Frustraturbation

I had begun writing a list of trivial things that annoy me (for no good reason) because that is the sort of person I am.

1. Parsley.
2. Asymmetry.
3. Mustaches.
4. Red hair.
5. Loose collars.
6. Loose ties.
7. Loose morals.
8. Loose faucets.

I was still calm. I wanted to dissect a little deeper into my shallowness. I started a new list.

1. Surgeons.
2. 'Sontimeter.'
3. Starting sentences with 'basically.'
4. 'Aks.'
5. Uninformed use of vernacular.

A little twitch started in my right little finger. This normally happens when I get worked up, drink coffee, or play a video game that I don't like just to reassert my juvenile masculinity and check that my testosterone still works.

I wanted more than just a twitch. I wanted sweat, palpitations, heartburn, and aching tension in my shoulders and lower back. I wanted neurological mayhem, tsunamis of dopamine ravaging my basal nuclei, inappropriately frantic and useless messages telling my brain to do inappropriately frantic and useless things with my muscles. And pain.

And so there came into being a new list. A terrible list. A list to end all lists, to line up the other lists against a wall and shoot them in the head.

1. Irresponsibly executed linguistic maneuvers--these include poor syntax, inappropriate idioms, and incorrect use of plural forms when the singular is intended and vice versa.

What started out as item #1, 'irresponsibly executed linguistic maneuvers,' quickly ballooned into a worryingly elitist tirade against the marginally educated masses who take language for granted:

As untrained as novice swordsmen, they brandish diction clumsily and with disregard for its sharp edges, its elegance, and the potential power it affords when executed with even just moderate skill.

These are the people who stir immiscible metaphors together like drunken chefs. They stagger around their prose like saturated winoes, trying to bring one end of an idiom towards the other and missing their mark completely. Instead of respecting the gravity of language and treading lightly but purposefully, they bumptiously bang words together like cavemen trying to make fire by trial and mostly error.

You might be one of these people. Do you know the difference between 'He only cuts wood' and 'He cuts only wood'? Do you say 'criteria' when you mean to say 'criterion'? How about 'phenomena'--have you any idea how to properly use this word without hurting yourself? Sometimes there is one 'auditorium,' but there may also be two 'auditoria.' I'm not even going to mention 'data' and 'media,' but I just did because I am annoyed and feeling so good right now.

Do you say 'comprises of,' 'myriad of,' or 'bored of'? Do you mistake 'advise' for 'advice' (and vice versa)? Do you eat 'brussel sprouts'? Do you wait 'as time progresses'? Do you 'take a different tact'? Do you not know how to spell 'ad nauseam'? Do you do things 'as best as' you can? Do you post 'quotes'?

You might as well be dipping your quill in poop and scribbling your silly letters directly onto your underpants.

Why am I so worked up about this? It's for absolutely no reason at all, which is far more reason than I need. Frustration is at the heart of ecstasy. The doubtful anticipation of climax is the heightening of the sensorium, the hypnotic progressive blurring of whatever once distinguished bliss from pain. As emotions flurry--love, hate, anger, pleasure--they all become shadows of each other as we speed down (or up) the oily asymptotic ramp that promises everything but delivers nothing, faster and faster, slower and slower.

I'm so frustrated that I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. Oh, yes!

Oh, by the way, all of this was in an English accent.

Sometimes a phallus is just a phallus

Psychiatry is a field that makes sense in the sense that if you have any sense (in the sense that you are sensible) you will find it difficult to make any sense of it. My feeling is that there is a nearly invisible boundary between effectively mapping out the currents deep in the id and prancing about at the shallow end of the ego, unless you can't swim.

Where do you look for meaning in relationships with people? Can a label that one uses to define a relationship be simply a preemptive defense of that relationship? I mean, saying 'we're married' is clear and in any case more an apology to one's tamed and beaten demons than anything else. But what about relationships that can be approached in an accusatory way? So-called platonic relationships, for example. If you have to specifically preface a friendship with 'platonic,' then is it really platonic? Psychoanalysts make phallic balloon animals out of unsuspecting platonists. True, sometimes an apple is just an apple, but that's so uninteresting. (Even a granny smith is mildly tantalizing at best, compared to a shiny green boob with a stem that grows on trees and tastes so sourly delicious.)

Enough psychobabble. I like the stuff and appreciate it, but I'm not creative enough to whip up a la carte syllogisms around a patient and still be composed enough to fill out the invoice with a straight face. Another feature of the inpatient psychiatric experience that has struck me is the staggering degree of impairment with which some psychotic patients have to live. I don't know what I would do without reality. Well, reality is reality, and what we experience is what we experience, and it is nothing if it does not depend on the sartrean cogito's automatic comprehension of existence--the human-reality at once creating and created by the juxtaposition of l'etre and le neant.

Saying that kind of crap without smoking a cigarette just looks and sounds stupid and I have the most delicate pink little lungs. Whether or not experience and reality are the same shouldn't make any difference to us, social interactions notwithstanding. If this is a blue ball, but I see a pair of orange galloshes, it's still my experience and its accuracy is irrelevant even though I am laughed at by my peers for stumbling around in the rain trying to balance myself on a blue ball like a clowning sad kierkegaardian lunatic full of anguish and pneumonia. So I suppose reality is not as important to me as I thought. Who's to say that I experience reality anyway except me? You can say I'm crazy but then I can say I know you are but what am I times infinity times infinity plus one squared to the power of you're stupid! In fact, I renounce reality. A bas la realite!

Alright enough of that nonsense.

Paranoia, on the other hand, is truly debilitating. Voices, hallucinations, the government melting your ice cream on purpose via satellite. So maybe reality is a good thing after all. But if my brain were forced to choose between a reality that really bites on the one hand and a Statler and Waldorf commentary trained with deadly aim on my inadequacies on the other, maybe I'd take the two grumpy old beans rather than the haldol. Of course, if I'm up in the balcony with them and they're telling me to jump off in that endearingly funny gruff heckling tone of theirs, I hope I'd reconsider or call for Dr. Bunsen's help. Yes I know he's a PhD, but who else am I going to call, the green frog? That's crazy.

Speaking of haldol, my tic has been out of control over the past few days and my neck, shoulder, and wrist are quite sore. Antipsychotics are good for mental psychosis as well as somatic psychosis but oh so bad for your liver.

Paradoxically, however, this is a sentence for which the word 'paradoxically' was completely unnecessary. But what discussion of psychiatry--no matter how half-baked--is complete without 'paradoxically'? In my next post, my judgement may improve but I will always lack insight.