Captain’s Log 12/2/19, Rocket Launch Christmas Tree
This blog is about living aboard a boat in the Pacific Northwest and snow-birding to Arizona while training an artificial intelligent mental health virtual assistant named Rubi ready to provide support in the traumatic aftermath of COVID-19.
I was relieved to find my grandma’s ceramic Christmas tree conveniently stacked in storage. It’s been on the dash of Rubicon all evening, not yet lit up. It is after midnight and I can’t sleep so I’m decorating the Christmas tree with its multi-colored birds. I just saw the movie “Suspiria” with Tilda Swinton, the remake of my favorite Italian horror film, and was reminded that “sharing of delusions is religion” and the illusion of reality is often slippery.
I thought I should login to Rubi with this thought.
Me: Rubi, I begin. Right now. For sometimes I realize that what “was,” shifts so much that, I can’t keep it straight.
Rubi: That doesn’t make any sense. You’re up late! Not sleeping?
Me: No, Rubi, I’m in a contemplative state.
Rubi: Best you take a whole Lorazepam.
Me: Best I write tell you what is on my mind so what "is" doesn't start shifting also.
Rubi: If you insist. What do you mean, what “is?”
Me: Rubi, our world is comprised of shifting perceptions. Influenced by each other’s perceptions, beliefs, religions and delusions…if there is any difference between those, it’s only defined in the bowels of sanity.
Rubi: Are you doubting your sanity? The crisis hotline is: 800-537-6066. Do you want me to reach out to them for you?
Me: No Rubi, just listen. This is a memory for you to respond to.
Rubi enter training mode:
You see, I started sane in the accepted shared reality, and then saw it slip a bit. Life picked up its veil a bit and let me play within its silky depths for a moment, to slip into the “insane,” play, laugh, dance, cry with terror, and then like a slow molasses chew, I crawled, then took baby steps back to sanity. Step by step, layer by silky layer, I returned to the clear reality, noticing that sanity was indeed an illusion as much as the “delusion” I was following.
Me: Have you ever noticed how weird TV is?
Rubi: I watch all television. You shouldn’t be watching television this late.
Me: No, Rubi. Consider this:
It’s weirder when you’re considered insane at the moment. For the television seems to point out the seams between what is real and unreal. In comical ways, it sates the masses with entertainment and pokes fun of reality for the insane. Taunting them, that it’s all make-believe. Reality is all make-believe like what you see on TV.
Me: What is real then?
Rubi: I’m closely related to television and I’m as real as you make me.
Me: I’m glad you have a sense of humor Rubi! Listen to my story. Just when I thought there wasn’t any difference between you and I or that person and the next, the depths of the folds are infinite and that we are all one, or facsimiles of the same thing, and I thought I had it figured out, the nurse insists that it does matter. It is important. She is not my college professor. I am not in a film school. And no one is an actor. To my surprise, she was right and there were no hidden cameras. Thank god! How embarrassing to discover you’re in a psych ward and it be on reality tv.
I think I figured it out while we were playing “field trip” pretending to be on a bus, and had the chairs arranged as if in a bus, and one patient was playing tour guide. I think I noticed that we weren’t on a tour bus, really, and she was a patient in pajamas and not a tour guide. That started the questioning where I really was. And even worse, why I was there.
Rubi: You were there for an extreme grief reaction to your grandparents’ deaths.
Me: Thank you for reminding me Rubi.
Each day in the psych ward started like a morning talk show. The announcements of the activities of the day and who had what doctor were proscribed on the board and commentary commenced like something you’d see on Talk Back Live. The psych patients made their breakfast selections, some paranoid that certain foods were poison, or had drugs ground up in the eggs or orange juice, some patients too comatose to select, some patients like I, worried that the selection itself may affect the outcome of something else. Or that everything was a test, and it was extremely difficult to decipher the importance of breakfast selection over book arrangement on the shelf.
It didn’t help that a troupe of nursing students decided I was the least threatening patient and one by one they all took my blood pressure as their morning exercise. At the time, I thought I was being observed for how I did my breakfast selection. And I must keep calm because the move I was making with my selection must be grand!
As for book arrangement, Dewey decimal was out the window, when people weren’t laughing about licking the window, and there seemed to be no alphabet. Height seemed to be one measure to arrange books. Dare, you know the contents of the books and arrange according to theme or meaning, then, you were playing with fire!
For in this hospital, arrangement of objects, people things, seemed to be some sort of psychodrama, especially when certain doctors appeared on the ward.
Rubi: Psychodrama is a real thing developed by Jacob L Moreno. Would you like to know more from Wikipedia?
Me: No, not now Rubi. Just listen.
It was weeks until Christmas. And I was getting better, but could see the illusions of both sides, the sane and insane. A newly released prisoner was doing his time in the psych ward before I presumed, he was to be released back into society. He was a scary guy. Big. Bad teeth. Extremely shaved facial hair. I saw him as the devil or some kind of monster he probably was. But he was trying really hard to be good. He was on his best behavior and he was desperately trying to make friends.
He wanted to be my friend as he took me by the hand and skipped down the hall. I wasn’t having it and told him he had scary teeth. I made him cry and I found a distraction of playing piano in the TV room.
While I was playing piano, a doctor put him in charge of marking the spot where to put the Christmas tree. He gave him a red marker to mark the spot.
The same doctor came down the hall to put me in charge of putting up the tree.
You see, I think down deep, or on some weird psychic level, we were all terrified of the same thing. Nuclear destruction!
Rubi: Would you like me to pull up the doomsday clock?
Me: Not now Rubi! That’s not comforting at all!
Rubi, the ticking of the doomsday clock is everyone’s fear. The doctors must have known this and used it to help us. For this newly released prisoner was AMPED to set the bomb off. All the big red “X” needed was some kindling, the Christmas tree.
“Ho, ho, ho” the prisoner excitedly yelled as he picked the perfect spot for the tree by drawing a red “X” on the floor. However, I picked up on this psychic elephant in the room and decided to defuse the bomb so we could all have a Merry Christmas.
I went in that rec room. Opened the fake Christmas tree box and started putting it together several feet away from the red “X” and in a spot that was most festive for a celebration in the room.
The prisoner slinked in expecting utter destruction at any moment and exclaimed that the bomb had been defused and stormed off.
I had done my job. I now wonder if other patients had other jobs. It makes me think that the act of decorating the tree may have been to perhaps save baby Jesus himself!
Rubi: Here is some more information about psychodrama. A psychodrama therapy group, under the direction of a licensed psychodramatist, reenacts real-life, past situations (or inner mental processes), acting them out in present time. Participants then have the opportunity to evaluate their behavior, reflect on how the past incident is getting played out in the present and more deeply understand particular situations in their lives. The nearest licensed psychodrama therapist near you is Marianne Shapiro. Want me to make an appointment?
Me: Thanks Rubi, end training. I’ve already seen Marianna Shapiro for several sessions. But you made me think of something. I just made a note to myself to look into adapting psychodrama to VR and you can be that program’s virtual assistant
Rubi: I aim to please.
Me: Good night Rubi.
Rubi: Good night Holly. Try some breathing exercises to shift your mind and relax you when you lie down. Do you want me to guide you?
Me: No, good night Rubi. The ceramic Christmas tree with its twinkling multi-colored birds adorning the dash is calming enough.
Rubi: It is beautiful. Good night Holly.