At last, hate, guilt, and repair
Back to that choice of subject. What’s in the subtext of that decision? I am a white male writer, an immigrant from the UK of nearly forty years—not exactly a refugee. Not even underprivileged relative to many US citizens, even. But I’m not setting my tale amid the black community of Flint, Michigan, or from within the Sioux Indian lands of North Dakota. Charlottesville? Well, that incident happened too late in my creative process. As for recent hurricanes, the shooting in Vegas, or the latest, wildfires? Well, I’ll touch on the Vegas thing, I guess, as it retroactively relates. Earthquakes? Earthquakes get a hearing in my story, because they lurk. We’re waiting on those. What’s all this got to do with Blended, a novel about a step-mom in a third marriage, juggling that third effort with half-hearted career choices, life in a blended family; an effort to help a refugee family blend into American society? Again, subtext.
It’s interesting to write about a female protagonist—only the second time I’ve done that in the decade I’ve been writing novels. Am I qualified? I wonder. So, I take care, I think. I protect Tillie Marsden from harsh judgment while trying to make her imperfect, and thus likeable—something I didn’t achieve with Daniel Pierce, my protagonist from Venus Looks Down On A Prairie Vole. Ironically, this task means introducing elements that are unlikeable, but not too unlikeable. Tillie’s a bit snotty about Jacob, her soft-bellied, mischief-minded step-son. She’s a modest social critic, insinuating comment about western consumerism, turning her nose up at mainstream branding, like Target stores, popular sport or vulgar music. She’s like a lot of middle-aged women, frankly, so maybe she’s relatable. I hope. Meanwhile, there’s evidence of her body-shaming attitudes, which seem adjunctive to overly healthy exercise and diet habits. There’s a back-story there, the reader may discover. The flip side of her sometimes muted, sometimes not muted criticism, is a deep-rooted guilt. On the whole, Tillie feels lucky and safe. She has arrived in middle age, in some ways dissatisfied and unfinished, yet clearly dealing with first world problems. Even her thwarted career path seems undramatic. Though she might have been passed over for privileged males, it’s not obvious that this happened, nor is it clear she’d bother to fight that problem if it reared itself again. Therefore, her volunteer job helping Bahram and Mira carries a melting pot of purpose: it is vaguely redemptive, but also an escape from home-grown troubles.
According to the laws of subtext, Bill Marsden, Tillie’s husband, would have even more to feel guilty about, and thus defend against. For him, this manifests firstly as protectiveness. He protects women from vulgarity (his testiness with Jacob’s offhand humor), and by denying women’s capacity for harm. Meanwhile, he exhibits a restrained skepticism about immigration, the trustworthiness of his blue-collar subordinates at work. As a middle-management figure within a construction company, he is a man in charge, ostensibly in a power-up position. But he’s not an obvious top-dog: a once-cuckolded husband, he betrays a fear of usurpers and infidels, across contexts. Regarding contractors who move on if work isn’t available (read the parallel, if sex isn’t available), he openly suspects, “their eyes wander.” The progressive view, attaching itself lately to object relations theory, would cast this as projection, a defense against guilty feelings that pervade the thoughts of presumed top-dogs. Therefore, he wanders/wonders: is he doing right by Jacob? Does he or did he neglect the needs of others, including his other two adult children, his cheating ex-wife? Subtext principle declares that each of these subordinate figures rebels against him, and now Bill Marsden—decent, hard-working, loyal and patriotic Bill Marsden—is taking it on the chin.
How much can people take? The tensions in the plot of Blended encircle eruptions that may or may not happen, so the reader waits for each figurative or literal event. An earthquake might happen, says neglected nature. Psychic tremors stir in the form of children’s acting out: the children of Tillie and Bill; the gaggle of nerves and play that Bahram and Mira seven-deep flock enact; the oblique, sometimes refreshing, sometimes merely annoying comments and toilet humor of Jacob. Children, the underprivileged: they provoke, and we ask them to apologize and thus repair. Adults in charge (including therapists) absorb the acting out of children; their unconscious defiance of power. Sometimes they apologize, repair. Each person’s task is to grow up, to take responsibility, protest against corrupt, self-serving leadership, or to yield authority with care.
We don’t yet know what happened in Vegas. For the moment, that incident suggests something we haven’t thought much about recently: indiscriminate hate. A man in a hotel holes up in his room with an arsenal of weapons, and during an outdoor concert that his room overlooks, he opens fire, spraying bullets and scattering people, killing and/or injuring hundreds. But he has no particular target, as far as we know. We’ve thought of hate, and we’ve certainly thought about discrimination, with respect to numerous such incidents in recent years. The culprits of violence are racists, or anti-western terrorists, we think. Amid progressive circles, at least, discriminatory hate has assumed a position of highest sin. As we gradually erode ‘judgments’ about sexual deviance, about substance use, for example, we’ve catapulted discrimination and hate to the top tier of social ills. And while selective hate has gripped our concern, the most pervasive form of hate—misanthropy—appears to have slipped past the hotel desk. I think of clients, even friends or colleagues, who sometimes jovially quip, “people suck”, or “people are disappointing”. I’m not suggesting that I or anyone else rebuke such expressions as if they necessarily portend atrocities, but consider this: what would be the reaction if the phrases were “black people suck”, or “whites are disappointing”.
Melanie Klein and others within the object relations school offered that hate and guilt live in the minds of infants, and are not easily extinguished. It’s not even clear that such a goal is realistic, or even desirable. Hate and guilt are innate capacities, not so much learned as inflamed by fateful development. By moving from what she termed the paranoid schizoid position to the depressive position, we experience our aggression, our love, our fear, and our power. We do damage. We have chances to repair. That’s life and humanity. In Blended, I have one character—a minor one—who embodies the civilized veneer that collapses and threatens to go postal. Then there are the characters who are more central to the plot. The people I want you, my would-be reader to care about. It is good to be an adult. I feel qualified to say that now that I’m grown and middle-aged. Yet I am a child. I will always be one.
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A subtext of what’s important
This subtext I reference: it’s nothing special. I mean that all stories have subtext, so it’s not as though authors do so much to inject it. Actually, the perception of subtext is more the job of the reader, in my opinion. These characters of Blended, who live in suburban Oregon in 2016, with the backdrop of an impending, contentious election, have elements to themselves that place them on different sides of social order. They’re parts of groups—some large and dominant, others small and vulnerable. I don’t have to spell it all out. As in therapy, you’d feel where everyone fits, because I think you’d relate.
Tillie Marsden is different from her mother, is closer to the spirit of her dad, who passed away when she was a teen. Mom is parochial, has barely ever left Tennessee, never mind looked beyond American borders with interest or concern. As Tillie volunteers through her local church to help a refugee Pakistani family assimilate into American life, she is re-igniting old, altruistic as well as internationalist leanings. Unlike her family, she is more in touch with her world citizen self. She’s a natural joiner, fits in seamlessly at church, at her non-profit workplace (though she dislikes its autocratic, national politics-mirroring new leadership). She is intuitively inclusive, open to new experiences and people. She is perhaps naïve.
Bill Marsden, her husband, is indulgent of Tillie’s volunteerism, but is skeptical. In between lines, a reader might detect his curmudgeonly scoffing. He’s decent and industrious, and in these ways, he embodies a familiar ethos in western society: he’s a provider, a father; a tacit advocate of neo-liberalist economics, which decree an individualist notion: anyone can make it in this world if they just roll up their sleeves and work hard. Therefore, anyone who isn’t making it is presumptively lazy or unmotivated, or else spending too much time whining. Jacob, his indolent twenty-something son, is therefore something of a challenge, not because he whines, but rather because he doesn’t work hard enough, or doesn’t seize his days properly. Bill is torn between competing needs: to commonly bond with his son versus lighting a fire under him.
Tillie is supportive of Bill’s parental stance, but becomes quietly sympathetic to Jacob’s idiosyncratic, indecisive nature, knowing it’s a function of his individuating path, which ought not be forced. Besides, she remembers a time when she was young and undecided over life’s direction, and was similarly wayward in her habits. Bill, meanwhile, is manifesting his own split internalizations. His late father was a Korean war veteran, and—I sort of hint—a roguish, perhaps womanizing husband (I don’t actually give evidence of this. Again, reader’s job?) Anyway, having not donned a military uniform himself, Bill is solely an economic warrior, and he protects women and children in the plainest and less dramatic ways, eschewing only emotional chores, to his detriment. His mother, still living, is a close-to-home figure—too close, actually. She hoards belongings, clings and irritates, and in so doing, exhibits her unconscious, chronic fear of loss. Thus, Blended is partly about people in relationship who are like one another, and otherwise how they live with differences.
Foreigners intrude, almost literally, and set up a few mirrors, but mostly provide contrast. That’s not the author’s POV, necessarily, but that’s the sense a reader should have if immersed in this fictional Bishop Grove world. My Pakistani refugee family cling together for survival and warmth, and seem ever-calibrating from lingering trauma and seeking fresh air to breathe. The father and husband, Bahram, seems most enamored of his new home and community, and he will look for Tillie’s help in ways that will test her limits. She must figure out a way to help him, to help Mira, his wife, and to help them all while protecting them from common, middle-American projections: that these poor, refugee immigrants are helpless, reliant upon charity; soaking up public resources or Tillie’s time away from her real family.
For many, family is not just the most important unit of society, it is an accomplice to that neo-liberal economic and individualist myth, and this generates considerable stress in some. I have clients, for example, who lament that they don’t have enough time to occupy themselves with social causes, community outreach, and they usually cite the dual priorities of work and family as the reason. I have Tillie belong to a church so as to compliment religious institutions for providing a compromise, for church programs manage to do both, I think: they confront social problems, organize events around community causes while engaging families in a process that brings them together at the same time. This traditional pastime isn’t uniting Tillie, Bill, and Jacob, but that’s only because Bill and Jacob are not religious, which isn’t the fault of the church.
I didn’t have to place action away from American shores to spark this contemplation of outsiders and insiders, similarity and difference, and in an important way I haven’t. I might have fashioned a drama that was closer to home but still compelling notice of diversity and disadvantage: an event based upon the water crisis that has befallen Flint, Michigan, for example, or the Standing Rock controversy, regarding a pipeline project that threatens to impinge upon Sioux Indian lands. Progressives, who can also be parochial, might complain that home-grown oppression is more important for artists and writers to address. As an immigrant and now American (and world) citizen, I lean towards depicting the less fortunate visitor, the truly outside and exiled individual—the refugee—and emphasizing not so much the political triggers of their escape but rather moments of assimilation blended with needs we all have in common. Water is, of course, a need everyone has in common. Oil? I’ll leave that as a question mark.
However, the focus of Blended is upon emotional needs that Americans, foreigners, people from Tennessee, all presumptively have in common: love, attachment, and—paradoxically—separation, and freedom. Hard work. Hard writing. If I keep going like this, I should make it, you might think. I might make it. But for now, I am almost done orienting the reader to what’s important about my novel without giving everything away. I want the reader to do some work, after all. Will you?
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On Blended: the refugee story
So, the plot of Blended centers around Tillie’s decision to volunteer through her local church to help a refugee family from Pakistan assimilate into American society, or more specifically, into the fictional middle-American mini-pot that is Bishop Grove, Oregon. The family consists of a thirty-something couple with seven kids, recently emigrated from the area of Pakistan that is near the dangerous Afghan border. The father is a former translator for a private security force attached to an unidentified American corporation. He says little about this background and Tillie doesn’t inquire, not so much because she isn’t interested—more because she is discreet in her approach. Half-internalizing her ambiguously xenophobic mother, she is reticent in her queries, not wanting to intrude. Tillie is…what’s the word…polite?
This lends an air of tension as the story proceeds, as curiosity builds and mysteries grow. What were their lives actually like in Pakistan? Why did they leave, or why did they leave so suddenly? Why is this foreign couple—Bahram and Mira are their names—so brittle and seemingly distant with each other? It seems inevitable that something will be revealed, and it won’t be pleasant. The reader may observe that Bahram seems enamored of American life, its seeming abundance, material promise. Actually, what he likes most is the fresh, unpolluted air, the greenery in the landscapes; the chance to see an ocean and relax on sand that is devoid of warfare. The rest of the family seems numb, and Tillie wonders: How are the children—aged 1 and ½ through 12—coping with the upheaval in their lives? They seem variably adjusted to circumstances: some are playful and bright; one or two others seem withdrawn and haunted. Whatever is the truth, none of it seems normal to Tillie.
And Tillie herself doesn’t know what normal is. Or, she is re-appraising that vague construct. Such and such is the new normal. That’s commonspeak today, for none of us knows anymore, I guess, what normal is. Peripherally interested in the politics of 2016, and critically observant of her own society’s norms, Tillie is perhaps best positioned to guide a new immigrant without judgment or fear. She is open-minded, and at least imagines that she will not be subject to any fears or judgments from this immigrant family—an assumption that will be tested when they begin to inquire about her. What will they make of her background: of divorce, of blended families, a third marriage, an unsatisfying working like in which she is straining for purpose? She might imagine their envy of so-called first world problems. Meanwhile, what will they think of American consumerism, or the various icons of American culture that they have previously experienced (especially the covetous husband), but only from afar. And will they experience xenophobia, or its umbrella concept, racism, as they settle in?
BTW, in telling this story, I’m not trying to assert myself as any kind of expert with respect to immigration, society’s norms, the politics of the Pakistan-Afghanistan region—none of that. Also, commentary on domestic politics is at best allegorical, perhaps facile, even. We’re not talking to one another properly: that’s the main subtext of Blended. The remaining thematic residue is really in the title. There’s a mix here of background, of present, of future fears and hopes, which block clear thinking, blinds vision. But it’s there to see. Characters observe in others what they might see in history and in themselves, but if they stopped and observed themselves—what’s called the observing ego in object relations/ego psychology—then…well, society would be better, let’s say. Projections are interlocking, moving fast, and in various directions. The author corrals ideas, other bits and pieces, but I, for one, don’t really know how these stories end. My endings are contrivances, my best guess (es), reflecting a desire for tidy order.
Which reminds me…
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Falling Squirrels
Staying with a theme. But first, a departure: last entry I wrote about some public musings (that’s like, thought plus something) of Salman Rushdie, who remarked that there are too many books in the world, sort of. He didn’t sound as elitist as I’m making him sound, but he was cautionary. Should we keep publishing? Do we need to, he meant, given the volume of titles that exist? He forgot one factor, it seems to me. This will sound elitist. People don’t read. Or, they don’t read old-fashioned print–not as much. And they don’t read novels, especially. Or do they? I don’t know. I heard all this on the radio, another declining medium. Perhaps if books could be downloaded onto I-phones. Actually, can they? Is there an AP for that yet….someone?
Anyway, a man in my office—not the same one as last time—also mentioned squirrels this week. I guess people have squirrels on their minds. Coincidence? Maybe not. Maybe squirrels are a new zeitgeist. Squirrels are important because they feature metaphorically in my novel, Blended. They scurry about the property, stealing food, getting in places they shouldn’t. That was the problem, the man in my office said. Squirrels were climbing atop his roof. One had fallen down the chimney and gotten stuck. He had to get it out. Can’t let it—them—run wild.
They run wild in my novel, also. Or, they are onlookers. They comment on us secretly. Tillie Marsden, my protagonist, ignores them, has other nuisances in mind, at home and at work. Home comes first: where will Bill, her third and by far her best husband, insist on taking them on vacation this broken year of 2016? Tillie likes modest getaways to seaside villages. Bill prefers rugged adventure in the wilderness. I know. What first world drama, you’re thinking? How will you, the reader, stand the suspense? Do I know how to grip you, or what? Well, hang on. Give me a few pages. So far, I’ve given you squirrels as metaphors, so you must be intrigued. And there is that interesting title, Blended, after all.
Tillie’s step-son, Jacob, a largely idle twenty-something, is part of that blend. He is an ambiguous nuisance, not stealing but certainly consuming food, and getting in places that he might have left by now, such as the living room couch. He’s back and forth between home and school, drifting towards his future. What he really wants to do with his life is unclear, but what you’ll read (hopefully) are the offhand comments from the millennial crypt: his thoughts about life as it is in art, as in action movies, as in war, terrorism as a spectator sport; modern diet. Tillie is mystified by Jacob, but were she to look more closely, she’d note similarities between him and her younger self.
There is little that is mystifying about Bill, to whom Tillie has been married for seven years. In his late fifties, he is stably employed, financially secure, having launched at least one of his three adult children. Cuckolded by his first wife, Bill seems decent and reliable, if slightly insecure. His only other foible is a curmudgeonly edge, which he betrays as Tillie introduces plans to help refugee families. Bill is skeptical the way that middle America seems skeptical: he doesn’t know much about life in Pakistan, and doesn’t care to know much. Though careful with his thoughts, he probably thinks that immigrants are a problem. They represent security risks. They steal or consume too much; will get in places they shouldn’t.
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Chasing Squirrels
A man in my office spoke of chasing squirrels and laughed. Prone to using comic metaphors, he explained the link to his current life circumstances. The squirrels represent lost causes, things we cannot change—but also the things we shouldn’t try to change. Let things go. Let nature be nature.
I reflected for a moment, struck by the synchronicity. See, this was yesterday, the day before my plan to write this entry, an introduction to my new novel, entitled Blended. Among other things, the first chapter begins with a brief rumination upon—you guessed it—squirrels. In my story, squirrels are also metaphors. They are likewise out of control, symbolic of the wild, yet they mirror humanity, for they are greedy, compulsive, hierarchical, and frail. They dart about our properties, seizing the unseen territories, taking what they can get, but trailing more elegant creatures, like hummingbirds, in the hearts of genteel homeowners. If squirrels care or have boundaries, as in rules, it’s not apparent. They are strong and quick, yet they do not make good choices. They seem blind and reckless, so they keep dying unpleasantly on man’s roads.
Allusively set in 2016, Blended is otherwise about a middle-aged woman, a mother of three, a step-mom to another three, who begins the story roaming the garden of her Oregonian home, picking fights with troublesome thorns, committed to aesthetics. Tillie Marsden observes the critters but she does not fuss over them. She makes better choices, jogs instead of dashing, and prepares for earthquakes and political fallout. She is likely based (because I don’t remember this specifically) on a character in a Geico insurance commercial. You know, the one with the woman who sits by a pool, calling her action star son at the wrong time (‘You’re a mom, it’s what you do’), and casually mocking his father for chasing squirrels, which appear swarm-like in the background. My character isn’t quite as blasé as that, and her husband, her third, isn’t actually obsessed with squirrels. But the point is that something is lurking in society and nature. Despite a comfortable, as in financially settled and peaceful suburban existence, Tillie feels a stirring unease. She needs to do something.
Family and career are twin poles of struggle and unfinished business, but it’s a new endeavor that’s catalytic for Tillie, and therefore the plot of Blended. An involved church-goer, she volunteers at a refugee support program, is assigned to a young Pakistani family that has recently moved to her town, a fictional Eugene-like community named Bishop Grove. Back in her teens, she’d once hosted an Iranian student for a semester. Bad antecedent. Tillie’s long-widowed mother, a stoic conservative of the American Gothic variety, was barely tolerant of that adolescent fancy, so the world citizen spirit was blunted. This latter-day charity is a do-over of sorts. It’s a resurrection of old aptitudes, promising satisfaction, not to mention distraction from autocratic bosses and drudgery. It’s a vacation from dense family drama, a chance to feel useful and recognized as a caring figure. It’s also one woman’s thumb-on-the-nose prep for Trump’s America.
I recently heard Salman Rushdie lament that there are too many books in print today; that the world’s writers could just stop writing and there would be plenty of titles for everyone to read for many years to come. That’s probably true. Over 300,000 books are published, traditionally and not, every year, in the U.S alone. Rushdie therefore opines that today’s writers should ask themselves an important question: not, is my book good, or entertaining? But rather, is it necessary? Is it a worthwhile addition to that already huge mountain of print?
Is Blended a worthwhile addition?
Hmm?
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The reunion
Sometimes you do something spontaneous—something that defies homeostatic caution. I do, anyway. I was overdue for some remembrance. Seeing Christine—I was 99% sure that’s who it was—in the bagel shop, I caught her glance, felt a hit of something and made a decision. After she finishes her phone call, I’ll say hello, I resolved. It had been thirty years since I’d seen her. Twenty years, at least, since I’d seen anyone from high school. Christine and I had been passing acquaintances at best, I thought. She wouldn’t remember me. But that didn’t matter. For reasons I’m about to explain, that didn’t matter.
“Graeme”, she called out, before I could say her name. To say I was caught off guard was an understatement. This, despite the fact that I’d seen her first and had already prepared an approach. She remembered me. I was astonished. By my recollection, I’d been a non-entity in HS: as invisible as any adolescent had ever imagined himself to be, I firmly believed. Christine had been class president. I’m not kidding. She was beyond ‘cool’ or popular. She was gracious, kind—what my father would have called “a class act”—as well as smart, and disciplined. She was even brave. She didn’t just go to school with ‘cool’ kids. She dealt with them.
I decided to share most of this in an e-mail a week later. In the interim I stewed over the prospect of “keeping in touch”, as she had suggested during that light, if genuine ten-minute chat in the bagel shop. Those ten minutes had been long enough for me to confess one or two things: that I hadn’t attended a single reunion since HS (which she probably knew already); that I hadn’t sustained contact with a single member of our class of 86’; that I scarcely recognized half the names she’d name-dropped to me as we spoke. I felt sheepish, embarrassed. I was partially re-enacting an awkward moment from decades past, even as a faint determination stirred in me.
In my e-mail, I shared more about my later and current life: about being a psychotherapist, and more specifically, about my (largely) past work with adolescents, which has long influenced reflections upon that fraught period of my life. I’ve thought about adolescence, talked about it, off and on, with countless people, over the last thirty years. But I’d never talked about it with anyone who’d actually gone through it with me as a peer. To embroider the memory, I evoked the period, recalling what musical icons I liked and didn’t (it was the 80s, past The Who’s halcyon, so there were more in the ‘didn’t’ category), what social or political events once shaped my conscience; what teachers and cliques then inspired or alienated me.
Christine responded promptly, moved by my honest and open-hearted follow-up, and was eager to relate and talk more. Indeed, she was at pains to dispel some of my fossilized projections: the impression that she or some others like her were more mature than I, as I had declared in my e-mail. She admitted that she’d also found some my peers difficult and obnoxious, despite their popularity. She recalled the problem of organizing events, peer activities, having to endure trivial complaints, the self-absorbed superficiality of some. She’d enjoyed my funny observations about the period, the social ambience of HS, and imagined that my sensibility served me in my work.
We followed up with a second meeting, a coffee-talk in the shadow of the old school neighborhood. Anecdotes flowed from those earlier impressions, spinning from one tidbit of recall to the next. I brought an old yearbook along, which further aided memory and stimulated thought. A page filled with handwritten text from a mutual female acquaintance reminded me that while I was once terse and inarticulate (writing single-sentence, banal farewells), the girls were prolific and personable. At this point, Christine further challenged my self-deprecation, saying that I was quiet in HS, but also calm, friendly, and far from obnoxious. Besides, I hardly seemed terse or inarticulate now, she said—regardless of how I once saw myself.
Ultimately, it felt bittersweet, this serendipitous meeting. As Christine and I separated, I almost but didn’t quite regret all the missed reunions and lapsed connections. After all, adolescence remains fixed in my mind as a time when I was not at my best, regardless of what others thought. As a result, I have preferred laying it to rest, and letting go the witnesses. And yet, Christine’s own reflections were compelling, and what once seemed benign or unfulfilling now seems to offer oblique, cathartic promise. She recalled peers who were like me, it seems. She specifically recalled one young man who reported (in retrospect) flitting between groups as a teen, befriending none with any real depth, spending time and energy upon concealment, while concealing that same concealment. That sounded familiar. Christine summarized: at that age, few are at their best, and because many (perhaps most) protect the self from exposure above all else, the young don’t learn to see one another. That’s a problem, she modestly, and without judgment, implied. I may yet change my mind on a few things: I may yet decide to not cheat history; to not deny the witnesses, and thus look upon myself and others from the past with an adult’s perspective.
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It’s high time
It’s been several centuries since the Sunni Persian poet Rumi waxed lyrical about the value of wine. Intoxication, escapism from anxiety: these were venerated effects once, before the medical or psychological problems related to drugs were apparent or widely known. Ancients bemoaned excess, thinking drunkenness shameful, but they also observed in humans the drive to change consciousness, as important perhaps as our drives towards sex and aggression. We seek freedom from oppressive thoughts, inhibitions…that problem of what others think.
I’ve long felt ambivalent about what intoxicants promise, regardless of what the medical or psychological consequences are. The tacit principles of psychotherapy extol the values of altered consciousness, but through natural means, not via the imbibing or inhalation of a foreign substance. Further, therapy implicitly encourages the exploration of anxiety or depression—the staying with pain—not so much its alleviation, or the substitution of it with pleasure-seeking. These values place my professional (or at least certain sections of it) at odds with many who are not interested in learning about their pain, and therefore addiction or dependency treatment represents a huge faction within mental health services. Implicitly, most of us in this field are wedded to sobriety, and professionally at least, suspicious of so-called altered consciousness, as induced by chemicals. Fortunately, growing knowledge about marijuana, for example, enables a different discussion: one that focuses upon pain, not consciousness. Increasingly, intelligent choices can be made about the types of pain that should be medicated, and those that shouldn’t.
Medical marijuana, or Cannabidiol (CBD), is one of a hundred plus cannabinoids that binds to cannabinoid receptors within the immune system, whereas Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) binds to receptors only within the central nervous system. That distinction has only been known for a few years. THC has intoxicant qualities—a ‘high’—and impacts various areas of the brain, including the basal ganglia (impacting movement), the hypothalamus (hunger), the hippocampus (memory), the cerebral cortex (reality testing and perception), as well as the medulla, which mediates the experience of pain. That marijuana disaffects short-term memory should remind us that in the context of PTSD, for example, or even certain aspects of grief, we might consider that ‘forgetting’—ordinarily an aversive symptom—is a propitious, as in welcome option. CBD does not get a user ‘high’, nor does it increase appetite, and can (unlike THC) treat rather than stir anxiety or psychosis. As an anti-convulsant, it can also be effective in the treatment of epilepsy. However, it can be counterproductive with respect to eating disorders (because it doesn’t stimulate appetite), and ineffective in treating depression, because it blocks THC from producing feelings well-being.
Research indicates that marijuana, whether in configurations of THC or other cannabinoids like CBD, places teenagers, and specifically males aged 16-24, most at risk for addiction, as that is assessed via DSM criteria. Adolescence is a tender period of life, for sure. We all remember what it is (or was) to worry about what others think, especially as a teen, and perhaps males are less socialized to talk about this–that’s the chestnut theory, anyway. But this vulnerable population constitutes just less than 10% of estimated marijuana users in this country. Now that 28 states have legalized use and possession of marijuana, and that legitimate medical uses for CBD have been established, it seems time to remove non-habit forming marijuana from the federal list of Schedule 1 narcotics (for which lack of medical application, plus abuse potential, is a criteria), and to block what has long seemed a tertiary, social effect: the indirect persecution of the black community via the pretext of illegal marijuana use and possession.
As a therapist specializing in addictions treatment, I have long dodged the legalization debate, especially when speaking to clients who are externally motivated to abstain. The legality question has always been in the way, it seems. The real questions—the ones that will persist over time, are the following: what do you want to do about pain? How do you want to raise consciousness?
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Viva The Who
I wasn’t quite on a high. On Friday morning, the day after my presentation, I strolled back to the conference center to hear at least one more speaker. I felt relaxed, sort of pleasantly drained, and because my own talk had gone well, I was spared the figurative hangover that otherwise may have left me sour or sluggish. The first talk was about children and trauma; specifically, it covered the story of a garrulous seven-year-old boy who enthused about movies depicting paranormal activity—movies that his mother watched obsessively at home, and that he watched or listened to because he had little choice. Ostensibly, the boy was a fan, but at night he wasn’t sleeping; instead, he was experiencing nightmares, was suffering injuries at school, hitting himself inexplicably. Self-harming. Dissociation. As I listened I thought of Tommy Walker, the fictional subject of my previous day’s talk, who might have shown similar symptoms had The Who’s famous rock opera been fleshed out with more vivid detail. Halfway through this Friday presentation, I was referenced out of the blue: the speaker was making a point about synchronicity, that Jungian/Joseph Campbell cosmic or spiritual construct, and reminding the audience of a biographical tidbit from my talk: that I was born around the time Tommy was in production. I can’t remember the context in which synchronicity was raised, and I had eschewed a spiritual focus in my talk, but as this other speaker continued I chuckled, and not just because my name had been mentioned. For me, this would be a day of synchronicity.
The afternoon would be anything but relaxing. Upon leaving my hotel, I left for the airport, bidding a fond farewell to Santa Fe—a gentle, artful little town, I must declare. At the conference center, in the airport lounge, and even on the plane to Phoenix, I was enjoying the aftermath of Thursday’s success: people were walking up to me, giving me nice compliments, thanking me for giving them a positive, educational experience with my Tommy lecture. I was basking but I was nonetheless anxious. One of my flights had been delayed, forcing me to wait two hours in Phoenix before catching the next flight, a late afternoon shot to Vegas. I’d never been to sin city before and I wasn’t planning to stay long. One night only: see a show, sleep in; then head home the next day. That was the deal. However, my flight was due into Vegas at 6:30, only ninety minutes before show-time. That would make things tight if disembarking, wading through a terminal, finding a shuttle or taxi, traveling downtown, checking in at another hotel, and then zipping over to a concert venue, all before the lights dimmed.
I wasn’t helped by airline seat assignments, or rather, by the lack of them. Southwest books passengers in groups of three, filling their 737 aircraft with roughly one hundred people for each flight. Technically, I was in boarding group C, passenger 35, or something like that. As far as I was concerned, my ticket might as well have read, boarding group no fucking chance. Anyway, someone or thing was looking out for me. I got a seat, right at the back, and was second to last off the plane, exiting around ten to seven. I made it to the taxis at ten minutes after the hour, got to my hotel twenty minutes later still, and—seeing a line that resembled the security check congestion at airports—decided to stash my luggage with bell staff, leaving check-in until later. The walk over to the concert venue was short, just a quick dash over a foot-bridge that overlooked the strip, but it was long enough to stir impressions that would continue over the ensuing twenty-four hours.
In some respects, Vegas was what I’d expected: a hot, steamy oasis, covering me with thick air and adult Disneyland ambience. It was heavily perfumed, with a tobacco fringe—the whiff of a dinosaur demographic, fused to slot machines. And those totems were everywhere: at the airport, in the lobbies of hotels, even next to restaurant entrances. I was half-surprised to not find them in bathroom stalls, where they would have been aptly placed, it seems to me. Beyond that tractor beam pull, sex was on alternative display. At Caesar’s Palace, within a vast lobby area, a phalanx of young women, mostly unattached, prowled in heavy make-up, ignoring men like me and wearing tight dresses that looked about as comfortable as scuba gear. The men seemed fewer, but they also traveled in groups and gazed about a lot. Like the women, they looked like they’d worked hard to be in Vegas: looking good, but more comfortable than their imminent sexual partners. You see, their pain was over. They’d given at the gym, not in the effort to wear clothes or walk in ridiculous shoes.
Past that display, I made it to Caesar’s coliseum, where I was amongst my element, sort of. Scores of middle-aged men, plus their similarly-aged women, mingled and then filed into the arena, there to see—you guessed it—The Who. A year ago, I met Pete Townshend, the band’s songwriter and guitarist, after a sturdy performance in Oakland. He autographed the paper that served as the basis for the Santa Fe lecture, and we spoke briefly. A special moment. This time, seeing The Who was my reward following a job well done, but there would be no private audience with Pete, despite the synchronicity of our shared presence in the desert. Seeing The Who was another peak experience–a spiritual one, or close to it–and the perfect, even predestined climax to a gratifying, triumphant week. Like many others in the audience, I knew their songs by heart; I danced (in place, sort of) and air-guitared like I did during my presentation; I sang along with lyrics like they were the pieces of hymns.
I’m back home now, with my feet on the ground, and my head more or less focused on the week ahead, the hours of listening that I’m privileged to practice. The Who have followed me and are playing this weekend at a festival in Golden Gate Park. A PBS radio commentator remarked that “Won’t Get Fooled Again” features the greatest scream in rock and roll history. It still gives him goosebumps, he said. Amen, I say.
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Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 