Imagine living your life totally without fear. Do you think it would turn out well or not? You wouldn't fear death, disease, poverty, pain, heights, wild animals, rejection, public speaking, loneliness, darkness, etc. It sounds promising at first. You'd finally be free of the heaviest shackles mankind has ever known. Think back to Louis Mackey's monologue in the film Waking Life (2001):
What are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic -- fear or laziness?
Is that what happens to most of us? We don't realize our full potential because we're either too scared or too lazy? Possibly. Maybe, without fear, we would be elevated to the next level of human evolution and make advancements in everything from art to technology to medicine. Or maybe fear is the only thing keeping us in check, and without it, we'd all just become insensitive jerks who end up harming and even killing ourselves and others for no good reason. Fear might be the only thing that's been keeping us alive all these centuries.
These issues are at the heart of "Fearless Malph," a very memorable episode from Happy Days' sixth season in 1978. The bizarre plot has cowardly Ralph Malph (Don Most) being hypnotized by a mad scientist (Hogans Heroes baddie Leon Askin) and becoming completely fearless as a result. Since Ralph is defined by his cowardice, what happens when that trait is taken away? Does he evolve into something better or does it just turn him into a jerk?
As a child, I spent my lunchtimes staring at the coked-out visage of Ms. Carrie Fisher.
Springview Elementary: a chamber of horrors.
The onset offallalways brings back memories of my own elementary school days. Unfortunately, most of those memories suck, and I would rather repress them than relive them. No offense to my former classmates, who have grown into thoughtful and friendly adults, but you scared the living shit out of me when you were children. Kids can spot weakness in a second, and I was lousy with it. I made the bullies' job too easy by being such a tempting and passive victim. (Fun fact: one of my childhood tormentors eventually did some prison time, a fate I had secretly predicted for him years earlier.) What would I have done differently, knowing what I know now about the world and about human nature? Just about everything.
Back in the early-to-mid-1980s, though, I was as clueless as they come. I mean, I was alert enough to realize I was not getting along well with my classmates, but I had no idea why that was or what I could do to change the situation. Walking to Springview Elementary School in the morning, I felt like a condemned man walking the green mile. I would not have known the words "alienated" or "ostracized" in those days, but both of those adjectives applied themselves manifestly to me. There was no sadder day on the calendar than the last day of summer vacation. I still shudder to think about it. For most kids that age, lunch and recess provide a welcome relief from class. In my case, it was just the opposite. At least in class there were rules and some semblance of order. The playground and, especially, the lunchroom were consequence-free zones where all sorts of torture, mostly psychological but some physical, was either tolerated or ignored.
Despite all this, I still have some residual affection for lunchboxes. I might have been part of one of the last generations in this country who actually got to carry the metal ones to school with them. These were banned years ago because -- and this should come as no shock -- horrible, bratty children were using them as weapons. That's how much kids suck. A second-grader gets a beautiful metal lunchbox in his possession, and his first thought is, "I should just straight-up brain somebody with this thing. It looks like it could cause serious injury." So now, metal lunchboxes exist only as collectibles for sad grown-ups like me. I don't actually buy them, mind you, but on especially lonely nights I do browse through Ebay and see if I can find any of the lunchboxes I carried as a kid. In fact, I think I can trace my entire youth through those long-gone food containers with their matching Thermoses. Let's take a trip down Pointless Nostalgia Lane, shall we?
(Note: I do not currently possess any of these lunchboxes. These are all pictures I yoinked off the Internet. Even if I did still have these, they wouldn't be worth anything because I treated these lunchboxes as carelessly as I treated all my possessions in those days. I was a profoundly stupid child.)
Flushing, MI's infamous "smiley face water tower." Photo (obviously) by someone named Bruce Larkin.
Childhood is a rich, flavorful stew of unresolved fears. I had a relatively uneventful upbringing, and yet when I cast my mind back to those early days, what rises to the surface more readily than anything else is the terror I felt at being so small and in a world that was so strange and often unwelcoming.
The town where I did most of my growing up was called Flushing, MI, and one of its few really distinctive features was a bright yellow water tower with a giant smiley face painted on it. We all called it (get this) the Smiley Face Water Tower, and although it was intended as cute and whimsical, it inspired within me a deep and restless dread. Why? Those eyes, man! Those unblinking, soulless eyes, always staring at you!
I first saw the SFWT at the age of six, and in retrospect it was probably the closest thing Flushing had to a life-size replica of the Lord God Almighty. As it happens, old Smiley has a peripheral but still-significant place in popular culture, as evidenced bythis 2004 write-up on the Roadside America website. A contributor named Dan McGraw reports:
There's a smiley face water tower in Flushing, MI. It got painted that way around the Bicentennial and occasionally gets repainted with the same design. For reasons I'm not sure of, it got nicknamed "Kick-boy-Face" by the local early punk rockers, and it kinda stuck. It has a drainage pipe that runs top to bottom, and it makes an awesome echo if you yell into it.
McGraw also says that there is a similar tower in the movie Natural Born Killers but does not specify whether it's actually the one from Flushing. (There are apparently many such towers in the United States.)
I have a couple of further comments to make about McGraw's review of the monument. I lived in Flushing for twenty years -- 1981 to 2001 -- and I never heard anyone call this tower "Kick-boy-Face." Not once. It was always the Smiley Face Water Tower. Moreover, during those two decades, I never noticed that Flushing had any sort of burgeoning punk rock scene. And if the tower's drainage pipe was particularly famous, I didn't know about that either. Mr. McGraw may be correct on all these points; his account just doesn't align with my own personal memories of the Smiley Face Water Tower.
What I recall was simply a giant, canary-colored monolith with a painted-on grin. As for its precise location, that's trickier to sort out. Flushing had at least two big water towers, and I seem to remember that the SFWT was near enough to my school that I could stare up at it from the playground. These could be false memories, though.
A quick Internet search reveals that there is indeed a water tower very near my alma mater, Springview Elementary ("Home of the Sharks"), but whether it's the infamous SFWT is impossible to tell. There's a Google Maps photo of the tower here, but it's taken from an angle that almost cruelly obscures the design. It looks like it certainly could be the one, but I'm not placing any bets on it.
UPDATE: A former classmate of mine, Denise Mercer Blackwell, has informed me that the SFWT was, in fact, the one next to the elementary school and provides this incredible anecdote, via Facebook: "It was across from the school. I remember in 6th grade Mr. D [that's Mr. Dumler, our sixth grade homeroom teacher during the 1986-1987 school year. - J.B.] had to shut the blinds because someone was on top of it, evidently going to jump, and we could not pay attention for all the emergency vehicles. I never look at that water tower without thinking of that day." I must admit, I had totally blacked that out of my memory. Thanks, Denise!
Daddy Long Legs or robot camels?
While Smiley loomed largest in my nightmares, I had a general fear of water towers when I was a kid. I was quite the Star Wars fan back then, and for some reason the towers reminded me of the heavily-armed All Terrain Armored Transports (aknown as AT-ATs or Walkers) used by the villains in The Empire Strikes Back. The animated TV show Family Guy referred to these fearsome machines as "robot camels" during its 2009 Empire spoof entitled "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side," but the Transports looked more like giant Daddy Long Legs to me. At least, that's how I saw them back then.
Anyway, a persistent fantasy/worst case scenario of mine in those days was that all the water towers of the world would spontaneously come to life one day and start stalking the earth on those long, spindly legs of theirs, crushing everything in their path and causing widespread destruction and panic among the citizenry. I pictured people running and screaming as they were being chased by the now-ambulatory water towers, which moved with a horrendously loud mechanical screeching, their footsteps landing on the ground with the weight of circus elephants.
Smiley, of course, would be leading the charge. Perhaps that was why he'd been grinning smugly all those years. He was just biding his time, waiting for the day when he and his water tower brethren could finally get revenge on their dreaded human oppressors.
Brian Hyland and the song completely misinterpreted as a kid.
You know which song scared the hell out of me as a kid? "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini." This will sound ridiculous, I realize. How could anyone be frightened by this totally innocuous, slightly risque 1960 novelty number about a young woman who comes to regret her choice in swimwear? Answer: because I was a kid at the time and kids' minds work in weird ways.
I'm not sure how exactly I heard this song at first, but I'm guessing it was because my mother had a 45 of it in her collection. While the rest of the world heard a fun little bubblegum pop tune about good times at the beach, I heard a song about a girl freezing to death in the ocean. The fact that the song was so light and upbeat only made it more horrifying: not only was the singer totally unconcerned about the girl, but he was actually making fun of her with this record.
Here are the lyrics that bothered me so much back then. (To recap the "plot" of song to this point, a young woman has come to the beach wearing the rather immodest garment of the title. Concealing her shame with a blanket, the damsel at first timidly progressed from the locker room to the shore. Now, having shed the blanket, she has secluded herself in the water and seems to be suffering from hypothermia.)
HYLAND: Now she's afraid to come out of the water And I wonder what she's gonna do. Now she's afraid to come out of the water And the poor little girl's turning blue. FEMALE VOCALIST: Two, three, four, tell the people what she wore! HYLAND & CHORUS: It was an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini That she wore for the first time today An itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini So in the water she wanted to stay FEMALE BACKING VOCALISTS: From the locker to the blanket! From the blanket to the shore! From the shore to the water! HYLAND: Guess there isn't any more!
The two lines that really bothered me were "The poor little girl's turning blue" and "Guess there isn't any more!" I cannot tell you the impact these lyrics had on my then-developing mind. Just so you know, this song no longer bothers me. I have it on my iPod, and it comes up in shuffle mode occasionally without causing me any stress. I can even now appreciate the cleverness of the lightly Latin arrangement, with the interplay between Brian Hyland and the sexy-sounding, flirtatious female vocalists -- not to mention the record's supreme use of cowbell. But when I was 4 or 5 years old, this song was a total nightmare to me. Kids, huh? Try to figure 'em out.
P.S. - This song was Hyland's first and biggest hit, and he was only 16 at the time. He'd go on to have other Top 40 smashes in the 1960s and 70s, including more serious tunes like "Sealed With a Kiss" and "Gypsy Woman," but none were bigger than "Bikini." So massive was the song's success that Hyland shamelessly copied himself with a sound-alike follow-up record that totally bombed. Here's that one. It's kinda fun, I guess.
The clearest visual representation I can give you of my life at the moment.
Iam at oncea skeptic and a soft touch.
It's all fake.
I am a skeptic in that it is very, very difficult to truly convince me of something. I am deeply wary of virtually everything -- every person I meet, every philosophy I encounter, every emotion I experience.
When faced with a new concept or ideology, I'm always suspicious there's a catch to it or that the whole thing is merely a false front, like those sets built for movies or plays. From the front, a structure may look like an authentic Old West saloon. But if you simply walk around to the back, you see it's just a two-dimensional facade being propped up by wooden beams. That's how I approach life -- always looking for the seams along the edges, always scanning for the fine print. So there is very little in which I truly believe. I have the information relayed to me by my senses, and I have no guarantee that this information is truly accurate. It is only "meaningful" if I choose to assign it meaning.
On the other hand, I am a soft touch, an easy mark, a pushover. I fear and dread confrontation, and I long for the approval of others. Because of these tendencies, I am usually complacent and compliant. I am almost always the first to surrender. I am accommodating past the point of all reason. I will go out of my way to do something for someone else, but I will feel awful about doing it. I am far too nice, and I let other people take advantage of that fact. I find myself frequently apologizing to others, even when there is no need to do so. Sometimes, I feel I was put on this earth to absorb the negativity of my fellow human beings. I figure, all that negative energy has to go somewhere, right? Why not into me? Let me take one for the team, humanity!
Even though I am on "happy pills" now and attending therapy weekly, I am far from sold on the inherent worth of human existence. I am not angry, nor am I particularly sad. Currently, there is little in my life to anger or sadden me. My days tend to be gray and interchangeable, marked by dull routine and dominated by trivia. I suppose most people's days are like this... if they're lucky. We must never forget that many people live in absolute misery (due to illness, poverty, or political injustice) and do not even have the luxury of leading a boring, repetitive life like mine. They might well envy my monotony. What right do I have to yearn for more when others have less than nothing?
A metaphor approved by the ADA
Today, readers, was not a great day. Nor was it a particularly bad one. It was a day. Oh, I suppose work went fine, though I had to make more of an effort than usual to cope with the stress and to suppress the anger and resentment which I often feel inside when haggling with coworkers over topics which ultimately do not matter. Sometimes, when I am especially weary, I feel like a tube of toothpaste which has been flattened and spindled to the point that it has nothing left within it. But somehow, through a combination of stubbornness and medication, I am functioning and functional. Is that enough? I don't know. I sometimes feel like life is one great big exhibit at a museum. There comes a point at which the spectator has seen all he or she cares to see. Why can't I simply say that I am finished, that my curiosity has run its natural course? What is immoral about that?
This has not been a very inspiring post, and I am fine with that. Who says that the narrative of my recovery has to be an infinite incline or a never-ending crescendo? There are bound to be plateaus along the way. Today was one of them. That's all.
Goddamnit, I just want to go out and have a little fun. Maybe that's all I need. But I don't know how to do that. I'm 37 years old, and I don't know how to have fun. I don't know what fun even is. I don't have a concept for fun. Maybe I should get out to a public place. But I'd have to do so alone, and there is no experience quite so lonely as being unaccompanied in a crowd of strangers.
Right now, there is an episode of Glee in my DVR, waiting to be watched and reviewed. Based on past experience, I am fairly certain it will be mediocre-to-terrible, like most recent episodes of that ironically-named series. In all likelihood, my Friday night will consist of watching that episode, composing some e-mail feedback about it, and then going to bed. I have been awake for a long, long time now.
Tomorrow, I will rise again and confront the Big Meh. Wish me luck. Or don't. I don't believe in luck. The confrontation will happen tomorrow -- and every subsequent day of my life -- no matter what.
This is me shortly after my time in the hospital. Smile, darn ya, smile!
This will be a very different kind of poston the Dead 2 Rights blog. Depending on my whims, it might be the first in a series of very different posts. I don't know right now. I've just been through an experience and wanted to write about it, and I figured this place was as good as any.
First, some introductions are in order. My name is Joe Blevins. Although I've lived in Illinois for the past 11 years, I was born in Flint, Michigan in 1975 and lived in that area until 2001. I am 37 years old, live alone in a one-bedroom apartment, and currently make my living at a market research firm in Chicago. Single. Never married. No kids. Since 2008, I've been contributing regularly to the Mail Order Zombie podcast as a character called "Wayne Kotke," and I've been writing this blog under his name since October 2009. In fact, we are just about coming up to the third anniversary of this blog. If you'd like to wish me a happy anniversary, please feel free.
I also suffer from anxiety and depression, and this week I was hospitalized for those conditions.
Let me explain. Depression is something I've had in my life since I was a child. It's always been a part of who I am. If I have a sense of humor, that humor is informed by my depression. As silly as they are, my posts on this blog and my segments for MOZ are manifestations of my feelings of inadequacy and sadness. They're my attempts to channel those emotions into something positive. I'm not sure how well it has succeeded, but if you have derived any pleasure whatsoever from my work, that is deeply satisfying to me. Thank you.
I'm not exactly sure where the depression comes from. I was raised in a stable and loving middle class home, and I have no major illnesses, handicaps, or chemical addictions. I was bullied and ostracized frequently as a child in school, though, and I think this is where a lot of my fear originates. I have a deep, stubborn distrust of others and a formidable fear of rejection, so it is difficult for me to make connections with other people. It's fortunate that, either thanks to geographical convenience or participation in extracurricular activities, I always had a support system of friends through those troubling school days.
Your blogger in high school
However, all of my problems intensified in 1993 when my mother died of cancer. I was in my last year of high school at the time, and I was closer to her than to anyone else in my family. My only sibling, an older sister, left home a year or so later and wound up getting married and starting a family in Indiana. I was left alone with my father, who was shattered by my mother's death and still to this day has not totally recovered.
Post high school, I spent a very dark decade living with my father. During that time, while my friends went away to school and started their lives, I lived at home, commuted to college by car, and wound up working at a nearby call center as a customer service rep, a job for which I was especially unsuited. After high school, I lost touch with most of my old friends and never bothered (or risked) making new ones. This was the beginning of my still-ongoing reclusive stage.
In February 2001, I attempted suicide by taking every pill I could find in the medicine cabinet. After two harrowing days in the ICU and one very scary night in the psych ward, a locale that haunted me for years, I returned to working at the call center and living with my father. But this arrangement would not last long.
In August 2001, despite a lot of guilt-tripping from my father, I moved to Illinois in order to take a teaching job. Even though I was happy to be out on my own and living independently for the first time in my life, I soon realized that a person's problems travel with him when he moves to a new location. My old issues of fear, anxiety, and depression prevented me from being a good teacher, and I failed miserably at the profession for two grueling, discouraging years. By that time, I was so overwhelmed by fear and sadness that I didn't feel I could accomplish anything.
After a few miserable months of unemployment and inertia, I managed to land a low-paying temp job in an office environment in November 2003. All I wanted at that point was a place to hide away from the world, and a cubicle at this company would provide that. So I stayed with that temp job until it turned permanent, and that's where I've been for the last nine years. Although it was extremely boring and repetitive, it was also quiet and stable. Best of all, I could do the job with very little human interaction.
I have not exactly "thrived" in this job, but I have survived for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, though, my social life was nonexistent apart from my participation in a local community band. Even there, I tended to be shy, sullen, and withdrawn. Still to this day, any public performance fills me with fear. Don't get me wrong. The band has brought me a lot of happiness, and I have met some genuinely nice people there, but I don't know if I'll ever be 100% comfortable with it.
In the last few years, my workplace environment has been changing rapidly and frighteningly. The financial crisis has meant rounds and rounds of brutal layoffs, all of which I have (thus far) survived. A few months back, our company was bought out by a rival. Not only has this meant more layoffs, but existing jobs have been consolidated. One person will now be doing the work of two or three. This is how my most recent crisis occurred.
This Monday (October 22), my supervisor was taking a vacation, and I was attempting to fill in for her while simultaneously doing my own job. I genuinely felt I could handle this, but the day was plagued by technical errors and computer setbacks that I could not solve. I found myself talking in endless, circular arguments with coworkers, and eventually my brain just stopped processing information.
After 11 hours without a break and with many problems left unresolved, I simply left the office and took a commuter train home. I could not sleep that night and began having unspeakably dark thoughts. Remembering my horrifying experience from 2001, I decided to call the National Suicide Prevention hotline at around 2 in the morning on Tuesday, just a few hours before I was supposed to wake up for work. I spoke with an operator there for about an hour, and she advised me to go to my regular doctor and get a referral to a therapist or counselor.
I called in sick on Tuesday and was attempting to make my way to my doctor that morning. I don't have a "family doctor" per se, but there is an immediate care facility that I have used for colds, earaches, etc. I must not have been thinking very clearly at the time, because I literally did not get beyond the first block before having a minor fender bender. Even though neither car appeared damaged, the other driver was apoplectic and immediately called the police.
When the officer arrived, I desperately told him my story. He summoned the paramedics, and they took me to the nearest hospital, where an ER doctor made the decision to hospitalize me. This particular place was out-of-network for my insurance, so I was transferred by ambulance to a behavioral health center in another town. (Does it help my story at all if I tell you that the ambulance drivers were two extremely dim-witted guys who initially drove me to the wrong hospital and bickered back and forth about which streets they "should have tooken?" Sad but true.)
Don't worry. The stamp washes right off.
From Tuesday afternoon to Friday morning, I was a patient at the behavioral health center, which seemed to be part of a much larger hospital. If you're thinking it was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Shutter Island, you've got the wrong idea. It was more like being held captive at a combination of a summer camp and a Motel 6.
Yes, it was humiliating to have to surrender my belt, shoes, and wallet. And yes, the food was terrible. (It is the tilapia that will haunt me from this experience.) Most of the people were quite nice, though, and there were only one or two people with obvious mental illness. The majority of the patients were like me -- average-looking sad sacks who just seemed burned out and overwhelmed. We had group meetings several times a day, and I was an active and cheerful participant in nearly every one of them.
The comment I heard the most from my fellow patients was: "You seem so positive! Why are you here?" Honestly, I didn't know. I mean, I could retrace my steps and understand how I had gotten there, but somehow it didn't quite feel "real" to me. I used the opportunity of the program to work on my social skills and made a point to introduce myself to as many staff members and patients as possible. The patients, especially, were generally bright, funny, and friendly individuals. Perhaps some of us will stay in touch.
In any event, I "graduated" the program with flying colors. My doctor was very impressed by my progress and moved up my release from Monday (October 29) to today (October 26). Having no relatives or friends in the area, I took a $40 cab ride back to my apartment this morning. I am now supposed to be taking Xanax, Celexa, and drugs for sleeping and for lowering blood pressure. My blood pressure shot up about 30-40 points while I was in the program even though I was outwardly very calm, upbeat, and composed. Maybe it was my body's way of protesting.
I am home now, back in my little apartment, and I am quite comfortable. It's nice to be able to write on this blog again, since patients were not allowed to use computers while they were on "the unit." My hospitalization is behind me now, but this problem is not merely part of my past. I still have to conquer my depression and anxiety, and this time I really want to do it right so that I can finally start living my life to the fullest. (I know that's an odd thing for a fictional zombie to say, but there you go.)
Phew! This was a tough post to write, but I'm glad I got it out there. I'm trying not to be embarrassed about my condition, and I want to be able to talk about it openly and honestly. I'm sorry if this was a little heavier or more depressing than you wanted, but here's a song that might make up for it. I think this song is going to be my personal recovery anthem.
P.S. - Here's a Zomby from before my hospitalization. Enjoy it before the happy pills cure me of my creativity.
