Becoming Better At Failing

Many young colleagues approach me for guidance as they venture out into their careers as a therapist. I thought I would share my experience in avoiding your patient's improvement and - which is most feared of all - your patient's recovery. 


Here is a Twelve Step Program that will almost certainly guarantee dynamic failure as a therapist: 

1. There is a central pathway to failure based upon combining the following foundational ideas. Combine them from the start to guarantee inevitable failure. 
1. Insist with authority that the problem which brings the patient to therapy is not important. 
2. Consistently refuse to directly treat the presenting problem.
3. Assert that if the presenting problem is relieved, something worse will develop.
2. Diagnose more, treat less. That's the beauty of labeling your patients with the scientific lingo of the medical community that will make you sound like an expert. Even better, you will never risk success in treatment is you stick to diagnoses!
3. Use one method of treatment. Doesn't matter what problem. Schools - not tools. If your patients don't behave according to the method, you can always declare them as "treatment-resistant" or even better "untreatable".
4. Cling to an ambiguous, ill-defined theory of what you should do as a therapist to bring about therapeutic change. It would also be un-therapeutic to give directives for change because there is a substantial risk that your patients might follow them and change.
5. Only years of therapy will every really change a patient. Make that clear from the start.
6. Offer repeated warnings about spontaneous, patient-driven improvements. Point out the possibility of psychotic breaks, mood dysregulation and relapse on substances if they improve without your guidance.
7. Definitely focus on the past. It can't be changed and it will reliably decrease your patient's mood.
8. Center your work about your patient perceives as his faults and past failures. Subtly increase guilt to resolve guilt by ongoing "treatment"- can you think of a more sustainable business model?
9. This technique is underutilized since the advent of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Ignore your patients' reality and dive into their infancy, their relationship with their mother and their fantasy life. And don't forget to interpret their dreams.
10. Avoid the poor, avoid  patients who ask too many questions. Both inquisitive minds and people with limited financial resources are much more difficult to distract from progress with insightful conversations.
11. Your continuing refusal to define the goals of therapy is essential. Can you imagine what would happen? One could actually raise the question whether goals have been achieved. That's a no-go for failure. In the same line - avoid evaluating the results of therapy at all costs. 
12. Always deal with your patient alone, being at the interface of family and society dramatically increases your patients' risk for recovery. 

To sum this up into a more memorable slogan, here are the Five B's to abide to as a successful failure-oriented therapist: 

• Be Passive 
• Be Inactive 
• Be Reflective 
• Be Silent 
• Beware 

> Irony/sarcasm off. 

This is based on "The Art of Being a Failure as a Therapist" by Jay Haley
Read more of him. Try to stand on the shoulder of giants.

Going Full Kondo

Time for spring cleaning. 

This year, I will go full Kondo. 

If you don’t know who (Marie) Kondo is, read here and there about her.

This is where I’m going:

Why not going full Kondo and move beyond just decluttering my house from belongings that don’t spark joy? How about decluttering my life from activities, content and people that don’t spark joy?

So, the next time you’re doing something, like right now, ask yourself: Does this bring joy?

You will probably point out now that snorting a line of cocaine would do that. 

Even cheating on your partner, when you’re giving into the temptation. 

Point taken. So sparking joy alone is not precise enough. Let’s add time to and subtract your ego from the equation. Ask yourself: Does this bring consistent joy to you and people you care about? Because snorting cocaine and cheating usually turn out to be destructive over time to you and the people you care about.

Going full Kondo means therefore to be rather selective about what you make your own by buying, picking up, taking in, and associating with.

Material objects can clutter your space. Can human beings do the same?

I think they can clutter your mind by taking up a lot of your time, especially when leveraging emotions like shame, guilt and complaining to get your attention. 

If you haven't so far, understand soon that your undivided attention is the most precious gift you have to offer. Everyone (family, friends, neighbors, Facebook, Netflix, Google, TV, and the list goes on) wants yours because that’s the most valuable commodity of the Information Age. One of the tried and tested ways to get your attention is to appeal to emotion. How is that done? 

By those little dopamine bursts you get from all those "likes" online. 

By using a drug like cocaine. 

By activating your fear response, claiming something is so, so urgent, you have to listen, watch, do, now, now, now! 

If you can activate the evolutionary older emotional pathways of your brain, they will take over and draw your (cortical) attention to whatever is triggering this emotion. 

That’s a sustainable business model:

Netflix is here to make money. 

Netflix is NOT here to make the world a better place. 

Netflix needs your attention to make money. 

Netflix will vie for your attention and use whatever they can to get it. 13 Reasons Why anyone?

CNN is here to make money. 

CNN is NOT here to make the world a better place.

CNN needs your attention to make money. 

That’s why there is a new urgent, fear activating story coming down that pipeline of new urgent, fear-activating stories. Every. Single. Day. 

Remember that urgent and important are NOT the same. 

Eisenhower is often cited with saying: "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." This was in 1954 he was quoting J. Roscoe Miller, president of Northwestern University.

Have you ever noticed that the urgent stuff demanding immediate attention is usually brought to you by someone else and associated with achieving someone else’s goal? And that few, very few of the urgent demands for your attention are actually also important at the same time?

What is important? That’s what helps you to be the person you want to be, your behavior in line with your principles. Principles (call them values if you like) determine preferences and preferences would make a good place to determine importance. A rather individual affair but something that is very likely to spark joy. Consistently. For you and for the people you care about. 

The bottom line: Consider what you are feeding your mind, your body, what you let into your personal space with scrutiny. It won’t be perfect, you’ll have to make compromises and accommodate negative emotions temporarily. Life is not all joy all the time. Strive to make is joyful more often than not.

PS: The picture above works on the principle of eliciting an emotional response and catching your attention. How did that work for you?

Decatastrophize Your Life

Have you noticed that the news circle always has a new catastrophe looming over us. 
And once that one is averted, the next one pops right up, out of nowhere. 
Actually, catastrophes are never averted, the next one just takes over and dominates what we are fed through media outlets.

The daily news might be urgent, but is it important?
How much of that will be a catastrophe in a week? 
How much of that will be a catastrophe in a month? 
How much of that will be a catastrophe in a year from now? 

Probably very little.

So, based on my own experience and realizing that many of my patients have similar tendencies, let's have a look at catastrophizing. That's when we have the irrational belief that something is far worse than it actually is, be it about our current situation or our future. In catastrophizing, the importance or relevance of a problem is exaggerated and we assume the worst possible outcome to be true. Catastrophizing is one of the cognitive distortions - irrational thoughts that have the power to influence how you feel. They are part of being human but too many are harmful.

How often does that happen?

I do it all the time, and believe me, catastrophizing can really get into spiraling thoughts, emotions and behaviors that take you down the rabbit hole of anxiety and depression. I easily end up with a negative belief about the situation at hand, hopeless, worthless with a good drizzle of self-pity.

What do you do about it? 

Glad you've asked.

You need to  de-catastrophize your life!

Have a look at the questions below. Similar to what I wrote in my post about the Socratic method, you actually want to do this as a daily exercise. Learn to question your own thoughts to correct cognitive distortions. Yes, it will take time and effort, but only a few minutes are necessary. So, write down your answers. Believe me, that just doing it in your mind won't be that helpful. Because if you don't write things down, your negative thoughts will weasel around your rational and adaptive ones and disqualify them as you develop them.

1. What are you worried about?
2. How likely is it that your worry will come true? Please give examples of past experiences and other evidence to support your answer.
3. If your worry comes true, what's the worst that could happen?
4. If your worry comes true, what's most likely to happen?
5. If your worry comes true, what are your chances - please give a percentage -of being okay?
1. In 1 week?
2. in 1 month?
3. In 1 year?

Lamotrigine

If you are taking any drug, over the counter, prescribed, recreationally, you need to understand:

1. The reason why you take the drug
2. Risks and (side) effects of taking this drugx
3. Alternatives to taking a medication

Making sure you understand this is part of my jobs as a psychiatrist (either as a patient of mine here in Brooklyn or a reader of my blog). I suggest you start seeing yourself as the CEO of YourBody&Mind Inc and a drug you take is on your payroll. You pay for it - one way or another. Therefore, the drug has to do its job to deserve that spot on your payroll. If I were you, I would fir it, if it doesn't. More about payroll and how this applies to other areas of your life in a future post. 

This post is about lamotrigine, a medication I often use for treating bipolar illness II. Lamotrigine, also known by the brand name Lamictal, has been around for more than 25 years. I think it is fair to say that it is well established, and that we know what to expect from using it. Lamotrigine came to psychiatry as a re-purposed drug. Just like valproic acid, it was originally used as an anti-seizure medication by our colleagues in neurology. I treat quite a few people on the bipolar spectrum here in Brooklyn. Lamotrigine has become one of my patients' favorites for treating bipolar II. 

Here are the basics I want my patients and their families to know know about it:

Lamotrigine - what is it good for?

• Stabilizing your mood - i.e. preventing abnormal highs and lows
• Treating depressive episodes in bipolar illness - lamotrigine has a reliable antidepressant effect. Compared to other psychotropic medications, lamotrigine has remarkably few and rare side effects. Weight gain is not a problem.

What does it not treat well?

• A manic episode

Because of that, it might not work well for bipolar I alone. Bipolar I means distinct manic and depressive phases, not just mood swings. Lamotrigine treats the lows well, not so much the highs. 

For bipolar II on the other hand, it can be a very good fit. In bipolar II patients struggle most with the lows. The highs are much less pronounced and problematic for my patients. Here lamotrigine treats the symptoms well without much (if any) side effects. Compared to antidepressants such as the SSRI fluoxetine, it has very little potential to push patients into manic symptoms. It does happen, for some patients lamotrigine works too much like an antidepressants if I had to give you an estimate based on personal experience, conversations with colleagues and online research, probably 1 out of 25 patients treated with lamotrigine will get worse, i.e. experience manic symptoms. 

What about side effects?

The one concern with lamotrigine is that it can cause a serious skin rash know as Stevens–Johnson syndrome (SJS). That's an allergic reaction, the probability for SJS is around 1 out of 1000 patients treated. The incidence (how often this happens) is higher with children and adolescents. Nearly all cases of SJS associated with lamotrigine have occurred within 2 to 8 weeks of beginning treatment. To minimize the risk, lamotrigine should be started very slowly and I do so with all of my patients. What complicates matters is that there is also a harmless rash that occurs much more often - about 1 in 10 patients will experience this. Increasing the medication. Now, being told about both, finding yourself with the much more common harmless rash will nevertheless send you in a tizzy. To minimize the possibility for even the harmless rash, I will start low and go slow with lamotrigine. 

Lamotrigine is notorious for the rare potential to cause SJS. Please know that there are other medications, that have the same potential: Carbamazepine (Tegretol), valproate (Depakote) and phenytoin (Dilantin) can also cause SJS, albeit at a lower rate compared to lamotrigine with the exception of phenytoin. I will stay away from prescribing lamotrigine together with these drugs, specifically with valproate. 

About that rash...

Because you will worry about it despite the low likelihood anyways, here are warning signs:

• Any rash on the face
• Any rash above the neck
• Any rash around or in the mouth
• Rash on the mucous membranes of mouth, nose, eyes (the conjunctiva), anus. 

If in doubt, at that means if you develop a rash while on lamotrigine, go see your doctor. 

Should one of my patients develop a rash, I would have them see a dermatologist within 1-2 days and hold the doses until then. If this is not feasible, I would stop the medication for any rash above the neck. If there is a rash anywhere else, I would reduce the dose to the previous level and hold it there, observing the rash to see if it is going away. If it does, I would increase the dose again, this time more slowly and by smaller steps. For itchiness, Benadryl works well. I would want you to see a dermatologist to stop the medication right away is necessary. In addition, the medication needs to be started from scratch and that is at the lowest level when it is stopped for more than 3 days. 

After the rash?

Studies show that re-challenging with lamotrigine after you experienced a rash can be done safely. A lot of participants did not experience a recurrence of the rash.

Re-challenging should be done at an even lower starting dose and dose increase, e.g. 2.5mg steps per week. 

Anything else?

Lamotrigine can rarely cause hair loss. Even more unlikely: Aseptic meningitis, kind of a really bad headache. In combination with quetiapine (Seroquel), lamotrigine will lower blood levels of quetiapine by 60%. Sometimes it seems to make things worse, sometimes it doesn't work at all. If you are taking lamotrigine, don't supplement with folate as this might blunt lamotrigine's effect. 

How does lamotrigine work?

I would like to give you a smart answer but the smartest thing to write is "we don't know", which means that I don't know either.

Dosing schedule for Bipolar Depression

Week   1 = 12.5 mg daily

Week   2 =    25 mg daily

Week   3 = 37.5 mg daily

Week   4 =    50 mg daily

Week   5 =    50 mg daily

Week   6 =    75 mg daily

Week   7 =  100 mg daily

Week   8 =  100 mg daily

Week   9 =  125 mg daily

Week 10 = 150 mg daily

Week 11 = 175 mg daily

Week 12 = 200 mg daily

Treatment for bipolar depression is off-label. That means that while thousands of patients are on this medication for exactly this indication, the manufacturer has not asked for FDA approval for this indication. Compared to the manufactures dosing schedule, I prefer to go even slower. If you are anywhere on the bipolar spectrum, specifically with bipolar II, you have been dealing with this for a much longer time than the 12 weeks it would take you to get to a maintenance dose of 200mg per day. Please keep in mind that some patients take higher doses - clinical trials have evaluated up to 400mg per day. However, if you look at guidelines, such as the WFSBP 2010, the recommended dose range is from 50 to 200mg per day. Even though most of my patients are at doses higher than that, you can be at an effective maintenance dose of 50mg daily in week 4 of starting with lamotrigine. 

How Do You Stop Taking It?

By letting your psychiatrist know and decreasing it by ~50% every week, taking a minimum of 2 weeks unless you are worried about a rash, which would require a more rapid withdrawal.

Restarting Lamotrigine after Stoping it

Professional guidelines recommend a complete restart from the lowest (starting) dose after you have not taken the medication for more than 5 half-lives. What that means in plain English and in real life: If you have stopped lamotrigine for more than 3 days, you will have to start with the dosing schedule as outlined above again. If you were on 200mg 4 days ago, you will have to start with 12.5mg again and work yourself up to 200mg. 

Lamotrigine While Being on Oral Contraceptives

If you take an oral contraceptive (birth control pill), your lamotrigine dose may need to increase twofold over the target dose, i.e. if your target dose was 200mg daily before taking the pill, your new target dose might be up to 400mg daily. After talking to your psychiatrist about this, your lamotrigine dose should increase when you are starting to take the contraceptive. Titrate up to clinical response but not faster than 50 to 100mg per week. Once you discontinue an estrogen-containing oral contraceptive, you will have to decrease the Lamotrigine dose by 50% but do not do this faster than 25% of the total daily dose over a 2-week period. Lastly, if you take any of these medications -carbamazepine, phenytoin, primidone, rifampin, lopinavir/ritonavir, atazanavir, ritonavir - forget about what I just wrote because no dose adjustment is needed.

The Socratic Method... Your Thoughts on Trial.

Thoughts are a peculiar phenomenon. Thoughts are almost always there, either as a monologue, a dialogue or a running commentary in your head. They come and go fast, in fact, their velocity and the seemingly endless supply of new thoughts leaves us very little time to focus and question them.
If we accept the basic tenet of cognitive therapy – that how what we think determines how we feel and how we act – the breathless pace of thoughts rushing through our brain has a major implication:
Because not all thoughts are rational and reality-based, having little to no time to examine and if necessary, challenge our thoughts, will leave us vulnerable to get hurt by some of them.
Therefore, challenging thoughts is a crucial skill to develop and habit to form.

How can we challenge our thoughts?

What I proposed at the beginning – putting your own thoughts on trial - is based on the idea of having a Socratic dialogue with yourself: Just like in ancient Greece Socrates gently challenged his students’ assumptions and premises, we can examine our own thoughts in a straightforward and systematic manner.

And how does this work in practice?

First thing to do is to write down the thought to be questioned. 

Ready? Now write down your answers to the following questions:

1. What is the evidence for this thought? Against it?
2. Do I base this thought on facts or feelings?
3. Is this thought black and white when reality is more complicated?
4. Could I be misinterpreting the evidence? Am I making any assumptions?
5. Might other people have different interpretations of this same situation? What are they?
6. Am I looking at all the evidence, or just what supports my thought?
7. Could my thought be an exaggeration of what’s true?
8. Am I having this thought out of habit, or do the facts support it?
9. Did someone pass this thought or belief to me? Is so, are they a reliable source?
10. Is my thought a likely scenario, or is it the worst-case scenario?

A few suggestions to make this work out well for you:

• Begin with a thought that has been on your mind repeatedly, every thought with a lot of negative emotion attached is fair game.
• Take a few moments to think about each of the following questions, then write down the answers and elaborate on the “why” or “why not” in your responses.
• The important detail to make this work is focus and deceleration. You have to write it down to bring a thought into full awareness and allow yourself to examine it there.
• This will take about 15 minutes of time.
• Did I mention that it is crucial to do it in written form and not just in your mind?

What's interesting is that once you've made it a habit, it doesn't take that long to do. Thinking about it, we live in an information society, countless bits of information are flooding your brain through all sensory channels all day. While you might not always be able to control access to your mind - remember that many things aim for the amygdala - you can do damage control by not taking thoughts at face value. True for you own - a must for those instilled by others.

Abolish TV

Here are 10 reasons, feel free to ad more in the comment section:

1. You watch other people work.
2. Guaranteed brainwashing.
3. Faster death by sitting all those extra hours on your butt.
4. (Mainstream) TV is like yesterday’s newspaper. No original thought, mostly regurgitated online content.
5. Negative bias towards murder, horror, filth and every other display of based human behavior.
6. TV aims for your amygdala. Why would you want to constantly fear-activate this part of your brain?
7. TV polarizes. What happened to rational thinking? I forgot, that’s boring…
8. People who don’t stop preaching are annoying at best, dangerous at worst. TV is a preacher’s monologue. It kills the dialogue of human communication.
9. You will waste money.
10. Video killed the radio star - TV killed your family life and entire communities. 

Abolish TV from your life.

Your iPhone Is A Weapon Of Mass Distraction

Multi tasking is dead. 

Actually, it was never alive, dead on arrival so to speak...
Single tasking is all you ever needed.
So how do we focus when we are glued to our "devices":

Glad you've asked.
Rule Your Devices. Stop Being Your Devices' B*&ch.
See, your phone can be very helpful when you use it as a tool instead of letting it become the single most destructive weapon of mass distraction (WMD).
The following step will help you return to being a productive and mindful human. In addition, you will live a longer and happier life. I have an iPhone and the following steps are written for iPhone users but I bet Androids can figure out the same steps on their platform.
Lastly, what you find here works for me. I trust that you can adapt it to your situation. That said, err on the side of less.

Here's the most important step: Turn off notifications.
Notifications fake importance by coming across urgent. But not everything that is urgent is important. Notifications are disruptive, they have taken me and will take you away from the goals we fave. Have you every been working in a flow state? Good. Know that notifications will kick you out of it. Repeat after me: "I Am the Ruler of My Phone." 

To do this, open Settings > Notifications. Now go through every app listed and turn off all notification:

• For most apps, you can safely switch off "Allow Notifications". 
• If you need to leave notifications on, minimize their detrimental effect:
• Switch off sounds
• Switch off badges - those annoying white numbers with a red background in the upper right hand corner of the app indicating that a new message, email, voicemail, or notification is waiting.
• For really important notifications, you can allow alerts in the Notification Center.

I will repeat myself here: Turn all badges off. Except a for a very few apps, turn all notifications off as well. 

• Only a few apps can have notifications on, for example:
• Your calendar app should have notifications on.
• Google Maps should have notifications on
• The phone app should have notifications on.
• Leave notifications on for delivery or transportation apps (Grubhub, Seamless, Uber, Lyft). Even for those apps: No badges allowed!
• For text message, leave banners on and turn badges off. You will see most of your text messages on your home screen when they come in. You don't need the badge for text messages, it will just give you FOMO.

And Now to Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... Hide them all. 

• Open a folder, they all go in there. Name the folder "Dilly Dally".
• The most addictive apps go on the 2nd screen of the folder. If you keep them on the first screen, they are still sirens calls luring you in. 
• Ideally, most apps are on the 2nd screen and  the first screen only shows a couple. 
• If you really want to push the limits: Delete your "Dilly Dally" social media apps. LinkedIn is okay.

All Messaging Apps Need to Get Out Of Your Face As Well. 

• All mail maps, the Messages App, WhatsApp go into another folder an on the second screen within the folder. Again, NO BADGES. If important, they can alert you via banner. 

Thou Shalt Not Steal

Have you every wondered why all these apps prompt you to rate them and write a review?
They want good ratings to get more customers and more sales. Stop giving them reviews! 

• To get out of this, go to Settings > Apple ID > iTunes & App Stores > In-App Ratings & Reviews

How to Catch Butterflies - On Thinking Original Thoughts

Spongebob SquarePants 

I haven't spent much time evaluating SpongeBob properly - I doubt he would make it through a full session. From what I can tell, he's not the most psychologically minded creation. It's a mystery to me how he's catching butterflies at the bottom of the Bikini Atoll. Maybe the radioactive fallout has created not only Spongebob SquarePants but also deep-sea butterflies. 

The reason Spongebob SquarePants entered my mind is that I thought about how to become more aware of my own thoughts, especially those fast, not automatic but high-speed cognitions that easily go unnoticed. That is what Daniel Kahneman describes as system 1, I propose SpongeBob only operates there. 

How to catch your own thoughts, let alone the thoughts of my patients? 

Is it like catching butterflies, armed with a huge net, you frolic in your thoughts and bring that's how you become aware of them? For sure, one of the exasperating but depending on the situation saving traits of our thoughts is that they are rather elusive. It's probably not as tricky as catching the Higgs Boson but difficult nevertheless. The constant urgent and unimportant, meaningless noise from our beloved "devices" has made it even more difficult to catch our thoughts.

That's an issue of modernity - that everything tries to catch our attention, because attention is a most precious commodity.

Not trying to catch your thoughts and not engaging in deep, effortful and focussed thinking we keep us shallow and reactive to whims of whatever and whoever succeeds in grasping our attention, chipping away from our ability to understand ourselves and our place in this reality.

And if that wasn't enough, our emotions interrupt our thinking as well. One of those emotions is anxiety, which often puts a quick stop to original thoughts. Thoughts that easily trigger anxiety are everything that is ad odds with what we think people around us do and should think about us. Thoughts that are forerunners of realizing that some decisions have led to unfortunate consequences. Thoughts at odds with current commitments and habits. We might not want to catch every thought. How about the ones that bring loss, failure and disappointment into our awareness? Very few things in our life elicit thoughts and emotions with the same emotional value, that is all good or all bad. With most people, events, even ourselves, we are ambivalent as there is light and shadow, qualities we cherish and qualities we abhor. 

So, catching butterflies seems to be a trivial pursuit compared to catching our thoughts. "What was I thinking?" is one of the crucial questions to ask repeatedly but to sit in silence and to simply think harder would we the equivalent to swing the net more furiously through the air when catching butterflies - probably not the best strategy. Our mind does not do too well when all we allow a mind to do is thinking and it can do a terrific job in keeping cognitions that might elicit negative emotions such as anxiety in the depths away from the conscious "surface". 

But we can help our mind, the trick is to lower its guard with benign distraction and solitude. That could be a journey alone, a train or bus ride. Or we could go alone to a cafe, take a walk in the park or the countryside, sit next to a stream or the ocean. A few things help us here: For once, distance allows our mind to be more willing entertaining challenging ideas. When outside walking, we do that automatically while we have to also take notice of what's going on around us. This might be enough "distraction" for our emotions to guard towards the outer world and allow original thoughts to slip unnoticed.

When I was a child, I took long walks with my best friend around the small town in Germany I grew up in. I realize now why that was so helpful for our development as independent thinkers. 

I suggest you take a walk now. 

Friendship Is Founded On the Possibility of Mutual Destruction

To be a good friend is more than to be polite, thoughtful and compassionate. Friendship requires taking the risk of giving our friend something that they could use against us. We do that, so friends feel safe giving us something in return, that we could use against them. It is peculiar that the real possibility of mutual destruction should build the trust our friendships grounds on. 

Pillen Gegen die Traurigkeit

Eines Abends setzte sich ein alter Mann zu mir und erzählte:

"Weißt Du, mein Sohn, irgendwann einmal, kurz nach diesem gewaltigen

"You know, my son, at some point in the future, just after this gigantic last bang, when the

Allerletzten Knall wenn's auf der Erde nur mehr große, nackte Steine gibt

Mit einer fettigen, schwarzen Rußschicht bedeckt, wird ein großes, weißes

Strahlendes Raumschiff landen. Irgendwo zwischen dem ehemaligen Los Angeles

Und dem verdampften Schwarzen Meer. Und diese fremden, hochgewachsenen Wesen

Werden Pillen an Bord haben, die sie uns Menschen als Geschenk überreicht hätten

So wie man immer, wenn man irgendwelche Wilde besucht, ihnen kleine Geschenke überreicht

Pillen gegen die Traurigkeit hätten sie uns geschenkt, wenn wir noch dagewesen wären

Stell Dir vor, mein Sohn", sagte der alte Mann ganz traurig

"wunderbare, kleine Pillen gegen die Traurigkeit

Und diese fremden, hochgewachsenen Wesen werden ihr Raumschiff verlassen

Sie werden sich umsehen und sofort wissen, daß hier vor kurzem ein gewaltiger

Ein allerletzter Knall war. Und dann werden sie sich kopfschüttelnd zwischen die großen

Nackten Steine setzen und schwer durchatmen

Und jeder von ihnen wird schnell eine Pille gegen die Traurigkeit schlucken

Einer von ihnen wird sogar mit dem Finger in die fettige

Schwarze Rußschicht an einem großen, nackten Stein schreiben:

Wir hätten so gerne gewußt, wie Du bist!

Wie Du aussiehst! Wie Du sprichst! Mensch!

Und dann plötzlich wird einer von ihnen was rufen, er wird rufen

Daß er was gefunden hat. Und das wird ein alter, verbeulter

Kleiner Filmprojektor sein mit einem eingespannten Film

"Ja, warum nicht", sagte der alte Mann. Und sie werden sich freuen

Die hochgewachsenen fremden Wesen

Sie werden warten, bis es dunkel ist und den Film auf ihr strahlendes

Weißes Raumschiff projizieren. Und sie werden sehr staunen

Denn sie werden einen Micky Maus-Film sehen. Einen Micky Maus-Film

Mit Donald Duck, Kater Carlo und Goofy

Und diese fremden, hochgewachsenen Wesen werden in ihr Raumschiffsteigen und sagen

Sie waren lustig, diese Menschen. Sie haben lustig ausgesehen

Sie haben lustig gesprochen

Wir hätten unsere Pillen gegen die Traurigkeit völlig umsonst überreicht."