Cabin Fever Pt. 1

I had agreed upon undergoing some "regression therapy". My insides were knotted and rebelling against me. Constant, and uncontrollable acid reflux kept me awake most nights, which wasn't entirely bad since I was unemployed and didn't need to be up during the day. I could catch a few Zzz's here and there throughout the day (whenever my indigestion would allow). My girlfriend Christine had convinced me that these esophageal disorders were a result of pent up frustrations and a long suppressed anger with my father. She was steeped in these psychological diagnoses, as she was under-going her own therapeutic treatment for her feelings of abandonment from a father who had died a few months earlier. It seems whenever a person begins undergoing therapy and discovering themselves, they feel an evangelical need to convert everyone around them to the joys of psychoanalysis. This often includes amateur pro-bono work analyzing the maladies afflicting their closest friends. It was this unsolicited psychiatric evaluation that led me to the downtown office of my landlady, a sweet-natured, ex-hippy, folk-singer lesbian moonlighting as a spiritual healer.

Perhaps some background information is necessary here:

I had been living with a woman for seven months. She was an art school graduate who was currently enmeshed in the "arts and crafts" world, her medium being weaving. I quite often found myself deflecting wisecracks from friends asking, "Is she a basket-weaver?" With the clarity of hindsight, I realize that they were dropping subtle hints that she was a complete nutter, but for a man in the throes of "True Love" I saw their comments as little chainsaws trying to sever the bonds between us. So in an effort to get away from the nay-sayers and to get closer to the heart of our ineffable union as struggling artists, we packed our things and moved from the spiritually soiled streets of Philadelphia to the consecrated grounds of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

As we first drove into the city limits of Asheville, we both looked at each other and commented on the sudden "lightness of being" that seemed to come upon us. This was our new home and it was Good and Holy. We found a renovated 17th century log cabin on the outskirts of Asheville, deep in the woods, that we were able to rent for $400 a month. As I was collecting a monthly unemployment check of $600 and my girlfriend had recently received a sizable inheritance check, this seemed to be well within our budget.

Our landladies were an older lesbian couple (in their 40s and 50s). They lived "across the way", our respective cabins separated by a small stream and a field, where a bonfire pit had been erected in the middle and several Buddhist sculptures were placed randomly about as "prayer centers". Deborah, the older of the two, had decided to let us rent from them after meeting me and sensing that I had a "beautiful soul". Her partner, Mary, told us this one evening while we were having dinner with them at their place. My girlfriend snorted her disagreement involuntarily upon hearing this, then carefully covered up by pretending to sneeze. "My," she said, "it's really dusty in here."

As the months dragged on, my girlfriend and I grew to dislike one another more and more. It was a classic example of cabin fever, and I often felt like Jack Torrance from Stephen King's book The Shining. It was only a matter of time before I hacked her to pieces with an ax. I assume she felt the same.

One evening we drove into downtown Asheville to do some grocery shopping and came across a fortune-teller on the street. She had her Tarot cards laid out on a wooden crate, draped with a purple piece of fabric. She also read palms and my girlfriend suggested we have our palms read "just for fun". What the hell, right?

She went first and got a pretty thorough reading that eerily touched on many things she was going through at the time. I never thought she was a gullible girl but she began to weep at the end of her reading and gave the woman an extra five dollar tip. I gave her a perplexed and angry look and sat down to begin my turn. Even though we weren't completely broke yet, neither of us was employed and we certainly shouldn't be handing out five dollar tips to anyone.

The faux-gypsy took my hand and began to trace the lines on my palm with her forefinger. She told me what each line represented. This was my life line, this was my love line, this was my money line, this was my tan line. I tried not to look like a smug bastard, fighting back the urge to smile. Then she mentioned that my life line had a very "weird shape" to it. It broke apart in sections as if I "lived several different lives". It was also very jagged, which meant I was full of anger.

What the fuck?! I'm not angry, I thought. I've tried my best to be an agreeable person and to be accepting of the world around me. I've lived a rather idyllic life, in the sense that I wasn't abused as a child, I don't feel like I've been treated unfairly because of my skin color, I don't hate anyone or have a need to avenge being wronged, and I've never been imprisoned for a crime I didn't commit. Oh sure, there are the daily grievances that everyone has to put up with, and my ship has certainly not come in (in fact it most probably sailed without me while I was drunk somewhere). The point is I didn't feel angry, and I didn't know what I really had to be angry about.

That, however, was the only word Christine needed to hear. The whole ride home she discussed my anger issues. I tried to ignore her babbling as best as I could.

That night my acid reflux, which had been a persistent problem for a good portion of my life at that point, took on a life of its own, rendering sleep completely impossible. I gagged and tossed about all night.

The next morning Christine suggested that the problems with my digestive track might be the result of a "conversion neurosis", and that my anger issues had manifested themselves as physical ailments.

"What anger?" I snapped. "I don't feel angry."

She gave me a dismissive look. Of course I knew what she was thinking. My father was to blame for my transpicuous anger. As her father had fucked her up, so must have mine. I'm not gonna lie and say that my father and I had a peachy keen relationship. It suffered from the all-too-common father/son battles. And as the eldest son who had taken the creative route through life and still found himself borrowing money and had nothing substantial to show for himself at the age of 28, our rows could get pretty heated. But, in the old man's defense, I can be a frustrating, combative son-of-a-bitch when my lazy, good-for-nothing ways are threatened. I really do need the occasional kick-in-the-ass. And he was always there to provide it.

So now I had developed, according to my girlfriend, a litany of health problems, not the least of which was the very possible ULCER that was eating me away from the inside. In her amateur medical opinion, my acid reflux was an offshoot of the growing ulcer that had developed in my stomach as a result of not dealing with my latent hatred of my father. I had a bottle of Tums the size of a quarter keg in the bathroom that was concrete evidence of my need to get help. And so, when we discovered that our landlady, in addition to recording several Cds of folk music and Tibetan chants, worked part time as a naturopathic therapist, we eagerly enlisted her help in curing my debilitating affliction.


When I entered Deborah's office I noticed the decor was almost identical to the cabin we were renting from her. Hand-carved wooden stools and tables, indigenously produced woven rag rugs, Native American-themed wall hangings. The only difference was the large cushioned table in the middle of the room. In the corner by the window, on top of a scarf-draped Deadhead conga, she had lit some incense.

"Please. Have a seat," she told me.

I sat on the table and she briefed me on the whole procedure.

"First, I'd just like you to tell me whatever is on your mind. Get everything you're thinking about off your chest before we start. You can tell me you think this is all a bunch of crap or whatever. It doesn't matter. It's just to clear your head. Then I'm going to massage certain targeted pressure points, see if we can't release some of the tension. And then we'll get right into it."

"What exactly is 'it' like?" I asked.

"Well, it's a little like hypnosis, only you are completely conscious throughout. You just get yourself into such a relaxed state that you begin to mentally see yourself returning to the womb. Not everyone goes that far back, though. But I'll be honest, I've had some people who actually physically curled into a fetal position. It took some twenty minutes for their muscles to return to the way they were."

"What do you mean?"

"Well their fingers were curled into fists. A fetus doesn't have much control over her own muscles ya know."

"Sure."

This would be interesting. While I'm skeptical of just about everything I haven't experienced first-hand, there is definitely a part of me that wants desperately to believe in everything. Ghosts, angels, astrology, politicians and corporations who DON'T want to fuck us over, I want them to be real and often give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm only an agnostic because I'm extremely non-committal. I can't say for certain that these supernatural things don't exist because I have no proof that they do or do not exist. But I don't want to be that guy who swore up and down about something only to be proved wrong. Let's face facts, I'm a spineless pussy.

To Be Continued...