Finding Myself at 5:55
Being a naturally curious person, I ask myself many questions. How does a man of 66 survive on only 4 hours of sleep? The question answers itself. I have been averaging about 4-5 hours sleep for the past 2 weeks. My sleep officially ended around 3:33. I finally raise my head, pushing my legs out onto the floor, I rise to stand erect and glance at the clock. I find myself getting up at 5:55. Again.
I find myself. ThIs is a curious phrase. I find myself in a situation not of my own making. Trapped in a world he never made! Somehow I was lost, only now I am found. I find myself. These three words deny agency, imparting an element of the supernatural or divine intervention. Did God pluck me up and physically drop me in this situation? Am I punk putty in his hands? Am I a pawn on a chessboard, casually sacrificed for a horse. Is that all I am worth? A horse?
I don’t want to discount myself here. There is worth, then there is worse. And then, like the horse, there is wurst. I am physically pacing like a pooch. My mental wandering leads me to wondering, ”Am I the kid who grabs his backpack, along with his well worn copy of On The Road, so he can hitchhike all over Europe, just to “find themself?”
Am I on a journey of self discovery? Careful. Discovery is just down the road from self destruction. To understand our self worth, one must think about what it is we truly value.
We need to compile a list:
Get veg
Write in my journal
Meet new people
Write to my Mother
Learn French
This list comes courtesy of a young woman we met in Calgary. One of my band mates wanted to meet up with this woman whom he had met just two weeks prior when we played a show in Calgary. Oh how the heart used to pound. After two weeks on the road in a cramped and stinky van, even Calgary can be inviting on the long road home from a cross Canada tour.
This woman in Calgary had made herself a to-do list, which she posted on her fridge. It was similar to the list above. Number five was almost as an afterthought-Learn French. As if she needed French in Calgary!
We found her list so incongruous and amusing. Funny, she didn’t write down #6, which is Have Sex with a Stranger. But when life brings you bass players, you make sweet love in the lower frequencies. During their 2 hour tilt-a-whirl, the rest of the band wandered around the block. Many times we circled that block. No quickies for the Man from Bass Clef, BC.
In the end all was good, as he bought Kentucky Fried Chicken for us as our reward for waiting. We were happy for him, and by the time we finished our frenzy of finger licking, his prairie paramour was left behind, making her lists and studying French conjugation.
The decisions we make are not always planned. More often than not decisions are made on the fly, completely random, just like situations we find ourselves in. By going with the flow, we hurtle through life, bumping our heads on the slightly open cupboard door. We say, “ Who left that door open?” Then we vaguely remember grabbing a glass at 3:35 am to fill with water.
We can cross number four off our list as Mother is long gone. She found herself dead after years of literally losing her mind to the ravages of dementia. I could still write her a letter, but the mail service to wherever she is now is abysmal. We like to assume she found my Father, after losing him before the dementia kicked in big time. Like the old married couple they were, they covered for each other for a number of years. After he died in 2006, we would visit her. There was a basket with old newspapers in it. We asked if we could throw them away for her. No. I might get to them. Leave them. What about these boxes of yarn, and old Simplicity patterns. Did you still want these? Leave them. But are you going to use them? I might get to them. At that point, she did not want to let go of her things, as she had lost her husband, and now was losing her memory, and bit by bit, she was losing her ability to think. She found herself at a loss for words.
My Mother was always good at Scrabble. Until she wasn’t. She visited us in our big house in White Rock, and we tried for a few hours to play a game. She would stare at her tiles, not knowing what to play. The ability to see those linguistic possibilities was gone. I would turn her tiles toward me, and help her. During that same visit she collapsed in the shower. You don’t imagine helping your naked Mother to her feet in a shower would someday be on your list, but there we were.
Lost and found. I still remember visiting her and my Dad in Olympia where they lived. We drove up to their house, and she was crawling on the grass in front of the house. It was early evening, getting dark. My Dad was inside, and didn’t notice she had gone outside and presumably had fallen, and could not get up. That image stays with you.
It reminds me of her Mother, my Nana, who came to live with us for a time when Inwas a young teenager. My parents had gone for a few days, and we had a babysitter. My Nana’s doctor had prescribed her with Valium, which caused her to soil herself, and to fall, breaking the skin near her nose, blood running down her face. It was just mead my younger sisters, and this babysitter, who was useless. So I picked her up, and helped clean her up.
Her doctor was an idiot, I can only guess now. Who gives an elderly lady Valium, without understanding that a muscle relaxant is not advised when keeping everything together was a daily challenge? No wonder doctors call their business a practice.
Can we excuse their incompetence because they are only practicing? The same logic applies to lawyers. Lawyers are the people you call when you can no longer talk with your relatives. Some folks think they can be their own lawyer or doctor.
It is said that only a fool acts as his own lawyer, but what about architecture? We are the architects of our own fortune. Once, I drank wine with an architect. He said, “If you want to make a small fortune in architecture, start out with a large fortune.” This same architect imagined that everyone in the Sixties was the next room having casual sex, while he was busy making plans. In the Eighties, while deep into middle age and alcoholism, he made up for lost time by finding himself a younger French speaking version of his former wife.
Have you seen Baby Reindeer? It is a very personal limited series on Netflix dealing with mental illness, stalking, and sexual abuse. This show tries to answer the age old question,”How can a man learn to love others when he hates himself?”
Secrets hold too much power in our life. These secrets confront us with our bad choices. Buried memories of mornings after. Buried memories have a way of coming back like zombies or Jesus. The burying of an abuse does not negate its power or significance in any way. Abusive experiences become central to our narrative. They are life defining. We try our best to compartmentalize, but string a few abusive moments together, and patterns emerge, like invisible writing. Just brush some lemon juice on the paper, and the picture will appear, revealing itself on the page.
I’m not brave enough to get confessional here. There are too many people who have suffered worse. My point is ……the point is….. well, points can be very sharp. They sink their teeth in and never let go. They suck all the moisture from the room, suck the very breath from our lungs. Something is always missing. You can’t see it, you don’t want to remember it, yet it is there. It is in your eyes, your walk, accumulating dust and disgust in the decades that followed that particular morning after. You circle the drain in a cycle of shame, a lifetime of living inside with the damage, hiding from those who might love us.
What is interesting about Baby Reindeer was how the show brought buried memories back for me. No wonder I couldn’t sleep. I was living in a house of former me’s, reliving those moment all over again.
We are in the infancy of artificial intelligence, but what about artificial emotional intelligence? Isn’t that what infatuation is? Infatuation is thinking you are in love, but it is not love. It is chemical, insidious, inevitably leading to bad choices. The resonance of Baby Reindeer is the rock dropped in the pool, sending ripples to the edges. It is also that giant weight we carry as we dive into the deep end of or past memories.
When I type the word love, immediately my Facebook page fills up with ads for Plenty of Fish. I kid you not. I go through the process of hiding these ads, but the digital overlords won’t just let me delete them. They force me to give reasons. I settle for irrelevance. Now that I have named it, I attempt to control the onslaught. Resistance is futile. Now I am bombarded with ads for little blue pills. Every meme I see has women with silver hair begging me to pay for their chair yoga, coyly whispering just improve your abs, and you will be irresistible.
Who is this person they want me to be? Forget finding yourself. Who wants to find that old you when you can become a new you. This time it will be better. The new me will have abdominal muscles. No strength of character, but a six pack of beautiful ripped abs. Now just take a few Viagra, and voila! Valhalla’s silver vixens await. Endless romps with Russian prostitutes and Ukrainian mail order brides. But wait! There is more. You can reconnect with ancient past lovers who think the pictures of when you were twenty look cute.
I can’t sleep. The words scream to be let out. Can I write myself out of this mess, this morass of melting me-me-me’s? The me that melts in your mind, not in your mouth. My hands are sticky with dread and anticipation. I hear Carly Simon singing in the background. Clouds in my decaf, clouds in my decaf. Mellow haunts me with vague memories of a Woody Allen joke. Something about melons or rotting cantaloupe?
Relax. Have you never been mellow?