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Category: Random Musings

The art of despair

Published 4 May 2022 by Jason Crane

On April 11, I started a new life in Pittsfield, MA. That was the first day of my new office job, my first day living in my van again after five weeks staying with family, and my first day living in a new town where I don’t know anyone. (I was born in Pittsfield and consider nearby Lenox my hometown, but I no longer know people in either place.)

As I left work on that first day and got into the driver’s seat of my van, I faced the largest anxiety attack I’ve had in a long time. The trifecta of no home/no friends/office job hit me hard, and within minutes I was in tears. I drove to a nearby marsh that has a walking path. I walked to the end of the boardwalk and watched the geese and ducks as I got my emotions under control. When my heart rate had slowed a bit, I found a bench and meditated.

That was the beginning of two very dark weeks. I burst into tears at some point nearly every day and found myself in thought spirals every night. As the second week dragged on, I started to worry about how long it would be possible to operate at the level of distress I was experiencing.

One complicating factor was that I had stopped taking antidepressants in 2021, working with my nurse practitioner in Vermont to wean myself off them. I’d been fine since then, and in fact I was very much enjoying a renewed sense of connection to my emotions — a connection that had been dulled for the decade or more I’d been on meds.

When this latest dark period struck, the intensity took me totally by surprise. I’d certainly had dark periods before; 2020, for example, saw the end of what I thought would be a lifelong relationship and the start of my life in a van. But this was something different. It was debilitating in a way I hadn’t experienced since the breakdown that put me on meds in the first place.

This period also coincided with National Poetry Writing Month, aka NaPoWriMo. I decided to participate. Over the years I’ve likened poetry and Buddhist practice, in that both help you see the world as it is. That can be great, but when the world is a pile of poop, writing a poem every day is less about observation and more about being slowly buried. Art can amplify the bad as well as the good. Looking back at most of the poems I wrote in April, I can see a terrifying darkness and despair. And I wonder whether writing a poem every day was about wallowing rather than processing.

Somehow, for reasons I can’t even begin to name, that dark blanket lifted after two weeks, and I’m doing much, much better now. I’ve accepted the reality that I’ll have to live in my van until summer, when I can afford to rent an apartment. I’ve begun to adjust to my office job, and even to find comfort in the nice folks with whom I work and the access to a bathroom and a tea kettle and a paycheck. I can look ahead to a time when I’ve got my own place and feel more stable and secure.

This year’s NaPoWriMo gave me a lot to think about concerning the relationship between my writing and my state of mind. I’ll definitely exercise more caution if this happens again, and I’ll try to pay more attention to the interplay between art and emotion.

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Bad vibes are OK

Published 28 April 2022 by Jason Crane

This sticker (and the similar “Good Vibes Only”) are not the way to go. Your friends need to know that they can count on you when they’re down, not just when everything is smooth and easy. Life has bad vibes sometimes, and when we refuse to acknowledge that, we do a disservice to ourselves and the people who need us.

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Tea

Published 25 April 2022 by Jason Crane

I’ve been trying to write a poem about tea but I really can’t do better than Douglas Adams did. [UPDATE: I wrote one anyway.] Here’s just one example.

“No,” Arthur said, “look, it’s very, very simple…. All I want … is a cup of tea. You are going to make one for me. Now keep quiet and listen.”

And he sat. He told the Nutro-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting the milk in before the tea so it wouldn’t get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the East India Trading Company.

“So that’s it, is it?” said the Nutro-Matic when he had finished.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “That is what I want.”

“You want the taste of dried leaves boiled in water?”

“Er, yes. With milk.”

“Squirted out of a cow?”

“Well in a manner of speaking, I suppose…”

“I’m going to need some help with this one.”

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The wisdom of Jim Harrison

Published 19 April 2022 by Jason Crane

During these times, many of us would have been far happier as trout making occasional little jumps up above the water’s surface for the view of the carnage. Has my country become a pack of wild hogs bent on eating the world? … Certain members of my family, in the midst of the usual Nordic emotional squalor, used to say, “It’s always darkest before it gets darker.”

— from “Paris Rebellion” in Jim Harrison’s book A Really Big Lunch

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Here endeth my streak

Published 27 March 2022 by Jason Crane

After 836 days, I finally met a New York Times crossword puzzle I couldn’t solve. I got everything but the final isolated word, which was the name of an Egyptian pharaoh. When I finally gave up, pressed “reveal puzzle,” and saw the correct answer, it was a name I couldn’t have ever come up with. And since it was isolated from all the other puzzle answers, you had to know it. There was no way to guess. Looks like I’m starting a new streak with the next puzzle.

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44 years ago today…

Published 9 March 2022 by Jason Crane

the first episode of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy was broadcast on the radio. I think my life would have turned out quite differently without it.

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Surface level

Published 4 December 2021 by Jason Crane

Tonight I’m drinking chocolate milk from the local dairy straight out of the bottle. (From a chocolate cow? Near a chocolate stream?) I was listening to Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 and when that ended I switched to Third Stream Music by the Modern Jazz Quartet. I know it sounds really pretentious, but that’s mitigated by the fact that I don’t know much about either.

“Surface level” is my whole thing. I like a lot of things and know just a little bit about them. My internal store of information is miles wide and an inch deep.

In one of the Foundation books by Isaac Asimov there’s a character — I think it’s the Mule — who can make intuitive leaps on small amounts of information with a high degree of accuracy. I’ve always thought that was the way my brain works best. Take a little bit of reading here, a dash of overheard conversation there, maybe a glimpsed movie poster or TV ad, and suddenly I’m in a conversation with someone who mentions a thing I don’t really know about but can carry on a conversation about. If we get in too deep I’ll eventually have to admit I don’t know much or else change the subject. But for a few minutes I can slide over the surface of the conversation as if my tiny chunk of knowledge was the tip, not the whole iceberg.

This kind of brain function lends itself to brief but passionate dives in a variety of topics. I’ll get into a band and listen to nothing else for weeks. I’ll read a book and devour more by the author or in the genre. I’ll take up the ukulele or the slingshot or whittling or the bow and arrow. While I’m in the middle of whatever the topic is, I’m consumed by it. And then … it’s over. It might be weeks or years until I think of it again. Maybe I’ll never go back to it. But a little bit of what I learned sticks around. At this point, 48 years into this method, all those little bits amount to quite a lot. Not a useful lot, but a lot nonetheless.

A librarian friend once told me that this is a good kind of brain for a librarian to have. I do adore libraries. And I’m glad to live in the age of streaming music and YouTube and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It’s the golden era of momentary obsession.

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Who you know (Dunbar’s number)

Published 2 December 2021 by Jason Crane

Yesterday, while sitting in a grocery store cafe and working on some projects, I suddenly had the idea to pare down the number of contacts in my online address book. I can’t say why exactly, other than the general shrinking of scope I’m attempting with my life as a whole.

At one point I had about 3,000 names in my contact list, but over the years I’d reduced that down to about 650. Last night I exported the remaining contacts to ensure I could restore them if necessary, then deleted all but the people I thought I’d like to contact again, plus a few deceased folks whose birthdays I’d still like to observe and thus left them on the list so they’ll show up on my calendar. When all was said and done, I was pleasantly surprised (well, maybe not that surprised) to see that I’d reduced my contact list to about 150 living people, aka Dunbar’s number. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar believes we can retain relationships with about 150 friends and acquaintances. Beyond that, it’s too many people to effectively maintain any kind of regular communication with.

As you might know if you’ve been in my orbit for a while, my philosophy of humanity’s survival is “small intentional communities of mutual aid.” I’ve been arguing for years for the idea that our time is better spent trying to make a difference with the people we live near and can actually know. The more we try to deal with massive problems on a massive scale, the more we realize our relative powerlessness and the faster we become dispirited, or else our activism becomes mostly hashtags and memes. But if we stick to working at a hyperlocal level, we can make an actual difference and build real relationships. You may disagree and that’s fine. This is what I think, though, and my past 20-plus years of labor, political and community organizing are the reason I think it.

As I look over the 150 people remaining in my address book, I realize of course that they’re spread over a wide geographic area — multiple states, multiple countries. They’re not an expression of this idea of hyperlocal community building. If I was more ruthless and pared the list down to people with whom I have some sort of active relationship, I’m sure it would drop down to the low double digits. Once I move to Albany and start renewing old relationships, and making new ones, I expect the overall total will end up stabilizing around Dunbar’s number again. Some people will move into my life, others will move out.

I do want to use this current list of humans to try to increase the number of people with whom I have contact each week. Not counting incidental contact in stores, I have face-to-face conversations with maybe one person a week, sometimes two. If I expand the circle to people with whom I have text or phone conversations, it’s maybe a half dozen on a good week. And most of those communications are very brief and surface-level.

Yesterday a friend called and said he had just a few minutes to talk but he wanted to use those few minutes to contact someone he cared about. I thought that was a great idea. Despite my general phone-phobia, I think I might try it.

I’ve spent decades winnowing people out of my life. I’ve always been good at walking away and never looking back (except in the case of my most recent long-term relationship). It’s time to get better at keeping people in my life, instead.

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