InvertedMind once referred to quarterback-then-former-quarterback-now-quarterback Michael Vick as an “a**hole” for his forray into being…well…a moral-less, heartless, scumbaggyish butthead who hated dogs and may very well have regularly thrown kittens against brick walls for some sort of perverted kicks and giggles*.

It’s hard to forgive someone for some sort of heinous crime, be it against yourself, a friend, or even just against humanity.  In this case, Vick gave the entire world population a black eye by showing that, even though we’ve come a long way from stone tools and living in caves, we can still be barbaric.  It’s especially difficult when we are, in no way, close to the individual; love is something that is formed and nourished through intimacy, not through news clips and sports highlights.  When there is no positive emotion in that space between you and another subject, negative emotion is likely to fill the void.

But, as a Christian, it’s my duty toward God and my fellow humans to forgive.  As much as we all tend to believe that a person cannot change, that is proven, time and time again, to be an falsehood based solely on ignorance and short memories.  More often than not, because of the good in all of us through the grace of God, a person does learn from his or her mistakes, and grows into a better steward for the Lord because of it.

Is Vick a Christian?  I don’t know; but that should never be a basis of my forgiveness.  The Bible clearly states that, if I harbor animosity toward other, I cannot possibly draw close to Christ.

So, on that basis, InvertedMind has forgiven Mike Vick of his transgressions.  And, no, this is not some holier-than-thou post where I make you look bad for still holding his past against him.  Rather, it’s to call out groups like PETA (already a horribly misguided group that puts animals above human beings when Genesis clearly states that God gave us animals for numerous uses, including for food).  There are marches scheduled tonight as Vick takes to the field for the first time since his arrest, protesting his involvement in the game, and in life in general.

I, for one, applaud Vick for at least trying to look as if he has changed; and until proven guilty again, he remains innocent in my eyes.  I wish him the best of luck, and I hope beyond hope that he has, truly, changed not just in his actions, but in his heart’s desires.

* – This is pure speculation; InvertedMind has no way of knowing what the walls were made of.

In roughly 10 minutes I will leave for a visit to my back pain doctor for a procedure that is just painful enough to qualify for sedation.  Anyone who has experienced sedation knows there is one universal rule: no eating beforehand.  Let’s face it, no doctor wants to perform medical procedures with a smock full of your lunch.

So, I’ve been starving myself since a triple-decker PB&J around 10:00 last night.  For anyone counting, that was 13 and a half hours ago.  By the time it’s all said and done, it will be at least 2:30 before I can eat something, putting it at 16.5 hours.  I’m starving.  I’m famished.  I’m wasting away.

I’m hungry.

Of course, to top it off, I had a long meeting this morning.  Nothing says “GET ME OUT OF HERE!” like being hungry during a meeting.

Then, suddenly, because I apparently did something to tick someone off, in walked one of our project managers, carrying a gift for everyone in the room.

A tray full of cookies.

That was the point at which I passed into a coma.

More often than not, unintentional humor is the sort of thing that makes you fall on the floor laughing. Sure, we all love a good joke, but the reality aspect of something in your daily progression through this world being accidentally hilarious trumps any joke you’ll ever hear.

Such was the case a few evenings ago. Sitting next to Mi Amore doing what has become our nightly ritual — the Yahoo! Games Daily Crossword — I found myself slowly start to chuckle, then laugh out loud, at a certain clue’s answer.  I wondered, out loud, how it could have slipped by the censors.

The funniest part about it is that I almost completely missed it.  And, for someone who has radar for absurdity in the daily grind, that’s depressingly impressive (is that possible?).  Granted, it was late, but how did I almost miss this?

In roughly 13 hours, I will officially begin my final trip around the sun as a twenty-something.  Age 29 is upon me, and is looming large.

Of biggest concern is the expected maturity that comes with reaching 30.  Personally, I think I largely hit that point sometime between 15 and 23 due to things like living essentially my whole life with divorced parents, living in three different states by the time I was nine, a lengthy bout with depression, or simply just my personality.

Sure, there were still aspects of my personality that didn’t reach trigenarian levels until recently.  My parenting skills, for one, didn’t arrive in full force until my own divorce, which placed on me the responsibility of protecting someone else’s life on my own.  Nothing will mature you quicker than that.

But enough of the woe-was-me stuff.  It’s time to kick off a year of reflection.  The way I see it, for every nine seconds I’ve lived in the last nine years, I have precisely one second with which to reflect on that time before I reach 30.  So, in honor of me..well…yeah, just in honor of me…I invite each of you to share in a comment any of your favorite stories of me.  They can be shared so long as they fit the basic rules of the site: 1) this site adheres to Christian values, so your comments doggone well better, too; 2) Everyone’s privacy is respected, including mine; 3) an occassional “d*mn” or “h*ll” is acceptable language, but only if it is pertinent to the story; and 4) differences of opinion are not just expected, but welcomed — but be polite about it (i.e., anyone trashing me or another commenter will immediately be asked to stop, and continued abuse of this rule will leave me no choice but to ask again (and we all know we don’t want it to come to something as harsh as asking twice)).

I fully expect between zero and three comments here, considering my level of readership is usually directly proportional to the rapidity of my posts.

People who know me even slightly well know there are two things that I have openly claimed will make me scream like a five-year-old girl with pigeon poop in her hair: spiders and snakes.  And, I admit after reaching the two-year mark of what I hope will be a permanent residence in North Carolina, I am adding roaches to that list.  Fear not, my house is protected; if any of those little balls of pestilence managed to get within two feet of the house without dying, they won’t make it much further.  I will resort to uranium and plutonium to kill the little turds, if that’s what it takes.

So, it’s with that understanding of my hatred for a few things creepy-crawly that I point out the ironic fact that I love Verminators on the DIscovery Channel.  Sure, I get the heebie-jeebies about every 37.2 seconds during the show.  The roach infestations and the episodes highlighting spiders actually make my skin feel as if it is attempting to hide under my muscle.  But in the end, the exterminators win.

And, since I believe the only good roach is a dead roach*, I approve.

* – Actually, a roach in your house is a good roach too, because that means it’s not in mine.  I’m kind of cold like that.  But I don’t care — we’re talking roaches here.

So InvertedMind walked into a bar…you’d think he would have seen it.

Now that the ice has been broken with one of my famously bad jokes, I’d like to say hello to the four faithful people who have hounded me about getting something new posted.  You’ve done nothing to get me back to the keyboard any quicker, but I thank you for bugging me, nonetheless.  It’s good to know you care enough to check whether or not I’m still breathing.

Where has InvertedMind been?  Why, all over the place!  That’s precisely what has kept me from my appointed rounds.  Starting with Halloween, I drove roughly 6,000 miles in a two-month span, between various destinations in Pennsylvania, Delaware and here at home in N.C.  Combining that with nagging pain in my left knee that eventaully required an MRI, as well as the day-to-day things in life, exhausted me to new levels.  I had a creative itch, but no energy to scratch it.

Nothing has changed aside from the fact that I’m too opinionated to keep quiet any longer than I have.  And, with that, I present the Rdrs. Dgst. (the abbreviated version of the abbreviated version, get it?) tale of InvertedMind’s Last Two and a Half Months.

The Youngster Grows Up

Taking a ride at Boomer's Family Fun Center

Not long before I departed temporarily for non-verbal pastures, Her Cuteness started preschool.  You already knew that.  What you may not all know is that she is now almost entirely potty trained, knows her colors and can count to 10 (not just reciting the numbers, but actively counting).  She can carry on full conversations with you.  And, I swear, she’s learning new ways to be “Almost Three” every day.  But, she’s still so adorable that it makes other parents sick.  Some nights I just sit next to her bed for a few minutes and watch her sleep while I count my blessings.

The bad news here is that I didn’t do her do the day the picture to the right was taken.  I’m as inept as ever at styling hair.  I don’t have much practice; the only reason my hair doesn’t look like Ronald McDonald after electroshock therapy is because I keep it short and bully it into cooperating with me.  Every time I try to do her hair, the Emergency Broadcast System revs up, FEMA goes on standby and some moron in Washington starts rounding up federal relief money.  He must be digging in the couch cushions in the Senate lounge, because we don’t have any money left elsewhere.

Three Pigs Just Flew Past a Blue Moon

Contrary to popular belief, it DOES snow in the south.

It’s snowing in North Carolina.  And, yes, I just skipped two months.  Why?  Because it’s been a blur of driving and Christmas shopping.  Nothing of note happened between Halloween and New Year’s Eve with the exception of a nice visit from a northern friend in December, and a Christmas show and concert with one of my best friends.

But let’s get back to the original point, here.  There is snow…falling from the sky…in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Even though I had been told that this happens about two out of every three years here, I had no reason to believe it.  After all, aside from a two-week cold snap in December in 2007, last winter felt like fall just jumped right into spring without stopping to freeze for a few months.  We got, as I sarcastically called it here, “the dusting of the century.”

But this time, it’s real.  The snow is real, and so is the measurement: over five inches since midnight.  Sure, that’s considered shorts weather where I lived as a young child, but around here it was enough to shut down the state capitol before a flake landed.  It’s still coming down good, and should continue to do so for another hour or more.  We’ll be lucky to hit the freezing point today, and that’s fine by me.  Hopefully, I’ll be feeling well enough after Kaylee’s nap to take her outside for a little while to play in the back yard.

Innaugurating Our Next Hopeless Leader
Barack Obama has just been innaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.

You can like it, you can hate it.  Your opinion will do nothing to change mine.  And from where I stand, things don’t look good.  We’ve just sworn in one of the men principly responsible for the housing crisis we are currently in, along with cronies like Christopher Dodd and Nancy Pelosi.

Why do I finger them, specifically?  Because they are three of the biggest recipients of campaign funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two entities that essentially triggered the whole mess.  Funds are generally traded for favors, particularly when it comes to wealthy people.  A lot of people got rich off of Freddie and Fannie since Bill Clinton “encouraged” them to offer loans to people who weren’t even remotely worthy of said lending.  Those people then gave money to politicans who they assumed would be most likely to keep them rich.  While that doesn’t directly implicate them, this does: the Democratic party blocked no fewer than 15 different attempts by (now former) president George W. Bush to more tightly regulate the two orgainizations.

Now, as a result of that — and the banking mess that was created not by George W. Bush’s policies, but rather by Bill Clinton’s sweeping deregulation of the banking industry in 1999, with full support of his party — we find ourselves chest-deep in a pile of political manure that our incoming president has vowed to clean up.  Now, answer me this: if your plumber screwed up your plumbing to the point that it backed up and flooded your house with a neighborhood worth of excrement, wouldn’t you hire a new plumber to fix the problem?  Why, then, do we keep re-electing — and promoting, as is the case with Obama — the same people who created the mess in the first place?

That is why this post’s title includes “fall of civilization.”  We are no longer an intelligent, civilized nation; we are, instead, a population of lemmings, blindly following the same leaders ever closer to the cliff.  George W. Bush may have made a lot of mistakes in the last eight years — every president does — but his biggest attempts at preventing the current crisis were blatantly ignored.  He shoulders the blame, while the people actually responsible for it get off scott-free.

Does that sound to you like a nation smart enough to survive another decade?  It sure doesn’t sound good to me.

Oh, and in case you have been living under a rock for the last 48 hours, the Steelers are going to their seventh Super Bowl, and as seven-point favorites no less.  Party at my house on Super Bowl Sunday.  Details to follow.

I’m going to put an end to any fears you may have while reading this: what you are about to hear (assuming you talk to yourself as you read) is going to sound a lot worse than it actually is.

Last week, Kaylee contracted an illness called Fifth Disease.  Now, here the point where you’re probably panicking: “did he say disease?!  Oh no!  The sky is falling!”  No, it’s just a virus.  And a weak one, at that.  It was named around 1880, and was given that moniker because it was the fifth common childhood “disease” on the list.  And, clearly, it wasn’t severe enough to actually be called something unique, like most of the other ailments on the list.

Fifth is caused by the Parvovirus B19 strain.  For anyone familiar with Parvo, you’re probably immediately thinking “dog.”  The difference between the Parvo that infects dogs and the one that infects humans is in that “B19″ part of the name.  So, no, Kaylee did not catch the Guatamalan Canine Flu.  What she caught is more closely related to measles or rubella, only far less so.  And it’s related to Hand, Foot & Mouth Disease, but only very indirectly.  To put to rest any fears you may have, let me put it this way: Parvo is to the other illnesses listed her as spitball is to ballistic missile.

Symptoms of Fifth are:

• Mild fever
• Sniffles
• A bright red rash on the cheeks, generally only present in children
• A splotchy rash over the rest of the body, similar in appearance to the illnesses listed above
• Joint pain, primarily present only in adults
• Itching on the rash, generally only in people older than 10

At this point, you’re wondering how she could have been exposed to a virus that causes an illness you’ve probably never heard of unless you are a parent and your kid has had it.  Well, chances are you’ve been exposed to it — by adulthood, 60 percent of us have been exposed to it, caught it and become immune.  It’s not exactly a rare virus.

She started showing the rash Friday (10/10), the day after her physical and a vaccination she still needed to be caught up on.  So, I figured it was a minor reaction to the vaccine, and just kept a close watch on it.  Aside from some redness, she had no problems — not even an itch.  Red cheeks and a few splotches on her arms, and that’s it.  But by Saturday it had spread over the entirety of her arms and was creeping across her back.  I had Nurse Neighbor come take a look, and we then proceeded to research.  A quick google of “red splotches on a toddler’s arms and cheeks” immediately brought me to Fifth/Parvo.  When I saw the symptoms, I remember that Kaylee had a runny nose most of the week, and that her temp had gone up ever so slightly Wednesday night — so slightly that I didn’t even bother checking to get the actual number.

I also remembered another symptom I had seen in her: Thursday night, after the physical, she was complaining about knee pain.  I figured it was from the injection, which was in her thigh — sore muscles from a shot.

Sunday, the rash got even worse, but she still wasn’t itching.  Now, the good part of all this is that, once the rash appears, the illness is no longer contagious.  Double-Plus-Good for me (any George Orwell readers remember where that came from?).  Of course, I figured there was no way on God’s Green Earth that she’d be allowed in school looking like that, even if I told them no one would catch it.  And, of course, I still was only basing the diagnosis off of things I found on the Interwebs.  So, a quick trip to the doctor Monday morning confirmed my diagnosis, and she was back to school, none the worse for wear.  All is well with her world.

But not mine.

Remember that “60 percent of adults are immune” comment?  Well, it would seem that I’m in the minority.

At first I thought it was just heat.  After all, I’d been in the office/studio/gameroom writing and recording a song.  That’s the hottest room in the house, especially with a computer, a printer and recording equipment running.  But, eventually, I came to the realization (after a closer look the next day revealed red splotches on my arms that continued to grow as the day progressed) that I, too, was pleading the Fifth.  Or, more correctly, Scratching the Fifth.  I’ve got the itch and the need to scratch it.  Everywhere.  Constantly.  It actually woke me up at least five times last night.

So, give me another three or four days before you call me or text me or even talk face-to-face with me about anything that may be annoying.  Because, given how annoyed I am at the moment with this itching, I may just have to give you a serious beat-down.

I enjoy my life.  There’s not much I have to complain about, aside from a pending divorce.  But of the few things about my life that I could actually say suck — and it’s generally a relative concept, as in, “relative to winning a million dollars on the same day a Belgian supermodel falls in love with me, not having a garage is kinda crappy” — there’s one that stands out and truly pains me every day.  It’s the fact that I can’t save the world.  By God, I’ll try my best, but I’m just me.  And the only man who can do it hasn’t come back yet.

But, yes, not being able to fix what’s wrong truly burdens my heart.  I see so much war, crime, bigotry and just general hate in the world, and I want to tell these people that it is the meek, humble and compassionate who shall inherit the earth, not the dictators and warmongers.

But there is something I can help fix, and I’m going to do all in my power to do so.  And you can help.

You all know I’m a single father, and we’re hundreds of miles from our nearest family.  My life revolves around that little girl, and I spend most of my time worrying about her.  When she has the sniffles, my heart aches for her.  When she cries for her “Dedo,” I want to cry too.  All minor, passing afflictions, to be sure, but she’s not just someone who depends on me; she’s part of me.

It’s that build-up that brings me to Katie Fitch, a beautiful little three-year-old from Florence, South Carolina.

See, Katie has hepatoblastoma.  Don’t try to say it, or you might wind up with your tongue in a splint.  But, essentially, it’s a cancerous tumor of the liver.  Cancer.  In a three-year-old.

My next-door neighbor and close friend is a pediatric nurse who deals with cancer patients all the time.  I have no idea how she can see this stuff on a regular basis and be anything more than a basket case for her entire shift — I merely read a story about someone and almost broke down crying in part because of the innocent child being afflicted with such a horror, and also because I can’t do anything about it.

Katie’s family is taking donations; you can contribute directly from the Web site they’ve set up for her.  I ask anyone who can give to do so.  Help make a future for someone who doesn’t even really have a past yet.  I implore you to find some way to scrape up a donation, even if it’s only a few bucks you scraped together by foregoing a cup of coffee, a Big Mac or a pack of cigarettes.  And please, tell your friends and family.

None of us can save the world.  But if everyone tried to save a small slice of it, we wouldn’t just save it — we’d make it infinitely better.

You can read all about young Katie and make a donation at KatieFitch.com.

Do I really look that old?
We often develop close relationships with the people around us at our jobs.  Those relationships, though (in Information Technology, at least) are usually tightly based on alcohol consumption, and not so much on actual personal knowledge of one another.  On my birthday a week ago, at a small celebration in my honor held by my manager and open to my coworkers, a friend speculated on my age.

He guessed 35.

D’oh!

I decided to let him live, but that wasn’t a decision I came to lightly.  I think it was based largely on the fact that there were several witnesses (if you so much as say “cake” in an IT department, you better have experience running with the bulls in Pamplona).

And They Partied On…And On…
I vowed this year that I would make up for last year’s birthday — the only way my 27th could have sucked worse is if someone had kicked me in the cajones, repeatedly, the entire day.  So, with that in mind, the party kicked off on Monday, August 11.  A trip to the beach — the Outer Banks is my new Favorite Place On Earth™ — launched the festivities.  A week of U.S. Olympic triumph, presumably in my honor, then ensued.

We won’t go into all the details — no, there was no debauchery, but there was food, music, general fun to be had by all, and even a $10 prize for finishing third in a beer pong tournament at a local bar.  I finally let the party give up the ghost on Monday, August 18, sometime around 11:45 p.m.  And, I’ve got to say, I think it ended a little too soon.  I had a semi-crappy 19th birthday too, so I still have a little bit of karmic make-up to do.

I got out tonight.  It doesn't happen often — the last time I recall getting out with friends was no more recent than early June, if that — and that's fine by me.  First of all, I'm a father now.  No, scratch that…I'm a daddy now, and that more than fulfills my desires in life.  Aside from an impending divorce, things in my life are wonderful.  But it's always a good thing to get out of the house with people whose vocabularies extend beyond the monosyllabic.

We went to a fancy-shmancy place downtown in the state-famous Glenwood South district.  Think of Amsterdam's red-light district, but without the illicit debauchery.  Okay, so if you take away the debauchery, you're pretty much left with the top floor of a college library.  Scratch that comparison.

The place was called The Red Room.  As far as I know, it's still called The Red Room, but I haven't been there for about an hour.  Crazier things have happened.  Anyway, it's one of those places that is as far from a Texas steakhouse as you can get: modern decor, dim lighting, no stuffed animal carcasses on the walls and portions that make Weight Watchers' meals look like a Thanksgiving feast.  The guy sitting next to me ordered — I kid you not — roast duck with bananas drizzled with chocolate.  Thus the name of this post; get your heads out of the gutter, you sick freaks.

We hung around until about 10:00, then went downstairs to a place called Hi5.  Again, a nice place.  A beer, one drunk guy who clearly had passed "three sheets to the wind" right about the time we were placing our food orders upstairs, and 30 minutes of dancing later and it was back to The Red Room — which had transformed itself over the course of half an hour from a modern, high-priced restaurant to a typical college-town bar.

One member of my entourage (we'll call it that because it gives me a significant ego boost) was meeting a friend at Hi5, and he came along with us back to Romper Room.  I mention this not because that part was significant, but because I realized this evening the fine line between a guy dancing because the women are, and dancing waaaaaaay too much.  It's okay for a guy to dance in public given the following conditions: 1) the hands stay below the shoulders at all times unless he is "raising the roof" — and this has to occur at precise times and only during a select group of songs; 2) there must be a beer in his hand at all times; and 3) he must never, never dance to the point where he breaks a sweat in an air-conditioned room. 

Now, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt because we were there with the best-looking women in the place.  Sometimes a guy has to break the rules to please the gals.  But I've got to deduct a point or two based on the fact that the group had dwindled from about nine women and four men to six women and one man (me); when this new guy joined the group, I no longer had the inherent appearance of the ladies' gay friend.  But the testosterone-charged scales were in a precarious balance that was teetering on the edge of over-estrogenation, and it collapsed spectacularly about the time it became obvious to anyone within a 20-foot radius that he had broken a sweat.

I would like it to be known that I think nothing less of him, and he seems to be a pretty cool guy.  Sometimes, in the presence of women, you've got to bite the bullet, put your testicles on a shelf someplace and dance the night away.  Mind you, I refuse and my left knee does too.  You just have to be careful not to cross the line, and all will be well.  But there's a rule here that needs to be remembered in the future: men sweat; women and dancers "glisten."

Other Ramblings

In computer programming, circular dependencies create catastrophic results.  In the District of Columbia, they're called "Democratic Stump Speeches."

Brilliant.

That is how I describe Barrack Obama.  Yes, you are reading InvertedMind and, yes, you read that right.  He is a brilliant, brilliant man.  No one on earth is as clever at distracting Americans from his inability to do anything but pander to the people.

Here's an example: Obama has proposed a second round of tax rebates, $500 for individuals and $1,000 for families, to offset the cost of rising gasoline costs through the end of the year.  Sounds like a good idea, eh?

Slow down, Speed Racer.

This is the same man who has already stated he would raise your taxes.  And don't think it's just your income taxes, either; he wants to increase the "death tax" — if your loved one dies, you get taxed even more on the inheritance, and just because the money changed hands!  So let me get this straight: Obama wants to give out money to the people, who he wants to tax more, so they can foot the bill for the government, an entity that will — if B.O. gets his way — increase its own budget shortfall by $50 billion with the proposed tax rebate.  To simplify things further, he wants to pay you so you can afford to pay him to cover the cost of his original plan to pay you.  It sounds complicated, so it must be a good thing!  Friggin' brilliant.

Oh, and one of the main points Obama has been pushing is balancing the budget.  In a recent independent analysis of his proposed tax changes, the deficit would increase by $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years.  People, I implore you: stop being caught up in his charisma and recognize the constant contradictions in what he says.  Our nation depends on it.

InvertedMind's Other Works
Note to all fellow Steelers' fans: The Steel Tradition, which I write for at MVN.com, is moving to www.SteelTradition.com.  Update your bookmarks, and visit regularly.  Your visits will help pay toward Her Cutness's college fund!

That's all I've got for this week, folks.  It's 1:25 a.m.  Maybe you'll get some bonus posts in the next few days.