The Benefits of Writing

[first posted November 2015]

Write two paragraphs and call me in the morning.

"Science has good news for people who write: The consequences of putting pen to paper go beyond hand cramps and furrowed eyebrows. Study after study has linked the act of writing to myriad mental and physical health benefits, including elevated mood and emotional well-being, decreased stress, an improved ability to deal with trauma and even physical healing."

FULL ARTICLE from whence come these conclusions.

Some Thoughts on Addiction

What do you think of when you hear the term - Addiction?

Heroin? Drugs? Perhaps, alcohol? How about nicotine, sex, shopping or gambling?

"Addiction is a condition that results when a person ingests a substance or engages in an activity that can be pleasurable but the continued use/act of which becomes compulsive and interferes with ordinary life responsibilities, such as work, relationships, or health."

One often hears: "We're all addicts" or "we all have addictions."

Songs are written about it.

"You might as well admit it, you're addicted to love." - Robert Palmer

"There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes." - John Prine

Addictions come in all shapes, forms and sizes. Some we cope with, others destroy us. Many of them simply chew up the fabric of our lives.

Take the Internet and it's death eater - Facebook.

I'm on a sabbatical from FB right now. Even went so far as to delete my last several months of posts, comments and likes. Addictions not only steal brain cells,  kill relationships and undermine well-being; we often overlook the ones that are just time sucks.

Minutes, hours and days can be consumed by the internet. Television, well admittedly in somewhat of a Golden Age right now, has spawned so many orphans (Netflix, Hulu, Roku, Sling, Amazon Prime) we can binge watch shows that haven't even aired yet.

Regrets, I've had a few but into the future the only Time Bandits I'm allowing in my world are those from Monty Python and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Oh, and Game of Thrones when it comes back

and the Coen Brothers

maybe PokerStars

but that's all

except for Ben & Jerry, which is a whole other addiction . . .


composite photo by Stephen McMennan

A Question (#1 in a series)

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” -- John Steinbeck

How do you, how does anyone defend the right of the 1% to be greedy, avaristic bastards?

I asked that question of a friend of a friend, a known moderate republican. Okay, so I might have softened the wording just a bit, but I got an immediate answer.

"I don't know why anyone begrudges another person the right to make a lot of money."

I let that sit for awhile and then followed up with this: "Don't you think someone who has become wealthy based in this system of free enterprise. Don't you think they owe something to country that gave them the freedom to make all that money?"

"What exactly did the government give them?"

I had to go with the obvious answer: "Well let's see. Roads and railways to transport their goods, the Internet to advertise and make sales. An educated workforce via the public school system. Tax breaks . . . shall I go on?"

"What do you think they should give back?"

"Well, first it would be nice if they paid taxes and didn't ship jobs out of the country."

"But both of those are legal."

"So, you're okay with someone dodging taxes using IRS loopholes, while you pay your fair share and you don't come home to a swimming pool, a vacation villa and half a dozen luxury cars?"

"I am perfectly find with it. It's called the American Dream."

Clearly, this lady and others like her have a very different Dream than I do. Though their view of fairness does remind me of what happens some  dark nights, only I call them -- nightmares.

art credit: timeline photos

Ain't Love Grand

"You can maximize your probability of finding the best spouse if you date about 37 percent of the available candidates in your life, and then choose to stay with the next candidate who is better than all previous ones."

Liberal Brain/Conservative Brain

I admit it - I am fascinated by the newest and latest research on the human brain. We are learning so much, so fast about why we are, who we are, why we think, love, talk, walk and do so many things good, bad, brilliant and deplorable. Some of the latest research in this election year is about what might make us either liberal or conservative when it comes to both our politics and our social interactions.

Long term studies of preschool assessments are showing that children noted to be expressive, gregarious and impulsive were more likely to grow up to be liberals. While future conservatives were more inhibited, uncertain and controlled. A mixed bag assessment for both groups. Conservatives to be were also children who were more organized, stable and thrifty; while the emerging liberals were more impulsive, indecisive and often irresponsible. 

Ambiguity was not a troubling issue for the liberal youngsters but often troubled the organized conservative kids. A stronger more limited moral code was seen in conservative kids, while liberal youths were more open to a variety of interpretations of right versus wrong.

What does this all mean?

It appears when both potential life styles show themselves early but are influenced by parents, schooling and other societal influences. Once set, however, the viewpoints tend to solidify as do other "adult" traits. Yet when viewed through the lens of brain research we can perhaps see from whence we evolved and consider the choices we made and those that were made for us by others.

The potential for growth and change resides in each of us but often is held rigidly by decisions made long before we were able to reason as an individual and make the choices that caste us as who we want to be rather than who others wished us to be.

Motivated Avoidance

"Research suggests the feeling that an issue is 'above one's head' leads people to feel dependent on the government, and this dependence is managed by trusting the government more to deal with an issue, and this is managed by avoiding the issue. This is psychologically easier than taking a significant amount of time to learn about an issue, all the while confronting unpleasant information about it."

Those findings come from research that looked at issues like the economic downturn or global warming and how people deal (or don't deal) with the troublesome aspects of such facts of life. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology uses terms like "Motivated Avoidance" or more strongly "Motivated Ignorance" to report their findings. 

The study found that when problems were presented with complex information and data, people were more likely to defer to some higher authority like government or scientists. When issues were presented in more simple terms with real world references, people were less likely to head for the avoidance behaviors. 


All of which implies that when presented with life real complexity, we tend to act like a Monty Python character. 

Some Personally Occupied Perspective

Call this my penultimate post of the year, check back Sunday for more on that.

I want to look at the four major points I have discovered in the past two months that are driving the Occupy Movement, the Tea Party and me personally.

I. Income Inequality, which for me is better expressed as Opportunity Inequality. The land of the free and the home of the brave has become a rigged game. Wall Street and Washington DC have conspired to put the American Dream so far in debt that none of us will ever have the opportunities our national government was originally formed to preserve and defend. We must tear down those institutions that are too big to fail, because only the nation deserves that label and if we do nothing - the nation will fall.

II. Money in Politics. This one has surprised me. I really had no sense of just how angry the overwhelming majority of citizens are that the government has been bought. Everybody knows it. Everyone is mad as hell about it, except those doing the buying. Once again we see the coalition of greed between Wall Street and elected officials. It has got to stop or we will get the same result - the nation will fall.

III. The Main Stream Media. No one trusts them anymore. No one. Several of my conservative friends gave up on Fox News because they just knew the news would be slanted every single day on every single story. CNN may actually be worse with Wolf Blitzer's breathless excitement over the endless stale parade of republican debates and new polling results. The good news is that the internet provides so many avenues of excellent on-site sources for news and commentary from the thoughtful to the extremely paranoid. Everyone can tune in the ultimate in Free Speech.

IV. The Department of Defense. For me, defense spending has been at the heart of our budget problems for decades. Do you realize the United States still maintains a force of nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea nearly 60 years after the military conflict ended. Not to mention huge bases in Germany and Italy staffed and maintained since WWII. Just last week Barack Obama agreed to huge new military expenditures for a U.S. presence in Australia.

To put it simply. We are not the police force for the world. We should not be. The U.S. Constitution is not a blueprint for the world. There actually are other cultures different from the one we know and they are not for lack of a huge military inferior to ours.

Cutting the U.S. Defense Department by 25%* would fully fund programs in health, education and research; including government seed monies for research and development to reassert the U.S. economy on the world stage. But we can do none of these things if we keep dumping billions of dollars into foreign wars that drain our resources not to mention maiming and wounding our military.

*By the way, none of the DoD cuts should come out of veteran's benefits for medical services or counseling.

V. Other issues. Yes, there are more. You probably don't agree with my top four. The Occupy Movement is about facilitating all voices; the needs and demands of those voices. Occupy is a call for deep change—not temporary fixes and single-issue reforms—this is the movement’s sustaining power. Here are some things you can do to get involved.

-and here is an analysis of Occupy from Mother Jones that is worth considering even if you haven't been in a tent in twenty years:

"The occupations provided a catalyst, but the most interesting conversations haven't taken place in the camps via the human mic. They've happened among the millions of people who found that kids in tents were quite effectively articulating their own sense of abandonment. What comes next is the question that should occupy us in 2012, and beyond."

Occupying Creeping Bureaucracy

"OccupySF follows consensus process. Peoples Reserve CU and OccupyMission are not organs of OccupySF, 

as they exist out of process." 

That's a recent tweet communication from someone regarding the organizational structure of Occupy San Francisco. The statement is both twitter-speak and Occupy lingo. I will translate: 

As with many non-hierarchal meeting structures, most of the Occupy groups use some form of consensus building process in order to reach decisions. For one such process you can view this short youtube video. The intention is not to get stuck in the old leader/committee/elite decision making process. Everyone should be involved with an equal voice no matter who you are or when you joined the movement. So ...

"OccupySF follows a consensus process." There are often local tweaks and twists to the process but the basics are usually the same and Occupy San Francisco uses just such a decision making process in the General Assembly (GA) meetings and in sub-groups created by the GA.

"Peoples Reserve CU and Occupy Mission are not organs of OccupySF." The Proposed People's Reserve Credit Union and the new encampment in the Missions District are not extensions of the original Occupy San Francisco @ Justin Herman Plaza organization. They are separate entities functioning under their own forms of decision making arrangement.

".. as they exist out of process." These are the key words that prompted my post today. The author means that both of these offshoot organizations weren't not created via the consensus process within OccupySF, therefore they exist outside of that process and are not authorized nor formally condoned by Occupy San Francisco. 

Fine. I do not disagree with the content of this tweet and I acknowledge the difficulty of communicating anything in 140 characters or less. So I have no issue with the original author. I do, however, have a big concern about that queasiness anyone including myself felt upon reading "as they exist out of process."

Insider speak is necessarily exclusive of those who don't know the secret handshake and don't have the decoder ring. We can excuse that in a twitter communication or a brief email but there is a more serious hidden agenda here, I would be interested if you had the reaction I did.

Did you find the communication strident? Did it sound vaguely like - "we have rules and if you don't follow the rules you are out." Should the 99% already be broken into ten groups of 9% or ninety-nine consensus meetings of 1% each? Yes there does need to be some sense of order and some means of processing the hearts, minds and feelings of members but guidelines become rules, rules become laws and laws lead to exclusion not inclusion.

Pace and the Wisdom to Ignore It

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. -- Niels Bohr

I am not claiming to be an expert but perhaps simply the holder of some wisdom accumulated over time. Recently I was doing was long-distance skype counseling session and heard words from my client that I had heard several times before. Now it's not unusual for individuals to have similar issues in their life, as much as we yearn to be uniquely ourselves we do share common thoughts, desires and frustrations. In this case my client was in an almost identical situation to two previous clients. 

This is one of my stories, it's not about any of the three clients and I am not going to disclose the exact life situation they shared. Just for clarity let's say they all had a similar scary nightmare when they were young.

There is a full decade between my current client and the previous one and another decade or more to the first time I was told about the 'nightmare' by a client, probably sometime in the late 80s. After the recent skype session I pondered just how differently I had reacted to those three so very similar situations.

My first experience happened during one of those 'kitchen sink' second sessions with a client. Sometimes after an introductory therapy session the client will spend the week thinking that they did not get all of their 'issues' out on the table, so in the second meeting they talk and talk about everything, just so the therapist has the whole picture of their life situation. When this happens the therapists has to spend a lot of time sorting and absorbing the client's words. Unfortunately, I did not give full weight to the 'nightmare' disclosure and that lack of therapeutic insight delayed the client's progress.

Ten or twelve years later, I picked up on the significance of the client's words as he said them but I also recognized he was not ready to pursue that particular aspect of his recovery. You see there is a therapeutic concept known as pace. If you push a client too soon or too hard they will shut down or run away; well that's the short version of pace. I was really into therapeutic pace back then. What? You didn't think therapists had strategies and styles?

Finally the most recent client. Again I knew exactly what was being said but I also knew this client was interested in progress - immediate progress. So I pushed back, when she resisted I pushed harder. Was I violating the client's pace? Possibly, but I am older and potentially wiser. On her third attempt at deflecting the conversation I said:

"Look we can talk about your boyfriend being distant or your boss being a dumb ass manager; but I thought you wanted to get to why you are unhappy and since you just told me exactly why, shall we talk about that?" 

There are lots of responses you can get from a client, some good, some bad, some confusing and some confirming. She said:

"Remind me next time to see a therapist who can't see so easily into my soul."

Therapeutically speaking I've made most of the mistakes before and from those hopefully I've gain a modicum of wisdom, if not expertise.

[Situational aspects of these client interactions have been changed to protect the indentity of the clients. No animlals were harmed in the writing of this post.]

--

photo from National Geographic

Aha! Moments

Sunset on Horseshoe Falls, Yosemite National Park

There is an Aha! Moment television ad in which a guy plays music at a Ronald McDonald house and a young girl comes up who has just had cochlear implants. It is the first music she ever heard. It reminded me of a story from the two years when I was a demi-god in a virtual world. Yes, a real job with Fujitsu of America, down in Silicon Valley. This was one of the early graphic virtual attempts (WorldsAway for the internet addicted) I was there in '97 & '98 before the dot.com crash.

We had volunteer helpers in the world, members who were experienced and given special powers to help new members, mediate problems and general keep an eye on things when the paid staff were not "in world." We called those helpers acolytes, this is a story one of them told and we retold when the business side of the company wanted to know what we were doing over there in our dark cave.

You get an avatar when you first entered the world and part of the identity process was making your avatar unique and recognizable to others. You could buy clothes, change your hair style and color, carry a cane or a pinwheel, have a pet puppy or a parrot on your shoulder. But the real defining change was the head. You could buy heads out of a vending machine and create yourself anew. Rare heads made for a thriving trade in noggins.

So one fine day, one of our acolytes gets a page from a member, the 'acolyte page' was an option for anyone inworld but was used most often by newbies who were just acquainting themselves with the virtual world. The acolyte responded with a standard - "How may I help you?"

Acolytes are usually busy with several citizens, so it was not unusual not to get an immediate reply. After three or four minutes, a reply came back - "I want to buy a new head."

Clearly a request from a new member and since heads are the most expensive items inworld and since you earn tokens by being inworld, it was likely the new member had not accumulated enough credits for the big purchase. The acolyte knew this, so she walked over to find the newbie and assist them. She messaged - "I will come over to you."

It took the acolyte a couple of minutes to reach the citizen, just as she got there the newbie responded - "Thank You."

Two responses each with a lead time of several minutes. Conversational lags are significant in virtual reality worlds, it could mean any number of things but being aware of them is part of virtual maturity.

The acolyte said - "Shall we go over to the store and look at some new heads?"

Again, a long lag before - "Yes, thank you."

[I am omitting a lot of the dialog here but let me just say that each move from locale to locale inworld takes two mouse clicks and each speech communication obviously takes both mouse work and key strokes. The summary is that it took the acolyte about 45 minutes to walk the citizen to the store and have them look at each of the heads on display. There were long pauses on each and every communication even though the acolyte took the initiative to accelerate the interaction by operating the head vending machines and commenting on each item for sale.]

Finally the member had selected a head and the acolyte being a good helper offered to buy the new head for the member. - "No, I would like to do it myself" was the reply.

The acolyte stepped away from the vending machine and over about five minutes the citizen was able to purchase the new head and try it on for the first time. After several more minutes the member wrote - "Thank you very much, I will write more later."

Our acolyte moved on to other requests she had been putting off while helping the member with the new head. But she was absolutely sure there would be more to the story. About an hour later, she got this message:

"My name is John. I am the person you helped buy my new head. Thank you again. I was born without the use of my arms or legs, I operate my computer with a blow straw. Until I found this world I had never ever earned any wages and today for the very first time in my life, I bought something for myself. Thank you again."

Aha.

Constructing a Personality

"I am just a bundle of reaction formation responses."

I don't know if I love my friends because they are my friends or if they are my friends because I love them. But I do know I love the wonderful things they say. So much laughter, learning and blog fodder.

Reaction formation refers to a coping mechanism (Freudian defense mechanism) by which we replace unacceptable or anxiety producing behaviors and emotions with their direct opposite. Or at least what is perceived to be the opposite. Different flip-sides for different folks as it were.

Of course, as with all psychological theory it all gets much more diffuse and complicated as applied to various personas and personalities. For instance, if you are reacting to a parent who is often angry then you might avoid anger yourself by overly compensating, being always agreeable, never oppositional. Perhaps trading one dysfunctional behavior for another. How then does someone express an emotion like anger when reacting to a pathological use of that same emotion in parents or peers?

Well fortunately we are not just a bundle of reaction formations. We really do have free will; we actually can break free of whatever traits our childhood imposed upon us. Our maturation allows us options other than reaction formation. Still buried down deep or not buried at all lurks the remanent of all we have been and might have been. All twisty and turny (psychological terms) yet changeable, malleable and unique.

All my friends are nearly normal and I love them for exactly those qualities.

Knowledge & Ignorance

"What did he know and when did he know it."

For those who may have forgotten or who are too young to remember; that question was bantered about during the Nixon/Watergate fiasco. The question was - did Tricky Dick know about the break-in; if he knew, when did he know. The same question was asked about the subsequent cover-up.

"Sometimes it's better not to know."

Now there's an adage that drives pragmatists crazy, until they are themselves in a morally ambiguous situation where it's ... well, better not to know. I think plausible deniability begins with this concept.

So when is it better to know and when not? Today's story is one of my own, a real event that happened to me over twenty years ago. I have written once before about the death of my best friend, this story unfolds three or four weeks after his death. He died of complications from AIDS, during the last year I went to Tom's various appointments with him. Sometimes I took notes, other times I asked the medical questions that weren't being asked; I kept track of things.

This was 1989, there was no internet to provide everyone with reams of information but we were in L.A. so there were resources. At some point Tom started getting a monthly AIDS update newsletter, he would read it and then pass it on to me. At some point in the final months he lost interest and the newsletters went unopened. 

Several months after his death I was cleaning out his home office and came across the newsletters including the last three or four still unopened. I was going to donate them to a local information and support program but for some reason I decided to open the last few. On the back page of one was an article titled: Progression of Disease for those with Pneumocystis Pneumonia and T-Cells under Fifty. Exactly Tom's condition so I read the article. 

I can remember sitting there in amazement as the article mirrored his last six months almost precisely. What drugs would be prescribed. What side effects to expect. What opportunistic other disease attacks to watch for. It was a retrospective telling of the end of his life. I even said out loud: "Well now you tell me." Yet I wonder...

A decade later while my mother was failing, friends and family would ask about her prognosis. What to do about estate planning, finances, bring the grandkids to see her and when? I always had the same 'lighten the mood' answer - "I could answer that question if someone could just tell me how long this play runs." Tell me when this will be over and I'll tell you how to make those type of plans.

But, of course, this is not what life or death is about. That's not how it works. But 20 years ago, if I had opened that newsletter; I would have know. How might those final weeks have been different. What might we have done or not done, if we had known. For me, not much would have changed; but there were others who delayed or denied - perhaps I could have given them better advice but who would have believed that I had a day planner for the end of days.

Fractals of the Past

Fractals of My Past: Serial Cerebral Eruptions in Both Hypnagogic 

and Hypnopompic States of Consciousness.

Sometimes the olde academic creeps out and we must have long titles with a strategically placed colon. What that jumble of mumble title refers to is a series of events I encountered not long ago, in which I experienced for several days a recurring pattern of thought. These thoughts occurred just as I was falling asleep, that transitional phase between wakefulness and sleep is called the hypnagogic state. They also happened in the early morning as I transitioned back from sleep to wakefulness or what is labeled the hypnopompic state.


Now we all experience some fairly jumbled mind-space imagery at times in the spaces between sleep and not-sleep. This is not unusual at all. But for two days, both morning and night I had a series of remembrances that were all of a very similar content. I vividly recalled incidents from my life in which I was either guilty of a social faux pas or some form of minor embarrassment. All of these events I regret but only in the incrementally smallest manner possible; anything less and I would not even be able to recall them. They were what are known clinically in the psychological profession as minor oopsies.


Yet time after time I would wake or drift towards sleep and find myself reliving yet another such memory. After several such incidents, I shook myself and began to consciously imprint a mental suggestion to avoid such cerebral cobwebs; a little shrink trick you can use when you start thinking about snakes or spiders or old girlfriends. But I stopped myself and decided to let the silly string play out on this one.


There was that too flippant comeback to the nice married lady at the Manhattan Beach party.


The rude slip of the tongue to the nun on the playground in third grade.


The unintentional sexual innuendo to that redhead and instead of politely withdrawing I followed-up, I wonder if she ever forgave me.


That tiny white lie that exploded in West Hollywood, how was I to know she had been to that motel?


I estimate that over two days there were at least ten or twelve of these mental machinations that welled up from the depths of my subconscious. The last was so vivid it awoke me at 3 a.m. but it was the last. The parade of mortification was gone as suddenly as it had begun and I was left with run of the mill prurient fantasies to lull me to sleep.


Strange what goes bump in the near night and dark mornings.

Conscious Control of Emotions

Here's the scenario, the scene and the set-up: 


Someone I knew and was voluntarily interacting with had the potential to really mess with my life. History told me this person could easily do something selfish, nasty, even evil. I knew this. When it inevitably happened I reacted as if I knew it were coming . . . because I did - snakes do not change their nature. I had consciously armored myself for this eventuality and dealt with it without emotional upset. I calmly made other plans and moved on.


Then I went to sleep . . . 


We really can learn to control our emotions consciously. We really can't or shouldn't learn to do that with our subconscious. I experienced a night of anxiety, anger and abandonment. It was ever so fascinating because each time I awoke I knew exactly what was going on - my subconscious was processing the selfish betrayal of someone who just isn't worth the price of warm spit to me. That doesn't mean the deep animal brain of my paleolithic ancestors did not want to hack him or her to shreds with a blunt stone axe. But no, I am civilized - I would use a well-honed blade and get the carnage over with quickly.


But no, I am civilized and evolved and I did what properly matured and restrained humanoids do -- triple scoop, hot fudge, no sprinkles.

M&M Monday - OCD

One of the comment traits of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is the need to have items in straight rows or consistent groupings. I clearly am not OCD because when I offered this picture as a joking example to two of my moderately OCD friends, I received the following responses:

"The yellow are too high and completely out of square, have you considering using a straight edge to get them right?"

"When you enlarge the photo you can clearly see that there has been no effort to align the embossed M's on the individual candies."

Also I can now attest that cats are seldom OCD or at least Midnight is not because just after I took the picture above his paw snaked up from the dining room chair to this result.

"Before there was Prozac, we had purring cats."

--

M&M Art by me and Midnight

Star 80

I 've had this post lingering in the queue for several months or more. Then last night it came up again "the scariest movie I have ever seen was . . . " For me the scariest film  is derived from the scariest character ever. If you have seen Star 80 you probably agree with me and very possibly you are not going to finish reading this post because you don't want to be reminded.

Star 80 is the story of Playboy playmate of the year (1979) Dorothy Stratten, played in the movie by Mariel Hemingway. Eric Roberts plays her boyfriend and low life Svengali. The story plays out in Hollywood and in particular at the Playboy Mansion. It ends when Paul Snider (the real life character) murders the real Dorothy Stratten and then kills himself. Now the story itself is not that unusual. What is compelling is acting of Eric Roberts.

If you have ever known a person, probably a man, who could literally go from love to hate in an instant, then you know Paul Snider. The mercurial explosions of anger, hate and the fear such behavior engenders has never been depicted as frighteningly as it is in Star 80.

The film came out in 1983, it was not a big success; too close to the truth apparently. But still today Roberts is often asked about the film and finds people still reacting to the brilliant fearfulness of this character.

I highly recommend the film and I strongly suggest you see it with the lights on.

M&M Monday - BiPolar Disorder

I mentioned that my M&Ms series was prompted by some psychologically based art I saw on the web. I was struck by how some psychology terms could be graphically represented. Today three images of what we might visually imagine as bipolar disorder, which used to be manic-depression and before that schizophrenia.

Sometimes we think of bi-polar disorder as being an A or B state of mind (below); when, in fact, it is very often more like AcdefghizyxwvutsrqwnkthvydhskB multi-stated state of mind (above).

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't.

--

Art by: me

Did the Suicidal Nut Job Change Your Day?

I apologize for that headline, the man being referenced is officially "mentally unstable," it was cruel and heartless of me to refer to him as a nut job. It seems in response to family issues he took his SUV, armed with red flashing lights (security guard) onto the Bay Bridge early this morning. He then stopped in traffic, got out with a handgun and a cell phone and proceeded to call police and a radio station, his actions caused the bridge traffic to be shut down for several hours. He eventually threw the gun into the bay and surrendered to police.

Tens of thousands of commuters had their days changed. Workers were late to the office, students missed classes, dentist appointments had to be rescheduled, someone leaving San Francisco in a U-Haul truck intent on moving back to the midwest felt the hand of the god of traffic telling them not to go. I missed breakfast with my friend M who was coming over from the City, she eventually just gave up and turned back. I took an uncommonly early shower but I got the text message while still dripping and nekkid, so at least I didn't waste a change of clean underwear. I just put on a just laundered cotton writing outfit and went back to my current story and vowed once again to have my big mental break with reality while out in the forest alone. 

If you have an existential crisis in the woods, does anyone hear your soul searching?

Two notes for locals and architectural historians:

Note #1: Yes this did happen Thursday morning, not actually today. But I already had a post up on Thursday and I really hate to double-dip.

Note #2: Did you take a close look at the photo up there at the top? Notice anything missing? The shot is from 1935 during the construction of the Bay Bridge and not only are there still a few lights to be installed, the double deck of the bridge itself had not yet been bolted into place. And commuters thought Thursday morning was a tough ride.

Dis-Ease

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

-Albert Camus

Today a little vignette to illustrate my point. About twenty years ago, I knew a lady, perhaps she was a client. Marnie was 36, had three kids and a husband who traveled for work often. She worked full time, kids were in school - 9th, 6th and 3rd grade; family planning don't you know. Big comfortable house that came with a big uncomfortable mortgage. The office where she worked was about fifteen miles from home, not a long commute but not right around the corner either. Dean, the husband, worked in the city a solid 40 miles one way and he was out of town two weeks a month though not always for the full week each time. Enough frequent flyer mileage that airport travel and big winter weather patterns were a family concern, at least for the adults.

Money was not tight but they did spend what they made. They did not want for the stuff their social standing required but without any real savings they were precariously perched on the lowest rung of the upper middle class. There was no marital cheating, no heavy drinking except perhaps at the two or three major social events of the year. Sometimes they had sex but mostly they were too tired. The kids were everything and as Marnie said at our first meeting: "Our family is everything and that's not enough."

I had scribbled in my notes: "middle class malaise" - a pithy but accurate diagnosis.

A couple of months into our conversation I had a vacation coming up and Marnie joked about patient abandonment. When I returned there was a cancellation for her next appointment, so we had a interlude of nearly a month between sessions. When we met again, she had a new plan for her family. There had been an accident, four of the neighborhood boys were in the car and one was killed. He was the son of one of Marnie's neighborhood friends. He was one of her son's friends but David, her son, had been at a weekend soccer meet and not in the fatal car. 

Marnie and her family were past the trauma, it had been over three weeks since the accident. But her plan came out of the realizations of that loss so close to home. She and her husband were about to tell the children that they were going "slow down the treadmill" -their imagery not mine. No more designer clothes, no more new gadgets, more home cooked meals, more family time. Eventually, dad was going to cut back on travel. Basically, they were going to stop living up to some ideal that Madison Avenue was promoting, again their language. Oh and -- no more therapy.

If you will, try to put yourself inside Marnie's body before the life changing accident. Feel the pressure of keeping up, get a sense of the frustration that comes out as "it's just not enough." Imagine the stress of each child, not one not two but three, the husband, job, bills, the future and the path that stretches in front of you. Got it?

Now take all of that angst, pack in all into one big amorphous blob; detach the family, the job, the entire external world. All you have left is the feeling of dis-ease, of not being calm or content or quiet or relaxed or at ease. Now stuff that big gob of unsatisfactorness into your body, your heart, your spirit, your soul. And wake up every morning feeling without ease. Nothing to attach the feeling to, not a job or a bad relationship or too many bills. The feeling of dis-ease exists as an entity unto itself and unto yourself.

There are people who have that experience every day of their life.

Sure there are degrees, sometimes you can control the darkness with strength of will. Pharmaceuticals work sometimes too, of course, what suppresses the anxiety also damps down the joy. Then you get to add in life, you remember this dis-ease comes fully formed without the everyday anchors of work, money, relationship, health care, Iraq, hurricanes or oil spills. No you get to start your day already burdened by the grey of greys, now stir in what the "normal people" call life and prepare for the big overwhelm.

The point? 

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Don't be a nobody [or be a nobody, wait reverse that].

Catastrophizing

I have a couple of issues today. First of all -- catastrophizing is not a word. I am normally not against adverbializing, gerunding, adjectivization, participlization, izing, ising and generally expanding the language. But some of it just comes out as lazy language. Prime example: "Are you disrespecting me?"

No, I am not! I am, however, showing disrespect towards your behavior because you have not made the effort to learn how to speak. Back to catastrophizing, according to some lame brain academics. Catastrophizing is an irrational thought wherein we believe something is far worse than it actually is. This is apparently treatable and therefore can be billed to your HMO.

Now I don't want to be a cynic here, nor do I want to dismiss what for some individuals might be a disrupting influence in their life. Mental health issues comes in a wide variety of shapes, forms, sizes and phobias; just about as many as there are mental beings walking the planet. Here is my real issue.

You might have heard the term: catastrophizing in the last month or so, as it relates to U.S. combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems that some of our soldiers are having thoughts that they are really in danger and that nothing good will come of their service in these foreign lands. Or what some mental health professionals would label -- rational thinking.

But, as far as the military is concerned, not correct thinking. These soldiers apparently do not have their heads on straight, so the U.S. Department of Defense has turned to psychology to combat this less than optimal mindset of its minions. The U.S. Army is planning to require that all 1.1 million of its soldiers take intensive training in positive psychology and emotional resiliency. Or what psychology professionals call Positive Psychology.

You should know that Positive Psychology is very controversial within the world of professional psychology. In particular, the idea that clearly dangerous or negative life situations should somehow be given a positive spin is viewed as the equivalent of brainwashing by some highly respected mental health professionals; particularly when such wisdom is dispenses along with psychiatric medication as is apparently the case for over one in six serving members of the U.S. Army.

Adding flavor to this mish-mash of military policy, the army has suggested that they have "40,000 teachers" able to train or retrain their 1.1 million soldiers. Those teachers would be the drill sergeants, always known for taking a deep interest in their students and imbuing them with a positive outlook on life and their future prospects. I am reminded of Jerry Della Femina's book -- From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.

To read the full article on this bit of military brilliance, go here. And remember, it is always darkest before the dawn, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel and catastrophizing circumstances may cause carbuncles, cankers, consumption and constipation; however, it is often also a sign of sanity and therefore something apparently to be avoided.