The Writing of John Scott Ridgway
Huplo Benlittle was at his computer every morning at Four AM for over two years, hours before he needed to get up for work, writing out lengthy answers to the questions in the Personality Development Workbookork that his therapist was sure contained all the answers that he needed to straighten out his life. By the time he ended up with his present therapist, Mac Gumm, he was absolutley desperate to quit drinking, after dissolving all he could handle of his life. Huplo meticulously researched his inner-self every morning, at the kitchen table where he kept his computer, while sitting on a chair that he had to adjust a bit too high-- making his feet quite annoyingly dangle a few inches above the floor. There was something vaguely disorienting about having nothing under his feet that added to his sensation of taking a mental journey deep within himself.
Later... he was sitting at 10 in the morning watching tv and trying to get around to be motivated enough to start the work day when a documentary came on and he found himself watching three paranoid schizophrenics being taken off a medication that was causing side effects, and suddenly going from working and excelling in school and having lovers, to having that self literally shouted down, and berated and confusingly convinced by the voices in their heads of all kinds of crazy shit. The lives they had during their good periods dissolved. Parents were stunned, girlfriends making excuses, so called freinds running away from the lost 'poster boys' for mental illness. There was no cohesion between the actions of the two people the crazy men were on and off the drugs as they went from together for years at a time to suddenly shattered against the wall like a glass figurine --humpty dumpties with shells pulverized into dust and blown away on a gale force wind and all the king's shrinks couldn't put them back together again.
He wondered if he was going to slide back into his own mental illness -- the depressions that had fueled his drinking and started him on what he wanted to think was a path to his own personal salvation, even though he had been down plenty of other blind paths in the past. As per his usual regime, he had written in the work book just four hours earlier, exactly how he planned to spend his waking hours. The technique had improved his work habits tremendously, and kept him from slipping into patterns that triggered his depression -- like letting the apartment get dirty, or not walking the dog on time, or any one of dozens of triggers that he had identified with the help of the Personality Workbook. He was surprised how recreating himself on the page every morning had indeed somehow rewritten his life as much as any lover or mentor.
He gets up from the chair and shakes his head, wipes the remainder of his tears from his eyes, and tells himself that he was supposed to watch the news and then shut off the television and make some phone calls. He had five accounts that he needed to see that day, and had no real idea how long the work would take with two of them. More than likely he would just be fixing a minor glitch in their computers programs, but occasionally something would come up major and as their account rep., they expected him to pick up the machines and get them fixed and take them back. Going that exta nine yards kept his customers loyal to him -- the more he saw them the better, as far he was concerned; he didn't want some other salesman walking in on a day when a computer fails and talking some pissed off employee into ordering another brand.
He doesn't want to let himself differentiate from the days itenerary; he has already though... thinking as much, he feels a deep disturbance, starting on the periphery of his mind and ecoing inward, until everywhere he looked, between the furniture and out the window as far as he could see, seemed tinged with a faded grey. He thinks he might know why -- the upcoming election, but he still can't shake the feeling that he is responsible.
He should be stronger than this, more thoughtfully engaged with the government on this tiny, seemingly useless manner... after all, they had just stolen the last two presidential elections... now he just wanted to avoid the whole election, from the attack ad's to thinking about the war and how wrong he had seemingly been even while being basically right, to the liberal gloating over the sadness of closeted gays -- those pathetic victims of our cultural-retarditiy; he couldn't help seeing how wrong it was to hate someone for that particular lie--they were told to lie about this from birth by forces large enough to dwarf the individual, make it question itself, declare some part of them evil.
Nothing in the Personality Workbook described how to deal with a depressive reaction to an election; in fact, the more he thought about it... he was pretty sure that being depressed over an election meant he was just depressed, and the election happened to be there. Certainly that was the stance the workbook would take -- it made him pretty much responsible for everything that went wrong, which gave him the hope that he could himself right all wrongs.
He takes off his clothes and leaves them lying on the living room floor, walks into the bathroom, turns on the shower and crawls in. Feels the warmth splashing over his body, soothing his aching shoulders, giving him the sensation that his cleanliness was a rebirth of sorts... though it was more of a thing he did to avoid the psychic sensation that he was filthy, which was something he could only shake by a daily shower. He suds up his pubic hair and uses the fragrant froth to wash his body. At times in his life, when he was young and working too much while he was going to school, he had briefly gotten over his phobia toward being unbathed for a day. Like the pain/pleasure of whether he went to the club every other day to work out, he loved not having that task master in his mind. He had re-accepted them both, though ... because they were what the Personality Workbook recommended, and who was he to think he knew better?
In his work he knew systems, most of what he did in correcting programming gliches was to find where the system was breaking down. The programs were the perfect post-modern, self-refrential worlds; each program required a different language and set of assumptions to communicate with them. He applied this same principal to people, and his success over the years said something about its validity.
He wished his subconscious was readible, like a person; he knew how to approach another person, but his own self was a mystery. He was convinced there was no over-all system of being that would deal with every situation; the times were tricky, with everyone wanting something different -- honesty or lies or honey or vinegar or bile; the language he used with his christian clients was worlds away from his chat's with the salesman at Chrysler; inside himself were voices that he could tune into as well, though none of them seemed to speak for all of him; there was a child in there, he knew from therapy, as well as the voice of wisdom that the workbook had helped him learn to listen to and recognize as his concept, at least, of his true self.
Nothing he said could say to either made much difference.
The child was convinced he was unsafe too long ago for him to go back and change things; sometimes the best he could do was to use the wisdom voice to talk the child and hope a few words would make sense to the presyllabic mind. Never did he feel in control of that inner world.
He had settled for just telling himself that he would do what the personality workbook said, whether he believed there would be results or not. Now after two years, he was in better shape physically and financially than ever before. He had learned to turn himself into a robot, just going through his morning list on autopilot, and he had changed. He hadn't become Willy Loman, like he feared when he first saw all the language of the salesman in the workbook. When he first started his own business, he had gone to a few salesmanship workshops before deciding that it was all a bit too dishonest for him in some vague way.
He was on the verge of believing the changes were permanent until seeing on the schizophrenic documentary how personalities could dissolve into nothing on a morning when he couldn't seem to get himself going... now he wasn't sure of anything... which added to his dismay by being one of his depression warning signs.
That night he comes home on time, gets in bed at just the hour that he had written down while planning his day. The depression of the morning had been forgotten in the rush of the day. Laying down with his thoughts, no longer a creature developed to make it through the work day, he feels himself dissolving, and thinks again of the slate grey mood of that morning; curls up in a fetus position and pulls the covers up under his chin, tells himself, 'tommorrow we'll write up another day... see what happens.'
He remembers how, before the therapy, he once had used fantasies of killing himself to find a modicum of mental peace to drift out into sleep upon; how that was the only way he could forgive himself enough, for even relatively normal faux paus's.
That kind of thinking eventually caused him to fall out of an otherwise normal day and wind up in a hospital with his wrists slit. He never wants to feel so confused by himself again...
The next morning he gets up with the alarm, makes coffee, and sits down again to work on the personality workbook, hoping he can create himself a little better than the day before. He checks his to do list and see's the election, feels the depression come knocking again... he almost decides to keep voting off the list to stop the dark feelings, then he goes ahead and writes in, 'vote out bush.' He laughs and feels better. . . for a few minutes.