Compliments (a dialogue)

Thanks for the compliments, Jeremy. I think very highly of you and I feel you would be even better if you took Xanax or something else like that. In my opinion, great men need significant therapies, or else they have shortcomings. I want to help you succeed in all your ambitions. Yours, ABN ---------- I see this as part of an old and tiresome dialectic. It almost makes me more reluctant to confide in you aspects of my life knowing that you will turn moralist and weigh in with the entire pharmaceutical lobby on your side. But here I go, falling for your bait: Consider the possibility that the drive towards medication is itself a SYMPTOM of mental illness. Perhaps the entire field of psychiatry is quackery - after all, Freud was a quack; he made many absurd assertions completely un-backed by anything remotely resembling scientific evidence. It's maybe based on a false premise - the idea that men can specialize in other men's minds and cure their minds; minds are too complicated for people to understand, no matter how bright sounding and erudite (Freud). Yes, medication may help some people, but what about normal people? That has been the crux of the SSRI debate. A literary person would not dismiss a whole panoply of emotions derived from legitimate feeling as sickness and so I can't believe you hold your views with any weight of conviction. Sex is currency. It doesn't just sell; it moves. You think I would be healthier and more accomplished if I were to repress my primary motivating power completely with the help of drugs? Surely not. When I was working I was not ejaculating so much but I was masturbating because I felt that was an important thing to keep up - it was important for me not to allow myself to become de-sexed and thus a drone. ----------That was a great response with lots of food for thought and many things to respond to. Part of what I was responding to was your statement that you wish to experience failure, the bigger the better, for failure is where learning takes place, as you say. Well, Jeremy, you can change the subject as much as you want, but I don't think you need to set your expectations that way. I believe that one achieves greatness if one expects greatness from oneself. Perhaps you may write me off as an old-fashioned positivist, but I tell you that was not always my outlook. At an earlier stage of my life I was content with living a life of missed opportunities to the point where I made a sacrament of being the last of the true (romantic) believers, to turn a phrase. Are you the last of the Noirists ? By the way, I am happy to hear of your experience with the de-sexualization and the accompanying alienation that is derived from the workaday world. I, for one, am very thankful I don't have to deal with that anymore. -----------Ironic you would say that. I was merely talking about not being so risk-averse that I'm afraid to aspire to success in the marketplace - in response to you suggesting I should sedate myself and opt out of any attempt to establish myself there, essentially. ----------Are you willfully being dishonest ? I merely suggested that a mood-stabilizer would lead you to greater successes in life, rather than the failures you have preordained. You know, if you took a pill like Xanax it would have a tranquilizing effect on you and mellow you out so that you wouldn't get over-excited in the morning and masturbate. I'm not saying that is bad to do but, in my opinion, too much self-involvement makes it difficult for life to happen as you would like it to. I take Risperdal, a medication which as Carol Librett, my therapist in Duxbury MA says, is an antipsychotic which has the effect of both a mood-stabilizer and a tranquilizer. I am proud to say that beginning at age 40, when I began taking 4 mg of Risperdal twice daily, my life has become wonderful. My 41st year was even better than the previous year, perhaps 42 will bring me even greater joy? One can only hope. (Please note that I don't think you need an antipsychotic, as you obviously do not have schizophrenia. I can only avow that taking a mild tranquilizer has allowed me to be the man I wanted to be. As Maxim Gorky says in his Diary, "Now I can begin to live quietly, to study, to write!" I don't have the ambition to write more than emails but now I have such great interest in writing and, more importantly, my mind is settled. I am able to apply myself to the task at hand, rather than being controlled by a powerful fantasy of who I might be. That's what I wish for you, too.) ----------There was a young African American named Shekirah who started working at Wendy's. She was only 16 or 17 and apparently, despite the differing spelling, she was named after Shakira. I was very attracted to her and thought she was very classy but I was amused/bemused to find that her reading level hadn't gotten past Goosebumps and Junie B. Jones. That's what she brought up when I asked what she likes to read. Despite that, I thought she was extremely classy and pleasant to be around and sensible somehow. I always wanted to bring her a real novel to read like Jane Eyre or Watership Down or The Shining. Maybe all three. If James is still working at Wendy's I should send all three with him to give her... // She seemed like she wanted to use me as a gateway to the real world. But I can't take that personally: I think 17 year olds are really open to the world in a way that no other people are. After 17, most get closed back off to it... // When I was around Shekirah, I always thought about how physically compatible I thought she and I would be. // She wasn't really the female co-worker I was most attracted to at Wendy's though. That honor would fall to Carmen (one of the three Carmens who worked there): She really liked me a lot and that's probably why I began to like her. She wasn't really my type, I didn't think, reminded me of a cousin I wasn't attracted to, but the more I looked at her, the more attracted I became with her - she just had an intelligence and sense of humor and I couldn't find any fault in her looks. I think Carmen was married and that was my stumbling block. I know she had a couple kids. // There was also a blonde customer with two girls who came in every now and then. // The hardest part about quitting Wendy's was leaving behind these sorts of females but finally I had to tell myself - that's not a good enough reason to keep working at Wendy's - so you can explore possible relationships with women who happen to work there or patronize the store. If that's my only reason for staying there, I'm falling into a pattern of convenience which is emphatically *not* my model for romance. ----------Do you think your sexual emotions and feelings are/were getting in the way of your working ? Back when schizophrenia was called praecox dementia they thought it was caused by an excess of sexual chemicals in the body. ----------The biggest physiological sign of schizophrenia that I've uncovered seems to be enlarged ventricles. http://www.schizophrenia.com/disease.htm#enlargedventricles ----------"War neuroses may never well be traumatic neuroses which have been facilitated by a conflict in the ego. The fact that a gross physical injury caused simultaneously by the trauma diminishes the chances that a neurosis will develop becomes intelligible if...firstly, that mechanical agitation must be recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation, and secondly, that painful illnesses exercise a powerful effect on the distribution of the libido." --Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle In my opinion, Freud is saying here in this passage (I couldn't quote the entire passage) that a traumatic brain injury like I had caused my libido to go out of control and ultimately ends in the condition known then as praecox dementia (i.e. schizophrenia). I find his words very enlightening. ----------Oy. I find them very opaque and ridiculous. You remind me of a believer in astrology seeing himself/herself so very well-defined by random sets of traits everyone has. ----------You are ignorant ! ---------- There is also a major drive for people to rationalize their actions and that's how you are probably using Freud - because it's easier than looking at ways you were interacting with your environment growing up - how did you think a Henry Miller/Howard Stern fan was going to turn out as an adult? As a chaste monk? ----------I think you are much more obsessed with sex than I am. Your desire creeps into almost every message you write, and when you're not writing to me, you're reading Nicholson Baker. ----------Haha. Of course I'm much more obsessed with sex than you are. Because you've given up on having any sex life and I have not. ---------I am disabled, you are not. ---------I think I heard once that the observation of hysteria in veterans returning from WWI helped people to take Freud's theories seriously. // Because formerly Freud observed this phenomenon - hysteria - in women and people questioned the reality of it, but they didn't question the reality of hysteria in PTSD suffering veterans returning from WWI.