Our minds love to betray us

Moontower Munchies #64

We weren't searchin' for some pie in the sky, or summit. We were just young and restless and bored.

Bob Seger

Friends,

Summer 1996. I turned down the $17/hr 6am to 4pm clerical job at the Canadian bank my mother worked for. I had done the job the prior summer. It was a good experience.

But scarcity mindset works on experience and not just money. The end of HS was the end of youth. I would have plenty of time later for getting “good experiences”.

I didn’t want to spend my last months before heading out for college riding a bus 50-90 minutes depending on traffic to Port Authority from central NJ, to walk 17 blocks to the cubicle farm in my ill-fitting suit heat sealed to my body by the mix of humidity and manhole vapor exhaled by the dragon known as Midtown in July.

Instead, for $5.15 an hour I operated rides at Keansburg Amusement Park 10 minutes from my house. This was a summer of degeneracy. The summer of Clerks and Dazed & Confused on repeat.

I’d work from noon to about 11pm 6 days a week. Of course only if the daily surf report dial-in lamented that it was another day of “no decent rideable ways man” in characteristic beach hobo twang. The rides in the park were the misfit toys and the employees were well-matched. I was the most responsible kid. Which is not comforting when you consider that I’d be drinking Zima (the clear color is plausible deniability-as-a-service) while egging on each side of the Pirate Ship riders to chant “less filling” & “tastes great” at the peak of the pendulum arc.

That summer’s rap sheet was a damn shame. A boy from Brooklyn drowned in the water park, the kiddie train flipped over (my friend who was operating that would die of an overdose a decade later), and one of the roller coaster carts ripped through the brake at the end of its ride, smashing into the cart that had just been loaded and was starting its ascent, injuring several riders. (Earlier in the summer I literally saved this from happening by using metal rod to trigger the magnetic mechanism that failed moments before the car came back to the platform. It’s hard to overstate how f’ng crazy this place was. Action Park got a documentary made but NJ had other contenders).

On the weekends, the live bands at the bar across the street provided the background music to an unrelenting sublayer of decay that the park desperately tried to lipstick over. The walk to the car at the end of your shift was Let’s Make A Low-Life Deal. Door #1 drunks wrestling on the pavement, door #2 an old lady shooting up like it was the 18th Street BART station. The prize door was your car intact when you arrived.

Now if my mother is reading this, it’s best to turn away now.

This is the Wildcat roller coaster:

This is a video of riding the Wildcat:

My esteemed colleagues and I noticed that the 300+ pound Samoan mechanic would grease the rails of the Wildcat nightly — by crouching down on the back bumper to spray the track as the coaster did its run!

Being invincible, me and the staff figured how dangerous could this thing be if Tuki (I can’t remember his name but it was something like that) could surf this sucker. We were already in the habit of riding the coaster ourselves as the park was closing when there were no customers around. Bored and emboldened, it seemed like the only logical thing to do was start riding the coaster standing up with the lap bar open. Count on the Wildcat to be able to go with the lap bars disengaged. As Axl once squealed “you’re in the 90s baby, you’re gonna die”…We leaned into that wind years before Rose from Titanic would make the pose famous.

I’m relieved to report that this behavior persisted all summer without incident.

Fast forward to today. I can still enjoy a rollercoaster.

But not a ferris wheel.

I can fly but I can’t do one of those treetop adventure parks. Other things I won’t do now:

• Climbing the steps of the Aztec pyramids outside Mexcio City

• Gondolas or ski lifts

• Driving mountainside or cliffside even on the PCH

In my 20s and 30s I did on ziplines in Costa Rica, a hanglider in Rio, a microlight over Victoria Valls in Zambia.

Today, I can’t believe the person who did those things are me. I am stricken with anxiety even thinking about it. I don’t know when it started exactly but all signs point to after having kids. I can’t even watch the boys go near railings.

I haven’t sought any help because the fear isn’t impeding anything I commonly do or want to do. I didn’t grow up skiing. I hate the cold. I don’t drive fast and I don’t chase adrenaline. A loopty loop coaster or performing on stage at the music school is enough anxiety for me.

But the infiltration of this anxiety is provocative in light of a few things I’ve recently come across.

1. Nate Bargatze discovering age comes with new surprises as well:

@bestandupPanic of claustrophobia is pretty funny

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One thing I got when I hit my forties was claustrophobia. Never had it, actually got it here on The Simpsons Ride, which is what’s crazy. I mean, we’re 100 yards away from where my life fell apart. I rode that ride with my daughter, and we’re sitting on it, and there’s… We had another buddy, and he has his two girls on. So we sit there, and they pull the bar down, and the bar… My leg gets stuck in the middle, and it just opened a door that I never knew was there. I mean, it’s just… It is like a problem. I had to stop the ride. It’s super embarrassing to stop a child’s ride and just be like… I’m just waving, like, “I can’t do it.” Then they open the bar and go, “You can do it again.” I was like, “I’m out.” And just, no one got to ride it ’cause I couldn’t ride it. We all had to leave. Yeah, ruined it for everybody. Uh… And that’s claustrophobia, just kind of ruins everybody’s time.

It’s the… What’s funny… The panic of claustrophobia is pretty funny, though. It’s not funny when it’s happening to you, but how quick you go from normal to just an insane person, is just… It’s all at the same time. So it’s all kind of new to me, so I forget I have it, and I’ll put myself in a situation, and I go, “There it is.” I got in an Uber once with, like, seven people. We get in, I go, “I’ll get in the third row.” Try to be a good guy. I climb in the back, they put all the seats up, and it just starts hitting me. I’m back there, like… [sighs] Just trying to be normal, you know, not talking. Then you go, “Hey, you think you can roll the window down?” “You know what, can everybody just get out of the van real fast?” [chuckling] Just… We’re just driving down the interstate. “Could y’all crack the window?” “Do you mind if I drive the Uber? You think I could drive it?”

2. One of my favorite posts ever by Lawrence Yeo How To Calm An Anxious Brain. The is a long and worthy read. My notes will likely be a good indicator if you want to jump in:
   

   Select excerpts from Lawrence Yeo’s How To Calm An Anxious Brain
   

3. Jared Dillian’s Obsessive-Compulsive.
   
   Eye-opening. It will also halt me from casually referring to any anal behavior as OCD. Jared talks about the cause and therefore the key to the therapy is identifying the underlying source of anxiety for which the controlling behavior is a distraction from.

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A few personal notes

1) I’ve started doing salt floats to see how sensory deprivation can buoyancy can help me to relax and practice emptying my head. The floating is nice if you tend to hunch over or catch your shoulders to close to your ears. That sense of self-disappointment when you catch yourself in that unengaged mid-section, sitting at a desk, creating tightness posture. I’ve done 2 sessions and will continue.

2) A close friend has a teen with severe anxiety issues. The friend has been reading a parade of books and journals as well as trying various therapies. I won’t share any specifics because the situation is a parent’s nightmare. I discovered recently that they tried clinical psychedelic treatment. The thinking was all risk-reward — the condition is as dire as possible, so despite a lack of any studies of effects on minors, it was worth a try. What’s amazing to report is that is has been the best remedy so far by a large margin. Cautiously optimistic that it will keep trending in the right direction and tempered further by the knowledge that these are long roads.

I’ll say this…my friend offered a poignant example of the difference of perception that the youth had compared to how others saw the same activity. And it was an activity that is fairly objective. The example highlighted to him just how different our internal experience of the world is. And his medical goose chase has taught him just how little we actually understand about what goes on within us.

But what did recur was this idea of unconstructive self-talk loops. It was very reminiscent of The Virus With No Vaccine, where I wrote:

There are constructs that do not exist in the world, but come into being because of language’s abstraction. For example, the idea of “worthiness”. A person may deem themselves “unworthy” replete with all the baggage imbued by the word. They identify with a word hung on them when they are young and for arbitrary reasons — a message their parent announced or simply implied. Of course the child is not unworthy anymore that it is a dolphin. Yet the word “unworthy” can initiate a stubborn thought-loop without a ctrl-break option.

By inhibiting language, the loop can dissolve. You are freed to have another thought.

It also ties in closely with Lawrence’s post. Consider these excerpts:

• The thing about the ACG is that if left unregulated, it has the tendency to spin around wildly, When this happens, emotionally-charged thoughts get caught in this constant loop …This is a prominent feature of people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, where intense and destructive worry can result from unreasonable thoughts. For example, let’s say you were at work and you emailed a document to your boss that contained a minor error. The reasonable response would be to simply dismiss that error as a minor one and go about your day. However, for someone with intense generalized anxiety, he could think that the error would be a sign of his gross incompetence, leading his boss to fire him, leaving him without a means to support his family, which will ultimately end in destitution and eventual homelessness. As implausible as this sounds, this negative thought can continue to loop around and grow, causing deeply unpleasant cycles of worry and fear that just won’t go away.
  

• Whenever your mind is wandering for no particular reason (scrolling through your social media feeds, daydreaming about a past event, etc.), your default-mode network is active; conversely, when you’re using attention to focus on external goal-oriented tasks, neural activity in the DMN slows down, which helps to induce those beloved experiences of flow states. Although much of the DMN is located in the Land of the Wise, it’s an area that isn’t very insightful a lot of the time. Studies have shown that a wandering mind is largely an unhappy one, and tends to focus obsessively on thoughts about oneself and his relationship with others. The wandering mind tends to conjure up thoughts about one’s past, one’s social standing in relation to others, reflections about one’s emotional status, visions of an imagined future, and all kinds of shit about the past and future. To put it simply, the DMN is the neurobiological epicenter for one’s sense of “self.”

  When we are absorbed in mindless thought and are not aware of the states of our minds, the DMN is fully active and our sense of self is in full force. While feeling like you have a “self” and a distinct ego can seem comforting, the reality is that much of humanity’s problems come from the belief that we are the conscious authors of our lives. The feelings of anxiety and fear are no exception to this. Anxiety largely stems from an over-identification with the sense of self. Social anxiety’s roots lie in the erroneous beliefs of how others are perceiving your “self,” and generalized anxiety stems from worries about situations that can impact the well-being of your “self.”

  It is through the constant belief in one’s distinct selfhood that we can fail to see our lives for what they really are: continuously changing pieces of the present moment.
  

• discomforting physiological sensations can be observed for what they are: patterns of energy that ultimately have no real meaning.
  
  There’s a well-known quote attributed to Seneca that reads, “We often suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
  
  Anxiety is the physical and emotional embodiment of that statement, and arises due to an unceremonious union of physiological sensations and erroneous beliefs. Concerns about a misinterpreted past and worries about an imagined future are the kindling for anxiety, and being aware of this can put out the proverbial fire before it even has the chance to start.
  

  As we go on, living our lives in a world full of incessant change, it will be tempting for each successive generation to wonder if theirs is the defining era of fear and anxiety.
  

Take care. Give yourself some grace. Don’t think too much. The poison is in the dose.

Stay Groovy

☮️

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