PTSD - Lughnasa 2021

 

Just before Independence Day weekend, I was once again storm watching, this time a girl named Elsa. This has become a regular occurrence in recent years, earlier and earlier each season. This year was the first on record with five named storms by the first week in July. We ended up watching the intensity models with interest. While most kept Elsa to a sedate high school homecoming dance level (tropical storm to cat 1), one blew her up into full prom queen meltdown mode (cat 3). That outlier had my full and undivided attention. Because I was not ready for a major storm, psychologically not physically.

 

I knew what needed to be done. We have been through storms and even bad seasons before.

 

I rode out Hurricane David as a kid, watching as a tree in our back yard fell in slow motion, barely missing a corner of the house, which left us without power for ten days. We watched Andrew make landfall in Miami a few months after we bought this house, the same year one tornado in a local swarm destroyed the last house we lived in while another rolled through the park behind this one. We rode out the year of four hurricane landfalls in Florida (Charley, Frances, Jeanne, Ivan). We got seriously lucky when Charley took a sudden righthand curve after blowing up in intensity over a three-hour span. By the time we got to Ivan, we were in line buying plywood, which we then put up for Jeanne. Followed the next year by monitoring Katrina, Rita and Wilma as they devastated the upper Gulf after passing us by.

 

Before she retired, my wife studied the impacts of hurricanes on the coastline through her career as a geologist. She has always been fascinated by storms. She flew recon for research after Katrina, after Sandy, after Ivan, after numerous other storms. She witnessed some of the post-landfall carnage firsthand. Some of those images are seared into her memory as well as captured in her pictures. But that only increased our respect for these powerful forces of nature. None of that made us, or at least me, fear them. Even before we replaced the windows with hurricane-rated upgrades, I could still find an inspiration for writing in them.

 

All that changed with Irma. After 2017, I no longer experience a childlike sense of wonder; I experience a childlike sense of dread.

 

Here’s where the story gets a little complicated because, like most PTSD triggers, it’s about two peripherally related events that got intertwined.

 

In late August through early September of 2017, I had a few things going on. Over Labor Day weekend that year, as for several years before, we held our annual Kitten*Con for a small group of friends. All but one of our attendees were local. She flew in from out of state. Because our little mini-con fell in the middle of hurricane season, she sometimes had to rearrange her incoming or outgoing flights to avoid a storm brewing in the basin. It was a running joke that she had become our storm magnet.

 

That year didn’t disappoint. By the time we convened the Thursday evening before Labor Day, a tropical storm had formed off the Cape Verde islands. Only my wife took much notice as it was small and literally thousands of miles away. It was something to keep an eye on rather than something to pay strict attention to.

 

So, we didn’t. We played our games, watched our movies, discussed our lectures, ate our con food and drank our wine, generally having a grand old geek time without a care in the world, as always.

 

That peaceful fantasy shattered for me when someone left a message on our phone either Friday or Saturday. Oddly, the message wasn’t for me but for my sister who has never lived here. The caller, my mother’s landlord, must have confused our numbers somehow. But he directed the message to her so I didn’t call him back but dutifully passed it on, desperately hoping I could ignore it since I had a house full of company for the next several days.

 

Unfortunately, I had a feeling I knew what it was about. A few weeks earlier I had called my mother to see how things were going. She told me she was having a plumbing issue in the house where I grew up.

 

A little background here: she had owned the house outright after my parents got divorced, but I’d discovered she’d lost it at some point before 2006, the first time we were over trying to get the house into something resembling habitable shape so she could continue living there after she broke her neck. She never told me she no longer owned the house and only acknowledged that fact after said I no longer saw her name on the deed as I was trying to piece together her finances to see where she stood, not knowing how things might unfold.

 

I did more digging in 2012, when we were called back over at our anniversary by a friend of hers who informed us that, first, she was in the hospital, and second, that the EMTs who had taken her there were ready to involve the Health Department because the house had gotten so severe as to be a health hazard, a distinct change from what we left in 2006. That’s when we spent two weeks of sixteen-hour days spread over three weekends excavating that hoarder-esque nightmare back to something akin to the more orderly level of decluttered I remember growing up. Which involved nearly a thousand books donated to the public library, several SUV loads of donations to Goodwill, numerous trips to a recycling drop-off to ovefill their dumpsters, an overflowing grocery cart of shredding (after we burned out a retail shredder and threw out anything that was moldy), and so much bagged trash for curbside pickup that the neighbors thought my mother had died. Nope, that was just all the broken, moldy or otherwise unusable, unrecyclable, undonatable junk we cleared out. And that didn’t include the boxes and boxes of unwanted, often duplicate items her friend sold for her on eBay. Even after we finished, my mother still had an entire 2000 sq. ft. home’s worth of contents inside, including enough clothing and shoes to fill four full bedroom closets. In the end, the authorities were satisfied enough for her to continue living there, although she lied to them to stack the deck.

 

All that happened while my father was slowly dying from cancer some twenty minutes away. As I’ve said before, 2012 was not a good year. In terms of the Machiavelli board game, it was plague and famine, rows and columns. Only maybe topped by this year when we added rebellion to the mix.

 

On top of that, I caught acerbic criticism for what we’d done in every phone conversation I had with my mother for the next eighteen months. She made it plain that she didn’t want our help and didn’t think she needed it. I swore at that point I would never do it again. Yeah, that experience left a mark.

 

Circling back to 2017, her landlord, the father of one of her former students when she taught severely multiple handicapped children, was out of town. The only contact number she had was the office of his day job in investing which didn’t know how to reach him (he rented property as a sidelight). The gist of the plumbing problem was that the substandard cast iron pipes in the master bath had finally rotted out and were leaking into my sister’s old bedroom. I told her that I was pretty sure under state law (the Landlord-Tenant Act) that she could get a plumber to stabilize the situation and deduct it from her rent. She had a second bathroom even if the master got shut down for a little while.

 

Now what I said and what she heard were likely two different things. By the time she talked to me, she was well into a fifth of vodka, her alcohol of choice. Just getting the details of the situation out of her and piecing it together was a bit of linguistic legerdemain. As I have said before, my mother was an alcoholic (verifiable from the Paul Harvey rest of the story of how she broke her neck and how she ended up in the hospital before she died) who was very possibly using alcohol to moderate the symptoms of other mental illnesses (anxiety, depression, OCD, perhaps bipolar disorder). I could never confirm whether those were treated conditions or not, although in 2006 and 2012 I found medication that might be prescribed for each. Just another layer to the onion.

 

What I put together long after that Labor Day weekend was that she had drunkenly harassed her landlord’s workplace every day, then called out a plumber to rip out and replace all the pipes and sent him a bill for thousands of dollars of work he didn’t know about until he got home. Needless to say, he was pissed. Enough so that he was ready to start eviction proceedings right away before my sister talked him down.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t know all when I heard his phone message. I assumed something related to the plumbing had slipped incredibly sideways. Because for the past decade plus, that was the nature of the calls we got from or about my mother.

 

Perhaps the most illustrative call, if I haven’t painted enough of a picture, was the one from her dog groomer just before midnight one year. She was in tears telling me the hospital (which I didn’t know my mother was in) was about to street her by putting her in a cab within minutes with no one to take care of her while she was still injured and somewhat delirious. While my mother considered this woman a friend, that relationship was not reciprocal. She clearly thought of herself as just her groomer. It took all my skill picks in Diplomacy, Admin, and Medical to calm her down enough to get her to explain the situation to the head nurse on the floor who could concoct a way for them to keep my mother overnight (they quickly “discovered” a UTI in her bloodwork). That after explaining this was all news to us and we were 3-4 hours away so couldn’t stop anything that was about to happen and couldn’t get there before it did.

 

Or the time my mother called to say she was going to be streeted from a rehab facility for not agreeing to pay her bill, which burned several hours of my time in intense, sometimes professionally threatening, negotiations with the nurse administrator only to have my mother call back and say, never mind, she had signed the original agreement after all. Or the time she called to say she had a similar dispute with the IRS where I told her not to sign anything and find a lawyer (the IRS is punching about my weight class), only for her to sign a payment agreement when they threatened to appraise the contents of her home to see what they could sell, then try to reneg by claiming she was under duress when she signed it. Which was the same tactic she tried when she revoked the POA she’d given my sister when my mother was in the hospital after a heart attack, an agreement both I and a floor nurse countersigned as witnesses as she calmly signed it over.

 

Phew, ok, there are many more examples involving other surprise phone calls filled with enough convenient memory and magical thinking to necessitate me taking active defensive countermeasures to avoid any Imperial entanglements, but you get the picture. A phone call from or about my mother was a percentile dice roll on an exotic, chaos-driven encounter table which could be moderately dangerous if said encounter sucked me in, which, somehow, they always seemed to do. Usually at the worst possible time. Like, say, just before, during or after a vacation. Or when I finally duct-taped and superglued enough of my own mental health back together to feel inspired enough to write. More on that in a special note.

 

Where was I? Right, back at Labor Day weekend. Kitten*Con friends have told me that I came out of the office from listening to that message visibly deflated. Even though the situation wasn’t mine to handle (my sister startlingly opted to paratroop in and take the lead after being MIA for all of 2006-2012), I was subdued for the rest of the weekend. Subdued but undauntedly determined to enjoy our mini geek Mardi Gras knowing what might be coming. And yet still managing to underestimate what those constantly weaving Norns had in store.

 

The Tuesday morning after Labor Day, we gathered one final time for our post-con hot washup breakfast before we dispersed back to our jobs and lives for another year. That was the moment my wife, who was checking the National Hurricane Center website on her phone, informed us that our little Irma was now all grownup, pre-post-menstrual and whirling a brickbat above her head as she endured her labor pains while raging against the injustice of the patriarchy, which at that point included all of us despite women outnumbering men at the table. While we’d been dancing at our invitation-only party, which we hadn’t realized was the Masque of the Red Death, she had blown up to a full category 5 storm with sustained winds of 175 MPH and was beelining for the Virgin Islands (where one of our number’s parents lived) with Florida sitting atop the bar as a chaser.

 

I think my exact response was, “Are you fucking kidding me?!”

 

That set off a mad five-day scramble of preparations the likes of which we had never done before and hopefully will never have to do again. We began compulsively checking every model run and interim positional update, trying to discern whether this beast of storm was headed for us or for the east coast of Florida where many of our friends and my mother still lived.

 

Of course, when I talked to my mother again, she said she had no intention of evacuating, despite having enough significant medical conditions that being in a special needs shelter with emergency personnel onsite might have been prudent to say the least. But just as she did with Dorian a couple years later, she lied and bluffed her way through by saying she would be fine, had people coming in to help and knew exactly what to do. My sister wasn’t on the ground at that point. I frankly didn’t have time to worry about it as we were in full self-preservation mode. We were busy making multiple runs to top off our hurricane supplies, scrambling around at 10 at night trying to find enough gas to fill our cars and containers, making ice, prepping coolers, checking equipment and supplies.

 

For a while, the models continued to dance back and forth as to which side of the peninsula Irma might hit, to the point where friends who had been at Kitten*Con and quickly made a reservation to evac to Georgia ended up canceling it because the storm wasn’t playing by the hotel’s timetable. They then decided to ride it out only to pull stakes on Saturday morning. How they got out is still beyond me. They slipped through a narrow window where millions of people were on the move, ending up in the only available hotel room two states away. A wiser choice than ours, perhaps.

 

Somewhere in there Irma grazed Cuba, dropping back from a cat 5 to a cat 2 but then drifted farther west into the Florida Straight where she reblossomed into a cat 4 and was still deciding whether and/or exactly when to take a northbound exit. By then, our county was firmly in the center of the cone of uncertainty with possible landfall sometime late Sunday or early Monday, a target that was holding fast. 

 

By Saturday morning, we were in full-force prepper mode. We put up plywood over our hurricane-rated windows as a double-strength precaution. We filled gallon after gallon of drinking water for the first time ever. We pulled in everything we could carry from the yard and the porch, wind chimes, bird baths, pots and pedestals, patio furniture. Knowing that cat 4 winds could peel off roof tiles like flipping pancakes, we retrieved the cat carriers from the attic and put them beside the first aid kits in the laundry room which doubled as our internal shelter in case we lost structural integrity.

 

That’s right, we were afraid some goddamned spinoff Dorothian tornado might Toto the cats like flying fucking monkeys. This was all off-script and well outside our playbook.

 

Once we finished around noon, we headed over to a different friend, another Kitten*Con attendee who would be sheltering with us, to help him finish his preparations, lifting the final plywood in place over his front windows somewhere around four o’clock. We came back for a cold dinner while he finished up inside, then drilled around our sliding glass window to mount plywood over it using an improvised bracket to hold it in place, again for the first time ever. Exhausted, we finished up as the first squalls rolled in just after dark.

 

Which led to a long twenty-four hours of waiting. By the next morning, we were staring down a cat 4 storm again and regretting our life decisions. We watched it first strike the Florida Keys, then weaken ever so slightly before slamming into Marco Island, still as a major hurricane.

 

All day Sunday the winds ramped up as the eye edged closer and squalls increased. By nightfall the track had shifted west again, putting us back in the bullseye. Amazingly, we still had power. We only lost it just before midnight but wouldn’t see it back for another five long, hot, brutal days.

 

When we finally went dark, the whistling winds seemed to amplify as they echoed down the stove hood vent. We heard creaks and crashes from the trees outside but with the windows completely covered could see nothing. That alone was eerie. Slightly more surreal, at the peak of the storm when the eye was just west of us (not over us, thank the gods), our oldest cat, Mara, who apparently had no fucks left to give, started ringing the bells on the sliding glass door, wanting to go out on the porch. She was quite insistent and demanding. Uh, no little one, not possible right now. Nyala continued hiding under the couch.

 

All this time Karen was texting with the last of our Kitten*Con attendees remaining in the county, the one whose parents were now out of communication in the Virgin Islands. Just after one in the morning, as we could barely hear the howling winds just begin to slacken here, this friend declared the storm was over so she was going to bed. We didn’t think we were far behind. Then fifteen minutes later, just as we were beginning to relax, thinking we had weathered the worst of it, Karen got a text from this friend saying a major tree had just crashed onto their roof, within feet of where her husband lay watching the television a few minutes before.

 

Bink. Wide awake again. No rest for the wicked. Thankfully, they were otherwise intact and ok. They didn’t even lose power. But that set off months of wrangling for them to get the damage to their roof and garage repaired. And the image of what could have happened and how close our friend’s husband came was inked into our memories.

 

Around two, as the winds began to trail more noticeably, we finally gave in and called it a night. When we crawled out of bed at dawn, we popped the seals on our shelter and slunk outside to survey the damage. All our trees remained upright. There were some small to medium pine branches down but nothing on the roof. All our neighbors were intact. Walking the neighborhood, we saw a couple big trees down, one blocking the road, another laying across a different house. But everyone we talked to seemed ok.

 

We all understood how incredibly lucky we’d been, especially as the pictures started rolling out of the Keys and Marco Island. We then slowly put our lives back together as Maria grabbed the headlines from her one-week older sister.

 

And that concludes our special presentation tropical excitement, so we now return you to your regularly scheduled family trauma.

 

Which stood with my mother being slow-roll evicted. With the storms out of the basin, my sister could finally fly in.

 

Things started out auspiciously enough. My sister seemed content to handle this round without us going over, which she said she was ok with (spoiler alert: she wasn’t). My mother had made it clear she didn’t want us over there at all, never mind my sister. She said she could handle it, which usually meant she would ignore the situation until she no longer could and then call in the cavalry to rescue her.

 

Still, I provided my sister with all the information I had gleaned over the years on my mother’s situation, from financial to medical to where to find the lease. Information that had taken weeks to dig up and compile so not worth her duplicating the effort. Not that she bothered to read any of it as I later found out. But I helped her out as much as I could, while still trying to keep the boundaries I had set. To the point of reviewing and marking up a sheaf of legal documents from a hotel room on the first weekend getaway we’d taken in several years.

 

Predictably things devolved from there, first to receiving passive-aggressive messages from my sister’s friends which duly went unanswered, then to icy silence, and finally to outright hostility and recriminations over something my mother (not I) had done nearly a decade before. It came to a final head over the legal documents I’d reviewed. My sister insisted on them; my mother was reluctant to sign them. I used as much influence as I had to get those signatures because I thought they were the best way forward. But just as I finally had my mother convinced, my sister sabotaged the situation by trying to throw me under the bus to get her way, despite my efforts on her behalf. Resulting in the documents going unsigned.

 

All of which peeled back the layers and layers of familial trauma by dredging up various unpleasant memories. These are scars that never go away, especially when they are constantly reopened.

 

Without belaboring the details further, this was mostly expected although still more than disappointing. That deflated look my friends had seen at Labor Day? That came from reliving every prior experience that told me this was coming, along with several unrelated traumas that came flooding back, ones I had recognized but no one else would acknowledge. 2006 and 2012 had witnessed the same pattern, the same harsh words, the same phone calls with me being screamed at for an hour and a half before I finally lost my temper. Only this time, the words couldn’t be unsaid. Bells couldn’t be unrung.

 

But even knowing it was coming had left me with a childhood feeling of being trapped no matter what I did. Even though I had made clear where I stood up front and desperately tried to cling to that position, regardless of how untenable it felt. As though the scales had fallen from my eyes, I finally accepted that nothing would ever change except the actions I took or, more importantly, refused to take. I had served my time with these people and had zero interest in extending my sentence. Selfish? Maybe. By that point, I viewed it as self-preservation. As the afterimages linger, I still do.

 

Of course, all that went dormant once my mother, with the luck of the damned, was safely ensconced in a new apartment, unscathed, after my sister had bolted home. But the same pattern predictably reestablished itself when my mother died two and half years later with the same predictable results.

 

My family life boils down to the instructions on a shampoo bottle: Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

But like waking from a nightmare, it’s hard to convey the emotional distress in words to where people who didn’t experience it can understand. As those who have read other of my essays and poetry about family life know, some of those family experiences contained existential threats.

 

That was just over a year ago, which brings me back to Elsa. Remember Elsa? This started as an essay about Elsa.

 

Elsa arrived just about a month after the anniversary of mother’s death, which saw all that lingering familial dread relived. So, when I saw the intensity forecasts bouncing up into a potential cat 3, I felt all the energy I’d recovered after Covid and the election drain, just like listening to that message during Kitten*Con. I felt completely exhausted. Knackered. Like I wanted to curl up and go sleep until it was all over. Wake me up when September ends. The same reaction I often had when I was a kid.

 

Which made me question why. As I said earlier, this wasn’t my first hurricane. Even after the parade of destruction that was 2004 and 2005, I’d still been able to joke about storms, as I did in Feeling Fay in 2008, or at least write about them as I did more seriously in Operation Skytrain after Dorian in 2019.

 

Even in 2011, as I stood at the same sliding glass door watching another tornado roll through the park behind the house after a lightning strike not 20 feet from my office window had dropped power and fried almost all my office equipment, I didn’t fold up. At that moment, Nyala and I (she was watching the slashing rain outside beside me) just looked at each other in shared a moment of connection I’ve rarely felt with any other individual, human or otherwise. I’m sure we both bore the same expression that said, “well mate, I think we’re fucked,” before turning back to watch events unfold. The remainder of that morning involved me, the Jeep, a payphone, an emergency call to my wife, and three Duke linemen sheltering in the lee between concrete buildings as they waited for the weather to clear so they could do their jobs staring at me being out in it like I’d lost my fucking mind. And that was after I’d waited for the worst of it to abate. Ah, good times. But I didn’t sit. I didn’t sleep. I seized what control I had and ran with it.

 

So, I began to question my creeping dread reaction to Elsa.

 

It took me a little self-reflection to untangle exactly what was going on. As with most PTSD (and I don’t use that term lightly), there were two things going on that in the course of events unfolding had become conflated in my mind. For those of you who have never experienced it, conflating two events is how psychological triggers work.

 

My mind had tangled up storms with family trauma from my experience with Irma. Because both shared a timeline and both generated a deep, instinctive, memorable, emotional response. You see the human mind isn’t particularly efficient or discriminating in how it processes information. In many ways it’s designed to deal with Darwinian situations of immediate, existential threat. So once an intense emotional response gets set, it becomes associated with anything and everything co-temporal, often focusing on the larger, more stressful event.

 

In this case, that meant storms had become synonymous with the running train wreck my family life had been in 2017 and again in 2020. Even after those situations were over and somewhat resolved, they still felt like they would never end. And they may not, or at least my reaction to them, as long as I’m alive.

 

So, Elsa triggered the existential dread of family trauma. Especially falling so close to the anniversary of my mother’s death, which was when very thoughtful and emotionally grounded friends decided that alcohol, albeit good alcohol, was the best solution they could offer other than a sympathetic ear. Because they had more than an inkling of how FUBARed the situation was, and they still haven’t heard the full story. But cognac, like a mother’s kisses, should be a salve for many wounds.

 

Some of you are probably saying to yourselves, yeah, well, duh. But piecing together that view is less intuitive and straightforward than you might imagine from the bottom of a well. Which is the other way triggers work. They release a set of intense hormones and emotions that by design scream for us to take immediate action without question in order to survive. We tend to get stuck when we question that reaction too closely, or when we feel, right or wrong, there are no good options left. Depression often stems from that damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Which easily leads to a psychological vapor lock until the knot gets untangled. If it ever does.

 

But a Nine Inch Nails Downward Spiral isn’t what I’m here to write about today. In reality, I don’t write about this stuff to help myself at all. I don’t always find it does, except maybe writing poetry. Even typing all this out has left me fearful, shaking, exhausted, and angry. I have been through this too many times before. The paths are well worn, the roadways sunken, the terrain fully mapped. Except maybe the blank spot ominously labeled Here Be Dragons.

 

No, I write in hopes I can capture something that someone else can relate to, and maybe use to improve their own situation however slightly.

 

A couple weeks ago, I ran across an article on feeling happier. Which is why I decided to write this essay rather than one of the two I’ve been threatening to get out for a while.

 

Normally, I don’t fall in with the Bobbie McFerrin don’t worry, be happy crowd (you’re welcome for that tune wedgie in your head). If others can sing Que Sera, Sera through the existential dread of an impending personal apocalypse, more power to them. It is not the way I’m wired. My head is more likely to echo either with Siegfried’s Funeral March or Men of Harlech.

 

But this was an NPR science article so not to be discounted right away. In it, the author pulled apart her own feeling of being trapped. In her case, much of her mental health decline was driven by the pandemic and its languishing isolation. A situation many of us can relate to.

 

Interestingly, the current research on reactions versus emotions has changed. Where we once thought that emotions drove reactions as a Darwinian survival mechanism, what we’ve found, counterintuitively, is that reactions actually drive emotions. Basically, your body reacts to certain stimuli instinctively by dumping a bunch of hormones into your system that drive other physical responses (like your eyes dilating, your heartbeat increasing, you sweating, etc.). Then your mind searches its memory database for an analogous situation so it can figure out the best emotional response.

 

As an example, the author cited that if you see a bear in the woods, you get an adrenaline dump to prepare you for what might come next, which isn’t limited to fight or flight (often bad and worse options with a bear). In reality your mind tries to put what just happened into emotional context. If you are an urban-dwelling hiker whose only experience with bears is hearing stories about people getting mauled, your mind will likely choose the emotion of fear. Whereas if you are hunting bear, your mind might choose excited anticipation.

 

This odd reversal of cause and effect offers a ray of hope. Because where we used to think something like fear was instinctive, beyond our control and thus almost impossible to fight, we now see it’s a contextual choice, albeit a lightning fast one. So, if you can change your experience database with a given situation, you may be able to change your emotions. Especially in situations where your mind might be conflating the stimuli from two different events, as was the case above.

 

All of which made intuitive sense to me as I pulled apart my experiences. I have a healthy respect for storms but do not yet fear them in and of themselves. I tend to see them as challenges, something to be survived (which might change with one more tornado interaction).

 

But interactions with my immediate family, and all their hidden traps and sliding doors, offer almost nothing but pain, so latching onto a set of emotions to keep them at a distance makes perfect sense. Confusing and conflating the two because of temporal coincidence does not. Ultimately changing either set of emotional responses requires changing that experiential database, or at least expanding and weighting the average by immediacy. Or at least separating them into neutral corners. As with bickering children, that is difficult but at least doable.

 

For me, that has been an ongoing process. Which started with remembering that I don’t have to do it anymore. My father has been dead for nearly a decade. My mother for just over a year. With each passing day, any of her machinations and bad decisions become more and more remote in their ability to affect me. And my sister, well, she’s a couple thousand miles away and running silent. She may be family but I don’t owe her and she doesn’t owe me. That equilibrium has existed since I was at least twenty, and perhaps as young as ten. I don’t see it changing, as for decades of constant updating, the experiential database has barely budged. Trust is a factor there, and trust, once broken, is extremely difficult to regain.

 

And so that thought of not having to do it anymore brings an immense wave of peace when I focus on it. That isn’t always in the middle of whatever reaction I am having, which just like the conflation of family trauma and storms often involves many sometimes-interlinked factors that need to be understood, acknowledged and pulled apart. Things like duty, responsibility, and my role as a man, a brother, a son, as well as self-preservation, physically (which has been an issue at times), mentally, emotionally and existentially (as in the way I’ve structured and live my life). All overlapped with memories as a child.

 

When I was in my 30s, I remember reading a set of science fiction novels that had an alien race whose memories were physiologically set in wax, which meant they were unstable and unreadable for a short period of time after an event occurred, as well as able to be erased and written over discretely. That was an interesting concept to me.

 

All memory of trauma, especially childhood memory, is somewhat unstable and even sketchy by design. The point of such memories is not objective, intellectual accuracy but compelling, actionable emotion. When the adrenaline and other hormones hit your blood, if the memory it triggers is sufficiently negative, especially existentially critical, your mind doesn’t want to dwell on parsing it; it wants you to react right away. Fight, flee, or freeze.

 

In 99% of the cases from which that trigger mechanism evolved, that is the exact right move for Darwinian survival. Let’s not intellectualize the motives of that predator lurking in the jungle by the river into some sort of empathetic context. “Fucking tiger! Don’t get out of the boat! Never get out of the boat!”

 

But in the complexities and vagaries of modern human society, that remaining 1% of evolutionary cases has increasingly taken over and now drives more and more of the strains upon our collective mental health. Including PTSD.

 

The thing about trauma (the T in PTSD) is that your mind gives you very little time to think about it while you are in the midst of it. It is only with time and reflection that any of it begins to make sense, kind of like the memory of the aliens in those books. And that only with the security that comes with enough distance, either physical or temporal, to allow you to feel safe enough to reengage that threat, if only through playing it out as a simulation, often by going over events again and again in your mind as you try to understand what actions, proactive or reactive, might have changed the outcome.

 

But in situations where you were powerless, or even just where you felt powerless, it is easy to get stuck in that churning reimagining, like a GIF constantly looping on your Facebook feed. Because there were no good options, nothing obvious or even subtle would have changed the outcome. Sometimes there were no real options at all. And sometimes you have to take on faith that just by surviving the encounter, you took the best or only actions you could have taken.

 

And yet, sometimes, with an investment of time and patience, you can pull apart the event from the trigger by reviewing events with a critical eye to understand them, not relive them. If you are very careful and very clever, you can sometimes defuse the trigger by reprogramming it. For many people, that requires professional guidance or at least advice. Don’t be afraid to use it.

 

In my case, it required recognition. I still don’t want to go through another Irma again. Next time, my wife and I will likely pack up the cats and leave. Or maybe move to somewhere that gets few storms (but perhaps more balanced seasons). Or maybe both at once. But that doesn’t mean I won’t watch the basin this season to see what impending storm might come up. Just when it does, I will try to treat it for what it is, not what it became associated with.

 

And by learning that, perhaps I will survive.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

Belief - Lughnasa 2020

When I was young, I desperately wanted to believe in something. I wanted to belong to something, perhaps because I didn’t get that feeling of belonging at home.

My early religious instruction was pretty normal. A pastoral church out in the country, an acceptable substitute denomination when my parents couldn’t find their own, macaroni iconography spray-painted gold, feeding carrots or apples to the neighboring horses after services. I still remember the excitement of the first day I was allowed to sit with my parents and sister rather than in the daycare center the church had for younger kids.

These bucolic outings were curtailed when the Congregationalist church opened a mile from our house. But we still attended as a family off and on when my father wasn’t traveling for his job, which meant less and less often.

That changed again after my parents got divorced. My mother declared she no longer benefited from going to church, though my sister and I still would. That never quite made sense to me, though I suspect now she was looking for a once a week break from us. The hypocrisy wasn’t lost on my sister, who started ditching church like school then stopped going altogether. I wasn’t far behind. Church was a family activity. My family had disappeared.

That didn’t mean I stopped searching, even in a back-burner kind of way. Or perhaps I felt a not so subtle need to conform. But none of that was pressing.

Then came the worst year of my life. Sixth grade arrived with a new school, new friends, and new expectations, all of which was normal enough. But those changes were combined with my sister’s now full-steam rebelliousness layered with my mother struggling to find a job then working nights. Most of what I remember from that year was them fighting Texas Cage Match style, knowing that at any moment it could spill over to me and often did. I remember feeling constantly terrified and exhausted. I often wished I would go to sleep and never wake up, that God would claim me. I didn’t have some vision of unearthly fantasy paradise filled with streets of gold and choirs of angels. That’s not what Congregationalists teach. I just knew heaven couldn’t be any worse than earth. All I wanted was some peace.

About that time a new church opened across the street from my middle school. The Evangel Temple. I don’t know what denomination it was. I suspect it didn’t have one at all. No one knew what to make of them. They were new and didn’t seem to play by the existing rules. I mean who named their church a temple? Not the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Catholics or even the Southern Baptists, never mind the Congregationalists. Not in the 70s, not in sleepy Rockledge, Florida. It sounded kind of Old Testament. Perhaps that should have been a clue. Yet here they were, all exciting, shiny and white.

But that’s not what grabbed my attention. Soon after opening, they started trolling the neighborhood in a brightly made up van like an ice cream truck, gathering an audience of kids with free candy, then enticing us with little Biblical puppet shows to say was how much fun their church could be. They were definitely progressive in spreading their Word, at least to our generation. They had a dedicated children’s church with its own rock band. They had a refurbished school bus that would pick us up if our parents didn’t want to attend. It was the perfect disaffected suburban setup, remarkably similar to other 70s cultural temptations. Remember, kids, samples are free.

Somewhere in my head I decided this might be a better way to spend my Sunday mornings than at home. All my friends were in church and television was a wasteland. Just Face the Nation, the 700 Club and the Bobby Bowden Show. And it wasn’t like there were any family activities in the offing, not even Sunday dinner. So, I signed up.

My mother was initially less than enthusiastic. But once the bus came around and honked its horn, she seemed onboard with my once again disappearing for several hours each week. In fact, as the shine wore off because I didn’t really make any friends in the children’s congregation or find it particularly entertaining or as comforting as I’d thought, she was the one who insisted I continue to attend.

The place was weird to me. The first thing they did each week was ask if anyone was new then drag them up on stage to be “saved.” Which I know now is a pretty standard scenario in most evangelical, charismatic and sometimes fundamentalist American Christian churches. Which, aside from making me uncomfortable, struck me as completely alien. No other church I’d been in did anything like this, especially with kids, especially without their parents around. Besides, it seemed unnecessary and redundant. I mean, I knew I’d been baptized. At least I’d seen the pictures though I couldn’t swear my parents weren’t beaming over some other random infant in a white christening dress near a font with a minister.

Plus, none of the sermons, if you could call them that, spoke to me or made much sense. None of the Bible stories were the way I remembered them. It all felt like a huge bait and switch. But as with any boring class in school, I tolerated it as I checked out and daydreamed the time away.

Then came the fateful day someone asked how old I was. I don’t remember if it was around my birthday or just a random question. Either way, thirteen was the answer. Oh, well, that’s a problem. Children’s church is for children only, meaning twelve and under. You now need to attend the regular church in the regular sanctuary. I didn’t like this idea very much. But being a rule follower, I did as I was asked. Not that it was a request. They’d given me one final week in children’s church as a courtesy. After that, the nice lady who ran the place drew a hard, red line.

The next Sunday, I went into the main sanctuary alone, which was as large and sterile as any other church I’d been in. The service was as dry and meaningless to me as any other I’d sat through, either in my previous churches or attending some of my friends’ churches as a guest. Hell, the last Congregationalist sermon I remember revolved around baseball. I’m not sure I followed the metaphor but I do vividly remember the minster examining the ball, tossing it up and down, and setting it on the podium. This was all Old Testament stories and sin as I remember. Definitely perplexing and adult, without a Virgil or Beatrice to guide me through.

But I couldn’t find a way out of it. My mother remained insistent I attend. I’d signed up so wasn’t allowed to quit. I did manage to get off the bus by saying I could ride my bike. My sister briefly went with me, but really that was just a cover for her to ditch and do something with her friends without my mother knowing. She swore me to secrecy and threatened me if I blew her in. That lasted until the day she wasn’t at the assigned meeting spot when I got out. I waited but knew when she didn’t show that I had to get home or risk my mother’s wrath. By this point, we were fighting over the lifeboats: it was every child for themselves.

I don’t remember how long I attended regular services before a family sitting down the pew from me said they’d noticed me attending alone and asked me where my family was. I told them my parents were divorced and neither my mother or sister wanted to come. They invited me to sit with them each week. I think the words “you can be part of our family” were uttered.

I may have only been thirteen but my stranger danger radar blared away full blast, red lights, sirens and everything. I went home that afternoon and told my mother I wasn’t going back. I didn’t tell her why or what had happened. She thought about trying to force me, but something in my stance and hardened eyes must have convinced her it would have been a futile effort. I was done.

So, after eighteen months, I was once again a confirmed heathen with my Sunday mornings free. That little experiment in freewill had definitely cured my itch to belong and believe, at least for a time.

That lasted until I was in high school and had a steady girlfriend. Which surprised even me. Somewhere in the time we were dating, she’d been born again outside the denomination of her birth. She was going to some nondenominational, fundamentalist church out in the sticks of Cocoa. She would tell me about her Bible study class, how great and educational it was. How we really should go together. As a couple. She’d told them all about me, which struck more than a little fear into my heart. After my earlier experience, I wasn’t particularly interested. But in the spirit of compromise and cooperation and a continuing relationship, I eventually, reluctantly agreed.

First problem. Bible study came with homework, which I wasn’t particularly inclined or interested in doing. I had a Bible. But sitting down to read it to discuss with a group of strangers wasn’t high on my list of things to do over a weekend. Second problem, the study group met before the first of two regularly scheduled services. So early, at least for me at the time, which meant setting an alarm on a day I might normally sleep in, especially after a late night on Saturday, or if I had to be at work at noon. Again, not high on my agenda.

But like a dutiful boyfriend, I did my best. For about eight weeks, I did (most) of the assigned reading and contributed to the discussion, though usually only when asked. My opinions weren’t what I’d call the standard interpretation at the table. But the group was at least different from what I’d seen before. The people seemed mostly ok. Though I had my doubts about the guy who would show up bright and early in a tie one week, late in a t-shirt and perhaps hungover the next, miss the next two or three meetings completely, then rinse and repeat. And the group treated it like nothing ever happened. Which struck me as pretty odd.

After the study group, my girlfriend and I attended the main service together. She seemed quite happy with the whole arrangement. At some point I realized she was showing me off, which I wasn’t sure I minded. While it wasn’t my favorite couple’s activity, the congregation was too conservative and literal for my taste, I could generally deal with it. Or so I thought.

Which lasted until a particular Sunday morning. We were sitting in the center of a long row of pews, about mid-distance front to back. Hard, polished wood pews as I remember. No pad or carpet like the Evangel Temple, which seems opulent by comparison. We had gone through the ritual of turning forward, back, and side to side to shake all our neighbors’ hands. It was springtime in Reagan’s newly minted America. Which cast us, I suppose, as the shining city on the hill.

The minister immediately launched a fiery sermon on the perils of premarital sex as a wage of sin. Living in the era of Just Say No, this rolled right off me. It was pretty standard rhetoric. I’d heard it all before. As far as that sin went, there were bigger worries in the world in my mind. In fact, I wasn’t really paying much attention at all.

Right up to the moment he added, “any woman who has sex before marriage is damaged goods in God’s eyes.” That caught my full and undivided attention. Had I just dropped back fifty years and landed in a church Pleasantville? Had my technicolor world just changed to black and white?

At first, I didn’t take his statement seriously. A smile might have tried to curl the corners of my mouth. I thought it was a provocative setup line for a twist that would lead to the real sermon. That had to be it. As I glance around, that nascent smile emerged stillborn. Everyone in front of me was nodding. These people were dead serious.

“Damaged goods.” The minister repeated that phrase for emphasis, with a pause for contemplation. Like women were precious cargo in their God’s eyes. Possessions not people.

I glanced at my girlfriend to check her reaction. She had a rapt expression fixed on the pastor as she nodded gravely, too. I quickly refocused forward, stunned, surrounded, my stranger danger blasting a red alert again. Understand that in our relationship, that ship was no longer tied up at the pier. It’s not like she and I had embarked on a different journey in that regard. Neither of us had sailed alone. Except I wasn’t damaged in her God’s eyes. She was. Not me. Just her.

Which made me wonder what kind of self-hating, hypocritical relationship I was in. If I had been alone, I would have walked out on the spot. I was that repulsed. As my anger curdled, I almost did. Instead, I donned a mask, not wanting to make a scene, working through the rest of the service from the safety of its disguise. On the drive home, I told her I would never go back. If she was comfortable accepting that kind of judgment knowing she didn’t conform to their God’s expectations and never could, that was her choice. Personally, I thought treating women like that was bullshit, albeit an ironic, artistic exclamation point in the statuary garden of the golden calf.

I am pretty sure that’s where our relationship began to founder, though it took another year or so to break up on the rocks. Looking back, that was for the best.

This time, I only kept free and clear from religious entanglements for another couple years. Once again, my return had to do with a girl. Two girls in fact.

The first was a friend who was two thousand miles away when she told me she’d attempted suicide. The second was in the campus Christian group my born-again roommate introduced me to for solace when I told him. She, and they, seemed different from the Christians I’d been around up to then. More caring and honest. Though still on the strange side of metaphysics in my mind, especially as an aspiring engineer.

Long story short, this girl was generous, kind and pretty. I liked her. I thought she liked me. I wanted to see where it might lead. That yellow brick road is paved with good intentions.

Where it ended up was in a tent revival, which is like a southern rite of passage as I understand it. I’d never been to one. Given what I’d seen and heard in the past several years, I figured I could handle it without a problem. How bad could it be? Once again, my estimation and reality didn’t quite intersect.

A tent revival is a lot like a circus sideshow. There’s a striped canvas tent setup in an empty lot on the outskirts of town. Inside there are row upon row of white folding chairs with an aisle down the center facing a platform stage. There are ushers, men, in long-sleeved button-up shirts who look a little like bouncers at a strip club. There is a local barker to warm up crowd and draw them in before the headline talent hits the stage. All this happens after dark.

Revivals are itinerant and somewhat mendicant. They travel from place to place, often in an established circuit, advertising their arrival at various evangelical and charismatic churches. Sometimes the headliners end up as a guest ministers or speakers in a local church, but more often not. Theirs is a particular talent more suited to Saturday night than Sunday morning. Some bill themselves as healers or miracle workers, others as speaking in tongues or any variant of being inhabited by the Spirit. Most are just fiery, inspired speakers who know how to work an audience, which ranges from small and intimate to local carnival large. It is a very strange ecosystem that inhabits the margins of society like a tidal pool.

It’s important to remember these speakers are old-school religious showmen. People turn up to be entertained as well as to be saved or renew their faith. While all are welcome, most know what they’re in for and exactly what to expect.

I didn’t. But I quickly learned. The dialog and narrative structure were novel to me, although as the night progressed, I found the plot points very familiar.

The first trick to showmanship is anticipation. You always make your audience wait. So, a 9 o’clock kickoff time drifts closer to 9:15-9:30. Bearing in mind this is springtime in Florida, so while not Amazonia hot, definitely not what you’d call cool. Pack a hundred or so bodies into a plasticized canvas tent and draw the flaps and it gets downright warm. Not quite uncomfortable, just bordering on giddy.

I don’t remember all the particulars of the how the evening unfolded. The lights were low to set the mood. There wasn’t a microphone, though it wasn’t a big space. An usher guarded the entrance with another at the stage entrance to outside and maybe a third stationed somewhere in front of the stage. There was a local warm-up act who gave the introduction. There was some sort of fiery sermon with allusions to the devil walking among us with his temptations and the punishment that awaited us should we yield. Like every religious service I’d been to, at some point they passed a plate. All of which built toward the highlight of the evening: the call for salvation.

At some point the speaker asked a series of questions. Who had never been here before? Who had a problem the Holy Spirit could address? Who needed to renew their faith? Who had never been saved?

For me, these were all rhetorical questions I had no intentions of answering, or even stirring for as they were asked. I knew what was coming from the Evangel Temple. While I was in the audience voluntarily, I had no desire to make it more than a spectator sport. I didn’t remember hearing a portion of my grade would be based on participation. So, I sat impassively with my arms tucked across my chest watching the spectacle unfold.

Unfortunately, the girl I was with didn’t get the memo. She must have raised a hand and pointed at me behind my back. Suddenly, there was an usher at the head of our row, beckoning to me.

I should have shaken my head and refused. But again, there was a girl involved, one currently encouraging me to accompany this guy. Against my better instincts, I went along.

He guided me up on stage, to the end of a line of half a dozen others. The preacher made a show of more build-up, dragging a last couple stragglers up to join us. At this point, I wasn’t really paying attention because I really didn’t want to be there.

Once he was done with the preliminaries, the preacher started at the head of line. He stood before the first individual, looked them in the eye, then raised a hand and pressed it hard against their forehead, pushing back quickly with a loud, “Be healed” at the moment he made contact. That individual fell back as if they’d fainted into the waiting arms of one of the burly ushers who helped them to their feet and guided them shakily offstage.

The preacher moved down the line, bam, bam, bam, felling individuals one after another like a row of yellow pines. Like a trust exercise at a team-building seminar, each was caught by an usher who assisted them back to their seats. You could see the preacher’s performance was gathering steam. This was why the audience was here.

When he came to me, he gave me that same long, meaningful look into my eyes but didn’t say a word. I assume he thought I knew the script from those who came before. Maybe the first person in line was a ringer to show us the way. Except I’d been through similar before. While I had no intention of disrupting his performance, I also had no desire to participate unless I felt so moved.

“Be healed.” When his palm connected with my brow, my head rocked back. But I felt no spark, no spirit, no knee-buckling euphoria. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to feel something, maybe even hoped to. But there was nothing. So, my head just snapped back forward.

The preacher’s eyes narrowed as his expression flashed between annoyance and outright anger. I just met his gaze levelly before I was grabbed firmly by the arm from behind and hustled back to my folding chair, now more than a little scared. These guys were truly upset that I had ruined their show.

The whole affair wound down quickly after that. As we spilled out into the night, I did feel somewhat reborn, not in spirit but in clarity. After seven years, I’d finally peered behind the curtain and seen the show for what it was. Needless to say, my performance didn’t make a good impression. I didn’t get the girl. Again, likely for the best.

I can’t say that was the last time I was in a church, though I am pretty sure it was the last time I went voluntarily for anything other than a wedding or a funeral. Within a few years, I stopped calling myself a Christian entirely, which was a harder transition than some might think. From what I’d seen, it was no longer who I was or who I wanted to be.

Some people might have been embarrassed by this episode. I know a few people reading it might be embarrassed for me. I am not. I value this experience. If nothing else, it taught me about indoctrination, insular communities, critical thinking, and to see the world as it is, not as I think it should be.

I see similar events played out again and again on social media right now, the same concepts, the same tactics, the same manipulation, if not always surrounding the same belief. The arguments unfold in the same way, uncritically. They rely on blanket acceptance of dogmatic axioms and postulates. Such beliefs are one small step away from prejudice. They are easily manipulated and weaponized by unscrupulous leaders who claim that you are either with us or against us. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s about religion or gun control or capitalism or civil rights, once people self-segregate and divide into isolated camps, once the dialogue is distilled down to memes or clever turns of phrases, coherence and understanding is lost. Everything is reduced to black or white.

Except this world is painted shades of grey. Most sin is simply shame in disguise.

That doesn’t mean I no longer have beliefs. I do. Most are nuanced and require some exploration to untangle. Some border on religious though I rarely discuss them. More are philosophical. A few just bring me comfort even if they only have an internal consistency to me. But I continually renew them or discard them based on my current understanding of the world, refusing to take them solely as articles of faith.

Everyone has beliefs, not all of which are religious. They are often irrational. Most are harmless. Some aren’t. The thing is, the vast majority of people are born into them. Most never have much reason to question them outside of a little adolescent rebellion which often only serves as a test.

That is not inherently bad. Beliefs serve an important psychological and sociological function. They are a shortcut to make the world understandable and relatable. They quantify the world into easily digested categories so we can make simple decisions without expending an inordinate amount of energy and move on. In that they are an evolutionary advantage. But like any inherited, instinctive trait, in modern society they can easily short-circuit and run amok.

On the other side, so can unbridled, undisciplined skepticism. When someone claims you have to verify everything for yourself rather than accept the findings of people with experience and expertise, they are sending you on a fool’s errand. They are trying to wear you down into apathy and exhaustion. It’s only meant to erode trust and damage societal institutions. In that, it has become little more than its own corrupt belief system, secular not religious, though many refuse to see it.

Thinking critically is more than just validating other people’s evidence (that’s called peer review, the operative word being “peer”). It’s about hearing what is and isn’t said. It’s about understanding rhetorical arguments and cognitive biases, our own not someone else’s. It’s more about self-reflection than cross-examination.

In his defense at his trial for heresy, Socrates said to his accusers, “An unexamined life is not worth living”. By which he meant any unexamined belief. Wise words. For which he was condemned to death.

In the end, people believe what they want to believe, regardless of the contradictions, regardless of the hypocrisy, regardless of the evidence right before their eyes. No one can change them. No one can force them to see the truth. Unless you seek, you shall not find.

In that, the last of my Congregationalist indoctrination springs to mind: God helps those who help themselves. And if we lose our ability to do even that in these troubling and contentious times, may s/he have mercy on our souls.

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III

Always Take the Free Stuff - Discounts

A friend of mine from college had a saying he repeated like a mantra. “Always take the free stuff.”

For him, that meant things like maps, information booklets and brochures from places he’d visited; a couple extra napkins at a fast food restaurant; free samples in a grocery store or a food court; the pens, pencils and notepads hotels set out for their guests; even promo items like basic solar calculators, tape measures, earphones, golf tees, cable ties and any trial-sized food, products, or OTC medications that various businesses wrote off as advertising.

Admittedly, he was a gamer, so much of this ended up in his backpack as supplies. The informational content almost always added whole new levels of detail to his games. Another of his favorite sayings was “I’ll file that under I, for I might need that someday.” Ok, in the end, he was a bit of a hoarder, but that’s different story.

He didn’t steal anything; he just took what was freely offered. Although he was not above smuggling out a particularly amusing phonebook, say from a place like Waycross, GA (“where there is absolutely no reason to be bored”), which he knew would be replaced. He used them to create encounters and as random name generators. Sadly, this is what we were reduced to in the dark ages before the internet.

The funny thing is, there are always a ton of things being given away in a capitalist society, and tons of discounts if you know where to look for them. Karen has picked up more cool swag from conferences she’s attended than I’ve ever seen. And if you can con someone into giving you an official tour of their business (which many are more than happy to do), they basically throw this stuff at you in hopes you’ll remember them if you need them.

After the last essay, you were probably wondering how we generated some of that extra cash to pay off the mortgage. Prepare to be bored by basic math for the next few thousand words in a way you haven’t been since second period in sixth grade.

Ok, remember way back in the essay where I talked about my second financial lesson in college? Of course not. Here’s a quick refresher.

I had just moved into an on-campus apartment and cut out the cafeteria meal plan to save money by cooking for myself. Most of us know that cooking at home is cheaper (and healthier) than eating out almost anywhere. Anyone can learn basic cooking if they apply themselves. Even children can learn to cook. It’s a survival skill I highly recommend. And the longer you do it, the better you get.

But that’s not what this essay is about.

At the time, I had two roommates. One cooked, one didn’t. The one who did taught me a trick for stretching a food budget that I’ve never forgotten. Buy meat in bulk and freeze it. Meat is generally the most expensive staple in a grocery bill, at least if you are an omnivore like me (sorry vegetarians but Nyala says your food is what our food calls food). Next is fresh fruit and vegetables, though as an interesting aside, flash frozen fruits and vegetables are nutritionally equivalent to fresh because of the way the technology and the supply chain works.

In the apartment I had to split the space in a regular fridge freezer with the roommate who cooked, which wasn’t really a problem as I was still working out the kinks of my system. The year after he graduated, I ended up with three roommates who didn’t cook so I had almost all of that little freezer to myself. I bought in bulk, which shaved about 10% off the price of meat per pound.

10%, that number should ring a bell. Yup, the S&P return number I keep harping on. But I didn’t know that at the time.

I dumb lucked into some of that savings because I basically hated grocery shopping. Not the act itself, just the time it took. I would only go every four to six weeks and stock everything into an overflowing cart. Which meant bulk buying worked for me on two fronts. Synchronicity.

Since those days of yore (when someone would just kill the mastodon and slap it on a glacier), I’ve continued and refined that approach.

After we moved into the house, the first appliances bought after a washer and dryer (because laundromats are the devil’s waiting room) was a small chest freezer. It cost $250.

I am what I call a lazy cook. Left to my own devices I eat pretty Anglo-Saxon basic (meat, veg, starch at the time, which is now meat, veg, salad). Combined with my aversion to spending time grocery shopping (only countered by my aversion to eating out), which got somewhat worse once I had a career, I still liked to stock up. The chest freezer meant we could.

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow history lesson and just tell why it was perhaps one of the best investments we’ve ever made. In fact, we still have and use it over twenty years later. The same one, never replaced. Remember way back in another essay when I mentioned Kenmore? Yeah.

The savings this 5.5 cubic foot freezer generates currently works out slightly differently than in college. While we don’t buy bulk packages as much anymore, we still stock meat in quantity. Because we always have a running stock, we can be picky and only buy it on sale. Saving $1/pound or more on chicken that normally costs $5/pound works out to a 20% savings (no, we aren’t buying the cheapest meat anymore). That’s a hefty discount. With Buy-One-Get-One, it gets even better. Lamb shanks, salmon, pot roasts, ducks, turkeys, all that stuff goes on sale at one point or another. And it easily keeps until we need it. Because we have enough stock to see us through, all we have to do is keep notes on what we’re low on and wait for a sale.

The only time we run down the freezer is leading up to hurricane season so that if we lose power for several days, we don’t lose several hundred dollars of meat.

As well, we can make and freeze soups and stews and lasagna all winter which we can then thaw when we don’t really feel like cooking. Karen calls it our “fast food”. As I said, I am a lazy cook. Which means the best countertop appliance we own is a crock-pot. That allows us to brown some meat, chop up a bunch of veg, throw it all together with some stock, wait a few hours, and presto. A hearty Anglo-Saxon meal. At least when served with fresh bread.

Which is another thing that gets stocked in the freezer. Every few weeks, Karen bakes a batch of bread that she makes into little two-person loaves. Mostly now we have it for breakfast but occasionally we have it with dinner. The discount of her baking over buying (multigrain, no additives, no preservatives) adds up. As does her making fresh yogurt, but that we store in the fridge.

Anyway, you get the point. This little freezer was one of the best investments we ever made, easily paying for itself a thirty-fold or better over the years with the discounts it allowed us to capture on stuff we normally buy. Which freed up the fridge freezer for larger bags of frozen veggies.

Say that generates $25 a month, which might be a little low. Doesn’t seem like much, maybe not worth going after. But that’s $300 a year, which for us is a better way of looking at it. $300 is money I can work with.

Next up in the grocery aisle is coupons. As I mentioned in the essay on budgets, I track coupons on our bill. I never really paid much attention to coupons until the Great Recession. Boy, do I wish I had.

For a long time, we had a subscription to the local paper. I occasionally glanced at the coupon flyers but when I was working, they didn’t seem worth my time. I started clipping them after I left engineering.

Coupons are an old lady's game, right? Wrong. In the past ten years, we’ve averaged savings of about $25 a month. That’s another $300 a year. A little less when we still received the paper (the coupons easily paid for a Sunday subscription). We killed the paper several years ago because we had better sources of news. Now the only coupons we get come in the local throwaway, in the mail and in the store flyers. But until last year, that’s been enough.

For us, there are a couple tricks with coupons. First, we are somewhat brand loyal. We have brands we like, so we only cut coupons on them. Second, we only use them on products we normally buy. Just because there is a coupon on ice cream doesn’t mean I’ll clip it. We don’t normally buy it. In fact, I don’t generally want to buy it. Third, when there is a coupon for multiples, like shampoo, we stock up. Karen usually has 2-3 containers of the shampoo she likes in the bathroom cabinet beneath the sink. Finally, our grocery store allows us to combine manufacturer’s coupons with store coupons for a double discount. They also accept competitors coupons.

A funny thing about coupons. They follow the economic cycle. When times are good, you don’t find as many offered. When times are bad, you find tons on items you almost never see. When times are really bad, like the Great Recession, grocery stores offer $5 coupons off a general bill about every other week just to get you in the door.

Right now, times have gotten good enough that we only averaged about $6 a month in coupons last year. That’s way down from our peak in 2011, with a whopping $55 a month. That was $660 that year. Which paid for our flights and registration at Dragon*Con. Currently, we see more BOGOs that we take advantage of in the same way, overstocking the pantry with sale items that won’t go bad.

So on groceries alone, we came up with $50 a month or $600 a year. And that’s without considering how much cheaper it is to eat at home is than eat in restaurants. Tastier, too, in my opinion. Those savings alone would have shaved five years off our mortgage. Or been a nice supplement to a vacation. Or a little more money to invest.

Let me give you another example. About ten years ago, we started having trouble with our cable company. The upshot of it was a technician walked out of the house saying he needed to get piece of equipment and never came back. We cancelled our cable the next day, though not our internet.

Which cut our bill in half, down from about $100 to about $50. Again, that’s a savings of about $50 a month or $600 a year. But we weren’t quite ready to ditch small screen entertainment completely. We bought a digital antenna and converter box to pick up the major broadcast channels (which we only tune in for sports, and increasingly not that). As well, we picked up Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions (Amazon for the video content, though it comes with other perks). Those totaled $250 a year, leaving $350 extra, or roughly another $25 a month.

Initially, we weren’t certain how we’d do without cable television. As it turns out, we are happier without commercials and have more quality content than we could ever watch on just two services. And again, at over a 50% savings, which well outperforms the S&P on even the best year. That’s year over year savings, at least until the cable companies figure out how to recoup their loss.

So we are up to $75 a month in savings we can track.

Where else could we look?

Well, a couple places. Fun fact, a number of businesses offer discounts on monthly services if you pay a year in advance. Currently, our pest control gives a 10% discount. They didn’t offer it, we had to ask. Now they just give it to us every year. Again, that magic S&P number. Though it only generates about $16 a year, it’s now our $16, not theirs. As well, they offer another 10% discount on termite coverage for having pest control with them, which is a little more. And they only cost half of the previous national service we had with none of the problems.

A number of companies also offer bundled service discounts. Cable companies for things like TV, internet and phone. We used to get a 10% discount from our insurance company for having auto and homeowners through them (we still would if they were writing policies in Florida, which most aren’t). Our old AC company used to offer a deep discount to do an annual service check if we scheduled it in February ($30 vs. $80-100 in May).

Speaking of pay-in-advance discounts, the State of Florida discounts our property taxes 4% if we pay four months early. Worth if for both parties (we get a discount, they get to put our money to work early, write fewer bonds and pay less interest).

Speaking of taxes, a perk to being a resident of Seminole is free access to the workout room at the rec center. That alone is worth about $250 a year just for me, though I’ve only used it sporadically. But I wouldn’t use the gym much either. I prefer to do my Jane Fonda impression without an audience.

And speaking of insurance, the longer you initiate a policy for, the deeper your discount in general. I had friends who paid their auto insurance monthly. The difference between that and a six-month policy for the same driver is amazing. A yearlong policy, if you can get it, is even better. Companies want a guaranteed, stable revenue stream and are often willing to pay for it.

AAA gets us a deep discount on our glasses when we need new ones, which easily overcomes the $80 a year fee (we have rarely used roadside assistance but it’s nice when we’ve needed it). We also get a 10% discount on labor with our auto mechanic. It also gets us better rates on hotel rooms and cars, among other things. AARP offers comparable discounts for many goods and services with much less of an upfront fee. A few professional organizations do as well.

On the utilities front, our power company offers an energy check and duct leak test which they subsidize half of, along with an insulation upgrade, which they also subsidize. We’ve had good luck with both and have seen the savings. Though we didn’t have as good luck once I was home with their energy control program that would interrupt our AC or water heater at peak hours. Upgrading our incandescent light bulbs to LEDs and turning on every energy-saver mode we can find on our devices (especially the computer and monitor) has made a noticeable impact on our power bill. Another reason why I track kW-hrs, as I mentioned in the essay on budgets.

Similarly, a low-flow toilet in back (and fixing a leak we didn’t know existed) made a difference in our water bill. The crossover-point there is probably a long way in the future, but the work had to be done regardless.

On the travel front, both our old employers allowed us to register and keep our frequent flyer miles from work-related trips, as well as hotel reward points. Which has meant free airfare to Dragon*Con and more than one free night in the Marriott Marquis. Karen’s employer also had a discount program for employees buying computer equipment and software, 5-10%.

All that easily adds up to another $25 a month, if not more. And that’s without breaking a sweat.

So now we’ve made that $100 a month. That’s ten years off our mortgage if we still had one by paying a little extra each month. And we could do more.

But honestly, I don’t really work that hard at this. Believe it or not, I spend very little time searching out discounts, especially now. But I haven’t lost the mindset or the discipline so I do know other places I could look should I need to.

One would be trading our landline (yes, the Copper Age still persists) for the simple cell phone I started carrying in 2012 for emergencies which gets fueled by $100 a year for more minutes than I use. That change would generate $50 a month, or $600 a year (which puts what I’ve outlined here close to $2000 a year, which you will see in the future is another magic number). Even trading it for regular cell service would save $120 a year.

Another might be signing up for a rewards program on a credit card. My personal card wouldn’t generate much cash back as I don’t make many purchases in a given month, but our joint credit card might since we started putting gas and groceries on it. But I wouldn’t pay an additional fee.

Over the years, we’ve found many enjoyable entertainment alternatives. When I was unemployed and living in Maryland, their library system was my bestest friend. One of the networked libraries specialized in science fiction which meant I read more classics than I ever would have otherwise. Recently, we’ve also purchased a number of HumbleBundles for books (and comics), which have contained a lot of classic and Nebula/Hugo award winning science fiction for exceedingly low prices.

We still look for free lectures at the local university and the community college by speakers we might never have found otherwise. We ended up seeing Robert Pinsky (a US Poet Laureate) at USF one year, for only the price of gas. They also hosted a small science fiction conference with major authors every few years. I’ve written essays on watching the US Men’s Under-16 team play down in Bradenton, again for the price of gas (which gave Karen an inordinate amount of joy). Plus many museums have free or discount days once a month, or once a year. And, of course, the park behind the house is open year-round, beautiful and completely free.

There are tons of these events for little or no money if you know where to look.

In the past we’ve also had good luck with rewards programs for businesses we went to regularly. Though like coupons, they tend to offer more in hard economic times than good. Total Wine still sends us 15-20% off coupons. While we don’t drink a lot of wine, what we do goes farther, especially on bottles recommended by Wine Enthusiast that only they carry around here. PetSmart still gives us discounts on necessities for the girls. Free and it about makes our 10% rule, although a few items are now cheaper online.

Of course, now that we have a Prime membership (remember, we got it for the video content), we end up buying more there. With two-day shipping we don’t have to plan out as much or wait as long for free delivery. We end up using their music streaming service off and on, but haven’t even tapped the Prime books we can get for free on Kindle.

Which brings me to an interesting point. Membership fees. In general, I avoid them unless I am positive they will pay for themselves (like AARP) or I want the underlying service anyway (like AAA or Prime).

Some people we know find good savings in a warehouse club like Sam’s or Costco. We never went that route for a couple reasons. First, I don’t like paying an upfront fee for potential savings. I feel like it locks me in to a location that isn’t always convenient for savings I am not guaranteed to get. That’s me. Second, when we priced out various items we regularly bought a number of years ago against what friends paid for the same items at their warehouse club, we found many of those items cost more, not less. In fact, I’ve read a number of articles that break down prices between the warehouses and groceries stores. You can generate savings but only by buying very specific items or brands, usually the in-house ones. There may be other non-grocery items that overcome that, but in general we don’t buy many of those.

As well, I’m now a lot more circumspect on various rewards programs. 10-20 years ago, they were mostly loyalty programs. Now they are data-mining operations. We’ve run into more than one scam (one being run at the local mall that made the paper which Karen neatly avoided by reading the fine print). If it seems too good to be true….

Another trick Karen uses. She created a special email account to give out just for rewards programs and other places that require an email. That cuts down on traffic to her regular account and keeps it separate from her social media (which we never use for offers, contest or promotions).

I always ask myself, how much is my data worth? In general, more than they are offering. The same with setting up a credit card for a discount on a purchase, which for me just entails the hassle of cancelling it (and a potential credit hit). Or free trials and introductory offers which automatically rollover to a paid subscription unless you cancel. No thanks.

Simplicity.

It’s easy to get carried away with all this and either spend more time or money than it’s truly worth. I always try to understand a rewards program or discount before signing up for it. We only tend to buy things that we want or need, not because they look cool and someone is giving such a deep discount. As I said in another essay, that is the easiest way to control our spending. And in general, we never pay for the privilege of receiving a discount.

In other words, we always take the free stuff, unless it’s not really free. 


© 2019 Edward P. Morgan III  

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