(The following is an excerpt from a larger memoir piece chronicling my experiences of living with mental illness and addiction. I will be posting the rest of the story in forthcoming blog posts.)

Teenage Lobotomy: acclaimed neurologist Dr. Walter Freeman performs a little mental health adjustment, early 1950s-style.

When I was nine years old I could control the weather. My parents had bought their first ever “new” house, a tract home in a fairly new subdivision. This was a big purchase for them; upward mobility as exemplified by a life-changing purchase. While both were frugal with money, a trait their youngest son would not inherit, after 16 years of marriage, raising two sons, and much hard work, they were finally able to buy a new home. They had both grown up poor, my mom a child of the brutal climes of Eastern Kentucky; my dad a product of a colorful Irish American ghetto in Louisville. They were born out of a kind of poverty that seems to be retained at the genetic level, generations of lacking that is encoded in the marrow. I have never actually sat down and eaten in a restaurant with my family. “It’s a waste of money,” is my dad’s lifelong rationale. The home was a two story house with four bedrooms, a fireplace, and a large backyard. It was there that I would secretly display my occult powers of meteorological prowess. At that time I was obsessed with the idea of magic. Not stage illusion but the real deal; wizardry, sorcery, necromancy – the works. Much of this interest was surely spawned by the innate imagination of childhood. Once I discovered standard fantasy stories like fairy tales, “The Hobbit,” and “Conan the Barbarian,” that initial spark of dreams was soon engulfed by the fires of a specific form of self-hypnosis that surely falls away from all children over time. The problem was that my magical gift was a secret. As soon as I was certain that no one would possibly see me, I would sneak out into the fenced backyard. Our dog would invariably try to follow me out there but I would issue her a stern look and quietly close the sliding glass door behind me. My parents had opted not to purchase any grass sod for the back of the house. “Who will ever see it but us?” was both a question and statement of finality posed by my dad.

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