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My Brain Has Returned to My Body

Temporarily dysfunctional

I Have Been Out of the Fight

Something weird happened to me on or about March 20. I had a kind of intellectual breakdown that has happened to me about 12 times in the past. Since I am 74 years old that means such things take place very occasionally and quite unpredictably.

It is related to the fact that I’m very poor at handling emergencies. I’m the kind of person who wants to chew things over quite thoroughly to decide what I think and formulate a plan. This became obvious to me when I was hitchhiking in Germany in 1987. To hitchhike in Germany, you must hold a sign with your destination (sticking out your thumb is as good as sticking it in your mouth). As I stood there expectantly, one car T-boned another. I ran and was the first to arrive at the scene. The driver of one car climbed out quickly, but the driver of the T-boned car sat convulsing and unconscious. I just stared at him, unable to form a thought. Fortunately, second to arrive was a nurse who commanded me to tell another driver to get an ambulance. She announced the plan that I was too stunned to formulate. I ran to a third car and told him in passable German, “Es gibt ein Mann der sehr verletzt ist. Wir brauchen einen Krankenwagen.” [There’s a man who’s seriously hurt. We need an ambulance.] Without a word, the third driver roared down the road toward a landline— this was several decades before cell phones.

Shocked speechless. This is my default reaction when things get too bad too fast. As I say, it happens seldom enough and unexpectedly enough that I don’t know how to prevent it. I don’t know what will trigger it. It’s not like my will to fight dies. It’s simply that I get knocked on the floor and I cannot rush the process of getting on my feet again. It’s also not that I am hopeless. I simply enter a state of temporary mental incapacitation, and I know that my capacity to fight will return, although this may take days or weeks.

What About Paranoia?

This temporary incapacitation has nothing to do with paranoia. Paranoia is overestimating the problems you face. My father had an extremely interesting experience with a paranoid co-worker. During the 1950s my father belonged to the Air Force Band, an organization that competed with other branches of the military by using their airplanes to send the band around the world on goodwill tours. My father went to Europe, Egypt, and Japan on these tours. One poor member of the band had an intense fear of flying. He would spend the whole flight pacing up and down the aisle making sure that the propellers kept turning (remember this was the 50s). One day, my father saw him wordlessly pointing out the window. A propeller had stopped turning. Those of you who are familiar with the old days know that a 4-prop plane can fly and land just fine with only three propellers.

That poor man had paranoia. I don’t recommend it, and I try to avoid it myself. I think paranoia is quite different from my sudden stunning syndrome. Paranoia is a long-acting background condition—stunning comes unexpectedly out of nowhere.

I am sure of this because I have a dose of paranoia, too. Along with millions of others, I have paranoia connected with flying. What bothered me were takeoffs— it made no sense that a multi-ton metal object could possibly get off the ground. I think the only way to deal with paranoia is to drown it (slowly) in fact. I studied the physics of flight to thoroughly understand the dynamics of lift. I told myself repeatedly that flying is much safer than driving. I recognized that landings (which do not scare me at all) are three times as dangerous as takeoffs. After years of telling myself these things, about two years ago I noticed that I had gone through a takeoff without a single thought about my take-off phobia.

Then there was my bear phobia. I have done a ton of solo backpacking, and I have no problems during the daytime. The number of problems that you can encounter while backpacking is relatively limited (about 12 major ones) and strategic planning should be complete before you go. However, when the sun went down and I crawled into my sleeping bag my bear phobia, which I had totally forgotten about in the daytime, returned in full force. My dominant thought was that a bear would appear out of nowhere determined to eat me whole. Not exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep. It likewise took me years to think my way out of this one. One thought is that over 90% of bear attacks are defensive—the bear finds you upsetting and when you back up slowly or fall to the ground in a fetal position, the bear stops feeling threatened. That’s why in bear country people wear rattles to warn bears that they are approaching. A second thought was that bears are diurnal— they don’t move or hunt at night. A third thought was that my sleeping bag would be a great discouragement. Any animal that took a bite out of me would get the mouth full of dry fiberfill, hardly encouraging a second bite.

Turns out that my bear phobia had its climactic moment. I myself saw the airplane propeller stop turning !!! I woke up one morning in my tent to the unmistakable sound of a large animal about 20 feet from my tent. My thought was, “After all these years, the bear has finally come!” I stuck my nose out silently, and it was a deer. Actually, to tell you the truth I have seen bears in the wild and every single one of them was running away from me.

I must tell you about a third and final phobia, that I never tried to cure myself of. In my late teems I developed the idea, that if I took a single dose of any illegal drug my brain would be totally and instantaneously destroyed. I never tried to talk myself out of that one, and that phobia may have saved me a world of trouble.

So, I have a relationship with fear that is long lasting, complex, and hard to fathom. I have bicycled across the country alone, but smoking a joint seems just too damn scary. I have another good reason not to smoke a joint: no one will ever force or shame me into doing what I don’t damn well want to do! That’s the fighting spirit that always returns.

Paranoid Certainty of Irreparable Damage

I have often read comments on the Internet since January 20^th expressing the belief that Trump has inflicted damage on our country that is irreparable. That is a thought that is likely to knock the fighting spirit out of you. My position is that death cannot be undone, but any damage is reparable.

The most damaging event that has ever taken place in world history is World War II. It started with Germany’s attack on Poland on Sep 1,1939. For the next years Germany was a steamroller, never stopping until it occupied most of Europe in 1942. Then, Germany came to the peak of its resources in manpower, while the Allies, largely because of industrial production in the United States, began to pile up men and materiel. Twenty million Russians were killed by the Germans, but the remaining 140 million fought on. As the Allies marched toward Berlin, the unparalleled debauch of death and destruction continued. As many as 60 million people died in World War II (that loss was irreparable), but ALL ALL ALL the damage of World War II has been repaired.

I have spent about 9 months of my life in Europe on five different trips. In every country, I have kept my eyes open for WW II damage, and I’ve only been able to find any in East Germany where some shrapnel marks on stone buildings remained unrepaired. Otherwise, the most damaging event in world’s history has left no traces behind!

Look at the photos below. On the left is London following Nazi bombing with St Paul's Cathedral faintly visible in the background. On the right is St Paul's on the day Charles and Di got married. That was the day in world history that the most eyeballs looked on that church’s front steps.

Left: St Paul's after German bombing during WWII. Right: St Paul's in 1981.

So, remember kids! No paranoia! No exaggerated fears! ALL damage can be repaired. Bears don’t go prowling for midnight snacks. Flying is safer than driving. BUT illegal drugs will destroy your brain instantaneously!!!

Well, could be …

¯\_(ツ)_/¯