Washington boulevards. The streets dropped precipitously to the west, north, and south, all with run-outs onto flatter spans. Weâd tighten our trucks with a skate key so the boards wouldnât wobble, lie feetfirst on our backs or face-first on our stomachs, and then bomb down the tarmac, backyard fences whipping by, the asphalt a black blur but inches away, praying a car didnât turn in from a side street. I stood up a few times and realized, from this higher vantage, how fast we were going: thirty mph, maybe more near the bottom. Had you hit gravel or gotten mired in pothole filler, it would have been curtains. Constitution ran out by the Safeway next to Aspen Plaza. Weâd coast to a stop there on moon-bright nights of boundless possibility, skid plates grinding as the boardsâ noses came up, happy to be alive in our private playground, feeling the hermetic specialness of the slumbering city.
But now: âGive me your fucking skateboards!â this madman shouted. âYou think Iâm fucking around?â He held a length of PVC pipe high in one hand, a switchblade extended in the other. He wore a denim jacket with an AC/DC logo on the back and tight black jeans: the metalhead uniform.
âIâve got my bat ⦠and Iâve got my knife ⦠and Iâll fucking kill you!â he continued, advancing on us four wee skatekids.
Weâd seen him in the distance, a tall figure with a wild tangle of dark hair, noodling around a bus stop along Lomas Boulevard by the Bernalillo County Medical Center, kicking over newspaper-vending machines and then weaving an erratic path along the sidewalk, orange with pools of nocturnal halogen. One among us, Owen, had skated past the guy on his way to our meeting point at the Albuquerque Indian Hospital, on UNMâs medical campus. Owen said something about âa weirdo down the road,â but we didnât think much of it. Down the road meant somewhere else. Flapping about in our trench coats, we lit up Kools, trying rail slides on parking blocks, oblivious as our attacker advanced through the night. When he suddenly emerged from a pine grove on the lawn, I saw the PCP glaze to his eyes and felt my heart skip a beat.
When bad things go down like thisâwhen youâre confronted with a physical threatâthe âfight-or-flightâ reaction kicks in. A primitive, automatic, animal survival mechanism, fight-or-flight activates at the first perception of peril as an azure spotâa brain-stem nucleus called the âlocus coeruleusââsets off a series of physical reactions. 2 The locus manufactures norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline), 3 which is a neuropeptide or neurotransmitter, a message-relaying, mobile protein molecule found throughout the brain and body, and one key to fight-or-flight. At essence, neurotransmitters are the intermediaries between the 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) in our brains, where they relay chemical messages across inter-neuron gaps called synapses, and between all the neurons found throughout our bodies. This transmittal happens when a message travels from each pre-synaptic neuron along a single axon; these axons, of varying lengths, then branch into many terminals from which the neurotransmitter âjumpsâ to specific, mirror-image receptor sites on the membrane of the post-synaptic neuron. (The neurotransmitter does so by traversing a twenty-nanometer gap called the âsynaptic cleft.â Received impulses enter the post-synaptic neuron via dendrites.) As Robert Whitaker frames it in his excellent exposé of modern psychiatry, Anatomy of an Epidemic, âA single neuron has between one thousand and ten thousand synaptic connections, with the adult brain as a whole having perhaps 150 million synapses.â 4 Untold neuron-to-neuron transactions are going on at any given timeâthe human brain and nervous system are immeasurably complex.
Meanwhile, neurotransmitters
But now: âGive me your fucking skateboards!â this madman shouted. âYou think Iâm fucking around?â He held a length of PVC pipe high in one hand, a switchblade extended in the other. He wore a denim jacket with an AC/DC logo on the back and tight black jeans: the metalhead uniform.
âIâve got my bat ⦠and Iâve got my knife ⦠and Iâll fucking kill you!â he continued, advancing on us four wee skatekids.
Weâd seen him in the distance, a tall figure with a wild tangle of dark hair, noodling around a bus stop along Lomas Boulevard by the Bernalillo County Medical Center, kicking over newspaper-vending machines and then weaving an erratic path along the sidewalk, orange with pools of nocturnal halogen. One among us, Owen, had skated past the guy on his way to our meeting point at the Albuquerque Indian Hospital, on UNMâs medical campus. Owen said something about âa weirdo down the road,â but we didnât think much of it. Down the road meant somewhere else. Flapping about in our trench coats, we lit up Kools, trying rail slides on parking blocks, oblivious as our attacker advanced through the night. When he suddenly emerged from a pine grove on the lawn, I saw the PCP glaze to his eyes and felt my heart skip a beat.
When bad things go down like thisâwhen youâre confronted with a physical threatâthe âfight-or-flightâ reaction kicks in. A primitive, automatic, animal survival mechanism, fight-or-flight activates at the first perception of peril as an azure spotâa brain-stem nucleus called the âlocus coeruleusââsets off a series of physical reactions. 2 The locus manufactures norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline), 3 which is a neuropeptide or neurotransmitter, a message-relaying, mobile protein molecule found throughout the brain and body, and one key to fight-or-flight. At essence, neurotransmitters are the intermediaries between the 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) in our brains, where they relay chemical messages across inter-neuron gaps called synapses, and between all the neurons found throughout our bodies. This transmittal happens when a message travels from each pre-synaptic neuron along a single axon; these axons, of varying lengths, then branch into many terminals from which the neurotransmitter âjumpsâ to specific, mirror-image receptor sites on the membrane of the post-synaptic neuron. (The neurotransmitter does so by traversing a twenty-nanometer gap called the âsynaptic cleft.â Received impulses enter the post-synaptic neuron via dendrites.) As Robert Whitaker frames it in his excellent exposé of modern psychiatry, Anatomy of an Epidemic, âA single neuron has between one thousand and ten thousand synaptic connections, with the adult brain as a whole having perhaps 150 million synapses.â 4 Untold neuron-to-neuron transactions are going on at any given timeâthe human brain and nervous system are immeasurably complex.
Meanwhile, neurotransmitters
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