THE SIX STAGES OF MID-LIFE CRISIS: 4-6) DEPRESSION, WITHDRAWAL & ACCEPTANCE
Reflection, Rumination & Rhetoric From the Road
This is based on a trip I took to Austin, Texas coming up seven years ago.
I knew it would be a tedious trek but I did not count on just how depressing and surreal, yet what better place to free-fall into the depths of despair than Dealey Plaza in Dallas where a U.S. President was violently slain more than half-a-century-ago. A place where the course of U.S. history was diabolically diverted into decline.
The three-hour drive feels like six as the unmerciful heat fights to penetrate our air-conditioned bubble through every crack or just by broiling the windshield along a dreary flat road.
The Dallas skyline finally appears and a jumble of highways suck us into its “historic” downtown where moments later we find ourselves smack outside the Texas State Depository from which Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shot John F. Kennedy as he rode in an open limousine down Elm Street.
Van Stein and I ascend to the sixth floor museum though the only real “attraction” (their word, not mine) is the corner window from which Oswald may have concealed himself, taken aim and shot.
We descend and alight from the building to inspect the infamous grassy knoll. So-called “conspiracy theorists” (a term created by the CIA in 1967 to thwart those who criticized the Warren Commission) have long speculated this mound to be the true location from which a shooter stood.
It is certainly closer to an “X” permanently taped onto Elm Street marking the spot where Kennedy took a fatal head shot, a trajectory that makes far more sense than Oswald’s distant perch from on high and more consistent with a frontal bullet impact so graphically captured by Abraham Zapruder’s infamous eight-millimeter film.
Walking around the Museum Cafe and Gift Shop full of cheap souvenirs from China this thought reverberates around my aching skull: Put him on a fifty-cent piece (as they did the last year of silver coinage in 1964 before LBJ undermined U.S. currency) and they’ll get over it.
Well, I’m not over it. I’m depressed. Which is exactly what I am supposed to be on this day, the fourth stage of midlife crisis. Dallas does not disappoint.
Dusty and disheveled upon returning to Austin, Van Stein and I commiserate at the Driskill bar where a dry martini and our chatter leads me to a new idea for a novel that would necessitate a visit to Sausalito and so weary we are by now of Texas and its incessant heat and everything LBJ that the artist suggests we jump on a plane and go straight there and get it done and I’m ready to roll.
And then everything changes—our new plan, our depressive disposition—when a pretty young woman from Venezuela suddenly swings from her perch at the bar and engages us in conversation having discerned that our pathetic selves need to be saved from our secure box in the Driskill, saved from Dirty Sixth and perhaps saved in general, and so this siren takes us under her wing and guides us from our protective shell into the night.
The blues are alive and well at Eddie Vs where we’re joined by some guy who’d been talking to our siren earlier—and everything’s just dandy until he gets snarky about something she says, just a throwaway comment about how in life you have this kind of person and that kind of person, which he moronically misinterprets as some kind of slight to himself. I’m not in the mood for conflict (in this case between he and himself) so I steal away under the guise of a phone call and walk the streets aimlessly.
Eventually I run into a panhandler on the Driskill’s steps and I rump my rear next to him to ask questions about the path that led him here.
Greg from Indiana explains how as a young adult he’d got arrested and prosecuted for possessing marijuana and cocaine and sentenced to ten years in prison, served four and thereafter could not climb out the hole that the system dug for him. The stigma of being a felon and an ex-con had reduced this poor fellow to a life on the street working day-jobs earning about $160 a week and relying on handouts for food and coffee. Which suggests that our ludicrous anti-libertarian laws that protect the wealthy and screw the non-wealthy are at least partly to blame for today’s rampant homelessness.
Our conversation is interrupted by three chunky uniformed officers of the law who approach us with faces and body language full of menace and order us to move on. This is a first for me so I’m merely amused by the oinks and their unnecessarily aggressive stance yet this is normal for Greg and what he expects as part of his daily rituals.
“Tell them you’re staying in the LBJ suite!” chirps Van Stein who has suddenly reappeared on the scene with our siren beside him.
Our trio journeys on to a basement jazz club called The Elephant Room and then the Rainey neighborhood, rows of craftsmen houses transformed into bars and cafes and restaurants, a scene full of joy, vibrancy and color.
The siren has an effect on my psyche because that night I dream of her and being in a place called Venema, which in my dream is her hometown and she disappears and I’m looking all around Venema knowing I’ll never see her again.
Sirens are like that and I guess this was my midlife crisis fling, if only in a dream.
(Once home I Google Venema. There’s no such place anywhere in the world and all I can find is a trumpeter named Melissa Venema and I purchase her CD, ironically titled, From the Heart.)
I consider staying in my room all day with curtains drawn to fully experience WITHDRAWAL, the penultimate stage of midlife crisis; such a scenario is certainly tempting after four hellishly hot days.
But I relent and lunch is taken at the iconic Hoover Cooking where we order Austin’s signature dish of chicken-fried steak, which isn’t chicken at all but a cheap cut of beef, battered and fried, served with thick milk gravy, candied yams and fried okra—a heart attack special not worth the risk.
So now I’m wishing I’d stayed in my room and drawn the curtains and at this point I’m planning to venture no further than the Driskill bar even though Van Stein has plans to paint the bats when they swarm from the underside of South Congress Bridge 15 minutes before sunset but I change my mind and make my way to the Colorado River and at 8:05 on the dot a million-and-a-half bats awaken from slumber and fly off in waves.
I’ve only ever associated bats with Halloween and vampires so this is a cool learning experience and a message from the universe to pay attention to bats, an Austin phenomenon I’d not known about till deep into this trip.
That night I dream I have the ability to take giant steps and defy gravity above ground and next morning google the dream symbolism of levitation: “Lifting up your emotions and thoughts beyond normal to benefit the spiritual state, enlightenment.”
The six and final stage of mid-life crisis, ACCEPTANCE, comes with returning home.
I pop bats into a search engine and learn that these winged mammals symbolize death and rebirth because after “going inside” to roost they emerge at dusk “from the womb of Mother Earth.”
If the bat has been "flying" into your life as an animal totem, this symbolizes great intuition and utilizing your sensitivities to explore the world around you. The Native Americans sought the bat for its connection to the "other world.” If this animal totem has appeared to you in your dreams or in waking life perhaps it is a sign that it is time for you to go within. It might be time to take some time off and go on a vacation and bring a journal with you as a way of becoming quiet and allowing your true self to speak... and explore your inner demons.
A few days after returning home I open a cupboard in the garage and out flies not a bat but a one-page essay penned years ago at elementary school by my younger daughter titled BATS and begins The IMPORTANT thing about bats is that they are good luck.
I call Enchantment Resort in Sedona to book an extra night having grown into the bat message about taking “some time off” and my travel agent tells me the rate goes up 20 percent at the weekend but after checking with the hotel informs me they’re running a promotion on a three-night stay, which means the extra night I’m looking for will be FREE.
I can hardly believe my bat luck.