Demon: My Ex-Wife

I just found this comic I made, maybe five years ago, for a project at my job. Our students were writing comics based on Lynda Barry's incredible book One Hundred Demons.  The teachers made demon comics, too. I made mine on paper towels (Barry drew hers on yellow legal pads). I never shared it anywhere beyond my school, because I didn't want to hurt the feelings of the person that it's about. Now that person seems to have disappeared from Facebook, the internet and my neighborhood, as far as I can tell. And I really love this comic, so I wanted to share it before the real, ephemeral version falls apart. If you know this person, you don't need to go telling her all about this, though of course I can't stop you. And if you are this person, know that I love you and wish you all the best. I don't really think you're a demon--just someone who haunts me from the past. 

(Click on images to enlarge) 

This is a story about my ex-wife. 

I met her in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We worked together in the grocery store. 

We became best friends right away. We spent all our time together. 

All my friends called her my wife. They called me her wife, too. 

We weren't dating but everyone thought we were. 

My wife was lots of fun when she was in a good mood. She liked to hang out and cook or go out dancing. 

But my wife had an evil side. 

She always told me what to do and got mad at me for no good reason. 

My wife sometimes had another best friend besides me. I enjoyed the break. 

But all the other friends always stopped talking to her. So then she was back to being my wife again. 

One day I snapped, just like all the others. 

After that, we stopped talking. 

I still see my ex-wife sometimes in the coffee shop. We do not speak to each other. 

She is married for real now and has a very cute little daughter. 

I have a recurring dream where she approaches me and wants to be friends again. 

I'm always relieved when I wake up. 

The End. 

Love is the Drug

My friend introduced me to a very useful but little-known word, limerence. It means the pain that we feel when we are obsessively in love with someone, when we can’t stop thinking about them, when our mood directly correlates with whether we’ve seen them and how we’ve been treated by them that day.

This term was coined by a relatively obscure psychologist in the Seventies, and it has no obvious etymological roots. This inscrutability mirrors the nature of the concept itself: like a prime number, the idea can’t be clarified by dividing it into parts. Nor is there any synonym in English that parallels the word’s meaning. The closest would be obsessive crush, or unreasonable pining, or love so bad it hurts.

And yet, in our culture that elevates romantic love over all other kinds, limerence is an everyday byproduct of our need to find our own mates, rather than having them assigned to us by our families or other social limitations like caste, class, or proximity. We can pair ourselves with virtually anyone, and this unending possibility leads to unending disappointment as we project ourselves into the lives of inappropriate and uninterested potential partners, wondering why they can’t see how great we’d be together.

Using the famous Eskimos-have-fifty-two-words-for-snow logic, you would think English would have dozens of words meaning obsessive, unrequited love, love that makes people anguished, insane, irrational, love that distracts us from every meaningful thing in our lives, that makes us irresponsible, unreliable, unproductive, that makes our lives into a long visit to the oncologist’s office, hoping with all our being for good news, crushed but not surprised when the news is bad.

But aside from limerence, we don’t really have a word to describe this state of being, which might explain why the emotion itself is so difficult to remember or relate to until we are experiencing it ourselves. Every time I find myself in this condition, I am shocked by how physical it is, how immune to reason, how distraught I can be over somebody who I have absolutely no claim over.

Nor do we have simple words to describe all the other extreme psychological and physiological consequences of attraction: obsessive elation, a feeling that nothing else matters besides seeing the object of our affection, the diminished importance of everything we usually care about, horrifying loneliness when the person leaves town for two weeks, the certainty that we could never be enough for this person, wanting to kill the person, wanting to kill the person’s attractive friend/coworker/second cousin, wanting to kill ourselves, the lacklusterness of everything else once the person is gone, the forgetting of what the purpose of life was and how we got through our days before we met this person.

What we do have, however, are hundreds of thousands of songs alluding to this sort of love, songs that are as blank and inscrutable as the word limerence itself, except when we are experiencing love-related derangement, at which point the lyrics suddenly light up with flagrantly obvious meaningfulness. For example, crazy and baby are the most commonly rhymed words in pop songs, despite the fact that they don’t rhyme at all.

You drive me crazy, baby.
I go crazy for you baby.
Love is crazy, pretty baby.

Our stubborn insistence on forcing these two words together shows how acutely we feel love as a mental illness. And the consciousness-altering effects of love are evident in all the songs that link the words or concepts love and drug:

Love is the drug for me.
You are the perfect drug.
I want a new drug, one that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you.

These songs all seem to describe the pleasant part of the love-trip, the drug “that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you” rather than the drug that makes me feel like my life is completely pointless without you. We have to focus on this aspect of love or we would come to our senses and go cold turkey, just as we go out drinking for the high, not for the hangover.

Still, there’s a new love-drug song out right now,“Your Love is My Drug,” that describes the negative side-effects:

I’m looking down every alley.
I’m making those desperate calls.
I’m staying up all night hoping,
Banging my head against the walls.

Songs like these show that we instinctively understand the connection between love and drugs, that love makes us completely out of our minds, that it’s a bunch of chemicals that make us feel this way.

We tend to minimize and dismiss this insanity, but we feel it, and we see its results every day: students dropping out of college over break-ups, people ruining their hard-earned careers by having affairs with their coworkers, politicians sneaking out of the country to be with their lovers when they are supposed to be governing, people walking in front of trains because they can’t imagine a life without the person who has rejected them.

These are serious drugs that have consequences as bad or worse than cocaine or heroin. But we can’t outlaw them or wage a war on them, because these drugs are in our own bodies, and we can’t get them out until we’re dead.

Going First

Someone I know recently died in an accident. It wasn’t the kind of accident that occurs during normal activities everyone does every day, like driving or showering or walking down the street. It also wasn’t the kind of accident that results from an activity so risky that no one is surprised when it goes wrong, something like white-water kayaking or flying an “experimental aircraft.”

My friend died doing something both dangerous and mundane, the kind of thing that makes parents declare that their children are trying to get themselves killed. He died from a skateboarding accident. He crashed his skateboard, hit his head, was in a coma for a long time, and then finally, just when chances for his eventual recovery had started to look up, he died.

Besides his death being incredibly sad on its own, it bothered me a lot that he had died skateboarding. Something about it seemed like suicide to me, like he had chosen to die on purpose. I couldn’t figure out why I felt this way. After all, he skateboarded everywhere, all the time. There couldn’t have been anything special about the day when he crashed; it was probably just an ordinary day, until things went horribly wrong. But I couldn’t get rid of this creepy feeling that he knew it was coming, that it was planned somehow.

I tried to shake the idea that there was some underlying significance to all this, that it was the end to some kind of parable or puzzle or syllogism.

“I suppose it could have been anything,” I said to a friend of his. “It could have been a car accident.”

“No,” said the friend, shaking his head vehemently. “It’s important that it was a skateboarding accident.”

That’s how I felt, too, but I didn’t like what this interpretation suggested. It meant that it wasn’t random, not a freak accident, that his death had meant something. But what could it mean, other than a referendum against the kind of life that we were all living, lives full of small dangers, unnecessary risks, hobbies and habits we all convince ourselves are safe, or safe enough?

Our friend was a brave guy. That’s one of the qualities that always struck me most about him. Without a hint of apprehension, he would do all kinds of things that to me seemed pretty scary: travel to China to study kung fu, practice crazy jumping back flips, spar on a raised platform with no protective gear, move to Guatemala on a moment’s notice when his ailing mother needed help, and, regularly, get on his skateboard and fly down Monte Vista, a street so steep it’s difficult to walk down without stumbling.

I had often been inspired by his bravery. When he returned from China during a time that I had been feeling ambivalent about sparring, the stories of his trip motivated me to face up to difficult challenges. Watching how easily he could pack up his life and travel, I reminded myself not to get too attached to my routines. If he can do it, I would tell myself, it must not be so bad.

His death reminded me of another one that occurred five years ago, when my coworker’s sixteen-year-old daughter flew off her dirt bike, which she was riding with her father, and suffered a fatal injury to one of her internal organs. I didn’t know her very well, but after she died, I learned she was another brave person, someone who, like my friend, inspired people around her to try to be braver themselves.

Just after she died, her mother told me that her friends were keeping her MySpace page as a memorial, and when I went to look at it, in addition to about a thousand heartbreaking messages from distressed teenagers, I saw her brief self-description, which included this:

I love my dirt bike, even though I seem to fall off it all the time!

The eerie foreshadowing of these words chilled me when I read them. Could she have known, I asked myself? As with my skateboarding friend, I imagined for a moment that she had chosen her death, or that it had been somehow fated. It just seemed so unlikely that she would specifically mention the falling off; why would she say that, if she hadn’t anticipated what it would come to mean?

Then I thought about the potential for creepy omens on my own online presences: so many jokes about getting beat up, getting hit in the face, so many pictures of injuries and bruises. It seems impossibly far-fetched that any of this would lead me to serious physical harm, just as the falls must have seemed reasonably safe to her. And they were; she was just really, really unlucky in how she fell. We can all be unlucky, whether getting thrown by a dirt bike or kneed a little too hard in the face or hit by a runaway bus as we cross the street. So it’s back to the car accident comparison. Are these deaths, which seem so particularly haunted, the result of the same kind of wrong-place-wrong time bad luck that causes people to die on the freeway or in the shower?

Is that the only lesson, I wondered, as I thought about these two deaths? That same old lesson we’ve always known, that you never know when it will be your time to go, that it can happen any time, in any way, for seemingly no reason at all? And if the brave people go and get killed doing things that are supposed to be safe, what lesson does that teach the rest of us? The implied message seems to be that maybe it’s not a good idea to be so brave—but that’s hardly an acceptable lesson to take from the lives of people who inspired those around them to be adventurous and take risks.

I looked back at the girl’s MySpace page this week, which would have been her twenty-first birthday. I saw that her friends are still writing notes to her on it, five years later. They tell her about their problems, and tell her that she is an inspiration to them, how they think of her as they enter scary new phases of their lives, starting college, moving away from home, dating. Some of them say that they imagine her as she would be now, as a young adult, and they look to her for wisdom about decisions in their own lives.

I reread her self-description and saw something I had missed last time. Below the part about falling off her dirt bike, it said that she loved softball and basketball, and, she noted, that she loved to play “full contact—it’s more interesting that way!” If I saw those words five years ago, I didn’t remember them, though if her accident had occurred during one of those sports, these words would have seemed as foreboding as the ones about her dirt bike. It turns out, she wasn’t psychic regarding her own untimely demise. She was just a brave girl who loved to do scary, exhilarating things, just as my skateboarding friend did.

The lesson I will keep with me from my friend is the same lesson I always learned from him, which is to be brave. I though at first that his death negated this message in some way, that it showed that taking risks does not pay off. But now, like the young adults seeking strength and guidance from their friend’s memory on MySpace, I feel inspired by my friend’s memory to be braver, even about the prospect of my own death. My friend did so many things that I found terrifying, and when he did them, they came easily, fearlessly, effortlessly. Death is far less scary to me now that he has gone through it. I think to myself, if he did it, it must not be so bad.

Adam Caldwell's drawing of Joseph in the hospital.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Joseph and Monica, both greatly missed.

Love, Magic, Logic

“I was reading this thing about love,” said a teenaged girl sitting behind me on a couch in the tea shop. She was telling her friend about a recent break-up, trying to get some perspective and make herself feel better. “It was about how you can’t go looking for love, that love is more a force that just comes into your life through different portals, through your own process of self-discovery.”

“That’s so right,” said her friend.

Their conversation reminded me of an anthropology lecture I watched recently about people who have schizotypal disorder, which is a mild version of schizophrenia. According to the anthropologist, people with this disorder are prone to metamagical thinking. This term, as he explained it, really just meant magical thinking, belief in the reality of unreal things: ghosts, angels, demons, gods, unseen forces, metaphysical realities.

Of course, as the anthropologist acknowledged, you don’t need to be schizotypal to engage in some form of magical thinking. Many of us believe in unprovable phenomena; it’s just that people with healthy brains secretly know that our beliefs are delusional, while the schizos really believe in them.

As humans, when we can’t understand some aspect of our own nature and the nature of the world we live in, we can search for meaning in one of at least two ways: through logical reasoning or through metaphysical beliefs. Logic is sort of agreeable in that it provides provable answers, reproducible outcomes. But since these conclusions can only be based on empirical evidence, they are not very emotionally satisfying.

In other words, the bare facts, what we can prove, can be pretty depressing. The facts about falling in love will tell that girl on the couch that her happiness is contingent on other people and that she can’t control those people. Those people will hurt her, leave her, betray her, or, failing all of that, eventually die, unless she dies first. So she wants to find answers that draw from what she can’t prove: imaginary answers to make her feel better about the grimness of the real. Love is a force; it comes into our lives through portals.

Much of our magical thinking stems from the classical flaw in logic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, after-this-therefore-because-of this. That’s how our superstitions work: “I broke a mirror yesterday and today I got in a car accident; therefore breaking the mirror caused my car accident.”

A lot of magical thinking follows this model:

Five hundred people performed transcendental meditation to end the Vietnam War; two weeks later, U.S. troops began to pull out.

I prayed to Jesus, and he cured my son’s Leukemia.

With this type of thinking, two known facts (I prayed, my son was healed) are connected in an illogical way (my prayer healed my son). But sometimes, our magical thinking is not based on any known facts at all:

We will be rewarded for our good deeds in a future life.

There is a god, and everything happens according to his plan.

Likewise, when we think about love, our magical thinking can follow a post-hoc model of reasoning, where we connect unconnected events:

Someone I know met the person of her dreams after she stopped looking; therefore I must stop looking.

Someone I knew met the person of her dreams after she decided to suck it up and try internet dating; therefore I should try internet dating.

But a lot of what we think is based on absolutely no evidence at all:

If we put it out to the universe that we are looking for love in our lives, the universe will send us what we need.

I will meet somebody when it’s the right time.

All of this reasoning is flawed, but there’s no better way to think about it. As with all the other types of pain that accompany the paradox of being both a mind and a body—death, hunger, illness, loneliness, longing—the cold, bare logic of love is too depressing to view objectively. We need make-believe stories to make us feel okay about our physical drive to mate with other people. No one wants to receive the Hallmark card that tells us the proven facts:

You cannot control whether somebody loves you.
Even if you work your hardest at making your relationship a success,
your partner could leave you, cheat on you, or abuse you.
Even if you have the most wonderful relationship in the world,
your partner could die. Therefore,
it would be prudent to prepare to be alone.
Happy Valentines Day!

It’s just like how we don’t want to tell ourselves: we need to eat other living things to survive, and we need to kill them brutally, and even if we don’t kill animals brutally, they will kill each other brutally; these are the facts of the world. People we love get diseases and get hit by cars and die and the only causal logic to explain it is, “We are mortal, and bad things happen.”

My sister the psychologist once told me that the schizophrenics she worked with didn’t want to take their medicine. “They love their hallucinations,” she told me. “They feel exciting and important.”

We need our delusions, because the facts make sense, but it is a depressing, empty, meaningless kind of sense. We need to believe that there is an order to all this, a meaning, that it is connected by some causal logic. There’s someone out there for me, we tell ourselves. It will happen when the time is right. It’s meant to be.

Thanks Brain for the lecture recommendation.