failures of spirit remain our little secret. I thank thee. I’m using the word “thee” because it sounds fancier.