I Am Like This When The Police Finally Find Me

Yes, I know, my entries have trickled down to one a week. I have only myself to blame for my no highs no lows only a dull medium lifestyle that I have these days. The upside is that there are no feelings like dark reptilian things barely seen in murky waters swimming around my conscious. I may never be Marty Sunshine, but it is a nice change not to have black sheets of rain falling in my head.

Anyway, back in my days of being a public policy/psych double major (oh Spin Doctors, so cruelly cut down by your own lack of talent when people realized that all your songs had the same exact goddamn harmony), I read about this study done back when colleges were allowed to lie and pretend electrocute people and generally fuck with your mind.

I think it was Columbia University who did this study, but I could be wrong--whudya expect, I learned about this over a decade ago. So the psych flaks paid students to come in and take a pill. All the students were told that the pills were vitamins. Half the students were given vitamins. The other half were actually given caffeine pills.

So each student was left to himself for about 15 minutes, and then another psych flak came in. The psych flak said he was also a student participating in the vitamin study. Then half the psych flaks started acting pissed, getting angry that they were being kept waiting. The other half started acting giddy, making paper airplanes and doing other things what were considered wacky back in the 50s. After a while, the students were asked to record their feelings.

Out of the students who really were given vitamins, almost all of them reported feeling a little annoyed by the other student, regardless of whether they were in with the pissed flak or the giddy flak.

Out of the students who were secretly given caffeine pills, the students who were with the pissed flaks felt pissed, while the students with the giddy students felt giddy.

OK, so what does this all mean? Well, that whole mind/body duality thing should be shaking in its boots. You got all these neurotransmitters, enzymes and, to quote Begbie from "Trainspotting", "it's all fookin' chemicals" coursing through you, and it's the environment that determines how you perceive the effect of all these fookin' chemicals. Without that flood of oxytocin and dopamine that your brain releases that floods your body like a rush of warm, you might still think that pretty l'il Asian thang on the dance floor shaking her rump is hawt, but only in an analytical way, much like you would think "the apple is red" or "quadratic equations are hard."

The problem with shy people is that their threshold for these neurotransmitters is too low, so that even a small influx shorts the fuse and leaves them looking for a corner to hide. The problem with moody people is that a shift in the wind sends these chemicals pouring through them like beef through the intestinal tract of a Berkely vegan. So if you're shy and moody, well, you're fucked.

So what does this have to do with me? I've been trying to lay low, intentionally trying to keep those fookin' chemicals at bay. I've been trying to envision those chemicals, those hormones like the sea, and trying to force a low tide in the summer. And slowly, the sea has receded into the distance, leaving bare rock in the sun, and all those dark things that had been swimming in the sea lay open, gasping and dying in the hot sun. But I know that the tide will be back eventually, and where there is sun now will be underwater later, and the large predators that have been in the sea for millions of years will be back. So for now, I'm just trying to enjoy the land and the sun. And preparing harpoons. Big fucking harpoons.