Category: Memoirs of James Pate Williams Jr

I was hospitalized on December 31, 1986 through February 6, 1987 at the Bradley Center on 2000 Sixteenth Avenue in Columbus, GA at a cost of $5,642.00 most of which was covered by my dad’s and mom’s insurance. I had enrolled again at LaGrange College in the Fall Quarter of 1986 in four courses: Introduction to Microcomputer Programming I, Numerical Methods, Analysis I, and Introduction to Special Relativity. Sometime in early November 1986 I started having a break from reality and I quit going to classes. I wound up with D, C, F, and F in my courses, respectively.

In December I started fantasizing again that I was somehow affiliated with the CIA and I could communicate telepathically or via a brain implanted device with headquarters in Virginia via my television. Now the brain implant delusion began to dominate my thinking. Here is how the fantasy went. Sometime in the summer of 1983 the CIA clandestinely implanted a subcutaneous transceiver device in my head. I had the coupled delusion that before the implant operation, which incidentally I fantasized had happened at the Comfort Inn on North Avenue just over the I-85 bridge from the Varsity Drive-In Restaurant, that the CIA had used some sort of advanced scanning device to read my thoughts while I was asleep at the Comfort Inn. I assumed they (the CIA operatives) had used something like a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscope to perform the brain scan feat. I did not know about MRI at the time and I don’t think the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner had been invented at that time. Anyway, I had the fantasy that when I went to get a CAT (now CT) scan at West Georgia Medical Center in December 1986 that this scan would somehow deactivate the transceiver in brain. I remember that Susan wanted me to get a CT scan since she erroneously assumed that I was a paranoid schizophrenic. I think that Dr. Kratina, my psychiatrist in December 1986, also incorrectly diagnosed me as a schizophrenic. Anyway, mother and father bought that nonsensical bill of goods hook, line, and sinker. I was a bi-polar individual who could easily be misdiagnosed as schizophrenic since I had a history of heavy cannabis sativa and cannabis indica usage as a late teenager, a teenage alcohol problem, and a history of hallucinogenic drug abuse as a young adult. Back to the CT scan. I had drunk beer before with the MD who did the scan at Foster’s Bar and Grill where I worked in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was reassuring that the CT scanner was guided and recorded by a Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I knew the Data General Eclipse line of computers well and I had been programming the Eclipse at LaGrange College off and on, mostly on, since the summer quarter of 1978. Not soon after the scan I had to affirm the blatant lie that “I was a danger to myself and/or others” in order to get into the Bradley Center.

I was in a private room at the Bradley Center without an occupant in the second bed for a while then I had a roommate. About all I can remember about my experience was my tremendous homesickness, the negative side effects of the terrible anti-psychotic drug Haldol and the almost daily walks to a nearby park for exercise.

Sometime after being released from the hospital in 1987, again due to Susan’s recommendation, I started treatment with a neuropsychiatrist in Opelika, Alabama. I think his name was Dr. Sampson. Anyway, he used to smoke cigars I believe. I can remember being really embarrassed about being brought to the appointments by my father with my mother in tow. I was almost thirty-five years old at the time and not driving and still living at home! Well this went on for several months before I became associated with Pathways in about late 1987 or early 1988. Again, Susan was with dad and I when I was inducted into the Pathways Center Mental Health Clinic of Troup County in LaGrange, Georgia.

I recall with some personal satisfaction my heyday of church secular volunteerism from sometime in 2008 to Monday, March 8, 2010. I had lost my job at Durand-Wayland and I needed some form of activity to keep intellectually engaged. I was trained by Holly Britt https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly-britt-45754699/ to run the computer and song lyrics feed for the contemporary worship service named the Morning Glory service. Later Andy Rainey http://www.lagrangefumc.org/welcome/staff/ trained me to use the audio console, but due to lack of practice I never became very adept at sound engineering on First United Methodist Church’s equipment. I do remember that the CD recorder was very delicate and if slightly shaken one could lose a whole service’s recording. In those long forgotten by most of my colleagues I was a “trustee” of the church. I had a smart-card that allowed me virtually all access to the First United Methodist Church of LaGrange, GA. Unfortunately, due to a catastrophic failure to communicate, a couple of concerned church employees had me involuntarily thrown into the Georgia mental Health Gulag Archipelago on Monday, March 8, 2010. First, I was held in captivity at Pathways Center Second Season from Monday, March 8, 2010 until Friday, March 12, 2010. After that I was summarily transferred to Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital in Rome, Georgia, a forensic psychiatric hospital. I languished in that location until Tuesday, April 6, 2010. I was freed from that imprisonment by John Leuken of Pathways Center Mental Health Clinic of Troup County which is near Pathways Second Season in LaGrange, Georgia. After that involuntary imprisonment I was still a “trustee” until I was officially relieved of my smart-card by a female associate pastor in 2010 or early 2011.

I used to tell myself if I ever had to get a “crazy check” (Social Security Supplemental Income), I would commit hara-kiri. Unfortunately, when the time came on February 14, 2014, I failed to have the bravery to make good on my former promise. My parents tried to get me to go onto the federal government’s dole way back in 1989. It is indeed fortuitous that the Social Security Administration’s independently  appointed private psychologist decided I was too sane to get the handout from our not so benevolent governent in that long-forgotten era. See I only had one degree in 1989, a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from LaGrange College, three unsuccessful years at Georgia Tech, and approximately eleven years of open source computer software development. The state of Georgia did have the “heart” for me to grovel before that not so benign entity by having me do a year as an indentured servant at the old school New Ventures organization. That really helped further develop my self-esteem, NOT! I just fail to make good on some of my oaths unlike the great computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing or the troubled but brilliant musician and lyricist Kurt Donald Cobain.

In the late summer of 1983 I developed a Trojan Horse program for the Data General Eclipse line of minicomputers. The program was written in Data General BASIC which was a variant of Dayton BASIC (Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). The user interface of the program exactly mimicked the logon screen of the Data General Eclipse. The program would capture username and password login combinations and write them to a disk file. Of course, the program was running in my account, so I could not allow the unsuspecting user to logon. I would just simulate failed login attempts. Normally, when you pressed the “Esc” (escape) key while in a Dayton BASIC program, the program would you stop executing and return the user to his login user account. Well Data General’s BASIC has a statement “On Esc Go To #####” where ##### was a line number. I used this statement to keep the user from aborting my program and discovering the logon ruse. I captured a few unsuspecting users’ logon credentials during the test phase of the program. Then I informed Professor Kenneth Cooper of the existence of my Trojan Horse program. We used this program to successfully capture the logon credentials of the system manager Steve Dudley.

Dr. Cooper was so impressed with my Trojan Horse and other security flaws that I discovered in the Data General Advanced Operating System (AOS) Program Manager that he arranged for me to have an interview with the company in its Atlanta office in the fall of 1983. I was still living at my birth-family’s house on 601 Hill Street, LaGrange, GA with my mother and father. I was not driving at the time and Atlanta is about 70 miles northeast of LaGrange. Dr. Cooper volunteered to take me to the interview. The day of the interview we stopped at an International House of Pancakes Restaurant in Atlanta. I had never eaten at an IHOP before that day. I was interviewed by a male individual whose name I have long forgotten. I remember the interviewer had attended Georgia Tech as a math major in graduate school and he had not finished like I failed to finish in chemistry as a graduate student in the period 1980-1983. He showed me a copy of the Data General macro-assembly language source code for the Data General Eclipse Program Manager. He asked if I would like to have the copy. I immediately and emphatically stated “Yes”. Well right about that point he was conveniently called out of his office leaving me alone with the source code and my briefcase.  I proceeded to load the two-inch high printout into my briefcase. In retrospect, this could have been a loyalty test to see if I would take Data General source code out of the facility. I think the interviewer left his office, so he would have plausible deniability about the whereabouts of the source code. Anyway, I was never a truly serious candidate for the job due to my home living conditions and the fact that I was not driving at the time. Also, Data General was trying very hard to transition from a minicomputer manufacturing company to a personal computer builder and seller. I saw the writing on the wall that the company could never compete efficiently in that marketplace. The company struggled on to 1999 but was never very successful with its portable computer that was introduced in 1984.

In late 1983 and early 1984 I started thinking about ways to become a superuser on the Data General Eclipse system without using a Trojan Horse or a direct attack by patching the operating system’s Program Manager. I remembered that in the corner of the physics laboratory at LaGrange College was a little bricked off enclosure that housed alpha, beta, and gamma radioactive emitters. Well the only thing I needed for a normal user to transition to a superuser was to change one bit in the memory image of the profile of the user. I got to thinking that if I could cause a limited cascade of multiple bit errors in the memory word containing the superuser flag bit that the ECC (Error Checking and Correction) hardware of the minicomputer could not correct then I might have a chance changing from a normal user state to a superuser state. I performed a thought experiment where I would expose the semiconductor memory chips to some form of radiation to induce the desired transition. I never carried out a real experiment because the minicomputer was a $250,000 system and I could perhaps cause serious damage to the machine. In retrospect, I think a gamma ray emitter with a collimated lens would have been best hope of causing the desired cascade a multiple bit memory errors.

I live in a diverse residential and commercial neighborhood of LaGrange, Georgia. I call 201 North Lewis Street apartment #6 home. The apartment complex is on the corner of West Haralson and North Lewis Streets. Location, location, location. The former Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) was across the street on West Haralson. The old VFW building is up for bidding through McKeen Reality. Kids Zone, a children’s mental health clinic, is in the old Zachry building at 200 North Lewis Street. There are at least two investment companies in the area and two banks one block and two blocks away. There are five churches within a several block radii of my studio apartment. The  only negative aspect is that I must keep my music turned down and unfortunately, I currently don’t own headphones nor a portable music player such as smartphone and/or Apple IPOD.

I just sent the following email to Kids Zone in LaGrange, Georgia:

https://www.kz-bh.com/

Dear Kids Zone Staff,

The United States has become a myriad number of local and state fiefdoms. Giant global businesses and corporations in conjunction with small businesses have bought and paid for lawyers and politicians to enforce their capitalistic best interests. Now more than ever the Latin phrase caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is more applicable in the United States than in previous much freer and saner generations. Remember capitalism is all about accumulating wealth for those who have the avarice and acumen for conducting business affairs. You may view my opinions as classic “Sour Grapes”, but I had a low value for capitalism, especially speculative venture capitalism, at a fairly young age.

I went out tonight at approximately 10:00 PM (22:00:00). I walked down and into the Main Street Pub:

https://www.facebook.com/MainStreetPubLaGrange/

but due to my ever-pervasive agoraphobic and current sanity, I sauntered in and out of the crowded bar. On Tuesday and Wednesday night I entered that bar safely and exited without having caused a disturbance. I had one bottled Blue Moon Belgian White Wheat Ale on both Tuesday and Wednesday nights at a hefty $8.00 for two ales plus $2.00 tip for each night. I don’t have a good lifetime experience with bars since I am a verbally belligerent drunk and bars are not an appropriate place to meet people. As usual when I become vocally abusive, I either get thrown into a psychiatric or jail milieu or physically beaten up by a drunken bully.

Since I have ruled out my church and other churches, certain restaurants and coffee houses, mental asylums and treatment centers, and jail as good places to meet people, I have no place to find friends and/or lovers. This town is a hellish environment for single people. Ageism, false chivalry, and sexism are rampant in my beloved LaGrange, Georgia and mostly the rest of My Country Tis of Thee, no longer the Sweet Land of Liberty, but still the greatest country on this biosphere. Workplaces, if ever can be found, are also off limits due to ethics for forming lasting non-work relationships.

Please follow the below instructions:

1. Type Excel in Windows 10 “Type here to search” textbox.
2. Select the Excel App
3. Select blank workbook
4. Select File Save as “Documents” and “Equation and Graph of a Line”
5. Label cell A1 as “x” and Label cell B1 as “y”
6. Select cells A1 and B1 and Alignment Align Right
7. Enter “0” in cell A2 and “=2*a2+2” in cell B2
8. Enter “1” in cell A3 and select cell B2 and drag its right bottom corner to cell B3
9. Select cells A3 and B3 and drag cell B3’s right bottom corner to cell B11
10. Select all the data from cell A1 to cell B11
11. Select Insert Charts Scatter with Smooth Lines and Markers
12. Select the Chart + Button to the Right of the Chart and select Axis Titles
13. Label y-axis as “y=2*x+2” and the x-axis as “x”
14. Label the Chart Title as “Graph of a Line”
15. File Save

I just garnered official word that I am a persona non grata at yet one more business in LaGrange, Georgia. The title of the following reproduced email was “Thank You for the Advance Intelligence”:

1. Dixie Donuts on Lafayette Square
2. Gus’s Grill on Greenville Street across from the Troup County Government Building
3. Waffle House #2223 on New Franklin Road
4.  International House of Pancakes (IHOP)