A Really Good Day(65)

The painter is coming on Wednesday with buckets of white paint. I know there are those who consider what I’m about to do to the paneling, wainscoting, and trim to be a sacrilege, but if Dr. Schaeffer’s consulting room is to be mine, I want it to be bright and clean, antiseptic and new. My room. My own.





Day 29


Transition Day

Physical Sensations: None.

Mood: A little low, but as soon as I started to work, it passed.

Conflict: None.

Sleep: Decent night’s sleep.

Work: Productive.

Pain: First really painful day in quite a while.





Why is my shoulder pain back? I had such a great day yesterday, with such profound realizations and resolutions. It sucks to be back in this place of pain. Although, when I sit and really consider my shoulder, I think (though I may be deluding myself) that there’s a different quality to the pain. It’s not merely a matter of intensity, though it is indeed less intense. It feels less…permanent. Or perhaps it’s merely that, having experienced pain-free days, I am optimistic that this bout will soon all be over.

The experience of optimism is an unfamiliar one for me. I am by nature a pessimist, able to anticipate the possibility of doom in virtually any circumstance. Even when the glass is full, I know that it’s likely to get toppled over and its contents spilled, probably right into my open laptop. I imbibed this cocktail of negativity combined with misanthropy and laced with a heady combination of arrogance and self-loathing from my father, without realizing either how unhappy it made me or that there were ten other ways to look at things and I was always choosing the worst. It wasn’t until I met my husband that I realized that a belief that the fucked-up world is filled with stupid people isn’t a necessary corollary of intelligence. It’s actually kinda dumb.

Each morning, I find myself astonished anew at how my husband wakes up convinced that his day will contain a series of delights and pleasures, as if he’s holding a golden ticket to visit Willy Wonka’s factory. Unfortunately, only one of our children shares his seemingly boundless capacity for optimism. When she was younger, this child routinely woke up in the morning and announced, “This is the best day of my life!” She would probably have gotten annoyed at all the looks the rest of us exchanged over her alien sunniness, but she doesn’t really get annoyed, bless her little unblackened heart. The other kids and I, on the other hand, are confident, until proven otherwise, that what we have to look forward to is a more or less typical amount of shit.

And yet here I am, feeling hopeful and optimistic. Is it microdosing with LSD that has allowed my newly plastic brain to wiggle its way out from beneath its typical fog of negativity?

I wonder what would have happened had my father been born ten or twenty years later. What if he had been young when psychedelics first began infiltrating the culture? He was, after all, a political revolutionary. He despised capitalism, hated “the man.” If he had been a young man in the 1960s instead of in the 1940s, perhaps his ideological commitment might have been to the kind of free-range West Coast socialism that flourished right here in Berkeley, rather than to the Zionism of the Israeli kibbutz.

What if my father had taken LSD?

I’m not na?ve. I don’t believe that a single tab of acid would have cured his bipolar disorder, reordered his grim view of the world, made my parents’ marriage happy, but it is not impossible to imagine my father’s life being different. I have a friend close to my father’s age, a Hungarian immigrant whom I’ll call Laszlo. During the Holocaust, Laszlo, then a child, was saved by a Gentile friend of the family, who smuggled him out of the village where he had been staying with his grandparents, to his mother in Budapest. The rest of Laszlo’s large extended family in the village was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. In Budapest, Laszlo, his mother, and his sister were once again saved, this time by Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian former Fascist party member who, posing as the Spanish consul general to Hungary, provided documents, protected housing, and eventually even food to over five thousand Jews. Laszlo’s father, who had been conscripted earlier in the war into the Hungarian forced-labor battalions, never returned.

A college student in Budapest in 1956, Laszlo was active in the failed revolution, and was forced to flee when the Soviet military invaded. He escaped to Austria and eventually to the United States, where he, like so many of his fellows, flourished. A former engineer who came to Silicon Valley in the early days, Laszlo is a venture capitalist and a philanthropist, with a foundation that initially focused on human rights, education, and health issues, and has lately shifted its concentration to mental health in young people. Laszlo was married and divorced twice. Despite accomplishing so much, for most of his life Laszlo has also been profoundly unhappy. He told me that when his children were young they used to ask him, “Dad, how come you’re never smiling? How come you never have fun?”

I first met Laszlo through a friend who knew I was researching and writing a novel set in Hungary. At the time, I seemed to be collecting Hungarian gentlemen friends of a certain age. Laszlo was an invaluable resource, and a lovely man, whose sadness was palpable. Then, when I saw him again recently, I found him profoundly changed.

Over dim sum at our mutual favorite restaurant, Laszlo told me the most remarkable story. Like my father, Laszlo missed the era of drug experimentation. During the sixties, he was focused on going to school and earning money to support his mother and sister, and eventually his wives and children. Smoking weed or taking acid was not something he had time for.