I GOT GAME

When first-time acquaintances in my town learn I am the "Rick" behind "Rick's Last Licks," they invariably ask me what I do for a living when I'm not writing for Inside Chappaqua magazine. As if I needed more on my plate. Somehow, they sense that my column isn't enough for a gainfully employed man -- at least a gainfully employed man living in Chappaqua -- to be doing.

Actually, I tell them that the wonderful publisher of Inside Chappaqua pays me ridiculously well. This and the few wild nuts and berries I can gather keep me in my upwardly mobile lifestyle. With frequent naps, that pretty much rounds out my day. While some people live month-to-month, Inside Chappaqua allows me to live every-other-month, to every-other-month.

No. I do other things for God's sake. Twenty-five years ago I hired myself to run a start-up business communications company -- Media Dynamics -- producing memorable corporate sales meetings and management conferences -- if for no other reason than I could stay in all the world's nicest hotels. Two and half decades and hundreds of happy clients later, it still feels eerily like a start-up.

I also write two blogs designed to cure Bush-Activated Depression, or BAD. But rather than shamelessly promote my news service, suffice it to say I keep just busy enough to stay out of jail. The wildlife in my yard is plentiful, and though my wife's vegetable garden is perennially decimated, there is so much meat available "on the hoof," that one has to wonder why Horace Greeley ever told townspeople to go west.

I remember once, during a visit to Hawaii, feeling that I could survive just picking the fruit hanging within reach of my hammock. Well deer, coyote, fox, bobcat, muskrats, snakes, moles, chipmunk, and endless wildfowl make Chappaqua a veritable supermarket for carnivores like me.

I even have a squirrel who conveniently beds down in my barbecue grill at night. He likes the warm grill just after the last embers have died.

With his blackened tail, the clever squirrel resembles a midget chimney sweep. To my amazement, he seems to tolerate the second-hand smoke quite well. When I evict him, he bites his cute little furry thumb at me and later, pelts me with acorns. Getting hit on the head with an acorn is painful. I can't actually see him doing it, but I know it's him by the sooty footprints on the acorns.

"Can we just not play this game any more?" I scream up into the tree. I'm going to eat that fuckin' rodent one of these days. But I digress.

It's amazing when you think we Chappaquakers live 35 miles from Grand Central Station. The Big Apple may nourish our capitalist cravings, but the bucolic swamps and hillocks of New Castle foster the family and fuel the writer's imagination.

The endless saga of life playing out in our hamlet plays against a backdrop of an indifferent Mother Nature happy to snap up our lilies and lettuce plants in exchange for life in a game park. No, whether man or beast, around us is everything we need to raise our young-in's and feed our souls.

A word of caution: Our Vice President notwithstanding, Chappaqua residents are not allowed to hunt people (or animals) with guns, so those contemplating a career in writing should also consider a companion class in archery.

CONVERSION

Two people came to my door yesterday, and before I could tell them I was a mass murderer, they handed me a Bible. My dogs usually alert me to unwanted visitors, but for some reason, they remained asleep, snoring on the couch.

I tried to hand the Bible back, but there was no hand to receive it. I didn't want to put in on the ground because, if my memory serves me, I think that's a sacrilege.

Talking in unison, they asked me if I needed any blessings and I said no, not today, I've got blessings coming out my ears. I had never seen two people synchronize their words before, except maybe on The McLaughlin Group Sundays on PBS. Before they could give me their spiel, I told them, look, I haven't gone to church since 1960, and my spiritual interests are nil.

They said good, then we've come to the right house. I said, look, I'm a non-believer -- I think you might even call me an atheist. I said this in the spookiest way I could, flailing my fingers and bulging my eyes like a crazy person.

They said, no problem, it was easier to convert an atheist than say, a Catholic, or a Muslim. Is that true, I asked? composing myself again. Yes, it was true. I couldn't believe I was being drawn into this conversation. How about a Jew? I asked. Yes, Jews are the hardest, they assured me.

Well, I said, you have no chance of converting me, because I am a skeptical person and besides, I have left the bathroom, mid-operation, to answer the door. They lowered their eyes, and to both our surprise, some toilet paper was sticking out my fly.

Satisfied I was telling the truth, they said, look, we'll be brief. I cut them off, saying I was obviously terribly busy at the moment and apologized for my rudeness. One would have thought that my shifting from foot to foot would have told them something, but they were determined to reach me. I noticed an elbow was keeping the door ajar.

The fact that you're a suspected atheist doesn't bother us; we can work around this, they informed me. Goddamnit, I said, excuse my French but I didn't want to work around it. I was quite comfortable with my world-view. Are you? they asked with a slight echo that told me their timing was getting a little off.

Yes, I will be just fine, really, I assured them. Trust me.

With a knowing look that said, brother, you're on the fast track to Hell, they told me my time on this Earth was getting short. Do I look that bad? I asked them, pulling out the toilet paper and stuffing it into my pocket. Then I remembered who was president, and conceded the point.

I said, look, I don't have any money, I'm a struggling writer and haven't seen any gainful work in years.

That's different, they said ripping the Bible out of my hands-- you really shouldn't waste people's time. Then, foregoing the walkway, they cut across the pachysandra, jumped into a rusting 1989 baby blue Volvo, and were off.

THE UNGREAT COMMUNICATOR

Even readers struck by my occasional flashes of coherence, are often confounded by my random punctuation. Allow me to clear this, up.

In the eighth grade I nearly flunked English and shortly thereafter, killed my teacher, Mr. Mizer.

Well before his untimely death, Mr. Mizer recognized that I was not grasping any of his grammar lessons -- and due to a peptic ulcer, he didn't suffer fools gladly. Mr. Mizer is not suffering anymore, and if he could overlook my complicity in his demise, I know he would be proud that I went into "journalism," or what passes for it these days.

I didn't shoot my mentor or anything. I killed him one misplaced comma at a time. Like bullets to his already compromised digestive system, my comma placement pointed out my complete and utter misunderstanding of the phrases and tenses that make English so beautifully and unnecessarily complex. He didn't see my future-past-perfect going anywhere.

Once, like a ski instructor taking away your poles, Mr. Mizer took away my commas and forced me to write shorter sentences without them. I substituted semi-colons; colons: and dashes -- in their place. My second sentences still started on the second page.

Because of my lack of promise, Mr. Mizer never paused to teach me where to put semi colons; or colons: he must have known he was not long for this world. My spelling was fonetic, and my vocabulary, dead on arrival.

I was particularly bad at Capitalization. Brought up to respect Authority (and fearful of being Jailed) I would Capitalize any word that sounded Officious.

While my unparallel tenses helped me in quantum physics, they left my English paper awash in red ink. Mr. Mizer told me he would spend half his evening correcting my pop quizzes, and the other half popping antacids.

Mr. Mizer wanted my parents to have me tested, but in those days you weren't dyslexic or autistic --you were lazy and stupid. Why go to high-priced doctors, only to have them write "Lazy and stupid" on a prescription pad?

Later in high school, when they knew more about learning disorders, I was tested and everyone was delighted to find out I really was lazy and stupid.

I did better in reading comprehension, though Mr. Mizer often wondered what book I was reading. Ethan Fromme was not about the perils of sledding in suburbia, he pointed out in the margins of one paper, though he liked the fact I had transposed Ethan Fromme's character with my own.

Since the terrible sled accident book-ended both Edith Wharton's novel and my synopsis, Mr. Mizer incorrectly concluded I had finished the book. In fact, I had read only the beginning and ending. I was proud of my "D+," however, it being the highest grade he had given me all year.

Sadly, both Ethan and Mr. Mizer were forced to live painful, unrequited lives, while I went on to write two books that curiously sold 78,000 copies (parenthetically,100,000 is a best seller), not to mention a magazine column read by past and future presidents. There is no justice, except that writers -- both good and bad -- die poor. So where's the incentive?

Anyway, for what it's worth, I write short tall tales.

Obviously, a vast sector of our illiterate populace doesn't get too precious about their language. The King's English never sounded right to me, and though my father was a fine English teacher and a good Democrat (who was forever correcting me), the message I kept getting was:

"A mangler of the English language will become president -- and you will write bad things about him."

THE FIVE MINUTE CURE FOR HYPOCHONDRIA

Ever since humans wiped themselves with leaves, they've had potions, tonics, elixirs, salves, and ointments to address their symptoms. None of this crap did any good, but if you asked those sufferers throughout history whether or not they found relief in these remedies, they would have sworn they had.

Today we're smug that our modern medicines work miracles, but truth is, if we could look back a hundred years from now, we'd get a big chuckle over the fact that we ever believed any of these treatments did any good.

This brings us to today's topic: suffering, and its harbinger, hypochondria.

Everyone is a hypochondriac to some degree. That means you. I challenge you to treat your hypochondria in five minutes by utilizing my new, proven method.

There are people who feel healthy when they are not. Hypertension patients can keel over having never felt any symptoms of their disease. The absence of symptoms is not the same as being healthy.

Hypochondriacs, on the other hand, imagine they are physically ill when they are not. They don't fake symptoms. That's Munchausen syndrome, or factitious disorder. Rather, hypochondriacs are sure that their symptoms are evidence of a disease or injury that never materializes because it doesn't exist.

Placebos are inert sugar pills used in place of medicines to trick patients into thinking that help is on the way. People who are, in fact, sick -- and know it -- are often helped by placebos. Placebos usually have a positive effect.

So what happens when you give a placebo to a hypochondriac? Hypochondriacs cannot feel better and still be a hypochondriacs, so the placebo has no effect on them at all. But then, the placebo, being inert, shouldn't have an effect on them anyway. So the hypochondriac is tricked into thinking he's getting help, but the help is actually a hindrance to believing he is sick, which he is not, so the placebo effect disappears, which is correct but for the wrong reasons. After all, the hypochondriac isn't really sick anyway. Are you with me?

But here's where it gets good. About a quarter of patients receiving a placebo have an adverse reaction to the pill, or a negative placebo effect. This negative placebo effect is called the "nocebo" effect. Though the placebo is inert, people suffering from the nocebo effect will get headaches, nausea, or any of a host of contraindications that aren't there because the pill has no active ingredients in it.

Actually, it would be inaccurate to say that patients suffer from the negative efects of the nocebo effect, since the positive effects of placebos are illusory and you can't have a double illusion (unless you're George Bush). That would be a double negative effect which would give you a positive effect, and therefore a contradiction in terms or more specifically, a contradiction of contraindications.

PNL, being at the cutting edge of science, thought it would be interesting to find out what would happen if one gave a placebo to a hypochondriac suffering from the nocebo effect.

Now, the hypochondriac, believing he is sick when he is not, and feeling his placebo is making his symptoms worse, starts to feel better because he knows the placebo will negate the symptoms telling him he is sick -- which would contradict his hypochondria, but since he has the nocebo effect syndrome as well, he dismisses the fact that the placebo can negate his symptoms and his symptoms vanish. Now the hypochondriac feels well and has no symptoms.

Voila! Better living through science.

Unfortunately, as we said in the beginning, the newly-cured hypochondriac feels well but could soon drop dead of a heart attack. Had he simply stayed a hypochondriac, he could have avoided the disappointment of thinking he was healthy when quite possibly he wasn't.