There was a guy, I don’t believe I ever knew his name, that lives somewhere in the deepest part of my memories. I met him one night, along with a dozen other strangers at a backcountry cabin in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. I had hiked there on my own, and my plan had been to pitch a tent, but thanks to a bit of serendipity, I had the opportunity to crash on a comfy mattress instead. All the other occupants had made reservations for this place many months in advance, so I felt the need to endear myself to the rest of the group. I played cards with them, and at one point I made a quip about two guys who were wearing the same orange outfit, asking if they had just escaped from prison. In the moment it generated a hearty round of laughter, but I doubt I made a lasting impression on anyone there. Yet what I remember most from that evening is the guy who found a guitar, and awkwardly attempted to play it for everyone.
I wondered what could have motivated our self-styled troubadour. He had to know he could provide marginal entertainment value at best, yet he persisted. As an amateur writer I often feel like I am foisting my compositions upon a captive audience. Obligating them to commit fifteen or twenty minutes to reading through a myriad of loosely connected musings. I don’t do it for validation, because I know I would be better served doing more song parodies and bits of satire if that was the goal. There is something deeper going on and, in my quest, to find that out I became fascinated by a guy who could play an acoustic guitar quite well.
Singer-songwriter Roger Miller was essentially absent from the culture during my lifetime. While he did compose what became the Hamster Dance, anyone young enough to be aware of that fad would not be old enough to have witnessed his time in the spotlight. I don’t ever recall hearing his songs played on the radio, and outside of my father’s infrequent renditions of Chug-A-Lug, his catalog was unknown to me until I became an adult. A significant reason for this may have been a bit of unfortunate timing as his debut came at the peak of Beatlemania. His whimsical songs, played on an acoustic guitar, were the antithesis of the sixty’s zeitgeist, but they would have been heartily welcomed in that backcountry cabin that night.
These days I seldom have prolonged interactions with new people and when it does happen it’s exclusively online. It is quite the challenge to express your personality to a total stranger using only words. Preferences in music and movies are often used as ice breakers, as they serve as a proxy for tribal affiliation. When you form a deep personal connection with an artist’s work or a genre of entertainment, it becomes part of who you are and by extension you share in a group identity. That is unless you like someone like Roger Miller, an artist who is not easily categorized. Is he simply a country singer? I have never been a fan of contemporary country music, nor have I found common cause with its conventions of rural life, religion and right-wing politics. The question remains, what is my tribe?
I was recently asked by a pen pal what type of music I listened to in high school and to be honest I struggled to give an answer. The first record I ever purchased was Off the Wall by Michael Jackson although the one I remember playing the most was Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits. In the latter case it was the stories, like the gang rape revenge saga of Coward of the County that compelled my 10yr old self, the instrumentation was much less relevant. This shouldn’t have been a hard question because high school is the time when you are supposed to pick your tribe. However, as I witness my children navigate these same waters, I am reminded of my own high school experiences.
If only it could be like the magical world of Harry Potter where the decision is made by a magical sorting hat. In reality we are expected to be the authors of our own coming of age stories. The first step in this journey was a gradual awareness of the people around us, and in my case, it became really obvious that I didn’t stack up all that well against my peers. As the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy, and I was in a sorry state. I wasn’t just undersized; I was far and away the smallest kid in my grade. Lots of people had glasses, but mine were much thicker, and made my eyes look like they were embedded deep within my skull. I wasn’t the only one with braces, but I didn’t know anyone who had to endure a cumbersome drool inducing mouthpiece that rendered them mute except for a constant slurping noise. Most of my elementary schooling had taken place in another town, and didn’t have a base of long-term friends, plus my new school had a much tougher curriculum. If that wasn’t enough, I was often my own worst enemy. As an outspoken independent thinker, I often had serious issues with the religious tenets of my Catholic school and burned bridges with my teachers and administrators. My parents, to their credit, tried to help.
My mother had a strong interest in popular psychology, and we had a copy of just about every self-help book that was printed in the seventies. Thus, she took it upon herself to get her young miserable son into counseling. I vividly remember that first session. The first thing the therapist had me do was draw a picture of anything I wanted, so I started drawing a football player. At some point she wanted to move on to something else but I wasn’t quite finished yet. I noticed that she wrote down that I was upset at being asked to stop drawing. I objected to this, and then we proceeded to have a fourth wall breaking argument over what she was writing about me. Next, she had a flip chart and asked me to list the things that made me unhappy. I mentioned all the items I just recited in the preceding paragraph. She said I would just have to learn to live with it all, and her solution was to simply be myself, whatever the hell that meant.
It has long been accepted that people exhibit distinct differences in behaviour that come hard wired, a deep seeded nature that they are born with that is independent of the environment from which they are raised. Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks recognized this, and they were the first to codify four distinct human temperaments that they falsely attributed to various body fluids. They were surprisingly prescient with this theory and it heavily influenced medical practices for centuries. These temperaments, or humours as they were known, are Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic and Phlegmatic. Now before you start Googling definitions for these mostly archaic words you are probably already familiar with their modern equivalents, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Slytherin. These are the four houses of Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s high school.
Movies, like the Harry Potter series work because they are based on underlying truths, but quite a bit has been discovered about human nature since 400 BC. In 1923 Carl Jung, a protege of Sigmund Freud, published the first scholarly book describing personality types. Over in America his work inspired Katharine Briggs and later her daughter Isabel Myers to create a system of their own, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI. While scoffed at by serious academics the tests remain popular and they had a resurgence in the 80’s thanks to the publication of Please Understand Me: a bestseller written by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates in 1978. My family of course had our own copy. The first time I took the test I didn’t find the results compelling. The main criticism of MBTI is that it suffers from the Barnum effect, people will believe anything you say about them as long as it’s positive. Reality is a bit more even handed which is why the current theory has five factors instead of four.
Big Five theory is bolstered by cutting edge research in biometrics, a nascent understanding of the role of neurotransmitters and how the brain functions. While a full explanation is beyond the scope of my writing there is a bit of shorthand way to understand it all thanks to a popular movie,1985’s The Breakfast Club. You don’t have to have seen the movie to know what it is all about. It’s a coming-of-age story, set in a high school in which five characters who represent bold stereotypes, are confined together for a day long detention. They are tasked with writing a thousand-word essay in which each must describe “who you think you are.” Those stereotypes map onto Big Five traits as displayed in the following chart.
| Big Five Trait | MBTI Equivalent | Neurotransmitter | Breakfast Club Character | Actor |
| Openness to Experience | Sensing vs Intuitive | Synapse Speed | The Brain | Anthony Michael Hall |
| Conscientiousness | Judging vs Perceiving | Serotonin | The Athlete | Emilio Estevez |
| Extraversion | Extraversion vs Introversion | Dopamine | The Princess | Molly Ringwald |
| Agreeableness | Feeling vs Thinking | Oxytocin (a hormone) | The Criminal | Judd Nelson |
| Neuroticism | No Equivalent | Norepinephrine | The Basket Case | Ally Sheedy |
Outside of the anachronism of having an all-white and heterosexual cast the movie holds up pretty well. Each of the five characters each shares a story that humanizes them to the group, then two couples form and pair off leaving the Brain to write the essay by himself. He states that while they have been judged by stereotypes “each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal.”
As I write this essay by myself knowing that in high school, I never got the girl, it’s easy to stereotype me as the Anthony Michael Hall character, yet in reality I was never seen by my peers as all that smart. What I do remember is one particularly frustrated school guidance counselor who showed me the results of my aptitude tests as compared to my classmates, and was flummoxed by my abysmal grades. Our brains work by processing neurotransmitters, the faster a synapse fires, the faster this process happens and the faster you can solve abstract problems. Yet as I detailed in another essay I wrote, The Untouchables, this is a flawed measure of intelligence. It is however the reason why some people are more open to experiences than others. In high school I dabbled in everything, even sports.
As a freshman I was a member of our high school wrestling team. Due to my incredibly small size, I was in a division that had only a half dozen similarly cursed boys in the entire city. I was a terrible wrestler, as I lacked, in 80’s vernacular, the eye of the tiger, I was low in trait conscientiousness. People with this trait are highly adaptive but you pay the price for this ability by having a lack of focus. This was made even more evident at my first job; I was a fry guy at McDonalds. I enjoyed working, I was never late, never missing a shift, and never had any conflicts with either my supervisors or coworkers, however at a place where they would make you punch out for an unpaid fifteen-minute break despite making $2.35 an hour I was let go after six months because I ‘didn’t fit in.’ The corporate world wants task-oriented people with high levels of serotonin and that wasn’t me.
I never fit in with the cool and popular kids either, but looking back over the sheer volume of people I interacted with, I realize now that a lot of people probably did like me, unfortunately just not all at the same time. I was very social and never at a loss of words. This is the hallmark of trait extraversion, a sensitivity to positive emotion created by dopamine. This reward stimulus is blamed for a lot of human vices, like retail therapy, over eating, drugs, unsafe sex, video game addiction etc. as people use it as a form of self-medication. I found that I had the opposite problem, an emotional instability caused from having too much dopamine, which presents as anxiety, mania, and paranoia.
I was less popular with my teachers as I brazenly challenged the catholic doctrines of my high school and would often ask uncomfortable questions. If I didn’t believe something to be true, I was not willing to just go along with everyone else. I remember in particular one English teacher that assigned us to write a personal journal that she swore that would not be read by anyone. When it came time to do this in class, I made lists of major world events like wars and assassinations instead. The teacher read this of course and told my parents that she was worried about me because in her words, I had an obsession with death. I wasn’t about to acquiesce so on the spot I invented a substitution code. I was to put it simply disagreeable, something that is more common in men, and it is due to lower levels of the hormone oxytocin.
As it turned out that English teacher must have been projecting her own demons as several years later, she took her own life. My own sensitivity to negative emotion, what is known as trait neuroticism, was never that severe but it took a long time for me to come to terms with it. I was unwilling to write about it in her class but I did eventually put my thoughts down in an essay I called Tossing Out Some Opinions. It presents as a fight or flight impulse, via norepinephrine, a product of your amygdala that unfortunately is not sophisticated enough to differentiate between imminent dangers and existential ones. I know personally that I would do just about anything to avoid triggering this response, but in the end, I just learned to live with it.
My senior year I got a job at a record store, or truth be told my father dragged me to the mall and had me cold call every business. When I started, Compact Discs were limited to classical music and within a year everything was available in that format often with substation promotions when legendary albums were reissued. Yet it was a Steve Miller greatest hits cassette that got the most play from me, much to the chagrin of the guys working at the Radio Shack next door. I still get a warm feeling when I hear the bassline to Swingtown, as I am reminded of the time when my braces had finally come off, my cumbersome glasses had been replaced by contact lenses, and I wasn’t short anymore. So, the answer to what kind of music I listened to in high school is I listened the 80’s equivalent of Nickleback, what does that say about me?
I didn’t appreciate it at the time but in hindsight I have to say that I am relieved that when I did therapy only words were offered as a remedy. Psychology has a long and often dubious history of well-meaning people who often do more harm than good. The four humours theory of the ancient Greeks was the justification for such horrors as leeches and bloodletting. We are within living memory of lobotomies being seen as legitimate treatments. At present we are handing out pills to teenagers at an unprecedented rate. Stimulants to kids who are easily distracted and can’t focus and SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) to break the focus of kids with chronic anxiety, on the presumption that the benefits outweigh the major side effects of these drugs. The original Hippocratic Oath isn’t “do no harm’” it’s actually “do no harm, intentionally”.
The years I attended high school coincided with a moral panic over satanism which culminated in the McMartin preschool trial in LA. The operators of this establishment were arrested and charged with child abuse despite the only evidence being the repressed memories of small children. It seems absurd in hindsight, but this dragged on for years and caused real harm. Families were destroyed in a multitude of other cases as well, because therapists everywhere were coaxing out repressed memories. The problem is that there is zero scientific evidence to back any of this up, and like other social contagions it ran its course, then faded in popularity and went away.
Not everyone in psychology is well meaning, especially when financial incentives are involved. Remember Sybil, the abused child with multiple personality disorder who was the subject of a bestselling book and TV movie starring Sally Field? It was all fake, and yet to this day you can find teens on TikTok talking about their alters. The same companies selling serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) aggressively lobby to prevent research on psychedelics like Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and Mescaline (peyote), which work by releasing a large amount of serotonin, despite growing evidence that those drugs are actually curative. All this is why when a new psychological treatment emerges, it should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I’m of course referring to the sudden rise of transgenderism that has all the hallmarks of a social contagion and the accompanying moral panic over criticism of it. I’m not going to pretend to care about women’s sports, but I do think there is an issue with locking someone in a cage with an intact sex offender who identifies as a woman, especially now when there are states who will force the victim to carry that rape baby to term. I’m fine with adults doing whatever they want with their bodies, but I question that giving puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and irreversible surgeries to minors is the best treatment for them. Identity isn’t something mystical like a soul, you are born with a temperament and you evolve a personality, using drugs and surgeries to try and fit into a stereotype doesn’t seem right. Have we learned nothing from The Breakfast Club?
The theme song to that movie was Simple Minds’ Don’t You Forget About Me, and it wasn’t until recently that I figured out the significance of that song. The movie was about looking beyond stereotypes and our prejudices, and seeing the real person. The characters don’t want each other to ever lose sight of that. Roger Miller expressed a similar sentiment when he was nearing the end of his life. He was only a few years older than I am now when he was afflicted with terminal cancer. When asked how he wanted to be remembered, Roger replied, “I just don’t want to be forgotten.”
I first became intrigued by Roger through the cleverness of his lyrics. As I worked my way through his extensive catalog, I read up on the man himself. He was raised by his aunt & uncle in the town of Erick Oklahoma. When asked by a reporter what that was close to, he replied “extinction” a reference to its location on the defunct route 66. Such witticisms were commonplace with him. He did a stint in the army as a penance for stealing a guitar as teen and henceforth referred to his education as Korea Clash of 52. Then for many years, in his own words, “tried to do things like other artists” but it wasn’t until May of 1964 that he released his own record, in his own unique style, and became a star.
He is widely hailed as a genius, but as one of his contemporaries put it, “Roger was the most talented, and least disciplined, person that you could imagine.” He once said, “the human mind is a wonderful thing, it starts working from before you’re born and doesn’t stop till you sit down to write a song.” My sense of him became clearer, high in openness, low in conscientiousness, extraverted, disagreeable and if his lyrics are to be believed, a great sensitivity to negative emotion. I felt like we belonged to the same tribe.
Now that I have committed these words to pixels they can be preserved, and my thoughts can wander elsewhere. However, if you have made it this far check out this Roger Miller fellow, unlike me he can express intelligent things in very few words. I highly recommend the original compositions on his first few albums, like this one, the fifth track on his debut album. Each verse contains a clever self-deprecating joke, and the chorus says much of what I have written here and is a lot easier to remember.
Well, it takes all kinds to make a world
Big and little, men and women, boys and girls
And I'm the kinda guy hard luck sure gives a whirl
But I guess it takes all kinds to make a world
Against My Better Judgement 