Howdy Strangers. How y’all been?

It’s been a while since I’ve provided an update. It’s not that nothing has been happening – actually quite a bit has been going on – but it has been a time of considerable cognitive confusion. I got a lot on my mind, and it’s extremely disorganized.

I don’t even know where to start.

On the medical front things are “stable”; which first responders will tell you is not really a condition. “Healthy” is a condition. “Critical” is a condition. “Normal” is a condition. Yet whenever we watch the news some talking head is always telling us that somebody is in “stable” condition. Such unrelenting dumbing-down perpetually annoys me. “Deceased” is a fairly stable condition (and a much more polite way of saying decomposing or if one is feeling exceptionally morose, rotting.)

Such is life in our post-truth world. We’re constantly being led – or misled – by language.

I’ve been pretty healthy. Coughing less. It’s been 18 months since we removed the trach. The doctor said if I made it two years that I would probably be out of the woods. So I am 75 percent of the way there. The wound continues to heal on a two steps forward one step back pace. They tell me I need to stay off my ass. But I like to go outside and sit in the sun. Maybe when winter comes and I stop going outside the wound will heal itself.

Things with the family are good. Suzie and her family are doing well. Clara is off to college. My dad recently had a run in with some bacteria but that appears to be under control. My brother and sister are each getting along doing their own things.

All in all, things are going pretty well.

So what’s the problem?

Really, there is no problem. I just got a lot on my mind.

Walk with me.

For those that don’t know, I never took a psychology class in college. I was in an engineering program. I had three semesters of calculus, then differential equations. A year of each biology and physics. A year of chemistry, then a semester of organic chemistry, systems physiology, statistics. Two semesters of accounting. Two semesters of economics. Zero foreign language. Zero history. Zero psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Zero fine art. If memory serves, there was an English Lit., English composition, and a political science. Everything else was in the engineering building.

As such, I never really spent any time thinking about how people think.

I certainly never spent any time thinking about how I think.

Law school didn’t help either. It’s essentially logic and mostly technical; a long series of if-then statements. It’s rules. Lots and lots of rules. The law actually has very little to do with people, after all, justice is blind. Very rarely does the law even care what someone is thinking, and even then we are instructed to infer thoughts based on actions. IF A pulled the trigger while pointing the gun at B, THEN A must have been thinking “I want to shoot B.” The law is really nothing more than computer programming with black robes. Truthfully, people are the weakest link of the justice system. We may be better off turning the whole thing over to AI. Which I suspect will happen in the future.

Anyways… Back to thinking.

In the first 40 years of my life I doubt I spent more than 30 minutes ever thinking about how people acquire and process thoughts or feelings. That isn’t to say I wasn’t educated (I was probably overeducated.) I had read hundreds of books, everything from St. Thomas Aquinas to Stephen King. I understood Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and was familiar with Pavlov’s dogs. And while I had studied various subjects, I always just took things as they came.

In line with being a good “student” I just took whatever words were on the paper and placed them in memory so they could be regurgitated at some later date on a test. And truthfully, I’m probably pretty “normal” in that regard.

In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell walks the reader through the psychological theory of “Default to Truth” and some of its historical implications. The concept is actually incredibly straightforward: human beings by their nature simply assume by default that whatever information they are given is the truth. Gladwell posits that if the opposite were true – that if no one trusted anyone – society would cease to function.

I’d say that’s a pretty fair assessment of how I’ve generally lived my life.

Storytime:

It was probably the summer of 1987 (maybe ’88), and I’m driving the family’s Dodge Caravan up Harlem Avenue. I’m alone, driving home from who knows where. Windows down. Radio up. I had just passed the Pacific Stereo and was stopped at the light at Foster when two guys in a white panel van pull up next to me. They were seriously overexcited, yelling and screaming about how they had just bought TWO very high-end Boston Acoustic speakers but the guy on the loading dock accidentally loaded FOUR of them into the van. Further, this was about to be my lucky day because they were going to sell me the extra set for half-price which I think was around $350. They even opened the sliding door so I could see the speakers sitting right there in the back of the van.

Now as fate would have it, I actually had just recently purchased some very nice three-way stereo speakers. They were not Boston Acoustic, but nevertheless, they would have to do. But seriously, who wouldn’t want a nice set of high-end Boston Acoustics for half-price?

When I got home my mom was in the kitchen preparing dinner. I was very matter of fact when I told her the story. She listened patiently, cutting up potatoes or something. At the conclusion of my story I believe I said something about how it was wrong for the two guys in the van to accept more than they paid for, and how the kid working the dock was probably about to get fired. My mom didn’t look up and her knife never stopped moving as she said,

“Jimmy, it was a scam.”

Now it probably should be recognized that the words, as uttered, were “Jimmy, it was a scam.” However, the tonal effects were unequivocal. What my mother really said was, “Jimmy, it was a scam you idiot.”

I think this is my earliest recognition of experiencing cognitive dissonance. It simply did not compute. I probably stood there, watching my mom cut up potatoes, for a full minute. Mouth agape. Eyes glazed over. Utterly speechless. Like someone had just hit the reset button. When my brain finally rebooted I believe I was told to make myself useful and set the table.

I haven’t thought about that story in at least 30 years. Wild.

Oddly enough, a very similar situation would play itself out a year or two later with some gold chains in front of the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s. Perhaps another time…

I guess I’ve always been the trusting sort. Without struggling I can think of another half-dozen (or maybe twice that) situations where I had taken the “default to truth” position – I had simply accepted the facts as presented – with varying degrees of misfortune.

This isn’t to say that I ever thought myself naïve. Quite to the contrary, I’ve always understood, at least as an adult, that people would lie to me. And despite actually having been an altar boy AND a Boy Scout, I’ve engaged in (more than) my own fair share of nefarious behavior.

No, I just never gave any thought to thinking.

Despite reading Kierkegaard and Kant, Yates, Sartre, and Thoreau – I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what other people were thinking – I’ve never spent any time thinking about my own thinking. Much like the famous scene with Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, I can write you couple paragraphs on Plato’s Republic. I can quote characters from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Citizen Kane. But just as surely as I cannot tell you “what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel,” I’ve spent nearly my whole life oblivious to my own thought process.

I can’t tell you exactly when – the genesis of something is often very hard to pinpoint – but I can provide a rough chronology of events which led me to thinking more and more about thinking. It started with:

• Reading Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
  This is a seriously wild book. This is the true story of how a misfit group of candle makers, bakers, and cobblers ended up murdering tens-of-thousands of Jews during WWII. It’s a real-life tale of how ordinary people can become brutal killers given the right group dynamics. (You probably think you have a solid moral compass. You’re probably wrong.)
• Then came Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Lawrence Gonzales and Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins. Deep Survival covers the stories of people who have survived airplane crashes, rock climbing incidents, losing their boat in the middle of the Atlantic, etc. There is a common theme among people who survived these events… incredible mental focus. Can’t Hurt Me is the life to date autobiography of Goggins, a Navy seal, ultramarathon runner, world record pull-up holder, and all around walking definition of mental toughness. (If you’ve ever been by the house you may have seen the “Goggins is a Pussy” hat which Bob got for me.)
• Around this time a few things in my life got a little wonky. In a long series of events, about which many books could be written, things fell apart. Mistakes were made. Jobs were lost. Businesses failed. Then, as fate would have it, after a nearly 10 year battle with multiple myeloma, in July 2017, my mom died.

I had a lot on my mind.

Everything has its limit (except stupidity which is infinite) and I hit my limit.

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
– – Yeats, The Second Coming

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It was right around this time that I started having these little “episodes” which, if you’ve ever seen The Soprano’s, turned out to be panic attacks.

Now at the time, in the beginning at least, there was a great deal of confusion about exactly what was going on. When you think about a “panic attack” you’re generally envisioning someone hyperventilating, nervous, agitated or at least anxious. Heart pounding. Lots of talking in between the heavy breathing. My “attacks” had none of those symptoms. That said…

I do remember this one time at my office. I’m getting up from my desk and as I walked around it toward the door, the door started getting further and further away. The room stretched out and became infinitely long and very thin. It was like something out of The Matrix. The ceiling, floor, and walls all bowed in. Vision narrowed; everything was going black except for what you might see if you were looking through a paper towel roll. All I could see was one tiny door way off in the distance. I actually started to fall, my knees gave out, I put my hands out to brace the fall and I remember thinking to myself “you are NOT going to pass out here!”

…

That’s where we’re going to have to leave it for right now.

I hope to have the next chapter complete next week.

As always, many thanks for all of the support.

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