Chip Hauss Slays Mental Dragon

The challenge to write an article about—in this case—overcoming a personal obstacle came at an intriguing moment, because I had just started Anthony Horowitz’s A Twist of the Knife. Horowitz is a witty British creative who created Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders for the. BBC and PBS. The new novel is part of a series in which he ingeniously casts himself as both the narrator and the “supporting actor” and in this case, he is accused of murdering a  middle-aged female Times literary critic who has just written a devastating review of his play. From what I know, the “real” Horowitz is poised and “together,” while the fictional one is a mess of neuroses.  Of course, Horowitz the author and Horowitz the real human didn’t “do it.” However, it might make sense for me substitute myself for Horowitz and write the story arc of how I (metaphorically) “slew” my toughest critic who was herself middle-aged when much of the “damage” on me was inflicted—although it began before and after her middle-aged years. I started writing this at the moment (p. 40 or so) when Horowitz is arrested for the murder.

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At the end of the workday Friday, a case worker from the hospital called to announce that the waters of the Red Sea had parted and a paradigm shift had occurred. Amy agreed to go at least into a short-term rehab facility. The next day she announced that she was getting ready to sell her condo. Leslie and I decided that, if she does, we’ll just have everything sent to storage and that we would figure out what to do with it after she dies. I don’t want anything.

A wave of relief….

But probably temporary…

Beyond the headline. At 10.45 on the morning of My 26, 2023—yes, just fifteen minuted before his weekly therapy appointment—Chip Hauss received a phone call from a case manager from Lawrence and Memorial Hospital’s ER staff who was asking for his consent to treat his mother. He knew the call was coming because his sister had called with news that she was on her way to the ER an hour or so earlier.

Still, the timing was both dreadful and fortuitous. Dreadful because it threw him into a tizzy before his appointment. Fortuitous because the following hour and then reading the first forty pages of Anthony Horowitz’s latest allowed him to make some quantum-leap-like changes in the way he envisioned his relationship with his mother and the impact it has had on him.

The dragon and her minions. Since, like Horowitz’s book, this is not the first volume, I’m assuming that the reader (all one of them) has worked through earlier volumes and already knows about the impact that the “dragon” and others had on my self-confidence and other indicators of anxiety and that I therefore don’t have to either set the stage or define the dramatic tension I need to resolve. Though I will add some new characters.

From fiction to reality. I’m doing the reverse of what Horowitz seems to do. He is clearly a smart and clever and creative and (probably) confident guy, but he casts his fictional self as rather bumbling and insecure. I’m proposing to literally flip the script and bring my fictional self more in line with its real life alter ego. Of course, I’m assuming that Horowitz has his act together in real life and knows it…

An epiphany in N stages over a single holiday weekend 

I wrote this. Rinse and repeat. Writing this in less than three hours time was fun. Useful. Maybe not as useful as you thought or in the form you expected. Definitely not the press release I mentioned. But useful. As the saying goes, rinse and repeat.

Not a caterpillar any more. And now I know it. For some reason, Mila and I were talking about butterflies and caterpillars. She knows that the latter turns into the former, but when I asked her how that happens, she had no idea. So, she asked me. I had no idea either. Good metaphor.

There is evidence? While on my daily walk on Sunday, I listened and laughed very spontaneously to this week’s Wait, Wait! Don’t Tell Me to the delight of everyone I passed. They probably outdid themselves this week (there was even an extended therapist joke about half an hour in) but more than I was just more relaxed. Here’s the link. Unfortunately, as of Sunday, you have to listen to the first half hour first.

Tim Hardin and Anthony Horowitz enter a bar. While we were at the weekly cookout where Ed controls the music, he played (as he almost always does), a Rod Stewart album. I usually tune it out, but I glommed onto his remake of Tim Hardin’s 1960something hit, “Reason to Believe.” I didn’t “hear” Hardin’s song as a lament about a conversation with his ex-wife but as a conversation I could have with myself. “If I listened long enough to you, I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true. Knowing, straight faced, while you lied, I’d look to find a reason to believe.” Horowitz would have a ball with this, trying to figure out how to incorporate those kinds of “conversations” in some of his other books in which he combines two parallel novels into one. Meanwhile, the bartender (who is themselves, a therapist in training), listens and nods their head and occasionally smiles and says, “I see.”

Binging all five Beethoven piano concerti. That evening, instead of watching reruns of something like Midsomer Murder on PBS, I binge listened to all five concerti and found myself actually concentrating on the music, especially in #2 and #4 which I was less familiar with. I found myself analyzing why the pieces “work” and then went back to the equally powerful theme music for Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders which evoke the shows’ themes brilliantly.

It doesn’t matter that Horowitz himself didn’t write the music. What does matter is that I think this way.

Lessons from the last Zoroastrian Jew on the planet. I spent more time with my new Zoroastrian/Jewish friend especially thinking about one the three groups she works with that overlap with what I do. She is on the advisory board for Appreciative inquiry leadership team and is close to its founder, David Coopperrider. In a nutshell, AI helps teams constructively plan a better future on the basis of what is working now/has worked in the past and extrapolating from there. In public health, known as positive deviants. To Chip and Dan Heath, bright spots. I use these kinds of tools all the time in my work. But on my self? What triggers could make thinking along those lines (more) routine?

Except on myself.

Bob Hardgrave comments from the grave. After I got off our Zoom call, I had an email from one of my Oberlin professors/best political science friends to tell me that another of my other Obie mentors had just died. Ken Sherrill (who had had a major fall the day before which I already knew about) helped me see my love for science and methodology. Bob Hardgrave introduced me to systems thinking and paradigm shifts during the second semester of my sophomore year which led to comparative politics and my first major academic presentation applying systems theory to Oberlin (which I did with Ron Rapoport and another classmate). I was not as close to Bob as I am to Ken, but both love to remind Ron and me about how much we meant to them when they were just starting their teaching careers and how we were never judgmental in dealing with them as gay men, which was a rarity in 1966.

Planning the next trip to Australia and explaining Johnny Appleseed. I also got an email from the friend who had dragged us to Perth Australia 20 years ago. We hadn’t talked much in the years since but left a huge impact on each other. She wanted to know when we were coming back to Perth which we thought about doing because the Rotary international convention is about to begin in Melbourne as I type. But I mentioned that we are prioritizing our funds for planting the seeds of new ideas, Johnny Appleseed-style Now, I realize that I have to explain who Johnny Appleseed was

My nephew makes a cameo connecting-the-dots appearance. While talking with my sister, we, of course, talked about her kids, including her son in law, Nick Fellers, who runs www.forimpact.org. The organization originally raised money for Catholic nonprofits with a tilt toward the right (he inherited the company from his mentor who was a major fund raiser and boxing coach at Notre Dame). It has since morphed into a more general advisory group for nonprofits which I sense from reading Nick’s newsletter. I’ve often thought of reaching out to him bout AfP’s nonexistent individual donor pool because he reads a lot of the same stuff as I do. Always held back. Why would he care? We only met at his wedding…. Email to him goes out after I post this.

The sequel

Oh, but Tim Hardin died at 39 of a heroin overdose. The stakes aren’t low here. Not the same, but there does need to be a sequel (or putting this into practice).

It (almost) doesn’t matter what my one reader thinks. This was a fun and useful thing for me to do on its own.

Next steps. After reaching out to Horowitz’s literary agent …