Magic

Things become round in our home this time of year.  Basketball shapes our schedules.  However, we don't have access to all the local games, sometimes turning to the radio or, as we did last week, finding compelling, related viewing.

Earvin "Magic" Johnson has been in Los Angeles news frequently as a member of (and public face for) the consortium that purchased the Dodgers.  He is also among the group of sports figures commenting on Lakers' (and other) games for ESPN, recently stirring controversy over remarks about coach Mike Brown.  I was not a basketball fan during his championship years, so really only know him from his role as businessman and larger-than-life ex-NBA pro.  My perception was shifted by a documentary called  The Announcement produced by ESPN Films.



Election years heighten my sense of spoken words as hollow and misleading, thought that can be said for non-election years, too.  To see as prominent and idolized a sports figure as Magic Johnson step up and tell the press and the public, extemporaneously, about being diagnosed as HIV-positive with no shirking or tap dancing, though it took place 21 years ago,  seemed to be taking place in an alternate reality.

I will leave you to your own viewing of the film, to your own opinions about the events following The Announcement.  The world of professional sports is filled with cautionary tales and tales of courage.  Sometimes the two intersect.

"The only way out is through"

Some years ago I explained to a therapist that I was Sisyphus AND I was the rock.  Instead of being the conversational cherry bomb that knocked some debris out the way, it sat there, unexplored.  One of the remembered and forgotten moments when I was sure I was talking in tongues.

Awareness is the telemarketer who keeps dialing your number until you answer.  Assuming, as with the Sisyphus/rock realization, that we are always all the performers, props, scripts and directors in our own dramas, I suppose I ought to take heart that any portion of my self is paying attention.  It wishes to be heard and it is relentlessly patient.

Knowing, then admitting, that each aspect of my struggle, as well as longed-for redemption, is my responsibility is wearying.  I would rather be writing about something color-drenched or lilting but fancy footwork takes energy I don't have.   My wiser self, once soft-spoken and hesitant, or so I imagine, has become insistent.  I see it watching the clock, urging me to a quicker response than I would come to on my own.  It has at its disposal the pointy stick of, oh, physical discomfort, insomnia, anxiety, the sense of everything being off.

More than 25 years ago, having arrived at the amends portion of a 12-step program, I stepped out of my car at a farmer's market one Saturday to see the person whose name was at the top of my list.  I tried to turn around, muttering, "you can't mean me, you can't mean now."  Turning back was not an option.  Now it seems, and perhaps I should say at last, putting right the wrongs against myself is not a choice, unless I am willing to let the increasingly intolerable symptoms of torpor dismantle and maim me.

As to the next step, the next, often-described, indicated thing, I am uncertain.  To write this may be a preamble to larger heroic acts. I don't feel heroic today; I barely feel present.  Such a capacity for generating interior fog will likely not make any list of personality strengths.  I do, though, believe a crisis comes when we are equal to the challenge, however inadequate we feel.  Time to answer the phone.

Old Dragons

Edward Gorey illustration.  He always gets it right.

No matter how much shaking, avoiding, ignoring, denying, explaining and ritual we do, our histories cling like rain-soaked summer clothes.  History assumes forms that bedevil us without cease. The eggs hatched just as we drew first breaths and their reptile-kin spawn have acted, always, as the rip currents that pull us into the deep water, just when all looked calm. That many of us haven't drowned is the miracle.  At my advanced age, I can think "I'm too old for this shit" as often as I want and it makes no difference.  Until I fill the basement with concrete and pile their 60-odd years' accumulation of foul-smelling stuff on the lawn, they will not leave.  I think of them as The Old Dragons.

Though by now they are as creaky and shrunken as I, they have going for them (a) numbers.  I am but one.  (b) the sharp elbow of bad manners which they use to intrude on tranquil moments.  (c) malice and dishonesty.  I think the writer of GAME OF THRONES patterned his endless parade of manipulators on some well-known-to-him Old Dragons.  (d) what they claim to be evidence of shortcomings and crimes that could not even called misdemeanors, when viewed through their magnifying projectors, seem heinous and unforgivable.  (e) stubbornness which I have come to believe rises from their fear of eviction.  And I swear by the ancient gods, they will be gone.

During my clearest moments, I know each of us, each human, is, like me, a wooden-framed screen door with an inexpertly patched worn spot that always works loose and lets the flies in.  No matter how much professional help (and I mean good professional help) we've paid for, shown up for and cried through, any dangerous residue of self-doubt, even a drop, provides the needed false bravado that is the dragons' trademark.  They grow, in their wee reptilian minds and eventually in ours, strong, unbearably loud and, because they wear us down so, apparently right.

One of the great mysteries is they way in which we can be pursuing a favorite distancing activity, like sleeping when it is not bedtime, and know as sharply as if we'd put a fork in the socket that something is very wrong and this is not the life we want, nor were intended, to live.  And then emerges the next horrifying question: how do I fix it?  This is where I come up short, for I am edging forward with the greatest care, taking the tiniest steps, and mostly acting on the strength of certain beliefs:

     It is never too late.
     Nothing this big can be fixed in a day.  Nor should it be.  This, too, is a process.
     Feeling terrified and small is normal.
     The dragons have always lied.
     The people who traded your silver baby cup and savings bonds for the dragon eggs lied.  It wasn't personal, it was how they got by.
     We continue to know in increments of ascending clarity.
     I am still here and grateful about 99% of the time.

The old dragons speak the language of why, at some alarmingly advanced ages, we discover that we have been keeping ourselves from what we love most for years, decades.  We have allowed the lies to stand between what felt like dreams without hope and our truest hearts.  Too-fresh beliefs about being undeserving, insufficient, incapable may finally be toted away in mildew-stained carpet bags bearing the dragons' former address.  Even dispossessed, they will try not to go far, not out of hissing distance.  Eviction may not be enough.  I trust directions must still exist for ways to slay an old dragon.

Gram Parsons, who has nothing to do with the vigilance vs. paying attention debate

(If, with my sketchy memory, I posted Gram Parsons' Return of the Grievous Angel (with Emmylou Harris) a few years ago and don't remember, consider this an encore.  Now I try to have labels for each post.  Who has the patience to look through so many when there are songs to be played?)


A separate topic:

Introduced by Jayne in her comment on the recent "Worry" post, we will look at vigilance, which I have come to believe is not the same as paying attention.  Not the same at all.

Vigilance, or hyper-vigilance, depending on how deep one's wariness runs, is usually a vital coping mechanism, resulting from too many real monsters in too many closets over too many years.  It is an exhausting, unproductive, full-time volunteer job that one can never do well enough to keep the cockroachs from crawling all over the chocolate cream pie.  Paying attention is just what it claims to be: an alert noticing of the world within and without and responding appropriately to its cues.

Jayne mentioned calling her lawyer, severing all ties with vigilance in a legally-binding way.  I like the vision of marshals serving papers on a shirtless, barefoot vigilance at 3:30 some morning.  As my son would say, "ooooh, snap."

This is a first installment of this exploration.  Having devoted what I might once have described as my good years to hyper-vigilance, I know its investigation is not an off-the-top-of-my-head activity.  I wanted to open the door for my own thoughts to wander through and invite others who, like Jayne, have grown weary of watching the horizon for ghost ships.

Quick! We need some music

Worry

My son uses an expression, "vortex of suckage."  I appreciate how emphatically it sidesteps ambivalence.  Worry has to own major real estate in that vortex.  It is possibly the poorest use of human resources.  I know it is the worst use of mine.

Cat versions of Guatemalan worry dolls.

Worry is a state of mind that almost proves demonic possession.  What, on an ordinary day full of promise and possibility, can cause a semi-normal senior citizen to make the mental leap into an unknowable future and start gnawing on bad outcomes as though there was nourishment to be found there?  Monkey mind.  Reptilian brain.  Like Odysseus, it becomes necessary to lash one's self to the mast of this very moment so as not to stray into places where trouble awaits.  Worry's call is that convincing, insistent and, perhaps to some, seductive.

Over time I have become more skilled at eluding its grasp.  I am much less inclined to put energy into frightening myself than I once was; the only payoff is anxiety which becomes sleeplessness, palpitations, dread, discouragement, defeat.  The wearing of tin foil hats makes a lot of sense, if it stops even one negative thought from forming.

Worry has not swallowed me whole, yet, today and likely will not.   But, quoting Princess Leia, it's "...foul stench" is enough to set off the alarms.  It is a task to combine vigilance with the ideal lazy, punting-on-the Thames existence.  The trick is always to know just where you are - and where you are not.  If whatever you hear shrieking that its hair is on fire is not actually in the room, it is worry.  Let it go.  I will try to do the same.

Willin

When music floats in over the mind/transom, who am I to question it?  Lowell George.



Still times persist.  But words are pulling themselves together and taking unruly shape.  Always, the next indicated thing. xo