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Up North Part 10: nearly home
I started walking up the ditch to get up to the next exit, wary of the interstate. It was tough going with the slope and the weight of my pack. I walked up the slope and started walking down the shoulder but felt very uneasy, especially when a state trooper cruised by. I walked back down the slope and made my way in the bottom of the ditch. Eventually I came to a ravine and walked back up the slope but stayed on the safe side of the guardrail. As I walked along a passing truck caught a gust of wind and got pushed over to the berm right where I would have been had I been still walking on the shoulder. On the other side I hit the ditch again and followed a deer trail, pushing my way through the knee high grass.
After a couple of miles of this I was beat. Before I got to the exit I spied a hotel that looked cheap. It was only 4:00 but I hadn’t eaten since my bowl of Count Chocula in what seemed another universe ages ago. Besides I was tapped. I clambered over the barb wire fence and checked in exhausted. I found myself again at “The Gateway to the North” and would likely be home tomorrow.
It was not until I got in the shower that I fully realized just how truly grimy I had grown. Days of hiking sweat and unchanged clothes had not only left me not only smelling ripe but I had to literally sluice the funk off my poor body. After putting on some clean clothes I walked down to a Ponderosa to put a serious dent in their salad bar and spent the rest of the evening channel flipping through the anthrax coverage.
When I flipped off the tube and started to drift off to slumberland I heard the rain let loose. Rain coming down on a solid roof is one of the most beautiful sounds you can hear after being houseless for a while.
I woke and was up and out for coffee early. I noted that the gas station closest to the on-ramp was also a Greyhound Station. I decided if the rain kept up I would finish up my journey on the big silver dog. I stayed in the hotel until check out trying to wait out the rain. It had let up to a light drizzle but I was pretty wet just walking to the gas station. I had used up my pen writing so I bought another one and a second cup of coffee and learned the greyhound leaves at 12:30. As I sat under the overhang at the gas station drinking coffee and writing Lansing Please on my cardboard I decided I would give it about an hour before catching the bus.
I stood by the on ramp trying to look happy and content in the drizzle and I hadn’t even finished my first smoke when I looked back down the on ramp and saw a large newish gray pick up pulled over. I started to fuss with my pack while I waited for reverse lights. When they came on I started to trot down the on ramp. I opened the passenger door and said, “thank’s for stopping”.
“You can throw your stuff in the back seat, throw back in anything that falls out,” the driver said. He was a blocky looking working man kind of guy who looked like he was doing alright for himself. I threw my pack on top of the suit cases, jackets, and boxes of shotgun shells piled haphazardly in the back seat. “Where are you headed?” he asked as we pulled out and merged with highway traffic.
“Lansing.”
“I can get you to East Lansing.”
“Sounds good. I can take a city bus from there. Thought I was going to have to take a greyhound, my least favorite way to travel”, I said as the rain started coming down hard. “I would’ve quit right about now. So, are you coming back from a hunting trip?”
“No, no. I live up in Petoskey. I’m coming down to see my cousin, his boy is missing. Might have fallen in a river. I’m coming down to help look for him,” he said heavy with emotion. He went on to tell me that his cousin’s boy had gone down to Michigan State to watch the football game or maybe just to party and had gone missing. Witnesses had reported that same night seeing a young white man in the river but couldn’t get to him before he was swept away. The family was expecting the worst.
I offered my condolences and we talked at length about grief and loss and the healing power of time. The driver was a contractor, mostly sewer and pipe work, and periodically took business calls on the drive. He had never hitched before but picked up hikers frequently for the company. “My friends say I’m crazy picking up hitchhikers.”
“I don’t think so. No desperado is going to go hitchhiking to find victims. They go to convenience stores.” I could tell the contractor wanted to talk. Wanted distraction from this drive he so much did not want to make. So we talked of many things but would inevitably come back to what he was facing.
“Most cousins you’re not really close to. You grow up, lose touch, and grow apart. But he always came up to go snowmobiling, hunting, fishing, whatever. We’re close. And he always brought the boy.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help, I’d be glad to.”
“No, no. They don’t even want me to come down. But I had to be there.”
“It has got to be really hard not knowing.”
“Yeah, you expect the worse, but still….”
We went on to talk about trips out West, problems with his previous pick up, the economy (business was still good), and development and sprawl. We both agreed Traverse City was growing into a nightmare. He reported Petoskey controls growth really well with strict building codes. And we talked about our wives. The contractor had married for the first time this summer in spite of being in his 40s. Took him awhile to find a partner who could put up with his schedule and his hunting and fishing. We both agreed partners need their own interests to be healthy and he never questioned my solo vacation.
We arrived in East Lansing with barely a break in the conversation. The contractors grim expression returned before he was finished wishing me good luck and goodbye. “I’ll pray for you, and your family,” I told him.
“Thanks,” he said and he looked like he meant it.
going crazy part 5
After a long night of restless wandering I returned to the mind spa. Everyone was up and rolling, cleaning up and packing. The first night we had arrived our host’s partner Rose had told us to “remember what it looks like” which in my then unspun mind was a simple admonition to clean the place up when we were done. Now i saw new implications of needing to remember what was here, what had transpired. I placed an Israel Regardie book on the shelf of metaphysical classics in thanks for the memories. Debbie seemed a little out of sorts as i put the last few of my things in my pack, doublechecked to make sure my ticket was still in my bag. I remember a couple of Aaron’s friends who hadn’t come over with us were there. I thought one of them might want to carry Debbie’s bag as they also only had one. I was remembering the Fishbone CDs left over from the show at the Melkveg. I was remembering Jennifer dipping CD sized sheets of hash into a large pot of boiling wax the night before. I was remembering that i’d brought Debbie’s bag over from the states. I felt very tired, that now i was ready to sleep, and told myself not yet. Its not yet safe. I’ll sleep on the plane when i know i’m safe. We left for the train station. Debbie was disgusted when i mentioned i was broke again. Jennifer asked what happened to the 100 guilders she had given me and i told her i spent it teaching an immigrant what “frivolous” meant. Debbie bought my ticket and we boarded the train to Schippol. I kept thinking about the 300 CDs, the CD sized sheets of hash, this whole extended dangerous practical joke i had fallen into, the vagaries of friendship – and who in fact where my friends? I had no clear plan but i knew i wasn’t rolling that bag through customs. My thoughts ran slowly through my sleep deprived befuddlement. As the train pulled into Shippol I pulled the roll away behind me, last in line, moving towards the door. I felt like i was walking through molasses. The doors closed before i could de-board the train with everyone else. Flooded with relief i waved to my dumbstruck friends as the train pulled away from the station. There was another passenger stuck behind me, seperated from her guy at the airport. She seemed nice and uninvolved in this mess. I thought i would ask her advice. We had decided, of course, to ride up to the next stop, change trains and return to the airport. On the ride I quickly explained i believed that i had fallen in with international drug smugglers and thought the bag i carried was filled with Hash and wondered on the ethics of checking. She considered my dilemma. She said, her guy would be at the airport when she returned however long it took because he loved her and would wait. If my friends were at the station i could trust them and if not then well….
We arrived at the airport and there was her guy, happy to see her and in a hurry to catch the flight. My “friends” were no where in sight. I pulled off my backpack to check the ticket for the time and gate. No ticket. I had seen it that morning, double checking it was in the flap it had rested through this whole ordeal, now it was gone. I checked the flight listings and went to the appropriate gate. We had been cutting it close and the flight was departed, no one was in sight. I was stunned, exhausted, not thinking clearly. I needed some air and went outside and sat on a bench to collect my thoughts. There was this rhythmic pounding of a huge piledriver at a nearby construction site. I felt drawn there. I had been thinking about the hypnotic quality of techno music and the risk involved in opening your mind to hypnotic suggestions enclosed in the “music”. I felt drawn there, i felt like our host would be waiting for some kind of final confrontation. As i walked towards the pounding i realized this was insane. He would not be there, trespassing on a construction site would only draw attention to me with possibly a huge amount of hash in my possession. I sat down more to think. I opened the large duffel and pulled out a cloth shopping bag with some of Debbie’s souveniers contained within. I consciously did not check the CDs. I felt it was safer not to know. I zipped the duffel back up, left it next to the bench and walked away. I saw an exit sign leading to a highway. I thought i would return to the known of hitchhiking. I saw i was on an on-ramp heading east. Home was to the West. Or was it, East would get me there too, it would just take a little longer. I felt ready for the journey. I felt beyond want, beyond fear, beyond even need. I walked as the 4 lanes of traffic, those funny little European cars whizzed by. I found a lighter in my pocket, from the Mind Spa. I wondered if this was how they tracked my movements? My sinuses were clogged, i felt like i could barely breathe, i felt exhausted. I thought if only my sinuses hadn’t been clogged i could have done progressive relaxation and shut off this barrage of thought and rested and i wouldn’t be so damn tired. I thought it would be over by now but here i was a stranger in a strange land still. I thought i didn’t know what was happening to me. Had I been drugged, hypnotized, had my mind blown by mindblowers. Had i touched the face of god? I felt powerful as i breathed air into my lungs. I felt i had to be a powerful magician to have survived or maybe i was an angel? I was uncertain, and i felt there was power in this uncertainty, that if i knew it would all crumble into dust. I realized i loved the unknown and did not fear it. I said quietly, “I whisper when i want to hypnotize and I shout when I want something”. I didn’t know if i was listened to by a microphone planted by mindfuckers or the god who made the universe or if i was being listened to at all but I was angry. Angry at my exhaustion, my clogged sinuses, my fear of pursuit as a drug smuggler though i had done nothing. I shouted, my spirit self grew to scrape the clouds, i found myself ten thousand feet tall and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that at this moment i wielded all the power of the universe. I shouted. “If i don’t get a ride right now! I will destroy Phillip Morris”. Bamn, instantly a van in the far left lane cuts through 4 lanes of heavy traffic. “Would you like a ride?” the driver asked.
ACTIVE LISTENING
Active or Reflective Listening is a relationship building tool that helps the listener provide support and validation to the speaker. Active Listening allows the speaker to clarify their understanding of their own thoughts, feelings, and attitudes and to arrive at their own solutions. Individuals who come to their own solutions are more invested in them as each individual is the biggest expert on their own life. For the listener active listening is how empathy is developed.
ACTIVE LISTENING TIPS
1. Listen with total attention
2. Maintain good eye contact
3. Keep an open posture
4. Keep them talking (uhuh, yeah, ok, you were saying, and then what happened)
5. Ask clarifying questions
6. Withhold judgment
7. Reflect back to the speaker both the content and the emotions you are hearing
ACTIVE LISTENING IS NOT
1. Advice giving
2. Problem solving
3. Swapping war stories or toppers
An example from literature:
“For Byers paid close attention, helping him on by little nods and eye narrowings and pursing of lips and voiced brief agreements and comments…” – Fritz Lieber
Breaking Glass
I am sorry I haven’t posted and will put up something substantial this weekend, I promise. Just now I was having a smoke break and the kids from the bootcamp/GED/job training program in our building were hauling out the trash. Amongst the trash were some fluorescent light bulbs which they put in the dumpster by smashing each one. It took me back to childhood and the sure glee of noisy destruction. Nostalgia is a pure joy and one of the best benefits of getting older. It feels a little like love, but doesn’t cost as much.
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.
Multiconstruct 
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