THE FROG HANDLED MUG: Chapter Six

I rented a Ford Escape thereby contributing to the greening of America and the expansion of American employment opportunities. The simple things work. Have you ever driven the I95 corridor between New York City and Eastern Connecticut? If you haven’t, here’s my advice. Only do it if it’s a matter of life and death. It’s about a hundred miles of asphalt laden hostility. It’s as if it was designed by a group of psychologists bent on providing a release valve for pent up hostility. People who are typically as meek as a canary feel free to rage against the machine. It’s nothing for a mother driving a minivan filled with screaming rug rats to flip me the bird and scream obscenities that would make a Russian sailor blush. Russians are notorious for their creative use of expletives. I often drive the whole way at 65mph in the left lane. I feel it’s my duty as a psychologist to provide as many safe avenues for the masses to vent their everyday frustrations.

The Chinese have a saying, “May you live in interesting times.” I heard it in the movie Disclosure. Demi Moore is a cougar. Funny what labels attach to age. Anyway, there is more to that saying than at first meets the ear. I am living in interesting times. They suck, but they’re interesting. Interesting doesn’t have to mean good. This avalanche of emotional distress, mine included, interests me. It probably doesn’t interest a parking attendant, but it interests me. Why now? Why me? I think of these things as I knock off mile after mile. Thank God they got rid of those God awful toll booths.

I turn north onto I395. Route 32 is a mere twenty miles ahead, and from there it’s a straight shot to Storrs. My sister is four years younger than me and until adulthood was a great thorn in my ass. A thorn in my side is far too mild. I think she’s really looking forward to my arrival this time because her twenty year old son has been dabbling in narcotics use, to use her words. It’s been my experience that parents underestimate by half their child’s drug use. My nephew is a great kid, but then most young drug users are great kids….until their drug of choice sinks its fangs into them. Heroin deaths are through the roof and physicians have become partners with the drug dealers in perpetuating the problem. I wrote a book, remember. A simple back ache can result in a severe oxycontin addiction. Whatever happened to good old fashioned heating pads?

An old lady passes me on the right and flips me off. I wonder if she appreciates what I just did for her. Maybe it releases just enough anger so that she won’t go home and poison her husband. She can barely see above the steering wheel, by the way. Not that that has anything to do with anything. It reminds me of an event from my college days. I was in Minneapolis, Minnesota and my compadres and I decided to try some mescaline. We spent the day at the Minneapolis zoo laughing hard. I had a VW minibus at the time. Anyway, on the drive back to the dorm I took a wrong turn and wound up on the highway. I looked out my side view and saw a car on my left approaching at 85 mph or so it seemed. The car was packed with eighty year old women. I mentioned it to my buddies. They laughed and told me to look at my speedometer. I was going 35mph. We still laugh about it today. It’s funny how drugs alter perception. The reason I bring it up is because it points out how perception varies so much from person to person. Individual perception is everything. More and more I’m convinced that there is no ultimately correct perception. I ramble, but then there is no one to talk to. Ever talk to yourself?

My sister, Rose, lives on the top of Spring Hill, a side road that will take you to UConn, basketball capital of the world. She has a dormered cape that sits on three wooded acres. I pull into her driveway and beep my horn. I’m not sure why I beep my horn, but I do it each time I drive up here. Come to think of it I don’t know why I do many of the things I do. They seem so automatic. Rose and Charlie come out their front door waving. Charlie is her husband. Rose is shorter than me and blond, taking after our father in body coloration. Charlie is a lumberer and I don’t mean in the Paul Bunyan sense. Following gender roles and etiquette Charlie grabs my bags and follows Rose and me into the house.

I smell cigarettes. James must be smoking because I know Rose and Charlie would rather breathe in dog shit fumes than cigarette smoke. Funny how these beliefs work. When I was a kid I remember athletes and doctors doing cigarette commercials on TV. Some ice skater would glide over to the rail and light up. “After a hard workout nothing settles me down like a Lucky Strike.” I don’t smoke, but I’m not rabid about having smokers around me. Pretty soon we’ll be shipping them all off to Dr. No’s Island. I notice that Rose noticed that I noticed the smoke smell. Lot of noticing going on. Maybe we should all be doing more of it. You know, less auto-pilot and more self navigation.

“James Smokes,” Rose said. “I saw you sniffing the air so I thought I’d clear the air on the matter. He’s upstairs sleeping.”

I look at my watch. 1pm. “Late night?” I asked.

“They’re all late,” she said. “But then his night doesn’t begin until at least 10:30. We’re in bed before he even goes out. The times, they are a changing.”

Rose sings that last line. She was a flower child back in the day. Now she’s a born again Christian. How she got from there to here I can’t tell you. She was a Catholic before she was a flower child. I was a Catholic before I got to be me. But me is a changing thing. I’ll bet it is for you too. We catch up on our lives and I remind her I’d be heading down to Norwich the next day to visit with the egg head and his psychic mother. That’s not quite how I said it. Sounds hard, doesn’t it.

Rose has my book, Breaking Addiction, lying on the coffee table right in front of me. I know what is coming.

“I’m worried about James,” she said. “He’s a different boy than when you last saw him. He loves you and would never sleep in past your arrival. Things have been hell around here. I’ve read your book three times. Implemented your suggestions, but it doesn’t work. Maybe James doesn’t fit the mold.”

Talk about getting to the point. “I’m rethinking the issues,” I said. “Maybe I’ll write a new book….call it Addiction as Choice.”

“I know it’s a choice,” she said. “It’s not as though he’s unconscious when he does it. I want to know how to get him to make different choices.”

“I don’t know how to do that yet,” I said. “The idea just came to me a few days ago.” I don’t tell her the idea came to me in a lucid dream. “Maybe it’s not about his choices. Maybe it’s about ours.”

“That’s a lot of maybes, Augusto. I’ve prayed to Jesus, but in his divine will I guess it’s not James’s time to quit.”

“Maybe it’s not,” I said. “Maybe there’s purpose to it that neither us nor his conscious mind is aware of. Maybe he isn’t listening to himself. Maybe he’s not paying attention to what he does.”

“How can anyone do something they’re not paying attention to?” Charlie said. He may be a physical lumberer, but his mind isn’t.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This is coming to me as I speak. Maybe it’s not paying attention to the beliefs that drive the doing.” That comes out of left field. I’m not even sure I know what it means.

“I don’t have to have a belief to brush my teeth,” Charlie said.

I think about that before answering. “Sure you do, Charlie. You believe your teeth will rot if you don’t brush your teeth every day.”

“That’s a fact, not a belief,” Rose said.

“I wonder. Things we once thought were facts aren’t facts anymore. Do you remember that Woody Allen movie, Sleeper? He wakes up in this sanitarium some time in the future. He walks out on the porch and finds the doctors smoking and eating cake. Woody is aghast. The doctors tell him they discovered that smoking and eating sugar is good for you. Hell, no more than a hundred years ago we believed that bleeding cured disease. Like I said, I’m just beginning to process this.”

“Should I wake him?” Rose asked.

“No. Let him sleep. I’ll unpack and have a cup of coffee. I bought a new mug. Brought it with me.”

I bring my bag upstairs and unpack. I notice Rose nailed a crucifix above the guest bed, a subtle form of proselytizing. A few years ago I would have draped my T-shirt over it. I wonder why she felt Jesus needs an army of recruiters. I mean, hell, if he wanted more devotees why not just create them. I would. Why leave it up to flawed humans? I check my cell for missed calls. I turn it off when driving so as not to be tempted to answer a call and get pulled over by the state cell phone police. Debra calls. I hit the send button, which I know I don’t have to do, but do anyway out of habit. Remember, I grew up with dial phones.

“Hi Augusto. I see you made it safely.”

“I have a crucifix over my bed,” I said.

“Sounds appropriate to me,” Debra replied. “So, have you cured James of his addiction? I know you just got there, but you are pretty good at what you do.”

I can feel her smiling at the other end of the…..It’s not a line anymore.

“You wouldn’t be mocking me, would you Debra? I’m dreading my stay here. Too bad I can’t stay with the Hastings.”

“But then Alex’s mother would know all your secrets. Woo woo.”

“You’re way too rational for your own good. A little woo woo might loosen you up a bit. We’ll go to a séance when I get back. What do you say?”

Debra laughs. “It might be fun,” she said. “Maybe the ghost of Christmas future will show up.”

“Maybe. I should go. Rose put on some coffee and I have a Jones rearing its needy head. I’ll call you later.”

James wakes up an hour later. His pupils are the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Not a good sign. The drugs have their teeth into him. They dull him down so that he can’t fight back. Addiction as choice…hmm. It doesn’t make sense that anyone would choose addiction, at least in the sense we generally understand choice. Maybe our thinking mind isn’t what makes the choice. Is there a part of our consciousness responsible for the ‘shit happens’ scenarios we all fall prey to? Are accidents not accidents? Where am I going with this? It’s so outside my realm of experience. It certainly seems as though we choose some things, but it is just as obvious we do not choose all things. Maybe my understanding of the psyche is too small, blinded by all I have learned and been taught, blinded by what I believe. “What do you believe, Augusto?”

The country side in Storrs is beautiful. No industry. Few businesses. Storrs is a rural college community, much as it had been when UConn began as an agricultural college way before my day. I excuse myself and go for a run. A big snow storm is due by 7pm. Plenty of time to get in a few miles. Running is my meditation, but instead of stilling the mind it opens it up. It seems to create a channel to the realm of ideas. Whether that realm was inside the brain or outside doesn’t matter to me, although I have recently become curious as to their origin.

There is little traffic on these rural roads. Perfect for a runner, biker or walker. I heard that at one time a squirrel could go from Maine to Virginia on a highway of treetops. I guess the idea excluded rivers. Maybe they canoed across, and anyway a river is not the ground. You can’t go anywhere in New England and not see a squirrel, and there are plenty of them in Storrs. They are very good at being squirrels. I doubt they compare themselves to other squirrels. I don’t think a small squirrel wishes he was a bigger squirrel like I used to wish I was a bigger boy when I was little. It seemed bigger boys had more advantages. I think that might have been the first thing I compared myself to, bigger boys. Comparing! Christ, what a curse. And it must be taught. I don’t think it’s hard wired into our deoxyribonucleic acid. That’s DNA.

A mile into my run I begin to sweat. I love to sweat. I met Joe Campbell once while on vacation in Hawaii. He had a home there. It was shortly after his Power of Myth came out and before he really got famous, thanks to Bill Moyers. He’s the ‘follow your bliss’ guy. At least that’s how the public remembers him. Great mythologist, though. He really ‘got’ it. Hmm…follow your bliss? Sounds like little David Cawley. I didn’t think of it that way until this moment. See what I mean about that channel opening up. It’s hard to follow your bliss or even know what your bliss is when you spend your life from the earliest days learning how you stack up against all the others. If mothers had their way we’d all be doctors and bottom feeders… that’s slang for lawyers. I know several lawyers and they’re good guys. I guess no one likes being sued or prosecuted.

If I chose not to see little David Cawley would it have altered the David Cawley in my dreams? From what I gathered, he gets to experience it all, the high road, the low road and the middle road, possibly everything in between as well. I try to imagine all of us doing that, but the numbers make me dizzy. So how would that work? Let’s say I have to choose between private school and public school. I like public school because all my friends are going to be there. Being an egghead of sorts I also know that I’d get a better education at the private school. The moment I decide on the public school there is a split. I create another me, who until that moment lead exactly the same life as me. Neither of us notices the split and each of us feels as real as the other. To him I’d be the split off and to me he’d be the split off. As our lives continue the branching would be…well…almost infinite. And that’s just me. I wonder if we influence each other. Do you see why I like to run? I never get this by trying to quiet my mind. That’s not to say that you don’t. I’m just talking about me, here.

There’s got to be a purpose to my exposure to this. I don’t believe that everything I do has a purpose. Like, what is the purpose of eating a brussel sprout? I can sort of feel into it when something has purpose. But, is it a purpose I’m talking about or rather is it trying to communicate something to myself? What’s my life’s purpose? Damned if I know. I never said my life’s purpose is to iron out the wrinkles of mankind’s psyche. I like what I do and that’s enough for me. I wonder if a life’s purpose is different than a life’s intent. I like intent better. It’s more general. What do you believe, Augusto? I don’t know, really. All I know is that what I believed a few days ago has come under attack. I’m coming under attack and it feels like the attacker is me.

I better head back to Rose’s. I lose track of time and distance when I go into this free thinking mode. It’s costing me an extra two miles and probably one less hour of awake time. It’s just as well. I’m a much better listener than a talker. That’s what I do. I listen. I just don’t feel like listening to Rose and Charlie tonight. I’m sure James won’t be home until after we all go to sleep. Sleep. Odd how that’s where the action has been lately. So, that’s the plan, dinner, an hour of chat and then dream time. Maybe I’ll see another frog handled mug.