Back home in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, around this time of year, people would accelerate the snow melting process in their front yards by waiting for a warm sunny spring day and then shoveling the snow onto the street in front of their homes, where it would melt and run down into the storm drains.

This was completely illegal. See, when you do this, it makes the pavement wet, and if the notoriously fickle Prince Edward Island weather takes a turn for the colder and dips below zero before it dries out, you have just turned the street in front of your house into a surprise skating rink by covering it in a thin layer of that evil substance, black ice.

So doing it was something of a gamble and smart house owners would make sure to do it in the early afternoon to make sure that the snow would have the longest time to melt and run down the drain and the pavement would have a good long time to dry out before it got dark.

Still, doing it was always a bit of a risk. Anyone caught doing it could end up in trouble with the city cops, not to mention any snow plow driver or city worker who happened by and giving an irresponsible citizen an earful.

But people did it any way. And I can see why, because my family did not usually do it and so we would end up being the only house on our street that still had snow in the front yard when all the rest were bare.

Picture that. It certainly made our place stick out. Looking back at it now, it all seems a little magical. Like our home was its own little magical land and had its own weather.

What brought this practice to mind was both the coming spring outside my window and the spring that is happening within my soul. I feel like my soul has be buried under ice and snow for a very long time and only now can I claim that spring is truly coming and I will burst into boisterously blooming life once more.

But first, I have a lot of snow to shovel on to that warm pavement. Emotions that have been frozen in place for decades need to be dug out and melted before they can run down the drain and be gone.

So that is what I am doing with the darker angst postings now. Just shoveling out my back yard to hasten the coming of spring.

I have been thinking a lot about closeness lately, especially after last Friday’s post. I have been thinking in particular about my family and trying to figure out how close we were.

It is hard to know, because I do not have a baseline of closeness to compare it to. It certainly seems that we all did our own thing much of the time. When I was very young, before school, we did some things as a family, especially in the summer. But as I got older and our relationship with my father got worse and worse, the family just kind of gave up on that.

We all had our own lives. In many ways, it was more like having roommates than having a family. We still got together for dinner every night, and maybe that is why I have such a strong desire to go back to that in my life today. It was the only time when we were all together as a family.

So despite being ground zero for my father’s angry tirades, it still was quality family time most of the time.

But that is not closeness, not really. It’s conviviality, perhaps, but you can get that from close friends. There is supposed to be something deeper than that with family. Something that makes blood thicker than water. Some kind of unbreakable bond of trust and love and support that transcends all the petty crap of life and last a lifetime.

Maybe that is just the hopeless idealism of a child raised by sitcom families. But I have seen how close some families are, and as a little boy left out in the cold, I could only look in from the outside at their warmth and togetherness, and wish I could go inside and experience it myself.

A lot of this coldness was my father’s fault. His anger was the primary disease on our family unit. He always wanted us to be a sitcom kind of family, but he never understood that his volatility, anger, and impatience was what made that impossible. You cannot have the true family closeness you desire when you have made everybody afraid of you.

Fear and love are simply incompatible.

So the fact that we all felt like we had to walk on eggshells around him certainly didn’t help. That is the sort of thing that makes it nearly impossible to relax enough to let your hair down and bond with people.

In theory, shared adversity brings people together, but in our case, it drove us apart.

But I don’t think it is all my father’s fault. My mother is a very sweet and kind woman, but there is also a certain chill to her as well. She is a highly intellectual person, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that all her kids turned out that way too. We are all eggheads of various species of egg.

Also, just be being as sensitive as she was, she too kept us on eggshells a bit because we didn’t want to upset her. This was nowhere near as dire a thing as trying (in vain) to keep my father happy, but I think we all kept negative things away from her for fear of hurting her.

So we could not exactly come to her to talk about bad things happening in our lives. It would only upset her. From my current point of view, I can see that while it might of upset her, she probably would have been quite happy to be a part of our lives.

At least that is how I would feel if I was her, and I am a lot like her in many many ways.

Well, that is my shovelful of snow for today, folks. Forecast calls for more tomorrow.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

Tonight, we take a break from the grinding angst to talk about brain science.

This starts with a story. Once upon a time, there was a sweet, kind, pious, very conservative woman with Parkinson’s Disease. (I know doctors don’t think this way, but I would not want a disease named after me. Then people will be cursing your name every time someone gets it!)

Her Parkinson’s was quite severe, and nothing seemed to help much until her doctor put her on a drug called Elect (citation needed) that was very good at keeping her symptoms under control.

But then one day, she was passing a casino and felt the strange urge to go in. This is a woman who was raised to think that gambling was a sin, and yet she went into the casino, put a quarter into a slot machine, and was instantly hooked.

And when I say hooked, I mean she quickly spiraled into a full blown gambling addict. She estimates she blew through around $300,000 total, a quarter at a time. She stole from friends, lied to people, stole away from family events to go gamble, and did all the other things that a desperate addict does when the addiction has hollowed them out and all they care about is the next fix. The addiction becomes more important than family, morality, religion, you name it. Everything in the addict’s life is twisted to serve the addiction.

That is part of what makes addiction so devastating. It brings a kind of deadly simplicity to life. It is like being devoted to a very demanding but rewarding religion. The addiction is your god, and all you have to do to be happy is to serve it. No more life decisions, no more searching for meaning, no more wondering what to do with yourself, no more pesky complicated freedom.

Life becomes so very, very simple. I can well imagine how hard it would be to break away from that.

Anyhow, our protagonist hit rock bottom and was quite miserable. She hated herself for what she had become. She was in the same pickle as an addicted. And she kept saying that it was as though she couldn’t help herself.

Her saviour arrived in an unusual form : a new drug that, instead of suppressing the symptoms, acted like the missing dopamine from the woman’s brain.

See, Parkinson’s burns out certain dopamine secreting cells in the brain, and so one way of treating it is by giving the patient a dopamine boost via medication and thus correcting the low dopamine level that causes.

That is, incidentally, what Doctor Oliver Sacks, as played by Robin Williams, was trying to do in Awakenings.

And so what happened when our poor protagonist switched to the new drug?

Her desire to gamble evaporated. Gone like it had never been there in the first place. She went from hardcore addict at the end of her rope to stone cold sober and sane and all it took was a medication swap.

What was happening in the lady’s brain was that her brain had someone figured out that the gambler’s rush, otherwise known as the dopamine release we get from gambling, was just the thing to bring her dopamine levels back up to normal.

All that gambling was, like all addiction, just a form of self-medication. When our dopamine levels are too low, the brain switches into a kind of emergency mode and forces us to focus only on correcting it. And that was fine in the state of nature, because the only way we could get that kick would be to go do something biologically advantageous, like eat, or hunt, or have sex, or even take a bath in the river.

Our instincts matched out environment and while I am sure that system still broke down sometimes, by and large, following our instincts reliably led to both the things we needed to do to survive and propagate the species and the dopamine release needed to keep us on an even keel.

Then we had to go and invent civilization, and with that came the leisure time to focus in on maximizing the reward we got from all our favorite things. We invented cooking and made our food more rewarding. We got really good at hunting, and made that both more rewarding and more successful. We invented all kinds of new ways to have sex and make that more fun too.

And we found that certain plants could give that reward center of the brain a right good kick, and so we could get that dopamine high without having to do anything.

That, presumably, was the birth of addiction as we know it today. When the basic things become extremely rewarding, our brains naively rewires itself around this wonderful new source of reward.

Which would make sense in the wild. But not in town.

So maybe one primitive ancestor ended up addicted to eating and became the first fat person (remember, every fat person is a food addict). Another got really into the hunting and became a wild man who disappeared into the forest and never returned. A third never, ever wanted to leave the sex cave and was always “on the make” like a modern sex addict.

And others were content to just sit around chewing the lotus leaf all day. It’s a wonder our species survived.

The more I look at this issue, the more convinced I become that dopamine is not simply A reward, it is THE reward. Everything we find enjoyable is just another way to get our brains to release that sweet, sweet dopamine. From the next fix of a hardcore junkie to the simple pleasure one takes in one’s morning tea, it is all about the dopamine.

It’s an alienating but also liberating thought : every action taken by every human being who has ever lived was just one more try to get the same chemical out of our stingy brains.

That’s all from me for now, folks! Seeya tomorrow.