The Suicide Hotline Boogie

Several years ago I got involved with suicide hotline counseling. I took a two month training course, and spent four hours a week answering a phone, knowing that utter despair might be on the other end of the line.
The training was terrifying. Two thirds of the initial class dropped out in the first month. I wasn’t dropping out of anything. I was training my character about the concept of commitment. All the volunteers had the same fear: what if we said the wrong thing and were RESPONSIBLE for a suicide?
The latter parts of our training were about role playing. We’d gather as a group and the trainer would ask someone to go first. I always offered to be first. I preferred to get my terror over with rather than sit and anticipate. The trainer and I would pretend to be on opposite ends of a phone conversation. The trainer would say “Ring Ring” and I would answer, “Suicide Hotline.” Then the trainer would act out a scenario and it was my job to respond to the situation as if it were real.
My heart started pounding, my throat went dry. The trainer would play an adolescent in crisis, or an elderly person sick, alone and without hope for the future. The trainer could be anyone at all. We didn’t know until we answered the “phone”.
In this way we got past certain inhibitions. It’s not only okay to ask if someone is thinking of doing harm to themselves. It’s mandatory.
“Are you thinking about committing suicide?”
Yes, we ask the question!
“Do you have a plan? Do you have the means to do it?”
“Have you attempted suicide before?”
If the answer to all of these questions is yes, if the caller has a history of attempts, and is holding a gun, a bottle of sleeping pills or a pack of razors, then it’s time to go into action. We try to find out the location of the caller. If the caller won’t give up this information, we have the ability to trace the call. We have a reverse phone book, addresses that yield phone numbers. We can call friends, relatives. We can call the police. We’re not helpless.
By sheer wonderful luck, this is the hotline associated with the Golden Gate Bridge. There are call boxes at regular intervals where would-be jumpers can get a direct line to a counselor. I never got a jumper. I got a lot of other things.
When the training was complete, I went as an intern to the switchboard. An experienced counselor was on hand to help out. We worked in teams. For a few sessions, the supervisor could listen on an extension to my calls. I got some calls, but they were mostly sad people wanting to hear another human voice. No serious threats.
On my third shift, it was time to go solo. There was another counselor there, but I was now officially on my own.
I was terrified when my first call came in. I picked up the phone and said the requisite, “Suicide Hotline” in a calm neutral tone. Then I waited, listening to hard breathing on the other end. After about fifteen seconds, a woman with a thick southern accent said the following:
“I have a loaded gun pointed at my head, and my finger is on the trigger.”
This is my first solo call! Okay, okay, be calm, work from the training.
“If you really wanted to die, you wouldn’t have called me.’
“Maybe I don’t want to die and maybe I do,” the caller responded. “Maybe I called to see if you could come up with a single good reason for me to keep living.”
“I can’t talk to you until you put the gun down. And I can’t give you reasons to live, you’ll have to do that for yourself.”
My supervisor had heard all this. She came and stood behind me. She took a pen and bent over to write on a piece of paper on my desk: “did you say gun?”
I shook my head yes.
The woman on the phone spoke in an acidly sarcastic manner. “You mean you’re not going to give me Jesus or Buddha or some crap like that?”
“I’m not here to promote religion,” I responded. “I’m here to listen to you.”
“Oh bullshit!” Now she was angry. “I’m going to pull the trigger!”
I braced myself for a blast. It didn’t come. There was just the sound of labored breathing from the telephone.
“Hello?” I spoke to the breath. After some seconds, the voice responded, with the same angry sarcasm.
“Yesss. What!”
“You didn’t pull the trigger.”
Then I heard a click click click.
“That’s the gun,” said the woman. “It’s not loaded. But I can load it, in a second.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you would have. I think you want to live, whether or not I give you a reason.” I was beginning to feel a little angry. I felt a sudden intense dislike of this person. I felt that she was bullshitting, that she had called just to mess wth my mind.
Again, the sound of three clicks. Mocking. I had a cigarette lighter in my pocket. I took it out, held it to the receiver and clicked it three times. My supervisor had been standing behind me. I saw her arm come over my shoulder with the pen. She wrote, “what the f…?”
I shrugged, then wrote, “B.S.”
I saw Leslie, my supervisor, nodding.
The woman with the southern accent said, “What’ve you got there, a thirty eight?”
“No,” I responded, “A Bic.”
She laughed in a witchy sounding cackle. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
“I know I’m smart, but that has nothing to do with what’s happening right now. Are you intending to hurt yourself, or anyone else?”
“I’m not gonna tell you, now. You’ll just have to live with not knowing.”
Click. She hung up. I sat there, half terrified and half enraged.
I pivoted my chair so that I could talk to Leslie.
“Doe she sound like this?” Leslie did a perfect imitation.
“That’s it.”
“Okay, well you just met Lynn Brogan. She calls four or five times a week, and if she gets a newbie, she does the gun routine.”
As I was letting the air out of my lungs, as my shoulders settled, the phone rang again and I nearly levitated from the chair.
“Suicide Hotline”, I said.
“You know, I have a pretty important job.” Same southern accent. It was Lynn Brogan.
I had to restrain my anger, restrain my urge to answer with sarcasm. After all, if this was how she spent her time, she was pretty unhappy. She was in a lot of pain.
“That’s good,” I said in a neutral tone. “What do you do?”
“I’m head of Research and Development.”
“With what company?”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s a VERY big company. Very important to the government. You’ll just have to take my word. I have thirty four hundred people working for me.”
The other phone line rang. Leslie moved into the next cubicle and took the call.
“Suicide Hotline,” she said.
Thus began my acquaintance with a list of characters who used the hotlilne as their primary social focus. They were hotline addicts. Kendra S. called fifty times a day until we cut her to a maximum of five. She started calling all the other Bay Area hotlines. San Francisco thirty times. Berkeley twenty five. Oakland fifteen. Each day. Her hoarse voice assaulted hapless volunteers with anger and self pity. She could not live without calling hotlines. As she got thrown off one, she migrated to another until she was calling hotlines in Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles.
One of our clients, named Gwen, had multiple chemical sensitivity and would go into a psychological meltdown if she thought she was exposed to a carpet that wasn’t detoxified or a whiff of someone else’s perfume. When she weakened and ate a piece of chocolate she entered a state of panic in which she believed her toxicity would be fatal. It wasn’t.
Bob R. had flown B-17’s during the war and couldn’t stop re-living his experiences, fifty years later.
Working the hotline was like that truism regarding war: hours of tedium punctuated by minutes of sheer panic.
Most of the time, my method worked. I kept at bay all the things with which I might lose my sense of equality with these people. Compassion can only operate on a field of equality. If I lost sight of the fact that I could BE one of these people with the tiniest slip of fate, then I was in trouble.
At one time I WAS one of these people. I could never forget that. I always felt a vulnerability, always felt as if the despair were as close as my skin. After five years, I reached the burnout point. The despair penetrated and I began to become my callers. That’s when I started leaking anger and judgment, impatience and contempt. It began to come out through the holes in my skin, through the membrane of invulnerability that I had worn in order to do this kind of work. The membrane was leaking pretty badly.
When I said to Kendra S., “For god’s sake Kendra there might be someone in real trouble trying to get through here….”
That’s when it was over.

Breath

Your breath has a shape
unique
like a fingerprint
no two alike
in all the world.
Everything about you
is found in your breath
all your lives
and deaths,
all your thoughts.
Think of your body
as gone,
only breath remains
it has an in stop
and an out stop
and contains so much more
than air.
If we could know one another
by our breaths
if we could see the human crowd
as a throng of breaths,
nothing else,
hello jagged anxious breath
how are you
hello smooth relaxed breath
nice to see you
the human race is
a breath collective
today some will arrive
today some will depart
lungs are merely homes
like hands fill gloves
everything sacred, every dark secret
lives in the breath
and when it leaves your body
it is a system of information
like a letter full of you,
air mail, breath mail.
I would tell you more of this
if I knew any more
but this is as far as I’ve got
in learning the nature of breath.

Why I Started Smoking Again

Why I Started Smoking Again

After seventeen years of tobacco-free life, I started smoking again.

(Long pause)

Goddammit!

I hate it when I do something SO stupid there’s no excuse for it, SO asinine that the only way to absolve myself is to take a spanking by bending over and backing up into a wall really really fast.

In 1992 after huge exertion, I quit a three pack-a-day cigarette habit. I am not a cold turkey type of person. I’m more like a warmed over chicken type of person. I have to do things in steps.

To quit smoking I used nicotine gum and the patch. In two months I was down to half a pack a day. I know, you’re not supposed to smoke and wear the patch. Tough. I did. Then I made a big jump. I went to a mere two cigarettes a day.
I managed my craving by hiding cigarettes in plastic bags on the side of the road. I smoked them on my way to and from work. On Monday morning I bought a pack and spilled sixteen cigarettes into the trash. As I drove the rural twisting road to work I smoked my first cigarette. Then I paused at my secret stash place, took a baggie from my pocket and deposited the remaining three cigarettes under a bush. On the way back from work I stopped again and smoked the second cigarette.. On the day following, I stopped at the bag in the morning, took out a cigarette, then stopped again in the evening. Every other day I would buy a new pack and start the cycle again.
One day a motorist spotted me as I was putting my baggie under the bush. He drove past, pretending not to see me. I drove a bit further in the opposite direction and stopped. I could see the man through the trees. Sure enough, he was looking around for whatever I had put in the baggie. I don’t know what he was expecting. Was he hoping for an ounce of weed or a wad of hundreds wrapped with a rubber band? He found my bag, and I saw his shoulders slump in disappointment. The man was obviously a low character.

He lit the cigarette, tentatively at first, to test it. Maybe there was something “special” about it. Alas, there was not. He finished the smoke, (the nerve of the guy!) crushed it underfoot and returned to his car.

I understood at that moment that I had reached the height of the ridiculous. It was time to end the farce. No more cigarettes. I was done.

It was lovely, being free of tobacco for seventeen years.

What drove me back to smoking? What could be so frustrating, so enraging to cause me to undo that effort, the dedication that I had given to ending my addiction?

I taught a class of rich tenth graders about the marvels of digital photography.

I had been hired by a private school to teach one semester. The money was good. I taught three classes per week. The head of the board of directors had read an article about my volunteer work with a low-income high school. I had done four years of mentoring. Working with disadvantaged kids had given me deep satisfaction. They were respectful, hungry and grateful. At the holidays each student made a card for me using a personal photo project. Some of them were lovely. Some of them betrayed an appalling lack of literacy. The students’ basic reading and writing skills hardly existed. I got a photo card from a senior. It had a razor-sharp black and white shot of a street scene. The little girl jumping rope was in mid-air. The old guys loafing in chairs were laughing as clouds of beer-spit hovered before their lips, each globule perfectly stopped like a cluster of stars in space. Some were small white and foamy, some were clear and spherical, some were shaped like flying liquid bullets. This was a real talent in the making. The boy’s scrawled message read like this: “Thang yu m Rosh fore teeshng mu to shit photo”.

I was thrilled to have a chance to be paid nearly five thousand dollars to teach a semester in a school where every student would have a laptop and a digital camera.

The school was a beautiful facility. It was set in the midst of parklands. There were benches under oak trees, little waterfalls, gentle rolling hills. I saw kids skateboarding along broad walkways, wearing torn jeans and hoodies. Most of the students seemed attached to a Walkman or an Ipod.

I had done my mentoring in a public school built like a prison. It was all fences, high walls and right angles. There was no greenery, no plant life. Trash blew along its paved quadrangles, empty Cheetos bags yawed in the wind. Every year there were a handful of murders among the student body.
Memorial posters hung in the corridors: “Jerry Rodrigues, 1991-2006. We’ll miss you.”

The posters were enlarged class photos of self-conscious teenagers with bad skin and confused expressions.

“Nguyen Van Pham, 1992-2006. So Much Promise.”

I felt no fear. Wherever I walked students greeted me.

“Hey Mr. Rosch, how ya doin?”

“Mistah Rosch, ‘wots happenin? Everything’s cool, it’s all good, you know?”

I carried four thousand dollars worth of gear in my photo bag. I never had any trouble.

I will call my private school “Tech-Arts”. I was confident I could ignite a love of photography in some of these kids.

On the first day of the semester I arrived at my classroom half an hour early and set up my tools. I had a laptop and my camera gear. The school provided a digital projector so I could show images and procedures on my computer to the entire class. I would have loved a digital projector back at Flying Bullets High School.

Every student was to have a Mac laptop for my class at Tech-Arts. The latest and best photo editing software would be installed on each computer.

There were four rows of long tables with chairs in the classroom. They formed a square that was open at the ends. In the room’s center I had a small table to hold the computer and projector while I spoke. I could stand outside the square and walk around the classroom to reach each student. I could see all twenty four of my students and they could see me.

I had been told that I could use basic forms of verbal discipline. There would be no shouting, no cursing and of course no corporal punishment. To back up my discipline I had the option of sending a student to the principal’s office. This was a feeble deterrent. The principal, Mrs. Forster, was as frightening as a stick of cotton candy. She used “therapy talk”. “What are your feelings, Trish?. Why are you acting out? What can we do to resolve your issues?”

At one o’clock the bell rang to begin fourth-period class. Within five minutes, fifteen of my students had drifted in and taken a seat. They were talking among themselves. They gave me a cursory glance. The boys continued pushing one another and laughing. Several were immersed in portable video games. The girls were listening to their Ipods, talking about boys and squealing at supersonic pitch.

By ten after one, another four students had arrived. They took their seats casually and looked around the room. They were either smirking or looking completely stricken and miserable.

I still had five missing students. I started the class.

“Hi, I’m Mister Rosch, and this is a class in digital photography. Would each of you answer when I call your name? I need a while to remember names, but I’ll know you guys soon enough.”

They looked at me as though a giraffe had suddenly materialized in the room, something completely out of place, exotic and impossible to ignore.

A girl wearing a soft white hoodie sat at the end of the rear table. Her eyes were unfocused. I knew she was listening to music. It was so loud I could hear it. I was amazed that her head didn’t turn to mush.

“Young lady, please take the hood down and turn off the Ipod.”

She didn’t hear me. I met the eyes of the girl next to her and cocked my head to the right. The girl poked her neighbor. The hoodie girl emerged from her trance. Her neighbor spoke with enough volume to be heard over the music.

“Off the hoodie! No Ipod!” she yelled, poking her thumb in my direction to fix the blame where it belonged. The girl’s face emerged from the shadow of the sweat-shirt’s hood. She was lightly freckled, her hair short and black. One of her cheeks was distorted by a huge wad of gum being masticated with large chomps of her teeth. Her mouth opened and closed like that of a lamprey.

“Your name is?” I asked. .

She removed the chunk of gum and put it into a tissue. “Stephanie,” she answered. She placed the gum and tissue in her backpack.

“Stephanie…Stephanie what?”

“Oh..uh.. Stephanie Blarney,” she said, and there was a titter of quiet laughter from the class.

I looked at my roll list and found one Stephanie, last name Hubbard.

I asked the girl in the next seat. “Is she Stephanie Hubbard?”

“Guess so,” the adjacent girl answered. She looked to her left. “Is that your name, Blarney?”

“Yeah,” Stephanie Hubbard grunted. The white ear buttons of her Ipod dangled from her dainty hand like the eye stalks of an insect she had just squashed.

I was about to resume roll call when a thin young gentleman appeared. His skin was conspicuously pimpled, his hair looked like a broom that had served as a target for shotgun practice. His eyelids were at half mast. Marijuana vapor rose from his clothing like mist from a rain forest.

As he took a seat I said, “Sir, you’re twenty minutes late.”

He looked up at me and said, “Huh?”

“Twenty minutes,” I said.

“Twenty minutes what?”

“You’re twenty minutes late,” I repeated. I wasn’t going to get angry. What would be the point?

“Oh well that’s cool,” he responded.

“Just take a seat, please.”

The boy looked around for a place of comfort, for a friend, an acquaintance, a safe spot. He stumbled to and fro until he found a seat that had no neighbor. His spot was padded with two empties on one side, and an empty on the other.

Some of the students were laughing at the boy. Little snorts gusted from their noses.

I continued the roll. Megan Ballantine. Anthony Candoli. Keith Eberhardt.
I had gotten that far when the door opened and a compact black student entered the room. He was the only black student I had seen on the campus. He walked with a combination droop and bounce, very loose in his knees. His hands were held with each index finger pointed out while the other fingers curled into a fist. His limbs moved with the swaying grooves of the hip hop gangsta. His head was thrust forward, his elbows locked, his arms kept criss-crossing his chest.
He went directly to a seat at the table nearest the door, scooched himself between two friends. There was a little rally of smacked hands, coded fingertwiddles and muttered incantations of “right on right on”.

When this was done the latter student squared himself to face forward and smiled at me with perfectly false sincerity and charm. His eyes twinkled with benevolent mockery.

“S’up man?” he asked rhetorically. “Everything ‘aight?”

I walked to the door and twisted the lock mechanism to the left, and then back to the right. I did it three more times, loudly, conspicuously.

It was 1:25.

“I want everyone to know that from now on this door is closed at three minutes after one. Class begins at one. You’ll have three minutes grace. That’s it. I’m cutting you slack.. Don’t even bother coming through this door after that time. Go straight to the principal’s office.”

I repressed my desire to start a “when I was your age” speech. No good, no good, utterly useless and stupid.

I booted up the computer. The screen at the front of the room lit up to display its desktop. I sat in the chair next to the computer and projector. I moused onto the icon of Photoshop, so I could open the program.

“There were supposed to be twenty four computers here,” I said to the class at large. “Does anyone know where those computers might be?”

A hand shot up. It belonged to a young man with a broad forehead and the faint beginnings of a moustache. He wore glasses and was dressed neatly in a short -sleeved shirt and belted khaki pants.

“Your name is?” I began.

“Damian,” he said. “I think the computers are still being checked out by Jeff in the tech lab. He’s supposed to bring them here when he’s done.”

There’s always a kid in class who wants to help the teacher. Sometimes he’s the smart kid, the geek. Sometimes he’s the kid with the worst grades. He becomes a helper out of desperation. I had a feeling that Damian was the-geek. He spoke with a quick enthusiastic tone. He knew everything, had all the answers. Damian nudged the boy next to him. “Bock,” he said confidently, “Why don’t you go down to tech lab and get those laptops, or find out why Jeff hasn’t brought them up ?”

Bock was a chubby frazzle haired person whose shirt buttons weren’t properly aligned.

The division of labor had already been apportioned. I had one of each, the geek and the helper with the low grades.

Without referring to me or looking in my direction, Bock rose from his chair and loped out the door.

“He’ll take care of it, Mr. Rosch,” said Damian with calm familiarity. “Jeff is notoriously slow.” He pantomimed the act of inhaling marijuana. The air hissed through his lips. “He gets the job done but he loses track of time.”

First day problems, I thought. At least the projector was there, and it worked.

“I’d like to finish calling the roll, so at least I can put some names to faces,” I requested. I tried to keep my tone calm.

Then a pert little girl wearing denim overalls and a Pendleton raised her hand and waved it like a semaphore.

“Okay,” I said fatalistically. “What’s your name?”

“Um…I’m Kate…and…um…I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Kate,” I answered, looking towards the wall clock. It said 1:30. “This class is over in twenty minutes. Can you possibly wait until then?”

“I …um….well…it’s you know…girl problems, a real emergency.”

What was I going to say? No, you can’t replace the leaky tampon in your snooch? I didn’t entirely believe her but I couldn’t be sure. I made the worst tactical error of the entire semester.

“Kate, just go,” I shook my thumb as if it had a mild burn. “Please come back here immediately. Don’t dawdle in the hall.”
Kate vanished in a whiff of pleasant soapy odor. I didn’t see her until the next class, two days later.

Immediately another girl waved her hand in the air. I held my silence for a couple of minutes. The girl in her seat kept waving. I held the silence until the room acquired an uncomfortable muttering edge. There was a hole where a response should be and no one wanted the hole to continue existing. Words began to spout from students’ mouths, random words, like “Man,” or “Hey”, or “Jeez. Finally the girl said, “Fuck, man, I gotta go too!”

I nodded. Three other girls rose with her, and all of them fled the classroom as if a plague-carrying stink had arisen somewhere in the room’s bio-mass. They were fleeing this stink as if it would otherwise stalk them the rest of their short lives.

Vizz! The door opened and closed. The class was down to fifteen again.

No sooner had the three girls vanished than a handsome young lad with the look of James Dean entered the room. The students were suddenly quiet. This young man, keeping his back to the wall, slid the entire perimeter of the classroom until he found the seat closest to me, the seat at the very end of the table next to the windows. He stuck out his hand and said, “Woodleigh. Atherton Woodleigh.” I shook his hand.

“Most people call me Lee. They tried calling me Woody but I cut them up a little and put a stop to that real fucking quick.” This was delivered with clear sincerity and humility. It wasn’t a boast. It was a fact.

I found the name of the sociopath on the roll list and marked it with a check and the time: 1:36.

The conversational volume in the room now grew until it was a general melee. Everyone was talking.

I found a phone book under the teacher’s desk near the windows. I raised it and slammed it down on the desk.

“Goddammit!” I shouted. “Will you shut up?”

They shut up. Now they were all watching me.

At that precise moment there was a clatter at the door and it pushed open as if by its own volition. I saw a long double tiered metal cart forcing its way into the room. The one called Bock slid past it and took its front end. He pulled with his back towards the class. Half his shirt tail hung over rumpled brown pants. At the other end of the cart, facing me, was a tall man with a long pony tail. He wore a black leather vest with a Hell’s Angel logo done in elaborate beadwork.

"Here’s the Macs” Bock said triumphantly.

Everyone began to rise from their chairs.

“Sit down!” I commanded, and I was obeyed. “Bock, will you hand out the computers, please?”

The Tech Man, Jeff, said, “Sorry about the lateness, man. These lops are a little creaky from last semester. The Essential Theater Arts class used ‘em and those guys don’t care about their gear at all, no way. Had to reformat every one of ‘em. Not the kids, I mean. The computers. You know what a bitch that is?”

Each computer had a number taped to its bottom. The first student to get a computer was a bulky boy with light curly hair. He occupied the seat nearest the door. He looked under the computer and said, “Uh uh, this computer’s bunk, number zero one three six, uh..uh..it crashes every two minutes.”
He thrust the computer back onto the cart and reached for another. Jeff slapped his hands away.

“Ain’t no computer good enough for you, Rick, you do this every time I give you a lop, every fucking time.”

There followed a general rumble as students vied for computers with known reputations. These laptops weren’t the latest, greatest Mac Powerbooks. They had less RAM, smaller hard drives, and for two years they’d been in the hands of careless students. Some had scratches and dings but they still made an impressive pile of laptops.

I had been mentoring on the other side of the bay at Drawn Dagger High School. There was one computer per fifteen students and that computer ran with Windows 95 and might crash every time it tried to digest a large photo file. There were three printers in the photography room, ancient Hewlett Packards that printed only black and white. By dint of my own efforts soliciting photographers I had attracted six good but obsolete digital cameras, four or five monitors and a very old copy of pirated Photoshop. The software wouldn’t install properly on half the computers. I had gotten some refurbished Epson color printers but there wasn’t money for the ink. The teacher and I pooled our own funds and bought some ink.

This wrangling at Tech Arts over Mac Laptops was too much for me. I felt as if someone had opened my chest and tied a square knot in my esophagus, then put it back inside me. Now I was expected to swallow.

I couldn’t swallow this. I couldn’t.

Every day was like the first day. Some were worse. A few were better. Mostly, they were like this: chaos, petty wrangling, disappearances to the bathroom without return, lateness accompanied by staggering indifference. There were rolled eyes, concealed music players, giggling, fights, reading comic books, animal noises and farts.

I tried really hard but I couldn’t help feeling that I’d failed in some obvious way. If I had been a better teacher I could have controlled these kids. I had two students who cared. One was mister geek, Damian. He had it all down. Technically he knew the subject better than I did. He needed counsel in the creative side but at least he cared. There was a girl named Lizzie. She was a big country girl with long straight reddish hair. She worked hard. She didn’t know anything, but she wanted to know. She worked, and she learned. Her photography was dreadful! Her photos looked like very poor snapshots. How could a person who learned what she had learned, worked as she had worked, still be incapable of making good images?

Some people have it, and some don’t.

I had promised that the student who showed the most progress would win a nice digital camera. It was a donation from other photographers. Liz won the camera. Damian didn’t need it. He already had a good digital camera and would probably end up at Harvard in a couple of years.

I projected the material on the screen while the students sneaked around in the dimmed classroom, plotting ways to disrupt their own educations. Their literacy was no better than that at Murder Incorporated High School. There was a difference. The kids at Murder Inc were trying but lacked the opportunity. The kids at Tech Arts had the opportunity but were trying not to.

I assigned essays. I spoke about the work of historic geniuses like Steichen and Halsman. I showed presentations of images on the screen. I assigned homework. I asked the students to read up on Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The latter was a French photographer who shot witty and profound black and white photos. He used a Leica, a small camera with which he could catch the spontaneity of Paris street scenes. I asked the class to turn in essays on the great Frenchman.

This was the one that sent me to buy a pack of cigarettes. This “essay” was scrawled on half of a torn piece of lined notebook paper in handwriting worthy of a four year old.

My student had written the following: “Henry Carter Beast was a great photographer. He was a genius. He took a lot of pictures. They were all in black and white. They had some greys too I think.”

That was three years ago. I haven’t been able to stop smoking. I don’t buy tobacco. I have a friend, a retired lawyer, who has some farm land in North Carolina. He’s a tobacco connoisseur. He loves to play with blends, tweaking this and that, walking through his curing sheds inhaling every fragrance. I’m a member of his research team. He sends me a pound bag every few weeks. I make the cigarettes on a machine. The tobacco is without additives or adulterants. It’s a long long way from Marlboros. That doesn’t change the fact that I am, again, a tobacco addict. I don’t smoke nearly as much as I did before. Maybe half pack a day.

I stopped once. I know I can stop again.

Goddammit!

Screw It! Or..."The I'm Sick Of Self Help Books" Self Help Book

If I am correctly reading the implications of all the self improvement books, here’s the paradox: I desperately need to change. At the same time, I desperately need to accept myself exactly as I am.
I woke up this morning, and I still had the same problems I had yesterday. I might be a compulsive eater, or a pill popper, or a seeker of awful relationships, or a gambler, or any number of things that I wish I weren’t. I’m desperate to change myself, to become a better person, more reliable, competent, responsible, creative, positive. I want to enjoy life, not suffer through it!
Where did this come from, this “ideal self”, this expectation that my life is going to be superb, transcendent, vigorous, fulfilling, that my dreams will come true if I’m REALLY persistent, that my wounds will be healed? Who gave me that idea? Oprah? Dr. Phil? A book? Television?

Where did this ‘self improvement’ model emerge and take over my life? This urge to get better and better, whatever that means, has become another addiction, and it’s making me even crazier. I can’t turn around without another book telling me what’s wrong with myself and how I should change it. At the same time, the guru is telling me to love myself as I am, that I can’t change until I’ve really given myself unconditional love. Is it any wonder that I feel crazy?

If I were to give myself unconditional love, I might turn into a puddle of ice cream that will slowly drip into the carpet until there’s nothing left of me but a sweet-smelling spot.
It’s said that changing one’ s self is the hardest job of all. No, there’s one job that’s harder: Loving yourself. I know it sounds hokey as hell, "loving yourself is hard" but it is! There are so many fears about letting go and just ‘being’, so many fears about not living up to some nutty competitive idea of how I should look, where I should live, what I should drive, what I should own. How am I supposed to love a creature this imperfect, this flawed and grotesque? How do I love a person who’s THIS BAD?

It would be irresponsible to love myself. That just wouldn’t do. I’d go soft. I’d sink into illusion and denial. I’d stop working on myself. I’d lose the benefit of fifteen years of therapy.




The Judgment Pressure Cooker




How many ways do I feel judged when I step out of my house to go to work? How much armor do I have to strap on to face the world? Everything is about appearance: there’s my weight, my clothes, my car, the whiteness of my teeth, whether or not I have hair. Is my skin unlined? Is my neck getting a wattle? Should I wear high collars and turtlenecks to hide it? Should I wear stripes to look thinner? How about a corset, a girdle, a tight belt, to hide the expanding waistline?

Aging is a disaster to be fended off as long as possible, by all means. That doctor on Oprah who tells you your so-called “REAL” age helped me do the calculation. I added up factors like my blood pressure, diet, number of remaining teeth and it turned out I was a hundred ten. I was already dead.
How much money do I make? If I’m not making enough money, I’m told that I must change the way I think so that I will “attract the right energies”.

What kind of job do I have? Am I a professional or just a working shlub?

What’s my house or apartment look like? Does it advertise success or is it a dump? Again, I’m not “attracting the right energies”. I feel very guilty about that. If I think and visualize correctly and stop sabotaging myself the “universe” will deposit everything I want, k’zam! right into my pocket. I know what it is: it’s my wallet. My wallet is not organized, it’s sending a signal to the universe that my thoughts about money are chaotic. Wow, I’m self-sabotaging, missing all these clues.

How long is it, two years, now, since I straightened out my wallet? Since I started visualizing all the things I want and chasing away negative thoughts? My mind became a well trained soldier in banishing doubts and hang-ups. It stayed in line, it repeated over and over again, “I can do anything I want I can do anything I want.” I followed the directions in the movie and the book, “The Secret Of All Secrets”, I was disciplined! I visualized my bank statement, an exact number, sixty five thousand two hundred eighteen dollars and thirty five cents. It’s a modest number because the bank is not the smartest place to keep money. I also visualized a safe full of gold ingots, saw myself riding the latest recumbent bicycle and using an eight thousand dollar camera. I have a fake check for three million dollars taped to my fridge. Hours and hours every day I did this visualization.

I had one teeny little lingering doubt about this program. Maybe that’s why it didn’t succeed. That doubt kept whispering in my ear, “Isn’t there something rather graceless about grabbing the universe by the throat and compelling it to give you everything you want?”

Even our spirituality is dominated by this drive for success. It’s sunk right into our hides as if a shotgun has blasted pellets of it to exactly the right depth. It’s impossible to extract. It’s so completely American, this self improvement mania,this urge to raise our station in life. This drive to succeed.

What’s sad about the way our social system is organized is the utter lack of compassion we have towards one another. The non-succeeders are treated as though they have a disease. They’re marginalized.
I’m not doing really great right now, I feel as though I’ve been pushed to the periphery of things until I barely take part in the workings of American culture. {sic} It’s too complex! There is so much paperwork, so many rules, I’m sinking under the weight of mere self maintenance.

It’s TOUGH to go out the front door and take on the world, day by day. Look at the junk that’s endlessly thrown in our faces.

I have an announcement to make: If you are here, you’re a survivor. You’re immensely heroic. To be a participant in the process of the Earth Plane in any form whatsoever is an act of supreme courage and achievement. Let’s put it in perspective, please. This is no cheap ticket, this life. This is Earth. Or, as I prefer to pronounce it, with a deep Brooklyn accent, Oyt. Dat’s where we are, Oyt. Dis ain’t no picnic, dis Oyt. Dis is a hell of a mess and a tough woild. Okay, okay. I’ll just stick with Oyt but blow the accent.

Oyt is a special place. It’s a material manifestation of God’s imagination. It’s a place where learning is done. To own a body, a human body, is a very extraordinary fate. The body is going to suffer many processes, and, eventually, it will decay and die. If you examine that reality with an unflinching gaze, you begin to realize that it takes some guts to continue, day by day. Give yourself some credit.

The alternative, to NOT exist in a body, means one of two things: you are either a ghost, without the courage to incarnate, or you are a Master, who is finished incarnating. In the middle, right here, is life in a body. On Oyt.

Your life, the experience you are having, however difficult or painful, is a gift without parallel.

Sometimes I make lists. One of my favorite lists consists of ways to be stupid. You know, “Ten Of The Stupidest Things People Do”, something like that. At the top of the list always seems to be the same thing: To regard this world as the only world there is.

I know, I know, it’s very scientific and brave to eschew spiritual possibilities. To be rid of crutches. I know many fine people who proclaim that this is the only world that can be proven, therefore, it’s the only world they accept as real.

How unimaginatively sad. I require no proof at all. I need only examine the facts as they exist, to make a leap of faith and surmise that there MUST be a mighty plethora of worlds, dimensions, alternatives and ways to experience being conscious. Just because I don ‘t know what they are, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Therefore, I consider it to be unbearably stupid to deny that something great and mysterious is occurring, simultaneous with my little life and its problems. There are other worlds, and we’d better recognize the possibility that we survive death, in some form and take responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Because there are consequences; we are held accountable.

That doesn’t mean we have to get crazy and turn ourselves into perfect little angels. Not at all. It just means we need to see things with an open mind.

Meanwhile I’m getting blasted with this message that there’s something wrong with me but if I truly live in the “moment” there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me. Where is this moment? Oops, it’s gone. Here’s another one, grab hold…nope,
gone. Another one, gone…gone….

I understand that NOT living in the moment is to live in the past or the future, both of which are places in the mind, noisy places full of desire, plans, regrets, a tangled bedsheet from a sleepless night of the soul, mind mind mind mind.
Shut up, mind! Let the heart speak!

Can someone tell me what this wonderful “moment” is? Mr. Tolle? Deepak? I thought not. You counsel me to “be” in it but can’t tell me what it’s like. Here’s what I’ve observed.

First there is breathing. I’m breathing, in and out. My heart is beating, my blood is flowing, my skin registers the air temperature. And I wonder how I’m going to pay rent next month whoops! Lost the moment.

Let’s try again. Breathing check. Heartbeat check. Blood flows check. Air temperature check. Uhh. Sounds. There are sounds coming to my ears. Wind blowing through leaves? Ah lovely. I Probably wasted my time sweeping the patio…whoops!

Damn, this moment shit is hard. I get only so far and then start thinking of other things and wheee, I’m whisked away into speculation, worry, schemes. All games of the mind. So, what does it take?

Superhuman concentration. To be in the “now” requires superhuman concentration.

Great.

I’m really fucked.

A Conversation With God

Lord, my whole life has been a conversation with you. It has been a pleading, praying, thanking, questioning, frustrating conversation. Though I am not answered in words, you answer me in every experience that occurs. There is no issue about my faith, about whether or not I accept your existence. It is not conditioned by what happens to me in my life. I don’t need good things and miracles to have faith. All I need do is look around at the world and I see an abundance of evidence. Without you and the great wind of your love, there would be, simply, Nothing. Instead, we have a great passionate world, a universe full of drama and strife, of burning stars, of miracles and mysteries. One thing I can see, Lord, is that you have made a universe that is not boring.
I thirst for truth, but truth is not an easy thing to grasp. I don’t want to be this way, the way I am: addicted, afflicted, incomplete, emptied out, wounded and afraid. I don’t want to be this way. But I am. These conditions go along with being human. Being alive and made of this material stuff is to be lost in a jungle, where spirit hides behind things and yet is out in the open for those with clear sight. My sight is not clear. It is obscured by my needs for so many things. I need comfort and enjoyment and every desire leads to a battleground, a wrestling with a thousand demons. I need truth, but I fear truth. I hold it at arm’s length lest it turn out to be monster with sharp teeth, about to rip my personality to shreds and throw me down into madness. I am afraid that I can’t handle things the way they are.

I am like a fairy tale creature following a trail of crumbs through the forest. Somewhere in this darkness there is a home in a clearing, a warm place to feed and rest and abide. I wait for the appearance of that abiding place, though it may not appear until after I die. If that is what is decreed, that I wander through the years of my life in a constant search for truth that is never satisfied, so be it.
My faith does not diminish. Nor does my fear. Faith and fear seem strange bedfellows. Both seem constant to my condition. Both conceal the same transcendant animal, hidden amid the trees and vines. Both counsel me to leave hope at the entrance to the forest, and proceed in spite of the hopelessness of the cause.

Such is a true conversation with you, God.

Twenty One Varieties of Stupidity

Twenty One Varieties of Stupidity

1. Thinking this is the only world that is.
2. Thinking you’re the most important person in this, the only world.
3. Thinking you are the same thing as your body.
4. Letting someone else think for you because it’s easy.
5. Hoping someone or something outside yourself will make you happy.
6. Punishing someone or something when your’re not happy.
7. Making your children live the life you didn’t.
8. Solving problems with force instead of intelligence and wisdom
9. All attempts to make permanent that which is not.
10. Mistaking symbols for reality.
11. Mistaking moods for permanent states of being.
12. Any activity that requires the wearing of large visored hats.
13. Embracing an ideology to dispel fear and doubt as to the nature of reality.


Subsets of the first varieties of stupidity


1. Failing to make the attempt to discover reality.
2. Not seeing through the shallowness of one’s attempts to discover reality.
3. Not anticipating the fragility of the body.
4. Philosophical puniness.
5. Greed for complex means of escape.
6. All complex means of escape.
7. Avoidance of change, lack of inner agility.
8. Mistaking merit badges for actual merit.

Ordinary Consciousness

There is no ordinary consciousness.
There is something we do every day,
get in our cars, go to work,
get food, pay the credit cards,
raise our families.
Billions of people
do it, thinking it is ordinary.
That is consciousness,
and nothing about consciousness
is ever ordinary.
Sometimes I long for visions
of sudden grace,
in the middle of the ordinary day,
oh how I wish I could be taken
to a visionary understanding, right now,
and know what is real, what it’s all about.
I should be careful what I wish for.
If I were to be taken to that magic land
I would also be held accountable
for my mistakes. Paradise
has a price for admission.
Paradise is Truth; in Paradise
there is no lingering trail of lies and crimes.
In Paradise, all bills have been paid.
I am grateful for ordinary consciousness;
I'm still behind on some of my accounts,
and consciousness knows exactly what I owe,
and to whom.
That is not so ordinary after all.