The Morning

When I was very little, I was always the first one awake, the first one out of bed and out of my room.  I got to turn the coffee pot on and hear the morning farm report that came on at six and started the broadcast day.  Sometimes I saw the static that preceded it and the national anthem tape that was probably made in the fifties.  

Then things started to change.  My father didn't have time for breakfast anymore.  Once I was introduced to the concept of homework, I was also introduced to the idea that if it involved reading, writing, or math, mine was probably wrong.  Eventually, if I couldn't get somebody to check my homework before school, I just didn't turn it in.  I'd rather have a zero for not trying than to be told all the places I was wrong.  

Eventually, my brother down the hall began to change into something very different from what he was before.  One of the reasons I write about him, and try to be really very honest about it, is because there are lots of people who never knew him before he became ill.  I'd like for there to be more to his legacy than what became of him.

Before I learned how broken I was, how broken the world around me could be, how people who don't mean any harm to anyone can suffer for no reason, before all that, I was the first one to get up in the morning.  I loved the morning.  I loved the rising sun and the opportunity of a new day.  

Sometimes, I get all that back.  Sometimes feist-dog pulls the covers off me, and I'm out of bed before the alarm goes off.  Sometimes, I go into the sun thinking, "Boy, I'm lucky!"  But not every day.  Not anymore.  

The world wore on me pretty roughly.  If it was just on me, I think it'd be ok, but when I look around, a lot of people who never did anyone any harm got it a lot worse.  Somedays, the world is a blank canvas ready for opportunity.  Some days the world is a gauntlet testing how much you can take.  

I was a pretty timid boy.  Especially when it came to talking to strangers.  It wasn't so bad with grownups.  I think I was expecting them to understand that I stuttered, maybe even be amused by it.  I always loved the world though, and loved getting out in it.  There are days when I get all that back, and then there are days when I just want to keep the door closed and the lights out as long as I can.  

Mississippi is full of wonders when you're little.  It's full of doubts and fears when you're old enough to see the world as it is.  That glimmer of childhood optimism never really dies, though.  If it didn't die after all the things I did to it, then it's immortal.

The world starts when you turn on the lights and open the door.  The world is filled with challenges but even more opportunities.  There's an imaginary dog that tells me this when I remember to listen to him.

Sunflowers: Ted Lasso in Amsterdam

Two pilgrims together are a pilgrimage.  There are spoilers ahead.

Everybody finds love in Amsterdam, or almost.  Rebecca connects with the best guy for her yet, but I'm pretty sure she'll fuck it up because it's Rebecca.  After five thousand product placement shots, her iPhone 14 gets dropped to the bottom of a Dutch canal.  Maybe that's a sign.

Sunflowers are the state flower of Kansas.  They're also the subject of one of Van Gough's most famous paintings.  Van Gough suffered his entire life.  He was never understood or appreciated when he was alive and died penniless at his own hand.  His last words were, "The sadness will last forever," in Dutch, of course.

Season three, episode six of Ted Lasso, reached me on so many levels.  Seeking new levels of inspiration and relief from his crushing depression and self-doubt, Van Gough chased the green fairy with passion.  Like many artists of his generation, he drinks absinthe with abandon.  Most men of his generation credited the tincture of wormwood with absinthe's legendary explorative properties, but it was probably just its extremely high alcohol content.  

AFC Richmond is in a terrible rut.  Everybody's life is in ruins except Keely, who is in love with one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen.  Coach Beard, reinforcing my thesis that he represents Merlin in this round table, provides Coach Lasso with a tea made with psilocybin mushrooms, a considerable step up from absinthe.  Because Ted is reluctant to drink the tea (because he hates tea) they separate.

What makes Ted Lasso different is it's a show written by actors, an actor from Virginia especially.  One of us.  A Southern boy.  His mother's brother: his uncle, is George Wendt, Norm from Cheers.  If you didn't know that, it's probably something of a revelation.  If you're a theater people, most of the people who read me are theater people, or at least are allies; if you're a theater person, you no doubt have picked up by now that there's a musical theater reference in every episode of Ted Lasso.  That's what happens when you let actors have a pen.  Tonight's musical theater reference was "Chicago" by Kander and Ebb.  A musical about love's betrayal, crime, booze, and Jazz.  

There are a number of thematic reasons why Jason Sudeikis wanted to locate this episode in Amsterdam.  Because he has a lot of interaction with his cast on an actor-to-actor level, he incorporates their stories as artists into the plot.  Sudeikis is twelve years younger than me.  Jeremy Swift is two years older.  When actors make out their resumes, they list "other skills."  It's usually something like dancing or fencing or singing, but for Swift, he listed that he played the double bass.  This resonated with Sudeikis, and Jazz became a driving force behind Higgin's character.  

In the Sunflowers episode, Higgins takes Will the Kitman on an expedition in the Red Light District.  Will thinks it's for the famous prostitutes, but Higgins takes him to the Prins Hendrik Hotel, where Chet Baker, at the height of his musical career, flung himself out of a window to his death.  Higgins tries to suggest that he might have been pushed, but I think people who make that case are just being generous to Baker.  Baker spent most of his life trying to kill himself.  Kill himself and make fundamentally different and brilliant music.  In 1988, in Amsterdam, he made the final choice between the two.

Suicide is something of a theme in Ted Lasso.  The death of Ted's father, we're told, is the seat of his problems.  It's the dragon he must fight and the source of his panic attacks.  Famous suicides are mentioned throughout the series; tonight, it was Van Gough and Baker.  The night in Amsterdam ends for Higgins and Kitt in a jazz bar, with Higgins getting to show off his skills.  The episode was shot so that there's no way Swift was faking it on the bass.  That's absolutely him playing, and it's brilliant.

Coach Lasso reluctantly tries the psilocybin tea after Coach Beard launches his own adventure.  If you've ever tried psilocybin, and I've tried psilocybin, I've tried it with some of you; if you've tried psilocybin, you know it doesn't hit you right away.  Thinking the drug didn't work, Ted makes his way to an American restaurant where a Bulls game and a tower of onion rings launch his mushroom vision quest.  A quest that gives him a divinely inspired offense pattern from the Richmond AFC Grayhounds.

Four men expose their souls and find solace in each other.  Roy forces Jamie to train rather than party in Amsterdam like the rest of the team.  In an argument about whether windmills are real, Roy confesses that he can't fuckin' ride a fuckin' bicycle.  He can't because his grandfather tried to teach him, but his grandfather died, and now he feels guilty for not having ever learned.  This is the most vulnerable Roy has ever been, and he does it with Jamie, who he has hated the entire show.  Maybe realizing that Keeley wasn't going to be with either of them provided the breakthrough.  In an unlikely montage, Jamie teaches Roy Kent to ride a bicycle, and together they see a windmill.  In literature, windmills represent many things; To Miguel de Cervantes, they represent the giants that Don Quixote de la Mancha must battle to claim his humanity.  To dream the impossible dream.

For the whole series so far, Colin has hidden his sexuality and fought to believe in himself.  We're never really told what sort of athlete he is.  He struggles to benchpress a single set of forty-five-pound plates, but we can assume he's good enough at football to play first-string in the premier league.  Separating from the group, Colin finds a gay bar, thinking he's alone.  He's not.  Trent Crimm walks in after him.  Colin panics and claims he's in the wrong bar.  Running after him, Trent confesses that he's seen Colin kiss a boy but hasn't reported it, and there must be a reason for that.  The two sit in the Dutch night air and bare their souls.  Trent was married to a woman when he came to grips with his sexuality.  This is a scenario that played out a lot in my generation.  Guys I knew from childhood who struggled and struggled to be what they are.  Together they discuss the pain Colin feels for having two separate lives and how much he wishes he could kiss his fella after a game like the other players kissed their girl.

When I was twenty-one, I grew tired of everyone, and everything I knew and everyone I knew was tired of me, so instead of Scrooges or CS's, I went to George Street.   I'd been there before.  Part of my job was to be an earwig to members of the legislature about bills that benefited education, which in turn benefited Millsaps and Mississippi School Supply.  It wasn't really lobbying, but that's what I was being groomed for, at least until I told my Dad I hated it.  I wasn't horrible at it; I just felt really manipulative.

Cotton was bartending.  Cotton was something of a legend in Jackson, starting with the bar at Sun 'n Sand but also George Street, The University Club, and Tico's.  I sat with a man twice my age who was in the House of Representatives.  We discussed Dave Brubeck, Steely Dan, and Chicago.  He was one of the few men I've met who loved Maxfield Parish as much as I do.  We talked, just the two of us, for at least two hours.  In a moment, he looked deeply into my eyes and put his hand on top of my hand.  It was subtle; in the darkness of the bar's corner, no one would see.    I tried really hard not to look shocked or hurt, or angry.  This wasn't the first time this had happened to me.  I really liked the guy and didn't want to hurt him or offend him or put him on the spot for anything.  After a moment, he moved his hand up to grip my shoulder in a very manly, coach-to-player sort of way.  He insisted on paying for my drinks and left into the night.

I stopped at a gas station across from the Baptist hospital for cigarettes and called a girl I knew to see if she was awake and see if she was alone.  There's a 50/50 chance she's reading this now.  I went to her apartment and watched her sleep with my hand under her shirt on the small of her back.  A lot of my friends knew I liked this girl.  She supposedly had a boyfriend somewhere, but it didn't seem to change anything.  I thought that--I could take this girl anywhere I wanted.  I could hold her hand anywhere I wanted.  I could introduce her to my father, my fraternity brothers, my bartender; nobody would ever think a thing.  We could spend all night talking about music and art, and she could put her hand on top of my hand, and nobody would ever think a thing.  They might even be happy that I found somebody, even if she supposedly had a boyfriend somewhere. 

It occurred to me how profoundly unfair that was.  I could do all these things with this girl or any girl who I could get to sit with me, but this guy, who I enjoyed so much, never could.  Even if I was as devoted to him as I was to this tiny sleeping creature, we'd never be able to have the same kind of life because I'm a man, and he's a man, and in Mississippi in the eighties, that made a difference. 

He ended up getting voted out of office as part of the great Republican Revolution in the Mississippi House of Representatives whereupon he retired to his little farm in East Mississippi, and in ten years, he was dying of liver failure, allegedly from drinking.  What Colin and Trent were going through resonated with me.  I'd seen it many times before.  Knowing that so many members of my tribe are gay always came with a fair amount of guilt for me.  I had opportunities that I didn't really deserve that they never could, just because I'm one way and they're another.  It's better for guys in the generation after mine, but it's still not good enough, and there are righteous pricks, mostly in Florida, trying to reverse whatever gains have been made.  The girl married somebody else, and I married somebody else, and none of us ever had to hide who we liked from anybody.  

I know that the end of Ted Lasso is coming.  I'm getting to the point where I need to start slowing down on the episodes and savor it some.  I'll miss it when it's over.  Ted Lasso is a very positive man in a world filled with quiet personal tragedies.  I'm trying to learn from that.  My entire life has been a quiet personal tragedy but one I've never been able to completely deal with because so many people around me have it too, or have it worse.  I guess maybe the point is that there isn't justice in our lives, but there might be hope if we believe.

Ted Lasso Merchandise

The Commerce of House Finches in the Setting Sun

I sought feeling the sun on my shaved head, my shoulders dappled with the sinking sun.  A trio of house finches hold a conference, one on the pitch of the roof, two in ornamental trees.  They puff out their pink breasts and exchange places, never standing on the same branch at the same time.  The content of their tet-a-tet-a-tet I couldn't discern.  They sounded angry at times, sternly making a point.  There wasn't a female in sight.  Maybe they were rivals

Active and demanding mockingbirds move in and out of the scene.  Twice the size of my little pink pinches, Mockingbirds are the undisputed king of the Mississippi sky.  From childhood, I was told they were named so because they mimicked any bird they heard, but their song sounded pretty distinct to me.  Their staccato song sounds like a New Orleans jazz trumpet warming up.  Three short blasts, then drop a note and three more.  I'm in their territory.

For a hundred thousand years, this spot entertained these same species of birds without anything like me nearby.  For the last forty-five years, their pristine habitat has been the manicured garden of a retirement village.  It makes no difference to the birds.  These are still their skies.  Millions of years before, they were therapod dinosaurs, and people like me were squirrels hiding in their shadows.  Part of God's plan was for us to exchange places.

Sweat bees, smaller than a field pea, ravage the dandelion and the clover of its booty.  I don't think they're capable of knowing their voracious scavenging actually is a vital part of the plant's life cycle.  I don't think they care.  I'm a giant intruder in their universe, but they don't care about that, either.  All they care about is the next blossom.   Bees never ponder their place in the universe.  Sometimes I envy them.

Suffering a digestive malady, I decided to attend church electronically today.  Galloway has broadcast their Sunday services since before I was born, first by radio, then television, and now the internet.  It was a true blessing during covid.  The pastor noted how much empty lumber there was at church this morning, gesturing to the empty pews.  He blamed it on the three-day weekend.  He might have been on to something.   One of the drawbacks of having so many remote options for attending church is that the pastor and the choir can't really gauge how many people they're reaching.  Today, it was at least two more than what he could see before him--probably many more.

I attended Sunday School by Zoom.  That's such a convenience.  Five of our members attended that way, including Ed King, who is somewhat famous in Mississippi terms.  My Sunday school is somewhat of a Millsaps Mafia.  There are graduates from the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties in the class, and a solid number of professors and staff members as well.  We don't have any more recent graduates yet, but that could change at any moment.

Today we discussed free will and God's will.  To try and get a handle on the subject, we included the Theory of Special Relativity, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger's cat, Christopher Hitchins, and of course, the bible.  We like to warm up the class with a brief discussion of politics since we have some of the best political minds in Mississippi in the class.  Today we discussed the dilemma of the Mississippital Hospital Association and Medicaid expansion and the moral implications of what's happening there.  I'm secretly hoping that what I write might attract younger people to our August group.  We're not your ordinary Sunday School class, but I don't think there are any ordinary people reading anything I write.

I don't know God's will, even though I study it a great deal and have for quite a while.  I'm willing to admit I'm often agnostic because I'm trying to be really painfully honest when I write.  I don't know God's will.  I certainly don't understand God's will any more than I understand Special Relativity or Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, but I understand they exist, and I understand what they address.  I understand that God's will exists, and I struggle to understand what it addresses.  With the sun on my bald head and the birds in my ears, sometimes I think I feel it.  I think we all do if we're quiet and listen.   God doesn't speak any clearer than my pink-bellied house finches, but I know they're communicating, and I know he's communicating.  I don't necessarily have to understand the message to understand it's important.

Fieldstone

In season two of Ted Lasso, Sarah Niles plays Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, a psychologist who specializes in counseling athletes.  

A good writer doesn't just pick names for a character.  Names mean something.  Although Sharon is of African descent, she has a very English name.  A fieldstone is a very specific thing.  In England, you have a lot of glacial deposits, which include igneous rocks that have had two sides worn flat by erosion and left in the soil where they're a nuisance to farmers.   After removing the stones from the field, the farmer can then plow and plant the land and make it fruitful.  The stones they remove from the field are then collected in a pile where somewhere in Britain's distant past, someone discovered that these stones with two flat sides could then be used to build the famous British walls or cobble-stone roads.  What once was a nuisance and an obstacle becomes something useful and beneficial.  In the show, that's a pretty good description of the relationship between Ted and Sharon.

Because of my Stuttering, Dyslexia, and ADHD as a child, I was given to many behavioralists for evaluation and training.  My father was a bit embarrassed by the whole process and felt like all I really needed was sports, even though he didn't have the time to participate in coaching or teaching me anything.  My mother read every possible book on child rearing and believed completely in these professionals.   To me, it felt like I was being passed from one stranger to another in uncomfortable settings, made even more uncomfortable because this combination of conditions made me really unnaturally shy and uncomfortable around people.  I'm sure the people my mother sent me to were generous and kind and wonderful, but to me, they were alien and intimidating and very interested in doing things to me that I didn't understand.  

As I entered adolescence, my oldest brother, who had been my idol, began to have pretty serious addiction issues.  When I got to the point where I had to shave every day, his condition advanced considerably, and he began to have pretty regular auditory hallucinations.  He had what you would call voices in his head.  

Immediately after that, the entire family was sent for psychological evaluation.  In Jackson in the seventies, there were really very few people doing this, and everyone suggested we use Clinical Associates at Highland Village.  Initially, I had four or five sessions with Jim Baugh, but since his son was in my class, they transferred me to Doug Draper.  Doug also had a child my age, but she went to a different school.  

I saw Doug off and on for something like forty years.  Initially, he treated me for issues of anxiety and feelings of abandonment, which expanded to panic and pretty serious depression.  Doug reported to my parents that we communicated well.  That was absolutely the truth.  Over the forty years, I spoke to him at least monthly; I always found we could and did talk about anything.  

Sometimes we would talk about me.  It was important to my parents that I develop a useful relationship with a counselor because between my father's career and my mother's career and the crisis in one brother's life and the more normal transmission of my other siblings' lives, whether they had an interest or not, nobody really had time for me.  I was the child that required the least attention, and that's what I got, which was fine by me because the only person in the family who understood the things that were important to me was either stoned out of his mind all the time or having conversations with imaginary people, so being left alone was about the best outcome I could hope for.

I grew to care a great deal about Doug Draper.  I still do.  Whatever he was like as a psychologist, he was a great intellectual mentor, and I found that valuable.  In time, I would find other people to fill that role, Catherine Fries certainly, Lance Goss, Suzanne Marrs, and probably the most important was Brent Lefavor, who taught me to use a hammer and use my mind as an artist.  

I can't say how much Doug helped me as a patient.  I can't say because I can't compare what I would have been like without him, but I can say he never cured me--if cured is even a word one should use with regard to psychology.

After my brother died and my mother died, and my wife left, I began having sessions with Doug over the phone because I refused to leave the house.  During those sessions, I covered my shoulders with a green blanket.  It's in my lap now.  The edges are frayed, and it has maybe ten cigarette holes in it.  Eventually, I quit making appointments.   Doug's secretary would call a couple times a week to see if I wanted to set up an appointment.  One day, Doug called himself.  I sank down into my chair and covered my head and face with my green blanket.  "Don't give up."  He said.  "I won't," I said, "I just want to navigate this by myself for a while."  and that was the last time I spoke with Doug Draper.

A few years before, I had an experience that made me really question the value of psychology.  

My wife and I were having trouble.  She wanted us to see a man she knew for couples counseling.  She had known him for years and been his patient for years and said she trusted him absolutely.  Her father, who I still consider something of a saint, said it couldn't hurt.  I found it much easier to talk about our problems with her father than I could with her, which is probably an indication of how poorly I was handling the situation.  So, I signed up to speak with this psychologist friend of hers.  

We had sessions together, and we had sessions individually.  During these individual sessions, I made a very sincere effort to discuss with him the things happening in the relationship that I felt were creating problems for me, things that I feared were damaging me.  It's hard to tell if a psychologist understands you because all they ever do is try to get you to talk more, which I did.

Going into the next couple's session, I felt energized and hopeful because, as much trouble as I had communicating my troubles to my wife, I had utterly unburdened myself with this counselor and believed he would facilitate her understanding of what I was going through and how this relationship was hurting me.

As the session wore on, he focused entirely on her problems with me, even putting me on the spot about what I was going to do to change.  I even said, "What about the things we talked about?" and his response was that I was going to have to work those things out on my own because what was happening to me wasn't what was important.

On the way out, I told my wife I hoped she brought her credit card because I wasn't giving that fucker another goddamn dime, that it wasn't worth a hundred and fifty bucks for my wife and her old friend to set me up like that.  Later that night, her father called me to say he was sorry, that he understood what I was going through, and it wasn't my fault.  We talked for an hour.   I could never tell if that psychologist heard any of the things I was trying to say, but I know my father-in-law did.  After the divorce, he would call every so often to check on me.  Eventually, he began to forget why he called, and then eventually, he began to forget that we weren't related anymore.  I never corrected him.  I was just glad to hear his voice.

They want me to get a new psychologist now.  There's a lot in my head to unpack, they say.  I suppose there is.  I wish I could say I had more confidence in psychology.  When someone's in a real crisis, I still find myself recommending they find someone to talk to.  In my experience, there comes a point of diminishing returns.  Somewhere along the way, I reached that.  I'm probably not being fair in my evaluation of the couples counselor I saw.  I probably would have been more upset with him if he hadn't completely taken my wife's side, so I might have put him into a no-win situation.

If the point of psychology is to lay out very honestly and completely the things that happened to you and how you feel about them and then try to make some sort of evaluation of what it all means and how to handle it better, I already do that with my scribbling.  If I'm honest, that's probably why I write.  There are things in my head that will kill me if I don't get them out somehow, and writing a few thousand words every day is the best way I know to get them out.  

I miss talking to Doug very much.  I miss talking to my father-in-law very much more.  Both were doctors.  Both tried to heal me.  I can't really say that either was able to do it, probably because I'm a fantastically bad patient.  Maybe that's not the point.  Maybe the point is not the healing but the trying, and trying gets me to hold on long enough for my body's natural systems to heal itself.  

The stones we take out of our fields become the stones we use to build walls and bridges and roads and houses in our lives.  God sends us people along the way to teach us how to do that.  Maybe that's what psychology is all about.