Saturday, September 8, 2012

memoirs of a potential phsychopath



i watched this video last night and if ever i needed a reason for flying below the radar, this is it. freud didn't take in europe until everybody on the continent lost their social identity. in america he took off like gangbusters, since you couldn't figure out who and what your neighbors were in this free-floating society. not only that, i myself spent thousands on therapy, trying to identify myself. an interesting process, yet it never freed me from suicidal impulses. that took prozac. 

in his futuristic novel a philosophical investigation: a novel philip kerr poses the conjecture: a few years from now potential psychopathic killers can be spotted long before they do anything, simply through psychological testing. problem is, one guy gets hold of the secret files and starts killing those so identified, in order that the world may be saved from them. remember the detective in little abner who shot people before they could eat the poisoned beans, in order to save them? the comic strip way too prophetic,  for now that's what's done. 

true, the united states has always had trouble with crowd-control, the civil war a monumental example, or the riots of the sixties. in my coast guard reserve unit, alameda, california, were policemen on the front lines of anti-war demonstrations in oakland. they showed us films and expressed their fear of the mob. luckily, a no-draft military and loading students with debt prevents such a thing from happening again. 

actually, what i wanted to reveal much more personal. besides the prozac, i take welbutrin. the first acts on seritonin and the second on dopamine, which keeps you interested in the world, learning, searching and so on. for better or worse, i tried doubling the dose of welbutrin, and boy, did something start stealing over me, a cold and brutal anger. i could feel myself becoming the unfeeling manager of a concentration camp. chemicals can knock me for a loop, and i keep thinking of the people driven to suicide in ingmar bergmann's the serpent's egg, by experiments in 1920's germany. 

my body can change dramatically. stress. lack of food. all of it alters the blood and brain. so, i too, can be a lot of things. a lolly-gagging drunk, a happy stoner, a bitter old man. watch those chemicals, kid, they're way more important than talking psychology.