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Travels with Trevor
So i have been back from vacation for three days and work hasn’t left me beaten down as of yet, a new record. Reviewing our trip after the KOPN interview last night left us both surprised we found the experience relaxing. We journeyed over 1,500 miles and clocked an average gas mileage of 44.2 mpg in Trevor’s Honda Civic. Our pentultimate location was Farmington Hills Michigan, which some would shorthand into Detroit, but FH is really more of an anti-Detroit, like a photographic negative it is everything Detroit is not. We ended up pitching in on our friend’s “re-branding” of the historic Farmington Bakery into the Sunflower Bakehaus, which mostly entailed a paint job, as they have been moving their menu to wholegrain goodness for months beforehand. Painting was pretty fun with Trevor being especially hilarious. Once it grew quiet and Trevor exclaimed in a total deadpan that “the agency promised i would be given positive feedback every hour”.
Our biggest impression of the Michigan leg of the journey was the economic depression in the area. My sister Betty and her husband Bill have been talking about selling their house and buying a business “Up North” as long as i can remember but no one is buying houses their anymore so those plans were shelved. Jeff and Becky were talking about selling the bakery and going back to school, but no one is buying bakeries anymore so those plans were shelved for a “re-branding”. Its interesting to see how these macro-economic trends play out in the real world of individual lives, not destitute, but changing everyone’s plans, touching their lives.
On the drive back we stopped and got a room in Cloverdale Indiana. We decided to go and see Indiana’s largest waterfall Cataract Falls the next morning and take a little break from the interstate. On the way the local High School caught Trevor’s eye and we drove over for a closer look thinking it looked like it came out of the WPA era. It was just an art deco facade but they had paper recycling which we had collected a bundle of and on such a series of coincidences a dog’s life lay in the balance. As we were recycling we saw some serious smoke and decided to investigate. We found a house seriously ablaze and called 911. We had to drive down the street to find a street sign and we were not sure what to do after reporting it so we just continued on our journey. Neither of us were eager for a contact with law enforcement as you never know how those encounters with the men with guns are going to go so we just drove on down to the falls. Thanks to the wonders of the internet we learned it was a blocked up chimney and the front page follow up story talked about the rescue of the family dog. We took a little bow for being curious and brave enough to call “The Man” if not stick around to talk to him.
Cataract Falls was beautiful and taller than i was which was pretty good for Indiana. There was also an old covered bridge there which was lovely. In the shadow of the new bridge the surface of the water froze into this intricate spiderweb pattern which reminded me of the hidden evils of modernity spreading out in near invisible webs until they are irrevocably frozen in place.
As our trip ended Trevor proposed I come on KOPN and do an interview. I ended up talking about my work with individuals with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse issues and the holidays. I like to think i went beyond the obvious of making sure everyone has a cozy fire to gather around and to think of sober alternatives for those of us with a problematic relationship to substances. I also talked about listening and being supportive and how to break down people’s ambivilance towards postive change. I might write a post on that topic later. I ended with a poem, my whamo poem, which Trevor and the next guy who has a show enjoyed. I will check back and see if i have posted it yet and if not i will knock it out for you all.
KOPN
For anyone who may be interested I will be on the 5:00 news show on KOPN tonight (11/27) around 5:30 for 15-20 minutes. I think I will be talking about co-occurring disorders (mental illness & substance abuse) and the holidays. I may try to sneak in a poem at the end. They stream live on the internet if your not local.
more thanksgiving travels
Day two on our Thanksgiving journey fortunately involved less driving. Trevor and I went for a hike in Oregon (Pierson Park) with Chad and his dog Nakomas. We drove out the “Greenbelt” Parkway and talked of our efforts to keep that boondoggle from coming into being and came back over the Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge which had better memories. We then drove up to my sister Betty’s and visited with the family. It was interesting having an outsider’s perspective on the typical family drama and we had a nice meal. Heather took Trevor and I on a tour of downtown Ida which hasn’t changed much although I was pleased to see the new library. When I lived there it was in a trailer and i remember having read whole sections of it. After saying our goodbyes we drove up to Monroe and checked out downtown which was quite still on a Thanksgiving evening and ended our sojourn at the truckstop for a bowl of chili and oatmeal respectively. Trevor’s biggest observation was the gaps in Toledo, the vacant houses and buildings and empty lots like broken teeth in a formerly perfect smile compared to all the new construction in my former country home rapidly joining the world of exurbia.
thanksgiving travels
Trevor and I set off on our journey to the heartland yesterday at 6:00 am. We drove straight through, with a lot of rain, but had some great conversation, and arrived in Toledo with only a little discombulation navigating about the city. Having lived in a number of places its my theory that our navigating grid that we use to get around gets recycled. The plus side of getting around CoMo better these days is Toledo got a little fuzzy and i ended up on the wrong side of the Maumee and taking a little longer to get to Chad’s and Melissa’s then necessary. Chad Olsen made us a great dinner and all of my favorite people came over. It got a little overwhelming but was a lot of fun seeing everyone, and all the T-Town crew looked happy and healthy. Trevor and I had been talking and he had asked me what was the key to the Toledo character which i couldn’t really answer but having spent an evening back I think its a level of parochialism thats higher than most places. There was just a lot of Toledo-centric conversation that I probably wouldn’t have been aware of if Trevor hadn’t asked me how much of the conversation i could follow having been elsewhere for the last several years. Nonetheless, Trevor was impressed with the Urban nature and thought everyone was really interesting in ones and twos but 20 of them at once is a little overwhelming. Today we are going to Ida to have dinner with my family and then back to Toledo in the evening. Tomorrow we venture deeper into Michigan to Farmington Hills. After our visiting there we are going to shoot down to explore Cincinnati/Covington and check out the serpent mound, before heading home. More travel updates to follow and Happy Thanksgiving to all family and friends.
I did not vote today
Good morning, i am afraid i lost the brilliant essay i have spent two long sessions working on and planned on finishing off and posting today. Apparently I didn’t turn the computer off and lost it to a dead battery. Its weird because i distinctly rememeber saving it when i took the break i never got back from. Also i had opened up a previous saved version to work on it so that should still be there right? But its not. So since i have had a fairly difficult week already i don’t feel like coming up with something original i stumbled across an essay i wrote last year for the election and with the presidential hoopla nonsense gearing up i thought it was kind of relevant for now, so enjoy. I’d like to hear your comments on this piece and on where i should go with this blog. What do you want to read, dear readers, poetry, essays, stories, something else?
I did not vote today. I chose not to get my hands soiled in a dirty irrelevancy that frightens me to be forced to live in and observe its operations, let alone meaningfully engage it in any voluntary way that is not destroying it, setting it back, limiting its scope. Fundamentally law is unjust. Law inherently lacks the necessary understanding and compassion to account for every possible condition, circumstance, and type of individual to be anything more than a “bull in a china shop” when provided with any ability to coerce, imprison, or deprive of liberty. I have no need of laws. I engage the world in a just and equitable manner whether the law tells me too or not. I pursue pleasure and avoid pain in a safe and reasonable way determined by my own reason and conscience in any way I see fit regardless of the law. Not only do I prefer not to choose someone to invest with power to abrogate my potential freedoms, I would consider it wrong to appoint someone to abrogate yours. I would prefer to live in a world where both you and I are free to determine the entire nature of our lives without coercion; the only limitation being our love and respect for the other occupants of our shared planet and a commitment to sustainability for future generations. I am grateful to live under the rule of law. It is a more graceful and accommodating form of institutionalized-potential-slavery than the previous power structures of enforced hierarchies of times past, but not one capable of real justice and equity, even in ideal circumstances, let alone in our actual world dominated by historic oppression. If I lived in a land without at least the semblance of the rule of law such that we struggle under I might not be an anarchist. I might be a republican, a democrat, a revolutionary constitutionalist trying to enshrine a rule of law. There are warlords, bandits and dictators I know but I live here, now. I dream of living in a better world in a society where we care about each other and voluntarily organize to solve problems and see our needs met in a totally non coercive manner. I believe we can only reach that world by building it now. The system only inflicts its harms and injustices through the participation of not only its law wielders and gun bearers but all of its contributors of energy and resources that we could be contributing toward a world of mutual respect and cooperation. I believe for me, right now, that world is more likely to come about through my not voting than by my voting. Not because I don’t care, but because I care so much. Not because I feel powerless, but because I feel powerful. Not because I have no hope, but because I believe a world of gentle sustainability built upon cooperation is inevitable. The only alternative is complete destruction. I, at least, refuse to participate in anything less than what is good, which is after all, ultimately, all that will last.
Hi Trevor
I am hanging out at my friend Trevor’s waiting for him to finish up with the plumber. I was showing him my blog and wanted to impress on him the immediacy of the thing so i am writing a quick mini-post. Trevor are doing a trip to Detroit for thanksgiving. We are going to visit Jeff Pavlik and Co in Farmington Hills and running by my old stomping grounds. I think i will have to retract any commitments i’ve made to do any particular thing and freestyle it. He is going to Eastern Europe in the peace corps in March and needs to see a doctor the day before turkey day. Do you know anyone who wants to rent his house? It comes with a cat named Ms Fezziwig. There is a lot of stuff you have to do to go to the peace corps. Thats why i’ve never joined. I have pledged to visit he and his wife and am hoping for kazakhstan or lithuania, now that Fiji has been ruled out. I will tell you all about the trip as it develops.
Bi-Polar
You were asking me on the phone about bi-polar disorder. I am going to run down some general thoughts on the disorder and some thoughts on dealing with it. Identifying your symptoms and coming up with a plan for each is a good start. As a rule that’s how you beat this “disease”. If you treat it as a thing in and of itself like cancer then the words a psychiatrist said to me are basically true: “You have a serious mental disorder and it is never going to get better”. The best you can hope for is a good psychiatrist and more agreeable than disabling medications for symptom control. A bleak picture and one I would not accept. When that psychiatrist said that to me I already had a Masters Degree in Sociology and was steeped in the idea of labeling theory the idea that mental illness is a socially created stigma far more than anything to do with brain chemistry or mood disregulation. So I refused to accept that guys label but I still had a bushel full of negative symptomology to deal with. So I broke it down, and enacted some cognitive behavioral interventions I knew from my mental health days as well as managing my environment I got better.
A diagnosis does not have to be a determinant of who we are as people. It also doesn’t let us off the hook for managing our lives. We are the ones who will benefit if we change and we are the only ones who can enact positive change in our lives so it makes since to accept the hand we are dealt, ferret out the part we have control over, and apply the force of our will only on that part. Fortunately science, metaphysics, and personal experience have taught me that our thoughts, behaviors, indirectly our emotions, sometimes our environment, and to a much larger than most suspect, our very physiology can be put under our conscious control.
All change comes through what I call the 4 “A”s: Awareness, Assessment, Action, and Accountability. Recovery from bi-polar disorder comes from becoming aware of the nature of our symptomology, assessing its impact on our overall well being and intervention strategies, implementing those strategies with constant measurement of success and reassessment of strategies along a coherent plan, and maintaining our plan through a systematic format of accountability (literally to count) with ourselves and sometimes others.
Fundamentally our personalities our sense of being our consciousness arises out of constructs; memes, scripts, patterns of operations, we had no hand in creating and accepting without question because to a certain extent we are made of these things. But at some point we reach a point of accountability. We are compelled to know who we are and perhaps more importantly to know who we want to be and make ourselves in that direction. The world of thought is malleable, adjustable, compliant to the will, evolutionary. Applying the 4 “A”s could look like this: Awareness – Becoming aware of our patterns of thoughts, the things we believe, the things we give meaning too, how we interact with others, how our self-observer treats our self, competing thoughts, adaptive and maladaptive thoughts, etc. Assessment – Identifying and prioritizing areas of out thought-life, identifying problematic or maladaptive thoughts, scripts, voices, habitual responses, behavioral choices (I will call all these things constructs as a reminder they are created things etc. and also identifying core thoughts, scripts, voices, habituated responses, behavioral choices (constructs) to build upon or unleash upon our maladaptive constructs. Assessment is a good time to write things down, awareness as well, but I know you are already journaling. Action is the time you enact your assessment. A lot of people stop at self-analysis and never identify and institute changes, which is the greatest gift of self-awareness. Accountability is measuring that action. Staying the course. Keeping track of your successes. It is a promise to yourself and others of the changes you are making. It creates someone (even if it is only yourself) to say, “Hey did you do that thing?” It allows us to know what we have done.
Most of life is obfuscation, a means of obscurement of truths we would rather not face. I propose we should boldly face who we are and why we are where we are so that we can enact who we want to be and where we want to be at. The means are myriad and widespread. Any self-change system can be effective if applied with diligence over time. Some you already know the basics of. Devise a plan, implement it, measure your results, and make changes as necessary based upon your outcome data. If it is so easy why isn’t everyone successful. Some of it is ignorance. People don’t know who they are or why they do things. Some of it is feeling comfortable, nesting in who we have been because who we might be is too frightening. Its worth some thought to ask yourself why you put yourself where you are right now, this is worth asking wherever you have chosen to put yourself. What do I believe about myself is incompatible with success? What am I really trying to do by failing all the time, and what is the easiest, or the quickest, or the surest way to change it?
In future posts i will add emotional, behavioral, environmental, and physiological management strategies as well as provide more details as folks raise questions or make comments. As a treat for reading this far here is a new poem i am working on:
Am I any less real when I am asleep
The world it keeps on turning
The sun still shines when its dark outside
But we don’t see its burning.
And if i die today
Will my soul pass away
Or is it gonna keep on living
If will if it just resides
In this meat-machine
But souls are made for giving.
an idea poem
Its been a productive time writing wise, since i started this blog, thanks again Ben. I have two pieces in the works and i was hoping to get at least one of them into publishable shape but i’m not feeling it. One expands more on multiconstruct thinking and how i came to think this way and the other is some general thoughts on bi-polar disorder. Keep watching i’ll get them up here one of these days (hopefully by mid-week since this post is going to be relatively lame). The only thing i have to post is an idea poem i wrote this week. I read it for a poet buddy on Saturday (after we carved pumpkins which was fun) and all he had to say is “what are you a neo-Platonist, have you read any Proust?
The idea of things are more real than the things themselves. Things decay, go away, become other things. I am more a consciousness than a body. I am a personality, a constructed device of organized information. I know and and am known. Every cup from which i have drunk is no more, or will be no more, or perhaps never was. Nevertheless, the idea of cup is wherever hand lifts drink to lips. Good ideas bring themselves into being out of necessity. What are ideas made of? From what land do they come? Unbound by time or space, ideas just are, everywhere and everywhen, a foreverland, a memic universe, heaven, the big book of life. I am an idea, information, a character in a story, observed and remembered even by myself. Point to that observer on an X-ray, MRI, bloodtest. You can’t do it. I am distributed. I am a multitude. And what of the idea of me? Where is that located? What is it made of? Does it dwell in foreverland, the memic universe, heaven, the big book of life? I am such a good idea if i did not exist i would create myself. I’m no cup, mind you, but i am bigger, more complex, a personality aspiring to archetype. For “Behold i am a new creation” and wise old Solomon knows “there’s nothing new under the sun”, sure and steady, but dieing nonetheless.
Voices
Last Thursday I had the great honor of reading some poetry at The Orr Street Gallery at a multi-media presentation put on by The Shelter on domestic violence and sexual assault. It was built around an 18 minute video of survivor’s telling their stories and it was very empowering to hear these incredible stories. I read 4 poems, closing with “A Good and Happy Child” which i posted when it was new. I thought I would include the others here:
“A Song of Love and Respect”
My Mother’s Mother was a lunatic
Her father died when she was twelve
She didn’t have anyone to teach her right from wrong
She had to learn that herself
She was raised by her sister and my Uncle Ott
A mean old bastard liked to fight a lot
He would start drinking around about lunch
He was harsh with his words and quick with a punch
So she left home when she was seventeen
With a boy she hardly knew who looked like James Dean
He liked to be in control didn’t want anyone to meet her
When she stepped out of line boy he’d beat her
So yeah she’s a little fucked up
She’s had to go through a lot
And yeah she’s a little fucked up
But tell me someone who’s not
She gets a little skittish if you move too quick
She’s lived in fear of the bomb
She worries about this and worries about that
But still she’s been a pretty good Mom
And yeah she’s a little fucked up
She’s had to go through a lot
And yeah she’s a little fucked up
But tell me someone who’s not
###########
“Define my own Reality”
I reserve the right to define my own reality
And that of others
Who have more power and less compassion
More voice and less insight
And for any hurt kitten who comes to my door
Licking a bleeding paw and needing a reality to stand in
Tall and proud and unafraid
And for any casual passerby
Eavesdropping on my public private musings
My meanderings through the memic garden of delight
###########
“Becoming Whole”
You see the whole absurdity
Of the human condition
And strive to see the beauty
In the life that your living
You’ve overcome the emptiness
And learned the art of giving
And you have broken the chains
That once held you down
You have learned to re-arrange
You are an agent of change
You think, and you learn, and you are
Destined for the stars
You love every part of life
You see the hope and the magic
You smile through the darkest nights
And rise to face the tragic
And you have opened your mind
And reached for the prize
You have learned to feel and grow
You can let people know
Change has happened before
It will happen again
The least shall rise up
The great shall pay for their sins
And you stand upon the rooftop
And shout out your agnosticism
But you love your neighbor as yourself
And live out your cathechism
And you have crossed the Great Valley
And are on the Other Side
You have faced the Great Fear
You have crossed the Divide
You have learned to overcome
Light shines from your soul
You are mighty and strong and you are
Becoming whole
Multi-Construct Thinking
Every way of organizing thought is a created system. Our perception of the world is shaped by the cultural norms of our belief system. Our religions, our philosophies, our professions, our role in our family, community, society, all channelize our conceptions of reality to a specific end which is not necessarily correlated with reality. How we define our terms and engage in language(s) shapes what we can and cannot experience or even perceive, invest with meaning. Each of these ‘organizations of ideas’ can be thought of as an artificial construction that can be dangerous to confuse with the real world.
Our constructs guide our vision to what reinforces our belief in the construct. Constructs both illuminate the true nature of the universe and obscure a true picture of the universe, mostly because the universe is just so damn big. We can access literally an infinite amount of information. A true picture is too large to comprehend so we cut it up into pieces. We make maps and guidebooks because there is a lot of room between being able to know something about something, which we obviously and easily are capable of, and knowing everything about everything. A true map of the universe would be as big as the universe, which is preposterous. So we create constructs, formalized systems to organize information to make the infinite universe appear to be knowable. Nothing is wrong with that until we mistake our construct of the universe for the universe. Every construct breaks down at the edges and becomes false and meaningless. That’s why every construct has a critic. To not stray from the truth ask not if a construct is true but how is this construct true? In what ways is this construct false? In what ways is this construct meaningless?
Constructs are a systematic framework of patterns of concepts and sub-organizations of concepts, memes if you will. Memes are words or ideas, but seen as existing independently in an information universe. Memes have many of the qualities of life in that they can be created (born if you will), they reproduce, they grow and evolve, and they disappear (die if you will). Constructs are simply large and complex memes.
Constructs provide power by directing or harnessing information in a directed fashion. A shared language allows cooperation and all it entails; it allows cultures to arise preserving memes in the cultural members and in their artifacts, increasing the memes chance for survival.
Constructs create meaning and are created with a purpose. Purposeless and meaningless constructs lack survival value from competition from constructs with purpose and meaning. Malicious constructs, or patterns of behavior or belief that have deleterious effect can continue to exist when chained to a larger construct with survival value.
Perhaps you have heard this example; an anthropologist, a physicist, and a mathematician journeyed to Scotland and saw a brown cow. The anthropologist said the cows are brown in Scotland. The physicist corrected her by saying there are cows in Scotland and some of them are brown. The mathematician corrected her with there is at least one cow in Scotland, one of which’s side is brown. This illustrates how our understanding of the world filters the meaning that we attach to our perceptions. Most of us already juggle multiple constructs. Lets say the anthropologist is also a mother, a Buddhist, and a libertarian. All of these constructs will inform the way she perceives Scotland. Multiple constructs may overlap or not. If our mathematician is a father and a vegetarian as well those systems have little overlap. They provide their respective meanings to the individual who is a mathematician largely in their separate spheres of understanding. Having disparate constructs to create meaning in a variety of circumstances enriches the individual.
When multiple constructs overlap they can be in agreement or disagreement. Our Buddhist anthropologist easily sees the connection between the threat of ethnocentrism, judging owns own culture as better or more right than others and the Buddhist idea of seeing the Buddha nature in all people. In fact the anthropologist is informed and enriched by her practice of Buddhism. Both the shared language of the two systems and the extent that each reaches places the other might not have gone makes our anthropologists personal uber-construct of anthrobuddhistmotherism a more robust system in which to place her sense of self.
Multiconstruct 
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