Chris Herrington decided years ago that his reality was much more fun…
and he’s ready to tell you why.
Sit back and relax.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
My mom always used to say that, “If you have chicken soup, either you were sick or the chicken was sick.” It made a lot more sense when I was six. All I know is that when Mom was sick, all of us were in a panic because mom was the center of the known universe. She was the hub of what made things spin, tick, groove and move. She was MOM. It was her duty to take care of us all, including herself, so that everything worked, and when she did not do what she needed to do to keep herself in prime working order, the entire household hit the skids. The point is that in our universe we have the duty, the ultimate responsibility, to take care of ourselves so that those who depend on us get the care they need coming from us. We are all a part of “the machine in the starry dynamo of night,” as Ginsberg put it.
One of the ways I have to keep helping myself, besides abstaining from coffee, chocolate, and assorted things like monosodium glutamate, nitrates, and BHT, is to constantly look over my shoulder to try and see how I get caught up in stuff that can be emotionally overwhelming. I love footnotes in books, and marginalia. One book by the German critic, Walter Benjamin, describes what history looks like in a very graphic way: Imagine an angel that has been involved in an explosion, and as he is hurled backwards, he faces the debris of the past, and, over his shoulder, is the ever and increasingly closer future unfurls; he can only surmise what will come next and the past looks like a pile of shattered incidentals. Pretty good, eh? All of that in a side note at the bottom of an otherwise densely packed page of hypertextual nuances hardly mattering at all to the outside world, and only of use to a few stack rat bibliophiles and squinty-eyed philologist nerds. The point though is that history is all we’ve got to go on, except for the occasional revelation or mysterious psychohistorical clues analytically projected down the long sleek lattice of superconducting inductivity. Okay, we make an educated guess that works. Sheesh!
I am sure that you’ve heard characters in movies say, “I hate it when I’m right.” Not far behind the wonderful advice that you’ve been given is the admonishment, “If that’s such great advice, you take it.” My mom always said, “By the time you get it together it will be too heavy to lift.” For a woman who only finished high school, she seemed to have an uncanny sense of the melodramatic love child of Apocalypse and Irony. “If you’re going to bring it,” she would say, “don’t leave it at the house.” For myself, I am working on my own post-humus body of quotes. “Learning how to think is more important than learning what to think,” is kind of catchy. In any case, we have to have gained wisdom to be able to pass wisdom, and it seems to me that keeping up with our own destiny by understanding its workings within the field of play is essential to the task of learning to be wise. I have to understand why I think and feel as I do. Then I have to learn how communicate those ideas collectively in thematic units so that I can transfer what I have learned to my nephews and nieces. Somehow, I have probably come to appear, in their minds, as some old loose-screwed inventor, darkly tinkering away on some multi-functioned perpetual motion machine, Rube Goldberg on Maalox.
One of the gems I have been working on in my little shop of horrors is the reverse engineering of what it is that sends me into a spinning panic attack. I am reminded of this poem:
In Bertram’s Garden
Jane looks down at her organdy skirt
As if it somehow were the thing disgraced,
For being there, on the floor, in the dirt,
And she catches it up about her waist,
Smooths it out along one hip,
And pulls it over the crumpled slip.
On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,
Asleep is Bertram that bronze boy,
Who, having wound her around a spool,
Sends her spinning like a toy
Out to the garden, all alone,
To sit and weep on a bench of stone.
Soon the purple dark must bruise
Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
And the little cupid lose
Eyes and ears and chin and nose,
And Jane lie down with others soon,
Naked to the naked moon.
Donald Justice
Now what in the world does this poem have to do with my panic attacks? Hmmmm. Notice how the beat of the poem stays along with the emotional content? This is exactly what happens to me. If I wait to reverse engineer the exact moment at which I actually notice that I am cascading into a full blown panic attack, it is too late to save me. I have to start earlier. Way earlier. I have to begin at the beginning, when the beat begins. The tempo picks up, but the beast is awakened in the first moment, the point of origin. For me, it begins with being asked to do the impossible. Not the nearly impossible. Not like Richard Thurman’s “The Countess and the Impossible.” I mean the really impossible. Hal the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” impossible. Melt down impossible. Shaming, debilitating, heart and soul wrenching impossible. And then making-every-effort-to-force-it-to-work-out impossible. Struggling against hope impossible. Things falling apart in your hands impossible. Utterly without hope impossible. But trying nevertheless impossible. Way too late impossible. Deadly silence and broken heart impossible. That’s what breaks me down. Now, read the poem again. See what I mean?
I have to start before it begins by having a mindset that frees me from having to engage the thought that that which I have no control over is beyond my reach. Now, interestingly enough, those who do not have this problem, although they may have other problems that I don’t have, may look at this emotional malady as an emotional weakness that could be cured with a set of hang-me-downies and a stiff drink. I’ll remind you that heart disease, strokes, over-eating, diabetes, and high blood pressure are all signs that people should have zigged instead of zagged, but these maladies still kill more Americans than everything else combined. You can say, “It’s all in your head,” but “just because you are paranoid does not mean that they are not out to get you.”
I want to revisit my mom’s words for a minute longer, “When you lose something, just clean up until you find it.” In the movie, “Altered States,” the main character is seeking the beginnings of human consciousness. I am not going back that far. I’m not ready for prime time, and I may not be able to handle the truth. I just want a look at the monster under the bed.
My mom had been watching my brother and me playing with bottle rockets, and I was playing dodge the bottle rocket so well that when my last one, “It’s always in the last place you look,” was thrown at my brother, I could tell it was going to be close to him. It hit him in the pocket of the new down vest he had just gotten for Christmas. The same pocket that held the other about 100 bottle rockets. The explosion was magnificent! The entire side of his coat lit up like…well, it was New Years day! He ran down the beach holding the smoldering vest like it was a child needing CPR. At the last second he pulled open a drawer on a cabinet on the porch and slipped it in, hiding it from anyone…and especially you–know–who. Within a few seconds, Mom came outside on the porch, apparently -looking for something. She went right over, opened the accusatory drawer and asked, “How did this get here?” Wrapped up in that question were the answers to all of the quantum problems of thermal dynamics, the missing sub-atomic particles, and the number of the angels that can dance on the head of a pin. The woman could read minds, predict the future, and knew the lottery numbers on your next birthday, but she did not reveal them to us so that we would learn the value of working.
April 24th, she would have been 77. She lived through the Depression. She birthed 7 children. She was the 7th child. I am the oldest of 7. I was born on Saturday. I was 7 pounds and 11 ounces. I was born on 11/7. I was born at 11:07. 11 X 7 = 77. I am finally beginning to see the connections. Thanks, Mom.
runningturtle87
Having completed 32 years of public school service, Chris Herrington lives, with his wife, in Appleby, Texas, and his writing consists of blogging and essay writing concerning an array of topics including education, mediation, self-development, and human interests. He teaches at the Martin School of Choice, plays racquetball, and enjoys his job.
Chris Herrington can be reached at herrington@everythingnac.com
