Down in the Hole

Like many, if not most, of the people who work in non-profits, I wear many hats, not the least of which is managing our social media outreach through this blog, Facebook, Twitter and now Pinterest.

All of the so-called social media experts tell you that content is king and if you are not constantly updating your pages, your site is dead and users--"eyeballs"--are lost. 

We are dependent on the kindness of strangers to support our work.  And in an increasingly competitive environment where dollars are few and getting fewer, being seen to be current, up-to-date on trends and information in your field is key to getting those strangers to affiliate with an organization and support it financially.  So, in between promoting news and events originating with our Agency, I supplement the content for these outlets with posts I find elsewhere on the Internet. 

To make this easier, I have set up Google Alerts to bring me content relating to our programs and so each day I get emails about poverty, mental health, mental illness and suicide.

Every day.

And, by far, the leader in content generation terms is suicide.  Especially teen suicide.  8-9-10 posts every day.

To be honest, some of these posts are multiple sources reporting on the same event, but it does create the impression that teens are an endangered species in this country.

And it also creates the impression that our most experienced teens, the adults, have somehow managed to completely blot out that experience and therefore have no connection nor understanding of what teens go through.

The parental "survivors" of completed suicides--those who have lost a child--are always portrayed in shock, always seen as searching for the big why that took their child.

At the meta level, the narratives all begin to read the same; as though they conform to a predictable movie-of-the-week scenario where only the names have been changed.

In addition to the stories about completed suicides and searching parents, I also read about prevention efforts: efforts intended to educate students, parents, teachers, community leaders, clergy about the signs and symptoms of suicide.  The notion here is that if we know what behavior patterns to look for we can intervene and connect those at risk with resources and treatment.

I can only imagine that this makes the survivor parents feel that much worse.  The implicit suggestion is that it was some sort of deficit of vigilance that claimed their child.

Another common prevention strategy is one of affirmation.  Reminding at-risk teens that they are valued and loved will keep them from seeking a permanent end to a temporary problem.  This makes sense in that it enables those participating in these outreach efforts feel as though they are being proactive:  kind of like making cinnamon toast and hot tea for a loved one with a viral infection.

It is not my intent to mock or ridicule or in any way diminish the experience of those who have lost a loved one, or who are involved in suicide prevention efforts.  The losses are devastating and the interventions are few and palliative at best.

Based on my reading, which I freely admit is by no means comprehensive, it seems that ribbons and wrist bands, walk-a-thons and poster campaigns remind us that there is a problem.  Lectures and resource lists are precautionary by definition:  intended to inoculate.  Viral videos, like luxury car commercials, are promises of a possible future:  like personal jet packs and flying cars.

Missing from the conversation, it seems to me is an acknowledgement of the present, the painful now, the nowhere-to-run tense that dominates the landscape and occupies every waking minute. 

To be a teenager is to experience the collision between the eternal optimism of childhood and pessimism of the adult world; to move from a box of 128 Crayolas, through the binary world of black and white, to the endless shades gray--way more than 50, thank you very much--of the adult world.

And, as if navigating that transition were not difficult enough, we must also factor in the shifting allegiances that define the social networks of our young people.  Not only is impulse control hormonally impaired, but you have to factor in a social landscape that shifts faster than do alliances in "The Godfather."

What's the difference between a teen that is depressed and contemplates suicide and one that is depressed and completes a suicide is a question best left to researchers.  I know that when I was in the thick of my journey through those years, I had my share of teen-angst, paint-it-black, "deep" thoughts. 

I remember the fear and the anxiety and the desperation. 

I remember the rage, the desire to escape, to hide, to make it stop.

I remember the lack of control, the helplessness....  The hopelessness.

A lasting reminder of this period is a record collection that is full of soundtracks from escapist movies and the work of singer-songwriters specializing in expressions of sadness and depression.

Late one night, I remember watching a snowy broadcast of the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder.  He was interviewing James Taylor and Carly Simon--I think it was Tom Snyder.  (Might have been Dick Cavett)  Anyway, they were talking and would occasionally sing songs separately, or together. 

I had never been a big James Taylor fan.  (I was definitely a member of Team Carly.)  But on that broadcast, he sang "The Secret of Life" and I remember being struck by the disconnect between what he was saying, "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time," and my experience which was definitely not enjoyable.

At that point in my Teen Trek, time was my enemy:  it could not pass fast enough and take me from my tormentors and to my personal jet pack world of the future.  People actually enjoyed time, appreciated it?  This was inaccessible to me.

But I was, as we say "time-curious" and decided to experiment.

I don't deny it, I dabbled in James Taylor records and tried to make sense of his perspective.  Drawn in by his optimistic "Secret of Life" I was blinded to the darker themes of "Fire and Rain" and had to have their mental health images pointed out to me.

I won't bore you with the rest of my journey, but a definite turning point of my teen years, was discovering Steve Martin.  His excellent book, "Born Standing Up" describes the thoughtful philosophical basis for his comedy, but I was absolutely taken by the absurdist quality of it.  His stand-up comic persona seemed to be defined by this "enjoying the passage of time" idea.  The pure joy that he projected when suddenly overcome by "happy feet" was admittedly a foreign language to me, but I knew it was a country that I wanted to visit.



Like most things in this life, there is no one answer to any question and, where emotions are involved, no one-size-fits-all strategies.  To impact teens who are at risk, who are drowning in conflict and hormones and weighed down by the secrets that are the common currency of those years we, the survivors, need to revisit our own experience and communicate with compassion and with honesty.

I am reminded of this wonderful scene from "The West Wing": 



You know how everyone says "Don't be that guy"?  We have all been that guy and now, when it comes to reaching out to teens who are at risk, we can all have a chance to be that friend who knows the way out.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director

The Secrets of Comedy

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved to tell jokes. Puns, riddles, shaggy dog stories, one-liners: didn’t matter to me so long as I could get a reaction from an audience.

I can remember waiting eagerly for each new issue of Jack & Jill magazine so that I could devour the latest jokes and riddles. It’s almost two generations later and I can still remember Q: Why is your heart like a policeman? A: Because it follows a regular beat.

I remember watching Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. At the end of the show, the regulars and, often some surprise guests, would appear from behind brightly painted doors and deliver jokes and riddles that were structured like those in Jack & Jill. I know now that I couldn’t have understood most of what they were talking about, but I do recall getting caught up in the laughter. Here were people like Goldie Hawn and Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson & Ruth Buzzi trading jokes with Vaudeville-trained past masters like Red Buttons and Milton Berle and everyone just seemed like they were having fun making one another laugh. In the same way that I committed the Jack & Jill material to memory, I would study Laugh-In and remember the jokes so I could tell them to kids at school.

Sexual permissiveness is the problem with today’s children, but if it hadn’t been for sexual permissiveness, we wouldn’t even have today’s children.

Clearly, my comedy was way too avant-garde, which is a polite way of saying that I wasn’t funny.

In his book “Born Standing Up”, Steve Martin captures my Cliff Notes approach to comedy in this one story:

"OK, I don't like to gear my material to the audience, but I'd like to make an exception, because I was told that there is a convention of plumbers in town this week—I understand about 30 of them came down to the show tonight—so before I came out, I worked up a joke especially for the plumbers. Those of you who aren't plumbers probably won't get this and won't think it's funny, but I think those of you who are plumbers will really enjoy this. This lawn supervisor was out on a sprinkler maintenance job, and he started working on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch gangly wrench. Just then this little apprentice leaned over and said, 'You can't work on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch wrench.' Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got Volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, and he reads to him and says, 'The Langstrom seven-inch wrench can be used with the Findlay sprocket.' Just then the little apprentice leaned over and says, 'It says sprocket, not socket!' [Worried pause.] "Were these plumbers supposed to be here this show?"

There is an elegance to a well-crafted joke that connects with both the brain and the funny bone. The listener is drawn in by the premise, surprised by the punchline and brought to laughter in less time than it takes to explain how to use a telephone.

I remember coming across a record by Nipsey Russell who made a name for himself by retelling fairy tales. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old when I heard this, but it is a perfect example of a well-crafted one-liner:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, She had so many children she didn’t know what to do…. Apparently.

I told that joke for years before I ever understood what it meant.

Mastering the well-turned phrase was and is an important rite of passage in my family.

I have written about this before and I am still not sure where it came from. It’s not as though we would sit around in the evening and read to one another from Oscar Wilde. In fact, I would venture that we were the very model of a post-literate family. In keeping with so many of my generation, my brother, sister and I were raised by television and movies.

The reality may have been somewhat different, but what I recall is that for a family we lead remarkably separate lives. My brother was and is very kinesthetic, always moving through space. We would watch episodes of The Green Hornet and he would want to practice a martial arts move he had seen Bruce Lee do and I would have to be his dummy.

It would be easy to describe myself as the bookish writer type, but I really wasn’t. I have always been a dreadfully slow reader and writing for any length of time makes my hands cramp. Everything I know about good writing and great ideas I learned in the same way I learned about comedy: by repeating someone’s else’s material.

My sister has the best balance of traits from my mother and my father: she has brains, she has grace and she has more personality than should really be legal. Whereas my brother and I both tend to put people on edge—my brother because he looks and moves like he has a temper and me because, given the opportunity, I look like I would try and sell you some software, or explain a particularly compelling plot point from Star Trek—my sister can put people immediately at their ease. She wields her personality like a spotlight transforming those on whom it is focused.

I won’t pretend to speak for my siblings, but I know that as I was growing up I spent a lot more time around adults than I did around peers. At the time I didn’t mind one bit: it seemed like my brother was always using me for judo practice and my classmates, by and large, were making fun of my weight.

My parents had funny friends and I remember the steady stream of laughter coming from the living room.

My dad often brought friends and co-workers home from the office and they would de-brief over drinks as my mother and the children would eat our dinner in the nearby kitchen. We had a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room that lead to the living room and it would swing open for refills and it would swing open for calls for my mother to join the guests, and it would swing open to use the telephone to call another kitchen to explain when someone or another would be home.

Once I learned how to pour a drink and could remember to keep the ice cube trays filled, I got to spend more time in the room. My dad’s friends were quick and funny and absolutely merciless.

To me, comedy equaled power: the ability to make someone laugh. In the same way that I studied Laugh-In, I knew there was something to learn from my father and his rogues gallery even if I didn’t understand it.

Growing up, I spent a lot of hours with my father. Hours past my bedtime when he would be eating a foil-wrapped dinner that had been left for him in the oven, or having a bowl of ice cream and corn syrup before turning in. Hours standing by waiting for him to ask for a tool from his tool box, or some part from his workshop. In all that time I don’t think I ever got to know him very well.

One of my father’s sayings was “children should be seen and not heard.” And by “seen” that meant on his schedule and not ours. My dad was not one to come to school functions, or meet the teacher nights, but he would get me up early on the weekend and take me to out of the way places that he had heard about where they made good sausage, or did quality iron work, or there was a tractor for sale that he wanted to see.

We never really talked all that much and certainly never had any of those father-son talks that I would see on TV or at the movies. I remember trying to ask him for some advice about a girl when I was in high school and my overwhelming impression was that instead of bringing us closer together, it just made him uncomfortable.

I don’t mean to suggest that my dad didn’t love his family, I’m just not sure that he knew what to do with us.

As I was growing up, there were times that I thought my dad was mean when he would be laughing with his friends one minute and making my mom cry the next. I know differently now, but, like the Old Woman in the Shoe joke, it took time and experience to reach that “understanding.”

I say “understanding”, but it’s guesswork really. It’s an untested assumption reached in the two decades since my father died.

I know with some confidence that he was an unhappy man for most of the time that I knew him. I sensed that it was only in the last few years of his life and after I had left home that he reached some measure of contentment. By that time I was only seeing my dad in snapshots when I visited at holidays, but he seemed settled in a way that I don’t remember him ever being while I lived with him. I remember trying to tell him that I thought he seemed happy, but I think that got lost when he received his cancer diagnosis shortly afterwards.

One of the great sadnesses of my life is that I never got to say goodbye to my father. As near as I can figure it, I was in an airplane somewhere over Lake Ontario when he died. I wanted to tell him that I loved him and to whatever extent I was, and am, able, that I appreciate a little more of where he might have been coming from.

People tell jokes as a way of making sense of their world, of controlling the uncontrollable. They are a reality check for know-it-alls and a momentary reboot for those who find themselves stuck in a rut. Comedy provides a kind of power over your environment, however fleeting, and one that improves with experience.

Just as experience tells you how long to hold the pause in the Old Woman story, it also tells you how to make sense of the other stories in your life. Waiting that one extra “Mississippi” can bring a lot of things into focus; too many and the joke isn’t funny anymore.

I love my dad: more now than at some points when he was alive. Every year brings more questions that I wish he was around to answer. I would like nothing more than to hear his raucous laugh and to see him wear his glasses upside down one more time. I think now we would have a lot more to talk about and to laugh about.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director