"Mommy and I are one"

I'm on my third read-through of a book called Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Meyer, Ph.D., which I stumbled over at the library a couple of weeks ago. Meyer was a noted psychoanalyst (she died right after the book was completed) who viewed the world through a scientist's eyes until she had a strange experience - what she calls an anomalous event. Her daughter's antique harp was stolen from the back of a theater in San Francisco. After two months of fruitless police investigation, a friend of Meyer's suggested she contact a dowser. "You mean one of those weirdos who walk around a field with a sapling?" "They can find other things besides water, you know." So she had a what-the-hell moment and called the president of the American Dowsing Association. The man, who lived in Kentucky, heard the story and said, "Okay, the harp is in Oakland - please send me a street map." Meyer complied, and a few days later the dowser called and said, "The harp is located near the corner of Fifth and Jackson streets." Meyer had never heard of that corner, but she drove out there, looked around, had another what-the-hell moment, and posted some fliers on the corner which said she was missing a harp. A couple days later, a man called her and said to meet her in a parking lot; she did; and he handed the harp over to Meyer - no explanations, no questions. As Meyer drove home, she said to herself, "This changes everything."

The harp incident made Meyer quite uncomfortable. It flew in the face of everything she knew scientifically about the world. After a number of sleepless nights, she decided to look into the various research that had been done over the years to prove whether extraordinary knowing really exists, and if so, what/where does it come from. And so her odyssey began.

It took Meyer awhile to admit her experience to other scientist friends, but as she haltingly told the story, she found that most other scientists, especially those who worked in a clinical setting with patients, had experienced similar events themselves, but had kept them secret for fear they would be ridiculed. It was like opening the floodgates to a torrent of anecdotes (anecdotal information being dismissed in the scientific world as so much crap).

One of her patients, a brilliant neurosurgeon who suffered from migraines, admitted that he stopped teaching because he felt he couldn't teach the real reason he had such an astounding success rate. When Meyer revealed her harp experience to him, the neurosurgeon haltingly admitted that he owed his near-perfect patient survival rate to the fact that he sat next to each patient in the hospital room, sometimes for just a few minutes and sometimes for hours, until he saw a white halo of light form around the patient's head, after which he "knew" that the patient would be healed and survive the surgery. And he was never wrong. How could he teach other surgeons, he said, if it all boiled down to this weird halo thing?

Meyer started reviewing the research into these anomolous occurences and discovered that much of the experimental data was scrupulously obtained - double-blind and triple-blind experiments, carefully constructed, meticulously carried out, and accurately reported - but peer reviewers still couldn't accept the results obtained. "The experiment was perfectly crafted and conducted, but I cannot accept the results," went a typical statement. The results just didn't jibe with what scientists understood to be the very parameters of existence as they knew it to be.

Meyer describes an experiment carried out which sought to see if prayer could effect pregnancy rates. A fertility clinic in South Korea took polaroids of each woman who came to the clinic requesting help with their fertility (the women weren't told they were part of an experiment). All of the pictures were sent to a go-between in the US. The go-between divided the pictures randomly into two groups; one group was sent to a Lutheran prayer circle in Oklahoma with the instructions to pray for these women to get pregnant; the other group of photos were just stored away. Six months later, data was collected regarding whether all of the women had conceived. The rate of conception of the prayered-for group of women was many times the rate of conception of the control group. The odds were something like ten million to one that there would be such a different rate of conception. By the way, this experiment was repeated with Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and non-denominational groups doing the praying, and the results were identical.

If you're like me, you scoff at this sort of thing, yet there's a part of me that says, "Aha, I feel like this could be true." I'm one of those people who won't quite believe in ESP, for example, until I see it for myself. But Meyers makes an interesting point - maybe instead of saying, "Seeing is believing," it might be more accurate to say, "Believing is seeing." In other words, if you believe that there are such things as extraordinary occurences, you're more apt to see them than someone who doesn't believe.

I've posted about my year in Palm Springs where I read Tarot for one of those psychic lines (floating in the pool, I'd deal the cards on the pool deck and sip iced tea while speaking on a cordless headset to the hundreds of people who called in). Sometimes the readings were flat - I would know it when the cards were dealt; but sometimes I'd get a little shiver as the cards were being shuffled and I'd think, "Well this one might be good," it was just a sense that a window was open - and sure enough, those readings were usually awesome. I mean freaky awesome. I'd stare off into space and images, words, faces, all sorts of things would appear to me. The customer would be blown away, and sometimes I'd get a call a week or two later confirming something I had said. As I'd be conducting these readings the information was clear; afterward, I wouldn't quite remember what I'd said, sort of like the experience of waking up from a dream and even as you grasp to remember the details, they just float away from you like smoke.

When I first started doing Tarot, I chalked it up to the enormous amount of information I could glean from a customer just from the few minutes of chat that preceded the reading. I mean, people are amazingly alike in certain fundamental ways, and it wasn't such a stretch to "see" something about a person. We're all quite intuitive about these things. I just got good at verbalizing some of these general patterns. An example? Well, let's say a 19-year-old girl calls in and asks if she's pregnant. Just let your stream of consciousness take you on a journey regarding this girl and her life, and you'll see all the stuff you can "know" about her if you just let it come to you.

But it wasn't long before I had moments when my cognitive impressions about a caller were quite different from the cards I was dealing or the visuals I was getting. And I soon learned that I would screw up the reading if I ignored the cards or the visuals. I just "went with it," and if I saw a black car, I mentioned it. Or if the seven of cups came up in a particular place in the deal, I'd say, "You're gonna move soon," even if it didn't seem like the discussion up until then supported it. Pregnancies, weddings, deaths, illnesses, promotions, firings, fires - - all of these and more would come to me. Sometimes I struggled to find the words to express the thought (you just don't blurt out "Grandpa's dying") but I figured that if the message came through, it was my job to express it.

One time when I was about 20, I went to see a psychic, a sweet older lady in her 70's with white curly hair who sat at her French Provincial dining room table and did readings. She found out that my mother had died, and asked, "Is her spirit around you?" I said, "No," and a couple of seconds later I felt a shivering WHOOSH around me, and the old lady said, "Well she's here now," and I thought, "Yup, she is," and then the psychic proceeded to verbalize a whole stream of stuff, mostly that my mom was saying "I love you - I'm sorry - I love you - I'm sorry." It was a blow-away moment, that's for sure. I KNEW my mother was in the room with us.

Maybe the most astounding experiment Meyer describes involves subliminal messaging - the idea that millisecond-long messages like "I want popcorn" and "Buy me" flashed at people and absorbed by the unconscious could effect behavior. Advertizers discovered it in the 60's and their manipulations were amazingly effective in selling product. In the experiment, two groups of people who signed up for a 12-week smoking sessation class received excactly the same instruction, except one group watched a video that had been edited to contain the subliminal message, "Mommy and I are one," and the other group watched the same video without the subliminal message. After the twelve weeks, all the participants had given up smoking. Six months later, the group that hadn't received the message experienced about a 57% return to smoking. The other group experienced only a 15% return to smoking. The odds of such a difference in success rate is in the millions. And I was astounded.

"Mommy and I are one?" Can it be such a universal thing that the behavior of a random group of smokers can be so affected by absorbing this message of comfort? I mean, do people seek comfort from cigarettes and food and shopping and sex and drugs because they miss their mommies, feel separated from them? Can it be this easy?

My mommy has been dead since I was 17. I was closer to her than to anyone in my life before or since. She was the world to me. In the year after her death I went around in a haze and gained a hundred pounds. I wasn't quite sure I would make it.

In time, my cognitive mind accepted her death, accepted my aloneness, and I don't think of her much. When I do, there's some sadness and regret, some nostalgic feelings, some good memories, and that's about it. The rational head says, "You're a grown-up now, Steve, you do not have your Mommy anymore, and this is what life is for you." But I cannot doubt that, subconsciously, intuitively, psychically, emotionally, physically, I miss my mommy.

Food is a comfort to me. Definitely. That's my number one reason. I use food to comfort myself. Sometimes I do not cognitively know what I'm comforting myself about - it's not like I'm always in a state of fear about the world or worried about my job, or any of a thousand things that could cause me to need comfort. Yeah, living in the world these days isn't a snap and can be fraught with concerns, and sometimes legitimately need comforting, which is not available to me in any form more readily accessible than a pint of Hagen-Daaz. I think it just might be as fundamental as I need my mommy. This is my baseline. This is where I reside, whether I see and acknowledge it or not. Efforts to lose weight quickly become ineffective because the underlying truth is that I need to be comforted, and food is my go-to for comfort. Period.

When did I "lose" my mommy? Not when she died; it was a long time before that. It was when I was five years old and realized I was gay, and concurrently felt that if my mother ever found out, she would stop loving me. This is the basic story of my life. And by the way, I was a scrawny kid until I was five. One of my first memories is frantically stuffing rice with butter and soy sauce (we lived in Japan) into my mouth while I was sobbing. I don't remember why I was sobbing. I distinctly remember the sound of the sobs pushing through a mouth full of sticky rice - the sound dampened as if I had stuffed a wet rag in my mouth.

I never came out to my mother. When she died, I lost the opportunity to find out whether my five-year-old-hatched theory was true, that she would stop loving me if she knew. Once when I was 12 I broached the subject with her, asking what she thought of homosexuals, and she spewed forth such hatred that I just shut down forever the idea that I could tell her.

I mean, really. If I were a script, the arc would be so damned obvious - little boy figures out he's gay, fears losing his mother's love, starts to eat to comfort himself, the mom dies, and he grows up a fat man. What a cliche - what a bore. No studio would ever greenlight it. As much as I distain this mundane truth about myself, I cannot deny its authenticity.

So can I change this fundamental need in my mind to seek comfort with food by absorbing the message, "Mommy and I are one?" Well, we will see. I just installed subliminal messaging software on my PC and will be getting "Mommy and I are one" flashed at me at the rate of every five seconds whenever I sit before the computer.

My cognitive processes haven't been able to release me from this simple cause/effect life theme, and not for lack of trying, God knows. Maybe something as simple as subliminal messaging can rewrite my core belief and release the need to be comforted because I miss my mommy.

Mommy, can you hear me? Mommy, can you feel me? Mommy, can you see me in the dark?

Nothing but the tooth!

I've been waiting a long time to replace a front tooth. Mostly because dental services, like everything else, have become so expensive as to be almost prohibitive. The techniques have developed greatly, but so have the price tags. I was expecting to get an implant, and have been saving my dollars for almost a year - - the best laid plans . . .

When I was eighteen, my upper front tooth started to get a little dark. Turned out I had jarred it somewhere along the way and it had died. So I got a root canal and a crown. Dad paid for it (thanks, Dad!). That crown hung in there for twenty-five years, twice as long as it was expected to last, but then it became loose and it turned out the post and crown were coming out of what was left of the root. So then came one of those "I'm not sure this will work, but" conversations with an endodontist, who tried to install another post and crown. Two thousand bucks. They had to make another crown, of course. This wasn't quite as successful as the first. It became loose after about a year and after many re-cementing efforts at the dentist, I learned to glue it back myself, with crazy glue. You know that ain't good, but what the hell. I was poor by then, Dad and his wallet were long gone, and you gotta have a front tooth, right?

So two years ago, it broke off for good and couldn't be repaired. The options presented were to get an implant, a bridge, or a partial (aka "flipper" because it flips out of your mouth easily). No way could I afford an implant then, and I didn't like the idea that a bridge involved sanding down the perfectly healthy teeth on either side of the hole, so I scraped together the three hundred bucks and got a flipper, just in time to get a job or two and start saving for something more permanent and more expensive.

The flipper worked well (aside from making my gay lisp more pronounced) until the tooth broke off the palate piece in a freak hotel incident. I was in Beverly Hills attending a training for my new job, and was freaked out to be introduced toothless, so I ran out, bought a bottle of super glue bottle and managed to reattach the tooth, only slightly crooked. Ah well, looked more realistic that way. Crisis averted. Over the next year I developed quite the technique for reattaching the tooth, which had a tendency to snap off at embarrassing moments, like the time I projected it onto a restaurant menu while ordering dinner. I would sand off the old glue with an emory board, put the palate piece in my mouth, put glue on the tooth, and aim it for the hole. Sometimes I'd accidentally glue the tooth to my gums, but with a little prodding, re-sanding and re-gluing, it would work.

But finally the flipper was beyond repair, and that's when I started my nine-month period as a toothless man while I saved up for an implant. At first I was horribly uncomfortable, not smiling much. All the pictures taken of me during this period feature an unnatural grin, lips pressed together, quite moronic. Ah well. I thought often of taking three hundred and getting another flipper while I was saving for the implant, but that would just put me three hundred bucks further away from the permanent solution, so I grinned and beared it.

Then a month ago I had a consultation for the implant. Turned out I needed a bone graft (cadaver bone, in case you're wondering), in order to create a happy home for the big metal abuttment I needed to hold the new crown, to tune of $2K. And then I would wait six months. And if the coral reef did its job, implant the pier (another $2K), and six months later, attach a crown (you guessed it, another $2K).

So screw it. I had the stump of tooth taken out on Tuesday. My dentist is from Viet Nam, a dour woman who cannot speak English well, but is a deft surgeon (not the most comforting bedside manner, though). My hygienist is from Mexico and also cannot speak English well. I had to serve as translator between them, not easy when your mouth is full of fingers. When Dr. Thieu said, "Bye - bye!" I thought it was time to leave. Actually, she wanted me to bite. Ahh. The hygienist said to the dentist, "You want topical?" Dr. Thieu said a noncommital "Unn." I translated - "Yes!" When the big needle came swooping in to give me a shot directly in the middle of my palate, I flashed back to the Steve Martin - Bill Murray scene in Little Shop of Horrors. "Candy bar! Candy bar!" It was grisly.

I've spent a couple of days moaning and groaning, and early this morning I got my new flipper. Four hundred bucks, including removal of the stump. And I did the math - if a flipper lasts on average a year or so, I can put $40 a month into my tooth fairy account and always be ready to get another flipper whenever disaster strikes. Screw the big obnoxious attempts at some permanent solution. I'm almost 50 years old - time to put away dreams of permanency and cope with having to clandestinely remove my flipper before meals.

On my way home from the dental lab this morning, I stopped at my Starbuck's drive-thru and gave the baristo, Sam, a huge smile - "Hiiie, Sam! Iced venti coffee with cream and four Splendas, pleeeeeeeese!" I hope he noticed I have a tooth now. I hope I'm no longer the toothless fat guy in a green VW beetle who always orders an iced venti coffee with cream and four Splendas. I hope I'm now the relentlessly cheerful fat guy in a green VW Beetle who always orders an iced venti coffee with cream and four Splendas. It's a step up.

I plan to spend the day smiling into a mirror. As Sweeney Todd said when he was reunited with his faithful friend the razor, "At last - I AM COMPLETE!"

Here we go again

Okay, so with everything going on right now at work, I took advantage of this lovely long holiday weekend (in between hurricane reports) to start the ball rolling again. I updated my online resume, scanned some documents, and created some search agents for other federal jobs - and I actually applied for one. It's here in Albuquerque, and it's a great job, but it's only just the beginning. I'll send out a flood of applications in the coming weeks. I know that's what it takes. And I'll score something awesome.

I have butterflies in my stomach for doing it, but I know I have to move on, and I know I can find something wonderful out there. I've reread a couple of my posts from the last job search, and it plunged me back into some of the trepidation I felt last time, but it's different now - I'm searching from a better place. I have a decent job, I don't have to take what I don't want. I can throw the whole thing into play - new job, new city, new future. No limits this time. Just having the freedom to go for it, whatever "it" may be. Following some of the ideas incorporated in "The Secret," I wrote these statements:

I am asking for and receiving the perfect job right now. I feel it, I see it, I accept it - I ask for it and receive it. It is wonderful! A GS-13, with great opportunities to be creative and to do worthwhile work, a perfect supervisor, wonderful co-workers, a great atmosphere, a beautiful location, support, security, appreciation and opportunity to promote. It is the most wonderful job for me in the world, and I gladly and thankfully receive it!

I am asking for and receiving the perfect place to live right now. I feel it, I see it, I accept it - I ask for it and receive it. It is wonderful! A charming cottage in a lush garden setting, with a private outdoor area, a pool and Jacuzzi, one or more bedrooms, a large living room with cathedral ceilings, a fireplace, a roomy bathroom, washer and dryer, hardwood floors, lots of light, just ten minutes from work, reasonable rent, a great landlady, perfectly charming and beautiful style, architecturally interesting, great neighbors and neighborhood, superb atmosphere. It is the most wonderful place for me to live in the world, and I gladly and thankfully receive it!

I am asking for and receiving the perfect group of friends right now. I feel it, I see it, I accept it - I ask for it and receive it. It is wonderful! The people are interesting, smart, capable, funny, loving and compassionate, creative, supportive, welcoming, and bring out the best in me in every way. They are of all ages, sizes, ethnicities and experiences. They share a love for music, art, philosophy, theater and dance. They welcome me with open arms into their beautiful lives and give me a great sense of comfort. They are the most wonderful group of friends for me in the world, and I gladly and thankfully receive them!

I am asking for and receiving the perfect opportunities to walk on the beach right now. I feel it, I see it, I accept it - I ask for it and receive it. It is wonderful! The water laps up against the sand and I walk along the edge, letting the water cool and refresh my feet with each step and allow the breezes to blow in and around me. I see the sparkle of the water, the glorious crash of waves and the sound of seagulls. I smell the saltiness in the air and the freshness of the breezes. I revel in being on the beach, on the edge between the continent and the great ocean. I feel my heart growing stronger and my spirit lifting. I am bathed from head to toe in the revitalizing energy of the experience. It is indeed the most wonderful place in the world for me to be, and I gladly and thankfully receive it!

That last paragraph is a giveaway - I'm definitely California dreamin'. But I'm not gonna limit myself. I can make a phenomenal life for myself in a thousand different places, and my cat and I can jump in my green VW bug and hit the pavement going East, West, North or South. It's a great big wide wonderful world out there, and we're gonna find our place in it.