Random thoughts from a night in the life of Steve.

Wednesday I saw the latest installment in online banking powerhouse ING's new ad campaign; like the clever "Make it Happen" series from the Royal Bank of Scotland that preceded it*, the ING campaign pokes fun at the postmodern tendency to talk things to death and, especially, to over-intellectualize (or over-pseudo-intellectualize) the solutions to life's daily problems. In the action depicted in the ING spot, the world pretty much goes into a tizzy when a cat gets itself stuck up in a tree. Crowds form to lament this cataclysm; police and firemen mull their plans of attack; and a distinguished-looking politician even shows up to outline his platform on such matters... Then the lady on the bench simply pops open a can of tuna, and the cat promptly returns to earth.

Of course, this speaks to one of SHAMland's most egregious sins. In their eagerness to differentiate themselves from competitors, and create new things for us to worry about (so that they can turn right around and sell us their 7-step "breakthrough" solutions), the gurus take everyday situations and make them sound as if they require (and deserve) a level of cerebration and planning that would befit, say, the U.S. exit strategy from Iraq.

I've said this before, but I go with Nike here: Sometimes in life—certainly, I think, in most day-to-day settings—you just have to do. Not think, not talk, not form a support group and commiserate or kick things around with a few dozen other people who are similarly mystified by life. Just do it.

Anyway, I have to think it bodes well that advertisers (we talked recently about Kia) now see the SHAMscape as fertile territory for satire.

************************************

Also last night, at one point during ESPN's broadcast of the Mets-Cardinals game, baseball analyst and former Mets GM Steve Phillips said this: "Winning is about knowing how to lose with character."**

Soooo, let me get this straight, then: An undefeated football team, or even a truly dominant baseball team, would be apt to have lousy character, and thus would be a poor choice to continue winning? Or take someone like the early, record-setting Tiger Woods. Would Tiger—an athlete who never knew anything but victory—have been regarded as an "incomplete" player because he'd never had to cope with defeat? And what are we to say of Tiger today? Should we consider him a better player somehow, now that he's losing golf tournaments he probably should win? (I guess the reason he's losing more often today is that, because he always used to win, he never developed that "character" Phillips was talking about. And I guess, also, that now that Tiger is learning how to handle defeat, one day soon he's going to start winning even more tournaments than he used to win back when he always won.)

See how silly this gets? How perfectly asinine?

The problem with quotes like this (and most of what passes for wisdom in the Sportsthink genre) is that they sound deceptively good. They go over well in front of groups. They impress as deep, lyrical, inspirational, meaningful. In truth, as a rule, they mean nothing, or damn close to it.

* and, I'm guessing, inspired it.
** As is often the case when these quotes are spoken in the background as I'm doing something else, I think I'm very, very close to the verbatim words, but I may be off by a pronoun here and a conjunction there.

For love and money, Part 3.

Looking back at all that has happened over the past year, Ginny says of Catherina, "She's a Svengali. This is a woman who saw an opportunity and took it. Because I believe that Gerry did not go looking for this. He would not have just gone off with Karen-down-the-street."

Gerry's brother, Rob, agrees wholeheartedly. "I drove with him in a truck for a year and he never mentioned any issues in his marriage. Ginny supported him in whatever he did. If he wanted to go sailing, he went. If he wanted to go to Sturgis, he went. My brother is not typically an infatuated-type person. This is a guy who, normally, if we went out and three hot-looking chicks went by, he'd tell me about his bike."

"In our will," adds Rob's wife, Jayne, "it even says that our children, if we die, would go with Gerry and Ginny. He was like Mr. Magoo! This thing was so out of character that we were concerned that [Catherina] was planning to kill him." If that sounds a bit hysterical, says Jayne, consider that "at around that same time we read in People about that guy in Brazil.* The only thing I felt a little good about is that Catherina actually did leave her husband, so maybe Gerry wasn't going to end up dead. He was just going to be used."

"I believe that she's a gifted, gifted individual," says Rob. "I think she was looking for money, and now she ends up with access to my brother’s inheritance as well as the Hamptons, one of the most affluent communities there is."

Cultish is the word Rob uses in summarizing Catherina's overall effect on his brother: "He's connected to nothing from his old life. He left his job. He left his wife. He refuses to speak to his best friend. He tries to have a relationship with his daughter, but it's too painful to her. She told him she doesn't want him at her graduation [this past month]. She told him, 'You can no longer speak to me unless you use real language. Whatever it may be, you need to speak to me like a normal human being.' "

For my part, I've long said in interviews that if there's a most insidious aspect of today's uber-Empowerment, it's that it gives people in its thrall an easy mechanism for rationalizing incredibly selfish, hurtful behavior—often in the name of "happiness" or "following your dreams!" Rob may have said it best: "I told my brother, 'I want to write a book called 'In the Wake of the Awakening.' Because what happens afterwards? What about all the turmoil you cause?' And I told him, 'For somebody who preaches love, you're certainly putting an awful lot of negative energy out there.' "

****************************************

Finally, regarding the Think Love project that set all this in motion: Confusion reigns. A limited liability corporation, Think Love LLC, was registered with the New York State Division of Corporations in Gerry's name on October 2, 2006. (For the record, that's a month before the Election Day "consummation trip.") ThinkLove.org, registered to one Jean-Claude Koven of Rancho Mirage, CA, clicks through invisibly to Rodrigues' personal site. (Koven would appear to be another latter-day "metaphysician," to use the label made recently popular by The Secret; his top Google listing brings up a quirky, introspective site titled "Conversations With My Dog.") However, if you Google "think + love + Rodrigues" and click on the first hit, you get the following error message: "The Think Love site (associated with Catherina Rodrigues) has been closed. We apologize for any inconvenience." ThinkLove.com, which loads as a "coming soon!," is registered to Brian Donohue of Toms River, New Jersey, who does not seem currently active in self-help circles, at least not under that name. Meanwhile, ThinkLove.net, parts of which are under construction, is a more traditionally spiritual site registered to a Norma Gomez of Orland Park, IL. Neither Donohue nor Gomez has any discernible relationship to/with Catherina Rodrigues. Rodrigues continues to tout her services as a speaker, life coach, and life coach trainer. Still, it's hard to get past the impression that her site was designed primarily to sell $20 "tee-shirts and pastel hats," as Ginny once put it.

Rodrigues says on the site that she's "committed to being a beacon of Light" and that her "intention is to create the healing energy of Love."

* I read about this, too, though oddly, I was unable to trace it down online in the time I had available. As I recall the basics of the story, an American man met a femme fatale-type who claimed to fall in love with him, lured him home to her native Brazil, took him for all he was worth, then had him murdered. I believe that her actual husband was in on the plot as well.

For love and money, Part 2.

Came Election Day 2006. Gerry and Catherina decided to attend a peace rally in Washington, DC, ostensibly, in part, to further their tandem business interests. "They said they were going to promote Think Love," says Ginny. "He went on a Tuesday and was completely out of touch until Saturday. When he came home he told me, 'You and I don't vibrate at the same level.' "

When he added that he intended to go back and stay with Catherina for the rest of that night as well, Ginny told him, "You have put her before me for the last time."

Catherina's husband promptly took their daughter back to Australia; Gerry took it upon himself to move his paramour into the vacation house in Sag Harbor and go about the business of transforming it into their personal sanctuary and love nest. To add insult to injury, recalls Rob, "They moved into my bedroom! I told him, I'm making mortgage payments on a house I can't even use now. I have to knock on the front door before entering, etc."

In an even more serious vein, Rob realized that Gerry's recklessness was putting his own finances at risk: "I told him, 'Your wife is filing for divorce. We have mutual monies that could get seized.' I expressed to him that I had to withdraw my interest before that happens. Either that or I figured I'd have to bring him to Utah for deprogramming." (This was not necessarily just an offhand remark. "We come from a long line of alcoholics," says Rob, "so we've done interventions before. We actually talked about doing an intervention on Gerry, to separate him from her, or his readings, or whatever was going on there.")

Unhappy with the (non-)answers he was routinely getting, Rob felt the situation was of sufficient gravity to warrant a visit to Sag Harbor. That's where he discovered that manipulating the truth wasn't the only new aspect of his brother's behavior—and that, in fact, Gerry appeared to have undergone a 180-degree metamorphosis in personality.

Rob's wife, Jayne, recalls the Gerry she knew before the Election Day "consummation trip" as a man who "was always very clean, impeccable about his clothes and everything." No more, according to Rob: "I was horrified at the condition of our home. There were dead flowers. There were clothes all over the floor. There was burned incense all over the floor. The smell of incense was so bad that—well, this is a guy who once took a mango air freshener out of the basement and threw it out because he couldn't stand it." Reasoning that all these new personal habits had come as part of the package with Catherina—what other explanation could there be?—Rob thought, If she was a tenant paying rent, I’d kick her ass out!

"The day I go," Rob continues, "I knock on the door—it's 10 a.m.—and they're still in bed, apparently. Now normally he's always the first one up, sitting in the back, reading a paper. So I ask him to hop in the van. I say, 'Let's go get some breakfast. I need to talk to you.' I tell him, 'I don't care about your social life; I just don't need my money locked up in your court battle.' But he doesn't want to get in the van. I say to him, 'Gerry, it's your brother. I know you your whole life.' So he goes back inside—to get his authorization from Catherina. Twenty minutes later he comes out and says, 'Can't we just walk around the block?' "

After further verbal sparring and another private consult with Catherina, Gerry finally agreed to go with Rob to breakfast; the meal featured more bizarre conversation. Plus, says Rob, "He has this glazed-over look. I told my wife later, it's like he's on crack or something.' "

Rob says he offered to buy Gerry out of their mutual business interests: "He jerks me around about a price for a couple of months, then he says, 'I want to buy you out.' " But Rob still couldn't get straight answers. "He'd send me quotes from books. I'd ask him, 'When will I receive my money?' And I'd get back, 'The Universe will provide what you need…' So I'd say, 'I'm not asking the Universe, Gerry, I’m asking you.' I finally had to threaten to sue him to get everything sorted out."

No doubt seeking to escape from the mounting negativity, the newly formed couple flew to Australia in late November. Though the chronology here isn't entirely clear, Ginny says that at some point, Gerry and Catherina "had gone to his mother's office and cleaned out the computer on which he kept his financial records." Fortunately, she says, he "overlooked some stuff," thus allowing her to get key account numbers.

She froze his assets. That brought him back for a time (one of several back-and-forth trips during this period). "He had no money," says Ginny simply. "He had to come back and deal with me."

The negotiations for the divorce settlement duplicated Rob's experience of separating his financial affairs from Gerry's. Since Ginny had no legal claim on any portion of Gerry's inheritance, he kept insisting that he wanted to pay her monthly alimony. Ginny allows a sardonic laugh at the memory. "I said, 'Monthly? You don’t even have a job! What money are you going to pay me with: from selling tee-shirts and pastel hats?'* Plus, if he left the country [for good], or if the two of them went through the money, what do I do then? But he made me fight ferociously. His brother loaned me the money just to divorce him." (Rob confirms the loan, adding, "He left her with $2200 in the bank and bills coming in.") In time, Ginny and Gerry reached a settlement on a lump-sum payment that she does not disclose.

Needless to say, all of this turmoil did not go unnoticed by Ginny and Gerry's teenage daughter—nor was the impact lessened by some odd and, really, thoughtless acts on Gerry's part.** "He actually took her bicycle*** and gave it to Catherina for her own daughter, who is just 8," says Ginny. Asked what her ex-husband could've been thinking, she replies, "It's just the total self-absorption, the narcissism of it. He can't see past what he needs and wants. It's this whole Secret thing that just lets you obliterate the past and anything that's uncomfortable."

Wednesday: The aftermath. And what, I think, we learn from this sad saga.

READ PART 3.

* a facetious reference to the main product lines that Catherina was selling on her website.
** Again here, in the interest of fairness: I was unable to get Gerry's version of events. I do not doubt anything that I was told by Ginny, Rob or Jayne. However, marital break-ups always create acrimony, and different people will have different perspectives on incidents that occurred. I urge readers to keep that in mind as they read.
*** Yes, I know that the item pictured is a "boy's bike." File it under "artistic license"; I liked the photo.

Does happiness really make you happy?

Before putting up today's "real post"—which will be Part 2 in our latest horror story, and which I hope to do by noon—I thought I'd mention an interesting article from Leah McLaren of Toronto's Globe and Mail. She writes about happiness, and whether it's been oversold nowadays in ways that actually end up being counterproductive. Leah, who has written quite eloquently about SHAM/SHAM* and related topics before, quotes me briefly late in the piece. Now, I'm not deliriously happy about the way she sets up the quote, or where she cuts it: It makes me sound like an advocate for stoicism and a particular kind of male chauvinism, and I'm not. In my interview with Leah, which took place several months ago, I quickly added that I wasn't endorsing my father's head-in-the-sand perspective on male emotions (or the lack of same). In point of fact, my Dad was a pretty unhappy man for the second half of his life, and he probably would've done well to examine the source of that unhappiness a bit more closely. Be that as it may, I think Leah's article is well-done, nicely nuanced, and provocative.

Incidentally, the title I chose for this post is pure silliness, lest someone accuse me, yet again, of being an "agent of darkness...." I have no problem with happiness, provided (a) it's an authentic, lasting brand of happiness, and (b) the pursuit of that happiness doesn't lay waste to everyone else's life in the bargain....

Which makes as good a lead-in as any to Part 2 of our latest horror story, a bit later....

* We've got quite a few new readers these days, so this might be a good time to reiterate the finer points of my use of the acronym "SHAM." When it appears bold-face and in red ("SHAM"), I am referring specifically to my book. (I also use a slightly different font, but not all browsers pick up on that.) At all other times ("SHAM," and in the normal font), it refers to the "self-help and actualization movement" as a cultural phenomenon.

For love and money, Part 1.

"Gerry and I were married 20 years, almost to the day he left," says Ginny. "His growth"—she speaks the word with sarcasm, then pauses to correct herself—"his descent into self-help was a long-term process. I could keep you on the phone till midnight."

Gerry* worked in the family business but, to Ginny's mind, was never that happy there. His brother, Rob, agrees: "He's always been a dreamer. He's usually worked for my father or my mother, or for me briefly. But he'd make little comments about being 'oppressed by the fluorescence' and so forth."

Still, says Ginny, "I don't doubt for a moment that he loved me. We had the marriage everybody wanted. It was sexy; it was fun. Now, did he love me the way I loved him? I'd have to say no. For one thing, he was always the fair-haired boy who put his mother first. I called it a Norman Bates relationship. And in the last 10 years or so, she was the one who got him involved in the whole Alan Cohen thing.”** Ginny refers to the well-known Chicken Soup contributor and driving force behind the Insights for Richer Living mentorship seminars. Like Tony Robbins' Life Mastery courses, these pricey shindigs often take place in lush, exotic locales. This year's menu, for example, includes an Alaskan "cruise to self-discovery" and a "journey to the heart of Bali."

Ginny continues, "I think it started to get really weird a year ago May [2006]. He just got so entrenched in this feel-good mentality that I couldn't even have the news on, I couldn't have Law & Order on. He said he 'couldn't have that kind of destruction' in his life." She also noticed that her husband was spending a lot of time online. It was the kind of sign that's curious but not yet ominous (though later, in hindsight, is recognizable as part of a pattern that seems clear as a bell). By this point, Gerry and his mother had already gone to Cohen seminars in St. John's and Hawaii. Then, says Ginny, "They decided to go to the one in Fiji."

Gerry returned from Fiji to Long Island with big news. "He tells me he's met a woman and has a tremendous emotional connection with. Her name is Catherina Rodrigues,* and she lives in Australia. She's married and has a daughter, just like us. And she's trying to launch a company, Think Love, which is designed to spread love and happiness and tranquility around the world. So I ask, 'Gerry, Is there anything I need to know?' And he says, 'Absolutely not. I still love you, et cetera.' So I thought a minute and said, 'Does she know about the money?' "

Ahhh yes, the money. Gerry recently had learned that he'd be receiving a very large inheritance—well into six figures. Ginny wondered how a woman seeking to finance a chancy new business venture might regard a sweet-natured, like-minded man who was about to come into serious cash. She also wondered about her husband's vulnerability to such a woman. Already, Ginny felt that the inheritance had affected Gerry's judgment and ability to think rationally. "I think he knew that it was his ticket to move away from his job, to travel the world, to sail the high seas," she says. "But we had a kid, for one thing, a teenager in high school. I was not going to sell my house and move onto a sailboat."

She soon began to get the idea that her husband's newfound spiritual ally had no such qualms. Though Gerry shrugged off Ginny's concerns about the money and Catherina's possible designs on same, Ginny was deeply troubled by what she saw happening in front of her: "They began to do a lot of talking on the phone. The calls just never stopped. Or Gerry's phone would ring every 20 minutes with text messages. He would never go to bed." To this day, she says, she still doesn't know whether the fateful meeting in Fiji happened just by chance, or was an arranged rendezvous. "But in my heart of hearts," she says, "I know that she fell in love with him there. She was willing to go with him to sail the 7 Seas, she was willing to leave her husband and her 7-year-old daughter. But back then, he would deny, deny, deny."

By the fall, plans had been made for Catherina to visit Long Island—a visit that would end up lasting six full weeks. "She comes with her husband and daughter," says Ginny. "I insisted that they can't be in this house—they were supposed to be staying at a hotel—but I was fighting a force and I was never going to win. It was ridiculous. [She and Gerry] would be singing spiritual songs in the living room. They'd be online together, or doing yoga together." Despite the original plans, Rodrigues and family seemed to be spending almost all of their time either at Ginny and Gerry's residence or, more often, at a vacation property Gerry and Rob then shared in Sag Harbor, deep in the lotus-land of Eastern Long Island. Gerry would accompany them there.

Rob, too, was growing uneasy, in part because, from the moment Catherina stepped off the plane, he says, "Gerry never went back to work." But Rob and his wife Jayne became even more uneasy as they learned new details about the nature of the financial dealings between Gerry and Catherina. "My brother has never really lied to me," Rob recalls. "But after [Fiji] he was deceitful, and it became more and more apparent that he was using his [self-help] learnings to manipulate the situation. First he invites Catherina, telling me she's just coming here 'with her family.' He tells me they have a spiritual bond and he'd like to be involved with her project. Then it turns out she's going to stay in our house out east. Then it turns out he hired her as a life coach—for almost five grand. Then it turns out he paid for her airplane tickets!”

Rob and Jayne's first face-to-face meeting with Catherina was a revelation in its own right. "My mother and brother are born a week apart in October," says Rob, "so I take the family out to dinner at a place here on Long Island—the whole group of them, including Catherina, her husband, everybody. They'd arrived October 8, and this was like October 20. We sit down at the restaurant, and Gerry and Catherina only interacted with themselves the whole time. They were knee to knee, turned towards each. I mean, I've seen horny 15-year-olds act with more respect for others! They completely ignored everyone else. They sat about as far from the rest of us as was possible."

Though others in attendance immediately sized things up and felt that Gerry and Catherina were rubbing Ginny's nose in it—Catherina's husband, for one, looked dazed—Ginny, it appears, remained loyal and, quite likely, in denial. "She's old-school Italian," explains Jayne. "You just couldn't say anything bad about her husband."

Rob, on the other hand, had no problems confronting his brother after dinner. "I said to him, 'What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell are you doing?' I couldn't get a straight answer. It's like later, when I'd ask about his business plan and I'd get the buzzwords, the cliched answer. He'd say something like, 'You're only asking that out of fear.' No, Gerry, I'm asking that out of common sense and concern for you." According to Rob and Jayne, their concerns were of such magnitude that they had a background check run on Catherina. Though such matters must be treated with a certain delicacy here, they say that the results did not allay their fears.

Even so, Ginny says that she could read Catherina's growing frustration with Gerry's remaining commitment to his existing family: "I made only one stipulation, and that was that he come home and spend every night in our house. And he did. He'd come home at 1 or 1:30 a.m., but he did come home. I think she knew she could get him—if she could just get him away from me long enough."

NEXT WEEK: Catherina prevails...the intervention that didn't happen...and, once again, the innocents left holding the bag.

READ PART 2.

* Neither Gerry nor Catherina Rodrigues responded to my attempts to reach them for comment.
** My emails seeking a comment from Alan Cohen went unanswered. Ginny wants to make clear that she generally respects Cohen's "good work" and does not hold him or his personal beliefs responsible for what took place here. As for me, I'll have more to say on this, later.

What not to wear...or what she's not wearing.

The female star of Live With Regis and Kelly—who, let me be clear right off, is not the woman shown at left—isn't normally a fount of great wisdom, either. But every now and then she does get off a priceless line. Such was the case this morning, when she said she wants to write a book, "How to Spend a Fortune on Clothes While Still Looking Perfectly Cheap." And I gotta give Kelly props; it may be remembered as the most succinct and insightful comment, ever, on trends in contemporary women's "fashion."

Now, as to the photo of actress Rose McGowan's, um, dress, it is neither a put-on nor some tacky paparazzi spy shot. She actually wore this get-up to the 1998 Video Music Awards, during her "Mrs. Marilyn Manson" (to her left) period. Believe it or not, the front is worse. FYI, Ms. McGowan later had a long-term relationship with my former Rodale colleague and Men's Health celebrity-editor/playboy, David Zinczenko. The (sexist) joke among some members of the MH set used to be, "Now that's what we call self-help, Dave...."

Check back later. I'll have the next story up.

For all we know, it could've been Tony Soprano out there.

Maybe I’m the only one who worries about things like this, but I continue to marvel at the way a person's dreams can accommodate to sudden changes in, or stimuli from, the sleeper's ambient environment. Last night I'm having this long dream, wherein at one point I have a discussion with my youngest son, then I leave my house (which was not, as depicted, my real house, but that's unimportant), then I walk down the sidewalk, then I see a little boy some distance away who smiles at me, then I see that he's got a stick, then the little boy runs over to a tabby cat, which meows at him, and then the little boy proceeds to savagely poke the cat, which shrieks in agony….

At that point I bolted awake in bed, realizing that the shriek was real: It went on for another second or two outside my window until it ended in an abrupt and chilling manner. Alongside me, my wife had also bolted awake at the same instant. "God, what was that?" she said. We both decided that some local cat or unfortunate woods creature had met an untimely end. Then I remembered the dream I was having just as the deathly shriek awakened us, and I lay there for another few moments in astonishment at the way my dream had played the whole thing.

Now, I can understand how my mind would've written the shriek itself into the dream. But the amazing part is the preparatory action leading up to it: having the discussion, leaving the house, seeing the kid with the stick, the kid seeing the cat, the cat meowing, etc. In effect, my mind had TiVo'd the actual shriek—giving itself time to create a seamless bit of action that sufficiently explained it—before "allowing me" to catch up in real time. The fact that my wife and I bolted awake at the same moment suggests that we both reacted instantaneously to the shriek, which was quite loud. Which means (not to belabor this) that in the span of the second or so between when the shriek began and when it woke us up, my mind had already inserted a whole new bit of action into an existing dream—while stalling off my recognition of the sound long enough so that I didn't experience the shriek too soon for the action to "flow" (or even make sense) in the context of the dream! (David Chase, take note.)

OK, maybe I'm more overwhelmed by this than I should be. Still, it's additional evidence of (1) what an amazing thing the subconscious is, and (2) all the little wheels that are constantly spinning in there, creating/synthesizing their own reality. And while this may seem like a small point, remember it the next time someone tells you he's got it all figured out and is in full, conscious control of everything he thinks and feels and does.

P.S. For those who've inquired, I'll have another self-help horror story up by Friday.

Secret-ive marketing?

I keep forgetting to post about Kia's new ad campaign, which, to me, seems clearly to have been designed to play off (and satirize) the phenomenal success of The Secret. The core of each ad—the "MacGuffin," as Hitchcock would've called it—is a book of roughly biblical appearance that, when the characters open it, consists of page after page with only the word KIA in the middle of lots of white space. In the action of the various spots, the characters will talk about how their lives were ordinary and unfulfilled until they stumbled upon the "wisdom" in this particular book.

At the end of the ad I saw last night, the female spokesmodel looks earnestly into the camera after delivering her pitch and says, "Because...the more you know, the less you don't know."

And I thought, we laugh at that, but in fact so much of self-help, even at its most exalted levels, gets by on a brand of circular logic that's no less silly. I am reminded of the immortal words of Tommy Lasorda, one-time Dodger manager and Sportsthinker par excellence: "The thing you notice about losers is, they don't win."

Like, wow, Tommy.

From the mainstream guru's point of view, the trick is to make the circular reasoning not quite so obvious, which is typically done by separating the second arc of the circle from the first arc by a fair amount of disguising/diverting verbiage. If you happen have a copy of SHAM handy and want to see a perfect example, take a look at my quote from Phil McGraw's Self Matters on page 14.

...On the other hand, is that really how you want to be spending this beautiful Father's Day weekend?

Even shamans read Consumer Reports.*

In a nice change of pace from the doom and gloom—yet in keeping with this week's theme—I thought we might end with a bit of shaman humor, submitted off-blog by one of our regulars:

A fellow was going to buy a new car, and wanted it blessed by the local shaman. So he called the shaman from work and they discussed the ceremony: The shaman would bring a fresh lemon and coconut, the juices of which were to be sprinkled on the hood of the car to celebrate this auspicious occasion, and to invoke powers of safety and reliability and good fortune.

Then the shaman thought for a moment and asked, "What kind of car?"

The prospective buyer said, "I think it will be a Honda Accord."

The shaman responded, "Good; that's good. Hondas and Toyotas are fine, but I don't do Hyundais...."

* Fairness compels me to note that this joke is actually somewhat outdated. Though Hyundais once lagged well behind their Japanese siblings in reliability and overall roadworthiness, they now challenge the likes of Toyota and Honda in rankings by CR, J.D. Power and others.

A curse in miracles, final chapter. And epilogue.

A magistrate* in the Family Court found some of Lesley's pleadings (as well as her recently declared change in sexual orientation) sufficiently unorthodox and eyebrow-raising that he would not, at first, follow convention by rubber-stamping maternal custody. Instead, the magistrate reserved judgment until child-welfare personnel could take a closer look at the setting in which the two Grogan kids would be living. There eventually came a time where Don and Lesley found themselves in front of a judge in the court, where they were asked to tell their respective stories.

That was where Don got another surprise: Lesley had changed her tune...or at least the way she sang it. She arrived in court with an amended divorce petition that used more traditional legal terminology—to accuse Don of domestic abuse. "I was sickened," he says, "not just because of the new allegations, which were totally false**, but because it made the whole thing sound so insincere. All those months I had to listen to all that crap about the universe, and she wouldn't really talk to me in normal language, no matter what I tried." But now, suddenly, with the stakes higher, Lesley had learned how to speak normal English again—and a very menacing form of English at that. "I felt someone had gotten to her," he says. "Someone told her to wise up and stop acting like a space cadet, at least till the case was over."

Fortunately for him, says Don, Lesley could not keep up the façade of normalcy in court. He recounts an especially memorable exchange between Lesley and the judge that went "more or less" (his words) as follows:

Judge: What was the nature of the physical abuse?
Lesley: Negativity is known to have numerous adverse effects, like stress, blood pressure, and so forth.
Judge: What I am asking is, Did Mr. Grogan strike you or your children?
Lesley: He caused me many harms.
Judge: Were these the kinds of harms where I would have seen bruises?
Lesley: If you were sensitive enough to it.
Judge: If I was sensitive enough?
Lesley: If you were open to seeing it.
Judge (trying a different approach): But these harms did not require treatment of any kind.
Lesley: That's why I went to [the shaman and the healer].

In the end, the judge decided that Lesley and her new lover presented no actual threat to the children, Lesley clearly impressing him with her obvious affection for the kids as well as her soulful courtroom proclamation of undying love for her new "partner for life." (As Don puts it, "I guess she decided that a woman is worth more than a man," an arch allusion to the title of one of Marianne Williamson's best-sellers.) Though still seeming somewhat thrown by the whole thing, the judge granted the divorce and ordered the usual maternal custody with paternal visitation. "Which I guess was OK with me, if that's how it had to play out," says Don. "I didn't see [Lesley and her new partner] as dangerous. I just didn't want my kids to grow up as Satan worshippers." He deemed the financial arrangements "fair, probably a lot more fair than they would've been if the judge had bought the allegations about abuse."

But here's the final kicker: Almost a decade has passed now, and though the Grogan union has long since been put asunder, so has the "life partnership" that Lesley so joyously announced in court. The two women broke up within a year, and according to Don, his former wife struggled through "several really rough years, emotionally" thereafter; she took the kids out of state for a while (with his permission) and "drifted." By the time she got back, apparently, "the entity inside her wasn't gay anymore," says Don with a mordant laugh. "She's married again, for five years now, and they live in a town 50 miles away. The kids are teenagers and driving, so at least I get to see them a lot." Adding that he himself doesn't have time for a real relationship, Don says the kids take their mother with a grain of salt. "They're bright kids; they realize she's a little 'out there.' But she's a good mother, and she's not really as wacky as she used to be, either. The kids came out of it whole. Every once in a while they'll still ask me, 'So really, why did you and Mom get divorced?' And I say, 'Hey, ask your mother. Damned if I know.' "

Which is what keeps Don awake at night, sometimes. He finds himself at a loss to understand "what really happened" back in the summer of 1997: "I truly feel that the way Les got caught up in things, there would've been a crisis for her no matter who she was married to at the time—that if she'd been with [her new husband] then, she might be with me now. I think, Why did our family have to get broken up? For what purpose? Because she's pretty much back to where she was in the beginning, except with a different guy. And to hear the kids tell it, they don't get along as well as we used to, before everything got crazy! It all seems so pointless and unnecessary."

Don's feelings about self-help and modern mysticism are about what you'd expect. He worries about the movement's tendency to cause confused or restless people to "step outside their normal personalities and convince themselves they're something else." As he sees it, self-help plays to, and preys upon, people living normal lives of quiet desperation. "They say to themselves, 'There's got to be something better.' And there isn't, necessarily." Echoing a point I made in very similar language in SHAM, he says, "A lot of this stuff makes normal people living normal lives think they're unhappier than they are, that they're missing out on something."

As for me, I do think it's true that the pursuit of better too often leads to worse. And that the cardinal sin of self-help is that many of the gurus—who are not stupid people—make their misrepresentations knowingly, taking advantage of suggestible marks, persuading them that they're miserable in order to sell them the supposed cure. This also goes back to a question I posed in my book, and that I've raised before on the blog: Does self-help really help you find you? Or does it more likely help you find something else that you think you're supposed to be that, just perhaps, you were never really intended to be?

The year before SHAM, Myrna Blyth, long-time iconic editor of Ladies' Home Journal, published her book Spin Sisters as a way of repenting her role in a $7 billion assault on the psyche of American women. Blyth observes that 50 years after women's magazines became arguably the most significant phenomenon in the history of magazine publishing (certainly post-war), readers seem more restless and unhappy than ever. Thanks to the "negative messages…that bombard women," writes Blyth, today's women obsess over the smallest flaws or loose ends in their daily routines, spending their lives feeling never quite good enough, happy enough, sexually satisfied enough; never quite "there yet." This is really true throughout American culture, she contends: "Instead of celebrating our opportunities, the media portray smart, educated, talented, resourceful women as harried, hurried, incompetent losers, always but always getting it wrong."*** Is it any wonder that so many people today spend so much of their lives "looking for something" instead of appreciating what's right in front of them?

The last and largest point is one that could probably be made at the end of almost any of these stories, so I'll make it here and you can simply apply it where it fits from now on. It's not a particularly brilliant or original point, either, but it deserves to be restated. "Taking the leap" does not guarantee success. An editorial intern of mine back in Indiana once said that the only way to ensure her success was to cut the umbilical: to move to New York City and throw herself into the maelstrom, which, she said, would "force her to succeed." It worked for her, so she still goes around giving that advice to young wannabes. But throughout New York, and for that matter in any city or neighborhood focused around an appealing industry, you'll find thousands upon thousands of people who took the leap, and threw themselves into the maelstrom—and are now tending bar, waiting tables, or even living under highway overpasses. This notion, that throwing yourself into the unknown automatically (a) guarantees success or even (b) is better than the known, is absurd.

Only in the lotus-land of The Secret—fantasyland—does one gain fulfillment by the mere aspiration for it. Somehow I think even Lesley might agree, looking back.

* In Don's jurisdiction, as in many nowadays, this is the judicial equivalent of a "nurse practitioner"—not quite a judge in the commonly understood sense, but imbued with full legal authority to make decisions in many routine matters. Magistrates play an increasing role amid today's crowded court dockets, even in low-level criminal proceedings.
** It behooves me to point out here, again, that there are at least two sides to every story. Lesley declined to be interviewed. However, the dissolution of the marriage and the basic circumstances that figured in same were independently verified and are not in dispute. That's the most I can say for the purposes of this blog.
*** Before you climb all over me, I agree that this topic is encyclopedic and worthy of many, many book in its own right, and that none of the phenomena Blyth notes can be examined out of context; innumerable things have changed in American society, thus you can't point to this or that in isolation and shout "there's the problem!" Nonetheless, I urge you to read Blyth's book. Her arguments are compelling. Yes, there is a strong political slant to the book, and if that annoys you, ignore it. Her self-help-related points stand on their own merit.

=====================================

NOTE: All situations recounted in this series of stories are as described to me by the people who were kind enough to submit their experiences. Where possible and practical, I have made a good-faith effort to verify stories through independent means. I reserve the right to make minor changes to names, dates, and places, in circumstances where such verification was not possible, or where the risk of legal complications looms large. Not a single material fact has been embellished or fabricated. Like all content in this blog, these stories are subject to applicable provisions of U.S. Copyright Law and international treaties on same. All rights reserved. No material is to be reproduced in any form without my written permission, except for usages covered by "fair use" provisions of law.

A curse in miracles, Part 2.

Don had told Lesley's boss at the daycare that his wife was "dealing with some personal stuff," and let it go at that. He even alibied for her—"Don't we all have tough times now and then?"—when the boss wondered whether Lesley should take some time off until she found her answers. "She says to me, 'Lesley just zones out sometimes, and I worry that she'll miss something where the kids are concerned.' I wanted to say, tell me about it! Instead I said, 'Lesley is the same wonderful mother she always is, you don't need to have any worries on that score.' I had my own concerns, but when it came down to it, I did what I thought any good husband would do. I defended my wife."

None of which prevented the Grogan household from devolving further into weirdness and confusion. The buzzwords now dominated Lesley's conversation. The talk (that is, when she talked to Don at all, which was becoming increasingly rare) was of entities and chakras; she began substituting ancient Hindu or Sanskrit words like loka and kaya for their everyday American equivalents (world and body* respectively). "Even saying life force apparently wasn't kooky enough for her," says Don, who, like many victims of second-hand self-help, has developed a certain gallows sense of humor about the experience. "She had to say prana."

Don soon learned that Lesley had acquired some local companions on her journey of spiritual growth: a shaman and a healer. By this point she had stopped asking to accompany Don on his trips, and would decline his own invitations to come along when he gave them. Of even greater concern, she seemed to be spending less and less time at home while he was gone. Normally, when he'd leave to do a haul, he could call home, day or night, and find his wife: "If she wasn't there, she was working at the daycare while the kids were in school." That changed as the trees went bare and winter arrived in earnest. Don began to get the impression that the minute Lesley heard him leave for a trip, she was out the door, too.

Then, shortly before Valentine's Day, 1998, Lesley dropped a bombshell. She sat Don down and told him she'd made an important self-discovery. She told her husband of almost 11 years that the entity vibrating harmonically inside her was a lesbian.

"I know this sounds strange," he recalls, "but my first reaction was to laugh. I kid you not, I just broke up. Hysterically. I guess it was just too much, or maybe some kind of delayed stress reaction. I thought she'd totally lost it and had no idea what she the hell was talking about anymore. She'd been saying so many screwy things for all those months, and now she says that!" In fact, he says, one of the first things that crossed his mind was the film Splash, wherein Darryl Hannah spends much of the movie concealing from lover Tom Hanks that she's a mermaid. "I actually said to her, 'Now come on, honey. You're not going to sit me down tomorrow and tell me you're really a fish, are you?' "

But the exchange got less funny, and fast, when Lesley told Don something else. With that same matter-of-fact detachment that by now was so familiar, she told him she was sleeping with a woman she'd met through her shaman. And they were going to move in together. And she was taking the kids.

Don says he never saw it coming. While he's not comfortable discussing the details of their sex life "when it was good," and though he concedes that their intimacy "really took a hit" after California, he says he "saw no signs in how she behaved sexually. If anything, it was like she'd become sex-less." Then again, he allows after a brief pause, "Looking back, I kind of feel like, 'So what was your first clue, Sherlock?' "

Genuinely worried about Lesley's state of mind, Don at first intended to fight her decision to take the kids. But he was coming into an especially busy time of year for him, and knew he'd be on the road a lot. ("And she knew it too.") Having no other local relatives who could reliably act as surrogates for him between trips, and still thinking that Lesley would ultimately "snap out of it," he yielded to what seemed inevitable, insisting only that he have a chance to meet the new light of his wife's life. "We met at a diner and I could size this up right away," he says. "This woman is a very powerful force. It's like when I was in college and we had the Women's Studies classes, there'd be these ring leaders, as we called them—these aggressive, feminist types who controlled the group thinking. They had tremendous influence in getting the others to basically shun men. I think Lesley just got in over her head at a very vulnerable time. She thought she found herself, but I think she really lost herself. And this woman took advantage."

In the ensuing weeks, Lesley found a sympathetic lawyer (recommended, Don assumes, by the shaman, the new lover, or some other spiritual ally) who even inserted the appropriate New Age jargon into the separation and divorce pleadings. "A lot of couples will say they're growing apart, and I could've even accepted that," he says. "But when she starts talking in a legal document about our being on different planes of existence? That's a bit hard to take."

Tomorrow: The final scenes play out, with a surprise—yet still unhappy—ending.

Read part 3.

* though, like most things having to do with spirituality and metaphysics, this is an oversimplification. We don't have the time or space to get into the expanded meanings, and frankly I don't have the inclination.

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NOTE: All situations recounted in this series of stories are as described to me by the people who were kind enough to submit their experiences. Where possible and practical, I have made a good-faith effort to verify stories through independent means. I reserve the right to make minor changes to names, dates, and places, in circumstances where such verification was not possible, or where the risk of legal complications looms large. Not a single material fact has been embellished or fabricated. Like all content in this blog, these stories are subject to applicable provisions of U.S. Copyright Law and international treaties on same. All rights reserved. No material is to be reproduced in any form without my written permission, except for usages covered by "fair use" provisions of law.

A curse in miracles, Part 1.

It is known as "A Course in Miracles." And in 1997, it became the gateway to the New Age—and a new sub-basement of hell—for Donald Grogan.

Donald was then a long-haul driver for a major interstate trucking firm; his pretty wife, Lesley, a former school teacher, was now a stay-at-home mom to their two young children, and a part-time daycare worker. Life was good for the Grogans, at least as Don saw things. He had taken a somewhat unusual path into trucking almost two decades earlier, arriving as what he liked to call a "corporate refugee" after graduating from college and quickly burning out on the business world. And he did well enough driving his long hauls from the Grogans' midwestern base, taking home "high five figures" most years. Sometimes Lesley would accompany Don on trips that ended in destinations they'd both wanted to see, if he could work out the timing and they could get someone to watch the kids. "You can't always pick and choose when you come and go," he explains. "You can't sit somewhere for three days with a load of cantaloupes." But by this point in his 19 years in trucking, Don knew how to work the angles of the schedule. He was especially pleased in the summer of 1997 when that schedule permitted him to arrange a long weekend in Los Angeles.

Aside from the normal enticements of a trip to The Coast, Don had planned a special surprise for Lesley, who'd recently developed an intense interest in Marianne Williamson. Williamson's status as high priestess of the New Age, Pop-Culture Division, was unquestioned in the mid- to late-1990s, thanks in no small part to her obligatory kiss-the-ring appearances on Oprah. What is true of almost all self-help stars was especially true of Williamson: Her message of love and faith proved irresistible to American women. Three of Williamson's books during this period reached the coveted No. 1 slot on the New York Times best-seller list, beginning with 1992's A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles, which spent fully 39 weeks atop the list. Although Don thinks he saw his wife eventually reading such subsequent Williamson classics as Illuminata and A Woman's Worth, it was Return to Love that had Lesley Grogan's full attention in the summer of '97; that much he's sure of. "It was like she was reading scripture," recalls Don. "She would read it a while, put it down and think, sometimes close her eyes, then pick it up and read some more. She'd do this over and over, any given night in bed." At the core of the book was the "course in miracles" itself, which Williamson has described as "spiritual psychotherapy."*

Anyway, because it all seemed innocent to Don—in fact, he'd noticed the increased patience Lesley seemed to show around the kids**—he decided that while they were in L.A., they'd take in one of the mega-seminars that Williamson now was holding. "I was never into that stuff," he says, "but Les'd tell me it would be good for me to 'try to grow,' too, you know. And I figured what the hell, it would make her happy if we went together." Seeing her happy, he says, made him happy.

Lesley Grogan was very happy, if not positively euphoric, on the night of the seminar, which Don remembers very well. He remembers the singing, and the hypnotic aura that overhung the auditorium. Above all, he remembers it as the last night that he felt fully connected to his wife of 10 years.

"Oh, I saw the change immediately," he says. "What I noticed first was, she stopped holding my hand. When we went out together, she used to always take my hand as soon as we got out of the car, and that's how we'd walk into restaurants." No more. In fact, not only did Lesley stop taking his hand, but she often seemed unaware of his presence, lost in thought: "there but not really there," as Don puts it. It struck Don as very odd behavior for a woman studying a book on love.

Over the ensuing several months, Lesley grew progressively more immersed in the New Age. For one thing, she began speaking differently, seemingly in a new, private tongue (a common characteristic of people on the path to spiritual enlightenment, as we'll see in other stories). "I'd ask her the same ordinary questions I'd been asking for years and get these spacey answers about harmonic vibrations," says Don. "A simple thing like, 'Have you seen my blue shirt, honey?'—you never knew where that could lead. The conversation could go almost anywhere from there."

Don also had a more concrete way of measuring his wife's growing absorption in the New Age: money. Specifically, its disappearance. "She was calling all the psychic hotlines," he recalls. "We'd get phone bills that were suddenly $300 because of the 900 numbers." The charges started showing up on the Mastercard as well. When one bill revealed $700 in such charges, he half-jokingly told Lesley, "Next time you call, maybe you could ask, 'Will we ever have money again after I finish spending it all calling you?' " Lesley didn't see the humor. "She looked at me with that peculiar expression that was almost always on her face and said, 'Money's not important to me.' " So I said, "We have two kids, don't you think money's important to them?' And she'd say, 'The kids will be provided for.' " Don wanted to ask what she meant by that—why she'd phrase it in such a strange, almost ominous way—but he was frankly afraid to. He had a feeling the answer was guaranteed to make him feel even worse.

Soon, having burned out on the understanding approach, Don tried to confront his wife, but that went nowhere, either: "She wouldn't engage. I could scream, I could plead with her, I could try to have a normal conversation; it didn't matter. She was in this place she went to where I wasn't invited." Still, the kids looked well cared-for and didn't seem troubled by the changes in Mommy that were so obvious to Don, so he tried to write it off as a "phase."

At around this time, late fall of 1997, Don was just back from a trip when he got a call from the daycare where Lesley worked. It came on an afternoon when Lesley was out shopping, and he welcomed the call, having wondered how his wife's newfound state-of-being was going over with the other adults with whom she routinely interacted. He'd planned to ask Lesley's boss about it, but the woman, though tentative and clearly uncomfortable, beat him to the punch. "She said she hoped I wouldn't think she was crazy," says Don, "but she wanted to know if I'd 'noticed anything' about Lesley. I wanted to say, 'Are you kidding?! How about everything?' " It took every ounce of willpower Don could summon, he says, for him not to scream into the phone, " 'Thank you, thank you—so I'm not the one who's going psycho here!' " But he didn't, he says, because he was loyal, and he still loved his wife very much, and he "didn't want to make things worse if this was something she would eventually snap out of."

Tomorrow: Don learns that it isn't just a phase, and she won't be snapping out of it.

Read part 2.

* It bears noting here that Williamson herself is not ordained to practice any religion, and owns no credentials in psychotherapy.
** Later, Don would wonder if it was really "increased patience," or the beginning of the detachment, the constant spaciness, that had overtaken his wife in full by the fall of that year.

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NOTE: All situations recounted in this series of stories are as described to me by the people who were kind enough to submit their experiences. Where possible and practical, I have made a good-faith effort to verify stories through independent means. I reserve the right to make minor changes to names, dates, and places, in circumstances where such verification was not possible, or where the risk of legal complications looms large. Not a single material fact has been embellished or fabricated. Like all content in this blog, these stories are subject to applicable provisions of U.S. Copyright Law and international treaties on same. All rights reserved. No material is to be reproduced in any form without my written permission, except for usages covered by "fair use" provisions of law.

Can you picture this guy reading "Self Matters"?

I'd planned to take the weekend off from blogging, but Jim Brown just wouldn't let me.

See, there's an article about Brown in the current issue of ESPN—that's Jim Brown, legendary NFL running back, not to be confused with the late James "Godfather of Soul" Brown, legendary R&B star, or James "J.B." Brown, the not-quite-legendary-but-still-well-known sports commentator. (To make things even more confusing, the latter Brown anchors CBS' pre-, half-time and post-game coverage of NFL football.)

The ESPN piece details Brown's disenchantment with sports stars like Michael Jordan and now LeBron "King" James, both of whom seem more than willing to take the money and run, using their celebrity to pitch underwear and bubble gum while abdicating the broader social roles that Brown feels they have. For the record, Brown walked the walk, and he walked it proudly and defiantly, turning his back on much of the payday he could've had. Faced with a situation that, he felt, would've required him to kiss team owner Art Modell's ass, he left football at the height of his astonishing career. And when you're talking about the kinds of numbers put up by Jim Brown, astonishing isn't just a convenient word to throw around. There are sports savants who consider Brown not only the "greatest running back ever" (to quote ESPN's writer, Dan LeBatard), but the single best player ever.

Though he did parlay his fame into a few plum movie roles—notably in The Dirty Dozen—Brown, who probably could've remade himself as a major Hollywood action star, instead spent most of his post-NFL life as a political activist and social critic. He relentlessly agitated for more jobs for blacks and minorities, and appointed himself a mediator in the turf wars among L.A. street gangs back when it was not yet cool to do such things. While the Al Sharptons were calling press conferences, Brown was marching himself into city halls and corporate boardrooms, pushing for improvements in urban neighborhoods. Then again, Brown never had quite as many post-football options available to him as do guys like Jordan, because he wasn't exactly Madison Avenue's ideal image of a spokesperson. By all accounts one of the toughest men ever to don a football jersey, Brown wore the same persona off the field. To this day, in fact, at age 71, he impresses you as the kind of guy who could walk into a bar fight in the worst section of downtown and quickly send any five of the surliest dudes to the ER. Jim Brown was Big Bad Leroy Brown—without the comeuppance at the end of the song.

Further eroding Brown's salability were his disordered personal affairs, in particular the troubling reports about his abuse of the women in his life, which surfaced throughout his career and generated headlines as big as his on-field achievements. These included separate incidents where he took a shovel to his wife's car and allegedly threw a female companion off a balcony. (The woman, a young model, did not press charges in the end, and Brown continues to dispute that it ever happened.)

Indeed, it has sometimes seemed that Brown was simply bent on alienating everyone. When he wasn't venting his feelings about his race's* treatment at the hands of white America, he was calling out prominent blacks whom he felt had lost touch with the black experience (this, long before the current piece in ESPN). A few years ago he came very close to using the words uncle and Tom in the same sentence in critiquing Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' Gucci gangster lifestyle. He suggested that Combs should spend less time partying in Malibu and more time TCOB on behalf of "the community."

So what do we finally have in Jim Brown? A man who crusades against one kind of violence...but shows an inability to contain his own rage. A man who talks about the athlete's responsibilities as a role model...while at times seeming to forget the impact his own actions may have on impressionable young people. I don't think the word hypocrite applies, because there's nothing Jim Brown urges others to do that he hasn't done himself, often at great personal sacrifice. It's just that, well, there are all those inconsistencies. Maybe what we have in Jim Brown is an object lesson in just how complex human beings are. Forgive the pun, which is decidedly unintentional, but Jim Brown reminds us that when you're talking about personality, nothing is black or white. There is good and bad in all of us, and maybe sometimes we have to take the bad as the price of getting the good.** I believe that Jim Brown's intentions have always been honorable, at least in his own mind. It's just, sometimes the demons got the best of him.

But like him or not, admire him or not, Jim Brown, throughout the half-century of his life in the public eye, has been an individual—a True Self. Is he fully actualized? I don't know. But he's a guy who did, not just talked, and who did it his way, period. In today’s world of clones and poseurs, maybe that alone has to count for something.

* Let me be clear, here, in that I am simply writing this from Brown's point of view, and yielding to the "conventions of the day." As regular readers know, I am not a big believer in identity politics.
** Also, to be clear: Domestic violence, especially the man-on-woman kind, is abhorrent, and in no way tolerable. I'm just saying that in making overall, after-the-fact judgments about some people in some settings, perhaps it is not totally out of bounds to look at the Big Picture. I know many women who hate adultery in concept, but would give almost anything to have Bill Clinton back in office because of the overall enlightenment of his stance on women's issues, from their POV.

Of horror stories and scarlet letters.

Here's the one final thing we need to talk about. Then we start the series—for sure—really—on Monday.

It's impossible for me to run these stories without mentioning the obvious, or what will soon become obvious as you read along: Adultery is a chronic pattern in the 23 stories I received (not all of which do I plan to use, by the way). In fact, adultery is a subplot or back-story in every single one. Now, my collection of vignettes may have no larger validity; they're just melancholy and/or bitter reminiscences submitted by a self-selected group of disparate people who consider themselves victims of someone else's quest for fulfillment (and have provided what I consider ample documentation of same*). But looking at them as a self-contained universe, one has to wonder:

Why is it that for so many of us, "personal growth" = "cheating" or even "leaving your marriage for someone else"?

Maybe I'm looking at it backwards. Maybe it's the folks with the bad marriages who are the ones embarking on these journeys of self-discovery, and who were therefore more susceptible in the first place. Or—the most cynical interpretation—maybe adultery plagues just about every marriage anyway, thus self-help is no more than an innocent bystander in these events. But I don't think self-help is an innocent bystander.

In the first line of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy memorably wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I think he overstates; it's one of those iconic literary openings that "sounds poetic" but breaks down on analysis. And yet I do believe it can be said that in just about every unhappy marriage where a partner strays, the same operative mindset applies: "I deserve this. I deserve more than I'm getting at home." Too often today, even partners in happy marriages seem to feel that way. Regrettably, I base such observations in part on personal experience. Infidelity has touched every relationship I've ever been a part of, including my two marriages. This goes back to when I was 15 and discovered (to my horror) that my classmate-girlfriend, who allegedly was "saving [herself] for marriage," had already been giving herself to some 19-year-old Brooklyn "Guido," as we called the breed, for six months. Some years later, I'd learn that my fiancee (this is a different woman we're talking about) had been late for our own wedding rehearsal because she'd spent the afternoon in bed with a coworker. True story. That particular unhappy family lasted seven months. And here is where it behooves me to admit that as I moved through life...well, let's just say that sometimes, what we've seen and experienced can affect us in unexpected, paradoxical ways. (But then, we all like to find charitable explanations for our own failings, don't we? And is that not also part of the syndrome that self-help has given us?)

I had no idea, going in, what themes our horror stories would distill to, and it's not my intention that this series become a morality play about adultery per se. Whether we want to face it or not, infidelity has been around in some form probably ever since there were expectations of fidelity. What's more, one is mistaken to portray men as having the franchise on cheating, and I don't need to fall back on my formative experiences in saying that. Every woman I have ever so much as discussed this with, save for my Mom and just one other, has admitted to cheating on at least one occasion. Most admitted to doing it more than once. The latest surveys appear to corroborate that infidelity is rampant among both genders; there's also evidence that such surveys, if anything, understate the prevalence of cheating. And incidentally, knowingly participating in adultery is adultery: If you've been with someone who's pledged to another, you've committed adultery, even if you yourself were otherwise unattached at the time. A married guy couldn't cheat if there were no one willing to cheat with him...if there were no one who felt that she deserved him as much as, or more than, his wife does.

One might easily conclude that infidelity didn't need a lot of help from the gurus of pop-psychology to become enmeshed in the fabric of contemporary life. But remember: Pop-psychology is also enmeshed in the fabric of contemporary life—and has grown progressively more so all the time over the past 40 years. As I demonstrate in my book, the liturgy of self-help has bled over into the popular culture, such that it now shapes the attitudes that inform (or misinform) the paths we take in life. In that sense, we are all, to some degree, victims of second-hand self-help.

Think about it: "You deserve this." Hmmmm. Now where have we heard that before? You are looking at the most important person in the world.** You're special!... Believe it and it will come to you... You DESERVE THIS!

What this series of stories is about, then, is a climate in which personal gratification becomes the highest "ethic" of all, if not the only thing that even matters. It's about gurus who trade in the myth that you can wake up and begin a new life on Monday without worrying about those messy loose ends from the life you were leading on Sunday (or the people who were sharing that life with you). It's about a mindset in which a person should never look back, never feel guilt or misgivings about "embracing The Happy," as one coaching program puts it, no matter what form "The Happy" takes; a mindset that says you can't let yourself get bogged down in pangs of conscience or unproductive emotions like regret because—as another self-help regimen exhorts—you need to focus on the path that evokes the "biggest YES in you" and makes your cells "vibrate in joy!"

As I reflect on these stories in the context of what I learned while writing SHAM—and also consider the lessons of my own life—I come away wondering if it's possible for humans, burdened as we are with that thing called human nature, to not regard Empowerment as a license to do the selfish, hedonistic thing. Any "belief system" that celebrates narcissism must, after all, simultaneously reject the notion that you "owe anything" to others.

But I've already said too much. I don't want to excessively color your perspective on the stories before you've read them. So I'll take the weekend off, read whatever reactions anyone may wish to offer to what I've said here, launch the stories on Monday, and hope for the best.

* I'm still in the process of getting the i's dotted and t's crossed for a few of them. I've got at least a dozen ready, and I'll sprinkle them in among other material, one or two per week.
** A sign commonly found over classroom mirrors in schools that emphasize self-esteem. Gurus in codependency workshops often recommend that participants place such signs over their bathroom mirrors.

"And you hear what my heels are saying, too, don'tcha, baby?"

I'm violating copyright by using the photo at left but in this case I don't care, because it embodies (literally) all that's wrong with the imagery modern culture puts out to young (and not-so-young) women. This is what Glamour magazine last night anointed its Woman of the Year. This Eurotrashy, hooker-garb-wearing anorexic with a bad boob job and that icy, you-KNOW-you-want-it mien.

Look, I apologize to any female readers who are offended by the cutting references in the preceding paragraph—and to all readers for being so damn humorless about it. But this clearly, if you've been reading along, is one of my pet peeves. We are killing young women with this crap; at the very least, we're messing with their minds. (Tell me: Is the photo at left really what we mean when we say someone has a "sense of style"? Is this how you'd want your daughter to leave the house? This is glamorous? And we wonder why the Islamics call us "infidels.") On so many levels, and for so many reasons, it just needs to stop.

It's a surreal irony, isn't it? In this culture, we spend so much time lamenting supposed offenses against self-esteem, and exalting empty expressions of same...while in the meantime we tolerate (if not encourage) the very real erosion of self-esteem that's set in motion when we hold up a Posh Spice/Beckham as a role model...

I'll be back, later, with the post I'd intended to run today.

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AND ON A NOT ENTIRELY UNRELATED NOTE, comes word that Paris Hilton has been freed from jail after serving just three days of her 23-day (re-)sentence. ("Free at Last!" declares the headline of one report on today's development.) Though in fairness to her, there is talk of an unspecified "medical problem,"* apparently Paris was "not adjusting well" to life behind bars. She'll serve out the rest of her time on house arrest—draconian punishment indeed, given the nature of her family's digs. You have to wonder what people like Tyrone Brown must think.

* And now that I think of it... What, they don't have doctors in jail? If they just summarily released everybody who got sick, who'd be left?

Guilty with an explanation. Part 2.

When we left me on Monday, you may recall, I was having a (rare) moment of clarity regarding our forthcoming series of self-help horror stories.

That moment occurred when I belatedly realized that it's not up to me to assign guilt in any of these scenarios as a prerequisite to posting them. (Further, it would be embarrassingly presumptuous of me to even try...and I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me from Day 1. Maybe I'm just too close to the material.) My job was simply to find the stories, report them as fairly and accurately as possible, and let you draw your own conclusions. Because in the end, it doesn't really matter if people have differing recollections of a few specific events. As long as there is basic agreement on the Big Picture—that there came a time when Person A embarked on a process of self-discovery; that as a result of that process, Persons B through F were devastated—that's what counts. It's not my job, therefore, to determine whether Fred and Francine had a lousy marriage to begin with. All we need to know is that Francine went to a seminar, decided to walk, and now Fred and their innocent twin 3-year-olds are miserable and alone. (That is a made-up example, btw. There are no Freds and Francines among my subjects, and any resemblance to actual people or situations is unintended.)

My basic premise going in—I'll say this much—is as follows: When self-help vows to "make life better," I also think there is (or should be) an implied moral covenant that extends beyond the individual who's actually reading the book, attending the seminar, hiring the life coach, etc. Here, I'll fall back on another of my famously-flawed-but-food-for-thought analogies: If I tell you that if you attend my seminars on health and fitness you'll emerge healthier than you've ever been—but I omit the part about how your getting healthier will cause the rest of your family to die—I think we'd agree that's a significant omission. It's something that you, and your family, deserved to be told. Yes, emotional self-help is a bit different. Sometimes, in order for Francine to be happy, Fred must be hurt, and them's the breaks. Sometimes it really is either/or. If you've read my book, you know I'm not a fan of "codependency," which I regard as one of the most vague, dangerous and ultimately inept constructs ever to come out of pop-psychology. That said, we all know people, usually women, for whom the label fits: They need to break the chains of their emotional oneness with their abusive partners in order to be healthy and whole again. And in those cases (which I do think are far more rare than what pop-psych leads us to believe), they can't get all caught up in how upset their partners will be once they leave. That's the very syndrome they need to escape.

But really, I think the question here is: Does today's Secret-style brand of self-help "empower" happiness? Or does it empower something quite different? In too many cases, it seems to me, self-help empowers irresponsibility and shortsightedness. It empowers (and then validates) an excuse to live a reckless, self-indulgent life, to give in to one's basest urges and emotions—all in the name of "pursuing joy!" The crushing irony is that that sort of mentality often ends badly for the joy-seeker as well, in time. As my father used to say, "The only thing hedonism and happiness have in common is, they both start with h." My father also said, "There's a difference between an epiphany and an erection."

Which is a perfect segue to the one final caveat we need to cover before we begin the actual stories on Monday (geez, this is worse than the endless series of trailers in the theater, isn't it??). I figure it'll be fairly controversial, and we'll deal with it tomorrow or Friday.

How Donna beats the drum.

As much as anything I've read lately, this blog by Donna Karan, for the well-read Huffington Post, can serve as the canary in the mine of your feelings on self-help, if you will. Or you could say it's a litmus test (hmmm, let's see how many metaphors Steve can mix-and-mangle at 5 a.m.!), in that the manner in which you react to her thoughts reveals your susceptibility/suggestibility viz self-help-based thinking in general. If this buzzword bonanza doesn't make your b.s. detector bark (hey, there's another one, and an alliterative one to boot!), then you're probably in deeper than you thought.

My favorite line: "It's not about me, it's about we." Thing is, I basically agree with that sentiment, in the abstract. But see, there's a context here and...well, read the thing. See how it hits you. It's not the kind of text where the insincerity leaps out at you. Which brings me back to the canary and such...

I should mention that in 1998 I wrote a long piece for now-defunct Worth* about Ms. Karan's machinations in taking her company public a few years earlier; they titled it "How Donna Beat the Street." This gets complicated for a succinct blog entry, and it's legally sensitive stuff as well, so there are risks in "overviewing" what happened there. Suffice it to say that corners were cut and people lost money, though Karan herself came out of it smelling like roses (or maybe one of her signature fragrances), which is usually the case in these matters. One is reminded to some degree of Tony Robbins and the whole Dreamlife thing (see SHAM for more details). Anyway, again, take a look at what Karan has to say. I also call your attention to the last full graph of the attached comment by "herrington." Love the green tea comparison! (as Simon might put it). I also wonder how litigious TR is feeling these days.

* It still exists, just in much tamer form. Worth used to be a top-notch medium for financial investigative reporting, regularly in contention for National Magazine Awards. But since it became part of the Robb Report empire, it's lost much of its soul, and today is more of a chummy, how-I-put-that-first-$50-million-to-work-for-me! vehicle for the yachting set.

Guilty with an explanation. Part 1.

By now, it will not have escaped the attention of faithful readers that nothing much has gone up on the blog for some time. Yeah, I've been pretty busy. (Thankfully. When a writer is busy, by definition that's a good thing. Note to any young people reading this: Writing isn't one of those enterprises you should ever contemplate if your goals are peace of mind and an orderly financial existence.) But in truth I've also been vamping, stalling, while I wrestle with questions about our forthcoming series of self-help horror stories.

I guess I was naïve when I embarked on this endeavor, which really was spurred by a single email from a particularly disconsolate victim of second-hand self-help. From the outset, I realized that the fact-finding process—approached fairly and exhaustively—entailed a high risk of my getting bogged down in an unending he-said/she-said, as I sorted out the so-called true facts of any given scenario. At times I've felt almost like a judge in family court, trying to determine who was at fault and to what degree, as well as what role, if any, self-help played in the unfolding disaster. To wit, could it actually be said that the self-help regimen caused the unfortunate events I was hearing about? Or did that regimen merely bring festering problems to the surface? Or, equally possible, was the regimen just an "incidental bystander" to a situation that seemed destined to end in tragedy anyway?

However, that wasn't even my biggest headache. As time went by, it became clear that I'd failed to consider the degree to which this inquiry would drag me into all sorts of ancillary issues having to do with the limits of individual responsibility and, indeed, the very essence of the pursuit of happiness. These, of course, are issues that have absorbed and ultimately confounded philosophers going back to antiquity.

Remember that to date, this blog, like the book on which it was based, mostly concerned itself with aspects of the SHAMscape that were fraudulent in an unambiguous way: programs that did nothing or helped no one, programs run by felons or self-styled gurus with bogus credentials, etc. What I'm attempting to do with these horror stories is a bit different. Yes, I've received stories wherein a self-help program turned out to be a disaster for all concerned, including the party who initially sought improvement. Except…most of the stories I've been hearing aren't like that. On the contrary, these are cases where the quest did deliver some level of benefit for the individual fulfillment-seeker. It's the people around him or her who suffered.

And that's what has had me up thinking well into the wee hours: What do we finally say about a program that helps the person who embarks on it—but lays waste to other lives in the process? Does it come down to a mere question of the "greatest good"? Do we simply fall back on math (i.e., "Let's see, one person was helped, but three others were shattered, so therefore it's a net loss of minus-two"...?) Suppose the equation is even-Stephen, as it were: one life improved vs. one life destroyed. Do we shrug and say, "Hey, that's life in the big city. Person A found her joy, now it's up to Person B to do likewise"? (FYI, that very situation existed long before self-help came along: We call it divorce.)

Further, what do we say of a program that teaches you that when you come right down to it, you're the only person whose destiny you can really control…ergo you're the only person whose needs it makes sense for you to worry about…ergo all decisions should be made based on their ability to promote your "joy"?

But then, this past weekend—a moment of insight. I realized that I've probably been overthinking things. I realized that maybe* it's not my job to "answer" the sorts of questions that have mystified the likes of Aristotle and Sartre down through the centuries.

Anyway, for those diehards who are still with me (a) I appreciate it, and (b) I'll have more on this—including where I finally ended up—tomorrow or Wednesday. In the meantime, I invite (and would sorely welcome) any feedback on the sorts of questions I've posed herein.

* maybe??