Chatterwhattery

 Chatterwhattery 

                                                                                         i

Gaspar Stephens is spending a year teaching middle school in Mississippi. How he got the gig I am not at all certain – some sort of National Foolery Foundation grant I am guessing. How he could be remotely qualified or temperamentally suited, I don’t see that either. He called last night, muttering about “race-based controversies” busting out all over, classrooms, faculty meetings, district policy, anywhere two or three were gathered. “I've reached a stage,” he said, “where I’m damn near paralyzed.”

     “That doesn’t sound like you.”

     “It doesn’t, does it? But, it’s because no one listens. You can’t listen either. If you don't latch on immediately to a particular viewpoint, if you don’t choose sides, if you try instead to listen and empathize, you're dead – run through the heart.” He paused. “Because you don’t have a weapon to defend yourself, your side. You have to take sides as you’d take up your sword, and you better start waving it around like a madman immediately. Otherwise, they’ll take you down.”

     I waited. “What made me think this was a good idea?” he asked. “I tell ya, I'm too old for this shit. Believe it or not, I’m too nice for this shit.”

     “Do you want my take?”

     “Is it going to help?”

     “I doubt it, but . . . .”

     “Yeah. Go on.”

     “It’s this, and I come to it reluctantly: Listening to anyone, especially sympathetically, trying to understand what they want to say, is a mistake. Because oddly, people don’t want to be listened to; they want to be heard – that’s why they’re yelling so damn loud.”

     “So.”

     “Well, my current default is: listen but pretend you’re not.”

ii

Speaking of pretending. One of you asked how my therapy was going, particularly the three-times-daily calls with Bob. Typically:

     “Hey.”

     “Hey.”

     “This is Ted.”

     “I know.”

     “Checking in.”

     “What have you got?”

     “What have you got?”

     “I was thinking about a time a student asked me about the Oxford comma.”

     “That was a positive thought?”

     “Yeah. It was. It really was. She actually cared; and I could explain it in a way she understood.”

     “I guess.”

     “What about you?”

     “I was thinking about lighting a fart. I haven’t done that since maybe fifth grade.”

iii

Mel Ball called. He wanted to know if St. Hubertus was in my abridged copy of Butler’s Lives of the Saints.

     “Wait a minute.” I thought I knew right where the book was, but it wasn’t.

     “You didn’t borrow the book, did you?”

     “No. Why would I?”

     “Because I can’t find it.”

     “Your logic is impeccable.”

     “What do you want to know?”

     “I read online he was Austrian.”

     “I read the same thing.”

     “I was hoping he was Italian.”

     “And died at a high-class Hooters in Texas.”

     “Yes.”

02.26.16

Neurasthenia, part IV

 Neurasthenia, part IV                                                                      

 

Bob, gettin’ his Freud on

“I’ve got another self-statement,” I was telling Bob. “Get this. I say, all the time, ‘What the flip?’ – though I don’t always say ‘flip.’ So: “What the flip – ‘What the flip?’?”
     He looked at me askance, easy enough since we were sitting side by side – at the bar at The Gaza. I said, “You know. I say, ‘What the flip?’ when I’m exasperated. I catch myself; I’m exasperated at being exasperated; and I turn it around on itself. I say: ‘What the flip’ – “What the flip?”?’”
      “I don’t know,” he said. “Keep working on it though, the self-statements. It’s a constant process.
      “So, good,” he said.

“Next step,” he went on: “new opportunities to think positive thoughts. It’s not just about countering the negative; it’s about thinking the positive.” The idea, as I understand it: You don’t just counter negative thoughts, you need to create positive ones. Vibe up! 
     Here’s the for instance Bob gave me: You walk into a bathroom at a moment of deep gastrointestinal distress and the cat is in the litter box even more gurglingly, splashingly desperate. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have a cat – this is “a hypothetical.” Instead of saying, “What the flip,” you look quickly – very quickly – around for five things in that nauseating room you can say something positive about. And you say them: how bright the canary yellow of the walls: how clean the stark white of the door and the trim; what a lovely shower curtain painted with van Gogh’s sunflowers; ah, out the window is a view of the mountains; there is a litter box. 
     That’s just an example. To be repeated. At least three times a day. “Set an alarm,” Bob says, “morning, mid-afternoon, mid-evening. When it dings, look around immediately for something positive. Say it: ‘The sun is shining.’ ‘I have caller ID, I don’t have to pick this up.’ ‘The moon is full and “The Good Wife” goes off the air this May.’

“One other thing . . . ,” Bob hesitated. He drained his whiskey sour and pushed the glass across the bar. The huge barman, Michael, who looks like what he is, a former linebacker gone to fat, shook his head. (I read, “What grown man drinks whiskey sours?” “What grown man,” I was also thinking, “dons a fake mustache and goatee, ‘puttin’ on the Freud,’ as Bob announced when he came in and sat down beside me.”) I pulled at my Guinness and shook my head at Michael. 

     “I hesitate to mention this,” Bob said, “because I know you’re going to react negatively – which we don’t want! Definitely we don’t want that. But it’s important.” Apparently his therapist set up a buddy system, so “buddies” could call each other to share their positive thoughts throughout the day, morning, mid-day, evening.      
     “Even at night,” I said, “if I woke up out of a great dream.” “There you go,” he said, catching my sarcasm. “But!” he held up a finger. The barman put another frothy drink in front of him. 

02.24.16

 

Neurasthenia, part III

 Neurasthenia, part III                                                                     

The story of my therapy continues (from the two previous posts).

Gaspar [TRP Wirephoto]

Gaspar Stephens, who likes to keep track of other people’s mental states – and “not because it distracts me from my own,” he insists – Gaspar called to ask me what negative thoughts my “self-statements” were supposed to “counteract.” (On “self-statements” and to read the ones I have written so far, see here. On negative thoughts, follow me on Twitter.)
     “All of them,” I said. “I’m supposed to come up with self-statements that will counteract all my negative thoughts.”      
     “But examples,” Gaspar replied. “I need examples. What does ‘Stop speaking to yourself in the second person’ counteract?”      
     “Whenever I start to say, ‘You really think you can do that?’ or ‘You idiot!’ or ‘You might feel better if you had a dish of cereal.’ For instance.” I said.      
     He said, “What about ‘Start and see what happens; you can always “abandon ship”’?
     I said, “‘You don’t want to do that; you'll never get it done.’”         
     “What?”
     “That’s the negative thought, ‘You don’t want to do that, because you won’t finish.’”
     “How is the self-statement any more positive than the negative thought?”
     “I don’t know. Ask Bob.” Pause. “I could also use it, if I said to myself, ‘You don’t want to do that, why are you?’ I could say, ‘You don’t have to do it; you can always “abandon ship.”’ That would be positive. Right?” Pause. “Definitely.” I was pleased with myself, even if I wasn’t quite sure what I’d just said.
     Another pause. Gaspar (archly): “Where did you meet this ‘Bob’?” The question was rhetorical, because Gaspar knows Bob. He introduced him to me.

Screw him (Gaspar). In my opinion, this is going pretty well so far. Now, I am working on more negative thoughts, so I can write more “self-statements.” And Bob says I’m on the right track.
 

02.19.16

Neurasthenia, Part II

Sinner in the hand of an angry Bob.

 Neurasthenia, part II                           
Amateur cognitive behavioral therapy begins. For how I got into this, see yesterday's post.

The first thing you have to do, according to Bob: you have to write in one simple sentence exactly what’s bothering you. “Everything,” I wrote on the napkin between us on the bar. He shook his head: “That’s not a sentence.” “ . . . is bothering me,” I wrote.

     “Okay,” he said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

The next thing you have to do, according to Bob: you have to write a series of “self-statements” to counteract negative thoughts. The idea apparently . . . . Here's Bob: “So, every time you have a negative thought, or even think you’re going to, you substitute one of these statements. But they can’t be too positive, or you won’t believe them.”

So far I’ve got these, which he’s approved:
     - “This is not the end of the world as we know it; that’s some other joker’s responsibility.”
     - “Stop speaking to yourself in the second person.”
     - “Start and see what happens: you can always ‘abandon ship.’”

02.18.16

Neurasthenia, Part I

 Neurasthenia, part I                                                                         

 

Bob, my new bfs (incognito)
ripped from a last century
faculty photo by m ball

Some years ago, though not too many, when I lived in a larger city and my insurance paid for it, I saw a shrink. For ten years. The insurance didn’t like it, but it kept paying, and I kept going – twice a week. Then the shrink, who had studied with a student of Freud’s after graduating from medical school before I was born, died. And we moved here.

          The insurance didn’t move with me. (“Those were the days, my friend!”) So, I was cured.

Some days ago I was talking to a friend of mine, who used to teach up at R****** College and retired early to write a history of llama farming in the Valley then became interested in Premier League Football and retired from that (history writing). He was saying how happy he was with this second career change, which “wouldn’t have been possible without cognitive behavioral therapy.” He meant his happiness, not the change.

          He elaborated. I listened to most of it.

We talked again and decided I needed some. Only the insurance hadn’t moved with me.

          He said, “Hell. It’s not rocket surgery. I could do it.”

          “What?”

          “I could be your therapist. On the house.”

Always a sucker for amateurs with confidence, I said, “Why not?”

So, watch here for updates as I learn to dodge my neuroses or beat them back with a stick. At least that's what it sounds like you do.

 02.17.16

#SimplyJesus

 #SimplyJesus                                        

 
Jesus comes to Twitter, “simply Jesus”; and to Denver in July:

 Two questions, or three: Will Jesus simply himself be there? Will he be allowed to speak?
Without interpreters?

02.12.16

Dateline 2012

 Dateline 2012                                   
This time in the last presidential election cycle (February 2012) I was reading Gore Vidal’s Julian.

     In it one character describes Christianity as a “hysteria which vacillates between [the] murder of heretics on the one hand and a cringing rejection of the world on the other.” 
     Neither hand can be traced back to Jesus. Both are inventions of men (claiming to be his followers) that lust after purity. By definition, purity is absolute. In the pursuit of the absolute, madness will follow.

02.11.16

 

Makes you want to go hmmmm.

   Makes you want to go hmmmm.                                                   

 

Caught reading a letter from Paul.
(apologies to JHF)

You have been wondering since 11th grade: “Who was John Cleland’s prose model?” Observe.

The first letter of Frances Hill:

Madam, I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders; ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous stages of my life, out of which I emerged, at length, to the enjoyment of every blessing in the power of love, health, and fortune to bestow, whilst yet in the flower of youth, and not too late to employ the leisure afforded me by great ease and affluence, to cultivate an understanding, naturally not a despicable one, and which had, even amidst the whirl of loose pleasures I had been tossed in, exerted more observation on the characters and manners of the world than what is common to those of my unhappy profession, who, looking on all thought or reflection as their capital enemy, keep it at as great a distance as they can, or destroy it without mercy.

The first letter to the Thessalonians:

Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the church of the Thessalonians: . . . We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers; remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labor of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and our Father, knowing, beloved, your election of God; because our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake, and ye became followers of us, and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost: so that ye were ensamples to all that believe in Macedonia and Achaia, since from you sounded out the word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith is spread abroad.

quod erat demonstrandum fere.

02.09.16