runaway

He ran away from home. Although we were a real city, with 37,000 people, it made the papers. We were in fourth grade. It was 1961, ironically the same year as "Runaway," the hit by Del Shannon. We weren't close friends, but close enough that I went over to his house once, over in the projects. His projects, not ours. What did we do? We went upstairs to his room and looked at his shoebox of baseball cards. No brothers or sisters. Just his mom and him. His mom yelled at him. He hadn't done some sort of chore. Dishes? Laundry? Make his bed? It didn't matter. You could tell she just liked to yell at him. She was making some kind of point, as if to say, This is how we do things around here, kid (me). Don't try to get smart with me. She smoked Camels. But the part I wanted to forget, the thing I didn't want to remember, was the walls. The walls in the hallway were black. At the bottom of the stairs, the hallway that greeted visitors, if ever there was another visitor, was smudged as if charcoal was rubbed over the institutional yellow paint. I imagine he and his mom braced themselves if they came down the stairs too hard and pivoted left to the kitchen or right to the living room. Or the wall was a casual pushing-off point, a way to launch oneself up the stairs. Or they leaned against the wall to put on or take off their shoes or boots. I don't know. I was thunderstruck. I almost blurted out, What's that? Where did that come from? I, who came from an apartment on the other end of the cleaning spectrum. Today people would use the OCD label, but it was just the way it went, the way we were. Saturdays were consumed with my brothers and I sweeping, vacuuming, washing, waxing, scrubbing, vacuuming again to meet Dad's white-glove inspection Army standards. We hated it. But this. The walls. The outer fringes of the wall beyond the opposite steps had handprints, vestigial symbols of origin. These marginal imprints left no doubt as to the source of the fully darkened portion. Hands. I didn't know how to respond. I didn't go home and tell anyone. Who was there to tell? And what was there to say? 

He was gone a few days. There was no manhunt, no panic, no search, but it was on the radio and in the papers. They covered the story as if it were an entertainment, a curious amusement, rather than a dangerous incident. They were flippant. And kids in our class? Nobody said much of anything. Some crude jokes, wisecracks, about his riding a freight train like a hobo. This came from some of the boys, and the girls shushed them. Mrs. Anastasia never said a word. Open your books. Practice your penmanship.

He came back. 

He came back to school on a Monday.

Nobody asked him where he had gone or how, nobody asked him what he did, or why. We didn't greet him or welcome him back. He just sat in his regular chair at his regular, assigned desk, in the second row from the window.

When Mrs. Anastasia read the roll, to which we were to say "present," she got to his name near the end, because of the letter his last name began with.

She got to his name and he didn't say anything.

He was crying; he had been crying all the while.

She went on to the next two names.

"Present."

"Present."
 

fine vs. not so fine

The recent suicides of celebrities Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have spurred a discussion on mental health, or mental hygiene, if you prefer, which is good, right? Some people close to these poor unfortunates have expressed surprise at these suicides; some have not. 

We register surprise at these tragedies because of the mismatch between outer appearances and inner feelings.

Is an outward show of happiness an American trait? When I traveled to foreign countries or if I have engaged in conversation with foreign visitors here, more than once I have heard them mock our cheeriness, our brightness. One person pointedly criticized our chirpy "have a nice day" or "how are you." They were British.

We say we're fine, don't we?

The first reason people do that is out of a social convention. Rarely would someone reply to a co-worker in the hallway asking how you are with a literal sob story or anything more than a superficial declaration of fineness. The troubled person doesn't want to be unseemly or overly personal with another who is not much more than an acquaintance, even if the two work side by side eight hours a day five days a week.

By virtue of their training and their mission, sales representatives often exude an avalanche of bonhomie. It evidences the power of positive thinking, in the mold of Dale Carnegie, who wrote the transformative best-seller and whose legacy involves courses and practices.

These are understandable social norms. 

I couldn't tell you whether Americans are different from anyone else on these matters. 

But what if one is not fine?

What are the avenues to travel, the resources to tap? I don't mean help lines, though I suspect they offer measurable value and life-saving tools.

In rooms where people seek recovery from addiction and other malaises, some try to subvert the facade that masks unhappiness by saying f-i-n-e stands for "fucked-up [or frustrated] insecure needy enraged." Variations include  "... neurotic emotional," "needy egotistical," and assorted alternatives. 

And they say, "You're as sick as your secrets."

What's the solution?

Not being a mental health professional, I don't know. I doubt the answer is to be exceedingly frank, candid about secrets, and self-revealing at the drop of a hat. But I would say it's critical to talk to someone, anyone, especially a confidant, a trusted friend.

I recently watched the last several episodes of "Mad Men." If anyone ever needed help, it was Don Draper/Dick Whitman. Near the end, he was suicidal: gone, lost, wandering, meandering, searching, driving through America's heartland to save his own heart.

His escape, his flight, didn't work.

Not exactly.

Remember what did work?

Don/Dick witnesses another man in the same kind of grave pain he is in. In a therapy group, the man tells his story and then collapses into sobs. Don/Dick watches, moved to his core, and walks over and hugs the man for all he's worth, with all he has. Don/Dick is saved by a perfect (very imperfect) stranger, another wounded man just like him, a man who felt invisible to those around him. Don/Dick ferociously embraces the weeping man and also breaks down himself.

So it wasn't a matter of talking.

It was a matter of being there -- literally, being present.

And from what we could see, it saved Draper/Whitman, and presumably the Weeping Man as well.

Something happened.

And why for those two, and not the two mentioned at the top, is a mystery.

assignations

The mind has a thought. You assign meaning to it. The meaning may be so-called positive or so-called negative. You attach significance to a cluster of electrons passing through your brain and central nervous system. love. hatred. loss. gain. joy. anger. pain. comfort. the list is endless, not infinite but innumerable, beyond the known words in any given language or all languages. You assign and attach meaning in this way, and you let it determine your happiness or unhappiness (again, mere notions, mere words) at any given moment. Reading this, you figure, gee, that's kind of crazy to surrender such power to "thoughts," pulsations in the brain, the nervous system, the emotional-cognitive network.

Lyrical dissonance

You've heard of the term "cognitive dissonance," right? I guess it means something like "discomfort or tension caused by holding simultaneous conflicting views or ideas." Um, maybe like Bill Clinton having a Monica Lewinsky flashback while having dinner with Hillary. Another example of cognitive dissonance could be rich Republican members of Congress (are there poor members of Congress?) boo-hooing that they have to pay taxes -- any taxes, really -- while they suckle at the federal teat for their paycheck.

How about "harmonic dissonance" or "lyrical dissonance"? That's how I describe a melody at odds with its lyrics -- surprisingly so. My first embarrassing discovery of this occurred while driving around in my car chirpily listening to and singing along with "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," on Abbey Road, by The Beatles. It's very catchy. Whimsical. Almost nursery schoolish, in its sound and rhythm. My younger daughter, maybe 9 or 10 at the time, or even younger, was sitting in the back seat. She dutifully called my attention to the outright violence of the lyrics. I mean, really, at least three people are hammered to death in the song, but, heck, it sounds like a jingle for chewing gum! I had no explanation for her. I, a wordsmith, had never really paid it much mind. And she never lets me forget it.



There's a current hit, by Foster the People, that summons the same lyrical dissonance. "Pumped Up Kicks" is an exuberant, danceable song with lyrics about a six gun and trying to outrun bullets, and other terribly disturbing references. It is positively finger-snapping catchy.

I guess the moral -- if there is one -- is either "don't take things too seriously" or "take them more seriously" or both or neither.

I will admit it is hard for me to get sanctimonious, given my own lyrical dissonance history.

I'm sure you have your own examples. John Lennon's "Imagine" comes to mind. A haunting, gorgeous melody, but not everyone would be quick to accept its secular, casually atheistic, anti-nationalist message -- if they even hear it.

Speaking of imagining, what if "Yesterday" by The Beatles were a heavy metal anthem? Or a cha-cha or salsa?

This reminds me of a game my older brother and I used to play, back in The Sixties. We'd conjure up mismatches, stuff like Kate Smith doing "Purple Haze" or Perry Como doing "Satisfaction."

Get it?

Got others?

Don't Sweat The Fast Stuff

According to a New York Times story by Louise Story, researchers at NBC claim commercials "work" even if you fast-forward through them. If true, that would mean advertising dollars could be reaped (careful on the spelling there) whether the ads are watched rapidly via digital video recorder (DVR), or in the more seemingly ordinary pace of so-called ordinary time (in itself, an intriguing theological term).

These new studies don't merely measure eyeball movement; they track biological reactions such as sweat (formally called "skin conductance"), heartbeat, abdomen or chest movement (to see if you hold your breath), erectile tissue, and wiggling in your seat. (Here's a pop quiz: one of those measurements in the preceding list was tossed in there just to see if you're awake. Which one? It's not hard. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.)

The buzzword for the viewer's response is "emotional engagement." Ponder the implications of a few of these seismic quotations:

"Whether people watch or not is not a useful measure of anything." -- Joe Plummer, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation

"People don't turn off their emotional responses while they're fast-forwarding." -- Carl Marci, chief science officer of Innerscope Research


"You've created a message that in theory requires 15 seconds or 30 seconds to get that selling message across. On a high-speed DVR, 30 seconds gets pushed down to 1.5 seconds with no audio. It just wouldn't work." -- Jason Maltby, president of MindShare North America

It was bound to happen. The world spins ever faster. "The centre cannot hold," to quote William Butler Yeats.

So much for sound bites instead of political or intellectual discourse; now we have vidbits. So much for character development; now we have subliminal stimulants. So much for linear plot; now we have streaming slides, no sound, please. So much for instant messaging; now we have IMage-racing.

I've gone on too long. You have no time for forays into verbal foreplay or airplay. Research says I've lost you already. Research says, you are not moist with the sweat of excitation. Your screen has gone black, just as in the last episode of "The Sopranos."