Tag Archives: love

10/12/2019

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WOW!

Time simply flies.

I thought I had been away for only a year.  It was when I returned to this blog that I realized that it is far closer to two since my last post.  (I just went back and double checked the dates and…no its only been about 13 months.)   I just don’t have a proper sense of time as it passes.  This felt much more like a long day had passed even though I thought it was maybe a year.  This blog, all of my projects really, call to me, begs and cries but life has plans of its own.  A lot has happened and I am having  hard time sorting out just what to write about.   I think though it has been closer to two years and this site has changed quite a bit.

How much to say?

Well…  Meta and I finally got a new Psychiatrist about  a year ago last January I think.  That was a bit bumpy.  The first thing, really the only thing our new doctor did was take us off of our Benzos…  I never can say or spell that name.  We will just say nerve pills.  .  Meta use to take Xanax and I use to take Ativan along with our other psychiatric medication.  It seems that he does not like those types of medications.  I can’t hold that against him as doctors tend to have medications they like or trust and medications they don’t like nor trust.  Surprisingly I made that adjustment, with time, without any big bumps.  Meta on the other hand has had a much harder time.  Her nervous condition is much worse than mine and she is getting older.

She found herself trapped inside the house.  This was hard for her as she had a presence in the downtown where we live.  She would visit the various shops and the local library often.  She has what the doctors use to call an anxiety condition.  This isn’t like an anxiety disorder.  I have seen other people shake like she does on you tube.  It was old footage of men from World War One that had suffered from shell shock.  In the beginning she mostly relied on stress eating to cope.  Now Meta smokes weed.  People have a variety of views on marijuana  but the anxiety and the physical shaking is too much for me and I’m just watching.  She also has the feeling of bugs crawling all over her body which provokes scratching.  She had suffered from this before and our last doctor prescribed the Xanax in response.  It had been so long that she had largely forgotten what this was all like.  This has been hard for her to adjust to but she had managed thus far.

I have been picking up more of the house hold chores during this period and in these last few weeks she has finally started to come around and begin doing more around the apartment.  I think this is good.  I hope this is good.

My home state has medical marijuana but that is so expensive.  We have found that we still need to go to the street if she wants it which strikes me as strange.  I was under the impression that the whole medical marijuana thing was to reduce the trafficking of street drugs yet the legal stuff is so expensive.  Well, I think most any one would understand what I am trying to get at.

The staffing problem at the clinic has finally been solved by the addition of two nurse practitioners.  Maybe the word solved doesn’t quite describe the situation.  Improved is probably a better term.  Meta and I are lucky.  We have each other and a few family members that do help.  I know what it is like here.  The lack of funds prevent more people, therapists, case Management and MDs/NPs but there are a lot of people in need and the system still appears to me to be over loaded.  I sometimes wonder what it is like in other community mental health clinics across our fair country.

On top of this over these last two years Meta has lost three close family members.  I do what I can but I fear I might be some what emotionally stunted.  I know this has been hard on her.  I fear that I am not much when it comes to offering comfort for these kinds of losses.  Its hard to watch the world you were born in dwindle around you.  It is in these times that I feel the most like a space alien.

I hope all has been at least as good for all of you out there and that today is a better than average day.

Able to Reason or Reasonable?

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Civilized is a term that is often used to describe a people or nation.  There are terms used that reflect on these notions of civilization such as deplorables.  It is hard for an outsider such as myself not to notice what human beings are capable of and what they have accomplished.  We have built a world, the world of people.  This world of people lies inside a greater natural world.  The human world is so vast, at least from my seat, that its takes us a great deal of effort and a great distance of travel to finally find these human free natural spaces.  I much enjoy those natural spaces and I have found after spending some time, usually week to weeks, that when I find my way back to the human world I see and feel the technical comforts with new eyes and new hands.  It is strange how I have to be away for a time to truly appreciate the wonders civilized humans have created.

If we take a moment and think about it there is only amazement at what has been accomplished.  The Stone canyons of the great cities, mass transportation by rail or wheel on time most of the time.  The machine coughs up currency when you ask for it, as long as you have enough available in your account.  Flip a switch and on comes a light.  Hot water is delivered to your sink or shower by some invisible entity.  Busy people heading about their day all running on the same clock.

Amazing.

We can fix on the negative and the crumbling and lose sight of the wonders around us.  The mind is a powerful and strange thing.  Obviously these wonders were accomplished by planners, bosses and laborers, various skills in specialized sets.  The educated have a tendency to undervalue skilled labor, I know I used to do it.  Now I simply marvel at the skill with either numbers or trowel and hammer and wonder where all such knowledge came from.  I hold the strange opinion that all this skill and knowledge has been generated by people.  As I said the mind is an amazing thing.

Logic or the ability to think rationally is one of those things our minds allow us to do.  People can rationalize about any situation, It can be a coping mechanism or a tool for destruction.  I watch some dark documentaries on You Tube from crimes like serial rape or murder to coverage of this or that war along with news,  Lots of people hurt or grieving visibly over the loss of the loved one(s) in very much the same way.  Whether by a mass shooter, a serial killer, a 2000 pound block bluster or a hellfire missile.   I am left wondering how these victims would react to each other even across national lines.

Are we still capable of seeing each other as people.

sometimes I think we do, that’s why so few of us can look over the pond at the horrors great countries are inflicting on the world.  That we avoid staring unblinking at the pain an suffering in the world.  What can one person with little means do anyway?

I’ve come to this conclusion:  The Actor (any given individual) is always justified in their own mind for any Action they (any given individual) are about to undertake.  This is called rationalization.  There is a logic to it even though it may be inscrutable to an outsider.  I came to this conclusion when thinking about serial killers, captains of industry and leaders of nations.  When I strip away the position, the authority an look at the act itself, the level of premeditation, the tools used, the people affected and the penalty, if any.  I find my self at an impasse.  Obviously some people can kill massive numbers with out any real consequence.  How can this be?  All I can figure is how the individual and the people around them think about the act, the whys and wherefores.

IN other words how they rationalize it .  As earlier stated.

The Actor is always justified in their own mind about the action they are going to undertake.

When I was younger it was easier to think about these things and make a judgement.  Over time the net of judgment widened and then became tangled.  My Grandfather was right.  The older I get the more I realize how little I actually know.  Everything comes into question.  I am riddled with doubt and aware that I have so few facts.

So what is there that I can do?

I do one simple thing.  I try and practice mental hygiene and use care to keep the way I think anchored and try and stay aware of the people in the world around me.  Stay conscious of the consequences.  I often find this exhausting.  But is is necessary because I have been close to a terrible action in the past.  That time I was doubly lucky as no one got hurt and I didn’t get locked up.  I don’t want that situation to arise in my mind again.

This process can be exhausting.

I have a reason for writing this thing but it slipped away about a quarter of the way through the process.  Win some lose some, I guess.  I hope this is of some use and if not…

have a better thsn average day anyway.

Nostalgia

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My mind’s wandering wondering eye

Find’s its attention fixed

on dusty archives of life’s long lived lies

Memories’ faded photographs

tales, legends and lore as nothing is ever quite as it seems

countless voices like an over crowded aviary

clutter your thoughts

grandmother, father

grandfather, mother

brothers, sisters, friends and others

viewed through the warped lens of the moment

the foreshadowing of youth’s promised failures

you cannot know then what you know now

you can’t go home

you must make home where you are

find your place in the sun

or the moon

what ever that means

Yet another Adjustment

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There is a beginning to these things and this beginning is a type of back story or an ethic if you prefer.   At its heart it the idea of a great quest.  A Great Quest is a concept one might encounter in a common novel of the fantasy variety.  I an sure that it occurs in other places as well but I have no examples that stand out in the front of my mind.

A great quest can be as simple as a journey through dangerous country or saving the princesses from a band of highwaymen and it can be very complicated like building an empire, discovering some long lost artifact or rediscovering some bit of knowledge that has been long lost. All of these are similar themes that run through many a story but the idea itself is not that foreign to our daily lives in a non fantastic context.  It is important to note that the Great Quest is not limited to fiction.  There are Great Quests that happen here and now in our shared reality, maybe not as glamorous as rescuing the princess but great none the less.

For instance, going for a higher education beyond a Bachelors for the sole purpose of gaining insight into a thing that is otherwise incomprehensible to you.  This could take a life time and odds are their isn’t a weekly paycheck in it for you, not that you can’t turn that knowledge into cold hard cash its just that the process is different.  A cashless journey to a far distant land and staying for a year, a life time or somewhere in between, even raising a family and keeping said family together is a Great Quest.  For myself the Great quest was knowledge, it was the world I wanted to understand, the human condition and why reality was the way that it was.  This great quest had two lines of attack, one the hard sciences and the second, the occult and mysticism.

Now that I think of it that probably should have been my first warning there that odd combination of seemingly incompatible fields of study.  To me though it made perfect sense as I had extrapolated them from a quote attributed to Carl Gustave Jung, “Psychology and physics are facets of the same concept.”  To me it seemed only natural to infer that Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, the Occult and Mysticism were all facets of the same concept, in this case human consciousness or humanity itself if you like.  Of course there will be time management issues but I felt as I slept very little that I should be able to manage.  I had contingency plans if something got derailed or if funding dried up or even if I needed to transfer schools in mid stream.  What I didn’t have contingency plans for was failure.

It has been said, by my Action Theory Professor that one cannot plan to fail.  One might argue that a contingency plan is a way of dealing with failure but I think these plans are for foreseeable obstacles and away of planning to succeed.  The Great quest is very much like a horse pulling a load.  Horses in this case often wear blinders.  These are used to keep the horse from being spooked by the various happenings around he or she.  People on the great quest also wear blinders in this case allowing them to concentrate full energy on the goal before them.  The down side to this is that when an event comes out of left field you don’t see it until just a fraction of a second before it makes contact.  This spells disaster and that disaster, in my case, was a mental breakdown.

I distinctly remember the sensation that all of that knowledge in Calculus, Wave Mechanics, Differential equations and Organic Chemistry stood like a house of cards built on shifting sands and when it collapsed it took a great deal more with it.  I was aware that I wasn’t going to be able to proceed into the Masters program right away, that I would need experience so that I might reinforce and strengthen the shaky knowledge I already had but at no point did I think I was crazy.  The thought never crossed my mind.  I entered the work force with out my degree thinking that in time I could go back and finish, the thought of collapse still hadn’t crossed my mind.  The hardest thing was the realization that the goal I had been working on since the age of 12 was now unobtainable.  That all that time and effort had made little or no difference and that not all problems could be overcome or goals achieved through nothing more than hard work.  Reaching this realization though would take some years.  I just couldn’t keep from continuing the act of pounding my head against the wall.  I think it was those blinders that kept me from grasping the reality of the situation more quickly.  In a weird way it was like suddenly finding yourself in prison, through no fault of your own and in this case the bars of the prison were your own mind.

What to do?

Everything had changed.

Rage was beginning to build.

I could plop down in front of a television and booze it up until I died.  Lots of people do that or something a kin to this each year in these days of late.  This is not new, people have been drinking themselves to death forever it seems, now its prescription drugs.  The difference is just the age.  I had to redefine myself.  I had to give up the great quest and turn it it into a hobby of sorts, something of a passing fancy I could dip into on rare occasion.  But that was only part of the solution, I also had to find something to do with myself, something I enjoyed.  This was very difficult.

In reality it comes down to how we define ourselves.  Many of us define our self by the Great Quest, or possibly a job description and even that we are a parent or wife or husband, when we lose this key definition, an idea so deeply entrenched in our minds and for so long that we aren’t even aware it is there.  It is a large part of who we are.  When this is gone it puts us at a loss.  We have a definition of ourselves that has been removed from our existence.  Finding a new direction is practically impossible without first realizing that underlying definition.

I can’t tell anyone how to do this, I don’t think there is an expert out there that can.  This is one of those instances where our individuality is most apparent.  We are peculiar beings.  In the end all I can do is point out that it needs to be done but I have no idea where the guideposts are or what they say.

To anyone going through something like this all I can do is wish you God Speed.  The only advice is introspection and perseverance.  The only wish…

Have a better than average day.

Meta Mumbles on about a family pet named Chico.

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While I was in grade school my grandparents had a rhesus monkey – there were times that they entertained the monkey, Chico, by sitting up a card table in the center of their living room and putting out on it a Sears and Roebuck catalog.  They would leave it there with the pages open.  That was a time when all sorts of things were for sale in their Big Book.

We would all sit around the room talking and watching the monkey browse through the pages.  He would turn each page and then carefully spread it out flat.  Then he would sit with his hands folded behind his back while exploring all of the photographs before him.  He would slowly look first at the left page from top to bottom and then the right, while chattering the whole time.

When Chico would come to the part where various breeds of dogs were pictured, he would get so excited that he sometimes flipped over backwards while he seemed to laugh – out – loud.  Then he would point to the family dog, Beau, sleeping at the feet of my grandfather.  Beau would quickly respond and go to the edge of the card  table poking his nose up by the monkey.  Chico would start pointing to a photo of one of the dogs, the breed would not matter, then point directly at Beau – back and forth his finger would go – apparently he recognized that they were all dogs – while laughing the entire time.  Beau would get excited and it seemed obvious to us, at the time, that they were communicating in humor.

And we want to think that we are the only ones that can make our thoughts known to each other.

The Art of Adjustment

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I have a hazy recollection of the day I was finally diagnosed as a schizophrenic.  I remember the intense sensation of relief.  As far as the date goes, I am far less certain.  That question I always answer as late spring early summer of 1989.  I want to say 1990 but I moved in with Meta around December 6th 1989.  That occurred after I was instructed that I had to stop working.

I had no idea how I was about to eat and put a roof over my head with out work but the alternative was institutionalization.  I can say I was the most not cooperative client the clinic had on this issue, but I was fully well aware that there was no real way I could resist if such a decision was made so I acquiesced.

I am pretty sure that I have talked about this before.

The label, Schizophrenic, like anything else, is a double edged sword.  One of the hardest things to cope with as the moment the sense of relief wore off was shame.  Wu live in a culture that has an individual-centric meaning with which every good thing that comes our way is the direct result of our individual merit and every bad thing that comes our way is also the direct result of our lack merit.  This is true it the very least in the working class and the lower middle class where I formed the basis of my world view.  This is a hard thing to cope with and it took many years, decades to be fair, to work passed this.  The most important step in this adjustment was resignation.  I mean this in the sense that Kierkegaard discusses in his work Fear and Trembling. 

I am getting a head of myself.

The first big adjustment that most people like me have to make, if we want to live, is medication.  I had taken a few Psych courses while I was at the university one being abnormal psychology and I had a distinct recollection of the subject matter the day I received my diagnosis.  That was “The number one problem with the treatment of schizophrenia is medication noncompliance.”  I remember saying to the Doc that day.  One of the big problem with Meds is side effects.  These are often hard to describe other than dry mouth, stiffness of the joints and one of the stranger effects for me was vivid dreaming and the sudden sensitivity to sunlight.  Now once a doctor has chosen a med for a client, such as myself, they generally don’t like to change it right away.  They want to give the medication a chance to work.  Often the recourse is to increase Meds if the desired effect hasn’t been achieved.  This causes side effects to intensify.  This will lead to other Medication being prescribed to deal with side effects.  I like to call this the Medication Pyramid.  I am a medication minimalist.   It best to learn to trust the Doctors.  When some one feels both vulnerable and powerless this is a lot to ask.  I remember the feeling of being threatened.  It was an intense experience and it took a couple of years and a change of doctors before I could make the least little bit of head way in this respect.

It was a tiny, tiny bit of head way.

When an individual is vulnerable and powerless the act of trusting requires a leap of faith.  This is a very difficult thing to accomplish.  The first few times it is a gut wrenching experience.  It isn’t like a great leap you might see in various action type films for the leap of faith is taken in an environment where you can not see the other side.  You have no real idea how the doctor, in this case, is going to react.  We like to paint doctors as great humanitarians but they are still human beings like you and me…well maybe not that much like me.  They have their own problems to deal with.

In my experience just being real with a person I barely know requires this leap.  There are repercussions to being mentally ill, especially schizophrenic. in a social and economic sense.  These are unpredictable.

I guess that I am writing this to get across one idea.  As a persons moorings give and they find themselves falling uncontrollably into a new unknown world where they don’t know the rules or how to work the system they will find that they too may have to take this fated leap.  I hope this provides some help.

Post Industrial

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Welcome to my desolation

post industrial rust pile

cold home

There are others here

shades paler and darker

in the streets

as shackled spirit eyes

with out vision

Once greatness was here

it still whispers

from the dark corners

of any winter’s night

but we walk child like

unknowing

empty gazes haunted

by impossible futures

The Searcher

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I search

in the eyes

of those who pass

for something unproven

a thing rumored

a hope

peace

I am paranoid

they say

you know how they are

and they are mistaken

I am aware of my surroundings

Am I or I am, I think

I search

for a softer trait

but, the all too human darkness

hides in shadow

what is kind

in our kindred

even faith succumbs

and still

I search

Meta’s Sleep Workings

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While writing out my 60s jokes for this blog, because it had been so many years since telling them last, I just couldn’t remember the second stanza of the elephant trilogy.  I asked others and then scanned their lists of elephant jokes on the internet to no avail.

Finally I thought of my memory aids.  The first ones that I had learned in a memory course that I took during the 70s.  As I cozied into my bed for the night I thought about what I wanted to remember then let myself forget it and relax into sleep.

Sure enough, still in bed the following morning it came to me without bidding.  If you are puzzling over a project or choice think over the problem – forget it- sleep – the answer will occur to you shortly after waking.

If you have things on your mind that you want to accomplish the next day that are keeping you awake try writing them down.  Afterwards forget about them as you cuddle back onto your pillow.  Rest soon follows.

Another technique to bring rest – picture yourself lying in the sand on a warm beach with sea breezes keeping you totally comfortable – feel your body grow heavy – sinking into the nice warm sand.  You will soon fall asleep.

My grand mother taught me that if I concentrated on the time I wanted to wake – then glanced at the clock – I could wake at the time I wanted with out the use of the alarm.

These sleep workings have rarely failed me – nor Iba after I taught him.