Manageable Bites

Each day you have to power through your work day…then home to your family in the evening where you have to be on your game-- effective, attentive, and sensitive even! What if that isn’t all?  You’ve got another two hours of work to do that is really important to you--pursuing who you see yourself to be.   

What if it had to be like that every day for the next 3 months?  That’s where I found myself. I was 29, working full-time as a surgical tech, taking emergency call weekends to make ends meet, working my way through Graduate School. Wife, children, house, dogs and cats, testosterone—all the requirements for madness.   

I had three months to complete my master’s dissertation. I could not take time off from work; I could not take any more time off from family. And the food I ate couldn’t power me through…I would fall asleep at my desk in the evening; didn’t have the energy to stay awake, even with caffeine. What to do? What to do?

Sing: “I was feeling oh so bad/I asked my family doctor just what I had/I said Doctor, Doctor/Mr. MD/Now can you tell me what’s ailing me/He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, (repeat 4 yeahs)/Yes indeed, all you really need is Dexadrine.”(Tune of “Good Lovin’” by the Young Rascals.)

My GP had used Dex at times to get through the rigors of Med School he confided. “Just be careful how you use it,” he warned. “Maybe try one early in the day to see how long it lasts, how it effects you, and how it helps you concentrate.”

Why did I need to concentrate more than just usual? I had accumulated over 300 pages of notes from some 30+  books over four years of study, and I was trying to boil it down to a theme that made sense. My focus was a demanding and much- researched play by Shakespeare called Hamlet. I used psychology books to help interpret what I saw going on in a very dysfunctional aristocratic family. I needed to pull it together in 90 days without missing a beat at work and at home.

On an upcoming Saturday, Val would be taking the kids to visit her folks…that would be the perfect day. D-Day arrived! D for Dexadrine.  I sat down at my desk with the pile of disordered notes, with the fervor of Dr. Frankenstein ready to assemble pieces of unmatched organs and limbs and to make it LIVE. I had the magic pill and swallowed it.  Eight hours later when Val returned, I was still at it, with notes all over my desk, tacked to the walls, and taped to the books on the shelves. 

Let me remind you. This was 1974. High tech was a Smith Corona Electric Typewriter. There was no Cut/Paste, no Google.doc no Word.

I was using scissors to cut out notes that seemed related to the various subjects and scotch taped them to the appropriate pages. Eventually, all these pages would have to be retyped.  But now they looked like the tattered, trailing tails of kites held together by the strands of the ideas that were threading through my mind.  Over the weeks, the theme started coming together. It was me, my ideas!…..or was it the magic pill that made the process seem so coherent, so exciting? Was the relationship I found of Hamlet’s “antic disposition” to concepts from Carlos Castenada and George Gurdjieff about acting out of character mine thoughts or the Dexadrine’s. Was the observation about Hamlet being an only child mine or the drugs?

I realized I could not do this every day. The next day I cut one of the pills in half…..good for a 4-hour Sunday afternoon of mind-rushing, attention-furling, insight-spiraling connections. Then Monday came.  I went to work straight, of course. Helped Val in the evening with the kids, straight. Then, I went into my room where I proceeded to cut the half-pill left over from Sunday in half again. Oh yes, Dr. Frankenstein was very careful with his patient—today only 2 hours of mind-rushing, attention-furling, insight-spinning connections. That would form the routine of reconstructing the corpus until it became animate. 

This far, I was legal. Had a prescription for 30 of the cerebral, stamina-surging pills. Then, as the young and serious sometimes do, I pushed the envelope. I was able to procure a copy of the Nicole Williamson-Marianne Faithful-Anthony Hopkins version of Hamlet. I watched it with Val who was an active accomplice in my studies after we inhaled a joint packed with That Which is now legal.

It was when we were watching the higher version of Hamlet.  I got this curious idea. That all the characters were part of one organism for the viewer. That, in fact, Shakespeare wanted us to identify with each role, not just the hero, or the hero’s friend, or his antagonist…..what if each of us were all the characters, and each of equal value? That became my theme.  Well, one of my themes.

As I watched the version of Hamlet High, all the words and actions of the actors seemed to be, not in slow motion, but paced in a way that I could see the depth of their meaning to each other, the importance of their feelings about each other.  I saw them as community even as adversarial as some were to each other.

I understood the characters……as if they were real….each sentence of their dialogue an intimate yet manageable bite of understanding what was real.  Where before I had felt puzzled without all the pieces, I saw meaning and motive.

You know Toastmasters…how there are times when The Awesome happens at our meetings….the Educational Minute, the Speech-of-the-Day, The Table Topics seem to be related, and what the Toastmaster, Table Topics Master, the Evaluators say seems to connect everything together…….when the meeting is greater than the parts we play. It was like that! Like being chuffed by our meeting. 

This is the result. {I held up the 300-page typewritten binder.} My advisor said that a Master’s dissertation was just supposed to be a review of what had already been learned. Well, would want to take all your time just tp rearrange someone else’s ideas. Of course not. I had entertained an idea no one else had thought of before.

Did these ideas belong to me….or was this contribution to knowledge in part attributable to a state-altering stimulants? They, no doubt, merited citations, but The Chicago Style Book was silent on how to do that.   

Toastmasters, we have heard that our bodies are temples. Well, then, what is the mind? This marvelous mechanism, this temporal brilliance is the driver of a vehicle that runs inefficiently on low-grade fuel, without directions, as it cruises across the surface of someone else’s story….until we see that story has become part of our life. And it sometimes needs to be traveled with someone else driving, so we can settle in and feel the importance of the journey.