We just got hit with 50 inches of snow, it's colder than the carcass of that pre-historic Mastodon they just dug up in the ice fields not far from here, and the kids can't go out to check the traps. So what the hell, let me edify you and face my demons with this list of psychological afflictions as diagnosed by my therapist last week.
Some of you may consider this entertainment, the sick ghouls among you. I think it's more a public service on my part. This is what happens when you don't (or CAN'T) fulfill your dreams of screenwriting stardom and are reduced to selling derivatives, futures and plaster gnomes from your home office.
In no particular order other than which malady is manifesting itself most strongly this morning, we start at #1 -- 50 being the most serious and debilitating...it's also a pain to count down and keep track.
1.
Histrionic personality disorder: Involves a pattern of excessive emotional expression and attention-seeking, including an excessive need for approval and inappropriate seductiveness, that usually begins in early adulthood or when writing self-absorbed blogs.
2.
Expressive language disorder: Characterised by having a limited vocabulary and grasp of reality.
3.
Dyspareunia: Painful sexual intercourse due to medical or psychological causes. The term is used almost exclusively in women, although the problem may occur in screenwriters. The causes are often reversible, even when long-standing, but self-perpetuating pain is a factor after terminating the screenwriting process.
4.
Exhibitionism: The psychological need and pattern of behavior to exhibit naked parts of the body to other people.
5.
Generalized anxiety disorder: Characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry about everyday things and picking the right case on
Deal Or No Deal.
6.
Primary hypersomnia: Characterized by recurrent episodes of excessive daytime sleepiness or prolonged nighttime sleep when interrupted by naps.
7.
Frotteurism: Involves rubbing against another person to achieve sexual arousal or even orgasm, discreetly without being discovered, typically in a public place such as a crowded train or the local offices of The Writers Guild of Canada.
8.
Retts disorder: The clinical features include a deceleration of the rate of head growth and small hands, feet and penis in children and screenwriters over 40. Stereotypic, repetitive hand movements such as mouthing, wringing and giving the "finger" are also noted. Screenwriters with Rett syndrome are very prone to gastrointestinal disorders and about 99% have seizures. They typically have no verbal or writing skills, and about 50% are quasi-vegetative. Constipation, frothing mouth, excessive ear wax secretion, nose-bleeds, slow-trickle urination and oculary tumors are very common and can be problematic.
9.
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD): Also known as Winter Depression or Pre-Wrist-Slashing Syndrome. Most SAD sufferers experience depressive symptoms in the winter, summer, spring and fall, especially when dealing with second acts if they are screenwriters. SAD is rare, if existent at all, in the Los Angeles area, but is measurably present in the North East, most particularly in Newfoundland.
10.
Tourette syndrome (Fuck it, no longer active...shit-piss-cock-Scarlett Johannson!)11.
Vaginismus: A condition which affects a woman's ability to engage in any form of vaginal penetration, including sexual penetration, insertion of tampons, and the penetration involved in gynecological examinations. And yes, I'm a man. Go figure.
12.
Shared psychotic disorder: This syndrome is most commonly diagnosed when the two or more individuals concerned live in close proximity and may be socially or physically isolated and have little interaction with other people such as my wife and I.
13.
Stereotypic movement disorder: Involves repetitive, nonfunctional motor behavior (e.g., hand waving or head banging against a computer), that markedly interferes with normal activities or results in bodily injury, and persists for four weeks or longer if dealing with second acts in a screenplay.
14.
Self-defeating personality disorder: A pervasive pattern of self-defeating behavior, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts including the profession of screenwriter. The sufferer incites angry or rejecting responses (also known as rejection slips) from others and then feels hurt, defeated, humiliated or suicidal.
15.
Pica: Abnormal appetite for soil and other non-foods such as coal, chalk, paper, Twinkies. etc.
16.
Primary, Secondary, Situational and Random Anorgasmia: A condition where one cannot physically orgasm while masturbating to pictures of Scarlett Johansson.17.
Dyscalculia (Mathematics disorder): - Frequent difficulties with arithmetic, confusing the signs: +, -, ÷ and x. - Inability to tell which of two numbers is the larger. - Problems differentiating between left and right, up and down, inside and out. - Difficulty keeping score during football games -- Wait a minute! That's not a disorder! - The condition may lead in extreme cases to a phobia of mathematics, mathematical devices, screenwriting software and
Charlie Sheen.
18.
Munchausen syndrome: Feigning disease, illness, or psychological trauma to draw attention or sympathy to oneself in order to get a job on the next
Terry Gilliam film.
19.
Narcolepsy: An episodic condition featuring loss of muscle function, ranging from slight weakness (such as limpness at the neck or knees, sagging facial muscles, or inability to speak clearly) to complete body collapse and loss of sphincter control.
20.
Hysteria: A diagnostic label applied to a state of mind, one of unmanageable fear, dread, horror or any number of emotional excesses. The fear is often centered on a body part, most often on an imagined problem with that body part (the penis, for example). People who are "hysterical" often lose self-control due to the overwhelming fear involved with living.
21.
Post-traumatic stress disorder: The consequence of exposure to, or confrontation with stressful experiences that the person experiences as highly traumatic -- such as writing this blog.
22.
Schizoaffective disorder: Describing a situation where both the symptoms of mood disorder and psychosis are present. The disorder usually begins in early adulthood, and is more common in screenwriters.
23.
Transient tic disorder: Consists of multiple motor and/or phonic tics with a duration of at least 4 weeks. However, add two weeks for every day the sufferer spends in front of a computer writing screenplays.
Switching over to some of my phobias for the next few:
24.
Anthropomorphobia: The fear or hate of acknowledging in non-humans qualities we wish to consider only human. Much like my groundhog friend, Nestor, who I plan to trap one day and feed his intestines to my dogs.
25.
Emetophobia: The irrational fear of vomiting or of being around others who are vomiting, especially when reading one of my screenplays.
26.
Gymnophobia: Fear or anxiety about being seen naked and/or about seeing others naked, even in situations where it is socially acceptable. Not a problem in a sauna with Scarlett Johansson.
27.
Paraskavedekatriaphobia: The fear of Friday the 13th. Not the date, the movies.
28.
Taphophobia: The fear of being placed in a grave while still alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead; usually attributable to long sessions in front of a computer screenwriting.
29.
Trypanophobia: The extreme and irrational fear of medical procedures involving injections or hypodermic needles to the tip on one's penis.
30.
Osmophobia: Fear, aversion, or psychological hypersensitivity to smells or odors. Do I have to funny that up?
31.
Lalophobia: The irrational fear of speaking or of trying to speak. Also known as Selective Mutism or Total Mutism. The disorder is often manifested by writing incomprehensible, unstructured screenplays with vapid characters and stilted dialogue.
Back to the disorders...32.
Premature ejaculation: Also known as rapid ejaculation, premature climax, early ejaculation, "Oh fuck, sorry honey", or by the Latin term
ejaculatio-by-proxy, is the most common sexual problem in men, affecting 98%-99% of screenwriters (if not more!). It is characterized by a lack of voluntary control over ejaculation. Masters and Johnson (he-he) stated that a man suffers from premature ejaculation if he ejaculates before his partner achieves orgasm or before reading the first sentence of the new Danielle Steel novel in more than ninety percent of his sexual encounters. Other sex researchers have defined premature ejaculation as occurring if the man ejaculates within thirty seconds or less of penetration or by the time his partner reads the second sentence of that Danielle Steel novel. However, a survey by Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s demonstrated that three quarters of screenwriters ejaculated within five seconds of penetration in almost all their sexual encounters with Mexican hookers when not suffering from erectile dysfunction.
33.
Joubert syndrome: Characterized by the absence or underdevelopment of a part of the brain called the cerebellar vermis and the malformed brain stem directly responsible for parentheticals (wrylys) in screenplays.
34.
Dissociative fugue: Widely understood to have its conception in a long-term life event (such as a traumatic childhood or persistent pain-inducing activities such as screenwriting), where sufficient time is given for alternate personality representations to form and take hold. Sudden neurological damage would also seem to fit more closely the onset of a fugue state as happened to me when I got my head caught in the wine press.
35.
Folie à deux: (or "a madness shared by two") A rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis (particularly a paranoid or delusional belief) is transmitted from one individual to another. Much like what I'm doing to you by reading my blog.
36.
Geografikosphobia: Fear of maps, especially the terrifying experience of falling through thousands of miles of space when you use Google Earth and zoom into your hometown!
37.
Narcissistic personality disorder: Characterized by extreme focus on oneself, and is a maladaptive, rigid, and persistent condition that may cause significant distress and functional impairment to the penis .
38.
Reading disorder: Poor recognition of the written word, many mistakes in oral reading,
very poor comprehension of what has been read, very slow bowel movements (or was that "vowel")
39.
Paranoid personality disorder: (also known as Russell Crowe Syndrome) characterized by an exaggerated sensitivity to rejection, resentfulness, distrust, as well as the inclination to distort experienced events such as my child's First Communion.
40.
Sleep terror disorder: Characterized by extreme terror and a temporary inability to regain full consciousness while at the computer writing motion picture screenplays.
41.
Rumination disorder: Bringing up partially digested food and rechewing it before swallowing it or spitting it out.
42.
Intermittent explosive disorder: Characterized by explosive outbursts of behaviour (throwing, breaking things, inflicting physical harm on others) that is disproportional to the provocation usually induced by a phone call from my agent telling me he's dropping me.
43.
Pervasive Developmental Disorder: Characterized by delays in the development of multiple basic functions including socialization, communication and breathing.
44.
Schizophreniform disorder: Delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms directly attributable to the process of screenwriting.
45.
Separation anxiety disorder: Persistent reluctance or refusal to go to sleep without being near a major attachment figure, like my mother.
Let me finish off with a few more phobias that have just come to mind...
46.
Mysophobia: fear of charities, or giving money to that hobo I ended up dousing with kerosene and setting on fire.
47.
Tokophobia: Fear of childbirth. Really.
48.
Ergasiophobia: Fear of work, better known as
procrastination syndrome!
49.
Genophobia: Fear of sexual intercourse.
50.
Coulrophobia: Fear of clowns.
I'm sure many of you screenwriters can relate to this list as the vocation does have its occupational hazards.
But there is hope!
I've been reassured by that therapist that many of these afflictions disappear when you get that first fat option check. Unfortunately for me, that doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon -- thus the medication and therapy sessions four times a week. On the other hand, imagine all the great stories and characters you can create from this treasure trove of pain, anger and self-loathing!
By the way, if you're wondering where the 19 "other things you don't want to know about me" from my previous post are, come on. Don't you think the above covers it pretty nicely?
Now go write and take your
Haloperidol!
Any Steve Reeves fan will tell you that this one-of-a-kind photo of the legendary body builder shortly after his disastrous gender-reassignment operation is priceless.
Perhaps the logo over the Mr. Olympia is too small to read. It says, "The Arnold Schwarznegger Italian Fan Club" of which I am the founder and director. If you're interested in joining, just email me through the blog and I will ignore your request. I have nothing else to add to this caption other than to acknowledge, yes, this is getting old. 
More Reeves trivia: Did you know Steve supplemented his income as a chiropractor? The above treatment known as the "Thorax Aligner", which he pioneered, gained him fame during the 1968 Chiropractors Convention in Reykjavik. The man pictured in the photo receiving Steve's delicate attention is no other than Stephen Hawking before his affliction turned him into a mollusk. 
Sorry, couldn't resist posting this. My kids having fun with some photos of aspiring screenwriters they found on the Web. 
