The Pixies - Where Is My Mind?

A Perfectly Reasonable Question

1. It was 2012 and I was living in Washington D.C. in Cleveland Park when the PTSD kicked in and my brain went haywire. I went to the store with a simple shopping list: garbage bags, hand soap, and tile cleaner. I was either cleaning my apartment or disposing of a dead hooker. You decide. The Walgreens I went to was in a converted cinema on Connecticut Avenue - this is a small, but important detail. The moment I walked something happened inside my mind. I felt it physically. I knew something was wrong. I immediately forgot what I went inside for. Just… gone. This was different from those moments when we walk into a new room and forget what we walked in for. That particular Walgreens is narrow, about six rows, but very deep, as it’s a converted cinema. I got lost. That's not a metaphor. I legitimately got lost inside a six-aisle store. The things I forgot: why I was there, what I was doing, my own fucking name.

2. The left and right hemispheres of my brain don't communicate with each other as intended. This shouldn't surprise you. If you're reading this you’ve probably realized my brain doesn't work like most. If you could imagine Larry, Curly, and Moe doing a bit in black and white at my expense while living inside my cerebral cortex.

   "Hey Moe! Hey Moe! You go left and I'll go right."

   "Don't cross the streams, moron."

   "C'mon... I have wacky idea. We'll make him think he's a woman."

   "A woman on his period."

   My asshole brain went full pratfall slapstick and played a practical joke on me. It happens more than I care to admit. I found myself looking at tea bag options for a solid ten minutes. Again, I went in for garbage bags, hand soap, and tile cleaner. I enjoy tea, but not ten minutes of staring at tea bags for no particular reason. I then went looking for honey, because I like honey in my tea. I remember clearly being entranced by Walgreens’ wine selection. ← That’s just a ridiculous sentence to write. I stared at the wine bottles for another ten minutes with no actual intention of buying a bottle while simultaneously questioning everything about what was happening. I was wholly cognizant of what was happening, but I was wholly incapable of doing anything about it. My brain is a Looney Tune. More to the point, my brain is Bugs Bunny and my emotions are Daffy Duck, forever getting his bill shot off and humiliated.

   "Why do I want this? What am I looking at? Huh? One day I'm going to show up to work wearing bleeding bandages taped to my wrists screaming 'I got drunk and I only wanted honey for my fucking tea.' Why is everybody staring at me?”

   Paranoia on full tilt. PTSD on 11. I have no idea why, some 11 years later, I had the urge, inexplicably, to check out. I made my way to the counter and paid for my purchases while my body was so drenched in sweat it was leaking into my shoes. It wasn't until I walked outside that I realized what I bought.

   I paid for a box of Maxipads.

3. I walked around a Walgreens in a daze trying to buy garbage bags, hand soap, and tile cleaner, freaked out over tea, honey, and wine, and walked out with a feminine hygiene product. My scrambled, Bugs vs. Daffy, Three Stooges brain apparently thinks I'm a menstruating woman. I mean not to demean women. That's not the intention, but I don't have the required equipment to menstruate. This is how my asshole brain behaves from time to time. I walked out onto the street with a box of Maxipads and my mind snapped back to normal. I realized what I was doing. Embarrassed, I walked back into Walgreens and the clerk looked at me as if to say, "Yeah, fam, you want an exchange, huh? I got you."

   He exchanged my Maxipads and I told him what I needed. He hooked it up with the garbage bags, hand soap, and tile cleaner. He was ringing me up when he looked at me briefly, paused, and slid me a business card. He looked straight into the fibers of my being and said "10th Mountain Division. I know, bro. I know." The business card held the name and number of his Veteran's Administration therapist.

   What I didn’t realize then was this incident was a harbinger of a mental health collapse that would leave me hospitalized for two months. At that juncture, in late summer/early autumn 2012, I was only a quarter-mile off the on-ramp traveling at 128 MPH with my hair on fire on the Nervous Breakdown Freeway.

   “And straight on into frantic oblivion.”

   Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas