Five Weird Things

Thank you for the tag, Bigg. Here are Five Weird Or Random Things About Me:

1. I have never in my entire life won a game of chess against anybody.
2. No member of my family, going back as far as great grandparents and outward in all directions all the way through brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles all the way to all known second cousins has ever been divorced. (2a: My family is living proof that this is not necessarily a good thing.)
3. My favorite food is Brussels sprouts.
4. Whenever I am singing Happy Birthday To You with a group I feeled compelled to harmonize on the last four words of the song, loudly and badly. I am not musical and can't sing on key and I know I should stop myself from doing this but I can't.
5. I doodle so much while I'm on the phone or supposedly working that I can go through all the ink in a ballpoint pen in a day.

Having been tagged, I hereby tag Anna (who we all hope is feeling better), Marco (who blogs seldom and may not see this), Bill, Jason and Facets of V. Simple instructions:

1. Thank the person who tagged you.
2. In your blog post five weird, strange or random things about yourself.
3. Tag five people.

Yes I know this is the 21st century equivalent of a chain letter. Fortunately it comes with neither a promise that you will win a million dollars if you do it nor a threat that terrible things will happen to you if you don't. It seems to be some kind of harmless community ritual, and that is all.

The Heart of the Problem

I started three-day-a-week psychoanalysis at the age of six. Yes, three days a week a lady my parents hired (both parents worked during the day) picked me up from first grade in a big old car that smelled of gasoline and drove me to the psychiatrist's office where I talked about--what? What does a six year old tell his analyst? I'd give anything to get hold of his notes and find out.

That's not the point: the point, as I noted in my last post, is that the inside of my head has never been a nice place to be, and clearly that fact became apparent at an early age. I'm now approaching this blog in much the way one of my favorite bloggers approaches his: as a way of telling his own story to himself in the hope that as it unfolds he will have a better understanding of how he got to where he is now and how he should face the present. For me, I would add another dreadedly overused and loaded word: I want to heal. I don't want broken glass in my head anymore. And whatever turns out not to be sickness, but is just the workings of me, I want to be able to serenely accept.

To that end, I'm going to tell a story which, though it took place 33 years ago, illustrates the nefarious workings of my brain more graphically than some of the more complicated and multi-faceted battles of adulthood.

It was the summer after my sophomore year in college. My parents had offered me as a graduation present from high school a thousand dollars to be used for a trip anywhere in the world I wanted to go. (If any of you ever hear me complaining about my parents, you are under orders to kill me at once.) I didn't take it right after graduation because I was in the seriously dark period that descended on me in senior year of high school and I didn't want to waste my big trip being near-suicidally depressed. But two years later I was beginning to feel good enough, or more accurately resigned enough, to say hell with it, I'll take the chance, and I went to Europe, alone, on a budget, after airfare, of exactly five dollars per day, all in: food, lodging, transportation, drinks. As part of the trip I spent three weeks on an archaeological dig in northern England and there I met Mary--that's her real name--a shy, beautiful red-headed artist from Philadelphia with a great imagination, a fanatical devotion to the paintings of Egon Schiele, and just as much insecurity and trepidation about sex as I had at the time--in short, a perfect match. We hitchiked to Edinburgh and arrived there just as a band of a hundred bagpipers were marching out from the castle gate in the golden light of a summer evening, pipes blasting a Highland tune... We found cheap lodgings at the out-of-term university and bought strawberries and thick fresh Scottish cream and a bottle of the local whiskey and poured all the above ingredients into a bowl to let them soak while we went hiking to the top of Arthur's Seat, the great green sheep-dotted hill that overlooks the city, and we kissed and looked out at the crags and battlements of the castle, and then we we went back to the room and ate the scotch-soaked strawberries and drank the cream and the whiskey and made love. We had no condoms so there was no penetration allowed which took all the pressure off and we did absolutely everything else and woke up both feeling that we had passed the fiery gate, alive.

This went on for a couple of spectacular days, and then it came time to go our separate ways. She went south to catch her flight back home and I went north, to the Highlands. And as I hitchhiked out of the city I felt, for the first time maybe ever, just plain simply boringly good.

That lasted for about a minute.

A few days later I spent a day hiking in the magnificent valley of Glen Coe. There were signs posted all over the youth hostel that said SCOTLAND'S MOUNTAINS ARE KILLERS: DO NOT HIKE ALONE but I was young and invincible and had just had a passionate romance so I went hiking alone anyway. I got way up high to a waterfall that fell into a deep pool and took off my clothes and swam in it, freezing cold, fantastic, and then a fog came up and I was trapped on a very steep slope, couldn't see to go up or down, and I took out a pen and paper and wrote a letter to a girl I had met back home the summer before, and seen on vacations home from college, and to whom I've now been married for almost 25 years, and told her I was trapped in the fog on a high Scottish peak and would she still like me with two broken legs? (She still has this letter.) Finally the fog cleared and I got down the hill and headed back to the youth hostel, exhausted, happy, my mind clear, my future ahead of me.

Then:

I heard a voice calling from the mountain above me, like somebody calling out "Orin!" or "Go on!" and the thought came to me: is that somebody calling for help? I couldn't see anybody on the mountain at all. I decided to tell the warden at the youth hostel what I had heard but when I got back to the hostel I ran into some people I had met in another youth hostel, and made dinner with them, and then went to write postcards on my bunk in the dorm, and an hour and a half had passed before I suddenly remembered the voice. I went downstairs and told the warden what I had heard, and where. This was the man in charge of mountain rescue operations for the valley so he took what I said seriously. He asked me, very solemnly: did it sound like a cry for help? I thought hard for a moment and said: no. Then I went to sleep.

The next day, hitchiking back to Edinburgh, the mental hurricane hit. Clearly, obviously, a fallen climber had died on that mountain last night because I had forgotten to tell the warden what I had heard right away. I tried to reason with myself: it hadn't sounded like a cry for help, certainly not in English. But reason, you see, has no power whatsoever against those kinds of voices. None. Right there, with my thumb out on a Highlands road, Loch Lomond on one side, the mountains on the other, I sank into a nightmare state of blackest guilt: how could I possibly enjoy my trip? What right did I have?

After all, I had murdered somebody.

In Edinburgh I looked up the word for "Help!" in various languages in a book store and found soccore in Italian. Yes, it could have been "Soccore!" that I had heard. S0 now I had more information: I had murdered an Italian climber.

Why didn't I just call the youth hostel and see if any climber had been reported missing? Because I knew it wouldn't have done any good. If there was no report, that's because it was a solo Italian climber, none of his friends or family knew he was even in Scotland and his body wouldn't turn up until spring. I sat in my room in Edinburgh for a couple of days shivering and weeping and wanting to die. Then it came time to catch my flight to Rome for the next chapter of my trip.

I had another month to go. Rome, Florence, the Italian Riviera, the Swiss alps. All the places I had spent my childhood dreaming of visiting. And not one of them could I enjoy. Because always between me and the Colosseum or me and the clear emerald waters of Portofino or me and the flowering meadows of the high Alps was the face of the Italian climber whose death I had caused. I cried every few nights. I couldn't make friends--I didn't deserve them. I doggedly kept trying to enjoy myself and to be fair there were some good days in there, when the beauty of what was around me somehow burned through the veil. But all in all? I was a murderer who deserved no joy or pleasure.

It took me A YEAR AND A HALF--until well into my senior year in college--and that includes a summer living with my future wife back home--to come to the simple thought that may have occurred to some of you already, and which finally set me free:

If had told the warden the second I got back to the hostel he would have asked me the same question, and I would have to have given him the same answer: no, sir, it didn't sound like a cry for help. To do otherwise would have sent search parties up a mountain for nothing, with night coming on. Which meant that the hour and a half delay which was Exhibit A in the murder case against me meant nothing. As soon as that thought came to me--suddenly, out of nowhere, while rushing to a class--the whole thing went away like smoke. A year and a half after the fact.

Unforunately that was far from the last incidence of my brain taking revenge on me for feeling good, happy and free. That's how my mind works, in large and small ways, way too much of the time. It turns out there's a name for it: OCD. Obsessive compulsive disorder.

And as I hope I've just demonstrated to you, it's a soul-killing demon.

Enough

It has been suggested by a respected blogger that I'm circling my point here and not getting to it. This is true. So I'll get right to the point, right now, although I don't have the energy or will to elaborate tonight.

I'm writing this blog because since the later years of the Eisenhower presidency--that is to say, since my earliest memories--I have experienced life way too much of the time as a pain-based, broken-glass-inside-the-skull dance of anxiety, dread and doubt. Or to put it another way: since about the time Sputnik was launched I have been one considerably screwed up, if apparently high-functioning, individual. Throwing myself into the 12 steps of Al-Anon, resuming work on a long ago set-aside piece of writing, beginning a new and powerful kind of therapy and, yes, blogging, are all part of my decision to make this, my 52nd year, the year that I say ENOUGH and begin to find a way to live without broken glass inside my skull.

You may ask what the significance of the photo is. Very simple: I took it one morning on one of the best bike rides I've ever taken in my life and I put it here to cheer myself up. No, that's not true. I put it here to show off to you that I've been to Easter Island, I can afford to take big trips, and so, you see, I can't be that messed up after all, can I?

Rowing Upstream

In Hollywood you take writing gigs for all kinds of reasons. You take them because you're passionate about the subject matter; because they're paying you a ton of dough; because there's a good chance it'll get made; because you need the work; because there's a producer or actor involved that you want to work with. One thing I've learned, or tell myself I've learned, is that no matter what the reason, if you don't feel the story somewhere in your gut it's going to be hell to write the damn thing, because trying to come up with it out of the frontal lobes of your brain with no help from the muse or the subconscious or the wellsprings of inspiration or whatever you want to call it is like carrying boulders the size of Buicks up hill all day long.

Here's the situation: Not long ago I got offered a job adapting a novel by an author I had never heard of but who turns out to sell more books than Dean Koontz and Stephen King and falls only slightly short of Nora Roberts and J.K. Rowling in the Amazon rankings. You've seen his books in the supermarket. Maybe you've bought them and read them. Maybe it's only the snob in me that doesn't love them. They strike me as essentially soft core--some kind of hazy love story/mystery wrapped around a few chest-heaving bodice-ripping sex scenes. I took the job because if it gets made I get to direct it and I haven't said "Action" or "Cut" for almost six years now, except to members of my family, and they don't obey the way actors do. So that means lots of fun once I'm out there in the forest with headphones on and a hundred people waiting for me to tell them what to do. But now I have to write it. I have to fill 100 or so pages with sharp witty dialogue and big emotional scenes and steadily building tension. So here I sit trying to do a great job with something I don't think is great, and the worst part, the very worst part of all, is this: since the book hasn't found a foothold in my heart, my inner compass isn't working right. I don't even know if my perceptions of it are correct. Maybe it's better than I think. Maybe this is just a new kind of procrastination and resistance. Maybe I should stop rowing so hard, turn the kayak around and let the current carry me. Or maybe that's just my laziness talking. Maybe I need to row harder. Maybe I need to light candles and chant and tell the muse I'm sorry I took a job I didn't really believe in and beg her to come back. Sometimes she does, you know, if you ask nicely.

And most of all I gotta ask myself: if hundreds of millions of people all over the world love this guy's books, who the hell am I to say they're wrong?

Important thought here: MASSIVE GRATITUDE that I have the job at all. I'm just saying...

More of the Other Side of the Story

My sponsor has wisely given me a deadline on the 4th Step, so: back into the water, back into getting those resentments on the run. What was my part in the two incidents in which my wife followed up an exceptionally nice romantic/sexual moment with a royal fit of unyielding irritability? This is a tough one because on some level I feel like she really did do that in those instances, and didn't have to. But that's her inventory, not mine, so: I'm looking at what I did wrong in those cases. At those times when my wife really lets go, gives herself over to physical abandon, drops her inhibitions, she becomes, understandably, extremely vulnerable, and that vulnerability doesn't go away right away. For me, being a, you know, guy, there's a great feeling of love, release, oneness and elation and then--what's for breakfast? Looking back at those romantic hotel rooms in Idaho '01 and Utah '04 I know that I was full of excitement for what the day ahead might bring--we were in great travel destinations both times--and didn't take into account my wife's vulnerability, and where she was left by how fully she had exposed herself. She needed protection, reassurance, she needed me to say that I loved her and that she was safe--and while I thought I was expressing that in my happiness at sharing the day ahead with her--I wasn't. So she reacted the way people react when they're hurt. And I only reacted back in a defensive manner. I didn't trust that my wife is actually is a sane and loving person, and so I didn't take the trouble to read the deeper cues.

I sure as hell hope that's a lesson I've learned by now.

You know, until I started writing this I wasn't really sure what my side of this one was going to be? Right here before me, the miracle of the act of writing something down.

The Other Side of the Story Part Three

Now to a resentment which I've long ago let go of--but which I haven't yet looked at my part in--the one about the time when our six year old son was starting to show the first major signs of the emotional trouble that would overtake him in a big way at age thirteen, the time when my wife, frustrated and at her wits end, struck him pretty damn hard across the face, leading to the cops at our door and all kinds of craziness. It's twelve years ago now, my son's doing great, he and my wife are super close, but: where was I in this?

In my office, working, head in the sand. Hoping it would all go away. Cleaning up his room instead of making him clean it up because it was easier that way. Telling everybody that peace was more important than victory. I think that's what Chamberlain was thinking in 1938 when he flew to Munich to tell Hitler it was just fine if he marched into Czechoslovakia and then flew home to England and said "I have secured peace in our time."

Peace. Right.

I was a F***ING SCARED WIMP who couldn't hold my son to a responsibility, who in the name of being "the good guy" left my wife to face the onslaught on her own.

I've forgiven her a long time ago for the slap. I hope when I get to the amends stage in this process that she forgives me---most of all for waiting this long to look at the other side of the story.

The Other Side of the Story Part Two

On to resentments three and four: The thorny issue of when sex slacks off, and the way my wife from the outset made that my problem instead of our problem. And what's my part in that? Maybe there was an entirely different path for me to take through the whole thing. Like:

Accepting the natural cycles of more sex and less sex and not getting all damaged-male-ego about it in the first place.

Seeing the fact that we were having less sex as something that was happening in the relationship, rather than something that she was doing to the relationship.

Not making every gap between times of lovemaking a great big reenactment of my own youthful miseries and adolescent agonies.

Not making her the means by which I was proving to myself and to the imaginary jeering crowd in my head that I had put all that behind me.

Listening to her, sensing her, instead of expecting her to say the lines and carry out the actions I had written for her in the script in my head, a script for a drama played out for the benefit of that imaginary jeering crowd.

Learning to be in the moment at all times, whatever that moment might bring.

Acting from love instead of need.

On the upside of this one? I think I'm getting better at all of the above.

The Other Side of the Story Part One

Okay: in accordance with the instructions of my esteemed sponsor, I have laid out all the resentments that I have been carrying around toward my wife, some of them, in varying degrees of intensity, for decades. Now, also in accordance with those instructions, I proceed to explore my part in the events that generated the resentments.

Starting with the first resentment, which had to with letting my wife driving a hundred and fifty miles out of our way in order to punish her for being pissy and imperious in refuting my original suggestion that she was taking the wrong route: well, in fact, while I sat there for two hours, knowing she was going the wrong way and just waiting for her to discover it, I was being what is commonly referred to as a dick. I could have acted from love instead of enjoying my vengeful, passive aggressive gloating. I could have said, "My darling, I know you're positive that this is the way, but I'm fairly close to certain that it isn't, so let's pull over and look at a map and make sure we're not driving to Hell and Gone, okay?" I know I could have done that. I know I could have weathered her refusals and loved her into being open to the discussion. I know because that's the way I deal with her occasional bouts of pissiness now. And you know what? It always works, and we're both happier for it. I'm not going to beat myself up over this--it was a lesson I had yet to learn--but it's very clear that I was more interested at the time in being right than in being happy, and that's a bad bad choice to make.

On to the next three resentments:

The time she crossed her arms and pouted and declared one of the most beautiful places on the planet to be ugly, thereby ruining my good time: The truth is, I knew very well at the time that she loves the mountains, loves setting up camp and enjoying the air and the place, but doesn't like to hike. She has told me this many times, in English. By encouraging--make that emotionally blackmailing (oh, baby, just for a little while, it'll make me so happy) her into taking the hike with me, I was forcing her to act out a scene in a script I had written in my head for us, a script in which we are the Happy Family In The Emerald Pool Among The Redwoods. What right do I have to do that? None. That one I'm still guilty of: I take my family on vacations and literally hear their happy exclamations of how wonderful it all is in my head, and when they don't say the lines as written, I get unhappy. Now whose fault is that? When will I learn to write my own lines and let everybody else write theirs?

The next resentment--well, the next few get into stuff about sex, so we'll save those for their own post. They deserve it.