Crying on the Way Home from Costco

It's been just over a week since I announced some changes to this blog. In a nutshell, I've taken the focus off of my son and will be blogging more about addiction, recovery, mental health, and just life in general. So if you don't abandon this blog entirely, you'll likely end up reading about some of the things I'm passionate about, like cooking, music, or helping others. Or you might get stuck reading about things that happen to me in my everyday life. Like this post about something that happened earlier today.

This morning I decided to go to Costco to pick up a beef brisket flat to smoke sometime over the next few days. My wife and I are having an event at our house on October 7th and I've committed to smoking brisket for the occasion. Since I've only smoked brisket a handful of times since I bought a smoker a couple of years ago, I decided I'd do a practice run. It can't hurt, right? As I told my wife, "I want to do a test run before the actual cook," which sounded very Walter White-ish.

Off to Costco I went, which is always an adventure and a challenge. Trying to get out of that store without spending your entire checking account should be an Olympic event. Could that advertising tagline I see Costco using on Facebook be any more spot-on?

"Go for what you need, leave with what you love."

Right???!!!

Despite my best intentions of going to Costco and only buying a beef brisket, I did end up leaving with more than I came for. But not that much more. The only additional items I caved to were a 4-pack box of organic Triscuits (on sale!) and two pairs of Levi's (one for me and one for my wife). I consider that pretty damn good for a Costco run.

On the drive home from Costco I was feeling fine. The sun was shining and I had Matthew Ryan's May Day album blasting on the stereo. I even gave the "homeless" person at the top of the freeway exit ramp a dollar, which I never do. (I use quotation marks around homeless because I don't think the guy is actually homeless; I think panhandling might just be his job. But I could be wrong.)

But as I started traversing the surface streets on the last leg of my ride home, something unexpected happened: I started crying. And this wasn't just an I-feel-sad-so-I'm-gonna-get-a-little-teary-eyed kind of cry. It was a full-on tears-running-down-both-of-my-cheeks-while-I-bawl-like-a-baby cry.

I started crying, out of the blue.

Now I'll be the first one to admit that I cry on a pretty regular basis. Not every other day or anything like that, but at least a few times a month. I find absolutely nothing wrong with crying, or with a man crying (God forbid!). Like Anne Lamott writes, "I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me."

Crying helps me. It always has. I consider crying to be my body's way of cleansing itself of an overload of emotions. Most of the time those emotions are negative, but I've cried a lot of happy tears, too. Regardless of what I'm feeling, if I'm feeling too much of it, crying always helps. So much so that back when I had an actual job and I was going through some tough times at home, I would book a conference room on occasion just so I could go sit and cry in private. (You've gotta do what you've gotta do.)

There was no particular reason why I started crying on the way home from Costco. I think it was just an accumulation of some very emotional stuff that's been going on in my life for the last few weeks. I was feeling too much, and my body decided it would open the relief valve and let the excess emotion out.

My cry only lasted a minute or two, but damn--it made me feel rejuvenated.

My penchant for crying might be strange for a 54-year-old man. I don't really know, and I don't really care. I'm an emotional person, and I'd rather "cry it out" than keep everything bottled up inside. Lord knows that's not healthy. I also kind of wonder where I picked up my crying gene (is that a thing?), because I never saw my dad cry. Never ever. I can't even imagine my dad crying. That just wouldn't have been manly. Come to think of it, I don't think I witnessed any grown man cry until I was in my mid-20s and saw my mom's father cry when his wife died.

My grandfather was overwhelmed with emotion. He felt too much and he cried to let it out. I'm so glad I got to see that, because it taught me something about life:

There's nothing wrong with crying. No matter who you are.

"Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots." --Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love