1) The psychiatrist sleeps perchance to dream that he is not a psychiatrist.

2) Um, obviously your then-psychiatrist was birthing the élan of a somewhat circular concept: Protesting the Protest of Protest.

3) Forget Kevin Bacon, Six Degrees of Tolstoy is maximally erudite. I just slipped in at six — score!

The song brings me to mind of an experience I had 2 years ago, when my then-psychiatrist asked me if I wanted a “tip” for an article I could write for the New Yorker. I didn’t know what to say, so I was like, “Uh, OK.” The tip turned out to be that his daughter’s college friend was working at the Whitney Biennial and discovered that the Thai artist Rirkrit had to modify his “Peace Tower” for “political reasons,” where the political reasons turned out to be that he wanted to close down the traffic and stage a peace protest on Madison Avenue. “Isn’t that fucked up?” my therapist asked. I still don’t know what part of this was supposed to be a story idea.

The “friend in Minsk” further reminds me of an anecdote told to me by the literary historian Luba Golburt, about a guy she knew who said that he was “three degrees away from Tolstoy.” When Luba asked what he meant, he said that his father’s father’s father was sitting on a bench in Tula or Dnepropetrovsk or somewhere, and a man walked by, and that man was… Tolstoy. (My first thought was: “Now I am five degrees away from Tolstoy!”)

Yours in the name of science… e

An American psychiatrist sings a Tom Lehrer song upon meeting his Russian born patient for the first time.

I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow
Is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.

Leaves you kinda lingering for sanity. Also, this happens to be true and the (utterly not mental) Russian happens to be my girlfriend.