Leprosy?!?

Some months back-probably about a year ago now-a neurologist looked at my most recent MRI and informed me that I was suffering from "premature brain atrophy." News that my brain was shrinking came as no tremendous surprise. What's more, the neurologist himself didn't seem all that concerned about it-he simply noted it, and told me that this sort of thing normally shouldn't happen until I was at least 60 or 70. He didn't even bother going much into what it implied, symptom-wise. I just assumed that it meant I'd start getting even stupider.

As a result, I didn't let it bother me, just like I didn't let it bother me when an eye doctor first told me that I'd be blind before too long. I'd wait to start worrying about it until the symptoms started making themselves readily apparent. Even then, lord knows how much actual worrying I'd be doing.

I don't know if that's the best way to go about dealing with life's little inevitabilities, or the worst.

Then this past week I received an email from a very nice fellow, a stranger to me, who attached a recent news story he'd come across and thought might be of some interest. The article concerned a 50-year-old man who was suffering from, yes, brain atrophy.

This fellow in the story has horrible, debilitating headaches that often force him to stay in bed two or three days at a time. He now normally sleeps up to 16 hours a day. He has trouble walking. His capacity for language is slipping away, and this once very talkative, outgoing man now avoids conversation when he can, given that whenever he speaks with someone, he spends most of his time in a frustrating, silent search for words.

Near the end of the story, it was reported that he was about to head to the Mayo Clinic for experimental brain surgery that might well kill him. He felt it was a risk worth taking.

The first thing I did, of course, was begin comparing symptoms. I certainly have been sleeping much more than I used to. Been having more headaches, too, but not of the debilitating variety (and honestly, most of them I can put down to hangovers and smoking too much). I've been having more trouble coming up with the words I'm looking for. And though it's not much of a problem anymore, there was a while there-it's one of the things that brought me back to the neurologist in the first place-when my legs would go all weak and wobbly on me for no sensible reason.

Even though there wasn't a note-for-note correspondence between symptoms, there was enough there to get me thinking: My God, what kind of (new) nightmare lay ahead of me?

The thing about his case that has doctors baffled is the fact that only the left hemisphere of his brain was shrinking. The other half was fine. When I read that, I breathed a sigh of relief. My own brain, after all, seems to be shrinking in a properly uniform fashion. I was home free.

Then I read the next sentence (I'm paraphrasing):"If his brain had been shrinking uniformly, doctors would have attributed it to multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer's."

Oh, that's just swell, I thought. Then I became convinced, if briefly, that I had multiple sclerosis. Alzheimer's I could deal with-who'd be able to tell the difference, anyway?-but MS would be a big pain in the ass. How could I use a wheelchair and a cane at the same time? How would I get into my second-floor apartment?

The same thing happened a couple years ago when I interviewed David Lander, who played Squiggy on television's Laverne & Shirley, for an unpublished New York Press story. Lander had MS, and was just then going public after trying to hide it from people for 10 years. The more he described the early symptoms, the more I became convinced I had them all.

The funny thing is, after turning the story in to one of my editors here, he read it, and then he became convinced that he had MS, too. "As I read it," he told me, "my legs started going numb. I don't need this."

Mention a few vague symptoms to people, and it works like a charm every time. Just hint at a symptom to someone and boom, that symptom will suddenly manifest itself. I've found it even works when I describe the early stages of Retinitis Pigmentosa. It's a peculiar phenomenon, and one to which I've mostly been immune until these past few years. I'm not sure why I started falling for it-perhaps the accumulation of things just left me fully expecting that something new could be added to the pile at any moment.

The day after I received the story about the guy with brain atrophy, a few hours after I stopped believing I had MS, I received another email. This one was from Grinch, who mentioned in passing something about Asperger's Syndrome, one of those mysterious, mythical flavor-of-the-month viruses or diseases, like Epstein-Barr or ADD that everyone seems to be catching. It's loosely linked to autism, which is also hard to clearly define. According to Grinch, symptoms include a lack of compassion for others, no consideration of the results of one's actions and socially inappropriate behavior.

Just sounds like a fancy term for sociopathology, I thought-which, of course, is exactly what it is. Then, just out of curiosity, I looked it up on one of those "disease symptom" websites-Christ, but there are a lot of those out there-and found a few more symptoms:

? Monomania

? Irrationally clinging to a series of unbreakable patterns and schedules

? Normal language development, but trouble communicating in social situations

It didn't matter that those symptoms, and the disease itself, were meant to apply mostly to children. Suddenly I knew I had this, too. Too many of the symptoms were present, and had been present for as long as I could remember. It would explain an awful lot.

(Those disease symptom websites, by the way, are evil, evil things.)

That's about when I stopped myself-for two reasons. First, I have enough physical problems as it is without inventing any more for myself. That would just be stupid. More important, however, at least in regards to that autism shtick-I didn't need another rationalization to pardon my shitty behavior. I'd have to take responsibility for that myself. I might not always understand why I do some of things I do, but I'm not going to try and hide it behind some flavor-of-the month ailment.

As far as the MS is concerned, I guess I'll just wait and see. It would be fucking typical, though.

With Thanks to Ronald Reagan

I was no fan of Reagan's while he was in office. His good-natured bumbling incompetence did not charm me. His movie anecdotes did not fool me. I will remember him for Iran-Contra, for surrounding himself with one of the most corrupt cabinets in American history, for El Salvador, Nicaragua and Grenada. I'll remember him for raping the economy and for bringing us closer to nuclear war than any president since Kennedy. I won't even give him credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union (I think we can thank the people of Eastern Europe for that one).

I was no fan of Nancy's, either.

I will give him credit for one thing, though. If it weren't for Ronald Reagan, American hardcore would never have existed.

Yes, punk rock existed both in England and in the States before Reagan took office. On the East Coast, you had the CBGB scene, with the likes of the Ramones, Television and Richard Hell. It was also beginning to pop up in L.A. and San Francisco. But with rare exceptions, late-70s American punk wasn't all that political. Granted, the Dead Kennedys were writing songs about Jerry Brown ("California Über Alles) and Mr. Biafra was ranting about Jimmy Carter at live shows-but how far could they have taken that?

It wasn't until Reagan took office, when punk as it had been known was ostensibly dead already, that it exploded across the entire country. Here was a scary old man with ultraconservative ideas and strong connections to the religious right; a man who, by all accounts, was going to mandate school prayer and launch a nuclear first strike before he left office. Suddenly bored suburban kids from Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Wisconsin and everyplace else had something to get pissed about. He was a remarkably easy target-much easier than that affable Jimmy Carter-and as a result, within a few short years he'd spawned thousands of songs by the likes of 7 Seconds, JFA, Crucifucks, MDC, Government Issue, Reagan Youth and hundreds of others.

Taking three-chord leads from the Ramones, teenage garage bands sprang up everywhere, forging a music that was louder, faster and angrier than anything that had been heard before. The hippies may have written political protest songs, but they were mellow-and they never bandied the words "fascist" and "fuck" around quite so freely as the hardcore kids.

Perhaps the clearest example of the shift came via the DKs, who rerecorded their anti-Brown anthem as an explosion of anti-Reagan rage called "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now." ("I am Emperor Ronald Reagan/Born again with fascist cravings/Still you made me president?")

Every band, it seemed, had at least one "fuck Ronnie" song in its repertoire, just as most had at least one "fuck Jerry Falwell" song (often the same song). Most were pretty stupid, and not terribly politically astute. But there were more than enough to support any number of anti-Reagan compilation albums, like Alternative Tentacles' Let Them Eat Jellybeans and Not So Quiet on the Western Front.

Did these kids really care all that much about politics? A few of them did, certainly, but not most. But it was almost as if they'd been waiting for something like Reagan to come along. They were bored silly, without having all that much to complain about except being bored. Reagan gave them an excuse to scream, something to hate-and most important, something to fear. There were little wars popping up here and there, there was talk of a new draft, the situation with the Soviets was getting worse. All of these things had the potential to affect these kids directly. Social conditions may not have been as bad as they'd been in the England of the mid-70s, but they were getting there. It was close enough.

That Ronald Reagan was integral to the existence of American hardcore can be seen by one simple fact: The moment he left office at the end of his second term, it stopped. Hardcore as a "movement" ceased to exist. George Bush, hateful and weasley as he was, just couldn't get the hot blood flowing in the same way.

There were still little punk bands around, and something calling itself a form of punk was coming out of Seattle, but as a nationwide grassroots musical form created and supported by disaffected teenagers, it vanished. The same kids who would have started listening to Black Flag and Fear and DOA a decade earlier had started finding an outlet for their youthful rage in rap music instead.

So for giving me someplace to direct my free-floating rage, for giving me something to cling to in my youth, for giving me a musical form I could honestly call my own during those rocky adolescent years in Wisconsin, Ronald Reagan, you old dead bastard, I thank you.