Hello again, folks. Miss me? My writing has lately been interrupted by my pressing need to drink liberal amounts of white wine and watch the entire series of Six Feet Under. I’ve made it all the way to Season Five by now. Somehow being able to laugh about Ruth Fisher’s anal-retentiveness and cry with Nate or David about their various traumas and griefs — set against the backdrop of the Fisher funeral home’s constant stream of deaths — is helping me stay human, stay sane, maybe even stay alive. If I said it before, I’ll say it again: god (or goddess, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster) bless Alan Ball. As Leonard the medicine man observed to Ed Chigliak on another one of my favorite shows of all time, Northern Exposure, movies are “white medicine,” our Westernized equivalent of the native healing story. And Ball’s series is like an ongoing movie. In other words, it’s my medicine.
**
I emailed an apology to Sam last week, for unintentionally contributing to his stress before he left. Doc had urged me not to do so, emphatic that I was not at fault, but right now what I need from Doc is an apology that has not been forthcoming. Sometimes you just have to bite the damn bullet and say you’re sorry. I realized I needed to trust my own intuition on this. Maybe I’m done with external guides.
After over ten years of therapy, I left therapy, with, I imagine, a greater awareness of my issues, and perhaps a greater ability to cope — but no life-altering changes. Now, after three years of coaching, I think it’s time to terminate (even if Doc and I patch things up, which we will, eventually), because while I’ve acquired a few more useful tools (e.g. Doc’s much-touted Voice Dialogue), I’m still mired in much of the same stuck-ness regarding work, money, goals, and (dare I say?) dreams.
“No one really understands what causes change,” says my girlfriend Jeannie, who holds a Master’s in counseling. I grew up with stories of miraculous conversions, and responded to the altar call more than once; in college, I met strident objectivists, fervent Hegelians, and condescending nihilists; within my more recent yoga circle, acolytes gushed about the life-changing wisdom and practices of Yogi Bhajan or Swami Kaleshwar; and Doc was always giving me some new binaural CD to alter my brainwaves. Everyone thought they had the answer, the secret to making life make sense and work for them, and they wanted me to see the light, too. But at the end of the day, watching certain behaviors and struggles continue, regardless of held beliefs to the contrary, I would wonder: what really rewrites our scripts?
What impresses me most about the past few months, regarding my brief but powerful encounter with Sam, is that a profound change occurred in my basic makeup — the kind of change that one can spend years in counseling and not have happen. Internal obstacles that had stood like imposing concrete walls for a lifetime collapsed as if made of poorly glued toothpicks. Big love, it seems, can effect big change. It was love for my atheist best friend, after all, that was pivotal in collapsing my fundamentalist faith in high school — because if everything the “Christians” told me was true, then everything she thought or felt was illegitimate, and not to be trusted.
Sometimes a relationship forces a sort of ultimatum, where you have to choose between a dearly beloved person and your attachment to a certain way of believing or being. Just ask any formerly homophobic PFLAG parent.
**
But speaking of PFLAG, I’ve become a tormented paranoid in the absence of any new information about Sam, coupled with the offhand tidbits and speculations I hear from other people.
I hadn’t mentioned it before, but Rob, Sam’s buddy, prefers men. A number of people assumed that Sam was gay because of their close association. And I did sometimes wonder if Rob harbored feelings for Sam, especially given the truly weird and uncomfortable dynamic between the three of us. But sometime after a conversation with a mutual friend from work, who had thought Sam had been planning to go to Las Vegas for some kind of Hunter S. Thompson adventure, and who had believed him to be questioning his sexuality, I started going slightly crazy with jealous, fear-riddled doubts about nearly everything I believed to be true. Did Sam and Rob have a “thing,” unbeknownst to me? Did Sam really go to the middle east, or did he just not want to tell me where he was actually going? Was the conversation he had with Rob in front of me, about what to tell people regarding his job, staged for my sake?
Rob and I have never related very well, as you know, but over the past six months I’ve watched him transform from a gangly kid with bony knees and nerd glasses into a suave, handsome, vaguely Machiavellian character (now a supervisor), with a hip, flattering wardrobe in just the right color palette. It’s as if he finally got that queer eye for the queer guy. He’s growing his beard out until Sam comes back — which does not reassure me that he isn’t in love with my erstwhile boyfriend — and currently looks kind of like a redheaded Charlton Heston in his Ben-Hur galley-slave incarnation. (Maybe I’m guilty of gross stereotyping, but I do take small comfort in the fact that Sam’s wardrobe consisted entirely of jeans and T-shirts, without any regard to what colors might flatter him.) It does make me wonder for whom Rob made himself so pretty.
It would certainly be ironic, and a rather sad commentary on “straight” guys, wouldn’t it, if the man who ruined me for other men turned out to be not that into women. One of the major differences with Sam was that I never felt the least bit objectified or depersonalized: he always seemed to be making love to me, as a person, and not just playing and getting off with a handy female body (eyes slightly glazed over). In my doubt-ridden moments, of course, I wonder if that meant he liked me so much personally that he made an exception for me. That it was all just an experiment, and one he decided to end without telling me. (Then again, I seem to remember Sam grabbing my broad German-frau booty on more than one occasion, as if he really liked it.)
So I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything to any of these speculations. Oftentimes when one latches onto a specific hypothesis, the mind starts to fill in the blanks, and suddenly the circumstances and facts seem to support it. In other words, we find what we’re looking for. And I’m definitely more inclined to believe something is true if it makes me feel bad.
It makes me feel bad, to think about Sam being secretly involved with Rob. Cold, and somehow not good enough. Afraid that he lied to me. And very, very foolish.
**
The other part of that hypothetical scenario is just as disturbing, because it thrusts Sam more deeply into a world I was actually happy to see him leave. Having to give him up completely was a little easier if I could frame his departure as something he needed to do for the sake of his own physical and mental well-being. Of late I’ve been listening to trip-hop band Massive Attack, notably this early hit –
Midnight rockers, city slickers
Gunmen and maniacs
All are featured on the freak show
And I can’t do nothin’ ‘bout that, no, no
But if you hurt what’s mine
I’ll sure as hell retaliate
You can free the world, you can free my mind
Just as long as my baby’s safe from harm tonight
I love that chorus precisely because it seems to be saying: go ahead, be rebels, be revolutionaries, insist on expanding my mind like Timothy Leary, just don’t let anything bad happen to my baby. Which is pretty much where I’m at. But more on that presently.
I do realize that no American can be entirely safe from harm hanging out in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a different kind of gambling than the kind Sam ostensibly left behind. He was so annoyed when his friends got upset and cried about his voluntary “deployment”…I wasn’t the only one whose fretting for his safety inspired his wrath. He might have been overwhelmed by his own mixed emotions, and unable to deal with all of ours. Maybe it’s difficult for a lifelong outsider to cope with a sudden explosion of concern. “He probably has problems receiving,” was Doc’s comment.
I hope he was telling us the truth, at least, about where he was going. In an earlier post I know I speculated about whether he had gone back to his parents’ home to “fade away” — one of my more dire scenarios — but I have a dozen of them. In some versions, he’s losing his life, in others just his mind (my counselor girlfriend started musing about schizophrenia), and in still others he just wants to get away from me, that crazy, needy woman who cried when she couldn’t reach him on the phone for a couple of days. Sam was a pleaser who took care of people; maybe he didn’t have the heart to tell me he wanted to break up with me.
I hate that I’m not sure, now, where he is. I hate that I’m obsessing about all these crazy-making things. In the end, I know Sam has to attend to his necessities, whatever they may be, and they may be legion, and take up most of his time, but I also know I deserve some kind of communication — even if it’s just a breakup fuck-you emailed from an all-male Libertarian meth compound in Reno. We briefly shared a reality, a private universe — what was for me, at times, a kind of paradise — which has since been assailed by every manner and variety of doubt imaginable. The darkest part about living in perennial uncertainty, depending upon neither Jesus nor Ayn Rand nor Swami Kaleshwar to tell you what’s what, is that you can start to doubt your own judgment, even your own experience.
And my only partner in this particular experience has vanished, leaving me to my freakouts and conspiracy theories.
**
On a different note, I was remembering calling Rick one Sunday afternoon in May to find out if he wanted to meet that evening. He told me he’d spent Saturday night out drinking with Sam. Apropos of nothing, he asked if I was religious at all, and mentioned that Sam was Catholic. “I’m not really into self-improvement,” he joked, “like a lot of the other people at work.” He seemed reluctant to make plans with me that night. I caught the unexpected vibe that he wanted to nudge me toward Sam, as if he thought the two of us would be more compatible than he and I were. (I even wondered if he knew something I didn’t, e.g. that Sam had taken notice of me.) I was vaguely irritated by this unspoken intimation, thinking at the time that I had no interest in Sam, and every interest in Rick. But of course Rick turned out to be right. He and Sam would become buddies, Rick would get sent back to jail…and the rest you know.
**
There’s another phrase my mother would love: Rick would get sent back to jail. I once noted, during the days of Rick, that I’ve had better luck, sexually and otherwise, with men who are current or former users of illegal substances. For many people, certainly the mainstream of society, this signals a serious character flaw or psychological dysfunction on my part as well as theirs. I would have judged myself harshly for this too, during my first two or three decades, having been effectively programmed by my parents, Ronald Reagan, and After School Specials to fear and loathe non-FDA-approved mind-altering chemicals and the freaks who supposedly ingested them.
Use always equals addiction, and addiction is always equated with personal weakness, a lack of the ability to cope with life that the “well-adjusted” and responsible citizenry allegedly have. But as you may have noticed, I no longer buy that we live and act in a vacuum where we can triumphantly master the universe through our personal will (as much as that goes against our national mythology). As you may have noticed, I find the cultural frameworks around us deeply dysfunctional themselves. Both James Baldwin and Jiddu Krishnamurti, men whose writings I turn to like a compass (maybe there’s at least a couple of guides I trust) pointed out that there’s nothing particularly healthy about being well-adjusted in a sick society. Maybe it’s not so incongruous that Buddhist master and Shambhala founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a raging alcoholic.
**
Statistics can be interesting. Two-thirds of attendees at Alcoholics Anonymous are men. An extensive American study found that over one third of the male population has been dependent on alcohol or drugs at some stage of their lives. The figure for women was exactly half that. Alcohol and drug abuse were strongly associated with an increased suicide rate in men.
From this I do not conclude that men are somehow weaker than women, any more than I conclude that higher incarceration rates indicate moral inferiority among minorities. I believe instead that this is merely indicative of what both my own personal observations and independent studies (about addiction, Western culture, and men) have led me to conclude: that males of the species possessing any sensitivity or impulse toward authenticity whatsoever simply cannot “adjust” to Western patriarchal capitalist culture and its demands without explicit damage to their mental and emotional well-being. Damage that, given no opportunity to heal (or even be acknowledged), often leads them to seek release, escape, or at least some form of anaesthesia. This subject could be a thesis in itself, but I’m not going to make one of this post. (Suggested reading: The Hazards of Being Male by Herb Goldberg, anything by Warren Farrell, Stiffed by Susan Faludi…not to mention my oft-quoted Carol Gilligan favorite.)
I don’t recoil from things like drug addiction or attempted suicide as if they were contagious diseases or shameful personal failings. I actually consider them to be symptoms of a sick society. Much like the inordinate rate of depression in American women.
**
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz…
Those are, of course, the opening lines to Allen Ginsberg’s notorious paroxysm of a poem, “Howl,” his heaving tribute to the Beat generation.
My favorite minds of my own generation, like Damien Moreau and Tony DeRocca, were great admirers of William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg’s lifetime friend (and onetime lover) and the Beat least palatable to the general public, who wrote bannable book after bannable book.
These days, for Sam and the intelligent rebels of his generation, old Bill seems to have been replaced by the more contemporary Hunter S. Thompson, but the two men had more than a few things in common. Both were vociferously pro-drug, pro-gun, and anti-government; both yearned for a return to a (somewhat romanticized) frontier society; both were known for the anarchic subjectivity of their hallucinatory prose: Burroughs for his autobiographical “routines” featuring alter ego William Lee, and Thompson for his “gonzo” journalism that inserted him into the story as a central character. Both found the values and modus operandi of the American system corrupt and destructive to human beings. “The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,” said Burroughs, “the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.” “In a nation run by swine,” wrote Thompson, “all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.”
Academic David Savran wrote an interesting book (another for the reading list) ten years ago called Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. He has quite a bit to say about Burroughs and the Beats, and the effect of this postwar consumer culture on white guys in general (who are supposed to be the powerful ones), most of which is too dense and layered to go into here. He quotes Norman Mailer, who (in his essay “The White Negro”) talks about the (Beat) hipster as “postmodernist subject,” “the fragmented, decentered, ephemeral subject of late capitalism” — a male essentially stripped of history, continuity, meaning, or identity, and basically lost in the supermarket, so to speak (to borrow from a band Sam and I both like).
Analyzing “Howl,” Savran asserts quite graphically that “the ‘best minds,’ having introjected the god (‘Moloch,’ or American industrial capitalism), attempt to exorcise him by allowing themselves masochistically to be penetrated, adulterated, maddened, befouled — in short, feminized — by various sharp metallic objects, drugs, poisons, and cocks. Grisly variations upon the subjects of postwar commodity culture, they are sickened and destroyed by that which they compulsively and helplessly consume.”
I’d agree with Savran that mind-altering substances can “feminize” men, in a sense, but not in the masochistic and unnecessarily degrading way he (and perhaps Ginsberg) seems to mean here. Breaking down boundaries and inhibitions, drugs allow for a fuller range of emotion, perception, sense, color…almost exactly the opposite of that “flattening of voice” that Carol Gilligan watched happen in young boys as they became socialized for elementary school. Drugs not only bring relief from pain, but they can also, at least temporarily, open up shut-down capacities and faculties and enable a richer experience, a whole other spectrum of aliveness.
**
I am thinking again of Tony, that self-proclaimed hermit who wrote like a belligerent and even misogynistic version of the rock critic Lester Bangs — with a lot of sound and fury — but in person he came across as fragile, as if he might dissolve like spun sugar if you handled him too hard. He was a disturbing sort of handsome, intense and bony, with long, grey-streaked curls, and always seemed to be watching me with smoldering dark eyes. For a long time I averted my gaze uncomfortably from those smoldering dark eyes. But when I finally turned mine his way, he literally, visibly flinched, as if my focused attention physically hurt him. He would eventually push me away with violent protestations.
It was for Tony’s sake, for Damien’s sake, for Sonny’s and unknowingly for Sam’s sake that I tackled my independent studies in sociology, as well as for my own. These were highly intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive men, after all; it didn’t make sufficient sense to me to conclude that their affinity for chemicals and my affinity for them just meant that we were all similarly pathological (compared to some normative and faceless John Q. Public) and leave it at that. Maybe we are all misfits in a system where “fitting in” is its own kind of pathological. Of course there’s always a choice involved, but it’s naive to say that the alternative to being high is preferable to being high. Maybe one can’t blame society for all of one’s ills, but neither can one take personal responsibility for everything that’s wrong with our collective picture.
The 12-step Serenity Prayer says it all, actually, when it invokes one’s deity of choice to “grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” It recognizes that we are neither the masters of the universe nor its hapless pawns; we are fumbling along somewhere in between.
And god help us.
**
The wallpaper on my laptop is a photo of Sam, my only photo of Sam, but it wasn’t taken by me or by anyone I know. It’s an arty black-and-white shot that somehow wound up being appropriated from one of Sam’s former Internet presences (he wiped out all online Sammage because of thefts like this) and is for sale on a stock photo site. In the shot, his head is down, his brow propped against one wrist; he looks like a man at the end of his rope. So far it’s been used in print ads about addiction and mental illness, and has even made an appearance on a national TV talk show. It seems oddly appropriate that Sam’s image has been turned into a public signifier for stigmatized, tormented outsiders. I feel a pang every time I see it.
Sam’s retreat into silence may forever be a mystery to me, I may wonder ever after what was really going on with this young man who made me so very happy so very briefly, but regardless, he will always be the man who changed me. Sam changed me, in ways that no book, no counselor, no guide, no religion, no system, no theory, no practice, and no drug — prescribed or otherwise — has ever done.
I will always love him for that.
Now if I could just go on without him.
It’s a good sign that you’re viewing this, at least in part, in personal terms of how the experience has changed you for the better, and not solely dwelling on the “It’s over!” part, which is always a source of despair and sadness. My existentialism may leave you cold at times, but I have to at least say for the record that life experiences are what they are, and that “good” or “bad” is largely a matter of how we look at them. Having said that, it certainly does suck to go without the “good”, and I can only hope that things will change for the better.
Still working on my LJ post about last weekend at Burning Man Seattle, it was fuckin’ somethin’ else. I don’t think I got the real X-perience, but what I got I LOVED. It’s all set and setting, and that was just a great time and place to be involved in. Oddly enough, I don’t think I’m doing it justice, in that I’m not Gonzo enough in my prose. I’m hoping to have it up in a few days, before the whole thing gets away from me.
I’m reluctant to speak to your ideas on being a sensitive and authentic male (as I would flatter myself) in our society, as regards substance abuse/indulgence as a means of dealing with it, since it would necessarily involve some characterizing my views on our society and how I see myself in relation to it, and the last time I tried to do that I seemed to have only made you very aggravated, which is something I definitely think you don’t need right now. Suffice it to say that I personally feel that your depiction of society at large as being the reason that so many men act disaffected is off the mark. It leaves out (at least) one very significant factor. Put it this way: if, as you say, you saw FIGHT CLUB and “felt very, very sorry for men”–then I think you don’t understand the resonance of the movie in the American male mind. Yes, we all own a DVD copy (OK, I don’t, but I have a poster with the Eight Rules over my bed, no joke), but not in the same way that a lot of chicks have a copy of VAGINA MONOLOGUES. We all love FIGHT CLUB because it’s very, *very* funny.
Then again, I’m not supposed to talk about FIGHT CLUB….
Shit, Russ, I’m just glad someone’s reading and commenting. I can’t get myself to write for almost a month, and lose everybody. I get 40 hits in one day on “Bullet” and barely 10 when I put this up.
I never said FC wasn’t funny. Not as funny as “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” but funny.
As I draw near to the close of a series that grappled weekly with life and death and meaning, and am still wrestling mightily moment to moment with “reality” (wtf IS “reality,” anyway?), I can honestly say that right now what I believe is that absolutely NO one has ANY fucking clue whatsoever. Not my mother, forever trying to sell me some fuzzy-kitty version of Jesus, not my yoga friends with their oddly homogenous burbling about bliss, not our old Johnnie pals with their highbrow references to Dada and Pushkin, not you, my dear existentialist friend, and certainly not me.
just a brief comment, having read the first half and the end of this entry.
“grant me the strength to…” – I heard this quote this week…
“I will always love him for that” – that sounds good.
heard of a scientific approach that studied what men want from women which said that if a man says “i want you” and a woman fulfills this literally and gives herself to him with neck and crop, then he will immediately start to withdraw… that “scientist” talked about internal fights of self-assertion with self-abandonment…
but what to do with this observation? stuff for a ton of novels, I guess.
take care!
Neck and crop?
Now that I’m sober…
R: regardless of whether you agree with the exact argument, I think the crux of the question for me has always been this: is it me/us, or my/our culture, that’s “off?” Is my interior alarm system “healthy” to sound off, in an society hostile to what’s human, or do I simply need to be medicated, 12-stepped, counseled, diagnosed…perhaps even institutionalized? Should I trust my own authority, or turn it over to the psychiatrists and gurus and talking heads? Am I a rebel, or am I simply crazy? A freedom fighter, or a terrorist?
B: That would hold true, I think, for most of the guys I’ve been with, or tried to be with. But Sam was unlike any guy I’ve ever met. Even a week before he left, he was telling me he wanted me to know everything possible about him. And learn as much as he could about me.
neck and crop probably was the wrong idiom. should mean something like “to devote one’s body and soul to sth.”
in theory Sam could have been not in touch with his deeper instincts, which told him to withdraw, so his mind still told you to come even closer. but that is pure speculation.
i’m having some intense time currently.
“Just try to be a little kinder” ~ Aldous Huxley, at end of life, when asked for his main advice. -quoted form Peter Russels Twitter.
love is probably always the answer… send it out with light speed
& don’t forget to go jogging before, after or during drinking.
I like your advice on drinking, but I’m afraid it might lead to violent throwing up. Of course that might be the whole point.
No, that is not the whole point of drinking. And it’s something I was wanting to speak to, especially in regards to what you were saying about manhood/maleness and chemical usage. I wanted to bring up Hunter S Thompson’s quote about why he got high. I’ll have to check for the reference, but I clearly recall reading something he said about not understanding all the talk about drug/alcohol use as an escape from life’s hardships. Rather, he said, he had always thought of it “as a way of stepping on my own accelerator.”
Yes! THAT’S what I’ve been trying to actualize (and my post about Burning Man will flesh out a lot of detail about this–), that it’s not about an escape so much as a creation. Hard to describe, but you may already know what I mean (if not, here comes a lot of existentialist pontificating…).
And in keeping with that, I actually have a lot to say (not much you’ll find useful, though) about your questions on whether it’s you or it’s society, if your moral compass is askew or if it’s a larger, systemic problem–been a question for me since at least high school, and I’ve long since come up with an answer (however nuanced) that satisfies me, myself. I’ll leave that to tomorrow, when I will most likely have more time to write (since my boss will be out all day). Unfortunately, I won’t have the advantage of four beers and some (?!) whisky and lotsa THC to help inform my thinking, but I’m sure I can manage everything into coherent form nonetheless.
I was actually responding to what (I THINK) was a joke on bm3′s part about drinking and jogging. But I could be wrong.
i hope to have more time next week…
i personally have horrible experiences with alcohol and thc, as i think i wrote here already, and i would prefer to never have had those.
a.b., this time i really tried to somehow care for you, because of your drinking, and i just thought that some jogging might be good for you, to give raise to different thoughts, and to reduce some stress by muscle activity and so on… alcohol is still better than valium i guess…
are you drinking alone? any chance to not drink alone? maybe one day drinking one day jogging? or am i just seeing problems where everything is cool?
And I am in no way suggesting concerted drinking as a good option–but then again, I don’t counsel anyone to follow my lead, on anything. As Hunter S Thompson famously said, “I hate to advocate drugs, alocohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
On the Individual vs. Society:
I’m afraid my position hasn’t changed appreciably since we were students. Only difference is, I can cite even more life experience to illustrate it.
Which I won’t do, but in broad strokes, it’s this: neither side is right. Or wrong–if you want to look at it that way. By and large it’s a question of how you prefer to look at it. Unhelpful though that may be, it’s actually the basis of my worldview at 41.
Is it you, or is it everyone else? Someone in the equation has to be crazy, right? Well, the book that changed my life was CATCH-22, I should confess that right up front. And I’ve never encountered anything that even comes close to capturing that sense of I’m-not-crazy-you’re-crazy, which I took as a basis for constructing my moral relativism. I mean, I’d realized by about the 8th grade that I wasn’t going to fit in, no matter what I did. I was just destined to be an outsider, best I learn it early. And so I’ve spent my life from then as a freak, willfully at times, but I come by it naturally, and I haven’t apologized since.
Out of this, predictably, came a very strong sense of self. Which was maybe there along, and just asserted itself, I don’t know. Certainly I’ve noticed that not everyone around me carries on like this, but I’m not sure what to make of that, since I can only speak for myself.
Is it you, or is it society? I say, both. And neither (for good measure, but more instructively–). Almost certainly a mix of the two, which seems only natural to me since I don’t believe in absolutes. I notice you asked your questions in a binary way: “is it me or is it the system?” Which makes it seem as though the answer is going to fall completely on one or the other–but I think you see that it won’t be that easy. A lot of what you do may be informed by what society tells you is appropriate; call it “community standards”, if nothing else. That’s where I think we get our morals. Our ethics proceed from within, and are the best enunciation of who we are and what our values are. Morality is epistemological fast food; ethics are home-cooking. Only: how to determine which is appropriate, in any given situation?
I’ve never been bothered by the uncertainty of it all. Guess I’ve just gotten used to life’s randomness, or whatever. I know this plagued My Crazy (Ex-)Roommate to distraction, she really can’t process a lot of ideas unless she can make some sort of moral determination about it all first. That frustration with me, as someone who’s a pragmatist, was a factor in her decision to move out, I now realize. So I can understand this is most likely not very helpful, but it’s where I’m coming from.
Does any of this rambling make sense?
i think i understand some of it.
please excuse if the following may make no sense, i’m tired, but wanted to give a short response…
Hunter S Thompson shot himself in the head in the age of 67, and he said everything after 50 was more than he needed and boring. Hm…
so drugs, alcohol, violence and insanity have worked for him? at least until the age of 50, one might say.
insanity is not a role model – see charles manson. maybe he also would state that it has worked for him. notably he also consumed thc and alcohol.
psychosis, grandiosity, drugs and violence are not a good combination at all.
i don’t know if hunter ever has raped a woman while on drugs and feeling insane, for example, but if he has, it was not a good idea, i am sure.
maybe you see where i come from.
i’m ready to discuss in more detail, if you want, maybe also via email. hopefully by mid or end of next week I have more time.
Sometimes it’s more interesting to watch you guys go back and forth than respond myself. Also, I’ve lacked the energy to do so.
Bm3, please don’t worry about me and booze. I’m on day two of “drying out,” with no ill effects. I got through the SFU season finale this week, and ended my nightly tippling. I’ll miss it as a ritual, but drinking and smoking (tobacco or THC) were both things I really could always start and stop anytime. I go through my worst withdrawals over people, not substances. Alan Ball’s series and cheap wine were my grieving tools. I needed to go down in the hole and be drunk and cry and question my sanity and basically lose it for two whole months.
I was just thinking about how I could probably support an argument or two (e.g. that there was unambiguous mutuality) better if I were willing to go into greater detail about my conversations and experiences with Sam…really, I’ve spoken mostly in generalities about us, and him, and divulged my own feelings, but there are certain things I don’t want to drag into the fray, even on an anonymous blog, because I feel like I’d be betraying Sam just to make a point. (Even if abandonment is a kind of betrayal.) I do think (now sober, and remembering more clearly) that it’s fairly safe for me to say two things: one, that Sam was as emotionally involved and at least as eager to share himself as I was, UNTIL that bitter end; and two, that his life beyond our relationship had become unmanageable.
The latter actually reminds me of why it’s probably best that he left when he did, for both of our sakes. That’s the gift in it, I suppose.
…and Russ, I guess that does make sense, but not in a satisfactory enough way for me. I’ve never been able to resolve this issue to my satisfaction ever since the suicide of our friend (I’ll call her “Christina”) who had one of the most subtle and slyly brilliant minds I’ve ever encountered, with its own special synaesthesiac capacities…and who wound up institutionalized and pumped full of prescription drugs while her father (who I thought was the crazy one!) wrote me hysterical letters about what he wanted me to say to her. I honestly never knew what or who to believe about it all, and I still suffer over it, as if her life had depended on it.
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2hF2ujCeFw but also http://www.iraresoul.com/alicemiller.html
There are good reasons why I didn’t want to have kids. I read most of Miller’s books in the 90s, when I was doing my own therapy (I own Drama of the Gifted Child and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware) and I did agree hers was the likeliest explanation when it comes to things like violence and depression (I hated my father for years, then my mother!), but I still have no idea when it comes to other supposed “mental illnesses” like schizophrenia, which is what our friend was diagnosed with (and which usually manifests in the early 20s, and involves things like hearing actual voices). Collectively we do tend to just throw pharmaceuticals at people instead of looking more closely at what might be going on…
Incidentally, Carol Gilligan’s husband James, who works as a counselor with “hardened” prison populations, wrote a fascinating book on the roots of violence in shame.
I don’t discount the role of religion, either. In my case I felt like I grew up with a third, much more violent and unpredictable parent in the person of their so-called “loving” God. (I actually asked my mother once what she’d do if she were Abraham, ordered to kill me.) But I talked about this stuff a while ago, maybe it was in the post “Dragonfly Medicine.”
As much exhausting work on myself and reading in psychology and sociology as I’ve done, I’m still on the fence about many of these things. Who was more out of touch, Christina or the people trying to medicate her?
I tend to believe that schizophrenia is also related to unloving treatment by parents, like many other personality disorders.
Of course there are genetic dispositions, but also the unloving behavior of parents is related to their own genetic makeup and their own bad treatment as kids…
Often the process is like this: first we love our parents, dissociating away all that may be wrong, then we start to see all their flaws and crimes realistically (maybe in depressive realism), and next would be to stop hating them as we realize how they are victims too and how their brains are damaged, e.g. connection from limbic system to frontal cortex and so on, and how (often) they are really trying their best, given the damaged neuronal paths they have. But we can probably only proceed to the next step, if we really have released the stored body-memories, the fear, the anger…”it was not ok…it hurt” – but it is over.
Here’s an interesting contribution to the discussion that came to light today in the US news:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/man_finds_out_charles_manson_is_61i9864FLbmgCtOrHaYO0J
This (adopted) guy is a peacenik and a vegetarian who won’t even kill bugs, but he does struggle with schizophrenia…just like his famous (and very violent) father, whom he never met. So there may be something physical and genetic to it.
Not that I think you’re far off, in most cases.
very interesting story.
Consider that his mother was raped – what were her feelings when she was pregnant? And how did she react when the baby was born, I think it would be normal if she could not help to have some ambivalent feelings at least.
To assume a genetic factor is certainly legitimate, but this story proves that loving parents really make a difference (those who adopted him).
You can become a peaceful vegetarian even if your father is Charles Manson.
hope everyone is alright!
the urban monk wrote about gratitude & happiness recently,
don’t know if you all are full of that, sometimes it just might be hard, but probably you could always find something to be grateful about, like not living in Kabul or Darfur, like not having lung cancer, and so on. But yes, I know that’s like the half empty or half full glass. Do you know the comic with the broken glass that says “hey, it’s only half broken”?
but still, let’s kill the evil thought patterns – not ourselves !
I haven’t been reading Albert recently…you can read about my new fave PD person in my latest. Nice glass joke. And no, I’m not dead.
You continue to carry such a sense of shame and stigma about not thriving in this sick, chaotic world! Your mind is obviously not made up about the matter. You are still absorbing the implied criticism that goes with not being married with kids, gainfully employed, wealthy, the toast of the town – whatever your yardstick may be. Perceive this worry as the senseless mosquito it is instead of trying to reason with it back and forth. Stop worrying about who is right. Some fit in, some don’t. Things may improve for you or they may not. Many have suffered more and failed to reach 41. It could be that life has a value beyond the states of getting what you want and not getting what you want. Maybe. If it does, I recommend not worrying about the inevitable – you might discover serenity and grace in the midst of suffering. Even if you get everything you want, you will still die and lose it all anyway.
Look at zoo animals: they have a high incidence of abnormal behaviour; some of them simply die in captivity. It’s just a fact – there’s no question of whether to blame the zoo or the animal. The zoo is trying and failing to be the perfect zoo; the animal is trying and failing to adjust to the zoo. As Clint Eastwood says in ‘Unforgiven’: “deserve’s got nuthin’ to do with it.”
Hey look! A new peeps! Hi G…
What you say is pretty Buddhist…I accepted similar reasoning all during my 20s to support my not aspiring to much. But I’ve never been able to just shake off something as deeply rooted as shame. As you may have noticed, I take feelings seriously, as if they were the dial on a compass. It’s how I make my way through the world. I believe they tell us when a part of us is asking to be healed, and I still believe healing is possible. Hell, I *know* it is. Being involved with Sam healed me some. Working with Lisa Brown healed me some more. It just took a while, and a fair amount of work beforehand.
I think the question here is how much relative power (or helplessness) we really have. I’ve lived for many years believing quite thoroughly in my own helplessness. Lately I’m trying out behaving as if I’m not quite so helpless, and things have already improved somewhat…at least in terms of my dating life. As my friend bluemorpho3 recently pointed out, we tend to filter our experience according to our expectations (in my case, expectations of failure). To quote Anais Nin, we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.
When I was a little girl, I had dreams of being a successful artist/writer and some kind of healer. (And of course I always loved boys.) As an adult, I despaired of all those dreams. Who’s to say the child was wrong, and the adult was right? People overcome all kinds of odds, odds much worse than my own. “Argue for your limitations and they’re yours” – I don’t remember who said that, but I’m not making quite as many assumptions about my limitations these days.
Many prominent Buddhists were wilful and ambitious. Hakuin Zenji is credited with reinvigorating Zen in his era and was a prolific and talented painter and poet, among other things. He built a monastery from rubble, practised the harshest austerities and attracted the most hardcore students around. Nevertheless, he struggled to give up sweets, tobacco and booze – no one is perfect.
He was not – as far as we know – and egomaniac who exploited his followers like Chogyam Trungpa; I rule that guy out altogether as an example of great spiritual attainment. His story is just ego run riot, freed from normal restraint and humility, surrounded by worshippers with fuzzy new-age beliefs and too many drugs.
An animal expresses itself fully and does not lament about what it might have been or should be. Whatever it is, it is, whether that involves a long prosperous life or not.