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• RT @eddiepepitone: Zagat's guide: best mental institution is Creedmore. Their chicken a la king will drive you nuts-great game room as well. #

As part of a family discussion, my mom names the three members of our extended family whom she considers to be nuts.

My sister adds two more people to the list, including my dad.

“No, Dad is not nuts,” my mom says, “although he gets along well with the nuts.”

My dad says to me, “That’s the best compliment I’ve ever had from this family.”

“That you’re not nuts?” I ask.

“That’s right.”

• Carrie Fisher on her core audience: Alcoholics, addicts, gay (both sexes), mentally ill & people named Erica – http://twurl.nl/hvswww #
• You know my motto: I never metacognitive I didn’t like. #
• Temps are soaring in the OC. Treated myself to an ice-cold lemonade at lunch… #
• @NoReinsGirl That’s why I stockpile rum, coke and ice. Emergency preparedness! in reply to NoReinsGirl #

Carrie Fisher on her core audience:

Alcoholics, addicts, gay (both sexes), mentally ill & people named Erica……

I had an office visit with my doctor, who is also my wife’s doctor . . .

We always spend a few minutes talking about my wife, who, to use the medical terminology, is “really crazy.”

“She is really crazy,” the doctor says. “I don’t know how you keep your sanity. You always seem so calm. I bow to you.” And she stretches both arms out and actually bows.

I’m glad someone is able to get a laugh out of it.

Then she refills my Paxil prescription so I can make it through the next six months . . .

Diagonal Jaywalkers

I don’t mind if you want to cut across the middle of the road. I do that myself.

But when I do it, I take a straight line perpendicular to the street and I walk briskly, maybe even jog a little bit. I don’t take a diagonal path into oncoming traffic and refuse to speed up when I see a car coming.

Why do I not do it that way, you ask?

Two reasons:

1. The person driving the car may not be paying attention and may run me over and kill me.
2. The person driving the car may be a crazy person looking to run over anybody who gets in his way. YOU DON’T THINK SO?! There’s a lot of nuts out there! Read the news! I swear to god, some days I feel like I’m just hanging on by a thread myself.

Think about that the next time you try to walk in front of my car.

One of our exercises in Crucial Conversations training was to “think of a person who is really frustrating to work with,” and to describe in writing a recent interaction with that person in terms of what was actually said, and what you were thinking or feeling but didn’t say.

My responses included the following:

What I Actually Said

This project presents some unique challenges.

What I Didn’t Say

I have a lot of experience managing IT projects, but not in running a day care center or a mental institution, which is what this project requires.

What I Actually Said

That’s not quite the way I would have phrased it.

What I Didn’t Say

Everyone else in these meetings seems to feel constrained by a sense of professionalism and decency that you appear not to possess.

One of my colleagues at our table of four claimed that based on those responses, she could identify the person I was writing about.

Since she and I and the person in question have never worked on anything together, I said she couldn’t, but much to my amazement, she did.

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Paul Davis, a singer and songwriter whose soft rock hit “I Go Crazy” stayed on the charts for months after its release in 1977, died Tuesday. He was 60.

— CNN.com

That’s disappointing.

Not the fact that he died, because who cares, really, but the fact that he didn’t actually go crazy and kill himself in some bizarre fashion . . .

On second thought, we have a family member who perceives things that cannot be seen, so #7 may be more indicative of mental illness than enlightenment . . .

Slate has some advice.

Here’s how it’s done at USC.

Fight On!

More details are emerging on the crazy naked woman with a gun case . . .

Not surprisingly, despite a neighbor’s assertion that Kevin and Joni Park “were not violent or crazy,” it turns out that they were in fact violent and crazy.

Continue reading OK, So They Were Violent and Crazy

A friend of a friend has started dating a guy with a history of mental problems, including an in-patient hospitalization.

That should be exciting.

Some guys are boring. Me, for example. My wife tells me all the time how boring I am . . .

I remember a few years ago, a woman came over to clean our house — a white woman, which is unusual in Southern California. She was telling my wife that her alcoholic ex-husband was in jail, as a result of which, she wasn’t getting any financial support from him and had to take up house cleaning to make some money.

Now that’s excitement! You hook up with a guy who you don’t know if or when he’s going to be home, how drunk he’s going to be when he gets there . . . maybe he’ll end up in jail and you can spend your life cleaning other people’s toilets to keep your head and your kids’ heads above water.

Me on the other hand — like I said, I’m boring. I roll my ass out of bed every morning in a very predictable manner and head off to work. I come home directly afterwards without stopping off at any of the local watering holes. I provide a predictable income stream. On evenings and weekends, I’m available for family activities.

So I’m boring, but I like to think of myself as boring in a good way. Boring is not always bad, and exciting is not always good, particularly if it involves being institutionalized in some fashion . . .

Somewhere at the top of the Hundred Acre Wood a little boy and his bear play. On the surface it is an innocent world, but on closer examination by our group of experts we find a forest where neurodevelopmental and psychosocial problems go unrecognized and untreated.

— “Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne”

The authors recommend, for example, that Winnie-the-Pooh be medicated for ADHD, inattentive subtype:

I take a
PILL-tiddley pom
It keeps me
STILL-tiddley pom,
It keeps me
STILL-tiddley pom
Not
fiddling.

Additional diagnoses and treatments are offered for Pooh’s fellow forest denizens, most of whom meet DSM-IV criteria for serious mental disorders.

My son’s on spring break and my wife — a moderately functional paranoid schizophrenic — is taking a day off to spend some time with him.

Continue reading Notes from the Asylum

1. Is it thrilling?
2. Is it a game I can win?
3. Does it hurt others?

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are very naughty — much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority . . . This is called moral influence . . .

— Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

One of the moms from my son’s hockey team tells me that there’s too much “silliness” on the team, that the kids need to prepare for games with a little more seriousness.

Continue reading Sports Parents Are Ruining the World

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.

— Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. Epistle i. Line 95

Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy.

— Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, chap. v. 2

My wife is schizophrenic. She’s mostly functional, but she’s crazy.

I always feel like someday things are going to get better, even though they never do.

Does that make me an optimist?

My boy is doing a school report on Patrick Henry. Something I didn’t know about Patrick Henry is that his wife went insane in 1771 and was subsequently kept in a straitjacket in the basement of the family home.

Continue reading Patrick Henry’s Crazy Wife in the Basement

‘There are forces, Lucius, infinitely more powerful than reason and science.’

‘Which?’

‘Ignorance and madness.’

— Anatole France, Thaïs

Abandoned buildings give me a weird feeling. Where are the people? Where’d they go?

• Dark Passage
• Modern Ruins Photographic Essays
• New England Ruins

Continue reading Abandoned