Psycho

A couple at the pub this past weekend sat in a booth facing each other and text messaging back and forth between themselves. ('SMS', as it's called in civilized countries, that are not as fond of acronyms as we are here in America.) Once they became bored with the game, they sat in silence drinking their beers. I was sitting at the railing opposite the bar, glancing occasionally at the woman's low cut blouse, expecting for a nipple or two to make an appearance any time (they never did), and trying to figure out a way to connect some stories I was jotting notes about on an insert pulled out from a free newspaper, advertising something called Argosy University. Wanna quick doctorate in Business Administration? I didn't think so. I'd only lose my job if I got one! Anyway, SMS, a new way to communicate without wasting one's breath. Well, they say that most of our communication is non-verbal.


My dear friend asked me verbally earlier this year, out of the blue, if I thought her breasts had been augmented. ('augmented' was not the word she used, but I don't recall the exact term.) After some hesitation, I answered "Umma, umma, you know, I never thought about it (which was true), but knowing you as a person and without having a peek, I think not!" She said, "They aren't , but they are beginning to sag." I then said " Whatever, I love you just the same." Which was perfectly true.

There was recently a well publicized trial of a woman who had murdered her psychiatrist husband. She had been his patient as a teenager, he left his wife and married her, 25 years his junior. Three sons, weird beliefs shared between the two of them about satanic cults abusing children, and "recovered memory theories", popular once and long since discredited, divorce and then the murder. She fired several attorneys and defended herself, an intelligent but psychologically disturbed woman, she was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced, now two books appear about the case. In one of them, the author cites a friend of the victim, who says that the doctor so loved her that he let her kill him and "died from suicide by wife".

I related some of the comic details of my own near-tragic melodrama to a longtime friend, one of the very few I had confided in, and he sent me an e-mail in reply, suggesting I move to his country where femme fatales are not as common as they are here. He then issued his own diagnosis, saying that, oh, she (the other player) must be such and such astrological sign, what with the anger, the revenge, the plotting. And I answered, dude, she isn't, I am that astrological sign myself, and anger, revenge and plotting are the farthest things from my mind. In fact, it's everything opposite of that I'm thinking about. He replied that I'm a strange specimen of that sign, and advised me to return to writing about music.


The way our thought patterns work, you'd expect that a folksinger named 'Elvis Perkins' were some desperate show biz pretender nobody with a stage name cashing in on the familiarity of the names of two co-inventors of hillbilly rock and roll, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. Wrong, thought patterns! The fellow turns out to be the son of Anthony Perkins himself, best remembered in the role of the psychologically disturbed motel owner Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's horror film Psycho.