Totally Mental

I just watched a program on TV about hoarding. A woman not only saved her trash, she saved her shit. Bags and bags of it. She had bypassed the toilet for so many years that the piss and shit had eaten a hole through the floor.

But I fucking love human psychopathology. For awhile, I loved psychopaths. How can somebody have no feelings about what they do to other people? Do most people realize that there are individuals whose entire lives are dedicated to fucking up other people's lives. It's the only thing that makes them feel like they matter. These people often influence our daily lives. They are CEO's, CFO's, housepainters, electricians, artists, school teachers. Some of them work in restaurants, hocking lugies in people's burgers when they think no one is looking. Some of them are good with computers and create horrible viruses causing hard drives to melt and life support systems in hospitals to stop working. They cause traffic signals to fail and funds to disappear from peoples' bank accounts.

Narcissistic Personality Disorders are good too. For a true narcissist, if he isn't the center of attention all the time he feels as if the rug has been pulled out from under him, or like he's falling down an elevator shaft. If you get a stomach cramp in his presence and make a face as a result, he will interpret it to mean that you don't like him and will either become immeasurably sad or determined to get revenge. It's all a continuum because everything is about him. Narcissistic personality disorders and psychopathy flow right into each other.

But Hoarding disorders? I can understand a lightweight type; people who save too many plastic bags, for instance, because what if they need one for-- I don't know, whatever it is people use plastic bags for-- but diapers full of your own shit? Of what possible use could that ever be?

Although "shit," like "fuck," is an important metaphor. I need to get my shit together. Enough of that shit. I'll beat the living shit out of you. You wanna smoke some of this shit. Is this something Jungian that I don't understand? Of what use could loads of human shit ever be to anyone?

But maybe there's something deeper here. Something I'm missing. When one of my kids was little, he was okay with shitting in his diaper, but when I told him he had to do it in the toilet you would have thought I'd asked him to climb Mt. Everest. No fucking way. That kid wouldn't take a shit for 4 days. The very idea of watching it swirl around and vanish forever down the toilet was simply too much for him.

What is it about shit?

But I guess a hoarding disorder is a mental illness. Those others are personality disorders. The difference between a mental illness and a personality disorder is that a mental illness can be treated; a personality disorder cannot.

That is all. I don't have to form a conclusion or wrap any of this up with a bow. This is a blog, the bastard child of an essay; forever up to no good, forever leaving someone waiting for something.