Physician, Commit Thyself

Part 30 of 30 -- Psycho Squad

As time goes on, long after my day, when better Psycho Squads are made, I’ll be there, my spirit pressed against the grindstone and sparking like mad. The current generation always builds on what came before. And so it shall always be, until everyone's normal.

Now I'm an old man and I’ve seen a lot of changes. For the most part the changes have been for the better. When I first started, we didn’t know much, we were feeling our way. They wanted to train us “right,” according to the standards of the time. But we were young and brash and said we could do it. We tried, really tried, and it wasn’t always a big success, with the wild massacres of the late ‘70s inflaming things, to say the least. Now it's all ancient history. Because we charted a new course, hating with a purple passion our banning by the infernal "responsible authorities." We had to take a different path if we wanted to eat...

Yes, a lot of guys were skittish and acted tough; they fell by the wayside. Some true talents were among them, too, who could’ve helped advance the Psycho Squad movement. But they wilted like violets, proving themselves namby pamby weak-willed nothings, always there when the going was easy but nowhere to be found when people started dying: “Aggh! There goes another one!” Which to me is when you need them the most. “Suture this man’s wounds! Set that bone! We’re dying here, people! Where are you going?! You can’t leave us! I don't care if drinks are half-priced! They’re locked in the bathroom with a box of matches and enough gasoline to ignite World War III!” ... You realize I'm not talking about patients, that was the staff...

But today is not a day for looking back but ahead, and having the same can-do spirit that made us pick up the loose pieces and march forward. Which, if memory serves, some loudmouths said couldn’t be done. I will be the first to admit, I almost believed the naysayers. Because, really, what'd I know? I was new, still fairly innocent in the ways of the world and personally had some tough times. Now I've had decades to reflect on the mission, but then I wavered. And just before I was lost forever on the naysayers’ path, I found my way back. Big thanks to Cindy Lou S___ for taking me in that night, for comforting me, stroking my hair, etc., and humpa humpa, the dawn broke.

Where have the years gone? Into service, that’s where! We've seen the whole mental hospital scene. County facilities for the mentally wayward. And a relatively recent emphasis on meds to calm and control. I was vehemently against it at first but they subdued me and thereby convinced me, “Yes, this works.” And now I have several prescriptions of my own, so, to be absolutely blunt, I’m chillin’, dude … You still here? Hope you can read these chicken scratches; I can barely read them myself, but hey… I’m OK, you’re OK, no one reads this far anyway. I could say anything or puke all over the place and it’d be all the same...

You know, I haven’t seen a psycho in a choke-hold in 20 years! The old ways have passed. Which was indeed fairly sad, but effective. Cuffed to a nightstand, turn the TV way up, and except for the noise everything was under perfect control. Of course you wouldn’t try that working on your re-cert! I mean, live dangerously if that’s your thing, just don’t tempt fate, that’s all.

She Said She Was Down to Her Last $3

There's been a rash of homicides in my town lately. I live in a quaint little burg, not exactly the murder capital of the world. The place is so small, when someone gets murdered it's still front page news. Then over the next few weeks, we're treated to every lurid detail, over and over, along with the official police statement of "No comment."

The last two or three have had a common theme. Not drugs, not a break-in, not a crime of passion. The victim had taken it upon themselves to invite the (alleged) perpetrator into their home to stay. The person was at their wit's end, it seems, casting about for somewhere to stay, for some blessed soul to say "Yes." And this very helpful person was the one.

I know something about this in my own life, even though it's very limited. Once over 40 years ago I let some guys I met hitchhiking stay overnight at my place. I even slept on the couch and gave them my bed. I slept well and didn't worry about a thing. Morning came, they got up, and left. Now, today, the same scenario would've ended with me in a pool of blood, a knife through my heart, and "PIGS" scrawled on the wall in blood, in a very gnarly font.

I believe it's still good to be helpful. If someone comes to you -- usually wild-eyed, super creepy, talking crazily, although they could be just normal-eyed, not creepy, and talking pleasantly -- wanting a place to stay, the best response is some version of "No." Along with general directions to the nearest shelter, bridge, campground, or city limits. Whatever they say about staying with you, put them off till they finally get the message. These killers are brutal.

If you invite them in, I can see how things would build over a week or so. You'd probably be quite safe the first night. They're just grateful for a place, and you're feeling pleasant. But by the end of the first week, they're busy thinking, "Why isn't this my place? I deserve more." And you're putting off a less pleasant vibe too, still being helpful but with a passive-aggressive "Why don't you leave?" tone in your voice.

He or she (and the suspects in the last two cases I know of have been women) already thinks the whole world's against them, and now they're not so happy with you. So they test you one last time. "I'm down to my last three bucks, three measly dollars!" she complains, moving the apricots sullenly in her dish before putting one in her mouth, then looking up. You don't know what to say, as you move your own apricots, having lost what little appetite you thought you had. "Well, I'm sure things will pick up," you finally say, trailing off.

OK, the whole subject is dropped. Until you have to go to the bathroom and you pointedly take your purse with you. And perhaps roll the safe out as well. I hate to say what happens next, except to say this is where you become the victim of blessed memory.

I too have the natural instinct to want to help. But these are crazy days. Without getting into a whole sociological rundown of society today -- video games, the lust for possessions, and general orneriness that demands to be sated -- I'd rather take my chance with a rabid dog, a hungry lion, or King Kong himself than one of my fellow human beings. Of course I'm personally a nice guy. If I were to stay at your house, I know you'd be safe from me. But I might not feel safe from you. I know if you said something about being down to your last three bucks I'd be gone.

Anyway, the killer strikes, then disappears, hits the road, goes somewhere else. Then it comes out in the paper. Complete with a picture of the outside of your house. Everyone's imagination is free to wonder what was going on in those four walls. Both the victim and the alleged killer walked through that very door... What else happened, we don't know. But whatever it was, it obviously wasn't very good.

The bottom line is, If you wanna help, don't! Run, don't walk! Get the hell out of there! 

A Psychotic vs. Romeo & Juliet

Editor's Note: I don't feel bad about writing this, if that's what you're thinking. What? Should I feel guilty? I'm sorry, I don't see it that way. Thank you for your kind indulgence. Editor out!

Have you ever been attracted to a girl, and say you become something of a couple, and then you're invited over to meet her parents? That happened to me once. I can still see (in my mind's eye) her father sitting in the corner, in an easy chair, reading the paper. He barely looked up at me, and whatever acknowledgement he gave of my presence was very much like a dismissing growl. Not a good experience. But at least I got out of there alive, unlike this other guy I heard of...

They had to reconstruct exactly what happened from the girl's sworn testimony. Because the boy didn't make it out. The father actually made it, but he was such a psychotic, his testimony would be worthless, sworn or not.

It was just like my situation, she took him home to meet her father. Mom apparently wasn't in the picture. As it happened, Dad was in the bathroom with the door open, right off the hallway, so she took the boy there. Dad was shaving with one of those Norelco-type electric jobs. You know the type? They're strictly no fuss, no muss...

Of course the father looked out the door askance at the boy, being sensitive to such things, meeting new people, possible boyfriends. I'd guess it'd have something to do with a house being a man's castle, but it's just as likely there was more of a personal revulsion, because, as we'll learn later, he was completely psychotic. Which can be a bad scene.

But it was the boy who started having a reaction to seeing the dad with the Norelco-like device. Which could've been a reaction based on something physical at the scene, like pheromones. I know that's common. It sounds like he sensed death. The girl said he whispered something about being worried, and she could see him sweating, like he was afraid the father might do something in despair, like cutting his wrists with the shaver.

I can only imagine what he was thinking: What chance will I have with her if I'm responsible for her father's death, him bleeding to death in a bathroom she'd never be able to use again in perfect peace? That's an entirely logical question to ask oneself. I know I wouldn't be comfortable under those circumstances, unless I really had to go.

The best thing the boy could do -- the only thing, really -- was treat her dad somewhat warily, lest he have an active psychosis thing going. It's obviously a bad combination when you have a sharp razor and an active psychosis. You'd have to think, He might fly around the room killing us all, not just himself but me and his daughter. It'd be Romeo and Juliet all over, a perfect one for one parallel.

Really, though, what is it with psychotics and weapons? They're not able to do one single other thing right in life -- cause and effect completely elude them. But there is one thing they're good at, weapons and complete destruction; that they're good at!

OK, this is where the girl's sworn testimony comes in. The boy handles the threatening situation based on something he saw on TV, where they brought in a guy's aged mother to talk him down. Going on the assumption that if the guy's psychotic, and not good at any cause and effect sequence apart from weapons, it would stand to reason that portraying his mother might do the trick.

So the boy whispers to the girl, "What's your paternal grandmother's first name? "Grandma?" "No, her actual name." "Wilma."

"Hello, sonny, I'm your old mother Wilma. I want you to listen to me and behave," and he goes on with that line of thinking, very simple and direct instructions or commands. The dad goes, "Mom, you've changed."

"No, no, sonny," the boyfriend said, "I'm the same old mother you've always loved. Back among the living and feeling better than ever."

Like that, then, he's calming the guy down more ... more ... ever more, and finally takes possession of the shaver. But suddenly the dad lunges for a knife behind the towels, comes at the boyfriend, and immediately kills his "mother." To me this is the ultimate proof of his psychosis, although some readers might surmise it was an Oedipal thing. I really wouldn't disagree, but it's that from a psychotic point of view.

And so it's true, they were Romeo and Juliet, paralleled. Shakespeare was right about so many things, including the biggest from Romeo and Juliet: Some families simply should not intermarry. Because there's bound to be trouble. The parallels are beyond spooky.

I Miss Good Old Fashioned Danger

We live in safe times. There's an ad with a car going through town jumping and sliding down rails like a skateboard. With a disclaimer, possibly not necessary, warning us not to try it, that a car is not a skateboard; we repeat, a car is not a skateboard. Right now, I'm looking at the safety label on a toothbrush: "Insert brush into mouth with caution. Be careful not to swallow it."

Anyone else remember the old days when we had a lot of pure danger, when, frankly, we didn't care if people drove their cars like skateboards. I remember a guy in school who got his car stuck on top of the swing set and no one cared. We all just piled in the car and saw how long we could balance it without falling off and killing ourselves. Years later at reunions we still observe a moment of silence for those 15 poor souls.

Danger was an everyday thing. I think of old fashioned elevators, no gates, or a gate where a kid can lose his finger. The door opens and the elevator might be three stories down and you step into the void. I can barely stand getting into a modern elevator with all the safety features, too cushy. Yes, there's a phone to call for help. But it's just for show, the danger's so minimal.

Wow, my memory's going crazy! Fans without screens, sleds with sharp edges, dinosaurs roaming free. No safety standards. It wasn't uncommon to see guys with one leg, one arm, one eye, and even nothing, walking by, or struggling to do so the best they could. My grandpa used to tell me tales I could barely believe. He said it wasn't unusual for half his school to have the Black Plague. They blew their nose a lot and did their best. They treasured learning so much they just sat there and suffered.

Even today -- Hallelujah!, things haven't changed in some respects -- we still have danger. Barbed wire comes to mind. The nanny state still hasn't gotten around to putting little safety caps on each barb. You can prick yourself on one of those and bleed for hours. Doesn't feel so bad. You get some of that rust in your system, especially if an animal died somewhere nearby, and it hurts like hell, then everything starts locking up on you, there's bile everywhere, etc., it's a beautiful thing.

This would be a good sociological study for someone: Figuring the correlation between making society safer in external things things and the nature of Man vs Man violence. Of course you can guess my thoughts on that. Man vs man violence is way up, ironically, while we're making life safer. It could be there's something in us that wants that intrinsic danger to life. Or it could be that psychos and antisocial halfwits used to die earlier, before we had child safety caps and railings, meaning the rest of were spared. The weird thing about that would be: The more dangerous life was, the safer it was. However it was more dangerous to the ones who wanted to make it more dangerous for the rest of us.

It was an ecological balance -- very fragile -- that we've now tipped more toward danger the safer we've become. And, this is embarrassing, the danger in life that I claim to remember fondly is still there, only it's shifted to Man vs Man violence. So what's my complaint? I guess I still have a complaint: I much prefer losing a hand in a bad elevator to losing my life to a psycho. Personal responsibility was key, but this is the fly in the ointment, even back then it wasn't permissible to simply kill psychos; you had to wait for them to stumble over a land mine on the way to school, or something.

Looking back, I can't think of precisely how long it's been since the change came. But I believe we can peg it as coinciding with some asshole tampering with Tylenol bottles. Wasn't that it? I believe so. From there it was safety caps on everything, then little plastic wraps on the caps, then safety warnings. Now you can't do anything without robocops and nosy safety officers behind every pole to warn you. Ever notice all the parents with their kids on Halloween? Back in the day, my parents used those hours to catch up on romance, which is how I got brothers. That's why we had such large kindergartens, all those late July births.

But is life perfectly safe, aside from Man vs Man? As it turns out, there actually are exceptions, heh heh. Antifreeze comes with a safety cap, but no inner seal! So that's something to be thankful for. I don't know if it has a label warning you not to drink it. I personally wouldn't drink it. I love life and am not a psycho. But if some future mass-murdering psycho were to off himself with a shot of antifreeze and a good stiff Quaker State chaser... who's to object? In short, the more dangerous we keep life, the safer we'll all be.

Your Website After Death

If you have a website or blog, maybe you wonder, like I do, what will happen to it after your death.

I'd like to think that somehow, some way, everything would be nicely preserved for thousands of years. But that's not likely without real dedication on someone's part. How often just within the last 15 years, since the internet really got jumping, have sites come and gone, like Geocities? They give you a month to download your crap, then that's it. After that, you're out of luck.

Imagine your heirs. They think everything's going smoothly with the website they're trying to preserve, two or three years pass, they go back to check it, and Google has some new standard that you have to log-in before a certain date or it'll be gone. They just did that with "legacy blogs," blogs that hadn't been updated for a couple years.

So the idea of your website outliving you by very many years, while it's a great idea, is maybe unrealistic. It's certainly fraught with peril. On the other hand, they say that anything you say on the internet is imperishable, although that might be more true for embarrassing things rather than what you want everyone to remember. Like if you're a teacher and you've molested your entire class, no one's going to forget that. But if you're just an average guy like me, who's never molested anyone and isn't likely to, we have to fend for ourselves. The penalty for being good!

But let's think about that a bit more. Let's say you are a real cretin, like the teacher in the example, and you have a website. (And this goes for mass murderers, or a crazed killer like the guy who tried to kill the congresswoman, or even someone who bullies someone on Facebook into suicide.) As soon as their crime becomes known and they're infamous, you can set your watch by it, whatever they've posted on the internet will be gone within five minutes. Maybe it's because of the overload on the server, or because no one wants to be associated with them -- whatever, it's gone! Of course their incredible failure at life will always be known, just not the other...

And that's what it is for all these deranged people, they're an incredible failure at life. There's different ways at looking at life, existence, and what it is we are here to accomplish, if anything. More or less, I think we're here simply to reproduce, like every other species. Although we've tamed nature to a certain extent and don't need to reproduce like wild animals. But socially we have a purpose, and that's to get along as best we can, be a decent citizen, and someday pass on. People will say, "He lived a good life." But if you're deranged, or do something psychotic, like killing a bunch of people, we say, "What a failure at life! His one chance at life and he blew it!"

But they ought to leave their websites up. The publicity is going to die down. The rest of us then can preserve our own websites and blogs, and if we ever need to be reminded, we can go visit those folks' and tell ourselves, "I may not be much. But at least I'm not that asshole."