Chicken Soup for the Damned

Table of Contents:

1. Finding the Real Me in the Slough of Despond
By Bede the Fornicator

At first, I was shocked to find myself being repeatedly devoured and excreted by Satan. I knew it was possible, of course, given that I’d bedded my fiancée and hadn’t had a chance to repent before I fell down a well. But still, it took time to adjust. The real surprise is how many friends I’ve made here. We don’t have a lot of time to compare notes, busy as we are being chewed, swallowed and defecated onto a dung heap of sinners, but on the other hand we do have quite a lot of time, actually, and I’ve discovered that I’m a very good listener…

2. I learned a goode lesson
By a naughty Puritan childe

Being engulfed in scorching flames for all of eternity after exploring my genitalia in the nursery has certainly taught me a life lesson! Father Bunyon tried to warn me with his picture booke, but sometimes you have to fall shrieking into a fiery pit of boiling pitch to fry, scorch and broil forever before that little light of wisdom winks on. Now that I’m more mature and my genitals have more or less evaporated, I can concentrate on what really matters…

3. Savoring the Sweetness of Each Day
By Ballios the demon

When life gives you lemons, add them to your recipe for roast heretic in garlic sauce. No, I’m kidding. There aren’t any lemons in the Sixth Circle of Hell. It’s too arid. The point is that you should never take being mindlessly and relentlessly evil for granted. If you feel things are becoming repetitive, try shaking them up a little. Select a different route to Satan’s Hellmouth in the morning, or trade red-hot pincers with a friend. Eternity is only as rewarding as you make it…

4. Everything Happens for a Reason
By John Calvin

Having articulated the doctrine of predestined souls, I have to take it on the chin now that I’ve died and discovered I was predestined to roil in a river of molten lead while demons gnash their teeth and whip me with scourges for no apparent reason whatsoever in terms of what I actually did with my life. So much for preaching two sermons on Sunday and burning libertines at the stake. Might as well have tumbled the maid. I could have stuffed myself with unleavened Eucharist bread until I passed out. Why didn’t I just dance around the streets of Geneva with a pinecone shoved up my arse, stabbing followers of Luther with my pen?
But, the thing is, you can choose to be bitter, or you can choose to be somewhat bitter but also nicely vindicated. As I, myself, so assiduously asserted, God adjudges some to eternal death…

5. Sometimes, you’re your own worst wrathful deity
By Bodhidharma Donaldson

My friends at Shasta Abbey warned me that death’s bardo realm would feature projections of my own mind, but, even so, it can be hard to look yourself in the mirror and say: ‘Yes, that’s me: a six-faced deity brandishing weapons and riding a cow.’ No one wants to feel like that. Really. It’s like admitting you’re overweight.
I am not going to lie to you, I almost got reincarnated as an aloe plant because I panicked when I first saw the projected diety Yamantaka, and rushed for the nearest birth exit. Realizing that this was all just my own negative psychic energy was the best thing that ever happened to non-me…

At the eleventh hour, Muldoon found the place, where a core group of fans already awaited him. Thank God. As he later wrote in the incomparably funny anthology, Mortification: Writers’ Tales of their Public Shame, “the core audience turned out to be the entire audience.” But he was a professional, an internationally respected writer and thinker. He owed it to them not to storm out. “At about five minutes past seven I got up and launched into my first poem. It was met with smiles and glances. They liked me. They really liked me. The second poem was guaranteed to knock them dead. But just before I’d got to the end, one of my fans put up her hand and asked me how long I expected to be. What? The thing was, these students were involved in a study group and had settled in this empty classroom in the hope of finding a little peace and quiet.”

Ah, the ignominy. Every thinker has experienced these sublime moments of humiliation, which Mortification’s editor, Robin Robertson, attributes to the “inherently ridiculous conjunction of high-mindedness and low income” that dogs the public intellectual. There is the author, I remember, who gamely did a reading in a dimly-lit bar in honour of the one person who had actually shown up, only to realize, at some point, that the loyal attendee was a life-size cardboard cut-out of Willie Nelson. There is Margaret Atwood on tour in the 1970s, discovering that her reading in Calgary was to be held in the bra department of The Bay.

For years, the quandary was how to convince the marketplace that interesting thinkers really were interesting, even if you’d never seen them on TV. What was needed was a platform, plus the sparkle of marketing magic—a sort of American Idol stage where the only thing the Paul Muldoons, and young Margaret Atwoods, and shy scientists and tinkerers of the world had to do was show up. Instead of belting out a version of “I Will Always Love You,” they could talk about aqua-farming, or brain strokes, or micro-finance in Bangladesh. They could be coached; their presentation could be polished. If you marketed the idea that ideas were cool, you’d get an audience.

Enter the TEDTalk, and its slogan: Ideas Worth Spreading. Much has been written about how these carefully packaged talks, curated by Californian entrepreneur Chris Anderson, have become a global phenomenon. But I hadn’t been paying much attention—one way or the other—until I, myself, was asked to give one. Almost immediately, I saw the difference in being associated with a brand.

“You’re giving a TEDTalk?” my niece asked in awe last November, as if I’d just announced that I was dating Johnny Depp. “So?” I countered. “I’ve been talking myself blue in the face for years. What’s the difference?” I’ve always been a comfortable public speaker. I like making people laugh, and going off on unexpected tangents that I pull back around at the last minute. It’s a chance to be playful—with language, with people. But this was apparently bigger. It was what TED organizers call “the chance to give the speech of a lifetime.”

Uh-oh. The more excited friends and colleagues got about my giving a TEDTalk, the more my natural confidence wavered. I got a note from some TED people politely requesting to see my power point materials well in advance, to ensure they were up to snuff. I was told to make a phone appointment with a TED coach. I was asked to be funny, and to try to mention gadgets, as TED audiences tend to like seeing fancy innovations.

Given that my speech was about grief and spirituality, I wasn’t sure where to fit in a pen that can be recycled as a plant, or a smart shirt that senses your temperament. I went onto YouTube and looked at other TEDTalks, and noticed that most speakers made a slight clacking noise as they talked, indicative of an anxious dry mouth.

I began fretting about how to memorize the talk, convinced for the first and only time in my life that I would mount the stage and go blank, staring slack-jawed as a cow. It was an absurd proposition, but the more I considered it, the more nervous I became. I contemplated writing key sentences on my hand, a la Sarah Palin. Or embedding cue cards, somehow, into my power point visuals.

The day of the event, I was hiking in the Arizona desert, breathless from respiratory flu, and a loose-limbed herd of university students came chattering around a seguro cactus. “Hey!” called my hiking companion, who was the gregarious organizer of TEDx Tucson, “what are you guys doing tonight? You should come to TEDx!”

“Wow!” cried one of the girls. “I love TEDTalks!”

He gestured toward me: “She’s giving one.”

“That’s so cool!” said the college kids, but didn’t ask about my topic, which was just as well. I was wheezing.

Shortly before seven, we speakers assembled in an air-conditioned auditorium at the University of Arizona and took our seats as the crowd milled in, preparing to go up one after the other and deliver the speeches of our lifetimes. There was an astronomer, an anesthesiologist, and a man who was doing something innovative with corn. Another fellow had been shot alongside Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and spoke about survivor guilt. Someone else talked about gang violence. No one appeared to have any gadgets, which was problematic, since my opening joke was going to be about not having a gadget.

Ordinarily, I would have adjusted my opening line on the spot, fine-tuning my speech to suit the context and the mood of the audience. But I’d managed to work myself into a state of such high alarm that going off-script was inconceivable. As the penultimate speaker, I had just spent two hours shivering in the air-conditioning and violently suppressing a flu cough. My muscles were so tense, and my mind so jangly that I went on stage with all the presence of an electrocuted cat. This is not the ideal body language for delivering a deadpan joke. About gadgets.

The audience was silent as a crypt. My legs began shaking. I developed a surreal split-consciousness, where I was aware that my mouth was somehow going ahead with the memorized talk, while my brain ran its own commentary: “Holy fucking Christ, I’ve never been so embarrassed, it is actually possible that I’m going to fall over due to the ongoing instability of my legs.” Needless to say, the prospect was distracting. (Later, I would be reminded of an elementary school talent show we went to, when one of my daughter’s six-year-old classmates performed a bit of ballet, peed her pants, and then cried out in wonder, “Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m peeing my pants on stage!”)

Somehow, through years of experience I suppose, I pulled myself out of nosedive about three figurative inches above the ground and recovered my equilibrium. The next joke I made had the audience laughing, and by the end I’d spread my idea sufficiently that people came up to me afterward to ask questions. The astronomer even shook my hand. People are generous. They are also, on the whole, inattentive. If you make them laugh, even once, or give them a sentence or two that strikes them as interesting, that will tend to be what they come away with.

One cringingly hopes.

This whole week I’ve been in OCD loops, checking social media and working unproductively and brooding away, watching the unfolding of events in Ottawa with the First Nations, who are finally standing up to Canada. It’s momentous, and riveting for those who understand what’s going on psychologically for them, as opposed to many Canadians who can only assess the whole thing in terms of political posturing and corruption.

Lots of folks don’t get it. This is not about ‘our’ way of wheeling and dealing, finessing talking points and strategizing about how to win points, how to manipulate deals. Quite the contrary. This is the upwelling of an identity movement, an assertion of cultural nationhood, a quest to reclaim a lost yet deeply cherished soul.

“What do you think the chiefs hope to gain from this meeting with the prime minister,” I keep hearing journalists ask experts. The very question is wrong.

The mere standing up and standing together is, for First Nations people, a gain. The mere act of having a collective banner that is being waved from San Diego to Australia – Idle No More – is what they are seeking to gain.

What did Rosa Parks “seek to gain” when she sat elsewhere on the bus? She was simply saying, “no more.”

Why should they meet where the Prime Minister deems them to meet? Why should they participate in a ridiculous ceremony of High Tea with the lapdog Governor General? Bullshit. No more.

I read the comments beneath news articles with a fascinated sense of horror, at how disconnected peoples’ understanding is from what the First Nations feel. On the one hand, you get so-and-so, posting underneath a CBC article about “natives facing up to their accountability to tax payers once and for all.” As if they’d somehow been parachuted into our country as fully-formed welfare bums, rather than negotiating treaties that allowed us to become one of the richest countries on the planet, in exchange for adequate education and healthcare, which we’ve invariably failed to provide to the point where First Nations children are literally sitting in classrooms filled with toxic mould.

Hunger strikes are deflections from poor audits. Lazy natives blaming their sloth on past grievances – ‘cause really, no one is throwing spoons at their heads in border cities to Indian country, like Thunder Bay. No one is raping and murdering their daughters without much police interest on the highway of tears in B.C. Really, all Canadians have been paying alert attention to the official, national Truth and Reconciliation Commission crossing the country for the last couple of years to heal the barbaric wounds inflicted by the Residential Schools. Right?

And then you follow a Facebook post from a First Nation friend at the teepee on Victoria Island in Ottawa, rhapsodizing about the shift in spiritual consciousness she’s witnessing in everyone who is coming there – the Elders, the young people, the Chiefs. There’s a never-turn-back feeling on their part. Elation. Relief. They’re done with being taunted and humiliated. The very act of telling Stephen Harper that they want to meet at their place, not his, is what they are gaining.

The truth is, this is Canada’s civil rights movement getting underway, and it’s totally historic and compelling, but the majority of the country doesn’t see it happening yet.

Karla Homolka, freed from prison in 2005, who scampered off to a new life, left to her own devices by a stunningly passive media until the intrepid journalist Paula Todd tracked her down this year. It emerges that she’s now a bored resident of Guadeloupe, raising three small children under an assumed name with her lawyer’s smitten brother. She’s in the Hell that the novelist Kelly Armstrong so brilliantly imagined for serial killers in one of her books, where they live in bucolic cottages and nothing ever happens. No power, no danger, no frisson of taboo excitement, just babies whining and toddlers demanding more juice. I can’t begin to imagine what motivates her now, reinventing herself as the Good Wife. But I know what I thought of her then.

My original profile of Homolka has been posted as an eBook, which you can find here: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Behind-Every-Successful-Psychopath-Why/book-zGbZotjVbU2iBYvGZVpSgw/page1.html

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/patricia-pearson/

Things to Fear and Loathe

 

Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

TAGS:

ANXIETY, FEAR, MENTAL HEALTH, PHOBIAS

 

 

A friend recently told me about a new app for the treatment of phobias. You stare at pictures of dental drills, snakes or airplane interiors, depending on your affliction, and these totems of menace  — interspersed with reassuring images of teddy bears  — gradually cease to provoke you.

Does it work? We can’t know. My friend has a phobia of stuffed animals. It’s something, he says, about the soulless glass eyes. We were talking on the phone, but I could picture him shuddering.

I, meanwhile, feel fine about snakes, jets and needles, but am haunted by heights and clusters. I haven’t seen apps for those, at least not yet.

The phobic can pour all dread into one vessel, and then swiftly run away. 

Of all the manifestations of anxiety, specific phobias are by far the most idiosyncratic. About 6 percent of Americans have an acute fear of animals like rats and birds. But after that, the sources of terror are myriad.

Why objects bunched tightly together should send me into states of high alarm, I cannot say. My daughter once festooned a sock puppet with googly eyes from the craft store, and when I encountered it in the house, I reared like a spooked horse. Being a conscientious mother, I managed to conceal my sense of horror, but she has since witnessed my reaction to stands of mushrooms in the woods, and to dandelion buds in the grass.

There is something  — some hint of unchecked growth, of aggressive profusion  — that I spy in certain geometric arrangements. Could it pertain to disgust, a burgeoning field of research? Might the underlying fear be one of chaos, or of the rapidly multiplying cells in cancer?

Perhaps. On the other hand, maybe not. One attempts to find logical causes for phobia at one’s peril.

There is no accounting, for example, for my friend Patrice’s abiding terror of mascots. Although she cannot swim, she once ran into the ocean fully clothed and shrieking when a man in a gorilla suit attempted to hand her a flier. On another occasion, she switched hotels in Orlando, Fla., to minimize her risk of encountering Mickey Mouse.

One could speculate about Mascot Zero, some clown or chicken who traumatized Patrice in childhood. But it might be entirely untraceable to any sort of triggering event. According to the psychologist Stéphane Bouchard, who studies phobia at the University of Quebec, about a third of phobias are indeed set off by direct exposure to frightening encounters, such as a dog bite. Roughly another third are culturally suggested: a classic example being the increase in shark and water phobias after the movie “Jaws.” With that final third, Mr. Bouchard told me, shrugging, “we just have no clue.”

Let me zero in on that final third.

“I have a fear of honeycomb shapes,” a woman once wrote to me when I solicited examples of phobias for my research. “I can’t look at something like a beehive. The other day, I saw a box of honeycomb-shaped pasta at the grocery store and it really creeped me out.”

Brian ReaCLICK TO ENLARGE

Another person wrote: “I am terrified of string. You know, when you have a loose string hanging off your clothes. Most people just shrug it off.” (Who knew?) “But I go insane until I get it off the item.”

Balloons, pigeons, boats, bald men, cotton batten, garden peas. These have all acted as the culprits, according to reports I’ve received, in making otherwise reasonable human beings assume the visage of Edvard Munch’s screamer. People fear chins, condiments, towels, cut fruit.

The object appears to be irrelevant, in many cases, beyond its subconscious assignation as the Very Thing to Fear.

Oddly, this act of transmuting anxiety into fear does possess a kind of logic. Anxiety has been described as fear in search of a cause, and there’s little question that fear is more actionable. Instead of being paralyzed by a sense of directionless menace, as would be the case with a generalized anxiety disorder where danger is everywhere and nowhere, the phobic can pour all dread into one vessel, and then swiftly run away.

In other words, phobia can be a form of compartmentalization.

Aaron Beck, a great thinker about cognitive distortions who founded the Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out multiple levels of displacement in phobias. A fear of flying, for instance, can relate to acrophobia (fear of heights), or to claustrophobia, or it can be a stand-in for a much more threatening prospect that dare not be confronted at any cost, such as the death of a parent. You’re avoiding grief, and the next thing you know you would rather be trapped in an elevator with bees than board an airplane. The airplane is departing for another world but no, that’s too obvious. We are not simple creatures, we human beings, and we know it; yet we still insist on imposing simple explanations upon our emotional conduct. “They’re just freaking dandelions, Mom,” my son tells me. It’s just a garter snake. They’re merely peas. How in the world  can you be so idiotically afraid of clowns?

There are wider implications here for our civic and political discourse. Certain people may be neurologically prone to anxiety, true, but fear is also circumstantial. The current economic climate is extremely anxiety-provoking, and research has shown that people can tolerate uncertainty for only so long. At some point, the neurotically wired begin to prefer negative certitudes  — or compartmentalized threats  — to ambiguity.

If we cannot tolerate uncertainty, then it might be reasonable to expect an increase in phobic behaviors:   xenophobia, Islamophobia, Obamafear, a terror of newts. These aren’t stances that can be dealt with by counterargument.  They can be quelled only by exposure, by a reminder that the threat is symbolic, a stand-in. Let’s invite the enemy we  fear to dine, then, and rescue ourselves  from irrational conflict.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the recession, and how Top Talent is standing on a sand bar about two feet across with the ocean of market corrections lapping at its feet. Here’s a bit of satire I wrote recently that wasn’t quite right for The New Yorker, and I couldn’t think where else to put it but my blog:

“It’s tough to retain top talent. Everyone knows that. Industry leaders and high potentials need to be engaged and incentivized. You have to factor their demands into your business approach, you just do.

Take my business. I sew and sell hog bristle ponchos for craft fairs. As you can imagine, top talent demands thirty million dollars per year to work with me, or they’ll jump to the competition. It’s a non-negotiable. I understand that.

Last year, top talent took cabs to my farm in Virginia, and after I served them a $900 lunch featuring tenderly massaged and laser-slaughtered venison nested in organic dew, I showed them around. Very quickly, they noted the difficulty in coaxing sullen, uncooperative Berkshire sows into surrendering their snout hairs without kicking you to death.

Top talent won’t do this kind of work without a ten per cent bonus for every successfully harvested and rendered poncho because — look what you’re asking them to do. It’s risky and specialized labor, very complicated. Not only does top talent have to shave the pigs, but they also have to glue all the snout hairs on to felt triangle shapes in my sunroom.

You need to pay them a bonus, and then you pay them more than that. One pig bristle poncho, size medium, without flaws, amounts to a bonus plus a free yacht.
Also, you have to honor expenses, like sewing patterns and personal investments in Singapore real estate.

That’s just how it goes with top talent.

Every now and then, when the market for repellant ponchos weakens, which can happen, you have to figure out how to keep your top talent on hold. You can’t let them get away. During the summer, I had to sell my private island in the Bahamas in order to finance my payroll, so that top talent could reorganize their basements and go heli-hiking in the Poconos while we waited for sales to pick up.

My old Harvard classmate Larry has assembled some of our fellow downsized classmates into a crack team of snowplow painting artists, and he understands the dilemma same as me. If you don’t pay his talent $1,000 an hour to paint Smurf hats and dinosaur teeth on Sno Way diggers in Syracuse, they’ll be poached by the city of Schenectady. What can he do? It’s that challenging to retain industry stars.

Here is another example I want to give you from my graduating class. I know a group of minstrels who used to work for AIG. You can hire them for your holiday party, and they will toot the flageolet and recount imaginary adventures from distant lands in singsong tones whilst attired in embroidered tunics, but they charge $400,000.00 per gig, and won’t even walk through the door without four ounces of complementary cocaine. Winning companies know that you need to encourage an atmosphere in which occasional failure is viewed as a necessary cost of doing business.

Meanwhile — and here’s the problem — top talent can start getting disengaged. Compensated, absolutely, but not necessarily interested anymore in the team’s overall objectives. How do you keep your top talent focused on the social, economic, cultural and mathematical importance of selling – in my case — hog bristle ponchos?

I’ve done some perusing of the literature, and I’m beginning to sort out a strategy. First of all, you have to stop forcing top talent to share the pain. They generally put in twenty per cent more effort than the other staff, and if you don’t recognize that, you will lose them. Smart managers reward the obsessed.

Consider it this way. I have this one guy who – everyone else leaves for the day, and he just hangs out in the barn and thinks about the pigs. He contemplates them as the moon rises over my farm. How can he strip them, he muses. Not just of bristles from their chins, but of costs to the company? Can he feed them air? What if he fed them recyclable Styrofoam coffee cups and a Vitamin E supplement? Would that locate the efficiencies that my company seeks?

I like this guy. He thinks outside the box. Air-as-food is the kind of idea you only see coming across your desk from top talent. I’d give him a bonus, beyond the bonus plus free yacht provision, except that, unfortunately, I met with my accountant last week. The best entrepreneurs hire bean counters who shoot from the hip. That’s what they do. So I trust his advice. He told me that I didn’t have any money.

Do I remember where I was? Of course I do. I was in the narrow backyard of my Toronto townhouse sitting at the picnic table polishing a chapter of my comic novel. Ambrose stood in the back door and said, sardonically, “you had better come and look at the television.”
“Why?” I asked, annoyed, for I was deep in thought.
“Just…” he waved his arm inward to our house “come now.”
I stamped across the garden to our reno’d mudroom, where the TV was kept.
“Manhattan’s on fire,” explained Ambrose, gesturing toward the screen.
And indeed that’s what we thought, the two of us in that moment. We hadn’t heard about planes flying into buildings and didn’t know the Towers had fallen. It was just this surreal cloud of billowing smoke over lower Manhattan, a shock all by itself.
No one in North America will ever forget that day. Every morning since has held the frisson of possibility that another calamity will ensue. It has coloured our expectations of the world ever since, every day. We may not be aware of this consciously, but for a decade, now, we have been vigilant to the prospect of jaw-dropping shock every time we turn on the freaking TV. Maybe that accounts for the intense popularity of shows like American Idol: the prospect that something will go insanely wrong on live television. And this time, we will be there.
I Dunno.
But it is a very long time to feel unsettled and uncertain. A very long time, indeed. My son has gone from being a toddler kept distracted by his babysitter on that 9/11 day to a soccer-playing middle school student raised in a social climate of apocalyptic thinking. My father has aged and died, my sister has been lost to cancer, I’ve published four books. Life has ambled on apace, and yet it has remained framed by that terror threat. Life has been intensely, subconsciously nervous.
I cited research in my book on anxiety about how people subjected to uncertainty wind up preferring negative absolutes to continuing ambiguity. The Devil you know is better than the Devil you don’t. An old aphorism with real wisdom. People solve the insufferable feeling of uncertainty by finding prejudice, which is to say: an actionable target. Something – anything – specific that they can react meaningfully to in order to diffuse the ongoing threat that they feel.
They can take concrete action against the target, whereas the uncertainty is maddening, what Clarice Starling felt searching the black-dark basement with her flashlight in the Silence of the Lambs, breathing carefully, as if every inward inhalation anticipated violent assault. People can’t live like that, for ten whole years. In a lightless basement. They need to locate a target.
Inevitably, then: Muslims are bad. Deficits are bad. Poor people/artists/immigrants are bad. Republicans are bad. Whatever, there’s a visible enemy.
Out of the ashes of 9/11 rise the toxic fumes of prejudice. Someone, somewhere, must be held directly to account for this lingering (and insufferable) sense of menace. If it isn’t Al Quaeda, because they are so diffused and underground and vague, and get spelled wrong, then it must be: the Mexican crossing the border and stealing a job, or the dance company that’s stealing “tax payer dollars,” or the builder of the “mosque at ground zero,” or the crazy spenders in government ruining our future by driving up the debt.
After the movie “Jaws” came out, people developed a phobia of sharks, which spread to a phobia of oceans and then to a phobia of water in general, including showers and baths. “Spreading phobias” is a well-documented phenomenon. And it is what 9/11 unleashed, ultimately, on the North American psyche.
The good news is that there is a cure for spreading phobia. In fact, phobia is the easiest of the anxiety disorders to treat. Exposure therapy works.
Expose yourself to Muslims.
Expose yourself to artists. (They also pay taxes, by the way.)
Expose yourself to the poor, as you are more likely than not going to be joining their ranks at some point soon.
Expose yourself to a Tea Party member, because they are motivated the same as you are, by love for what they have in their lives, and a fear that it will be taken away.