Energizer

What keeps us going? For some people, such a question might seem ridiculous; they appear to keep going because they like it. Others probably never have considered an alternative; they just keep going because, well, what the hell else are they going to do?
Some people don't necessarily like life, per se, but they carve out enjoyable pockets, activities to which they can look forward, like drinking or smoking marijuana or jumping out of airplanes or driving race cars or having sex. Those people's normal lives appear to represent a holding pattern, occupying the gray areas between when their lives take on color. That holding-pattern time, however, for many people lasts much longer than the colorful slivers, which fade too quickly. Sex, for example, can vary in its intensity and duration but generally speaking doesn't last as long as, say, a normal workday. Jumping out of airplanes attracts adventurous spirits, as does bungee jumping, but they're fleeting adrenalin rushes. My dog has taken a piss that has taken longer than falling off a bridge connected to a springy cord.
I guess porn stars or NASCAR drivers make a living out of doing what thrills them, but I bet longevity dilutes those thrills and turns them into gray areas. Booze and pills help, but overindulgence induces an eventual reckoning; they often leave an unpleasant residual effect. Unless we could have pills that help us to perceive the gray areas differently from how we might normally. Oh, yeah, the drug makers are trying.
Other people appear to permanently occupy their own, more ordinary gray areas, and some contentedly so. We have vacations, but the knowledge that we must return to the gray for way longer than vacation lasts tempers the satisfaction. A week at the beach doesn't quite mitigate the months of work required to get there.
For others, the gray areas are more like black and making daily peace with the world presents more of a challenge. The people who populate, and tolerate, the gray areas, tend to have difficulty relating to those who take up residence in the black areas. So, too, do those who live in the rosy neighborhoods. I don't trust them. The rosy people obviously keep going because life is grand. The gray-area people compartmentalize or accept or figure there's nothing better or like their lots in life. I can't relate to them.
So, back to those of us who don't want to brush their teeth or shave, let alone clean the bathroom. Some part of me always has clung to the notion that I will find something satisfying enough to persuade me that everything has been worthwhile, that it really has been a wonderful life, that I'll be able to stop saying I still haven't found what I'm looking for. I'm competitive, too, so if life represents a game and poses a challenge, like continuing to live, I don't want to lose.
Does love keep us going? Certainly, for some, love for and from their children provides sustenance. Then again, some people with children kill themselves. Love of self seemingly sustains some, as does spousal affection. Longtime spouses sometimes follow the death of their significant others by dying themselves.
Some people endure life because of the promise held by the afterlife. Long-suffering Catholics bear their burdens secure in the belief that Heaven awaits. They proudly forsake earthly pleasures. Dogma promotes misery.
Maybe this holds some answers, but I think it's largely bullshit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?em
The article doesn't seem to account for those people for whom depression cripples, instead of clarifies and focuses effort.

Stoned

Eight years of my life barely had passed when I rode my bike down the road to the gas station so I could top off my tires with air. That always seemed to be a problem, a deficiency of air in our bicycle tires and no pump with which to breathe life back into them. Gas stations didn't have coin-operated air pumps then, so we didn't need to scrape up any change, but the pumps' unreliability introduced a measure of uncertainty.
Flats constituted disaster, like an appendage lost, and our amateurish surgical procedures risked further damage. We would remove the tires from the rims with flat-head screwdrivers and in so doing often introduced additional punctures into the tube. If we managed to extricate the tube without inflicting further damage, we then contended with a patch kit. The kit, packaged in a rectangular aluminum box, contained glue, which eventually would dry out and crack and resemble a used-up tube of toothpaste that had baked in the August sun; the patches themselves, which we cut to fit; and the top of the aluminum container, which resembled a cheese grater in miniature with its rough surface intended to scratch up the area around the puncture before applying the patch. After applying the patch, we sometimes, in an effort to further entomb the offending hole, would set afire the glue that seeped from under the edges. The chain, too, could prove equally problematic. A malfunction often left us streaked black with grease and frustrated by immobility.
My bike also facilitated self-injury. I once trailed blood 200 yards from around the corner to my house after a no-hands ride carried me face first into the door of a parked car and left my lips in threads. Wheelies the length of football fields often ended with the back of my head or my tailbone meeting asphalt. Someone stole my Sears Free Spirit with the American-flag motif that my grandfather bought for me, delivering an affront to me and patriotism in one blow. I lusted after the rims on the fancier BMX bikes, which made mine look pedestrian.
And so it was that my bike carried me on that fateful day to the gas station. Construction crews had partially completed the interstate near my house, and the pale green metal supports bore the weight of the highway as it crossed over the road on which I traveled. Once underneath those supports, my tires zipped on the asphalt and echoed in the chamber. I looked at the as-yet unspoiled white concrete embankments that angled up to the base of the bridge as I passed.
I emerged from the shelter of the bridge, exposed on the other side, and a group of teenagers standing on the as-yet-unopened highway spotted me, like birds of prey sighting their quarry. They unleashed a fusillade of rocks from their perch above me. Time slowed, and the recognition that a group of kids were stoning me sunk in deliberately. The rocks rained down and tore flesh, and I pedaled furiously as tears formed in my eyes and blood rivulets turned peach fuzz crimson. I looked back at them and saw someone I thought I recognized, the stringy hair and the cocked arm.
I pedaled until I reached the gas station, another half-mile, and I puzzled over how I would return home. The kids had left by the time I had summoned the courage to venture home. Safe passage. At home, I showed my brothers my wounds, and we all immediately piled into the car, hell-bent on vengeance. Solidarity. Once up on the highway, we encountered a man my oldest brother knew, and he, too, sought the rock throwers for hitting his car. To no avail.
Most mornings, I drive my car under that overpass, and sometimes the sting of unbridled cruelty resonates more than 30 years later and again leaves a hole somewhere deep inside of me.

Reality Show

I consider myself a realist. As such, am I destined to live a life of relative disquiet? Apparently. Do all people consider themselves realists? Everyone necessarily has an individual version of reality, so who is to say which reality equals the real reality? All realities ring true for someone.
But can we come up with objective measures of reality? Men and women, for example, often perceive situations differently. Witnesses offer different takes on what they have seen. Certainly some circumstances lend themselves to reasonably objective interpretations; if someone threw a baseball through a window, and the window broke, and someone else said it didn't, you could say, "Bullshit, I just saw that fucking ball break the glass," and anyone else around likely would share your interpretation.
On the other hand, not every situation presents in such a fashion. My mother and I have quite different interpretations of certain (most) events, and even when we agree on what transpired, we disagree on why. I could say the same about other women with whom I've interacted. So I either for some reason interact with women who are predisposed to disagree with me, or most women have that predisposition, or I'm the one predisposed to disagree. Here I will acknowledge some culpability.
I also will concede that my perceptions, based on life experience, appear to deviate from the perceptions of people who have had less turbulent lives. Or, as my wife says, my normal isn't normal. Drinking, drugs, violence, depression, suicidal tendencies, electroconvulsive therapy all have skewed my perceptions. I have taken a while to come to that recognition. I bet not everyone knows somebody who has undergone ECT. But that's my reality, and I can't change it.
I can change how I process some of my experiences, so I guess our past doesn't have to hold a completely inexorable grip on the present. But that involves work and energy and an emotional investment and a willingness to make oneself vulnerable and to keep at it for years and years in my case before something clicks. Is that a way to spend a life? Although, the alternative looked grim, and final. Most people I've encountered don't have the inclination to change. As a result, no reason exists to investigate the formative experiences that have shaped who they are and how they got there. The path of least resistance apparently holds the most appeal. That's their reality, and they're sticking to it.
People lie, too, and in so doing further muddy the reality waters. For some people, the lies eventually become truth to them. If you tell a lie long enough....No wonder, then, that reconciling these disparate realities can prove elusive.
I've read, and I don't know where, that depression affects realists disproportionately. I guess it would. Which comes first, the realism or the depression? The way people cope might make the difference. I'm genetically predisposed, I think (maybe nurture played a part here), to wake up in the morning and for the most part decry daily life's drudgery. Paying bills and cutting the grass or shoveling the snow and getting the car inspected pretty much suck. Then you have to deal with the selfish dickheads who appear to exist to make other people's lives more difficult. Work holds little appeal. People who go to church on top of all this amaze me. Why not add one more shit-ass thing to do in a day/month/year filled with shit-ass things? I'll stop, since I run the risk of depressing anyone reading this.
But this is my reality. And I'm right, after all. And you can't run from your own head.

Fear

Might we have something to fear beyond fear itself? I fear little now, but more intensely, primarily for the welfare of my children. I saw the writer John Irving on TV once talking about how having children made him more acutely aware that bad things happen in the world. Indeed.
Children themselves fear, with uncomplicated purity. My son has run from a room when Bruce the shark has appeared in "Finding Nemo." Simple. I'm getting the fuck out of here because I'm scared. Same thing with most animals, like my German shepherd. Her father, for example, scares her, so she tries to get away. If a fish perceives that it is about to be eaten by another fish, it tries to split. No posturing. No reasoning. No need to persuade themselves that they must confront that fear.
I've been concerned for my safety at times since having children, and I've tried to act prudently, but I haven't been scared. I suppose if God came to me, like as a burning bush or something, I might be scared. Certainly I would find it curious, that talking, burning bush. I'd even video it with my cellphone. Perhaps I'd be more inclined to be scared if a vengeful god appeared out of the heavens like in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," I think it was. Maybe Satan would scare me, especially all the fire and brimstone stuff. Seriously, if a red guy with a pitchfork and and horns and a tail suddenly appeared before my eyes, at the very least I'd be startled. I might very well even shit my pants. Who the fuck conjured that image of the devil, anyway?
Somewhere along the line, I seem to have lost the capacity to fear, except concerning the children, and in that respect I fear like I never have. I would wager that there exists a relationship between my lack of fear and disregard for myself. I didn't care if I hurt myself, so I wasn't scared. I embraced risk, in a destructive way. Drunken bike rides at midnight on busy highways. Walking on a six-inch ledge 30 feet above a river. Driving my truck up a steep embankment of the Mississippi River, unsure whether it would flip backward. Walking certain sections of New Orleans, against the earnest advice of locals. One of my therapists tried to get me to channel this into more creative and constructive risk taking, like skydiving (I might add here that heights do, in fact, scare me), but it never really took. Old habits die hard, and I was headed that way myself. When I fear for myself now, it's only in the context of those I would leave behind. I fear for how they would cope.
I used to fear. Reading "The Amityville Horror" scared the shit out of me. "The Exorcist" gave me the creeps. I sometimes feared getting in fights. But as the self-esteem diminished, so too did some of the fear. And as I started to question Catholicism, which seems to thrive on fear, the subjects that traditionally had frightened me no longer did. I once feared loss above all else, particularly the loss of my mother. As I lay awake at night awaiting her return home or as I pondered the potential pitfalls of her vacations with her friends, fear paralyzed me. One parent already had abandoned me. Fear and guilt commingled, and I feared that if I were to disappoint my mother, she too would leave me. She did nothing to allay such fears and in fact used them as leverage. She would say that she was running away, which of course elicited from me childhood entreaties that she not. Eventually, I feared that she would return. The fear of loss, however, influenced my relationships, sometimes to the point of destruction. Or I would shelter myself from loss by preemptively making a break with another person or by never getting involved in the first place.
I feared the unfamiliar despite the unsettling nature of the familiar. I never wanted to go back to school on Monday, let alone after the summer. I didn't want to go on trips with the soccer team, and when did, I was predisposed to cast aspersions on the families with which I would stay so that I could stay at the hotel. My mother caught me, sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, reading a note she had written to my third-grade teacher. She started slapping my arms, but I had read most of it; she asked the teacher in this note why I never wanted to go to school. She probably never entertained the idea that the problem may have resided within me, and her. That proclivity to look for an external reason probably influenced my approach toward my own tumult; what, or who, on the outside had the balm to salve my wounds? Perhaps if she had asked more penetrating questions, we might have been able to address my difficulties earlier. But she lacked that capability, and awareness generally lagged behind these more enlightened times. My mother herself lived in perpetual fear, and the multiple locks on every door kept potential intruders, and reality, at bay, allowing my mother to exist in the world she created. Since having a stroke, her paranoia has only intensified, as if the incident removed what little capacity her brain had to balance out her irrational tendencies, the blood from the brain puncturing the rice-paper dam and allowing the full torrent of irrationality to pour forth.
I behaved well in school and brought home the sterling report cards. My third-grade teacher, the same one to whom my mother had written the purloined letter, blew a gasket when I punched a hole through my royal-blue turtleneck. Such uncharacteristic behavior for the child who wasn't. I was latchkey before the term existed, and my mother exclaimed over and over and over that I never lost a key. So I stole and I drank and I smoked marijuana and lived a life in parallel, Thomas the twin.
The most pivotal factor in overcoming fear consisted of my recognition that no greater horror awaited me that could surpass what I already had experienced. What on the outside possessed the capability to frighten me when the devils within had haunted me for my entire life? And why do my dreams keep me awake at night?

Copyright 2010 Thomas F. Hofmann