h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You've got my prayers for that part. Feeling cut off is hard. Nobody can help by telling you to cheer up. Here are my best wishes for the dark times.

I've found it helps to identify and isolate the panic attacks - the sudden feeling out of nowhere that things are out of control. And it helps to talk, of course.

I share your suspicions of the medical version. Since trying to describe perceptions that cannot by their nature be shared is like telling my dog about Sherman's March to the Sea, I don't try. The term 'schizophrenia' is just a catchall for anything they can't figure out.

I don't know if you've seen the film 'A Beautiful Mind'. It's inaccurate, but I admire John Nash. He's from West Virginia, way up in the hills, and he's a smart fella.

My favourite bit in the film was when Russell Crowe, as Nash, looks at someone he's just met, turns to a third party, and says, 'Do you see that person?' then talks to her.

I have always been able to distinguish between baseline reality and my own delusional system - it's just a matter of keeping good mental books. Just because we're visionaries doesn't mean we can't keep track. I am well aware that other people don't see two moons.

And that my explanation for this would raise eyebrows. The way I look at it is this: As long as I don't try to start a cult, or break the law, I am - as a freeborn, red-blooded American - entitled to think what I please about reality.

And since I don't try to convince anybody, or keep rattlesnakes in the cupboard, I figure I'm harmless.

Unless you count writing bizarre fiction on h2g2...

About Foster and old songs: I agree. As I was explaining to Elektra last night, people in the past had different ideas - not all of them bad. Don't ever let people tell you that you aren't entitled to your own past.

And singing 'Kill the Boer' is as bad as singing 'The Horst Wessel Lied' in public. (Okay, four of us did it once - but we were graduate students in the German department, we happened to know the lyrics, and in our defence - we had no idea there was a faculty meeting in the next room until our professor came out and said, 'Meine Herren! Bitte!' Nobody thought we were trying to perpetrate a political statement, just four-part harmony brought on by exam stress.)