Breakfast And Brain Chemicals

This weekend, my wife and I went with our son to a local diner as a way to get an early, bacon and waffle fueled kick-start to our family fun Saturday. Things went well throughout almost the entire breakfast, with Trey using words like please and thank you to butter up the waitresses and flirt his way into extra syrup, but as the meal slowed and breakfast came to a close, our happy family fun was interrupted and brought to an egregious halt by the sudden and uninvited appearance of a needlessly concerned and woefully ignorant, blue-haired busybody. It was bad.

We were finishing up our eggs and munching down the last of our crispy bacon when she suddenly materialized next to our table like something out of a bad Star Trek episode, all leather-skinned and Shatner-haired. She’d apparently walked over at some point, after having noticed the Nintendo DS we’d brought with us and placed at the far end of the table, which she took as some sort of grave example of irresponsible parenting. Nevermind that no one was playing it, or that Trey and I had spent a great chunk of time pretending to give life to the sundry items scattered about the table, he preferring to play Mr. Salt to my Mrs. Pepper as we explored the wonders of condiments and waited for our food to arrive. All she cared about was the diminutive devil box we’d brazenly placed at the end of the table to corrupt and enslave all mankind. Apparently, she’d read “studies…”

We would soon discover, as she prattled on with the nonsensical, tongue-clucking verbiage characteristic of the righteous and the mindless, that she had ten grandchildren and so was a pretty good authority on the delicate science behind a toddler’s developing neural pathways, only she referred to such things as “their brain chemicals”. She approached our table with the best of intentions, I suppose, to warn us of the extreme dangers inherent in allowing a child to play video games. According to her unnamed studies, any time a child is put in control of a video game, “it goes through their eyes and rewires their brain chemicals in their heads” which, she would later elaborate, “gets in their chemicals and gives them a deficiency disorder”. Clearly, we were dealing with a serious mind.

Seeing as how Brittany doesn’t like it when I respond to people like this, I just sat there quietly and took it in, enduring the ignorance as my fingertips dug their way into the palms of my hands. I tried not to see the harm in listening to the old coot, as she seemed genuinely concerned with the evil horrors that video games would visit upon our beautiful child. However, she pushed it too far just before she walked away, when she launched an assault of implications attacking her ill-informed perception of our method of parenting. “You can’t just put a kid in front of a TV,” was the starter, followed by gems like, “Leaving them in front of a video game will hurt their brain,” and “You have to play with your kids.” The best part, of course, was when she patted Brittany on the shoulder and told her, “You’re going to have a long road ahead of you.”

Still. That’s what I kept thinking as I sat through the entire diatribe of ignorance and stupidity. Just stay still. Quiet. She’ll go away eventually, and hopefully before she tries to sell us something. Just wait her out. Bite your tongue. Hold it in. Murder is a crime, even when the weapons are logic and reason. Let her have her moment in the sun, basking in the warm glow of believing that she’s bringing the light of knowledge to the neanderthals who are poisoning their child’s brain chemicals with rock and roll music and video ping pong – what’s the harm? She’ll go away, wrapped in the comforting embrace of having done her Good Deed for the day, and we’ll go back to our business. Live and let live. Life goes on. Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da. Let it be.

As she walked away, Brittany and I sat in stunned silence for a few moments before I looked my wife in the eyes and told her, “I didn’t say anything.” She sighed as she told me she was proud of me, then we went back to our breakfast and finished our waffles in relative silence. Shortly thereafter, of course, the ripple effects of the old woman’s tirade raced across the surface of my own brain chemicals and I grew ever more enraged, ex post facto. I began fumbling around for my soapbox, Brittany rolled her eyes, and I went off on a little rant of my own. It went a little something like this:

Ignoring the whole debate over whether video games are bad for children (ignoring because, regardless of how many genuine, peer-reviewed studies you show someone that prove the beneficial effects of gaming while dispelling the myths of their evil influence, people will always believe what they want to believe), I take great issue with the whole idea of “brain chemicals” and “deficiency disorders”. Why? Because it’s a crock. A sham. Balderdash, even. Hogswallop!

I’m not a big believer in the murky science of modern-day astrology called Psychiatry (not to be confused with Psychology), at least when it comes to the trend of over-diagnosing and subsequent medicating of so many children with so many so-called disorders. It’s hard to throw a baseball back over the fence these days without hitting at least one kid who’s ADD or ADHD and doped up to the gills. I hate psychiatry’s insatiable desire to define some sort of baseline for human behavior, a so-called level of normalcy from which all manner of ailments and afflictions spring forth and deviate like the fjords of an angry ocean. Trust me, there is no “normal” standard when it comes to human behavior and cognitive thought. Don’t believe me? Go ask an anthropologist. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

The wonderful thing about the human race is our great capacity for individuality even while participating within the structured framework of a complex society. Our brains, while fundamentally the same across all members of our species, are unique to each and every one of us. Our brain chemistry, our neural pathways, and everything about how we think is determined by an infinite amount of variables that are unique to each person: where we grew up, who our parents were, how we were raised, who our friends were, where we went to school, what we ate, what we saw, what we experienced – all of these things are different for every person, and each plays a subtle role in influencing how we think and perceive the world around us. There can be no normality under a system of infinite variety unless it’s imposed by external sources, aka The Shrinks.

Granted, there are obviously severe cases of minds debilitated by disease, where treatment and medication help rather than hinder – but I’m not talking about those right now. I acknowledge that the human mind is fragile and easily broken through abuse, neglect and inherited conditions, but what I’m referring to here is the escalating rate of non-crippling diagnoses, particularly in children. You know, the trendy ailments: attention deficient disorder, hyperactive disorder, or the especially popular and exceptionally trendy Asperger’s diagnosis for kids with few social skills. I will be blunt when I say that I doubt the validity of most of these diagnoses.

Why? Because there’s no reason for it. It’s not because of high fructose corn syrup, and the Jenny McCarthy-fueled autism fear of vaccinations has been proven to be junk science. No ancient meteor has crashed to Earth and unleashed alien spores into the atmosphere, cell phones aren’t giving off enough radiation to explode popcorn kernels and melt your children’s brains, and video games don’t poison their “brain chemicals”. There is no identifiable aspect of modern life that should result in the sharp and sudden rise of children with mental and developmental “disorders” – probably because most of the time there’s nothing wrong with the poor kids who are being diagnosed and labeled as different.

By all accounts, some of history’s greatest personalities probably had some sort of disorder. Charles Dickens was clinically depressed, along with other writers such as Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, and Ernest Hemmingway. Beethoven was bipolar, and so were Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt and Vincent Van Gogh. What if Alfred Einstein had proven too inquisitive and troublesome (not to mention too slow compared to his classmates) and been medicated for his “condition” – where would modern science be? What about Nikola Tesla or Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates? What would the world look like without history’s ‘disordered’ loonies?

This is a relatively new idea to the world, the notion that there is a universal standard against which all others are judged – and that, for whomever deviates from it, there is promise of a cure. A treatment to get them back to “normal” where they belong. A way to make them better – to make people better, by making everyone exactly the same. Ticky-tacky. Drones. Boring.

I am thankful for the weird and the wonderful things of this world, including the hyperactive kids and awkward teen outcasts. I support the problem child in the back of the class who doesn’t bother raising his hand before asking difficult and dangerous questions. I encourage troubling behavior and difficult children, because those kids often grow up to be independently motivated and critically thinking adults, of which there are far too few in this world. I defy the idea that medications can treat these so-called childhood disorders, because I defy the very notion that there is such a thing as an ordered mind. People are human and alive and strange. We are all broken in our own twisted ways unique to our own warped lives. There is no standard. There is no normal. There are only variations of weird – or at least, that’s how it should be.

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NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

Humor | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

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Have you ever made a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you're still living with the hilarious consequences years later?

If so, then grab a snack, get comfortable, and prepare to have all of your own poor life choices seem just a little bit more bearable.

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Short Stories
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The nine stories of rage and sadness collected here range from the most intimate of human experiences to the wildest realms of magic and fantasy. The first story is a violent gut-punch to the soul, and the rest of them just hit harder from there.

Those who tough it out will find a book filled with as much hope as despair, a constant contradiction pulling you from one extreme to another.

Life might knock us down, over and over, and will the beat the ever-loving snot out of us from the time we're old enough to give it attitude until the day we finally let it win and stop getting up.

Always get back up.

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This isn't just a book. It's a portal to other worlds where there be magic and dragons and hilarious pirates. Okay, not really. But this book is about those portals, except they're called video games.

The Life Bytes series of books take a deep dive into one man's personal journey through childhood into kinda/sorta being a responsible, competent adult as told through the magical lens of whatever video games he was playing at the time.

Part One starts way back in 1975 and meanders down various digital pathways until, oh, around about 1993 or so.

If you're feeling nostalgic for the early days of gaming or if you just want to understand why the gamer in your life loves this hobby so much, take a seat in your favorite comfy chair and crack this bad boy open.

I'll try to not be boring.

Horror
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What you are about to read is not a story. There is no beginning, middle, or end.

What follows is nothing more than a series of journal entries involving shadow people, sleep paralysis, and crippling fear. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t follow story logic, and nothing works out well in the end.

You've been warned.