(Just in advance… I apologize if the next couple of installments are late, or erratic, or commentary-free. My wife is due in the next ten days with our first child; I’m pretty busy & distracted, but should be able to post the pages consistently, if with little accompanying fanfare.)
“Insane young man”. Ridiculously overdone, perhaps, but nonetheless, a pretty resonant thread throughout the fictions from my teenage years. Not just the cheap stuff I wrote, but also the slightly-less-cheap stuff I’d read (or, you know, watch / listen to). I think it’s a variant of the “angry young man” scenario, but where that anger perhaps doesn’t get an outlet? Angrier to the point of nuts? Not sure, but it was around a lot, and something I attached to… y’know, as an “author”.
And so when it came time to actually start introducing Pargimus and the main context through which Quitoclam defined him (or which he chose to be defined), I couldn’t shy away from it. I don’t know that I’ve come up with anything close to original in portraying a “confused” young man’s relationship to psychiatric institutionalization, but at the very least I hope I’ve stepped far enough away from the more cliché aspects I originally envisioned, in my own confused adolescence.
There was a building I knew (from reputation only) as a “mental hospital” just down the hill from where I grew up. I never knew what went on in it, but an old girlfriend whose grandfather once worked there mentioned some pretty uncomfortable stories once upon a time. Of course, it’d probably be something as mundane as budget problems that would close such a place before staff misconduct would. The place is probably closed now.
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