Subject: Re: making money
From: Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net
Date: 03/12/2020 06:32 PM
To: Nikola Chubrich <nchubrich@gmail.com

Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your letter.

Somewhere Nietzsche made a distinction between texts that were written with red ink and texts that were written with blood. Your letter is NOT written with red ink. Your letter in which I find much literary merit, speaks for itself with such eloquence that any comment from me would be presumptuous.  

Please feel free to come back to talk with me, on 30 or 60 minutes' notice, whenever you think it might be of help. I am, as is usual, intellectually occupied, and I am not impatient.

as always, my very best wishes to you.

EJM


On 03/12/2020 05:24 PM, Nikola Chubrich wrote:
Dear Dr. Meyer:

It seems to me that though a daily visit and eventually, some overnight stays, are my intention, today may be a good time to make an exception. Or perhaps not; it is fluid.

I stayed overnight at the peer support "Living Room" in Framingham. I am still here. I may have more conversations tonight, or then again I might sleep. Probably both. I got a hotel out here so I could sleep on short notice. They also have a recliner, for even shorter notice.

The conversation last night was so remarkable (but then, so many of mine /are/ nowadays: just a couple of days ago, I had a wide-ranging conversation with two of the staff where David was staying, and they taught me to mix concrete by the by),, that I kept going all night without exhaustion (though approaching the 3 pm circadian well, I feel tired /now/; but I think I will sleep better tonight if I push through it). It was with the manager of the Living Room, though she was so ordinary and unimposing I immediately forgot she manages the whole enterprise.

Peer support is a mutual-aid movement in the field of healthy-mindedness (my preferred term over "mental health"). Broadly, it is akin to Herodotus's description of Babylonian medicine: the ill, he said, used to lie down near a thoroughfare, and any passerby who recognized the illness /and had recovered from it/ was obliged to stop and give his advice. The idea /did/ seem unsound from an epidemiological perspective (infectious disease having been my usual idea of illness), but there really /is/ something in the practice. /I/ could tell people how to recover from stuttering; I could say very much about recovering from back pain and poor walking; I could say /something/ about recovering from ulcerative colitis. I am not yet ready to be a "peer specialist" in recovering from so-called bipolar illness; but there are plenty of people who /are/. And out here in Framingham----at state expense----at least one such person is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, free of charge, to anybody, from anywhere, who wishes to show up. (Please do not get the word out, lest they get overwhelmed. Ask rather for more such places to spring up.) And they have been trained. And that training is a miracle.

There is no lock on the door, no psychiatrist, no security, no management hierarchy, no fear of insane people a Danger to Self or Others. We are across from a high school. Just one person spends the night. I kept asking last night if she thought I was manic; she said /no/. But I am far more manic /now/, by hospital standards, than I was going in to McLean Southeast. My presentation depends on /who I am with/.

During the day a woman named Ann----I believe I am within the bounds of correctness to share her first name, which I am too tired to fictionalize----told me about her difficulties with lithium. Much was not disclosed about its impacts (all from long-term use). Her kidney disease was not even revealed to her until it had reached stage III. Hypothyroidism and even brain atrophy are possibilities; lithium she said also accumulates in various parts of the body, including most painfully the bladder.

She recommended a careful taper, but I have done what I have done; and she thought a removal from short-term usage was hardly akin to going off after /years/. Still her advice on /not /stopping abruptly more or less tallies with yours. Were I to get in dire straits, I should be willing to start Abilify again on a five-milligram dose----I guess. I am nowhere near there yet, and the longer I spend here, the further away I get from fear.

The less one fears one's own mind; the less one fears other people; the less one fears institutions;; the better life gets. I want you to know that I went in to the psychiatric hospital /by choice/. I was experimenting; I was /acting/; but there was also the burning need to deal with my high school experience. And I was grateful to be in a psychiatric hospital when forgotten horrors resurfaced.

Some time after I encountered the first pederast, as a freshman (I soon lost the ability to read: he was an English teacher) I had begun to have a recurrent nightmare. When I remembered the nightmare, I was in a mindfulness group in the hospital (the groups were uniformly excellent, even /extraordinary/). We were listening to a tape suggesting we take an elevator to the basement of our subconscious. It was a beautiful elevator, they said, with a wood-paneled interior, and a stained-glass door. When we got out, we would see what was in the basement.

The Gas Boy was in the basement. In Goodwin House, where I lived my freshman year in increasing but well-denied despair (I knew that I had to /succeed/; going home was /failing/), until I fully plunged into despair sophomore year and more or less died to myself and the world (/Ich bin der welt Abhanden gekommen/)----the Gas Boy was at the bottom of the stairs.

The air in the basement was green with poison gas. There was no color visible in the room. He lived all his life, and /would/ live all his life, lying on a concrete bier, barely alive, hooked up to a poison gas machine without which he could not live but within which he could not live. The gas-breathing apparatus went over his nose and mouth, and emerged from a complex tangle below the bier, like a cephaIopod monster of the deep. I would see him take the gas-breathing-apparatus off for a brief moment. He would turn his head to look vacantly at me. It was my own face.

I could not bear to remember the nightmare. I quietly got up from group, and as inconspicuously as I could, rushed down the hallway to the nurse's station and pounded on the metal gate until they gave me Ativan. I was glad to be under lock and key that day.

Psychiatric hospitalization had been my worst fear. And I faced it, after the horror of Langley-Porter in San Francisco. This time I complied with everything; I made friends with /everyone/ save one abusive orderly; in whatever way it is possible to triumph in there, I triumphed.

And yet the medications proved to be unbearable to the mind I now have.

*

Ebony came at night here; she'd grown up in Roxbury, in section-8 housing, and now after years of being on multiple psychiatric medications was off everything. She had a calm, competent demeanor, neither depressed nor manic. She was the businesswoman /par excellence /when she came in and assessed the day; the best therapist I have ever encountered for the next seven hours. I wanted to ask her about drugs too, but for some reason I began one of those multithreaded conversations that you and I often have.

/We/ may get up to five threads; Ebony and I got well past twenty interwoven topics, and we never dropped a single one. Multithreading is an efficient and beautiful way to have a conversation. Few people can tolerate it, but those who can enjoy it immensely. As soon as you think of something, you pause and /drop into it/, and then return to the prior topic once an organic attachment point emerges within the digression. There is no need to pause and grope, /so long as your interlocutor can keep track of the threads/----but, I fear, few people /can/. For those who have passed over what I call the /cognitive event horizons----/which are treated with fear and loathing in our own society, though great reverence in traditional ones----it is no great difficulty.

Conversational ornament is not at all like a Christmas tree ornament. The weakest branch of the conversation can support the weightiest topics. Somehow I got on to the topic of Jan Smuts and his work /Holism and Evolution /(now mostly unread, though the term has proliferated); I mentioned the Germans of Namibia, Brazil, formerly the Volga River and Transylvania; we spoke much about American racism, without the slightest amount of tension across the race divide. And then at the midpoint of the conversation----as I had observed her listening ability, the multithreading increased beyond what most people can even conceive----she began to talk about medications. Her "cocktail mixology" experience was gargantuan, and one by one we discussed all the antipsychotics I had heard of, and then moved on to every conceivable drug class, all of which she had been on. Lamictal, an anticonvulsant, was a sole point of tolerability (I had heard this before, and were it to come to that, I'd be willing to try it). Depakote, as I well knew, was horrible. None of the new generation of antipsychotics seemed any better than Abilify. She fully related to my own experience of akathisia, as did several other peer specialists today. It is something they would not wish on their worst enemies, they said. And nobody can see from the /outside /just how bad it is.

I think antipsychotics are a form of chemical sodomy for the mind. They perform the /controlling /role that pederasts and institutional hazing does in prep school. They destroy enough internal selfhood to make obedience obligatory, but leave enough externally observable functionality intact for people to run an empire. Now, you can go through life as an empty-headed yes-man and die healthy. But people on antipsychotics die younger; they gain weight; they have oculogyric crises, much like the victims of Sleeping Sickness that Oliver Sacks observed in /Awakenings----/and many become Parkinsonian----by their /thirties/.

There was a quiet acknowledgement of the risk I might have taken in jumping off the drugs, but also acceptance of just how badly I had been doing /on /the drugs.

My love of music has returned. Mein Gött! I need the German word, one of the few I yet possess, for its grandeur; el palabra 'God' en Inglés tiene Guerra en su mismo. Beethoven Eroica conducted by Erich Kleiber. And before that, also on WHRB, a thunderbolt even more devastating: Bruckner's /Te Deum/. I had never heard it before, and I /gaped/; my mouth, physiologically, was unable to close. Should such disruptions even be allowed over the radio?

I have cried so many tears of joy today; past tragedy and present joy, there is no difference. I can cry at anything. For some reason I cried when I spoke about the death of Sophie and Franz Ferdinand, killed by a Serb, thence the death of forty million.....the Tsar and his family, doomed by Sophokles' bullet set to Strauss's music in /Elektra..../. All of these tears are precious, all of them like the relief of an oasis I was not sure last week that I should ever find again.

Xueqin's debt of tears is relentless, and will play catch-up once it is acknowledged but, by whatever means, temporarily forgotten.

Last week there seemed no way out of the non-selfhood of Abilify. Inside the hospital, where I was absolutely powerless, and operated solely on kindness, respect----and, once or twice, had the opportunity  for gentle mockery (I did manage to literally kowtow to an orderly I by then knew well)----selfhood did not matter; once the locks came off the doors I could not stand it. Outwardly it was a successful day; since I was unable to sit still, and also unable to think, I proceeded with preplanned endeavors. Inwardly I spent much of that week in Hell. You who have not taken these drugs /cannot imagine this hell/; nearly everyone///here/ has known it, and /survived /it, sometimes for weeks and years.

And now I can write again, too----even while exhausted. I write nearly as fast as I type. Tell me, Dr. Meyer, has this letter any literary merit----or is it the mere ravings of a lunatic?

When Klemens said I should never find a psychiatrist who did not think in terms of /years /on these drugs, and when you sternly warned me of my poor chances.....for a few hours of that day, I almost lost hope.

I was outside my primary care doctor's office after a frightening appointment when you called; God knows what he had put in the records when I told him I had /stopped/. I saw his toned body and cool demeanor, and at once I realized he was a /jock, /even though he is a black man. I remembered the Cap Crew of Milton Academy, the jocks who wore hats always and joined with the Mean Girls to sit atop our Lord of the Flies social hierarchy.

He began badgering me over the internet this week to make an appointment with some psychiatrists whose biographies he got off his computer. I don't care anymore. Here in Framingham, I have recovered my selfhood and my hope. That I did not sleep last night hardly matters right now.

Ebony and I finished after about seven hours of conversation----for now. She invited me back tonight. Much remains to be discussed. I may try until I cannot continue. Why do that? Because I might as well get to the bottom of what keeps me awake at night; when I have done enough for now, I will sleep without trouble. I'll take Thorazine and Ativan if I have to; but I by no means assume I will need them. And Ativan, /even in intermittent doses/, is terribly addictive, both physiologically and psychologically. This they know well here.

*

Why did I embed questions about drugs inside a complex discourse about history? Because /all/ of us exist inside the maw of history; I /know /this, and /acknowledge /it. I am no longer in denial. Ebony /knew /I could not talk about drugs until I had spoken of the decay of my beloved country, and the sweep of history amid which I tumble. And then she taught me.

*

No brain is an island.

After last night, the idea of receiving therapy from a psychiatrist seems to me as hopeless as taking violin lessons----from someone who has never played the violin.

I have met minds that once screamed----and now sing.

N.I.C.

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 10:42 PM Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net <mailto:ernstmeyer@earthlink.netwrote:

Dear Nikola,

The topics you suggest seem to me interesting, worth thinking about and
worth discussing. Let's do so when next we talk.

Thank you for your visit today.

EJM

On 03 about and /11/2020 10:13 PM, Nikola Chubrich wrote:

 Dear Dr. Meyer:
 
 My fantasy for making money has always been something entrepreneurial.  Too much aligned with my flighty nature, I fear. But I do have a lot of ideas.
 
 Here is a way of making money off the Coronavirus panic, and \maybe doing some good as well, though that remains to be determined: objects for dealing with objects without transferring putative viruses hanging out on dry surfaces.
 
 To close or open a faucet, something like a chopstick might do: and would be best, since the hands are wet.
 
 To open doorknobs, a one-handed glove open at the back, held together by enough fingertip component remaining. This could be easily done by modifying an existing glove. The point is to make it easy to get on and off.
 
 Both could be attached to clothing, perhaps by a belt loop or a cord or velcro.
 
 Quick US manufacturing capacity is the only thing needed. As for the marketing, it would be.....viral.
 
 N.I.C.