Gremlins and psychopaths and genes, oh my!

When I have a "gremlin episode", I wonder nightmarishly whether I'm actually seeing things with greater clarity (horrors!), or am deluded with dark nocturnal pessimism.

Do I really want to know?

I'm thinking of a show I saw on TVO a few months ago, called "Genetic Me". A Scandinavian journalist - there's darkness right there - disturbed by what she sees as her negative personality resulting from unhappy incidents in her childhood and adolescence, explores where our personality comes from, ie. genetics.

Can we help it? No. And yes.
Does our family life have a role? No. And yes.

Apparently, we have some say in how unhappy or happy we are, because we can choose how we respond - and our choices may be rooted in what has happened to us in our family.

The strangest story involves her encounter with a Dr. Fallon, a leading expert in psychopathic murderers, who accidentally discovered that he too is a psychopath -- his brain scan confirms it. However, he's a "pro-social" psychopath. He dispassionately analyzes how a "good person" responds, and this has mostly worked for him, preventing him from damaging those around him. He gives his mother's raising of him credit.

The Scandinavian journalist has troubles with what she calls "ruminating" - the experts call it perseveration - the first time I heard this term was June 28th, 2000. A speech therapist used it to describe my younger daughter, then four.

So, I think, the gremlins are my own way of ruminating. I can embrace it, recognize it, and move beyond it.

Can't I?

I rose, walked the Accent Snob with the Resident Fan Boy. As we made our way back, I thought of ruminating, gremlins, my panicking amygdala. I did my Creative Visualization exercises, and the angel cards drawn from my Blessing Bag read: "Comfort", "Cooperation", "Healing".

I can't stop aging.
I can't change younger daughter.
I can work on how I respond to these things.

Hugo First

New Year's Day hit me like a hair-pin turn. Shortly before awakening that morning, I was hit with an attack of gremlins, and woke up in a sweat of anxiety, the myriad of worries I'd set aside for Christmas flying at me like panicked bats. What I'd like to know is, do I get overwhelmed by anxiety in the wee small hours because I'm vulnerable with lack of sleep, or is it because I'm seeing things with dangerous clarity? Oh gawd, I really don't want to know, do I? I'm blaming this on PMS.

Best to cling to what is beautiful. I started the new year with the almost completely silent filmThe Artist because I've heard so many good things about it, and it is charming and lovingly made, but I'm going to make a plea for what is the most gorgeous and beguiling movie I've seen in ages:

Hugo is also a tribute to the art of silent film, but the much earlier works of Georges Méliès. The movie itself is not silent; it's a russet-brown and midnight-blue fantasy of Paris eight or nine decades ago. It's meant to be seen in 3D but the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I saw it in 2D in a small-screen cinema and you know what? We were still enchanted.

There is not a single ugly shot in this entire work, and the performances by Ben Kingsley, the two child leads, and a half-dozen not-quite-cameo supporting performances are a joy to watch. If this doesn't get some sort of Oscar recognition, I certainly will be pelting the television with foodstuffs.

If you haven't seen it, go. 3D or 2D, it won't matter.

The third day of Christmas (some admittedly desperate anti-gremlin measures)

Another favourite Peanuts comic strip: Linus is comforting Charlie Brown, who is afraid of the dark, with the quote: "It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness." Elsewhere in the dark field, Lucy is bellowing: "YOU STUPID DARKNESS!"

I haven't been tackled as much by gremlins over Christmas, but every now and then the spectres of the coming year have been sneaking up on me and I've been taking measures. Years ago, a Hare Krishna type handed me, just handed me, a copy of Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain. Shortly after this, Hospice Victoria, where I was volunteering at the time, gave a workshop on Creative Visualization, so I've hung on to the book and dipped into it over the years.

Sometimes it takes a little struggle with my knee-jerk reaction to the New Age-y overtones of the concept which, over-simplified, is this: You draw into your life whatever you imagine, both for good and ill. I think there is some validity to this notion, although I draw the line at using this idea as a bludgeon on anybody going through a tough time. In the late eighties, early nineties, when creative visualization seemed to be particularly in vogue, I heard some horror stories of people suffering from cancer being informed by some well-meaning numb-wit that they had brought the cancer on by the wrong attitude.

It seems, though, that I am doing myself no good whatsoever by allowing myself to be beset by scary and upsetting imaginings at 3 am, no matter how realistic, so I slipped Creative Visualization into my bedside drawer and set a flashlight nearby. When the fears and recriminations close in, I do a meditation exercise. I don't know if I'm managing to manifest more positive stuff in my waking hours (in satisfying ways and for the greater good of the universe, of course), but I'm sleeping better and that's got to help my attitude right there.

In further vaguely New Age-y news, my favourite horoscope is by Georgia Nichols whose kooky irreverent humour is a breath of fresh air from all those other deadly serious or airy-fairy horoscopes. There's actually some practical and common sense advice in there too. Anyway, she's suggesting this year that the best day for resolutions is today. Since I resist the idea of New Year's resolutions anyway, believing them to be doomed to failure by definition, I think I'll try a couple of creative visualizations (or at least a wish list) for today. Most of them will revolve about younger daughter because this coming year, when she leaves elementary school, is terrifying beyond belief. Between the bus strike and the freezing rain which has transformed the sidewalks into icy chutes, I'm not likely to get to any place of worship any time soon, so this will have to do. In this, the darkest corner of the year, I need to light some candles. I'll skip the incense. And the bellowing.

The wee small gremlins of the morning

If I should wake sometime between 2 am and 6 am, the gremlins usually come and find me. Sometimes it's a global warming gremlin, sometimes it's a killer comet gremlin. Or the world financial situation. Or Yellowstone National Park blowing us all sky high. (Oh, don't bother me about that last one; go ask Bill Bryson...) Or worse, there are the gremlins of things I'm failing to accomplish in my day-to-day existence such as helping younger daughter in her daily struggles or maintaining exercise resolutions. This morning, I woke from a fitful dream of taking photographs in a haunted library (which involved climbing a ladder and so slowed down my escape from the spectres), and a really nasty gremlin had me by the guts. The Resident Fan Boy returned from the bathroom to find me in a sweat: "If you die, I'm screwed! What will become of the girls? I don't know where the will is, or how to pay the mortgage, or where to send your body...."

Now, this is probably not something a husband wants to hear at the best of times, certainly not at five thirty in the morning of the day he's due to set off on a four-day business trip to Québec City. Add this to the fact that I'm addressing my concerns to the one of the chief Worrywarts of the Western World. This is a man who has spent days pacing and wondering why he hasn't received his free golf towel from the local pub. (He doesn't golf.)

Anyway, to give him his due, he held me close and whispered tenderly, "The first thing you do is notify the bank, and the second thing you do is notify my office." Of course, then I wondered about the wisdom of this because a) the bank would immediately freeze his accounts; and b) I only have his work number which leads to his voice mail ("Uh, hi darling, you're dead, so will your boss check this?"). However, I decided to leave such questions for the morning. Or slightly later in the morning, as RFB's alarm clock then went off and he had to get up. I went back to sleep and dreamt I was at some sort of Jerry Falwell camp and I needed to pack, take a shower and clean out some drawers that were full of grey muddy grunge.

In case I've worried any of you out there (I know there's at least five or six of you who check in here), we emailed our lawyer in Victoria for copies of our wills (because we can't find them); we phoned the insurance company (which has changed hands twice since we took our our policy); and we located the local branch of the Memorial Society (because our membership in the BC Memorial Society is unlikely to do us much good). The last has a fabulous web site which actually has a check list of "what to do when death occurs" --- in case you too were wondering. So if the Resident Fan Boy meets with tragedy in Québec City (say, if someone discovers his last name while he's touring the Plains of Abraham and takes umbrage)....well...I'm still screwed, but at least I have an idea of what to do.