Walking Free Will Not Save Us, According To Reports....

 

They’re still at it.

Far be it from the likes of myself to question success, but my hat goes off to the inventive entrepreneur.

For twenty years or more, an outfit known as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has been soliciting for and collecting some handsome funds from the public at large.  It’s for an important and notably visceral and emotionally charged cause.

It’s a cause predicated upon something very intimate within any given self, often one very misguided and irrational.  And sometimes, despite any ethical stance, one quite well thought out and very disturbingly rational.

The taking of one’s life is one of multi-faceted reason and decision.  Irrational acts have certainly long been the stuff of impassioned, and maybe at times substance-influenced youth or adults. I don’t quite know if the leaders and officers of the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention are capable of recognizing that these Bible-old behaviors are not going to at any time soon be affected or re-directed by some organizational movement akin in image to a population of wide-eyed young folks all joined in hand on a sunny hilltop, chiming a musical hymn like a 1970 Coca-Cola ad with vocal backing by The New Seekers.  But that apparently didn’t deter a batch of suicide-affected young folks from banding together and forming a fund-raising organization designed to, in some way, shape or form “get the word out there”, and influence America at large to kick that dangerous suicidal impulse.  You know, the one that comes on when the girlfriend dumps you, or you decide at 3AM on a Saturday night when you can’t fit into those party jeans that you’re just never gonna lose that 25 pounds, or maybe you’re all of thirteen and perhaps much like Todd Solondz’ fatal hero Dawn Weinerdog in the acclaimed 1996 film Welcome To The Dollhouse, you’re arriving at the realization that you’ll never see any civil justice against the unfair bullying that’s slowly murdering you every single day in school, and the only logical move left would be to emerge dead at last.  It’s only understandable that people close to and bearing an affection for those they’ve lost under those circumstances may not have been able to resolve their pain, but are nonetheless, in Howard Beale Network fashion, just Mad as Hell, and are Not Gonna Take It Anymore.

That’s certainly enough to build a trending foundation upon:  Collective aggravation, and the determination to see better.  I wouldn’t mind a crime-free New York and violence-free America myself, one where rents freeze and all middle-agers can look forward to comfortable retirement unconditionally after fifty years of getting up, going to work and getting emotionally abused every single day of their lives.

Somehow though, I don’t think there’s a grownup around who doesn’t recognize, at least deniably, that the world doesn’t work that way. Almost any functioning human of some wisdom-endowed age will maintain some regimen of solemn and daily prayer in their lives, of some sort.  It may not change the world, but it certainly comforts the way the praying human sees it, and for that human, that’s literally all that matters. 

Prayer might correct some of the surrounding wrongs we have to rationalize our way through every single day, the way we didn’t really have to as children of vast question and inquiry. But movement-intensive organizations of people likely won’t affect that sort of change.  If you’re talking about something like New York’s Guardian Angels, who formed a youth army to work in tandem with law enforcement more or less, about fifty years ago, to combat crime in the subway, that’s an effective organized movement.  Citizens forming neighborhood clean-up groups to tidy up parks are a worthy cause, too.  What does an emotionally scarred body of people do as a unit to eradicate suicide..? 

Citizens have faced arrest from time to time when their outward suicidal efforts have threatened to harm or disturb the peace of others.  But often, the more intent efforts will involve perhaps a weapon or a drug-induced end on a very well-hidden, solitary level.  And there lies the eternal question:  would circumventing that person’s act in the moment have cured their intention forever..?  

Maybe it would, and maybe that’s kind of the problem.  Because whether anyone wants to accept this or not, to take one’s life may not in fact always be what might be termed ethically arguable.

There are good people in some extremely, dangerously untenable situations in their lives, that perhaps only monetary miracles could mitigate.  Controversial author Barbara Ehrenreich in her 2000 manifesto, Nickel and Dimed, outrightly admitted that perhaps a 1930s Great Depression wasn’t necessary for some U.S. residents in sheer destitution today to simply end their struggle logically with their own bodily final option.  Not all are willing and courageous enough to come to New York City and become full-time beggars and subway platform residents. 

Not everyone will recall one of the greatest personal substance addiction dramas of the 1900s, a TV production by David Wolper based on a Jack Weiner memoir, brought to life with painful acuity by actor Dick Van Dyke in 1974, a film called The Morning After.  It’s not a shining tale of redemption, but rather a realistic portrait of the suggestive fatalism of alcohol addiction.  The 1986 TV-movie Vital Signs featured Ed Asner in yet another realistic depiction of an aging and prominent surgeon, who succumbs to his dangerous alcoholic battle, one that threatens his son’s life and medical career, by ending his life, quietly and politely.  His passing is met very tacitly at his memorial by many.

The take-out package here is that the act of suicide, while denounced by that holy compass, The Bible, still remains a final option to many, and one that cannot be morally or ethically shelved on any generally acceptable terms unifiably.  Nonetheless, the movement is entirely understandable. In keeping with perhaps the holiest system in our nation, Under God, Invincible, to bring acceptability to the act of Self-Unaliving might actually bring harm or loss to so many of our economic structures, like realtors who need paying tenants.  Hospitals who need surviving patients.  Prisons that need prisoners to scale their federal and state funding, as well as juvenile detention centers and courthouses that couldn’t function without a requisite number of felons and offenders every day.  Are we really going to let the funeral directors walk off with the bulk of economic gain..?  Not by any moral design, if we can help it.

And thank goodness there’s an organization unafraid to step forward and help it, repugnance be damned.  They’re not going to do anything militant about their resolve, like march down the boulevard all day.  Instead, they’ll walk.  At night.  In group funded, logo-branded T-shirts to advertise their contribution-based movement.  But this isn’t some coin-in-the-can thing.  I stepped in on one of these AFSP overnight walk recruitment things way back when, in heightened curiosity.  I expected a few brochures and a pitch for maybe thirty bucks.  You had to sign a contract to commit to raising $1K personally, through ten $100.00 donations.  I thanked the Amway-reminiscent hosts with great awe, and resolved to help the suicide -affected in perhaps a similar, less costlier way.  I met up with a friend who’d lost a life-taken loved one not long prior.  She, myself and a friend of hers met up one evening for a nighttime stroll together.  A few hours of talk, tears and laughs.  I sprung for the coffee.   But we all made it home by midnight.   We had to work the next day, and we understood.  That resolving suicide won’t happen by walking, T-shirt wearing and raising or donating $1,000.00 to do so.  But by understanding, surviving, and living. 

-Noah F.

 

 

 

Health Ball

 

I’m no expert on baseball.  Really.  I know who Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner were, but unlike a globe full of sports enthusiasts, I’m game illiterate.  However, there is one very basic principle about the cherished sport that I’ve learned only from the resigned disillusions of elders at the end of their worn-out theoritic conversations:  It’s not a game anymore.

That one returning truth is a disrespectful reality that will spray any enjoyable sports discussion to death on contact like Raid.  The best athletes, the most colorful managers, the greatest writers and broadcasters, none will dissolve the piercing reality it all seeks to blanket.  It may seek to entertain and engage, and it had better. But it’s certainly not an honest game, the organic creation it once was well more than a century ago.

Food in these United States is no different.  To hear the historians tell it, bread didn’t exactly begin as some synthetic biochemical sponge in a plastic bag, ingestion of which can lead almost immediately to various stomach and autoimmune conditions.  But there is in fact a reason the product today successfully exists in name as an almost entirely non-food-based product on every store shelf in the country.

The earliest television programs gracing the earliest wooden-housed tubes in the late 1940s in the U.S, mostly along the East Coast, where signals were very much alive, were the only offerings the founding communes could invent: Live, original dramatic creations, stage plays made exclusively for television.  Some of the greatest American 20^th century drama saw it’s premiere on those screens, and would be further immortalized in silver-screen adaptations.  Within a year or two however, as the medium advanced, along with audience size, the drama anthologies were eradicated and replaced by predictable little numbers, neatly timed and produced film productions on the Hollywood lots, action and adventure movies in convenient prime-time increment formats.  You wouldn’t hear the name Paddy Chaefsky again for twenty-five years, when he’d surface as the screenwriter for an acerbic satire called Network.

The string tying all these historic ornaments is the coaxial cable that binds our nation: The Industrial Complex.  And why should it begin and end with the arts..?  How about our health..?

Of course, to say that our personal health has been arbitrarily farmed out to profit-seeking industry is probably kind of hyperbole.  We generally in this day and age however tend to misuse the term “health” as an abbreviation for what we’ve been trained to rely upon in our modern culture, which is “health care”.

In itself, that’s a term too broad to instantly analyze, except to readily acknowledge the fact that we don’t own it.  It’s long been made clear to us American civilians that in no unconditional way are we ever to be in command of our personal and intimate health effectively, without the arbitrary aid of what we can now call the Health Care Industrial Complex. 

How long has this been going on..?  Well, let’s go back to early civilization and see if we can trace it.  The Greek societies of B.C, the ones we read about, but no one’s great grandparents were quite around to live in, were presumably not too unhealthy. People ate only sparingly, subsisted on what we now define as Mediterranean diets, little meat and plenty of Omega-3 based nuts and vegetables. Most every citizen was in a trade or applied skill of some sort and was actively building or creating every day, being physical and working up an appetite they had no time or willingness to sit down and merely feed.  Work and repetition-based inflammation and injury meant therapy and occasionally some medical advice from the trusted neighborhood sage, who likely maintained the plant-based tinctures and exercise directives necessary to get the injured up off the bench post-haste. 

Sure, when I was a kid, we had hospitals, and they were full of patients, my folks among them.  But it wasn’t until somewhere in the early 1990s that the essence of medications and illness talk moved from the bedsides of the elderly into the enchanted land of prime-time television continuity, full-time. That cherished landscape of cars, colas, shampoos and fragrances, models in jeans and frozen-food jingles were now invaded by scrolls of prescription fine-print and mysterious consonant-heavy medication names, with no definition on what they do, except that you should “ask your doctor”.

The iconic image of the American Male by the mid 90s was oddly no longer a slim-jeaned, forest-headed contemporary.  It was a crew-cut, balding, overweight chap visibly beyond his years, clad in loose khakis and a tent-size untucked plaid short-sleeved canvas top.  He would often be seen in print ads in a solitary tearfulness, the surrounding copy questioning if this is true sorrow, or a testosterone crisis..? This, by the dawn of the Millenium, was the all-new lasting paradigm.

What drove the creation..?  Supposedly an abundance of convenience foods had rendered a society too fat, electronic convenience leaving our constituency clinically unexercised, and a casino of mis-prescribed ask-your-doctor pharmaceutical panaceas autoimmune deficient.  But wherein was the benefit of this movement, was it in fact premeditated, and who actually made out like bandits..?

Whatever windfall came to the pharmas would ultimately lead to a run on the health care industry….hard.  Quiet voices would begin to remind us that our own precious health begins only with our own proactive awareness and practice.  Hospitals and M.D.s alike might stand by that philosophy, but they can’t enforce it.  They can only treat what’s put before them, and for that, the minibar gets rung up accordingly.

Enter the Health Care Crisis.  Unaffordable deductibles put to people whose wage job-provided packages are leaving them with less and less rent money in the bank each month. And those are the privileged ones. 

Of course, at a time like this, no one’s any different from anyone.  If you want to stay alive, health care coverage of any sort is a basic requirement, right..?  In order to beat the fierce demons our parents couldn’t slay, you need each and every annual test and exam, unconditionally.  We’re not living in the Dark Ages anymore.  This isn’t 1959.

What could possibly deter a health care subscriber, even one far behind the eight-ball of affordability, with an unapproachably high four-figure annual deductible, from indulging mightily in those preventative exams, that the insurance package gallantly covers at one-hundred per cent…?  A friend of mine shared with me her reluctance based upon one significant and immediate economic factor:  Were anything untoward to be discovered or arbitrarily acted upon as a result of said preventative, the coverage ends right then and there.  Let the out-of-pocked deductible begin.  She said it was just unaffordable right now.   Hence, prevention loses out to the economic caution of fear.

But at least however, she does have health care.  What would she do without it…? I never really questioned that postulate until I learned the stats on just how many middle-incomers in the cities have in recent years been all but forced to forgo health care coverage entirely, in the wake of Obamacare laws.  The very provision the old laws were meant to provide people with for their own good managed to fail and haywire into a movement eradicating that provision for many.  Many of these folks will manage to save a few bucks until of course something serious flares up, or an injury happens.  And when it does, the payout will probably amount to little more than the deductible costed to the friend of theirs with their job’s health plan. 

Hence, at the skyrocketing rates we’re seeing now, supposedly the result of laws, lobbies, corporate buyouts and payouts, political war games, malpractice suits, NASDAQ indexes, and people having to simply pay their rent and utilities (Food..? There’s plenty of banks around, and good neighbors never let their brethren and their children go hungry….it’s perhaps the last vestige of civilized society we know, and thank God for it..), perhaps this trendy, industrial product known as Health Care isn’t necessarily as critical to our lives as coffee or social media, and just may be on it’s way to becoming the bourgeois, boutique item the print and online ads make the providers out to be, handsome and attractive young practitioners beaming through their medical-blue scrubs, just waiting to caress your panicked arrythmia.  A return to the truly proactive society held by the primitive Greek cities may be our educated destination.  We might even get to the theater a little more often for some good entertainment.  And see a ball game.  The real kind.  Without analytics.  That’ll go back into the schools, where it belongs.

Noah F.

 

Dig That Shine..

 

Farewell to the relevance of those arcane $500.words finally at once given dollar value by SAT prep courses nationwide.  As functioning, practical grownups we need words that serve our immediate business and personal needs with top efficacy.  We don’t need synonyms.  What we need are euphemisms.

There is no such category or section of challenge on the SAT exam to this day, far as I know.  And if you really want to go all To Sir With Love, and use public education as a tool for life prep, clearly that’s the category needed.  Euphemistic verbosity is very much an elite art, held by only the most clever, and not necessarily the most well-read. At its most effective, it parlays as amusing, well-taken, and if skillful, candidly accepted by even the most uncooperative.  But amidst a cottage industry of aptitude exams, one principal is tacitly understood: You can’t teach it.

The unguarded science known as “AI” hasn’t yet really been put to it either, for just that reason.  Most humans don’t yet know how to do it.  Verbiage Is kind of a dangerous science. Do it wrong, and you’ve insulted and incited half the population. Do it right, and you’ve accomplished nothing but disrespect.  Do it effectively, and you’ve suddenly got a battery of enemies. 

Somewhere in the last decade or more however, the Secret Tribunal of Word Developers, trusted with the direct injection of new terms and pledges into our daily working societal vocabulary, people who likely scored no more than a laughable 1100 or less on their SATs when Jagged Little Pill was on sale at the Virgin Megastore, smashed a rock of a new word into our working lives.  It’s a euphemism, to be sure, and a word as common as a $100 prize winner on You Bet Your Life.

That word is transparent.

Hell, I remember that word.  If you’re an old enough Gen-X’er, it was the key selling point of Future floor wax, in that ubiquitous commercial you kept seeing as a first-grader on your aunt’s living room Zenith during the breaks in Days Of Our Lives.  The kid in the Judo gear would be stomping on an acrylic floor you could see through, thanks to that magic, windshield-clear syrup. Transparent was the take-away word purred by the lady narrator. 

Suddenly, a word life-long associated with the merits of Windex now defines a behavior, a personal practice, immediately representative of one’s values.  What a phenomenal invention.  One of those “What took them so long to come up with something so simple..?!” creations.

The term was developed for use on the professional front.  It has yet to really transcend into the intimately personal realm, and there’s good reason for that. While It seems to serve the immediate needs of the professional interoffice proscenium, as far as anything personally communicative, it’s in no way potent enough.

The current day term transparent as we know it thus far, meets a conveniently polite standard in fulfilling a very immediate need.  Corporate and business settings are composed on almost any level, of staffs of people.  Within those staffs are enclosed teams of two or more, within which strategies are composed and executed, followed in practice.  Multiply that by a few office floors and you’ve got yourself a small nation of interworking strategies composed and controlled by various leaders. Everything works with quiet efficiency, a calming purr that moves to the beat of the office Muzak.  Then, all of a sudden, on any given, unassuming day, something in the chain fractures.  A piece of information is needed about something that happened four months ago.  Documentation is missing.  What the hell happened..?! Zoom Meeting in 20 Minutes..!

Suddenly, the team circle has a “Contra-gate” on their hands. Maybe.  That’s if they can’t get to the innocent bottom of all this.  But what the young, crew-necked corporate leaders on the Zoom meeting are going to implore of all participants first and foremost, is that they be absolutely transparent in their responses and directives here.  What do those handsome sweater models mean..?

Defined, transparency entails full accuracy.  Precision in detailed information.  As well, you’re expected to tell everything.  Leave no detail out.  It’s your golden opportunity to disparage the whole thing by boring the room to smithereens like Edith Bunker, describing every second of that mysterious day from the breakfast you ate to the towel you chose to use in the shower.  But you’d better not be that clever.  This whole meeting wouldn’t have been called if someone in the building hadn’t royally f$*&d up to begin with.

And in corporate practice, as the science effectively goes, the tacitly achieved result of that Zoom meeting Is a successfully logged company effort to confront, resolve and repair the situation.  The shattered antique mirror certainly won’t be glued back together and made brand new.  In fact, in a pooled concentration of transparency, there will be no revelation, admitted or otherwise as to how that mirror got mysteriously shattered. But the resolve to offer maybe a nice new hand mirror or compact will be the conclusive and winning handover, made possible only by the dedicated effort of a very inventive team, whose pronounced dedication to transparency makes this delicate process possible.

That whole flowchart proves just how ignorant this old-schooler probably is with regard to this magical new term he’s yet to fully embrace as such.  I seem to remember a perfectly good word that defined a practice dictated out of every loudly-spoken mouth of every teacher and grownup around me in my sound upbringing. Maybe you remember it as well.  It was the word honest.

If I didn’t know better, and clearly I don’t, it would seem as though somewhere, ten years into the new Millenium, business keepers of sorts found the desperate need to re-instill some new-age embrace of this principle to team members, staffers, co-workers and employees all, a kind of re-leveling of personal practice just to maintain our sense of gravity, and not float off into some dreamy 1980s Wall Street freedom of appropriation.  What was the takeaway of the 80’s culture, anyway..? The so-called “bubble” of the 90s only kind of serviced it a little more, and even though neckties seemed to go the way of hula hoops about twenty years ago, the geometric pattern of tailored suits was restored, and with it came this need for restored order, something a brand new, well younger generation of office residents with laptops and opaque plate glass walls and doors would have to learn how to command.  New culture, new word..!

But it is in fact a new definition entirely.  No one is replacing the word honesty, which is what we continue to teach our children daily, as a value and practice.  Transparency is a practice and value of intercorporate convenience, and as such, requires a level of achieved skill and candor, decision making and temperance.  In execution upon the given situation at hand to be addressed, one needs to consider just what information is relevant, how best to deliver, and what in fact needs not be delivered, as existent as that reality might be.  It’s about one’s intention, if not so much an exact police report on the incident itself.  It’s not so much the facts, as the presentation, and the well-meant thought and extremely careful and mature consideration that counts.  While few Americans never came to terms with the aftermath of Watergate, it’s clear that the remaining functional committees of Washington D.C. and the appointees of the suddenly promoted, and forgiving President seemed to have no problem with it.  How could they…? We’ve got a job to do and a business to get on with.  Any fool can see that.

Clearly, the situation remains one transparent.

 

Noah F.

 

 

"You Don't Know Something Else When You See It...?!"

 

Only my mother could certify the fact that indeed I was not your average kid.  And much as I know she appreciated that, it’s quite possible that on occasion, she dreamed otherwise.

It was the summer of 1977 when this Mountain Dew commercial, a very Clio-worthy thirty second musical with slow motion cliff leaps into foamy streams, starring a cast of absolutely young, gorgeous fashion-model bathing-suited teens cut right through the fuzz on my mom’s 1961 black-n-white RCA portable. I was nine years old, a perennial life-long Charlie Brown, never any friends, but lots of unidentified enemies.  My time was best and most rewardingly spent alone with my imagination and action figures and accessories.  Most kids’ heroes back then were Pele, Luke Skywalker and Steve Austin.  Mine were Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and Bob Dylan (“Hard Rain” sat atop my 8-track pile).  I was unfashionably overweight, hair like a windstormed haystack, and I found the image of the Disco culture only more disturbing than a circus of clowns and whipped, trained elephants.  Earlier that year, my mother handed me her 1951 copy of Catcher In The Rye and said I might find the narrative interesting.  After two pages I decided I could compose my own memoir the same way, only cleaner, and proceeded to do so.  After making the mistake of sharing my work with my younger cousin, whose troublesome profile I disclosed in my writing, his angered response shattered my memoir intentions for awhile.  Every writer needs to learn a few hard early lessons.  Even Salinger went into hiding afterward.

And now here we were in our quaint, humid little flat, me hundreds of miles from my one or two prior block friends, the only ones who came close to “getting me”.  Now it was all Bad Day At Black Rock, for the most part.  Thank goodness my mom at least got me.  But even then, she could, almost despite herself sometimes, leave me stranded.  Like when this ad flowered upon us.

This gorgeous, technicolor splash hit the screen (in rustic black & white..), the folk tune chirping “Gimme a mountain, and nothin’ to do..” as the hot models dived, splashed and guzzled from long-necked bottles of a beverage commonly known as the sugar-coma-inducing bloat-intensive soft drink to end them all.  And my mom in her dreamy M-G-M-musical-scored brainscape says to me, “You know, I picture you as one of those kids one day…”

While portions of me characteristically wrote it off in “yeah, right..” fashion, unable to ever see my self image in the hot, sexy pictoral, for the first time, unidentified portions of me became offended.

Was this image preferable to the image I currently held.?  Was I supposed to pine and scale myself toward that hot, beautiful, perfect-haired, rail-thin, six-pack-ab’d image to become worthy in even my mother’s eyes, let alone that of general society..?

Moreover, did my mother, a woman veering into her post-alcoholic AA years and learning in her late forties to embrace recovery, unable to see that 1970s youth image for what it was misrepresenting itself as..?  Somehow, at my tender, formidable age, life in these 1970s taught me enough about What Kids Are Really Doing amongst one another by a creek at that age.  And if they’ve got long-necked Mountain Dew bottles with them, Mountain Dew is definitely not what they’re swilling from the inside.   And their other packed treats aren’t exactly Mallomars.

Did she really not know this..?  Was my mother, a notably well-read sophisticate who couldn’t stop lecturing me at her leisure (and mine) about Emily Bronte and Henry James, unable to recognize the poison of the advertised image..? 

I never did become one of those goodtime hotties.  Years later, when I actually tried some Mountain Dew, I certainly didn’t know how anyone swilling that stuff could deep dive off a cliff into a stream and swim for their life.  But the day I heard my mom swoon over that ad and her romantic image of her son’s pending teenhood, I was bolstered with the best inner response possible.  I was proud to know one thing: I’d never be them.   And with due respect to the great actors in that commercial, I’m pretty sure none of them ever were either.  We were probably all much more like each other than we realized.

It's amazing how right mothers can be.

 

Noah F.

 

We Have To Stop For Today....

 

A long-time dear friend of mine, with whom I’ve drifted in and out of contact since teenhood and blessedly reunited with recently, has at mid-life handsomely achieved professional status in her life’s true calling, as a psychotherapist.  Or Analyst.  Or Life Counselor.  I have to apologize, as I don’t really know her accurate and correctly referenced classification.  But in reality, chances are a good many of her ensuing clients, or patients, as it were, will reference her as The Shrink.

This whole therapy thing is no small box of Cracker Jacks.  It’s the Las Vegas of self-help, and in a world of diminishing health care coverage, the industry shows no sign of slowing down, on any professional level.  It has been the target of humor good and bad, sophisticated and banal since the double-digit Greek and Roman years, and that’s been an industry just as lasting. Mainly because it’s a science equally inexact and respected enough to never, ever be thoroughly dismissed.

Dismissable to this day only by those who cannot tolerate it, financially, mentally or emotionally.  Those would be pretty good reasons.  I’d cop to the financial one, basically, though even though I’ve never really considered myself averse to traditional office-visit tradition, I’ve just never really believed myself in a ready state to confront the subconscious of my brain and soul in a way that’ll really make those high-priced visits pay off from day one. Once you sign up for a commitment like that, generally the instinctive desire is to make this work from the outset, like an academic course, or chiropractic treatment.  Get the pain and gain underway with purpose immediately, and make the whole expenditure a valuable one.  You’re not gonna sink half your life savings in co-pays ostensibly, unless you know exactly how each and every trip to the minibar is gonna go down.

The unfortunate inability to establish this very application is what truncated my one or two very dedicated efforts in the distant past.  It all came to a head one day when the licensed clinical professional seated directly before me at her desk during one of my afternoon diatribes fell fitfully asleep.  I very, very silently rose, stepped out, issued my co-pay cheerfully to the young concierge and chose not to return.  I would have returned the lady’s apologetic voicemail that arrived late that night, but some relationships are just better off ended.

While my long-time crony, couched at last in her rightful theraputic-analytic righteousness, was demanding to know why I’ve long refused to delve back into therapy, as any particular individual bearing any early-life trauma or hardship of any sort should, in order to maintain a successful, cured existence on Earth, I very honestly explained why, beyond reiterating my economic constraints:

I’ve long maintained a therapist of my own. 

The fellow, of voice only, has lived in my frontal cortex for pretty much most of my life.  He has no actual name, but I guess he’s what Disney’s Jiminy Cricket would have referred to as my Conscience.  That’s the built-in guide that little song from Pinocchio says you’re supposed to be equipped with.  Mine most blessedly has.

MC (my conscience) may not have always won out over the course.  Like during my early life as a fat pre-adolescent reaching for the second devil’s food donut in the Entenmann’s box, alone in the kitchen with it.  But even back in those years, conversations with MC both short and long, over walks to school, car rides, strolls through the downstairs courtyard beneath our apartment, strolls up and down our block in our earliest suburban times, not one of those aimless childhood moments alone was without the critical companionship and time spent with the therapist no price could acquire.

I guess my mother, for all her sophistication, my aunt and uncle, for all their pragmatic intolerance, kind of set me up right where the internal head gear device was concerned. I knew how to talk to myself, how to address my thoughts, how to intellectualize my fears and disturbances.

Usually, it came down to a puzzling chess match.  My mom, in my earliest acquaintance with her, was an alcoholic, classified as the “functional” kind.  That means that she’s capable of being the office-working, ever-present superhero everyone knows and relies upon each day.  But she’ll also find the down time she needs to get pounded off her ass, stumble home stinkers and f@#k up everyone’s night.  If my formative life amounted to an uncountable battery of sporadic f@#kd-up nights, that didn’t even really infringe on my bedtime, how bad could my life have been..?

Fact is, it could have all been much worse if I’d not had in-residence the honorable MC, or acting Analyst I’d installed at an age too young to chart.

I may have been four or five when these comforting one-on-one silent conversations in my mind first commenced.  I don’t know where I’d have been without them.  And the fact is, that’s one fear I never had to maintain.  “MC” was always there.

At age four, for example, as the day wound down in Class K-2 at P.S. 203 in Springfield Gardens, while Mrs. Sachs, our matronly teacher implored us to begin putting all our toys and crayons away, I was, while doing so, as others rapped with their classmates, in a strategy session with my mental health professional over how I’d best respond later this evening, when my mother would predictably arrive home from work an hour later than usual, falling over herself, reeking of scotch and ready to strike out at my aunt.  I had to steel myself on keeping cool inside. “Remember…..it’s just gonna be a night…Be solid and get through it.  Hold your breath when she embraces you if you can’t stand the smell…”  Good tip. 

As a conscience, MC worked pretty damn hard every day, and so did I, as a patient.  In most ways, it was everything effective therapy is supposed to be.  If I flunked a math test for example, and left school that day in the fifth grade suicidal, over the slow journey home, I asked myself in-session, “So why did you really flunk this test..?  Is it because you can’t learn..? Is it because you don’t want to learn..?? Why can’t you do what every other kid in that classroom can..?  You belong there….so why can’t you..??”

Ultimately, we took it to the painful acknowledgement that my mother, in all my math hangups, took the low road of “walking me through”, by originally trying to demonstrate problem-solving with homework assistance, and then simply completing the workbook assignments for me, without as much as my verbal request.  It was just easier.  Even if I knew better.

Easier while knowing better is what the excruciating awareness of one’s crime is made of.  It’s what Watergate was in fact made of. It’s what white-collar sentences are made of.  While at age ten I wasn’t really putting all that together, I did know I was in some, at least partial way at fault in not counteracting any of this.  My only recourse were those afternoon sessions, the ones that uprighted the upside-down Wonderland I was living in.

As I recall, that Wonderland Alice was trapped in was pretty functional.  In fact, she was kind of the weirdo that didn’t belong.  As I grew up, the injustices and wrongs I either dealt with or ended up committing against myself rendered me to myself a weirdo, an outcast a lot of kids around me didn’t understand.  Usually, a kid with little patience will respond only one way to a kid he doesn’t understand: aggressively. 

So, naturally this worried grammar-school fat kid was also the beat-up, threatened persecuted kid, for all the wrong reasons.  MC didn’t cut me any slack for that either.  He reminded me that this is just something you have to live through in order to get to the next chapter in life, the one where I’d be a fun-loving, girl-dating, tall, skinny, hot-looking Shaun Cassidy in high school, all hair and denim, chilling out on Camaro hoods. 

Ten years out of fifth grade, I was a wretched, skinny little alienated nebbitz of a disenchanted college kid, with no prospects, roaming home from my part-time supermarket job to yet our third, spare little apartment, once again deep in strategy over how I’d deal with my life-long roommate of more than ten years, my mother.  Things were of course different now.  She didn’t return home from work drunk all that much.  After a sober seven years, she was a little more tempered after time spent on the wagon.  She waited ‘til she got home to get slammed.  But if all those same structures were in place, so was my life-long therapist, the reliable MC.  What the hell would he have cost me by now if he were a human being..??

And we weren’t limited to life’s larger confrontations, either.  Sometimes I just needed a reminder not to spend that extra five dollars when I could wait and get whatever it was for three.  Or maybe an alert to mind the light at the corner when the cars are speeding by.  It may have been a reminder that the VCR it looked like we were finally going to scrounge up the $400 for was just not going to happen this time around, and that there’s still too much to be grateful for.  Maybe it was a reminder at age eleven that while I was really looking forward to going to the new Woody Allen movie on Sunday, and then my mom asks me if we could sit this one out today because she’s just not feeling too well, I need to just let it go and appreciate all that I have anyway.   MC never really steered me wrong.

In fact, he only steered my wrong when I slammed the door in his face and avoided him. Sure enough, it happened, somewhere in my thirties.  That was around the time I was too neglectful to accept my self-neglect.  That’s around the time the panic attacks and autoimmune problems moved in.  I would, in demonically possessed fashion find myself dashing up the block, ducking into phone booths (there were still a good many around) not to make a phone call, as I had few if anyone I could open up to about this kind of emotional emergency, but just to quietly cry a good five minutes of tears.  I hadn’t cried since I was ten. How could I articulate this crisis to anyone..? I couldn’t relate it to myself…

Before all the imbalances set me off, I was starting to recognize a frightening detachment from family members I loved and respected.  People I’d not regularly visited since teenhood. I’d kept no friends other than some long-timers who were emerging after years to appear self-dangerously disturbed.  It all led to an isolation I could no longer bear to sort out.  MC and I parted ways.

But alas, we would re-unite just a few years later or less.  I had to re-learn how to hear and acknowledge him, and embrace what was now more uncomfortable than ever.  MC has talked me through repairing my body, my self-courage, and changes in my life that just kind of had to happen, like dealing with job transition, courtship and marriage, re-locating to a new flat.  Not necessarily life’s most stunning accomplishments, but they were certainly mine.

The most challenging times in our professional relationship are probably those I face today.  Middle age is a frightening tightrope.  It is in too many ways a jaywalked crossing of a near-fatal traffic intersection at rush hour, with no lights. MC has no need nor any room to cut me any slack now more than ever.  And yet, he remains the wiser of us.

In my most fearsome pockets, he will be there not to excoriate, but to calm me, to remind me that in a world of what appears a population alienating, an economy threatening, and a human odometer doomed to disrepair and incapacity one day despite every advanced health awareness set in place, nutrition, exercise, constant flossing and the like, I am well and stronger beyond my greatest fears. 

And when we ascend from the subway and I make it to work, as I approach the entrance, as the case has been since childhood, I never hear MC utter the phrase, “we have to stop for today’.  I’m usually the one to call an end to the session.  I’m the one with other appointments.  He’s earned himself a rightful nap.

 

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

When The Family Moved In....

 

It was 1979.  I was all of eleven and just about ready to give up on prime-time TV after the long decay and departure of one of my most relied-upon weekly tube visits:  All In The Family.  The show basically signed itself off that spring, allegedly to return as Archie Bunker’s Place, the focus on Archie’s new identity as tavern owner, and the adventures within.  TV viewers one and all by this time well knew the ills of “shark-jumping”, as demonstrated by Garry Marshall’s Happy Days two seasons earlier.  Far as I was concerned, All In The Family went much further off the cliff in its final two seasons.

You wouldn’t be able to tell the late, great creator Norman Lear that.  To his insistence, the attempted rape on Edith Bunker, the cruel, tragic street death of her friend the cross-dressing Beverly LaSalle, Archie’s face-to-face encounter with lesbianism, the departure of Mike & Gloria and their subsequently failed marriage, the arrival and residence of Edith’s ten-year old niece Stephanie, and Archie’s struggle in realizing his dream as saloon owner were all no less than relevant and necessary life structures completely germane to the existence of our extended family.   Somehow, at my formidable and media-advanced age of eleven, I was more inclined to perceive it as a corporate television network desperation strategy.  The point is, Carroll O’Connor, who spent the duration of the show’s run in publicly reported walkoff-threat stalemate, was by 1979 prepared to continue when every other original cast member was in split mode.

I had no misconceptions about the fact that the pending Sunday night watered-down all-new Archie recipe would not replace the Saturday night uproar that welded my characteristically warring family for thirty minutes each week around the ’62 black-n-white Zenith for a solid few years at least.  But something much more important was about to happen, anyway.

It was announced that fall that all episodes of All In The Family were about to roll out in nightly strip syndication, meaning Channel 5, six nights a week at 7:30pm, and for good measure 11pm Sunday nights, right before The David Susskind Show.  I couldn’t believe it,  But I wasn’t exactly stunned.

I long knew about the gift of strip syndication.  It was the stuff of my earliest TV awareness.  The Lucy Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, My Three Sons…..Basically every show my kitten eyes glimpsed in network departure at first were now ubiquitous décor.  A little ABC show I’d been introduced to called The Odd Couple was now this hot 11PM weeknight thing on Channel 11.  It’s like the sandwich meat you always liked for occasional lunch now becoming a frequent condiment spread for other meals.  Every day of the week.

And now that dinner treat was All In The Family.  I was quite elated. This was around the time that I had little or nothing to look forward to sitcom-wise in prime time. 8PM meant lots of time for homework after dinner, if none of my favorite movies were on. The only TV I really kind of leaned on was anything prior to 8PM, which were those independent-channel prior-network sitcom reruns. Nothing bad about The Honeymooners, The Odd Couple or The Dick Van Dyke Show, even if I could recite half the episodes (or all of them) like favorite songs.  But that’s kind of the idea behind strip syndication, believe it or not.  It’s a reunion with the iconic TV treats you remember best…..kind of like favorite songs on the radio.  Music stations have “play lists”, that strategically program songs they know their listeners cherish most and know best.  TV stations did this with sitcom reruns. 

Trouble was, those Andy Griffith, My Three Sons and The Brady Bunch episodes were getting a little too monotonous, to the point where you wanted to play an obnoxious round of Mystery Science Theater 2000 with them to break the excruciating boredom.  When you have the urge to begin vandalizing the greats, that’s bad news.

Life breathed its way in the door when All In The Family arrived.  While in fact the show’s long run was being re-lived each weekday on CBS for the past four years, it was not at such a highly accessible viewing hour.  This new implant would, certainly in the New York-New Jersey region, if not nationwide, transplant this already-renown TV icon into the infinite lexicon.

It probably started out that way.  Anyone with any enjoyable familiarity with the show would be reuniting fondly on a nightly basis.  In my home, we certainly did.  For the first time ever I could have dinner along with the best act of the evening, and properly attack the homework before bedtime.  Much of the tri-state must have agreed, because the 7:30 time slot held for at least a good three years or more.

By year three however, the best act in the house kind of lost something.  With that kind of rigid repetition, it sort of makes sense.  Not too many comedies of limited run can withstand that kind of ubiquity.  The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, known for their rooted Commedia-Del-Arte composition, packages like The Three Stooges or Laurel & Hardy will likely play that way through the next millennium or more.  All In The Family, as a sitcom of a more modern age, is a different story.

The show began it’s run in 1971.  The characterizations were still very pre-formed, and the composite on the screen was just that:  A trial run with promise.  That weird experiment of a show, a four-piece band that hadn’t quite found their sound or synergy yet, was in it’s first ten episodes little more than an odd comic depiction of a foregone sociopolitically heated period.  While Norman Lear was intent upon getting this hot commentary on the air in its time, no network would take a chance until CBS saw the promise in its domestic humor, just a few years after the holocaust of the 1960s, and agreed to put this now-comic cartoon strip of a period depiction on the air.

In the early seventies, this had its place. It was more or less in context.  Now, flashing onto TV screens every full-series go-round (off-network rerun cycles in those days mostly ran chronologically..), in a world full of dinner hour The Muppet Show, Family Feud, Entertainment Tonight, and anything else uber-80s, we had these grainy-orange, color-faded tape remnants of a foolish era, when youth resignation ruled.  It was the equivalent of playing your folks’ old early Donovan or Joan Baez worn-out LPs on your little portable suitcase-styled phonograph each night, those acoustic little whispers beneath the snap-crackle-and-pop of scratched vinyl.

Those historic artifacts of 1971, appreciable in their own right as such, were now, to no one’s fault, badly out of place.  A modern art exhibit probably wouldn’t fare all that well to an arts crowd in the concourse of a shopping mall.  Yet this was what the delicate history of one of television’s most pivotal contributions to our modern culture was now reduced to.  If you saw your favorite ballad on the roster of a jukebox inside a raucous barroom with a TV and video games blaring deafeningly, would you drop a quarter and play your song..? Probably not, if you had any interest in listening to it.  The same kind of justice was now being robbed of one of TV history’s great early foundations.

The gift in the strip syndication of All In The Family nonetheless however, was the blessed installment of some of those brilliant and perennial verbal exchanges and misguided insights of ironic brilliance into our daily and nightly lives, almost something ecumenical, a spiritual offering.  And every so often, my folks and I would in fact find ourselves wrapped around the TV together when one of those old flickers were before us, and we’d roar together like never before.  The lesson just might have been that life itself, the one we have to live, is bigger and more consuming than a brilliant little sitcom we look forward to once a week.  But we can instead find time throughout our struggled week to recall that wit, and mine that laughter.

Even the ancient aspect of those obtuse early episodes trapped in historic time end up maintaining kind of a Warhol-exhibit quality that one can appreciate from some Lichtenstein-esque standpoint.  I long certainly have.  It’s kind of like the TV commercials and preserved station continuity captures randomly uploaded on YouTube.  I’ll visit those precious historic treasures often.  And I’ve been predictably asked by some, just what is the allure in all that old junk, anyway…?

I’ll never be able to answer that one, and won’t, for one very simple reason.  You can’t explain art.  But when it plays in the middle of a shopping mall concourse, I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll be.

Noah F.