A Decade Full of Questions and Some Answers

I am a bit of a pack-rat of sorts. I keep a chest filled with reams worth of papers: journals, postcards, playbills, bad poetry, scribblings, and love letters. 

I recently considered piling most of the chest’s contents into a burn barrel and symbolically torching them. I thought that at 25 it was time for me to start a fresh. 

Then I went through the chest’s contents and I decided I was wrong. I realized that pile of papers represented something to me. They chronicled a decade of my life- and a set of questions which I’ve wrestled with since it began. These questions came up again and again in things I’d written at 15, 19, 22, and just the past few months. 

How can I relate or understand women? That was the first question I recognized in those papers. 

I’d like to think I’ve learned a lot about the fairer sex during a decade of loves lost and won (but mostly lost). However reading back through the years, I realized how little I’ve been able to really grasp about how women think, feel, and love. They still baffle me. Women manage to be enticing, beautiful, a bit magical, inspiration to my soul, yet at times terrifying, hurtful, and often opaque. 

I’ll likely never really answer this question and I’m ok with that now. 

The second question I’ve been wrestling with for the last decade stems from the first: is it better to live a solitary life or suffer the slings and arrows of love in hope it’s undiscovered country holds a bit of paradise? Most people may find the first option absurd, but to an only child who has always enjoyed, and even deeply needed, a measure of solitude in my life, it’s easy to imagine life as a permanent bachelor. For the longest time my go-to call sign was “tin man” (from ausTIN MANess). In my most emo periods I have romanticized the idea of a missing a heart, because without a heart you can’t know heartbreak. 

I’ve finally found my answer to this question: I don’t want to be alone, it’s no way to live. God said himself, It is not good for man to be alone. Love is worth the pain endured finding and keeping it; maybe it wouldn’t even be the same without them. Life wouldn’t hold the same meaning without death. Maybe love wouldn’t mean as much without heartbreak.

The last question is one I believe most people of faith have felt at one point or another: How do I relate to God? 

I am a hopeless and often unrepentant sinner. How can I ever be worthy of God’s love? With all my faults and failings, how can I ever feel competent to teach or relate those things I have learned about God, life, and what it means to be a Christian to others? 

The answer to this question is obvious to anyone educated in the tenants of Christian faith: we are all sinners and it is only through God’s love and grace, the sacrifice of Christ, and our faith in them, that we can ever hope to relate God. 

That said, this is one struggle that I am almost certain I will always bear and I’m ok with that.  I will always be a sinner and often a doubter. 

I believe faith is a struggle.

King David, “a  man after God’s own heart,” knew sin as well as any man that has ever lived. The prophet Jonah tried to escape God’s call by sailing away. Moses didn’t believe himself capable to speak for and lead his people. 

In Gethsemane Christ himself asked his father to provide him another way. 

At his death he cried out, to what must have seemed like a universe empty of all traces of the divine,  “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Faith is a struggle. If it were not so, it would not accomplish in us that which it must: transformation, transcendence, and enlightenment through pain, suffering, and sacrifice.

Those questions, answered and unanswered, are why I’m keeping the contents of that old chest- they remind me of who I am, where I have come from, what I have learned, and what I have yet to learn. 

Yes.... More on Depressive Realism

I was doing a little blog scanning this morning and I came upon an interesting article on Alternet entitled "Are Antidepressants a Scam?" link.

The article makes some points which support my belief that the psycho-pharmaceutical industry peddles expensive medications which are often unhelpful to patients (read: people), and which in the case of antidepressants may be no more effective than sugar pills.

One quote caught my eye and relates directly to my last post on depressive realism:

From several classic studies, we know that moderately depressed people are, in a sense, more critically thinking than are nondepressed people. These studies show that depressed people are more accurate than are nondepressed people in both their assessment of control over events and in judging people’s attitudes toward them. Researchers Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, studying nondepressed and depressed subjects who played a rigged game in which they had no actual control, found that depressed subjects more accurately evaluated their lack of control when either losing or winning. And researcher Peter Lewinsohn at the University of Oregon in 1980, found that depressed subjects judge other people’s attitudes toward them more accurately than nondepressed subjects. 

Emotional reactions, and I believe that "depression" is often a prolonged emotional reaction and not a "disorder" in the true sense of the word (e.g. schizophrenia), are God's/evolution's way of alerting our conscious brains and those close to us that something is wrong in our lives. While sadness may be ourbrain's reaction to temporary stressors/problems, depression represents a reaction to the presence of long-term problems in our lives. 

It is my firm believe that for most people the "cure" for depression is remedying those things which are wrong in our lives to the extent we can to do so (e.g. becoming physically healthy, improving interpersonal relationships) and perhaps more importantly, developing a healthy philosophy of life and a  hopeful outlook towards one's own future.

The article speaks to this as well:

In The Thought and Character of William James, Ralph Barton Perry’s classic biography on his teacher, in the chapter “Depression and Recovery,” we learn that James at age 27 described himself as going through a period of a “disgust for life” in which Perry describes as an “ebbing of the will to live. . . . a personal crisis that could only be relieved by philosophical insight.” What was James’s transformative insight? 

James was a critical thinker and had no stomach for smiley-faced positive thinking, but he also concluded that his pessimism might just destroy him. With his critical thinking, he came quite pragmatically to “believe in belief.” He continued to maintain that one cannot choose to believe in whatever one wants (one cannot choose to believe that 2 + 2 = 5); however, he concluded that there is a range of human experience in which one can choose beliefs. He came to understand that, “Faith in a fact can help create the fact.” So, for example, abelief that one “has a significant contribution to make to the world” can keep one from committing suicide during a period of deep despair, and remaining alive makes it possible to in fact make a significant contribution.

Believe in belief.

Depressive Realism, the World Today, & Me

I've been around, you know. There was a time I could see. And I have seen boys like these, younger than these, their arms torn out, their legs ripped off. But there isn't nothin' like the sight of an amputated spirit; there is no prosthetic for that. - Frank Slade

I have a lot of friends who’ve “been around.” I’ve had the pleasure of running around with brilliant and exceptional men and women from all sorts of backgrounds through my time at Pepperdine and my brief involvement with the interfaith youth core and the foundation for the defense of democracies.

I’ve travelled a bit myself. I’ve lived in the suburbs; I’ve lived on a farm; I’ve lived in Malibu, Italy, and a concrete jungle. No, I’ve never been to Africa. I’ve never really been to a third-world country unless you count Tijuana or Frayser, TN. 

I honestly don’t think I needed to. I’ve been all over this Empire. I’ve been to its borders and it’s forgotten corners. I’ve sat in the backyards and cafes of its most elite districts and neighborhoods. I’ve stared up at the sky in its last few empty places. Perhaps most importantly I have spent the last three years of my life in the training school of its oft-maligned bureaucratic enforcers: lawyers. 

I have seen many beautiful things. A cloudy sky above while backstroking in the galilee. The sun setting over the Santa Monica Mountains. Families. Children. Forests. Deserts. Mountains and Oceans.

But what I have seen of the current state of mankind in the major, I have found repugnant and even nauseating. 

I’ve seen walls going up everywhere. Walls around the neighborhoods and houses of the rich. Walls around my homeland. Walls through the heart of the Holy Land.

I’ve seen good people struggling to get by burdened by tremendous debts.

I’ve seen our environment raped, burned, and spit upon by shadowy things called “corporations” or “embodiments” which you cannot touch, you cannot see, and most importantly you cannot call to justice in a jail cell or on a gallows.

I’ve seen us all running against the wind. Running. Running. Running.

There is a theory in psychology called “depressive realism.” This theory holds that people like myself, with a moderate or borderline depression, have a more accurate perception of reality because we are not blinded by positive illusions. 

In my case I’m not sure which came first: the chicken or the egg, the depression or the realism.

It doesn’t really matter. 

I have seen. 

I’m not sure if the state of our world is objectively worse than it was 5 years ago, or 10, or 100. I know there have been steps forwards and steps backwards. 

What I am sure of is that the winds of change are blowing and that my generation grew up in a doldrum or perhaps just in the eye of the storm.

I am also sure that while this is certainly not the worst of all possible worlds, it is also not the best.

I have hope for tomorrow.

But not the blind, bullshit hope that we were sold in the 90s. Not the blind, bullshit hope that we were sold in 2008. 

I have realistic hope.  I thank God for the opportunity to have tasted failure, to have felt impotent, and even worthless. If you’ve never been there I’m sorry. I’m sorry because someday you will. 

If your there right now, I congratulate you. If you have lost something or everything, I congratulate you. 

It’s not just a platitude: freedom really is just another word for nothing left to lose. 

Depression is a burden, but its also a gift. 

If your interested in learning more about the joys of sadness, I’d encourage you to pick up the book “Against Happiness” by Eric G. Wilson. 

Here’s the blurb: 

We are addicted to happiness. More than any other generation, Americans today believe in the power of positive thinking.  But who says we’re supposed to be happy? Eric G. Wilson argues that melacholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that is is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation- and that is is the force underlying original insights. 

When you take off your rose-colored glasses, or have them ripped off you, you can see the world as it really is, both beautiful and broken.

I’d also like to point you to two other depressive realists: Thomas Krenshaw of Freedom Guerilla and Mike Ruppert.

The documentary “Collapse” concerns both Rupert’s personal history and his worldview.

Here’s the trailer:

Solitary Man

Don't know that I will, but until I can find me...

Recent Life Lessons

Lesson 1: Retreat is not defeat. Retreat is not capitulation. Life isn't always the Charge of the Light Brigade. Sometimes it's better to live to fight another day.

Lesson 2: You can't change people. People must want to change themselves.

Lesson 3: What one cannot do alone, perhaps two or more can do together.

Mighty Mike Mashups

some djs (e.g. DJ earworm) make mashups so good they might be better than the original.

Mighty Mike is one of those DJs.

"Simple Martyr" Lynyrd Skynyrd vs. Depeche Mode



"Every Beautiful Girl You Take" The Police vs. Sean Kingston



"Your 1979 Song" Smashing Pumpkins vs. Elton John



"Neverending" Rick Astley vs. Mika

tom cruise speaks truth to power

I went back and listened to this interview just now. Through personal experience and research I have come to agree with Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise may be a little "out there," and I do not agree with scientology, but he was right about this. He was ridiculed by the media because he was right. He was ridiculed by the media because the same corporations and people who own the media own the pharmaceutical industry. Notice how calm and rational Tom seems during this entire interview. He keeps his composure even when Lauer tries to trap him with inconsistent questions; he even confronts Lauer on his attempt to trick him into saying something he wasn't. These are not the ravings of a mad man. These are the rational thoughts of a sane person who is deeply concerned about our society.

We are medicating emotions!
We are medicating psychological reactions which humans exhibit in order to express that there is something is wrong in their life or their world.

Drugs are not the answer.

Confronting our problems and changing our society is the answer.

That's the truth.

Disclaimer: I do believe there are extreme circumstances in which someone should be sedated if they are likely to cause harm to themself or another person. My main concern is with the widespread medication of anxiety, depression and "ADD."