Numerical Explorations

Although I had started my first undergraduate tenure at LaGrange College in the Fall Quarter of 1971 at the age of seventeen years old, my lackadaisical study habits and drug usage led to my temporary stays in mental health milieus as described in Chapter 1. Below are my somewhat tainted memories of the school year Fall Quarter 1971 to Spring Quarter 1972

I took Music Survey, grade C, Survey of World Civilization I, grade B, and Elementary Functions, grade C in the Fall Quarter. I can recall being a very long-haired druggie in that academic year. Although I loved Music Survey, I could not keep up with the course load or staying wake in class due to my extracurricular drug usage. My predilection for pot and other illegal drugs plus illicitly obtained pharmaceutical medications such as barbiturates and opiates impaired all my learning and studying abilities and capabilities. GPA Fall Quarter 1971 = 2.33.

My grades just kept going downhill in the Winter Quarter of 1972. I took Reading and Composition, grade C, Survey of World Civilization II, grade D, and Analytic Geometry and Calculus I, grade C. GPA Winter Quarter 1972 = 1.66. Although I loved all three subjects my mind and body were just not dedicated to the arduous work required to achieve good marks.

I pretty much hit the rock bottom of my academic ladder in Spring Quarter 1972. I attempted the following courses: History of the US to 1865, grade D, Analytic Geometry and Calculus II, grade withdrawn failing WF, Softball, grade C, and General Psychology, grade D. Thus, I ended the quarter with the sub-stellar GPA Spring Quarter 1972 = 0.75. I recall Mr. Searcy, my calculus instructor told me if I missed one more 8:00 AM class it had better be because a meteor hit me. Metaphorically the “meteor” flattened me with a WF in the class.

After my family’s ardent and heartfelt negotiations with the LaGrange College Administration primarily consisting of Dean of Students, Dean Love, and the President, Waites G. Henry, I could reenter LaGrange College in the Fall Quarter of 1976.

I believe in late spring quarter of 1978 Mr. P.M. Hicks a chemistry and physics professor at LaGrange College introduced me to a large desktop Texas Instruments programmable calculator. I immediately became immersed in the manual and I learned the rudiments of calculator programming on this machine.

I advanced to LaGrange College’s almost new Data General Eclipse minicomputer in the summer of 1978. I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) using the book “BASIC Programming” by Paul W. Murrill and Cecil L. Smith which I still own a copy and it is copyrighted 1971. I seem to recall I special ordered the textbook from the LaGrange College library. This self-study put me many steps in front of my peers in the Fall Quarter of 1978 when I took a course under Professor Kenneth Cooper on BASIC programming. I taught Professor Cooper how to perform matrix and vector calculations using the Data General BASIC interpreter.

I also was taking my first course in physical chemistry in the fall of 1978. During the week of Monday, November 6, 1978 my physical chemistry partner Chuck H. Pitts (now Dr. Chuck H. Pitts, a prominent dentist in LaGrange, GA) did an experiment whose lab report title was “Determination of Molecular Size and Avogadro’s Number”. I seem to recall the division of labor was that I perform the calculations with the aid of a BASIC computer and Chuck and I would write up the experiment and I believe someone in the Callaway Foundation office or Chuck did the actual typing of the document at the Callaway Foundation office on Broome Street in LaGrange, GA. Well it took a lot of persuasion by Chuck to get me to do my part since back in that era I was prone to destructive perfectionism. (Incidentally, I did not give up on being a perfectionist until Professor Felton at Georgia Tech in 1981 stated categorically “There is no room for perfectionism in science.”)

The Winter Quarter of 1979 I took a FORTRAN (Formula Translator) IV course under Professor Kenneth Cooper. That quarter I also had Professor Cooper for Physical Chemistry II and Biochemistry. I did well in the computer programming course, and I can remember helping several fellow students to pass the course. Professor Brooks Shelhorse then of the Mathematics Department was one of my fellow classmates that I tutored. Biochemistry was an 8:00 AM course. I spent a lot of late nights in the computer lab, so I would sometimes fall asleep during the biochemistry lectures. I distinctly remember Dr. Cooper hurling an eraser near me to wake me up one morning. I made B’s in the two chemistry courses.

Spring Quarter of 1979 was my final quarter as a chemistry student at LaGrange College. I took Quantitative Analysis II, an Independent Study in Chemistry, General Physics III, and Angling. I made all A’s that quarter. The independent study was an introductory course to architecture and programming of the Intel 8085 microprocessor. Dr. Cooper in his time as a computer engineering student at Auburn University had built two very nice and unique computers, a rather large analog computer and a digital computer that consisted of an Intel 8085 microprocessor in a wooden box with hexadecimal keypad, two seven segment red light emitting diode displays, EEPROM, and RAM memory.  I used the digital computer in my independent study. Professor Cooper taught me about the instruction set for the microprocessor and I would hand assemble my assembly language programs into two hexadecimal digit strings of machine code and manually enter the machine code via the keypad. One of my first assignments was to count down from 0xFF = 255 decimal to 0x00 = 0 decimal. I had a delay of about a ¼ second built into the program, so it took me one minute and four seconds to count down to zero. I was the only student in my independent study, therefore, it sometimes felt funny to have Professor Cooper give a whole one-hour lecture to an audience of one.

I bought the IBM book “Sorting and Sort Systems” by Harold Lorin in the summer of 1979. I proceeded to implement most of the sorting and merge algorithms in the book. I first translated the IBM PL/I (Programming Language I) code to BASIC and later for FORTRAN IV. Professor Cooper had developed a large BASIC program for the LaGrange College Registrar. This program used a slow sorting algorithm which was either Shell sort of Bubble sort. I implemented a very fast sorting algorithm named Singleton’s sort in BASIC and was able to dramatically cut the time required to sort all the students by their Social Security Administration numbers which many colleges and universities then used as their primary flat-file or database key. I also began teaching myself the Data General Advanced Operating System (AOS) macro-assembly language. Like many computer programmers before I became infatuated with all the control over an operating system that assembly language afforded a knowledgeable programmer.

I convinced my parents to pay for me to audit Calculus and Analytic Geometry IV under Professor Shelhorse during the Fall Quarter of 1979, so I would have an excuse to be on campus to use my favorite computer, the LaGrange College Data General Eclipse minicomputer. That quarter I reimplemented my fast sorting algorithm in assembly language and set a new sorting time record with a program that sorting about 1000 student data records. Since the code was in AOS macro-assembly language it could not be readily integrated with the existing registrar’s system.

In 1980 I bummed around the college using the computer system until I was accepted to chemistry graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the Fall Quarter of 1980. I taught myself Data General Pascal and further my work with macro-assembly language, BASIC, and FORTRAN IV in the Winter, Spring, and Summer Quarters of 1980 at LaGrange College. I was unpaid computer programming teaching assistant for those three quarters which allowed me to earn my keep so to speak.

The preceding mouthful of a title is another version of my autobiography. I am writing this document to edify a general audience and to reassure fellow mentally ill individuals that they are certainly not alone. I am only giving away shortened chapters. Somehow I hope to monetize my memories and experience.

Chapter 1 – Early 1973 to February 1976

I was originally diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic at a private hospital located on 1999 Cliff Valley Way, Atlanta, North-East, Georgia. The primarily humanistic with some behavioral modification mental hospital/drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility was named Peachtree-Parkwood Hospital. One floor was dedicated to drug and alcohol rehabilitation and the rest of the real-estate catering to psychiatric disorders.

My first and only psychiatrist at the hospital was a forensic and administrative medical doctor named Dr. Dave Mcallister Davis, MD, who coincidentally, was the administrator of the hospital. I distinctly recall my family’s initial meeting with Dr. Davis. As I remember my dad drove me to my preliminary appointment since I was not driving at that time especially not in the atrocious gridlock Atlanta traffic. My mother was probably at her LaGrange School system teaching job. I graduated high school in the June of 1971 and had a nepotism related job at my dad’s textile plant at which he was superintendent. I was initially employed as a stock clerk and later other positions within the cotton mill mostly in the weaving department and cloth inspection section.

My dad were essentially two hicks from the sticks as we entered Dr. Davis somewhat vast and cavernous office. He had several bookshelves of famous treatises and case histories by several big named psychoanalysts including Dr. Sigmund Freud, MD. I was certainly in awe of the all the psychiatric and psychoanalytic knowledge contained in tome after tome on the artfully arranged bookshelves.

My primary problems were of psychiatric woes masked by hallucinogenic and other drug usage. I had a voracious penchant for the whole gamut or spectrum of illicit drugs and illegally obtained pharmaceutical drugs. I particularly liked cannabis sativa, hashish and hash oil. I believe in a later visit in 1973 I blew my involvement with opium laden hashish out of all proportion and earned a spot on a drug information radio show conducted in Dr. Davis conference room. Dr. Davis would board me out as a “dog and pony” show to the local criminal justice students and practitioners at Clayton Junior College long before it became the loftier Clayton State University.

I really liked this private hospital due to the abundance of good looking and intelligent female staff who were willing to talk to me as I long as I was aware of the stringent ethical boundaries and roles the staff and I were forced to play. I recall having some reasonably sane conversations with many of the personnel both male and female. We had a fair number of games we could play such as board games and volleyball. We had a large volleyball net on the back outside porch of the I seem to recall the second floor of the facility. We also could engage in arts and crafts such as the clay pottery wheel. I think we had both a manual pottery wheel and a motorized wheel. I learned the rudiments of “throwing pots” and ceramics since we also had a kiln.

I bounced in and out of Peachtree-Parkwood Hospital from 1973 until around the summer of 1975. My visits to the somewhat prestigious and expensive private facility were beginning to weigh heavily on my dad’s pocketbook and West-Point Pepperell company’s insurance policy. My dad in conjunction with Dr. Davis hatched a bold plan to show me how the rest of my life would consist of bouncing in and out of state-operated asylums for the mentally ill. I first visited the flagship of the state snake-pits at Milledgeville, GA, Central State Hospital, an alarmingly 1930s looking building. The sleeping arrangements were in an open dormitory with individual cots and roaming nurses/security personnel with flashlights during the long hot summer nights of 1975. The only entertainment that the inmates possessed was rocking in Kennedy rockers on the narrow back porch of the old Georgia red clay brick building. Fortunately, my stay at this locale was about ten overly long days.

My next stop was the relatively new West Central Georgia Regional Hospital in Columbus, Georgia. I seem to recall I was placed in the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Building of the hospital. It was an exceedingly dangerous place in which to be confined. You had to literally watch your back all the time. Now the hospital is a full forensic asylum and a much more chaotic and perhaps murderous locale. Why are we converting all our inpatient mental health facilities into prisons? I was not in the hospital overly long. We had to march single file from our dormitory to the cafeteria.

Finally, my 1975 to 1976 mental health/drug treatment facility excursion ended with me being placed in Renewal House in midtown Atlanta, Georgia. I seem to remember that drug treatment facility was on Sixth Street halfway in between Peachtree Street and Piedmont Avenue. Renewal House was primarily a behavioral modifying military boot-camp approach to drug abuse treatment. Professor Joan B. Read, Chair of the Psychology Department at Georgia State University was the clinical director of the treatment center. I had some interesting conversations with Dr. Read. She stated that I used my vocabulary as an offensive weapon to keep other people at arm’s length. The house had what were called staff members to expedite the work and keep the residents on their appropriate behavior. During a heat wave we had to act like chain-gang prisoners clearing a very overgrown lot. I left Renewal House in February 1976 and I still had a penchant for drugs.  

I hear the aphorism “Age is just a number”. No, that maxim is so incorrect, age is a demographic used to stereotype and discriminate. Retirement for many of the so-called elderly is a death sentence. Age has anatomical, emotional, mental, physical, and physiological features. Muscle mass becomes harder and harder to maintain as we age. Our health generally becomes more of an issue with age. Ageism has become rampant in the United States except in the special cases of legislators, military leaders, senators, Supreme Court justices, and usually Presidents.

We sometimes believe that as a person ages that he/she becomes wiser. That is not always the case. It is a well-known fact that most of the grand scientific achievements of the years 1900 to 1960 were done by relatively young adults. Sometimes some old people because of their conservatism and fear of change stand in the way of scientific progress.

I have long-standing anger at the State of Georgia. I will try to elucidate all the ways the Georgia state government has screwed me over almost continuously since the 1980s. And no, I am too poor and too comfortable here to move to another part of the United States.

I was a paid teaching assistant in chemistry at Georgia Tech from Fall Quarter 1980 to Spring Quarter 1981. I was thrown into this role with no real training and extraordinarily little faculty support. The teaching assistants are indentured workers or even slaves of the higher education system in the U.S. Thankfully my first round of being a teaching assistant was ended by my making a D in Inorganic chemistry. Professor Donald Royer was my inorganic chemistry instructor. Coincidentally he later became my research advisor.

My grades and attention span and concentration went up when I was freed of the chains of conducting chemical laboratory lessons and sessions. Some other quarter or quarters I was again an indentured servant in chemistry, and I was still inadequately trained for the role. Finally, I was a research assistant a few quarters at Georgia Tech. I left Georgia Tech sans a graduate degree in the Summer Quarter of 1983. The whole chemistry department faculty tried their best to find the correct niche for me to no avail. I was very downtrodden and feeling defeated when I left Georgia Tech. Before my exit from Georgia Tech, I was offered a chance to transfer to Clemson University and have Professor Adolph Beyerlein as my research advisor. I seem to recall his group was performing high precision computer calculations of the virial coefficients of real gases.

http://www.clemson.edu/emerituscollege/about/board.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virial_theorem

Here are some predatory businesses which prey on the disenfranchised and downtrodden:

1. Georgia and other State Lotteries
2. All pawn brokers and pawn stores
3. All bounty hunters
4. Illegal gambling casino like machines at some small business venues
5. Copyright piracy by nation state and domestic entities

The legitimate banks would need to start being more friendly towards the poor. I am sure that many Baptists would like to see the end of gambling in our country. The means doesn’t justify the ends in the case of state sponsored gambling in the form of lotteries.

If you are loading your own ammunition for a pistol or rifle, you must possess the cartridge brass,  loading equipment, etc. The four parts of a center fired round are: bullet, casing, powder, and primer. If you are incredibly careful your reloaded round can have relatively constant ballistics. To check your rounds’ ballistics, you need a ballistic Doppler radar. Loading yourself can be more economical than buying factory created rounds. However, great care and caution must be used when pushing the envelope of a given caliber with self-loaded rounds. Obviously, factory loads can be very consistent within high tolerances for the basic components of a round.

Beginner’s Guide to Reloading Ammo [2020]

One of my registered nurses at Pathways Second Season was a former Lieutenant Junior Grade in the United States Navy. He served on a frigate in the mid-1980s. He also was a Veterans Administration nurse in Clayton County, Georgia. I think he was stationed on an Oliver Hazard Perry class of guided missile frigates.  He worked the third shift.

At first, we did not get along well. However, he was just trying to keep me quiet during the early after midnight hours. Once I learned that he was a former naval officer my respect for him grew exponentially. He told me a little unclassified information about the ship on which he did his duty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Hazard_Perry-class_frigate

While I was in jail (May 8 to June 12 and October 17 to November 26, 2019 = 75 days), I did a lot of crying, swearing, and yelling. I was emotionally oscillating wildly since I did not understand why I was being held in jail essentially incommunicado. What held me together was saying the Pledge of Allegiance repeatedly using the racially charged words,  “under God”, my Crude music, cleaning the grate of my latrine, and my loud lectures on some military history as I remembered it. The words “under God” were not in the original Pledge. I am an agnostic, but I recognize and follow certain contemporary Christian and other religious traditions.  I have forgotten whether I was on my current medication of ABILIFY, hydroxyzine (generic Vistaril),  levothyroxine, and olanzapine (generic ZYPREXA) while in jail. The preceding list of drugs are just becoming very efficient at controlling my moods.

I was a very much a mood oscillating individual while on my 127 day junket to Pathways Center Second Season. I was easily moved by music and small kind gestures of the staff. The staff found that the best way to keep me relatively stable was to play music for me or look up historical events for me. The staffer who brought the musical toy for me to use two days also bought me a book about the “One Hundred Greatest Battles” or a similar title. I could not read it due to the size of the book’s printed font.

While I was incarcerated at Pathways Second Season from June 12, 2019 until October 17, 2019, a span of 127 days, many psychotic and strange events happened involving me. I will not give the whole list but here are a few:

1. A fellow inmate literally beat with a Bible multiple times. She was a former veterinarian specializing in large animals, especially horses. For some reason, my voice grated on her nerves and I reminded her of someone she was in a love/hate relationship.
2. A security guard whose name I will withhold or mentally redact poured a whole pitcher of ice water on me and he thought that was humorous and appropriate.
3. I was told that I had a mixed child via a sperm bank and a black birth mother. To my knowledge I have never been to a sperm bank and I certainly have not consented to give away my sperm in glass vessels. I met the genuinely nice young woman who made this declaration and I would not mind having her as long-lost child, but I think that was all psychological warfare.
4. Another inmate became overly attached to me and thought that by my talking to her we were having dates. I admired this individual greatly because of her dad. This inmate claimed that her dad was one of the Alpha Six which means he was supposedly one of the first six Navy members of the Underwater Demolition Team (UDT). The UDT is the direct ancestor of the Navy SEALS of today. According to this female her dad survived Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. If any of this is true, her dad is legendary and deserving of many medals of valor for his heroic and very dangerous lifeguard duty and demolition of beach landing obstacles. I am not able to verify this female’s war stories.

Once upon time, the period from about 1961 to 2013 sans a few years, I lived in a relatively large three-bedroom house with a den and living room. After the death of my father in 1993, I made the living room into a music room for my large Technics 5-1 surround sound stereo. Then in 2001 when I began playing the electric guitar again, I set up my Fender Deluxe Reverb Amplifier in the living room. Later in about 2007 or so I bought a Fender Twin Reverb Amplifier that has 85-watts and two nice Jensen speakers. I gave away my Fender Deluxe Reverb Amplifier, a Roland Boss effects console, and a relatively unused Fender custom shop Telecaster to James and Jennifer Emery’s children. I practiced almost daily from 2001 to 2010. I would rev up my twin amplifier and shake the wooden floors of my house. I love playing loud through a good amplifier with pedal effects. Anyway, when I was summarily sentenced to West Central Georgia Regional Hospital (part forensic old school asylum), I lost my house. I was sent to the bedlam in Columbus, GA via a probate court order initiated by my sisters.

When I finally got out of the nearly completely forensic hospital in February 2014, I was placed in a single bedroom studio apartment. Of course, I cannot practice guitar loudly, so I rarely turn on my twin reverb amplifier. I have a miniature amplifier, Roland Micro-Cube amp, that is more appropriate for apartment living.  I do not practice every day which is bad. Also, now I just turn on my twin reverb amp occasionally to keep the tubes and capacitors in working order.

Does anyone besides my old friend George Daniel have a place I could practice loudly?