I Don't Like Mondays

CW: This story contains themes of various potentially disturbing topics.

"I DON'T LIKE MONDAYS"

After the police came to the house that night and I went through the system and the court-mandated 5150 hold and almost 30 days in the psych ward, when I was scheduled for release within 48 hours I had to meet with yet another new psychiatrist who would be responsible for making an assessment as to whether or not I was a continuing danger to myself or others. Whether or not I could go home.

I was tired. I was tired of all of it. I was tired of the lame-ass basic cable TV shows, I was tired of the shitty food, I was tired of the medications and I was tired of the staff and the other patients and all of the rest. I just wanted to go and get back to my life, whatever that might look like now.

But I had to get past this gatekeeper first.

She did the usual opening friendly chit-chat thing and I played along because I wanted to be discharged. But after a minute or so I remember her asking me in a quiet, clinical and detached tone, almost like she was reciting a line from a play, “So Ryan, tell me how you got here. I’ve read Doctor Cahill’s notes from the last few weeks, and I know about the events that occurred between you and your family that night, but I would like to hear the story in your own words. Can you tell me that story, please?”

How did I get here? That "story"? Okay. Let’s see…

Part of me wanted to just give her the answer she presumably wanted to hear but I guess there was a bigger part of me that just needed to be heard. To answer with the truth, I suppose. There was some kind of difficult-to-define compulsion there. If anything good had come out of this time it was that my head had cleared and I was able to remember and articulate many of the things that led up to all of this to begin with. Before I knew what I was really saying the words were just coming out of my mouth. I think it might have had something to do with all the medications they were pumping into me but in my own defense I really did sincerely try my best to just answer her question honestly. I started off by calmly and rationally explaining the following…

Between 1997 and 2022 there were 1,453 school shootings in the USA. In the most recent 5 school years there were a substantially higher number of school shootings than during the prior 20 years. I don't like Mondays.

About 20,000 people die in single-car accidents in this country every year. How many of those aren’t really accidents? How many people just don’t want to keep on going on but also don’t want their friends and family to know about their despair or the truth of their passing (or simply don’t want to invalidate a life insurance policy)? How many unintentional overdoses and other “unnatural forms of death” fall into this same category each year? Who can really say?

Speaking of overdoses, since the opioid crisis began in this country about 20 years ago over 300,000 people have died of this cause and more than 20,000 babies have recently been born each year into a state of full-blown opiate withdrawal due to drug abuse by their mothers during pregnancy. This is only growing more extreme with the meteoric rise of Fentanyl. That’s nice. That’s good to know.

In 2023, over two-thirds of the wealth in America was owned by the top-10% of earners. By contrast, the lowest 50% of earners possessed about 2.5% of total wealth. About 40 million people live below the poverty level according to U.S. government statistics here in "the richest country in the world" but anyone who knows anything on the topic understands that the true number is much higher than that. This wealth disparity encompasses everything from poor health and educational outcomes to early mortality, higher probability of incarceration and any number of things you would never want for your own children or grandchildren.

The FBI estimates that approximately 25-50 serial killers are active in this country at any given time. That's a joke. Most professors and other experts of criminology, including many former FBI special agents, believe this estimate to be below the true number by a full order of magnitude. The FBI likes to keep that number low. As low as possible. It helps people to get to work on time. It helps to keep the economy moving along.

She stopped me. I didn’t look up and I didn't really hear her clearly but I think she said something like:

“Ryan, I really want to bring this back to you. What I am asking is how did you get here? Let's leave the rest of this out and just focus on you.” It was weird and dreamlike, the way she said it. What was wrong with this lady? I was in the middle of answering her question in ample detail. Why was she interrupting me? After a moment I took a deep breath and continued.

Adult retrospective studies show that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men were sexually abused before the age of 18 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This means there are currently more than 42 million adult survivors of child sexual abuse in the U.S. How many of these people would fall neatly into a Venn diagram with one or more of the demographic groups detailed above?

The black community represents about 12% of the overall population and about 40% of the prison inmate population in this country, an index of over 300%. Coincidence? Don't be silly. These numbers track very closely with income and wealth ownership disparities by race here in America.

There are approximately 330 million people living in the U.S. at present and the ATF estimates that at least 500 million firearms have been manufactured and sold into this market since they began keeping official records. This is considered to be a low estimate as it excludes all unrecorded and black market gun sales. But hey, they say this is the main reason why neither Japan nor Germany ever drew up any serious plans for an actual occupation of the American homeland during World War Two. USA! USA!

On that topic, the United States of America is the only country that has ever deployed nuclear weapons against other human beings, vaporizing almost a quarter of a million people in two blinks of an eye, and countless more down through the generations in collateral fashion. The Japanese have a term for this. The "hibakusha" are the surviving victims of the atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While these individuals survived the immediate effects of the blasts, the hibakusha have suffered from the effects of radiation sickness, loss of family and friends, social stigmatization and various other forms of disease and discrimination for decades. You have to wonder if they could hear the wild cheers and revelry coming from Times Square all the way over there.

This is the one thing that we truly excel at, our most central and innate talent. We can project our military might anywhere in the world at any time. Our primary export is murder and we are truly elite and "world class" when it comes to this. When U.S. warships arrive off the coast of your country you wave the white flag fast or you die screaming. In 2024 the U.S. Congress appropriated over 2.4 TRILLION dollars for our Department of "Defense", more than the next 20 top-spending militaristic nations combined, of which we have treaties and alliances with 18. (Sure this seems excessive but when you owe $200 billion annually on the interest payments alone for your foreign debt this is an excellent way to keep your lenders patient.) Secondarily, this country is also pretty good at the production of films, TV and music. After that, it's mostly just well-calculated global financial malfeasance, arms trafficking and illegal narcotics consumption.

Once again, she stopped me, just as I was getting close to the end of my thesis. This was getting incredibly annoying. Why the fuck would you ask someone such a seriously profound question if you didn’t want to hear their answer? I was getting really pissed off.

Fine, lady. This is how you want to do this? Because I can take it up a notch if that’s how you want to play it. If that’s what I really need to do to get the point across. Fine.

To date, Catholic dioceses in the U.S. have paid out at least $3 billion in compensation to settle claims filed by victims of child sexual abuse by the clergy. In most situations, the church has retained a large, prestigious and politically-connected law firm to quietly speak with the victims, consolidate a large group of cases into a global settlement and minimize the financial exposure on a per-case basis. After a year or two of work the small handful of attorneys involved usually walk away with about half of what the thousands of victims and their families receive after a lifetime of suffering (which often manifests itself in the forms of drug and alcohol addiction, suicide, depression and the infliction of further sexual abuse on others). It is widely understood that the vast majority of these sexual abuse victims of the clergy have never and will never come forward for various reasons, so the real number should probably be at least two or three times this amount, and there are countless new cases pending all the time as the abuse and cover-up efforts are clearly ongoing.

Enough of that. The median age of a homicide victim here in America is 20-24 years old, roughly the same age of a college student. This is essentially the same median age for casualties of U.S. military service men and women in Iraq during the peak years of the war between 2003-2006, which is, of course, almost nothing overall compared to the various official estimates of one million plus Iraqi deaths directly related to “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, a very odd notion of the meaning of freedom indeed. (Interesting Comparative Note: The average age of the US Government officials who sent these soldiers off to war was 67. This group suffered zero casualties. But don’t worry. “They will greet us as Liberators”. )

More importantly, U.S. and other western oil companies, military contractors and various other corporate concerns did very well during this time period, which was clearly the main point right from the start. This became abundantly obvious a few years after September 11, 2001 when then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered the question of why we were invading Iraq with the simple response, “There are no good targets in Afghanistan.”

Never mind. We could get caught up in that all day. Listen to this. During the subprime mortgage crisis that began in America during 2008-2009, millions of people lost their homes and their jobs due to risky financial wagers placed by a very small number of enormously wealthy commercial banks and investment houses that were later deemed “too big too fail” and ultimately bailed out without consequence by the American taxpayer. The economic downturn that these firms created through their recklessness and greed rippled like a tsunami all around the world, reeking economic carnage on billions of people. Note: Exactly one Wall Street trader actually received a prison sentence for these actions, there have been no meaningful financial changes or reforms made since that time and - interesting fact - according to the National Institutes of Health there is a direct correlation between unemployment rates and “early-cause specific mortality” due to an increased risk of suicide and death from various other undetermined causes. Yay! Fun! Once again...USA! USA! Leader of the Free World!

Need I go on, doctor? Fine. Let’s keep on with this. I can dish this out for as long as you can take it. Maybe some of this will eventually get through your thick fucking caffeine-addled, self-important skull if I slam on it hard enough. Maybe some of this will finally get through to you…

During the late 1950s and early 1960s pregnant women were often prescribed a drug called Thalidomide for nausea, which resulted in severe birth defects in thousands of children. Prescriptions of this drug continued well past the point when these health effects were fully known and understood by the drug-maker and the FDA. Similarly, not long before this same general time period, Castle Bravo nuclear bomb testing by the U.S, Government in the South Pacific at Bikini Atoll and other places also resulted in severe birth defects in countless children, so we had some prior experience with this sort of thing. We were not amateurs by any means. (For the record, we deployed doctors to these locations right away. But not to treat the victims. We sent them there primarily to study the victims.)

The serial killer known as Samuel Little from the State of Georgia confessed to murdering 93 people, nearly all women, between 1970 and 2005, a 35-year unchecked reign of terror over dozens and dozens of helpless people who lived in zip codes that the local police simply didn’t care all that much about protecting, mostly due to racist proclivities. “Misdemeanor Homicides” is what some law enforcement veterans call this. The FBI has confirmed Little's involvement in at least 60 of the 93 confessed murders, the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in United States history.

On average, approximately 500 women are raped per hour here in the U.S. according to aggregated law enforcement data. Statistically, about 5% of reported sexual assaults actually lead to an arrest.

I haven't even touched on the irreparable damage we have done to the global environment and the fact that our grandchildren will almost certainly have to live in a very different and rapidly-failing and unsustainable world than the one that we grew up in. Do the terms "subterranean living quarters" or "insect-based proteins" conjure up any positive mental images?

IS ANY OF THIS GETTING THROUGH TO YOU, DOCTOR? DO YOU SEE WHERE I AM GOING WITH THIS? I ASK YOU. AM I THE ONE WHO IS TRULY INSANE HERE???

She cleared her throat quietly and repeated herself.

“I’m sorry, Ryan. Did you not hear me clearly? I know they have you on a lot of medication and you haven’t been sleeping well, so I understand if you didn’t hear my question. That’s okay. I just asked you to try to explain to me in your own words how you got here. This is really important, okay? Please just try to tell me. I really want to know and I want to help you.”

The patronizing tone was just too much. I hung my head and held it in my hands. What was I doing here? Just take me back to my room. It was almost Tuesday, Taco Night, the only halfway decent thing they served from that God-forsaken kitchen. Plus, the National Geographic Channel TV show “How To Catch A Smuggler” was coming on soon. I didn’t want to miss the start. I just wanted to get back to my room and settle in. I was tired and I needed my medications. I needed my rest. I just wanted to watch TV with my roommate. I was done here. Done with this lady. Done with her questions. Just give me another 30 days. Maybe I will be able to explain myself better then.

THE END