Expand.. The Music Hutch
The Great Irony of Pellucid
Part One: See No Evil
“Are you nervous?”
I looked up, temporarily distracted from my own little world, to the girl in thin-rimmed glasses staring inquisitively at me.
“Huh?”
“You’re chewing your nails. Are you nervous?”
“Oh.” I laughed a little. “I’m chewing my nails.”
“Yeah. Are you nervous?”
“No, it’s just a…habit…I guess…”
I was in the two-level duplex of a person I didn’t know. I didn’t really know why I was there and I hardly felt compelled to stay but I stayed anyway, seated cross-legged on a chair and set apart from the rest of the group. I sat the way Buddhist monks do when they meditate, except I wasn’t Buddhist and nowhere near as focused as a monk; I just did it to establish myself even though it looked awkward.
I didn’t know anybody. Jesus. I didn’t know anybody. Of course, instead of actively getting to know people like a healthy normal individual would, I sat cross-legged in a chair. This was because I am not normal and I’m probably not healthy.
It wasn’t anxiety. I actually felt quite comfortable. It was more like a high school assembly with an inspirational speaker. You know, the kind of speaker who asks some dumb question — one of those adolescent “How-can-a-loving-God-create-sin?” questions supposed to shake you at your core and make you dig deep introspectively — and lets the ensuing silence hang for ten minutes. Then he says something like, “It’s funny how people get really uncomfortable when there’s a lot of silence” and leaves everything unresolved. But I always sat resolute and didn’t feel uncomfortable. And I’d already worked out the answer to the question years before.
I’ve always been years ahead and ages behind.
“That’s a bad habit,” the girl said, distracting me from my thoughts. I had moved on by this point, thinking she was just going to ignore me like everybody else. You know, the same way you respond when some overoptimistic youth leader pointedly asks, “What’s wrong?” and you shrug and say “Nothing” since you know that if you expounded they would just exacerbate the situation.
Truth is, I was disenfranchised with the whole alpha male pastime.
I didn’t know anybody here. And nothing particularly caught my attention or engaged my mind, except the laughing reality of why I came. It felt so puerile and adolescent. I blamed myself, spinning the situation incessantly around my brain like a spider web, repeating the apparent response, “Shouldn’t I have outgrown this by now?”
“I know just the person for you,” somebody had said, their words meticulously weaving that serendipitous air of mystery for me to wonder in my pervasive loneliness if perhaps there actually was somebody attractive in the cosmos who shared my sentiment. Of course, it got me to do exactly what they wanted. “I know just the person for you,” that fucker said. They were like a ventriloquist and I was their little puppet.
And inevitably I surrendered to find a place full of boring spoon-fed people. A laughing irony mocking me, taunting me, reminding me of that somebody so wrapped up in their agenda they could give a shit less about me. Hardly serendipitous.
This was my present reality in my
Let me tell you a little about this city. There are always multiple things going on at once, too complex for the human eye to differentiate. One individual is aware of the thriving indie rock scene, the other only of the red state phenomena that comes with football. I’m aware of both and I find both particularly boring.
I am also aware that this place is smothering me and trying to swallow me whole at the same time. I’m too big to live in a place as dull and unengaging as this, and yet I am in it, consumed by these menial tasks I naively committed to upon arrival in a genuine attempt to get the fire burning.
And now there was this girl. Talking to me. I already presumed she was married. Fuck it. Move on.
When I arrived, my friend told me the women here were love hungry. That scared the hell out of me. It wasn’t encouraging. For all the naïve people encouraged by that, a place that has love hungry women doesn’t mean you go there and see a love hungry supermodel walking down the street. The reality is more like terribly awkward situations in bars from a proliferation of homely women who have never had the attention they so covet. They live in a world of fantasy to mask the harshness of their reality, so sexually frustrated are they by their lack of opportunity. Any male that crosses their path and intersects with their lives is a “the one.”
In
In
I was still going at my nails.
“That’s a really bad habit,” the girl repeated. “You should quit.”
I just shrugged. Nothing.
It’s a mystery to me why some people get so bent on proselytizing me on the issue. My Mom persisted until I was 18 to no avail; why would a complete stranger (who was presumably married) suddenly convince me? Oh, the light’s been shed. My scales, like the apostle Paul’s, have been removed.
To me, the issue was irrelevant. I was more distracted by the heavy doses of eyeliner lining each of this girl’s eyes.
“I’m Elisabetta,” the girl said, extending her hand.
“Oh.
“Elisabetta.”
“Elisabetta.” I looked confused.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Elisabetta. Nice to meet you. I’m Roger.”
“Roger. Like the rabbit.”
“Sure.” I said it innocently as if I hadn’t heard it an infinite amount of times. She was the prototype for inspirational speakers asking dumb high school questions. The person who pointedly asks, “What’s wrong?” Her slits for eyebrows peered probingly into my vacant pupils for some sort of means to a common ground, the way a salesperson looks for an end. “Elisabetta is an interesting name,” I said. “Are you Italian?” To be honest, I had no clue. I was just thinking Italian because it was a pizza party and Italian food was on my mind. Her pronounced eyebrows were so goddamn distracting.
“No, it’s a French name.”
“Oh cool. Well, my favorite Sonic Youth song has a French title.” I don’t know why I thought that.
“Oh.”
Elisabetta wasn’t sure why I thought that
either. “Well, I was actually born in
the
“Oh.”
“But I did visit
“That’s cool. I’ve always wanted to travel. I’ve never left the country, though.”
“It’s a good experience.”
“Ya know, as much as I will hate it when it actually happens, I want to be in a French train station. I want to try to exchange a 20 for French currency and get back a few small coins. Ya know, where I don’t know how much it is but I know it’s definitely not 20 dollars. As much as that’ll completely suck, I can’t wait for it to happen. Because then you know you’re in another country, ya know? I mean, that’s as helpless as you can get. Where you don’t even know the language. You know you were wronged but what can you do?” Sometimes I don’t know why I think of these things.
Elisabetta narrowed her doused eyes almost like she was offended that I could conceive of a Frenchman being corrupt.
I’ve heard the French can be that way.
“I’ve heard that when you try to talk to the train guards in your broken French they put they hands over their ears and yell, ‘I don’t speak English! I don’t speak English!’”
“Well, they do really value their language,” Elisabetta said blandly, and I could tell she would rather talk about something daft like the weather. I was just starting to get into this, though. I mean, she was the 95 percent of the human population that bored me to tears; at least I should take pleasure in fucking with her. “It’s probably something that we could learn a lesson from.”
“Yeah. Ya know, there’s a beauty in words. I heard somebody saying once about how you shouldn’t use all these superfluous details in your writing and you should keep it as simple and to the point as possible. And I was just sort of like, ‘But that’s so bland.’ I mean, how can you adequately say what you want to say without using some of these bigger words that are such great descriptors, that describe simple things in so much more detail?”
“Well, I think the message should be clear to everyone.”
“I don’t. I remember reading textbooks in college where it would lay everything out clearly and go into such detail about people and places. I got so bored. I mean, we’d already studied it all in class. I wanted to get to the meat. I think that writers should liberally — or casually. Maybe that’s the word I’m looking for. Or maybe both — but they should casually and liberally mention the thinkers they used to develop their idea and it should be the readers’ responsibility to do the research if they haven’t already. And if they don’t do the research, then it’s their own fault.”
“I don’t think you’ll end up with very many readers that way.”
I smiled quaintly. “I guess people just need something accessible that doesn’t make them think.”
Elisabetta furrowed her eyebrows in deep concentration. “I don’t know if I follow you.”
“Well, if you’re going to spend 100 pages laying the spoon-fed groundwork for people — groundwork that would be much more interesting and much more insightful if they did the research themselves — then you’re just burning people out before you get to the truly innovative things you have to say. But maybe people just need that groundwork and not what will shake them to their core.”
“Why should people be shaken at their core? I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
“I think it’s healthy. It tests how solid of a foundation somebody has in what they believe.”
“People already know how strong their foundation is. It shouldn’t be a writer’s job to try to strip that from them.”
I should’ve stopped there. I should’ve conceded. But I’ve never had that kind of humble spirit. Besides, I was getting worked up. I let it out, the most inaccessible a priori thing I believed. It was stupid. “Just tell it as it is,” I always hear, but those people are usually assholes and use that as a platform to invalidate the noble few who hold different ideas than the majority.
“I guess people should just belong to a niche.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“They should just find something that makes them comfortable and settle down and not explore the rest.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to say.”
“But it’s what happens. I mean, you look around and people just find something that interests them — music or sports or politics or religion — and they just associate with people who share those similar interests. Well, I’ve never belonged to a niche. I’ve never associated with a single group of people. Perhaps it’s just this grossly inflated production-based Greek ideal in me, but I study up on multiple subjects to try to have a well-rounded understanding of the ways the world operates and the ways people operate.”
“Well, that’s healthy.”
“But I think people have taken the freedom they have in this country and they’ve used it to specialize. Instead of doing the Renaissance-man polymath thing and trying to be good at everything, they just specialize on this single thing like computers or psychology or whatever. And then everybody gets all bent out of shape about issues like abortion and same sex marriage. No wonder they’re so huge. Of course they’re hot button issues because they come down to the individual. With as individualistic a society as we live in it makes sense that those issues would be the driving forces. We wouldn’t have either of them to the extent that we do if we had a healthy sense of community. Just look at the ‘70s. Abortion and homosexuality weren’t even the big issues. You didn’t have Christians voting Republican because it was the pro-life thing to do.”
This was clearly inaccessible to Elisabetta. “I don’t understand,” she said.
I didn’t really want to elaborate. In all my inflated hubris, I should’ve known this would happen.
I’ve always been years ahead and ages behind.
I suddenly felt exhausted. I spoke too much.
“How did this happen?” I asked, with a friendly smirk.
“What?”
“How did we get here?”
Elisabetta shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I laughed. “I’m sorry. I’ve been told that my way of making small talk is asking what the ontological guiding principles are in life.”
Elisabetta stared blankly.
“I’m going to get a drink.”
“Did you hear about Britney?”
Kosovo declares independence
“No.”
“She had another looney breakdown and her ambulance was surrounded by police cars and helicopters just to shield her from the paparazzi.”
“What?”
“Yeah. And get this. They’re thinking about implementing a ‘Britney law’ where you are required by law to stay 20 yards away from her at all times.”
Scores killed in Afghan bombing
“No way.”
Four dissidents freed
by
“Yeah. It’s like her own personal bubble.”
Part Two: Hear No Evil
“So get this shit, Little Peter Rabbit.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What?”
“You know I hate that Peter Rabbit shit.”
“Okay…Mr. Rabbit.”
“Fuck you.”
Toby just laughed. “So here’s the thing about smoking
cigarettes,” he said, taking a liberal swig of whiskey from his plastic
coke
bottle. “It’s more important how you eat
than if you smoke. They say if you eat
“Toby, you’re full of shit,” I said in the friendliest way possible taking a swig from my own bottle. Our destination was unclear but we were taking it easy, walking downtown sipping from our bottles openly in front of all the bodies walking by. It was a typical Friday night.
“No, it’s true. I read it on the Internet.”
“And we all know everything on the Internet is true.”
“This was a legit site, man.”
“Oh yeah? What was it?”
“The Environmental Conservation Agency’s official site.”
“The Environmental Conservation Agency? What the fuck was it doing on there?”
“They said smoking is a form of phenomenological pollution.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it was pretty interesting. They said that the reason we don’t care about the environment as much as we should is these phenomenological pollutants that we don’t address. Take care of those and you can start to educate people about the environment.”
“That’s the most ridiculous fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I think they’re for a nationwide smoking ban.”
“Jesus Toby, you read this?”
“Yeah. Pretty cool shit, huh?”
I laughed. “I swear, you’ll stand by anything. I’m sure I’ll hear the exact opposite from you tomorrow. If you eat healthy and smoke, then it has even worse effects than if you just smoke on a diet of pop and candy.”
Toby laughed. “Say what you’d like, Pete. Little Peter Rabbit.”
“Fuck you.” I smiled. “You told me that you’re an alcoholic if you drink alcohol routinely every Tuesday at the same bar.”
Toby shrugged. “That is true.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. That’s almost as ridiculous as saying you’re an alcoholic if you drink alcohol every time you go to a bar.”
“Then what is an alcoholic? You tell me.”
“I looked it up. It’s a person who imbibes more than six alcoholic beverages in a week.”
“There you go.”
“I think it goes deeper. It’s more about the lifestyle. It’s all about the time and place, you know, and knowing the time and place for drinking. Ya know, maintaining a healthy lifestyle.” I took a swig from my bottle.
When I made my drink earlier, I forgot to shake the bottle to mix the soda and whiskey so now I took in a mouthful of whiskey. I felt the burning sensation on my tongue that I first experienced in junior high when my friend Jeremy and I passed a bottle of SoCo back and forth. It was a reminder of my healthy post-collegiate lifestyle or just the extreme hypocrisy of my words. Coals touched to Isaiah’s lips.
It was bitter cold
tonight in
Most Friday nights the streets were packed tight with people, but the numbers were down tonight. Because it was so miserable fucking cold.
We had the whiskey to keep warm. Toby kept the rest of the fifth in a backpack slung over his right shoulder so we could stay warm when the sodas ran out. Duck into an alleyway and trade swigs after making sure there were no cops around. Put our lips to the glass. The alcohol content would take care of any germs. The real community.
We were returning from the movie theatre, walking because we were both poor and didn’t want to pay for the bus. We didn’t anticipate the bitter cold. Well, we did. That’s why we brought the whiskey. But there’s a certain cold where no amounts of whiskey will help.
I never understood how somebody could get locked into a city until I moved here. The nomadic lifestyle appealed to me and I didn’t get why people didn’t do it more. Why are there homeless people in these big cities? They should just move to some rural place where rent is $300 a month. It’s easy.
Then I landed my first career-oriented job — by accident, more or less — and felt everyone’s pressure that I had to give this first introduction to the real world at least a year. And then I ended up in an apartment on a six-month lease. And then I made a few friends who encouraged me to do whatever was best for me but secretly wanted me to stick around.
“Eating
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“That’s what it says on the raisin box. Eat five to nine raisins daily for healthy results.”
I laughed. “Who eats five to nine raisins? Have you seen how small they are? Jesus, I eat five to nine handfuls of five to nine raisins.”
“Raisins are potent shit. It doesn’t take much to have a good effect.”
“What got you on this raisin kick lately?”
“Oh I just bought some yesterday.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, strawberries are out of season and I was sick of grapes. Decided to try something new. For a change.”
“I’ve been keeping up with my humble sandwich dinners.”
Toby smirked. “Or spaghetti.”
“Yeah. Or spaghetti. I’m a fucking terrible cook. I can hardly manage spaghetti and sauce at the same time.”
“You are a terrible cook.”
I laughed. “It’s funny. Every time I talk to my Dad, he’s all like, ‘You have such self control. It’s a really good trait to have.’ And I’m just like, ‘I don’t have that much self control.’”
Toby smirked. “Every time my Dad calls he just wants to talk about the environment. I guess it’s a big issue for him.”
“That’s funny.”
“Yeah, we get on these huge talks about Al Gore. My Dad is like this huge conservative but he considers himself open-minded because he’s pro-Al Gore’s-environment-campaign.”
“Well, if Al Gore were to run for president I would vote for him in a second.”
“I don’t think my Dad would go that far.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I guess.”
“That’s one of the things I’ve never understood about conservatives. They get so caught up on certain issues and lose sight of just wanting to help people.”
“I think that’s all politics, my friend.”
“Yeah, sure, but I mean, the way we define poverty is so backwards. We say that a family of five or less who makes less than $25,000 a year is below the poverty level. But a family that’s right at the $25,000 mark isn’t in poverty. But a family of four making $25,000 a year is still really hurting.”
“Yeah.”
“I just feel like…I mean…we just really need to get our shit together. And Al Gore’s doing so much to actually do that.”
Toby shrugged. “At least then we’d have clean air.”
“Do you realize how much he’s doing for our generation? He’s trying to get us engaged with culture again. That’s huge. If he ran for president, I’d vote for him in a second. I mean, I know he won’t but if he did—”
“How is he going to get us engaged? What makes us not engaged?”
“Well, he was talking about how voting has gotten to be so ridiculous. Like he shared this story where he was down in the polls and his consultants told him to say something in his speech and that if he did his points would raise by 2.7 percent. They had this real specific number. I don’t remember what it was exactly but it was like 2.7. So he did it and sure enough his points raised by exactly 2.7 percent. So he went on to talk about how politics has come down to manipulating people to gain points in the polls. But people aren’t dumb. They start to realize they’re being manipulated. But what do they do? How can they respond? So that’s how it happens. They just don’t. And so we see this overwhelming apathy.”
“Interesting.”
“Americans are growing so detached.”
“How so?”
“Well, like, I read recently about the groundbreaking science on the nature of morality. And it didn’t really break any ground as much as affirmed what psychology’s told us for years. Ya know, that Descartes was wrong. But it claimed that we’re really just like gorillas because gorillas mastered sign language and we’re really like termites because they construct buildings out of twigs. Of course, it ignored that we’ve mastered multiple languages (and gorillas only sign), or that we’re sill innovatively constructing elaborate skyscrapers. I mean sure, we, in a very overarching vague way, follow the same basic rules of survival that they do. Sure, monkeys can press buttons on a screen faster than we can. I mean, perhaps it’s my own bias, but there’s something inherently deeper about mankind. I mean, shit. We’ve surpassed these overarching themes of survival. An elephant may have a better memory than a man, but it’s not solving physics problems. Humans have this inexplicable drive to better themselves that no other animal has.”
“How does that make us detached?”
“Well right now, the way technology is going, people are improving computers to be twice as fast every year. Eventually they hope to make a computer that is self-conscious. If they made a computer that was self-conscious, there’s no question that the kind of knowledge it would have would be immensely greater than any human. But here’s the thing. Let’s say it’s twice as smart as a human. With that logic, it should be able to develop an entity twice as smart as itself in half the time that we can. But what would make it do that? If we say that we could program it to be that way then we’ve already forfeited the idea of free will. If the computer is truly self-conscious, then it would have free will and it would have no reason to better itself. So there’s something that sets us apart from computers.”
“Okay, that still doesn’t explain what makes us detached.”
“I like to call this inexplicable drive for us to better ourselves the soul. It’s why J.R.R. Tolkien called us ‘sub-creators.’”
There was silence. And then Toby laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“I think you just logically proved that we have souls.”
I smiled. “Yeah, I think I just did. But here’s the problem. The further we separate ourselves from others and from ourselves, the further we are from that ability to predict, adapt, and have any feeling or instinct about a choice or path. It seems to me that must be the motivation for creating these machines. Individuals that get so separated from life, love, and friendship seem to have little to do with their time other than to recreate God through machines. Ya know, be gods themselves. The human race is becoming more and more detached from one another and it’s the motivation behind our desire to create these entities in our own image. And that desire will only grow with each generation.”
In the neighborhood I grew up in, our neighbors were the Mulligans. They were the “keep-to-themselves” type. The kind of people who come home and immediately shut the garage door behind them. Who call the cops when other neighbors are sitting on the porch in the summer because that certainly means they’re up to no good. I know their last names were the Mulligans. I don’t know either of their first names. I never really met them.
Once a year in the local newspaper, the editors run a list of the level three sex offenders. Level three means they’re likely to repeat the offense.
There are a lot of problems with running the list, though. It’s good to make parents aware of the predators, of the 40-year-olds trying to lure six-year-olds into their homes to suck on lollipops, but it’s a great stigma to the 18-year-old who fucks his 17-year-old girlfriend.
Plus, it’s not always accurate. Once a sex offender, you are supposed to notify the police every time you move so they can release your current address to the public. But sex offenders don’t always do that. Instead, a sex offender moves out and innocent families like my own moves in. Then the newspaper runs a list of sex offenders with the wrong address attached.
Imagine the Mulligans’ surprise when our address showed up on the list of sex offenders in the neighborhood.
Imagine our surprise. We had the paper run a correction but it didn’t matter. The damage was done. Ours was the house with the shadow cast on it in the pinnacle of summer.
I only learned about
the previous
family via impersonal stories. The
father was somehow a level three for an experience that happened years
ago. He’d undergone some sort of religious
transformation, got married, had a son, settled down and I never
understood why
he was level three. But when he wouldn’t
let his wife file for divorce, she committed suicide and he ended up
taking his
eight-year-old son to
There’s something inherently wrong with shutting the garage door right behind you when you get home.
“I fear for the future of the human race,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know if I care.”
“But I have faith in the power of love overcoming the love of power.”
“That’s good.”
“That’s why I like Al Gore so much. He’s doing so much trying to get our generation involved again.”
“He created the Internet.”
“You’re a douche bag.”
Toby laughed and sipped his bottle. “I think we might have to refill soon.”
“Aren’t you wasted?”
“Not enough.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m buzzing pretty hard.”
“How many shots did you put in?”
“I didn’t use the shot glass like you, you pussy. I guesstimated like a real man.”
I laughed. “You’re full of shit.”
“Maybe.”
We walked in silence. Then Toby spoke up, “Ya know, I’m not sure how I feel about the Internet.”
“Why not?”
“Well I mean, my whole thing with the Internet is, ‘Where do you begin?’ Trusted Web-sites? BBC News, Drudge Report? Even then, it takes like an hour and a half to get your daily news. Then there’s the added emphasis of all these conspiracy sites like Digg and whatnot. It’s overwhelming.”
“True.”
“And then you have the distraction of social networking sites which could be great if they weren’t so goddamn distracting. I mean, Facebook has a million quizzes that are so fucking pointless and Myspace is overrun with ads. Both are kind of lame but nobody else uses the cleaner underdog networking sites so there’s no point.”
“Yeah.” We took a few steps in contemplative silence before I spoke up. “Plus, I only use the Internet for porn.”
Toby laughed.
More silence. Then I said, “Do you got any cigarettes with you? I left mine at the house.”
“Yeah.”
“You wanna smoke one?”
“I’ve been wanting to all night.”
Intermission
“Which would you rather be: blind or deaf?”
I want
to know everything
“I don’t know. I’d have to think about that. What about you?”
I want
to be everywhere
“Blind. I can’t even go a day without listening to music. I could never give music up.”
I want
to fuck everyone in the world
“Yeah, but to never be able to see a hot chick again… That’s pretty tough.”
I want to do something that matters
“Yeah.”
A little grace, please
Part Three: Speak No Evil
Pastor Graham rolled over and answered the cell phone buzzing on the table. It was set to vibrate and ringing with such urgency that he couldn’t ignore it. He answered groggily, “Hello?”
“Pastor Graham?” My words were nothing more than a whisper.
The first time I met Graham was when I went to his church. I guess I was invited, or at least told I had to attend three times because Satan would be testing me the first two. I don’t really know why I showed up; I don’t really know why I show up to anything.
I decided to be open about my faith and my questions, though, with the hope of dialoguing. I was cordial and polite with an air of professionalism so as not to step on toes, admitting I wasn’t there because I had all the answers.
I didn’t want to pass early judgment on Graham but he seemed to have this condescending air about him whenever we talked. It was offsetting but I decided to overlook it because I thought perhaps I was projecting his arrogance with my own. Maybe he was doing it because he was getting defensive.
It was fine with me. I was willing to talk to him on his own terms.
The funny thing was when I talked to him in his own terms, he said, “Oh, you have the ability to talk to me on my own terms and we share a lot of the same beliefs; therefore you are a Christian.”
I told him cordially and politely with an air of professionalism, “Well, that’s the term you labeled me. I never made that claim myself.”
I hadn’t talked with him since, but now the timing was urgent, the mood grave and surreal, my voice barely a whisper.
“Yeah?”
“I need to talk.”
“What time is it? Bugs, it’s
“I know, but…the demons visited me again.”
The first time demons visited me was two years ago when I lived in a single room at my college. Their names were Lou and Bob. I’m not sure if I was asleep or not, and that will forever remain a mystery to me. If I was asleep, it certainly was my strangest dream ever.
I heard a knock on my door. “Come in,” I said. I invited them in. Lou and Bob walked in, Lou in a yellow shirt and Bob in a red one. Both had encouraging smiles that highlighted their distinctly Christian-subculture goatees — the kinds supposed to make them look artistic but makes their lack of a creative aesthetic all the more apparent. You know, the kind of mutation that would happen if you crossed DNA strands with Robert Downey, Jr. and Bono.
Both of them sat by my bed and I think they talked to me but I don’t remember anything they said. I remember I felt really encouraged. I even wondered if they were angels.
I heard a faint beeping noise and I wasn’t sure what it was. beep beep I looked around the room to pinpoint the noise and saw my alarm clock. beep It was the time I was supposed to wake up. beep beep I climbed out of bed, wondering beep if it was my alarm but I felt confused beep because beep it was still so faint. beep I turned the alarm off.
Then I got ready for my day.
I didn’t feel so hot later that day when I realized that yellow represents fear and red bitterness.
“The demons visited you?” Pastor Graham said. “What happened?”
“They came in a dream. I dreamt about this ecologist and he said that the way you solve the problem with pollution is to get people to stop thinking outward. If people think outward, then they think about space and they want a lot of space. If you get them to think inward, then they automatically reduce the amount of space they need.”
Smoking is a phenomenological pollution.
“Mm hm.”
“And then I dreamt that my friend was at the airport and he put his luggage on the tram and he started to step on the tram to follow the luggage. There was this nice girl — I think she introduced herself as Kelly — who helped him down and said she’d lead him where he needed to go. And then they started going. And before I could do anything I heard this giant commanding voice tell me that Kelly was a demon. And then, as soon as he said it, I felt her presence like this enormous rain cloud on my soul. My entire body tensed up. I was paralyzed with fear and shivering and there was just this huge sickness that passed through me.”
“Mm hm.”
“Then I thought I woke up so the first thing I did was grab a Bible and pray that I would never feel it again. I opened the Bible to Romans 3 but everything was blurry and I couldn’t read it. And then I woke up for real. I was laying on my left side, which is bad.”
“Why?”
“Well, ya know how they say that you can wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”
“Yeah.”
“Well apparently when you sleep on your right side the left hemisphere is dominant in controlling your dreams. And the left hemisphere is the concrete part of your mind; you know, the part that structures and stores information in a linear, precise and exact manner. It’s all logic and reason or whatever. Mathematics.”
“Right.”
“But the right hemisphere is associated with feelings and emotion. So when you sleep on your left side, your right hemisphere controls your dreams and so all your worries or present stress or whatever is exaggerated. And feelings can be scary things. I mean, we all have nightmares even when we sleep on our right side. We’re all prone to it because it’s all the unconscious. But they are especially scary when there’s no reason or logic guiding them. It’s kind of funny that Freud would say that making a left turn in a dream is a symbol of misbehavior. And then Jung took that and said it represents the unconscious. Because they both associated left with feelings.”
Graham sounded bored. “Yes, that’s very interesting and all but it
is
“Yeah.”
“What did it say?”
“It talked about how no one is righteous but we are justified through faith.”
“Exactly. So you have nothing to worry about. You’re justified by faith.” This didn’t feel as encouraging as I expected.
“Yeah, but I’m…I’m scared. I mean, demons just visited me.”
“Well you have nothing to be afraid of. Our God is a lot bigger than any demon. Those demons had to ask God permission before they did that. You realize that, right?”
“Well…”
“Really, that should be an encouragement to you,” Graham said. “You know you’re on the right path. You should feel empowered.”
Graham’s inspirational words did anything but inspire me. I felt myself grow annoyed. “What? I was just visited by fucking demons. That’s not fucking encouraging!”
“Please,” Graham said, patiently. “That’s very un-Christian to use those words.”
I felt like telling Graham to fuck off and that his stupid fucking church was the only unproductive and very un-Christian thing. You hear that Graham? If a church isn’t really about reaching hurting people, it’s an institution. The same way politics is lost if they lose sight of the hurting people. Who cares about conservative or liberal if it’s just a fucking “me-me-me” pedestal?
And you know what Graham, that’s the part what annoys me more than anything about your stupid fucking religion. I ask, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” and you say, “Oh, it means to accept that Jesus is the Son of God.” And I say, “Okay, I believe that on faith. But I don’t care about heaven and hell because I personally find it a distraction. I’d rather work to help hurting people and make their present realities of hell into something better.” And then, if you don’t completely lose your shit at that point, you say something absolutely fucking retarded like “Well, you know, I can tell God’s working in you and you’re searching and you will believe in heaven the way I do someday.”
You know what I feel like saying to that Graham? I feel like saying, “Jesus Christ, can’t you accept that maybe God’s revealed himself to me in a different way than you, you egocentric fuck, and accept on faith that we’re really heading for the same goal even if we believe differently?” But I don’t say that because I’m not there to proselytize.
I’m not out to convert people who are chewing their fingernails just because my superego calls it a bad habit. They’re already more than aware of the consequences of their actions when they go outside in the bitter cold and the exposed flesh that is where their fingernails used to be pulses with a heartbeat of its own.
I felt like saying all that to Graham, but I didn’t say anything. I just held it in and felt encouraged that demons visited me.
“Do you need to talk about anything else?” Graham asked.
Tears welled in my
eyes. Sometimes I really felt for that
little
eight-year-old boy forced to move to
A little grace, please.
And I always had a hard time understanding how somebody could get locked into a city.
This poor eight-year-old boy, whose father handed him over to his sick NAMBLA friends to go out to the international waters under the guise of fishing trips, selling him like Joseph’s brothers to slavery. This poor eight-year-old boy as helpless as an American tourist in a French train station who’s been given unfair change trying exchange $20.
A little—
“Do you need to talk about anything else?” Graham repeated.
“No.” I hung up.
Addendum
“You know, lisp is such a funny word.”
Eric Berne developed Transactional Analysis. He was shooting for a psychotherapy that was easy to understand. A practice that was accessible to all.
“Yeah.”
We each have internal
roles of
parents, children and adults, according to
“You sound distracted. Are you distracted?”
There are two parent models — the nurturing and controlling parent.
The nurturing parent is caring and concerned. They want to keep their child safe and offer them unconditional love, calming them when they are troubled.
The controlling parent tries to make their child do exactly as they want by transferring values and beliefs to help the child understand the present construct and live in society.
“Maybe a little.”
The adult is grown up, mature — the rational being that talks reasonably and assertively. He doesn’t try to control or react. He is comfortable with himself. The adult is more or less our ideal self.
“Oh.”
There are three types of children we play — the natural child, the little professor and the adaptive child.
The natural child is largely naïve. He is open and vulnerable.
The little professor is the curious and exploring child who always tries out new things. Together with the natural child, they make up the free child.
The adaptive child reacts to the world around him, either changing to fit in or rebelling against the forces he feels.
“What were you talking about?”
When two people communicate, each exchange is a transaction. Most of the fucked up things in our lives come from unsuccessful transactions.
“Nothing.”
Parents naturally speak to children. After all, this is the role of a parent. Parents can talk with other parents and adults too, although the subject is usually about children.
“You said something. Lisp is a funny word?”
The nurturing parent naturally talks to the natural child and the controlling parent to the adaptive child. In fact, these parts of our personality come out in lieu of the opposite.
“Yeah, because people who have lisps can’t say it. Lithp. It’s kind of a mean word.”
The games get really intricate. Apparently, there are entire rituals from greetings to whole conversations about the weather where we take different positions for different events. These are usually pre-recorded scripts that we just play out. They give us a sense of control and identity and reassure us that all is still well in the world.
“Yeah.”
Complementary transactions occur when both people are at the same level. A parent talking to a parent is a complementary transaction. Here, both are thinking in the same terms and communication is easy.
Problems occur in crossed transactions, where the other person is on another different level. For example the nurturing or controlling parent speaks to the child, who is either adaptive or natural in their response. When both people talk as a parent to the other’s child, the wires get crossed and conflict results.
The ideal line of communication is the mature and rational adult-adult relationship.
“Or speech impediment.”
For example, a controlling parent may get the other person into a child state where they conform with the demands. There is also the risk that they will be an adaptive child and rebel. The other person could very well take opposing parent or adult states, too.
“Yeah. Or pellucid.”
The idea, then, is to be a nurturing parent or talk at the same level of another person to create trust. Watch out for crossed wires since this is where conflict arises.
“I don’t see how pollution is a funny word.”
When wires get crossed, the best way to handle it is to go to the state that the other person is in to talk to them at the same level. Then, work at moving yourself and the other person to the adult level.
“Not pollution. Pellucid.”
“What’s pellucid?”
He was shooting for a psychotherapy that was easy to understand. A practice that was accessible to all.
“It means ‘easy to understand.’”
Give it to him to make one of the most difficult technical therapies in all psychology.
“Yeah, that is a funny word.”
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.. The Music Hutch |