Label Me

If there was one thing Mike loved to do, it was label things.  Even before his descent into paranoid quasi-madness, he was always quick to identify the good guys and the bad guys, and everybody was either one or the other.  I haven't met a man or woman alive who didn't in some way use labels to identify themselves: introvert, extrovert, feeler, thinker, progressive, conservative, goth, punk, jock, prep, vegan, anarchist, Christian, lesbian...the list goes on.  In the concluding chapter of his rather apocalyptic book of cultural and political commentary Deer Hunting With Jesus, Joe Bageant laments the fact that we have all these props at our disposal with which to construct our identity as limiters upon them.  I don't know if that's true or not, but it's certain that if there are advantages conferred by them, there are also unintended consequences.  This post is an attempt to in some way explain the way these labels work, for better or worse.

I should start by talking a little bit about myself.  I have never dealt well with labels.  This is not me proclaiming myself a unique snowflake; being unique is unimportant to me.  Nor is this post in any way an attempt to claim any moral superiority.  I am the way I am because I am the product of my experiences.  That confers neither superiority nor inferiority.  It simply is what it is.  I have, however, struggled with this, mostly in my relationship to other people.  It is true that in the past 100 years, our society has grown exponentially more complex, and the amount of information available to us today is so much greater than to someone 100 years ago that I doubt an adult from that era could even make sense of our world as it is now.  Joe Bageant speaks of a time before all this as some sort of utopian ideal, when we were free to be whoever we want, but I don't know if that's really accurate.  Looking historically, if anything, the lack of access to these identifier props seems to have been a limiting factor, not a helpful one.  What were my options in 1910s New Hampshire?  Not many.  But today when I walk down the street with my hair down in a t-shirt and jeans, I am more or less identified for what I am (though of course a quick visual observation will miss the nuances), rather than some sort of deviant.  Every Christian I know certainly draws a lot of security from that label: at least as much as from their faith itself.  There is nothing wrong or illegitimate about it.  In fact, I think one could even make the argument that it's necessary.  Bombarded as we are with advertising, news, and entertainment, how could we even make sense of what we perceive without in some way labeling ourselves?  We couldn't.  No, labels themselves aren't the problem.  But there is a definite downside, and this is really the heart of the matter.

Mike is not alone in his dichotomous thinking.  In fact, I'm hard pressed to name even a single friend or acquaintance who doesn't in some way engage in this.  My Buddhist religion teaches that this dichotomy is an illusion -- a form of ignorance that prevents me from becoming enlightened.  But that simple statement belies just how difficult it is to break free from that mode of thought.  So let's examine that way of thinking a little bit closer and see just where the problem lies.

Whenever I talk philosophy, or even really politics, one particular dichotomy always seems to come up: thoughts versus feelings.  Time and again I've been told that someone is a feeler and not a thinker, as if that somehow made them any different from me or any other human.  I've heard many times that feeling things is better than thinking them.  Jon Stewart likes to lament this when talking with scientists and other skeptics on The Daily Show.  It does indeed seem to be a difficlut conundrum.  But how true is it really: that feeling things is better than thinking them, or that there is even necessarily a difference between the two?

I think it's no secret that I feel things very strongly.  My capacity to feel emotions is every bit as great as my struggles with them, and if that were the end of it, I wouldn't be writing this post.  Emotions by themselves are largely useless without an ability to understand them.  After all, if you can't explain why you feel a certain way, what hope do you have of controlling your life?  Which is not to say that most people do this--they don't.  I certainly was beholden to my feelings for most of my life, cripplingly so.  The way out was to see them for what they really were--in all their subtlety, nuance, and complexity, and think about them.  We believe that thinking and feeling are two diametrically opposed philosophies.  In fact, one cannot exist without the other.  It's like chemistry: certain combinations produce certain reactions and results.  Thoughts and feelings are two sides of the same coin.  Trusting one to the exclusion of the other is not only dangerous, it's an outright recipe for disaster.  And that is part of what makes politics and religion so maddening in this country sometimes.  There is great precedent for this dilemma throughout American history, going all the way back to the Second Great Awakening of the 1800s and even earlier.  After all what were the New Deal, the paranoia of the 1950s, the culture shocks of the 60s and 70s, the modern conservative movement, the so-called culture wars of the past thirty years, and the Tea Party but visceral emotional reactions to changing circumstances in the world at large?  At the same time, the rational skeptics, the intellectuals, and the scientists grow further disconnected from the seething masses, and that vital line of communication begins to break down, making public policy more and more dysfunctional.  We believe anything that feels right to us, especially if the rational evidence is counterintuitive.  To that end, our illiteracy is killing us--figuratively in our dysfunctional social policy, and literally in the case of vaccine denialism and wholistic medicine.

I don't have a ready solution to this.  I only attained the level of understanding that I did because of a very specific set of circumstances.  Mike was emblematic of a very typical kind of American: emotionally adolescent, not quite self-aware enough to recognize the cause of his problems, publicly immature, and much more keen to trust his gut instinct than his intellect regardless of what he may have believed.  At the same time, swinging all the way over to the other side and trusting your thoughts to the exclusion of your emotions like Nick the Magic Unicorn does doesn't work either.  Sure, you may have a more accurate picture of what's going on in a broad sense, but you're still missing the details, and forget about trying to connect and communicate with someone who isn't exactly like you.  It's up to us as individuals to find the balance and discover our own particular formulas for looking at things the way they are, rather than how they feel to us or what we think alone.  This is not a problem endemic to any one gender, subculture, religion, or group.  We need to grow up, and quickly.

You might be wondering now if I'm predicting doom and despair for America as a result of all this.  I am not one of those people.  We humans almost always rise to the occasion when faced with these sorts of dilemmas, and modernity removes most of the restrictions on recovering from such crises.  We have solutions in hand, but putting them into practice is risky and takes what we perceive to be a leap of faith.  I'll end this post with a note of hope, in that as I see it, we're already starting to make that leap.  This is a difficult problem, but not an insurmountable one.

There is a lot more that I want to say on this subject, more than I can fit into one post.  This narrative is far from finished, and so I'll save the rest for another day.  But the next time you're upset about politics, try and stop and think about what you're feeling.  You may not learn anything new and keep right on feeling what you were before.  But you might not.  The chance, however slim, is more than worth it.

Feeling Special

When I get right down to it, all Mike ever wanted was to feel special.  Special is a very, well, special word in our society these days.  From pop songs to self-help books, individual conversations I've had, and my own introspection, it's a very charged subject, and a very emotional one as well.  This guy certainly seems to think so.  I had originally planned this post to talk about Mike and his relationship with partisan talk shows, but as my week has progressed, I find this post has evolved into something a little bit more.  I had a friend link me that particular video, very excited about its message.  There is nothing illegitimate about it, certainly.  However, if self-esteem is limited to feel-good catchphrases and mix-and-match prepackaged identifiers, it is also missing the point.  Self-acceptance without introspection and self-reflection is ultimately meaningless, and potentially dangerous.  So consider this post to be about two things: a post about self-esteem, and a response to how Mike formed his identity.

I dislike any and all philosophies and intellectual movements that were born out of the 1960s for a very specific reason.  In the 1960s, it was very popular to believe that mankind had no inherent nature: that we were all essentially blank slates that life could mold into whatever we wanted.  I believe that that concept is fundamentally flawed.  As any keen observer would note from the past 30 years of our history, mankind does have a very definite innate nature, and that nature often comes into conflict with the civilization we have built.  Certainly, though, it would also be unfair to dismiss this belief outright without first putting it into context.  The previous model had been the other extreme: biological determinism, which gaves rise to eugenics and such horrors as the Holocaust.  The 1950s and early 60s were also the era of Dr. Spock and Carl Rogers, who emphasized nurture over nature, and it was perfectly reasonable to theorize about the other end of the nature/nurture continuum.  The only mistake was to take it too far.  Reality is very seldom one extreme or the other.  It's almost always somewhere in-between or failing that some combination of the two.  But the idea that man is without an inherent nature is also a very dangerous concept -- equally dangerous to the model that it replaced.  Here's why.  If man has no nature, then fact becomes completely subjective.  No one piece of evidence can ever be considered "truth" to the eye of a believer, because there is no basis of measuring it against anything else.  If that's the case, then evidence and proof themselves become meaningless as concepts: it is simply whatever you believe.  And if we humans are good at anything, we'll believe anything we like so long as it validates us and feels good if we get the chance.

Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this.  Despite initially conferring some significant benefits (civil rights, the sexual revolution, women's rights, etc), it also created many of the forms of denialism we now suffer from in our society (science denialism -- specifically climate change denial, vaccine denial, the organic food movement; economic denialism -- modern conservatism's fetishistic obsession with marginal tax rates over all else; and social denialism -- the Evangelical obsession with sexual morality).  And before you accuse me of making this a political argument, this is a problem that cuts across all spheres of political orientation, though I will concede that I believe it is stronger in some than in others.

This makes Mike a fascinating case study.  Mike wore the mantle of "conservative" like a magic cloak: at once a suit of armor and a protective sword with which he could face the world.  Mike however was not a Christian.  Far from it, in fact.  He was an avowed atheist and a self-proclaimed proponent of science.  The science he believed in, however, was completely beholden to the ideology of his conservatism.  Thus, while he blogged on Facebook about Mars rovers and astronomy, homosexuality was a lifestyle choice, and carbon dioxide was not a greenhouse gas.  If humans are good at another thing, it's selectively ignoring the evidence that faces them to support their beliefs.  This is a real problem.  In order to fully explain it, let's turn our attention back to that video at the top of the post.

I am often praised as being "special" or "unique" or "gifted," etc.  However, I try to take all of these labels with a grain of salt.  I did not always, and I wrapped myself up in them just as Mike wore his conservatism.  So let's follow that logic to its conclusion.  I'm special.  All throughout my childhood I was told that I was going to go on and do great things, like cure cancer or invent a quantum computer.  I still might, but sufficed to say, it hasn't happened yet.  But I'm special.  I just have to cure cancer or invent a quantum computer.  I just have to write a book and get it published.  So what happens when I don't?  Mike was very concerned about this, at least as concerned as I have been at various stages in my life.  But what exactly is success?  Can we even quantify it?  Or define it, for that matter?  If it's a subjective measure, one of two things will happen: either we'll meet our goal (however realistic or unrealistic) and then after the initial high wears off we'll go right back to wanting bigger or brighter things.  That is, unless we fail, in which case we feel incredibly disappointed.  Our disappointment either leaves us bitter, or we counter it by coming up with reasons why, all of which seem only to self-validate us and miss the point.  After all, we deserved it.  The logic begins to break down.  The truth of the matter is, there is nothing that dictates something HAS to happen, at least as far as human life is concerned.  We're born, we grow old, we get sick, and we die.  These are the only certainties in life.  We are beholden to a biological body and a brain that was designed to be a hunter-gatherer, and it trips us up.  So you can call yourself special.  What does it get you?  Just a false expectation.

Now you're probably saying to yourself "Oh, now he's being one of those negative 'get over yourselves' cynics."  That would be true if I were then going on to say that that meant we shouldn't have hopes and dreams, and aspire to greatness.  You'll notice I very carefully did not.  I might become world-famous.  I might not.  Disconnecting yourself from the need allows you to want all you desire.  But there's no expectation or subsequent disappointment or letdown.  Things are what they are, for better or worse.  Really whether you're a conservative, a Christian, a hippie, a Buddhist, old, young, one or more or all of these things, the principle is the same.  Self-acceptance is perhaps the most deceptively simple idea mankind ever came up with.  What good is belief if you can't question it?  What good is self-esteem if you don't truly know yourself?  You'll fall right back into those two traps again and again.

I suppose then that this was Mike's truly fatal flaw.  He couldn't question himself.  There is a lot of talk of people being irrational these days.  I don't think that's entirely accurate.  Most people are perfectly rational on a functional level given what they know.  However, many people are either uninformed or worse yet, misinformed.  Logic and reason are only as good as the evidence that supports them.  But neither is the solution to throw logic out the window.  We make the best decisions we can based upon the information available to us.  Humans crave certainty, but there is very little to go around, save for birth, ageing, sickness, and death.  These are not very palatable for most of us.  So we search for deep and concrete meaning everywhere we look.  This produces both tremendous good and tremendous damage.  I can't label it wrong, because the good and the bad are two sides of the same coin.  One could not exist without the other.  So it becomes the central paradox of life: we were meant to search, but the end of the search is the realization and acceptance that there's nothing to search for.  Most people die still desperately searching.  We do great things in the name of this search, and commit terrible crimes.  The search is who we are.  But like with everything, there's an upside and a downside.

So to bring this back to the beginning, are we special?  Well, if we are, so is everyone else.  But if everyone is special, what does special mean, exactly?  We wear our identities as a way of feeling unique, but if everyone is unique, then we're essentially all the same.  I personally prefer to avoid the argument altogether.  I am what I am.  Trying to assign a label or an expectation to myself only hurt me in the end, and hurt a lot of other people too in the process.  You have to search for a very long time to figure that out.  It can't be taught.  So in conclusion, I'd say keep searching.  It's the journey that makes our lives meaningful.  But try to remember how the search ends, and keep it in mind.  Maybe you won't get what you want, but you'll feel better in the end.

Manly Man is Manly

Perhaps nothing about Mike the Broken GI Joe was so noticeable as his masculinity.  Mike was in many ways the masculine ideal put forth by our society.  Before I go on, a few disclaimers about this post.  One, this post isn't really about him so much as it is about me.  Two, (and I really hope you haven't closed the window in disgust yet at the words "masculine ideal") this isn't some sort of horseshit gender theory treatise.  If you want gender theory, you can read a book by CJ Wilson any day of the week (who incidentally isn't bad, if a little biased towards feminism).  Three, I have yet to meet a single guy (myself included) who was very comfortable talking about this.  Clearly this is a sensitive topic, but one that must be addressed for my narrative to continue.

Still reading?  Good.

I have long had a difficult relationship with my manliness.  My mother was a sex-negative radical feminist who really wanted a daughter, and when I turned out to be a boy, she intentionally tried to raise me without gender roles.  At the same time, she often refused to socialize me at a young age, and following a series of coincidences, I wound up thrust into a predominantly blue-collar Italian-American neighborhood on Long Island to start kindergarten.  My relationship with my mother deserves an arc of its own, and so I'm not really going to comment on it beyond what I've already said.  More important to this post is how I got along at school, which was not very well.

I have always struggled with my emotions.  I have Bipolar Disorder and a long history of both Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and dissociative phenomena.  I feel things very strongly, often overwhelmingly so.  Compounding this, my parents made little or no effort to teach me how to regulate my emotions as part of their raising me.  This was not without benefits, by the way, and I can't exactly fault them for it because it is an important part of who I am now, but it also did come with significant drawbacks.  Crying was rewarded in my home.  This is a real problem in a rough-and-tumble school system.  Again, don't get the impression that I think this was wrong or even really disagree with it, at least not totally.  It solved a lot of problems, but caused a lot of others.  This is not really the skillset one needs to grow and adapt socially through childhood and going into adolescence.  I fell behind.  I was a wuss.  I cried in public over bullying and teasing.  I could be pushed, and I'd snap and lose control.  It was actually a testament to my classmates and friends that it didn't go further than it did, at least until I graduated to middle school.  By the time I was in the sixth grade, however, I was not just a faggot, I was THE faggot.  The word was carved into my locker repeatedly.  I was spat on.  Every time I was punched or thrown against a locker served to further disconnect me from reality.  I grew paranoid.  I grew suicidal.  There was talk of pulling me out of school.  Then, just as it was all entering its crest, we moved out of state the following summer.  But the damage had largely been done.  I don't think I fully recovered from it until my twenties.

Whether it was the dissociation, my mother's influence, some other part of my illness or experience, it was hard to consider myself masculine after that.  Then my body began to change.  I was freakishly skinny and effeminate as a child.  I was frequently mistaken for a girl, even with short hair.  Then, in the summer before the eighth grade, my body very suddenly became very broad.  Compounding this, I was put on a medication that caused me to gain a lot of weight.  I went from 86 lbs to 195 in only two years.  Since I got so little exercise, it was almost entirely fat, not to mention that it was all out of proportion given my pubescence.  In my mind, however, I still felt like I should be skinny and effeminate.  This was about when Jennifer and the alter who would become Emma started to separate from me, which only made things worse.  I had been raised to be an intellectual; brainy, and now my illness was taking even that away from me.  I'd lock myself in my room all day and live my life through my computer.  It was really only when I started writing in earnest when I was sixteen that I finally found an outlet, and even that was an expression of my femininity far more than it was my masculinity.

All of this sort of makes me wonder what exactly it is that men are trying to be.  The boys I grew up with, and most boys in general, I've gathered, were very focused on destruction.  It's a compulsion towards violence, something very primal, and reinforced by society.  Whether it was nature or nurture, I never shared it.  This actually caused a noticeable change in the way my teachers treated me, consistently lumping me in with the girls instead.  The girls policed this too.  So this is not just limited to men.  Where I grew up, physicality was everything.  You were masculine based upon what your body could do, and how dirty you got in the process.  The dumber you were, the cooler you'd be, it seemed.  In their documentary The Merchants of Cool, Frontline labeled this character the Mook.  They cited Tom Green of turn-of-the-century MTV fame as a shining example.  My friends' favorites were Opie and Anthony on the radio (first  on WAAF in Boston and later on Sirius Satellite Radio).  For girls, the same documentary offered The Midriff (epitomized by Britney Spears), but girls always seemed to have an easier time breaking that mold than boys did theirs.  Give modern feminism a lot of credit: it works.  It is regrettable that what few attempts there have been to do this for boys (such as my mother's) garnered mixed results at best, if not an abject failure.

I never really grew comfortable with my body until very recently.  Going from so skinny to so overweight (and ballooning back and forth a few more times similarly, first because of medication again and later due to an eating disorder) made it very difficult for me to be aware of my own body.  Part of my walking meditation has evolved into teaching myself about my body and what it can do.  As my relationship with my body changes, my sense of masculinity changes as well.  But there's more to it than that, of course.

There is also a requisite rigidity that I notice in all my more masculine friends, this kind of self-reinforcing refusal to compromise.  A harsh and highly compartmentalized system of judging others, as well.  The only thing that can seem to truly overcome it is shyness.  In the media, and even in books, heterosexual men are so often portrayed with these strictly hierarchical world views, and the more egalitarian men are almost always portrayed as homosexual, submissive, or in some other way not masculine.  These concepts become as self-reinforcing as the rigidity, especially in group situations.   I highly dislike hanging out in large groups of other men for that very reason.  Yet there has seemingly been little or no attempt to study this phenomenon, let alone make an effort to change it.  Male college attendance lags far behind females, and boys' high school grades are very often much lower than their female counterparts.  The male response in government and in society seems to be to try and subjugate women as much as possible in order to force things back to the way they used to be, but that's no more of a solution than throwing a hissy fit: the legislative equivalent of running around with your hair on fire. There can be no self-reflection, because self-reflection is a supposedly feminine trait.  Emotions are the enemy: a sign of weakness.  Not only that, society's expectations of men haven't changed.  In fact, there exists a frightening double-standard these days.  Men are supposed to provide and be mature and all of these things they used to be, but women seem to want to have it both ways: the benefits of this system without the responsibilities.  One of feminism's great failings is its failure to address this.  If you ever wondered why men feel so threatened by homosexuality, this paragraph contains all the answers you'll need.

So where does that leave me?  To be honest, I'm not sure.  Emotional mastery should be the goal in life, not emotional denial.  To that end, I think I've succeeded.  I can see my body for what it is now, and it can do lots of things I would have been far too afraid to try even a year ago.  The more confident I feel about my body, the more confident I feel socially, and that's really where the conflict ultimately lay.  And what about Mike?  Mike ran away from his anger and fear, which only allowed it to dominate him.  I take this as a cruel lesson in self-awareness.  Acceptance is impossible without awareness. That's just as true of oneself as it is one's relationship with the world.  This at least is my goal.  The consequences of failure are immense.

Mike the Broken GI Joe

After a week and a half-long absence, I'm back.  I'd put the blog on hold while I finished up my latest manuscript, which commanded my full attention for the past ten to twelve days.  I have a new arc of posts that I'd like to do here, building off what I've written in the past few months.  I'm going to start by talking about someone specific: a friendship that went terribly, terribly wrong.  But this story, and its moral, are bigger than any one post.  To truly do it justice will take an entire week of blogging.  It covers a lot of ground, and brings up a lot of the themes I've written about thus far.  So, without further ado, I give you Mike the Broken GI Joe.

Mike could have been a great man if his life hadn't intervened.  He was attractive, charismatic, intelligent, articulate, and imaginative.  Some of the most tragic people are the ones who seemed to have all the elements of greatness but for a fatal flaw.  In that sense Mike is an incredible tragedy, the story of a would-be genius done in by insecurity and fear.  For if anybody I ever knew embodied fear and a hopeless insecurity of oneself, it would be Mike.  Mike and I were destined to be great friends for a very long time -- ten years -- but that friendship was ultimately doomed.

Back in 2000 and 2001, Mike ran a music review website that specialized in obscure and underground metal -- the kind you don't hear on the radio, and exactly the kind that I had just begun to listen to en masse.  The number of bands he introduced me to that I still listen to even now is almost too big to list: Opeth, Katatonia, Agalloch, Mercenary, Soilwork, Dark Tranquillity, Evergrey, Sentenced, Theory in Practice, to say nothing of the Children of Bodom and In Flames mix CDs we traded a full decade before they became popular.  It was a prodigious time for me: I was seventeen and coming of age, just starting to figure out my identity.  Mike was in many ways a mentor to that identity: an older brother figure I'd lacked.  Mike embodied a certain kind of machismo and masculinity I still struggle with to this day: aggressive, cynical, and wholly unaware of itself.  He was cool in the way that adolescent boys aspire to be.  Here was one of the cools kids from high school taking me under his wing.  I lacked any self-awareness to perceive his flaws.


Mike was a former Marine, an aggressive clubber and womanizer, and an ardent opponent of illegal immigration despite being a quarter Mexican.  He was tough and mean because he perceived himself to be constantly under attack, whether by real or imagined foe alike.  He worried constantly that he was a failure, a weakling, or socially compromised, even though this was almost never reflected in what he said.  It's always the people whose actions are inconsistent with their words that are the most dangerous, and Mike's thoughts always seemed to reflect his words, not his actions.

Even still, our relationship, though sometimes distant and sometimes more intimate, remained steady.  I wanted his approval.  He was a validator: he told me I was all right.  Two things changed, though as the years went on.  The first was me.  The other was him.  It was to be our undoing.

I have written extensively about a certain kind of cynicism I notice in people who feel insecure and threatened.  I know others like this: uncompromising, rigid, perenially disappointed.  In fact, as far as heterosexual male friends go, I seem irresistably attracted to them.  It's at once a strict form of idealism, and the experience of being crushed under the weight of one's beliefs.  Mike was the living embodiment of that type.  I knew what he wanted to be.  He wanted to be an intellectual.  He wanted to feel smart and respected for his intellect.  But during the critical years when that part of one's identity forms, he lacked the discipline or the financial means.  I've seen so many like him.  The failed intellectual is the most dangerous kind of all.  Without a requisite self-awareness, reason always devolves into misinformation and the worst kinds of self-righteousness.  One need only look to many of history's great revolutions (French, Soviet) for exmaples of this kind of thinking put into practice.  One of my favorite authors, the great religion scholar Stephen Prothero, likes to describe this as the following: "The most dangerous game man ever plays is dividing people into the good guys and bad guys and suggesting that the bad guys be punished."

At some point between 2008 and 2010, the weight of Mike's disappiontment began to finally crush him once and for all.  I saw warning signs: frequent links to Glenn Beck and his radio and television shows; conspiracy theories; paranoid delusions of the government and groups of designated "others" out to get him.  But I still needed him to validate me, so I ignored them.  It was, however, also around this time -- 2010 especially -- that I began to change.  I had gained a level of self-awareness and inner peace that I finally felt comfortable expressing myself outwardly to the greater world, for all my virtues and flaws.  And I was not like Mike at all.  There was a time when Mike and I could share that certain cynicism about the world.  But as I've grown older and up, my own cynicism and disappointment seems only to be diminishing, not increasing.  I was never a pessimist.  A realist, yes, but an optimist to my core.  I do genuinely believe that human beings are basically good.  I don't know when I began publicly asserting this, but it marked the beginning of the end for our friendship.  Neither of us are very good at shutting up, and at least until recent months, I wasn't particularly good at letting go of a fight.  Mike made certain assumptions about the way the world worked.  I made others, and we disagreed.  Our clashes grew more intense by the week, and started getting personal.  As I came to realize, Mike lacked the ability to distinguish attacks on his words and actions, and attacks on his person.  I still do believe that at his core he's a genuinely good person, just terribly misguided.  In many ways, people like him are far more dangerous than the truly malicious and evil.

There was no ultimate confrontation between us.  I simply unfriended him from Facebook and removed any means for him to contact me otherwise.  I think that was for the best.  I don't hate him.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I pity him.  He was in many ways pathetic and broken; a failed person.  Understanding Mike has allowed me to understand so much more about the world.  He was in some respect one of the catalysts to my own self-realization.  And for the better part of a decade, he was a good friend to me.  People have called him a douchebag, and he may have been nasty and tone-deaf to others sensitivies, but that doesn't make him a bad person.  He may have been in the process of flaming out when I knew him, but that doesn't mean I can't learn from him.  The lessons his example has taught me will form the next several parts to this story.  For now, though, I think I'll leave it at Mike the person.  Destruction always saddens me, particularly destruction seemingly without a purpose, and Mike is no different.  It didn't have to be this way.  So I mourn, not only for our friendship, but for his own inability to be happy.  As for me, however, the end of my relationship with Mike would come to be the beginning of a realization on my part of just how wonderful the world truly is.  Stay tuned for the sequel tomorrow.

Nick the Magic Unicorn

Nick is an interdimensional space-faring unicorn.  He is also one of the smartest people I've ever known, and one of the unhappiest. I've known a lot of very weird people with a lot of interesting lifestyles in my life, and been both horrified and delighted by what I've found.  I've always found Nick's eccentricities to be both charming and original, and he's personally bought me over ten drinks in the past year and a half.  Nick is also the key to understanding something about myself that has long confounded me, and it is to Nick that my narrative has taken me.

I find writing about Nick to be somewhat paradoxical, and this is one of the real challenges of a blog like this.  Thus far, everyone I've written about has more or less been out of my life -- characters from my past rather than my present.  But Nick and I are still good friends.  What I write here I write with explicit permission on the grounds that I conceal his identity, and I am very grateful that he trusts me enough to let me publish this.  At once brilliant, strange, driven, wise, foolish, and surprisingly capable of empathy when it's needed, he is both blunt and capable of astonishing subtlety, very often at the same time.  No matter how difficult he can be to be around sometimes, he is both a loving and supportive friend, and an endlessly fascinating person to me.

This story starts, like so many, on an internet forum.  I wrote a story that Nick liked, and he wanted to roleplay with me via instant messenger.  I noticed the contradiction as soon as we started talking about our respective creative works.  It didn't take me long to work out just how cerebral he was, like the computers he worked on, and yet so creative that his imagination at times overwhelmed him.  My fantasy life has been well-documented here, but I was unprepared for the depth and intensity of Nick's.  Nick is only a few years older than me, but he had clearly spent most of his life working on an entire universe -- places, timelines, and people -- right down to the tiniest detail, such as the choice of fabric of a military uniform.  I got lost in that world after only a weekend of exploration.  But the intricacy and complexity of it belies a simple truth about it: it is separated from the rest of him by a tremendous firewall.  The Nick that the outside world usually gets to see is not the Nick of that universe.  In fact, quite the opposite.  Nick is an eminently practical man.

Nick's philosophy in life is to take game theory and apply it to every sphere of human existence.  One of the first times we met, I was driving him to a restaurant from the train station and he complained bitterly that I "drove like a little old lady."  I have a bad history of getting speeding tickets and try to avoid speeding anymore unless it's absolutely necessary.  A couple of months later, when our roles were reversed and he was the driver, I watched him fly into a frustrated rage that he had mistimed a column of traffic lights and now had missed hitting all greens.  To Nick, something is only as good as its usefulness, and then that usefulness is in turn rated on a scale of how useful it is.  This applies to both people as well as everyday objects, and it's a belief that we both not only share, but can often turn into a source of endless frustration and disappointment.

I tend to value both objects and people by their potential.  A lot of people believe that genius is something innate.  I am not one of those people.  Rather, it is our ignorance (or the ignorance of others) that holds us back.  On the face of it, this seems like a rather optimistic philosophy.  Certainly, there is a lot of benefit to be had by optimizing one's potential.  This is something Nick and I agree wholeheartedly on.  But this belies a deceptively simple truth about this belief: most of what we encounter day-to-day isn't the best that it could be for any number of reasons.  Nick tends to turn this disappointment outward towards others.  I not only do that, but take it a step further and turn it in on myself.

The truth of the matter is, neither one of us really know how to have fun.  When you spend your life constantly trying to analyze your surroundings, you lose out on the experiences to be gained by just accepting them as they are.  My favorite moments on my meditation walks are not when I'm thinking about something in particular, but when I'm just simply enjoying my surroundings and taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.  This is something many of us preach, but in practice it can be nearly impossible.  Why wouldn't it be?  I don't know a single person -- myself included -- who doesn't struggle with this.  Is life meant to be about doing everything bigger, faster, and better than before, or is the meaning of life about letting go?

The irony is of course that at least in modern times, it's both.  It's this drive for the former that brought us the ability to ponder the latter.  The older I get, the more important it becomes to me to try to strike a balance between the two.  He only seldom admits it, but it's plain for me to see how stressed and depressed it makes Nick to believe what he does.  I think in his mind too that he sees himself as something of a disappointment, despite a very high-paying and intellectually rewarding job and a substantial savings account.  What good is success if you can't enjoy it?  At the same time, we have become so obsessed with the failures and shortcomings of others (particularly our leaders), but we run away headlong from any kind of self-reflection of our own.  It seems clear to me after many years of effort that one of the first steps to coming to terms and accepting the world is to accept yourself.  But we don't, and instead we recognize the failure high and low but everywhere except where it truly matters.

One of the most confounding things to me about being a Buddhist is just how easy the Noble Eightfold Path seems to be on its surface.  You would think that it would simply be a matter of changing our views and practices.  But that makes a fundamentally wrong assumption: that we are inherently and instinctively rational and integrated beings.  If I know one thing about the human race it's that we're quite the opposite.  So maybe I should be cutting myself -- and everyone else, for that matter -- a break.  I think Nick could stand to do the same.

As for our respective imaginations, I don't think either one of us would be where we are today without them.  Freed from the restraints of a restrictive reality, we can both imagine worlds without limits, however impractical or implausible.  Not everyone talks about it, but I like to hope that most of us have a secret place like that in our minds even if we're not necessarily comfortable openly sharing it.  That is after all the greatest of human gifts.  The tragedy is that all too often we reject it in return for the illusion of security.

Nick is many things to me, but what I value the most about him is just how alike we are.  He is both a good friend and a living reminder to know when to push forward, when to stretch your mind to its limits, and most important of all, when to just simply relax and enjoy the ride.

Maggie Fournier

It was the fall of 2006, and I had just met the devil.  The devil wore long skirts and cowboy boots, and her name was Maggie Fournier.  Maggie was the last in a long line of academic rivals, but in time she would be a lot more than that.  At times matchmaker, often a thorn in my side, theological opposite, and secret lover, Maggie Fornier and I paradoxically hated and wanted each other at the same time.  Our relationship was to affect my life in a very profound way even to this day.

French Canadian Women and I have a very bad history together.  I lost my virginity in Quebec to a stripper with fake breasts on a dare a few years before I met Maggie.  I had equally bad luck with them in between.  The year before I met Maggie, I'd gotten involved in another twisted relationship with Catherine, a preppie with too much makeup and an eating disorder, with an equally soft last name, though I didn't go so far as to sleep with her.  Maybe it's the Catholicism.  Maybe it's something else.  I don't know.  Like many things that happen in college, Maggie Fornier was a very bad idea that seemed like a perfectly good one at the time.

Every word Maggie uttered was like a photon from the sun.  It had been forged deep in the core of her mind and spent an achingly long journey escaping.  There was nothing spontaneous about the way she talked: every line was rehearsed a thousand times in her head if she said it once, every thought lingered over and second-guessed, like she was a character in a movie and not a real person.  She was also drop-dead gorgeous: strawberry-blond, with a stocky swimmer's frame, ample breasts, and nearly picture-perfect curves.  Her eyes were like beads of amber they were such a light shade of brown.  She dressed like a Victorian might if they had been transplanted from the late 1800s directly into the early 2000s with little or no period of transition: long skirts, tall boots, long sleeves and high necklines, but always a flair for the dramatic and feminine that never quite managed to become modest.  She was a mystery, she broadcast to the world.  A forbidden tome.  Come and read her.

I met Maggie at an undergraduate fiction writing workshop class at UNH, though we'd had several mutual friends for some time and each recognized each other by face from somewhere else.  I actually wasn't supposed to be in the class -- I had transferred into this division due to a scheduling conflict.  The class was, in a word, cutthroat.  Fiction-writing classes tend to amass collections of egos, and at least at the time I was no exception.  There were about fifteen of us in the class and we all had a chip on our shoulder about something.  Our professor, who I'll refer to here as Adam, was a well-known and award-winning writer of literary fiction.  I had been to other writing classes before, but this was the big time.  My writing repertoire was just beginning to blossom, and the summer before I had embarked on a massive creative binge.  In fact, by the time it finally petered two years later in 2008, I would have written well over two million words spread across close to fifteen manuscripts.  I was going to kill, I thought to myself.  I had it made.  This would be a coronation.  The women would adore me.  The men would fear me.

Let's just say that Adam was not so easily impressed.  It was only the second week when I was singled out for particularly harsh treatment, and he began to push me.  Tough love, it's called.  True, I was one of the better writers in the class, but I was not the universal object of adoration.  And let's face it, I had no idea how to write anything but a first draft, and my characterization sucked.  To Adam, writing was all about language.  I would argue that a story is first and foremost a story -- language can only be built off of it, but I can't blame him for the bias.  This was after all a writing class, and writing was what I needed to learn.  And Maggie was the best writer of them all.  If I thought her speech was beautiful, when she was actually able to take the time to fully meditate on what she wanted to say, she could produce some truly spectacular prose.  I fully admit, I was jealous.  To make matters worse, it seemed that for every time Adam harped on me about one shortcoming or another, he would lavish praise on Maggie.

So Maggie and I became rivals.  We really didn't like each other.  To each of us, the other was arrogant, unduly harsh, and a perverse slow motion train wreck the other couldn't help but stare at.  We fought.  We screamed.  We snarked.  And then one night it all boiled over, until Maggie was in the living room of my crappy little apartment and we were making out.  For two glorious weeks we saw each other in secret, a forbidden relationship culled from the sauciest of romance novels.  Then it ended as suddenly as it had begun.  She dumped me.  There is more to this story than that, but I don't want to detract from my thesis, and the particulars are irrelevant.   We had used each other up, and managed to deeply hurt one another in the process.  Maggie and I both meant everything we said, and when the end came, we meant to cause pain.  We never publicly acknowledged our affair, and no one from the class ever found out until much, much later.  It was like a fever or a prolonged dream.  In those two weeks we had taken each other apart, deconstructed ourselves like we would to a Flannery O'Connor short in class, and then one morning we woke up next to one another after a particularly wild night, fully disassembled.  Love, lust, whatever it was, it had burned itself out, and after a brief fight she walked right out my door without another word.  I had never felt so empty, and we still had five more weeks of class together.

For most of my adult life, Maggie has been something of a mystery to me.  Understanding is the key to acceptance for me, regardless of motive or reason.  The world can be a pretty stupid and fucked up place sometimes, and I'm cool with that, I really am, as long as I know why.  But I had never really fully explained Maggie to myself until now, and I realize now that she is at the core of a problem that has been nagging me for some time.

I have never taken criticism particularly well.  For better or for worse, I am narcissistic in a way that makes me feel unsually sensitive to others' opinions of me, and by extension my writing.  Adam was of course right about everything -- and for every time he pointed out yet another mistake or flaw he followed it up with a way to fix it, which I responded to.  He listened to me rant.  He listened to me rave.  We conferenced, and conferenced, and conferenced.  The man devoted dozens of hours of his own time to helping me.  But still, at the end of the day all I felt was shitter and shittier.

I am also a terrible judge of my own merits, and I've all but given up trying to apply any metric to my accomplishments in life.  If I can find a way to diminish the good that I do, I'll take it.  So, truly, it was a miserable semester, even as I slowly began to pull my writing together.  I should have taken it as a good sign when I was invited into an advanced graduate form and theory class, but by then it was hard to shake me from my funk.  After the sucker punch of my two weeks with Maggie, it was hard to find anything good in either myself, the class, or the world.  I withdrew -- into my writing, into my fantasy life, and away, and only the chance meeting of Kari three months later ever pulled me out.  Had she not, I'm not sure where I would have gone.  I suppose I'll never know.

There's nothing new to the notion that my writing reflects my state of mind.  It is in many ways the crucible of my illness: both an expression of it and the primary vehicle for its treatment.  But that medicine is also in its own way a form of poison, because success in writing is not based upon one's own judgments, but rather the opinions and judgments of others.  To that end, I have a very hard time.  It's difficult to be a famous author if you have that much trouble even showing your work to others.  But even still, that in and of itself is only a symptom.  If I second-guess everything I do and constantly need validation for everything, how am I supposed to get anything done?  If Maggie and Adam and that class represented anything, it was doubt.  Doubt in my confidence, doubt in my talents, doubt in whether I even deserved to be loved.  I wish I could say that I'm over it, but I've struggled with all of these things to this day.  Maggie hurt me.  She had gotten deep down to my core, seen who I really was, and rejected me for it.  I had largely rejected her too, but that made it no less traumatic.  We finished the class, and spoke sporadically from there on out, but we had nothing more to say.  I haven't seen her in years.

As for Adam, I probably haven't been very fair to him.  He gave me the kind of gift that only comes a few times a lifetime, even if I couldn't see it for what it was at the time.  It absolutely hit home.  I think there is a very human tendency to believe that fluid, transitory things are in fact permanent, and that includes our own identities.  I am not who I was in the fall of 2006, but that is one of many images I still see when I look at myself in the proverbial mirror, with the ghosts of that class and Maggie right over my shoulder.  So let this be my beginning.  I am acknowledging our time together for what it was and moving on.  There is no profound realization, no great dramatic breakthrough.  It is what it is.  That's all I'm going to say on the subject.

Atheism

Ja, ve are nihilists.  We don't believe in anysink!

Any discussion I undertake about music is inevitably going to lead me to talk about metal, and any discussion I undertake about religion is inevitably going to lead me to talk about atheism.  The two are actually more closely linked than a lot of people think, but what links them together may be surprising.  Maybe I can do this in one post; maybe I'll need two.  We'll see.

When I think of metal, I think of a friend I knew when I was younger who I'll call Mike.  Mike has had a huge impact on my life over the years, even though we're no longer speaking.  He really deserves his own post; more than one, actually.  But since this is a post about metal and atheism, I'll talk this time about the greatest thing Mike did for me, which was introduce me to many of the bands and artists who have had the greatest influence over my young life.

The year was 2000, and I'd been "officially" a practictioner of the alternate lifestyle for about three years.  In those three years I was kicked out of two high schools and got into probably three dozen fights.  I was at the age where anger and frustration with the world synergizes so perfectly with adolescent self-absorption, and boy was I ever pissed.  I like to think I had good reason to be: I was dateless, most of my friendships were in ruins, I was going on my third school in as many years, and even though I had plenty of people to blame, in my heart I knew even then that this was all my own damn fault.  In its purest form, I truly believe metal is an expression that one can see little or no beauty in the world, and when that ability is taken away all we're left with is our pain, anguish, anger, and spite at everything else.  For my adolescent years, it was a match made in heaven (or, erm, hell).

Mike ran a website that reviewed popular metal bands and albums of the time, particularly those that were part of a movement in the genre that came out of scandanavia in the mid-to-late 90s and crested in the first half of this decade.  Primarily focused on the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, these included bands that would later find commercial success in the US such as In Flames, Arch Enemy, Soilwork, Children of Bodom, and Dimmu Borgir.  Generally speaking, as far as music goes, if it's popular in the US, I tend to dislike it, but if it's popular in Europe, I tend to like it a lot more (the crossover metal/progressive rock band Dream Theater is a notable exception).  In the span of a year, from late 2000 to the end of 2001, Mike and his website introduced me to literally hundreds of bands that received repeated play time.  I spent probably upwards of two thousand dollars on CDs and merchandise that year, and my collection grew from about 50 albums to close to five hundred.  But it was more than music I'd bought: it was an attitude, an image, a lifestyle.  I grew my hair long and wore dingy band shirts.  I cursed.  I spat.  I was generally an angry dick.  But as far as being an angry dick went, whatever I could do, Mike could do a hundred times better.  The world was as bleak and dark to us as the music we listened to.

One thing people don't seem to appreciate about metal is how much like classical music it is.  Metal, no matter how noise-like and unmusical it may seem, has and always will be about emotion.  In particular, it is about negative emotion, and the intensity of the anger and the bitterness of the music and musicians reflects the anger and bitterness of its listeners.  The whole Satanic motif is only useful as a means to an end as far as imagery goes: the message is really about atheism and nihilism, not a belief or worship of Satan.  This is something the traditional critics of metal have had a really hard time understanding.  Mike was at his core a nihilist, like I was for those years, even though I called myself a Buddhist.

There is an emotional tendency of human beings to view things and speak of them in absolutes.  This is just as true for a belief in nothing as it is a belief in God or the Bible.  As I approach the age of 27, theologically I really only draw two lines in the sand anymore, both of which I learned the hard way. The first is the belief that one's own spiritual or moral problem and prescription is necessarily true of anyone and everyone else.  I resoundly reject this.  The other has to do with the rigidity or absolutism of one's faith and/or practice..  Either one of these beliefs, however they're practiced, at best guarantees the practitioner will do not good in the world and at worst will cause a great deal of damage to those around them and the world at large.  Every atheist and everyone who appreciates metal the way I used to has for whatever reason been unwilling or unable to see beauty in the world.  They have also been unbelievably rigid in their belief of this, and insisted that others come to the same conclusion.  Stephen Prothero, in his various non-fiction books on religion, likes to call a fundamentalist "a religious practitioner who is angry at something."  The same applies here.  Whether you're angry at the world like a metalhead, angry at modernity like a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, or just angry at religion, you have ceded control of that part of yourself to the emotion, and you will cause harm, not the least of which to yourself.  This has not been an easy lesson for me to learn.  Anger and hate are very easy and convenient sentiments, because they allow us to avoid responsibility for our actions.  Which is not to say anger is wholly or inherently bad and call for its elimination: rage is as human as joy and compassion and therefore just as legitimate.  But we have to be careful how we digest and carry that rage, and deny it power over us.  This was to have significant consequences between me and Ken, as I will write in the coming days.  So let this serve not as an admonition, but merely a caution.  When you believe there is nothing good and reedeeming to the world, or even if you simply believe that as a net result on a theological balance sheet, you're going to have a very hard time controlling your anger and your hate, and you're going to have an even harder time maintaining a balance between the positive and the negative: thus you will cause harm to yourself and others.

All this is not to say that I don't still enjoy metal.  Negative emotions are every bit as important to us as positive ones, myself included.  But the dark side does have the ability to infect and take over the light in a way that the light does not really have the ability to do the reverse, at least in most people I know.  So we can't let it be the only way.  There is always beauty and positivity if you're wiling to see it, even in tragedy and misfortune.  The real tragedy, and the true misfortune, is that so few of us are willing to see it.

The Prophet Arjen and Notes on Psychosis

Arjen Anthony Lucassen is more epic than you,
as this green screen clearly shows.

Any post that follows my feelings towards the musician Neal Morse and continues to talk about music, spirituality, and life, must inevitably lead to Arjen Anthony Lucassen and his various projects.  Arjen Lucassen is somewhat of an oddity in the metal and progressive rock genre, in that he's known more for being a composer than being in a band.  From the mid-90s to 2008, he had a long-running project of interconnected rock operas featuring a plethora of the best and brightest vocalists in the two genres called Ayreon, and it was Ayreon that provided the soundtrack to most of my lunatic meditation sessions last spring and summer.  I can't talk about myself and what I went through without also talking about Ayreon and the story and the man behind it, too.  Let this post fill in the blanks.

Ayreon is as much a story as it is music.  I'll spare the reader most of the details, as the plot is highly complex with a large cast of characters and many suplots, each told out through five operas, all but one of them double-albums.  At its root, there is a race of aliens, called Forever, who have become so dependent and indistinguishable from their technology that they have ceased to feel, grow, evolve, and change, and are forever frozen in a permanent state of eternal waking stasis, unable to feel either pleasure or pain.  Their home planet is called Y, and is purported to be in the Andromeda galaxy, though in the final opera 01011001 it is claimed they are capable of sending a comet to Earth in a reasonable length of time, so perhaps Planet Y is instead located in the Milky Way.  Mankind is their experiment, designed to help them relearn how to think freely and feel.  Over the millenia, they have conducted various experiments on selected humans to help further this aim.  These experiments form the rock opera INTO THE ELECTRIC CASTLE.

Separately, on Earth, another plot unfolds regarding the demise of man in a nuclear war in the year 2084, which is witnessed by the last surviving human: a colonist on Mars (which forms the two albums THE DREAM SEQUENCER and FLIGHT OF THE MIGRATOR).  Before the war, a group of scientists attempted to warn the past of impending disaster due to global warming, environmental degredation, disease, and chronic conflict by sending messages into the past.  However, the warning, instead of going where intended, finds itself in the hands of a blind mistrel in Dark Ages England named Ayreon (which forms the basis of the first opera, THE FINAL EXPERIMENT, as well as one of the main plots of the last opera, 01011001).  In addition, one of the Forever uses a device called the Dream Sequencer to complete their experiments and fulfill mankind's intended purpose, which forms the basis of the remaining album THE HUMAN EQUATION.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Admittedly, I am a huge fan.  But it is significant for another, far more important reason.  To explain this, I am going to have to explain a little bit about how my psychosis and my dissociations worked.

Before there was Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley, there was a world.  This world took many forms, but it always possessed the same properties: it was utopian to those who had power, dystopian to those who didn't, and in it I forced the will of my beliefs onto its form and shape.  I'm not entirely sure how long it's existed for me.  It seems like it's been a part of me for as long as I can remember.  It started out simplistically, sure -- often the result of an imagined encounter with a djinn.  What I wanted was power.  I was bullied in school, both a scapegoat and target, and my relationship with my parents growing up was both complicated and ambiguous in a way that didn't exactly engender a positive worldview.  I dreamed of escaping it all, and slowly those daydreams coalesced into something living and breathing.  As I grew older, I began to explore the flip-side of all that power, and the dynamic contained therein, and so was born the world.  It was my own private alternate universe, one very few ever got to see.  The world of THE ACADEMY is very loosely based on it, as are a number of my short stories, but the purest expressions of it I never showed to anyone.  Its four prophets were Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley, who came to embody the narrative of the world and how it changed, grew, evolved, and eventually was redeemed.

I would not exactly hallucinate when I lost touch with reality.  The only description I can provide would be for you to try to imagine having two realities superimposed onto each other.  There was me, and my apartment in Portsmouth, and my fiancee, Prescott Park, and the hospital where my psychiatrist works.  There was also Jennifer and her machine world, Emma and her life, AK and his campaign of terror, and Haley and her kingdom.  It was possible for any of them, or me, to slide back and forth between these worlds.  But sliding was just about all I could do, for the most part, unless something else could help me penetrate the barrier between them.

Enter Ayreon, and in particular the opera 01011001.  There were many things that could breach the fantasy world, but 01011001 was always the most effective.  Jennifer identified with the Forever.  Emma liked the theme.  AK identified with the apocalyptic aspects of it, and Haley understood what it meant to me.  01011001 was playing on my headphones on probably at least three-fourths of my meditations.  I could even see myself in there, as Arjen Lucassen's autobiographical hippie character and would-be prophet, by the time of this story now aged and in a mental hospital, his prophecy ignored in one of my favorite songs "The Truth is in Here."  Other things -- songs, people, stories, characters -- could penetrate the world.  Ayreon tied it all together, and grounded me in this world.  It was to Arjen Lucassen's operas that I fought my demons, and slowly began to come to terms with my illness and get it under control.

To that end, as I later learned, 01011001 was written at a time of personal distress for Arjen Lucassen.  My favorite music always seems to be produced during times of great trauma, stress, and pain for the artist that writes it.  As a writer, I can certainly attest to the power of putting yourself into your art.  It's that element of the artist's personal struggle that makes their art so great to me, like I can feel and experience their own pain and suffering in some small way.  01011001 oozes with pain, guilt, regret, and frustration.  Arjen even took it to another level shortly after he concluded the Ayreon saga by creating a side project specifically to address those feelings, Guilt Machine, the year after 01011001 was released.  There are things that I think and things that I feel, and music is something that I feel.  My favorite musicians are all like me: artists for whom the emotion of the music always shows through regardless of the content.  Which is why 01011001 feels as personal to me as one of Neal Morse's TESTIMONY albums: Lucassen's pain is palpable throughout.  When I'm feeling sad or depressed or low, I don't want to be cheered up.  I just don't want to feel alone.  Listened to, really.  01011001 hears those prayers and delivers a resounding response: "I understand."  So I listen, and I feel better.

Some people are like this; some aren't.  Maybe ten years ago I would have felt like there was a right way or a wrong way to appreciate music, but I don't anymore.  What I've come to appreciate the most about people over the past year is just how different our needs can be.  Kari, my fiancee (her real name, used because it would be nearly impossible to conceal her identity), takes quite a different approach.  Her favorite band is The Flower Kings, who she listens to specifically because it cheers her up.  This is not just true of music, either, as I've written about in previous posts.  When I read a story or listen to music, I want something that will break that barrier between me and it, and the barriers within me as well.  To that end, Arjen Lucassen is the master, and I'd be hard-pressed not to like anything he produces.

The Gospel According to Neal

Religion and spirituality has been on my mind a lot these days, and after giving it some thought, I've decided that I can't really talk about my spirituality without also talking about music.  Both are deeply connected to my psyche and my emotions, so much so that they're almost tangled up in one another.  That isn't a problem for me, in fact I enjoy it quite a bit and it brings me tremendous benefits.  It plays into my obsessive nature and my means of regulating myself.  As such, while I want to talk about religion and what it means to me, this post is probably going to turn into a musical review of sorts, because I can't really talk about my religious practices without talking about the prophets of my religion, and one prophet in particular who goes by the name of Neal Morse.

Sorry, Neal.  I love you, but you still look like a church boy.

That's Neal on the right there.  Neal was not the first musical prophet of my life -- in fact, he's one of the most recent.  The first belongs to Jimmy Buffett, the object of much obsession for me as a child.  Jimmy gave way, strangely enough, to Metallica, Metallica begot Corrosion of Conformity, who begot Arcturus, who in turn begot Opeth, then the metal bands Mercenary and Katatonia joined Opeth in a pantheon, who in turn yielded influence to Dream Theater, then Ayreon, which lastly brings me to Spock's Beard, and the man behind Spock's Beard, Neal Morse.  Sound convoluted?  It's enough to make a Yoruba practictioner's head swirl.

For the longest time, I felt trapped when I talked about music.  Like any teenager, I tended to believe that my personal opinion was objective truth, and that led to many an argument over music between friends and enemies alike.  What I've come to realize about music is that it isn't necessarily the quality that makes it for me (though I do primarily listen to progressive rock, so take this with a grain of salt), but rather what it means to me that makes it good.  I used to be one of those metal snobs who wouldn't listen to anything they played on American radio, but for most of my life I probably couldn't tell you what made the bands I listened to good.  Ultimately, what I decided, after I had fully converted to my cult of Ayreon/Arjen Anthony Lucassen- and Spock's Beard/Neal Morse-ism was that it was music's power to affect me positively that ultimately determined its relative strengths and weaknesses.  Had you asked me two years ago what I listen to, I would have unequivocably told you "Metal."  Now, I'd simply say anything that happens to move me, regardless of genre or label.  Arjen Anthony Lucassen, the man behind Ayreon, will get his own post tomorrow, because it's Neal whose personal story compels me more, and that story is reflected through his music.

Like me, Neal was a struggling artist for most of his youth, a musician of immense talent who couldn't quite put it all together into material success until later in his life.  His band, Spock's Beard, became one of the most successful acts of the late 90's prog revival, along with Dream Theater, The Flower Kings, and Porcupine Tree.  In fact, Neal has frequently worked with former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy.  Don't get me wrong, I like Dream Theater too, but unique among all the prog bands of that era was the amount of himself Neal put into his music.  He alone wrote almost all of Spock's Beard's songs, and many of them are not only quite technically complex and beautiful, but also mesmerizing in their ability to stir my emotions.  His singing voice, deep for a prog singer and nasal, has always had a tremendous capacity to soothe me.  Over the course of five albums in the span of six years, he poured his heart and soul and all of his energy into some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard.  Then, in 2002, immediately following the release of his magnum opus, the double concept album Snow, he seemingly very suddenly and abruptly became a born-again Christian, left the band, and moved to Nashville, Tennessse to pursue a solo career in gospel and Christian music.

I came to Spock's Beard in the fall of 2010, shortly before I attended Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity (another fulcrum point of my life, which I will write more about as the narrative unfolds).  Spock's Beard has gone on to release another four albums without Neal (drummer Nick D'Virgilio took over the job of vocals), and the change to me was very abrupt.  It had seemed, if the lyrics and Wikipedia were any guide, that Neal had simply gone crazy and had an epic meltdown.  As it turned out, there was a public record of this, as he then recorded a double-album about his experiences becoming born-again, which to me only seemed to deepen the mystery, not solve it.  It wasn't until literally the past month, when I gained access to the album's sequel (and, I came to understand, Neal was ready to tell the rest of his story).  What it told was a story of self-loathing, frustration, hearbreak, longing, and self-doubt that could only be gained by simply listening to what he had to say, rather than trying to study notes or websites.  What astonishes me the most about his story is how close to my story it seems to be.

I know very few people who have as much access to as much of themselves as Neal appears to, and even fewer who can so ably and directly express it through their art.  It is a skill I've had no choice but to learn as I try to fight my own demons.  And yet still, the way in which Neal appears to have broken to me under the weight of his burdens makes me deeply uneasy.  It serves as both a testimony and a reminder that life is not an upward spiral -- that at any moment there can be both a tremendous breakthrough or enormous damage.

I think it's very hard to manage life's complexities and tribulations without having some sort of mythos or spiritual system.  I've yet to meet an avowed atheist who was happy about life or the world they live in.  Most seem to treat nonexistence as a release from their misery, which at least to me seems like kind of a bummer.  Which is not to say that I think their position is any more or less reasonable than living this life for immortality in the next.  Life presents us a great many different existential problems, which we all try to solve in our own way as we live.  But there's a particular kind of self-loathing many born-again Christians seem to embody, and a particular kind a cynicism that seems to go along with it (though which comes first to me is a chicken and egg problem), and while I decided on a different solution to it, I appreciate Neal, his story, and his music and can connect with it as deeply as I do precisely because he can communicate it so well.  Every person I've ever met has had some inclination towarsd nihilism and some inclination towards hope, and it's how exactly the two are balanced (both quantitatively and qualitatively) that seems to shape one's outlook the most.  The two can often be confused for each other, as well.  The Rapture is a story of hope, but that hope is based upon a tremendously nihilistic premise.  Buddhism, my chosen religion, is not immune to this phenomenon, either.  I've used the Dharma both to secure myself and inflict pain on myself.

Whatever the reason, it's clear to me that Neal Morse spent most of the past two decades in unimaginable pain, and he found an outlet for it through his music.  At the end of the day, (incidentally, also the name of my favorite Spock's Beard song), what matters more in life are the outcomes more than the processes themselves that led to them.  I may not know Neal Morse, but I feel like I understand his pain, and I feel like if we met, he could understand mine, too.  For that, he occupies a place in my spiritual life, despite the differences of our respective religions.  And his music always moves me, even his Christian praise songs (for more on my views of God, consult the post "The Day I Met God").  So, to sum up both my feelings on music and religion and tie this all together: in the end, it doesn't really matter what you like and what you believe, as long as it gets you where you need to go.  It's a difficult answer to a complex question, but I believe it to be the truth nonetheless.

The Day I Met God

On June 22nd, 2010, at about eight o'clock in the evening, I met the Cosmic Spirit of the Universe on a mud flat on Peirce Island in downtown Portsmouth, and for about twenty minutes, we talked.  I want to do a whole bunch of posts on spirituality and music, and since I started talking about my life, I've wanted to keep a cohesive narrative.  This is the beginning.  My blog started as a blog about religion on Facebook, and this will bring it full circle.  But it occurs to me that before I start talking about spirituality, I ought to lay my own spiritual cards on the table.  So much of spirituality is perspective, and so before I can begin to comment and critique the perspective of others, I should talk about my own.

I was raised nominally Jewish, but I was more or less an atheist for most of my life.  Now I prefer to think of myself as neither and atheist nor a theist.  I converted to Buddhism when I was fifteen because I was seeking a way out of a seemingly endless cycle of violence in my life, but I didn't really start practicing until I met the Cosmic Spirit of the Universe last June, (or God, for you monotheists out there).  God and Buddhism is something of a non-sequitur, but hopefully after I explain it, it'll start to make sense.

This began, like with so many things, with a walk to the waterfront.  My walks had their own sort of evolution: first to the swing set at the bottom of the hill my building is located on, then to the end of the complex, then to the first major intersection ten minutes away, then Prescott Park, and finally Peirce Island.  Really is was time alone with my thoughts I wanted, and thanks to a mild winter, I had more or less free reign of the city streets and parks by myself from when I started in early March to May.  But Memorial Day marks the beginning of tourist season here in Portsmouth, and with it most modicums of privacy along the Piscataqua.  By June, my runs had extended all the way to the very end of the paths on Peirce Island, a full four miles from my home round-trip.  I was looking for a good place to wait out the sunset in solitude, but all of my usual spots were already occupied.  Until now, I had mostly concerned myself with the Piscataqua side of Peirce Island, where I believed all the good views were.  But there is another side to the island, that faces a back channel that overlooks the both South End of the city and the bridge to Newcastle Island.  I passed it every day, but never really noticed it before.  Walking on a path through thick woods, I came to an overlook that was clouded with gnarled locusts.  Wanting a better look, I took a step forward, where I could see a small path that appeared to cut through the trees and lead downward.  When I emerged on the other side, I beheld the face of God.

A sudden stillness immediately enveloped me.  It was just about eight o'clock, and the sun was setting through a shapely tree on the west end of the island that made it look like it was aflame.  It was low tide, exposing a vast mud flat where burrowing clams spat out water here and there in little squirts.  About a hundred feet away, a heron picked for shellfish.  The gentlest of all breezes blew onto my chest.  In the direction of the sun, I beheld everything there was to the universe and everything that ever would be, a sensation I have only ever experienced again deep in meditation.

I've been psychotic before.  Psychosis for me is the addition of something – the layering of a superimposed reality on top of my own.  This was very different.  This was a glimpse at reality itself.  There was nothing otherworldly or exterior about it.  I stood there, enraptured, staring at the sun, the water, the mud, the trees, and the bird, the houses made of wood, the church steeples, the clams just below the surface, the bridge, and the docked boats, and it was as if all of them were one single entity that spoke with a single voice that knew me better than I knew myself.  We communicated not with words, just with strange primal gut feelings that had no verbal or even intellectual equivalent.

I remember, in this strange language I suddenly found I could speak, asking it what it was, and my answer came as an understanding that all these things I saw were in fact interdependent parts of the same whole, and that I was intrinsically linked to them as well.  It was a profound realization.  What followed next was a conversation of such subtlety and nuance I can hardly do it justice with the written word.  What was my purpose, I asked.  Should I have believed in You?  No, God replied.  My purpose was here on Earth.  The Cosmic Spirit had nothing to offer me.  My divine mission was simply to get better.  God couldn't help me with that – that could only come from within me.  I was on my own.  I asked it for help, guidance – something, anything.  I already knew the truth, God said.  I already had all the answers, I just didn't know it yet.  As if for emphasis, two dogs came running out of the bush and began frolicking in the water, like I had been transported to Suzie Salmon's heaven in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.  The sun set a few minutes later.

I walked off the shore in the twilight in an absolute trance.  I tripped over the curb.  I almost got hit by a car twice.  I wasn't just seeing things anymore.  I looked at the lobster boats docked at the wharf and I saw them brand new, just put out to sea, and I also saw them rusted and wrecked, decommissioned.  A few minutes later in the flower garden at Prescott Park I came upon a sculpted dogwood and saw it as a sapling, and later turned to dust as it was dead and dessicated.  A hundred years ago, none of this had been here, and a hundred years after all of this would likely be gone.  It was only when my fiancée called me to tell me she was coming home from work that the spell was finally broken and I walked home.

The core of  Buddhist teachings is called the Four Noble Truths.  The first Noble Truth states very simply that all life suffers.  The second explains that our suffering is caused by the impermanence of things, our attachment and desire and craving.  The solution is the acceptance of things, the acceptance of impermanence, and the Noble Eightfold Path (the fourth truth) provides a guide to put it all into practice.  It was only after I got home and picked up a Thich Nhat Hanh book I had lying around that I realized what it was I had perceived, and what I had been doing on my walks.  From that moment on I considered myself a practicing Buddhist.

I'm not sure what it was I encountered there on the beach that night.  It doesn't really matter.  I could give it a name and call it God, but to try to assign any label or explanation to it would not only be futile, it would be to miss the point.  We try to seek a higher meaning in everything that we do, like our suffering and the trials and pitfalls of being human is for some great purpose or design, but in our quest for understanding we blind ourselves to the meaning that's already there.  What I felt was neither male nor female, human or otherworldly.  It may have even just been something deep inside me.  I don't know, and I don't really care.  It just simply was.  That's why I say that I neither believe nor don't believe in God.  Whatever it was was supremely indifferent – it told me as much, and if I was looking for a purpose, I found it there without really looking for it.  Nothing had changed except my perception.  It truly does not matter to me what that actually was – it was the realization and the awakening that followed that was important.

Incidentally, I count that as a major turning point in a battle against my illness.  It was the start of a long road of forgiveness and acceptance that continues to this day.  The journey itself is far more important than the vessel you take to undergo it.  I don't want to be sick anymore.  That's my mission.  The rest seems to have just written itself along the way, and it continues to do so, up to and including this post.

What more could I ask for?

Emma

The note was forwarded to my Gmail account, from a name I'd never heard before.  It didn't look like spam.  It was from a man named Tim, and he sounded pretty mad.  He said he knew who I really was.  He wasn't angry or anything, but he didn't want to talk to me anymore.  He said I was sick and needed help, and he was concerned for my safety.  Confused, I sent an email back, not knowing what had led up to this. This was how I met Emma.

I knew I was dissociating.  I'd been dissociating since February.  I can't speak for others who've dealt with it, but dissociation is one of the most misrepresented psychiatric phenomena in popular culture.  Forget the stories of hypnosis and crime.  And forget the popular image that people somehow enjoy it.  I remember that morning, as I learned that Emma (one of my alters) had been carrying on a quite bizarre sexual relationship with the man named Tim (who was only a few years younger than me) over the internet.  It didn't take me long to find evidence of Emma's handiwork: AIM logs, a Gmail account in her name, fetish forums and Flickr searches in my browser history, and a cache of unusual porn.  I was reminded then not of the movie K-PAX or old Law & Order episodes, but of the movie Fight Club, right when Edward Norton realizes that he and Tyler Durden are one in the same.

I should explain.  At the height of my madness, there were four of them: Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley.  Jennifer was their unofficial leader and spokesperson, and my self-proclaimed protector.  Jennifer also thought she was a robot, though she also possessed enough self-awareness to know that she wasn't real, and therefore was good at keeping herself hidden.  Talking to Jennifer was like giving my ability to be rational and reason a name and conversing with it.  An imaginary friend who occasionally took control of my body when I didn't want to.  It could be an awfully convenient arrangement at times.

Emma, however, was a little bit different.  Emma was my emotion and insecurity, who one day woke up and decided she was an eighteen-year-old girl.  There was simply no stopping her.  I certainly couldn't control her.  Emma did not share Jennifer's self-awareness, either.  As I pieced together what had happened with Tim, I discovered she'd created an entire virtual life for herself.  Tim was not the only relationship of hers, either.  There was Steve, and George.  The former was an auto mechanic in Calgary, Alberta; the latter a musician in Scotland.  A few checks of various places and I determined that Tim was the only one who'd figured out she wasn't real.  However, Emma was having internet sex with all three.

I didn't really have a system of calling them.  Jennifer spoke for the other three, but she had trouble controlling Emma, too.  As it turned out, however, calling her wouldn't be necessary.  In my panic, Emma came to me.  She thought she had died.  I charged my Droid and prepared for a very, very long walk.  I wasn't in control of myself, and it was going to take a lot of concentrated effort to get myself back under control.  Looking like a stark-raving lunatic, I walked down to the waterfront.  This was more or less going to be the most difficult thing I'd ever had to do in my entire life, at least thus far.

That was April.  By August I'd more or less stopped dissociating, but Emma was never gone.  She may no longer have been independent, but she was still an integral part of me.  Controlling my emotions has always been one of the hardest things for me to do, from childhood right up until now.  People who know me know what kind of outbursts and mood swings I'm capable of.  They make me feel deeply embarrassed and ashamed.  That was in its own way the driving force behind my dissociations.  I was being forced to feel things that I was either unwilling or unable to admit and acknowledge, and so I outsourced them to imaginary friends who could feel them for me.  Until I could admit my insecurity for myself, she'd always be there, and I'd always feel her.

In my experience, you can only really see things for what they are after you've let go of them.  It's taken me a year, but I think I've finally let go of her.  It wasn't some epic psychotic battle that they make movies out of; I didn't go catatonic.  I spent most of my life desperately trying to convince myself that I didn't care what other people thought of me.  I had a real shell I could put up around myself, a tough, angry-looking shield that could keep people from getting in and letting me feel the shame and embarrassment.  I pretended.  In the end I probably wasn't very convincing, either.   But I do care.  Maybe that makes me shallow or petty, but I care very deeply about my image.  It was only by admitting to it that Emma ever really went away.  It was, in the end, a very bittersweet experience.  When I realized she was gone, it was like I'd lost a very close friend.  And there is a mourning process for friends like that, imaginary as they are.  Letting go of her is letting go of a part of myself I'd clutched to with white knuckles for most of my life.  I'm tired now.  Whether the reader understands it the way I do or not, this is a huge step for me.  I'm in uncharted territory.  But it still feels good, like I've freed myself of something heavy.

That's not quite the end of the story, though.  Emma was simply too rich a character in her own right to simply abandon.  So, being a writer, I did what I knew best.  I'm proud to announce that Emma has been reborn, as the protagonist of my new novel, which is currently about two thirds of the way done.  I'm excited about it, because this novel is unlike anything else I've ever written.  There aren't any robots or lasers or death-defying combat scenes (though there are aliens).  It's just an honest look at the art of letting go, heartbreak, and a nice clean take on the apocalypse.  I'm not ready to share too many details just yet, but I think now you'll be able to know how personal it is for me to write this story, and hopefully that'll really show through in the character and narrator.

So that's me, Saturday May 21st, 2011.  I'm at the end of one phase and starting another.  Now if you'll excuse me, I believe the rapture is scheduled for a few hours from now, and I'd like to go loot me an iPad.

Clara the Windup Doll

Note: I'm going to be doing a series of posts about my life and my struggles with mental illness over the next few months.  Though the people I talk about are real and everything I recount in these posts actually happened, I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of everyone who I write about out to protect their privacy.

Clara was a fairytale character transposed into real life: blond, sprite-like, with the body of a broken down music box dancer.  I met her on an online fetish forum in 2008, and for a few months last year, she lived with me.  Clara kept a necklace of several interlocking gears that was made for her by her ex-girlfriend in San Francisco: an affectionate reminder of what she believed she was: a windup toy.  Like with many of my friendships and relationships, this one began when she read my fiction, in this case a short story I had posted to the site.  She said she'd been a member of the forums since she was thirteen: for five years, then, as she claimed she was eighteen.  She was both astonishingly earnest about her troubled past and equally naive.  I liked her because we had so many diagnoses in common, and it made me feel like she could relate to me.  The time we knew each other consisted of the better part of a quasi-psychotic and emotionally dissociative phase in my life that corresponds to some of the sickest and most disabled I've ever been.  It was, actually, Clara herself (among others) who had suggested I apply for Disability in the first place.

I've told this story many times before, but never in writing.  Clara was, literally, a delusional drug addict who wound up costing me a lot of money.  Money, that universal solvent of human ties, was in fact what ultimately ended our friendship.  I have been quite harsh and critical of her behind closed doors in the company of close friends, perhaps unduly so, but that's not what I want to write about here.  Rather, I've come to realize, Clara's struggles are a reflection of my own.  It's those struggles that I want to talk about tonight, and I can think of no better way to view them.

People with a severe diagnosed mental illness generally fall into one of two categories, but in reality they're one in the same.  There are those who are ashamed of it and try to hide it, and those who do the opposite and celebrate it.  To the extent that she was aware of her own illness, Clara was the latter, while I was the former.  As I've come to learn, both methods are little more than a severe form of denial.  We were, at the time we knew each other, both fractured people: openly dissociating, psychotic, at times psychotically babbling incoherently.  The popular image of the mentally ill is the lunatic schizophrenic, but the reality is often more subtle.  Clara wasn't incoherent.  Her system may not have been on the level with everyone else's, but it made sense to her, and to those who were willing to learn it.  I too had a system of my own.  Like Clara, I had devised an ingenious method of escape: a fully-fledged virtual fantasy world of my own design.  I suspect that a lot of people do this, ill or not.  It's just that few of us are ever allowed to take it as far as Clara and I did. These places, and the thoughts, feelings, and people that inhabit them can lay undisturbed for years, even decades.  It is, in principle, a highly effective substitute for reality.  The catch is of course that sooner or later these sanctuaries, however elaborate or simple, do eventually collide with reality.  If and when that happens, it can be truly terrifying for everyone involved.

Last summer (the summer of 2010), I was out of my goddamn mind.  I'd walk to Prescott Park in downtown Portsmouth having visible animated coversations out loud with my alter egos.  Though no one ever seemed to notice, I spent a good many nights after the play let out in the outdoor theater bawling my eyes out as I hung over the railing that sat atop the seawall on the Piscataqua River.  Each night my dream world broke a little bit more, and each night I was dragged kicking and screaming one step closer into the real world.  I'm quite impressed I was never arrested.

I live about a mile and a half from the park.  I'd taken to going on long walks just to try and sort everything out.  It was as good a coping strategy as any.  From April to December of 2010 I spent literally half my waking hours either in the park, on the attached recreation areas of Peirce or Four Tree Island, or in transit to any of those places.  My fiancée hardly saw me, and she lived with me the whole time, too.  In contrast, Clara's strategy of choice seemed to be prescription painkillers and benzodiazepines.  As a result, she spent a lot of time sleeping.  Both our efforts were equally time-consuming.  But, in our own way, in the waking moments we had together, Clara and I were supportive of one another in a way that few others could be.  I trusted her to understand what I was going through in a way that I didn't really trust anyone else.  Most people have no idea what to do when someone else disagrees with their reality on such a profound level.  In the case of politics and religion, they become obsessed with correcting the other person, and with everything else the stimulus simply never makes it much past the input channel.  Which is why I can't truly fault Clara for her flaws -- they were my flaws too.  My only advantage over her was that I was aware my delusions weren't real.

Slowly, things seemed piece themselves back together over the summer, and this brings me to the lesson Clara taught me.  The truth of the matter is, which I learned over the course of that summer, is that there is no escape from reality, not even through death.  We exist or we don't.  I pick up a magazine or see a self-help book, and I see this all around me.  My life is equally painful and scary now as it was last year.  The only difference is that I've slowly come to accept it.

At the time, I called my massive walking/running/meditating/generally-acting-like-a-crazy-person routine self-improvement.  And maybe I learned some skills.  But the pursuit of self-improvement is ultimately no different than Clara's and my delusions, or her drug use.  I never started to get better until I accepted my weaknesses.  It's a life-long struggle that never ends.

But the reward for all the effort is a chance at real peace, something I really don't think Clara ever knew.  what else are muscle cars, gym memberships, and expensive jewelry?  Clara would make me drive her to the drug store on a nearly daily basis so she could buy new brands of blond hair dye.  Hers is only an extreme case.  Our desire for escape is only the reflection of our deep dissatisfaction with the way things are.

I try very hard day by day to accept this.  It's neither easy nor glamorous.  But, it ended my dissociations and
ended my dependence on fantasy, and let me focus on what was in front of me: a woman who deeply loves me and for whom I feel an equally deep love, the thrill of watching the sun set over Portsmouth and the Piscataqua, and even just the freedom that comes with being unburdened with keeping track of it all in my head.  In the end I discovered that that's all I need.  We have the world, and each other, as fucked up as it is.  Why would we want anything else?