Remembering The Day I Died.

Or, how I'm learning to love transparency.

Here’s the good news. It doesn’t matter what age you are, if you want to remember how to be a decent human, you can. I’m old. 63.

Although - when I was working as a Production Manager at a gem of a jazz club (just like Northern California’s greatest secret) called, get ready, The Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, I was surrounded by people in their 70s and 80s, and they called me young.

So, old is a perspective thing.

Yet, to my point, no matter how rooted you are in neural programming, unprocessed trauma and unchecked habitual routines, you can change. I am.

Because as we look around at all these broken people, so full of certainty and passion and cruelty, it seems hopeless. Personally, I’ve felt pretty hopeless over the last forever decades. Sure, I had ups and downs, but underlying it all was a sense of “something is definitely wrong.” For me it was pervasive, ubiquitous and like a best friend, that sucks.

I never talked about it. To anyone. One reason was, I couldn’t put it into words.

When I could muster a metaphor, and I was with somebody I trusted, I said things like, “When I think about the future, it’s very dark.” Not a lot for anyone else to chew on. Never understood by anyone really, and rarely even “heard”. It was lonely.

Internally, I was dicey. Externally, I was curating city-wide celebrations.

Not to sound like a total loon, but people looked up to me for some sort of positive, uplifting vision of things. I pulled together 10s of thousands of people, creating community around music (and comedy) -

So when old mopey me shows up, in person, and starts lamenting about how difficult things are, nobody wanted to hear it. Fair enough. I certainly don’t want to hear most people’s weepy tales. The thing is, I was trying my damndest just to fit in, and I didn’t have any insight, or coping mechanisms in place, to ease the constant doubt - which if you deal with this kind of thing, causes depression and anxiety.

I have only, very recently, started to learn why I have been the way I am, and what I can do moving forward to have a more decent life. It’s been really revelatory, hard to keep a handle on (old patterns are tough to excise), and poignant (for me, anyway).

By the way, if you have made it this far and you’re like, “WTF is he going on about?” I hear you! And, I applaud your mental health. I’ll be back soon with a unpublished Stan Lee interview.

Now, an embarrassing thing is that I have a background in psychology, but I never applied any of the terminology to myself. I just couldn’t see it. But now it’s obvious. Look, if you are waiting for me to drop a bomb of “what cured me”, so you can buy some of those, “shrooms, amulets and crystals,” it ain’t coming - I did it the old fashioned way, therapy and doing the work to find, not an answer, but a window to look through, that works.

(Extreme) ADHD, dyslexia, learning difficulties, inability to remember a list, nor an ability to explain something, inability to discern speech in an environments with competing sounds, and fun stuff like that, plagued me throughout my life.

Also, turns out, the litany of “disorders” listed above fall under my neat little diagnosis of APD, or audio processing disorder. We’re a small corner under the neurodivergent tent, but we have a chill vibe and cookies. Things like ADHD and dyslexia fall under the umbrella of APD. Think of APD like a bundle of Disney, Hulu and Max.

The quick rundown on APD, quick because I’m feeling a real pull not to be doing this anymore, is that my ears work fine (besides all the damage from rock and roll) - but the way my auditory cortex processes those electrical impulses, varies from user to user. APD peeps have a real tough time with anything linear. And, part of my awakening to it all of this, and finding acceptance, is that, circular reasoning is valuable. Not when trying to tell a concise SubStack, but in other ways.

Most people, who have it, are born with APD, but some lucky souls, get scrambled brains after being born. Hello. Here are my sad receipts.

I was born. Then, not much later, I died.

I was dead for a while. It was 1962 and people didn’t take photos, notes, make social media posts, or much in the way of capturing and cataloguing an infants death. It wasn’t something to go viral, more of, “get a broom, I gotta sweep something under the rug.”

My brother, Eric (RIP), found me lying on top of my golden stuffed lion, in my crib. I was a shade of blue that is reserved for Krishna and Smurfs. The infamous Ash Wednesday storm of March, 1962 was a month before my birth, but it was foreboding.

Sometime during a brutal New Jersey winter, I was administered too much, an overdose really, of penicillin. The family doctor made a house call, saving my family the hardship of driving during a treacherous blizzard. I received a shot of penicillin, and the house doc gave my mother a bottle of pills. He hand-scrawled the dosage on the bottle, but reversed the directions. Instead of one pill, 4x a day. It said, 4 pills, 1x a day.

When I was found, blue and still, my mother called for an ambulance. Back when dialing 0 on a rotary phone got you to all emergency services. My father (RIP) then called his brothers (RIP) and let them know they were going to murder the doctor. Family lore is the ambulance crashed in a snow bank on the way to the hospital. A squad car had to finish the drive.

I was brought back from the ethers and from that point on I had several years of high fevers. These were so traumatic, that my mother (RIP) did indeed write them down. 102, 103, 104 and 105. My brain was baked, sautéed and grilled like an onion. My brain was an Easy Bake Oven and my mouth would pop out little muffins.

Remember this is your brain on drugs? Well that was my brain on 105 degree fever days and nights.

Audio Processing Disorder is what I have been officially diagnosed with. My ears hear fine, and inside my brain, information is processed - but getting it out of my mouth is a real crapshoot. I’ve developed coping mechanisms throughout the decades. From kindergarten through 1st grade, I just stopped talking. While it kept from being laughed at for reversing words and thoughts, it also put a damper on my social skills.

Nothing prepares a child for a life with learning disabilities. The 1960s and ‘70s were the wild west for treatments. My silent routine got “diagnosed” as, the embarrassing title of, Lazy Lips. The “experts” would take me out of first grade and put me in a WW2 bunker, in the basement of the elementary school, and make me listen to myself on giant headphones, while reading color coded cards. When the “experts” decided that I could actually talk, it was just that my lips were lazy. That’s right, when I was eight, I was told my problem, was “Lazy Lips.” Better than getting shock treatment, but not nearly as good as compassion.

I also had terrible eyesight and couldn’t see the blackboard, or teacher, until 3rd grade.

I couldn’t see, I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t hear sometimes. I was Tommy.

Oh yeah, also, everyone kept dying around me.

So I sunk into my own world. I found a dusty old bargain bin book on magic at Barnes and Noble. It was a how-to-book on making magic tricks from the 1800s.

If I combed a cat it would create electricity. I had a comb I just needed a cat.

Which was unlikely, as my father had an obsessive dislike of cats and dogs. His job was going into basements of tenement housing in Newark, NJ and measuring the walls. Checking for leaks and unsustainable structures. He created appraisal’s for the buildings. I imagine at certain points, groups of surly dogs were involved. He barely talked when he got home.

I began to draw. All I had were hand-me-downs from the siblings that had left the house by the time I was 5. I had a fountain pen and an inkwell. Apparently, my siblings all lived in the schoolhouse on a Little House on the Prairie. I would sink into a drawing. Sinking down, and becoming the thing. Until I spilled the ink. Then I would throw some white powder on it. It could have been cocaine. For all the John Wayneness of my dad, my brother Eric was at the Fillmore East, every weekend, seeing every band, and selling bags of Owsley. So, maybe it was cocaine that was mopping up my Valdez of spills on my Frankenstein (the monster, not the doctor) drawing.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, how dying rewired my auditory cortex.

Since I’ve started this essay, I’ve had my therapy session, made sure my dog doesn’t have heatstroke, brushed my teeth, cleaned up the dried schmutz on the sides of glasses that had contained a smoothie, sent a couple of texts, thought a lot about this movie I’m filming in five weeks, and washed my face.

And, for some of the first times in my life, I feel OK about it.