On the Madness of Men
As many of my readers know, I spent some time in Central Ohio campaigning for a guy who was then a Senator. It was back in ’08 and you might have heard, we won that little dust up.
With me, I brought all of Brusts’ Taltos books*, and an iPod full of movies, music, and the first 3 episodes of Mad Men.
It turns out that talking to every Democrat in Franklin County Ohio is hard work. I didn’t get a chance to watch Mad Men until the plan ride home. On a tiny screen. I actually found the experience deeply satisfying, but…
For the next few days, I would experience some weird and intense flashbacks to the more pivotal moments of the campaign. My head was, in essence, fucked up. It cleared after a bit, but this show I spent a couple hours watching sort of got lost in the shuffle.
Anyway, I hear it’s pretty good, and I’ve got all of Season 1 on DVD. Guess who’s gonna watch that this week?
*This was in the pre-kindle days.
No related posts.
YAY, I SAID!!!!!
You’ll get addicted. And then you might be me, and watch all of a season over a two day span, and then not remember how to function in the real world.
It’s smart, smart, smart show. And if your head was still a bit of a mess, I’m not surprised you would have paused on it, because it is also disturbing, and violent, and fucked-up. But I can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it . . .
I didn’t actually realize how much of a mess I was until a few days on. Hearing guys talk about PTSD, I sort of recognize some of the symptoms…
Yeah, folks are better at talking about long-term trauma, like PTSD, but no one really talks about short-term trauma, and how it can take a week to get your head back on straight.
In doing activist work, there’s a lot of checking in with others, because working with really horrendous things can start to get to you . . . when I was working in South Africa last summer and we were taking depositions in a refugee camp, and many of our clients had been raped before they escaped the DRC. And we would go in there and take statement after statement and man did we all get pretty fucked in the head after a while. We didn’t have PTSD, but it was certainly some kind of trauma.
I don’t know that we all handled it well. We started laughing at inappropriate, not funny, pretty terrible things, and were cranky a lot, and drank a lot. It was hard.
The work itself wasn’t too terribly stressful. I mean, I _was_ in the middle of the American 3rd world. But they were generally willing to pause their warfare when they knew we were in their neighborhood– I only actually heard gunfire once. The only time I had to run from an angry dog, it was accidentally set on me by a supporter.
Mostly, though, it was the 18hr days for months on end. Having to be at my best with (literally) the whole world watching waiting to criticize every decision. Without false modesty, I can say that I (and my team!) rose to the occasion magnificently.
But yes, after that my brain sort of melted down for a while. One of my volunteers was a trauma expert (from the Bay Area. Represent!), and noticed the signs in me a couple days before the election. Told me to meditate more. I probably should have listened to him at the time…