On Therapy and Artistic Immortality…On a Tuesday, At That

As posted Tuesday on the Parking Lot Confession.  Make-up work for missing my regular Sunday post.  Thanks for reading…

SS, in full Blackhawk "Playoff Beard" Regalia

Good morning, Confession-ees! I’m confessing today from strange places and times. Tuesday morning. Not my usual day.

You might be thinking: WTF, him again, we know to avoid PLC on Sundays as to not subject our eyes to his ridiculous blabber, and now he’s tricked us; posting on a Tuesday! Look away, Eyes! Look away! WTF! WTF!

As am I. As am I.

(Or…you might not be thinking that at all. Who knows what we think, right?)

Yesterday, I attended my very first therapy session, with a therapist who one of my best friend’s recommended. To be truthful, the decision to try therapy (again) wasn’t a shot from the hip, I’ve gone back and forth for a while now on it’s necessity. I settled down many a night on my mother’s verandah, sucking on a bottle of Knob (“Knob Creek, the only bourbon Sleep Sunshine will pass-out from“…still waiting for that check, Knob Creek; remember Cheyenne Drive is spelled with 2 N‘s), staring out into a Chicago rainstorm, going back and forth:

To Therapy, or Not-To Therapy; the question.

During this debate, I recall an instance, another of my best friend’s likes to retell, about a time when I was in college, and one buddy, lets call him Goro, and another of my best friend’s, let’s call her Silvanopolis…yeah, that’s what I said: Silvanopolis. She’s part Russian, part lost city at the bottom of the ocean. A Russo-opolis mix. Very sexy.

Here’s the interplay:

INT. Living Room–College Apartment–Day

Beer bottles and fast-food containers and passed-out individuals lying around on a beer-stained carpet, top-less girl sprawled on an adjacent couch. GORO and SILVANOPOLIS sitting next to one another engaged in a heated DOOM battle, smoking four-foot glass bong between them.

Goro: Yo, Sil, what shall we get Mike for his birthday?

Silvanopolis: I don’t know. A psychiatrist.

GORO nods his head.

Fade to black.

My College Yearbook Photo: Gosh, I looked so much younger then!

Harkening back, I question if I’ve always been sorta crazy, and come to the conclusion I guess I have.

But now I’m doing something about it. Kudos to me.

Really, what I seek out of therapy, what I expressed to my therapist, lets call her Fredreicka Goldenfarb (what is with me and Russian names this morning), was my desire to have the ability to de-clutter my brain to a point where I can make some Big Choices in my life. At the moment I feel so buried, mentally, so over-extended, that it’s hard for me even to decide on what to have for lunch, much less figure out what career I want to do for the next ten years, what state I need to live (as in geographical area; not mental, IE–catatonic), who I will marry and have children with, etc.

The only part of my life which has remained relatively constant is my work, my writing, and I wonder if the roller-coaster of productivity I’ve experienced–weeks of 70,000-word-production coupled with weeks of struggling-to-write-a-decent-page-of-prose–can be aided by this de-cluttering of brain.

For her part, Fredreicka stated her confidence that we’d get there, that she’d do all the heavy-lifting (then proceeded to ask me how much I’d pay for her services; to which I wrote down the secret password to my trust fund on a slip of paper and handed it to her. Then she mentioned how it would get worse before it got better and I snagged back the slip of paper and emptied the change out my pockets onto her nice therapy table, instead).

One of the touchstones for me has always been, can I be “normal” and still hold onto my artistic edge?

Fredreicka again seemed confident. She said, not only would my artistic edge not be affected, but I’d be a happier person, which would allow my creatively to flow more freely, and I’d have more control over it, eliminating, or at least tempering, the frustration of never knowing which Sleep Sunshine will settle down to the keys–the Manic-uberProductive-SS, where the sentences flow like I’ve possessed Jonathan Lethem’s fingers; or the Depressive-NearIlliterate-Nicholas-Sparks-clone.

We hang onto this creativity like it’s something that will hold us to the earth when the tornado of our lives rages around us. It’s what we have. It’s what keeps us sane. It’s who we are, isn’t it? Non-artists don’t get that, do they?

Yet, our creative endeavors won’t feed us (literally and figuratively), won’t cloth us, won’t hold us when tragedy strikes, won’t love us back (not in the way our human-ness needs), won’t grab a beer with us, won’t provide us children (real children), won’t allow us to feel the great stimulations living, real living, has to offer: eternal love, friendship, family, orgasm…

Often I think of some of the greatest artists of Time, and note how many of them, outside their art, lived miserable existences–failed marriages, estranged children, friend-less, penniless, drug and alcohol addictions, shotgun chokings–and I wonder, I do, if that is the price we must pay for greatness.

And if it is, will I make this sacrifice? Can I? Should I?

Fredreicka seems to think not.

Me? I hope not. I want the love, the marriage, the baby-carriage. I want all the gifts I bestow on my characters and with them all the pain they bring. I want to feel, in real-life, viscerally, not just on the page, through my creations. But mostly, I want artistic immortality. And if I can’t have both–if we all really must choose Red Pill or Blue–I remain unsure of what choice to make.

My hope is Fredreicka will help me de-clutter my brain enough to make the best decision I can.

Thank you for reading.

As always, I wish you great words!

-SS

For those of you in the Chicago-land area, Sleep Sunshine (Michael James Greenwald) will be reading his poem “I Am Lane” at 42 Degrees North Latitude on Thursday, May 20th, at 7PM. (I’ll have two, no three, therapy sessions under my belt by that point, so the chance you’ll witness some on-stage weeping is really good!)

Click here for more details.

Thanks for supporting your local Chicago artists!

One More Day

Good Morning

By: Michael James Greenwald

It’s a melancholy day, here in Chicago, inside and out.  Drizzle and wet, white-gray clouds linger over my damp drive-way.  Water beads my sister’s windshield, blades of sprung grass.  I feel it in my head; maybe like an old man feels the cold weather in his arthritic knee, I feel a somber day in my depressive head.  Winter has found its way back, there’s a hard chill in the air; birds that had returned, perennials that had poked heads above the dirt–this morning, believe they’d somehow erred.

NOT me (thank God no one had camera phones in my day)

But I’m not nineteen anymore.

The option of smoking a bowl and/or cracking open a bottle of suds, sitting on my couch and thumb-wrestling my MLB “The Show” all day has been over for a while.  Dad no longer pays my freight.  I can no longer pick up co-eds.  I’ve graduated to the world, unprepared, possibly, but thrust out of a collegiate womb filled with pot smoke, beer bongs, video games, Oscar feeding, laying college girls with no performance or procreation expectations and hopefully no STD’s.

The world is a cruel place.

Probably.  Yes.  I think at least three million people today agree with me.  But infinitely more interesting?  Probably that, too.  Because there’s something utterly interesting about a winter haze hanging over a winterized forest, and nature, caught unawares, unsure of whether to spring forward, unterred by this sudden regression into the heart of winter, as though the seventy-degree, sunny days of the past two weeks had been a terrible tease, an elongated April Fools joke, an unfunny frat prank on us all.

Yet, I can’t help wondering how many people died yesterday (I tried to look it up on our wonderful Internet, but evidently unless you are notable or a celebrity, no one seems to record your passing).  How many people would give whatever they own for One More Day, even a lousy, overcast cold day like today.

And if that doesn’t clear my head of winter, then possibly nothing will.

Come on chemicals!  Adjust!

Hello, Dopamine?  Time to rouse and face the day!

I’m going to force my tired body and aching head out from slumber, fold my sheet crisply over my comforter, brew a strong pot of brew, and plant myself at my desk.  There, I will click open my The Rainbow Child file and allow my fingers to wiggle this depression away.

The best part of being who I am is using what I have, for the greater good of the world, and more importantly, the greater good of me.

Write, You Fingers!

Write!

–MJG

HORNS!!

Michael James Greenwald fights off his daily dose of depression with his fingers.  He’s a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and considering allowing UT, Austin a second chance at deliverance, by accepting him into their MFA program for 2011 (HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!).

For now, he works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago.   He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.