The Frog Handled Mug

By Bill Marshall

Augusto DeRosa PhD is a psychotherapist and a professor of psychology at Columbia University. Like most shrinks he thinks he has his mind pretty much figured out. At least that’s what he believed until he went to sleep one December night in 2009. Before that night he was a man driven by invisible beliefs that directed his every act. In that sense he wasn’t any different than the rest of us navigating our worlds on auto pilot. That December night switched off Augusto’s auto pilot and sent him on a search for the nature of his own psyche. The story is Augusto’s account of his psyche’s gradual metamorphosis from a mind ruled by male dominated dogma and rational linear thought to a mind driven by the feminine principles of intuition, impulse and imagination. It is a story of the plasticity of time and the multidimensional nature of space. Tom Friedman tells of the transition from left brain to right brain in his award winning book, The Earth is Flat, but Augusto never read the book. The metamorphic process leads him through a maze of confusion as habituated beliefs are challenged from every direction. The change affects every aspect of Augusto’s life, including how he addresses the problems of his colorful list of patients, his drug addicted nephew and his new love interest, Sarah Hastings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Marshall
• Release date: Mar 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466038264

Bill Marshall

I live with my wife, Sarah, atop a wooded hill in Yantic, Connecticut. Our four children are grown and are following their own paths. I have been writing for twenty years, mostly because of my love for the process. I Graduated from UConn (B.A.) and the University of New Mexico (M.S.). Served in Vietnam 67-68. Not fun. I have been a nationally ranked long distance runner. I still run because of my love for it. I have studied consciousness and the nature or reality for twenty years and much of that can be found in my writing. Hope you enjoy my books. Namaste.

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The Frog Handled Mug

Bill Marshall

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Bill Marshall

Other Books by Bill Marshall

The Nature of My Game

One Year Short

Gideon McGee's Dream

The Blueprint of Reality

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Chapter One

He is me, but not me. Tall and blonde he sits at the kitchen table sipping coffee from a frog handled mug. The coffee is bitter without sugar. I can taste it. How I know I can’t tell you. He is thirty-six and married to a dark haired woman with brown eyes and killer legs. I’m a leg man myself, preferring a well turned calf over all those other features that usually turn a man’s head. Most of my male patients do not share my preference for the female leg. Sure, they like good legs, but their preferences lay further north.

A few pieces of snail mail are on the table, and unlike my mail there are no bills and no junk. Maybe they came yesterday or are coming tomorrow. His name and address are on the top letter, David Cawley, 121 Briarwood Rd, Norwich, CT 06360. There are no stamps or postal cancellation marks on any of his mail. That’s odd. It is summer there, as the large maple outside his kitchen window is ripe with dark green leaves. I can hear the birds greeting the morning sun. The ground was covered with snow when I went to bed at 11pm, 2009, ten stories up in a Manhattan high rise. David turns in his chair to check the date on the calendar. It is August 24th, 2075. He has one of those rip-off-the-page calendars where the only date showing is the current date. David is religious about ripping off the pages. Why, I don’t know. I just know that he is.

If David Cawley is thirty-six and the year is 2075, then he was born in 2039, a good 94 years after I was born. How can he be me? Hell, he won’t even be born for another thirty years, and by then I’ll be long gone… maybe. Ninety-four isn’t out of the realm of possibilities. Why do I feel so certain that David Cawley is me, and not just symbolically me? How could I possibly have a dream of me in a time that is sixty-six years in the future? Hell, the future doesn’t exist yet.

David gets up from the kitchen table, his cotton bathrobe untied at the waist, and shuffles his six foot frame into the bathroom. He peers into the mirror and rubs his morning stubble. Being him I know he is not going to shave. David never shaves on the weekends and the stubble is only a day old, practically nothing for someone with Scandinavian genes. My beard, on the other hand, is dark and thick and requires daily removal lest I look like a bum. I am a professional after all, and have an image to maintain. I never liked Freud’s stubbled face. There are too many Freud look-a-likes in my profession.

Julia, David’s wife, clad in men’s boxers and a T-shirt that had SHIFTED 2069 printed on each short sleeve, walks into the bathroom. She rubs the sleep from her eyes and says, Did you make contact?

Yes, he said, he’s watching us as we speak. He thinks it’s a dream.

Julia wraps her tanned arms around David’s waist. Does he know you’re him and he’s you?

He gets it at a gut level, but he can’t wrap his mind around it yet. Augusto’s too much a product of his time, and he’s too stuck in his profession’s dogma. He’ll come around though.

He has no idea about the part he’s to play in all this, does he?

David smiles into the mirror. It’s a tough time for all of them. The three years starting in 2008 was not a pleasant time. Emotions were being tweaked like they had never been tweaked before. Every emotion was intensified. Augusto’s office phone is ringing off the hook and he’s feeling overwhelmed. His theories, that worked for so long, no longer work.

Brave man, Julia said.

I wasn’t feeling brave in 2009. I was confused, freaked out. David turns and bends down to give Julia a kiss on her forehead. I think Augusto, has had enough for one night’s dream.

On the wall behind him is a picture of a deer, a five point buck that is reflected in the mirror along with David’s head. He turns back to the mirror and as though looking directly into my eyes said, What do you believe, Augusto? David Cawley takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and disappears from my dream.

Over the 30 years I have practiced psychotherapy my patients have regaled me with their dreams. I humored them when they told me that the person in their dream was them, but not them. After all, they were a bit off center, if you know what I mean, and I never experienced a dream like theirs. Sure, symbolically all aspects of a dream in one way or another represent the dreamer. But, David Cawley IS me, Dr. Augusto DeRosa, psychotherapist extraordinaire. I am as sure of it as a schizophrenic is of talking to little green men. My patients had described lucid dreaming - being consciously awake within the dream - and I had read much about it in the literature, but this was my first experience with it. I must say, the experience far surpasses the description, but then that always seems to be the case. My body awoke directly after the dream. It is 6am. I say my body awoke because my mind is fully engaged. This damn dream challenges everything I believe about consciousness. It unsettles me. I am not easily unsettled.

It is just a dream, though, isn’t it? Sure, as a psychotherapist I believe dreams hold meaning, but the meaning is symbolic. What do I believe? David Cawley wouldn’t have asked me that question if the question itself had no significance. I feel the significance. I sit up and turn on the light. The sun should be up in about twenty minutes. I smell the coffee wafting in from the kitchen. I love those auto-timers. There is a chill in the room, but I like it cool when I sleep. I don’t like it when I wake up. I put on my robe and walk into the kitchen where it is warmer. Maybe I’ll skip my run this morning and exercise my mind on line. Tynedale’s appointment isn’t until 10am. That leaves plenty of time to check out a few things and make it to my office for my first appointment.

Chuck Tynedale is a classic obsessive compulsive. Nice guy, but a pain in the ass. Always shows up twenty minutes early and insists on the first appointment of the day, which means I have to open up earlier than I would like. Why do I do that? What do I believe? I believe it is the right thing to do for this particular patient.

I pour a cup of coffee, lighten it up, and dump in a teaspoon of sugar. How could David Cawley take it black? Too bitter. I like his cup, though. Maybe I’ll get one like it. Frogs are symbolic of many things. I walk to my front door and get the Times… Damn, Obama’s sending more troops. What a quagmire this is going to be. Another Nam. Felt like the hottest place on earth when I was there. More rain than a fish could tolerate. It was bad timing for me, being there for the Tet offensive.

I take care of some early morning business and spend the next two hours online trying to figure out what happened last night. First on the list was a symbol search…frogs, cups, summer, legs, mirrors…and…that picture of a five point buck that hung on the wall in David’s bathroom. I barely noticed it. Not much connects except for the frog. Every culture seems to have its own symbolism. Metamorphosis seems to be a hit, though. I mean, I’m not feeling any great change in my life, but I get a little tweak when I read it. I pay attention to emotional tweaks. Change would be welcome at this point in my rut of a life. No wife, no kids, one sister a hundred miles away in Connecticut, a drug addicted nephew and a girlfriend I’m not in love with. All I really have is my practice and my professorship at Columbia. I look at my clock, a horrible art deco thing. It’s time to meet my OCD.

Chapter Two

It is 9:40am. Tynedale is ten seconds late according to my cell phone clock. He is a middle aged accountant, dumpy in his mid section and soft at the extremities, but he is highly sought after for his skill with numbers. Two marriages ended in divorce. No surprise there. Fortunately for the kids, he didn’t have any. The knock comes at 9:40 and twenty seconds.

You’re early, but late, I said, forcing a smile which I half felt.

I know, he said. The cabbie was more interested in talking than in getting me here. He missed a green light. Stopped at the yellow just so he could ask me about his tax return. I didn’t tip the asshole. I figured my advice was worth ten times what I would have tipped him.

I actually like Tynedale, or rather I like his manner of speech. Since you’re here we might as well get started. Nothing changes. We mosey into the inner sanctum where he takes his usual place on the leather sofa in front of my desk. He wipes it off with one of those hand sanitizers before sitting then places the cloth in a plastic baggie.

I went to the movies last night, he begins. I wouldn’t have gone to the shit hole, but I wanted to see this movie on the big screen.

What was it? I asked, curious about the movie that lured him into what he considered a festering cesspool of contagion.

2012, the Armageddon movie. Something’s going on. I can feel it. The world is falling apart. I’m falling apart.

The title of the movie refers to the Mayan calendar, Chuck.

Screw the Mayans, he said. I know what I feel and I don’t know anything about the Mayan calendar. We’re heading for Armageddon.

It seems like it, doesn’t it? December 21st, 2012 is when the Mayan's Long Count calendar marks the end of a 5,126-year era. The Maya were hoping to celebrate the end of a whole cycle, but never made it. It’s all about the stars, Chuck. On the winter solstice in 2012, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years. From what I’ve read the energy that typically streams to Earth from the center of the Milky Way will be partially disrupted on that date. What that means for us I don’t know, but our astronomers don’t seemed worried.

Chuck Tynedale straightens his black tie which didn’t need straightening and uncrosses his legs, placing his right foot exactly parallel to his left. He looks to make sure.

How do you know all this? You’re a shrink, he said.

I’m a religious reader of the Times….front to back. So, how did you like the movie?

It sucked. All I got from it was a runny nose. I probably picked up that god damned pig flu. Doesn’t anyone cover their mouths when they sneeze? I’m thinking of moving to Japan.

Why’s that? I asked.

They all wear those white face masks. I admire them for their cleanliness. I first found out about it from Clavell’s Shogun. I think I was Japanese once or twice.

Chuck believes in reincarnation, and attributes his OCD to a life he had in London during the plague in 1665. He was one of the body removers who hauled the dead to the burying pits. He eventually succumbed to the disease. At least that’s what he thinks. I’ve been trying to connect him to the here and now for three years. Hey, he’s going to the movies and that’s a big improvement over how he was when he first came to me. Well, he didn’t really come to me. I had to go to him. The only way he’d let me in was on the condition that I wear one of those face masks he so admires the Japanese for. One of his clients, a friend of mine, begged me to see him. My buddy is claustrophobic and hated those face masks. He moved to San Diego a week before we were to begin therapy.

Chuck rambles on about the Japanese and germs, and finishes up by bashing the London culture of the 1600’s for his current blockages. Chuck is into blaming, a classic victim. But, going back in time to an imaginary life to find a cause for what is happening now seems counterproductive. Sure, someone runs a red light and sends you to the hospital then you’re a victim. No control there. As Nascar fans like to say, Shit Happens. Get over it and drop the blame. It keeps you stuck in the past. At least Chuck’s going to the movies and proving my value to him. He obviously thinks I’m worth the hundred fifty an hour or he would have stopped seeing me. Who knows?

Tynedale looks at his digital watch that he had perfectly synchronized with his cell phone clock and stops talking mid-sentence. It is 10:45 and his time is up. He walks out without a word, following a pattern that he either would not or could not break. Christ! How did he get two women to marry him? I guess there is some truth to the saying, there is someone for everyone. In his case there were two someones. I’d love to get into their heads. It is Saturday in David Cawley’s world, but it is Monday in mine. I lock the office and head to Columbia for my intro to psych class. Teaching freshmen is a trip in itself. It’s December and the last week before finals. By this time my students think they have the know-how to solve the puzzle of their friends’ minds. It makes me laugh. The course content is at least a decade old and mostly bullshit. Changing the minds of the curriculum committee is about as easy as sucking an egg through a pin hole in the shell. It’s not worth the effort.

Without the brain there is no consciousness. That is what they are taught and therefore that is what they believe. I believe it, too. Midway through the course one of the more creative student thinkers brought up a clever hypothetical. What if, he said, an alien landed in your living room while you were watching TV? To him it appears that the set is producing the image. To test his theory he cuts a wire and the set goes blank. He splices the wire back together and the set begins producing the image again. Now, we know, he continued, that the images are actually produced outside the set and that the set is merely a conduit of the images sent from elsewhere. If a component fails you encounter a problem with the image or the sound. Who’s to say that our brains aren’t like our TV, not the originator, but the conduit. All I could say was that science has yet to discover a signal source outside the brain. Until that time we’re going with what we know. He raised his hand again and asked if we’re looking for that source. I knew that there was a fringe element of my profession that believed this kind of stuff, but science is as dogmatic as any religion. I told him his inquiry was outside the scope of psych 101 and to research it if he’s interested. An artful dodge, I thought. But after the previous night’s dream, or whatever it was, the kid’s question just popped into my mind. I don’t know his name, but I see him sitting in the third row center, his usual spot. I ask him to see me after class.

I cut the class fifteen minutes short so that the kid and I would have some time to chat. I look up his name. Alexander Hastings.

Did you ever research that question you posed to me several weeks ago? I asked.

Yes, sir, he said, his voice high pitched and cracking. I see he is trying to grow a mustache and goatee. It is nothing more than peach fuzz. Physically he is more like sixteen than eighteen.

How old are you? I asked.

Uhmm, Sixteen, Sir. I finished highschool in two and a half years. I have a pretty high IQ I’m told.

What prompted your question about the brain being a conduit of consciousness? It was cleverly put.

A couple of things, actually, Sir. Two nights before I asked the question I saw myself sleeping in my bed. It sort of freaked me out. I thought I was dead or something. I was just awake though, while my body was asleep. I was able to go wherever I wanted just by thinking of where I wanted to go. So I did an experiment. I found the nearest trash can and looked inside at its contents. I excluded all the things that could appear in any dorm trashcan like cans, candy wrappers, stuff like that. I saw on the top a paper on sociology that had a big red F on it. I read the cover sheet then went back to my room and just hopped into my body, and that was it. The next day I woke up early and found the trashcan and sure enough that same paper was there.

Maybe you were sleep walking, I said.

Nope. My roommate was up all night doing a paper. I asked him if I got up during the night. He said, no. So I figured that either the brain projected its consciousness out of itself or that the brain was merely a conduit of consciousness. Either way it seemed pretty revolutionary to me. I’ve read-up on this and it happens to many people, and yet I was not able to find any investigation in any of the refereed journals. There are many ideas like this outside mainstream thinking, but none within it other than opinion pieces debunking it all as merely anecdotal. I don’t know. It just seemed to me that if people have experienced it then it must be real.

Not necessarily, I said. Have you read A Beautiful Mind? John Nash believed that all of his schizophrenic experiences were real. He literally saw people that didn’t exist.

They didn’t exist in our experience, the kid said. He is smart and not the least bit cowed by my Ph.D. My mother’s a psychic and her experiences are very different than what your profession has described as possible. Try telling her that what she sees and hears is not real.

I find myself partially agreeing with this young heretic, but can’t bring myself to tell him that. Instead I said, I wouldn’t dream of it, Alex. There is much we don’t know. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the one to discover it. Do you plan to major in psychology? You seem to have a knack for it.

"No, sir. It’s