What Could Go Wrong?

I'm hunting down a psychiatrist.

Deja Vu all over again. This is my third attempt.

The first two were wimps. Afraid to slap me around. They both took this squishy feel-good approach. They turned my stomach.

I need to re-tune my brain. Actually I need it completely rewired. If it was a thing, I would have the bad shit scooped out, leaving the good shit behind to fuel confidence and happiness.

Feels like it was a simpler process years ago, but I could be wrong. I am insane, you know.

Maybe I should adjust my approach. Hunting them down seems aggressive. Maybe I should make polite inquiries.

Psychiatrists can prescribe medication, psychologists cannot. So one tinkers with your brain and gives you drugs, the other just tinkers with your brain. Believe it or not I would prefer to avoid drugs and go right for the brain re-alignment.

I am happy with the drugs I take. I'm talking about at midnight, when I am watching Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

You also have clinical social workers and licensed professional counselors. Who is best for what? Who should I trust? I don't have a lot of time to make this happen. Every day when I leave the house the Grim Reaper is across the street waving at me with a diseased smile on his face. Drooling. If the sun is up, he squints.

So I call these people up, talk to them a bit, and this is the typical response that I get:

"I'm sorry, I can't help you. You'd be better off in a mental institution and a straight jacket."

Apparently I got a lot of work to do.

Truthfully, I email them, they email me back, refer me to someone else, or tell me they don't accept Medicare, or they are not accepting new patients.

I just want to get my brain fixed. Fortunately I know this guy who hangs in a bar that I frequent. He dispenses his own brand of wisdom to anyone willing to buy him a drink. He seems relatively coherent most of the time. 

What could go wrong?

Rewritten

If you're happy and you know it, kiss my ass

If you're happy and you know it, kiss my ass

If you're happy and you know it

Don't you dare to fucking show it,

If you're happy and you know it, kiss my ass

No Denying It

 Responsibility is the enemy of creativity.

Went To A Show Last Night

Went to a show last night.

We actually got out of the house. The neighbors were lined up along the thoroughfare applauding wildly.

"There they go! They're going out to have some fun. Sure wish we were them. Good luck kids - don't stay out too late."

It was heartening.

The show was called Live From Laurel Canyon - Songs and Stories of American Folk Rock.

There were many iconic communities back in the sixties and seventies, places where creative free spirits congregated and lived, and wrote music - Laurel Canyon was one of them.

Some who lived in Laurel Canyon - The Mamas and the Papas, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Doors, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, America, The Eagles - can you imagine what that was like?

It was between 1965 and 1976. These people lived there off and on, coming and going, but meeting up in each other's houses and making music - mixing and matching creativity and insanity.

The show features a band who plays the music of the Laurel Canyon residents. But they also told intimate stories about the groups - about the inspiration behind writing certain songs, or the history of individuals, about the clubs they played in. And, they had a screen behind them flashing pictures of the Canyon, the homes they lived in, the groups, the clubs they played in, various permutations of the people who lived there hanging around each other's houses.

I was absolutely stunned by how deeply this all moved me. Got really emotional. That was a time of hope, a time for believing you could live an interesting life, a time for believing the world could be changed for the better. It was a place in which I wish I had lived.

Of course, I was obnoxious last night because I know 99% of the stories and I like to show off. As the stories got told, I would whisper into Carol's ear the name of the group or person or song the story was heading towards before the narrator did, and of course I was always right. But I did shut up when I noticed that "shut the fuck up" look in Carol's eyes.

When I was a teenager, I said to my parents "I would like to move to Laurel Canyon so I can hang around with David Crosby and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Jim Morrison and Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt so I can be inspired by them and learn about life from them so my life can evolve into a thing of beauty."

My parents said "No, no, no Little Joey. You will stay here with us and grow up to be an accountant and wear clip-on ties." Sounded exciting, so I stuck around.

Might have been a mistake.

It was a very nice night out. The average age of the audience was 76. Hey, old people gotta have fun too, you know.

It was a homecoming of sorts for me because it was held at the Capitol Center, where I worked off and on for 7 years. Ran into a few people who high-fived me, hugged me, shook my hand - it made me feel better about myself.

So there was that too.

"And then I'm gonna................................"

Stop wasting time, for Christ fucking sake.

This is your LIFE we're talking about here.

Vacant Eyes

I have a two minute commute to Job #1.

That is too short - no time to think or adjust my attitude from defiant to subservient, so I do laps. I leave 20 minutes early, I crank up the rock 'n roll, and I drive aimlessly out to the Circle K, which is a few miles down the road. If I still have time, or, more frequently, just don't care what fucking time I get to work, I'll do it again. It's possible as I cruise, that I administer a central nervous system depressant as medicine to get me to the right level of "I don't give a fuck."

You didn't think driving alone could do it, did you? This is a brilliant plan. It keeps me from killing my co-workers.

When I circle through the Circle K lot I often see a worker bee sitting on a concrete stoop outside the back door, taking her break. Cigarette dangling from her mouth, phone dangling from her hand. One day she was sitting in the rain, hood up.

To me, that was the perfect vision of the typical American worker.

Desperate to get out of the work environment for 10 whole minutes, desperate to sit outside in any kind of weather, desperate to grab at anything that might bring happiness, entertainment, or escape.

So sad. This country is viciously exploitative. Businesses are not designed to treat employees fairly. They are designed to suck every drop of blood out of the workers, while paying them the lowest legal wage possible.

Disrespect and condescension are critical management tools, taught in business school and refined on the job.

I am not sure employees have ever been treated fairly or with respect in the history of this country. I'd like to think so, but the era I grew up in exposed me to nothing but lies, condescension, and blatant disrespect.

So I am a wee bit jaded.

Originally I was going to label this post Monkey On a Phone, but I couldn't do it. She is not a monkey. She is a human being trying to take care of a family or herself, and this is the situation she finds herself in. She is demoralized and searching for "better".

She will probably never find it because the odds are stacked against her. 

Once you get into a situation like that, the entire employment apparatus is stacked against you. Free thinking from employers goes out the window. It's a lot easier to typecast potential employees, pigeon-hole them, and trap them into a vicious cycle of low paying jobs, rather than to look past the vacant eyes to get to a spark of humanity. A tell that reveals this person to be much more valuable than past experience would suggest.

"Nobody ever said that life was fair." Yeah, I get that. But nobody ever tells you that life is a vicious game that will crush you if you take your eye off the ball for even a second. Happiness is not part of the equation. 

Nobody ever tells you that you are nothing more than a necessary evil to management, and that if you die, they are indifferent. And they will replace you with another poor soul that they will try to pay even less, justifying the low pay with convoluted corporate speak, otherwise known as fucking lying bullshit. 

All those years ago, we should have known, should have seen this coming.

When they changed the name of Personnel Departments to Human Resources.

WTF

"I can honestly say I do not want to be anyone else but me. It's not an easy gig. There's a lot of ups and downs and I really don't like the job most of the time but I am committed to it."

"For me resentment is just rooted in how I feel about myself. I don't like myself that much, I'm very hard on myself and I don't usually think I'm good enough at.......anything."

"It's just uncomfortable being me and I want to be comfortable being me."

Marc Maron, September 15, 2025

"And believe me I'm sick of myself going on about it. There's plenty of things that have changed for me and my life but there's a deep wiring that hasn't. I'm not even afraid of cutting the wrong wire at this point. The most it could detonate is a lifetime of welled up tears."

"You reach a certain age, usually pretty young, when you realize your parents are just people and they aren't going to help after a certain point, if they did at all, really. So, it's on you. And there's some part of my brain, emotionally, that's pretty stifled. I assume that's where a lot of my anxiety comes from."

Marc Maron, August 18, 2025

"I think gratitude is important but I don't engage it much and I should. I think there is some part of me that is afraid to be grateful, afraid of joy, afraid of happiness, afraid of peace because I assume it will all be crushed or taken away. I can't do it in a general sense so the exercise to me is identifying what those things could be attached to. What can't be taken away. Because by stifling them I take them away from myself."

"I choose to focus on my flaws and use them as a scourge as opposed to accepting them."

Marc Maron, August 11, 2025

I know some people who feel this way. Probably a lot more that I don't know, that also feel this way. There's one guy who I'm really close to, who I know very well, that feels these things overwhelmingly.

I don't know - should I sit down and talk to him? Is there a chance that I can help him adjust his thinking?

Maybe I'll give it a shot.

I just want him to get happy before he dies.