Jonathan Harnisch Podcast

Benjamin J. Schreiber has left rehab, but isn't out of the woods. His life, plagued by schizophrenic personalities and Tourette's, exists in series of maddening hallucinogenic episodes that combine his deepest insecurities with dark fantasies. In every one of these manic flashes, the same characters appear Georgie, the alter-ego living in Ben's body, and Claudia, the object of his twisted desires and destructive obsession. In his sickness, Ben writes to his psychiatrist, Dr. C., about these "schizophrenic blue-movie skits and sleazy hardcore porn-flicks", creating with his pen a disturbing window into the psychopathy that controls his every moment. The Oxygen Tank is a dark chronicle of one man's schizophrenia and obsession. In a way no other book on mental illness has done, it provides a direct tap into a disturbing reality (and lack thereof) that tangles love, obsession, hatred, desperation, fear, dominance, and the terrible need to be loved.