Beggars can't be choosers....

Alert Reader knows that the energy behind the blog comes from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I have a minor case, subsequent to a minor stroke long ago. How do we know?

Several ways. I have a slightly unusual EEG. Most of all, though, I have the telltale "soft" signs: Hallucinated smells. Unexplainable and rapid shifts in mood. In my case, sudden and uncontrolled episodes of despair, which last maybe 15 minutes or so. Supposedly, and this is disputed by some neurologists, there are traits associated with TLE, which are constant between true seizure episodes: hyperrelgiosity, fainting, deja vu, jamais vu, pedantism (moi?), and, for me, pressure of speech. A lot of times, I just can't stop talking.

And, surprise, hypergraphia -- the need to write stuff, really a lot. Dostoevsky had TLE; yessir, me and Dosty, scribbling away.

TLE people turn up often as shamans. Perhaps a new career path for my later years.

Over the last months, I have become very suspicious of the sources of my own behavior. If I start yapping while having lunch with someone, I often look back later and say to myself: "You bozo. What was all that? Just shut up. Please!"

And, I am open to questions by others. If someone says to me, "Why did you talk so much?", I can say "Well, this TLE thing....". And at the same time, I think, "There is no other way to be". I understand the question. I am being asked "Why are you acting so goofy?" And, again, there is no other way to be.

If someone asks me "Why did you choose to talk so much?", I just have no possible response. None. I didn't choose to talk so much. I just did. In this situation, as in so much of neurology, there is the ambiguous space for doubt. Maybe I did choose. Maybe, going into the discussion, I thought "Well, it would be fun to just let it rip here and not let anybody else talk". In that case, if someone asked why I chose to yap, I might very well say "Nyeh, just wanted to see what it was like."

But I would not. I could not "just want to see what it was like". Not with the hovering TLE. The humiliation of being so out of control of my physical process is profound. I would never choose it, nor choose to imitate it. Neurology meets ordinary language. How about an analogy to confuse things?

Take a child who wets the bed. The child is desperately upset by the event; the surrounding adults jump between a benign attitude and a blaming attitude. The idea that the child would deliberately make such a choice is actually malevolent. And, yet, I've heard, "Oh, he just wants the attention", and "He's got us all running around all night". Uh oh. Blame.

I think that "choice" is inextricably bound to "blame". There can be no blame if there is not choice.

And we like to blame. Blame is second only to baseball as the national sport. We blame for everything. We blame people for being sick. We blame them for being stupid. We blame them for being tall, or short. We blame them for being gay. Our penchant for blame is well documented, going back hundreds of years. Slaves were blamed for being slaves. Natives were blamed for being, well, natives. We invaded countries, and then blamed them for it.

But I want to stay focused on sickness, and on neurological disease, as blame-makers. Is it somehow my fault for talking too much at lunch? Sure. I didn't have to go to lunch; I know very well that "lunchy" situations make me prone to yap a lot. So, it is my choice, and my fault, after all.

We can see where that all leads. Stay out of sight until you get it fixed. We'll talk to you then. Disappear. And I have felt some of that, in some conversations. I can think of all the times I've seen it happen to others: The inept player on a Little League team, the stumbling reader in class, the nervous speaker at a meeting, the drooling oldster in the wheelchair. We want them, basically, to just disappear. I am quite surprised to be on the wrong end of that transaction, though.

I'm just not quite sure yet if we can blame me for for talking too much, or for having TLE, or for dreadful blogs. On the one hand, it makes sense, particularly in the context of loving to blame. Hey, nobody said he should do that damn blog. On the other, it makes no sense at all. I know it wasn't a choice. I know there is no blame waiting to catch up to me.

There is a lot more here, a lot more language to be explored. The neurological stuff sends me off course. But don't worry, I'll get to it. Hypergraphia will triumph!!!