Story of 8
“The teenager of the new generation grew up in a time of nerves. Newspapers screaming headlines of race riots, revolution, earthquakes. And back of it all: speed! Everyone rushing nowhere to get nowhere for no reason. Fast planes, fast cars. It’s a fast life, Inspector. It’s a whirlpool of speed and confusion and all these kids are caught right in the middle of it.”
LATE NIGHT, AUDIO-VIDEO HALLUCINATIONS!
- Individual Psychological/Neurological Reactions to films produced by George Weiss (1948-1956)
- Final Report for the Systems Neuroscience of Psychopathology Lab at Harvard University
- Subject arrived at Harvard University on October 9th, 2018 to begin the experiment. Subject is a male, 50 years of age and self-described, “social outcast”. Years of social and physical anhedonia have led to frequent psychotic breaks associated with schizophrenia, LSD intoxication and chronic alcoholism.
- We began with functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) of subject while watching The Devil’s Sleep (1949) aka Hopped Up, written and directed by Merle Connell, starring Lita Grey Chaplin, William Thomason and Timothy Farrell.
- Subject was scanned on a 3Tesla Siemens TimTrio at Harvard University. Echoplanar image (EPI) acquisition parameters: 40 oblique-axial slices with 3 X 3 X 3 mm isotropic voxels; time repetition (TR) = 2,560 ms. Data was processed and analyzed with SPM8.
In the Patient’s Own Words:
So, my surgery is scheduled for next week and I’m getting sillier (and stupider) as the days dart by. I really shouldn’t be drinking. In fact, I was warned by flare gun not to drink. Dr. Naguib (carrying Jupiter’s gravity) came into the room, said something abrupt about Vikings and then pulled a cartoonish-looking rubber gun from a hidden holster and fired it over my head. It went off with a shoof! and a bang! (italics mine) and sparks stuttered and winked before me and the hospital room filled with fluttering colored afterspots and smoke that smelled like singed hair.
“Are we clear?” said Dr. Naguib. “This procedure may save your life, however, I’d prefer it if you did not continue to throw it away.”
I bite my smile and drink my beer. I tend to drink one after another. As soon as the cold, flowering pounce cuts into my guts, my brain starts in on me. If I were still connected to the fMRI at Harvard, the machine would be emitting carnival calliope music right about now.
Smoke Dope/Kill Pigs/Die High. Kids in my elementary school used to etch those words with punishing cuts of a switchblade into their pallid little limbs. Self-loathing and defiance united in exposed bloodstreams. Ah, where are they now? Are the scars still legible? Had they whittled their limbs to thin little meat sticks? I was never a scarification guy.
My poor empty stomach accepts the beer with only minor squalling—a low gurgling in my guts. I’m not going to lose any precious liquid to the toilet or the floor. The sounds that my struggling organs produce mimic the loud sounds of my 1950s plumbing. A syncopated symphony of slosh and slop. Thank you. No sweat, it’s what I’m here for. I drink.
I open my wallet and remove a business card with the name of a counseling service: Evergreen Mental Health Systems. The social worker who looked like Edie McClurg gave it to me. Insisted it into my hand. “They can help you,” she’d told me. “Even if it’s just to provide a sympathetic ear to shoot the breeze with…”
I scale the card across the room, aiming for my haunted postcards.
I have haunted postcards.
I’d crashed the first can of comfort into my brain. “Get up there, get in. Do your job,” I tell it. I open a second can and sip it. Like I said, one after the other.
And then I smell the mailman; a mix of rain on cardboard, corn chips and muffler exhaust. I climb to my feet and grope and weave to the window to look out at him.
A sudden tearing ache assails me and a split in the fragile fabric of reality occurs. I have a disorder that is part Involuntary Bilocation and part Possession. It’s another of my chronic maladies. There I am in the window but I’m also Dave the Mailman. I’m that weirdo again. A mile of fractured geometry melts and pours between us. It’s like looking through a soft, alive kaleidoscope and I pull out my keys and open the door to the building’s mailboxes—twenty-five slots in all. I, me, Dave. It’s cold and I’m hungry for lunch. The Fritos I’d eaten have triggered an anxious appetite. I look up again. He’s still there, looking down at me as I sort through the mail, filing it into the numbered openings. I can see, even from up here, that the junk mail is garish and loud—store flyers and such. Dave the Mailman looks up at me and the little weirdo (me) ducks away from the window as if afraid of being seen. I think I saw me. I wonder what would happen if I went outside and met him (and me he). What would pass between our eyes? We’d experience some kind of metaphysical vertigo no doubt. I finish filing the mail and look up. The little weirdo is back in the window, looking down at me. I wave and wave back and then I’m getting back in my truck and I’m afraid to get the mail. I know it will bring bad news. Let it age a while… I start watching Paris After Midnite, (1950) produced by George Weiss, directed by Robert C. Derterno starring Tempest Storm and Timothy Farrell.
There’s that carnival music again.
I notice the Evergreen Counseling card on the floor and retrieve it. My first instinct is to tear it up, but wait, maybe I’m being too hasty. Why flatly dismiss the idea? Maybe they could prescribe some promising balm to plug the holes in my brain. Or bore new ones. I’ve always wanted a trepanation. But I’m worried about trusting a psychologist; if I start talking I might not stop and my cover would be blown. My secrets may escape. People will see me.
Hmp.
Oh well, I’ll dope it out later. Right now I have drinking to do. I pound the can-in-progress, toss the empty over my shoulder and then open another. My stomach is as secure as a Swiss bank vault. A loud belch echoes around my apartment. I detect a lingering whisper of corn chips.
Y’know, Paris After Midnite is a great fucking movie. So fucking great. I love that fucking movie. It’s so weird. I don’t just fuggin like it, I fuggin loooooove it…
…..not like….
,fihhit = < fuggit…
Crumbling Asphalt 