If you have ever wanted to float on your back in the Dead Sea or get out of gravity and become an astronaut, you’re going to love today’s podcast. Sensory deprivation tanks are slowly growing in popularity again. If you can get to one, or if you are Joe Rogan and are lucky enough to have one in your basement, it might help you with stress, sleep disorders or even chronic pain.
On today’s podcast I discuss my experience using sensory deprivation tanks. I also want to say little bit about stress relief, vegging out and watching old movies. Finally, I have an update on the latest addition to the SleepCycle app.
Sorry for the delay releasing this ep of the All That Chazz Stress Relief Podcast. Between some issues with technology and broadband costs, I could not publish a podcast last week. To contribute to this podcast, please click the “Become a patron” button at AllThatChazz.com. There are various rewards for sponsorship from free books to advertising.
Catch Phrase Contest
This podcast is still desperately in need of a catchphrase to finish the show. Send me your suggestions at expartepress@gmail.com. The winner will get a free paperback copy of Do the Thing!
Here is the obligatory disclaimer:
Do not take medical advice from a podcast. If you need medical attention or if you are not sure whether you need medical attention, get medical attention.
Someone is trying to pull me into their psycho-drama. This is a person committed to the illusion of their victimhood. Every problem is a catastrophe and a conflict. Every slight, real or imagined, is a mortal wound. A mistake is their excuse to try to own you forever.
Worse, they are trying to make a victim of me.
I will not get sucked in. Whatever the problem, I can solve it. Whatever the challenge, I will meet it. And I will remember who I am.
Each day is full of milestones, big and small. If our milestones consist solely of breakfast and lunch and dinner, we are merely marking time and not using it. Negative people create their own hell and I will not live there. Do-nothing people risk nothing and stay nothing and they demand you be nothing, too.
That’s not for me.
I will use this day. I will rise above my enemies. I will rise so far above them, they will look up. They’ll want to be my friends.
I am very good to my friends. I am very bad to those who choose to stay my enemies.
We do what we do and dream of what we want to do, but we will never know why. What motivates us to choose this over that? These are secrets we keep from ourselves. Hidden among many skeins of branches amid forests of neurons, the answers are locked away. Why did you choose this man or that woman, that ambition and this life? Did you really choose at all, or did invisible forces choose for you?
The answers to these questions is a mystery and sometimes (often?) a misery.
On dark nights we peer at the stars and wonder about what life on which planets might be born and living and dying beyond the reach of our senses, long ago and far away.
But we are just as much a mystery to ourselves. Our minds hold secrets and hide memories the brain will never yield. The gears of the subconscious spin and work, autonomous (up to something?) pushing and pulling us, this way and that. We say things we don’t mean and we don’t know why. We drive, zombies on automatic, and awake at our destination hoping the last three traffic lights were green as we sailed through, oblivious and unharmed.
We are not awake.
We do not see all there is.
Even as I write this? My heart rate, the secrets of my blood and what makes me write at all? All unknown to me.
I am still asleep, dreaming of waking. It’s hopeless.
We are never truly awake. I don’t even know which world is better. In moments when I swim closer to the lens that lets in light, I see things. More is revealed to me. I understand more. I am more interested in the world then, but less happy.
This is a dream. When that reality becomes too harsh, I escape to my bed, into a deeper dream within the dream. Each morning fool myself into thinking I am awake.
Maybe death could be merciful like that.
We die, but in the fog at the end, we do not notice our passing. We continue, dreaming that we are living. I don’t believe that, but I love the symmetry and grace of it. We could die and it wouldn’t matter because, no matter how absurd, dreams make sense and we continue dreaming, warm and insulated from the worst the world can offer.
Don’t let me die. Let me keep on dreaming I am alive. Just like tonight.
That wouldn’t be so bad.
~ Robert Chazz Chute is waiting for blood test results and thinking about mortality.
This will get uncomfortable. You might as well laugh.
Today, in the early morning of my 48th birthday, I dreamt of Christopher Hitchens again. Instead of writing “again”, Hitch would have written “as I sometimes do.” Read and listen to him enough and you start to write and speak in his patterns, as one violin resonates with another. He spoke in complete sentences with a professorial British accent. You could hear every comma, semicolon and period.
I disagreed with him intensely over the idiocy of the Iraq invasion. (Christopher — never Chris — would have said “wisdom”, not idiocy.) For someone so against religion, his unwavering faith in that war still baffles me. His books were researched deeply and well-written. He shone brightest in debate and was always erudite and witty. I miss him. We met again today in a good, safe place.
In the dream, I’m some sort of documentarian but I’m helping him mow a massive lawn. He rides a huge mower and cuts a massive swath with wide blades. I have the same small red lawnmower from Canadian Tire I had when I was a kid. The metaphor for that didn’t strike me until after I awoke. (“I must caution you,” as Hitch would say, that’s a writing metaphor, not a penis metaphor. Hitch was a titan. I write amusing little stories for a tiny audience.)
The setting was a summer cottage, though here, it is always summer. Hitch confessed he enjoyed mowing the expanse on the big tractor so much he often mowed neighbours’ lawns, as well. That’s a joy difficult to imagine for him in real life. That was my first clue I might be dreaming.
He was friendly enough, but he was still Christopher Hitchens — before the cancer took him — so I was cautious with my words and mostly listened for fear of wearing out my welcome. (Hitch would have said, “…for fear of growing stale in his company.”)
He showed me his sanctuary where things were most quiet. I expected a large office with walls of books. Instead, we tiptoed past his sleeping wife so he could show me an incredibly white and clean bathroom off his master bedroom. In one of those Felliniesque details that makes you wonder about the gnashing teeth in the spinning gears of the subconscious, the toilet appeared to be filled with milk. I didn’t say so, but I thought he must have thrown up in that toilet a lot because of the chemotherapy. Reading my mind, he said that chemo and all pain was behind him now.
We sat outside in Adirondack chairs on the freshly cut, green grass and sipped lemonade under a warm sun. Wanting to appear game, I mentioned it was my birthday and told him how strange it was and how little I’d changed. “What’s the evolutionary advantage in not adapting? I haven’t changed much at all. In university, I studied the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history. Seeing so many civilizations rise and fall, it’s impossible for me not to be fatalistic about the fate of our own. Writing books is the closest immortality.”
“How have you changed, really?” he asked. “You must have, some.”
At 24, I was immersed and obsessed with violence and at 48, I’m a crime novelist. In sublimating my rage with humour, I’m creating art instead of bloody noses. I’m happier now. I laugh more and make others laugh. I was afraid all the time then, though I still can’t afford new glasses.
I became lucid then and I knew I was having a conversation with myself, not Christopher Hitchens. Disappointing. Though neither of us believe in heaven, the melting illusion saddened me more because Hitch after death was more placid than he ever was in life.
“Is fear of mortality what this dream is all about?” he asked.
“I’m still young enough that I fear failure more than death, though the two are inextricably linked.”
“‘Inextricably’, hm? Even though you know I’m not here, you’re still trying to impress me.” He didn’t say it unkindly.
“I’m not awake yet,” I said, though I could feel the real world pulling me away. I fought it, but once begun, that process can’t be stopped.
“I think I just answered my question,” I said. “The adaptive advantage of our minds changing so little and thinking like a young person is that I can still focus on achieving things in the future instead of worrying I’m going to drop dead any minute.”
“Try to stay young until the end. It goes easier that way.”
But that’s me talking to myself and I’m almost back in my bed with weak, gray light filling a cold horizon of snow and ice.
“You should write more,” he said, and toasted me with his glass of pink lemonade.
“I know. Thanks.”
I awoke thinking, time’s running out. I got up right away and wrote this.
This afternoon I took my son to see Here Comes the Boom, a fun little movie with Kevin James and Joe Rogan. It’s an extremely unlikely story about a 42-year-old biology teacher competing in the UFC to raise enough cash to save his high school’s music program. Henry Winkler plays the music teacher, a guy so endearing, who wouldn’t want to save him? It’s worth a few laughs and it’s sweet. It must have been okay because the moment I sat down I spilled half my son’s Slushie down my ass. I stayed and watched and got into it, though my left cheek didn’t heat up until I got home and had a hot shower.
The thing is, there’s a moment in there that made me cry (not the Slushie thing). I won’t spoil it with details. If you see it, though, it’s the moment Kevin James asks the gorgeous Salma Hayek, “How did you do this?” She replies, “I called him!”
Cut to Joe Rogan, the generous guy. I happen to know that Joe Rogan is exceedingly generous in real life: Hundred dollar tips to waiters for a bagel; helping his friends out; being kind to strangers. Like that.
And my heart said, “Chazz, you gotta be more Rogan.”
I have to do better. I’ve paid my dues and it’s time to be a success. I’m going to make that happen. I want to be the guy who does well enough to be more generous, to inspire others more , to help out more. I will, because I’m also the guy who gets things done. You know how I do that? Deciding. Then decide to do it again, and again and again and so on. The only way up that mountain is one step at a time, moment by moment.
I’m launching a bunch of books soon: non-fiction to inspire other writers and fiction to help people forget their troubles. That’s one part of what’s coming. Stay tuned. In the meantime, be more Rogan.
