random thoughts and thoroughbred selections

Friday, January 02, 2009

Magic Trick

People come and people go
Sometimes without goodbye, sometimes without hello
I got one magic trick
Just one and that's it
I disappear

No, this isn't a retirement post. I promise. Actually, it's something like the opposite, except maybe not quite that at all.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's a reasonable hypothesis: my problems have historically been a veritable buffet of largely self-invented bullshit intelligently designed (*1*) to create some sort of insufferable Mobius strip of personal pity bolstered with reaffirmations of woe regularly situated at mile markers along every step I ran in place.

Here's an obvious corollary to the aforementioned reasonable hypothesis: I'm smart enough to have realized this all along.

Let me admit, for the record, that my history with psychology/psychiatry/psychoanalysis/etc is limited to a couple dozen sessions across three distinct periods of my life:

a) The oh-my-god-I've-got-to-leave-my-wife-because-she's-going-to-fuck-other-guys-until-I-do-right? phase

b) The half-assed attempt to "go to counseling" (a phrase I tag with the appropriate ironic quotes) to fix the marriage

c) The fuck-I-hate-it-here-and-they-won't-promote-me Allentown years

The first guy was pretty good, and I would have stuck it out had I not left the home I shared with my then-wife and moved back to my mom's. The second shrink, when the ex and I "went to counseling" (*2*) to "fix" what was wrong with our marriage, sucked. It took five minutes to figure out the counselor wasn't smarter than me and was one of those people for whom comity came through finding mid-points of disagreement. And, you know, when you start trying to find a mid-point between two polar opposite points, you're not "building," you're just refusing to call a foul when you see one.

I think I actually needed a referee at that point, if for no other reason than to tell me I wasn't batshit crazy for pulling the plug on a situation for perfectly valid reasons (*3*).

So, it didn't take.

The third guy I saw about a dozen times in Allentown, maybe less. I paid him a co-pay of something like $40 an hour once a week to bitch about my job. Really. I had a blog at the time and everything. Again, the guy wasn't smarter than I was and although it took me awhile for me to fire the guy (I didn't want to quit until I was sure it wasn't working for me), I did draw two pieces of value from my time with the guy.

One, he introduced me to the term "cognitive dissonance." CD is a fancy way of saying, "shut the fuck up, it's all in your head," but I guess some shrinks see it as a serious condition in need of specialized treatment.

And two - and I'm just figuring this out lately - the three distinct phases in which I chose to see a shrink establish a pattern. And that pattern clearly marks the three points of my life where I absolutely needed the friends that I didn't (or didn't think) I had.

Funny how that works, right? Don't misunderstand my hypothesis above. I'm not saying that job problems, plus a then-wife who decimates your self-esteem on the way to disappearing with a new boyfriend (*4*) in a hotel and then ignores your ultimatum and makes you leave and file divorce papers isn't a "real" problem. It most assuredly is. I'm just saying that I manufactured woe from these problems which I've internalized and transformed into some sort of albatross around my neck (*5*) I wore with a perverse sort of masochistic anti-pride to the point that this obvious burden I was toting around poisoned all my possibilities at finding my own sense of self again.

I guess I had always thought she helped me find a better version of me, somewhere in our past. I'm not entirely sure that's an idea without merit, but it's absolutely an idea that had an expiration date that came and went before we faced and altar together. I mistook raw emotion (*6*) for... fuck, I dunno - adult reason? sensibility?... and blithely pushed along, trying to make sure we got to the end-game, whatever that was.

At some point together, somehow I got the message that my friendships weren't coming along for the ride. And I cut them loose. As a matter of fact, the total count of my friends at our wedding who knew me first, but knew us both together? One. One. A total of one friend of ours from college, who actually knew me first, but knew her before I met her, so it's almost hard to count him for this purpose. I was running so low on friends (and with only four brothers between us, family) that I imported a grade school friend (*7*) to work as an usher. Hadn't seen the guy in five plus years, and he's putting on a tux.

Then, when my marriage fell apart, I had no one to slap me around or pick me back up. No one to help me sort out why from a first-hand perspective. I had nowhere to fall back, so I just held on tight and never let go of what was wrong.

Them's the breaks.

I think, though, my wake-up call has come slowly over this past year or so. Back in late 2007 I flew to Utah to see my best friend (who many of you met in Vegas - the big schlub poker neophyte who won that tournament at the Plaza in Summer 05 I think) marry his long-time girlfriend (and, more importantly, her two terrific kids). It's no secret that my mood kind of ebbs and flows, and for some reason I was having kind of a rough go in my head during that period, and so I pretty much holed up at the mountain B&B in which I was staying and got drunk with my dad - at the expense of going out for drinks before and after the wedding, ditching him on two occasions.

We haven't talked since. After about six months without talking, I sent him a dumb-ass text message every day for three straight weeks with only one real response. No emails, no phone calls. I can't help but feel that I broke something here, and it frustrates and saddens me horribly.

Fortunately, for a variety of reasons, the circumstances of 2008 (*8*) helped me cut most of the albatross (*9*) loose. My self-image, while still admittedly not Lorenzo-Lamas-esque or anything, is actually doing pretty well. I'm happy. I know, right? I barely know what the fuck to do with myself (*10*) anymore.

So, I decided I'd set a resolution for myself, that's actually more of a goal than anything. In 2009 I'm going to fix the friendships that are broken (at least, I'm going to try), and give more of myself to the friendships in good shape than I have in the last ten years or so.

You know, quit disappearing. I got really good at that.

I'm sure I'm still going to be a particular weirdo who sleeps eight hour nights in Vegas (yeah, wanna fight?) and such, but I can be more available and more invested, right? A happy BG is a BG you'll want around a little bit more anyway, right?

Happy 2009.

[>>]posted at 9:54 PM by BG - click to email
-----------