Has anyone ever accused you of being judgmental? Did you ever wonder how they arrived at that conclusion without judging you? Tonight, I shall rant about a senseless admonition that no one actually follows. Usually when you get chided for being judgmental, you haven't done anything wrong, apart from stepping on someone's toes.

Typically, when people tell you not to be judgmental, what they mean is be aware that you may not have all the evidence to arrive at an informed opinion on a person's behavior. The most famous example of this is Chekov's story, The Mourner about a woman who fails to control an unruly child on a train trip. Her fellow passengers make the determination that she is a not proper mother until they find out the purpose of her trip is to accompany her husband's casket back home. I am fine with that kind of advice. Get the data you need to make informed decisions.

Making judgments is a survival skill. When we tell our kids not to hang out with hoodlums, we're instructing them to make judgments on other people's character, as we should. One of the most important jobs we have as parents is installing values in our offspring. They will inevitably reach their own conclusions on those values, but at least we get them pointed in the right direction. I'm pleased to say that my son and daughter are firmly anti-racist, and always have been. Both of them have traits I admire and seek to emulate as well. They are good parents. They've made good financial decisions. Not only that, but they work hard.

There are a great many things I will not judge people on:

• The number of tattoos or piercings they have
• The kind of car they drive (unless it is a new, off the lot Tesla)
• The clothes they wear
• The color of their skin
• The use of profane language
• Their sexual preference
• Their gender identity
• Their nationality
• Their job

Things I will judge people on:

• What kind of computer operating system they prefer
• The items in their grocery cart
• Whether they know what to do when they forget their password
• Whether they will use a search engine to find out the answer to a question
• Politics
• Religion (if they belong to one that uses one of the categories above to judge people)
• If they start whispering when they describe another person's race
• How much they tip

The good news is that quite often, the result of me being judgmental is that I find that I admire something about a person. My judgments are usually more positive than negative. It's only in the case of modern MAGA behavior that I will unleash the thunderbolt of eternal damnation on your ass. Anyone who starts making excuses for the Fascists gets assigned to the bad list for all eternity. I'm old. I don't have the time or energy to put questionable people on a rehab program. If you back the fash, you're dead to me. Next, please.

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One of my bad habits was imagining myself to be a super-villain. It took me a long time to realize that I am not a unique and special snowflake. I am a man among men, just your average, garden variety dude, no better (and this is crucial) and no worse than the next guy. it's actually a skill of maturity to be able to realize that it's OK, in a general sense, to tell yourself that everybody fucks up from time to time. Good mental health does not include perfectionism, a certain impediment to actually making progress in this world.

I'm not a trained psychologist, nor am I well versed in therapy talk, but I know a few things about you. You have undoubtably done my some things in your life that you wish you hadn't. That does not define you. Once you honestly acknowledge to yourself the part you played in whatever it was and made an honest attempt to make amends for it, you can move on. In fact, if you don't move on, you're not being fair to yourself or the other people in your life.

One of the most dreaded parts of the 12-Step Recovery process, although ultimately, one of the most freeing, is the process of writing down what the program refers to as a searching and fearless moral inventory. What it really boils down to is actually making a list, with pen and paper, of all the stuff you feel guilty about along with your resentments towards, well, everything and anybody.

Guilt and its brother in arms, shame, are two of the worst impediments to leading a happy and useful life. They are intensely self-centered emotions. Like most things that are self-centered, they are cunning, baffling, and powerful and will lead you right back into self-defeating bad behavior. I don't know about you, but I can't live for long while wallowing in guilt and shame before I start looking for some relief. As an alcoholic, if there is one thing I know to be an unhealthy but sure fire way to squash some feelings out of existence, it's by drowning them in cheap bourbon. Of course, they will still be there to greet me when I sober up, but such is the illogical reality of the disease.

Since drinking stopped being an option for me in 2008, I had to find a healthy way to do two seemingly contradictory things: admit my part in the many, many mistakes I made over the years and let go of the guilt and shame attached to those things. I am a retrospective person by nature. If you've read this blog, you know that a lot of what I write is deeply autobiographical. My memory is weirdly specific. I may not be the best a figuring things out, thus my lack of math skills, but I can remember the hell out of a set of facts. What this means, practically, is that I deeply internalized seemingly every single time someone ever told me that I disappointed them, that I failed to live up to my potential or that I was just an asshole.

Step One was figuring out that not all of that was actually true. Even the people we love have agendas and issues. No one gets to define us to ourselves, but ourselves. I feel no guilt and no shame for my early and steadfast decision not to seek a formal university education. True, this decision may have caused me to earn less than the maximum amount of possible dollars, but so what? I had a great career in a field that I loved, with plenty of time to pursue things more important to me than work.

It is indeed a fact that I have been married four times, but anyone who knows me also knows that I am in a committed and happy relationship with a person I deeply love. Today is our 12th wedding anniversary.

We are the only people who really and truly know if we are committed to self-improvement. I'm a guy who had lots and plenty of opportunities to do better. Alcoholism is an ugly illness that is characterized by self-centered and dishonest behavior. It stops emotional growth and kills the maturity process. It prioritizes one thing above everything else in the world. Putting down the bottle down gave me the chance to do things that drinking robbed me of. I had the chance to be honest, first with myself and then with me family and the world. Lo and behold, did you know that being honest is the key to good mental health? Who knew?

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Typically, I just can't bring myself to part with the exorbitant amount of cash it takes to go to concerts these days. The thought of shelling out several hundred dollars to see a billionaire make music just doesn't sit well with me, no matter how much I love Paul McCartney or Bruce Springsteen. Then there's the whole "being around other people" thing that can sometimes be problematic if those other people are drunk or rude or both. Moreover, I may be a grumpy old man, so there is that.

Concerts weren't always crazy expensive and my tolerance for other people wasn't always as low as it is now. I don't have a long list of shows to reference. I knew someone who lived in Germany in the late 70s, and she had double fistfuls of tickets to huge festivals and concerts she'd made it to. The list of acts was long and storied Clapton, The Who, Yes, Muddy Waters, Todd Rundgren, Genesis, The Stones. Zeppelin, Iggy Pop.

I never went to any shows while I was in high school, too poor. The first time I saw popular live music was July 4th, 1983 at Ft. Jackson, SC when our drill sergeants marched us dutifully to see The Guess Who performing for the troops. I knew the same two Guess Who songs everyone knows, American Woman and No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature.

The next year, someone gave me tickets to see Heart and Eddie Money at the local auditorium. It's main claim to fame is that it's where Elvis's next concert was to be held before he died. I don't remember much about the show. I was there by myself and while I liked both acts, neither of them were among my favorites.

The best show I saw in my 20s was complements of my mother, who gifted my siblings and i tickets to see Paul Simon when he was touring for the album, Rhythm of the Saints, the one that came after Graceland, which is one of my all-time favorites. Paul sand all the old hits, lots of stuff from Graceland and engaged with the audience all night long. He even gave a shout-out to the section where we were sitting in appreciation of our non-stop dancing for the entirety of the show. Somehow we even managed to sway to Bridge Over Troubled Water.

During the following years, I saw two of my favorite acts twice. The first was James Taylor, performing just a few miles down the road from his childhood home in Chapel Hill. It gives me cold chills to hear that man sing "In My Mind, I'm Gone to Carolina" under a crisp, springtime Carolina moon. The other repeat performance was by a man I considered to be a living legend, Doc Watson, master of bluegrass, country, folks, blues and gospel music. Doc was blind from the age of two. Seeing him walk onto the stage, holding on to the arm of his accompanist, Jack Lawrence, was breathtaking. I was so familiar with his voice that when he started to speak to introduce his songs, I felt like I was sitting in my living room listening to an old friend.

A few years after they hit it big, Hootie and the Blowfish put on a free show in the center of the town where I live. We went down extra early to get good seats and ended up less than 50 feet from the stage. People were in a good mood, proud of having such a talented group playing their heart out for the locals. At the end of the show, Darius Rucker said, "We're from the south and when we play in the south, we like to do this song because people appreciate it." Then they launched into the David Allen Coe version of "You Never Even Called Me By My Name." It was glorious.

Some of my other favorite shows include Gillian Welch with David Rawlings at the NC Museum of Art. Before they went there separate ways, I also saw The Carolina Chocolate Drops with Rihiannon Giddens play a free show in Black Mountain, NC.

For the first time in ages, I'm actually going to a concert next weekend in Winston Salem. Wonder Woman bought us tickets to see Old Crow Medicine Show. These fellows might have gotten started way up in Ithaca, New York, but they wrote what is now considered to be the unofficial North Carolina state song., Wagon Wheel, which declares, "If I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free."

Headed down south to the land of the pines
I'm thumbin' my way to North Caroline
Starin' up the road
And pray to God I see headlights
I made it down the coast in seventeen hours
Pickin' me a bouquet of dogwood flowers
And I'm a-hopin' for Raleigh
I can see my baby tonight

Amen.

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I know I'm in a good place mentally if I am willing to take on difficult tasks. There have been depressive stages in my life where the simplest things, like shaving or just taking out the trash have been overwhelming. I can remember standing in front of the sink, just looking at my razor and shaving cream, and being furious that picking them up and putting them to use was so difficult. Thanks to the miracles of modern pharmacology and a lot of lived experienced, I haven't had a prolonged episode of that kind of living in a couple of years. KNOCKING ON WOOD.

When I'm on the upside of my mood cycles, the sky can be the limit of what I'll attempt. In days gone by, the desire to do hard things would often come in the form of physical challenges. They weren't competitions against other people, just attempts to better my own previous records or to keep some activity trend upwards. I like data, so I've always kept records of how far and how fast I've ridden my bike or walked. When I was power lifting, I was constantly trying to break my personal records. If I couldn't do that for a one-rep maximum, then I would try to lift more cumulative weight. I will measure anything and attempt to improve upon it. I've done it with the number of books I've read and the number of words I've written. Setting goals works for me.

Speaking of goals. I know that some people dislike the concept. They say that you should read a book for the joy of the experience, not because you want to put another tally mark on a sheet. The thing is, everyone has goals, whether they write them down and think about them or not. Some people have a goal of watching as much TV as possible and doing as little work as they can. Of course, they'd deny that to be true, but the proof is in the doing. I just find that I tend to do better when I consciously set goals and make plans, then when I drift. I am a poor drifter.

My current voluntary hard thing is setting up self-hosted services on my home server. Since retiring, I set up a Linux laptop and messed with it enough to discover that I enjoyed the process. Swapping out the hard drive and converting it into a server was the next logical step. Despite a longtime interest in tech, I've never gone down the self-hosted rabbit hole before, So I don't have a ton of experience to draw from. I do, however, know smart people on the Internet. Some of them have said, "Please let me know if you need any help." That's an offer that I'm taking seriously, whether they know it or not.

I'm also doing some things in a few of my relationships that take some effort. My Dad and I haven't ever been real close. We've been estranged a few times, although not in the last few years. He's struggling with the reality of aging and the toll it takes on you physically and mentally. The hardest thing for him though is being the caretaker for his wife of 43 years, who has Alzheimer's. He is one of the few people she still recognizes, and my whole family admires how patient and gentle and loving he is with here, even when she gets confused and angry. Dad shared with me how lonely it is to live like that. I resolved to spend more time with him as a result, and now we meet for lunch every week. I love being able to cheer him up over a plate of food. He does his best not to mention touchy subjects, which I appreciate. I do the same for him.

These days, I try to have a routine. Since Wonder Woman is still punching the clock, I'm doing slightly more around the house. I have to-do lists and I cross off tasks as I knock them out. My tech projects and writing take up most of my days, and the evenings are given over to making home cooked dinners and spending time with Wonder Woman. I'm grateful for long stretches of good mental health, always hoping that I've finally beaten the black dog for good. Who knows, maybe I have.

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