Dead Man Talking

I found out last weekend that I had died. Rumor had it I had bought the farm many years back in a car crash, a violent one. Once the rumor started, it quickly became fact. Word had spread. Pat Nolan: dead.

I was visiting Fullerton after Christmas, the place where I used to live in my un-guilded youth, my wilted salad days, when I was green and black in judgment. I used to play in a band and lived a fantasy punk rock star lifestyle. These were good years, and I gained a lot of experiences which I'm lucky enough to be able to recall. But this time also was a dark night of the soul, or more accurately, just the beginning of a dark night of soul, the descent into hell. So much time pursuing pleasure at the expense of dealing with the darker side of the soul only compounded my mental state of spiritual atrophy, frozen emotions, and self deception.

So on Saturday, I ran into S. Baxter (now known as simply "Baxter"), the lead singer of our band from back then, and it was a nice reunion to see him. He was very glad to see me. He and I spent a lot of time together, drug taking, womanizing, and partying. We were friends, and it was pleasant to know after all these years we still had affections for each other.

After the hugs and beers and emotions recollected in relative tranquility, he confesses that he thought I was dead. Another woman there, Haven, says the same. He had heard from an old roommate that I had died in a car crash, and because he hadn't heard from me in so long, he started to believe in the story. In the absence of physical, empirical truth, the myth fills in the gaps, the void. Pat is gone, no one hears from him, so he must be dead. Sympathetic magic.

So I had died, and Steve began telling people this news. Haven told me she actually mourned me. Pat Nolan didn't make it. I was sad to hear that. It's a weird feeling to know you were thought to be dead. I felt like a ghost, a phantasm, and even though naturally I am alive and well and living in San Jo, just knowing that many people think I checked out and was killed creeps me.

Steve tells me he will now spread the correct rumor. I am alive!!!

Old Letters & Love Hungry Image Drops

Cleaning out the drawers, finding old letters. Keep them or not? Old love letters. It's a regular genre, love letters. Sometimes I wonder when I read old letters from women I knew, courted, loved, slept with, made an imaginative, psychic connection with, and I wonder how much of this connection, the intangible feeling and "relationship," was beyond any physical touching and connection. I feel as though I was an image-drop (love hungry) in their minds, a picture, a character that they constructed, and in the process of knowing me I helped shaped with my own intentionally ambiguous words, coquettishness, vagueness, double meanings, ironic puns. I made sure that this person they wanted to know and strove to shape with their own desires was ever-changing, always puzzling, yet always offering the promise of a better life together.

I'm likely to think that when we get to know people, we shape ourselves as much as we shape the person we try to love. We use them to shape ourselves, access our own selves. Because it's very hard to know who we are, to see what we look like, to know how others see us, when we get the chance to know someone deeply, intimately, we are able to project out the things inside us that otherwise we have no way of seeing. The significant others, the person we love and become angry with and frustrated and also care for, becomes a conduit of our own otherwise unknowable personality traits. A mirror, an ink blot.

Relationship: The stage on which we act out the characters of our own becoming selves.

Irony & Semi-Sincere Sincerity

Recent goal: Stop using ironic, quipy pseudo white rap/hip hop slang, AS IF: as if I were both in the know and hip with rap slang and terminology, aware of and "down with" the streets, AND able to stand a little outside of the rest of the conversation in my ironic safe-zone and slyly critique both the slang itself, and the person listening who does not know or use such slang.

Irony is a trap and it's liberation. When Irony is intentionally used to explode meaning, so represent multiple ambiguities, and as well the difficutly of making exact meaning, then it's noble and important, an imaginative act. When it's used as a safety blanket, a means of hiding from committment (Rachel's notion) and responsibility to an idea or position, and also used to mock everyone involved, then it's a wrecking ball (ITO).

"I am going to try to start being more sincere." (Impossible to say this without being ironic, for me at least.)

"It's impossible to say exactly what I mean." (Prufrock)

Example Of CT Requested by the Illustriuous SR, aka, Cake Girl
(Note true, fiction)

I go to work. A new girl is starting her first day. She is beautiful. I am attracted to her. I am shy and nervous, but manage to say Hello and ask her name. She pauses, looks at me, mumbles hello and walks away quickly.

My internal, hidden thoughts:
I am ugly, I must smell, she doesn't like me, I can't attract women, women don't like me, I'll never get a girlfriend, I'll never be married, people think I'm gay, I'm a failure, my parents are disappointed in me, I'm a nerd.

I may have these thoughts, that is, they may run through my head at such a speed that I am not even aware of them. These thoughts are merely opinions, probably false, and really have nothing to do with the truth, or reality: the girl might have been in an accident on her way to work, may herself be shy, I may not be a failure in anyone's eyes but my own, etc.

Yet, these thoughts (hence the name cognitive therapy, which basically means thinking or cognition) exist and influence my view of the world and my place in it. Thus, invalid thoughts or opinions are being used to define reality, it's my lenses into the world and my view of myself.

In reality, I've had several girlfriends, make very good money, am educated, am adored by my parents.

Later in the week, I yell at a coworker who I don't really like and cause a scene. Later, I drink at a bar and get drunk and get dissed by a woman for being a jerk and saying she has a nice ass. Her BF slugs me in the gut and I double over. My own assumptions are being confirmed. I wake up the next day with a hangover and lay in bed brooding, sad and depressed. A knock on the door. It's a Jehovah's Witness and they tell me I can be saved. I start to cry because I feel as though I do need to be saved. Saved not from the Devil but from my own distorted thinking.

The cognitive therapist helps a person untangle thoughts so they can get a more realistic picture of reality and unburden them of emotional suffering.

Mastering Your Own Thoughts

Reading more about cognitive therapy, Aaron T Beck's Cognitive Therapy and Emotional Disorders.

I can't say exactly why, but this subject fascinates me, and many years ago I believe gave me the tools to manage my own unruly chaotic mindscape. In the midst of depression and what only can be nebulously described as "the edge of the abyss" (right after the big Loma Prieta earthquake), I was recommended by a therapist a mass media book that was based upon cognitive therapy principles, and it saved me. Or, enabled me to move back from the darkening void of depression and insanity and transcend the binary thinking (cause and effect) that leads to a self-defeatist, deterministic life view that can destroy a person trapped by this mode of thinking.

Cognitive therapy in a nutshell posits that depression & emotional disorders can be traced to a system of thinking and thought patterns in the sufferer which are at odds with reality. So the depressed person comes to think that their thoughts (and the tangle of irrationality and ill-logic they contain) is reality, when in fact such thinking is a distortion of reality. (I believe William Glasser's whole "Reality Therapy" originates from this school of psychology.) A depressed or emotionally disturbed person exhibits irrational behavior because his thinking is irrational, yet because they mistake their erroneous thinking for reality, their thoughts can cause them great suffering and problems.

What's so interesting about this idea is that cognitive therapy focuses on the stream of thoughts that lie just under or out of reach from most people, and which happen at such lightening speed that the person is barely away they have them. Yet always at the heart of emotional response or disturbance is a series of un-empirical, irrational, and faulty logic structure that leads to the emotional response. This is important, because part of what causes the depressed person to feel so helpless is the (invalid) deterministic belief that they are slave to their emotions, to forces beyond their control, and that their emotions define reality for them. Yet, when you analyze the series of lightening-quick thoughts and logic patterns related to the emotional response or disturbance, you find that these thought patterns always precede the emotional response. By studying these thoughts, and how much they differ with the reality most of us share, the patient can understand that their problems are based upon their own thinking rather than forces beyond their control. When these thoughts are made conscious, then they can be controlled, changed, or simply not believed in any more.

What I also like about this theory is how it relates to Yoga and meditation, in that the person can learn to transcend the hurly burly din of the mind's linguistic racket and begin to discover a deeper, more meaningful self in the process. It's often the habitual, repetitive, and mostly unconscious types of thinking that leads to stress, poor posture, and as well, depression.

I am endlessly amazed at how powerful our mind is, and when we do not examine our thinking, who we are, and how our thinking starts to stand in for reality, we will always find trouble. Left unchecked, the mind will run rampant, and depending upon our upbringing (and the patterns of behavior our parents modeled for us), run our lives. When closely examined, the mind can be our ally, and enable us to become whoever we want to be.