Irredeemable

[jayfurr]

Let's begin at the beginning.  My name is Joel Furr, though I go by 'Jay', and I'm the worst person in the world.

Too general?

Okay: I'm Jay Furr.  I'm gonna be 43 on Monday.  I work as a technical trainer in the software industry -- specifically, the highly glamorous world of the medical billing and claims management software industry -- and my main skill in life is that I'm really good at running my mouth.   I'm allegedly somewhat intelligent, but more a more salient and relevant personality trait for this discussion is that I'm incredibly annoying if you have to be around me for more than a week or so.  I drive people nuts with what passes for my sense of humor.  I'm a massive underachiever -- despite scoring very highly on various assessments of intelligence, I was an indifferent student at best at my Virginia high school.  I barely got into college as a result... and wound up attending a university whose main claim to fame was winning a national championship in football and then promptly getting embroiled in a major academic cheating scandal.  I scraped through that place with a C+ grade point average -- and got a degree in English, of all things.  Then I went off to grad school back in my home town in Virginia, got an incredibly useful (not) master's degree in public administration, realized I had absolutely no marketable job skills, worked on an even less useful PhD in the same field, and gave up about the time I would have had to start serious study for my pre-lims.  I never even contemplated a doctoral dissertation.  I had nothing whatsoever to say.  I said farewell to my graduate program, moved off to North Carolina, did absolutely nothing of import for about five years, met my future wife, and somehow got a job in the software training industry, which is what led me to my current job and my current status as a resident of Vermont, which brings me to where I am now.

I've been married for thirteen years.  I have no kids.  Nor am I likely to have any.  Nor should I have any.  

My father, a nuclear physicist and university professor, had an incredibly bad temper and took great satisfaction from telling me at every opportunity that I was utterly useless, that I should be sent off to school with a sign around my neck reading "jerk", and that I was essentially a waste of air.  He never complimented me for anything.  Case in point: when I got every question right on a school-administered IQ test in seventh grade (apparently the only kid to do so, as I found out from a high school guidance counselor years and years later), my father kept my score secret from me and simply said "You did okay.  Other kids got perfect scores, though."  Nothing I could ever do was good enough for him -- especially nothing that in any way involved my brain.  Anything that I did out of cleverness or intelligence was dismissed as irrelevant and trivial -- after all, he said, I had been born with my brain and a high IQ... it wasn't as though I'd done something special.  

He kicked my ass on a regular basis for most of my childhood, right up until I worked out that I could just run out into the night and the woods and make my way to an acquaintance's house.  Our relationship was so cordial that starting about ninth grade I started going hungry when our family would go out for dinner.  See, no matter what I ordered, my father would loudly pronounce that I was ordering it just to get attention, trying to be stupid and weird.   And no, I wasn't ordering 'grilled octupus'.  I was doing horrible awful things like ordering ham steak, which was on the menu, at a steak and burger restaurant.  OH MY GOD.  What a bastard I was.  So I started just saying "No, I'm not hungry" and sitting there watching my parents and siblings eat.  That angered him too, but less than my ordering food did.

With that as a model for proper parenting, you think I should have kids of my own?  

Yeah, no, I think passing on that opportunity is just plain sanity.  I'm actually doing quite well to even be married -- at times, I can be just as big a browbeating S.O.B. as my father ever did.  The main difference, I guess, is that I know it's wrong and I'm actually sorry for it.  To this day, when my wife and I visit my parents at their current home north of Tampa, my father always greets us with insults.  Jovial insults, but it's so much a part of him that I think he'll go to his grave thinking that people like it.

I don't know for a fact that my father's tender loving and absolutely unremitting emotional (and at times physical) abuse was what led me to decide that actually trying to accomplish anything with my life was pointless and a lost cause.  All I know is that I never did homework in high school; I found it boring and annoying.  I rarely did homework in college until my senior year, when I suddenly realized what an idiot I was being.  I did lots of homework in graduate school and had a reasonably good grade point average -- but that counted for nothing, because when I finished my master's degree in 1990 absolutely no one seemed to be hiring.  And the less said about the three years I spent in a comfortably drone-like existence pursuing a doctorate that I never finished ... the better.  And don't even get me started on the utterly useless five years I spent doing next to nothing between 1993 and 1998.  

I've led a pretty useless existence, contributing just about nothing of import to society or to the people around me.  I've been a consumer of food and stuff on the Internet, but other than my wife, who would probably miss my moderately competent home cooking and baking, there is no one to whom I routinely give back.

In my own defense, you could make a case that this is largely due to my work schedule.  I travel for work, sometimes spending three or even four weeks out of the state on site at various health care providers, hospitals, clinics, and sometimes sites on the insurance and HMO side of the business.  I enjoy the variety and the opportunity to get out and see the country, even though after twelve and a half years of travel the 'country' is starting to look pretty homogeneous.  If you look out of a hotel window in mid-winter, Pittsburgh and Providence look a lot alike, as do Dallas and Los Angeles.   Yeah, I have my share of those "... Jeebus, where am I this time" moments upon waking up in some far-off city in the morning.  But that's beside the point -- the point is that by traveling for work as much as I do, I have essentially no opportunity to volunteer, participate in any civic organization, donate time, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam.

And that ultimately is what led me, at age 40, to decide to get involved in the cause of fighting breast cancer as a participant in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure.  I started with the Washington, DC walk in 2008, then crewed one city and walked another city in 2009, then moved on this year to walking three cities and crewing one.  I think in the end about half of my motivation comes from a strong desire to make the world at least a slightly better place than I found it... and with my inability to volunteer at any sort of local cause that would expect me to show up on a regular basis, an event like a once-a-year breast cancer walk makes perfect sense. That's the reason I tell people, anyway.  It's hard to tell people the other half of the reason, namely that deep down inside I feel absolutely worthless.  Absolutely irredeemable.  Racked by guilt at how little I've done with my life and always hearing a mocking voice in my head telling me that nothing I ever do will ever be worth anything.  

I'm far from the only person on the planet to experience this sort of feeling; depression isn't uncommon.  But I do think that at times my manner of trying to overcome it borders on ... no, scratch that.  Crosses way over into the world of pathetic overcompensation.  Now and then I've gotten a bit carried away with trying to be helpful and made people wonder what the heck I'm trying to prove.  I could cite examples, but that's not the point.  

Now, all that being said: let me change gears for a bit.  

Let me tell you about a dream I had earlier this summer, a few weeks after I served as a crew member for the Boston 3-Day and a couple weeks before I jetted off to Minnesota to walk the Twin Cities 3-Day.  It was a bit hazy, as dreams are, but the gist of it is this: I found myself walking down the streets of Richmond, Vermont... a small town of about 4,000 people, a far cry from its larger namesake in my home state of Virginia. It was the middle of the day.  There should have been cars driving down Main Street and Bridge Street.  There should have been people shopping at the Richmond Market & Beverage.  Should've been people eating at the Bridge Street Cafe.  Should've been people buying gas and milk and snacks at the Cumberland Farms.  

But there was no one around.  

I won't say that my overactive imagination visualized tumbleweeds blowing in the wind and similar things.  It wasn't as though a great fire or destructive tornado had torn the town to bits; there was simply no one there.  In the stillness and great quiet, I searched around for anyone -- anyone at all -- who could tell me what had happened, but there was no one to be found.  There weren't even any passing vehicles on the interstate that runs through town.  

But then I wandered west along Main Street and found myself at the local cemetery.  At least, I think it was the local cemetery, the one you pass as you head out of town heading toward Williston and Burlington.  It looked much the same, except the one in my dream was vastly larger... and full, as far as the eye could see, with recent burials.  All manner of dates of birth, some recent, some in the distant past.  But the one thing every headstone had in common was the same year of death: 2010.

And somehow, it was all my fault.  

There was no Hollywood-esque denouement or wrap-up or twist ending where I found out how all my neighbors and fellow residents had come to meet their end.  It was a bad dream.  Bad dreams don't have to make sense.

But the next day I paused to think about the dream, and then did some checking.  (You'll pardon me for thinking of all this in a breast cancer-oriented light; years of fund-raising and training and walking and spreading the good news about Susan G. Komen For The Cure has left some deep grooves in my brain.)  Forty thousand women died last year, give or take a death or two, from breast cancer in the United States alone.  A much smaller number of men died as well: somewhere between 350 and 400 if my numbers are correct.  

That's ten Richmonds.  Ten towns of the size of Richmond, Vermont disappear from the map every year.   Or call it losing half of twenty Richmonds if you prefer to focus on the fact that breast cancer primarily claims women.

Vermont itself has around 620,000 residents as of the most recent census estimate.  Every fifteen years we lose that many people to breast cancer.  If it helps to visualize it, think of it this way: Each year we lose some of the people who make your Ben and Jerry's ice cream.  We lose some of the people who groom the slopes so you can have a nice winter vacation skiing.  We lose some of the people who work eighteen hour days for weeks on end over the evaporators making maple syrup for your pancakes.  We lose some of the people who keep the Long Trail in good repair so you can come hike our Green Mountains and we lose some of the people who keep watch on Lake Champlain so you can spend a pleasant afternoon boating.  And in fifteen years' time, we lose everyone.  

No more Vermont.

Perhaps that's what my over-active imagination was trying to convey that night back in August.  That's one of hell of a bad dream.

I am blessed that I have never lost a loved one to breast cancer.  Nor have I had an immediate family member suffer from the disease.  As I've said before, the closest it's come to my immediate family is that an aunt by marriage, Debbie Stoops, fought and beat it years ago and is a proud survivor.   Thus, I can't honestly say that the specter of breast cancer should be such a frequent visitor to my conscience, but there it is.  My well-trained conscience seems to believe that I'm responsible for everything bad that happens, all because I haven't worked hard enough and tried hard enough to make things come out differently.

Time for another change of gears.

One of the frequent things that we 3-Day walkers have to remind ourselves of is that our participation in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure does not cure breast cancer.   Though I suppose you could make the case that being involved in the event, or knowing that someone cares about you enough to take part in the event, might give someone battling the disease enough willpower to keep fighting, the fact is that the actual walking does not make any difference.  Even if you give us walkers credit for raising public awareness about the disease by being rather public ambassadors in fifteen cities each year, moseying through the streets of one metropolitan area after another in our pink clothing and our overstuffed Wonderbras (worn on the outside of our clothing, of course), it's really the money we raise that makes a difference.  Money is what funds research and clinical trials and prevention efforts and education about the disease and all the other fronts on which progress against breast cancer is being made.  Walking fast, or walking slow, it makes no difference.  Raise a ton of money, that makes a difference.  There are women alive on the planet right now because donations funded programs by which mammograms were made available to women who might otherwise not have had access to them or been able to afford them, or both.  I know some personally: women who happened to go get a mammogram simply because a 'mammo van' was in their town one day and they figured it wouldn't hurt to drop by.  Women who got a nasty shock when they got their results -- but would have gotten a nastier shock if they'd waited.

Money talks.

And that's why I feel so damn stupid when I think about what was going through my head for most of the 60+ miles I walked in Minneapolis and St. Paul and Vadnais Heights and environs a few weeks ago.  As I've said elsewhere (in previous blog entries that you can read here), I walked the Twin Cities 3-Day at top speed.  Faster than was reasonable, or even sane.  I'm not saying I walked it in that speed-walking heel-and-toe fashion you see the Olympic race walkers use, nor that I attained their 9+ miles per hour speed, but I did walk fast.  Fast enough that I was the fifth walker of around 2,400 to finish on the first day, nineteenth walker out of 2,400 on the second (because, see, I slowed down on Day 2), and ninth walker overall on Day 3.   I was so far out in front of the pack on Day 1 that I walked for most of an hour between Grab and Go A and Pit Stop 4 and only ever saw two other walkers -- who walked even faster than I did.  Once those two folks went on by, putting me in fifth, it was one quiet, lonely walk.  At the time I was walking southeast on East River Parkway in St. Paul, eyeing the clouds overhead and praying that it wouldn't rain.  But that's not the main thing that was on my mind.  The main thing that was on my mind was that I wasn't walking fast enough. 

Each time I contemplated slowing down, I felt bad.  I felt like I was a slacker.  I felt like I was being lazy.   I kept an eye on the GPS I had with me and tried like heck to keep my speed at 4 miles an hour, or faster. 

Frankly, maintaining that kind of speed wasn't easy because, first, I was carrying a fairly heavily loaded backpack.   The reason my backpack was so heavy isn't really important (okay, okay, it might have had something to do with it being jammed completely full of Nutter Butter cookies, but that's a story for another blog entry), but trust me, it was heavier than I really wanted to be toting right then.  And the second reason is that -- it's actually not easy for me to maintain that kind of speed, period.  I have a genetic abnormality -- a little monkey on my back called thalassemia minor.  It's a trait I share with around two million Americans, most of whom are from southern European or south Asian descent.   I'm not here to give you a full breakdown of the condition -- but will mention that it means my red blood cells are smaller than normal (which has freaked the heck out of more than one doctor that's had reason to look at my blood) and can carry less oxygen.   Long and the short of is that I'm predisposed to fatigue easily.  I'm perpetually anemic.   But before you think it means I'm crippled, allow me to add that tennis legend Pete Sampras also has thalassemia trait (and throughout his career he had to keep this fact a secret from his opponents, who would otherwise play to tire him out) and I understand he did okay.   So in the end, having hereditary anemia is no excuse for not giving 100%, and that day I said to myself "You have GOT to keep on going." 

I think I got a little crazy during that long solitary stretch when there were absolutely no other walkers in sight and, frankly, hardly any cars or joggers or runners or cyclists.   I might have been off in a little world of my own, an empty little world with only my strange, weird thoughts for company.   I hummed my favorite training songs (which led to a moment that confused some people, when I randomly posted a Twitter update that simply said "PACHYCEPHALOSAURUS!!!" -- thanks to They Might Be Giants and their song "I Am A Paleontologist").  I counted my steps.   But in the end I couldn't help thinking back to that strange, odd dream I had, the dream of an empty world, the dream of full cemeteries, all because I hadn't done enough.   And so I'd walk faster.  And faster still.  Trying to stay cheerful.  Trying to smile and be happy. Trying to have a good time.

I may be dating myself here, but do you remember the M*A*S*H episode, "Dreams"?  If you saw it, you probably can't forget it.  The officers and men of the 4077th MASH have a particularly stressful period of nonstop surgery -- and steal off to grab catnaps when they can.   Each of them, from Klinger to Potter to Houlihan to Hunnicutt, has a disturbing and upsetting dream.  For my money, the most surreal and troubling of all the dreams was easily that of Major Winchester, who dreamed that he was standing in front of a wounded, dying soldier ... and was dressed entirely in the outfit of a stage magician.  In the dream, Winchester performed magic trick after magic trick, accomplishing absolutely nothing to help the wounded serviceman... whose condition steadily worsened.   Pathetically twirling hissing sparklers, Winchester finds all his fellow M*A*S*H surgeons and staff looking at him in disgust at the uselessness of his stage conjuring.  And so the dream ends. 

Sometimes I feel exactly like that.   I can dress from head to toe in pink.  I can walk 60+ miles wearing a pink hard hat, a kilt, a pink tie-dyed shirt, and so on, and so on, and it's not going to cure cancer.  I can write funny, silly, off-the-wall blog posts about various aspects of the 3-Day... and other than just maybe entertaining my readers, I'm accomplishing nothing of merit.  Not one life is going to be extended as a result.   I can walk at ninety miles an hour through the streets of Minnesota cities, driving myself to go faster and faster.  I can carry the pink "Keep Going" flag for 24 miles -- as I in fact did on Day 2 of the Twin Cities walk... or carry the "My Wife" honor flag for 15 miles as I did on Day 3 of the Twin Cities walk, and other than the dubious benefit of getting the flag back to camp or to closing faster than another walker might perhaps have managed it, what have I really achieved? 

I feel so damn bad sometimes.  I enjoy being part of the 3-Day family and I've met dozens, if not hundreds, of inspiring people.  I like to think I've made some difference with the money I've raised... but then I hear the nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me that compared to a lot of people, I haven't really raised that much at all.   I feel pride at some of the honors I've received, like getting asked to carry the "Irreplaceable" flag during opening ceremonies in Boston in 2010... but then I remember how I kept forgetting myself and referring to it not as the "Irreplaceable" flag... but as the "Irredeemable".   I'm a little hard on myself, aren't I?

You know, like it or not, the 3-Day isn't always about the fun and the inspiration.    I was being all perky on the morning of Day 3 in Minnesota, waiting in line for the route to open, chatting happily with some of my fellow walkers.  But then I happened to talk with a woman from Georgia who had come up to walk the Twin Cities 3-Day.  I asked her if she was also walking the Atlanta 3-Day, or if she had walked it in previous years. 

"No," she said.  "They always hold that the weekend that my sister died."

I carried the pain I heard in her voice with me all day that day, and for many days thereafter.  

No matter how hard I try -- and I'll never stop trying to work harder -- I'll never be trying hard enough.  Not as long as the dreams we all hope to see come true are replaced time and time again by ... nightmares.