Psychology/Psychiatry

Television night with Music and BEING. Apartment strewn with clothes, bottles, ash-trays over-flowing, cake and candy wrappers, coffee cups and cartons emptied of fast-food, junk-food, food-flavored processed food product.
Colorful slaughter on the big TV.  BEING and Music deep in the couch. Music sucked cigarettes, BEING his bong. They stared hard into the grim eye of The War.  I preferred not to.  See.
Cheesy crunchy chips, beef jerky, beer.  Enemy vehicles blown to bits. “Our” planes over The Enemy City.  Loud significant explosions.

Just what are we teaching young people, society at large,  in and out of school? Just what is it to be an American today, awash in consumer madness? The Last One with the Most Toys Wins bumper sticker,  or is it this little chant:  You’ll have to peel this i-thing Apple appendage from my cold dead mind, err, hand?

Staff meeting. Topiary Techniques Auditorium. Horticultural Technicians, green-and-yellow t-shirts. Back row, Friday evening, work day done, go home.  Now.  Run.
Victor commandeered the small stage. Stack of papers width of several phone books dramatically dropped loud. Thud. Heads up. Tirade. Paper replacement forms processed last financial quarter, over $250,000.
“That’s $250,000 lifted from Topiary Techniques,” said Victor.

The Company Gym. Buff bodies.  Faces taut with grim determination.  Diets optimized by scientific know-it-all know-how proven computer-charted-and-corrected scientific method.  Belief systems built on strong foundations of clinical experimentation repeated for accuracy under stress-increased conditions, peer-reviewed.
Hard labor builds hard selves.

Note: Certain critics among our “journalistic peers,” so-called, have impugned the integrity of The /dev/null Staff with accusations of “unprofessional and unsavory tactics” pertaining to the reconstruction of this particular sequence during The Plantman’s ordeal on earth. The Staff did hire a professional hypnotist to delve into this part of The Plantman’s past prior to The University and his subsequent employment at Coolman Associates Advertising Agency.

Straight from “MBS-in-hand” churned copy for Coolman & Associates Advertising and Image Management (AIM).  Cool AIM.
Agency days bleak indeed. Frantic. Hive of urgency and tension. Get Word to public. Word was product. Word and image. Factory of words images.  Word-image-product proposal better be damn good or say “good-bye” to the
account. Ready. AIM. Fire(d).
Didn’t mingle. All those stressed designers and copywriters stiffening in cubicles, dreaming words and patterns.

University Mental Hygiene Clinic. Peace soft prints. Water-colors.  Comfort plants. Celebrity and Fitness magazines. Difficult rising from the waiting-room chair: drunk, drunk. Tired.
The affable Shrink plump, welcoming.
Talk released words to chill, conditioned air.
“And what makes me me in my head?” I blurted. “I’ve seen things that, you know, I want them to be mine.”
“And if they’ll be yours?” asked The Shrink.