Road Trip Reflections

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Hello Reader,

Got insights?

If life is for learning, then road trips can sure help. I like them for clearing my head and allowing insights. Recent shockwaves from my discovery in the town of Camrose are still reverberating: I  wont’t just blurt stuff out; better I sneak up, essay-style, on my latest reflection. Which means doing something I seldom do: writing about myself, as today’s piece involves backstory about little old me.

In Edmonton 

I stayed in a fancy hotel with a flatscreen TV. How strange to watch some Star Trek episodes in color, episodes that I had seen with bated breath when they originally aired. I saw again “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (by Robert Block) my favorite one of all: The one with the giant Ruk (He played Lurch on The Adams Family) from down in lost underground caverns, where the bad guys make an android duplicate of Captain James T. Kirk. (Cribbing from the dialogue of an episode of The Wild Wild West where they had a duplicate imposter for James T. West) I like it for the blocking, (where the actors stand) and for the karma of Professor Roger Korby and his partners in crime.

What I didn’t like, during the original airing, was my older brothers keeping their emotional distance, skeptical, “not getting into it.” When the landing party beams down and approaches the mouth of a cave my brothers said, “They should be shivering.” 

For years, with every exciting re-run, I’d recall what was said, during that original wondrous evening, by my older, wiser—no. They were fools, and I’ve chosen to drop my memories, gone forever. The reason for their silly lack of enjoyment was something I did not understand at the time,  but now I know: They had emotional insulation. Better to NOT feel. In a few years, as I insulated too, I would stand at attention, and I would sit like a pharaoh: limbs all symmetrical. Back then I might have thought I was uncreative, proper or uptight. But no: Having grown up in a destructive place, I was insulating. 

What else? I was conservative, believing in the Bible’s injunction: I would honor my mother and farther, and, in some bizarre double standard, not hurt their feelings. It was Ruk, the android lone survivor of a lost civilization, who gave me the way out, if I dared. His “Equation” was: “You can’t protect what is trying to destroy you.” … For a short while I simply avoided talking with my dear destructive relatives; for a good while I felt survivor guilt at moving on in life.

A nerd?

My hotel stay allowed me to finally catch the opening episode of Andromeda, a TV series with an interesting take on the King Arthur legends where The Commonwealth (Roman Empire) has fallen, and Captain Hunt of the warship Andromeda (an anonymous Arthur) is trying to end the dark ages. The ship is the sword Excaliber, the ship's A.I. is the Lady of the Lake... The series finale (with the Lady taking back the sword) was a delightful take on the final battle of Arthur where, as in the historic battle legend, he failed to hold back the night, as his companions, one by one, fall. (Don’t worry, their deaths are offstage) Legend tells us that King Arthur only sleeps in a cavern, and will appear again in England’s hour of need: Just as Captain Hunt and his ship had appeared, through a Black Hole time warp.

Given my interest in old history and TV sci-fi, sometimes I laugh to wonder: Why did I not grow up into a nerd who lives-in-my-mother’s-basement with a computer, and is lost behind brown pants and beige shirt, and argues on-line as a troll? I don’t know, but I have always avoided vexatious nerds. Perhaps computer trolls argue with such derision because the only thing they have going for them is a feeling of smart superiority, with web arguments as their only way to feel any passion since they don’t watch pro sports. Well. Let them argue with each other on their blog comments; I feel no guilt at leaving them to each other.

I arrived in Camrose 

Forget the stereotype of rural towns being left brain, conservative, and darkly suspicious of city slickers. No, the town is a microcosm of society, with plenty of exotic coffee houses, an art supply store, a comic book store, an awfully barren Japanese cartoon store, and hey, one of the lady’s clothing stores along main street even specialized in “unusual fun fashions.”  Camrose still has a nice second hand book store, praise the Lord, while lots of used book stores in this province are closing down.

I found a book—I went “WOW!”—that reminded me of my younger days, back when I was losing my insulation by attending a certain weekly meeting of a 12-step recovery program. Not a meeting for substance users, (such as Alcoholics Anonymous) or families of practising alcoholics, (That would be Alanon) but a meeting for adults who had grown up in alcoholic households, becoming as crazy as a drunk without ever taking a drop. On the outside, we had jobs and marriages and dressed normal, with none of us living in Mum’s basement, but still, we loved to meet to share our experience, strength and hope. Yes, it worked: I watched people in recovery becoming functional.

At least now, as adults, we were able to get better: If staying sober helped, we would do that; if refusing to blame our parents or our society helped, we would do that too. What wouldn’t help was wimping out and not even trying for any personal growth—we had already seen such wimping in our siblings and parents. The angry loud alcoholic who says, “Be tough!” and “Quit crying or I’ll punch you” and then punches, well,  he’s a wimp. But you just can’t realize that as a child, not in a home where craziness is normal.

We learned 

Two surprising things from our sharing at meetings and our socializing afterwards: One: that we would “isolate;” and Two: that we mostly, both men and women alike, had the majority of our friends being of the opposite sex. (Not like, say, in high school or on The Flintstones) 

Isolating, as in not getting out enough, was safe. As for our having opposite gender friends, we thought this was partly a self esteem thing, as it was safer, and partly because at least we could offer our adult sexuality—we had problems around feeling self-worth. Naturally. For we had been abused and brainwashed in our childhood. 

If I like feminism (and I do have that interest listed on my blog page) then it is because, besides having female friends, I can identify with the earliest folks in Women’s Liberation struggling to overcome their brainwashing, just as I have had to. As it happens, I’m still trying to understand people in general, “normies,” let alone women. But I really do try. What made me go “wow!” in that town was something in Chapter One of For Young Women Only.

The book was in the Young Adult section. Camrose is in the Bible Belt, where it is a cliche that young rural ladies go to church, and Bible studies too. This book, by two earnest authors, was meant for such ladies.

What the authors learned 

They had a big group of young men and women, at “a singles retreat.” They had the two genders divide, going to two sides of the big room. Then they asked the young men for a show of hands, based on a question, with two bad choices, “former and latter,” for if you somehow had to choose:

The former part: Would you rather be alone and unloved in the world, 

OR

The latter part: Would you rather be inadequate and disrespected? 

You might think the young ladies would choose the latter choice, love. Who could exist unloved? For the women’s choice, you would be right. For the guys? A show of hands… they nearly all chose the former! The ladies gasped! They had no idea how much even the outwardly confident and cocky guys needed respect so desperately, even more than love. No wonder, notes the authors, that the Bible tells wives to respect their husbands, but tells husbands to love their wives. (Ephesians) So that each gender gets what they need. (And of course to be “inadequate” means to be “disrespected” by one’s self)

What I immediately thought of was all those men, and all those women, in my 12-step group, “isolating.” As a lifestyle. Putting safety over being disrespected, taking no chances, as if being judged was figuratively life-or-death. Well, for us it was. At least in my 12-step group we safely had each other, praise the Lord.

Driving out of town 

Motoring past all the pretty pastures, wheels whispering, I reflected on my own bizarre life. Oh, the people, places and love I have avoided—like I said, bizarre… … I once did an essay on Being Good at Something. (Archived June 2016) It could well be that my achieving tangible skills and material possessions has done just as much for my willingness to risk a fleeting disrespect as any abstract increase in courage and self-esteem. But that would be a topic for some other road trip…

Sean Crawford

On Alberta roads

Autumn

2018

Footnotes:

~For Young Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn and Lisa Rice, (the former wrote For Women Only) 2006, Multnomah Publishers, Colorado. I’m too old to correctly judge, of course, but I think it’s a useful book for young people.

~My safe buddy Blair, in order to be heard from the next room, would -shout- to me and his fiancé. Blair was so charmingly normal: I had to explain to him to please stop doing that, as his dear fiancé and I would visibly flinch.   

~What I know can help is radical self-acceptance, beyond what any “normie” needs. (Let the normies have their “self-esteem.”) I remember one day, back from overseas at age 20, visiting with a teenage girl, her younger sister and her mother. The girl was back in high school after having been a runaway—everybody knew—and been living with a man. She said simply, “I am me; I won’t be either more or less.” 

~Come to think of it, I once essayed about Self Esteem and Acceptance, archived back in September of 2011.