Phat Unplugged

All our behaviors are biochemically mediated.That was a hard lesson for me to learn.Though we have little prior history of mental illness in my family tree, there was quite an eruption in my father and brother, both diagnosed with diverging degrees of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia -- mild in my father, florid in my brother. I feared that fate, and sought multiple psychiatric evaluations for reassurances, which I got. I'm merely neurotic.But when I spent some years in a medical mill of injury, illness, and lengthy hospitalizations with high fevers and heavy opiates, I experienced states akin to ICU psychosis: alternately frankly and mildly delusional, ill-tempered to enraged, infinitely distracted. I threw out the opiates, and focused on my physical health: I returned to normalcy (whatever that is for an Omnivorous).My perspective on "mental illness" changed dramatically. One day, while insisting to myself I wasn't mentally ill, I realized that ALL "mental" illness is physically grounded. It isn't a flaw in character or a snapped mind: the mind is the brain is the body.I'm not suggesting you are mentally ill; rather that when' one's thoughts become notably disordered, first look to your physical health.Plato said, "Mente sana en cuerpo sano.” (“A sound mind and a sound body.”) That's not merely a truism; it's the truth.I have great personal affection for your presence here. Like AZ said, get right, get healthy, come back. I'll still lash you with limp noodles if I think you're wrong, but I hope we'll both be smiling.

Isn't it just awful?My wife is 12 years younger and just retired at a youthful 60; I'm about to turn a well-worn 72, medically forced into retirement years ago. She is now a professor emeritus with retained university privileges, giving me enormous access to academic libraries and online journals.There are classical and Shakespearean warnings against boasting of one's wife, but fuck 'em, i just won't name her. She's a brilliant poet, a lovely, petite woman who stays toned and trim with Pilates, yoga and hiking with me, an enormously popular professor whose students stay in touch for decades, and for reasons I classify alongside exotic matter, she loves me without reservation.Folks have asked how I caught a wife like that, and I say I used to be a lot cuter; she says I have a great big heart.I've waited impatiently for her to join me in retirement. She has had to endure being told several times in hospital waiting rooms that I might be slipping away. My physicians speak of a Lazarus syndrome: the patient multiple times balking at death's door. They speculate on some quality in me.Me? I credit her.If death knocks, Theo, just say no in your wife's name. If love can't save you, nothing will.NB: I don't watch TV of any kind. I read. The last time my set was turned on was January 6. I tuned in to watch an historic peaceful transfer of power with a sense of great relief, but instead I spent the day watching fascist scum defile every value that raises the U.S. above just another oligarchic empire.I couldn't look away, my big heart broke, and now, like the fascists, the TV sits in a dark corner and broods.