Drinking and Emotional Expression

Scotch and soda, mud in your eye. Baby, do I feel high, oh, me, oh, my. Do I feel high.
Dry martini, jigger of gin. Oh, what a spell you've got me in, oh, my. Do I feel high.

People won't believe me. They'll think that I'm just braggin'. But I could feel the way I do and still be on the wagon.
 

All I need is one of your smiles. Sunshine of your eyes, oh, me, oh, my. Do I feel high.

People won't believe me. They'll think that I'm just braggin'. But I could feel the way I do and still be on the wagon.
 

All I need is one of your smiles. Sunshine of your eyes, oh, me, oh, my. Do I feel higher than a kite can fly.

Give me lovin', baby. I feel high

Scotch and Soda: Lyrics by Kingston Trio

Its quarter to three, there’s no one in the place
Except you and me

So set ‘em up Joe, I got a little story
I think you should know

Were drinking my friend, to the end
Of a brief episode

Make it one for my baby
And one more for the road

One for My Baby One More for the Road: Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer

“Son, he said without preamble, never trust a man who doesn't drink because he's probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time."

James Crumley, The Wrong Case.

I don’t know where you stand on the issue of “altered states,” but I tend to agree with the artsy crowd that the highly examined life tends to create the need for recreational relief. If you have researched global warming, pollution, political corruption and the CIA’s Black Ops activities—any sane human would want a drink.

Writers seem to drink a bit. There are numerous examples provided in this article by Joan Acocella in an article in The New Yorker.

Tom Dardis begins his book “The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer” (1989) by noting that of the seven native-born Americans awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature five were alcoholics: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. As for problem drinkers who didn’t get the Nobel Prize, Dardis assembles an impressive list, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, Djuna Barnes, John O’Hara, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Carson McCullers, James Jones, John Cheever, Jean Stafford, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, and James Agee.

In an article for “The Washington Post,” Writers and Alcohol, Ann Waldron says,

Nancy J. Andreasen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa with a PhD in English, did a 15-year study of 30 creative writers on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where students and faculty have included well-known writers Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Cheever, Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor. She found that 30 percent of the writers were alcoholics, compared with 7 percent in the comparison group of nonwriters, she wrote in the October 1987 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Andreasen had begun her investigation to study the correlation between schizophrenia and creativity. She found none. But she did find that 80 percent of the writers had had an episode of affective disorders, i.e. a major bout of depression including manic-depressive illness, compared with 30 percent in the control group.

My own humble opinion is that emotionally distressed people seek, and find, comfort in the solitary reflection and personal exploration that writing affords. Perhaps the primacy of internal dialogue and the examination of one's personal sentiments and feelings provide a vehicle for catharsis—that’s the way it works for me. I know very little about art, but from my perspective most artists seek emotional expression.

Being “in touch” with ones emotions may be different from emotionalizing life through symbols, images, metaphors, and analogies. Many of the most famous writers seemed to revel in expressing themselves through eccentric emotional behavior, in public and in print. I am not sure they were “in touch” enough to understand the effects of their actions on the feelings of others—which is a very different thing from understanding how to emotionalize the behavior of a fictional character.

Artists may just be neurotics that use their writing to control their symptoms. The practical, well-balanced John Waynes of the world eschew the emotionalism and sentiment that drives my obsessions. I once showed one of my favorite movies, “How Green Was My Valley,” to a friend who was a CPA. He thought it was disgustingly sentimental. I find it to be melodramatic, heart rending, and inspiring.

The business majors of the world, the captains of commerce, the utilitarians, pragmatist, realists, naturalists and other practical people have probably never cried at a movie, or when reading a poem. In which case, to rewrite or an old adage—I think the practical life is not worth living. I'll drink to that.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

Life's Passages

I don’t think anyone under the age of 50 will have the faintest idea what this blog is about. Predictably, every age has its psychological symptoms; when you are 19, you are always the smartest guy in the room and anyone over 25 is a target for your rebellious ire.

In your 20s, you are sorting through career and job and college and he and she stuff. Your 30s are about stabilization and family. All of these phases are superimposed upon a foundation of optimism and possibilities and opportunities and hope. You might be great; around the next corner fortune may favor your portfolio or you will distinguish yourself among your peers in some unanticipatable way.

Yet life tires of itself and plays out its string. Stimulus overload; the novel becomes predictably…well novel. I looked into the Grand Canyon…I saw Harrods at night…luminescent against the London mist. I’ve seen the California coast off Carmel and heard the seals barking commingled with the breaking waves off the rocky Pacific coast. I’ve seen America from Erie, Pennsylvania to Santa Barbara.

I’ve flown into Toronto on a clear night and seen the city – like an arrangement of sparkling jewels – glowing geometrically against the dark earth. I’ve been to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territory...a city of ice and cold isolated and solitary in a land of white and… more white.

I’ve seen the grinding poverty of Nigeria…the cement walls and AK 47s that guard the expats – the compounds…the guards…the gates…the cardboard shacks. I’ve been in Dammam on a day when the temperature was 130° F – in the shade and smoked Shisha amongst the revelry of Muslim camaraderie and boisterous sociability.

I’ve drunk Caipirinhas in cafes on the beach of Ipanema and smoked Marlboro cigarettes and watched the tall and tan and young and lovely people play volleyball and drink coconut water out of green coconuts…smelled the sizzling meats…the fragrant smell of red meat being barbecued at the tables.

I stood at the top of Christo Redemptor overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro and enjoyed a view of perhaps the world’s most beautiful city. And, after about 2 minutes I was ready to go, to eat lunch, to move on. When you are old, times winged chariot is tailgating you…almost pushing you toward your end…toward your undoing…the time when you will be undone…when you will be no one.

The question I ask myself as I am immersed in these unique environments…unusual and new to me…is this; what difference does any of this make? You’re going to die anyway…and that right soon – perhaps. All the diversity and beauty and horror and mystery and romance and banality of this reality will evaporate and…then…nothing.

As I write this, I can hear the groaning of others for whom these reflections appear to be cynical and jaded…the ennui expressed herein unacceptable by the standards of their life perspective. The empirical and hedonistic tone of my comments seem cold and faithless…spiritually disquieting and devoid of the merry optimism of the sacred.

As E.O. Wilson says in his book, Consilience; “The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or other, however intellectualized. They will refuse to yield to the despair of animal mortality.”  You would think the incredible fact of our being would serve as a spiritual source for people.

At a certain age – which differs for each person – the decay is undeniable. The body disintegrates irrespective of any efforts to discourage its accelerating decrepitude. The fresh-fleshed and life-scented buoyancy of the young presides at every gathering and asserts its predominance over those of us who are vanishing.

Look at the old people dragging their disabilities and deteriorating carcasses around the world to get one last glimpse of all that is and all that can be – just before they cease to be. Being a part of that predicable and desperate mob is depressing. What does one hope to gain at this last moment; unique insights into what life could have been had you understood yourself and others more completely in your youth?

So much futile wandering in the service of moral development or to develop one’s aesthetic sensibility just in time to sit in a rocker and think about all the things you should have seen and appreciated but were to busy to enjoy? I’m not sure about the objective shared by this caravan of gray hair and arthritis. Most of us seniors travel because we don’t have anything else to do and to exorcise the demons of boredom from which we suffer. And, it gives us stories to share with others – people who are still immersed in purposeful lives – earning, spending, and supporting their families…advancing their noble career ambitions.  We have something to talk about other than the physical infirmities that assail us.

My point is that travel doesn’t mean much to me at this point in my life. I look around the various settings in which I find myself and ask, “Am I once again the oldest person in the room?” As I see the physical beauty of the world, I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would have been to see it when I was in my 30s. When I might have fantasized about actually moving to a location and living in a strange and wonderful other world from the one to which I have habituated.

At my age, I know that won’t happen. I will never live overlooking the beach at Ipanema. I will not work in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or London or Dublin and experience the otherness of people and other cultures.  Everything that I could have been and might have become, every possibility and dream and fantasy has cascaded and deflated into the now…the here…and this last end.

The Death of a Species

In the inimitable “soap operatic” fashion of our times, many choose to hyperbolize their life’s twists and turns as part of a tragic drama – one which they share with their friends whenever they can corner them. I am convinced that the lower socioeconomic strata of our society spend considerable time and energy “doctoring” the events and circumstances of their daily routines to evoke dramatic elements and emotionalize their hum-drum lives. I do that sometimes myself.

Humdrum lives compel us to put some creativity into stories about daily events. You can catch people at this pretty easily; someone tells you about an experience they’ve had and later you hear them tell the same story with additional dramatic content. Exaggeration, particularly if accompanied with animation and histrionics, elicits an emotional response from your listener – it holds their attention. Attention is one of the biggest positive reinforcers available.

Very few people (as I have commented before) are either capable of, or want to, repeat the written or spoken word exactly or describe an observed event accurately. What’s the fun of that? Why not give it some juice. You come across as entertaining and hopefully tighten your relationship with the listener. Plus, what’s the harm. In a world where nobody can lay claim to facts (everything is challenged by someone no matter how well researched or documented – like whether the Holocaust actually occurred), why not create a story with some sizzle.

Though I spent much of my life trying to teach leaders, managers, and supervisors how to deal with their direct reports in a humane manner, I’ve observed that in spite of every attempt to convey the notion of dignity and respect as the wellsprings of employee commitment and performance, managers either mechanistically use words to condescendingly compliment or shove some goodies at employees to incent them. Human nature and organizational structures seem predestined to bring out the worst in people.

How can you view yourself seriously in a world with 8 billion others, all of whom are laboring under the same delusional conceit? In two thousand years, even the memory of George Washington will be lost to posterity – if the meteor has not hit, the new ice age has not frozen the planet or global warming has not flooded the country. If the volcano upon which Yellowstone National Park rests should become active, it will most certainly wipe out life on the North American continent. In 200,000 years we may be extinct.

I have friends and acquaintances that are obsessed with their legacy – they want to leave the world a better place or so they say. I think the whole concept of being remembered by society is part of the insanity of trying to cope with the notion of ceasing to exist. Has anyone left the world a better place? The ancient Greeks are remembered for their philosophical contributions. Apparently western civilization and the rights of man qua man would not exist without well structured syllogisms and Socratic questioning.

We do not instinctively recognize the rights and freedoms that should be accorded us by virtue of our existence. We need something in writing (the Declaration of Independence) and an army to enforce the propositions presented therein. Historians say that approximately 2,000,000,000 humans have died in wars or from the diseases associated with them. In the last 3,500 years, there have been only 270 years of peace. Here in the US, an estimated 20,000,000 American indians were slaughtered by Europeans. Here you will find more details about the true legacy of mankind.

It’s interesting that men seek to establish their value by affiliation and identification with institutions; man needs an assortment of human organizations whose principles have been codified and sanctified through the ceremonies of authentication – the rituals of validation and authority. The notion that each human’s life is sacrosanct and inviolable is unaccepted unless it is publicly endorsed by an established authority.

So, we seem to take seriously those facets of our life that are the least worthy of consideration and fail to recognize the importance and beauty of the ineffable spark that defines our uniqueness. Although the numerous “faiths” men adhere to ostensibly celebrate man’s value, I am suspicious of “beliefs” that appear to impose the restriction that all men who believe as they do have value and the rest are misguided.

Albert Einstein said, “The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”

Spiritual paths to peace of mind and harmony with existence is more attainable through the secular admission of life as it is. Yes mankind is a mixed bag.  We are good, we are bad, and sometimes we are horrible.  But our existence is a miracle and nothing in life would lead us to believe that perfect creatures were a planned part of our genetic encoding.

Acceptance of what is, of who we are - the range of our strengths and weaknesses; that is the path to wisdom.  With acceptance comes the removal of barriers and impasses of prejudicial assumptions, of stereotypes and emotionalism that each block true understanding and harmony with oneself and all that is.

Spirit of Christmas

Like me, you probably try to recapture the spirit of Christmas every year—remembering nostalgically the exhilaration you felt when you were 9 or 10. Christmas was idealized and innocent and Biblical and shiny and wishful. There was always an abundance of expectant chatter among friends, sharing the hope that you would get the one thing you had been dropping hints about for weeks.

For anyone who wants to rekindle forgotten feelings or to experience the joys of Christmas as it was meant to be, take a few minutes and read Dylan Thomas’s, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. It captures the spirit of the day unlike anything I have ever read. It is secular, so there are no Angels or references to the Madonna or the Manger. It is about a boy’s experiences on a Christmas day in Wales.

My Christmases now are comforting if not inspiring. When younger, I attended Christmas parties and drank whiskey and talked broadly about all manner of inconsequential persiflage. Me and the other Christmas revelers would drink too much, and eventually dance grotesquely and salaciously flirt with women who had no interest in us. Somebody always got too drunk to drive and somebody always got sick and somebody always made a fool out of themselves. But, not me of course. I loved Christmas parties with friends.

Now all my Christmas friends—people who would hold or attend a celebration—have gone with the wind. Literally. They are geographically scattered, psychologically unimpassioned, preoccupied, morose, reclusive, or so damned quirky and eccentric that they can hardly stand their own company, much less a room full of gaggling, expansive, hyperbolizing, mendacious drunks. 

When I worked in psychiatric hospitals (while going to college at night), I went to some great parties. The staff, psychology interns, psychiatric nurses, clinical assistants, sociology interns, chaplains, medical students and nurses’ assistants shared a bond—a closeness related to the commonalities of our unusual work. There is a bond created by stressful occupations, a bond the particulars of which need no explanation—no words to substantiate their validity. Our parties were lively, warm and emotionally fulfilling.

It’s funny that you don’t know when the best times in your life are until they are passed. The best times always arise reflectively. Why don’t we think that these are the best times? Is there a substantive difference? I think so. My best times were during my late 20s and early 30s. A time when health, vigor, optimism, hope—all the possibilities were there, on the table…waiting for me. It is the time before you have to start preparing psychologically for your eventual demise. I will always have that time; I have captured it emotionally in my memory and it will always be there.

As secular as I am, it is astounding how the spirit of Christianity is interwoven into my emotional life. It makes no difference how practical my perspective on religion…deep inside I feel some kinship with the forces that have brought us here. I don’t believe some mythical figure created all this, but sometimes…sometimes when I am trying to understand…when I ache to know…when I miss the departed…when the wonder of it all overwhelms me and the me part of consciousness seems so little…I fervently wish I believed.

At least once a year, we are reminded that it is “A Wonderful Life,” and that there are miracles, great acts of charity, and a brotherhood between all men that is implicit in our species. We are capable of great acts of kindness, willing to sacrifice for others, and most of all we want to live in peace. At Christmas we let down our guard a bit and wish with all our hearts that the world could experience the same transformation that turned Ebenezer Scrooge around and caused him to say:

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me."

Charles Dickens

Determined by Design

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I have extracted a few lines from one of my favorite poems, “Ulysses,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. A few of the lines are often quoted, and for good reason; they articulate one of the greatest characteristics of our species—will.

My blogs are sometimes darkly unsympathetic to mankind; they often describe our failings—through my personal experiences and perspectives—and in that regard, perhaps unfairly and with a bias. But, I recognize the thing that honors us, that differentiates us from the mirthless, cavernous, endless and indifferent space that surrounds us is our undaunted drive to preserve ourselves—to perpetuate our being amidst this strange environment in which we have arisen.

In a dialogue with Ophelia, Hamlet makes some observations about himself that is appropriate to my perspective on my existence:

I am myself indifferent honest;
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at
my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
imagination to give them shape, or time to act them
in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven?

Many of us are “errant knaves,” as Hamlet refers to himself; the title fits more than a few. I think that most humans are doing the best they can to get by. I am a behavioral consultant by occupation, and have spent most of my life applying the principles of operant conditioning to organizational change and improvement. 

I fear I have been tainted by the behaviorist’s perspective.

Determinism has insinuated itself into my mental life, forming an uneasy alliance with objectivism (I can’t believe Ayn Rand and I agree on so much) and some other "isms" and a bunch of other stuff that is probably mutually contradictory; but, I don't care. Although philosophers try to maintain a logical interrelationship between their basic tenets and their protracted conclusions, I am under no such constraints. So, I borrow bits from here and there to explain what I am striving to understand.

To me, it makes no sense to think that men commit acts of violence and other dysfunctional behaviors because they choose to be evil. Given a choice, would anyone choose to be a pedophile, a serial killer, or a petty thief if they could choose to be a well-educated, affluent pillar of the community? I think our neurological conditioning hard wires our emotional predispositions which in turn predetermines unmediated, automatic cognitive and physical responses within selected environmental contexts.

We are compelled. We have uncontrollable urges. If you were brought up in a family where you were left alone all day in the house and beaten when your father came home—never experiencing love and security, there is a good chance you would be a sociopath incapable of empathy--devoid of a conscience and the accompanying guilt and fear that guides most of us to avoid societies censure and the policeman’s attentions.

If you are good, it has more to do with early learning and natural endowment than it does with your “choice,” to be good. The sanctimonious and the self-congratulatory will disagree with this I am sure. After all, it feels better to think that you are “self-made,” than to feel that your behavior is an accident of genetic and developmental circumstance.

To most it appears that executives are seduced by money and power to betray the companies that they defraud out of millions; I believe that the predisposition to yield to temptation is embedded in them long before the context of opportunity presents itself. Many executives honor the written and unwritten contracts under which they are employed. The seeds of good and bad are sown and stitched in our physiology, psychology, and neurology without our consent. Our destiny is foretold, not self-controlled.

I realize I am placing myself at odds with the notion of freewill; I believe we have situational choice capability, but in the long run--character will out. Character being a word that describes our behavior in situations where the behavior exhibited in that situation is used to evaluate that nebulous term.

Yet within the limitations of our evolutionary equipment—the consciousness that serves our adaptation encourages (mistakenly worshiped by some as a Godlike attribute), the unlimited compulsion we have to continue against daunting odds and obstacles (often described as “the will to live”).

I love our species for what we are—animals—creatures of cosmic coincidence, who have arisen from the dust of distant stars and stare outwardly into the timeless space that was our origin with challenging dignity. “We are what we are.”

We are stardust, we are a billion year old carbon,
We are golden
We just got caught up in some devil's bargain
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Joni Mitchell

Ode to Mortality

I don’t think anyone under the age of 65 will have the faintest idea what this blog is about. Predictably, every age has its psychological symptoms; when you are 19, you are always the smartest guy in the room and anyone over 25 is a target for your rebellious ire.

In your 20s, you are sorting through career and job and college and the he and she stuff. Your 30s are about stabilization and family. All of these phases are superimposed upon a foundation of optimism and possibilities and opportunities and hope. You might be great; around the next corner fortune may favor your portfolio or you will distinguish yourself among your peers in some unanticipatable way.

Yet life tires of itself and plays out its string. Stimulus overload; the novel becomes predictably…well novel. I looked into the Grand Canyon…I saw Harrods at night…luminescent against the London mist. I’ve seen the California coast off Carmel and heard the seals barking commingled with the breaking waves off the rocky Pacific coast. I’ve seen America from Erie, Pennsylvania to Santa Barbara.

I’ve flown into Toronto on a clear night and seen the city – like an arrangement of sparkling jewels – glowing geometrically against the dark earth. I’ve been to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territory...a city of ice and cold isolated and solitary in a land of white and… more white.

I’ve seen the grinding poverty of Nigeria…the cement walls and AK 47s that guard the expats – the compounds…the guards…the gates…the cardboard shacks. I’ve been in Dammam on a day when the temperature was 130° F – in the shade and smoked Shisha amongst the revelry of Muslim camaraderie and boisterous sociability.

I’ve drunk Caipirinhas in cafes on the beach of Ipanema and smoked Marlboro cigarettes and watched the tall and tan and young and lovely people play volleyball and drink coconut water out of green coconuts…smelled the sizzling meats…the fragrant smell of red meat being barbecued at the tables.

I stood at the top of Christo Redemptor overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro and enjoyed a view of perhaps the world’s most beautiful city. And, after about 2 minutes I was ready to go, to eat lunch, to move on. When you are 69, times winged chariot is tailgating you…almost pushing you toward your end…toward your undoing…the time when you will be undone…when you will be no one.

The question I ask myself as I am immersed in these unique environments…unusual and new to me…is this; what difference does any of this make? You’re going to die anyway…and that right soon – perhaps. All the diversity and beauty and horror and mystery and romance and banality of this reality will evaporate and…then…nothing.

As I write this, I can hear the groaning of others for whom these reflections appear to be cynical and jaded…the ennui unacceptable by the standards of their life perspective. The empirical and hedonistic tone of my comments seem cold and faithless…spiritually disquieting and devoid of the merry optimism of the sacred.

As E.O. Wilson says in his book, Consilience;  “The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or other, however intellectualized. They will refuse to yield to the despair of animal mortality.”

At a certain age – which differs for each person – the decay is undeniable. The body disintegrates irrespective of any efforts to discourage its accelerating decrepitude. The fresh-fleshed and life-scented buoyancy of the young presides at every gathering and asserts its predominance over those of us who are vanishing.

Look at the old people dragging their disabilities and deteriorating carcasses around the world to get one last glimpse of all that is and all that can be – just before they cease to be. Being a part of that predicable and desperate mob is depressing. What does one hope to gain at this last moment; unique insights into what life could have been had you understood yourself and others more completely in your youth?

Is all this futile wandering in the service of moral development or to develop one’s aesthetic sensibility just in time to sit in a rocker and think about all the things you should have seen and appreciated but were to busy to enjoy? I’m not sure about the objective shared by this caravan of gray hair and arthritis…and I don’t care. Most of us seniors travel because we don’t have anything else to do and it gives us stories to share with others – people who are still immersed in purposeful lives – earning, spending, and supporting their families…advancing their noble career ambitions.

My point is that travel doesn’t mean much to me at this point in my life. I look around the various settings in which I find myself and ask, “Am I once again the oldest person in the room?” As I see the physical beauty of the world, I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would have been to see it when I was in my 30s. When I might have fantasized about actually moving to a location and living in a strange and wonderful other world from the one to which I have habituated.

At my age, I know that won’t happen. I will never live overlooking the beach at Ipanema. I will not work in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or London or Dublin and experience the otherness of cultures and people different from mine. Everything that I could have been and might have become, every possibility and dream and fantasy has cascaded and deflated into the now…the here…and my  last end. I can see the end of me. I no longer cast a reflection in the mirror.