About Me

Chris - age 47, Northern New Jersey, "abled" 41 years, dis-abled 6 years, married young - now 28+ tremendous years to Noreen, the girl with the gorgeous heart, three wonderfully luminous daughters - Holly, Meghan & Claire. These women are the very best parts of my life (their presence & love had me fight back from "the edge of the edge" in ICU). I'm a marketing & management consultant, business writer & corporate teacher who loves to inspire smaller companies how to be good to their people and good for their community while still making a solid profit (corporate social responsibility truly pays off!) I'm a fair-thinking, left-leaning Democrat who misses civil discourse & open-mindedness in the USA. Hate today's name-calling and instant dismissal of and by people who disagree on anything. Disabled at age 41 (wasn't supposed to make it, lost my "identifiers" and so sometimes I feel nearly invisible), introspective/thinking type, reading is just after breathing when it comes to interests, love smart humor and making people laugh,I'm pretty damn good at "Catholic Guilt" and feeling somewhat responsible for too many things that I didn't really do. Sometimes winning/sometimes losing in my struggle to live as a MAN WITH A DISABILITY rather than a DISABLED MAN (big difference between the two), live close enough to NYC to not get mad at "Jersey Jokes" - great concerts and art there. Disability left me w/severe intractable pain so meds (and sadness) are part of my life, hate them and thank God for them, love to think about things that I'm not sure others ever contemplate (not a conceited fat head, more of an admitted weird head), used to be very logical/linear, found comfort in rules and scientific laws, worked super hard to achieve the "perfect" results career-wise, lost all that and more. With personal devastation (my transition to the world of the disabled was NOT a transition at all - earthquake, lifequake, soul-quake ... still quaking) came questions about the validity of many things - rules and universal laws included, currently missing flat supportive ground to stand upon (some of that is good for me, but my identity feels ghostly). I'm so worried about money (I was a big planner and thought I had the future all worked out for security ... NOT!), getting social security disability now, can't accept the "small me" and how to fit in when I don't like myself very much anymore, spend too much time trying to find answers to the imponderables of life, my original immediate family has disintegrated and so I'm a middle-aged orphan/survivor. Many remind me that "it" could all be so much worse (they're right, of course) but at the same time no one ever says "it" could all be so much better??? I sometimes feel weirdly jealous of fully-recovered people who almost lost it all through careless attitudes and reckless acts with their life. Wish I too had fallen into God's catcher's mitt like them. Pet Peeve: people, including supposed family members, "pretending" I'm not disabled and therefore never ask me, or my also suffering wife, anything real about our lives or how I'm "really" doing, they don't realize that being inquisitive or interested is natural and shouldn't be squashed. I'm not going to suddenly realize/remember that I'm disabled and fairly-well screwed in many facets of life and then go berserk on them. I love life but not in that twirling through a field of wildflowers while playing a recorder kind of way - but I love it nonetheless. I sure love music, guitar-oriented power pop/rock/punk songs and SRV blues, movies, films of all kinds, space/NASA and astronomy, word games, the english language, pop culture, the generally hapless NY Jets, amazon.com, history and the future. If I could be anybody? Easy ... Homer Simpson is my choice by a mile. I love America but our government and the undisguised corporatism scares me and that's completely backwards. Our "Leaders" are mostly corrupt (not necessarily in the black bag filled with fifties kind of way, they're controlled and controlling and that, along w/our Mass Media being owned by less than 10 powerful puppet-masters just breaks my heart. Hoping Americans start reading, thinking, organizing and fighting back instead of giving up. We'd all be shocked by our power if just 25% of us (maybe less) shook the rafters with passion for our Constitution (currently in an oxygen tent). We no longer seem to be a country of knowledgeable civilians - instead we "appear" to be slack-jawed, jug-eared doofuses, worshipping the wrong people, waving lottery tickets and signs that someone told us to wave at the cameras. Please stop celebrating wealthy douche-bags and factory-made stars. How do we repair the America that believes that 4,000 yrs. ago cavemen rode T-Rex's and Chuck Darwin is Satan's Science Professor when so many couldn't find Canada, Iraq or China on a map? Please worry, shout, volunteer, write to editors and vote w/your educated brain. Good luck Disaboom!!! Good luck and LOVE to all members of the Disaboom Community. Let's help each other to "Live Forward."