Origins of Garzology

I first coined the term Garzology (for my crazy thoughts) when I was first diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1988. I was an in-patient in the Sunnybrook psychiatric ward at the time. One of the words I most commonly used at that time (in my crazy talking) was "Garzob." Garzob was an example of a character (another character, which I still use, was "Harold"). A character is not a real person, or even an imaginary person, but is merely a place-holder, referring to a person/creature in the third person. Example: "Garzob must be destroyed" or, "The brain of Harold must be tortured to death."

When I was a kid, long before I became schizophrenic, I came across the word "Garzob" in one of my sister's counter-culture comic books (she was a hippie, and is 11 years older than me). Those comic books were written by people like Robert Crumb; some of them featured characters known as "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers." One comic strip in one of those comic books consists of 4 or 5 frames. The first frame consists of a woman's face, which is beautiful, and she is saying: "And now the transformation must begin." In the next frame she starts getting uglier, and gets progressively uglier and uglier until the final frame, in which she/it looks like a monster with a mouthful of long, sharp teeth, and she/it is saying: "GARZOB!".

In another one of those comic books, one comic strip consists of a man and a woman, who are apparently husband and wife. The woman, holding her hand out, palm up, says: "Harold, show me your penis," and the man says: "Yes, dear." It shows the man with his hands in his crotch area, and the woman is holding a big knife behind her back. The theme of the dominant wife and submissive husband resonated with me, as my father was relatively quiet and my mother talked a lot and was more sociable.

In 1984, about a year after I started having symptoms of schizophrenia, I used my father's typewriter to write down my crazy thoughts. At that time they consisted of little words, in a sort of word salad, for example: "in of it use and to be of have in its do and of it use in its of do be..." For 3 examples of my crazy thoughts in their present form, please see my earlier blog post: "Garzology (crazy talking)".