Inflexibility of Crazy Talking

Letter to Ralph:

Thank you for reading my blog, or at least part of my blog. I quit my job at Fred Victor Centre, and never got around to asking Robin out for coffee. However, on my last day she told me about St. Andrew's Church (which is downtown) serving free dinners on Monday from 6 to 9, so maybe I'll drop by there this evening, which means I should leave work about 4:45, and hopefully I'll see her there. If not I can always ask Diane, the Volunteer Coordinator, to ask Robin for her email address, so I can get it from Diane. Diane said that Robin expressed an interest in keeping in touch with me.

As for my ranting and raving, it doesn't really work unless I use a very rigid and inflexible word-set (content). This content changes over time, although very slowly. I have a book called On Intelligence, which is about how the brain works. That book says that knowledge tends to become more and more higher-level over time. This nugget of brain lore is reflected in how my crazy talking has changed over time. In the beginning, in 1984, a year after I first started having symptoms of schizophrenia, the crazy thoughts were a "word salad" of little words: is of but use and of have in using do be of have in it of, etc. A few years later my crazy talking consisted of entire sentences. In 1987 I was riding on the train with you from Montreal to Toronto, and on that trip I first had the idea to record my crazy talking in the form of a computer language syntax-specifying document. That document enables a computer or a human to generate random crazy sentences, starting with a high level representation such as {noun phrase}{verb}{object phrase}, and systematically substituting non-terminal symbols, which are enclosed in brace brackets ({}) with lower-level symbols: {noun phrase} killed {possessive pronoun}{noun phrase}; Harold killed my {noun phrase}; Harold killed my {adjective}{noun}; Harold killed my violent dog. This process is repeated until there are no more non-terminal symbols, only terminal symbols (English language words), in the above example: Harold killed my violent dog.

Nowadays my crazy talking is often in the form of short stories, like Example 1 in my blog which I often launch into when I step out of the shower:

Reginald! You're mother and I don't like you anymore. No, we don't like your brain at all. blah blah blah.

So just like in the book On Intelligence, my crazy thoughts have evolved over time, from a low-level word salad to crazy sentences to short stories/paragraphs. Sometimes I use what I call guest words/phrases, which is what I call words that are not part of my rigid and inflexible word-set. For example: "I have decided to kill the President, and torture his vandal-eating artificial leg." In that sentence, "artificial leg" is a guest phrase, and "vandal-eating" is a near-guest phrase, since I don't often use the word "eating."

Once I told a psychiatrist about my crazy talking, and he remarked that it was gloomy, and suggested that I change the content to be less gloomy. So when I got home I tried to use words like "love" instead of "hate", or "of peace" instead of "of death", but it didn't work. By the next day my crazy talking was back to normal (gloomy).

MH