Where Stories Come From

[This post has been renamed from "90 Days and 90 Nights"]


When you're sinking like the Titanic, you can:

(1) hold your breath and wait to drown,
(2) keep rearranging the deck chairs, or
(3) jump.

I'm sure there are more options, but you get the idea. The problem with depression is untangling what is external, and therefore largely out of your control, as opposed to internal, and therefore completely out of your control.

We live in an age and society where we medicate depression, although, as a recent New York Times Magazine article reported, some doctors and researchers now see an "upside" to leaving depression untreated.

Among the examples cited were writers (one small sample found that 80 percent are depressed), with the implication that many might not produce their best writing if they were medicated.

The idea is that there's a trade-off here -- treating the pain with drugs vs. sublimating the pain into stories.

***

Let me be especially candid tonight. From the beginning, this blog has been a chronicle of one man's pain. There have been, at various times, many other emotions captured and evoked, I hope, but there is no denying that my main personal motivation to write about my life is to work through pain.

In this, I'm acutely aware that I am not alone. Not only from what I hear from readers here (casual and regular), but from other friends, colleagues and strangers who know exactly what I am writing about.

When it comes to the question of whether to medicate or not medicate, I'd never presume to tell another which choice to make. But there does come a point when the preponderance of evidence suggests treatment.

On the other hand, even at that point, another option might be consider the thinking of the experts in that Times article.

Let me try to explain.

We all know some of the triggers of depression -- losing a job, breaking up, getting sick -- and unfortunately, over time, we all experience one or more of these triggers. Some of us experience all of them. Others among us experience all of them multiple times.

Maybe this creates an accumulated pain.

After all, these are all external events, although any reasonably sensitive person takes such things personally, blaming himself even for misfortunes for which (a more objective) observer might apportion responsibility elsewhere.

To the depressed man, it matters not. Over a lifetime, as the slow, awful realization sinks in that these cycles of loss are your fate, you have to develop, by brute force, a personal survival strategy.

You cannot allow these things to defeat you in the end.

Giving up always appears as an option, but it's actually only a cop-out.

Going on is the only choice; it's the morally and ethically correct choice. No one is perfect, no life is perfect, no path can be revisited once you've traveled too far away from the place and the time when things might have turned out differently.

I heard an artist from another culture describe what she called "pathways" recently, and -- if I understood her meaning -- she was using the term to describe those pivotal moments in life when we make fateful decisions, from which there is no return.

Looking back, these moments stand out with all of the crystalline clarity of one tiny tree branch coated in ice, lighted by the sun, outside my childhood window many decades ago in a white Michigan winter.

As I pressed my face to the window, I felt only awe. I was clueless as to what I was actually seeing -- how the branch was me, the ice confined me in that place, that time, and that position, but that even the ice itself would soon be melting, or indeed the role of the sunlight, and how that would come to define my own life as a writer.

None of this could I have known then; only the years have brought it back and brought it into a sharper focus.

***

Today, as on certain other days, I struggled for hours to find the strength -- physical, mental, emotional -- to get out of bed and enter the day. I had more reasons than most men to rise and become active.

Three of the most important were my young children, already long up in my apartment and going about their daily routines, which on Saturday includes watching TV, playing video games, and making themselves yummy cinnamon bread toast.

They left me to resume my life at my own pace; they are empathic children, so, without words ever being spoken, they knew some things were wrong for me in my world. I can try to hide sadness but I always fail, at least with them.

All in a moment I was able to get up and join the world again. Without recounting what in every way was an ordinary day, allow me the indulgence to specify a handful of moments that brought me out of my darkness and into the light once again.

My daughter asked me to build a Lego toy with her in the morning. This is a type of play that is mainly in our collective past now, she is very busy becoming a young woman and only occasionally reverts to being a little girl.

But I really needed a little girl again today, although I never would have put it that way, nor would I have known that a simple game from yesteryear would brighten my dismal spirit state.

My soccer-playing son and I drove to his practice. On the way across town to out near the ocean I was angry, upset, frustrated, not able to find the route and hating myself for that, and a million other personal failings.

Why can't I perform the simplest tasks? I knew my outburst, plus the underlying emotional stress of feeling his father's sadness was weighing heavily on him. He slumped back and tried to nap the rest of the way to the field.

As he practiced. I spoke with other dads about little things in ways that comforted me. Parenting is so complex sometimes, and then, also frighteningly simple. I also had a long conversation with a friend about the subject of this post -- depression -- which helped mine lift, centimeter by centimeter.

The sun emerged, warmed our day, heated my skin, raised everyone's spirits. From yesterday's gloom came today's spring-like air, the air of life and love and hope and a freshness of purpose.

In this air I can be anything, and anything can yet happen, including all kinds of good and marvelous things.

This air is the purest of music, and what I needed, desperately, was a new song to enter my brain.

On the way back my son told me how much he loves soccer, how it is his "passion," and then he told me something I never knew before today.

Last summer, as he was about to begin high school, he had visited the soccer coach to tell him he would like to try out for the team.

"I'm sure I looked like what I was, a scared, skinny little freshman," he told me. "But do you know what Coach did. He smiled that big smile of his and said, 'Welcome! And I'm sure you're going to be a great addition to our team!'"

He was. He made the team, became a starter, a star, and a key part of a winning team that made the playoffs.

It was a magical fall for him and -- as his father -- for me. I can't even think about it without tears filling my eyes. I'm so proud of him, and I know how much work he puts in to excel at competitive team athletics -- a world I never really knew as a boy.

As he told me this story, I loved his coach all over again -- a big, somewhat tough-looking but essentially gentle man, African American, a man who loves his wife so much he spends hours at school openly making her a poster for her birthday, or planning what to do on their anniversary.

This man does this proudly in front of his athletes -- young males whose minds might otherwise rarely focus on the kind of love a man can have for a woman, not in the movies or in a bar or in a song explicit with sexual lyrics, but the simple, lovely feeling of a man for his wife.

Whatever happens to my son's soccer "career," which he explained to me today he fully intends to pursue throughout high school, and barring injury, throughout college, I know he will always remember that first encounter with his high school coach. And now I will too.

Later still his little brother and I played "21" and "Horse" in our backyard court in the sun; then we sat and talked about a variety of topics. This is possibly the gentlest child in the universe, a boy with a brilliant mind that reaches into places far beyond the grasp of the typical 13-year-old.

His favorites these days include Orwell and Hemingway, and as he describes their fiction, he always illuminates new meanings of their work while he critiques them frankly and effortlessly -- dissecting their stories and characters and voice as if he somehow inhabits these writers' brains. There is no move they make that he cannot understand as to its purpose and effect.

But it wasn't his soliloquy on literature that touched me so much today as his pragmatic skill in solving another nettlesome problem. Just as I seem incapable of finding my way in my car I utterly lack the logical genes necessary to make any device work for long.

My camera's Memory Card claimed it was full, but I wanted to take a picture. My daughter loved the look of a certain soda bottle we had gotten from the corner store when she was thirsty.

Back home, I had clipped a bit of jasmine for her to place in that bottle.

My son calmly reprogrammed the Memory Card, handed me the camera, and I shot the photo at the top of this long-winded post.

So I offer that photo to you now and I also say, thank you for stopping by. Sometimes, I hope, working the muscle trumps taking the medicine.

-30-

Out In the Cold

The sky was gray, the color of emptiness.

There were no dramatic clouds or bright patterns; not a single patch of blue anywhere to add a dash of hope. No sign of the sun.

Just gray. Endlessness.

Pushing up into that void were the green buds and tender white blossoms of the plum tree. What does it know? It only knows spring.

Looking up, hoping for a sign: Which way to go?

To sink into the void or hold onto a tendril of hope, however fragile?

Time won't wait; time doesn't care.

On another day, those flowers would be beautiful and fill this place with purpose. The future would be clear, or at least seem possible.

But on this day, the cold sky won out. There was no respite for the softer feelings, tender but unwelcome, vulnerable without a home; they could only sink back into gray.

-30-

A Walk Across Campus, Many Years Later

Years ago, before I started this particular blog, I taught journalism at Stanford.

Today, for one of the few times since I left the university late in 2005, I was back on campus. I didn't have my camera on me, so words will have to do.

Stanford is a large, rambling campus, nicknamed "The Farm." It's one of the best-endowed private universities in the U.S., so you might expect its students to be a snotty, entitled group -- but that wasn't my experience while teaching there.

Those who attended the various classes I taught came from all over the world and all walks of life. Many were not from privileged backgrounds; many were ethnic minorities.

All were exceptionally bright. There's something I learned along the way as a teacher and that is to try and pose a question at the beginning of each class that I didn't know the answer to. (I've mentioned this method before.)

As often as possible, I practiced this at Stanford, and the resulting joint explorations with students took all of us into territory I couldn't have anticipated.

Some of my favorite teaching experiences were class projects, designed by students who then worked cooperatively in teams.

They'd go out and survey other students or community members about various political, social, or academic issues, and the results were inevitably illuminating.

These memories came back today as I navigated around campus, somewhat lost, seeking a venue for a symposium. Universities at their best are places to explore ideas, including new ideas that may or may not turn out to have merit.

I remember urging my students to "take risks -- you're safe here."

Taking intellectual risks isn't always as easy as it seems for students hard-pressed to earn grades, get ahead, pay down loans, meet the high expectations of others, including their family members.

As a teacher, you have them in your influence for but a moment. For me, that moment was dedicated to discovery, both for them and for me.

I miss that.

-30-

Dreaming Like an Immigrant

Dream of a better future.

This has long been the American way, and it's what attracts immigrants to this country, away from places where they dare not dream at all, because no better future seems possible at all.

I'm hardly oblivious to this, when I talk or write about the shrinking prospects of "middle-class" Americans.

Those of us caught between the poverty line and the wealthy class are the ones being squeezed, both by internal economic forces inside the U.S. and the external pressures of globalization.

Therefore, our sense of despair deepens.

Meanwhile, immigrants continue to arrive, just as my grandparents did the better part of a century ago.

Today's newest Americans take jobs that we don't, start businesses that we wouldn't, and buy houses we overlook.

***

To once again thrive in America, perhaps we have to relearn how to dream like an immigrant. Thinking like a middle-class person when there is no longer a reasonable chance of living a middle-class lifestyle is becoming downright foolish.

Of course, many people have careers and assets that insulate them from this discussion. They are not struggling in the creative arts, trying to live in places like San Francisco while pursuing what might be called a non-profit lifestyle.

Yet, downward-mobile writers and artists and musicians remain, in my view, far more important to the health of our society than our society perhaps generally recognizes.

Money rules. Therefore bankers, insurance companies, lawyers and others who feed off of the financial world's entrails continue to live a life of riches.

But those whose lives are devoted to creativity are no longer welcome in the halls of the comfortable. We have been downgraded, like a municipal bond in a debt-laden city.

We were tolerated during a period of excess; now we have become excess baggage. Of course they would miss us if we left them without their readings, their paintings, their music, but (in their view) we, the artists, have always been expendable as long as our art remains behind...

Regardless of this, we do face a new set of choices -- to leave these places to the super rich and the very poor, and move to the interior, if family and professional obligations allow us that much flexibility, for an example.

As a child of the Midwest, I've long known I would be comfortable returning there, or to a closer venue like the Northwest or the Southwest or Florida -- all places I enjoy -- except that I am still raising relatively young children, so that kind of relocation is precluded for now.

A more intriguing option would be to start thinking like an immigrant. What would my grandfather do?

Stay tuned.

-30-

A Failure of a Day; It Happens

Evidently not all days are created equal; at least there are those when I feel like I've accomplished absolutely nothing, no matter how hard the effort.

Of course, that isn't literally true, a point I'll return to in a moment.

***

But first, when I picked up my high-school freshman today, he told me about the upcoming rallies and demonstrations planned against impending cuts in the public school budgets here in California.

Only vaguely aware of this imminent controversy, partially because it so upsets me, I haven't wanted to know the details. The prospect of further scaling back on education here is appalling.

This a place where conservatives have long since ruined what was once a leading example of a state education system with the notorious Prop. 13 decades ago. California has since plunged from near the top of the states to near the bottom.

Now they want to finish the job. These are the type of fools who believe not in learning, but in ridiculous concepts like prayer in school, creationism, and anti-abortion propaganda. In other words, they do not care about knowledge or intellectual development at all.

They are creatures motivated by fear and parochialism. They fear anyone who is different, any idea that challenges their religious fantasies, any expenditure that does not conform to their own strict, narrow definition of what is right and proper.

All of this is too distressing for further words. Because as we've systematically uneducated Californians for decades now, many voters perceive little more than these purveyors of fear tell them to perceive.

The money is all on the wrong side in this case. The situation can only get worse under these conditions.

Of course, it is not conservatives who are precipitating the present crisis -- that is a consequence of the recession, which itself is a consequence of stupid foreign adventurism launched by the Bush administration combined with a historic transformation to a global economy, where we in the rich world must become used to a lower lifestyle in the future, for reasons both good and bad.

But it was the tax-cutters who laid the groundwork, who set us up for today's collapse of our schools. Thanks to them, our children face a more difficult path to gaining the type of education we once collectively believed they had a right to.

We don't collectively believe that in American any longer.

We don't collectively believe in anything here. Everyone is divided up into camps.

***

That was a highlight of my miserable day. Still recovering, I realize, from my winter illness, today was a day where my energy had been sucked out of my being before I even arose from bed.

Of course, everyone has such days, I'm sure.

Demands came at me from all sides; there was so little I could concretely do about any of them.

As the day proceeded, however, I did in fact accomplish a few small things, helped a few people, laid some future plans, met obligations best I could.

But I'm left tonight with an awful sense that this day was a failure. Thus, I am telling its story -- a failure of a day -- not to write it off but to share it in case this resonates with someone else, somewhere, who also had a bad day.

What is far worse, of course, is when we collectively have a bad day, and the day they cut the school budgets further will be exactly that kind of day for all of us, whether we agree on it or not.
-30-

Love, To Be Known

In writing we always talk about finding your "voice."

There is a presumption that everyone wants to be heard.

John Berger in his classic, Ways of Seeing, considers, among other propositions, the concept of wanting to be seen, as well as needing to see.

These wishes, or needs, to speak, to be heard; to learn, to be taught; to feel and to be felt are universal, presumably, although they certainly vary by culture, not to mention gender, age, and personality.

That is a word I rarely use -- personality. Why do I shy away from it, when it is so clear to everyone that we have widely varying personalities.

Of course, "clear to everyone else" might be a better way to put it when it comes to our lack of ability to perceive our own personalities.

The other night, after I finished guest lecturing at a class at a local university, the professor, who is also a fellow journalist friend, and I discussed interviewing, one of the journalist's main tools.

He talked about how hard it is for anyone to truly understand the effect they have on others. Thus, he asks his students to stand before a mirror and talk, to try and gauge how their facial features and expressions might impact people they are interviewing.



All of these thoughts came rushing in on me yesterday when my youngest son gave me a gift from Mexico -- a hand-made model car, made out of scraps of metal, screws and spark plugs.

He said he knew the minute he saw it that I would like it; that it was the perfect gift for me.

And, of course, he was right -- in fact, I love it.

My father would have liked it too, for the same reasons I do, which is interesting.

My son therefore knows not only me and my tastes but those of the grandfather he never got to know. (My father died when this boy was not yet three.)

Anyway, today, as I was showing the car to my friend, I felt a wave of gratitude to my son for knowing me so well.

Whatever else can be said about us, we -- he and I -- have our understandings of one another, on deep levels, and those include the types of things either of us like.

Recently, I gave him a book I knew he would love, and he does.

This reciprocity, so simple in one way, is profound in another. It's one of the components, in my book, of true love.

-30-

Alone and Together Under the Night Sky

My youngest son returned from his class trip to Mexico today. Late this afternoon, into early evening, I sat with him and his brother and we talked -- for hours.

Sometimes, with teenagers, it can seem like your time is characterized by long periods of silence punctuated by grunts.

Not this time. Both boys were talkative, and I stayed longer than I'd planned, not wanting to break the spell.

The older recalled his trip to the same small town a year ago, when he was an 8th-grader. The younger one had his own unique take on the place, the people, the experience.

Two young people comparing notes. One older man listening, interjecting a question now and then.

As I sat with my boys in their bedroom in the attic of their Mom's house, my eyes drifted around to the photos, books, awards, toys, clothes, and furniture around us.

It is a nice room, and they both mentioned how much they like it there. They have no room at my house; rather there is a small bedroom they used to share with their sister but they've long since outgrown it, and it was never very nice to begin with.

Now, when they spend the night with me, they sleep on our large couches in the living room.

Spending time with my kids in their mothers' houses has always provoked a certain kind of protectiveness inside me. I used to spend much such time with my older kids at their Mom's.

What was different about that experience was that I had also lived there, for a while, in the first years after we bought the place.

But this house, for my second set of kids, is a place where I have never slept, never lived.

Part of a parent's feelings about trying to protect his children are tied to being close to them. So, when they live separately from you, a kind of ache opens in your heart that can never be healed.

I tend to examine the places closely when I visit, seeking to reassure myself that they are safe there. No one in the entire extended families feels as I do, I know, this is just my thing, my fate.

In an odd way, my life as a father has been a very lonely journey. Much of the time I have spent apart from my kids, thinking about them, talking about them to friends, girlfriends.

It isn't fair, I know. No one really can understand my need. Or if they perceive it fully, it can only make them sad as well.

Still, the warmth of the moments with my kids remain as I return to my own house alone. It is nice, as on this occasion, when someone very special is waiting here for me, too.

It is in fact critical to my mental health.

I'm not sure I am cut out to live alone. More and more I am realizing this -- something that probably is obvious to others, if not always to me. On the other hand, as a good friend said, "you are not alone when someone is thinking of you."

Thinking about one another.

Then, those moments together remain something that lingers long after we have separated once again -- all of us. Friends and family and lovers -- each scattering ultimately to different corners of our worlds.

Being alone isn't necessarily being lonely. Being together isn't necessarily not being lonely.

Being connected is all...

-30-