Being epileptic means that the world is divided into normal people and epileptics. Even the weirdest of you normal people are normal. The only people I’ve ever met who aren’t normal are other epileptics. They seem normal, not your kind of normal, but epileptic normal. I think what makes you all the same is all those emotions. You have an incredible range of emotions. You get upset all the time and feel intensely about things that I have no idea it’s even possible to feel intensely about. It’s like you all feel in vivid colors and I feel in black and white, and I can see only a fraction of what you all get so worked up about. As I age my brain gets more steadily fried from all the loose wiring and zaps and my emotional range gets narrower and narrower till you all become virtually incomprehensible at times, colors that I not only can’t see but have no idea even exist. I just watch you all emote, bemused, and try not to get involved.

I tried to write fiction for years. Some of the writing could be very pretty, but the characters were ludicrous, utterly unreal. A couple decades later it finally dawned on me that I hadn’t a clue what people felt, no idea at all. I couldn’t write about anybody else but me and if I was going to write about me why bother with fiction at all? How Dostoevsky wrote those vast character rich novels bewilders me, because he was one fucked up spazz who drove everyone he knew nuts. But somehow he made normal people think he was writing about them. Completely mystifies me. Maybe my bewilderment is why I don’t read fiction anymore. I have a huge stack of novels here to read, but I haven’t read one in decades. I used to love them. I remember some of the last fiction I read was the Alexandria Quartet twice in a year or so and having my mind blown. My whole writing style changed. How it changed I don’t know. I wish I’d written how. Now it’s just part of another life many seizures ago. A life that doesn’t even seem like my own. The brain changes, identity with it. Memories vanish. Emotions slip away. I think about myself then in the third person, in various third persons even. A succession of Bricks.

Anyway, time for my pills.