Like a wave bashing against the rocks as it gains purchase with the tide, women speaking out about their experiences with horrible men are starting to drown the old easy-to-toss-aside PR responses that led to no change. ![]() It's maddening, disheartening, and depressing.Īnd then, this rising moment overtook us. None have that luxury any more, and every day of this year has presented is a new battle, a new outrage. 2016 relentlessly presented us with stark, impactful deaths, and one of those was of the death of being able to mostly ignore (if you are privileged enough) politics, unless you enjoyed not ignoring them. Last year, for our Thanksgiving essay, Paul Constant grappled with the election that pried free the last finger holding to sanity our world offered. Imagine if they became your entire reality. Imagine if you could never rid yourself of them. You know you are parroting the culture's response, and you know well enough that it is lies and you don't have to listen to that damaging bullshit.īut those little ghost whispers that want you to think something? Imagine if they were overwhelming. One sign of being a progressive sort of person is not that you don't hear the horrible, racist, sexist intonation of default culture rattling around your memory pan, but that you know well enough not to squirt it out between the flaps of meat that make sound and language just because your brain thunk it. What mechanism of the brain is there to reinforce this? Is it an evolutionary advantage, or a glitch in the operating system of humans that allows things to get stuck and amplified ad infinitum? I was wondering about song loops, earworms, or snippets of music that get trapped in the head. It was music that brought him to mind, after many years of not thinking after him. If I remember, it was just chanting the three words over and over again. I did write a song about him in my band at the time, which I'm glad there are no recordings of (that I know of). I found him unusual and therefore interesting, but also unnerving. I wonder if it was good for him, to have an audience like that, or if it fed his manic side? Was he a balloon that needed to let air out, or would talking about it ramp him up into unhealthy excitement?īecause I was not one to find mental illness ironic or funny - unlike some folks who encountered him in my group - I kept my distance. He was an evangelist, and his evangelism was based on trying to save the world from the evils of this horrid nightmare toxin. A thick, messy, paranoid obsession ruled this man's mind, but he could talk about it in a disjointed dialog for hours on end. He sat on a bench, and around him, punk teenage skaters sat on their boards while he explained what Symptomatic Nerve Gas was - a nerve agent made by the Vatican, spread in the candles they use in church. Once, outside a punk show at this all-ages joint called the Vortex, where the bands would play 30 minute sets interspersed with 30 minutes of dance music, he held court. He must have liked something about Bellingham, because he spent quite a time there, over at least a few years. Then, familiarity brings scorn, Symptomatic Nerve Gas has an important message, but no stage presence. "People are first shocked into avoidance. Jack Cady wrote him as a character in his book Street, about a serial killer in Seattle. You can Google him and find reports from Bellingham to Eugene. We are all witness to it.Īpparently he travelled the Pacific Northwest, spreading his message. Yes, this guy is really breaking a social contract in a minor way. I looked around, and other people on the bus caught my eye. Looking up, I saw his duffel had a manilla folder taped to it, and on the folder in black marker he had written those three words: "Symptomatic Nerve Gas." Why would you look at anybody talking to themselves on a quiet bus? You would hope that it was a momentary glitch and they'd go back to being quiet. Until the bus had left the station and I heard a little voice quietly say those three words, nasal, at the top of his baritone register: I'm sure I was reading, so paid him little mind. He dropped his bag to the ground and sat across from me on the sideways seats in the back of the bus. This very solid looking middle-aged man came aboard, an army green duffel on his back, stuffed to the point of breaking. ![]() I was riding home, after putting my quarter in the fare box. I first encountered him on a city bus in Bellingham in the mid-80s. He was a real man, a Korean War vet, apparently, or Viet Nam, perhaps, or maybe not a vet at all, depending on who you believe - the narratives are mixed and told in different ways depending on when you met and talked to him. He went by the name Symptomatic Nerve Gas, and no, this is not some kind of sub-par Vonnegut fiction. The Pacific Northwest is home to many unique eccentrics, but there was one character who, if you encountered him, you never forgot.
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