by Jeff Bell
But all that’s in the past. I am now living in the present. This moment is rife with possibility and potential. Unfortunately, it’s also a good half hour after I was supposed to leave the house. I’ll have to pick up my unusually lucid thinking tonight.
I am on a roll, and I know it. Plato has nothing on me.
Some ten hours later, I sprawl out in a backyard hammock beneath a bazillion stars overhead. It’s a sticky August night and a chorus of crickets is about the only sound I can hear. I am more excited and invigorated than I can remember being in years, and I’m not too sure I understand why.
I do the breathing thing again, but it gets me nowhere this time. No blue spots or pulsating waves, so I just open my eyes and stare upward until I lose myself in a flickering star.
Soon I am again contemplating the power of free will, fumbling with the Believer dog tag around my neck, thinking how true believing must involve the boldest of all choices, since when it comes right down to it, you’re choosing to trust what you cannot see. I flash back to the handful of times in my life when I managed to do this—somehow put my faith in something bigger than myself—and I remember how powerful the results always were. I think about my old AA friends and all their tales about surrendering their addictions to some Higher Power and coming to trust their own “greater good” guidance, and how they’ve used those inspiring stories to help so many others.
And then without any warning or logic, I catch myself making what feels like a bargain: Okay, it’s your turn, I mouth upwards to the stars, unsure of just where to direct my pronouncement. Show me how to turn around this crazy life, and I’ll share my story with anyone who will listen.
A strange sense of certainty washes over me next, and I know in this instant that nothing in my world will ever be the same. With a mixture of fear and excitement, I also come to realize that Wayne Manning wasn’t kidding with the last words he’d left me with in his office back in May.
For as preposterous as it strikes me at this moment, I now know I am indeed “writing that book.”
nineteen
fast-forward 2 months
Day 1 (12:00 midnight). I stand now on the precipice of the most important undertaking of my life. This is it—my chance to put into motion the greatest premise of my belief: that I hold in my power the tools to transform. My outcome is certain or my premise eternally flawed.
I believe.
Precipice? Most important undertaking? Tools to transform? The words all sound so desperate, so dramatic, and mostly so foreign as I read them back to myself mere seconds after having committed them to paper. Yet here they are in my own handwriting, staring back at me from an index card—the first of hundreds I’ve stacked in an oversized shoe box just behind my desk. At this moment, the other cards in the box are all blank. Soon though, I tell myself, they will fill up with great wisdom and together take my life to new dimensions—three inches by five inches to be exact. Because for the next twelve months, three-by-five cards will indeed be at the very center of my world.
It’s all part of my grand plan to transform my troubled life—that most important undertaking I’ve been plotting for nearly two months now, ever since my foolhardy “bargain with the stars” back in late August and my subsequent commitments to do all of the following: (1) reestablish contact with Jackie and arrange her coaching twice a month on the phone; (2) keep my little pills buried deep in a drawer until such time that I might actually need them for their intended purposes; (3) put myself back under the stars nightly for exactly one year, beginning tonight, on the eve of my thirty-fourth birthday; and (4) take notes, just in case I need to hold up my end of the bargain.
I have no idea whether I’ll end up with a story to share, and therefore an obligation to share it. As a professional journalist, though, I do know a few things about note-taking, including the importance of always keeping with me a stash of index cards. On them I will record everything: all my obsessive thoughts, all my compulsive checking rituals, and all my triumphs and setbacks in dealing with both. I will fill out daily “journal cards” with all the observations I can make, and “episodes cards,” detailing all the various OCD episodes with which I have to contend. I will take notes from the many books I’ve committed to read. And most of all, I will attempt to log and make sense of those occasional whispers coming not from my voice of doubt, but rather from some inner-believer I know is inside me—those very whispers that have led me to bank my entire future on a stack of empty three-by-five cards.
All this strikes me as both brilliant and ludicrous as I sit at my den desk at a little past midnight, no more than five minutes into my “project,” as I have come to call it. I read back my scribbles one more time and shake my head as I reach the words This is it. Did I mean to do that, spell out the song title? I can’t remember consciously doing so, but I guess I must have; the three words have been camped out in my head for sixteen years now—ever since that still-all-too-weird graduation speech experience and the last time I found myself sitting at a desk, staring at words so seemingly foreign.
This is it, all right, I whisper as I tuck the index card away in its new cardboard box home.
Morning arrives with a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday to You.” Samantha and the girls are singing to me from the bedroom doorway, and Nicole and Brianna are bouncing on their toes, the way kids do when they can contain their excitement no longer. The sight of my precious daughters and their mother all decked out in smiles and eager to greet me couldn’t offer a more striking contrast to the final scene of my Visiting Day at the Nuthouse horror film, and I know that none of the gifts that they’re holding could offer me more than this particular one.
The girls deliver their presents and hugs, then scurry off to get ready for school. Sam makes her way over to the bed and plants a kiss on my cheek.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw you in such good spirits,” she says.
“It’s a big day,” I tell her, wondering if she understands what I mean.
I’ve told Samantha about my journaling plans. But I’ve stopped far short of detailing the particulars of my full year-long project, and I haven’t even hinted at the all-or-nothing stock I’m putting in it. It’s a delicate subject with us, my recovery plans. I’ve botched things so badly so many times. And though she’d never say so, I think Sam is disappointed with me for getting off my meds just as quickly as I’d gone back on them in August. Still, I know she’s thrilled that I’m on a schedule with Jackie again.
The rest of the details can wait.
The girls leave the house an hour later, and I start putting together a survival kit of sorts that I plan to haul with me everywhere. I’ve dug out an old black leather notebook and I stuff it full of blank index cards, along with a pen. I also toss in a copy of an old “mission statement” I wrote some time back as part of a goal-setting exercise in a self-help book:
To serve God in his chosen ways, while
demonstrating my belief:
In myself, through integrity, strength,
initiative, and release;
In others, through respect, compassion,
generosity, and trust;
And in life, through passion, perspective,
involvement, and faith.
All this and only this, right here and
right now.
The whole thing strikes me as rather over the top. In fact, for all my recent reading and practice during this stretch, spirituality continues to fit me like a coat at least three sizes too big. Still, the pragmatist in me understands how important a focal point is going to be in the months ahead, as I struggle to make this project the target of my ongoing refocusing efforts. So I promise myself I’ll read over these words at least three times a day, every day, until next October 21.
And now I have everything I need. Index cards. My Believer dog tag. Self-help books to read on my breaks at work. Weekly goals from Jackie, just like old times. And a written reminder to do nothing more with my time t
han to demonstrate my belief—in myself, in others, and in life.
Yeah, good luck with all that, I can almost hear Doubt taunting.
At 9:30 I am out the door on my way to a production appointment, and a few minutes after that, I am attempting to get my little Mazda Protégé up to speed on the Forty-third Avenue on-ramp to northbound I-5. I am looking for a hole in the traffic now, battling my usual fears of cutting off cars and causing massive chain-reaction accidents, when I get this strange and sudden impulse to turn on my radio.
Huh?
The radio.
Oh, I get it, I say to myself. No way. I’m not playing that game. Compulsive urges are the calling cards of OCD. I’ve spent years fighting them, in all their disguises. That’s what this is. A command from Doubt, no different from the usual ones to wash my hands or loop around the block or check my parking brake. Besides, there’s a whole subset of OCD known as “magical thinking,” and OCs who battle with it are always looking to draw meaning—and horrific conclusions—from the various mundane “signs” all around them. (Like whatever song might happen to be playing on the radio.)
But something is different, profoundly different, about this particular urge. It doesn’t seem to suggest there will be any dire consequences if I fail to act on it. Perhaps just a missed opportunity. If for no other reason, I know this isn’t Doubt egging me on. But then again, how many times in the past has my devious nemesis managed to trick me?
A few seconds pass, and then a few more. Still none of that familiar do-or-die pressure. Intense curiosity, in fact, is all that I’m feeling. I want there to be something good waiting for me. Finally I can take it no longer. I lunge for the On button and watch my jaw drop in the rearview mirror as my mind grasps what I am hearing. Blasting from my car speakers are the unmistakable opening chords of Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It.” Now the lyrics kick in, and for the first time in sixteen years, I truly get how powerful, and how ominous, their message is.
For once in your life, here’s your miracle
Stand up and fight
This is it
Make no mistake where you are
This is it
You’re going no further
This is it
Until it’s over and done
…. This is it
One way or another
And then it hits me like a Mack truck barreling up from behind: what are the chances? I’ve always considered myself a student of commercial radio, and if there’s one thing I’m certain of at this moment, it’s that “This Is It” is not a song getting airplay in the late 1990s. It just isn’t. I can’t even remember the last time I heard it on our local airwaves. And of all the possible times and places to hear it now …
A shiver snaps to attention every hair on my body. This is not what I’d envisioned when I promised to “open myself to divine guidance,” as Reverend Manning likes to put it. This has got to be some kind of OCD trap. Somehow, Doubt is messing with me.
An hour and a half later I am on the freeway again, now on my way to KFBK, when another urge starts tugging at me. This one, however, is both familiar and predictable in its timing. It begins the very second I swerve to avoid hitting a scrap of tire tread. Get off at the next exit and loop back for a look. Check the shoulders for cars you may have hit in the process of swerving. Do it now, or people could die while waiting!
This is Doubt. This time I’m sure. I will not give in.
I make it to the station parking lot without indulging my compulsion. But I pay the price big time as I walk from my car to the studio thinking about how irresponsible I am to have left the scene of yet another potential crash. I should go back—maybe on my lunch break. Perhaps I should call the highway patrol to report the small scrap of rubber. But it wasn’t a very big scrap. Or was it? I play back a tape of the swerve as I continue crossing the parking lot. The usual fuzzy images are all I can make out. Damn it all. Can’t I enjoy just one friggin’ day?
And then I look down and see a nail on the ground.
Pick it up!
No.
Pick it up, or someone’s going to get hurt.
No one’s going to get hurt.
Pick it up, or some car is going to run over that nail and puncture its tire.
No. No! NO! I will not pick up the nail.
No?! What if that punctured tire causes a spinout that kills lots of people?
All right, goddamn it. I’ll pick up the nail.
I pick up the nail.
Oh, great! Now where you going to get rid of that lethal thing?
At ten that evening I am in our backyard, staring up at the stars, keeping the second of my 365 scheduled appointments with them. I have logged the nail and the tire-swerve on my “episodes” card for today and have done my best to recap the whole “This Is It” radio experience on today’s journal cards. Now I’m just waiting for the Big Dipper or any other sparkling constellation up there to impart some great wisdom to me—to make sense of Day One of my project, or at a minimum to instruct me to turn on my television, or open the freezer, or look in my dresser sock drawer for more inspiration like I found on the radio.
Nothing.
It was just a damn coincidence, that song, you big loser. Get over it, says the voice in my head.
twenty
fast-forward 1 day
Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
That’s me in my next tape-segment starring role. Listen, and you can almost hear that haunting five-note sequence: G … A … F … F … C …
The segment starts off so innocently, really. There I am, sitting in my parked car after the Noon News, reciting my mission statement for the umpteenth time on Project Day Two, mulling over the uncanny symmetry of the twelve words I’d chosen several years back to define my goals in believing:
… in myself, through integrity, strength, initiative, and release.
… in others, through respect, compassion, generosity, and trust.
… in life, through passion, perspective, involvement, and faith.
And then it dawns on me, much as solutions to complex math problems suddenly make themselves clear, or once-elusive answers to riddles become obvious in an instant: rearrange the words and stack them in a pyramid.
So that’s what I do. Grab a pair of index cards from my notebook, and urgently sketch out top and side views: one side Self; a second side Others; and the third side Life. Then, starting from the base and working toward its apex, I give my three-sided pyramid four horizontal tiers (which I would later label Reverence, Resolve, Investment, and Surrender.)
Finally, I drop my twelve words into place.
There are few things in life more satisfying to an obsessive-compulsive than a solid sense of order. Perhaps this is why I find myself speechless as I gaze at the crude drawing I’ve just made. The symmetry. The associative groupings. The spatial relationships. A perfect model of the inner structure of belief. I can’t wait to finish up my shift at the station and get home to build a mockup. For three long hours on the air, I talk about homicides and interest rates and the Kings’ next big game, all the while thinking about one and only one thing: pyramids.
Once home, I begin mulling over construction options, and that’s when the whole Richard Dreyfuss thing kicks in. Remember that dinner-table scene in which his character becomes obsessed with some illusory mountain shape? He needs to give it form, so he does what any quick-thinking diner would do: he starts sculpting his mashed potatoes.
Samantha’s not serving potatoes or anything else malleable this particular night, so I power-eat my dinner and quickly excuse myself to the den, where I start cutting up cardboard. For the next several hours, I sit at my desk folding cardboard into pyramids of all sizes, giving three dimensions to the geometric shape taking up all the space in my head. By the time I climb into bed, I have put the finishing touches on a three-inch model with all twelve of my believing words stenciled neatly in their places.
Okay, you alrea
dy know I’m nuts. I think I’ve made that abundantly clear. But I can only imagine what you’re thinking right about now. I mean, here’s this guy who’s talking to the stars at night, gleaning divine messages from his car radio, and now stamping out cardboard pyramids. Pretty damn weird, even for an admitted obsessive-compulsive who drives his car in circles, scrubs his hands till they hurt, and checks and rechecks everything around him. But here’s the craziest part of it all: that three-inch cardboard pyramid, the one I crafted that night and that sits on my desk to this day, still strikes me as the sanest, most rational, truest thing I have ever seen.
I dunno. Maybe OCD is just the beginning of my psychosis.
Trust. Strength. Faith …
Four days after building my cardboard mockup, I am at our church, mentally scrambling to affix my believing words to their proper places on the virtual pyramid I have etched in my mind. The woman extending her hand to me while I’m attempting to do this is making the process exceptionally tricky.
“You must be Jeff Bell,” she says, smiling.
She looks pretty normal, this woman. Composed. Dignified, in fact, with elegant features, perfectly coiffed silver hair and a big, light-up-the-room smile that reminds me at once of actress Andie MacDowell’s.
Maybe this isn’t the woman I’d agreed to meet today. I’m expecting a freak.
“My husband and I listen to you all the time,” she continues, waiting for me to say something. Anything.
