The Search

 

NF is a rapper that has things to say.  His nom-de-rap is simply his initials which speaks to a lack of pretense.  Hello Nathan Feuerstein, aka Nate, aka NF.

Elias and I first heard his music while playing basketball at the outside courts of our local middle school in the summer of 2019.  It was “The Search” blasting out of court side speakers.  There were no cuss words and the lyrics were raw and real like they were coming from someone who was searching for some deeper meaning to life.  It was like the antithesis of so-called Gangsta Rap.

Then later that summer as Elias became more and more enamored with him I found out NF was going to be in Columbus at an outdoor venue (pre-pandemic by about 6 months).  It was perfect timing and I bought tickets for us which included having his latest CD mailed to me included in the cost.  Anytime Elias was in the car we would pop it in to the player… "Hey, Nate, how's life?  I don't know, it's alright.  I've been dealin' with some things like every human being and really didn't sleep much last night.”   

We went at least a few hours early to the concert and stood in a line that ended up snaking around a couple of city blocks behind us.  It gave us some time to talk as well as observe humanity in all of its sincerity and silliness around us.  We were standing near a twenty-something red-headed guy with a red beard who was obviously full of himself and going on to others about how people thought he looked like the MMA fighter Connor McGregor.  And then a young struggling artist-type came by walking up and down the line handing out little business cards with a web link to his music trying to get his own rap career kickstarted.  I even had time to snap a photo of the ghostly outline of leaves on the sidewalk that I later submitted for a publication whose theme that issue was about our abuse of the environment (rejected).  

Another interesting phenomenon I watched unfold was the arrival of a man in a yellow reflective vest who had developed a scam of sorts.  He was standing at the entrance of a public parking lot that was nearest the venue and stopping cars that pulled up looking for parking.  He had a wad of cash and was telling people it was five dollars to park there.  Most gladly paid b/c it was so close to the concert, but a few were wise to him and simply drove past him and into the lot.  He made a good amount of money the two hours we stood there and when the concert doors opened he simply walked away with his tidy sum of mendacious earnings.  Not that I begrudged him any of it.

The opening act was “Kyd the Band” which was a young guy sitting at keyboards singing earnest songs that had vaguely Christian themes trying hard to be emotionally edgy.  They weren’t bad, but the crowd was uninterested.  Black balloons (an NF trademark of sorts) suddenly began appearing from somewhere to be bounced around and provide distraction from what was happening on stage.  I took notice when a few songs in the singer picked up a bass guitar and I braced myself for either some wicked slap bass action or melodic jazz stylings a la Jaco.  I was disappointed when neither happened.  He simply used it for repetitive plucking to go along with some pre-recorded tracks he sang over top of.  Thank goodness for the balloons.

When Kyd’s equipment was mercifully taken off the stage by the roadies the crowd began to quiver with excitement.  White translucent sheeting was draped down covering the front of the stage and lights began pulsing from the inside.  The musical intro from “The Search” started things off and the crowd roared in a quick crescendo of sound to acknowledge their love for NF who was soon to appear in disembodied voice.  When the beat drop hit a few minutes in the sheeting fell to the ground revealing NF on stage and emotional pandemonium ensued as everyone began jumping in sync and rapping along with him.

Elias and I were about 30 feet from where NF stood on stage and in the thick of the crowd.  As far as I could tell I was the oldest person in that lower section of the venue nearest the stage by a long shot.  Elias glanced over at me with a beaming smile like “Can you believe this Dad?!” and I felt my own heart light up with joy.

I am thankful for what NF has meant to my son.  He shows that acknowledging your own struggles and the suffering that comes from that is OK and is the starting point for healing.  Just last night we watched a Youtube reaction video from a man who was listening to “Nate” off of that album.  It is a song about NF talking to his six year old self and at some point he tells his younger self “Even good people are great at making bad decisions.”  His raps are full of these little nuggets of insight.  NF has let it be known in his lyrics and interviews that he struggles with depression and anxiety for which he sees a therapist.  What the Youtube reactor so astutely pointed out was that it is like NF has taken the therapist’s notes from their sessions and turned them into raps.  It immediately struck me that this is an excellent way of understanding NF’s songs and what he explores in them.

For example, in the title song he raps “Last year I had a breakdown, thoughts tellin' me I'm lost gettin' too loud, had to see a therapist then I found out, somethin' funny's goin' on up in my house” as he gestures at his head with wiggling fingers.  He has a kind of dark humor that he creatively intersperses through his songs that forces you to smile even when he’s talking about something really heavy.  He lacks the rapping skill of Eminem (who he has been compared to) but what he has to say is much more impactful when it comes to learning what it means to be a human being.  And for that I am grateful.

Dr. Gray has Passed Away

 

A colleague from Washington DC informed me last night that my friend and mentor Dr. Sheila Hafter Gray passed away on Tuesday.

She was my mentor/preceptor/supervisor during the four years I spent as a psychiatry resident at Walter Reed in DC from 2002 to 2006.  We considered her our own personal Yoda due to her age, diminutive size, and piercing intellect.  She was a Harvard grad years before I was even born and an OG analyst who also embraced the biomedical side of psychiatry and had her hand in developing the field through research and teaching.

She was a faithful attendee of our Grand Rounds and regularly participated in the question and answer portion by slowly raising her hand with index finger pointed skyward.  Her voice was quiet and a bit shaky which made it difficult to hear her so a microphone would be quickly placed in her hands despite her mild protestations that she did not need it.  WE needed it.  We wanted to hear what she was going to say because it was sometimes funny, oftentimes profound, and always on point, drawn from her vast experience and study.

Dr. Gray was who I sought out to be my supervisor when doing longterm therapy with patients and when I needed a faculty sponsor for my research project that I would ostensibly use for my senior Grand Rounds presentation.  All of the information and data needed for that presentation did not come together in time for that purpose but she helped guide it to publication when it was eventually finished.  In the meantime she provided feedback for a back up presentation I entitled “Combat Stress Control: Past, Present, and Future” that I pulled together as a precursor to my own deployment to a Combat Stress Control unit in Iraq that faced me upon graduation in just a few short months.

And it was during that deployment to Iraq post-graduation where her mentorship as well as friendship was most appreciated.  I found myself in a situation where my commander was forcing me to be involved in a situation that I found morally suspect.  I felt powerless and complicit with seemingly no support which brought out strange feelings of rage and despair in me.  When it was all said and done I thought of Dr. Gray and I sent her an email laying out the situation.  She immediately responded with her wisdom and insight to help me navigate those feelings in order to find some healthy way forward.

A few years later she was putting together a panel for the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference being held in Washington, DC that year and invited me to join it as a co-presenter.  It included her and the Army’s top research psychiatrist proposing the possibility of adding a military-specific diagnosis to the DSM.  I was tasked to provide the perspective of the boots-on-the-ground soldier-psychiatrist as it were.  We had lunch as a group after the presentation which led to a kind of tradition of finding each other at subsequent annual conferences to have lunch and catch up.

Several years later I finally found a way to process that experience in Iraq by writing a poem about it, "Hiding from the War".  I’d tried to just write it out as a story a time or two over the years, but what I wanted to convey was getting lost and it was put aside.  When the poem was finished Dr. Gray was the first person I shared it with and I subsequently submitted it to be published in the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library literary journal “So It Goes”.

After that I would hear about Dr. Gray from time to time through Doximity notifications that she had been cited in someone’s research paper.  I did not go to the APA conference in early 2020 due to the pandemic but I thought there would be other opportunities to see her there and meet up for lunch.  She seemed quite elderly even back in 2002 and over the years I fell under the delusion that she was going to live forever.  May her memory be eternal.

***

Red Light Green Light

 

It’s on some of the on-ramps here in Columbus, Ohio.  They are stop and go lights on the top of a pole that alternate red and green to control the flow of traffic onto the highway.

My mind is prone to metaphors and switches to the flow of humans into this world coming in at a steady but staggered pace: red light, green light, red light, green light.

I’d been on the highway for quite some time before my son got his green light and then several years later my daughter got hers.  They are lights in their own right, impossibly shiny.     

And now I’m thinking more about off-ramps, especially with the radio informing me this morning we are having over a thousand deaths a day from this pandemic.

I personally know several who have been forced off the highway at this particular off-ramp and I am sure I will learn of several more before it is all said and done.  

Drive safely and care for your neighbor.

***

No Words

 

Sometimes there are just no words.

You hear the keys clicking.

Letters appear on the screen.

But they are empty promises to understanding.  

They don’t mean what you think they mean.  

The things most necessary to say are swallowed.

Yet the words keep coming to wrestle 

meaning from what seems meaningless.  

***

Get Back

I have to say I’ve been a bit taken aback by the new Beatles documentary “Get Back”. It’s such an intimate look that conveys the feeling of being in the room with the boys joking around and making music together. It covers a few week’s period that they are tasked to come up with enough music to stage a concert and make a live album.

The first few days are painful as the task seems so daunting and their anxieties bubble up in various ways to include George Harrison actually leaving town for a few days with no guarantees he’ll be back. They get a bit short with each other under the pressure, yet music starts to trickle out.

There’s Paul strumming out a rhythm on his bass that sounds like he’s playing a guitar and with some slight of hand the ear suddenly picks up in his mumbles the beginnings of the song “Get Back”. It’s like when you’re a kid at a carnival and the guy walks up to you and pulls a gold coin from behind your ear and you are like “where did that come from?!” At first George and Ringo seem uninterested in Paul’s noodling but as they begin to pick up on what he’s doing with it and the refrain pops into existence they are bobbing their heads and singing along, “get back, get back…”

And Yoko, God bless her misunderstood soul, is quiet and unobtrusive throughout until the moment she is allowed to have some fun with the boys in a manic impromptu jam, smiles all around. She exchanges pleasantries with Linda McCartney and stays out of the way. Where is her meddling? Where is her command of John? It’s all missing in what has become standard Beatles lore; that she broke them up; that she was insufferable.

And speaking of John, he is so much more passive than I thought he’d be. Sure he loosens up as the sessions move on to more productive days and he is a constant jokester, but he is not as overbearing and potentially caustic as I supposed he would be, especially when it comes to forging the new songs with Paul. He is almost demure.   I subsequently learned he was using opiates at the time which could explain this phenomenon in part.

And Anya is watching much of it with me. She once mistook John for me in the video for "Watching the Wheels" when she was about 3 years old. Now that she is 10 she points out that I really did look like John when I was in my 20’s, but adds that his being goofy and jigging around in the documentary shows that I ACT like him as well. It was a surreal moment for us both because it was undeniable. I just wish I had his musical genius as well.

I have not seen the 3rd installment, but another magical moment comes in the 2nd part when their old friend Billy Preston shows up and they rope him into sticking around to play the electric piano so John can be free to go back to guitar and sing. They start grooving with “Don’t Let Me Down” and when Billy slides in with some soulful piano licks Paul’s face pops up from his bass to give Billy a look of surprise and wonder. He realizes in that moment that Billy’s playing just made the song ten times better! Later in conversation with Paul, John is so impressed he wants to make Billy the fifth Beatle and not just a paid session musician.

Another surprising moment is when John is singing a song fragment he has come up with that is listed as “Road to Marrakesh/Child of Nature” in the subtitles, but it is the exact tune of his later song “Jealous Guy” that shows up on a solo album after he has left the Beatles. I loved watching them hash and rehash music in this way as a creative outpouring that later finds a final form that we recognize.

The whole process played out in this documentary reminds me of the process I go through when writing stories or poems where at the git-go the ideas are poorly formed and the page is too white and too empty of words. There is the temptation to give up or become irritable with the process, but if you just continue to plow through and accumulate some things a flow starts to develop and drudgery turns into delight as inspiration strikes in surprising ways. It is a testament to the creativity of the human spirit.



***

Flying Saucer over 315

An honest-to-goodness flying saucer appeared in the sky on my morning commute today, I kid you not.  It was a glorious glowing disk of mysterious intent that both fascinated and terrified at the same time.  A circle of lights were rotating underneath it making a pulsing noise that could be felt if not heard.  It reminded me of a baby’s heart beat when using a doppler, but at about 20 beats per minute instead of 120.

And it chose an amazing morning to show up!  The rising sun was yet to be seen but the clouds were heralding its arrival in grand fashion with yellows, oranges, and pinks at the horizon transitioning into blues and deep purples further up in the sky.  I felt like it knew it looked fabulous in this context and just hovered in a kind of solipsistic splendor.  Look at me!  I do what I please!  Gawk in awe, simple earthlings!

But then it must have gotten bored with so much suspended gravitas and no plans to use the death ray or tractor beam to suck up some unlucky motorist.  I say this because the lights began spinning faster and it suddenly shot vertical out of sight.  By this time I’d slowed to a stop because of the car pile up on the highway that the spectacle had triggered.  Maybe they felt guilty and gave up on their fun.

***