Is it easy being Vic Neptune?
     There are times, like now, when I can't concentrate.  Thoughts knock around in my brain unable to land and send out roots.  I attribute this to long-standing mental conditions established by DNA combinations at conception.  In 1998 I began a novel I never finished called The Accelerated Man.  I wrote it longhand, accompanied by illustrations drawn in my primitive style.  It was about a man named Xavier Compton, doing spy work on the largest moon of Uranus, Titania, in the twenty-third century.  His enemies in the Titanian government get an agent of theirs to dose him with a mentally disabling drug, propelling his mind into ever more frequent phases of uncontrollable hyper-cognition.  When in these frames of mind he's brilliant, but no one can understand his ideas.  He figures out the corrupt nature of the Titanian government in the space of a day or so, identifies all of the players correctly, but can do nothing effective about it because from society's perspective he's nuts. 
     The Titanian Health and Human Services Department ships him back to Earth, where's he put in a controlled but pleasant sanitarium in Kentucky.  Compton's handlers in the Earth-based intelligence agency keep him an eye on him from a distance at first, but manage to infiltrate a female agent into the sanitarium, posing as a suicidal schizophrenic.
     That amounted to about twenty-five pages, then I gave up on it. 
     I could write an entire synopsis of The Accelerated Man, making it up right now and maybe over a few more sessions, but I don't want to.  For one thing, I've found in my own case that figuring out everything in advance kills the actual writing of a novel.  I need the spontaneous moment of branching off from what I'm thinking should come next.  A random thought, a quick unplanned glance at something outside, may enter what I'm writing.  It could be that my mind's general whirling condition finds attractive the random thing used in an essay, a blog post, a movie, a collage.  People walk on beaches picking up driftwood and stones.  These objects catch their eyes because they're interesting and beautiful, but they're also pushed up onto the sand by random oceanic movements.  These beach people, whether they think of it or not, embrace randomness, something they may not do when buying a stock or a car.
     I had read some of British author D.M. Thomas's Russian-themed novels around the time I began writing The Accelerated Man.  In one of them (I think it was Ararat) I learned of Soviet persecution of some political dissidents using involuntary commitment to psychiatric wards as a means of control.  Haloperidol (Haldol in pharmacy lingo), an anti-psychotic drug with distracting and even disabling side effects, was injected into these Soviet dissidents, giving them enough physical and psychological turmoil to deal with, that plotting or speaking against the official system was contained.
     What a brilliant idea!  Got a problem with someone?  Just fuck him up with (legal) drugs and claim he's mentally ill. 
     At least ten years after The Accelerated Man I watched Robert Rossen's 1964 film Lilith, starring Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg.  It takes place at a sanitarium out in the country somewhere, remote and beautiful, with a lot of patients with various brain chemistry problems.  Seberg is a young woman who attracts the attention of the new employee, Beatty, brought on as a counselor.  She's paranoid schizophrenic, something made fully apparent to the viewer far into the movie.  It's one of the best psych ward movies ever made.  I was struck by its resemblance (the sanitarium part) to my abandoned novel.  The male/female roles were reversed, but the movie's eerie atmosphere, shot in black and white, captures the feel of mental illness in an institution, with days and nights gelling into a timelessness so oppressive it can only be called time made elastic and unyielding, a patient's life delineated by doctor appointments, medication handouts, and ceaseless condescension by those "helping."
     Is it difficult being Vic Neptune? 
     Not always.  This, like anything involving creative effort, whether it's making music or love, brings a gratification at the end for me when I realize I added another brick to the edifice of my fucking ego.

                                                                          Vic Neptune