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The fun thing about psychological disorders is that most of them are clinical diagnoses—there’s no blood test, but if you meet like four out of eight super-vague criteria, you can help yourself to a healthy dose of victim status, courtesy of your newfound condition. Most criteria for psych disorders could easily double as “symptoms of human existence.” Take, for example, these four randomly selected signs of clinical depression:

• Depressed mood, such as feeling sad, empty or tearful
• Insomnia, or increased desire to sleep
• Fatigue or loss of energy
• Trouble making decisions; trouble thinking or concentrating

Come on folks, the above pretty accurately describes a state commonly referred to as “living.” Most people probably feel like this at least 50% of the time. Amirite? Every so often, though, you meet somebody who is so miserable that you think OK, that person might be in a different category. They might really be mental. Or…they might just be a total piece of shit. Like people who spend all their time drunkcalling old girlfriends to stalk and threaten them. And how about that asshole on the freeway in the red sports car.

Do you ever think, “wow, if I found out that person was dead, I would be so glad?” or “you know, if that guy’s car just flipped off the side of the road and blew up in a canyon below, I would say he totally deserved to die, and I would laugh?” I definitely think that shit sometimes. Is that bad?

I would never actually kill someone, even that one guy, because I might get in trouble. But what if you had a wish-granting genie? If it only gave me three wishes, I wouldn’t use one up on a murder, but if I had an infinite-wish genie I would certainly wish that a few people in particular were dead.

See, now technically I’m displaying signs of possible schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, so could somebody PLEASE send some Xanax my way? For Christ’s sake, my HMO doctor is stingy as fuck.

Issue: 11-2 (orig. pub. date: )