Thursday, April 4, 2013

Drinking, Fast and Sloe

My father did me a disservice. Because of his absenteeism, and alcoholism, and death, he deprived me of the opportunity to have a relationship with a father and left me vulnerable to the predatory instincts of other males. As a result, I, to some extent, haven't taken full consideration of my value as a father or the potential for collateral damage because of my behavior. I try to keep it together, to do for my kids what nobody did for me, support the family, be present, all against a backdrop of battling the darkness, of wanting sometimes to collapse into myself and avoid it all.
Leonard Cohen has called depression "a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next." And this: "You don't have time for anybody else. It's time-consuming. And, although I think everyone lives their life as an emergency, the emergency is acute when you're just trying to figure out how to get from moment to moment and you don't know why, and there are no operative circumstances that seem to explain."
In other words, you feel like shit and there's no obvious reasons to account for it. You look for causality, until you realize that a reason might not exist, doesn't need to exist. This book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, talks about causality. I don't understand everything he says, and I'm going to have to go back over it, more slowly, but he breaks down thinking into System 1 and System 2. This guy provides a summary. System 1 processes quickly, often without our even realizing that it does so. For example, most people I know have had the sensation of thinking something wasn't right, without realizing why. That helps us survive and is an evolutionary trait, perhaps more valuable when our ancestors encountered mortal threats more consistently than we do today. System 1 sometimes calls on the allegedly rational System 2 to help it out. That can be beneficial, since System 1 can sometimes lead us astray. But Kahneman calls System 2 inherently lazy.
So this got me to thinking (slow thinking, I guess). Sometimes I mention something to people, and they're like, "Where did that come from?" And usually I ask if they really want to trace the thread. It generally requires too much energy for me to detail the multiple-step process that led me to say something seemingly out of left field. For example, from my seat on the train a few days ago, I spotted a limousine. The limo made me think of a friend of a friend, someone I haven't seen in maybe 20 years. This friend of a friend started a limousine business, and he had an improbably attractive girlfriend. Once at a gathering at my friend's house, she was on the couch in a short skirt and we all saw her underwear. She eventually left him for a fitness trainer. My friend's mother died recently. At the viewing, I saw his sister. She wore pants in college that had something written across the butt. So, I saw a limo, and the end result was me thinking about a friend's sister wearing sweatpants a few decades ago with something written across the butt. If someone had been with me, I might have said something about pants with writing across the butt. And that person might have thought, "What the fuck?" And I would have said something like, "Well, didn't you see that limo out there?" and then said that I didn't have the energy to trace the genesis of my thoughts to explain how I came to mention pants with butt writing. To take it a step further, her ex-husband's mother allegedly used to iron his underwear. So, I could have seen a limo and asked a companion for thoughts on ironing underwear. Alas, I had no companion, which was probably just as well, but who wouldn't think about ass-writing and ironing underwear after seeing a limo?
Then I wondered if my System 1 or System 2 was operating in that instance. Because all those thoughts came to me in about 45 seconds. But I'm guessing System 2 came into play, retrieving those stored associations. I get fatigued thinking about thinking.
Which circles me back to Leonard Cohen's notion that dealing with the mental violence consumes so much time and how you have to figure out how to make it from one moment to the next. That violence can descend swiftly, without notice, and interrupt rare calm moments. At other times, it's just there, the prevailing sentiment governing one's life. And it consumes so much energy trying to fend off, well, your own thoughts, consuming you from the inside. And then you don't have the energy to clean the house or cut the grass or brush your fucking teeth. But you know what helps? Alcohol. Not the Kinks' rendition. Get a buzz on and cut the grass. Much more tolerable, even if it does involve potentially dangerous machinery. In an episode of "Breaking Bad" I recently watched, a character said pot and chemotherapy go together like apple pie and Chevrolet. So, too, I think, do alcohol and depression. The problem, however, is that it's not sustainable and also carries the potential for that collateral damage. The argument I hear from some people, including my psychiatrist, is that maybe I'd feel better if I abstained. Perhaps, but back when I didn't drink, or not nearly to the extent that I do now, I didn't feel good. I've developed my own therapeutic regimen. But, unsustainable. Pity. Depression and alcohol, a parasitic co-dependency. I'm lucky just to be alive, it serves me right that I survive. That's Robert Earl Keen, taken out of context. But at some point, I'm going to have to give abstinence a shot, at least for a while, and see how it goes.
My mother had an oft-repeated, likely apocryphal, story about how Babe Ruth stopped drinking after a kid asked him why he drank. I couldn't find any evidence to support the claim that he stopped drinking at all. Now I'll have to read a Babe Ruth biography. Anyway, my kid has expressed a similar sentiment, through his mother. I guess he feels like he can't bring something like that to me directly. I wish he could, but sometimes I think he finds my personality overwhelming. So, the lack of an appropriate male role model for me and the absence of any bonding along those lines left me without much of an idea of how much a father, present, namely me, can have a bearing on a child. I know theories exist that say that it doesn't matter what we do as parents, that our kids will be who they will be. Bullshit. I think there's some truth to it, but it can't be taken unequivocally. We want to feel like we matter, and I believe we actually do. So I need to be even more attentive, because it doesn't come naturally, flowing from a positive frame of reference stemming from a relationship with my own father. I do hug my kids daily, though, and think what even that simple gesture could have done for me as an anxiety-riddled child, and the comfort I might have taken from a father saying goodnight to me as I lay in bed fearing the nocturnal onslaught from my own mind while asleep. The inverse can obviously be true, also, in which people who have shitty parents become equally shitty parents because they just repeat what they know.
Here's Kahneman's description in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"of our thinking processes:

Freely mixing metaphors, we have in our head a remarkably powerful computer, not fast by conventional hardware standards, but able to represent the structure of our world by various types of associative links in a vast network of various types of ideas. The spreading of activation in the associative machine is automatic, but we (System 2) have some ability to control the search of memory, and also to program it so that the detection of an event in the environment can attract attention.

What he's partially saying here, if I understand correctly, is that we've seen things before, so they're familiar and also associated with other things. We can't help but make such associations, so maybe it was all System 1 when I went from seeing a limo to pants with writing across the butt and ironing underwear. Dogs appear to have a similar system. They don't like surprises, and when something pops up that's alien to them, out of their comfort zone, they react. Same with us when a situation strikes us as different, even if we're not completely conscious of why. With depression, I'd guess triggers from System 1 cause System 2 to go into overdrive, and something seemingly innocuous can induce despair. An interesting question concerns why some people's Systems 1 seem to work so much more effectively than others' and the apparent differences in the Systems 2.     
Something else Kahnmena cites in his book:

The psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic n 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. He observes that "we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls." The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die.

 This seems to say we're predisposed to believe in God. That would certainly appear to be true, considering religion's reach. I would think System 2 would be the one to say, "Wait a fucking second, you're telling me that this lady conceived without having intercourse and her son eventually rose from the dead? And this other guy parted the Red Sea and brought locusts and all manner of assorted shit?" But if we're wired to be religious, why? Maybe it's another survival mechanism. Common belief, common cause, strength in numbers. Bloom, an atheist, says belief in the divine stems from an evolutionary fluke. Or maybe it just helps people to feel ok and rationalize away all the fucked-up shit.