Yo, people. So it’s come to my attention that most readers enjoy stories about cute dogs that miraculously end up saving their owners from tragedy. Don’t worry about how I know this. I just do. Accept that I know it, and then move on: understand that I have no pleasant stories about doggies to share with you. Instead I have a crystal ball, and two uncanny psychoanalytical spiels as to why certain mental deformities (or blessings, however you look at them) come into being, or at the very least, how they look.
Deformity #1: Addiction
It is common knowledge that the addict gene can be passed down from parent to child. Consider all those horror stories you hear about babies born hooked on crack because their mother had plunged the needle clean into her vein during pregnancy. Those stories are not fables. But then the term addict does not always have to mean ‘drugs’. After all, it is the ‘addict trait’ that is passed down, not the particular taste for narcotics. My parents provide a perfect example. For the past 35-40 years my mother has gone for a run in the morning. If she has happened to miss her daily run she becomes unpleasant, anxious, quick-tempered, and generally stale. She ‘needs’ that morning run to relieve her of her addiction. In other words, for an addict, pleasure derives from relief, and it is up to the individual to decide how they want to transpose their addiction into tangible circumstances. Now consider my father. For the past 35-40 years (this time frame ring a bell?) my father has compulsively carried on with his work for General Motors, as an engineering manager. You mightn’t say he ‘loves’ his job (surely he loves aspects of it), although he definitely cannot do without it. If it is not his work at GM, it is a household chore, a financial quandary: a problem to be solved. In brief, my father is addicted to problem solving. He rarely experiences true relief (which we’ve also established as pleasure) unless he is in the process of solving a problem.
Deformity #2: Schizophrenia
If I were a painter like this dude Jimmy Chiale I know, I would probably paint the physical manifestation of schizophrenia, which I recently discovered sitting on the 28th floor balcony of a friend’s apartment building downtown. I looked up towards the sky — and between prophesies of the empire around me crumbling at my feet — I understood for the first time what it truly means to have two competing voices going at it in your psyche. It’s like — physically that is — two strong fists going at it, trying to push the other into submission. In other words, two fists waging battle against each other, two fists fighting for supremacy of the brain, for control. Which can be a scary thought when you consider that one of these fists is typically the fist of the devil, and the other the fist of God. What happens if the fist of the devil wins the tug of war, defeats God in this arm-wrestle for your soul?
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Whelp, now that I’ve gotten that out, and fed my own absurd hunger for relief, for satisfaction — my addiction to writing — I’m going to head on over to Chapters. I’ve got a lead on some new material — some new junk — to settle my fix for the rest of the weekend. After all, isn’t that what research really is? The pursuit of the next greatest fix?