This is not meant to be a white man apologizing for bigotry in another white man. It is meant to help a sick man find a way out of his disease.
——
I saw the explosion on the net, like so many others. I saw the anger, the rage, the bizarre and incomprehensible fury that just seemed to keep coming, that just seemed to spill forth from you in ways no one — least of all you — might have expected.
When I was in my 20s, I was pretty sure I was an alcoholic. I did most of the usual stuff you expect from drunks. I pissed off my friends, alienated my family, and generally behaved like a complete asshole.
(I mean, as opposed to now, when my assholiness is calculated and deliberate; back then, it was a lot more like your bizarre behavior, shocking and just plain out of touch with both reality and who you imagine yourself to be.)
Your comments on Letterman just seem to underscore my concern. You aren’t quite there yet, but I’m also not willing to say you have a drug problem.
It might be a lot more simple than that. You might be just mildly manic-depressive, as I know myself now to be. (Never formally diagnosed, but I don’t have reasonable doubt; I’ve been in this meat for nearly 40 years; I know how it works or doesn’t.)
It took me a long time to figure it out, because when you’re borderline it’s so much harder to detect. You get moody. You have swings. You have long, long bouts of total normalcy — complete self-responsibility, complete control (though that’s not quite the right word; it’s more like ownership) over yourself. Everything is in balance, everything is in equilibrium.
But sometimes things go awhack. Sometimes it feels like your mind is just racing, just racing, going a hundred miles an hour, sometimes it feels like you can’t keep up with all the words, the ideas, the thoughts, the vibrance in your head.
And then, to try to bring it all back, you self-medicate; most of us use booze, because it works. Our thoughts become dissociated, relaxed, random; we stop connecting so many things to so many other things, and we just sort of fall into a fog of drifting chaos.
The next few days, we’re down — way down, like shockingly down, like even as we’re working happily in the lives we love, doing the things we do, sometimes the idea surfaces that we’re failures, and we remember, intimately and personally and immediately, how badly we’ve fucked up here and here and here too, and we think of killing ourselves, but it’s not even surprising when we do; it’s just a thing, like looking at a cloud and realizing, hey, there’s a cloud. Maybe I should be dead.
And we attribute the downside to the booze, to the hangover, and we regain our equilibrium until we’re caught in that crazy upswing again … and the cycle recommences.
I know your bewilderment. I’ve had it a few times in my life.
There is no outside cause or cure for it; it’s fucked-up brain chemistry. And the sooner you realize that, the better off you’re going to be. Even if you never take drugs to correct this specific problem — there may not be a good mild dose for this understated flavor of psychosis — still, knowing what is wrong can be so empowering; you don’t feel so totally fucking nuts any more.
I’m not saying you have to start Prozac right away. I’m not saying you have to do intensive religious rework. (Please, don’t become a Scientologist; you’ll only get a lot worse, even though a lot of what they say about engrams seems to make so much sense.) I’m not saying you have to do anything except listen to your own mind.
That’s what I’ve relented to myself. I don’t want the drugs; I’m using a mild herbal supplement to help.
It doesn’t always. Sometimes I just go wack.
But I know it will pass, and that, for the moment, I’m not myself — and when that happens I tend to clamp down most, to be most guarded in how I interact with the world; because I know the bubbling chaos is just there, that how I respond to pretty much everythying is not a normal reaction.
I ride it out, but while I do so, I remain circumspect as best I can.
I’m writing this now in a manic phase. I am not telling you everything that is happening inside me. Because I know that if I did, in the light of my cooler mind, it would be impossible to explain.
It would appear insane.
But I also don’t want the drugs, man. I don’t want myself to be compromised; when I’m stable, I do things with a single image and a dash of words that can make jaded men weep, and I’m afraid of losing that. Because I know my contact with the mildly crazy is what gives me the fuel I need to make my work have real meaning.
So my struggle is not to maintain equilibrium in the face of my peers. My struggle is, instead, to maintain the appearance of equilibrium during those occasional times when most of my marbles seem utterly lost in the drain of the universe.
I ride out the black times too, the dark times.
My role model is Spock. I seem cold, distant, unemotional to so many; but underneath is a boil of hot emotion, some of it exhilerating, some of it frightening.
To most I’m just moody; that’s all. I can live with that.
I know what happened to you, I think. I really do.
The good news is that it’s not you, and you don’t have to always put it out there for everyone to see. You can sense it coming; you can feel the onset; and you can just shrug, and know it’s due, and hang on for dear life, and let yourself be sure that eventually the worst will pass.
My formula is to generally avoid all stimulants and depressants, including strong coffee, nicotene and alcohol. Start there and work forward.
And, as best you can, withdraw. Tell the world you need some time to work on yourself, and go within yourself for a while.
The public apology just didn’t help, and I know it as well as you do, and I know why.
Hang in there. And for what it’s worth, I forgive you.
0:23 on November 23rd, 2006
I watched the video of “kramer” like a lot of people have. It seems that he didn’t like certain people in the audience talking during his show.
He got angry and decided to hurt those people using language that he must have known was unacceptable. It then seemed that he tried to pretend that he was just being humorous.
As happens when people try to hurt others. they use language which will negatively affect the people to whom it is directed.
I am in no way trying to excuse or apologise for his behaviour. I suppose I am trying to explain the behavioral process that I witnessed on the video.
This guy may be a flaming racist, he may also be someone who let his anger use a verbal tool which he knew would hit hard. That is - an inflammatory racist attack.
Either way, he still looks like a dick.
0:37 on December 1st, 2006
Yeah, his behavior was dickish. I wasn’t trying to excuse that; I’m trying to express to him — in an open way — my understanding of what may have happened, and to give him a possible reason for it, and a possible way out.
It’s about introspection more than anything else. I can feel my onsets. To borrow from Pink Floyd, I can feel one of my turns coming on. Used to be I’d look at its onset with a kind of helpless terror, feeling totally powerless to understand, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.
I know now, and that helps. It helps a lot. It lets me remember that the things I am feeling are transitory. They are not concrete, they are not me, and they will pass; yet, those things are me as well.
Today I went to the ophthalmologist for a checkup. Part of that is dilation of the iris and probing of the peripheral retina by use of a bright light, magnifying lens and something called scleral depression, which is basically the doctor hovering over your wide-open eye with that insanely bright light blasting into you, all the while pressing down on your eye with a sharp, stiff metallic probe in order to push your retina into view.
It doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as, say, biting your cheek accidentally; but it is intensely uncomfortable; you want to blink but can’t, and there’s this dull aching press on your eye — such an important organ, so very crucial, and one which we’re all afraid of having poked out. No one wants to feel his eyeball squeezed until it bursts and the fluid runs out of it like hot jelly.
Enduring such an exam for the first time is terrible. It’s never pleasant to revisit it, but I have to, since I was found to have retinal holes when I was fifteen or so; untreated, these can eventually lead to detachment and blindness.
The point is that the exam is awful, but the awfulness is mostly a kind of psychological dread. The first time I had it done the poor doctor had to load me three times with Valium before I settled down enough for him to complete an exam which, in normal cases, should have taken no more than five minutes.
It was more like two minutes today. And it was done without sedatives. Why? Because I knew what to expect and knew it would be over in a very short time.
That’s how all physical pain is. Generally it’s over pretty soon; generally it becomes a memory in less time than it takes us to steel for it, dread it, wish it wasn’t about to happen.
That’s what my “turns” are to me now. I understand them, know they will pass, know that they’ll be over very soon. For a short time I’m not how I imagine myself to normally be, and then … it’s all over.
Just as pleasure is fleeting, discomfort is a temporary thing, most of the time. But we get so locked into our neuroses, into our belief that this temporary breath will become vast enough to fill the universe, that we behave all out of proportion to the scale of the occurrence.
I don’t think anyone has ever died of an eye exam. And I don’t think anyone ever has to die of bipolar issues, particularly the mild ones; and just as I no longer need sedatives before I get my eyes poked with a sharp stick, I think mild bipolar is something that, identified and understood, can be handled with tremendous agility.
That said, I’m all in favor of medical intervention whenever it’s necessary — and it may well be, in Richards’s case.
And that is nothing to feel ashamed of.
9:26 on December 21st, 2006
[...] Oops. I guess I thought maybe he’d had a chance to sober up and was going to retract his bigoted and xenophobic ramblings, but it seems not. Apparently he’s less concerned about public opinion than Michael Richards was, and since he’s so clearly unrepentant, I don’t think he has the problem Richards might have. That is, I think Goode really is a bigot, and not simply mentally ill. “He stands by the letter,” said Linwood Duncan, aide to the 5th District Republican. Duncan refused to say more. [...]
15:22 on January 25th, 2007
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH MICHAEL RICHARDS?!?!?!?! He is sooooooooo disgusting!! I’m having trouble holding my food in!! And now while I”m watching his “apology” on Letterman, it’s really coming out!! He’s saying he’s “not a racist”, a blind deaf caveman would be convinced of the fact that he IS a racist!! He’s even trying to make excuses ‘I improvise on stage, I go into character’ there are NO excuses!! He makes me sick!! I’d heard about the one particular word he keeps using over and over AND OVER again, but then when I saw it on YouTube, I must say the “that’s what happens when you interupt a whiteman” comment, made me want to stick a fork up his ass! I will NEVER be able to watch a Seinfeld episode without a nauseous feeling everytime Kramer stumbles in. HE SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED ON STAGE TO PERFORM IN PUBLIC………. EVER!! In cases like this, where you are a public figure (and have been for a long time) I feel we should stand by ZERO TOLERANCE!!
18:10 on January 26th, 2007
Thanks for the comments, Julia — thing is, we have this entire freedom of expression thing going on that more or less bars anyone from censoring others, at least in theory.
It seems to me that social opprobrium — such as your comment about Richards and the way he went completely nuts onstage — is a very effective tool for handling this kind of egregious misbehavior. Simple shame can be a pretty powerful antidote to public stupidity.
The best thing that can happen to Michael Richards right now would be for him to seriously soul-search and get himself some therapy. Banning him — or anyone — from saying things we don’t like, though, rapidly becomes a slippery slope. Eventually we end up with a society wherein no one says anything out of fear of insulting someone … and that way has been tried before. Check out Wiki sometime on “Bowdlerization” for just one example. (Another is a scene in Citizen Kane, wherein Kane is talking to a friend and begins a sentence with, “Gosh only knows…” That’s simply silly, but it’s clear that no one at RKO wanted to hear the word “God” used in that context.)
I prefer a messy, sometimes hurtful world where people are free to say what kinds of things they want to over a world wherein no one is allowed to speak.
9:35 on February 8th, 2007
[...] Contrarily we have a 41-year-old NASA astronaut who wore diapers in a cross-country drive, apparently intent on kidnapping and possibly killing a woman whom she perceived as a romantic rival. In the process, this person might well have destroyed her own marriage. This kind of behavior is near enough to Michael Richards’s outburst to make me think she needs meds as much as he did. But, diagnosably unbalanced or not, this behavior is clearly an example of obsession on something … well, not necessarily insignificant, but certainly unrealistic. [...]