A Spiritual Therapist
I couldn’t get Carl Jung because he’s dead. I figure he’s the go-to guy because he wrote Modern Man In Search Of A Soul. That about says it, right? But again, Carl Jung is dead. Maybe I’ll try reading his book. The only thing holding me back? I tried reading Man And His Symbols back when I was in college, 40 something years ago. It was a very tough read. Well, kind of tough. Maybe not that tough. It was easier than trying to read Finnigan’s Wake. So maybe I’ll give Modern Man In Search Of A Soul a shot. Maybe…later.
Maybe later means never.
Anyway, I lucked out and found a Spiritual Therapist. I wanted a woman therapist. They were all booked up for months. I found this guy with a profile that says he studied Freud, Jung, Carl Rogers. Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, Krishnamurti…Jesus, Buddha, Muhammed, Zoroaster….it’s a long list. He’s studied everything short of Scientology. Maybe he studied a little Scientology. What the hell…
I figure he’s a good guy to go with…he’s fairly cheap. Best of all, I never need to look at him because he’s a PHONE APP THERAPIST!
The Gloomer Holds His Initial Conversation with Drake Bornheim, BA, MA, PHD, SC-C
The Gloomer: Should I call you Doctor Bornheim?
Doctor Bornheim: If you wish.
The Gloomer: What if I call you Drake. Are you okay with that?
Drake: That’s entirely up to you. We will not be interacting within a power dynamic. My function is to bring to the surface truths you’ve suppressed or chose to ignore as a result of adverse conditioning.
The Gloomer: Wow! I like that, Drake. Hey listen, before we start, is there any way I can get a little better deal than the thirty bucks an hour you charge? Maybe you got a hardship deal.
Drake: Hardship is what I do. My normal fee is 275 dollars per hour, which is the going rate here in the Bay Area. By the way, if you’ve read my syllabus, it clearly indicates the fee schedule. 30 for the first session. Then 50 for each additional session. With a 200 dollar an hour additional fee if we choose to meet in person. Now then, are we ready to proceed?
The Gloomer: Wow! How much time I got left?
Drake: 42 minutes…
The Gloomer and his spiritual therapist get to the point
The Gloomer: So anyway, that’s basically it. I listened to that damned radio program and I can’t get it out of my head. I mean, it’s really put me on a downer. There’s a quarter million metric tons of nuclear waste in the world. And every year there’s more and more being produced. Nobody talks about it. What happens in a few thousand years? All that shit’s gonna leak out. Rabbits and Trees will croak. There won’t be any more trees. We’re doomed. I’m trying to think positive. Help out poor Alice. She fell. A couple times. Once her dog fell in the water and I had to fish the little prick out. She was shouting HELP and I came out on the dock…
Drake: Excuse me. Who is Alice?”
The Gloomer: Alice is my neighbor. She lives on the Carver 30.
Drake: What is a Carver 30?
The Gloomer: A boat. She lives on this old Carver 30 right across from Scruffy.
Drake: Scruffy?
The Gloomer: Scruffy’s my boat. That’s his name. Scruffy. I call him a HE because you can’t really call a woman Scruffy. I don’t think there’s anything deeply psychological in that. It’s just good manners. You call a woman by woman’s name. Who ever called a woman Scruffy? Anyway, that’s my boat’s name. Scruffy. I didn’t name him. His name came with the boat.”
Drake: Go on. You were telling me about this woman, Alice. Your neighbor…”
The Gloomer: That’s right. She’s eighty years old. She’s failing. I mean, she can barely make it down the dock. But she still climbs down off her boat. She climbs aboard real slow. I gotta watch her in case she falls. At night I see her light on. I’ll get up at 2 a.m. to take a pee and I see her light on. Maybe she sleeps with her light on. I’m afraid any day now she’ll fall again. Poor thing…”
Drake: Please explain how Alice and Nuclear Waste are related?
The Gloomer: You don’t see the relation?”
Drake: Frankly, I don’t.
The Gloomer. Well, it’s pretty obvious. I’m sixty nine years old, right. I’ll be seventy before long. I’ve been thinking about the Meaning Of Life lately.”
Drake: And?
The Gloomer. Don’t you see? Poor Alice is eighty and she’s failing. Any day now they’ll come for her. I gotta keep an eye on her in case she falls off her boat. Why do I have to do that? It’s not like we’re related. She’s eighty years old. She’s having trouble walking. A woman her age living on a old boat. Nobody cares about her. And nobody cares about the nuclear waste, either.
Drake: I see.
The Gloomer: Is this the meaning of life? Nobody giving a shit? I guess that’s it. That’s what life is all about. Look at you. You don’t care about the nuclear waste.”
Drake: I certainly do care about nuclear waste.
The Gloomer: Then why don’t you do something about it. Put your money where your mouth is.”
Drake: Excuse me?”
The Gloomer. I didn’t stutter. Do something. There’s 250,000 metric tons of the shit bubbling in vats! Leaking! Seeping into our drinking water! Nobody does a damned thing about it. So how about you doing something about it. I’ll watch Alice in case she falls. You handle the Nuclear Waste!
Drake: I’m afraid our time is up.
5 thoughts on “A Spiritual Therapist”
I feel you may have ” nuked” the doctor.
Seemed like the price was going to get a bit steep anyway.
Shrinkage
I’m thinking I might need him later. Chisel him a little on the price!
Hi Gloomy Boomer:
To some, the meaning of life resides within the invisible Venn diagram of time and space, but doesn’t extend beyond it. I think such a realization caused William Shatner to experience “profound grief” in his brief journey beyond the atmosphere to see Earth floating in the vast empty orb of the cosmos.
“I saw more clearly than I have, with all the studying and reading I’ve done, the writhing, slow death of Earth and we on it,” Shatner said. “It’s a little tiny rock with an onion skin air around it. That’s how fragile it all is. It’s so fragile.” Yet, it takes an impossible moment such as his — to be thrust outside the protective assumption of Earth as absolute.
As a student at Reed College I saw the Flammarion engraving woodcut, first seen in 1588, in which a man pokes his head beyond the world to contemplate the mystery of the cosmos, of which French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, ““I see the terrifying spaces of the universe that enclose me, and I find myself attached to a corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am more in this place than in another, nor why this little time that is given me to live is assigned me at this point more than another out of all the eternity that surrounds it.”
Once that seminal moment occurs as it did for Mr. Shatner as well as the in the illustration, one remains haunted by finitude, which, thankfully, rests obscured while people are young and living their lives into the unrestricted future – yet once the future resembles the last swirl of water down a bathtub drain, some people find themselves wondering, what then? Of course, those fortunate souls who wear God-glasses have nothing to fear, they are moving on to a better place…. even if their belief, to me, resembles the Saudi family I saw picnicking beside a large poster of trees on the desolate highway from Taif to Jeddah.. Behind the poster was desert in every direction, yet the family believed they were having lunch in a forest. I, too, wish I could picnic beside the photograph of the trees, but I know the poster is only a decal slapped over emptiness.
My picnic occurs inside the daily epiphanies of life: reading a great poem, say, Nirvana, by Charles Bukowski, or taking a walk along Richardson Bay to spot an egret in the reeds, balancing motionless on one leg: a moment lasting long enough for me to believe in the beauty and immediacy of this world without having to worry about the next. As for the hereafter, I am like every one of the 11 billion souls who have lived since we started up the ladder of human evolution: in the dark about the dark after the light ends.
Aging is a landscape for which there is no map or guidebook. You are on your own, no matter how many hands you hold or promises made to you about heaven. The alien and alienating experience of aging rises from within you, imperceptible until it is too apparent to deny. Should you want to read a book on aging sans warmed-over platitudes or promises of what awaits, I suggest Jean Amery’s On Aging. Reading it is a challenge, like looking at the sun, which, like death, LaRouchefoucauld said, were two things man couldn’t contemplate directly.
As for Amery’s bleak but unblinking vision of aging, it can be verified simply looking around and at yourself, to realize one of the most staggering remarks in the book: aging, you find yourself abandoned by the world, like losing pace in a parade, watching it as move away from you – you who marched in the parade for so long, are now alone watching the shrinking figures that surrounded you for life merging into a distance you cannot inherit. What happened? The bees of time never stop working. Yet, to extend the analogy, they leave us honey to compensate for what they take. Carpe diem isn’t the feeblest attitude with which to confront aging, as long as one makes his or her time matter. Let me quote writer Mike Davis from his interview embedded in the following link:
theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/30/mike-davis-california-writer-interview-activismbe .
With only months to live, the writer and decades-long crusader against the destruction of the environment we now may too late to save, ended his interview with the following sentence: “Despair is worthless.”
Yesterday, I read his obituary on line. A life spent standing up for others and lived without seeming regret for himself. Davis ceased taking morphine for fear it would blur his perception. He wanted to remain lucid until the end. Now gone, yet I can find him in his books or in the interviews he gave. I wonder, isn’t leaving hope and meaning about life as one leaves it a form of immortality?
Anyway, here we are…..tik-toc goes my clock, not like the 15-second Tik-Tok of endless amusement and distraction. I’m sure it’s an age thing, but my clock can’t be rewound or have its battery changed. Like the host of this blog, I am a dinosaur and my asteroid is wending its way in my direction. Like the doomed soldiers at Custer’s Land Stand as waves of Sioux broke over them, you can die fighting or die huddled in terror under a blanket of denial. Yep, either way you’re dead — yet…
Anyway, thanks for taking time to read my response to the host’s blog on the meaning of life. Should my vision of aging appear bloated with pretense, overly somber or nihilistic: you can always adopt the perspective of the title of James Tate’s book of poetry as your own: The Oblivion, Ha, Ha.
You need to start blogging!
Thanks, Gloomer, your response was anything but gloomy. In fact, your blog was the first blog to which I crossed over from reading to reply; and your post motivated me to quit talking to myself or to the pundits on the TV screen . I can already feel the temptation to plunge into the flow of responding to further posts. Being a Boomer kept me from seeing a blog is a transparent glass a responder can step through to respond directly. Now that I have blogged (verb?), I feel the immediacy of your blog and blogs themselves. They eliminate the wait-time in responding to on-line writing. Thanks, even if blogging turns out to be addictive. It is the closest experience to visualizing dialogue once-removed I know. By the way, should readers be interested in getting an idea of my background as it pertains to the meaning of (or lack thereof) life, they find my essay, Deadline, published in The Antioch Review on-line.. Thanks for responding to my response to The Meaning of Life. On ward into The Blog of Life.