To the dungeon with Friends

So when did it start?  I wrote yesterday about the importance of routine, of structure. And then the day I had planned for myself fell completely apart. I did something I rarely do…

Cleaned the house!

And I am horrified to state that I’ve barely begun. This despite devoting three hours to the task.

Today, I woke, did the trot, and came back home. With only an hour before my class at eleven, I decided not to write, but to read the newspaper. Had a good class—during which, incidentally, the office ghost (yes, I’m serious, there is one…) opened the door of the conference room we were using—came home and went to eat and write a post.

What did I do? Wasted an hour and a half talking to the owner and an acquaintance from years back.

Felt annoyed and ungrounded. I also remembered something that had troubled me about yesterday’s post.

It’s not either / or but and / both.

I had compared, yesterday, depression to diabetes, and suggested that urging Pablo to think positively was like urging a diabetic to lower his blood sugar.

And I believe that.

I also think that to leave one familiar but dangerous place and venture to another unknown but better place takes real work.

I know, because I did this, the computer tells me, in the last week of February.

Readers of Iguanas will know that I lost my mind in December after a bad experience with an antidepressant. In the last week of February, I willed myself to allow something / someone to replay, really, relive the experience. I consented to a couple weeks of emotional maelstrom, going from terror to hysteria to wild fits of laughter to elation; someone had their finger on the emotional fast forward button.

Was it an existential edge? A mystical experience? A spiritual journey?

I knew two things. I had to fight as hard as I could, and trust with utterly no reason to think I wasn’t willing myself into madness.

And I wrote like crazy.

This is what I wrote, on a Wednesday, the third day of that week. (By the way, I just thought—is that true? Did I remember correctly, that the 29^th of February was a Wednesday? Well, I just checked. Yes.) 

Even now, I find it chilling.

To the Dungeon with Friends

It took me perhaps thirty seconds to type the words above.

Why?

Because I am relearning everything.

It’s like being a stroke patient.

OK—here’s the process that you know so well, and I don’t.

First—assuming that you have opened the program Word (I didn’t, I did PowerPoint first) you must make a decision. Save As or not? Then you must move the cursor. Your finger must be on the touch pad. You must move it slowly to the top left of the screen, where there is….

Hey, let’s see what is that thing called? The Office Button? Whatever it is, I really hate it. It’s about as stupid as Peruvian furniture with all of those damn curlicues.

STOP!

“You got distracted. Return to your task. Where is your finger? What were you trying to do?”

“Save a document, Sir.”

“Then what do you need to do?”

So enters the first of the friends, Susan, who writes, “how are you doing?” This, for Susan, is an unusual phrase. Or perhaps not. The phrase of hers that most sticks in my mind is “you are observing fear like a cultural anthropologist. That’s a mystic.” Oh, and “Bach when I can’t think, Beethoven when I’m….”

Emotionally troubled? Confused? Can’t remember the exact word.

Also got distracted.

So it might have been Susan, who stuck her finger on the iPod today, and pressed the Bach violin partitas. I’m relearning my mind as well—I don’t know anything.

Well, to be digressive (and I certainly am these days, or have I just noticed it?) the lady who’s playing, Lucy Van Dael, well, may not be quite a lady. She takes those things on, grabs the sheets of music and throws them into her violin and then she roars. She’s a beast, and like a beast, can also be tender. Think licking her cub….

And she must have wanted out of her cage really bad, because even though she started decently with the first movement of the D minor partita, she growled and then attacked the chaconne.

So we’re off, it’s raining a bit, and I do my rain walk. I walk all the streets of the city, and if it rains, well, there’s usually a balcony.

Rain holds off, but that demon who has snatched Bach and put him in her paws is now flailing him in her mouth. Or rather, she’s extracting every last drop of blood and savoring it.

So am I.

And we’re three streets up, she and I, and I turn the corner, and that magical moment in the chaconne arrives.

Right—just as I turn the corner.

So who’s playing?

Well, we go on, if it’s we, and get to the next corner. I’ve passed Mona’s house, who’s moved but is still there, and I wonder about the music we played together and where that went and then I turn the corner—corner again, written through tears—and I stop and think…

‘God I miss it!”

Playing.

Most, the feeling after playing.

I’m in tears, and once again, by the sea.

I’m close to one fort whose door I have petitioned and moving to the second fort, whose door I have pounded.

Enter Margaret, whose words have resonated as much as Susan’s. “You fearlessly break down the barriers between reality and what we don’t see or refuse to see….” As well as “has it ever occurred to you that you are too hard on yourself?”

Well, I or the violinist am or are walking to the fort. And I’m remembering yesterday, with my students.

They are, of course, teaching me more than I they. And I had told them yesterday.

Particularly interesting because I had struggled to be mindful all day before leaving like mad (as in insane.) And then arrived to face the most challenging student of my 20-year career.

I charge the law firm 30 dollars an hour. For this student, the rate should be 300. But who should bill whom?

“You passed the test,” I say, as the class concluded. 

She had told me how to make blood sausage.

Also, she had told me what teaching is. Not that I didn’t know—I often say, “I don’t teach, I observe learning….”

Just had never done it.

And this girl is Harvard.

The next class—equally good, though much easier. Then, from the struggle of the learning or the teaching (don’t know which way I mean that) I went to plead exhaustion from my third student.

Who tells me that she’s busy—can’t take class.

I’m punchy, and I have the silliest conversation in the world, or my world at least. Actually, there are three of us, because the secretary is a yard away, giggling and smiling at the insaneness of it all. (I wrote inaneness, computer corrected to insaneness—you choose….)

“I do hope that secretary doesn’t know English,” I say, knowing that she does. And then, leaving….

“I don’t think I know your name…”

She tells me, and I tell her…

“I’ll forget, you know….”

She nods, and I leave and go to the bathroom.

The door slams and I think “SHIT! MINDFULNESS!!!”

And I am laughing hysterically. And then I remember the bathroom at Wal-Mart, where I, so depressed, had thought, ‘they’ll have come get me…’

That thought does not help.

Or does it? 

For I am laughing so hard that truly….

OK, breathe, concentrate, locate my hand, reach for the doorknob, open the door, feel the motion of air brush across hand, exit.

And BAM!

I’ve slammed the goddamn door again!

Well, go out the door that says Pull and which in fact I push (though I did get out) and I am laughing as hard as the Buddha who sits on my desk. Fortunately, just as silently.

Or loudly.

I don’t know.

Nobody looked funny at me….

‘So what is it about bathrooms, Marc,’ I think, as the lioness chews her Bach. At this point, I’ve gotten to the second fort. I decide, yeah—I’ll go there.

It had been the scene for which I replayed the scariest moment of my recent life.

Oh, and Margaret had that day pressed Brahms, Piano Concerto Number One.

“Porn music” I had thought, starting out that day.

“Another one of my fuckers” I had snarled, getting to Cristo Street.

“On the fucking way to Golgatha,” I had raged, walking the path to El Morro.

And I am being flailed.

By the wind—my worst fear is hurricanes.

By the music, which has become a chain.

It is a brutal SM scene, this trudge to the gate of the dungeon, and two people—slaves as well as I—are in front of me. I drop my sunglasses and am whipped, lashed. And I later will write…

“FUCKING A!  I’ll finally see blood!”

But that’s after the fact, because I am told to go, to approach, and…

…to follow the slaves ahead of me.

They cross the moat.

I cross the moat.

They touch the door.

I form a fist and pound on it.

Or not. Because the “I” is not there, it’s the HE.

“Fucker thinks he did it!”

Now a fucker as well as a slave.

“Turned the fucker around and walked him over the moat,” I write later.

And the slave is walked and then he whimpers, “how did I get through  it?”

BECAUSE I AWAYS PULL YOU BACK, FUCKER! I GOT YOU THROUGH IT! I CALLED RAF! I MADE YOU SIT AND WAIT!! I PULLED YOU OUT OF THE TRAFFIC!

“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

And we’re down by the gate to the city, and the slave is taken out of the Old City, and the second movement starts.

The slave thinks of Brahms, thinks he wrote it after his mother died. Slave thinks of Pergolesi, and the Stabat Mater.

“Yeah, yeah—fucking bitches.”

Says the Master.

Slave sees cats, a lady feeding them, goes back, gives her money. Sees a sign. Donaciones aceptadas.

“Fucker thinks he did it. Needs these fucking signs. Thinks they’re coincidences.”

Slave walks on. Thinks “HE could throw me in the sea, and I would die in water, not traffic.”

Answer:

“COULD!”

Slave is told to go home and write the experience.

He puts his fingers on the keyboard and accepts dictation.

And is ordered to send it to Taí.

As he has been ordered to write this.

And send it to you.

“Yes, Sir!”

That said, it was no surprise, this morning, as the Lioness strolled through the jungle of Bach, that I said …

“Yes, Sir!”

Had to do it because HE had told me, yesterday, right after trying to leave the law firm, that he was a teacher. And his classroom had been the grocery store, at which merry Puerto Ricans playing in the fields of the lord stroll leisurely to the altar, place their hosts and receive salvation. They leave, having been fed.

As did I—for the first time in 20 years.

Or ever?

“Passed the test, Fucker!”

“Yes, sir!”

He takes me home, orders me to lie next to his chair, and lights a cigar.

As he takes me to the door, this morning. The door he pounds.

“What will I do?” I think.

I caress it.

And see an egret, which is Franny, and start to cry.

“I put him through so much shit,” he’s crying.

Teachers / Masters cry too.

“I didn’t know. I just about killed the music in him. All those years when he struggled and fought and bit himself—no, not fair, I bit him oh FUCK!!! What have I done?”

He’s weeping as hard as I was laughing yesterday, and somehow he gets out the door too. He hears, “you were learning too.”

The Lioness?

No.

The egret?

That’s how I’m doing, Susan.

Salud mental

“I’m trying to think positively,” said Pablo, “They tell me I gotta think positive, so I’m trying.”

I had asked him how he was doing.

I can do that now. I’m back to normal, back to my schedule of waking, doing the trot, plunging myself in the ocean for five minutes, returning home, writing, cafeing (guess what just happened!) and doing a bit—a very little bit—of housework.

If that comes at the price of eating jellybeans at three in the morning, it’s well worth it. 

I can do it because I have a good shrink—a Harvard man!—and good supports. 

But what about Pablo?

He’s just a kid, maybe 21 or 22. And he’s a cashier at Supermax, the little grocery store in Old San Juan. For reasons that make perfect sense in Puerto Rico and nowhere else, I have become something like a therapist.

Well, not surprising. Happened at Walmart, too. Most of my classes—I confess this now—drifted into group therapy sessions. Motivational talks as well.

So Pablo told me, a couple weeks ago, that he’s depressed and having panic attacks.

‘Why,’ I thought, ‘he’s a kid, he’s good-looking, smart—what’s he got to be depressed about?’

Answer—how old were you, Marc, when you first got depressed?

Sixteen—I was going to kill myself in the gravel mine in Shorewood.

So I told Pablo—“you gotta get to a psychiatrist.”

He agreed wanly. And I knew.

He won’t go.

Could be that he doesn’t have insurance. Could also be that the insurance doesn’t pay for it.

My guess, though, is that he doesn’t go for the same reason I didn’t go.

He’s stuck.

Look, I worked for ten years as a psychiatric nurse, and could I diagnose myself? I had to have a brother screaming in my face before I got help.

And how am I now?

Happier than I’ve ever been.

A lot of that is medicine. I ran out of the drug I was trying to taper off recently, and went ONE night without it. By four the next day, I had started having leg cramps, just as I did when I was trying to stop taking the drug. And no—I wasn’t imagining it. I looked at my calf, and could see the muscle constricting.

Well, I knew what to do. I went to the pharmacy, got the prescription refilled, took the pill immediately after leaving the pharmacy (bought water just to be able to take it sooner…) and waited. Forty-five minutes later, I was fine.

A lot of it is routine. A rainy day comes, and I don’t do my trot? I feel it. I write in the mornings and promote Iguanas in the afternoon. I have a to-do list that is longer than I could possibly do.

A lot of it is support. Between 5:45 and 6:00 every afternoon, the gate below will click, I’ll hear the lock snap, and Raf’s footsteps climbing up the stairs. He does not go to the glen to mix with men—an old phrase from somewhere.

Nor do I.

Now then, let’s run back to Pablo.

Is it logical to tell a depressed guy to think positively? Would we tell a diabetic to concentrate on lowering his blood sugar? By definition, isn’t thinking positively exactly what Pablo can’t do? Aren’t we setting him up to fail?

And what’s the message here? ‘Oh, you just need to straighten up and get out and chase those nasty thoughts out of your head!’ Depression as a form of badthink. (Darling computer, badthink was a term invented by Orwell—so stop with the red squiggly, hunh?)

I didn’t tell any of this to Pablo, though maybe I should have. I did ask if he was exercising, and told him my own regimen. 

“I could do that,” he said, “I live five minutes from the beach….”

That, I thought, was the classic example of the depressed mindset.

You are five minutes from a beach.

A beach you cannot get to.

Not working….

It’s a day when everything—including this blogger—is not working.

Well, I have those days. Yesterday, when I should have been resting, I industriously compiled the largest post I’ve ever written. Today, I am fretting.

It’s the damn iPod. Why is it that I absolutely crave every Apple product, and then instantly hate them the moment I start to use them? Do I have a secret aluminum fetish?

OK—news of the day. The iPod (curious—computer seems to know that word….) that put—or conversely shuffled—music into my ear, has died. And curiously, the death took the form of refusing to display anything except that annoying little apple with the bite taken out of it. It was the techie equivalent of the children’s “nyah nhay NA nyah nyah.”

(Incidentally, and just to fill up space, did you know that that sequence of sounds exists in ALL cultures? And that kids use it the same way? Just one of those facts that fill my brain, shoving out where the house keys are….)

Well, I took the iPod to Radio Shack and they said they might—a shake of the head here—be able to fix it. So now I have a new iPod—not the Touch but the Classic. The new Touch, it seems, has gotten all fancy: camera, video cam, email, I don’t know whatnot. The Classic, I’m happy to report, has but four buttons, three of which I will probably never use. I did check, there appears to be no nemesis—the dreaded shuffle button.

Unless, of course, it’s hidden somewhere on the elegant aluminum sheath, and I activate it….

Right, so spending 250 bucks made me hungry, and I go to the café where a completely annoying woman is screaming into her iPad. She’s on Skype, or rather she’s dragging us all onto Skype—her Skype.

OK—and am I being paranoid in thinking she was using up all the Internet? Because for some reason the connection was terrible. She was closer to the modem, if that makes any difference. (If I’m right, please tell me. Otherwise, no….)

Well, my new iPod has now come to life. Because I have iTunes already installed, it’s synched its way through my library—those 2500 “songs” that are motets, arias, cantatas. It has greeted me cordially by saying “Welcome.”

So what am I supposed to do? Say “Welcome” back?

The manual, I think, which was artfully or zenfully hidden in the bowels of the box, beneath the iPod and above the little gadgets—ear buds, cable, dock.

The little manual, of course, doesn’t deign to do words. Just little pictures. I study these for a bit. The USB cable has to go into the USB port.

Thanks, Apple!

Oh, and don’t submerge the device in water….

Guys!

Well, I press the round button in the center of the dial. And Welcome goes away! Now what we have is a little list on the left side of the display. The first item says “cover flow.” Right, so what happens if I click it? I do, and discover the covers of every album I own doing the stupid Robert Burns (or whoever—Ms. Taí will know) effect that Apple loves so much. (Speaking of which, shouldn’t it be aPple?)

Guess what! I now have Beethoven’s Ninth symphony playing!

I know why—it’s the first “song” on the iTunes library. Why?  Because iTunes has decided to organize itself by artist. The mezzo in the last movement is Agnes Baltsa.

Agnes—A—get it?

I was always perfectly happy to scroll by Baltsa in the past, but now there’s a problem. I cannot scroll. I put my finger on the display—no luck. I press the down button, but that’s “play / pause.” There is absolutely no way I can get my way down the list to “playlist.”

Oh, and guess what!

There IS a shuffle button!

Worse, Apple has again hidden the volume button. On the Touch, it was on the side of the chassis. On the Classic? Who knows….

Hey, guess what! The stupid little black wheel turns out to be a dial! I just started whirling my albums all around—Now I’m hearing Zelenka!

It’s so typical Mac—I’m right back in high school and EVERYBODY knows where to get dope except me. I’m buying it off the undercover cop….

Well, I know what I have to do. They’re expecting me, the boys at Radio Shack. They probably have a pool going on how long it will take me to come back in the door, swearing under my breath, and ranting that their stupid product is defective. They’ll sigh, customers will look on in interest or disdain. It will develop that the volume button has been there all along, or that merely flipping my wrist in just such a way will roar the machine to epic volumes. I’ll learn all of this and forget half of it and have to go back and the boys will explain it all over again.

Of course, I will swear never to buy another stupid aPple product again.

Until the next sleek little device comes out….

P.S.—Jimmy, whom I know better than my own brothers, has just shown me the little dial thing. And when you have achieved the herculean task of actually making the thing play what you want it to play, then all you have to do is swing the little unlabeled dial again, and that becomes the dial volume.

Wouldn’t tell me where to get the dope, though….

Schubert revisited

Well, I’ve heard of impaired doctors, impaired drivers, but impaired bloggers?

Which is to say you might read this post with the Morton saltbox near to hand. 

I’m loopy.

Legally loopy, I’m happy to say. Nope, not writing from Amsterdam—I’m here at my familiar desk, with the wearingly constant sound truck of the guagüita de los dulces iterating mechanically its jingle for the gazillionth time.

I spent the morning doing the second part of the dental implant surgery. And any snippy thoughts I ever had about Michael Jackson’s craving for IV hypnotics I now retract, and with shame.

The stuff is wonderful.

It’s a bit like the old television sets that slowly, in the space of just ten seconds, go from whatever inanity you’ve grown tired of to just a small white dot in the center of the screen. And then….

…nothing.

Well, who wouldn’t crave the stuff?

Right. So, I lurched home in a taxi, stood wonderingly about in CVS until a white lab-coated lady put bottles of pills in my hands, and told me to go home. I dimly realized that home was up, so I started, well—up.

Did recognize the corner jewelry store, and took a chance on a left….

Worked.

Well, an old nurse knows what to with pills in bottles, and soon I was medicated and in bed. Of course I took the Percoset—hey, anything guys pay good money for up at the punto has gotta be good, right? And is it sane to wait for the pain to arrive? Would you stand around watching until the A-bomb mushrooms, just to see how bad the radiation was?

Right—so that was the plan. Spend the afternoon in bed. Justifiable—surgery is surgery. I have a friend who spends one entire SUNDAY each month in bed, and ardently—defensively?—defends the practice.

Made it to 1:30….

Right, so what to do. I cannot do Sudoku until Raf climbs the hallway stairs in five hours. The house is a mess, but any slight mismovement (dammit, computer, I’ve just been through SURGERY—gimme a break!) of my hands might imperil the achingly tender sutures in my mouth. (And I challenge any Impudent Reader to dispute THAT!)

So I set myself to consider Raf. It was he, you remember, who diagnosed the disjointed mishmash (hah! got away with that, so what’s the deal with mismovement?) I had produced in Iguanas as a blook. Then I went on to ponder Jaime, who had pointed out that reading on an iPad becomes a different experience. Sure, there had always been illustration in books, but in a blook, there can be music.

And there is. Handel, twice; Samuel Barber; some other stuff, I think.

Well, I’m sure somebody has gotten in before me, pitched his stake, done it better. I come late to most things.

Then I got to worry about Toney, a young nephew who adopted us several years ago on the strength of Raf’s bacalao. We raised him gently, delicately, we did—the anxious gay uncles, and then sent this quite beautiful youth out to combat the wicked world. We watched, our hands clutching lace handkerchiefs pressed to our swollen eyes, as the taxi took him away.

Feeling the need for home, or perhaps just hungry, he appeared two weeks ago. We put the codfish in the water.

And set him to work. Look, I need reviews for Iguanas. No reviews, no listing in Amazon, no visibility, whaddya got? A book that goes down—hello cliché!—like that preacher’s daughter into the electronic graveyard of cache.

So we put him to read Iguanas. OK—review for bacalao. Questionably ethically—but hungry men sink low.

Right, so he liked it. And made insightful comments. And decided I really should crank out a novel. And told me what the theme would be, and provided as well the name of the main character.

What didn’t he do?

Toney, honey?

bacalao = review.

I don’t know a thing about fiction. I don’t know a thing—I think—about writing. 

Well, I feel bad about that. Anybody who has a Facebook page called “Marc Newhouse—writer” (I nixed the word “author”—after all, writing describes a discrete, simple task—author felt like a stretch, somehow….) should really try to figure what he’s doing.

The problem? Writers writing about writing write wrong. (Sorry, just sort of feel into that…onomatopoeia? Alliteration? Hyperbole? ¿Bíjte?)

It’s a form of sadism. “Don’t come whining to me,” snarls Toni Morrison. She teaches full time and writes in the summer and fall, and only Trollope beats her for fecundity.

Oh, except for Joyce Carol Oates, often described as “the word machine”, who has written over 100 books for the world to nibble upon. “If I waited for inspiration, I wouldn’t be much of a writer!” she growls.

Why do I feel that dumping 100 plus books onto the world’s bookshelves is at least grandiose if not frankly—blatantly —narcissistic?

Well, to a brain swimming in narcotics, all this hectoring, this thrashing of the pedagogical riding crop seemed to much for me. Easier just to go to the damn computer and write.

And then I realized!  

I had screwed around with creative writing! Back in the days when I was just crawling out of the pantoja or morass of depression and agititation (oh anybody can see that that’s agitation / irritation! Really!) of job and Franny loss. Reaching into the very farthest galaxies of my imagination, it was about a agonized, near catatonic, sardonic guy into classical music confronting a nincompoop psychiatrist.

I justify this as following the old line—write what you know!

But it was—following Jaime’s insight—an interesting experiment. Was it any good? Did it work?

Be gentle, Good Reader. I wasn’t at my best….

(PS—my own psychiatrist, whose single diploma in his office is from Harvard, is excellent and insightful. His predecessor, who put me on massive Klonopin and disappeared—enjoying those festive navidades we do so well? Sin comentario….)

Session Two

The patient appeared less hostile on the second visit—no doubt the therapeutic effects of the Haldol were starting. I tried to put him at ease.

“And how are we feeling today?”

“We don’t know, do we? How could we? I barely know what I am feeling, and cannot, of course, speak for you. How are you?”

“ Is your preoccupation with Schubert, the…err….Viennese composer continuing?”

“I’m hardly preoccupied,” he said. “Deeply interested, of course. Well, who wouldn’t be? Everybody should be interested in Schubert.”

“I don’t know the composer,” I said. “Perhaps you could fill me in?”

“Certainly I could fill you in. Would you like the Wikipedia version or my version? Or perhaps,” this said with a sneer, “for a doctor who is only schooled, the Wikipedia version might be the only one possible….”

I had forgotten his dislike of the word perhaps. 

“A bit of hostility still remains,” I said, deciding to confront him at last.

“I am not hostile. I admit to acerbic. Rebarbative as well. Prickly, should the previous words be too advanced for a Harvard graduate. But hardly hostile.”

I let this pass….

“Schubert?” I say.   

“Ah, Schubert,” he says, his face relaxing. “Viennese, as we know. His father, a school teacher. The mother, the daughter of a locksmith. Dates: 1797 to 1828, he died at age 31—having two years less than Mozart. Cause of death: typhoid fever, though he was also afflicted with syphilis. A terrible businessman, who barely got anything published, and that on unfavorable terms—unfavorable for him, not his publisher. Known perhaps best for his lieder—art songs, in German. Prolific—600 plus songs, nine symphonies, 15 quartets, a string quintet that is assuredly one of the greatest chamber works in the whole canon of Western music. Six masses, and 21 piano sonatas. He dies in virtual obscurity, broke, but surrounded by friends who deeply admired him. Oh, and just incidentally, he composes the two greatest song cycles in the world. That enough?”

“It seems a bit manic,” I venture.

“Your word, doctor. Mine would be possessed, a genius that may never come again….”

“Thank you,” I said. “So now I know Schubert.”

He jumps to his feet. 

“You know NOTHING about Schubert!” he roars. “I’ve been giving you the briefest sketch of his life. People spend their LIVES trying to understand Schubert, and there are mysteries that will, I believe, ever remain locked. What have you ever heard of Schubert’s music, my good philistine doctor?”

“Not much,” I say. “Didn’t he write the Unfinished Symphony?”

“Of course,” says X. “Dismissed by some, beloved by the masses. I personally like it….” 

Ahh—perhaps the basis for a clinical bond!

“So perhaps we could have your version of Schubert?”

“Mine is of little interest,” he responds. “My good doctor, have you no curiosity? Wouldn’t you like, for once in your life, to enter into a masterpiece? To experience something that is greater, truer than anything you or I will ever do? I could play you one song—ONE song—that had he written nothing else would have established him as one of the greatest composers of all time.”

“I’d like to hear it,” I say, though really, I don’t much like classical music.

“Nothing easier,” says X, and pulls his iPhone from his pocket. He fiddles with it, and then shows me the following clip from YouTube. We listen, and blessedly, it’s short.

“So,” says X. “You now have been initiated. You have heard one of over a thousand compositions of Schubert. Your impression, please?”

“Well,” I say, “speaking clinically, it sounds deeply sad. Depressive, I would say.”

“You know, doctor, I am far less interested in your clinical impressions than in your reaction as a man, a person. But I am perhaps being unfair. No one can grasp the song without knowing the lyrics. Let’s listen again, this time with the lyrics, German and English.”

He hands me the liner notes.

Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder; Nieder wallen auch die Träume Wie dein Mondlicht durch die Räume, Durch der Menschen stille Brust. Die belauschen sie mit Lust; Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht: Kehre wieder, heil’ge Nacht! Holde Träume, kehret wieder!

“And now,” he says, let’s turn to another singer, with the lyrics in English. Much slower, and a bit more operatic. Well, it would be—Fleming, of course. But here, she does a fine job
.

We listen again. And I am still more mystified. 

“The title of the song, by the way, is Nacht und Traume—Night and Dreams. Tell me, my good psychiatrist, isn’t that rather up your alley? You do do stuff with dreams, don’t you?”

“I’m feeling a little out of my league,” I say.

“I’m delighted to know that,” says X. “It’s a poem that is seemingly simple, and yet Schubert brings out the most amazing depths in it…. Consider it just as a poem.”

Holy night, you sink down; Dreams, too, drift down Like your moonlight through space, Through the quiet hearts of men; They listen with delight Calling out when day awakens: Return, holy night! Fair dreams, return!

“Really, not much to it. But I listen to it often, on those many nights when Holy night does not  drift down. I suffer insomnia, you see….”

“Ahh,”  I say, “a sedative may be called for. Something more than the Dalmane. But tell me, what does this song, this poem, mean to you?”

Again, as he had in the first session, X dissolves in tears.

“Dreams,” he says, weeping. “Have you never had dreams? And had them die? And wish, more than anything else for their return? This is Schubert, in his moment of darkest sorrow—lost and yearning—imploring God to return him to his path, and restore his dreams. And filled with despair, he manages to suggest the possibility of hope, of redemption. A feeling I, frankly, do not share”

Clinical note: Will add halcyon 2 mg. for sleep.

Chain letter from an Unchained man

You’re gonna hate me for saying this but…

…went to the beach this morning!

Oh, and also got up at 8AM.

And I know where you are, my friends who are lost and still in my heart. You’re in a cold grey box, sitting looking at the dirty blue-clothed wall that separates your little workday world from your co-workers.

A storm passed by the island this weekend. Did the customers go nuts? Did fights erupt in the store? Old ladies attack each other with their canes over cans of salchichas?

You know, I don’t know. And really, I care only vaguely.

I’ve been freed, you see.

And I return bearing a message.

There is another reality, another world. And all will be well. 

I know you’re dreading it. I know because I did it, both the dread and the subsequent reality. There’s something about hearing that your job position has been eliminated that fucks up the day….

Ever see a bird fly hard into a glass window?

From the other side comes this advice: write the email to all your friends and family immediately. That’s all you have to do—for the rest of the day.

Oh, and go buy a good bottle of champagne. You’re starting a new life.

You’ll have the weekend to figure out what to do on Monday morning. Here’s what you won’t do.

Flop onto the couch and turn on the TV.

Ditto the Internet.

I went to the beach, that Monday morning when Raf left the house and there were ten hours to fill with…

…what?

Well, that was the question, wasn’t it?

That’s when I learned how scary it was, to lose the chain. Yes, it keeps you from moving on. It also grounds you.

So don’t be scared—my message to you whom I saw so many Monday mornings, and then one Monday morning didn’t.

It will all be OK.

I’ve done it, you can too.

Don’t worry about it, as I did. When the people from the Home Office came, put me in a little room, and asked nicely, “Now, what is it exactly that you do?”

That I found disconcerting.

The email—how many students had I “given service” to?

Besides a little suggestive—given service indeed!—it seemed more like writing on the wall than email.

Look at these videos instead. Laugh! Relax! The day will come and they will free you!

And since it’s Monday morning, send this link to absolutely everyone you know!

Well, well—I promised you a chain letter, way up there in the title. So here goes:

BEWARE!

DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN!!!!

You have until 11:59 PM today to send this link to EVERYONE!

Mary Elizabeth Scornfeld, age 23, laughed at this email and deleted it! At precisely 12:01 the next morning, she rolled out of bed and fractured her spine on a bowling ball she had stupidly left by the side of her bed. She remains at Dwindling Days Health Care Center in a permanent vegetative state. (Or maybe it’s Fading Light Nursing Home—anyway, she had it coming!)

Her sister, as well, received and deleted this email. Two weeks later, she took off for Venice, and was eating pasta at an outdoor café. Busy flirting with a hunky Italian guy, she didn’t notice the pigeon who flew overhead, and did what pigeons do. Well, I don’t need to tell you where it landed! She died an agonizing death and good for her! Serves her right.

Still not convinced?

How about rehab nurse May Ellen Shnittke, engaged in a little late-night lechery with her 300-pound paraplegic patient, whom she had gently placed on top of her! Well, he was doing what men do, when all of a sudden he stopped.

Dropped dead!

Then she realized—she was trapped!

And that’s what scared HER to death!

I could write more—but you got a task or two to do.

1.     Watch the videos

2.     Laugh

3.     Send the link to EVERYONE you know

And…

DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN!

I'm Gay

Words I said to Johnny yesterday afternoon.

Barely missing a beat, he replied, “thank you for that information.”

Lawyerly reticence—do they teach it in law school, or does it just develop over the years?

“Well, do you have an issue with it?”

I had to know.

“Nope,” he said, completely casually, “other stuff about you, I have an issue. Being gay is no problem.”

Well, two can be reticent just as well as one.

I don’t go there….

Besides, I know perfectly well what he was thinking. My sartorial sense—or maybe no sense or nonsense. Don’t know.

And don’t care. You got an old horse blanket in the barn? Send it along, I’ll wear it to the next gala at the Met.

John? He combs his hair before going to sleep….

Well, it had been a melancholy morning, there on the beach with Franny and Dido. Mental health dictated a tuna sandwich at the café. And that’s where I heard that it was National Coming Out Day.

Right. Wanted some coffee, so I asked Gayla if it really was Coming Out Day.

“Yeah,” she said.

“OK,” I said, “I’m gay.”

“So am I,” she said.

A fact about as obvious as her skin color….

“Right,” I said.

Five hours later.

“Shoot, we forgot that it’s National Coming Out Day,” says Raf at the computer. And then plays a clip—a guy talking about how we have to come out to everyone.

“Our parents,” he says

Check!

“Our children….”

N/A.

“Our bosses…”

Came out to Susan Chambers, the Executive Vice President for Human Resources at  Wal-Mart Inc….

I don’t have to go on, do I?

I passed the test. Which is why, yesterday, I realized there’s pretty much nobody in my life, however marginal, to whom I could come out.

Yes, even the cashier at the supermarket.

Once, Webster came to visit us. He’s gay, he’s a wonderful viola de gambist (making that up, but you’ll tell me if I’m wrong, right?), and likes bacalao. So there we were, and the cashier who has never been anything but sunny and cheerful is completely flat.

“I’m totally worried about Inés,” I say to Raf. “She just wasn’t the same in the grocery store today….”

What was wrong?

I realized the next day. Raf and Webster and I were walking past the grocery store, and I glanced in to see Inés at the register. Then it hit.

“Come in to the store, I gotta see something.”

“We don’t need anything…”

“Not the point.”

Reach for a package of gum, stand in line, and tell Raf to introduce Webster to Inés.

“Ay mi’jo, ¡mucho gusto!” she beams, and gives him a kiss!

Moral—don’t bring your tricks into the grocery store! This is a respectable establishment.

That might be the real point of coming out. It’s not just that staying in the closet leads to a double life, shame, a message you don’t want to give yourself. Coming out puts you on the social and emotional map. It grounds you, places obligations on you—even in a place as trivial as a grocery store.

By the way, today is International Coming Out Day. So for the 27 people from the UK, 14 from Russia, 9 from Trinidad and Tobago (think I know who those are!), 6 from Germany, 4 from Canada, 4 from France, 3 from Gabon (gonna have to look that up—sorry), and 2 from Bangladesh who have visited the blog this week….

…I’m gay.

By the way, I had figured that, with no one left to come out to, I might just as well start the thing over again….. 

Two singers on the beach

Who knows what brought it on? 

My mood was perfectly good when I left on the morning trot. Was it the music?

Well, English folksong can be a bit melancholic. And there is something otherworldly about the singer, Alfred Deller.

Deller was born in 1912, sang as a boy soprano, and never got around to changing. Yes, his voice broke, and he no longer could naturally sing soprano. But he had a beautiful falsetto, and there was the tradition of countertenors singing in the cathedral choirs.

But Deller went on to champion early music on authentic instruments, as well as what WikiPedia calls “historically informed performance.” Michael Tippett hears him, Benjamin Britten creates the part of Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Well, it’s a haunting voice, as you can hear. But maybe it wasn’t the music, or even the voice.

The weather?

Yes, it started to rain quite hard, but I found shelter next to an abandoned tennis court near the beach. And yeah, I like rain.

Well, the English folksong disc petered out, so I turned to “An Evening with Jessye Norman.” I’m putting all of my CD’s that I never listened to when I worked at Wal-Mart into iTunes. So I’m hearing things I haven’t heard in decades.

OK, first track—Dido’s Lament.

That might be when it hit.

Remember me, but forget my fate. Six words, but oh, how Purcell milks them. And Jessye Norman isn’t afraid to step up and face an emotion or two. So there I was, thinking why on earth was I giving all of my time and energy, those last years of my mother’s life, to Wal-Mart?

Yeah, I would take 15 minutes or so twice a day to call her, yeah I made the trips every three months, yeah I told her she could live with us and she said no. 

So what was she doing, those last terrible years?

More often than not, I fear, sitting in her chair by her stove.

Alone.

Why didn’t I move to Wisconsin to be with her, I thought. What the hell was I doing those mornings on the bus, walking into work at 6:30, leaving at 5?

Ever hear of Raf, she replies. She talks to me, sometimes.

And now I’m crying and in the water and I’m saying ‘I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry’ and she says don’t be. I had to have that time to be ready to do what I did. That’s what let me stop eating and drinking. Now be quiet. You were a wonderful son and remember what I said yesterday?

Yeah, it’s a triumph. That’s what you said after the recital with Gunnar, and that’s what you said yesterday about Iguanas.

Yes, a triumph.

And what have I told you today?

Remember me but forget my fate.

Yes.

Will this mourning ever stop, I ask her. You didn’t go through this with your mother, did you.

I wasn’t as close to her as you were to me. And it’s much better now than two years ago. You know that, of course.

Of course.

Now stop it. Enough. What did I sing to you?

Remember me, but forget my fate.

And I plunge into the ocean…

…and then float.