am i paranoid?

[michael baird]

hi,
because there is so much discussion of pynchon and paranoia, i'm wondering 
if any of you on the list have first hand experience with a 'true' paranoid.
a few years back, when i was eighteen, my family and i watched with 
incredible horror as my older brother 'went crazy'... both he and i were 
taking alot of pyschedelic drugs, and so i had been chalking it up to an 
hypersensitivity to the drugs...
now he is diagnosed and treated as paranoid schizophrenic. at the moment he 
is doing quite well, but when he was in the throes of his 'sickness' 
(forgive all of the quotations, but i use them in recognition of the fact 
that these terms are loaded with heaps and mounds of cultural bias), his 
delusional system was so complete that he believed he was the only 'real' 
person alive.
he now remembers telephone conversations we had where he thought i was a 
mere robot of his brother sent by god to fool him. etc, etc...

it was him who, a few years before, had turned me onto pynchon. i remain in 
love with the beauty of his writing, however i am not     impressed with his 
depictions of paranoia in GR, or CL49. nowhere does it seem to ring true 
with the shit-in-your-drawers desparation in whose grip my brother was held 
for so long. instead it seems rather a speculative exploration and or 
exageration of your above-average joe's quotidian paranoia. that is great, 
but it seems to deserve some other name than paranoia.
i tend to think mason and dixon takes a more honest whack at it... though i 
still love slothrop more than any of pynchon's other characters.

just wonder whatchyall think.
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