Look how much that's going to cost!

I was watching the last part of the recent film "Beowolf," with my clients at the halfway house. It's a clever high-tech hybrid of real actors and computer animation, and tells the story of King Beowolf and his travails. The climactic scene is him battling his son-cum-dragon, who is rampaging across the country burning villages and so forth. He goes after Beowolf's concubine and wife, who are standing on a stone walkway between two high towers. Of course, the dragon burns chunks out, bites other chunks, all but destroying the construction. Earlier, he burned a wood bridge across a chasm.

So where does my mind go? To think, who's going to repair that? What a waste of workmanship! All the drama is nice and all, but in the long term, some poor group of schmucks are going to have to do a lot of heaving and hauling to get the bridge up, the walkway reconstructed. Probably some will get injured or fall. The kingdom's coffers are going to be drained for the construction, and resources that otherwise could have built infrastructure have to go for these repairs.

Oh, how easy it is to destroy, how difficult to build...

A weekend in review

Well, I had quiet a variegated weekend. Texturally nuanced, as it were. A topography of tonalities.

Friday morning started early, waking up to sit at 6:30, and then being in the Inner Sunset to meet a new colleague, who contacted me about her MBCT group. (I'm currently running a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Depression class, and she saw a posting of mine.) We had a chilly cup of coffee (decaf for me) at the coffee wallah on 9th and Irving--chilly because the fickle San Francisco weather turned from sunny to demonstratively overcast within a half hour, and the only seats available were outside. We chatted about our classes, and especially about the what has had to happen inside in order for us to show up as teachers outside.

Then I got on the lawnmower scooter, Heather's original Honda that now is held together by prayer and red duct tape, and rode off to the beach were I was to meet my friend Robert at the Seal Rock Inn, our usual haunt. Robert and I met at my old counseling intern site, and struck up a friendship there which has stuck. We get together every 4-6 weeks to do what his current and my ex supervisor calls "nondual ping pong," which involves a few hours of smacking nondual ideas and experiences back and forth, laced with psychotherapy and personal history. It's always very rich and warm.

Then from there, I rode home along the park and got home a little before Heather, and when she arrived, off we went for our every-other-Friday therapy appointment with Philip, our beloved couples therapist. We had a good session, as we're both learning to be nicer to each other. I think that's the real upshot of couples work, and relationship in general: be nice, be kind, and don't hit. If you lived that out purely in your relationships, you'd be doing pretty damn well.

And next? Off to the scooter store to buy me a helmet, which I was ready to do but the very nice manager guy insisted he order a different model so I could compare before buying. SF Moto is a great place, really friendly and competent, from the grease monkeys in the back to the owner who still works the sales floor. That's where we bought our Sym, which is a great freeway ready scooter.

Then shopping at Rainbow, our venerable whole-foods worker owned coop under the highway on the edge of the Mission district. We have been going over our food budget the last two months, but we managed to keep the expenses fairly low with this shopping run. Yeah, budget!

And we'll probably be spending less, at least for a bit, as I've taken up my mother-in-law's diet, called Fast Five, which basically is eating within a five hour period, and fasting the rest of the day. I've been doing this for the last four days or so, and am fairly amazed at how steady my energy is, how my body is feeling somehow, um, snappier, and that I've already lost a pound. I'm not sure if I'll want to make a lifestyle out of it, but since I've wanted to drop 5-8 pounds, this seems like a good way to do it. I simply feel better when I feel leaner. And I remember my grandfather saying how he chose a target weight, and when he saw himself edging over it, would simply fast to keep on the mark. That sounds like a good plan, especially since I'm seeing how the hunger is negligible and easily manageable (probably because I'm used to retreats where you don't eat after the noon meal).

Let's see, so then we went home and I did my evening meditation, in the afternoon because I had a presentation at CIIS in the evening. The ex-dean of students invited me last month to present on my clinical work, as an alumni at the 40th anniversary celebration. The day before, I had been musing topics and thought I might look on the website and see how I was listed. Lo and behold, I'd somehow been assigned to talk about MBCT.

I'd scribbled up some notes, but with certain of these presentations, it feels like you just kind of set the intention to show up, and then the thing shapes itself. So last minute, I decided to do a particular exercise from the MBCT (the "mindfulness of raisins" bit) and then just sketch the protocol and ask for questions.

Heather was too fagged out to attend, so I rode the scooter down to that familiar building in SOMA, and presented myself in the lobby as a speaker. The genially harried table people couldn't find my name, so just gave me a name tag to write on, and I headed upstairs to my assigned digs. Come my start time, 5:30pm (I had a half hour), the alumni who was had missed her 5pm start time due to traffic, came in with the eccentric (ahem) psychotherapist from last year's nondual conference, the one who had almost physically attacked a presenter. One person came for my talk, so we two pairs retired to separate corners (after the organizer came in to give me a hug and wish me well, like we'd seen each other yesterday, though I had the dimmest of memories of her). My attendee and I started talking a bit before three folks from school or internship wandered in, wine glasses in had, to say an enthusiastic hi and to wish me well. Then as I turn back to my attendee, a wash of people drift in to hear about MBCT.

Now, when a speaker has 30 minutes to present, shouldn't you endeavor to get there on time? Anyway, I started over and did the raisin exercise, and then discussed how it went and why it was a good illustration of what the group's about. Then some questions, with me answering a tad clinically at times, and at the hour the next group entered and off we went.

It was really an enjoyable experience, not because of the outcome or my skill level--both can be tweaked--but because it reminded me (for the first time) of being on stage with my old band, Bi-Curious George. The sense of presence in the moment with the people, of partially making it up on the spot, and of endeavoring to guide the energy while fundamentally having no control over people's reactions or responses--pretty exhilarating like I remember from being on stage all those years ago. It's just so real. So, I want to do more of that, for it's own sake as well as for marketing purposes.

Then from there, I rode back home and woke Heather up so we could go to the first of a 12 series of swing classes at our YMCA. She was groggy, but since once you get her over her inertia she wakes up, I kind of gave her the first push and let the momentum carry her outdoors and to the Y down the street.

The class was fun, more fun than I expected, led by a Swedish woman who claims to have helped revive the Lindy Hop. Well, OK. But the steps were relatively easy, the classmates amiable, and I seemed to pick it up fairly easily. It will be fun to see how it develops.

And then we did a run on the treadmills before heading home and settling in, me reading a bit and then watching the fun and ridiculous Transformers. Which I think Heather said had a good portion of "car porn."

Saturday began more slowly than Friday, with me waking relatively late (9:30a) and sitting for an hour. The day was gorgeous, blue and clear, so I thought to call James and see if he wanted to go to Chrissie Field for a picnic. Robin couldn't make it, having a gig down south, but he and the Boychik could, so we arranged a time and then Heather and I noodled around till he came. Which he said was more or less on time, but I don't quite remember it that way.

Still, we made it to the beach, which after a few shivering minutes of wind and drifting sand, decided us to retreat to Golden Gate Park. Boychik, nee Benjamin, was in pretty good spirits, and when he sat on the grass in his beanie, he looked like a garden gnome.

GG Park was less windy, but not by much, so we huddled together eating sandwiches and chips while Boychik picked grass and repeatedly placed it in father's hand. Repeatedly, but without a seeming diminshment in interest. Early onset OCD? James thought that it might have been the first time he had sat on grass.

With Boychik's nap time looming, James took us home and we retired to our abode. I sat, then sans Heather (who was to get her fingerprints done for her new internship, and then was too tired to get out of the house) went to the gym for a good upper body workout and a long soak in the Jacuzzi. I just dipped my legs, and sat on the edge reading my MBCT group to prep for this morning's class (the second of eight). Regardless of what people might think, everyone is amiable there, no one really blinks at idiosyncrasies.

Then home to do some more preparation for the class, and as Heather was feeling a bit funkified, I retired to bed, to read a book on Buddhism's vector into American life, and then the first couple chapters of a book that's been on Heather's shelf forever, Good Omens, the story of the coming of the Antichrist, and the demon and angel who'd prefer that not happen. Like short grained brown rice, novels are something I never give enough attention to, and which, when imbibed, tell me how neglectful I've been.

And then this morning, I did the MBCT group and it went very well. My fear that I wouldn't be able to fill the time was demonstratively unfounded. We actually went over 10 minutes, and I could have gone another half hour. So that's good in terms of calibration for future sessions. Lots of good conversation happened, and reports on people's efforts and struggles--all normal and predictable, but poignant, seeing people work hard and what's quite difficult practice. And I seemed to even have some lucid things to say, and felt both supportive and appropriately focused in leading the class. I'm actually liking this role. Whodathunk.

And lastly, I drove down to Redwood City to work, and it's been quiet and relatively uneventful. I did try to do some CBT with my men's group in the evening, but it was beyond all but a few, so I'll have to ratchet the cognitive level back a bit to keep it meaningful to them. We decided though, perhaps as a break, to watch "Letters from Iwo Jima" for the next group. That's a good dude flick, yeah?

Surf is up!

I went surfing for the first time yesterday, with my friend and ex-supervisor Michael. We didn't have a camera with us, so I found the above picture to represent my experience. Well. My internal experiences. Externally, from the shore, to make it accurate, you'd subtract about 25 feet off the wave, make it mostly whitewater, and have the surfer wobbling onto his feet for a second before plowing over and trying not to get hit in the head by the 10 foot board.

We went down to Linda Mar beach, in Pacifica, a local surfing mecca. After the long suiting up process, Michael taught me the basics, but the little board of his was too small so I couldn't really get up on a wave. So we rented a longer board, which proved much stabler. I was actually able to ride a couple waves pretty much to the shore, maybe crouching a little, but there ya go for a first timer.

It actually felt quite intuitive, maybe from learning to rock climb or back in the day, ride a bicycle. It seems to be one of those activities that require very little head, and just a lot of allowing the body to learn from doing. I'm pretty sure that within not too much time, I could be up consistently and learning more of the nuances.

The culture is very interesting, kind of a liminal area between the land lubbers and the sea farers. The rules of conventional society seem to get a bit loosened at the water's edge, like the commonness of stripping down in the parking lot, en route to the water, or drying off. The surfer stereotype does seem to have a lot to do with that dreamy in between space on the waves or on the beach.

I can't say I'm hooked, but I'll be back to give it another try.

Dogville

There is something utterly disgusting about Lars von Trier's "Dogville," which is belied by the richness of production and the sheer weight of acting talent. It's the story, shot as a play without an audience, of what seems to be a gun moll escaping to a small Colorado town for refuge. The town slowly plays out its suffering on her, like a J.G. Ballard story, where the human race slowly devolves into its most primitive forms. She turns out to be the daughter of a mafioso, and she orders the execution of the whole town in the film's finale.

But the disgust is not in the story, it's in the sheer adolescent arrogance of the director, in his pompous and supercilious dismissal of human weakness. The end montage, of America's downtrodden, is really horrific to see, like some Versaille aristocrat pointing out their window at the suppurating peons in the slums below. The setup is so easy and yet the payoff so self-righteous, and psychologically stupid.

The film sketches certain moral issues, about responsibility, liberalism, but never plays them out with any integrity. What you get is a cypher for the director to play out his own disgust, to make of the characters what the characters make of the mob daughter: a scapegoat and screen for projection.

Because the production is so skillful, it wasn't till the very end of the film, as the denouement was reached, that the simple point of the film was reached, and the director got to piss on everyone and walk off content. It's like listening to a long, sophisticated speech about race relations, which then ends, "And that's why I hate niggers."

The disgust of the film is supposed to be directed at the morally weak, while in truth it's deserved focus is the director himself.

Some movies

I seem to have seen a slew of movies recently, more than usual. I just got back from "The Bank Job," which was curiously bloodless. Maybe because it was British, and they can't help it. It felt like an exercise in genre, well done, nice people, derived from a real event. But a the end, I kind of shrug. The denouement was rather anticlimactic, bland. So, that's that.

We also watched "Across the Universe" on dvd, which was a colorful, fun trip through the late '60's in America done through the music of the Beatles. But at the end of the day with this one, not much substance, and kind of a string of stereotypes and stereotyped situations. Like they looked through the papers of the time, and stripped the major headlines and cultural figures: there's Janis Joplin, and Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the radicals turned bombers, the student movement, the soldiers. And that's pretty much it. It was nice thought to see Joe Cocker playing a singing hobo.

Ok, and then there's "South Park the Movie," from years ago, which we never saw. Actually, the TV show is, in general, much funnier than this movie, I think because on basic cable you have to censor yourself. Where here, the boys are swearing up a storm, which kind of takes the edge off. It was funny seeing what you'd always thought, that Saddam Hussaine is Satan's lover...and batshit crazy.

Also, "Eastern Promises," David Croneberg's second film with Viggo Mortensen, a story of the Russian mob in London. It was a more straightforward story than "History of Violence," that horrible mess of a film. This one has the nice, order-affirming twist at the end, and the baby is saved. Yeah! Well executed, but pretty forgettable.

Anything else? Oh, I saw "Domino" on the on-demand cable, and was really impressed. Which was curious, because it got TOTALLY panned in the press when released. I just checked Rottentomatoes and of the credible critics, 9% liked it. But Roger Ebert liked it, which makes sense (here). I almost always agree with Ebert; I wonder if we're the same Ennegram number? I love the way he can love the scraggly dogs that no one else wants to let in the house, or can see the beauty of.

I told Heather that "Domino" is like a Joss Whedon production on methamphetamine, a story of a totally dysfunctional, but loving family of thrown-togethers. If it were shot in a linear, cinemagraphically conventional way, it would be banal. But Tony Scott's crazed Vegas color scheme and ADD editing style gives the film a vibrancy and surreal sweetness. Some films look at their characters as if they were either planets floating in space, or a bunch of billiard balls knocking into each other (The Bank Job was a bit like this). Others, like "Domino," somehow see their characters as both people, representatives, and locations of spirit. Which is weird to say of a film so violent, so on edge, and so darkly comic. But these people really seem, in their brokenness and unpolished and unaware selves, reflect that Leonard Cohen line, "There's a crack in everything/And that's how the light gets in." There's a lot of light here because there are really tremendous cracking in this world. And Tom Waits as the desert prophet in a Cadillac is wonderful.

Plus, the totally audacious scene of a man having his arm shot off at the shoulder by a double barrel shotgun, in front of the ex-stars of Beverly Hills 90210 is, well, jaw droopingly ballsy. Christopher Walken's character, a sleazy reality show producer, just looks and says, "Wow."

So, that's my movie roundup.

A show only a therapist [i.e., your mother] could love

"In Treatment" began airing on HBO last week, and will run for 9 straight weeks, 5 days a week. And what you get is two or three people talking for a half hour each day, mostly in the therapist's office, or in his supervisor's office. That's it. But man, it's like therapist porn! I'm not sure how anyone who's not a therapist--not just in the mental health or healing trades, but a working shrink--could possible love such a show.

But I find it riveting. The acting is mostly solid and the stories are real enough (though they've definitely selected the more extreme cases), and the therapizing is pretty accurate. Paul Weston, the psychiatrist/analyst played by Gabriel Byrne, is a competent, caring clinician who is falling apart in about the way most therapists I know are. His marriage is imploding, his relationships with his children are thin, and he hates the supervisor who he keeps returning to for support and to punish. In fact, Friday with the supervisor is some of the juiciest interactions in the show, because you have two veterens of the game playing doing very high level sparing with rather low-level emotions. Watching Paul lie to her without even realizing it is thrilling!

The verisimilitude is a bit strained, but that's ok, since it's being adapted for dramatic television. For instance, 30 minutes is pretended to be a 50 minute session, which is a little mind bending as it happens (because you see the total session), but you can handle it. And as I said, the intensity level is higher than in most therapies.

But what you get is an intense presentation of one man and his many relationships, in which little nuances carry great meaning. He says in one of the first episodes, to the cocky fighter pilot, "In our profession we have a saying: 'The customer is always wrong,'" which he later explains as that a chunk of his work is to expose how his patients are lying to themselves and to him. Watching this unfolding and unpacking happen is riviting, and really funny at times, though the show is in no way a comedy. What's funny, to me, is seeing these common human train wrecks happening, and watch the games and machinations of the human psyche laid out so clearly. It's not a phony or supercilious clarity, though, because there are times when people are so clear and obvious.

It would be a much paler show if you didn't get to see Paul interacting with his wife and with his estranged supervisor, which then changes the way you see him interacting with his clients, even though his demeanor is consistently professional and competent. Like the one scene where he's spent most of the episode fighting with his wife after she exposes her having an affair, and then after she is dismissed from the room, he straightens his jacket, wets his hair, and opens the door to greet his next client, who launches into his own self-centered stuff. It's funny because it's so accurate, and is a juxtaposition of tones which is part and parcel of the therapists life. There are unresolved contradictions which are simply held, which is also so much of a therapist's work.

Seeing a portrait of a mature psychotherapist is a treat for such as me, relatively green in the field. Because it's a complex portrait of a complex man, who is both very skilled and personally very flawed. And it gets the therapy situation right--they must have good consultants. It's like seeing a show shot in your home town. You get to point and jump up and down: "Ooh, I've been there!" Good stuff.

An update

I'm here at work, with the morning's rain blown off, and thick, gray and pink clouds pushed across the sky by a high wind. The day's paperwork is finished, and a Fresh Air interview with a Russian double agent is playing in the background. A client is out cooking fish and fries, which I helped him with though I had to look up the cook time in the Joy of Cooking. The others are watching the Superbowl, which I hear is going to fall to the Patriots, which would have done my maternal grandmother proud, her being a big fan of the Patriots.

These Sundays have gotten harder and harder to manage emotionally, as I haven't had a co-worker for quite some time. With the severity of clients we've had, you're always vigilant, while at the same time there's no other staff to help carry the responsibilities, and the level of depression has increased. It feels at time like I'm at the end of the earth, and my own depression buttons have been getting pushed. Someone will be coming in soon, which will help.

There are these moments, though, like when I went out to check my clothes (I do wash every Sunday) and no one was out on the patio. I stood there and watched the bamboo wave in the neighbor's yard, and the tone was so still and placid, hard to relate to the crowd inside. But when I can coordinate the two experiences, I'm at peace here.