Rilalities XIII

RilalyLeave a comment

“80% of success is showing up,” Woody Allen once said.

“So, what you’re saying is if I want to succeed, I should show up?” you ask. To answer that question, we ask another question, how many people don’t? How many apathetic and self-destructive types didn’t show up for the opportunities-of-a-lifetime Woody Allen received? Was Allan Stewart Konigsbeg (Woody Allen) the most talented person in his troupe, or did he show up so often that he got the job, the jobs, and the career that the apathetic and self-destructive did not, because they weren’t there.

In his book I’m Dying Up Here, author Arthur Knoedelseder suggests that Woody Allen’s 1978 Annie Hall winning numerous Academy Awards that year opened up all kinds of opportunities for standup comedians, comedic actors, and writers of comedy. Most of those who would land multiple picture deals would go onto be the faces of comedic humor in the ’80’s and beyond. The question is was Woody Allen funnier than those peers, or was he in the right place and the right time in Hollywood history?  

To listen to modern screenwriters tell their tale, Woody Allen’s story isn’t the type of story we enjoy. We’d much rather hear the story about “the kid,” “the natural,” or the one everyone agreed was the most talented person in the room who finally got his big break, and in the next scene, they’re asleep or dead with a heroin needle hanging from their arm. It happens so often on screen, that it’s a trope, but is it true? We’re sure it’s happened, but has it happened so often that it’s a truth, or do we just love to cringe so much that screenwriters feel compelled to write about it.

I can only imagine that the screenwriter tries to sell his script pitching about “the kid,” “the natural”, and the potential Hollywood producers asking “Okay, but where is the arc? What does the American public love more than anything else, the rise and fall. We build him up as the kid, the natural, and then, on the cusp of him finally realizing his talent on a national, worldwide scale his dysfunctional, self-destructive traits rear their ugly head. It’s the Freddie Prinze story. People love that story. They love to cringe.”  

It can be a little scary to put all of our potential to succeed, and all of our hard work, on the line. How many of us have the potential to succeed, and how many can stand before others, relatively anonymous and proverbially naked, to showcase our potential? Are you a fraud, or are you so confident that you’re just waiting for an opportunity to show your talent? Are you the type who creates your own opportunities, or do you wait for them to happen? If you’re the latter, will you not show up, because you’re afraid you’re not ready? Even if you’re “not ready” in a relative sense you’ve defined, that might just be your opinion. If Woody Allen’s quote holds any weight, it might redound to your benefit to show up anyway to see what happens.   

Some of us cringe when we hear tales of the dysfunctional and self-destructive types, others laugh, and we all feel sorry for them, but they’re the ones we replace. We’re the ones who show up and do it so often that we might overcome whatever relative level of talent we might have.

Showing up is also starting up. How many of us think about doing something, how many of us daydream, and how many of us actually do it? Showing up suggests that you’re ready to make it happen. You’ve surpassed the dream stage, and you’re there. You’ve shown up and you’re ready to work with others to make it happen.  

Stop Letting Your Bullies Bully You

There are few things that bother me more than watching a victim of bullying make their problem worse by the manner in which they deal with a bully. When I hear, read, or see a member of an audience become so offended that they’ve become outraged at something a standup comedian says, I say, “You’re going about it wrong! You’re doing it all wrong!”

There might be some exceptions to the rule, but my bet is every standup comedian was a former class clown/bully. The essence of the craft is such that it attracts guys and girls that someone, somewhere once called a class A jerk. (A class A jerk is someone other than the class D jerk who pokes fun at others for sport and backs down if anyone informs them they’re offended in anyway.) 

When real life darkened their door, most standup comedians admitted they didn’t know what to do. They were as lost, or more, as the rest of us. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if my predecessors didn’t do what they did in this craft to make it what is it today. Not only am I not good at anything else, I didn’t particularly like doing anything else.” What is it they’re doing, on stage, every night? What is it they enjoy doing so much that it saved them from the depths of despair? If we dig through all the particulars of the craft, we find that making fun of other people is the core of standup comedy. Where do you think they discovered their talent, and how did they hone it? They did it on your back, and your delicious tears told them they might be onto something. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.

One other special ingredient that defines the difference between most great comedians and the ones who never made it to the main stage, pushing boundaries. What does that mean? We think pushing boundaries is about filmmakers teaching us what we don’t want to hear, and it is, but it’s also about standup comedians telling us what we don’t want to hear. They’re mutually exclusive, diametrically opposed, and the same. Tell a standup that they can do anything they want except this, and this will be the only thing they want to do. Tell them that they can make fun of everyone, except these people, and a joke about those people will probably make it into their intro. My problem is not with standup comedians. We all know who they are. They’re bullies. The problem is with the offended. If the standup comedian is wrong, tell them why, and do it from a position of power not weakness.

If we ever effectively find a way to diminish, deter, or defeat bullies as a whole, the one detriment might be our inability to deal with bullies. The only solution we’ve found at this point is to inform them that we’re offended by something they’ve said. Who cares if you’re offended? Some do, of course, and there are probably more now than ever before who aren’t afraid to say that they’re offended, but I can tell you one person who doesn’t care, the offender. I’ve been offended by something a comedian said, and I always think that’s just one man’s opinion, and it’s not an informed one. (I use the term offended, here, for the purpose of illustrating a point, because I can’t think of any comedian who has ever offended me.) You getting offended is exactly what the offender wants. It’s what their audience wants too. How many nice guys finish first in the world of standup? What is it .0001% The nature of the beast is such that if a comedian goes clean and tries to avoid offending anyone, the audience might chuckle politely, but the chuckle will be soft and almost internal, as they wait for that hurtful haymaker to punctuate the joke. Most good guy, clean comedians are widely regarded as too safe to be truly funny. We, as a whole, want our standup comedians risqué, we want them to push boundaries, and we want them to speak out against unsafe targets. Who are the unsafe targets though? That’s the question skippy, and that’s the point Howard. The unsafe targets have shifted from my guys to your guys, and from my issues to yours. We didn’t handle it well, claiming offense and outrage, and now you’re doing the same. 

If this is true, wow do we stop the mean-spirited comedian then? I don’t think you do. I think they love it so much there’s nothing we can do or say to stop them. You can see it on their face. They were born to do this, they love it, and they wouldn’t want it any other way. They define your offense as effective penetration. Their audience, comprised mostly of former bullies and class clowns, love it too. Do we get in their face and try to mow them down? Have you ever been bullied by a class A jerk? They’re unusually very good at what they do. They’re often unusually smart, and not only are they smart, they’re quick, and not only are they quick, they’re funny. It’s often that final nugget, funny, that just tears into our soul. They come up with material quick, and how do we defeat them? If it’s a class A jerk, we’re on their turf when we’re trying to outfunny them. The only way to defeat them is to switch the playing field to our internal home court and outdo them there. If we can convince them, there, that they’re not getting in, we’ll take all their fun out of it for them. That’s all I got, and I know it’s not great, but it’s obviously better than everything you’ve come up with thus far. You’re encouraging them and making them think they’re onto something when you declare that you’re offended. You’re making it worse.   

Crazy Joe Davola

Crazy Joe Davola (actor Peter Crombie) has died, and Fox News reports that his friends suggest that even though “he was cast as a bad guy on Seinfeld, and he played numerous interesting and complicated characters, including Bernard Goetz, he was very sweet in an old-school way. When not working as an actor on stage or in front of a camera, he was genuinely humble, preferring others to talk and take main stage.  He was always helpful, giving and funny. He was one [of] the kindest, soft-spoken, loving and caring people I have ever met. A gentle giant.” It’s a fitting tribute, but it’s not funny? We might not want funny to be on site forever more, but in private, on stage, I think Peter Crombie would’ve loved it if someone, someone like Lewis Black, offered Crombie a comedic sendoff. “It wasn’t much of a challenge for Peter Crombie to play the awful characters he did, because he was awful. He was an awful human being. I remember one day he saw a kid with ice cream, and he stole it. He didn’t want their ice cream. He didn’t even like ice cream. He would pitch it in the nearest receptacle. He did it just to do it. Just so he could say he did it. He said that he liked to hear kids cry. “The younger the better,” he said.”   

Review of Self-Reliance

If there’s one thing an aspiring writer can learn from the movie Self-Reliance, it’s that your audience doesn’t want anything bad to happen to the fictional characters of your stories, until they nothing does. Leaving out all of the other particulars of the plot, the primary plot of this movie is that a bored, lonely man is offered a proposition. If you can survive for thirty days, with murderers trying to murder you, we will give you $1 million dollars if they are unsuccessful. There is a catch for the murderers, however, they cannot kill him if he’s within three feet of another person. The need to have someone near him, leads the character to realize that in his life before the contest he forgot to make real, human connections throughout his life, and he forgot to live life to the fullest. That underlying theme would’ve been engaging if, IF, it was properly balanced with the character narrowly escaping harrowing threats. The problem with this movie is that this viewer (you might be different) never feels the threats are anything more than an excellent plot device to sell the movie. There are some threats made on the character’s life throughout the movie, but they are easily, too easily, vanquished. This reveals to us that the threats on the character’s life are basically ancillary to the underlying theme. It’s as if the writer said, I want to write a post-COVID script that reminds the audience of the need for human connection and companionship. The problem is how do we go about writing about that without getting too gushy? I got it. Let’s develop a contest for the character in which he needs to have people around him. All of that would be fine, except the writer/director forgot to concentrate enough on the threat therein. 

Anyone who watches this movie will realize as much as we don’t enjoy cringing, we enjoy cringing. We want to see scenes where the character stupidly gets into harrowing situations that he can’t possibly escape, until he does, and we’re awash with relief when he does. We want to experience the ups and downs of what it must feel like to have people trying to murder you. We want to scream, “Don’t go in there!” when he approaches the wrong door. We want to see pianos fall behind him while he’s talking on the phone, comically unaware of what just happened. We want to grip the arms on our chairs when a gigantic ball comes rolling after him, as he runs through a cavernous region in which there’s no lateral escape, and we want o see a poison-tipped arrow hit a guy standing somewhat near the main character after the main character bent down to pick up a piece of garbage that some rube just threw on the ground. “Hey, it’s called littering man!” The main character shouts at the litterer, as the man with the arrow in his neck, behind him, slowly falls gurgling to the ground. There can be humor intermingled in the tension, but we want/need the tension. What we get from Self-Reliance are all of the hypotheticals a man who must survive a scenario might have to go through to insure his survival. The movies is really about the social interactions a person might not go through if there wasn’t an ever-present, or in this case never-present, threat of death. My takeaways are that the movie accomplishes two things: It teaches writers what not to do with a thriller, and it leaves you with the weird, uncomfortable feeling that you actually want bad things to happen to fictional characters. Those of us who know and enjoy so many of Jake Johnson’s projects, enjoyed this one too. He’s a funny, interesting actor, and Self-Reliance is not a bad movie in anyway, except for that lack of threat, and the ending is more of a wrap-up than an exciting conclusion. The character basically tells us what happened at the end, and he shows us some shots that visualize what he’s saying. 

To Parent or Not to Parent

RilalyLeave a comment

When it comes to the prospect of parenting, an overwhelming majority of us hang between “I’m not sure if I’m ready” and a friend sitting us down with a “listen my friend, you’re definitely not ready”, but did you ever meet someone who was ready, at a very young age? Did you ever meet someone who was parent-material? I have, a couple times. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, as it’s not something that you can spot, but when you’re parenting, and you’re thinking “What the hell did I just do?” with that screaming kid on your shoulder, you think back on the Bills and Courtneys of the world, and you kind of wish you were more like them, sort of, and in a roundabout way.

They never complained about anything, and they never said a bad word about anyone. I’m not eulogizing them, because I’m sure they’re still alive out there, somewhere. They were just responsible, well-centered, strait-laced people who were so happy. As a student of cultural tropes, I expected to eventually find something scandalous about them, but there wasn’t. They were just happy, well-adjusted people who really enjoyed life, but I found them so boring I couldn’t be around them. They probably made some excellent parents though.    

The rest of us hang somewhere between between dysfunctional and self-destructive on a graph, and we need to seriously consider our level of sanity before having children. If I had a kid in my twenties, like the rest of you, that kid would probably be in a straight-jacket screaming something awful about my parenting skills in repetitive cycles. He would know how to read, and his math skills would probably be somewhere around adequate by the 5th grade, but all those interaction cues that we pick up from our parents would’ve been so out of whack that his pediatrician would’ve rushed him to a place where he could be monitored 24-7, or on some radical, experimental drugs that I would’ve had to sign off on.   

One of the 10 commandments of quality parenting that I would’ve failed most miserably is the “don’t be selfish” one. Don’t be selfish with your stuff, and don’t be selfish with your time. I’m sure I would’ve seen to it that he was fed, and I probably would’ve made sure he had clothing and all that, but the minute he started touching my stuff or saw to it that I couldn’t go out boozing with my friends, because he decided to show some signs of diptheria, I would’ve resented him for taking my fun time away.   

I know I was selfish, but are you? “No!” No one says yes, and very few say, “Well, maybe a little. Maybe in some circumstances, I might be a little self-involved, but who isn’t?” No, we all but shout a gameshow-quick “No!” answers that suggest we think there there might be prizes for a quick answer. There’s no gameshow button here, and there are no prizes, unless you count feeling better about yourself a prize. 

If you watch the same sitcoms I do, those that loosely revolve around parenting, you see parents with all this free time. Kid walks in the room, says something cute, and exits stage left. I understand that the show is not about the kids, but when I see these parents standing side by side with a sweet smile, looking down at a sleeping child, cherishing him, I wonder what we did wrong. When we put our kid down and he eventually slipped off to the dream world, we exited the room on tiptoes whisper screaming, “He’s down! He’s fricking asleep, finally! Thank you God!!!”

These sitcoms are all about the joys and love of parenting, but those of us who know some elements of parenting now, know that no kid exits stage left in real life. They’re center stage, about twelve hours a day, more if they don’t nap, seven days a week. And if these dependent, little sacks of flesh are not center stage, they’ll find unique and creative ways to get it, until they soak up almost all of your precious and ever-dwindling free time. 

That’s the one thing prospective parents should be ready to give up/sacrifice, more than anything else, before before you agree to bring something so needy and dependent into the world: time. 

Most of us have a very narrow definition of selfish. “I had a big bag of pistachios the other day, and I gave some of them to Henrietta. You saw that. You know I’m not selfish. I share.” Okay, let me rephrase the question, how much of your life revolves around you? If we’re as self-centered as we think we are, we might not be able to answer that question objectively. A better question might be, how frustrated do we get when our friends have to back out, last minute, on a planned, fun-filled night, because of something their kid did? 

Do you have that want, that need, for a-night-o’-fun out of your system yet? Check that question hard, because that could be the proverbial switch in the track that decides it. I know it did for me. I had to get it all out of my system before I was ready. Most people answer one way on Sunday, the morning after, but that answer changes somewhere around 6:00pm, on Friday, when everyone is off work, they’ve finished dinner, and they’re headed to the bar. I knew I wasn’t ready for the end of it for a long time, and I would’ve resented the wife and child for taking up so much of my free time if I rushed that decision. If I had a kid back then, I may have enjoyed spending time with them on my terms, but I can now tell you now, ten years in, that it’s rarely on my terms. 

To be fair to everyone out there, and ourselves, the definition of quality parenting is so relative that it’s almost impossible to define in an absolute. Some of us might surprise ourselves in the beginning, by being a responsible, selfless parent, but we always revert to who we were before we met this kid. The shock and awe of seeing them for the first time changes us. It is, as the old cliche suggests, a moment when you realize your life will never be the same from that point forward. Once a parent, always a parent, and all that runs through our head when we make those vows and promises to this tiny, little thing that we can spin on a finger, like a Harlem Globetrotter, and we live up to those vows and promises…in the beginning. In the beginning, we put our best foot forward when we meet them, like we did its mother. Our brothers and sisters might be in awe of our parenting skills. “Never knew you had it in you,” they might say, and we bask in the glow of that compliment, but everyone who knows us knows that we will eventually revert to who we were/are before we ever met the kid. That’s the person we need to interrogate beforehand, to find out if we’re too selfish, self-involved, or narcissistic to have a kid.   

“Are you responsible now?” I hated the ‘R’ word growing up. Everyone threw it at me. “You really need to act more responsible,” they’d say. Okay, but I’m seven. You know that right? “You are only seven, but you still act like a six-year-old.” Okay, I realize I don’t know much about this real-world you’re always going on about, but this childhood thing doesn’t last forever. You might not remember that, because, for you, that was fifty-three years ago, but there’s something about this childhood thing that leads me to believe I should be focusing on enjoying this as much as possible before it’s over. I don’t think responsibility should even enter my purview here, at least not until I’m eight, and I continued to think that way until I was about thirty-eight. “You can’t do that, you have responsibilities,” or “You’re in a position in life now where you have to be act more responsible.” The ‘R’ word was that annoying itch they put in my hair that I ran away from, screaming, for much of my life, because I wasn’t ready. 

I eventually had so much fun for so much of my life that it wasn’t as fun anymore. We all know the burning the candle at both ends phrase, and I was doing that. Except it wasn’t work, as most attribute that phrase. I was burning the candle at both ends with fun, great conversations, and moments that last forever, until they’re about releasing all the tension and stress from the work week. Are you ready to call an end to all that? How ready are you to spend your Friday nights at home binging on Spongebob, playing Chutes and Ladders, and reading the same Dr. Seuss book for the thirty-ninth time? When your friend calls you up and says they’re headed to the 18th Amendment, how frustrating will it be to say, “Sorry, kid’s got the runs, and no one wants to babysit a kid with the runs.” How much of your precious fun time are you willing to sacrifice to the relatively unrewarding task of raising a child? 

They say it’s rewarding. They say it’s the most rewarding job on Earth, and it is, when it’s all over and we think back. The good times are rewarding, as is the element of how much they’ve added to our lives, but how long does it take to get there? The kid doesn’t even appreciate it. “It’s your job!” they might say on the rare occasion when we humiliate ourselves by asking for a little appreciation. We might conveniently forget all the crap involved, and dung and vomit in between, if we’re lucky enough to live long enough to see them parent someone themselves. At that point, they might appreciate how hard it was for us to raise them, and they might turn to us and offer that one glorious compliment we’ve waited our adult life to hear, but they’ll probably qualify that by saying, “You did a lot wrong too. Here’s what I am not going to do.” 

“Where should your focus be, working on the marriage, or rearing the child?” a priest once asked us. “The child,” we answered in unison. The priest obviously engineered the question to get a wrong answer, so he could explain, “Quality parenting flows from a quality marriage. Not only does a quality marriage give a child the definition of a quality marriage, the foundation of a quality marriage provides a general sense of stability in a child’s life, and it provides them a definition of love and life from both the female and male perspectives.” Anyone who has lived through the death of a parent, or a divorce, knows how seminal these points are in childhood and the subsequent adult life. 

As I wrote earlier, it’s impossible to define the difference between quality parenting and poor, because that definition is so relative, but there are extremes. We all have flaws, good days and bad, but some of us are not systemically sound, and some of us loved dating those types. Some of us are almost instinctually attracted to the dysfunctional, self-destructive types. We don’t exactly know why, but we thought they were so funny, so mean, and so mean-funny. We don’t know who they remind us of, or if they were so unique to our experience that their captivating qualities reside in the idea that we’ve never met anyone quite like them before, but we climb all over one another to date them. They make us laugh, cry, and we feel so alive in their company that we might unwittingly become attracted to their chaotic merry-go-round. They’re exciting, dramatic, and different from day to day, but those qualities often don’t lead to quality parenting. Dating them might be another thing to get out of your system if your plans involve having a family, you might want to find the closest thing to normal you can find. 

There are a number of sites that list top 10 qualities of a good parent, or top 10 signs you are (Or will be) a good parent. We could list those, and even add some things you could do to find out more about yourself, beforehand, but parenting is one of those roles in life that is so relative and so day-to-day that we won’t know the final answer until we’re doing it, every day for months and years. We can know who we are in the now, however. We can ask ourselves a bunch of questions regarding our level of maturity, and our ability to handle responsibility, multitasking, and stress. We can also look around at our friends and focus on those couples who never should’ve become parents in the first place, and we all know those who should’ve known. Every parent thinks this at one point or another, temporarily, but as with everything else, there are extremes. There are those who never should’ve had kids in the first place. Some are so dysfunctional and so self-destructive that they aren’t parent material. Some had such a toxic and dysfunctional upbringing that they should seriously consider ending that horrible legacy. Those of us who have relatively normal dysfunctions and a relatively low level of self-destructive habits, who are still questioning whether we have what it takes to be a quality parent, should consider that nothing answers those questions better than time, and in my case it was a whole lot of time.  

Yesterday I Learned … VIII

RilalyLeave a comment

Yesterday I learned that the makers of South Park predicted that with the advent of AI a college degree in Geology might prove pointless sooner than we think. Being a paid Geologist, as with many studies in informational pursuits, will be relegated to the ash heap of history if AI proves a greater information resource than men and women pursuing answers to geological questions. “It might damage the human element of the profession as a catalog of facts,” supporters say, “but what about new discoveries and new information?” How does AI uncover new information in the field of Geology? Mathematics.

Today I learned that we discovered a planet called Neptune almost solely using mathematics. The planet Neptune is so dim that it cannot be viewed with the naked eye, so based almost solely on mathematical principles, some French guy predicted that a planet had to be acting on Uranus with a perturbing, or unsettling, force in a manner Saturn and the Sun were not. Using Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity and motion as a guide, this French guy theorized that Uranus’ orbits and movements were so irregular that there had to be a planet right … there, causing it. The ellipses in that sentence was filled with mathematical calculations and theories. That French guy was a fraction of a degree off.

I also learned that Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has recently progressed to something called Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.). The difference between the two is math. Most of the research to this point has led to progressions in A.I.’s ability to solve and resolve linguistic problems. The progression into math, or more general intelligence, has excited some and put the fears in a whole lot more.

Tomorrow we’ll learn that no matter what incarnation A.I. takes, it will always require some sort of human input. We fear the extent of A.I.’s capabilities now, but we feared the extent of the internet, yesterday, and the capabilities and unforeseen consequences of fire yesteryear. The gods punished Prometheus for introducing humans to fire. Some suggest the gods feared the progression of the human, others say that that the gods feared for the human race. They didn’t think the humans were capable of understanding the consequences of playing with fire.  

Yesterday I learned that nothing is original, particularly in the arts. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the Sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9. So, give up on the ‘O’ word, original, they say, and strive for the ‘U’ word, unique. Today I learned that Kilmister, AKA Lemmy Kilmister, AKA Lemmy, the lead singer of Hawkwind and Motorhead passed away. Listen to his music, watch an interview with him, or read about the man. If he’s not one of the most original artists you’ve ever heard, then you know this genre far better than me. If we don’t view Lemmy as an original tomorrow, I think we’ll at least acknowledge that he definitely gave new meaning to the Oscar Wilde quote, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.”

Yesterday I learned that “The death of a language occurs when young people, progressively refuse to speak it.” That’s so obvious that it’s hardly worth writing, but why would young people stop speaking their native tongue?” Steven Pinker writes about this as if it’s a bad thing, which it kind of is, when one puts it in the frame of a death of a language basically killing all links to a culture and the subsequent death of traditions and folklore of said culture. Today I learned that even though the Russian language is not even close to a fear of extinction, Russian parents prefer that their children learn English. They try to teach it in their home and they want it taught in their kids’ schools. These parents pursue this, according to the report, because they want more for their children. They want their children to speak a more universal language to hopefully open up more economic opportunities for them. This could include their children working in the service industry, the tourist industry, or some other industry that they hope will lead to their children an easier life than the one they had to endure. We can’t help but guess that their greatest hope/dream is that their children might find an opportunity that helps them escape Russia. Whatever the case is, they believe that their children continuing to speak something nothing but the “mother tongue” might limit their opportunities in life the way it did theirs. Tomorrow, we will see that most young people are self-serving. They might love their culture as it pertains to their love of family and the essence of their being, and they might want to continue the history and traditions of their culture, but if it does nothing more than romanticize the past, most young people will not carry the torch if it comes at the expense of what they perceive to be a path to personal gains, their personal happiness, or the intra-or-inter-personal connections they develop in life.

Yesterday I learned that one of the last individuals I’d ever expect became a drug addict. If we all sat in a room, with all those we all know and love, and someone asked who’s the least likely to become a drug addict, he probably would’ve been the last one everyone selected. When I found out he became a drug addict, I had so many questions that I couldn’t think of one. To say I was disappointed doesn’t even crack that shell. He was the apex of stability, and all that, until he hurt his back, bad, and he didn’t want to undergo surgery. He preferred to treat his near-crippling pain with painkillers. If you’ve ever been ground-bound with back pain, and it hurts to breathe, you probably have an idea what he was going through. The meds made him feel better, temporarily, and he wanted more of those “temporary” moments, until he got addicted to them. Did it alter his brain chemistry, or did he fear the return of the backpain? Regardless, he became an addict. 

Today I learned that some consider that addiction a disease. Even though the least likely I would expect became one, I cannot grasp that concept. I do not suggest those who state that are lying, excusing the behavior, or have any other ulterior motives. I also leave ample space for the idea that I don’t know what I’m talking about, because prior to this moment, I never knew anyone who suffered from any form of a drug addictions. I just don’t understand how the decision and resultant decisions to continue to take drugs can be classified a disease. Before we try a hard drug, for the first time, we know most of the stories about the harm we could do to our body, and every time thereafter, we know we’re doing greater damage. We also know that we fall prey to various addictions easily, and we know (or I know) that we could become personally, psychologically, and physiologically addicted. As John Lennon once said, “Cocaine was the first drug I ever tried where the moment after I tried it, I wondered how much more of it I could get.” 

Tomorrow, I think we’ll reread Psychology Today’s article that suggests, “There is significant evidence that addiction is a complex, cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon, as much as it is a biological phenomenon … that baffles physicians and philosophers.” Some recreational drugs provide a shot of dopamine that can lead to a restructuring of the brain. Among the many things various deleterious recreational drugs do to the brain, one thing they provide is short-term, artificial fun. They can make a trip to the grocery store fun. They, along with alcohol, can make a good time great. I have little in the way of personal experience with recreational drugs. I was never an addict, but I was a binge-drinker. As a binge drinker, I never understood responsible drinking. “You want to go out, after such a rough week at work, and drink one or two drinks and go home? That’s the exact opposite of what I want to do.” Most addictions, in my opinion, are an addiction to something else, something different than what I’m experiencing in my otherwise uninteresting and unfulfilling life. They’re an escape from the hum drum of life. Very few addicts of anything say, “I do it, because it’s fun, and I like having fun. I know sobriety, and I know it well. It’s boring.” If we had the self-control to do it just once, and no one was affected by it, we could claim no harm, no foul, but how many people have such self-control? Have you ever heard the term chasing the dragon, chasing that first high. It’s way above my pay grade to try to understand if addiction is a disease, but after seeing what happened to a friend I deemed far more capable than me, I walk away with the notion that we’re all susceptible to various forms of addiction, because, as another friend of mine once said:

“We’re all chemical.” I had no idea when she said that, but my friend was a Neurology student who specialized in Neurochemistry. *She also said it so long ago that her assessments may have aged, my remembrances of what she said could be faulty and incomplete, and I might exaggerate certain points that she hit, but this is what I remember about what she said. “We can debate the particulars of this very complex subject, and we do, and I can go into those particulars if you want, but it all boils down to that simple statement, we’re all chemical.” The two of us had a long shift before us, and I could’ve asked her for the details, but I asked her to give it to me in a nutshell. “You’ve heard the term brain chemistry, right? Those chemicals in our brain dictate mood. If your brain is not, naturally, producing enough green, you might be suffering from a chemical imbalance that affects your mood in a variety of ways both mild and severe. To relieve that malady, you seek a specialist who prescribes you a dose of green,” she said that trying hard to find colors we don’t associate with mood. “If, however, you’re not suffering from an imbalance, and you have plenty of green, and you then take a green pill, it can provide an excess of green that results in feelings of temporary euphoria. We’re all chemical. The problem with taking certain prescription and recreational drugs is that they introduce these colors, moods, and stimulants artificially. If you don’t need green, and you artificially introduce more green, you have an excess of green, and your brain stops producing green organically. The brain adjusts and sees that we’re all stocked up on green, red, yellow, or whatever color we’re talking about, so it stops producing it. As a result, the next time we take a green pill, the brain has already adjusted its production of the color, so we don’t experience an excess, and that excess produced the euphoria the first time. So, our inclination is to take more than we did the first time if we want that sense of euphoria. This is why they call it chasing the dragon, because you’re continually trying to up the dose to return to that initial feeling of euphoria. Every case is different, of course, and the amount of damage is different too, but when we stop taking the green pill, it can take a while for the brain to start producing green organically again, and that can lead to feelings of withdrawals.” 

*For anyone who is seeking a more comprehensive discussion on this topic, please visit: Psychology Today.