Dr. Ben is so freaking calm that he makes Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush look animated and energized.  Nerves of steel like the imaginary John Wayne.  Placid like a Buddhist monk. (The Dalai Lama was quite energetic the time I saw him giving a speech at a seminary.)  Does his demeanor hypnotize his fans so they don’t notice the weird and bizarre stuff that comes out of his mouth?  Or that he concludes whatever insane thing he says by laughing?

I know some doctors have a god complex, but if Carson is godlike, could a devil be less creepy?  Or is Carson some freak of nature that made him perfectly suited to become a neurosurgeon?

Trevor Noah is going with zombie

Vampire, which would seem to be closer in demeanor to Carson, had to be rejected because he’s been known to appear in public during daylight hours and claims to have patronized the Popeye’s organization which is way too high up on the food supply chain to have fresh animal blood on offer.

But what else could account for this man with nerves of steel?  Floating around in the recesses of my brain was a vague memory.  One time when I had that level of calm without being comatose.  A little laugh came easy.  Gibberish didn’t come out of my mouth.  To others I didn’t give off a bizarre vibe.  To myself, I had only a slight awareness that my thinking was a bit slow.  How I came to be in that zone is easily explained.

I hate to fly.  Seriously hate to fly.  White knuckling my way through plane flights is exhausting and left me in poor condition for the business meetings that followed most of those flights.  I finally asked my primary care doctor if there was anything he could do to help me.  His initial response was, “Probably not.”  After I explained my problem, he gave me a prescription for Valium.  Being wary of taking a drug without having any experience of how it would affect me, I broke it in half and took it an hour before my next flight.  It was perfect.  Took the edge off and otherwise no appreciable difference from my ordinary state of being.  The bit of anxiety towards the end of longer plane flights as the Valium wore off was manageable.  The key for me was getting through the take-off and first couple of hours of the flight.

One time, I got to the airport (SFO), popped half a Valium, and sat down to wait for my flight.  Thirty minutes or so later, an announcement was made that the flight would be delayed.  Our airplane had yet to depart from LAX.  Calculating if I would still be good to go when the plane was ready to became increasingly difficult with each announcement of a further delay.  Finally opted to down the other half of the pill.
I was conscious that it was a rough flight (bad weather not airline dysfunction was the cause for the three hour delay), but more from frequently assuring the woman next to me that we were fine (a service other kind people had rendered to me over the years) than any personal body sense.  Preparing for the scheduled stop, the flight attendant announced that they might not be able to continue to the final destination.  For a moment I considered what my alternatives were.  There weren’t any as the roads were flooded or washed out.  We took off again and safely landed.  Probably thanks to extraordinary effort on the part of the pilots and air controllers at the non-radar equipped airport.

I was still cool and calm, but the only passenger on the plane to remain so after landing when it was announced that there would be another delay because they couldn’t get the door open.  Many angrily screamed,  “left us out of here.”  I recall laughing, not  loudly, at them.  That’s when I knew that I was not in anything close to a normal state of mind.  A pleasant enough place to be but definitely not in touch with the surroundings.

Perhaps Dr. Ben has some natural biochemistry that pumps out something that acts like Valium on him.  Unquestionably an asset for someone that needs very calm and steady hands to perform neurosurgery.  Or perhaps he found a little helper.  Addiction with any drug is always a concern, but if used sparingly and intermittently, only for a specific intended purpose, and not to get high, a physical dependency may be avoided.  Although wouldn’t rule out the possibility of  physical/mental consequences from long-term usage — say on average twice a week for a period of thirty years.  If I’d flown that frequently for that many years with the assistance of Valium, who knows if today I wouldn’t have a zombie demeanor and say lots of incredibly ignorant and irrational stuff without the aid of that little blue pill. OTOH, doubt a doctor would have prescribed that much Valium for me over such a long period of time.  

(Sidenote: my goal in seeking chemical assistance for flying was to become accustomed enough to flying that I could do so without a crutch.  Eventually, if the flight was short enough and I had to be on my toes within an hour of landing, I skipped the med and dealt with the  flight anxiety but it was only slight less intense and never fell below that level.)

Dr. Alexa Canady, pediatric neurosurgeon: