Birds and trees and forests and stuff

Okay so, I know I am not normal. It’s true. And it’s something I have embraced as I’ve gotten older. I just don’t have what anyone might describe as “standard” human wiring when it comes to the way I think and the way I see the world.

I’ve taken to informing people I am working with on projects that, “Look, I’m not normal. There are gonna be times when I sound insane. But if you can hang with that, then the end results are usually worth it.”

At least I think so.

So, I’m gonna start with confessing to some illegal behavior. It’s cool. It was more than 40 years ago and the statute of limitations ran out a long, long time ago.

I met a good friend of mine when I was running a door-to-door sales team for a scammy company (long out of business) called California Cabinet Masters. In my defense, I did not know they were scammy until much later and quit as soon as I figured it out.

Anyway, me and Jeff bonded right away. We were both significantly older than the rest of the crew, which consisted of high school and freshmen college kids. I was in my mid-20s and Jeff was about a decade older than me. I don’t remember how it came up but somehow Jeff convinced me that I should go see his therapist, which I did for a couple of years.

We did all of the standard ’80s pop therapy stuff, including hypnosis. Many years later, I discovered that he had been perhaps the pioneer in the pseudo-science of “recovered memories” but he did help me a lot.

After I had been seeing him regularly (as regularly as I could afford) he told me he wanted to try something with me that was not quite legal. I was pretty screwed up and willing to try pretty much anything to feel like I fit in pretty much anywhere, so I agreed.

MDMA. Also known as Ecstasy. P.J. O’Rourke described it as “St. Joseph’s Baby LSD.” It’s an extract of sassafras oil. Yep, the same stuff they used to make traditional root beer. It had shown promise as a therapeutic drug in the ’70s but was classified as Schedule 1 in the early War On Drugs in the ’80s, the same drug classification as heroin and cocaine, which means it was deemed to have no legitimate medical use.

I went to his apartment on a Saturday morning. It was what you would call a “guided trip.” My therapist had not taken anything, he was there to guide me through the experience. I took a little capsule and waited.

The next handful of hours were — I have said many times — like three years of therapy in an afternoon. I remember staring at a painting and telling a whole story about a tiny cabin in the picture of a mountainous seashore (which may or may not have actually been in the painting…) and the man who lived there and when he asked me who the man was, I replied that it was me.

I never used that substance again. I did this long before I got sober and while I abused lots of other stuff over the next couple of decades, I had way too much respect for it to take Ecstasy casually. It was a profound experience.

My therapist was a little “hippy-dippy” and during the experience, he performed a shamanistic “feathering” ceremony and pronounced that I had “bird magic.”

I know, it sounds just ridiculously flaky. But I looked it up and it is the idea of being able to occupy multiple worlds at the same time. As in earth and sky. Or, put simply, it’s the idea of someone having an ability to get above things and see what some would call the “Big Picture.” It’s about being able to see how things fit together.

And, he was right. It was not until then that I could describe in any coherent way (not that this is super coherent…) the way my brain worked.

Some people are wired in the exact opposite way and can only see what is right in front of them. There is an old cliche about that kind of thinking that runs, “Can’t see the forest for the trees.”

And, while I sometimes have trouble focusing on important details without a lot of effort, honestly, this weird wiring has been pretty cool. It makes other people, ranging from my wife to my editor to my bandmates a little crazy sometimes. But that is mostly because I just assume that everyone can see the connections I see and when they can’t, I sometimes sound like a crazy person.

But that ability —whether you call it “bird magic” or pattern recognition —has won me journalism awards because I saw connections that might not have been obvious. It’s why I am able to figure out how stuff works and fix it, which is invaluable. It’s given me the ability to work with music in interesting ways because I can see and hear the invisible tendrils that connect artists as seemingly diverse as Jobim, Todd, Hall and Oates, Coltrane and the Ramones.

It can also mean a tendency to go down rabbit holes. (This is the one that makes Ron, understandably, a little crazy.) While I admit that I have sometimes spent way too much time in a warren that went nowhere, again, as I’ve gotten older, I’m better at recognizing a dead end and backing out of the rabbit hole before it consumes me.

I started thinking about this because we live in times when events and news are happening at a pace that can be overwhelming and it is easy to forget that there are patterns and that things are connected and the big picture is impossible to understand if we don’t keep that in mind.

And I guess that the ridiculously fast advances in large language model artificial intelligence is on my mind, too. I know the models are coming for my job, probably sooner than I am ready for. But it also feels like, for the first time, a machine may be able to replicate what makes me weird and unique. When you get down to it, all my “magic” consists of is the ability to see patterns in information.

And, I’m not sure I am ready to give that up to a machine quite yet.