THE FROG HANDLED MUG: Chapter Nine

I’m back in New York and the routine of my life. It’s 2010 and the Health Care bill is ready for a final vote. Too bad about Kennedy’s seat in the Senate. Interesting imagery there. Polarization is not conducive to either cooperation or compromise. Sarah Hastings is coming to visit this weekend. We were intimate over the holiday and I must say that she has completely changed my stereotyped impression of her profession, if I can call it that. She should be counseling my patients, if they could only understand what she was talking about. I have to redefine a few terms. Funny how redefining a word changes things. For instance, she considers facts to be beliefs held as truths. To Sarah everything is belief driven. Mr. Rational has entered a brave new world.

I haven’t smoked weed since my college days. I wasn’t a pot head because I felt the stuff dummied me down. I couldn’t follow my own thoughts and often lost the beginning of a thought as I approached the end of it. It was funny then, both to me and my buddies. They experienced the same lost threads. Things that were hilarious when I was stoned were stupid when I was straight. I thought Easy Rider was the best movie ever made. A year ago I watched it again with James after hyping it to him for years. It barely seemed the same movie that I remembered from the 1960’s. It was inane. James agreed. We were straight when we watched it. At least I was. The sound track is still the best ever.

I have a friend who works as a corrections officer. He’s getting long in the tooth and trades his Viagra for weed with a thirty year old co-worker. Go figure. He did me a favor and gave me a couple buds. He told me this stuff is nothing like what we smoked back in the late 60’s. John calls it medical grade, a real head blaster. He says some of it may be laced with LSD. I figure the stuff might weaken some of my walls so that…were my walls my beliefs…so that…what? I lost the thread and haven’t lit up yet. I think too much. I put on the newest Rodrigo and Gabriela CD, light up, and let the effect wash over me.

Marijuana isn’t supposed to be a hallucinogen, but this shit immobilizes me. I’ve never done LSD before, unless you consider mescaline to be a form of LSD. This stuff is definitely laced. How can anyone smoke this shit and function? They get used to it I guess. Some alcoholics justify their continued use of alcohol by saying they are functional alcoholics. I let them know what I think about that. My mind weaves itself into the music. I am no longer listening to the music. I am the music. It’s an awesome experience. I would love to be able to do this without the use of any ingestible material. My perception is different than it was back in the day. Is it because of the recent dream events, or is it because I am older and more experienced? Quit trying to figure this out, Augusto. Go into the experience. Feel it. Become it. I lose track of time…time?

What do you believe Augusto. OK. That thought enters my head let’s go with it. I believe that it is the laced marijuana creating this experience…and yet…what about choice. I chose to smoke marijuana, but I didn’t choose the experience it gave me. Or did I? If I didn’t choose the experience then I remain the pawn of the THC and the LSD, a victim of its effects. That’s the company line. I’m glad I’m recording this, as I’d never be able to write it down. I close my eyes. Faces appear, one after another. Men, women, children, black, white, brown…all the races are represented. I feel the knowing. They are me, Augusto, but not Augusto. There are hundreds of them. I don’t know how long it lasts. I know there was more than just David Cawley and Dr. Smythe. There had to be. I went into this smoke induced haze with an intent, and the intent is being realized. Is this where the choice lies, or is choice even deeper than that?

I go to my window and look out upon Central Park. It is dark, but lit up with colors of all sorts. What am I seeing? The leafless trees shimmer with moving greens and blues and yellows and reds. The leaves that are gone now appear to shimmer in potentia. The colors reach out and mingle with other colors emanating from the snow, the bushes, the people. I am witness to a kaleidoscope of colored energy. Beautiful. Alive. Am I merely a witness or the actual creator? Hubris! I look at my hand and it shoots out greens and yellows, mixes with the window, the curtains. I reach for the tree across the street and it reaches back. I feel it. I feel the energy of it. It’s not solid. Like the faces they are me, Augusto DeRosa. I know I sound like a marijuana commercial, but it’s not that. It’s a glimpse at a possibility, a peek through a window into a reality far more complex than I had ever suspected. Why me? Was it only me? This changes everything and all it took was the realization that it is me choosing this. An insight came that I use the marijuana as a focal point, but that it is me creating the experience.

I wander back to my chair that is glowing in various swirling shades of blue and green. It doesn’t look like it can support me, but it does. I trust it to hold me. I look at my frog handled mug sitting on the table next to my chair. It triggers something. What had been an experience that simply happened and that I observed, now becomes one that I can consciously control. A clarity comes over me. Thank God for this recorder. God? I almost feel like God, or at least my conception of God. My Catholic upbringing gives me a twinge at that thought. Strong belief there! I think of Sarah and see her energy. How do I know it is hers? How, how, how? What are the mechanics of all this? And why now? Why me? Maybe it isn’t just me. That’s something to investigate. But, this experience shows me that everything is me and not me at the same time. A paradox! Am I alone? Is it all an illusion, Maya? Are the Hindus right or just partially right? Can something be real and not real at the same time? So many questions! So few answers! As James has told me so many times and much to my irritation…Chill. I hate it when someone tells me not to do something I’m doing.

I call Sarah. “I’m stoned.” I said. “I see what you see. The energy. I miss you.”

“I miss you too, Augusto. I used to think seeing energy was the normal thing. But that was when I was very young. It became a curse when the people I told freaked out. I became an oddity. They did x-rays, but found nothing. Gradually I accepted it as a gift, thanks to my parents. Now I realize it is something we are all capable of doing, some more easily than others. How was it for you?”

“Real, but not real.” I said. “I have such strong beliefs about how my reality works that I can’t get past them yet. I’m more tired now than buzzed...I think. I recorded my impressions as I was experiencing them. I’m looking forward to hearing what I said.”

“Me, too. Maybe you’ll let me hear it this weekend. I can’t wait to see you in your element. Alex is excited that we’re seeing each other. He likes you. I like you.”

“Like?”

“For now,” Sarah said. “That’s all you’re going to get out of me, but it’s a big like. Not a little one.”

I could feel her smiling on the other end. “I’ll settle for that….for now,” I said. “I think it’s time I got Ben Kingsley to bed.”

We say our good-byes, which I hope will eventually become more intimate. I am sure of it. The frog mug stares at me as if to say, “don’t forget me.” I grab it and stumble into my bedroom. I am exhausted and taking my clothes off is an ordeal. I sleep in my boxers. I hate briefs. Pajamas are ridiculous. I might as well sleep in my clothes. This night I would have, had I taken just one more hit from the pipe. My mattress is one of those patented Swedish foam deals. Best purchase I ever made. That is my last conscious thought of the night.

I wake up the next morning with one remembered dream. My dream trigger didn’t make it into this one. I am watching a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, but the game rules are different and so is the gender of the players. In my dream, third base is first and first base is third. Why did the rules change as well as the gender of the players? It has to symbolize something. Base runners are going in the opposite direction. The advantage of being a right handed hitter switches to an advantage for the lefties. In America’s game it is always easier for a right handed batter to run to first. The left hander had to turn around and run in the direction his back was facing. What was an advantage for most people, being right handed, was no longer an advantage. Actually, I thought, it is the world that adapts to the righted handed people. It only became an advantage for the righties when they adapted the world to them. There were too many righties for the lefties to have a say.

Hmm. Brain function. Right handed hitting is controlled by the left brain and the left hand is controlled by the right brain. I get a little twinge on that idea. Let’s stick with it. I teach this so I should remember it. The left brain controls logical, sequential, rational, analytical and objective thinking. It sees parts. Sounds like me until a few weeks ago. The right brain is random, intuitive, holistic, and subjective. It sees wholes. That’s Sarah. So, in reality my dream is saying that we are shifting from a left brain male dominated world to a right brain female dominated world. I don’t like that word dominated. This actually makes sense to me, but the dream specifically points out a rule change. It didn’t just replace male players with female players. I could have figured out what I just figured out without having the rules of the game change. Female is symbolically associated with right brain and male is symbolically associated with left brain. The Chinese have known that for thousands of years. They symbolize it with the Yin and the Yang. So, it’s not as much a gender domination change as it is an energy change. There’s something important here that I’m not getting. What’s the rule change?

I have to get ready for my first patient. Sometimes life gets in the way. I enjoy my sessions with Sean Flaherty. I see him once a month for maintenance. Sean was born to be a salesman. He can fill your house with stuff you don’t need before your check clears the bank. He has a severe flying phobia, a big problem for a VP of sales for a multi-national ball bearing company. Sean couldn’t take a flight without being heavily medicated with mother’s little helpers. That Valium crap screwed a generation of 1950’s housewives. They were hooked before they knew what hit them. Keep them placid and compliant. That was the male mantra. Hollywood made a movie about it, The Stepford Wives. It was really a movie about payback.

When Sean isn’t working he is Mr. Casual. Find him at work and he is Mr. GQ, a regular fashion Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He feared nothing that I could discern except flying. It turned out it was a control thing and a fear of death thing. They were linked like Siamese twins. Time wasn’t the thing for Sean that it was for Chuck Tynedale. A few minutes early, a few minutes late… no big deal. I don’t have a receptionist as it seemed a waste of money to me. I train my patients to take a seat in the waiting area if I’m not immediately available to greet them. They don’t mind and they don’t see my lack of a receptionist as an indication of my lack of skill in my area of expertise, the human mind. I, however, have begun to question it, my skill that is and not my need for a receptionist.

Sean arrives five minutes late according to my cell. He shows me his wind-up wrist watch and with pride says, “See, right on time.” He needs to join the 21st century. Wind up is not the 21st century. We walk into my office and he sprawls out on the couch as though he is here to watch a movie. I get right to business.

“How’s the fear?” I asked.

“What fear is that,” Sean said. “You know, Augusto, I figured out that the fear was not a control issue or a fear of death issue.”

“Oh,” I said. I scribble a few doodles on my yellow pad, content that my patients will never ask to see it.

“It’s a trust issue. I never completely trusted that I’d make it to my destination alive. No shit, Augusto. That little inkling of doubt was just enough to trigger my fear. I didn’t believe in my safety enough.”

“But the safety was still about living or dying and that you couldn’t do anything about it.”

“Sure, but the trust thing was underneath it all. I’ve been practicing trust. You know that I’ve always trusted that I could make the sale. No doubt, nada. I don’t know how I did it, but somehow I made the connection between the trust of my sale making ability and my fear of flying. I knew the stats. I’m less likely to die in a plane crash than I am driving my Lexus. It didn’t help knowing that. I believe in my salesmanship and because I believe it, I trust it, trust the belief. So I said, ‘Hey Sean, what do you believe about flying?’ It turns out that my belief in living through a flight was not as strong as my belief in being the king of sales. So instead of working on the belief that was based on statistics I worked on trust. I can’t change the stats, but I can change my trust. Each time I fly and live through it my trust grows. The belief doesn’t change. There’s always a possibility I won’t make it, but each time I do make it my trust builds. It’s a pretty tough cookie right now...the trust I mean. So, what do you think of them apples?”

“I think you should be sitting in my seat,” I said, not fully disbelieving my words. I think of little kids flying. They don’t know the statistics and yet seemingly have no fear of flying. Still, how do I know that it’s trust or ignorance that keeps them happy in flight? I mean, who’s going to tell a kid that they have a chance of being killed on their flight just to prove a point. The trust thing was interesting though, at least in terms of how it relates to beliefs and how beliefs relate to experience. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Alexander Hastings would say both.

Sean is one year out from his second divorce and eighteen months into a relationship with a twenty-five year old sales rep in his employ. Dangerous territory, but Sean doesn’t care. He is old enough to be her father, but since he falls within my own twenty year rule I can’t in good conscience say anything about it. He doesn’t want me to. He is having too much fun with it for me to throw in a crow bar and jam up the works. He spends most of the session talking about her and how good the sex is. He forgot that the sex was good, at first, with his first and second wives. If he should ask my opinion about marrying I will point this out. I knew he wouldn’t. He is pretty much a man of impulse and moment to moment living. I have a secret admiration for people like Sean. I keep it to myself. There is something to be said about doing what you want without the attachments of all those ‘shoulds, and ‘should nots.’

My next patient is Wall Street Al. What a peach. He makes more money than God and is the most miserable son of a bitch I have ever met, not treated, but met. I’m not kidding, just looking at him makes me want to run in the opposite direction or punch him in the face. Some patient’s I’m never in the mood for and Al leads the list. He probably leads everyone’s list. Al’s at the gym everyday and it shows. His face is a la Calvin Klein and if you fall for the exterior you’re in trouble. Al knows he’s a miserable prick. That’s why he sees me. I try not to judge him, but it’s like trying not to break wind after downing a can of beans. Eventually you have to go there.

Al doesn’t do the work. He thinks seeing me once a week is enough, and so he comes back each week unchanged from the week before. I should cut him loose, but something keeps me lassoed to him. He’s knows I don’t like him. How could he not. He sat in the Queen Ann and crossed his legs man-like.

“I’ve been thinking of quitting therapy,” he said. “It’s not working. I’m as miserable as I was two years ago.”

No shit Sherlock! “Is your misery the same as it was when you first came here?” I asked.

“Do you mean am I miserable about the same things?”

I say nothing. He is thinking.

“No,” he said, answering his own question. “What made me miserable then was all the pricks in my life. I couldn’t meet a single person that wouldn’t stab me in the back at the first opportunity.”

“But that’s what you told me you do. How is that different now?”

“I’ve actually stopped doing that… most of the time.”

Sarah had mentioned to me that the energy of judging keeps what you judge in front of you. Maybe that’s why Al is still a prick in my eyes and why he finds himself surrounded by pricks. I take a stab. “You’ve stopped being a prick, but do you still judge the pricks around you?”

“What’s not to judge?” he said. “They’re pricks.”

“So, you’re not a prick anymore, but you judge everyone around you. Being a prick is bad in your book?”

“Of course it is. Do you like back stabbers?”

“No,” I said, trying to think my way through this. “But there is a difference between not liking someone and judging them. It’s subtle. Maybe the judgment of them is what keeps you surrounded by them.”

“Come off of it, Dr. DeRosa. Do you judge those priests that diddle little boys? Sure you do, but you’re not surrounded by queer priests.”

He has a point, but I’m not a kid. I point this out to Wall Street Al.

“OK, he said. “Let’s try another one. You told me once that you hate getting behind little old ladies that count out their pennies at the checkout. It must happen often enough for you to tell me about it. Do you judge them for being old and slow and poor?”

“No,” I said. “At least I don’t think I do, but what I do judge is slow checkout lines. I don’t like them and they are bad.”

“All I know is that things are not working out. I’m quitting.”

“Then quit, Al, but do me a favor. Try catching yourself when you go into judgment mode. Try it for a week or more and then get back to me. I’m interested in whether this works or not. Would you do that?”

“Yeah, sure, Doc. You’ve been good to me. I’ surprised you didn’t kick my ass out long ago. I’ll give you a call.”

Al leaves early. When Al is done, Al is done. He pays the full freight for his visit. To him $150 is like tipping a kid a quarter. This judgment thing is incomplete. How do I not judge a pedophile? I don’t. I judge the hell out of them. Maybe the missing piece will come to me. It doesn’t make sense right now.

I had three more patients and then left my office. I am bushed, a leftover from the night before. My days have intrigued me since all this started. I was sleep walking through my life, even with Debra. Oh! I was right about our relationship being one of convenience. When I told her that I was starting a relationship with Sarah she wished me luck. She too, had been looking around for something more substantial. Convenience gets too easy to do. I guess we both felt it’s time for a challenge. If she only knew!