Me vs. All the Liars and Cheaters in the World, Including YOU! Ch. XI - "Reborn From the Ashes" or "You Can't Get Rid of Me THAT Easily" It's been 396 days, 19 hours, 53 minutes and 50 seconds since I finished my last chapter of this series. I'll wager many of you thought you wouldn't see any more of it. Wrong again! What set me off last time was my living conditions: unemployed, starving, sleep deprived, and lack of drugs. Well, I'm not starving (yet), but I have "schizotypal paranoia" as a suitable wild card replacement. Got it in fucking spades too. Since this is my chosen method of self-therapy (petty near-megalomaniacal ranting), I'm going to look at what put me here THIS time. I'm still fucking unemployed. The damned union hasn't called me with work yet. I've got half a mind to just say "fuck it" and get a job at 7-11 again. Unfortunately, the OTHER half of my mind says "fuck that. If you get some shitty minimum wage job where you have to deal with the public all day, I'm fucking leaving." So it looks like I'll have to just sit here waiting for the damn phone to ring. What I *REALLY* need to do is finish my fuckin' CS degree so I can get a REAL job. Sleep deprived? Let me tell you about sleep deprivation. I like to think of myself as an expert on this. Going one night without sleep doesn't even COUNT on my scale anymore. I've gone two, three, and four nights without so many times I can't hardly remember 'em. I've done three nights straight three times this year without actually planning to. Back when I used actually BUY speed (yes, if I go more than one night, I gotta have it. Anyone who DOESN'T is really fuckin' whacked), I did 2-3 three-days a month. I've gone a week a dozen times. My record is sixteen and a half days (July '91), but that was a carefully planned experiment involving four people and 12 GRAMS of really good crank. Never do THAT again. This time it's a completely different situation though. I don't have any drugs. Doesn't look like I'll be seeing any anytime soon (I'll address that later). Something has gone terribly wrong. For the last four weeks I've been getting four hours of sleep a night. I can't get to sleep till four or five in the morning for some reason. And then I wake up at eight or nine every morning and can't get back to sleep. It just doesn't make any sense. I'm getting all the psychological effects, but without the any of the usual itchy-red-burning-eyes-tired-climbing-a-flight-of-stairs symptoms. Well, the symptoms DO appear occasionally, but only if I've consumed alcoholic beverages the night before. I don't like drinking anyway. It's really starting to bug me. I guess I shouldn't worry. Napoleon did the same thing for YEARS. Fucker slept 3-4 hours a day the whole time he was taking over europe. It'll be an asset if I can adjust to it. I'll get one-sixth of my lifetime that I'd normally have wasted sleeping to do with whatever I please. Lack of drugs. Despite all their bad press, I don't view illegal drugs as harmful. With the possible exception of crack, I have yet to experience any drug anywhere near as dangerous and debilitating as alcohol. Even the time I bought speed cut with PCP (NEVER buy dope from strangers, only from friends), I woke up the next day feeling fine. Can't say that about the time I drank 15 Coronas and a pint of peppermint Schnapps. Every time I've taken anything, half the time I've felt I came away with some sort of personal insight (usually nothing profound or surprising), and the other half I could at least say I've had a well-needed mental emetic. Booze makes me do things like jump out of third story windows or fall asleep riding my motorcycle on the 101 freeway. Which leads to my current problem. With the exception of that acid I dropped last month, I haven't had ANYTHING. And I really NEED something now. There's so much shit piled up in my brain that I can't get rid of it all. I'm in dire need of an industrial strength mental enema. If you could see me now, you'd agree. I'm typing this wearing nothing but OD green shorts and my steel pot infantry helmet. I've decided that it's my thinking cap. That's not the decision of a happy, well-adjusted individual. Which brings me to the Ace of Spades in this madman's royal flush. After the repeatedly-jumping-from-the-third-floor incident when I was in the army, somebody freaked and ratted on me to our platoon sergeant. Monday morning they sent me in to psych-eval for a few "tests". They gave me the ubiquitous MMPI test: a series of yes-no questions designed to measure your mental state in an absurdly numerical manner. Some of the questions are truly hilarious: "I'd be more successful if people didn't have it in for me (yes/no)", "God speaks to people in their dreams (yes/no)","People have spoken to me telepathically (yes/no)". The one that seemd like a loaded question was "I want to be a soldier (yes/no)". Not only did I want to be one, I *WAS* one. I wonder if a "yes" answer to that one adds to your "loon factor". Anyway, being a ratherobsevant fellow, I could tell which questions to answer "no" to even though the truth was "yes", lest I be pigeonholed as a nut. They mostly dealt with paranoia and personal views on the nature of reality. Even so, A few must have slipped by me. When the test came back, it told the army psychiatrist that I was manic-depressive (I coulda' told him that) and displayed some "schizotypal traits". He said "schizotypal traits" didn't indicate anything serious, just that my perception of reality was "a little different" than everyone elses. Later, when I did some looking into the MMPI, I realized that if I had answered all the question truthfully, it would have come back with some level of "schizotypal paranoia". Big-time paranoid schizophrenics have little, if any, ties to the real world. I wasn't THAT bad. I would have been classified as "functional", meaning I'd worked out ways of reconciling my own twisted views of reality with the "real" reality. The psych-eval turned out to be a good thing. It served as a wake-up call, telling me I better get a grip. So I quit drinking and voila! The audio/visual hallucinations stopped. They've returned though. So has the paranoia. It's not the "classic" paranoia where you think everyone is literally plotting against you. It's a more subtle variety where I think people are looking at me and thinking bad things about me. It's strange, because I know logically that it's unlikely that they're giving me any more than a passing glance, but I'm absolutely unable to shake the paranoid reaction. It's not true that crazy people don't know they're crazy. They know. They just don't realize how crazy they are. It's a weird feeling to understand the nature of your psychological reactions in a scientific context, but to still be unable to control them. With any luck, I'll get a job and this nonsense will stop. Coming soon: MvAtLaCitW,IY! Ch. 12: "Why I'm better than YOU!"