Undoing Depression

Twelve General Principles for a Program of Recovery

from Chap. 20, Undoing Depression, Richard O'Connor

1.  Feel your feelings. 

Depression is an effort to avoid feeling to insulate myself from painful emotions.  By trying to avoid only unpleasant emotions, I miss out on good feelings to and become numb and develop Acadia. I cannot control how I experience my feelings but I can control how I express them.

Our most intense joy, our must intense pain never lasts, while depression can last a lifetime. p. 313

2.  Use your mood journal regularly.  

Knowing what made me feel bad is the first step toward recovery.  I have 3 choices in any given situation:  I can alter it, avoid it or accept it.

3.  Practice Mindfulness. 

Regular mindfulness meditation practice can reprogram my brain and reset the thermostat within me so I can stop obsessive worrying and experience  more happiness than ever. My mind, brain and body can work together to make me slow down and pay attention to the joys of life that I am missing.  I will then make better decisions which will help me gain greater satisfaction with my life.  I will be able to see the world and myself objectively, without the distortions of depression.  Consistent mindfulness is not easy to achieve. It is a goal to strive for through mental discipline.

4. Keep practicing.

Only by practicing new behavior -- including internal behavior like stopping obsessive thought patterns or deliberately changing my perspective--repeatedly, day after day, even when it seems like I am not going anywhere, can I build a healthy brain. Just  thinking about getting better isn't enough.

5.  Rise above depressed thinking. 

I can use the Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts to help me identify my depressed thinking habits. I will identify my Inner Critic and stop listening to her.  I can remind myself that is  is a voice left over from childhood.  It is not me nor the truth about me.

6.  Establish priorities.

Review my key values.  Make a serious effort to stop procrastination and follow my priorities.

7.  Take care of yourself.  

Work on feeling proud.  Each day jot down 3 things I have done to feel good about. Pay attention to small pleasures.  Find opportunities for feeling flow - getting out of the preoccupation with clock time. Practice concentration. Make deliberate effort to focus on task at hand. Learn to relax: take a yoga course  Exercise 3x/week.  Eat healthy, delicious meals.

8.  Communicate directly.

Practice extroversion: reach out to people.  Don't give up and withdraw from conversation when you don't feel you can get a point across.  Practice metacommunication.

9.  Look for Heroes.

Find people you admire and strive to be like them.  Help them with their work.  When our models are people we respect, we respect ourselves.

 10.  Be generous.

Cultivate a true spirit of generosity.  Volunteer in the community. "Fake it till you make  it." Be courteous and thoughtful of others.

 11. Cultivate intimacy. 

Let down your mask.  Let your true self breathe.  Let your loved ones know your fears, doubts, inadequacies.

 12. Get help when you need it.

Identify signals and warning signs that tell you when you're slipping into depression. Set up a support system in advance--therapist and psychiatrist, support group you attend regularly.

Living according to these principles is not easy.  It requires a total commitment to change.  You must devote a lot of time to continuous self-examination and practice new skills to replace the old habits of depression. Be patient.  You'll have to practice new skills for a long time to change the brain patterns.

Mental Health Defined

True mental health comprises healthy but realistic self-esteem, a basic liking for one's self that recognizes both abilities and limitations. This self-esteem has its roots in the experience of being loved as an infant, owes something to the child's innate endowment and temperament, and is affected by the fit between the child and the parents' abilities. After maturity, [a mentally healthy adult] isn't threatened by the usual ups and downs of life.

Undoing Depression, Richard O'Connor, p.301

Nature of a Vicious Man

---from Ethical Teachings of Sri Swami Sivananda (1887-1963), published by the Divine Life Society, 1995, 5th ed.

A vicious man is miserable both in this world and in the next.  He commits sinful acts and feels an irresistible inclination for doing them.  He speaks ill of others and is himself censured.

He always speaks of his own charitable acts.  He beholds others with malicious eyes.  He is very mean, deceitful and wily.  He never pays others their dues.  He is haughty.  He lives in evil company.  He always boasts of himself.

He fears and suspects all with whom he mixes.  He is foolish in understanding.  He is miserly.  He feels excessive aversion and hatred for hermits, Sadhus and Sannyasins.

He takes delight in injuring others.  He is perfectly careless in marking the merits and faults of others.  He is a terrible liar.  He is discontented.  He is highly covetous and always acts cruelly.

He considers a virtuous and qualified person as a pest and things everyone else to be like himself.  He never trusts anyone.

Such a person trumpets the faults of other people, however insignificant those faults may be.  But about similar faults in his own self he does not refer to them even slightly or remotely.  For the sake of advantage, he reaps from them.

He regards the person who does him good as a simpleton whom he has imposed upon.  He repents for having at any time made any gift of wealth even to the benefactor.

Know him for a wicked or malevolent person who quietly takes choice foods and drinks when persons stand by with eager eyes.

A vicious or malevolent person should be shunned by aspirants and wise men.

p. 72-73

Christians in the American Empire

--from Vincent D. Rougeau's book, Christians in the American Empire, Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. [Vincent Rougeau is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. His father is a shareholder in the law firm where I am employed.]

American culture has a particular propensity for celebrating notions of freedom that are rooted in extreme versions of individual autonomy. Increasingly, this has driven American law and politics away from understandings of the human person that are situated in communal values like solidarity and sharing. Hurricane Katrina and the near destruction of New Orleans exposed an American governing elite that was shockingly cavalier in its disregard for meaningful emergency preparedness and virtually incapable of demonstrating the kind of community-bonding leadership and compassion one would expect in a crisis of such magnitude. American politics has continued to descend to shocking new lows, with corruption scandals enveloping prominent members of Congress from both parties, as well as some of President Bush's closest advisors. Nevertheless, American power elits continue to nurture a culture of self-promotion and greed in order to maintain their social and economic dominance, to justify current structural inequalities in American society, and to promote the creation of economic and political structures around the world sympathetic to their interest. p. 3-4

In this book I argue that the social, economic, and political life of the United States has reached a crisis point that will require many Christians to make some difficult choices about the nature of their participation in American democracy and society. p. 6

I argue in particular that it is somewhat disingenuous for Christians who align themselves with the Republican Party to claim their political choice is demanded by a meaninful understanding of the intellectual traditions of Christianity. The Republican political program is driven not only by neoconservatives but also by ideologues who embrace libertarianism, nativism, free-market capitalism, militarism, and moral absolutism in ways that are completely at odds with modern understandings of orthodox Christian theology. p. 7

Despite its being cast as a "crusade" by President Bush and neoconservative intellectuals, the Iraq War has little to do with Christianity, properly understood. It is simply one step in a broader process of bolstering America's world power and creating a civil religion sympathetic to the social, political, and economic objectives of key elites in the United States.

Thoughtful American Christians must recognize that, regardless of who occupies the White House, the United States has not been selected to be a special recipient of divine favor, nor has God chosen the United States to play a unique role among the world's nations. Attempts to justify U.S. economic and military hegemony by likening the nation's foreign policy to a divinely inspired moral role in world affairs should be dismissed out of hand as irresponsible political pandering by people anxious to preserve their grip on power. Why is the United States more deserving of God's favor than any other nation on earth? Are our wealth and military power proof of our favored position? Orthodox Christian theology rejects any attempt to link wealth and temporal power to God's favor. Indeed, if any group can lay claim to a special relationship with God, it is the poor. In the final analysis, no U.S. political party or presidential administration has any right to claim a Christian mandate for a quest to maintain world dominance.

By exposing some of the powerful imperatives that drive legal and political choices in the United States, I hope to explain why key priorities of America's governing and social elites part with the ethos that should underlie Christian citizenship in a democratic society. I also argue that religious influences on political choices in pluralist democracies have certain pragmatic limits and that it is absurd and dangerous for Christians to see American politics as a means for creating a coherent Christian culture in the United States. Diverse societies filled with people of varying beliefs represent the current reality for most liberal democracies worldwide. It is a political and cultural environment that Christians committed to human dignity and respect for individual conscience should embrace, and it is one in which a Christian can both survive and thrive. Working from an active and respectful Christian participation in pluralist, secular democracies, I propose an approach to political engagement and civic life for Christians that nurtures human dignity through the enhancement of community life and social solidarity and rejects the heavy-handed power of military violence, the social emptiness of radical personal autonomy, and the winner-take-all mentality of loosely regulated free-market capitalism.

A Christian's public life must be rooted in charity and love. In a deomcracy, Christian citizens should look closely at the assumptions and values that shape law and public policy and then determine whether, on balance, the apparatus of state strives to promote the dignity and participation of citizens in the nation's common life.... The Christian's role is to assess the overall direction of the society and ask hard questions about what type of community the nation's political and legal actors are attempting to create. How do our leaders understand what supports a decent and dignified human existence, and how does this vision affect our nation's relationships to other human communities around the world? pp. 7-8

Christians in the United States could exhort their fellow citizens to be less materialistic, nationalistic, and self-centered and challenge them to become more charitable, more cosmopolitan, and more open to the transformative power of engagement with others, both home and abroad. p. 9

More and Bigger Always Better?

In the last 50 years we Americans have doubled our living standards, added a full month to our annual work hours and tripled our per capita spending. We are on the work-and-spend treadmill which our culture promotes, requiring us to work more hours to pay for our spending. We typically define “success” as wealth, power, and status. Our businesses worship economic growth. Even our President himself told us it was our patriotic duty after 9/11 to spend our money so our economic growth would not be disrupted. However, our business and political leaders have finally come to realize that our planet cannot survive to the end of the 21st century if we continue this highly materialistic lifestyle that not only depletes our resources but interferes with our nonmaterial needs.

Research studies on happiness show that once our basic material needs are met for food, clothing and shelter, the keys to happiness are found in relationships, community, meaningful work or purpose, spirituality, and connection with nature.[1] Some of us have rejected the cultural conditioning that more and bigger are always better. We have voluntarily chosen to reduce our consumption, spend less than we earn and live a simple lifestyle which means living only with what we truly need or genuinely cherish. Our choice not only helps to preserve our planet’s resources but saves personal time and energy required for acquiring, storing, maintaining, insuring, and eventually disposing of our possessions. The result is that we free up physical and emotional energy that we had devoted to maintaining our possessions and have more time for personal relationships, fulfilling work, creative pursuits, community service, and enjoying nature.

[1] Linda Breen Pierce, Simplicity Lessons, p. 10.

Musings on Endless Growth by Eckhart Tolle

from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction that a cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. p. 37

The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded. p. 48

Jitterbug Perfume

I'm going to read some books by novelist Tom Robbins because I need to laugh, to work on my metaphors, and to read some wisdom--all of which I can do by reading Tom Robbins. He was born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina (1936). He's known for novels such as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994), and most recently Villa Incognito (2003).
He says that when he starts a book, he does not know what the story will be. He does not outline and he does not revise. He perfects each sentence, sometimes for more than an hour, and then he moves on to the next one. He said, "I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life."

He also said, "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

A reviewer wrote of Jitterbug Perfume:

This book has just about everything I could ever ask for in a read: amazing, memorable characters that are so strange and unique that they feel all too real; dialogue lovingly rendered for each character; a wild ride across the globe, through history, customs, food, clothing, mating rituals, social class, and mythology; an amazingly intricate and creative plot that eventually ties up in the end; and finally, a grand theme that serves as the foundation to this whole wonderful, wild, imaginative, freeing ride.

One gets the feeling that Robbins had a grand time writing this book. I was laughing out loud on one page, underlining passages of exquisite wisdom the next. Everything flows so naturally; the feel of this book is LIGHT, airy, featherweight. Yet like a drone or mantra, its rhythm and texture winds its way into you until you have been relaxed by Robbins' prose into another mindscape: HIS, or perhaps, yours, expanded.

Robbins is a master of metaphors. And comedy. And when he combines the two, you WILL be re-reading passages wondering "how did he do that?" Robbins is truly a master and has a strong, unique, comedic, wise, wild, creative voice. Highly recommended.

Menninger on Mental Illness

Known as the "dean of American psychiatry," Karl Menninger, was born in Topeka, Kansas (1893). His ideas about mental illnesses and how to treat them were revolutionary for his time—and many of the approaches he advocated and developed became instituted in modern psychiatric treatment centers.

Menninger built on some of the foundations that Freud had established, and some of his achievements rest in explaining Freud to the general population through magazine articles, books, and letters. But he also diverged in many ways from the founder of psychoanalysis. Where Freud believed in treating individuals through set therapy sessions, the Harvard-educated Menninger advocated a total immersion experience to help mentally ill individuals get well. He-co-founded with his father and brother, who were also medical doctors, the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. It was inspired partially by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, which Karl's father had visited many years prior and had come home to report, "I have been to the Mayos, and I have seen a great thing."

The Menninger Clinic started in a farmhouse with only 13 beds for patients. At first, local citizens sued to stop the opening of a "maniac ward" near them. The clinic expanded greatly and eventually grew to 39 buildings on 430 acres—and to a staff of 900 people.
In addition to disagreeing with Freud on the best approach to therapy, Menninger had differing notions as to what caused mental illness. While Freud attributed mental illness largely to conflicts within a person's mind, Menninger thought that societal influences played a large role in an individual's mental health. He believed strongly that mental sickness often came about because of a lack of parental love during childhood. (emphasis added)

Also, he thought that criminal behavior was often a stage of mental sickness and that it should be treated accordingly. He was a lifelong advocate for prison reform, believing the current system did nothing to help stop antisocial behavior. He told Congress in 1971: "I sometimes feel as if I would like to scream out to the American public that they are squirting gasoline on the fire. The prison system is now manufacturing offenders, it is increasing the amount of transgression, it is multiplying crimes, it is compounding evil."

He often said that it would help anyone "to be getting three square meals a day and to know that there is opportunity ahead—things to be done, land to be turned, things to build." Once, when someone asked him what to do if a person feels he is about to have a nervous breakdown, Menninger replied, "Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them."

He wrote more than a dozen books, including several best sellers. His works include The Human Mind (1930), Love Against Hate (1959), Man Against Himself (1956), Whatever Became of Sin? (1988), and The Crime of Punishment (1968).

--from The Writer's Almanac, by Garrison Keilor

FAY by Larry Brown

If I'd been born in Mississippi, this could easily have been my story too. I certainly tried to run away from home, but Fay, unlike me, was successful at it. Like Fay, I did find my way to New Orleans in the '60s.

Larry Brown's dedication page reads: "For my uncle in all ways but blood: Harry Crews."

Larry Brown is considered by an increasingly large and vocal group of admirers to be one of a small handful of great American writers working at the end of the 20th century.

Synopsis:A beautiful, naive, and good-hearted woman, 17-year-old Fay is fleeing home and her father's sexual advances, only to encounter a series of men all too willing to take care of her. As she makes her way from the woods just north of Oxford to the beaches of Biloxi, leaving bodies in her wake, Fay emerges as one of the most captivating heroines in recent fiction.

Another snyposis from the publisher about the novel FAY, by Larry Brown...

"She's had no education, hardly any shelter, and you can't call what her father's been trying to give her since she grew up 'love.' So, at the ripe age of seventeen, Fay Jones leaves home. She lights out alone, wearing her only dress and her rotting sneakers, carrying a purse with a half pack of cigarettes and two dollar bills. Even in 1985 Mississippi, two dollars won't go far on the road. She's headed for the bright lights and big times and even she knows she needs help getting there. But help's not hard to come by when you look like Fay.

"There's a highway patrolman who gives her a lift, with a detour to his own place. There are truck drivers who pull over to pick her up, no questions asked. There's a crop duster pilot with money for a night or two on the town. And finally there's a strip joint bouncer who deals on the side.

"At the end of this suspenseful, compulsively readable novel, there are five dead bodies stacked up in Fay's wake. Fay herself is sighted for the last time in New Orleans. She'll make it, whatever making it means, because Fay's got what it takes: beauty, a certain kind of innocent appeal, and the instinct for survival.

"Set mostly in the seedy beach bars, strip joints, and massage parlors of Biloxi, Mississippi, back before the casinos took over, Fay is a novel that only Larry Brown, the reigning king of Grit Lit, could have written. As the New York Times Book Review once put it, he's 'a writer absolutely confident of his own voice. He knows how to tell a story.'"

Fay is a novel that could only have been written by Larry Brown, whom the Boston Globe called "one of our finest writers — honest, courageous, unflinching."

Review:
"[H]is most powerful novel yet...[B]y the end the reader is mesmerized, waiting for a gun to go off, but praying for a miracle. There are no miracles, of course, but the raw power of this novel, the clear, graphic accounts of both humble and perverted lives (in the bars and strip joints of Biloxi) is a triumph of realism and a humane imagination." Publishers Weekly

Review:
"For years, Larry Brown has been known and respected as a writer's writer. But now, with Fay, this profoundly Southern novelist may win the broad readership he so richly deserves. Spellbinding." William Plummer, People

A documentary, "The Rough South of Larry Brown," premiered at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in the Spring of 2000.

All Good Books

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). His first important book was the collection of short stories In Our Time (1925), and he followed that with The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the book that most critics consider to be his greatest novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Hemingway said, "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

Dirty Work

I read this novel Dirty Work (copyright 1989) by Larry Brown about the Vietnam War.
Brown dedicated it to "Daddy, who knew what war does to men." One of the 2 main characters got his face blown off in the war. The other one was a quadraplegic - lost his arms and legs. The ending of this novel left me gasping in shock. I forced myself to read it, remembering my cousin, Dexter Bentley, a Vietnam vet, who was my same age. He died alone in his house somewhere in Asheville, North Carolina in October last year. The local sheriff found my name in Dexter's address book and called me to ask me what to do with the body. His ex-wife had long since left him, taking their two boys with her. Most folks thought he was crazy. He would make you feel uneasy - on edge - just being around him - like he might explode any minute. He used to visit me sometime--drive all the way from Roanoke to Richmond by himself. I accepted him and I understood PTSD. His father (my father's brother) worked on the railroad. His mother was deep Southern Baptist religious, and I guess she was the first one that messed him up. He talked incessantly about Jesus. He was never "right" after he got out of the service. We were kissing cousins in our teens.

Critiques from various newspapers:

"A powerful and original work all its own that moves along in short, staccato chapters with indisputably authentic language." - The New York Times

"Not only one of the best books about Vietnam but also one of hte most powerful anti-war novels in American literature. -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"[Brown] has created two fully realized, believable--and often very funny--characters....No one who reads this book is likely to forget them." - Houston post

"Stunning power...Dirty Work makes the human cost of war achingly real." - USA Today

"Courageous...It's hard to imagine a more powerful effect than the one Brown creates with his attentive, unsparing prose." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

a few favorite passages...

"Bursts with power and humanity." - Chattanooga Times

"A marvelous book...Brown's swift, intuitive dialogue explodes like a land mine and leaves the reader dizzy with shock." - Kansas City Star

a few favorite passages:

"I woke up, just wide awake. I was leaving that day. Boarding a plane at Memphis, going for orientation and weapons fire before we jumped off. What we called jumping off. Jumping off the world. I had all that in head of me and I woke up in my mama's house with her cooking biscuits for me. Smelled the same way every morning. Always smelled the same. She never woke me. Didn't have to. Biscuits woke me. I heard her tell people, That child can smell them biscuits in his sleep and when he smells em he wakes up. My mama was so good to me.

"I laid in there that morning. Had my uniform hanging up in there. Soldier of them ost powerful nation in the world. And all I could think was Why, you know, why? I didn't even understand the whole thing. Just went cause it was my duty. I'm sure there was plenty who went didn't understand the whle thing. Just went cause it was their duty. This my country, I'm gonna fight for my country. Sentiment was strong for God and Country, young boys, listen up. Everybody's daddy had been in World War II. Some daddies, anyway. Now they telling us we won't never be in another one like that one again. That one taught us a lesson. We ain't having no more futile wars. Til we have one in the Middle East. Or down in Nicaragua.

"Ain't no need in having a war lessen they just bomb the hell out of you like Pearl Harbor or something. Then all you can do is just bomb the shit out of them right back, and fight, and get a whole bunch of people killed and finally not accomplish a goddamn thing except get your economy ruined forty years later.

"Everything just pisses me off. The world gets worse all the time. Had one man one time that would have stopped it. Of course they had to kill him. And then things just went to shit."

--pp.23-24


"...people has been fighting since God made the first one and they always going to. Nothing don't change but the reasons, man. All you can do is love the ones close to you and try to do right. That's all God expects. God can't be blamed for what happens to me. Ain't God's fault what happened to you, to your daddy, or what happened to me. Fifty-eight thousand of ours was lost. Think about it, Walter. Each one thought it wouldn't happen to him. You oknow how many friends I lost? Seventeen. I mean friends. People I was tight with. Seventeen. i don't have to tell you. I mean you get to know a man, you get to talking to him, he pulls out some pictures sometime and show you. Show you his little girl. His crib. His mama and daddy. He alive to them. Theya ll taking about him at home, wondering when he gonna come back. Is he gonna come back. And then he be dead two or three days before they even know it. They don't know you, but you know him, and you the one have to put him in the bag and zip it up. I done that seventeen times.

"World don't change for no man. World gone keep going on. Don't make no difference what you do, what I do. World keep turning. God got a plan for everything. Man may suffer in this world. But God got a better world waiting. I been waiting to see it twenty-two years, Walter. You ain't no man if you don't do this for me. I tired, Walter. I tired and I want to go home. Want to see my mama. She waiting, too.

"You think you got trouble? You don't know what trouble is. Trouble when you laying in a rice paddy knowing both your arms and legs blowed off and are they gonna shoot the chopper down befoe it can come and get you. Trouble when they pick you up and you ain't three feet long. The people in my fire team started to just let me lay there and bleed todeath. Cause they knowled I'd wind up like this if I lived. Knowed I'd lay like this no telling how many years. They ever one of em has come to see me. And they each said the same thing. You know what that was?

"We wish we'd left you, Braiden.

"You been sent to me, Walter. You been sent and I ain't gonna be denied."

p. 225-227

"That joke I was gonna tell you. They were having preaching one Sunday morning in this black church and they had a new piccolo player playing along with the choir. Well, they played two or three songs there and somebody all of a sudden hollered out in this real deep voice, The piccolo player's a motherfucker. Everybody hushed. The old reverend was up in the pulpit and he looked out over the congregation. He was just shocked. He said, Who was that called my piccolo player a motherfucker? Nobody said a word. Everybody was looking around to see who it was. The old revered stood up there for a minute. Said, All right. I want the man who's setting next to theman who called my piccolo player a motherfucker to stand up. Nobody said a world. The old reverend was just getting madder all the time. He said, All right. I want theman who's setting next to the man who's setting next to the man who called my piccolo player a motherfucker to stand up. And hell, nobody stood up. Nobody said a word. The old revered stood up there and just got pissed off as hell. Then he hollered, All right! I want theman who's setting next to the man who's setting next to the man who's setting next to the man who called my piccolo player a motherfucker to stand up. Finally there was this one little bitty guy in the back who stood up. And everybody was looking at him. He said, Reveren, I ain't the man who's setting next to theman who's setting next to theman who's setting next to the man who called your piccolo player a motherfucker. I ain't even the man who's settingnext to the man who's setting next to the man who called your piccolo player a motherfucker. And I ain't the man who called your piccolo player a motherfucker. What I want to know is, who called that motherfucker a piccolo player?" pp. 128-129

Larry Brown's Big Bad Love

I've just finished reading a book of short stories by a really good Southern writer, William "Larry" Brown, from Oxford, Mississippi ( also home to William Faulkner and John Grisham), who died in 2004 unexpectedly of a heart attack. I didn't like all of BIG BAD LOVE but there are a few gems that made me laugh out loud - "Falling Out of Love," "The Apprentice," "Waiting for the Ladies," and "Big Bad Love." (That one was made into a movie in 2001). His characters are from the blue collar life of hard living, plenty of drinking, sex and relationships gone sour. He has been compared to William Faulkner, Raymond Carver and Earnest Hemingway, and his prose has been described as simple and direct. I loved most his ability to make me laugh out loud!

His life story should give hope to any aspiring writer. His father was a sharecropper and his mother was the postmaster and owned a bookstore. He flunked senior high school English and had to attend summer school after which he enlisted in the Marines. When he was discharged after serving 2 years, he worked odd jobs that show up in his writing - especially house painter - but also hay hauler, fence builder, lumberjack. Finally in 1973 he joined the Oxford Fire Department and worked there for 16 years, serving as captain. It was during those years he taught himself how to write and read Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and Faulkner. In "The Apprentice" his male character is married to "Judy," who wants to be a writer. Through a hilarious account of her struggle to write about "The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati," which he said was boring as hell, he made fun of his own early efforts to write all those stories that were rejected, especially one about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone Park. When he described her, he was really describing himself:

"She wrote a novel first. Blasted straight through, seven months, night and day. I'd be in there on the couch watching old Hopalong Cassidy or somebody and hear that typewriter going like an M-60 machine gun in the bedroom.... She'd be sitting at her typewriter when I left, and most of the time she'd still be sitting there when I came back in. ... I never saw anybody so obsessed. Her appearance went to shit, and she'd dress in the first thing that came to hand. Sometimes she wouldn't even get dressed, just sit there and work in her nightgown.

"And then she started getting published. One story here, another one there. The first acceptance was a great event, and we were happy for a few weeks, and she wanted to throw a big party and invite all our friends. But some of them didn't show up, I guess because so many of them felt that they had been left by the wayside. I understood it. I told Judy that you couldn't keep friends like a can of worms and just open the can whenever you needed them. I said that to her after everybody had left, while we were standing in the kitchen after cleaning up the mess.... Success for her isn't a matter of if any more. It's just a matter of when. Once in a while, just for fun, I pull out 'The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati' and read it. It's got to be the worse damn thing I've ever read. But I'm sort of beginning to like the dog." The hunchback had a son who was a cripple and a "damn dog you didn't even know about until the last page, and the dog had some rare disease that only this vet in Cincinnati could cure.... I damn near puked when I got through reading it." p. 18
"The Apprentice," BIG BAD LOVE, p. 18, 28-29.

Finally, he got one published in 1982 in a biker's magazine, Easyriders. It was 5 years later before he published anything else - this time in the Mississippi Review, a literary journal - a short story titled "Facing the Music." An editor from Algonquin Books read it and that's how he got his big break. He was married for 30 years to the same woman who survives him along with their 3 children.

Larry Brown...I wish you were still around. One thing he was quoted as saying is, "There's no such thing as a born writer. It's a skill you've got to learn, just like learning how to be a bricklayer or a carpenter."

One reviewer wrote of Brown's short story collections that they are all "dedicated to the proposition that folks born south of the Mason-Dixon line are biochemically altered by this accident of geography. It predisposes them to overheated lives of hunting, boozing and hopeless love... [Brown] enrolls [his] male chroniclers in Hemingway's 3-F club of fishing, fighting and fornicating.... Southerners since the 1800's have always promoted the notion that they are a tribe apart."

His novel FAY, a "Southern-fried Odyssey," chronicles the haphazard wanderings of his heroine, a beautiful teenage girl, who hitchhikes from Oxford toward Biloxi and meets mostly jerks. I'm reading that one next since I've met a few myself--that is, after I read DIRTY WORK, his first novel, which is based on stories he heard from Vietnam veterans. My cousin Dexter Bentley, who was my same age, was a Vietnam Vet who died alone in his house in North Carolina, his wife having long since deserted him, taking their two sons. Most folks thought he was crazy because he was strange. He used to visit me sometime--drive all the way from Roanoke to Richmond by himself. His father (my father's brother) worked on the railroad. His mother was deep Southern Baptist religious, and I guess she was the first one that messed him up. He talked incessantly about Jesus. He was never "right" after he got out of the service. We were kissing cousins in our teens. One of the 2 main characters in DIRTY WORK got his face blown off in the war. I'm not sure I'll be able to read the whole thing.

High Living: More and Bigger are Better?

In the last 50 years we Americans have doubled our living standards, added a full month to our annual work hours and tripled our per capita spending. We are on the work-and-spend treadmill which our culture promotes, requiring us to work more hours to pay for our spending. We typically define “success” as wealth, power, and status. Our businesses worship economic growth. Even our President himself told us it was our patriotic duty after 9/11 to spend our money so our economic growth would not be disrupted. However, our business and political leaders have finally come to realize that our planet cannot survive to the end of the 21st century if we continue this highly materialistic lifestyle that not only depletes our resources but interferes with our nonmaterial needs.

Research studies on happiness show that once our basic material needs are met for food, clothing and shelter, the keys to happiness are found in relationships, community, meaningful work or purpose, spirituality, and connection with nature.[1] Some of us have rejected the cultural conditioning that more and bigger are always better. We have voluntarily chosen to reduce our consumption, spend less that we earn and live a simple lifestyle which means living only with what we truly need or genuinely cherish. Our choice not only helps to preserve our planet’s resources but saves personal time and energy required for acquiring, storing, maintaining, insuring, and eventually disposing of our possessions. The result is that we free up physical and emotional energy that we had devoted to maintaining our possessions and have more time for personal relationships, fulfilling work, creative pursuits, community service, and enjoying nature.

[1] Linda Breen Pierce, Simplicity Lessons, p. 10.