.<\/em> \u201cBut his alters did have penetration of Michael.\u201d<\/p>\nLockhart had almost no experience with these mental disorders. But his journalistic reflex and friendship with Dodd convinced him to forge ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t claim to know the intricacies of DID,\u201d Lockhart says. \u201cI\u2019ve read some books on it. But one thing I didn\u2019t want to do is come off as saying, \u2018I know this, or that, or how it works.\u2019 We were clumsy friends trying to figure things out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Voice recorder and fishing pole in hand, Lockhart began cataloging Dodd\u2019s story. He knew that their time together would be best spent in the wilderness, \u201cbecause that\u2019s where Michael kind of calms down,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Michael\u2019s alters were significantly less relaxed. A bevy of vitriol, much of it directed at Seattle, comes through in their voices.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are the goals of anyone who lives in America?\u201d asks MacGregor, the name of a right-wing alter that Dodd \u201cmeets\u201d at a court-mandated, Aberdeen-area therapy session. \u201cAll we want is not to be denigrated or stepped on,\u201d he continues. \u201cHow about this: my goal is to eat a Big Mac, smoke a cigarette, and not recycle a single (expletive) soup can without being classified as mentally incompetent by some yoga-practicing, politically correct academic snot (expletive) in Seattle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even when Dodd is speaking as himself, both he and Lockhart, having grown up in areas of industrial decline around Olympia, come off as hyperaware, even jilted, about the geographical distance between their respective upbringings and the cultural American elite. \u201cThat just comes with growing up in Southwest Washington,\u201d says Lockhart.<\/p>\n
But if Lockhart has an aggrieved spin to his journalism, the chip on alter John Knowles\u2019 shoulder is of another magnitude. He believes that global elites have teamed up, purposefully and maliciously, to torture the postindustrial American underclass.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Pusher,\u2019\u201d Knowles says to Lockhart, pointing out pedestrians as they drive around Aberdeen and Hoquiam after dark. \u201c\u2018Tweaker,\u2019 \u2018bum,’ \u2018skin popper,\u2019 \u2018wino,\u2019 \u2018zombie,\u2019 \u2018drifter,\u2019 \u2018screamer.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter a while,\u201d writes Lockhart, \u201chis pronouncements took on the cadence of some strange, dystopian language, as if he were reading an abstract poem comprised of iambic words for the damned.\u201d<\/p>\n
Encountering a \u201cSubaru couple\u201d near the Hoh Rain Forest, Knowles says he \u201ccan just imagine them racing back to their Queen Anne home, risking the inconvenience of running out of gas on some lonely state highway to avoid their condescending preconceptions of small-town America. Isn\u2019t it just like those clever Seattle people to turn every journey, every stopover, into a judgement on the places and people they encounter?\u201d<\/p>\n
Lockhart withholds a verdict on Dodd\u2019s psychological diagnoses and Knowles\u2019 MAGA leanings. His role in the story is, first and foremost, to support his struggling friend. \u201cI seemed to need this as much as he did,\u201d Lockhart recognized midway through his project.<\/p>\n
Most of the hot-button political talking points in the book can be found across social and national media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce you saw yourself as a victim,\u201d writes Lockhart, \u201cit was that much easier to embrace \u2026 things that confounded fantasy with memory. And victimhood was more seductive than ever these days. People marketed it, preached it, made a living out of it, conquered others and garnered power and influence from it. The culture of complaint was big business.\u201d<\/p>\n
Knowles\u2019 victim complex ultimately leads Dodd, in the imaginary company of multiple alters, to Olympia on that day that would soon enter the American lexicon.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jan. 6 isn\u2019t commonly framed in terms of the country\u2019s class divide. Lockhart argues that it should be. \u201cIt\u2019s there for a reason,\u201d he says of the rural-urban schism class divide at the heart of his book. At the same time, he doesn\u2019t see it as inherently negative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s funny, because I grew up here, went to UW and all that stuff,\u201d Lockhart says. \u201cBut as I get older, I\u2019m always going to Eastern Washington. We need each other. Eastern Washington, Western Washington, rural, urban. It\u2019s easy to look at them as divisive. But there\u2019s a synergy there. It really works when it works.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Author Chris Lockhart was fishing in the Touchet River near Walla Walla several years ago when a childhood friend called out of the blue.\u00a0 This friend was Michael Dodd (a pseudonym used by Lockhart to protect Dodd\u2019s identity), an avid outdoorsman and Afghanistan war veteran who had been committed to the state mental health system […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2515591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2515590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Olympia-authors-new-book-follows-a-man-and-his-alternate.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2515590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2515592,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515590\/revisions\/2515592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2515591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2515590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2515590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2515590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}